skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bogus bank in China scams people of over 200M yuan
I'm hoping Go's error handling is improved in 2.0. I understand the objections to Java-style exceptions but I think they underestimated the actual cost of having so much boilerplate clogging up every non-trivial program, not to mention the way it actively encourages people to punt on error checking which is why so many projects are littered with `x, _ := foo()`.

The approach I'd like would be a lightweight assert-style failure mode where the compiler would treat any function which returns an error as being followed an implied `if err != nil { panic("Unhandled error") }` unless the error is checked on the next statement. That'd allow you to handle things which you expect to fail regularly while preventing the litany of bugs in C programs caused by forgetting to check return codes on things which rarely fail.
I don't know, or have much opinion on, what is a fair fine (if any).
Interesting. In practice, I have started following a pattern where I have two Serializer classes - a "serializer" and a "deserializer".

The "deserializer"'s job is to perform validation and type coercion of incoming requests. It returns a "native" dictionary, which the application code then saves to ORM.

The "serializer" is basically a presentation layer. It calls out to other nested serializers [this is awesome!], and it throws in convenience-fields that make the API response easier to consume.

This pattern makes it a little bit less "magical", and it's easier to distinguish between the API's "incoming" behavior and its "outgoing" behavior.
I remember this video: http://www.warriorsofthe.net/movie.html
Actually, you can do `grep -r` by just combining `grep` and `lstree`. Here's an example:

example = do
file <- lstree "some/dir"
True <- liftIO (testfile file)
grep "Some pattern" (input file)

This is an example of how most of Bash's option heavy ecosystem is an outgrowth of Bash's limitation as a language (individual commands accumulate flags to work around functionality difficult to implement within the Host language). I think having a decent host language decreases the need for so many configuration knobs for every command.
One would also hope that the System RS-232 Security Code is actually unique to each device and is not simply specified in a manual somewhere.
Jolla Tablet returns to Indiegogo – introducing the 64GB version
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8930360
Not Clojure, but Lisp for iOS/Android/OSX: https://wukix.com/mocl
Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing
I haven't read the linked book, so I can't comment on which is a better introduction.

I will say that having read the Tannenbaum book, it is a very thorough, bottom-up survey, and you will certainly know quite a lot about computer networking after reading it.
Approximately no one comes to the UK to look at gas holders. It's not like number of infrastructure nerds coming to look at King's Cross and St Pancras would drop if we were to remove the gas holders nearby. But yeah, convert them into park-like areas if the community wants (as they're doing at King's Cross)
I realise all this now. So do you - more so than most people as you're intimately familiar with the image.

I'm explaining the impression that it gives, rightly or wrongly, to those not as intimately familiar with it as you; those less familiar with Docker who may read through the README and come away thinking that it's ok to mix roles without appreciating the unwritten use cases you actually had in mind; those newer to Docker who have a Node app and a Ruby app and think "hey, this passenger-full image looks convenient, I'll use that" without appreciating the implications.

> It's even better than that: Redis and Memcached aren't even INSTALLED by default. Thus, no warning is needed. If you don't explicitly choose to use them, you do not pay any price.

Doesn't say that in the README, just says they're disabled. The fact they're not installed doesn't impact on the impression that's given.
What would you say was the biggest cause for this to be so difficult? is it "just because" you didn't have the proper documentation? or was the nature of the communication protocol itself hard due to its design? or was it perhaps the fact that both factors would compound terribly?
It's the case of me scrolling the site and reading most of the GH readme - and still getting almost no idea what status it is, what is the goal/vision and how I might use it..

"We do LXC stuff in secure and user friendly way" is the message?
Ask HN: How Should I Market This Thing?
Finished my labor of love:

http://blanqd.com

...but don't have experience with promotion or "growth hacking". Any tips, tricks, or ideas you can share?
Things like Sandstorm are really important as they allow people options without becoming a full-blown sysadmin. Just look at how many crowd funding ideas are based on 'personal cloud' concepts.

However, we also need to work on the fundamental problems to make it easier to build decentralised products in the first place (not everything is a web-app). Namely, how such apps are built, how they store/sync data, and how we deal with identity. The current tools simply aren't designed for the world we're heading towards, so we need to re-evaluate our assumptions. On top of this is the need for business models that don't rely on mass data collection (eg advertising) -- we can't rely on everything being open source but the underlying infrastructure must be.

There are many ways forward and the particular approach I'm taking is based on unikernels and creating a modern stack to deal with the above issues directly. There's more info at http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/

If anyone happens to be at FOSDEM this weekend I'd be happy to chat about these ideas in person.
We should be so lucky. The problem with these tools is precisely that they successfully specialize, in substantial and generally-reliably detail.
Its not clear from the article which factor the 50% figure applies. I doubt its the overall odds ratio, but rather the likelihood given some priors. For example, given a prior that 90% of startups fail, what is the likelihood that this particular startup will succeed? If the prior is already factored in, then the model predicts no better than a coin flip.

