skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always taken "turtles all the way down" to mean the fixation that Lisp/Forth/Scheme/Smalltalk/etc... people get about implementing everything in their language of choice, all the way down to the OS and even silicon if they can. This is almost always an enormous waste of time (unless the goal is only to have fun and learn) and of no import to your 'average user'. The scripting language guys came along and got popular because they concentrated on what their languages were good at, and happily interacted with C (and now Java).

Also:

> I think it's a good thing when languages are highly consistent, in the vein of Scheme, Smalltalk, and Forth

Yes and no. It's very elegant, but in the end, I'm not convinced that that's what (most) people really want. Elegant is often a thing to be admired from afar, rather than something you use every day. I'm also in agreement with Larry Wall that sometimes these languages get too hung up on their Elegant Paradigm and forget to be practical.
If I was a VC and someone came to me saying he is an entrepreneur, I would run as far away as I could.
beautiful.

Creativity + simple tools (for hackers atleast) = Genius
Totally agree. Its spring break time, so flights get expensive.
First, I think it's important to note that empty space in a design does have a purpose, and putting ads in it can detract from the design. If the ad clashes, it's extremely jarring from a design perspective. Several of the design articles posted here recently make note of the importance of whitespace.

Second, I tested showing ads on news.ycombinator.com, and it partially covered the login link with an ad. I'm using Firefox 2 on Linux.
I made an account and will be getting in touch with you tomorrow if I'm in the office. I think your product is worth a shot.
See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110034
Zak you're totally right. This product isn't for every one. I was trying to strike a balance where website designers could maintain the beautiful aesthetic they worked so hard to create but also allow website owners to monetize the 20-40% of real estate that most didn't know they had. However if the user keeps their mouse over content the ads shouldn't appear (but we're not perfect :P).

Lastly, we have two detection modes: "Automatic" and "Let Me Decide". The current preview features is set up to use the former. However, you can choose the latter and explicitly lay out the divs you want the ads to appear in by simply adding the "ESAemptyspace" class attribute. Once you do this, we'll make sure the ads only ever appear within those divs. We think we do a decent job of finding your site's empty space, but we know you the website owner can do the best job.
if you're not a hacker, you have to at least understand technology and be able to hold your own in tech conversations. hacker news is the best resource to do that.
lyteRAD.Dream, click, build. Its that easy to build your personal or business applications.
i find interesting that your other site phonemyphone.com is not using your own ads
Modu to launch tiny phone 'module'
Ask YC: What do you think is the future of Android?
- Does Android have a future?
- How should phone manufacturers adopt or leverage it if they should (including apple)?
- Though there were free mobile platforms like Linux, they were not a threat to commercial platforms like Windows Mobile. This can be attributed to other problems with free Linux, like lack of support, cost of building Linux applications to the state suitable to finally put it in a phone and sell. Now Google seems to address these issues by bundling free applications with Android platform (both from Google and from worldwide developer community). Given these aspects, is Android going to give a tough competition to mobile platforms like Windows Mobile?
I'm betting on it being at least somewhat successful, which is why I've been spending a lot of time working on Hecl for it.

I've talked with various other people who seem enthusiastic, because it seems to get a lot of things right: 1) open 2) backed by some muscle 3) reasonably complete API.

My biggest worry is really always-on connections and web apps, which, although they don't give you all the low-level access, are an order of magnitude easier to develop and deploy.
Well, it was a combination of supposedly shared values and reputation by people who I've come to learn are easily manipulated by what other people think about a person and the internet blog-sphere more than any actual first-hand knowledge. Everybody I asked about thought the world about him but when I ask now about firsthand actual experience, nobody in particular actually worked with him on anything. Everybody just "respects" his "rep" although for the life of me I can't figure out what that respect is based on other than a prima donna attitude and not much else.
Ask 37signals: How do you document code?
I use emacs to write in binary
... and a weapon!
I've always loved seaside.

Was kind of hard to get into though last time I looked, probably better now.

Any experiences?
Intel's docs. Huge and comprehensive:

http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/

NASM docs:

http://www.linuxmedialabs.com/nasm/html/nasmdoca.html
Hecl is cool. It's what Jacl should have been. Keep up the good work.
Thanks! They have different goals though... Jacl is an implementation of Tcl, whereas Hecl is its own language, that borrows some things from Tcl, but tries to improve on it: the core is smaller, we've abandoned the "everything is a string" idea (note, however, that Tcl does not represent everything internally as a string and hasn't for 10 years), and the commands are different.

