skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dunno which is a bigger problem, this or the massive library pain issue.

Of course now that Clojure is out there I don't know if CL really COULD gain traction, most people who want a Lisp for "real work" are going that route, or have gone in other power language directions like Haskell, or so it appears from where I'm standing.
What it sounds like you are saying is that it can, in the right circumstances, create a feedback loop in either direction. And you are right.

With that said, Nico had an excellent point. For most people their friends will include a peer group that almost certainly makes similar incomes to theirs, and for most people you will only really start making a lot of friends at a higher socio-economic point on the ladder when you move up to (or are in the process of moving up to) that same higher point yourself.
I certainly hope you are right. I am just starting my own graduate studies in math, but having limited apparant innate abilities in mathematics I am counting on practice and study to correct that deficiency.
Cute design ideas still require some semblence of competent execution. The "lines" are completely random. Of course they're going to be arbitrary, but at least try to be thematic about it.

It's missing the AbeBooks acquisition, which is a hell of a lot more relevant than most of the stuff that's on here.

Investments are not acquisitions. Amazon had a significant investment in BillMeLater, but eBay still was able to acquire it. Oh, they missed that one too.
The "operational risks" of using Scala
And, Larry and Sergey hired a guy who has a PHD in EECS to be their CEO.
I actually have no idea if this is even feasible in the fashion industry, I was just using a similar (fictitious) internship as what was described in the blog as an example. And the key is that an internship should be indicative of the business. Either way, the intern would have lost that week or two (even if they recognize it was a bunk internship), and the position would be open again if the business wanted to continue it. Without the protection from unpaid internships, businesses are free to exploit low-skilled labor in order to perform low to no (monetary) cost for experimentation.
As I understand - the issue is that WordPress allows in-browser editing of PHP code.

If you only allow people to edit standard HTML, then this issue would go away.
Typical buzzword laden vague recruiter sales pitch. Die and rot.
That feels extremely unlikely.
A Library Without The Books
I'm an on and off again fan of classical music and I got turned on this week to Amazon's "99 most essential" series. It's a pretty good deal - for anywhere from $6 to $9, you get almost a hundred classical songs in a DRM-free format. Sometimes they're even on sale for $3.

http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1252216067/ref=sr_shvl_1-all?ie=...
I browsed 3 pages .90% of them are related to external modules. Whereas about wordpress, well no comment. It is not about which one has more vulnerability it is about design and how the software enforces security. Take a look at drupal prepare query callback http://api.drupal.org/api/function/_db_query_callback/6 with respect to WP's prepare function in wp-db.php(I have WP version 2.7.1). Drupal's code is double checking users data on the other hand WP just unquotes the %s section. Also look at escape function of the same file. It uses addslashes and commented out mysql_real_escape_string function because it is causing problems!! WTF. Also drupal has a very good guidline on writing secure drupal modules http://drupal.org/writing-secure-code. Show me a equivalent in WP. So your popularity proportional to vulnerability theory is mostly flawed.
Lego Thinks Beyond the Brick
I think that one or two solid, relatively short, screencasts can sell me on a framework or language... DHH's screencasts back in the day sold me on Rails despite his unique voice :-)

After that, something that is text-searchable is really preferable...

I started using Cappuccino on a project about a week ago now. I watched one Cappuccinocast, and then wished that some of the text-based Cappuccino tutorials were better developed. By now, I've found my way, though knowing Objective-C and Javascript really helped.
Screencasts are usually good to give an overview of something's capabilities, but rarely are they useful for teaching how something works.

Unfortunately, talking into a microphone is easier than typing, and reading is harder than being dictated to.
They should try to figure out why people don't upgrade. Maybe there need to be clearer reminders, or separation between features and security. The same goes for why people aren't making backups. I would imagine it would be quite easy just to diff the releases and exploit whatever got fixed anyways.
Yes, however, perusing the history of vulnerability disclosures in popular software demonstrates that the degree of likelihood of a new issue being found varies to a considerable degree based on the software in question.

Given that, software with an exceedingly low historical defect rate could reasonably be considered 'secure'.
"Metaklett can support maximum weight when pulled on in the plane of the strips, and a square metre can hold a perpendicular load of 7 tonnes, says Mair."

So you only need a 7.1 tonne weight.
I felt the same, but after searching for a few minutes I wasn't able to find anything to contradict it. It looks like their hosted option may actually be significantly more secure than installing your own.
If they're lucky, someone competent pwned them and he is now doing a great job defending his turf.

Everybody gets owned, kept or rm'ed; just a matter of time.
Just an observation, the VK captcha doesn't support visually impaired users.
Most definitely, your analysis is spot-on.
Exactly. It's like the old question of the difference between having an open mind versus holes in the head.

