skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your article doesn't list any of the library features that tipped the scale in favor of Arc.

The features of Arc are well described in the Arc tutorial, http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt would you recommend that I include a link to that?

it doesn't stand well under scrutiny ... public technical rationales aught to be a little more than ...

Well, I had posted it to the Arc forum, where people are already familiar with Arc. I expect that your criticism is valid if it had been intended to be a technical article.
Bring Power Strips/Squids To Conferences
> Can you give me an example of a snide remark that could be rewritten?

Here is a quick list of what I think needs further deliberation and scrutiny on your part.

> 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.

[You came to the wrong Lisp then, as Arc has no libraries compared to all the mainstream lisp dialects]

> I found the [Scheme] rationale of hygienic macros -- avoiding all possibility of conflicting identifiers in macro expansions -- to be compelling. After all, who would want to write a macro that breaks just because the user happens to be using a variable of the same name as one used in the macro?

[Actually, scheme's hygienic macros shift the burden of capture-avoidance to the compiler. It's CL that has to use gensym.]

>I now understand that all these language features that people work hard to create solve some problem, and it can be a useful and important problem to solve, and yet it can be a problem I don’t care about, a problem I don’t have. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad language feature, but it can make it one that I don’t want to pay the cost of using.

[This is fraught with reasoning errors. If you want a language that only has the features you want, create your own DSL. And even after that, you might apply that a la carte reasoning to the runtime and question why you might need a certain garbage collector, if any at all, or why you might need your runtime to have bindings for the OS system calls when you don't use them. Slippery slope. Richness is usually a good thing, not bad.]

>Yet in Java, it’s hard to get anything shorter than ten or twenty lines of code. See some code duplication, and by the time you’ve written the classes and interfaces and methods you need to write to remove the duplication, the code is just as long as it was before.

[A personal opinion that will send java programmers in uproar. not that java doesn't suck ;-]

>Languages written by hackers for hackers like Perl and Ruby and Python are lots better (and, I find for myself, a lot more productive for me for the kinds of projects I work on), and I can write shorter programs in them, yet they don’t help me go further

[and now the Perl, Python and Ruby programmers feel trolled and will jump at your neck. You requirements are of the DWIM kind.]

>they don’t help me make my program shorter.

[Yes, and an Aston Martin can't tow a boat. Right tool for the job]

>Now I see some pattern in my code, if I’m doing more typing than I want to be doing, BAM I write a macro and use it. Just like that

[and the Lisp programmer collective is surprised by your surprise.]

and so on and so forth.
Federal judge blocks SC Attorney General from prosecuting craigslist management
To be honest, what I'm looking forward to most in VS2010 is the revamped IDE, and particularly the Call Heirarchy feature - which shows you the heirarchy of everything your method calls into (and vice versa).
Oliveira's "new features in Visual Studio" are all programming languages it now supports-- in other words, the development environment is synonymous with the compilers bundled with it.

When I left Windows as a development platform (maybe 10 years ago), it took a while to appreciate how deep the Unix philosophy of "compact, orthogonal tools" really runs. Now, though, it would never occur to me to describe a new compiler as a "feature" of the other tools I use.

I'm not sure that the difference in worldview really matters. I doubt that I'm significantly more productive now than I was with Visual Studio. However, I do feel incredibly straightjacketed whenever I have to go back to VS, as if that monolithic view of software is imposing itself on me, rather than letting me do what I want as I want.
You sound exactly like the people criticizing the Altair when it first arose. How many elementary school kids or design students or Ruby programmers ever hacked the Basic Stamp? Whether it be historical coincidence or simply passing some minimal threshold of price/ease-of-use, these small improvements sometimes result in dramatic epochal changes.
+ camera + evernote
"I don't see how that indicts the process that runs the most successful mobile application platform ever deployed."

So far. The Apple II was a pretty good business, too.
One of the driving forces behind hackers is that they (we) want to solve problems. Larger companies don't let us solve problems because of politics and bureaucracy. They don't have enough "interesting" problems, so we invent our own.

We also have a much higher risk tolerance than most corporations, perhaps for good reason! Look how many startups "fail." Part of the difference is how hackers vs. corporations define fail. If the problem is solved, the hacker believes it is a success. If the solution makes money, the business believes it is a success...
It is unfortunate for abstractbill to use this incorrect explanation, because hygienic macros are still a red herring - a decent module system and a bit of restraint gets you there.

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

(define (boo)
(let ((if list)) ; if is shadowed
(my-if 'x 'y 'z))) ; gives (std.if x y z)

(define (boo2)
(let ((std.if list)) ; error! cannot shadow module vars.
(my-if 'x 'y 'z)))

I've posted this around a few times asking why this isn't already used in Lisps and never seem to get a convincing argument back. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that CL-ers are ashamed of the fact that multiple namespaces aren't actually necessary and Schemers are rightly ashamed of hygienic macros. Please convincingly prove me wrong!

