skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think he's got a point that Von Neumann machines get trashed a lot by people who have no better alternative. After designing a processor in a senior level computer architecture class, I think the Von Neumann machine really is the best organization given your building blocks are binary logic gates. Also, a lot of work has been done on instruction level parallelism, caches, and branch prediction that keep the whole processor humming. Hardware is very expensive to design and build, so it's economical to build to a general purpose and widely used instruction set architecture and then optimize that as much as possible.
The next best thing is probably massively parallel architectures, but the compilers and programming languages to support those are just not there yet and there is so much code written sequentially. Perhaps when we have some crazy new medium to build processors on (think analog neural nets or quantum computers), a better architecture for those mediums will supplant Von Neumann's.
240 is easy to remember, just swap the two first digits of 420
Perhaps investors are getting worried that VMware customers are getting wiser to the availability of lower cost alternatives?
As far as searching goes, there is also that old favorite: brute force linear search.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3

...
Amateurish article by someone with scant grasp of technology
Because it costs far, far less than this per user to operate. All I run is a rendezvous server, which uses very little bandwidth per user.

The economics are actually pretty good for a small thing like this. It ain't gonna be Google, but it might be sufficient to help me bootstrap. (I am working on bigger stuff too.)
The OCaml Summer Project
Actually, as it turns out, the Rule 240 has been phased out over the years, as the carriers are no longer required by regulation to maintain one.

http://www.smartertravel.com/travel-advice/rule-240-fading-f...

And, ultimately, you should look in the detailed "contract of carriage" on the airline website (or on the back of your paper ticket, if you have one) to see what the airline's obligations truly are.

Also, "weather" can happen anywhere in the country and still affect your flight, even it's not where you're traveling. If your flight requires an aircraft that is arriving from another city where there is a weather problem, or even if there was a weather problem earlier in your city and now the backlog of flights is greater than the number of arrivals and departures that an airport can handle, the delays can stack up over multiple cities. The airlines can't afford to keep equipment (and crew!) buffers at each airport to absorb these delays.
Teddy Roosevelt on critics of Arc.. and Ruby on Rails
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
I tried that one, which indeed seemed to have a potential, but after a few days of usage, I bumped into some issues like:
- I can't see the public annotations
- my own annotations only show up about 75% of the time (refreshing several times)
- small community
- somewhat confusing doc

I do see an interest in having public web annotations. So I'm asking, are there any good annotations tools out there? What are the references?
It's a good indication that the chicken-and-egg problem isn't such a problem in this case.

I see a lot of potential for interesting things to do with this. There was always a lot of future-looking hot air when I was in school about how location-aware content delivery was the thing to do. It really was a lot of hot air because nobody really wants the kind of content you'd put on such a stream. But say you're standing in line for a Sox game (Red, White, doesn't matter which) and they've got a list of upcoming home games posted. Snap the barcode next to a game time/date to go to the ticket sales site for that day. On your way out, when you're at the bus stop, snap the barcode to get an estimate of when the next bus will arrive. Simple.

If I were a band, and I knew that cell phone calendar/event managers supported iCal event files, I'd put barcodes that directed people to the file on my website, so my next show would show up on their calendars.
Steve Jobs Stanford Speech 2005 (vid + transcript)
he could search the literature for existing material on the topic. you can, for instance, read quite a bit about the architecture of the lisp machines. searching google scholar for "tag coprocessor" comes immediately to mind as producing some literature on the topic. i think work has also been done on hardware support for generational garbage collection.

so, random challenge, promising big prizes, from someone who hasn't searched the literature... crank.
A lot to choose from. Anyone want to separate the keep from the cull? Recommendations?
Why Google Isn't In It To Win
Ask YCNews (or just pg): What's the most popular submission ever?
After the Arc announcement got over 200 upvotes, and the recent women and minorities discussions got around 100 comments, I was wondering what the record was. Maybe you should make a page like the leader board to show the top X submissions by votes and comments.
Now, if they would just bring SimpleDB out of closed beta so others can use it...
I think technical people believe in the free market too much without understanding all of the requirements. One of them is that everyone has perfect knowledge of all options. If someone doesn't know about you, they can't choose you. This is why marketing adds so much value - you become an option and your technical merits have a chance to shine. If you market something crappy, you'll only succeed if no one knows about the better alternative.
A slicker course picker built with Exhibit
I always get more done after everybody else leaves
What's interesting is that this happened during the holiday shopping season in the 4th Quarter, which is Amazon's busiest time for its own Web sites.
I get in early.
Google, Facebook Battle For Computer Science Grads. Salaries Soar.
Yep, I invoke rule '420' when stuck at an airport
What's the difference between this and Third Voice?

