skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why does Yahoo have over 120 properties and 14,000 people but only make 660m in net profits? Microsoft has already declared that this merger will create a 1 billion operating efficiency. Guess where that's going to come from?

And Yahoo might have more popular destination sites but Microsoft has the lock on operating system. MSN/Live is seen as a cloud computing services for the _future_, Microsoft would rather saving those than the multiple Yahoo turds. How's Brickhouse doing? They pumping out hits yet? How about 360? Mash? Pipes? What about those landing pages for products? That whole group is gone.

Most of the hardcore people from Flickr, ie. those whining separate login people, will be jumping ship the second this deal is inked. Instead you'll just end up with a shell of a service but again, Microsoft could care less. They'll just slap it on to Windows Pictures like they slapped Hotmail onto Windows Mail. And the masses will gobble it up because to them it doesn't matter.

If anything, this will be great for Windows 7 if it ever comes out. On your computer is Microsoft, on the web it will be Microsoft apps with Yahoo names and the products will actually not suck as bad. What Yahoo also needs to do is to properly tie in all its features and properties to formulate a social network. They have every single parts required but just lack the skeleton to bind it all together. Hmm... What company does Microsoft have an interest in that's like a social network... Hmm...

EDIT: As an addendum to this, I just read Gruber's opinion on the merger and he agrees with my premise. Microsoft culture will pounce Yahoo culture. Yahoo's products (web1.0/2.0 lamp stacks) will be naturally converted to Microsoft technology (yay windows 2000!) because at the end of the day the Borg can't stop. So if you have a job at Yahoo it's best to polish up your resume and if you're a Yahoo user be ready to get a Windows Live account. The name might be Yahoo but the backend's going to be .NET and if it's not Flickr or Delicious then most likely you won't be able to use it.
Intro to Social Design Podcast
not if you used infix notation for + - * / as a child e.g. in school and learned Lisp after age 16 -- at least that is my experience.
Our Internal Blog
Hey guys,

I'm the founder of The Point (www.thepoint.com), a startup that launched a few months ago for organizing collective action and helping people make things happen.

We've got a staff of 10 or so, including 5 or 6 developers. For the last several months, we've been communicating in part using an internal, password-protected blog, mostly as a stand-in for what would normally go into group emails.

Looking at it recently, I noticed there's nothing in there that's really worthy of secrecy. And while most of it is uninteresting to the public, it's kind of a window into how our team works together. I would have liked to have that kind of perspective when I was getting started, so I thought I'd at least let you know it exists. Some of you voyeuristic types might find it interesting.

We won't be promoting it on our site or accommodating an external audience in anyway, but here it is for anyone that cares: http://internal.thepoint.com

Anyone else doing something like this?

- Andrew
this is a Yahoo plant. They're going to use this to renegotiate the sales price. Can I haz $50 per share?
While I don't have a blog for my projects, I do appreciate the fact that you're letting us in to this area of your startup. I'm sure it will be of use to others who wish to observe the inner-workings of a startup, and hopefully inspire others to begin projects of their own.
Merborial: Getting Started with Merb and DataMapper
Firefox Usage Hits 28 Percent In Europe
Your CRUDdy scalability plan on a napkin [img]
Heh heh... Well, she did ask what I thought happened to the package, but she didn't give me the third degree. Just sent me a new shipment.
Heh! Arc begin in October 2001, as I recall...
I think this is great. Not necessarily something every company would do, but it does let someone get to know you extremely well. I think this will be useful when it's time to hire more people. Anyone prospective employee can look and make sure your company is a place they want to work. I think this is an important difference from the typical "company blog" used for marketing and SEO.
it's not just prefix vs infix.

a.b().c().d().e() is easier to read to me than (e (d (c (b a))))

I also prefer object.method() instead of (method object). Now granted the OO model used in Lisp allows for some really powerful things (like methods that specialize on more than one object and adding before, after and around methods to modify code).
Forgive my total ignorance; do the kids today not use HP calculators? When I was in college (+/- 1990), we all had HP calculators, and so thinking in terms of (+ 1 2 3 4) felt pretty natural.
That's way too much influence from yhoo!. They'll probably remove the |.

The new company slogan will be "Microsoft. Period."
This could be good news for startups. Suggested business plan:

1. Find something Yahoo currently does well (e.g. flickr)

2. Make a clone of it.

3. Wait for Microsoft to ruin the original.
I never understood why this was an issue. People are really used to writing prefix functions in all languages
def foo( bar, baz):

And I've never really had a hard time with reading arithmatic, so the debate really leaves me scratching my head.
Netscape: R.I.P. Feb 1 2008
There's also the possibility another company will outbid the original offer.
Nope. TI graphing calculators are basically standard. TI-83 is standard in high school and a TI-89 is preferred by those who know how much symbolic manipulation and calculus can improve their grades. They both do infix order of operations.

