skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the crucial thing:

Unrated links default to Safe-For-Work.

The extension becomes useless if the ratings don't keep up with content (in other words, if some dude posts a nudie picture of his girlfriend, it's got to be rated before I get to it or your extension doesn't help me).
"Sorry :("

Nah, that's ok. ;) CL isn't really for me, now. As I said, common lisp, right now, is too much work. Who knows what Arc 2020 will be like? ;)
In Arc, as written by a n00b:

(= f [+ (sqrt abs._)
(* 5 expt._.3)])
(= a '())
(repeat 11
(= a (cons (coerce (read) 'int) a)))
(each i a
(let f_i f.i
(if (> f_i 400)
(prn i " TOO LARGE")
(prn f_i))))

Not sure if reversing-while-reading is considered "cheating", but it seems natural to do it with a cons.
Atari user's desk, circa 1983
I see your point, but I respectfully disagree with the notion that you need a new solution to grab some of this money. If there was a credible company that offered an exact clone of AdSense (i.e., no further innovation) but they paid more, I believe people would switch. I know I would.
Prejudiced.
I agree that lisp can be made readable. And C can be made unreadable.

OTOH lisp encourages deep nesting, which makes it harder to be readable. Here's a rougly equivalent program, if I read the lisp correctly.

void test-+()
{
*test-name* = test-+;
another-var = foo;
assert( 1+2 == 3 );
assert( 1+2+3 == 5 );
assert( -1 + -3 == -4 );
}

I'm not saying that this is any better than the lisp equivalent - the lisp function is certainly more elegant. But because C is procedural/stateful, it's more natural to have flatter programs.

And flat programs are easier to make legible, because you're less tempted to put multiple things on a single line to avoid going another level deeper in your indenation.
Why? Is he using an alternative currency system? Does he do math in base 8? Is there some other flaw in reasoning that makes this argument not worth listening to?
I could change that, but won't it would get too annoying (for a fresh data-set) ?
That paragraph originated from Wikipedia, and is not really correct. "Till", like "ain't" and "their" (for his-or-her), is old and begrudgingly accepted, but not considered proper English. Sure, Shakespeare used "till", but he also wrote "wherefore". 'til is the preferred form.

Not that any of this actually matters a whit.
Still, this is a deal killer.
Mine had a simulated woodgrain finish.
..Which in turn means this should be a feature of a plugin like 8aweek, or maybe 8aweek could be a feature of this plugin :)
I can't help but think that people who want to replace HTML+CSS+JS haven't written a widely used web application before, because the idea seems so absurdly impractical and would become such an incredible time sink.
Git's avalanche
I was actually making a reference to the cellphone conversations mentioned in the article.
> "I think that certainly...TechCrunch 50 is a great venue for young companies," Shipley said by phone from Madrid, Spain. "But to put it up against Demo means those companies are now going to be competing for attention, and I just don't see how that's good for entrepreneurs."

Actually it gives entrepreneurs value by letting them choose between spending $0 for, say, half the attention formerly held at Demo, or by paying Demo's fees for half the attention formerly held at Demo.

Sounds great for entrepreneurs, terrible for Demo. ;-)

> Still, she suggested Arrington's assertion that Demo needs to die is unfortunate.

> "I'm not certain why it must die," Shipley said. "I think that there is a lot of room in the market for products and services that support entrepreneurs. And I don't see how it's a benefit to (the entrepreneurial ecosystem) to kill off a platform that's all about supporting entrepreneurs."

Hey, that's exactly the opposite of her previous argument! What is the word for when a hypocrite hypocritically uses different standards for different people in similar situations, in a hypocritical manner? Oh, yes: hypocrisy.
Cholesterol, Caffeine and Alzheimer Disease-like Pathology in Rabbit Brain
I understand this would raise red flags for a yc type crowd.

