skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What this author should really be saying is that AP testing is a scam. Unless there is an IB/honors equivalent, AP is the only option for most students to get a weighted grade for the class, and thus their only realistic option to get admitted to colleges.

Students really have no other choice if they are college-bound.
The ARC algorithm is patented (by IBM according to Wikipedia), so that might be why it's not used at least.
Thanks for posting a bounty!

Sorry about the latency, I'll work on that. I'll also address the Terms and Conditions issue (by most likely removing it entirely, since there is a redundant notice on signup). Please let me know if you have any other suggestions or feedback, I really appreciate it.
They have to do it like this:

- emule like dht.

- keep a cache of 1000 of ips that had trustworthy content in different ip neighbourhoods.

- provide a pub-sub of new content + hot/top files.

- seed one-to-download one file. Host encrypted content, freenet style to have faster speeds on other files. Never allowing a file to go seedless.

- the software could be provided as a chrome+firefox sandboxed addon or something like that.

Go hackers go.
Well, fortunately I've seen the XML terror coming from SOAP and WSDL, but in the class we had to use drag & drop wizards to create the service. How relevant is that.

Probably the intention is good, but the execution is dangerously discouraging and very very much out of sync with the industry.
Closures inside property initializations inside the class body don't work. Not even in an array.

So this code throws up a "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'function' (T_FUNCTION)"

class User
{
public static $mapping = array(
'username' => array(
'type' => 'string',
'length' => 32,
'unique' => true,
'nullable' => function() {
// Some logic to determine value.
}
)
);
}
I was just pointing out a method that would be considerably more simple to pull off than a timing attack. I recognise that there are still numerous steps that would need to be taken to pull it off.
I think this is quite a good technical reason:

Because code comments should never be necessary for a script to function properly.

In which other language do you see comment is necessary to make the code function properly?
What's in the annotation is configuration, not application logic. As such there's no real difference between putting configuration into YML, XML and annotation comments.

In response to your 4 specific criticisms:
1. (DX regressions) - in theory yes, in practice the frameworks are good at this. The annotations compile down to PHP which you can look at directly, and you get exceptions if there is something wrong with the annotation.
2. (Decreased readability) - subjective POV. I find it easier, because the relevant configuration is next to the code to which it applies. It also prevents crufty out-of-date comments floating around.
3. (Yet another library) - Yep. No answer there.
4. (Icky feeling) - I get far more icky feelings out of seeing 30 lines of custom written 'setup code'. Annotations help to prevent that.
It's a nice piece, but nothing new in it, and most certainly no doors were thrown anywhere.
I disagree.

> First of all PHP isn't about elegance...PHP is about getting stuff done.

What language isn't about getting stuff done?

> He doesn't offer one good valid technical reason why not to use comments...

Not true. The OP explicitly points out that it breaks many PHP debugging capabilities.

> The fact that you can even parse out comments with the reflection API lends, to me, that meta-programming is a-ok.

So what? PHP also has a goto function. Should we use it just because we can?

> I'll take the first one because I have other shit I need to do.

Just because it's less verbose doesn't mean it's better. Otherwise, everyone would use Coffeescript instead of JS.
> the official RFC for annotations is actually a little cleaner in syntax, easier to read and implemented in the language itself which is a way beter system than comment annotations.

Sure, everybody knows that, but when the language does not have actual annotations yet (in whichever form they are), in-comment annotations are a very common choice. That's also what Java libs tended to use before annotations were added in Java 5.
> In which other language do you see comment is necessary to make the code function properly?

If by "language" you mean "some library which also provides a separate but way more painful and verbose way of doing the same thing", then it existed in Java before Java 5 added annotations to the language itself.
Came here to post the same thing. I don't know if it has been fixed in 5.4, though.
http://hn.arcticmill.com/ hackernews reader works for me.
It's very easy to identify most people who use Tor (almost all nodes are publicly available). You can't know what they use it for, but if merely using it becomes illegal, the secret police will have a very neat list of houses to visit.
And before annotations were added in java, the exact same hack was used for annotations. The alternative was to have separate configuration and mapping files which was painful. And then, you had libraries which did not have in-comment annotations and intermediate ones which compiled in-comment annotations to the original libraries's mapping files. Oh the fun we had.
surprising omission at the end - any mention of scipy should at least include a pointer to sage as well.
That somebody could be you!
Its a syntax problem then ? what if the annotation wasn't inside comments would that make it ok ?
I never know that, but still, the point stands: making a comment necessity for code to function properly is bad, bad, bad. That's why the Java folks throws it out right?
College junior here. I am very glad to have taken as many AP classes as I have. I took 9 AP tests and did well enough on them to get credit for all of them them at my top 25 university. I started college with around 45 credits. More importantly, I started with nearly every general education requirement fulfilled. This is what made it possible for me to finish all of the major requirements for my Computer Science degree in my first two years and then also pursue my school's fairly intensive two year business program while taking more CS classes on the side.

