skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Feel free to correct me - I hope to learn something new if you say exactly why you think my points are incorrect. Especially - why would you choose lisp over a specialised solution - static type safety, multiprocessing, oo being the main areas discussed. I don't claim to be an expert in lisp, as I mentioned before. What I wrote is based more on what I see, rather than what I work with every day and I appreciate other views even if don't agree :)
This reminds me of something I once did with Poe's "The Raven":

http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/3741/weightedundirectedra...

http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/5436/directedraven.png
Ordinarily I'd make an effort to keep an open mind -- even
if I'm being asked to believe that Rolling Stone could print a piece that gave Ivy League JD/MBAs and mathematical finance PhD's anything close to a fair hearing without royally pissing off their core audience of people who pay money to read about rock stars and Paris Hilton.

But this author has a history of oversimplification and allegation-slinging that almost makes you believe his real goal is to sell that audience it can get righteously worked-up over.

Here are two blurbs about the piece Taibbi wrote about Goldman Sachs in July, from journalists at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

First, progressive Kevin Drum of Mother Jones magazine:

Someone also asked [Ezra Klein] about Matt Taibbi's takedown of Goldman Sachs in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. I finally got around to reading it the other day, and my verdict is simple: it was terrible. Taibbi wrote a terrific article about AIG a couple of months ago, but the Goldman piece was just phoned in, a long series of blustery assertions with essentially nothing to back up any of them. If he wants to claim that Goldman was the wizard behind the curtain of everything from the dotcom boom to last year's oil spike, he really needs to produce some evidence for it instead of just saying so. (http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/07/furloughs-and-perk...)

And libertarian Megan McArdle of the Atlantic:

I think, sadly, [that] Matt Taibbi is becoming the Sarah Palin of journalism. He seems to deliberately eschew understanding his subjects, because only corrupt, pointy-headed financial journalists who have been co-opted by the system do that. And Matt Taibbi is here to save you from those pointy headed elites.

Taibbi is a gifted narrative journalist, whose verbal talents I greatly admire. But financial meltdowns don't offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system. Confronted with this, Taibbi doesn't back away from the narrative form, or apply it to smaller questions where it is more appropriate, as William Cohan did in House of Cards. Instead, he grabs whoever's nearest to hand and builds them up into a gigantic straw villian, which he proceeds to bash with a handful of recently acquired technical terms that he clearly doesn't quite understand. It's not that everything he says is wrong, but the bits that are true aren't interesting, and the bits that are interesting aren't true. (http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/matt_ta...)
Ask HN: I have an idea for a startup... now what?
I've got an idea for a startup which I think many people would find useful.

I've gone through the following steps:

1) Other people (from different demographics) agree that this idea would be useful - some of them would even use it.
2) I have places to look for funding (tentatively interested parties).
3) I have a sketchy business plan (sketchy is in currently vague).
4) I have a basic process that the user would go through to use my product, and ballpark figures for costs and required elements for the idea.

I want to get this up and going soon, and I'd probably like a partner who could help with this (especially seeing as I'm in college, currently).

What's next?
In the long run the only ways to control health care costs are to let old people die, or cure aging. I'd prefer the second.
My one complaint is that the the "embed image" link includes the key to let anyone edit it.
You write unit tests and ensure 100% code coverage.

That sounds like a lot of extra effort; it would be nice to automate the testing a bit. Maybe some sort of simple declarative system to check that the code obeys certain constraints. Ideally, you could make your auto-test system clever enough to actually deduce a lot of the constraints itself, based on the structure of the code--you'd really save time that way! Then you could focus your effort on just testing the things your auto-testing system can't check.

I wonder if anything like that exists?
Bash can also auto-complete remote paths, if appropriate keys are set.
Depends. How much extra code did I have to write to satisfy the type checker?
1. Get in line.

2. Start testing.

i.e. Minimum viable product. Customer feedback. Iterate.

