skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been a point of discussion for at least half a decade. The article has nothing that hasn't been posted to HN before. My take on a the playing field: Smart grid stuff has a weird confluence of stuff going for it, which is bad for security, but not as bad as the doom-and-gloom-for-profit folks say it is.

* Very legacy systems are very much in play, and compatibility is a requirement -- replacement and modernization is extremely expensive and time consuming.

* Old school engineers who hang on to "the power grid is different, we need specialized, non-standard it systems" mentality. This is partially true, but to the point the make it.

* A general distrust of power grid engineers (including software) of anyone claiming that "evil hackers are everywhere". They don't understand certain software issues, like once an exploit is found it is essentially free to take advantage of, which is the exact opposite of may real-life security issues.

* Utilities that view security as a matter of procedural compliance with some set of rules.

These combine for a bleak picture, the tempering tho comes from:

* vendors and regulators (doe, nerc, ferc) are very concerned with security at all levels.

* researchers are starting to show how real, physical damage can be caused by cyber-security problems (not just hypothetical, but demonstrable, bottom line affecting issues).

* recognition by the more pragmatic older engineers that today's "kids" are maybe on to something using commodity communications and software instead of custom everything. This has inherent security benefits in many places.

All that being said, this is a giant field, and the "smart grid" is not one thing (in fact, if you have n people talking about it, (n-1)^2 definitions of smart grid will usually emerge) -- security for the grid is an exciting and interesting place to be.
Ask HN: Do I have too many interests to fit in a single blog?
Hi HN. I have a dilemma!

I would really like to write a blog. Especially after a recent article that made it to the frontpage, which advocated writing a blog even if no one is reading. I love writing, I do it all the time, but in terms of blogging I have one big problem: Too many interests!

If I had one blog, its subject matter would span video games, fencing, martial arts, armchair philosophy, ruby, python, Android & iPhone development, vim tips, some of my own illustration, general software development, personal finance, microfiction, graphic design and Photoshop tips. Now, I know we're supposed to write a blog even if no one is going to read it, because it is its own reward; but I feel like there really isn't a point to publishing a blog unless you think someone out there is going to visit regularly. Otherwise, there just isn't a reason to make it public--right?

My question to you fine ladies and gentlemen is: What should I do? "Wing it" and put up an interdisciplinary blog, trusting that it'll get an appropriate audience (whether an audience of ten or ten thousand)? Create a whole bunch of blogs and update each of them less frequently? I haven't spent too much time fretting over this, because it's probably more important to actually get things done, but that frontpage article last week inspired me to really find a solution, because it really bugs me when I write something and have no place to put it.

What do you think?
Emacs is not just a text editor, its more like a text editing platform or framework, or something like that. Emacs is literally the lisp of the text editor world, if you have the time and patience you should learn it even if you won't use it much, for the so called enlightenment it will offer you.
Actually, a colon (:) would have been the correct punctuation mark to use.

The headline should have been: Meet Tumblr: Facebook and Twitter's New Rival
Comparison of Facebook Answers against Yahoo, Aardvark, and others
"But what we can change are the policies that subsidize college. Student loans should be drastically curtailed, especially for the "at-risk" groups (which are also the fastest-growing). Loans to students at for-profit schools have an appalling 40% default rate. While I can't find data for degrees, I suspect that hard science graduates default more rarely than social science graduates (except for education, where the compensation is nothing if not reliable)."

Are you really suggesting that we take away this opportunity from the dis-advantaged?

I may not be willing to give 99% of bumbs money, even for food, but i am completely willing to give money to the government no-matter the cost to make sure that everyone has a chance to seek knowledge. I am almost of the opinion that there is no greater thing a country can do, than to provide a proper education to everyone within it's boarders. ( regardless of race, creed, gender, nationality, or citizenship ) let the world come here to learn, let the world compete to come here to get an education.

yes, we need to make hard decisions in the coming years, but limiting access to knowledge is not one of them.
To anyone who learns the idiom, this code is fine, and perfectly readable. I don't even know Ruby yet, and it took me less than a minute to become fully comfortable with this kind of code. This isn't a huge barrier to "non-experts".
If I recall, Wikileaks does work Swedish jurisdiction (where it is illegal to reveal a source in some circumstances) into their submission chain somehow. Or is it The Netherlands I am thinking of?
Archos' first Android tablet was 5". It could use Android 2, but the media-playing capabilities are solid.
> The problem is that developers are making a lot more money on iPhone apps.

Is this necessarily a problem? Maybe there will end up being enough good free apps that the Android ecosystem will do fine without needing people to "make a lot more money" selling apps.

