skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your argument above seems to miss at least one thing. A corporation wants to reward people who value the company. At the upper eschelons, they may reward people for independent thinking, but in most cases, people are hired to perform a job to meet a corporate goal. I recently had to reprimand a person because she missed a client meeting to attend Junior Achievement. I praise her for her efforts with that organization, but it doesn't pay her $100K salary, and my organization does. It's not that any of these ideals being mentioned are terrible, it's the juxtapostion of "I want salary X" and "I'm going to wear offensive t-shirts to work because I'm expressing myself" and "I want to take off time whenever I want".

Having compared many fortune 500 companies, I can tell you that at a company with flex-time in place, it's hard to schedule meetings for a 20 person team. Effectively 2 days out of a 5 day work week were "unavailable" and therefore lost. I love flex time. Love it. But I can also point out the very real reasons why a company would not be able to support it. So there's a lot of trade off and I think it's killing our ability to be competitive.

Power shifting to the defective is more a matter of the Peter Principle than any person's ability to separate personal time from corporate time.
People seem amused by the "antiquated" computers, but there are a lot of reasons to select a computer no bigger than needed for a job like that. Low power, cooler, big manufacturing process (rugged, maybe more resistant to gamma rays), lower errata count, simpler architectures are easier to validate, etc.

Often people scoff at not having 2gb of ram and 2ghz CPUs, but a little perspective is in order: probably every major protocol on the internet today (except the P2Ps, Bittorrent in particular) are largely unchanged since the 486 was a supported (if not current, mind you) CPU.

One thing I've not read but am quite curious about is what the failed CPU is. For all of the news about OMG 486 BACKUP, it would be interesting to know what the main one is.
Sure, lisp syntax is itself not intuitive, but I was pointing out that the reasoning involved in lisp programming does not clash with how humans are wired. It could clash with how humans are trained, but inherently, s-expressions are a good representation of human speech.
Except that there's going to be very limited start up money available...
You're completely off-track on the DSL part.

I'd rather have to learn a new small DSL language that lets me read and write exactly what is meant (the semantics of the language map almost directly to the language of the domain) than a big clunky API (apis are languages!) that will make my code littered with book-keeping tasks when I use it.
Artificial debt inflation is like heroin. The Keynesians correctly pointed out that going off of heroin causes you a heck of a lot of pain. Therefore, their solution is to never stop shooting heroin. Their cure for withdrawal is more heroin. This is good in the short term, but fatal in the long term. Unfortunately, the Keynesians deny that shooting heroin can even be a problem.

The Austrian position is that 1) we should not start using heroin in the first place and 2) if we find ourselves on it, we should quit cold turkey. This may be a good idea for a mild debt (heroin) dependency, but after the inflation of World War I and the 1920's or the inflation we've had the past few decades, going cold turkey causes a great depression. Therefore, I'd prefer we'd check into a methadone clinic, gradually wean ourselves off the heroin, and make sure to never shoot up again. Not very likely to ever happen.
You could move back to India and run the buisness from there.

...yeah our immigration policies are pretty bad aren't they.
While [printing too much money] might make the current recession relatively short and mild ...

That is by no means assured. Right now, we are in truly uncharted territory economically. My prediction is that theories are going to be rewritten.
I think the non-object-oriented philosophy in Arc is so deeply ingrained it'll be hard to change without starting over.

But really the question is whether any object-oriented philosophy is necessary. My take is, let's say you write a function in Arc that operates on lists. It's recursive using car and cdr. Now ideally, you could also run that function on anything else that is list-like. But in Arc, car only works on lists. Maybe you can fix this without making everything an object, that'd be fine by me.

In practice modern programming languages are tending towards a default dynamic-array-like datastructure that supports both random access and amortized-O(1) append. This is so convenient for hacking programs together, I can't believe the 100-year language won't have this as a very basic part of the system. But Arc doesn't do this. In news.arc you have a very Lisp-list-centric way of programming. But I think for many problems less restrictive datatypes are the most convenient. Hash tables and dynamic arrays need to be just as easy as Lisp lists. This is the Python way, the Ruby way, and I think the way of the 100-year language. But I don't know how to make iteration on any of these look equivalent without making the core of the language be more object oriented.
We're just joking around. Most of my colleagues are boomers. Try not to be so sensitive.

We all have our faults, but if you can't laugh at them, you're lost.
It's a glorified CRUD app. If they had written the DBMS or Apache or Memcached, then I'd give them credit for the scaling.
That's because social networking sites addict like crack.
"If you have ever been in a math class with people who are not programmers, who are just plain old Joes, you'll notice that the most difficult subjects have to do with abstractions."

People who can't think in abstractions shouldn't become programmers, that's all. Besides using very simple DSLs, perhaps (ha!).

