skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what's the problem with boring code? It's boring. This means its information content is low, and its abstraction level is low. This means that you need more of it to express an algorithm.

When you have a lot of wordy, boring code to maintain, you have to make coordinated changes in more similarly boring places. A human's brain can only keep that many lines of context. So it becomes easier to make a mistake.

I understand that abstraction astronautics can leave you with puzzling, convoluted, hard-to-maintain code full of leaky unintuitive abstractions. This problem is not unique to Lisp macros; languages like C++ and even Java are known to be widely used by perpetrators of the above-mentioned atrocities.

What makes code easier to maintain is clear separation of concerns and low impedance between code's abstractions and the subject area. This is, again, attainable in a number of languages (though expressive power and minimalism help make it even nicer), given the right mindset and skills. I suppose John Carmack possesses both.
This tactic of bundling feel-good legislation ("free puppies for orphans act") with bad legislation ("extend copyright for a billion more years rider") is so lame. I wonder if there could be a constitutional amendment that required separation of concerns with new legislation. As in, if a vote is primarily about, say, healthcare, but someone throws in a rider to build a new bridge to nowhere in their state, the entire thing could be challenged in court.
less secret than tls keys, yes.

However, that completely does not relate to your question. I'm not saying that they both aren't security vulns, they both are.

You asked how heartbleed leaked secrets (implicitly how it was different from the rust code), and I told you how it differs. Where the secrets are stored is different. One is user-supplied secrets only, the other is arbitrary secrets within the process, user-supplied or otherwise. Yes this is different.

Your response here is simply moving the goalposts.
That's right, so realistically the average case is somewhere around 55 hours.

I wonder how much that is reduced by starting off with more likely combinations, e.g. "1111", "1234", "9999".
That's an interesting point. I'll be straight, it's lifted right from https://istlsfastyet.com. And cio.gov is in the HSTS preload list [1] so (once the list makes it into stable channels) the chances of the domain being downgraded to plaintext are pretty low. But I had not thought of that angle. Hmm.

[1] https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/02/09/the-first-gov-domains-hardcod...
Ask HN: Software specifications, how to?
I've been watching a video on YouTube about the need of thinking above(before) the code.

Question:
What other alternatives exists to specify Software? Besides TLA+

Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Yp3j_jk8Q
By the great Dr. Leslie Lamport.
TouchID doesn't work when the phone is first booted. You must sign in with your pin or password (whichever is setup) once first to'unlock' it.

But it also has a lockout. If you mess up too many times (5-10?) then TouchID gets temporarily disabled and you must login once with pin/password as if the phone was reset.

That means their 'reboot the phone' attack is worthless against TouchID. By the time you figure out the password you've already unlocked the phone and TouchID is no longer relevant to you unless you're somehow trying to reverse engineer someone's fingerprint.
Okay, but you could use that logic to claim (possibly validly, though I don't think so) that nobody should care about the Ivies because they only make up a fraction of schools (.08% times 5 = .4% of admissions, according to your data). This is not a sound argument, though, since very few of the 5 million students admitted to universities in the US would be competitive applicants at the Ivies. The pool of competitive applicants is much, much smaller.

"To address most of the responses below. I'm implying that even if all appropriate students applied for these programs, as the article suggests, it wouldn't make a difference because some tiny fraction of them would be admitted."

The article doesn't suggest that every student should apply, just that many academically qualified students are missing an opportunity to apply (even if that opportunity only results in a ~10% chance of acceptance, that's still a missed opportunity).

EDIT: Formatting.
You remind me of a guy I once knew who reasoned that because type systems could not prevent all bugs, they were useless.

"Half a hole is still a hole," he said smugly.

"But it's a much smaller hole," I replied.
SF Woman with the Huge Rent Increase Does Airbnb
And that's the benefit of something like TouchID. Since you rarely have to enter your full password (after restart or too many TouchID failures) it's much easier to use a longer or more complex password than 4 digits. Even a simple dictionary attack would take a very long time at one attempt every 40s.
I wrote my state insurance department because I was so annoyed by the paucity of information in Anthem's disclosure. https://gist.github.com/paulhenrich/d1015fff356d037dc41d
I haven't seen this trend, really. Most of my friends want to wait a fair while before having kids.
hardware takes a long time
Your explanation doesn't account for Asian Americans.
And has it been evaluated in this regard?
> I didn't claim it was "easy", just that bugs would still exist and the browser's "securedness" would only increase marginally.

I disagree with the latter. Based on our analysis, Rust provides a defense against the majority of critical security bugs in Gecko.

> It is a nice goal, but the question is where is the world afterwards? Will Firefox all of a sudden become substantially more secure and robust vs. its competition, to the extent that it can out compete them and increase its market share significantly?

