skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I have yet to meet my first independent safety researcher, who looks for flaws in life-critical equipment for fame or money or ego…"

You have now, this is what I do for a living.

"The article also completely ignores the fact that DO-178B certified code, as found embedded in civil aircrafts, has a perfect safety track record"

DO-178B is a process, and not a "certification". It's utilization has not produced a "perfect track record" in safety critical systems.

You should know better than to make such grossly incorrect statements. Experts in this industry know for a fact that testing only proves the lack of a "tested for" failure condition, and cannot be relied upon to assure safety.

DO-178B is but one of several criteria by which the Aircraft certification authorities judge an avionics system to be safe.

Software is too complex to be assured by testing alone.

Static analysis is merely a tool, and is not a solution to this problem. You should be well aware of the limitations of Static analysis.

Regulators no longer are provided with access to design and testing data sufficient to fully review a product for safety, and they routinely rely heavily on the manufacturers, thru delegated authority, to regulate themselves.

Design defects can only be eliminated in the application of a transparent review process. Complexity issues in "limited human cognition" and "human bias" are the key causes of life threatening defects in safety critical systems.

Without external review and oversight by "outside consultants" such as myself, life threatening safety defects routinely go undetected.

All safety critical systems will ultimately be "public domain" for this very reason. Just as proposed by the
Software Freedom Law Center.

The FAA does not absolve aircraft manufacturers for liability, as the case with the FDA and Medtronic. (see Varig v. United States) 28 USC 2680(a)
Discretionary function exception

DO-178B software does not "in fact" have a "perfect safety track record".

Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 was a passenger flight which crashed during landing to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Netherlands, on 25 February 2009, killing nine passengers and crew including all three pilots.

software defect utilized "invalid altitude data" as valid.

"Tests showed that the Rockwell Collins Enhanced Digital Flight Control System (EDFCS) uses radio altitude values that are characterised as ‘non computed’ (unusable,) whereas this characterisation should have prevented this."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

ADIRU software defect utilized "invalid data" as valid.

This device was certified to DO178-B Level A, the very highest level of certification, where failure can result in catastrophic loss of aircraft.

1 August 2005, Boeing 777-200 registered 9M-MRG, from Perth to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

use of invalid data as valid

This device was certified to DO178-B Level A, the very highest level of certification, where failure can result in catastrophic loss of aircraft.
I think Cliff Click pretty much makes the best case in that argument that for complicated problems, STM doesn't offer a lot more than regular locks.
You can basically leave off the "if you are a Founder" in the title, and still be accurate.
I enjoy using PHP in spite of its quirks. But my main wish is that the PEAR system was a bit easier to use. After seeing some Ruby Gems in action, it made me wish that PEAR was a little slicker.

Does Python have a good and unified package installer like PEAR or Ruby Gems?
Good news for Apple or bad news for them? It would definitely help the IPhone ecosystem but breaks Apple's control.
Apple has proven willing to brick jailbroken phones in the past.

Have they?

The famous case of "bricking" back in 2007 was not related to a jailbreak, but was a botched unlock tool[1] that corrupted data in the baseband firmware. The corruption then led to problems with an update. Apple issued a warning when the update was released saying it would affect unlocked phones, and I can't imagine this is out of malice so much as it is out of Apple's pre-release testing activities revealing problems.

If it were an intentional attack against people who had jailbroken phones, why did it only affect those who used that particular flavor of unlock software?

With a jailbreak being simply a software modification, when has strictly a jailbreak (not an unlock) led to a bricked phone? At worst, a software update from Apple will just lead to the phone being restored back to non-jailbroken state.

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-elite/wiki/iPhoneBrick
Ask HN: Payment API
The little business I'm working on centers around paying users small amounts of money (< $20).
I see that PayPal has an API for this (Adaptive Payments API).

Is this a good option, or are there better options? Also, the lower the fees, the happier I am.
Designing a Better iPhone Sign Up Screen
I'm with you that I found the social implications of this many times more interesting than the technical ones!
I think the main reason is that they don't have a good test for who's a bona-fide founder or not: anyone can put up a website or release some iPhone apps and claim they're running a tech startup and are in the process of trying to monetize it. Who's going to read those business plans and filter for the legit ones (and what does legit even mean; estimated likelihood of success?)? Hence the buck-passing to someone else (VCs, angels, or revenue numbers, if you successfully bootstrapped) to make the decision. If your startup's got enough cash or revenues to pay you a salary above some threshhold, you're considered a legit entrepreneur; otherwise, you're merely an "aspiring entrepreneur".
Yeah, I'd thought of this. Unfortunately, the exit row is not normally an option for physical reasons (I often travel with someone who could not do what's needed if there is a problem), and I've only once been so lucky as to get a bulkhead seat.

