skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're thrown a typical webdev task, like setting the filesize limit for user uploads.

That's a web server configuration, not a programming issue.

Connect to MySQL and store some data.

(with-database (db '("host" "db" "user" "pass") :database-type :mysql)
(insert ...))

With CLSQL. http://clsql.b9.com/documentation.html

Now determine the dimensions of a jpeg image.

CL-GD has image-width and image-height functions.
http://weitz.de/cl-gd/

And parse some JSON from a file.

In my world, json is rarely read from disk files. It's passed around between client and server. At any rate.

(with-open-file (file path)
(let ((json-buffer (file-length file)))
(read-sequence json-buffer file)
(decode json-buffer)))

http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-json/

You are showing a complete misunderstanding of software engineering. You don't go running around looking for examples and installing 3rd party packages willy nilly. Weird problems don't just "arise" out of the blue, and although there is some urgency to things there is never any chaos. Things are a bit more controlled, and you are assumed to know what you're doing, Lisp or otherwise.
Per @ev: http://www.bing.com/twitter
Yes, but XP is also polished ... unless by polish you mean eye-candy.

The problems with XP are more under-the-hood. They tried fixing some of those in Vista, like the UAC, but it was a complete failure.

I also have a 5-year-old LCD that's pretty good, but it doesn't work well with their clear-type technology. I don't understand why they haven't added a classic anti-aliasing option like I have in Linux. So to make Vista bearable, I have to deactivate all the flashy stuff, because that's the only way to have sane fonts.

So it really doesn't matter if Windows 7 feels polished. Normal people will have to have real reasons to switch.
I am only smarter because I am online more often. 25/7.
being 15 feet and one wall away from someone who's rented space specifically to work is VERY different from 100+ feet and many walls away from a home during the daytime...
J1772 Standard for Charging Electric Cars Should be Adopted Soon
Awesome! The only thing I was waiting for to boot OS X 10.6 with the 64 bits Kernel.

This just made my day!
This doesn't really contribute anything. How about "I think the all-caps keywords and unmatched braces are ugly" or "parallelism should be considered a requirement in a new application language and highly-stateful Java-style OO doesn't really seem like a good way to accomplish that"?
Microsoft Project Gemini Preview (in-memory, column-oriented processing)
Statements and expressions are different syntactic elements. So "x = print" will throw a syntax error in 2.6:

>>> x = print
File "<stdin>", line 1
x = print
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

But not if you "from __future__ import print_function" first. This is also why __future__ imports need to be at the very top of each file they are included in (unlike other imports).
LLVM does have an ARM target.
They mentioned this at the recent SF Python Meetup. They had found an academic paper that they thought they could apply to Python to get rid of the GIL, but it turned out someone had already tried it unsuccessfully. I think that goal of unladen-swallow is definitely "beyond" for now.
Rackspace cloud has great customer service (they did as Mosso too). We pay about 150 a month for our hosting (4 servers, 2 paid by clients). We're small time, sure, but upgrading/resizing is super easy and we've never experienced any downtime (knock on wood) of any of our servers.

Our dev server is running 5 rails apps in testing on a 256 box so it's well worth the money if you just want to try it out (it's about 20 bucks a month).

They also gave me a sweet tshirt. But that doesn't skew my love for the RS cloud ;)
The key to dropbox's awesomeness is delta compression, which this is totally going to destroy

Not necessarily. It looks like encfs is vulnerable to a cleaning lady attack, in which case dropbox (acting as cleaning lady) will be able to recognize and take advantage of unmodified blocks.

That said, this approach won't be able to recognize blocks which are duplicated (rather than merely unmodified) either within a file or between two different files (actually, I'm not sure if dropbox can recognize data duplicated between different files, even without encryption; but tarsnap can), and sensible generally want their encrypted filesystems to be secure -- so this really isn't a very good solution.
Mobile will be bigger than you think
Despite the (probably purposeful) lack of determiners in the title, I assumed it had to do with the Android OS. That said, I think this is awesome. Defense systems are an interest of mine, and a more-or-less standardized OS deployed in defense hardware is something not often seen.
Perhaps Bram could devote his time to improving vim's scripting language.
No, your attention to the issue is about a decade out of date. Amazon hasn't been losing money for years; they posted over $200 million profit for 2008.

