skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get very annoyed by LOC questions. They are idiotic. I was very, very surprised that PG uses it as a measure, in his interview to NYT and in the YC application.

In my day job, I am maintaining (and enhancing) a distributed system that was written by apparently Cobol programmers who switched to Java rather suddenly last year.

- apparently did not hear of functional programming, so 600-800 line sub routines with if-else-while nesting up to 7-8 levels deep. very hard to follow the logic.

- no knowledge of exceptions, so return codes were used.

- hand rolled socket server because application EJB servers were not on their radar.

- a pseudo "object-oriented" database layer with all sorts of design problems and takes 5-10 times the LOC (that I have written in a simple database access class to show them a better way).

Their output in terms of Lines Of Code is phenomenal but it is a maintainence nightmare.
Champions pay the price
M8 looks cool too
hmm, out of habit, I hit [] with my middle and ring fingers, which requires the same slight movement of my right hand that typing () does. maybe I need to break the habit.
PG: If starting Viaweb today, would you use Lisp?
Question behind the question: All things being equal (libraries,etc) does it support a better mental framework for development than ruby, python, etc?
I wish you well, Goladus.
The title is horrible... that's probably what did you in.
What's next, are they going to take the De Lorean back to 1985 and put the kibosh on gambling in The Bard's Tale?

Ironically it seems the freer virtual worlds of the future will need to in reality be located outside the "land of the free".
That would still misrepresent the people capable of starting with 110 lines of code, then refactor it down to 100.
Enquiring minds want to know!
I never counted them.
Pythonista: How a Python programmer should code
Circuit breakers wipe out the Web
Yeah that hundred million idea sounded pretty amazing to me, hooray another scientific project funded to do a dozen year project..
You've heard of Arc, right? You're soaking in it.
Dude, have you not read his essays?
Look at the last two paragraphs of the "Blub Paradox" section of Beating the Averages:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

I think that answers your question behind the question. Then read the whole essay. It's good.
y-scraper
Lisp as an alternative to C++ makes more sense than Lisp as an alternative to Python.
there's a facebook group for it too
fake knock-off? so it's not a knock-off?
You'd probably be better off using Rails or Django right now. Writing a web framework in Lisp is an order of magnitude harder than just using a battle tested one.
How deliciously evil.
http://usc.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2449811475

The group says the location is TBA.
Yahoo's Paul Levine goes to AdBrite (Confirmed)
An open letter to the twins suing Facebook
Yeah, I forgot. It's been a few years since I read it.
Here's a lisp web framework:
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/weblocks-demo.html

But the idea is that what you get out of lisp is an order of magnitude more power than other battle-tested ones, right? I ask this in seriousness, not to provoke a flame war.
Buy one and find out

;)
FWIW, Hunchentoot has performed flawlessly for me, and it is very easy to work with. I use it for clutu ( http://clutu.com/ ) among other things.

[edit: I'm not entirely sure what people mean when they say web framework, so apologies if Hunchentoot wasn't what you meant.]
Hey bluishgreen - the meetup is at our flat 1203 in 2140 Taylor Street (Y Scraper). Email me if you don't know where that is.
Study: Web-based instant messaging is growing fast
Just yesterday I had a thought about the link between Paul and Lisp. I came to the conclusion that since Paul was a published author of Lisp books at the time, and saw an opportunity to use it in production (maybe to gain experience and write another book about it to share his findings with others) but ended up learning about startups, dot coms, investors, and users as well, he instead wrote essays on paulgraham.com and used some of them in his Hackers and Painters book.

I dare say his essays are about starting up in general, and there is no secret plan to convert users into using Lisp. Every week on YCombinator Startup News, somebody asks about learning Lisp to do a web app, when there are way more other things to worry about than the language. Use something you want to use every day, not just in theory because someone else did. I'd learn an unknown language if I was at a startup that used it every day, but otherwise, I would default to using a web framework that I have already used in the past.

My conclusion is that if you're creating a web application using a web framework in any language you find interesting at the moment, go for it. Because that's exactly what Paul did. It just happened to be Lisp that he was an expert at, but it could have been any other exciting technology.

Whether Paul would use Lisp today or not on a new project is irrelevant as far as your plate is concerned. He could use Lisp, but it wouldn't mean that there aren't other good alternatives. And if he did use a language other than Lisp, maybe it would be so because he would want to learn web framework since he wouldn't be writing Lisp books any more, but Lisp may still be something he would normally use more often.

I think this is a great question.
What rights do I have over my domain name?
I bought a domain name about two years ago for a little web app I've been working on. For conversation sake lets call it Umize. Recently, a new startup launched with a similar name (Umizr).

Here's what bothers me: they use my name (Umize) as the title of one of their features. And this title is displayed prominently on their front page and throughout their web site. The feature is also somewhat related to my web app.

