skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, here are some things that it does that other tools don't:

- It type checks JSX
- It supports some ES6 features others don't (like destructuring) as the build step
- It has union types (TS will get those soon, already in master)
- It does a lot more inference and a lot more assumptions. It assumes you won't multiply a string by a number for example (although technically '10' * 5 is legal in JS). So it's opinionated in that it enforces checks that rule out code that is legal but not likely intended in JS (an opinin I agree with).

Yes - it is possible to write tests and get good coverage and not use those tools - however static analysis can be very valuable in finding errors early. While I'm not sure I'd bother with explicit typing in this in smaller projects from the examples and unit tests it looks like it could find errors people would not easily notice otherwise. (Think JSHint, on steroids).

That said, only time will tell how good the implementation will really get in understanding your code.
Your first Python example is just numeric coercion, not weak typing. Haskell does numeric coercion too (try 2 + 1.1 in ghci). C does not behave like Python and print 42 in this example. Try it yourself and see.

True being coercible to a number is unfortunate, but it's still not the same as what C does with that printf.

"foo" * 3 is just an example of a polymorphic operator. You could implement the same in any strongly typed language that allows polymorphic operators.
This looks latest (fall 2014). Thanks :) Will try it out, I was looking for descrete mathematics course almost 2 years back and could find only MIT one. Good to see some options now.
Building Perl 6 with Visual Studio 2013
By predators it does. Unless you're chomping on some raw grass right now -> then I stand corrected.
Well, it's hard to write an interpreter with the performance of, say, MRI Ruby.
Hydrogen Cars Join Electric Models in Showrooms
I suppose he was talking about TypeScript and CoffeeScript.
I believe that the combination of HTTP/2 and TLS length-hiding makes that attack impractical. Though admittedly we're still years away from widespread deployment of those two technologies.
Not saying it is the ideal solution, but even as an interim solution until you find the right software, you could use a shared Google Calendar and setup pre scheduled reminders for you and your team. That way 2 days ahead each month for each client (or whatever) you get your reminder.

Outside of that, you could try Basecamp to manage your projects and use the To-Do list as a reminder system to send your team the reminder to do the blog post etc, and then they can mark the task complete in Basecamp once it is done.

Just some ideas as I am not sure of any specific software built for your need.
Difference Between BeanFactory and FactoryBean in Spring Framework
supercool!
Massive conspiracy! I think you overestimate the impact of lobbying.
>Effectively what we have here is XMPP/Jabber with TextSecure on top of it instead of XMPP/Jabber with OTR on top of it, which has been around for quite some time now. Maybe that's not terribly impressive but it's great to see big companies join the privacy-by-design camp.

The TextSecure protocol, based on the Axolotl Rachet, is a significant improvement on OTR, both in terms of cryptographic capability and usability.
Using Animals to Build an Early Warning System for Natural Disasters
I believe the reason he may have found it weird is that Show HN were once about weekend projects.
Awesome. FYI, the Language Reference Next/Back links don't match the order in the left navbar.
Does it support structural typing? That seems to be the strongest advantage of TypeScript.
bookmarked :)
In the obviously far superior ;-) RPM world it's possible to have multiple "linux-kernel" packages with different versions installed at the same time.
Even if the only result is tossing the evidence that will still incentive Parallel Construction, which has been going on for a long long time.

The legal System is setup to encourage this. The only way to prevent that would be independent audits of all investigations which would be both expensive, time prohibitive, and over time the "independent" auditors would be corrupted leading to the need for auditors of the auditors, etc etc etc

it is the "who watches and watchers" problem, you find a solution to this you let me know because you will be a very rich person.
> comets go round the sun, not into it

But that does not mean all comets survive their close approach to the Sun. Some, such as the sungrazing comets[0], come quite close to the surface and can be destroyed by their encounters with the Sun.

As jnevill points out, this particular comet's orbit does not take it closer to the Sun than the Earth's distance from the Sun. The comet is on a ~6yr orbit, I believe, and so should survive for a long period of time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sungrazing_comet
What Can Programmers and Writers Learn from One Another?
There is no such thing as "small integers" in CPython, only PyObjects, of which PyInt_Type and PyLong_Type are implementations. You can't special case integers without changing every C interface that accepts an object, and special casing every piece of code too (i.e. several hundred million lines of 3rd party extension modules, NumPy, lxml, ...). The trade-off is 1 extra machine word per integer (adding to the 2 + heap/alignment slack already present), or 1 conditional branch per object access everywhere.

This isn't so bad on memory either, since Python keeps a static cache of integers that are reused on every int constructor call. Also allowing for slack, I wouldn't be surprised if the machine word came for free.
but as user I can understand that an http site is insecure, while a self signed certificate might lead me into a false sense of security.
I think someone had set up a Goodreads account or group for HN readers.

