skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Which is it?

It is power, of a sort: brevity (voltage) multiplied by clarity (amperage).

The clarity, however, is not clarity of the syntax, but of the resulting AST. Assuming that the AST is such that every construct in the code is encoded somehow in the resulting transformation to the AST (otherwise the differences would just be artifacts of implementation), it would require two kinds of blocks: (parenthetical-form ...) and (brace-form ...). If these evaluate the same, and are semantically equivalent, in all cases, this is definitely less clear.
A proof that 12=13. Just look at the picture and count the people. (pic)
Smart idea.

How would you determine that though?

I have my doubts that approaching this by finding some kind of formula on people-attributes will work.

I believe it is best for me to say who I work well with.

What is needed is a collective intelligence augmentation tool. Which the internet basically is, but how can it be improved? I.e. what we really need is more, and more relevant information at my fingertips.
Phamaceuticals wouldn't collapse; half of their current expenditures go into advertising, half into research. But that only accounts for half of the actual research costs: the rest mainly comes from the NSF. We could just have the NSF give them a 100% handout and cover all the research.
Just as an aside about your Ruby example:

(condition && string).to_s

(string if condition).to_s

both work (though the first fails when passed false instead of nil.) I use something similar in quick-and-dirty Ruby shell scripts:

n_to_generate = (ARGV.shift || "0").to_i
Interesting proof. I believe this does sufficiently prove BREVITY isn't the only consideration one must take while creating a language design. Fortunately, PG also considers other things as well, such as generality and flexibility. I agree incidentally, Arc' sounds like a terrible language. :P

I believe the problem you may have with the "succinctness is power" philosophy PG uses is merely a matter of communication; the sad part about the English language (or any spoken language), is that it isn't perfect, and there is no way to exactly specify the full description of what he means by "power". Why? People learn most of their language in context, and depending on how that individual learned it and that persons professional and unprofessional background, there may be subtly different definitions of the way they use words. For example, a mathematician has a significantly different definition of the word "equal" than, say, the lady who works at the register of the local McDonald's.
What can Your Startup Learn from NFL Coach, Bill Belichick?
I'm scared to think, but there might be a Firefox extension that embeds Word into text fields...
That is also how I read the title.
Facebook used to target Colombia's FARC with global rally
I would not choose my undergraduate university based on what types of technologies they teach in their courses. Any schools that make a big deal about teaching you stuff you can use tomorrow are not programs aiming at future-proofing their graduates.

Which is to say, prefer that your first programming class is in Scheme, not AJAX.
Two problems with this electric analogy are

a) Voltage and current are related by I=V/R (which I guess you could also express as (let ((I (/ V R))) I)) and

b) Brevity and clarity are closer to the ideas of resistance and/or impedance. The shorter and more precise the language, the less it prevents the problem from being solved.
And these will belong to Microsoft in a few short months...
I am in violent agreement with you, but slightly amused that we are in the minority.

Its 2008 and we are still getting interested/excited in CRUD frameworks for web apps?
How Rackspace Now Uses MapReduce and Hadoop to Query Terabytes of Data
I love your blog. I used to follow it a few months ago (but then I got busy). Keep up the good work.
The AOL XMPP scalability challenge
Miranda was my first language. Did me a fat lot of good ;)
Android Developer Challenge deadline moved to April 14th
What Is The Opposite Of A Vacuum and Should You Develop Software In It?
I am currently studying as a grad student in the Computer Science dept of the San Jose State University, and I came here looking for the same things you are...am a little disappointed I have to say :(.
I say check to see more about the community you will find at the universities than the curriculum aspect IMHO.
The Industry Standard 2.0: Their Analysis, Your Predictions
AOL Acquires Webtop Goowy and Widget Creator YourMinis
Charging compound interest on debt could lead to loansharking. Allowing payment between accounts could lead to money laundering. For these reasons, such activities generally require financial regulation.

