skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Most challenging? Cookiepie (2006 in Javascript): opening different web accounts on different Firefox tabs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pfg-kJ4nAw (It's not working anymore and I am not supporting it).

Why? Because Firefox didn't have any API to correlate cookies (network requests/responses) with tabs and I ended up traversing recursively objects to discover extremely indirect relationships.

2) Most weird?

i) Vulnerability and exploit using linux terminal escape codes (1999 in C/ASM), so you can run the exploit even if the user just "cat" your file or a ftp server displayed a specific banner: http://www.shmoo.com/mail/bugtraq/sep99/msg00145.html

ii) Adding a second keyboard to a Commodore Amiga 500 (1989 in ASM) (from a Commodore 64) enabling two people to use the computer at the same time in different screen places with one monitor.

iii) Adding an API to Microsoft Outlook Express (2003/2004 in C++) (the application doesn't offer a whole API architecture): http://www.nektra.com/products/oeapi-windows-mail-outlook-ex...

iv) Doing a file compression tool in Cobol (circa 1997) for the MVS operating system because the organization didn't want to buy a relatively expensive C package for the mainframe.
I am disciplined enough to keep my functions pure and use immutable data structures where they are useful. I try to apply each paradigm where it makes most sense. What is a pure functional way of implementing GUIs for example to use instead of MVC/MVVM patterns?
Hustling has been the ONLY way of life until very recently, perhaps the past few hundred years. This is really only since yesterday as far as the history of humanity is concerned. Things could be better in the U.S. for the middle class but we are still wealthy as far as most of the planet's population is concerned. I'm sorry I have no sympathy for the author's chief complaint. You can still find a nice quiet well paying job at a place like Exxon or Goodyear where you can in fact work until retirement. You could also choose to live in a place that isn't so expensive that the only way to survive is to hustle. Then you could save a little money, purchase some income producing assets, and become a capitalist yourself.

Given all that, some of us do enjoy the hustle. For us, the only true safety is that which we provide for ourselves through the hustle.
phancap, a self-hosted website screenshot service API. JPG, PNG and PDF output. Useful for web-based bookmark managers.

Homepage: http://cweiske.de/phancap.htm
Screenshot: http://cweiske.de/graphics/phancap/www.bogo-029bd33b9f01eccf...
> I have no idea if it's FireFox's fault that it crashes,

It almost certainly is. It could be an OS or graphics driver problem, but these options are far less likely.

It certainly isn't the site's problem: in the ideal world we don't live in (where browsers, drives and OSs have no faults) it is not be possible for any browser hosted code to take down the whole browser or worse, even if deliberatey trying to do so. The site may be doing something that highlights a problem elsewhere, that the site's designer may be able to work around, but that problem is not their fault.

If the crash is repeatable it would be useful to report it to the Firefox team as that may help them find the bug and therefor either fix it or report it further upstream if it isn't in their code.

> but you'd hope the developer would test on the major browsers.

The developer probably did, if by "major browsers" you mean "the latest of the two of the big three that are available cross platform, and maybe a mobile browser or two" as they were at the time of the site/app's last major update. But testing on all common browsers can be a time consuming process that demands significant resources (a Windows instance for each IE version considered, a Windows, Linux, and OSX instance for each version of Firefox or Chrome considered (as they sometimes hit different problems on different platforms), oh and don't forget that there are several common Linux arragements that you'll see actively used by many people, 8 Windows variants (excluding service packs as variants, 7 if you exclude XP), and a few OSX ones, and that is before you consider 32-bit and 64-bit variations and I've not even touched mobile platforms yet, ..., ..., ...).

Multi-browser testing can be a painful process and even if you either stick to a limited number of combinations (that covers for example 80% of your audience) and/or have the testing automated by some means, the results of tests that you run now might not be relevant tomorrow after a browser maker releases an update or an OS maker releases an update that somehow triggers a latent bug in a browser.

tl;dr: if the browser crashes that is never the site/app's developer's fault. If the site/app fails to work correctly in a given (recent and relatively standards compliant) browser than it probably is but there are practical limitations on what we can do to try acheive 100% correctness.
I agree it would be nice to bring renting (in London) etc into the 21st century but you're unlikely to ever incorporate a yelp type ratings system for property as there's no incentive for landlords / agents. They rely too heavily on spin and sales techniques - they don't want you talking to other people and discounting properties before you've seen them. They want to take you on a journey where they lower your expectations so that the one property they show you thats better than the others but slightly out your price range makes you fork out the extra cash. Estate agents and landlords want to control the market - you'll have a hard time democratising it. It really is a sellers market in London.

