skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Andrew created a teleporter in an attempt to instantly apparate to the Starite -- instead, it took him to a medieval world where he was besieged by shadowy assassins. He tried distracting them with candy -- really, Andrew? -- then created a fairly anachronistic nuke. The nuke didn't detonate, however, so andrew created a laser rifle to take out the assassins. One of his lasers grazed the aforementioned WMD, and blew up the entire level.

If the game can consistently do things like that and actually keep the gameplay fresh, it will be amazing. But I'm worried that after spending more than 15 minutes with it, the facade will fade away and a few underlying patterns will start to show. I would love to be wrong, of course.
Sure they work without Erlang VM. A lot of them also do fine without UNIX. That doesn't prove anything or anyone wrong or right.

He simply described his experience in writing a highly distributed system and proved it can be robust. He also did write it in 6 weeks, which I think is a big achievement for any (working) distributed system in any language. But saying he was language hopping because he "[didn't] understand Unix systems programming" is a bit silly. If he claims it made the experience better, I don't understand why you imply he doesn't program in a proper Unix way. He used the right tool for the right job.
Oh if only such a site existed... I would love to drop TechCrunch completely.
There's an endless supply of this stuff. Or more precisely, a supply limited only by the publication needs of thousands of professors. Just search for the relevant buzzwords on Google Scholar.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=menstrual+poststructural...

It's funny at first, but after a while just kind of draining.
Although the context (being on news.ycombinator) tends to make me think of Lisp macros, there is no reference to any language in the post's text. I believe c macros still count as 'macros'.
If you search YouTube for 'Sasquatch Dancing Guy', you'll see that the same guy in black shorts in several different instances of dancing (other times/songs) like he is the lord of the dance. Other video segments of the same Santogold song show he was dancing all the time.

But does that invalidate the mob/snowball/inspiration-to-act effect captured so well here?
I'm not sure that poker is a game that's amenable to being "massively multiplayer" in the usual sense. Server sharding is easy and obvious with poker, unlike with MMOs where everyone can (potentially) interact with everyone else.
Anybody else instantly hear the theme song (as played by an 8 bit machine, probably a Game Boy) in their head the second you read the word "Tetris"?

I picked up a couple of old original Game Boys a couple of months ago for making chiptunes, and one of them came with Tetris. It never stops being fun.
A contrapositive of this situation is sometimes you get judged as being inferior if you don't have have some fancy ivy league degree. Or maybe that's just my own inferiority complex speaking or a combination of both. I dunno.
10,000 years is a blink in the eye in terms of human evolution. The problem is the time it takes people to have children. Assuming the average parent is 20, and you go back 20 generations (1000 years) you only have 1 million ancestors which is still a small subset of the population. Thinking in the other direction useful mutations only spread as they help people survive longer / have more children so the change is normally vary slow.

If anything the shift to agriculture has reduced genetic diversity as stuff that had little impact on hunter gatherers are culled from a civilized society.

PS: Alcoholism is actually the default, populations with a long history of alcohol use have far less Alcoholism. However, it's far from eliminated in society's that have been using Alcohol for thousands of years.
I think there are at least a few nerds who also hate TechCrunch because of some pretty shoddy journalism like the whole Last.fm imbroglio.
It's both, no? You can always write macroexpanded code by hand, only with much repetition, so in that sense macros are always compacting.

Except, I suppose, for perverse macros which expand into shorter code :)
C++ version:

template<typename T>
void zap (T (*f)(T x), T &x) { x = f(x); }

Example:

int square (int x) { return x*x; }

int foo[5] = {1,2,3,4,5};

zap<int>(square, foo[3]); // foo is now {1,2,3,16,5}

Admittely, the <int> is a little ugly, but that can probably be fixed with Hindley-Milner (or just plain dynamic typing).
I see a YC pitch in here somewhere...
This is most definitely not a hacker news.
While you fan the flames, the principals are apologizing to one another.
VentureBeat (http://venturebeat.com), Silicon Alley Insider (http://www.businessinsider.com/alleyinsider), and GigaOM (http://gigaom.com) are each high quality alternatives to TechCrunch.
That's not exactly my position. I don't think authoritarian schools as we know them today should exist. I'd like to see lower cost, higher quality, and much more variety, innovation, and experimentation in education. Government involvement hinders all of those things.
Who cares about headhunters?
If I want to hire a graphic designer, I'd like to see that A) they know their shit and B) I can work with them - He's not too much of an årtisté.

