skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an oversimplification to assume the hypothetical Python implementation would have less errors. We don't know that. Some type of math errors would overlap between Excel and Python. Some types of errors would be easier to stumble into in Python than Excel.

For example, an inexperienced programmer in Python might use floating point instead of Decimal data type to add currency amounts. His programming loop to sum the amounts would be incorrect. In MS Excel, adding currency in cells correctly down to the penny is a no brainer. Sure, the Python programmer can be taught "best practices" to avoid this type of error but the point is that while Python helps eliminates some errors, it also creates new ones.

Another example is data munging. A programmer might write some Python to slurp a data file (exported from mainframe or whatever) and do some financial calculation on it. Load the values into an array some other memory structure. The problem is that the memory contents are "hidden" from sight unless the programmer uses a visual debugger or prints out all the values to inspect. The Python programmer may not notice that some values are misaligned or garbage. With Excel, the non-programmer imports the data file and he immediately scrolls through the worksheet as a sanity check. His eyeballs notice that the source data is dirty. Again, the Python "problem" can be corrected with best practices but the point still remains: different tools create different problems.

Lastly, Excel spreadsheets are easily emailed among dozens of people. You can't send ???.py programs to everyone because you can't expect all the Windows users to have the Python runtime. Spreadsheets are even sent to iPhones and tablets and you definitely can't expect easy Python deployment there. With less coworkers examining the ???.py file, it has potential for more errors compared to a scenario where everybody can participate in questioning the spreadsheet's numbers.

Our intuition says that on balance, the hypothetical Python/Haskell solution should have less errors than MS Excel but I can't confidently say I've seen any definitive proof of that.
"Sign in with your Firefox Account" and its predecessor Firefox Sync were both designed with decentralization in mind. Unlike other services, you can set up your own sync server and take the Mozilla-run servers out of the equation entirely. https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
I am not. Checking them out now; looks pretty cool.
This is like saying we should stop locking our doors because every door can be broken by a locksmith anyway. The purpose of captcha is not to break any attempts of automation but only to make it more harder. Considering that automating a script to break captcha with human intelligence / automation is not trivial by any means I think, they serve their purpose.
> my privacy on the internet

Location history isn't "your privacy on the Internet", it's "your privacy".
> I suspect most people give up and permanently have their income lowered as a result.

And as you age, it becomes even harder to break into an entry-level position. I know a few folks who didn't go to college, and ended up in low-end jobs and are hoping their experience will lift them out of it. But it's been a very very hard thing to do. Many of them aren't qualified for the upper-tier jobs their experience would normally have gotten them, so they're readjusting and shooting for entry level (which would still be a pay increase), but are finding the requirements issues even stiffer.
Similarity Measures for Text Document Clustering (2012) [pdf]
It might still be worth it, but can't possibly be worth it forever. If you have a baby today, you might need to save $500,000 for a 4 year degree.

It's hard to imagine an economic climate where that will be worth it.
It would be great if there was a website to track contracts like this, I think it could include basically all public private partnerships in the U.K. along with almost every layer of our rail system.
Wikipedia – Lists of lists of lists
Managing Stateful Docker Containers with Cloud Foundry BOSH
College graduates earn more, but that doesn't prove college is worth it
> it stays fresh for about two weeks

That's hardly special. I've stored lettuce that I bought commercially for 4 weeks and it was fine. So that's 4 weeks plus however long it took to get to me. (I bought too much by mistake.)
So the de facto standard we have now of just doing whatever the latest crop of MBAs thinks will be profitable is ok with you? The place I am in now has so much technical debt that I'm surprised they haven't issued technical bonds.
Ask HN: How do you prevent Security Anxiety?
Backstory: I'm currently developing my first web-facing application, but I know almost nothing about security. I actually started coding my application in Clojure, but I read an article [1] about Clojure web security and it scared me away. Now I'm developing in Scala/Play. I do think this was a good decision, but I'm only saying so due to social proof (other large respectable companies using it). Apart from this decision, I'm constantly left worrying about every single decision I make.

I try to follow what could be called as best practices, but there only seem to be a handful of things that are common denominators amongst various lists of best practices. And it worries me when I see one security expert taking down the writing of another security expert on some particular practice...not even security experts can agree on what is a best practice.

I don't want to be ignorant, and absolutely want to protect the privacy and data of my customers. I don't want to give myself excuses for making stupid mistakes. But I also don't want to spend 100% of my side project time worrying about what I'm doing wrong.

Is there some sort of cure to this Security Anxiety? What can I (implement|test|monitor) now to ease my fears enough to actually develop my product?

