skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's been no Mac malware released through the App Store process.

Depending on your definition of "malware," the 999$ "Am I Rich" app and the baby shaking app might qualify.
Labor has become so specialized that individual workers are too often disconnected from the final product or outcome. It's hard to remain motivated and engaged under such conditions.

I'm not an entrepreneurial hacker like so many on this site (wish I was). My job offers great opportunities to craft creative solutions to interesting technical problems, but I am far too disconnected from those who will ultimately benefit from my efforts. This disconnectedness really takes the interestingness out of solving interesting problems.

By the way, if anyone knows of a list of manual trades well suited to hackers, please post it here.

Recommended reading: Wendell Berry: _What Are People For?_
Read what he wrote again and you will be surprised by the logic:

"I’ve long liked Lisp, but hadn’t been programming in Lisp for a long time because I hadn’t found any features in Lisp compelling enough to overcome the advantage other languages had in having large libraries available and such like."

I mean, come ON. If Lisp wasn't compelling enough because of the perceived lack of libraries, then Arc is the last way to come back to Lisp as it has NIL.

It's completely acceptable to have a preferred Lisp, but it's unacceptable to do so for irrational reasons ;-) Every time you need a new library/feature in Arc you're most likely to call out to the MzScheme runtime and FFI. It's highly hypocritical of you to dismiss a language for lack of libraries, then jump on another language it hosts.
np :) and apologies for taking the comments off topic.

Do linguists agonize over language efficiency as much as some programmers do? For example, writing English is maybe far more letters/strokes than Japanese (idk), but we don't all start learning Japanese and bash English.
After years of using mostly a laptop, I had to work on a crowded desk, with only a keyboard. After a few minutes of coding I wanted to point at sth, so I started to fondle the desk in front of the keyboard in a desperate attempt to use the non-existent touchpad. After the 5th time I realized what I was doing and said to myself
"profesionalna deformacia".

there was a mouse, but not enough horizontal space
By Wikipedia, a proof that relativizes is one that isn't affected by the addition of an oracle.
There be hackers of both hardware and software in the Greater Toronto Area, but not so much within the city itself

Huh? Spadina Ave. in Toronto is lined with startups and tech companies, as is King West (aka 'Liberty Village'). There are tons of tech events in the city (Democamp, etc. See http://yousayyeah.com/calendar), as well a hacker space (http://hacklab.to)

I'm not aware of much hacker activity in the 'burbs other than Markham perhaps.
I'm not having it both ways. I'm saying that you can make this argument about both sides. The linked article implies Al Gore's in it for the case, so there ya go.

This is a silly argument. My whole point was that we should move beyond questioning motives.
"Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?"

Maybe this is why Obama was so fond of Rahm Emanuel (who famously lost a middle finger to a meat slicer).
Developers on twitter
In sales mostly.
Ask HN: check out our upcoming web stats dashboard app - MightyReach.com
Ok, this hasn't launched yet, but we'd love to get some feedback on the idea and the direction we're going.

Backstory: We've been working on a new set of features for MightyBrand.com, our social media monitoring and engagement platform, and we decided to take this particular set of features and also release as a standalone application. MightyReach lets you quickly and easily create a customized dashboard that pulls in just the stats you care about from Google Analytics, Feedburner, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, etc. You can subscribe to email and RSS reports, and export the data in XML, CSV, and PDF formats. The goal is to help people really easily get a top-level view of the results of their web and social media marketing efforts and save time in the metrics & reporting phase of the process.

http://MightyReach.com

Questions for you guys:

1. Would you use something like this?
2. What features are most important to you?
3. Would you pay? If so, how much?
4. What services or features are we missing?

Thanks as always for the awesome feedback...there's nothing like this community :)
Clickable link: http://MightyReach.com
I think, frankly, there are easier ways to do that too. Less controversial ways.
What's the benefit in 'not forgetting'? Even when the first one was fresh in the memory, it didn't stop the US from slaughtering another 100,000 civilians with the second, did it?
Hmm, I don't know if I'm going to be able to explain it very well without an example. My general experience was that I'd start with syntax-rules, which would turn out to not be powerful enough for the particular macro I wanted to write, so I'd turn to the more complex but more powerful syntax-case. Which then might turn out to not be powerful enough either, or else it might be powerful enough but I'm struggling to understand how to implement my macro using it, plowing my way through pages of documentation and reading examples.

Then there's a macro in Arc, for example,

(mac awhen (expr . body)
`(let it ,expr (if it (do ,@body))))

which, on the one hand, yes it is true it's not hygienic. But, on the other hand, I can bang out in seconds. So now I'm moving ahead writing my program instead of struggling to write a macro. And the lack of hygiene has never been an actual problem for me in practice.

