skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cookies with MACs did in fact get substantially easier, that was in fact a feature people regularly screwed up, and the fact that you have to manually arrange to expire user-based cookies when passwords change is a sign that there's still work left to be done.

The more of this functionality Rails takes over and stops leaving up to developers, the happier I'll be.
AMD reveals Fusion CPU+GPU, to challenge Intel in laptops
I'm not bored with buzz after a few minutes. Looks like someone is trying to capitalize on the hype of buzz (to catch the buzz so to speak) for their own blog by saying it sucks.
We've pretty clearly executed the wrong people since there has been DNA testing too. Grisham wrote a non-fiction about it "The Innocent Man." There is some heavy stuff in it.

I guess I'm kind of torn, I think we want prosecutors to be aggressive when they go to court. One the case is over, it seems like they need to be removed, their opinion on DNA testing or other things should no longer be needed. DNA or not, how do you convict an innocent man of a crime he didn't do? Just incredibly bad luck and circumstantial evidence? I don't buy that, not if he has a good defense which he's entitled to. The other thing in this Grisham book is that a lot of the mis-convicted folks are poorer, maybe not the most emotionally balanced, and often kind of outsiders in their communities (like the black guy in the all white town, or the dark haired gothic guy in the rural community) and there is more than just DNA evidence that have been perverted. To have any reasonable oversight or feed back into the system, you'd have to remove the prosecutor once his job is done.
Frankincense: Could it be a cure for cancer?
I read over the "Capitalism" essay, and it was full of simplistic, thoroughly-used ideas with a strong Randian smell. What is interesting about this site? What does it add to the conversation that's new? How is this different from Yet Another Crank Amateur Internet Philosopher Blog (YACAIPB)?
I totally agree that you loose static safety guarantees when you program in a dynamically-typed language. But the lack of compiler support does not prevent you from writing code that is monadic (both in its types, and in the other monad laws - which another commenter mentioned are not provable by most statically-typed languages either). You seem to agree with this, since you say you've implemented monadic functions in a dynamic language. Really you are just saying that it requires other sources of discipline, which is true of lots of things besides monads.

For example, I see you are a Perl hacker. In Perl, even my simple (42 + "foo") example results in "subtle loss of information." This doesn't mean that + doesn't work in Perl, just that someone other than the compiler has to make sure the values on either side have compatible types.

Look at the clojure.contrib.monad documentation, and you'll see that monads do have benefits beyond "normal" combinators, even if those benefits don't include all the static safety of Haskell or ML. You get the "domonad" macro which provides the same benefits as Haskell's "do" syntactic sugar. You get generic lifting/mapping/chaining functions that you can use with any monad (like the Control.Monad module in Haskell), and you can write similar generic functions of your own:

http://richhickey.github.com/clojure-contrib/monads-api.html

Generic/parametric monad actions do look different in a language with a weak type system. Rather than letting type inference take care of polymorphism for you, you have to use other language features. For example, in JavaScript you can use objects and duck-typing, letting the function access the enclosing monad's operations through an implicit object parameter. I don't know enough Clojure yet to know the equivalent idiom.
An Annual Report on One Man’s Life
If Windows were open sourced today, would Windows users be safe? No. Parts of Windows have such bad design that they'll never be safe. Big example: the silly "attributes" that don't include "executable". Having a file name determine executability is prone to human errors, especially since a definitive list of "extensions" that make a file executable is not forthcoming.

But if you open-sourced it, someone would eventually provide you with that list of "extensions".
Genetic Variant Influences Aging Rate?
That's why you need to spread the wisdom about the benefits of gouging _before_ the disaster.
"...without a type system..."

Sorry to be a pedant, but dynamically typed is not the same as without a type system, it is merely without a type checker. They probably look the same to somebody well versed in Haskell but the distinction matters.
right, I don't know much about micro-biology. therefore I don't go spouting off about it. rand (and chompsky) routinely spouted off about things that were out of their domain.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1776
I'm afraid I don't agree with your use of the term "innovative". Regarding Gmail, I'd rather say they managed to clone mutt+procmail for the web in a reasonable manner.

