skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a world where XML with DOM and SAX exist, there is no difference. Now imagine that all this and all related technologies (and there are quite a few...) wouldn't even have had to be invented :) ...because you could have just used one parser, that you developed for the language in the first place. Think of the amount of code duplication in all the parsers for all the languages and file formats!

I argue that the point should always be to reduce complexity of the systems and keep them DRY, even at the cost of slightly less functionality and slightly worse performance. Mainly because the introduction of complexity in a system tends to be irreversible in practice (whereas performance can always be better tuned and more functions can be added when/if needed).

Now, in the real world, where the complexity of XML and friends (and this is probably not even the best example) has already been introduced, and where you can't make it disappear because you have so many things that depend on it now, you're right, there is no real benefit of the fact that you can also do it in a simpler way. And most pro-Lisp arguments hit the same walls: yes, you have a more elegant way to do things, but the complexity of the other ways of doing the same thing has already been introduced and it's not going away, so there's usually little benefit for also having simpler ways to do things.
I'm a Canadian expat in San Francisco, and one of my favourite cultural-tourist hobbies is comparing my public school experience with my (American) girlfriend's

> Heck our high schools even teach us how to properly consume, and how to acquire things we cannot afford.

I'm curious as to what you mean by this. Could you elaborate, for someone who never went through your highschool system? Thanks!
I don't know why this guy thinks it's a good idea to create his own idioms and language features which inhibit the ability to understand the code by pretty much anybody else.
Shameless plug, I just wrote about how to learn trig without onerous memorization (http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-trigonometry/).

A reader made some simulations based on the dome/wall/ceiling metaphor (https://www.desmos.com/calculator/az45nwnmis).

The right metaphors are essential; I can now visualize the cosecant, where it'd be useful, and intuit why cot^2 + 1^2 = csc^2. Hope this helps someone.
Propositions for EU copyright legislation
The way Apple could "read" the messages is by sending a keybag down to the person sending the messages with another public key, one that Apple holds the private key for.

For example if you have 3 devices (iPhone, iPad, MBP) and someone goes to send you a message, they have to re-encrypt the message three times because Apple would have sent them three public keys.

Now if Apple were evil because of a government order, they could send down four public keys, the three ones for the devices you own, and the one public key that Apple has the private key for. At that point once they receive the message they can read it.

Any system that distributes public keys like this can be compromised the same way.

---

The only real way to stop something like this is to make sure that the person you are talking to holds the keys, OTR does this for example by allowing both parties to verify the fingerprint...
Though many of us are computer scientists (at least by education), and engineers. Vocabulary does not just manifest out of thin air. Where do you think the words function, or algorithm came from? I can tell you they were in use before 1950. We have already collectively borrowed a huge amount of vocabulary from mathematics. There is nothing wrong with adopting a few more that accurately describe what these objects are. For example we could call Functor Mappable or some such but it falls short in describing the abstraction. For example functions of one argument form a Functor and its "map" is function composition. So for functions Mappable is a pretty poor name.

Edit: Yes languages get this wrong but I was focusing on the borrowing of vocabulary more so than the correct usage of it. Many words are abused like Functor to mean function object in C++, functions referring to procedures, ad-hoc vs. parametric polymorphism, strong and weak typing ect.
> If rent is $2,000/month, a mortgage would be far more than that

Typically, the rent is covering an existing mortgage + taxes + insurance + maintenance + profit. If the mortgage were higher than the rent, the building owner wouldn't be making any money renting it out.
Scientist Explains How THC Kills Cancer Cells
Indeed. The "garbage collection" described seems to have been state-of-the-art in the late '80's. And, of course, it's compared to features that weren't officially added to C++ until 2011.

Yes, garbage collection is inappropriate for things with finalizers---for resources other than memory. Other than that, I can't see anything useful here.
> Rushing to live on a fixed income seems like a big mistake

And you've missed the entire point.

The point is to live on a fixed income if you want, for however long you want. If you don't want to, just pickup some work and supplement that fixed income.

Choice and options is the point.
I see, thank you.

I am certainly a perl novice.
Neal Stephenson described a very similar (fictional) paper in Cryptonomicon. "Unshavenness as Signifier in World War II Movies."

http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide8.html
I agree completely. To me, the most concerning question is whether eventually, his $110k income won't even be enough for the essentials - housing, health care, taxes, food, etc. Costs keep going up; will they stop? Will his income go up automatically? Where's the money going to come from? Most of the profits and growth in this economy seem to be going to people who are already rich, while jobs keep evaporating.