I imagine that a Scheme programmer who was experienced in writing hygienic macros and so could write them quickly, and who was more bothered by the lack of hygiene than I am, could well reach a different cost/benefit decision than I do and decide they'd rather go with hygienic macros.
How Google's cute "doodles" became Satan's pawns
Using NSInvocation and NSProxy instead of performSelector
I understand what the guy is saying, but this is equivalent to art students discussing the technicality and construction of canvases. Even if you select the best canvas in the world, it does not make your painting better.

I think that too much of writing about programming is focused on the details of the programming act, and too little on the result of the programming.

Reading about finding and learning a programming language is like reading about an artist choosing a brush. Reading about the technical details of someone scaling a Django app on a single server to serve 1000 concurrent requests per second is like seeing the finished artwork.
90% of your ideas suck
For some reason, the redirect links are broken for me in Safari. I get the message:

Safari can’t open the page “http://wordoid.com/RegistrarRedirect.aspx?registrar=godaddy&... because it’s an invalid address.

For some reason (doesn't make sense to me) it seems that Safari doesn't like the keyword 'domain' in the query parameters, because changing that to something else actually sends the request.
To make it even more abstruse, it's not usually results that we describe as "relativizing", but proofs and proof techniques.

For example, the proof technique we call "diagonalization" relativizes. If I prove that complexity class A is contained in complexity class B, what I'm formally proving is that a Turing machine obeying the resource constraints of class B (e.g., polynomial time) can solve any problem that can be solved by a TM obeying the resource constraints of class A (e.g., logarithmic space). If I prove this by diagonalization, then I've also proved that this inclusion holds even if the Turing machines are granted access to an "oracle" that can solve problems that the machines themselves could not solve.

Here's an example of where this gets interesting: it's been proven that there are oracles relative to which P=NP, and other oracles relative to which P != NP. This means that no relativizing proof (in particular, no proof by diagonalization) can ever resolve the P vs. NP question. (See why?)

So, oracle results don't tell us too much about the actual relationships between complexity classes, but they tell us about what kind of proofs we should and shouldn't bother trying to use to prove those relationships. It's a sign of just how hard complexity theory is that it's often considered a big achievement just to get an oracle result that tells you that the other proofs you were trying will never solve your problem.

If you're really interested, this line of research now goes beyond relativization. There's another barrier to proving complexity separations called "Natural Proofs" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_proof), and more recently a third has been proposed called "Algebrization", which (far as I can tell) generalizes relativization to the case where we get access not only to oracles but to low-degree polynomial extensions of oracles. (Unfortunately, if you know what that means, you were probably already aware of the new results.)
Don't show vote totals before people vote if you want honest votes.
Since both OpenID and secure logins for small sites are but a plugin away for the frameworks that such sites will inevitably use this assertion just does not hold water. Given the fact that the two are roughly equivalent for the server provider (albeit with an increased number of potential failure points for the OpenID system due to reliance upon third-parties for authentication) the determining factor should probably be usability. On this point OpenID fails miserably.
I like Omnisio , nothing beats a screencast of a prototype
So it's a personal-preference choice made after sufficient deliberation and experience in all the options on the table, I hope.

Ok. I will accept that.

Here is my take on your personal essay, it's also a matter of personal opinion made after sufficient technical evaluation of the matter: I think you need to be a little more critical of your own reasoning, specially when writing for programmers. The spirit of your essay has been largely positive, IMO, but go easy on the snide remarks and the dismissive attitude of other technologies you have very little experience in (yeah, it shows.) Otherwise a much less sympathetic reader than I, and a far more competent one, will come aboard and tear your argument to pieces.

A better way to frame your enthusiastic writing would be "I can do X in Arc, I really wish ${LISP_DIALECT} would let me do the same". This is both curious and also accepting of one's own self-limitations. Someone will come aboard and show you what you have been missing, and you might as well get pointers to the literature that further your understanding of Arc or whatever other technology.

Regards.
ESPN360 is usually sold to ISP's and bundled with internet service. It's not so much a matter of "blocking" as "not buying". It's a weird business model, but it was enough to switch me from Time Warner cable (which was excellent through and through) to Verizon DSL (which has no other redeeming characteristics).
Way oversold. The Arduino is a nifty AVR microcontroller board, no more and no less. It's distinguished from other such things that have appeared over the years (anyone remember the BASIC Stamp?) only by price (cheaper, but not much cheaper) and integration (it has a USB device plug and a reasonably attractive IDE).

It's not breaking any ground that hasn't been a four-lane highway for the last two decades. But it's cute and cheap, and if you're interested in playing with embedded stuff or hardware control, I'm sure it's a lot of fun.

