skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blame them for what? That is key to this point.

> Would we still blame a company for leaking 6.5 million hashed passwords if the hackers decided for whatever strange reason not to take advantage of it?

I'd blame them for negligence. I would not blame them for the hacks that "strangely" never took place.

> Would we blame someone for putting arsenic in their spouse's meal if the spouse coincidentally passed up dinner that night?

I'd blame them for attempted murder, and this analogy has nothing to do with anything.

> Would we blame someone who killed a family of 5 by driving drunk on the road even though he or she is way too impaired to think straight?

Blame them for killing someone they actually killed? Sure, no brainer.

The analogies are getting ridiculous, as analogies always do, so let's both avoid those.

What I wouldn't do is blame someone for the death of many people when no one actually died. Analogies be damned, this just makes no sense to do.
Perl 7 is going to be another Perl 5 stable release, just wait and see. No one is going to use Perl 6.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5179513
When should I take the SAT?
In my experience (at various hackathons, global game jams and startup weekends), the tactic that's given me most success is to be very strict about what features to implement, and to keep any unfamiliar technologies at a minimum. When you only have so much time, don't waste it writing profile settings pages (why even have auth at all? everyone just types in a username and they're logged in as that person now!), don't waste time dealing with any browser compatibility (just program for chrome, or whatever tablet you're going to demo on). There are so many things that I've seen other people mess around with that just wastes your time and energy.

Regarding unfamiliar technologies, choose a stack you're used to (that way, you don't waste time debugging/googling how to do something) and use whatever helps you get things done fast. If anything, have one unknown thing in the mix so you can take advantage of the learning opportunity. Just make sure that thing is necessary for the product you're working on of course - for example, use mongodb's geospatial indexes for that geo-aware app, or try out d3 for those nifty interactive charts, or use websockets/zeromq for a real-time system.
A very detailed report on an early computer virus called the Morris Worm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm).

It's actually extremely interesting; the fix even goes into editing assembly if the source of the affect program isn't available to recompile.
First off, you are describing a plugin, I am not saying that the Flash plugin was not without it's problems. Only that it could do more than HTML5 can do today 8 years ago AND had almost universal penetration. Stepping back is my problem with standards and HTML5. I am not saying that Flash ever was the answer. I am merely using it as an example that proves that standards will always hold back innovation, and I think that an open plugin standard could yield the best of both worlds.

We tried the plugin model back in the 90's. It was uniformly rejected by users and developers alike.

This is just wrong. It was on 98% of desktops and there were over 1 million Flash developers. Mobile is what really hurt flash (actually IOS's rejection of it)

flash is going the way of the dodo because innovation couldn't happen at top speed, because it was limited by a gatekeeper that insisted on keeping it closed

It still managed to stay FAR in front of other web technologies which stood nearly at a standstill for over a decade. Closed is not what I am suggesting anyway. Sure someone can develop an plugin that is closed, but the plugin architecture itself will be open and adopted by all browsers who want to compete.

The lacklustre support for Silverlight was a demonstration of how badly we were burned by flash.

I disagree, I think that Microsoft's stagnation and terrible management of 95% browser share is what doomed any web UI tooling to come out of Redmond. Internet Explore was so riddled with bugs, so vulnerable to virii/malware and so stagnant that it became a stench in the mind of nearly every web developer. This was the biggest mistake IMO that Microsoft has EVER made. They could have pushed innovation and owned the search engine market at the same time. They will never get it back from Google now.

While it's taking a long time to catch up, we're now free to expand the capabilities without being in a situation where a single party can hold everyone for ransom by refusing to support specific browsers or OS's.

Having a standard for plugins in the browser would not allow this situation to happen. A lot has changed in the last 12 years. Sure Macromedia was the only one who made a viable plugin to fill up the Internet Explorer window with, but that would not be the case today. We would see open source and competing products popping up everywhere - Just like the JavaScript/CSS/HTML5 frameworks we are seeing pop up every month. These frameworks try to innovate past the limitations and cumbersome methods that the standards constrain us to. We would be a lot better off if there was an open and secure plugin architecture with access to a VM, Drawing and DOM API (Perhaps the HTML5/CSS/JavaScript implementation would even run on top of this API).
I've been hearing exactly this argument since the early 2000's when I was myself a smug lisp weenie. The thing is though, that software is by and large a highly competitive business and any tool that offered the kinds of productivity gains people claim are possible from specific languages would enjoy fairly rapid adaptation. Witness the rise of Ruby & Rails for instance.

