skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that's a problem with macros so much as obscure naming conventions and an obsession with brevity. In the original example, I had a pretty good idea what minipage, tab, each, dedup, map, keys, downcase, tr, td, and tdcolor mean. I can figure out c (color?) and req (request?) from context. I have no clue about defopa, uvar, trues, _, [], profs, topcolor, hex>color or hspace (or I have guesses, but wouldn't trust my guesses enough to pin down the semantics).

From PG's post above, it seems like those are fairly evenly distributed across macros and functions. I don't need to know whether td is a macro or function to guess that it outputs a table data cell. I do need to know that it outputs a table data cell, and I only know that because I'm familiar with HTML.
Is this an example of setting a timeline for your users to force yourself to stick to that timeline?
I curse you, __! My Lucky Seven program is running as we speak and I'm moving on to the maze problem. I can't resist. I had plans for tonight, but not anymore.

(Just kidding about the curse part. I love this stuff. Is there a 2x2x3 step program for people like me?)
Scheme also has "CL" like macros that are hygienic. Scheme 48 for instance, supports explicit renaming macros and MIT has syntactic closures. However, most schemes have a library that adds your traditional defmacro style macros, CL users are likely to want, but there use is almost always discouraged.
Dying in Code (RIP Chandler)
Ask YC.Hackers.Lisp: How hard is it to jump from MIT Scheme to SBCL or PLScheme?
Has anyone here started with MIT Scheme and then jumped to a more popular LISP? How much of a learning curve is there?
No matter where you put an advanced setting, somebody will tell you that you are an idiot
DrScheme on the XO (photos)
The article could have gone one step further and poised the question: what do you want to say to your new boss if you had to truthfully explain your interactions with your old one before you finally decided to leave?
what I thought would happen.
Building Facebook + Blog Widgets for your App by Matt Biddulph of Dopplr [video, audio & slides]
Very exciting.

Should we arrange another Lightweight Languages day at MIT for this?
Bah. I've met a few good 9-to-5 linux administrators. One of the defining traits of an exceptional admin is their ability to stabilize their environment by automation and rigorous attention to detail when they are working.

That doesn't mean they don't have to work crazy hours once in a while, it just means that they care enough to know that part of their job is to create a high quality environment.
OpenMCL (http://clozure.com/) works great on the Mac and 64 bit linux too. Threads and all.
Coghead App Platform Moves To Amazon Web Services
Startup Shows Software For Google's Android Smartphone
The Top 10 Heartbreaking Gadgets of 2007
Q&A: Terrifying Future of Computing
Did Chandler ever have any seasoned open source developers working on it?

Perhaps it's just me but it always looked like Mitch just got a bunch of eager developers and said "go forth and produce some great software".
FANTABULOUS!

It's always exciting to right-click on such an app and find out it doesn't actually use flash!
All other Lisp-inspired languages, including Ruby, have added one important feature by introducing their biggest restriction: they went with more complex syntax abandoning Lisp's S-expressions. By doing so, they have created a substantial difference in how code and data are represented: whereas in Lisp everything, including your code, can be treated as data.

This is, in my humble opinion, the biggest difference between Lisp and others.
Edit: I did it! w00t! Turns out I had to choose i386 from the options at Debian. Also, when the Debian booted, error EIP 00000060 c0100231 00000230 appeared. I looked this up, and I had to type LINUX ACPI=OFF during booting. This didn't work either; I found out I had to change the onboard virtual memory from 8mb to 1mb. It's not the linux people at all. The problem was that the default onboard virtual memory of hp pavilions is too high. It took me three days to find that out.

"The computer is personal again."
I don't understand or appreciate FaceBook that much, but this article bites. It's not like I like or dislike the web app because of the politics of the owner. And even if I did, perhaps I would let the owner speak for himself instead of listening to some elaborately constructed straw man argument!

