skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes...and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use."
-- Hal Abelson
Unless you're a native Greek speaker. My point being that prefix notation is not something common in programming languages, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work or it's obscure: it's obscure to you because you're not used to read it, that's all. And yes, maybe the example is not best example.
Maybe, maybe not. That kind of stuff is harder to quantify.

I know just the little bit of Scheme and Haskell has transformed how I think and my thought patterns. I can say the same about learning to play Go (the game, not the language).

Now, whether you get anything out of it, that's up to you. It's not really about learning a language that fit your mindset so much as learning a language to change and expand one's mindset. If you expect a language to fit your mindset, then you're unlikely to get anything out of it. In which case, definitely stick with the popular languages with a lot of community support. That has a pretty good ROI too.
The HN relevant bit is "How to write an apology". Which comes under PR, which is part of startup knowledge.

I agree it's less interesting than very many other articles.
Eh, the slowness comes come from it being based on group primitives normally reserved for public key crypto. In a sense, basing a PRNG on a general believed-hard problem is nicer than on a believed-hard instance of bit shufflings, so the idea does have merit despite low adoption due to performance.

What I have to wonder is the implications for all of the other random generators.. The NSA has been studying symmetric crypto far longer and far harder than the public. Symmetric crypto is both sufficient for state security (hierarchal+opsec), and breaking it is sufficient to snoop on the public's communications (the bulk encryption and PRNGs).

On the other hand, academics love neatly defined problems, so their interest is heavily skewed towards studying asymmetric crypto where foundations of open mathematical problems and implementations based on nice closed-form number theory.

The same backdooring approach may have been applied to other NIST generators (which would be sufficient for the NSA to preserve its dragnet snooping and still secure against other attackers), and we simply don't have the analytical tools to see this (what is the entropy diminishment of a nothing-up-my-sleeve-number when the explanation is chosen a posteriori?). Dual_DC_DRBG comes across as so ham-fisted only because we have the ability to analyze it.
How do I get the Mail app to only give me notifications during a specific time
period?
Can I use iOS's do-not-disturb mode for a specific app without applying it to the whole system?
You are very misinformed if you think these strategies do not work. They are a necessity for a startup in very high competition niches.

Take a look at the source of the very reputable: www.usatoday.com/sports/ and search for "NFL Tickets". Blatant link buying by vivid seats. SeatGeek does this all over the place as well. When you have really strong competitors buying links like this and getting away with it--it's the only way to compete.

In my experience Google has never penalized a competitor for doing this in my niche, therefore to compete I have to do it as well.

What Rapgenius is doing is very innocent compared to a lot of what is going on out there.
Have you learned other Lisp-like languages before? Lisp exists truly in its own realm, syntax wise.

My experience so far is Logo when I was 6 and reading Godel, Escher, Bach, but I was thinking yesterday of investigating Clojure and that's my task for today. I'll check back.
I'm Italian. Here tax burden for artisans, small business, big companies is over 50%. What if we could shift part of the taxation from artisans to big multinationals? What's wrong with this idea?
I see some tension between values like "go for the root cause rather than the symptoms" vs "bias towards action rather than analysis-paralysis", as well as "speak up when we we aren't practicing our values" vs "value action rather than process".

At the end of the day it'll come down to the personality of your manager and the dynamics on your day-to-day team.
a textbook examples of the dreaded "bro-grammer"
Yeah, I really don't know, to be honest. It depends, I'm sure, on which indicators one measures against.

I think in some ways, even the poor are better off. In some ways, even the wealthy are probably worse off. I agree that any notion of "We're all {better|worse} off than 1950" is naive without a greater degree of specificity. It's equivalent to saying that football was "better" in the 50s. How? Certainly not in player safety. Certainly not economically. In pure terms of game play, what metrics? Certainly not in passing. Etc.
> 95% of Wall Street's activity.

I think most people consider growth of their investments and savings "valuable".

>And even those in the value-creating category often attribute much of their wealth to right-place, right-time luck rather than an unusually high ability to create value

Irrelevant. Point is that the value has been created and thus so has their wealth.
What would objectively define "readability"? I hear this word thrown around a lot without much thought given to what it means. As far as I can tell whether a person considers a language "readable" is really only correlated with whether they were first taught a language with similar lexical syntax. People who were taught Scheme consider sexp based languages more readable, and people who were taught C/Java prefer semicolon delimited block-like languages.
Apology/excuses strategy is the worst, can't even stomach reading their whole post.
> These are failures of execution.

They are, but in my opinion they happened because they tried to do a full on web site in a rush with outdated federal procurement and hostile stakeholders. The implementers and implementation were doomed.

