skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lisp (1) metaprogramming sucks. I've got a closure. Why can't I know over which variables? Why can't I know which function called foo (ie.: access the stack)? Why can't I know what the fields of my struct are? Even Python knows how to do that one.

I want my macro code, expanded here, to be aware of that other bit of macro code expanded in that other function.

Yeah, there are work-arounds. I've got my own defstruct, my own defun, my own everything. And this morning, I started writing a code walker. With anguish in my heart over a lifetime of debugging the monster that was born today.

Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp, indeed.

(1) That would be Common Lisp and what I know of Scheme. I'll be glad to know there's something better out there.
Is this the time that 3D sticks?
JSAwesome : JSON to HTML markup quickly
Ask YC: Large Hosted Backup Solutions?
With hard drives becoming ever cheaper, it looks more and more attractive to host backups in the clouds or at least off-site. The problem is I can't find a solution for my own needs:

* 200 gigs of data across 10 computers.

* Would prefer simple shell/cli access (scp/rsync/etc.)

Here are the major suggestions from browsing old discussions and why they don't work for me:

Amazon S3 - Would cost too much at $.15 per gig.

Mozy - No cli, costs too much at 5.95 per computer. Would also rather blur distinctions between computers.

Dreamhost - Pursuing those breaking TOS.

A solution such as Dreamhost would be perfect for me, but I can't find a shared host that allows using their services for backups/persistent storage. And Slicehost doesn't support expanding hard drive space (although I'm sure it would cost too much if they did.)

Am I stuck with my brick at home I currently use to do backups?
MySQL base64 encoding/decoding functions
Suns Jini+JavaSpaces was good a few years ago. Was sad to see them drop it though.

Can you talk more about the edge cases and problems/solutions in your next blogs?
US scientists design robots that climb walls
Amazon S3 - Would cost too much at $.15 per gig.

You're really not likely to do much better than this if you care about making sure that you don't lose data. Go around to hosting companies and price out servers with 1TB drives, and keep in mind that you need some sort of RAID to avoid losing data when a drive dies... you might get down to $0.10/GB/month, but I doubt you can get below that.

In the long run, any company which is selling you storage for less than what it costs them is either going to go bankrupt or throw up TOS roadblocks (like dreamhost). There really is no free lunch.
There should be feature to add friends so that it becomes more social
wget is left out simply for licensing reasons. curl is an MIT license, wget is GPL.

edit: I second guess this now that I think about it. bash is GPL...
> I've got my own defstruct, my own defun, my own everything.

So is Lisp, a programmable programming language.
Python is a little bit more practical than lisp. I'm learning scheme now, but I'll stick with python as my main language.
Crawling the Internet to track infectious disease outbreaks
Ask HN: what medical examinations would you get if money didn't matter?
Just curious if there are any medical screenings that would make sense to invest in?

For example I just did a blood test for food allergies for 150€. Would have been useful to do that years ago. What else could make a big difference to my/your future health?
If only I was. I'm an experienced developer and unix sysadmin and it still took two full-time days to get a working production-grade rails system installed on top of ubuntu.

I'm no rails guru, but I still thought that was an incredible amount of time to be spending installing and configuring things.
BTW -- DZone, which is mentioned in the article, is awesome.

Great little startup out of North Carolina. Terrific material -- topical, technical, and relevant. (No -- not a paid endorsement, just I like the site)

You guys should check it out.
A dangerous conflict of interest between Firefox and Google
when i was 15 or 16 i used to smoke a lot of pot. I got bored and started some more interesting hobbies, like parkour and football(real football, not that American parody of a sport). Anyway, if you are realy bored, go ahead and smoke, but if you are still bored, thats because you are a boring person, i realised im boring and started to unbore myself. Now im satisfied with my self and i don't realy need weed. If somebody offers me to go smoke i might agree, if i have nothing better to do at the moment, but for me it is esentialy the teenage anti=boredom drug. Because most teenagers are really bored a lot of them smoke.
Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment" offers an interesting exploration of this idea.
6 Optimization Tips for Ruby MRI
IT graduates always required a breadth of skills.

