skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to review, this stream of comments leads us to the invention of a new unit, the "Hypothetical Paul Graham" or HPG, which represents the amount of BS required to defend poor coding practice.

Absolute reliance on OO even in non-real systems is a 5 HPG proposition, as it would apparently require five hypothetical Paul Grahams before the use of closures to simulate objects became too complex.

A language that does not include functional abstraction is at least a 10 HPG proposition. We would need to posit at least ten hypothetical Paul Grahams before the dangerous ability to simply define one's own functions (even redefine system functions, oh my!) and pass them around would become dangerously confusing.

This raises the question: is there a theoretical limit of HPGs? How many would be required before we could justify just writing machine instructions?
DDJ | DDJ's Portal Blog
Is Google Recession-proof?
A true entrepreneur...diversified income stream. Keep at it.
Well neither have you.

unless the Internet stretches farther than I am aware.
You will be affected.
Got that right.
Believe it or not, I still have a :CueCat.

I hacked it to output standard barcode numbers (unmodified it uses some silly obfuscated encoding to lock people into their software).
I'm not talking about the religion of Buddhism, I'm talking about a mental state of nothingness. I only wish I could reach that state without the use of mind altering substances. As great as Nirvana is, it doesn't seem worth the effort to train the unenhanced mind to get there. That process is what is boring.

But if you're looking for shortcuts, I've got plenty of them.
Nothing!

Nobody said I was going to be a highly efficient Arc programmer. :)
i was comparing one imaginary place, and arguments based on it, with another.
Design's Place in a Startup
But Nirvana is real. Close your eyes and try and think of nothing. That's Nirvana. Close enough, at least.
Users care if their name is zoe (with an accent on the e), or if they want to discuss prices of things in euros or GBP.

I wrote a php forum a while back. You wouldn't believe the number of emails telling me that the gbp sign doesn't show up properly when they post a comment.
The Google PageRank Algorithm in 126 Lines of Python
This is very un-Steve.

But either way - Only in SV would employees complain about 100% YOY growth. Come on people!
http://del.icio.us/sbok
http://del.icio.us/toffer
The original algorithm, I presume... I would think they're up to millions of lines of python/c++ by now.
http://www.oreillymaker.com/link/7686/arc-for-dummies/

Please forgive me.
The word "OOP" is so ill-defined that we can't begin to have a meaningful discussion unless you tell us precisely what you mean by it. In particular, what is an "object" and how is it different from a collection of closures?
I forgot to add that my e-mail can be found in my profile =). Looking for a software engineering summer internship located in NYC or Silicon Valley.

(Hopefully this isn't a faux pas =)
Next: "Linux in 62 lines of code!!!"
http://news.ycombinator.com/whoami
Do you really think that Arc is a competitor for CL?
"... what's your del.icio.us username? ..."

http://del.icio.us/bootload
I'm a developer for NCEAS, an ecological research center, attached to UC Santa Barbara.
Using Rack to create standalone RESTFul services in Ruby
Even if the users don't care (although they very much do when their characters all show up jumbled), the conversation here in this thread _is_ very much about the coders. Saying unicode is irrelevant is pretty strong in this context and IMHO, pretty bizarre.
I wouldn't have upmodded you, if curi hadn't made the comment about not upmodding you.
I couldn't resist.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...
Aha!

zip == matrix transpose.

I wonder why I never noticed that before...
If your HTML is generated programatically, you can roll your own mechanism for separation of concerns in the source.

I see merits in standards compliance, but making my life easier is not necessarily one of them.
zip is matrix transposition in disguise.
Yah, I can see how it sucks but unfortunately that's the way it will have to be for Arc given PG's disinclination to spend time over it. If you end up contributing a unicode fix, who knows, it might even get incorporated and others will thank you as well :)
What's Your Backup Strategy?
http://del.icio.us/tylermoody
Then all of us who went through the dotcom crash (I started my hosting and colocation company in 1999) are well suited to survive this crash.
"I was surprised by the simplicity of the math underlying the google PageRank algorithm, and the ease with which it seemed to be efficiently implementable"

It's actually not all that easy to implement this stuff efficiently when n grows to any sort of useful size. E.g. the article uses an n x n adjacency matrix, so if we take n = 1 million pages, we need 4TB just to represent it, assuming no overhead. (Adjacency lists help here.)

