skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ditto. The level of discussion and topics of interest here are vastly better than what's available to me with my coworkers and people I bump into in real life. Can't speak for the YouTube community though.
Thanks for the offer! It might take me a while to do the trip (unless YC accepts my application, if I submit one), because it is a long way to go. But the answers to my question here have been very inspiring, so I hope I can make it eventually.
congratulations! (how much?)
Good lord... that's really, truly abominable.
Is it just me, or are the mouse gestures backwards?
HubDub creates 'fantasy league' for news
If CNet calls this "news", then no wonder its going down the pan and people (can't remeber who) want to "rescue" it with a hostile takeover.
> This definitely makes it easier to write code, but it then takes 20 minutes for anyone reading to figure out what's going on in the tiniest of functions.

With Lisp, it's easy to broadcast your ignorance. To do that, just make it clear that you don't actually understand macrology and what the right circumstances for using and creating macros are.
so thats 206% of people? I am confused by those numbers.

I personally do it to share cool stuff and engage with people with the same interests as me.
Billions of Entrepreneurs in China and India
Congrats guys - awesome, awesome news.

Now we can do away with the awkward silence when I smugly ask what you guys have been up to.
It's all about image. When Google came on to the scene, everybody loved them (including myself) for supplying innovative technology that brought more order to something that was growing ever more disordered, and they were sticking-it to Microsoft as an under-dog as well. However, recently, I feel more and more people (including myself) are concerned over privacy (not just Google, but Facebook, etc.), hence, the ever rising rate of suspicion towards Google. I even find myself liking Microsoft because they appear to be the under-dog now in terms of internet technologies, and particularly after that Bill Gates video about his retirement - he seems like an alright guy! If Google did a video like that, then I am sure people would warm to them (even more). Doing good deeds every now and then just makes Google seem as if they are doing it for the sake of keeping face, whilst the Gates Foundations loud publicisings puts Microsoft in an increasingly positive light.
Reg Braithwaite is a developer at startup Mobile Commons (weblog.raganwald.com www.mcommons.com)

Hank Williams is working on an unannounced startup (http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/ ).

They're from Toronto and NYC. Maybe it's a coincidence of demographics - many startups and most of startup culture are in Silicon Valley, most people there are white or Asian.
"Many modern languages similarly give up readability for writability, like Ruby, where you can literally redefine the + operator on integers so that it no longer gives you their sum." I believe Dave Thomas covered this in "Metaprogramming Ruby" video [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/metaprogramming-ruby], and the problem here is not that the language allows you to do it, rather your programmers are willing to do something like this.

This is not a language feature problem, its a developer education problem. I agree with sammyo that a wrong abstraction can make it harder to decipher whats really going on. On the other hand, isn't that true for any kind of abstraction? Frameworks like Spring abstract away notions of AOP and unless you really understand whats going on under the hood you will be left scratching your head. Does that make Java a toy language? If yes, then whats the point of this post?
I'm assuming people were able to choose more than one option. Check-boxes rather than radio buttons.
A production language should favor reading the code over writing it, and a toy language should do the opposite. Note that I don't mean that the language is a toy, but that it's used to make toys.

Yes, Lisp is used to make toy programs like the software running on the $100 million 1998 Deep Space 1 probe.

Their final top-level function is:

(define (sqrt x)
(fixed-point-of-transform (lambda (y) (- (square y) x))
newton-transform
1.0)

Good luck figuring that out. I'm sure it was fun to decompose the problem into those functions, but in production two years from now some programmer is going to be in a world of pain when he has to add a feature to that program.

That's only hard to read if you don't know Lisp. And the function names are quite descriptive if you understand numerical methods. If the hypothetical developer doesn't understand fixed points and Newton's method, he shouldn't be modifying that sqrt function anyway.

There might be a good point about obfuscation via abstraction somewhere in SICP, but this example isn't it. Even if it were, it has less to do with the language itself and more to do with the developer that designed the abstraction.

I suspect Mr. Kestleloot is simply ill-informed.
Congratulations guys, nice work!
Does this seem troll-ish to anyone else?
drool.. so many buttons
Your comment immediately reminded me of Bill Murray's speech in Rushmore -

"You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore.
Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich.

But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it. Thank you."
- Herman Blume, speech to Rushmore Academy
Remember How Google Was Before the Internet?
I think Youtube doesn't belong here, the motivation and process to create and post a video are quite different from posting a link.
Putting your trust in the cloud?
Agree. At my last employer, we did a bunch of market research before building the product. The CEO thought there was enough interest to go forward, so we built it. (Personally, I think he was suffering a bit from confirmation bias...) We took it before potential customers, they said, "We don't want that. But if you could solve this problem, we'd pay big bucks for it..." So we built that product. I left right as it was going to market, but from what I've heard from coworkers, it's had no more success in the marketplace than the first version.

