skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an extreme exaggeration, but it illustrates the point that a C programmer writes some source code that produces effects only at runtime and the compiler may be thought of as a pure function (though, with a bit of external state, but that is manageable in Haskell too).

The point is, it is the runtime system that produces the side effects, just as Haskell RTS does; the only difference is that Haskell annotates effects with its type system.

On the other hand, it completely blurs the line between "pure code" and "effectful code". Though the definition of "pure code" is rather tricky (we used to it in the Haskell meaning, with memory management completely abstracted away and explicit signatures of side-effect presence), but what's the point of a term that applies to all source code in existence?
I'll give an anectode from just last night. I wanted to fetch some online video, so I went ahead and downloaded youtube-dl-*.tar.gz, extracted it, and then tried to run it, all inside a cygwin session. For some reason, it did nothing. I ran file on the script and it claimed it was a data file. I run less on it and damn, it's a binary file. I was definitely surprised but didn't want to waste more time on it after fiddling for 10 minutes, I run the native Windows Python on the exact same file and it just worked.

I didn't look back so I don't know what was the main reason but I can say there are some problems.
The push is that all devices will end up connected as commodity manufacturers continue to search for 'value-add' services (even if that value is dubious). In a few years, I wouldn't be surprised if 'smart TVs' were the only ones available. Security also becomes an afterthought as companies rush to get products in the market. This is mainly because the components used to build software rarely take account of security/privacy themselves so it has to be considered by the developers -- who are rarely trained to handle it.

One approach to this is to build new tools and components that incorporate security & privacy by design. Discarding elements that are not required for a particular use case is also beneficial as there's less a hacker can do if they do manage to get in.

These approaches are captured in ideas behind unikernels, such as MirageOS [1], which themselves can be part of a larger stack [2]. I work on both of these and we even put together a contest (Bitcoin Piñata) to incentive a search for weak spots (and a bit of fun) [3]. I honestly think that only new software stacks or government regulations can fix these issues. Given mass-surveillance, I don't hold out much hope for the latter.

[1] http://mirage.io

[2] http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/

[3] http://amirchaudhry.com/bitcoin-pinata/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9027743
That assumes a two way connection, adn/or a persistent connection. Various existing fire alarms etc will only open a connection to the service provider when needed. This usually because it has a legacy from the POTS days.

That is perhaps the biggest issue with IOT, assuming a always present and bidirectional connection.
The problem with what you're saying is that the people who "do not draw a clear line between work and play" are not nearly as romantically satisfied with their work as you claim.

Do you not see how this "passion for work" argument is often employed to make employees work the maximum they can? If you apply to work at Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey, or Google, the message is clear: it is not enough that you sell your time to us, you must sell your soul as well! You have to be "passionate" about investment banking, consulting, or software engineering to get a job at these places. Consequently, young grads who are looking for jobs now have to make a genuine effort to work ungodly hours in an effort to demonstrate their "passion" to these firms. Now maybe that is because some of them are genuinely interested in their work (although how you get a "passion" for excel modelling I do not know), but it is more likely that it is something these new workers feel they must do in order to be successful. What is the outcome? Elite companies can make talented young people work insane hours without compensating them for the extra profit that they create. The notion that Eric Schmidt is saying his workers should work round the clock out of sheer concern for their fulfilment is absolutely laughable.

Btw, this form of thinking is quite uniquely American. Perhaps it springs from the puritan ideal of deriving meaning in your life from work. For the rest of the developed world (Western Europe, for example) the notion of working harder and harder because you have to be as "passionate" as everyone else sounds ridiculous. There is more to life than work. Truly. You are on earth. You can read fiction in your spare time, also hike, and perhaps volunteer to socialize feral cats for adoption.

TL;DR: Please stop with your propaganda that it is a noble thing to find this mythical level of enjoyment with working to increase shareholder value. Leisure time is cool.
Or Piketty (quoted in the article). The book also contains ideas how to solve the phenomens described.
> hodgepodge of gripes in search of a premise

Welcome to The Guardian's opinion pages, where everything is a source of outrage and the shadowy "1%" are always out to get you.
Constantly! Unfortunately I haven't been able to focus on one good topic, so it's mostly me whining and "bit##ing" about life. It works wonders against stress.

Then, there was that one time when I wrote 30K words in one session. For once, I was very proud of my work... yet I deleted the file shortly after by mistake. ?#@*&%!

Lesson: Always make backup copies of your writings.
Or a Magic Gold premium membership, if people want to ask non commerce questions beyond the first three free ones.
Hi, I was using pure functional programming style, so list only.
Pablo Villalba – Designers hate useful graphs
My view is that the industrial revolution devised machines which, whilst increasing the efficiency of production, helped to increase the efficiency by which states and key individuals were able to extract wealth from others.