I don't see how arguing that people who aren't hard-wired to program have greater difficulty with Lisp than they do with languages with more exposure makes the case that Lisp is too complex.
I didn't even know it was possible to give a -1! Does that mean a moderator thought I was trolling?

First-time user here, let me know if I'm violating a community standard and what's up with the -1... thanks.
I've thought about this some, and think it depends on how you define "health". What you describe sounds very healthy in terms of a good place to be for those wanting to hack on cool, new things, to push boundaries, to explore, and so on. However, I am less certain that it makes for a healthy community in terms of one where there are relatively fewer producers of the language, and many consumers, and those consumers want something that "just works" that they can depend on. In that sort of situation, you run into the problem where people get annoyed with the "which one!?" problem described here:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2006/02/18/maximizers-sa...

My gut feeling is that there's a 'right' balance that's hard to find. If you just want to explore and be creative and push the limits, that kind of fragmentation is probably good, or at least not harmful. If you want to create something that people, say, base their businesses on, I think that it is not as positive. People get nervous about picking the 'right' one; beginners are especially confused, because they may not even have acquired the knowledge to decide what is 'right'. Lots of hacking goes into implementations, rather than libraries, and libraries may not work on all implementations, further exacerbating the 'which one' problem, which now involves looking at which libs run where.

Another part of the "problem" is that if you're aiming for "fun and experimentation", you are in a somewhat different (enviable?) position than most programming language creators: you've written about and popularized the language already, and are somewhat famous yourself, guaranteeing Arc a wide audience, something that is probably likely to attract more 'consumer' types than 'creators'. They're the ones who will be grumpy about not having something stable.
I know nothing regarding US immigration law, but what do they define as "working"? In other words, could you contribute for "free" and just pay yourself via dividends?

Otherwise, why don't you just incorporate in India, or wherever else is applicable? If you're going to sell via web payments, nobody really cares where you are. There may be a few issues with corporate clients, but for 95% of people it would be seamless.
Isn't the abstraction, and sticking to the abstraction, the job of the programmer, and not the language?

We all speak English here; you can say, "let's all speak like Yoda now." Quite easy, that is. But the underlying language doesn't need to change; other people can invent different rules and create different settings where these rules apply strictly.

So imperatively, your socket program is like this:

f = file("/hello.txt")

p = makeport(8934)

s = makesocket(p)

s.send(f)

s.destroy()

which is perfectly fine. This is basically a line by line translation from your English-looking pseudocode to this OO-code-looking pseudocode. Using s-expressions would make the whole process read much more like speaking:

Let's say I wanted to send a file:
Using the socket that uses the port 8934, send the file hello.txt, and destroy the socket.

Plain English, right? Reorder into:

Destroy the socket that is used to send the file hello.txt and is created with port 8934.

Translate to s-expr:

(destroy-socket (send-file (make-file "hello.txt") using (make-socket (make-port 8934)))

I'm taking liberties with the send-file function syntax.

Looks ugly, but that's pretty close to the natural language representation. If you parse the syntactic tree it will almost overlap completely.
They're actually responsible for a lot of improvements to Memcached.

Here's a list of things you should give them credit for:
http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php
Just wanted to say that I enjoyed this reply.

I think that the word choice subordinates was unfortunate, in this case. But basically when you work for a person, you are their subordinate.

There's definitely something weird going on with the people I've worked with lately. Despite having only a few years experience they're perfectly willing to commandeer a meeting. The enthusiasm is great. The initiative is excellent. But the content they provide is sub-par. So somewhere there is a gap between "taking initiative" and "knowing what you're talking about and then taking initiative" and that's kind of my problem with the workforce I face.

It's not so much subordinate in the sense of "respect my authority" as it is "please when you're speaking in front of the board and I kick you under the table... SHUT UP"
What is this guy's point? That he's worked so hard he deserves not to be taxed? I read this carefully and I can't find the argument about how the Obama tax plan threatens his business. What I did find was a bunch of innuendo about ACORN, "ninja mortgages", and liberalism.

During the Eisenhower years, the top tax bracket exceeded NINETY PERCENT. I run a business that makes considerably more than $250,000 per year. The Obama tax plan will impact me in 2009. We sweated to build it. No government program helped us. And I call bullshit on Cory the Well Digger.
Colin - Excellent, excellent post. This is exactly the type of feedback I was looking for. Definitely pushes me in the direction of a Blackberry. Thanks!
Germany also has a 19% VAT

Companies don't pay VAT -- people do.
I do feel entitled to get talented employees. But if I cannot get them, I look at the cheepest way to solve my problems, and I turn the work into a commodity. As soon as I do that, I look for the person willing to perform the work for the lowest price, and that isn't likely to be a millenial in the US.
Newspapers are supposed to print news, not print platitudes. :) I recommend you take at least a moment to wonder why your generation is coming under fire so much.
That's pretty much the case against Barack Obama: Trade (BIG BIG BIG win for McCain), Taxes (small win for McCain), Subsidies (big win for McCain), Healthcare (big win for McCain: got to address cost, not access), and Energy (slight win for McCain).

