skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see no other options but trying to find a job where all that matters is whether you get stuff done, no when or where.

Life is too great for being wasted on some company's stupid playground rules: it is NOT okay to think "well, it's the same everywhere -- i'll just have to take it"! You deserve to embrace your talent in the best possible way. If you know you write quality code because you're a passionated and self-respecting coder, you have the right to excuse yourself off these bosses and companies who can't see your value beyond their time clocking schemes. You do no better at your work by adhering to these rules.

From what I've observed and discussed, programmers and intellectual workers seem to get something like 3-4 hours of real work done in an 8-hour day. If they're good. That sucks! Everybody thinks it's frustrating to be at the office when you actually cannot work as you need some time to think over your problem. You could do other, useful, personal, creative things while mulling on your problem and then when you're finished, just sit down for a couple of hours and effectively do a couple of days' work in that one sitting. You feel productive and you get things done. Both personal and professional. Everybody wins.

There are companies that understand this. Keep looking and when you find one, stick to it.
"Which was Woz, the perfectionist or the pragmatist?"

Over time, I've learned that it's not always an either-or thing. Many -- perhaps most -- people are both, depending on the activity. I'm a perfectionist about writing (code and natural language), but I'm certainly not a perfectionist about fashion or cooking, for example.
I already have a 0,8 inch notebook. I hope with LED display and solid state disk, the new MacBook will be slimmer.
For once, I will answer this question: yes, soon. This winter, I hope.
Wall Street: Thanks IBM, we needed that.
Well I find this slightly condescending and incredibly judgemental.

A. Who are you to tell me if I'm living or not. Furthermore, what's your criteria for "LIVING". Assuming the status quo; I'm hitting all the major tenents: I travel extensively, I'm married, I've a whole host of life experiences worthy of a book or a movie, I read, I enjoy film, I live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood in NYC, I eat great food. I have nice friends. That sounds like living to me?

B. If you also define living by including having an impact on other's lives, than indeed I'm living life to the fullest. No I'm not writing any life saving medical software, but I do write software that people use to express themselves creatively and know a number of the users of my software who have gone on to do some pretty impressive things because of what my software taught them about themselves; their capabilities, talents, etc. This is why I write software in the first place.

Now, could I do this extreme lifestyle if I was working for a bank? Hell no. If I was working at an advertising agency? Hell no. But guess what? My extremism has lead me to an oppurtunity to write software for myself and for my own company. Again, living life to it's fullest. Instead of helping others chase their business dreams, I am living my own.

So get down from your horse, dude. Because I don't live in the suburbs with my wife and 1.5 kids doesn't mean I'm not living life.
Amy Editor (collaborative in-browser hacker's editor)
This is nice. Thanks for the various links and pointers; I dream of the day that I have time to sit back down with Lisp and finally grok the mysteries of the macro, and articles like yours will help.

Language designers seem to agree that the secret to giving Lisp a bright future is to invent a brand new Language of the Future that just happens to encompass Lisp. This is not exactly a new argument around here, since this very site is written in a FutureLisp candidate. Other aspiring FutureLispers include Guy Steele and Matz (http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html).

The thing to recognize is that Lisp's storied history is not an advantage. It's actually a big problem for the language. People like new languages. They're not big yet. You can grasp them. Their core team is young and obscure enough that you have a fighting chance to join it. They haven't accumulated decades' worth of parasitic features. They have no installed base that must be accommodated. Their design flaws are not yet so old that they've been enshrined as advantages. They are not steered by a committee of middle-aged managers. They haven't spawned so many children that you can't decide between them all. The experts haven't yet had the chance to become intimidatingly skilled, let alone entrenched and opinionated, let alone bitter and burnt out.