However, you probably don't want to do such activities. You probably want to allow customers to earn commission and get a lump payment when they reach a threshold or an amount of time elapses or they request a pay-out. This would be quite acceptable for a business. The reason for this is quite simple.

It is legal for individuals to owe money and to be owed money. Likewise, it is legal for businesses to owe money and to be owed money. However, a business may have to declare money owed in annual accounts. Additionally, it may be neccesary to hold the full amount in a separate bank account. Even if it is not strictly neccesary, this would be a concise way of showing that your company is trading solvently. Consult an accountant for regional details.

You may wish to make payment by cheque. It is fairly simple to write a program which prints two or three fully written cheques on a sheet of paper. You can minimise mis-addressed cheques by using envelopes with windows and placing the recipient address on the cheque in the appropriate place. Regardless, cheques will go missing. Be gracious. Trust your customer. Fix the problem quickly.

Make an arrangement with your bank to accept your sequentially generated cheque numbers. After the first 1000 cheques or so, you may also wish to make an arrangement to omit your signature from the cheque.

You may want to make an administrative fee for premature withdrawals. Make it small and absorb that admin cost for payments above your preferred threshold. If this fee is excessive then you may run afoul of unfair contract law.
Betting markets in everything, Super Bowl edition
A singularity is the opposite of a vacuum. Lots of metaphor fodder there.
Reading that gives me a feeling like driving by an accident on the freeway.
I guess I'm the only one who's slightly worried about privacy issues here?
It's all opt-in :)
Multicast only works on either something as esoteric as the MBONE or on a local LAN/WAN. It isn't out there on the general internet, it requires too much state in the routers, so it never took off.
Which metaverse platform should we bet on?
Wouldn't it be pretty easy to write an Arc (or even Arc') program to do this for you automatically?

My first macro in Arc' would be "arcp" a macro which took Arc code and translated it to Arc' code. Then you just wrap every file in:

(arcp ;;file contents
)

So, based on that, Arc' has an extra macro compared to Arc and extra entries in each file, and thus isn't as succinct as Arc and thus isn't as powerful as Arc -- if we're going to be philosophical about it.
He is thinking of more than just money, and in his argument, that's exactly why Yahoo should sell. Then they could focus on building great products rather than bending to the will of Wall Street.
I was talking about this place, news.yc, not about Arc programs in general. Of course a place for Spanish speakers or Chinese speakers is going to support the charset for that language. I _hope_ we can agree that we do not want comments in languages other than English in this place.
Get over it. There are more than 11 reasons. Privacy is relative, especially in a world where your identity can be associated with a fixed static IP (common for broadband or MAC address - wireless). Only when egregious errors are made e.g. Facebook Beacon broadcasting on the newsfeed what someone bought for Christmas presents is it really visible. Deleting cookies (see what happens when you clear the cookie cache in YC, you're still logged in) does something for your privacy but not really.
TripIt could be a nice orbitz acquistion
I remember when our math teacher stood in front of us in High School and told us math was important because of all the ways we'd use it...

She lied. I think I used the Pythagorean Theorem once, for a cool bookshelf, five years ago.

Now, I'm learning it all over again. One thing I've found is that if I can teach something, I understand it better. In that spirit, I'm volunteering with the local Alternative School, tutoring math. It works out great. I keep myself about two chapters ahead, the kids are bright and unafraid, and I find myself motivated ever time I plow into my own book.The best thing is, I spend less time tutoring the kids than the rest of my morbidly unmotivated 'catch up' math class spends practicing problem sets. I'm saving time, having fun, and understanding.

I highly recommend it.
Because their options vest and they can leave with a bunch of cash to do startups with, if the deal happens? "Microsoft" is not a brand I associate with "focus on building great products". I guess that's a bit of a cheap shot, and at one point in time, they certainly outcompeted everyone else to win what would go on to become their monopoly, but still, I just don't see anyone focusing much on anything with two big icebergs crashing into one another, let alone 'great products' free from political interference.
Yawn...

