skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I could imagine a Smalltalk function that takes a method, applies a Rewrite Tool syntactic transformation to its source, compiles the method as a Block, then calls this Block with the arguments that would've been send to the original method."

I don't understand what you said, but in non-hygenic Lisp macros (the kind you get in CL, Arc, and Clojure) a macro is simply a function that expands into code before being compiled or evaluated. You can almost think of it as an extremely clever query-replace functionality in your text editor that always happens before you compile or run your program.

This is why so many Lispers claim that Lisp is at the top of the heap when it comes to language power. If you can arbitrarily expand your code into some other form at compile time, you can pretty much do anything any other language can do. A canonical example of this is that the object system added to Common Lisp is just a bunch of macros. Name your programming paradigm, and there's a very good chance someone has implemented it in Lisp, with macros.

What you describe sounds more complex than Lisp macros, which brings us to the necessity of all the parentheses. The idea of macros only works well when the language is built up out of a data-structure supported by the language. In Lisp, of course, programs are lists and macros let you do anything to your program that you can do to a list. When people try to add "macros" to languages where the code is not a data structure, there usually needs to be some intermediate representation of the parse tree, and then things tend to start getting ugly as the relation to what the source code would look like is quickly lost.

Having said all that, I'm curious if anyone that knows both Smalltalk and Lisp can name concrete examples of programming in Smalltalk and finding something you were unable to do without macros.
even in this article, techcrunch mentions twitter.
Humbling...
Uh... no, no that argument definitely doesn't scale like that. $100,000 profit for a year's work sounds like a plan to me.
Pompano Beach FL
Welcome to Pompano Beach , Florida where the total area of this city covers 22.15 square miles where 7.22 percent of that total is made of water.
A journalist could go do the research and compile an article that answers my question.

I think the position you're looking for is "librarian"
I would put the doctors with the mechanics. Same kind of real world diagnostics and problem solving, where criteria for success or failure are clear and easily observable.

The scare-quotes-knowledge-worker is someone who never gets that kind of clear, observable criteria to know if she really did a good job, or just played the office politics well.
http://spot.us is trying something interesting but I simply dont know if their scope is large enough
Yeah, a monopoly on financial instruments seems ridiculously bad. You need to construct markets.
Why do you think that MSFT's current behavior toward mono will continue in perpetuity? If mono ends up negatively affecting profit motive, then MSFT will attack with full force, as it should. If mono doesn't have some security in writing, then mono may be vulnerable - and that's a perfectly fair issue for commercial developers to concern themselves with.

There's all kinds of ways to spin the mono future. One might be that, as MSFT realizes the OS is being devalued, let mono become popular, then work a licensing deal after litigation. How is this different from Novell caving in on Suse?
You aren't talking about Journalism you're talking about research and you can already hire a researcher.

Journalism isn't about finding answers it's about finding truth. Despite what people think of him now Richard Nixon was a tremendously popular President (the electoral vote count in '72 was 570 to 17) so most were not asking for him to be exposed. But Journalists did and it was exactly what they should have been doing.

The problem with Journalism now is it's been corrupted. Now we have Liberal MSNBC and Conservative Fox News and they both are just spin machines for their side's agenda. That's where tech comes in because people simply don't trust Journalists anymore so they are looking more and more to other sources.

As for saving journalism I don't think true journalism needs it. My favorite modern example of true journalism is Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack". During the 2004 election it was recommeneded by both the Bush and Kerry camps and it was a best seller because of it.

Because truth appeals to everyone.
There'll be huge consolidation in the "generic" news market that's for sure.

