Twitter Display Guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://dev.twitter.com/pages/display_guidelines

<comment><USER2> It's ironic to me that on a page discussing display guidelines, the numbers inside of the red circles overlaying the screenshot are not x/y centered. It's annoying me, I want to fix it :(

Anyhoot, on the topic, it would be nice if Twitter would give you a special .png image that's generated on the fly or something by the server, for a tweet. Like embedding a youtube video, but simpler. Like add .png to the basic tweet_detail URL to get an image of it.

Example: <http://twitter.com/whalesalad/status/14450770448> Could be: <http://twitter.com/whalesalad/status/14450770448.png>

Of coures this presents a whole new can of worms for the Twitter team... but it would be nice :) There might even be a way to do it where you can't hotlink it, but you can download the file and host it yourself.

A real life example of this occurs when hitting up speedtest.net. Once you're finished, you're given a simple link to share on forums, with friends, etc.. to a generated image of your results. (<http://www.speedtest.net/result/822174957.png>)

<comment><USER3> Embeddable tweets do this? Not as straightforward, but: <http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/>

<comment><USER2> Ahh that's pretty elite too. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title says "Guidelines" but the page itself calls them "REQUIREMENTS" and says you have to email Twitter for approval if you want to deviate from them.

If it's really their intention to enforce this on all Twitter API users, then I think it's a huge mistake.

</comment><comment><USER5> Notice how point #3 says hashtags should be linked, but in their reference image the #TweetUp hashtag isn't linked.

</comment><comment><USER6> I might be hypersensitive here, but my first thought is "is it time to jump ship"?

I refer to the "Branding" section - for the first time Twitter makes it clear who owns the Tweets in their opinion. And it is Twitter, not the users.

Bummer :-(

(Speaking as a developer of Twitter apps)

<comment><USER7> This has nothing to do with who owns the tweets. Rather it's an indication that Twitter want to make it easy for people to recognize a tweet across the web.

<comment><USER6> They determine how I am allowed to display the Tweet. That just plain sucks. For me it is a biggie.

If Twitter wouldn't own the Tweets, how could they make the rules for the way I am allowed to display them?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps as a condition of API usage?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So for example what Panic is doing [1] would not be ok and in need of approval? Twitter sure has some fascists working on their branding, I'm not really sure whether that's good or bad, though.

[1] <http://www.panic.com/blog/>

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not exactly sure how this helps Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER11> The one nit I've always had is whether third-party apps/sites link the @ symbol when attached to usernames. I prefer unlinked @ symbols (as seen on twitter.com site), but even so, search.twitter.com links the @ symbol... how consistent.

<comment><USER12> search.twitter.com is still a separate app all-together (purchased from I-don't-remember-whom). Twitter officially intends to roll it into the rest of their internal apps and API at some point. You're right, it is inconsistent, but at least there is some sort of excuse.

<comment><USER11> Well yes, I know. They acquired Summize well over a year ago, and it would probably be a one-line code change. It's probably not a high priority issue for them, but it still bothers me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This page was a very pleasant surprise find when they introduced dev.twitter.com at Chirp in April. I don't like that most Twitter clients reinvent the wheel in terms of UI. A little consistency and familiarity doesn't hurt.

</comment><comment><USER14> So uh my little Chrome extension I made has to do all this shit? Uh fuck that, thank you very much. I'd rather just delete the extension. What a bunch of bullshit.</comment>


Tim Cook:  Next generation of children 'will not know what money is' - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/shopping-and-consumer-news/11989595/Apple-boss-Next-generation-of-children-will-not-know-what-money-is.html <comment><USER2> Because they won't have any...

HN: the title should really be money --> currency which is what Tim is really saying.</comment>


Ex-Employee left me without access to Facebook Page - <AUTHOR>

We had a former employee who set-up two Facebook pages for my company. After he left we were not able to retrieve the passwords or user account info from them. Without info to reset the passwords how do I gain control of the pages? If there is not option for reset what is the process to submit a DMCA take-down request? These pages are being controlled by someone other than the corporation whose copyrights the pages display. <comment><USER2> You don't have that former employees contact info? Or is it that they're unwilling to help you?

They just have to add your facebook login email address to the admin page.</comment>


D.E.A. Says Hondurans Opened Fire During a Drug Raid. Video Suggests Otherwise - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/world/americas/drug-enforcement-agency-dea-honduras.html <comment><USER2> Strange that they got a quote from the lady that operated the victim boat, but couldn't get her to explain why they practically rammed the DEA boat. Maybe they just didn't see the other boat because it was dark?

<comment><USER3> "The passengers and pilot on the civilian boat would later say they were terrified by the helicopters and did not intend to steer toward the canoe containing the law enforcement agents."