Personally, I think the best way to figure out what your customers want is to do their job. Even if it's just on a trial, couple-of-weeks basis. Just make sure you try to do it to the best of your ability and actually seek out best-of-breed existing solutions.

People differ greatly in their needs, but most people doing the same thing run into the same problems. So if you're a financial software startup, try to make money with your investments. If you're a gaming startup, play lots of games. If you're a dating or social networking startup, try to get laid. If you're an e-mail startup, manage your company through e-mail. If you're a bugtracking software startup, put lots of bugs in your product. ;-)

Really, just a variant on "eat your own dogfood", except you can start imagining yourself as a dog before the dogfood actually exists.
wow, nice job.

i hate that auto-full screen though.

gestures seem to work fine. not backwards for me.
http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/
Is there any chance that someone can mention lisp without the OCaml folks popping off?

If you want to see a move towards OCaml, write great apps or useful tools.
Social approval. People seek recognition and acknowledgment. Social websites let folks feel like they're important.

You notice that other than outright trolls (who seek attention through infamy), few people will continue to use a social site where they repeatedly get negative karma? And the aphorism "Don't feed the trolls" attempts to make them go away by denying them attention?
Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks talks about this at length. The whole text is available online but don't let that stop you from running out right now and buying a seminal work of our time.

Here's a passage you may find interesting:

"For a wide range of reasons - institutional, cultural, and possibly technological - some resources are more readily capable of being mobilized by social relations than by money. If you want to get your nephew a job at a law firm in the United States today, a friendly relationship with the firm's hiring partner is more likely to help than passing on an envelope full of cash. If this theory of social capital is correct, then sometimes you should be willing to trade off financial rewards for social capital. Critically, the two are not fungible or cumulative."

Benkler's argument is rather complex, so I urge people to read the chapter in full (if not the book) before gainsaying it.

http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Se...
Joshua Schachter's (del.icio.us) views on auto-incrementing: http://joshua.schachter.org/2007/01/autoincrement.html
Right, but tomorrow's high end will be the successor of today's high end of the low end.

Put it this way: nobody wants a PII/64M, but do you buy an Intel Core Duo or do you buy a Sparcstation/SGI box?
first thing I thought too.
Meh, I'm not sure why they've got seats in there... it's not like the pilot actually flies the thing. :-)
rock out with your spock out.
Fundraising Guide
Yes.

And I find it very odd that he points to the Viaweb transition from Lisp to C++/Perl as an example of going from an unreadable/unmaintainable language to a readable/maintainable one?

I've programmed a lot in C++/Perl and those languages require very, very careful programmers to prevent them from becoming unreadable.

Also when he says "There are probably two ways to write Lisp code: with all the expressive constructs (in which case it's unmaintainable) and without (in which case you may as well use Java)." I think you can replace Lisp with Perl or C++ there and come to the same conclusion.

Java's verbosity is one of its great weaknesses IMHO. Just the shear reams of code that I have to wade through to discover that we've done something very simple.
Let's take a poll. Which is easier to maintain?

1. Lisp.

2. "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
But they could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
Xobni competitor: Extract Email Addresses from Messages in Outlook Folders
New Smartphone Reads Printed Text to Users
The world's first smartphone that translates photographs of written text into audio and then "speaks" the words aloud to users is expected to become available in early 2008.
Finally, someone has said it. Besides Ozzie. But who listens to Ozzie, he's a "Microsoft guy", nobody listens tho those anymore.
I have been quite an addict in fields like blogs, online games, forums and the like. The desire to withdraw could have been strong at those times, but it is almost impossible to do so as those who experienced that.

Even now I still am addicted to blogs. And it makes so little sense not to discontinue should visitors come no more. In fact, it's the reason why the blog is in partial apathy.

Over time, I believe it is the social networking : "connecting people". Or in more concrete terms it is... the ability to announce your presence, as well as offering you things that would not be possible or not easy to achieve in reality. The web makes these possible. Like the blogs for life and a place to express your views without a column or a book, the video sharing you can share your videos, imaging sites where you can share your photos, getting to know friends and lie tremendously with much less fear being exposed ( not quite the case as of a decade, in my opinion, as privacy problem arises ).

