skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually quite like the Haskell and OCaml type systems! I had them in mind while writing my post above. Personally, I dislike type systems which are rigid but weak. Strong compiler verification is awesome in a language like Haskell which offers union types, bounded types, contra- and covariant parameterized types (not commonly referred to as such, but implict in functors), etc. I agree with you that it makes it easier to handle complex codebases, catches huge classes of bugs readily, and allows you to solve problems in less code. [1] Good type systems are programmer amplifiers.

I also love the concision and flexibility that comes with Clojure's idiomatic eschewing of type information: it helps me focus on functional composition instead of the particular data. Both have their advantages. Java just makes me angry. ;-)

Regarding the difference in cost: I meant to say that many "strongly typed" compilers are not yet smart enough to elide many of the run-time indirections and safety checks that dynamic languages must use. Really good type systems, like Haskell, are different: precomputing finite-domain functions to lookup tables, finding fixed points, etc.

This is not a domain I understand very well, but the comments I've read from language folks (for instance, the Dart VM designers) suggest that type checks in particular have a relatively small impact on performance. Polymorphism still leads to things like vtables, etc, and as I understand it modern x86 is pretty good at handling these cases.

Again, I know very little about actually writing compilers/vms, so if you have further comments I'd be interested to hear 'em!

[1] That said, Haskell's type system drives me nuts in its proliferation of types which are almost but not quite compatible; nothing worse than trying to use two libraries which will only interact with their own particular variant of a String or ByteArray.
I don't buy that this thing was built for hackers & makers. If you really wanted to build something for them, why not release something like the beagle board or rasberry pi but running Android? These ARM SoC based development boards are really getting cheap and are a lot more practical for building stuff since they have general purpose IO pins, are powered by a few volts DC, and include handy stuff like serial UARTs, single wire bus interfaces, etc.

The Q is expensive, lives in a funky impractical case, and doesn't have a lot of useful IO. For $300 you could buy a few Arduinos, a beagle board/ARM SoC dev board, and even an FPGA dev board.
"more influence" is enough. In a democracy, nobody has but "influence", that's called "checks and balances". Giving real power to any human being --elected or not-- is generally a bad idea.
I get the feeling the normal displays are going to hang around for a while. Keeping a non-retina iPhone model (3GS successor) would allow Apple to continue its move into prepay with a cheaper device than the retina iPhones.
Prismatic Team Page
Google TV is another Android platform that plugs into an entertainment system, and Google recently revamped it, with third-party manufacturers expected to launch new iterations of it this year at or around the $100 pricepoint. I see no reason, hardware-wise, that a Google TV STB couldn't do all of the things in your list, with the right apps on top of it, so even if your predictions come true, of the $300 you'll be paying, $200 will be for it to come pre-installed with software that will probably be available from a third party for the GTV for $5.

The only thing you get with this that doesn't ship standard with the GTV boxes announced so far is an amp, but the amp in the Q is pretty puny, and if you're hooking it up to an existing sound system, you won't use it anyway.
The Moto ROKR was Apple's iPhone stalking-horse - the project was likely doomed to fail commercially, but Apple gets valuable industry experience in rolling working on a cell phone.
"This is the most expensive and expansive internet application in the world."

Facebook uses chat/pictures to sell ads and cheesy games.

Their entire value proposition comes from surfing a wave of attention. What they need are scruffy surfer dudes who keep an eye on the weather, show up at the likeliest beaches, and never stop riding the waves. Anyone with a modicum of skill who keeps paddling out to try again can make a real contribution.

What they do not need are rockstars, certified supergeniuses, arrogant hotshots, etc. You can't buy or impress your way to the big waves, you have to ride there.

If you try to keep winning by being awesome, you will wipe out. For example, Netscape, AOL, Alta Vista, Geocities, MySpace, and many others.
This is my first comment on HN....

I am a mid-level software developer, and this test is bullshit... The only question that was even remotely applicable to a tech journalist, (even a typical techie) is the one regarding network security.

I agree with jfasi; Tom, your post was incredibly arrogant.
As someone who is vaguely familiar with programming and got about 1/2 way through the Udacity Python course I was disappointed with the education I received. Udacity courses seem to gamify to the extreme, giving hyper-specific tasks and immediate feedback without that much context or exploration.

I decided to sign up for an O'Reilly School of Technology course instead. Yes it's not free, but I fee like I am actually learning something.
What is probably unsurprising, but should have been expected, is that banks and major business interests got seriously upset when they found that they were lying to each other.

Clearly the earlier financial upsets, which were caused by them lying to the public, were not really their fault.
If they do release a iPad mini, I would expect Apple to quit making the iPad 2. I also would expect the $299 price point, but would not be surprised if the went $249 or $199.
FSF announces winner of Restricted Boot webcomic contest
I think my current terminal window is prior art...
If turning a profit and a moral goal are aligned, so much the better.
Apple doesn’t do stuff like that.

