skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The end-the-world scenario is this: A droplet of photosynthetic cyanobacteria escapes into the wild. Since they are immune to natural predators, they take over the niches of oceanic photosynthetic organisms, converting more and more of the planet's photosynthetic biomass to inedible mirror-life. Since ocean photosynthesizes are at the foundation of so many food webs, many ecosystems crash, civilization falls, homo sapiens goes extinct.

Eventually, something will evolve to eat the mirror-life, but by then we'll all be dead.
> I simply don't buy this "cleaner" (and incorrect) history argument.

Incorrect how? Incorrect in that it doesn't reflect the exact way that history was constructed locally? Spoiler: it rarely does. Every —amend, every usage of a queue (MQ, Quilt, …), every patchbomb sent to a mailing list means the history recorded won't exactly reflect the way it was created. And that's for the better: history should be crafted for sense, not for useless historical correctness.
Securecode was affected as well, which is the payment portal you need to go through for many on-line shops.
It's even simpler and more general than this: don't rewrite public history. There, you're done.
Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 14
The question is how that bytecode should look to provide benefit. If it's just a bytecode equivalent to JavaScript, it won't provide much benefit except parsing speed - and I don't think this is a big issue anyway. A typical stack-based VM will not provide continuations for example.
Not sure why you got downvoted. You are correct in that the government can't exactly hand out a giant contrract for a cavity search scanner to some shadowy corporation with expensive lobbyists.
Decoration and Design are two different things. What 'Wired' does for it's cover, internal pages is of course 'more' but most of it is decoration. Underlaying design principle is still 'as little as possible'.

It's sort of like grid for web-design, you can decorate it no-end but grid (design) remains design.

On David Carson's work, I see it as a work of art based on design principles. Herd of rule of thirds? You can have as much 'more' in your photo / visual as you want. But the design principle of 'thirds' is as little as possible.

And for rest of the stuff and more examples you mentioned - my personal opinion is "If you hit your head with hammer long enf, it's gonna feel good when you stop." All that more & clutter is hitting your head with hammer - it is ugly. That is what designers like Massimo Vignelli and Dieter Rams see as things that need to be cured. That is what inspires design.

Design is beyond brands, it's the underlaying principle of thinking.
Slides from functional programming class might clarify things a bit [PDF].

http://www.it.uu.se/edu/course/homepage/avfunpro/ht10/notes/...
Still waiting for my flying car...
I've been through a few airports since 9/11 and I've yet to see dogs patrolling security checkpoints.
It's a design pattern for encapsulation, with similar goals to OO but different methods. Rather than telling you what a monad is, I'll just tell you the goal.

OO is designed to hide the dangerous parts of the world from you. The dangerous parts of the world (or at least some dangerous parts of the world) are encapsulated inside little black boxes with well defined interaction points. If you interact only through those little boxes, you should be safe. For instance, a logger object gives you 1 methods: writeLog (I'll ignore logging levels). The details of actually writing logs are not your business, and you (in principle) don't need to worry about them.

Monads are stricter. A monad puts you into a box and only gives you a few interaction points with the outside world. You can do whatever you want in a monad, but you are never allowed to leave the box. Inside the logger box, you are permitted only pure functions (functions with no side effects) and writeLog.

So basically, in an OO world, code using a logger might call os.unlink("/var/log/myprogram.log"). This would interact in a harmful way with your logging mechanisms. In a monadic world, from inside the logging monad, you are not given access to os.unlink.

