skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dropped out of college after my freshman year to join a startup. I've been doing programming and general IT work ever since (~8 years).

After taking some more classes part-time, I've probably got about 1/2 the requirements for a degree in mathematics from a couple of different schools, but never seem to find the time to go back full-time and finish it out.

I do work at the college I dropped out of all those years, ago, though.
geeks. you guys forget about us sometimes. what is this?
shawndrost: Thanks I've verified the bug regarding accidentally counting clicks and will look into it. Can you elaborate on flickering? I've tested with your same setup some days ago and had no issues. Or just ping me privately through my Hacker News profile.
BASc in EE from University of Toronto; immediately followed with my first start-up
Ah I see. Can you tell me what OS & browser you were using? I've tested with many setups and the ads should go away when the mouse is over flash elements.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa! I've met at least one other Lisp programmer in the state...
Heroku Lifts Ruby on Rails Development into the Cloud (YC Winter 08)
Still in college for CS but plan to complete course work on part-time, I've been programming since I was 14 professionally. (A friend of my father had an SEO startup and needed a script kiddie for PERL/JS/HTML stack. He bought me any book I wanted and payed 15/hour. Purely self-taught, but higher level mathematics and discrete theory have improved my programming beyond anything else I've taken.)

Computers are made for making life easier, and in a capitalism that equates to making money if you can teach a computer to do a human job. Just waiting for that dynamite concept to take to market.

I love this site btw.
AS Computer Science - Penn State York

7 years out of college. Web programmer for a startup. Still learning the ropes, hoping to have my own startup someday.
I agree with the co founder point, if only to increase your chances of being accepted if/when you apply to YC for funding.
While you are in Portland, don't miss Barracuda http://www.google.com/search?q=barracuda+portland
B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Mississippi. Programmer Analyst at FedEx Services.
We have been domesticated by corn
By "Classic static typing", do you mean C++/Java-style static typing, or does it include Haskell/ML-style type inference as well?
The problem with technology people making predictions about intelligence is they don't understand the most relevant field: epistemology. In particular, you can't make very good predictions about AI before you have a very good understanding of how learning and knowledge creation works.

You can tell someone doesn't know these things when they never bring it up, despite it being critical to their claims.

One way this is relevant is that people talk a lot about raw computing power. As if that was the bottleneck in humans. But the more critical issue, by far, is irrationalities. And they don't address whether AIs will have those, or not. Nor do they address how to "parent" an AI.

This particular article doesn't even mention traditions or memes.
Captain Kirk :-)
农历新年 Happy (Chinese) New Year!
Where have all the hackers gone?
I've enjoyed reading the comments for "Turtles all the way down, please" here on Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110541

Thanks! Meanwhile, over on programming.reddit.com, this is what people have to say:

http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/67xk0/comments/
if you search for "Smjörið er brætt og hveitið smátt og smátt hrært út í það, þangað til það er gengið upp í smjörið." on Google this thread is the fourth result.

Damn fast...
no degree for me. i started programming in my early teens with vb, worked for an isp during high school doing unix sysadmin and perl/php programming. after high school i didn't bother with college and just continued at the isp for a number of years doing perl/php/ruby programming. i left there two years ago to become self-employed doing software development.
He did however say:

"It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn't have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn't distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn't have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn't support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there's also a place for a language that skips them, just as there is a place in architecture for markers as well as laser printers." (http://arclanguage.com/)

I certainly interpreted this as ASCII-only (along with presentational markup) was an explicit design decision, and I don't think this is a far-fetched interpretation. Luckily PG has clarified (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111189) that this is not really what he meant, and now everyone is happy and has regained trust in Arc!
"professional" programmer, self-taught, no degree.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110541

http://reddit.com/r/programming/info/67xk0/comments/
B.S. Applied Mathematics, UC Berkeley.
i'm near chicago
Zdravím do Čech :)
Neat, I think you found a bug that allows us to write literal asterisks!

* test* *

EDIT: OK, if you put three asterisks in a row with a whitespace or newline to the right of the asterisks, you get a literal asterisk, but six asterisks in a row does not get you two adjacent asterisks.
Northeast Ohio (Akron) here.
People are social animals. Living and working by yourself 24/7 is a recipe for burn-out, maladjustment, and general unhappiness. I'd recommend finding some ongoing events to draw you out of the house: volunteer with a local charity, or join a programmers' group in your area.

Try to spend at least an hour a day interacting with people you don't see every other day. (I.e., not a live-in significant other or a business partner.)
See this thread: http://arclanguage.com/item?id=1563
BS, Computer Science, Central Washington University.
I work for a non-Silicon-Valley company that was incorporated in 2001, has had several rounds of financing, and seems to be doing quite well thank you very much, even though we don't use Ruby on Rails or have a Facebook app.

