skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't expect newLISP to be everything to everybody, and I don't consider it to be the be-all and end-all of languages.

Lutz Mueller does. For instance, quote: LISP is an old language born, grown, and standardized in times very different from today, times when programming was for highly educated people who engineered programs. newLISP is LISP reborn as a scripting language: pragmatic and casual, simple to learn without requiring you to know advanced computer science concepts.

Sure, no advanced computer science concepts: just five different hacks to choose from to do some aspect of what a lexical closure does. (Just pick the one whose assumptions are least likely to break in your use case: but no engineering knowledge required to do that, nope!)

NewLisp requires the users to absorb advanced concepts that have fallen by the wayside of the computer science mainstream. A fexpr or self-modifying code are still computer science concepts.

Basically what Lutz is the real problem in NewLisp; other than that, the thing is what it is, take it or leave it. More than needing a compiler, garbage collection or lexical closures, it just needs a dose of humility, really.

On that note, it's somewhat good to see that a lot of the anti-Lisp ranting has been toned down compared to just several years ago. I don't get the sense that Lutz is yet eating any real crow. At best, he's pouring crow-flavored syrup over his ice cream. But at least that's a start!
Heh, that's a contentious topic. Personally, I would like to do so. I think I speak correctly when I say that most of the Infrastructure team would like to do so, to increase security/auditability and ease the maintenance burden on ourselves.

However, large portions of the team are opposed to Gerrit because a) it doesn't integrate as well with our other systems (such as trybots and cq) and b) the UI has some issues. We are working with people to try to fix those, but there's no particular timeline for switching, or even a guarantee that we will.
Built a team from 2 people to 12 in 2014, starting 8 months before elixir hit 1.0 and didn't have trouble. We attracted a number of people simply because we were using elixir. We also got a number of people who were interested in functional programming.

Really, language should never be a barrier to hiring... a good engineer will want to learn a new language, and in my opinion, the really good engineers are already erlang programmers.

The biggest barrier to hiring, in my experience building a team for an elixir project, was medieval HR practices. ("oh you can't hire him, cause he wants a plane ticket reimbursed for relocating across the country. He's being greedy." Seriously.)
But, newpLisp's tiny C codebase can be compiled and made to run on even obscure UNIXes like AIX, Solaris, HPUX etc without installing any dependencies which Pixie needs.
There is a lot of 'dead rail' out there that might be repurposed for this ..
Not really, no, because it turns out cops aren't actually stupid. When they arrest you and take your phone (or anything electronic, really) the first thing they do is clone the memory. You might succeed in wiping out a copy by giving them the alternate password, but that's just going to add to your charge list.

There was a case a few years back (discussed on HN) where a gang had software installed on everyone's phone that caused a remote wipe when activated. The cops did a big raid, and even though they took everyone's phone someone they hadn't caught yet was able to wipe them.

The cops changed their SOP so that when they get ahold of your phone the first thing they do is yank the battery.
I'm finding humor in the fact that number 3 has an AND and not an OR in it.
> Why is stuff being "solved" part of the discussion at all?

Because ju-st stated "I think the engineering and construction [of fission reactors] is not a solved problem" [0]. This is untrue. We have well-tested fission reactor designs and know how to put them together. This is a solved problem.

> Is this the study that took all roof-related deaths as solar-panel-related?

I can't parse this. Would you be so kind as to restate the question? :)

I'm not sure why the fact that a nuclear plant (that's been -as you say- running past its optimal design life) that

* Got hit with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded

* Then got hit immediately after by a twenty foot high tsunami

* Then exploded

* Then melted down

kills fewer people than a single average coal-fired power plant [1] kills every year as a part of normal operation, fails to significantly increase the cancer risk of the majority of on-site containment workers, and fails to create centuries-long contamination [2] fails to make you question your assumptions about the failure modes of these power generation devices.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259794

[1] According to http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_01.html , there were 300 such coal plants in the US in 2013. :)

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/04/fukushima-rice_n_64... Four-and-a-half years is far less than 100 or 200 or 500. :)
I saw Ben (I think it was Ben) speak at the Solidworks conference in San Diego, about 4 years ago. I was familiar with Quirky before his big talk, (I'm an industrial designer) but walking away from the talk I was thinking, "This is fucking brilliant. They set up a system to get free ideas, gauge interest, receive feedback, iterate a product, and have a batch of initial customers ready to buy something once its developed. They're outsourcing a decent amount of work to the customers, and the customers are happy to get small royalty checks."

They told the story of the kid that led that power strip's development through Quirky, and how it paid for his college - but it was easy to see that most customers or contributors or Quirks or whatever they called them would not be making big money by choosing a new product's name or color or whatever.