But there IS still a market for in depth quality journalism, you just have to pay for it. The atlantic, new yorker are examples. People will pay for high quality journalism. The problem is that most journalism is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

To give an example of high quality journalism Here's what
I subscribe to:
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

- Laphams quarterly. Quarterly journal that covers a topic
through essays/letters/speeches of those from the past.
The war issue has churchill, patton, george orwell,
sun tzu, etc. The money issue henry ford, aristophanes,
jane austin. The insight is excellent.

http://www.economist.com

- The economist. A classic that covers business and
the world in a no bullshit way.
They. Don't. Do. Gimmicks.

http://www.monocle.com

- Monocle a briefing on global affairs, business,
culture and design. This magazine has me
addicted and paying $150/Yr. Why? The first issue had
an interview with the ceo of lego on innovation.
Every single issue there's thoughtful intelligent
reportage on some interesting but non-obvious subject.
(Like Lego, or japanese retail, or the falkland islands).
There's something intangible about the magazine, it
deserves a look.

In summary, is journalism dead? No. Most are just incompetent at it. Become competent at creating a quality product and you can make money.
And those news come from... journalists who work for news websites, right ? There's no problem with journalism, there is a problem with old-fassioned mass media, which are no longer "mass". And yes journalism generally has nothing to do with news.
"Yet in Java, it’s hard to get anything shorter than ten or twenty lines of code."

I am a Java programmer, I find much to like about Java, and I agree totally with this statement. I tried writing some functionality in Clojure, then re-writing in Java. It was a factor of 2 or 3 increase in lines of code.
Would you mind elaborating on how you invoke that ability to hyper-focus?
Niche journalism. I like it.

I'm not an expert on journalism, but I think this is happening to some degree already. Major TV stations have industry analysts covering their industries. I suspect that any more drilling down would result in journalists not having enough 'good' stories to be economical for them. Journalism works for the journalists because they can gravitate towards the stories wherever they are happening. Journalism for hire is probably closer to private investigators, corporate spies, or market research firms.
Do you work late into the day, up to the moment when you go to sleep?
After taking Adderall my brain would sometimes be too wired to come down, at first I attributed this to the medicine but later realized it's simply exhaustion.
I wonder if this will get as many upvotes as Last.fm's linkbait denial.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491750

I'm happy to say that I personally see an uparrow next to that item.
That's exactly what I meant in "In CL ... (b) using packages greatly reduces accidental shadowing." So I'm not sure what you are asking to be convinced. CL certainly does not prevent you from messing with package-private symbols, but usually a convention is enough to avoid disaster. I mean, I won't write (let ((your-package::private-symbol list)) (your-macro ...) ...) unless there's absolute need to do, such as emergency workaround of a bug in a third-party library.

On the other hand, one of the reasons Scheme avoids explicit module prefix is, I think, that it breaks abstraction. Suppose my-module defines my-macro and my-function. My-macro expands into a call to my-function. But I don't really want my module users to call my-function directly, so I only export my-macro and keep my-function private.

In your proposal, my-macro will expands into prefixed-symbol like this:

(define-macro (my-macro arg) `(my-module.my-function ,arg))

But... if we allow module-private function to be called with module prefix, we can't prevent ordinary code from calling my-function as well.

This is a language design choice. Some may not mind others to mess with module-private bindings; CLers certainly would not. But if you want to hide module-private symbols, and want to allow macros expand into them, how will you do that? One idea is to mark the output of macro expansion so that the compiler can distinguish whether the reference is from legitimate macro expansion or not... well, that's what hygienic macro is doing.
Don't Do Me Like That Lyrics by Tom Petty
I literally said that to myself when I saw it.
Hmm, I'm not sure I believe that. At least, the statistic is designed to be alarming. The unemployment rate for those with a bachelors degree hovers between 2 and 4% - over decades.

http://verifiable.com/charts/1359
Do you know of a market place for researchers? I'm thinking of something like elance or crowdspring for research.

Here's some perspective on the topic of research for hire in the stock market:
http://www.sism.com/independentresearchagrowingindustry.htm?...
> We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

You know, I don't always see eye to eye with Michael Arrington, but that is a remarkable offer, and I applaud his honorable deed. (I hope I don't end up eating my words after some sort of scandal.)
The guy expressed an opinion... this isn't a Draft Proposal For The Official Unanimous Worldwide Opinion On The Best Programming Language Ever And For All Time.

