skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
to be honest i'm tired of all this language talk. The fanboism surrounding lisp, haskell, arc, scheme, erlang, and other less popular languages is getting to be a little too much

Languages don't matter!

When I first started programming, I was so impressed by superhackers who knew like 10 languages or were experts in obscure ones like Forth and whatnot. Then as I learned more languages, I realized that languages are just interfaces into the computer system. Thats it.

Arc won't be able to do anything that binary code can't do.

This is nothing against pg. If you want to create a language because that interests you. Great! I'm just tired of all the elitist fanboys mentally masturbating over how great their language is. maybe i just read programming.reddit too much tho ;)
I think this is a great step. What I'd like to see though is a much larger hard drive and a Netflix-style monthly subscription option. It'd be sweet if they could combine the new Time Capsule (terabyte hard drive + Airport Extreme) with the Apple TV. That would be a really nice device.
what do you think of the book itself (Programming Collective Intelligence)?

It might be just me but I found the book fairly useless. All the author does is take some ultra basic AI/Machine Learning algorithms and build some bare bones web 2.0 type scenarios around it. The chapters on neural networks, svms and decision trees struck me as particularly primitive. A lot of additional work would need to be done (e.g: nomalizing data for the NNs) before those algorithms would be useful in a real world context.

An ok book if you know nothing at all about AI/machine learning. I wonder how much value it actually provides. I might be missing something. If you think so feel free to correct me.
Well said, spoken like a true Blub programmer!
you'll understand most of them if you read the book. Swig is just a wrapper generator, LAPACK is a fast linear algebra library. If you read the book you will start to see how these can come in handy.

Plus python is trivial to understand. Why not work through some of the more modern examples before dismissing it?

There's a big ML shop in mountain view that uses Python a lot. Can't seem to think of the name right now but ...
is there a Ruby version of NumPy?
/me to the tune of $765 (a double dip on a two year pre-payment.
It was on a credit card not a debit card and the charge was erased within hours.
Handbrake. Don't watch dvd's without it! Half of the new releases these days include copy protection "features" that make the super drive go bonkers when trying to play the disk.

Far better to handbrake it and them just watch the files with VLC.
it's a good starting point for someone with no mathematical background. A lot of these were state of the art in eg compbio a few short years ago... Very few applied texts out there use examples from interesting sources for a lay reader.
If you frequent programming.reddit, you must have read http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ? Is your opinion still the same?
SSH via web browser | Anyterm
I must admit I am curious about his statement that 25% of viaweb code would have been very difficult to do in other languages.

I would like to hear examples of that.

My feeling is that the success of viaweb development had much less to do with lisp than it had to with PG and friends being really good hackers.
Avoiding using a database by using Smalltalk
Ruby vs. Smalltalk
Ask PG: Database, flat files or other for YC News?
I know that you wrote that you used flat files for Viaweb. I was wondering if you were still doing that for YC News, if you had broken down and started using a database or rolled your own data store with Arc.
I have actually witnessed it first hand. When I have a budget for advertising, I tend to use it up quickly; but when I don't, I spend a lot of time thinking of ideas to get free promotion in other ways. Lack of resources does push you to be more innovative. The only downside is if you find your fundded competitor spending on marketing and getting all the buzz and attention while no one ever talks about you.
I for one welcome our new robo-simian overlords.
Aw, man, you fed the troll with an even larger troll.

This is going to be messy.

Maybe I can defuse the situation with the Premature Godwin Maneuver. Look! Over there! It's Hitler!
Right, and ad hominem attacks are OK if someone really doesn't get it?
o man i wish i could design like that
"If, because of this billing mistake, you somehow incurred some fees from your bank or credit card company, please let us know after tomorrow (today we are just replying to all 10,000+ billing messages with a generic explanation) and we'll do our best to make it right for you."

