skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where on earth did you get those function names? Perhaps you meant

(sum 3
4
(difference 1 (division 3 4))
(product (difference 9 2) 8 3))

Moving the function name outside the parens makes as much sense as moving a verb outside a sentence.

P.S. The way to pronounce the < function is "ascending".
I know I'm not as smart as you guys, but I very strongly prefer
3 + 4 + (1 - 3/4) + ((9-2) * 8 * 3)

If you code Lisp long enough does your first expression becomes as natural to read as my expression is for me?
Yes. Microsoft was down 4% on the announcement.

It's merger arbitrage.

Buy YHOO, short MSFT. If the merger doesn't go through, then sure, your YHOO stock will drop, but your MSFT stock will gain.

If you get the right proportion of long/short YHOO/MSFT, you make money no matter what happens.

(Where the "right proportion" is really complicated to figure out, and is often wrong.)
I upmodded you, but I also upmodded this comic. Obviously if the front page of news.yc was riddled with comics and other image links, that would be lame, but on the other hand, this xkcd was inspired, and I'm really glad I saw it (which is my litmus test for upvoting posts).

Yeah yeah. I should probably just add xkcd to my RSS feed.
http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NASDAQ:YHO...

take a look at the annual data. they may be profitable, but a 62% fall in net income over 3 years, that's pretty bad.
Beyond idiotic. Clearly I'm not drunk enough for that inanity.
Example: Maximizing Rails on Minimal Hardware
The Digg Heat Map: Digg is mostly US and mostly read at work
> (How big? I don't know. Big!)

I didn't say it was a big problem, I said it was a real problem. And the larger your code base, and the more people start sharing code, the more real it will be. It is only a matter of time before someone writes something like:

(let foo snoz (jims-macro frotz))

and gets an error of the form "42 is not a valid function" and has to spend an hour puzzling over where that error came from before realizing that Jim's macro expands into Bob's macro which expands into Ann's macro which uses a helper function called foo.

Is it a "big" problem? Maybe not. But it's a real problem, and given that one of your stated goals was to design "the 100 year language" I think it's a shame that you chose to solve it by placing the burden on the programmers. (And I use the plural advisedly here, because the potential for encountering this problem grows as the community grows and people start re-using each other's code.)

But I would reiterate that the lack of abstract data types is IMO a much bigger problem than the lack of hygienic macros. (And just so you know I'm not just sniping from the sidelines, I have proposed solutions implemented in CL which I'd be happy to help port to Arc if you agree that this is in fact a problem.)
It becomes just as natural, and it's easier to debug. You can drop down lines and autoindent to see the structure of the mathematical forumula. I don't know of any editors that will do that sort of thing for infix.
Myspace had a very good idea. This is obvious because it had a million copycat sites that were pure knockoffs but still became incredibly rich.
YHOO/MSFT Bidding War? MSFT to Raise Offer? Doubtful
>> how many startups could they fund with $45 billion?
100? 200? 1000? why exactly do they want to be at the helm
of a slowly dying web portal left over from the first dot com boom?

I understand the "startups are king" mentality around here, but come on. Regardless of their quarterly performance, Yahoo! is one of the biggest brand names on the web. Microsoft won't establish a bigger web presence by "funding startups."
First Yahoo messenger and MSN messenger joined networks. This was a reasona next step. yahoo is not completely worthless. In many parts of the world Yahoo dominates the IM market and in email Yahoo and Microsoft have a much bigger market share worldwide. yahoo also owns sites like Flickr and Delicious, both of which are better than their Google counterparts.

yahoo also has deals to provide email for many ISPs in the US.

I think Microsoft could benefit from the increased market share in many areas.
Reddit bookmarklets allow web site owners to cheat to get mostly up votes (simple realistic example given).
The idea is to associate a positive link and a negative link with your site. You would submit both to reddit.

Based on the user's experience, you would switch him/her to the positive/negative link.

That way, happy users would vote up the positive link while unhappy users would vote down the negative link. Your site now has a better chance of making the front page.

As an example, suppose your site has a game/puzzle.

