skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're writing a programming language, Lisp's terse syntax makes writing the boring parts like the parser very simple. That's why many of these cool projects use it.

But for the more everyday tasks, other languages work just fine. Lisp isn't always going to be a big productivity win over Ruby or Python. If you're looking at it from that angle, you'll be disappointed.

But yes, it's worth reading On Lisp and SICP, and working through the examples. Afterward you'll find yourself missing features that Lisp has when you work with other languages; at that point you can make an informed decision which one fits your problem best.
News reports claim that the FBI has said that they can not crack TrueCrypt.

http://news.techworld.com/security/3228701/fbi-hackers-fail-...

Some people argue that they want to encourage the use of certain encryption products (e.g. Clipper chips) while others argue they are being honest about their capabilities being limited in the face of strong encryption.
I love my Kindle 3. It has gotten me thru many a long and boring waits that are inevitable as a part of daily life in India.

The parts I wish will not change when it morphs into a Tablet
- High Readability in Sunlight
- Low weight, easily handled in one hand for hours
- Ridiculously long battery life
- High build quality (dropped mine once to no discernible damage)
Now I am conflicted. I agree with this article just as much as I agree with this one that says "Architecture has no place in software", also posted today: http://hhgttg.de/blog/?p=352
Bing will be default search engine on RIM Blackberry devices
Microsoft Announces Partnership With RIM, Bing Now Default on BlackBerrys
A Built-In Eye Tracker Makes A Projection Screen 
Students from the University of Texas at Austin have created a virtual reality gaming setup in which the player cannot tear their eyes away from the action using a pico projector and an eye-tracking camera. The camera tracks a player’s line of vision, to move the screen while gamer’s eyes are moving.
The iMac screen is highly reflective, to the point that it's almost like looking in a mirror when running an app with a dark background color. My default IDE background color is black, and I had to change it on my iMac, so I could focus on my code instead of my face...

Apple offers a matte display on the MacBook Pro, and I highly recommend that option, especially if you intend to work outdoors.
منتديات اغاريد الشوق
Well, I'd like to quote a comment from the original posting. "If you remove one branch from a tree, doesn't change the fact that it's still a tree."
This cannot in any way dwarf the magnitudes of contributions they have made to the open source world.
UK HN'ers LeedsHack is back
LeedsHack is an overnight hackday in Leeds, its free and is the first weekend in August, http://www.leedshack.com, any questions post them here :)
The HDD on an iMac is replaceable if you have heavy duty suction cups ...
You are not late, it's me who decided to comment 11 days after you posted ;)

I think it definitely depends on the company. Maybe I was "lucky" with my first two companies? (both SSIIs, with around 100-150 employees).

I got offered a job at a smaller company (a "PME" with less than 20 employees), and it did not include any RTTs... Which is one of the reasons I declined (since the compensation was not better anyway...). I think small companies have a special status re: RTTs, and do not need to give them.
Hands-on Node.js (E-book)
Finally! Apple Canada prices on a par with US prices,

$1199 really means $1199.

Except for GST :(
there is plenty of free software which is up front about including ad's, which is the ethical way to offer free software and get paid to do so. Also, this is not some software that was developed as free, but often pirated themes/modules/plugins modified and then billed as free to put in ads.

Also, one of the links in the article does show many of these echo'd. In some cases it is a lot of javascript, in other pure links.

As for proof, you are right, it is possible these guys are using unethical SEO firms instead, but I still think they should be monitoring and dealing with this issue. In some cases, there are thousands of backlinks which have similar footprints. I have trouble buying that they are blissfully unaware.
Thanks a lot. It's nice to see there are options, although they require a bit extra work, they're worth if you consider your privacy valuable.
Dear Julian Assange: The Internet is the Most Appalling Spy Machine
I'd be fine with it, but the US implementation was truly awful.
Hmm, even the low end one's default is to ship with Apple's wireless mouse and keyboard (with an option for a free swap from mouse to trackpad and and to a wired keyboard with numeric keypad. Thats going to make a lot of desks look pretty by default.
50 years ago, Lisp was 30 years ahead of everyone else. But it grew complacent.
Gendarme (an extensible rule-based tool to find problems in .NET code)
Went to this last year, and was great fun.

