skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the real point here—the one that half the article was spent in making—is that Lisp (the grammar that uses lots of parentheses) isn't the same as Lisp (the concept).

Lisp (the concept) isn't a language at all, as far as we use the term to describe something that humans can use to communicate information serially. Lisp is actually a model for representing a transformation of an AST as an AST—no more, and no less. To communicate a Lisp transformation model, we must encode it as a stream of characters—and that stream, if we don't do anything to make it readable, becomes the "degenerate case" of programming languages: pure S-expression syntax.

However, there's no need for Lisp and S-expressions to go hand-in-hand. For decades we've known that programming languages have UX considerations every bit as important as those of the programs made with them. Lisp precedes that realization, but even when Lisp was first invented, S-expressions were never intended to be its primary encoding (search "M-expressions".) It just turned out that Lisp was such a powerful model that it was immediately put to use before a nicer syntax could be wrapped around it. (Also, its core user-base were mathematicians, who already had the isomorphic Lambda-calculus notation to think in terms of, so the learning curve wasn't evident to them.)

The point I'm getting at, here, is that any programming language syntax can have Lisp-transformation-model semantics. As long as `read` and `eval` are separate functions of your compiler+runtime, and the AST that normally travels between the two can be manipulated by your own code, you have a Lisp.

That's what people mean when they say that "the parentheses don't matter."
I use this to map it to ⌘⇧Q

defaults write com.google.Chrome NSUserKeyEquivalents '{"Quit Google Chrome"="@$Q";}'
I've fought Python's "semantic" indentation at least as much as I've fought ; : => , ( ) { } [ ] _ ' " $ < > | \ \\ \\\\ / ... et al.
Secrets of the Little Blue Box: The Best Account of Telephone Hackers (1971)
Agreed. We do colocation for about 50 servers. Up front costs higher, long term costs MUCH lower - but man can it be a pain in the ass sometimes when there's a problem. :)
Workplaces and workspaces are the subject of patterns at each scale. Windows and light are also themes.

Patterns are listed here: http://www.patternlanguage.com/leveltwo/patternsframegreen.h...

The book is excellent, I can't vouch for membership on the website.

The biggest issue with computer monitors and light is of course, glare.
BJ's wasn't there way back in 2000, either, IIRC -- it was the Peppermill.
You only use your session for your work? Or are you only talking about the config on your work computer?
Rings a bell, I think I have it bookmarked at home, I'll see if I can find it.
Thanks! We've got plenty more planned for hipmunk - as many in this thread point out, there's a lot more than flight search that needs agony removed.
Me too, ugh. I also can't tell you how many times I've hit M-d thinking I'd delete a word and then keep typing, and end up writing all over the address bar instead.
Wow, if you code half as well as you can over-generalize, you must be a JavaScript god. But seriously, frameworks and smaller code libraries should be used when do something useful. If you don't find a framework useful, don't use it. And if you find that you're copying code from project to project, make your own library. This is all pretty simple stuff, I guess you just wanted an excuse to flex your amazing JavaScript ninja muscles on the internets.

Your point about framework docs being better than JS docs is a little puzzling. I think the folks at Mozilla.org would take issue. Plus, there is at least one very excellent JS book ("JavaScript: The Good Part", Crockford) out there to get people started, and most of the silly "Learn JavaScript in 24hours" type books aren't on any JS dev's bookshelf that I've seen (except as a joke).

Relax and go back to coding. :)
I would have bought it just for linode but: New or inactive customers only. unused accounts will expire on December 31, 2010. Users agree to abide by the Terms of Service.
Oh how I wish. Actually, in the mobile space, this is happening. Slowly. Painfully at times, but it's not exactly too far down the horizon (bliss).
Yes, this matches what I have heard from several of my friends who work there. The rosy picture painted in the article doesn't mention the extreme overwork that Apple employees have to go through, although most employees appear to be okay with that.

Having said that, it's no coincidence that Apple never made it even in the top 100 of US companies to work for, they really don't treat their employees very well from an objective standpoint and any former employee who's had a chance to leave and take a step back can easily see that.

The distortion field obviously applies to Apple employees as well.
Free games - Free online flash games at go2games.org
Play online free games at go2games.org
I found it particularly interesting that Max created an incubator primarily to initiate an environment of creativity.

How do you come up with the best ideas possible? Easy! Just setup an atmosphere where great ideas are pooled together, then pick the best ones.
Their DNS used to be great, if simple. You could put in a record for your new server and by the time you'd logged in, the record was live.

Now, it's gotten to the point where their DNS updates so slowly that I just re-use old subdomains instead of creating new ones, just so that I can get my project tested today rather than tomorrow.

I'm working on moving everything over to Amazon; more flexibility. I like Rackspace Cloud, but they're falling behind and they either don't know, don't care, or can't catch up.
http://lastpass.com is storing the information on their servers, thus the availability.