In that case, as time progressed, the people started to become aware of the inequality and the leaders and states started to see the result (in Russia and other countries) of this inequality being challenged. To protect themselves, the states and key individuals devised to funnel a portion of the benefits from the industrial revolution back down to the wider populace, to offer comfort through more spare time, better health, better living conditions.

The industrial machine operated at only slightly below the potential level of efficiency it promised, but now the machine was able to sustain itself and ensure it's future.

Where we are today is that the digital revolution has created machines that achieve an even greater efficiency. The "sharing economy" it has brought about is little more than an externalisation of corporation costs of production, allowing those corporations to reap greater benefits with very little cost. The inequality technology has brought about is staggering to behold.

What I believe has yet to be achieved is a balancing of the externalisation of costs with the need to build a system that is able to sustain itself. For the current system to survive, those who have need to find ways to increase the comfort and conditions of those who have not.
A trip through the graphics pipeline (2011)
Add $20 and you can buy a Wacom CTH461 Bamboo Craft Tablet complete with stylus and 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity.
Even if something is not directly connected to, or reachable from, the net they can still be a issue.

Consider something like a network printer.

Convenient as heck, but if your PC gets compromised only for a shot while the attacker may have left a little surprise in the printer firmware. End result is that even after you fully scrubbed the PC the attacker returns because the printer is acting as a proxy.

More and more it feels like a no win situation, unless you physically unplug the router between each time you need to do something online.
Should Founders Blog? [Medium Post]
Right, Darwin nailed the principle of evolution but Origin is now primarily a (very important) historical document, not the field book of modern evolutionary biologists, for some of the reasons that you give, DNA, punctuated equilibrium, etc.

Likewise with Magna Carta - its an important historical document which laid down the principle.
Ask PG: Why don't you allow users to delete HN accounts?
At least allow people to replace it with something like [deleted] or [deleted-account] text instead of the user-name after a user has decided to delete the account, if you would want some kind of indication to remain, or sth random, whatever pleases or suits you.

Or at least give an option to disable/lock the account. I mean it should be like a basic right on the Net to have your account deleted.
How would you deal with the following cases?

- people using the service just to figure out the price of something (and then declining)?

- people not being happy with what they got delivered (perhaps rightfully so), and wanting their money back?
Good luck finding enough people who will be passionate about cleaning your office, or collecting your trash, or driving your Uber, or processing your DMV application, or building your new house, or stripping your old laptop for recycling, or making your Starbucks, or exterminating your pests, or cleaning your blocked sewer, or picking your fruit, etc etc.

It sounds lovely to say we can all be passion workers, and of course there will be people who are passionate about the above jobs, but not all of them, not by a long shot.

Of course automation will help here, to some degree, but its potential is overstated in the absence of general purpose AI.

We're a very very long way from technology solving the need of many to perform any available job to support their existence, and even if we could get there, there are many people for whom their passion is not something that can generate economic returns.

Tl:dr, I believe your comment is fanciful :)
Not a solution but a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D*

I used this for a similar problem in my computer science studies. We had a map with an unknown layout of fields, each with a different travel cost and had to drive a tour of multiple flags in the fastest way possible. It worked quite well.
I noticed when they give you a URL to follow the parameter is just a counter!

I opened http://getmagicnow.com/pay.php?p=1 then clicked the button, it showed this message:

Here is the VIP phone number to access Magic: (408) 7x7-xxx7

Do NOT release this phone number to anyone outside the VIP level of service.

Is this a vuln?
I don't get it. Are you saying it is ok to force an American into poverty so an Indian can get out of poverty?
Gorgeous Trio Sings Sufjan Cover to Raise Money for Down Syndrome Research
That seems a really good argument for killing manual memory management, not for killing the GC option. As a user I want dev time to be spent adding needed features, not chasing down memory cycles (which _will_ happen when you add something like blocks to a language without garbage collection).

As a programmer I don't want to litter my code with disgusting crap that only serves to tell the compiler something it should be able to infer anyway.

My suspection is that Apple is just doing it because they don't want to put the necessary RAM in their phones (Android has something like twice the amount of memory Apple has at this point).
The net result is that employees are exploited to an absurd degree, without proper compensation. That's just how it is, it's a disgusting ideological tool for oppression.
> [...] A tiny slice of us are now able to work with passion, on what we want to do. Like artists working on a song or a painting or a book, they do not draw a clear line between work and play. They're always working and always playing. [...]

Yes and this lifestyle is simply unhealthy. Life should be your top priority, not work. Even artists sometimes need a break and care about different things then art itself.
Eye Sim – The eyesight simulator
Idea to scale:

As a non-coder, I love reading the responses of programers here. "Automate this!" "There is no way to scale." "This needs AI."

