skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It can be. A value of type `IO foo` is an ordinary, pure value just like a value of any other data type. It can be passed as an argument to a pure function, returned from a pure function, manipulated using any functions that can apply to `IO` values, stored inside an arbitrary data structure, composed with other `IO` values to make new ones, etc.

What isn't pure is the process of extracting the `foo` from the `IO foo`, i.e. getting the result of the I/O action. For instance,

getLine :: IO String

is not a function in Haskell, which you can "call" in order to get a string from stdin. It is instead a value which represents an I/O operation yet to be performed. There is no way to force it to yield its result within your entirely pure program (ignoring escape hatches like `unsafePerformIO` and friends), but you can nonetheless compose it with other I/O operations which depend on its result, such as putStrLn:

echo :: IO ()
echo = getLine >>= putStrLn

The above defines a pure value representing an I/O operation which, when performed, will echo a line from stdin to stdout. The `>>=` combines the two pure values to yield a new pure value. Again, there is no way to directly cause this I/O action to be executed, which would necessarily introduce impurity. You can only ensure that it will happen later by threading it into the special I/O operation `Main.main :: IO ()`, which every program must define, and which will be implicitly performed when your program is run.

By reifying "statements with side effects" into simple, pure, first-class values of type `IO`, Haskell lets us remain 100% pure even while our program will eventually have effects on the real world outside of the machine. Haskell code is just a set of pure declarations; the side effects are deferred until after our code has already run (which conceptually happens instantaneously when the program is launched). Since our code runs "before" any side effects occur, it cannot possibly depend on their results.

A Haskell program merely sets up the dominoes in an elaborate arrangement, then looks the other way while the runtime system knocks over the first one.
Nice example of PHP being put to use on the console.
you need to apply for a H1B for a STEM extension.
You cannot simply blame the government policymakers. Civil servants make the policies based on Congressional direction. Congress develops laws due to public pressure which is often led by lobby efforts. Who funds the the lobbyists?

The entire society is guilty for the current state of economic affairs as civil servants don't stand up to Congress, Congress wants to get re-elected, the public is easily distracted, and the 1% or .001% fund the lobbies.
Yes: the X.509 nameConstraints field, which modern browsers will read to determine which subdomains are acceptable as subjects for certs signed by the CA.

Earlier today I thought that nameConstraints was ineffective, but it seems to turn out that the problem is mostly limited to Safari.
I had an "aha" moment here - very nice little article.
I'm one of those people and it looks like I am, for the most part, wrong about that.
While I'm not privy to the specifics of this specific deal, I believe often the point of raising large amounts of capital, is to secure and ensure continued market dominance, in winner-takes-all stakes.

It's usually not the primary goal to innovate new features per se, although that is often what is stated publicly.

Furthermore, when it comes time to exit, a premium will likely be paid, for the competitor in pole position.
Amazon has patented the milkman, etc.
A lot of people like to be coy here. That's okay. For an example of a profile of a person who desires to be more identifiable, see mine.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult

I don't have any problem with the look of Hacker News. Insofar as the look is a bug, being off-putting, it is a feature, discouraging people who are looking more for pretty websites than for intellectually engaging discussion.
In some older version of Windows, the blue screen would dump out debugging information that was useful to developers. For example:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chagiajose/3326640267/lightbox/
The problem with that idea is that the CA root store on your computer is a tiny subset of all the CA=YES certificates out there, because of intermediate chained CA certificates.

So what you really need is something that watches every CA cert your browser ever sees and then does detective work on them. Which is sort of what Moxie Marlinspike's Convergence project was doing.
I'm not signing that petition, because fuck Oracle, and fuck Java in the browser. We don't need it anymore. I hope they keep bloating it until people simply refuse to install it, and even corporate IT departments start saying "what the fuck?" and start porting their software to something else. JavaScript, CSS3, Canvas, even SVG does everything the Java plugin did, but better. Way better.

EDIT: Wow. Didn't realize I felt that strongly until I wrote this. But client-side Java, which I spent many years programming, is a tragedy of epic proportions, and my anger hides a real sadness.
College professors grading essays purely by computer - is this legit?
Hi HN, need some opinions here. My girlfriend is going to college at Oklahoma City Community College. She's enrolled in a intro history class there. Today she tells me that their professor told them to submit their essays through this url:

http://katengine.com/collector/he-hist/prompt/MyHistoryLab011/begin

He explained to them that this is an automated system that will actually grade their essays and only if they want an exception will he review their work. He also told them that their work would be used to further train the system - he didn't tell them anything about how to opt out of this if they don't want to. I'm not sure if this is something he is doing himself or something the college is adopting in their classes.

All i've been able to find about this katengine is this document:

http://www.reedpetersen.com/portfolio/pe/pa/writetolearn/download/kat-engine.pdf which makes it seem like a simple latent semantic indexer.

