skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your example isn't complete. If you're determining whether "succinctness is power", you would need to compare Arc' to some Arc'-like language which is less succinct but which has the parentheses requirement.
Startup offers high-tech gadget buyback plan
Existing corporate solutions measure internal email traffic (and its content) to specific individuals when problems occur. Patterns emerge in who handles a support request for a certain type of query that may more greatly indicate the usefulness of one employee over others, even if they're all in the IT department. It would seem more relevant to larger groups and varying types of queries (who's the excel expert? who knows <x> better than anyone else?).
If you use paredit.el in Emacs, it would be absolutely trivial to write Arc'. Some Schemes are already sort of like that, because they allow you to use brackets as parentheses, and they require that closing brackets match opening brackets, and closing parentheses match open parentheses. It's not a problem at all.
Is the Moon moving away from the Earth? When was this discovered?
I think if you tack on that qualification, then the statement becomes vacuous or at least near-so. Considerations in language design are dreadfully non-orthogonal to each other. I don't think you could measurably alter a language's succinctness without completely blowing away ceteris paribus.
I wonder how much of the Paul campaign is going to come out of this primary disillusioned with politics...
Another pointless war's coming. :(
Who else here besides me is using PostgreSQL for a public web site?

http://ourdoings.com/
I stand corrected. Thank you. Although I'm not too sure on the financial status on whether or not Flickr actually makes a profit. There appears to be a lot of speculation surrounding Yahooo and Flickr's profitability.
(off topic)

I imagine a lot of folks on all sides are going to be disillusioned with politics this time around. We've seen a lot of grass roots guys, but the political machines don't seem to be paying that much attention to them.
Because MS is one of the few companies willing to ignore Wall Street to work on long term viability.

Did you guys even read the article, or is this just knee-jerk anti-Microsoft sentiment.
I like the idea. It's very similar to 43things, except for it's not goal oriented. However, you might get some ideas from checking out 43things. I think they've been pretty successful...
I think the site has real potential for fun, but it needs more focus. It's too vague right now. I couldn't really understand what it was for by looking at the front page or the help page, and that's bad.

Consider this tag line:

"Mobtropolis helps you find interesting life experiences, document them, and show them." [1]

Life experiences is a fuzzy and abstract phrase -- "challenges" or "unusual experiences" would be better, and a specific mental image like "strange foods" or "something you've never done before" would be better still. Document is an abstract phrase -- what you really want to say is "describe" or "photograph".

The help page... is not much help, I'm afraid:

"Mobtropolis is a tool to find, map, and share interesting experiences in the local world around you through peer pressure and simple game mechanics."

Peer pressure and game mechanics? This sounds like an abstract from an academic sociology paper. People who aren't game designers don't want to hear about game mechanics, they want to play games!

Compare this to a (hypothetical) Flickr tag line:
"Take a bunch of pictures and share them with the world." Or the Twitter tag line: "What are you doing?"

Your own introduction right here on news.yc is a vast improvement over the site itself: "An easy way to think of it is as a photo scavenger hunt or photo dare site." Yes, that's absolutely true, and your site should say that. Just sticking the words "photo scavenger hunt" on the home page would improve it tremendously.

Or something like this: "Challenge yourself. Take photos. Then challenge others." (Your "help" page, or the "about this site" box on one side of the home page, can go on to expand this tag line into a three-step numbered list -- kind of like the help page does now with its three sections, except that I would explicitly number the steps. You want to teach people that doing all three steps in order is what the game is all about.)

[1] Note: I fixed this English up a bit. :)
I'm sharing PG's premise that languages shouldn't require such tools in order to write them effectively. Eclipse is not an excuse for Java.
How could "everything else equal" include bloodletting? Of course the experience of using C++ is different than using C++ with knives, that's trivial, and I'm not saying that they are the same language or environment. My point is: the original argument makes the same trick, by making a modification to the language / environment that makes it very unusable... my extension of the argument to blood and knives it's just a way to show that the original argument is using exaggeration.