As an outsider looking in, my idea to scale is similar to Uber. Have workers that can sign on to work whenever they have the time. The workers handle the orders and receive a cut of the fee you charge. It would be great if you could have some kind of rating system where the consumer could choose who they work with, but I'm not sure how to make that happen with SMS.

I'm not saying this is better or more cost efficient than automation. I just see it as a solution to their current problem.

Uber is looking to automate, but check out their current valuation. They can afford to do so all by scaling with humans.

I'll now wait to get hammered by HN. :)
"Shared" by who? And whose definition should we use? The "common" one, or say, the one used by academics. I woult not claim that my "definition" is found in books, but I chose my words carefully (I have a background in political philosophy)
What is the actual loophole, the article doesn't spell it out (or I missed it) it seems that if a company is laying off an employee and then replacing the employee with an h1b employee, then the company has broken the law. I don't see the loophole that is being exploited.
2000BTC isn't very much at all, especially since the mixer having 2000BTC doesn't mean they can securely mix 2000BTC.

Exchanges will most definitely be storing logs, so that won't help much.

Comparing mixers to relays isn't valid either, with BTC the attacker will have access to the blockchain, which is basically the worst possible attack scenario for Tor.

And in any case, there isn't enough BTC transaction volume to reliably hide large amounts of BTC.
This is horrible compared to my daily experience using Seamless. Why would a person craving sushi want to exchange 8 text messages and then click on a web link and get sushi 2+ hours later?
Is the book readable, as in well-written?

Edit: I just read a detailed synopsis of the book (I know it's not the same as the book). I strongly agree with his diagnosis, but not his cure. I think two things have gotten us into this mess:

(general commentary, my remarks are not aimed at parent comment)

1) Corporations (as in the legal construct) and all the legal and financial benefits they enjoy, which allows capital to accumulate at a rate much faster than it would otherwise, and (on a related note)

2) Regulations.

The more Washington tries to legislate us out of this mess, the deeper we descend into inequality. As one example: regulatory concerns are keeping the brightest, most innovative, and most honest among us out of the fintech sector, and so now I see mostly dishonest or reckless players. If there's ever a sector that needed disrupting, it's consumer banking, but the banks have erected so many regulatory barriers, that small players can't get in.

And please spare me any pleas about how banking is "serious stuff" that requires major regulations, several million dollars for regulatory compliance, and an anal probe to enter the field. I see exactly who that's keeping out, and it's not the nimble dishonest companies, who steal people's money and seem to almost thrive amid these kinds of regulations.
The French word for engineer is ingénieur, which originates from engigneor which has the same roots as the English word engineer...
What i find odd is that he is ranting as if it is a code problem when it is a package manager problem.

Unless i am badly off the mark, ld will use soname to tell lib v1.0 from v1.1 or v5.97. But the problem is with package manager flatly refusing to have anything to do with installing multiple lib versions side by side.

That is, if they have the same package name. End result is that one distro use glib3.xyz to designate glib 3.x, while another use glib-3.xyz Yet another use glib.3.xyz.

They all hold the same files, but for the package managers they are different packages. And will resolve dependencies based on that.

Applying containers and/or sandboxes to this is a Will E. Coyote solution...
Facebook “Copyright Violations” Message: A Phishing Scam
This seems like another one of this startup ideas that will blow up, sell for $X,000,000 in a few weeks/months, then die as the fad wears off.

Congrats on being so successful so far, but my advice would be to sell out before the investors loose interest!
> The article claims that rosemary extract is Bad because it substitutes for BHA/BHT, a preservative.

It's bad because they're being dishonest. They're running a solvent extraction on rosemary to obtain a fairly impure mixture of carnosic acid and carnosol - the chemicals they actually want - and remove all the stuff like aroma and flavour that makes it identifiable as rosemary, then they're calling it "rosemary extract" rather than "carnosol" because it sounds better, even though the end product is almost nothing like rosemary.
Yes

It also seems like a text that is missing an ending. Very shallow text
The C Preprocessor might be functional in the same sense as the lambda calculus but that's about it.

And actually it isn't really: it needs to be supplied "evaluations" to work. Evaluation is naturally recursive but cpp only performs one pass, so you need to explicitly request more evaluations (or "scans").

