skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It seems several people are comparing Arc to other Lisps.

Not me (at least I hope not). I was trying to judge Arc entirely by the standards that Paul set for it in his foundational essays.

> what would it take for you to use Arc instead of Python for web programming?

At the very least better documentation :-) There appear to be some really cool things in the Arc web infrastructure, but the only way to figure out how to use them at the moment seems to be to reverse-engineer the code.
1) Some of Yahoo's major open source projects are java based that alone is bad

2) Instead of supporting major, mature open source projects with good traction in the .NET world (NANT, NHibernate, NUnit, ...) MS instead chose to reinvent proprietary wheels (LINQ, ...)
Stock prices are weird. The current value is where half the people think the price is too low and half the people think the price is too high. Of course everyone who still has Yahoo stock think that the price is too low--because everyone who thinks the price is too high has already sold their shares.

So everyone who still holds any given stock thinks that the market price is too low.
VC Fundraising Manual: Another Reason You May Be Rejected: Portfolio Concentration
In my posts, Why You Might Not Get The Meeting and VCs Have Flashback Syndrome, I listed four reasons why you might get rejected by a VC. There is a fifth reason worth noting: portfolio concentration...
Imagine for a minute that I did read before I posted, and apply my comment in that new light. :)
I am, for a startup called SmarterReviews.com. It actually parses consumer reviews and quantifies what people are saying about a product (e.g., an IPhone has great screen but bad battery life). I'm very pleased with how it's turning out.

Unfortunately, PG turned us down last spring :(
No idea, but I can certainly see how they could make money - context sensitive ads in their e-mails. You know where the person is going, for how long and how frequently they make trips, amongst other things.
Funny. I read this piece and was waiting for the profound statement that was going to convince me. But at the end it sounded like the message was "Google guys and gals are productive in other languages than LISP". Huh!? Not very convincing... Why do I care about them? From my point of view it's me and the machine. Google is just some company.

C is beautiful for what it is. Pure. Running on the metal.

And LISP too is beautiful for what it is. Running on abstractions.

The rest are all kind of in between.
The Dirty Dozen Mistakes of a Startup Entrepreneur
Interesting concept. In the Google maps demo, is it possible to add comments to the pins? That would be very useful I believe.
Google's Gathers Social Graph Information From The Web, Launches API
I'm going to start prefacing all my submissions with "Humor:". That way, people will laugh.
What Arc gets right
You don't have to read much of the business literature to discover that mergers and acquisitions, especially at this scale, rarely produce the expected synergies. All in all, I think this is good news for Google.
>Aaaaand wtf is with the creepy pics of young girls looking into the camera all over the site?

That was my initial reaction, too. Unless there's a specific reason you're trying to target teen girls and no one else, you might mix it up a bit.
The original article accused Canadians of being too concerned with "proving themselves to their big brother." I would just like to point to the following blog post:
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/digg-heat-map.html
to show why we do that. The article basically makes the assertion that most digg users are American, because most of the signups happen during times where Americans are at work. Not like there is another country sharing those same timezones.
Well tripod did more or less the same 5 years earlier, and had a million copycat sites. What exactly was the great idea that myspace had?

If you read up on myspace history and how they came to dominate the market it is quite obvious that it was by pushing their product relentlessly - not by innovating or having excellent ideas.
It's one of the fastest growing poker networks in Europe. Only been going three years, I left after two.
People buy stock to make money, and a 62% premium is good money. I doubt shareholders would reject the deal unless they think Yahoo is worth more than that. I doubt they would reject it because of some sort of amorphous anti-Microsoft sentiment.
It'd be Microsoft.

And "Flickr (a Microsoft brand)", etc.
The python way is to use a dictionary, or in simpler cases, if statements.

