skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I couldn't agree more with #7. In my experience, once an idea takes on a life of its own, it's very difficult to not execute on it. Some ideas are different than others, but at some point it clicks, and it's like trying to hold back an avalanche. You just have to roll with it.
Well put, Moto both earned and lost the ability to do battle in this arena. The big cell phone providers of the early 00's were caught sleeping by the iPhone and now have to play catch up. A well played move by Apple, and now Google.
Stupid does not mean "not worth it". Stupid means "obvious, and often overlooked".

And plenty of "stupid" things do mankind some good. Amazon invested a whole lot in selling books online, and now they contribute significantly to our quality of life.

That said, I acknowledge in the article that there should always be those aiming higher.
I see it a bit differently. I had to learn enough lisp to port some small application I needed to python. The result is basically this:

I don't have any problem learning the syntax - I didn't have anything against ml-s, haskell and others either, even though I started with pascal. But what do I gain by using lisp seriously? I can do easy prototyping in python; safe, functional code in haskell; serious multiprocessing in erlang; fast tight-loops in c; nice oo in either python, c# or java, etc. etc. Why exactly should I spend more time with lisp? What does it help me achieve? Python right now is basically lisp + community from what I can see. Sytax doesn't even matter that much.

If I need to rewire my brain to feel natural with a language that doesn't give me any new possibilities... then what's the point? I need those wires to understand haskell, sorry ;) I just need some balance - I can change the way I write my code, but tell me what do I get in exchange... and then tell me how is it better than doing the same in any other language.
...however, what is important advice, is that smart people should not do the first thing that associates to "smart people stuff", like string theory. Also don't do the first thing that associates to "altruistic" or "unconventional" or "entrepreneur". Do a smart thing that most smart people aren't doing.
Python also wins because it's a living language, still changing, adapting and updating itself while Common Lisp died the day the ANSI standard was published and today is a zombie, even if it still smells fairly nice.

Now that comp.lang.lisp is utter crap, there isn't much of a community either except for #lisp, which as an outsider I find kind of intimidating and not a good place to ask for help. Actually, what lisp really needs is for Conrad Barski to clone himself 10x :)
Oh, I agree that ECMASCript is a wonderful language which is widely misunderstood and underestimated (not in this community, but in the industry in general). However, there is more to a successful language than just the "linguistic" quality, or else Lisp would not be where it is now.
Sounds like he had a good manager. You've heard the saying:
Give the employee only enough rope to hang himself, but not enough rope that he can hang the company. I've learned far more from my failures than successes and your ability to recover from a failure shows even more than either the success or the failure.
> Is this something that just takes a while to get down?

Yes. You can practice in python reading this:

[f,b,(),q,[1,7,q],[q],[q,r,6,1]]

> Or are some people just naturally prone to the syntax?

Lisp "code" is just a data structure (largely: nested lists). It's not the syntax that bothers you,
it's dealing with complex data structures. You can see for yourself that they bother you no matter the actual syntax because the above form is python, and it bothers you as well.

People who seem to pick up lisp quickly, simply have a better- rather, a more compatible background. If they lack your particular impetus, they might already be comfortable with complex data structures.

Yes: People can be predisposed to "getting" lisp, but I doubt it is a genetic thing.

> it takes so much effort for me to figure out what's going on

There's nothing going on. In python, there's an invisible stratum between the code you write and the code the computer executes. You don't usually see the substrate, and if you aren't paying real close attention, you might often forget that it is there. Lisp simply lacks that invisible layer.

If you can't get past the complex data structures bit, there are other languages that lack that stratum that use very simple data structures: Forth, for example.
> "The writing is on the wall" is an expression not meant to be taken literally.

I think that was satire.
As is so frequently the case, it's all a matter of definitions. While "a cyborg has unremovable implants in the body" certainly has a long pedigree, it's arguably less interesting in practice than "a cyborg is a person whose brain has adapted to using artificial intelligent tools as an extension of itself". (Note I don't mean "tools with AI" in the usual sense, just tools that themselves bring some intelligence to the party, however limited it may yet be.)

Neither is "right" or "wrong"; they're both just definitions.
> Well - this comment is quite interesting. The parent one looks like a one-line "meh" comment. I'm quite happy to downvote the original and upvote this one...

The original title is a stupid flame-bait and the funny thing is it's a dated argument. [That was my point, turning the flame back.]

> There's a big difference though: afaik there's no real library for ecmascript that would integrate it with the os. There's simply no way to use ecmascript standalone on a typical system.

What are you talking about? There have been people working with Spidermonkey for ages. Now there are so many V8-based projects it feels almost like a crazy fad. The hello world example of V8 is a shell showing trivial OS integration.

> Once someone produces a serious repl-like environment and a set of sys / os / file libraries - it can compete with python.

