skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd still say the type system is there to help you in C, C++, and Java, it just doesn't do nearly as good a job of it,

Are you sure? :)

Couldn't match type `b0' with `Step Builder IO a'
because type variable `a' would escape its scope
This (rigid, skolem) type variable is bound by
a type expected by the context: Enumerator Builder IO a
The following variables have types that mention b0
[...]

I do love Haskell :) and usually the type system is there to help you.
Do you not have any issues with uploading proprietary information?
Imperfect Attendance Award Cartoon
Can you please state what law you believe would force them to lie about it?

As i've pointed out in a few discussions, the law does not (and generally cannot constitutionally) require you to actively lie about something (IE compelled inaccurate speech). It can require you to not speak about something, compel you to speak truthful things (as a disclosure or otherwise), and require you to not tell someone something, but cannot require you to tell them something that is a lie.

AFAIK, Lavabit was forced to not disclose something to their customers, which fits in with what I said.

There are actually fairly important distinctions, legally, between different types of speech, and important legal distinctions between compelled speech and lack of disclosure.
So you can't really paint all of these things with the same brush.

(note: The above is about the US, someone asked me privately, and I have no idea, about other countries)
That was my impression too.

The simplest way to mitigate a DDOS is to just have way more resources than your attacker. If you're getting hit with 10Gbps, and your site can handle 100Gbps, you're not going to go down. Google obviously has plenty of capacity.

On top of that there are filtering technologies that can block obviously fake traffic or well-known signatures like the LOIC.

The most sophisticated attacks occur at the application level. A Google service would not be able to help configure your install of Wordpress to resist this. But they could probably serve a static cache of your site. Interactive features like login or search would not work though.

Cloudflare does all of these things and more.

The way I read this, Google would not charge for this service. They would select "worthwhile" sites to protect out of the goodness of their heart.

The cynical take is that it is a PR project to help repair their "defenders of the Internet" brand. They built it up with SOPA, but it's been damaged by PRISM.
"protect free expression online"? and who will protect us from google itself?...
This is a good rebuttal. That NYT article smelled bad immediately.

The other thing that bugs me is when people complain that Obama should have just pulled in his campaign people. Integrating with undocumented, legacy APIS, and strange law-driven requirements is a completely different challenge than the type of still very difficult but free-wheeling and modern integration the campaign people had the freedom to play with.
Part of the article laments the possibility that two Americans might have less in common than an American and a Japanese, as if nationality actually matters. Why does it? Surely the only cultures that mean anything are rooted in ideas, interests, and activities, not ancestry or aggregation of political power.
Could anyone have made this project succeed? Is any IT project of this size destined to fail?

What private enterprise projects could compare in scope and size? Google's infrastructure? Facebook? Could they have succeeded if they hadn't started small?
Hardware Hacking in China: PCBs for less than 100USD in 5 days
The biggest problem I have is what to do when a newer version of something comes out. Sure I run 3rd party repos for things like Node.js... but getting Postgres 9.2 on Ubuntu is an exercise I can't imagine a normal GIS person undertaking. Sure a developer or sysadmin would dive right in. But on Windows, it's download exe and run. Mac it's download DMG and double click. For linux it's "hope they have the release I want to use in their packaging system".
/second LYAH, Lipovaca has a talent for explaining complex concepts clearly. One of the best learn-programming books I've read.
How? Seems to me like an "every day person" wouldn't dive into the source code of their browser.
I'm a Christian, and I'm always baffled by the blindly-patriotic attitudes many Christians hold and promote. If you tie your religious loyalty to a specific government, what happens to your religion when the state turns on you?
Guess this is how it's done in the SaaS world? Watch out for repeat of RSS's story -- market got dominated, then the dominating service got plug pulled.

Microsoft really should have patented the `Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' business method back in the day ;-)
Why would Iceland be a vulnerability?
All of the major players are equally guilty, if not more so, of 'abusing' the patent system.

Some of the players are more equal than others.
You should probably revise that to 'successful Kickstarter page'. I've seen plenty of doomed Kickstarters that clearly had very little to no work done ahead of time. Which kind of shows the previous point.

If you want to see lots of doomed Kickstarter campaigns, look at the local listings for your town. I live in San Diego and even for a big city there are tons of campaigns that maybe earn 1% of their goal and look thrown together with little planning.
If you are using Java and the JVM: Kotlin[1], a JVM language that attempts to improve on Java, has non-nullable references.

http://kotlin.jetbrains.org/
How Technology in Education Has Changed Since 1989
Ha ha, epic. :D
As of my last experiences, it still does.
Adding another anecdotal Washington state data point, my private individual health insurance plan (Regence Evolve HSA) with a premium of $149/month will no longer be available come January. The plan most similar to my current one is $252/month (Regence Direct Silver), which is a pretty massive increase. As a healthy, single 25-year old though, I knew some version of this was coming.
Didn't see this one - looks like they beat me to it, so I'm #2 then! :)
>If there were allegations that professors were tying their instruction to investment ...

