mcn

Another issue is old books. I recently got value out of PAIP and On Lisp, and I still see people recommend A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. Stepping beyond CL for a second, car and cdr have even deeper roots; for example if someone is introduced to the wider lisp-like world through SICP they will also have to become comfortable with car and cdr.

I think another factor is that while the primitives for modifying readtables made it into the standard, an interface for using them in a way that limits the changes to the code you own (and not, say, additional libraries you load) is something that the users had to come up with.

It's not a lot of code or too complex to do that, but it's not obvious either and some people got it wrong or do it differently and I think that made reader modifications less common than they otherwise might have been.

I haven't looked too closely at the details but some of cl21's changes look like they might try to address this issue.

I agree with you and lispm about the complexity of code walking in CL.

For your specific example of replacing calls to foo with another bit of code you may be able to get away with macrolet. (Example: http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap5.html#sec_4 )

The MIT 2005 Introduction to Algorithms course is available.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

> we’re also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger

As you are doing this, please keep in mind that when you incorrectly broaden my query, and there is no immediately obvious way to re-narrow it, it costs you much more than you gain each time you correctly broaden my query.

I found that one to be powerful, but double edged. It's unpleasant to remember that ad when researching a serious situation that is likely to have a negative outcome.

>Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments.

That is not the primary reason that I want points back. I believe that allowing people to signal their opinion with public upvotes discouraged redundant posts, and that visible upvotes encouraged participants to let their arguments stand rather than creating unnecessarily deep threads.

A secondary issue is that votes were a valuable part of the signal in many "Ask HN" threads.

Thanks for the quick response, and thanks for adding the note to the documentation.

(As to the quicklisp version being a bit stale, it looks like the last CFFI tagged release is 13 months old. I updated my above post to point to the official git repository.)

I'm looking forward to playing with this.

If you run into the following while installing:

"Unknown Grovel syntax: CFFI-GROVEL::BITFIELD"

You may need to download the git version of CFFI[1]. The 0.10.6 CFFI release doesn't have bitfield grovel support.

[1] http://common-lisp.net/gitweb?p=projects/cffi/cffi.git

I hit the above bug using what I believe was the latest quicklisp distributed version of CFFI.

Edit: Point to the official CFFI git instead of a fork and a patch.

Thank you for that; I recently tried to find out how he implemented his 30 second distraction-delay but I had misattributed the quote and so my search was unsuccessful. I think that the delay is a powerful idea.

The approach I'm experimenting with is a "productivity mode" toggle in a tiling windows manager which disables most of the windows manager commands, leaving me mostly stuck in whatever application(s) were already visible until I toggle it off. The toggle off function has a 30 second delay.

Keep in mind that the 1% margin of error applies to the measurements of the conversion rates. The 29% has a significantly higher margin of error.

There is a "dead" answer in this thread that you might be interested in too. (You can activate showdead in your profile.)

I've noticed an increase in posts reiterating each other: it seems that the wrong kind of post is being used as a substitute good for the wrong kind of upvote. For that reason I would like to see voting made public again.

I think the lack of timeless* articles in content streams -- HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc. -- is a serious problem. I'm imagining a middle-ground between a subreddit and a longform.org for the topics I'm interested in, and think that would be a significant improvement.

The "essays" format or similar can do a decent job of funneling me towards timeless content once I am on a site looking for it (see Peter Norvig's webpage for another example), but it really doesn't address the stream issue.

Good luck with your tweeting experiment.

*I'm really thinking of something weaker than timelessness: worthwhile over a matter of years, at least.

Someone (sorry for not noting your name) suggested dimming/graying the parentheses in lisp modes and gave this elisp snippet to do it. I find that I prefer reading lisp with dimmed parentheses.

(defface paren-face '((((class color) (background dark)) (:foreground "grey20")) (((class color) (background light)) (:foreground "grey70"))) "Face used to dim parentheses.")

(add-hook 'scheme-mode-hook (lambda () (font-lock-add-keywords nil '(("(\\|)" . 'paren-face)))))

I also came across a blog post[1] which includes a slightly more complete solution.

http://briancarper.net/blog/492/

Agreed. It appears that she was averaging a $4k+/day bill -- it shouldn't take 4 months to notice that something is wrong with that.

Removing comment scores seems to have increased the amount of mediocre/poor comments around contested topics: I am noticing more more brother/sister comments that are basically reiterating each other and more debates that veer to uncontrollable levels of indentation when the key points were already covered in the top level post and first child.

The relative absence of these black holes of discussion is one of the things that brought me to HN in the first place, and I think that showing comment scores discouraged them on multiple levels. Public upvoting lets people express their view on the topic without posting points similar to those already expressed. When two comments have a lopsided point spread it lets one "side" of the debate feel more comfortable letting the other have the last word.