There are plenty of libraries in the making, perhaps the criticism could be there are too many. The thing is, since it's trivial to interface it with C and C++, at the moment most (?) of us are just exploiting the much, much larger library base of those languages.

Use whatever language you feel like. In a few years, remember this. I might be wrong, or Python might get its act together, we don't really know. But the writing...
Maybe not a new machine, but how hard is it to immediately wipe to a clean installation? "Windows" doesn't come with the "gigs worth of crap", the machines typically sold with Windows preloaded do.
If Javascript obtains a standard library as comprehensive as Python's, then yes, Python would be in a tough spot.

That is not currently the case.
George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose (1946)
Thanks, that's very helpful, sounds like we'll need to brush up on promotion. You sound rather well versed in this, thanks a bunch for taking the time to write such a thorough relpy.
I definitely, definitely, definitely can't recommend it enough. I really wish someone had said exactly that sentence to me ten years ago!
Good words;

As an serial entrepreneur I would say that startups are not but organisms, but organism that need bootstrapping (no not the ”business bootstrapping” – shoestring budget model – but… ) the original sense of the word, a system need to initial criticai mass and parameters to start working like an organism…

That is what the entrepreneur does, force the catch-22’s into a critical mass that starts growing like an organism.

Cheers,
NIcolai
Lisp macros make it possible to DSLs that make sense.

The syntax also helps with code generation.
Three years old.

When this was written, there was no such thing as Clojure [1], and a number of now-essential CL libraries were just getting started.

Providing no new information, this article just invites needless soapboxing.

[1] Clojure is fast, free, trendy, inherently parallel, and fits seamlessly into the Java ecosystem. It's just an anecdote, but I notice less complaining about parentheses, too.
I agree with the library argument and the GPL argument. And I agree that it is unfortunate these two languages (Lua and ECMAScript) do not have a complete standalone environment at this point.

I disagree with the downmod argument: the one-liner did not feel as a "meh" argument but a succinct reference to an easily (re)constructed (but more verbose) argument regarding ECMASCript versus Python similar to the original argument of Python versus Lisp. I think such succinct arguments are fine here (in fact, I have upmodded it to compensate for what I considered the undeserved negative score).
> I can do easy prototyping in python; safe, functional code in haskell; serious multiprocessing in erlang; fast tight-loops in c; nice oo in either python, c# or java, etc. etc. Why exactly should I spend more time with lisp?

Because I can do easy prototyping in lisp; safe, functional code in lisp; serious multiprocessing in lisp; fast tight-loops in c; nice oo in either lisp, lisp or lisp.

If you find a problem that needs a new paradigm, you either need a new language, or you need lisp.

> Python right now is basically lisp + community from what I can see.

Python is a great language. It supports a lot of the most useful and powerful paradigms that lispers use, so many lispers like it and use it.

But python is not "basically lisp", simply because it lacks the property I mentioned earlier.
You are correct. Still I think it offers useful historical perspective.
Well, there is always Clojure, as another commenter mentioned. Its community is different (friendly and helpful) and so is the language (vibrant, modern and evolving).
Well... I think I'll refer to what you wrote as lisp/perl6 syndrome :)

There is no lisp and there is no perl6. There is no ecmascript. There is some v8, rakudo, drscheme and others... It cannot compete with python, ruby and the rest. If you tell me that "ecmascript can be a standalone scripting tool", people will expect that you can run `ecmascript somefile` and make it just work. I heard about spidermonkey in mozilla and v8 in chrome of course - never heard that they can run standalone - it might be surprising to people involved in the project, but others?...

I meant the sys / os / file library, not some collection. If it's external to the language itself... sorry - but that's not good enough for "general purpose". If you say there are too many system libraries, then maybe you're right. C has stdlib, python has standard modules, ruby has standard modules, java has standard runtime environment - I see a trend here. If it's not obvious which ecmascript am I supposed to use and I cannot just download it and open a file with 1 line of code... sorry - it's not general purpose enough for most of my needs.

The community itself is kind of closed too. http://www.ecmascript.org/ doesn't lead anywhere interesting. Even the community page / wiki doesn't give me any interesting information. "This is a wiki for the ongoing specification work of Ecma TC39...." - thank you, but that's not what I'm looking for. We're "safe" from ecmascript for some time - at least until the people involved figure out how to introduce new people to the language.
True, but they never worked out a way to monetize what those companies were making -- e.g. mp3 playback software.
Don't you mean 2.0.1?
Someone Stole My Startup Idea Part 3: The Best Defense is a Good IP Strategy
Very useful! I suppose I was wrong to say the syntax is confusing, because lisp is so syntactically minimalistic. But when I look through lisp code, I can't determine anything with respect to scope. Take, for example, the code in pg's A Plan for Spam:
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

(let ((prod (apply #'* probs)))
(/ prod (+ prod (apply #'* (mapcar #'(lambda (x)
(- 1 x))
probs)))))

It took me several minutes to weed through this code. Part of that is because I didn't know what, say, apply did, and had to look it up. That's not an issue because you have to do that when learning any new language. But I had to carefully inspect the source bottom-up and break it apart because I couldn't tell what the arguments are on each function call. An IDE that does block highlighting would help a lot, but even then it feels overwhelming, because it only helps me inspect the block that my mouse cursor is currently on.