Sounds like they made a mistake and it sounds like the DEA agents mistakingly killed them for it and then claimed to have been shot at to cover up the civilian death toll. Obviously none of us were there and even if we were it is unlikely that our recollection would be more accurate than a video recording.</comment></comment>


Eventually, An Update Will Make Google News Not Suck At Tech News, Right? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/16/google-news-tech-section-is-a-joke/ <comment><USER2> > _"Rumors of Apple secret launch for 10th anniversary of Apple Stores. Hot > story? Yep. Bullshit? Maybe, but judging from the smoke surrounding this, > probably not. Regardless, it's something everyone wants to know about. And > yet, it's story number nine on Google News, waaaaay below the fold."_

Perhaps they use an algorithm which doesn't place a high priority on blogged rumors because they are using "news" in the journalistic sense.</comment>


Gimp with task-based interface customizations - <AUTHOR> http://www.adaptablegimp.org/w/Welcome_to_AdaptableGIMP

<comment><USER2> A few thoughts:

1) Great for tutorials... If it only had examples to go along with the steps.

2) Horrible for actual usage. The search and selection take up way too much screen real estate, and the step-by-step box is even worse.

3) Since it's not in the official client, you have to rely on them to bring in all the official updates. It would be better if this were somehow a plugin instead.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.

Making it a plugin will also ensure that the classic toolbox is still available. That way, a novice user can quickly become proficient in GIMP.

<comment><USER2> Judging by the video, I'm pretty sure the classic toolbox was still available... But you still had that search stuff above it.

<comment><USER3> Yes but as you said earlier, it has taken up way too much screen real estate and it's not at all intuitive. Making it a plugin will retain the classic GIMP intact as well as one doesn't need to install a separate GIMP client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.adaptableg...](http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.adaptablegimp.org/w/Welcome_to_AdaptableGIMP)

:(

Anyone got a cache or mirror ?

<comment><USER5> Haven't seen the site, but there seems to be a blog:

<http://adaptablegimp.blogspot.com/>

and a Youtube video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP8c2R8YEb4>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the kind of stuff that Gimp needs instead of playing catch-up with PS.

</comment><comment><USER7> Good idea.</comment>


Black, Hot 'Superionic' Ice May Be Nature's Most Common Form of Water - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-hot-superionic-ice-may-be-natures-most-common-form-of-water-20190508/ <comment><USER2> Article:

> They squeezed a droplet of room-temperature water between the pointy ends of > two cut diamonds. By the time the pressure raised to about a gigapascal, > roughly 10 times that at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the water had > transformed into a tetragonal crystal called ice VI. By about 2 gigapascals, > it had switched into ice VII, a denser, cubic form transparent to the naked > eye that scientists recently discovered also exists in tiny pockets inside > natural diamonds.

Actual paper:

> Double-distilled, deionized water was loaded in diamond anvil cells (DACs) > with 200×200μm quartz plates either 15 or 30μm thick and four ruby > microspheres, then compressed at room temperature to 2.5GPa to form ice VII.

A great example of science journalism translating technical language into vernacular.

<comment><USER3> Let's hope they don't get to ice IX.

<comment><USER4> I suppose that's when the cat falls of out its cradle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't help but read it supersonic ice but either way that is pretty cool stuff. The idea of an face centered cubic oxygen structure with hydrogen nuclei swimming around in it as charge carriers is pretty wild.

Seems the only thing left to do there is to collapse a magnetic field around it and see if you can get the hydrogen nuclei to fuse.

<comment><USER6> I got superironic ice. I wasn't sure what that was. Extra edgy?

<comment><USER7> Given its crystalline structure, it's actually less edgy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool to see essentially a reverse metal. One where protons rather than electrons are free.

</comment><comment><USER9> Available soon at the Sharper Image. I'm not kidding, someone will figure out a way to market this to people who have more money than sense (or taste).

<comment><USER10> Not sure how you would drink something with the pressure of 2 GPa..

<comment><USER11> Slowly, then all at once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what happens, at the same pressure, as the temperature drops. Maybe a new form?

<comment><USER13> There is a nice diagram on this page:

        http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_phase_diagram.html

<comment><USER12> Thanks. From the Nature paper cited in TFA:[0]

> Here we use laser-driven shockwaves to simultaneously compress and heat > liquid water samples to 100–400 gigapascals and 2,000–3,000 kelvin.

And in the phase diagram that you cited, it stays at ice XVIII over the whole temperature range.

