skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Define an anonymous function that takes no arguments, and execute it without assigning it to a variable. It's often used in javascript to keep things out of the global scope.
Caution, monopoly at work.
The original article is one giant PNG file (i.e. no actual plain text), so perhaps Google's bots don't see much content on the site. It's rather amazing that the site owners do this and yet claim to be mystified by Google's actions -- really?
Terrific read, as unfortunate and common as the content may be.

As an aside that some may find of interest, and since the article mentions the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I forwarded it to a friend who works with the firm that does royalty audits for the Chili Peppers. His response (the auditor's name has been removed):

"The Chili Peppers use ____ to audit their royalty statements, which they pay ____ a lot of money for, and they always get checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars when ____ settles the audits with Warner Bros. Obviously, Too Much Joy can’t afford ____’s level of expertise. So the little guy gets screwed... No surprise there!"
> Cliki was launched, C-L.net, and the #lisp IRC channel was born and

Google doesn't see any uptrend: http://www.google.com/trends?q=common+lisp
> Doing away with government-granted monopolistic regulations is the solution.

I have no prescriptions, but I do observer that the grantor and grantee are typically two hands of the same will. That monopolies are granted because the grantee wants it, and has found ways to make it so. How do you do away with that?

Capitalism is premised on the concentration of wealth to fund capital-intensive investment. Given the concomitant concentration of power, how do you prevent regulatory capture and the general perversion of government? How do you dilute power and preserve the system?
Creating A Useful Wordpress Widget, Using Topsy
They have another post at http://www.studiobriefing.net/studiobriefing.net/TV_News/Ent... where the text is copyable. I wonder if someone made a PNG of this page and reposted it at the other link.
" ...continuous and rapidly increasing micro-speciation of all ruby projects from the VMs down to template formats."

This is simply bullshit. There are merely a fair number of solid choices, as one would hope any decent language would offer. Being able to select appropriate tools for basic Web framework, ORM,and template language is a Good Thing.

There are only a handful of viable VMs, and for Web development the practical choices are MRI, REE, and JRuby.

"micro-speciation"? That's hysterical. Literally.

If Ruby doesn't interest you, fine. Bogus characterizations don't help anyone though.
Sprixi.com - a more useful image search?
"commitments from potential high-value customers"

Without more information, I think you are in better position to judge that. But, commitments without any contract is something very volatile.
Books that Have Influenced Me
Google’s PageRank predicts Nobel Prize winners
"Either that, or we're just hearing one side of the story."

And likely that's all we'll ever hear.

Ads are bad enough, but to be de-indexed, with no way to know why or how to fix it is scary from a business point of view. It could, and does, happen to anyone.
I don't think we're disagreeing on much. Yes, of course, a startup with better connections in the US has a better chance to get funding from US investors, and it's easier for an US startup to make these connections.

My point is that P(Canada/foreign startup getting funding) is greater than zero even with today's visa situation, and is still large enough to make a visa program worthwhile, even if it is smaller than P(Silicon Valley startup getting funding).
And then this deal with Yahoo! Facebook Connect is a simple way to use Facebook ID and connect to other non-Facebook websites, and then if you want, send those interactions back to your Facebook page. For instance, if you logged into GigaOM and left a comment using Facebook Connect, you can tell your friends that you did so.

While a single point to get identity/authentication from is nice, and Facebook is poised to pull it off (despite that I'd personally prefer something more open, portable and federated) more so that previous big contenders in this area (MS Passport comes to mind), I think the jury is still out on if this -- tell your friends you did something, like posted a comment -- is a valid use case, no matter how many people keep bringing that up as one of the possible future powers of Facebook.

While my Facebook network is relatively small and is composed mainly of people I've met in real life and have a relationship with that is not solely on-line, the actual interaction I get on Facebook for my "internet actions" (all imported via Facebook/Friendfeed integration), and the interaction I see other people get on Facebook for things they've posted (mostly directly posted, since few people use Friendfeed and the Friendfeed Facebook app), is extremely minimal. Admittedly, this could be because my network is, in general, boring. I think there are two core reasons the interaction is minimal.