When the user visits the site via the positive or negative link, you redirect to the negative link.

If the user plays several levels of the game/puzzle, then he/she probably likes it and then you can switch him/her to the positive link.
has yc funded any open source projects?
Humor: Arc developer wanted
Bose QC-2 and a music player - iPod or whatever. The QC-2 by itself isn't enough. I find any low level of music is enough to keep out modest conversations. Keep spare batteries with you at all times. ^_^

I bought my first pair in response to an officemate who conducted loud meetings. Now it's nearly as if I'm cloistered with the QC-2.

I grok the frustration, but the QC-2 is worth the money and is an investment in personal sanity.
Best practices for loading seed data in Rails
Ah the nuances ot title compostion. If the title had been "17 ways how VoIP can help your sex life", I might have clicked on it...
Exactly. When companies get as big as MS, they need big wins. Big companies never seem to be interested in or capable of managing and dealing with lots of small deals - perhaps it would be too much of a hassle chasing a lot of small fry even though a few will eventually take off.
BTW, don't forget to do something with http://www.archub.org/ , maybe a redirect.
Social Media Founders Opinions on SEO Abuse of their services
How Are People Twittering on Twitter ? Google Tells It All
I note that infix was so natural that you resorted to parens.

Infix looks reasonable until one has more than 2 operators. Then people start making mistakes. To combat those mistakes, they start parenthesizing. The number of mistakes goes down but there's still confusion. (Some folks know more precedence levels than others and many folks think that they know precedence levels that they don't know.)
Persuasion: Facts don't sway people, feelings do.  And stories are the best way to evoke feelings.
shit! I am going to have to move a way from deli.cio.us, I already had lot of links!
Intel releases graphics programming manual
thatsmymouse.com - Social browsing
my point is that they could get a lot more bang for their buck elsewhere. yahoo is a dying brand.

if they invested that $45 billion in 45 one billion dollar projects, if at least one of them had an annual net of more than $700 million/year, they are doing better than buying Yahoo.
Hi All,

I launched thatsmymouse.com this morning. Mashable posted a very positive review; http://mashable.com/2008/01/31/thatsmymouse/

I read news.yc everyday (or all day as the case may be), so if you have any questions feel free to post them here.
crap... given MS's history with standards, I should switch from yui's css framework to another one if the bid goes through
Open-source silver lining in Microsoft's wedding vow to Yahoo?
Programmer's food pyramid
Sounds like he's lost his faith in Lisp uber-alles, but not necessarily in high-level languages or dynamic languages.
Closures would be nice in Java.
It's a big missing feature in Java and Python.
How Microsoft Could Go Hostile
Nice - I can see using this with my older relatives that live far away =)
in my opinion - if Yahoo accepts; all of the open source projects under its under wing are in danger; I'm already thinking of how to get out of yui...
yeah good point but they are not losing money and I think you will see google do the same thing in a few years once they hit the peak for their products.

Yahoo's problem seems to be the management and the fact they are still playing catch up with adsense.
Just launched a social news site for fashion, beauty, etc. (with pretty photos) Comments?
Microsoft's Yahoo Bid Is Also About Business Users
besides aws - what did you use to build this?
It's also not true with airlines.
So... to avoid using tables, reinvent all the table-related tags as classes? I haven't had my caffeine yet. Is this a joke?

Plus, you have to use "float," which if you think about it means you're really just pushing the dirt under the CSS rug.

Isn't that what CSS is all about?
Sure they could fund a lot of startups. But how would you manage 1000 startups - hire 50 in-house VCs?

Better to let former MS employees bet their own cash on startups, which MS then gets to pick and choose and buy the ones they find most interesting.