To quote John Carmack:

To the eternal chagrin of language designers, there are plenty of externalities that can overwhelm the benefits of a language, and game development has more than most fields.
Yah. $watch ties into angularJS's model checking scheme. If anything at all happens in angularJS. It runs through all of the defined watches check functions to see if they return a different result.

ng-change is an event triggering when the input element changes.

watches can fire multiple times (I think up to 10), if the result of one watch changes the model, then angular will run all the checks again.

watches have their place on custom directives, but they're otherwise a pain in the butt.

I THINK this is how it works. I can tell you this with certainty: ng-change and $watch behave very differently.
I thought this would be an article about auto generated journalistic texts.
"computer" usually includes some concept of "programability".

There are many mechanical calculators (some of them are really nice!) but they are just calculators.

Curta - (http://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm)
(http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/stunningly-intricate...)

Arithmometer (http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/staff/saj/arithmometer/)

Stepped Reckoner (http://history-computer.com/MechanicalCalculators/Pioneers/L...)

And there are a bunch of gadgets (http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/gadgets.html)
Google Launches Zopfli To Compress Data More Densely for Web Pages
Reminds me of Branson converting back to a private company for similar reasons.

http://esecourses.com/cfincase.pdf
Gracious would have been a better word, but I was in a hurry when I typed that (there is also a typo in there that I didn't notice until hours later after I couldn't edit it).
Challenge HN - The State of Air Travel
As I type this post - I'm flying across the country. I'm a frequent traveler. Last month I logged nearly 20,000 miles. Yet here I find myself in Coach - Middle seat for 5 hours.

I can not move.

I can only type in a way that contorts my hands un naturally.

How did it come to this? Can we as entrepreneurs not solve this problem some how?

I challenge you HN - Fix this... if not for us then for our children.
You do not need powerful magnets to make a generator. You use whatever permanent magnet you have and put an electromagnet in parallel with it. When it starts turning, the output power from the permanent magnet can be fed to the electromagnet and the generator pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.
> I don’t think the Romans could have built the analytical engine or other purely mechanical computer because of the tolerances required. I don’t know much about their manufacturing abilities, but I know they didn’t do a lot of it and imported most things.

But yet the greeks produced machines of incredible precision and function circa 150 to 100 BC.

http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/

And whether they imported them or not, clearly the ability to manufacture to such precision did exist.
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This article provides an entertaining economic theory based on getting paid as much as you can cleverly manipulate somebody to pay you: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/01/31/stone-soup-for-the-capi...
They absolutely could have built a digital computer and much more. He's slightly underestimating Roman enginuity for delicate manufacturing. Consider for example the Cage cup[1]. It's an exquisite piece of art and creativity and, all things cosidered, engineering as well due to the very tight tolerences and detail.

There's a lot more to progress than just the capacity for great leaps in engineering and sciences. Often times, there's a bit of luck and timing (Newton's apple and, of course, Newton himself) and also a societal willingness to promote new kinds of thinking.

The Antikythera mechanism is thought to be more a Greek invention than Roman[2]. And I've felt the Greeks were more appreciative of experimentation than the Romans who were driven more by the necesities of war and maintenance of the empire and they may be better candidates (with perhaps some Roman help) to go about making a proper computer.

We also need to understand that certain concepts in mathematics didn't exist in Roman mathematics at the time, like Zero (before Ptolemy)[3], which in addition to meaning "nothing" as quantity it also means "something" as a value.

We also know the Romans traded extensively in the Middle East which means they could have potentially been exposed to very early experiments with electricity[4]. While the age of "Bagdad Battery" like devices are debatable, it's not too much of a stretch to see ancient alchemists experimenting... more than likely the Greeks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cage_cup
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_wreck
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number)
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery
It's also interesting to note that the worm's author went on to cofound YC.
I was a teenager when this happened. RTM's worm probably started a number of security careers and brought career peak levels of excitement to many of the people involved with analysis. I remember being absolutely astonished that someone writing computer programs could cause such a commotion. Some people must have realized that it was a good thing that awareness was raised. I have a hard time putting much stock in the pretend damage estimates.
I'd dismiss that idea as too costly to implement. If I were in their shoes I'd try a different approach.

Has been widely known that Japanese companies focus on longer term business goals instead of month-to-month gains, and I argue that worked alright for them.

Instead of valuing so much secrecy I'd make public a ten year business plan, and offer to buy the shares of those who lack the vision, patience, or interest in the company's goals. Thus giving freedom to the company by making those funds available to invest on a long term business plan. This would turn out to be much more affordable for the company.
One thing that's a bit confusing about "The Roman Empire" is that it bifurcates into the Western and Eastern empires, which were two wildly different polities with a shared name.

