skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's nothing wrong with working for people younger than you. Plenty of my coworkers are fiftysomethings working for thirtysomethings, and nobody objects to the situation.

And salary should have more to do with productivity and skill than seniority. If anything, I think programming is a good field for getting paid what you're worth. New skills and languages come around so often, you can (and have to) compete with the next crop of "3 years experience in NewFangLang" programmers head to head. So I think it's easier in this field than in most others to appeal directly to the market.

Yeah, if you're older and just starting to learn, you won't be worth as much as someone else your age who's been doing it since high school. So what? Isn't that true with any career change?
You may be able to use Amazon Mechanical Turk. Pay a penny a vote. Though I'm not sure how many rules that may be breaking;)
I've been using zsh with my old 300 line bashrc for several months now.

If you haven't already, try copying your .profile to .zshrc (just to see if it works); only your login shell reads your .profile.
Good feedback. Yeah we can do that, too. ;)
Ask the uncomfortable questions

This is by far the most important thing I've learned in my big company life. If you are in a meeting of 10 people and somebody appears to be saying something insane or stupid, the reason nobody is saying anything is because there are 8 other people in the room who are all nodding uncertainly and they don't want to sound like the jackass.

So ask the question. At worst, you will have misunderstood what they're saying, and since it's unlikely that you are the dumbest person in the room, there's probably at least one other person who has the same misunderstanding as you.

At best, you're the guy who has spotted the flaw in the plan and spoken up before it was too late. Either way, it's a win-win for you.
The musical pieces are fascinating from an algorithmic point of view, but to call them "music" is to use the word "music" very loosely.
Sorry, I can't get over the incredible irony of a web application about English grammar not being spelled correctly. Someone has a good sense of humor.
Get Glue: The Nework That Sticks To You
http://www.plt-scheme.org/ is the new website.

I feel its wrong for me to push this without at least mentioning that one of my professors wrote Dr. Scheme :-/
It's more of ideology and design principle.
Obamas Big Sellout
China's one-child policy is arguably the most controversial mandate introduced by the ruling Communist Party to date.

What? More controversial than the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward?
The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is this a bad thing?
If you want to use a two word node you can surround the two words with quotes. It feels a little slow to respond but other than that it seems to work nicely.
Lisp does not, at the moment, have any truly practical implementation of multiprocessing. It also doesn't gather any of the lazy benefits of Haskell. It is worthless for prototyping as its modules haven't been up to date in 20 years.

Edit: Gruseom is right, I was very critical without providing any support. Lisp is still very useful in certain cases. The instances which I find trouble with it are detailed in my second response.
E players -- and especially ES players -- shouldn't play online RPGs at all. They should play tabletop games, preferably with a top notch storyteller/DM.

Nothing beats the exploration and interaction value of an expansive world (say, something like Exalted), a custom story written for your character, and a group of people who come to spend time doing nothing but exploring and interacting with and generating it. Anything driven by bits is a shabby and distant second best.

Though if you must, something like Nethack can keep your E side happy for a while.
For the common user with 1~5 tabs, the issue is still relevant.
I'm not sure this is quite correct. My own (admittedly controversial) opinion is that lisp is old, and it's "syntax" is broken because it's nonexistent. Python has it's own problems, but it is less broken. :-)

The raw basic "syntax" in terms of the parens is a bear to read (and write), but you get used to it. It may be different, but that isn't really the problem. Anyone can figure out nested parentheses and escaping. Just as someone else pointed out -- this isn't alien territory .. nested parens/brackets/whatever and literal escaping are common in complex/terse code in any of the popular languages. Possibly Haskell is different, but I find it's terse syntax of juxtaposition more inscrutable than lisp, for the most part.

