skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see the advantage of hiding the implementation in this case. The new name doesn't give any new insight, nor provides any useful abstraction over the list comprehension syntax. It only raises question marks in the reader's head: where is this defined? Does it have side effects? Am I OK to mutate the returned list? The passed list? Am I OK to assume the passed list unchanged? etc.

Re: different ways to traverse a list and square elements, whenever the idiomatic implementations in your language are good enough for you, you just want to go with them. Hiding those details behind names is premature abstraction IMO. If you know you'll need your own list and square implementation, you can abstract that from the start. If you find needs for change that you didn't anticipate, the overhead of refactoring (or overloading operators, if it suits the problem) there and then is probably less than having abstracted everything that you might possibly want to change.

Deciding to square the list in place is not trivial at all. If you do that, you'd better change the signature of the function so that it doesn't return anything [Edit: or using whatever convention you have to highlight mutators, like bang! names in Scheme]. Otherwise, it's too easy to use the old list assuming it has the original values, or to mutate either the old or new references assuming they belong to independent lists.

Re: readability, you have to balance the familiarity of the syntax for a newcomer, and more importantly, the ease with which you can get acquainted to it, with its expressive power and its consistency with the rest of the language. If English was precise, concise, unambiguous, and consistent enough a notation, we wouldn't have many other programming languages.

More specifically, I find list comprehensions (and generator expressions in general) very quick to get used to, I find that they read well once you have acquainted yourself with them, I find that they have a great ink to information ratio that justifies making that initial learning investment, and I find that they feel right at home in Python.
"Blub programmers" are referenced in "Beating the averages" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html and describes the "Blub paradox".

"... As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer
is looking down the power continuum, he knows
he's looking down. Languages less powerful than
Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're
missing some feature he's used to. But when our
hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other
direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't
realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely
weird languages. He probably considers them
about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all
this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is
good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub ..."

Raganwarld has a good explanation of the "Blub paradox" ~ http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/10/are-we-blub-programmers....
I'd be very interested to see some references discrediting it.
He was standing on the wrong side of the mirror at this very moment:

> When I first looked at Facebook it was in the bar of a hotel with workmates. [...] They showed me - it meant nothing.

People who use Facebook wonder what going to bars is for:

"As far as I can see, it's a building where you put out an image of yourself [a bunch of make-up and/or cologne] and other people do the same.

Then you all send each other little glances and approach one another and make pretend 'friends'. And that's sort of it, really."
A few books on amazon have criticism of it, that is all I have seen. But no "mythbusters" episode ;)
Wikipedia uses the wrong criterion. Instead of asking of an article, "Is this notable?" they should ask "Is this useful?" If so, let it remain. This is much more elegant than their already large body of law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_notability_g...) and precedent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log/delete). It works for edits too; you just ask, "Does this edit add or subtract utility?"

The usefulness criterion would allow promotional articles and edits. Automated spam should still be deleted, but promotional handwritten stuff that contains some facts is better than nothing. Subsequent edits can remove the spamminess.

Of course, this means an article on any topic is OK. In a web encyclopedia, that's the right thing.
That is not your definition of luck. It is Darrell Royal's definition of luck.
Yep. Our original startup (based on Steve's idea from a trip to a gas station in central VA) was mobile-based and 100% rejected by YC. Heh.

We left that meeting with PG (Steve and I still have the notes in our notebooks) aiming to build a "front page of the web." And we didn't have a clue as to what it'd look like. Case in point: http://reddit.blogspot.com/2006/12/time-machine.html
Yes, as I mentioned above, we left that conversation with PG thinking about how we could build a destination for all the best & freshest content online. The catchy slogan (front page of the web) was pure PG. But how the actual site would function came about while Steve and I toiled in our Medford apartment. Perhaps the biggest inspiration was actually del.icio.us/popular -- we thought that site (albeit a byproduct of the actual site) was on to something.

We really had never heard of digg until we'd already been online for a month and change, but by then reddit had already developed a unique identity. I believe that ignorance turned out to be quite an advantage.

We just tried to build the best site we could.
I don't think broadcast.com even exists anymore. Yahoo spent almost 6 billion dollars for a company/website that doesn't exist less than 10 years later (if I remember my facts right).

So I'm sure not everyone agrees with his definition of "right".
I use Vista (on my MacBook) more often than OSX lately. Somehow all MacBook hardware features work (except the camera/mic). The keyboard, tab and scroll down all work fine.

Putty works better for me compare to the default xterm that shipped with OSX. The "just work" phrase doesn't seem to reflect that based on my own experience.

For development, Vista has pretty much everything while OSX has almost everything minus .NET (yes I know there's Mono but I don't need Mono, I need Microsoft .NET and its tools Express or Full-package).

I prefer Office 2007 than Office 2004 or iWork. Outlook feels my need.

