skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it depends on what you mean by "error". Certainly Haskell is not a silver bullet here.

As a person who works at a large organisation focused on correctness, there are some crazy intersections between what "error" means, what programs do, and how humans work. In general, if you can clearly define what "error" means, you can mostly solve it with a sufficiently good language. That is not so easy.

The "automatic"[1] hammers we seem to have are good type systems and "Design By Contract" (think Eiffel, but having a strong proof assistant is a much more powerful case). In this case, I'm discussing the problem from a security point of view:

Some examples in order of difficulty:

* Process errors outside software; OK, these are usually not the programmer's fault. For example, Amazon account hijacking via customer service. No way to point-fix; DBC or typing won't help you.

* Software interaction with humans; I've seen regexes to disallow shipping (e.g. for identity documents) to P.O boxes, which allow the input "POSTAL BOX" rather than a variant of "PO BOX", "P.O BOX", "POSTAL BOX", "LOCKED BAG" or so on. The problem is that the data will be eventually interpreted by a human, who will correct the error and ensure delivery. AFAICT not fixable with DBC or typing - you need a business process improvement here.

* Ambient or environmental changes. The call you used to make to a third-party library or binary was secure, but now it isn't. For example, your app used RC4 or $RANDOM_BINARY, and it used to be secure, but now it isn't because your environment changed out from under you. Now your code needs a countermeasure or a fix.

* Subtle business logic errors such as missing a permissions check on private profile or data views - probably only fixable with proof or DBC, type system is not the right hammer here although maybe with effort you can sort of do it. Probably encoding rapidly changing business rules into your types is not a good idea though.

* Obvious business logic errors, e.g. allowing -1 books to be ordered in an online store; fixable with a good type system or DBC. (e.g. type "Quantity" is a natural number rather than a machine type).

* XSS or SQLI - should be fixed by type system alone in a sufficiently advanced language.

It's mostly the relatively trivial stuff at the bottom of this stack of possible errors which is fixable by good programming languages, assuming of course that your DBC logic or way you structure your typing is correct.

As a total aside, what would be really interesting to me would be a powerful "business process definition language", which could map data flow between systems and humans - and actually describe the real-world information flows when a user contacts customer support to reset their password. If that could interact with contracts or proofs in individual applications, my world would be rocked.

[1] Not requiring humans to check when changes happen, although obviously human effort is required during system definition.
Whitespace can improve readability, but only up to a point. The Slack concept currently at the top of the list would fit less than a minute's worth of conversation in a moderately busy Slack channel, so the increased readability of individual messages comes at the cost of dramatically decreased readability of the conversation as a whole.
haha, no need to apologise, this site is full of educated people who make up their own mind. I think I snapped a little with my comment (mid way building an iPhone App so stressed) Apologies.
So, replicatable teaching methods.
I think the difference is in one case you are talking about specific properties of specific programs, and in the other you are talking about a universal question about any program.
Honestly, I think something that would be super interesting to YC and Silicon Valley and the world would be creating a technology prediction market. Using markets to gauge consensus about the future is super useful for any company or government making decisions under uncertainty.

You could have contracts about all sorts of technology predictions, such as "Will more than 1% of cars be self-driving by 2025?" or "Will MOSFETs have gate widths <10 nm by 2020?" or "Will virtual reality be a market worth over $1B by 2018?" or whatever you're interested in (and can define precisely).

SciCast.org was a technology prediction market that I participated in for a few years, but it was an academic project and ran out of funding.
The "next big thing" won't have voting. It's too easily gamed and leads to groupthink in the worst way.

Inb4 "HN has voting but no groupthink". It has both in large quantities.
I bought Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 and Turbo C++ for Windows 1.0 around 1993.

Those boxes still look like new and occasionally I do a trip down memory lane skimming through the manuals.
Remote work. We need research to give us answers about productivity tradeoffs and also specifics like what kinds of jobs are well-suited for remote work? how does it affect the life satisfaction of workers? Does it increase employee retention? What effects do cultural and language differences of employees have on productivity when working remotely? etc...
Out of all the proposals I'm reading, this seems to be one of the most realistic, for one reason only: this is something where a little money and a lot of computer science knowledge can go a very long way.
^ agree with this.

Also, we should really focus on getting people on board with the life-preserving tech that currently exists (medicine, water treatment, doctor training, etc) before developing new (and potentially expensive) tech that will only widen the gap between what the rich can do that the poor can only dream of.
Thank the UNIX vendors.

