skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could everyone on HN just take a course in languages theory so we can all stop with these stupid trolls about the best languages which have been emerging for a week.

Hopefully it would allow everyone to realize that a language is just some syntax and semantic and that a compiler is just a program like another. Nothing sacred here. Hell you can even do imperative programming in Haskell if you wish. Coding an interpreter to do so is not particularly difficult.

With a bit of luck, everyone would understand at the same time that the compiler is building what is executed therefore the expression"speed of a language" is utter nonsense. You can only speak of the speed of the implementation which, yes, vary widely amongst compilers for the same language.

So, yes, Haskell semantics encourage functional programming, C semantics imperative programming, both are Turing complete and yes GCC is currently better at optimising C code than any Haskell compiler, nothing new under the sun. Can we all go back to a normal activity now ?
> we're not fickle when it comes to technology

> Compatibility is something which people have stopped valuing, which is bad.

OK, test your website in Netscape 4.
You seem to assume a lot of things. Your complete statement is nothing but a prejudicial bashing on a product made by a company that you don't like.
In a nutshell:

All you have to do is download a little script called lein. You run it to get a skeleton project set up. Add whatever libraries/dependencies you need for the project, including the Clojure version, in the project.clj script. Then start the repl using lein ($ lein repl), and Bob's your Uncle - leiningen manages everything after that. No complicated tool chain set up, not even any need to rely on the package installers on your OS (and the usually outdated versions they provide).

I couldn't help you with an article that tells all, but that was a really compelling story for me.
Firefox now do 'Extended Support Releases' for controlled environments where the admins dont want constant updates
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
> wondering why no one will play with him

That's kind of a strong statement about a language which has approx. 1000 users in it's IRC chatroom.
You're sad because people disagreed with you? Have fun in the OSS world.

Your original post is a bit ridiculous too. OSS isn't for the commonfolk? I guess android isn't the most popular smartphone OS and ubuntu isn't grabbing huge market share.
> today’s diabetes patients are tomorrows alzheimer patients

... possibly. Or they could be tomorrow's cancer patients, or tomorrow's stroke patients, or tomorrow's jack-knifed tractor trailer across three lanes of traffic patients. All those can happen to people without diabetes, too, though; it's part of living.
Why did MIT call in the secret service right away?

The answer must lie with certain Charles M. Vest who, in 1990, became president of MIT and served in that position until December 2004. He is now MIT professor and president emeritus.

He also happens to be a key member of the board of trustees of Ithaka, the owners of JSTOR.

I would not hold out my breath for MIT investigation criticising its own President Emeritus.
What doesn't run on IE8 at the moment? Trello is one prominent app that steadfastly refuses.
Atari files for bankruptcy protection
This reminds me that when I was interested in learning haskell I was completely put off by their "introduction" page on their homepage. It was a couple of years ago but it doesn't seem to have changed much:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction

It looks like a very pretentious sales pitch to me. You have quotes like "Writing large software systems that work is difficult and expensive. [...] Functional programming languages, such as Haskell, can make it easier and cheaper." and a whole bunch of very vague and poorly backed up assertions.

After a couple of paragraphs brainwashing you about how good functional programming is, you finally get to some code. The first code you get is (of all things) a quicksort which is not used as an introduction to the language but as a way to boast that haskell is so much better and more expressive than C. I mean, look at that C code just after it, disgusting isn't it.

What they don't say is how much slower their implementation is, of course. They also give a link to a more direct (and faster) C-to-haskell version of the quicksort[1]. Hey, it's actually longer than the C version! And it uses 3 imports. And it's still slower than the original C. Oops. I wonder why they didn't put that one in the tutorial. I went back to common lisp after that, I have yet to write 1 line of haskell.

TL;DR: when I want an introduction to your language, I want to know what I can do with it and how I can do it. Give me some code to chew on, show off some features. Don't spend 10 pages telling me you're the best of the best and everything else is crap. This is the kind of article I expect: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html

[1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction/Direct_Trans...
In Australia, I'm happy to say all I need to do is report a data leak to the privacy commissioner and they'll basically investigate what's happening and force changes.
Decode Jay-Z with Bing - Case Study
"Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how to make people click more on ads?...One simple answer to the question is Geography."

"Why do some of the best minds in our industry spend time figuring out how to make people click more on ads?...One important factor to answering that question is Geography."

See the difference?
wikileaks getting some free publicity...
It involves more or less humongous amounts of pre-meetings, meetings, post-meeting, legal documents, reviews of meeting, implementation strategy, review of implementation, certificating/accepting, post-...

You got the picture.
In big companies it might take some time.

Essentially is is very broken system that destroys itself.

It is like you need a manager to watch over a manager that watches over a manager.