One of those resumes and a portfolio would handle A. If I saw a boring ms word template resume I might start to doubt their skills.

gpa? For a graphic designer, I expect it to be way down there (from all the artists I've known).
though the level of reaction was not warranted, a reaction was understandable.

How could he continue with the review? It was obviously going to be a positive one, and just by raising the question of bias, Arrington pissed in the pool. Anything Leo could have said would've been filtered through that lens.
Or an open source alternative?
This isn't important.
Great Job on the short installation manual video, it seems pretty straigforward to get started.
A Demo of what Alchitect can be used for would be great. Also, I couldn't find the other Video Tutorials mentioned in the introduction.
Good start...
From a design point of view, I think it makes the page easier to read....
Very interesting. It's fascinating how many of these undercut themselves by making the information hard to parse or in some cases actively sabotaging the person's prospects.

Sean McNally's RPG character sheet in particular tells me he's not serious, doesn't use a spellchecker or perform proofreading, gets himself into trouble on a frequent basis and is deeply insecure about himself. Also had to love the last one for Sofiane Yaya, which urged me not to drop it as litter in a public place. Mentally, I did the responsible thing and put it in the trashcan as suggested.
Here's what I don't understand:

I see anti-Arrington comments like this frequently, yet TechCrunch appears on the frontpage every day (usually several times a day). Where's the disconnect?

(Full disclosure: I received a Mike Arrington review copy)
There's a lot of crap in postmodernism, probably more than in other disciplines, because it recognizes every framework of inquiry as contingent, and this can be abused to excuse sloppy inquiry. But the fact is, there's crap in every discipline. Have you seen the CS paper generator[1]? Have you read "Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees"[2]?

Sokal et al. acted in bad faith by cherry-picking the worst instances of postmodernist discourse and setting up postmodernism as a monolithic entity universally opposed to the values of scientific inquiry. I Love To You[3] is an example of a book written by a post-modernist (one of the ones Sokal et al. made fun of, incidentally) without any obvious obfuscation. I also enjoyed the interview with her, "Thinking life as relation,"[4] although it's a bit less accessible.

[1]http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

[2]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/nature0...

[3]http://books.google.com/books?id=-6fSONDCgW4C&printsec=f...

[4]http://www.springerlink.com/content/g447683933t14555/?p=6bff...
I used to like arguing over the Internet about this subject. There are many good technical and management/organizational arguments you can make for and against macros. What I've come to realize is they're all pretty much irrelevant.

The entire point of programming is automation. The question that immediately comes to mind after you learn this fact is - why not program a computer to program itself? Macros are a simple mechanism for generating code, in other words, automating programming. Unless your system includes a better mechanism for automating programming (so far, I have not seen any such mechanisms), _not_ having macros means that you basically don't understand _why_ you are writing code.

This is why it is not surprising that most software sucks - a lot of programmers only have a very shallow understanding of why they are programming. Even many hackers just hack because it's fun. So is masturbation.

This is also the reason why functional programming languages ignore macros. The people behind them are not interested in programming automation. Wadler created ML to help automate proofs. The Haskell gang is primarily interested in advancing applied type theory.

Which brings me to my last point: as you probably know, the reputation of the functional programming people as intelligent is not baseless. You don't need macros if you know what you are doing (your domain), and your system is already targeted at your domain. Adding macros to ML will have no impact on its usefulness for building theorem provers. You can't make APL or Matlab better languages for working with arrays by adding macros. But as soon as you need to express new domain concepts in a language that does not natively support them, macros become essential to maintaining good, concise code. This IMO is the largest missing piece in most projects based around domain-driven design.
Hmm, can someone point me to the documentation for Hacker News's markup system, please?
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A less sensationalist (and apparently more informed) analysis can be found here:
http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/
It looks like Alchitect is a PHP MVC-style web framework, but I had to click around quite a bit to figure that out.

Why not make the first sentence on the front page something like this:

"Alchitect is a MVC web framework written in PHP that does [ whatever it is that makes Alchitect special]"
Palm Pre Dismantled
Yeah, agreed. Though he tries his best to hide the fact, Arrington was a lawyer at a big law firm, neither a nerd nor a journalist. And here he is running a "news" site about technology.

To his credit, he filled a void. I wish there were folks like Arrington around and things like the VC-funded "internet week" in NY this week back in 1999 during the first dot-com boom. Something is better than nothing. And he's on the right side of a lot of things -- specifically on intellectual property regulation.

And also to his credit, he's trying and he listens. He's been responding to commenters on his site and there's something to be said about that.
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No, no I agree. He not only interrupts him, he does so to question someone like Laporte's journalistic integrity. Coming from someone like Arrington immediately following the last.fm thing, this is clearly something to object strongly to.