AP may have its flaws, but it has allowed me to get much more out of college than I would have been able to otherwise.
I think yes. It's ok if it's not inside comments. Just like any other language (I know at least C# and Java do this for example).
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Thank you from sparing me from reading the article. :)
the clearest positive argument for AP participation is that high performance in AP courses correlates with better college grades and higher graduation rates, especially in science courses

Really? Everyone I know who participated did so primarily because a high enough score on the exam was likely to get them credit for some college course (that they then would not have to spend extra time and money to take).
The year is 1984 and I am 'Mostly Harmless'
Awesome.

Except for loading in google analytics. I'd really rather that my interactions with my government were not reported to a US based megacorp.
Nice to see the relationships visualized. I think it's a bit more cloud provisioning focused than, say, general purpose orchestration -- but this is an important problem that needs to be solved too!

For my take on this, see http://ansible.cc -- though I think we've talked already. One of the goals of that was modelling rolling updates and repeated idempotent configuration management, which is something orchestration tools need to be able to do for once those nodes are up (versus say, bash scripts). It doesn't really take on provisioning so much and assumes the nodes already exist.

I'm still thinking there is a good way we could collaborate so you could provide the modeling of the provisioning layer and leverage our backend for actual actions on the nodes (we'd need to write a push_script module, which is easy), since you seem to be doing the SSH thing already, which is the right way to go :)
He doesn't offer one good valid technical reason why not to use comments for meta-programming PHP other than "it just feels wrong" and an "icky feeling" which is entirely subjective.

Maybe it is subjective, but it sure gives me an icky feeling. You're breaking down a clear division between code and comment - fuzzing the lines. There's something about the idea that yes, I can only describe as being gross.

To each their own I guess, but it's not something I'd allow in one of my projects.
Hard to know where to start with this article, so let's take it from the top.

- Asserting that AP classes are not equivalent to classes where he went to school is unhelpful. Mr. Tierney fails to mention that he went to Yale, making this anecdote disingenuous at best.

- Colleges no longer accepting AP credit is hardly the fault of AP courses. This point is presented without evidence.

- Marginal students being allowed into AP courses falls squarely on the schools; this has nothing to do with the value of the exams

- We should be looking for ways to extend AP classes to minorities, not taking them away from everyone else because minorities do not have access.

- Is the "...mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry" mentioned by the author more likely in an AP class or in a freshman lecture with 400 students taught by an adjunct?

- The issues the author mentions w.r.t. the College Board have nothing to do with the value of the AP exam, but the author intentionally conflates these issues.
Pretty easy; you just email secure@microsoft.com (there are PGP or S/MIME keys available too) and you generally receive a response in a maximum of 48 hours. In most cases you get a reply within a few hours stating that you've passed their spamfilters, that they've done an initial overview of your report and that they will start looking into it.

If you google for "microsoft report security vulnerability" the first page you get is this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/ff852094.aspx. Doesn't get much clearer than that in my opinion.
My thoughts on the time limits...

I have wanted a service like this a dozen or so times this year, and each time it has been when I'm stuck on a problem that I need to get sorted ASAP. If I have time, I'll figure it out myself (that's part of the fun).

I usually want a solution within minutes/hours rather than in a week. I would happily offer relatively high bounties for solutions if I get them quickly, but if I have a problem and I have to give people a week to complete it, what happens when I solve it myself the next day?

This might not be the standard use case, I don't know. But I had an SQL query I was struggling with a few days ago that would have been fairly easy for an SQL expert to correct and I would have happily put up a $50-100 bounty for it, provided It was done in a few hours.

In any case, I love the service, and I will certainly test it out next time I get stuck on something!
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yeah, and he's entitled to his opinion, of course. It's up to us as readers and listeners to determine if the opinions hold any merit.
> I never know that, but still, the point stands: making a comment necessity for code to function properly is bad, bad, bad.

Not really.

> That's why the Java folks throws it out right?

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. "Java folks" don't throw anything out, Sun introduced a better and better-supported mechanism for doing what javadocs were coerced into doing.
It's called Haml and Slim, not HAML and SLIM.

Are you running the server in production mode?

