skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, Common Lisp has both sets of operators; it has car, cdr and all the combinations of c(a|d)+r you can handle, it also has the ordinal number words, first, second .. tenth, and rest.

The difference is that first, rest et al. are used when the data being handled are proper lists. A list of items terminated by nil.

Car, cdr and others can be used with lists as well, but they're more primitive operations that mean cons cells; a pair data structure that has two parts. You can view a proper list as "a primitive pair data structure that has the first item of the list as its first cell, and has its second items a pointer to rest of the list" .. and construct the rest inductively.

You can't use first and rest to operate on associative lists, graph structures cyclical or otherwise and a host of other data structures.

Some programmers decide to make their intent clear when operating on proper lists, while others prefer to stick to car and cdr out of habit, nostalgia, not-knowing better, street cred, or as a cheap way to advance pointers with one compact operation.

CAR and CDR are less relevant now that people use CLOS, CL's Object System, and to a lesser extent structures. Defstruct gives you the accessor FREE, it constructs the accessor functions as classname-slotname for the reader and (setf classname-slotname) for the update/write function. With CLOS you can choose the name for it with an initialization argument (:initarg :accessor, :reader, or :writer)

Please update your Common Lisp prejudice check-list.
Actually countries disappear all the time - they just don't usually sink into the ocean.

For example Czechoslovakia and Zaire have ceased to exist as countries, and correspondingly the .cs and .zr TLDs have been removed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain
(Not speaking officially, obviously. I had nothing to do with Haystack anyway).

They're images. So you flip a bit every once in a great while; as long as the bit isn't part of image metadata, no human user will notice. The next time they load the image, (at least, assuming it's been long enough for it to get evicted from the CDN) they see the right data.
Park Names - Information on Domain Parking and Website Monetization.
Park Names presents in-depth reviews of domain parking companies. Our website will help you find the best places to park your domain names. Park Names evaluates the best opportunities and provides valuable free information on domain parking and website monetization. Complete list of over 55+ places to get paid for your domain traffic.
"So, which church is distributing condoms to Africans? Oh, that's right, none of them."

I don't think most religious people go on missions in Africa... in fact it's probably the fundamentalist minority that would do that kind of thing.
Ask HN: Startup on the side
A friend and I have been thinking about starting a company that will [insert awesome pitch here]. Problem is: I work for a megacorp (Moogle for the sake of argument (no, it's not Square Enix)). When I started I signed one of those nasty documents that gives them the rights to anything I produce that's related to their business. My question is how far should I go in my planning while still working? Should I just go ahead with my idea, build it, and deal with ownership issues later? Or should I refrain from putting anything at all in writing about my idea and keep my business plan in my head as long as I'm employed?
No.
Youre being suckered to try and enter into negotiations.
If you counter offer to a point it is cheaper for them to put a lawyer into the mix, you will face accusations of trying to profit - and by all precedent lose the lot.
Cut and run is the only advise that will get you out with more money in your pocket than you have today.
Why do you think my username is nopassrecover.
I think the haystack folks made the right decision, here. A rule of thumb is that it takes 3-5 years for a novel on-disk format to gel. There are always random bugs that rely on particular sequences of allocations/deallocations, races, etc. Using an off-the-shelf filesystem that allocates the blocks and then stays out of the application's way, like XFS, probably saved these guys at least one year of screwing around.
Ok so - morality aside - is $4200 a month in revenue worth $125k?
Sir,

Attached is my official Smug Lisp Weenie card. I have no further use for it. Please pass it on to someone who is worthier than I am.

Regards.
According to The Curve of Binding Energy, nuclear power was going to be subsidized by the sale of plutonium to the AEC. At about a megabuck per kilogram of plu, the sale of plu would pay for the cost of constructing and operating a nuclear power plant, and that lead to the AEC's Chairman claiming that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter" because it would be a by-product of the nuclear fuel cycle. At the end of 2005, there were 1700 tons of privately owned plutonium in the US (the US military has about 100 tons of plu: about 2/3 are in actual weapons).

http://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodore...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7006056.stm

If his claim is true, then it wasn't tree-huggers who killed off the nuclear power industry, nor Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome, it was cold economics.
Move the domain, and diversify to other data sources, but in doing so try to keep your user base.

And, if you're really good, try to do it in such a way as to maintain friendly relations with zillow. If that's possible. It would be tricky. Stalling tactics are your friend, I would guess.

My gut feel would be, do not try to make money from a sale to them, if their (TM) name is on your domain. Give them the domain free, AFTER you get your users moved away. Take it down now and start redirecting people asap, because they sure aren't going to do you the courtesy of doing that, even if you're on good terms.