They had a working revenue stream, which meant that when they'd reached a point of sufficient growth, they had a slew of things they could reasonably adjust to achieve profitability.

Twitter has no revenue stream. Twitter can't change prices or restrict spending to become profitable - it has no prices! They would have to actually create a business in order to become profitable.
Twitter live on Bing
Too modest to post links, but it looks pretty cool:

http://eser.org/

http://hydrocarbon.search.eser.org/
Ask HN: Review My Site AppTiger.com
hey guys, i would really appreciate any/all of your feedback regarding my site, apptiger.com. I'm open to any comments, related to UI, render speed, usability, etc. Most importantly, if you have an iphone, would you use my site? If not, why? Thanks so much, Evan
This is essentially how I set the pricing for Tarsnap -- I started out by asking myself "how much would I like to pay to store my backups?"
That's quite interesting. I live a block away from Ike's Place and have seen several businesses come and go in that space. I figured the location was just not good enough to support enough traffic for a business. Then one day this little sandwich shop opens up. I write it off as something that won't last based on what I've seen happen to other shops in that space. We'll I'm glad nobody was taking bets that day. Oh, it's lunchtime, I think I'll treat myself to a sandwich.
Top concerns about Windows 7 (from actual users)
Searchable twitter/facebook?
Expect a tide of spam soon.
NASA chief touts Bezos' space flight project, Blue Origin
The hyperspec was written before programming was watered down for the hurried masses.

There are at least two dead-tree manuals other than the hyperspec; CLtL2 and the book by Franz.

Nearly all your documentation reading will be done within your development environment anyway.
Apple was almost forced to create the iPhone, though: much of it's access came from the iPod, but phones were getting better and better at playing music, too.
What you mean is it allows me to check it my friends watch porn without clearing their history or using private browsing mode. So basically it allows me to check if my friends have a computer that no one else uses.
Not all of them have been backported, but basically anything that says it's been contributed by Collin Winter or Jeffrey Yaskinn is something that's been backported.
If you need the support I would go with rackspace. If you dont need help AWS is better IMHO.
Logic and rational comparisons are not welcome in the PR world.
Huh! I did not know that. Re: the 10k access problem, that would completely negate the use of the API for enterprise sites, would it not? When I wrote the post, I said that enterprise would be the most likely users, too.

Not everything Google releases is a gem; disappointing to know that actual users of GWO aren't impressed.
Sysfunboost.sh: More fun with your linux system
Darn, I thought the movements were calculated to take gravity, momentum, and friction into account, thus keeping the cans stationary. There has to be a better or more succinct term for this phenomenon -- centrifugal or centripetal force is involved, surely.
"Microsoft will still make more money from Windows7 than Apple makes form selling computers. They made more from Vista than Apple makes."

Probably true, but it may be closer than you think. According to Yahoo, AAPL had $4.8 billion in profit. According to MSFT's annual report, Windows profit was $10 billion. Some of that is XP sales, so lets say $8 billion for Vista. It took Microsoft 5 years to make Vista, and Apple easily cranks out new versions on gorgeous hardware and makes 50% of Vista's profit. Plus, the Windows sales derivative is flat to negative, while Apple's is steeply positive. Microsoft may be making tons of money, but from a business perspective, Apple is a better business.
Rackspace is tough to beat for customer service. Reliability is on par with Amazon in my experience. Are you just interested in cloud storage (S3 vs Cloud Files)? I went with Rackspace for Cloud Files because of the one-click Limelight CDN feature. Amazon S3 + CloudFront was more complicated to implement.
Because "Type foo = new SubType()" comes up approximately never.