At home (PC desktop) I use Media Center frequently. Front Row isn't anywhere near. Oh, I never use Front Row because it doesn't do much.

I prefer to use Windows Live Gallery than iPhoto because WLG is simpler (for me) than iPhoto.

Overall, Vista is smooth for me. My machine is a budget one; it took $450 CAD to build it. Here's the spec:

ASRock (or ASUS I forgot) mobo with built-in vid-card
AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core 4400+ 2.30 GHz
Kingston RAM 2GB DDR2 800MHz
Samsung 160GB SATA2
Haupauge WinTV PVR 150

Windows Media Center detects the card with no problem at all and it fetched all cable channels. You could also watch tons of clips from MTV via Windows Media Center.
While I understand the real-world situation that the author describes, there's no need to hate something that you've never tried.
Google 'Cave Clan'.

There's a fairly large network of urban spelunkers in Melbourne that have found military bases, and even held races using VW bugs through some of the tunnels.
From what I understand Vista needs plenty of resources to even handle network traffic, for example. Its a sleeping tiger in the sense that MS is waiting for all the multicore cpus to really make a showing and power the OS to a new level.
Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Piraha Don't Have Numbers (quicktime video)
It doesn't run my one app I need Windows for (in compatibility mode, as admin, or any other way).

And updates still require reboots. Grr.
"They would do so for security reasons. Vista runs apps in user mode."

That, for me, became so annoying after a few days I turned it off. (I do keep running into inexplicable instances where I am not allowed to delete or move files I created without engaging in much unintuitive file property manipulations, so the machine still seems to be boss of things.)

Vista is amazingly annoying in so many little ways. I suspect that is true of all OS, and people just become numb to them, but Vista seems keen on reminding me what "opinionated software" is all about.

So far the only thing that keeps me from replacing Vista with XP is the pre-installed Media Center software.

(I already set up the dual boot for Kubuntu, for Serious Computer Usage. :))
The Piraha, an Amazonian tribe with three numbers: one, two and many. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_24_168/ai_n16...
Tough Choices
by Carly Fiorina

A good read concerning many of the topics mentioned in this post - Alex, cool post; Interesting topic that is not brought up nearly enough.
> List dest_list = squareEachElementInList(source_list);

Well, that had better be wrapped in a needless function, too:

# Correcterest way
assignSquaredListToVariable( dest_list, source_list);

or there'll be some serious code rewrites going on!
ok that's what I thought then.
Seriously, think how little money it takes to live, and fairly comfortably - probably only about $20,000 a year. That's nothing for any of the multi-millionaires that roam this site. There should definitely be some kind of criteria to determine whether a person is promising (such as what they've done on their own time), but besides that I don't see any problem with the idea.
I'm not impressed. It thought a site running Hunchentoot behind mod-lisp was PHP-based.
from the perspective of early startups, is this even on the radar since Amazon's S3 is essentially the same thing except without the fuss of buying and setting up your own hardware?
Facebook To Launch Friend Grouping. Competition Can Suck.
Interesting article. Olin sounds like a school built on project or problem-based education. That approach helps you stay motivated and connected to real-world applications. (A major reason why problem-based approaches were adopted by med schools, even for first-year education.) The difficulty is how to educate students on the base of knowledge that must be mastered if they are only learning the bits relevant to a given problem. Or maybe the approach assumes that mastering core knowledge of any domain is difficult if not futile, due to changing and increasing knowledge, so best to teach them to learn what they need to know.

I've occasionally seen some project-based courses at traditional universities that fit the Olin theme. This new Facebook course would be one example:
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/9/25/facebookMovesInt...

A more advanced example was a course offered at Stanford Bioengineering last year. About 15 students (mostly graduate) were taught how to model blood flow using 3D medical images, and half of the semester was spent on class projects where five teams built and simulated their own models of clinically-relevant conditions. They did an amazing job, and I would think they learned quite a bit. (You can see their presentations here: https://simtk.org/home/bioe484)

It's funny that Stanford, like Olin, was established as a tuition-free educational experiment. Wonder how long tuition remains free at Olin :)
I guess I'm the only dumb one here. Can someone explain to me how he came up with the 1.5 as a multiplier for the new hire's salary? Also the part where he talks about making a 50% "profit" on the new hire and then proceeds to subtract a third from 16.7%. Why 50% and why 1/3? How did he come up with those numbers? Please enlighten me.
Ask YC: Incorporation in Delaware (remotely)?
So, here's the story: I need to set up an LLC for some corp-to-corp work, with an eye towards using the same company to form a startup later on down the road. I am located outside the USA, and will be there for the majority of the job (it's located in Russia).