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops/
LOL, one of the comments on http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops/ reads:

#20 Tiara Says:
January 15th, 2008 at 10:31 am

Well if you guys need a place to go after fleeing from this billing crisis, you should definietly head over to Lunarpages:

"For all DH webmasters looking for an escape, Lunarpages has created a coupon code just for you! Use code DHRefugees to receive $40 off hosting with Lunarpages and we will also buy out the remainder of your contract with DreamHost! (Up to 9 months!) If you have several months left on your contract with DH, sign up for Lunarpages and email us your billing receipt (not the triple billing ones.. lol) and we will add that extra time to your account with us!"
> Do you people not work in an enterprise environment?

Sure do - but it's an enterprise environment that has 80% travel. I have a Treo and an iPhone, neither of which I sync very often, and when I do, it's from my workstation not m Macbook. I don't bring an external mouse or keyboard when I travel, that would just be too bulky.
For me, your ruby version is more readable because the order is more sequential (like a pipeline). The arc version has to be read from the inside-out, vs left-to-right in ruby.
That's not really something I could answer at this point. I would never put my faith in a language that I haven't hacked around in.
But fewer layers you have to pay attention to... you don't have to think about lower layers, you treat them as if they work, and build from there.
This has been covered before. IIRC, it's all in memory. The data structures are saved to disk as s-expressions and read on application startup.
Ethereal becomes Wireshark ... now Sharkfest
If you want to write a ton of your own support libraries, feel free to join the fray. While you're writing a library to upload files to S3 (or whatever), others are going to be implementing actual website features in Rails. Do you see where I'm going with this?
I've had the exact same experience. When I read that the MacBook Air didn't have an optical drive, my first reaction was "WTF?", but then I counted how many times I've needed mine, and it turned out to be zero.
Cameraphone used to control computers in 3D
Template-Python: The Python port of the Template Toolkit
I've been anxiously awaiting to give Arc a try for five or six years now. I don't necessarily have a particular project in mind for it yet, but from what I've seen, I expect to like it, and will start using it for SOMETHING as soon as possible.
"... All source-code-level documentation from the Perl Template Toolkit has been copied to the Python version, with all Perl-specific terminology translated to its Python equivalent. Documentation appears in Python docstrings, as appropriate. The main body of POD documentation for each Perl module appears as the corresponding Python module's docstring ..."

Before python had a usable web framework, Perl was my toolkit of choice. And Template Toolkit (TT), [0] later TT2 was my framework of choice. Now Sean McAfee [1] has ported it to python. Wonder if I can get it to work with Django and ditch theirs?

[0] Created by Andy Wardly ~ http://wardley.org

[1] Sean McAfee ~ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_threa...
Seems like you're a good candidate for a catch-22...
"Languages don't matter!"

That's why I write raw machine code exclusively!
> I realized that languages are just interfaces into the computer system. Thats it.

What do you mean... that's it? From where I stand, that's quite a lot...
Not only do I plan to do my startup in Arc, I've already decided to use holographic storage to do my backups (it's big, you know).
Not really - hacking around with Arc doesn't require faith in it (since the commitment level is well below the level where you would use it to implement your Next Great Idea). And of course hacking around in it is how he would become confident/impressed enough to use it for bigger things.
Here's a data set that needs scraping, if anyone has the time to spare: speeches and PR communications, esp. those from government officials. Visualizations of what talking points or ideas are spreading through what organizations (political parties, campaigns) and in what countries would be really interesting. Data mining to see which phrases or ideas "stick" in political blogs or on social websites would be neat, also.
Really? I skimmed the article, but Sharkfest only seems to refer to a conference about Wireshark.
Documents vs. Objects: a new model representing RESTful resources
Right. Except now to make restarts faster I use lazy loading.
It's sad. After coding in Haskell and Erlang I moved back to Python for a project and my code was just littered with extra variables. I had become so used to the functional way that varying variables just seemed so wrong and foreign.
I'm getting one.
What a weird situation. I keep trying to tell people Lisp is great, and they say, no, no, you guys were just really good programmers. But if I'm such a good programmer, why don't they believe me?
haha, is Arjun with you guys? tell him I said hi.
Please write about how you do this and how you interact with the files (loading and serializing). I'm looking at alternatives to using relational databases and information about how to avoid data corruption (features analogous to transactions) is scare. How would you convince a mission critical site developer that this is safe?
It's kind of funny when you scan through the replies to that post. Some people say the post is too light-hearted, a few say they're leaving, and another large group appreciated and enjoyed the post. It's hard to tell whether the result is a net gain or loss of business, but I certainly wouldn't be quick to say that it is definitely a bad thing.
is dreamhost okay? im planning to move to dreamhost...
do they have SSH and SVN?
Apple TV has to be using some serious compression to be able to serve you a 720p movie fast enough that you can watch it as it does. You're still getting an inferior experience to the guy with Blu-Ray, especially if he has a 1080p capable set.

