skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The sad thing is all of those things are opinon-based and if we all started downvoting every opinion we disagree with then the comments here would surely be doomed.

Would be nice if heavily downvoted comments (even if they were countered with even heavier upvotes) were reviewed once in a while and if they contained no 'bad' material the downvoters downvoting privileges would be rescinded.
> One of the best moments of my programming life was writing a recursive descent parser for a non-trivial grammar in one sitting (about 500 lines of python), hitting run and having it just work first time.

This was, in the grand scheme of things, likely offset by the hours of frustration most of the students went through while debugging their parser which did not work perfectly the first time.
I'm absolutely in love with C++'s RAII scheme but it seems almost no languages use it and, instead, go with a complex garbage collecting scheme that requires pausing.

I want to like GO but a language that targets native development but still uses garbage collection just seems like an odd pairing to me. Maybe it's just me especially since I rarely get an opportunity to do native development.
my project employs several techniques to flag and block scrapers; note that any technique will eventually fail against the 'perfect storm': a distributed scraping network featuring camouflaged user agents operating from innocent-looking IPs (from the same ISPs of your regular users) and performing a single, RANDOM request each.
There is little one could do to prevent scraping in this scenario; fortunately enough, scraping bot developers don't usually take all those precautions, so identifying them is often much, much easier (some even proudly identify themselves in the user agent string... :)
The shallow writing of this article aside, I think it overlooks a rather promising authentication scheme by Steve Gibson. https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm
I actually have a problem with things like Google Authenticator. I use it to secure the login for my Digital Ocean account. Worked great, until my phone broke. When I signed into Digital Ocean with a new phone... well, of course Google Authenticator doesn't know how to generate a new compatible code. That part is controlled by a QR code when you enable 2FA, and you can't get back to it without logging in. Same thing with securing the admin login to a site I run. When I switched phones, I lost my login.

Sure, there's a way around it. Digital Ocean lets you disable 2FA with an SMS code. Then I can just log in, set up 2FA again, and have it working on my new phone. But then I fixed my old phone and switched back. So I had to do it all over again.

Clef worked great, until someone with a Windows Phone joined the team and needed to log into the site. Suddenly our authentication method of choice, one we were really happy with, wasn't an option because Clef doesn't make a Windows Phone app.

These are the problems the author seems to try to point out. Passwords at least work every time you type them in, from any platform. Passwords aren't tied to Google or Apple, passwords don't shun Microsoft platforms simply because there aren't enough users. If your users have to buy an iPhone just to be able to log in, or if they lose the ability to log in because they replaced their phone (something that happens all the time), it isn't a solution at all. They're going to end up going back to passwords (like we did) because nothing else works as well as passwords.

And that's not a high bar to get over!
An excellent suggestion!

In fact, that would send a very clear message to EA that their DRM is worth, at best, negative $6 to some customers. If people would rather pay $6 for a game without the DRM than pay $0 for the game inextricably bundled with the DRM, even a corporate executive could do that math without screwing it up.

Of course, if you opt for Origin instead, I guess that also sends the message that you don't value your control over your computer any more than $6.
Amazon.com: Same-Day Delivery
But did it drop to zero? Are you willing to serve those people a big scary error message?
For those interested in additional technical details of high-performance garbage collection, the book cited (The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management) is a fantastic reference. It's one of the best-written technical books I own, and distills much of the modern literature. If you need to do GC performance tuning or reason about memory management issues in the JVM, having this book around will be very useful.
Looking for a Business Generalist
We’re a an off the record YC company, fresh out of the Winter ‘14 batch and growing fast. We're already cash-flow positive, and laptops, and snacks, and etc. and so forth. and all the regular good things. Here's what's awesome: we have non-technical customers paying us for an online tool. Everyday, our clients call and email to say that we're making them happy. And that feels great.

We are a super small team and with that comes a somewhat hectic office. Lots of little things that fall through the cracks. We’re facing down hockey-stick growth, so we should tackle those small things before they become Large Things.