Does it make sense for me to set up an LLC remotely in Delaware, where there are a lot of services for companies located elsewhere? What are some 'gotchas' about remote incorporation that I am missing? And is it necessary to set up a bank account? Any advice (I know you're not lawyers or accountants, but still) would be appreciated...
That was an excellent article, I think. I was following along up until the 1.5 multiplier, 50% "profit", 11.1% "retail" price part. I have no idea where those numbers came from. Will someone please enlighten me?
I say - meet at home. It's more comfortable and way cheaper.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61237
Maltego search engine: uses a node based approach and is different from Google
... and Al Gore was written in Blub, which was itself implemented in Arc ...
In Paul Graham, Soviet Russia... er... what?
and it comes with instructions: http://www.paterva.com/help.html
that did help.. thanx
Facebook: You log in continuously and see up to date information about people you know, if everyone you know is on Facebook. It was fun before the minifeed too.
You should give The Black Swan a read sometime. Lots of people are smart, well prepared, work hard, but few get the phenomenal returns that Mr. Cuban has. That's luck.
I "explored" some of the University of Oregon's underground tunnel system with some friends, but that didn't last too long. One evening I had a bad feeling about it and didn't go, and indeed, they got busted. Gut feelings +1. Especially these days, my guess is that you are more likely to get in serious trouble (my friends didn't, luckily).
I'm not too sure that it's because of the ease of voting. That's obviously part of it, but I think that as religious/political extremism rises, the propensity to vote also rises. So you tend to get extremists voting more often than "average" people who don't care enough one way or the other. And there is no good way to get around this-- it's a problem that has been around since Athens and mathematically weighing things probably wont do a lot of good.

This is why Ron Paul is mentioned in every reddit/digg thread.
I agree with you that syntax matters, but don't think it's the only reason. Functional programming is a much bigger obstacle, in some ways, than a new syntax.
>there is no good way to get around this

An authoritarian can minimize the influence of the extremists or other people that vote in a way contrary to the well-being of the community.
He is also pure virtual class, which needs no overloaded virtual destructor implementations. All dispatches are written doubly, and there are no leaks, whatsoever.
Business should be just like basketball, doing what you love. Then again if the world was already perfect how could anyone get lucky?
Why all the fuss with DSLs? Isn't it just "metalinguistic abstraction" as described in the SICP? 
The current "fashions" around DSLs I find a little annoying, it seems like the idea has been around and in use for some time, as this shows. Is there something new and profound? It seems that DSLs taken out of the context of lisp are much much less powerful.

Its a good technique, "language oriented programming" it may be marketed as in a parallel universe.
"Facebook is just as likely to compete with you as pay a few bucks and just buy you"

facebook is still at the size where they can churn out code and features quickly. i'd be surprised if they purchase many third party apps while they're in that position.
Steven Pinker's wonderful book "The Language Instinct" claims the the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bunk. It's not the strongest part of the book, but still well worth reading.

As a taste, Pinker tracks the evolution of the myth that the eskimos have more words for snow than English-speakers. He explains how this myth was manufactured by anthropologists who wanted to give credibility to Sapir-Whorf, and eventually took on the status of a "fact", appearing in textbooks and so on.
Ardit33, thank you, I am doing some specs now, I can let you know.
ebay is not great drunk either.
iBrick is certainly going to backfire - the arrogance due to brand power is going to have a negative halo effect and it may be too late for apple to un-do. I don't understand why apple went for a single vendor (at&t) distribution, i would have never done that, instead i would have used my strong brand power to distribute unlocked iphone thru multiple channels like walmart, costco, bestbuy etc. , this way customer would have got the power to choose their service provider - giving customer the power is always the biggest business benefit/wisdom in long and short term - if apple can hold the position against Hollywood for selling a song for 99c then they can do the same by selling unlocked iphone ... customer who don't want to use iphone as a phone device can still buy it to use it for playing music, video, surfing internet etc. I think this would have been a win-win situation ....
Students Thrown Climate Life Preserver
Tracing Silicon Valley's roots
Why WSGI?
Gmail cookie vulnerability exposes user's privacy
There is no way facebook even remotely approximates live interaction.

Also, going to bars isn't just about singles. Getting a drink at a pub with friends is lovely.

To a certain extend, I agree with the guy, from the first few paragraphs at least.

There needs to be richer interaction online for most people to "get it". Two-way streaming video and audio would be a start. Expressive physical avatars would be fun too.
Everyone loves to play Apple iCEO; yet, few ever do a good job at it.

1) Apple went with AT&T because running a phone business is pretty tough. Apple focuses on making hardware and software.

2) That said, concessions have to be made. AT&T wants to sell usage and service. They paid an exclusive to do that.

3) The Phone business isn't like the music business which also coincidently isn't like the TV/movies/video business.

