skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The circularity-argument for type systems is actually correct, but that is an aside. Type systems on programming languages are proof systems, so they can be used as tools for building better type systems.

There is a big lack of TDD in highly succesful Open Source endeavors. Part of this is perhaps because a failed project never get attention. But also note that defects in Open Source projects are good. They instill new programmers to come to the project and work on it because there are some easy low-hanging fruit. Furthermore, as exemplified by Keith Packard recently (see http://lwn.net/Articles/354408/ -- which unfortunately is behind the Iron Curtain for 24 hours more). Keith mentions that he sometimes deliberately breaks some old code by introducing obvious bugs into it. Then, when nobody have complained for a couple of years, it can be removed on the grounds that it was not interesting.

With rigorous testing this is unachievable.
If you could encourage him to put it online that would be great.
The Ruby 19x Web Servers Booklet
Practical Optimization: A Gentle Introduction [Book]
I think the real lesson to learn here is to never assume anything. They assumed performance wouldn't be a problem, so they didn't test for it when prototyping, and they didn't make those tests part of their development cycle.

It's tough, these things, especially if you're talking about a feature you personally appreciate a lot. The article talks about the performance problems leading focus away from actively marketing these solutions, which makes me wonder: if properly marketed, would this have been a killer feature ?

The fact that they decided to get rid of it suggests no. However, are they putting the code in the freezer for a while until they fix these issues and re-release it ? Or is it simply a problem that can only be properly solved by giants like Google ?
I think you massively underestimate the benefit of sharing libraries

Nope, I understand that this is incredibly efficient. The difference between C libraries and Perl libraries, though, is that Perl library data structures modify themselves as they are used. (The optree is immutable, that's about all.) UNIX/C shared objects are immutable, so it's easy to share them efficiently.

It is common for people to complain of preforked mod_perl processes using all their memory -- not immediately after the fork, but after the app has been steady-state after a while. Things like memoized functions are obvious causes of this behavior, but even Perl's internal data structures change as they are used, and cause the sharing level to decrease over time.

preforking works OK, but it is not perfect. (If you want one preforked process per core, that is fine. If you want one per client, and the process is reused for many clients, that's where I have seen problems.)

Another thing I like about writing lightweight-thread-based apps (or simply async event-based; same thing basically) is convenience -- when I start up my development webserver, the same process can also handle mDNS requests. So I can just click a button in my browser to visit my app; no messing around with making sure that something else isn't binding port 3000, or whatever. Things like job queue runners, scheduled tasks (for cleaning up expired sessions), and so on can also run this way.
Introduction to Economic Analysis [Book by Preston McAfee of Yahoo Research]
How Language and Math Intersect: Chinese v. English
Based on my limited and tangential experience with this sort of stuff in a different country those numbers seem quite reasonable. First of all finance related regulations change quite often and you really have someone who continuously monitors those changes to see what applies to you. Secondly every time you add a new feature or change anything in the way you do things that can quite easily lead to a new avalanche of paperwork.
See also a 2007 paper "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" by two of the same authors:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Quick view: https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Flabs.google.c...
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Which is an interesting point. Most of the top schools are really only known prestige-wise for one or two kinds of majors (at least in my circles): MIT for engineering and CS; Harvard for Business and Law; Stanford for Engineering, CS and Computational Linguistics; Brown for Social Sciences and Education; Princeton for Math and Economics, etc. etc. etc.

Which is one reason why companies in those respective fields tend to recruit from those schools. I'd be highly surprised for example, if Baker & McKenzie spent a lot of time at the University of Virginia recruiting law students, but would fully expect Google to spend lots of time harassing M.I.T. students (but not Harvard students).

Also, not all of the top schools have representative schools of business or law. And for those schools that do, I'm curious how much interaction there is among the three student groups (technical, law, business).
They do not own the company; they run it at the pleasure of (yes) a bureaucracy.
This is an excellent follow-on to the disk failure papers, especially since there are unexpected conclusions.
How is that an experiment?

Unless you have controlled groups, the experiment is useless. You have no idea how many people are going to see your domain and the title and figure it's a repost and never click through because of that.
Forget Googles' other properties, my gmail account pasword is my password for everything for the simple reason that an attacker with access to my gmail account can reset my password on almost every other web system by requesting that a password update email be sent to me.

This is one of the reasons I caved and got an iPhone with push mail notification. I want to know the moment I get a password reset email. Alas, a really clever attacker would probably read and delete the mail before I could see it.
Mediterranean Diet Associated With Reduced Risk Of Depression
Try Coro; the overhead per coroutine is very low. I have some numbers in a HN comment from a few weeks ago... let me dig that up.