That said, highly compressed 720p is still going to be an upgrade to a lot of people over a standard DVD. Perhaps only obsessives like me will care.
I've been using DH for almost 10 years (I've switched to dedicated servers years ago so I haven't been affected by those shared hosting issues, though their recent main switch / nameserver failure did.)

I don't know anybody inside DH personally, but I initially liked about them having atmosphere of a company run by a bunch of geeks. It's been inspiring to watch how they handle various issues as they grow, and yet try to keep the atmosphere. Sure they've made some basic mistakes which can be criticized as "unprofessional", but any company can do so. As the number of customers grow, you need to hire more staff and I think it gets difficult to keep the high standard.

When you start up a company, probably it consists of only smart people. As you grow and you have to hire more staff, some junior, and it'd be getting difficult to for you to track what everyone is doing... how will you handle the situation?
We just went from 19 to 20. (Or worse.)
I use dice to decide in which language I write today.
If you can re-use the MzScheme libraries there is some hope.
This is just flat out linkbait. Crunchgear is desperate.
All his points are bogus. It's a freaking laptop, how many USB ports does he need? While I can come up with tons of use cases, I honestly don't recall an actual visual image in m head of a laptop with 2+ USB devices connected at the same time. And the only time I see someone sticking a CD/DVD into a laptop is to watch a movie, which doesn't stop me from thinking about replacing my CD/DVD tray with an extra bay battery (ThinkPads rock).

And Duo 2 1.6Gz is too weak? That's just insane. Software has stagnated for at least 10 years, lagging behind hardware like crazy. What is that guy running today that he wasn't running 10 years ago? I have a CPU scaling frequency indicator in Gnome menu that 99.9% of the time shows me freaking 800Mz - yes, that's a typical frequency my 2.2Gz Duo 2 is running at.

The only time I wish I had a faster PC is when I do batch conversion of a bunch of RAW files from my camera. But it's like doing backups - pushing gigabytes around... And even that I am doing on my "big" PC where I need more screen real estate.

The only thing this laptop is missing is UltraNav found on ThinkPads. An enormous productivity/ergonomics booster, something that will keep pe glued to Lenovo forever.
I think you make a good point but also consider,

MZ Scheme links trivially to C libraries. I would think that anyone who uses Arc would use this facility heavily. Now whether there exists a C library to do exactly what you want is a different question. And I know this might be heretical here, but ROR is hardly the great time saver the fanboys make it out to be when you count in issues like deployment and doing non standard things with it. (Don't get me wrong, it is a good framework, but it is hardly a magic wand and neither is it very unique - Wicket + scala comes very close to ROR in productivity for example)

PS: How long do you think it would take before people hack up a virtual machine or C code emitter? I, for one would do exactly this if I planned to use it in my startup. It isn't that hard (Ruby's recursive descent sloooww interpreter still powers all those RoR sites, minus the vanishingly few ones in JRuby.)
Tiger Escapes at SF Zoo (Apologizing for bad design)
To nitpick this remark,

Suppose: 1, cperciva is a really good programmer, 2, writing a Viaweb is within his ability.

Given: cperciva intends to write a Viaweb.