Slim already has a set of benchmarks that compares it to Haml and ERB in various settings: https://github.com/stonean/slim#benchmarks

Do all three template engines use automatic HTML escaping?
If they are truly independent it would not matter what language they were written in.
By imposing a constraint of not the same, that imposes a dependency.
DX - As in Developer Experience? That's a first for me.
3) In this specific case we're reliant on Doctrine to read Doctrine annotations because we're already reliant on Doctrine to be Doctrine. Possibly relevant if the annotation reader was purely collecting metadata it did not use itself.
My takeaway --- from the fact that Matt Might's domain is second only to pg's --- is that you should write up easy to understand lecture notes on deep PL-related topics.
J is more of a general-purpose array language than one specialised for numerical work.
Reddit CEO on Violentacrez In Leaked Memo: 'We Stand for Free Speech'
> I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. "Java folks" don't throw anything out, Sun introduced a better and better-supported mechanism for doing what javadocs were coerced into doing.

I mean the Java community didn't use it anymore, because the "annotation inside comment" thing is worse than "annotation supported natively by the language". Granted, it's the only practical way to do it in PHP for now, but it still didn't change the fact that it's bad, IMO.

I wonder why SensioLabs (the creator of Symfony and Doctrine) didn't make the PHP's annotation RFC into reality. They are a quite huge powerhouse in the PHP world...
Somehow I don't think bittorent under TOR would catch on. Unless you don't mind waiting two weeks to watch your new movie.
This seems to be more like a Rundeck to me, i.e. parallel script dispatch?

Idempotent models are kind of important when managing systems in production environments as systems can be in heterogenous states and well, scripts fail. Part of the goal should be to get out of the practice of writing scripts.
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I'm not sure, but "independent production company" might refer to stage production.
I'm a ruby & rails beginner so I would definitely be interested in a book like this.
You get better security back for all the Windows machines that are in your local network, the ones that your customers use or the Windows/Azure servers you use for your day to day business.

If you dump it online way more people start looking at it. They might be able to turn it into a reliable exploit leaving you, your customers and your servers at risk.

But the last thing HN needs is another debate on the pro's and cons of full disclosure; that's been done to death in the past decade all over the web :)
I would argue that it's better for configuration and application logic should be separate though. You can run the same appliation with a different XML configuration without modification of the source. You couldn't do the same with in-comment configuration.
and even in the event they [cloud providers] found out
it would be impossible for them to gather data on the users.

The encryption key that is providing disk encryption on the VM instances would be accessible to the VM host. The VM host could also directly access the memory of the VM instances to read the disk cache, etc.
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It's kind of funny cause his proposed alternative is how Doctrine originally worked...

http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine1/en/lates...
they need to be able to dial support.

FTFY. Vendor apps and commercialized software aren't purchased (to my knowledge) with the intent of being able to point the finger with the buyer's lawyer. The reason large enterprises prefer Perforce/TFS/etc. is (along with their proven capability to scale) that if something goes wrong they can call the vendor for help.

While you might be able to post on a usergroup and hope for a response, you can't call Linus directly. That's a big difference for the people making the decisions from a financial, architectural, and tools-planning level.
They actually try to hide the usage of Tor as much as possible. There was a lengthy talk at 28C3 about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMr8Xl7JMQ
It seems like we got a competition (by we I mean http://carmivore.com/).

We're not this far yet though, so we better hurry! :)
+1, I saw this one coming... top secret DC with open doors ? duh.
Perhaps but it also increases the probability that a possible security issue gets exploited. I suspect the author just wants publicity first. Ego talks.
i wonder if this would becomes some sort of internet nuclear arms race which can only end poorly.
Didn't know Slim was much faster than Haml, might worth it to switch, since the syntax is pretty similar anyway!
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A123 Systems becomes America's latest EV battery maker to file for bankruptcy
Just for a Jekyll blog, you could just host it on a free Heroku instance with an Nginx server and put CloudFlare in front of it.

In a free Heroku instance you have a lot of juice actually, especially for an Nginx server, the only problem being that the instance will go in idle mode after an hour of inactivity and so unlucky visitors can get some latency on the first request, although it's not that awful.

On the other hand CloudFlare is a pretty good proxy that works like a CDN, so with the right caching headers set, CloudFlare will serve many requests from its own cache.
Apple acquire web firm Particle
I don't get it. It takes the exact same time to write a report to Microsoft about it. The author clearly didn't even consider it.
There are tons of developers who've got no experience dealing with (potential) security issues or have any idea about the "gentleman agreements" that are prevalent in the security- versus the IT-industry. So it could very well be that he has no idea what he's doing.

