skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not entirely sure under what logic you can call one of the fastest evolving sectors in the world 'glacial'.

Take a look at a Web 1.0 application and compare it to a web 2.0 application. The difference in quality and feature set is remarkably greater than if you take two equivalent cars from the same periods and compare and contrast them.

I'm pretty sure the 'solving difficult problems' thing is more of a hacker mindset than a gender specific one :-)
MOG launches all you can access streaming music
A single, non-nested list comprehension or generator exp is basically map(filter). You need nesting to get filter(map).

e.g.

map(expensive_call, filter(cond, seq))

equals

[expensive_call(each) for each in seq if cond(each)]

but

filter(cond, map(expensive_call, seq))

equals

[each for each in [expensive_call(x) for x in seq] if cond(each)]

note because of "expensive_call", it's inefficient (and silly) to do

[expensive_call(each) for each in seq if cond(expensive_call(each))]

So map/filter combination gives more flexibility than list comprehension, and for functional-thinking minds, it's just so natural to think in abstract terms of passing functions around. List comprehension is pretty syntactical sugar to do similar things, but it forces you think about the "how to do" instead of "what to do".

That said, it's not really "compelling" though -- there is no real "compelling" reason to switch from one Turing-complete language to another given that you can do the same thing eventually. But hey, it's the itches that drive us nuts, isn't it? :)

Just my 2 cents
The fact someone sells a service doesn't mean it's right, proper, etc.

Gambling is heavily regulated for a reason. I would say that games like these should be regulated just as much.

Imagine going to the arcades, playing street fighter II, and it saying "We know you can't get on the score board because you suck, but if you pay $20 we'll put you at the top of the score board anyway". Would that be completely fine and above board?
Python's multiprocessing library (http://docs.python.org/library/multiprocessing.html) provides a similar interface that one would expect from a multithreaded library. For example,

from multiprocessing import Pool
p = Pool(5)
def f(x):
return x*x

p.map(f, [1,2,3])

I do not have direct experience with the library, but from what I've seen, the code you would write is not significantly different from the code you'd write using a decent multithreading interface.
I said that an acceptable solution would have to use VML, not that a VML solution would have to be acceptable. The Canvas API is completely dissimilar to VML, so it's not surprising that excanvas et. al. have proven to be notoriously slow. It's not clear to me why anyone would even bother, except as a way to bolt IE support on as an afterthought. Like it or not, anything that does that is going to be commercially marginal.

As I mentioned, VML is remarkably close to SVG. So there's an obvious solution here.
Just Say No: VC terms that can really hurt
Good at least to see someone making games for people other than the hardcore crowd.

IMO, this shows that in gaming there isn't a straight line of worst-to-best but instead there's lots of different types of games that appeal not only to different types of people but different moods a person is currently in.
The automatic response of the North Korean government would be introducing a prohibition. Or maybe that already happened, who knows.
Interesting. Thanks :)
But you wouldn't say the same to defend Apple, right?
I know scheme (r5rs), but I can't figure out how this code works. Are there any good introduction text for this lisp?
Just a suggestion: Use github gists for Clojure code if you want to embed in posterous.

For other languages, posterous has a code tag that automatically highlights/formats for you. They just don't support Clojure very well.
It depends on the country and the time period. There were stretches of time in Poland when being caught with a substantial amount of foreign currency would have meant heavy jail time (for the crime of 'speculation'). But no one in history has ever gone down for having too much hooch.
Throwaway account for same reasons.

My experience with a psychiatrist did not help much. My main problem being with dealing with people, I really hated having to talk to one more person. I dealt with whatever problems I had on my own and I think I'm fine now. Still, I really wish there was a good AI I could talk to...

What ever happened to Dr. Sbaitso?
Any commodity approximates currency, but in practice this doesn't keep totalitarian governments in check.

The government can take away your house or any possessions you couldn't hide, ban trading of popular commodities (like foreign currencies; this drastically reduces liquidity), or, as a measure of last resort, kill you.

Former socialist countries have seen all of these after WWII.
Best Programming Language According to Google
Let's Give Visas to Startup Founders
I second the recommendation. A Pattern Language outlined a lot of the actual patterns (which was neat), but Notes on the Synthesis of Form did a better job of illuminating a broad conceptual foundation for designing systems. I think I need to re-read it now that you mention it.
Why on earth would you use a semantically insignificant element (SPAN) to markup something as significant as the name of the interview object?

I'd easily mark this up as a DIALOG:

<dialog>
<dt>Iwata
<dd>In this interview, we're going…
</dialog>
There are some places I don't want Facebook, and email is one of them.
How is this a loss for an open web exactly?
Even now? Then better bring gold back into the market ...
That's what's called rule of law and it is, regretably, not as common as one might think.

