skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was in a similar situation: I love LISP and I wanted to use it for web development. I spent several days looking at Clojure and Compojure for this purpose but came to the conclusion that it was far too restrictive and cumbersome for rapid web development.

Then I discovered the Dragonfly framework, a web framework for the newLISP scripting language and became its co-author.

Advantages over Clojure/Compojure:

- No need to switch web servers to Jetty/TomCat. (runs as cgi).

- PHP-like development, no need to recompile/reload code.

- Extremely dynamic and flexible routes.

- Very fast and very low memory usage.

- newLISP is an awesome language.

http://www.rundragonfly.com/

http://www.newlisp.com

Questions to the Dragonfly forum:

http://www.newlispfanclub.alh.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=17

It's still young and is being actively developed, but I think if you give it a look over you'll find much to love about it.
It also wouldn't hurt to put yourselves in the shoes of the etherpad owners who had to sell out. Maybe they wouldn't have if the fans had ponied up for the pro account.
It's been in at least since Erlang Day. I'd bet it's been a year or two.

It's always felt on the verge, but has never dropped off the edge. I suppose it's more exciting that way.
Hmm, not exactly what I was looking for but close nonetheless. I'll check out your site though, looks good.
It's bizarre these so-called conservatives at the WSJ have abandoned Chicago style economics for gold-bug reactionary alarmism.

The monetarist theory--now the dominant theory of monetary policy--is that one of the biggest, most economically important features of a recession is a flight to liquidity. In such a situation, the demand for tangible money--and, under US law, there is none more tangible than the dollar--will drastically jump, despite a limited supply. Nobody doubts the tangibility of the dollar when they are forced to pay taxes, and if they do, they might find themselves in a cell with a tangible lock and 6 by 6 tangible feet.

The correct thing to do, then, is to expand the money supply. This might happen by a seemingly alarming amount, especially given the highly leveraged nature of our economy. But otherwise a flight to liquidity will shut down the financial system, cause huge losses in "safe" bank accounts and funds, cause massive deflation as money becomes scarce, and cause a nasty depression--which is what happened from 1929 to 1932.

The money supply has expanded from about $800 billion to $2 trillion. Alarming? Maybe, but

1) we're not seeing inflation yet

2) most economists agree that the Fed contracting the money supply was a major cause of the 1929 Depression

3) the Fed is perfectly willing to stall the economy to prevent inflation, which is what they did in 1979 when a shameless monetarist finally was given power. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Chairman_of_the_Fe... . It's worth noting that Volcker is one of Obama's chief economic advisors: the guy in charge of economic recovery board.

4) the amount of paper cash has increased by a "mere" 120 billion or so. Most of the remaining cash is sitting in Federal Reserve bank accounts, not being used.

So I wouldn't dump greenbacks yet. If you're like most people few of your assets are in greenbacks anyway.

Finally, if I keep seeing articles like this, I'm buying puts on gold. You heard it here first, folks.
Don't know of any java-based one, but I use the original version from http://lesscss.org quite a bit. (That can run stand-alone and generate CSS files, or it can run as a plugin for Ruby-based sites.) It offers a lot of what SASS has, but uses a superset of CSS instead of a different mini-language, which made it a lot quicker to get going with when I tried both.
Freeverse is a publisher; Graveck developed Skee-Ball for the iPhone: http://www.graveck.com/
Other: newLISP

http://www.newlisp.com
I didn't post it to find a "winner" so much as to see what the trend was like. I expect javascript/ruby/python to be very well represented because they are common in web apps, and a lot of people here are working on web apps.
No, I hate screencasts for several reasons.

- I can't stream video at work. I can read documentation all day long, but streaming video, audio, etc. is not a valid use of company resources.

- I can't easily find the information I need. Video is not searchable, and it's difficult to just skip to the right spot.

- Documents can work as a reference. A lot of tutorials are good enough to be reference materials, especially when the thing they document is lacking in the documentation department.

- I don't like listening to people talk to me, I read at least 10x faster than somebody can talk to me.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977632 for more info.
If the findings of parapsychology are always false, then it's only because things cease to become parapsychology as soon as there is an established mechanism. Things go from being parapsychology to psychology all the time.

Synaesthasia, mirror neurons, and mystical experiences are three completely different parapsychological phenomena that have become accepted by mainstream science within the last ten years. I see no reason why science won't keep validating more paranormal theories in the future.
Don't downmod comments just because you disagree with them.

This is a legitimate and rather frequently made suggestion, but a contrary suggestion was made in a comment by pg

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

where he wrote, "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

On some threads, I can find occasion (as I do here) to post a reply indicating substantive, polite disagreement with a previous comment, to which I reply with my disagreement. On some other threads, I see comments to which it would not be good use of time to post a disagreeing reply, and sometimes in those cases (not all the time), I find it most appropriate to downvote to indicate disagreement. I can tell that I am not alone in that practice.