Well, sometimes they do and fail spectacularly. Does anyone remember the iPod HiFi? Similarly expensive, point- and useless.

If this is how they want to compete with Apple they haven’t understood Apple very well. (I do not think that’s their intention. Google is, in fact, pretty good at competing with Apple. Android does very well. They know what they are doing for the most part.) Apple is about making mass market products that differentiate themselves from the rest by their design – but they are not just design props. They are actual products people love to use, not put behind glass and stare at.

The Nexus Q is Google’s iPod HiFi. Utterly stupid, doomed for failure but of no consequence for Google in the long run. I wouldn’t read anything into it. Even the best companies do stupid stuff from time to time.

(Yes, this is a prediction. I recognize that I might be wrong and you can hold me to it.)
"First, the idea of false balance, suggesting that there are two sides to the current state of our knowledge on a scientific theory. No, the scientific method produces our best understanding of a subject to date. It does not produce both that and its antithesis."

Well - no, science produces falsifiable hypothesis. Here is my hypothesis, you (or me) could falsify it by showing x. x could be shown, but I can't show it - can you?

That's science.

In this debate the homeopaths are asked time and again to show x, they never do, so the hypothesis that we have is that it's utter bunk. If some homeopath can show that their shit really works (with a double blind randomized trial with controls) then booooo yahhhh! it works!

It's not about debates, it's not about who is right. It's about what can be shown to be true, or not.
Hmm, maybe its actually a gaming console in disguise?
A question for the people here who do know: Coda Hale says "Use bcrypt. bcrypt. bcryptbcryptbcryptbcrypt", and appears to get a lot of support from those in the know. Right, got the note, makes sense. Now, does PBKDF2 count, too? I do a lot of .NET and it's built-in and "verified" (whatever that means) there.
Great info, but given that carriers are paid for every message I receive, I doubt their commitment to fighting text spam.

Here's what I want: a whitelist. If I want to add you to my whitelist, I put my phone into "receiving" mode. I get your text, confirm adding you, then go back into normal mode, where texts from anyone not on the list are rejected and I don't pay for them.
I was thinking more along the lines of just running the top 100 passwords through each user
hasn't lying has always been a business model?
That's disappointing though. Nobody is going to give credence to the crazy-sounding core tenets of Singularity U if they allow pseudo scientists on their staff.

If I were in charge of Singularity U I would view this as immediate grounds for firing Mr. Wadhwa.
Why is the app to control the Q Android-only? Does Google genuinely think that iPhone users will switch platforms to Android just to have the chance to control this player?

Seems like you are throwing out half the potential audience for this type of product by only supporting the Android OS.
They should fire the PM who came up with this work flow.

I own an Apple TV and hosted a party at home.

My Apple TV is not protected by password, so all my friends with iPhones (the last one to own an Android got tired of it and replaced it with iPhone) could see the special 'Air Play' icon (http://cms.whathifi.com/Images/189140462bli.jpg) on their iPhone as soon as they join my WiFi network. Now anyone can play media on my TV, be it music from their library/photos from their camera roll/any other App which supports AirPlay. No set up required.

When I bought Apple TV, I bought it only for Netflix but I have been using it a lot through AirPlay. It's a killer feature.
Nobody in the mainstream identifies it with Linux.
HuaYi Industry Co., Limited
Tropo
Robot avatar body controlled by thought alone
Get Documents, Forms, NDAs, Contracts Signed Online using GroupDocs
Heh. That a was our hack at Apportable (YC11). I was the one that presented that at AnDevCamp.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of some of those numbers. I still find the question hurdle to be the biggest... I personally just haven't found the time or energy to go and find questions I can answer, or do research necessary to answer.

My gut feeling is that SE's post structure, handling of reputation and permissions is overly complex... feature creep in a way.

I am glad to hear that your rep can affect other sites rep. I feel like the fractured approach doesn't work very well and it is good to see some improvements in account handling from the beginning like:
- Easier account creation and management(openid feels very arcane and this has smoothed out a lot since the beginning I think)
- Logging you back on when you visit (I guess they changed how they did session cookies or something, I get these 'welcome back' messages now)
- Cross-site notifications and relationships

Maybe if they had gone with centralized SE accounts at the beginning with per-site reputations it would have been simpler. The current method might be because of how SE evolved from the 'original trilogy'.
Ah, ofc... right you are.
Thanks.
What to do when someone copies your startup
The point is that UI elements on the iPad are now slightly bigger than on the iPhone because of the lower DPI (ignoring the retina screen). Pixel-wise, UI elements are the same size between the iPad and the iPhone.

