noahlt

iPhone, Android, and Mac clients. Maintaining as well as improving the web interface and the API. Lots more scaling - people check Twitter way more than they do Wordpress-hosted blogs.

I'm sure there's more, this is just what came off the top of my head.

An intellectual hackers' site like this one tends to be home to people playing with Scala, Erlang, Haskell, etc. Hacker News in particular was started by Paul Graham, so its seed community had a significant number of Lisp adherents. The startup community in general is biased towards dynamic languages, in particular, Ruby.

All this makes me think that Hacker News readers will tend to be on the leading edge of language popularity. But it is interesting to see the progress of mainstream adoption.

Not quite. According to the article, the Japanese deployed a solar sail with a Venus probe. This, though, is the world's first solar sail on a probe designed for Earth orbit.

Yes, I certainly am aware of the technological solutions to this problem. Nevertheless, I am still baffled by the apparent stigma towards linking to your site in the URL field, which seems like the natural, obvious, and right thing to do.

I would welcome an explanation!

Why do some people consider it "bad form" to include your link in the URL portion of the HN submission form? I've been wondering this for a while, since I am always annoyed when I have to cut-and-paste a URL.

A tangentially related story:

Talented secondary school kids all across America end up doing egg drop competitions all the time. But the rules of each competition are each slightly different. A friend of mine was in a competition which was scored like this:

Score = (intactness of egg, as 1 or 0)/(distance to target)/(mass of egg-protecting device)

While everybody else designed careful egg encasements, but my friend played video games and read sci-fi novels. When it was his turn to test his "device", he grabbed the egg and threw it away from the target, into a nearby bush, which broke the fall and kept the egg intact.

His great distance from the target would have made his score very low. But since he didn't actually have a device, the judges were forced to divide by zero...

Another good option: only integer answers.

One of his strategies (from the README on Github) is "favoring static compilation rather than a runtime interpreter", so I suspect that `eval` is not included in Mug.

However, `apply` is included (cf. test/regression.js line 19). So your example pseudocode could probably be written like this:

    for (var i = 1;  i <= 10;  i++) {
        var f = function() {
            print("I'm " + i.toString());
        };
        f();
    }

Ah, then my earlier comment is invalid. Thanks for the correction.

I guess this is a great example of founders never giving up. I had forgotten that Flock existed, and would have assumed that they'd called it quits, but here they are with what appears to be a successful exit. Kudos to them!

Investing in index funds has been lauded around here, but the goodness of that strategy revolves around its consistency in returning 10% over ten to twenty years. This graph makes index funds look much less consistent!

Does this graph debunk the index fund strategy, or am I missing something?

I don't know what "ascendant time" is, but I'm guessing it's some virtual good whose scarcity is purely artificial, so that the makers of Obsidian Portal don't incur additional costs when it is used.

If I'm right, then these guys are very cleverly making the world a better place.

Don't forget http://norvig.com/lispy.html

As the author points out, all those success stories are known because the worked out. He then goes on to lament the companies that failed because their founders gave up too early. But there are also companies that failed even though their founders never gave up, and we never hear about those, either.

The title of the paper is a bit misleading, and rhetorically clever if intentional. When I read this headline the first time, I parsed it as "Timeless (Decision Theory Paper) Released", so that "timeless" was an adjective describing the (non-specific) "decision theory paper", which had apparently just been released. :-)

Alternatively: be a good Jedi and write your own Lisp.

Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach also has Python code examples.

It's also worth noting that, in Python 2.6 and higher, we DO have a ternary operator:

    x = 3 if foo() else 6

It's worth noting that in California schools, any fighting (even in self-defense) results in expulsion.

I think that in general there are more interesting problems to work on in the programming language design than additional syntactic sugar.

I'm still a full-time student. What math should I learn?

I see an exciting future in journalism that consists of building tools to help users navigate and manipulate data.

Can anyone explain why this is so terrible? To me, it seems like Lisp, but backwards: in Lisp, you have symbols, which normally evaluate to their values unless they are quoted. In PHP, you have strings, which normally evaluate to themselves unless they are 'unquoted' with $.

Are you aware of Daytum? It's a web app by Nicholas Feltron, the guy who does "personal annual reports", infographics about his life. http://feltron.com/ http://daytum.com/

You might be interested in contacting him. At the very least, I thought you should know about the similarity in applications and names.

It's interesting to many of us here who are interested in building online communities. If a person happened to walk by this man's funeral, they probably wouldn't shout that he was "better off dead". But a person who happens to see this man's obituary online apparently has no qualms about the online equivalent.

As hackers, we build things that are used, ultimately, by fellow human beings. Those things we build can have unintended consequences. This story highlights that fact.

"Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only, and if you'd try to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have a technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms."

Clearly I missed something here -- what are they using to create the holograms?

There's a trend, particularly in the Apple community, to use "gorgeous" and "beautiful" to describe software which uses full illustrations rather than 'vanilla' UI elements. In accordance with this trend, this "Amazon Instant Search" might be called "gorgeous". But I disagree.

For one, I can't possibly describe it as 'instant': Google's instant search gives me feedback as I type, but here I have to stop typing and wait before I see any change in the search results. Even after I see the search results, it takes another few seconds to load the images (book covers).

The interface is littered with other imperfections: the book titles are truncated, I can't see the user reviews (arguably the most useful part of Amazon), and after I used it for a few minutes the page started flickering between two different sets of search results.

This is a cool tool, and it's fun to play with. But it's not gorgeous.

"That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." (Steve Jobs)

The words are genderless, singular pronouns.

Surprising that it took this long. PG's quotes page includes several by "Tara Ploughman", an anagram for "Not Paul Graham". When this was discovered, PG lamented the lack of a socially acceptable way to publish "single sentence essays". Twitter fills the gap nicely.

His point isn't that the public sector should shed a proportional number of employees, but that the collective income of private sector taxpayers has decreased, yet they are forced to sustain public-sector pensions with that decreased income.