See http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en....

(I hacked together a script to compute this on MediaWiki wikis a while ago, by examining the DB directly -- http://collison.ie/code/pagerank.rb)
Heh, I used to think that being an engineer was prestigious.
Dudes, really...

PG just released an entirely new dialect of lisp for web programming, he's mentoring about 20 startups right now, and runs Hacker News... "Oh, and can you add Unicode support, it would only take 2 or 3 days..."

I know that not having Unicode supported in your web language is inconvenient, and at times is a show-stopper. But really. Give the guy a break. If PG doesn't want to "spend a single day on character sets". Don't ask him to spend a day on character sets.

If you want Unicode support in Arc, code it up and submit it.
Thanks, Paul.
Pixel - Photoshop for Linux
Interview with Steve Yegge on Rhino on Rails
Wanna See What Gold Atoms Look Like?
In Defense Of Computer Science
Using git without feeling stupid (part 1)
Slashdot Idle - finally admitting Digg is winning
Who does not understand recursion? Who has not learned the recursive version of quicksort at least a dozen times? Recursion is fast at the expensive of memory. It's also very fun to make something that calls itself.
If those people had the chance... the opportunities you have and threw them away... they'd be idiots.

Make the best of the opportunities you have else the rest eat dirt in vain.

Feel free to give back though.
I'm surprised the Russian hackers gave away their implementation for free. I suspect it was an unintentional leak.

Anyone else remember that Chinese website that was selling captcha hacks for 20 different types of captchas?
pganti
Fine. My point it that it's hardly a "major deficiency" that would make arc "unusable".
Google's money is in advertising. Advertising is not recession proof. Thus Google is not recession-proof. Seems simple to me.
DevChix
Mrton, this is not FUD, this is fact, and I speak from experience rather than conjecture.

When a release goes out on the wire, there are a multitude of sites that will pick it up automatically from the wire. On the order of thousands, including Yahoo! News, Google News, simultaneously That being said, if your press release contains a link to your site or other relevant keywords in conjunction with your site or product name, you WILL get a siginificant boost (aka, jumpstart) in your rankings immediately.

In addition to that, if a particular publication finds significant interest in your business, product, or service, they will call you for a more in depth interview, or op ed piece, or in some cases, a full feature. It depends on the relevance and interest level of the publication.

I don't claim this to be a panacea, and ultimately the effect has a very short halflife, but traditional press releases can be used very effectively in conjunction with non traditional PR. They both have their place.
Bah, PG could write that in Lisp on the back of a napkin.
http://del.icio.us/randomiam
are you guys still using Nuance?
Facebook + Wikipedia:  partner needed
Um... I think the fact that they are comparing Google to direct mail.

I think a look at how Goto/Overture did during the last downturn (was it around) would be more telling.
best username. :)
I think that's a fair point - quite distinct from the original comment though.
maheshcr
Sex, Drugs and Unix
Digg is winning on what? The war for the most retarded users and comments on a news article?
Joel is Old
How Intel, HP & Compaq Killed The Fastest Processor In The World
Voting with (Little) Confidence
http://del.icio.us/oddimperfect
Paul: Small detail - there's a minor typo in your article:

"I spent a fews days"

Thanks for arc.
The Real History and Origin of Woot and w00t
10 Morning Rituals For The Healthy Entrepreneur
Is the user database is shared, or just copied?

I forgot my news.yc password and wonder if resetting password in news.yc propagates to the arc forum.
Paul Graham's kind of dirty (On Unicode support as an exercise for the programmer)
With arc, he'd need just a postage stamp.

http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/6710p/comments/c0312wv
From 0 to 2000+ Subscribers in 90 Days
oh man i had one of those! high-quality cable for free..
I wonder how much they were making off of sub-prime alone.
IMHO, it's not an issue of implementation. It's an issue of design.

