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interhack.net

16 pointsparenthesis12 comments

There's a fine line between madness and genius, and as far as I can tell, this seems to be exactly on the line. I think I might have to download the source...

Madness and genius actually form an intersecting Venn diagram. This falls squarely in the middle.

I actually worked for two summers at Interhack, so I found it interesting to see a link to their site here. The founder (Matt Curtin) is a really cool guy who teaches a Lisp course for one quarter a year at OSU (that's how I got the job). Matt had a hand in cracking the DES and wrote a book about it called Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard.

Unfortunately, Interhack does a lot of computer forensic stuff that has human-intensive requirements. Because of his work, Matt is considered an expert for the purposes of court testimony, and he spends much of his time working on and testifying in computer forensic evidence cases, rather than hacking in Lisp as I'm sure he would prefer to be doing.

Don't get me wrong... his company is doing great. They just got an entire floor in a 12-story office building built to their specifications, they worked on a high-profile case last year for the state of Ohio lost tape archive incident, and they have somewhere around ten full-time employees. I just wish he (and the company itself) had some time to show off his programming chops in something other than internal software.

You know, I'm really not usually too picky about this stuff, but I have to say, this is an extreme example (for me, at least) of presentation overwhelming content - I started to read that page, and the combination of the font size, the layout, and (mainly) the color scheme literally made me dizzy within seconds. I actually can't get through it, the text starts to pulsate on the page as I look at it and it's so distracting that I can't parse the content.

Maybe a great product, maybe even something revolutionary, but in all likelihood I'll never find out because of the website's color scheme.

It's funny, I'd always heard that white-on-black was considered bad design, but up until now I never really understood what "they" meant by that...

Same here. But (in Firefox) View..Page Style..No Style takes care of it.

I think it's a matter of preference. My Emacs is set up with an off-white font and a fairly dark background, and, under most sources of light, it tires me out less than the glow of white backgrounds.

In any case, that page is just text. Copy and paste it into a text editor and read it. It's a pretty clever idea, and I'll definitely keep it in the back of my mind for those times that I spend hacking C++.

Color preferences are a strange beast. I use green on black in emacs, and white on black in terminal windows and I'm pretty happy with things that way. But I have a terrible time reading webpages with any dark background. Wish I knew why.

I see this complaint all the time, and it's really annoying. It's just a matter of opinion. I program in vim with light-colored text on a black background. For the longest time, I used the compiz window manager so that I could invert the color of my Firefox window so that web pages would have light text on dark backgrounds.

I'm betting that the real issue is alternating from one to the other. If you spend all your time looking at dark on light and then try to switch, I can see how it could be an issue. But the opposite is also true. At least light text on a dark background has another good thing going for it... you're not staring at what is effectively a light bulb.

Either way, can we please stop talking about this? At least half of the submissions that lead to such a page have a comment like this. It comes off as complaining and laziness, since if you really wanted to read it, you can simply highlight the text, use copy-paste, or any number of other solutions (the "No Style" suggestion was a good one).

No: it's bad design, and it should be eliminated.

Reminds of pg on Viaweb: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99143

Where is the REPL?

Don't be so demanding. :) The library has a couple of debugger hooks, though. Not as good as a REPL, but way better than what you normally have to deal with in C++ and gdb.

Check out the sample code in the source distribution. The 'let' type hack the author uses makes this some of the most readable C++ I've seen. The same thing with templates would've been either a forest of angle brackets or required a boatload of typedefs which the reader would have had to constantly refer back to.

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