See here: http://pfultz2.com/blog/2012/05/10/turing/ and here: http://theorangeduck.com/page/c-preprocessor-turing-complete
This will get abused by fraud really quickly.
What does it matter? Don't use it. Or are you trying to send your past comments down the memory hole? If we are suggesting changes to HN I think a mobile style sheet should be at the top of the list.
I don't think there was any implication that the American worker deserves more, or that the foreigner deserves less. Just that is what the rates are.
And yes, you can't invite a foreign worker into America to displace an American. Most countries have that rule, what is wrong with attitude of a country trying to protect its citizens?
> 50% of requests could be handled with total automation

Do you actually use Siri yourself? Siri might have seen some improvements lately, but there's no way it could handle stuff like this.
I'd rather be able to change my username personally. This one is tied to a domain I used to run in the late 2000's and it's not the least bit relevant.
I mean it should be like a basic right on the Net to have your account deleted.

No, it shouldn't. Most forums don't allow account deletion including post deletion, because it would destroy many threads and make it extremely hard for later visitors to follow the conversation.

Since HN doesn't require you to put any personal details, you can just throw out your email address and your account will remain as an empty hull holding the strings of your past conversations.
Yes, because it worked great in Cuba, the USSR, Eastern Europe, etc

"But nobody was unemployed" sure, and if you live in a hut by the Amazon river you'll never be in need of water, but it pretty much sucks otherwise.
Piketty's TED Talk. IMHO, a bit dry, like the book.

http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_capi...
This mentality is terrifying. Is this what younger people expect?
I read an argument that if you know you'll never be able to delete your account and posts, you'll be more careful about what you say. I don't think this is something I'd be considering when writing posts. We change as we get older and recognize that things we may have said in the past were stupid, but now we're stuck with them for life because they're on an interet forum with our name next to them.

This is why I now only post anonymously.
The first step out of depression is finding someone to trust. Find a therapist or a friend. You can determine if a person is trustworthy by how they respond to your feelings. Do they honor and affirm how you are feeling. Do not carry this alone, its too much.
It is well-written from a scientific point of view, but not easily readable. It is a dry, fact-driven book without any humour or "light attitude" (for lack of a better phrase) to help the reader.
Hi tfg4k,
I am coming from Romania, so I know a little bit about geography problems and let's just say that on the old continent, coming from the Eastern is still a handicap.
I also love IT security and I dedicated 1 year of my life to try to get in and do something. The biggest stupid thing that I could do. It's way to little and this industry is so closed, that you have absolutely no chance to make it on your own. It's impossible. In order to break something, you need to understand it and then exploit it's weakness. Because everything is so complex now, you're pretty much like a fish out of water.

If all you are saying is true and you are really good, your problem is not getting a job. Your problem is finding out what you want to be in the IT. Developer/consultant/tech support or what? This is what you should be asking yourself in the first place. After you know want you want to be, then go and find a technology THAT YOU LIKE, THAT MAKES YOU VALUABLE.

> What area or "discipline" in IT shows promise for a career?
This is one of the biggest top 3 mistake in my opinion. What tomorrow is cool and trendy, tomorrow will because obsolete (e.g. Flash), so technology doesn't actually matter to be honest. One day it's a keyboard, tomorrow it's touchscreen and in 10 years there'll be mental commands. This makes no difference, because we built the whole 1/0 logic in order to help us in our day to day work in any way possible.
So if you are serious about this, FIRST find out what you like, than prepare for it, practice it and the step you foot in the door. Regardless if you're going in for an internship or to be the manager, your goal is to get on that door and keep going in, day after day. If you're that good, they will promote you by default.

Cheer up and find something that you're good at, the reward will come by itself. The most important thing is to like what you are doing, the rest is history :)

PS: By the way, I ended up being a SAP Developer, after which I switched at being a SAP Consultant in Germany. I still keep a closed eye at the security field, but just as a hobby, nothing more.
Did you read Marx, so we can have a discussion about his theories here or do you just talk in platitudes to disrail any serious discussion?
> as long as the state run redistribution of wealth allows everybody to live a life in dignity.

I'm not really sure what you're proposing here.
Now just put this $100 arm band on so we can let your health insurer know how much to charge you.
How to become a Badass iOS Developer
Ask HN: Can Paying Founders Too Much Hurt Productivity?
Curious for anecdotal experiences or links to studies that explore correlation.
I wondered the same thing, or rather was going to post a link to busybox here, but it's already in a comment to the original article. Not sure that's why you got downvoted though, seems a bit harsh as re-posting interesting links related to the original post is quite common here and not something I thought was frowned upon.
Yes, I completely agree. Ordering a take away pizza yourself, buying a frozen one, ordering one at a restaurant, making your own using bought ingredients, they are all steps along that path. My point doesnt really belong here. In my last post I used the word "triggered" because that is what reading about this service did. I was witness to yet another small step being added to that path. At times like this maybe we can all step back for a moment and think about the ridiculousness of the system we have built.
Trivially changing your username? What do you think HN is, a forum that uses a database to decouple data from code? It's doubtless far too clever for that.