Edit: here we are: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794535

(Thanks, SearchYC. I found this post with a signle query!)
On the other hand, punting on any hard problems just makes it that much easier for your competitors.
I don't think that particular move highlights the health of the company as much as it underscores the ability of the founders to pursue their strategies independently of the board of directors. I don't think that upper management would have protested an acquisition (in 2005) that would have moved the company into the mobile space. Android is certainly interesting, but I doubt Larry and Sergey buy companies without a clear plan of how that acquisition will (eventually) grow the bottom line.
Exactly. What these schools are selling are exclusivity and access to the "club". Not the best education possible. This article shoots that right in the bullseye.
"But usually once you've outlined (legally) how you're going to approach something there isn't a monthly cost associated to that legal work."

Oh how I wish that were true for everything :(

Ph0rque is right, though. Unfortunately, if you're dealing with money (payment processing, financial services/PFMs, large-scale real estate, investment management, etc.) then you basically must have a law firm on retainer to deal with all of the changing legislation, certification guidelines, compliance programs, patents, general disputes, etc. etc. Stuff is constantly in flux and the lawyer work is almost never-ending. Especially right now while the US market is in the economic scramble, blame-game mode. This stuff isn't like writing a basic TOS and being done. I'd actually be very surprised that Mint's legal fees were that low, except for the fact that Yodlee handled all the backend work for them. I would absolutely love to get off that cheap...we pay a multiple of what is quoted here. For each of several financial service companies.

I've heard several entrepreneurs say they intend to fill the vacuum created by Mint (by building another anti-Quicken PFM.) My firm has gotten pitches from half a dozen teams already, and we're not even actively seeking investments right now. The relatively small Mint exit seems to have chummed the waters and everyone is probably going to blow out a bunch of money and drown each other like usually happens in these little entrepreneurial frenzy pockets. I'm normally all for the little guy, but if people think this is an easy market to enter now without buckets of cash and industry experience, then they're idiots. For some (most?) industries, being an outsider gives you a new perspective because you don't know what can't be done. Financial industries, however, you need both the cash and the experience or else you may end up in jail.
From the article:

His closing paragraph is technically accurate, but is completely at odds with the article’s title and opening premise — unless he meant that Apple has “fixed” creator codes in the same sense that one “fixes” a dog.

Scathing, but a very reasonable estimation of Apple's extremely poor explanation of why they did away with creator codes.
Note that "increased the economic divide" sounds bad, but there's no way from that statement alone to know whether people are better off or worse off, on the whole. If the "economic divide" was broadened merely by making some people better off faster than others, as is usually the case in a freer market, then there's no problem. It's only when people actually get poorer in terms of what they can do and have that "increasing the economic divide" is a problem, but that's much less common than nearly everyone getting poorer, which would have the effect of narrowing the gap by at least some measures.
You could maintain the same professor-student ratio, but you wouldn't be able to retain the same professors. If Harvard expanded, it would be less able to maintain the 'superstar professor'-professor ratio because other colleges would be able to court the professors away with offers of greater access to better facilities and bigger corner offices with better grad student support.
I definitely support the author's suggestion that Google offer a premium RSA-style keyfob for extra security.

It would be much more secure and still have the ease of a single authentication process for all Google services.
Not exactly. I would say that most people have a highbrow, but highbrow has a zillion different niches. Everyone's lowbrow is basically the same - farts, boobs, various impacts to a male crotch, beer, etc.
My only reply to this: Ram is free. You are optimizing the wrong thing.
In fact, he does mention Peron's protectionism being a root cause (along with depression and wars) for Argentina's financial woes today. He states that protectionism, regulation, large state enterprises (which are anti-capitalistic themes) have never been 'particularly good for growth'.

I feel he does start of with the capitalistic premise. Only later is education hypothesized as a major culprit.
Btw I submitted this news report yesterday, but I titled the submission with Newsweek's title/headline for the article - "Striking It Rich: Is There An App For That?" (Hardly anyone noticed that submission :-).
--
On other posts, I've seen some commenters suggest that hn submissions should keep the original title of the article and not editorialize by typing in a new title, but as this this submission shows, sometimes, re-titling a news report makes it easier for people to understand what the news report is about.
What is the evidence that things are worse off for anybody in India today as compared to 1965?
That seems backwards. The problem isn't your gmail password getting leaked, but some other site leaking your password. If that site also has a clue about your email address, now they have access to your email, since you made them the same password.
Probably repeated compliance filings, expanding to new countries, partnering with new banks, etc plus they probably hit several milestones for legal needs as they grew.
From my experience, I've seen about a 50/50 split in "pro" bloggers versus newer people who want to become pro bloggers. That split might have changed a little because Darren opened it up to his wider audience - though early on it was nearly all "pros". There's a very active "critique" board on there though - I've done perhaps 10-15 critiques so far - they range from overall designs/strategies to posts.
That's kind of sick if you ask me. Sure the $140 USD might be used to help people in refugee camps, but buying a street name for yourself?

