skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I change the word "consume" in my comment to "absorb" then the point is the same. I'm not really one to care to argue about particular words used in the discussion, but more the point of the discussion.

If you consume fewer calories, you also absorb fewer calories. Is that not true?

Your comment only reinforces my point, which is that people would rather consume more, that is, pay for a doctor to prescribe a drug, pay for the drug, consume the drug on a regular basis, than simply consume less food or do more work. I'm sure orlistat has a huge list of side effects. It probably does stuff to your body they don't even know about. It would be better to consume less food or burn more calories than to consume a drug to enable the overweight person to consume more food than they need. And think of the moral implications of over-consumption. Doesn't it seem odd that we are selling people pills to enable them to consume more than they need? What about those who need more than they get?

Yet, people choose to consume the drug. The question is, Why? and you didn't even come close to answering that question, but rather focused on a semantic issue that doesn't move us any closer to understanding.

At one point, I too was overweight. I ate 3 big meals a day, I sat behind a computer all day. I never exercised. Then I started eating less and exercising and I lost weight and became healthier.
$db is something different altogether, in my code I have a cheap Database class and each model creates a new one -- but it relies on the MySQL functions it uses to re-use the database connection. So in reality it's the same thing.

The problem with not using a constant where it's necessary is that you're communicating the wrong thing to someone else or even yourself 6 months down the line. You might want to re-evaluate what you see as "ugly code" especially if it changes how you write the code.
Who is the apex predator of the startup world? Let's define a predator as one who prospers because they make transactions where they have a different and highly advantageous understanding of value than the other party. The transaction can still be beneficial to both sides.
If the mechanism speculated in the article is true (app developer hacking iTunes accounts and buying his own apps), then a crime has been committed, and It would be irresponsible of Apple to "respond" (in a visible way) until proper steps had been taken.
I doubt it's as easy to resolve as you think...

a. That would barely mitigate the problem; it might stop some of the goofy alert() hacks from people messing around, but the others are just going to use the exploit to include an external .js file. Even if your meta-tag would require all JS code to be in the <HEAD>, someone could have used this exploit to create an iFrame which then contained the JS. Or create a meta-refresh tag that redirects to the page with the exploit. The possibilities are endless.

b. If someone figures out how to break the character escape jail, then they're going to be able to write a </noscript_within> tag.
Right, that's why I say I think they're at least partially right. However, I can come up with a few other theories for why the opposite could be true as well.

Just off the top of my head: Whether the food you consume is burned immediately or stored as fat is regulated significantly by taste sensations, as evidenced by studies where people were forced to eat diets consistent of bland-tasting (but otherwise not especially healthy) food, and lost significant weight. Also, people who eat ad libitum will gain more weight than people who consume identical amounts of food through a gastro-nasal feeding tube. Studies on livestock have shown you can promote weight-gain by adding water to dry chow, which makes it taste better but obviously does not alter its nutritional content, even though the animals are fed the exact same quantity of chow. So, it's reasonable to at least suspect that doing something that increases the taste sensation of food, such as instructing people to chew longer before swallowing, might cause weight to increase.

I don't know which of these is true with certainty. The evidence is still somewhat ambiguous.
i suggested that (deleted comment), but it seems easy enough to at least scan for a closing "</noscript_within>" tag in the comment body.
And that's exactly what I hate about the AppStore: it's one big popularity contest. I've had one of my apps dip into the US Top 100 this weekend thanks to a random mention in the NY Times. While the attention is nice, I experience the lack of control over these kinds of media events as truly depressing.
"+ x + = - ... would be to heap absurdity upon absurdity."

Perversely, "+ x + = -" is valid Scheme:

#;1> (= (- (+) (*) (+)))
#t
Swingify (python script) as a Cloud App
Slashdot Science Story | Poor Vision? There's an App For That
Until someone writes </noscript_within > or < /noscript_within> and your script doesn't catch it but the browser accepts it. Or one of hundreds of other small details that neither one of us has thought of yet.
#1. It is written in PHP.

(sorry, I couldn't resist)
I'm going to disagree with #9 that says using a core framework is bad. Now, if the core framework isn't a pre-built web framework like CakePHP, Symphony, there's a good chance there is some ... interesting things in there. But honestly having a "core" at least tries to reuse code.
To clarify: I am aware that there are plenty of outsourcing disaster stories, and that these probably outnumber the number of successful cases.

I am looking to hear from some of the latter, especially from those on the commissioning side as they might be seen as less likely to have their jobs depend on it.
The mights don't really mean anything. This is just how scientists talk.
Yes, you often want to do this just to make sure you're overriding the server's defaults.

