skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right about cond, but don't forget that cond and other Scheme syntax can be implemented as hygienic macros:

http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z...

Macros are a build-your-own-language construct, but to a certain extent so are functions. I agree that one should try functions first, but would not go so far as to put macros in the same category as using eval.
Could this be sampling bias, i.e., the kinds of startups that tend to do well in Boston are the kinds of startups that you and your team are not so interested in funding?

The startups that I've encountered in the Boston area tend to provide "enterprise" products and services, while the YC companies that I read about seem to be more consumer-oriented. ISTM that the two kinds of companies need different kinds of social networks to sell their wares and to raise capital.
If you put spaces in front of your code, news.yc will indent nicely.

(cond ((or (string=? "hello" my-string)
(string=? "world" my-string))
(print "match")))

(string-case= my-string
(("hello" "world") (print "match")))
FYI, my order from Amazon shipped today (I ordered it 5 days ago).
strangely, the customer might be happier than if the error never occurred at all.
The WHOIS deadlock
As far as I can tell, it's just [total submission points] + [total comment points]. Each vote is one point, each downvote is -1 point. And no, people with more karma do not have their votes weighted more heavily; my votes still count for 1 point like anyone elses. (There appears to be a karma threshold for downvoting comments, though.)
I lived in NYC for 2 years and have been in Boston for 3. New Yorkers care much less about the RedSox than Bostonians care about the Yankees.

Similarly, I have to agree with the grandparent that people in the valley don't think about Boston much.

But this navel-gazing turns me off. If you're working on a startup and want to live in Boston, just forget it and get to work.

Pining for a better environment is very different than building it.
Users are experts at clicking the back button as soon as they encounter a speed bump.
Yeah, $20 for a way underpowered (256megs?!) system with little storage. I guess that could work if you have a system that you want to scale up little by little, but I'm suspicious of VPS's after having had a few blow up on me and generally perform badly.

When comparing apples to apples, you want to look at LT's specials:

https://order.layeredtech.com/ConfigureServer.lt?method=disp...

Which is $20 setup and $70 a month, which is the same price as the slice system, only with double the storage and your own, real computer.
kyro, why don't you do this instead:

1) Pick a very easy tutorial for both of them
2) Do them
3) Choose

Framework will only get better each day so if today Rails deployment sucks, tomorrow it'll become better unless the growth is stagnant. Same case with Pylons or Django or the 100000000000000001 python frameworks out there.

Now if you're looking for a job, Rails would be a better choice because the hype marketing has converted a lot of people (they drink the kool-aid straight from the hose).
Coal mines can yield more coal without taking up more surface area. That's what mines are: they go underground.

Nuclear power requires orders of magnitude less land surface area. Waste produced can also scale underground. Yucca mountain doesn't actually take up much of the surface of Yucca mountain.
Web Developer Sells Name to Raise Start up Capital
what is this doing on hacker news? I see no reference of spiders coding, juggling startup finance issues or learning how to be productive while not eating for days on end.
College Drinking Game Spurs Cottage Industry; Mr. Best's Backup Career
Like Artix, Chain would have failed in its current form no matter how smooth it was polished. It was very important that we failed fast so that we could focus on morphing it into something that works. You lose that with perfectionism.

So you'd better be a Steve Jobs.
I notice a lot of animosity towards PG in Aaron's writings...
You don't need a plan, you need skills and a problem.
I have reservations about that name.
MS Office 2007 Ribbon now available in the Linux World
Researchers aim to make Internet bandwidth a global currency
Are taller people smarter?
Troublesome manager.. what would you do?
So I'm a senior at top 10 engineering university and since January I have been working as lead webdev on a large, sponsor/government-funded project. I've done everything from focus groups, usability studies, surveys and have been creating a top-notch site.