Things sound like they're OK for the OP right now, and he doesn't sound incredibly troubled, just perturbed. And that's probably the right point of view; no use freaking out. But I genuinely worry for a big chunk of the US - people my age and younger - because I don't know if they'll be able to afford anything, or get jobs, 10 years from now.

Once you're able to pay your expenses and put enough money away to have piece of mind, I think the intangible things matter most. If all my friends have to move into the wilderness to afford their rent, though, I'm gonna be pretty lonely :)
I don't know why pushing back on licensing requirements invented last century is alarming. We already see it with the rise of PAs and nurse practitioners. People who aren't doctors are prescribing medications and performing routine procedures.

Also, making $110k in Texas as software engineer is very doable without working on an oil rig. Of course, salaries vary a lot when you start factoring in benefits like healthcare and 401k matching.
If there is evidence that MtGox was complicit in the loss of their customers' Bitcoin, someone will go to jail, regardless of the jurisdiction. It's plain old theft.
People indent text files for reasons other than "I am writing in a programming language."

For example, take an English class. Any. English. Class.
Can't they man in the middle the encryption? If there's a key exchange, how do clients verify the keys they get are legitimate? SSL/TLS uses trusted authorities to verify the public key.
1) My uncle lives in a suburb in New York. He was paying $900 per month to rent a small 2 bedroom apartment. He bought a 3 bedroom house for $130,000; it is much bigger, nicer and monthly payment (including taxes and insurance) is less than his previous apartment. Moreover, he is not just giving that money away; it is contributing towards the equity. At some point, he will have no rent and own the house out right.

2) How about the cost of Insurance? Let's add that to the expenses as well. Thanks to Obamacare, we are now able to get healthcare; Insurance company previously denied our treatment due to pre-existing condition despite charging $1,500 per month.

3) I am exploring that option, but most people still use big banks.

4) Of course, I got deals. I own my phone outright, and pay $50 per month for pre-paid data plan. My 50 mbps internet + digital TV (mid-package) is $55 per month. No contracts. But most people are still paying $100 for phone and $100 for cable.
This is great security for what it is. Probably enough to keep you 98% secure.

Which is still exactly 0% secure as far as I'm concerned.

All in all though - in general - I'll be more than happy to continue using iMessage and feel at peace. As a general rule, however, never send anything electronically that may screw you over later.
And this is why SSD prices stopped falling.
http://stsdb.com/uploads/pages/SDD_SSD-price-b.jpg

Now you see undersupply?
This is one of the most absurd site designs I've seen in a while. I'm waiting many seconds at a time for the site to load images of attractive looking people doing glamorous things, while what I really want is to understand the utility value of their product. Now I'm annoyed and they come across as pretentious. Too bad. While this kind of gross presentation of product values happens once in a while, what made misfit really stand out is the fact someone really made a significant effort on that site. It's as beautiful as much as it's silly.

TL;DR when looking for a fitness tracker, don't bullshit me with pictures of people in suits
You would need to compare it to other professions lawyers/medical doctors and other types of engineers - and I woudl bet that the median for those working in the tech industry's is lower than MD's and lawyers
What would be done if massive deposits of precious metals were found, rendering those metals little more valuable than perhaps copper or aluminum? You could still make coins with the same value of course, but they would be a bit impractical to carry around.

A copper coin worth $20 in todays USD would weight nearly 3 kilograms!

Surely at least paper gold and silver certificates would be a reasonable concession.
I've done quite well in Seattle living within my means.
You're absolutely right. We don't track individual filenames or data.
I'm not going to claim to have a better name at this moment.

However, I would like to think that there's somebody out there who could come up with a name that describes the concept sufficiently, while still using pragmatic C++-style terminology.

All I'm saying is that "monoid" is terminology of a style that's very different from basically all other C++ terminology. To many C++ programmers, even those with a background in mathematics, it's no better than gibberish.

At least the existing C++ keywords and terminology tend to be far more descriptive of what they're referring to, even if there is ambiguity in some cases. This is true even for the more abstract concepts in C++.
Author isn't very clever about crypto attacks.

Sending device grabs all of the recipients public keys (as well as all of their own keys for other devices, which allows the conversation to be replicated on all of their own devices as well) hosted by Apple. Sending device has no way to verify those keys belong to the intended recipient. User has no way to verify which, or how many devices they are sending to. User doesn't even know if the recipient is mysteriously using a different key that has never been seen before. Sending device does not display any information about how many keys it grabs.

Apple wants to read your messages? They drop one of their public keys in the list. Apple gets a warrant? They drop the FBI's key in the list. You'll never know that you're CCing the FBI device keys on all of your messages.