First, the majority of anyone's network is not going to actually cares that someone made a comment on GigaOM. If they did, they'd be on GigaOM, not on Facebook. And if they're on/frequent GigaOM because they are interested in the content there, there's no reason to do their GigaOM-centric interaction anywhere else.

Secondly, Facebook being a proxy for reporting on all internet (or real-life) activity adds a layer of indirection but doesn't add significant value. There's no incentive to move a conversation that already exists on GigaOM to a Facebook comment thread. I've been disappointed that a lot of Facebook interaction (for what I've observed) has been of the "me too" variety. The ability to click through and view the original source of the content is too easy: the Internet itself is already federated (AOL and Compuserve tried that with their own walled gardens).

So Facebook can be a clearing house for activity, but I think it'll end up being a jumping off point, which in itself has significant value from the standpoint of aggregation (this is the main use of Friendfeed, in fact). But there a lot of other players in the aggregated content market that focus more on the user generating the content than on the consumers (tumblr, posterous), which are even easer to access than Facebook, since you don't need an account on a single site to consume them and the entire content is available on the original site. This very comment will get truncated once imported to Facebook (through backtype and Friendfeed).
Thanks Tim for the review!
I'm the founder of Sprixi - would love to hear what you guys think.
Maybe just raising awareness
Java regex quickstart
Open-Source Effort to Hack GSM
" ... there does not seem to be a viable alternative to ActiveRecord around?"

Sequel, which seems to be the most common ORM used with Ramaze, and DataMapper.

(I had been a fan of Og from years back, but development has, I think, stopped. )

Ramaze lets you swap in the ORM of choice and is the best alternative for folks who find Rails heavy-weight or heavy-handed.
AKA (also known as) Ron Garret.
As a beginner to lisp, I have always been bothered by the lack of standardization - especially in terms of libraries.

For example, a couple of weeks back, there was an article about a python-based tool on HN (I forget which). There was a lot of opinion, however was generally about BeautifulSoup vs lxml.

Coming to CL, I dont even know where to begin for XML parsing (http://www.cliki.net/XML). Which is why, it seems like black magic when people make amazing software (quantz, postabon) .

I just get too intimidated on where to begin... it is similar to the javascript library fights that keep erupting on comp.lang.js : you ask about one and are made to feel like you should have chosen another.
List comprehensions are great, but they're sort of a DSL-- something the syntax recognizes as special and converts to something else. It's unusual that you can pass around higher-order syntactic elements, while every modern language worth its salt allows you to pass around functions.

Common Lisp has something similar, called LOOP. Implemented as a macro, it's a within-Lisp DSL for expressing looping constructs, e.g.

(loop for i from 1 to 10 sum i)
=> 55

(loop for c across "bar" collect c)
=> (#\b #\a #\r)

It's controversial within the CL community, because the loop language looks much more like traditional languages than Lisp.
People like Craigslist. People like Craig. Hard to hate on something useful, free, and fronted by likable people.
The fact that you can see a full spectrum -- as in a rainbow, thin-film refraction on a puddle on a paved street, etc. -- should be an indication that the band-pass for neural firing is relatively wide. If each optical receptor had a narrow acceptance window (the way that individual atoms absorb), there would be gaps in the rainbow. Remember that ALL of the colours you see in a rainbow are pure, composed entirely of photons of a particular wavelength proper to each of those colours. It's not RGB; it's not CMYK.

We can, to an extent, simulate a full spectrum through additive and subtractive colour mixing of "primaries", but it is only a simulation. (And Edwin Land demonstrated that we don't actually need all three of R, G and B in order to create the illusion of a full-colour picture with only a comparatively tiny gamut loss. It is a fragile thing, though, and requires the integrative function and cognitive mapping of our brains.

