skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never found subtlety to be the strong point of the FSF. The fact that this particular campaign suffers from hyperbole is...less than shocking.
The broad text chunks are certainly a problem, but recent studies have proven that longer line lengths promote faster reading: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200509/line_length_and...
From personally having taken both the GRE and the GMAT a few years ago, I think saying the GRE is much easier is not necessarily true.

The math might be easier but the vocab sections test your ability to memorize obscure words, as opposed to GMAT's critical reasoning/reading comprehension which is more application. I would recommend taking the GMAT too, but not because the GRE is easier.
Oh man, modern SCADA protocols suck, mostly because none of them are modern. There are hundreds of small proprietary protocols, and a few larger "standards", such as modbus and DNP3. None of them are very good. Frequently they are designed to be run over serial lines (rs-232,423,485). The IP layer for these is mostly just "ecapsulate the whole thing in an IP packet (or TCP/UDP), and have some bad glue code for the networking". Sometimes there is no real IP connectivity, but instead it is effectively telnet to a serial port concentrator. Further, being designed for serial, many of these protocols (the state machine for the prot itself, not the implementation) can't handle multiple packet streams at once, opening easy DoS attacks (way less traffic than "flood the network"). Finally there is no concept of authorization or authentication, so anyone who can get a command to the right box can send a "turn off everything" or "change parameters to damaging[1]".

To further complicate matters, these networks are usually cordoned off with firewalls, but there are all sorts of wierd exceptions, for vendors, engineers, consultants, etc. These may be through the front door, or via a cellular modem randomly attached to a device somewhere in the facility. The final complication is that SCADA networks and systems have lifetimes measured in decades, that $1B plant better work with no significant downtime if it is ever to be profitable. Of course with such big stakes, no one ever wants to change anything once it is working well enough, which does not help (sometimes with good reason, it will take a year of disassembling to get to that controller!).

A big human factor I have not discussed yet also exists: The control systems engineers tend to scoff at computer security folks. They think security is easy... put up a firewall, sprinkle in some encryption and always have strong passwords! They flat out deny that there may be real world implications to some bug that is found, or they say "the firewall will handle that", or "its unlikely to happen".

In all there is a lot of interesting work to be done here, as these systems are increasingly hooked to public networks for efficiency and business reasons, there will be more call for good security. And there are TONS of these systems, your building's hvac... if it is medium or large it is on a SCADA loop, power grid, traffic lights, factories, SCADA is a quiet giant, it is everywhere and no one seems to know it.

[1] It is very much possible to tweak settings in control systems to ruin products, to run just outside of "safe operating range" and ruin a part in 1 year instead of 10, and other subtle forms of sabotage...
My Evil iPhone
well, you won't be comfortable or efficient with any new framework or language until you spend the time/effort to get familiar with it.

i like CI for php.
RDFa and Linked Data in UK government web-sites
The worst drivers I've seen in my life have all been on 400 series highways.

I figure if my method can work here, it can work anywhere. :)
I don't mean to be offensive, but I find this ridiculous. Maybe I'm crazy, but isn't it obvious that a user can only follow a limited amount of people before things start getting out of control? I'm sure it would completely destroy my Twitter experience if I were to follow any more than 40 or 50 people. Why should I do that? Just to make my followers feel better about themselves?

My Twitter home page is great exactly because it's manageable... I only see updates from people whose updates I care about. Followers should be something that you have to earn by tweeting things that are useful and interesting for all.

Why should FamousAuthorX be interested in what RandomDudeY had for breakfast?
What is this post about? Somebody who finally is able to prioritize his life? Having standards is great but this is a stupid philosophy for life... Alternatives and compromise are important in many decisions, and your maximum level of interest may not always be the best factor to weigh your options.
Do you know any private tutors in Pittsburgh? Or how I would find a private tutor with relevant experience besides Craigslist? Based on the prices for GMAT classes I've seen, it seems like a private tutor would be significantly cheaper.
Perhaps the popularity of landscape screens come from television, where there is usually more to be seen horizontally than vertically.

Economies of scale would have made the CRTs cheap for use in computers, even though computers are usually used for documents rather than scenes.
Executive Summary: Still Open
I definitely agree with the humanist sentiment here. But an institutionalist would argue that the institutions, policies, procedures, systems have been set up to prevent countless losses of human life and human dignity. Undermining them for the sake of accommodating a single outlier would result in much more harm overall.

I don't necessarily agree with this line of argument. But people will keep making it, so it's worth formulating a response to it if you want to win the debate. (Not that rational discourse wins any debates these days.)
That pretty much prohibits any kind of law enforcement that utilizes potentially lethal force.