I believe what is popular right now with new calculator buyers are the versions of the TI-83 and TI-89 with USB connectors and faster processors, I think they're called the TI-84 and TI-89 Titanium.
Google Launches Social Graph API -- Google -- InformationWeek
Not necessarily. Infix precedence/associativity is so "natural" that different languages have have different precedences or associativity for the same operator.

If one works in multiple languages, the only safe thing is to ignore precedence and associativity and parethesize everything.
>I will put it bluntly, "what's wrong with common LISP?"

PG already covers many of his objections to CL his essays. I will not repeat them here. It might be more fair to ask "What's wrong with Scheme?", as Arc seems much closer to Scheme than CL.

As I see it, one of the biggest reasons to create Arc is social. It doesn't have to do anything CL and Scheme don't already if PG and RTM can build a real community around it.
Here's a fuller response. You said:

infix only works with a limited number of built in
things, it doesn't scale nicely. i suppose you could
change this, e.g. make # a special character, and then
you can define infix foo then write arg1#foo#arg2. but
like, that's ridiculous. no one wants to do that with
functions in general.

First, there are languages which have infix functions as a first class concept in the language (e.g., J, and I would suppose APL and K), so it isn't that infix doesn't scale. Secondly, even in languages which have the call() convention, user-definable operators can coexist (see logix, for example, which is an infix macro system built on top of python).

Additionally, you don't have to have an arg1#foo#arg2, as long as you're willing to use spaces to separate things, the way that lisps, forths, and so on do.
> However, in every field besides this niche of computer science, including almost all of math, finance, science, and engineering, infix is used.

The reason is that the "reader" in all of those domains is another human and humans do error correction almost without thinking.

Also, each of those domains has a very small number of operators - programming languages have lots of operators.

Feel free to demonstrate that you know the precedence/associativity rules for your favorite programming language by typing them without looking them up. (I know two people who can do that for C; the vast majority can't.)
Stay on :target
> but a little study in compilers and formal languages and its obvious that all languages are describing trees.

That's not the issue - the issue is that lisp folk can easily write programs that manipulate their code. Other folks have to get a parser involved.

In most cases, that means that people who write programs in "not lisp" rarely have automated methods for manipulating their code. They don't define dsls. They have macros weaker than regular expressions.

Programs have a lot of structure that can't be exploited without being able to manipulate code.
Stop Crying: The A-List works harder than you do.
Emacs subsumes them?
Why don't you use the Point as your platform for discussions etc. It sounds like you guys are trying to do something you can't do alone by working on thepoint.

Chow your own dogfood.

I like the idea that you are showing the world whats happening inside your company. Its kinda like 37 Signals and their blog
This is the most inspirational thing I've seen all year, no joke.
Yahoo recently received a similar email from China.
That's because pseudocode conventionally uses indentation to denote structure, and Python does too. This explanation is trivial because pseudocode is trivial. The sort of code that can be meaningfully written as pseudocode is easy to understand in any language, and so it doesn't matter.
"Anyone can learn Lisp in a day, but if he'd previously been exposed to C, it'd take 3 days..."
Yeah, that would be a good idea. I wanted to do it for launch, but didn't have time to put it together. I might give it a go today.
There are guys! And a cat!

Yeah it's creepy, but it has a low bounce rate :)
Internet undersea cables [pic]
Haha, I agree. It started really well, but he got tired at the end and didn't elaborate much on how he lost his religion.
My hope is !Microsoft.
I'm only trying to defend a very narrow point, that when coding mathematical expressions, infix isn't bad.

Code is read by human beings too (perhaps just the person who wrote it) and more find infix arithmetic more natural looking.

I see the appeal in the idea that arithmetic is really just a very special case of a programming structure and should be treated as such, but on the other hand, I and many others can instantly see what a + bc/d - d(e+f)*g means and would like equation-heavy pieces of my programs to somewhat resemble equations everywhere else in life.

Does you have the quadratic formula memorized in list notation? How about the sum of an arithmetic or geometric series, or a formula for an inverse square law force?
Social Search - Personalized search results based on the user's social network
Yahoo-Microsoft merger bad news for startups?
Microsoft buying Yahoo is like Microsoft(1) buying Microsoft(2). Both companies are huge, with dying net brands, and both are being cut to pieces by Google (and probably soon enough Facebook). I don't see the great synergy, and they definitely not paying that for a great product pipeline. My only guess is they want the search/ad system. That seems to be the only thing that makes Microsoft(2) != Yahoo.
A simpler explanation is that everyone holding a stock wants it to go up so they can profit. When it goes up to a point where they don't think it's too low, they sell it, and hence no longer own it. So everyone that owns a stock thinks it's too low.
Hey Andrew. I really, really like the site design and overall presentation. Best of luck moving forward.
I have a feeling of vulnerability when I see such a map. A bit of bad weather/vandalism/terrorism and you got countries (partly) offline. I'm actually surprised why there is not more accidents like those from this week.

