skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm just going to reply to one part with an example of the problem.

> I think this is somewhat incorrect. You should never just be type-casting your inputs. (In fact, I think it should ideally be impossible to do so without the compiler generating really big flashing warnings saying "THIS IS DANGEROUS!"). The static verification here will prevent you from doing silly things, and should ideally force you to do input validation at the location of input, instead of blindly casting things to the type it needs.

I did not say anything about type-casting inputs. I said coercing values into a given type. The naïve approach can be to type-cast, the other way is to write the code for the coercion process.

// some collection we are holding the values in for some reason
NSMutableArray *inputValues = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

NSString *someInputValue = // probably read from user input or a file
NSInteger value = [someInputValue integerValue];

BOOL validInput = YES;
if (value == 0) { // we need to check that there really is a value of 0...
NSString *trimmed = [someInputValue stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:NSCharacterSet.whitespaceCharacterSet];
NSString *trimmed0 = [trimmed stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:@"0"]];
if (trimmed0.length != 0) {
// oops, actually had an error... handle it
validInput = NO;
}
}

if (validInput) {
[inputValues addObject:@(value)];
}

Of all of the places where could have had errors along the way, the last `[inputValues addObject:@(value)];` doesn't really concern me that much.

Also, the compiler doesn't help me get things correct... the only thing it would have helped me do is make sure I put an integer into the array, not that I had the right values in the array. Had I not known that `integerValue` returns `0` in its error cases, I would have not known that I need to write some additional code to verify the string value was indeed a zero.

And generics only helps you when you have collections of identical types. Storing arrays of plist entries, for instance, requires you to revert back to `AnyObject` (or similar).

Generics can be helpful, if it's done well. However, even in .NET's generic system, with all the limitations and constraints it put in, there are many times where it still gets in the way.

I'm tired of fighting with my tools just to get the job done. Currently, Swift makes me fight a heck of a lot more then I want to or need to just to make the compiler happy. The end code I write is the same both ways, but the Swift code has a lot more annotations and is a lot less flexible.
My pleasure ;) I'll go update the wiki.

Updated: https://github.com/rspec/rspec/wiki/Background
Fascinating science!
The CS24-CS isn't so bad.

Sounds like a hair drier on low, as others have reported.

It's only super loud if you load it (I calculated Pi to 5 billion digits). It would spin up fans, be loud for 30 seconds, and spin down for a few minutes and repeat as it computed.
Instead she comes across as extremely stubborn and unable to compromise or see other viewpoints besides her own. I would have fired her too just because she was so difficult to work with.

Not "unable to compromise or see other viewpoints besides her own." More like unwilling to put down in writing that 2+2==5, just because her boss said so. Or to sit silently and be a party to gross malfeasance (at taxpayer's expense), generally.

But with your own cocky dismissal of her actions, it sounds like you'd do very well at a company like Goldman.
IMO, the fact that they decided to respond at all is a really good sign for the viability of RISC-V.
ReadyNAS (Netgear's NAS) uses dash by default, and bash can be upgraded to "4.2+dfsg-0.1+deb7u3"[1].

[1]: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2014-6271
Yeah, the RAM alone is a costly thing actually.

I was lucky to find it so cheap :-)
Great way to connect this to other things we know about -- thanks.

a few minutes: I'd guess more like a few days: 1 mm/100 years = 10 micron/year = .1 micron / 3.65 days.
My bad, I never saw it... Didn't realize it was ever posted
Looks like the usual 'Millennial hate' to me.
It's not just CV, but I get your point.
But the change in the report was minuscule, and I think her boss was actually correct.

Goldman had written materials about conflicts. Segarra claimed they weren't enough to a "policy" by her opinion. Her boss argued, it was a policy even if it was a really poor one. He didn't tell her to change the report to say they had a policy, he told her to change it to say Goldman's policy was very deficient and need to be improve a lot.