(ps. This ofcourse would not be limited to the languages std module but would also apply to any exported module symbols.)
The IDE is redesigned and now uses WPF.
Also, the Historical Debugger sounds intriguing.
That might be the real underlying motivation here. The reviewers might be under instructions to disallow any app with the ability to download arbitrary content until the version with parental controls is released. Picking some bit of plausibly offensive content at random is just a pretense.
I hear the Marines are looking for a few good men.
90% of everything that I've seen done with the Arduino (that doesn't require portability) can be done with an old PC that has a parallel port and any Linux distro that has gcc.

I'm not dissing the Arduino; I think it's an interesting platform, but it really is overhyped.
100% agreed. These metrics don't really matter to me. I think the reason why most start-ups have customized metrics tracking system is because we are all different. For a social product, engagement metrics would be much more important. If you are an utility product, metrics that are more important are probably usability, time spent, effectiveness, or whatever that's relevant to the developers.

The metrics I see in that dashboard are just a bunch of numbers that are fun to see, but doesn't give me insights into how I should push my product direction. Google Analytics + CrazyEgg on the other hand, they do.

On the other hand though, that tool may be very handy to track marketing campaigns. So that may be the angle on how you can position the tool. But be warned, web analytic tool is not a good market to be in because it's very hard to scale... you need a direct sales force for instance.
Why would you post links to ruby based irc frameworks here? I might as well of come here and posted VB, C++, or any other language, it's just spam. Not that we expect much more from a rails user though
Repeat after me: censor-ware does not work. It's like spam -- since you can't even define what constitutes offensive content in a consistent, formal way, how in the hell can you expect any system (human or algorithmic) to make an effective, fair determination about what goes in which bucket?

Apple does a great job of design, usability, hardware hacking, and recently they've even been pretty effective at getting content owners to move in the direction of reasonable licensing terms for digital distribution. However, they do not have magic pixie dust which makes them immune to brain-dead "content filtering" algorithms, whether human-mediated or not.
Well, I've heard that Blocks get you most of the way to Macros, but not quite. I'm wondering if the "not quite" part is something beyond what's afforded by the Rewrite Tool.

The Rewrite Tool is not dynamic. Perhaps this is the key? But 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.

Something like:

perform: methodName
with: arguments
rewriting: aMatchingPattern
as: aRewritePattern

Where aMatchingPattern would be something like:

``@rcv
ifTrue: `Block1
ifFalse: `Block2

Then aRewritePattern could be something like:

"Order of Blocks reversed"

``@rcv
ifTrue: `Block2
ifFalse: `Block1

Just be careful to cache the result of the compilation by method name and Class, and this wouldn't be too much slower than a conventional #perform:

This particular example would let you dynamically call any method, but with all of the if-then-else equivalents with the then and else clauses swapped.

Would this constitute Smalltalk Macros?
I haven't had Java installed on my computer for years, not going to start now.
Clojure : Lisp dialect for JVM
I feel the Arduino is little overhyped. It isn't too hard to build your own PIC or AVR programmer on a veroboard and start hacking. I find the BeagleBoard to be a lot more promising/interesting given the amount of raw processing power you get on a tiny 3"x3" board.
"board full of tiny holes" ---> breadboard? (I'm too lazy to include the link to wikipedia.)
I'm an American a few hours North in Prague. Drop me an email if you come up this way; it's in my profile.
We're still playing around with the pricing model...we'd definitely like to come up with a few different plans that would work for sites of different size. Thanks for the suggestion!

Also, what's your idea of "not much expense"?
If this extra cost/regulation was enacted it would just move the business offshore.
I definitely agree that the BeagleBoard is really interesting as well. I've got some friends working on a building an incredibly simple OS that would be used for education and tinkering. However, if you don't think the barrier to entry of having to build a board from scratch and jump over all the other proprietary hoops for working with PIC keeps out lots of people -- from programmers and other non-hardware geeks to artists, designers, kids, teachers, etc. -- you need to work on increasing your empathy with people who aren't you.
Just to be clear...we're not doing any web analytics directly, just pulling from 3rd party services like GA, Clicky, Mint, etc. This is just a dashboard / reporting tool.
Before computers came about, the geeks were carpenters and mechanics. I find I get along well with both types of people and we usually have lots to talk about.
Depends entirely on what you want to do in "meatspace", of course. There are lots of options for, say, robot control out there. Hacking one's Roomba seems popular. If you have a spare laptop or netbook, there are huge numbers of USB-based interface devices you can use to deal with the outside world without even leaving the comfort of your PC.