There's a lot more to a web site fronting a huge federal program beyond mere technology.
Fewer lines of code doesn't necessarily mean obfuscation, this is a language feature. If Clojure is obsfuscated, then what is Perl, encrypted? On the other hand, fewer lines of code definitely mean less bug probability.
That it does not lower at all taxes on common people and normal jobs. Large corporations who have interests (and money to enforce it) will always find a way (at least political).

This is the usual attempt from our politicians, who have no idea how a computer is turned on (no wait.. they play poker on their ipad while discussing laws), to regulat something they do not understand.
First, the companies don't have the same name. It's the name of a software package, not the company that created it.

Second, that's not relevant, but is relevant to the rest of my comment. Trademark law does not bar two companies from having the same name. There are tens of thousands of companies with the same name. Most words have hundreds of separate listings in the trademark registry. Ever heard of Delta the airline, Delta the faucet company, Acme the laboratory, Acme the furniture company, Acme the grocery store chain, Apple the computer company or Apple the record label?

Trademarks are limited both regionally and by the categories of goods and services the marks are registered under. If there is no likelihood of consumer confusion, there is not going to be infringement. Moonpig's trademark is limited exclusively to "printed matter, namely, books in the field of humor, stationery, greeting cards, and calendars".
the least spammy lyrics site on the internet

Is songmeanings spammy at all? They didn't even have ads for the longest time, and they don't do crappy a-dozen-pop-unders like other sites these days.
MobileTerminal (the app he's running) hasn't been updated with iPhone 5 support
I second this.

I really like Clojure, and it's what I started with in terms of Lisps. When I wanted to explore more "traditional" Lisp, I looked into Common Lisp, and it didn't thrill me. It felt old to the point of decrepit.

Racket feels very modern, and very polished. I'm trying to groom it as my go-to scripting language.
There's zero to nil chance we'll invade North Korea ever. North Korea could devastate the global economy by bombing Seoul which is within artillery range and Japan, which it can fire missiles at.

North Korea would have to act first and they will never do that unless they are cornered.
Wether or knot I take you're advice, it is a suite tip.
Are you paying yourself too much?
Regarding "piratebay blocks" and, more generically, DNS censorship: recently, RIPE published [1] usage estimations of 8.8.8.8 by country. It is estimated that 12% of Italian internet users has configured 8.8.8.8 on their machine, which I believe is an astonishing high number!

I work at an Italian ISP and we ran some statistics ourselves and found that percentage to be around 5%, which is lower but still massive. If you consider that the average Internet user doesn't even know what "DNS" is... that means a considerable part of tech-savy users are not using their ISP's DNS (which breaks down many kind of things, among which CDNs).

That's a direct consequence of Government-issued DNS censorship, which all Italian ISP need to obey.

[1] https://labs.ripe.net/Members/gih/measuring-googles-public-d...
Huge security vulnerability reportedly uncovered in Samsung phones
Whiz Kids it was indeed. Too bad it's not available for watching online. Thanks for taking the time to answer!
HN Idea: a subforum for creating and critiquing startup ideas
If there's one thing the HN community does really well, it's to constructively critique ideas. Unfortunately that often happens after a lot of time and effort has already been invested in a project.

I think it'd be awesome to have something along the lines of the "Ask HN", but specifically for startup ideas.

Some of these ideas will come out fully baked, but what I would hope for is somewhat of a playful tone and an acceptance of half baked ideas. Some of them might even hopefully be incredibly ridiculous (What about something like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFZo5xXukec ).
We are definitely in agreement then :)
Gangbang Interviews and Bikini Shots: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem (2012)
This is a far too simplistic analysis of a multifaceted issue with no single answer. It's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear on Fox.
OMG such truthiness! Who are you? Can I make you a statue in my city? :D
1) For success to happen, you need an app that people like more than the competition. Which requires building that app. Which requires knowing how to program... and having an idea of what will make it better than the competition. Start from the bottom up.

2) http://platformed.info/

3) Some ideas:

- Have the company confirm the pictures on peoples profile (that way you know that the pictures are accurate, not from 5 years ago or of someone else).

- Have the site compile user data, and recommend 10-20 people for a group date.