Regarding Maps, the fundamental operations had been in place since at least 2002 at e.g. http://www.nl.map24.com/. Actually I haven't been there for quite some time, and I think in 2002 their interface was actually better than now.
Yeah, my g/f got one about seven years ago with the same result, so it will take a long time and a better track record before another purchase.

In the meantime she found a (slightly) more intelligent vacuuming device.
If you thought it was hard now to get a developer who switched teams to help fix bugs in their last project, wait until you put $200,000 on the table.
Right. They can be used as one-shot continuations. It doesn't cover all use cases, but a good subset of them.

There's a patch by Mike Pall to add coroutine copying for simulating multi-shot continuations, though.
I agree with the jist of this article. And Apple's strong point IMO has always been their IJFW technology (it just fing works), which seems to elude so many others who cram in 10,000 features and wonder why nobody uses their product which takes a Ph.D in computer science to decipher (especially open source projects in many cases steps off soapbox).

The problem is, I actually think Apple is starting to abandon this approach for a more of a corporate driven 'I want you to lock you into this' model, which will NOT work.

The whole Flash debacle is the prime example of this IMO: if I want to use a Flash application on a webpage, and I'm the average user who doesn't even know* what Flash is, it better just f*ing work. Otherwise this product will be going back to the store, and I as Joe Public average computer-illiterate internet user will be on to something else. End of story.
When I see concurrent, how is it different from NFA? Non-deterministic finite state machines also have concurrent multiple paths.
It's the same criticism people have had with wave really "I log in, nothing much is happening, it's boring"
Wouldn't facebook be pretty much the same if all your friends weren't posting?
I wondered if you meant Metalua. That's a different dialect, like OCaml vs. SML different. Standard Lua doesn't have macros, and the packages I've seen that add them (such as Luma, http://luaforge.net/projects/luma/) do so via eval.

I haven't done that much with Metalua - I don't really feel that Lua's lacking macros is a major problem, really, though I like the author's views on metaprogramming ("Make it obvious when something interesting happens", etc.). I remember looking at it a year or so ago, but didn't get into it.

I just gave it a quick stab at porting, and I remember why - "Prerequisites - a 32 bits, little endian CPU" - I tend to switch back and forth between a couple OSs and hardware platforms, and Lua's portability is a big bonus for me. Adding a couple ML-ish features to Lua would be tempting, though.
Google street view on top of Whistler Mountain taking pictures of the slopes
I agree. Learning about the problems that arise in cryptography (as well as general security issues) help me avoid certain mistakes when writing my own code. This book looks promising, particularly the "learn why certain decisions were made".
That's a good question. I would take the same attitude in Roman times. Their traditions had a lot of flaws, but they were (in most respects) the best knowledge available at the time. I don't think people could have improved from Roman times by ignoring or disrespecting what they already did know then.

I think you've misunderstood a bit because I am not saying our current traditions are the best possible traditions. (That wouldn't even make much sense because they contradict each other frequently.) I am in favor of changing traditions in a gradualist, piecemeal fashion because I think that's the most effective way to make progress.