I'm trying to find it but no luck so far (I'm at work, no Goodreads available here).
WatchKit Daily: Tips, Trick and More
Google Fit Developer Challenege
That's not really a statement that can be defended.

"No, no, we won't look ONLY into your children, we'll ALSO look into your spouses, siblings, and parents."
> A restaurant isn't a 501(c) either, but I would call it absurd if they charged a customer to use the restroom.

The cost of the restroom visit is, in a sense, folded into the cost of the meal. That is why many restaurants only allow paying customers to use the restrooms.
Here is the HN post from yesterday that also points to the NYTimes article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8621658
https://redditmade.com/ seems to be going with this idea as well.
NASA Sites Lunar Far Side for Low-Frequency Radio Telescope
Are you me?!

Wow this described my situation exactly.

Same revenue, same costs, same lifestage (2 kids, mtg), same high paying job, etc.

I've found some ways to make the process even more self-serve than it already is, maybe we can compare notes?
To know something is insecure can be acceptable. To think something is secure when it isn't can be far more dangerous. I'm considering secure to mean encrypted and identity reasonably verified. Whatever your thoughts on the CA process it serves a purpose.

There are plenty of other things to complain about. EV for one.
As kmavm said, thanks for saying so on behalf of the people who have been working on open sourcing things (I haven't as yet).

I don't think there's been any policy changes. I think the policy has always been that we're open to open sourcing stuff, so long as it is useful to others (ie, not just a code drop that nobody can use) and someone signs up for the work and there isn't something important that's being dropped in the process.

The difference I think is people, energy, and momentum.

We've been able to find people (many already at the company) genuinely interested in some of the less glamorous parts of building a scalable program to open source things - things like sync processes and pull request management and UIs for ACLs and CLAs and so forth.

We've had people who, often due to the availability of these tools, have developed an internal energy to want to put in the extra effort to make their project ready to be open sourced (like making sure all dependencies are available already, or scoping out or stubbing out things that are Facebook-specific (our asset management flow, for example) while still keeping the software useful, and so forth.

The momentum has also made the idea of open sourcing code more top-of-mind to people, which helps to get people to rewrite their changes to accommodate a nascent open sourcing effort on a piece of code, or to get more discretionary time to investigate or work on making something open source. Or even just moral support from your team and colleagues.
To what extent are you "entitled" to "investigate" into the personal lives of entrepreneurs and people building real value.

If your goal is not to intimidate, attack, or slander, what purpose does it serve and accomplish? Freedom of speech and self publication is important and is part of the Constitution. Entrepreneurs can investigate shady journalists who seem to have a bias and who are crossing ethical lines even if you think they shouldn't.

Looking into the financial ties of companies is game. But the industry and business is not the same as someone's personal life, their sexual preferences, children, family, etc.
Somehow I think that's sad. Really.
The 16th century self-publicist whose medical text books caused a stir
Acting like an ass is not necessarily a zero-sum game. But that doesn't change the fact that publicly musing about going after someone's family for revenge is totally unacceptable.
Given the amount of vitriol surrounding Facebook messenger as a separate app, I'll be interested to see how users respond to this new head that has spawned on the Facebook app hydra. Looks like a direct competitor to Groupme and Whatsapp groups, and one that could've (should've?) been implemented within the messenger app rather than building out a completely separate application for chats that probably already live inside messenger.
> Besides being a compiler guy, i'm an open source lawyer.

Apologies for replying in-thread (I couldn't find contact in your profile). Would it be possible to ask you a few questions about a perhaps-novel compiler licensing question for an open source application we're developing (we're a commercial entity and can pay for your time)? If so you can reach me at the email in my profile.
Ugly Email – Gmail Extension to Check If Email Is Being Tracked
Any equivalent of this sort of a Hackathon in the SF Bay? If not, wanna organize one together? :)
Interview with Dennis Liu, Director of Plurality (2012)
It would be ideal, but let's face reality. If they stay separate, there's a chance Whatsapp, Hangouts and let's say Skype (long stretch here, especially after Microsoft worked so hard to make it wiretappable back in 2009 [1]) would all adopt this solid and secure protocol. But if they have to interop, they'd never agree to it. Google even removed XMPP support so Microsoft can't build Gtalk support into Outlook/Skype (among other reasons).

[1] - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2509604/data-privacy/mi...
Ok, thanks - just emailed you. (I recognised your handle, as I've spoken to you by email in the past).
> they call out HN for blocking this backlash

I try to respond to these, but what we're being accused of here eludes me. Nobody who "blocks" things at HN had any idea of this controversy.
No, Stack Overflow is just getting more popular. A lot of beginner programmers want to know how to send a JavaScript variable to a PHP script. This has been solved years ago on Stack Overflow, so it will get closed. This is just an example.
Google - Ready, aim, fire: an open-source tool to test web security scanners
Interesting to see firefox for android in the stock photos. Does anyone know if that is going to be the default browser?
WhatsApp Adds Encryption to Secure Text Messages
> Even the author of the story said it was hypothetical. Multiple times.