It has something to do with making something possible and easier, and most importantly to identify yourself.
Here's the money quote:

Here's my litmus test: When making a claim about your startup, ask yourself if anyone would ever claim anything different -- or even better, claim the opposite. If the answer is a clear "no", your description is probably empty. Examples: Which startups are not innovative? Who's not looking to disrupt? Who's not creating a culture of success? Who's looking for B- players? Who's looking to build a third-place team?
I've been plagued with tendonitis on and off since I started typing like 20 years ago. The number one thing that I've found has helped is keeping track of my wrist alignment. Make sure your wrists are on a straight plane.

The easy way to describe it is that your wrists should be simliar to their natural resting position while you type.

A common problem that people have is that they use their wrist and elbow muscles while they type, and it puts a ton of stress on the joints and tendons.
Awesome news guys - great work
wow, this makes me wonder why ynews doesn't have a vote down button
congrats guys :)
What browser / OS are you using? I haven't noticed that at all. (FF 2.0.0.11, XP)
Overengineering? Is your design battle-ready vs superior spec'd
Don't be so inaccurate.
"The ultimate goal of our company is to enhance shareholder value by empowering users to meeting their goals easily, effortlessly and conveniently in the niche we have chosen while extracting monetary value from said users to enhance shareholder value and enrich founders and investors alike"

Wanna invest ?
Bill Gates House - Virtual Tour
Am I the only one that hates these flash-sites where you first have to figure out the interface, which is often ill conveived and sporadically working across different browsers?
REST is a broad term, which covers different ideas. One of these is that the statelessness of HTTP is an inherent aspect of web applications. Instead of trying to build abstractions, to hide this fact, (some) REST-proponents, will say that the only proper way to write web applications, is to avoid server side state, and instead rely on client side state. Continuations are in direct conflict with this principle.

Continuations captures state in a way very similar to closures. I think this is why the lisp/scheme crowd are so found of them. In contrast, the client-side-state-way appears procedural. I strongly believe that client side state is the _only_ worthwhile solution; We need to accept that fact and get rid of continuations.
Advocates of languages with both low and high expressiveness use the readability argument. The writing speed argument is a bit of a red herring; Java and .NET programmers tend to use code generators to write code quickly. The code they emit is widely regarded as unreadable.

I think using the right abstractions makes code more readable, so having the tools to write them available is a Good Thing. Abusing those tools makes code unmaintainable - that's why large projects have (or should have) coding standards that say things like "don't redefine what the + operator does to built-in numeric types".

The big problem I see with less expressive languages and less compressible code is that it's really hard to get a higher-level view of what's going on. There's too much you can't abstract away to the point that you can ignore it while trying to think about how the bigger pieces fit together. You can uncompress your Lisp as much as you need to to see the details you want to see. You cannot compress your Java as much as you need to to see the big picture.
Bad usability calendar
His points make sense if you're talking about desktop apps. For web apps, on the other hand, the value of using the cloud is increasing steadily.
whats you mean multitaskcking slowing dumping us down? Im do fine and does ten things at same time too!!!
Darwinism adequately explains the phenomena of social networking. It is basically just like when we sat around the campfire telling stories to each other. The men would tell stories about their great and dangerous endeavors. The women would want to mate with the man who had the best stories (had done the greatest thing, had most appraisal from his peers) because there would be a greater chance that he had the support and power to support the children.

This is a derivative of the campfire.

This is of course simplified tremendously, but it gets the basic idea across. When you think about evolution it is amazing what it can explain in terms of human behaviour.
The people already doing this probably consider this trivial, so it's not well documented.
What is a capability, anyway?
Is Eric Schmidt's love life putting shareholders in danger?
The Four Viral App Objectives
Sorry, just checking whether it was working for me :)
Free music downloads site in chaos as record giants pull out
I think you have some good points, I have friends in (offline) marketing - these people are the greatest bullshitters of all time...

But I think that there is another simpler explanation: supply and demand. Since everyone has a blog with banners, and one on five people runs a website with ads the supply is enormous, and this naturally drives prices down.
If I don't have paper available (if I'm driving a car, for example) I will subdivide a problem like that. I'm a visual person and it's easier for me than visualizing long division.

There are many schools here in the Seattle area that switched to this "reform math" a few years back, and there is a lot of talk about switching back to classical instruction because this stuff just isn't cutting it.

I don't find the alternative methods work as well in alternative number bases, especially if the student is overfit to some base-10 subdivision strategy.

Maybe we should teach kids logic first, then a ripple-carry adder, and go from there :)
Vista on Eee PC
I'm not sure what virus app your using, but the site is plain text.

Here's the copy:

<thefiddler> Holy sonofabitch.
<thefiddler> I think my editor is flirting with me.
* thefiddler frowns
<Uhmerwell> ...Notepad?
<thefiddler> Errr.
<Uhmerwell> oh, you mean a human
<Uhmerwell> don't you :<
I've been very tempted to take the Facebook App first approach on a number of projects. Like you say, it focuses you on what the core value of your application is without being distracted by the social networking fluff around the outside.

