skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is a very good a practical explanation of how to abstract third party, organically grown web services. Thanks for sharing.
It was an apostrophe, but since Arc doesnaEURXt support Unicode, fuck it.
And now problem solved. Thank you, Paul.
My favorite quote:

Lisp was great at the time of its inception if only for a radically new way of using machines. It has suffered the fate of having been elevated to a status of de facto standard with all its defects. Despite its conceptual novelty a lot of the design of Lisp is terribly amateurish even by the standards of the time. When I read the first manual, the Lisp 1.5 manual, published in 1961, I could not believe my eyes. It was an extremely poor language. Now it has become the defacto standard of the AI community, which now suffers from Lisp, the way the rest of the world suffered from Fortran.
He also appears to have made advances in birdfeeder technology.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=Sl0gAAAAEBAJ&dq=%22paul...
What kind of keyboard do you use that has an actual apostrophe on it? Or do you go out of your way to use Markdown (or something) to clean your input before submitting? Just curious...
Why use REST?
I'm building an app in rails for a niche market. I don't plan on offering any kind of API or support content types other than html (no demand for them).

I've read several articles on REST and can see how they would be of benefit to larger web apps with APIs, but as a sole developer working on a small project, is there any point in me using a RESTful approach?
This one's a lot more interesting: http://www.google.com/patents?id=jTkLAAAAEBAJ&dq=%22paul... "Remote web site authoring system and method" how Viaweb works/ed...
Since the python interpreter interprets tabs and newlines and commas as tokens, you have to count them as well (in arc you have to count spaces that aren't part of strings).
Journey Through Genius is a pretty good way to go "ground up".
If your project stays as you describe it, REST isn't crucial. Given that you're using Rails, though, it's just as easy to do it as not do it, as idiomatic Rails automatically enforces that architecture and gives you API support "for free." Why fight against the framework?
For everybody on YC/Arc News at least, since these sites are obviously using Yahoo's technology. Does YC/Arc have a license from Yahoo to use this scheme?
I couldn't agree more. I think, in fact, that a great deal of the current confusion and chaos surrounding software IP issues can be traced to exactly this important distinction.

"Piracy? That's stealing software." Well, no, not exactly, since no physical instance is stolen. Physical things can be stolen. There are analogies in the software world, but they're usually imperfect.

"Let's patent our software widgit!" Again, kind of misses the mark. I mean, would it make sense for me to say: "Sweet, I'm gonna patent my English essay!"?

Anyway, I could rant on about this. Just a round about way of saying I think you're right, murrayh, that the physical/virtual distinction is a critical one and that it gets overlooked, both here and generally.
Speaking as someone who just decided to try and see their first software idea to market, I actually found that particular comment in the article helpful, though not in the way I think they intended.

So I have an idea for a software. Let's say the awesome happens and, at some point of time T in the development cycle, someone wants to buy my company/idea/etc. How much is a fair asking price for my time, energy, ideas, etc.? Well, a good starting place would be the amount of fiscal and temporal resources already invested, plus some amount.

Now, I can't speak generally, but tend to be HORRIBLE at estimating hours or money invested in something after the fact. So tracking development costs makes sense to me, if for no other reason than it will give me an idea of how deep I'm into the project if I ever get to the point of negotiating financial issues with an outside party.
Wow, that's a bracing bit of honesty. Speaking as someone who is just at the starting stages of trying to make a go at their first entrepreneurial endeavor, I suppose it's good, if a touch disheartening to hear about what it's like to fail.

Of course I'm not going fail. My plan is perfect. Right? Right?! Crickets
mephisto 0.8 is out
> Hope it helps :-)

It does.
Google's Chief Legal Officer on Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo
Claims 4, 6, 8 and 9 are pretty specific and from a cursory examination of the current challenge solutions none of them work that way.

Could it be that at the moment the only system to worry about a lawsuit is Arc? Yahoo (not pg) is the patent holder.
Seconded. Spivak is ideal for self-study because there is an answer book for it. I tried Apostol first, and, although it's a good book, I had no idea if I was doing the exercises right because I didn't know what a proof was supposed to look like.
My god! He's going to sue everyone who answers the... birds.... uh..
The book What is Mathematics by Courant et. al. is a terrific, read, and highly recommended from generations of mathematicians. It's one of the few math books good enough to compel you to read through the whole thing.

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Elementary-Approach-Ideas-...

There's also the Princeton Companion for Mathematics, which isn't out yet but is available online. It's a wonderful book.

http://pcm.tandtproductions.com/

User: Guest
Pass: PCM
Software Patents are a sham.

Software should be copyrighted, but not patented.

I wonder what would be if a writer could patent story lines:
"It is like a like a novelist, patenting all action thrillers, that involve a guy saving a girl, who is kidnaped by the bad guys.

