skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm interested in this part: "Steele and Sussman tried to start over when they first began working on Scheme, but they seem to have been practically the only ones. And they made, at least from the point of view of brevity/power, some serious mistakes early on."

Paul, out of curiosity, what are those serious mistakes?
You don't need additional nodes. The syntax of Arc' is still context-free. Paren types can be checked on-the-fly during parsing and never have to enter the AST.
For consistency of the interface I think "threads" could be renamed to "my threads" in the top bar.
Something mighty strange going on here - Fourth cable cut in Mideast
Google responsds to Microsoft's Hostile Takeover Bid for Yahoo
The Internet's Role on Super Tuesday
Lucky for Arc' programmers. They don't need to worry about paren types for expanded macros.

OK, so you added complexity by making the reader more complex. I still think the evaluator has to be different for this to be a meaningful example.
Another bogus correlation based proof is the one with the frog. [caution: do not read if you are offended by animal experiments]

Some (bad) scientist is experimenting with a frog put on a table. He suddenly screams "jump" while hitting the table with both hands. The frog of course jumps, scared away. The scientist then cuts one leg away and repeats the experiment. The frog still jumps away but of course with less agility. The scientist cuts another leg away and repeats the experience. The frog still manage to jump in someway. Until the scientist has cut all the legs away. At that point, the frog doesn't jump when he scream "jump!". Even if repeated.

The scientist then writes in his log book: "when all the frog legs are cut away, the frog becomes deaf."
What? Why would I want to introduce more differences? That the languages are so similar is the strength of the argument. Identical concision, different power, QED.
At your level, you may want to go through the video lectures - "Joy of Mathematics" Google for it.

PS: There is some excellent advice here and I intend to make good use of it. Thanks everyone.
Funny how you reach a point where posturing, lobbying, and legal maneuvering play a bigger role than your technology. Oh wait, that's how Microsoft got so big in the first place. Never mind.
It proves nothing. Imagine a language named Arc'', which drops you a little amount of blood for every keyword that is present in your computer programs. So, if you write a program that is large enough, you die.

So, trivially, for every Arc program there is an equivalent Arc' of the same length. So Arc and Arc' are equally succinct. However, you would no doubt rather work in Fortran.

It does not prove a thing, you see.
I think people are making too much of a fuss about this. MS and Yahoo are both big corporations, they won't be that different internally.
I'd even go a step beyond "customer feedback". I insist upon "deep immersion" in the customer's business.

My favorite analogy for software development is ham and eggs. The chicken was "involved", but the pig is "immersed" in the process. Hate to say it this way, but you gotta be the pig.
The only absurdity in that line of reasoning is the one that you introduced. Of course it's ridiculous that a language could cause you to spill blood when you enter a keyword. Not because we can't imagine a machine that worked in such a way, but rather because it's a non-sequitir. You've made a mockery of the argument merely by bringing up something completely outside the frame of the discussion. When we talk about languages we mean them in more-or-less if not exactly the formal sense in which Turing discussed them. Turing machines can't implement Arc'' because they don't have a spill-blood instruction. They're perfectly capable of implementing Arc'.
Number theory is cool because it works with items that everybody understands, namely numbers. The only prerequisites you need are basic concepts like squares, even and odd numbers, and similar items. Instead of building up some giant edifice of weird symbols and concepts, like one does in calculus, you're just solving puzzles.

It will also answer 90% of the "hard" problems on the GRE, if anybody cares.

Also, I second not jumping into calculus too quick. It can be frustrating and isn't terribly useful for problems outside of Physics.
gobleedeegook!!
Agreed. SVN is much more user friendly than GIT (command line interface).

The major reason I haven't made the switch from CVS/SVN yet (and am unlikely to).
Not upvoting. I've devoted weeks of my time to the Paul campaign and even I am getting tired of politics.
I've been thinking about PG's assertion that more "powerful" languages express things with less code for some time now.

I just can't say that I'm a believer. There are a lot of reasons (perhaps an essay in there somewhere), but the main one is -- it seems to me a fallacy to think that as languages evolve they work with smaller sets of code. Part of the problem is that languages are so contextual: PG's challenge is a salient example of context. If the context is "typical" web programming, the code set is small. How do we define "typical" web programming? Why, the type of thing PG trimmed up Arc to perform! The circle is complete.

I'm not happy with my disagreement, however. I think there's just something intuitively wrong with PG's assertion. Wish I could express my concerns better. His belief obviously fails at the extreme. One can imagine a program that says "do stuff" which then proceeds to solve world hunger or download pictures of Britney Spears. It would be difficult for an observer, however, to determine what "do stuff' actually involved.

Programming is not a solitary sport.
"Advertising" includes training doctors, not just "ask your doctor about erectinol" commercials.