Barack on the other hand is better on avoiding World War III, Big Brother, and Theocracy.

It's a depressing choice.
I have to echo my comment earlier. When you say that young people want to be judged on the quality of the work (only), you're turning your work into a commodity and making it easier and easier for your work to be outsourced.
Except that you have to compete with a generation in other countries that don't do that. Who's a better return on investment?
Not anymore. ;-)

(When the counterparty goes bust, they've gotta collect what they're owed in bankruptcy court. Even if they were on the winning end of the trade, there's no guarantee that they'll get cash out of it. And in the meantime, the sudden disappearance of their trading partner means that some of their trades are likely dangerously unhedged.)
> Is this all just a giant social experiment to see what will happen to the language and community given no leadership and x-number of years?

It's pretty clear already: arc has failed.
I did consulting work for FedEx.

Instead of asking America to bail him out like we've bailed out banks, Fred might want to look at his company. I've never actually encountered a more inbred group of incompetents. They, like Microsoft, happened to become lottery winners....and like Microsoft, they will watch themselves slowly lose to more agile organizations. He (and McCain) are completely backwards looking.
But you could read this in another way and say that this was the start of the decline... and we're just worried about how much farther we can slide...

I know I've probably made a lot of people on this board a little irked, but I'm serious when I say I'm worried about how we'll compete.
Part of the problem is that the central bank only measures inflation by consumer prices, and not investment asset prices. As long as consumer prices rise slowly, central bankers feel no hesitation in following loose monetary policy. This is true even as stocks and real estate prices take off into the stratosphere, causing potential instability.
Reading the technical questions made me realize how crappy a programmer I am, algorithms-wise.
Our immigration policies do suck, but doing it from India isn't a bad idea at all. Low living costs + same amount of money = longer runway, employees are cheaper, he gets all the purported benefits of outsourcing.

Plus, stevesmith has plenty of local knowledge (being Indian), so he can avoid most of the pitfalls of outsourcing.

Seriously, give it some thought. Once you get rich, immigration to the US should be no problem.
Wow, we are talking Philip K. Dick stories right here. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, etc.

If this is reliably applied to humans, well, the implications are just staggering.
Advanced Squid Caching for Rails Applications: Preface
Can You Behave Randomly?
In Age of Impatience, Cutting Computer Start Time
If No One Sees It, Is It an Invention?
Great advice for scaling. Especially considering the size of scribd. I will definitely be interested to see the nginx module, but I wonder how this development and the recent news of Rack::Cache will affect each other.
But Have We Learned Enough (from the Great Depression)?
Long Live Ye Hackers
I agree with Kalvin above. They've had to do a lot of work to keep facebook running smooth and snappy, incorporating many different technologies. And luckily they are open sourcing a lot of their technologies! =]
He's not asking the government to "bail him out". He's asking them to get out of his way.
Interesting letter. I fail to see the guy's point though.

And as for the site, Freerepublic, it has more idiotic comments than YouTube.
I am sympathetic to the Austrian critique, but there's a big problem with refusing to print any money and just letting the debt pyramid collapse. M0, the actual amount of green dollar bills in the world, is at $750 billion. MZM ( Money Zero Maturity, all the money in bank accounts and money market funds) is at $8.5 trillion. If the Fed refuses to use the printing press - ie it refused to print money or give loans to bail out the FDIC, and refused to bail out the money market funds - there will be a giant bank run as everyone with dollars in a money market fund rushes to redeem the holdings with actual green dollar bills. We're not talking about a couple big Wall St. banks going out of business. We're talking about every startup that has VC funding in a money market fund losing everything. We're talking about every mortgage in the world defaulting. Every bank account will vanish.

Of course, this won't happen, but only because Bernanke has guaranteed the assets of money market funds and the FDIC by promising to print money. Now, I think it is awful that MZM grew to be 10X the size of M0. The Austrians are right to condemn the fractional reserve policies that caused MZM to get so big. But the only thing the Fed can do now is to print money to make the two match, and then make sure it never happens again.
Likely they mean for multi-threaded apps.
> Let pg and rtm take whatever time they need to build a language they are happy with.

Yeah, pg and rtm can do whatever they want. Meanwhile, I want a language I'm happy with.
Interesting I should read this today. I saw an ad for a job I wanted back in early September. I wasn't qualified for it that I could tell from the ad. I applied anyway and went through the interview process. I didn't know exactly why I wanted the job until I was close to actually getting an offer. I figured out I was just bored doing web development. I was already 3 months on a job I had just taken, doing .NET, PHP and web dev using a variety of CMS's. I did it for three months and I realized I just didn't enjoy it anymore. I started doing web dev back in 1999-ish and that's all I know in real world experience.