Thus, f: a -> Loggable b in the monadic world (where Loggable b is an b living inside the box) is safer than f: (Logger, a) -> b in the OO world.
I think PG should add a cache link next to the comment and flag links.
The Cyberwar Hits Home: Think You’re Immune? Think Again.
It absolutely needs to be admitted that it is easy to make a well intentioned unmaintainable mess in Lisp and other highly dynamic languages. Brilliant programmer A will add a lot of layers and abstractions that make sense in one context, which is great until brilliant programmer B does so in a different context. This all seems to break down somewhere when the number of programmers exceeds 1.
I'm really curious about this. People on HN are saying "oh it's just security theater" as if the TSA purchasing officials are knowingly disingenuous. I suspect the testing procedures are badly flawed and the TSA has no clue whether the devices that they buy work. Right now I don't haven enough data to say either way - lying or stupid. Both hypotheses fit the facts.
To be honest I can't really relate to this whole extra-help from professors/lecturers business. Nobody's going to magically make you understand something. Your best option is to come up with some specific questions which you figure are key to advancing your comprehension - but actually there's many places to go for those answers. If I was looking for feedback on a large (extra-curricular) project I would at least prototype it or draft it before asking for an appointment. I guess I'd just feel sort of embarrassed asking something to the effect of "i've got no idea where to start, I need your guidance." On the other hand, maybe that's been a hinderance to my (academic) career. Shrug.
You can't use dogs for static defense because they can only stay on task for so long. After 10-15 minutes of bomb sniffing the dog needs to take a break. You would need several dogs (and handlers) per checkpoint, which is cost ineffective.
With Tropo, you can implement that in less than four minutes - it's two lines of code.
Ruby:

message "something important happened", {:to => '14155551212', :network => 'SMS'}

And then one line of code to hit our session API over http and run the code.
I agree, that is what I am doing. I'm using SELinux as a synecdoche for all the OS security strategies that rely on access control policies, and pointing out that they are being made fun of by exploits that simply turn them off.

There clearly is a philosophical different between Theo de Raadt (new security features are window dressing, what matters is code quality), SELinux (the missing MAC feature is the problem with operating system security), and Scott Spengler (the problem is that the system has to be built to anticipate the specific things attackers will throw at it).

This isn't some deep insight on my part; the parties involved are pretty vocal about it.
Although it was more like "The Week MAME Save My Ass"...
I'd be interested in the trends! What communities are growing, which ones are shrinking, and which ones are stable?
I couldn't find a date on this essay, but it must have been written around 10 years ago. The open source Common Lisp ecosystem, though still small, is much larger than it was then. (For instance, he doesn't mention SBCL or OpenMCL/Clozure CL in his list of open source implementations, and he claims there aren't any with multithreading, which hasn't been true for years.)

So if he still misses Lisp, he should come back. Common Lisp is still around, and in better shape than it was, and there's also Clojure.
I imagine after the Kik incident any startup that had social mobile apps has probably already written RIM off as a platform worth developing for. If RIM's strategy is to "scare developers" into building apps for their platform then they have already lost.
Because a good idea may also require a good implementation, which (depending on the idea) not everyone can pull off?

My point exactly. "Why me" is "Because I'm the best in the world at doing this."

Do it fast, milk it for what you can, and accept that eventually others will copy it and spoil the party.

I agree. If you're in the game to do something fast, milk it for $$$, and then get out, then don't post it on HN. Not only is it not in your best interest, I can't imagine it being interesting to anyone besides another person in the game to do stuff fast and get out.

What you ought to post on HN is your business plan for having "deal flow," a funnel full of "do it fast" ideas. Some companies demonstrate a knack for constantly identifying and capitalizing on these temporary ideas and exploiting them.

That "meta-plan" for building a repeatable business would be damn interesting.
By the time a mother has had a few kids, her blood has held all of the DNA in the family.

I found the most striking revelation for me was that _my_ DNA will be floating throughout my wife's body. That seems a bit weird... for her
@antifuchs always makes my day. German hacker and recent San Franciscan.

@MoRocca is consistently funny, and often timely. Comedian celebrity.

@mattmight and @ccshan for serious CS, both professors.

Following "startup scene" types just filled my twitter stream with desperate, trivial minds.