Hecl is also very targeted at applications where its small size and flexibility give it a bit of an advantage... There's no way I can compete with JRuby or things like that on standard Java, given their popularity, so I continue to target the mobile/embedded space, even though you certainly could use it as an embedded interpreter in all kinds of different Java apps.
How do you think Hecl compares to Sun's own JavaFX Script / JavaFX Mobile?
PG attributes much of Viaweb's advantage to Lisp but I'm convinced that even if competitors has used Lisp they wouldn't have attained the same results. The real thing that worked at Viaweb was smart people working in a focused environment doing things in the most efficient way they knew how.
or (shudder) Emacs.NET !

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1069

the horror.. the horror..

Any good recursive acronyms for it?

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.acro.exp.html
But we are :P. If you move your mouse to phonemyphone's emptyspace, you'll see the ads appear. We've been running them for months and I just checked again a few minutes ago (still see them).

Note, if you had Firefox's Ad Blocker installed, you will not see them :(.
Their language looks interesting, but it's fairly new. They certainly have a lot more resources to throw at it than I do, but on the other hand:

- Hecl is real, and runs on all kinds of existing mobile phones, even old ones, and is deployed in existing products.

- Hecl is not tied to Sun, so for instance the Android port has no political implications. I'm doing it because Android looks like a decent bet.

The fact that they made a scripting language at all is proof that my basic idea (scripting language for mobile phones) is on the right track. Incidentally, YC also funded a company that made something similar: http://tsumobi.com/
I clicked the comments solely to post "no." Looks like you beat me to it. :-)
RIFE: java web development framework with continuations
Given the recent trend for the continuations based approach, I thought this framework might interest some people. I haven't tried it myself, though.
Sorry about that :-)
More specifics here.

http://rifers.org/features/integrated+web+continuations
The fall of mediadefender
It was my adblocker; FF3 works just fine...
Have you noticed whether being bilingual has affected the way you think? This is a claim I often hear from multilingual people, and I'm interested in specific examples.
From a European perspective, anyone in his right mind should wait till a major handset manufacturer buys into them before starting to develop applications for it.And I must tell big names are very wary of depending on another big name for their products; hence Microsoft Mobile's miserable track record across the pond.
Cool, you deserve many up votes for this!

I just played around with it quickly, pasted in the recursive definition of factorial:

(def fact (x) (if (< x 1) 1 (* x (fact (- x 1)))))

It was fairly quick, but the results came back as floating point numbers. It broke on (fact 100).

Under arc-over-scheme it did better.

CLISP performed better than both, but the default limit in the call depth was easily exceeded (E.g. it busted on (fact 8000)). I don't recall exactly, but for around fact 5000 CLISP seemed about twice as fast as arc-over-scheme.

These are very rough estimates, but perhaps give people an intuition about performance.

Now what I am really waiting for is the arc-over-CLISP. I am too busy with other things to dare an attempt...
A few more anecdotal data points:

I had a philosophy teacher who was known for being something of a terror. However, he became a lot more placid after getting married.

A fellow student was very driven, he was on track to becoming a SEAL at one point (changed his mind due to the psychological effects of being a SEAL). However, he too became much more laid back after getting married. He told me that he noticed married people lose their drive.

On the other hand, I had a classics professor who is married with 4 kids, and he is very prolific.

Besides the biological aspects of getting married, I think marriage makes life more emotionally comfortable for people. So, if a person's drive doesn't come from a lack of emotional stability, then they'll remain productive even after becoming married.
Quite well done! I'm very impressed.
Future unclear as AOL ad growth at low - Only Yahoo performed worse than AOL
Collaborate with Lunarr on the "Back" of any Web Page
As a programmer who've used Lisp and Scheme for commercial projects, I object to that, although I admit there's a tendency in the circles of these languages that pursue ideals obsessibly.

However, "turtles all the way down" has also very practical implications. I have been saved more than once because Lisp/Scheme have the way to tweak very low-level stuff within it so that I can tune the whole program to meet the performance requirements without changing the large structure of the program. And don't take the Scheme guy's discussion about Elegance by their word---we know that tools of day-to-day jobs has to have a kind of dirtiness (I don't despise that; in fact, I rather like to play with lower bits, UI, or legacy workflow,...). We only believe that keeping an eye on the ideal will serve as a long-term guide.
oh sorry, i just realised that the window of offscreen, so i didnt see them
While I didn't think it would be JavaScript, I think my prediction of "how long before there's another implementation out there" of a "few days" was only a little bit off.
whatever prediction we make has more probability to cancel it self than happening.
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html

It's not Nokia, but it's not quite 'nobody' either.
There was a company that did something like this in the 90's. You could add little "sticky" notes to web pages that other people could see. The novelty wore off in about 3 months, IIRC.
> This is the bit that will cause a lot of flack. Is there any way to mitigate code breakage?