- Make it a dating/matchmaking a side outcome. Maybe make it like reddit. User generated content and discussion + reputation. I would think that that would give users a lot more data as to who they'd be compatible with intellectually. This could also make for quite the social news site, because people would be desperate for reputation (because single people are often desperate to be not single), and thus site usage would be very high.
You seem to keep using examples with friends or buddies, and no one is gonna fault you for sharing a link to your buddies site from your site, especially if you say "Here's my buddies/friends site...you should check them out"..thats genuine

the problem here is they are/were promoting a campaign in which they were asking you to specifically place "beiber" links on your blog, so that they get better page ranks in google.

you and you're buddy (or even a celebrity helping out their friend for free) are trying to share a particular link with your blogs viewers, and that single instance will probably not have a crazy effect on google page rank

RG is trying to game the system by getting bieber backlinks on a bunch of blogs in trade for a tweet...thats against googles rules
Wanted help
my cat a bad thing to do?
Flashbacks from when I got a Lumia because I thought I needed to try it. After trying to like it, I tried to avoid using the thing at all for anything and I reverted back to my S2 after a few weeks. My wife had the same reaction and got an iPhone. I use the Lumia to build apps solely now; outside that it's switched off.
Interesting! I suppose var and val are as easy to type, but in Scala my mental default is always val; var is a smell to me. Isn't that the case for most people writing in Scala?
You don't need to "know Lisp" in the sense of being proficient, but you need to be familiar with s-expressions. Once you grok s-expressions, the rest is "just" grokking a bunch of functional idioms not specific to Clojure.

Actually if you're familiar with Haskell then Clojure idioms should be more familiar to you. Clojure's datatypes are (almost all) immutable, driving it towards a lot of functional idioms you see in such as Haskell or maybe Scala.
Have you read the law? Do it.
Rendering is not illegal, but if you're an Italian company you can buy online ads only from another Italian company.
So I think there is a key takeaway for the RapGenius guys here, and it has nothing to do with Google, SEO, or their tactics.

The lesson to be learned here is that if they continue to intentionally behave in a childish manner like they have been (in interviews, emails, etc), it puts off a lot of people; a lot of the tech community. I'm seeing a lot of comments here which seem to put a lot of weight into their image (which is perceived to be negative) and that then affects people's opinions about whether they support or don't support RapGenius in this matter.

In short; quit being douchebags, it's not helping your case, your site, or your relationship with the community. All publicity is not good publicity.
The Sexcoin project
You mean (contains? pred-val-map k)?
I'm looking for a mail client for an Android tablet
Hey, everybody. Can you recommend a zippy mail client for a Samsung Galaxy Tab3? It's important that it not use a lot of my data plan and it's gotta support IMAP. I'm willing to sign up for a new email account if I must!
Growth at all costs. Concepts of "right" or "moral" don't exist. Only money exists. They're above the rules. They have insider connections. Untouchable, yo.
And what kind of story would you prefer? I always find these "....., but" in comments about N. Korean stories very interesting.
I've written elsewhere in this thread about how it seems some of the tech community has been reacting so strongly for so long to the content cartels insistence on copyright over everything that they often assume any defense of copyright/music sales is in service of a draconian tech-crippling regime. Sometimes they even arrive at the complete opposite (and equally incorrect) position that copyright and revenue from it is completely unimportant.

I can only assume that's what's going on here, given that nothing I've proposed would reasonably prompt your questions.

I suppose I'll respond anyway, though:

> How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people?

Wealthy? I suppose there are some pop acts that make it so big that they become pretty wealthy. These are indeed folks (like Iron Maiden) that could continue to enjoy good business even without much recording revenue at all, but they're no more a representative sample for the sake of discussion here than most hackers are (or ever will be) Mark Zuckerberg wealthy.

As it happens, I am willing to distort society a little, in much the same way that the original copyright bargain does, for the same reasons. I think that the norm should remain that recordings are something people should pay for. That's it. No need for SOPA or DRM required everywhere by law or million dollar fines for vigorously prosecuted individual violations. Piracy still exists, and may even be often treated as discussed in the article, but people who do it know it for what it is and that the approved (and supportive) way to participate in getting recordings is to either purchase or download from where they're explicitly free.

Probably wouldn't do terrible damage to other "more important" industries.
#3: "3) Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links
We don’t do this."

That is a flat out lie. Maybe it wasn't large scale, but this is exactly what they were doing by asking people to put the links back to their site to try to rank for Bieber lyrics.
How about making the country a better place to start a company instead? You know, so you can attract foreign capital and entrepreneurs, and also reduce the local brain drain.

No wonder Italians run to Germany, UK and Ireland to start their companies.

Also, good luck enforcing that law.
This site should be penalized up the wazoo.

Can we get them banned on HN? NSA-level penalized? Insta-dead?
You just went way up the ladder of abstraction. The point is to go down. http://lesswrong.com/lw/bc3/sotw_be_specific/
I think you have a rose-tinted view of the past. To take one example: I have much more togetherness with people in my family who would not be currently alive had they died of diseases with dramatically higher mortality rates 40 years ago.
My problem is when companies think that "do everything we can for <metric> while staying just inside (and maybe a little outside) the boundaries we're given" and "do what we can for <metric> in line with our business values" are the same thing.

