skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've written before that if you represented an AST as a data structure, wrote a function to transform one instance of that structure into another, and ran it at compile time, you'd have something close to Lisp macros. What's interesting about this Erlang example is that people are actually doing it. My suspicion is that it's more trouble than it's worth. The simplicity of the sexp representation and the fact that it's the same representation as the original language (no special notation for ASTs) are what make macros so natural in Lisp. Take away those properties and things will get messy quickly. But it might still be worth it for writing certain kinds of tools.
Here's what I've learned, for the case of dealing with small jobs for small clients (which in my experience is a very "long tail" of contracting jobs):

1. Have an hourly rate, but make an estimate for all jobs and make the price fixed based on that. Feel free to overestimate in this part; just make sure that you can come up with a solid number. For example, "10 hours, that means you owe me $1000." This will be the fixed price for the job.

2. Tell them that if your estimate goes horribly wrong and it turns out that the job is vastly more complex than you thought (but you couldn't know ahead of time), they owe you nothing if they decide to stop the job at that point. If they want to continue, of course, they can pay you more based on a new estimate.

In my experience the primary problem with small clients is that to them, $1000 or $2000 is really big money; they feel very worried about signing it over to you for dubious gain. So it's very important to make sure that they feel that they are guaranteed to get the return they were promised. And 2) almost never actually happens in reality; it's just an important step to making them feel comfortable with hiring you.

Another reason to go with smaller clients is that it's easier to get a job and there's less overhead; instead of dealing with a huge corporate bureaucracy you can often just get on Skype, discuss what you need, sign an agreement, and start working within an hour or two.
cough HACK cough

=)
Agreed. They're both incredibly handy, and even if you only learn the common feature subset, it's still a huge win.
I use screen every day for administering multiple remote servers. I don't know how I functioned before I used screen. One of the coolest things are "backtick" commands you can put in the caption string. Here is a pastie of my screenrc and one of the backtick files which displays the free RAM of the system in the caption line, updating every 30 seconds (ymmv on the free RAM command depending on how your distro's `free` command displays its output)

http://pastie.org/633808
I often use idiosyncratic screen setups with very specifically-purposed windows. I support this behavior with a special config file that launches screen with certain windows pre-loaded for certain uses:

source /home/mcantor/.screenrc
chdir $SANDBOX/src
screen 0:svn
screen 1:lib
screen 2:nosetests
stuff "activate_environment\015"
screen 3:ipython
stuff "activate_environment\015ipython\015"
screen 4:
select 0

I use stuff because it's the most straightforward way to send commands with carriage returns (015 in octal) to a window.

I make this even more effortless by using a special alias in my .bashrc:

alias scd='screen -c /home/mcantor/.screenrc-dev'

I also use a few other aliases to support common uses:

alias scr='screen -rd'
alias scx='screen -x'
alias lsc='screen -list'

Also, don't forget the very useful -S switch:

screen -S someproject

Or, you can use Ctrl-a :sessionname, if you're already within a session, to rename it. That way, screen -list and screen -r can use your sessionnames, and you don't have to parse or remember the process ID's.
You would need a large number of like-minded moderators to manually remove off-topic articles and idiotic comments.

It's hard enough for HN to keep a high level of discourse. A community based around politics will attract partisans and weigh heavily against people's identities. Eventually one group or another will reach enough critical mass to bring the site to one political center or another, and it will be socially impossible to stray too far from that center. Most forums get around this centering problem by explicitly declaring a center. HN does this implicitly by centering around pg's views--a programming social news site founded by Jeff Atwood would have a much different bent.

Likewise, political forums either implicitly or explicitly center around left-wing, right-wing, libertarian, feminist, socialist, or some other default viewpoint where there may be a core community of e.g. leftists, and right-wing commenters who show up to the fight are something of a different social group than the core of people who agree with the site's ideological bent. (Huffington Post comes to mind).