But "the next Altair?". Please.
> let me click through to any

Or make a step in the shadow of the darkside and use socialhistory.js to determine the visitor's registrar
For me it's a cost/benefit analysis. Programming in MzScheme or Arc has a cost to me in that the libraries I typically use for my projects are mostly available in other languages, so they are harder to get to. I may decide to program in a language despite such a cost if it has other benefits for me that I find outweigh the cost. While I liked MzScheme, I didn't find its benefit to me great enough to outweigh the inconvenience of the library issue. The scale tipped in the other direction for me with Arc, where I'm happy enough with the benefits I find in Arc that they outweigh the other disadvantages for me.
After all of this publicity, I'm sure that they will let the app through.
Woah. I remember Spiderman 2. Are they sure this is such a good idea?
Ah, this has been repeated many times, but I can't help to click "reply"...

> It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms.

Gensym cannot prevent global identifiers from being shadowed in macro use environment.

(define-macro (my-if a b c) `(if ,a ,b ,c))

(define (boo)
(let ((if list)) ; if is shadowed
(my-if 'x 'y 'z))) ; evaluates to (x y z), not y

In CL you don't need to worry much, since (a) it is Lisp-2 so variables won't shadow operators, and (b) using packages greatly reduces accidental shadowing. In Scheme the chance is much higher; you probably don't bind 'if' locally, but you can't check every user-defined global procedures the macro inserts into the output.
I find it interesting to see these memes questioning basic assumptions about the economic structure of our society. I think many of us just assumed someone else had figured it out, that all of those economists and politicians calling for more "knowledge workers" knew more than we did. Or assumed that Wall Street knew things we didn't, which explained why they could offer credit to people who used to be bad risks but now, suddenly, were not. Or that salaries for people with a college degree could continue to increase even as the number of college graduates exploded.

Nobody trusts any of those institutions any more. It will be interesting to see how people's behavior will change with this changed outlook.

Having said that, I think I am one of the few people actually happier with abstractions than actual things. Shop class projects generally ended in tears for me. So, I am fine with many people leaving to engage in more hands-on professions, leaving more "knowledge work" for me. :)
OpenID is an okay thing to have around as an alternate "backup" type of sign-in option. It seems to be most useful for people whose set default MO is to use the same username and password for most of their online accounts; typical users.

But OpenID does have its issues. Obviously trusting one provider with all of your username and password credentials isn't the best idea. I think, however, that having an OpenID URL is a good idea. But the better idea is to give new users their own unique ID on your site, and to allow them the option to link it to some other previously established online ID. Not by default.

In fact, information auditing doesn't really work without the rule of three: which (at some level) includes the separation of power from control.
I speak french, but I wouldn't know how to spell it phonetically in english.

However this text to speech site pronounces it very well:

http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo...
Those are all "modern lisp dialects", none of my tone or phrasing suggested CL-centrism. Please re-read.

I hope any pre-conceived notion of Lisper hostility isn't getting in the way you read my prose above.

Demand for rigor in thought shouldn't be mistaken for hostility.
Can you give me an example of a snide remark that could be rewritten?

(I appreciate your suggestion to say that I wish another Lisp dialect was more like Arc, but I'm not sure how I'd choose one since I don't really have a favorite aside from Arc).
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/mac-detailed-stat...
Solar Plane Crossing the Alps [video]
HR and teaching are traditional jobs for humanities graduates.
Not exactly a great time to be a blue collar worker either.
Well, I'm a noob around here (and in web dev), but I do like the look & sound of what you're assembling there.

This is a rather self-serving suggestion, but would you consider any kind of sliding scale pricing: based on some ranges of traffic... so that a tiny little site just starting could test-drive it and see how our traffic was developing (and not have much expense during early stages), and start paying more significantly when we had a business going to such a degree that we really needed to keep up with even small % changes.

[or (less work for you?) at least a trial test-drive period?] — A noob's 2cents.
It's funny, just today I finished up some work merging a hygienic expander into the core of Guile. I've been writing defmacros for a few years now, and while things are not all lovely in the world of syntax-rules or syntax-case, it is so much more lovely to write a macro that you know catches the important cases, and that will compose well with other code, and /especially/ code from other modules.

That said, have fun with Arc ;-)
mahmud makes some excellent points. I'm no design guru, so I won't comment too much on it, but overall it's a nice clean site. Be careful with your font choice as well as your word-choice ("vomitable?"). On your front page change "Engineering Fitness" to a call to action: "Engineer Your Fitness"
It looks nice, but I see a big panel of metrics I'd never use.

http://20bits.com/articles/8-tips-for-crafting-metrics-that-...

Taking the Twitter followers graph, will your system let me track the referral traffic from Twitter and break down what they do on with my product? Can I A/B test to see how it impacts their behavior and have it reflected in the reports?

Tracking my Twitter followers and Facebook fans is fun, but it doesn't help me make decisions about my product.
In their defense, it's not claiming to "break ground" any more than the PC broke ground over the mainframes at the time.