First of all it's not PG's patent. Its Yahoo's.

Second, if anyone ever goes after you on a software patent, celebrate! It means you are a success. It means you have deep enough pockets to be considered worth the trouble.

Third, as much as software patents are a joke, see them for what they are: A little side show for the lawyers and MBAs to leach off the big boys and feel like they are holding important cards. Hackers are wasting time/energy if they get too worked up about software patents.
Get your stats right, do your research before you comment.

Pharmaceutical research in the US 2005 34.8B USD federal funds 41M USD. Thats less than 0.12%.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf07335/
Actually just ignoring it is probably the best thing to do.
Another Difficulty for a Microsoft-Yahoo Marriage: Recruiting
Harvard's CS department seems pretty decent (dedicated, interesting students; a variety of challenging courses; etc) to me, though as a non-CS-concentrator myself, I'm probably not the best one for advice. :) Also, I'm not sure whether you'll find much in the way of Ajax or similar technologies, but I'm far from convinced that you really want to take courses in that sort of thing. I was somewhat unimpressed with the intro theory course--would have been better to walk down the street and take Sipser's course at MIT.

As you mentioned, one big thing to consider is what you are interested in besides CS, what other types of students you want to hang out with, etc. College, at least at good American schools, is generally less about preparation for a career, and more about personal growth and exploration.

Finally, I imagine Stanford has somewhat better weather than Boston. :)
I've found that we don't know how much we don't know until we try teaching it to someone. Congratulations for choosing to tutor math. Long live SOHCAHTOA.
Patents may be a joke to hackers but they aren't to the investors who fund them.

Of course if you don't need investors for what you're doing in order to be successful then more power to you.
I'm not against patents per se (they're a necessary evil, I believe that shortening their length and/or adding a forced licensing clause could improve them), but the problem is that software patents too often do the opposite than what they're intended - stifling innovation in a rapidly evolving market - and the patent system is currently too-often used on things that are likely to be reinvented and become popular independently rather than the actual purpose which is share knowledge with the world in exchange for a temporary monopoly on your invention.
option-shift-] on the Mac does a proper apostrophe.
Sure, it's OK to pretend that they mean something... If you feel it helps make you look stronger, apply/get patents. Just try not to pay through the nose to do it... be careful with those lawyers.

Just don't worry about stepping on the other guy's patents. They are just paper really.

And as we know in this economy there is a lot of phony paper out there that people just want to call valuable/meaningful.
This argument doesn't refute anything. All it demonstrates is that succinctness is not the only thing that enables a language to be powerful. I'm not sure anyone has ever made that claim.

The fact that there are other things, such as sensible syntax, that can affect a language's power should come as a surprise to no-one.
This reminds me of how "macros" work in Factor, in a way. You don't avoid manually creating the s-expression (though Scheme and Dylan have a nice mechanism for that), but there is a finer line between macros and regular functions. A macro is a function which takes a bunch of arguments and returns another function which takes no arguments and does the action of the macro. Basically, it's constant-folded at compiletime if possible. The runtime definition is memoized. For Factor's syntax, this kind of macro is practical for everything but new definition syntax and datastructure literals (neither of which this idea would work really well on, and which there is a different mechanism for). In general, a macro operates just like other words and can be quoted and executed like them.
Google troubled by Microsoft move
Overhaul of net addresses begins
Chips pass two billion milestone
Great Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels
"Well, Google's results are quite linear and is built on the notion of sites,"
If Google's results don't include junk like this, so much the better.
Bezeq launches porn-free "kosher phone" service
Ericsson to provide mobile broadband to Lenovo
Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?
This is insanely cool, but...

optical illusion != proof
So by this logic you (and I) should be downmodded.
Features sell products
Paradox of the Active User
Or, if you don't like it, let it stay at 0 or -1. No need to keep going beyond that for anything but blatant trolls.
Every User Lies
Well, hacker is part of the issue. I guess he hacked the check system, but not the market in any meaningful way. Like I said, he followed his gut, which is a strategy employed by millions, with comparable results.