0) [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1114-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1114-6)</comment></comment></comment>


Jason Scott: "Here's some thoughts, before Patreon dies." - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1230184047982366724 <comment><USER2> Patreon signed its own death warrant when it started censoring certain artists and creatives it deemed to be "unacceptable". Throughout history the most creative and interesting ideas have frequently been on the edge of what's considered morally or socially acceptable at a given point in time (think Oscar Wilde). Yes, you will end up with some very despicable people on your site if you don't practice censorship, but you'll also end up with some very exciting ones, and even some that are both despicable and existing. Creativity and censorship cannot live side by side.

<comment><USER3> I have to seriously laugh at the idea of comparing Oscar Wilde, a gay dandy in Victorian England to the few racists that patreon has thrown off its platform. But I guess comparing the worst corners of the internet to great historical artists is worth an attempt.

Either way I'm not really sure where the death talk is coming from because patreon seems to be doing fine.

<comment><USER4> They did also crack down on erotica a couple years back, but I thought they'd walked that back in some fashion. I do agree that the comment you're replying to is likely to be a dog-whistle for cracking down on racists.

Anyway, there is news from the last day about Patreon setting up "Patreon Capital" where they offer loans to creators. I suppose the extrapolation is that they're doing this because their existing (useful-to-the-world) business isn't profitable enough for their VCs.

<comment><USER5> The argument/extrapolation I've been hearing has more to do that Patreon maybe couldn't be trusted as "Patreon Capital" is a business model of known predators ("Pay-Day Loans" aka "Loan Sharks"). Whether or not Patreon needed to do it to make their VCs happier with their business model or if they thought the new business model would be more profitable or as their PR seems to imply they just thought it would a useful feature intended to help their "Creators", it smells like an escalation (to possibly "mob boss") in Patreon's relationship with their "Creators" and the "Creators" _may_ be likely to bolt from distrust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Patreon should use VC dough to buy Opera back from Chinese. Opera has this whole mobile micro 800% APR loans with blackmail thing figured out, and as a bonus they get a modern web browser!

[https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/21/opera-predatory- loa...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/21/opera-predatory-loans/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Does Patreon prohibit its creators from offering subscriptions elsewhere? If I was a creator, I'd create my own subscription service on my own site and offer the same subscription packages at lower prices. Patrons benefit by getting the same content at a lower price, and I benefit by cutting out the middleman.

</comment><comment><USER8> I got a Ko-fi Gold subscription to help build up alternatives. They're trying to get by on subscriptions, but seem to do okay. I like to think all my patrons would switch over if Patreon blew up, but I know how much it matters that they already had Patreon accounts.

</comment><comment><USER9> Venture capitalists are vampires. I'd only ever work at a company beholden to them with the assumption that it'll be a short-term affair of learning, saving, and "good snacks". There's no way in hell I'd let them anywhere near one of my own ideas that I had any faith in at all.

<comment><USER10> I think VCs are good for "gamble" companies where if you miss your medium term goals you can be happy chopping the assets up for parts.

If it's a business you want to see through to the end, through thick and thin, then you basically need your VC's to be founder-level personal compatibility. Which narrows the available pool of money A LOT.

You can also take VC if you can bootstrap through product market fit and only take money during the growth phase, and you can stop after one round. I.e. you are already profitable, you want to take debt to do capital expenditures, and you can turn off the CapEx and go back to profitability after you spend the VC money.

Patreon seems to have gotten addicted to financing very early, which is a very weak position to negotiate from, and hampers your ability to make decisions that benefit the long term health of the company.

<comment><USER9> Maybe it's selection bias, but it seems like every "successful" VC-backed startup I read about ends up destroying what could've been a profitable core product and burning itself up out of the sheer growth-pressure imposed upon it by investors. Dozens of what could have been sustainable small businesses, crumpled up and thrown in the bin because they couldn't achieve ludicrous unicorn growth. That's not good for the economy.

The "quit after round 1" idea makes sense, though.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who is seeking co-developer? - <AUTHOR> List your project/startup-idea if you want a developer/programmer/engineer to join your project/startup.
Edit:
Please mention if you are open to remote co-developer. <comment><USER2> I am the creator of Makely ([https://makely.me](https://makely.me)).

It's a platform that connects users to 3D printing enthusiasts and hobbyists.

It's a self funded, solo project. I would absolutely _love_ to have another dev or business minded individual to help me. Working alone is difficult in more ways than just managing the workload.

In any case, I am well aware that finding someone will be near impossible given that I can't afford to pay anyone full-time, hell, even part-time. But if you are interested despite all that then you can drop me an email (see my profile)

The stack is: ReactJS (+ Redux), Python backend (Flask), PostgreSQL and some AWS services.</comment>


Anatomy of an (un)fundable startup - <AUTHOR> http://venturehacks.com/articles/unfundable-startup?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+venturehacks+%28Venture+Hacks%29

<comment><USER2> Also, don't have been in business long.

