skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, why is anybody posting about this garbage on HackerNews?

There are no startup opportunities for "trustworthy" computing, because there simply aren't any customers for "you do it the way we tell you, or else" products.
UCW, Weblocks, and LoL were all started by people who did not understand web programming. If you're using continuations to "abstract" away browser-server interaction, you pretty much don't get web programming, period. Instead of focusing on the browser, these people want to focus on the server and pretend everything synchronously flows from there. This is a brittle and expensive (esp if you don't have first-class continuations!) illusion.

That explains why the frameworks were not high-quality in the first place (note: I personally don't believe that any web framework is worth using), and more importantly why the people who started the projects left: they just don't care about web programming (or actually any programming that has to deal with asynchronous human input) and just wish it would go away.

Release management is a catch-22 in the Lisp community: until people who maintain Free Software Lisp projects stop believing they don't have any users, they won't invest in it, but until they start investing in it, they'll continue to believe they have no users because people will just give up instead of complaining about it.
This quote is from "Yes Minister": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y
I read through the article and thought that pretty much all the activity taken by the Apple Security team sounded reasonable. If I'm not mistaken, everything described was taking place in the work place/work systems/etc...

The sketchy companies go a little further, and start doing this with people's _personal_ lives. I'm thinking about when Patricia Dunn (HP Chairman) hired a private investigator to start hacking into people's Cell Phone Bills to find out who they were talking to - Not just from the office, or on office equipment.

There is a reason why you see so many Silicon Valley people carrying two laptops, two cellphones, etc... - One of them is for work, and is to be used in the workplace, and is handed over / searched / subject to surveillance / carries confidential company material. The other one is for personal stuff.

If there was a material leak from my organization, and it was jeopardizing my livelihood, I would darn well _hope_ company security would have its act together and would track down the leak in a professional manner.
How is it "sane" for companies not to be able to control and monitor their own Internet connections? People clearly do abuse those connections to violate IP, confidentiality, and insider trading agreements.
A reminder: Dunn was charged with felonies for that stunt.
I have long wondered if there is a good solution this this problem: given that politicians serve some short term length, say 2-6 years, before running for re-election and given that major policy changes can not be enacted overnight nor in one piece, is there any way we can get forward-thinking legislation into law?

It seems that any major legislation should require an informed, rational public - something I do not believe to be possible. What solution is there, other than benevolent dictator (which is not a true solution)?
Ditch the Resume - Make a Chart Instead.
Like his claim about the people he is attacking, it felt like his arguments were a little empty. He certainly had some facts about the actual movement of malaria, but most of the piece was dedicated to attacking specific climate-change proponents on one small issue. He even went as far as to claim that everything Dr. Epstein and co. published is a myth with the only evidence being one article on which the author is now correcting.

In truth, the science is never in. We’re not pollsters or policy-makers. We proceed by question, observation, hypothesis, and testing by experiment. We are still re-testing Einstein’s theory of relativity! So I’m happy to be a sceptic. That is how science works.

I think if you were to go out and try to claim that relativity wasn't true and still needed to be tested you wouldn't get much attention from the rest of the scientific community. Science is about finding evidence that verifies or falsifies a claim, but once that has been done multiple times (as it has with relativity) people find that it is much easier to just accept is as true until they find evidence to contradict it. I think it is a bad comparison.
The complaints about inaccuracy of the "activists" are so hard to swallow when the skeptics have been throwing every dirty trick in the book to successfully derail any progress for decades now.

"Gore made a mistake on the mosquitoes, what an idiot! and he's fat! har har har! dirty fucking hippies!."

Our grandkids will look upon these people as monsters.

I'm not sure why there is such a big climate-skeptic strain here on HN.
Ok, but Russell, you're leaving out the fact that you couldn't draw a cluster of security startups anywhere before ISS. The only companies that truly predate them in the space are TIS and Secure Computing, both of which were pre-startup-culture companies.

I'm not refuting you, I'm just saying that I think GATech has more to do with the Atlanta security scene than ISS does. Several of major companies on your list --- Lancope and the Jay Chaudhry graph clique, for instance --- have no genetic material from ISS at all.

One point worth adding to your analysis (it supports your argument and not mine) is that part of the cluster owes to Sigma Partners, early backers of ISS and enthusiastic supporters of an Atlanta security scene.
"I'm not ending with a red herring, I'm saying you're creating a huge integration hassle with the rest of the web application world."

How so? You're still getting regular JavaScript out of Parenscript. That's the whole point.

"Heck, even pattern-substitution templating systems are falling out of style as it becomes feasible to do structure-substitution templating."

What is pattern vs structure substitution? I've never come across those terms.
He gave a presentation that I attended emphasizing exactly the same set of points, so don't take it "as a joke", though Von Ahn tends to make jokes a regular part of his presentations.

The fanboyism to which I am referring is common among undergrads at Carnegie Mellon. Though I applaud Von Ahn's efforts with Human Computation and think the awards and rewards (namely, the acquisition of reCaptcha by Google) are well deserved, I question the apparent need to discuss his greatness on a regular basis. Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) oughta be enough approval for anyone.

Simply look at the poster's comment and submission history to see what I mean by fanboyism.
For the past couple years, Intel has had a different but related approach: they use a combination of a coprocessor (with its own OS and memory aperture) and hardware virtualization to run a TCB alongside Windows, from which you can run antivirus and attestation code.
I've been using MonoDevelop 2.2 builds quite a bit on OSX for developing in MonoTouch. I have very mixed feelings about it (and granted, I haven't tried the final 2.2 release yet, but all builds leading up to it).

