skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mean that everyone is that obsessed; suffice it to say that enough people have the mentality that they want their entire environment to be in Lisp/Scheme/Smalltalk (the last of which is pretty much that way by design) to have created a culture that is, on average, more concerned with that kind of thing than the scripting languages were - they were too busy getting things done, piggybacking on Unix, C, and Windows to some degree. Note that the Java people have also gone in big for 'turtles all the way down', but that's easier with millions of Sun dollars at your back.

My point wasn't that Scheme/Lisp/etc... are impractical languages, or unusable for real work, but more along the lines of "ok, these are great languages, languages that have changed the way everyone thought - so why aren't they more popular? What went wrong?"

One very specific example - I recall fooling around with Scheme a while ago, and the implementation I was using didn't even have a string-split (string -> list). Easy to implement? Sure, but also evidence that it wasn't being used for the sort of practical things I wanted to do with it.
My next statement might go against the grain of YC startup programmers but in my opinion; Design should be at the core of the entire business... think Apple. If you've found a great designer make her a founder. It could be the best move you'll ever make.
Does she want a founder's share of the company or just the title? If she wants a larger cut of the shares, it seems like you'll have to decide if you're okay with that or not.
Comments are disabled for all job postings.
Lambda Calculus in a Can
What is Erlang-Style Concurrency?
> I get that you don't care for that.

You're putting words into my mouth.

And you and I are talking about different things:

> Turtles all the way down is a philosophy where you try to define a ridiculously minimal set of orthogonal axioms and build the language by combining those axioms

What I'm talking about is the "my whole environment must be Smalltalk/Scheme/Forth", from the OS, or even silicon, on up. That's different from your version of turtles. Yours is not the enormous waste of time that the "environment turtles" are.

However, I'm still not sure whether consistency is really that important. People seem to do ok with some inconsistencies and warts in their languages, and continue to favor languages with warts and weirdnesses and quick idioms to the ones under discussion (incidentally, what could we call Smalltalk/Scheme/Forth to group them together?).

Since there are many factors that contribute to popularity and diffusion of languages, it's hard to pin down what has kept those languages from being as popular as many people think they ought to be, but it's a question worth asking.

Naturally, I think the more people are aware of languages like that, the better. It's good for your brain and a great way of expanding your concepts of how to do things.
I wouldn't be so sure...
Programming Language Politics and Technology Decisions
I think what you are trying to do is extremely dangerous. 'Founder' is not just a title, its also a role - that role does not exist in your startup - understand that and let her also know the same. Otherwise you will just be lying to her and both of you will figure out in sometime which could lead to a major disagreements which is the biggest startup killer. If she is willing to take as much risk with as much commitment you can offer her a huge percentage of stocks which is something that she will value as much. Also, incase she thinks that your setup is a good match and understands the extreme difficulty of getting a committed startup team together she shouldnt have a problem with it.

Getting a committed and talented team which can work together is the hardest part of a startup.Everthing else almost always works out. Consider this the biggest opportunity as well as the biggest challenge you face.
I used to have the same problem and tried a lot of the things mentioned here, but nothing helped.

Then it took me the longest time to realize that when I "started to get the desire to get up and go somewhere", that was a clear signal from deep inside me that something was wrong.

This may sound kind of weird, but my project is my baby and I'm in love with it. Why would I ever want to be somewhere else? Because either a) I'm burnt out or b) Something is wrong with what I'm currently doing.

If it's (a), get out and exercise, socialize, etc.