Similarly, we can easily tell the difference between full-spectrum lighting and discontinuous spectrum lighting. Discontinuous spectrum lighting makes us uncomfortable. None of the colours looks quite right. Food is unappetizing, pictures and people less attractive. Did the light-makers just miss the right mix of frequencies by a hair? No -- any scheme that relies on a small number of discreet wwavelengths will cause a similar discomfort. We may not know why we feels the way we feel at the time, but we sho' 'nuff knows we'se feelin' it.
Comparing the two is already old.
Racism aside, it does seem likely that this was planned far in advance, and that Arrington fell victim to a serious con.
Studio Brief had a much more prominent place on IMDB in the news section. It consists on little snippets of news about the entertainment industry.

For an example entry:
http://www.studiobriefing.net/studiobriefing.net/FILM_NEWS/E...

The page has a title, selectable text article, ad column to right, and user comments. It is much like a digg page (heavier on article, less clutter).

The only real thing I see wrong with the page is the empty title tag. I wonder if this set off some issues. It certainly makes it hard to have multiple pages in tabs.
Good Data and Flawed Conclusions
With potentially the worst meta title tag of all time "￼" on all news pages...they had no chance of been indexed.

Fix this and the URL structure - back in the game (dont know if that is positive for anyone though - couldn't see any value in the posts).
Happy holidays from Gmail: Free snailmail gift cards
Move along, nothing to see. Flagged this, as it's non-news... "crappy spammy-looking site gets delisted from Google". The only notable aspect of this is that somehow IMDb is syndicating this trash.
I wish there were more detail to some of these points. For example, "Have an office, not someone's living room." This sounds reasonable, but why? What is it, specifically, about having an office that makes it so important? What if what he really meant to say was, "Have a space where your team can work without distractions; an office is ideal, a living room is not, because roommates will be walking through, the casual atmosphere is too distracting, and phone calls will disrupt the atmosphere." Otherwise, someone could read this manual, then go ahead and fill an office with couches, video games and other distractions that make it just as bad as (or worse than) an apartment.
Wow...that's... really... his house? What a mess. I can't see how a renowned architect would want to live in such a ramshackle way. Seems like if you're an architect you need to have your house be a showcase of your work - an example that clients could look to get an idea of some of your better work.
My heart bleeds. If you've ever tried to remove or alter one's personal information in IMDB (I am aware that this article references a blog operated by IMDB rather than the IMDB itself), all you get is a boilerplate non-response, even as a paid subscriber to the pro version. A company which declines to allow its users any control over the privacy of their information has no business whining about being fobbed off by Google.
Have they checked website optimizer? Google isn't a call me and let's talk about it company. It has very efficient and streamlined tools to help people figure out what is wrong.

There's a good chance there is an indexing problem that could easily be rectified if they just check webmaster tools.

(PS. Ditto on the misleading URL)
How big is the company?

< 10, < 100, < 1000 etc?
I had the same sort of thing happen to my blog. Google refused to show my ads due to 'landing page or ad quality' but I couldn't ever determine what the problem was or get anyone to review the site after that.

If Google has an achilles heel it's definitely lack of customer service.
Ask HN: How do you use your Facebook Fan page?
I'm working on KartMe's fan page on Facebook.
I'm wondering how best to use it to drive user growth. How do you use yours? Any tips?

Here is my work in progress: http://www.facebook.com/pages/KartMe/19284583250
I like how you phrased these in "You know you're a redneck if .." format.
Not only that, it's noise compared to a few other dynamic languages:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+com...
The issue isn't as clear cut as that.

They are offering you an 'easier game' for money. When you're competing against other people, that's an un-level playing field.

I'm pretty sure people who run lotteries think they are stupid. They are a tax on the poor, but they're extremely effective at raising money.
The metal is just the tool. Like the Constitution or anything else, it's up to the people to hold the govt. to the standard. Unlike non-backed currency, with metals any shaving of value can be detected obviously (more obviously than taxation via inflation) and quantified.
A good read... I'll be thinking about that one for awhile.
I don't really think they are obligated to describe to you how they make the sausage.