Shrinking the iPad to 7.85" would give it the same density as the iPhone and UI elements would be the same size.
Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Confederation#Influenc... and look at the #1 external cause. That doesn't say much about the history, but does confirm that fear of US invasion was important to Canada's formation. Sure, a lot more internal reasons are given, but that external one was by far the most important and drove the timeline.

Here is more background on that. The official policy of the USA was that it was their manifest destiny to expand/conquer/control a variously defined part of the world that always included Canada. In the 1840s the USA launched a fairly unprovoked war on Mexico and annexed half the country. Coming out of that war, the USA negotiated a treaty where they took a large chunk of British territory in the great plains. Then the USA fought the bloodiest war in history to that point. (The US Civil War.) Coming out of that war the USA was hostile to Canada with the Secretary of Defense making comments indicating that Canada was next. And the Fenian raids (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenian_raids for more) were being launched from US territory against Canadian targets.

2 years and a week after the ending of the Civil War, the act of Confederation created Canada as a single country. 3 years and 11 months after that, Canada had achieved approximately its current borders. (The USA did manage to take the Alaskan panhandle from BS, Newfoundland didn't join Confederation until after WW 2, but the country was recognizable.) And the #1 goal of the new country was to build a railroad across its southern border so that troops could be moved to meet any possible US invasion.

For more historical background, the original separation of Quebec into Upper Canada and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) was to accommodate refugees from the newly created USA who wished to remain British subjects. In the USA they are called "traitors". In Canada they are still called "loyalists".

And to this day Canada has no real national identity other than, "We're not Americans."

So there. Thank you for proving how little Americans know about Canada, and hopefully you learned something. If you have any follow-up questions I would suggest doing a Google search and reading appropriate Wikipedia articles first.
I know with my friends the remote app gets used fairly frequently. We play different music on each other's speakers and it's really useful and nice.

AirPlay too. At least two houses I've been in the past few weeks involved streaming music to a friend's speaker system after connecting to a friend's wifi point.

Lately I think AirPlay has become more common than remote.
Right. I did not say it was enough, just that the goal certainly appears to be eugenic.
Have there been products in the past that were underwhelming at launch but later software upgrades to it to add features made it a big hit?

I think these devices, especially at $300, need to be attractive at launch to become hits. Adding features 6-12 months down the line doesn't seem to ever turn a lagging product around - launch is the time when potential consumers are paying the most attention.
I think it was more problem of iterative design and having to pull out features before release. I think the Q does a lot more but Google wanted to ship by Google IO and would improve it with later software updates.
I like this idea of abstracting out the operations and keeping them 'composable'. I'd be interested to see some sample apps utilizing this pattern. My concern is that it may add more complexity than its worth for small apps. It seems like this would be an evolutionary move you make when your codebase is swelling and more stringent organization is needed to keep things tidy.
I am a SU alumnus and I can assure everyone this is not representative of Singularity University in any way.
By definition, fixers aren't leading; they're reacting to what the breakers do. Also: you're a breaker. Face it.
I'm not ashamed to admit that I could use a tl;dr version.
OP is saying that in science a hypothesis needs to be taken off the table once has been falsified. (Unless new evidence comes along saying otherwise.)

Homeopathy deserves to be removed from the table.
Thank you all for the advice...
Certainly beneficial.
can someone explain the 'woo' reference? k thx.
I know it doesn't actually say that Opera is supported, but all highlights work, and that little bug he mentioned also occurs in Opera
Blog spam?

Contains snippets from RWH mis-rendered...
Ask HN: Hiring a co-founder... is it possible?
Seeking: Technical Co-Founder, with exceptional knowledge of Objective C, Node.js, Ruby and the complete web stack.

I am a visionary. I am a designer. I am the Jobs to your Woz.

I am a young professional. I studied computer engineering. I programmed the intertubes. I soldered embeded microprocessors. I was a nerd's nerd. And I sold out after graduation. I went straight onto wall street to make mon$$yy.

Now I have money. And a desire to change the world, go all in and say 'fuck you' to the man. To bootstrap the shit out of the SaaS era, and make a billion before 30.

But I need my co-founder. I need the yin to my yang. I need a technical lead to drive code and make mobile and web 3.0 his bitch.

What You Get:
> $2k/usd a Month
> Free Rent
> An Awesome Idea (with lots of room to pivot)
> 50% Equity

What I get:
> A Technical Co-Founder Roommate
> A Full-Time Employee
> A Fellow Detail-Obcssessed UX Deisgn and Tech Nerd to Geek out With (and possibly change the world!)

Requirements:
> Willing to relocate to Amsterdam
> BA/MS in all majors with an analytical/quantitative related field of study
> Must be awesome. In every way. Period.

