skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Backed up by:

1) You can write insecure code in any language, and

2) Platforms written in other languages have security vulnerabilities.

When your argument in defense of a computer language can be applied to every single computer language ever invented without any changes, it's a sign that it's not really an argument.

Here's my argument about how I'm as good at ping-pong as everyone else:

1) Other people can play ping-pong badly.

2) Other people have lost ping-pong matches.
IANAL, but while that may be true in general, California (where the author was employed[0]) is an at-will state, and most people reading HN (in fact, most people working at startups in general) are likely to be employed at-will. AFAIK, that means that they are not entitled to any severance unless their initial contract stipulated otherwise.

[0] Actually, where the company was based we don't know which employment laws applied to his contract without reading it. You can be a California resident employed by a Delaware corporation operating out of California and your contract can still be subject the the employment laws of a third state. I'm not entirely sure how this actually works in practice, but I know it is done.

EDIT Some quick Googling found this website, which has some interesting information (albeit a rather terrible layout): http://www.careerprotection.com/severancepay.html
Right. They need the signature to get free of any wrongful termination suits. Though, the non-disparagement clause pretty much ties in with that, I suppose.
For me it's rather common (more than 75%) for the __init__ parameters be other than simple assignments to attributes.
> And if, as I interpret what you say, you believe that children are better off having access to everything online in order to feel trusted and respected? Well I disagree pretty damned strongly.

You're entitled to your opinion regarding your own kids. You're not entitled to an opinion regarding my kids or how I raise them.

Well, you may have an opinion about my family, but don't expect me to respect it or even take the time to discuss it.
I think natural language designers might also look at the letter frequencies and question why 'E' shows up so much. Is the canonical sound it makes just common in English or is there some problem with its "design"? It turns out E is way overloaded in English:

- it's silent in the case of modifying preceding vowels separated by a medial consonant e.g. hat vs. hate, bat vs. bate

- and in older English (or English that wants to feel old) was a superfluous final letter e.g. olde, pubbe

- as a silent letter entirely e.g. eagle

- as itself e.g. egg, education

- as a silent or nearly silent suffix separator for -ed e.g. dropped, judged

- as a non-silent suffix for -ed e.g. educated

- silent as an immediate vowel modifier in vowel digraphs (in some spellings) e.g. archaeology, encyclopaedia, caesar used to be ligatured it was so incidental.

- silent as a modifier on itself e.g. teen, feel

- one of several representation for schwa, ə e.g. taken (takən), enemy (enəmy)

etc.

'e' is a mess. It's mostly silent, either ignored completely or modifying something else (an issue even Benjamin Franklin tried to solve through a proposed spelling reform). It's conflated with schwa (the most common vowel sound in English yet has no singular representation).

A language reformer would probably tackle this letter first and fix a great deal of the spelling problems in English.
Or you can sign it and nevertheless keep making disparaging remark.
Seconding your objection.

"in societies that decide their federal system should be arbiter of its health care system..."

To most of the world this reads as:

"in first world nations..."
Not exactly. You aren't considering that there's a threshold to overcome. All customs searches would be unreasonable if there were a trivial way to send items without going through customs.

Invading everyone's privacy to catch a few dumb criminals (because all non-dumb criminals would have just sent their data through the internet) is a really really bad tradeoff, because the cost:benefit ratio is too high.
When will the limitations of the battery be surmounted?
Thanks for this post. Needed it. Building an email app - which is such a large market... and large customer base. Need to narrow it down.
Interesting you mentioned CoffeeScript and syntactic sugar, because adding an equivalent "self." in python inits' parameter names doesn't work the same way in CoffeeScript.

def __init__(self, self.x, self.y): # fail
pass

Did you mention this because there is an existing PEP that proposes this functionality?
Opting out of the filter is not saying "i like hard ore porn", it is saying "i want to read sites like HN that are wrongly blocked by your shitty filters".
http://www.impredicative.com/ur/
I don't mind the need to research DOM-level APIs on the fly. In fact, I'd be just as impressed that they not only know what they need to look up to refresh their memory, but where to look. Where and how they look might say things about them as well.