The problem is that in practical terms, the lisp syntax is not just nested parens and various forms of quoting and basic function invocation. The syntax includes the positions of arguments to various standard macros and special forms. Are they are sublists or inline? what are the keywords? And most importantly, are they evaluated or not? From an academic point of few, this technically could be considered semantics of a programming language, but I think that's false -- we don't consider human sentence structure semantics. This is totally syntax. And in lisp, it's highly irregular from form to form. It's just something you have to "know" based on the form, and the lack of syntax other than parens and quotes certainly doesn't help you at all here.

Compared to something like python, it's unreadable and confusing.
I gave up after the first 30 seconds of the main talk. Does the audio get any better later on?
Tech4000: Was Bartz's 'God Bless Tiger' an act of kindness?
ah yes! I figured that out by just trying it out :)

But I wanted to have nothing next to those arrows. Just the boxes. so i tried just 2 words and it doesn't work. Seems like there has to be some word to refer to those arrows
Selling TV wall mounts online is not a very great contribution to human progress

You speak like a person who has never had a grant proposal turned down. Congratulations! May you continue to enjoy your life in the ivory tower until retirement.

However, for better understanding of how other people's lives work you may want to google Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where you will encounter the observation that a person who doesn't have a secure source of food and shelter often has a lot of trouble caring about their contribution to "human progress".

A lot of people will hand you money in exchange for TV wall mounts. There are a lot fewer people who will hand you money in exchange for research data on ferrofluids, and there are a lot of people in line for that money.
Please link to actual content:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/emo-labs-raises-1-5-mil...
Fascinating stuff. Although I can't come up with any uses right now, I'm sure it will come in handy. Are you using Graphviz?

This reminds of a time when I used a perl script to extract includes from my Objective-C app and then used Graphviz to visualize dependency graph in my app. I was going to make an XCode plugin out of it, but then gave up on the idea. Still, Graphviz rocks for this sort of stuff.
You have a point; your basic statement is something I agree with. However, it depends on what variant of Lisp. Common Lisp, it's true, does have a lot of remnants from the past which make it ugly. (After all, why should I have to say 'aref' when it would be so much nicer just to say [] for array references...)

However, other Lisps exist. Take a look at Scheme or Clojure. Scheme is prettier, and Clojure more practical.

(On a side note: these different variants of Lisp certainly don't help create one "Lisp community".)
In the spirit of the Windows 7 Taskbar (or OSX dock), what about merging main-bookmarks and tabs? I for one would use it.
In fact, experienced functional programmers become adept at encoding correctness constraints directly into the Haskell type system. A common remark after programming in Haskell (or ML) for the first time is that once the program compiles, it's almost certainly correct.

A difficult position to defend but the reason I end up favoring strictly typed languages over dynamically typed (I'm ambivalent about duck-typed, so Python ends up being my favorite language for other reason). I love Haskell, as you may be able to tell.
The misspelling does make finding info about it much easier in search engines.
As somebody who is basically face-blind, I've been wanting a face-recognizing, Facebook-enabled implant (or heads-up display, or whatever) for years. It'd be particularly handy at conferences. I mainly just want it to tell me whether I've met somebody or not, and, if I have, where and when the meeting took place and what the other person had been wearing at the time ("blue shirt", etc.). That's usually enough to jog my memory.

Really, the only major thing keeping this from being at least mostly feasible today is the lack of a good way to do the user interface. Glasses-mounted HUDs don't seem to be production-ready yet. I guess if I were one of those people that always wore a Bluetooth earpiece, I could just route it through that, but I want something a little (ok, a lot) more subtle.
Fish is zsh, but with reasonable defaults and worse customization. If you want to build/find a good zshrc, zsh is a good choice. Otherwise, fish is probably a better choice.
I just don't see how this doesn't have prior art. The PeoplePC, for example.
Looks like he may have crossed one of the invisible lines.

http://www.flexyourrights.org/faq

"just touching an officer could get you tasered or beaten and stuck with a felony charge for assaulting a police officer."