The other option, of course, is to simply not fly. For the price of an extra laptop battery, a bus (or train or boat) ticket, and optionally some sort of network connectivity, I can get where I'm going slowly but comfortably and productively. It has not quite reached the point where this is superior to flying, but it's moving in that direction.
"undesired side effects, ideally for each strain, and particularly related to long term usage."

Considering that even the academic studies on this are very unreliable, I think it would be virtually impossible to do this on the site unless you had tens of thousands of users filling out very detailed questionnaires.
Dr Eric Brewer (CAP Theorem) speaking at Riak Meetup in SF
This is the case in pretty much every western country, afaik. The $250k limit is also held by Germany. Other countries have floors of (I hope you're sitting) 1 million currency units (pounds, etc.). Personally, I think they are all misguided. But try to explain that to border control. In this vein, you may find this post by Max Klein of interest: http://maxkle.in/giving-up-on-europe/
Taxpayers foot the bill today. This is about today, not some hypothetical.

I have never claimed that forcing prisoners to work is slavery. What I did say is that forcing prisoners to work without fairly compensating them is slavery. I also do not oppose letting criminals work; I don't even know where you pulled the "moral and not practical considerations" from.

Are you reading my posts before you respond to them? Are you confusing my posts with somebody else's? What's going on here?
Unfortunately, the App Store developer agreement means that devs can't sell on Apple's App Store if they ever use a third-party store.
I don't really agree with this article. Number 4 goes out of its way to cherry pick periods starting from a stock market boom as examples. This is not really relevant for today's markets because the boom has already passed and we are in a slump.

Number 6 is especially egregious. Think about the reasoning behind this for a second:

"The widely quoted price/earnings (PE) ratio, which compares share prices to annual after-tax earnings, can be misleading. That's because earnings are so volatile -- they're elevated in a boom, and depressed in a bust."

Are we currently in a boom or bust? If we were in a boom, then they might have a point that corporate earnings are higher than they will be in the future and that the P/E ratio therefore makes stocks look better than they are. But I don't think anyone can say that we are in a boom. We are instead in a very serious recession. So the above paragraph would mean that the P/E ratio actually underestimates the values of stock which means that stocks are even better buys than they would initially seem.

I don't know why the WSJ seeks to deflate demand for stocks now when stocks are relatively cheap after trying to inflate and encourage demand right before the crisis when stocks were really expensive. But I would not trust their advice much.
thanks

http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html

was the best guide I found, its brilliantly in depth and covers more behaviour than I ever realised, like how the pacman turns corners. Pity I only found it after I mostly finished it.
Stuffing a bunch of things into a DB in parallel doesn't seem like a very interesting problem to solve to me. As discussed earlier, Clojure's concurrency primitives are only useful for a somewhat specific class of problems: computationally intensive tasks in a single shared memory space. The benchmarks in the ACM paper seem to me to have a lot more to do with the kinds of complex datastructures you're going to employ in those scenarios than batching writes to a key-value store.
I wish they had China on here, even though it's probably like 0.5.
Why SSDs Will Not Replace HDDs.
Seems so, at least it's the database which failed and not the web server. A web server failure on a site covering real-time web servers news would be too weird.
Um, 3600.
Of course there's no guarantee that getting a CS degree (or any other degree of the moment) will get you a job. But still, there's a huge difference between someone who at least made an effort to use college to become employable, and someone who majored in liberal arts.

For me, it really has nothing to do with shadenfreude, it has to do with expectations. I think someone who majored in chemical engineering should be surprised and disappointed to discover the jobs aren't there. I take no pleasure in watching a communications major struggle to get a good first job, but he had to know that going in.

This guy really seems surprised that going to school and doing well in Poly Sci didn't open the magic door to jobs. Really? Has he been living under a rock?
Sick Building Syndrome
I am not sure about the advice here. I am a H1-B holder, and here is what I see wrong with his advice -

H1B: (the most popular) This Visa let you be hired from your company. So you can be the CEO, CTO or a developer of your company. It lasts 5 years, then you can extend it.

Not entirely true.

1. The Visa is for 6 years (in 2 3-year segments). Furthermore, you can't extend it unless you have legitimate reasons for it (for eg. if you are waiting on your GC to be approved).

2. It's very hard to be hired by your own company, especially for startups. He does allude to this in his "Cons" section but there is more to it - For a firm to hire a H1-B the business itself needs to prove that it actually has such a need. Furthermore, its needs to prove it's own viability via a business plan, a tax statement (that shows that it makes $x in revenues each year) etc. The latter portion is hard for a startup - since they may not have any revenues yet.