If you bootstrap, quietly doubling year after year, remaining profitable or break even, then decide the market is now ready for what you do so it's time to go big ... you likely won't get funded. You've proven ability at the wrong model, when investors want a blowout. A lack of history lets you sell the exponential growth story. History makes them ask why you didn't already have it.</comment>


Ask YC: I started learning Lisp and I'm looking for some advice. - <AUTHOR> Hello all. Let me give you a brief background of myself, its important to the post, I promise.
I am a graduate with a CS degree. I didn't really get into programming during college, I enjoyed it, but it wasn't my life like so many other students. I now am getting to the point where its becoming my life (in a good way). I feel like I am really behind in certain areas and no matter what I do, I can't seem to break this barrier and step it up to the next level. I was taught C++ in college but haven't used it once since. I got a job as a web programmer and now work using mainly PHP and Javascript.
I have wanted to take my abilities to the next level for some time but I didn't know how. A friend of mine wanted to start programming so we decided to learn a language together. We narrowed it down to Python or Lisp.  I am now learning Lisp and enjoying it, but I don't know how to proceed. It seems every time I try to read a book, the basic stuff is too basic and the advanced stuff is too advanced. I'm in this limbo where I know enough to be a successful web programmer, but know almost nothing of real programming. The ramblings in this message should convey how upset I am with myself. I just don't get it.
I need some advice. I can't seem to find basic lisp projects to get me going. I have even tried to find home work problems on the web just to get something. Books seem to go from "here's a loop!" to "here's a bunch of stuff that we have never covered and now we are throwing it in!" I don't know how to move forward.
Any thoughts and advice would be most appreciated. <comment><USER2> Have you read Peter Siebel's "Practical Common Lisp"? [<http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/>] Its a great book to learn Lisp from IMO. The pace is just right (for me) and every chapter tackles a truly practical project. Its free online, so you don't have much to lose just to try it.

I have also heard really good things about PG's "On Lisp" [<http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html>]. Again, its free to download, so you don't have much to lose to try it.

Hope this helps.

<comment><USER3> "On Lisp" is excellent but is an advanced text; I would advise against it as a first book. PG's Ansi Common Lisp is pretty good and I use it as a quick reference before I go to The Common Lisp Reference.

<comment><USER4> It's an excellent text to be sure, but I wouldn't call it advanced. PCL was the the first real Lisp text I read, and I found it to be a superb introduction to the subject.

<comment><USER3> Just a clarification. I was referring to PG "On Lisp" as advanced. Not PCL. "On Lisp" is mostly about complex uses of macros. Hence the name -- programming "On" lisp instead of programming in lisp

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since you already have a CS degree, take a look at SICP (it's free online). Also, recognize that Javascript is pretty Lispy, and use it to write some kick ass code at work.

<comment><USER6> When he said the advanced stuff was too advanced I figured he was referring to SICP. When he said the basic stuff was too basic I thought he might have been referring to HTDP.

<comment><USER5> BRL is some kick ass code. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're pretty comfortable with your programming chops, want to get up and running quickly, or are planning to do "real-world" programming with Lisp, Practical Common Lisp (<http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/>) is great.

Personally, I loved learning Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) from from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/>), and since it's used to teach CS courses, you can find lots of exercises and project ideas online. If you don't mind a slower, more concept-based learning method, you can supplement your programming projects with this book.

</comment><comment><USER8> I recommend learning Scheme first. I found "Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days" to be very readable:

<http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just wanted to reply and thank everyone for their help. All of you gave me some great links and ideas. Pat your self on the back News.YC, you guys are about as nice and helpful a bunch as you can find on the internet. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER9> If your aim is web application, the best way to start may be to first choose your web server. We're using Portable Allegro serve even though it's not as full featured as we'd like. A full featured (but slower) webserver is Huchentoot - which would probably be an excellent choice for starting out. You could then learn lisp by creating a web app - the inductive approach. Also extremely helpful is lispdoc.com where you can run a search on anything lisp and get references to numerous web resources.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the pointer to lispdoc.com. Any idea why it doesn't find Seibel's unit testing chapter when I search for unit test (or +unit +test) (or (and unit test)) (or unit and test) (or "unit test")?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually wrote a couple of blog posts on this very topic for the O'Reilly Network which I still believe are probably one of the most extensive collections of links to free resources on the web for learning Lisp. You can read over them here ( part 1 - <http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/8397> and part 2 - <http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/8595>). Also, I've recently gotten back into lisp once again myself--although this time I am going the scheme route--and I am currently reading through R. Kent Dybvig's book The Scheme Programming Language and I'm finding it to be a truly excellent book and it is also free online here <http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/>. And of course make sure you take a look at the Arc tutorial (<http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt>) and the blog.arc and news.arc source code as they will have you up and running with a Lisp powered website in no time.