It is funny to work at such companies, I got fired from one when I said everything I think about them.
Yeah, but if you look at his submissions, comments and account lifespan you can see he has no interest in taking part in the community, only pimping his app.
Cute idea but ultimately a dirty and pointless solution
You might be "only" 17 years old, but with emotional intelligence higher than some 40 years old I've known (and much more than I had when I was 17).
p.s. thanks for introducing rhok.org via your post, sounds like a great initiative.

p.s. I have read your original post's comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016620) and I completely agree the comments were nastier than they should have been to make the same point.
Wow, what do you do, if you don't mind me asking? I'm very impressed if you're making close to 200k as a software engineer.
I agree. I'm sure Google has at least some idea of what's going on. I'll assume you're using pseudonyms and other falsified credentials in order to prevent Google from linking your information... but your phone's MAC address and IP indicate that the accounts are all being utilized regularly by the same device. The big question is whether or not Google's systems are sophisticated enough to distinguish one device with multiple users from a single user with multiple accounts. Because Google's algorithms are proprietary there's little chance we'll ever definitively know whether or not they're successfully seeing through your tactics (unless there's some sort of public privacy statement that I don't know about).

At this point I'd say the benefits are outweighed by the fact that your efforts could very well be pointless.
This is a perfect example of 'No good deed goes unpunished'.

The best action to take while you find a security flaw is to do nothing. Let some one evil abuse the flaw and make the guys miserable enough to realize the importance of a responsible disclosure.

Without this the guys ego is going to take this as- 'How dare he point a problem in my/our work' and not 'Thanks for saving my life before some body could screw me'.
Show HN: A List of SaaS Metrics Tools on Quora
I'm surprised there isn't more criticism of Microsoft in this article.

There's one big reason why IE9 isn't available on XP, and it's commercial rather than technical. Microsoft know that businesses don't have many reasons to upgrade from XP (at least not before 2014), and they're trying to force them.
I manage a few standardised XP desktops and it's going to take some work before we can upgrade them to Windows 7. If IE9/IE10 was available for XP then I'd have upgraded already.
Is there a ready-made trusted image that people can use as a secure base?

I'm not exactly good with dev ops and tweaking operating sytems. Even If I do attempt to fix it up and secure it, it will leave me uneasy because I don't fully understand the things I've done.

If there was something trusted and ready-made would be great.
the lowercase t is also a giveaway, helvitica has a flat top with arial having a slanted top.
I memorized HJKL thusly:
• H and L are leftmost and rightmost keys, therefore they move the cursor left and right respectively
• J kind of looks like it's pointing down
• This only leaves K as the up arrow (the only remaining choice)
Except you know that this is an age-old rhetorical technique, right?

Examples of Apophasis: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis

I'm trying not to be harsh with this, because I think the blog post was quite nice, but the only reason to say, "I am never going to play the 'I'm-a-kid' card" is to project a sense of superiority in comparison to kids who "played the card."

I think it's fine if you want your work to be judged on "adult" standards -- it's quite admirable. But if I was 14 and wanted advice on how a 14 year old should proceed, the advice could be very different from the advice you would give to someone you presume to be an adult. This is not an ideal situation, but it's a simple fact that being 14 puts you in a very different position than someone who is 24 -- it's impossible to show up at a bar to attend a meetup, it's harder to find other hackers (depending on location), and there are also a completely different set of life-related priorities that may factor in.

To put it simply: it's not the kid's fault for saying that he or she is 14. It's the community's fault for voting it up just because of the kid's age (if that's what's happening -- in many cases, the upvotes can also be well-earned).
Sounds like a very cool course.
I think this is really awesome. I know I can use ES5 and I don't even have to worry about old browsers because my app requires the latest to work, but I think this is more a preference thing.

Hell, I could even use JQuery for a lot of this stuff, but I really like ruby standard library and it's cleaness.
Does anything stop people from running Portable Firefox [1], the version built to run without installation, e.g. off USB drives and such?

[1] http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

(edited to add forgotten link)
For money, obviously.
He could have been reading HN without necessarily having the confidence to post something until he had something he felt he could contribute (i.e. an app he built). Obviously we can't read his mind, but I wouldn't mind giving him the benefit of my doubt.
That's exactly what I was looking for, thank you. He doesn't include results, but has some good ideas.
There are plenty of other browsers. Given a choice between changing browsers and changing OS, I suspect the suits will choose the browser.
Chrome Frame is viable and a solution we push for. The reason is that our product is sold to a variety of customers, some wanting "cutting edge" and keen on automatic upgrades, while others are more reluctant and want a more static panorama (control issues, or 'special' demographics that would be lost on a browser switch), yet both want convenience features like file attachments via drag and drop.