If you want all your notices logged into an error file as well as the fatal errors, and the server defines the default error level as E_ERROR, then you'll have to override the default error level.

Horrible article.
So true. In fact, I think this argument outweighs any or even all of the author's arguments.
So why not try and take control of the media events?

This is why people have PR and Marketing staff... They go out and help create the stories and influence how the media report on product and services.
He mentions the small sample size (5 people) as a negative, but I wonder if this situation fits Jakob Nielsen's arguments about testing smaller groups.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
I liked Marcus Hutter's tutorials on the same site: "Introduction to ML" and "Foundations ..." but not the "Universal AI" stuff. Then there are the Stanford ML lectures.

I admit that the topic is not 100% the same though but there is overlap.
I'm not sure how long ago this was. Islamic banking is a very well-established field now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking
If they're only offering 10% of the spot value, then by all means stay away. But if they're offering 50% of spot, that sounds about right for a retail operation like that. They have a lot of overhead to cover, including smelting, fulfillment, marketing, salaries, and other expenses.

That said, from what I'm reading at cockeyed.com, it sounds like they're not using a professional, objective formula for their bids, but instead playing silly games. Why does it not surprise me that they're in Florida?

The "cambios de oro" in South America offer roughly 50% of spot value. They pay you for the jewelry, then mark it up a bit and sell it off to a smelter.

If you come in with fine gold, e.g. a Canadian Maple Leaf, obviously they offer a lot more. They'll try to bid 10% under spot, but you should try to hold out for 5% under spot.
I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but The Last Question is what made me become an AI master student instead of a regular CS master student.
The only proper steps they need to take are to backup the situation before tossing the fraudster and his impact. That should just take a couple of hours.
Spoiler alert.

I thought the ending was a really nice unification of scientific and religious thought, done in a novel way that I've never really seen before. If you don't like it, then I guess there's no other way to really argue for the story. I always thought that Asimov's strength in writing lied in his ideas, as opposed to his descriptions and writing ability.
Help, my iPhone app made it into the New York Times, what now?
So I have this app that has been steadily bringing in a tiny amount of passive income & then suddenly today I saw a huge spike in sales. I googled around a bit & it seems my app has made it into the paid Top 100 & the NYT has mentioned it.

My dilemma: this attention comes at a pretty bad time, because I'm working on a new venture & I really need to focus on that one.

Should I focus on the new venture & let this spike die out? Or should I try to use this spike in media attention now, & if so: how? I'm torn between long-term focus & short-term profit.
Food for thought:

1. As another responder mentioned, some of your examples sound more like named constants than global variables.

2. Not using global variables is just an example of a more general rule: variables should generally have as small a scope as possible. The wider the scope, the harder it is for someone reading the code to understand how the variable is used, and the riskier it becomes to change that code.

3. 20K lines and 100 files is a small project, in the sense that one person can be familiar with all of it. While limiting scopes is still beneficial for readability on that scale, it really starts to pay off when there are multiple people working on a project and no one person knows the whole thing.

I see parallels with modular design generally here: although it is helpful even on quite small projects, you can get away without it up to a certain point. Beyond that point, you really start to suffer from having different parts of your system tied together in ad-hoc, uncontrolled ways.
crisp & concise. The analogy about refs being post-its is a nice one!
Ask HN: Downsides to using Reddit's source code?
I'm thinking about integrating a reddit/hackernews style of discussion forum into my website. However, I'm not a coder. I'm looking to hire someone with Python experience to mod reddit's source code. What are the downsides to basing my website's discussion forum on reddit's source code? I'm dealing with time constraints (I have about two months to get my site built out). This is a better idea than building from scratch, right?

Also, if you're looking for contracting work and are experienced with python- hiesenburg@gmail.com
If a user can do an alert(), they can pretty much do anything. JS has no security-levels except domain restrictions.

> someone could have used this exploit to create an iFrame

But this exploit wouldn't even run. My browser would only run JS on youtube.com from external JS files. YouTube devs could put <script> within their php pages and it would do nothing, let alone random users putting <script> tags in comments. Only way to run ANY JS on youtube.com would be to load an external .js file. If this meta-tag was present, you cannot load an external JS file unless it was defined in the <head>. I really fail to see a way to break out of this shell. Adding a <script>, <meta>, <link>, <head> tag below the initial <head></head> would not work if this mode was turned on. Well-designed sites don't add meta/link tags outside of the <head> anyway. So I don't think it is asking for too much.