Anyway, good luck with your studies, I think the rewards are well worth the effort. I can honestly say no matter how long I've been away from lisp I always find myself going back and loving it even more each time.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm pretty much in the same boat as far as lisp and scheme. I've been reading The Little Schemer and The Scheme Programming language. Both have been really clear books and I've learned a lot from them both that I use at my day job programming PHP/javascript.

</comment><comment><USER13> The breakthrough for myself as a programmer came from intro CS classes....it may seem odd but I would still recommend going back to the core CS topics of data structures and algorithms, focusing on the implementation - on what kinds of language features might be used to implement these things, and how the language interacts with the hardware. Just pick a promising field of study - encryption, text processing, compression, search, whatever. Choose a common and well-understood algorithm in that field, do all the research you can, implement it, and then try writing something around it.

The key for me was to have some code of a non-trivial complexity to play with. This would be something that you would be willing to rewrite four or five times and really master. Having an interesting application in mind helps one get there, but one can often flip states between "interesting app" and "interesting problem" in programming.

It's not in vogue nowadays, but Knuth's Art of Computer Programming is chock- full of this kind of "programming exercise" and it makes a pretty good reference too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would suggest The Little Schemer to understand the concepts of Lisp/Scheme. I would read and digest this before any other lisp book. The book appears to be an easy read but it is not. Practical Common Lisp lives up to its name and has some very good examples/projects intermixed with lessons. Be prepared to spend a lot of time manipulating, breaking down and refactoring code (for macros use macroexpand-1). This is exactly what you need to do when you get that lost feeling. The best thing about lisp/scheme is that the interpreter is always available to you to test and environments like slime or allegro IDE which allow interaction between the editor and interpreter. Also checkout lispcast (<http://www.lispcast.com/>)

</comment><comment><USER14> I have not had that experience myself as I am pretty happy with the lisp books I have read. Maybe it's because I took lisp courses in undergrad, and then worked on projects where my figuring things out was driven by specific projects. I would recommend possibly a video course, and following like a real course, doing the work, and then coming up with a project where you apply it. Here is a free video course from MIT following the classic textbook, which is also available for free online [http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman- le...](http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I went through the same as you (except replace PHP with C#), so here's what I did. It echoes a lot of the thoughts mentioned already:

To learn "lispiness", functional programming, and get a feel for the computational approach to programming, read The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer. Also watch the SICP lectures ([http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman- le...](http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/)) and if you're ambitions, read the book (<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/>). Doing these things will help keep you from writing PHP in Lisp.

To put it into practical perspective and learn the nuts and bolts of modern common Lisp, read Practical Common Lisp (<http://www.gigagmonkeys.com/book>).

If you read PCL, you will run into Emacs and SLIME (the generally preferred [NO FLAMES, PLEASE. I KNOW VI IS AWESOME TOO] open source way to edit Lisp files). I wrote some resources to help with that:

[http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/public-beta- open-f...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/public-beta-open-for- ultimate-n00b-slimeemacs-cheat-sheet/)

[http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/reference-for- the-...](http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/reference-for-the- slimelispemacs-screencast/)

I'm surprised no one has mentioned PAIP (Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming). It's half AI book, half tutorial on Lisp programming and Lisp style. It's a good read with lots of example programs written in good Lisp Style.

There are three hurdles people usually run into when learning Lisp:

a) the language looks different - this goes away with practice and familiarity. It starts looking normal fast. The parentheses are a bit tough to manage unless you use a capable editor, which leads to:

b) Emacs is different - really powerful, fun to use, but it takes investment in learning. It's really tempting to quit when starting, but worth getting over the hump. Once you do that:

c) the way of thinking is different in Lisp - Lisp seems a little awkward to use until you get (don't need to master them, just get the idea) the following ideas: 1) code can be manipulated as data because the syntax is so simple, 2) creating your own syntax (using macros - code that writes code) means that you can express your program in a way that closely matches the problem you're trying to solve. Some good articles to help get these points are:

<http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html>

<http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html>

Don't worry if you don't get these "big picture" things at first, they click at some point and everything makes a lot more sense. You can speed that up by putting a lot more Lisp in your head in the meantime.

Good luck!