Note, I did not say never. But don't give me a line about how you use it all the time. You don't. If you think you do, go grep over your code; you may think you do but I still bet you don't, it's probably a perceptual bias where you notice the exceptions out of proportion to their actual occurance. If you still pass that test, congratulations, I was wrong, you're one of the five people who do it all the time. You should probably stop, as something is probably very wrong with your design.

Meanwhile, optimizing the syntax for this case is a terrible optimization decision. That's the real problem, forcing literally millions (conservatively) of type annotations that are totally redundant.

"I've seen some brilliant code written in Java (If you steer well clear of 'enterprise' etc)."

You don't see the brilliant code that was never written because Java doesn't offer you the ability.

I also point to the "brilliant code" that isn't Java code at all, but compiler and bytecode hacks, which I suspect had you taken the time to mention some examples of "brilliant code" would have been in the list. That's not brilliance you can credit to Java, it's simply stuff that was so desirable it had to be done despite the fact Java didn't permit it.
I like static types, but I prefer "myShape = rectangle", with the most general applicable type (e.g. Shape) being inferred.
Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal explains it pretty well: http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20091007/a-windows-to-help-you-f...
If you want to use static types, you can't really argue against that syntax

Maybe before ML appeared in 1973... after that it's just Bondage and Discipline to repetitively declare non-machine types.
FYI, this needs git 1.6.5 to work properly (or at least newer than 1.6.0, I'm not sure which specific version)
My first thought was... boy, I hope their slogan is "Hidden App Crouching Tiger"

I'm wondering what sets this site apart from the other app review sites?

I think a lack in the market is a site that lists on sale applications. A lot of applications do one day or weekend sales. I hate it when my friends say, "Oh, did you get X for free when they had it on sale?" Well, I didn't know about it!
You're missing cognitive psychology. Due to risk aversion, people would rather pay a higher fixed price than a lower but variable price. Odlyzko has several papers on this topic: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html

It has also been argued that setting the marginal price of Internet traffic at zero encourages innovation, although this innovation is subsidized by the people who don't use it.

Also, metered pricing would impose extra costs on all the people infected with botnets or Skype supernodes since they'd have to either pay a high Internet bill or pay the Geek Squad to disinfect their computer.
New Windows Is a Lucky 7
A pretty technical article discussing the benefits and risks associated with owning the supply chain in hardware manufacture.

That sounds a lot more boring than the post actually is, though.
New York Times, still uncertain on charging, sets seven digital priorities
Alert: spoiler ahead. First you have to get beyond the abstract and 10 pages of dense material. The answer is 10^10^10^7, which is a pretty big number, even bigger that the 10^500 from string theory. Then they start applying simplifications, like the number of distinct universes, and the number that are observable locally. It is still a pretty big number.

If I apply their criteria that the universes be locally observable, I get a much smaller number. Our universe is probably much larger than the observable universe, so I get > 1.

Fooey, I was hoping to grab my laptop and a copy of the PDR, jump backwards 30 years, marry the other girl, and become filthy rich. These cosmologists just have to try a little harder.
This is a GREAT read. I love stories that get into the nitty gritty details. Sort of like Founders at Work. 100k users don't come out of nowhere. There's a lot that causes that and lots of tinkering. Figuring it out is great.
This is potentially pretty big news. While this means that we'll probably see blazingly fast/cool implementations, Python as a laboratory for language innovation is coming to an end.
(1) is easily solvable given enough political will; a federal program funding medical loans in exchange for N years of post-education service in particular hospital systems.

There are successful models for this in use in the army (both at the level of things like ROTC and also at the level of becoming a doctor-for-the-army); if the federal government's role in healthcare expands a program like this producing physicians for "general service" is entirely reasonable.

(2) is correct in principle but without firmer #s it is hard to say if it's materially limiting.