3. The 5 year time range (for getting a GC) is random at best - It all depends on the country of origin of the immigrant. People from certain countries can enroll in the GC lottery process and potentially get lucky (I have a friend who went this route). For most people from China/India it usually is on an average 5-6 years (a EB-2 classificatio. EB-3 takes longer, while EB-1 is usually very fast, but a very small portion of the population can apply in that category)

4. He's right about having the right salary. You need to pass labor certification when getting a H1-B (or a GC for that matter). I don't know enough about part-time H1-Bs so I can't comment on it
But if you signed a 2 year contract to get that iPhone 4, how does it hurt AT&T?

You're free to put another SIM in that phone after jailbreaking, but the bill will still come every month.
Taking your thought a step further, let's also save the comments you make on others' blogs and bring them into your journal/blog as well.

At the end of the day, I don't need another blog or a slight variation on blogging technology. I need something that basically blogs for me. If I can add value to my site by adding comments like this one to other people's sites (then pressing this "magic" button (maybe a bookmarket?) to automatically save it as part of my blog), that'd be pure awesomeness.

Beyond saving boatloads of time for everyone who used it, it would create a more connected blogosphere by allowing people to link their commenter accounts (like HN, Reddit, etc) to their primary blog...effectively giving people more ownership over the things they write on others blogs, increasing author recognition, etc.
I was going to complain that parts of the article were disjointed and contradictory (Use -->, don't use -->, JK use it) until I noticed the name of the blog is "Two Guys Arguing."

Solution from the comments: (apply merge-with + (map (fn [c] {c 1}) “abcdaabccc”))
The Acceleration of Addictiveness
Would that I had more upvotes for this.

The actual cutting edge of event-driven server architecture[1] looks something like this:

server = do {
sys_call_1;
fork client;
server;
}

client = do {
sys_call_2;
}

(And even then it has marginal benefits in terms of throughput and latency compared to threaded implementations.)

[1] Li and Zdancewic. Combining events and threads for scalable network services. Proc. 2007 PLDI (2007).
That is what I was also thinking. You could do that on Posterous with privacy on, you can also attach files to the email.
I don't like these kinds of questions because more often than not people get it wrong. People who aren't actually performing any of these actions often mislabel and completely misunderstand the distinction, but also we often don't understand it either. It's not very difficult, but I feel being precise is important because it classifies exactly what your skills are and what can be expected of you.

First, a programmer is simply, as the word implies, someone who programs. A programmer can be a polyglot or monoglot — either way, a programmer programs.

A developer is someone who develops. Developers write code, but they do so on a more macro level than programmers. Developers tend to work on whole projects, so they'll start from scratch and finish the project out. This term is pretty commonly applied to people who built websites or web apps.

So the key difference between a programmer and a developer is the scope and length of their work. A developer can be working on many projects at once and only for a short time; a programmer likely works on only a few projects for a very long time.

An engineer, however, is completely different. An engineer is a trained professional with a college degree. Engineering is the long respected art of developing solutions for problems using mechanical devices. Engineering might employ the use of programming, but programmers and developers are not engineers.

I've held each title. Programmer and developer can sometimes be interchanged, but engineer can't. I personally identify myself as an engineer — after a grueling four year degree — and it really gets to me when engineer is just handed out as a title. You're not looking for a 'web engineer,' you're looking for a web programmer. Not only is it disingenuous, it's also harmful to a profession that has been around for centuries. I wish there were more consistency in which titles are applied.
I use f.lux backwards. I leave it on normally, but when I need to wake up to re-focus and get stuff done (and it's dark out), I turn it off, and I feel more awake again.

It's probably all in my head, but I'm going with it for now ;)
I only had time to take a quick look, but I like the name a lot.

I also like the color and layout of the index page. Maybe in the green block though, think about replacing the text "micro to small size companies", with a more upbeat sounding "independent professionals". That is probably more of how your target market thinks of themselves.

Maybe somewhere put a graphic of a caduceus, Lady Scales of Justice, and a CPA logo, to catch the eye of your target market.

Also on my big wide monitor the left and right margin are not anywhere near equal. With medical offices it might be wise to keep the old narrow format for the layout hardcoded in, but when it loads in a wide monitor it is not centered, and looks a little broken because of that. You might want to fix that up.

Overall I find the index page attractive, professional, and inviting to explore further into the sight. Good job with it.
Don't take it harsh, but if it takes all this for this simple theoretical problem, imagine for a real world problem. In my opinion, a pure iterative approach is really simpler:

(pseudo-code) :

<code>
myset = {}

foreach c in mystring:
if myset[c]:
myset[c] += 1
else:
myset[c] = 1

myset.sort(fn x,y: myset[x] < myset[y])

</code>

As I said, it's all about opinion (and I know there are million ways to simplify that or make it different, i.e. myset.get() or whatever), but I find the imperative approach way easier to gasp at first glance.