Would the average surfer feel as strongly ?
Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 Released; Supports BlackBerry and Java Phones
I use Parenscript and LML2. There are a profusion of such libraries (although for CSS I wrote my own simple thing). I'm very happy with the abstractions I'm able to layer on top of them with macros.

One thing it took me a while to realize about the Lisp world is why there tends not to be standard frameworks or libraries for some of this stuff. The answer is that, for certain kinds of problems (basically, anything involving metaprogramming), it's actually easier to solve your problem yourself than to learn someone else's framework and then use it to solve your problem. A good example would be unit testing... there are probably a dozen unit testing frameworks, none standard, none much used. The reason is that the frameworks don't add much value over what a programmer can easily do for himself, with all the advantages that implies. I think this may also be why web app frameworks are less prominent in the Lisp world.

This is not the case with all libraries, of course. CL-PPCRE adds huge value, to pick an obvious example, but not in the class of problem I'm talking about.
Engineering 'mindset' doesn't include politics
DHH on the pluses of PHP
Github really is great. If you haven't used it, and claim not to be a fan of Git, you should really check it out. It almost manages to make Git seem friendly, even; Suddenly, forking isn't a dirty word any more (and it shouldn't be, this is OSS!).

Tools like Github and Gitorious make Git palatable, and are also interesting from a 'social graph' point of view, where relationships amongst Geeks are measured by the lines drawn between the projects they work on or are interested in...
Hi, Ken. Thanks for the reply.

I think what's happening currently in programming is that lisp-isms are filtering through to other languages. What used to be unique lisp-juice is available more generally, so the switch to lisp isn't perhaps as compelling.

Anyway. I'm off to write that metacircular evaluator in c# ;)
> The latter are not vertical systems. They're middleware that the client expects to integrate with existing systems (paying huge consulting bills in the process, though they may not know it yet).

Agreed. Tools to abstract workflow can be useful. My impression is that whether middleware tools to abstract workflow can be useful depends largely on how well they integrate with the overall toolset being used. Ours works because it's fully embedded in the tools. Standalone solutions may or may not work. I'm hearing good early returns from a friend using Microsoft WF in an all-Microsoft shop, but (1) it's still too soon to tell whether it's really a success, and (2) solving the all-MS solution is a much smaller problem than a universal workflow engine or even a general-purpose Java workflow engine.

> Sooner or later the vendor decides that their in-house framework is so great that they've really solved the problem of enterprise software development in general. Now they "just" need to package it up as a platform.

Actually, we're exactly at the point of trying to figure out whether our tools useful to VARs and client-level users, or whether it's really only useful to us. And, yes, figuring out whether we can increase product revenues as a percentage of our overall revenue mix.

> Of course even in the success stories (SAP?) the consulting role is still huge.

Unequivocally. However, if we succeed in working with VARs and technically savvy clients, we would be offloading most of the consulting work to them by building expertise outside our organization.

I won't pretend that I think it's a lock to succeed at a problem a lot of people have failed at, but since we're not really risking our core business model to try, it seems like a reasonable gamble as a way to grow the business faster.
The point is that "requires you to think" is not a feature, it is a bug, because that thinking could be put to better use on whatever it is the program is trying to solve. Everything else being equal, this means that language features that can be used without much thinking will do better than language features that can't.
We've had guys right out of college throw map applications together pretty quickly. All the hard work is done by others.
some of this money != viable
If anyone else had written this, it wouldn't be worth noting.
I realize that in a way I am just restating what other people have said, but it seems very odd to me that this complaint would even come up in 2008. We are living in a time when Linux distributions have amazing package management that make Apple and Microsoft seem primitive in comparison. If your distribution can't do that, it's time to switch. I like Ubuntu personally. I have several different dialects of lisp installed and a slime environment in emacs. It took me a matter of literally seconds to install each one of them. Just apt-get install sbcl or if you're using a distribution that uses yum, then yum install sbcl. Or clisp, or whatever else you want to try using.
Well that's no fun. With IM or email you can talk to 50 people at once.