No one cared about GNU until they started selling the SDKs
Best way to test the engine is for Elon Musk to make one and send it up on his rocket if it works then he can bring his timeline for mars down a few years.
Cratejoy is hiring – #1 growing startup, #1 growing city via Forbes and Mattermark
Every year, there are millions of people who suffer from life threatening diseases like cancer. The statistics refer to only that single person, who is suffering; but the truth is the close family members and friends also suffer, along with the patient.

Usually, they are left to fend alone with their suffering, as it is very difficult for them to share their true feelings with others, because people who are not in their shoes are not actually able to comprehend them.

How does it impacts the patient's care,well-being and recovery? What can we do more to make society more empathetic towards these people? How does this impact economically overall?
Hardware and Firmware Attacks: Defending, Detecting, and Responding
If it can identify a bug and fix it then its fully automatic. If its good enough we could eventually give it the password to our source control systems and let it do its thing unsupervised. As a funny thought I imagine a future virus that gains write access to all github projects but instead of deleting everything it just fixes all the bugs.
I know if I say 'conspiracy' I'd get down-voted. Oh well progressives, I know it's you.
This. In keeping with Gates' philosophy, when working effectively with non-governmental levels of capital it's critical to make sure you leverage as much as possible to effect real change. Things that play out across a long timespan (relative to a human lifespan) are an excellent opportunity to accomplish that.

Education: We've had teacher-run schools. We've more recently had test/metric run schools. Let's (in the US) finally try and effectively fuse those two into better outcomes per dollar for kids in public schools. My personal pet peeve: develop a modeling technique that predicts an "average" educational outcome for a student given his or her family's socioeconomic status and other inputs. Then at least we have a basis for a fair measure of teacher success -- no teacher can turn every child who grows up without a single book in the home into Albert Einstein or Marie Curie.

Economics: Post-scarcity minimum / basic income, as mentioned.

Democracy: Follow on and unify the various open-* voter information efforts (example: http://votesmart.org/ ) and find the best and most unbiased way to communicate that. Democracy only works with an informed electorate, and we can do much better than throwing our hands up and letting the most ad buys have the strongest influence.

Nutrition: There's a huge amount of bogus advice out there. Synthesizing this into actionable, individualized suggestions and helping people eat healthier by unifying food and recipes with budget. Eating healthier for one day does you no great help -- eating slightly better for your entire life does.
The Ultimate Sales Machine in 4 Minutes
The title needs a (2013), as this was published nearly three years ago. I didn't realize this until I saw the words "two years ago" in reference to his arrest.
Nearing IPO, Interswitch may become Africa's first unicorn this year
Science Exchange (YC S11) is solving this problem. The basic idea is that instead of the "authorship bartering" model that's pervasive in research today we move towards a market-based collaboration model. Basically we encourage researchers to collaborate because it's financially lucrative to do so. By making researchers wealthy they're able to release themselves from being dependent on prestige publications for generating funding. As a result of this we can start to deprecate the somewhat toxic "public or perish" incumbent system. If your entire livelihood relies on being published in a high impact journal you're incentivized to do anything to make that happen. That is not a system that promotes accuracy of information.
No, the two are not equivalent.

running programs have state, that's the issue with the halting problem.
The guy who runs the youtube channel Smarter Everyday has his own subreddit and promotes it regularly.
Amazon cares much less about your security than about the fact that tiny increases in latency decrease conversion dramatically.
Agree on this. Especially research on Soylent like nutrition products for third world countries. Or the cheapest way to build muscle. Or a Crossfit alternative that's free and does not need equipment.
why its 2013 on 2015 is needed
Nikon Awards Prize to Badly Photoshopped, Hilarity Ensues
It's a shame how much Apple don't care about gaming. I'm actually selling my Mac Pro (2013) because the graphics performance is so lack lustre and I have no hope of running Oculus Rift.
In general health. Research on new treatments for diseases/conditions like:
- Hearing Loss
- Cardiovascular disease
There's a chicken and egg situation there. Invariably, I've applied to jobs that want "hackers!" or "full stack devs".

Neither of those jobs actually meet immigration categories. If you want to hire someone through H1B you need to provide a job spec that is needlessly specific with exact skills checked off. The kind of job that, if you saw it, you'd think "I never want to work there, they list a job as if it's a checklist of acronyms!"
This is especially critical be because the two fastest growing economies - India and China - need Thorium energy to move away from fossil fuels
You're both assuming that their mortgage was paid off or that they owned the house outright.
Education isn't ideal now, but I don't think online education is a good start or even a viable model.

Training more and better teachers is the way to go, especially in "third world countries". Not only is there big issues with motivation and the whole social/interactive/distant aspect to moocs; what do you do when you don't have internet, or your device breaks? Now your education depends on a machine that costs a couple hundred bucks, instead of a notebook, pencil and early morning.

