skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Then guess what: you're still stuck with PayPal.

Another thing is that PayPal works without a credit card in most cases, it can directly withdraw from my bank account.
Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean that no 'completely new' things have been created.

This is like measuring the slope of a line across a very large span, and saying that because the change in Y value is so large, there must be a discontinuity.

This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology....

I don't think biology is the best place to look for guidance when creating an epistemology or taxonomy of technology. The concept of species is important in biology, because it's a strong signal as to which organisms can successfully interbreed. In technology, nearly any two (or more) ideas can be combined.
All I can think about when reading this is Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092880
gF to open the html source in vim
for finding stuff again (~one third of all your searches)

http://archify.com - What You See Is What You Search
is your private search engine for web/FB/TW/email/..

Disclaimer: I'm archify team member
IP issues will go away when IPv6 catches on and things like this will only increase adoption.
Well yes, of course your diet should be well-rounded and contain all the necessary vitamins, fibers, protein your body needs.

My comment was more a reaction to all the different kinds of diets, and how they're supposedly a better way to lose weight than the previous diet. If you want to lose weight, and you already have a varied diet that meets your body's daily intake requirements, it can be useful to calculate your calorie consumption and burn rate and try to tweak both of those so that you end up with a caloric deficit.

Of course this only directly affects your weight, and you need to also take care of your body's general health. I would hope it's obvious to most that you shouldn't start a wood chip diet.
It's unlikely the case here but responsible disclosure is not always so simple and can make 0-day public disclosure a "reasonable response".

I have heard of cases where informing the company of a vulnerability and telling them "I will publicly disclose the vulnerability in N days" has resulted in security researchers being taken to court as a "blackmail attempt". Annoyingly I can't find the case I'm thinking of (though I've found numerous other unsettling ones such as [1]) but will update this comment if I do. One example of such madness is Dmitry Sklyarov[2] who was arrested under the DMCA's anti-circumvention laws for revealing that an e-book vendor used ROT13 to encrypt their documents.

A useful introduction to the complexity of public and responsible disclosure can be seen at the EFF's Vulnerability Reporting FAQ[3].

[1]: http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/276780,security-researcher...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov

[3]: https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/vulnerability-reporting-fa...
Completely agree. The most shockingly amusing part is in the second paragraph, where she uses the fact she has no financial proof as her financial proof...
If there is an "Australian" edition of a book, it is illegal to import copies printed elsewhere and resell them. Or, as it's also known in polite circles: retarded protectionist bullshit.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/business-old/shorten...

As for "cheaper to ship from the UK", you're thinking of the Book Depository, who take advantage of subsidised export rates.
You wouldn't have been able to make more perfect sock puppet trolls if you tried with actual comments like:

"I've never heard of Twilio, can haz power users?"
Task tracking for power users: Holly
well, figure that if it were true, Java, python, Perl, c# are useless tools for delivering cross x86 OS code. (I just develop a side effect of the claim one can inject some code in memory bypassing all the HW/OS control).

Why God these stupid Larry Wall, GvR, MS, Sun, Google, linus torvalds lost their time trying to achieve what a JS code can do in less than 1000 lines?

How can I believe a code I can read and that is obviously a fraud would through the sheer power of obfuscated unused strings become such a revolution in the world of CS?

Plus, I have no demonstration nor readable documents to back up the claims of this so called genius.

Science is accepting what you can understand and reproduce. Not being impressed by obfuscated crap.

I have no doubt this is a mystification, and I don't trust blindly what is written on the internet. I still have a brain.
On the subject of letters, I personally pay more attention when I receive a sales pitch in a letter rather than an email or phone call. I know it doesn't actually take a huge amount more effort, and companies can spam through the post almost as easily as over wires, but it just feels like they've tried a little harder to get my business.
What is the IP issue with SPDY?
Wow. This has both bubble and disaster written all over it. May things go much better than that for them, though, of course. But it reads more like a parody or a list of warning signs than an article about a real new business.
Reinventing variables
"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in." - Larry Wall

C's macro system, for example, is so unreliable that you
can't even define a simple macro like

#define square(x) x*x

How do you set the value associated with the "foo" property? Oh, you use "setf", which rewrites

(setf (get x foo) 1)

to

(LET* ((#:G847 X) (#:G848 FOO))
(MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (#:G850) 1 (COMMON-LISP::%PUT #:G847
#:G848 #:G850)))

but you don't have to know that. It just works.

I agree about C macros. But, show me the source for:

(defmacro setf ...

and you may be quoting Larry Wall.
Last I checked (about 3 years ago), the median salary for a full professor in the US was $70k/yr. Obviously, there are regional and institutional differences, but I highly doubt that any professor at Harvard is making in excess of $300k.

