skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was asking about Joel's article because you used the phrase "JS has become your assembly language", which he also mentions. My comment regarding abstracting away browser nastiness was in response to my original comment, "You still have to deal with HTML and CSS and the DOM", which you didn't address.

"The idea of abstracting away from the browser entirely seems attractive, but turns out to be impractical once you get to know the problem better."

In fact, I know the problem very well, and can tell you that this is simply not true. Unfortunately I can't give you any more details right now, so I'm sure you'll think I'm full of shit.

I'll admit that a) I'm biased, and b) I haven't looked at Parenscript in depth, but from what I've seen I don't see it solving any problem well enough to get non-Lisp geeks to use it.
Founder Craig Newmark Talks "Turkey"
Hack Your Startup Credit Rating
Surprising news: top ten most viewed pages on Wikipedia and Conservapedia
Top 12 Areas for Technology Innovation through 2025
As a general principle:

1. Distribute an RSA public key with your software.

2. Using the associated private key, sign the hash of the latest version of your software, and put that signature online.

3. Each time you update the software, replace said signature with the signature of the hash of the new version.

4. Have the client software periodically fetch that signature file over HTTP, verify the signature, and check that it is up to date.

5. For the love of ${DEITY}, don't install updated versions automatically. If someone steals your RSA signing key, you don't want to hand them a convenient automatic worm distribution system; and in any case, users are generally much happier if they can say "not now please".

Beyond that, approaches vary depending on the complexity of your software. If your software is a complete operating system, you'd probably want something like the FreeBSD Update utility which I wrote; if your software is just a single executable with no data files, you'd probably want something much simpler.
Because they hire too many people. The more people you hire, the less you get done per unit people. With development, the more people you hire the less you get done period.

Virtually every startup that raises more than $100k is wasting half the money its spending. Most of them don't even realize it.

I love the comment by the guy who said "founders aren't willign to forgoe the $100k job they had" LOL. If your founders wouldn't rather have equity than a salary, then your startup isn't getting their bet... and they have the inside info.

The more money you take, the less equity you have. Thus, if you believe in your idea, you don't want to take any money....logically.

But the reality these days-- especially in "Silicon Valley" where the reality distortion field sets in-- is most startups are just built to flip- they want the big vc money the big burn rate and the quick exit to an acquirer... they aren't started by people who want ot build a business.

This is why SF is not a good place to build a company and why you shouldn't listen to the "spend lots of money" advice you tend to get (eg: you need a lawyer you need lots of employees, you need office space, you need to buy servers, etc.)
"They are going back to Microsoft!" -- facebook has a lot of ex-microsofties already. Anyways, I hope it doesn't get polluted too much with the ms mentality. The facebook experience and the newsfeed are loosing their simplicity and looking more and more like windows live.
Yeah, the rest of the article seems to contradict the beginning.
I agree that the sites shown are prettier but I'd argue that they are much more of a visual work out. I think content is paramount, everything else is secondary. Anything that gets between you and the content begins to grate and should be removed.
Possibly the only CEO ever described as anti-establishment, a communist, and a socialistic anarchist
http://www.ajaxflakes.com/web-20/top-100-online-generators-w...

I challenge someone to create a "web 2.0 generator generator". Or a generator that uses these generators to generate a "web 2.0" site without any interaction from the developer.

Not unlike the CS research paper generator that these guys wrote: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ Some of the papers were actually accepted into conferences.
From the article: "Entrepreneurs want to work at the hottest place on earth and right now that's Facebook."

I see at least two false statements in that sentence.
Top 10 Software Engineering ideas (Ed Yourdon)
Some of us are less lucky. Our last month's bandwidth cost was around 4k--all pushed to our credit cards.
Tim Berners-Lee - Giant Global Graph
How much freedom does Facebook provide for its software engineers? Do they get something like 20% freedom?
Hacker News Item ID=1
"... Each new generation doomed to re-discover basics ..."