And, when you're ready for "serious" work (something other than turning lights and motors on and reading sensors at 10 Hz), you'll probably want to be looking at FPGA development boards and learning Verilog or VHDL. Take a look at the products from http://knjn.com for example.
Abiding by their own clearly-stated policy is "evil" now? I can see how they're being inconsistent and a little stupid, but it seems to me that you grossly distort the meaning of the word "evil" when you use it to describe this.
"ratsbane" agrees with "pj", and the world can do nought but comply.... ;-)

People do choose to install Adobe Flash into their varied browsers, and they do so successfully and rapidly. It is a real capability in the world today.

For every authoritarian iPhone sold, there are forty-odd Flash-enabled phones sold. Not ubiquity yet, but we're getting there.

Browser vendors could indeed improve plugin communication for things like prefs-setting, cookie-blocking and so on. Instead Opera, Mozilla, Apple and Google are on a dysfunctional goosechase with VIDEO.

<em>"If your web app requires some plugin you WILL lose at least a small part of your target audience."</em> That's true. But it will be more accessible than requiring a browser update, or change in browser brands.

Browser plugins let people choose their favorite browser brand, without losing functionality to other brands of browser. It's cross-browser functionality. Plugins enfranchise minority audiences, and makes it easier for minority browser vendors to compete.

jd/adobe
Paul Allen's Venture Firm, Vulcan Capital, On Its Investment Strategy
I would never use this however if I've learned anything in this life it is that there is no upper bound on appeasing the ego.

You should be a runaway success... add some website karma monitoring and it'll really take off. Even better, give the user an overall average rating and let them compete with their friends to establish who the most popular person is.

One issue would be monetization, as this is usually something for the facebook/teen crowd, but I'm sure you can figure something out.

Nice work!
Ask him why claims on his website that they have 5.4M unique visitors (http://tinyurl.com/pwobdf) when Compete shows they have 70'000 :)
I don't know about 'hacking nirvana', but I found the Arc tutorial coupled with help from an appropriate newsgroup to grok macros (#arc? I don't remember now) was enough to write a ray tracer (LightMakesRight in the anarki distribution). Arc was my first exposure to a lisp dialect.
If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, then they should if they don't already. If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true for programming languages, then our agonizing is perfectly reasonable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir–Whorf_hypothesis
It took about 10 seconds, because that was my immediate reaction and I didn't see anything else in your post to contradict it.

And I did look up shiftless beforehand.

Maybe you should consider that your arguments aren't half as clear as you think they are?
This reminds me of another article that was posted to HN a few months ago. The author speculated that one of the reasons why we have not seen signs of alien life, is that any advanced civilization capable of space travel will eventually create a technology that they don't understand, and that destroys them.

I don't think we will be destroyed this time, but we will probably come to a point where there are things we shouldn't try unless we can test the experiment on another planet.
[You came to the wrong Lisp then, as Arc has no libraries compared to all the mainstream lisp dialects]

I'm not saying that Arc has better libraries than other Lisps, I'm saying that for me the advantages of Arc outweigh for me the disadvantages of not having the libraries that other languages do.

[Actually, scheme's hygienic macros shift the burden of capture-avoidance to the compiler. It's CL that has to use gensym.]

Yes, what I was saying was that when I learned about hygienic macros I thought they were a good idea for that reason.

Richness is usually a good thing

If I can choose to use a feature or not (as it typical with libraries: I can choose to use a library or not) then the cost to me of a feature that I don't want is zero; if I have to use a feature or it is harder to avoid then it matters to me whether the cost to me of that feature outweighs the benefit to me.

A personal opinion

Not at all. While it wasn't the purpose of my thank-you to do such a demonstration, it's easy to compare the relative length of code needed to do a particular implementation in different languages.

feel trolled

Yes, perhaps it is common for people who like X to be mad if I say that I prefer Y.

DWIM kind

I'm not following you.

and the Lisp programmer collective is surprised by your surprise

Perhaps they have had better luck than I have at writing hygienic macros.
1. yes
2. feedback from twitter (search)
3. not really, there's already more elaborate apps like scout labs
Google Chrome 2.0 review
As you all know, Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google with extremely fast browsing and speedy loading time. Google have now unveiled a much more improved edition of their highly thought of web browser. The issue many of us had with Version 1 was that it seemed to lack all the vital tools such as a “full screen mode” in order to make a browser the best it can possibly be, but this “ferrari-like” web browser has made a good attempt in producing advancing features to make Google’s engine go vroom vroom!
Why is this surprising? Why should college degree imply ability to find a job? Alot of my classmates appear to do little more than drink + party. I know for a fact that I would not hire them. Why would others?

If anything this seems to show that the general market has finally started realizing how worthless a college degree is.
VS is required to develop software that will run on Windows (and that will forever be handcuffed to Windows). I do not wish to develop such an abomination, but many people won't have the same moral objections.