And don't write off Yahoo's presence in the Third World, like China, Philipppines, India, etc. As those economies grow Yahoo's user base there will be more valuable.
haha yea it'd be expensive. maybe $50 billion expensive.
Looks good - good luck with it! I have always wondered why something like that doesn't exist.
How could an offer, that is 62% higher then the price at the stockmarket be refused?
FCC Auction Opens Door to Open Access
Pirate Bay: big revenue claims fabricated by prosecutors
Microsoft + Yahoo = Microwho?
iPhone Killer? Garmin Adds A Cell Phone To Its GPS Device
not only that, 2 of the 3 sets of paren were not needed, the order of operations already would have gotten it right
regarding state, see the other example above. then post saying you meant infix math, not state.

edit: and state is not only used to avoid nesting. that is just common. i do it myself in ruby. too much chaining stuff is confusing in ruby, even with OO shortcuts (which are how people actually avoid using the crappy function call syntax too much, even more than via infix math). so you save to a variable and split it up.
you're saying lisp is harder to understand b/c it's higher level and has more abstraction away from the way computers really work and away from assembly language (which are easy to understand, or something)?

you don't need to know what your lisp gets turned into. you do need to know something about what tree your lisp, or infix math, or chained C functions, get turned into. you have to actually know which tokens go into which branches. you have to know what functions are being called on what tokens, in what order.
read before you post
I found the Jaql link in his article interesting

http://www.jaql.org/jaql-overview.html

It looks a lot like FLWOR for JSON.

It's too bad the JSON examples they cite there don't conform to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt which requires member names to be strings with quotation marks.
"Early this morning Goldman made an awfully timely call, putting out an analyst note at 3:56am PST suggesting that Microsoft should buy Yahoo -- only to freeze analyst coverage of Microsoft at 6:55 AM PST on the news that Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo and it is providing i-banking support"
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/02/01/yahoomicrosoft....

Now that's a coincidence...
Do you really believe that by "Trillian of Social Networks" he meant something as trivial as an RSS feed of updates?

I have been at "RSS startup". The problem with RSS feeds is that sites (sources) are smart and are using them to BRING visitors back, not to give them away into your favorite RSS reader. A content owner is always a king. You want to own a content, not a pipe.

Sean is talking about building a service that liberates you from visiting MySpace/Facebook/Orcut completely. Needless to say, Facebook won't be happy about such thing and almost certainly won't allow it.
"For example, my language of choice for doing Web development now is Python. ..."

To Lisper:

It seems several people are comparing Arc to other Lisps.

I think that's somewhat unproductive. The Lisp user base is so small now that there isn't much sense "marketing" to that audience by comparing Arc to Scheme, CL, etc.

So, an alternative question: what would it take for you to use Arc instead of Python for web programming?
New cable cut compounds net woes
In pictures: Mobile design competition
Great. According to Neal Gafter's blog http://gafter.blogspot.com/2006/08/closures-for-java.html there will be a java.lang.Null class to handle the type of null. Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

...But I guess that's what happens when you have to worry about backward-compatibility.
case beercount
0 1 "inanity"
2 3 4 "good sense"
else "genius"

Drink all you want. The pseudocode above still translates into Scheme in a straightforward way. The Python community still can't agree how to translate it.
I thought Python had lambdas, albeit restricted to expressions, which in turn are restricted to single lines?
Microsoft says Yahoo would help it turn Web profit
Betting against Mr Moore: Internet on TV, and the commoditization of bandwidth
Ericsson says "very cautious" about Motorola assets
Chinese vent anger online at snow relief efforts
Google search is a pipe. It's doing well.

From your "RSS startup" comment I don't think you understand friendfeed. The main reason to go to myspace/facebook/orkut is to waste time looking at your friends' activity. With friendfeed you can do that in one place.

For example:

http://friendfeed.com/paul

Facebook can decide they "won't allow it" and be left out in the cold.
Microsoft discusses bid for Yahoo
Ask YC: What do you think of Yadster's search-feedback-update mechanism?
Please try out Yadster and leave your comments/feedback...

Yadster takes feedback from the searcher on which results they like, and then changes the original query to bring them better results.