It's a hard and interesting problem though, so if something comes of this discussion I'd be glad to help.
The most notable part of mine is

# Set up my status line at the bottom of every frame
caption always "%{gb} %{ck}%m-%d %C %{gb} %{gb}%?%-Lw%?%{ck}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?%{gb}%?%+Lw%?"

I use tmux now, though. (it has a statusbar similar to the above by default)
Looks interesting but I am too paranoid to give apps access to twitter now unless they tell me up-front what they are going to do. (make me follow them? update my status? etc)
I think it's ironic that your argument is remarkably similar to "nothing stops you from using a closed source program unless you planned to start hacking on the source." Sometimes you don't know when you start using something what amount of hacking may be required.
I like this idea. A couple suggestions:

Improve the algorithm for determining which @replies are a "conversation". I had one group of 21 messages that were really several conversations that took place over several weeks. I bet a simple clustering algorithm based on post date could get 99% of these cases.

Don't include 1 message threads. They're pretty pointless. (edit: just saw the checkboxes, maybe they should be bigger?)
Well not necessarily, though it will be hard.

What you basically need is an incredibly thick skin (you will be attacked from both sides of the political spectrum) and remove trolls/bad debaters with an iron fist.
This IS a hacker's ideal Terminal - a while ago I set out to write my own shell with all the features I wanted. A huge portion of the functionality I intended to implement is accomplished with GNU Screen. Since I found Screen - I haven't felt enough need to keep developing my own shell!
How to promote Windows Server 2008 machine to domain controller
You can copy and paste between terminals with the keyboard. This alone should be reason enough.
Free Online Self Paced Training for Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V
Well, few of my tests are regretted, but then I have done lots of stuff without tests and it goes fine. The system I am working on has undergone several major wrenching changes, and would have required discarding a more complete set of tests had they been done.

I am still of two minds on the subject, and look forward to more discussion.
Fast food calories per dollar
Kent Beck said in a recent episode of FLOSS weekly (http://twit.tv/floss87) that he first learned a TDD-like approach to writing code from his dad who programmed in the paper tape-era. Of course it was not called TDD back then.
In the same vein, if you use a repl on a remote machine you should check out detachtty if you're not already using it. It's particularly nice for use within emacs because it doesn't eat the whole screen and it doesn't eat ^A.
Thanks for the link. Here's a paper on natural computing that overviews the various aspects of CS + biology. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844150
We just ported our tree from straight CSS to Compass and without doing anything clever at all, it's been a huge win.

Straight off the bat, going from CSS/Blueprint to Sass/Compass got rid of ~300 lines of styling, simply because Sass is so much more expressive.

Then we went through the code and extracted all the color literals and stuck them in a variables file. Instantly we were able to play with site colors without search/replace drama. The stylesheets themselves also got far more readable, since you never have to work out in your head what a particular hex string probably meant. Little things like that remove friction from the dev process, and are totally worth it.

Of course, once we had all the colors in one place, it became obvious that we had, for instance, 4-5 different oranges all within 15% of each other. We kept the variable definitions, but made them all the same base color.

We repeated the same process with font sizes.

Finally, we went through all our markup and evicted the Blueprintisms, moving them to the stylesheets via Chris' Blueprint Compass mixins. This was more than a "semantic vs. visual" hygiene win. Playing with column widths involved finding where Blueprint classes were passed in or coded into markup. Now they're right there in the CSS, where you expect them to be.

We've got tons of opportunities to reduce the stylesheets further by macro-izing or mixin-izing, but just by transliterating our code from CSS to Compass we got a big enough win to be happy for this dev cycle.

Can't recommend Compass highly enough. Great work, Chris.
1.4% margins. Yowza.
Your second scenario can be handled with nohup from within a vanilla ssh session.
Decapping, staining, and reading ROMs with a microscope?? Using some clock timing trick to electrically dump ROMs? Holy crap that is some insane dedication.
> Tell them that if your estimate goes horribly wrong and it turns out that the job is vastly more complex than you thought (but you couldn't know ahead of time), they owe you nothing if they decide to stop the job at that point. If they want to continue, of course, they can pay you more based on a new estimate.