If PG explicitly says "ok, I don't have time to do Unicode stuff now, but my idea is that a string is a sequence of characters, regardless of how a 'character' is represented", then somebody can go ahead to change Arc Unicode-clean (it won't be much work assuming MzScheme has support of Unicode).

If PG says "the language Arc (not mere an implementation) doesn't support beyond Ascii", then I feel that PG reserves that part of design (e.g. it may conflate byte-array and multibyte strings, or it may use richer character representation than unicode codepoint, such as a character object that holds the sequence of base char + modifiers, or it may hold raw byte array plus encoding info). In that case I hesitate to change Arc code without understanding PG's intention.
http://del.icio.us/andrewlee.com
Video Interview with Auctomatic's Harjeet Taggar
I was telling a friend that a slowdown in the economy is the best time to hack because no one is pressuring you to make money and implement <insert catchphrase>.

A recession may actually be good because I'm guessing the true believers will stick through with it and the next evolution of the web will come out of it.
Microsoft can't speak straight any more
Just out of curiosity, how would these events unfold?

1) They do the campaign and 2) rationalize [what I presume is] a failure, or
1) Rationalize a bad campaign and 2) get it going?

Also, how valuable was branding? Were the bad ROI's justified after all?
http://del.icio.us/PStamatiou
They survived the last burst, they should be fine in this one as long as they focus on innovation and better products.

Usually people say they are immune also because of overseas operations, but it seems that this recession may be a global economic downturn.

Hopefully Google has some things going on in emerging markets.
Georgia Tech Alum++
The assertion was "Obama simply looks presidential", not "sounds" or "acts". I displayed the portraits of ALL PRIOR PRESIDENTS, and NONE OF THEM LOOK LIKE OBAMA. Even if that as-perfect-as-humanly-possible disproof was somehow "inadequate", the proof in the first place was completely absent...only a bald declaration.

What on earth are you talking about?
Pretty slick, but everytime I click the bookmarklet it freezes up my browser for a while.

Suggestion: pop up the window immediately, then use setTimeout to have it perform the action. That'll actually make it seem more responsive, because people can switch back to the main window and continue doing what they were doing.

(Assuming I diagnosed the javascript problem right..)
I use the same keyboardlets to access my bookmarks or add to them. The URL/javascript may keep changing.
More generally, life in a recession's actually not too bad. It's the adjusting to it that is hard, but that goes for adjusting to anything.

This is a good place to repeat one of the most interesting comments I've seen on YC News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40558

"The 1930s are often seen as the "golden age" of the motion picture, because no matter how hard up they were for cash, people still went out to the movies. Walt Disney got his start then. Bootleggers and bordellos also did well during the 1930s."
It even happened to good old Bill Gates with his ubiquitous blue screen of death-

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgriTO8UHvs
Pirate Bay owners To Be Taken To Court
Pirate Bay owners To Be Taken To Court
This post invites a ridiculous "me too" thread.

I think you meant to write "if you read hacker news, please bookmark http://news.ycombinator.com/ if you haven't done so already".

Then we can have a real discussion in the comments section, you get the usernames listed in delicious in a way you can click-to-browse them, and you even get a few more hits from people who care about hacker news but didn't think your particular post was worthwhile :)
Fred Wilson: Facebook Platform--Taking Stock Of The Marriage After The Honeymoon's Over
boring. don't read.
I liked Clive Thompson's summary of the paper: http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2008/01/this_m...
Write it down. As important as the solution write down the problem you are trying to solve, who the customer is (everyone is not a customer), what the key features and benefits of your approach will be, and what are the real alternatives (could be many different aspects of the status quo) that you are replacing.

To the extent that you are supplying the last piece to an emerging technology (see Business Week "Long Nose of Innovation" article) you may be more successful than something that represents a complete break with existing efforts. This doesn't mean that technology has to come from the industry or discipline that you are focused on, it's also a valid approach to find a solution from one field and re-purpose it in another. Andrew Hargadon offers the example of the developers of the Reebok Pump shoe using proven "air cast" technology to build a pump for a basketball shoe.

Since you get a lot of ideas you should keep two master files: the solutions you have come up with and the problems you have identified. A number of posters have pointed out that good ideas may take a while to percolate so develop a system for writing them down and keeping track of them.