Are you a programmer?
The reliance on Google Accounts makes me think they want Google to buy this out.

It might be because they are using Google App Engine. I don't think any significant number of sites built on App Engine are trying to be Google acquisition bait.
Fascinating stuff. I'm not a professional statistician, but I was mostly able to follow along. Here are the two most interesting statements from the piece to me:

> Foul play is assumed and the hunt is on for a culprit; a natural suspect is man made CO2, which has increased coincidental with temperatures. It's a small part of overall global greenhouse gases (5.5% if you don't include water vapor, 0.3% if you do), but maybe -- just maybe -- the atmosphere is in a delicate, wobbly, equilibrium balance.

It never occurred to me that human-produced carbon-dioxide was such a small percent of the greenhouse gases.

Then there was this:

> But a funny thing happened on the way to Copenhagen: a couple of Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, found that when they ran simulations of "red noise" random principle components data into Mann's reconstruction model, 99% of the time it produced the same hockey stick pattern. They attributed this to Mann's method / time frame for selecting of principle components.

That's just a wow. Incredibly damning of that model, and that model was one of the biggest calls to urgency in the field. I'm happy this sort of information is coming out and being thought about.
Related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=966243 (uses some of the same probabilistic models and rising sequences)

I also wrote a simple javascript card-shuffling library based on these models after reading the davidson.edu article: http://jazzychad.com/js/deck.php
Satisfying the static language's compiler usually doesn't require more code; it requires more-correct (ie. less buggy) code.

And the statically typed program is probably going to contain a lot less code than the dynamic program, especially if you consider all the extra code you'd need to write in those unit tests which simply duplicate the guarantees that you get for free when you use the static language's compiler.
Dogfooding is a way of life at Microsoft. Sometimes to very painful degrees. We've been using Exchange 14 as our one and only email server solution for quite a while, and yes it has gone down a fair amount and cost a ton of productivity, but it also gave the Exchange team invaluable feedback. I've also got some very painful personal experiences of dogfooding Team Foundation Server in its early days. It's not like we can say "eh this early build sucks, let's go back to X for now", because there is no X, it's been completely removed. The dogfooding is hardcore on purpose.

But the "MS employee using non-MS tech" myth is really a myth. At least nowadays it is. MS employees will and do use anything and everything. As a simple example, I personally know at least 20 MS employees with iPhones (including myself). We also have no problem pointing out to teams when their competitors are better (there are certain teams at MS that really get a whipping, from both the public and the rest of MS, I don't envy them at all.)
It's just an anecdote, but I notice less complaining about parentheses, too.

I still like the idea of "Lisp with syntactic whitespace". A few simple transformation rules to add implicit parentheses based on indentation would make it a lot more readable for people who aren't already veteran Smug Lisp Weenies.

There was even a specification written for adding it to Scheme: http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html
It may be the devil, or it may be the lord..
Google Phone May Be in Works
Satisfying the type-checker can take a huge amount of extra code if you use type annotations everywhere. Even more so if you don't make good use of polymorphic functions.

Which is of course ludicrous--no one would create a static-typed language that made you code that way; it'd be practically unusable.
Open Source Projects for social causes?
I want to help develop open source software which tries to solve social issues e.g. environment, the poor, disabled. Where can I find such projects?
Dear parent and parent-parent comments: your content is good, but please s/it's/its/
I'll parse last first.

I probably should have mentioned that I am a programmer, mostly Python, but have work experience in Java and am capable with JS/HTML/CSS (and have knowledge of or am somewhat capable in Scheme and C).

Problematic is the fact that I don't have a grasp on database software or security and I dislike the idea of using Django, partially because I don't want to think in Django. I'd almost like to write in Scheme, if Python didn't (a) come more naturally, having written much more code in it (b) seem to have more libraries etc... (c) I have formal education in Python, and I still don't have a solid grasp on where call/cc would be used in a program, which signals to me that I'm not ready to use Scheme.