A company that I would support would look at the link tactic and say, "damn, that's anti-consumer, anti-business, and pretty shady all around. Let's build our site traffic by making our content better and working with Google to figure out ways to improve our site's searchability."
You appear to know what you can know from the outside. The only thing left is to try it out. Or choose not to; if you're that deep in embedded programming its utility to you will probably be marginal.

One bit of advice though; "trying it out" means getting to the point where you can actually "do things" with it, not running through two tutorials, filtering a couple of lists and writing a factorial function. That's the equivalent of learning how to write an if statement or a for loop or something, not the payoff. It's likely been a long time since you've actually felt like you don't know what you're doing, but that will be a sign you're on the right track.

You might also be interested in this: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2908 Being in the embedded world, you've probably just gotten used to certain things being "just the way it is" after 28 years, but one of the things that FP can show you is that those things aren't "just the way it is"; they are that way as a result of the choices we've collectively made. You've probably independently partially rediscovered a lot of FP's insights about state management over the years; you've probably also not independently pushed it as far as the FP community as a whole has. We don't actually have to live in a world where a flag flipped 25 million instructions ago is now causing a crash in seemingly unrelated code; we chose that world. It is not without its advantages, but it is not all gravy either.
I think you're misunderstanding what's going on.

Google employs lots of local people in many different countries to sell ads, etc.

In order to do so it has national companies that are owned by Google US, but are separate legal entities.

But what's happening is the national sales people are closing deals but then book those ads through a different legal entity in Ireland, even though the sale happened with a local sales person, in a local company. This is with the express purpose of avoiding tax and claiming it was 'only following the law', when it is clearly deliberately avoiding tax.

That is why it started getting into serious trouble in the UK when it became clear that it was the Google UK sales people who were closing the deals but then the deals would magically appear on Google Ireland's books.

As far as I understand it, it then uses the double dutch loophole to avoid paying even Ireland's corporation tax.

Google US does not employ the Italian or the French or the UK sales people.

So what you said, as far as I understand it, makes no sense. Google are based in Italy.

http://www.google.co.uk/about/company/facts/locations/

Notice how a lot of the locations have localised version of the US's 'Inc' like 'Ltd', 'GmbH', 'n.v.'. They're all owned by Google Plc (US).
Value for the world != things I happen to think are worth a lot.

Your view is hampered by your ignorance of the definition of the word value.

If people are making money (i.e. selling a product or service for a profit) they are by definition creating value by default.

The fact that you may not find what they are doing valuable is as irrelevant to the equation as the fact that I don't like broccoli.
Closures are nice, but you don't have to understand them in order to understand functional programming ... Closures are more about how functional programming languages are implemented.
Totally agree.

To the OP: I would recommend spending a decent amount of time developing "industry" connections with others that work with the same technology that you do. When you attend an event though, don't have the mindset of "I'm going to find a job", but rather something like "I'm going to meet smart people that I'd enjoy working with." Maybe try taking some small freelance work with some of the people you meet too. Anywho, good luck!
I'm not the OP, but I've had trouble with the JPEGOptim feature of ImageOptim. It created JPEG files that crashed the JPEG decoder on some older android phones.

The files worked fine elsewhere, so I think it was an decoder bug not an invalid file, but I had to avoid optimizing JPEG files to avoid the problem.

This was about two years ago, so I don't recall version numbers or phone models.
Russia and CIS countries don't care about US fraud so won't allow citizens to be extradited. FBI/Secret Service prob know who they are and will just wait until they go on vacation somewhere and kidnap them like they usually do.
https://speakerdeck.com/kachayev/stop-coding-pascal
At the end, his example for rebalancing our time portfolio: Despite the many positive outcomes of practicing pickup artistry, he'll actually sometimes recommend giving it up if it hasn't produced the long term returns you expected!
If they had already known about the exploit, it would have been much easier and more straightforward for them to just fix it.
They were (or are) being deprecated because they were broken beyond repair. That's pretty damning considering that all of the things I mentioned have been done properly in plenty of other languages. They aren't treading new ground here.

> Akka actors (which are awesome, BTW).

PartialFunction[Any, Unit]. Ridiculous.
TL:DR - learn new things, don't be a dick, ask for help, and write code.

This all seems like standard stuff, but if you look at it like a framework and evaluate all actions using that methodology, it will help to identify areas in need of improvement.
Because that takes too much strategic thinking for these spastic, greedy bureaucrats.