Idk, I don't see online education as any more than just a sometimes-useful alternative.
> Or do we need more realistic perspective about death?

We do: we need to realize how horrible it is that we treat it so casually, rather than as a tragedy. Perhaps then we'll do something about it.

> [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering.

All three of which (especially the first and last) have heavy ties to aging. It isn't just about living longer; it's about not aging. We're not talking about getting a few more decades like those in your 90s; we're talking about getting a few more centuries like those in your 30s-40s. (And hopefully that will buy us enough time for the next such improvement, and the next.)
The point is that that would offer no benefit. A root user can just mount it rw again in a single call.
With Lisp you get that out of the box
From https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack/blob/master/spec.md

Raw
String extending Raw type represents a UTF-8 string
Binary extending Raw type represents a byte array
One thing that I don't get from the article is if it can really catch my logical bugs. And I'm not trying to bring this research down because I don't doubt the results, but I am curious, and a bit skeptical, if this is a true step forward in catching "real" bugs or just surface ones. Even a sophisticated algorithm such as this. It takes into account features such variable scope and the operations performed on them, and is trained by real examples of bug patches on open source projects. Can it really understand my project? Because my logical bugs are specific to my project. It kind of reminds me of a recommendation IntelliJ once gave me for the following code:

return {left: am.left, top: am.right};

"WARNING: 'right' should probably not be assigned to 'top'"

This sounds like the kind of conclusion that such an algorithm might come to after seeing enough examples of similar bugs. It turns out that my code in this situation is actually correct, but in order to know this, you would have to have a thorough understanding of the rest of the program.
Thanks for this. Vulnerable apps I found on my system:

- Macdown
- Transmission
- XQuartz

2 of the apps I checked (Sequel Pro and Stuffit Expander) had empty plist files which seems odd. Initially I thought I had maybe updated the software and not opened it since so the file wasn't yet generated but in this case the grep wouldn't have found a plist file at all. Do you know why they would be empty?
Murder She Grepped is the name I would've gone with.
What a tortured soul.
Autonomous computing, perhaps with non-human participatory economies based on Bitcoin.

ML for complex systems that haven't been as explored, for instance agriculture. ie grow crops better by analyzing the billions of ways to do it

ML for the genome is another
You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. An extended lifespan won't help those issues. You need to get over them whether you live 50 years or 500.
Caste matters everywhere: schools, jobs or life at large
China wants to become a semiconductor superpower, budgeting $100B to achieve it
There are many, slightly different ways to describe innovation.

I have found that 20% of the time project is about personal motivation to show on something different (than my usual tasks) that I can do it or make it better. Managers only need to enable it, and shall not force it. If the individual is not motivated to show that it can do better, let it be, because they may be just fine with their normal work.

Groups working on things together for a week (~yearly 20% time) is more about exploring the team's creativity, exploring business or product ideas. It can be called internal pitch or demo days.

Some ideas need time to get some exploring, some trial and error, some fiddling, some long discussions, and may not be doable in a week (wall clock time). Due to their different nature, they will result in different products.

I have written a couple of other points that are related about product development (e.g. moonshot, 10X, competitions), you may find them useful:

https://drillio.com/en/2016/best-practices-in-product-develo...

Re: article. I think the author is using the 20% projects as a team building exercise. It could be working for that purpose, and maybe for some incremental changes, but will not explore innovative ideas.
https://getsentry.com/ added support for CSP a few months ago, but I haven't tried it out yet. https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/pull/2154
Hey, you don't know what it's like. Certain people claiming to be engineers have optimized on finding out what you're trying to accomplish and either blocking it or taking credit for it. They also have figured out how to punish people who do work that they are not getting credit for (i.e. authorized). This is their whole 'job' for which they get impressive titles and money for doing little actual work and having little actual knowledge. While you are sitting there coding all day they are off telling some VP about how they have you working on their project that was actually your idea and your sweat. The best policy for an engineer is the one I described.
At least ten of the suggestions that I've read already are better than what I have in mind, but hey, why not...

How do people stay informed in the 21st century? By which I mean informed well. We are all naturally drawn to echo chambers, and I don't think I'm imagining people becoming more polarised over time as they surround themselves with news outlets that tell them what they want to hear.

This will only get worse as more media companies collapse - only the opinionated ones will get the audience to survive... if they even do. There's a business model question but also a broader philosophical question: how can anyone help citizens be informed about the world around them? How is it sustainable?
If you delve into the documentation of Xerox PARC (Cedar, Interlisp-D, Smalltalk) and later Lisp Machines vendors, their environments already offered many of the Wolfram features.