Hiring doctors to travel the country, give lectures explaining how it works, renting conference centers, providing lunch, etc adds up. Learning how to use a new drug is not easy like learning software; trial and error doesn't work.

A drug is worthless if your doctor doesn't know what it does.
Now we got a horse race. Arc vs perl6 - first company to do a million dollar month with an [arc|p6] codebase. Any handicaping?
Everyone I know is supporting Obama, which would seem to support this idea as well. That still doesn't make it any less stupid or off-topic. Please pg, add a link to vote "irrelevant."
PostgreSQL 8.3 Released
I don't want more differences, just difference in a different place.

You could have, for example, defined Arc'' as identical to Arc except gzip-compressed. Once you have a parse tree, Arc, Arc' and Arc'' are identical, but Arc'' is actually more concise. But that's useless, because nobody is saying conciseness and power are identical. Arc' is no more likely to educate anybody than Arc'' is.
An overview of Rails monitoring and development products by FiveRuns
Giants routinely get things wrong. It's called an argument from authority. The consequences of accepting arguments from authority because of their authority can be damaging and wasteful--read about Linus Pauling and Vitamin C, for example. So I would say he has no more to prove than otherwise.
The guy on the far left counts as an extra person after the shift (and the loss of the top of his head).
Implementing Lisp Without Lists
ahem. remember when microsoft bought hotmail? they converted it from using a bunch of unixy technologies to their own ms-flavored stuff.

yahoo is once again mostly powered by unixy stuff, but they've surely got several orders of magnitude more code and infrastructure than hotmail did.

sounds to me like the irresistable force meeting the immovable object.
Old School CS and New
AOL Gets Goowy, Acquires Widget Startup
Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall: What Startup?
New tech lets college students scan barcodes with cell phones to gather info around campus
Looking over the XML datatye [1], at first it doesn't seem that this would be very useful.. It doesn't seem to index the XML, only store it in a string-like manner..

But when I look at the XML functions [2], I can start to see where the real value is. In Chron X, we're storing vast sums of XML in SQL as strings, so being able to parse it per-element and pull them could be very helpful.

[1]http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/datatype-xml.html

[2]http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/functions-xml.html
A Lesson in Apple Economics
How Apple's icons were designed
"Collectively, We're All a Lot Smarter" (Interview with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures)
Rands In Repose: How to give a presentation
So it cuts a line out of like seven people and makes a thirteenth dude, right?
Guerrilla's Guide to Optimizing Rails Applications
It wouldn't have been my choice for a messaging protocol either, but it's hard to argue with the huge number of extensions XMPP has grown.
I don't know, was Hotmail a billion dollar company with thousands of employees and thousands of servers? If not, maybe there is no point in drawing analogies.

I don't think MS wants to buy Yahoo for an opportunity to convert another server farm to Windows. Maybe they will convert, maybe they won't, but that is not really the most interesting aspect of the whole thing. Does it really make that much of a difference, anyway? The actual web servers and databases are available for both Linux and Unix, so application developers should not feel a difference. The rest is for the system admins to figure out.

Personally, I expect MS to switch to Linux eventually (might be a couple of years still). They did good research in User Interface design, which could come in handy for designing a fancy Gnome skin. With falling hardware prices, it seems difficult to sell Operating Systems in the future.
I've always been a fan of PostgreSQL. The one bit that appealed to me was its erstwhile ability to 'shard', or partition data across tables.

http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2006/11/04/postgres-for-the...

Any comments?
If programming languages are for making programming easier, then it's clearly a mistake to use just one language to write programs. Different languages are optimal for different areas of concern. Rob Pike spent 6 months writing a language optimized for concurrency, then wrote an entire windowing system in just 300 lines. If a programming language is a tool, then people have been advocating doing everything with a hammer. What if we had a way of combining many different languages, so that each area of concern could be written in the language which is optimal for it? I think one of the strengths of Lisp, is that it's its own abstract syntax tree. In some ways it's more like a substrate for implementing other languages than a conventional computer language. What if we had a substrate that let us use multiple languages together?

Google Tech Talk on Newsqueak & High level abstractions for concurrency:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344&#...
There's an author Morris Kline who wrote a number of fairly useful books on mathematics. Particularly worth mentioning are Mathematics for the Nonmathematician and Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach. The former traces through the history of mathematics and places each of the math discoveries in their proper context. The latter covers most of the topics covered in the first couple calculus classes. What makes Kline's approach valuable is how he grounds the abstract math topics in practical examples and in ways making them more accessible than your typical textbooks.
No one's seen the disappearing square trick in math class?
While I have enjoyed Postgres's reliability, the clients (for OSX) have left me feeling empty.

A majority of the time I just want to see the tables. When using pgAdmin3, I am forced to expand Servers->Local Server->Databases-><the desired database>->Schema->Public->Tables

And then when I finally get to the table I want, if I double click it, it brings up the properties for the table? Huh?