We have limited resources, therefore we stay focused on our area of expertise and stick to standards (zero flash/java/silverlight to minimise support area and odds of yet another thing possibly going wrong), develop edge (HTML5, CSS3, responsive...) first, and have fallbacks for less compliant browsers (e.g IE9), and possibly block access to part or entirety of our products to old browsers, while clearly informing the user as to why he should live with it or get on board, and that he can use Chrome Frame to not change anything to his habits but raise the "features" bar (most of the resistance comes from ivory tower project managers and BOFH sysadmins, while users mostly don't care or agree). This is, for us, the only viable solution in the long term.
One of the big advantages of wearing a mask (any mask) is that it stops you touching your mouth. Most people touch their mouths dozens of times a day without even thinking about it, and it's a fantastic infection vector. Person with a cold sneezes, gets rhinovirus all over their hands, touches a door handle, you touch the door handle, you bite your nails - hello cold!
I'm trying to translate what you are saying. All languages are Turing complete, so it doesn't matter? Do you program in assembly language then? I mean, if it doesn't matter....
How do new pastebins get discovered? I've never used the service - was assuming someone should post the link to the pastebin on Reddit?
The World's Largest Natural Sound Library Is Now Fully Online
They intentionally target the weak pretty often. Migrant workers were a favorite for years. These guys work in bad conditions in the US for 5-10 years or more, saving their money in a big wad of cash, then they'll go back to Guatemala, buy some land, pay for their kids to go to school, and so forth. Police know that they got the money working in chicken factories, construction and field work, and that they don't fight back, so when they find one of them driving south, they stop them and keep looking until they find their wad of cash, then steal it. Usually by the time the wad of cash gets back to be checked in, it is smaller, assuming it is checked in at all.

These sort of shakedowns are common in the third world by corrupt police. Make no mistake, this is the same sort of police here. Didn't used to be like this. There has always been some corruption of course, but it wasn't the normal way that things are done.
There are various things you can do and various machine learning techniques you can use, but I imagine that the single user version would be enough, to start with.

I'll give it a go and see if it works well. If it does, I might release it as a service.
I've observed several attempts at pushing chrome frame to large multinationals with IE6 and IE7. Couldn't get traction. It's too much of an unknown, and in one case they were using a custom browser around IE's browser control and chrome frame wouldn't have worked.
My progression went something like this: some form of basic, Visual Basic, Python, C++. I then stuck with C++ for personal projects for about five years. In this time I tinkered with a ton of other languages too (assembly, ML, prolog, pascal, ...)

Sometime during my C++ years I studied computer science, where I learned Java, some more x86 assembly, some mips assembly, some haskell, some more prolog and rediscovered Python. I then used Python as my main language for a few years. After university, I worked with Java and a little C++ for a few years and then left to do contract work, where I used Python for web work and assembly (PIC24), C and C++ for embedded systems work.

And now I run a startup, where we use Clojure, Python and a tiny bit of C++.

So to answer your questions, Python played an important role in my programming history (indeed, still does), but I think the most important thing is to learn many (different!) languages. Python is a good language and will serve you well, but you don't want to get stuck with a single way of thinking. For example, there's more to the world of programming than Object Oriented programming.
Some people like bickering. But I think the point of the article is that C is, by nature of the language, easier to optimize than Haskell, since it is lower level.
What's the status on the Windows 95 and IE 5.5 crisis? ;)
Two things I love about Haskell.

1. It is very terse/expressive. I can look at code I haven't touched in 6 months and still understand what it's doing. Perhaps because my code is newbie code and thus somewhat simple.

2. It is the only language that brings me back to the days of Turbo Pascal when the joy of coding came from coding itself, not from building cool things. A small but vital distinction.

That said, I rarely get to use Haskell. For most of my tasks javascript is better suited, but haskell has affected how I write javascript to a great extent.
That's an extreme point. IE8 is only 3 years old and still supported. Netscape 4 hasn't been around for nigh on ten years.
Show HN:My Music Hack Day STHM hack - create playlists of cover song chains
USB ports being disabled on corp PCs for one.
What did you think of the course textbook ("Exploiting Software", Hoglund & McGraw)? Is there a more modern alternative that you (or anyone) can recommend?
It amazes me how bad developers seem to be prepared nowadays in compiler design and language theory.

Back in the day we were able to understand that language and implementation are separate concepts. As well as why certain languages had a specific implementation as the default one.

Now young developers seems to think language and implementation are the same thing.
Cannot access the Hacker News Meetup page anymore... (http://wiredcraft.github.com/hnshanghai/)
Yeah, I'll have upvotes and downvotes to tell it what I liked or didn't. Unfortunately, I can't see a way to do this without supervised learning (maybe semi-supervised would work), which is why I posted here for ideas (I want to avoid the costly supervision step if someone knows the result won't work).

Thanks for your comments, they help a lot.
When you find a tool that in many ways is far better than every other tool used by the mainstream (and of course in some ways worse) you might get excited about it so you want to share the knowledge you found.