We’re looking for a Business Generalist. What’s a Business Generalist? Well, first and foremost, it’s a phrase we made up, and so isn’t really anything. But what does it mean? Well, here are some things we need done:

* Answer customer support tickets
* Help sales with lead gen
* Monkey around with Excel to clean up client data imports
* Contact customers to solicit guest blog posts
* Write blog posts
* Really, so much more.

“So much more,” you say. “Like what?” Well, that might be for you to decide. We’re looking for someone ambitious and technically curious. This position will be a great way to learn how a small, growing company operates. Pretty much any skill you’re curious about cultivating, there will be a way for you to work on it.

What skills are we looking for?
* Detail-oriented (with nicely organized details to prove it)
* Eager, driven while still courteous
* A college degree in more-or-less anything
* Technically-capable. We’re talking the ability to google-your-way through impasses.

Send an email to fintechw14@gmail.com telling us about yourself. Please include a resume.
This is brilliant. Are affiliate links on the roadmap? That could create a great revenue stream for self-hosted projects.
Even if you can't say which school specifically, can you give more detail about the city or tech stack? I'd imagine Utah + Ruby has different outcomes than San Francisco + Ruby.
Just because someone doesn't want to code in APL (!) does not mean that they dislike programming. Whether you understand them or not, there are actual reasons why most programming goes on in languages that aren't the ones you mentioned.
I'm pretty sure Final Fantasy is more successful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game...
Back in fall 2012, I attended Starter League in Chicago for their 3 months Rails bootcamp. Prior to joining the bootcamp, I had experienced with Rails through Michael Hartl tutorial and by participating in different hackathons. Taking part in SL required an appreciable upfront investment from my part: moving from Montreal to Chicago for three months, $6K tuition fee (at the time), leaving my job and not working for the duration of the program. I am extremely happy with the results and I am now working as a lead data analyst and I am coding in different languages (python, javascript) as part of my daily job. One of the upside of a great bootcamp is the streamlined learning process. Jeff Cohen, the instructor at the time at SL, built an incredible curriculum for students, enabling deep understanding of the underlying mechanics of Rails. Furthermore, the immersion is a very interesting aspect of a bootcamp. Every day, you are surrounded by people who left their job and family to learn to code. These people want to change careers, start a tech business etc. This can be very motivating. Tips: Prior to joining a bootcamp, know exactly what you want from it. Do a bunch of tutorials, read books about coding, participate in hackathons and get to a level where you can build stuff with code. Too many people haven't tried much before joining a bootcamp and expect to get miraculously good at coding. It's not the case. Learning to code is hard, know what you are getting into. Also, if you expect to have a dream job on a silver plater at the end of the bootcamp, this probably won't be the case. You'll have to work hard for it and chances you'll have a few more months of learnings necessary prior to a full-time gig that interests you. You can learn to code online. A bootcamp can speed up the learning process and is a great learning experience and good for networking but it is not required to learn to code. Know exactly what you want from a bootcamp.
Interesting article. Scaling Rails is a complicated topic, that exceeds Rails itself - you have to also look at Ruby.
Anyone recognize the CAI setup in the upper right inset of Williams4.jpg?

Edit: I think it's an IBM 1500¹ station, in which case the left-hand display is a mainframe-controlled 16mm film projector².

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1500

² Buck & Hunka, Deveopment of the IBM 1500 Computer-Assisted Instructional System http://digitallearning.ualberta.ca/-/media/digitallearning/i...
Where is PKI-based sign-in? Why the heck every-fucking-one is so obsessed to move your identity to third parties (email, domain or webpage providers) and disregards one of the most sane, obvious, flexible and secure (if implemented properly) concept out there?

Added: My points are:

- (Security) They are immune to attacks on websites. All attackers would extract is a public key.