(Although my expense reimbursement checks are issued by "Silicon Valley Bank". Go figure.)
I'd like to know the answers to these too, they're relevant to my, ah.. interests!
What goes with Heroku? Red or white.. Cloud or localhost. Interesting. This might make Ruby more palatable

Edit: Heroku already responded! The Ruby environment looks great. Time to watch some screencasts. Kind of like cooking watching a Cooking show. This means I can bring my ancient supermodel-skinny Sharp laptop (P-233MMX) to a coffee shop and hack Ruby code!
chicago, but headed west inside 2 mos
kicks ass. Congrats guys!
You will be fine by that time. RailsConf 2008 will have many workshops to goto and learn from. For now, books are good but screencast are better. Try railscasts.com & peepcode.com.

"I'd like to get the point eventually where I could see myself doing sites like twittervision.com in a weekend"

Once you figure it out, please let me know! :)
When you have leftover parts, that means you were more efficient than the manufacturer. :P
BS in CS, BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering -- from Carnegie Mellon
If you are in a funk, go to somewhere with a lot of people and say hi with a smile to first twenty people you cross paths with. The first 15 probably won't respond but once you cross a magic line and people start smiling back you'll feel more connected
Do I understand correctly that Arc strings are sequences of octets?

If so: I really don't want to be a negativity guy but it seems like every language that has made an 8-bit string the default string type has regretted it later because it is so painful to change it without breaking code. Okay, Paul says that he won't mind breaking code. Maybe he means it, but it doesn't make any sense to me to knowingly and consciously repeat a design mistake that dozens of other people have made and regretted.

It really just takes one day to get this right. You need to distinguish between the raw bytes read from a device and the true string type (which needs to be 21 bit or greater). You need a trivial converter from one to the other (which you can presumably steal from MZScheme) and back.

That's it. You get this right at the beginning and you never have to backtrack or break code.

My apologies in advance if this post is based on incorrect premises. I'm trying to help.
IT seems like there is a cycle that social news sites go through.

First they cater to an elite

Then they grow

Then the masses swarm in and make youtube comments look like they were written by Einstein.

The only site that I know of that has seemed to steer clear of this is slashdot. The secret is in the voting algorithm, and it needs to be adjusted when the site starts to grow.

I heard that there is a pretty smart guy who has written this site in a pretty smart language, and I am confident that he has both the intent and ability to keep it in line.
Öt szép szűzlány őrült írót nyúz. Egy hűtlen vejét fülöncsípő, dühös mexikói úr Wesselényinél mázol Quitóban.
BS CS Washington State

Will finish this year: MS CS University of Washington

programming for other people for 5 years
Awesome! Already in line for the beta testing.
B.Sc (Computer Science) and an incomplete B.A (Philosophy/Classics). University of Canterbury here in New Zealand. Currently programming for my startup.
erases all non GPL software from your system.

Actually, it just prints this:

Macintosh-2:~ ivankirigin$ python -c "import this"
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
Macintosh-2:~ ivankirigin$
I'm excited to beta test. Who needs a MacBook Air to create your own interesting RoR project? This will let me hack Ruby on an ancient laptop. For bonus points, eventually, perhaps they could offer for-fee code reviews...
Here's our CEO discussing that very thing:

Please scroll down to "The Virtues of Virtual..."

https://spideroak.com/blog
Very nice. I had this same exact idea a couple months back with the focus of tying it into a thin client computer. You buy the hardware and you instantly have access to all of these browser based applications that are hosted and built through a web service.

I'm on the sign-up list, can't wait to give it a try.
Speaking of back-end stuff, what is the backend of Hacker News? What are you using for persistence? Do you have any sort of model layer? Any recommendations/anecdotes?
python -mthis
Arc snarfs the string implementation from MzScheme which support Unicode in The Right Way, as code points rather than octets.
Necrotizing Fasciitis
My bank (USAA) has offered this for about a year. It's really convenient and awesome, more banks should do it.
As a Wufoo competitor, I kinda understand what you mean.
They have settled on a well executed "fun and simple" concept, and I don't see any of the big actors going into this market.

I don't mind however having them as competitors. There are plenty of customers for which fun and simple is just not enough.

You should also kick their asses. No updates since Nov. 07... I'm worried they're working on some sort of secret weapon :-)
ARM to show Google Android phone prototype next week
no degree, quit when I was told I couldn't take the fun (math, chem, etc) classes and had to take poly sci

code part-time, not as good as I'd like. Thinking about going back to school and finishing a CS degree, but I'm 40 with 5 kids to support (geeks get lovin too)

PS: You might want to warn someone if they have cookies turned off... the error message is counterintuitive.
This is freaking awesome!