NOT to excuse what they did, but I crossed the border for decades. You're free to refuse consent to a search. That doesn't mean they have to quit searching. They appreciate you remaining respectful. Pushing the definition: crossing a border is probable cause for drug warriors. And when you're ordered to get back into the car and don't, you're pushing your luck. I'm guessing these guards (crossing just north of Detroit) had had enough attitude for one day and were primed for a rumble.
Unfortunately this is the flaw in western society today. The risk/reward ratio in science is out of wack.

Philip Greenspun says this very succinctly in his article about why there aren't women in science.

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
What's this coded in? Is the source available?
There are too many people who would love nothing more than to say "Look there - a Microsoft employee using an iPhone/Google/Linux/whatever"

Such as their own executive management: http://garywiz.typepad.com/trial_by_fire/2006/03/ballmer_fam...

I wonder what happens if Steve Jobs catches you with a Zune at Apple? My guess is, nothing.
Yeah that is a downside. I don't usually like words next to the arrows either.
I figure a SmartPhone that is sold subsidized at $199 with a two year contract works out to about 10-15% of your monthly bill but it depends on the actual cost the carrier pays for the phone and the monthly package costs. So it would translate into a modest savings if the carriers actually discounted the packages on non-subsidized phones. They do not. So you're paying that extra 10-15% either way. Doesn't seem fair to me.

The added competition of customers not being locked into contracts is defeated by competing standards. Many GSM phones won't work on T-Mobile's 3G network and most of the handsets engineered specifically for T-Mobile don't work on AT&T's 3G. An unlocked CDMA phone would fair better since you would have legitimate choice between Sprint & Verizon. What we really need is an unlocked GSM/CDMA hybrid and we might see some real competition.
It will take an empty set of quotes for that, e.g. 'chicken "" egg'.
You caught my attention with that one: it sounded like a cuckoo quote. I don't think of Wittgenstein and silliness as exactly hanging out together. However, it turns out to be genuine and there's a related one to boot:

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein)
> We can shoehorn every paradigm into any language - sure. But then you get something that can do everything and isn't good for anything in particular

That doesn't necessarily follow, but it might very well be true.

In addition to features, languages need speakers. Java is rarely regarded for its feature set, but it is certainly a "good" language in that it is good at something.

The rest of your comment is largely drivel, compounded by the fact you simply don't know lisp well enough to think in lisp, and consequently have a meaningful conversation about what that means. Nevertheless, you somehow got the impression that I thought you should switch to lisp, and I sincerely apologize for that; I never meant that at all- only to express how knowing lisp is valuable.

However, there was one thing in particular:

> I don't want old-style message passing OO

Most lisp programmers prefer CLOS-style OO which uses generic functions, and not message passing.
And it's a shame, too. I know a lot of Motorolans, and they're depressed at how a company that makes great hardware (I'm talking the RF stuff inside) missed the boat on software and design.

But Moto needs Google more than Google needs Motorola. And that's why they can pull a move like this and nobody can say boo.
Note that almost most all of the philosophers surveyed were from English-speaking countries, which are dominated by Analytic Philosophy. I bet you'd get quite different results if the philosophers surveyed were from the rest of the world, where Continental Philosophy is much more prominent.

For example, many of the issues the respondents were surveyed on (Newcomb's paradox, qualia, philosophical "zombies", Fregeanism vs Millianism, A-theory vs B-theory, etc..) are just not issues of interest in Continental philosophy. Conversely, many of the issues which concern Continental philosophers aren't even mentioned in this survey.

So it would be more accurate to call this article "What do Analytic Philosophers Believe?"
Deciduous software
It looks like it's written in Java.