I was away for two weeks in the time between summer semester's end and the beginning of fall semester and got an email from my manager saying essentially "hey, I've been working with someone else on the site". What was created from that was a complete bastardization of the design and was all new code. I had lots of PHP for general ease of dev and the new guy did all 50+ files in html.

Fast-forward to yesterday, new guy won't be working on it anymore and my manager wants me to take over. I've looked at this guy's code and it's a horrible mess - I want nothing of it. Deadline is in about a week.

Going back to my code is an equally large task as he had been adding other pages, content and "design features".

What would you do? I'm sure I am not the only one that has had this problem.
The problem w/ perfectionism is that it's only perfect in the eyes of one person...
This comment made me think "wouldn't it be weird if PG owned a basketball team?"
Yes, I'm coining a new term - "pefectionism." Don't know what it means, I'll let the audience decide.
That open library project didn't last too long...
That's because bostonians care about the redsox way more than newyorkers care about the yankees. WAY more.
I like how they have to add "a rich sum for the time." It's like "You kids out there getting $50M Series C's, understand that $50M was a lot of money back then!"
A friend of mine joked that they should have changed the symbol to DTRC
+1 for an end to navel gazing and getting down to work.
Anything goes now remember? Someone will put some science spin on it and say that it's ok because it's not startup news anymore... it's hacker news now!
This is an excellent opportunity for Scribd to counterattack. I hope they're on the phone with Cory.
No, it's fine. The site's going to let you list famous people who you want to sign various body parts. It'll make for an interesting tag cloud.
"We suspect Paul Graham will not be very popular in Sunnyvale today."

What's that even mean? Who is "we"? This post is sensationalist to the max.
See the second comment on the following page:

http://greenoptions.com/2007/07/26/nuclear_power_is_green_re...

Re. "orders of magnitude" see the page below.

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/printable_versions/ge...

Quote: An entire geothermal field uses 1-8 acres per megawatt (MW) versus 5-10 acres per MW for nuclear operations and 19 acres per MW for coal power plants. Coal power plants also require huge acreages for mining their fuel. These mining operations can involve large-scale movement of earth for construction of underground mine shafts and tunnels, waste heaps, and/or open pits. Disturbed surfaces from open pit mining also can limit plant life participation in the carbon cycle and evapotranspiration, which replenishes water in the atmosphere. Adequate remediation of strip-mined areas can be expensive too.
In many ways, both Boston and Silicon Valley have a lot in common -- cities with character that attract likely startup founders, world class universities, a well developed VC community and so on. But they differ in a couple of ways (1) Boston is unbearably cold 6 months of the year (2) Silicon Valley has a more vibrant immigrant community. While (2) may not matter much in the case of Web related startups (for reasons that I cant really figure out, I have seen fewer immigrants gravitate towards founder positions in web based startups), the effect is more pronounced in the case of Enterprise startups. Every other enterprise startup in the Bay Area seems to have an immigrant as a co-founder -- often in the role of CTO or VP of Engg.
Domain Names: Rupert Murdoch takes website away from 7-year-old girl
The Living Room of the Future, from 1979 (pic)
From the comments...

>I went to law school. Everybody was short.

Yup, pretty much confirms it! :-)
I don't think this is a good way to evaluate a framework; tutorials don't necessarily bear much relation to the reality of using the tool.
Wow, that's a post with zero substance. I can't possibly vote this up.

Out of all the great stuff in Paul's last essay to comment on, this is the best they could do?
I think this is related to the brain volume being larger for taller people. Another paper showed that larger brain volume results in smarter people.

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mamcdani/Big-Brained%20article.pd...
Apparently, you can put a price on your dignity.
Just goes to show how difficult making predication about the future is: except for the domestic robot, none of those have been realized yet.
didn't you see that other post? he finished it!
Hmm...the average height at MIT is definitely significantly on the short side, even across all ethnic backgrounds.
I'm curious what you dislike about SQLAlchemy, the ORM, the SQL toolkit, or both?
Monster in a Wheelchair
I think brain volume is what matters. I think there's a correlation between height and brain volume, but perhaps it's weaker in some races, particularly those where most people are short.
First talk with your manager.
If necessary, talk to your manager's manager (or whoever has a say in it). Explain the situation. If possible, refuse to work on the "horrible mess".
That's risky, but it's better than letting your name be associated with that project forever.
if this were true it would be hard to explain asia...
1. What is your direct stake in the project? (tied to your grades? Large monetary investment?)