Both vary so much between even similar situations, that there is no way of knowing which side of the line cases fall on, unless they are extremely good or bad, except try it and see.
I'll just say: sometimes, the most innocent and un-biased opinion is from someone that has no standing in the matter.

I would say that I'm on neutral ground, being neither predominately in either industry. That said, I feel that the current method of distribution for music (CD and iTunes) is completely outdated compared to the great advances that we've seen in other areas of technology. With the drive towards users wanting free content, there has to be a way for artists to capitalize on this.

I obviously cannot wish for the world's top artist to be working for minimum-wage salaries, but seriously, there must be better ways to make money than for record companies to strong-arm individuals into paying ridiculous sums of money for "sharing" copyrighted content.
Wordpress.com is up to date on the Wordpress software, only blogs that haven't updated since the last 2 versions are open for attack.
What evidence I can find indicates it was actually the other way around - that Henry VII co-opted the legend to reinforce his legitimacy, rather than being inspired by it. If anything, the other part of your original point (having strong problems to overcome) is probably more apt for that case.

Anyway, your broader point of having heroes is still valid.
Offensive Security 101 v2.0-Full course video download!
There are pretty clear reminders. If you log into the Wordpress control panel, there's a bar that says "The latest version is x. Click here to upgrade." And they also built an automated update script that downloads, unpacks and installs it all for you.

My guess is that people don't update because they fear potentially breaking their styles or something.
well i'm fucked. my first 2 posts netted me -28 karma. i'm applying for the winter 09-10 app.
People don't upgrade because they break some plugin compatibility with virtually every release, sometimes even cookie compatibility with every other release (seriously).

The upgrade process may be simplified but who wants to spend hours trying to fix compatibility every time they discover a bug they introduced with the last patch because they've broken backwards compatibility yet again.

What they should be doing is a general upgrade release for non-technical users and a technical bulletin about what exactly was wrong so technical users can manage older versions as desired. Instead you have to dig for an hour in trac notes to find what the heck they changed and why.

I have version 2.3 & 2.5 installs running safe because I've manually patched them and locked down the server. Delete any XMLRPC interface which is where half the bugs are introduced. The other half is the open ended admin interface which even regular users are allowed into to escalate privileges, which is asinine - you can even run PHPINFO through the admin panel as a regular member on many WP installs.
I changed mine for the first time in years, to show me which git branch I'm in, to avoid doing the wrong thing in the wrong place.

davidw@fortrock:~/workshop/langpop (master) $
In many ways the extremely high frequency of Wordpress security updates completely works against them.

Whenever a security update is released it is utterly trivial to do a diff against the previous package and get a vector to exploitable vulnerabilities in the previous version (in many cases the changelogs themselves are a good hint). The default Wordpress headers also make it easy to quickly tell which version of WP a site is running and whether it's worth attacking.

I give Wordpress credit for the advances they've made in automating parts of the upgrade process - it's now one click from the dashboard and if you are a popular site there really is no excuse for running an out of date version.

However it's not enough. Wordpress need to move to minor/major versions where minor versions, that consist of security updates, are automatically updated to when detected by a blog. (Major updates that feature changes likely to break plugins should still require user input).
If you enjoy Bash's customization, You'll love Zsh's

http://aperiodic.net/phil/prompt/

Once you go bash->zsh, there is no turning back.
Except that Wordpress is written in PHP and designed without security as a goal. True, security is all about probability, but Wordpress' odds are not that good.
When was the last time you gave up your Lisp project for the lack of libraries, and what were those libraries?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_day_attack
It doesn't even need to be that complicated. A Wordpress install is already capable of checking for new versions and updating itself. All that's needed is for this to be checked and performed at various intervals using a wp-cron style scheduler (e.g triggered by user visits).
What makes you think I know what I want to do with a computer until several attempts later?
I agree it's very hard to tell if someone has the determination and focus to succeed. One thing you can do is to look at past accomplishments, challenges, hardships and most importantly failures that they've encountered in the past and how they were able to overcome or cope with it.
Interesting ... yet another example of convergence between Chinese and South Korean Internet cultures?
http://www.net2ftp.com/
I don't know where you got that definition of "discipline". Discipline is the development of or training intended to produce a habitual and specific pattern of behavior. There are several slight variations in the meaning of discipline, but none that comes close to its being used as a synonym for will-power.
Pwgen - Password Generator: Add-ons for Firefox
Ironically, that one would be a prime example of an iPhone app that works better as a web app.
There doesn't seem to be anything in the article related both to speed and to Desktop installations of Linux specifically.

> Desktop applications can experience long and noticeable pauses when the application's code path jumps to a part of the code that is not cached in memory and needs to be read from the disk, which is slower.