As everyone else has pointed out, they got halfway to successful with a bunch of products. Their connected products had people excited about them, and many could have turned into legitimate businesses or product lines. But when you're making a new product every week,( 50+ a year) from concept thru development to production, your focus and execution will stray.
I don't excuse them in the least, there is no one working a programming job that can't afford to "put food on the table" -- independent of their employer.
It's infuriating that OS X doesn't have an option to turn off animations by default.

I'm sure Total Spaces is nice, but I refuse to pay money for what should be a basic OS feature.
I'd imagine many working on this won't tell you their real job. For example when you apply for MI5 stuff in the UK you cannot tell people your actual job.

God knows how many there are doing these jobs.
Engaging the naysayers – how to get standing ovations at your daily scrum
How about a political revolution, where legislative power would rest on every citizen in the country thus making the aforementioned tactic impossible (if such system ever came to exist I think we should call it a "Democracy").
There's also Planck, a Clojurescript lib that allows you to write shell scripts in Clojurescript.

http://planck.fikesfarm.com/
the ones i have seen have fencing funnels to them, there are gates for humans to cross, but the fence runs from one overpass to the next. the animals have no choice but to use the overpass.
We have both already :)

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/bots/jabber_mirro...
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/bots/irc-mirror.p...

In addition to Zephyr mirroring, which we've had since 2012.
The law absolutely matters in practice. Playing by the rules never guarantees that you won't be sued by a former employer, but contrary to what a lot of people here seem to believe, most employers don't make a habit of suing former employees for no reason when they have no evidence.

As I wrote, a lot of former employees who get caught up in these types of disputes make claims that they can't sustain through the discovery process because let's be honest: when you're working on a commercial side project that you're excited about, it's difficult to at some point not do some work (however minor) on it during working hours or using the resources of your employer.

Finally, if you take the time to read Smule's complaint against the Shred folks, you'll see that this isn't the case of an "aggressive" former employer. Smule presents a different version of events and appears to have some legitimate questions.
Extensive recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10082517
And now we're all on a watchlist.
Why shouldn't I use topcashback.com instead of you guys? With them you get to use coupons and get cashback also..
Making a toy shark fly using brain waves
usually, you use one lambda for one specific need. get the request, do the work and return the response. I did not see how can be locked. the concern for me is the limitation of uploaded file size.
It helps that British geeks love James Bond and Alan Turing, and at GCHQ they get to play at being both - although you'd have to hope some of them have wondered if this time round they might not be the unequivocal good guys.

Also, if you get a reputation for hiring the brightest and best, you also get people who've spent so long being told they're the brightest and best that they may have little concern for whatever lesser beings get spied on, shamed, discredited, disenfranchised during their fun intellectual challenges.

Right, I'm on a list somewhere now! Hi echelon.
<shameless plug>

We at sameroom.io do this in sort of backend-only way.

</shameless plug>
Fascinating side-chain .. thanks for that!
>At first, we looked at services like VirusTotal and a few other open source options. But there was nothing that would run independent and download the file and scan quickly.

VirusTotal is actually downloading the file from a URL independently and (from my experience) near - instantly scanning it. So why reinvent the wheel? (Plus, VirusTotal uses many scan engines to determine a result...)
It's a pity they have a hiring booth at jQuery UK, which is otherwise a great conference.
No, Namecoin is the proper solution to this.

DNSSEC is not safe:

1. It requires centralized trust which can be exploited by governments.

2. It still leaves your domain and PKI in the hands of incompetent rent-seeking registrars who can and do get socially engineered all the time.
Forcing the suspect to input the password still looks legal, according to the last paragraph. They just can't force you to tell them the password.
The Tesla Warranty Is Ludicrous
6 Sci-Fi Movies for AI Geeks
> Does that completely invalidate these tools

Yes, when the error is this large and so easily manipulatable. (breathalysers are notorious for being incredibly broad in what the detect (bad false positive rate), and they are required to assume a 2100:1 ratio when estimating blood concentration from the measured breath concentration. In reality, there is a lot (up to +/-800 for some people). There is a good, science-based reason for that ratio involving the partial pressure of EtOH. The reason is valid, it simply ignores the (large) minority of cases where other factors complicate the analysis.

You may suggest that it would be easy to use modern techniques to find a better formula that accounts for these variations. That would work... but it has always been possible. You don't need anything particularly fancy to add a few corrections. These problems - and how to correct them - have been known for decades, yet breathalysers haven't changed. Why? Because an inaccurate tool gives police the leeway to target a much larger set of people (if they want to - selective enforcement is a powerful tool).

> Should we only opt for rigorous methods like drawing blood samples?