Your example falls short because case statements aren't such an obvious method of solving the problem as you think. They are nothing more than an artifact of the machine that C pushes up to you.
Its a good idea because with most other ideas you would have to work much harder to reach the same level of success.
Prefix arithmetic is easier to read:

(+ 3
4
(- 1
(/ 3 4)
(* (- 9 2)
8
3))

You can see straight away that the whole thing is one big addition; that the third summand is a subtraction, etc..

Also, a lot of math is prefix: f(x,y) ; d/dx (...) etc..
I can't be certain but I think you're being sarcastic :P

The reason is because Google WAS the underdog. Yahoo and Microsoft were the established giants. After 5 years or so the situation has almost reversed, though, with Google making (and buying) the killer apps and the other two players stuck in a game of follow the leader.

In 2007,
Microsoft's net income was: $14 Billion.
Yahoo's net income was: $660 Million.
Google's net income was: $3 Billion.
Some functions map multiple elements of their domain to single elements of their range. My pseudocode is a concise way to express such a function. It is not an artifact of the machine.
This always happens with buyout offers, the buyee's stock price shoots up close to the amount of the buyout offer, but never reaches it. It generally stops a couple dollars short of the buyout price. At this moment, Yahoo is trading at $28.25, still low enough to make a sure-thing couple of bucks per share. It's a gamble though. If the deal falls through, or gets blocked by the government, the buyee's stock price drops back down to where it was before the offer .
You can easily do closures in Python.
Yahoo +47%
It's NTT: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/02/twitter-chooses-ntt-america-...

AFAIK, Level3 doesn't even offer hosting, just colo.
How to obtain product(apparel) catalogs from other websites(merchants)
Hello,

I am in design phase of a startup(Not mine). Website uses power of crowds to select and recommend best apparel to other users of website. However to start with we want to have inventory where users can start voting and recommending to each other. Any Ideas where such catalogs for apparel can be found?

I know lot of merchants submit their catalogs to websites such as yahoo shopping and others but for a new website what is the best way to obtain them?
What Does Creativity Really Look Like?
Do that in javascript and I'll start using it:)
Ask YC: Best solution for offline access to a webapp?
Our company is developing a rewrite of our flagship app, which has historically been a Windows product, as a web app written in Ruby on Rails. So far it's gone moderately well; our complaints lie mostly with ActiveRecord (so bloody limited) and the lack of documentation of how to write good tests for complex models.

However, it turns out that our webapp also needs to be usable when the customer has no internet access. (Perhaps this should have been taken into account when the CEO decided to do the webapp idea, but we're pretty well invested into this approach now.) About 25% of our potential customer base would require this; another 25% would like to use it but do not require it. We sell access to our app as software-as-a-service to health-care agencies, so if they need to have offline functionality, they need to have it; it's not just a preference.

These are the alternatives I and a few others have come up with, but I'm hoping some YCers might have some advice.

* Google Gears: Seems to require substantial rewrites to our app.

* iPhone version of our webapp: our customers don't have much money to buy iPhones and service plans. also, some of our customers need to do work with the app in places where there is no cell phone service, let alone wi-fi.

* Joyent Slingshot: The basic architecture (local install of Rails, with some extra code to transfer data between the local install and the webapp) seems sound, but Joyent seems to have abandoned Slingshot halfway through rewriting it. If we go with this approach, we'd probably implement our own version rather than struggle with Joyent's unsupported code.

* Slingshot-esque with eee: Provide a custom install for the ASUS eeePC that launches the user directly into our app, with Slingshot-like methods for transferring data between the eee and the webapp.

* Slingshot-esque with VMWare: Same as above, only we provide a vmware image instead of an eee install.
On the other hand, Hotmail being run on Windows shows that MS believes the server editions of Windows to be stable enough for their own use, implying that it should be stable enough for whatever you might need to do, too. Keeping customers from switching to *nix is of immense value to them.
It's still absolutely no more difficult with if statements, and with if statements you don't have to worry about error prone fall through. There is no lack of consensus on how to do this. It's very obvious.