But... I'm just some random guy on HN. My advice is worth every penny you paid for it.
One more thought: it's a trap. Do not take money from them. They can then prove that you are making money from their (TM) name.
I just took a look at Tuvalu on Google Earth and according to Google Earth, it's already under water (you have to look at it from the 3d perspective).
I was just looking at your app earlier today as I was browsing AppEngine apps. Lots of talk about the domain name and ICAAN, but there is no way they can take izillow.appspot.com and Google is not likely to roll over easily.

Also, your app proved the business case for their iPhone app. I think that makes the lowball offer even more offensive. I like #zillowfail
$250 is absolutely a game changer in another sense, though. They can use his acceptance of payment to show that he is (arguably) making money off of their trademark.
I disagree. I think they're intentionally lowballing the OP order to abuse the AntiCybersquatting act to screw them into the ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticybersquatting_Consumer_Pro...
A beautiful desktop does not directly make your more productive, having a nice workspace does have a impact.

Another source for high resolution wallpaper goodness.
http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/downloads/date/any/?...
What do you think would be the take-away if you already felt "connectedness and perfection behind our apparent reality", because of one of those other things?
I somehow feel this wouldn't work in negotiations especially when the other side is not playing fair. When they offered as low as $250 it tells they are playing it mean. All this nice idealistic talk is not going to move a blade.

I would suggest don't work on their sympathy or expect them to value your efforts. They will not. Be ready to lose the meagre amount and play it hard. If you lose, make sure it costs something for them to fix their bargain of $250.
Since they where in contact with the app author and asked him to make a remedy to the issue (tagging it with 'unofficial version') they have effectively defended the trademark. Defense of trademark doesn't mean you have to prevent others from using it, but rather that you have to show that you are taking steps to control it to prevent it from running into the general venacular.

Also to lose the trademark your going to have to show that it's become a common synonym for a particular category (think Kleenex instead of tissue). Zillow is a LONG ways from that.
I got mine on ebay.
Bingo.

Negotiating shows bad faith and the would-be purchaser gets the domain for free, almost instantly.

Negotiation is the absolute worst possible thing to do in a situation like this.
Web System to Handle Membership-Site Adjustable Recurring Billing 
Hi,

I'm planning on building a drupal-based webapp with customizable monthly billing plans. In short, there will be something like 4 main packages with different amounts of allowed users, storage space, additional features, etc - all costing different amounts. I also intend on including upgrades and downgrades for each plan to offer additional flexibility - which varies the price.

Problem is, the two leading ecommerce solutions for drupal are Ubercart, and e-Commerce - both which completely suck (at least for this scenario). Being that the main app will be drupal-based, I intended on hosting subdomain copies of it for each client. If that is the case, I can have my main site running something else. So my question is, what sort of (hopefully open-source) systems are out there that can handle and manage this type of billing system (the type of system that the other half a million companies are using, etc).

Thanks
An OpenBSD box and babysit plenty of Solaris boxen in a DMZ sandbox.
In practice the sticking point tends to be code. Someone at some point will ask you whether any of your code was written while at your prev employer, and you have to be able to say no. No one seems to ask about ideas, because that's so much vaguer.

If you get an explicit carve-out for your side project, you're ok. Companies vary about those. Google seems to be very accommodating, more suitish companies less so.
This is a very dear topic to me. I have dealt with chronic pain for the last 5 years. While not a disability in the "Americans with Disabilities Act" sense, it is something that has impeded me. I've tried using reliefinsite.com, which I found so clunky that I am now trying to get a web-service off the ground that would compete with it.
I don't know what Popper or Burke have said about starting from scratch vs. evolving the existing, (I'd be interested in reading it if you've got a reference) but the French revolutionaries seem to be a bad comparison. The whole reason for sea steading is that libertarians aren't willing set up fortifications and overthrow the government of New Hampshire. Non-violence is a key philosophical difference.

What Thiel is saying is that the chance evolving the current system into something even vaguely libertarian falls somewhere between extremely unlikely and absolutely impossible at this point. Maybe there's room for arguing that evolving the government is possible, but the natural course is growth. There are few (I can't think of any) historical examples of government moving in the other direction.

If evolving the current system is ruled out, then considering something as revolutionary as starting from scratch like the seasteaders, while maybe less than optimal, doesn't seem so far-fetched either philosophically or morally.
2.5x revenue isn't bad, if that's how the math actually works out.
Clojure for non-Lisp programmers
With New Software, Iranians and Others Outwit Net Censors
totally agree.

Goodrich could have done better by doing a 'cc' instead of a 'Bcc'. If it concerns MYB they would have wrote back immediately to TC & Goodrich.

It is really bad for Goodrich now on people would restrain from sending any serious emails to him. He has closed one mode of communication for contacting him/his business.