And I've to agree here, it's a must use product.
I get what is being said here, and I somewhat agree with it. Telling people something bad happens doesn't actually do anything to stop a bad thing from happening. And yes, having everyone use HTTPS all the time would be a better way to combat firesheep. But the fact is that not everyone is going to do this unless it becomes the out-of-the-box standard for web browsers.

However, blacksheep is not useless as the author suggests. If I am in a Starbucks using wifi, I might be using HTTPS for everything. I also might be using blacksheep. In that case, when alerted that a firesheep user is around, I might make use of the DoS tactics found here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884176. This allows me to protect other less tech savvy users from firesheep evil-doers, and more importantly, screw with people who are screwing with people.
kind of annoyed me there was no explanation.

- 2nd UL list is opacity:0
- :target psuedoclass applies to element whose id is in the url
- targeted element has opacity:1
Facebook cannibalizing Google search for younger demographic
I'd say you're right. VB only came out in 1991. Then again, Google wasn't around back then either - I'm unclear how they came up with the stats for 1985.
As a former Army Soldier, it was very cool to read the piece about the military. Props to Apple for taking a strong stand.
Look up the contact's name on the website. Find out if they are actually a General Partner (can make investments.) A lot of the time the people that reach out are analysts, who likely have no investing power.
5) Count perforations in ceiling tiles in the room where they detain you for "additional screening"

6) Miss flight and lose non-refundable airfare
In a lot of systems, you can change the password without knowing the old one as long as you're logged in. Others, you can change the email address, only confirm on the new email address, and then get a password reset.

So if you really cover all of your bases, and require confirmation at every step, then the least they can do is access your data and generally impersonate you until you log out of that session (which no one does) or the session times out (which it won't, because you're still logged in as them).

It's pretty much the same.
I don't see how it isn't sustainable if you are loving it? Most people would love a job where they don't need to stay, but want to stay.
That's not true universally, though local laws can choose to disallow cameras at security stations.
Rage for iPhone
Good thing we're fixing this!
Hacker unshackles Kinect from Xbox
Open Source Ecology: The Global Village Construction Set
Thanks Bro.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax_highlighting#History_and...
Care to get into just a wee bit more detail, Alexis? :)
Wow, that sounds like me. 32.
Maybe im to inexperienced with classic lisps, or maybe im just spoiled by clojure, but i have no idea what cadadr means, is it the rest of the first, of the rest of the first, or the other way around?
I also have a scroll wheel, but that scroll wheel is clickable
Worth it just to get six months of SendGrid Silver (i.e. dedicated IP address for sending emails) for, umm, about half the price of buying one month normally.

Given that "sign up for SendGrid" was on my todo list for tomorrow, well, that worked out great.
And if you use the Recently Closed Tabs feature on the New Tab page, you can reopen sets of tabs that were all closed at once.
Am I the only one who wants the firehose and the API to come back? As long as it can be done without taking the servers down and killing HN, that is :-)
Making CI easier to do than not to with Hudson CI and Vagrant
For the millionth time: Fortune's "Top 100 Employers" list is not an objective ranking of every employer in the US. It relies primarily on unverified employer-provided data. Many companies, like Apple, realize that it's mostly a PR game and don't bother to participate.

My experience at Apple was that working ridiculous amounts of overtime was not at all required. Most of my coworkers didn't. On the other hand, generally you wouldn't get told NOT to work a lot if you wanted to, and that's the true weakness of the company culture. If you're a workaholic, you can definitely burn yourself out. If you're not a workaholic, you'll do just fine.
Tabs: ⇧⌘T

Apps: double tap

Windows: Good idea! If only there was an OS that treated those as vital UI components...
For serious data analysis and CSV manipulation work in Python another library to check out is Tabular:

http://www.parsemydata.com/tabular/

It's built on top of Numpy so it's very fast and plays well with the rest of the Numpy/Scipy ecosystem. I've been using it daily for the last couple of weeks on relatively large data sets (>300MB) and have been very pleased with how elegantly and efficiently it handles things like pivot, join and aggregation.
I guess it depends how private the data needs to be. My view is that for stuff that's even vaguely sensitive, it would be nuts not to use TLS/SSL for data in motion. But you also need to think about whether it's acceptable for the data to reside with whoever will be on the receiving end.

At my day job, the intranet is hosted internally on servers within the premises, but this is more for historical reasons than security concerns. There are a number of other file servers etc. that are kept in-house for historical reasons and because they contain sensitive information. satellite offices are connected to the main office by a VPN.

Our public websites are hosted external to the office network on a VPS. I tend to be a little obsessive about making sure that all possibly sensitive traffic that goes between our local network and our VPS is encrypted (admin interface over https, SSH sessions, FTPS etc.) and because there's really nothing on the public websites that shouldn't be public anyway, I'm happy to trust the hosting provider with that data.

