skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A compiler could check that all inputs that are possibly from a user are sanitized or explicitly marked as being unclean / clean.
I usually dont like to talk in sound bites. But I can't help but say this famous quote from Gandhi.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

This article has a very judging tone. People are doing whatever they think matters for whatever reason - Its their choice. If you think Physics/Chem/Bio research is more important than dating, please be the guest of the world.... learn it and do it!

If you improve dating (to sufficient levels) and people are having better marriages and in turn healthy family structure that could possibly be more effective(in some measureable way) than say finding cure for some disease. So I dont buy that doing a dating service is worser!
In theory, for sure. Valgrind can test for certain kinds of undefined behaviour - it runs the code in a special virtual machine.

You could also have the compiler insert checks. Obviously this isn't desirable for a lot of C projects by default, but (other than in places like kernel development etc.) it could be a nice debugging aid. I don't know of any good tools for doing this comprehensively.
That is almost correct understanding. Processes that are waiting for things like disk I/O do not respond to any signals, not even KILL.
I don't intend to start a flame war, but I would like to recommend maybe using Mono on Linux instead of .NET on Windows. http://www.linode.com has some fantastic servers, I use mod_mono on Apache.

I apologize for not answering your question directly for I have don't have any experience with Windows or Windows hosts for that matter. If Windows is a MUST I apologize that I could not help.
You're also limited to one weight with web safe Ariel, which I noticed most of those logos had non standard weights.
C.R.E.A.M. my friend, it all comes back to the C.R.E.A.M.
I've heard of several:

http://embed.cs.utah.edu/ioc/
http://code.google.com/p/c-semantics/

Haven't used either in anger though.
I don't think he succeeded in starting any kind of conversation. He just sort of screamed vehemently at the internet, eliciting what appears to be a general backlash from HN.

Writing a blog post comprised heavily of expletives that most people immediately reject is not really promoting a discourse.
Unbridled curiosity. I highly recommend the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" - it's very good and insightful into how he approaches situations and how his thinking style shapes him and eventually his surroundings.
How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture
How many people do you think have had their health greatly improved by researching their condition through Google?

No doubt. When I was diagnosed as a diabetic a few months ago, one of the first things my doctor told me was "get online and research diabetes". Now, he knows I'm the type that would do that anyway, and that I try to be a very active participant in my own health-care decisions, but still... rather than trying to recite a laundry list of data and dump it into my brain, he's basically tell me "go use Google".

Heck, as far as that goes, my doctor routinely Googles things himself, while we're talking. Just a couple of days ago, we were talking about some test I might need, and he's going to Google and looking up stuff while we're talking.

So yeah, Google are helping people in any number of areas, albeit indirectly.
The article contains great confusion about ISP matters and "content" matters, but I don't see how Orange and Google should give a fuck about "content" matter (including the political circus) when they are negotiating peering agreements‎. If they do somehow, they this would be in very bad faith, but there is no sign they have done so in this story.
Block level deduplication?
> something deeply rooted inside the human psyche that refuses to completely accept that we are imperfect

I'm an atheist, but I've always been struck by how almost all successful human societies have an idea of god(s). I think it must confer some benefit. One of those benefits is a receptacle/personification for all the things we don't know/can't do - and a handle for all our ideals realised. Hence, the possibility of humility, not to another human "alpha male", but to something that, as mortals, we simply can't compete with. So the greeks had all these tragedies about hubris and nemesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(mythology)

Perhaps having a "god" as a label is psychologically easier to grasp than the nebulous and infinite "unknown".
There's a difference between Cerf's appointment and these positions:

Cerf wasn't elected.
The game feels well refined in terms of engagement. The difficulty builds at a good pace, and the achievements seem to be spaced out well. The balance you struck between challenge and reward is remarkable.

I was also fortunate enough to have the opportunity to learn programming at a young age, but I didn't understand user engagement until I was much older.

Best of luck to you. I'll be subscribing to your blog and following your ongoing programming adventures! And to reinforce other comments here, I would be interested in some "making of" posts.

PS- Great music. I love that you invested time in all the details like music and sound effects.
>it isn't at all easy to get into finance

so.. you are saying you need to.. be one of the best minds?
Thank you for this list! It'd be great if there was a resource somewhere that aggregated these companies so hackers could reference it as they look to switch jobs.
Hey tokenadult,

It's good to see someone that is much better read on this topic than I. You comment implies that you reject a hypothesis that I find interesting and I'd like to get your thoughts on it more directly.

