skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A caller of a function in an imperative environment cannot assume anything about the scope of that function's access of mutable state within the program"

This really doesn't make sense.

main() {
A a = new A();
f();
...
}
the caller main() can assume that "a" is not in scope of f().
Is it the robust refutation you need ?

The caller can further assume that the scope of f() is limited to the part of the state for which there is a path from a global variable or from one of its parameters (You can see the state as a graph. The nodes are the data and the links are the references) Therefore, this scope is not the whole state but a limited subset of the state.
Claiming otherwise is wrong and does not help to bring attention to what need to be improved : this subset is itself a superset of the part of the state that the function really need. We need new techniques to hide more state to the function, for example some kind dereferencement control ?
fail2ban solves all our problems. We only get about 5 hits a day total on each host now.

http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Download free pc game-Dark Tales: Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue
A dreadful murder and kidnapping has occurred in the Rue Morgue and only you can solve the dark crime! Use our Strategy Guide to find the killer and the missing family. Become the apprentice of the famed C. Auguste Dupin and solve the devious puzzles to find the hidden clues. Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s most acclaimed murder mystery, Dark Tales: Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder in the Rue Morgue is a fantastic Hidden Object game full of suspense and excitement.
Samuel Johnson: Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
Attacking someone's character are NOT ad hominem. Ad hominem is when you attack an argument BY attacking the person who made it, eg His argument is wrong because he is a conservative (which I see on HN fairly often).
A devaluation of its currency should mitigate that (all that debts their citizens will have) afaik.
Thank you for pointing me to this. Looks very useful.
16 Years old boy meets 42 years old woman 'soulmate' on WoW
But surely the distinction with a 'subscription' is more than just a language game? To my mind, a one-time fee for content strongly implies (by way of cultural expectation if nothing else) that I own rather than license that content.

On the other hand, for a subscription service such as Basecamp, my interactions with my data must necessarily be mediated by a server. I do of course expect a way to export the data itself should I wish to unsubscribe - and they provide this. What more could I reasonably expect from them?
That isn't using the right font either. The 'e' is all wrong.
As I understand it, Mac doesn't use 96dpi as its logical mapping, but rather 72. The kerning in Firefox (Win) isn't great either.
mongodb doesn't do concurrency very well -- at least not as good as Redis.
Pharmacy software
McKesson's comprehensive pharmacy management system suites and business services are designed to make your pharmacy more efficient and more profitable while helping you improve customer satisfaction.
Inforama, A java based Powerful Document Automation System For Enterprises
How reliable are your split test results?
Nuclear Energy Facts Report (Dec 13, 2009) (PDF Linked)
TSA cannot get PDF redaction right.
Stack Overflow Gives Back
lib-mapcar's argument list is several lines away from its name, hidden behind some unrelated profiling code and a lambda

If that's the complaint, the solution is to have a `define-profiled' macro, which can define the logic of the profiling code elsewhere, and also allow it to be reused in other methods. I don't see how lexical scope applies.
Make tags not trees - filesystem based on tags instead of directories
From the original story that the video is connected with: "Then they asked me to wait. Since they had asked for friends and families phone numbers I assumed they might be calling to verify my answers to questions or confirm I really had extended family in Tel Aviv. An announcement played over the sound system, interrupting my break in the sunshine. First in Hebrew, then Arabic, then in English. It was something along the lines of, 'do not to be alarmed by gunshots because the Israeli security needs to blow up suspicious passanger luggage.'"

Perhaps not entirely standard procedure, but sounds like it's not an isolated incident.

While I agree with you that the comment could have been phrased more effectively, the reminder that this article portrays perhaps an overly rosy interpretation of Israel's security practices was helpful, at least to me. It seemed odd it would be sitting at negative numbers just because someone didn't like the way it was phrased.
The thing is it's already here to some extent, and there are some widespread deployments of embedded OTA data products, kindle, On-Star, various netbooks with modems included, commercial washing machines(for laundromats), alarm systems; there's a lot of product already out there.

Yes, it's a long term trend, but it's growing stronger and there's a lot of equipment that's only going to be reporting 20-30kb of data per month. And the cost of the parts has fallen along the same curve as most other electronics. A $40 dollar broadband module can pay for itself with one service call or critical alarm, depending on the context.
I sympathize. I run a wholesale / delivery bakery in Beijing. I've been looking for a storefront for over a year, but am convinced that most people who've signed rental contracts to do retail within the past year or so are currently losing money.

That is to say, I think the cost of commercial real estate (and likely residential) is currently too high. But that seems to indicate that it will eventually go down - if enough people start realizing they can't turn a profit with the property they're looking to rent, demand will sag, and prices should follow.