Compare that to:

(let [a (sort str)
b (partition-by identity a)
c (map (juxt first count) a)]
(sort-by second > c))

First, I don't really like a,b,c as name variable (to be fair, myset and mystring are terrible too).
Second, I find there are so many extra step to resolve this simple problem.. we need: partition-by, we need identity, we need juxt (wtf is juxt?).
Third, wtf are first, count and second..?

I know high-level function are kewl, and working with lists are even cooler and using all of this in a 4 lines in a pretty clean way is again even cool-cooler. However, when I read this, even if there are less lines than the imperative way, it still takes more time to understand what the code is doing.
Could you elaborate on why a nonstandard port makes these apps useless?
The tech blogs are starting to realize that these kinds of sensationalist headlines about Apple really bring the page-hits. If they lose a few serious readers along the way, well who really cares?

The reality, of course, is that Apple has been doing very little to prevent the Jailbreak scene, and I'm sure those who do Jailbreak couldn't give a rat's ass about the legality of it.

This doesn't change how Apple approaches Jailbreaking, nor does it suddenly make jailbreaking less of a pain in the ass. And it surely doesn't change users' attitudes. In other words, nothing has changed.
There is an active post about burn-out symptoms. People that think work harder and harder is the solution are best candidates for it. Perhaps those that pursue positive karma to the extend that they bend their comments for approval are the next class, so is a real pleasure not to be in that group.
Lexi-Sortable Number Strings for Key-Value Stores
Yes, or apple's customer support could be to re-flash the phone to the original state.
Founding IRC: http://www.mirc.com/help/jarkko.html

Very similar to the birthing of Linux.
Ask HN: Fast Internet in San Francisco?
Dear HN,

Our startup is in SOMA, the heart of the internet in San Francisco, and we're on the fastest AT&T DSL line with only a few people on it... and it's unbearably slow. This is sad.

Anyone have recommendations for fast internet in SF?
Fix is posted: https://secure.herf.org/flux/xflux.tgz

I wasn't able to find this in the old build, but the current one definitely has the bug. Let me know how it works.
My idea is that you ought to see a doctor, preferably a sleep specialist, instead of asking random strangers on the internet for advise or a diagnosis.
Why ZeroMQ?
It always amazes me how many people either never noticed merge-with or simply don't use it. Having done something similar with a list of words (created via regex parsed over a file) I adore what you can do with it. Especially if you use transients.

Unless of course they just didn't think of the fact strings are seqs in clojure by default.

edit: I could be crazy, but one problem with using apply is you force the realization of your object, so while in THIS case it's fine, using larger amount of data would cause a problem. IIRC more space sane way to do this is use
(reduce {} (merge-with + %) list)

and man I MUST be rusty, I can't remember if the default value comes before or after the function, and no repl handy. Hopefully the point is gotten across :)
Let Crockford himself explain why 'Yes' is the right answer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook#t=30m39s
I have never read a privacy policy, EVER. Am I missing something good?

If they violate their own privacy policy do I have legal recourse?

And is it even possible to write a privacy policy without loopholes?
Apple already sells unlocked iPhones. And unlocking is legal in most parts of the world; in some places it's actually required by law.

Such decisions may affect the carriers, but anything that makes Apple's hardware more useful is good for Apple.
I think javascript is a fine little language.

But: I don't make my server-side language decisions based on what happens to be in the browser. To think that a language required for use in such a constrained environment is just _coincidentally_ also the best language to use server-side where people have been doing event-based programming for decades seems... unlikely. It would be as ridiculous as asserting that we should all use postscript in the browser because that's the standard we've been using in printers for the last 20 years.

I suppose if you make the argument that browsers dictate that developers _must_ learn javascript, and therefore, with Node.js they can also program server-side without ever needing to learn a second language, that is a sound argument. I don't, however, know many good programmer that spend a career knowing exactly one language.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454468
How long did the trip end up taking, and how much did it cost? I'm curious if there's much, if any, time savings versus driving[1].

[1] With a highly variable border crossing time if not all passengers hold a NEXUS card
Depends on the area of coverage, it could be Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile.

Technically, AT&T is the amongst the fastest currently (along with Sprint WiMax and T-Mobile HSPA, where available), but I've been both in areas where its much faster than Verizon and areas where its been much slower than Verizon.

T-Mobile has pretty limited coverage areas, but they're rolling out HSPA. If you're in an HSPA-covered area of theirs, that may be your best bet. If you're in a Sprint WiMax-covered area, Sprint may be your fastest bet.

Summary: It depends on your coverage area and congestion levels.