I do it exactly like that, it's a good rule.

It gives people certainty, and it's not only the small customers that like it.
processing.js / canvas visualization part-time at Cloudkick
It's a really bad place from which to seek funding, YC or not. Sachin overemphasizes the Chicago financing community, but it's worth knowing that most VCs, even outside Sand Hill and Waltham, aren't going to be happy funding a company in Chicago.

And they're right. It's easier to flip a company in San Mateo, where a bizdev meeting is just a 15 minute drive to Palo Alto, than it is in Chicago where the same meeting is a 3-day trip arranged 2 weeks in advance.

It's just not easier enough to matter for a founder, who is so unlikely to get a real round in the first place, and then so unlikely to get the B round, and then so unlikely to wind up with something that can be flipped at a huge profit, that this is just not something worth optimizing for. That's hyperbole, of course, but not by much.
Is this true? Can someone with more knowledge of convertible line of credit, comment on this?
present day medicine seems to have a problem with diagnosing the cause

Not true, the cause is well understood. How to fix it is another matter.

"jammed bones" (don't know how to express it in english).

It's pronounced "Voodoo placebo"
Doing a Turnaround Versus a Startup
Wow, that's awesome. Many people have it in their mind that sass and compass are more of a "new project" or "rewrite" kind of thing. Thanks for sharing your success with an existing project as a form of refactoring. That sounds like exactly the right way to approach it.
A chess program trained on previously observed input is not able to then learn how to paint, or drive a car, or play basketball. This is the difference.
Nothing can justify what these people have done. But to be fair, neither McVeigh nor bin Laden would have reasons to commit acts of terrorism if the federal government wasn't doing things it wasn't supposed to be doing. McVeigh was motivated by Ruby Ridge and Waco (both of which were debacles the feds completely mishandled, to speak charitably), and bin Laden was motivated primarily by American intervention in the Middle East.
Definitive List of Free WordPress Theme Frameworks
Phoronix's "benchmarks" are notoriously useless.
It also gives OSX RS-232 terminal emulation capability. As far as I know OSX ships with no other such program. Once you get your USB dongle's driver situation under control you just:

screen device baud

ex:

screen /dev/tty.usbserial-FTDPZOEJ 115200

Very useful for embedded system hackers and others who still need to speak RS-232.
I think the 'Incompleteness Theorem'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...

might address what you're describing.
I don't understand. Why does Newegg have to be as big as amazon? Is the IPO being done at a market capitalization near Amazon's?
I didn't realize MVCC was only implemented in Postgres. That's a huge advantage if you're doing anything other than a mostly-read DB.
fwiw, screen doesn't "eat ^A"

You can send ^a to a window in screen by typing "^a a" - I do this everyday using emacs inside of screen. It becomes second nature.
As I write this, someone is pressing an acetate of a grime/dubstep remix of the Tinnitus Treatment song that they will play during their second club set tonight.
Same goes for releasing open source software.
My company (startup, ~25 employees) also used the free version for several months (late '08 and early '09) but were disappointed with the sound quality (we, too, never tried the paid version).

We used GoToMeeting for several months as well, but got fed up with frequent issues (dropped calls, failures to connect to join meetings, etc. almost daily).

We now use WebEx. We've had very few issues and the quality is good, but the interface is a real pain in the ass to use.

I'd be interested in hearing anyone's experience going from the free version to the paid one.
If you want to write lisp macros in Erlang, Robert Virding's Lisp Flavored Erlang might be what you look for: it's a lisp syntax on top of the Erlang VM (so it should be compatible with everything else) and it's supposed to support more powerful macros (http://github.com/rvirding/lfe).

