skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Charles Petzold has similar things to say about IDE autocompletion (http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...).

The article also reminds me of Brian Kernighan's remarks regarding debugging (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan):

"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements."

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
Mixpanel: Analytics for startups
Windows Mobile 6.5 designer themes showcased
Climate Change, Argumentative Fallacies, and One-Way Hashes
I got rejected and frankly it didn't bother me one bit. I don't need the money. I have enough. I just wanted the feedback of experienced mentors. Also, I though it would be a great way to meet highly motivated individuals who I could probably bring into my startup since right now I'm flying solo.
Depending on which file I modify, building can take 4 hours.

Do you think this is a good scenario for using print statements?

I often still find myself adding print statements and rebuilding due to the complex nature of debugging this particular (multi-process) system. For obvious reasons, rebuilding is very inefficient. Interested in any other suggestions or references you might have.
I use a debugger mainly as a way of inspecting values without printf everywhere.

I put a break at a place where I suspect something is going wrong, and inspect the state of the program; I could simulate the same thing with printf, but that takes recompiling and trial-and-error.

A debugger saves me a great deal of time. Especially with DDD's way of stepping through data structures.
so an exclusive forum for rejects? Thats like the worst kind of wankfest if you ask me ;)
Interview stage != getting in.

Congrats in any case!
There is already a discussion going on at

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550823
Very nice. Having real threads is convenient.
Daniel is right, and splitlist is wrong. Irregularity is clearly harmful. It is much more difficult to produce new parsers and VMs for Ruby than it is for Lisp, Smalltalk, and even Python. This has clearly had an impact on the Ruby community.

It should be possible to produce a "mainstream" language with the attractive qualities of PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Python, but with a more elegant design. (Ruby itself was implemented as a way of getting the power of Perl, but with cleaner OO.)

I suspect that Stallman had it right when he came up with his grand unification plan through GUILE. Modulo the cultural expectations of the programming mainstream Lisp makes a better compiler target than a language.

Now, before the Lispers get all up in arms -- this would make a Lisp the "one language to rule them all."
This also depends on what you're building; there are plenty of sales opportunities in the middle of the country, just probably not in the social media space. Which is pretty saturated right now, anyway. Opportunity exists where you create it.

I applaud Pennsylvania in trying to boost their state economy through programs like this.
I would test them by suggesting some shiny objects and see if they go after them. i.e.

"Yes, Bob, we should do what you're suggesting but we should also do X, Y and Z."

If they don't say "No" or something to the effect of: "Those are good suggestions but I think we really need to focus on getting a prototype out the door, some real customer feedback, etc. Then we can revisit these great suggestions and see if they are still in alignment with the product."

Cheers
I like that you include non .com suffixes but it does add length to the url. However it seems to me that some people may think you're trying to be malicious by using the domain.suffix as some spammers do. I'd suggest you do a replace on the . with a - or some other character.

I'm also keen to get an api or a bookmarklet :)
One cut line in London affects thousands
References are far from useless. It's like interviewing: if you let the candidate give you fluffy BS answers you'll get snowed every time.

Listen carefully and dig deep. Don't just settle for "I know this guy and he made me a bunch of money." Ask the reference what the guy did to make money, what was his plan, how they met, why he decided to work with him, why they aren't working together any more.

Imagine you're sitting down for lunch with the reference and having a conversation about the person he's referring and you'll do a better job of understanding what he's all about.
Code that you didn't write is basically just a black box. This is even more true if it is undocumented or written in a way that makes it hard to glean information from the code.

There is no way I could feasibly sit down and understand the entire flow of their code (especially when it is very poorly principled to begin with). I can manage without a debugger when I handle the code, or when the abstractions in use provide great error handling... but when it's just a giant pile of somebody else's barely-structured cowboy code?

Debugger, please!

At the moment I'm working on a massive system composed of about 4 years worth of code (written by someone who will readily confess that they are not a programmer) with no step-through debugger. There's a lot of printf going on and at times it is an extremely painful process.
probably the same reason Facebook, Amazon, eBay and tons of other companies don't use prettyfied urls.
More than 20% of self-made billionaires never completed college
I have to question if Jobs, Gates, or Ellison would actually be good employees in a large company like Google. It definitely takes resiliency, dedication, and tenacity to start a company; when you're joining a well established one, however, those almost seem like negative traits. I realize that Google encourages employees to try things their way (the 20% paid time they give employees to work on their own projects pretty much locks down that argument), but an organization in which every employee wants to do things their way strikes me as inefficient.
i find the small wheels on the back disconcerting. presumably they're still working out some bugs keeping it upright, which is understandable as this is clearly a prototype, but the implications there are still troubling. It's too big to work on the sidewalks but it's hard to imagine trusting their stability controls on a crowded road full of other traffic.

