skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am playing around with it, and it is good and bad at the same time.

The good:

1.Their SDK and emulator are pretty good, even at this early stage (few bugs). Not everything is documented, but at this early stage it is good enough.

2.There is a lot flexibility, many widgets to choose. It is very powerful when you compare to other platforms. Lot's of layouts, lots of things you can use. You almost feel like a kid on the candy store, not knowing what to eat first.

3.You can do UI both programatically or with predetermined descriptors (xml). In large applications this is pretty useful.

4. There is a resource file called R, which get's autogenerated and includes all the resources. Given my experience, (I have a Constants file in very popupal J2ME app my company is doing, that does the exact thing) it would end up with too much stuff into it. Very useful for small applications though.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

>>>>

>>>
The Bad:

1.The API is not elegant as it could have been. Some classes extend other classes, which extend other classes, the result? Something like Gallery,class has over 50 methods, and a bunch of constants.

2. They included everything that is under the sun, making it confusing, as there are 10s of ways to do something. This is a Java problem also, but their API made it worse. (compare it with the pythonic way of thinking as there should be one very obvious and easy way to do something).

3. Too much XML.(which I really disslike). You can describe screens, and UI with XML descriptors, (xml is very lame, something more looking like CSS would have been much better). Even the Manifest is fricking XML. There was absolutely no need for this. Sun's J2ME has the manifset in plain text, which makes it simpler.

4. Wierd namings and terminologies, make it confusing to get started. Events, are called Intents, there icicle, bundle, and all other really wierd naming allover this place. Did they do it purposely, so beginners will be so confused and wont be able to do anything with it?

>>>>>>>>>

So, KISS was defenitetly not the mantra when building the android. It was more "Let's include everything under the sun", so the developers will like it. Well, that's great, but don't give me 10s of way to do something, which are just little variants of each other, and none does the exact thing I want to do.

Since I do Java for living, and Python for fun, I can say that I was slightly disapointed by android. Lot's of power, but not elgant enough to be called a perfect platform.

So, yes, I probably would be developing for it, but not necessary just for fun.
no, the ui is programmatic also. But if you just follow their examples, they mostly use the xml descriptor, which I find are not useful for small applications.
Amazon's hot new item: its data center
This article is OK. I thought it was unfortunate that there is no mention of the late Jef Raskin, who covers zoomable interfaces at length in his book, The Humane Interface.
The peanut butter jar is empty
You were there? So was I - too bad, it would have been nice to meet somebody from news.yc...
This works for information that's physical or pictorial. The examples cited in the article (e.g. Google Earth) fit into this category. Other forms of information (literary, musical, social, mathematical, you name it) aren't nearly as easy to represent this way. There's a reason why humans use symbolic notation.
It was. You probably care not, but:

http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20080128/0482...
This game is about pure numbers. Color coding is good, backgrounds are distracting. If anything, I would only recommend polishing the rest of the site. Music could be optional, but I would opt for sound effects over background music. In any case, I'm almost addicted to this game. Keep up the good work! I'm going to go play some more...
I think YC is a great concept.

It is actually not a VC but more like an adoption agency that takes promising orphans off the street (not based on needs and not based more merits, but based on genetic match) ... feed them and cloth them, then send them off to foster parents (real VC's) who can afford to bring them up properly.

I don't mean to be harsh. And I have great respect for everyone who is involved with YC. And I am certainly not trying to be a sour grape.

I am just saying that it is unique.
Arc seems to embody the idea that "Language design is library design, and vice-versa", but how can we tell where the boundry is?

When I look at something like

(defop said req
(aform [w/link (pr "you said: " (arg _ "foo"))
(pr "click here")]
(input "foo")
(submit)))

what I see is more or less ordinary lisp that uses a library to solve an issue with applications that rely on http. I'm sure plenty of us could do the equivalent with the appropriate Python/Perl/Php/Ruby library, but then the obvious criticism would be that you're not really comparing lanugages. You would be comparing libraries.

