skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The region had Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī, and Avicenna as contemporaries, and then Omar Khayyam soon after. Persia in that era was like Florence in the fifteenth century. Something in the water? Genetic fluke?

Probably not...
I guess I'm asking, how does Haskell reduce the amount of effort required to write secure SQL?

* It helps in the first case, but then, so do parameterized queries, which developers already have and are familiar with.

* It doesn't help --- at least not elegantly --- in the second case.

* It can't help in the third case, because that error is happening in the database itself. (By the way, not sure why injections in dynamic SQL in stored procedures would be least critical).

I get you loud and clear that "even though it's easy to avoid these problems in PHP, developers don't". You're right. "Use good code" is not a solution for the problem of "bad code". But is Haskell?

I like the idea of static analysis in Haskell.
Art of the Start- Guy Kawasaki
Go It Alone- Bruce Judson (Yale professor of Management)
Mark Cuban's blog (blogmaverick or something like that)
Anything by or about Warren Buffet
Redeye VC: LeaveWallStreetJoinAStartup.com
Where a static analysis tool can help is in flagging those cases where a developer might have made a bad assumption, and forcing them to reconsider that code point. Basically, it's a way to enforce some basic code review practices without requiring one of your senior developers to be able + willing to read over your junior devs' code.

The whole point of programming is to automate those tasks that can be automated, right? So, let's automate the first-pass stage of a basic security audit as much as we can.

To your specific points:

* Parameterized queries are available in some cases, as you said, but don't work when you have to build some portion of the query (sort order, grouping, etc.) at runtime. Static tools can help flag such dynamic values as being tainted or clean, as well as help insure that resulting queries will be well-formed.

* All that's necessary to extend your type checking to the database is to enforce the same level of discipline you do for built-in API functions. Just as static analysis tools need a signature for primitive functions provided by the runtime platform (syscalls for C, primitive library functions for PHP, etc.), your static checker could ensure that queries which used stored procedures checked at least the asserted type signature of those procedures. (SQL is pretty type-savvy, and most stored proc authors should be able to trivially provide type sigs for their code.)

The advantage to using Haskell for all of this is twofold:

* There are excellent existing parsing and graph algorithm libraries maintained by the Haskell community

* Working in a strict, pure functional language makes you think in terms of mathematical theories, rather than stateful effects, which in turn tends to result in better, more deterministic code

That being said, I think you could use OCaml, Lisp, or any number of other high-level languages to similar effect. The uniquely math-oriented world view of Haskell (and its implementers and users) does tend to lend itself to just the kind of defensible reasoning that you would want from a security-focused static analysis tool, though.
GREENSPAN GREENSPAN GREENSPAN

who do you think put the US on a "low low low rates" regime?

who do you think CREATED THE DOTCOM BUBBLE and the HOUSING BUBBLE?

not CEOs, GREENSPAN

and bernanke is just playing the hand he was dealt

the problem isn't CEOs who are out of control, it is central bankers who blow bubbles without consequence. the Fed has power these CEOs can't even fantasize about

go ask any of the serious financial journalists at thestreet, marketwatch, wsj, nytimes....without hesitation they will all tell you that low rates set by the Fed created this mess.
Fare: Metaprogramming from the ground up: avoid C
Cramer was saying to cut rates. That would have delayed the problem in exchange for exacerbating it. Lehman would not have been leveraged 30 to 1 if they didn't think the Fed would cut rates in the event of a downturn.
It's true that there are inevitable conflicts of interest regarding risk tolerance.

lets ask ourselves WHY the bankers took such risks

because they just wanted to have fun? get real

how do you make money as a banker when the Fed has lowered "real" rates (rates adjusted for inflation) to ZERO???

you have to make riskier loans. you sure as shit can't make money in a low interest rate environment lending to credit worthy people

the Fed prodded bankers to make these risky loans

sorry cuban, any cub reporter for the WSJ could tell you this

First of all, bubbles and crashes seem to be an inherent property of market economies

indeed, but we've had two massive bubbles in ten years. the nasdaq bubble was 10x the size of the 1929 bubble (ref: bob prechter). the housing bubble dwarf the florida bubble of the 20s...you must admit that this is curious
New Perl Patterns Book
140 million Mobile Social Networking users
I'm thinking of my mom, who retired as a teacher and then took another job as a consultant training teachers. Many of her friends and former coworkers have done the same thing. If they were a lawyer, they retired and took a job in a different field of law. If they were a principal, they started a new school. If they were a doctor - well, they're still working. These aren't lower income people - their incomes are often well into 6-figures.

The more interesting trend, as you mention, is what this is doing to the career opportunities of the next generation. Since boomers aren't retiring, the top jobs in many organizations aren't opening up. And so many people my age and slightly older (I'm a very early Millenial) believe there's no possibility for advancement on the corporate ladder. Hence the recent trend towards entrepreneurship among young Gen-Xers and Millenials.