What I especially like to do is to upvote any comment that is good, where "good" is defined as helps me learn something I didn't know or makes me think from a new point of view. People can disagree with positions I hold and still get upvotes from me, especially if they post verifiable information indicating why they hold the positions they hold.
"All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM (local time) on Saturday, December 5, 2009."

Unfortunately, it looks like we missed the window to participate.
same here. Use this every day.
Simple hack of Google's JS API to geo-locate your users for free
Just realized that when you fetch Google's JS API it will include your geo-location embedded in the javascript file it returns. You can verify this by just going to http://www.google.com/jsapi in your browser and looking at google.loader.ClientLocation

You can use this easily in any javascript code you write with the following snippet:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>
alert("I love living in: " + google.loader.ClientLocation.address.city);
</script>
First alpha of Python 2.7 released
Why Introverts Can Make The Best Leaders
Other: Mumps. (Yes, really.)
Yes, and no.

When I am beginning a subject of interest, I find screencasts to be exceptionally useful because I am a visual learner; however, there is a point that I reach in which screencasts become a hindrance opposed to a useful tool. To define that point precisely is a bit difficult, but if I had to I would say it`s the point at which I know enough on the topic to transition into 'hands on' learning. At that point, I find textual references far more useful and videos just slow me down. Of course, most of these points have already been touched on, but I figured I could back them up. More data is never a bad thing.
I don't think the example is actually that different.

My response was to the point of "the casino might actually not be out any money". If the outcome of the wager (that the casino won and "kept" the money) is critical to determining how/whether a case is prosecuted, then you set the casinos up to be free-rolled, which is the point I was making with my coin-flip after loan analogy.

The moment Ryan beats me in the coin flip, he's "earned" $1000. If the law differentiates at all whether he's entitled to be paid based on whether I moments earlier borrowed $1000 from him, then I have a free-roll.

I borrow $1000 in cash, and bet $1000 in cash on heads.

Heads, I win $1000, pay the loan off and walk out with my $1000 profit.

Tails, I lose $1000, but I say "well, you have the money anyway, so you're not actually out anything" and walk away with no more and no less money than I started the day.

Mathematically, that's the same as Ryan giving me $500 and us making a $500 wager on the coin.

I wasn't trying to address whether it should be civil or criminal; I tend to agree it should be civil, but Nevada gets to make the rules for Nevada. I was merely pointing out that whether or not the casino "kept" the money that it beat the guy for is not relevant.
My biggest complaint about Hacker News is that the upmodding and downmodding of comments is used to express agreement/disagreement rather than as a method of distinguishing the quality of the post itself. I regularly upmod intelligent, yet unpopular, comments if they've fallen below 1.
Beej's Guide to Unix Interprocess Communication
T-SQL almost daily at work.
It's very pragmatic, and very python. I appreciate it for sure. 3 still seems really far off from the wide adoption standpoint.
Some discussion already here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978425
No, hashing is part of the O in O(1). For pathological cases O(n) could be faster than O(1), but fast hashing is fundamental to Python performance, so I expect it to be fast.
Hasn't someone yet written a compiler that targets MUMPS from a nicer language? And if not, why not start on it yourself? Fun project, with very relieving results :)
A separate problem, not dealt with in that particular essay, is the quite hideous degree to which average scientists don't understand the statistics they use.

I would put a good deal of the blame for this squarely on frequentism as well. Bayesianism isn't hard to understand, it's just takes an effort of the teacher to explain well - I've made certain notable efforts in that direction myself. Once you do get it, you get it.
My Say: Hacker News User Profiling?
Writting Games with Lust and SDL
Social networking surveillance lawsuit
Big green Apple life: live smaller, drive less, share more
Other: Scala
Other - F#

I voted for Ocaml, which is a close cousin, but with all the libraries available, F# is really another kind of thing entirely.
What's a mystical experience? I find parapsych pretty interesting, but I've never heard of this, at least in the context of mainstream science.
I registered an account to see what else is visible in the bid window. The interesting part for me was their "Tiered packages" that takes advantage of customers by playing off their assumptions that buying more bids at one time would be cheaper. If you do the math, no matter how much you buy at one time bids are always $.60 each.
Other: Ada
I am not sure why you think deletion has to be O(log n), but can assure you that it is O(1). Of course, this is assuming you consider a hash table lookup to take constant time. If that can help, this is implementation of deletion for the OrderedDict collection:

def __delitem__(self, key):
'od.__delitem__(y) <==> del od[y]'
# Deleting an existing item uses self.__map to find the link which is
# then removed by updating the links in the predecessor and successor nodes.
dict.__delitem__(self, key)
link = self.__map.pop(key)
link.prev.next = link.next
link.next.prev = link.prev
This position is incredibly difficult to actually maintain, given that when _non_ parapsychologists (that is, people who don't presuppose the telepathy exists) reproduce the experiments, they consistently get contradictory results. Infact, its only when the believers in psi phenomena do these experiments that they discover positive results. Is this a problem with science as a whole, or is this a problem with parapsychologists?
If you would upmod them anyway, why do you distinguish by " I regularly upmod intelligent, yet unpopular, comments if they've fallen below 1." ?
Wouldn't you just upmod these anyway?