The mystery is why they now need to be told this, rather than showing up with them already.
But now it seemed like a privilege to consider
economic globalization and its relation to
British poetry

No comment.
Laloo prasad yadav in comedy mood
"Alana's Facebook profile says she graduated from high school in 2006, eleven years after I did, and at a point where I'd been married for three years."

Bah...my apologies. I parsed the above sentence incorrectly, and somehow read "eleven years after I did" as "eleven years after I was married".
You'r not weird. I did a search on Mr.Mihaldo as well. Please check out: www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/489065/detail.html
Apologies. Mr. Mihalko
I like fluxbuntu better than xubuntu. It's not an official canonical distro, but i have a pretty old pc with only 64 mb of ram and fluxbox runs far better than xfce on it. I think xubuntu is a waste of time anyway, but i can't i8magine using gnome either, im kubuntu till death(mine, or theirs) Viva KDE.

Anyway, a friend of mine can get me a cheap mac(prices are unbearable outside of the us because of shipping and resellers adding up to the price) so I'm going to get pretty close to OS X and i know that its good, but like that guy i might choose to dual boot and have the OS X just there if i need it.
Layer 4 vs Layer 7 DoS Attacks
What a poorly written article. The main gist of the guys argument is that since Mozilla doesn't include some Firefox ad block extensions (which he likes, and perceives to be popular), as default feature's in Firefox and those extensions might be frowned upon by Google, Mozilla must be in Google's back pocket.

His gauge of the ad blocker extension's popularity is that these extensions are "getting to be extremely popular. It has been featured in The New York Times,"

This article reads like a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Esp. when he goes on to contradict himself by pointing out that this add blocking software that he loves does a good job on banner ads but misses many of Google's text ads. If this really is the evil scheme he is hatching it out to be wouldn't Google want an extension included that easily blocked it competitors banner adds whilst letting it's text adverts sneak through?

Maybe next week he can write a follow up about how Firefox3 doesn't include the DOM Inspector by default and hypothesize that Google strong armed Mozilla into removing it so folk wouldn't be able to get at all those juicy Google HTML secrets.
Thank you, tptacek.

Sounds like you just snapped.

Not at all. This was planned. I won't beat it up, but like I've responded already, I just don't want to see any more about drugs, sex, religion, politics, profanity, and certainly not the stream of conciousness bloggings of liberal arts students. I can get all that at a thousand other places (but I don't). I just didn't think that the usual "not hacker news" would have much impact here.

I pushed the envelope and learned a little more about our community. Lots of people disagree with me on more than just a few issues. No surprise.

Sorry if I disappointed you. Hopefully I'll be able to earn respect in future discussions.

Now let's get back to hacker news.
Is it possible to get rid of all the metadata in Lynx, like image names etc?

I tried "lynx -verbose" but it still displays stuff like [INLINE] and [LINK].
Southwest's Seven Secrets for Success
I wrote to the Gmail team in 2004 to request this feature, as well as the possibility to set up a second layer password that would be required to perform some operations (like deleting the archives, changing the accound password, reading old archives, etc.). I don't want anobody to be able to download or delete all my mail since 2004, while like everyone else I have to log in sometimes on "unsafe" machines (cyber cafés, family computers and such). So this would be the best compromise.

I'm glad the first feature was implemented, but I'm still waiting for the second one so I can really keep all my mail on their server instead of downloading and encrypting it locally, then erasing it from Gmail because it's sensitive.
Moving the ‘C’ in MVC
A Multi-Threaded Python S3 Application
Apple just gave out my Apple ID password because someone asked
Ask HN: "stock market" mechanism for stuff?
I've just been wondering if trading used stuff in a way similar to the stock market could work.

What I mean is: sellers enter the lowest bid they would accept, buyers enter the highest bid they would be prepared to pay, resolve by some algorithm (I don't even know exactly how the resolution algorithm for the "real" stock market works).