Whether this results in a net inflow or outflow in the capital markets depends on the real economic growth of all these startups. If they really do open new markets, then the economy expands, more money flows into savings, and the stock market keeps going up. If they don't, then the non-retirement of boomers just means a transfer of savings rates from the young to the old. Boomers won't have trouble supporting themselves in old age, but they'll have to support their kids.
i am probably more bearish than anyone here, but there is no evidence that dividend-bearing stocks do better over any meaningful timeframe
"One of many metaphors you could use for YC is a steam catapult on an aircraft carrier"

from http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html
okay explain to me how a company like google could have been privately funded to its current level. you think a bank is going to write a check for $800 million to buy servers? go ask a C-level exec at wells fargo
Well, just so we're clear: I buy the idea of using Haskell or OCaml for static code analysis (in fact, one of the better known static analyzer tools, which operates on binary control flow graphs, is written in OCaml).

What I don't buy is the idea that the Haskell runtime actually improves SQL or HTML security. By all means, write a Haskell source analyzer. It will help. But a web app stack written in Haskell will presumably have the same problems (or lack thereof) that Rails does.

Mathematical reasoning, for what it's worth, doesn't have a great track record in systems security. ;)
wrong. most boomers are still in fixed retirements. some of those pension fund managers got suckered into subprime, but not many
Reviewed: Slacker's second-generation Internet radio handheld
I swear I remember Alan Greenspan being quoted as saying that he know the low rates would create a housing bubble, I haven't been able to find it though so it may just exist in my memory. Any idea?

Also there's absolutely no need to shout here.
I think this theory is on track but not complete. It's correct that the risk and rewards for CEO are decoupled. However, the people who continue to hire and pay ridiculous amount to these CEOs are no other than the investors and consumers. Yes, that's us. As investors, we irrationally pump money into growth sectors during the boom, into companies that can outperform expectation and increase profit margins, directly voting for 'talented' CEOs who can cut cost and increase revenue by all means. As consumers, we chase the best deals. Would you go with banks who only let you borrow a tiny amount in line with your credits on strict terms? Of course not, not when you can flip for a quick 100% gain within the next 6 months. We go with the most outrageous deal and lenders in turns have to create more outrageous deals to compete. Market behavior reflects the behaviors of its participant (duh). As long as investors and consumers indulge in irrational exuberance like there's no tomorrow CEO will continue to be overpaid and bubble will burst. Robert Reich says it best in his book Supercapitalism.
Same here :-(

RIP Richard Wright...
http://tumblelog.marco.org/40558829/sad-trombone-beats-tumbl...

It's more anti Techcrunch than it is anti-Posterous, though.
cramer was right that an emergency rate cut was needed, and i say this as someone who thinks low rates created this entire mess. at the time he has his tantrum, the market needed a massive cushion regardless of the consequences. the problem is, the Fed is finding it hard pressed to take away the stimulus. with commodity prices getting killed, the pressure is off for now

what does it all mean? DEFLATION IS HERE. even near-zero real rates can't elevate prices. deflation is here, depression2 cannot be avoided
Personal experiences probably determine our view of things. I think this because my parents are a single-income family. My dad rose to president of his company, which suddenly went bankrupt, and he ended up (in his early sixties) starting his own company to take over the government contracts that the previous company depended on (I helped write the business plan for that company). Most of his retirement fund came from the last few years (president + own company). Now he's moved onto a second career - namely harvesting the discretionary income of the other golfers at his club (some of them 20 years younger). ;-)

He did teach me that entrepreneurship is a lifelong pursuit.
BTW, it's curious that you're all in cash right now. I am too, as is my sister, as are most of my highly-paid college friends, as were a bunch of former coworkers (one quite wealthy - 3 successful startups) I talked to in late 2007 just as this broke. I think mattmaroon posted here once that he was all in cash, as have a few other folks, as have lots of people on Reddit.

I'm thinking there's actually a large pool of cash sitting on the sidelines, from people that didn't drink the Kool-Aid during the 04-07 boomlet. And once there's a signal that this has bottomed out - maybe it'll be Dow 10K, or S&P 1K, or the bankruptcy of the last of the big-5 investment banks - all that cash is going to come flooding back into the market, and they'll be a big pop in stock prices. I'm waiting a bit - I think there's still more bad news that hasn't been factored into the market. But it may be time to start buying soon.
I've been doing this since my freshman year. Now a senior, I've saved myself thousands of dollars.
Top 100 Iphone 3G Missing features
Agreed with the evil bit. If you become popular, what is to stop every major search engine to treat links from your site as a negative (spammy) signal?
It is such a comprehensive list of desired iphone features. You will find sites listing 10 missing features at the most. If you spend much time you may come up with 15-25 features missing in iphone. I sincerely hope you will value effort in this. Please help to populate this list, so that, it grows and grows and reaches Apple or Steve Jobs one day.
what isn't haskell for?