Everything else equal, the shorter program wins. Arc' breaks the "everything else equal" part of the argument very obviously, the same with the imaginary bloody machine.
If you haven't seen it yet, check this presentation about partitioning with PostgreSQL:

http://images.omniti.net/omniti.com/talks/partitions-public....
Microsoft Setting Up Another Office in Boulder, CO?
Here's a simple tagline: "Mobtropolis - try something new today".

Oops, that seems to be the tagline of a big grocery chain in the UK. Maybe I should be in advertising:-) Maybe you can work from it and create something similar that creates that idea. I think what I like about the site is it encourages you to try things that are readily available (well, to some people in some places at least), but you might not have considered before. I could see looking at that from time to time.
Anyway, in his article, PG doesn't actually restrict his own argument on that way. However I don't think he's being very strict in his presentation of the hypothesis, and while he could present it in a much more formal and precise (and theoretically correct way), I'm not sure that would make a very interesting essay. I imagine PG knew there might be restrictions to his argument, such as bloodletting and Arc' (or Arc' with bloodletting, imagine that!)... bah, who knows...
Education Automation by Buckminster Fuller
Yeah, "interesting" should be where the voting comes in, but I suppose at this stage, hand picking some can only help.

Your suggestion wasn't a bad one so I put it on live, though that makes the sidebar a little bit busy. I'll have to keep on tweaking it. Thanks!
No, and I don't like the idea of having one point of failure for my entire web identity.
... and on the First Day of the Second Month of the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eight, the Beast issued forth from his Vile Abode and laid Charge to the Land of Light, burying their Heros with irresistible Seductions and Temptations of False Fame and Glory. The Heros of the Land of Light did hold council, and after many a deliberation decreed that the Battle was to be met with full conviction and the aid of Macro Expansions. And the Battle was fought for twenty and three days and on the morning of the twenty and fourth day, the Beast was slain by a mighty hero of the Light, whose Karma was without parallel - Sir Paul Graham, Marshal of the Closure, General of His Magesty's Symbol Tables, Diviner of the Continuation, and all other Titles held and to be granted by Our Lord Almighty - Lisp - and His Son Who Walked On Earth - Arc. And so ended an Age of Heros and Villians, the likes of which shall never walk the Net again.
Dutch unveil robot to fill car gas tank
Thanks for the feedback. :) Yes, I had a lot of trouble coming up with the tagline. I suppose in a moment of weakness, I conceded to academic paper speak. You're right about things needing to be concrete.

I like your last one about challenging oneself and others. Mind if I roll with it?
womper.com?
Huzzah! I'm glad that part came across (albeit with difficulty). This originally came about because I felt like I was stuck in the office chair all day, and all any of my friends ever could think of to do after work was eat at a restaurant, watch a movie, or go to a bar.

There's lots of interesting things to do in the world, from the extravagant to the everyday that you might pass over. But it's hard to be spontaneous on the fly, so having something like this would help.

Huh, yes, you all should work in advertising. The taglines that you came up with are vastly better than mine.
YahooSoft Bid Shakes The Start-Ups
thanks for the heads up. It's some validation, at least.
i think you're underestimating the importance of the underlying technology. my job is mostly writing linux programs on a mac. if my boss came to me today and told me that my new job is writing windows server apps on a windows pc, i'd be looking for another job. i'd be willing to bet that a whole lot of yahoo engineers feel the same way.

and personally, i think microsoft would sooner die than switch to unix. i can't see them giving up like that.

if the situation gets really rough and they're finally forced to do something drastic, i think it would be writing a brand-new-from-scratch operating system, which would allow them to ditch 20-plus-years of legacy apps and APIs, the main thing that's holding them back. if they were to do that, i might actually get interested in them again.
Alan Kay tried to design Smalltalk as a sort of friendlier dynamic language like Lisp. So instead of lists of things, you have named slots in objects.
I really, really, really wish it was better. :(
Of course the obvious solution here is to sort them differently. You don't have to reject anything. Just sort the front page by popularity instead of "hotness" and give a link to recently popular. (on a side note, picking someone else's nose is listed 3 different times in the first two pages with the same photo). Or, you could make the top of the page a "Most Popular of All Time" box and the start listing the "hot" ones under that.