The problem to be solved: buyers can instantly buy the things they want, or at least more instantly than they could on ebay. Sellers could still be more or less sure to get the appropriate market price.

Problem with implementation: other than stock, things are not always identical (wear and tear). Probably it would only work for things that are traded a lot (iPods, and stuff ...). Maybe the wear and tear thing could be resolved by providing set categories (new, almost new, worn...), and users could enter numbers for each category, or enter default penalties in their profile (if used offer = 75%*offer). It wouldn't be a precise match, but maybe the convenience would offset the losses incurred by the inexact matching.

What do you think?

I have been looking to buy a Wii on ebay for quite a while now, hoping to save about 40€ compared to buying it in the shop. Of course it is totally not worth the effort - sorting through the auctions is time consuming, and then you still can't be sure that you will actually win the auction (usually I don't). Ebay's system forces you to pay attention until the last minute of the auctions. Interesting auctions might not finish for a couple of days - so I wait, and in the end it amounts to nothing.
Standards-Compliant HTML Filtering in PHP
This article neglects to mention that Southwest also hedged it's bets by buying a bunch of oil back when the price was still relatively low so they are flying on 2 dollar a gallon gas so to speak.

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/11/29/southwests-oil-hedg...

hence the can undercut competitors prices until those contracts for cheap oil run out.
I would like to add Clojure to the languages discussed.

It add macros and metaprogramming and real functional programming to Java, while keeping the library support and deployability. So, as other programming languages borrow what is good about Lisp, Clojure is a Lisp that has borrowed much of what is good about Java.
In Ontario, it's not a crime anymore to possess small quantities. It's a minor offence punishable by a fine (about $50-$100, I think), and mostly the police don't even do that.
"Now, since you're not a PhD student, you like money, so this is bad." - great!
IPhone Apps: To Pay or Not to Pay?
I agree with pg.
This reminds me of the talk at Startup School about charging for things.
They mention it on Page2.
Pay someone
Little House on the Prairie :-P
So they do.
From Biopsychology by Pinel, J:

"... many people believe that marijuana causes mental illness, in particular, schizophrenia. Several correlational studies have shown that heavy marijuana users are more likely to be subsequently be [sic] diagnosed with schizophrenia... However, there is no way for correlational studies to rule out the possibility that the correlation between heavy marijuana use and schizophrenia occurs because people who are predisposed to develop schizophrenia also tend to use marijuana."
If that's a an accurate account of what happened, that really is just unacceptable.
Shit, I thought he was innocent.
Looks great. I have wanted to do something similar (not for HN...) for a while now, but never really got around to learning curses etc. Can you write a post here or on your blog explaining the steps involved or maybe give a link to the curses tutorial you used - or did you just know all this stuff already :).
It sure does (I've personally done it).
There is a start-up that is trying a market making model for buying and selling "stuff" at http://www.wigix.com/
plus a fair bit of HN discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191774
Incredible. Someone should probably get fired for this - not the poor sod who changed the account details, but probably the person in charge of customer service processes for .mac. That's just... appalling.

I also look forward to seeing Apple's response (or to hearing comments from any Appleistas on this site?).
Since we're referencing science articles, I have two:

"... researchers have concluded that neurocognitive changes that can be reasonably attributed to chronic cannabis use are subtle compared, for example, with those seen in neurological illness, and depend on prolonged and quite heavy levels of consumption." (Rogers and Robbins, 2001)

"Some cognitive deficits appear detectable at least 7 days after heavy cannabis use but appear reversible and related to recent cannabis exposure rather than irreversible and related to cumulative lifetime use." (Pope, et al., 2001)

Sources:
http://research.lycaeum.org/researchpdfs/2001_rogers_1.pdf
http://www.cannatrade.com/pdfdocuments/new/Neuropsychologica...
Well, what can I say. I was in the exact same situation about a year ago and it took me about 4 hours to set up a whole new Ubuntu server with Rails, nginx, Mongrel, MySQL, deployment via capistrano, Subversion, etc. That was the first time, nowadays I can install that stack in about 2 hours tops (manually).

