skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's too bad the author is writing for a prominent website, instead of terrorizing a homeowners association somewhere. It should be abundantly clear to anyone that has ever dealt with the government in any capacity that the incompetence is thorough and complete, yet people continuously invent new brilliant ideas to inject them into everything.
Ctrl-Shift-t for similar behavior for "Open Type" in Eclipse, also Ctrl-o is handy for a popup outline for autocomplete navigation to methods/members (if you have huge bloated Java files for example).
A Bright Future For Drizzle
Patrick McKenzie advertises his business and hasn't taken a dime from an outside investor.
Disclaimer I've neither used nor looked at the source for either Tarsnap or Zumodrive, all the following is based on the public statements I've read.

A major point of all this is that you don't have to break TLS/SSL to get the unencrypted data from Zumodrive. They have the unencrypted data pass through their server. They almost certainly also have the final encryption key sitting on that server for all the data stored. This is a completely unnecessary hole in the security. There are other probable problems (such as given their obvious lack of understanding the basics I wouldn't be the least surprised to find that they've messed up the way they are using AES to encrypt the data) but really just this is more than enough to know to stay away.

Tarsnap on the other hand does correctly encrypt the data and have the keys held by the client and this can be verified because the complete client side source code is available.
Your assessment of Colin's article is unfair. He does do better than 'picking on them for saying "military-grade cryptography."' In particular, he points out ZumoDrive's encryption is not protected by a key known only to the owner of the data, and he points out that there are plenty of points where the plaintext and/or keys can leak out for a variety of legal and technical reasons.

Colin does describe some technical aspects of TarSnap: at http://www.tarsnap.com/security.html and http://www.tarsnap.com/crypto.html. In addition, he's written some very good articles about practical issues regarding crypto on his blog. (If I was going to criticize him for anything about his blog, it would be the poor UI for navigating the archives.)

Also, is this really a case of one company simply "bashing" a competitor? I don't think so. From reading his blog, Colin seems to be very passionate about crypto and security. This blog post is the same kind of reaction that many of us who are passionate about security and privacy would have. See Schneier's numerous "doghouse" posts for example. Also, see Colin's blog post where he explained what was wrong with AWS signing V1; AWS was a partner, not a competitor.

Colin's criticism of SSL/TLS should be expanded upon so we can see exactly why he thinks it is only good for key management. However, he is correct that "client encrypts, client sends to server, server decrypts, then server encrypt again with its own key" is not a great design.

Also, Colin doesn't mention anything about OpenSSL in his post.

(Non-)disclaimer: I've never met Colin or anybody involved in this discussion, and I have no business dealings with anybody involved.
The Awesomeness of a Hackathon
No, they need knowledge, creativity, and courage to ask "why?" and "why not?" A PhD is a firm credential for a job in academia that may or may not indicate that you have these qualities. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to becoming a scientist.
I don't consider the executable critique to be legitimate. Java cannot run without a JRE, and arbitrary Lisp code cannot run without the entire Lisp image without losing runtime compilation. It would be possible to forbid (eval ...) and friends from a source program, and then save a Lisp image sans compilation machinery, but that is a lot of work to save a few megabytes and you would break compatibility with existing code in the process.
This will certainly have a positive impact on the quality of films coming out of Hollywood.
That was probably accurate until you got to Twitter. The average user probably isn't on Twitter (based on recent Twitter surveys that were posted on HN).
"If the distributor shorts a $100 contract and the movie grosses $50 million, the distributor will make $50, thereby limiting the company’s total losses from a film."

From what they have said, this does not sound like a viable hedging strategy for those in production. There is unlikely to be enough contracts traded. Instead, it seems more like a gambling operation with a CFTC gambling shield. I'm surprised they did this, given how much general anger there still is regarding derivatives and speculation.
I'm going to put my skinny little neck out here and mention the emacs calculator (rpn for the win!) and pari-gp.
Ask HN: Best hosting solution for a startup?
Dearest HN Network,

Assuming a budget of about $100/month, what are the best cloud hosting solutions available? What should one be aware of in choosing a cloud based hosting solution?

Please discuss.
Which then effectively means "Non-Windows compatible".
VCs & Starter Stock - Why & How to Ask for "F Shares"
"Looking at emacs, I really see no visual cues of what functions are supported..."
A lot of his critiques are based on the assumption that technology is the main driving factor in human development and behavior. If I apply his logic to the real world here's some of the questions I would have:

-If lightweight body armor is available, why do our soldiers not have access to it?

-If the technology for filtering clean drinking water is available then why does half the world not have clean drinking water?

-If plastic surgery can improve or change our appearance why doesn't everyone use it?