You can also go see the people I follow, many of them are silent but it was a pleasure to see them on twitter. Names like Mitchell Wand, Dan Ingalls, Richard Gabriel, Scott McKay, etc. I will happily retweet whenever they decide to speak :-)

You can also follow me; I tweet mostly about programming, often drunk, and always aim to offend. @bigthingist
There's plusses and minuses to PCI. On the plus side, it has absolutely increased awareness of web security at commerce companies, and further it has pushed people from trying to do their own credit card handling to outsourcing that function to companies that can keep on top of it.

On the minus side, it's spawned a small industry of checkbox consultants who do companies a disservice by allowing them to believe they've been audited and assured when really nothing of the sort has happened. It's not hard to trace public incidents back to the PCI auditors who OK'd those companies.
Ask HN: Is anyone else tired of reading the same articles?
I have spent the last hour reading articles from HN I've saved over the last few weeks. They are all the same. Lean startup this, A/B test that, Design is important, I failed, Build a community then revenues, etc.

After years of reading the same articles, I have learned very little. Everyone is repeating the same stories/advice, and, as a community, I don't see any progress.

Are we doomed to continuously repeat the same sad stories over and over again? Can we finally kick this habit? I don't know- but I am tired of reading the same articles written with slightly different adjectives.
"When queried in landscape mode, the Galaxy reports a screen.width of 683px and screen.height of 334px. Since the actual device resolution offers 1024×600, it’s giving us a 1.5× ratio of device to CSS pixels."

I'm interested if this is because the browser app runs with default support for all screens. I wonder if you built an app that supported large/high-density screens and used a webview if you'd get the same scaling or if it would give you 1:1. I'll have to look into that.
Simply put: complexity increases over time ... this would infact lend itself to more and increasingly "interesting" things :D

GO HUMANS!
I've worked on several large Lisp systems, and have never had this problem.

You can make a mess in any language. I will grant that Lisp offers more ways to do that than most languages, but so does C++ (template metaprogramming, anyone?).
Also, the advice is wrong. Research has shown that 120-degree angles (closer to lying down, really) are better for the body.
Thanks, there are different challenges with international routing by country and by receiving carrier. I'll definitely pass this information along, and if you have specific calls (I'd need your Twilio account ID to look at them, better sent via email) that will help a lot, too. We know international support is important to developers everywhere, and we're definitely working on it.
Where are the predictions then?
NASA's Space Shuttle launch videos are spectacularly incredible
I don't think this a a good suggestion. Sure, it's commonly true, but it completely depends on your use case.

This is a very specific article about optimizing the linked lists as used in the Linux kernel, with wonderful data about real world usage. I find it highly doubtful that the Linux kernel would benefit from dropping linked lists in favor of resizable arrays. Possible of course, but I'd want to see the data before making any recommendations.

In general, it would depend on what's in your list and what you do with it. If each item is the size of a cache line, you're probably not trashing your cache[1]. If the list is large and you are keeping it ordered, you might benefit from easy insertions and deletions. If you've got millions of little lists of non-power-of-2 sizes, maybe doubling the size on a fill up would be problematic.

Obviously you know this and I'm not giving you any new information, but I'm confused why you'd make this recommendation. Is it aimed at Rusty? Or do you truly feel that the linked list has no place in the world?

[1] Well, maybe, but this depends on how often you need to do a full scan through the list. If you're storing unordered, you probably are scanning the array; if ordered, you'll be shuffling memory a lot on inserts. Again, use case matters.
Yeah, I thought about that. But he mentions "emptiness testing" a few times in the rest of the post. If there's no empty list representation, what's the point?
pg is a bad example for me as I don't know and have never spoken to him so he doesn't get undue upvotes from me ;-) But I get your point, as I'm more likely to vote up someone I perceive as a friend because I actively want to read what they say - but I'm also "cool" with that. I'm more bothered about people downvoting people they don't like, but I don't do that and the people who do, I'm not sure they're mature enough to use your extension.
For the same reason you refactor code, it is often useful to refactor your commit history _before_ you publish it.