Watch out, any other books that have a bad guy kidnaping the girl, can be infringing this patent."

There are many industries that flourish without the needs of patents. How did we end up in this mess?
Microsoft's statement on the acquisition of Yahoo
"ecommerce sites are making it as difficult to buy products as humanly possible."

If my credit card has a number as four blocks of four digits then I expect to type four blocks of four digits. A webpage with <input limit=16> is wrong. This was easy to fix in 1998 and it is trivial to fix, client side and server side, in 2008. This isn't academic. This increases support and it costs sales.

If I encounter this case then I take business elsewhere. If they cannot get this issue right then how I trust that they'll fulfil my order? I'm not being petty but if this issue is apparent then testing isn't sufficient and they're not acting on feedback. In either case, this is evidence that they're less likely to send the correct products first time, less likely to fix mistakes and less likely to give a refund.
Thanks for the links. I especially liked the following observation:

"During the APL75 conference in Pisa Ken visited the Leaning Tower. He pronounced it the first software project -- late and overbudget, and from early on everyone could see that it was going to be a disaster, but by then the project was too far along and there was nothing to do but plow ahead."
So much for Twitter and the Super Bowl (app is down)
I'm guessing Joyeur is no longer providing extra capacity?

EDIT 19:30 est: back up now
Start with mathematical logic, set theory, abstract algebra and number theory, in that order. Do not follow the usual course of calculus, differential equations, linear algebra and so on. That is, do learn those things, but later on.

The problem with math education is that "the basics" (things that I recommend you start with) are neither easy to understand nor obviously useful in "the real world". Or at least the latter was true before computer science came along. But most educational programs were established before CS, so basic math is regarded as something you don't really need to know. But you do, if your goal is to understand math, and not to be able to design bridges as soon as possible.

Now universities are gradually fixing the situation. They still start you off with calculus and such, but before you go on to more rigorous classes like Analysis or abstact algebra, they give you a "transition course", which is essentially a survey of the basics.
well you have to think like that !
I guess I can kind of empathise with the feeling, but not really.

I have found I can get past failure easier if there is less of a physical reminder of it - but was it crushing financially? did you loose anything that made you think that you couldn't go through it again?
"You should realize that in any field the time lag, the delay between a significant scientific progress and its acceptance by the scientific community at large not to mention the moment that it finds its way into a product should be measured in generations."
Many companies use software/business model patents like Saddam used WMDs - as a way to threaten without actually deploying the skill or resources they don't have.

Unfortunately it's usually a bad business decision to fight the system head on so only the worst intimidators ever encounter resistance.
Thanks for posting this... bookmarking it for the answers. I'm early-thirties, too, and while I finished the first year of calculus (10 years ago!), I screwed up and got a PoliSci degree. Now I'm looking at maybe going back for CS, but I need to relearn trig and calc so I can finish the physics and diff equations prereqs. It would be nice to not have to spend a year retaking the classes.
"1089 and all that" by David Acheson is charming and very readable. It covers a variety of different types of maths but more importantly get across what maths is really about. I've bought it for friends and family with a wide range of maths backgrounds (graduate mathematicians to not-since-school-forty-years-ago).

Also "Alice and Numberland", Baylis and Haggarty; and "The Foundations of Mathematics", Stewart and Tall. These are both pitched somewhere between high school and university level and bridge the gap well.
Linearity is killing the Living Web: Blogs don't work anymore, Google search is useless
Twitter seems up for me via the twitter site, but not via twitterific.
Joyeur had some PR/blog post earlier this week or last week announcing that Twitter was on its own again, but Joyeur was standing by to assist. (Or some such wording that read to me at the time like "you'll be back").
That's because my whole point is that programming is much too rich and complicated for any one metric to be particularly useful.

I think that's where Paul disagrees. I don't have enough experience to agree or disagree with either one of you - it would be nice if Paul were right, and there were a simple "rule of thumb" metric that could guide him to create the 100-year language, but your point sounds truthy also.
I'm getting a 404 on the link
A REALLY innovative way to write (domain-specific) code
Could you try it again? It works for me on Opera.
TIME

Agreed. These are all correct ways of defining the same thing (the "power" of languages), and we need to pick whichever is useful depending on what we're trying to do. If we're trying to put a precise measure on the power of a language, PG's treelength seems to do the job perfectly. But how do we design a language which would create programs with the smallest tree length, or which would take the least time to write it? To answer this, it's best to consider how easily our basic mental structures can be expressed in the language.