This is intended to be a workaround for repeatedly changing the query and re-searching for hours in Google, when you are looking for something general.
Google still waiting for social ad payoff
Cultural differences loom large in Microsoft-Yahoo
http://www.nabble.com/Erlang-concurrency-to14747956.html#a14...
India Net capacity at 80 percent after cables break
Minimum bid hit in FCC auction, triggering open access
Dell to cut almost 900 jobs
It can be a little tough to hear that entrepreneurial success does have something to do with luck... But there are ways to create your own luck right?
"I suspect that it would give Microsoft a convenient excuse to reverse course on its open-source antipathy and embrace it"

We all know what the 2 other E's are...
Ballmer's letter to Yahoo: We want you
Microsoft is so dead... I was intrigued by your post and went ahead to research Groove a bit more, but their site is full of "marketing messages" and I ran out of patience looking for an answer for "WHAT DOES GROOVE DO?", therefore your post remains the only information I got about this service.
Algorithms for Newbies: Static or Dynamic?
Three in three days? http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/01/internet.outage/in...

What are the odds on THAT? Looks less like an accident all the time.
As a current Yahoo I'd have to disagree, from what I've seen in my department (and the departments in my building), I don't think the company is particularly hostile to Microsoft. Plus, the stock price is so low that I think a lot of Yahoos would welcome a big change, if for nothing else then to boost their portfolio.

At the very least I'd be interested to see how Microsoft could integrate such a huge company properly. I had discussed the idea 6 months ago when the rumor began to surface, the big question (if it happens) is how the two cultures and systems would merge...I think it would take years before they would actually operate as one company.
Some way to seamlessly call Python modules from Arc.
I have been hacking away on a Rails app for the past while, and in about a months time it will be ready for public beta - I have no idea how much server power I am going to need.

Any YC'ers got any advice here - I cannot see it being overly popular, but I want it to be able to withstand a bit of a load spike.

I was thinking getting a VPS from Slicehost and see where it gets me. I was also going to start with Mysql, Apache and Rails all on the same VPS. On my box at home, I get 50 requests per second on most actions (I am the only user - no load simulation) - there is no way I will be serving that many requests from day one, or quite possible ever!

I know its very much an 'it depends' answer, but how far do you reckon a gig of RAM and a single CPU will get you in Rails terms (with zero page caching as all pages are logged in pages)?
Some recruiters are still looking for an impossible number of years of experience in a technology. That's one of the reasons the startup revolution is happening.
Think they will move everything to MS servers and re-write in .net?! heh
I'm sure I'm not a good representative Lisping example, but I routinely use let to bind more than one variable, especially when extracting program state from a URL in multiple variables, and probably use the implicit progn in cond 70% of the time. I can see the value of not allowing the implicit progn which would force creating more numerous and smaller functions, but in the case where I have only 2 expressions in a cond, a function just for that would seem a bit verbose. But again, this is really no big deal as with ARC, one can write a macro utility to put the multiple option back in.
I've heard of ISO 8601 timestamps but never 1606 (and neither has google it seems). What is that?
Thanks a lot for the comments. You seem to know much more about these things than I do, so I don't have much to add.

2. call-it: What's the problem with not knowing (+ 1 2) until run-time? Efficiency? Then I would argue that expressive power of the core language ought to take precedence. In an actual implementation, funcall could leave (+ 1 2) to be evaluated (or not) inside the function body. I would add funcall-normal-function to the language, which would amount to a funcall + (declare (normal-function f)). Both for documentation and for efficiency.

Of course, not knowing if (funcall x (print 2)) will print 2 is unsettling in a way, but that's the same basic argument that's made against macros. They disrupt the evaluation order.

I read about normal-order before, but it didn't make much practical sense. I'll Google your pointers and look it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Groove has a pretty good summary.

It certainly says something when you can get better information from Wikipedia than from Microsoft about one of their own products.
That should get you pretty far, depending on how big your database gets. Not knowing much about your application, I can't really say much else, though. We started out with a server much like that and were able to deal with a good techcrunching on it. The first thing you'll want to do when you get more users, though, is get a separate database server so you can have more available ram for things like query caches, buffer pools, and etc.
That may be true. But the thing I really love about Sweden, is that I am guessing that these guys will pay at the 40% bracket and do it out of a sense of obligation. And when they go out and celebrate their spoils, they will do it with a love of society and not with a single instinct of snobbery or vindictiveness.