But if it's (b), stop and take a good look at what you're currently doing. Maybe your "inner hacker" knows it's not right.
Women lurv engineers, there has always been great engineering by married men. The great discoverys come 'out of the blue' by someone essentially sitting around for five or six years thinking about some crazy assed idea like time slowing down the faster you run, that no one would ever think worth while. Until it changes the world.
Note the differential between discovery and engineering. OMG, Paul, think long engagment, at least until the crazy creative part of Arc is wrapped up... ;-)
Television New Zealand Gives Up on DRM
> Is there any way to mitigate code breakage?

unit tests
Functional Python Tutorial
It seems you are assuming a white background- the background should match the color the add is placed at.
For my preview, the add was placed partially in actual empty space and partially on empty space that had a background image.
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, wry observations on growing up to become really really creative. It makes me less sad that I left magic tricks behind me.
I find it interesting although your current implementation may not be 'sticky' over time.
Best of luck :)
So much for whitespace: AdCamo launches background ad network
cough firefly. yup, i said it.
RedeParede: Classifieds Service on Rails
James Crane-Baker is about to release public APIs for his Rails-service RedeParede, in his own words, Craigslist meets Web 2.0. Sounds good to me.
One more thought...On your website the design is very clean but the ads appear jarring, maybe you could do something so that they blend with client websites better.
Numb3rs
Get into the habit of going to sleep with her, but waking up early. Very early. You don't need more than 4-5 hours of sleep, even if you think so.
Plus the early hours of the morning (4 o'clock onward) are silent, cool, and your brain is fastest after resting. Best creative hours.
The Evolution of Tech Companies Logos
I don't think 2 is right. Not enough sleep, that is often correlated, is the problem.

We had sex yesterday, and today, before breakfast, I swam 1.5 miles (crawl) in a good time.

You may reply, the sex was boring...
18 Smokin' Hot Business Card Designs
Well, you need terms that apply to the first and second halves of a pair as well as the first element in a list and all the rest of the list. First and second work for lists of two items, but they don't feel right to me for longer lists.

Also, they aren't the same length, and that would bother me. I'd prefer left and rite. Or alpha and omega. Or mom and pop. Then you can compose them into mop. Or maybe I'd better leave it to Paul, as I obviously can't be trusted with this kind of thing.
AT&T plans major 3G expansion ahead of second-gen iPhone
Silicon Valley Arrogance
Hawler, the Ruby crawler
How to access Web Services with GWT
Super cool, thanks a lot! Now if only we could push return to enter instead of having to use the mouse ...
Ask PG:  How many lines of Arc code is Hacker News?
Just curious.
Perl, the first postmodern computer language
I totally agree.

And furthermore I think that it is not always good for entrepreneurs to be in Silicon Valley. I have noticed that a lot of valley people are extremely focused on whatever the fad of the day is. If your website doesn't have tags and RSS feeds, and is done in Ruby on Rails you are just sooo yesterday.

But guess what? Nobody cares. Most people that use the web (AKA customers) don't even know what any of these things are. They just want something that works.

And they don't care whether it is built with Ruby or assembler, or whether it has Megoo-ultraflash mashup components.

People from the valley often miss this.
Ads appear in my firefox when you enter the Flash applet too, not only on blank space.
The Arc version doesn't depend on continuations. All you need for this is closures.
Android has already been delayed and there's no news about when exactly are we going to see handsets for it to come out. Also, we don't know yet who won all those spectrum auctions.

If Google did win those auctions, then Android does have a future. If they lost, I'm afraid that Android is probably not going to succeed.

Just look at how Sergey Brin is praising the iPhone and uses it all the time... that should tell you that maybe you should hedge your bets and start looking at the iPhone SDK as soon as it comes out instead of betting on Android... at least iPhone is real.
Ah, but it's not it. The one in the animation is not a geometric problem, it's more subtle (I solved two years ago, see my other comment).
Really? When's the last time you saw a bunch of text suddenly become self aware?
Delayed? I'm developing for it right now with the publicly available SDK. Are you referring to that TechCrunch article that got its facts wrong? The only thing that's been pushed back is the contest deadline.

Apple has a history of creating great things that are never open enough to grab a large share of the market. I'm sure the iPhone is cool and that with the SDK you'll be able to do neat things, but in terms of widespread use.... I'll wait and see.
2421, but a lot of that is back-end stuff no one can see.
For the record, everyone working with me on this startup is currently getting options, plus the promise of a job when (not if!) we get funding.
Battlestar Galactica is a current favorite, and I've been re-watching an old favorite, Babylon 5.