It seems that most times the author uses the word "desktop", as above, it could be removed and the article would probably be improved by it. I know "Linux desktop" is a catchy phrase, but really.
Dobar dan,

I am not in YC, but am geographically a bit closer.

I don't have One Big Idea that I'm working on right now, but if you ever wanted to come visit in Padova (or meet in Trieste or thereabouts), it'd be interesting to talk and see if we have something in common that we could work on.
TWiST Episode 14 with Garry Tan (Posterous)
This post is from May 2008 and I couldn't find a link to download Lisp anywhere on his site.

I don't disagree with his point, but over a year to make good on his promise doesn't speak well of his argument.
Agreed 100%. Also, for enterprise/vertical app's that usually seem to be released half cooked, releasing them as web apps gives the developers fewer ways to foul up the user experience.
The Haskell Platform: Status Report from the Haskell Symposium 2009
Call me paranoid, but I'm not flying on one of these things until SP3.
It was generally library problems, but then I was trying to use sbcl on windows the last time I attempted CL development (this was over a year ago, before I found out about clojure) so even the libraries that DID exist were painful to deal with.

Maybe things have changed but I could not make much headway with ASDF so even when I did find the libraries... yeah. And yes I did have cygwin installed which is why I got past some of the problems.

Maybe I'd have made real headway if I were full on in Linux land where sbcl and everything else has much better support, since it's built around the *nix tool chain.
Since then he switched to using Clojure, unless he's since changed back and I missed it, I don't actively follow the site anymore so couldn't say for certain.
If you make a small change to the style you're using, it gets overwritten on each update as long as it's a built-in style. The workaround is obvious (rename your changed style) but, as an example, I have always been too lazy to do this and I'm always behind the latest version.
well, best of you luck! hope any possible bad phases dont get to you.
Ha, good point! I've been using CL for quite a few years now so this issue isn't even on my radar. But this question could be asked for C++ and probably Scheme as well.

This is a 'problem' for languages with no single implementation that's easily solved by Google. "common lisp download" gives the CLISP site as top hits which is a good CL to start with.
Not at all with Scheme. PLT Scheme is an awesome example of a centralized, well documented language with easy installation and application deployment.

Note the prominent download link on the home page: http://www.plt-scheme.org/
Agreed. This is a singularly bad design.

They invested in Delicious too, but probably too small to show on this chart.
I develop on Windows and deploy on Unix. Library problems are something we have to face on every platform and programming language, as programmers, but we learn to work around them.

This morning I needed HTML to PDF generation; my first instinct was to use something from Lisp, I found xhtml to pdf generation stuff in CL-TYPESETTING's contrib but it didn't work for me, so I went out and mocked up the application with a web service .. just to find out the remote server shut me down. Next try was to download Perl modules, PDF::FromHTML was broken for me and I didn't know how to fix it (I am not a good perl programmer, btw.) I tend tried the PHP HTML_ToPDF, and it too was too problematic for my tastes. A few hours later, I retooled the app to use a shell pipe:

(let ((file-path (handle-file file))))
(if (and (shell-command
(format nil "html2ps ~a > /tmp/~a" file-path file-path))
(shell-command
(format nil "ps2pdf /tmp/~a /tmp/~a.pdf" file-path file-path)))
(handle-static-file (merge-pathnames #p"/tmp/" file-path)
"application/pdf")))

Ugly but worked.

I then played with that for a bit and found it too fickle. Took a second look at the CL-TYPESETTING stuff, my application was now working but still I wasn't confident with it, however, since 7AM this morning, I have had so much exposure to HTML to PDF converters that I knew how they were supposed to function. It took me about 10 minutes to find the problem in the CL-TYPESETTING package (Windows didn't have truetype font it was referencing and the sample usage was buried in a comment at the bottom of the xml-xform.lisp file.)

It would have been very convenient for me to bitch about Perl and its broken PDF::FromHTML module, even though any competent Perl programmer would have told me how to fix it in a jiffy. And the PHP package. It was also convenient to bitch about the web service that blocked me, but I found out they were charging an access fee for the API and I shouldn't have scraped their web page and abused their servers.

Truth is, all languages, tools and platforms suck in small user-dependent ways (they are not DWIM-enabled.) You could waste a life time complaining about them, so the productive thing to do is weigh the language's pros against its cons, and if it's mostly good, then you better learn it well and use it to its full potential.
Also Annabel Slack, Annabel Stark, Annabel Query, Annabel Strake, Aanabel Streem

Tip: Google the query like this:

+annabel +"She's the Sherlock holmes for the 21st century"

The Annabel variants will all appear in the search summary. No need to click through to the cached page.
Multicore Programming in Haskell Now
Where is the link to download Fortran, Cobol, C, C++, and "Assembly"?

