skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's like watching your hero being swallowed by a monster and then discovering the monster started to exhibit some personality traits of your hero ;-)

Oracle is ceasing to be the Ultimate Uncool Company in tech. (no, really, that place is Microsoft's - Oracle never stood a chance)
> Honestly, how hard would it be to just fix this first?

I thought it was a breath of fresh air. The unique ID is clearly very random and long enough to be unguessable. Even if the user and document hashes are not picked in a cryptographically secure way it's still going to be much more secure than the average alpha web 2.0 app that's hacked together with some generic login&auth component.

I think you should be upset at products that do auth but do it insecurely, not those who make a conscious decision that a simple solution is good enough. Just look at the websites that don't hash passwords, that don't restrict login cookies to the domain of the app, that don't have SSL logins, and so on. There are a million points where it can go wrong, and even today it's pretty difficult to asses whether your application is secure.

Think about it for a second. The security system the authors have chosen is almost impossible to mess up. Given how the hash looks I'm almost entirely sure they used some kind of crypto library to generate it. (If their magic ids looked like the output of randrange(100000, 900000) it would've been obvious). There is no other point of failure. If the hashes are random and unguessable, you're done! For a free product, I'd say that's pretty good!

What you want is security, but what you ask for is a login page.
Every time I start a project in C, I end up switching to c-style C++ when I realize that I'd really like a standard library of type-safe containers.
Are Questions The “Future Of Facebook”?
RHJunior was all over this

http://www.rhjunior.com/QQSR/00023.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/187998/row-offset-in-ms-s...
I really appreciated my CS education after reading the following from Apple's core data documentation:

"There are many situations where you may need to find existing objects (objects already saved in a store) for a set of discrete input values. A simple solution is to create a loop, then for each value in turn execute a fetch to determine whether there is a matching persisted object and so on. This pattern does not scale well. If you profile your application with this pattern, you typically find the fetch to be one of the more expensive operations in the loop (compared to just iterating over a collection of items). Even worse, this pattern turns an O(n) problem into an O(n^2) problem."
An essay mark is based upon a series of criteria
How your essay is written will be the deciding factor on your essay marks. Many students have no proper idea as to what marks will be the most affected if their essays are not up to standard. Having an understanding of how to write their essays properly will ensure they receive good marks for their essays.
BuySellAds Introduces The Image + Text Ad Format
I am proud to announce a new ad format at BSA — Image + Text. The image + text ad format consists of a publisher defined image size, a title with a max length of 25, 50, or 100 characters, and a description with a max length of 80, 150, 250, or 350 characters.
We could but it would be difficult. Our product requires that our customers subclass our Java classes to implement their custom business logic, and sometimes it's necessary to provide the source to our base classes for reference. Sending a customer some Clojure code and expecting a Java developer to know how to handle that doesn't seem reasonable.
Ira Glass on when to kill your startup idea
I think OP's point is that enjoying the simple prose of programming, reveling in what you can accomplish with simple tools and techniques, is another equally valid route to enjoyment.

If that was true, the OP would have shown better understanding of the difference between "poetry" and "prose". Plinkplonk posted a pretty good analysis of false dichotomies and misinterpretations present in the OP's essay, so I won't repeat all that.

There is one point, however, that I would especially highlight here. The OP first claimed that when he has to look at the code, "the more obvious the code the better". Yet he claims further down that "the vast majority of the world’s programmers, want an 'easy' language, not a highly expressive, poetic language". That's where the OP's lack of understanding of what he calls "poetic languages" is made evident. The benefit of a highly expressive language is that you can make your code more obvious.

As it is, the essay basically reads as "Yes, we Blub programmers like Blub precisely because it's in our comfort zone and that's good enough and we don't care for the rest."

It's hard for me to disentangle pg's "blub" epithet from the fact that he's an investor who benefits from having a technical audience overly concerned with artistic merit and underly concerned with economic benefit.

I confess that I don't understand your logic. How does Paul Graham "benefit" from "having a technical audience overly concerned with artistic merit and underly concerned with economic benefit"? I would expect the opposite, that an investor would benefit from having an audience that always keeps both its eyes on the economic bottom line. I would give your statement a benefit of a doubt if he was a CEO of a company that markets some fancy, new Lisp platform as "The Next Big Thing".
I like it, but the 'Save Changes' button is just a bit too low to be visible on my netbook screen (javascript says window.innerHeight is 481).
What #1 on Hacker News Does For Your Stats
Clojure continues making everyday programming easier, while ensuring type and time and thread correctness. Outstanding.
Why Bankers Suck at World Cup Predictions
I've reluctantly come to a similar conclusion. I moved to California from the UK in 2001 thinking that the anti-smoking laws in bars, etc were oppressive 'nanny-state' measures. I was finally able to give up smoking though, and it really helped that it was socially unacceptable to light up a cigarette in most situations. It also helped that I left behind my smoking friends and hung out with people who didn't smoke, so it wasn't just the laws, but it made me reconsider my previous position on paternalistic regulations.
Using a cellphone seems to protect against two types of brain tumors.
to play devil's advocate, what you'd need to know to parse that paragraph was covered by my CS 102 class. So you'd only need to have taken a couple classes, rather than majored in the subject.
Obesity is on the rise in much of Europe as well.
That's an article from May 01, 2000. That's 10 years ago.