I like a lot of Star Trek, but the signal-to-noise ratio in those series is worse than what I would consider "favorite" quality.
Traveling to U.S.? U.S. Confiscating Data at the Border
How-to Goes Video
Going for a run is good. Then you get both out and exercise.
eBay's new feedback policy: no real feedback (no neg feedback for buyers)
Life in an Indian Startup
Good design will make or break our product; while we're doing a lot of cool things, simplicity is key. I myself use a Mac, and had a NeXT machine oh-so-many years ago, and agree that design is a key differentiator.

The question isn't whether the designer is a key person we need, but rather whether joining six months after everyone else entitles her (or everyone) to the "founder" title.
> > I get that you don't care for that.

> You're putting words into my mouth.

My bad: I misinterpreted what you meant when you said:

> Elegant is often a thing to be admired from afar

Any ways...

> > Turtles all the way down is a philosophy where you try to define a ridiculously minimal set of orthogonal axioms and build the language by combining those axioms

> What I'm talking about is the "my whole environment must be Smalltalk/Scheme/Forth", from the OS, or even silicon, on up. That's different from your version of turtles. Yours is not the enormous waste of time that the "environment turtles" are.

Perhaps I'm talking about "turtles most of the way down" and you are talking about "turtles almost all of the way down." I understand why you say what building, say, a Lisp Machine seems like an enormous waste of time.

> I'm still not sure whether consistency is really that important. People seem to do ok with some inconsistencies and warts in their languages, and continue to favor languages with warts and weirdnesses and quick idioms to the ones under discussion

Are we equating popularity with importance?
Tab-return?
Does that include the webserver code or is that separate?
First, the web is only a system of hyperlinked documents which can be browsed by a man or a machine. This means that the web is only information, and as far as I can tell information is not intelligence. A system capable of using this information may be intelligent, but not the information per se. So, maybe the internet will evolve to a "superintelligence". But this leads us to my second point.

From the verb used in the question, emerge, it looks to me that this "superintelligence" is reached without human intervention. But as spontaneous generation does not exist, we need a system capable of evolve, without external help. And as far as I know, nowadays, neither the Internet (network) nor any of each nodes can evolve without human help.

So, until somebody invents an evolving device and connects it to the Internet, my answer is no.
I thought the midwest and east coast still used gopher?
Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly
> Perhaps I'm talking about "turtles most of the way down" and you are talking about "turtles almost all of the way down." I understand why you say what building, say, a Lisp Machine seems like an enormous waste of time.

Your breed of turtles is contained entirely within the language itself, and makes no demands that the language interact with: an OS written in the language, a GUI written in the language, a database written in the language, etc... It's an internal thing if I understand you correctly, and orthogonal to my breed of turtles where people turn their nose up at interacting with anything that's not written in The Language.

> Are we equating popularity with importance?

I don't know about you, but I am, at least to some degree, although I suppose my phrase might read better as "really all that important to most people" or "that important for many practical applications".

I think you're correct about the elegance, simplicity and power of a language built as you describe, but my gut feeling is that, taken as a whole, that kind of power has not been enough to tip the scales in favor of languages that wield it. I'm genuinely curious as to why that is the case. The facile argument revolves around people being "too dumb", but I think that's an easy out for fans of those languages.
The GTD crowd would hate this! lol.

I'm not as mobile as you, but I sit on the couch and work every once in a while.