We're thinking of giving Yammer a go for adding to internal communications and I will of course be recommending that we use TLS/SSL with Yammer should the idea go ahead. There's so many of these hosted services these days, it would seem like shame to dismiss them all just because they're hosted and you need to travel across the Internet to get to them. I prefer to look at things on more of a case by case basis and weigh the pros and cons.

To oversimplify a complex issue: encrypt data in motion across untrusted networks, make sure you trust where the data is ending up (whether you're encrypting it at rest as well or not). Or host it internally and make sure your own network is secure and reliable.

So in my experience from the places I've worked, I guess you could say it's usually a little from column A and a little from column B. Larger organisations seem to be warming to the idea of taking advantage of the cloud more and more these days when previously they would more likely opt to host stuff in-house.
Congratulations. The realtime collaboration is pretty slick. For us it's less of a collaborative process and more I make the stuff and then send it for review. Im looking forward to what myBalsamiq.com will offer.

The pain points in wireframing software are:

* organizing projects / groups of similar wireframes

* keeping track of versions

* allowing anyone on your team to get access to / update the latest file.
I've posted this here before, I'll post it again:

http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/1397/lispnd7.png

In practice, I don't find it has many more parens or angle-brackets than, say, C++ or Java. Considering (), {}, and <> in those two languages, I'd bet Lisp wins.
I hear lots of awesome things about Linode, however they are actually hosted by Rackspace so with Rackspace's known reliability issues... maybe an issue.

Another service to consider is VPS.net. We have 6 virtual servers with them. They are cheap and perform well, their control panel is great and they have tons of great pre-configured OS installs. However downtime can sometimes be an issue. Usually it's not major, e.g. a server will just be unavailable for say 30 seconds or maybe a few minutes, but this happens probably an average of once or twice a month for each of our servers so it can get annoying. Like I said though the outages are usually minor. There's only been one that I remember that was major, and lasted several hours. We've been using VPS.net for about 8 months and overall are very happy with them. Not sure I'd recommend them for your setup but we only use them for a custom built CDN and for that it works very well.
6 months of SendGrid Silver, and some credits on Twilio is totally awesome if you are not using these services yet, because you should be.
Newest This American Life is all about Toxie, NPR's toxic asset
NetNewsWire for Mac 3.2.8
Math helps. I'm finding myself saying that more and more lately.
"The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings."

I'm going with flawed methodology.
I don't get it. I've read MozDev's Re-Introduction to Javascript and the coffeescript looks just as clean.
I can't give any benchmarks, but I was doing a compile (openssh) the other day, and I noticed something peculiar.

I started the ./configure, and it blasted through 40 or 50 checks almost instantly, then stopped. Suddenly, it started taking about 3-5 seconds for each check (i.e. 'check for blarg in -lfoo'). For the rest of the compile, it was like I'd gone back in time ten years; incredibly slow. Checking top, it showed the %steal at 99.5-100% - the host system was scheduling almost no CPU at all to my machine.

Playing around, I found that you basically get a specific allotment of CPU cycles per a certain amount of time, and once you run out you don't get any more for a while (other than the bare minimum to keep the server working). This makes it great for 'bursty' load cases, but after you burst burst, they cut you off, so it's terrible if you suddenly get a sustained burst of traffic.

It's so bad that I spun up a clone of the machine, compiled SSH there, and then spun it down afterwards, which turned out to take easily half the time as compiling it on the micro instance itself.

So: great for personal blogs; terrible for suddenly getting traffic to your personal blogs.
if you've got an idea now and are a hacker, there's no excuse not to try with this kind of deal.
Wow, that is an amazing deal. I'm tempted to get it without a good reason to.
Looks like the recommended way (according to the tutorial) is to use RPy. I imagine there is some support for pyplot, too, given the Numpy/Scipy integration.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700043

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713743

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1607964
I can't help you with the forgotten user name, but in contrast to all these kids with their cloud-this and server-that, I'll pass along what Stan Isaacs (a true gray beard) taught me -- and he got it from his wife:

break your password into two hands' worth of typing, the first part on one hand is the same string of gibberish at all locations, the second hand adds a location-specific suffix of shorter gibberish.

If you pick a simple algorithm for going from location to suffix, you only have one hard-to-divine string to memorize -- and that's the hand you practice all the time.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go shoo some kids off the lawn...
Rate My Startup: Pagebuild
A software product is a copy of runnable software installed on a computer. The vast, vast majority of such products are built the same way cars will be built in 2055: entirely automatically, with automatic testing and verification, with no human intervention whatsoever.

It's generally only when we are designing a new piece of software that has to handle a new set of requirements that we start building things by hand; but even then, we almost always use assemblies and sub-assemblies called "libraries" to get the bulk of the design. Then we run the design through a compiler and linker, which automatically manufactures a runnable copy of the software, and then we test it.

