l0stman

You're not a company man, aren't you? :)

I used to agree with these principles, but in the long run it will cause HN's demise. It was fine when we used to be a low-traffic website, but I think these guidelines don't scale very well. The most upvoted stories are the ones which everybody agrees upon, not the most interesting ones.

But who am I to complain? I don't contribute that much either.

Indeed. This video is probably worth a thousand words. http://www.guba.com/watch/3000054867

Well, I wrote a simple blog engine after finishing the chapter although I don't use a database here, the blog is saved directly to disk (http://github.com/l0stman/Blog).

The biggest hurdle with Common Lisp is configuring the system correctly because there's no out of the box solution. Although there's a lot of library -- http://www.cliki.net is a great resource -- figuring out how to use asdf-install is a bit painful. I took me almost four days to figure out how to launch Hunchentoot as a daemon at startup under FreeBSD (http://github.com/l0stman/Hunchentoot-daemon). In my case, the lisp server itself lays behind nginx as a proxy. The latter serves the static pages too. Here's nginx's configuration:

     server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            root   /usr/local/www/nginx;
            # Use absract URL for static pages
            try_files $uri.html $uri/index.html $uri $uri.txt @fallback;
        }

        location @fallback {
            return 404;
        }

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /usr/local/www/nginx-dist;
        }

        # Tunnel all requests where the URI path begins with "/ht"
        # to a Hunchentoot server listening on 127.0.0.1:8080
        #
        location /ht/ {
            rewrite ^/ht/(.*)$ /$1 break;
            proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:8080;
            proxy_redirect http://127.0.0.1:8080 /ht;
            proxy_read_timeout 300;
        }
    }

Seconded. I just finished the first chapter of this book and it's really worth it.

I want to complete a project using Common Lisp. And I'm using Hunchentoot as a webserver, Postgresql as a database and the Postmodern library to interact with it.

Einstein was certainly a great physicist, but not a mathematician. He was really bad at math, it wasn't false modesty.

A problem can occur if you're shuffling a large number of cards (greater than the maximum of the random number generator) because each random number should be unique.

Well, SICP is hardly about Scheme itself as a language. Some features such as macros aren't mentioned at all.

It has more emphasis on programming paradigms and Scheme is just a tool to convey them. Its core is small and simple enough that you could introduce advanced topics without the need for the reader to learn the language beforehand.

Especially for those who don't have flash installed.

If the command-line interface doesn't scare you, I recommend Mutt. It's customizable and have pgp integration.

It seems there's a Windows port too but I haven't tried it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/unixmail-w32/

> No other programmer has this kind of track record. Donald Knuth probably comes closest, but his diary about writing TeX (printed in Literate Programming) shows how he kept finding bugs for years and never expected to be finished, only to get closer and closer (thus the odd version numbering scheme).

I don't want to be dismissive but I think TeX is more complex and uses non trivial algorithms. So it's like comparing an apple to an orange.

What do you mean by being better? Having better grades than him or being a better problem solver. Because most of the time, these kind of people follow their own agenda and don't really bother to be at the top of the class.

And what method do you use to remember your keys? Chicken and eggs...

This isn't enough reason for me. You could encrypt your emails if you don't want google to read them.

Frankly, I don't know. It seems the most creative people are also self-confident. They're both arrogant and humble. Plus, we should rate someone's achievement by his best output, not his thousands failures.

In fact, I have an old Toshiba laptop with initially 256MB of RAM. It had both Windows XP and FreeBSD+KDE in dual boot. Windows XP takes forever to boot and runs like a snail. On the other hand FreeBSD was pretty usable.

But one day, some part of the RAM stopped to run stripping it down to 68MB. Even FreeBSD+KDE wasn't usable anymore. So I decided to use Enlightenment as a window manager instead. Installing only the strict necessary: xmms for listening to music, vlc for videos, emacs as a text editor and for coding, xpdf as a pdf viewer, feh as image viewer.

The performance is pretty correct. It doesn't have an internet connexion because I found out I'm more productive without it when coding. So I use it more than I expected to get things done.

But a billion dollars could buy you more spare time to try to understand Finnegans Wake.

How about Smalltalk?

So basically the world is worse than 8 years ago, what a surprise. Seriously, do you know of any period of history were the world goes well?

Craig Silverstein?