I happily used Linux on my desktop for years even though there wasn't much of an ecosystem of paid software.
In an info-overloaded world, who wins?
a) You're right to want to do this.

b) This is not difficult to accomplish via Nginx (or whatever) using reverse-proxying.

http://www.pastie.org/1071380

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/08/22/using-wordpress-and-rail...
Sean Tevis--the "some guy on the internet" I think you're talking about--ran for State Representative (Kansas) in 2008.
I'm just glad android seems to have passed the threshold beyond which companies have to care about it. A good android app is becoming a necessary part of any consumer cloud-based service (kindle, nook, etc.) just as a good iphone app has been for a while.
It's clear to me that you haven't answered this question for yourself. Haskell has a lot of features that Lisp generally doesn't:

• A powerful type system with inference

• Purity

• Pattern matching baked into the language core

• Full laziness (such that "if" can be written as a pure function, no need for special forms or macro-like functionality)

• Curried functions and partial application (so, for example, Lisp's (defun double (n) (* n 2)) would be double = (* 2) in Haskell)
It reminds me of similar trends of people who photograph what they eat:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/dining/07camera.html

or that they photograph themselves every day, then post time-lapsed videos on YouTube.

I realize this misses the emotional point of these series - this was a more artistic undertaking, but still...

Also, to those suggesting this is a good idea.. it's already happening. Nowadays people's life albums are being shared on Facebook and other social websites... there was a great post about how we will feel more keenly our own mortality when our online "friends" start to die.

(see: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1932803,00.... )
... and we are talking about "market", that is about usage of Linux that involve exchange of money, no? So that's even more impressive.
Two helpful mods to your macro:

(1) After the f(, you probably want h to move the cursor left onto the space before the (.

(2) Instead of d$, just use D.

Alternative for both those comments: Replace d$ with Dx

More than one way to do it anyway...

I would have spammed "qq" instead of "q0" to save finger space, but you might have already been using your q register for all I know.

The other nice thing about vim macros is that since they are stored in vim registers, they can be accessed and manipulated. Make a one-keystroke mistake in your macro? Paste it to your buffer, edit it, and copy it back into the register. Now you can use it again. Example:

"0p => df"f(d$j0q

Modify to be df"f(Dxj0q and highlight and "0y

For the readers, " accesses a register, y = yank, p = paste.

Emacs defines "yank" the opposite way of vim: it means to yank from the clipboard and paste to your buffer. In vim, it means to yank it out of your buffer and put it into your clipboard (another register, as it happens, along with special registers that understand different levels of your OS's clipboards).
I'm starting to worry how much cargo-cult work must be happening in Ruby, if operators that have been in the precedence table for years are considered to be something obscure that you'll eventually discover.
I wasn't really considering jumping directly to the VPS plan at first. I think as far as getting the site actually running, and proving itself as a concept, I can leave it on a relatively cheap shared host for a while.

My concern became that if I ever outgrew the shared host, which can happen for any number of reasons (bandwidth, needing to configure things in certain ways, etc.), I might not be able to afford to go full managed due to expense. I'm not expecting miracles for this thing financially, as it's just a minor itch I thought could do with some scratching, so full managed might never feel viable to me.

To be honest, becoming a sysadmin was never a big concern of mine, but I wouldn't go so far as to say I "don't want to know" how to do the job. I'm perfectly willing to learn, which is precisely why I created this post.

If I ever do get a VPS, it still won't be until at least a couple months from now, which gives me a reasonable amount of time to learn enough not to embarrass myself and to provide a decent foundation to learn more as I need to.

My top priority with this, and I hope I've made this clear in my comments here (I know I made it clear in my x-post to reddit) is that I want to be sure the system is secure. That is the reason I'm asking for help here, as I never had a doubt that I could get the system to a working state, but I don't have the expertise yet to know when I've left something in an insecure state, and that's exactly why I asked this question: to close that gap before it becomes a real problem.
Depends on what you call "this kind of code". Operators like "and" and "or" facilitate some very useful and expressive idioms, so having that kind syntactic constructs is rather useful.

However, I think it's a big mistake to make those constructs use "and" and "or", because it overloads the semantics normally associated with those keywords. Yes, it's true that it's precisely the same logic under the hood, but you have to fight the "oh, boy, that's so neat!" reflex and think about all that could go wrong.

There's a similar gotcha in Python, where instead of ternary operator (a ? b : c) you use a combination of "and" and "or" (a and b or c). The gotcha is that it backfires if "b" evaluates to false.

All in all, it's probably not "worth it" to have nasty surprises like that, but that could be avoided by using different keywords, not "and" and "or".
When developers have to seriously think about which platform to support first you can say they've achieved parity.

