skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[The parent was deleted, but doesn't matter.]
The post is riddled with technical inaccuracies.

be­cause JavaScript is Tur­ing-com­plete, which any an­tivirus re­searcher can tell you is why they still have a job

Viruses exploit security vulnerabilities to self replicate and assume control. They can be written in non Turning complete languages.

the facet of JavaScript's be­haviour I'm in­ter­est­ed in pre­vent­ing is in the fam­i­ly of cross-site script­ing and re­quest forg­eries

Gimping JS would have no effect on this. Increasing browser security would. We have XSS/XSRF because we explicitly allow some cross site communication. Reduce or disallow it and your problem is solved.

The way to get what I want would be to look into the code be­fore run­ning it and se­lec­tive­ly dis­able cer­tain be­haviour.

You don't need to fully understand a piece of code to restrict it's actions. This is what a sandbox is.

I hear tell that there's even a com­pa­ny that bro­kers dis­tribut­ed com­put­ing tasks, tak­ing money on one end from cus­tomers and pay­ing web­site own­ers on the other end to pass on to their users to ex­e­cute for free.

There is nothing you can do about this, short of personally inspecting the source code. Which in this case will certainly be obfuscated to prevent you from easily understanding it.

His re­sponse was prob­a­bly, but I'd still have the prob­lem of prov­ing code cor­rect­ness—a per­fect­ly le­git­i­mate con­cern.

The person who defined the idea that the author defers to told him that it wouldn't solve the problem. Why are we still talking?

But the point is, this is to­tal­ly doable. The the­o­ry is sound,

Where was this shown?

there's high-pro­file de­mand for it

Where was this shown? I personally would not use a web browser that wasn't compatible with the web.

To top it off, the email link provides the brogrammer subject "yo dawg i herd u like TFP"

I don't see how anyone has upvoted this article. If you care about browser security, you might be interested in building better sandboxes based on Capabilities[1]. What the poster has shown is a misunderstanding for both the technical problem as well as the reality of why we run JavaScript in the browser: because web pages are written in JavaScript. All attempts to do anything about that have failed the market.

[1 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security]
Please, you think under a SOPA regime one media corp is going to kick another out of bed? Those laws were meant to be used against the plebians.
Running Closed Betas: Which Users You Need and When To Stop
Ask HN: Best tips for finding a cofounder?
I currently work for Google, which is a nice enough company, but there are enough signs of change that I'm beginning to plan my next move. I've wanted to work for myself and build something awesome for quite a while now, and after saving my Google bonuses, I think I have the runway I need to do it.

Just one problem: I don't know anyone interested in being my partner on this. I know from my own experience that I work better with someone to work with and bounce ideas off of, someone who's just as invested in the project as I am. I've read pg's essays; they tend to suggest finding someone while you're in grad school. I went to a crappy state college and dropped out before I got my bachelor's. I don't regret that -- heck, look where I am right now -- but it does mean grad school isn't in the cards.

So what would you suggest for finding like-minded people? I live in San Francisco and work in Mountain View. I've gone to a few "cofounder meetups" but typically just find your stereotypical "idea guys". I don't need to find someone right now; I'm just trying to set things up so by the winter 2013 cycle, I'll know who my cofounder is.
Bees 'self-medicate' when infected with some pathogens
I guess you stopped reading at that point, because he goes on to say:

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.
This might not be as big a blow as folks might assume, because design patents are very specific. For instance the tablet in this video has a raised, seemingly plastic bezel framing the screen, while the iPad design patent specifies that the screen is covered with an edge-to-edge glass surface.

It is that edge-to-edge glass that is a big part of Apple's suit. I won't claim I've done an exhaustive review, but I've glanced back at some older tablet concepts like the Apple "navigator" video, the Star Trek TNG PADD, and even the Newton and Palm and Windows Tablet designs, and every single one I've seen had a raised bezel framing the screen.

The Samsung Galaxy tab has an edge-to-edge glass surface, not a raised bezel. Stupidly pedantic? Yes. That's pretty a good description of design "patents" in general IMO.
do you have any idea how airbnb scraped the craigslist listings (given that craigslist is so protective of its data)?
Just curious... what makes Eric Ries and Steve Blank successful startup founders?

I'm just not very read-up on their backgrounds, but which companies have they started and successfully built? Anyone know?

Are they currently working on any big idea now? I think it would be really interesting to see them try to apply their own theories into practice.
I agree with needing more data but I will give my testimonial. I switched from Windows 7 to Mac Lion several months go and have not looked back. Simple things like responsiveness of the touch pad, gestures, and a better terminal are definitely what got me. Overall I would say the UX is just simply better.
Your total functional programming does not solve the problem at hand. TFP prevents you from creating a program that never halts, but it does nothing to prevent you from creating an incomprehensible program that takes 1e10000 years to compute.
It's pretty hard to give good advice without knowing if you want to go into industry or academia. The job market for computational biologists in industry is tight and problem-specific, and you'll generally need some research experience before you can land a gig -- there's not much computational biology going on that isn't considered "research" (even in industry).