So I figure out I must click the table icon on the toolbar to bring up the table. Instead of bringing up the data within the same pane, it pops up a second window? Grrr....

While the tool gets the job done, I'm starting to miss MySQL just for the sake of having CocoaMySQL at my side.
The NSF isn't the primary fund granting organization for medical research, the NIH is -- with a funding level (28.7B) that eclipses the NSF (5.9B). In 2003, NIH is estimated to have funded 28% of the overall medical investigation costs:
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/...

Pharmaceutical research in all likelyhood includes the cost of bringing drugs to market, currently around $800M per drug. Because of this high barrier, much of the Pharma energy goes into 'me too' drugs of a higher risk/reward ratio, again inflating the true spending on new research:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/what-dont-w...
I know some pharmaceutical reps - they say without irony - that they push (in the drug dealer sense) whatever drug their company wants them to.

America is the one of the only countries that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers. http://tinyurl.com/27y5df
I think that the actual basis for "less code = more powerful" is psychological. You are less likely to want to write a feature if it requires putting up lots of boilerplate code. People tend to do what they want to do (discipline is highly overrated ;-)). So in a language that requires lots of boilerplate, you end up writing fewer features, even beyond the cost of typing (which is negligible for good typists).

Of course, there are other psychological factors at work. You are less likely to work on a project where you have to keep lots of unknowns in your head at once, and adjust them all simultaneously. (I suspect this is why Arc took 6 years to write.) You are not likely at all to work on a project where you can't understand the required language features, or can't figure out the existing code base. And it's no fun working on a project where every time you fix something, something else breaks.

The "ideal language", for me, would be the one that minimizes the sum of all these factors. IMHO, Java goes too far with the boilerplate, eliminating the gains it makes in not having to keep much of anything in your head. Arc makes for inscrutable code bases and requires that you keep the definitions of any macros you're using in your head. Complex JavaScript tends to break when you make small changes. Python hits the sweet spot for me, with liberal helpings of doctest and docstrings.
Sun SPOT Overview
Social Networking Slowing Down in the U.S.
Lesson from Super Bowl XLII : "4 Pts down is better than 3..."
Why I'm excited about the Google Social Graph API
It doesn't index the XML because it also doesn't provide any comparison methods for XML. Largely because string comparisons on XML tend to be less than useful, I think.
Ask YC: Need feedback on my startup
Hi all, I've been working on my startup, Mobtropolis. It's a service that helps you find, record, and share interesting experiences in the local world around you. An easy way to think of it is as a photo scavenger hunt or photo dare site.

It uses social news and game mechanics to help coax you to experience the world and take pictures as proof. Photos can be submitted through your camera phone or through the web from your digital camera.

It's at a point where I would like some feedback from YCers, so any feedback or insight (positive or negative) is welcome, so I can keep improving it. And if you know of other specific groups of people that would find it useful or fun, please let me know. Thanks. :)
Oddly enough, there's something a little bit BS-like (EDIT: 1960s-ish) about PG's definition of "powerful". (I know Paul, you hate having to explain everything little thing you say, but bear with me here)

The word "powerful" is such a generic it doesn't work here. I guess the simplest way to explain is to look at what I think Paul is saying: as our languages evolve, it takes less "stuff" to tell the computer what we want it to do.

The problem here is that the amount of "stuff" required is as much a user interface problem as it is a syntactical one. Surely neural interfaces can render most coding obsolete eventually. Perhaps well inside our 100-year timeframe. So what, then, is meant by powerful? Is it our conversation with the computer we are trying to maximize, or our conversations with each other? In other words, am I trying to get to the quickest magic to get from my thoughts to code, or am I trying to get to the quickest magic from my team to a solution that we all understand? In the second scenario, the "power" of a programming language is more about how well it can help the team discover, implement, and maintain solutions that have value. Not about the directness of my personal thought-to-code.

I think this second definition of "powerful" holds up better in the real world. My opinion only, though. I don't have a bunch of essays or a cool venture fund, so take it for what it's worth. I hate to be Mr. Definition Guy, but it's tough to have conversations like this without understanding what the heck we are talking about.
This is not ridiculous. If you don't like Arc'', you might think about this: we have two implementations of Arc, one in a normal computer, and another in a computer environment that makes you spill blood on every keyword, that we call Arc''. Nobody will want to use the Arc'' implementation right?

Languages, as considered for practical use, aren't only Turing machines. In Turing machines it's unimportant to have libraries, and you have no way to create sockets, access to disk, or anything like that. In real-life programming languages, the language implementation and environment does make a huge difference. My point is: you can think of many ridiculous environments that will make any language terrible for daily use. You can also think of many small language variations that would make that language use terrible as well. Thinking about those variations isn't that great... the point of succinctness is power is: everything else equal, the shorter program wins.