Yes, absolutely, and I (and many defence lawyers and civil right organizations) recommend insisting on a blood test should you ever asked to take a breathalyser because of how inaccurate and manipulatable the breath test is in real-world situations. (disclaimer: this can vary between states; see a local lawyer for proper advice)

> at the inevitable cost of some errors and inconvenience

A necessary feature of a free society is the assumption of innocence until proven guilty. Law enforcement is deliberately given a harder task, because errors are not simply an inconvenience. Errors risk charging an innocent person with a crime. You would not call being arrested because of a false-positive an inconvenience.

> You assume that this system will be used to justify police brutality and that this system will be used by people who think that any black person is a "criminal".

I don't need to assume anything. These things are already extremely common today without the need for advanced data processing techniques. If for some reason you doubt these facts, you may want to look up the per-capita incarceration rates by race and compare that to stuff like the drug use rates for the same groups.

> In my world I believe in just intentions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy

> I have a higher opinion of the people who join the police

I prefer to keep my opinions based in reality.

While I'm sure only a minority of police are abusive, the rest are aiding and abetting by not reporting the crimes committed other officers. Misprision of felony is still a crime in the US (18 U.S. Code § 4) ( https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/4 )
Linus Torvalds – secure computing is a dream
How successful startups use a formula to get funded
Zulip use RabbitMQ for passing messages where persistence is desired; last I checked Redis didn't support persistent on-disk queues.

Zulip's use of redis right now is basically just for the API rate-limiting; it could be easily removed.
Isn't Slack an IRC client with some project management features?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221405
No linux client? That's a deal breaker for us right there... Pity, looks interesting otherwise.
yes, oh heck yes. I gave up after trying Adobe Media Server and just stream to youtube with the tricaster and let them do the work.

If your looking for a "take my money" project, an easy streaming solution would be an amazing thing.
You'd think it would be cheaper just to breed more animals.
lets-chat (https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat) works fine with XMPP and is relatively straigtforward to setup.
Looks pretty bad on my end too, Firefox on Windows 7 64bit.

https://i.imgur.com/AlcbVbR.png
It's a feature for expired cards, it's a flaw for stolen credit cards. I know plenty of people that will report a card stolen and then cancel the card to avoid dealing with that kind of crap.
All the tools you need to design in the browser
Thanks for pointing this out! Will fix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics#Use_as_Biom...
Sad as it may be, it's pretty clear at this point that XMPP won't be the communication protocol of the future. Everyone who ever seriously worked on it seem to have come out of the experience a broken man. Setting it up requires pretty deep knowledge and the promises of compatibility with most XMPP servers break down pretty fast unless you know which extensions to support.

All these problems are fixable but I don't see the tide ever actually changing direction and "hey suddenly XMPP is cool again, we should all use it".

One thing is for certain... humanity needs standard, open and widely-used protocols for communication. And there's a lot of ground to cover: Text, audio, video; single and multiuser; topical (IRC-like); social (invite-based/people I know); Synchronous (IM) and asynchronous (email/offline messaging)...

XMPP tried to do a lot of that. Maybe it tried to do too much. Maybe you just can't do all that in one protocol. I don't know, I just hope we'll get there soon - if nothing else, I'm tired of maintaining those "best way to reach me" charts JoshM33k is talking about.
I kind of forgot that while lambda only supports node, you can use it as a glorified wrapper to call your c++ code
Hurray \o/ Congrats on the release!
Intellij vs. Eclipse: Why IDEA Is Better
The Beginner’s Guide to Home Automation Possibilities
Branchless Equivalents of Simple Functions (2008)
If you really want to blame religion, you're going to have a hard time making the case. The ancient Greeks were quite religious, but were also quite advanced in some fields of philosophy and mathematics. They also (largely) moved war away from their mainland. They actively worked to remove the daily effort of living onto a working class, which consisted largely of non-Greek citizens. This freed up the Greeks (at least a large class of their citizens) to expend energy on what would previously have been considered trivialities or indulgences. See the Roman empire, war on the fringes made the core of the empire safer and advancement of various schools of thought much more feasible. The same story has played out in other locations at other times.

Move war and famine away from your core population. Move the core population closer together (to enable communication, this is a non-issue today with the internet). You'll see a surge in productivity and advancement of knowledge.
This was a positive read! About the stress and modularization. It's important that developers feel they are an important part of the team. But if they are working for free, it needs to be fun and not feel like work.
Interacting with others are fun! But not if it gets out of control. So when you modularize, you should try to make a balance for human interaction in mind. Maybe keep the number of module interaction down below five at any given time, example: When a new feature is added, max five modules should need updating.