2. What is your extended stake in the project (manager have lots of connections? Is this industry leading and highly visible?)

3. What are the chances you will succeed if you start work again?

Based on the answers to these three questions (which I know will be difficult to obtain) you should make one of the following choices:

1. Politely refuse to work on the project, saying you've committed to other things and do not want to over-extend yourself.

2. Bite the bullet and fix the project based either on you code or the current mess. (and shut up about things until you're done) Walk away once released.

3. Perform some type of negotiations with the manager: (e.g. extend the deadline (all deadlines can be extended), limit the scope of the release, limit the expectations of you) and schedule a post-release evaluation of the project and your role in it.
So the brain volume (not head size) is smaller in Asian people?
by "even across all ethnic backgrounds" I meant even the run-of-the-mill white people are shorter too.
Maybe? The point of my smart ass comment was that a person's height or brain volume doesn't matter...
Eh? It's actually not too bad, once you get past the captain-dork-of-the-future outfit that guy has on (replete with white boots):

- Giant tv's - can't say since they don't define giant, but what with projects and huge flat screens, I'd say it's true.

- Flat screen tvs.

- Video camera - they're wrong about the holographs, but right about electronic cameras.

- video disc player - well... not quite, but pretty close.

- most mail will be sent in electronic form. I think that's true - just that the volume of paper mail didn't diminish.
Ugh.

This is the second no-content post from valley-wag in less than a few hours. Please stop submitting this crap to this form.

There is little doubt that the owners were paid handsomely for the name. Clearly, pictures of a little girl being on that particular domain wouldn't be subject to that high an offer.

This is borderline defamation.
Personally I used to be like this. I would never launch anything, because nothing I did was ever good enough for me. However, recently I learned my lesson. I launched hackrtrackr with only one feature, and without and going back and rethinking what I had done. The result an insanely simple website that has taken off very well. Also by launching with only one feature and minimal code it allowed me to quickly add the features I received requests for, because I didn't have to wade through a bunch of lines.
Is San Francisco included in the San Jose metro region? If not, then probably the entire upper half of the peninsula isn't included in the comparison.

Looks like it is, though. That's weird.
I thought a lot of Scheme implementations define IF in terms of COND. Is there some reason you're pointing this out?

I should have been more detailed and noted that on the "by all means use it" vs. "if you think you need it, think again" continuum, EVAL requires IMO more justification than a macro. The source of my concern over macros is that when designing them, care needs to be taken to clearly communicate their semantics, which is best done IMO by following the established conventions of the language and whatever other macros the user is expected to be familiar with.
I can believe that.
Steve Jobs releases with less than perfection all the time. If you need evidence, look no further than giving AT&T an exclusive with the iPhone.

The key is accepting that people prefer products to promises, and just going ahead with something that's good enough without it being perfect.
Aaron did know PG personally; maybe he's right. Tell you what, anybody in a YC-funded startup who, like Aaron, tires of weekly+ email exchanges with this humorless nudzh, just redirect him to me. PG can pester me about my project, and you can work undisturbed. Sound good? I'd be happy to do you that favor.
No I am not. You can use mongrel with any framework you want.
Interesting. Every one has happened, except that perennial tarpit, the robot serving drinks.

Predictions about the future are driven by a mix of what we expect to happen and what we hope will happen. Domestic robots, flying cars, and apps that take natural language commands are dangerous to work on because predictions about them are driven mainly by hope.
Both, but the ORM more. I am curious, why do you ask?
http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2007/02/07/jottit ?
Cut the Fat to Get to Lean Productivity
Being a perfectionist doesn't mean you make perfect things. However, perfectionism requires perfect taste for success.