Got pinged by Ed Yourdon today checking if I had some of his books in photo of a bookshelf (I did, 'Structured Analysis'). And I come across this particular presentation on his website (http://www.yourdonreport.com). It's an interesting report because it takes a similiar approach Tim O'Reilly used to define Web 2. Analyse the current market and draw conclusions from them. [0] What I particularly like is the themes overlayed on a map with published book images used to support the problems.

One idea that immediately sticks in my mind as being a bit odd was the theme of code re-use. Programmers are notorious for perpetuating "Obsolete culture" in the hope that re-using code can save them time ignoring the possibility the code they are going to re-use is crap. [1]

The presentation can be found here:

- google doc (requires permission, yuk) ~ http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dd2trp3s_42cwb9js&f...

- pdf (19Mb) ~http://www.yourdon.com/downloads/CompAidTopTenJAX.pdf

- bonus Interview (200Kb) ~ http://www.compaid.com/caiinternet/ezine/edyourdoninterview....

[0] Tim OReilly Web 2.0 definition, 'What is Web 2.0?' ~ http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/wha...

[1] Alan Cooper, Inmates running the Asylum, CH8 An Obsolete culture, Reusing code pp 106-109.
Facebook's Future
All of this and more would be feasible if there were better cross-browser support for vector graphics.

These whimsical designs might be ok for niche markets, but they require tedious Photoshop skills and they don't scale.
Summary:

J2EE sucks.
Rails, Django, WebGears, and Zope are pretty nice.

The problem with this demo is that both examples (hello world, and a time tracking app) are very simple examples. While it's very easy to do simple things in Rails (can't speak for the others), it's still hard to do moderately to very complex things. There's no magic bullet.

That said, Rails, etc to make things more fun and take some of the grunt work out.
Startup with Intel ties to launch Office Live competitor
A conversation with Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos - Charlie Rose
For a side note: Google products start to look boring. No new features. No wonder they're losing their employees; nothing more to do.
Some days, Tech Crunch seems more like a gossip tabloid than a serious news source. I once heard someone describe TV news as an ounce of fact poured into a sea of speculation, and this isn't the first TC article I've read that's gotten really creative with the speculation part.
...but when can I compile JS to Lisp? ;)
10 Tech Pioneers: Where Are They Now?
I'm not surprised. The point is that the web wasn't all cluttered like the author implied. Most of it was just text. http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/index.en.html

Much of the content I looked for were actual text files, maybe with some ASCII art: http://www.rpgamer.com/games/ff/ff4/info/ff4_monster.txt

(incidentally, the original version of that ff4 file was not double-spaced.)
Yes, I don't know about the rest of you but I'd rather be working on what will be the hottest thing around in a year's time. Catch the wave _before_ it breaks.
FYI that 20 percent thing is a trick for keeping potential entrepeneurs from quiting and starting their own companies.
So how is not having it any better?
I think I will use this, thanks!
You can, however, block an adversary of using the medium. If your mob sabotages the ads everyday - or most days - the ad will always be off. He won't lose money, but opportunity.
I disagree with this. I could see the main page getting bogged down with job offers. However, being able to vote up/down on the jobs page isn't a bad idea and I think it'd have the same effect you were looking for.
Inventor of the light bulb, phonograph... and DRM!

Edison was adamant that Edison recordings would be played only on Edison phonographs. His competitors, Victor and Columbia, shared the same playback technique, etching a laterally cut groove that sent the needle moving horizontally as the record played. Their recordings could be played on one another's machines. Edison, however, adopted his own design, a groove that varied vertically, called at the time a "hill and dale" cut. An adapter permitted Victor records to be played on an Edison Disc Phonograph, but Edison forbade the sale of an attachment that permitted his records to be played on competitors' machines.
Hookers and blow. And Aerons. Lots of Aerons.
They're missing the biggest of all, which is gaming.
From what I understand, it's not even that real. That is, if you can get all your work done in 80% of your time, then you are free to work 20% on whatever, but most people don't end up doing it because they have to spend 100% of their time (or close to it) on official work.
Where is AI?
>You keep saying that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.

