skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just wanted to point out a couple of things:

> unusual prototypical inheritance

It was the language Self (as far as I know) that introduced prototype based programming. The initial definition of Self happened in the mid-80s if I remember right and there were a ton of papers formalizing various aspects of the language including theories for prototype inheritance.

Bib for Self: http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html

> notation

Must say that I don't consider notation as theoretically interesting. It is practically interesting obviously. (And things like anonymous functions have existed since Lisp)

> single-threaded asynchronous execution

There is an incredible amount of research in concurrency models. It is a little hard to point to a single source; but the theories of CSP and the actor model have been around for a long time and it has been incorporated in to various languages in more or less the Node JS style.

Don't get me wrong. Javascript has many interesting things to it practically. But the theory has been around for a long time.
Unlikely: a standing army is a lot easier to squash than a load of unrelated, unconnected individuals.
Why powerful women make the greatest Friends
I don't trust (ex-)spooks, but it was worth reading just to see the ever-so-slight grin on Putin's face.
Supreme Court says natural human genes can't be patented
I'll give this one to NASA for free: start using artificial gravity instead of watching how horrible micro-gravity is to each new group of astronauts.
If Bootstrap is allowed and html5-boilerplate isn't, then I think your teacher should do some more research.
While this update is pretty small it is important as it fixes some garbage collection corruption issues.

Issue list: https://code.google.com/p/go/source/list?name=release-branch...
Interesting contrast to the patenting of crop genes by Monsanto: their crop cross-pollinates with yours, and now they own the seeds of your crop!

It's a good thing that the SC struck this down, since it could lead to really weird claims over humans. Imagine if someone receiving patented genes in a treatment absorbed some of that information into their own genetic makeup. Then when they had children, the company could claim that the child contains their intellectual property.

Might be a good sci-fi novel.
The article isn't about whether hackers are more or less effective, as a group, at causes in the public service. It's about aggrandizing their moral character. Who has a greater moral character? Someone who puts all their effort into the public service with the skills they have, or someone who has some positive benefit on the public merely incident to his lucrative job? Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

Also, by your reasoning, Goldman Sachs (which donates like $250 million a year to public service causes) is a far greater force for good than the EFF (which has a budget of $3.5 million). Now, the EFF might be more efficient at doing good than Goldman's charities, but is it 70x more efficient?
Jeremy Dunck joins the DSF Board | Weblog | Django
Hacking Your Education: The Next Generation of Students
For a more concrete perspective, if you assume that a good developer costs about $150,000/year, then this is one hundred years of development time for a team of 10 good developers, which is quite a lot.

I don't know just what this thing was supposed to do, so I don't know what the scope is.
If I was commissioned to do a portrait, I would sell the person my practice sketches and paint if they wanted them, I would just charge more. (Paint is expensive)

If I was building a collection for a show, I wouldn't. But personally commissioned work is different; you have to understand what your customer wants and accept that they're paying you for your skill, not your artistic sensibility.

All that said, I know plenty of people that wouldn't sell these things. My advice to OP is to find a different photographer.
This comment https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine-go/iV5UkqD5... implies that it will happen for Go.
Thanks. I solemnly swear to not abuse statistics, so I'll play around and update the piece.

The goal is to use this as a hook to get the public interested, then take them for the ride as I learn. That's why I tried to be really cautious about pointing out all the reasons why this particular model is bad.
>Once they gained entry into this room they found Mr Dotcom near a firearm which had the appearance of a shortened shotgun.

Not actually a shortened shotgun, just looked like one. Pretty damning!
You can make synthetic DNA?!?
Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.

It's going to see a pattern of what I watch on TV, the websites I visit during the day, and on my phone, who I talk to, where I go, what I do, the kind of business I run, the products I buy, etc, etc.

One night, I'll be watching Breaking Bad and head over to Google on my phone to see what other shows one of the Extras was in.... but Google will already know I'm probably watching Breaking Bad, and Google is going to know that I've looked up Extras before, so guess what, my Google home page is already going to be showing a list of all the Extras that were on Breaking Bad that night before I have to type anything in.

When I turn on my Google Android phone in the morning, the phone will be smart enough to know everything I check every morning. I'll see the weather forecast first, then my sales numbers, probably headlines on Reddit and HN.

When I pull up Google Maps a few days before Fathers day, it's going to know that I'm trying to find my way to various sporting goods stores, it'll automatically put them on the map before I have to type anything in.