The good news is that each decade's new language is a bit more Lispy than the last. Ruby seems likely to tide me over nicely until it's finally time to jump on the Arc bandwagon.
I've restarted learning Scheme now, and found an Eclipse plugin: http://schemeway.sourceforge.net/
I don't know how it compares to other Scheme environments, but it seems to work well enough. It bundles Kawa and SISC, but can apparently also be used with external scheme interpreters like MzScheme.
ITA Software's puzzle archive
Since pg has been pretty mum on Arc and he has designed it more as a pure language than a stack, I'm interested in Qi from Lambda Associates (http://www.lambdassociates.org/lC21.htm). That sounds like a balanced approach that solves the library problem and the implementation problem nicely. Hopefully pg will surprise us (this winter, he says! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98330 )
My additions, for super-coders:

1. Have, more than once, wished to stop time, exit society and live on an isolated island so you can figure out this incredible algorithm that you know will change and amaze the world.

2. Has grasped the importance of concentrating for long contiguous periods of time to work out very deep problems. Probably worked out a very strict, detailed set of priorities to ensure that this can happen on demand.

3. Focuses more on whether he can beat the hardest unsolved problems than bragging that he is the best coder. Realizes that such a definitive metric doesn't really exist. The point is that by focusing on the science itself, you can always be challenged and won't be held back by the satisfaction of being better than some other bum. Although, this doesn't mean that he doesn't have a strong ego internally, just knows that it can only be proved through code.

4. Has some deep-seated inspiration.

5. If forced to stop working on at least something incredible for more than a few weeks, he will go crazy with a large machine gun. If he hasn't had this desire for a good while then he probably hasn't put in the effort to become great. This holds until the day he gets burt out..
On Experts and Expertise
What's the point of living but to be happy? If the work jawngee does is satisfying and enjoyable, wouldn't that make him feel happy and alive? Would you tell Mozart to play less music or DaVinci to drop one of his extra-curriculars? You think his formula wouldn't work for you, but don't forget you're a different person, and he might think that you aren't living because your job isn't inspiring enough to work that hard at. Lay off.
Three tremendously useful websites that can save you 500 hours this year
Other features that have piqued my interest (besides the already mentioned, and vitally important, macros) are:

- conditoins and restarts
- CLOS
- reader macros (which are distinctly different from normal macros).

If you're talking about other Lisps (besides CL), like Scheme, it's worth looking at define-syntax and syntax-rules and how they deal with some of the intricacies of creating macros with define-macro.
CSS Resources
popularity, social power, and possibly getting laid

As you suggest, these things are gotten from relative and not absolute wealth. If I make 50,000 dollars in an area where everyone makes 25,000, I am extremely wealthy, and can name my price for the important things in life. I wonder how the "researchers" missed that point.
There is a Lisp extension? library? that supports strong typing, it's called Qi: http://www.lambdassociates.org/
Cool! I love looking at these when I am on the Red Line. I like the overlapping chain of movies one the best, and have even gone so far as to fiddle around with some CL code to solve it.

Sweet company.
I just went to check it out, I like the three last lines :

You were granted voice by moderator.

[8:25pm] pyl: i really prefer the bsd license, but run linux out of practicality.

[8:25pm] Shaze: you jackasss, there's no one in meta

[8:26pm] Cach-e: pyl: Oh. Don't know if I'd manage to play that game mentally then What if your favorite character die?

[8:26pm] roel-: woohoo I can talk again

[8:26pm] moderator: roel-, you have been muted for 34 minutes 8 seconds.

[8:26pm] roel- had voice removed by moderator.
Game Design Essentials: 20 Mysterious Games
Top Custom Colors In YC-HN Top Bar
Well, this is good news. It would be nice to have FutureLisp ready for prime time when the Ruby programmers (weaned on closures and metaprogramming!) get frustrated with their stale, old, crufty language sometime around the year 2015.
There is a huge body of literature on cognitive biases. Under the right conditions, people will reliably make stupid bets. For example:

"Consider a regular six-sided die with four green faces and two red faces. The die will be rolled 20 times and the sequence of greens (G) and reds (R) will be recorded. You are asked to select one sequence, from a set of three, and you will win $25 if the sequence you chose appears on successive rolls of the die. Please check the sequence of greens and reds on which you prefer to bet.