My question is: do I have any copyright for the use of my domain name? Do I have the right to ask the startup to rename their feature?

I'm not planning on taking any action now. I'm just wondering what my options are if this becomes a problem in the future.

Thanks so much!
Theoretically, as search engines and advertisers both get more and more sophisticated, the organic and paid for links should converge. The most 'relevant' results for (search term, searcher history, other relevant data) indicating someone looking to buy something will be the sellers most likely to convert the given searcher. At the same time, advertisers would be unwilling to pay for clicks from searches indicating unlikely buyers.
If matching ever get that sophisticated, some altruistic sounding blurb about keeping commercial links off the organic section probably won't be far behind, however.
This is a parody, right?
You didn't get hired; some guy just bribed you to do your job.
How is the parking situation there (or if its bad, how is the transit from caltrain/bart)
So you are asking: "If PG had to engage in an air war today, would he choose an F-16 or a Sopwith Camel?"

The point is that he thought at the time, and still (probably) thinks, that Lisp is language superior in power. As far as I know, no other language has eclipsed it, so the answer hasn't changed.

At least, that's the argument that has compelled me to re-visit it (after learning some Scheme in undergrad).
Confirmed: No iPhone in Europe until Q4
No other language has eclipsed it, but other languages are much, much more disciplined than Common Lisp. And you need a little discipline to build a community, which is required for a programming language to succeed.

For example, the fact that 'foo creates the symbol foo if it doesn't exist is undisciplined. That means if you try to reference something in a certain package, then find you didn't import that package yet, then try to import the package, it will fail. The reason it fails is because you've already created 'foo, so it can't import 'foo.

That's just one example. Lisp is the most powerful code abstraction, but it needs discipline to succeed.
Does Task Management Software Really Work?
How bad can it be? GoTOs - Greg Young [MVP]
Open Source for Relaxation?
The Cranky Product Manager: How to Piss Off Development in a Really Big Way
http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/b/bondage-and-disciplinelan...
Are they doing the same thing or something similar?
The possibility of confusion exists...if you have copyrights on your name and predate them you might have a case (if you decide to spend the money on lawyers). Cheapest way out of it is find a new name IMHO.
not great but not terrible either, you should be able to find a place to park within a few blocks, bart is pretty far away
..That would be the polar opposite of undisciplined. Like I said, a little discipline, not.. erm.. bondage and discipline. :)
That little example will probably save me some misery later. Thanks!
It would be interesting to see how MS's kernel differs between client OS's and their servers. They have huge user camps both on the desktop and in enterprises, both of which are major, strategically important profit centers.

The GPL pretty much ensure a server centric development model on Linux, though. Most open source developers and supporters aren't quite so 'open' with their own companies' source code, thus preferring to 'distribute' their apps as web apps, requiring no source disclosure.
Truemors For Facebook
when you really think about the big picture this is really sad. this is coming from the civilization that invented paper and gunpowder and this is what they're reduced to: a big obvious copy machine? What ever happened to their sense of pride and creativity? This is just pathetic...

Relatively speaking, Korea and Japan put China to shame...

(for the record: I'm of Chinese descent)
Microsoft to get early Silverlight, Web tools out the door
240k/year for web developer, with one catch...
I don't think it matters. If you know Lisp you should be able to decide wheter it's the right tool for your project or not. If you don't know Lisp you should do a little effort and try to learn it. Whatever the Pauls answer is (but I imagine the it will be something like "Yes" or "Arc").

I'm learning Lisp right now. Reading the Practical Common Lisk on the web http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ until my dead-tree copy arrives (I'm also waiting for my copy of ANSI Common Lisp. Paul, if I manage to get to the face-to-face interview on Boston for that Y-Combinator round, do you mind if I ask you to sign to book? pleeease ^_^), and so I currently better building a website with Perl+Catalyst+MySQL than with Lisp. Probably when I get more confidence with Lisp it will change.

So, although Paul is a great writter and a really great hacker his answer to that concrete question has not really a lot of value. And, I've previously said I bet a beer-token that the answer will be something that evaluates to true.
it's way too positive a view of product managers.
Microsoft's challenge to Amazon.com's EC2 service
Hah... not a bad price for a free vacation (even if it is to hell... ;) )
It could be, if you're a high enough manager. You could let two similar projects compete and see who got the most users internally, then release that.
Google Print (Newspaper) Ads (Launching -- Discussion)
Has anyone heard about the Google newspaper ads? I received an email to my adwords account email today offering $1000 free credit to beta test this service.

Do you think this will be successful? I wonder why they're starting to target newspapers instead of staying online. Newspaper readers are dropping in replacement of them reading the news online so i wonder why would they do this and if it'll be successful?
what am i supposed to glean from this?