It helps me to just put it away at times like lunch and dinner. (I'm in ohio, so the 'outside' options are limited right now)
ikiwiki: a wiki that can use git as a backend
sorry I was just testing that I couldn't change my vote. Probably should have tested up :-(
And some of it is for the AI who is learning by reading the articles and will soon be self-aware.
I'm interested in these ideas too. But when there's a clear, obvious antecedent to the discussion it seems to me that it should be cited.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enCA237CA...
I mean, really, who needs fiction?
You might want to explore someone of your taste here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2406120893

I was one of the initial creators, not involved any more. They should have pretty good suggestions for you and I can bet you will bump into your biblo-twin there.
Ask YC: How many people here have a degree and are programmers?
Quick poll - what type of degree - from what school -
I read Kurzweil's book "the age of intelligent machines" where he set quite a few predictions for the next 10-15 years. This was 15 years ago - and he got almost all of them right.

I just don't want to dismiss him - besides it seems arrogant that we should forever be the best evolution can offer.
It's All About Location...and Local News
I dropped out of business school.

Too boring, especially macroeconomics. It was quite clear early on that they had absolutely no idea how things actually worked in the real world, and were just dreaming up theories.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm learning. It's so hard to get good programmers that I thought I would learn how.
I speak Swedish and English (learned Swedish in college years when I lived there). Now obviously I know English better, but Swedish has a smaller vocabulary and so it was actually easier to express myself sometimes. In English, there's a tendency to be wordy because it's such a rich language. Communication in Swedish was much more direct and to the point. This wasn't because of a limited proficiency on my part - I noticed the same thing in newspapers and listening to native Swedes talk to each other.
That approach could work. He's storing the current continuation as a global variable, which I never thought of, because typically you want your interpreters to be self-contained. (I was also working off Guy Steele's toy CPS interpreter, which passes cont in and then ends each function with a tailcall to another function or the invocation of the continuation.) But I can't see any real reason why the global won't work; it'll get stored in a data structure when the continuation is captured, and since stack frames are normal JavaScript objects in ArcLite, the garbage collector will hold on to them.

It'll mean that any loop that may call back into the interpreter has to be rewritten as a tail-recursive function though, with the tail call being saved into the global continuation variable. Could be quite a bit of overhead.
Microsoft tinkering with scary-smart ad spots
Anyone who gets caught up in that mentality should go read Joel On Software. He gets some derision in technical circles because he uses [holding nose] Microsoft products, but he makes technical decisions based on how it will affect his business. And he has a successful business. Go figure!

And he's not in Silicon Valley.
Masters in Mathematics UC Berkeley
Programming since 1969.
Purdue University - BS in Computer Programming Technology
Bluffer's Guide to Fermat's Last Theorem
No degree, I left for Italy afer a few years of Italian courses at the University of Oregon. I have worked as a programmer for 11 years.
I wonder if the ability to be downvoted to below the original comment score of 1 makes people less likely to join in the discussion
Yeah, that's what I do. I couldn't figure out how to get accesskeys to take "return" as the key. If anyone knows a better solution, I can change it.
That's separate. But it doesn't need anything that wasn't in arc0.
I dropped out of Informatics (Universidad de La Plata), in 3rd year. I'm now starting studies on Maths (Universidad de Buenos Aires).

I've been programming for about 12, or 13 years now, I think.
Thanks for your feedback imagelgringo; this was very valuable. Please ping me (from my YC Profile Info) if you'd like to discuss running the ads... I'd love to see if we can help you out.

This was some of the best feedback I've read in this thread. Thanks for taking the time.
I thought about that while I was writing it (I started before your challenge came out). Here's the results for ArcLite:

> wc [^j]*.js
66 147 1359 buffer.js
369 1114 10672 eval.js
149 488 4522 primitives.js
188 509 4989 reader.js
356 1145 11869 types.js
136 370 3260 utils.js
1264 3773 36671 total

> wc [^d]*.scm
1093 4404 36047 ac.scm
16 30 242 as.scm
48 152 1252 brackets.scm
1157 4586 37541 total

So ArcLite is about 100 lines of code more. OTOH, if you take out the reader (which is supplied by Scheme but I had to write myself for ArcLite) it's -254 lines for ArcLite and -48 lines for Arc0. Which means the JavaScript version is actually smaller, at least in line count. (There's also the matter of the missing I/O primitives, but most of them just delegate to Scheme in Arc0 as well.)