That's not the point. The faculty-student relationship and university-student relationship is fraught with those kinds of ethical landmines. For example, I can tell you right now, if a professor is invested in student's company, he cannot be his professor ever again (i.e. he may be his lecturer, but he can never grade his or her projects, papers and exams).

This is all especially true in the context of investment and startups. I'm sure if you're a high-flying startup going towards a billion dollar exit everyone is happy and best-friends. But let me tell you, the nature of your relationship with your investors changes fundamentally when your business starts failing and there is a very real risk of people losing hundreds of thousands (or millions) of invested money.

>but unlike high school, the students in college are legal adults.

Doesn't matter. A doctor cannot write prescriptions for people he may know personally because of the obvious conflict of interest. Similarly a clinical therapist shouldn't be providing therapy for friends or family. It doesn't matter that all parties are responsible, upstanding adults.
Comments like:
// Adds two numbers

// method takes Object argument and returns list

Are useless.
Because it's much cleaner and more powerful if the thing that generates the next page is a closure rather than just an index. Among other things it lets you show each user a different set of items (depending on whether they have showdead turned on for example).
I seriously doubt it's x86 baggage. You don't pay a battery life penalty for code you don't execute.
Ditto! NOVA is moving in the wrong direction with this guy.
Wait, where's the affiliate link? I don't see it anywhere.

Small comment about the site: looks great and well-made, I just wish that every next page click didn't populate browser history, such that I needed to hit 'back' 10 times to get back to where I was.
Basics of Statistical Mean Reversion Testing
Simply. Excellent.
How to scale meteor
Darwin wasn't written in the 70s, and the foundations are regularly updated. The source code is publicly available. Your speculation that few in Apple dare touch it, as if it's some indecipherable monstrosity, is nonsense.
"Good riddance. Can't stand the guy. "

I'm not sure I understand why you feel it is good for you if Pogue is leaving NYT and going to Yahoo?

If you don't like him I can understand a comment like this expressing disdain and schadenfreude because something bad happened to him. But from what is being said (by Pogue) this is a actually something good for Pogue and has no impact on you positive or negative. And has no impact on Nova (Pogue says "I’ll still keep up my NOVA specials") so why the delight?
Ask HN: Why do polarized lenses make certain colors float over one another?
Note: you'll need polarized lenses for this to work (I believe mine are radially polarized, but I'm not sure if that makes a difference).

If you go to https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449 you'll notice the little black icon to the right of "Learn more" appears to float around the red background. If you tilt your head to the left and right while looking at it, you can get the black icon to almost overlap the surrounding characters. You can also look at the edge of the red box (the left side worked best for me) and you'll notice the red dramatically pull away from the left edge of the screen.

I've noticed this before with pure red and blue LED frequencies pulling away from each other (NYC street vendors have some great examples), but I always thought it was due to the thickness of my lenses towards the edge. The idea is that different frequencies of light bend with different amounts, thus causing them to split.

But I tested this with some coworkers and it appears that it only affects those of us with polarized lenses.

So I ask you, HN: What's the cause of this? Why does this only appear to happen with polarized lenses and not every lens?
This kind of link-bait title and article seems above The New Yorker.
Agreed. The custom domain makes it pretty trivial to do initial scaling. This leaves only marketing as the big hurdle to go from small scale to something larger.
Especially bizarre because the Times tried to explain away their tolerance of Pogue's conflicts of interest (not applying their usual ethics rules to his case) by saying that he wasn't really an employee, but some kind of freelancer. However, this article certainly gives the impression of a Times employee leaving their employ to be employed by a new employer.
This may be the best summation of OP Syndrome I've ever encountered. Awesomely stated. I may need to quote this, but I'll give you credit when I do.

Err, sorry. What I meant to say is that, while I agree with part A of your post, part B is total garbage. In conclusion, you are 100% wrong, and in fact, you are everything that's wrong with the internet.
That is a very modern take on it. I think the cultures that matter are the ones that will protect you if you protect it. Traditionally they are very much based on ancestry or political power. Still today, when people run into trouble, the ones who pick them up are their oldest friends and relatives, not people from their professional or hobby subculture, even if they are big shots within those circles.
Generate product screenshots in realistic environments
I don't see how anyone could actually read this entire page and grok it. It's like a giant puzzle made by stream of consciousness.
No one is asking to you to come and read the comments. The small minded conversations which you are talking about are obviously getting upvoted both other Hacker News participants - which leads me to believe there is some credence to it. Why don't you take a stab at writing something positive and see how the community reacts rather than spreading the negativity..
Creating a Vision Board
Great format, simple execution and presentation for us who were unable to attend, lots of valuable insights.