4) iPod touch.
Backup Lesson (Coppola Loses All His Data)
Is facebook really worth 5 billion? If so Mark Zuckerberg should really consider selling more %. The way I see it facebook serves some basic wants but it is far from the ultimate website, which should take over within the next two years when web developers start to fullfill the potential of Internet.

This article is extremely biased but the points made are legit. Facebook needs to develop its 2.0 or start selling while its stocks are high.
It took centuries and a lot of very smart people to develop calculus and now students are expected to learn all that while building a golf ball machine.
To me "luck" is like the word "love", the moment you start using it to describe things, you stop thinking about it. Perhaps in the case of love thats a good thing, but when trying to be succesful at something, going around calling things luck instead of trying to find the source does not do you any good.
An arraylist is easier to traverse with respect to CPU cycles and memory usage (typically) than a linked list. What does python use internally? I don't know, and I'd just as soon decide that myself...

Ah, here's a major difference between us: I'd rather not decide that myself, unless it becomes a problem.
This is a pointless argument until everyone agrees on the definitions of "Corporation" versus "University." The article is careless on that point, and vague about what we should do if they are really the same. He highlights a few exceptional cases, which may be representative problems but are probably not.

In particular, he doesn't seem to have thought at all about the consequences of levying taxes on Universities. That seems to be the central injustice he's concerned about, but does he really think the money would be better off in government hands? He doesn't seem to have considered those implications.

Personally, I think there is a ton of value in the idea of a University, in spite of the possibility for corruption and definitely in spite of anyone's attempt to abstract away random differences until corporations and universities look the same in some meaningless description. The culture of any decent university campus encourages learning in a way that you almost never see at a large company. You might compare Harvard to Google, or Xerox PARC, but start comparing second tier colleges to second tier companies and companies don't even come close.
I believe this is mostly a problem with software that was not written with vista's user mode in mind.
Here's a different sort of friends app that you might find interesting:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=5469363031

Find out what your friends have told everyone you are good at and track your public expertise rankings.

In turn, increase your karma by telling everyone about your friends.

Discover experts on Facebook.
Most people didn't upgrade to XP from 2000, they upgraded from 98. XP was also much cheaper than 2000. (Like $70 vs $300 or something like that)
Paul Graham is a CIA experiment that went very very wrong....and he has an 'arc' chip embedded in his brain
Python, Perl, PHP, Lisp, ASP, Ruby and JS hackers show us your goods!
If you are interested in submitting basic examples (code+demo+info) in those languages, please submit your page at Usynk.com so all of us can benefit.
Funny...I'm a self-taught Python programmer, and didn't know there was any other way than what he describes.
excellent article Paul. I am part of those who changed their mind about a degree in philosophy after realizing that most debates were rooted in language imprecisions. I was leading the pack in my philosophy class. I studied commerce instead and don't regret one second to be an entrepreneur!
thanks for the enlightening thoughts!
The Web is the ultimate website. That's what walled gardens forget.
Not actually.

I can say that I have heard more positive things about Vista during launch than I heard about XP during its launch. The architecture change is bigger and better than in 2K->XP. In this regard MS should not be worried...

What's different is what MS has at stake. They _need_ Vista to succeed much more than they needed XP to succeed. And the market perception about MS has changed too. In XP times MS was an OK company. Now they are simply EVIL. Using XP instead of Vista is the only way people has to hurt MS.

Another difference is the huge amount of time it passed since the last release. MS made lots of companies to subscribe to any SO updates that would have happened in the last 6 years.

Then they released nothing during that years. They got the money and provided nothing in exchange of that money. That's a (very valid) reason for a lot of companies to dismiss Vista, as in 'this is payback time'.

So the initial opinion of Vista is in fact better than the initial public opinion of XP. But, public opinion of XP changed slowly but surely towards positive, specially with service pack 2. All its problems were technical and nothing else. Vista has already fixed most of the technical problems and public opinion is still bad. I see no signs of the public opinion of Vista getting better.

Seems like people finally understood that DRM sucks and should be repeled with full force.
MS is always like that. They always designed their OS to exploit future hardware, not current. That's why for every OS they released, it's always feel "slow" at first.
iPhone Web Development with Ruby on Rails
Let's take this backwards:

Yes, you definitely need a bank account. That's one of the basic ways of showing that the corporation is separate from your personal interests.

I ended up creating an LLC in my home state of Oregon, because I go there once in a while, and my parents live there, so they can also handle things if they come up, and I don't need to list some (for pay) service as my place of business.
I always find those sites to be annoying. I bet making a better one would make for a good startup. How, I don't know, that's up to whoever takes on the problem to figure out.
One example is doctors: they are people who work hard to achieve, do an important job, and certainly earn well, but they don't seem to get these stratospheric startup paybacks, just a good, steady high return on their investment in learning and practice.
Steve Jobs, Motivational Speaker For Yahoo
Doctor Who has a real name, but Paul Graham encrypted it.