But maybe not in the near future - we've been seeing some serious inflation over the past couple of months.
It might work if they can sandwhich the two screens together, so it just looks like one screen that changes modes.
iPhone has multimedia messaging now, but it's usually more convenient to send emails or use an app to post to whatever.
JShot 0.9.9.5 Beta su LinuX
But the macbook air is very big and heavy. It's even bigger and heavier than my PC laptop.
Anybody else notice how this relates to pg's essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular" (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html)? Getting sex as a teen, like being popular, takes fairly dedicated effort, and more intelligent, especially nerdy, people have other things to spend time on.
Where people are motivated to type rapidly, they do so quite effectively, especially when young and communicating with their peers.
When I read your post, I thought 'I bet this guy programs in Haskell'. And seeing your submissions I think I was right!

Humor aside, I agree. I think it's also a big problem in (general) AI: the usual cycle is someone thinks about a clever-sounding but vague and completely arbitrary theory of thought, then starts coding it up and fails to get anything really interesting. Early lisp programs were just one of these attempts at hacking away an AI. I think what we need is an abstract, mathematical language to describe intelligence. AIXI, as mathematical as it may be, doesn't fit the bill; it's one particular AI, not a language sufficient to describe AIs and their properties.
As unbiased as I can put it:

- Dustin Curtis, a freelance (?) designer, posted a spec redesign of the American Airlines main page, along with a scathing blog post about how bad the existing site is, accusing AA's online team of gross incompetence, and calling for their mass firing. HN reacts overall negatively to what is perceived as a presumptuous attitude, along with several potentially major shortcomings in his own redesign.

- A member of AA's online team contacted Dustin directly to defend himself and his team - and offer insight as to why things are the way they are. This individual permitted Dustin to post his response, which he did. This resulted in the individual's firing from AA.

- A few equally scathing blog posts were written about Mr. Curtis' professionalism in this matter - IIRC mostly concentrating on the combative, aggressive tone of the original post, the lack of understanding of enterprise-level web design, and his cavalier attitude when it came to the responses to his original post. These, in turn, generate more controversy.
It's an interesting video (I've watched it before), but this comment seemed apt the last time said video was mentioned:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723043
Bathroom bath the most essential in your bathrooms
Bathroom bath is the most essential in your bathrooms. Relax yourself in your favorite bathroom bath and enjoy them, they are available in different style, colors and shape.
Thanks for taking the time to answer :-)
In other words ranting is entertaining but it does not move us ahead.
K-means should work fine even with more dimensions as long as the statistical model that's implicit in k-means is a reasonable model of your data-generating process. Specifically: In the "relaxed" form (aka "continuous" form) of k-means that allows cluster centroids to be any coordinate and not just the coordinates of the observations, k-means clustering is equivalent to PCA[1]. PCA works under the assumption that your data generating process can be modeled by a linear factor model with isotropic Gaussian noise[2]. If your data fits these assumptions, or if you can preprocess the dataset accordingly, k-means should be able to give you more than 2 to 3 useful clusters. Machine "learning" usually works best when the dataset is first preprocessed and massaged to expose the hidden structure in a way that can be captured by the algorithms you're using.

Kernel SVMs are really mathematically cute with their infinite-dimensional-basis-functions and all that jazz, but I agree that in practice there's a lot more to be gained from understanding the problem at hand and its underlying stochastic process then selecting/designing algorithms accordingly.

1. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1015408

2. http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~cvrg/hilary2006/ppca.pdf
The author touched on something that has bothered me for years. It's been how long since Windows came out? Since te internet became common for home PCs?

And yet we still can't share files. I'm serous, we can't. Not out of the box, not on any of the common OSes.

Try this. You have a document - be it picture, PDF, whatever. You want to share it with someone in the same room as you. Can you, on a stock, out-of-the-box machine (i.e. no special software installed/configured) get the file to the other machine faster than using a memory stick? Nope. Windows File Sharing is a joke, Apple File Sharing a bit less so (thanks to Zeroconf/Bonjour) but still crappy...

The sort of ad-hoc file sharing problem has been grating on me for years - we've advanced so dramatically in every field, but still cannot manage this very simple problem.

I saw Avatar recently, and this split-second scene where one of the scientists grabbed an image on a desktop machine and "tossed" it onto his tablet... that blew my mind way more than it should have. Without the whiz-bang touchscreen holographic technology, the premise of this operation should be second nature to us by now.
Tell HN: Happy New Year
Sure, it's an arbitrary point of our planet's rotation around the local star, but there's nothing wrong with finding an excuse to celebrate. Looking forward to a great 2010!
Project Oberon: The Design of an Operating System and a Compiler (pdf)
I don't think the author uses ad hominem in the traditional sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem . Most probably the author really meant 'insulting' but used 'ad hominem' because it sounds more sophisticated, but there is no equality between those two.
I disagree about kNN ineffectiveness. It produces satisfactorily results even for gene expression classification, where you have about 100 examples described with 10000 attributes. It does not succumb to the curse of dimensionality that quickly as it evaluates each attribute separately and only combines the results afterwards. The curse of dimensionality is more evident if the learning algorithm tries to deal with attribute interactions of higher orders.