You might compare it to updating big, messy legacy code systems. You want to do one thing at a time and then run the code or the tests to make sure you didn't break anything and the change works as intended. If you add a bunch of stuff at once, and then there's a problem, it's harder to figure out which change was behind it.
This is really very key here. A study in China trying to figure out why two identical towns, right next to each other seemed to have radically different health profiles on their elderly eventually came to the conclusion that it was because one of the towns had a a modern road while the other was still paved with cobblestones. The difficulty of walking on the cobblestones kept the population substantially healthier. There are even some experimental retirement homes in Japan designed around this idea. Instead of trying to make everything easier, and allowing the population to grow weaker in response. The entire home is designed to challenging. Things like short door frames so people have to duck.
I understand you will be able to turn it off, just like you can logout from Facebook. That's not the issue. It's the idea of creating something of this kind in a "holy place" like your inbox.
If the person who was tested was chosen at random from the population, then yes. But -- and this is an important point that somehow almost gets omitted when the usual examples of DNA evidence, medical tests, etc., are brought up -- when you're testing someone's DNA against samples from a crime scene, or testing whether a person has a rare disease, it's almost always because you already have evidence that brings Pr(they did it) or Pr(they have the disease) way above the baseline level. And in that case Pr(they did it | DNA evidence), or Pr(they have the disease | test result), may well be quite large.

(Of course that's not true if the person with matching DNA was found by some kind of search of a Vast DNA Database, or if the positive result on the medical test was the result of a mass screening exercise that tests everybody.)
When I first really got into the web, pixelsight blew my mind. It was so ahead of its time.
But at least each paragraph had its own permalink.
Exploring the Fibonacci Numbers
There doesn't appear to be any information about what's changed between "Practical Cryptography" and this book. That's a pity.
Dave Whiner.
Simple way to organize business plan/pitch to investors
Ethics Pledge for Neuroscientists?
In some parts the camera is covered in ice. For example if you click next here you'll see the transition:
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&hq=http:%2F%2Fmaps.goo...
LoseThos O.S. documentation and much code now available on-line
The Pipeline 2: Ryan Carson [Podcast]
The one fact you will never hear when DNA results are being discussed: 1 out of every 100 DNA tests are bungled by the testing lab. Either through mistake, contamination of samples, whatever. So that "1 in X billion" odds they toss around should be viewed with that fact in mind. Oh, and you're not allowed to mention it in court. Ever. They're too afraid the jury will get confused.

(The book "Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" contains all the details.)
I'm going to reserve final judgement until I actually get a chance to use the service and see the direction Google wants to take it. My first reaction is not positive. This feels like Google's Microsoft Money moment Go into a market with an established leader, use your size and dominance to undermine the competition just because you're the 800lbs gorilla and you need to be fed at any cost. There doesn't appear to be anything new here. Just a Google logo.
Regarding the Animoto proposal: You should look into the Stupeflix API (http://www.stupeflix.com/api), which could easily automatically stitch the videos together into something that looks impressive. Let me know if you would like a personal intro to the Stupeflix guys.
Interview with Paul Stamatiou, Georgia Tech Graduate and founder of Skribit
Brute forcing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025520

I think a new admin needs to read up on locking down ports in iptables, Bastille, snort, filesystem fingerprinting and some checklists:

http://www.mnxsolutions.com/blog/apache/securing-your-server...

http://blog.dhananjaynene.com/2009/10/configuring-a-secure-u...
Something is happening: Some Biggest business USA sites don't work from China
http://paypal.com/ is blocked using the 3G card from China Mobile, CMCC, in Shenzhen, Guangdong.

Gmail is badly throttled periodically and google.com too. Techcrunch ( obviously i do not consider it as "one of the biggest business ", i won't go on telling more. Anywyay, techcrunch has been blocked temporarily too and it seems to work fine again.

I do have also an adsl connection and i have noticed the exact same problems lately, the only exception is that paypal is actually working on the adsl. And as usual most of the forums and blogs, containing keywords such as forum, or blog, are automatically blocked by human and automated systems.

Can anybody located in china try to probe this a bit more down and provide serious output ? i think it is an important issue for all us, since it relates to international politics too, but that would be another discussion. Thanks a lot for your attention.

Alberto Armandi
Many of the cover designs on these programming/tech books look liked they were designed by programmers. That's not a good thing...
I guess the most odd aspect to an outside observer is how incredibly indistinguishable , at least from a physical observation, caste members are from each other. This is in such stark contrast with the societal confinement it locks people into it borders on a parody on prejudice, were it not so tragic.