Interesting facts: cables' used capacity for telephone: 1%. Bandwidth purchased: 80%. Bandwidth actually used: 29%.
Because it's fun to cheer on the underdog if the underdog is better and the established players are just bumbling idiots holding down the underdog via cheating and uncompetitive strategies.

Trying to claim that YHOO/MSFT is (technically) better than Google and that Google is just a bumbling idiot trying to hold down YHOO/MSFT via cheating and uncompetitive practices is a bit of a stretch, even for the seriously deluded among us.
Oh. Well, aren't you a bit afraid some people could decide to use your "solution"?...
So, Google decides to rename the address book to Open Social Graph and makes a general API for everyone to adopt and gets some attention. Thats really big news.
Welcome innovation.
While technically possible, you'd be hard pressed to find many companies that could put up that kind of money, even fewer actually in the industry (no Wal-mart doesn't count), and even fewer that could pull off the financing in today's debt market.

Microsoft is sorta uniquely positioned to make this offer at this moment.
> I'm only trying to defend a very narrow point, that when coding mathematical expressions, infix isn't bad.

Programming isn't math.

> Code is read by human beings too (perhaps just the person who wrote it) and more find infix arithmetic more natural looking.

And that's how infix causes bugs. The human reader error corrects and the compiler doesn't.

My goal is correct programs. What's yours?

Lisp notation eliminates a whole class of bugs.

Bugs are expensive - what are you getting for the ability to have more of them?

> I and many others can instantly see what a + bc/d - d(e+f)*g means

Really? It has at least two meanings. Which one is correct?

Yes, I do memorize formulas in a form that doesn't allow for precedence/associativity errors. Why I should prefer a form that does allow for such errors?
Or lower. Dashed hopes can be (temporarily) worse than no hope to begin with.
He suggested he start with all the property, and I start with all the money.

I remember being pretty damn pleased with myself when you agreed to that ;-)
all of 2008 eh?
That's why I knew I could say it without reservation. :)
http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...
so you really advocate tokens in the order:

x foo y

over

foo x y

? well, right or wrong, you are definitely deviating from the mainstream. that is, C and java coders will agree with me that prefix, and unlimited arguments, is better. the only difference they'll do in the general case of function calls is to add commas in the argument lists, and move the open-paren to the right one token.

i think not using infix function calls has nothing to do with why people are put off by s-expressions.
Ask YC: Status of your startup
Hi! Want to get some conversations going here. How's your startup doing right now?

Any planned launch dates?

What's your startup anyway?

We're quite busy with ours, we were ready to release a beta, but choose to redesign and refactor things again. What about yours?
"so you really advocate tokens in the order:"

No. Nowhere am I advocating that. Rather, I'm pointing out that it's not an obviously ridiculous idea -- people have implemented it, and some people like it.

"i think not using infix function calls has nothing to do with why people are put off by s-expressions."

I disagree; I think it is one reason.
Grr. I just interviewed for a position at Yahoo on Wednesday.
cool. which of the basic arithmetic operators have difference precedence in which languages?

what i am used to is * and / first, then + and -.
but how can it be a reason people dislike lisp when C and Java programmers put their function calls in prefix order, too? the vast majority of programmers do function calls that way, and prefer it.

and infix function calls in general is obviously a bit ridiculous because it doesn't scale. why would you want all functions to take 2 arguments? or were you going to

(a b foo x y z)

for a function of 5 arguments? and memorize which side to put the extra one on, and what order they go in, etc?
I'd say that the conclusion (I came to) wasn't just that googlers were more efficient with other languages, but that after that many years of lisp he's already more efficient with python.
"Buying some networking"? I admit I wasn't exactly clear with what the app does, but in the iPhone section I did say the app has to be used in places where there's no cell phone service, let alone wifi.

It's an app used by public health agencies, who _have_ to be able to visit clients in their homes and chart their progress. And plenty of homes in the rural US have no dial-up internet, no broadband, no wi-fi, and no cell-phone coverage, and no sign of that changing soon.