As long as the end result is what you paid for, does it really matter if they employ trained professionals, or monkeys with notepad.exe?
They share a lot. They are addictive, and the further in you get sucked, the harder it is to stop. Because of this, the further in you get, the easier it is to be exploited and taken advantage of.

I don't think it's about being puritan, it's about protecting the most vulnerable members of society from themselves.

For example, say you get 95% of the way through a game, then the game asks for $100 to get past an absolutely impossible stage, they'd probably get a fantastic amount of people spending the $100 reluctantly. Which IMHO isn't a nice way to do things.
The first response was perfectly adequate. Let's keep threads clean. Read other responses before responding.
> "If the frequency of closed door meetings goes up, and often the managers will disappear for hours on end"

I've seen this happen.

In a small to medium sized company, when key people start leaving, the company is failing. "Key people" means not just execs, but anyone close enough to the execs to know ahead of time what is wrong. A lot of times, it's a funding issue.
(I should also say that in Perl it is, and that's why this code looks perfectly normal to me. I imagine it's frightening to a C# programmer!)
I agree, but I think the firm should have just covered all their bases and given her an e-mail at their domain.
In that case, so did I.

You compared free high-end foods to free healthcare, which frankly just seems bizarre.

Nobody wants to use healthcare. Even when I lived in the UK, and I could have visited the doctor for free every single day if I had chosen to, I did not. Neither did I ever hear of anyone ever doing that or anything close to it.

Having lived in both the US and the UK, I haven't changed my habits. I visit the doctor when I feel I really need to. The only difference is that in the US, an insurance bureaucrat then sends me a letter telling me they're not paying up because <insert random excuse here>.
It would be also be nice if the list of steps wasn't displayed all at once, but more like a lazy evaluator (Show-Me-Next-Step?). That way you can let Mathematica lead you for a bit, but then still be able to proceed on your own without too much guidance.

Then again, knowing the answer ahead of time doesn't really hurt since understanding the steps in between is what matters.
Same with my blog. It appears on search, but one day they decided something fishy was going on with the ads and simply terminated the service. The automated e-mail said I could appeal and the appeal resulted in a "yes, it pretty much was something fishy" automated message. No further information, just silence and a warning that they would ignore messages about this subject from that point on.

AdSense needs competition. Badly.
Yeah, the bit about name-brand drugs being only for those who an afford them out of pocket is especially bad. Drug patents are 20 years, so the peasants would be getting 20-year-old cancer treatments, while the select few would be getting actual modern medicine. Besides the ethics, though, what would the cost of modern medicines be for those few thousand who can actually afford them? Today, plenty of middle-class people get modern drugs because their insurance pays for it, so the cost of research, clinical trials, manufacturing, etc is distributed among a large population. What would the price of a pill be if only the richest of the rich could afford treatment?
Suffice it to say, my students love this. Graded homework is now obsolete.

Of course, the department says graded homework must still be turned in...
You'd be surprised how common that is.

The same thing has happened to me and I didn't know until after the project was over. In the end, as long as your happy with the design it shouldn't matter who worked on it. That being said, stopping the project is def. within your rights since you're the client :)
You hire a design firm because you like their portfolio work. As a client, you shouldn't have to ask if the same people responsible for the portfolio work are going to work on your project. My guess is that this is an assumption that most clients will make (I certainly would), so it certainly seems that their actions are a bit disingenuous.
I'm not disagreeing, but to be fair, "common lisp" is often referred to as "lisp" or "CL". So the phrase is good for (down)trends, but not for comparisons.
This is an incorrect presentation of data. The process you describe is Anullment. The Catholic church permits the standard definition of divorce, but does not allow remarriage while the divorced spouse is still alive.
I agree with you nearly 100%, but why do you think the market fails to recognize the higher value of such a home?
The site seems to be pretty high-profile, and I seriously doubt they are "mystified." Looks to me like they're trying to drum up support and/or attention, and this post making it to #1 of HN indicates that their strategy may be working.
This will help how? There are few economies of scale to be gained by going national [1], and single-payer gives consumers no incentive to consume less.