It feels like there are two forms of design: "release early and release often" and "release it perfectly". Very few people have the taste necessary to find success in the latter.
If you're actually into making this more awesome, you almost certainly want to put this together with some in-memory data structure. And that data structure should probably be a suffix tree/trie. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_tree. You'd need to modify that to deal with having more than one word, but that's not too bad (you just lay the trees on top of each other).
"There is something to this, of course. But I have a contrary proposal: users love perfectionism."

Wrong. I would love to see more new features on reddit rather than waiting for them to re-write everything. The search function is still somewhat broken!

There is even competition of sorts: http://redditmedia.com/
That site displays thumbnails for stories...why doesn't reddit.com have an extra section or option/setting for that? So many good things could be done if not for this perfectionism bullshit.

Another good story: 37signals took a long time fixing Backpack and finally released a new version. Too late, I had already switched to Simple GTD. I don't get why they didn't incrementally improve things...I bet they've lost many more users due to their slowness.

Perfectionism is paralyzing.
if this non-sequitur post is the best valleywag can do, seems like the rest of silicon valley gets it a lot worst.
Don't you dare say Chain is failing. I'm still using the site!

Just make it look a tiny bit nicer, get a few mentions on various blogs and you'll be fine. A PayPal donate link may help too?
You pointed out one could achieve much the same result as the aif macro by using cond. I wanted to point out that cond itself is an example of the power of macros.
Didn't Enron have this idea before the shit hit the fan?
Funny, since Aaron had exactly the opposite strategy when he launched Infogami, blogging about launching a new feature everyday and taking a very incremental approach. I don't think that lasted very long though. Everyone is free to change their mind, of course...
Thanks for the history lesson. Now, let an Irish man (same former 'colony' issues as you Yanks) who's based in the UK, point out that the largest population in the USA is of German origin and the second is Irish. The closest vote in US Senate history was to vote your national language be German (lost by one vote) and it was the single most important factor in the USA staying out of WW2 for so long (apparently, I'm not sure I agree with that, nor am I here to start a American/Europe historical/factual dispute).

Arguably it was the British who were being entrepreneurial then as, put in historical context, colonising countries was primarily for economic gain - Land equalled money then, through taxes. We replaced the aristocracy with the government, which is now collecting the taxes instead. When we created the government, the Aristocracy had to find new vehicles for wealth creation so the created 'Corporations', hence why all big trade missions were funded by entities like the 'Corporation of London'. This gave the rich a way of passing wealth down the family without being taxed on it.

The David / Goliath analogy is rather paradoxical as it is American companies that lead globalisation and are the largest in the world. Google has a turnover in the BILLIONS; sorry that's not quite mom and pop corner store.....they are a goliath. But I am not here to give business lessons.

Please allow me to try focusing this discussion. I am interested in your brain/personality/experience. I'm asking YOU, as individuals and Americans how you feel. How does starting up make YOU feel? I believe the answer lies in societal norms and, therefore, American attitudes. This, I agree, has to do with historical trends.
The red flower graduation icon looks like it's dying. That's kind of funny.
Aw, thanks mouse! I love creating something that at least one person likes.

We're just refocusing the site. I'll toss you an email with the outline of the redesign so you can approve or disapprove it.

Edit: Email away
Taller people are indeed smarter if you don't remove the malnourished from your sample. Useless information, one way or the other. It's sort of like...well, X race has a lower average IQ than Y race. As long as you're not shaping policy around the contrary, it doesn't matter at all.
I've been learning it recently and I'm not sure what to make of it, specifically the ORM component. It certainly has a good reputation as far as ORM's go, but I'm not sure if even a good ORM fits a large, popular, or complex app, or is perhaps more suitable for protoyping and low-traffic uses.