The point made in the article is that investing at the odds of a coin flip would be better than investing with incorrect risk assumptions (ie. buying into "particularly bad ideas").
Oh that sounds interesting, haven't come accross myself - thanks!
Mind Controlled Dildo
No, but we have been told that the performance characteristics of the native Swift array should be the same as an array in C.

Judging from what the compiler team at Apple regularly write in forums and on twitter, it seems that they consider the performance issues for arrays (actually, this happens in other circumstances as well) to be a very real issue.

When you say "swap for a C array", then I suppose that you mean we allocate a chunk of memory like in C, then access it using unsafe methods (as there is no "C array" in Swift). Unfortunately, working with UnsafeMutablePointer and friends is extremely verbose and clumsy, which makes it an extremely bad experience.
Ask HN: Examples of real life like projects I could use in mentoring
A bit of context :
I'm a seasoned IT professional (with a management / enterprise architecture background) and when I get the chance I use some of my spare time to help inexperienced people (usually college level or just out of college kids of my friends) with advice and a bit of mentor-ship on what they should learn so that they complete their academic knowledge with skills required in the real world. I've been doing it so far for software development. I basically come with an idea of a small project and ask them to develop, recommend techniques, review their code, approach, do some Skype office hours, etc.
It's not a big effort for me, I do it for the good citizen effect and I helped them learn useful things and get jobs. In software development only, though.

The question :
I have 2 new "students" which reached out to me for a professional reconversion and it seems that targeting an analyst profile is the best fit as they lack any technical background and at least in Europe is a good entry point in the IT world.
I built up some sort of a curricula but I face a challenge: this exercise is really helped by actual challenges and there is only that much "do a use case diagram for somebody getting money out of an ATM" type of small challenges I can give them.
Has anyone been facing a similar issue or would care to throw some idea of meaningful projects I could get them working on to develop analyst type of skills they could later use to get a real job ? Again, the challenge is not really inventing a project ("write specs and gather requirements for a job board") but inventing a project that is meaningful and requires little interaction (I don't have the time to impersonate all the different persona they would have to interact with : stakeholders, managers, architects, developers, etc..)
There have been probably 15 different proposals for this throughout the years. They never make enough momentum to go through. While record pain points seem like a huge deal, in practice they're not sufficiently bad to motivate changes in the language in the face of the various tradeoffs that would have to be made.

Today, typeclasses and lenses cover 99% of "the record problem" as far as I've experienced.
No you are not alone, I got a Lumia 630 as secondary phone and find the OS very good.
Nope, you're still right.

Assume startups fail 90% of the time. 50% of the time your coin comes up tails, and you claim the startup will fail. 50% of the time your coin comes up heads and you claim the startup will succeed.

You guess correctly 0.5 (the chance your coin comes up tails) * 0.9 (the chance the startup fails) + 0.5 (heads) * 0.1 (success) = 0.5 of the time.
For anyone looking for argument parsing and serialization with Flask, I recommend webargs (http://webargs.readthedocs.org/), marshmallow (http://marshmallow.readthedocs.org), and flask-marshmallow (http://flask-marshmallow.readthedocs.org/).
Antifragile mindset
> Right wing politics in the US claims to lean toward reducing/dismantling SS and the welfare state, radically changing immigration and education policy.

That's not generally true. Right wing politics usually claims its for the first two things, and one form of the last, but generally opposes substantial reforms of immigration policy in favor of more stringent enforcement of existing laws.

> In contrast, left wing politicians just want to throw more money at the same things.

Incorrect. "Liberal" politicians in the US favor substantial reforms to immigration policy, healthcare policy (though perhaps less so at the moment, given that they recently achieved a fairly major restructuring in that domain, though there are plenty that would drive further), and, in many cases, reforms to the structure of SS, welfare state systems, and taxation structure. In a very different direction than right-wing politicians seek to change them.
> chemists experimenting at a nuclear accelerator in Vancouver observed that a reaction between bromine and muonium—a hydrogen isotope—slowed down when they increased the temperature

Isn't saying muonium is "a hydrogen isotope" sort of like saying a car is "a horse isotope"?
> Sort of a TAOCP for electronics and circuits.

Except people actually read The Art of Electronics :)
The problem is that the NSA has both the defensive and offensive roles and I think they've failed at the former role so badly because there's a ratchet effect pushing everything towards greater secrecy and a quasi-military role.

We'd be much better off as a country if we split the NSA into half with one side basically being a sort of USDA/EPA/FEMA with the only goal of improving baseline security standards and a healthy budget for things like aggressively auditing widely used code and services.
It is quite expected if you run an exit node. However this was in regard to a relay node, which is something else entirely.