And both the original argument and mine, were wrong in the "everything else equal" part of that point. That's why that's invalid in my pov.
Javascript Trim Showdown
Its already built of open standards what further integration is required?
> When using pgAdmin3, I am forced to expand Servers->Local Server->Databases-><the desired database>->Schema->Public->Tables

Yes, that is annoying, but at least the 1.8.1 version of pgAdmin opens in the last db/schema used... that is the behavior I get.

> So I figure out I must click the table icon on the toolbar to bring up the table. Instead of bringing up the data within the same pane, it pops up a second window? Grrr....

File -> Options -> Preferences.
Unmark "Show object properties on doubleclick in treeview?"
Does that help?
Login password recovery. :)
Before digging into the various books others have suggested, you would do well to read "Where Mathematics Comes From" by George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez:
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Bring...

That book explains the origins and understanding of the basic items of mathematical analysis: infinity, sets, classes, limits, the epsilon-delta of calculus and alternatives, infinitesimals, etc. The explanation is from the viewpoint of psychological understanding. It details how we build up a scaffolding of tools (starting with basic counting) sufficient to slay the dragons of modern physics and mathematics.
How will your service figure out that a given group is smarter than its members?
I wonder if the bottom of the ocean would be a good place for a datacenter, networked directly to those cables. There would be ample opportunities for power generation and cooling.
I would put something else in place of the first two, "make out with a celebrity" and "pick your friends nose". They aren't very compelling in terms of the site's content if you're trying to attract users.

It's kind of a cool idea though.
I didn't... How does it work?
Hrm. Doesn't really give me much of an idea about what they're good for or what people are doing with them, though.
So in other countries, they simply spend the same money trying to bribe doctors instead of consumers.
Thanks. As with any community orientated site, while I can reject submissions, I can't change what they submit. I've had submissions for "hug a policeman" and "watch nancy drew in the theaters alone" Despite that, there are interesting ones, like "fire a weapon", "eat ootoro sushi", "drink an obscure soft drink"

What kinds of things would you consider more compelling?
Some time ago I found this picture and worked on it until I could generate similar animations on my own. It's tricky: the guy that disappears is gone not because it's divided in two parts and both are made into different guys; but because lots of little parts are made into different guys, so making a disappearing complete guy. That is: lots of different parts in different guys disappear in a very obvious way, and if you sum all of them, they complete a single guy (it's not easy to explain, but there is not a single disappearing guy, but a lot of tiny parts of different guys disappearing at once).

Try to make it work on paper to understand how it works. Notice that the upper half of the "paper" should be cut in two halves, and those two halves _have_ to be of a different size.
Not if the cloverfield monster has anything to say about it.
Bad timing
> This is not ridiculous.

You're correct, insofar as if we assume the hypothesis of the Sweeney Todd Machine, then the above becomes a valid argument leading to a valid conclusion. However, it's an uninteresting argument because it refutes something that nobody believes; nobody would assert that succinctness = power when equality is defined over a domain that includes bloodletting. My original argument assumes stronger restrictions on the domain of what constitutes a language. Under this set of hypotheses, some people, namely PG, would assert that succinctness does indeed equal power, and therefore a refutation of that assertion is interesting.
I'm pretty dubious about some of those 'research' organizations.
You should get the interesting ones to be prominent on the home page, and subtly deemphasize the others. The nose-picking thing has got to go. :)

One idea is to have a box which introduces the site, at the top or to one side. Include a very brief explanation, and a few handpicked examples in the Introduction box. Then have the "latest submissions" be a different list of teasers, below or on the opposite side from the Introduction.
I perhaps one of the exceptions on hackernews (at least seems that way), to think that this perhaps is a good alternative for yahoo. The other possiblity is that yahoo could go on being independent for anouther 3-5 years and be continually dominated by Google.

Listening to Jerry Yang CES keynote was hardly optmistic, and if I was a shareholder watching that i'd have been disappointed. Google is going from $300,$400,$500,$600, to even $700/share. And prior to Microsoft annoucement, YHOO shares fallen back to a price they were trading at 4 years ago.

Not only that, you consider over the years, Yahoo has had more then good opportunities to buyout big companies when they were small like Google and Ebay, and the recent future Facebook (which is small but could very well become big one day).

This is obviously not a match made in heaven with Microsoft and Yahoo. But there are clearly facts here. If you think Yahoo is only temporarily at low point in their history and sooner or later they'll bounce back, then Microsoft should not pass off the opportunity to buy them now. If you think their at a low point, and they could possible go lower, then God damn, they should looking for mergers rather than choosing to die a slow an painlful death at the hands of Google.

Lets for a moment(if possible) stop thinking like mere coders and pretend as least to think like astute businessmen.
And the new moon is February 7th. (The most preferable night to start a stealth bombing campaign.)
PMOG as a kind of Augmented Reality