Also MYB should have just said something like 'lets talk'. Its bad to start a deal with final numbers on an email without even knowing the intent from the other side.
Tell them make the 250 250K and I will consider.
Smugness, Facebook, and artificiality
Another one like that a http://www.theresumator.com/
Mathematica looks really powerful and practical. The demo was really impressive rrrrrrright up until he had to start using a Java library. Then it was all the creating of client objects and credentials objects, initializing things, marching to and fro... There may have been some factories in there; I skimmed it.

Man, does Java suck or what?
Yes, $300. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465403
I disagree because I think there are two fundamental drives to the Netbook craze that are not dependent on the recession.

1. Netbooks typically are not the main laptop of the user. As such, they do not need to be super fancy and used more as a very portable backup.

2. As computers get more powerful, more and more people are finding that most applications can run without massive computing power. Thus, people are starting to find Netbooks to be a much better value than their more expensive counter-parts.
This isn't meant to refute your argument or insult anyone I just that pariah probably doesn't mean what you think it means and you might like to know.

From Wiktionary:

1. An outcast
2. A demographic group, species, or community that is generally despised.
3. Someone in exile
4. A member of one of the oppressed social castes in India.
I suspect the main reason MS or Google or anyone else prefers young programmers is that they tend to be more committed and 'fresh', in the sense that they are not yet bitter, cynical, and hopelessly opinionated. They also tend not to have as heavy a set of personal/family obligations, so can work cheaper, longer hours etc.

And of course on average, if you're too lazy to actually find out from the interviewee, they probably tend to have more up-to-date skills.

OTOH, a seasoned veteran often has a knowledgebase in a specific problem domain that can be immensely valuable. However, it takes a lot of work to find the right person and ensure that his KB is the real thing, is up to date, and that the personality attached to the KB is going to mesh with the culture of the rest of the team.

When things are going gangbusters, it's easier to just ignore these subtleties and hire the lusty, naive young waifs who will work their skinny little asses to the bone for da man before they realize their souls are being sucked dry by evil sorcerers.
Let me know if you have a YC startup and I missed your blog - http://friendfeed.com/yc-startups
It's mind-boggling as to how much stuff Apple is getting away with simply because they hold the market lead. Delays in deployment, denying projects that had significant investment and a highly opaque culture that is leading to tons of unrest. It finally took going after what really matters, money, for anyone to grow some balls and take this on. Hopefully, Apple will wake up a bit after this happens. Stop spinning words in your favor (96% approval! eye roll) and start fixing the problem!
I'm a web developer who once worked as a low-level IT guy and I'm sorry but the excuses in the ZD comments just aren't flying with me.

First of all, any app that breaks in everything but IE 6 was written by somebody who is incompetent. Any business whose success hinges on such an app was equally incompetent in choosing it.

And let me make this very clear. We write our apps for modern browsers first and then fix the various flukes and oversights that have made IE 6 such a royal pain to deal with last and we are doing so in even quicker and dirtier ways the longer it drags on. I work at a major retailer that was probably also late in upgrading from IE 6 and even our managers are sick of hearing about what we can't do because IE 6 has market share and have stopped caring if people get an obviously subpar or uglier experience on that ridiculous browser if it shaves a week or two off of development.

And what, you're worried about security? That's why you're sticking it out with IE 6 and an ancient version of Outlook? Please.

Any IT department that's still on IE 6 is being run by somebody who was probably more attracted to IT for the favorable pay to training ratio and who has too little faith in their abilities and the abilities of the people they're responsible for to upgrade a freaking browser for crying out loud.

I don't care about how big your networks are. I don't care about your ridiculous IE 6-only apps that you should have been searching for alternatives to six months after IE 7 came out and you still didn't get updates from the "developers" (hacks with a GUI IDE of some sort more likely). If you're still on IE 6 you're not really interested in information technology, you don't know what you're doing and it's no surprise that management has started favoring cheap labor from overseas over homegrown incompetence. It's not like you're any better at communicating or have fewer excuses than some guy they picked up off the street in India anyway.

Cheap shot? Sure it is but how come nobody is coming after my job? It's not like JavaScript syntax is hard or anything right? If IT professionals were doing what they ought to be doing, which is continually honing their skills and improving the productivity of businesses rather than holding them back for fear of revealing their own incompetence they'd be seen as an asset rather than a necessary evil and an expense.