Jantelagen!
Ballmer's Internal E-Mail to The Troops Explaining the Yahoo Acquisition
It's simple. Half of you will all be fired and Yahoo will merge with MSN to create a monstrosity web division. The overlap in web products will create 3 tiers of service, the windows-ized integrated Live products (Live Mail, Live Search), the consumer centric Yahoo products (Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search), and the pro-sumer products (Inktomi Search, Flickr, Delicious). This will be so confusing and stupid that after 2 or 3 years of Google eating their lunch they're fire the rest of the Yahoo staff and shutter off the Yahoo branded products in favor of the Live products.

But also, let's not kid ourselves, Microsoft could give two shits about Flickr. What they really want is Yahoo/Overture/Panama or whatever. That's the expected growth and cash cow that makes this deal possible.
It would be nice if I could define a personal view with some rules that would move matching articles up or down. Something like

(view "/mynews" "/news"
((url "xkcd.com" -5)
(title "arc" +5)
(user "bayareaguy" +5)))

The number -5 means move it 5 slots lower than it otherwise would be.
Typo on the front page does not inspire confidence (but it happens to the best of us.):
"ThatsMyMouse is live! You can now add ThatsMyMouse to you site. Let us know what you think in our blog."

Aaaaand wtf is with the creepy pics of young girls looking into the camera all over the site? This is a good idea* in need of a GUI designer and a copy writer.

*If it's good enough, the rest of this sentence may not matter.

Oh, and I'm not all piss and vinegar: the chat is pretty smooth and nicely implemented.
Pretty sure if it's Ozzie vs. Yang, Yang is out in a heartbeat.

And I think this buy is more about strengthening Microsoft's online presence, not their desktop apps.
Augh, all that teasing and no meat. I want to know specifically why the author thought Python was better than Lisp.
It's in shareholders' interest to take that huge per-share premium and run with it. Better than holding Yahoo! until it's a penny stock.
Some seemingly minor issues make me wonder how bad a situation Yahoo is in. Google has integrated their messenger into chat well enough that you can search through chats, grouped separately, as well as send messages of either kind to people you have contacted through chat or email. This makes a whole lot of sense, and I would think is relatively easy to accomplish. However, Yahoo's messenger is a bloated spam attracting monstrosity that seems like an estranged sibling to Yahoo's equally hideous email service; all the distressing genetic similarities but no conversation. Now how can a company that couldn't integrate two obvious candidates from their own bundle of services do in Microsoft, which isn't any better at integrating its own cluster? I don't see synergy.
If the biggest advertising entity on the web (Google) can buy one of the other biggest advertising entities (Doubleclick), I'm pretty sure one of the also-rans can buy another also-ran.
Rails Powered by Glassfish and jMaki (pdf)
Stating The Obvious: Do I Yahoo? Are you nuts?
Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast
For those who missed the context of this post, its author is the same Ron Garret who recently wrote "My take on Arc" (http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-take-on-arc.html, posted on Hacker News at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107623). Those who noticed the name of this post's author, Erann Gat, could easily be confused: he changed his name to Ron Garret several years ago (http://www.flownet.com/ron/eg-rg-faq.html).
Not if they actually care about ROI. They got no benefit other than PR when they moved Hotmail to windows.
Lets just give up on those ugly names and give them a new name: "The Party"
Look I know it's an ignorant post of mine. But I use CLISP and I am very busy with a lot of things these days. Too many to count...

But my plan is to continue to use CLISP until I become convinced that arc will help me in some way. I have almost 20,000 lines of CLISP I have developed and thus I am quite reluctant to even contemplate a switch.

I will put it bluntly, "what's wrong with common LISP?"

If somehow people don't like all the redundancy, well use the subset you like. That's what I do. Sure it would be nice to have a language that forced some kind of uniformity and consistency in its nature. But these are abstract/fluffy terms. And like I said I have 20k lines of LISP that I am not interested in porting...

But if a crystal clear reason were to emerge, then yes I would do it. I do have an open mind.