Plenty of examples over here: http://arclanguage.com/item?id=722

Is it really the case that when you boil it down, Arc (language+libraries) is about making small web programs? If not, why this challenge and if so I suspect it won't live up to the 100-year idea.
We launched http://bug.gd in late 2007 as a way for everyone to search and capture solutions to error messages. Happily, it was covered on TechCrunch, Digg, Mashable, etc. Exciting stuff. We recently created a full Firefox extension that makes it even more natural. http://bug.gd/download

bug.gd plans to drive its revenue through corporate intranet sales of our software and P2P helpdesk solutions. The public-facing error database is expected to always be free and ad-free as a consequence.

Interesting primarily to places like YC, we're about to announce our http://featurelist.org which is really just a tool we use for our feature tracking and thought we'd open it up to the world. It's a free little Reddit-inspired site for startups and open source projects to let their community vote on features. Anyone can host a project there and have users visit http://featurelist.org/MYPROJECT to request/vote on features. This will probably go public beta in a couple of weeks, but it's really just a gift back to the community more than anything we want to make $$$ with.

Very, very busy lately. Back to work. :)
Yes. (No sarcasm.)
Cool idea. Good luck with it.
Microsoft/Yahoo: A Bad Deal For Silicon Valley
> Though simple, as such tests have to be, this is not a contrived example. Web apps have to do this sort of thing all the time.

No. Web app prototypes do that sort of thing all the time. For production web apps, the problem ends up including such confounding factors as meeting accessibility policy, making the HTML surrounding the form elements match what a web designer came up, etc. The more web development work I do, the more wary I am of any system that writes HTML for me. Inevitably the system ends up putting too many constraints on what HTML can be output.

Witness the ASP.NET framework, which writes lots of HTML for you. Unlike Arc it was written with the best practices of the time in mind, but it's aged badly as the web has grown and changed. Doing accessible, cross-browser, standards-based work in ASP.NET today involves a certain amount of fighting the framework which offsets the initial productivity gains.

I understand that Arc is intended for exploratory work and rapid prototyping. But that's exactly why the Arc challenge is meaningless. We're being asked to compare Arc to languages that provide -- dare I say it -- a great deal more flexibility and expressive power when it comes to outputting HTML.

So here's my challenge: Take a sample Arc application and modify it to replace tables with appropriate block elements that have designer-specified IDs and classes. Use <label> elements for each input if you aren't already. Replace a few regular submit buttons with image buttons or vice versa. Reorder some elements, and throw a few more arbitrary containers in here and there. Compare that process against a conventional language and let's see where we get.

In my line of work, that kind of scut work is absolutely part of prototyping. Before I can build the real thing my prototype has to be approved by people who have a hard time looking past even minor visual inconsistencies with what they're used to. For that reason I'm very wary of any design that makes fine-grained control of HTML any harder than it has to be, and I've come to value clean view/everything else separation even in early prototypes.

I suspect that Arc is much more appealing to people who don't live with such constraints.
Rolling along with about 25 new users per day. Getting ready to launch the first round of user-requested and pre-planned features. So far it has been a lot of fun! My main problem is I built the site to scratch an itch and now that it exists I use it myself so much I don't work on features enough.
Note: I posted this at http://arclanguage.org/item?id=1043 as well. It's kind of weird having this topic on both YC news and Arc news.

Suppose instead of being a temporary state of affairs, YC/Arc news were to support cross-forum discussions. How simple would that be to support in Arc as it is today? I.e. no fair adding something like (crosspost) to the core libraries.
It's true that this example will do more to distinguish Arc from other languages than from other Lisp dialects. But if I'd used a Lispy sort of problem as a challenge, everyone would have accused me of cheating by using an example that favored Lisp dialects.