Don't distract geese that are laying golden eggs - just stand back and keep very quiet (IMO). I just hope having to deal with this attention and criticism doesn't hurt pg's motivation or the freedom of his frame of mind.
The Seven Largest Open Source Deals Ever
Some things every C programmer should know about C
Seaside vs Arc: Taking the Arc Challenge
Object Oriented Arc
This happens to me regularly. Perhaps the ability to change your vote will help?
It's not possible for the answer to that question to be yes. You can't do the impossible. If he creates a perpetual motion machine, then it's not impossible.
Japanese astronaut to throw boomerang in space
For me your demo had an ad appearing over the content on http://www.guitarsite.com and the ad blinked on and of a few times. Nice idea though especially for those looking to monetize a site without a lot of hassle, as long as the your ads are easy to install.
Being in the alliance does not mean that they will do large volume phone production with Android. Samsung and Motorola are always keen on being Linux consortiums. What's their Linux phones' market share in Europe?

I am not saying that Google will never make it. It will take time before they can grab a decent share. The name of the game is wait and see at the moment.
Unix Tree: A One-Line Shell Script for Drawing Directory Contents
Ask YC: Dealing with cabin fever
I work and sleep in my apartment and I've noticed that I'm starting to get the desire to get up and go somewhere... Anywhere really.

It's a fairly large and comfortable apartment, and I'm not unhappy been here. So, how do you people deal with cabin fever?
The Arc Challenge by Jim Weirich
Holodeck 0.1: the durable, rewritable holographic display
" Sell all the old books, invest in new books ", " Sell all the old books, invest in new books ", " Sell all the old books, invest in new books " >> chant
Ask YC: Who is a founder?
I'm heading a small startup that's looking to get funding. Despite our lack of money, I've managed to recruit a programmer, a finance person, and a marketing person; we're moving ahead with development and marketing plans, even as we look for angel or VC funding. I have a separate agreement with each team member, giving them options in the company as well as some compensation if we get funding but don't work together. I'm happy with all of the agreements we've reached to date.

It's pretty clear that we need a graphic designer. We think that we've found a good and talented one, and she seems inclined to join us, once we negotiate exact terms. But she has asked to be described as a "founder."

Now, I was developing the business idea, including market research and technical analysis, for about a year before anyone else joined me. It's clearly my vision, including my overall marketing plan and technical architecture -- although clearly, there's no way that I could have gotten as far as I have without the other (amazing) people I've recruited. But we've now been working together since October, including meetings with each other, VCs, and angels. None of the other people have asked to be called founders; as far as they're concerned, it's fine for me to be the only founder.

My question is this: Should I call this designer a founder? Would that mean calling everyone else, who has been working with me much longer, a founder as well? Or should I just keep things as they've been so far?

My gut feeling is to keep things as they are, with me as the only founder. But if it's typical for all of the pre-money people to be called founders, then I'm happy to share the title. I just want to know what's typically done, assuming that there is any typical case.
Ask YC: What's your favorite sci-fi or tech TV show?
Lost, The X Files, Star Trek (classic series and NG), The Twilight Zone etc.
this is the best startup i've ever seen in an AskYC. Congrats.

I will be looking you up in a few weeks when I launch.
I go buy some fresh food/vegetables at the store every day, at the very least. Initially, my wife didn't get why I went shopping every day "just go once and get more stuff!", but then she figured out that it's the only time I get out of the house and doesn't mind. It's nice to have fresh stuff in terms of fruit and vegetables and we waste less because I only buy what we need.

Some actual exercise and/or interaction with other people is probably better though - during the summer I got out mountain biking pretty often.
Ask YC:  Read any good books lately?
I'm currently reading Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by Annalee Saxenian, and I'm loving it. It covers the history and tech culture of Silicon Valley vs Boston. I'd recommend it to anyone trying to get a grip on what makes Silicon Valley unique. I was suprised, but a lot of the Valley's distinct high tech culture flows from the early years of Fairchild, HP and Intel. This book provides great readable insight into that culture.

What are you reading that's good?
Strange as its increased my productivity.
Kids do take up a load of time, but its been THE most focusing effect of my life :-
1. Any spare time I have, I work immensely hard - no creativity suites with bean bags for inspiration; no procrastination on which direction I take or how elegant/short my code can be. If it works, its in.
2. My product (or subsequent ones) HAS to succeed. I'm simply working to keep a roof over our heads and now have another mouth to feed. "Necessity is the mother of all invention" a smart chap from across the pond once said.
In short - I do not suffer from motivational problems.
7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development
Yes, you can create an environment in every language to help you write very short web-apps. I still dont get the point Paul wants to make with his Arc example. Your Ruby solution looks a lot more readable to me. Also my PHP solution, which is here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108625

Maybe Paul wants to elaborate, what from his point of view the advantages of his ARC example are?
How about "Would Like a Place To Stay" and "Can Host a Hacker", possibly even check boxes on the application form.