After all, I often have to look up a rarely used method. Seems unfair to judge harshly if they do so.
Using negative margins and thus displaying text outside of the viewable area of the page probably isn't the best idea, either. Hopefully their coin code is better than their ability to create a mobile web page.
I am confused as to whether this article is trying to compare the security of the language implementations (PHP Interpreter, JVM, Ruby Interpreter, V8) or what vulnerabilities can be exposed in programs written in the language (SQL injection, non thread safe, stack overflows) etc.
If the Internet has taught me anything it's that the next form of currency will be cats. You can take pictures of them, add words in impact font, or take videos of them. You then generate tons of money somehow when you mother shares them in a forwarded email (I think).

I have therefore started mining cats. Turns out when you put 30 of them in a room they generate more 'interest' than the best Bitcoin mining outfits.
What "First Amendment rights"? You give those up when you take a job. As Bob Black said in The Abolition of Work, "There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace".
<blog>I recently signed up for Kaggle. I think it's cool, too.</blog>
Windows 8.x breaks 10 percent, Internet Explorer 11 makes a splash
I mean, don't not fixing what ain't broke is certainly a matter of integrity. Fixing something to the latest hippest new fad just to "attract young hackers" detracts from integrity. Making the editor an awesome badass attractive editor should be enough. Otherwise you'll only be attracting groupthink-prone douchebags, anyway.
If you live in the Uk and you want to do something about this you can join the Open Rights Group https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/cameron-stop-sleep...
This is me at a used car dealership Wednesday, the 1st.

HIM: $13,999

ME: $9,500

HIM: Oh no no no no.(click click click - on his computer). Ok ok, this is what I can do for you $13,499. I take blah blah

....
5 minutes later
...

HIM: Ok $10,000 and that is my final.

ME: $9,500.

In the end I didn't buy it. It's just amazing how we shaved $4000 off in less than 5 minutes. This industry needs to be regulated.
I definitely love sports and am currently working on a side-project in that area. However, it is not an in-game experience. Hoping to do a Show HN soon to share it.

My feeling is that the "in-game" experience will be tough to crack. Call me old fashioned, but when I sit down to watch a game, I may have a second screen open, but it's rarely used to augment watching the game, it's mostly for multi-tasking.
Its been a while since I did any ASP.Net, but I remember some sort of error that would be thrown by default for common sql injection or script injection patterns on user inputs. There were still many many ways to screw things up, but this probably prevented quite a few attacks for extra lazy/ignorant coders (we have all been there at one point or another).
Why does desktop chrome seem to have taken a plunge about 6 months ago giving FF the lead over non-IE browsers?
I've grudgingly signed one of these a few years ago because the owner of the company had a habit of vindictively pursuing employees she didn't like until they were poor. That trumped the crappy termination clause so I signed it!

But ultimately I don't think it really matters too much so why not just take the money and have it both ways? I reasoned that it would be pretty hard to enforce if I ever did really feel like venting some serious spleen.

Having said all that, most sour-grapes aren't worth publicizing IMHO. Unless they're funny of course and this one wasn't funny enough.
If it's a mass layoff, the event will probably fall under the WARN act which requires 60 days notice for "full-time" workers.

http://humanresources.about.com/od/glossaryw/qt/WARN_Act.htm
Agreed. The fasted state is key here, giving the body a chance not to be processing food. After doing this for a while I can't understand the deal with eating small meals a bunch of times a day.
>> "The age is relevant, because it is likely that his/hers resources are limited (and thus may have little to work with)."