Signed up for beta!
M.S. from Norwegian School of Business Administration and Economics (NHH), M.A. in linguistics, University of Oslo, currently programming CL in a telco.
Big congrats!
S.B., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Let me begin by extending a large, rigid middle finger to those questioning the eventual validity of such an amazing article. Having said that, I agree with pchristensen in that the web itself will not simply become "self-aware", but when an AI-capable system (or thing) gets a hold of such a pool of information, it will feed itself a quantity of information that the human brain could never understand. When this day comes, it will be the last step towards limitless innovation and human/machinist achievement. We are so close!
Hays, Kansas. I'm interested in any other hackers or programmers in the area, if there are any.
heh fantastic. I take back all that I said. Nice one ☺
Why the downmodes? malkia is just so happy about his new son that everything else (including being a genius) seems unimportant.
If I am responding directly to someone, I will link to them. If I think there's value to be added for the reader, I will also link to an essay like that.

Other than that, I do _not_ insert links and footnotes and citations into every blog post. The footnotes would outnumber the paragraphs if not the sentences.

Should I link to Alan Kay every time I discuss objects? How is that different? Or for that matter, if someone discusses the signal-to-noise ratio in programming language idioms, must they mention a post I wrote that was popular at the time?

And FYI, I have written about Blub and linked to Paul's essay as well as written about Blub without linking to Paul's essay. You are right, the two things are exactly the same and I have treated them the same way.

I choose to link or cite when I think it improves the reader's experience. In this case, I didn't think so, and after re-reading AVi's post, I still don't think a link belongs in my post. You could force it in, perhaps by adding a post script "If you find this interesting, you may also like..." or by adding a parenthetical remark "(TAWDry languages have other benefits, like...)."

But you know, that isn't what you are arguing. You do not appear to be arguing that a citation would improve the user experience of the post. Or at least, that's not how it reads. Your comment reads like I have written a scholarly paper and violated the rules of citation. Is that really what you are saying here?

There is a saying that I will attribute to Jerry Kaplan (since I read it in the forward to his book "Startup"):

"Your ideas will go further if you don't insist on going along with them."

Avi hasn't emailed to insist that he go along with that metaphor. Which is probably part of why it is spreading.
Adsense Payout "Sharply" Dropping
I think it's a human thing, not an algorithm thing. Without someone to kind of play cop, these things sort of degrade with time. Maybe it's not even that, maybe past a certain number of people it just degrades. It's a frustrating pattern though.
No, man, they've upgraded to Archie.
The Golight: Tool Support for Test-Driven Development
Columbia, MO (Turns out there are things other than sports here, just not many)
Colors of a Well Aged Scotch
Lincoln, NE
Already got a response. I'm in! Though I don't know what to do as I don't know any Ruby. Time to learn... "Hello, Heroku!" here I come!
Just got my invite and holy this is so much better than Ubuntu + vi + screen. How do you Mac+Textmate guys like it?
My team and I used the standard IM, email, source control, etc. But Skype could just _never_ replace a good old fashioned meet-up.

My co-founder and I have been friends for a long time, and the chemistry we have makes work both fun and extremely productive when we're in the same place at the same time. Over the net, it doesn't really happen. Admittedly, we waste a lot of time in person just bullshitting, but I think it's worth it and it makes the time enjoyable.

For a time, everyone on my team had to drive a half-hour just to meet somewhere between where we all lived -- due to school, job changes, etc. In my opinion, this was one of the biggest things that led to the team eventually falling apart. Simply put, when people moved apart, the fellowship was broken. :-)
BCS (yes it exists...) University of Waterloo

So at Waterloo you can now get a BCS (in the math dept, school of comp sci), BMath - CS, Comp Eng, or Software Eng.
I think the diversity in the programs is a good thing. Hell half the Electrical Engineers end up as programmers, but I would never hire one :P
Bona novaĵo!
MPhys in Computational Physics from University of York, UK.

Self-taught in programming from age 9. Had 1 long-term job as a game programmer, got fed up with it, now working on my own tech. (I'm 23)
BS Computer Engineering Technology, 2004 - Southern Polytechnic State U.
I program non-stop...
Should Developers Manage Copyright Like Photographers Do?
И тоо!
ПГ рулз.
My grandma is danish and I love copenhagen. A former business partner of mine is an excellent hacker based in Denmark.

I agree with what you have said, but here are the disadvantages of being based in Denmark:

1) high taxes

2) hard to start a business, compared to USA or even places like the UK or Australia

3) nearly impossible to become a permanent resident if you are a foreigner

4) Copenhagen is more expensive than California

5) Janteloven
Google to help green technologies amass scale
No tech business card discussion is complete without mentioning Steve Wozniak's: http://www.tuaw.com/2006/10/03/the-wozs-business-card/
Go outside?