I can summarize the whole thing as:

"I really like working with arc, and it makes me happy enough to blog about it."

So yeah, while I didn't find it particularly worth upvoting, I'm not sure why you are trying to convince this guy he is somehow _wrong_ about being happy, and telling him he shouldn't dare write about it. You can no more do that than convince someone who claims their favorite color is red that it is in fact blue.
Ah...now that you've rephrased it, I see how your comment could read that way.
In GM's case the corresponding thing would not be to redesign their site but to redesign their dealer network, which would actually be a really good idea.
If it's something you need regularly I strongly suggest looking for someone locally. It's easy to find a research assistant but much harder to find someone who will take intuitive leaps and search out stuff that you didn't know you wanted. If you are working in a specific field you should try finding a University in your area and e-mailing the head of that dept.

That said, before I developed a relationship with the guy I use I generally had good luck with Guru.com
How much of this is just buzz-creation? It is next to impossible to verify the $'s spent. However, 18 months of time + volunteers does have a high opportunity cost.
That's right, niche journalism. Could be called research. Perhaps a community of people could ask questions and they could contribute a certain amount of funds to the answer. When the amount of money people are willing to pay for the answer gets to the right amount, then a journalist "adopts" the question and finds the answer.

The community who wants the answer could evaluate the truthiness of the article/research and the article writer could gain credibility. Perhaps they could even leave the article up and people in the future could pay to see what was written.

It's not unlike the situation now with custom web development. Hackers are paid to write code. These journalists would be paid to write articles. Similarly, lots of problems the Hacker will solve require research and analysis becore the problem can be solved effectively.

Seems like a marketplace problem.
taskbar shuffle (http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/) lets you reorder taskbar applications via drag and drop. Windows 7 has the feature, but XP and Vista don't.
Do you have a pointer to any more info on tuning TC? (Apart from the API guide)
I have recently begun experimenting with Adderall (under dr. supervision of course). My symptoms don't seem to be as bad as others' but I do have problems with planning and problems with executing a plan without getting distracted once I've made it. The distractibility makes programming difficult because I tend to want to take a short break before tackling a difficult design or debugging problem but then end up surfing the internet for 30 minutes before I can get back "in the mood" to move forward again. Adderall seems to take care of these problems and keep me focused on the work even when it gets difficult. At this point I look on it as a performance enhancing drug.
The Rewrite Tool meta-syntax allows you to do a few nifty things. It is also "an extremely clever query-replace functionality" and in the scheme I proposed, you could "decorate" a function, such that a transformed version is called at runtime.

The Rewrite Tool also gives you access to the Smalltalk Parse Tree, though this isn't quite as pretty as Lisp's. However, you can very easily apply a Visitor to your AST. Perhaps even better, there's also a { : ... } syntax for executing arbitrary Smalltalk code to do your transform.

which brings us to the necessity of all the parentheses

Yes, Lisp is it's own AST! That's amazingly brilliant! Makes software toolsmithing equivalent to just plain programming.
This is a wonderful opinion. The things mentioned are unanimous and needs to be appreciated by everyone.

Cynthia Kurtz
When you wake up in the morning you have the choice to achieve anything you want. Do not waste another do reading stupid web comments...get out there and live life!
[url=http://mymmoshop.com/buy/warhammer-online-europe/gold/index.... Europe Gold[/url]
True Journalism - Because truth appeals to everyone.