I disagree with this point. When developing (relatively simple) apps the biggest resource is time - something a teenager has A LOT of. As someone who started developing apps when I was 17 I know that I was able to develop 5x the number of apps then that I can now. Simply because I had more time. Also because I was living with my parents as most people at that age are and money isn't really an issue it doesn't matter if apps fail, you can keep building. You don't need to spend time on paying projects or evaluate the risk of developing a new project of your own.
I suspect the survey is probably selection biased towards 3 as it is. In any event, whether respondents considered it a mistake or not, it's a mistake.
The only real test is to make it open source. There isn't a lot of money in cryto done correctly, that is closed source. Because without public audits its impossible to know you've done it correctly, and even if you have, the public perception will be you haven't due to its closed-source-something-to-hide nature.
Text processing w/NSLinguisticTagger: implementing Writer Pro's syntax control
I did something similar for Go and Java. It's simpler if you don't need the whole API, but of course not as powerful.
https://github.com/bashtian/jsonutils
Because there are times that jQuery is not available to you for whatever reason. Most of time the tasks I stated are not really that hard to do in vanilla Javascript, it just can be more verbose as opposed to doing it with jQuery.
Just won the lottery

Close relative has received a terminal diagnosis

Believed their horrorscope

Got pregnant

Saved enough money to retire to Thailand

Spouse has had an affair with a co-worker (Trust aside this is still a good reason)
There are a lot of other things too. We live in what I call the "economic order of fake-gender-neutrality" where women get ahead by foregoing having families. This means that a certain kind of woman is going to be interested in taking high-risk long-hours work like being a tech founder. Not someone like my grandmother who was a tenured astrophysicist while raising four children.

I know this is probably not going to go over well on HN given the connections to VC's but a major part of the problem is that "tech founders" means businesses caught in the VC exit strategy. But I think a lot of the really disruptive businesses of tomorrow are going to be lifestyle businesses, and if you want to attract women to coding, I think that lifestyle businesses are a better deal for most people. The potential payoffs are lower, it is true, but the freedom is higher, and the security is better in many cases. And with a lifestyle business, the freedom to have a family, and to integrate family and work time, makes the challenges that face child-rearing men and women (but they affect women at a younger age) easier to handle.

I think that as one starts to show that these lifestyle businesses are really viable in technology, that we will see women come (and truth be told, probably become the majority of coders in open source software).
Rule Databases; or, How to Make Writers Even More Awesome
What if you don't get out of a car that is doing 100mph against a brick wall? That's php if it's not clear.
> Assuming you have nothing disparaging to say, not agreeing is foolish.

That sounds an awful lot like "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear", a statement which I know is very much false.

What you think is disparaging may be very different from what your employer thinks is disparaging. By signing away your rights using ill-defined and imprecise language, you are only opening yourself up to potential legal troubles later.

I could flip your final statement on its head: assuming you don't desperately need the severance payment, agreeing is foolish.
One of the leading causes to Detroit's failure in the automotive industry is because it could no longer compete with the manufacturing capabilities of car companies abroad. If we want to determine whether Silicon Valley will last, I think we need to ask, what is the competitive advantage of Silicon Valley? And what would it take for SV to lose it's advantage?

Perhaps what SV has which is unique is a disproportionally large tech infusion. Let me elaborate. Many large tech companies reside in SV and the Bay Area including Oracle, Apple, HP, Google and Intel. It could be argued that these companies are so large at this point that they have cultural effect on the surrounding communities. In tech right now, the largest competitive advantage is good engineers because almost everything else has become easy to obtain thanks to the internet. In order to compete with SV, you may need to duplicate the cultural effect that SV created, and that isn't happening anywhere else on the same level right now. Maybe there is hope in Chicago where students K-12 will start learning Computer Science as part of their core curriculum fairly soon.
The big advantage of software though is that you don't have to maintain a fixed ratio of developer:user like that, though. Sure, your employee count should increase as user count does, but far less than linearly.
Garages and Ecosystems
The importance of the research round in creative technical work
Yes but it only takes one eval or config flag set wrongly for that to be moot.