But Laporte does get pretty salty there. And at one point he tells all of them to fuck off, not just Arrington.
There isn't much: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
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Of course they're apologizing, it would be crazy to let a vendetta form over something like this. But that doesn't mean Leo wasn't justified here.
Right, that's what I had in mind.

Of course, it's a bit of a jump to assume that the result is the same when you use a cryptographic hash function instead of a trivial one.

But regardless of the hash function, the same problem will occur unless there are no collisions for input between 0 and 2^160 - 1 (inclusive). From what I can tell, SHA1 can't guarantee this.
Thanks, I'll edit out the markdown markups, then.
You may want to play with the name a bit, but it could be too late in your development for that - the first thing I thought of when I read "alchitect" was a site that I could tell all the kinds of booze I had in my closet, and it would give me some interesting mixed drinks (alcohol + architect). But that may just be my mind being somewhat recently out of college.

I would also change the video you have highlighted on the front page - after watching it, I have a good idea how to install something, but I'm not 100% sure what I would have installed, or why I would have wanted to do that. Based on the description at the top, I think Alchitect is some kind of web framework, but I'm not clear on what makes it special, distinctive, or even what language/platform it's for.

As opposed to an install video, I'd make the main front-page video into something like one of the Rails videos - "Watch me go from nothing installed to a basic CRUD MySQL site in under two minutes" - and highlight along the way what makes your framework different from every other one.
TC is polarizing, but HN doesn't have downvotes.
They're talking to each other directly now. Both said they were basically mortified about the incident. I have more respect for Arrington after this than before it.
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Oh, I absolutely agree with you that the advantages of those at points up the social ladder extend beyond just cash, but my point was that it isn’t just about teaching them to “work hard” or “value their educations” (which is not to say that those aren’t also important lessons). It also matters that parents have the time to spend with their kids, read with their kids, help them with homework, etc.; that the kids have the time to work on school instead of at minimum wage jobs trying to keep the family fed; that they have supportive teachers and fellow students; that they have proper materials and decent workspaces; that they have someone to go to for help when they don’t know about something; that they have connections when applying to schools or job searching; etc.

Kids of professors have a whole host of social and material advantages that can't just be boiled down to “better culture.” I really don’t think that the ability of professors’ kids growing up to be lawyers or doctors really says all that much about overall “social mobility.”
Terrific idea / tribute. Touching
> Where's the disconnect?

Nobody can downvote articles.

Also, TC's journalism isn't usually just MA stirring up drama. The average TC article on HN simply profiles a new startup, or service, or acquisition.
Not for another 94 years or so... http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
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755 comments and counting on Leo's ff:

http://friendfeed.com/twit-conversations/1d37431c/live-now-g...

and it looks like Arrington's apology has been accepted:

"Thanks for the post, Mike. Apology accepted. Now that I know what was going on in your mind, I apologize to you.
There seems to be something about the Gillmor Gang that just engenders over the top passion. I’m embarrassed by my overreaction. Peace."
"Were humans once more evolved than we are now?"

From the looks of the code I have to maintain, no."
INCORRECT.

If you're thinking about starting something up in any space that TechCrunch covers, the politics of TechCrunch in particular and of the "new journalism" in general are very much relevant to you.
I guess the new business model being presented is the dealer network owning the company (as opposed to the other way around), and the "company" being centered on design and marketing, as opposed to manufacturing. In some ways - but on a larger and more expensive scale - it reminds me of how the computer industry changed from corporate-owned manufacturing, to everyone using four or five no-name companies in Taiwan for everything. It worked out pretty well for the major players in that industry (Dell, Compaq, Apple, etc.), so I wonder how it will work out for cars.

I'm not sure, however, how it will work out with the labour situation for factories (I'm thinking long-term, once their two-year contract with GM expires). In order to make this work, you'll have to have some free-standing auto plants willing to bid for the contracts to build the cars; an industry which doesn't currently exist (almost all auto factories are owned by car manufacturers). Conventional economics says that in order to get prices down with this process, you'd have to have competition in the bidding process for these plants, but I'm not convinced that there would be enough (any) plants who would bid for them. I'm also not sure how the existing supplier network would work out, and how they'd stay in business.

All-in, it will be interesting how this shakes out over the next five to ten years - if it works, it's got the potential to change how the industry works.
No, you're right. This is a big part of it.

College degrees today are titles of nobility, thanks to state support. Yeah, I thought we abolished those, too.
It seems a little rich to me that Arrington feels like he's got the high ground on journalistic ethics.