The situation of Lisp in that timeframe has improved by leaps and bounds. Much better documentation, many more libraries, less community fragmentation (SBCL has become the clearly-best-supported implementation), better OS integration, new exciting stuff like Clojure, etc.
You should consider http://www.moneybookers.com/ - they have the lowest fees I've found yet, and support credit cards/wire transfers/local bank checkouts. We use it at http://www.adperium.com/directads
Thus, what is it good for? The point was the Conservatives probably never did care about the public view. It was something they were legally obliged to do and that was it.
It'll go the same as with the iPod and iPhone - the first generation or two of competitors will fall flat on their face. The UI will be awful. The software on them will be awful. The software for syncing to them will be awful.

We'll see a viable alternative to the iPad as soon as someone writes the software to run it. Once that happens, the hyper competitive device market will take it the rest of the way.
That's not a bad idea, but I believe people have tried something similar and run in to legal problems. If your site can be viewed as coercing a vote, it'll get shut down by elections canada.

Power to you though, a site where people can enter where they live and be told if their vote matters might be an interesting proposition.
Europeans believe that Indian leaders in politics and business are so blissfully blinded by the new, sometimes ill-gotten, wealth and deceit that they are living in defiance, insolence and denial to comprehend that the day will come, sooner than later, when the have-nots would hit the streets.

In a way, it seems to have already started with the monstrous and grotesque acts of the Maoists. And, when that rot occurs, not one political turncoat will escape being lynched.

No sane person actually expects this to happen. If you can't come up with a more likely resolution, then you are giving in to despair. How about a more rosy scenario: the rising middle class, who are not rich or connected enough to live on theft, insist on India becoming more honest and transparent so that its legitimate economy can flourish?

The kleptocrats can distract the middle classes with religious and cultural rifts and turn the lower classes against reforms (perhaps by painting political transparency and commercial honesty as "capitalist fetishes" or part of the capitalist mechanism of exploitation,) but that can't last forever, can it?
> So Intel, like Sun, will be trapped at the high-end of irrelevance?

It is too early to tell, but there is a large risk of this. Intel has tried several times to break out of, go beyond, the x86 architecture and has mostly failed at this.

Examples are:

* iAPX 432 "object oriented" processor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432

* i960 RISC processor - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960

* Itanium VLIW processor which has had limited succes - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

* Larrabee - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)

> Is Apple pulling the same catch-up maneuver with "good enough" general computing capabilities on the iPad? (Or are they going to be trapped at the high end of irrelevance by Google and Android on commodity multitouch tablets?)

The Innovator's Dilemma focuses on the niche markets where companies hone their skills, and then the niche markets "expand upwards" into a commodity market, undercutting and toppling the market leaders.

Apple is a very interesting company from the Innovator's Dilemma point of view. They have a interesting history of creating innovations themselves and also commanding a premium for those innovations. I think Apple's "secret sauce" is to create innovations in style (especially) and implementation (It Just Works[tm]) which are very difficult for competitors to duplicate. This allows them to both be a market leader and command a price premium. Essentially Apple has been successful in self-defining their market in such a way as to exclude the innovator's dilemma.

What I'm trying to say is, if you let the market define you, you are vulnerable to the innovator's dilemma. Apple does an incredible job of defining their own market and not conceding that control to outside forces. They do this, not by asking customers what they want (and thus being constrained by their customers' imaginations), but by being more imaginative than their customers.

Henry Ford supposedly said "If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_Ford#.22If_I.E2.80.9...
Anecdote: Myself, plus 3 guys I work with decided to lose weight. We all succeeded (I lost about 50 pounds over 9 months), but the guy who lost 3.5 pounds per week started having serious medical issues.
Not sure why this wasn't caught when I submitted this.
Thanks. This is great. Can you add an editable heading for the canvas page please?
A Crack in the Stoic’s Armor
From the site: 2CO applies a 5.5% commission on each transaction, plus a $0.45 USD charge per transaction.

That sounds incredibly expensive to me, even PayPal is cheaper (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving...).
Ray Kurzweil and James Randi at Singularity Summit 2010 (SF, Aug. 14-15)
What part of HPC would you like to work in? I have some contact with various HPC facilities but have never envied the people who work there -- they're just sysadmins who happen to work in larger, noisier server rooms than most.
Big challenges are sometimes too big. Small challenges can teach us techniques to solve bigger challenges. Before you fly to the moon, you have to get a tin can in orbit.