A look at an actual chart is revealing:

http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/charts1982to2007.pdf

...page #3 (as printed on the page) has a matriculation chart:

- in the 1982-3 period 16,597 students matriculated

- in the 2006-7 period 17,759 students matriculated

...which is ~7% increase of 20 years.

The last page has a graduation chart which is similarly flat.

By comparison, the # of full-time fall enrollees at degree-granting institutions:

- in 1982: 7,220,618

- in 2007: 11,269,892

...which is a ~50% increase over 20 years ( cf http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_188.asp ). I've omitted part-timers as largely irrelevant wrt the # of future medical school students.

Now it's possible that:

- there's been a nearly-constant supply of students enrolled in college each year who are interested in and capable of becoming physicians

- ...almost the entire 50% increase in student enrollment has been in students uninterested in medicine and/or incapable of becoming competent physicians

...but that extreme of a shift seems rather unlikely.

What seems more likely is that medical schools have decided to hold class sizes mostly constant over the years, with a slight upward trend (which I'd wager is mostly accounted for by the opening of new medical schools over those decades, not by increased class size at existing institutions).

If that scenario pans out -- that the pool of qualified candidates is larger than the current matriculants -- than while your point (2) is a limit on how far the supply of physicians can be increased it wouldn't be the case that we're necessarily close to that limit..
About damn time. I wrote a post about these guys and their ilk on ReadWriteWeb a couple weeks ago, and I really can't condone their practice of charging startups to pitch, ESPECIALLY for very early-stage companies.
Nooke eReader... Nookie Reader...

Call me immature, but isn't it rather silly?
Works on 1.6.1 but you need to change the %Cyellow to something else, this version only supports red,green and blue
Skin Cancer, The Changes Needed To Achieve A Permanent Cure
Skin cancer is a malignant growth on the skin which can have many causes. Skin cancer generally develops in the epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, so a tumor is usually clearly visible.
See also: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/10/2...
I installed the Beta version of Win7, and am running the Release Candidate now. The visible improvements are minor evolutionary things that won't sound huge, but lead to a generally faster and better experience.

Like Vista, it has the search bar built into the start menu. The taskbar is improved - you can pin icons onto it in a way that makes them easy to click and load into. It speeds things up quite a lot for commonly used things. The Taskbar also uses icons now instead of words, which works surprisingly well.

There's a new library feature where anything you save in different folders can be viewable in the same library. So, you can have all your financial spreadsheets organized by month in each folder, and then have a library that shows them all next to each other. For people that do certain kinds of work with lots of files and folders, this is a godsend. For instance, people who take a lot of pictures can have all the pictures feed into one library - makes it much easier to find things instead of hunting for them.

There's some added security which is good, and they stripped out their bloat. It loads fast and doesn't lag. Crashes less. There's some other under the hood improvements. It's a solid OS overall, I quite enjoy using it. You get all the benefits that Vista had, new benefits, and performance is comparable to XP. Not sure about the status on drivers - I've had a couple older games not work, so that sucks. If you run some slightly more obscure and older hardware and software that runs on XP, you might not want to upgrade to 7. If you're using a more mainstream set of applications, Windows 7 is fantastic.
"(This is one of the reason that the Lisp community uses reader macros so sparingly.)"

And why Rich Hickey chose to reserve reader macros for his own exclusive use (as language designer in chief) in Clojure.
One of the authors, John Baez, has been blogging since before the concept existed. If you're interested in these kinds of topics his _This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics_ is an amazing resource -- even more amazing that it's usually accessible to those of us who aren't professional physicists.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html
Just so we stay on point here, I am only talking about NEW vaccines here. I support ones that have been established.