Methinks you should upgrade your tool kit if it took you two days to do this.
Please Update Your Browser
"the maths of quantum mechanics quickly becomes to difficult "

Huh, what was that 'to difficult'.
I'll write a post about it in near future :)
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Cheat Sheets for Front-end Web Developers
The Web Standards Curriculum
Interludes like that should be part of everything. I want Steve Yegge to have a Scarlett Johansson mini rant in the middle of his blog posts.
You clearly know little about psychological research techniques if you don't know how they test rats for memory. Ever heard of the term "rat in a maze"?

And, what do you mean by "farce of fMRIs"?
The figure at which Facebook values itself internally doesn't matter. Determing Facebook's true value, based on its potential, is impossible.

PB on the potential of Facebook's data set:

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/04/facebook-knows-who-...
T. Boone Pickens goes Web 2.0, trying to solve energy crisis
A sleep study. Obstructive sleep apnea can cause serious problems with the heart.
See, there is this better-than-Lisp language in the sky, that's not made yet, call it sky-lang. I state that every sufficiently complicated Lisp program contains an ad-hoc, half-broken version of sky-lang. I don't want that. I want the real thing.

Every language is "programmable", that's what the Greenspun rule says. Just because Lisp does it better than the others doesn't mean that it's actually close to what can be done.
Disruptive Technologies Can Shrink Addressable Markets
Who doesn't know that. I don't think that has anything to do with having Aspergers.
Data Robotics Launches Second Generation Drobo
Mental illness does mean insanity or crazy.

It could be a deep bout of depression that caused him to bury his wife. Regardless of circumstances, it is not a reasonable thing to do.
1. A test for dyslexia. I had a friend who didn't know he had it until well into his teens.

2. Sleep Study. like hunterjrj

3. Figure out your blood type.

4. Full drug/food allergy testing.
Lovely essay, I have translated it into swedish: http://kyrkansframtid.se/2008/07/hur-man-ar-oense/
I can't imagine anyone acting upon that email. It made no sense whatsoever. Might as well as "password, please give me at marko.blah@yahoo.com"

That's ridiculous.
America: A Broadband Loser?
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Is this the kind of thing that is appropriate to flag as spam? In any case I just did so - sorry, Stubbs, your other submissions seem fine...
I'm not gonna lie, it would make me read the whole thing.
Bootstrapping a startup in India with zero money or less
The magical shrinking machine and the difficulty of dual representation
JQuery LiveSearch
i like it.

this could've been done hundreds of different ways (rss, lynx, etc, etc.) but i still like it.

python rocks.
Unrelated to posted item, but why does Opera tell me:

"The page you are trying to open has been reported as fraudulent. It will likely attempt to trick you into sharing personal or financial information. Opera Software strongly discourages visiting this page."

when I try to go to that site?
reality=market value/num_of_competitors;
potential=reality/hope;

bubble=d(value)/d(time);

if (potential <= bubble)
bubbleburst();
Like you, spending time with my daughters is the single most important thing to me in the world. It probably means I won't be rich, or change the world with my startup but I'm okay with that.
"In between the time a user requests a CAPTCHA and the time the CAPTCHA is scored, Asirra must keep state in order to recognize if the answer was correct, and do other accounting."

In this section, the paper only explores ways of keeping state on the server. But a better way to do this is to give the client an encrypted token -- as a cookie or as part of the form action URL -- identifying the CAPTCHA they were sent. Then the server itself can be stateless.
Still?

And yet so few Columbia jokes.
Yahoo in favor of open instant messaging standard XMPP
Why you shouldn't start a tech company in Silicon Valley
> Pools of brainpower directed towards any task imply centralized planning.

Not really... after all, isn't this what "collective intelligence" or "wisdom of the crowd" is all about? People self organizing around their personal interests and thus contributing towards a greater goal?
Being a web designer/developer I need to see the web as my customers do, with means handy plugins like AdBlock are useless to me.