He completely glosses over the fact that economic factors play a huge role in how technologies are used and adopted.
That very fact is blatantly obvious in the film itself, you even have a main character who can't walk, for no other reason than the fact that he can't afford to pay to get his legs fixed.

The whole movie is about a company that is trying to maximize profits. Why would we expect them to buy top of the line gear for every single soldier if they can get away with cheaper stuff? My argument is supported over and over again in the film: the only reason the protagonist was even involved was because the company was unwilling to lose money by wasting an avatar.
and then choose the best partner that exceeds it

Meaning, choose the next candidate who is better than the previous ones.
Web Laureate Classic: "comotivate"
I had the same issue learning the standard library. It's huge, redundant (I think...), and has completely unsearchable names and no organization or hierarchy.

I seem to remember sbcl having some way to compile real executables though, someone back me up on this?
The scratch buffer in Emacs has a similar function for me.
Don't you think that is a good thing?
I agree that physical metaphors are overused. Unfortunately, they sell software: http://delicious-monster.com/images/librarypage/screenshots/...
Perhaps James feels that the message about putting profit and industrialization above human life is something the he wished to address to Americans because we can benefit from the self-examination?
Actually I think you just agreed with everything I was saying!

My point was canvas isn't quite there yet, not that it never will be, and also that I think the Flash-has-an-editor argument isn't the reason why canvas isn't ready yet.

As a side note, I'm already one of the people writing a library/framework to overcome the things I mentioned, the problem is I don't think it's going to be fast enough to do much with for a while.
It has been discussed here. Numerous times. Use google or the HNSearch link, below.

The unanimous result of the discussion, in case you're curious and don't want to look it up, was that everyone doing any kind of startup anywhere should click on the affiliate link in this article;-)

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
How to save a friend from the brink
If what you are saying is true then characterizing marriage as 'prison' makes even less sense, which is exactly my point.
Ok, but most people want more than a 1/2N share of the economic "pie".
TLS is not so easy to implement correctly. You still have to decide (a) which version of TLS to support, (b) which ciphersuites to support, (c) which signature algorithms to support, (d) which CA(s) to trust, and (e) which certificate revocation checking scheme(s) to use, at least. People tend to choose the defaults, which mostly works. But, Colin does make a valid point that the default list of CAs in particular is probably not the best choice considering the policies of the companies making these default lists.

See http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2009/8/27/a-working-theo... for another example of a common misconfiguration of TLS implementations.
the pricing issue is very interesting, but there's not a lot of meat to the story here. i'd like to see the developer find a way to interview the people who bought the increasingly pricey app and try to actually get some data to go with the conjecture.

otherwise, in a competitive marketplace you need to differentiate and promote your product constantly, i would think that's a given and not really a fault of the app store. is there a design decision which can help that? i'm not sure. i'm sure we don't want Apple to be MORE selective of which apps they allow in some kind of attempt to separate the chaff, though, and that means your awesome app may always be outnumbered by crap.
(1) Calling their security/cryptography "military grade" should be a warning signal.

(2) SSL/TLS isn't inferior, it's the wrong tool for the job. Using the wrong tool in encryption almost always means opening up unnecessary attacks.

(3) When the competitor has such obvious holes and not only do they have them but are trumpeting them as their strong security; I think it makes a lot of sense to point out how bad it is.
I would set off flares, I just wouldn't be standing next to them. If you create a signal, you get to define the playing field and observe from the perimeter as other people approach to investigate.
Great, let's use anecdotal evidence.
Nice. When do you suppose they will support editing code? You know, features we've learned to expect from IntelliJ and Eclipse?
Visual cues are distracting. They're training wheels. The ideal calculator has either a) so few functions that you can remember all of them trivially, or b) so many functions that it would be ludicrous to display them all (or to omit some). I can't think of any smart compromise in between.

For example, let's say your calculator supports trig functions. Should it show you sine / cosine / tangent? Or all trig functions? Or should you dive into a "Trig" menu, so you're three clicks away from what you want to do, instead of being three keystrokes away?

I've never had a reason to use trig functions in my desktop calculator. And yet, (sin (/ pi 2)) does exactly what I'd expect it to!
As someone whose stress has almost wrecked his life, I can relate to many of these points.

The levels of stress that I have can be debilitating and actually keep me from doing my work. It's useful to see lists like this to remind myself of what I should be avoiding.
Would you pay $62 for a Wikipedia article?
Please note that Soulver is available for Mac and iPhone only and the full version is 20$.
Solaris Online Learning Center
I can't say I've even seen a database that had redundant man/woman tables in this way. Regardless of where your politics lie on the issue, it's a violation of normal form with no benefit and any number of inherent problems.

When I was writing code for a medical facility, the guy who designed the database was as straight-laced and socially conservative as you'll meet.