Where does that quote come from?
I'm not alarmed. Are you alarmed? ;-)
We're talking about CPC ads here and you know it.
Does Facebook make anything interesting (from a programmers perspective)? I know a lot of cool stuff coming out of the google sweatshops, but I couldn't name anything interesting from Facebook. Am I missing out on something?
> I have a difficult time seeing the value in an application that can be developed by a first-year computer science student in one weekend.

I have trouble believing that billions of gallons of oil discovered in 5 minutes by a 5 year old should be worth anything. Wait, that reasoning makes no sense at all.
Economy Rankings - Doing Business
So you can go home and do your own startup if you're not satisfied working with X company that doesn't give you 20%.
Search, GMail and Maps are the only 3 things I used. I don't even use Calendar, My Maps or their Cinema search whatnot. That's pretty much their products that I know of (and most of my friends outside Valley)
So "robust" = "rigid"?

I asked you to explain yourself because you were expressing a belief - that a statically typed language that uses a lot of boilerplate and doesn't have first class functions is preferable to a dynamically typed language that doesn't require a lot of boilerplate and does have first class language - that is believed to be false by most members of this community. You are, of course free to get excited over anything you want, but expect to be challenged if you make meaningless claims about your favorite technologies.
What would you do if you had users but they weren't requesting any new functionality? Do you have your own plans for what you want to add or would you start working on something else? Also, how do you know your users are happy?
Newspapers Lose 9% In Advertising In Q3 2007
you're missing the point. This is not for non lisp users, it's a way to make javascript and client side development more bearable for lisp users.

As far as the abstractions, you will need to write some ugly DOM code at first, but then you hide away the ugly low level stuff inside of a package, write a couple of macros and you move on to writing the meat of the application at a higher level of abstraction.

To make an analogy, think of starting with C, implementing Python in it and then writing your application in it.
That's already three more applications than I could name from Facebook :-) That wasn't a rhetorical question, but I've really no idea what would make Facebook interesting for a programmer.

Google on the other hand is teasing me regularly with brandnew interesting API's (for which I never find the time to really check em out).
Okay, you might want to actually look at some of those links. Just in case anybody else doesn't know what conversion tracking is, basically:

1. User clicks on ad.

2. User does something advertiser considers significant, aka a "conversion", like going to a download site or a credit card entry page.

3. Google tracks that occurence and crunches the numbers.

4. Advertiser can make decisions about what ads to run based upon how many conversions they get. Thus, if political ads never "convert" to donations, it's obvious they should be removed.
ah, quick and dirty throw away programs. Personally I think writing output to the console should be harder (but I'll save that for later). I'd like to see more sane comparisons, like: making a TCP connection, making a web request, encrypting and decrypting a string, computing base64, md5, etc.

And in Python, print "hello, world" is bad form. It would be proper to write (news.YC is omitting some newlines below)

def main():
print "hello, world"

if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
I challenge someone to create a "web 2.0 generator generator".

Psh easy. Just use some Lisp macros.
That was one of our biggest fears and the main reason we chose our current provider. He offered unlimited traffic and we are offering a rather large demo (about 25 MB) and some videos. But by now I found out that getting above 500gb (which was a typical limit for other providers) seems not to be possible with our weak vserver so the unlimited doesn't mean much (but maybe I'm just not a good enough admin for that).

We lost a lot of downloads that way, though when I now read how much you had to pay - that sounds really worse.
Everybody who works in a particular field will say that'll be a big area of innovation. So, if you take people from a bunch of big companies, the answer you'll get is that the areas where there are currently big companies will improve. So if, in 1967, you asked everybody what the top areas of technology innovation would be in 1985, you'd COMPLETELY MISS personal computers.