I've seen a few references to these supposed problems with running a relay nodes lately, but the poster never replies with any information where this have actually happened. This behaviour is new. It wouldn't surprise me if it's coordinated, considering what else we've seen lately.
Travel the open seas together
Will you be talking about Mirage/other bits of your work at FOSDEM, or are you “just” attending?
I take it he doesn't agree that mentally beating an ideology into impressionable young minds is the way to turn people to the left-wing.

But it has worked so well so far!
What's wrong with saying "people like this"? Seems like a pretty clear delineation between proactive, pragmatic developers, and developers who aren't?
That prediction doesn't improve over the prior. So its no better than the (biased) coin flip.
The one thing I've read (don't remember where) that makes sense to me is...is it possible that MS is trying to figure out a mobile Docker system to allow Android apps on Windows Phone? With multi-core CPU's on phones and more memory, you could assume the capability is there.

But this would be more than Windows Phone...with Windows 10 merging into one store and Universal apps allowed, is it possible MS is telling everyone to build for Windows 10 and you'll get tablet and phone apps for free?

I'm a Windows Phone user (Lumia 1020) and really frustrated by the lack of a new flagship phone, but my feeling is MS is just waiting to leapfrog everyone else's hardware in 6 months. A lofty goal, but seeing the Surface Pro 3's success, maybe, just maybe they can do it.

But embedding Android inside Windows seems plausible to me.
> Other programmers write libraries, functionality that is meant
> to be used by other programmers to build their code upon.
> In this case, you rarely know the context in which a user of
> your library will use it, therefore you
> cannot really make any decision about types.

Uh ? Even for a library you certainly can make decisions about types, document them and enforce them. Who wants to accept unspecified data types ?
Apple's Lightning-to-HDMI Adapter Contains an ARM Chip [2013]
The government has made representations that we're facing a "cyber warfare" threat, and NSA is a paramilitary organization with a big role to play in conducting such a conflict.

The FBI is an investigative agency. They aren't beat cops. They aren't soldiers. They do have a counter-intelligence role.

From a threat POV, consider how dependent on gasoline and diesel the US economy is, and what the impact of disruption would be. If an attacker could disrupt fuel supplies in key areas or highway corridors, they would cause all sorts of chaos and economic damage.

As Americans, we've been very lucky to have two oceans protect us from the shift in warfare from the battlefield to total war, with the exception of the US Civil War. Our global connectivity changed the threat landscape. That's not a police matter.
For example, a wind turbine should only need to generate power efficiently. It should not need to look good.

That's obviously bollocks - human beings aren't machines - they enjoy existing in an environment that they find beautiful. So, we should consider aesthetics when designing technology that is visible.
The streaming section of the article has nothing about composing processes, that I could see; it appeared to be about treating the output of commands as input to Haskell lazy lists. I may have misread it, though.

Here's a pattern that comes up fairly frequently for me:

foo | fgrep -v -f <(cut -f 2 info.csv) | bar

It uses the second column in info.csv as fixed strings to match inside lines in the output of foo, and filters them out, with the remaining lines going to bar.

All 4 processes (foo, bar, fgrep, cut) run concurrently. Likely fgrep will block on cut sooner or later, but the point is that multiple communicating concurrent processes are set up using a fairly easy to use DSL.

That's what a shell is, to me.
Not to mention that Double Fine then went on to start Spacebase DF-9, which despite a successful Kickstarter relied on a paid alpha model[0] via the Steam Early Access program to fund the ongoing development and was eventually canned[1] when it didn't meet the monthly sales numbers they depended on to finance the project.

[0]: Sadly they didn't really communicate that they were relying on continuous funding for development and had to use most of the Kickstarter funds to pay back the initial investment. This miscommunication resulted in a lot of bad blood because many fans had assumed the Kickstarter funds would pay for the future development rather than the development that had already happened.

[1]: Well, they just called it "1.0" and released it, but calling it a finished product would be absurd. It's barely playable, has game-breaking bugs and contains only a fraction of the gameplay that was originally proposed.
Please forgive my lack of familiarity with the concurrent workings of Haskell, but since the Shell streams are based off []/IO, and not Concurrent.Chan, does this mean one turtle function has to complete (and write its results to memory) before the next turtle function can run?

To me, magic bits of shell scripts which turtle would need to improve upon were it to replace said scripts are not the loop constructs, conditionals, or even the type system (even though it's completely lacking in bash), it is the ability to use pipes to link processes concurrently.
I feel like we're comparing a consumer electronics business to an enterprise software company though, so there are bound to be some stylistic differences.

And Microsoft ships more products than Apple does. I don't want to turn this into one of "those" posts because I'm sure you can find a list of products (and versions) that Microsoft has shipped over the past decade including the Surface line, which positively out-classes Apple's iPad.