There's another marketing PDF here : http://www.reedpetersen.com/portfolio/pe/pa/writetolearn/download/wtl-faq.pdf

that has a section on their "Intelligent Essay Assessor" which claims it works by checking similarity with some model essays. This seems like a simple LSI model with some added features.

I'm pretty irate about this- i work on machine learning and distributed systems myself and given the state of the art, I just can't fathom how a teacher could responsibly decide that a system like this can actually assign a student a final grade for essay type answers. I'm planning on asking my girlfriend to raise this issue in her class.

So my question is this - does anyone here have any more experience with these kind of essay grading systems - are they actually able to do a reasonable job (and is my indignation overblown), or is this a case of people using poorly understood technology in bad ways that should be protested or at least explained in greater detail to the students.
Show HN: What's still open during Nemo?
I thought it might be nice for people to be able to search for establishments in the Northeast that are still open, surviving Nemo's wrath. So I hacked together this site for that exact purpose.
No, there is a way to do this, and it appears to be mostly effective today.
He confirmed it wrongly.
I think it would be more accurate to say a "MITM certificate" is any private key with the ability to impersonate server and intercept SSL/TLS traffic.

There's a huge difference in security between a cryptographic-strength guarantee enforced by reliable technical mechanisms and the security provided by a civil law contract enforced by an audit regime. Also, note that the world's true Relying Parties (i.e., every web user and server operator who could potentially be MITM'd by this private key) are usually not formally acknowledged as parties to these contracts and as such have no say in their creation or even knowledge of their existence.
Thanks Adam, yes these are not MITM certificates.

They are used by large environments like Google and Microsoft to issue certificates for their assets and people.

They are contractually and technically (new but now standard) prohibited from using them for malicious use cases including MiTMs.

They are audited to conform with those terms and must meet the same requirements a certificate authority in the Mozilla guidelines.
> Silicon Valley has been filled in recent years by people who've seen movies like "The Social Network" and read TechCrunch with its myth of the heroic entrepreneur, and have come here thinking this is how it is.

Really? I seem to have met someone like this last year when I first arrived in the Bay Area, but he seemed to be focused on the racier party scenes in "The Social Network." There was one incident where he decided it would be dandy repeatedly to leap up and down from his bunk to the floor, in the process spilling a glass of beer on a woman's Macbook and upending it face-down opened on the floor. He didn't apologize to her or even acknowledge that he did it.

This guy has the gall to mumble editorial comments under his breath while I'm trying to talk business to someone.

He's also the quintessential example I give of shallowness I've encountered in the Bay Area:

"This needs better design."
"Really? Do you know what those buttons do?"
"...no."

When pressed for what better design constitutes, he recommends a different font and "some gradients."
Concise indeed, only around 2,000 lines for the whole thing. Though I'm not sure if it's possible to quantify the accuracy of the emulation.
the accuracy does not seem to have reached the level where it would be really usable yet. 80% accuracy means every 5th slide the transition goes wrong. but i suspect pouring some machine learning magic dust on this could get it there.
Hm ok, I guess that makes it less of a big deal, but it still sits funny with me.

I guess all iOS devices are still "vulnerable" to a rogue nameConstrained CA then - assuming they share code with Safari?
The Importance of Excel
Merely humorous comments detract from the true comedic function of Hacker News, to satirize Reddit. I'm kidding?! As to the community, it seems to support our gracious host's objection, not to jokes as such, but to jokes based in meanness or stupidity and to the ease with which such jokes proliferate. Here is a post that quotes this objection specifically: http://www.kottke.org/09/02/the-fluff-principle-and-other-th...
ITT: People in SF get a taste of LA and NYC.
40% of Mexican GDP in hands of 0.18%
Owned by 208,000 out of 115'296,767 people. Pareto?
For a niche product you'd expect to pay more, not less!
Obviously, you're supposed to not vote for anyone, then go online and tell everybody about how you're fighting the system.
That's actually true about Hacker News on mobile screens. Yes, you can zoom in, but then you have to scroll left and right to see the text. Extremely annoying.
No, I just wanted to make sure you weren't conflating what happens to species with what happened with Columbus and Hispaniola. I'm not so sure we know in enough detail exactly what happened to Neanderthals for that to be a good example, especially since the conversation is about the meeting of different civilizations, not just different species.
The census: Some other race
Rain-X/Fox-X hardly eliminates the need to wipe windshields or clean bathroom mirrors, so my guess is that while it will reduce time between cleanings, it won't rid the need altogether.
Note that this project includes a makefile, though Rust will be moving away from make and friends entirely once the new rustpkg tool is merged:

https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/4610

Independence from external build tools is one of the coolest features of Go, so I'm really excited about seeing more languages take this route.
Holy center aligned code batman. Nice work though, wish I had been that adventurous during the snow storm :)
Ask YC: team that you wanted to fund, but one member you didn't like?
A couple guys I collaborate with want me to join them on their YC application. I'd like to do it, but I'm old and I've already been rejected by YC twice in the past (once with written, once I made it to the in person interview). I'm worried that having me a part of their submission will lower their chances of getting in. I think they have a good chance otherwise.