<comment><USER16> thank you! One of the best advices I've ever read on Lisp. Once again, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Common Lisp Directory has a list of online resources (tutorials, references, books, blogs, etc.) here: <http://www.cl- user.net/asp/tags/information>

</comment><comment><USER18> Have a look: [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and- Compute...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer- Science/6-001Spring-2005/Projects/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER19> Take a web application you like and rewrite it in Lisp. Or better yet, take one that you wrote in PHP and rewrite it in Lisp. Nothing else beats the knowledge you will gain working this way.

<comment><USER20> In order to truely benefit from this, you'd have to ensure you're not just translating the PHP into Lisp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Build something you've built before - just do it in Lisp. Read up on what others have recommended here as you go.</comment>


Apple Mac Pro review (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/23/5234574/apple-mac-pro-review-2013

<comment><USER2> About as critical of an Apple product as the Verge can get. Very thorough nonetheless.</comment>


Website runs all in S3, no server. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tomevslin.com/2008/03/amazon-s3-backs.html

<comment><USER2> When I'm reading about how he does this, it looks like it has all the app logic in client-side Javascript. That scares me from a security standpoint.

<comment><USER3> IF everything is stored somewhere on the client (including keys), what prevents someone malicious from borrowing the same keys to wreck havoc on your S3 bucket?

<comment><USER4> The secret key isn't stored in the client (I looked :P), only the AWSAccessKeyId, policy, and signature are.

The policy dictates what can be stored in the bucket, and the signature validates the policy so folks don't tamper with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be interesting to combine this with Google Gears for offline storage too. Tougher to create something that securely shared data between users, but for a single user this could still make some powerful apps!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a neat trick, but not very flexible or scalable.

Basically each user is given a presigned authorization token that lets them upload certain files to their bucket. Other users only have read access to the _index_. The clever trick is that the _key_ is used to store the publicly available data like the latitude and longitude.

It works out well in his case, but it's not very useful generally.

</comment><comment><USER7> Static IP's are a game-changing game changer.</comment>


Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge

<comment><USER2> The Vedantic school of Indic thought got all of this distilled to a ' T' , rather a 'OM'' a few millennia ago.</comment>


Ask HN: Is HTML broken as it is, so why Jade? - <AUTHOR>

Just to get something clear, i am a self taught web developer and i love learning new USEFULL technologies, recently i have been assigned to work on a project and it uses Jade, its a MEAN stack project and since i started using Jade, it just sucks for me, so my question is why Jade, what is worng with HTML as it is? if its not broken then why try to fix it? I feel like learning the shity Jade is like a waste of time and mental effort. <comment><USER2> Personally, I prefer HTML too. That's the reason I enjoy Angular so much. It essentially allows you to use an enhanced version of HTML, so you keep the strengths of a DSL without the limitations of basic HTML.

But in pure HTML, how do you do something like ng-repeat?[1] You can't. You have to either use a template language or you have to construct the HTML in the code. Both have goods and others. A template language allows you to keep an HTML like format that non-programmer's can possibly understand and contribute to, and that can help separate the view from the business logic, but it comes at the cost of having to learn a new language / framework and the hurdles that abstractions sometimes create.

Similar question on Quora. [2]

[1] [https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/directive/ngRepeat](https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/directive/ngRepeat) [2] [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-using- a-t...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-using-a-template- engine-like-Jade)

</comment><comment><USER3> HTML is too slow. My web dev method is so streamlined at this stage, if I'm writing <tags> individually, I'm spending too much time on stupid shit that doesn't really interest me.

Consider this takes me 45 seconds to write:

#{item.title}

Versus 15 seconds:

        .container
          .container__item(data-id=item.id)
            h1.container__item__title= item.title

<comment><USER4> If you are hand typing each and every one of those characters by hand you're doing it wrong. There are a lot of projects out there aimed at making writing HTML faster.

For example, [http://emmet.io/](http://emmet.io/)

The problem with your "15 seconds" example is that it is almost completely unreadable. .container? Ok, .container what? Is it a
?
? ? I think you're losing a lot more by trying to gain 30 seconds of time.

<comment><USER5> > The problem with your "15 seconds" example is that it is almost completely > unreadable. .container? Ok, .container what? Is it a
?
? ?

It takes 2 seconds to learn and forever on know that Jade defaults non- specified tags to divs.

For me Jade is faster to both write and read.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but my, and most people's, thoughts, is that code should be easy to read and understand what's going on. Jade does not do that. It might take "two seconds" to learn, that's extra time that you're wasting going and looking it up. It's much simpler to just write
, that way everyone who knows HTML and looks at your code will know what's going on. Jade is bucking a standard for no real added benefit.