You've changed the question from "will this increase security" to "is improved security going to result in users choosing Firefox en masse". The latter question is a business question, not a technical question, and not one relevant to Rust or this thread. At the limit, it's asking "why should engineering resources be spent improving the product".

Rust is a tool to defend against memory safety vulnerabilities. It's also a tool to make systems programming more accessible to programmers who aren't long-time C++ experts and to make concurrent and parallel programming in large-scale systems more robust. The combination of those things makes it a significant advance over what we had to work with before, in my mind.

> My brief experience at Coverity makes me guess that you could be getting rid of one class of bugs without necessarily improving the product in any noticeable way...that ya, those bugs were common but not particularly easy to exploit or hard to fix once found.

It is true that exploitation of UAF (for example) is not within the skill level of most programmers and that individual UAFs are easy to fix. But "hard for most programmers to exploit and easy to fix" doesn't seem to be much of a mitigation. For example, the Rails YAML vulnerability was also hard to exploit (requiring knowledge of Ruby serialization internals and vulnerable standard library constructors) and easy to fix (just disable YAML), but it was rightly considered a fire-drill operation across Web sites the world over. The "smart cow" phenomenon ensures that vulnerabilities that start out difficult to exploit become easy to exploit when packaged up into scripts, if the incentives are there to do so. Exploitable use-after-free vulnerabilities in network-facing apps are like the Rails YAML vulnerabilities: "game-over" RCEs (possibly when combined with sandbox escapes).
The reverse of this is of course baby boomer generations who hate what the news has become (TV and Newspaper) yet slavishly consume it anyway, because of a lifetime habit.

Whenever I see an older relative frothing about some stupid article in the newspaper, or some pointless piece on TV - I just say 'why not switch it off? Why buy the paper anyway?'

I don't watch the news or read newspapers anymore, unless I happen to be in the vicinity of either by accident. If something important happens, I find out. Everyone does. Neighbours, people you work with - they're always delighted to share news you didn't hear about, and they don't drop in ads.

In the case of TV news and newspapers - lets say 6 hours a week glued to the talking heads and 4 hours a week in the paper = 500 hours a year - 12 24hr days in total, or 24 12hr days. All so they can sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder. Who wouldn't like 24 extra days time to do as they please with?

Stop paying attention to the media. You end up selling your time for pennies worth of benefit.
Most colleges are moving towards need-blind admissions too, debunking the common complaint that they don't admit low-income students because they'd rather admit students who can pay.

It is also important to note that these types of policies are more common the more elite a university is.
The worst thing about Apple packaging is the environmental impact. There is no need for so much plastic. I know they could design a recycled cardboard insert which would achieve the same design sensibilities and be a selling point to environmentally conscious consumers. STOP POISONING THE EARTH AND OCEANS!
One problem I have with this is that technical interviews are not as straightforward as orchestra auditions. Technical interviews are already argued about frequently and some important qualities in a candidate (culture fit, how easy they are to work with, how they handle pressure, etc) are hard to determine through a blind interview. As you said, there would have to be non-blind interviews anyway. I know many companies already have preliminary online coding problems, but once the candidate gets to the meaty in-person or phone interviews, we are right back where we started.

Additionally, many of the standard algorithmic questions are similar to UIL and ICPC questions which are dominated by males for various reasons. Even if we could have completely blind interviews, I don't think that a significantly higher percentage of women would get the job because of larger problems in the tech industry like convincing minorities to join clubs like UIL and ICPC or enter the tech industry in the first place. That being said, I still think this is an interesting idea. I would definitely like to go through a blind phone interview to see if the interviewer treats me differently. Bring on the voice changer.
Judging by how many redditors whine about "the reddit circlejerk", it might not be as bad as that book you are alluding to thinks: each time I see someone complaining about a circlejerk, I infer that they really mean that they don't like that they feel they are the minority opinion.
When a common perception is supported by statistically significant evidence, it starts to be more fact than perception. That's the point I was making. They aren't relying on a perception - they've taken a good step toward proving that the perception is true.
That's still an electrical keyboard; it just has switches that click.

As I've mentioned previously, I restore pre-WWII Teletype machines, so I often type on real mechanical keyboards with electrical outputs. A Teletype keyboard is a motor-driven mechanism where, when you push a key, a clutch is released, a shaft revolves one turn, and, via levers and cams, contacts close and open and the bits are encoded and sent. During this time, which is about 200ms on the older machines, you cannot press another key - the keys won't move. You can't press two keys at once. Everything is mechanically interlocked. The best way to use one is to type at a steady 5 characters per second, like playing a piano.