Reminds me of the Dymaxion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car

http://images.google.com/images?q=dymaxion+car
Humans are going to come into this climate change crisis and muck it all up just like they did the financial crisis.

Many of the scientists and promoters of the idea that humans caused and can undo global warming have million and billion dollar stakes in the public believing them. Their jobs rely on the idea that we can do something. Their solar panels are paid for with earmarks. Their hybrid cars drive in the HOV lanes (like mine)...

These global warming charlatans deny that the power of the sun is billions of times stronger than all our power plants combined. They deny sun spots. They deny that, according to their own charts, carbon dioxide levels rise /after/ temperature changes.

And the worst part is, /if/ they are right and we stop producing CO2, we also reduce global dimming, which may be protecting us from the sun:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
From the article it seems the foreign workers are given false information before coming to Dubai, and then their passports are taken (and/or payment withheld) so they can't leave.
yeah, exactly. Google isn't looking for the next Bill Gates (although I am sure they would be happy to have him), they are looking for brilliant brilliant hackers who can be successful at the problems thrown at them.
"However, at some point, the public needs "grow up" too, and always treating us like five year olds certainly won't stimulate this process."

The public always has the ability to "grow up" as you put it but they do not want to. People are not motivated to take action if there isn't an immediate risk to their own personal well being. Risk has been taken out of many things that we do so now we can make ignorant choices without immediate consequences.

We keep falling off the bike, but instead of scraping our knee and learning not to fall, we have a security net there to save us over and over again.

I don't blame the government for treating us like 5 year olds when that is how a majority of people act.
You could still use the old, ugly URL for such purposes.
FYI, your "Lisp uses prefix notation for things that" line is causing the window to wrap verrry wide. Could you please edit it? (Thanks in advance.)
Yeah, I'd say DoLeaf is a me-too product. I don't look for things that are earth-shattering. Instead, I look for ways to bring existing technologies or practices to underserved communities. I think that can be incredibly profitable, while also being predictable.
> "If you just do what Hacker News does, you'll have a great community!"

I never meant to imply this. Building communities online is an incredibly hard thing to do, there is no secret sauce. I meant only to suggest that using those rough guidelines, instead of the buzzword-happy guidelines the article suggests, might be a better way to go. I know of several communities that are following those guidelines + domain specific value adds to build great communities.

> it isn't trying to sell us anything

I'd say this is something that works specifically for HN, but isn't applicable to the general case. For instance, Mp3car.com is building an awesome community around car modding and is building their business on selling directly to users. They have great content (a lot of it user-generated), they keep the conversation on topic, and they stick to what they're about - car-modding.

In their case, selling to their users makes perfect sense - power users generate the content ( more time & skill to write guides ), motivated lurkers consume the content and follow the guides, and lazy lurkers ( more money than time ) just buy the parts from mp3car.com and have someone install it.
Work with him for a trial period. Set a goal and see if he helps you achieve it or even exceed it.

You could also ask him to defend his management experience to you. Has he demonstrated results in a particular area before (winning new business for a similar product, for example)?
But if they add URL click tracking, you still might want the new URL, even if it is longer.
(You know, something's always (bugged me) with Common Lisp (and other Lisps (for that matter)) but I can't seem (to remember what it was))

Allright, Lispers -- take the joke...
It's only a downside if you think you need the connections. Other than that I fail to see the downside.
Hmm, that means 80% did start or complete college. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
> IMHO, there is quite a lot of support for the argument that modern day scripting languages are getting closer and closer to becoming lisps...

Yes, but, I'm sorry, not every computer science advance came from Lisp. (Not singling you out in particular, berntb.) Insisting otherwise makes one sound condescending, fanatic, and/or naive. There are good ideas in Lisp, yes, but there are also good ideas in ML, Lua, Awk, SQL, Smalltalk, Prolog, Haskell, SNOBOL, etc.

Lisp is cool as a clean embodiment of the Lambda calculus and all, but if people stopped treating it like it were a divine revelation, other people would perhaps stop getting the impression that Lisp users are [insert torrent of unflattering adjectives].

(The Scheme community is generally much better about this than the Common Lisp community, but the Scheme community at large also seems to spend more time trying to actually move the language forward rather than insisting that some old standard has everything people will ever need.)
> If Google had been started in Pittsburgh, they still would have been successful.