- (Flexibility) They are social, yet privacy-respecting. When you want to keep your identity across multiple services — you use the same key. When you don't want so — you just generate a new one — it's free. Some variants (like OpenPGP) have web-of-trust out of the box.

- (Flexibility) They are supported on almost every modern system out there — if we're considering X.509 client certificates (probably not the best option, but). Just polish the damn UI for those already, please.

- (Sanity) They are something user actually possesses, not temporarily leases like a Facebook account, email address or domain name.

- (Flexibility/security) They could be stored as securely as one wishes. Keep those in a file (your OS or browser's keystore, actually) if you don't care, and HSMs are already here for those who want them.

- (Flexibility/security) They could be easily synced across the devices. Just escrow the key material with other key — derived from a password, if you wish.

- (Security) They could be mass-revoked. Not easy and not flawless, but there's OCSP. There're CRLs, too (although those suck). Certainly better than running across multiple sites if one had used the same (compromised) password with them.
> lied to Go and told it there was only one CPU but then you loose all the cool features of channels etc..

channels work just fine in a single-cpu context. concurrency is not parallelism.
Was it that you wanted to write your own custom recursive-descent parser, or you just wanted to use ANTLR or something? To me it makes sense that a compilers course would de-emphasize parsing.
FWIW:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinFisher#Detection

"According to announcements from ESET, FinFisher and FinSpy are detected by ESET antivirus software as "Win32/Belesak.D" trojan.[26][27]"

Apple did patch its itunes player - 3 years after apparently knowing about it:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/finfisher/

"A prominent security researcher warned Apple about this dangerous vulnerability in mid-2008, yet the company waited more than 1,200 days to fix the flaw."

But yes, I agree you should go with OpenBSD if you're worried about this:

http://www.secpoint.com/Top-10-Most-Secure-Operating-Systems...

"By default, [OpenBSD] is the most secure general purpose operating system out there. The proof in the pudding? The fact that it suffered only two remote attack vulnerabilities in the last decade serves as solid evidence of its stringent security and strict auditing policy. Moreover, OpenBSD lacks a large enough attack surface (care of running numerous web applications) for hackers to exploit."
Don't mean to troll but for your information his name is spelled as SnowdEn.
There are trends in both directions, toward government at levels beyond traditional nation-states (this is particularly visible in European institutions and things like the International Criminal Court, a permanent international court with jurisdiction over persons rather than nations), and toward smaller nation-states. Its not hard to imagine an end state where a narrow range of basic functions were handled by a world government (or a collection of function-specific, separately-constituted, global institutions), but where the unit below that was a set of governments (which might be characterized as "national") over regions smaller than today's nation-states (at least, the medium-to-large nation-states of today.)
Can anyone comment on how saving works on the iOS version? If I get a call or switch apps, does it reliably save or am I liable to lose my progress?
Scaling up Data Frames
Passwords carry some of the blame for being a pain in the ass to manage at scale. Because grandpa doesn't know about password managers or the xkcd method (he just wants to get to his email), he picks bad passwords and reuses them. Passwords have enabled him to shoot himself in the foot, alongside the troves of similar folks.

Passwords aren't the problem, but they're enabling the problem and because of that they certainly aren't awesome.
Right, but you're talking past me. Look at the code:

(LPSTR)((char*)pSessionProperties + pSessionProperties->LoggerNameOffset)

He's casting pSessionProperties to a char* so that he can do the arithmetic on it--otherwise, the compiler would assume "Oh, golly, I should increment the pSessionProperties pointer by LoggerNameOffset times sizeof(SessionProperties)".

He has to make that conversion in order to do byte offsetting correctly. He then casts that back to what it wants (an LPSTR), to match the required argument type on the function.