One consequence of the parenthesis and prefix notation is that n-ary operators are idiomatic in lisps. So, the above example would more likely be written:

(print (++ a " " b " " c " "))

If my junior high and high school curriculum didn't even make it through precalculus after the typical six years of dedicated math courses, often featuring nightly homework, I would probably wretch at the mention of math too.

I suspect that your students had already learned that they weren't going to use the covered material, even within subsequent math classes -- by being taught the same material year after year.

Emacs could be a stumbling block, but you don't need to learn lisp to use org mode. I initially ran into the same problem of getting to the point where I could follow a tutorial, so here's a 2 minute quick start. The next paragraph guides you through making your first org outline, and should leave you with the tip of the iceberg and a snorkel.

Once you have org installed, hit "Control-x f" to open/create a file, and name one "orgtest.org". Type "* first header" -- if it doesn't turn blue, type "alt-x org-mode" to turn on org-mode. Now type "alt-enter", then hit tab a few times -- it should change the number of stars (level of indentation). Leave it with two stars. Type "take dog to park" on that line, now hit "control-c control-t" several times. It should cycle through a todo/done tag. Hit a regular enter this time, and type "remember your frisbee". Type "control-c control-s"; a calender should pop up, click on tomorrow's date. Now type shift-tab a few times and watch the outline fold/unfold.

Note that the date line and TODO tag are plain text, as is the entire .org file. It could be helpful to think of org-mode as a code editor and interpreter for org markup.

I believe the above should take you to the point where you can follow org-mode tutorials and reference material, although if you decide to really dive in you should probably take some time to learn emacs as well.

One morning I noticed that stories had been coming in at over one per minute for an hour, so that the front two new pages only contained about 30 minutes worth of submissions each. The great majority of them had not been voted on.

The stories are coming in even faster right now, but there seems to be more people checking them out.

I don't think that the goal here is to degrade public education; one of the main attractions with this incubator is that it has connections to get your product into public schools.

Didip replied to you but his reply is "dead." I think his first word might have caused his post to get caught by a filter so I've reposted what he said but changed that word.

>Didip said: [500 error solved]. I knew that 3am new feature addition is not a good idea =) UPDATE: yeah, two clicks bug me as well. The technical reason is that often times i want to bookmark a few images on that page. To do that (the most convenient way), is to save the image, onclick() event when the bookmarklet menu appears. Sorry, I'd love to have 1 click bookmarklet as well. If the UI makes sense, I'll make the simpler bookmarklet.

This is from the same Erann Gat (aka Ron Garret) who wrote the popular lisp at the JPL essay[1], and it covers some of the same ground.

His last point, that lisp can and should be improved, is one that he makes periodically. There's a barrier to some improvements to Common Lisp caused by the fact that the standard has been long closed and doesn't look like it will be reopened, but there have been improvement in areas that are outside of the standard.

For example both Ron's extended post and the previous hn discussion of this post note the pain of finding and installing lisp libraries. Quicklisp beta was recently released which relieves a significant amount of that pain.

[1]http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

Edit: I noticed this in the previous posting of this thread:

Ron> For the record, I did not submit this article, and specifically declined a request to do so. It's not that I don't stand by what I wrote (I do) but it was written for a specific audience at a specific time and I don't think it deserves the attention that it's getting now.

...

akkartik> I noticed. http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-programming-lang... Thanks.

You can find his more data-focused writing here -- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=7387...

IANAL, but the DMCA includes a ban on circumventing access controls. Recently exceptions to this ban were issued, allowing people to jailbreak their iphones. Unfortunately the broadest exceptions were limited to "telephone handsets."

The summary of the exception with respect to video games said this:[1]

>(4) Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities, if:

>>(i) The information derived from the security testing is used primarily to promote the security of the owner or operator of a computer, computer system, or computer network; and

>>(ii) The information derived from the security testing is used or maintained in a manner that does not facilitate copyright infringement or a violation of applicable law.

[1]http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2010/Librarian-of-Congress-120...

I like it. I would love to see the comments without having to click through to hacker news or stack overflow.

Their two day class, right? I'm a fan of that also; it quickly gets you to a level where you can do basic things and lookup slightly more complex things. http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ind...

My strongly preferred solution to this problem is to search for the desired media by using a keyword, like "!images cat".

I'm not aware of a way to do this from within google, which creates an odd situation: setting my default search to duckduckgo increases google's usability.

If you want to argue that policies which reduce income inequality should be repealed it could be an interesting essay.

Arguing against a "goal of total [income] equality" wouldn't be as interesting though: pushing for total income equality is not a mainstream policy position.