Very poor rant. He could have made a much better case against the value of FaceBook to people in general instead of wandering all over heck and Georgia.
Allocating Stock: Five Common Mistakes
Corruption allegedly caused by ZFS affects Joyent's StrongSpace and BingoDisk
What about the rumor of Jay-Z launching a record label with Apple? They could call it Apple Records.
I'd love to find some of those $200 and hour contracts... is he for real?
Bill Joy: Why the future doesn't need us
How to create a language mode for Emacs
The team at OSAF was really quite good. They werent seasoned open source developers, they were serious developers. Some were world class. But it was hamstrung by a series of bad decisions and some bad management. I also think having infinite money is a horrible thing for encouraging delivery.
We are waiting to type:

git clone git://ycombinator.com/arc.1.0.0
Note that Paul did not say that Arc will be open-sourced this Winter, just that he hopes it will. That's a big difference. So much of a difference that this headline seems Reddit-ready.
Rubik's Revolution -- An amazing advance on Rubik's Cube (NOT)
Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP
Three ways to add Ruby Macros
Just googling around, doesn't seem to be a real number. For instance, the 4th google hit for "ruby on rails contract" says "This is a 2 month contract position paying $40/hour"

I know I just got through paying some RoR guys about twice that for some code monkey stuff. So the 40-80 range looks a lot more real than 200. Note that I'm not saying there isn't somebody out there making 200/hour, just it is not indicative of where the market is at. Heck, there's probably a few 200/hour COBOL programmers out there too, but that's not saying much for the idea of being a COBOL programmer. It's just an outlier.
Come on... I phrased it: "Likely", didn't I? :-)
Sure, and I've no problem with that. The article in question, though, was suggesting that people are choosing wrong when they knowingly choose to be poorer but happier. There was no failure to understand the problem implied -- it's just that they didn't choose the way the article author wanted them to, and he conveyed this by calling them irrational.
Seems to me that recession == unemployment. I'd make a guess that contributing to open source is attractive to unemployed people because it's a good way to "audition" for a job. So I'd vote for "yes."
On never using popular products:

If you refuse to use certain tools because of religious or ideological reasons then you're just narrow-minded.

If you're an start-up entrepreneur, you're in the situation of having to efficiently allocate scarce resources, ideally you should be using the best tools for the job without arbitrarily limiting yourself, no?

Luckily for them, the guys at Google decided to go ahead using boring uncool commodity hardware instead of the 'better' fancy machines.
"When looking for matches, the bot ignores punctuation, case, and nicks"
A combination should work well enough.

1. Obviously allow password resets to on file email addresses.

2. If the above fails, try geocoding the address with google or geocode.us. If it successfully geocodes, ask the user for the address used to signup for the account, and tell them the zipcode the address was in so they know what address if they moved. Take the address they give you and geocode that. If they are very very close in lat-lon it is the same address (you might call this a geo-hash of the address).

3. No email and fake address? Well, this is a consequence of lying when they signed up, so you might say TFB and let them start a new account.

I can't give you more alternatives without knowing what other info you have on them, but the first two here should cover 90% of your users who didn't lie about their address based on the statistics that I pulled from my butt.
I agree with the sentiment. A lot of this stuff seems to be retrofitted to the observation. You can explain a lot of things through evolution, but to explain all behaviour in terms of it leads to a lot quackery and pseudoscience.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of rigor in these types of papers; a lot of hand waving.
Macros can be used to automate function definition.
You can't use blocks and HOFs for that, because
definition occurs at compile time. You can also
automate definition of other macros.

http://paste.lisp.org/display/54227
Er... yes you did. A Reddit worthy headline would have been "Paul Graham Exposed! Fundamentalist Christian plans to finish an arc before 'Judgement Day'"
This is a little tricky, Types can be pretty broad. First, you could define a tree type with all sorts of different leaves, you could have a list of tree parts, something like:

Tree = Branch Tree Tree
| ILeaf Int
| SLeaf String

then a list like [ILeaf 1, SLeaf "foo"].
Another way to go takes advantage of type erasure. Currently it's just a popular extension but it lets you have lists of stuff in the same type class.

A good example is "Show" you can have a list off stuff that knows how to turn itself into strings. always a handy thing.

Basically you get the big two, group things based on what they are, or group things based on what you can do to them.