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/04/42803
Is what you want here?

http://news.ycombinator.com/lists
dabbledb?
IM send file almost never works if both parties are behind firewalls. Skype works, but it tends to be very slow since it almost always ends up relaying (sometimes several times) to get around the NAT problem.

This uses some sophisticated NAT traversal magic. It usually is as fast as a direct TCP connection or nearly so.
Did you read the whole post? The first part of what you said almost mimics what the author said.
Sort of, except for the entire history of the site, not just the last month. Just curious.
Big Tech Ideas That Are Just Around The Corner
The whole point of being able to upvote, in my opinion, is to be able to say, "yeah cool" or "LOL" without creating a lot of noise. Our instincts may want our name to show up saying "I AGREE WITH THIS", but once you get used to it, it's not such a big hurdle to get over.
The Browsers of 2009
The increase in comments about meta discussion and comparison to digg/reddit is a more direct sign of declining quality, in my opinion.
That sounds kind of like voting. I have heard people say, "Don't vote, you're just validating a rigged system." At the same time, others equate low voter turnout with general well-being; that is, they're not voting because their life is good and not likely to change much either way. Again, it's an information problem.
1. But what do you gain from having cons cells limited to 2 elements? I contrast cons cell list mostly to Python lists, which just seem to me to be a better abstraction... Do you think in terms of 2-element pairs or in term of lists? I guess in a way you are right, if the two are essentially equivalent, maybe there is no problem.

2. Macros come with a ton of pitfalls and limitations. On Lisp has a nice list of reasons to avoid macros. But consider if your macros are really called at run-time rather than compile-time, and you have a special operator like eval, but that evaluates in the calling context. Then you can write normal functions like this:

(defmacro average (x y)
(/ (+ (eval-in-caller x) (eval-in-caller y)) 2))

and

(defmacro my-if (condition x y)
(cond ((eval-in-caller condition) (eval-in-caller x))
(t (eval-in-caller y))))

defun can be written straightforwardly as a special case, and in fact extended so that eg.:

(defun do-many-tymes (n-times &not-evaluated body) ...)

would behave half like a function and half like a macro. These run-time "macros" can be function-quoted, recursive, and have no problem with variable capture. With such a defun, you no longer need a defmacro.

These are my fantasies about fixing stuff, so I won't waste anyone's time by writing more. I don't know if that could work. Macros are just so ugly... I was curious to see if PG or anyone had tried alternatives.
Not exactly a dup, but the same story was covered in uweek earlier. The YC discussion of that article is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100226
I think you can do the phone call music purchasing in the UK with Shazam (2580)
Millions in Middle East Lose Internet
I find it funny that many of these comments are on ways the code could be improved. We are a strange bunch of people indeed. Still, I laughed when I saw this image.
On the other hand, the conclusion that things will probably work out better if the XO leads a pack of for-profit companies into the space is pretty sensible. Imagine Dell, Intel, Asus and others slugging it out to get cheap laptops into the developing world.
Agreed. A lot of the techniques mentioned in the article are effectively impossible on consoles, which makes turnaround times even worse. (disclaimer: I haven't worked with all major consoles, so maybe some have decent compiler/debugger pairings) Lisp (or ANY dynamic language) could make a big difference. Some places reportedly have gone down that route. It'd be interesting to gather some data for game completion & schedule slip times and amount of high-level code used. I suspect there to be a strong inverse correlation.

However, the attitude I encountered in the games industry (okay, my sample size is relatively small and geographically constrained) is that many people, particularly in the more senior positions are VERY resistant to learning anything new and only do so if they absolutely have to. You'd be surprised how many people still code in plain C even in situations where using some C++ features would save a load of time and even prevent bugs. A lot of build scripts and such were batch (!) files which contained horrendous hacks to get around the lack of proper flow control and scoping, and thus were effectively unmaintainable.

We had a Lua interface, but that was mostly used for level-specific functionality, used by level designers, not programmers. Part of the reason for this was that the interface was so half-heartedly implemented - no debugging, no dynamic changes to the code. We had a full-on reflection system in C++, but for some reason there was no Lua interface for it. The other reason was that most programmers just weren't interested.

And yes, I did volunteer for improving the situation (as I did in many cases) but that was shot down. Maybe that was just the particularly short-sighted approach taken at the studio I worked at.
>self-effacing remarks

In Matz' case that may be due to him being Japanese. That's the way they generally speak, a kind of etiquette.
Sure, of. But a Matrix of Matrix printers would be nice.
Games have to ship on time to succeed. Towards the end developers cut corners wherever they can. Perhaps your suggestions were good but came too late in the development cycle?
Just an observation: No one complains that Brainfuck lacks strings, and they have fun playing with that. Software doesn't have to be about building things that are useful in the everyday. I can think of plenty of programs to write that don't involve strings.