In real life, there is no escape from balancing potential risks (in this case, of innocents being killed) and benefits.
I'm tired of Calacanis too.... please pull a Scoble and say "x will kill x-1"
And that's where PHP truly fails. On the surface, it appears to have many nice, advanced features. But they're implemented so poorly. They're not thorough about use cases or testing.
On the YC submission thread created when this vulnerability was first noticed there were several good solutions suggested for this problem. al3x from Twitter responded to several of the comments and if memory serves he thought several of the solutions would work.

For a halfway decent coder this could be solved in minutes. This has nothing to do with maintaining a huge website as some users have commented. Stuff like this should probably break less when your website is huge.
> Microsoft generally goes to great lengths to ensure people are not offended.

Except with Clippy. Ok, ok, I know... I couldn't help myself.
Undermining them for the sake of accommodating a single outlier would result in much more harm overall.

The magnitude of "overall harm" is not an issue.

I simply adopted the axiom of "nothing is more important than a single human life" and came up with one approach to make sure that axiom is never violated. There may be better approaches.

Agreement on this axiom is a necessary first step. I'm not sure we have it. What a shame.
The other problem with venture capital - management fees
It's too bad that standard hacker slang for "I am incredibly disappointed and feel like kicking something today" is so similar to linkbait. But, really, what is one supposed to say when one discovers this:

$this cannot be used in lambdas or closures. So, when it comes to using these new features with objects, they're quite nearly completely useless.

... except "This is bullshit?" I mean, that's the censored version of what I think about this.
If you are trying to do something "more advanced", why are you trying to use PHP at all? What do you consider "advanced"? Just the WAY you use the language, or the application you are trying to write?

PHP is trying really hard (it seems) to be a more advanced language, possibly to get new users to move over from other languages.

But they don't need to.

They should just stick to their roots, do what they do best:

Super small learning curve, low barrier to entry, it's everywhere, it works great for most apps, keep CRUD super-simple.
lol.

On a serious note, I wrote the comment mainly because people ignore manslaughter, which is inexcusable. But also because a person that spends years in public office isn't there "for the public good". That's just rhetoric that gets people elected. I'm amazed people still buy into the idea that politicians are good people. Enterprising startup founders, or even miscellaneous hackers working on interesting projects, do far more for the public good.
The default scope within a function is not global, and all global variables are available within a function by using the keyword "global". You can also access the superglobals, but that of course is optional.
The interesting thing here is that apparently the difference between PHP and the 'rest' of the languages out there is not large enough to supplant PHP in the WWW domain.

Very astute observation. PHP doesn't have to be the best. It just has to be good enough to maintain it's place.
I found the repeated misspelling of "lambda" to be off-putting.
Twitter should disable everything except registration through the web interface. If it is not a script injection vulnerability, it is a 404 error returned for the CSS file resulting in a linear layout, or the web interface not loading at all. The API on the other hand is usually up (and by extension so are third party apps.) If they focus their attention on supporting the API they could charge app developers a fee, which many would happily pay since they would be the exclusive interfaces used for Twitter (since the web interface would be gone) and they could build ads, charge for app use, and provide customized extended Twitter functionality.

I am completely half serious on this.
My biggest interest in PHP is job-related. I work for a large travel website whose software is all OO PHP. If it weren't for that, I'd probably be in Perl-, Ruby- or Python-land.
Grr...I typed out three or four hilarious jokes about humans not being robots, but none of them worked, here goes:

I can't find the link, but there was an article a while ago about a positive correlation between mental instability and creativity. The reasoning behind it was that people who are mentally unstable do not have the same sorts of inhibitions about "radical" ideas. They'll allow their mind to drift further away from the norm than what is...the norm.

This, I think, is the reason why it's so hard to come to the solution to a moderately abstract problem if you're concentrating on trying to come up with a solution (at least if you're doing it alone...working in groups with a big ol' whiteboard and some mental lubricant [beer] can help too)...

You need to let your mind wander a bit so that it stops over-analyzing everything...I don't know what you guys would call it, but whenever I code something that needs to "guess" a bit (image processing, for example), I code in a "fudge factor", that is: change this a bit up and down from what you read and see if it works.

Letting your brain wander off to something unrelated to the task at hand, to me, is like letting it increase the "fudge factor" on whatever it is you're working on. You "don't care" as much about your task, so you pay less attention to making sure that it falls within norms. This helps you come up with more creative solutions (which are sometimes required).

Is this making ANY sense at all? Probably not :(

What I'm saying is that distracting yourself (by internetting) will help you find the solution to the problem that you're working on, and increase your productivity.
The article was updated to read:

"No one said anything about CS3 being "not supported" on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation."
I wasn't aware, Jacques, that it was our responsibility to be aware of every tragedy and every death in the history of mankind.