[1] You save a bit of money by having the IRS collect payments, but the billing department is not a major component of healthcare costs.
Correlation vs Causation, and the MetaCritic MetaQuestion
Well, can't they be just disconnected? may be cut the wires off?
Yeah, we should definitely redo the screencast. That one was done after 48 hours of not sleeping and hacking to finish up the rails rumble.
All in all this affair is fishy.

However, it's not the first time we hear from google cancelling adsense accounts and cut all communication. I know it's the user's responsibility to make sure his stuff is clean, but most the time the user has no f*ing clue what stuff he did/does wrong.
Our TOS says that!? Silly TOS... we use adblockers ourselves.
As a personal exercise, I've been working on a basic math engine of my own recently. It's not very difficult to break problems down into computer-friendly steps, but if you approach them that way it's another challenge to choose the steps you should pull out to show in human-friendly output.

Here's a screenshot of the output from a very simple example in the current version: http://imgur.com/hevar.png. It uses LaTeX for the equations and Flot for the graphs. It's a fun project to work on; it can be surprising how far a program can get by just repeatedly applying some simple rules. :)
Facebook Connect is not an open technology in any meaningful sense of the word.
Around 200 people.
God knows what they did.
Interesting comment. But then again saying "terrible" is easy. On the other hand, how do YOU present ideas, concepts and information to your clients and audience? I am open to suggestions.
You're right, that was a rather asinine thing I said.
It's definitely important to know what kind of talent is behind your design project. If I'm paying $30/hr for a small project, I would expect it to be handled by a junior person. But if I'm shelling out $175/hr to the same firm for a larger project, I sure as hell better have their best creative minds on it. Setting explicitly clear expectations is an important part of client work.
How wireframing makes your website designs better
Bing now offers 3d street view (needs silverlight)
Its ridiculous to assume that a popular newsletter and site which had been running for 15 years would be "left with no alternative but to shut down" because one search engine won't index their content. I don't buy that for a second. Does ALL their traffic comes from organic search?

Also, as someone else pointed out this company's meta tag structure is awful. They've clearly invested no time in trying to optimize their site for search engines.

This is a ploy to get media attention. Why am I contributing to the probelm?
That's beyond silly thinking. I wouldn't click on Ads even if I didn't have Adblock on. I mentally block them out. That means I don't care about the site. Silly silly.
coverage is limited right now, but includes most of downtown SF. I have to say the 3d implementation is rather impressive.
Sluggish? Really? The reaction times for air movement and probably movement in general are miles faster than in the original SMB. Are you sure you're talking about SMW? The one that introduced Yoshi?
Search is another. Call it a total lack of trust on my part.
Current waiting time for China and India-born employment-based Green Card application is likely to be 4-5 years.

Many of those applicants are potential startup founders. Sadly they cannot pursue their ambitions due to the long immigration process. Some of them will choose to leave US and found their startups in their home countries.
Hehe, on a small note I've never thought of C syntax as a positive note.
> I could write code faster than I would in Perl, Awk or TCL, it ran as fast as C++

Was that GUI code (as the rest of your post seems to imply)? CL is not competitive with C++ in terms of raw speed, in my opinion. Without type declarations, it's close to Perl.
Then if it was later discovered that the freelancer wasn't a "real" employee they would be accused of misrepresentation as well. I think that the approach they took was correct, they did not attempt to hide, or call attention to, what exactly the freelancers tax status was.

They could have hired this freelancer the day before as a permanent employee, with an honest for-real @designfirm.com email address and the OP would have been perfectly happy (assuming the outcome as acceptable).

This is a mostly a matter of getting worked up over the formality of which logo is on the paycheck.