Or maybe you prefer the tool you like to get more adoption so you could use it in more situations.

I advocate Haskell because of those two reasons. I think that like me, many others can get enormous educational and practical benefits from learning Haskell and I'd really rather be using Haskell than e.g Python.
The number of people present in the IRC channel is more of a sign that they have a very engaged and active community, which is a good sign for the language itself, for sure, but doesn't necessarily correlate to the general adoption of Haskell as a whole.

A measure like http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... (by no means a perfect one, quite like speed benchmarks ironically) seems to indicate that Haskell still has a long way to go before reaching "mainstream adoption". But you're right about that statement, it was intended more as a humorous jab than a statement of absolute truth :)
wow, a blog post ranting about a blog post where HN users don't have the same opinion as you...really ?
> more jail time than robbing a bank

This meme of "more jail time than robbing a bank" needs to end.

The federal penalty for possessing a firearm while robbing a bank is a mandatory minimum of 5 years and a maximum of life in prison. The mandatory minimum means that a judge could not sentence an armed bank robber for less than 5 years for each bank robbed while holding a gun (you don't even need to show it; just having it is enough). To make it worse, each 5-year gun sentence must run _consecutive_ with each other sentence (ie., be added on after you serve the other sentences). [1] If you brandish the gun, it becomes a mandatory minimum of 7 years, and if you fire it you get a mandatory minimum of 10 years [1].

Contrast that to all of the hacking charges we've discussed recently where the mandatory minimum is zero (a judge could sentence a convicted defendant to no penalty, or to probation).

To go further, the US Sentencing Guidelines [2], which are all-but-mandatory for federal judges (there's a constitutional out, but in effect most defendants are sentenced according to the Guidelines) gives "wire fraud" a base offense level of 7 (of 42+), which gives a sentencing range of either 0-6 months or 4-10 months, depending on how much economic harm is caused. Compare that to robbing a bank, which is a base offense level of 22, brandishing a firearm adds +5 for an offense level of 27, and if you actually make off with any cash add another +2 for an offense level of 29 (of 42+). The sentencing guidelines call for a sentence of 87-108 months (7-9 years) for a first-time bank robber, per bank, assuming that nobody gets hurt---plus the mandatory additional 5+ years for having a gun.

Realistically, bank robbers face a lot more time than even malicious computer criminals.

[1] See section (c) of 18 USC 924 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/924

[2] http://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/index.cfm
Dancer Goes Megasplat
I'm stating the truth that you can do what you like, but I don't think that is necessarily right.

We still have a lot of corporate users on windows XP with no sign of them upgrading any time soon. Why? They don't need to - they're not on the public internet and everything they already do still works. There is little value in them changing. Their windows 7 upgrade is scheduled as an incremental step around 2015 but only on hardware failures.
I'm never going to play the "I'm a kid" card, he says - 10 paragraphs after playing it. ("My 17-year-old-brain thought...")
Has Jeff Minter had a kid?
Usability problems of the Gmail app for iOS
No, he's 100% right. This irrelevant "hypocrisy" charge scares people into pointing things out that should be pointed out. So what if someone admonishes Google/Facebook for working on "stupid" ideas while working on an even stupider one? Wouldn't that put said person in a better position to know about working on stupid ideas?

Crying "hypocrisy" is just the "cry wolf" fallacy.
The problem is the that would provide a legitimate cover story for black hats. "Oh I was just doing a white hat scan".
Try hitting reload - I managed to get in after a few attempts
Where is your HEAD?
They use the same process to seize websites. MAFIAA, RIAA, MPAA or any powerful lobbying group can use this tool to sieze any website without any due process.
it seems like there's more to this story, and the more to this story is around his actions two days after the report.

I've seen things like this happen before. You find a bug, you report it, they tell you "oh we're getting on it immediately". Some time goes by and you think, hey, did they fix it? You look, discover "nope", think "man I bet those guys would fix it if I lit a fire under their ass" and try and use the bug to deface the site, or something.

this is logic that makes sense to a 20 year old (speaking as a former 20 year old..). I've seen that happen before. the article doesn't say this, but perhaps reading between the lines the second attempt did not have a pure motivation behind it...
Xly
Sorry, that's crazy talk. If IE9 were available for XP, these business wouldn't use it for the same reason they aren't upgrading to Google Chrome (even though its free and available).
From what I understand Admin rights are not needed for a chromeframe install. I'm not sure how locked down a PC would need to be to prevent its installation.
Tell that to the valid copyright holders hosting their content on MegaUpload. Regardless of whether the system is used for legal or infringing purposes, the reality is that distribution companies have the ability to take down both when they claim some are using it to infringe. The concern for copyright holders is not the encryption per say, but the ability for big business to NOT be able to take down their legal content under the guise of a moral cause.