[1] https://hackworth.be/2014/03/26/clojure-web-security-is-worse-than-you-think/
If my product is well-formatted data, why should I build a server that needs to know how to vend that data in a machine-readable visual-formatting-agnostic format (such as JSON or XML) and also a targeted-for-human-consumption format such as HTML? It's a reasonable architectural decision to build one server that knows only how to vend JSON and an associated viewer (that happens to use HTML and JavaScript for presentation purposes) that knows how to consume and render that JSON.
Complexity as the Enemy of Security
>It seems like the only reason you'd buy one would be to develop.

And there's something wrong with that on a OS reference phone manufactured for developers in far smaller quantities than a Moto E or a Moto G? The only reason I'm buying one is to develop. I'm happy that it will even make calls; I've spent money on hackable phone/OS pairs that couldn't.
getMultiples is even shorter and clearer written like this:

getMultiples = [x | x <- [1..999], x `mod` 3 == 0 || x `mod` 5 == 0]
The system could normalize the password (convert to upper/lowercare, remove spaces) before hashing it. It'd be dumb, but not as bad as storing in plain text.

I don't find that likely, though.
loL. try to buy one of the commercially "available" phones then. first they are not sold thru the operator normal channels. they have a firefox phone "hotsite"... which is common in 3rd world countries.

but usually that hot site wont even work on mobile browsers for some reason. when it works, you get a message that they are out of stock.

saying people from any country buy those phones is a lie. i know because i tried. both mexico and brazil.

in mx i did get one after 30days trying, and via channels no regular consumer would go thru. and all 3 employees in the store were very curious as to why i was buying that phone, which nobody wanted, that they didn't even remember they had one in stock... and if you ever worked in retail, you would know that it has to be really odd for a salespeople to question a sale....
This little tidbit from Chris Granger seems relevant:

"Excel is inherently observable since it doesn't have any hidden state and all values are there for you to see and manipulate. It's also direct. You change values in the grid, drag drop things, do calculations on selections, and so on. And it manages to sidestep a lot of incidental complexity; spreadsheets are timeless, without setup, and don't even have a notion of being run."

http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/03/27/toward-a-better-prog...
this is pretty awesome. been needing something like this every now and then. however, keep in mind there are free packages that provide similar artwork as font awesome in .png and .eps.
Even if only the database is compromised it is still worth trying to find the key to decrypt all passwords whereas cracking a salted 10000 rounds of scypt or bcrypt hash is just not feasible unless you're the NSA on the hunt for Edward Snowden
I'm curious what you are defining as 'low-end' jobs?

Are we talking people who make 60k a year? 30k?

Are we talking about people in their 30s? 40s? 50s?
Nice to see you HN, Adam =)

We just opened up the roadmap for contributions (click the "view source" with a logged in account). Feel free to add any of these notes where you think they'd fit in nicely -- don't worry about messing anything up, we have version control for a reason. Also, please email me if you run into any problems/confusion.
Maybe someone could purchase it for him?

I may be looking at this from a possibility perspective instead of finding doubts and holes.
This view on higher education saddens me a bit.

Is the self taught dev in your example ahead in work experience and financially? For sure. For how long though? I've personally seen brilliant people stuck in positions they don't belong in just because people generally prefer to give an opportunity to the most educated fellow of the group. Anyway one of the reasons I enrolled in college because I wanted to learn stuff I would probably not have a chance to learn while working. College opens a lot of opportunities (living abroad, studying abroad, prestige internships) that self-taught people usually can't simply 'break-in'. As a simple example, research groups are usually closed to people with college degrees. Not to mention the friendships, freedom to learn new things, the environment in which you can fall and stand up again easily, that college provides.

On the other hand, there are some benefits you can't just dismiss. Try telling a Japanese immigration officer you want to apply for a skilled worker visa because you learned a bunch of stuff contracting and on the internet.

I'm not saying the world is right not taking self-educated people as seriously as college educated people, but as long as the world works like that, self-taught geniuses will be at a disadvantage the same way college-educated punks will have an advantage.

PS: I purposefully didn't start to mention that the upsides of getting a college degree are virtually the same in the US as in places where the ratio 'upside/price' might be much higher.
I'm undoubtedly a Haskell convert (from Erlang / Scheme / Python) with little experience in Go.

The investment is pretty big, yes, but I also believe it is great from a commercial perspective because it really improves the result for End-Goal-Programming (end goal is to serve business needs, not technology for technology's sake):

1. Time to market for a product
2. Easy / clean refactoring
3. Massive scale code base management
4. Program longevity and maintainability

1) Time to market is extremely important for businesses and products and schedule over-flow is a common problem in software engineering that Haskell really does help solve. Since building production software in Haskell I've become completely frustrated by Python because I spend far more time building in it due to debugging my own undisciplined habits out of the end product. I'm not a very disciplined dynamic type programmer.