Have you ever had a team that you wanted to fund, but ultimately decided against because of just one member of the team that you didn't like?
Oh TC... you give me much amusement while i browse the internet while i poop
I don't even really mind it, since I can manually adjust the size. What drives me up walls in a murderous rage is when they lock it down with CSS, so my zooming has no impact. I'm all for your site looking however you want, but don't force it on me.
I used to agree with you. Never did I wish to have a touchscreen on my Macbook. In my head it manifested a cumbersome scenario. Then, my lady bought a Surface RT. I use it as a laptop often, and find that having a touchscreen is great. I often find myself trying to touch the screen of my iMac or Macbook, after using Surface RT.

I hooked up the Surface to a 21 inch Samsung tv through the microHDMI. It is a great way to watch a movie and surf the web, all from the little guy. I have cranked out serious work through the Surface Type Keyboard as well. The best part is the tablet can live without being a parasite to my main computers.

It would be great if every device had many types of inputs, touch, voice, or gesture.
MHacks: Nation's largest student hackathon
I think this is only for companies over 49 people right? So as long as he has small co's he's fine with that opinion/approach no matter how iffy it is.
Call your representatives. Seriously, honestly, call them up and explain it to the staffer who answers the phone. Make sure to let them know that you are a voting member of your district and express your opinions politely and confidently. They really do listen to what their constituency has to say, which is a large part of why younger generation's interests are rarely represented. The older generations are actually communicating with their representatives rather than fire-and-forget style of voting. A trip to their office is the most powerful for communicating how you feel, a phone call next, a written letter next and an email is basically a "I don't care much" type message.

While you won't reach your representative directly, the staffers do pass on the feedback to the representative (each office is different, some will read each piece of mail while others only get summaries of what people in general are communicating about).

A representative democracy works only when you actually communicate to your representative what your interests are.
> First, we aren't the real elite. Founders are yeoman project managers at best, engineers are less than that-- not even able to raise a family in the Valley-- and even the venture capitalists are, for the most part, merely junior elite.

I bet a lot of folks in France between 1789 and 1799 were paraphrasing, "I'm not a real aristo," or "I'm only a minor aristo."

Note that the junior elite is more likely to be left as scapegoats to the mob, while the real elites will have the resources to escape.

And you do realize, as a smart, hip, dare I say elite person, that the ;) was a signal of sarcasm.
For an app like SnapChat, at scale they "could" make money by inserting ads based on location, two friends "snapping," or ad-on features. But, would need to reach scale, which they may just do.
While I too dislike small fonts, I'm particularly rageful of web designers that force this on the user using -webkit-text-size-adjust:none; [1]

That bit of CSS will prevent Chrome and Safari from allowing the text to be resized at all.

The Facebook Social Comments plugin is one such occurrence, but I see it all over the web.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1831922/how-to-prevent-us...
>do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison

Hilarious! That dude is the worst of the worst, and should be on the wall of any Oracle using companies engineers as a reminder of why you want to put in the extra hours to implement Postgres to deny that asswipe his next megayacht.
Interesting - right now, can a user set a picture to not expire?
I made a rough estimate what instagram spend on hosting just before FB bought them, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was a few 100K/month. At this scale, and especially AWS, this isn't cheap.
If snapchat supposedly does 50 mln imgs/day, their hosting also won't be free.

Also, if they could raise this at a nice valuation, it gives them a nice runway.
I think you misread: the grandparent is talking abouthe box web aapp, not the native one.
It's already happening. Our desktop support IT guy came by to do some updates to my computer and he asked me if I wouldn't mind if he uninstalled Java. I said sure, no problem.
epic hackathon!
The rate of bit-coin creation is only fixed over time, you can create a new bit-coin 'out of thin air' if you add enough computing power to the network at the right time and in the short term. The compensation is to slow the rate of bit-coins over the next cycle not shorten this cycle time. In theory you could crate more bitcoins than the 'long term cap' if you had enough computing power.

There is also a voting mechanism that can change the Bitcoin protocol, the NSA for one probably has enough computing power and bandwidth to flat out 'take over' the network and give themselves arbitrary bitcoin amounts.

PS: Voting is a basic problem with all network based protocols. If enough machines say this is what happened then that's what happened.
It's a question of terminology, but when groups like Chrome Security, Mozilla etc talk about MITM certificates and that they are forbidden, we mean those that are used for intercepting traffic.
Forget the petition, just stop installing JRE.
Yes, but only on the amount you profited.