What's more, is these keys are provided by Apple over TLS without certificate pinning. So now anyone who can mint certificates from a CA trusted by the device can just assume Apple's position. You don't need to hack or legally compel Apple in order to eavesdrop.

If your iDevice is managed by your company IT department, it can be silently fed a certificate without compromising a CA.[1]

Finally, if you did not apply the goto fail update a few days ago, it's trivial to break that TLS channel and also "misconfigure" those keys. That hole has been there since September 19, 2012, by the way.

Basically, iMessage has been securing you against someone who knows how to run wireshark or tcpdump, but not much else.

[1] http://blog.quarkslab.com/imessage-privacy.html
Something does not add up here or, at the very least, I am missing something important.

I live in Seattle proper, rent an apartment that is relatively expensive by Seattle standards, have a ten year old car, no dependents, etc and have lived that way on a similar income. I am not frugal but I also don't buy much "stuff" which probably has the same effect as being frugal. It would be hard to argue that my life is not comfortable.

Somehow I managed to save tens of thousands of dollars per year after taxes which, invested sensibly and lazily, accumulates pretty quickly into a substantial chunk of change. This is not because I am a great saver or a financial wizard, it was kind of a default outcome.

How much do you think you should be saving every year such that saving tens of thousands every year is not enough?
I've been 'recruited' for positions where I was the hiring manager. They must've seen a posting online since we never hired recruiters that I was aware of. I'd expect they'd be embarrassed when that was pointed out to them along with 'we're not contracted with you' but frankly two out of the three times it's happened they then went on to tell me about how many great candidates they had for me.
Yale thinks smart students from poor families are hard to find
In Canada, you have to be an accredited professional to use the word Engineer in your title. This means being a member of a specific association, meeting professional standards in your work and qualifications. This is enforced in part by a trademark on the word "engineer".

In the U.S., there is no such requirement. Anyone can "be an engineer". Now that I work in the US, I call myself a software engineer or a software developer or a programmer, as interchangeable terms.

If there is an actual distinction here I would really like to know it. I also wonder how much these terms may have different meanings in other countries/regions.
No, I completely relate. I feel the same way reading it, and like you said, it's not fair, but that doesn't really take away my general feeling about it.

It's the kind of book where I think I can intellectually appreciate it's contribution and what it was in the context it was born out of, but I'm not really super interested in reading more like it.
You should learn Ruby.
I just moved from NYC to Oakland. When I moved, I switched my LinkedIn location to "Oakland, California". Immediately, I went from 2-3 recruiters per week to none at all.

Mostly out of curiosity (since I'm not looking for a new job), I switched my location to San Francisco Bay Area. And like magic, the recruiters immediately returned in full force.
> The mere fact that the debate is 200 years old is simply more credit to its importance.

No, it usually means one side lost and can't get over it. Half the country still disagrees with Darwin, it doesn't make the debate important despite it being well over 100 years old. The same applies here.
Nations are not necessarily tied to land, nor is the sovereignty of the Native nations full sovereignty.

I don't understand the full ramifications of the treaty and legal status myself. My point was just to indicate that the flippant remark about "some religions can use peyote" leaves out a lot of historical, political, and legal context.
I will agree that sharing larger accommodations (3br, 4br, etc) is a great way to cut costs, and that housing is much cheaper in other parts of the country.

Will you still argue that housing + health care don't dwarf most other expenses? Cost of living is a sum of costs, not just the cost of rent or the cost of health care. That sum keeps going up.

Also, for many people sharing a big apartment/house is simply not an issue - having kids, having health issues, or a simple lack of available large housing. I've definitely shared places here in the past to cut costs, but that comes with all sorts of hidden costs built into it, and it's riskier.

Living 1 hour from a major city already imposes significant costs. I hope you're not an hour from the nearest hospital or fire station (I used to live that far from the nearest hospital, in an area with no fire coverage. Not the greatest...)
I've never used calc. I use rpn, an incredibly simple rpn calculator someone I know wrote in like 1998. Why would I use emacs calc? (Curious).
We're going to be discussing WebRTC & PPSP together at the IETF meetup next week in London. I see WebRTC as a browser technology atm, so effectively a potential PPSP client and seeder. PPSP's aimed squarely at one-to-many sharing, so maybe there's some cross-over for video conferencing, but I'm not too familiar with it to say for the moment.

BTW googling IETF acronyms isn't easy -- try UDP, TCP, HTTP... ;-).

The protocol's described here http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ppsp-peer-protocol and there's a corresponding tracker protocol that's not finalised either.