Or are you referring to business communications? I'm sure that no one in the US undervalues the effectiveness and persuasiveness of voice communication for critical negotiations.

On second reading, I think you're just referring to the resistance of old people to new technology?
I just set this up to coordinate a local user group and I've got to say it's pretty nice. Looking through these comments, I can see they've incorporated a lot of the feedback. Here are some observations (turned into its own blog post):

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/using-coordinatr-t...
Built-in data structures are a big point of categorization of langs on my end. To me, the defining feature of Java is its classical structure. If you got rid of classes, you'd have a different language (in the interface sense). And interface is really all I'm talking about.

I'm basically just asserting that objects (should) == hashtables. This is quite literal in JavaScript. Other languages bend the metaphor in different directions, and obscure it to that no one even knows what "object-oriented" really means beyond particular idiosyncratic syntax in this language or that.

PG of course talked about this before, in Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented:

> I've done a lot of things (e.g. making hash tables full of closures) that would have required object-oriented techniques to do in wimpier languages ...

I'd argue that he was employing genuine object-oriented techniques, but just didn't have classical syntax and didn't consider what he had an "object." Other languages make a point about it, and use special syntax, which fogs the whole thing. Perhaps some people in "OO" mindsets have the kind of naivete that C-only hackers I've met have about first-class functions.

Actually, I just realized the whole reason C++, Java, C#, and co. have "methods" in the first place is just compensation for not having first-class functions you can stick in a hashtable.
It may well be that it only really becomes apparent on larger projects. It's hard to get to that point, though, and maybe that's why the takeup is low.

OTOH, some languages are particularly good on small things, but don't offer much help for large problems.
Does anybody have Xoopit? I find myself hitting the hide button more often than not...email is secure and I'm not ready to open up this in-box.
it kind of depends. in general, its best from a planning or PM perspective (and probably important to people funding you) to know the big four: timeline, size, cost, quality.

exactly what you use to measure each one is flexible. they might not be important for a startup to track thoroughly, but its good to know the general neighborhood you're in on each point. funding won't last forever.
I don't necessarily agree that those languages are dead either. I was just clarifying the point I thought he was trying to make. Plus I wanted to turn pg into an adjective :)
ITunes beats out WalMart and BestBuy, now top retailer
Weblocks does this (sort of). I've just read about it, not actually used it much.

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/ui-dsl.html
His argument is based on guesses and assumptions, including:

- Uncertain data: "We've struggled to get formal business metrics for Craigslist"

- Assumptions -- count how many times he says "let's assume"

- Doesn't acknowledge potential competition

- Doesn't note that Newmark has repeatedly ruled out selling Craigslist

You don't think these are problematic?
There are various coworking spaces across the country. (Notice that's coworking with a little "c.")

Here ya go:
http://coworking.pbwiki.com/
I suspect there's a good bit of truth in your statement. I feel compelled to point out that it's incredibly short-sighted of programmers to think that way. Programmers spend a lot more time reading code than writing it, and it's hard to read code that doesn't use the right abstractions.
Wisconsin voters... fancy ... governor’s ability to ... veto ... with ... creativity
Or what happens in that subroutine.

Or the performance characteristics of that library.

Or the fencepost cases of a loop.

Or which exceptions to handle.

...
So programmers who work with objects and methods don't have to think about them, while programmers who work with macros do? Sorry, but this just seems ludicrous to me.

Perhaps what you mean is that when a construct is unfamiliar to a programmer then they have to think harder about how to use it?

http://www.google.com/search?q=blub
I'd tend to agree on those who want to replace HTML/CSS/JS with some other abstraction. What I'm suggesting is that they're arbitrarily divided and should be unified under one syntax, which then compiles into the served "bytecode." JSON would probably make the most sense. But, as you suggest, it would take some time to get it right. So I'm sticking to doing it by hand, all divided up, for now. Maybe after our startup launches...
i'm having trouble justifying a rewrite of something that works really well as-is

You're different from a lot of hackers I know.