Then again; every 12 months or so the debate regarding full/responsible/no disclosure flares up again in the security-/IT-industry after another public outcry regarding one specific bug, company or patch. In the end nothing is resolved and we still continue to rely on gentleman agreements.
Yes, some configuration detail would be helpful. For instance, I can't find any custom Haml config, suggesting it's running with the defaults - in production mode this would mean that the output HTML is indented, while it wouldn't be in development or test. This has a noticeable performance effect, and it looks as though the same is true of Slim.
I was about to write basically the exact same comment. I am a product of several AP classes, followed by an education at a top 10 engineering school. All of my AP classes allowed me to save thousands of dollars in tuition by graduating early, and left me very well prepared for my college courses.

Of course not all programs are created or implemented at an equal level, but the author's single experience and unreferenced conjectures present poor arguments.
Mplus is quite popular in social sciences. From what I understand its main functionality is fitting Latent Variable Models and structural equation modelling. I've never used it myself, but it can in fact do things for which it is hard to find R packages at this point.
Looks like an acqui-hire. Their site[1] mentions they do (did) a lot of work for Google/Chrome.

http://particlebrand.com/#/about
Seems to be a dup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4663946
As an elder statesman here, (my high school years were 3 decades ago), I'm not sure how valid AP classes are today. But in those days, no one took AP classes unless they were extremely serious about college. The books we used and the instruction we received were sometimes higher quality than the courses at the university. My high school science and math courses were more challenging than all but most difficult university courses. It wasn't uncommon for students to test out of years of college classes. In retrospect I know now I was at one of the better public schools in the US, but at the time it was pure hell on occasion.
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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4663946 for earlier post
But then if the traffic between the loadbalancer and the actual server is vpn'ed, you can just sign up using another credit card with another person, and the host will be none-the-wiser again. That is, until they get another C&D letter. The game then repeats.

I think eventually, something has to give tho, but hopefully, it will be a while before that happens.
Education is probably one of the most complex social topics the world continues facing. Speaking only from having an American education experience (public schools, public college and public grad school), there seems to be a central underlying issue which the author highlighted. The central debate is the extent of teacher discretion we should allow in the class.

The battle is between two sides, one who believes teachers should just go in the classroom and teach what they think is best for the students, and the other side who believes teachers should follow a regimented curriculum to make sure students learn what they need to.

In a perfect world, where every teacher was amazing at helping students learn, the first option would be best. In the real world, teachers come in a variety of skill levels and we need some type of testing to make sure students are working hard and teachers are providing value.

Currently we (the US) solve this balance by allowing teachers to teach how they want but also testing kids every year in a standardized way. This is exactly how the AP test works and provides an important metric to understand how well students actually did. It is certainly not perfect, but is the best balance we can come up with at this point. My guess is that places like Khan Academy will serve as additional help as time goes on to increase student learning, and may even provide the opportunity for teachers to have more discretion in class while students learn more out of class.

As far as the rest of the arguments the author makes, it is clear the author did not teach in an average public college. AP classes were far more challenging in high school than anything my undergrad offered and many times better taught. My one regret was not filling my schedule with more AP classes.
For the curious, here is the tech stack: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/
I would have preferred fully distributed solution. This one is easy to take down. Also memory snapshots can be take from servers, so disk encryption doesn't help. Not best possible solution afaik.
Single page version: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-googl...
The problem isn't the particular reforms, it is the idea that any reform could evoke the needed individualization from centrally planned institutions.

My heart aches to think of the hell this man is in, and that his father is in watching him. I have worked with people in this condition, it is heartbreaking. I get the screaming urgency to do SOMETHING.

But if that something doesn't make sense it just isn't going to work.
I had the pleasure of helping to build and manage these facilities, both hardware and software, for 5 years. It's nice to see some of Google's real innovations reach the public eye. Some of the smartest folks I ever worked with at the company build absolutely mind blowing tech that the outside never has the opportunity to see or appreciate.

In fact, while much of the content in the article has been written about before, it's still probably 2-3 years or more behind where Google is actually at. I left in 2010 and did't read about anything I had not experienced.
One of the biggest reasons to switch is that Slim supports streaming and Haml doesn't, or at least won't until the next major version.

Sources: https://github.com/stonean/slim#slim, https://github.com/haml/haml/issues/436
You cannot point naked domains (like example.com) to CloudFront, because naked domains can only be configured with A records, not with CNAMEs.
Comments should be comments only, but your code in "alternative" is very dirty. Static(!) public(!) property is violation of encapsulation.
A Simpler Connection to Online Extras Wins Top WSJ Tech Award
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Indeed - I taught calculus years back, and the students who got good AP grades typically already knew nearly everything.

The students had a scam they seemed to like, however- take AP classes then retake the college course. Easy A.