Edit: here's the macro test file http://github.com/rvirding/lfe/blob/master/test/test_macro.l...
What is "John The Ripper v1.7.3.1" test? I'd like to see "Firefox startup" test and similar..
Don't need it? Don't install it.
After we used this cognitive task to deplete participants' self-regulatory capacity, they didn't exercise as hard as participants who had not performed the task.

This is science?

They used a subjective test of questionable applicability as a measure of a subjective metric of questionable importance to determine that a test group didn't perform as well (whatever that means) as a control group.

The only willpower needed here was to make it to the end of this pseudo-scientific article. Now that I have, I probably won't be able to complete any work for the rest of the day :-)
> The interviewer doesn't ask very many good questions from the context of Erlang or Haskell.

Well - who wouldn't look like a bit of a bozo next to those two guys? I know I would.
Westley Weimer has a presentation on the same @ Stanford University today at 2pm (1 hr from now) in Gates 104

Map - http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
Agree that the design could use some work but the idea is great. I like the links to books, maybe add links to other online resources. I also like the idea of discussion. It would be nice if 'study groups' could be formed around the various subjects.

FYI - There's a similar site here - http://academicearth.org/
In fairness to Adobe (and as somebody who has worked briefly for them) even moving things in, say, Photoshop, will result in a monumental outcry from many people who have used it for years and years.

Also in fairness, considering the wide variety of different workflows for which Photoshop is used, dtermining what is a sane set of defaults is by no means an easy task, and prioritizing things per a user's most-used isn't really a solved problem; and there is already the option in PS to customize menus, panes, etc.

That being said, I do think Adobe has lost the plot a bit since they aquired Macromedia (though not to say that Acrobat isn't every bit as bad in its own way as Flash) and from what I know of the company I don't really see them turning around any time soon - I just hope for Pixelmator or similar to get to the point where they can actually compete with Photoshop on a broader level, so that Photoshop actually has some serious competition and they have to start improving it significantly. (Though I should note to the best of my knowledge they're doing fairly well with After Effects, still, which afaik doesn't have any significant competitors.)
Every major tech firm has an in-house app security or "SDLC" team. But outside of Microsoft --- or, even in some cases at Microsoft --- most people sub crypto design and verification out to people like Paul Kocher's CRI.

It's probably not fair to trace a cryptosystem flaw back to a web app security team.
The Who, What, and Where of Chinese Internet Users
Explanation of reddit's recent markdown bugs
Canada for one.
'True Size' displays full-scale product pictures in web shops
Enschede, The Netherlands - The Dutch start-up 'True Size' is developing a service for web shops to display full-scale product pictures on the computer screen. Every product is depicted at its exact actual size, regardless of screen size, resolution or web browser. Web shops observe increased customer satisfaction and expect higher conversion rates.

Web shop visitors will now be able to accurately assess the real size of products, which previously was only possible in regular shops. "By making products tangible we can improve the online shopping experience. The ability to better assess online products generally leads to higher conversion rates for web shops." says co-founder Niels Hoogendoorn.

Full-scale product display on the internet is now done for the first time, therefore the size of the impact isn't clear yet. However, according to Hoogendoorn the interest from several large Dutch retailers confirms the potential of True Size. "We expect to start two large pilot projects this year."

True Size is already available as a plug-in for popular web shop applications such as Magento. The examples on www.truesize.nl/en/ show several full-sized product displays.
Larger players tend to have a competitive advantage over smaller. This can be things like economies of scale or supplier bullying.

Having Amazon as a competitor will make it hard to make a buck, but if they do, they will clearly be a very strong operation.

I think staying private has helped them compete with Amazon up til now. Things like SOX compliance costs and disclosure requirements will add overhead.
Neave Strobe ...like dropping acid, but not
Write a program to convert torrent files into midi files. They should be normal midi files that will play music, but can be run through midi2torrent to get your original torrent back.

The idea being that you now have unique pieces of music you can host anywhere, rather than scary torrent files.