That said, I agree with you. The decision-maker at this company doesn't, and as I mentioned below, I've got little leverage to change things.
how about answering your own questions first!
you should release the beta. Then you'll at least have user feedback for the redesign.
We're really excited to launch. We kept pushing dates back, as there is just more work than expected. We're working on a complete ondemand solution. So instead of signing up for project management, crm, invoicing separately, we'll provide an all in one solution. Plus it's a platform, so it's extensible. We're working to go into private beta this month.
Built the system, but then we realized we were hitting a common demographic. Went back to the drawing board and begun to rewrite it. We're close to private beta.
The redesign is really a user interface design, not looks. We'll confuse users too much if we completely change the whole thing on them. But we're close to launching anyway.
What are you guys doing? Even just roughly.
I agree completely. However, the idea that only lisp describes trees, or that the describing is where lisp is powerful is wrong. All languages describe trees and the process is not that obscure. Like I said elsewhere I could write a lisp like language with no lists, no lamdas and no macros and it would very clearly describe a tree. It wouldnt be a powerful language.
State in procedural languages has more to do with side effects than nice syntax for it. This article has a nice description of how why explicit state is good in procedural languages sometimes: http://prog21.dadgum.com/3.html
Threw out something as fast possible to credibly sell our product, we've made some sales, and now we're going back and fixing everything / adding infrastructure & features.

We also secured a small seed round of funding ---enough to last us a few months.
i already upmodded the thread before making the comment, so it wasnt meant to be hostile, if it felt like that.

pre-launch phase for a startup its very exciting time. Hopefully you will keep up your work with the same mood right after launching, and won't get dissapointed by the attack of anyone or non-immediate massive response of your application.

for everyone else, i think its interesting to pariticipate in commenting other startups as it helps them kept focused also in their starup efforts, so i suppose we wil hear from you again here.
Curi, I'm not saying it's a good reason to dislike lisp. If I thought it was a good reason, I wouldn't like lisp, and yet lispy languages are my favorites (most of my lisp code has been CL, but Arc is interesting at 0.0).

There are a number of possible solutions to your question about infix functions. In J, insofar as I understand it, all functions take either one or two arguments, but the arguments can be arrays, so you often get the effect of more than two arguments.

For example (it's been a while) the form * / 2 3 4 would have the function *, the function /, and an array or list of three integers. J is parsed right to left, so the array is collected first, and then there's a modifier function '/' which takes two arguments: a function on the left, and an array on the right, and applies the function to each of the elements of the array (like map in lisps), outputing the new array. I don't know the details anymore of which symbols are what primitives, but J is interesting, in my opinion.

Alternatively, for your example, you might do

(a b) foo (x y z) ; or
(a b, foo, x y z) ; or
a b Foo x y z ; if functions have their own
naming rules like in Erlang, or
a b foo! x y z; # where the bang means call, or

something else. Surely you can come up with 10 or 12 yourself. Some of these scale in some ways, and not in others; you could have a rule that you can only have one call per line, to remove ambiguity. That sounds rather restrictive, but so do Python's indentation rules when you first hear of them, and that works out okay, in my experience. I don't think any of them lend themselves to nice general-purpose macros, but I might be wrong.
BTW, three different 'accidents' with cables being cut? Right.

I smell war coming...
Oh it's all good. :)

It is exciting. We're pretty committed. We're good with a low key response first, while we're a semi public beta phase.

Appreciate the comments, for sure you'll hear back from me. :)
Qi: An interesting Lisp with pattern matching
I think it's more like dreadnoughts vs. a F-16.
What's your startup?

How do you deal with the loss of flexibility once launching? You really can't make big architectural changes after launching in some cases. I.e., when were you confident enough that it was a good time to launch?
Meet your new Rails Bible
We are doing online backup and storage. We have an open source project (http://allmydata.org) that we are building a commercial product (http://allmydata.com) on top of. We have a fair amount of beta users (10K) and have our new architecture beta release due out mid-February. We will then be fixing any major issues, testing usability, and then going full release.

We've had good feedback from our users which has helped shape our usability and also which features were important to them (like having ftp access for example).

Hope this helps,
Peter
Richard Gabriel: The Art of Lisp & Writing
Hey Peter, how did you promote your beta to get to 10k users?

Appreciate your sharing.
Actually they got a huge benefit. They had internal users doing a high-volume stress test on Windows and associated middleware, so a lot of bugs got found and fixed. The products now are noticeably more reliable.
Reading the day-to-day story of The Point is entrancing to me, an ambitious yet too passive person. Entrancing in a way similar to that of watching awesome Salsa dancers in a Latin club about a year ago. Entrancing enough to get me to start taking lessons and eventually step out onto the public dance floor. Maybe The Point's story will entrance more of us to get out there and start our start-ups. Thank you for recognizing some of us who really want to know what lies ahead and beneath the romanticism of a real start-up.