Well, evidence to one particular story comes to mind:

"Still, as observed by a participant in the immunization program, the vaccine killed more Americans than the disease did."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_flu#1976_U.S._outbreak
But everytime you write to it every byte in the volume will change and dropbox will have to resync the whole file.
Startup Visa Update - Lord of the Visa
The Start Visa is starting to boil. Check out this comedic Lord of the Rings rundown on the movement. Entrepreneurs are Hobbits!?! Brad Feld is Aragorn?!?
Interesting about the mercury. The CDC site, under "who should get the shot," states pregnant women as #2 on the list.
That's a recent change - it used to be very difficult to get academic staff into the US, even for international research programs.
It's why a lot of international scientific projects aren't head quartered in the US anymore.
A Multidisciplinary Approach to Mathematics (pdf)
Useless x 2, reminds me of:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/2330/saturday-night-live-the-herli...
Bing does Twitter
Rackspace is great for customer service. However, feels like we've paid them way too much over the years...

Amazon S3 rocks! We've moved everything over to them - except a billion emails still sitting with Rackspace...
It's pretty slow compared to Twitter's own search. I'm seeing 9 minute index times.
I wonder if they evaluated AMQP...
Oh, YES! This would give me a chance to catch up. :-)
Hmmm...didn't know that - I guess we need to say we support male Boobies too for h Startups For A Cure - check it out...http://blog.vidli.com/startups-for-a-cure/
FWIW, Twitter seems to be on top of the arms race right now. A little while back I was getting 3-4 spam followers/@-replies a day; over the past few weeks, though, I've had exactly two.
Well, keyword substitution doesn't imply a change in syntax, though it's about as asinine I have to believe.
"Uses 1/10 the memory" would have been much easier to parse.
Fedora 12 Beta Released
Good Times Ahead for VC-backed Tech Companies?
Someone asked why we haven't updated our homepage in 3 years (and the significance of that) and if I could speak to that. The comment got deleted before I could respond, so I'll just create a new thread.

It's partially covered in the article. The first year, we were still do consulting work, so we barely spent any time on Carbonmade. And then in the second year, we were working on a second product that never saw the light of day. And now in the third year, we're focused on Carbonmade exclusively and nearly ready to release the new version.

Here's what I learned from running a company for three years without any update to the product: Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do. (Granted, you need a pretty solid product.) During the first year we were really bad with emails and responding to our customers around the Net. We practically ignored everyone and everything. We just didn't have the time. Then in year two, I began to take customer support very seriously. I'd respond to peoples emails within minutes (when I could) and within hours 90% of the time. You literally can take a look at our graphs and see a HUGE uptick in signups/paid sign ups/customer retention within a month of responding to emails.

I also went back through at least 6 months of old emails that we had simply archived away and responded to everyone explaining how sorry we were for not giving them good support and answering their questions. I wrote everyone individually and got a lot of "it's no problem, I'm happy that you're spending the time to do so now." It really impacted our brand a lot and we saw a lot of people begin to respond with emails like: "Wow, you guys responded faster than I've ever been responded to before. You're so great. Thanks so much for your service. I'm telling all my friends."

Also, around this time I chose to treat all customers equally no matter if they were paying or if they weren't. I figured -- and you'd think this was obvious -- that spending a few extra minutes to treat free customers well will make them more likely to upgrade and actually costs less (in time and money) than going out and finding new customers. This turned out to be very successful. I can point to hundreds of emails from free customers that upgraded after hearing back from a "real person who was kind and helpful".

Good customer service is king and really turned our product around.

(Thanks for reading my rant.)
or, reduce project complexity, to make it easy to judge the outcome of his work.

complexity is evil.
Checkout NIMBY in Oakland. Not sure if there are places in Menlo Park or nearby that are similar or not.
That's why I think Google has the long-term winner here. Open source makes all sorts of innovation possible.
I think the lists feature is awesome. I have a certain fixation with using Lists to structure things by purpose. ie- Apps that help with gardening or in a different sense: Places to go in Miami for Steak, Where To Buy HDTVs Online. Lists define purpose and I think there's something to be had with that in regards to navigating the product space.

On the flip side, I don't know if you need to have all apps there. The problem isn't search when it comes to iPhone Apps (or the product space), but it's more so discovery. What happens when there's TOO much information and you don't know what you want?