Especially dictatorships often had and have some kind of law that allows the dictator to do anything. You could call it rule of law minus one. One person who is exempted from the rule of law is enough to bring the whole system down. Strange, how fickle the rule of law seems to be.
I think InclindedPlane was referring to the fact that the article emphasizes that Warner Bros. technically is not out $400k. They've recouped their expenses from the TMJ loan by taking 90% of the band's profits throughout the years. There is no negative cash flow here.

What they are missing, however; is the payment from the band. Presumably they agreed to pay back the full amount out of their pockets in the original contract. And where does their personal income flow from? Royalties. This is how I see the numbers if they were to pay back the loan:

Gross Profit: $4,000,000
TMJ Share: 400,000
Warner Share: 3,600,000

TMJ Profit: $0
Warner Profit: $4,000,000

Warner Bros. will essentially make a 10x ROI before TMJ earns a dime. Just because bands willingly sign these contracts does not make them morally defensible. The record labels are clearly making a killing off artists who simply break-even, and I think people are finally starting to realize this...perhaps your friend's business was just ahead of its time.
“Hulu for Magazines”
No. (You are not from Europe, right?)
"The first week I was in our new office, I was more productive than the previous month altogether."

Good article but the author recently just started working from an office so everything is new and interesting. He should do a follow up after six months.

I think this article illustrates the importance of having a good routine while working at home. The author would just roll out of bed and get to work. It is important to do things in the morning that you would normally do if you were going to work. Also, it sounds like he just worked till nightfall and had no life. While working at home, I make sure to get out of the house in the evening and usually do social activities at least a few times a week. This helps as I don't like socialising at work when I am working in an office.
Mono 2.6 runtime ported to Android
Need help with Common Lisp
Need help with inplenting Djikstras algorithm in LISP.

Contact me: mradi_92@hotmail.com
AOL's dumb plan to mimic the universe's worst news site (Associated Content)
This stunt is lame as he is not violating any Danish laws, so why would Danish police arrest him?

If he had done it on US soil though (perhaps in front of the US embassy) there could have been an actual dilemma.
Does Facebook let you export your data? No.

Is Facebook a private company? Yes.

Does it sell data to advertisers? Yes.

So my question is, now that the number 2 and 3 most-visited sites on the Internet are sharing this data, how is this _not_ a loss for an open web?
I'm talking about Yugoslavia and 80s. Borders were officially quite tight (you couldn't import anything beyond some small value), but lots and lots of people used illegally traded foreign currency to buy food, clothes, toys, computers(yes, you could not buy zx spectrum in Yugoslavia), etc. and bring it illegally over the border.

It is likely that things were different in 70s and even before that, because rules relaxed a bit in the 80s.
Ambitious plan for electric cars in Denmark
> Enough intellectual speculation: Java schools for all.

A monolithic, one-size-fits-all approach is hardly consistent with an evidence-based approach that considers the needs of individual cases.
Sorry, but no. Of course most ground breaking applications are done by start ups, thats mostly why they are formed.

Someone has a good idea, thinks they can make money from it so tries to..

If your idea is truely novel then im pretty sure you will come across many 'difficult problems' that need solving.

Gender doesnt matter, ability & a good idea are the important things.

O, and btw if it wasn't for a bunch of guys trying to solve difficult problems you wouldn't have a computer. at all.
Google down or something?

It will even correct your spelling :)
It's not about entertainment or bait/switch - it's low challenge accomplishment. The 'Villes let you feel like you've accomplished something, even though all you put into it was time and money. Usually accomplishing something takes true effort and creativity, with a risk of failure, but these games are "accomplishment lite" with no risk of failure.
But the goalposts haven't moved at all. There's simply a vendor on the sidelines selling rocket boots for 25 cents. Its not like these games start you off on a path, tell you "oh, once you've played for X long you'll be able to get Y," and then changing it so that once you get to X you find out that you also have to spend a dollar to get Y (some of these games might, but the ones I've played haven't, they've all been very clear up front what costs money and what doesn't). Most of them don't even make it so that you can't get to the goalposts without paying money, they just make it take considerably longer.

I fail to see how charging money for faster progress is taking advantage of idiocy. As another example, look at television programming. I can get a half dozen broadcast channels for free. If I want more, and want to get more out of my tv watching experience by having more choice in it, I have to pay for cable, who then offers me various packages, depending on how much each of those channels is worth to me.

It doesn't make it idiocy to value things differently than other people. I value $10 a month more than HBO. Does that make all of the people who pay for HBO idiots? Does that make all it blackmail for the cable company to offer a trial of HBO when I sign up (admittedly, that practice is slightly shady, due to the difficulty to stop the channels after the trial, but that is a completely different issue)? Just because you put more value on your money than others do on a shiny digital fish doesn't make them an idiot, it makes them someone who values shiny digital fish.