By my guess, it simply takes the first and last words of each sentence and treats them as nodes while everything inbetween is a directed edge. This is probably then passed into graphviz.
10 Tips For Startup Operating Planning
They should include the Fam Fam Fam Silk Icon set, still the best and most complete icon set out there.

http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
I don't think it has to be true, though they do go together well. Not all CL hackers use Emacs. You might consider trying the Lispworks IDE, or the Allegro IDE (on Windows) or the Clozure IDE (on Mac).
Or two spaces -- Obj1 space space Obj2
Or the remote lib could return sprite coordinates and dimensions, and serve one composite graphic.
Well, don't be a tease. Why is the iPhone better?
Lisp does not, at the moment, have any truly practical implementation of multiprocessing.

That would explain why there aren't any Lisp web servers.

It is worthless for prototyping as its modules haven't been up to date in 20 years.

Tell that to the people who are using it. Oh wait, I'm one of them. What you're saying here is such a crock that I have to wonder what your purpose is.
It’s All About Selling for Survival
.. and here's the takedown of this piece:

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=12&#...

Taibbi got people confused because they had similar last names, got people's titles confused, claimed Geithner was hired by Citigroup (he's never worked for a bank), and accepted ludicrous worst-case scenario estimates for the outcome of the recovery.

I know people will find this article congenial because the recovery is unpopular, but Taibbi, good writer though he is, has been blazing a trail of crappy reporting on the government as well as the workings of the actual market (read his ramblings on algorithmic trading, for instance).

This isn't serious reporting. It's no more credible than a DailyKos piece.
Fugue is far larger (http://www.pinvoke.com/) and is aesthetically much more pleasant.
Of all the colleges in the world to have problems in such times, Harvard is the one I have the hardest time finding sympathy for. Most schools wish they took in annually what Harvard earns in interest.

So many of us are paying for the massive screw-up in so many ways. Yet, I'm seeing few signs that anyone is seriously thinking about how to keep it from happening again. The subject seems to be taboo ... even though noone's reporting that torches and tar are getting hard to find.
Not an Autechre fan, I take it? ;)
They might be using mscgen http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/ but I'm not sure.
Kos bloggers at least get names and titles right...
This would've been useful in college. Drawing and labeling all the little arrows in Dia for classes was a real time waster.

"Kushal wrote Chartbeat to make it easier for people to communicate diagrams"

So it was originally called Chartbeat?

The reliance on Google Accounts makes me think they want Google to buy this out.
The article doesn't say Geithner was hired by Citigroup. It says he was hired to run Treasury by someone who previously worked for Citigroup.

If you're going to factcheck, make sure you're checking facts.
> Ruby has mostly replaced Lisp in my toolbox.

Wow. Would love to hear why. Could you list some of your weighted plusses and minuses for Lisp and Ruby?
UK Vista telescope takes stunning images... can map sky faster and deeper
I think there analogies for both sides of the argument. In the case of bank accounts (or bank security) I don't test it by trying to break in, check how it works with id theft etc ;)

But for backups, at least in this (early) era of manage hosting/cloud, its probably not too onerous to test your plans etc...
Nexus One - The Google Phone Confirmed
That sentiment probably is a reaction from seeing the opposite sentiments in the world.
... and here's a takedown of your takedown:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/11/fernholz-vs...

Key quotes:

> often Taibbi simply doesn’t say what Fernholz implies that he says

> the schadenfreude over Fernholz’s attack on Taibbi is particularly weird since they seem to actually agree with each other

> This is quite astonishing. Fernholz is basically saying that Taibbi is right

If you're going to link to a takedown, make sure it's actually a takedown.
Pitching Hacks, in paperback
Here's an argument I always use in such cases:

Imagine this setup: You use a fully dynamically typed language. You write unit tests and ensure 100% code coverage. You run those unit tests during the build phase.