I agree we're not quite at that point, but we are getting close. We (justin.tv) are putting some serious resources into Android development right now - not as much as for iPhone, but still, I'd say we're now treating them as nearly equally important platforms.
More info would be quite helpful.
If the movement between the user groups remain the same, then in 10 years time, it will have stabilized on around 6% blackberry, 70% iphones, and 24% android (ignoring everyone going to "other smartphone os")

(Finally I got to use Markov chains! Code here for anyone interested: http://codepad.org/cstzwXbG )
Quick correction: Mike Davis did a lot of fundamental research on the platform IOActive attacked for Black Hat in 2009, but my understanding is that Travis Goodspeed wrote the actual exploit code used in the demonstration.

I point this out not to diminish Davis' work, which I'm sure was great, but to illustrate the extent to which "smart grid" attacks are in vogue right now in vulnerability research. There were, I believe, at least 4 talks on it at Black Hat this year. Every software security consultancy in the country has done multiple projects targeting "smart grid" components in general and automated metering (AMI) in particular.

Smart grid components are interesting to me not because they're a vector for flashy (and horrific) real-world attacks, but because they demand a different strategy for mitigating attacks.

In conventional software, dev teams can rely on a "get it right and then patch what breaks" approach. While updating software is notoriously difficult, it is at least a plausible response to a serious security flaw.

When you deploy 100,000 smart meters running RTOS's on TI microcontrollers, this strategy doesn't work. Anything straightforward you do to make those meters feasible to update is going to blow up in your face. And this is an extremely unforgiving place to deploy security countermeasures; you face not only strict code-size limits on the meters themselves, but also RF protocols that need to squeeze every bit out of every message.

I think the winning strategy for the "smart grid" is, like Blu-Ray, renewability. Instead of trying to train 500 microcontroller realtime C devs in secure code and crypto protocols, people should sit down and devise mechanisms to recover from security flaws. Things as simple as protocol versioning, or the ability to shun/revoke specific devices, or the ability to fault to manual reads are like to make a bigger difference than whether the devices are using truncated SHA1 vs. SHA256.
You could have had it a few weeks ago, too, as Cyanogen released a stable-ish version for the Evo. (I have been using it since it was released. Getting rid of Sense was well worth the loss of the never-working 4G functionality.)
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JavaScript grid editor: I want to be Excel
> some in-house designed and quite alien packaging system

Looks a lot like apt
> The volume real market participants want to buy or sell.

What is the definition of "real market participant"?

For example, are day-traders real market participants? If not, why not?

How about me? (I rebalance every few months, maybe.)

Note that day traders and I have exactly the same goal - make money. How many people trade for other reasons?
It's always easy to claim something is okay when you "don't even know [language] yet", isn't it? ;)

All joking aside, the problem with this is not that "non-experts" don't understand what the code does at all. It's that they don't understand all that it does. If you never read anything that warns you about the difference between "and/or" and "&&/||" (or if you skim over it), it can bite you really bad.
I host my sites on a server in my living room.

I use my HTPC at home as a server for my SVN and sites which haven't started making money for me yet. What I like about this setup is that I can deploy large amounts of data in an instant. I have a mostly static site with a few million pages I plan to update daily.

More importantly, now I can justify paying for the fast internet connection and keeping the PC running 24hrs.

The problem area is keeping backups. My server is a retired P4 I got from ebay for $50, which is not really reliable. I had to go through the pain of setting up all my backup scripts, which I guess I would have to do any way.

The P4 has enough processing power to handle all my sites' traffic while I'm watching youtube on it.

I also use the server to download anything and everything I need. It also serves as a file server and hosts some of my personal ssh tunnels and proxies.

Having said that, I would recommend using a home server unless you really don't want to spend money on hosting or if you are worried about bandwidth caps. Start ups can benefit from a home server, but plan to movie it to a real server once you start growing. Don't invest on home server hardware or try to upgrade. What you already have is probably good enough.
It's going to be "custom-everything" for the foreseeable future, since the grid operators want (need) to deploy this stuff in a tower-and-mesh topology. Even if you managed to build a system out of "COTS" technology (say, GSM and IP multicast), you'd still be working with technology that gets virtually no ongoing scrutiny from software security teams.

Unfortunately, I think software security expertise is going to be relegated to nipping at the edges of this problem, which the vendors and grid operators appear to be delegating to the "national labs" like Sandia and Idaho.
Everytime someone talks about college being a bubble, people get offended because they think the thesis says their degree is not as valuable.

That is not the point-- you've got 3 different angles: the opportunity cost vs future income, the actual market price of college debt (think mortgages), and uni tuition vs. overall demand.