-To your edit:

Well, if that was the way things were from the start, sure. Say you go to the arcade, and pick out your game to play. To make this all fit well, lets pick tetris. As long as you know from the start there are various "powerups" you can buy throughout the game, it seems totally fair. Its 1 quarter to start the game. Later in, you can buy various powerups, like double points for one level for another quarter, or the ability to choose your next block for a quarter.

Does it make things different? Yes. But it certainly doesn't make them unfair. The options are open to everyone, those at the top and those trying to get there. Its fair, but is a little shady.
You're certainly right about the first point, and some of the other advice in the article is good, under the right circumstances. However, it's hardly worth putting this wiki page on any kind of pedestal (or even, I'd argue, posting it here). A thousand people (even me: http://inter-sections.net/2008/05/07/13-tips-for-creating-a-... - see tip 1) have already posted this and other "startup tips" in far more coherent forms.

This one does not seem to add anything whatsoever to the discussion. In fact, it is considerably less good than some of the stuff out there (e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html ).
`Working out of x' to mean `working in x' is such a strange and potentially confusing idiom.
But no one in history has ever gone down for having too much hooch.

Except for the United States in the 1920s.
The Security Implications of Windows Volume Shadow Copy
Sprint has a sort-of response to this article: http://community.sprint.com/baw/community/sprintblogs/buzz-b...

It doesn't really say much, though, other than attempting to clarify what "8 million times" means. I don't know about anyone else, but that portion didn't really require much clarification.

Someone from the ACLU posted a comment on their response which asks for more specific information.
According to the article: "It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs."

I think it's a worthwhile attempt to resolve a contradiction of a stupid law.
I think you drawing that conclusion may be a result of how I structured my essay (I introduced my conclusion, then my reasoning).

I freely admit my personal biases and experiences eliminated a lot of potentially good options without ever giving them due consideration (e.g., Haskell, Scheme, Lua). But I really did try to give the 3 options listed in the article a fair shake at the time.

For what it's worth - I was about 50-50 on using Python till the very end ...
I don't read the article this way.
He candidly admits his bias towards functional languages and
he says that Ruby and Clojure could have been his choice
if not for reasons related to the specific time-frame in which he took the decision.
The point is that I already have a algorithm but it has some bugs that I need help to sort out.
To be fair, I think most explanations for the decisions we make work this way.
I'm confused. Unless the article is wrong, "It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs" seems to state that he did break a law.

It makes quite a bit of sense to do a stunt like this, although I certainly would not be willing to be the person to risk it. The way most of the anti-piracy outfits work is to make vague claims about the legality of various actions, and demand a settlement. Sure, its cheaper to do that for both parties, but if they're just waving about a threat that has never been upheld (or not upheld) in court, it creates problems.
Helpful points.

The problem in today's VC environment is that "terms that can really hurt" are front and center in the typical term sheets. Perhaps the most abusive of all is the aggressive imposition of reverse vesting without protections of any kind for the entrepreneur from arbitrary terminations. Throw in abusive liquidation preferences, etc. and the result is that entrepreneurs should be very selective in doing VC deals. Until this climate changes for the better, do them only after you have built significant value in your company and have reasonable leverage in negotiating terms.
Catch 22: You Don’t Have Barriers Until You Scale - Can You Raise Capital?
Stuart Halloway's Programming clojure book is exceptionally good[1]

The basic idea is to map (using Clojures parallel pmap) over each component and call the event handler for the event being processed, if the component has one. The code is slightly complicated by wanting a non-global event queue and async event sending, so I use a dynamic binding to rebind the event function so that it can access the local event queue (which is the only mutable variable I use).

I'm sure theres better/simpler/more idiomatic ways of achieving this, but whatever.

[1] http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj
At the same time there was no physical destruction of physical stuff, so it was wealth transfer not wealth destruction. In theory the country should be approximately as wealthy after this action as it was before it.

PS: Ignoring the intangibles.
Zsh Reference Card
Anecdotally, this dovetails with another HN story "How to achieve greater productivity of teams (lostgarden.com)"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971708

He went from massive overtime (75-100 hours/week?) to a lot less (50 hours/week?) and got a substantial productivity improvement - same output at half the time spent.
Ah, no ... but from another "socialist country" (China) :O

Actually I'm currently in Germany so I was quite surprised by that. Seems it was quite some time ago, though. Sorry, my fault :|
A Closer Look at BuildABrand's Closed Beta
Most times you are interested in doing the simple, e.g.:

filtered = [x for x in seq if x>10]

Python's list comprehension is much more readable than using map/filter/reduce - at least for Python programmers :) Anyhow, I really like Guido's decision on dropping these - it creates a cleaner language and forces people to think Pythonic when programming in Python.
New algorithms for computerized, large-scale surveillance
To troll or not to troll, is that the question?
It's fascinating/ironic that the original joint-stock companies were formed for seagoing trade: The East India Company (of England, later of the United Kingdom), sometimes referred to as "John Company", was one of the most famous joint-stock companies. It was granted an English Royal Charter by Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600, with the intention of favouring trade privileges in India. The Royal Charter effectively gave the newly created Honourable East India Company (HEIC) a 21-year monopoly on all trade in the East Indies.