Disclosing conflicts of interest is on aspect of that --- and does TechCrunch have a disclosure policy, just to keep that small portion of the issue on the up-and-up? --- but there are other aspects as well, such as having a retraction policy, fact-checking, how corrections are run, and operating (and citing) a comment forum where inconvenient comments are censored. The Washington Post couldn't get away with most of that. Maybe that's some of the overhead that's driving print journalism into bankruptcy.

The fact that TC requested and did not receive a Palm Pre just drives this controversy further into silly season. Maybe Arrington is concerned that Laporte's conflicts are disclosed. Or maybe (heh) he just thinks this is funny joke. But also maybe all Arrington cares about is that TC doesn't get scooped by someone else.

<strike>[edit]: Oh look:

http://www.crunchnotes.com/2006/11/01/techcrunch-bashing-hea...

"I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn’t going to change. I also write about startups. That isn’t going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn’t come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren’t. We never have been. We never will be."</strike>

Not worth it.
It's for both, but utility functions also serve the same purpose (which is why you see people claiming they could do whatever Lisp macros do with function/methods/classes/monads/templates/makefiles, etc.) :-P
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Crazy weird to me that you think that. Some of the most respected institutions in journalism are cratering --- when the NYT screws up, people make movies about it --- and what we're left with are the agile, light-weight, utterly unmoored web news outlets.

If we ran politics here, I'd be giving you the same rant about HuffPo and RCP.

But we run tech and entrepreneurship here, and if things break the wrong way for us (and him, I guess), Michael Arrington could be the next Robert Moses.
I don't care if it's the kernel or whatever else. I just know that the dang thing blew up on me twice. So you go and think about kernels and stuff - and have fun with EBS - I'm not using it anymore.
But isn't not upvoting a form of downvoting?
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they're preprocessor macros. editor input recorders are also "macros", but they're editor macros. Lisp macros are not generic "macros", unless you're in the company of Lispers, but lisp macros :-P

If you want to explore the highest level of code transformation, grab a nice little book called "Term-Rewriting and all That".

P.S. It's actually not a nice book. It's a theoretical mindfuck that will have you chasing abstract algebra down rabbit holes. It took a good year of my life and I still have no clue. </confession>
Ha, on a related note, pizza hut is hiring interns this summer at their headquarters in Dallas. The Job: Twittering for pizza news and promotions.
Given the amount of negative Arrington stories we've seen hit the top of HN I concur that this is also HN news. TechCrunch does face an intense amount of scrutiny and as such Arrington has to guard himself.
I don't think you read my comment correctly. I agree that a flamboyant resume is appropriate for a graphic designer - but not for a programmer or other tech applicant.
No, if 100 people love something and 100 people hate it, it will show up on the front page with +100. With downvoting, it would not show up on the front page with a score of 0.
To answer your question, no, that doesn't invalidate the effect captured here. However, if you are trying to duplicate this effect, you should realize that these things are probabilistic, and not deterministic, like so many phenomena in human society.
Any other HNers in Tokyo this week?
A bunch of techies, investors and analysts are going on a tour of East Asia this week (http://www.geeksonaplane.com/) and they're having quite a few events in Tokyo early this week. Just wanted to see if there are any other HN folks that are attending and have a chance to meet / grab a drink if you are.

Leave a note here if you are and we can figure out a way to meet up.
just wondering - if nobody can downvote, how is it than some trollish stories end up at 0 or negative numbers?
Ask HN: Have you ever felt inferior for not being from a name-brand college?
I saw an interesting comment in the thread for the post for "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645000) that prompted me to flip the bit and ask this question.
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Never seen a negative story, but I have seen stories removed, which is done by an admin (i think) after it gets a few 'flags'
Hold on mate, Alchitect does not seem very MVC from its Twitter timelines tutorial ( http://alchitect.com/app/documentation/twitter_timeline ) -- the HTML (V) is weaved deep inside the function (C).

Technicality aside, for a framework to be popular, it's necessary (though not sufficient) to have lots and lots of documentation/tutorials.
Here is the comment you're referring to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645316

I want to add that even if you personally don't feel inferior about it, you'll probably still feel something when you know someone else is judging you for it.

And of course, sometimes it doesn't even matter how you feel. You are at a disadvantage regardless.

As I said in the other thread, college degrees today are titles of nobility by definition, thanks to state support. Titles of nobility were supposed to have been abolished.
It's cool to see this hit HN; one of my good friends has been staying up late writing code for this game. http://chuckskoda.com/
what do you mean by "thanks to state support"? please clarify, thanks.