PROTIP: Bring a nerf gun :P
Ruby programmers love domain-specific languages implemented in Ruby (eg RSpec). A Lisp dialect lets you implement libraries with fewer restrictions on what the DSL can do and more expressive power. Lisp takes Rails-style succinctness through metaprogramming to the next level.
True, but it makes me wonder if SE would have the comparable coverage on those media if it got as much push as Quora has.

(I don't think that the two sites should be directly compared, btw -- I was just noting that they had been whenever SE was mentioned.)
Hells to the yeah!
Perhaps he had a 3G connection? That would conflict with their statement about no internet connectivity though.
Just a comment from Asia (Singapore). It's rather difficult to get doctors or medical personnel to adopt new technologies. The nature of the industry selects people who are trained to behave very cautiously, as it concerns life and death. The healthcare industry is also very fragmented geographically due to necessary regulation. This makes it difficult to scale, as each location may have its own set of legal, medical, safety and privacy requirements. Doctors are also used to pen and paper. An example we saw when visiting our clients is the use of a touch screen tablet for taking patient's notes. Basically, it just replaces a paper notepad with a digital notepad. The doctors fundamentally do not change their behaviour or actions. However, there are changes happening with the advent of electronic medical health records and the integration of the internet to connect the various systems.

Another point would be the costs involved. Everyone seems to charge some insane multiple once it's healthcare-related, even though it's just the same hardware/software.

I guess there's a lot to talk about and discuss, drop me an email if you are interested. I'm also pretty sure the DrChrono guys (I've seen them post on HN before, I think) can chip in with a few insights from their end.

When designing systems for doctors, you really need to talk to them and watch them use your product/platform/software/website. There are a lot of idiosyncrasies/terminology involved which an outsider is unable to grasp easily.
This is what's amazing about Apple. That a grey-box PC has been able to take a $50 video card for decades to get three monitors, nobody cares. When Apple introduces a new connector to do it, though, suddenly it's so exciting that people are willing to throw away their perfectly-good computers and spend $3000 on two new ones. Wow!
No word on if the Thunderbolt ports support video in like the 27" before them did - you used to be able to plug another computer into the 27" iMac and use it as a display.
At least in the US, merchants typically get stuck with the bill for fraud. As a consumer, it's only a mild annoyance if my number is stolen.
Agreed. It's a problem, but VC just isn't built for dependency management.

Since the histories of the dependencies don't get tracked, merging them can be tricky. Especially when dependencies get upgraded separately by multiple people.
as usual, wait at least a month to complain about an ubuntu release, I think with the exception of 10.04 you should wait until the next release to download the previous one.
IBox's Mail on the Go
I think you would struggle (at least initially) to feel more productive in Scheme than Ruby / Python (although Racket seems like it would probably be equivalent to Ruby/Python in capability).

However, I'm concentrating on Common Lisp these days, and there are things about it (it's object system (CLOS) and probably macros) that feel much more flexible and productive than even Ruby or Python.

Here is the order of books I'd recommend if you want to explore Common Lisp:

1. Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski
2. Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel
3. ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham
4. On Lisp by Paul Graham (available online)
5. Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence by Peter Norvig

Then maybe:
6. Art of the Metaobject Protocol
A Bit of event blurb --

LeedsHack: The largest UK hackday outside of London

LeedsHack is the only overnight hackday for the city of Leeds, the basic idea is we stick 150 people in a room, give them food, water and wifi and see what magical thing they create over the weekend.

Hackdays are a great way of unleashing creativity of teams and learning new skills, the time limited nature of the event means that you tend to focus and dive right in!

