skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In some browsers, there's currently a way:

Safari and IE (but not FF or Chrome) will display 'text/plain'-served-content as HTML. That means the GitHub 'raw' view of project content can be used to execute arbitrary user JS from github.com.

Such JS can get at a logged-in user's name and make (at the very least) superficial changes to profile information. A harmless demo (works on Safari and IE) is here:

http://github.com/gojomo/scratch/raw/master/getuser/index.ht...

Trivially, then, a Pages subdomain can use the above in an iframe to export the username out. Demo:

http://gojomo.github.com/getuser

The 'raw' issue seems more serious and isn't affected by whether Pages are on .github.com subdomains or not. Still, subdomains have a slight leg up on exploiting any security slip-ups and browser bugs that may occur.
> A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

Say I employ someone for a week, then, come their payday I disappear without paying them. By the definition above, they're a slave. But while my behaviour would be dispicable, I don't think most people would call such a situation slavery. So I don't think the definition is a good one.
Their "No Spyware" image links to http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ghostery.com , which says only that the website is queued for testing.

Since it is a Firefox extension, you can just open up the package and look at the JavaScript (my quick perusal saw nothing out of the ordinary). Still, it would be nice if they said "Ghostery parses the web pages you visit to find web bugs" or something.
The effect has to be adjusted slightly to be used in a UI context. If it is changed so that the item nearest the mouse cursor snaps to the cursor, then suddenly you'd be able to precisely and easily select an item from a group of tightly-packed items. So the UI advantage might be that you can see a lot of items, but can precisely select any of them.

Also, for UI purposes, it might be beneficial to remove the "springy" effect on the items. When the mouse isn't moving, the items shouldn't be animating. In other words, the animation should be driven by mouse movement, with no elasticity.
principle true,the spread to society is questionable. The public sector and unions have enough power to hold the walls from change. Competition there does not exist. So seniority and organizational politics still dictate rewards.
But common lisp does come with vectors (make-array), hashtables (make-hash-table), and set-operators (intersection, union, pushnew, etc) that work on lists.

Also, Common Lisp (CLOS, in particular) supports multimethods (defmethod), contrary to what the author claims. And all of the special forms I saw in clojure have a counterpart in common lisp.

In fact, a lot of common lisp implementations (I like SBCL) have support for threading/asynchronous action built in. The one problem is that none of that is part of the ansi spec, so most multithreaded code won't be portable between implementations.

It isn't the language's fault that your teacher wouldn't let you use all these features.
How does that make sense to anyone?

I still think Java is just a cruel joke on the part of the authors. I don't think they really thought manifest typing was a good idea. I don't think they really thought that Java's OO system was any good.

I think we will be seeing a paper soon that has a title like, "How bad could a programming language be before people stopped using it? A case study on Java."
Thank you.

In lieu of sparking up conversation about an article I think is good, because it may be regarded as "redundant", I'll just vote up and keep any opinions quiet.
XtraDB benchmarks - 1.5X gain in IO-bound load | MySQL Performance Blog
Are you talking about medicare or social security? If we took a little under half of the increase in defense spending in the ~2002-2006 period, social security could be made solvent for the next 75 years:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6514572148606053094...

It isn't exactly out of our capacity to do. We just have to stop blowing things up and destroying wealth.
I played with Io a long time (like 4 or 5 years) ago, at which time it didn't seem ready for anything serious. I would expect it's gotten much better since then. It would be interesting to know what sort of apps are easy to build in it.

This author doesn't seem to know his subject very well, though. To say that an object-oriented, message-based, fully-reflective programming language goes "far beyond" Smalltalk suggests ignorance of how far Smalltalk goes.
6nd?
Tried Io a year back. Gave up after it crashed after a few tries. Add with it that it was one of the slowest in speed comparision tests.
What's distinctive about Clojure is not that it has them, but rather that it makes them first-class citizens in the way that lists are - i.e. provides a universal set of operators for manipulating them (or so I hear anyway). This is certainly a weakness of CL. I think this is the original point underlying the author's garbled statement, and it's an improvement specifically to CL that has nothing to do with the presence of arrays and hashtables in the language.

Edit: I realize this is probably obvious, but let's not confuse what this guy says about Clojure with what Hickey has to say. He's well aware of CL and doesn't make silly claims about it.
Gaithersburg YellowPages
Complete Gaithersburg Maryland yellow pages helps you find everything you need in the area including: hotels, real estate, restaurants, bars, and attorneys.
Google is Dominating the Ad Server Wars
Ask YC: Your workstation specs? (pc manufacturer, os, #monitors, size...)
Dell, Windows XP, 2 monitors (19",24"), HP headset.

