skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slightly meta, but: has anyone else noticed how much love languages with very strong type disciplines have been getting on HN recently? Scala, Haskell, Clojure, Go, Rust jump out.

Maybe language designers/toolmakers are getting better at bringing the benefits of stronger typing (superior editor support, faster execution times, less need for unit testing) without as much baggage: highly ceremonial code, complex compiler setup/tooling, etc? I suspect editor/compiler-level type inference, where you can do things like "val x = NewVal()" vs. "NewVal x = new NewVal()" might have something to do with it.

As someone who's swung back and forth across this divide, I get the sense that modern static language development is much less of a pain in the ass than it was 10yrs ago.

I'm less interested in static vs. dynamic than I am in why the community seems to be floating in this direction recently, when the past 5-7 years has been all about RoR, Django, and even Perl.
The ironic part is this "outlier" was originally the purpose of higher education... provide a lifetime of interesting things to think about for the kids of the local nobility.

Then it morphed into a proxy for social class, where a degree meant the odds are the applicant was of a higher social class.

Then it morphed into way to make employees desperate to pay their loan, much as managers are always glad to hear an employee got a house loan or a car loan, there's someone easier to take advantage of. (edited to add, also an indication of a strong conformity streak, which in some corporate environments is highly prized, at least at the line employee level)

In the era where blue collar jobs were being eliminated but white collar jobs hadn't yet been eliminated, it became a mere daycare / votech job training facility. Liberal arts, why would I want those, I want a job!

Later it turned into a financialization scheme where the government will socialize the loan losses while the banks will privatize the loan profits, and the institutions can charge any amount of money they feel like because .gov will just print some more.

Finally it becomes an unusual noteworthy outlier to consider going to higher ed to become ... educated.

If this cycle perpetuates, as seems likely, we can make testable falsifiable predictions about the future, such as the number of students collapsing and higher ed attendance becoming a proxy for social class. To some extent we already have this, with ivy's being "real degrees" for "real jobs" and everything else not mattering much, where a liberal arts degree from Yale means you might be employed in the field not just bartending or sales like grads from lesser schools, the point is everything else will be going away, not just not mattering as much.

As typical in the fast paced world of today you'll have some people preaching the gospel of step #7 when most of the world is on step #8 and some of the leaders are already operating in step #9, #10, or even #11. This linked article is pretty much like the old timer preaching the values of the past, as if they still matter today.
Show HN: Font Awesome to PNG
I watched the talk live. I'll throw this out there just to see if anyone disagrees or has a different perspective.

It's basically Scott bashing C++ in his incredibly informed style. He shares some of the parts of C++ that everybody hates: the gotchas. This is what he has been doing for a few decades now with his Effective C++ series.

The conclusion was that the last thing D needs is someone like him. Someone to explain D like he has had to in his Effective C++ series and talks. Some of the crowd comments that D doesn't need this because it has less gotchas.

I admit to being let down by the talk mostly due to my expectations of what this talk could be about. I was massively excited to see Scott give a presentation about D. In the end, it was hardly about D.
How would you overcome the very large inertial barrier that exists in that world to using something new and untested? The world of finance and investment banking is a world of networking and extreme resistance to change. There's a reason Bloomberg's suite of products sits as pretty as it does, and unless some great upheaval occurs will continue to do so for many years (it's not because the products are easy to use, developer friendly, or even good tools necessarily).

Also, you should put some contact info in your profile, or provide it in your comment, if you want to be contacted for further discussion.
The effects of pre-existing ability are clearly huge, and any attempt to measure the value-added by college is pretty much worthless without accounting for it.

If college primarily functions as a hard-to-fake signal of pre-existing ability (a theory which is more compelling than it initially sounds), then there could be arbitrarily large pay gaps between graduates and non-graduates even if college was provably making graduates dumber. Economist Bryan Caplan has a very entertaining interview about this idea:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
>Need a beefy RDBMS for 15mm rows? Maybe if you want to store the whole denormalized table in memory, but if you're just indexing a small field (or even partial-indexing a larger field) you should have no problem.

Good point. Honestly, I don't have that much experience with using row-based RDBMS for analytics purposes (my background is mostly in finance where folks use expensive proprietary columnar databases) and Hadoop. Any good resources on testing the limits of using MySQL/PostgreSQL for analytics?
JavaScript name clash
And, of course, people who are less bright, work less hard, or have financial hardships (or who attend terrible primary or secondary schools) will find K-12 harder to complete, and make it to college less often. People who find school easier will have little to no reason not to attend college, especially with the large discounts that come with good grades and high test scores.
All these drivers talk about liking how they can work when they want. It makes me wonder if Uber ever goes into Surge pricing on times where the demand is low, but the supply is even lower, like Sunday mornings.