Seriously, though, you probably will eventually rewrite most of it if you turn it into a startup. And often when people rewrite things they're glad afterwards. It will probably take less time than working out a deal with the university, and be much more interesting for you.
Although I definitely think you're correct, it's an important point none the less. A lot of us get so caught up in bashing PHP usage for large apps that we forget it's really great for small throwaway scripts and prototyping mini-apps.

DHH pointing this out reminds us that even someone super devoted/entrenched in the RoR world can see the utility of it for this kind of use case, and that the rest of us should as well.
I don't know the specific reasons why CL and Scheme are not very popular for those things; my general answer is that they're adapted to other things (like classrooms and smart students' brains). My point is that it's very hard to figure out, and so the best bet is probably to let a new dialect evolve in response to the demands of one or some of those environments.
On Markets and Complexity with Economist Robert C. Merton
That's a nicely written, approachable article for those of us who have forgotten much of our university studies.

I should add that anyone wanting to put fluid dynamics into their program might also wish to google about for papers on opengl and GPUs performing the calculations.

To see a game that makes an interesting use of fluid dynamics you could look at pop-pop from Ambrosia Software. Completely ungamerelated, but the background of the playing field appears to be a fluid simulation reacting to the play elements. It is beautiful and slightly hypnotic. (Game was built in a day of slower CPUs. The blockiness of the simulation reflects this.)
Another detail oriented bit for you guys:

There's a problem with your headers. The rounded corner sprite is a png and I believe, without doing too much testing, that difference in color profile rendering is causing it not to match the generated color of your columns.

Solution: use gif.
The best demonstration of that "big system" effect that I've seen, that's easy and small enough to read and comprehend, is the database[1] or unit testing[2] chapters in Practical Common Lisp. They show good examples of using macros and HOFs to completely remove boilerplate code, and that it's simple enough to do it for even simple boilerplate.

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-a-simple-database....

[2] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/practical-building-a-unit-te...
I agree that the C version is slightly more readable than the Lisp version, but this slight improvement comes to a big price which is the difficulty to programmatically parse and generate C code.
The average surfer probably would not feel as strongly. The average surfer is correspondingly unlikely to install plugins for Firefox.
Why do you need to rewrite links to your server? Can your extension not insert JavaScript to do most of this logic client-side?
Yeah, this is an issue in Safari. We didn't use gif because we wanted to keep the "custom background" option open.
Seems like this should be settable. If I want to be uber-cautious, not rated should default to NSFW. Also, maybe a white/black list of domains the user knows to be safe/unsafe for themselves?
Still not really worth noting. It shouldn't take a celebrity telling you the obvious for you to acknowledge it.
Justify it by thinking of the dollars in your pocket. Right now, none, after rewrite, (possibly) many.

Sounds like a justification to me. :-)
This is not about technology at all, it's about ways to communicate. As I said, differences are larger than most people realize.

Here is another example not related to tech or "old people". A co-worker had a birthday party few weeks ago. The next Monday I had a "Thank you" card on my desk, even though he's sitting next door. You see, a card like this will only freak a Russian out: a card? why? couldn't he have said something instead?

This is why IM and SMS picked off very quickly over there. I've met people with ICQ numbers on their business cards as early as mid 90s: these media fit their culture better. Email is just like a birthday card: too detached, too impersonal, not real-time, etc. The only email I ever get from my parents always contains short and usual "Call us", everything else is too important to be shared "indirectly".

It's all changing, of course. And my views and memories may be getting a little rusty (haven't been there since '02), but culture does play a major role in everything we do, including preferences for technologies.
Actually it uses Javascript to rewrite links.

But the info about links being safe of not are contained in the server links.
I could pre-emptively get info about all links, but that would slow down Firefox.
Ask YC: Bootstrapping to the Nth degree - How far is too far?
I am designing my first web application for the masses at home during nights and weekends. My day job consists of programming and database design so I do have some coding experience.