If you thought the gcc/egcs fork was a big deal ...
It's likely that the greater forces responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire would have happened regardless of what advanced technology they might have developed.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.--Lao-tzu
Reusing your frontend JS on the server with V8/Rhino
interesting analysis, but I would prefer if it were pitched as - could a time traveler to ancient rome build a computer or could you build a computer while lost in the woods?

The article talks about the knowledge of the romans, regarding making wires and such, but building core memory or a transistor successfully and stably requires a very high level of knowledge of electricity, magnetism and some important higher level abstractions for thinking about storing information.

So, I think no, to a very high degree of certainty the romans could not have built a computer. If a society has not developed light bulb, I don't think they understand electricity well enough for a computer.
It takes a lot of cues from Mormon dogma, actually. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_mythological_refe...

The show's premise is an space-faring, industrialized, polytheistic society are surprised-attacked (and devastated, only a small band of humans survive) by Cylons, a sentient, monotheistic 'terrorist' group.
According to Kohlberg's theory of moral development, recognizing rule of law as the authority is only the fourth of six stages. Manning's actions and stated intentions are consistent with the fifth or sixth stages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of...

One could take the position that his stated intentions were lies and that he was actually acting consistent with the second stage (self-interest). But all we can do there is speculate unproductively.

In any case, law seems like a silly standard to base a moral argument on, and there is no shortage of obviously dumb laws, in addition to outright malicious laws.
> and keep most of the IP afterwards

I have never been to a hackathon where anyone else got to keep the IP, and I have been to about 30.

I am not sure what pressure you are talking about, I always found them great fun.
Now that you mention it, it matches up exactly with Caprica's plotline!
The version of Pascal I learned on (early 1980s) had the problems Kernighan refers to in this piece:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

Most awfully, "length of the array is part of the type of the array". This made some programming rather painful (strings and numerical programming, for example). Maybe other dialects of that time didn't have this problem, I don't know. I do know I found C to be a great relief.

Javascript is a good example of historical accident, on the other hand. It's got just enough extensibility that its flaws can be worked around. But its popularity is not due to its careful design.
Ah, I see.

I think it's a different premise though. The novel is about an uncontested superpower dealing with asymmetric conflict.

BSG seems to be more of a classic symmetric war to me.
First thing that came into my head as well.
I'm at a work-sponsored hackathon right now! It's an annual thing so there's novelty. Several a year would be quite rough.
Programmers already know the DSL for every problem: English (or their native tongue). If they're writing programs for a specific domain without knowing the language of the domain, they have problems that won't be solved by using programming terms they already know.

How many people have learned what MVC means from Rails? Or the term "routing" in the context of a webapp?

One caveat I'll give: the DSL must be well-conceived. Writing a DSL that is dissimilar to both the underlying language and the domain vernacular is obviously horrible.
From what i can tell, the only "broker" from the list you provided is AMHF. All of the others directly operate clinics and hospitals in various impoverished countries, and directly employ doctors, nurses, pay electricity, buy equipment, etc. AMHF seems to partner with pre-existing health facilities which are in need of funding, which I guess makes them kinda like Watsi, but not really a clone.
I cant say about the legal issues, but on ethics front this is ok. The purpose of research is not to remain in libraries and papers. The purpose is to benefit the humanity. Make everyone better of. You have played your part in conveying the researchers your intentions.
That may be the case (I never watched BSG), but I'm not sure if that precludes her from writing a story in what is ultimately a very different setting.

I'd also note that sometimes plots occur more than once in literature and entertainment by mere chance. Shocking, I know!

Edit: having looked up the Caprica plot on Wikipedia, really, they have nothing in common.
Full commitment, shares vested over 4 years with one year cliff.

how do you write on paper/agreement you need to commit more than a full job, like 60h/w?
Oh, of course =)

I don't know why I put the 'not' there
Oh, I wasn't aware that you only talked about those. MUMPS is also not for systems programming, as far as I know.

To nitpick a bit, compiled or not is more a property of the implementation than of the language itself. Of course, some languages are more commonly compiled than others. But, don't Facebook have a PHP compiler?
Paypal: Elaborate hoax by Ronaiah Tuiasosopo to steal my $2K
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Totally agree with division into modules lowering complexity (provided it narrows inter-module communication). An interesting idea, that a DSL is way to do this.

But designing a language is hard, including a DSL. Even for experts. e.g. Codd had two attempts at a language for relational algebra, but "mere mortals" couldn't use them. Mathematicians create new notations at the drop of a hat, giving their own definitions to common terms willy-nilly, but this can be an impediment to collaboration.