A blogger pointed out that American racial groups score better on PISA than their countries of origin. Asian Americans do very well compared to Asian countries, White Americans outperform every European country except for Finland, and Hispanic Americans outperform every Latin American country. Subsaharan African nations aren't included - the only real "black" country is Trinidad and Tobago, and African Americans do better than that.

I am aware of the scientific weakness of the concept of race (there is a ton of diversity that is obscured by a simple label like "black" or "white"!). But I think the data can support the statement that Finland does well because it is populated by Finns - with all the cultural advantages that Finns enjoy. Whereas America has many cultures, some with a stronger evaluation of education than others.

Surely a country that receives an immigration equal to 10% of its population over a few decades from a country that performs lower than the country's average on the PISA is going to see its PISA scores go down.

Here are some interesting graphs from his blog:

http://www.vdare.com/images/121910_ss002.jpg

http://www.vdare.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullsize...

And yes, I know Sailer is racially obsessed and not a creditable source. But his analysis holds up to reason, and maybe we could check his numbers to make sure they are true? I do not read Sailer's blog, but I found a link back to this from a more mainstream source that I normally enjoy.

I'm going to be reading through your other links. I'm browsing and there is lots of great material here.
There's also two different (popular) typing approaches: inheritance and structural typing. Each gives you different ways of reasoning about functions and data.

Most of the hangups with static typing seem to come from three problems: Excessive boilerplate, excessive "type purity", and excessive compilation time. I would also argue that a lot of the hangups with static typing come from Java.

Java requires a lot of boilerplate to manage class constructors, etc. However, this is greatly reduced in new languages thanks to type inference.

Java is supposed to be about "pure" OOP, making it very difficult (and slow) to invoke any sort of dynamic method. It can't even type arbitrary methods, once again due to its object-centric focus. However, newer languages are offering more ways of dealing with different type systems, and/or dodging typing altogether in certain cases.

The last problem is with compilation time, which can eat into development time the same way that testing does.

There's newer static-typed languages that are making big improvements across all of these problems. Scala, Haxe, Dart, and Typescript are ways of making development easier for pre-existing platforms... either by relaxing type issues on the jvm, or providing type features for dynamic runtimes (js).

On the other hand, dynamic languages are starting to get very sophisticated linters that are catching classes of errors that are typically found by static typing.

So, in a way, both camps are addressing problems in their own way. I'm primarily in the static camp, but I develop using a lot of dynamic languages, and have been impressed with the tooling and resources available there. However, I see more improvements coming from the new static languages.
Still, exist a one true answer to everything. The problem is that truly understanding the question and work toward the correct answer is far harder than anyone can anticipate, for any kind of above-to-super-easy task you can imagine.

I dislike the "shades of gray/full colors" vs "black & white" thing, because IMHO, create the idea that exist several competing and contradictory correct answers to things. I tough still exist one puer solution, but several * approximations* that, because our limitations and/or limitations in the tools we use look like different (in computers, the final solution is expressed in assembler/bits. Languages are a illusion!).

But at the end, and with the age, I think is become clear that some questions beg for a better answers, but suck to solve it with our current approach. And I for example, all the time, working with python, obj-c, sql, delphi/pascal, javascript, coffescript, foxpro, html have the constant grief of "What if, I could to do this, instead of what I must do, because I can't with this tool!"

However, I firmly think is super-important to use several, opposite languages, to truly discover better ways to do things, learn more effective, faster, expressive or whatever approach to a solution, and broad the selection of tools to solve a problem. For example, when I use c# or obj-c, I tend to look the solution in python (my personal experience have taught me that python folks have the super-easy-to-understand solution to anything). I'm gratefull to have learned first foxpro. Is my secret sauce to be better with sql databases. I kill to have linq in other languages. How I wish to have learned haskell before. How I hate the verbosity of anything except python. Why python have null exceptions? And so on.

Is not, I think, the true realization of many, claimed to be: "shades of gray" but instead: Look, understand the life, universe and everything else become simpler when we have telescope, microscope, radioscope, math, physic, art, music, literature, science fiction, the other boring but useful science...........
If those things are bad, why does the standard allow them? If any trained C++ programmer would know not to write that sort of code, what purpose does allowing it serve?
Thanks for the suggestion. I've looked into Mono+Linux as a solution but I (unfortunately) need the server to host an Umbraco CMS instance which apparently doesn't work well with Mono.
Maybe he admits that he isn't a great mind? He might mask this admission by being overtly aggressive and profane, but let's not lose sight of this possibility.
Hey, the standard allows it. Why are we excluding code that is allowed by the standard and that many programmers would write if we are not making the "just do it right" argument?
Well, my classifier works based on categories like ruby, programming, php, magento etc.