I'm also decent with sysadmin tools, by no means an expert, but I can use bash and I can script a bit.

So yes and no?

I'm all for the agile approach. I'd like to open with a bang, though. I'm thinking a designer?

2. I suppose I do just need to step into the game. Now. The advice I hear but selectively ignore is "just do it."

1. ?

Thanks!
View all the letters of Vincent Van Gogh
JOb Hunting in recovering markets
This article is worth a read before making bland comments about the tagline.

Edit: To provide a little value, the article digs into some history of how the US managed amazing increases in productivity in agriculture in the early 20th century. That portion of it alone is fascinating. Whatever version of the healthcare bill the article's using includes similar techniques to how the government approached agriculture.
Most modern statically typed languages (for example, Haskell, ML, and OCaml) feature type inference; which means you don't have to annotate types except in very unlikely corner cases.

My own experience with some of these languages has been that when the compiler complains, it's because of a bug in the program, not because it can't figure out a type without annotation. So, a statically typed language's compiler becomes, in effect, a bug detector (to a much greater extent than a dynamically typed language's compiler or interpreter can be).

Having such a bug detector can be worth its weight in gold. But just how useful it is depends on how good the error messages are (or how good the programmer is at deciphering them). Unfortunately, this is an area that leaves a lot to be desired. But if you're seriously concerned about safety, statically typed languages (with all of their shortfalls) are still clearly the way to go.
Not really, Fish's command language breaks compatibility with other POSIX shells in order to be cleaner and more consistent. So, you can't run sh or bash scripts with it. This isn't a huge issue, but definitely sets it apart from Zsh.
Interview with founder Chelsea Howe of Proper Walrus, a game developer start-up
Fun, but what languages/libraries are being used? I don't understand why this information isn't in the post.
If you sign in on the front page, you can control access to the diagram better.
Yup, it's Java, partially on App Engine, and calling out to Dot. Still deciding whether to OS it...
Oops, typo. Fixed. I work at Chartbeat and have it on my mind a lot. :)
HackerNews->SlashDot->Pwnage->Real gnome dev message
If you want real time streaming, you can sign up for tdameritrade, and then request API access.

It's free, and decent quality.

The interface is RESTful, but the data is a funky binary format that's hard to parse without the documentation they make you sign an NDA to get.

http://www.tdameritrade.com/tradingtools/partnertools/api_de...
so, how many times?

i read parts of the pdf but didn't find the answer. i did see it say 7 isn't enough.
This is really ridiculous.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=htt...
Lisp code is almost always written on multiple lines, with an editor that automatically indents everything. Code in a more familiar language (C?) would also look incomprehensible if ten lines were all smushed together on one.

I let Emacs indent that, and it came out like so:

(let ((prod (apply #'* probs)))
(/ prod
(+ prod (apply #'*
(mapcar #'(lambda (x)
(- 1 x))
probs)))))

You still have to learn the idioms (it's a different language!), but it's not just a jumble of parenthesis.

Prefix notation takes some getting used to for arithmetic, but that's neither here nor there. You probably have a bundle of idiosyncratic operator precedence rules memorized (quick, does 3*4+5 equal 27 or 17?), and Lisp doesn't use those, preferring to consistently use parenthetical nesting for everything.

See also: http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/1397/lispnd7.png
Some software called Supercollider.

Here's the article that links to that page.

http://thewire.co.uk/articles/3177/
A lot more than a public option is needed.
SSL Proxy: ClearlyDrunk.com
I just returned a pair of Erises and went back to the iPhone. It just wasn't snappy. For example, in the iPhone browser it really feels like there is a physical web page under that screen that you are dragging around with your finger. With Android, it's more like you are scrolling on a trackpad off screen. Buttons won't give feedback when the system bogs down, and the UI is really inconsistant. Some windows scroll past their borders like the iPhone, but settings windows don't. And since your always waiting for the phone to stop responding, when a window hits the bottom then stops on a pixel, it feels like a freeze, not the end. It's all fixable, of course, but I'm going to wait until it's more mature.
PG says this in one of his essays, I think the example was basically that the secret to making money is getting someone like Einstein to do something like designing refrigerators.

