skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem in languages like Java, C#, etc..is that best practice would be to wrap up the string in a class, but that's a "heavyweight" solution and developers are lazy. But these "stringy" bugs can be nasty when the wrong string is passed into the wrong argument.

In some languages you can at least "typedef" or "type alias" strings so that in your type declarations and argument types, it's the typedef and not just a raw string that is being passed in.

e.g. (made up pseudocode)

typedef ZipCode as string;
State LookupState(ZipCode zip);

So with solutions that don't involve wrapping everything in a class, you can incrementally develop your type by first doing the "typedef" and then adding functions.

So that's the problem with languages like Java. You develop a "I don't need a whole class for this" attitude because you can't incrementally develop your type safety.
The encryption happens on your end, not Tarsnap's.

The bar you're setting, though, is impossibly high. Can you absolutely, positively, definitely trust that your machine is not rooted and some nefarious entity isn't quietly collecting your every keystroke and snickering in the dark while stroking a white cat?

At that level of paranoia, you're probably best off using a device personally soldered together with hand-selected transistors that XORs all your backups with the white noise collected from your tv (while disconnected from cable, of course).
That's more or less my understanding - the AG approved requesting a warrant from a judge, which approval is required in certain cases for whatever reason.

This is different than the subpoenas, which skip the judge altogether.
Author probably never led any big project, and never experienced the amount of criticism one gets for doing anything. Furthermore the critics are the real dictators, having done nothing besides using (probably for free) your product they are the know-it-alls.
Sure it's good to be humble, but you shouldn't listen to everybody. As for the designers, more often than not it isn't hybris, but miscommunication. Or maybe they're just lacking in public relations.

And then there is this huge community of interface-conservatives, they are against change per se...
On github:
https://github.com/tlongren/vps-status
Someone upvote this past middle management!
Well, the BC PST is stupid. I find it amazing that during the HST referendum campaign a large number of people said they thought the HST was good, but they were going to vote against it anyway to punish the BC Liberal government... and now we don't have the HST, the the government they wanted to punish has gotten re-elected.
Fourth Estate vs. fifth column...
> "Those who make such a judgement are guilty of performing a cost/benefit study without the benefit of studying the benefit."

Sounds like the last forty years of mainstream corporate policy in a nutshell.
>When rejecting candidates for my own company I wanted to tell them why I rejected them, and how to improve, but I have been told not to do it, for legal reason.

When the laws prevent you from giving actionable feedback to the person you didn't hire, you know it has gone too far.

The government should have no business in your selection or rejection of new hires, and the firing of them if needed.

>I believe the US way to be better

I don't. It may be less backward bent than France, but there is certainly a lot of room for improvement - like being able to give proper feedback.
I think the meaning was fairly obvious at first glance, and it read as a sloppy way of conjoining expressions, where && should be preferred, because it doesn't rely on the arbitrary block rules of if expressions.

Imagine for a moment that a stray ";" ends up at the end of one of those if statements. I don't care how, perhaps you just dropped your Warby Parkers on your keyboard or something. Not only is the code now broken, but it still compiles. With &&, it would fail to compile and the error would be caught immediately.

The moral of the story is that syntax is your friend, not your enemy. Use syntax as much as possible to catch errors. Especially with strictly-typed languages, you have an incredible tool for automated verification of certain portions of your program. Use it.
As an interesting example, the people in charge at Facebook seem to be well aware of the downsides of open plan offices. They however consciously choose to lower engineer productivity in exchange for higher openness and visibility. It's actually refreshing how they don't try to pass it as "much better for the developer". It's better for the company as a whole, not so much for the individual: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3119 (starts around 11:35)
He used titanium for the game pieces because they would be more likely to last a couple thousand years. I wonder whether amber would have been an easier material to work with? Amber seems to preserve quite well over the ages.
I've always felt that space preference varies by person and task. Given that nearly all knowledge can or do use laptops, it seems curious everyone has an assigned daily seat.
Nope, I'm not rsync.net, but they provide a great service and contributions to FreeBSD, so they're obviously awesome people.
Good points, but what a sad level of discourse. "Dumb VC"? If you don't like the VC, or find them unprofessional, there's no reason to lose your own professionalism, certainly not to write "dear dumb VC" articles on Medium.
Sounds like something tokyo residents would like. I fear we're headed for this ("Future Travel" short animation), though http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKrYHLE8mDc
It's a sweeping statement, yes surely, but it has basis. Ellen Ullman's writing on early programming culture, while now dated, reveal there is a significant gap between the developers and the rest of the company - and that it works for development.
And I don't get why they should use Bitcoin. You're trying to secure your data, not obfuscate your financial transactions.
roger, thanks!
I know, I was saying that for English speakers that open the link and find an article totally in Spanish, that there is something for them to read.
Exactly. The FBI was unable to perform their job properly. Then they ask the public for help. What, the bomber didn't leave behind any Facebook conversations to track? Boo hoo.
Ask HN: What's the tech scene like in Brisbane?
I'm considering moving out there and wondering if I can get a job as a junior web developer.
For me, xml and other types of config files can be hard to debug because everything is a string. IDE/smart editors help out a lot when you have types.
"Being an FBI agent is a very honorable and well-respected profession"