We offer a 97 page workbook called "Mapping the Path From Idea to Revenue" that we make available to anyone willing to answer the first seven questions in the book.

Mapping Path from Idea to Revenue
http://www.skmurphy.com/services/workbook/

First Seven Questions in Developing a Software Product
http://www.skmurphy.com/resources/developing-a-product/first...

The long nose of innovation
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2008/id20080...

The Trouble with "out of box" thinking (Hargadon Interviewed)
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v4i30_hargadon.html

How Breakthroughs Happen by Andrew Hargadon
http://www.amazon.com/How-Breakthroughs-Happen-Surprising-Co...
I would actually try and sell it first.

Write up a one page description of what you would be able to offer and see if you can get some potential customers/users excited enough to critique it. A strong negative reaction is as useful as a positive one (provided you get criticism that identifies issues/problems). A lukewarm response or the answer "it's not a big problem for me" may indicate the need to let the problem and the solution percolate a little longer.
This is simply a private read-it-later list and aside from saving a link, nothing like del.icio.us. Crappy title on the post announcing it but not a bad service for some.
The supply of banners might be huge, but companies don't buy the banners as much as the eyeballs that see them. It's the same with TV; marketers buy a spot for its viewers; the price of an ad depends on the show's ratings.
http://del.icio.us/jeffdlouhy
yeah, I never noticed it until you posted this and I worked it out on paper.

when I first saw zip, I thought, when would I use that? Then when I was playing around with erlang trying to write a dot product function, that's when I figured it out.
that's what I get for trying to be snarky.
Oh my god! The singularity has begun!
If you click on the "parent" link you can see the prior comments made by myself and others.
I built a very similar site a few months back as a way to learn Rails and make a few bucks. It's called http://toreadlist.com/ , and one of the features was not requiring registration. It also had RSS feeds.
copied, but I'll reset your pw on both if you want
http://del.icio.us/simianstyle
Name one screen reader that handles divs and doesn't handle tables.
I usually measure code trees rather than LOC. There's a fn (called codetree) in there somewhere to do it.
Awesome reading.
Ask YC: Finding advisers
Hi everyone,

We're bootstrapping two startups and we've met the tipping point when we very depend on the Advisers Board. We haven't incorporated, yet, so we can't propose anything in cash or on paper. We're about to look for seed and angel money. However, I'd be happy to start looking for investment having a good advisers on board. I see two key persons on the board - the marketing (product placement) guy and investors-linked one.

I'd be glad if you'll share your thoughts with me.
1. Whom do you think a young startup company should have as advisers?
2. Where can a young startup company find them?
3. How motivated should advisers be to help the company? Cash? Stock? Anything else? What if the company isn't incorporated, yet?

Thanks!
Domain Tasting Goes Sour: ICANN Will No Longer Issue Registration Refunds
Most screen readers handle both. The problem is that screen readers will attempt to read the contents of tables as if they were tabular data. (Surprise, surprise. :P)

This turns out to be a relatively poor user experience.
Goto/Overture IPO'd in 1999 and was thriving on pay-per-click ads when Google was still using CPM for AdWords (2001).

An interview with Overture's CEO after their blowout 4Q2001:

Newsmaker: Who says the dot-com era's over? (February 19, 2002)
http://www.news.com/Who-says-the-dot-com-eras-over/2008-1082...

The next month, Google wisely began its shift to PPC:

Google Takes on Overture With Pay-Per-Click AdWords (March 4, 2002)
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2164631
I think the author fails to realize that Arc is open source and free. You want Unicode support? Write it in. PG didn't say that it should be in a library, he just said that he didn't want to work on it. Which is a good reason to open source it.

I forget where I read it, but an article claiming the superiority of open source software said something like

Who is most likely to do a good job on Unicode support?

1. An international who needs it

2. A hacker who is interested in that sort of thing

3. A corporate worker who is told he has to support it

The answer, of course, was basically "anything but 3," and I had to agree. I think the same logic applies to this situation. Do you expect PG to do a good job on Unicode when he could care less about it and feels like it's a waste of time? Of course not. The whole point of open sourcing it is to allow someone who would be interested in such an undertaking to go about doing it.

