skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's barely any such thing as a debugger, and no such thing as an object graph, and even modifying a function in place is far more complicated than real tools would make it -- but nonetheless, in the sort of browser-based Javascript development I do on an almost daily basis, I sense a faint echo of the je ne sais quoi to which you refer; specifically, iteratively fiddling with a live system until it behaves more like how you want, then baking those changes into the serialized form of it (also called "source code") so that they're incorporated next time the system is instantiated.

Granted, I have only the most trivial experience with Smalltalk; I'm pretty sure at least some of the concepts I have in mind here are entirely meaningless in that context, but I wonder if it would be fair nonetheless to consider the modern browser Javascript environment, for example Firefox with Firebug and a proper REPL instead of the single-line console, as potentially possessing at least some of the flexibility a Smalltalker considers de rigeur.

On the other hand, if you wanted to build, for example, an object-graph generator in pure Javascript, I don't think you could do so, at least not one worth having; unless I'm very much mistaken, Javascript's reflection facilities don't suffice to allow one thing to notice when another thing changes, unless the latter thing explicitly notifies the former of the change. So you'd have what would be essentially static analysis on running code; you could recursively walk properties from the global object on down, following references where necessary, but it'd be dog-slow in modern JS implementations; worse, there'd be no way to keep it synchronized with the actual state of the objects to which it refers, short of rewalking everything to spot the changes, which would be ugly in theory and unusable in practice. So it's probably also accurate to say that the modern browser Javascript environment offers no immediate prospect of attaining anything remotely resembling the facilities a Smalltalker considers de rigeur.

Which is a shame, because what I've seen of Smalltalk has been impressive in the extreme, especially by contrast to the tools whose use I can actually justify in my professional life.
Business maybe, however free software undoubtedly has a positive economic impact...
This is the ad-hominem fallacy and is not at all relevant to the correctness of his point.

I don't think it's an ad-hominem to critique design of the site critiquing anothers' design.
He was Canadian, red and white are the colors of their flag.
My '95 CD had the Rob Roy trailer on it too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0-2kzujLA8
I guess I was referring more to web services that provide data.
Show HN: Accordive - Customer Context in your Inbox
They compare against a copying collector.
Years After Manning Leaks, State Department Cable System Lacks Basic Security
That's a question I have. One potential answer is that it moves authentication out-of-band, in case there's a keylogger or other malicious mechanism of the machine you're using. Also, it removes the need to remember a separate password for every site. Your master key is secured with a password, but that's it. It also removes the need to have a shared secret with a site, and doesn't require any third-party involvement.

He spends a good chunk of the latest episode of Security Now [1] describing it's advantages over current schemes. The episode isn't up yet (I listened to it on the the site's live stream), but it should be soon.

[1] http://twit.tv/sn
Tracking the Silk Road on Storify
Post suggestions if you have them.
"I created my own animated series" - ask me anything
Neither really. Pro-Apple in that he is willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt. If they make a decision he doesn't understand or agree with, he will figure out some acceptable reason they would do that he can agree with. Someone who is anti-Apple would look at the same facts and come up with a reason they are incorrect, for doing the same thing.

Essentially, I would be shocked if Asymco had a post saying he disagreed with Apple's strategy.
My favorite part right from the intro (and touched on elsewhere):

Releasing information that could induce adversaries to shift communications platforms in order to avoid surveillance would cause serious harm to national security...

So now I wonder a few of things:

1. The NSA will protect the companies who entered in a strong agreement with them by using the "they can't lose customers, we need to watch their customers" argument? If so, that means that companies may be encouraged to enter a strong agreement knowing it will remain secret and they don't have to spend time/resources validating requests. The only thing preventing the want to enter a strong agreement with the NSA now is morality.

2. If some companies are given the transparency and others aren't, isn't the omission alone enough to assume it has entered in a strong agreement?

3. Did these companies make the petition knowing there request for transparency would not be granted on the levels they want so they can save face to their customers saying "well, we tried"?

Edit: Formatting
[slow bow, with flamboyant hat salute] :)

I never expected the very geek joke to be understood. Very cool!

On a more serious note, I didn't mean to support the ever old myth that postgresql is slower than mysql. It hasn't been the case for over ten years, and all the while being a better database in every aspect.