If I'm Googling before 5am, guess what, I'm looking up the best fishing reports... it'll be on my Google Home Page.

Or will this all be in front of my face as soon as I put on my Google Glasses?
Unscatter.com: Port Python-Go, faster, less code
There are so many things wrong with that code its not even funny...

First off counter is of type static int. not unsigned int like the article says. Secondly j is decremented, j isn't even defined.

They are however right that it most likely will crash due to an overflow problem. Though this is not necessarily true.
I think that they still did something too Apple-y.

Not a totally different operating system, but a totally different runtime called RT for new apps.

What I do think is the right approach? I recommend you to see the Ubuntu Phone videos.
Justice Scalia's concurrence, reproduced here in full:

"I join the judgment of the Court, and all of its opinion
except Part I–A and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology. I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even
my own belief. It suffices for me to affirm, having studied
the opinions below and the expert briefs presented here,
that the portion of DNA isolated from its natural state
sought to be patented is identical to that portion of the
DNA in its natural state; and that complementary DNA
(cDNA) is a synthetic creation not normally present in
nature."
Why Your Startup Needs a Sales Methodology
I think the basic flaw here is that author assumes that NSA does data-mining. I personally doubt it.

Rather (and here I'm going off on pure speculation myself) I think they can use the system to start with some off-line lead (say one of the Chechen bomber brothers) - and see who he was calling / emailing and then checking if there is anything valuable there.

Ie - how in the past FBI would do an investigation off-line and talk to people and piece things together - they are looking to be able to replicate it (possibly by going back in time) online.
I guess Economist's CMS is not as sophisticated, as one at BBC
I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this.
> Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake. This is a typical big government project.

Your last two points contradict your first two. There's nothing unique about a government's ability to make terrible decisions. I'd say one difference is that private enterprises typically go under if the mistake is big enough, and they have no great interest in telling the public about their mistakes.
David Ogilvy on Writing
You're missing the point. In non-production environments a large user base (eg developers, etc) have direct access to the database as needed for development.

In production environments, they do not.

This is exactly why data masking technologies exist. To mask/transform production data in non-production to that non-production has meaningful data but not REAL data
Nice post Alex. I share the same problem of trying to do something more elegantly than is necessary and end up wondering where my time went.
Huh? Overflow in C doesn't cause a run-time error. Overflow of a signed integer is technically undefined but whatever the result is, it should just keep running.
Had it on my iPhone 4S and the installation was the smoothest so far. Running it on your primary phone could be a bit risky, depends on how you use it. I use Podcasts app a lot and having that completely broken is unacceptable to me. I'm going to revert back to iOS6 for now until Beta 3 or higher comes out. Also, I hate the Home screen and the icons...just so terrible of a job from Ive and his team.
I like the idea of funding startups but it is a risky business.

It would be interesting if they had programs like DARPA, X-Prize challenges.

I think this method is more efficient and should be leveraged by the rest of the government. It is basically a fixed-bid R&D contract.
I like that idea too. The FFII (not known for their love of the patent system as used for software in some places) has proposed a more complex approach based on that idea, where there's a bounty system in place to act as a sort of garbage-collection mechanism to remove duplicate ideas:

http://eupat.ffii.org/07/p2parl/exam/
I wonder if the NSA will open source their server architecture?
What's with all these CSS frameworks which serve one css file for everybody? Toolkits like GWT have had the sense to serve only what each environment needs, since 2004. If you are worried about mobile devices being able to handle things, how about NOT downloading things that they don't need?

Your CSS framework should include a precompiler that generates files for each platform. Then either the client or the server can decide the right file(s) to load.
Help Me Help You -- A Month of Code
Hi there,

I just sat down and realized I'm free for most of the month of August, and I'm looking to fill my time with a software project. So here's the deal. I'll work 40 hours a week for 4 weeks at no cost to you (save a couple hours of your time). All you have to do is provide me with genuinely challenging software problems to solve.

My experience is primarily in Python [Django] and Javscript [Node], but I'm family with C++ and have been known to write PHP when pressed.

Shoot me an email at madison.may@students.olin.edu if you're interested. Thanks!
This is an interesting article but I don't understand why he says to forget the HTML and then goes into Flask.
Darn, well there goes my plan to patent myself and require that my wife buy a license before she can bear my children.
But they surely don't have a patent on all cDNA synthesis techniques, especially given that that is a highly generic technique (it should fall under the "obvious from previous art" criteria). So other companies should be able to utilize a cDNA as well so long as they don't simply follow the Myriad protocol?
You're thinking about external threats, I'm talking about internal threats.