(Also, the close button on site's popup "please sign up to be spammed" window is almost invisible with dark grey on black. So scammy.)
Indeed. An excellent alternative to Bluebird's implementation.
The most interesting part of this is that the regulations were ostensibly instituted to protect the public from a parade of horribles; but the public seems to like the 'dangerous' service.
Unfortunately I don't have time to look at it right now. Should we just link to the pdf instead?

Blog posts consisting of nothing but an excerpt from someone else's work generally don't count as good links for HN.
Oh no! Not another VPL :-) I am looking forward to seeing interesting applications.
IPhones frozen by hackers demanding ransom
Big deal, every product gets it's-not-for-me-so-it-must-be-stupid comments.

The 'Pencil' product is a good example of the points made in the article. It's a souped-up stylus with some nice features and pretty hardware. But for it to be a sellable and desirable product at $75, it has to tie in well with software. Its app seems to be nice and well-received. They also have a printing service and incorporate social aspects where people share their creations.

It's not uncommon to buy hardware, that on the face of it is very nice, and /would/ be good to use, but getting it to work with your software is just an annoyance. Any company that can convince you going in that the software will be nice to use, is going to have an advantage.
When reading Japanese above your level, always pay attention to the words written in roman letters. They are a dead give away.
They are awaiting certification from JATE and TELEC.

http://www.jate.or.jp/english/
http://www.telec.or.jp/ENG/index.html
I'll give this a try. Still hoping for a neutral third-party test though, since I will find less speed than claimed from my ISP. That means I still have a situation where they say they are delivering gigabit and I say my tests show differently.
For login purposes, it is indeed good to use hashes, this prevents timing attacks and the like. But I fail to see the harm in keeping encrypted passwords for admin purposes. It is very helpful in certain situations.
Thanks, we think it's pretty cool too! And you've totally hit on why this is awesome - by automatically funneling users towards better-performing variations you can focus your resources on validating what matters and cut down on the deadweight loss associated with a traditional A/B. For more on this here's a recommended read: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=132?utm_medium=referr...
firefox phones for devs are a scam.

i have several in the drawer. all beyond useless.

i use the emulator mostly. when i have to test multitouch or perf, i use an old-top-of-the-line-android that cost me $50ish on craigslist. why? because all the official firefox phones are useless. crappy touch screen. etc.

yeah, they say we should use the device people are using, but the point is, nobody uses them if not for firefox devs! also no hardware drivers when you want to flash some other kernel. just like with a android phone repurposed. so, why???

and if anyone thinks real people buy those, i challenge you. take a plane to mexico where the alcatel one is even advertised on billboards... and buy one. i tried. if you manage to find one at any store, i will reimburse your trip. they dont even sell it! nobody buys it.

in the end, those phones only secure a tiny margin for a manufacturer that would otherwise fail on the android ecosystem. a small royalty fee/donation for mozilla. and lots and lots of wasted time for the dev comunity having to document how to work around the annoyances and binary blob crap of yet another cheap phone.

not to mention the environmental impact of producing yet more phones that will not be used for a few years and then be disposed.
> Who knows what other legal obligations he faces - the moment he opens the account, someone else may have immediate notification & right to seize the funds (tax delinquency, child support, etc).

Yes, and I would have liked to read about this instead of reading about some vague uneasiness concerning banks that this poor guy developed by being homeless for so long.

Then it would turn into a story about how the System is giving no chances to a man who deserves a chance, about the "entry fee" to get back into the System, instead of it being about him feeling awkward about what it would mean to open up a bank account like a non-homeless person.
TL;DR Imo, for at least the next year, the P6 project needs to encourage contribution by folk who enjoy creating an entire system and discourage use by folk who just want to get stuff done.

----

I've loosely followed P6 since 2000; daily read the log of the central hub of P6 activity -- the IRC channel #perl6 -- for the last 3 years; and summarized it daily for the last 2 years.

I am concerned about folk getting the wrong impression about Rakudo's readiness for general use by mainstream programmers that just want to get stuff done.

I started using the following disclaimer a year ago and I think it still sets expectations appropriately:

Perl 6 is not remotely as usable and useful as Perl 5; it has dozens of users, not millions; it is 100-1000x slower than Perl 5 for a lot of stuff; the P6 documentation is immature and incomplete; the spec has not reached 6.0.0; the Rakudo compiler has not fully implemented what's already in the spec; most of the concurrency and parallel implementation has only just begun; P6 can not currently use CPAN modules; Perl 6 has syntax and semantics that are not backwards compatible with Perl 5; Perl 6 culture is -Ofun which some think is incompatible with getting things done; some folk think that Perl 6 code looks like line noise... In summary, there are infinitely many things wrong with P6.