I'll eventually post some comparisons of the same programs in Arc and other Lisp dialects.
Yeah... I asked Dan a question in the first group of the 'internals' session after the introduction, if you happened to be in that group. I stuck around pretty much until the end. Would have been fun to meet up indeed.
Do you consider News.YC a mere prototype? It's been around for a year, never gets runtime errors, and serves about 80k pages a day without breaking a sweat. And the source is full of code like this.

I think you're confusing types of software with organizations that sponsor them.

Arc certainly wasn't designed for use in the sort of environment where programs are 10% functionality and 90% the embodiment of the random bureaucratic processes of the organization paying for them. More for the opposite end of the spectrum, in fact. That's where you need power.

That said, if you care to make your challenge a precise one, it's likely I (or someone else) would try implementing it in Arc, if only out of curiosity.
That's horrible. I really grieve for her other child. Tremendously sad.

To me, it's also a reminder that private flight is still quite dangerous. Airline flight is seven times safer than driving, but driving a car is seven times safer than general aviation. Lots of fun, no doubt, but make sure your will is in order.
A Green Energy Industry Takes Root in California
Stephen Fry introduces the open source platform that will see off Windows
Here is my contrived example:

How would you, in your favorite language, implement a program that displays GDP information for every country for years from 1970-2007 using a nice graph. Countries should be selectable using a fancy popup menu that displays country name and country shape...

Using Mathematica 6:

MenuView[Row[{Rasterize[
Show[CountryData[#, "Shape"], ImageSize -> {40, 40}],
Background -> None], #}] ->
Dynamic[DateListPlot[CountryData[#, {{"GDP"}, {1970, 2005}}]]] & /@
CountryData[], ImageSize -> Automatic]
Yahoo Deal Is Big, but Is It the Next Big Thing?
What did you do differently between the success and failure?
Paul, in emphasising code brevity I think you are missing a greater good. I believe most of us subconsciously look for a language that is frictionless -- one that allows us to express our ideas without the language getting in the way. To me this is a far more appropriate measure of a language's power than the length of a program. I'd love a language that would allow me to stay in flow* and express my creativity without having to stop and think about the actual language itself. That would be the ultimate Zen power tool.

To be more specific here are three attributes that seem to aid frictionless flow. (perhaps in order of importance) -

--> Expressiveness -- i.e. simple, explicit and unambiguous abstractions.

--> Obviousness and readability. -- i.e. no need to decipher tokens, and the code structure illuminates the intention and flow of the process.

--> Terse. -- i.e. apart from the obvious benefit of requiring less work it also helps me 'keep the whole program in my head'.

There's nothing wrong with brevity of course, but when pursued for it's own sake it seems to be counter productive, in that when you focus on terseness alone there can be a tendency to ride roughshod over the more important attributes: expressiveness and obviousness. You then end up with code that's not as enjoyable to create and whose beauty is lost, except perhaps initially to it's creator.

BTW Paul, this is a great first shot, so a big thank you. I, for one, am routing for Arc to be a widespread success, if only so I can do most of what I need to do in a language that I really enjoy.

* On Flow -> http://www.life2point0.com/2006/06/the_little_book.html
AssociaDirect giving away a $5000+ Website to a Non-Profit Organization
Where'd you get those statistics? I was under the impression that the opposite was true (regarding general aviation).
Rethink your exit now
A Revolution in Computing Is Taking Shape
Flickr Rebellion Brews at Specter of M$ Acquisition
"A small but vocal minority on Flickr are already staging online protests at the prospect of a Microsoft takeover. Flickr is one of several popular Web 2.0 websites owned by Yahoo that loyal users fear will suffer under Microsoft ownership."
Bureaucracy isn't the only reason to care about, or have to modify, HTML. Things like accessibility and browser compatiblity matter too, and that ground is constantly shifting. Beyond that, there aren't a whole lot of people outside the world of hackers and scientists who don't care about aesthetics. That means that the overwhelming majority of us will end up working for people who care how stuff looks, even at the prototype stage. That's not bureaucracy, it's human nature.