See my response to gyepi below for more info
His choice of HK was very game theoretic.
Just something I tossed together to deal with being asked what /Date(1346997005000)/ means in human redable format -- this is the format .net/ WebAPI puts dates in by default... (it's just a timestamp--but this just makes it more transaparent....)
I just spend half day cleaning client's website from intense attack targeting outdated timthumb vulnerability.
Attacker discovered inactive old theme (canvas) within website, scanned for thumb.php and planted external malicious PHP script inside website.
Then through that planted malicious script - infected about 100 of other PHP files overwriting header of each with malicious code.
This type of attack couldn't be cleaned up just by reinstalling wordpress as attacker could use any of newly infected files to re-infect the whole site again.
Luckily her website was hosted at http://hostrum.com where she had a detailed report of all suspicious files that are suddently appeared.
Lessons:
1. Make sure your hosting company has realtime malware notification and protection. Very little number of hosting companies do that.

2. Do no keep uninstalled old themes or old plugins - they can be used as a backdoors into website. Delete them if not used.
I believe they just have a patent on these particular cDNA types, namely cDNA created from BRCA1 or BRCA2, and not on the well-known lab techniques for creating them.
I think it's a good idea to ship fast for the sake of getting early feedback. However, you don't have ship to everyone. You can ship early to a small group of users, then when you've improved the product over a number of iterations you can release to everyone.

So I'd say, ship quickly and regularly to a sub-set of users that have shown interest in your product who will hopefully be keen to provide feedback. Then ship to the public once you have made any required improvements.
I appreciate the feedback. Some of the criticism is the price you pay for an off-the-cuff for draft. :)

If I rewrote this, I would definitely tone down the egocentrism by a few factors. I didn't realize it came off as such.

I'm not going to say that there aren't the Terry Childs types out there that give all of the tech community a bad name but its anecdotal at best. My comment was based on my own personal opinion and observations.

I did not say that my use of the term 'army' in any way precludes other collectives of individuals fighting for the just and that somehow that the tech community is exclusive in this fact. What I was pointing out was that never before has the power to abuse been in the hands of so many and yet (for the most part) that power has been handled responsibly.

The 'walled garden' jiggy2011 mentions is my biggest fear as well. Without a continued commitment to open systems we place the control mechanisms in the hands of fewer individuals where morality plays a far less part in the concept of self-governance.

As for selling information to the highest bidder, I cannot speak to that as I do not have a strong background of experiences to develop an opinion. Personally, I exchange certain aspects of my contact information and habits to companies in exchange for certain services (Facebook, Google, HN, etc.)
How to Successfully Pretend to Work Hard as Software Developer
I don't know whether to smile at this decision, or frown because it took the Supreme Court to strike this down. I think I'll smile at the continuation of recent trend of the Supreme Court benchslapping the Federal Circuit, and slowing the unintended consequences of a specialized appeals court.
In general, talking to customers, shipping software, and selling things to people for money strictly dominate either thinking beautiful ideas or wondering what alchemy would hypothetically make your startup fundable. If you're really, really interested in that question, I can explain it in detail, but I would bet against you liking the answer, so I'd suggest talking/shipping/selling rather than spending more time thinking about what other people are doing.
Asking whether this will hold up in court is asking the wrong question. National Security Letters themselves are highly unlikely to hold up in court.

The whole premise rests on people being intimidated into not fighting it.
no one working for the BBC in the UK would make that sort of money as a developer
First question I think you should ask yourself: do you really even want to pursue funding?
Yes. This has been around for several decades. Furthermore, you can request companies on the internet to synthesize sequences for you and mail you the results.

(First result from google)

http://www.invitrogen.com/

Wikipedia Article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis
In my humble opinion, the least morally questionable action to take in this scenario would have been to ignore the gag order, explain in public why the business was being lost, and take the rational sale option because of it.

Even this option isn't that great from his perspective though, I don't know what the penalty on breaking those gag orders is, I guess it's more than the penalty for insider trading?

They put him in a situation with a stack of bad options and even the best ones weren't that great, sitting back and criticising his actions after the fact whilst laying none of the blame on the people and institutions that created the situation is something I'm not smart enough to understand why you think is an acceptable analysis to take?
Auto McCarthyism.
Generally agree.