1. RGRRR

2. GRGRRR

3. GRRRRR"

65% of the subjects chose 2, even though 1 provides the greatest chance of winning money. (From "Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment," by Tversky and Kahneman.)

Maybe all those subjects had the unconventional goal of avoiding free money. But it seems more likely that they weren't thinking well.
http://progressiveboink.com/nick/images/calvinandhobbes/CH86...
> and I should be able to say just (compare > karma).

I suggest you implement a terse syntax for partial-apply. For my own pet lisps, I use {}. (You are welcome to steal it ;-)

So {+ 1} would expand to (in scheme) something like (lambda rest (apply + `(1 ,@rest)). You could keep partial-applying arguments

(do
(= x {+ 1})
(= y {x 2})

then actually apply it with ()

(y 3 4 5) ; => 15

Your accumulator generator in Arc:

(def foo (n) [++ n _])

Could be shortened to:

(def foo (n) {++ n}) ; even terser than regular Arc!

The only time you'd need _ is when you want to change the order of the arguments (e.g. you'd never need {+ _ 2}, but you might need {/ _ 3}, or even {/ _ _ _ 3} if you want to jam the first three arguments in front.

This has some other interesting properties:

- In a lisp-1 OR lisp-2, #'foo can be represented as {foo}.

- Your karma macro can fit in there as (compare > {karma})

- With the _ variables, it might even be a general case of your [] syntax.

- {} stands out visually. "Here be electric magic."

- If you ever implement generic functions dispatched left-to-right, you can implement partial dispatch for partial application.
Deepak Chopra thinks he can:

http://www.amazon.com/Ageless-Body-Timeless-Deepak-Chopra/dp...
How to Sell a Startup - Talk given by Paul Graham at PARC
Now you don't think pg's time would be better spent writing essays, do you? :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97830
I found an Upcoming event posting[1] that indicates this was given as a talk at PARC on May 4, 2005.

There are draft notes at the bottom so I'm not certain if this was the final version.

[1] http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/18619/
People also like to beat up (a ka vote down) people who are already lieing on the floor (evil grin).
Dude, I told you I was sorry for that.
PG: Arc Likely To Be Open-Sourced This Winter
Rails isn't a ghetto, the sector's got lots of work, and Zed Shaw uses it every day wearing a tie and dress shirt
It's true. I'm not computer literate. I thought I was, but that is because I underestimated what computer literacy meant. I thought that if I knew how to change the BIOS, knew how to burn a disc, and could unzip files, I could install Linux.

Another problem is that my situation is probably an outlier. My computer is in Spanish, which makes it a lot harder to mess with. Plus, it runs on Windows XP from 2002. On top of that, my disk drives are slightly messed up. They burn correctly according to the MD5 hashes, but one of them might not read well. Finally, none of the two computer-literate people I know are around, and "build your own PC" books are hard to find, universally in Spanish, and expensive (here in Santiago).

I'll keep trying until I find the stupid mistake I've been making all along.

And you're right. I'm being hostile; I've spent too much time over the computer over the last few days, and I'm going a little crazy. But, much like being drunk, driving oneself crazy does not excuse what you do/say when you're kind of crazy. I apologize.

Edit: both CD drives work properly.

Edit: I followed the tutorial, and burned the CD. I'm going to reboot now (both fingers crossed).
I was going to rant about this, but their company actually has something resembling an original premise, and principals from MIT, as opposed to the usual social-network-rails-2.0 crap. And it is a very engaging ad which appears to have homed in on a large concentration of its target audience.

Good stuff, and well played -- a case study in low-effort, high-payoff marketing in an unorthodox capacity. Smart guys.
Fifty Years of Human-Machine Symbiosis
Why would you want to sell it instead of making your startup grow?
Another way to look at it -- "the best is the enemy of the good". Which side of that battle you take will depend upon your desired outcome and time frame.
My guess is that it's a fake, but it happens to coincide with the actual planned keynote anyway. ;P
fake: the mac pro was introduced a week ago.
Sorry, it was not Carnegie who did the study. He only cited a study by Frederick Winslow Taylor (of 'Taylorism' fame).