Perhaps there is a big pile of random stuff you want to hang on to, but i'd bet 99.9% of the time you really want to collect the stuff into a coherent type.
2007 Darwin Awards
Agreed on the obsession with brevity.

Reminds me of mathematical proofs, where you work out everything offline, and then make the proof elegantly brief. There is a similar process going on here - writing macros really does boil down to that kind of offline work.

Just as with such elegant proofs, though, you do need a pencil and paper to trace through the steps. And if the programmer were anything but of the highest caliber, it is fairly easy to get tripped up.

The way blub languages handle (the absence of) macros for td, tr etc. is to invent templating languages (JSP etc) where you embed Java inside HTML. You basically have a DSL living in a separate syntactic space. That gets the job done, for the specific problem space at hand (web apps).

I have come to like that syntactic space separation: HTML lives as HTML, SQL lives as SQL and so on. With macros, you are getting everything to live in the same syntactic space, so you get the proliferation of tokens, without that structural separation that aids in comprehension.
Heroes and Villains
Straight c's is where it's at.
Filming an Invasion without Extras
I thought the point of ZFS was to avoid corruption?
It's just a small part of much bigger picture actually :-).. (http://www.april-child.com/temp/ior/).

Shame I had to stop real-time collaboration for now due rewriting some parts of the server-side code.
I've observed that inheritors are more risk averse than those who have earned their money. This may be rational. The earners know that they can earn it again. The inheritors know that they probably will not inherit again.
"Arc Doesn't Scale, You Should Use PHP"
Hotmail's cofounder wants to develop a sustainable city in India
Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial
he's not saying that you can't work a 9-5 as a linux admin, he's saying that you can't work a 9-5 job as a linux admin if you don't know what you're doing. Your lack of knowledge would quickly be exposed, whereas Windows systems/networks will allow itself to be set up completely wrong and still at least function to some extent.
I was going to support the "What's wrong with the pub?" part as well.

He's incorrect when he says it disconnects us, at least some of the time: I've got in contact with long lost friends through it. But if he arguing geographically close people use it instead of "going down the pub", and if that's true (which I'm undecided), then I agree with him.

To the others, the British sense of neoconservatism means liberal economics policies (less regulation) and conservative social policies.

His rant was interesting at least. I still view my facebook membership as a little worrying. But still, it's the best way to get in contact with long lost friends at the moment (in addition to being hugely annoying which most of humanity seems to like...).
I hope someone makes a framework for Arc called de Triomphe.
In a recession, many hackers may end up settling for sub-par jobs in the IT field or even outside of it, many of which may be more exhausting or draining than an ideal hacking job. Would they come home to exhausted to do anything other than nap, eat, or watch TV? Would they have to reduce their entertainment budget, and spend longer recuperating with inferior diversions? Or would they reduce their entertainment budgets and recuperating by hacking open-source projects?

Would a hacker work long hours at an easy job and then need some good mental stimulation at the end of the day? Or would the hacker work long hours at an easy job and then spend a few hours looking for a better one?

Would a hacker feel too anxious about his/her decaying economic situation to hack, or attempt to block out the anxiety by entering the mental bubble of hacking?

Would an unemployed hacker contribute to open-source to "audition" for a job, or would there be too many employers with the all-too-common anti-open-source clauses in employment contracts to even think of leaving a trace of having done that?

In my opinion, there are far too many variables to make much of a good prediction.
I'm not sure about 2x2x3, but I hear the 0xC step is quite active.
That's right, and this sucks since I have data in my lifetime StrongSpace account.
Popular but shitty products are rarely "the best tool for the job".

Unfortunately, there always seems to be a lot of them around...
Your comment is too much of an Arc tangent.
Amputee Barred From Olympics (prosthetics are getting good)
He did specify that as the rate for "premium Rails talent", as opposed to $100+ for "average rails talent". Presumably he defines "premium talent" as lying somewhere between "'senior' in the job title" and "Rails Core member or equivalent"; where exactly I don't know.
I meant I was planning to, unless there's some disaster. I'm working on it now. Anyone have any preference for licenses? BSD? Or should I not have asked that...
Going Bankrupt With Amazon S3
The Great Website Design Gallery Roundup by CSS-Tricks
10 Alternative Ruby Web Frameworks
I think there's a rule that when you create a new language you also have to create a new open source compatible license. I look forward to releasing code under The Arc License.
8 Top Tips for Young Entrepreneurs
Change the World or Go Home: Why I Love Working at Microsoft
I like the MIT license (aka X11 license). It's simple, understandable, and permissive.
Feature: Customize Your Mac with Leopard Power Tweaks
So you're waiting for Arc to start your startup?
Well, that just complicates my "language to learn this year" decision.