It's completely reasonable code, so stop complaining about it as though it weren't.
This was not a huge experiment for NASA, most likely the budget wasn't there for vacuum-capable capacitors and the time to convert the equipment. It was either go with what they had, or don't go at all.
I do hope that, with a tentatively positive result, they can now get a bit more budget to perform the test again with an improved setup.
I recall Anders giving a talk (at JAOO maybe?) saying that the big jumps in between C# 1.0 -> 2.0 and especially 2.0 -> 3.0 caused some push back. People complained that they were changing the language too fast and it was causing knowledge churn. So 4.0 was more 'targeted' in scope as a result of this feedback. I know dynamic was a 'big' feature, but it was mostly in it's own corner and had little application to most daily code. .NET 4 introduced Task<T> and the TPL which was very important but it didn't see any assitance from C# itself.

As to C# 5.0, I am assuming that the managed languages team at MS was well into designing and implementing roslyn and probably didn't see great value is contributing massive features to the old compliler, but Async/Await couldn't, well uhh, wait for roslyn to be finished.
On a side note, libccv is absolutely amazing, especially the SWT text extractor.
Perhaps you'd like to explain why you think pattern matching has any necessary connection to functional programming? Sure, popularized by ML, but otherwise I'm not buying it. We already have switch and type-checking statements. Those are just special cases of pattern matching.
Are we heading towards another market crash?
I would consider myself a passive investor - I don't tend to check the market too often as I'm mainly invested in large U.S index funds.

However, as of late every-time that I do check the market it seems to be in the red. One of my holdings is the Vanguard Index fund and it's constituents are all large fortune 500 U.S companies. Needless to say, it's not a bad representation of where America is economically at given anytime.

So the fact that it's been on a downward spiral has raised some red flags for me, should we be worried? Is it likely that we are towards a recession?

For anyone with knowledge of economics it's a known fact that market corrections have to happen roughly every 10 years or so but we're pushing 6 at this point from the 2008 market crash.

Any thoughts, input here would be great.

Cheers!
PyGotham Python + NYC
NYC is have its own Python Conference! In a week and a half. August 16th and 17th. Tickets and scholarships are still available!

http://pygotham.org/
When I wrote that first line, I knew that somebody will completely ignore the rest of the comment and make a post about it. Adding nothing to the actual discussion.

There is absolutely nothing serious about the first line. The rest of the post clearly indicates it.

Reminds me of people who will show up to threads featuring proof of concept implementations and comment on how the code lacks unit testing.
There is a lot of crossing between Fantasy and Sci-fi in the early stories.

The John Carter of Mars stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs have some weird technology with sword and sorcery tropes, IIRC.

The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey transitioned from one genre to the other.

And, of course, we have Star Wars. Would you characterize as sci-fi or Fantasy.

I believe Western culture has the tendency to specialization, while japanese blend a mish mash of tropes together. That's one of the things that attracted me to japanese anime, manga and games.
LegalSifter: find out if your client sent you a fair contract
Why Ebay Tells Manufacturers in China What You're Searching For
Heroku should consider using SVG for the badge, just like shields.io and services like Travis CI do. The current button is blurry on a retina screen, and basic SVG is really well supported.
I think they're still working out the kinks [1], but nevertheless, great when it works. No more 'behind' hosted demos for open-source apps, just let them instantly deploy it and play with it on their own.

[1] Tried the sample node.js app immediately, although I am getting "Deployed to heroku", viewing it throws a "No such app" - https://www.dropbox.com/s/bsl55sia46ymrwv/Screenshot%202014-...
So, it was before Satellaview, but I lived in Japan in 1993 when I was sixteen, and it was the best time in my life. But I also was a giant f*ing nerd. Here are some things I remember, with regard to "retrofuturism": a Blockbuster video VHS kiosk that rented you movies, ala Redbox (in 1993!); Minidisc everywhere; waitstaff with wireless "notepads" that looked like old TI calculators, to type in your order that would send it back to the kitchen automatically. Akihabara was literally like being in a cyberpunk novel, I would drift past a salvage electronics part store, squeeze between some shops and up a darkened, narrow staircase and wander into a backroom stuffed to the ceiling with laserdiscs and commercial 8MM video cassettes.