It works for two reasons:

1) The reward for invention and innovation is basically the same, but the ROI on innovation is 10x better than the ROI on invention. (This is one of the main ideas of Seth Godin's book Free Prize Inside.)

2) The best person in a given industry makes 10x as much as the tenth best person, and 100x as much as the 100th best person.

Thus the best way to make money is by innovating, not inventing, in an area that you are way overqualified for. It took me a long time to really understand this, but it's a lesson that's well worth learning.
Please do ^-^
> but lua is not enough. Unfortunately neither of them is useful as a general-purpose language right now.

I emphatically disagree. Lua is a great language, it just expects you to be comfortable with more than one language (ideally including C). It's a scripting language, in a more literal sense than, say, Python - you use it to glue together libraries in several other languages and give them a simple repl and scripting interface.

It also seems to be a lot less "opinionated" than Python (let alone Haskell) -- since the whole design of the language is skewed towards being embedded in something else, it's quite happy to be used in just the parts where it's the best tool for the job, and otherwise stay out of the way, and it doesn't come with its own heavy style requirements.
Uh,

The article's headline is sort-of plausible.

The article's body is a pathetic absurdity. An massive integrated, interdependent industry can't be plausibly compared to the motley collection of itinerant farmers roaming America in 1900. I'd laugh if this article wasn't such a pathetic failure to address the oncoming gigantic failure that is the looming health care bill. As it is, I want to cry...

Edit: The history of agriculture improvement are interesting. But cryingly inapplicable - health care processes are absolutely not the product of the decisions of individual health care providers but the massively complex interactions of multiple sub-industries, regulations, etc. Sheesh.
In what sense does Lua not have a standalone environment? That's news to me.

$ lua
Lua 5.1.4 Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
>
You may want to reread my post with the sarcasm bit flipped to "on"; I was trying to make fun of static-typed languages that don't have type inference. Sorry about that.

I was actually hacking on some Haskell just now, in fact, trying to fix a "bug". ("Couldn't match expected type `ProgrammerThatUnderstandsMonads' against inferred type `Newbie'")
If the user has visited someone else's site, they may have the hotlinked image cached and thus your page will load faster for them.
Thanks for pointing that out. That was my only complaint - perhaps the author should put that on the page where you create your diagrams rather than on the "About" page.

Otherwise it's a neat little app. Love the "How I Met Your Mother" reference on the example diagram. Great show.
its amazing how many people put up with such bosses but then again a lot depends on the environment and available opportunities!!
Or for that matter gets their intellectual stimulation of choice at work.
I won't be switching to javascript from python anytime soon. Javascript took about half of the bad ideas from perl and mixed in a few bad ideas of its own into a not very good language.

Invoking a method on a primitive string silently fails and does nothing?

Javascript differentiates between primitive strings and object wrappers such that you have to write ugly code like what's shown here: http://www.planetpdf.com/developer/article.asp?ContentID=tes...?

Forgetting the var keyword makes a variable global?

No module or package system without hacks?

Passing in the wrong number of arguments into a function is normal behavior that doesn't cause an error? At least you have nice syntax to bind arguments to variables, which perl doesn't.

People think ECMAScript's implementation of prototype based programming is a good idea? I could do the same thing in python easily by only instantiating objects and adding functions and properties to them manually, and the syntax wouldn't be much worse than in javascript, but I don't, and neither does anyone else.

It's been a while since I've studied javascript so my memory of dumb things about the language has grown dim, but I honestly don't get how people think it is a good language, or should be used anywhere else than where we are forced to use it: in the browser.
His reaction would be severe if you tried to pitch a Zune at him. I don't think he'd feel threatened by seeing an employee using one, the way Ballmer clearly is when he catches somebody with an iPod.
An open source Matlab-to-Python compiler
"Understand what normal people are trying to get out of technology."