It also produces cleaner and less buggy product for the end-user. Which is so important!!! Particularly as a startup.

2) If you need to cleanup some technical debt from taking short-cuts or not accurately pre-planning architecture, Haskell's type system makes it so friggin' easy your eyes will bleed when you try to do the same in a Python / Ruby / Erlang program.

Additionally, it really allows you to respond to the market better too! If you have to pivot your product it's not "Oh shit, now we're going to have to take that duct taped sewage monster and turn it into a duct taped ninja turtle." it's "Hmmm, well, let's think through the new types a little bit and re-shape some of this code, I know the compiler will tell me when I'm being a silly human."

3. Python and Ruby aren't really appropriate for large scale code bases because dynamic typing means you need an equally massive amount of tests to ensure no one else in the org fucks shit up. It makes team based programming on the same codebase far more manageable!!

4. Once I've built my Haskell programs and wrote a few minor property tests with QuickCheck, they usually run forever. I've rarely ever had a case where I would get unexpected crashes (usually from my not understanding Haskell's laziness earlier on in my Haskell career).

Long-term maintainability is massive factor here too; it's so much easier to figure out what the damn thing and all of its constituent pieces do with the type system!!! It's like having an index and a table of contents for a book. Since most programmers forget their own code anyway (comes back to that fallible human thing), having a neat and correct abstract description of your program and its parts is invaluable to a commercial enterprise.

So, in short, I actually think Haskell is the best language a commercial enterprise could choose. All you need too is one really good programmer that can mentor, then train them as you go; the good news with Haskell is even when you write shitty Haskell code (un-idiomatic, mostly in the IO monad, and barring space leaks), it's usually better than even the good Python and Ruby code those people would be writing.
"That's because here they can't afford healthcare at all and they just die."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...

The life expectancy in the United States is lower than most European countries, but not that much lower (e.g., 81 for the UK, 79.8 for the US). I suspect much or all of this would go away if you controlled for overweight, violent crime, motor vehicle accidents, etc.

The data is not consistent with masses of people dying in the streets because they can't get medical care.
If I remember correctly then Mark Russinovich is an Azure architect since at least 2011 and I think he had a leading role even back then. He is with Microsoft since when Sysinternals was bought in 2006.

A little off topic, but if you ever wondered what all those numbers shown by Task Manager really mean, Mark did a video[1] that really explains it well.

[1] http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL...
KYSS: Keep Your Social Simple
I get way more recruiter spams for Python jobs these days than I did just two years ago.
It's not there any more. See Bug 900564[1]. Basically, they removed the pref from beta and release builds last fall because they don't believe it works nearly well enough.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=900564
ScatterPlot using D3 + R + shiny
A new version adapted from original work of https://github.com/timelyportfolio/shiny-d3-scatterplot
Good picture. It's like it starts with a solid font D-I-S-C and then things get all funny. The V is too thick as well.
Well, if we use your approach, we're mostly water then.
Create Your Own YouTube Alternative for $150 or Less
YouTube is a very profitable business type and now you can create it too with no technical experience or development knowledge.
Protecting Chrome users from malicious extensions
unlocked... but you still need binary blobs for anything to even work.

why do they litter the earth with that garbage? a low tier phone with no requirement for binary blob drivers would make more impact than that mid tier phone. since that is exactly the same phone i can get if i buy a 2~4 yr old android phone on craigslist. 100% identical outcome.
Harvard/MIT cancer research Bitcoin fundraising
How Americans choose to get their news
Python doesn't need any reviving. It's a fantastic and very popular language in both web development and scripting. And plenty of jobs exist for it in the market.
That's funny, as a Python person, I think the same thing about the begin and end in Ruby. After awhile, you just get used to whatever language you use most, and those things fade into the background.
Because it pushes work onto the client, and the client has an indeterminate number of applications competing for the same indeterminate speed and size of CPU and RAM. You know exactly what your situation is on the server, and you can decouple data and presentation without putting them on different sides of the wire.
I'd suggest putting example values inside input forms, not only as a hint in placeholder so sample preview could be generated instantly with only one mouse click. People are lazy now.
The theory that colleges are primarily about signaling is something I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. Though sometimes they do: http://www.abajournal.com/mobile/article/justice_scalia_tell... ("'By and large,' Scalia said during the April 24 law school appearance, 'I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?'")

Obviously it depends on the field. The value-add of an education in say medicine or engineering, which have a strong lab/practice aspect, is probably greater. Personally, I think in general, people overestimate the actual value-added by education at all levels.
"it isn't easy to ignore Lubos, but it is always worth it" if he could just be a little more on the topic, instead of insulting everyone, his legitimate critiscm would a far greater value.
It's the difference between Eclipse and Emacs. Haskell actually encourages "internalization" of abstractions through terser syntax.