Sometimes we forget that we are making software for humans, by humans, and not for compilers and computers.
I call CL "lisp." The reason is that CL was invented to unify lisps. It did a great job. There are no other contenders in the space. Other languages in the lisp family have their own names. A language can be "a lisp" or in the "lisp family", but in my eyes Lisp is (Common) Lisp. Scheme is Scheme. Clojure is Clojure. Etc.
Google Photos may be uploading your pics, even if you don't want it to
A third of a cow is dinner!
Durability is certainly not being compromised. I think they are just referring to increasing lease times. Timeouts are always a tradeoff (false alarm frequency vs. recovery time), and this event has prompted them to re-evaluate the tradeoff.

If you suspect the design of DynamoDB is sloppy, I encourage you to read this: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/4/184701-how-amazon-web-s...
Intruder: How to crack Wi-Fi networks in Node.js
Maybe I'm still not understanding fully, but that really sounds just like having branches, except they aren't treated by the system as such. There's still the possibility that while developer A's change is going through code review and testing, developer B's changes (which conflict with developer A's) make it through and get landed.

I'd agree that having long-lived branches is often bad, but that's more a matter of discipline than anything else. I could certainly start working on a feature locally using Chromium's model, take my time, and get far enough behind the tip of the tree that by the time I want to submit for code review and testing, my stuff doesn't apply to the new tip.

Branches vs. no branches doesn't seem to be a factor here.
they also support java, and both node and java can launch other things on amazon linux including bash, python and ruby according to their docs
Ask HN: Time between founder stock and priced round – tax implication?
How long should a company wait between incorporating (issuing founders stock) & taking in a priced equity round from investors?
I recently incorporated and issued myself founders stock at a par value of $0.0001/share. I now have investors who want to make an equity investment of $500,000 for 25% of the company. I was told that I need to wait a period of time between from when I issued the founders stock and when I take in a priced equity round, so that I do not have to pay taxes on the founders shares that I received. How long does the IRS need that time period to be? 2 days? 2 weeks? 2 months? My investors may be able to wait, but I also recognize that the market may dramatically change in a short period of time, since I am in the tech industry. I've been told that it's better to take a check immediately, and I would image Ycombinator startups commonly have to incorporate and then immediately take in their funding check.
There is a web client for it.
"What the hell did you people do to my computer? Where's all my shit? I'm going to sue you assholes!!!"
Is there really a difference between attacking the user and attacking the system?
Every week I have to use a Cisco jabber client, Hipchat, Slack, and Hangouts within the same company.

I know it's got less of a "cool" factor because it wasn't invented last week, but I soooo wish everyone would just use IRC. Use irccloud if you want some nice apps and picture embedding.
Is it ever right to try to create a superior human being?
Unfortunately, at this point bigot is a distinctly Orwellian term. Consider, for example, the statement "Italians are more intelligent than Germans." By itself, this statement can't be bigoted, because it simply represents a possible fact about reality. At worst, it's false, or perhaps simply ill-posed (if, for example, one rejects the notion of quantifying intelligence). It's categorically distinct from things like "I don't like Germans because they're dumb" or "She can't be smart, she's German!" or "We don't serve Germans here." Any use of bigot that groups the first statement with the other three creates a false category, using language to attack (possible) reality for particular social and political purposes.

In the colloquial sense of not liking people simply because of their ancestry (or other such categories), I can assure you that the creator of Urbit is not a bigot. But, as with all Orwellian terms, bigot tinkers with the tools you use to think, so the word is best avoided.
Really? Do you really expect intelligence organizations not to do this? This is what we pay them to do. International relations is anarchy. We shouldn't be blaming GCHQ we should be lauding Snowden while building surveillance hardened systems.
yup! Easylist has pretty comprehensive coverage. The "whitelisted" ads that have gotten press are not part of Easylist
Who might be the right entity to take on creating a replacement for XMPP?
Preventing burnout for programmers
Management is a different job, not a better or superior one.

Oh please. Until management is no longer a more profitable career track than staying in engineering, could we stop lying to the younger folks that might believe the nonsense they read on HN?

In well-run technical companies there are managers and individual contributors at all seniority levels

Non-management contributors with C-suite pay (and occasionally titles), are still rare enough to be noteworthy. Unless they're on par in compensation and control of the company, pretending traditional corporate management doesn't consider themselves their superiors is just ego-stroking the engineers too dumb to be insulted.
Just to clarify, these are all currently metadata, right? Eg, this stuff is, in theory, not linked to any individual people without a warrant/authority?
It's a bit disappointing C seems to be getting left behind in some areas. It's simpler to compile, which in theory should mean that it's more portable.
I did some research on XMPP interop and its demise (ignore the title) - https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...
Node.js: Fluent Logger 0.3 have been released