Last year was Common Lisp. I was planning on doing Python this year. Then recently Scala has been looking very interesting, with the functional/static thing with not bad performance and access to the whole Java stack (I program Java at my job).

Now Arc might be a possibility. At this rate, it will be December and I'll still be trying to decide.
How to Effectively Use a Unique Website Layout
Thinking in Erlang - Coding in Everything Else
Sorry, but your list looks like is searching for psychotic people. I know that some great coders are very passionate about what they do, who borderline into obsession.

I also know, that the best coder/engineer I have ever met, is married, very balanced, works 9-5:30, so he can be home with his kids, and is super super productive, and a very great guy to be around.
Lightning would be the best.
There's already an Apple Records. It was the Beatles' record label. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Records
Just to continue this meme (YC's first?)...

I look forward to typing:

emerge -av arc
Ok, Kudos to Randall. That was a sharp idea to be sure. That's also some fine looking perl compared to what I deal with on a daily basis. Good job guys.

It would take microsoft nearly a decade to complete a feature like that... and then when they were done, there'd be enough little stuff wrong with it that it'd be unusable.

Yes, I'm still bitter about my vista expereince.
I was out of town until today, so I just saw your comment. Rest assured when I'm done with my current gig this May I'll shoot one your way. Thanks for the glory that is Buxfer!
Now that you put it this way, I may have to invent a new reason.
pg has said in an earlier post that he likes designing his own custom languages to fit a particular need. I'm interested to hear what the tagline for Arc will be.
PG writes about Arc ( tryarc@paulgraham.com )
But should we call Arc's future CPAN-like collection of applications "hive" or "hipelago"?
I prefer zlib or boost licenses which make a distinction for binaries. You don't have to attach the license for binary-only applications which makes it more suited in some cases (like embedded development).
This seriously reads like an op-ed from the DailyKos. His premise is poignant (Facebook knows too much), but then he dilutes his message by talking about neocons destroying reality. Politics aside, writing that sort of stuff just makes you look like a toolbox.
I wonder what makes the difference in person's perception of code. I think I have a good idea of what the pg's code fragment does at a first grance. (I do know what [ _ ] means in Arc, though; pg mentioned it somewhere.)

I doubt it's the density that's the problem. I also doubt macros are. It's more like whether you recognize "the way" in which you're supposed to write, in the given language. Any language, verbose or terse, is indecipherable until you get familiar with the way even you know the syntax and semantics of the language.
You're just confused by some syntactic sugar.
[uvar _ topcolor] is shorthand for (lambda (x) (uvar x topcolor)), according to "Arc at 3 Weeks"

each = mutant foreach

dedup = remove duplicates

(trues [] (keys profs*)) would mean "map the lambda (predicate) over the list of keys to the hash of profiles, returning a list of elements for which it returned #t."

A few more specifics about the application and language would make this comprehensible.
ANN: Official ARC Web Site by Paul Graham
With dense code, you have to think about every word. With sparse code, you have to think along with every line/block/idiom. Both require the (same?) thought process, but with dense code you get two advantages:

- You can look ahead easier and get a bird's-eye-view
- Once you learn an operator, recognizing it (and writing it correctly) becomes a single word instead of said line/block/idiom.