What I covet: a better chair, wireless headset, a bigger coffee cup.
"our proprietary open source design community".

a good start ;-)
Infecting our kids with passion for learning is key and we must do a better job of it.

I think this is backwards. Children have abundant passion for learning. What we ought to do is stop stifling it.

Edit: what they don't have a passion for is (to paraphrase basically everybody) blah blah competitiveness blah blah global marketplace blah.
What I wonder is how long before these countries ask for repayment of their debt, and what the consequences will be.

We know that by pulling out money, we’re not serving anyone’s good. Including ourselves. [This is the famous modern “balance of financial terror.” If Chinese officials started pulling assets out of the U.S. and touched off a run on the dollar, their vast remaining dollar holdings would plummet in value.] So we’re trying to help, at least by not aggravating the problem.
The Venture Capital Process
At Siemens, Bribery Was Just a Line Item
The moment of enlightenment is his last sentence: "Achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise."

In our quick-fix society, there is something to be learned from living in the moment, and from journeys made for the sake of journeying.
How India Avoided a Crisis
maybe it could be a preference. i personally run a greasemonkey script that not only opens links in a new tab, but inserts a topbar so i can vote and get to comments from the article page.
Surely they also look at your browsing history, when you use Chrome, or even when you use their search engine.
> "But what doesn't make sense to me is that parts of our country are in serious economic decline and I am not aware of an uptick in engineering and science students in those regions."

There's a logical flaw in that line of reasoning.

The authors claim the following: "If a student has tackled a difficult subject, it is because s/he was motivated by economic hardship [or a passion for the subject]."

However, Fred seems to interpret this as the converse: "If a student is motivated by economic hardship , s/he will tackle a difficult subject" (This is NOT implied by the original statement), and base his argument on that. There are probably millions of people who are living proof that economic hardship & an opportunity to study doesn't automatically make you prefer difficult subjects.

His argument about passion, though, is spot-on. We do need to do more to encourage kids to develop healthy passions. I don't think you can make a kid love math overnight, but you certainly can kill a kid's passion for math by not supporting it. Supporting this passion for learning though, is easier said than done. It is much more of a family responsibility, than something that can be legislated by the government in a top-down fashion.
As I hinted in the article, you're right: I didn't really experiment much with Smalltalk. Does Smalltalk allow the same level of reflection? Does it offer the same "freedom" as Io? I'm asking because I _presume_ it does not, but I honestly don't know.
Vista was a problem looking for a solution.

Unfortunately, the solution never came, so the problem hung around like a miasma. Vista is why I switched to Linux.

Congrats, Microsoft.
It's in the country's best interest to have a thriving economy; making it easy to start a business supports this concept. The whole idea of throwing up obstacles to weed people out smacks to me of elitism. Starting a business is difficult enough without adding more rules, fees, licenses, etc that have nothing to do with the business's day to day operations.

Just look at countries where you need to have $thousands in escrow/bank before you can even get off the ground and compare how many small businesses they have to the US.

I mean, really, if I wanted to start a business tomorrow I could do so without filing a single piece of paper as long as I did it under my own name. As long as I'm not in a regulated field, all the gov't cares is that I pay my taxes. It doesn't get any easier than that!
experimenting with lua this evening. be curious to hear if others have had good/bad experiences with it.
I don't have a reference at hand, but I recall reading somewhere that the tiredness attenuates some of the distractibility. Perhaps the mind is a bit less "agile"; it therefore foregos so readily jumping from topic to topic.

There is the counterpoint of hyperfocus. Something that is intensely interesting -- whether due to the topic itself or consuming pressure to get it done (NOW!) -- also lessens distractibility.
Firefox 3.0.5. I haven't played around with the nightly's much, but I might. Thanks.

And yeah, to the Javascript VMs progressing. I don't think I've seen as much buzz about performance upgrades as in the JS space.

Waiting for it to hit the server side in a big(ger) way.
Also, there was a Canadian medical advisory recently that a rash can indicate a potentially severe reaction to modafinil. It sounded quite unusual, but something to remain cognizant of.

http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/219836.htm

http://www.napra.ca/pdfs/advisories/Health-prof-Alertec.pdf
Yeah, it's that bad.
A human and a computer are equally good at clocking one person into work on time.

A computer is probably much better at tracking the hours of 500 people, using this to estimate the probability of various inconvenient person-mixes (the foreman and backup foreman are both sick!), and using this to generate schedules.

A person is probably better than a computer at deciding whether or not it's better to clock out of work eight minutes early to surprise the wife with flowers.