To train the classifier I grabbed feeds from different reddits and used that as a based data set. What you are trying to achieve sounds more like a recommendation engine rather than a classifier maybe recommendify might come handy https://github.com/paulasmuth/recommendify

You still can use the bayesian classifier, for training it I would recommend the supervised training route, basically start with a small dataset(100 records) and manually classify each of the training examples.

Also you should leave some sort of way to provide feedback to your classifier to improve the results and make corrections
So has anybody been able to actually use Megaconz (i love the ironic name, btw)? My 70kb image upload's been pending for hours and the ENTIRE site is unusable while an upload is pending. I could have flew the fucking jpeg to New Zealand already. I guess i can speculate that the thing is either getting slammed with traffic or the release didn't go well.
No, you didn't. Best of luck.
Thanks for the encouragement! I will definitely try to find time to post more on my blog!
Here is a story from the beginning of last year of someone who did this. http://joelgrus.com/2012/02/16/hacking-hacker-news/

Link to HN Thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602407
Confirm. This system was obviously designed by people who had no idea what they were doing, which is about the last thing you want in a cryptosystem. Failing to authenticate the JS cryptographic code (TLS would've helped here) makes this system effectively worthless and simple to MitM.

A good read on the matter is Matasano's JavaScript Cryptography Considered Harmful: http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/
Wow the topics look pretty solid. I've never met Dr. Srinivasan but his credentials look impressive.

What I like most about the topics are that they are focused on what is needed from the tech side when starting a company.

In fact I would argue that a technical cofounder should be able to offer pros/cons and at least a few suggestions for each of these topics. Being semi opinionated about these types of topics is sometimes what separates a senior engineer from a junior one. (But not blindly opinionated).

For examples:

- VMs - Big leader is VMWare followed by a host of others. Almost any cloud service will be based around some form of virtualization such as Xen. Most startups use VMs because it is cheaper than buying regular hardware.

- IAAS/PAAS - Talk a bit about Amazon EC2 for infrastructure services. Jump into stuff like Heroku and why it is different than EC2.

- Text Editors - Pick whatever one you like. Don't be afraid to learn a new one if it helps your productivity.

- Frameworks - Use one. Don't write your own unless your startup is predicated on selling a framework to developers.

Etc...etc.
It's very easy to not let google index your content. What exactly is the problem here?
That's an interesting take. I always thought that they didn't know that their actions would result in such disaster.

I worry about the same non-effect with the gun-law blitz we're seeing after Sandy Hook. I worry that we're not attacking the problem- which may have more to do with mental health issues than gun laws.
> Learn the engineering skills needed to build a technology startup from the ground up.

"Learn the engineering skills needed to build a web startup from the ground up." FTFY
I used to be an Austrian but it's been almost a century now and it's become clear to me that the Keynesians are actually correct. Even after the GFC things bounced back very quickly. The power to inflate away old debt is too useful to sacrifice.
Your two statements are paradoxical.
The greatest minds of today are not all specialized in diabetes. If they are not masters of a highly specialized skill, their main focus is probably earning money. Which is OK, because all this infrastructure being created is going to hopefully make the life easier of those who do specialize in curing disease.
I think the research of education (and therefore, teacher education) is a big problem. It's one of those soft sciences where rhetoric and fads are more important than what's actually true. The critical pedagogy page on wikipedia is as mind-blowing as the postmodernism one, and not in a good way. I'm not saying that hard reductionism is a good idea in all fields, but things have to either be grounded in theory or reality, and the theory of education (as taught in a lot of universities) is neither theoretically sound nor realistic. See - learner styles (debunked, still pretty fashionable), MBTI (debunked, still pretty fashionable), and the huge amount of poorly-defined waffle. Tell 'em, show 'em, and make 'em do it themselves is still pretty much the gold standard.

At the other end of the scale, there's the way education is treated by policy makers. Teachers come from a wholly ivory tower, into "teach them how to pass the next test" grinder. Which is fine, if the tests were valid, but they generally aren't. For the vast majority of students, the best way to improve their marks (in the short term) is to help them exploit weakness in the test, not properly teach them the material they should be learning. Write lots of words on written response tests, and have a few widely applicable "big words" or "big phrases" ("Despite these not inconsiderable factors, the balance of evidence seems to suggest that ..."). "Science" is even easier to hack, as there are very predictable questions, and a shallow memorisation of the process of "solving" the problem is sufficient to pass (and easy to teach to the students who won't really "get it"). Sure, they are learning an important lesson - "work the system", but I don't see how the system (society) really benefits from this.
I suspect the rewards of an academic career are not on par with or even close to those of a career on the commercial path. The cost of tuition is prohibitive for most families and the rewards of a teaching/research career are mediocre at best compared to one in on a commercial track.