It's essentially a semantics argument, not some huge cover up.

And her boss's stance is arguably more detailed and accurate.
Add CSS Encapsulation to Your Favorite MV* Framework
mzs had some info about this in a separate comment[1] if you missed it. I've hit the edge of my knowledge about it. :-)
> That so many things delegate setting environment variables to the system shell

I think you've completely misunderstood the problem. The environment variable isn't and doesn't need to be set by a shell for shellshock to happen.

Why shouldn't a DHCP client pass server-originated data to a shell? Or any other program? There is nothing wrong with passing data. The only problem here is that a specific shell had a bug.
I think it's time for an Uber for Uber for ______ service. There's so many of them now it's confusing and time-consuming to pick one. So why not add a crowd-sourced middleman to do it for you?
Why One Developer Chose Go
This a great writeup and super easy to follow along with. The figures are really nice!

One observation: training a neural net to classify segmented characters is probably overkill. The author observed that the font never changed, but never ended up exploiting this fact. After the very effective preprocessing, thresholding, etc the characters are almost identical to the 'average' representations the author generated!

I bet it would be enough simply to classify an unknown character by the letter that it shows highest correlation with.
No it didn't, I believe that image is just an example of "a captcha" for the article
First, what I meant, was in its past life it was in a cloud probably.

Secondly, I do cloud research.

I run a modified KVM/QEMU hypervisor.

I run a cloud with features you can not find anywhere else in the world today.

So, it is, indeed, a mini-home cloud :-)
Nothing at all alarming about "You didn't hear that?", really? Actually, the non-alarming part you do address is invalidated by the actually-alarming part you don't: if it was so unremarkable, why did her colleague instruct her to pretend it never happened?
If you want previous-generation rackmount gear, try Weird Stuff Warehouse, in Sunnyvale, CA. Weird Stuff is where Silicon Valley data centers go to die. Typical: "HP Proliant DL160 G5 2x Quad-Core Xeon E5472 @ 3.0GHz 4GB RAM 1U Server - $189.95" They have lots of older Cisco gear and all the accessories you need to build a retro data center. Not that you'd want to.
so there was a typo in the email i entered in the application. is there a way for me to check if i'm on the list?
Direct link: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/29197/

Softpedia's business model includes seo-hijacking download pages for software, plagiarizing news, and even spamming HN with many accounts (not the submitter).
Java (or should I say "JVM") is great and only getting better. If only the JVM had something like npm or RubyGems and a language not as complex as Scala to compile to bytecode as efficiently as Java, with some less verbose syntax, it would be a total killer. I recently started to use Groovy more and more. I'm not sure how efficient its compiler is, looked into Golo, but something bothers me in it. Ceylon seems great, but its pace of development is even slower than Java's own and it doesn't even support JDK 8 features yet.
Security Collapse in the HTTPS Market
how do you mean? this is SaaS, and charging for resource magnitudes is the only actual fair way in order to get some transparency.
It isn't just about loyalty, though, it is about building a relationship with a single provider who can learn your preferences and provide a consistent service in the future.

I get my haircut by the same person every single time not because I think they are the best hair-cutter in the world but because I don't have to explain to them how I like it, they already know and I know they can do it that way, so going to them eliminates 5-10 minutes of explanation and a lot of uncertainty as to what the end result will look like.

For the same reasons I agree with crazypyro that "Uber for Massages" (local massages being something people tend to find one provider and stick with them for consistency) is not nearly as compelling as Uber for transportation where all I care is that the driver gets me to where I'm going in a relatively short timeframe and relatively safely.
Prefer Objects as Method Parameters, Not Class Names
it's a combination of euphoria, a slight mania, boost in enthusiasm and motivation, and it quite possibly 'unlocks' part of your personality (i.e. the funny part, since it completely eliminates your inhibitions to tell racy jokes).

so just like you said, this is why it's so hard for problem drinkers to cut down. it's just a whole different experience than a person who has a couple and then feels dizzy and wants to sit down.
> technology startups with explosive growth potential and just a few employees, that such a high level of desperation, so different from nearly all of millions of US small businesses, is necessary or usual seems difficult to believe

I see what you're saying, thanks for clarifying.