But his design handled same-sex marriage/bigamy/polygamy/transgender issues, etc.

(It was a mental health facility. You get all sorts of interesting data problems when tracking the outliers.)

His philosophy on the design --and I'd imagine this isn't so odd amongst geeks-- was that data was data and needed to be tracked in a proper and robust manner, regardless of rightness or wrongness or personal feelings.

Assuming a male/female table is a reasonable logical starting point because 'some people feel this way' is akin to suggesting redundant christian/muslim/dirty_atheist tables would/should be expected to occur in professional code, because 'some people feel this way'.
20 per cent of ‘tweets’ contain a reference to a product or brand

What % of those were auto-retweets, tweet bots, or were originated by the brand owner? "Real" tweeters seem much less inclined to do this brand-whoring than this 20% figure implies.
Oh, the prison comment was not from me.
T-Mobile call center uses "dynamic interactive live scripting"
Smartgit: http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/

might be worth a look
My favorite example is Mark Daly (of GWAS fame). He basically got a PhD for signaling purposes. He was already doing his excellent work beforehand, and got the PhD for the benefit of the institution (MIT/Broad). Or, at least, so goes the lore.
Received a recommendation for this book this morning, because I had bought Peter Norvig's PAIP and other books on Lisp.
This is a very broad question. Heroku has dead simple deployment for Ruby applications; see the pricing page to play with options. Also it's free for very low usage applications, but scales up easily. VPS offering from Amazon, Linode, Rackspace, Slicehost, etc have a minimum threshold around $25-ish.
It depends what side of it you're trying to do, just getting a tree structure of Sprite-like things working is actually quite easy - canvas' drawing transform stack is ideal for resolving the nested transforms for each shape. The trickier part is re-rendering the smallest region of canvas possible when you do change part of the display list.

Maybe I should post a link to my stuff when I get around to working on it some more!
Good support for keyboard navigation combined with some amount of smartness about the AST can work wonders, though. Most modern Java IDEs do a fair job of this.
I use a python REPL as my calculator. I went through many different apps until it hit me that was what I wanted.
Can the founder on this visa eventually apply for a green card, and bring their family here? Or is it employment-only visa?
We have a twitter account for announcements. I find it quite inconvenient and inappropriate when people send questions or messages through Twitter that could be better handled through email. It's essentially a waste of time as the twitter format is so limiting.... it's not possible to say anything detailed or truly informative in those tiny messages.

That said, it is worth engaging customers and providing info on Twitter. I wouldn't really call what it works well for 'customer service', however.
I agree. My point in the beginning was to say just because I value a human life more than trees, doesn't mean I wish to go out and kill any trees I find for no good reason or without weighing things. The 150k number was in keeping with the thread's number of choice; it's not a sufficiently large number that I'd think twice about it, though if you bring in an unending amount we're talking about infinite value so...

Hope I've cleared it up a bit, it's early. ;)
That's how I learned it (although I never used 'round brackets' explicitly). This gets really confusing when you begin to talk to Americans and refer to 'brackets', thankfully everybody understands parens, and the others are the same.
Indeed. If multitasking comes, apps will still have to interact with everything else through well-defined, public APIs; the only place they'll have free reign will continue to be their own folder. Also, I'd expect to see some quotas enforced to guarantee that, say, background Pandora really does only take x% CPU, probably within a static amount of memory.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182081
Point taken. I have now integrated the display of taken (and parked and error) top level domains again, trying to make it useful but not too distracting.
A conspiracy requires more than one party.
Sorry, I replied to the wrong comment - meant to reply to the guy talking about prison.
tl;dr troll
The Trouble With Climate Science
You can fit in some curses.
Chickenfoot for Firefox: Rewrite the Web
"82% of open source software runs on Windows"
I suspect this should worry them more than Linux.

Without the Office monopoly and the Server+SQLServer+IIS or exchange licence fees MS doesn't look so good.

It doesn't really matter about linux's 10% of the desktop market if the EOM copy of windows that came with your machine is the last bit of MS software you (or your company) ever buys.
I've used "Consultant". It's not really what I am (my main business is advertising/subscriptions), but if I'm handing you my business card, then I'm probably a consultant to you.

Consider "Web Dev Consultant" if you want to be ever-so-slightly quirky while still being informative.
Yeah, this was frustrating to me as well. oconnore's point is valid, in that CL is not the only language to behave this way --- but Java (his example) is more up front about it :) (that is to say, learning Java, you learn this limitation quickly, and it's not a problem because most machines have a JRE; CL you might go some distance before you have to look up what's going on, and once you do you realize how few machines have a CL).