Concise? I've got some perl code for you.
Cisco I-Prize Contest Offers $250k, Business Unit Status, Plus $10 Mil Over 3 Years
If you're interested in creating something in the online video, virtual worlds, file sharing, or another high-bandwidth space where success would mean ISPs need more Cisco infrastructure, this may be for you. The "Brainstorming" (Proposal) phase is only open until February 13th.
I very, very strongly agree with you. A couple years ago I went through the exercises in SICP, and I remember being shocked at how hard it was for me to look at and understand Scheme code after 10 years of looking at C, C++, Java and C#. It felt really weird, because I remember being an undergrad and thinking that Fortran and Pascal and C looked really hard, but that the Scheme code in SICP felt very intuitive.
Well that's the most cunning and insightful comment I have read in quite a while.

"because if they had done something else they would have to work harder..."

I give up. I concede. I appraise your superior intellect. I will never be able to give a due answer to that amazing argument.
Google Gathers Social Graph Information From The Web, Launches API
fucking think.
Don't treat paying users like criminals- Was: Why Does the Wall Street Journal Hate the Web?
This is going to be pretty cool once there are more supported sites (like Facebook). Hopefully that will be soon, I really want to use this.
URLs are People, Too
Thanks for that - I figured something like that would get me far enough - I guess if you need to scale beyond a single server it is a sign of at least some success!
Hold Everything: We May Get Another YHOO Bidder
hey, congrats, looks cool! I would suggest that the map demo connect users to each other rather than forcing them to invite others (though you should keep that potion)... that way people can use it without going through the hassle of inviting a friend.
Yea, without Facebook it's really lacking.
I'm not a lisp programmer neither I know the peculiarities of each lisp implementation, but I think I understand it a little bit.

My question is, what hinders Arc (or other Lisp if it has the same problem) to create an operator that finds any global symbol from the top, like when an absolute path starts with "/" to find a file?

For instance, let's stay that there is an "unshadowable" operator called "." and let's take your example:

(let foo snoz (jims-macro frotz))

Well, that shadowed "foo" is causing the problem. As you said ("Jim's macro expands into Bob's macro which expands into Ann's macro which uses a helper function called foo."), this symbol is shadowing the actual function "foo" used by Ann's macro.

However, if Ann's macro were written carefully (and all macro writes should know that macros can be used in any context, any scope), Ann would care to call "foo" from the top using the "." operator, like:

...
(. foo args) ; excerpt of Ann's macro.
...

In this case, in every "(let)" or another scope definition method, you could always escape to the global scope using this operator, behaving like a hole to the outside world.

Of course, I'm just a Lisp newbie, maybe I'm just creating a huge mess with the concepts :-).

Is there any Lisp using that approach?
Froogle Feeds (?)
From the comments on that entry:

From: Microsoft
To: Yahoo
Subject: Be evil!

Succinct! :P
totally - they keep telling me "that's a good problem to have."
Followup to social network monetization
Thanks for the answer. Yes I considered it. But the size of the images is small and I might need images to be higher quality if I have to retains users on apparel website.
Contributing to Merb (Part 1) (git, merb)
Python is written to be easily parsed and manipulated by humans

... used to C

You sound like an English speaker claiming that English is easier for people to understand than other languages. There's nothing intrinsically human about infix syntax. It's just a question of what you're used to. I honestly find prefix syntax (or lack thereof) much easier to read, because that's what I'm used to.
Sorry, I don't have an answer; but I do have a question :) Why rewrite the thing in the first place? It's not too late to trash the Ruby on Rails project and focus your effort on improving your current asset (the Windows app).
Map fight!
> call-it: What's the problem with not knowing (+ 1 2) until run-time?

Not only efficiency. You don't even know if (+ 1 2) means "1 plus 2" or "choose 1 or 2 randomly" or "generate a sequence of numbers between 1 and 2" until you know what x really is (assuming funcall does delay evaluation of its arguments and passes the original form in case x is indeed a macro).