Remember kids, single-implementation languages are the exception in industry, not the norm.

It's actually a two way street: where can I download the ANSI/ISO language specification for Perl, Python and Ruby? Just because it's nimble, interactive and quick to hack doesn't mean Common Lisp is a prototyping language.
According to the article, you can pull it apart "without special tools". It looks like it might work like a zipper: curving one of the sides of the connection disengages it from the other side.
Step 1: Try doing concurrent programming in Common Lisp.

Step 2: Switch to Clojure.
The ascii art in 7, using angle graphics, is very appealing to me. It looks compellingly like a FSM (though that's not how the eg is using it).

http://images.maketecheasier.com/2009/08/bashprompts-7.jpg
I live in the city. HN nyc drinks night anyone?
Please ignore the troll article. Anybody interested in a programming language can google for implementations and compare them. I don't understand why there needs to be a single lisp.exe binary.

The abundance of Scheme implementations is actually a good thing: there is a scheme for every n-choose-r machine configurations :-)

http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implem...
It really takes one accident that can, even partially, be traced back to problems with the carbon-fibre construction, and suddenly the promised 20% fuel cost savings will seem miniscule when compared to the horde of fleeing customers.

Composite fuselage would be a good thing per se but it's one of the technological advances that you can only build slowly, with lots of testing and enough wrecked planes, until it matures into "proven technology". Now it seems that so far they've just patched problems with the construction as they appear.
That's for the whole area. If you pull just a fraction of the area, the force required is proportionately less (think of a strip of Velcro that you pull apart from one end).

fun fact: the Firefox spell-checker knows that Velcro is a trademark, and must be capitalized. Obey the spell-checker. ("Firefox" is also).
By proportion, you're 0% reproducible; you consist entirely of atoms that must be sourced from the environment.

The relevant thing is the availability of the needed parts from the environment and the amount of human effort needed to carry out the replication. At this point the needed parts are widely available and cheap in the US, but sometimes hard to find in other places, but it doesn't look like that's the real problem. And the time to assemble the new machine once you have the parts isn't a big problem. The current problem, as far as I can tell from reading the blogs, is that the machine isn't yet reliable enough to reproduce itself in a lights-off fashion. You have to keep fixing it.
"3D printer" is a colloquial term for a variety of 3D automated fabrication machines, including FDM machines.
Seconded. I stuck to bash for a long time, and I regret not changing to zsh much earlier. It's like bash in all the ways bash is good, but with extra excellence thrown in to the bargain.
"In order to download lisp, one must first download lisp."

Antiviral marketing.
RiderOfGiraffes: What were the techniques you applied, and why were your colleagues mystified? I assume you didn't rewrite the routine in assembly. It seems that you have some interesting evidence about the question you're asking, but you left the meaty part out of your story!
Or 64 bytes: http://canonical.org/~kragen/demo/klappquadrat.html (I wrote the explanation but not the code!)
Python is, in many cases, a serious contender for Java and C++. E.g. if you're dealing with any sort of machine learning (suppose you wish to add a recommendation engine to your site), Python (e.g. with NumPy) is more than capable of that (although these scripts will generally ran standalone, they could still use the same libraries for fetching user data).

Yes, there are many cases where Python/Perl/Ruby can't do what Java/C++/Erlang can, but their capabilities stretch far longer than those of PHP. PHP essentially limits you to front-end web development; writing standalone scripts/tools/daemons in PHP -- been there, when a boss at a startup I worked in refused to allow me to use any other language -- is horribly painful.

There's a progression between "simple CRUD pages" and "complex, service oriented architecture". Python can fill a lot more on that continuum.
The Growing Irrelevance of Wordpress
> The notion of "withholding his labor" is manifestly silly: he created knowledge

Said knowledge is the result of his labor, just as a ditch is the result of a ditch digger's labor. No one feels entitled to a ditch, yet you feel entitled to knowledge.

And yes, the ditch digger also built on the work of others.

I want people to disclose knowledge, that's why I want them to be able to profit from doing so.

Note that said disclosure is why Joe was able to produce the knowledge to which you feel entitled....
A startup opportunity? Video cameras are incredibly cheap, a PC with eight webcams, software to do initial editing of a lecture with final edit done by a human?

I can imagine a lectures could be put on video for much less than $2000 each with the right technology.
This essay seems to be somewhat at odds with http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html from January 2005.

Now, PG argues that discipline is an important component of determination. For startups, determination is called "the most important predictor of success."

In the earlier essay, these comments were made:

Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running.

PG, does this difference in opinion represent increased wisdom due to the experience gained from doing YC rounds? Or is it simply a nuanced or superficial difference?