skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of people in this very thread are complaining because the add-ons are the only reason they use Firefox in the first place. So basically, citing this thread.
Except that's malicious to a much greater extent -- an extent that ought to catch the attention of anti-virus software makers.
You're not banned. If you want to discuss these other details further we can do so offline (hn@ycombinator.com).
Nice of them to put it there. Two points.

1. My confidence in the continued existence of Hackpad is falling by the day and it saddens me as it is where I keep all my stuff.

2. I really would like to get access to the Dropbox Notes beta to see if it is a direct continuation of Hackpad. Seems it is almost impossible to get access to it though.
Top Big Data Challenges for Small Businesses Today
Dissent is not tolerated, despite that the criticism comes attached to clear evidence of poor moderation? Keep the downvotes coming - it only goes to prove how arbitrary and non-information bearing they are.
The point is not so much the size (which has changed over the years) but how foundational it is. You can remove without replacement almost everything else from that pie chart except Linux and GNU and still have a functional OS, but without any coreutils or Linux or a replacement for either you don't have much of an OS left.
The organization should set objectives and measures its effectiveness against the objectives. While it might not give you a sense of the organization's relative effectiveness (i.e., the objectives might be nigh impossible and making any progress at all is a miracle), at least you have a general overall sense of what they're trying to accomplish and how effective they are at solving those problems.

A data-driven and specific approach to projects will give people a chance to ask questions like: is this problem worth solving? Is the UN the right organization to solve this problem? Is this problem worth the cost we're putting into the UN? Is the UN taking the right strategy? Etc.

If my government is funding the UN, I'd want a statement of what the UN is attempting to do with that funding, and which parts of that my government supports and thinks is valuable. I'd also want my government to conduct its own assessment of whether the UN is effective (GAO style) and include that analysis in its recommendation to me of whether to continue to fund them with my tax money.
Any Interest in a FOSS History Project?
This trick fits more into the "prank" category.

package main

import "fmt"

// <Add one short line of valid Go code here>

func main() {
var n int = 1
fmt.Println(n)
}

Compiler: "prog.go:8: cannot use 1 (type int) as type int in assignment"

Here's a trick that I expected to work but doesn't. Would be interested to hear the rationale if anyone knows it.

m := map[[]int]int{}
And I thought analogies in scientific journalism were annoying. I certainly prefer them to this.

What's biggest:

7000000000000000000000 grams

700000000000 gigagrams

70000000000000000000000000 milligrams

The mass of Ceres

The mass of the water currently in the Pacific Ocean

The mass of the Earth's atmosphere

The mass of Mt Everest
Even that isn't true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_for_differentiation

But even so, programming in significantly different programming languages isn't just a difference as simple as that. Just look at control flow. Some languages you're expressing an explicit list of steps, others you're merely writing an expression that it's free to evaluate however it wants according to certain rules.
Why? Simulate it in software. Save yourself a lot of time and shelf space. There is nothing additional this hardware teaches you other than plugging and unplugging ethernet cables.
This article is spot on about working for the UN. It matches my own experience. The various organizations are sadly, for a number of reasons, becoming less relevant and more sclerotic.

I don't fault the UN for not paying interns. There are lots of kids who think it is glamorous and are willing to take unpaid posts just like in the music industry, the U.S. Congress, and a number of other industries. If the UN had to pay interns they simply wouldn't take them on in the first place.

The UN is much more poisonous than screwed than working for the US Gov. I worked for the USG for 5 years (Dept of State) and had an excellent experience. Govt bureaucracies are actually much more efficient than the UN as they have voters to hold them accountable. Accountability for UN agencies is practically nil.
'Indignant Minnesotans' remind journalists that data can hurt
> they don't allow non-Chrome Store add-ons AT all

This is wrong. You can drag and drop an extension into the Chrome extensions folder (or enable the developer mode in the extensions page) to install any extension in Chrome.
I use them extensively for test cases (`cases := []struct{...} { ... }`) as mentioned in the slides. Also sometimes to marshal/unmarshal one-off json or xml payloads.
This post sounds fishy to me. If the "financial statements" are sufficiently important for the fine details to matter, then they need to be produced by someone who knows exactly what they are doing (a properly qualified accountant). If they aren't important (why are the financial statements for a YC _applicant_ important?? surely they have zero revenue typically and nobody believes their projections), then who cares if the terminology is slightly wrong? Certainly if I were given such a document, I'd ask who prepared it and go from there as regards how accurate I expected it to be.