Key travel is about half an inch, and the newer (1930 and later) models have spring-loaded green keytops with a nice cushioned spring mechanism. This provides about 0.100 inch of travel before the key lever starts to move. So if you type a little too fast, you don't blunt your fingers. The 1924 model doesn't have that; it has hard Underwood typewriter keys.

That huge key travel, combined with a low key pressure (the motor is doing all the work, unlike a manual typewriter) is rather relaxing. Teletype operators were expected to type with few errors; there is no way to backspace or correct. Full-time Western Union operators often typed "blind" on a machine with a keyboard and tape punch, but no printer or display. That's a lost art today.
Google: Our new system for recognizing faces is the best one ever
"socioeconomically bling"

I'm not sure what this typo should mean, but I do know it needs to become a central phrase in American culture.
Quick tip: If you turn off Simple Passcode (the 4-digit pin) and your Passcode is all numbers then you will be presented with a number pad. It's not as secure as numbers and letters but I find it much easier to type in a long number.
Just speaking for myself here, but what makes sense in terms of legacy client support for e.g. taxes or health care may be different than what you need for a set of technical resources.
Don't worry, NPR already did a story on how many of their commenters don't actually read their articles.

There is also a weird amount of astroturfing in the NPR comment section.
Chemical trick makes 3d printing take minutes instead of hours
I know these studies are common (probably because they are easy to conduct) but they don't measure the intrinsic bias of the interviewer.

What they measure is a combination of the intrinsic bias of the interviewer, and the statistical inference that the interviewer does based on race/gender (statistical discrimination).

Because a resume is a noisy signal, it is still possible that race/gender contains extra information even after you have seen the resume. For example, suppose people tend to exaggerate, and this exaggeration introduces some randomness. Given the signal "lead some impressive project", there is some probability that the person didn't really lead the project. Now if the probability of exaggerating is the same, but a Black person or woman was less likely to have lead the project a priori, then even after observing the resume that claims to have lead the project, the a posteriori probability of having lead the project is lower for the Black person or woman.
Sure! However, I feel like the grand irony of these kind of studies is that the same kind of unconscious selection against orchestra members is probably also occurring in evidence acceptance. It feels like people are overwhelmingly critical towards evidence that women are treated unfairly in a way they aren't to other evidence. But hey, that could just be a feeling.
If you know C/C++, the concepts of Go and python should be easy. Especially since you understand how python itself is implemented.
During the US Civil War, the Confederate States Constitution had a section like that, to limit bills to only contain one subject. Article I, Section 9(20):

> Every law or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Confederat...
Interestingly enough my father and I do this for a couple of hours straight about once a week.

One of the few differences is that the story is usually finished within said few hours, and a new one begins next week, unless it's considered interesting enough or needs a continuation.

I believe that it's a wonderful idea to do this in general. It exercises creativity and thinking, et cetera, and it's fun to do. :)

s/every kindergartner/everybody/ :P
Every time I hear these stories I always think to myself, if those guys became engineers, they'd eventually make around $100K. At a modest 20% tax rate, thats 20K a year in revenue for our country.
This is one of the reasons why poor people stay poor, because they typically have a wildly disproportionate value of their household's portfolio in jewelry or gold (+), often explicitly because of the ability to use it as savings or collateral. It happens to be an abominably bad vehicle for both.

+ I'm trying to find the citation but I think the average value in the US for households in the lowest wealth quintile is > 25% of their assets.
Just like the gold Apple iPhone, or other luxury items, those who can afford such things will create the market for it. I don't see how diamonds are any different to other luxury goods.

Let those who can afford it buy it, I'm sure it gives pleasure to many people. It's also a status symbol - just like cars, luxury watches, handbags etc.
California drought: State OKs sweeping restrictions on water use
> One can deduce from the context that a passport is required to use bitcoin.

You deduced incorrectly. I'm saying that if the KYC system flags the recipient, for whatever reason, then they will likely be required to produce a passport.
In what way is affirmative action poorly understood? What you have described is simply the bar being lower for certain groups, which is exactly how affirmative action is understood by most people.
Very much agree. When I was a kid I watched one (and only one) of the three network news channels, read The New York Times + the local paper, and that was about it--this was before the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, so talk radio hadn't yet metastasized. It was hard to get alternative opinions in either direction, even if you wanted to.