EDIT: This star trek episode comes to mind (Are you blind?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi7QQ5pO7_A
Ask HN/pg: Do you sell to SMBs? How do you do it?
What methods have you tried for selling to small/medium business? How have they worked out?

What do you think of direct mail, on-line advertising, cold-calling, etc.?
Die gif die.
This. I was worried about so many other things on my wedding day. The last thing I'd want to fret over was doing tech support for a laptop and piece of video software. Most of my groomsmen were top-notch tech guys and I wouldn't even want them to worry about it. They were there for me, my wife, and our wedding day, not to play help desk tech.

But if this was something our videographer or photographer had offered I would've jumped on it in an instant.
It looks like the author is a glass-half-empty kinda guy. The sentence immediately preceding that justifying the conclusion that something "went wrong" is:

> The results of the case studies indicate that the pre-release defect density of the four products decreased between 40% and 90% relative to similar projects that did not use the TDD practice.

Sounds like a net win to me - possibly 35% more effort, for a possibly 90% "better" product.
90%relativetosimilarprojectsthatdidnotusetheTDDpractice"
Bing continues to gain share in latest search rankings . . .
IPv6 History: First YouTube videos streamed on IPv6
Feds Bust Cookie-Stuffing Code Seller
But they're indexed anchors, so if he ever inserts or reorders content, the links will break.
you can't even make Set a functor in Haskell

Well sure, because map on a set is only defined over functions that return values that can be compared for equality, whereas the generic functor map is defined over all functions.
The average person is, for no good reason whatsoever, certain that they will never be falsely accused of a crime. They also believe that anyone who has drawn the attention of the police must have done something to deserve it, and are fine with a few 'innocent' people slipping through the cracks if it means more safety overall. Anti-intellectualism is dangerous, and it is global right now. The principles the US justice system were built on - innocent until proven guilty, acknowledging the possibility of fallibility on the part of the prosecution, etc - are viewed by the general public as loopholes that keep criminals on the street. The simple idea that we would operate based upon principles, regardless of what they are, is viewed as wrong. There is no way to reason with these viewpoints because they reject reason as their basis.
One issue is that you can't always expect an Internet connection at a wedding. But interesting link nonetheless.
The sadder/funnier part is, most highly educated Phds etc get hung up on caste mostly because (a) They would rather not argue with their parents about these things (b) Arranged marriage is the easiest way for them to find a partner

The silver lining in this cloud is that, in my observation, most of them don't consider other castes to be inferior in any way. They just don't want to deal with the inconvenience of arguing with their parents, especially when they are dependent on parents for finding them a bride.

It's a pretty faint silver lining though :)
It's too bad, because the cover design on _Practical_ was pretty solid.
The link doesn't work for me, but this one does: http://www.justin.tv/clip/256d3b4ba66875ae

(Interview starts at 8:40)
Cringely hints around that the government should try and encourage startups...please no!

They'll just foul it up with some pork-barrel spending plan. Keep the government far away from startups! Unless of course they're going to require almost no paperwork.
I've gotten to the point that I think the death penalty should be abolished and substituted with life / guaranteed no parole. I am not morally opposed to the death penalty, but I believe that we are not perfect and shouldn't 'accidentally' execute anyone. Plus, it is a whole lot cheaper to keep someone in prison for life then the cost to governments for a full run through the appeals process.

In short, its a badly designed, error prone, high cost process.
I've asked a couple of friends with corporate jobs, and they said Gmail is usually open but FB is blocked. They also said it doesn't matter, because everyone has a smartphone.

Not a great data point, but interesting none the less.
my roomba detects heavy dirt and focuses on it. it also has a manual spot cleaning button.