How can you say that they "lost a decade"? Where you see "laser focus" I see lack of options. Where Microsoft has 3 products that cover a broad range of use cases that people actually need, I see Apple with 1 product that covers only the most common use cases. It's really nice for Apple's bottom line, but it's also the same reason that most businesses don't use Apple computers.
I would imagine the majority of people tithing do not exceed their standard deduction and therefore don't include their donations on their tax return anyway.
The logo is very cute. I love it.
The History of the Future of Skyscrapers: Thomas Nast, 1881 (2009)
Yea but they couldn't tweet about their day so you know, its the same.
> You cannot control evolution by choosing whether or not to reproduce.

Yes you can; you're changing the environment, changing which genetics have higher fitness.

You are technically correct, but to express what the grandparent meant: we should be happy that our culture is such that traits that are positive for humanity (increased intelligence) do increase evolutionarily fitness.
Not speaking but doing a demo at the Xen booth on Saturday (likely 1pm-3pm but email me to be sure).

The repo has details about the demo if you're interested (though it's probably also a spoiler) https://github.com/amirmc/fosdemo
Positive computing
... and would you then test all critical systems, one by one, when having morning rush to work in example?

Once you trust you trust, and if you don't, you don't update. Not much space between (for me) ...
Looking at the source, this seems to be an RDP client written in Javascript (and if the HN effect of mass clicks passes, I guess they hooked up a Windows server on the other side).
I imagine Tesla would love this. My guess is that Tesla has much more rigorous software practices, given Musk's software engineering background.
This article is a bit incoherent. If children of privileged intellectuals are much more likely to be academically successful, then having a purely meritocratic education system (especially at the university level) will only exacerbate the divide. I would guess that the author isn't in favor of this new aristocracy, but strengthening the heritability of this new aristocracy seems to be exactly what the author's prescription would entail. Maybe the author is assuming that all the inferiors will just die out and the planet will be left with only the children of the current privileged?
Oh that's interesting. I'd assumed that FreeBSD had made bash the default shell around the same time that Mac OS did. I guess my point still stands for /bin/sh. Not a fun programming language though.
Until you've completed not inconsiderable testing that might take months you wont push a component to its limits or within 99% of its limits. Same with normal cars. e.g. Diesel components are very heavy and can deliver much more power than the engines they live in have by default.
3 Chinese ISIS found dead north of Muqdadiyah
Rusty bits: prepare, install, code on OpenSUSE
No One Cares About Your Product (But Here's What You Can Do)
We tend to load things (GET) in one large request that pulls a big hunks of JSON for everything certain parts of the app need. These have lots of nested serialization going on.

We then have separate, traditional REST endpoints for updates/creates and incremental updates of the larger object.
If you have the time, could you elaborate on those rules? I know nothing about that field, but am very curious.
Instead of wholly claiming Swift is slow (with your limited expertise in the language, as well as running no optimizations), why don't you reach out to see what you can do to improve performance? Sid you reach out to anyone to see what you can do to improve performance / if you are doing things the Swift way?
That's... not accurate. There are two success conditions (Fail, Fail) and (Succeed, Succeed), and two failure conditions (Succeed, Fail), (Fail, Succeed). If you flip two coins, the chance that they come up both heads is 25%, but the chance that they come up the same is 50%.
March 1, 2013

You ought to add [2013] on the end of the title there.
Sure, you could write an app that does A/B testing, but the whole idea is that people will use Sandstorm to run _personal_ servers/apps. And A/B testing your own reaction to an app doesn't make much sense.

Runtime permissions of these apps will be easy to control, so the Sandstorm platform will prevent apps from phoning home without your permission.
We use client certs in the company where I work to authenticate into all internal pages. Once the infrastructure was in place (an easy way to generate a certificate to any new colleague) it has been a breeze to setup and use.

Server side, it is 3 or 4 Nginx lines. Client side, people only have to get the cert, click it to open, and install it on Chrome. After that, they are happy they don't have to remember any password for our different services.

I think we could implement it for our users if we gave the option to "login using cert" and "send me a new cert" (to the email they used for signin). People need minimal training but they don't have to be computer literate to do it (half of our company are not, and they found it better than passwords once the system was in place).
You might want to read PG's essay about fund raising [0]. He advises to "hear no til you hear yes" amongst other things.

[0] paulgraham.com/fr.html
^ To those not in the know, the above poster 'jashkenas' is Jeremy Ashkenas, the creator of CoffeeScript and Backbone.js
My brother is getting rich faster than Bill Gates - I mean, he went from 0 in the bank last year to $200 this year, whereas Gates actually gave some money away!

Sometimes the absolute value is much more meaningful than the derivative.
Literally everyone who's ever written a container.
Wouldn't a coin toss be right 50% of the time?
Who is this for? Engineers/instrument designers? Korg to use internally?

This is an important question. I doubt I'll have the chance to use this unless someone in Asia makes a knock off.