I've actually been quite surprised by myself the more I make inroads into "hacker" culture. Many software engineers I know seem far more concerned about the precise incoming dollar volume than very many people I know from my ostensibly "elite" background, Many old friends went wandering around the world attempting to start microfinancing initiatives, work for the Peace Corp, or who dedicated themselves to teaching children in the inner cities for little or no pay.

Within the hacker world it often seems like a need for self-validation vis-a-vis jocks (a major theme in pg's own Hackers and Painters), of which the entire game is playing "catching up" by accumulating enough "fuck you" money.

That sort of anti-social and anti-societal aspect has actually become more and more mainstream, as we see the success of YCombinator and the greater popularity of reddit, etc. but there definitely is a dark side to it, which goes beyond passive or active promotion of "jailbait" and to the core of our own identities as human beings.

I think that people who have to teach things to other people, or engage in some way with broader society, learn necessarily the value of community and should be honored for their contributions to such. The hacker mentality, sadly, often values only linear metrics like lines of code or benjamins in the bank.

Very sad. Silicon Valley is not what it used to be (a major reason why I left).
"int" is signed unless you specify "unsigned". So "static int" would be a signed int that is also static.

Also, I see no reason why it would crash. Once it gets to the max value, incrementing would return some other value but I've never seen C produce a runtime error for an integer overflow.
I just don't think a large enterprise would engage in an internal $100 million project to build a CMS.

I'm not saying private enterprises can't fail or don't fail. They just wouldn't fail in this specific way at that magnitude.
Did you inform Instagram first before posting it to HN?
Up and Running With Espresso: Rapid Web Development in the Browser
No, that's not remotely plausible even if Myriad had won. They had patented isolated DNA. Biological processes such as human reproduction were always free and clear. Furthermore, your characterization of Monsanto's patents doesn't seem accurate.
I really think that we are in a period of fundamental change regarding information. The norm has been that we find information, but increasingly information is finding us.

While I don't feel the technology is quite there yet, it's only a matter of time before recommendation/predictive systems reach a level where they are able to personalise everything that we interact with.
First thought when I read this: Is this the system das was the base for all their DDD talks?
Dwelling on whether it's violent or not seems silly. It was excessive. And the problem with using excessive measures is that it makes the line between non-violence and violence as simple as one guy with a gun being surprised and accidentally pulling the trigger.
There's nothing special about private enterprises that makes them immune to risk. As others have said, many IT projects fail [1]. In the private sector this is just seen as a business risk, but when a public sector project fails then its "wasting taxpayers money".

For some reason the Economist article doesn't mention that the project was originally awarded to Siemens and Deloitte [2], but technical failures and cost overruns by these private companies caused the BBC to bring the project in-house. It could be argued that the BBC lacked the capability to deliver the project on its own, but thats also a mistake found in the private sector.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9116470/IT_s_biggest_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Media_Initiative#Initia...
> Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake.

I would say "Actually large private enterprises don't usually [admit to making] this kind of mistake." I swear the ERP and document management are the two areas where every enterprise tries to "standardize across organizational units" and fails badly[1].

I have come to believe that this type of software is hard because it imposes rules foreign to the entity on it and doesn't value a companies existing workflow[2], or it requires thousands of developer hours to adapt.

1) oh, they keep using the new system, but their customers feel it

2) often a very successful workflow for the entity and its customers since the entity can now afford a multi-million dollar software package
It would actually be quite interesting to see how large enterprise clients modify/utilize the Django admin... if at all.

Other than Grappelli, I've historically used the admin pretty much as-is. Creating admin functions is one thing, but lots of custom screens is quite another.

I also think that's one thing really lacking from the Django documentation, really great customization of the Admin.
Nowhere near as much as the £12Bn the NHS spent on an impossible moving-spec IT system that they also scrapped(1). Oh wait, it's a tenth of the amount.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health
More important, what is in it. A large difficulty with content management systems are the data types; pairing down or normalizing metadata while trying to map old to new.
We treat all environments as production. However we add additional security to staging since it's the most experimental. (Additional security meaning it can only be accessed via VPN and after two factor authentication.)

To be very clear: Beta, production, rollout and staging environments are secure. They run all the same front end security provisions, same data center, same patches, etc. The difference is they run differing versions of the code base based on development.
Just an anecdote, but I recently launched a little side project and DigitalOcean crushed EC2 and Rackspace Cloud when I did some benchmarking. The low cost is appreciated but was NOT a factor in my decision.
Supreme Court Rules Isolated Human Genes Can't Be Patented
Why Hashtags are Spam #hashtags