I guess what I'm saying is, I feel as if the syntactical constructs in other languages are necessary for me to be able to quickly parse a language.
I've had many - some good and some not so good (my current one is one of the best I've had).

The best ones typically trust me to do my job well and would back me up if I got into trouble. They also assumed that I screwed up and they needed to know about it, I would let them know first.

The bad ones...not so much.
I think it is useful.

But, like all other definitions it can look useless when stretched to technically apply to specific situations (like the laptop-on-back example).

For instance, my refrigerator is technically interactive by the definition of reactive interactivity: "A message is related to one immediately previous message", where my messages consist of opening and closing the door, and the refrigerator's messages consist of turning on or off the interior light.

Saying my refrigerator is interactive is technically correct, but useless and silly. Still, the definition for reactive interactivity is useful and popular (at least in computer science).
Nice application, unfortunately the icon sets IMHO need to be expanded! I also got reservations about hotlinking. Why not download? It will make your pages faster. Even better download and turn them into CSS sprites.
Ask HN: How do I get a lot of voters for my video contest entry?
I made a video commercial and entered a contest with a prize of $25,000. My video was selected for the top 10, out of 700 submissions. The winner is chosen by public voting on YouTube.

I'm facing contestants who are not playing by the rules; they are offering prizes in exchange for votes and that has left my video trailing far behind.

How can I reach a very wide audience in the next few days before the contest ends?

Here's what I've done so far:
- advertised on Facebook, Myspace, and every social site there is
- posted on Craigslist
- thought of donating part of the money to charity (and still considering it)
- tried to find a famous twitter-er to post for me
- ate a ton of pistachios for inspiration

To see the video, go to http://www.youtube.com/loftylizard.
Lisp already has too much historical perspective. That's one of the things people like about Clojure.
Don't Reinvent the Web Design Wheel
I tried to take it that way but since the meaning of the expression is godly written messages of upcoming doom it didn't make any sense. For satire to be funny it has to [follow], or at least mirror, in some way the original meaning. I picked he isn't familiar with the expression to the alternative, that he failed at being witty.
Diagrammr - create diagrams by writing sentences
Zoho is big enough for a startup.
Really. They should do a screencast along with a recording of the presenter speaking and they should be presented together. I've seen this down, it can't be that hard.
3-D Maps, Camera Phones Put ‘Reality’ in ‘Augmented Reality’
I'm not sure about level-headed, but definitely rational. Linus, for example, is a famous hot head, but he's most certainly pragmatic and rational in his approach.
If the market tanks again, we can rise against the shortsellers for destroying the economy. As for now, this is paranoia and is ignorant of how markets operate.

Further info: http://bit.ly/8M0Sj7 -- From The Big Picture (Ritholtz)
What do Philosophers Believe?
Tech4000: Invisible Speaker Technology - For REAL It's Invisible....
The thing with Emacs is that I feel like I am missing out on the full potential of developing in CL if I'm not using it. How true is that?
Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock, has been on a crusade against naked short sellers, blaming a group of hedge funds for driving down his company's stock. He's been all but called a nutjob in the financial press, which has led him to criticize certain journalists as being in bed with the short-sellers.

The most recent episode concerned Deep Capture, a blog that supports Byrne. They were able to obtain the Facebook friends lists for the hedge fund managers and journalists targeted by Byrne and were able to show a large number of cross-links between the journalists and fund managers, and in some cases their families. Deep Capture was careful to avoid making specific charges, but the basic argument is that it establishes the possibility of collusion between the fund managers and an unprofessionally close personal relationship with the journalists.
>It is a multi-billion dollar industry that employees many many people.

Which is exactly why RMS is viewed as extreme. If the world followed his philosophy, it would not be a "multi-billion dollar industry that employs many many people." It would be slightly larger than HAM radio, full of smart and well meaning hobbyists trying to scratch personal itches but not adding up to much of consequence (which pretty much describes the state of the movement today).