Computers and people differ pretty wildly in their thought processes and abilities.
In this case, "you" IS me in particular. I'm slow on the uptake more often than I'd prefer. =)

Thanks for the comment; I hadn't thought of much of that.
AT&T to release $99 Netbook on Data Plan
Hmm,

Nice to have all the up-and-coming languages lined-up in an internal comparison. I like Lua, Haskell and Io. I think that future languages will have to have a cleaner rather than an uglier look and syntax. For that reason, I have a visceral reaction to scala and factor. Even the one-line examples I've seen of these language have look like gibberish. I'm sure they are great in many ways but don't want them to succeed since they will make my brain hurt more. Also, I think that they won't succeed for similar reasons.
What if mechanical_fish comments and 20 other people on the leaderboard flag it (including some ranked higher)? Why does mechanical_fish's comment override everyone else's distaste for the article?

I like the system as it is.
I find Self to be worth checking out, as well (http://research.sun.com/self/) if for no other reason than seeing how fast dynamic languages can be. The research that went into it--techniques for blazing fast implementations of highly dynamic, object-oriented languages--has become especially relevant and provides the basis for many of the numerous new Javascript vms (especially V8).

With regards to Smalltalk and its incredible reflective abilities, this video from OOPSLA'08 ("Smalltalk Superpowers") is particularly amusing: http://www.veoh.com/videos/v163138695pJEMGmk. Unger even does a pretty neat demo of Self.
For the simple reason that it's not trying to make a profit - it's trying to give back to people the same amount of money they put in.

If Charles Ponzi wanted to live modestly, but donate huge sums to charity so everybody would love the big-shot Ponzi, it wouldn't have been a Ponzi scheme? If he'd wanted to buy votes, would it have been less of a Ponzi scheem?

It's more of a forced investment than anything else, with the variation of having the money skip a generation.

Well, no. It's forced redistribution. The money is not invested; it's spent.

The difference is that if all you do is give people the exact same amount of money they put in, you can run forever. All you need is a buffer of some kind.

But SS was designed with the assumption that either demographics wouldn't change, or that they'd change so slowly that nobody would suffer politically for having invented Social Security.
The linked page to EFF is very informative actually. After reading ghostery.com, I had no idea what this was about. The EFF page made it clear to me. (I actually never really thought about that problem before)

I think ghostery.com should explain better what it is on their own page. The small text sounds as if web bugs are a good thing.

On a related note, it seems to me that advertising companies like DoubleClick aren't in the news as much as they could. I feel like I never hear anything about them, and in particular in terms of privacy issues, while they should be amongst the first to be suspected and talked about. No?
You have no idea how happy I am to see that you used the word "webapp" instead of "startup." (read: very happy)
What philosophical problem did Popper actually solve? I hope very much you aren't referring to his verificationist approach to confirmation in science.
Going to wedding parties! Looks like all of my friends are getting married nowadays.

Also beginning work on a new project that is essentially an online site editor like Weebly but for a very niche market. Still figuring out exactly how to do that though.
If you want people to study engineering/science, then there has to be jobs awaiting the graduates. Unless, of course, you merely want erudite cabbies and burger flippers. These fields have never been the route to serious coin, and now they've decamped for cheaper countries.

Unless there's strong economic or national security issues I'm unaware of, leave them to those interested in engineering/science. Hopefully, such people will actually know the subject matter and thus be able to actually deliver on their promise.
Calling them bugs is just trying to spread FUD.
I think a link to a slightly less biased discussion would be better. With clear reasons why they are used, what benefits they have for users, etc

The EFF link used is stupidly outdated and pretty much irrelevant these days - "there is no method of distinguishing Web Bugs from spacer GIFs which are used on Web pages for aligment purposes."

In any event, the use of them is simply because it's easier and less prone to error than the webserver doing the call itself (Also harder for webmasters to tamper etc).

For instance, you could easily setup your webserver to send over information about each visitor to quantcast, doubleclick, google etc etc, and the user would never know. The only issue with that approach would be that quantcast etc would need to trust that the IP etc you're providing is correct, and you're being truthful in terms of page views etc.

You know what the easiest thing for an advertising network to do would be though?
Setup some innocent domains, and host prototype.js etc there. Then tell large websites that use the ad network (Under NDA or something) to innocently link to that version of prototype.js.
I checked it out and don't see how you are generating income with the project. Will probably submit a project though, all the Pagerank helps! :)

It takes a smart person to look for a developer with vision, and a smarter one to keep them on-board. The tough thing is finding a business model that can be used to bootstrap profitably, but that will also scale.
Grease monkeys aren't known for their software chops I guess:)
i'd love it if hn added a simple checkbox like techmeme to open links in a new tab. The middle click is pretty sweet though.
This would seem to argue the contrary, and I'm not finding an online reference to what I seemed to recall in my previous comment.

http://www.physorg.com/news93623459.html

So, take my comment with a good grain of salt. If I find a relevant reference, I'll follow up.
>...seems much more like Reddit material. And guess what, that's where it came from - it's been at the top of http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/ for a couple of days now.