I know this because I talked about this last year and caught a lot of flak for the argument. My thesis can be seen here: http://bit.ly/bUCfec
Ask HN: Which mailing list program or service?
Any recommendation for a mailing list management software or hosted service? Thanks
This loss of common ground has happened before, in the mid-1800's. Some of these issues were resolved at the end of the Civil War (e.g. states' rights [0]). But not all of them: when some state legislatures were unable to choose U.S. senators, the vote had to go to the people (the 17th amendment to the U.S. constitution) [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#States.27_ri...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
Here's a couple flattr invites if anyone wants 'em:

both have been used

0bff0372ffa0ed106

6860b41d1b04b64c6
Is Italy Too Italian?
“Good On Video” Is The New “Good On Paper” With HireHive (YC S10)
The article isn't talking about the short-circuiting behavior, which I agree is what a Lisper would expect. The article is talking about their operator precedence, and why it's useful to have two sets of operators that are identical except for precedence rules. That is something that you won't find in Lisp, not even buried deep in the guts of LOOP.
Just wanted to share my hobby project with y'all - it reads Twitter and tries to classify each message as "bullish" or "bearish", then keeps track of which ticker symbols are mentioned, calculates the most mentioned each hour and creates a leaderboard. The backend is Haskell (Snap framework) and Redis, the frontend is Raphael.js and JQuery.

As an aside, I recently have found myself unemployed - anyone hiring or have some contract work they need done? Take a look at my github account at http://www.github.com/texodus for some of my code, including (soon) this site.
Spotli.com now saves searches
Here's my method: Convince yourself that you're willing to take the x% risk (where x < 100) of running out of money and dying on the street, rather than the 100% risk of living out something boring for no reason, and possibly feel like you might as well be dead anyway, particularly because you didn't even try. You almost don't have a choice.

And then realize that it's very unlikely that failure will really mean dying on the street, someone will back you up. At this point it doesn't seem so difficult :)
It makes even less sense to rigorously enforce that metric without factoring in price point or the size of the market that can feasibly be reached.

Enforcing an artificially high conversion rate is almost a disincentive to actively market the product (or even permit trials) once you've gone beyond the exact niche you've designed the product for, not to mention an incentive to offer "first year" prices well below market value.
Tevis ran for the KS house, and lost, probably in part because he tried to make a national movement out of the KS house (I followed the race somewhat closely and his fundraising was definitely part of the negative package aimed at him).

My point is, forget about a national political movement. Engage with local politics, for local reasons. "Move" towards real engagement, not the feel-good merit-badge engagement that this article alludes to, where by giving a buck and signalling your support you might help create some sort of "tipping point" that will fix national politics.

Anybody who's telling you that you can fix dysfunctional national politics by giving up your credit card number online is, obviously, selling you something. I bet a lot of people on HN could easily get themselves onto township planning committees, where they can actually make a real difference.
BackType is hiring front and backend engineers
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskin_Commission

Also, there's "core CPI" which is referenced the most often, but it doesn't include "volatile" things like food and energy.
Posterous founder: 8 management lessons I learned at Apple
The primary servers are in Sweden because of the favorable free speech climate -> higher barriers to take down notices. The video editing was done in Iceland a few months ago. Julian Assange is Australian. There are people from pretty much everywhere working on the project.

WikiLeaks is a trans-national organization, trying to fit things like it into a construct where it has a nationality is obsolete.
I completely disagree.

You just have to classify 1> What bugs are and 2> What bugs aren't. We have warranties on close to a hundred iPhone apps out there. If its within the spec, and it fails under the version of the OS it was developed for on one of the devices it was developed for, it's under our 6 month rework warranty.

We have a long list of disclaimers (say Apple changes API functionality, private functionality, policy, etc, none of those are covered, but many real bugs are).
Their Trams
Sounds nice, but I'm somehow very wary of following this logic. Let's hear from the guy who's living paycheck to paycheck who did what was fun. Though maybe he's still happy too, who knows. Or maybe the guy who started doing it and then "wised up" in his 30s but then it was too late and he's stuck in a job that's more boring than what he could have had if he was more prudent with his career.

God, I sound like my dad now.

EDIT: Also, him saying that money is a detail only helps in the short run. I have the same attitude toward an interesting project I'm about to quit my job for, but I recognize that this "fun", as it were, will be very short lived if I don't have some revenue. So, trying for real and lasting a year is better than selling out, but finding a way to make money off of the "real" thing is necessary if it's going to last.
I manage my own stuff, works better than any hosted solution I've ever dealt with, and ensures maximum compatibility with various email clients.
You have to compare like with like. A tickstream is more like writing to an in-memory ring buffer than it is to a database. Or a tick is like a UDP packet compared to an X400 email. Even the ECNs run their backoffices on mainframes.

I would be willing to bet that Amazon do their warehouse and logistics operations on a mainframe too.
I think it's sort of interesting that the solution for the problem of all of these virtual groups splintering or again becoming polarized against each other is essentially an autocratic one. But what's to stop "First Nation" -- our virtual group philosopher king -- from becoming biased or corrupted by partisanship?