Adding new features to a living system is hard, even in Ruby.
Keep a paper trail of everything, from emails sent relating to your service to any fees paid out to contractors or anytone else working under/for you w/ the project. If they make a stink out of it, I would suggest hiring a lawyer to represent you (we have one that we have on retainer -- tends to be cheaper this way). If you don't have the funding for this, you could always ask them to rename theirs and maybe they'll comply in good faith if you prove you had your name and whatnot first... or the last option would be to follow chandrab and just rename your product... it'll keep a stink down w/ the other company and won't be a costly blackhole to throw money you could have put into marketing the new name.
As much as I enjoy collecting generic, one-word domains... this is just crazy. You're buying the right to use the name and not the name itself; a virtual promise if you will. It's like buying an ad space on the side of a building in downtown SF only to be covered in a couple years by bigger, nicer looking buildings and ads.

I guess it's not so bad seeing that it was a mostly stock-trade deal, but the idea of spending that much money on a domain that isn't all that grand is absurd. Does anyone want to buy OrdersUp.com for $200 million? Heck, i'll make you an even better deal... $150 million with full rights to our software... ;-)
make sure what you use is primary-browser compliant. if it isn't, make sure there is a fail-safe system of code/css that allows the person to still easily navigate the site. one additional thing: make sure that if your site is to be crawled by search engines, that the menus don't appear "blind" to them as that will reduce their crawling capabilities/performance.
It's one example I'm hoping will be absent from Arc.
Thanks sharpshoot, I will be there. Looking forward to meeting you all.
The green zone is a far cry from a true hell... there are worse ways to get money to fund your startup, right?

If I was actually a competent web developer I would consider doing this, as long as they don't really mean 12 hours a day 7 days a week. That's 80 hours a week which makes this job a terrible deal.
do politicians even know how to turn a computer on? seriously tho, this was the same argument that was given when the internet was introduced to the public a few decades ago. instead of holding technology and their creators accountable, the government needs to hold the individuals that use and abuse it accountable.

most of the "bad guys" i know of who make viruses and spread bad stuff around the internet are not usually the ones starting up companies and trying to make a product people will be able to use. the government has a tendency to point the finger and blame the small guys instead of taking responsibility and training their employees how to use the resources given to them... and then complains about being under-funded w/ their technology program.

if the RIAA (which i respect but don't agree with) can kick around little old grannies and people who died a decade ago, can't the government track down someone on their own set of networks sharing information? not to mention... haven't they heard of simple port blocking? >o<
"3 month contract (could be shorter) " - Any prizes for guessing why it could be shorter?
Why create a facebook app now?
Why create a facebook application now given that there are thousands out there already and facebook has created lots of restrictions preventing the viral growth that the earlier apps experienced. Even the new ones like the one released by Yahoo only have 5000 users.

It may have made sense in the beginning - Can anyone see any benefit of this now? or is it just hype ?
Lets think about it like this, what happed when Microsoft released an OS and restricted the App developers, gave them hell. Well they wrote a new OS right. So when facebook doesn't go to bed with the app developers .. ummm, I am just wonderin out loud.
I don't know of even one startup that's considering Silverlight. Is anyone here using it? What are your experiences with it so far?
Vertigo: YC startup Xobni expands its team and expands
Good article, nasty comments :( TC has become a very negative place.
Well - its not really about facebook. They are also responding to their users telling them to stop apps and that its spamming them.

But as a company, why would you create an app now if at all? Whats the business benefit if any ?
The chinese are now the #1 most formidable competitor to the US in military superiority, almost entirely due to their advanced military electronics. I believe that their spending ranks very highly in this area.

They are not reduced to anything. They play by their own (although unethical) rules.
mythbusting: Craig Newmark, filthy rich on eBay's millions
shows that if not honest about your business, your users will find the truth out for themselves...
this isn't about military or economic superiority (of which yes you're right China is rising)... which again suprisingly leads to the same topic: most Chinese military tech = Russian military tech (either bought outright or again - cheap copies there of)

this is about pride and creativity of which 99% of mainland Chinese don't seem to have anymore
ok, so facebook stopped showing me event requests so I just made the event open so if you didn't get confirmed you can now add yourself
aren't they going to offer downloads soon? i could have sworn i read something about that officially from them...
"this is about pride and creativity of which 99% of mainland Chinese don't seem to have"

Well, certainly 99.99 percent of americans don't have this either:)

As for the first part, I'm am almost entirely certain that that is not correct. The russians are very far behind and technology changes so very fast. I remember hearing this from some friends in electronic defense contracting. I'll have to find some sources.
well, if they offer the api or rss feeds like CL does... i don't see why not. :) http://www.housingmaps.com/ does it :)
As I replied on the techcrunch post, here's a quote from the recent film Ratatouille, that I believe sums up my opinion on the numerous haters out there (uncov, jay (living in first life) and the rest)

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
"Well, certainly 99.99 percent of americans don't have this either:)"

It's more like 90% in my opinion (counting crappy ideas)

"The russians are very far behind and technology changes so very fast."