And just because you use rebase, doesn't mean you don't also merge. I often use git like this:

git checkout -b feature origin/master
while not done with feature:
edit, save, commit -am "added blah"

My commits are so small that I can write the entire commit message on the command-line. When feature is done from a coding perspective, I then:

git rebase -i origin/master

Now I can squash together commits, possibly dropping some, re-ordering, etc. Generally, presenting my change in such a way that I have small'ish, self-contained changes that are easy to review, and with no obvious mistakes.

Now that feature can be published for review. I happen to have setup gerrit for this purpose, but for git.git, you'd use format-patch and you'd email the patches, and that works well too. Each patch needs to be small enough that your reviewers aren't overwhelmed by it. (Smaller commits also help later on if someone has to git blame your code, or if they have to deal with conflicts when merging with your code.)

Rebase is also how you'd incorporate feedback to your patch series. Typically I'll put the correction on-top of my patch series, then squash it into place with rebase -i.

Finally, once your feature is done/done:

git fetch
git checkout master
git reset --hard origin/master # I use master only for integration
git merge --no-ff feature
git push origin master

Rarely, I will rebase topic onto a latter version of master, but only if I need some functionality that was added to master since I began the feature. I could merge master into feature, but that then makes feature harder to review.

$0.02.
There is a lot of articles on the same themes... which is reasonable, people aren't so unique that there won't be tons of overlap. You can choose to not keep reading A/B articules et al. Spend the time you have wasted reading the same things over and over again learning a new skill...
> "Foetal DNA makes up about 10% of a pregnant woman's blood plasma." <- I'd be quite surprised to learn that DNA makes up 10% of anyone's plasma, so I think they're saying that 10% of the DNA isolated from plasma is found to be fetal.

> "The latest research isolated foetal genetic signatures in the floating DNA, then compared its characteristics against the genetic maps of the mother and father. That way, scientists were able to construct a genome-wide genetic map of the foetus, which they could then scan for variations and mutations."

Now I'm interested to read more. The article can be found behind the following paywall: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/61/61ra91.abstract .

Update: OK, I was a bit confused by the DNA extraction process. From what I can tell, they only took DNA from the parents once, at ~12 weeks gestation. They then GWASsed them and found sites where the fetus would be an obligate heterozygote because the mother was homozygous for one allele while the father was homozygous for another. (So if mom is AA and dad is GG, the fetus must be AG, assuming no point mutation occurs there.)

But if the blood is only drawn once, 10% of the maternal DNA will be fetal DNA, so how are they confidently calling sites as homozygous in the mother? I suppose this makes sense if Birdseed is robust to 5% error in the data, and if so this is quite clever. (5% because 10% of the DNA is fetal, and at the obligate het sites half of that 10% will be maternal so only 5% total will be of paternal origin.)

Now, their method is for high-depth whole-genome sequencing, which is still very expensive, but there's no reason they couldn't use targeted sequencing with this approach (they address this in the discussion). That would allow for a potentially inexpensive test for inherited genetic disorders without invading the fetal privileged space (which is what we currently do, and which is high-risk).
Sentry Data Systems is hiring, looking for Technical Analysts. Depending on the person could be remote.

http://www.sentryds.com/company/employment/
Beacon, which was a much watered-down version of your idea, backfired. So I'm not sure if this would fly. Although it would be pretty whacky.
Just my own ignorance here, but I'd love to hear what you like better about linux than BSD. I don't know a lot about the advantages of linux.
Hey Hector, thanks for this feedback I'll check with the team on the status of Puerto Rico phone numbers. Regarding TTS, you might want to take a closer look at the Twilio <Say> verb, we actually support Spanish TTS... you just have to specify the language and you'll get the right accent, like this:

<Response>
<Say language="es">Es un robot que hablan español!</Say>
</Response>

Also have French and Germain. Details here: http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/2010-04-01/twiml/say
I've no figures to back it up, but my initial thought is that the simple cost of the OS isn't the deciding factor. For a PC people expect the Windows name, to see Windows on it, and for all their Windows software to work. That leaves using Linux as an unseen cost to the supplier. For a phone most people probably don't see an OS (with the probable exception of Apple), and don't have legacy software. They just see a phone they want that does shiny things. Therefore the OS chosen might not have such a hidden cost making the fact that Android is free a bigger advantage.
Considering how completely wrong the book has been predicting the last 40 years, I think it's pretty safe to ignore it. The air, water and soil today is significantly cleaner now than it was 40 years ago, population is now predicted to start declining within 50 years, et cetera.
I made something similar to what you are describing. http://www.socialadmanager.com I kind of abandoned it though. What I found is that people hate ads no matter what and most people dont recognize people e.g.: Facebook friends in pictures.
I think you are hitting at exactly what I'm so frustrated with - the goal of these articles is to help people learn a new skill/ learn from their mistake. However every few weeks, the same meme reappears. The Startup version of Groundhog Day.
Did you miss the point that these lists aren't being crawled? That's not the slow part.

There are lots of reasons to keep track of things even if finding them is actually rare.

And an array doesn't solve any problem. Searching it is still linear, you're still tearing up the cache doing so because in a case like this you're storing pointers in the array, not data, and now you another memory allocation that can fail. structs with builtin links can always be added to a list without fail, growing an array not so much.
The svn issue seems under-appreciated. In my experience, far and away, the best way to merge subversion branches is to pull them in with git-svn, rebase, and push back to subversion. I've done this more than once for projects that I'm only tangentially involved with.
I have a concrete suggestion along the lines of some of the suggestions here.

I assume you live in at least a moderately big city (e.g. maybe SF Bay Area). Pick up one of those alternative weekly newspapers, or find something equivalent on the web, or somehow find some long list of activities, clubs, and events that represent a decent cross-section of what people do.

Now number all of them -- make sure you get at least a hundred or so -- then generate five random numbers, and choose at least two of the five activities you randomly picked.
I'm Voxeo's CEO.

Thanks for the summary of what Twilio makes possible.

What nivertech (who you responded to) knows and was trying to say is this:

With Voxeo (and others) a competent web developer has been able to create a telecom company in six weeks - or add voice features in less than a day - for ten years now. Voxeo delivered and has grown a completely free web-based telephony developer program since 2000.

And since 2000 over 200,000 developers have used Voxeo to do just that.

This is the Voxeo developer site in the wayback machine archive from August 19, 2000:

http://bit.ly/voxeo-dev-2000

Quoting that site:

"our mission at voxeo community is to make it as easy as possible for web developers, service providers, and enterprises to create and deploy applications for an existing market of 1.5 billion telephone users.

existing web developers & services use technologies like Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion, Microsoft ASP and Java Servlets to create web applications for traditional web browsers via HTML. we make it just as easy to use those technologies to create web applications for telephones, using phone markup languages such as VoiceXML, Microsoft WTE, and CallXML."

Here's the juicy part:

"if you have experience creating web applications, this site will help you create and test your first phone application in less than an hour -- without any new hardware or software."

Sound familiar? :)

What Twilio has done that's new is use marketing and hype to convince developers they invented something that was invented by others and available for a decade now. The power of hype never ceases to amaze me.

To be fair, Twilio also did a great job creating more modern developer documentation and refocusing on simplicity. These are things Voxeo had drifted away from as we grew into "the man". In short, we got distracted by million dollar deals with enterprises and carriers. We've continued to invest in our developer community but things got increasingly complex as we added more and more features and options over time.

Our new Voxeo Labs group - and it's Tropo.com service - was created to fix that. We're behind on the evangelism but way ahead on the technology. And I dare say we're getting better at evangelism every week. ;)

-Jonathan