I think majority of small businesses are formed to serve pent-up demand, e.g. somebody opens up a pizza restaurant, just because there's no pizza joint in that specific neighborhood, but it's high on people with disposable income (and many franchise companies will actually run market analysis for you, should you decide to go that small business route). A lawn-mowing business might also start with a few friend-and-neighbor customers, and make some back of the envelope estimates on the demand and customer base.

With technology startups not only you have to build the product outright (your Mother Goose example), but then you have to acquire the customer base, so all along you're quite unsure that is achievable. As @sama mentions, you could spend a few years of your life building something, and then discovering the market doesn't need it. The realization of that weighs on founder, as by the time you've hired a few people (@moskov's quote from lecture 1), you also feel responsible for their time and opportunity cost.

It's hard to debate the point on over-supply/under-supply of software engineers without concrete data, but I think as far as your point on them being experienced in a completely different stack, a lot of startups would tend to follow the Python Paradox - http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html - " if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job".

Your point on being able to assemble a team quicker/cheaper/more efficiently on relying on .NET stack is also valid nevertheless. I was just trying to guess why a certain company would choose a specific language and a specific set of tools, and require proficiency in it.
That's already more expensive than what I paid for the 1U server :-)

And I packed in 24 GB RAM for less than $190 (I think $188).

Only the HDDs bring the price up, and a couple other accessories, to $300.
I disagree with that; people will still try to get theirs, but most people are smart enough to go for the PayPal model: get 100 million dollars right as the bubble pops and spend it wisely.
Well that's what their marketing says, and if true, then good for them. I guess I was thinking about something more atomic and a la carte. It'd be cool to have a card that said "Protonfish - certified expert in Game Theory, H. G. Wells, Franciso Tarrega, molecular biology and TCP/IP.

(I am not actually an expert in these areas, but I wanna be.)
Linux like terminal for Windows?
I use Linux and Windows.And a major drawback I feel in Windows 8 is better terminal and drawback with Linus is Better UI.

If there were a better terminal in Windows 8 it would make a developers life easier.
I'm assuming now that most of my VMs will be completely cached in my 24 GB RAM.
FYI, we require that you oauth in via a Google account purely for authentication right now. We don't request permissions for your email, calendar, contacts, or other data--only your name, email, and profile picture (which is used in the UI). We're working on support for email/password based signup, as well as oauth support for other services.
'Battlestar Galactica' is leaving Netflix. Watch it all before October 1st
Disk contention?

I'm expecting to cache my VM disks in RAM completely while I do my experiments.
Form connections that will last past the conference, get people's contact information so you can get together again later. Also like rohunati said, talk to everyone.
I especially find ridiculous the fact that the government itself can "patent" a technology - in its own country.
4 of my favorites:

- .Net rocks (plenty of non .net stuff)

- Hanselminutes

- This developer's life

- Software Engineering radio
To make it easier to reason about whether the program will terminate. This is an important part of writing high-assurance software.

From the actual patent text (https://www.google.com/patents/US7788659): "Because of the possibility of looping and branching within loops, a brute force attempt to enumerate the paths through a computer program will most likely fail. Therefore, there is a need for a method of converting a computer program that contains loops to one that does not."