The misleading part of the title (to which "hacker" contributed) is that it looks like he succeeded, and thus that one could learn from reading the article. It's a very debatable point, I guess... No offense intended to the submitter.
John Resig: JavaScript-Based Injection Attacks
The value of an RSS subscriber at 30 dollars
Ah yes, I forgot about this use case :)
The original comment was not on transport level multicast, but on application level multicast. This is the one implement in ejabberd patches and thus works over Internet, not only LAN/WAN.
The server knows how to distribute the message to multiple recipient and does that by itself. The client has of course nothing to do.
ejabberd does that automatically for presence, but also for Multi-user chat and pubsub.
Stanford has an excellent computer _science_ department. A degree in computer science at Stanford will expose you to functional and object-oriented programming; it will give you a solid grounding in discrete mathematics, automata theory, and the design and analysis of algorithms; it will teach you the fundamentals of compiler and operating system design and implementation; you can also choose to take classes in computer security, networking, programming languages, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, graphics, databases, human-computer interaction, and computational genomics, among other subjects.

"Newer technologies" are offered, particularly in the CS193 classes. I wouldn't waste my time on them though; you can learn as much by reading documentation online. (The exception is the class on Objective-C and Cocoa. Final projects are presented to Apple engineers, and Apple does a fair amount of hiring from that class. If that's your thing...)

Like I said, though, it's a computer science curriculum, not a "programming" or "web startup" curriculum. Everything you need to create a successful web startup you can probably teach yourself (c.f. Zuckerberg).
I upmodded every post in your comments history.

<3 downmodders.
Transport-level mcast requires special routers..
Ah! No wonder I couldn't get the MBone videoconferencing stuff to work with Trumpet Winsock, years ago
This is driving me crazy. Time to break out an image editor.

edit: if you can't let this go either, save yourself a few minutes: http://tlrobinson.net/misc/illuuusions.png
Brown University
He was up 500 million Euros in late 2007 and never thought of going legit? That is serious delusional reality. I think he's as much as a hacker as a script kiddie
lol. did you read them?
New proof: piracy correlates to global warming (pic)
You'd think someone writing about "editing, publishing, and the future of journalism" would know the difference between "it's" and "its"...
Not an optical illusion. Twelve guys really become thirteen. But they have to pay a price for that: they're somewhat shorter, their heads are slightly smashed in, etc. Basically the same as what happened when hunter-gatherers switched to agriculture: more people but less healthy.
Coding Horror: Get Your Database Under Version Control
IT salaries in Japan comparable to US
Dr. Dobb's |  Concurrency and  Python
Ingenious. Made my (early) morning. Reminds me of this proof: "The less you know, the more you make"
http://tinyurl.com/yu2swe
Stanford and UIUC probably win in terms of startups just because of number of grads in the startup world, but I'm perfectly happy here at Carnegie Mellon...the job fairs are full of all the big-name software companies as well as some startups, we have a Google office literally next to campus, and the school is diverse enough that if you ever tire of the CS personality there are plenty of liberal arts folks, as well as a whole city full of college students. Granted, the weather isn't that great, but the classes are challenging, the professors are great, and the people are nerdy.

Of course, most everyone here is going to be pushing their alma mater, so my advice is to visit as many of the major CS schools as you can. You get a comparable education at all of them, I doubt one is that much better than the rest, so go with whichever one feels right. Ask random students walking to class about the best and worst thing about the school, ask about the courses and workload, and most importantly see if you like the area: distance from home, climate, how big-city it is. You're going to need to live there for 4(ish) years, you want somewhere that you'll enjoy living in so that you don't lock yourself in your room and burn out.