Is this you?

send me something interesting + your github @ omg.hire.me.now [at] gmail.com
The salt does not need to be hidden. First of all, it needs to be unique per hashed information (password), so you cannot store it in code. Second, its purpose is to force any attacker trying to use a lookup tables to calculate one lookup table per password.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28cryptography%29

Edit: also, instead of using a "system salt", why not use an HMAC to replace hash function?
"Prepend the salt to the password and hash it with a standard cryptographic hash function such as SHA256."

No! At the very least, you ought to be using an HMAC.
When a VP Academic makes a statement, this statement is supposed to reflect the view of the entire institution. When a VP Academic makes such public statements demonstrating gross misunderstanding of science (which I would describe as incompetence), (s)he can normally expect to be fired if (s)he works for a reputable institution.
At the very least Udacity seems to be winning the PR war. Coursera had the same origin as Thrun's AI class, and arguably had the better platform/user-experience from day one and today offers many more courses than Udacity - yet all the attention seems to be on Udacity only.
That's what I like about SO's points: they prove my answers have helped someone, which does feel good. It's not like an actual video game, where you're like, "Hey, I got 5,000 points, which means... absolutely nothing outside the game."
I was under impression Android is a Java VM (Dalvik) running on top of Linux kernel, meaning it could theoretically work with any base OS capable of running JVM.

While it may use some linux-only features, is it really hardwired to it so much it cannot be ported elsewhere?
I made an iOS version of Cop Recorder for the OpenWatch project: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cop-recorder!/id433040863?mt=... // https://github.com/chrisballinger/Cop-Recorder-iOS

There is no background support for recording, and Apple requires you to have a "conspicuous" recording indicator. I was initially rejected by displaying a black screen during recording.
> For most students, I do not think that is the case.

Unfortunately, most students in this world have shamefully little access to quality education. Access is definitely a problem.

Even well-funded education systems have limited access to the best possible resources. The best resources are scattered everywhere, from Stanford professors to worksheets on some teacher's desk in Idaho. Getting them online is a big step.
Disagree with your disagree.

As an example I deal with the registries (the people that deal with the registrars such as Verisign, PIR etc.) and I know what security they have in place to prevent a person from imitating a registrar and gaining access. I also know exactly how to circumvent that security (which you don't) and obviously the registries don't (because if they did they would have steps to prevent what I know could do to circumvent their security).

While this only illustrates one example, the mindset of someone whose thought process is excited by how to break into something is not necessarily the same as someone who designs a system (although that could be the same person).

Here's another example that is maybe a little closer to the parent's point. I once got into a medical conference by setting up a website about the medical specialty that the conference was about. They requested I fax them a request on a letterhead (easy to whip up in a graphics program) and was quickly issued press credentials. A domain was also registered called "(Speciality) Treatment News" with a simple banner. Doing that revealed flaws in their system for vetting who should be issued press credentials because the person setting up the system a) didn't think like a breaker does and b) didn't realize the simple skills that are necessary to fake a letterhead that looks legitimate.

The idea is you're not going to be able to think of as many attack vectors unless you also spend time breaking things.
:sigh:

I was talking about the claim "Almost nobody here[the US] knows even basic historical facts about its neighbors".
I was reluctant to pursue this option only because
a) USA is far from where I am.
b) Costs of getting law involved has been prohibitive... when compared to outstanding amount
c) Contractually I'm in deep water (my own fault).
Made in USA is about much more than just patriotism. In the USA, many people buy locally produced goods since it supports the local economy better, reduces carbon emissions from shipping goods half-way around the world, and isn't produced in slave-labor conditions of 3rd world countries.

(Also, you don't understand patriotism? It's tribalism, something deeply encoded in our behavior from many thousands of years of tribal evolution.)
I'm ambivalent about Kurzweil because he has been a great early popularizer of empirically/scientifically-founded futurism.

But at this point he is probably doing more harm than good, for the reasons you describe.
> Could the made in the US selling point of the Q actually be big enough to drive sales? Would americans actually pay more only because of that?

Well, generally no. Which is why you don't see many products actually being made in the US and it's more the domain of obscure kickstarter projects. (And why the Nexus Q is such a confusing and odd exception that this makes the news.)

There is generally a notion that the US should be doing it's own manufacturing and an idea that we should be doing our own sweating for our own goods. It's seen as a fairly noble goal, but I think the market has generally shown people aren't usually willing to pay that much more for it. It's a marketing point in your favor if you can get it, but if it's going to effect the cost by a bunch... most people just don't care enough.

Also I think the motivations are mixed. It's not just about patriotism but about a political desire to see products made in a country where it's easier to ensure that the people who poured sweat into them were compensated fairly. The impression is US labor laws generally will ensure that and most of the countries US products get imported from, do not have those types of frameworks.

(Obviously there are other countries which do, but we don't tend to import cheap consumer goods from countries with labor costs as high as ours, for obvious reasons. :))
The iPhone. It wasn't terrible to begin with (a fancy phone with a decent web browser), but it became a whole different product after the SDK was released.