This is why I like it so much, even if it is commercial. After all I used to pay for my compilers.
learn touch typing if you havent already
> 20% doesn't even work at Google. The reason being, if you care about your career, it ends up being 20% _on top of_ 120% you're already putting in.

From what I've heard from close friends who work at Google, this depends a lot on the team you're on and the manager you have. If you Google around a bit you'll see a lot of mixed feedback on the idea for this reason.

> And I don't know about you, but I'd rather the company did not know about anything I do on my own time and with my own resources, so that they couldn't lay any intellectual property claims to it.

They don't need to know about anything you do on your own time to lay IP claims on it. In California at least, there are very clear rules [0] that state that an employer can lay claim to IP under a number of conditions, none of which is that the employer knew it was happening at the time.

If it's anything worthwhile, it's likely to come up on your employer's radar at some point. It's better just to be upfront about such things instead of sneaking around. If you can't trust your employer you should probably find a new one.

[0]: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...
My startup, Thinklab, is trying fix the incentives. The concept is to partner with science funders and help them distribute their money in a way that rewards scientists for openly sharing their work in real-time while collaborating with each other over the Internet. The first simple step is requiring researchers to openly post their proposals in order to get funding. A portion of funding is then set aside to reward valuable contributions from the scientific community. We would love to have the support and participation of YC Research.
A little red padlock? It's a start... but why not refuse to load the page if it has a form tag but no https. That's how you solve this.
Agreed. With overpopulation already a problem I'm not sure that living longer is a pressing need for the world. Better to help people make the most of the time they have allotted on this planet.
My point was that even though they are allies there are normal & public interactions around spying. So yes, very much expected. The unexpected thing is people assuming allies don't spy on each other.
Automation of common medical lab tests. Not just for the sick but for the healthy. How cool would it be to every week send a drop of blood by mail and get to see a nice graph on a website how the different hormones and proteins etc in your blood has changed throughout the year. It could help you live a healthier life.
Take a look at Incapsula or Sucuri:

https://incapsula.com

https://sucuri.net/website-firewall/

Both a lot cheaper and do a great job protecting against ddos.
We'll have to agree to disagree over the definition of substantial!

The fact NLF units were using antiquated weapons even until the late 60's would suggest the assistance they were getting wasn't widely available.

The fact that the NLF almost disappeared entirely would suggest they did most of the fighting during the Tet offensive. Was the NVA involved? Sure.
Dart 1.14 continues to improve core APIs and tools
what did amazon do that was skirting the rules?
> Yes, today most people who use Docker build containers with unnecessary distro bits in them.

>... to move away from a heavyweight distro like fedora or ubuntu, to something like alpine or even more minimalistic.

The distro package management is one of the biggest reasons why people still stick with heavyweight distros like Ubuntu.

This is why DockerSlim [1] was created (at one of the Docker hack days, by the way :-)) It lets you use heavyweight distros as-is eliminating everything you don't need. You get the best of both worlds where you don't have to change your process and you still get small images (7, 10, 20 and even 30 times smaller than the original).

[1] - http://dockersl.im

P.S.

It is safe for use in production :)
The trapezoid rule, also known as Tai's method in the diabetes community.

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract
Kinda...

I used OVH in the past and they rely on TCP resets/disconnects for large syn floods, making your servers pretty much unusable while being attacked.

I found it better to hide the server behind Sucuri or Incapsula if you are worried about ddos.
I agree this sounds a great candidate for YC. I hope you are looking to take this global. The cost/benefit in health outcomes would be enormous.

Most importantly, I think a system like this must be non-profit and freely available for global usage. Privacy issues can be solved with careful ETL process. Ideally a single global platform...although political realities may force multiple instances.

Regardless of implementation details - this seems to fit the YC Research charter in terms of medium/long horizons and big 'change the world' payoffs.
I agree this sounds a great candidate for YC. I hope you are looking to take this global. The cost/benefit in health outcomes would be enormous.

Most importantly, I think a system like this must be non-profit and freely available for global usage. Privacy issues can be solved with careful ETL process. Ideally a single global platform...although political realities may force multiple instances.

Regardless of implementation details - this seems to fit the YC Research charter in terms of medium/long horizons and global 'change the world' payoffs.
good!!!!
I think this service also good for instagrammer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5qWzgHQG4g
How  VR Will Blow Your Mind This Year
You are right, I was thinking more in a direction of books, magazines and other more complex works. "high-quality" should probably read "high-complexity" or something
Usergrid now has push for Apple, Google and Windows and scales to >10k/s which is probably more than most apps need, but good to have when you need it. We are finalizing our 2.1.0 Apache release right now.

Disclaimer: I've been leading Usergrid development for the last year.