Unless you are doing this:

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/01/secret_government...

It is not as though this is some kind of new, unprecedented behavior either:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/31/mlk.fbi.conspiracy/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

So let's say a young man is thinking about joining the FBI; he wants to do good for the world, maybe help catch a serial killer or take down a child abuse group. How does he know he will not be asked to conduct surveillance on an anti-war group? How does he know he will not be asked to dig up some dirt on a civil rights leader?

This "honorable profession" you are defending has always had a dark side.
Historically they are consistently about 10 years ahead of the curve per Bruce schneiers Applied Cryptography. I have no reason to not believe this to still be true
You mean numbers which are the product of two large primes.
Perfectly serious snarkless question - how would that work, financially? You're reselling S3 storage with your value-added service on top - obviously you set your prices in a way that pays for your costs, time and generates some sort of profit. Short of adjusting your prices on a daily (or hourly!) basis, how would you be able to accept payment in a currency of such extreme volatility?
The open plan is something I don't miss about working at Facebook. You look up over your monitor and see nothing but rows of harsh fluorescent lights. Opinion was definitely mixed, but I was in the camp that found the lack of quiet tiring after a while.
Amber is amorphous, isn't it?
This is already happening, I'd say.
Paul Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/images/disagr...
Totally random Googling led me to this: http://www.masterstudies.com/M.-Tech.-(Robotics-Engineering)...

which costs about 4655 USD
"it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes"

I think you mean that it is hard to factor the product of two primes, factoring primes is pretty easy regardless their size.
How to diagnose a bridging (ethernet) loop? Troubleshooting tips
Here's the problem: Windows* For Dummies (does not actually contain windows) is not MS's cash cow; the "old and ugly" style is, because that's where all the business apps run. Only providing the Metro style would trigger an event similar to Vista: "we're just fine staying with the previous OS version, thankyouverymuch [oh, and somebody look up the alternatives, now that MS has thrown us overboard]" (what is the figure on WinXP marketshare again?) Driving away business customers just because some individual customers prefer a dumbed-down coloring book sounds downright insane.

TL;DR: Breaking compatibility would be a completely suicidal move, and MS is well aware of this.
> That's not editing, that's literally throwing everything away

Throwing stuff away is editing. Sigh.

> and forcing his vision on them. Precisely what I'm talking about.

1. His vision was "a simple experience for the user". iDVD didn't end up with a simple rectangle and a single button marked "Burn". He refocused his teams around simplicity and ease of use.

2. I note that you've avoided responding to the other parts of my response in which I inquire as to whether you believe all designers in history are "forcing" their "vision" on others.

> And "empathy" is not a word I'd use to describe Steve Jobs, who by all accounts was a terrible jerk.

Product design is all about empathy with users. Steve Jobs was blessed with that in abundance. If you attribute Apple's success to his vision and design, then you have to acknowledge that users love their hardware and software. Jobs was great at cutting through bullshit and getting himself, his team, his engineers and designers -- who are all highly technical 'power users' -- to be humble and remove themselves from the equation and build something for mass consumption.
I don't get why I can't simply mount a volume with encription and write there.

You can (and you could even use tarsnap to back up the encrypted filesystem image if you want), but writing your data to an encrypted filesystem tends to expand the amount of data changing -- in the extreme case, if you create a copy of a file you'll write that many blocks of new encrypted data which needs to be backed up, whereas tarsnap would just say "hey, I recognize all these blocks, it's those ones I backed up earlier" -- so Tarsnap's encrypted backups of a filesystem tend to be many times more efficient than backups of an encrypted filesystem.
Personally I will never work in an open plan office again if I can avoid it .. when I was interviewing for a new position a year or so ago I had to turndown two offers from interesting companies due to their seating arrangements.