I think HN does an above average Job with its comment moderation. I think this is a testament to the quality of the HN community.
So if you're new to rails, is it better to learn rails 2.x and move to 3.0 later, or to just learn 3.0 now?
its only when the believers in psi phenomena do these experiments that they discover positive results

Hmm? Isn't that what we expect if there are no psi phenomena?

[ETA: Ah, perhaps this was an argument against the premise that parapsychologists use exactly the same procedures as other scientists. But in other sciences, one suspects that researchers who believe in XYZ tend to find it more than those who don't...]
If you claim that you haven't seen inflation, then I am going to guess that you are not the one in the household that is buying groceries. Example: Wheat-based products like pasta used to sell on sale for 50 to 80 cents /lb; now a sale price is $1/lb; or an increase of over 20% over the past 2 years.
Wait. The app store? Huh? Where has this journalist been?
Suggesting that mirror neurons were ever somehow parapsychology seems like a bit of a stretch.
Other: COBOL.
That sort of implies that all companies should gradually "become" whatever is the most profitable kind of company, though. If it turns out that, say, spam is the most profitable thing a company can do, then your todo-list app, or even your brick-and-mortar home-and-garden store, would gradually swap out parts (including employees and even founders) until it has become an online spamming service!
This debate has been raging for 250 years. Brad Efron, one of the greatest living statisticians today and one of the few who can transcend the debate, has VERY interesting things to say about it. He believes that Empirical Bayes, or using some of your data to model your prior, will win the day.

http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWMode...
You should be careful in the way that you use the word 'Chutzpah'—in English people usually use it to mean ballsiness, but in Yiddish it still means impudence, affrontery, gall. Not a good quality. I don't know about modern Israeli but given its negative cognates I wouldn't be surprised if it is still not a nice thing to accuse someone of there, too.
This is remarkable, but these kind of things are only possible at extremely low temperatures and in high magnetic fields, for example this was done at 100mK and in a 4T field, so you won't be seeing intel pumping these out any time soon.
So there are several names for the same thing: mystical experience, primary religious experience, enlightenment experience, etc.

But it's basically the experience of leaving your body, traveling through a tunnel toward a bright light, and then learning one or more of the noetic truths described here:

http://csp.org/experience/docs/stace-states.html

This experience is said to feel more real than real life, and to be largely ineffable. This is obviously problematic for science for a number of reasons. (For example, if it's true that there is such a thing as an ineffable experience, this means that the basic assumptions underlying all of science are false.)

Anyway in 2006 scientists were able to recreate mystical states in 60-70% of participants using a high dose of psilocybin. These experiences corresponded very well with the traditional mystical states as described by all the world religions. (Basically the vast majority of religions were created by people who had a 'primary religious experience'.)

If you want to experience this for yourself, you can sign up to be part of the next round of experiments at csp.org. Although there are definitely some pretty serious risks, so you wouldn't really want to sign up until reading a few books on the subject so that you understand these risks and can make an informed decision.

There is a podcast called Gnostic Media that has a really good interview with the researcher who did the 2006 Hopkins study. I'd highly recommend it. All of their interviews are actually really good.
In what ways does a Stradivarius sound different from a normal violin? I'm curious because according to Wikipedia, "In a particularly famous test on a BBC Radio 3 program in 1977, the great violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman and the violin expert and dealer Charles Beare tried to distinguish among the 'Chaconne' Stradivarius, a 1739 Guarneri del Gesú, an 1846 Vuillaume, and a 1976 British violin played behind a screen by a professional soloist. The two violinists were allowed to play all the instruments first. None of the listeners identified more than two of the four instruments; two of the listeners identified the 20th-century violin as the Stradivarius." This suggests that there isn't much of a difference between the instruments. Does anyone know if there has been other research into this subject?
I do that also but I upmod and downmod higher modded posts according to my opinions. It seems like a popular approach. I think that's why my favorite comments usually stay at 2.

The way to get a high modded post seems to be state a completely obvious refutation of a parent post. Saddly, I don't actually find such posts terribly interesting.