VS is Microsoft's "Office for developers" application. It's only reasonable to tout the features os languages and compilers not available elsewhere from Microsoft as features of the whole thing, because Windows developers have no other option.
I'd like to see this same statistic by college tier. Or at least ensure its from a static set of colleges in both data points.
agreed, the arduino is oversold in and of itself. However it does remove the need for a separate programmer board/aparatus and a simple language. The ease of just using USB is a win along with a mixed community of experts, amateurs and kids. The synergy and accessibility is the main point of the article IMHO.
You may want to take a look at http://MightyBrand.com, our social media monitoring and engagement platform which is more akin to Scout Labs. MightyReach is more geared towards getting a high-level view of all your existing web analytics and social media stats, rather than monitoring social media mentions of your brand. Make sense?
> Hygiene is a red-herring. It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms.

Hygiene can also be baked-in to a nice lispy defmacro-style system; there's no reason that hygienic macros have to be scheme-style. Variable capture can be permitted with a (capture x) special form. (I like to use ^x as a shorthand for that).

At that point, macros start behaving scope-wise similarly to lexical functions, and captured variables behave kind of like dynamic variables in a function.

It suddenly occurs to me that this form of hygiene could be implemented in the expansion of let, lambda and defun forms, at which point (someone yell at me please if I'm wrong), plain-ol' defmacros would be hygienic, unless there's a type of variable capture that I'm forgetting about right now...
If someone were purely after karma, I think the best way to do it would be to submit not just any old crap, but a broad selection of mainly "off topic" stories from relatively high quality sites like economist.com, ft.com, wsj.com, nytimes.com and maybe some stuff like reason.com, which is bound to get some votes from the libertarian crowd prior to being killed. If you were steady about submitting lots of these links, a few would be winners, and the rest cost you nothing.

This is essentially the strategy followed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=robg

Lots of material, much of it good. Although plenty of it might be considered off topic by some, most of it's interesting, and gathers at least a few votes. And it's certainly not spam.
That's an insane comment. Don't even know where to start.
2) Dude, where is my IDE ? Not Netbeans. Something like that shiny “Adobe Flash” thing.

Obviously the author has never tried to write ActionScript within the omg-rip-my-brain-out-before-i-kill-myself-awful "Adobe Flash" application.

The best thing Adobe ever did with Flash was base FlexBuilder on Eclipse. I hear they were going to write their own IDE, but they had just hired some Microsoft guy who told them they were nuts and convinced them to build it on top of Eclipse instead.
Welcome to the rotten fruits of crony capitalism 2.0. The millionaires who own Tesla got a $350 million loan from the U.S. government this year. Taxpayers only get downside, while a bunch of insiders and now a foreign carmaker capture all the upside.

http://www.redherring.com/Home/25831
Nobody seems to notice this, but using quotes stops you from error of using {foo:"bar"}. In JavaScript, {foo:"bar"} is not an Object, it is a code block containing a labeled code block with the label, foo, in it with a string, "bar". This is what {foo:"bar"} really means in JavaScript:

{
foo: {
"bar";
};
}

Labels cannot be strings, so quoting them will help you catch this error earlier.
Drupal Security Issues + Drama
Then why does the Perl implementation (http://search.cpan.org/~msergeant/CDB_File-0.96/CDB_File.pm) warn of the error:

CDB database too large -- You attempted to create a cdb file larger than 4 gigabytes.

?
VS is required to develop software that will run on Windows

I'm sure the user base of the delightful open source #develop making Windows apps will be sad to hear this, as will everyone using VS to develop against Mono.

Which compilers are part of VS that aren't available elsewhere?
To make it clear, the example below would become:

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

This assumes that awhen is being defined and exported from the std module too, so that it can also be used in expansions. Slightly more verbose, but that's optional hygiene if you want it.
1. yes.
2/4. multiple YT stats, time per page.
3. $19.95/mo., I'd want a 1-3 month trial (give me time to sell it to my boss).
I found myself thinking of the ways in which programmers have tried to make programming more like working with real world, erm, objects, over the years.
Umm, not sure about that ... I'm not saying college kids don't party too much or that degrees aren't worthless to some degree.

But I think it's clear that this statistic shows that there's more competition for fewer jobs.

At the very least, a college degree isn't worthless if it's required to enter the field you wish to work in. Browse Monster.com and see how many finance and/or engineering jobs don't require a college degree.

From your tone, I'm gathering you have problems with people who equate a college degree with skills/ability ... you're more than welcome to feel that way, but I don't think you're proving such a consensus has caused the drop in graduates w/ jobs.

signed,

A college dropout
It's a shame the author isn't really distinguishing between Visual Studio 2010 and v4 of the Common Language Runtime / Dynamic Language Runtime.

VS 2010 has some neat integration points but isn't really of interest to the HN community - an in-depth look at v4 (particularly the DLR) however is worth chatting about sometime.