Mind you, also, that the average age that one reaches "full professor" is something like 45 or 50. If you want to go down that track, you're looking at a salary in the range of $23k until your mid-to-late 20s as a grad student, followed by a salary of no more than $45k as a post-doc until sometime in your mid 30s. If you are lucky enough to snag a tenure track position by your mid 30s, then you'll probably make around $50k for the next 7 years, at which point you might get a tenured position (which can eventually, through promotions, lead to "full professor"), or you might be sent packing at age 45 with essentially no future on your chosen career path. This is not a hypothetical. I watched this very thing happen to two Ph.D. advisors.

So, no...despite what you might have been told, no one chooses a research career to get rich. (Consequently, I left academia to pursue software engineering and easily increased my expected lifetime earnings by at least 4x.)
Even more exciting - He is going to go into details about the Transportation Idea (Hyperloop) that he alludes to in the video in a few weeks https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/224406502188916739.

Can't wait...
50 Geeky Things Kids Should Do Before They're 12 | GeekMom | Wired.com
This doesn't prevent anyone from tampering with the code while being transmitted.
> Embrace and extend.

That's not what "embrace and extend" means. To give a hint, it typically has a third part: "... and extinguish."
Set market prices and it will sell
Again, I'm way out of depth here, but if your javascript loop ran fast enough relative to the cache latency, you could perhaps create a similar effect. The key would be whether the cache logic flaw depended on requests from two distinct cores to the same cache line, or if it's something that multiple requests from a single core can excite.

No clue if this is the case.
Trouble with this is that prerequisites differ. I taught myself multivariable calculus out of a differential geometry textbook that I lacked roughly an entire degree's worth of "prerequisites" to, in order to pass a bog-standard calculus course, because I found the ostensibly "easier" approach advocated by the undergraduate calc book utterly incomprehensible.
JOSE FERNÁNDEZ ÁBALOS
The story I got told in school was that as the romans advanced through Gaul and into ancient Britain, they were appalled at the leather britches worn by the barbarian tribes. When they finally took (part of) Britain however, they realised that the extreme cold (compared to rome) meant that the trousers were basically essential.

All those barbarian tribes would have been horsemen, so the article fits with this idea I suppose.
> Are there more, or was that the one you were referring to originally?

That's the one. Though there are two with that name, I believe. One for Strange Loop and one for a Ruby conference. The two talks are mostly the same, but it's worth watching both. Then watch all other talks by Rich Hickey too, as they are all excellent.

> At a minimum, for Java, you're going to want an object

Java, if you ask me is a degenerate case. It's a language that pushes consistency at all costs, in the face of any common sense. Most other OO languages don't pressure you into programming this way. I.e., they give you normal functions in addition to methods.

Though when programming in Java, I am personally not averse at all to just putting functions into an empty utility class that exists solely for holding nothing but static methods. Scala actively encourages doing this, as it provides for a type of object called a "package object" that exists for this particular purpose.

> I have heard of the Law of Demeter, but in practice, I'm not sure I see it obeyed that often if ever.

Maybe people in the trenches don't typically obey "best practices", but the OO best practices gurus all seem to push the Law of Demeter these days. I'm sure it's difficult to figure out how to do well. But then again, so is figuring out how to apply Rich Hickey's advice on simplicity!

> nobody wants to maintain those niggling chains of accessor calls.

Nobody wants to be locked into an inflexible API either, but I agree that people are lured by what is easy!

Hickey is contrasting a simple approach with software development as it happens now, typically, not as it might or ought to happen.

It would be interesting to know how what Hickey would do is different from what OO best practices gurus recommend. Indeed it's clear that in the real world, people don't often follow either advice.

> Also, for what it's worth, I don't think encapsulation is irretrievably the province of OO.

For the most part, it's usually considered to be. API's surely existed before OO, but they were typically for one program to talk to another, not for communication within a program. Before OO, different parts of programs typically revealed all their data structures, and you were allowed to go to town on them. Though, it's true that for certain things you probably weren't supposed to do that. E.g., as you said, on the malloc heap in C.

I believe that encapsulation as we know it today was invented by the CLU programming language. It was certainly the first language to enforce encapsulation. CLU isn't necessarily what we would consider an to be OO language today, as it didn't have inheritance, but it considered itself an OO language at the time.
> you no longer have much of a justification for deleting that page that says cancer can be cured by chugging bleach and shoving silver up your rectum.

So what? Just add another paragraph to that page explaining the scientific consensus that anally penetrating yourself with silver won't cure cancer. (Believe it or not, Wikipedia actually has a rule requiring balanced coverage.)