But as a software hacker wanting to move to meatspace,
what do you suggest as better?
From what this guy is saying, the power of Lisp style Macros is akin to what I can do with the syntactic Rewrite Tool and Blocks (Lambdas) in Smalltalk. I've always been led to believe that Lisp Macros are something even more powerful. (I haven't had the time to really delve into them.)
It's not as simple as "knowledge work" tho'. E.g. a doctor has a lot of knowledge, but his services have to be performed in person, he's not a knowledge worker like a programmer is. Similarly an artist is primarily a symbol manipulator too - her job can be done from anywhere, but there's no easily quantifiable body of knowledge or "hard skills" behind it.
Anything that runs with its own executable code on the user's machine is a potential attack vector. Here's just one such example:
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb07-20.ht...
There's definitely a huge need for this.

You should include delicious links too.
Your article doesn't list any of the library features that tipped the scale in favor of Arc. It's unfair to the MzScheme developers and users to dismiss their platform without telling them what's lacking. Please revise the article and flesh it further, if you have the time, because as it stands, it doesn't stand well under scrutiny.

Public technical rationales aught to be a little more than "just cuz" and personal preference. If you wanted a discussion that is ..
The Education of a Codewright
What is the Brain Computer Analogy?
Most users of the internet aren't aware of security issues. They don't know what to do and not to do. If a window pops up telling them they have to install something, they do and that might be a trojan or malware or a virus, who knows...

These types of popups requiring additional software be installed should never happen on the web. The user should have an instinct to click NO! and run away. This is a real problem for the web as a whole, not just individuals. Even if you aren't infected, you can be affected. Imagine all those zombies being used to DDOS your site or XSS attack it, that sort of thing.

They are unwitting participants in the dark cloud that looms over all of us. Over-dramatic? I don't know... I think it is a serious issue.
In comparison: http://www.xgamestation.com/

Build your own video game system, run atari-esqe games on there. More avenues for fun in my book.
There's a lot of more complicated things that we'd like to do down the road, but a lot of people aren't even using the simple top-line stats to the degree that they should be, partly because things are so spread out and fragmented. That's the theory, anyway :)
Certainly true. Capitalism has yet to find an efficient way to reallocate human capital despite its obvious success at allocating other resources. It's (relatively) easy to make a rational decision to quit investing in oil in favor of biotech if you think that industry will perform better. But it's hard to say to workers who've spent their entire lives developing skills particular to an industry that they should just go and find a job in an industry that needs more workers. Retraining is hard. Relocating is hard. People are a lot less mobile than capital. Tearing down restrictions on immigration is one way to make people more mobile thereby allowing for more efficient allocation of human resources.
Thanks for the comments guys, its definitely stuff I'm going to look into.

I agree about the enter page - the entire splash needs a make over
I should have been more clear. I do not develop in Flash. Unfortunately, I do have to install flash to view some content on the web.

I also forgot that I do use FusionCharts and that is Flash, but I do intend to move away from it when time/resources allow me to build fancy charts with images on the fly. FusionCharts is pretty cool though, I do like it, though I wish it wasn't flash...

So I do use it, but I don't like using it... that was what I was trying to convey. Sorry for the backtrack, I typed too fast before I thought enough... But I stand by my extreme dislike of Flash and other web augmenters! Hypocritical though I may be.

Anyone know a good JavaScript based charting library that doesn't use Flash?
I look at this problem in terms of automated systems. I think it's interesting how you can architect large groups of people to efficiently deliver a service. If you can conceive of and design systems you can as you put it "converge" nodes of the internet to produce wealth. There is a lot of opportunity and focus on leveraging current software and building social systems around that, which is great. The idea that interests me is how you can build virtual companies of people who do work and deliver value to a customer, which I think is ultimately what you and the paper you referenced are getting at.

> Which technologies are still out of reach to most people in terms of price or required technological know-how?

Entrepreneurs have fantastic building blocks available today. In the first world price isn't a problem, it's know-how. Benevolent hacking can deliver a kid from poverty to financial independence pretty quickly if he's clever enough and can truly solve people's problems. That's an inspiring idea. At some point, laziness becomes the real barrier.

> What is the optimal size for hackers to be able to effectively collaborate but not be bogged down by excessive control?

That's an interesting question. I suppose the answer would depend on the quality of the hackers, the problem they're working on and the parameters they're working within.
Yes, there was a recent article on HN about "your language features are my libraries."

http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/05/20/your-language-features-...

That was comparing Smalltalk to C#, but it is a similar idea. Smalltalk and Lisp belong to that elite fraternity of programming languages where the ability to easily extend the syntax is built into the language. The mechanisms are different, but the expressive power is similar.