It's perfectly possible to write a pure C web page that is 100% secure. It just requires experience.

The same with all other languages. PHP doesn't protect the novice, neither does C. Experience does.
Interestingly enough, lots of consumer printing software will not print images of US currency. Photoshop will absolutely not allow you to even open images of it.
I frankly wonder how much of PHP's poor reputation is directly related to the high Google PageRank of W3Schools and their awful PHP/MySQL tutorials.
Netflix’s dumbed-down algorithms
The one from your domain registrar, I would imagine.
If the company couldn't be bothered to learn what I thought in the months or years I've been working with them, I don't feel any motivation to tell them now. An exit interview is essentially saying, to me, "We didn't care until you left."

There's also the fact that I find most interviews incredibly dehumanising experiences. Someone sits down and reads some set questions at you... bleh. Does anyone enjoy that? You want to know what I think, try having a conversation. If the emotional and intellectual investment on your side is you deigned to read me a list? Just... stuff that for a game of soldiers. I'm not going to put up some of my feelings and concerns in response to a list-reading machine.

Ultimately, if I've got a good relationship with my manager, she or he will know why I'm leaving without needing to sit down and treat me like some stranger who they can interrogate. If we don't have a good relationship, then under those conditions all they've really done is pay my wage in return for code, and when they stopped doing so they lost the right to my time and effort in any form.
Just because you tested more secure .NET site than less secure PHP sites doesn't mean that PHP is less secure. It means you tested more secure .NET sites compared to number of less secure PHP sites. If you flip a coin 10 times and you will get 10 tails it doesn't mean that the coin is broken or faulty. Random numbers are random.
Chmod777: simple steps to improve yourself in 2014
I see many comments here acting like this means not aligning on word boundaries (e.g. using packed pragma, sandy bridge have unaligned access, etc.). This has nothing to do with word alignment. As the article states at the beginning, this is about aligning to page boundaries, which is on a very different level than word boundaries or structure packing. Let's not get these confused.
So the bigger half of developers stick to Python 2 and the smaller other half actually tried migration to Python 3. After 5 years of promoting Python 3 as the future.
Should Your Startup Adopt a New Management Style?
My problem with a lot of these competitions, particularly the high-reward ones, is you've got people duking it out at the 4th or 5th decimal point for the top few spots. At that point, you're not even competing for best generalizable algorithm, you're competing for 'algorithm which happens to fit the holdout set exceptionally well'. It's overfitting at a distance.
A PDF? What is this?
Pando just published an article on a super-model who also writes and releases her own iPhone apps, codes also in python. I guess you could also say she is a software engineer who dabbles in modeling.

http://pando.com/2014/01/02/from-coding-to-the-catwalk-this-...
Funny Treadmill Accident
Big Data Startup MysmartFarm develops a Big Data cloud solution for farmers
It's a thin veneer because ISPs have been strongly pressured into "providing" this. They did not do this freely in response to their customers' desire. This give the government some plausible deniability as well as immunity from responsibility for cockups. It's also a thin veneer because most moderate people will not want to contact their ISP and fill out a form^ requesting access to obscene and tasteless content.

^Kindly posted by itricsquid http://i.imgur.com/dWxORfJ.png

Honestly, I'm quite shocked how many HN readers see this as reasonable.
Wait until the Word Cup comes this year, I know many hackers that love Soccer.
"The way the salespeople negotiate between two different parties – on one side with the customer, on the other side with their manager"

This is what really struck at me. I was really surprise at how isolated a car sales guy is, even within the same dealership. It truly is every guy for themselves.

Is this situation ripe for a disruption?
Our app is iPhone only, but this is a great point to remember for anyone thinking about dropping the non-retina image.
I will readily admit I don't fully understand the whole thing, but can't find a reasonable and non-partisan explanation anywhere (I'm not British and not even from an English-speaking country).

What are those facts exactly? If it's just something implemented by ISPs, how is Cameron's government implied?