If what you create proves to be really compelling, you should be able to convert a good portion of your Facebook users over to a stand alone version of your app at a later date.

Obviously this only really works if enough people in your target market fit into the typical Facebook demographic.
The new site design is awesome beyond compare.

I think I've found a new messiah.
I'd hate to live in that home (or rather, residential complex)...

It's way too big, and there seems to be a lot of "features" to distract you, steal your cognitive resources. It's not zen at all.

It's an home I wouldn't feel at home at.
Wal-Mart Has Plans for the Internet
Nokia hasn't purchased anything

"The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including acceptance by shareholders representing more than 90 % of the fully diluted share capital"

They want to buy at least 90% of the company. 67% is already confirmed. If they don't get 90%, there won't be a deal. So you can't say "Nokia purchases 67% of Trolltech's stock"
VC Fundraising Manual: Meeting Follow-Up Items
During the meeting VCs may ask you to send them some material after the meeting. When they make a request you should do two things:...
Python : myFile = open(argFilename)

Java : import java.io.*; BufferedReader myFile =
new BufferedReader(
new FileReader(argFilename));

Verbosity improves readability? Really?
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/qdb.us/summary/
No insult was intended with the term 'misleading' -- it was a description of the headline sentence itself, and not about the author or the author's intentions.

Can you suggest a better term for describing a headline that has a high risk of creating mistaken impressions in readers?
Top Secret leak from the Googleplex
It is only a matter of time before they become like any other large company, AKA evil.

The turning point was their IPO, after this they had had at least some responsibility to public shareholders. Public shareholders in general want the stock to rise. Not in a year, not in six months, but now. This means shortsighted decisions, that can hurt their image. But you don't see this on the quarterly report, since longterm benefits in form of image get sacrificed for short term benefits.

Also like any other growing tech company, the suits come in and take control. And all they care about is quarterly earnings and bonuses.
It'd be fun to play around with it.... see what the lights do if you throw your pin down the hallway, or drop it down the stairs.

I wonder how upgradeable the whole thing is... "please leave your home and rebuild it for these updates to take effect".
Helping the Average Programmer
Piper cub:

http://www.tradewind-aviation.com/images/cokpit/cockpit_cub_...
For the startup I'm working on, we're going to put together a small app to take advantage of Facebook for advertising purposes - basically an optional thing to put in your profile to say "hey, I'm using this service, this is what's happening for me, come check it out."

That's part of the marketing plan though, rather than the development plan, so it's a way off still.
From TC: "... making an early exit likely below $5 million possible"
I spent about 4 weeks working on the transition to Dvorak, and it never 'clicked' for me, and at the end I was in the 40s for my WPM touch-typing Dvorak whereas I'm about 85 on QWERTY. After 2 weeks in Colemak, I'm at 40 WPM and growing.

If "learning curve" is stopping you from switching keyboard layouts (as it was me), don't let it: Colemak decreases that transition time to bearable levels.
Just wanted to mention that I posted this because I thought it might generate some good discussion. I don't agree with everything the author says and wasn't trying to be a troll.

This brings up an interesting question. I assume most people post things they find interesting even if they do not agree with the content, no? Does anyone think that every story someone posts reflects that individual's beliefs?
I think the core of this post (which I agree with completely is this: "When talking, try to say something (preferrably true)"
= "we have no idea"
Fair warning to those who modded this up: These submissions are Y-combinator tests in disguise. Anyone voting for submissions from this classified pile, categorized as the-dumb-trap, is secretly disqualified from applying to the startup school.
> I strongly believe that client side state is the _only_ worthwhile solution; We need to accept that fact and get rid of continuations.

It's not clear to me if you're joking, but in case you're not: there are some situations, especially in closed-system webapps, where it's useful to use a non-transparent scheme for resources. You don't want people to jump into a middle page of a survey or other workflow, and going out of your way to have the middle pages accessible via a RESTful scheme seems pointless and potentially misleading. Continuations or similar methods for papering over the "page" abstraction can be helpful, here. Even if you don't use something like that, you'll end up doing the same thing manually.

I agree, though, that those who use this style typically overuse it and apply it to situations (like, er, discussion forums... ;) where it isn't really appropriate.
Hm. I'm really more of a Lisp person than an OCaml person. I just find the language interesting. And specifically, I was responding to the comment "studios moving away from C/C++". Which, of itself, has nothing to do with Lisp.

Regardless, I'll take that as a "no".
Dick Costolo of Feedburner on Why You Don't Need a Business Model (Yet)