The concept of sets, lists, map, and reduce exist in our lives whether we know program or not. If a language contains or lets us easily express other embodied mental structures such as relations, tags, partitions, etc. easily, it will be more powerful than languages which don't.
Wikipedia is great for math topics. Also, PlanetMath (http://planetmath.org/) and MathWorld (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/) are both good free online math encyclopedias as well.
Yeah, it looks like the author removed it... Google doesn't have it cached either.
No change from the earlier screenshot. Here's the About info:

Version information
Version 9.50 Beta
Build 4506
Platform MacOS X
System 10.5.1
Java Java Runtime Environment installed
Browser identification
Opera/9.50 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X; U; en)
Project Euler is great for practice, but it doesn't really give you a well-rounded math education. The problems focus mainly on number theory and a few other small areas.
Developing an improved online environment for educating computer users
If git has five files and you have five files then git has more files than you.

Git can kill two stones with one bird.
Cool video, but the headline is a bit misleading.
There is a little of it cached:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=why-microsoft-acquiring-...
A hypothetical counterexample to "succinctness is power"
Let's construct a hypothetical language called Arc'. Arc' is identical to Arc except for one difference, as follows. Arc' has two styles of parentheses: () and {}. The two have no semantic difference, but, gratuitously, the programmer is required to alternate between using () and {} at each level of nesting depth. Failure to do so is a syntax error.

So, trivially, for every Arc program there is an equivalent Arc' of the same length. So Arc and Arc' are equally succinct. However, without the assistance of an editor that would rewrite your parentheses for you, Arc' would be an absolute bear to work with for exploratory program. A change as simple as adding a conditional around a large block of code would require toggling the form of every paren within that block. I'd rather work in FORTRAN.

So, while Arc' is equally as concise as Arc, it seems to me that it is considerably less powerful.
And soon it may be held by the Beast.
Arc' fails the saved time test as the gratuitous syntax would take more time to learn, debug, write editor extensions for, etc - making it less powerful.
and web based mobile apps even bigger. 2.2 billion mobile phones vs. 700 million computers in the world.

I doubt more than 1000 people in under-developed world know what Y C is. Again YC's reach is not world-wide -- not yet anyways.
Are you a philosopher?
I think the problem with the Power=Work/Time approach for programming languages is you can never get people to agree on how to measure Time.

Whose time? What does it include?
There's an upside and a downside to this possible merger that isn't mentioned much in the press, which would affect us little guys.

It seems that many people inside these companies on both sides would bail if this happened, and the best among them would probably be right out front leading the exodus.

That means a) a bigger pool of available talent for other companies, and b) more competition from the companies these folks might start.
Looking at the comments under the post, evidently the content is stolen from another site. :/
They would be testing for the distance to the break from at least one end, probably both. Two separate breaks would be quickly discovered.
Wow. <3
>> someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption.

Elitism and snobbery at it's finest--like saying someone whose first bike had training wheels can never learn a ten speed.

BASIC is a gateway programming drug because in many incarnations, it can DO things with a short learning curve, which is rewarding. Many intro comp sci classes start with Waxing Off as opposed to creating something and building interest which then drives the lessons. There's no deeper understanding of WHY an approach is wrong than when you've been bitten by it's ugly consequences.
Ask YC: How would you go about teaching a child?
More specifically, I want to teach my little brother some programming. He is 9 years old, pretty intelligent for his age, ie does really well in math at his grade level, reads at a much higher level than his grade. I opened up the python repl for him and showed him how to do basic arithmetic and some for loops and he seemed to understand, but I think it would be beneficial to start with something much simpler. The short solution would be to start off teaching him html, that way he can easily get a webpage up and see results happening on the internet. Then move on to either javascript or python and show him some simple dynamic stuff. The harder/longer solution would be to start working on a very simple language. Something like logo but with a web lib. I was tempted to start teaching him scheme because I myself am trying to get decent at scheme and am starting to understand macros and all that jazz, but am worried that by not seeing quick results on the internet he would lose interest. The main problem is that shared hosting providers usually do not have scheme setup to where you can run a web application. I don't really want to have to go through a bunch of hacks to get it to work either. So my idea is, and this would be a learning experience for me as well, to create a very simple scheme like language to teach a child web programming. I was thinking it would compile down to python, because almost all shared hosting providers have python installed. I have no idea what I am doing, but like I said it would be both a challenge for me, and something that would be beneficial for my little brother to learn programming concepts with. Thoughts? Suggestions? Would people be willing to help with a project like this?
Why Yahoo Should Say Yes To Microsoft
I noticed. http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang...

Thanks.
recently i found a very good collection of lectures:

http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=nptelhrd

a couple are math-specific, but they keep adding videos so there may be more later on
SwitchPipe: New Rapid and Easy Way To Deploy Web Apps
true, I only come here for the community not to get into YC though.
You really need to learn Math by doing it there really is no other way. Books are really just references and guides and can give you good problems to work from. Either find a friend who will study with you or get direction from a math professor.