If I travel cross country for what could be a life changing weekend, I'd rather spend the down time hanging with like minded people instead of at a Best Western.

(Maybe then someone could throw a web app together to help us find each other)
i think everyone here assumes hackers means programmers..and also sometime those who build stuff often creatively..the word hacker i guess is much abused by the media to refer to whom most hackers call crackers
Grab your laptop and head to the nearest Starbucks or coffee shop. I find I need to constantly change locations at least every four hours to keep productive and prevent my mind from going "stale". Thank god I work at a university where I can just hop around from the library to other common areas.

Try changing where you usually sit and work in your apartment. I sit in all kinds of weird places. My new favorite place is on top of my desk. Don't knock it until you try it.
Our "company" works out of a house and we rarely get out, but we always make sure that we go to the YMCA at night (while there everyone splits up to do their thing).

Aside from that, we make sure that we know what needs to get done because if you're focused on the task at hand, the days go by faster.
I like the site and concept. My 2cents: Some of the graphics need tweeked - like the go button and the hot callout bubble are a little cheesy. I am guessing the ad creator/publisher will be able to choose the border color - so I won't go there. Will the advertisers be able to create Flash ads? I agree with mixmax; I think the ads should be relevant to the content of the site. I noticed that your the only founder; since you know what your doing from a programming point of view, I'd look for a co-founder who has a design background. Once again I like what you are doing.
Anyone care to sum up the advantages of continuations in a web backend over say just a session?
Where's the comment field?
Why can't I comment on this job posting?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110664
arooni: Great website, and a good idea IMO. I think most of what came to me was covered in other comments, and this may sound offhand, but I went to see your demo, then hit the back button and saw this "Code corrupted. Insert fresh copy" at the top right hand corner. I am probably nitpicking, but it caught my eye, so I figured I would drop in a comment.

Good luck. Great idea. I might consider it for my app too...
First, unless you have a prototype, you shouldn't be worried about this. It's this type of stuff like LLC v. C-Corp that startups focus on and they shouldn't.

Second, think of founders as your YC group (if you were to apply). If she would be part of your YC group (the group that is the core of the company at this stage), then she's a founder. Usually being a founder also implies a class of stock.

Third, you should always hire people smarter and give them compensation that makes them happy and aligned with your company. If she's worth it to moving the company foward, then go ahead and call her "founder." She's got to be in it for the long haul though. Meaning getting paid peanuts banking on those options/equity.
Everything about Ancient Greek Coins
A good part of banknotes and coins show the profile or bust of a certain personality on the obverse...
> I've always taken "turtles all the way down" to mean the fixation that Lisp/Forth/Scheme/Smalltalk/etc... people get about implementing everything in their language of choice

That's how I take it as well. I wrote this to point out that Turtles all the way down languages make it easier to make consistent languages. I get that you don't care for that.

> 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...

> But the advantage of having everything in the language built on top of a small set of axioms is that when you want to make a new feature possible, it's often just a case of burrowing down a level of abstraction and combining the existing things in new ways. For example, it could be as simple as rewriting select to return generalized variables instead of values... if Ruby really treated "=" as a method instead of treating it as a special case that is sometimes a method and sometimes something else and sometimes a third thing.

> Elegant is often a thing to be admired from afar, rather than something you use every day.

"Elegance" sounds like some effete aesthetic quality, there's no point in debating that word. Instead, I am asking you to think about consistency and discoverability, qualities that have a direct relationship to the programmer's ability to translate thought into programs.
LG to sell 38% more handsets in Europe
Korean cell phone maker LG Electronics Inc wants to sell 38 % more handsets in Europe in 2008.
Battlestar Galactica (BSG) because it:
a) is not a sci-fi show with utopian aliens
b) politics (especially Iraq and religion)
c) hot women
d) space (especially the battles)
I think if anyone is willing to work with no income for options, it's OK to call them founders. Anyone pre-VC is basically a founder anyway. There will never be any doubt about who the 'real' founder is. In the end, it's more important for you to know that you're the majority shareholder than for others to know who the founders are. You get to sit on the board and you get to have the most control.
By definition, the "founders" of a company are the people who "founded" it. If you join after the company is founded, you're not a founder. That said, there's a lot of pressure to interpret this liberally: Early hires (such as the designer mentioned) want to be called "founders" since it sounds far more impressive, and potential sources of funding (YC included!) are happier if people are described as "founders" because it suggests a greater degree of commitment.

My personal view is that the set of "founders" should at very least be limited by the set of individuals who have worked for a company while receiving any cash compensation. If you're paying someone a salary plus stock options, they're an employee as far as I'm concerned.
What's happened to the title of this post?

It looks like the text is ended up in the title block.

I'm used to seeing the title from the front page at the top of this page. Very confusing otherwise.
Stargate