I think the theme that stands out for me personally from all of these notes is: Find something you can work on almost non-stop, expect to fail a lot (because you will), learn and adapt, keep trying.
In-place Markdown to RTF [video]
Yikes - the Charlie Chaplin mustache of gestures.
This is true for properly written installers and apps, but since not everything is properly written, a related problem does crop up from time to time: an installer or app assumes the user has permissions to something that the "admin" group usually has access to, and therefore doesn't bother using the correct API to elevate. Even here, though, in the typical cases of installers and updaters, there are easy workarounds that at least don't require logging out or giving additional rights to the logged-in user: fast user switch or login(1) to an admin user, then retry from there.

The only thing Windows does differently here is that it provides a silent, non-admin workaround (filesystem and registry virtualization) for buggy applications, which works, but which can be problematic in other ways. Most notably, while OS-level workarounds are a clear win for older and otherwise unsupported software, they reduce motivation for developers to fix bugs in current software papered over by Windows' workarounds.
Can someone help me understand how to think about the transition from 2.7.x to 3.x?

I have recently switched my work to Python and just started development on what will become a series of web projects all done in Python + Django. Yes, when it comes to Python I am a noob.

Looking at it with fresh eyes it seems that the most useful ecosystem is solidly rooted in the 2.7.x branch. Books and online courses promote the idea of using 2.7.x. My kid enrolled in the MIT intro to CS edX course and they use 2.7.5. Codecademy, same thing.

From the perspective of developing a number of non-trivial web-based products, how should I view the 2.7.x and 3.x ecosystems? Do you see a timeline to a transition? How should one prepare for it (or not)? What should one avoid?

At the moment it seems safe to pretty much ignore 3.x. I kind of hate that because I have this intense desire to always work with the the latest stable release of any software I use. Here things are different due to the surrounding ecosystem of libraries and tools. I'd certainly appreciate any and all help in understanding this a bit better.
Kivo (S13) is GIT for document collaboration. Currently supporting PowerPoint. They have done some interesting work to tightly integrate with the MSFT Office client and version each slide separately.

You should talk to them.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/05/kivo-uses-git-to-make-colla...

http://www.kivo.com/
> GMail uses a proprietary protocol that is decidedly not imap

A thousand times, this.

Using a traditional IMAP client such as offlineimap makes this painfully obvious. Gmail synchronizes labels as "folders", not "tags", for some unknown reason, which means that mail in the inbox ends up getting duplicated on disk under "All Mail", and then again for every single label attached to that label.

Archiving hijacks the way that deleting works, and while clients can adjust to this, it breaks the way IMAP is supposed to work. If clients have to add special cases to interact with your service, that means you're going off-protocol!

Even the login is different. On IMAP, your username should be "foo", not "foo@example.com".
Fully agree on the operator overloading complaint. It really is a LOT easier when working with matrices, vectors and scalars to be able to type their math expressions naturally rather than with functions like add(multiply(.....))
Can human agents handle the 7 million applicants needed to make it work (at least early on)? And they'll still need computer support, I presume you're only talking about taking the place of the front end web site.

Trying to do 7 million identity checks manually? Well, maybe something can be kludged to speed that up. On the other hand subsidy calculations had better be done by computer, and that's not working reliably right now; it could probably be Tiger Teamed into something that works and at scale, a simple calculator (heck, I bet it could be done in Javascript).

But again I get to the biggest problem of management. Starting at the very top, the CEO of this organization (Obama, per his Rose Garden event earlier today), they're in (public) denial of how bad the problem. In part they can't help it, they aren't experienced IT people, they aren't like us who can look at less than 1,000 words of clues and know "it's fucked".

Really salvaging anything out of this needs decisiveness. E.g. to get your kludge working for 2014---and again I note the critical detail of subsidies, especially since the only plan that can now be offered is gold-plated (e.g. coverage of your children through age 26) and inherently very expensive even before you get to community rating (everyone under 50 is to pay a bundle to cover the 50-64 set)---someone would have to decide to start it now. "Wastefully", in parallel with trying to get the site to work. As it is, millions are losing their old-fashioned high deductible major medical polices as of Jan 1st, things start getting really bad for a lot of people really soon.

If this nightmare drags out to 2016 (which today we can't discount, and that's even counting the website or its substitutes vaguely working), do you really expect it to be the law of the land by 2018?
Yes, definitely. Google gets over a million applications per year as of 3 years ago [1]; it's feasible that Yahoo would get half of that now.

[1]
Great work. I noticed on the Dan Siroker (optmizely) slide that he states them having 140 customers, is that number right? Their site says 6000.
Using your argument I could say that if you leave your laptop unattended, it's my right to steal it.