If your business is still on IE 6, whoever is responsible doesn't deserve their job as far as I'm concerned.
Definitely, it's an absurdly low amount for an important domain name, but at the same time they could probably win it in court without much trouble, I'd think.
Awesome idea! I thought of just a few things (my car, my coffee maker) and the manuals are right there. The best products are always those that solve common problems.
The new geolocation feature is creepily accurate. This page found my exact location.

http://channy.creation.net/project/firefox/geolocation.html
Quite feature rich for devs. Geolocation, native video support, XmlHttpRequest across domains and offline/local storage are my favourites. And that is not even the end of the list.
Btw, have you seen this -> http://blog.mozbox.org/post/2009/04/12/Firefox-35:-a-new-exp...
Well, options are granted at the discretion of the board and YC doesn't take a board seat. Most companies will incorporate leaving some percentage of their stock unallocated. Founders only "lose" that percentage of their voting rights when they grant options to later people joining the company, which they'd probably do anyway.
I'd heard some years ago that the Navy's nuclear operations officers and their nuclear safety officers are not allowed to even talk to each other, just to prevent any chumminess from creeping into the relationship. Is that still true?
How much does filing a lawsuit cost, along with the associated attorneys fees? Probably a whole lot more than a few thousand dollars.
Evolution of Amazon.com Logo
Weren't they booming before the economy tanked? They're small, dirt cheap and you can get online with 'em. That's not a hard sell no matter what the economy.
I downloaded the PHP plugin, and applied for a private key to use the service. The key came immediately, and I've already added the captcha to my site So far I am impressed. http://www.backwardsparadigm.com
Thanks for the info. My fields are Signal Processing and Control Theory, and I am years away from being able to contribute anything remotely interesting to this nascent field of Computational Topology. Maybe after my PhD. And, indeed, I tend to dislike DARPA-funded stuff for the same exact reasons...
Venture Center, Pune
Mini Mario Game as Resignation Letter
Ask HN: What's the best way to incorporate a startup?
I've heard conflicting opinions from a lot of people on incorporating a startup. Some say to go cheap and use legalzoom, others say that it's better to incorporate the legitimate way from the start, and to go through a law firm like Orrick.

My needs are that of a typical startup -- multiple co-founders, potential investors down the road, and equity stakes that will need to be offered to employees.

What are your views on the best way to incorporate?
This is absolute ignorant non-sense.

Edit: I designed the Feedwater Control System for the Lungmen Nuclear power stations going up in Taiwan.

Edit2: Reply to jibiki below; Yes, no containment was the absurd comment. I don't know the details but I can guess the builders strengthened the containment building to appease the eviros - it was probably completely unnecessary and only raised the costs. The enviros and the lefties have gotten away with such "stories" for years but now thanks to the internet, the truth shall set us free! See Clay Shirky on Thinking the Unthinkable.
I thought it was news media that was becoming largely irrelevant for being hopelessly out of touch with modern media trends. I mean, hasn't TV been getting better, not worse in the last 20 years?
Rubbish. If people have plenty money to buy laptops for themselves, they'll still buy netbooks for their kids. In fact the relative lack of power will be an asset, since parents won't want to think they're buying one so the kids can run Crysis.
The geolocation put me about 8-10 miles south of my actual location.
It seems to be a popular story.

From: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/27/three_mile_island_30th...

"I want to mention that the reactor containment at Three Mile Island was actually thicker than most others, because citizen action, prior to the construction of the plant, demanded a thicker containment, because the Three Mile Island Unit 2 is right in the flight path of the Harrisburg Airport."--Harvey Wasserman

(Of course, nobody was ever planning to build it without a containment... I hope?)
I'd give them license to be total jerks about it if they'd just deliver the death blow to Office already.
IANAL...but fuck that. I assume your previous communication about the 'unofficial version' was in writing, at least by email. So legally, they don't have a leg to stand on because they've already folded and accepted your right to supplement their service with your little app. I(f they had strenuously objected straight out of thegate that would be a different situation, but they've already committed to a course of action and now they're backtracking. You can show you dealt with them in good faith (I presume) so I think you're quite safe with 'thanks, but no thanks'.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=588098
Microsoft Offers Secure Windows … But Only to the Government
But the reason the number of tenured positions is very small IS because of funding.

Everything comes down to money.
Good I didn't know about it, it can help a lot of people that are logged in :D
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/482413_for_lega/comments...
I'd refine that second statement: it's not usually in a graduate student's best interest to collaborate on a project, but the student's PI typically has a competing interest (and a longer time horizon), and so collaborations still happen. The smart PI just manages the risk by assigning collaborative projects to his students -- he gets to reap the rewards of the rare good collaborations, whereas the bad collaborations merely crush the unfortunate grad student to whom they are assigned...and nothing of value is lost.

Part of the game of grad school is recognizing and fending off the "collaborators" who will do nothing but slow you down and/or take credit for your work, while still remaining open to that rare collaboration that can make your career -- the two most successful graduate students I know basically walked into career-defining projects as a result of collaborations that were handed to them in their first year.

Of course, you can be torpedoed by a bad collaboration at any stage of your career, so this isn't a dilemma unique to graduate students. Collaborations are useful only so long as you're getting more than you're putting in.