But since SQL is pretty necessary for most web apps, it makes sense to pick some abstraction layer, and as far as I can tell SQLA is best of breed for scripting languages, so I'm trying to work out how to apply it most effectively.
Agreed. Most of the frameworks have the 20 minute tutorial which (most of the time) is no way comparable to the type of work we will be doing with it.
Yes, that's right David could afford to buy a new 'slingshot' with the spare $1.6 BILLION dollars he had just lying around. What is a Goliath to an American?? Boots - to - big - for, comes to mind.
This completely misses the point about productivity. In my experience, the #1 reason why workers are only productive for 2/3 of the working day is they have no incentive to do otherwise. After all, you go home at the same time regardless of whether you finish your work quickly or not. You probably get paid the same (module a small % raise) regardless of whether you do good work or bad work.

People who want to get lots done typically get lots done. They don't need to resort to productivity tips.

And companies with incentive structures that reward hard work typically get it. Nucor consistently has some of the highest productivity in the steel industry - their compensation structure involves salaries that range in the $40K range, but bonus that can total up to $130K. Management consulting firms consistently elicit high effort from employees, because they don't have face time: once you finish your work, you can go home. Hedge fund managers never seem to goof off, because they get paid 20% of the profits, often amounting to billions of dollars. Startup founders work for incredibly long and focused periods of time, because they enjoy all the upside of their work.
what is the preferred way to deploy django these days?
No, that's Jott.com. Not sure why the author refers to it as "JottIt".
Good point - "release early, release often" is also a quest to perfectionism, but is a public quest. You have your users determine what is perfect, what directions to go in.

Holding something to yourself until it is "perfect" is a solo quest. You may spend too much time on the wrong things and no time on the right things. But you also won't release something that is completely broken.
lol thats the first thing I was going to say when I saw this! Bravo
That's a great sentence. Could possibly even be boiled down to "you need a problem," since trying to solve problems is the way to develop skills.
I can't imagine two weeks causing too much trouble. I've seen crap rewritten over and over on 6-month iterations that could make you weep.

Just say the other guy's design is bad and you're going back to your own. If it's an "equally large task", obviously you're better off with a familiar code base. Suggest to the manager that he should not swap devs in and out of a project in time frames normally smaller than those used to ramp up new workers.
Ask: How to get the word out about your website? Does a press release help?
I created a website and now want to get the word out. Since it is my free time project I don't have enough funds to hire a PR agency. What do you recommend?
Python 3000 Alpha 1 Released
I would ask for a lot more money to finish the job (a lot more) and say "take it or leave it". If he isn't willing to pay the extra money, I would just walk away.

There's nothing to be gained from debating with a troublesome manager who doesn't understand programming. You would just be wasting your time.
Where I come from (UCSB) we had a different take on the nomenclature. The game the article describes was called "Beirut", as the article notes. "Beer Pong", by contrast, was much closer to an actual game of ping pong, paddles and all, each player having a beer on the table that served as a target.
What is Chain?
mod_python

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/modpython/
What's Jottit going to be, then?
Demand Outstrips Supply for Clean Energy Deals
So it's something like a community incubator? Interesting. Not something I'd use, but interesting.
Watching this get abandoned will be enormously humorous.
Where's Chris? (on reflexive design): "If I won't use it, I shouldn't expect you to either"
My point was more than one isn't usually missing much by being limited to writing hygienic macros. I don't think anyone is disputing the power of macros; it's the power/cost of hygiene violation that people are discussing.

Someone could give a "trust the programmer" argument for making unhygienic macros available in a language, but that nostrum is problematic because there are two programmers: the macro writer and the macro user. It's harder than you think to write a macro using DEFMACRO that always behaves the way a user might expect it to behave, and as a user of a macro, you need to wonder how hard the macro writer worked to protect you -- something that I don't like as a fan of black boxes.