If you buy $1000 of toys and then sell them on eBay for $200 later, then you won't owe tax because you had a loss of $800. However, if you were audited, you might have to prove that the toys originally cost you $1000. If this is the only unusual item on your return, it's unlikely that an auditor will bother with it.

However, if you went to, e.g., China and bought $200 of toys and came back to the US and sold them for $1000, then you will have to pay tax on the $800 of profit.
MidWinter Dance Festival
I love the Rasmusesque PHP zen. "Hi. I am dumb. I don't write good programs, I write programs that work."

Reminds me of Colombo.
ATI?
So impressed with this hackathon! To have 127 hacks submitted for 550 hackers is unreal! The recruiter at Facebook said he was most impressed with these hacks at a student hackathon over any other one.
For the lay - could someone explain the benefit of a private airport (as opposed to a fleet of private planes)? The speed at which you can get through security can't be worth that much - can it?
i didn't even know about this CSS function. It's so stupid, unbelievable.

I can only imagine all those Designers that don't want to get their "stunning" designs getting destroyed.
What I read from authors like Jared Diamond indicates to me that this is too often couched in ethnocentric terms and was heavily dependent on nutrition. In a highly extractive, oppressive state, I could believe people might be oppressed into a lower IQ. I'd also suspect that those regions would be out-competed by regions where the average people had better diets and whose intelligence is average.

In the wilds of Papua New Guinea, lots of highlanders meeting us there would consider us clumsy and stupid and wonder how we run a complex civilization.
They won't keep his money in any case, they'll either hold it until the buyers can no-longer reverse the charges (at which point they'll release it to the OP and close his account) or they'll refund it to the people who paid into the account.
I'm not sure, but in the back of my mind I don't think that it does. I've agreed to write about this stuff for the Web PKI Working Group so I'll need to do a survey of the various capabilities at some point.
They should have a new qualification - CCIE FG - (CCIE fun and games!).

I have seen a few highly qualified networking people do some funny things, but, this has got to be the best by far!
The closest thing that comes to mind is Artemis (it's a spaceship bridge simulator where various people play stations on something akin to Star Trek's Enterprise). They had a PC version and now an iOS version as well.

Based on their manual they use a separate server and everyone hooks a native app to that. So they effectively went with option two.
Detect movement with OpenCV and Clojure
it was epic!
It is because grad school "classes" are a charade to keep up the pretense that an apprenticeship is a classroom education that merits tuition.
13 Startup Mistakes To Avoid And Tips To Get Ahead
To be fair, this isn't a private airport, it's really just a private terminal at San Jose International (SJC). Don't get me wrong, that's pretty darn cool, though really no different to, say, Lufthansa's dedicated First Class Terminal at Frankfurt. Well, apart from the private Google planes, of course :-)
Upvoted because this drives me crazy. It's especially bad when I'm viewing links from in-app browsers that don't use the full screen width.
Not my startup, lol, we run a tight ship here.

I'd checkout meetups though.
that it was :) have you seen the epic video too?

http://youtu.be/D6_bF3dFEAI
mtr in debian, but if you're running it in X, you might want to use mtr -t
For reference, here's the original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178303
Presumably the SD port will cope with Class 10 or UHS-I and so transfer at HD video rates. There can't be much call for higher rate transfers for most users; it's not like you're going to use it for data gathering from a hadron collider.
What car is worth 25% 11 years later? Honda civic?
Gosh I am so different. I drive an economy car and I try not to spend so much money and live within a budget. I don't pretend to be something I am not. What you see is what you get with me. I don't live a startup lifestyle, I try to live a minimalist lifestyle by making do with less. Sometimes less is more.

As an executive I'd even go for a lower salary just so the company can have a higher profit or pay employees better benefits. That is the way I'd run my startup lower executive salaries, higher worker salaries and more benefits to keep them on, and then a higher return for shareholders as well. If anything I might even go the Steve Jobs route of $1/year CEO salary and be paid in stock instead.
I suspect (but am too lazy to research) that it's intended for captions on buttons and similar non-content elements. Seems reasonable in that context.
That is a good article.

Ironically I've eaten at that restaurant. It was quite good before it was shut down. (No, I never had the whale sushi.)
How is Paxos hard? Inventing Paxos is hard. Implementing it is implementing a well-specified state machine.
Here "the border" is a 100 mile wide buffer zone near the border. This is just ridiculous.
How did they keep your money? Was it just a small amount that you couldn't be bothered with so you let them have it? (going by how well your products seem to be doing that's unlikely)

Otherwise I can't see any legal way that they (or PayPal for that matter) would be able to keep anything beyond their transaction fees.
I would urge you to look a lot deeper than putting people, judges and legislation in Republican=bad and Democrat=good buckets.
Laws are fundamentally codifications of human nature. So a law that goes against the majority of people's natural inclinations (or to use your term, personal choices) is by definition immoral.