Oh, and if you're visiting CMU drop me a line, I'll show you around (current student).
"evolving human social structures" is just hand waving. What would the economics of your patent-less pharma world look like? Research dollars are a scarce resource - how will they be allocated and by who?
Yeah fair enough
MSFT-YHOO: Some Conversation and Lots of Noise
Fault-Tolerant Partial Replication in Large-Scale Database Systems
Among other things, this is also about taking over the IM market. Yahoo+MSN together would be able to impose standards, and in case of acquisition the standards most likely will be closed or just partly open.

It is interesting that both MSN and Yahoo messengers are gaining customers largely based on the Eternal September effect. Once a user becomes more advanced, she usually abandons these toys and moves on to better tools. What I am trying to say is, an Eternal September-based market is shaky and if I were... well, whoever - I wouldn't bid on a shaky market. (But then maybe that's the reason I'm not "whoever" and I can't bid.)
IPv6 kicks in
"in orbit" (getting a startup to profitability)
magic / the worm Ouroboros
For this deal to have any kind of upside for Microsoft, they need to focus their energies on combining their search technologies and their AdWords technology and ignore everything else, let the existing Yahoo org run it.

Don't waste your efforts on branding, don't waste your efforts on trying to consolidate your data centers, keep your eye on the ball.
This is a nice thought experiment. We all know it proves nothing and at the same time, formally, it does prove something.

Let's get back to PG's original essay. What he says essentially is, if the goal of high-level languages is to make computer instructions (programs) shorter, then making them even shorter might be the ultimate goal of any high-level language. The shorter the better. Sounds like a very valid point.

However, there's something I think PG omits or disregards - the complexity of the language in terms of the total number of abstractions introduced, which intuitively should be low as well. In Lisp, which itself is a succinct language, you may have a framework with some number of functions in one case, and an equivalent framework with fewer functions in another case. Same applies to built-in constructs and notions - you may have fewer notions that cover same scenarios or vice versa, both producing (roughly) the same length in terms of tokens. But clearly, there's a difference and we'd prefer the framework that has fewer functions/abstractions/notions to remember.

So if we agree on this, Arc' is bad because it introduces more notions while achieving no or very little effect, if not harm actually.
"as well as at least the option to learn newer technologies (AJAX, stuff used in web startups)"

Don't bother. Learn to program, don't learn a language or a technology.

You can (and should!) do AJAX+RoR on your own. Learn how to think about programming.

I loved MIT. But I also went XVI (aero eng) because I've always felt that a direct approach is a mistake. I got to learn about rockets and aircraft and learn how to apply CS by taking all of those classes too.
there is, its called "its all text". It works for any text editor, actually.
You need a different counterexample. Arc' programs have more nodes than Arc programs.

In Arc, parens only define the structure of the parse tree. They carry no additional information. In Arc' the compiler's behavior must change based on the type of paren. You need an additional node of information for each paren pair to know its type. Thus Arc' programs are substantially longer when measured by nodes.
From my experiences, I would discount most CS programs. Software Engineering may be a better fit for what you're describing, especially the entrepreneurial part.

I attend the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Software Engineering curriculum here is top-notch. I would not hesitate to recommend it.
Funny correlation. Would be worth verifying quantitatively.

However beware of confusing correlation with cause-effect relation. We don't know which one could be the cause of the other or there could be a hidden common cause. For instance, if weather is good, people go outside and don't do piracy. If weather is bad, people stay at home and look for entertainment. These are just examples.

A funny story is the one with the London taxi drivers. A survey has pointed out a positive and significant correlation between the number of accidents and wearing coats. It was assumed that coats could hinder movements of drivers and be the cause of accident. A new law was prepared to prohibit drivers to wear coats when driving.

Finally another study pointed out that people wear coats when it rains! Rain was the hidden factor common to wearing coat and accident frequency.
Good god. Pizdaus links on yc news? Say it ain't so.