Also, if your role is an incubator investor, isn't it your job to educate the inexperienced founders about things like this?

fwiw I don't understand how anyone could confuse LOI with executed contract. I mean, really the only way that the concept of a LOI can arise is when you ask "can we get a contract in place?" and the answer is "not at this time" so you counter with "how about an LOI?". Hard to get confused about that..
OK, I thought maybe I was missing a physics pun or something... :-)
Ask HN: Which SaaS Idea? API Tester or Code Quality Checker?
I'm planning to launch a small side-money-maker SaaS based on my work experience (basically utilizing the knowledge and make a by-product). Two major fields I'm thinking of, one is a REST API Tester, the second is a PEP8 Python code quality checker (integrated with CI/build etc).

The former has bigger market I think but there's more competition, the latter is more exotic and maybe a bit unique (or can be, nice status report etc), but seems less "useful".

Would be good to see some feedback and thoughts, so that I can make a decision! Thanks.
One of the photos shows the system in use at the DHS immigration line. Aren't there notices all over this place telling travelers that cellphone use is strictly prohibited before passing the checkpoint? It seems strange that the airport relies on people breaking the law to provide better service...
Yes, but no demonstrated speedup problem still remains.
Considering their track record, I wouldn't be surprised if they have no intention whatsoever of going public. Uber has to convince investors they will be able to exit their investment and the total pool of investors willing to try their luck in the secondary market is likely much smaller than those looking for traditional IPO or trade sale liquidity events. Not that they would have difficulty raising money, but they are certainly pushing the limits of the terms they can receive. Someone else pointed out this would also be a useful tactic in recruiting pitches.

Is it really worth it to go public? The reporting burdens for public companies are well documented. But also this management team has used some pretty shady tactics in the past. I can't imagine they love the idea of the scrutiny that comes with being public. You can always sell your share of the company in one of these financing rounds if you wanted to diversify your wealth.
That's not really a "network effect", but more of an "activation potential barrier". If it cost almost nothing to migrate to a new system, then 5% better might be a good enough reason. If I'm going to do back-end setup, data migration and re-train myself and others, then, damn it, I demand a 500% improvement to show for it. :)
Yes, they do! Other VCs are kind of following suit, but it sure cuts into those management fees so they aren't running to it =)
The other change could be stronger privacy laws in the USA and possibly harsher sentences for hacking
You can run squeak in the browser: http://bertfreudenberg.github.io/SqueakJS/

Another one is http://pharo.org/ (haven't tried it)

But I've worked with Squeak quite a bit in university, and the consensus generally was: The language is really nice, and a joy to use for many things. The environment is awful and makes working with it a pain, and since everything is integrated so closely there are no obvious ways around that.
Racket is its own language now, it isn't Scheme per-se. They've split apart because of disagreements over which direction the language should take.
This would be trivial to do with one-time-pads. A bit bulky, but simple. But in a way, you'd still be right. The "dummy information" is (encoded into) the second key.
Um. I've emptied the trash cans at my company, but we still had an accountant (external). And lawyers.
Looking at what is more useful is certainly a really good idea if your goal is to calculate and understand a specific problem. But I think you would miss out on something if you ignored the question of what is fundamental. And I personally am absolutely not interested in specific problems, I want to know what really is out there. Realism? Locality? Space? Time? Particles? Fields? What is really fundamental, what are just emergent phenomena?
If anyone's interested in listening to a lengthy debate on the "Right to be Forgotten", check this out --

http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1...

It's a fascinating debate, and a really great listen. For me, I was on the fence at the beginning, but ended up firmly on the side of "No, the 'right to be forgotten' should not be adopted by the United States" by the end of it.

Edit: Oh hey, I listened to the podcast, but turns out there's a video version too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDzW-2q1ZQ
It's not guaranteed, but they said they are hiring people to work with addon developers to update their addons. It seems very likely Tab Mix Plus would be on the top of that list, since it's already mentioned as an addon they want to work in the new model.
anyone else find that graph hard to understand?
Thanks for the reply! (I didn't actually build those tutorials, i.e. learn x in y is another person's site, like I said I only spent a couple of hours on the concept of a site like this and the current tutorials are external. I did add the time analysis.)

I like your final example - and remember, you guys are Oracle experts: you're the most qualified people on the planet to learn ApEx properly from scratch, even though you haven't.

Now switch gears and imagine a college student who just has an idea for some cool project, but barely codes in any language. This describes the computing needs of 3 billion people. They're not qualified to quickly become experts and engineers at anything. But they still have a computer in front of them that does a trillion operations every few minutes. The gulf between using that to surf facebook or building... anything at all, even very poorly, is immense. (Like git that you can learn in 15 seconds, versus manually copying and renaming files for version control.) Thanks for the encouragement.
So I was interested when someone noted that apparently Pharo/Squeak stumble when it comes to unicode:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3ha1gu/why_are...