I think it's marketable. The only problem with it is that the powers that be will bury it with noise, as described in _Manufacturing Consent_. People eat up the spin because people like their own ideas confirmed.
I think the point is that Adobe Air creates a "closed" web. Standards are open.
You male chauvinist pig!! Uncle Sam's Misguided Children also recruits women, ya know? ;-)
IANAL, but there are a number of issues here:

1) Whistleblower statutes generally only apply when exposing criminal contract, not a civil liability (as with a violation of a company's Privacy Policy).
2) I wouldn't want to figure out which state or states' laws apply - you'd probably want counsel in at least DE, NY, and CA (and maybe DC as well)
3) Third party payments may weaken attorney-client privilege
4) The interests of TechCrunch and the fired employee may not necessarily be aligned, although that's hard to predict through what would ostensibly be years of litigation.
5) If it takes years, TechCrunch's appetite to continue to pay counsel could weaken

Look, I appreciate the sentiment, but I wouldn't take that offer if I were the fired employee. If Arrington wanted to help the guy, he'd give him a job.

[EDIT: Arrington is a lawyer, although non-practicing, so I'm going to hope that he's thought through all this and that I'm wrong on some of the facts. He's, at the very least, smart enough not to represent TC himself. A fool for a client and all that.]
The economist. A classic that covers business and the world in a no bullshit way.

I have to say, the podcast "Global Forecast from the Economist Intelligence Unit" is insightful, dares to make predictions, and seems to know what the heck they are talking about.

(BTW: "speeches" - no 'a')
There's two things you've (plural) done here then I'm very grateful for: USB and OSX software.

I've a birthday coming up soon, so I've just been showing my wife these ;) Thanks.
Wierdly enough, the original last.fm story also broke late friday night.

Is there a reason for the timing? Other than coincidence of course.
I don't feel like transcribing it, but Douglas Crockford addresses this here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook#t=1h0m29s
You forgot the land surveyors and cartographers ;-) Great article, BTW. If only I had a hundred upvotes to give...
No, I'm careful not to take it too late. It's not that bad, just my sleep isn't as good and I wake up more at night. Overall, the positives outweigh the negatives.
That's exactly what I've been looking for! Thank you!
Second the book recommendation. Great title to read for HN denizens, I think.
It's mostly the stuff I mentioned in the comment below (or above, depending on how the voting goes).

For those not familiar with hyper-focusing, it's a trait that's been observed in a significant minority of ADD cases where the person has the ability to focus extremely closely on a task for an extended period of time (for me often 12-16 hours). I get most of my code written in those blocks, which happen on average 3-ish times a week.

The ground rules for me are that it has to be something that I can really get into. Today I'm writing docs, so that's a no-go (hence the proliferation of news.yc comments). Code will do, hard debugging will do, reading research, writing essays will do. Catching up on email, writing docs -- really a good half of startup-y tasks -- won't.

Sometimes it comes naturally and I can start as soon as I wake up, especially if I just slept because I was too exhausted to continue and am still in the middle of a problem. Every once in a while, this will last for periods even up to two weeks.

The trick is building up momentum. It's easy to get distracted at the beginning, almost impossible once I'm "in".

So I open up my to-do list. Pick a problem. Turn off the internet. Close my door. Usually it takes about half an hour. If it doesn't work in the first half hour, I can try a couple of things to jump-start the process: 10-15 minutes of meditation or running will work probably half of the time.

From there I'm usually good until a problem is solved. There are some activities that won't snap me out of it -- cooking, playing bass a bit (often I do that when thinking through a problem), but I can't, for instance, talk to people. Sometimes the problem lasts an hour; sometimes it's a week. Since there's momentum already built up, I usually have a quick break of doing administrativa and maybe 30-50% of the time can jump right into the next problem.

Naturally most people that know me never see me in those blocks, so I often come off as scatter-brained or generally laid-back, but that's because my largest bursts of productivity are partitioned off into those blocks.
[Sorry, my original reply was so incoherent that I wanted to delete it before it caused any trouble, I couldn't even find a salvageable edit.]

I'm not a lawyer either, but if I were in this guy's position, I would make sure I was as well informed as I could be and take advice wherever I could get it. If it was free, all the better. I would seek out a second opinion if it started to look like multi-year litigation or something scary.