Learning algorithms are just tools. No tool is perfect for every task. Also, you should use the tools you know well, because you can leverage them best.

SVMs are quite hard to be used correctly due to sensitivity to parameters, which do not seem intuitive. You need to know your data well to set them right.
Japanese researchers develop see-through goldfish
You can use iptables to rate limit connections:

-N SSH_RECENT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p tcp --dport 22 -j SSH_RECENT
-A SSH_RECENT -m recent --set --name SSH
-A SSH_RECENT -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 3 --name SSH -j DROP
Is This Really an Intelligence Failure?
The Universe as We Know It
don't know if they are as unusable though

Pretty much.
[Apple] realized that keeping WebKit closed and exclusively pumping money into it was pointless. So they opened it out...

Webkit started as a fork of KHTML (part of KDE and LGPL licenced) their mishandling of it is a good example of how not to work with open source.

Andriod is another. As Google isn't developing it in public they're carrying the full cost. And their re-creating of userland libraries to avoid the LGPL is pretty much the opposite of your argument (though possibly inherited from before Google bought Android).

Aside from your examples I agree with your point. It's similar to one Doctorow makes in Makers that everything turns into a commodity after a few years and it doesn't make you money anymore. However it can still act as a barrier of entry so examples like Chadaustin's can still make sense if maintenance costs don't dominate.
I just want to note that flights to/from Israel happen to be more expensive than in other countries.
Shoot a laptop to check if its a bomb ?

Do they also drink suspect liquids as a check ?
Welcome to the frustration decade
Founder visa bill proposed
People seem to prefer entertainment over enlightenment.
To be accurate, one of the articles was yet another boring article about java types and stuff like that (personally I've never used or understood why I should use java)

and the other article is about a topic that is cross-server-side platform (java, ruby, python, php, etc...) and a much more interesting article.
Not only that, but most people can understand an article about HTML pretty easily, but type systems is not an easy read (imo)
A bit out of topic... but I really hate the magsafe connector, it always falls off of the computer, restrict me in which positions I can use my laptop and all that for the unlikely possibility of it saving the day if I trip on the wire

But, yes apart from this, I love apple's attention to details.
Yes, this.

Cringely opined some years ago that tech companies evolve through three categories (or stages of development): technology driven, sales driven, and marketing driven.

There's an assumption in this ontology: that growth and evolution of a tech company is predicated on new technology.

The new (post-1997, Jobs II) Apple breaks this rule. Apple is design driven, at a level that makes more sense to folks with a Fine Art degree than a CS background. (The reason for their success? Lots of folks with an aesthetic background like this stuff and will pay extra for it.) They're seeking a better user experience, vertically integrated at all levels with their web ecosystem.

Gruber -- who's been tracking apple for something like 20 years -- gets this. J. Random Gizmo columnist doesn't.
Well, different people are having different takes on the semantics I guess. How about a quota though? Nobody likes an overly negative person at a party. IRL, we can't enforce good behavior that way, but here we can through the power of software.
I agree that giving the power of extradition to an employer or investor is ultimately going to undermine the benefits that the business relationship brought in the first place. However, how do you define 'excellent'? A uni degree isn't indicative of excellent. It's not even a required component of 'excellent'.
Requiring a business plan is probably a good idea in that it may help prevent these visas being sold (100k + sponsoring fee may be reasonable?).
> As a standard, XML is actually pretty simple and, in my opinion, well thought out.

XML is good at text markup, but not good at data structures, which is what everyone inevitably tries to use it for. This is the basic problem.

XML by itself is a way to create tree structures of text strings. There are no data types (only strings), no schema, and no clear mapping to actual data structures in programming languages.

The evidence of XML's inadequacy for data structure serialization is that it takes a mountain of specifications (XML Schema, DOM) to address all of the needs that XML by itself does not satisfy. And even with all these specifications, there is no simple way to (for example) serialize an array of integers into XML and have them get deserialized into the same ten integers, without doing your own text manipulation.

XML has had ten years of almost no serious competition and the favor of the w3c and the web community, and all we have to show for it is an ever growing pile of specs that still fail to make data interchange easy. Also, XML is horribly inefficient.