However, go back enough and it was slower (than mysql) for real-world loads. You could get near enough if you disabled fsync, but then were negating many of the advantages of pgsql. Even then, in the old days, table based locking would kill a real database. Table based locking was solved early enough ('98? '99? around that time). Fsync was solved with WAL, in the performance effort of the early 7.x series. It was around late '2000 that I came back to postgresql for good. Until then, it was either mysql for a quick hack or oracle for anything serious. Since then, it's postgresql for everything (I don't deal with the scenarios where Oracle still leads).
Articles about how great Smalltalk is usually remind me of articles about how great the Lisp Machine was. And there is a lot of merit to an entire system, hardware and software, designed to operate in a high-level language.

My complaint is that neither of these things is coming back in a relevant way.

Perhaps the biggest shift in software engineering in the last decade or two is the fact that no one writes entire systems anymore. We've moved to a system of (somewhat!) interchangeable parts. If your thoughtfully constructed, delicately handcrafted utopia doesn't play well with tools the user is used to and libraries the user needs, no one will use it in the real world.

Smalltalk, though a wonderful entire system in the 80's, hasn't kept up with computing progress. Most of its best features made it into other languages (Ruby and Obj-C are the premier examples), languages which aren't so opinionated about what OS you run, what IDE you're using, what language adjacent programs are written in, etc.

Much like Lisp Machines, the rest is left to rot, and incite wistful blog posts by old hands. And pretty much everyone else ships code in other languages.
>99% of the time, writing your own custom allocation strategies is a waste of time. Sometimes, though, it can be a win, allowing you to allocate and free in a matter of tens of CPU cycles with no GC pauses at all.

Agreed, but again, if you're willing to put that effort in you can do it in a GCed language.
MtGox market value of BTC as SR news breaks
I'm totally there with you, and my hope with DDP 1 was to make some progress on that first step: decoupling code from data, so that a standard DDP client can connect to any DDP server and pull data out of it.

In the future, I'm super excited about investigating ideas like DDP discovery (asking a DDP server what data and methods it has) and description (having a DDP server publish metadata in some standard format that explains the semantics of the other data that it's publishing in terms of microformats). I think the main place we differ is that I think that these formats should use something more like a relational model rather than a hypermedia model, or a formal knowledge representation model like RDF. Isomorphisms exist between these models, and used properly they are all equally powerful, so really this just a design decision about what will be easiest to implement and adopt. And of course I believe that it has to be server push (websockets) rather than poll (HTTP), and that it has to support server-side joins (doing 1 query rather than N+1 queries, and taking 1 roundtrip rather than 2, to retrieve your newsfeed stories plus the comments on them.) I can't tell from your comment whether you agree with that or not, but like I said, these are two of the main things that motivate DDP.

All of that said, I think that by far the hardest part of the puzzle is the product design and federation issues. In your federated Github and HN, the technical work is the first 10%, the next 90% is finding a user experience for it that makes sense to and is ergonomic for a large number of real users, and the final 90% (really should be more like 9000%) is convincing the industry (read, creating incentives to force the industry) to cooperate with the federation and to resolve all of the political squabbles about advertising, control of the data, licensing, and so on. I mean, Google pulled out of XMPP federation -- all practical evidence suggests that keeping these federation together is wicked hard.

So that's why we're just trying to build the first 10% of that first 10%, which has a very clear use case for building rich browser apps and mobile apps -- and hoping that we will be a stepstool that others such as yourself can stand on to build the full solution that everyone dreams of.

Anyway, if you are sympathetic to this line of argument, I hope you'll check out DDP and see what interesting discovery and self-description features could be built on top of it, or suggest how its semantics could be strengthened!
Regular testing of blood sugar can save your life
To be fair, someone back in October 2011 could have made that comment too, as his name was in the email address that he gave.
The individuals responsible for disclosing go to jail?
> revenue totaling over 9.5 million Bitcoins

According to this that's close to the current total supply of all bitcoins:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time.p...

The graph shows the supply in 2013 at around 9.5 million, same number as what the article claims.
Just because they didn't respond to your email? I don't follow.
The current owner stated this was the case in an interview he gave after the FBI had already found and imaged the server hosting Silk Road.

Given the information released today this claim seems to be false in every way.
Note, you can chose to keep your fundraising private, which allows you do to verify accreditation the old way. However, it's now unclear if events like Demo Day, a post on Facebook or other pitch events would count as 'general solicitation'. You don't want to run afoul of the SEC.