The human mind works well in 45-minute intervals (obviously this isn't always practical, but even working on something related-but-easier for 10-15 minutes between two 45-minute intervals) so I try to step away from the computer every 45-90 minutes, give or take.
I work on a distributed team. We aren't a startup however. Using SVN, IM, con-calls, Confluence, JIRA, and an excellent project manager we are able to work very effectively from all over the country.

It was key that we all got together for the project kick-off for a week or two and got to know one another a bit. Being able to picture someone, and having a sense of how they communicate, how their sense of humor works, etc... can make non-face-to-face communication later much easier.
Did you guys get a confirmation email when you signed up? When I hit "sign-up" all that happened was an instant AJAX-y refresh of the page.
Sorry, I'm confusing continuations and closures in the parent post. You don't need to persist the call stack to implement the Arc-challenge, it is enough to persist the closure. It still have the same problems, though.
No confirmation. But less than a half-hour later got the invitation email...
[that 'ts' should be a 'k']
B.A. in Philosophy from University of California, Santa Cruz 2006. Started programming around 1999.
BA Software Engineering, University of Waterloo.

Working as a C++ developer at a big online retailer.
Dropped out of CS school, twice.
The Reddit comments aren't so bad. At least they're civil. I feared far worse before I followed the link.
Join one or more clubs so that you have events to go to at least four times a week.

Also, pick clubs that are more than just social get-togethers, but will help you improve something (my main two are Toastmasters and Aikido, e.g.).
Can we assume you won't go for the hat-trick as you probably already have the skills to pay the bills.
BS Computer Science & Engineering
Downtown Chicago
You should really investigate the FF issues... I'm on 2.0.11 and had major issues with the demo.

Other than that, good luck to you... I echo most of what already been said.
If your language doesn't support anything but toy apps it quickly evolves to be optimized for building toys.

If the first Arc apps had not been full-featured Web apps, but had instead looked like examples from SICP, everyone would be complaining that the language was only good for computing Fibonacci sequences and writing interpreters for itself.

OTOH, you can't expect a new language to immediately offer the library resources of, say, Perl.

So the plan for Arc's early days seems to be similar to what the Pragmatic Programmer guys called the "tracer bullet" approach:

Tracer code is not disposable: you write it for keeps. It contains all the error checking, structuring, documentation, and self-checking that any piece of production code has. It simply is not fully functional. However, once you have achieved an end-to-end connection among the components of your system, you can check how close to the target you are, adjusting if necessary. Once you're on target, adding functionality is easy.

On day zero, Arc let you construct and deploy every aspect of a useful software system (a web app)... but it took a very narrow and direct path to that goal: emphasis on tables, no Unicode support, borrowing some functionality from an existing Scheme environment, etc., etc. That is what PG was trying to convey in his announcement: the strategic plan for Arc's early days is to work on designing a complete skeleton, but not add a lot of flesh.
Hmm, I like the idea of the IRC bot logging to a intranet-type site.
Fight on!

BS CECS and MS CS, USC, '07
Thanks for your feedback run4yourlives. Can you please elaborate what specific issues you're talking about? I'm testing it now (http://www.emptyspaceads.com/about/demo) and don't see any issues.

I have been noticing that I'm getting a request for
Processing ApplicationController#index (for 153.XX.XX.XX at 2008-02-07 12:42:01) [GET] from some users which is causing the flash demo file not to be found.... but I'm not really sure how users can even get to that action since I don't have a method that defines index.
Well, I often think I should go back to school. But I guess I've been lucky so far :)
That said, I think self-learning is much more important. They don't teach you how to use version-control, right?
MS, Computer Applications (National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India) Manager of a Development Team. still like to call myself database programmer
PhD in Biology (Developmental Genetics), Univ. Barcelona, Spain.

Self-taught as a programmer as well, but it's a totally different mindset.
spot on... Especially 3 and 5. My brother has been married to an Australian and they had to move to Australia, since she couldn't get a working visa in Denmark. He is an engineer, and she is a lawyer.

1 and 5 are somewhat countered by the high wages, but you are right. Because of the progressive taxing you end up paying 65% in taxes if you are a high earner. This is only for personal income though - if you keep your money in a holding company the tax rate is comparable to the US.
So should I infer that the only reason UTF-8 is mentioned is that the reader APIs do not let you select the codec? Or is even that provided in which case it is accurate to say that Arc supports Unicode-in-general?
Bork bork bork!
OK. Now how about database access (with support for prepared statements), regular expressions, and networking?
Great... but that's Scheme, not Arc.