What is the right answer? Protocol Buffers. They are 3-10x smaller, 20-100x faster to parse, they have a schema built in with real data types at the lowest level of the stack, they have both a binary and a text format, and they have a much more natural mapping onto real data structures. Compare:

cout << "Name: " << person.name() << endl;
cout << "E-mail: " << person.email() << endl;

with:

cout << "Name: "
<< person.getElementsByTagName("name")->item(0)->innerText()
<< endl;
cout << "E-mail: "
<< person.getElementsByTagName("email")->item(0)->innerText()
<< endl;

(The examples and some of the statistics I quoted come from http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.ht...)
The line above the title says it all :-D
I've been thinking of pretty much the same thing ever since I got a Fujitsu Scansnap scanner to digitize all the documents I have. Tagging is often more appropriate to categorize my documents than hierarchical folders. Spotlight comments may make up for this although they are a bit cumbersome. Right now I only enter a comment for files I know I want to find back.

I have also considered Evernote to handle my document storage (and always accessible, including search) accompanied with its tagging features but I found it too slow and plain directories combined with Spotlight worked better for me. These directories are in my Dropbox folder so I can access them anywhere, some hierarchies are applied for Bank statements etc. but most files are in one big folder. It's a pity there is no good searching in documents from the Dropbox site.
Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide
A recent trip to SF seemed to indicate racial profiling is pretty much the US approach so far. As a white Australian I was nearly waved through customs/immigration until I mentioned I was travelling with a work colleague who is Polish (which meant repeating all questions + explaining why I was travelling with a Polish national). Similarly all non-white passengers were grilled after luggage collection but Anglo-caucasians (including my girlfriend and I) were waved straight through.
Surely most companies licensed Id, Unreal or Duke engines or used the ones supplied by Sony / Xbox.

Early Id, Unreal & Duke Nukem 3d are all OSS now.
$7.5 Million: Wikipedia Reaches Fundraising Goal
> ... but as a universal transport it is pretty rad

I think that's the key point that everybody misses. XML was really just intended to solve the data interoperability and transport problems, not to function as a datastore. It just so happens that once you've made some XML, or received some from somebody, you may as well just deal with it as is rather than XSLT it into your local apps proprietary format (and as it also turns out, it's fairly easy for people to write by hand and debug in simple cases).
except everyone already knows everything about iPhone OS
You mean something like an Apple Newton?
He always seems to fail to recognize the principles of defense-in-depth...

That's a broad claim given that Schneier's built his reputation/business around defense-in-depth. It's practically his hobby horse and I don't read any such misunderstanding in his essays on the TSA.
Ask HN: Does the color scheme in a website affect signups?
If so, which bg/fg color pair do you think, works?
The real problem, and I use this article and your post as evidence, is that after more than a decade, XML is poorly documented, poorly understood and hard to use. The tools stink, and unspecified proscriptions to "use good tools" pervade the XML community yet nobody seems to really be writing "good tools" and there seems to be very little consensus about what is a "good tool".

What I mean by poorly documented is this, to people unfamiliar with XML, they head over to their local bookstore to pick up a guide or somesuch and find a 2000 page tome with 20 authors on the cover setting forward a several month path of reading and writing code to understand the concepts in the book, and probably finding little illumination on the topic to help them grok the part of the vast XML spec they need to parse and map relatively simple data structures to their software -- something that should take a half page tutorial in some random XML library's documentation.

And I agree, DTDs and XSD are in a sense external to XML, but when every 2000 page tome you pick up hammers away about XML validity, you feel like you have to support those too -- and supporting those adds vast amounts of complexity to your application, the XML format you are using, the message interchange, etc. (so nobody who knows anything uses them anyways).

So what should be a 2 hour development task turns into a 3 month hair pulling and library testing exercise.
Updating Firefox
"Most book readers don't know or care about it particularly."

This is just false: may not care about the mechanism, but they certainly notice the practicalities - the aforementioned lending, selling, bequeathing, etc. - and will be heavily reminded of them when e.g. the Kindle is no longer the market leader for ebook reading.
One month ago; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980465
ossec hids got active response and other cool helpers.
Hi, great game! Just a few thoughts:

* In Act 2, things get more expensive, but I don't seem to pick up much more money. I think many people would stop playing at this point, as it's harder to tech up. (In particular, it makes it harder to casually experiment with weapons. Which of course may fit the theme...)

* It might be nicer for weapons in the store to be more sorted, so I can more easily look at what I want and compare similar weapons.

* In pitched firefights after a while, when I'm keeping the mouse down, the frame rates go down. Which is usually great for me, since it's a lot easier to do ninja things like strafe while grabbing money and dancing with bullets. Dunno if that's a bug or feature. ;)