To address your opinions on what constitutes help, I am not really sure how it bears on the matter.
It's still impressive that he was able to borrow and recruit volunteers for the whole deal, but the $70 budget is a bit deceiving when he certainly used equipment worth far more money.
Why are people crazy about gadget news?
Today’s world is all about gizmo-gaz. Technology has advanced to an extent that man cannot even think of surviving for a day without it. Technology just keeps getting better day after day. Everyday there are better and more advanced gadgets introduced in the market to make life easier and more comfortable. Everything is available and ready at a click of a button. I just wonder what it will be in 50 years down the line.
A futures hedge fund in 18th century Japan
Transport Law Experts
Experts in transport law based in Clitheroe, Lancashire.
Facebook Announces Settlement of Legal Dispute With Aaron Greenspan
If they ditch the Java part, or relegate it to it's rightful place as a tech bullet point, then I think they're onto something. There is a point that would not just be imitation of Apple. There are a lot of users out there who need serious hand-holding -- the kind that they have to bug their tech savvy relatives, pay lots of $$ for, or that they simply don't get right now.

If someone can deliver a dead-simple system for getting slick, high-quality, security vetted desktop applications to people, it would serve an urgent need. It doesn't matter if the underlying tech is Java, Python, .Net, whatever. Most people will only care if it's easy and useful.

Do most people know or care that much of the iPhone code is Objective-C? Nope. They care that it works.

There is a big problem, however. The iPhone App store could get a critical mass of potential users because the hardware was so sexy, people bought the phone even when apps weren't available. What's going to do this for the Java App Store? Are they going to slip it into the JRE? Also, Sun has a history of not being able to make things easy or slick enough for the general populace. Heck, they have a hard time making interfaces gearheads like!

"My powers of whit fall short..."

Unintentional irony is often the funniest.
You miss my point: if he takes Arrington's free lawyer, there's no guarantee that those conversations are privileged as you have a third party picking up the tab. I'm aware of no caselaw where the press has paid for a source's legal fees.

Look, I'm crazy-ass conservative when it comes to legal matters. It's a bias of mine. But I would not take a "free" lawyer knowing that there was a possibility that what I said to the lawyer might get out.
I see CatDancer's touched a bit of a raw nerve. You've been compelled to respond with about a dozen (didn't count them) posts all quite attacking of both CatDancer and Arc.

What the hell is your problem with a) someone creating their own Lisp implementation, and b) someone else enjoying using it?
It didnt work for me at all. Initially didnt write anything in the box, pressed go, nada. Refreshed, punched in test in the box, pressed go. Nothing.
It's out-of-pocket money, just like those "I built a web startup for $100" posts. If the web startups counted how much the OSS would have cost if it was not free, the total cost would skyrocket.
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. </quote>
Ask HN: The most fun and beautiful code you know of?
What is the beautiful, interesting, suspenseful, fun code that you would rather curl up to read with a cup of coffee than most any other writing?

What is your "nightstand" code?
Server restart--I'm still pushing out a few minor changes.
Why save journalism at all? It's not in any danger. Some big companies that used to have monopolies on journalism are in danger, that's all.
You certainly raise a valid point. I found info on how the Minnesota state bar views the matter here: http://www.courts.state.mn.us/lprb/05bbarts/bb0205.html

It's not that I miss the import of what you're saying, it's that I am suggesting that making a sound determination of the ethics of the situation is not an insurmountable obstacle. If it turns out that it's a bad idea, that's okay. Not every good act plays out as we intend.

I think it is worth reiterating your point that Arrington is a lawyer, and that said it seems fair to presume he's acting in good faith with knowledge of these issues.

[edited for clarity]
Ten to the power of six? That's like a cube, right, because a cube has six sides, right?
Hollywood has a long long history of fudging the numbers on the true costs of movies. They use it for everything from simple tax evasion to huge complex schemes in order to deprive rights holders of royalties.

Calling it $70 as a publicity stunt is pretty benign.