That said, I'd recommend you start off by looking for a programmer gig in a good research lab. It's not as difficult to get one of these jobs because good CS students usually go into other fields, and academic labs are more willing to train. Spend a few years there learning the process of research, and you'll be much better qualified for an industry job. You'll also have a better idea if you really want to pursue computational biology as a career.

Other posts in this thread recommend applying for engineering jobs at biomedical startups (23andMe, Counsyl, etc.) That could be a decent option, but remember: if you're working on the website (or the robots, or...), you're not learning how to do computational biology. So it may not be the best long-term choice if you're interested in the science. Make sure that the position fits your long-term goals.

Finally, the general rule in computational biology is that "biology" is the most important word. From the perspective of a biology researcher, programmers are a commodity -- an expensive commodity, but still generic and interchangeable -- but biologists who know computer science are rare. The only way to ensure long-term success in this field is to be the latter. So regardless of what kind of job you pursue, make sure that you're spending at least as much time learning the problem domain as you are learning about computers. You really do need to become a domain expert. Being a computer scientist isn't enough.
>Turing-completeness is difficult to avoid [...] For every addition to the language [...] we will have to very carefully prove that it cannot introduce any way to create a non-terminating function.

Solving the halting problem doesn't mean all programs end - it means you can automatically determine whether an arbitrary program ends.
I still have to find a situation (outside of gaming, where I suppose it's key to the experience) where this 'lag' bothered me at all. In fact, I've been using a Mac for almost a year now and wasn't it for that article, I would have never even noticed there was a lag.
It's a real shame how many Americans are against public transit and think "infrastructure is communism."
"It is a math­e­mat­i­cal im­pos­si­bil­i­ty for the be­haviour of Tur­ing-com­plete code to be an­a­lyzed by ma­chine."

This is categorically false. There are plenty of static analysis tools that can determine if programs written in turing-complete languages will halt. They can't do it for every program, but they can do it for large numbers of useful programs.

Simple counterexample: python is turing complete, yet it is possible to mechanically analyze and determine a whole lot about this program:

print "Hello, World!"

Yes, that's a stupid example, but it demonstrates that the premise of this article is false.

As further example that the author misunderstands the issue is the quote: "That, or view­ing your web­site means I have to pore over every line." If good static analysis tools can't figure it out, it is less likely that a person will.

Static analysis tools running on Turing complete languages are a useful tool. Sometimes they answer "I don't know" at which point you will have to decide if you trust the author or not, but the vast majority of code out there is fairly tractable.

[edit] It is true that it is a mathematical impossibility for all possible programs in a turing-complete language to be analyzed, but that doesn't mean that there don't exist programs that are analyzable and has little bearing on whether or not real-world programs are analyzable.
Why does allowing me to access my bbm account on my computer go against this strategy? Its just another reason for me to value bbm.
It seems inconsistent and not in the public interest but I don't need Mickey Mouse to be in the public domain

Honestly, I agree with you. I suspect it is in part because at this point Mickey Mouse is practically Disney's logo, and we certainly don't expire other company's rights to their logos.
New Google Drive Leak Points To 5GB Of Free Storage
My thoughts exactly.
I was exited to read it, as this is the kind of thing that sometimes feels like I'm the only one who cares, but was disappointed. No mesurament, nothing.
To add to this I remember when OS X came out there was a lot of groaning about how slow window resizing was. Years of improvement later it still lags a hair. Noticeably slower than windows.
"I guess I just see this as a smile-and-raise-an-eyebrow kind of story, and not a break-out-the-pitchforks-and-torches kind of story."

I loled :) Saving that in the memory bank for later use. Reddit comment karma, here we come!!
The Senate Banking Committee held hearings yesterday on mobile payments. Unfortunately they're totally unaware that it's possible to initiate a mobile financial transaction that doesn't make use of a credit card or cell phone carrier's billing system, and that it's basically impossible for startups to compete with the card networks (possibly by offering new anti-fraud technology, for example) when the cost of regulatory compliance nationwide is $20 million. So we'll probably keep on seeing a lot of stories like this one...
Rim's ECC patent portfolio (from certicom) has to be worth a decent amount of cash.
Is hashmonitor open source or going to be open sourced?