I do not want to spend the majority of my working day five feet from someone else with no barrier having to deal with the distraction, noise, invasion of personal space that comes with that

to me it shows a lack of respect towards your employees
Sounds like a normal day in Second Life to me. Just steer clear of the furries.
> Due to ongoing challenges making payments to Argentine developers, we will no longer be able to pay Google Play developers based in Argentina.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

The main reason seems to be the integration of Google Play with Google Wallet which would definitely be a problematic product for argentinian dollars restriction.
"Are there any video chat clients with end-to-end encryption?"

Jitsi claims to. ( http://www.jitsi.org )
Spend some time training voice recognition software.
I explicitly said I wasn't disagreeing with his point, just pointing out the lack of courtesy that I find endemic in rantings that are posted here. Your posting of the "hierarchy of disagreement", on the other hand, looks like classic middlebrow dismissal.
"Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications"

I am not sure I see the difference. On the one hand, you have two people who likely have a legitimate reason to meet at a restaurant speaking quietly to each other. On the other, you have two people with a legitimate reason to have an Internet connection using it to communicate. There is a matter of distance I suppose, but so what? Postal mail has always allowed people to communicate at a distance, and it has always allowed anonymous senders.

Why not require all restaurants to record their customers' conversations, just in case the FBI needs to investigate it later on (with a requirement for a warrant, of course)? The same reasoning applies to this FBI push for expanded wiretapping power.
I'm guessing you mean "non-player character" (just looked that up) but I'm not sure what you're asking here...

I assume that one could not wear Glass in the future yet still have online profiles (which others would perhaps still be able to see with facial rec. via their Glass).
The noise would drive me crazy. Earplugs would not even work with so many phones so close together. How can people program in that environment?
You have to look at TV. The lead time for movies are so slow, you only get about 5 year old scifi.
Shouldn't the spec define a way to _encode_ the name/value in such a way that any string can be used as a header name/value? Then `addHeader` is responsible for handling encoding. For example, if I had a method that takes a name/value argument and converts them into "name=value" syntax to use in a URL query, I would consider it a bug if it didn't url-encode name and value.
The subscriptions feature looks interesting; I'm assuming that it's a mailing list type feature. Is there a list of subscribable addresses somewhere?
Speaking only for myself, I can't work on a laptop for long periods of time. The downward tilt of my head to see the screen, the tight keyboards & mice, and small screens make it very uncomfortable for more than a few hours.

For this reason, I have a dedicated screen, full sized keyboard and separate mouse. All configured and arranged to be most comfortable to me, so not exactly interchangeable.

Thus, a dedicated "assigned" seat. I wouldn't want it any other way.
XML has data types. You just have to load the schema.
Point of clarification, concurrent transaction count is limited to 255. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/access-2010-sp...
Let's be honest. If we wanted engineers to be most productive, we would give them quiet, private spaces to work. But that is expensive so we put them in open plan arrangements that cost less and pretend that the main reason it's done is higher productivity.
So, your first sentence is at complete odds with your second one. Some people like having something to call their own.
I vote a little dumb, a little evil (you know, the banality kind) and pretty incompetent.

Anecdotal, but the FBI's first web site was hosted by a NASA machine. I think the FBI was traditionally an IBM shop, and mainframes and the web didn't work well together at first.

In more verifiable evidence of incompetence, there's the Virtual Case File epic fail (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08... just one of many articles about it) followed by a minor debacle in Sentinel (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407922,00.asp)
I really struggle to get in the 'zone' where I can do the creative aspects of software engineering (e.g. researching graph databases like neo4j and determining if our startup can benefit from it) when I'm in an open environment. I have been diagnosed with ADD for the past 8 years, but am working towards a medication free approach to dealing with it.

Open spaces really hurt my productivity because my mind naturally tries to keep track of all the conversations going on around me. This ADD wired brain helped make me a great waiter, but it's hard to explain to bosses/founders why I prefer to work in a quiet environment with as few people around as possible whenever I'm not simply cranking out code that takes no thought.

Most of my bosses have been very accommodating at first, but each time the scenario ends up where management feels like my isolation is a sign of not wanting to be a team player and is harming the morale of those programmers that look up to me.

I really don't know what the right answer is to this dilemma, but for me, at least, the trend towards an open plan offices is stifling my ability to perform at a consistently high level.

Edit: to those replying below, thanks for the suggestion. Thankfully my employer has no policy against headphone usage, so I do get some help from that. One thing many people don't realize about ADD is that a loss of focus can be triggered through other senses such as seeing movement out of the corner of my eyes. Sound is definitely the most distracting element, but an environment with a lot of movement can be almost as bad in my case.
I would be surprised to find that the NSA has a quantum computer that can quickly factor large numbers.