Every time I've let somebody else's tools write HTML for me, it's caused me grief. Either because the tool author had an agenda that was at odds with my needs (Microsoft), because of bugs in the tool (everyone), or because the problem set shifted since the tool was written as browsers and techniques changed (everyone). Likewise, I'm wary of entertwining HTML output with the rest of the program the way Arc does because it makes it too much work to change things down the line.

It would be interesting to write a templating system that separates HTML output without making Arc programs take much longer to write. I suspect that it could be done, but it's not entirely clear to me what shape it would take. If done right it would give users the option to leverage Arc's existing HTML output functions where desired. I'll have to play with it.
When did web sites become "properties"?
Seems like one of those faddish language things. When did it come to pass, exactly? I suppose it appeals because "property" sounds a lot more concrete than "web site".
Interesting to see the things people are doing.

A few months ago, 2 of my friends from college and I came up with an idea for allowing people to create polls online and give them tools to look at the results in more detail. Only problem was none of us knew anything about web programming and design. We learnt a lot from reading forums, through w3schools and other websites. After more than 6 months of tinkering and working pretty much on weekends (2 of us work as bankers), we came up with PollBag (www.pollbag.com). Its probably a bit amateur but would love to know what you think. We are always looking to get constructive feedback.
They called them that at Yahoo in 1998. I think it's derived from the entertainment industry, which Y was then trying to imitate.
Spot on. The re-organization along old-media lines accelerated when Semel took over, all the way down to separate budgets, server allocations, and almost no communication between the "properties".

Frankly, I don't know what the fuck they were thinking... the most obvious effect of the internet on business is how it dissolves structures like that.
Social Graph visibility akin to pain reflex
What are programming languages for?
How about this: make news.yc look right in Dillo (http://www.dillo.org).
Just updated with Google's Social Graph API and NoseRub.

BTW anyone starting to get a bit nervous about Social Graph API?
How do you pick an idea (from the many) to follow?

How do you pick your team and hire?

(I've asked many people, always good to get another opinion)
His new rules:

- The big bounce is gone.

- Television ads don't matter as much as they used to.

- Technology allows a candidate to raise money quickly and inexpensively.

- Debates are a great way to come on late and make up for a lack of resources and endorsements.

His old rules:

- Appealing to one part of the party isn't enough.

- Adapt or die.

- Bad exit polls shape coverage.

- Win early somewhere or run darned close.

- Joining the race a lot later than everyone else doesn't work.

- Money still cannot substitute for likability or message or broad appeal.

- Ideas still matter.

Some of these seem remarkably similar to startup company tips we've seen here many times.
I think I've noticed it a lot more as of late, but of course it could be that once I noticed it, now I notice it more often...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=web+properties

This seems to vaguely support the theory that widespread use of the term is more recent, although it only goes back to 2004.
A flight instructor once told me that flying single-engined piston planes was statistically about as dangerous as riding motorcycles, which I assume is more dangerous than driving cars.
Well it's really hard to point to one, or even a few things that made the difference. But I'll give it a shot in no particular order:

1) Build something people want now - Notice the "now". My first startup revolved around searching and indexing information (think somewhere in between Google and del.icio.us). We did this before google came onto the scene and while altavista was still the king. Nobody understood what we were trying to do because we were a few years ahead of the pack.

2) Know your tech - I don't know how much it applies here since this is a pretty technical crowd. I'm a business guy (was anyway, in the startup I'm working on now I do the damn programming myself...) and in my first venture I didn't really have a grasp of the technology involved, which led me to some bad decisions. In the second one I purposefully absorbed technical information, and had a good grasp of what was going on in the technical department. Which wasn't easy since it involved both embedded programming, Phone carrier networks, hardware development and web programming. The same probably applies if you are the tech guy - learn bookkeeping, marketing, etc. if you don't know it.