The idea that any company would include ad blocking tech in their web browser is insane. The web is built on advertising... talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
Legitimizing Comet with HTML 5 WebSocket
Kudos to Apple Support - they responded to that grammatical marvel of an email so fast!

The poor guy probably will probably need to spend weeks undoing their mess... Can't wait for Apple's response.
Messages placed along the right side of the screen appear off the edge of the page and therefore create a scroll bar at the bottom of the screen.
actually i would like an extension that only blocked large, obnoxious ads while leaving alone google-like ads.
Startup Idea: a high-quality, inexpensive university
It's pretty nice to be able to do this from stored procedures, but from a performance point of view, wouldn't it make more sense to write it in a couple of lines of C? MySQL does support pluggable functions right?
about 1.5 hours north of Pittsburgh

Where? I went to Allegheny College in Meadville.

Contact me off-line or add your email to the "about" box in your profile. Looking forward to talking to you, semigeek.
Digg's Jay Adelson, media moguls descend on Sun Valley
I do! How about Friday night 7/18 or Saturday night 7/19?
Tell Sen. Grassley to keep his eyes off your online activities
Help stop this legislation! Hidden deep in the Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision inserted by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America's small businesses. There is a good chance that we can still stop this, but not without everyone's help.
I wasn't really paying attention. Did you guys know this (from wiki):

In 1999, while working in Russia, Hans Reiser selected from a mail-order bride catalogue[8], and subsequently married, Nina Sharanova (Нина Шаранова), a Russian-born and trained obstetrician and gynecologist[9]

In Russia, there are trained physicians who sign up to be mail-order brides. Can you believe that? I figured they were all crack whores or scammers.
Use Brutus to Audit a Box Running Telnet
Microsoft Crosses The Line
I know nothing at all about the "bug" being discussed, but it seems to me that the attitude displayed by the initial two commenters is poor form. I'm not sure what the guy from RedHat has against the guy from SuSE, but it seems like a private phone call could have cleared it all up.

When you work for a company that maintains open source, makes money from open source, and has public discussions about issues with the code, I think you're held to a slightly higher standard. You ought not act like that when your bug tracker is public.
i agree with this. if the OP thinks S3 is too expensive, you probably need a reality check. or you could continue to host your own stuff.
I was hoping this could be used for marking up return values to JSON callbacks that are so common in JS apis.
Ask HN: Formatting Documentation
http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Has the formatting documentation moved to another page? I had this bookmarked but it appears to be empty at the moment.
The decision to apply schedule pressure to a project
A system call is a pair of context switches: swap the registers, swap the stack, change the TLB mappings, on some architectures flush the cache. Even the fastest system calls (Linux on amd64) take a thousand clock cycles or more.
Like thwarted said, 3D desktop was doing this on Linux back around 2002, before OS X had multiple local users.. You'd zoom out, the cube sat in the middle of the screen, about 75% of your monitor, rotate, then zoom back in. It was a little flickery, but damn cool, and worked on the KDE setup I had at the time.
i would argue that ebay's system does NOT force you to pay attention until the last minute.

if you want an item, enter in the maximum amount you're willing to pay. it'll re-bid by proxy until you win the item or someone is willing to pay more than you. if you were willing to pay even more beyond what you entered, you should've put in a higher proxy bid.
I think we're quibbling about terminology. I'm not sure of the difference between a "protection domain crossing" (not a common term, AFAIK) and a "context switch" (pervasive jargon). You seem to be indicating that the latter always involves a separate process, which of course is more expensive (on most architectures) due to cache issues. I'm using the term to mean a switch between two execution domains.
Its a trade off: increased spatial awareness versus a few fractions of a second. Compare most office suites, which now smoothly show when new rows or columns are added to a spreadsheet for the same reason - animation shows you what's happening, and where its happening.

It's a lot easier for people to get the concept that they have another desktop around the corner, than that they have another desktop on an abtract flat plane.
Food Fight
Wow, this is the first arguably "mean" thing I've seen you post, edw519... it seems to have really struck a nerve with you.