What I understand is that the British government made it compulsory for all ISPs in the UK to implement that filter, and make it "opt-out", and left it to ISPs to decide the lists of things to "filter".

If that's the case then yes, it is a abomination.

If ISPs are somehow free to make it opt-in or opt-out it's less worse but still not good.

(And of course I have no problem with parents wanting to filter things on their home network if they so choose).
Maintaining a program year after year is more important to long term health than the immediate benefits of any diet. Most any diet studied shows a short term benefit. Even just participating in a study (placebo effect) usually happens short term. But few diets have notable retention rates after 2 years.

Having lost >30 lb multiple times and having regained more each cycle, the problem (for me) is that work, stress, sleep deprivation, children, family crises, work crises, business travel, etc. present significant obstacles to any extreme protocols.

I tried IF for 6 months; it worked short term. But I felt so unfocused and unstable during the fast days that it was difficult for me to maintain.

My latest effort (lost >100 lb, for over a year) has greatly simplified things - eat lots of veggies before I eat protein or other foods for any meal. No other restrictions, calorie counting, or biochemistry hacks. Very easy to eat out, travel, maintain. I did not join a gym or buy equipment this time - instead I walk to work (5 miles each way.) Also maintain sleep program - no more evening alcohol or coffee.
What changes need to be made to the uk system to make it more like proper censorship?

1: make it mandatory for all ISPs to provide it.

2: make it mandatory for all people to use it.

3: have a government supplied list of banned material

4: have penalties for being in possession of such material.

At the moment ISPs are chosing to offer these filters (albeit with the threat of potential legislation).

People don't have to use the filters. Not everyome is opted in by default, and for those who are there are proceedures to opt out.

The government isn't supplying any lists of what to ban, they've just asked ISPs to make sure that under 18s are not getting access to pornography.

And there are no penalties for possessing any content blocked by these filters. Someone can have terabytes of this stuff with no problems.
Wait, are you saying that college is too late to learn how to program?
Get buying advice from your social network contacts (alpha+bootstrapping)
Redis Persistence and Backups in Production
Show HN: I created my first digital download, you can have it for free!
Hey HN,

I created my first digital download, a printable dual timeline calendar for 2014.

In an effort to create more products this year I'm sharing this in some of my favourite web places in the hope I'll get valuable feedback and learn from these experiments.

While the end product may not be technical, the type of product and delivery method are areas I'm really interested in.

The calendar layout was something I've used myself in pen & paper form and has been more recently inspired by bulletjournal.com, the GTD method and quantified self movement.

It may be of use to those of you interested in design, analog note-taking & tracking metrics/data.

I use it to split work from home, track calories in/out & for income/expenses...

You can also use it as a couples calendar, a single line journal, track your mood, your run times - whatever data you'd like to collect over the coming year!

Use the code hn2014 to make it a free download.
Feedback is really appreciated as it will help me to improve my ideas & products.

CalCal - A simple printable calendar - http://gum.co/IEMpg

Thanks guys, hope you'll find it useful!
Actually I am considering C. It's pretty easy to write a CGI that Apache can call. Process startup is pretty cheap on UNIX and it's secure if you suexec, chroot it and know how to write C code that isn't full of holes.

http://undeadly.org/ is written in C. Source: http://undeadly.org/undeadly-src.tar.gz
If their primary task was to build HTML emails then I could understand that train of thought.

I suppose there are people out there that are working as front-end developers for websites that only work in HTML and CSS, but I would think that's getting more rare as time goes on. Of course, that could just be bias based on my own career.

But, going with your suggestion as a thought exercise, I would go in a different direction. To make a pattern like fizzbuzz I suppose I would do something more like: build a page with a series of paragraphs so that these CSS properties apply to every third paragraph, these CSS properties apply to every fifth paragraph, and so on. Something possible with CSS but requires the ability to think things through.
I usually like the news chosen by http://thetechblock.com/ and their design is really clean.