Also, when he said Arc isn't the kind of language for people who would be upset with lack of Unicode support, I mentally appended in a development release of a beta language to the end of that sentence. If PG isn't even guaranteeing a consistent language to build on, how can anyone be upset about lack of Unicode support? Clearly, people are missing the point of the beta release cycle and open source in general.
Frog.
That's easy, what's with the mind altering substances? I've never seen the need; it isn't hard to get into a state of semi sleepiness and drift off somewhere in your imagination.
I am talking about having absolutely no thought in your mind, conscious or otherwise. How long can you hold yourself like that before you think of anything?
But what if you are thinking about why you shouldn't be angry and how society would look down on you in this moment. To just throw that all away and be "angry" instead of "was starting to be angry and then restrained youself" you are not practicing Zen because you are artificially restraining yourself from restraining yourself.
Version control:

$ git clone http://codewikia.com/arc
Excellent! +1 for ICANN.
http://del.icio.us/thedeeprussian
The function 'trues' seems like clutter when you can just write:

(keep [_] seq)
I commented because this seemed like an opportunity to say something funny and cleverly self referential, but I guess this'll get me modded down.
MySpace Platform Goes Live February 5; Accepting Developer SignUps Now
STARTUP CEO SKILLS: Do you have what it takes?
I was looking at everyones' bookmarks and I opened an interesting link about CSS design without using float. But alas Firefox crashed before I could read it. Does anyone have that link?

I don't remember whose bookmarks it was from.
Depends on my mood, but I've definitely reached "nirvana" for long periods of time. It is especially easy if I'm out in nature.

The second sentence just refers to the use of mind altering drugs in general. I've done things that cause my mind to drift off without my control, and to drift off under my control, and I prefer the latter.
Google Experiments with New Search Tools, and You Can Too
I thought the article was okay and upvoted it, but am I the only one who was getting annoyed at the constant use of the word "learnt"?
Ask YC: How important is it to make your domain defensible?
If you can get the .com how important is it to have the .net and .org as well as domains for potential competitors and defensive domains like companynamesucks.com?
Communication Bypass
RIAA (cartoon by hugh)
I'm working for Truviso, a startup in the Valley. We're building a data stream management system on top of PostgreSQL -- essentially taking PostgreSQL, and giving it the ability to evaluate SQL over live streams of data in addition to static tables.

(BTW, we're always looking to hire good hackers -- send me mail if interested.)
Interesting. Can you talk a bit more about the nature of the data mining project?
Scientists discover way to reverse loss of memory
If you look at Arc's source, it certainly seems like PG prefers short names everywhere - it's more like what I've seen from Haskell people. I generally prefer medium-long names. Scheme's call-with-current-continuation is too long. Arc's ccc is too short. Ruby's callcc is just right.
Since there are 864 people already linking to HN in delicious, it might take a while to check out all of them and find the ones you like.

This way, you find the ones who give a damn enough to post on a thread.
The FAIL Blog
I'd say it depends on how big your idea is and how much capital you have to start with...
Zip = Matrix Transpose is on Peter Norvig's list of Infrequently Answered Questions about Python.
The Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions
For the $10 it costs you to register another domain, I'd say it's worth the price to get the .net, .org, and possibly some European/Asian domains if you can see yourself doing business there in the future.
I wouldn't go into companynamesucks.com and the like though - there's no end to the number of such domains that people can come up with if they really want to hurt you. A better use of your time and money would be to make sure you don't give customers a reason to say you suck...
"Todd was five times as old as Jane is."

I believe that that semantic flaw sadly classes Todd out of existence by 15 years (that is, t = -15).
http://del.icio.us/theolagendijk
http://del.icio.us/kaine
A CAPTCHA method that just came into my head at this moment, and thus is completely unfounded and horrible: "Please compose a haiku on the topic of 'togetherness' [or something equally vague]. Your work will then be passed through a Bayesian filter specifically trained on that topic."
The Problem with PHP is PHP Itself