Having murky guidelines is probably a good thing. The trend in fundraising really should be headed toward more public, less private. It's worthwhile to read up on the history of why we have this line between "private, accredited" investors and general fundraising and the Securities Act of 1933. After spending a good day - day and a half researching what the new law means for companies starting to think about looking for Angel and/or VC funding, I wrote up some findings: http://ink.hackeress.com/2013/09/what-title-ii-of-jobs-act-m...

Like most of the movements of the time (prohibition), the original intent of the law was noble, but ultimately was misguided.
Nothing else matters.

Lots of other things matter, such as revenue.
Am I too old to innovate?
So sad for you that one must follow the license. I guess it would be more "free" if people where allowed to ignore copyright all out. Music, and music software particularly.

Since people try to say that I live in a free country, I guess I should also be allowed kill anyone, torture, and do anything I would like to. How dare they have laws and at the same time say that I am free. Its so misleading. Truly troubling how they define it as "Free".

I guess in your world, BSD is also a virus, demanding that all advertising materials must include the acknowledgement that: This product includes software developed by the <organization>.
Ok, put another way... all videos on Youtube are videos and relatively transparent, easy to view and inspect. On a file locker your files are opaque mysterious entities that the site can't hope to inspect.
It exists. That's better than the alternative, and if this seems like damning with faint praise, it's because there really isn't anything else good to say on the subject -- the debugging facilities available in any Lisp environment, even Emacs, make those offered by Python (or Perl, or Ruby, or Javascript) look pitiful, and from all I've seen of Smalltalk, it is to Lisp as Lisp is to your interpreted language of choice.
By "commercial license", I presume you mean a closed-source one.
Just went to look at the Esquire article itself on Firefox with noscript installed on a laptop. 73 scripts and 1 object, that is a record (but I don't usually use Web sites like Esquire).

Does iPad not have a noscript like thing?
You asked me if I would let myself off the hook for blowing the whistle because I told my employer in advance that I would do so. I wouldn't characterize it as letting myself off the hook, because there shouldn't be a "hook" in my clavicle mandating unethical behaviour in the first place. I'd characterize it as doing the right thing if for no other reason than being ethically obligated to do so. Blowing the whistle should never be a "letting myself off the hook" gesture. It should be the expected default choice of action when the protocols put in place to address bad behaviour are being subverted.

>"No, I'd not disclose anything that jeopardizes my chances to be that whistleblower. I'd just disclose the main thing that jeopardizes my chances to be that whistleblower."

>It just seems like you've constructed a scenario where you will never be called upon to do what you seem to think is such an obviously good choice...

It seems the nail has met the head. Now, I don't know if you are indeed a software engineer for Google or not --and perhaps I'm torpedoing my own opportunity to join the ranks a year or so from now-- but Hacker News does seem to have quite a number of folks online that are genuinely involved in the thick of the industry. Of course, I understand that you cannot, will not, confirm or deny, comment or speculate. But you've brought about the very point I'm raising: Why on earth would asserting that I would behave ethically, affirming that I would blow the whistle if the protocols in place to address such issues failed, constitute "[disclosing] the main thing that jeopardizes my chances to be that whistleblower"? Why would such a statement constitute "[constructing] a scenario where [I] will never be called upon to do" the right thing? What is it about stating "my loyalty is to the company up until I'm expected to behave immorally, unethically, or illegally" that makes every last employer want to run for the hills?

>...and therefore I have trouble seeing how you came to the conclusion that the choice is easy or obvious.

I didn't come to either conclusion. Whistleblowing is neither easy nor the obvious answer. But when it becomes clear that it is the only viable answer, when every other avenue of objection is exhausted, it most certainly does become the right thing to do. Everyone has their own excuse for staying silent. They can be perfectly valid excuses. I wouldn't expect someone to blow the whistle if their dependents would be ruined by it. I wouldn't expect them to blow the whistle if they genuinely felt that it would make absolutely no difference and leave them forever destitute. But that doesn't make it right. Just excusable. And in the tech industry, a knowledge industry dominated by single, unattached, 20 somethings, I find it hard to believe that every last soul could have a valid excuse.
in what ways did you find corba/idl more limited than soap/wsdl?
Average Handle Times
SecondMarket also offers an accreditation service:

https://www.secondmarket.com/education/avp

It's part of their General Solicitation Solution:

https://www.secondmarket.com/education/landing/general-solic...
Marketing For Websites Just Got Collaborative
can't wait for the follow up article: "one weird trick to make sure that your online drug-dealing empire doesn't get brought down"
Says the guy with the green on black page...
What if we assume that we are consumers hoping that companies will produce products we want to use? Are we going to be super tolerant and understanding of all the pain their site imposes on us? Or are we going to call them assholes and morons and make it very clear that we can and will get equivalent content elsewhere?