Seems like it would be a really useful contribution to the JS development community to make this available for everyone to use.
Relying on MAC addresses for UDIDs is a mistake
Adobe's 9% Flash tax
New Video Of Sand Flea Robot Leaping (Onto) Tall Buildings 30ft High
cards do not flip on ipad
How to Make Your Business Transformative
Gamers are probably the most affected by this. Similarly, music apps on Android are affected by the audio lag problems.
If a blog is generating that much traffic it's probably generating a good deal of revenue as well. $200 doesn't seem like much if it is getting him consulting gigs.
By unified you mean another splinter?
Logos fall under trademark law. Will it really hurt Disney's brand if someone else is selling DVDs of Steamboat Willie?
Still haven't removed the background wallpaper, though.
For sure! I'd really like to - just didn't have time to extract it out this week :) To be useful, you will probably want the collection components too. Maybe some weekend hacking...
I just had a thought. You just described the strategy they used to grow Xbox to what it is today.
OSX has definite advantages here.

1. The trackpad hardware is great. It's so good that when we were making the Bamboo Touch at Wacom, the Macbook Pro trackpad was the standard we measured ourselves against.

2. True pixel-level scrolling from HID devices. Windows has the concept of "wheel scrolling", but it's only vertical, and lots of apps won't scroll in less than a wheel increment (which is oddly 120 units), so you're stuck with jerky 3-lines-at-a-time scrolling. Oh, and it's vertical-only; there's no system standard for horizontal scrolling.

3. It's never had a software-based rendering and compositing engine for the windowing system. The Windows team is fully committed to backward-compatibility, which means allowing all sorts of wonky GDI-based pixel pushers to work they same way they did in Win95. OSX has been OpenGL-based from the start.
Here's my wishlist:

1. OS and platform agnostic

2. Easy to use

3. High storage at least on the paid version

4. Secure

5. and above all, an unequivocal guarantee from Google that they won't "peek" into my files just to show ads on gmail or search based off this info, even in the free version.
New ORM + web services/clients fwk for .NET
Project site: http://vita.codeplex.com/
Can we have some proper HTML and CSS rather than tables in tables in tables indented by GIFs?
I'm guessing this is only for implementing an OAuth consumer; is there any good Python solution for implementing an OAuth provider?
Intuitively this has seemed like a good idea to me for a while, but whenever I've pitched it to women they've always hated it. I think it's telling that the two people they mention loving the idea are both men. Not saying it's a bad idea, but I don't think Scoble's opinion is a valid predictor of success either.

There are actually three or four different versions of this idea on the list of 999 business ideas here:

http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html

This was my version:

"Pandora for clothes. A service that drops off a different set of clothes for you to wear on whatever days you want each week. (E.g. only on Friday and Saturday.) It shows you a complete wardrobe on the website, and if you don't like it then you get to veto it. You get up to three vetos each day, and if you veto three wardrobes then you automatically get the fourth. Then the clothes get delivered to your apartment. You have the option to buy the outfit at the end of the day, but if you don't buy it that day then you never get the option to buy it again."
It saddens me to see RIM's declines, having watched it grow out of the single building just off the University of Waterloo campus while I was an undergraduate there.

I remember in 1998, before their Mobitex device was publicly available, a friend let me send an email from his production prototype - it seemed like the coolest thing in the world to have this little wireless device that could send email. There was nothing like it at the time, as far as I know. They were really pioneers.
Not to mention the fact that much software (at the source level at least) never terminates by design.
There's a lot of reasons to move to LA / Santa Monica, but I'd say for the women isn't one of them. The girls in NY are much friendlier, probably due to the fact that they outnumber men and most of them aren't from NY.

In LA the men still outnumber the women (all you need to do is walk into a crowded bar to see this - it's almost as bad as SF, though not quite) and most of the women are originally from southern CA. Take that as you will.

Having said all that, if you're married/relationshipped/gay?, you can't really beat it if you can afford it!
I started when I was 13. I was coding simple programs in pascal within 3 months (guess the number game, etc). I went onto c/c++ at 15.

I think it's different for everyone.
Okay downvoters, let's run the numbers.

Suppose you have about 1 square meter of solar cells on the roof of your car. From Wikipedia, a typical solar PV installation in the US or Europe gets 1kWh/sqm/day (depending on latitude, of course). How far will 1kWh take you? Let's see, gasoline contains about 37 kWh/gal (US), which at 40mpg is a little over 1 mile/kWh.