I am trying to get this one idea to become a reality as cheaply as possible.

I have already purchased a domain address and have it pointed at my single-user DSL line at home. Doing this voilates my "user agreement" with my carrier but I figure that I can upgrade to a business line if I can drive enough/any people to my site.

I have my own doubts and would like to know what everyone else thinks about this.

Am I not going far enough to get my product established? Should I be leasing a slice of equipment at a co-lo? Is there a minimum amount of money needed to have a fair go at creating a successful, revenue generating web app?

I know that I should definitely have confidence in my vision, but I do not want to throw excessive cash at something that possibly could not have a chance of bringing money back.

I figure I can take more than one shot at a successful outcome if I can keep my costs as low as possible for the execution of any one idea.

The big questions: When bootstrapping, is there a minimum investment beyond which is just crazy? How far is too far?
Where are the fast dynamic languages?
Installing Lisp? Hell, I have two Ubuntu boxes at home that I can’t connect to the internet.

There’s always the XP partitions for when I need to get things done, though.
Not true. If Guido van Rossum had written it, it would definitely be worth noting.

It would be noteworthy if any evangelist for any programming language that is not PHP said something like this.
Did anyone actually install the plugin :) ?
I would appreciate any bug reports / feedback.
Just out of curiosity, did you like working in Lisp? I mean, if you can abstract away from the annoyances you cited, did you actually enjoy the Lisp mode of programming (basically, writing syntax trees)?
Just tried whitehouse.com and it said it's safe for work. i couldn't figure out how to vote on the site (without using the plugin).
For now you can only vote via the extension.
And the site is pretty much empty, so all sites default to safe.
Thank you! These are all problems I noticed, too. Interestingly enough, when I went into 'view source' and changed the byline to 'ilamont', the problems were still there. Almost as if they had nothing to do with the author.

In fact, the whole article is pretty specious. 'Value', as ex-analyst Blodget surely knows, can refer to either the price someone else will pay for an asset, or the present value of the future cash flows generated by that asset. The first one doesn't make sense because Newmark says he won't sell; the second invalidates all of the assumptions in the article because Newmark appears determine to run it the way he likes it. By that standard, CL is probably worth something like $250 million.
I (((((((have)))))never)been))able))(((to))understand)why((((((it is)))unpopular))))
So what do you want to do about it?

Get some googlers to co-found with me, ideally...
I think even just MzScheme could become viable if the untyped stuff gets a bit more polished and there is just a lib everyone can agree on called "pragmatic.ss" that pulls in the relevant SRFIs.

Most of lisps problems these days stem from social issues and logistical issues. The core tech is excruciatingly sound, and the language itself is great.

To someone out in the startup circles, it almost seems like Lisp and Scheme focus more on being a standard than being a pragmatic and global platform. While noble, this is not the path to massive popularity. Some people might be okay with that, but it seems to me like you could serve both goals and end up with an overall better product.
I am saying that working with objects and methods requires less high-level cognitive processing than macros and continuations, not that you don't have to think about them.
This is because the brain can treat the objects largely as if they were physical objects. With macros that is much harder.

No, I don't mean unfamiliar. Things like parentheses and prefix notation are unfamiliar to many people, but once learned, they don't require much more cognitive processing than other notation. There are several things in Java that are similarly weird until you learn them.
Upper limit on your own investment should be set by you. Some sort of function of how much money you can spare to part with and how much confidence you have that your project will generate a financial return.

I use a virtual private server, atop which I have tried offering a variety of web services. The cost is pretty cheap. It seems a decent way to experiment while keeping my dayjob... I built up a library of functions to use, and can often whip out a version one in a few weeks of part-time work. If my prototype seems to be a waste of time, and/or I can't convince enough people it's a good idea, I either move on to something else or try it again.