In fact, I can see one great use for Arc already: a more "hip and modern" language than Scheme that you can convince students to demand they be taught (instead of Blub.) I could envision a version of the SICP written for it by, say, _why.
> Seriously, what self-promotion?

Well, he did write about it on paulgraham.com, the #1 site for anything, ever.
Anyone here seeing their site numbers drop as a consequence of this?
More seriously, perhaps there should at least be a link to

Google Custom Search for YCombinator - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010873684121060933661:c5rc...

somewhere on the site.

Actually the best place may be on the submit page, along with a polite note to encourage potential submitters to first check if someone else has submitted the same story.
> I think many people mistakenly thought Arc was supposed to be some new kind of framework like Ruby on Rails.

- Didn't you hear? Arc, the language, uses tables in its HTML!

(My god, I would never use a programming language that was ever used to generate tables!)

- The zeroth release of Arc only supports ASCII! What about us EBCDIC users?!

- Arc didn't cure my unsightly dandruff, like I hoped and prayed it would!

- Arc is out and Jesus didn't come back!

- I downloaded Arc and the tarball just sat there in the directory, doing nothing!

- Arc doesn't completely integrate itself with its temporary host language!

- Arc killed my entire village, just as we were about to start our annual Unicode Festival!

- Arc is just a bunch of library functions and syntactic transformations on a parse tree that ultimately compiles to machine code. There is NOTHING new here!

(Did I miss any? ;-)
Gartner's forecast for IT sector for 2008
Wealth and Entrepreneurship --"Cost of External Finance and Selection into Entrepreneurship"
I'm a bit shocked. Here's an industry-insider article upset about "trashing Von Neumann machines when there's no alternative".

But pensioners who read the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/technology/17chip.html) know the problem is that Von Neumann architecture is already dead. The CBE (the PS3 chip) has 8 cores, Tilera has 64, Intel is working on a 128 core chip, etc.

The question isn't, "Will vector processors prevail?", but, "What are we going to do in the software industry to handle the fact that this is the future."
Why do investors want control?
More evidence

#1 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107156

#4 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967 which is actually 6 months old so I guess it shouldn't count.
Entrepreneurs are, on average, significantly wealthier than people who work in paid employment. Research shows that entrepreneurs comprise fewer than 9 percent of households in the United States but they hold 38 percent of household assets and 39 percent of the total net worth.

according to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107334
Goodbye Netscape, and thanks for all the fish
"Just Use Blue and White Again"

Screw that, this is the best rule ever! Really, why not? I have no designer ego to feed.
Ask YC - Can we have an rss feed for the new queue?
I am not sure if this has been asked before but if there a way that we can get an rss feed for the new queue?

anyone else want it?
you guys. so funny.
Start making use of parallel programming libraries? More stuff like this I suspect - http://www.parallelpython.com
I thought you said "throw Bill Gates under a bus" and it confused me.
The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry
The Most Expensive PCs
The Secret Life of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You
huh?

I don't have a dog in the fight. I wasn't looking forward to Arc, and I am not going to try it.

But it seems kind of weird to say that people who were disappointed had dubious psychological motives. What if, perhaps, they expected the first released to be stand-alone and that's not what happened? I mean, aren't there lots of ways to be disappointed that don't involve some kind of psychoanalysis and therapy?

I'm sure people are petty and small mammals. But I don't watch Dr. Phill for a reason -- you can make various psycho arguments all day and not really have a lot of anything when you are done. Perhaps the author of _this_ piece is really just a suck-up? There's simply no basis for evaluating one opinion over another. I guess I could say the article is crap, but that would take less words. :)
That's whats up.
Hey should use a site like http://storymash.com/
At least it would be readable, and he'd get paid.
Twitter has come a long way!
Which queue (webpage)?
"... but if there a way that we can get an rss feed for the new queue? ... Which queue (webpage)?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/newest
And, Internet services badly affected in India - http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/jan/31net.htm
I think Opera has the best Cost - Benifit ratio, which is why I use it.

I love the Speed Dial feature, especially being able to hit control + a number to get to one of them quickly. Numbers move between tabs. The order you viewed tabs in is remembered. Thumbnail previews on mouseover of tabs is great if you routinely keep 20-30 tabs open. Adblock is a default feature. There's a built in IRC client. I hear the mail client is great, but I use gmail for everything. Fast forward and fast backward is awesome. Having it remember all of my tabs when I open / close the program is sweet. The trash can for deleted tabs is convenient. I absolutely love mouse gestures.

I'm sure much of this stuff can be done in Firefox with 20 different plugins, but it's all there by default in Opera and works flawlessly. I have two complaints with Opera, though. First, flash doesn't work well for me in linux with the 9.5 beta and, second, some web sites I have to use for school don't work correctly, so I resort to Firefox for those.