My guess is that [uvar _ topcolor] is a function similar to (lambda (x) (uvar x topcolor)). That's just a guess, but once I learn whatever it is, I'd wage that it's easier to recognize and debug the bracket syntax.
Pre-MacWorld story: Braun and Apple design similarities
Arc Based Webapps etc ;)

ArcAde - Retro Games
ArcAne - Obfsktd Programs
ArcHer - Dating Website
ArcHetype - PDF Generation Tool
ArcHegonium - Porn website for hardcore mosses & ferns freaks
ArcHipallium - Image recognition framework
ArcHosaur - 'Enterprise' apps
ArcHlute - Anywhere.fm competitor

Thanks: http://InstantWordSearch.com/
Choosing Python would leave you 49 weeks left to learn something else this year. That's discounting the two weeks you've been taking to decide.
Still, even a $125 an hour gig would be pretty awesome. Wouldn't mind leaving my mind-rotting intra-corp job for a few months of something like that. At least then I could work on the same platform as my startup - not only at night but all day.
Sounds interesting. Please drop me a line to talk about the filter concept further. My email is on my profile. I'm also interested in exploring the idea of porting this type of applications to Facebook, and therefore I'm arranging a weekend event to get a lot of developers together in once place to rapidly build Facebook Apps and learn from each other.
Honestly, he doesn't sound like he'd be the best for a startup. Not the best for an OSS project (which are always done on your own time) either. Certainly not going to make any breakthroughs in mathematics. He's going to live a wonderfully marginal life.

He may be the best around, but what's he going to amount too? Nothing different than a million other good engineers working their asses off in some giant corp in china.

I'm completely certain that some of the best painters where psychotic too. Go ahead and fault them for it if that's what you like to do.
Loss aversion is about the only reason people don't do startups! :)
The remark about lack of individuality at Apple was surprising to read. But on reflection, Jens may have a point, I think. Apple is Steve Jobs and, to a lesser extent, Jonathan Ives. When Steve was gone, Apple sucked. When he came back, Apple stopped sucking. But, it seems everyone who works at Apple is in the shadow of Jobs. Ironically, it seems like the 1984 commercial, and people refer to the iKool-Aid often when talking about Apple.
The ISC license seems to fit your style.
"the best coder/engineer I have ever met, is married, very balanced, works 9-5:30, so he can be home with his kids, and is super super productive, and a very great guy to be around."

"He's going to live a wonderfully marginal life."

Uh, sounds to me like he hit the lottery (and so did those around him). What's marginal about that?
Hacker Charged With Extortion After Attack On Model's MySpace Account
Robots Evolve And Learn How to Lie
"engineer, works 9-5, and has a wife."

Wow, you're setting your goals real high, eh? Is it the wife or the job that you're having trouble getting?
PG, any thoughts on when the documents for startups will be open-sourced (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62998)?
I thought it was http://www.archub.com/
He seems to have forgotten to include the final reason he hates facebook.
"Because I didn't think of it."

Or, more broadly, he seems to dislike the poeple (and their personal politics) behind facebook a lot more than he dislikes the website. Here's betting if facebook had a hippie/commie "lets unite the world and sing cume-by-yah" board of directors, he'd be singing its praises as the savior of us all.
He would use too many words to do this as well.
i'll take the bait :-) why not just public domain it?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98193
More Google Queries Get Google Maps
Amazon Beat eBay in Holiday Traffic
Someone IANALed in Reddit that 'Do Whatever Fuck You Want With It' license is not legally enforcable or something. So I'll take 'Public Domain'.
No Silver Programmers
Why inheritance isn't as useful in dynamic languages, and other notes on OO in Lua
PG registered arclanguage.com 20 days ago.
Yeah, I agree with your points. In the article, I was trying to summarize the impression that is conveyed by reading what people have written about Lisp. I actually had the Jedi analogy in a draft but took it out for length - small in number, deceptively powerful, greater than several people armed with clumsier weapons, etc.

As for c.l.l, I've read enough people express trepidation to go there. I think it's mostly the tongue-in-cheek fear that CS students have of compiler class. Also, I don't doubt that most posters are courteous and helpful, but the anecdote about the noob who asked a dumb question and got a script to format his hard drive traveled pretty far. The 1% of people with bad experiences are just a lot more vocal than the rest with acceptable or positive experiences. I think that if there was an easier setup and more thorough online documentation, fewer people would go to c.l.l for help.
I meant:

git clone git://archub.com/arc.1.0.0
Who really cares about data privacy or security?