Companies are seeing the advantages of hackdays internally by scheduling them regularly and letting development + design teams work on new ideas that wouldn’t be possible within the usual development schedule.
To be fair, though, this kind of case would warrant the NSA's attention - and they seem to be much better than the FBI at this kind of thing.
As they are population based studies, they are of no use clinically at all

Why not? Are you saying that population based studies are meaningless unless the study includes the individual we are interested in?

They do this by reporting the odds ratio found by a GWA study as their personal odds ratio of getting a disease

And isn't that correct, given only the information about SNPs? How else would you define a "personal odds ratio"?
They were more concerned about keeping the American operators alive. When you're going after a zealous nutjob who welcomes death and seeks only to take as many others as possible with him, capture becomes significantly more dangerous than killing. The SEALs were mostly likely briefed that they were to attempt capture but not to endanger any of their team members for that purpose. The reports I read stated that he was offered a chance to surrender but declined. Since UBL was holding an AK and a human shield at the time, the SEAL who cornered him didn't waste any time going to "plan B."
"Dropbox as a mountable location to/from which to sync files"

Dropbox isn't "mountable". The files are stored locally and synced. This is MUCH different as you can work offline. Additionally, you get the performance characteristics of local access.

So this is equivalent in the same way say a flash drive, or Filezilla would be equivalent. It doesn't miss edge features of Dropbox, it misses most core good features.
Yeah, that whole paragraph really read like someone went "oh crap, we need to say something about the implications and practical implications of this research, otherwise what's the point of it all?!" and then forced something out of the researchers.

Now excuse me while I go and kick my darned slow liquid-sipping robots out of frustration.
That said, to upgrade the hard disk in an iMac is a total PITA and requires a special sensor cable to the hard disk that is HDD vendor specific:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/iMac-Intel-27-Inch-Hard-D...

I pine for the old days of white G5's and original iMacs where they were a piece of cake to work on. That said, I don't pine for their bad capacitor problems...
You're right. That's actually one of the things I admire about TC. When I spoke of fairness, what I meant was my personal perception and preference. He isn't required to be fair by any means, but I require fairness to not get fed up and stop reading. I should have clarified that in my post.
Do people actually use the Apple keyboards? Sure, they're a triumph of visual design, but absolutely horrible to actually type on. I throw them away and replace them with Cherrys at the first opportunity.
The good news is these are actually inexpensive compared to other essential tech tools: http://www.ifixit.com/Tools/Heavy-duty-Suction-Cups/IF145-02... ($14.95)
With 2x Thunderbolt you will be able to hook up multiple external Displays, thats great news for me ;)

Could possibly undermine Mac Pros in the future.
> If the minimum wage was $2 an hour say, a vast number of currently unemployed workers would quickly find themselves with work to earn honest money, delivering you delicious home cooked meals.

Did you not read his comment at all? I don't see how else you could've missed this, as it was at the beginning of the first sentence:

> I wasn't talking about food delivery
Architects do bridges not software.
XYDO Official Launch
The author is careless in using screenshots that implicate companies that have nothing to do with this issue. This article is a linkbait remix of the most obvious security tip out there: don't download and install stuff from places you don't know you can trust.

Proving my point...I can't speak to the Wordpress themes, but one of the screenshot looks like it's the Drupal theme called Acquia Marina (http://drupal.org/node/315555).

You've got four people who are commiting to the git repository (http://drupal.org/node/315548/committers). The only way this code gets in there is if one of those four is putting it in, which they're not as you can view the commits and dig through the code to see if there is anything like this (http://drupal.org/node/315548/commits). They have not.

Therefore this theme has to be coming from another source rather than Drupal.org, the officially supported source for Drupal themes, and to my point, Acquia, a company founded by Dries Buytaert, the fellow that created Drupal.

So if you're downloading code for Drupal from somewhere other than Drupal.org, or downloading themes for WP from somewhere other than WP, or Microsoft system patches from somewhere other than Microsoft, or apt-get-ing from random sources, yup, you've got a risk exposure.