But this new company took a chance on me. If I can keep up, I'll have that low-level C++ programming experience I have always wanted, including multithreaded stuff.

My intense interest registered and my new employer decided to take a chance on me. Of course, there is more to the story. Such as, I had spent significant time learning C++ on my own and had code to show for it. I'm also older and maybe people take me seriously :)

I have a feeling the top developers are going to all start getting bored with web dev soon. It stands to reason all these 20-somethings start branching out and discovering the underlying software that makes the web work and will want some of that action.

I'm just glad I'm ahead of the curve so I had little competition for this job. The wave will be behind me! Yay!

More comments by me and possibly others here:
http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=41745&Posts=...
"Good luck teaching the unwashed masses lisp."

What problems did you have learning Lisp?
"And Ruby is quirkier still, taking most of perl's weird syntax ..."

Um, what?

I don't think you know much Ruby.
> He wants to be able to write off the purchase of planes as expenses? What? They already get to write off depreciation on planes,

Expenses are now, depreciation is later. And, if you get one, you don't get the other.

I don't know how all the numbers work out, but it could easily be that the tax code encourages borrowing by corporations for things subject to significant depreciation terms. (Interest paid is an expense.)

> but you can't write off the whole plane because you can sell the damn thing after you buy it.

You just record such a sale against expenses, that is, "net everything".

I do think that expenses should be tied to cash expenditures. So, if a company borrows to buy something, it should only be able to expense what it actually paid in any given year. Such treatment would make all expenditures "equal" in some sense.
Well I'm replying to my own reply, because it was rude and I didn't intend it that way. Apologies.
right - exactly what do you think he's doing by asking for a write off on a fleet of 777s?
Here is a dataset that includes the value of the S&P and dividends, going back to the 1800's.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm

The dividend yield used to be much higher, the long term average is 4-5%. The current yield of 2% is pitiful. Dividends are really how you make money investing in stocks, the price appreciation is really just a proxy for money supply growth, see http://www.cashflowanalytics.com/news.php?articleID=172. You can get that same kind of appreciation investing in gold, art, 1950's baseball cards - anything that people value and find hard to dilute.

I've wondered if the appreciation of the S&P index takes into account the constant reweighting that needs to be done. For instance, there's a lag as the company falls out of the index and when a mutual fund can actually sell it. I've also wondered if it takes into account the dilution rate of stocks, which traditionally has been around 2% a year.
Really? Trade: small win for Obama. Taxes: small win for Obama. Subsidies: small win for Obama. Healthcare: big win for Obama. Energy: insanely large win for Obama. Foreign policy: insanely large win for Obama. Civil rights: big win for Obama.

In fact, I seriously doubt the mental state of any intelligent person thinking of voting for McCain.... but then again, that's just my opinion. Not fact.
we can discern millions of colors though.
they ARE screwing things up. bad government is the number one killer of the 20th and 21st centuries. it's not even a contest.
the intelligence service is one of the worst offenders. it is the epitome of bloat and corruption.
No, he's part of the segment of the populace that thinks there is a 1:1 correlation between effort and payoff. He worked hard and now he's wealthy. Ergo: anyone not wealthy must not have worked hard. It's a classic case of affirming the consequent.

Besides, it's funny how people argue that the Democrats are to blame for the politics of the last x years which have been overwhelmingly controlled by a Republican congress and President.
Good advice, but I don't know if I would call it a best kept secret. Maybe I've just been reading all of the right books.

Fred Brooks: "Show me your flow charts and conceal your tables and I shall continue to be mystified, show me your tables and I won't usually need your flow charts; they'll be obvious."

Rob Pike: "Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming."

Eric S. Raymond: "Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust."

Peter Norvig: "Use data-driven programming, where pattern/action pairs are stored in a table."
YouTube - The Secret History of Silicon Valley
YouTube - Developing iPhone Applications using Java
The Austrians are right to condemn the fractional reserve policies that caused MZM to get so big. But the only thing the Fed can do now is to printing money to make the two match, and then make sure it never happens again.

To even have that discussion, there has to be acknowledgment from academia & the Fed that their policies led to this. Right now, the intellectual climate is far, far from any such acknowledgment. In fact, the Nobel for Krugman signals exactly the opposite. It has conferred on him a degree of economic credibility (and perceived infallibility) that, frankly, he does not deserve - that was the point of my post.

Without that Nobel prize, he was easy to ignore as just-another-commentator. Not now. Yet another Keynes quote seems appropriate, why this debate is important:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.