Coffee cups are easy to relate to, so the hope is to inspire a lot of interest. That energy once applied to this problem can be reused to work on similar problems of bigger scope.
So does this make Clojure a hybrid functional / object oriented language like Scala? Or how do these features compare to the object oriented features of Scala? Which approach do you prefer?
And we've been needing a usable syntax for anonymous classes for years.

I am fully onboard with closures as semantically equivalent to an anonymous class with a single method. The current syntax for creating them, though, is ridiculous.
I don't know why the grandparent mentioned it, but I do know that D.E. Shaw works on both.
Good to know that they at least work on it and dont delay it till jdk8. This will be a great addition to the jdk for alternative-language-developers just like MethodHandles allowing them to compete with Java performance-wise.
In my own experience im really happy with clojure and common lisp, and im also happy with python, until one of its quirks that i have to remember comes after me and bites my ass, anything else seems either tolerable or unbearable. But thats just me, both common lisp and clojure have the capacity to drive me nuts, but it seems to happen a lot less often.
Every engineer or physicist programmer I've met has been really good at taking math in their domain and converting it to code a compiler can understand, but none of them know how to design software or would be capable of writing larger-scale software systems. That's ok. Most of the code they'll be writing will be < 100k lines of code, and you'd be amazed at how much hackery you can survive, especially if you're reasonably smart, at that size of program. Just don't ever ask me or any other competent software engineer to ever have to maintain or extend that system! Let the physicist who wrote it do it.
I don't think you've read and understood the article. Your posting smacks of ignorance and I find it intolerable.
Not to mention how close are Smalltalk and Ruby.
You can always static import Collections.sort. The main thing missing, then, is a way to simply refer to an existing method to perform the comparison. Is there syntax for this in the current release? (I believe there was in some of the earlier proposals.)
Progopedia - free encyclopedia of programming languages
The way I understand it, AMD was in bad financial shape after purchasing ATI.

Then they did the conservative thing by letting Intel release i7 unchallenged, and investing in their process/research for the next big release they do.

MaximumPC had a good article on this back in the day.
For the first time, I wish I could mark a HN comment as "favorite".
You shouldn't speculate without doing a bit of homework first. The Ebola virus is reported to have a mutation rate that is approximately 100 times slower than the influenza virus, making it more like other human viruses, which also tend to mutate slowly. (HIV is an extreme outlier with its extraordinary mutation rate.) The RNAi sequences used in this experiment will likely work for quite a few years.

The investigators plan to do safety tests in humans next, but they have some preliminary data on safety this is positive.
That sounds like a reasonable request ;) Will plug that in sometime soon.
I have limited knowledge of AA, so please someone correct me if/where I'm wrong, but have a friend who attends, and from what I gather it's more that their official position is that alcoholism is a permanent condition, and that life from then on consists of how you handle it.

Recognizing this is central, hence the "Hi, I'm Bob, and I'm an alcoholic."

You're never cured and return to drinking socially... (ideally) you don't ever drink. Ever. Whether publicly or not, you refer to yourself as an alcoholic so it's always clear to you what the deal is, and you don't fool yourself.

The permanence of it feels harsh to me, but it does seem to work, perhaps because "admitting the problem" is so important.
I think a lot of this has to do with where the school's CS department came from. For those few that started in the Math Department they tend to stay close to the math. For the engineering based ones (e.g MIT's EECS) engineering is always the prime focus and CS theory is at minimum a means to that end and for the serious CS types they can concentrate in it but they'll still in theory be good engineers. (When most of a school's students are engineers it just tends to rub off anyway, even on the theoretical physics types, it's hard to escape without groking a fair amount about engineering which many realize will be useful in the real world.)

Also, the ABET accreditation requirements require serious teaching of engineering whereas you could skate on serious math outside of the one specifically required half-year discrete math course plus one other serious one (no doubt most if not all require single variable calculus).
The vast majority of social research doesn't establish causation either. It's an extremely difficult task for large, complex, disorganized systems (e.g. social systems, economies).
academia sees their "failure" to churn out programmers for industry as a crisis...They want to increase their rolls basically, and they saw how switching from CS to learn java style trade schools during the internet boom helped do that.

There's a disconnect in the market here. Numbers like enrollment and hiring of recent grads are easy to measure and make for fine report fodder on academic committee meetings, but give a completely inadequate picture of the quality of education. Hiring is a bad metric -- too much of hiring is through buzzword matching, which is horrible. Then again, HR hasn't any reason to get better, if the pool of available hires is so poor, buzzword matching is good enough. This may not be so true in the startup world. It still seems to plague big companies.
Just as a future heads up that jpg you have on the front page would look much better as a png (nothing mission critical or anything), other than that I'm not a fan of pop up editing but I really can't think of a way you could do it better.