3) Luck

4) Experience - having failed the first time it was much easier to see upcoming problems and what to do about them in the second.

5) Execution - In the first startup we thought we had the greatest product on earth and that it would sell itself as soon as somebody gave us the money to build it. In the second one I had learned that what matters most is execution. Making sure investors are happy, taking care of cashflow, making and keeping schedules, bookkeeping, extuingishing fires of different sorts, etc. The idea isn't really that important - it's all about how you execute it.

6) Don't get too many ideas. In the first startup we had a great idea, and then another, and another, and another. And we lost focus. In the second we stuck with the idea, unless there was a good business reason not to.

7) People - My first startup was with a guy that was really smart, but in the end just didn't have the stamina to go through all the boring everyday stuff and all the downturns that inevitably faces a startup. This dragged the whole venture down, since I eventually ended up having to do everything. Second time around all three founders worked their asses off. Oh, and make sure you start a company with people that can do stuff you can't. If you are the tech guy do a startup with a business guy. Make sure you have as many bases covered as possible in this respect.

8) Patents only matter to investors. Give me a week and I will come up with ten ideas that can be patented. But nobody really cares about that. All customers care about is your product. And ultimately your customers will decide whether you are a success.

Hope it helps :-)
I'm very interested in the Arc vs. Lisp comparisons. (especially vs. CL)
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these comp.lang.lisp guys? All the citations I have ever heard from that place consist of derision, ridicule and wiping the hard drives of unwary readers. Do they want their language to ever become anything but an intellectual curiosity used exclusively by hardcore hackers?
>How do you pick an idea (from the many) to follow?

Well to be totally honest, I just pick the one that I would most like to do that is still doable... The important thing is to stick to it once you've decided.

>How do you pick your team and hire?

I try to find people that I know, or people that I have heard of in some way. That way I know a little bit about their track record. It is really really hard though, and if I knew the perfect answer I would be writing best-sellimg management books :-)
Yahoo sale could be bad for minnows
> Can't come up with a decent name for thing!

"Turd Polisher" ? :-)
Code Raj?

Code East India Company?

Code Clive?

sorry...
CabooseConf (Rails)
The economy in the long run : an interactive Solow model
Interesting question. Yahoo hasn't actually been buying many startups for the last couple years, because they've been feeling pinched. So not much would change if they went away. Will the perception that there are fewer acquirers make a difference? I wonder.

Actually it would not be at all unlikely if, having acquired Yahoo, MSFT started to buy more startups through them. It would be a smarter channel for all that money.
It looks reasonable in "links" (could use an alt-tag or two)
Agreed, the rundown of the board is hilarious. And that criticism is spot on. Amazing really when their future will make or break based on their digital transformation.

As my main news source, I'm mostly satisfied by the coverage. While the Sulzbergers may get the most from the editorial mouthpiece, I don't see their influence on the main stories of the day. As the coverage tilts toward politics, I assume a bias, but the columnists help a bit there. Safire has essentially been replaced by Kristol though that to me seems to be more a sad reflection on the current status of American conservatism than on "The Paper of Record".
I believe disco had a similar uptick between 1976 and 1977. The trend didn't really hold there, either.
Good observation. That's what I was thinking, that MSFT would provide the funds Yahoo needs to purchase more startups.
bzr is fine, as long as you don't want to refactor anything. Ever.

(it doesn't track moving lines between files)
Book review: Experiments in Ethics (Xphi)
He criticizes them for not having internet-savvy people on the board, but the nytimes has a perfectly good, very popular website. I forget the statistics, but it gets something like 50x as many readers as the paper, and about 1/50th the revenue. The internet isn't going to save the print business.
For a hacker, the joy is in the journey
ask yc: application
i am stuck filling an application for summer cycle. the most confusing questions are the following:

Please tell us about the time you, zaqzaq, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

what is that supposed to be?