Result: Viaweb in C.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96431 (I know, the logic is flawed. I'm being half-facetious)
Viaweb manipulated s-expressions at runtime and called compile on them. One literally could not write it in C, short of writing a Lisp interpreter in C, which is what Yahoo had to do when they ported it to C++ after I left.
lol... is it yc application season yet?
Ah, I've got this one figured out. I'm going to use it to implement another dialect of CL... in which I will implement a dialect of Scheme... in which I will reimplement Arc. I'd like to see how many iterations of this one could go through before it becomes completely unusable even for simple arithmetic.

Assuming each one interprets the next.
You obviously weren't watching the keynote. Steve demoed downloading and starting an SD movie, not an HD one. SD downloads fast enough to start "instantly". HD does not.

The claim that this is "highly compressed" is baseless.
Dear Microsoft: Enough with the Silverlight
I believe it could be very ugly in C, but not that it could not be written in C.
Transaction isolation would be handled like any non-database backed application: use your language and/or library's native thread synchronization features.

As for persisting transactions, you could marshall to file the deltas for each transaction, and on regular intervals apply them to the full image to create an up-to-date image.
My reaction was:
"fantastic news! No more irritating seek noises every damn time my macbook starts! No more tainted region coding infection! No more useless thing I never use anyway!"

Great news.
Search low prices on Bountii : http://bountii.com/search.php?item=macbook+air
Been using a 12" laptop without an optical drive for about a year now. I only missed it when I wanted to finally install Linux about a month ago. I couldn't get it to work from a bootable USB drive so I ended up borrowing a friend's external CD drive. Glad to be rid of Windows, even if the fonts aren't very good. I'd kill for the equivalent of Windows standard font smoothing in Linux.
> use your language and/or library's native thread synchronization features

You may try using a single thread and cooperative multitasking. It helps if your language makes this convenient, e.g., Stackless Python or Scheme:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561

Just remember to yield every now and then if you do anything lengthy. Depending on your application, it may not be that bad, and if you don't need anything fancier in the way of scheduling fairness, it makes your life really simple.
Have apple install a new battery for $129 all-in.
Yes, they do have those.
Advice for my nephews?
I went home for Xmas and my nephews are getting into computers (mainly playing runescape on-line). I left the older one with a copy of Lutz 'Learning Python' and installed it on his desktop and showed the younger one how to make a simple html page and sent him a copy of 'A Kid's Guide to Creating Web Pages for Home and School' via amazon. you can't force anyone to be interested in a subject but i figured i'd open the door - this probably would have been enough for me at their ages. what would you have done?
Not quite gigabit. I think I read somewhere that http://www.apple.com/wifi/80211/ can hit around 160 megabits, though.
No idea how pg handles it, but here is an easy do-it-yourself way:
http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/2006/09/pure-and-sim...

It doesn't matter it is in Erlang - you can do it in any language. A Lisp that implements software transactional memory is Clojure (runs on the JVM):
http://clojure.sourceforge.net/
I've never changed the battery of my notebook, and it seems to me the inputs are fine otherwise - USB gives you everything you need.
No, but I may try Clojure. Because it runs on the JVM, there are lots of libraries, and I can always fall back to Java/JRuby if something doesn't work.

Arc and Clojure together may make for a great Lisp year.
The Long Tail Of Business Models
I guess he's doing alright if you only have to complain about the font :)
Ever heard of the concept of Turing Completeness, Google it...
Business Users Get Into the Vista Adoption Curve
IBM opens its application lifecycle management (ALM) platform, Jazz
have they not heard of testing!!!
My kids already do plenty of simple web stuff on their computers at school so I generally encourage them to do other things at home.

My son has an iBook and my daughter has a MacBook. I got them both subscriptions to several online games years ago to get them through that stage as quickly as possible. They still like to play games, but now they are into the ones they can modify themselves.