I could spend years studying every genocide, every cruelty, going on in the world today, all of which are worse than a single drunk driving accident. I could spend years and plummet into the darker parts of the world. I choose not to.

Not knowing who Ted Kennedy is an ignorance that can surely be forgiven.
There's a hydrofoil going for the water record which uses a very similar design: force balanced rigid wing instead of a sail, tiny flying ama.

http://www.sailrocket.com/

The designs are both basically laid out in The 40 Knot Sailboat by Bernard Smith, which is a really cool book.
Multitaskers beware: your divided attention comes at a price
I usually don't jump into these kinds of threads. You get an awful lot of programmers -- some hobbyist, some professional, some experienced, and most of them self-taught -- all with their own prejudices and methodologies, all arguing over what the "right" way is. They go absolutely nowhere, do nothing productive, and turn into a huge time sink for everyone involved.

That said, this article, and every other one like it, reeks of some strange belief that every single language is supposed to have all of the features of some programmer's favorite language, as well as all of the neat new trendy stuff, and if the language doesn't support all of that -- well then it's dead! Or dying. Or "a husk".

There doesn't seem to be any realization on the part of the programmer that a particular language is just a tool, usually designed for a specific application. The programmer is attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole, and they're cursing at the square peg because it doesn't fit.

Let's take one example: closures. They sounded interesting, and potentially could solve a problem in a large JavaScript library I was working on. So I got to know them, I practiced with them, I made sure I grokked them before trying to apply them. Then I put them to work, and found that they ended up making my library unnecessarily complex, that they caused some odd behaviors occasionally, and that they didn't solve any problem that I couldn't more easily solve using simpler methods.

So, does PHP's lack of this author's favorite features really make it a "husk"? No, not at all. Applications as large and complex as osCommerce don't rely on those language features; they rely on the features that the language does have, and they work just fine.

One of the most basic skills programmers need to have in their toolbox is the ability to adapt their habits according to the tools they're using. The programmers that spend their time writing blog posts like this one don't seem to have picked that up.

...Ugh, this just cost me 10 minutes that I could've spent actually working on one of my projects. :-(
So far I have not personally run into anything I _can't_ do in PHP - it may take some creative thinking, but there is usually a solution - this includes "advanced" functionality as well.

I think what a lot of the issues people have with PHP is not that it can't do something, but more that many of the ways you implement something feels like a "hack" - it works, but isn't as elegant as other languages.
Exactly! I'm not interested in link bait. I'm just really depressed after I finally made the realization--just last night--that the language I've been using for years is going nowhere but down.
It may have an impact on drums but not on guitars. Playing guitar on Rock Band and playing guitar in real are totally different things. But playing drums on Rock Band gets you to learn how to associate a body part to a seperate rhythm. I know I've improved in drums while playing Rock Band.
i like the golf course concept. drop me an email, i'd be willing to give it a shot
Eliezer Yudkowsky's dissolving of the consequentialist/deontologist divide can be applied here, I think: Nothing is more precious than a human life. But people die, so we have to make compromises to minimize the rate of unnecessary death; there's no use spending all your time and resources to build a completely death-proof car if you then die of untreated appendicitis you were too busy to have fixed.

In addition to that opportunity cost concern, there's knock-on effects, like you touched on, mustpax. Letting a killer live saves one human life now, but a policy of letting killers live may end far more human lives in the future. Personally, I don't think the data supports that, but if it did that's a choice we'd have to make.
Jeez, they downvoted you for it, too.

Hacker News is very mature regarding certain things; regarding others, they act like kneejerk jackasses. Politics is one of the latter categories.
That pretty much prohibits any kind of law enforcement that utilizes potentially lethal force.

If you've ever worked in public safety or law enforcement, you'd realize how uninformed that opinion is.

Law enforcement officers don't carry weapons to use them, they carry them as deterrent. Good law enforcement officers regard the use of deadly force as either a last resort measure or just bad police work.
Then you are testing two different things, and if you use tail recursion even Ruby 1.9 still runs it faster than Python.

# 400
$ time ruby fib.rb

real	0m0.017s
user	0m0.010s
sys	0m0.006s

# 400
$ time python fib.py

real	0m0.023s
user	0m0.011s
sys	0m0.011s
Since they claimed they will make no updates to CS3 for compatibility purposes with Snow Leopard, by my definition it won't be supported.
The most fundamental issue, I think, is where "two human lives" falls on your importance scale.
Nothing is more important than a human life? So you would, say, compel a thousand people into slavery in order to save one human life?
By the way, Audrey, welcome to the HN community. :)

Just noted that you were new here, or at least, the account was. Enjoy your stay!
Why corporate IT should unchain our office computers
He did. But avoiding punishment for that crime does not immediately make him a terrible human being, or a human being that's incapable of changing. He certainly changed, and for the better.