> If someone figures out how to break the character escape jail

I agree but that is almost certainly preventable. Right now, JS can be introduced via so many ways (<script>, on-events, javascript:) and web devs have to protect against all of them. I remember in one of the MySpace XSS attacks, IE allowed "<scri\npt>" to execute despite the new-line. Browsers will look for string <noscript_within> as start and </noscript_within> as end. So will web-devs. No partial-lines, no attributes, no nothing. RegEx doesn't fail.
I'm not sure what you are imagining the scope of your first project to be, but I would recommend you begin by understanding and implementing some well-known algorithms. Start with a Guassian Mixture model trained with the EM algorithm. Then do linear and logistic regression, perceptron is pretty simple and a simpler version of the widely used support vector machine.

The handwriting recognition database here is fantastic for testing a variety of simple ML models:

http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/

In our machine learning class, we would use data from the KDD cup for our projects. Why don't you create a submission for old KDD cups and see if your model can do better than random? 1998 is good for logistic and linear regression:

http://www.kdnuggets.com/meetings/kdd98/kdd-cup-98.html

Using the 2007 dataset, you can try out some of the matrix factoring methods that have worked well for the Netflix prize:

http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/Netflix-KDD-Cup-2007.html

These should all be relatively small tasks. Learning how to interpret your results and iterate your models to make them better will take longer than understanding the algorithms.
I think you are missing the point. US citizens do not, for the most part bank at Islamic banks. Concepts that are common sense to a general population (culture) can be completely foreign to another. This "tribal knowledge" is omitted many times because it is taken for granted that everybody know it.
That's why browser makers have to agree on the acceptable usage and suggest what web devs should search/for and sanitize. Right now, browser makers do not recommend anything except "sanitize your input" and that means something completely different for each browser.
In practice, this can be very expensive. If you need to pay a couple bucks a click, you could be in for thousands of dollars before you get meaningful data. It can also take a long time. You may as well build a demo and test that.

This is a tactic better suited to free traffic, which makes it tough to pull off from a cold start.
I actually approve this argument. My personal experience also shows that usability testing can be done with very few people at a time, over many iterations.
Obviously, this is not a universal rule. It's useful for practical usability testing, but not for testing all cognitive processes.
Perhaps, if the variations are small enough, it may be sufficient.
I am glad you mentioned (EC)DHE. The TLS snap start draft is quite discouraging against (EC)DHE ciphersuites because it says snap start doesn't work for (EC)DHE key exchange, and I got the impression that Google isn't interested in using (EC)DHE, despite its significant security advantages.

I think snap start would work for resuming connections that were originally started with (EC)DHE key exchange. And, with an optimal OCSP stapling + snap start configuration, the only types of handshakes that would be done would be full non-snap-start handshakes (with OCSP responses stapled to them) and snap start resuming handshakes. This leads me to believe that snap start only needs to be defined for the resuming case; if snap start full handshakes are happening then it means something needs to be improved w.r.t. OCSP response caching. I believe this would make snap start much simpler.

Coincidentally, I was just working on reducing memory consumption in NSS, probably very similar to the way that you reduced it in OpenSSL. I am curious as to why Google is doing its optimizations for servers using OpenSSL and for clients using NSS. What makes NSS less suitable for servers than OpenSSL?
You nailed it. I actually had an incident when I was in swim class when I was very young where I sucked in a lot of water through my nose. It left an deep impression as I often flashback to this when I smell pool chlorine. I like to think I'm over it, but I haven't been in a pool since. Soon enough though.
http://tech.puredanger.com/2007/09/18/spelunking/

http://debasishg.blogspot.com/2009/06/code-reading-for-fun-a...

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/05/post.html
(section about "making Mongrels stable and secure"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=483824

http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/005-code-rea...
Also disagreeing with #9. Plenty of popular frameworks have "core". core provides a clear delineation between extensible parts of a framework and its inner foundation. A well designed framework allows you to extend its functionality and upgrade the core at any time without disruption. Frameworks have core for the same reason objects have private members: interface opaqueness provides change protection.
Just to add to what agl said:

With RSA key exchange, if somebody ever gets your RSA private key, they can decrypt all past and future traffic that was protected with that key. With ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange, even with the RSA private key, they cannot decrypt that past and future traffic, because each session has its own unique encryption keys that are independent of the RSA keys. They can only impersonate you to intercept future traffic, and only if they set up a MITM attack, but that kind of active attack is MUCH harder to execute (especially undetected) than the passive attacks that RSA key exchange allows. And, again, it doesn't allow them to decrypt past traffic at all.

This advantage of ephemeral key exchange is called "perfect forward secrecy."