Recently I installed Inform 7 and some text adventures on both their computers. I also wrote an incomplete adventure involving finding the owner of a lost dog at a local park. My daughter really enjoyed playing Zork and so I showed her how my small adventure worked. Now we've traded places - she's added more details to it and I do the playtesting.
When I work in Python, I find I need to use emacs' support for rectangle editing frequently when rearranging nested blocks.
Writing code is only half of "doing a startup".
Lisp-style metalanguage for News.YC
Speaking of Viaweb... Actually, I'd love to see Lisp-style metalanguage here at news.yc, for example:

{i This text would be italic}
{y:99053 This is a link to a news.yc post}
{r:http://wikipedia.com Click to go to Wikipedia}
This does the math for you, so 2 * 2 is {* 2 2}
Literal curly brackets: ~{ ~}, literal tilde ~~ - that's all you need to know.

Angle brackets < > could be used instead of { } as well - doesn't really matter.

Not that it would be a huge improvement, but rather ummmm... for the sake of some lispness.

The idea is not new, I thought about a text pre-processing language like this before. And no, I'm no lisp hacker, just a C/unixoid programmer with oily greasy hands.
Wuss. I use dice AS the input device. Yep. Has a random number generator built right in, it does.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99171
Why not, Paul?
I wonder how often the reverse occurs (i.e. someone ports a Python module to Perl)?
Startup idea for theinfo.org community
I love Aaron's idea to create a community around people "build[ing] a Web of data". There may be potential for a startup to help them out, also...

Well organized data can be very valuable. When the data are so valuable that companies providing them have revenues in the billions [1], the costs of distribution are negligible, and there is a lot of competition in such fields. However, there must be many not-as-valuable data sets, the sale of which would cover gathering and organization costs, but the distribution costs of which make it not worthwhile (hosting, coding of payment processing backend, keeping track of legal issues, etc.).

If so, would it make sense to create a website which lets people scrape their own data streams (for example, tagged and organized texts of political speeches from around the world), focusing on the quality of the data, and letting the site take care of hosting and distribution? At the least, it would be a searchable repository of organized data sets. Optimistically, it could be the search engine of the semantic web... ;)

What do you think, ladies and gents?

1. The Thomson Corporation had revenues of $6.6 billion in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thomson_Corporation
This one seems perfect to me. Just what I need.
Did they preserve the s-expr structures in the C++ version?

PostgreSQL was once a collection of C modules called from Common Lisp. Debugging the cross-language implementation proved too difficult so it was ported entirely to C using tools which mostly moved the parens around. Some lisp structures live on inside it to this day.
I think the blogger is just not in the market for a small laptop. I have a white Macbook that I'm very happy with, and I couldn't imagine carrying around anything larger. I'd have bought a 12" Powerbook if those had survived the Intel switch. In contrast:

> And lastly, let's be honest: did we really need things to get that much thinner? My MBP is a great size, not too heavy, and it's thin enough that there's quite a lot of leftover room in the laptop compartment of my bag.

There's obviously much more room for ports and other little conveniences at 15", but it's unfair to call a machine "useless" if it makes compromises to get smaller than that.
Something like a community-based Dapper? http://www.dapper.net
Mysql's license is all about trying to make money from Mysql. My guess is that pg would prefer wider adoption to trying to make money. At least, initially.
As paulgb said, Lisp is not purely functional, unlike Erlang or Haskell.

And actually, you could ignore functional programming and write code in an imperative style in Lisp (though it's not recommended, since you'd be missing out on the benefits of using Lisp).

Take a look at "Imperative Outside In" (chapter 3, section 2) in "On Lisp" (http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/onlisp.pdf) for an example.
If you have hierarchical or self-referencing data, making the triangle or circle peg fit into the square hole seems like a lot of effort.

The effort may be worth it when an application has to share its data with other applications since the alternatives may be even harder.
Is any startup ever "done" in just one language? Everwhere I've been there are a half a dozen.

Why not just wait to see what Arc ends up doing really well out of the box and then considering it for that and leave the things it doesn't handle to something else?
Is it still a rails app? just seems silly to take a message, store it in a database, and then read it out again almost instantly (and over time there is no point to even have it in a database).

Bizarre use of rails.
Oh, how I look forward to the corporate environment..
Facebook "one hundred percent" buying Plaxo