RMSs response has always been a vague bit of handwaving about creating more innovative business processes around the free software but which basically amount to every software company becoming a services company. I'm sorry, but I really don't need or want services for 99.995% of the software I use every day.
Which is fascinating but tells you first and foremost that the ISS is practically in our front garden (300 km up, that’s less than one thousandths the way to the moon).
Precisely, RMSs definition of "freedom" is one that's tightly controlled by his idealism and precludes numerous uses for software that a developer may actually want. In effect, his concept of "freedom" is like DPRK's definition of "Democratic".
Rejection augmented with Moore's Law? I am officially doomed.
By "safe" I meant "static type-safe" - sorry for the confusion. And no - can't do that in lisp.

What do you mean by serious multiprocessing in lisp? Does it have a distributed database included? Or a node registration and message passing framework? Or a process control framework? Can it run my 10000 processes? Does it have portable networking and thread implementation where nothing ever blocks... Or did you mean that I can have for example the sbcl threading http://www.sbcl.org/manual/Threading.html and can build all of that on my own? I could do the same in c... but I won't - erlang is better for that.

I'd also argue with "nice oo in lisp"... for some values of "nice" :) For big projects I want a code browser / ide. I want types in my OO. I want the code to be structured in a way that makes the methods belong to classes. I don't want old-style message passing OO (not saying that it's bad... it's just not what is used these days in big projects). I want new-style enterprise-level OO with interfaces and self-commenting code where you write what you want to do, because every single person in your 100-person team has to understand it without any comments when you're not around.

So everything that's left imho is easy prototyping. We can shoehorn every paradigm into any language - sure. But then you get something that can do everything and isn't good for anything in particular. If I learned lisp before python, I'd probably say the same thing about python... it's just not worth the additional attention, because they're both easy-prototyping languages, where you can promote the code into production when your first design is "good enough".
Orkut - meu orkut
If you mean "obvious" then you should use "obvious" and not "stupid" - - because they are different words with different meaning... For example, selling books online is an obvious idea, but not "stupid" and it isn't easy either. Selling books online and creating Amazon is far from a simple achievement and something you could do without intellectual power or really hard work.
Perhaps it's for Apple TV. The images in the patent obviously look more like a traditional OSX desktop, but the patent does mention other types of devices.
They probably patented the concept to prevent anyone else from doing this sacrilege.
I agree. I also think the annoying alarmism is caused by not identifying the changes in intellectual habits.

For instance, in the past the high school math geeks all knew how to use a slide rule, and mastering it was an intellectually satisfying task. Now that slide rules have been replaced with calculators, the geeks instead know how to solve quadratic and differential equations with a technical calculator, which is an intellectually satisfying task to master.

The problem is that some of the "old school" can't really see the new skills and knowledge. They see only the lack of the old skills, and thus determine that X has been dumbed down and the kids today don't learn anything hard anymore.
Yes, extremely likely. Hey gridspy guys, do you want to see if we can find some common ground between wv and gridspy? :) ping info@wattvision.com
This has important limitations on the liquidity of your "wealth". Let's say that you've created $1 quadrillion worth of meat. You want to convert this into alternative forms of wealth such as currency and medical supplies. However, is it at all likely that you will be able to convert all this wealth before it expires? Nope. And this is one of the most important distinctions between wealth and currency.

Yes, assuming you didn't try to hoarde the currency. You would sell it in large portions, buying what you needed with other things in the process. There is only a problem if you want to actually hold $1 quadrillion in currency, not at all if you want to hold $1 quadrillion in value.

The supply of currency is artificially limited by the government, while the supply of wealth is an arbitrary measure that people decide to assign their work and belongings.

Fiat currency must, by definition, be artificially limited by the government. It is created by governments and given value only because they assign it value (largely through accepting it in payment for taxes). Nonfiat currency such as gold bullion or else paper money issued back by gold is limited by the available supply of whatever commodity is being used. I believe, though I've never verified, that all currencies in major use today are fiat.
From the video it appears that the UI lags noticeably behind the user's actual motion. A friend who has demoed Natal mentioned it suffers from a minor lag as well.

This strikes me as a major problem when one is expecting the screen view to reflect their current position rather than their future position. For precision tasks it is akin to giving your mouse cursor acceleration and then training yourself to decelerate at the correct thresholds.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Common Lisp provides the ability to declare types of variables, and do type-checking on it. This allows you to make CL type-safe if you want to. It also allows a major speed up.

The real problem I see with Lisp is that it lacks a vibrant community like Ruby and Python has, and is in some cases quite ugly. (Why, why use names like 'progn'? Why not the shorter, clearer 'do'? etc.) Clojure addresses that, but I get the feeling that Clojure is just an addon to Java and that you must use the Java lib in order to use Clojure; the integration between them seems to be to be a bit ugly, if easy to use.

However, due to the size of the JVM base, Clojure is very good for production code - but strikes me as lacking the hack-hack quality you can get with CL. And only has one implementation. Aurgh! If only they didn't standardize CL. (Except, then it wouldn't exist at all right now, I bet.)