I'd personally like to see the use of web/tech to integrate the whole experience - so everything from deposits, rent, grievances and so on is centrally managed and moderated. Again though, hard to get traction.
This is the Internet, not everyone speaks perfect English. The article is actually quite good, relatively speaking. You'll get used to it eventually if you read enough. :-)
Show HN: Veu – A free travel guide for iPhone that works everywhere
I made this: http://countrack.me - which is somewhat relevant to what you are asking.
Major Outage on BitBucket
C, Clojure, Speech, Web Hackers? Join us and build a new kind of AI
One accusation about the Common Core I recently investigated, the official documentation and telling comments by one of the professors involved in the process:

It's math curriculum does not even reach the level of precalclus by high school graduation. No one who goes to a school that's totally based on it will ever be admitted to MIT or any other serious STEM program that expects you at minimum to be ready to learn the calculus when you arrive.
i've been doing ee/cs work for 40 years. i've lost count.

dead programmer/reverse engineering projects are in there, but not as common these days.

i did a bunch of rather amazing things in the rocket business for martin-marietta, raytheon, applied research associates.

once, i walked up to an employee who had been fighting a problem for two weeks, asked him what he was having an issue with, determined it was a variable initialization error, looked at his monitor, pointed to the missing # sign on an 8051 assembler listing and said, "it's right here". walked away... 60 seconds total. win.

another time... three engineers working on re-creating a poorly documented test station for a guidance section on a missile. again... two or three weeks spent trying to wake up an interface board based on a 68020 micro. they worked for me, and had sent an engineer to ask me what i'd do. i was busy, but took two pieces of test equipment down to the unit (a logic analyzer and a processor troubleshooter (Fluke 9010)), made them show me their failure. looked at what the processor was doing (nothing... just executing 00 op codes). inspected the memory to see where the real code lived. found it, but it was at the wrong address. burned an EPROM set with the code moved from 08000h to 000000h and installed them. problem solved. start to finish 2 hours. win. went back to my management stuff, which was making charts explaining schedule slips and cost overruns. these guys were hot shots. i smoked em. woot.

fixed a consumer product that was a serious design error. solved problem. product went on to sell several hundred million dollars of units, making the owner a very rich man and handing him 85% of his market. huge win.

i have at least one or two of these a year (though the last one is a bit more unusual because of the volumes involved.)
BitBucket was down
A bookmarking service, that not only saves any "interesting" links that you visit but also saves the data in that link for future search. The service should let you specify topics that you are interested in and will analyze every page you visit (with the exception of blacklisted pages) and put it into the appropriate bucket (topic), for future reference. It should also index the PDFs and word documents that are read by you. In research we consume so much of content. Organizing them effectively becomes as daunting as the research itself at times.
https://blockchain.com/ and
https://blockchain.info/
seem to be different companies
E.T. Atari games uncovered in New Mexico landfill
There isn't sufficient (any) evidence to justify belief in a creator, magical or not. You are free to believe that there might be a creator, but it isn't any more rigorous than believing in unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters. I realize this isn't r/atheism, but it bothers me that otherwise scientifically minded people allow themselves a soft spot in their ontology to incorporate cultural myths.
Ask HN: Entrepreneur Excuse: "I dont have enough experience"?
I've been working on an IT-Sec company for some 6 months now, solo founding it. I recently met a guy at a networking event who advises startups - we met 1:1 for coffee, and then he sent me a really lengthy email basically being really frank on what I was doing.

I have a number of years of IT experience already (primarily in programming) and some IT-security (some of the experience hands-on out in the world)

He stated he thought that I:

" didn't have enough experience in the field I was creating a startup in"

and also stated I should:

"Go back into the working world for a number of years to gain more real world experience"

I'm just really trying to distinguish out what said whether its signal (frank, legitimate feedback) or just noise.

Do you have to BE AN EXPERT in a field to really make a nice dent in it?

Personally, I just think its noise more or less, but wanted some other opinions.

Thanks
I don't think Canada is a latecomer here either. We recently had a child in Canada and all the advice we received from healthcare professionals was consistent with promoting moderate exercise.

I think the article and paper, as some scientists have a tendency to do, went overboard when making the case for why this research was needed.
The OP should probably include a restatement of the purpose, too- wouldn't want people to get confused with the side project help thread!
That's very true in this case. The issue here was that Knight isn't just trading for its own account. They're a broker where they likely have some SLA-ish agreement with clients, or face repetitional risk at the very least. As a registered market-maker they're obligated to quote two-way prices. Shutting down costs them money and exposes them to regulatory risk.
Amusingly, that story is what convinced me to finally read up on autotools. It has been interesting to see just how much they already covered.