They manipulate and abuse us, we manipulate and abuse them. If we are supposed to be understanding of the self-interested reasons they manipulate and abuse us, can't we expect the same courtesy in return?
I think you have it backwards.

Firstly, I am not a huge fan of Ruby, but ruby isn't magic itself, just Rails, which is a piece of crap.

Secondly, 'big enterprises' tend to employ a lot of mediocre or poor developers, and as a result have gigantic code bases to do more poorly what might be done with 1/100th as much code. You say Ruby devs use 'magic' like code generation. Big Enterprises use copy and paste.

Also, in case you woke up from a coma, it's not 1997 and everyone generates HTML. What do you think 'big enterprises' do? Type the same header into 50 million pages?
I honestly don't know why it surprised me. I suppose I'm just as surprised that it surprised me as I was at learning it.

Especially since I'm the one in my social circles that usually has to explain MS's history with other standards and the anti-trust charges.
It's pretty clear to me that those are extensions to the core class.
Hi, thanks for the comment. We couldn't agree more. There's a systemic problem with STEM education that affects the entire industry.

We welcome female experts and will be doing outreach in this area. On the bright side, we've had quite a few female customers already and are happy to be contributing to righting wrongs.

-Maksim
Good PC hardware review sites learned over a decade ago that benchmarks are basically useless when comparing apples to oranges.

Welcome to 2002 mobile sites
Works for me in Safari 6.1 on Lion

My MacBook is so old it doesn't even have a GPU. NICE.
Ignorance is not bliss
People tend to conflate garbage collection with Java's object model, but the two things are distinct. Most of the time when you're talking about performance limitations in Java, you're really concerned about Java's object model, not the GC.

Garbage collection limits your object model, but Java's is much more limited than required for garbage collection. For example, in C++, you might pass small structs on the stack or in registers, while in Java you pass a pointer to a heap allocated object. But there is no reason a garbage collector can't handle value objects allocated on the stack, and indeed the CLR supports that feature.

All a garbage collector prevents you from doing is hiding pointers in integers and the like. But that's not as significant a limitation as not being able to say flat arrays of structs, something that is totally compatible with garbage collection.
>>Lots of other things matter, such as revenue.

Revenue in this case is tied to good user experience, specifically things like how long people stay on your site and whether they click the various links on it.

But you already know that. You're just arguing for the sake of arguing.
I'm not sure I remember it billing itself as a facilitator of copyright infringment and I do seem to recall megaupload responding to DMCA requests. I remember in response to their indictment megaupload said that the DMCA requests they didn't respond to were on machines that had some other legal instrument demanding they not interfere with the evidence.

I wasn't sure how youtube's private videos worked but jlgreco has explained above - further blurring the lines in my view between megaupload et al and youtube.

I think the litigation you mention is evidence of Google's lawyering and lobbying prowess.
Thanks. Creating simple categories for the vast quantity of frameworks, languages, apis, etc out there is hard. We're hoping to get better at it as time progresses
Parallel construction requires PR support.
Data Visualization Developer, Bloomberg - New York, NYC, NY

We are looking for a data visualization developer to join Bloomberg's Visual Data team. You will be a part of a small group of talented designers and programmers in establishing Bloomberg as a global leader in data visualization. With Bloomberg's trove of data at your fingertips, you will be delivering consumer facing products that emphasize exploration and discovery while engaging and delighting users.

Examples of Visual Data products:
- Billionaires: http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/
- State-by-State: http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/state-by-state/

You will be key in selecting the tools, technologies, and development of best practices. You will report to the R&D Head of Visual Data and work closely with designers and editors.

Qualifications:

Qualified candidates will have 5 or more years of experience developing web applications, services, or data visualizations and find much of the following list familiar:

- JavaScript
- HTML/CSS
- Ruby, Python, Node.js

You can also email me directly at jburgess29@bloomberg.net

http://jobs.bloomberg.com/job/New-York-Data-Visualization-De...

H1B sponsorship is possible
This is an interesting concept.

The authentication should be safe to be transmitted on the same network... What about if the phone and computer are on the same (i.e. WiFi) network?
I'm not convinced laziness is an emotion.

Even though I suppose you can say "I feel lazy today".