Really? Hmm...Ctrl+F "hypothetical" 0 of 0 results.

And here's a screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ifydpomabnm8ijb/bfss.png?dl=0

Troll harder.
One of the things I was only belatedly appreciative about Lotus notes was the experience on Linux. While I was at IBM, I used Lotus notes on Windows, then on Linux. The Linux version did occasionally crash; but overall the experience was similar to a Windows user.

The next company I worked at used Exchange, and developers could use Outlook webmail or an IMAP client like Thunderbird. I found this experience to be substandard; both from a perspective of consistency with managers who had Outlook and found calendaring to be pretty awful compared to Lotus notes.

This might be less important now that you can have your Calendar integrated into your smart phone, but I did not have a smart phone at the time.
The product you are looking for is “editorial calendar” or “content calendar.”

If you aren’t truly a marketing agency, then it may be better to augment your existing project management solution (like basecamp) to track this with calendars/projects for each customer with recurring tasks. This will provide great visibility and alerting.
There's no question in my mind that the whole thing is a racket and militates against security (you generally don't even know all the evil organisations that your browser implicitly trusts - and all the organisations that they trust etc).

There are certainly other options too: here's my suggestion-

The first time you go to a site where the certificate is one you haven't seen before, the browser should show a nice friendly page that doesn't make a fuss about how dangerous it is, and shows a fingerprint image for the site that you can verify elsewhere, either from a mail you've been sent, and with a list of images from fingerprint servers it knows about that contain a record for that site shown next to it.

Once you accept, it should store that certificate and allow you access to that site without making a big fuss or making it look like it's less secure than an unencrypted site. This should be a relatively normal flow and we should make the user experience accessible to normal people.

It's basically what we do for ssh connections to new hosts.
@nsxwolf because surprisingly the baseband is actually the main processor in most modern designs, the application processor (your quad core snapdragon or whatever) is a slave to the baseband and receives events and data it
That's the proffered reasoning as we all know. But the actual outcome (to quote rufb from this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8625739)

Encrypted (Certified) COOL GREEN
Encrypted (Self-Signed) EVIL RED
Unencrypted NOTHING / NEUTRAL CHROME

Tell me how the logic works here (for an average user).
That's interesting, it doesn't mention that on their website. I have only received a certificate from them as an individual, so I haven't encountered that limitation.

Even so, I'd argue that $200 is a fairly cheap way to protect the integrity of your company.
True, though I was thinking of plants making war on each other rather than eating animals.
I've understood it has solar panels. But what would be the reason they didn't put a nuclear battery on board? That would work for years.

If the direct output power of the nuclear battery was too low, it could still be used to charge the rechargeable battery until it can make the lander do work again for a few hours/days.
www.electology.org/threshold
Yes! Two modern languages that are 1) statically typed and 2) statically compiled. At least some people still get it that "modern" and "nice to use" does not implies scripting-like dynamically-fancy typed language "à la" PHP/Python/Javascript/...
And the author did not mention Playground for Swift which is just incredibly useful to start experimenting with the language!
(Edit: of course Rust is another one as well, but I was in the context of the article)
The God of the Gap fallacy is more or less the opposite of a thoughtful theological position.
Would it be possible in the future to set the thresholds based on time?

Say I expect high traffic only during mornings, and not want to handle it during the evening if it occurs. Any chance this is in the making?
except that you must make over a certain amount of money to qualify for income tax? if you're flat busted you're not paying any taxes besides incidental ones like sales. it's a really gross disingenuous argument to draw equivalences between the historical monstrosity of chattel slavery (the indignity of humans being reduced to property) and having an apportionment of your income siphoned for collective costs. at that point you're just saying that any form of social obligation is the same thing as not having legal standing as a human being
Not that I know of. This historical index actually has been in place for many many months, but Twitter just decided to publish this article recently. The API sometimes has less than a week of data, as little as 3-4 days I've noticed. And some days (like once every 3 months) it returns 50% less data, but so does the web app.
Planet Labs – new images of the Earth everyday
Vamo Startup Simplifies Booking of Complex Trips
Small lib for React.js views on server and client
That's not a weak typing artifact, its an artifact of the fact that different languages use operators with the same name but with different semantics. (And the fact that you can have PHP and JS, which are different languages, in the same file.)

You could have the same issue with languages with indisputably strong, static typing with different semantics if there was a way of embedding them in the same file.
> 2. Python is interpreted rather than compiled.

Can we stop saying things like this? Virtually all Python is compiled, as part of the interpretation process.

There is a valid point here, of course. The point is that the top Python compilers do not compile to native code. So say that.