----

> From what I read ... rakudo is very close to spec completeness ... implementing last bits of spec and improving the speed

Ignore implementation (Rakudo) for a moment.

The spec isn't complete.

There's very recent talk of producing "a list of big ticket items remaining" for "hitting 6.0" and "a tri-color marking of the spec" showing "Implemented in Rakudo, not implemented but we agree we really should for 6.0, deferred to 6.*".
I feel like this article mischaracterizes sysinternals as something of a Microsoft critic and watchdog which just wasn't the case. They were more like a valued and vital member of the Microsoft ecosystem.

If you did development on a Windows machine in the last 20 years, you probably downloaded a sysinternals tool at one point. Many Microsoft KB articles pointed to their tools and articles and when Microsoft announced their acquisition, most people were like "That makes sense".
For anyone who wants to see a preview of Sabu's entrapment of anonymous members, one of his chat logs were leaked:

http://cryptome.org/2012/09/sanguinarious-sabu.htm

> Why is an informant going around throwing out a location to a claimed cache of classified documents concerning SCADA systems? So this is like a textbook attempt at entrapment, its akin to giving someone a key to a door but telling them its legal to open it with, someone being an informant, to take them down after. It also does not appear the FBI gives not one fuck about the security of critical infrastructure as long as it entraps another kid. Nothing at all wrong here is there? Full transcript: http://cryptome.org/2014/05/sabu-m45t3rs4d0w8-2012-0330-0524...

Perfect example of the FBI looking for easy arrests using morally-vague methods of entrapment, instead of doing the hard work and stopping real criminal conspiracies. This is a technique they perfected in domestic terrorism cases where they find dumb criminals with no skill, financing, or strong motivation, then give them all of the resources and information they need to do conduct a real scheme. While holding their hand along the way.

Makes great headlines when they arrest someone "domestic terrorist caught by FBI!" but hardly a good use of resources when they keep missing real terrorist attacks.

Bruce Schneier nailed it in 2007: https://www.schneier.com/essay-174.html. None of the 'foiled plots' were ever a real threat until the FBI showed up. People could argue these people should be in jail anyway but they are hardly worth the skill and resources of the most advanced investigators in the country.
Asa Dotzler answered me about that on Twitter, "Battery life is pretty solid. I'm getting at least a couple of days of active use out of the Flame between charges."
Write The Docs: BERLIN Unconference, July 19-20 2014
Haskell syntax just seems pretty crazy. I know nothing about it, but I just read it and wish that maybe one could use a few more lines and get better understandability at the expense of terseness.
Yeah, I don't get all the Excel-hate. You can most certainly put in tests and other safety factors; back in the 90s I built spreadsheets for tasks ranging from electricity market pricing (for a national power generation company) to interest-rate shopping (for banks to allocate expense spending). There were tests and tests of tests because the sheets were shuffling around huge quantities of money. The object was not just to arrive at the best outcome every month but to generate a defensible audit trail that referenced the canonical steps of the manual procedure.

I get that programmers hate the formulae being distributed all over the place, but this is precisely the advantage for business people; they want to be able to 'walk the heap' and follow the provenance of individual values back to the source, and they want to see things in parallel at all times. CS people lean towards theoretical provability, business people are inclined towards using statistical sampling. So I would write unit tests that would lock most of a spreadsheet while running a batch of checks on the contents of individual sub-sheets, then lock the validated sheet, unlock the next sub-sheet and copy-by-value the data into that for the next round; but I would also load up random historical batches that were known-good and make sure all the final totals matched.

Sure, spreadsheets are inefficient, but a mistake in an a very efficient process can easily lead to monstrous results. And from the domain specialist's point of view (ie the accountants/business managers), the inefficiency cost of doing things in spreadsheets is far preferable to the costs of auditing a black-box process at a later date if queries arise about its integrity.
I'm really glad they did a follow-up on this. Seems much more insightful than just throwing an idea like "Let's teach them to code!" out there, trying it for 10 minutes, and then moving on to the next story. This does a much better job of illustrating how complex the issue is, and how just throwing money at it may not help much.
You can't be any of those things without lots of formal training and certifications starting with a college degree, except perhaps in states where you can "read the law" without going to law school (this may still require undergraduate work, I'm not sure).
the parent seems to be referring to survivorship bias.
You can get data about your Google queries from the Firefox history database even when you are not using Google history, for instance using the following (no guarantees on sanity/completeness, assumes you are on Unix with necessary utilities installed, have only one profile folder, etc.):

sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/places.sqlite 'select last_visit_date,url from moz_places;' |
perl -pe 's/%([0-9a-f]{2})/sprintf("%s", pack("H2",$1))/eig' |
grep -E 'google\.[a-z]{2,3}/search?' |
sed 's/^\(.*\)|.*[?&]q=\([^&]*\)\(&.*\)\?/\1|\2/' |
perl -pe 's/%([0-9a-f]{2})/sprintf("%s", pack("H2",$1))/eig' |
tr '|+' ' ' | sort -k2,2 | uniq -f1 | sort -k1,1n
Coding Principles Every Engineer Should Know
I'm not sure this would be very useful if you're only looking at people who successfully got a job in that field. Let's assume software devs make the comparable salaries regardless of education. It could still be true[0] that CS degree holders who look for tech jobs get one 80% of the time, whereas non-degree holders who apply for a tech job get one 20% of the time and end up in a much lower-paying job. The analysis you suggest would indicate a college degree has no effect on salary, but it actually had a huge effect if you consider everyone who was interested in tech but didn't make it.

[0] and in my opinion very likely, aside from these specific percents being made up and probably pretty far off.
Where do you keep the decryption key?

If it's stored in the same place as the encrypted password, then you have gained no security over storing it in plain text.

If it's stored in a separate system, then you have substantially increased the complexity of the system, and in general, a more complex system is harder to implement securely.
Right. I have tried that with jQuery Mobile and the behavior was similar to what I saw in this framework. Basically for mobile, it's nearly impossible to have main page scrolling and swipe right to pop out the left menu which also has its own scrolling.
Not at all !
The conclusion is D does not need him. If fact, D should not need someone like him.
C++ needs Scott because C++ is not consistant, and with this talk he wanted to show us that if D makes the things the right way, we will not need him.
If the server is hacked, the attacker can decrypt everything. Your users are going to have a lot of problems, and you'll have lost (rightfully) their faith in your service.
SO much this

MFC was bad, but there are even worse stuff

Every time I have to check a new API (thankfully, not that often) it's a mess. They keep "re-solving" the same problems with new APIs that are a pain to use

The .NET stuff is not too bad though (but yes, it has some warts)
As a bonus, the website accepting pre-orders (everbuying.com) emails you your password in cleartext after registering!
I largely agree with you.

Perhaps it is a difference in semantics.

It is very easy to learn to use correctly, but if you aren't taught by someone who uses it correctly (either self taught or otherwise) you're not likely to discover the best practices.

Easy to learn correctly != obvious way is correct != commonly learned correctly.
Static energy consumption analysis of LLVM IR programs
The global surveillance network that’s currently being built by the NSA, GCHQ and its collaborator agencies in dozens of countries may become a new international institution, like the World Bank or the United Nations, but more influential and rather harder to govern. And just as Britain’s imperial network of telegraph and telephone cables survived the demise of empire, so the global surveillance network may survive America’s pre-eminence."

Sounds a lot like the Central Intelligence Corporation from Snowcrash. Presumably Google glass owners are going to become the gargoyles.
I think it should never be possible for admin personnel to access a users' plain password, much less necessary.

Given that you're an admin anyway, you don't need the extra privileges, and there are already established methods for dealing with resetting and recovering accounts without having to decrypt a password.
Are they comparing people with a college degree to people who dropped out of college? Because it seems to me the latter would be quite a specific sample and introduce a lot of bias.

Also, have they accounted for people with a college degree who don't have a job?
You pay for tickets.You pay your registrar. You don't have to pay for Google and Facebook .
I don't think this is a problem for safety-critical applications any more than neural networks were before. It also gives a very interesting way of keeping CAPTCHA alive for awhile longer. Also possibly a new method to increase generlizability in neural nets (and possibly making them resistant to this.)
> Do you honestly believe that if the NSA decided they wanted your browser history, the encryption used by Chrome or Firefox would stymie them for too long?

If they care about your browser history specifically, then in a battle between one individual and a government-level adversary, I'd bet on the latter; it's unlikely they'd try to break the encryption when they could use keyloggers, cameras, or any number of other methods that work fine on targeted individuals. (Or,

But if they care about doing blanket capture and analysis of everyone's history, then yes, I think the encryption used by Chrome and Firefox should work. Security bugs are always possible, of course, and browsers are quite notorious for them, but the more widely a security bug is exploited, the more rapidly it'll be detected and fixed.
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com

Try again.

EDIT: To be fair, I'm not sure they're active anymore, but for like six-eight years they very much were.