In fact, the only thing the autotools don't do, that every current tool does, is download the dependencies. Which, is not surprising, since fast network connections are a relatively new thing.

And I'm actually not sure I care for the download of dependencies thing. It is nice at first, but quickly gets to people pushing another thing to download, instead of making do with what you have. This is plain embarrassing when the downloaded part offers practically nothing on top of what you had.
I disagree, because the entire article rests on the premise that imperative programs are bad because they rely on shared mutable state. Here's the thing, though: every complex-enough program relies on shared mutable state; even Haskell programs[1]. Pure functional code just might outsource shared mutable state to an external database.

The solution, then, is not doing away with shared mutable state, as that's downright impossible, but with providing transactional semantics for that state. Once shared state has clear transactional semantics, the pure-functional nature of the programming language becomes secondary.

Let's imagine a programming language with perfect STM (i.e. an STM implementation that executes the most efficient code possible in every transaction). That language would have none of the problems described in the article, even if it were completely imperative. Hence, the problem is managing shared mutable state, and not existence of side-effects in general.

Pure functional programming could have been one solution to the problem, if only for the fact that it's not even a solution at all: Haskell programs still need a database. But the article assumes no other possible solutions, which is wrong. It focuses on one particular solution (which isn't even really a solution), rather than exploring many approaches. It is simply begging the question.

EDIT: I do agree that some partially-functional approaches are inherently dangerous, but I do not agree with the conclusion that the answer is going pure functional.

[1]: Except maybe for compilers, which is probably the most common complex software built in Haskell.
Are there any implementations or user-friendly frontend webapps designed to interoperate?
A paying Wine (winehq.org) that would work with demanding multimedia programs such as Adobe LightRoom or Sony Vegas.

I would pay something like $100/year for such software that would keep up with every new version of its supported programs.
From the article:

The infix application function (ma>>=\a->f(a)), commonly called bind, executes the computation ma to expose its effects, calling the resulting value a, and passes that to function f.

This is the kind of imprecise language that really made life extraordinarily difficult for me when I first learned about monads. I think this is an important point:

>>= does not execute ma!

If it did execute ma, that would violate the purity of the language.

Instead, >>= takes the computation ma and combines it with the function f to build a new, larger computation that is composed of smaller parts. The resulting computation (and ma) might never be executed (depending on the rest of the program).
Let the Sun Shine In: WaPo Story on the Magistrates’ Revolt
Indeed not, but that's not quite the point I was trying to make. My point was more that preemptively programming as if every single little piece of state is potentially distributed state is actually detrimental. Distributed mutable state is hard and there's no way around that other than changing the model to e.g. a reactive one -- local mutable state shouldn't be hard.
This is great! Would you mind sharing how you got started? Is there a great tutorial out there for building indicators and widgets for unity?

I tried to do this twice, once for unity and another time for the gnome shell and I couldn't find anything useful out there (or even figure out what programming language I needed to know) and became pretty discouraged. I think that was about a year or two ago and it seemed like outsiders to those respective dev communities faced an exceedingly uphill battle.

I mentioned this to a gnome dev I know and he agreed that the docs were lacking but is there a secret or something new we don't know about?
Doh! Yesterday, I was rather content with the decision to use a different driver from Semiocast[1], but now I guess I actually have to evaluate this new epgsql work to see how it compares :(. (Yeah, I imagine this is a rather awkward kind of response to this kind of work ;P... like, I'm glad to see PostgreSQL on Erlang getting some love, but at least with epgsql in the "semi-dead" state it was easy to not have to evaluate it ;P.)

[1]: https://github.com/semiocast/pgsql

(I have now posted this comparison question to the new mailing list[2]. I must say it is incredibly refreshing to see someone appreciate the importance of mailing lists over the "fork it in public, make some changes, and likely never tell anyone: my work here is done, if they want to merge it I guess that's now their job" style of interaction that GitHub seems to be training the new generation of open source programmers :D.)

[2]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/epgsql/gd5-NWib_iY
”Elegant” wouldn't be a world I would use.

”Standardisation” would be more like it.

Though you could have separate $GOPATH for each project. Note that $GOPATH can be colon delimited (though `go get` will download packages to the first directory in the list).

You could use something like http://swapoff.org/ondir.html to switch out $GOPATH depending on which directory you are in in your shell.
Yes, that is what I meant. Thanks for the clarification, although I think the term "beauty contest" trivialises the issue. Its not about beauty, its about buggy software.
> It's more about common sense and convenience. If your place is empty for a while why not let someone stay there and get some money.