Yes, I read this article on Reddit before submitting here. But as far as your assertion:

> not quite sure how it's hacker-news material though

I disagree. One of the first questions that came to my mind, and is indeed very similar to the top comment for this article, is the following: how can the world be hacked, perhaps through startups, so that slavery becomes ineffective?

If an article inspires those kinds of questions, how does it not belong on Hacker News?
A tiny interpreter for a stack-based language
Great idea! Very useful and easy to ue.
"It is much more of a family responsibility."

"In my house we give glory to achievement, self-respect and hard work. It's up to us to set these high expectations. And that means meeting those expectations ourselves.That means setting examples of excellence in our own lives."

That's a quote from earlier in the year, from our soon to be inaugurated President.
Smalltalk blocks are objects that respond to messages about themselves, so yes, Smalltalk offers the same kind of reflection, in fact it invented it. (It's possible that Io takes it further in some respect, but I'd need to see details.)

So which (if any) of all these languages will you use to do a real project?
11th grade
Yes supply massively outstrips demand for engineering graduates. Of my Mech Eng class most ended up in IT or banking. I estimate my salary now is at least 2x what I could be making as an engineer, and despite the economy being down at the moment I feel a lot more secure with my IT skillset than I would if my entire industry was in systemic decline.

I do wonder tho' if one day someone, a government or large corporation, will initiate grand engineering projects ("let's colonize Mars! Right now!") and I'll be left out for having abandoned the "true path". Nah, never happen.
There are some amazing statements in here:

"Bribery was Siemens’s business model," said Uwe Dolata, the spokesman for the association of federal criminal investigators in Germany

Before 1999, bribes were deductible as business expenses under the German tax code

To handle the business side of bribery, the executives turned to Mr. Siekaczek, a man renowned within the company for his personal honesty
The linked EFF page seemed to have "Doubleclick" bug! Then I realized that it is flagged for just having "ad.doubleclick.net" in the text.

Anyway, this is a good tool... Thank you.
that would be pretty magical. it would take some refactoring of my setup, but it would be awesome. I'll fiugre out how much work it would take and think about it.
Outsourcing vs. Offshoring
11. F#

F# is a mixture of C#, OCaml and Haskell. F# will be included in the next version of Visual Studio so it's no longer just a research language. Performance is similar to C# but coding in it is faster in my experience and above all a lot nicer if you like functional programming. Because it runs on the .NET VM or Mono VM it has good multicore support unlike OCaml. Haskell is more powerful as a language, but also has it's weak aspects. The main thing F# is missing imo in comparison to Haskell is type classes. And of course the Haskell community.
There should be :(
Free Defrag Utility for Windows Vista | TechJaws
The very reason I wrote this article in the first place was that I couldn't make upmy mind. I am, as a matter of fact, interested in all of them: I was hoping you people could help me decide.

As a matter of fact, I work as a technical writer, so I'm not going to use any of these for any big project. However, I do code in my spare time and prepare small programs to automate tasks at work, when my boss lets me.

At the moment (literally) I'd like to try learning Haskell again, but it feels very difficult.
That's very true. I personally like clojure - and it does provide a lot of potential advantages to common lisp. I just don't think the author of this article understands them - he's just spewing bs.

Hickey does make a lot of valid points about the advantages/differences of clojure (http://clojure.org/lisps) though.
Then the "free" world on the net is more Orwellian, than you could imagine in your wildest dream. All the scare stories about China internet surveillance are a joke in comparison to what goes by in the name of advertising. And this is the trouble with GOOG, and zeitgeist:

"It's data that's practically a printout of what's going on in your brain: What you are thinking of buying, who you talk to, what you talk about."
--Kevin Bankston, staff attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Add to this GOOG CEO's AAPL board membership and their 1984 Superbowl ad, and be scared to death with the alu macbook digital restriction management.

ps: DoubleClick is related to GOOG (layoffs); the latter also swept up urchin.js -- look for this program on your PC, and dig into what it does. Far more than a "stray" pixel.

As to understand why this fuss about advertising: it is an extremely latent and powerful means of exercising power. I would suggest Adam Curtis, Century of the Self in particular. (e.g. from Brewster Khale's archive.org)
Why would anyone care how many people work at Twitpic? Does he or the people giving him "advise" think he's running a bank or something?

Lamest coming out ever.
Most web 2.0 startups just plain don't do customer support. He's not running a poker site.
I was hoping you people could help me decide.

You're likely to just get people recommending their favorite.

If I were you I'd apply some combination of two criteria: which is the most fun, and what do I want to try to build?

It's great that you've done some broad experimentation (much more than I have). I suggest that you'll get a different and rewarding view if you try to use one of these languages to do something real that you care about.