...it seems like that could potentially lead people to be skeptical about an environment/language that is touted as being highly productive, with automated refactoring ease, unit testing, test driven development, and turtles-all-the-way-down, etc.
"This post really marks the final end of Firefox. The end of a truly robust Add-On model is the only thing remaining at all that sets Firefox apart. The Foundation’s constant running after being a Chrome-alike has finally run the browser into the ground fully."

This comment hit the nail on the head.

Really in general the browser vendors are all killing the web day by day. Maybe ~2004 to around 2013/2014 or so will be remembered as the golden age of web browsers. NPAPI worked in major browsers, you were allowed to install extensions without Mozilla or Google's permission, and Firefox had yet to mutilate its interface in an attempt to be a Chrome lookalike.
You have a great point. However, we are NOT using affiliate links, and we are NOT collecting any commission at all.

Every deal on FoundersKit is a unique partnership between us and the specific company. It took us about 4 months to establish all of the existing relationships. We are even still working on more partnerships to add more value to the bundle (as Fred mentioned).

A lot of the companies on our bundle do have an affiliate program but our coupons are not associated with that, and offer a higher discount (or longer trial).

Great example would be Grasshopper - $125 credits are not handed out to affiliates. Affiliates get $100 kick back, we do not take any kick back.

Please do comment back if you have an example from our site where our discounts offer the same value as an affiliate program. We would love to address it.

Thanks for taking the time to leave feedback :)

Best, Dylan
Doesn't seem as dead as the article suggests. In addition to squeak:

http://pharo.org/
http://www.strongtalk.org/

One of the more impressive things I've seen in the past (like 5 years ago?) was DabbleDB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB), also written in smalltalk (the company / app was acquired, see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=avibryant)
Would such a thing even be sustainable?

Forks are free. Good, maintained, used forks are another.
This does not cover the "Free" tactic that was used to make Jell-O actually penetrate the households.

That story can be read in the book "Free" by Chris Anderson: http://www.amazon.com/Free-The-Future-Radical-Price/dp/14013... (pages 7-10, available in the book preview)
I've heard about that being a thing in the US (I don't know where you are from). I've never met anybody who actually fell into that trap, so there might be interesting cultural issues at play.

Personally, I got humbled early on when I realized that I wouldn't be able to read all the interesting books in the world. I wouldn't even be able to keep up with just the new interesting books being published. A very sad day, that was.

It was a simple matter of reading (and not quite understanding) a few real books aimed at researchers to see that some people were far brighter than me. Just like some were far better at drawing or playing football or high jumping. I count on someone (or many someones) being better than me at absolutely every single thing that I might be good at. Hopefully, the talent profile I have will be good enough anyway, especially if I work hard and avoid winner-takes-all areas.

(It did take a long time to learn how to apply myself, though, after so many years of enforced boredom.)
Slightly off topic - I remember a anti-drug commercial that features a thin brunette girl scrubbing the gout of the tile on her bathroom floor with a toothbrush while the jingle went "oooo, meth, oooo, meth - I don't sleep and I don't eat, but I've got the cleanest house on the street, oooo, meth".

Now I never really wanted to try drugs, but that seemed more like a pro-meth ad than an anti-meth ad.
billings vs revenue
markup vs margin
payout vs dividend
Pale Moon has builds for Windows:

https://www.palemoon.org/
The one about the ocean takes up the most bytes. It's biggest.
> I see this opinion expressed quite frequently. Avoiding C avoids only a limited number of potential bugs, and bugs can occur no matter what language you use.

That's not a useful comparison, since you're distilling the question of how many bugs there are to whether there are bugs. If a language gets you two security-critical bugs in a 10-year-long project, that's not a reason to say "Eh, might as well have used C".

> Case in point -- how many web sites have been hacked that are written in PHP? or Wordpress? Avoiding C does not avoid bugs.

Sure, don't write security-critical software in PHP either. There are other languages in the world; some of them are specifically designed for writing security-critical software (e.g., Ada and Rust), some happen to be much better than C due to other parts of their design (e.g., Go, Haskell, idiomatic C++11, Vala), and some happen to be not significantly better than C (e.g., PHP, Python, Perl, bash, etc. etc.).
Show HN: Build your own middleware stack (ruby)
Gotta get the next layer of the pyramid when you're losing that much money.
My original reply a few parents up:

>Palemoon removed Tab Groups and the addon is extremely buggy and doesn't restore properly when the browser crashes. Waterfox had several issues with plugins I use.