Your first thought may be that many of the social news sites sort by recent activity by default. And this is true, but they also have users that check back several times a day. Your site, while interesting and promising, probably will not have that kind of user. Maybe once a week or even once a day.

Or another possibility is what I did on my site (ratemystudentrental.com). Sort by what is most useful to first time visitors, but then once the user logs in, make the home page sort by recent activity.

Also, while I do think this is a pretty cool idea, I have two other criticisms.

1) The design leaves much to be desired. I thought I had been redirected to some static placeholder page, or maybe some subdomain of your blog when I first clicked the link. This is also partially due to the fact that your homepage redirects to mobtropolis.com/scenes/hot, instead of just giving me mobtropolis.com.

2) This would be way more freakin' sweet if it integrated with Facebook. You could have an app that pull my "adventure/dare" pictures into my Facebook profile. You could also allow users to determine the difficulty of each challenge and give awards to users who compile the most difficulty/popularity points by proving they've accomplished those challenges with photos.
I feel bad for Yahoo's shareholders.
Thanks.

Yes, I was a user for a while, but I found it a bit lacking in some regards. While it has a good community to encourage you and cheer you on, there isn't a sense of urgency to do things nor an easy way to share with people where to go about doing it.

Mobtropolis can geolocate photos and scenes, so once someone has done something and posted it, you can see where most people have done it. Gives a good clue as to where to go do it.
I read (Slashdot):
"A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues."

http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/02/04/0158249.shtml
verdict. the idea is good, but i think
you can improve your description and make it more interesting.
the second improvement is the layout. just by having another digg layout you are putting yourself in a "us-too" category.
an interesting layout would be to have stories placed randownly as squares (like modules) and instead of having them placed from top to bottom you could be creative and increase/dedrease the font size of the letters as it gets more/less votes.
don't require registration (maybe you don't) .
Ask YC: Source of users for early stage startups
When in early stages esp in an online B2C model one usually faces the following issues "together"

- You need real users to evaluate your business, to dictate your product/features/presentation etc.. in effect evolve the idea.

- Your product might not be mature or tuned to generate good ROI.

You have little money to spend it on paid marketing, with low ROI it obviously seems too pricey or risky. But it becomes critical to prove that your startup brings value, it works (for a VC it would be mostly - you can make money)

So you need traffic (significant - lets say 3-4K hits a day).

What are some smart ways (preferably deterministic sources) you have found to achieve the reach you need ?

Google/Yahoo/MSN search. Digg, Stumble Upon.. more.. ?
> the experience of using C++ is different than using C++ with knives

Not by all that much.
This is worse than the stuff that ends up on the reddit front-page. Please, let's try to keep this stuff away from yc.
I had originally thought that as volume grew, it would catch up to update the front page more often, even if a single individual checked it less often than social news. But when you put it that way, you're right that the frequency of visits changes what should be on the front page.

1) I'll fix that.
2) Dutifully noted. You'll be the first to know.
I, for one, am realistic about this race and its historical context.
Ask YC: Anyone done any work with Processing?
I'm about to jump in and do some experimenting. Anyone have anything to share?
If you can afford it, buy some users from an existing service by having that service offer your service to their users for "free". You'll probably have to pay the existing service a fee for this (unless you have some connection or you've found a service that is a true synergy with yours).
I don't have time to look at this carefully, but this has to be a dissection fallacy like the ol' "64=65" one.