Similarly, in my opinion, this is completely missing the advent of useful mobile, possibly domestic robots, which are significantly less than 18 years away from being viable, especially teleoperatedly (which doesn't require AI to be solved).
Google's big wave came and facebook's hasn't. What's your point?
David Rusenko:

>call any investor in the valley and tell them "I'm growing so fast and I need $15,000 to pay for servers and hosting" and you'll have convertible note paperwork signed by the end of the week"

http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2007/07/why-you-wont-run-out-...
What browser(s) do you use? (FF, Flock...)
1st. FF (lov eit but it crashes about 34 times/day)

2nd. Flock (my favorite )

3rd. Maxthon (blocks ads like its noone business)

4th. I just downloaded Opera

5th. IE who?
I was asking about Joel's article because you used the phrase "JS has become your assembly language", which he also mentions.

Ah, no, I didn't get that from Joel, it's just the obvious analogy if you're generating low-level JS.

my original comment, "You still have to deal with HTML and CSS and the DOM", which you didn't address

I thought I did address it. You can generate these things from something higher-level which is much easier to work with (but not so abstract that you don't still have to understand what you're generating). I don't claim that this is a unique approach but it is certainly an area of strength for Lisp, and Parenscript deserves to be better known.

Incidentally, in the app I work on we don't deal much with HTML or CSS. We keep those to a minimum and do almost everything in Javascript. We even try to avoid the DOM when possible and do as much as we can in pure JS (for example, using arrays rather than childNodes). This is the only way we've been able to get acceptable (or nearly acceptable) performance in the browser.

In fact, I know the problem very well, and can tell you that this is simply not true. Unfortunately I can't give you any more details right now, so I'm sure you'll think I'm full of shit.

I don't think you're full of shit. I'm describing the best solution of the ones I've seen so far. If you can do better, I look forward to hearing about it.

I remain skeptical, though, that HTML/JS can be fully abstracted away in a way that doesn't leak (now there's a term I did get from Spolsky) and still yields usable, performant web apps. There's too much going on there that's too essential to what a web app is. Take for example that html sexp you quoted. There's a lot of information in it. However you represent it, you still need a way to say that you want a 1px border, a certain font, links that get bigger when you mouse over them and so on. There's a whole model there which can certainly be abstracted into something else, but that something else won't necessarily be simpler (it will, however, be non-standard). My feeling is that there isn't much "compression" to be had in the general case. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.
A lot of programmers seem to think the Facebook API is pretty interesting... and they've found the time to check it out, too.
It has some interesting possibilities, but as a hypothetical Google or Facebook developer, I'd much rather be hacking on something like Android than the Facebook API.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of the Microsoft VPs. When asked about Google free lunch and recruiting tactics, he replied: "That's the culture in Silicon Valley. What's frightening is that people come and go within 2-3 years"

These googlers came to my school and advertising how proud they are working at Google. Now we know the truth (^_^).
Looks great. I've admired jQuery from afar since watching John Resig's talk on it a few months ago (links below).

One thing I'd love to ask those of you who have used both js libraries: Other than the file size difference, what do you see as the main advantages of jQuery over prototype/scriptaculous?

John Resig Part I: http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=410472

John Resig Part II: http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=412541
Israeli Startup: Wefi - Find And Connect To WiFi Networks
but, afaik, you can club all the personal time you don't use and take it as a continuous block of time, perhaps between projects. Anyone working for Google, please clarify!
You don't know?? Inconceivable!
Isn't food (and rent) a personal expense, rather than a company expense? So your company has to first pay a wage to yourself (taxed) and then you personally buy the food? Same for rent, unless you're renting an office, right?
I don't think this has anything to do with the engineering challenges they have to solve at Facebook or the fun working environment. As that code-leak incident hinted some time ago, Facebook probably isn't more than a huge pile of spaghetti php-code. The only motivation of people for switching is greed. Facebook is pre-IPO, so stock options can potentially make some employees millionaires in case of a good IPO.
That's what I thought, but anyone feel free to pipe up if you're managing to buy all of your food as a company expense.
What do you think is Facebook's long-term strategy?
I'm still trying to understand what is preventing Facebook from becoming just another social fad, especially after reading the whole article on the Google exodus to Facebook. Right now it's still just a glorified social network slowly trending towards Myspaceism with all the AppCrap (as I call it).