Compared to that social media is a cornucopia/vomitorium of diversity. Alternate opinions are easy to find and sometimes hard to escape.
Don't be so aggressive. If I criticize code, it doesn't mean I criticize people.
I tried to say that language injections (such as C++ libs) make Rust apps more fragile. If my assumption is wrong, and all these failures because of Rust code - I apologize.
I believe pnathan is implying they would prefer to buy and own a device to use as they choose.
https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master... loaded fine here. My computer is almost 10 years old.
New Playgrounds Part 2 – Sources – Swift Blog
Isn't the exact opposite also possible? That there are all kinds of biases in the world, but studies are being selected for (a) showing a bias against women and (b) showing that women are objectively as good as or better than men?
using two finger back on the OSX trackpad is broken on this site, what a pain...
It is interesting that people are talking about the Ivies, not "elite colleges" in general. The article defines a high achiever as "anyone who gets a 29 or better on the ACT or a combined 1,300 on the SAT." At most elite schools (Ivies + MIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc.) a 30 ACT score would be rather below average.
It doesn't raise the bar high enough that the people who are currently snarfing internet traffic wholesale would bat an eye at.

It doesn't matter how secure the phone line is when you have no idea who you're actually talking to. Especially when there are people with money, means and access to make sure that you're always talking to them.
I don't understand the goal of this. Maybe it is related to IPFS. Have you seen it?
Try taking 3 kids to a restaurant on a bicycle in a city.

People who think cars are just plain evil need to realize why they are popular.
A side question to HN:

For the security topic, most of the power of Rust come from a strong typing, safety checks (boundaries), ownership checks... Well, a lot of checks at compile time.

As far as I know of Rust by glancing at the doc frequently, C++11/14 also contains these "safe tools": ownership can be dealt with smart pointers (unique, shared), value semantics, move semantics (rvalues) and the rest. Boundaries checks with the correct containers (std::vector, std::array...). Mutability with "const". Atomicity with std::atomic... Type safety by using explicit conversions, templates instead of macros, variadic args...

Heck, all the drama from C++ seems to come from a misusage or some legacy parts from another age (up to C). In order to avoid people to shot themselves in their feets, why couldn't we just introduce a strict compilation mode a la JavaScript to let say Clang:
# pragma strict

# pragma unsafe
# pragma safe

Nowadays, good C++11 compilers can even deal with such a things like constexpr. This seems a reachable goal.

What are the true drawbacks of a fully modern C++ code compared to a Rust? Is there any true feature that can't be done in C++ due to a deep problem of conception? Don't le me wrong, I do not seek to diminished the amazing work of Mozilla. I am not talking neither about the other cool features from functional languages, switch cases... that Rust has and C++ don't.
how do you not understand that "statistical discrimination" is a subtype of "intrinsic bias"?
It is unreasonable to require a person, albeit implicitly, to justify their motives, when the thing they are objecting to has a material impact on their life. In this thread people are talking about noise, pollution, safety and more. Yet you side-swipe his/her motivation.

Your fun is yours alone. Their motivation is theirs alone. A vehicle's aforementioned externalities are common though. We can just focus on those.
One of the items I struggle with is that I want to keep the current client-side simplicity of Snebu -- on the client, the only thing that is required is bash, find, and tar (although GNU find is required, and older versions of find don't support enough options). However, I think I have a potential solution, which I'll work on this weekend.

The solution is: on the client side, include an optional encrypting tar filter, which takes a tar file as input, and encrypts the file contents of each file within the archive, delivering a tar file output with regular headers, but compressed encrypted files. I'll probably have to take some liberties with the tar file format, but as long as the snebu backend is similarly modified (to recognize a pre-compressed and encrypted file segment), then I should be able to get it to work without any major compromises.

The only issues with my current plan are: 1) Multiple files with the same contents will still be de-duplicated, which may leak some information (if an attacker already knows file A's contents, and B is marked as being a copy of A, then the attacker will know what file B is). 2) The metadata (file name, size, owner, possibly SHA1) will still be visible. Although I may just use the SHA1 of the encrypted version as the file reference. 3) Sparse files will still show where the "holes" in the files are, unless you tell it not to preserve file sparseness.
You should start with what interests you. Passion is a strong motivator for learning.
Given a choice between those two, I'd recommend algorithms, since you can probably apply that knowledge more readily to everyday programming projects. For example, it's useful to know roughly how long it takes to sort an array, add an element to a hash table (like a Python dictionary), etc.

Language theory probably won't be that useful unless you're planning to write a parser for a programming language or something similar. I occasionally need to deal with grammars (for the Bison parser generator) in the work that I do, but most people probably do that kind of thing very rarely, if at all.

Also, it's never too late to learn stuff.
I imagine a lot of people don't register an account until they feel the need to comment on something. I had browsed HN for a long time before I decided to register and the only reason I did register was so I could reply to someones comment. This is of course anecdotal but its easy to imagine the same case for many people.
Is.js – a general-purpose check library
Business Town - What Value-Creating Winners Do All Day
It really does seem weird at first, but it really does get comfortable. It also seems to have a moderate lifespan, since I've used mine for over three years now.