crescendo

Hi everyone, original author here. Thanks for all the feedback! My friend posted this before it was really ready for public consumption.

My goal here was to learn how Lisp works at a really low level. I'm planning to add the features you would expect from a Lisp (e.g. macros) very soon.

Yep, this is still very much a work in progress. Metacircular eval and macros are up next.

Does anyone else find it amusing that it seems to have become the norm nowadays that "Release Candidates" are "Released"?

Whoops, I downvoted you before I got the joke. Sorry about that!

First of all, congratulations! There will be a lot of ups and downs, so just remember to enjoy the good times and hang in there and be persistent through the bad.

I have a couple suggestions for your landing page:

* The current overall payload is 382.1K. You could significantly reduce this and speed up the load time if you enable gzip compression on your web server. Seems like you're running this on IIS 6.0--there is a configuration option for HTTP compression buried somewhere in the submenus, I believe.

* The rounded corners have a white background, whereas the page background at the top is gray. This causes the top corners to have a very visible rectangular edge. The IE-6 friendly way to fix this is to change the background color for the top corners to match the background color of the top of the page. If you don't care about IE 6, you can simply give them transparent backgrounds.

Good luck!

From the FAQ:

wrpme is an ultra fast _persistent_ cache engine

Blippy's response: http://blippy.posterous.com/blippy-and-credit-card-numbers

Academia.edu is hiring: http://www.academia.edu/jobs

We're currently hacking a lot of cutting-edge technology like Node.js and Redis to scale the site up, and we're looking for some really talented engineers to help us out.

Based in San Francisco.

Thanks, dannyr. I wasn't aware they'd added that feature.

The problem with analyzing companies like this is that they don't really admit of a traditional value-based assessment. What is the value proposition of a service like Vidly, really? It shortens the process of posting a video link to Twitter by a few steps. Yes, I'm understating what they do, but when you distill it down to its actual benefit to an end user, that's it.

    Option 1:
        1) Open youtube.com.
        2) Create a youtube account (First time only).
        3) Post video to Youtube.
        4) Open twitter.com, or a Twitter client.
        5) Post a tweet with the Youtube link.

    Option 2:
       1) Open vidly.com (or client?).
       2) Post video and tweet to Twitter.

This is highly reminiscent of the broken window fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

And Mountain View, CA (GoogleWifi).

This app is awesome. I'm a musical hobbyist, but today was the first time that anything has ever remotely made it sound like I can sing.

I use the following analogy, which seems to get the point across most of the time.

Imagine you're catering an event, and you need to make 500 identical sandwiches. Now, the usual approach is to get out the bread slices, lettuce, tomatoes, turkey, etc and set to work constructing each sandwich by hand. And what if the client suddenly tells you they need 1,000 sandwiches? Your work doubles!

But what if you do this instead: build a machine where you press a button and it creates one perfect sandwich, exactly to specification. Then even if you have an event that calls for 1,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000 or more sandwhiches, your work doesn't really increase. You just keep pressing a button, and any number of sandwiches pop out of the machine, exactly to specification.

In this case, the machine is the program. More accurately, the machine is the CPU and its instructions for creating a sandwich are the program, but you will lose people going to this level of detail. And the sandwiches are the output.

Reminds me of this Feynman rant about honor groups:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3164300309410618119#...

Apple is making a huge mistake here. I love my iPhone, but in the wake of this GV business, I find myself seriously considering a switch to an Android phone. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm sure I'm not the only iPhone fan out there who feels this way.

I think the point is that for every wildly successful company out there, there was surely an early group of naysayers who could see instantly that it was a dud.

Arrington might fail here, but you have to give the guy a lot of credit for how he has moved forward on this thing.

I was actually wondering the other day whether Apple does any kind of arbitrage behind the scenes of their international app store sales. Seems like they could be making a lot of extra money that way.

Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup here?

I can't remember where I read it now, but there was a very well reasoned argument positing that this is essentially why we have sports. A sport is a means of venting primal violent and competitive urges in a way that's controlled and (usually) not harmful to civilized society, so they claimed. This violent expression works directly for those playing and vicariously for those watching.

Football is a very important pastime to a lot of people. Just playing devil's advocate here: can you name one reason why those NASA programs are more important than the football arena, without making reference to your own subjective value system which would be at odds with that of the ardent football fan's?

This allows an attacker to iteratively try various HMAC values and see how long it takes the server to respond. The longer it takes, the more characters he has correct.

Can one of the security gurus here explain this in a bit more detail? I'm guessing he would base this on an average over a sample of response times with the same input. Otherwise, how would he account for other things happening on the server that could affect the timing for a single request?

Yea, this is classic linkbait sensationalism: Top n list, FUD, overgeneralization and exaggeration.

I'd like to think they were going for something recursive: Bing Is Not Google.

Does anyone have any recommendations for what to plug into to munge images?

ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/) has worked well for us. There are bindings out there for many languages, including Common Lisp (http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-magick/); you might want to look there for inspiration.

If you keep generating random series of tones, eventually you will end up with Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here or any other piece ever recorded.

Is this really surprising? Blackberry has been an established market leader in this domain for years. Apple claiming the #2 spot with a single product in a 2-3 year time frame is pretty amazing, I think.

I've been very happy with my Markus chair so far. I would also recommend the Mikael desk (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40079218) and drawer unit if you're looking for something cheap, simple, and functional.

I'd love to see this guy try to answer James Randi's speaker cable challenge.

I think what he's trying to say is that it's best to concentrate on that which brings in the money rather than on the money itself. The latter should follow from the former.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that user momentum is what differentiated Facebook from the countless other social sites that were sprouting up back then. Not anything inherent to the site. Consumer lock-in has only taken hold now that most everyone has already chosen the Facebook platform.