The people who left their wi-fi open didn't do it on purpose, and didn't want Google to access their information.
Nice work.. and some good 1-liners.
Any service that is dependent on network effects needs a plan to cultivate activity before it launches. It's crucial to offer engagement to the Real People that are early adopters on your product, and the reality is that if you go hands-off and attempt to wait for the audience to self-materialize, you'll get a lot of people who drop by, make one post, and check for interaction a couple of times, and then never come back. It's a bad deal for everyone.

Get together a group of people -- pay them if you have to -- who are committed to using your product before you do a real public launch, and then new users will immediately be engaged and it will grow from there. Launching without this spells disaster.

If you are launching SaaS that doesn't depend on other parties' involvement, you should still gauge interest, but it's OK to start small.
Petition: Open up healthcare.gov and let the public help find and fix problems.
Open source means that the community is allowed to fix bugs and contribute to the system.<p>According to Slate.com, Healthcare.gov is 500 million lines of code, and the problems plaguing the system may necessitate a rewrite of 5 million lines of code. As a software developer who has worked on very large projects, both of these numbers are shocking.<p>Numbers like that could indicate that the software could benefit from using more reusable parts and libraries developed by the open source community.<p>Many bugs could be hidden in duplicated code. It's time to put this project on a system like Github and accept pull requests from experienced developers interested in helping on this significant historical undertaking. Healthcare.gov needs to work. Let's make it happen, together.
Can you please elaborate? What specifically is incorrect?
The New Full Screen Mario Game Is Amazing. It Should Be Taken Down Immediately.
I agree. And some of the clone makers offered a better customer experience than Apple, too. For example, Power Computing had a great online store before Apple did.
There is a gulag archipelago, Guantanamo, but it contains only 46 prisoners now.

As an added bonus, most (all?) of those inmates are foreign nationals, who apparently don't count as people anymore in American politics.
His reportage, both as tech journalism and just as journalism, is generally of pretty poor quality[0], although now and then he comes out with a useful and entertaining article.

[0] http://lee-phillips.org/pogueGoogle/
BBM for iOS / Android Released
The problem is that you're talking down to me. If you can't or won't see this, I don't want to engage in a debate.
Quite the glib and misanthropic response, not to mention the value you measure is based upon imagination and a strawman. If you're not interested in engaging the community except in terms of price, why participate?

Most of the time one's hopes are not as valuable outside that person's head as they are inside.
Based on the wording, technology used is going to be a mixture of IP Anycast (traffic sharding) and cache proxying (serve content through), which is what CF does. Except google has all the cash and resources to throw at the problem without putting a dent on their bottom line.

But the interesting tidbit coming out of this project's going to be the internal packet/traffic scrubbing system they've developed. Will it be commercialized or will it spawn a new startup. So many positive outcomes however it ends up.
Thanks.

We currently get our data from Twitter API. We're going to use third party data sources to allow our pro product Hashtag Intelligence to get past data - those sources are pretty expensive ;)
It doesn't seem that I can change the post to include a URL and no text, but I followed your advice and added a one line description of the service on the home page.
The problem is that traditional tribalism and nationalism lead to untold suffering through war, conquest, assimilation, extermination of other groups of people, etc. Pretend fighting in multiplayer games is probably the lesser evil.
Delphi is pretty neat for rapid user interface development. If I'm not mistaken then Skype Windows client is based on Delphi.
I don't personally, but I could imagine our company might. That being said, we use Box and other "insecure" places to upload files. I argue that as long as you have a policy in place that what is uploaded isn't shared without permissions given, I'm sure we wouldn't have problem uploading.

Thinking about it more though, keeping it integrated into excel or offline has its merits. We have 20mb+ financial models that would take forever for your software to churn through.
You can't "fix the process". The website has to talk to hundreds of corporations, and dozens of federal and state agencies.
I am a current Stanford sophomore. I think that Mr. Thompson has a misguided view of what is currently happening at the school.

Stanford definitely puts a lot of emphasis on engineering and entrepreneurship but this has been the case since Frederick Terman encouraged Hewlett and Packard to create Hewlett-Packard. We've got plenty of pure researchers, especially in Artificial Intelligence and in self-driving cars. We also have Don Knuth. If you ever want to see pure academic research in CS, flip through TAOCP for a little.

We also have plenty humanities researchers and writers. The Hoover Institute at Stanford is a leading think tank about government and has a handful of researchers you've heard of (read: Condoleeza Rice). Add in our 22 Nobel Prize winners that are currently teaching at the school, and you've got a pretty established research university.
This is probably my background in sysops talking, but $29 a month for an nginx frontend, rails daemon and PostgreSQL instance sounds like highway robbery...
I am not able to understand any of the questions because the jargon used is unfamiliar although the concepts look simple. Are all these terms specific to a particular framework ? Genuine question, thanks.