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_analysis
Overcast by Marco of Instapaper fame has a great feature where it syncs your podcasts from the iPhone App to his web app at overcast.fm, so you can go back and forth between the two. It has been really useful in my experience
autoparallelization
Maybe I'm missing some context, but isn't that just an accurate statement of fact? There are, indeed, consumer protection laws that only apply to people who do not either make a certain amount of money per year or have a certain level of assets. This is the notion behind accredited investors[1], and I wouldn't be surprised if more esoteric laws have other similar sorts of exceptions. (There are definitely laws the deal with small businesses differently than with large corporations, for example.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor
How does the automation of Excel work on the Mac since there is no COM on mac? Is there some Applescript alternative ?
Some twist on loop unrolling[1] perhaps.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_unrolling
Whitespace Interpreter in PHP
The government is not a business. It shouldn't act as a business. There's FAR more value from researching a technology with taxpayer money and then allowing everyone to use the results of that technology, rather than a few select companies (to which they have to give the stamp of approval, meaning there can also be selection bias)
Well, do you just use something like requests to make an HTTP call (or a series of them) and examine JSON or XML results (which seems tedious to me), or do you have a higher level library that understands resources, links, etc.?
Whatever, kid. I’m a lady.

I did not realize until this point in the story that the author was female!
I think he meant it's a repurposed cloud server, i.e. in its original home it was used in a cloud computing scenario.

I'm with everyone else though, in thinking that a good quality workstation would be a better fit for his purposes. For the same $300 you can get a decent workstation with a quad core CPU and hardware virtualization on eBay that can handle 32GB of memory, and room in the case for at least 2 HDDs and 4 SSDs if you use a stacking mount.
Debian has already released a batch patched to only treat BASH_FUNC_FOO() as exported functions.

It's the second half of the security fix, so I recommend upgrading.

There is a small potential for breakage as you mention, but less than ripping the feature entirely out.
I wish I had more hands so I could give this post four thumbs down!
-Rick James
Using Social Media to Cover for Lack of Original Thought (2012)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK62I-4cuSY
To get a job, write your story instead of a resume
Visual Content Marketing: B2B Branding
Or use god mode!
With my 400W and around 10 cents per kilowatt hour in my area I'm seeing for 750 hours a cost of $30.00 estimated.

Now, I do not have this running 24/7.

Only when I or she wants to run a research job.

So we're talking 8-10 hours, 2-4 times a week.

Pretty cheap actually overall :-)
Can anyone compare this with PyXLL[1]? It does require add-ins, but xlwings requires a VBA module. From the instructions, importing the two seem about equally complicated.

I am more curious about technical differences than the difference in license (I know that PyXLL is closed source, while XLWings is F/OSS, BSD-licensed).

[1] https://www.pyxll.com/
He wrote “think different”. Follow him
Ask HN: Services to review code for quality, performance and security?
We have been running and gunning with a small team, young and cheap. I have no reason to believe we are headed for a Fail Whale, however I'm curious if the HN Community can recommend methods for receiving a reliable and economical code review / audit from experienced programmers. The idea would be that they would offer recommendations for improvement, whether in regard to performance or security. I found DrupalCheck via HN search and also BugCrowd for security review... What other services or steps would you recommend for ensuring your code is as tight and as high quality as possible?
Mine runs at 400W, less at idle.

We don't run it 24/7, only when we have some research jobs to run :-)
Unless the article was changed, the author only questioned whether they were vulnerable, and did not assert that they were: "One key question is whether Mac OS X and iPhone DHCP service is vulnerable..."

One early analysis [0] seems to indicate that OS X not vulnerable to this sort of DHCP client exploit.

0. http://complexitydaemon.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/bash-os-x-d...
> Andreesen hasn't said "worry" since 2008

Of course, he was two years late that time. 2008 was a great time to start a company or invest in one.

Because downturns are in large part socially constructed, it is impossible to have an accurate consensus on a downturn until it has already happened.

Market predictions are guesses.
These apartments are so small they can only be photographed from the ceiling
I just make requests:

https://github.com/playtomic/gameapi-as3/blob/master/src/com...

plus complemented by tests on the server as well:

https://github.com/playtomic/apiserver/blob/master/tests/lea...

and generally test functionality + output format.
iPhone jailbreak – Jailbreak any iPhone, iPad, iPodiPhone jailbreak
It's called loop unrolling. Most optimizing compilers do it to increase performance. The most obvious gain is that you minimize your branch penalty.