<comment><AUTHOR> i totally agree with you</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Minus.com sharing site isn't fine. Rumors were true. They removed many features. - <AUTHOR>

Some time ago I submitted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4386799 to let others know about Minus sharing site allegedly trimming down their ability to upload any kind of files. It was denied by John Xie, but apparently Blake Barker (back then pretending to be Minus moderator and now maybe even having such position, I don't know) was right. It took only 2 months to come true.
The original info can be found in:
http://feedback.minus.com/topic/121115-why-are-files-converting-automatically/
Snapshot as of today: http://i.imgur.com/AYLsg.jpg
I created a proper bug report too:
http://feedback.minus.com/topic/122270-disallowing-files-other-than-videos-audio-and-images-shouldnt-be-even-considered/
Snapshot as of today: http://i.imgur.com/mBONs.jpg
Today noticing lack of "Download Folder" button I visited feedback.minus.com again and found out that Blake Barker has his so-called Minus: User Guide.
http://digitechguide.webs.com/project-minus#nabble-td18
http://digitechguide.webs.com/project-minus#nabble-td20
I haven't reverified file size limit recently, but checked other things and they are true.
FEATURES REMOVED
1. Linear/Grid Views
2. ZIP, EXE, etc. Anything that is not audio, video or images aren't allowed.
3. Download All feature. This feature originally limited download all feature to 500MB... the feature was simply removed and might be returning if Minus offers premium services in the future. <comment><AUTHOR> I don't know whether I need Prozac as someone suggested on the feedback site, but I do know that Minus is slowly and constantly losing its reputation of a great service it used to be.

What's really bad is that all these changes aren't officially announced. When Minus was growing and still adding features, most of them were mentioned on their blog: <http://blog.minus.com/>. Now you have to track obscure <http://feedback.minus.com/> to learn about any new thing (i.e. mostly removals).

What's the worst is that I was even assured that users would be notified upon removal of uploading non-multimedia files ability.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/MINUS/comments/y9c8b/soon_only_video...](http://www.reddit.com/r/MINUS/comments/y9c8b/soon_only_videos_audio_and_images_will_be_allowed/)

Snapshot as of today: <http://i.imgur.com/3a8eT.png>

But there was no such thing. Of course my post on /r/minus was invisible for a long time, so not many people could learn about upcoming changes, possibly until they were silently introduced...

Why am I posting it? Who cares about some Minus? I believe some do care. It's also an example of how having a pretty good site you can start ruining it. I feel bad about it also because I was recommending the site to others back then and even quite recently (after John's reply), apparently just before Minus started to rip off its features.

Is it how you prepare for introducing Premium Service, really?</comment>


Algorithmia – Open Marketplace for Algorithms - <AUTHOR> https://algorithmia.com/ <comment><USER2> When you're working on a startup the hustle is real. Walking into work this morning and seeing that somebody added us here and that it hit the front page is a great way to start the day. Thanks y'all :)

As a thank you here's a code to get 30,000 credits on me to test out some of the algorithms. Here's the code: HNDec2017

<comment><USER3> very interesting. Is there any kind of forum where you can state a problem and someone can suggest what AI/ML to try and apply to the problem?

We have an IOT platform where we have thousands of sensors gathering all kinds of data for all kinds of industries, there are lots of interesting things we could do with the data. A lot would be around predicting the future, other situations is about classifying complex data streams as a certain kind of events which we can then use as alarms or information for decision making.

<comment><USER2> Awesome. Would love to hear more about what you're doing. Do you have a site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Competitors include:

* Azure Cognitive Services (REST-based)

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive- service...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive- services/directory/)

* Amazon ML (REST-based), including Polly, Rekognition etc.

[https://aws.amazon.com/machine- learning/?nc2=h_l3_ai](https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/?nc2=h_l3_ai)

AI-as-a-Service is a interesting space that is likely to grow over time.

Part of the problem with doing AI in-house is that it's really hard/expensive to get large corpuses of correctly labeled data to train your algorithms on, so what these folks are really selling is a set of trained model weights exposed as an API.

<comment><USER5> Is there some legal/technical reason you couldn't encapsulate their APIs?

<comment><USER4> Resell Microsoft or Amazon APIs? I don't see why not but it sounds a bit like misrepresentation to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Algorithmia is great. They're hosting one our summarization algo's [https://algorithmia.com/algorithms/SummarAI/Summarizer](https://algorithmia.com/algorithms/SummarAI/Summarizer)

</comment><comment><USER7> Algorithms are valuable, but in the scope of machine learning what is becoming increasingly valuable are data sets.

The algorithm is one very important building block but a good data set is what finally allows you to materialize a solution.

<comment><USER8> this is exactly what I say every single time someone shows off a project like this. Give me valuable data (and lots of it).