As an aside, the OP site is using Drupal.
This doesn't surprise me at all: the guy was notoriously paranoid and wouldn't have wanted any kind of electronic tether that Americans could have potentially used to trace back to him. Never mind how plausible such a scenario actually is, in his mind it was a threat.

I'd bet that he had a dedicated sneaker-net servicing his compound with high bandwidth and acceptable (to him) latency.
What camera was used?

Something better than a Canon 7D?
It is. Unfortunately the call center rep was clueless and meant 0.1 EUR, so 100 EUR/GB. Let me tell you, that was one frustrating discussion. I don't know why people are having such difficulties with decimals...
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
What makes Lisp unique, in my opinion, is its elegant unification of code and data. The 'eval' function and of course Lisp macros are very powerful features that come out of this immediately, and theoretically you can implement any other language feature on top.

In most other languages, to do the same things you have to parse the syntax, build an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree), do whatever transformations you need, and if you're very lucky you can then call the compiler as a library. Lisp makes the AST directly executable with 'eval', and provides a syntax parser already. Moreover, the AST is made of lists and symbols, which Lisp is naturally perfectly suited to manipulating.

All this makes Lisp quite beautiful as a mathematical object. I can't speak on its practicality ;)
I just retweeted Michael's tweet link this blog entry - this is really a very good classification of Lisp systems! It could be a potential time sink however, trying more implementations :-)
Your attitude is exactly the point. In many other countries, they _would_ spend their time packing a box lunch. As an American by birth, I didn't understand this either until I went abroad. At first, it was simply shocking how much time/effort went into food preparation/consumption. But over time, I came to appreciate (and missed upon my return) the much more nuanced approach taken to cuisine in some other countries.
I'm particular about keyboards and I've got to say that while I was initially appalled by the new Apple keyboard, and was no fan of the precursor, the newest kind is actually one of the best keyboards I've ever used. The short travel of the keys makes them surprisingly good.

If you like clanky, clacky keyboards, they're not for you, but that's why Matias makes keyboards.
Yep, it seems like they haven't figured out the solution to gorilla arm yet. On the positive side they have a free trackpad option to start educating desktop users about multi-touch input.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Gorilla_arm
Could be satellite internet...
OK, but can you really call "one" fiber with "multiple" cores a "single" optical fiber?

All the same, pretty amazing stuff.

The current state of the art in systems which are starting to get deployed now is 100Gb/s per wavelength on a single optical fiber. Each fiber can carry 10's of wavelengths.

These 100G systems can use existing fiber that was run for 10G systems. They exploit more advanced modulation techniques than the old "on-off keying" used in 10G.

Backbone carriers are starting to fill up the so-called "dark fiber" that was over-supplied ~10 years ago. This is creating the demand for 100G and eventually higher.
80M instead of 40M? When 24,000M costs $300, who gives a flying fuck about 40 megabytes?

(Yes, yes, this attitude has ruined the software industry. Fine, use your slow but conservative-of-nearly-infinite-resource browser.)
Ah, thanks, I couldn't judge intention from your previous post...
I'll echo what astrodust wrote and say that my first reaction was "this keyboard is too flat" and I didn't enjoy typing on it, but now I think it might be the best keyboard I've ever owned.
Being non-mountable isn't a core good feature. It's a serious deficiency. If you want to store locally and sync so you can work offline, this is only one of about a hundred solutions. It just happens to be one that also allows you to use the file directly, that keeps your data secure and private (unlike Dropbox), etc.
Keep in mind, that many job interviews are for a position that would be a step up for the candidate. And also keep in mind that there are a lot of lame programming jobs out there that just require a narrow technology skill set. Asking if a candidate programs in their spare time can be a really good indicator of whether they are up for the challenge of learning something new, or whether they're just looking for a bigger paycheck.

Other professions have more formal, expensive, and rigid requirements for certification and continuing education. Programming does not. Consider spare time projects as one potential proxy for the former.
When you work for someone, you have to do what they pay you for. For a 'software architect', that often means doing things someone else's way. It's tougher, and often less than optimal, but that's what you're paid for.