Fortunately, I don't think everyone posts for points here.
Mirror neurons themselves were never parapsychology, but they explain phenomena that were considered paranormal before their discovery:

http://health.howstuffworks.com/synesthesia.htm/printable
Has anyone thought about creating an open-source version of this type of product?

That would ensure this "problem" happen in the future -- and you gets lots of brainpower in figuring out how to really improve on the basic theme!

What functionality would you like to see in a great collaborative online editor?
(to answer my own question: yes, there's a 1.9 thing happening here).
Jquery.mb.flipText first release is out
> this is assuming you consider a hash table lookup to take constant time

That's exactly the part I was referring to. If deleting the key from an OrderedDict is O(1), then all these operations have to be O(1):

- dictionary deletion

- _map.pop (which is another dictionary deletion)

- linked list removal (obvious)

I'm not saying they aren't - just wanted to make sure that's the case. I didn't know whether to interpret the sentence from "what's new" as - "we use a map to know the elements, so the only operation on a linked list is unlink, which is O(1)", or "the whole lookup+delete is O(1)".
if it's true that there is such a thing as an ineffable experience, this means that the basic assumptions underlying all of science are false.

Isn't the fact that these experiences can be induced by using a physical collection of molecules to do something physical to the brain an indication that, actually, they're just the sort of physical processes that are compatible with materialistic science?
See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

from the keyboard of pg, expressing a differing point of view.

After edit: the low-rated comments that most disappoint me are the comments asking follow-up questions, to verify information asserted in the parent comment. I'd like to see a lot more upvotes for comments along the lines of "Could you cite some references on that?" or "What is an example of that?" or "What are some of the best online sources on that issue?" Most of us like to learn here, and the guidelines say that "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on topic, so anyone who asks a question to pursue curiosity ought to see that comment upvoted, it seems to me.
> you are probably "doing it wrong" in terms of producing fast code in a selection of browsers.

And yet JQuery and Mootools are both incredibly fast, as benchmarks show.

And yes, I'm aware of the model you're using, and reiterating explicitly what I implied isn't making your argument any stronger, in my opinion.
More C than I expected (go us!). Would be interested in what the specific projects were using it.
PyCon is in Atlanta in Feb.
Why is this posted? There is a link for the guidelines at the bottom so what's the point of making a post of it.
You happened to use an IP address that had been banned for spamming.
I just wrote an essay that supports what you said:

http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/dont-reject-your-experien...

We HAVE to assume "out there" stuff has some objective underpinning, or we commit the same sin as invoking God, but in mirror image.
I have a proposal.

The idea of up/down voting expressing agreement/disagreement seems standard. At least, that is what I have seen. If we try to impose a new standard (downvote -> moderation), then users will (probably) ignore that standard or not follow it.

Therefore, why don't we try to do something different. Instead of having upvote/downvote arrows which implies the standard, we can use a plus sign (or an arrow up) for agreement, and a null sign or an 'X' for disagreement. That way, down voting might not imply disagreement, because an 'X' does not mean disagreement; it means 'not allowed'.
I think there may some misunderstanding of the "Chutzpa" ingredient. As an Israeli living in NYC for the past 3 years, I don't think Americans are less entrepreneurial or more risk averse than Israelis. What is very different is the manner of communication - which I think has as much to do with the fact that modern Hebrew is extremely young, and simply hadn't yet evolved the "syntactic sugar", so to speak, that makes American communication somewhat more abstract.

The Hebrew mode of communication vs the American English one can be likened to executives at a board meeting vs engineers working on fixing a bug.

This has positive & negative implications: communication in Israel, translated literally to English, would seem blunt and sometimes plain rude to Americans (and remember, I'm in NYC ;)). On the other hand, the same directness (and almost total lack of rank - you call your army officer, or cabinet ministers, by their first name) tends to get assumptions questioned, ideas presented and problems recognized quite faster.
Other: Tcl
I've seen Paul's comment before, and have now voted it up. Still, I don't think encouraging voting based on agreement is a good thing. Yes, given limited channels of communication, sometimes voting up a comment you like is the best way to show solidarity. If in the long run this produces a better forum for discussion, then great!

I'm fairly happy with where the quality of discussion is now, and I'd like to see it continue at the same or better level. I think a guideline that encourages conscious and non-reflexive voting based on quality rather than agreement would help, even if the other only difference is that people think more about why they are voting as they currently do.
Well known VCs also matter in doing deals. Big companies will now return your calls.
Of course it's compatible! But that doesn't rob it of its magic. Just because we discover the lever, doesn't prove there isn't something tugging on the lever.

I have a couple articles on my site about how the concept of the "supernatural" is incoherent, but that it doesn't matter: we experience such a small subset of "reality" that we need a concept "outside the normal realm of experience." I called it "Hypernatural," for lack of a better term already in use.