Nice work otherwise.
Fart apps for the iPhone: Big red button in the center of the screen that says "fart." Cost: $0.99.

Fart apps for the iPad: An array of buttons labeled things like "squeeker" and "poot" and "low rumble" and "Shock and and Awe." Plus controls for volume, stereo center, and a time line editor for layering multi-channel, multi-event sequences. Cost: $4.99.
Actually there are over 100 strains of cold viruses, many of which were completely sequenced and reported in a paper in Science last year.

But as to why this group of scientists chose Ebola: they have been working on Ebola for over 20 years, so they made that choice long ago. Every human virus has a scientific community of experts who study it.
pilikun nussija
Thanks for making me seem far smarter than I am. My mental process was basically: "Etherpad was easy to use, I'll do that." (come on google, I'm just like them!)

You can also type in a more memorable URL (like etherpad, trend emerging) but that, of course, makes it much more guessable.
Here's one anecdote of my own experience. Learning LISP (and Haskell, and Smalltalk) has given me even more appreciation for computer science, for the theory and universe of knowledge that lies underneath the surface of programming.

And as for my day job in C++? Well, I prototype in Python for a couple hours, then spend a week translating it to C++. My boss doesn't understand the whole languages thing, but he's happy when I get a 2 wk job done in one.

As for my feelings? Well, I keep reminding myself that I get to move from project to project faster. And that's fun.
I greatly support this idea. And if you mean by branding, it also does have to do with how they present their logos (big difference between the old school venture firms and the seed fund firms)
100% of the iPad profits go to Apple. How much of the profits go to each individual Android licensee?
It makes it a hybrid functional / object oriented language like common lisp, man.

Lisps in general are not functional languages, they're verb-oriented (or classically, “procedure oriented”). The functional stuff is sort of a legacy moniker that meant something very different when Sussman & Steele wrote "Lambda the Ultimate Goto".
tl/dr:

Person A makes claim "on average X is true". Person B comes out swinging "I know at least one case where X is not true, therefore person A is full of shit."

How boring.
The complaint should be lodged against the current browser behavior rather than linking itself.

The cognitive cost to follow the link is not cheap because of how browsers work and the way linking is generally used today (even using tabs/additional windows).

Overall I see the article as a call to improving browser technology and more thought and effort by the authors as they write and decide what to link and what not to link.
I was about to start a big project on App Engine, so your comment is worrying.

Anybody else having reliability problems with GAE or is this just an isolated case?
I expect many people to have multiple tablets, possibly of various makes and sizes. A simple glass panel with a touch screen will be commoditized quickly. At least among geeks. Heck I'm already using my iPad as an adjunct monitor on my laptop. Imagine a few years from now when we've started to push what these things can do. The old Star Trek trope where a person has a bunch of tablet-like devices spread out on their desk, like stacks of paper, may be hear sooner than we think.

The real question is which tablets will support an active and innovative eco-system that _normal_ people will use, trust and pay to run apps on.
Not a lot of it is statistical arbitrage - yes this is what Rennaisance and D.E. Shaw do, but this is not what banks (sans perhaps Goldman Sachs) devote much of their compute power to. It's just too hard to make money doing this compared to more traditional activities like market making.

As stated, risk management is a big application: VaR and market stress scenarios are computationally intensive, particularly for portfolios with path-dependent derivatives. Pricing is the other big application: it is similarly computationally intensive to value derivatives against the market-implied term structure of volatility.
The difficult part is the burning the 2000 calories. You do not have complete control over how many calories you burn. In the example DrSprout gives, if your body senses that you are burning too many calories it may adjust what is it does to conserve energy. In this case by delaying the process of healing the muscles.

In short, the way to lose weight is by burning more calories then you consume. But the difficult part is finding out how to do so in a healthy and sustainable weight. The means for doing so will vary from individual to individual.
A start-up who's function is to help other start-ups.

Novel idea!
Standard Customization. Evaluating Flexibility through Quick-MI.
The XBox division finally started turning a profit mid-2008 (to the tune of 9 figures). The division may still be in the red overall though, as many years as it was losing money.
Unnatural ways to calculate Fibonacci numbers
Look, I'm an independent programmer and I can pretty much chose everything about what I program in. Still, when it comes to completely new, and not very mission critical projects, I go for Clojure (still a bit green and unsure on my lipspy feet). When it comes to existing projects and serious stuff, Java is and Java will stay. Way too much code invested in it. I can and I do try to evolve my style and tools, but the one single thing that's always been in my way was a complete lack of higher order functions (anonymous classes are a verbose joke). So yeah, I'm ecstatic :)