You might even vote to move that entire section to a page of its own. (Does that also count as deletionism in your dictionary? What about article-splittism?)

Either response will take a lot less time and effort for everyone involved, compared to starting a heated and confrontational debate about deleting an entire article.

"If there be time to expose through discussion falsehood and fallacies, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California (1927)
Just because it is Functional Programming it does not mean to "throw away encapsulation". Most languages still allow you to limit the extent to which a piece of data is exposed. And that is needed for large systems - otherwise you will have to change many many functions as your data representation changes. This is also true of loose coupling. Seeking to modularize your code is always a good idea - but it is not impossible to achieve in non-OO languages. After all they also have module systems for exactly that.

The trick is to have a small set of functions which are very generic. And then stack these on top of each other as a mini-language from which you build up the access pattern you desire. After all it is a functional language, so these kinds of constructions should be fairly simple.

As for representation, consider that a book is represented as a tree: chapter -> section -> subsection -> paragraph -> body_text. But nobody said that this was the natural representation in a machine. You could have made a database table - CREATE TABLE book (id SERIAL, chapter INT, section INT, ..., body_text TEXT). Now access is by a small mini-language, namely SQL SELECT statements. Another way is to represent Chapter, Subsection, ... as dimensions in a vector space. The body text is then a point at a coordinate of Chapter x Section x Subsection. This has a KD-tree representation because it has neat spatiality for instance.

We could represent the book as a list: [(chapter section subsection ... body_text) ...]. A list has a formal derivative called a "zipper". This structure allows us to go "forward and back" through the paragraphs of the book - one paragraph at a time. This is the perfect representation for a screen reader. If we need to go larger strides, we can probably consider a zipper of a Rope-structure or a finger tree.

Finally, we could use a trick where the book is represented as a function. That is, we simply call book(3, 12, 32, 4) to get Chapter 3, Section 12, Subsection 32 paragraph 4.

What I really don't like about OO is when it is taken as the assumption that physical objects in our world has an isomorphic representation in the machine. This is nearly never the case. Good OO programmers naturally know when to break away from an isomorphic representation - but sadly this is not always what is taught in schools. You know, a Cat is an animal and so is a dog. Hence they are both subclasses of the animal class :)
I had to reread your comment a few times. Because I actually thought it was true and you were serious. Because it sounds consistent with the rest of the vibe I was getting about them. They're punching way out of their weight class, especially for their first venture. You can see it in their writing, their decisions, and I'd argue even their faces. Hopefully they pivot early enough over to something wiser and more nichey.
I'd hope that anyone speaking SPDY would also be SNI-capable, thus negating the usual need for one IP+port per certificate.

Granted, it does nothing for your older non-SNI browsers, but they won't be speaking SPDY or HTTP/2.0 or whatever it winds up being called.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
What I finds funny is that all these OO design patterns and best practices are aimed to solve problems that doesn't exist in FP. Of course I may be over generalizing, but you get my point.
... in a time when investors are desperately seeking anything to throw their money at that will get good returns. And it's hard to find software engineers. And, especially to less sophisticated investors, they just know "social" and "cloud" are the hot hot thing so they want to park some bets in something with those words involved. Thus... MySocialCloud.com
Funny enough, I came here to argue more or less the opposite.

In many countries, the standard payment problems have been largely solved locally, at least for the local markets. In the Netherlands, a wide selection of payment providers will give you the ability to receive payment through virtually any method.

Merchant accounts are easy to get, and the most popular local form of payment, iDeal (direct "my bank to your bank" payment), is supported by all banks and can be easily implemented without the need for any payment provider. The vast majority of all only transactions in NL go through iDeal.

Most payment providers also offer multi-currency support, but it's only a very small part of the market that needs that. The use of PayPal is very rare and becoming rarer by the day. It's about as old school as seeing a "made for Netscape" button on a website.

There's only one area where PayPal is easier and more accessible, and that is very low budget private stuff like donations on a small software project. But given the constant horror stories about PayPal, any solution that targets that market effectively will wipe PayPal away in a matter of months. And then PayPal will be history in the Netherlands.
Good point, but that's research, not general software development, which is what you were initially talking about. Software development is about implementation, and less about research. That research paper is not the entirety of what's novel about google's search algorithm. It's more silly to assume the majority of computer engineering talent get on the megaphone when they've done something novel, many of them just aren't interested. Games developers leave it a couple of years before getting public about the nitty gritty of what they did.

You know already which one this is going to be :)
http://xkcd.com/664/
Benefits of cat's claw herb
Certified highest antioxidant fruit
> Just because it is Functional Programming it does not mean to "throw away encapsulation".