As well most schools have incentives to place students in commercial careers. It's what parents and students expect these days from an educational institution.

Finally it's extremely easy to get started and learn enough programming to be dangerous and difficult to learn enough to produce real innovation.
Would you have a copy of the tweet exchange?
I don't think so. In order to be a hypocrite, one needs to criticize a group into which one fits. However, the post explicitly referenced our nations "smart people," or whatever phrasing he used. Evidently, he doesn't consider himself sufficiently educated or academically positioned to pursue cures for diabetes, so it's permissible that he criticizes people who are in such a position and choose not to cure diabetes. This is why people who are not professional football players can still criticize a team: they are not members of that team and do not have the capacity to improve the performance of the team, so there is no hypocrisy.

Although this post is arguably bullshit for other reasons, it's not hypocrisy.
Not so. Assuming that a piece of code isn't doing anything undefined is a lot easier than detecting that it is.

That's generally how compilers take advantage.
> Are you against private resources being spent by a rich person to live to 94 instead of 92, or just public resources?

I'm against using public resources to do it.

I think it's irrational to use private resources to do it too, the equivalent of burning your house down before you die, but hey people are welcome to do that.
The compiler alone cannot do this, but the compiler combined with judicious use of the type system can. This is really the big value-add of Haskell/ML-style type systems; you can fit so many useful constraints into the type system that you can enlist the compiler into proving that you haven't made various common mistakes. If you can formalize an application logic error into a type error, you can use the compiler to enforce a wide variety of application logic error checking at compile time.

A simple example: suppose that every web form input is mapped into an "UnsafeUserInput rawtype" (that is, an algebraic data type parametrized over the raw input type). By simply ensuring that your output code only works on "SanitizedUserInput" types, you enforce that at some point in the code you apply a sanitization function to any unsafe input. Now the compiler is working for you, checking that your overall data flow respects the constraints you've encoded into the type system. In this style of programming, the type system becomes a way of encoding your desired integrity constraints inline with the functions and data types rather than outside the application logic in test suites.
I love this app:
http://readable.tastefulwords.com/

I've setup a bookmarklet using it; greatest thing since sliced bread.
I don't think Erlang's syntax is at all inconsistent; it's just different.

Once you understand what periods, semicolons, and commas are actually doing, there is no confusion. In the same way an English writer doesn't get confused about when to use periods, Erlang's periods become invisible before long.

That's not to say they are awesome. They cause some issues with refactoring. Moving a bit of code might involve also changing its ending punctuation. This is also true in JavaScript, Python, and Ruby in list/map syntax. You just run into it more with Erlang since there is more of it.

Pattern matching is also one of my favorite things about Erlang, especially the binary syntax.

One example I particular like is the binary digest to hex representation[1]:

hexstring(<<X:128/big-unsigned-integer>>) ->
lists:flatten(io_lib:format("~32.16.0b", [X])).

[1] http://www.enchantedage.com/hex-format-hash-for-md5-sha1-sha...
Precisely. Most here are going to be able to benefit society the most by creating the next pinterest or whatever and then using their money to bring forward change in the world, than trying to do some bio-medical-whatever that they don't have any skills in. Basic laws of specialisation/comparative advantage.

Of course, if you can find a relevant area to apply your skills to, then that's great. There is a lot that is less frivolous, too, even in the tech world.
Ask HN: Google+ Communities
Does anyone else around here think the Google+ communities is a good idea besides me? I honestly like its approach to the whole group concept much more organized than Facebooks. And personally I have learned a lot by just looking at some of the discussions in the communities I am apart of.
Is there a more accurate translation of iPhone "Math"? I don't see Cupertino naming a phone that.
I was thinking about this the other (past few months)

Getting into _that_ industry, I mean.

I was wondering specifically if it might be possible to get some existing medical devices to communicate via bluetooth with a central server; to build an adapter so everything that sent out a vital signal was logged on disc and remotely accessible in real time.

I was in a hospital recently, and the vital signs were logged on paper, and abnormalities were signaled by a loud alarm, to be audible at the nearby nurses station.

But I don't know how I can 'weekend hack' this sort of thing. Perhaps I can grab some medical surplus, a bluetooth adapter and start hacking?
As Warren Beatty said in Reds:

"Profits"
Everything before 'Did I get it right?' is correct.

I have no opinion on the bit after that. :-)
Doesn't really matter if you're "first" with a cryptosystem if it's horribly, horribly insecure either. Putting out badly designed cryptographic software like this is just irresponsible.