There are very hard fundamental physics problems with quantum computing. IANAexpert, but as I understand it, the difficulty lies in closing off the system (cold atoms, what have you) you're using to do the computation from the outside world, while you're doing the computation. Any contact (up to a very, very low limit), and you smear ("decohere") the computation so that the output will be in essence noise---not what we want at all. One can approach this as (in some sense) an engineering/experiment problem and try to limit contact with the outside world, or as a theory problem and try to come up with a system that inherently resists problematic contact with the outside world (topological quantum computation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_quantum_computer), comes to my mind).

So we're dealing with a physics problem: either the gloriously messy, difficult work of experiment, trying to track down and eliminate sources of decoherence, or the theoretical work of finding an appropriate system (and then figuring out how to implement it).

Both of these are far from the core competencies of the NSA, as I understand them (not that I have any real information---just an impression based on way to much time spent reading Hacker News :-) ). As you say, NSA is (perceived as) very, very good and far ahead of the community at computing, cryptography, and cryptanalysis. The problem is, this is not a computing problem, it's a physics problem.

One possibilty, though, is that the NSA has figured out some way to use something like the D-Wave quantum computer (which I am ridiculously far from understanding, but you might recall Scott Aaronson's blog post on the subject not too long ago) to factor large primes---that is to say, to transform prime factorization into the D-Wave problem. At a gut level, I find this much more plausible than that the NSA has independently built a quantum computer: that sort of problem-transformation is much more the kind of math that I feel the NSA would be good at, or be able to become good at very quickly.
Coding from starbucks at the moment. It's definitely doable. Our office has an open floor plan and once in a while there are conversations I wish I could block out a little more effectively but it's not a daily frustration.
Ask HN: What was the original "in browser editor"?
CodePen is very new... was jsFiddle the first?
Hah, this was more a parody of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5766663 hence the wink but good on ya for the honest comment.
Essentially every program is a big number written in binary. DRM blocks number sharing while some OS numbers require activation before running. The world is doomed.
Check out Arq

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/
I don't know about open plans making people more susceptible to sickness, but on my exit interview on Friday, I mentioned that I thought the way we had done open office was counterproductive.

I like the idea of pods though, where QA, BAs and developers are all together, as opposed to 60 or so people all in this huge area, which is how we did it.
Hmmm... I'm not sure I'd agree here. At 44Con[1] we get an average of between 100-150 talk submissions a year. Just reviewing all the talks once as part of the CFP panel is a herculean effort. If everyone had a 2 minute intro to their talk I guarantee that after the first few none of them would be watched by anyone on the panel simply because you're looking at adding 5 hours to each scan through the submissions.

The enthusiasm is a strong and valid point. People who are keen to come always score higher than people who can't be bothered putting the effort in.

I would suggest that anyone who wants to get a talk accepted needs to:

* Structure their submission properly

* Make sure they provide sufficient detail for reviewers to identify what the talk is about

* Provide enough detail for the reviewer not to have to google obscure terms

* Have somewhere on the Internet (e.g. a blog, github etc.) that allows reviewers to easily work out where the speaker's skills lie

* Have video or slides from the speaker available - e.g. on Youtube so reviewers can see how they speak. If you haven't spoken at a conference before, make a video of a howto describing something related to what you're talking about

[1] - http://44con.com/
In Ireland for well over 90% of degree courses it's blind marked exams all the way. In Britain apart from Oxbridge it is again exam marks all the way (big apart from). In France I think ENA is the only school with entrance exams/interviews but much like Oxbridge acceptance means you are part of the ruling/upper class unless you choose to throw it away. German universities don't do entrance interviews, they do exam ranking and brutal weedout classes.

The USA is more or less unique in the blatancy of the class values implicit in its university entrance requirements. The cancer spreads, much like professional graduate degrees but it is still most obvious in the land of origin. Gotta keep them Jews out, or nowadays them Asians. It's about the right sort of extracurricular, don't you know?
As you say, preference varies. Some people like having a workspace with their own "stuff" there. This can range from pictures to toys, and for work-related stuff, a number of people like print-outs or physical things they can handle (printed out documents or designs, or physical models).
Recommend the best on vehicle gps
What is the best gps system on the market for small businesses to track where their service vehicles have been?
While I'm not sure String should be abstract, I see what the author is implying. The idea is that having String abstract would force the programmer to come up with appropriate data structures more often than not. There's definitely some truth to it.
> These people can no longer cope with life on life's terms. If that's not a loss of free will then I don't know what is.

That's probably what creeped me out about Wall-e's distopian future more than anything else. It's the embodiment of what was described in this article, without the happy ending...