i've been throwing it at everything from fastcgi programs to scrapers to scripting to systems stuff

maybe the one place it isn't well suited is in the realm of throw-away quickies. haskell code takes longer to write. that doesn't mean you are writing a lot of code. i still see a role for perl/python in throaway scripts

haskell has practically every meaningful cool concept in CS built in. it is the functional language (for now). it is very fast and as the number of cores rises, haskell's performance will start to leave traditional tools in the dust. with the new GC it will destroy erlang on its own turf.

haskell takes time to learn and time to code. if you are in a rush, it is not for you. otherwise, haskell can handle almost any problem

in any case, you can come to haskell or it can come to you. the next ten years will see functional concepts get weaved into every language.
Stephen Hawking to unveil strange new way to tell the time
For protection against sql injection, I'd recommend taking a look at Meredith Patterson's Libdejector http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=145075

A partial presentation on it is here: http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-05/bh-us-05-han...

It works by having the user offer an exemplar of a dynamic query and then verifying that the actual query is limited to the syntactic forms seen in the exemplar.
'BusinessWeek' site hacked in potential malware attack
I only started to enjoy Pink Floyd after I realized I didn't need to be a stoner to like it. Stoners and their mindlessness ruin good things.
well what he is also famous for is the prediction years ago (when he was hanging out with the objectivist pseudo-intellectuals) that a kondratieff winter (bad downside in the economy) could be nullified by very low rates. he did his best to prove it

greenspan adored low rates. he set the too low and then was too late in raising them. poor ben bernanke...given a corpse and told to make it ready to run a marathon. not much choice for ben but to lower rates again. once again, he was too late in raising them.

its all in the Feds rate-setting power folks. THEY are the ones who dictate the level of risk in the economy. why do you think so many people call for the abolishment of the Fed?

trivia: did the US economy grow faster and with more stability pre-fed (pre 1913) or post-fed?
History doesn't really bear out the "meltdowns are caused by moral hazard" theory, though. They happened like clockwork, every 20 years, during 19th century America, a period where there was no safety net and no significant government intervention in the economy.

I'd attribute bubbles and meltdowns to flaws in humanity itself. They happen because people have to make investment decisions in the absence of perfect information, using thought processes that have evolved to take into account peers' opinions as much as hard factual data. Inevitably, some of those decisions will be wrong, and that wrongness appears as a large number of firms going bust at once.

The way to avoid financial meltdowns is to make every human a God. However, if we did that, they could just snap their fingers and get what they want, so their wouldn't be much need for an economy at all.
Om Is Hungry; Buys Another Blog (TheAppleBlog)
The question is not one of doing better, but of inevitability; for a company's stock to be worth anything, it has to pay profits out to the stockholder. This can mean dividends or an eventual lump sum when the company winds down. The problem is the latter never happens because companies never want to admit they are dying. On top of that, every company dies; just in 2006 the oldest company in the world, Kongo Gumi, went under after operating continuously since 578. The stock price is, in theory, the net present value of the stream of earnings its bearer will receive. So if no company will ever pay significant monies when it winds down, that leaves dividends (edit: now that I think about it, getting acquired counts too).

I have no evidence to show dividend-bearing stocks outperform their counterparts, but my point is that those counterparts are overvalued. If a company will never be bought, will never pay dividends, and will never wind down operations rather than face bankruptcy, the net present value of its stock is therefore 0.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi
Nah. He's no genius. Genius is controversial and abrupt. Seth Godin is almost certainly bright, but that's about it.
> did the US economy grow faster and with more stability pre-fed (pre 1913) or post-fed?

Not really a fair comparison - the U.S. economy was smaller pre-fed, and so it was much easier for it to grow at a higher percentage rate. That's like saying that China is growing 3x faster than the U.S, and so a pseudo-communist authoritarian government with all ownership of land is better than a free-market democracy. ;-)

Trivia: Who performed the role of the Fed before there was a Fed? Just because you get rid of it doesn't mean it won't exist. ;-)
This is the kind of thing you deploy when you didn't write the app. You can implement it easily for Rails apps by proxying MySQL network connections and parsing the queries. If you can write a lexer, you can catch 99% of attacks just by counting terminals.

It's not the right idea, at all, for development teams. The reason is, parameterized queries solve this problem. If you're parsing queries before you bind parameters, you're not injectable.

Audit your code to ensure you're using stored procedures. Audit your inputs to make sure they aren't passing things like "DESC" and "ASC" when they should be passing "down" and "up", which you can't fuck up. Then stop thinking about that problem.