Don't get me wrong, I still love me some common lisp --- but I agree with Britton that the issue shouldn't be dismissed as meaningless.
i end up running multiple instances typically, as opposed to a single one over multiple monitors.
Consumers already have that choice. They tend to prioritize different things. (Though you could argue that we should interalise the externalities of running a bad system.)
I don't think anyone's concerned about the executable size. It's annoying, but unless you have a lot of should-be-small executables, it doesn't matter.

However, exposing the innards of a program on event of an error can be undesirable. CL's behavior of dropping you into the debugger is great when you're writing software that doesn't have to be delivered, or that is entirely open-source, but you can't do closed-source executables that way.
Likewise. It's always open anyway.
For active bloggers - have you noticed higher numbers of comments furthering your sites goals at all? I see lots of people that actively try to increase comments, but I wonder if they're getting causation/correlation wrong.

A high-commented post probably indicates that you hit on a point well, and probably correlates with something meaningful. But do higher comments cause improvement in other metrics? That is, does actively trying to get your comments up produce good results?

Most blogs have near unreadable comments for me - I rarely bother. But maybe my experience differs from others'. Thoughts from regular bloggers?
Don't forget to check out Wally's 118' 16.000 horsepower carbon fiber poweryacht that looks like something Darth Vader would love.

http://www.wally.com/jumpch.asp?idChannel=44&idUser=0...
So we start with "how to put gay marriage in a database" and end with "marriage is a union between any number of people, where people can come and go as they please." By that definition, I could be married to the company where I work.

Truly, an obliteration of any meaning to the word "marriage."

Really, I think we should start over. What is marriage, in the eyes of the state? Why should it grant special privileges to encourage it? Does society reap benefits from having a man and a woman committed to each other? Does it benefit from having eight people of varying sexes and self-declared genders semi-committed to one another in varying degrees? Are we prepared to draw a line somewhere and - gasp! - judge some unions better than others?

If we don't have widely-accepted answers to that, maybe we should stop recognizing marriages legally, substitute designations like "this person can make decisions for me if I'm ill," and leave marriage to be a religious designation only.
Nice. I just turned it into a stand-alone app with Prism; now I have Soulver but free (and dependent on an internet connection). The bookmarklet is also really handy.
I am reminded of these old lines by Neal Stephenson:

The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor.[...]

I have no objections to beautiful design externals, but would prefer it dresses up good engineering instead of hiding shoddy innards.

Actually, the other day a nice Mac online backup app showed up here, and my private thought was that the author and Colin could probably profit from a collaboration.
You upload the file with computer A, and you want to download it with computer B. Computer B has to be able to decrypt the file that was encrypted on computer A. If you want this to be doable without keys being installed computer B ahead of time (for example, you want to be able to go over to your friend's house and download the file from his computer, using just the web browser), then the server has to know the encryption key.

For my own personal use, I prefer something more like Tarsnap's or Mozy's design, but the benefits of ZumoDrive's design definitely would be appealing for many users.
You appear to feel that "the only real differentiator between Zumodrive and Tarsnap is the integrity of the code that implements the service". I didn't see that as being an architectural critique, but a commentary on the quality of source code. Perhaps you did mean for that to be a comment on the design of the two services though?

The article wasn't just an ad for tarsnap, it was a reasonably good article on how not to encrypt people's data, and things not to say when you've failed to protect people's data. He's written other articles on how cool tarsnap is.
Summary: "Because I'm used to something else."

- executables: [1]
- library: while there are certain libraries that are harder to set up in CL than Ruby/Python, the provided example of list and string functions is laughable. [2] [3]

[1] http://www.xach.com/lisp/buildapp/
[2] http://cl-cookbook.sourceforge.net/strings.html#number
Things would be better for Lisp if it were as easy for non-hacker end users to obtain and install the needed Lisp system.

A Google search for java runtime results in top hits like "Download Free Java Software", "Java Downloads for All Operating Systems", "Java SE Downloads" (with the pertinent phrase visible, "What Java Do I Need?").

A search for Lisp runtime results in top hits like a chapter from the gigamonkeys.com Lisp book, an irrelevant question thread on StackOverflow, and a somewhat relevant page about the Lisp runtime that comes with Autodesk.

I can imagine that doing something like, say, making an easy-to-find, easy-to-download, easy-to-install package of CLisp, tossing in wx widget bindings for good measure, would go a long way toward making distribution of Lisp software easier.
As a DoubleTwist user, I have to say the product absolutely sucks. Updating a single album would resync tends of gigabytes of music to my Android device, the software provided no user feedback, and appeared crashed for a large portion of the time. I have no trouble in recommending people avoid DoubleTwist.

In the end, I found MissingSync for Mac -> Android syncronization and it works - not without it's quirks (mainly around compilation albums) but much better than DoubleTwist.
Essential guide to picking an open source operating system