Russia military tech is still decent; if what u said is true then so is China's. It's been pretty well known that most of China's new military tech comes from Russia (I guess you can count espionage too - but again, it's copying....)
Okay ... we've listened to our users on this one (other people said similar things :-), and now http://micropledge.com/ is as open as it'll ever be.

I know what you mean about not hearing back about invites -- we aimed to reply to each one with an invite code ASAP. We debated the invite issue. Our thought was that we don't want too much happening too fast in case there are problems. But having the invites caused more problems, I think.

So my advice: don't do invites -- they complicate things and confuse people. Just hold back on the PR if you're worried.
You can make just as much working in the financial industry. Having worked in it, I might give serious thought to Haifa Street over Wall Street.
10 Steps to Improving Your Email Customer Service
Lisp as a replacement for XML -- any ideas?
If I want to use Lisp syntax to store tree-like data structures (as a replacement for XML), are there any libraries, standards, or just ideas how to do it?
i have had a class c corporation for the past six years what can i do with it to gain wealth?
Microsoft aquires large web ads company
traffic and service recognition with a very focused market group. facebook's valuations, as inflated as they may be, could hold some truth based on the market they have targeted themselves into.
One of my mentors told me once that once he sees Aeron chairs at a startup, he not only doesn't invest, he cuts the meeting short and leaves running away from the company.
Here's how we do it:

("as_2586" ("as_2587" ("as_2588" ("as_2637" ("as_2638" ("as_2639")) ("as_2640")) ("as_2595")) ("as_2589")))

Equals:

Sub Projects

* 200705_PSC_Trinity (Construction)
o as_2587 (Client Approval)
+ as_2588 (Building Permit)
# CD Set (Deliverable)
* A-110 (Deliverable)
o 1. Site Plan (Deliverable)
* PSC Survey Info (Building Surveying)
# as_2595 (Systems Coordination)
+ as_2589 (Programming)
... the race has begun.
Just curious, did you do this independently as a 'small business', or was it as a consultant through a 'solutions provider'?

If independently, your business skills must be excellent - to get so many clients who would not choose an off the shelf solution.

But in any case, these are not products.
The essay neglects what happens to the 9 of 10 companies that don't, as far as the VCs are concerned, pan out. Closing them down means they have to give any remaining money back to the investors -- including their own fees they had already pocketed. Any dollar the company doesn't spend before it dies means money from the VC's own pocket.

The solution is to drain the company. The VCs install executives they owe favors to, at massively inflated salaries. They make the company hand over millions to "market research" and outsourced marketing companies. They make the company sign big service and equipment contracts. Each of these deals means a kickback or a favor owed. Best of all is if the money goes to one of the properties not being drained, or somebody the VC owes, or personally owns stock in.

It's no accident so many companies folded after buying unnecessary enterprise-grade Oracle and Vignette licenses.
I don't quite get it -- can you show an example with tags, attributes and text?
I know a bunch of folks who have done stuff like this. You will work very hard which is fine because there is not much else to do. And you will be safer than you would in most major cities in the US.

Secret clearance = no drugs in the last year, no bad credit, no criminal record, and no contact with members of unfriendly governments.

Definitely a great way to fund a startup. Hadn't thought of that!
I just showed the hierarchy structure. You can put anything you want in the nodes of the hierarchy. In the example, these are object names that then generate the example hierarchy below in our application. Hope this helps.
Video tutorials from Y! Doug Cockford: The JavaScript Programming Language
"2-4 programming experience preferably with JAVA or HTML"

Java OR HTML? Is that for real?
Is Brooks Wrong? (9 women can't have a baby in 1 month)
The Fast Pace of Information Transactions
Semantic Web The Next Big Thing?
My Friend Is a 72-Year Old Programmer
Coders at work Q's
Also a page for suggesting your "coder(s)" of choice ~ http://www.codersatwork.com/shuffle.fhtml and read about it here ~ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/blog/2007/07/17/coders-at-work-so...
attributes are a red herring in XML. attributes could just as easily be expressed as a child called attributes, or just by listing the attributes as children.
You're just replacing the data storage. XML has a lot more features, like schema validation and querying.
I've heard that you can't have smoked marijuana more than 15 times in your life in order to get a government clearance.
Ads are here to stay and if you have to encounter them, why not let them be ones for things you might actually like?
I think the voting thing is pretty ingeneous, though i feel there will be some problems:

People don't like extra effort, they are more likely to ignore an ad they don't like than click or move a slider. On the other side of the same coin, they will be more likely to just click on an ad they do like than muck with some sort of rating system.

People don't always know what they like, just because one day they find something attractive doesn't mean a week later or even hours later they will like the same thing.
sincerest form of flattery and all that.