Now, is there really difference in terms of guarantees that can be given about the app after it compiles? This arguably gives you better guarantee than static typing because it is also protects you from variety of errors such as using one expression of type FOO in place of another expression of the same type.
Yes. This is the major problem with leaving out a public option. There is no way to control costs without one. Preventative medicine has been shown to improve patient outcomes but has also been shown to increase, not lower, costs.
http://www.diagrammr.com/edit?key=d5D2oO1kz0N ?
Much more? They look about the same to me. But thanks for the link.
Gravatar is used all over the place and is almost always hotlinked. Download if you want and you know the set of types you need icons for. Otherwise, it's just easier to blindly hotlink.
Yeah, that was one of the original sets I wanted it to support, but I think they were missing some important ones.
Well it was useful for visualizing some of Yoda's lines: http://imgur.com/OZOxG.png
Fair, I was overly critical. For me, I find that it is far easier to find modules for Python than for Lisp. For example, the other day I was looking for a module to read and write ID3 tags. The only thing I could find for lisp was http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls..., which is buggy and incomplete. It didn't take very long to find a suitable Python module.

As to multithreading, first since when is a web server the be-all-end-all of multiprocessing? Hell, you don't even need multithreading to do a webserver, just use Unix processes. My issue with Lisp is that there is no standard for multi-threaded Lisp; the ANSI spec doesn't consider threading at all. The Lisp community seems to be increasingly fractured over the years, which is too bad because I'm not insulting Lisp because I hate it -- it has just become too difficult to use as my generic do-everything language.
Now let's say you write the same program in a statically typed language, with the same unit tests. Which is safer?
I started learning scheme recently, and enjoyed it for a while, then went back to ruby. (I have been programming in Ruby for a few years now.)

If I want to prototype something quickly, I will use ruby. I think the modular way you can program in an oo language is another factor. It is easy to write a demo, and then add the class to a rails project. I tried to read about using modules, such as those used by gambit-c, but the mailing list replies were dense with jargon, which I found more of a barrier than the parentheses.

I found the scheme environment too fragmented and lacked a decent equivalent of rubygems. The lack of a non-emacs editor with nice indenting was a contributing influence.

Replace ruby with python and scheme with lisp above, to see the relevance.
From what what I know about both companies, Steve Jobs' reaction would be much more severe than MS management. Apple doesn't seem to tolerate "different" much - it's either the Apple way or the highway.
From the "takedown of the takedown":

In any case, I feel that Fernholz is a bit like Heidi Moore: he’s missed the point of Taibbi’s polemical style. Taibbi is not interested in an writing an even-handed examination of Obama’s economic policies: he’s interested in writing an enjoyable screed which jumps off the page and which describes Alan Greenspan as “a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters”. This stuff isn’t meant to be taken nearly as literally as Fernholz is taking it — but in any case, Fernholz’s game of gotcha comes up with precious little of real substance.

Later:

Yes, Taibbi is polemical and one-sided, and he exaggerates his thesis, and he’s entertaining; I daresay he’s learned a lot from watching Fox News. And no, I would never want to live in a world where everybody wrote like that. But Taibbi is one of a kind, and we can enjoy him and learn from him as such.
Gifting Lounge Honoring Dancing with the Stars is a Smashing Success
>I wonder what happens if Steve Jobs catches you with a Zune at Apple? My guess is, nothing.

Really? The impression I've got from Apple employees I've met is that there would be quite a reaction indeed.

BTW, I worked at MSFT last summer and everyone seemed to have an iPhone. A lot of people used Firefox as their primary browser, and I used Opera. There was nothing impolitic about it. In fact, the only time people mentioned it was to ask me what browser I was using, if Opera's visual tabs caught their eye.
If you have 100% code coverage you don't necessarily have 100% path coverage, so there could still be errors that a statically typed language would catch at compile time. Realistically, most programs aren't going to have extensive test suits that get anywhere near 100% code coverage, so static typing becomes even more valuable. Also, running a full test suite for every build would take much more time that running a type checker.
You write unit tests and ensure 100% code coverage.

Let's image this counter scenario:
You write a couple unit tests for your most common cases and a couple corner cases. You don't even try for code coverage over ~80%.

For me, the second case is more common. I simply don't have the time to keep the unit tests up to date with every iteration. In these cases I like static typing as it finds errors I miss.