Soon afterwards, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company issued shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

During the period of colonialism, the joint stock company Europeans, initially the British, trading with the Near East for goods, pepper and calico for example, enjoyed spreading the risk of trade over multiple sea voyages. The joint stock company became a more viable financial structure than previous guilds or state-regulated companies. The first joint-stock companies to be implemented in the Americas were The Virginia Company and The Plymouth Company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_stock_company#Early_joint...
Unlike computer languages, constructed human languages seem never to gain enough mass to carry on. Too many people have invested too much time and money in English currently, so it's wiser to reuse that (or any other language provided it is popular enough).

Also I don't think English is tied to a particular nation ... well, maybe English-speaking nations. That's sad, but true, fact of life :|
a little fluffy.
Has anyone else ever heard of duct tape called "100 mile an hour tape" in small aviation?
Did they tell you the specific reason you didn't get in? I'd rather know what went wrong than how to prepare.
Time Inc's New Tablet Magazine Format
I always though that much of the actual COST of a magazine went to cover the actual paper & production costs.

EG - The huge discount given to actual magazine subscribers - seems like in digital format they would have a much better captive / complete audience that they could adapt their sales departments to sell around . . .
New [GoogleBot] User Agent for News
Or, more subtly -- and not requiring any force at all -- a government can simply hoard any commodity or currency through a series of differences in trading other commodities or currencies, artificially inflating the value of the commodity (or currency).
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The $100K are used to promote the product, so it is just an investment for the label -- which may be eventually fully paid from the band's money. It looks like a sweet deal to me.
Together with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971785 it looks like they’re taking the newspaper industry’s concerns seriously.

Somehow I suspect this won’t be enough for some but it will be interesting to see which publications adopt these measures.
CBC News - Health - Hand sanitizers work best with scrubbed hands
They’ve also added a new news-specific user agent for their GoogleBot: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=972412
Modern Chinese nouns, esp. in technical fields, tend to be word-by-word translation of their original/English terms. It's crazy to invent a new set of terms for the same thing.

Unfortunately most Chinese translation of computer science/programming books are just garbage. The irony is that if you cannot understand a translated sentence in Chinese, try to revert it (usually word-by-word) back to English and then suddenly it rings the bell. That forces me to read the original one instead ...

I heard Japanese have better translation though ...
how about when prognosticators refer to iPhone users as "people who have wet dreams about Steve Jobs?" by your logic, that could have contributed to why certain predictions about said users were so disastrously wrong, yes?

http://mattmaroon.com/2007/05/03/why-the-iphone-will-be-a-fl...
They have nuclear weapons -- or want the world to believe they do -- and likely intend to use those weapons to ensure that they get an unlimited supply of aid from other countries.

That was all over the mainstream U.S. news not that long ago, even.

Poor? Maybe in terms of GDP. But certainly not powerless.
I'd also recommend The Timeless Way of Building, which provides the overview of Alexander's method (of which A Pattern Language is just one piece). I once wrote a review of The Timeless Way from a programmer's perspective: http://advogato.org/person/mbrubeck/diary/106.html

(The Oregon Experiment, which I mention in that link, might also be of interest to programmers inside huge organizations.)
They don't even need to go that far. They can just ration supply, forbid stockpiling and fix the price to artificially low levels.

This was occurring as recently as last year all over the world when commodity/food prices spiked. Anywhere you see black markets, you can find rationing and price fixing nearby.
OP V: up-to-the-minute updates on the status of the LHC proton beam (CERN)
"potential" has little value.

You have boundless "potential". I just dreamed up an idea for a new online social networking viral game. My "potential" userbase is billions of people (my game can do accurate language auto-translations on the fly, so Chinese people can play with Russians seamlessly). My "potential" income is huge, my "research" shows that people will pay $1/mo to be a part of this game. That's BILLIONS of dollars in MONTHLY income.

Only problem is that, well, I haven't written any of the software yet (but I sketched everything out, and priced my servers, so I've "eliminated" that risk). I even checked with a bunch of people I know and confirmed that they would pay $1/mo to play this game.

There is a TON of potential here. I'll give you a 20% equity stake if you'll sign up to just write the initial code.
Replacing the File Manager in Zsh
Spock: The enterprise ready specification framework