The promotional material:

We provide the opportunity for anyone to have a street named after them or one of their loved-ones — normally you’re required to have done something incredibly heroic and be dead before you get that sort of privilege

Probably many of those refugee's friends or family did heroic things and/or are dead. What must they think of ridiculous Americans who will donate if they get a street named after themselves?
The people that remember only the lows wouldn't become entrepreneurs.
While Mr Gruber might not use any computer other than a Mac, the rest of the world does. There's a lot of value in following the lowest common denominator in this case -- encoding the type in the filename isn't a bad way of ensuring the type never gets lost.
Then they should simply lower the tuition cost and avoid the aid hassle.

They could still just select the top 1600 students a year (or whatever the figure is)...but that would dramatically change the makeup of those 1600.
Learning in the Open
title has nothing to do with video.
I think there's something that's different about the App Store, which is basically the same as on the Internet: the barrier to entry is very low.

In something like the Console gaming business, there is a huge barrier to entry. Making a copycat game happens, but they are few and far between. It takes a lot of time and money to create a game. Since it does take such an investment, everything is generally thought out much more and markets are analyzed carefully before moving in.

On the iPhone, the barrier to entry is much lower, allowing copycats to crop up very quickly and flooding the market and driving down prices. With a coffee shop there is at least a significant barrier to entry, while it isn't as much so with the App Store.

The same thing has happened on the Internet. It is very hard to make a for-pay site because there are so many others which are willing to offer similar services cheaper. This has lead to most sites on the Internet being free or mostly free. For example, look at on-line newspapers. Many of them aren't able to turn much of a profit on-line because they have to compete with many many other sources of news that are free.

You could argue that the more expensive items are better and so will attract users, but I think the Internet has taught us that a lot of people will settle for a lot less as long as it is cheaper.
This is the same guy who thinks online education will replace traditional colleges:

http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?do...

Here's his ideal fantasy university -- funded by Bill Gates, with unlimited online enrollment:

http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?do...

Given that, more online education is likely his real message here: "Harvard can just expand online! Admit everyone who wants to go! It'll be great!"

I've done online education, correspondence courses, and live satellite courses. They don't compare in any way to college courses, let alone the college experience.
Although you're right that websites might have access if you use the same password for everything, in this case even if you use all different passwords, you're completely blown if somebody gets the gmail password, because they can just reset all the other ones.
We're starting a new company, hiring 2 developers and paying ~$50k, ~2-4% equity (4yr vesting), and providing health/dental via AdminiStaff. However, we're based in Austin so that's closer to ~$70-80k along west coast. As founder, I'll be taking a salary around ~$30k unless we receive our full ask.

I suppose it's also worth clarifying that this is an angel round to build the prototype, 9-12 month runway. Salaries will go up if all goes well of course.
could be. i'm sure there's a lot of chicken/egg questions that could be asked with respect to a lot of issues in the country.
Were you personally able to profit from your connections?
Interesting point - The social factors of Open Source have numerous subtle consequences. It reminds me of how someone noted that it can be easier to get help with (some) Open Source software by going on IRC and spouting misinformation (and getting corrected by a mob), rather than asking for help and getting treated like a stupid newbie.

My note about type systems doesn't have anything to do with whether it's correct or not - just, if the first example people give for the usefulness of type systems is more type systems, it makes me wonder how much consideration the speaker gives practicality. (Then again, I'm not a grad student...or an agile methodology coach.)
In addition the illustrations (in the original older editions at least) would probably not be considered politically correct these days. They show Chinese people as the typical 1930's "Chinaman" depiction which many might find slightly insulting today.
Anecdotal evidence isn't exactly an irrefutable argument.Not to mention you're begging the question as to how many unemployed people you actually know.

Finally, talented people with preference for working in a system than designing one out of scratch may be out of luck when looking for employment in a low-yield market. I don't think either of us are talking about talent as a static, singular or sole factor of employment probability, after all - and like it or not, there's such thing as Plain Bad Luck for some folks.
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> First, on the 1984 scandel he cites, Amazon has apologized, sworn they will never do it again, refunded customers money and given customers new copies of the book. Give them a break already.