OTOH, there's an advantage of having many different attempts at a language, inspiring and cross-fertilising each other, til eventually settling on a near-optimal design (if everyone designs their own DSL, this doesn't happen). In practice, you get one group of people experimenting like crazy - academics, visionaries, hackers - and a huge majority that waits to see if something emerges that they can standardise on. Meanwhile, experiments continue. (This is basically the "technology adoption lifecycle".)

The ruby community develops new DSLs very quickly, in the form of frameworks. I get the impression the rapidity of change is challenging, but the improvements are worth it.
Yeah, very true. The Germanic Tribes were probably as much, if not more Roman by the 6th Century than the Eastern Empire (Byzantines) were. From my understanding, the Germanic tribes did not exactly want to destroy the empire, they just wanted to be a part of the Roman Empire and share in its protection--to be Roman and share in their luxuries and technology. However, the Romans were too distrusting of them and treated them as second or third class citizens and isolating them on worthless lands far away from the core empire[1]. It was also business as usual for the Romans and how they treated many of the civilizations they saw as inferior--sucker them out of whatever you can and assume they're too dumb to know. They even traded the Goths dog meat in return for their children[1]. However, the Germans were smarter than the Romans gave them credit for and realized what was going on. When the Germanic tribes saw how weak the Romans were and after years of mistreatment, they decided they had enough.

Byzantines with a more Greek Culture (and spoken language) and different religious practices in some ways, despite being part of the same Catholic Church. I'd imagine that many in the West by the time of Justinian viewed them as invaders as much as any of the other groups.

Mistrust of foreign cultures still plagues us today in most countries throughout the world. It's too bad we do not learn from the mistakes of the past, such as those of the Romans and Gothic tribes. Isolating your fellow man because he speaks a different language or has a different culture/religion ends up making a country less safe instead of more safe.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(376-382)#Outbreak
Nope you won't, but you will find a quote from the Pentagon saying no damage was caused.
Yes I think you are correct.

Nil/null/nothing is different to zero. The former is the lack of anything and the latter is an integer with no magnitude. This is something I'm always having to hammer into our developers' heads over and over again.
> This is no longer a data type seen as a language type, but an Abstract Data Type as known in Computer Science.

Yes, it's no longer a built-in data type. But non-builtin-types are perfectly fine, too. By the way, how do you get bounds checking in C++? I guess you use the same technique, but C++'s overloading makes it syntactically easier to hide that you are not using a built-in?
It is ridiculously easy to make a calendar in Angularjs
I did read that after seeing it in another thread. Thankfully HN is nothing like the financial world. I might enter a marketing forum with that mindset, but knowledge and recognition are the currencies here, not money, so the rules are a bit different.
I've been using them for a year or so. They're much better than any other registrar I've used before, and so far have stayed true to their slogan - "no bullshit".
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Maybe its just that I don't have enough experience, but I've never met and can't think of any problem that may made think that I need to write a programming language.

Most languages I know allows me to form some type of class/data structures for my need. What kind of problems are OP referring to? some kind of extensive math/scientific problem?
Writing bindings makes sense if people are paying you to consume your API (AWS, Stripe, Twilio, etc) - it makes it easier for people to pay you money. If not the decision gets a little murkier.

I wrote a lot along similar lines here:

http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/client-library-design/
Sorry, GroupOn was under someone's command?

:-)

But yes, good point, sarcasm was inevitable.
>They even began dabbling in technology vastly ahead of their time. Hero of Alexandria drew up plans for a rudimentary steam engine in his Spiritalia seu Pneumatica.

Sorry, but Hero of Alexandria was a Greek. Not a Roman.

The Antikythera mechanism, mentioned casually in the article was Greek too.
Yep, mostly ClojureScript and a bit of Javascript for boot and setup.
... what? You think the industry should focus on the back of phones being scratched rather than the screen? How is this related to battery tech?
Many Christian societies are also polytheistic. The trinity is nothing if not an expression of polytheism.
IIRC the reason companies focus on growth over paying dividends is due to the tax structure.
I disagree. As a programmer every function signature you write is an interface to the code inside. API design is a slightly higher-level version of this. I would expect good engineers to be able to design good API's, it's a natural extension of something they should be good at anyway.
Actually this is how it was when I started at my current position.

We are doing web-testing in clojure, and in past year our little framework evolved into a DSL of a sorts.

On one hand it is great, we a have consturct like (with-client [name connection & body]), that behind the scenes sets up a virtual machine, registers it as a client of our web-service and destroys it after commands in body are done.
I can't imagine we would be doing setup and teardown by hand.

On the other hand it took me a month to get into it (two weeks learning the language, two weeks messing around with the framework) ... and there are still lots of things only our lead-tester knows how to fix, after our devs decide to change something we were relying on for testing.
Paul Barnett, New Testament scholar, on the historicity of the New Testament