PS: If anyone does this, let me know :)
I just changed 4 projects to use SASS with Compass: there is no other way now.
MakerBeam: An Open Source Building Kit
You know, TDD is somewhat controversial, but design-by-numbers GoF patterns aren't: you might as well be busting out UML or the Booch Method. It's a great book to learn a way of thinking about systems, but a discredited methodology (and one that was never actually intended to be a methodology).

Let's be careful about what we lump together here.
Best way to jumpstart a stackexchange site
Well, now we have stackexchange to play with. But its useless until there is a big user base. Anyone care to share resources, books, ideas, etc about how to boot up the userbase?
I will take that into account, thanks.
Google Docs Now With Equation Editor
Famous Folks' Workspaces
Is There An Artificial God?
Where does it tell you how to get customers?

You may be a programmer now, but once you start your own business, you are now a businessperson first, and a programmer second. This is a critical change of state that you must make. Like almost everything else, you shouldn't count on anyone telling you anything. You are no longer someone's employee. You must initiate the finding of all "how to's".

You are correct in believing this is the biggest obstacle. Without customers, you are dead. With them, you can solve almost any problem you have.

As far as getting them, you can (and should) try just about anything. Some of my experiences:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182489
The Stroop test is a fairly standard and well-respected test. To claim otherwise takes a post with a lot more substance than the one you have offered.

Care to explain why the test or metric is subjective or questionable, or why you are qualified to declare such?

Until then, refrain with your indignant declamations.
Privacy and the Quantum Internet
I've definitely regretted tests. Badly written or ill-conceived tests couple test code to implementation details. On several projects, I've found myself stuck in places where trivial (and necessary) implementation changes necessitated 45+ minutes of test grooming.

Testing is good. Long live tests. But be careful not to let the cart drag the horse.
Wow, uhh... I actually thought Amazon had acquired Newegg a long time ago and kept the stores separate because of the very different product and customer focuses or something...

Tells how much I was paying attention.

edit: OH, I was thinking of Egghead.
I wouldn't hire either of those.

If your A isn't able to hold intense discussions and sometimes lose, he's useless.

And B is useless in a startup as well. He's at the earliest employee 11 or 15.
he misses out 2 of the major disadvantages,
1. you add a dependancy / stage of complexity in the build stage,
2. you lose a direct mapping from your dom elements to your css, ie I can click inspect something in firebug and see on what line of what css file I need to change

and to be honest since I dont find css that hard to manage those tradeoffs are enough to put me off using one.

also worth mentioning css variables have been introduced, just waiting for ie? now
TCP/IP Server in Factor
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tineye.com doesn't do all of this, but it will sometimes match different photos of the same thing / location.
Is it wrong to flag for incompetent English?
No, 10ren is merely talking about correctness within the given system.
If you don't "get sass", please take a couple minutes to read the article -- if you've never had to live the life of a front-end engineer, you have no idea how hard it is to do that job with the tool that is CSS. Balancing browser support, design, and constantly changing requirements is hard. Doing it without a form of abstraction at your disposal is lunacy.

I would also like to point out that this post is not an advertisement for compass or even Sass. It's a rebuttal to the people who think any advancement in stylesheet technology is unnecessary. Sass is an implementation of these ideas and compass shows their power in action. But it really is an argument for a new approach.
I heard from a friend recently that NewEgg came from EggHead from the Pre 2001 days, anyone know?
John The Ripper is the most famous password cracker in the world, presumably in the benchmark because it's a good example of a heavily optimized compute-bound application.
I changed to C-\
And, being intimately familiar with what those advisories implied, I know how many of those had any impact on your system, and how many of them were well-addressed by FreeBSD jails. You're overstating your case, Colin.
Microsoft's Windows 7 Launch 'Party': Pass the Cringe
OpenSSL is somewhat notorious for being a high-maintenance codebase. I personally think jailing it is overkill, but this argument (about whether the code is perfectly safe for a pre-auth attack surface) is a rathole.