Davertron

Awesome. Can you add sliders for size and padding?

Great point. One of the more confusing things about looking at the upstream logs when not using rebase is that they are (by default) in chronological order. It does seem like it would be more useful to have commits upstream show in the order they were merged in.

My understanding is that it keeps the history cleaner at the expense of being "historically correct". It's cleaner because you have fewer merge commits, but less historically correct because it makes your commits look like they happened after the commits pulled in by rebase.

Personally, I use merge (with --no-ff) vs. rebase. The only time I actually use rebase is to squash a series of (unpushed!) commits on a feature branch, and I usually only do that if I went hog-wild, committing more than necessary while experimenting.

Practical Common Lisp (http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/) by Peter Seibel is an awesome book and free online.

I find this is one of the things I struggle with the most. I definitely "refactor" code by moving it to a subroutine sometimes purely for readability's sake. I also try not to stress out about how reusable something might be until I actually NEED to reuse it. Otherwise it often seems like "premature optimization" trying to generalize a routine that I'm not even sure will ever get used anywhere else.

Can someone describe why this sort of thing would be useful? I'm not criticizing, I just can't think of a use case for this.

I didn't know about that trick either. I've been using YankRing (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1234) which would get me around the same problem. Basically, you hit p to paste, and if it's not what you want, you keep hitting C-p (control+p) and it will move backwards through time and keep pasting. Once you paste what you want, you're done! Awesome plugin that I can't live without.

Have you checked out http://thinkupapp.com/

I think it's strange how upset people were about the story, given the story of the first movie.

I'm from Johnson originally but now living in Essex Jct.

Maybe it's time for a VT HN meetup :)

I use VIM as well to edit lisp and it works wonderfully. I, too, wanted to scream back in time at this guy :)

I do think that I'm probably missing some nice things that SLIME has that I don't currently take advantage of, because I usually just treat my lisp programs much like other programming languages: I write all my code in an editor (VIM), and then I hop over to a terminal and just run "sbcl --load file.lisp". The interactive piece is probably nice, and may be a little faster, but for what I'm doing, this is is all I need. Besides, this is pretty much how I program in every other programming language anyway.

I'd love to see more examples of math that make for cool visualizations/procedurally generated content.

This was the point I wanted to bring up; if you have your login form on a non-ssl page, it's possible for a man-in-the-middle attack to replace the "action" on the form and send your login credentials anywhere they want. To prevent this with the drop-down login, you have to make your homepage SSL, which has other drawbacks.

I second this, the people in #vim are awesome and usually very quick to answer your questions. It's also one of the friendliest channels I've been in, for what it's worth.

This could be really good; I've started reading this book twice now, and gotten about 1/3 of the way through both times before my brain starts to melt.

Also, Douglas Hofstatder's "I Am A Strange Loop" is a little more accessible and is all about consciousness, if that part of Godel, Escher, Bach interests you.

I recently used this for an app I'm working on.

In case you're thick like me, here's how you convert from the deg min sec format to a decimal format:

deg + minutes/60 + seconds/3600

Then make your answer negative if you started with a South or West lat/lon.

So, for example, if you had 53 08 50N, that would be:

53 + 08/60 + 50/3600 =~ 53.1472222

I'd love to hear some actual ideas about how we can improve eCommerce; just saying "it's been the same, we can do better" doesn't really help much.

I'd say freeform is a pretty good way to go if you don't need automated systems looking at the data. We've had issues with having specific fields for all the reasons mentioned in the comments (certain places don't have states/zips, etc.). However, we offer estimated shipping, so we have to be able to easily parse the address to send data to shipping carriers' web services (UPS, DHL), and that would be a total nightmare with freeform text. I would say making a nice interface that changes depending on the selected country would be ideal (google checkout seems to handle this pretty well).

Someone in the comments mentions Conque (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2771) which makes it easy to run other applications (mysql, irb, etc.) in a split and send text from your current buffer to the other program. As the commenter mentions, this is sort of the opposite of what this vimcast shows, and for some people might be preferable.

More like "hindsight is 20/20"...

They started a series on Security Now! focusing on the basics of computing (starts with this podcast: http://twit.tv/sn233). I just listened to that and then saw this entry for a half adder (which they talk about implementing in the podcast) so I thought I'd link it here in case anyone was interested.