As I recall it Taylor did not only advise the workers in general - but every worker in the study had been assigned a guy with a stop watch who told the worker what to do. Must have been pretty annoying micro-management.
This was a good article and I enjoyed reading it, but I have to say I disagree with the central premise. I love the "family of languages" aspect of Lisp and the incredible amount of innovation that is going on with Lisps and functional programming. Lisp has become like Jedi training, you aren't a real Lisp geek until you have built your own light saber (aka rolled your own Lisp dialect). The story should be to tell new people that part of using Lisp embracing this richness. There are implementations that can get people started in a hurry and anyone with ten minutes and access to a search engine can find them.

I used to post and even answer some questions on comp.lang.lisp and I honestly cannot understand where it got the reputation that it seems to have. I can't tell you how many incredibly helpful messages I received from people correcting some of my misconceptions about macros and even helping me track down a type in one of the books I was learning from. The regular posters there really just had a few simple rules that were not hard to live by, e.g. don't ask the group to do your homework, try and make some effort on a problem before asking for help, don't continually make inflammatory claims about why Language X or Feature Y are so much better when you have only been using the language for three days.
Translation/summary: Zed asked me to cover up for his angry rant. "All those profane indictments were actually just little jokes! He's an okay guy, really!"

All this just makes me want to learn Rails that much less. I progam with creating wealth in mind, not insane drama.
Finally. ;)
But it's already open-sourced for all those who are coding in it now?;)
I'm going to call BS on this one, for one simple reason: submitting source code to an application is both unlikely to fly with independent developers, and a pretty poor way to protect the underlying platform from malware.

The former is especially obvious in the context of independent OS X developers' love/hate relationship with Apple -- it's a great platform, but if your app proves too popular, Apple is likely to just roll their own version into the next release of the OS, and shove you out of the market. Giving them source code along with the deal is just not a good deal for anyone but the boys in Cupertino.

The second issue is more subtle, but no less important. Manually reviewing millions of lines of code submitted by random ADC members is hardly going to be cost or time-effective for Apple. Also, even if they did decide to eat the cost, it wouldn't work -- even gifted developers have a hard time doing strong security audits of their own code, much less that written by other people.

Overall, it looks like a wishlist, not a feasible leaked outline.
This reminds me of something I always wonder about: the importance of management in startups (once they hit, say, 8 employees).

For the most part, if you hire the right people they are self-motivated and in general the team has a clear direction. But at some point you need good managers -- when is that?
In reality, though, the interpersonal drama that plays out in the blogosphere does little to make any given framework more or less effective of a tool.
Putting it into a more emotionally charged version for us all - you can do a startup on your own and sell it for $1 million. Or you can be partners with someone who will do no work and take all the credit, but then the company will sell for $110 million, of which you will get 1% or $1.1 million.
It's the VC value proposition ;-)
Perhaps you should do the opposite: Live every day as if it was your _first_.
Thanks, I think. :)

<self-serving-crap>
For the record, we're a bit different from many startups in that we believe in "User Generated Revenue" (what was previously known as "sales"). We're growing revenue (not traffic) at double-digit rates a month and having a pretty good time with it.

And yes, we have a bit of an MIT slant. Not just both the founders, but 7 (over 25%) of the team has MIT roots. This could be partly because we're located right in Kendall square too -- but we like to think it's because even smart people like to make money.
</self-serving-crap>
1. CLOS and the MOP have some very devoted advocates, and it's obvious that CL's object model contains a strict superset of the behaviors available in other languages. If you don't absolutely hate OOP, they're worth checking out [1].

2. Macros. Macros, macros, macros. Commonplaces like "code is data" and "program-writing programs" are useful characterizations, but they make it easy to underestimate how much of a productivity booster metaprogramming can be.

Despite regular practice and a lot of first-rate reading material, I stayed clueless about macrology until I got stuck with a big ugly infrastructure problem [2] that forced me to use a bottom-up style. At some point I macroexpanded my code out of curiosity and found myself staring at pages and pages of boilerplate. Some of it -- database code in particular -- even reminded me of stuff I previously would have done by hand.