So in short:

https://xkcd.com/1172/
But it avoids a huge class of really really bad bugs.
If you remove manual memory management and mutable stare you can go pretty far in terms of security even in a dynamically typed system. See clojure as an example.
I disagree. Lots of programming work out there is "boring" enterprise work. Keeping systems running. There are a lot of people on here who are innovating.

But for most of the programmers I know, they're just writing code that runs a business which is certainly not IT.
Also see

Why is Smalltalk Dead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071681

87 points 5 days ago 61 comments (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsSmalltalkDead)
I wonder if 'leaked' could've been replaced by 'announced'
From the article:

> During a controlled demonstration , Bear was able to find a hard drive stashed between couch cushions, an iPad in a backpack, a micro SD card tucked away in a wine rack, a flash drive in a magazine holder and other items.

I'm very skeptical. It should me much more difficult to detect a SD card than drugs, because each drug has a unique chemical signature (even humans can sniff some drugs). But dogs have a high rate of false positives, for example this article discuss a really controlled experiment: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/supreme-court-con...

> But here's the more interesting part: The dogs were about twice as likely to falsely alert at the packages designed to trick their handlers than they were at the packages stuffed with sausages.
Why didn't you hire people to empty the trash? Would save your time, and another soul out there who is struggling to find a job get something.

Personally, I love the fella who empties our trash. He's become a close friend of ours, with his heavily accented "Hello friend!" message he greets us all with and everything!
write into hackpad support! someone will let you in :)
To me it all reeks of @sama's "fake work" post from yesterday [3]

Blogging in general, or submitting to HN? If you mean the former, I strongly disagree. Blogging is, IMO, a key way of attracting attention and getting our message out. As for submitting to HN... well, once I have a blog post published, it takes 30 seconds to submit it here. Why not do it, if it's reasonably on-topic?

you're not going to achieve "TOMA" for enterprise social network software from a briefly popular blog post about something silly and unrelated Oracle said.

Not by itself, no. Of course not. It's just one more thing to get people reading our blog. And that most recent entry was not just an attempt to draw hits for the sake of hits... since everything we do is OSS, we actively look for opportunities to promote the use of OSS, especially in favor of proprietary plays like Oracle. And a blog post pays continuing returns over time due to hits from search.

So anyway, I agree that HN in and of itself isn't necessarily a great tool for driving specific actions. But I will argue that submitting an article (which would have been written whether or not there was a HN) here is just part of a broader overall strategy for building awareness / gaining attention. A small part, granted. :-)

I wouldn't be too quick to consider optimizing for HN harmless.

Oh, absolutely. And I can't speak for anyone else, but we don't "optimize for HN". We write about the stuff we feel is important or needs to be said, and (usually) submit the link to HN (unless it's completely off-topic or irrelevant).
Good question. :-) I guess there definitely would be cases where the programmer would be restricted in what they want to do -- this is a nature of type systems. For example, I guess following code would not compile:

var f = (n) => n / 5;
f = (n) => 5 / n;

What I hope for is that usual patterns would survive in a convenient manner. For example, calling function with function argument that is evaluated inside this function is something that could be handled by language without too many problems.
tl;dr Economies need something safe to invest in with a decent return (more than inflation). Government treasury bonds provide that flexible safe haven.

If T-bond interest rates are too low (a function of supply and demand), investors will avoid them and seek higher-risk investments, adding risk to the economy. So when governments run low/no deficits, there's no motivation for them to create bonds with attractive interest rates for investors. This raises the risk profile across the economy.

Meanwhile, the private sector cannot be fully trusted to create safe, low risk investments. Remember the housing crash? That was the result of CDOs, a very clever derivatives game that indirectly coupled AAA mortgages to the worst subprime junk bonds. The private sector is full of very bright people who are paid lots of money to find clever new ways to game the system. That means it can all be gamed. So government-backed securities mean there's at least one honest(ish) game in town.

The triumph of ideology over evidence, and "common sense" over deep thought, causes no end of economic problems. Austerity is common sense and ideology. Debt is bad, right? Except when you need a certain amount of government debt out there to stabilize markets. When investors are practically begging for government bonds to shelter them from the private sector storm and there are no bonds to be hand because the austerity police think the common sense thing is to reduce spending, they're actually making it worse, not better. They're leaving private investments out in the rain.
This ends up sounding like "kids these days". Did you build your own computer? From the gates up? Oh, well then you're not a real engineer... It's usually an ego based distinction too.