My family economist described it as "promoting higher rates of capital utilization" - i.e. helping people make better use of the resources and investments that already exist.
Choosing the Right Blogging Platform
An encyclopedia of odors. Like the perfume scent strips in magazines, but for everything.
Why? Isn't it easier and cheaper to run a VM?
Technical nitpick, Scheme isn't pure.
I think in this intance we've passsed the line between "not being nice" and "being a dick", or in this case being an accessory to a dickish move.

If the issue is used to DoS a site Zuckerberg cares about, not that I would encourage such action as it would in itself be a dick move, I'm sure some form of rate limiting will be implemented in short order...
If you combined cm accuracy in cell phone tracking and a armed quadcopter, and hacked the phone company, you could build a handy remote killing device.
Does there currently exist a system of scent catogarization?
Soulver for the web (http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/)
You probably think you're getting downvoted because people disagree with you, but it's actually because your comment amounts to the cliché "wake up sheeple".

(edit: sorry, I shouldn't tell you what you 'probably think'. Bad phrasing.)
You don't really have to send the entire video feed from the camera, only the part your looking at. That way, most of the "software" is running remotely, and you also don't have a mechanical component to worry about.
An Introduction to the Web Notifications API
Perhaps it's a matter of degree but a woman who posted pictures of herself crossfitting while pregnant invited no small amount of controversy just last year.
I tried to push commits and the command hung. Then I went to isitup.org and the connection hung. So I went to downforeveryoneorjustme.com and found that both isitup.org and bitbucket.org were down.

Great. Let's go to HN to find the "Bitbucket is down" thread just to make sure. There are now three threads on bitbucket.org being down so I think it might be the tinyist bit news worthy.
Except this part:

>> The service should let you specify topics that you are interested in and will analyze every page you visit (with the exception of blacklisted pages) and put it into the appropriate bucket (topic), for future reference.

Evernote does all of this.
This SO post does a decent job and answering this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2672791/is-functional-gui...

It's also worth noting that frameworks such as Java's Swing are somehow functional in their architectural style, if not in their implementation.
Not easier. You have to wait for the OS to load, login, find the app you want in your menu bar, etc. I think Wine just opens the app in you current desktop environment and it's presumably faster since it doesn't need to emulate the CPU.
That doesn't allow 2 windows comfortably though which is what shoots dev productivity through the roof. Higher res big screen 16:9 would be better, but then you reach the weight limit.
Certificates in Data Structures
It's a really good idea to have something like this to create a canonical build environment. We've had quite a few issues on my course of "it works on my machine". The only thing I'm wondering about is GUI programs. Currently it looks like those wouldn't be possible, which is unfortunate, because several of the main programming assignments I've had have been Java GUI applications, C++ and OpenGL programs, etc. I wonder how these could be done?
Before learning about monads in Haskell, you probably should learn a bit of Haskell first. Most tutorials assume that. So the fact that function application is lazy is assumed as prior knowledge, since any approach to learning Haskell would cover that before monads.
Only if you base your evaluation of “outcome” on what will happen to you, completely ignoring the effect you've had on this world.

Which is why I am disappointed with this game and utterly false “wisdom” it's trying to convey.
Dead-end? You mean like perl?
A dead simple way to remember where you parked your car and when you need to move it. Like this: http://jchendy.com/2014/04/10/dude.html
And it's important to note with Scala, a big part of its complexity comes from the practical philosophy of its creators: purity is sacrificed in order to actually make it work on the JVM the way we want it to.

I used to work with Java on the server-side, but I'm programming almost entirely in Scala now (I'm at a small shop where I was lucky enough to convince the boss to let me give it a go on a project last year) and I've got to say that it's completely changed the way I think about and solve problems. I learned Haskell in university and I'm trying to learn more, but I don't see it ever being accepted in our office.

The Scala syntax does (especially when working with async programming / Futures) suffer from problems, like the nested callback problem that Javascript also has, but there is an elegant solution in the language... you just have to know how to use it. But on the other hand, it doesn't look like a completely foreign language to Java developers and it's not too hard to get our new hires productive with it.
Is there any reference for transactional semantics?
No, I wrote a fully custom SIP parser and database format. If I was doing it again, I'd look at stealing a SIP parser from another project. Scale out and don't worry about every CPU cycle.

I thought about commercializing it but interest seemed lukewarm.
My embarrassing iTunes receipt
On Using Microbes to Treat and Extract Power from Wastewater