The macro version of call-it has the same problem, of course, but if you embrace first-class macros in the above way, every higher order function call will have the problem. Considering how often HOF is used, the impact is huge.

However, as you suggested, you can have two versions of funcalls, one of which evaluates args no matter what x is; then this problem will be solved.

(Or you can use hygienic macros, then you can deduce what '+' means purely from its lexical context, at least.)
Yes. I used all the CL and Scheme source of my own that I could find, and I also asked Ken Anderson to analyze some big collection of CL (I think it was) code at BBN.
That's kinda the right idea. There are two problems with your specific proposal: 1) it places a considerable burden on the programmer to annotate every invocation of a top-level function. For complex macros that can become quite annoying. 2) Baking the concept of a single top-level into the macro system makes it hard to add modules later.

If you pursue the idea of having the system walk the code and automatically insert those annotations you will (almost certainly) end up re-inventing hygienic macros.

(For the record, I much prefer the Lisp2 solution, because it's the hacker's solution. It's not mathematically elegant, but it's simple (compared to hygiene) and it gets the job done.)
I said you can make a mechanism to define new infix operators, but it's not very good. Then you quoted so as to imply I didn't know that, and said that actually some languages have it.
By my understanding, the Windows app is written in an obsolete language and is requiring more and more heroic efforts to just keep it working -- sort of a Red Queen effect. We could certainly scrap it and rewrite in .NET, but our past experiences with .NET have been less than positive. In addition, we're pretty far from a startup hub; even though we're not a startup, this is a problem, because we want to find expert hackers, not just average .NET programmers. So in that respect, Ruby on Rails is good for us because the few Rails programmers we do find are better than nearly all the .NET programmers we would find, and there's fewer resumes and interviews to go through.
It is for me. I literally wrote it so I wouldn't have to use CL anymore.
A little harsh, no?

You forget that Yahoo has over 120 properties, what about things like Yahoo Autos, Real Estate, Shopping, Finance, etc? There's significant overlap with what MS offers, yet Yahoo is clearly kicking their asses in many of these. I highly doubt MS would kill off the more-popular site/name for their own, especially if it could give competition a chance to jump in as the new #1.

Also, things like Flickr and Delicious could do very good things to MS's perceived image in future generations, so there's more here than just cash.
Zed Shaw: love him or hate him, he exists
Microsoft and Yahoo - A $45 billion bet
If it requires more and more heroic efforts to just keep it working, it probably means that your organization can't manage a software project; either because your developers are not experienced or, more likely, because management doesn't understand software development (you're not alone; few companies truly master software development). Hence, it's probably not a language problem and switching to Ruby on Rails won't solve it in the long run.
This is pretty cool. Congrats, I particularly enjoy that you have a chat function built in to speak to other users who may be clicking around.
So, they're trying to hire PG or RTM?
Social Graph API: One small step for Google, one giant step for the Internet Operating System
"France Telecom, part owner of the other cable, said it was uncertain when repairs on it would be repaired."

Recursive saboteurs?
Nah, I really wasn't making any claims. I just didn't buy the argument.

Personally, I find Lisp easier to write but much harder to read. The syntax certainly plays some role in that, but I don't think it's the key. The problem, I think, is that it's just too dense. When you use a lot of intermediate variables, you get to name them something relevant. But Lisp code (or at least my Lisp code) usually doesn't have all of this context floating around, so it's harder to figure out what's going on.
Does anyone whether this will be further integrated with data portability project? It's already sweetly useful, but its intersection with data portability and openID will be fairly important.
This is probably the case, yeah, but I don't have the leverage to get this changed. I'm leaving the company myself in in about five months.
There's no error-prone fall through in the code I posted. You would advocate the following pseudocode?

if beercount is 0 or 1 return "inanity"
if beercount is in 2,3,4 return "good sense"
return "genius"

I wouldn't advocate that. I think my first version is more concise in a clear way, not in a line-noise way.
I hate to mod this up, but, darn it, I have to mod this up.