These are drafts and in theory can change at any point in time.
But no serious manager / founder will want to hire David Heinemeier Hansson. DHH is way too ambitious to work for someone else -- he is not a good role for a position even if he is extremely talented on paper.
I've read "beating the averages" about a billion times, along with all the other PG essays. I was (and still am) a fan. I took several classes using PLT scheme and I've used PLT scheme for a reasonable amount for other tasks (wasn't called racket then). I've also dabbled with some lisps. I've read the little schemer, I've went through the wizard book. I've written the obligatory metacircular evaluator. All this got me excited.

Over the years though, I've done my best to learn the lessons and move on.

Is it really a surprise that lisp, an aged tool of refined elegance, was a competitive advantage over the other popular languages in 1997, which were still in their neanderthal phase? I'm not sure if the difference is that huge these days though. While in the olden days languages seemingly refused to learn from the teachings of lisp, it seems today they steal from lisp like pop artists steal from each other. Say, a ruby DSL with blocks and other tricks is not as flexible as a defmacro based lisp one, but could there maybe be a tradeoff here?

Writing in lisps give me what I call the intellectual warm-fuzzies. I get to use many elegant tools to form abstractions upon abstractions to create the DSL for my problem domain. I like that. Some call it doing the Right Thing. The polar opposite of duct-tape programming if you will. A quote from the article: "to translate this program into C++ they literally had to write a Lisp interpreter [so basically a lisp-to-c++ compiler]". This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's cute. It's the Right Thing. Rewriting the code by hand in C++ is for plebians.

And, given enough code, maybe writing the lisp-to-c++ compiler is less effort than a rewrite initially. Maybe. I'll allow the benefit of the doubt. But what about the machine-outputted C++? Is the code idiomatic? Is it performant? Who wants to maintain machine generated code? Who wants to maintain a custom compiler? Maybe none of these are problems, but my vote is that it's unlikely.

The blub paradox applies much more strongly (or maybe I could say "only applies") when you haven't been exposed. When you, in your arrogance, refuse to try something different. I've traveled up and down the proverbial ladder, and I know where I'm comfortable. For now. I suspect it'll change sooner or later.

What astounds me is the arrogance to claim that lisp(s) is the One True Language, and anyone who doesn't agree Just Doesn't Get It. It's like the audacity a religious person has in claiming that their god is the one and only, in effect taking for idiots all the millions of remaining people who ever existed and sincerely believed in their own creation stories. What are the chances that everyone is stupid and you're the only enlightened one?

In response, I give you the Bipolar Lisp Programmer: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm
I'll do that, thanks. I will also talk to my doctor about this in case it turns out it's a sign of something else going on.
Do you know what's being talked about here? It's state machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_automaton), not cellular automata
Your questions made me think that any response would probably be met with comments like "well, what do you mean some people are 'disadvantaged'? Why don't they just study something useful and work hard? What do you mean 'deserve'? What do you mean 'under-represented'? As compared to what, some kind of ideal representation? What is this bleeding heart rubbish? Why don't you trust the market?'

Dunno about everybody else, but it doesn't really seem a conversation worth having to me.
Totally agree. And that's why we're taking the time to make it personal. But doing this has made me understand why so many recruiters just let everything slip into automatic.
even worse is the fact that his partner is on the Groupon board of directors :)
This actually looks pretty cool and could really help a lot of people. I've been running a few years now, and a couple of years ago I started to get serious knee pains. A physio basically explained to me that my legs move in totally the wrong way, and I had no way of knowing this until he showed me what was going on, gave me some advice and helped me fix these bad habits. It really, really helped - for that kind of advice to be given in real-time during a run would be absolutely fantastic. Running isn't just about distance or speed!
I was sort of sloppily making two points. Gas prices are energy prices that 'we really feel', and they have only gone up some; qualitatively, gas is still cheap enough that (many) people drive around without thinking about it much.

This shows residential energy as a percentage going down:

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10891

This shows gasoline roughly matching the other link:

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=9831

But to the point, a 1 or 2% increase in gasoline spending might stink, but it shouldn't be smashing the economy.
I've had a highly successful career so far (though I'm only in my mid 30's) without maintaining any significant online presence. My HN profile is probably the only place where you'd find my email address listed. No LinkedIn, no Twitter, and a Github account that is only mentioned if someone wants to vet my work remotely.

Granted, it could lead to trouble down the road if I ever seriously wanted to leave Austin, but just keeping good meatspace contacts in the Austin VC community along with a good track record of delivering quality output has allowed me to comfortably enjoy my career and take interesting jobs on my time schedule.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'd love to think that the bullshit associated with meticulously grooming some social media facade is by no means a prerequisite for a career in software engineering.

Obviously being a CEO requires a completely different degree of public visibility, so it's not a comparison to your situation.