"We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system so you can run full applications..." (Zuckerberg). Ok that's great, but the majority of Facebook apps are FAR from what a traditional OS offers.

As a successful app developer (550k users) myself, the bin of roughly 9,000+ growing apps has made it pretty damn hard to unite any major Facebook usergroup behind a single app. It's the same problem as trying to find a single, unified, interest-group among the millions that exist (hint: you can't). If only 2 of your 200 friends have added the app, it's pretty much worthless from a SocialOS standpoint, no matter how awesome it is. Obviously "social apps"-"social"="plain old app", and there are very few Web apps that can compete with plain old desktop apps right now.

Facebook has executed the social network component amazingly well, but their vision as a SocialOS by web developers has not been much more than a hack-job with 99% of apps falling into the "Value-Added: None" category. They would do better to buy up the good applications by developers and make them permanent components to Facebook.

Don't even get me started on the SocialAds network either, that has absolutely ZERO benefit to the end-user other than another way to brag about what you've bought to your friends.

Right now the biggest thing Facebook has for it is the appeal of FB as the cool new thing to do (over Myspace) and the fact that many of us still use it as a glorified contacts directory (College student speaking here who's been on FB since v1).

So in summary, we have a great Social Network + Poorly executed socialOS + Privacy-Invading Ad Network. Right now users are only benefitting from the first one, and I see no reason why they won't just move on to the next great(er) social network. After all, that's exactly what's happening as people get rid of Myspace for Facebook.
Thanks, that's the stuff I was searching for. Facebook ain't that common here in germany and I'm no webdeveloper, so I didn't know until now about this API. I only had found the Facebook website which completely failed to impress me and if the name wouldn't drop so often I would probably not even have taken a second look.

Well, time for new API's... maybe next year. If facebook is still the hype in 2008 ;-)
I remember the "Pikey" which was a USB key with PKI stuff built in. Hilarious.
To complete the procedure I'd add just one thing: incremental upgrades

Sending all your client the entire software package again just because your graphic designer moved something two pixels to the left is not advised.

Build the mechanism to handle individual file updates.
it's interesting that about half these were core infrastructure related - distributed energy, transport, climate and water. these systems were invented in the late 19th C (or not recognized as a problem in the case of climate), massively deployed in the 20th C and now we're realising aren't able to scale up to 10B people. personilised medicine is a no-brainer (to pick, "GBP$"GBP hard to develop!). sorry guys, the internet is the coolest thing ever but it's an addition to basic human needs, not a substitute. Facebook's not gonna feed/water/energise/heal the world.
And the downside is that their disk access, from experience, is really slow.
For me it's all down to philosophy. Prototype adds a bunch of global variables and extends loads of built-in ojbects. That's fine, unless you ever want to include code that has a different idea about how any of those extensionss should work (like mooTools, which I also avoid on philosophical grounds). jQuery adds just one global variable (called jQuery) along with a revertible alias (the $ symbol). That pretty much guarantees jQuery will work flawlessly with any other code.
anyone out there have experience in mathematica and the learning curve involved? i've gazed wistfully at it for years but never thought it applied to me but this v6 edition with it's buttons and web tie-ins is making me think it might worth a 1000 hours (i'm interested in analysis/display not programming)
Is MVC the right pattern for your app? MVC vs MVP vs PAC
ahem i believe 'hacker' is an attitude - not a statement that the site/forum is only about programming and web start-ups (just a comment from your friendly neighbourhood energy R&D chemist)
Yes, I bet that at facebook placement they have air conditioners.
Sudoku may save us from spam