Web apps have pros and cons. Desktop apps have pros and cons. Desktop apps written with web-app technologies have... cons. The interface is limited to what the browser can support. There are more moving parts. You have to worry about synchronizing the data. You have to worry about pushing out upgrades. You have the same support costs as any Windows desktop app, and worse, because you're supporting a system that nobody else has ever seen because you wrote it yourself. Etc. Etc.

Of all your ideas, the Asus-eee one seems the best -- just make the customers buy hardware with the software preinstalled. If they screw it up, have them mail it in for a new one. If the eee gets discontinued, find another small OEM Linux PC and port the software over. If you go the vmware route you might as well be selling and supporting an installable Windows app, which you already are.

But the idea is still crazy. Customers are not stupid. They know the difference between a full-featured Windows app and a web app that has been crippled by cutting off the Web part. You're going to throw away all the advantages of moving to webapps in the first place, and invest mighty engineering effort, all to replace a Windows program with a program that (from the non-networked customer's perspective) does the same thing but with a different, feature-poor browser-based interface. That non-networked 25% of your user base is likely to respond by either (a) demanding that you continue to support the Windows version; (b) switching to a competitor's Windows- or Mac- or Linux-based product; or (c) buying some networking, and joining the other 75% of the customers. Once that process has shaken down, you'll be left holding an expensive, tricky Slingshot-esque technology that has almost no users.
I agree throwing in a lot of variables with names can make code easier to read. You can also achieve the same effect by making one-line functions that just call a few other functions.

It's quite possible that the prevalent style of writing Lisp code is in some ways worse than the dominant style for C/java/etc. But that is a different issue than the language itself, which can, for example, create a bunch of name intermediate variables, if you want them.
So, I'm Now Nick@SocialMedia.com
I wonder if anything has changed since the days of hotmail. I recall everyone gloating over all the trouble they had trying to move that from FreeBSD to NT. IIRC, Yahoo does not use a lot of MS products on their servers... maybe I'm wrong, or maybe MS will be less insistent about pissing away lots of time transitioning to their tech?
Impact of Microsoft and Yahoo merger on Open Source
Please upvote the parent comment.

EDIT: I guess I'm sorry for pointing out that I thought the parent comment was underappreciated...?
I don't remember if CouchDB was open source when Damien Katz got a YC interview. He posted about his experience further back on his blog, if you want to read. PG told him he was a Woz and he needed a Jobs.

But to my knowledge, no, they have funded any open source projects.
I think the hope is: Microsoft!
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Your Spelling Sucks (Part 1)
Your Spelling Sucks (Part 2)
Your Spelling Sucks (Part 3)
I was just chuckling to myself about that: Yahoo being forced by MS to ditch all that 'patent-infringing' stuff on their servers for the 'superior' MS alternatives. Oh, and of course, our very own pg's offspring would become owned by his favourite company!
Annotating the Anatomy of An Anime
Do You Know Your Rig?
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AssociaDirect Free Website Giveaway for Non-Profit Organizations
Another way to put that is that Lisp is so natural it resorts to forcing parens everywhere even when I don't want them! I'd never deny that confusion about order of operations between &, |, ==, <<, %, and so on, is a major source of bugs. (But I'd blame poor coding style for that, in any language, in the first place.)

However, in every field besides this niche of computer science, including almost all of math, finance, science, and engineering, infix is used. This means that it is at least good enough and I suspect it has advantages.

Many math operations really are just fundamentally unary or binary. Generalizing - or / or x^y or mod to lists is just silly as far as I can see, and adds confusion. I don't need to see parens around the outermost operation. For the two most common associative operations, + and *, order of operations is quite good enough and it has the advantage that everyone since grade 6 has been working with it.

(I'll give you that there are very many cases where list notation is great, but I don't think it's common that they help very much in science, business, or engineering.)