Edit: Whoops. That's cost - benefit for developing for a particular browser, not cost - benefit for use. Oh well, maybe someone will find this post useful and consider switching. :)
Thanks, Gutenberg - but we're too pressed for time to read
Microsoft Under Antitrust Scrutiny Until 2009
There you go: http://www.feedity.com/?xccH2xIG%252bIhCywXfu149J8ltp3V3aMhk...
Maybe the reason why this was the number one criticism was that it was so prominently mentioned in the introduction of Arc.

One complete paragraph on how hard it was to fix this in python and that it seemed to take whole year. And another large paragraph basically telling that it's trivial and could be done in a few days, but who cares anyway.

This is simply the sort of writing where pg had to expect attacks.
Finding the door to a parallel universe
It really is a simple and effective tutorial. I like it.
See the MacBook Earth, Water and Fire
A tour of Google's new Experimental Search. Verdict: awesome
12 Signs that You May Be a Social Media Addict
Introduction to the Volatile Keyword (C/C++)
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) -- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
It's interesting to see that learning to read was responsible for increasing the age of entering adulthood from 7 to 14. It seems in developed countries this is being pushed up to the early 20's, after graduation from higher education. Will the web have an effect on this trend?
Google founders had made pact to work together for 20 years
Overcoming Information Addiction
Gigabyte and MSI have overcomed Intel
Numismatics filed a Lawsuit against EBay
The American Numismatic Association and the Professional Numismatists Guild filed a lawsuit against eBay on January 10.
Startup Office Space: Starbucks Shutters Shops
Is Google Looking to Tuck in a Search Startup?
The title made this sound like an interesting article...and then it wasn't.
Dang, I thought the article was going to be about some cool new browser technology/GUIs or something.
Even SSL Gmail can get sidejacked
Amazon buys Audible
Size matters in pornography, except when it comes to tiny mobile phone screens
Rackspace - hosting of virtualized systems
How Facebook Exposed Us All as Freaks
Drop an Anchor in Egypt, Damage Indian Economy
First sentence should have been:

"Funny how much commenting about improving code."

Second sentence should have been:

"We are strange."

Third sentence should have been:

"I laughed anyway."

50.6% as much text.
Digging into Arc In 24 Macros Or Less
I guess it's a good time to be graduating.
I know he didn't mean it, but it's starting to sound like an argument to develop more in Flash. ewww.
Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate: Part II
I can at least confirm that a year ago, Google's base salary for starting engineers was in the reported range, some 25% short of this year's alleged number. Seems like a big jump.
TechBit: Remote-Control Robbery Foiled
Because in today's "journalism", correlation = causation. Makes more sensational headlines like, "Rats Bring Garbage Into City"
If not seen yet you should have a look at the Intruders interview with Premal Shah (President of Kiva): http://uk.intruders.tv/Premal-Shah-of-Kiva-org-on-microfinan...

I wish more ngos would be run with this kind of startup mentality!
This article has a lot of value besides the arc announcement; I think it should be listed among the pg essays.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98349
Do All Companies Have to be Evil?
Does online match-making really work?
Six Apart Offers MT Activity Plugin
How to lose $7.2bn with just a few (Visual) Basic skills
C PUZZLES, Some interesting C problems
http://del.icio.us/mirrano
The Definitive Reason Why Facebook Is Worth At Least $15 Billion
Interesting Arc discussion on Lambda the Ultimate
"This is actually a very common scenario anytime a laptop connects to a hotspot before the user signs in where the laptop will attempt to connect to Gmail if the application is opened but it won't be able to connect to anything."

I'm sure this sentence just flowed in the author's head, but what? It's a pity because this is the most crucial sentence in the article.
Personally, I'm suprised this train has generated as much steam as it has. The emotional intensity of the commentary wars between the "Arc Sucks" camp and the "You suck for thinking that Arc Sucks" camp is perhaps higher than the situation warrents. Those who like it will use it even in the absence of some important features, those who don't certainly don't have to (I daresay there are plenty of other programming languages for them to use). :-)
A very enjoyable debugging story. Thanks, and it ended with a patch that makes the current Arc implementation more cross-platform.

Now we just need to make (date) cross-platform. Since Scheme provides seconds->date which will do the same as the call to GNU date in arc.arc, this looks pretty easy.
Internet failure hits two continents
Thanks a bunch! Just what I needed to get my head around the current boundries of the release, and I'll get it running on my lap quicker. Now, if you'd just add an itty bitty little patch to implement Unicode... ;-)
Yes, for certain approximations of Evil.
This was for speccing out the tech for the game that was about to go into production. I never ended up working on that because I left the company.
The great thing about the success of EC2/S3 is there are a large number of competitors coming out with similar services.

Should help to push prices down, I would stick with zon's because they have been so reliable.
How does Arc make exploratory programming easier than Scheme, Common Lisp, Python, etc?