For example, let's say you are a dictator and you want to decrypt some encrypted GMail sessions you suspect were done by dissidents in your country last month. If those sessions were done with RSA key exchange, you could steal the RSA private key from Google today (admittedly a very difficult task) and then decrypt those past sessions. If (EC)DHE key exchange was used, it would be practically impossible (no exaggeration) to ever decrypt them.
I just started swimming yesterday. Do you recommend getting a coach or can one learn swimming by himself? How long does it typically to start swimming? I've just learnt to swim at the moment.
Your comment is a little silly when you don't cite any examples of companies that weren't founded by technical people. Digg would have been a good one.

And also, no one on HN argues that a business guy shouldn't start a business, they argue that a business guy shouldn't start a tech business. Anyone can found a laundromat.
I'm not involved in any great moral war between discipline and sloth. I'm a civilian. I'm sorry for making you waste your bullets.

The factors that determine how much of one's food intake passes through the body undigested are numerous, and the overall effect is far from negligible. In addition to possible effect of eating speed discussed in the article, caloric absorption is impacted by food's flavor intensity, its texture (particularly whether it's wet or dry), how readily the food can be converted to glucose (glycemic index), whether the flavor has been previously associated with elevated glucose in the the subject, what time of day the food is consumed, how long it's been since the previous meal, how much food is consumed in a sitting, whether the food is consumed along with flavored beverages (even calorie-free ones), and whether consumption is followed by physical activity, rest, or sleep.

Your point was that weight-gain is simple. It is not.
That's a tough position to be in. Use odesk or another site. Hire someone from East Europe if you can.

Read up a bit and get an idea of what's a good work rate. Work with 3 to 4 people and get an idea of relative work rates.

Your biggest problem isn't that you don't code - it's that you don't know what a really good coder can create + the rate at which he can create.

the mythical man month book would be a good book to read.

Looking at the comments why don't you team up with vlisivka. One big reason to pick someone outside the US is they won't just run off with your idea and there's less of a sense of entitlement.

Coders seem to feel (and I'm one/used to be) that they create 99% of the value, sales creates 1% and everyone else steals off the value they create.

You need to find someone in a country that doesn't have this attitude and East Europe and even South America are perfect.
The biggest problem with all this is the "shocking discovery" that it was all some sort of signal display issue and implies you won't have more dropped calls. It's disingenuous because yes under ideal conditions the phone gets better reception than prior generations. When the problem occurs (which is most of the time for me), it's a complete loss of signal.

While other phones suffer degradation, few suffer complete and repeatable dropped calls with such predictability and frequency. The "shock" that Apple claims seems highly unlikely since I discovered this after 10 minutes of using it before the problem became well known. The shock is also unusual given that Apple is making bumpers for the first time ever. It is also a bit of a blatant assumption that I am stupid enough to believe it's solely a display issue when I have the phone.

True the gradation can be changed so it's less sensitive to dB loss at lower bars, but a dropped call is zero bars even if you signal strength is in pesos or Zimbabwean dollars.

They should try just being honest and telling the truth about it. There are advantages to the new design and with a bumper you can mitigate both the upsides and downsides of the design.
Solar research will dramatically kicks in as soon as oil become too expensive. Moreover, solar productions will kick in when it become too expensive to run our economy on oils.

There is no need for solar researches until then. We could use that money to spend on other research programs, such as space exploration, semiconductor research, or even water conservation research. However, we don't know which to fund. So we end up with a government that more or less redirect the path of technological development, not so much advance the overall state of technology.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.
For extra reading material for the curious, the history of the proposed implementation of "defer" in CoffeeScript:

Part I: http://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/issue/241

Part II: http://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/issue/287

Part III: http://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/issue/350

If you have a suggestion for how to handle the bits of "defer" that are still undecided, such as how to handle the "return" statement, and enforce a callback parameter, please feel free to add it to the third ticket.
"To do it right, it cost as much as onshore development. Outsourcing should be used to find quality people, as they are always in short supply, and not for cost cutting, because the reality is that it is not cheaper."

This isn't quite true in my experience. You are absolutely right in saying that finding good people should be the primary focus of outsourcing but the fact remains that the cost of living for even a very good person varies quite bit across the world. I have lived in both the United States and in India, and I would charge significantly different rates if I were to take up an outsourcing project today from Bangalore vs from California, say. I know peopel who are outsourcing high quality Ruby On Rails work at 35-50$ hour to small teams of ex ThoughtWorkers (due disclosure: some of my ex colleagues) in Bangalore, who are very very good at what they do (just to give a specific example). They deliberately avoid bottom-of-the-barrel rates, but I'd be very surprised if even those rates were viable in San Fransisco.

(Just to be clear I have no intention of doing this kind of work ever again - most outsourced work happens to be crap maintenance-of-terrible-codebases/braindead-cookie-cutter-work people in the West don't want to do. Cleaning up muck gets old very very fast)