Words have meanings. Use them correctly. <grumble, grumble>
Economics. Suppose you have a factory and a growing order book but you're running at or near full capacity; if you get any substantial increase in the number of orders, it's going to take longer and longer to fulfill them, and customers might start to go your competitors if they feel the quality of your service has dropped. This is a diseconomy of scale - you've run out of room to grow and the more business you get the lower your margins.

The obvious solution would be to set up another factory. Suppose for simplicity that this costs $25 million and allows a doubling of capacity. suppose further that TeeSpring is making a profit of $100,000 a week (a completely imaginary figure - I know nothing about their finances). Because it's near full capacity that weekly net isn't going to increase much. But saving up the money to purchase the factory outright would take 4-5 years - an organic growth strategy - is plenty of time for competitors to move against you and pull away customers.

So you have a couple of options. You could go into debt, either by getting a loan or issuing a bond that pays interest (effectively the same thing). Now some of your income goes on interest payments, but they're tax-deductible and after you've paid off the debt you'll still have the second factory. As long as the increased income resulting from the investment is greater than the cost of borrowing the capital then going into debt can be perfectly sensible - the same reason it makes good sense for governments to splurge on necessary infrastructure during periods of low interest rates, just like we're not doing now due to politics :-/

Another option is to issue equity, ie sell shares in the company to raise the money. For large firms this may not be any more attractive than debt, because shareholders will expect a dividend of some sort. For growing firms it makes a ton of sense because early investors are not so much interested in dividends as in the possibility for the shares to appreciate in value - who wouldn't have liked to invest $1 million in Google or any other large company back in the early days? This is ideal for a firm like Teespring that has a very simple and straightforward business model - manufacturing a basic consumer product like this is great from an investor's POV because it's so easy to analyze.
15 Fresh CSS frameworks for 2014
Why do so many cycle lights blink? It's very annoying and actually even not legal in my country. Visual spam.
Honestly I think it still is to the majority of the public. Sure another engineer who is at all concerned with privacy knows about these devices, but I doubt a kid who is robbing a pap john's driver at gunpoint is aware.
$199 Linux-ready zero client offers GbE connection
What specifically did she do that would justify investigating her family?
edited: Sorry I confused Groups and Rooms! ignore this.

------------------------------------------------

A couple of UX decisions in the Rooms app are interesting.

It uses QR Codes to provide access to a Room. You take a screenshot of the QR code, the Rooms app scans your camera roll to find new rooms to give you access to.

The typical account creation process is side-stepped. You create an account after you use the app. The account is initially based on your device, so it's only needed if you switch devices or use multiple devices.
The article did say the prosecution also claimed to have a confession from the defendant.
Agreed, what about communities where marriage is extremely strict or are arranged?
-they essentially cannot leave
-they must work or can be beaten
-they cannot go out alone
-money is often exchanged in the marriage process
This meets all the listed criteria for slavery. No black and white (pun not intended, but it works) definition that can be used, so any quantification is subjective.
On the subject of prison labor, just after the civil war many southern states used trumped up charges to essentially enslave the newly "free."
When the GP talks about "small integers", I'm assuming he's talking about numbers between -5 and 256, which are cached ahead of time. They're never going to be garbage collected, so refcounting is largely unnecessary.
> If it's public static content, what is SSL protecting?

https:// helps protect the act of participation and deters the building of dossiers.

Its the difference between the books in the library and the list of books in the library you have read.
Small Chinese/Indian companies come out with multiple Android models every year. Was it so hard for Nokia to do the same under Elop, and put eggs in more than one basket?
I hadn't considered that extensions which needed direct memory access would need access to these objects. But it's a solvable problem. The proposal might read as follows:

"Objects with IDs between 0 and 2055, inclusive, are considered unreleasable. The Python runtime shall initialize the refcount of these objects to 1 when they are first used, and shall make no guarantee that the refcount on such objects accurately reflects the true number of references to that object. Native extensions may increase and decrease the refcount on these objects as if they were normal objects; if those extensions are well-behaved, then the refcount should never decrease below 1. However, native extensions that can statically reason about whether an object is likely to be unreleasable, may benefit in performance by checking for whether objects passed to their functions are indeed unreleasable, and refraining from modifying or checking their refcount in such cases."
This is HUGE!

Thanks to everyone at Facebook who worked on this. You guys are awesome.

Also: The fact that this is written primarily in OCaml (as opposed to JS) is an excellent example of people choosing the right tool for the job.
Best tech news I've seen this year, in terms of potential to directly improve my workflow and my clients' applications.

I'm surprised I didn't hear more about this before since it was apparently unveiled at the "Flow" conference. Wasn't at the conference and somehow I missed any prior mention of it.
A more compact representation is one advantage - that's why numpy has array of int.