Anyway, I guess I recommend the Kool Aid...

[1] OOP owes me my Freshman and Sophomore years.

[2] I was building a platform, but I can't talk about it.
(before I begin: I am familiar with macros & DSLs, code generation, building a custom language layer and then write your app in that custom language and so on, and I buy into almost all of it)

I am sure the code above is poetry for those deep into it, but for a person who is a bit rusty (or god forbid, new to the code base), this is basically indecipherable. Look at how many tokens are there in a line like

(each c (dedup (map downcase (trues [uvar _ topcolor] (keys profs*))))

How many people can answer the question of which ones are macros, functions, simple identifiers and so on? In that particular example I am stumped at [uvar _ topcolor] and can't get past it.

Yes, I have read Paul's thesis on Lisp code density (quick summary: each line is dense, but there is a lot less overall code so it evens out or better), but my counter would be that there is a density beyond which most mortal brains can't penetrate.

Without intending to cause offense, I am going to say that this is tending to write-only code. Sure, the equivalent Ruby or Python (leave alone blubs like Java or C#) would be pages long, but I suspect that lower density leads to better understandability.
They're not sorted.
Look at how many tokens are there in a line like

There's not really a concept of lines in Lisp; you can
break expressions wherever you like. E.g. you could also
write:

(defop topcolors req
(minipage "Custom Colors"
(tab
(each c (dedup (map downcase
(trues [uvar _ topcolor]
(keys profs*))))
(tr (td c)
(tdcolor (hex>color c)
(hspace 30)))))))
What Does MySpace's Child-Protection Deal Mean for Facebook, Bebo, and Google?
Actually, the equivalent Ruby/Python would use a simple SQL query. I have long noticed how SQL is the poor-man's functional "DSL" for such uses ...
I'm already listening to music, so shut the fuck up. thanks.
Edit: I think I found the problem. I had to choose i386 instead of alpha on the <a href="http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/>debian site</a>. I figured out this referred to my processor. Thanks to the guy who posted the tutorial on the infrarecorder; it looks like it will work.
True, it probably has nothing to do with Ubuntu. It might be the windows, it might be me.
Can you show counts please?
Shouldn't the title be more like "10 worst PC keyboards of the late 1970s and early 1980s"
haha! I love those aging commies at the Guardian.
From the Ruby side the difference is the quantity and quality of libraries that are available. You are likely to find stuff that is currently been worked on, with CL this can be a real problem. There are a lot of half done libraries, so you have to be willing to read a lot of code, either make improvements yourself or write some from scratch.
I think the author is omiting one important fact in those successful businesses : Time. Yes buddy, when Microsoft and walmart first launched they were only cool to a small group, but quite lame to the vast majority. They could not understand the value of home pc or super sized stores that cuts the local shop business in half. Maybe not so much for walmart since it provided instant gratification through cheap prices. It took time to educate the users, and the masses before getting significant traction. Google was the cool product a few years ago, today it is becoming more and more lame, but more and more attractive to users. Therefore, if you are product fanatic and you got techcrunched now you have earned the respect of the small smart crowd, but you need to educate the bigger crowd. Explain them that their vision has been imperfect and you are here to change that and this is how.... Now Personaly I don't like to work on something revolutionary (unless it could involve redistribution of wealth, world hunger or something similar), I don't want to pay for someone else's r&d, but I encourage anyone who is working on something cool to keep going, because I may sell for 5 millions in 9 months, but you will sell for 10 billions in a few years and you will be more likely to finance research for mental disease such as (greed).
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
The sooner the better. I bet a few people here would want to help out. With the documentation and the like.
12 hours a day, 7 days a week? Are you high? Oh, wait...
I don't think it says MacBook Pro, though. It's just talking about MacBooks.
People would want to do their startups in Arc too. So, yeah, sooner the better.
I think I'd consider hiring someone with laser focus who answered no to all but #7 and #14.

Actually, come to think of it some of the better windows programmers I've met are that way.