Emacs is like that, you internalize the editor which makes you 5x more productive than you are with an editor that externalizes the abstraction requiring your brain to use another layer of translation (the visual one).

If you learn Haskell, you'll find it quite enjoyable (I do now). The way I think in that language is so much more abstract and precise than it ever was in Python / Scheme / Erlang / Ruby / Javascript.

[EDIT] To whomever is downvoting these legitimate comments, speak up why you think they are inappropriate for this discussion instead of downvoting.
It's surprising how the titles of such posts always never mention the content, just "Important Information".
WordPress: unsafe at any speed
True... but it is a lot of trouble with a large number of EC2 instances. Anyway, have to deal with it.
It's surprising how the titles of such posts never mention the content, just "Important Information".
The article tries to frame him like a noble hacker who turned to the good side but in fact he remains a backstabbing snitch. Does anyone here have respect for what he did?
Ask HN: How to talk to big companies
How do you get in touch with influential people at larger companies? I've tried googling around for important email addresses, contacting support and asking for an introduction, etc. Most recently I've been trying to get in touch with people at Tumblr.
This reminds me of airport bars. It seems that recently (I don't fly much) they imposed electronic limiters on the alcohol bottles. The bottles will now only pour one shot at a time and record the number of shots poured. I miss the old days of tipping a bit high and receiving an "erronoeous" over-pour. Some things are just better left to humans, I think...
It's not "unfair". This guy could have bought a place and had a fixed price for 30 years, but instead he didn't want exposure to real estate prices. He played the rental game and lost.
Ask HN: What tech companies are based or have offices in the DC/MD/VA area?
I agree. I am continually finding repos on github that are massively popular, yet I've never come across them.

Does anyone know any sites which are devoted to curating high-quality repos on github/elsewhere¹? Obviously high quality is a subjective metric, but some mix of popularity, file size, whether under active development, number of issues etc. should suffice. GitHub's explore feature is too time-sensitive to use for this purpose.

¹ I know there's unheap.com, but that's focussed specifically on jQuery plugins. I'm thinking something broader, any language, different parts of the stack etc
Amazon used to do it: http://www.wired.com/2011/01/amazon-password-problem/
I think the higher-level point is that the D community needs to actively work to avoid needing someone like him. Changes to the language need to be evaluated not just on whether they improve things in the short run, but also on if they're adding things that in the long run will interact in weird and confusing ways with seemingly unrelated features.
I find it interesting that the `web history` link wanted me to re-authenticate, which I failed to do. (Specifically it wanted a 2FA token.)

This location history came up w/o even verifying my identity or asking for re-authentication.
(I'm on a machine that has multiple Google profiles signed in.)

An adversary mining my location history for metadata is _much more worrisome_ than somebody finding out I listened to the whole `Kagerou Project` playlist on youtube for the third time.

I'm not upset that Google has this data; I do use Google Now which practically exists solely to extract metadata from my routine. I just can't believe its not behind a `re-authentication wall.`
It's pretty nice. In my ipad the header only shows/hides if I scroll up/down AND stop touching the screen. Maybe that needs to be changed.
It's worth keeping this[1] in mind while reading. Someone in the bottom quartile who goes to college has an 11.4% chance of finishing, vastly reducing the expected return of the decision to go to college--even ignoring the fact that people in the bottom quartile are probably attending much lower quality institutions.

The most plausible story about education is that graduating from any college used to be an effective signal of intelligence, conscientiousness, and ambition. But everyone realized this, the demand (and therefore the price and quantity purchased) for college educations increased dramatically, and the quality of the signal was significantly diluted--attending an "average" college in the US and getting a non-job-related degree now just shows that you're minimally capable. This is worse for everyone.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/05/three_graphs_ab....
It seems they don't really care about people being able to actually purchase their devices. Bizarre, and frustrating.
right... We are doing the Flame to address these issues: better hardware, better update story so they are durable for developers. These are very decent devices, fast enough, front and back camera that will let you do video calls with webrtc, etc.

Oh, and you're flat wrong about the "no one buys them" and that could cost you a lot ;)
The reason they look at you that way is outside of programming, not having a degree is a barrier to white collar jobs. My father in law never finished his degree, but worked his way up to a director level position in IT. But when he had to find a new IT job, he had a really hard time getting a comparable position, because those positions required a degree.

People in the software world live in a bubble. There's is not an oversupply in that field like there is in nearly every other. That makes employers more willing to overlook paper qualifications to broaden the pool of candidates.