This is key. I've found that public transportation gives you more insight into how people use smartphones than anything else.
And, it makes absolutely no difference who gets the money straight from the printing press, aside from the value of enjoying crisp, shiny new bills. The government spends money it got from printing in exactly the same places as it spends money procured from taxes.

That is incorrect. Banks that have access to central bank money are able to borrow from the US a rock bottom interest rates, and then use it to loan to the public or invest in a business before the rest of the economy knows that there's more fiat money in the system.
actually thats what i found too... i typed in "how are who and what related?" and what you mentioned was exactly how it got rendered :D
From a Haskell background, I'd say static languages of a sufficient power still have the advantage due to things like QuickCheck. 50% of the battle with a unit test is writing up good edge cases, thus smart typing and QC systems can make (up to) half the problem disappear.
Coding Conventions are for Automation
Ask HN: re-review my website
Thank you for reviewing my website 40 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916875

I've made most of the changes suggested (really great suggestions), and some others. The main changes on http://bargain-notify.me/ since the last review are:

* twice more deals, more stores

* display how much you save

* customize your home page: get the deals you are looking for on the landing page (registration required)

* login with Facebook or Twitter

* etc.

Please take a look, and let me know what you think of it.

Thank you
I don't know that I'd disagree. In its current state, I'm afraid there are too many pressures on each individual actor for them to try new things.

The advantages in agriculture were that they were suspicious of trying new things, but once they did they demonstrated profit advantages. I have more trouble seeing how the pilot programs the article mentions would profit individual practitioners, or how insurance companies would provide the same kind of demand signals that direct consumers would.
I was going to write about something about my own AlphaLab experience, but great advice Don!

Btw smackBOTS is now a Top 100 app (free). Going to pen down some thoughts down on that too.
This isn't for a desktop computer, its for the iPhone or a tablet, right?
I think the problem is that we are overestimating the intelligence of an average HN reader.

The concept you are trying to explain is somewhat abstract and difficult. My stab at explaining it:

Let's say that there are $100 in the economy right now. A piece of bacon costs $0.01 dollars.

The government, now fearing deflation, wants to issue another $100 into the system. The banks get access to this additional $100 at a rock bottom interest rate of 1%. They then proceed to use that money to buy out the bacon on the market for $0.01 dollars.

The people selling bacon now realize there is $200 in the market instead of $100, and start selling bacon for the true price of $0.02 dollars a piece. Unfortunately, the bank and their friends were already able to purchase the bacon for $0.01 dollars out of $200, when the market corrected price was $0.01 out of $100.

This correction error happens every time the fed prints more bills, and serves to enrich the people who get central bank money first.
I believe that this will cause your history ordering to go a bit wonky. Hitting up to get the last item will almost always get the command you last typed into the current window (as it should be, imo), but if you hit enter a few times after you run a given command it will be something else (sucked in from the surroundings I guess)

Every so often this really bites me, but the usefulness far outstrips the quirks.
When you tried sandboxing python, did you look at http://wiki.python.org/moin/How%20can%20I%20run%20an%20untru...? There's multiple sandboxing options listed there.

Also, Python has SWIG, SIP, and Boost to help integrate native code. I haven't yet integrated python and C, but I have integrated Ruby and C. A quick google for V8's C/C++ interface is not leading me to anything useful. Is it really that much easier? If so, that's an advantage of the V8 runtime, not of ECMAScript the language itself. Both Python and Ruby have multiple implementations for which native code interface can work differently. Pypy, for example, claims to have a simple libffi interface.
Help save MySQL
The Latest News - Tech4000 Has something to Give
Let us give you the gift of information! Delivered to your twitter!! Follow us on twitter and get the latest in Tech News Delivered right to you Absoutley FREE!