Does anyone else have some good resources about the basics of computing? We studied logic in one of my college math classes a bit, and learned how to implement the basic math functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) in binary, but I've forgotten a lot of it at this point and find it really interesting. I'm specifically interested in the EE side of things, since I don't know all that much about it (they talk briefly about how a transistor actually works in the podcast at a high level, but I'd love to get a solid reference on this stuff that went from low-level up to the higher levels).

Firefox ships with a bunch of trusted root authority certificates. If I understand how certificates work correctly, essentially what this means is that any certificate that is signed by these root certificates is automatically trusted by your Firefox browser.

The implication, and what makes this scary, is that if this were done with malevolent intentions, there could be a whole host of sites out there that had "bogus" certificates that Firefox would think were fine because they were signed by this trusted authority.

Just as an aside, you can always see the certificate chain in Firefox by clicking on the favicon area when a certificate is in use (i.e. when using https), clicking on "More Information", clicking "View Certificate", and going to the "Details" tab. You can then see the "Certificate Hierarchy". This shows you all the certificates in the chain, and who signed what. At the very top should be the "root authority"; this is usually someone like Verisign.

To bring this whole thing around, then, on some sites, you could see the root authority as the certificate mentioned in the post.

I guess, finally, I should point out, like others have, that this doesn't really mean anything bad is going on; the certificate could be perfectly valid. However, it is at least a little worrisome that they aren't sure where it came from.

This is awesome, I never knew about this; I usually type "delete from where" and then fill out the query, just to avoid accidentally hitting enter after typing "delete from users".

For me, this is sort of like standing at the edge of a big cliff; you just have this weird feeling that you might accidentally, compulsively jump.

I'm not really sure what you're talking about; his whole point referring to Objective-C was that the reason it's popular isn't because of any of its particular language features (i.e. "other languages are equally powerful"), it's popular because Apple took it and built a whole bunch of great libraries with it for its computers so that, if you want to program applications on a Mac, and you want to use things like Core animation and all of that, you're probably going to end up using Objective-C.

I think what Jason is saying is don't FOCUS on being an expert, and don't obsess over it. I know that I personally feel like I never know enough, and often think things like "well, I'd like to do x or y, but I should probably learn more about z first". I think the important thing to realize is that there is always more to learn, and you shouldn't be killing yourself over not feeling like an expert. Of course there's lots you don't know; there always will be. You just have to accept that and realize that there's plenty you DO know, and taking on challenges that seem just a bit above where you're at is one of the greatest ways to grow and continue learning.

As a semi-related side note, when I first started reading HN (almost a year ago), I felt like 95% of the stuff that was on the front page didn't even MAKE SENSE to me (some would probably argue that HN has changed over the last year, and I think I came in to HN during one of those "let's push Erlang articles to the top to scare off the incoming swarm of n00bs" phases...didn't work on this n00b though :) ). Over the last year, I find that I at least have a general idea what most of the posts are about, even if I still don't totally grok everything that gets posted, and I've learned a ton. I'm happy with that, since I still feel like I learn something new everyday.

This is basically EXACTLY how I feel. I sometimes think about starting a blog, to showcase things I've worked on, or interesting things I've read about, or new things I've learned, but I often think that it wouldn't be original enough to warrant doing. The thing is, you don't know until you try...

It seems a bit arbitrary to just chop up a flat fee and pay it out equally once a month to all the content providers I "flattred"; it's sort of like saying everything was of equal value, which probably isn't the case. However, from Flattr's point of view, I see how this makes it a lot easier to manage as far as distributing funds goes.

This is basically what I used to do as well, except just to my normal e-mail account.

Love *nix :)

I haven't tried it, but it looks like there's a similar growl command line utility called "growlnotify" that you could call:

http://growl.info/extras.php

I like this idea a lot; however, I don't like beeps. Ubuntu (and possibly other linux distros) now supports desktop notifications via Notify OSD. So instead of having the other machine ssh to me and beep, instead I use a utility called "notify-send" to create a desktop notification pop-up. You can install notify-send on ubuntu using:

sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

Then call notify-send like so:

notify-send "Back to work."

The text can be anything you want, and you can also supply a summary, an icon, etc.