I think it's one of the reasons so many programmers start their own project and just work for themselves. It allows them the freedom to do it however they want.

Personally, I like the structure of a company above and around me. I like being told what to work on and how it should end up.

In my free time, I work on projects for myself. This allows me that freedom that I don't get during my paid hours, and I end up with something -I- want instead. Eventually, I expect one of those projects will become popular, and I'll deal with that if it happens, but for now I get to do anything I want on them.

Going back to 'respect'... If you do your job, and you get paid a fair wage for it, where's the lack of respect?

However, if you're complaining about your paycheck-supplier complaining that he's not getting his way, you're disrespecting him, not the other way around.
Do you think the service would still be interesting if it didn't offer Exchange integration?
I've seen this, but I've also seen some reservations about whether this is safe. I think secure erase plus garbage collection will hold me until I get TRIM in OS X Lion.
Well my Chrome folder in C:\Users\simon\AppData\Local\Google is 1.66GB, the application being 323MB of it, so I suppose its a bit of a space hog.

But I don't see the problem with large memory use. Ideally, all of your memory should be put to use all of the time, otherwise it is wasted, no? Shouldn't we be complaining that browsers aren't using more of our 4,6,8,12,16 gigs of RAM?
Ask HN: Entrepreneur/Startups-friendly cafes in NYC
I am not sure if this has been asked before. As many of you can relate to, I tend to get bored working at home and try to go out and about in the city hoping to find a good spot to get some work done. Startbucks does not do it for me - WIFI is too slow and I lose my patience waiting for the bar to go 100% when I FTP a file. Very frustrating. Aren't there places that can relate to this and are catering to startups? I might just not be aware of them - can you guys share some spots? My schedule is not consistent - I can be very productive at home - so I do not necessarily want to rent a cube or workspace. Just looking for a change of scenary where I can be productive as well. Thanks!
I've done some benchmarking of softlayer cloudlayer and their "SAN" back cloud servers have about the worst IO performance of any provider. Even the largest 16 and 32GB instances performed extremely poorly. EC2 EBS is a much better performing storage platform. Stay away from cloudlayer if you have anything even remotely IO intensive.

http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in...
Ask HN: Will security ever be "the next big thing"?
Hey HN,
in the light of recent PSN hacks etc. do you see security will be a hot topic (such as "social", "local" right now) that picks the interest of enterpreneurs and startup people (For example, having multiple information security related startups in a YC batch)? If so, when do you think this will happen? If not, what do you think keeps this from happening?
Why not squash all the broken commits together before pushing to the central repository (assuming you use a DVCS)?
I've grown to like short-throw keys and also like how little desk-space the Apple keyboards without numeric keypads consume.
Verizon 3G Outages
It looks like Verizon is having trouble with their 3G networks today.
> OK, but can you really call "one" fiber with "multiple" cores a "single" optical fiber?

Depends on what they actually used.

There are special optical fibers with air holes (google for "photonic crystal fibers"), if they produces such fibers to guide multiple modes independently, you can really call it a single fiber.

If they used separate fibers within a single plastic cladding, you can argue about that.

If they used multiple fibers separate plastic claddings, they probably would have been shouted down at the conference where they presented their results :-)
I've come to adore mine. The mice, though, are still rubbish.
There were a number of tools involved in the analysis, including code examination.

Can this loop be closed and automated? Why do we all keep having to do this manually?
What the FBI, and all security services are really interested in, is FUD.

This is the same reason why they've never issued a denial about aliens at area 51, the same reason that they make random comments about truecrypt out of the blue, the same reason they've never released all the CCTV footage from the pentagon on 9/11 even though they could, the non denials around ECHELON, HAARP, etc. etc. etc.

They'd much prefer people keep wasting energy guessing about the infinite space of "unknown unknowns" than spending time talking about the less titillating abuses that happen in plain sight.