I'm not a huge Silicon Valley booster (I like MA, thankyouverymuch), but I think the idea that Google would have been able to hire as much top notch talent, as quickly as they did, in PA is nonsense.

The only way that Google could have started in PA and been as successful as they have been is if they very quickly moved to Silicon Valley (or - maybe - MA).
The small wheels are probably for when the thing's turned off, like a kickstand on a bike.
Aah, more of this madness. The only people who can afford to drop out of college to pursue a startup are those with parents who will subsidize them while they do it, have extensive contacts or those who get very, very lucky.

It's just not practical advice and society doesn't treat folks in the status quo particularly well who do so. You might get far, but inevitably you'll get stuck in a rut somewhere along the way, if you end up out of startupland, because of your lack of an degree or sometimes, an advanced degree or two.

It's not fair, but that's the way the world is. If brilliant folks were more interested in finding ways to bust the higher ed/accreditation monopoly, rather than building the next Facebook or Twitter-killer, perhaps we can solve this problem before our kids become adults.
"It's nice to see more programs like these starting up, even if they do feel a little derivative of YC."

I don't understand - Are you disappointed that these programs try to emulate YC?
Inside a University (GA Tech) Nanotech Center
If you look at it the other way around

80% of self-made billionaires went to college
Dan Weinreb is a smart guy, but too many of these points seem like straw men, at least if the point of identifying problems with CL is to investigate the apparent lack of mainstream adoption. Let's see:

Too many concepts; irregular

Yes, but unless you're implementing the language you can really almost ignore the concepts you don't like. If you prefer property lists, then forget about alists if you want. But really, a lisp in which you couldn't make an alist would seem awkward and irregular to me.

Hard to compile efficiently

I benchmark. SBCL is fast. It's much faster than it needs to be for mainstream adoption. It knocks the socks off of perl, python, and ruby, for example. For years it destroyed the JVM in performance, though I presume that the JVM has caught up somewhat by now.

And really, any language is hard to compile efficiently. GCC has received tens of thousands of hours of optimization. A naive C implementation would likely be slower than SBCL for real-world code.

At this point in history, we've even figured out how to implement ECMA JavaScript efficiently.

Too much memory

OK, I can agree with this. All of us would like an implementation with a tree-shaker, for example. But for production applications this isn't too much of a problem. In 2009 you shouldn't still be using CGI calls.

Not portable

Java is 'portable' because there is one widely used implementation of the language. Trying to port code from the JVM to GCJ is not straightforward. Porting CL code that runs on Linux to BSD requires no work. Porting from Linux to Windows requires no more work than would be expected in Perl, and probably less because CL makes an attempt at handling the pathname issues.

Archaic naming

Is this really a problem? People who don't speak English seem able to learn programming languages in which all of the symbol name choices would seem meaningless initially. And plenty of common English-like names don't actually map to their English equivalents: 'for' in C has almost no relation to 'for' in English, and even 'or', which in programming languages is always inclusive, is usually used exclusively in English.

Not uniformly object-oriented

On the rare occasion that I want to implement something like a new type of sequence, or arbitrary precision floating point numbers, I care about this. The most common case though, is wanting to implement a new type of stream, which has already been fully handled by gray-streams, widely implemented on all CL implementations you would actually want to use.
I was in the same boat. With the exception of Facebook's walled garden, RSS pretty much tracks everything else that I need. Twitter updates that I actually care about aside from casual browsing (for which I don't need FriendFeed) go to my phone.

FriendFeed also felt like a tech echo chamber of self-marketing people who just use whatever comes along to expand their social stats. I didn't get anything fresh there.
Yes, the base rate of college graduation in the general population is a good bit below 80 percent.
To be more specific, the HN source is included in the Arc language download (news.arc, as I recall).
Put another way, 70% of self-made billionaires completed college. This strikes me as higher than the national average, so completing college increases the chances of you becoming a billionaire.

Also, with a sample size of only 292, I find it hard to believe you could precisely determine what made them a billionaire. In fact, for all they measured, you could probably find 100 people of each who shared all of the same characteristics and are not billionaires.
Ask HN: Paywalls
Anyone familiar with paywall technologies? Micropayments? What's a good resource?
->"Adopt the "And Stance". Take control of the conversation by pre-empting distractions, objections and blame by using "and". "I know you worked all night, and I know you want to do well, and I know you just joined the company, and I know the graphics people sometimes get the data wrong, and I know I could have been clearer in my directions to you...." And, and, and."