So if your electricity-to-fuel conversion process is 50% efficient, you'll get about half a mile on a day's charge.
I don't know anything about TFP personally or whether it's the best tool for this job. (I just agree with the job description.) And you misunderstand the halting problem - you can perfectly well write never-ending programs in a non-Turing complete language. The only difference is that you can tell whether an arbitrary program ends or not.
I'd seriously hope those (very serious) people use SFTP, at least.
I have a Visa card, and I haven't been notified. CNET said that Visa customers were notified, but I have no idea what sort of scope this notification was.
Cool! Best of luck to you and keep us posted :)

And you're right about one thing - if I ever found myself suddenly single, I would move back to NYC in a hot second. As a (somewhat) sane straight guy with a bit of money, that dating scene can't be beat. Hands down.
RESTful SOAP? To read anything you have to POST the SOAP envelope.
How to thrive as a solo non-technical founder
My Twitter Window To The World During Chemo
Client-side detection in JavaScript or UA string aren't mutually exclusive, since the UA string is exposed on the DOM.

Are suggesting they would rather guess the browser by inference through presence of DOM properties and methods?

In the end it narrows down to: would you rather a) break the functionality for some users in exchange to give the best possible solution to others, or b) give an OK experience to everyone

I usually go with "b". I think that frustration is much more powerful than awe.
I think RIM will still be around in some form for years to come. Simply for one reason: heavy usage in government work and with government contractors due to the security encryption.

I could see some kind of corporate white knight come in and swoop in for the rescue. Probably a company with huge cash reserves that will be heavily "encouraged" to do so by the US government.
I have trouble with it at the sprightly age of 33.
Magnificent Nature Photography
> Unless the shooter is psychotic.

Nitpick: You mean "psychopathic", not "psychotic". People with a psychotic illness are more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence, and are much more likely to harm themselves than to harm another person.
Learning bioinformatics algorithms would probably suit me best, yes. On the other hand, I believe there is great inherent value in creating things, so the software dev jobs would be great. Would taking that route eventually limit me? It seems that at a certain level I would need the knowledge that comes with a masters in bioinformatics.
In my experience there is a large class of people who lack basic curiosity about how things work. They are content to believe that things just "exist". I haven't done much research into this, but I would be interested in seeing if this is considered more an education problem, or if some people simply don't have the capacity for curiosity.
It's probably some intern, and that's JUST THE POINT:

"This kind of casual copyright infringement, with no malicious intent, is exactly the kind of thing that SOPA was after. (...) SOPA covered so many cases of fair use, remixing, commentary and satire that it would have made a good number of the websites in the world immediately vulnerable to being taken down at the whim of ‘content creators’ like NBC."
Strangely, New York and Silicon Valley are the two places that I've always eliminated when I considered moving. I, too, graduated from utexas, and then stayed in Austin for about 20 years. I never wanted to take the cut in my standard of living that either SV or NY would mean. A few years back, I did move, even further from civilization.

Back in 1994, I bought a three-bedroom townhouse for $45,000; during the dot-com boom, I realized that moving to Cali would mean living in a refrigerator box with six other people. These days, I'm paying (half of) a $1600/month mortgage on a house on 1.5 acres on the shore of the Tennessee river.
Yes. So? We’re not talking about the halting problem. The author wrote of total functional programming, a paradigm in which all functions and programs are provably terminating.
I concur.

The reason this topic generates chatter is because its simple to understand. My teenage sister gets it, my 7 y/o gets it, the homeless person at Union understands and the Bay St exec gets it. Its not obviously complicated. It takes $0.16 to make a penny. Its eradication will save millions in Gov't spending. "It costs 1.6 Canadian cents to produce each one cent coin and stamping out the penny will save around C$11 million ($11 million) a year." (1)

The other proposed budget topics aren't so easily understood by the general public. Old Age Security? Greater than 40% of Canadians are <30 years old (2). This isn't likely to be the prevailing conversation topic. CBC? Canadian Crown Corporation? Really? Who knew? Who cares? Who understands the impact?

I don't think mass media has conspired to fool the common man (in this case anyway). Its just a simple conversation topic.

Edit: There really isn't any complication since only cash payments are effected (3)

(1) http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/30/canada-penny-federal...

(2) http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/demo10a-eng.htm

(3) http://www.budget.gc.ca/2012/themes/theme2-info-eng.html
UFO causes a stir over Highlands Ranch, Colorado (video)
Quickness: Get your ubuntu boxes up fast.
Yes, some software needs to run in an infinite loop. You can still prove that a single iteration of the loop is safe.
Nice write up. I love the inclusions of the comics/funny images. What is a serious article without a little humor added, right?
This is a great idea for deployment; I really want someone to write something that helps with development.

Example: I'm using Coffeescript/Closure/whatever as well as LESS/SASS/Stylus as well as some javascript package system. Whenever I change any of those files, I want the appropriate compiler to get run. I might want to then cat all of the output files into a single big file (e.g. main.css). Now I can edit-refresh in peace.

But now I'm done developing, I want to test and deploy. Now I really want that minification. Perhaps I want require.js's optimzation binary to run. Anything that wasn't cat'ed together should get cat'ed now.

Sure, you can make this two separate tools, but I'd rather have just one.