Surely not, as even Clojure has support for OO programming. But Rich Hickey says that 90% of the time that encapsulation is used by OO programmers, it shouldn't have been. Instead, they should have just used a map or a list, etc.

So, does something as complex as representing a book fall into the 90% case or the 10% case?

Or maybe Hickey is really just alluding to the Law of Demeter and saying that methods should return data and not objects. It might very well be that if the Law of Demeter were religiously followed in OO programming, that the use of objects would fall by 90%.
Saturday night is not the same for every one here... It's Sunday 10:30am for me ;)
As the creator of [citation needed], I refute this. There is no need for someone to believe a claim from a particular source if there is no citation involved. It is indeed up to the author to provide the citation.

However, should someone else provide a citation, then this will also do - and the author should really thank that person for doing the hard work in providing a more meaningful discussion.
Serving multiple SSL websites on different domains on the same IP address requires the SNI extension and much fiddling around; it is ill-supported by old browsers. This is needed because with HTTPS, the header that tells the server which site to serve is still encrypted when the server needs to direct the request to the relevant application code. IPv6 will fix this by allowing you to easily give each application on your server its own IP as well as its own domain. This is simply because IPv6 creates a lot more addresses so we won't have to ration them like we do now.

Sorry, that's a poorly worded explanation, but its sunday morning. Have a look at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Server_Name_I...
SPDY uses SSL and as it stands anything that doesn't support SNI will only accept one SSL certificate on one IP address. So if you run n certs on the same box you'd need n IP addresses.
Interestingly enough, as a California native, I got hung up on "insure" as well. I'm not sure I've ever used that spelling.

Not sure if it's something unique to my upbringing however.
A couple points. The first thing is that you need a systematic approach. This means trying to orient a lot of things towards getting traction. See it as a core aspect of how you think about your business.

Blogging is a good thing. Try to get your blog syndicated. Try to make your web site useful enough that your target audience comes back for more stuff all the time (think Amazon reviews here as something which has this function).

Don't be shy about hiring a real marketing firm either. Tradeshows are good but be prepared and make sure you put in the time ahead of time to ensure your marketing material is tailored to the audience at the trade show.

Pursue PR at every opportunity. Think of PR as something that infects everything your business does. (EDIT: Tech support is PR in a different context, for example.)

Also pursue strategic partners, even if that is with the competition.

Once you have a bit of a name for yourself, start advertising.

Hope this helps.
There is no issue with IP addresses and SPDY perse. It's just that for SSL encryption (HTTPS) to work currently you would need your own IP address as older browsers (read IE < 8 on windows XP) don't support the SNI method of setting up HTTPS where you don't need your own IP address.
African "instagram" reaches 1m users
Relevant: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~madst/tool/papers/expression.txt

The salient paragraph: "Whether a language can solve the Expression Problem is a salient indicator of its capacity for expression. One can think of cases as rows and functions as columns in a table. In a functional language, the rows are fixed (cases in a datatype declaration) but it is easy to add new columns (functions). In an object-oriented language, the columns are fixed (methods in a class declaration) but it is easy to add new rows (subclasses). We want to make it easy to add either rows or columns."
San Diego Airport Taxi Service - 858-224-5474 Better service for less
They made their point quite well, you realise you only quoted the last 3 words?

Conveying emotional reaction to what is said, is useful as well. Clearly the GP found it offensive. It's not a logical fallacy...

> That isn't the kind of atmosphere we want around here.

What does that mean? You don't like it when people react emotionally to offensive stuff? I'd reckon you'd have a hard time finding somewhere where that doesn't occur... it's called "being human".
What's great about lisps that support modifications to the Reader is that you can go even beyond the standard sugar and use your own characters for some special purpose. (e.g. adding map-syntax with curly braces...)

> (It bugs me that I can't think of a simple example that must be a macro (and not a function), but you get the idea.)

My main three rules: 1) delayed, conditional, repeated, etc. evaluation of arguments 2) compile-time computation for massive optimization potential 3) running or inserting code before or after any of the argument forms (useful for tests--init clean env, run test body, destroy env) or changing the argument forms themselves.
IMO this is why people who post online think GCC is more popular than it is. VC++ and C# have far more usage than GCC, but most of it is by professionals who don't post online. Ditto for the lack of awareness of the popularity of Perforce in professional environments.
If I could use one word to make a generalization about the financial industry as a whole, including Wall Street, banking, etc., it would be this: shenanigans. You need to be very very careful when dealing with them, and I would also avoid their world as much as you reasonably can. Perhaps not a complete boycott is wise or possible, but as much as you can.
The end of Netflix
I stopped using eBay 6 years ago, and for 5 years before that I used it every week, for buying and selling. eBay is fast becoming irrelevant. And I'm not in the US either.