On the other hand, most places didn't take credit cards and I saw very few personal computers compared to the USA at the time. So it really was a strange, uneven retrofuturism.
Facebook job listing reveals plan improve the Linux kernel network stack
Researcher snaps a Zeus hacker's photo through his webcam
Yves Behar is an enigma, in the sense that I can't think of one thing he was involved with which actually does look good or function particularly well, but his involvement in projects is promoted in such a way it's now a sort of clichéd joke, when based on their normal track record of success after his involvement it's almost like he actually has the kiss of death.
Any method of authentication that's more secure that simple passwords is going to be more inconvenient. 2FA is no exception.
> I'm absolutely in love with C++'s RAII scheme but it seems almost no languages use it

RAII is but one resource-management strategy, and one intrinsically linked to C++'s memory model. But if that's what you're looking for, Rust uses the same: http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/trait.Drop.html

And in the absence of cycles, refcounted implementations have similar properties (although of course that assumption will break with alternate non-refcounted implementations if refcounting is not part of the language semantics).

> I want to like GO but a language that targets native development but still uses garbage collection just seems like an odd pairing to me.

Not that rare. OCaml is native and GC'd, so is D, or most lisps with native compilers. Hell, Boehm's GC exists.
Now it's throwing internal server error.
Rapid Mailer | Easy Third-Party Sender Integration
Every time I see Foursquare's monthly bill for Slack I think of some quote (possibly from pg?) about how to price enterprise software. He said that you know you have the right price when customers complain about it....but still pay.

Then I show my grudging respect the slack team. I don't like their pricing. But I'm still paying.
Thanks msane! We want to take time tracking a step further by giving businesses actionable info that can be used to reduce costs and/or increase operational efficiency.
it's definitely not zero. as for whether or not i'm willing to serve those people a big scary error message, i'm not sure yet. It's something we're actually going to have to come to a decision on in the next couple weeks though, this isn't a hypothetical for me.

a lot of my traffic is repeat, so we'll probably do a good campaign to push users off IE8 this fall and officially declare it unsupported in Nov/Dec.
I think the complaint was about the cast to LPSTR at the end.

typedef char* PSTR, *LPSTR;

After the addition, you've already got a char * - casting to a char * again by another name is unnecessary.
Ask HN: Where to donate to?
I have recently done some work for an open-source project, for which I am getting paid $250. The money is not important, the main reason for doing this tiny side project was to contribute to the project.

My plan is to simply donate the money. The project itself is backed by a corporation, so there is no need for the project itself to get the money. Should I then donate to the EFF, FSF or Apache? I normally donate to health and social related causes, so this area is new to me.
Which is the point of the deduction. Any work at all is better than sitting around doing nothing. - I'd suggest you check out Friedman's original position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM It's elegant.
Another important point is that users already consider passwords to be a hassle and have little patience for anything that makes it harder to access resources online.
Async didn't change anything for you? It seems pretty big to us.
Soul crushing is exactly what they are!

My earnings from previous jobs and contracts, and the returns on my financial investments, will keep me going for the next 5 years. I'm single, so it's relatively easy for me.

I'm currently writing an ebook and working on 2-3 software project ideas which I hope to sell to local businesses and earn revenue. I'm also preparing some training materials, since trainings pay a decent dime here.

My long term plan too is the same - software products, some electronics products, ebooks, and trainings.

In addition to waiting for a gig, perhaps you can also think of monetizing your ideas into a business to sell to customers.
I've got an interesting problem with regards to this. For all I know, I work in the Profit Center, I'm just not informed of this. I'm never given an indication of how much money my code has earned the company.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that every X months there's a new teen thing. IIRC, FormSpring was one such thing that seems to have faded from the zeitgeist. Will be interesting to see which way SnapChat, Yo, etc. go.
Oops, I meant in Japan, though I can't seem to find any statistics that back that up.