Finally, being able to set my robot buddy cleaning while I frantically get ready for guests is a fabulous boon.
The problem I'm hoping it will solve is a great portable pdf reader. If the iPad doesn't solve this problem hopefully something else will and I'll buy that. Of course having bought an iPad (or other tablet) I'll no doubt use other functions, but reading pdf docs is the problem I want solved and whoever solves it the best gets my money.
Managing your net presence after you die
There is a VERY good reason to tell them, and document the fact. If you commit a violation and they know about it they must act within 3 years or lose their case. However if they don't know about the violation they can go after you 15 years later. Don't do it in secret. If you afraid they'll kick you out line up another job just in case.
Google Buzz Test Drive Report
Lecture overclocking
We'll just have to agree to disagree then, because I don't see how anyone could look at mutt+procmail vs. GMail and say GMail wasn't innovative, or at nl.map24.com and say GMaps wasn't innovative. Both of those seem ridiculously hard to use by today's standards.
I'm just surprised that Buzz doesn't somehow reinvent an application he deployed 3 years ago (which sank like a stone unnoticed) but is now evidence of Google's evil intentions to destroy his established internet standard.
XHP: A New Way to Write PHP (from Facebook)
That's a valid point, and a good one I think. Personally though, I still think the benefits outweigh the dangers - especially given the points bediger adds.
I usually where toe socks, sometimes not. Sure in the winter my feet are a little colder, it doesn't bother me.
Seems to me that Dave Winer is always down on something. If its not Buzz its twitter or PubSubHubbub its something else. I don't know Mr. Winer, so I try not to judge, but to me he just seems to be negative guy.
I've got Practical, myself, but out of curiosity, what was wrong with Applied?
Clearly, his individually indexed paragraphs are undying prose that mustn't be modified.
I too feel the internet is falling short in some ways. My take on the shortfalls is different, but related. The attempts to commercialize every aspect of the net have created this massive amount of noise that too much of the time gets in the way of the best information. In the early days it was a more select intelligent crowd that had discussions on the newsgroups. Some groups produced some real treasures as "FAQ" files. Most people doing casual searches now would have a hard time finding information not driven by a commercial motive. If not made dysfunctional by outright spam, many forum have paid trolls and shills.

Contrast U.S. commercial television with programming from the B.B.C. and P.B.S. to see just how destructive heavily monetizing media can be.
Emergent structure within the event sponsorship networks of British Parliament
I think you nailed the problem I had with this too. The future is not measured by years, technology, or economics. It's measured by how much it disagrees with the past about what is and is not important.
Very nice job. I'll be using it soon. I second the idea of submitting it as a "Tell HN."

I don't think the security is a huge deal because, since it's setting up a new server, you really should just change the password afterward. But it probably wouldn't be bad to reassure people (or say "don't worry about security! just use a throwaway password for us and then change it"). It doesn't matter if security shouldn't be a concern if prospective customers see it as a concern.
DIY Geek: In-Ear Bads
Is investing <25K from you a bit too little? I know YC invests very little but at least they have whole bunch 'intangibles' come with it. That makes the small investment a bit easier to swallow. What do you bring to the table beside 25K?
The Anatomy of a Whale
Right. That's why we made Thrilled for You as a client app that requires no internet connection. Internet is still so flakey... it's the last thing anyone should have to worry about.
About as well as needed for an average user. The problem with it is I don't work within its workflow - and it doesn't nicely deal with mine.
I'm going to create a new group and the whole point of it will be to overthrow the US government have it be replaced with chipmunks and then register on this and pay the $5.
Does anyone know what kind of revenue Skribit is getting these days? It would be interesting to know how the business has done in the last year or so since he's graduated and worked on it full time.
Agreed. With enough demand... we'll add more versions. :)
Courts are not computers; they apply subtle judgments based on a total reading of scenario.

If your intent was to discover and then market tunes identical to popular copyrighted tunes, a court can view the totality of your system as 'copying' existing works. If your two corporations exist to obscure the real intent of the people behind them, a court can treat them as co-defendants.