(I'll ignore the "he was a politician" quip, which proves nothing and says nothing.)
Diff Match and Patch: Google's open source text synchronization library
I'm not complaining about what features PHP has. In fact, I was never that annoyed that PHP didn't have lamdas or closures until now.

My problem is that it wasn't implemented _correctly_. If you're going to implement a feature, do it right or don't do it at all. Their lack of concern or pride in their project does not bode well for the community.
Thank you for this - I'm the author of a very large PHP application that has been in development for 7 years, and it _works_. We don't use a lot of the more advanced features in PHP, since our target support is PHP 4.3.0, so this leads to some creative (i.e. fun) problems at times. PHP is as "complete" as it needs to be for us.

It reminds me of a time when I had to maintain some very large programs written 100% in AWK - talk about a limited feature set - you had to work with a more limited set of functions and features, but often led to some creative solutions.
Honest discussion? Right now people are just flaming. I don't see much point in discussing the dead at all - it's not going to change a thing about their lives - and I don't see the point in us all gathering round and arguing about how best to judge his life. The way I see it, if we're going to talk about the dead on Hacker News, it should be about the dead's accomplishments and not about the dead person himself.
Which makes me think an input device that allowed you to put hit switches on an actual drum set would be fun, cheap, small, and fix the aversion to a plastic drum set.

You can buy a used drum set and guitar off craigslist for less than it takes to buy an Xbox and Rock Band.
That would be an interesting study. For instance, most people will tend to be around the middle. 95+ and 5- are almost never used. Not sure about the rest.
Craigslist exploit?
> In fact, complications in calculating sales tax cause many businesses to outsource their entire payments to something like PayPal.

How does PayPal address that problem? I don't see anything on the paypal site that concerns tax rates for different items in different jurisdictions.
Ask HN: Client Risk Assessment on Startups
We're a maturing startup company with primarily Fortune 500 clients. Recently, amid all the economic events, we have seen a significant uptick in the implementation of "vendor risk assessment requirements" from our clients.

These requirements require us to fill out our P&L and balance sheets for a number of years, from which they calculate our solvency risk.

Obviously, this is not a favorable practice for vendors (us) who are startups or young companies -- who typically lack the sort of financial strength of large, older vendors, even if our product is better. We're also concerned because this client represents a healthy chunk of our revenue and for purposes of negotiation we'd rather that not be known.

For those of you who have sold products to big companies, what have you done in these situations? Is it safe to ignore the request and say we do not provide financial data?
he shouldn't! I just don't follow FamousAuthorX, that type of guy might be awesome, but he's not who I want on my twitter stream.
Maybe it was a poor choice of title, but the thrust of the article is that closures supposedly are available in the language, but the implementation is so poor as to be unusable.
While looking for two bedroom apartments in Prospect Heights I found this property.

http://www.trulia.com/property/1085497834-Co-op-Brooklyn-NY-...

Click on "View more details" button. I think you can figure out the rest...

Also, you don't have to be logged in to Craigslist.
I had forgotten that Windows existed. A campaign may be counterproductive.
Is anyone else going to be a first timer besides me?
How Long Does it Take to Build a Technology Empire?
You're making the mistake of assuming a universal "quality of output" function. I have no problem with people following many less or more people than follow them, in my experience they're just not the type of person I like to interact with on twitter.

I'm just sharing the way I use twitter, not making a claim about how anybody/everybody should use it.
it's odd because it's one of those words that's hard to imagine someone having learned only through spoken language.
I agree. first-mover advantage plays a big role as well.
Totally agree. My son can play every song on expert and I always razzed him about never playing my real drums. So, yesterday I suddenly hear some amazing drummer beating the living shit out of my drums and was in shock that it was him and not my other son who plays the real drums all the time. If you want to learn how to play drums, I don't think there is a better way.
Need a DUI Attorney
Depending on the state which you live in, being arrested for any form of drunk driving could have grave implications. In most cases, the state would initiate two simultaneous actions- one in response to the ticket issued and the other in response to your driver%u2019s license.
Isn't it "oppression" when government is the bully?

You probably don't see it as "oppression" because you disagree with some part of the ethic that drives them to fight. I'm just guessing, though.
I wish they would have put more effort into deprecation and cleaning up past messes instead of building new features to attract serious developers and making things even more of a mess.
We hear that's not what you want. What we are asking is why?
There's no law that says they can't execute him, because he was already tried, and convicted by jury. There were several eyewitnesses who testified.
The "hit switches" are called triggers and there are hacks to do exactly what you are suggesting, like this one

http://www.otronicon.org/InDash_Display.aspx?PGID=440