For geometric examples, see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DissectionFallacy.html .
Contrived.
Learn about SEO
I've always thought there was something lacking in 43things, and I think Mobtropolis is and will be better.
>One of the standard examples cited by TechForward is a $9 fee for registering a $300, 8-gigabyte iPod Touch.
The promised buybacks -- assuming the device is judged to be in good condition -- are $130 at three months, $120 at six months, $90 at one year, $70 at 18 months and $60 at two years.

I'm pretty sure you can get a lot better price on eBay. Sure, you'd have to deal with possible scammers but the price would be worth it.
If Arc' became more popular than Arc, I suspect that M-x arc'-mode would handle the (/{ issue for you.

For any rule you can come up with, it should be possible to compile the rule away (e.g. if Arc'' was Arc in ROT13, we'd all write in Arc and then apply ROT13). Which should demonstrate that your example is weak. Can you imagine a language as concise as Arc, and analogous to Arc, that can't be converted directly into Arc through a simple process like the one above?
Nine trillion Google Checkout Webgoof ($9,223,372,036,854.78)
Why not just use psql and '\d my_table'?
Philip Greenspun: "$1K HP desktop running Windows Vista"
That's astonishingly close to the US national debt.

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Would Eclipse be an excuse for Java if it were a language rather than an IDE, and if it compiled into Java?
Three ways that social networks are different from other forms of online communication
Arc and Arc' could be compared as long as they're both written in the same language. Arc is written in Mzscheme. Arc' is..?
Wow, I definitely stared at that for 15 minutes. I know it's trickery, but it's still pretty brain-twistingly cool.
Do you know if the environment would put undue wear and tear on the equipment housing? I don't know much about undersea material constraints. Otherwise, that's an interesting idea. One of my favorite books as a kid was about scientists who lived under the sea.
My friend said "this is going to be a nightmare; I've heard such bad things about Windows Vista; maybe I should switch to Apple?" I confidently assured her that we would have the machine up and running within 20 minutes.

That's the funniest thing I've heard all year.
We are.

http://www.massify.com
How would cut cables affect things? Merely stopping the rest of the world from knowing what's going on?
PGAdmin for OSX is a steaming pile.

I use a combination of tools:

Aqua Data Studio

PgMaestro via Parallels
Any particular reason?
Right, that's the short road to negative karma, otherwise known as hell. Unfortunately, this post may qualify, since pg isn't a fan of saying things need to be kept under wraps. However, this is really a clever piece of reverse psychology, when you take into account the non conformist and devil may care attitude of us hackers.
Past Ron Paul types got worse treatment. Consider Goldwater in 1960 or Reagan in 1976. Also, consider what Reagan seemed to be when he was establishing his libertarian street cred, versus how he ended up governing -- if the primary campaign didn't disillusion Paul supporters, the Paul administration would have it covered.
Yes, I offer it to you royalty-free! :)

Really, it's just a distillation of your own news.yc post. It's already clear, just by comparing the site's description of itself with your description here, that your marketing skills are improving with practice...
Border cases are where the interesting things lie.
Since he's announcing open source code, Nazmul should have included direct links to it.

The SquawkVM's source page is here: https://squawk.dev.java.net/source/browse/squawk

The SPOT libraries source page is here:
https://spots-libraries.dev.java.net/source/browse/spots-lib...
Considering how arrogant doctors are, and how powerful the placebo effect is, it might make us healthier if we had more advertising directly to consumers and less to doctors.
I've only poked at it, but some pals are knee deep into it. They produce truly beautiful interactions with it.