Instead of an algorithm store, have a dataset store. I wanna buy a dataset of 1 million tagged stackoverflow questions. I wanna buy a dataset of 1 million random Amazon reviews. I wanna buy a dataset of 1 million blog comments. i wanna buy a dataset updated monthly of billions of new urls found in the web. data, data, data.

with data I can come up with a crude algorithm that works in a day. with no data, not even the most sophisticated algorithm will work.

<comment><USER9> Check out Synapse.AI basically answers your question to data + ML models -- in a decentralized way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A related endeavor is James Simons' Flatiron Institute.

They're creating bespoke algorithms for academics in the fields of computational biology, computational astronomy, and computational quantum physics -- replacing current practice of passing down old, duct taped Fortran code from professors to grad students.

There was an interesting profile in the New Yorker a few days ago: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/jim-simons- the...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/jim-simons-the-numbers- king)

</comment><comment><USER11> Took a deep dive yesterday comparing a few tagging/classification algorithms to the Google Cloud Natural Language and AWS Comprehend APIs, and I have to say I'm impressed.

I've been searching for the right tool to try to add tagging to a large dataset of charitable data, and while I couldn't find anything off the shelf at Algorithmia, the GUI allows for easy forking and adjustment of existing algorithms. As a primarily front-end developer, never thought machine learning would be this accessible. Great work!

<comment><USER2> If there's something that you need—please use the chat box to tell us what you need. We have engineers that are constantly helping devs get their algos dialed in. If you're doing 501c3 work you can probably ask for some bonus credits as well (we love helping good causes :) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I never used this platform until today, wow. This reminds me of old Mashape and early Blockspring if they had a baby (loved those). I'm very excited to dig into this more! WOW, I can tell more developers would love this if there was more outreach and love around this product!

<comment><USER2> Welcome to the community :) What would you like to see?

<comment><USER12> \- Video tutorials - at least for the onboarding to show around the platform and get users adopt faster (other than the hello world). Cause when we did the api marketplace rebuild from the UX perspective we messed up the onboarding (for a while) because we didn't give users a clear explanation of what they had to do to get started. There was too much text in the docs and too many buttons - once we fixed that users started consuming APIs within a minute

\- Integrations with other platforms - how can I use this with something like Zapier (where all the non techies live)

\- Community <-> Have a question? Join our Community slack/discord/board whatever instead of emailing you.

<comment><USER2> Awesome. Thanks! \- In January we're going to start live webinars where users can ask questions and we can help with specific questions. We'll use those recordings to make some onboarding videos. The second two are great ideas. I'm going to see if we can get them on the road map ~ Mike

<comment><USER12> Good luck my dude! Keep rocking it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is really great! Being able to deploy without installing anything + having the pricing set per API call is exactly what I've been needing.

<comment><USER2> If we can help—let us know. We've got Intercom chat going and engineers ready to help you get going :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is an decentralized AI/ML startup building something in this domain on top of Ethereum called Synapse.AI you'll want to check out if you're interested in Web3 stuff. They do both the data, algorithms, and other functionality to help autonomous agents grow.

Numerai also wants to monopolize Data and ML models in a decentralized way, and I believe that is also on Ethereum.

There is also Enigma, Doc.ai, and a few others if you're interested in this space.

<comment><USER2> Seems like they are mainly focused on data collecting and monetizing. Do you see something about them hosting AI/ML models?

<comment><USER14> Yeah read the yellow paper. It's all about connecting data to models and beyond. It's next level stuff. It's been posted a lot in the groups I'm a part of and people are saying it's part of some crazy automated future of AI and robots.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Using Unicode in HTML - <AUTHOR> https://codepen.io/mjunaidi/pen/OJJJNxR <comment><USER2> If your HTML document is using a Unicode encoding like UTF-8, you shouldn't need to enter escape codes to insert a special characters; you can just paste or type the character in directly and everything will Just Work.

(And to make typing in special characters easier, you can use a compose key: [https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/03/make-typing-special- chara...](https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/03/make-typing-special-characters- drop-dead-easy-with-the-compose-key/))</comment>


Digg 'will grow by letting others copy us' - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/31/digg?gusrc=rss&feed=technology

<comment><USER2> No offense, but how hard is it exactly to build your own social news 'platform' ? If I were starting a social news site, I would rather use an open source package like pligg that I can modify to my hearts content than use any of these so called platforms </end rant>

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope this is true. I just started using coRank.com to attempt to open a social news site for a niche market. Digg's platform is just much better. We'll switch in an instant if this happens.

<comment><USER4> Could you elaborate on what it was in coRank that you didn't like? I'm building a competing service and would be interested to know what features users need.</comment></comment>