I have no idea how it compares in code-tree count. Probably larger, as my JavaScript coding style is fairly dense. One could argue that that's the point of syntax though; it makes common operations take up very little space on the page.
I don't know that a superintelligence will emerge from the web, per se, but I think it is becoming a sufficiently large body of textual information that an appropriate AI program could use to bootstrap itself to amazing levels of intelligence. AI programs have a problem that they have to infer all their patterns just from text, which is fairly low-bandwidth. Humans (and robots) get much more bandwidth through vision, hearing, touch, and body feedback. This might not seem important, but it provides context around every piece of information that comes in, making it much easier to make sense of things and giving richer patterns to try to match against. Without that context, an AI would need to multiply the amount of text needed by 1M (1B? 1T? X?) to train itself the way a child does.
We have two detection modes (http://www.emptyspaceads.com/publisher/customization_options) that you can use. The preview feature is using the Automatic detection which isn't always perfect. However, you can use the "Let Me Decide" detection which will only cause the ads to appear in divs or HTML elements that you add the class attribute "ESAemptyspace" to. That way you can explicitly tell us where you'd like the ads to appear on your site.
I was shooting for a weekend but didn't quite make it. ;-)
utnick, I'm honored, thanks for taking the time to look at our product. I'd be happy to help you out in any way that I can. Please see my contact information in my Hacker News profile.
Thanks for the feedback hhm.

So perhaps the demo page is too confusing. The ads are supposed to show up in the demo page when you move your mouse to the empty space of the site (http://www.emptyspaceads.com/about/demo). Could you please elaborate on your comment?
I tried factorial as one of my test cases. Up through factorial 10 it was still coming back as integers. You may have triggered some overflow condition. The interpreter uses the native JavaScript + operation, then checks whether result == Math.round(result) to see whether it should wrap it in an int or a num.

I'm truly amazed you got it to work up to (fact 100), and that it came back in a reasonable amount of time. Firefox has a recursion limit depth of 1000, which means that the interpreter overhead is only about a factor of 10. I was expecting much more...
Good point. I think that for practical purposes, the opposite of secretive isn't broadcasting, just ignoring. For instance, for a web startup, the city you're located in isn't anything worth keeping secret, but it's also not very valuable to reveal either. With pretty much any aspect of a startup, you can ask "Do I benefit from keeping this secret?" and "Do I benefit from broadcasting this?" If neither of those are yes, then just move on.
What about us sellers who get fraudulent buy requests from Nigerians? (It really happened). What do we do about the buyer at that point?
Masters, EE, Penn State
I agree! I'm an avid runner partly because sitting all day at a computer makes me jittery and it gives me a severe need to expend physical energy.
BA in CS, Amherst College.
Thanks for the feedback dejb. As called out in the thread, you can specify your site's own empty space by adding the class attribute "ESAemptyspace" to elements you'd like the ads to appear in. On our part, we'll make sure to only place the ads within these elements. In our preview feature you used, we use our "Automatic" detection, but if you were to sign up with us, you could try out the "Let Me Decide" detection. Please let me know
Info & Comp Sci Degree from UC Irvine. Just transitioned to being a programmer in our group.
I never had a negative view of startups...it would seem that they're tighter (people in startups become close friends) more often than the large corporate culture.
Been developing software for more than 10 years.

- Stanford U, Masters in Engineering
- UC-Berkeley, Engineering
- UC-Berkeley, Computer Science
- UC-Berkeley, Business Admin.
I'm a sophomore working on a BS in Comp Sci from Northeastern University. Go Huskies?
High school kids don't have degrees yet ;)
Thanks for the feedback raju. I've never seen that bug before and thanks very much for calling it to my attention, I'll investigate. Please don't hesitate to contact me via my Hacker News profile regarding using our product on your site. I'd love to see how we can help you.