The Wikipedia article on it is quite good with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_unrolling
Personally I want to make a huge Raspberry PI and Netduino cluster.
He's right, eventhough there have been other groups pushing biblical literalism in history.

Think about it, for a long time the predominant biblical scholarship was catholic biblical criticism, whose point is viewing biblical texts as having human origins. Also remember that Protestantisms critique on the catholic church was that it was too literal in its take on biblical texts, that transubstantiation for example (this is my actual body; this is my actual blood) didn't exist.

And regarding this thread: at least, please stop attempting to do biblical literalism in english. those are not your holy words.
You're going to use ... what ... to re-remit false market data? A model airplane, compared to a giant tower designed to send microwaves over vast distances. Sure, that sounds possible. As for intercepting the signal for profit ... what are you going to do with it? The microwaves are already the shortest path.
Interview questions for systems engineers
Same thing again. "Coder" is always a "web coder" now. That's annoying.
It sounds like you didn't take advantage of all of the resources available then. Just because you didn't network in college doesn't mean it isn't useful.
Translating technological terms throws up some peculiar challenges
Nooooo! I'm sure this screws up a lot of people's TO-DO lists, like it did mine.
If your government isn't going to engage in commercial espionage on your business or employers behalf (as does China) then it darn well better do technology transfer. If you can't explain your mission value to the American public - whom you happen to be spying on - you could at least articulate this kind of value that can impact citizens in a positive way. IMHO they should double down on this and allocate funds for start-ups ala inQtel.
Nice, I thought RAID 1 just gave redundancy.

I use mdadm's RAID 10 on 2 drives for redundancy and speed.

"In mdadm, the RAID10 level creates a single complex software RAID that combines features of both RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring). Multiple copies of all data blocks are arranged on multiple drives following a striping discipline."
http://doc.opensuse.org/products/draft/SLES/SLES-storage_sd_...
I don't think it's special at all.

I work with these things in my cloud research and thought it'd be cute to play around with one at home.

Partly because of the challenge at getting an old clunker back into a working state.

And partly because I like dogfooding and really knowing what it takes to run an entire stack---including the hardware underneath me.

Those are my real reasons. This was for fun :-)
I had the opportunity to get a 7U Compaq server for cheap one time (quad xeon CPUs, tons of RAM, 2 different RAID arrays). And I'm looking at it thinking "Wow, this would be so cool to have at the house!".

But then I look at the label by the dual power supplies: 20A circuit required -- each! I would have to pay an electrician to install a new breaker and run a new line to it. And that would have doubled my purchase costs. I passed.
I don't see why. Passive income vs profit is not really dichotomy; passive income is a question of how much work you put in, whereas profit is how much you make relative to how much you put in. Regardless of how you structure your commitments, more profit is better than less profit.

You could argue that to be successful at generating a passive income of any magnitude, you'd be better off selling value-added services on top of a free browser rather than just selling a browser. I'd be curious to hear that argument, because the opposite seems true: making freemium work means that you need to invest not just in making a great free product that people will use, but also invest in creating enough additional value to make the sale. Thus I think wanting a lower commitment to the company actually says you should just sell the browser.
Note that the whole ARM ecosystem relies on a crapload of open source stuff, like the entire GNU toolchain, kernel and on up.

So any criticism of the call for openness in the RISC-V paper from the ARM camp is sheer, sheer hypocrisy.

In economic terms, the free stuff that helps ARM be popular is a "complementary good". When you sell something, you want the complementary goods to be commoditized and as cheap as possible, while keeping your ingredient as proprietary as possible.

Obvious table reversal:

"No, no! Open source the CPU cores, and buy my compiler instead! That's how you keep costs low, and everything from fragmenting."