Check out http://www.processingblogs.org/. It's a blogblender of active work on processing.
it is probably longer than a tagline, but it would have got the point across to me if near the top of the home page it had said, "The purpose of this web site is to coax you to have new experiences, and perhaps to take pictures as proof."
I would say to aim for getting a cult following like in the early days of craigslist or facebook.
Yes the NIH is a major source of funding for pharma, although not as big as you think, medical investigation includes a lot that is not pharmaceutical research

The me-too phenomena is a problem but only because of two factors, pressure by pharma reps and the fact that the US is the only country I ever heard of that allows advertising of non over-the-counter meds.
Google's Android Is Already Delayed
What do you mean by server apps? Maybe I am living in fantasy land, because I was a Java developer most of the time, but I couldn't care less if my web applications run on Linux., OS X or Windows, if the system admin can ensure me that it is secure (or at least takes the responsibility for it). And all other web development languages, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP and so on are all available for Windows, too, so where is the problem?

Does Yahoo have any other desktop applications besides the useless messenger? If not, then everything else is web applications, so most of their engineers should be fine. Only the sysadmins might be in trouble, IF MS decides to switch over to Windows servers anyway.

I know MS switching to Linux seems unlikely, but wouldn't it be cool? ;-)

I just don't think that MS are the evil empire most people seem to make them out to be. They solved some really hard software problems, that for example Apple never had to solve (hardware compatibility). They really did useful research in usability. They never were a monopoly. And they made some bad design decisions, but to their defense, a few years ago security wasn't the big topic that it is today. I can't think of an excuse for Vista, though.

Personally, I also use Linux, btw., I am definitely not a MS fanboy.
But why bother? Isn't the best thing for google to let these two companies merge and screw up?
I don't have anything specific to share, but my past experiences were pretty good. It's definitely great for doing toy types of things (I wrote a 3d clock, for instance, that changed color based on where the hands were). There's also great library support and a pretty big community. If I happen to dig up that clock I'll post it.
I had briefly entertained the notion of organizing it spatially, rather than linearly, but threw it out as being a bell and whistle. I'll think about it some more. I've tried to keep as much out in the open as possible, but it's generally tough to tie an action to no one if you want to do something with it later. Maybe OpenID will help in this regard. Have to look into it.
I believe Hi5 is a big PostgreSQL user. They gave a talk on how they use it about 7 months ago.

POSTGRES AT HI5, Paul Lindner / Ram Gudavalli, June 12th, 2007

- http://www.inuus.com/talks/hi5_pug_06122007.pdf
Easier than I thought to find it: http://apgwoz.com/processing/ColorMixClock3D/applet/

Source is http://apgwoz.com/processing/ColorMixClock3D/ColorMixClock3D...
From one point of view, an ecosystem is the opposite of a vacuum. And yes, you should develop software in one of those.
You disrupt communication. One of the first casualties of war is truth. You want to prevent it getting out.
Not in defense of Arc, but so far your definition for "concise " is the length of the program. But by mandatory alternating '{' and '(', you add a level of complexity in grammar to Arc' . I guess that is the reason you feel it as less powerful. So maybe 'concise' does not mean 'short' but means consistent and easy grammar for expressing idea. I guess that's why people like Ruby better than Python better than Perl.
As has been pointed out in the comments, he got his facts wrong.
Requesting Feedback on www.playforcleanwater.com
Please tell me what you guys think of my first social entrepreneurship venture.
http://www.playforcleanwater.com

Also, do you know of any good PPC ad providers?

Thanks in advance and good luck to you all!
Great stuff. It's very easy to dive in. The editor is clunky, though.

I'm currently working on a series of programs that process webcam input and render "magic mirrors" made out of words, wood, swimming fish, etc.
Nice list. I have been kind of doing the same thing - only over many years. One book that was incredible and disturbing was a small paperback - giving a layman's guide to Godel's Proof (maybe by Nagel&Newman?). The topic is too abstract to ever apply to a real world problem. But it is so profound that it is hard to imagine going through life not knowing it.
Depends how often you are getting new data. If its not too often, you could write directly to SQL. Otherwise writing in batches like you suggest could work too.

After looking at your post again, and depending on data volume, you might be ok with a purely SQL solution too (ie, finding nodes 1 or 2 steps away on a graph is easy in SQL if your adjacency data is all in the db).