Move on to a more important problem, which everyone ignores: locking down your database connection. Why does the (one) database connection in WordPress have rights to insert into "wp_users"? A much better area to spend your time in.
Cricket Liu is the co-author of the Oreilly DNS & Bind (Cricket & Grass hopper cover) ~ http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596100575/ a handy reference for setting up Bind.
That doesn't make Cricket (who is a nice guy) someone who understands the future of DNS.
You just piped up as a potential buyer. Which means we haven't hit bottom yet. I'll wait another 6 months, thanks ;-)
As anyone who has spent any time on Wall Street knows, the best way to be successful is to do what everyone else is already doing, only slower.
If you believe you can time the market then you might as well go all the way there and start speculating in options.

If you do not believe you can time the market though, then being 100% cash is as bad strategy now as at any other time.
DjangoCon 2008 Videos
Rightly so, I think. Debugging somebody's "poetry" can really suck. I'm not so sure this is necessarily a Lisp thing, though.

(And, I'd rather see somebody get creative in code by finding unexpectedly elegant and simple solutions, rather than by adding lots of flourishes.)
In fact, I believe totally otherwise. He is not only a great thinker but an excellent author also. While reading Fooled by Randomness, I literally wished the book could go on and on.

If he is pompous, he is so because he wants to drive home points which people think are unconventional and idiosyncratic. But in fact the points are real. I just wish people could understand him more, without any biases whatsoever.
It probably couldn't have grown as fast as it did, but it certainly could get to it's current size. Many of the largest companies of the industrial revolution used mostly retained earnings, sometimes supplemented by small bank loans or equity investments from private individuals. American Tobacco, which captured 90% of the tobacco market before being broken up into R.J. Reynolds, Liggett, and others. Almost the entire meatpacking industry. The Mars candybar company, which is still privately owned. Ford Motor Company, still controlled by the original founding family.
Not necessarily. You can't time the bottom. You can sure as hell tell overvalued from undervalued though.
Is Dataflow the new Black?
Personally, I read it and half-agreed, half-disagreed. Her ideals are powerful and moving. It would be great if people could be like that, but they aren't. Plus, her characters seem to have a few too many tantrums and blow up buildings ;-)

Overall, I ended up incorporating elements of her philosophy into my world view, but rejecting other parts. I'd still highly recommmend her books to anyone, but really, if you're not willing to think about what the books say and blindly follow what she outlines as her philosophy... well. you've just become one of the sheep that she heaps so much contempt on in her books.
Hackers block Al Queda's 9/11 tape
i'm too young to remember, but i always thought the 1984 break up resulted in 4 companies. apparently it was 9.

wow.
Why though? What's the gain?

Discipline for it's own sake?
In previous eras, mature companies paid dividends and growth stocks made up for their lack of dividends with growth. When a growth company matured it would start paying dividends. Thus the ROI on investing in mature companies versus growth companies was about equal.

The recent trend is that mature companies are not paying dividends. This trend is new enough that it probably hasn't shown up in performance statistics. But it is very worrisome on a fundamental level. A stock like Yahoo! or Alcatel has little room for its price to grow, thus you can only make a return via dividends. Without dividends, owning it is almost certain to be a losing proposition.
You're making a classic mistake. People are telling you problems, and instead of trying to solve them, you're justifying the reasons. Classic fail.
Not really a fair comparison - the U.S. economy was smaller pre-fed

its totally valid. the economy has only shrunk temporarily on a small number of occasions. the economy is more or less always growing, so it is always smaller in the past. indeed the US suffered a bad depression in the 1870s but pulled through without the Fed

Trivia: Who performed the role of the Fed before there was a Fed?

there wasn't one source. remember bank and state notes?

in any case, prior to the fed, a dollar held its value for decades. post fed, the dollar lost 99% of its value
Google Chrome...is Windows inside, which may be a strategic error
It seems to me that for the past six months or so we've been in a period of monetary deflation. As long as that continues, stocks will decline. Since in our system, money is created via credit creation, it seems the thing to watch for is when big banks start to lever up again. It might be a while.
There is even a simpler explanation:
'Fear is temporary, greed is permanent'
true. However today any given field can be covered to a far greater depth than one person can be familiar with as well. 500 or 600 years ago, science was just smaller.

Half a millenium ago, I could probably know everything about the cutting edge of physics, astronomy, math, chemistry and optics in my head at once. 500 years ago, calculus had yet to be invented, fire was still thought to be "somehow" composed of phlogistons, and scientists were jsut coming to grips with the idea that the earth circled the sun.

Even 200 years ago, the knowledge encompassed by science was tiny compared to what we know today.
But that doesn't mean it is impossible to write trivial harmful metaprograms in CPP, as is easily demonstrated in my counter-example die_die_stupid_c_compiler.c

I'm slightly disappointed that

gcc -E die_die_stupid_c_compiler.c

didn't die, although it did produce about 750k of output, which is quite impressive...