I do not know Spivak's Calculus but his advanced books (by Publish or Perish) are excellent, So I assume his calculus book is also. Especially Calculus on Manifolds and A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry. Anyone who wants to understand calculus on higher dimensions should read Calculus on Manifolds.

If you want to learn from the masters and you have the confidence, audacity and intelligence. I would suggest Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis by Andrew Gleason and Geometry and the Imagination by David Hilbert.

Just a warning. These books are for people adept at mathematics and are willing to spend hours on a page or two. If you are not, then avoid these books.
Interesting but surely Arc' is less succinct since succinctness is brevity and clarity and the extraneous bracketing reduces clarity?
Seems that was the original rationale behind computers, as intelligence augmentors.
Yahoo OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta
"So no, we don't hire architects. We hire developers."
The Cult of Bootstrapping
SwitchPipe - Make deploying Rails and Django apps an "upload and run" experience
Ask YC: Do you support OpenID?
Do you already support or plan to support OpenID relaying party in your application?
40 signs you really are a lousy PHP programmer
Routing the Rails Way (Excerpt from "The Rails Way")
There's a huge market for it, but nailing it seems to be an issue for everyone. I'd advise not to try solving everyone's problem, or you'll be another Quicken!

I'd love to hear more about this... make sure you keep hacker news posted!
Why don't you just contract it out?

Put whatever crappy design you can make on it, and then take it to some of the big name designers, and see how things go? Even if they do it, a few bucks to them and I'm sure they'll post about it on their blog... they get thousands of readers.
I opine that Python should be sufficiently simple for this purpose.

If you really want to show him Scheme web apps, you can run the PLT Scheme web server locally, and make Scheme web applications with that. Not o'er the net, but I would like to think it'd be sufficient at this stage.
I thought about that. But would probably stick to python. Thanks.
I certainly agree that logic, set theory, etc are the formal bases of mathematics, but I wouldn't say they are the basics. It'd be like learning the syntactic rules of grammar before learning words and constructing simple sentences by rote. Sometimes it's better to have an appreciation of the goals (which are easier to learn) before embarking on the fundamentals (which are rigorous but abstract).

When I first started learning set theory, I wondered why this wasn't taught first since it was so fundamental. It took me a while to realise that I wouldn't have understood any of it, because you need some measure of number sense and a moderately well-formed abstract reasoning to appreciate this stuff.

Throughout my experiences in learning, I've always found that it is a zig-zag path - learning the superficial or applications, before drilling down to the fundamentals, and then going back to applications with a new sense of appreciation and so on. Going from the bottom up sounds to me like a recipe for losing interest in the subject very quickly.
A program written in Arc' has the same number of characters and tokens, but the specification of Arc' is slightly larger than that of Arc, so the languages themselves aren't quite equivalent. But, point taken. Power involves succinctness, simplicity, orthogonality and generality; Arc' certainly fails simplicity and orthogonality.

And, surely it wouldn't be too hard to write an editor mode to automatically toggle the braces and parens as needed, so with that enhancement writing Arc' would feel only slightly more awkward than writing Arc. The size of the language specification is what affects the ease of writing tools to manipulate it.
If you look at the acquisition of Hotmail by Microsoft then you see a large amount of software implemented on open source software re-implemented on closed source software. Along the way, there were a few service outages and a notable security flaw where anyone could read anyone else's messages. That's a whole lot of effort to reduce portability and damage your brand. Furthermore, while you're re-writing existing functionality your competitors are adding new functionality. Note that when you re-write functionality, it doesn't guarantee improvement. Indeed, it doesn't even guarantee that you'll maintain the existing level of functionality.

In this case, you won't even maintain the current level of users, due to future concerns regarding accessibility and terms. So, would you either oversee the re-write of widely used code for dimishing users or would seek other opportunities, such as a start-up?
I read that git was written to intentionally use every trick available in Linux for performance. Mercurial has similar features, but it's much more agreeable to cross-platform work. Mozilla uses it.
if Microsoft acquires Yahoo and ignores the users interest, then this is only going to benefit innovation.

and complaining who? Google who has almost a monopoly on search.
A match making service for forming capable groups with high collective intelligence.
The idea here is to form groups of 3 or 4 people who together are a significantly smarter entity than any of the individuals.

So the challenge is to search for such groups of people among millions who will complement and get along with each other.

Of course, you could consider group goals along with the expertise of potential members. But just as important would be to take into account psychological and sociological factors when forming such groups -- taking advantage of empirical data as to what combinations are most likely to work out well.

Do such services exist? Such a service could even be used in a large company with thousands of employees.
> succinctness is brevity and clarity

Which is it? Those are two very different things.

> extraneous bracketing reduces clarity

I'd argue that clarity is increased. It makes it easier to tell what open paren matches what closing paren.
Yahoo bid bad news for the net, says Google