Mathematics builds new theorems the same way we build new software and the same way General Motors builds new car blueprints. This is likely to change somewhat as car manufacturing becomes more similar to writing software.
Hello HNers,

I've been wanting to do this post for some time. This project has taken a significant portion of my recent life and I'm keen to know what you think.

Pagebuild is a service we've recently launched. It allows you to instantly provision and create a website without knowledge of HTML or programming of any kind.

We provide a number of stock themes. You can also upload themes using our very basic templating system if you know some HTML and CSS. A service also exists where we will design a custom theme for use with the site.

http://www.pagebuild.net

Please check out our demo site and let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Ben
The TSA screening area is not under local jurisdiction.
At a previous company, we were using Rackspace Cloud for one of our sites, and we decided to double the size of the server as we were under a lot of load and needed some capacity fast.

Each step completed (the new server was spun up, the old server was backed up, etc.). Then it said it was going to take the server offline to do the actual clone of the disk from one to another. Then it took us to a screen saying 'Did everything complete properly? Yes/No', saying that clicking 'no' would just boot the old server back up again.

We waited for an hour, then two, then three, and the server still hadn't come back online. I didn't want to click 'no' in case it was something simple, so I called their support. After explaining what had happened to the guy, he told me to click 'Yes', which I did. Suddenly, the new server booted up and came back online. Support told me that when you get to that screen, you just hit 'Yes' and then your server boots up.

I couldn't help but think this was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. They take your server offline, tell you it's going to be back 'any minute now', and when it is, you tell them if it worked properly or not. In reality, your server stays offline until you say 'Yeah, everything's working great', at which point they bring it back online.

I still recommend them to people who need basic services, such as 'I need a dedicated server for my blog'. Amazon is flexible, but also very complicated for semi-pro users to deal with.
Ask HN: When your production webapp breaks, what do you do?
When you don't know how to fix it, what do you do?

For those that are not YC alum, what are the options?

Just sit on Stack Overflow until someone can help you ? Or check out the other forums and IRC chans?

Is there not some other service/way you can get help when you need it?
I'm an US ex-pat living and working in a developing country, and I see this situation all the time. For the first couple years, I would lose my mind when it happened. Then I realized that it's not an intelligence or skill thing; it's a cultural and communication thing.

- A friend of mine here once hired a guy to paint his ceiling. The painter did a good job on the ceiling, but didn't put down tarps and got paint everywhere on the walls and floor. My friend was understandably angry, but the painter couldn't understand what the problem was. From the painter's point of view, my friend didn't specify that the floor and walls not get paint on them.

- I hired a crew to build an addition to our office. After they put in the floor, I realized that it was lumpy and misshapen. When I confronted them about it, they didn't consider it a problem. I didn't say the floor needed to be flat.

- I asked a smart, college-educated colleague to fix one of our broken clocks. She ended up just switching the clock with one of the working clocks. I had to go back and specify that all clocks need to work.

If you're going to outsource, you absolutely need someone who can bridge this gap. What feels half-ass and unacceptable under any circumstances to you and me, could just be normal and expected for a lot of people. And similarly, what feels normal and acceptable to us can feel obnoxiously strict and overbearing for others.

The trick is to understand that for any given situation, the meaning of "acceptable" varies from culture to culture. And it has nothing to do with skill or intelligence.
For things like cadadr, I just chop off the "c" and "r", and use the middle part to figure out the sequence of car and cdr calls. (cADADr x) = (cAr (cDr (cAr (cDr x)))), which would be (first (rest (first (rest x)))) in Clojure.
We ran some benchmarks for our workload on Micros here, but compared them to other EC2 offerings, not Rackspace...

http://blog.documentcloud.org/blog/2010/09/evaluating-amazon...
Huh? I never had that problem and do actually like it that way. Train yourself to use the middle finger for "W" and the ring finger for pressing "Q" and the problem vanishes. It will still happen to you perhaps once per month, but I can live with that.
Funny you should mention that. I use Excel+Python extensively and have developed my own plugin for embedding Python in Excel. Basically it lets me easily write worksheet functions using Python, and also with some multiprocessing magic lets me calculate them in parallel (which VBA doesn't let you do).

I was debating whether I should clean it up enough to share it (or maybe even sell it!). Seems like there's some interest in this, so maybe I will.
Yeah, I was in the midst of playing with Gosu and thought about playing with it to get HN posts from the API. Sadly it went down.
These are all criticisms of bad implementations of lightboxes. Used correctly, they can be quite useful. The trick is to realize that you're interrupting whatever other workflow the user is considering on this site.

For example, a lightbox that fades when you scroll the page might be less invasive.
If TSA uses the same machines as the Department of State uses at embassies then I can speak from experience that the pictures are stored by default.