Has Amazon taken any steps to remove the feature of the Kindle software that let them do this in the first place? I don't think so. Thus, I am rather disinclined to "give them a break".

To use an analogy: a criminal obtains the key to my house. One night he sneaks in and steals some stuff. I'm upset, of course. But then he apologizes, returns the stuff, and even gives me a few gifts. However, he keeps my house key. Am I happy? (BTW, yes, I know that what Amazon did is not illegal. But it is certainly lousy enough to keep me from ever buying a Kindle.)

Unless someone wants to explain to me why being able to muck about with a customer's computer, behind the customer's back, is a Good Thing (?).
A point on Human Capital: From what I learned, developed countries (and companies) depends much more on Structural Capital and not Human Capital in long run.

Human Capital is seen as a risky asset due to its volatility. From a intellectual capital management perspective, my guess is that Argentina has not been successful into converting its Human Capital into Structural Capital.

Education is one of the tools of such conversion. With my limited knowledge, policy and society design are the high level effective tools for the job.
+1
Where is OAuth integration for Gmail IMAP?

This kind of thing weighs down innovation. Take Threadsy.com for example. I'm sure people aren't thrilled about having to give out gmail passwords to make full use of their service.. It's a shame that Google hasn't addressed this yet.
That was the point I was trying to make, thank you for finding a way to use one word where I used two :-)
Rebuilding times are a hot topic in light of the industry adoption of 1TB drives
This post probably won't make sense to you unless you're a penetration tester. Let me take a stab at some context.

Pentesting is black-box testing for security problems. Chris and Mike have been doing a lot of pentesting of ActiveX controls. ActiveX controls are native X86 code packaged as DLLs that run in IE. They're very horrible, but big companies have tens of apps that rely on them.

You can think of ActiveX (AX) as the web extensions for Win32 COM, which is the "advanced" version of OLE, which is the mechanism that allows you to embed Excel spreadsheets in Word documents (by loading Excel as a DLL and giving it a window context). Ruby has support for OLE and for native Windows calls with Win32OLE.

What Chris has done here is build a system whereby he can take any AX DLL, use Ruby to find all the AX interfaces (they're registered, because AX uses COM), and then automatically generate a web server that will generate pathological inputs for each of them. So basically, you drop in the AX binary, and Chris' system automatically builds a torture test for it, without you even knowing what the AX control does.

This isn't our idea; I'm pretty sure we stole it from HD Moore.
He is wrong on the facts.

Only Three of the top hundred grossing apps cost $50 or more. These three apps are all from big companies and the apps are iPhone versions of their current products.(Two of the three apps are MobileNavigator from Navigon and TomTom's navigator)

I'm surprised that anyone can get away with saying that "Figures show that the top grossing apps were $50". The top grossing apps list is easily verifiable in itunes <g>
Don't trust the safekeeping of your password with the entire internet. Use a different password for every website, it's really the only way.
Where is the Java reference? I have found not articles claiming the new system is in Java. Where???
Would anyone have a problem raising 100k from friends and family, knowing that in 12 months if you were unable to raise a series A, you would be forced to tell them that they had little chance of seeing their money again?
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This is why I don't use Google apps much.
The key phrase is 'But why was Argentina's public sector so problematic?'. Other countries have thrived despite similar policies, what he argues is that lack of education led to poor implementations of them in Argentina.

I wouldn't disagree that he's starting from a standard narrative, but his argument doesn't require those causes as premises to explain Argentina's lack of growth.
I agree to what you say, but by economic divide in India, I meant, the rich get richer, the poor, frankly cannot get any poorer there and are untouched, maybe even adversely affected by the economic boom.

For the sake of free-market policies and rampant industrialization, people are displaced without their consent. For example, dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people in India.

Successive governments like to publicize decreasing poverty figures, which are constantly rebutted by independent agencies.

A 2007 report by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) found that 77% of Indians, or 836 million people, lived on less than 20 rupees per day (USD 0.50 nominal, USD 2.0 in PPP), with most working in "informal labour sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty."
[http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSDEL218894]
Video of Airplane Laser Hitting Truck
My experience is that TDD helps you write code that consists of tiny functions that are trivially correct. For the simple reason that this is the easiest way to write a test for.

As for the exploratory programming argument, a key element in TDD is to write one test and the make it succeed. You are not supposed to write a lot of tests and then the code that makes them succeed. So unless you are so exploratory that you don't even know what you want your next function to do, this would not hinder you either.
Shamiq interned with us this summer; I met him here on HN. He absolutely kicked ass.