Interesting strategy but (1) because I'm a stickler for sentence construction even when I'm speaking I would not find this natural to do and (2) if you make a list of points that are part of that "And Stance" and just firmly plough through them, blocking any interruptions, you can achieve the same effect. A better approach might simply be to say something like: "Let me make a couple of points first".

->"Paraphrase. To create clarity and to let people know you're genuinely listening, summarize what they're telling you -- and ask them to do the same."

Paraphrasing is a technique that's used extensively in counseling psychology but its uses are unlimited. By simply mirroring something that someone says you can improve communication in a whole range of situations. It increases the perception that the speaker is being listened to and neutralizes emotions in difficult situations by making people who are upset feel empathized with. It actually increases the feeling of connection on both sides.
But teams asking for help/feedback from peers, here, benefit by demonstrating earnestness and tenacity.

More to the point, I think, is that they benefit by fully disclosing their situation. Disclosing that you are not YC funded (either through rejection or simple disinterest in applying,) is helpful when one is asking for advice.

It might not be something that you want to include in the headline, but it's certainly worth mentioning, especially if you are looking for VC or financial advice.
I don't really see this as a problem. After college, nobody asks or cares if you went to college. So while you do need to have some skills to get a job, you don't need a piece of paper anymore. (Not in the programming industry, anyway.)

If you want to do a startup, spend the 4 years that you would have spent in college learning how to program and making money doing that. Then, you'll be able to support your own startup.
So you think there's been progress in GUIs since 1981.
Pardon this off-topic comment but would anyone happen to know why on pages like this I see unusual characters in place of punctuation? Screenshots: http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/safari.png http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/firefox.png. It doesn't matter which browser I use or what user account I'm logged in as, my Mac chokes on certain web pages - the linked article being an example.
It's a generalization, but he's on to something. I've heard it described as Americans having "lazy lips." We do tend to slur our words, and we're so used to it, that it sounds normal.

For example, most Americans leave out the "a" in orange, so it sounds like we're saying "ornge." Another example would be that I tend to say the word hospital as "hos-pit-al" which sounds strange to a lot of other Midwesterners who are used to the "hos-pittle" pronunciation.

But having said that, it seems like stretch to say that it affects the speech patterns he's talking about.
I totally agree re: thirst for knowledge. But I'd be more impressed by a business guy who read widely _outside_ his field.

Tangent: one way in which the internet and e-books will definitely affect book publishing, for the better, is that there will be less need to stretch a single idea to book length. Many nonfiction books should really be ~30,000 words long, and once everyone has a Kindle there's no reason for them not to be.
Smart way to share PSD files using diff and patch
I think the idea of dropping out of college fits in with the general startup mold. Startups are disruptive, they do not follow the traditional path of what's out there. Likewise, dropping out of college and leaving that safety net is certainly disruptive. It takes a special kind of person to do that. Also, it is unclear how many of these billionaires came from the world of tech startups, inherently more disruptive than say, finance.
This has been around for at least 10 years - the bottom of the web page says "13 November 1995." As a PhD in graph theory I'm curious to know:

* why do you think this is interesting?

* what other 10 or 20 year old results might you be interested in? I have lots ...
I have to disagree with this. I dropped out of college, spent the winter as a snowboard bum in Colorado, moved back to Boston, and started working for minimum wage in retail. Managed to save enough money to buy a new computer. Got a better job, rinse & repeat. At no time was I subsidized by anyone else. I also don't think I was "very very lucky". Sure, I consider myself lucky in general, but the path from dropping out of college to success is all about hard work (and some natural aptitude wrt tech startup stuff).

I'd argue that if you have what it takes to create a successful tech startup (technical skills, strong drive/work ethic, determination, unhealthy willingness to work 16 hours a day, etc...) then you could do just fine dropping out of college. If you don't have those things, then I'd say stay in college for sure, but you won't start a successful startup regardless.

I'm also not sure what you want people to "fix" in higher education. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it sounds like you want EVERYONE to create startups. No matter how amazing college is, most people simply don't the right set of traits for that, and that's 100% okay! Society needs artists, call reps, grocery store managers, stay at home moms/dads, and everything else. Plus I honestly don't think sitting at the computer for 10-18 hours/day is physically or mentally healthy. So while I do it a lot, I'm really glad most people don't.
1950 called. They want their hilarious joke back.
I think there's a lot of overlap. For example, the three traits you listed are "resiliency, dedication, and tenacity." There's nothing in those three things that requires doing things your own way. A big company would probably love an employee who had those three traits, but deferred to higher authority for decision making.
Observing the Earth - How does Earth Observation work?