MonoDevelop is a nice, lighter weight Visual Studio clone. VS users will feel at home right away. Its intellisense is quite good (just as good as VS's), it's refactoring is nice, most features are either as good as VS or better. For example when you do a replace, it highlights in your current document all instances of your find string to give you a better sense of what the replace is about to do. There are lots of little touches like that that I really like a lot.

On OSX at least though, GTK# has some issues. Often times the window ignores mouse clicks, and this is a massive roadblock to using the app efficiently. To fix this you have to cause a refocus to happen, such as focus a different app then come back to MD or focus a different part of MD. If the final release didn't fix this (and I reported this bug), then that's a huge deal breaker. This problem really hurts productivity and workflow. I also don't like how MD doesn't work with apps like SizeUp, and how dialogs are not modal. For example, the find in files dialog is not modal, so after you use it, it can go behind the main window. Then from then on the key command to invoke it seems to do nothing, as the window is still around. You have to go behind the main window and close it.

TLDR: On OSX, a nice IDE that is very VS-like with some nice added touches, but has some UI issues that can really hamper it.
They seriously need a marketing person on this team. Besides the fact that it is pretty hard figuring out how to buy the product, when you do get to a shop page:

Cherrypal 7" Africa mini-laptop (small, slow, sufficient)
[C101]	$99.00

..The 7" Cherrypal was designed with developing countries in mind.
Having spent considerable time in quite a few positions/organizations, often around sensitive materials, this surprises me not at all. In many circumstances, if an employee points out the problem, they are ignored or criticized for making things "more difficult".

People don't care. Once the records have no value to them, they want to be rid of them as expediently as possible. And/or they haven't been taught to even consider the matter. It's only when people are actively incentivised to handle things differently (good management and operations education and practice, or punitive incentives against negligent behavior), that they go to the trouble of ensuring proper disposal.

Again, my personal experience has been: People are busy and/or don't care. They want the stuff gone with minimum fuss so that they can get back to what matters for them. "Who's ever going to look in that dumpster?" There's also a lot of cognitive "not my problem", in my observation.

I mention this because if you are a stickler for handling important things correctly, such as security, learning the above is an important first step. Both in maintaining a healthy distrust of casual reassurances, and in being prepared to maintain your calm and blood pressure when you run across the results.
Do older laptops cease to be laptops when they are surpassed by phones?
Two points which I think make you sound a little overzealous:

There is nothing about even the hardware-enforced security on premium Intel chipsets that forces you to use them.

There is a limit to how secure you can make a modern PC without hardware support for security, and any hardware support that protects your machine can also be opted in to protect the interests of someone else.

Frankly, I'd rather have my computer attesting to Apple than to some teenager's botnet.
The object system [in CL] is different [than Java's], but it's front-and-center.

No, it's very much off to the side. I almost never use CLOS. While it's far better than static OO, it's still OO, which means you still get object spaghetti. The beauty of CL is that its object system is basically just a library and you don't ever have to go there.

Side note: it still surprises me how few people have figured this out about OO. Yesterday I was browsing through the source of an OO-style JS library and it didn't take 30 seconds before the old familiar frustration kicked in of having to wade through a morass of methods-type-declarations-and-constructors in order to find the simple line of code I was looking for.

People used to talk about learning to think in objects; unlearning to think in objects is way better.
Agree. And Eolas would gladly settle with JP Morgan to get the ball rolling and encourage others to follow suit.
I think implementation should be allowed to be patented, but vague ideas describing what you want to do, but haven't done are worthless. They only reason they are worth something is because the government is artificially giving them worth by covering millions of possible implementation with a couple of sentences.

On the brightside, more abuse means more unrest. So hopefully we're getting closer to reform.
Scientists who Committed Suicide
I think it's because there's a "big [insert anything] skeptic strain here on HN".

Edit: Which is a damn good thing, and why I love hanging out here.
There is a point to the above comment. If it is easier to apologise & easier to be forgiven for vendor shoddiness, it creates an incentive to outsource dirty work.
Nice work! I can see the rendered formulas with firefox (3.5.5) but not with konqueror (kde 4.3.3).
The linked iPhone user guide (in fact the very default one from my iPhone) does not now load on my iPhone. On Firefox Windows I get redirected to http://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone/. Don't know if that's in reaction to the article or what.
Microsoft didn't cause any scandal, the contractor they hired did. Yes, of course, MS is responsible; but MS was also a victim here.
An Ex-Scientist Turns to the Comedy Circuit
In addition, this is the year 2009. SQL INJECTION by a company this big? Thats rather sad.

My final project in class gets and instant 0/100 (40% of the grade) if SQL injection was possible...
People also use their home internet connections to violate IP, confidentiality and insider trading agreements. Using the purported Apple-logic from this post, Apple is (indirectly) paying for that too, so shouldn't they be able to monitor those connections as well?

A utility argument here, I don't believe is the way to approach this. There are all sort of "useful" things that companies could do that most folks would agree cross the line into invasion of privacy, in the US or elsewhere.

I think there are two important assumptions I'm working with:

- People have a right to privacy in personal affairs

- The work place being only for work is an idealization that in practice does not exist

My argument won't make sense if you don't agree on those two.

Employment is one of the fundamental elements of the social fabric, and the rights of employers and employees are participant to a more general social contract. There exists a line at which a company must sacrifice some utility to uphold its end of that contract (e.g. they can't make people work 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week, even if they think it'd boost output), and as employers have an imbalance of power in negotiating employment terms, the government, in the interest of the people, lays down some guidelines for what the minimum boundaries are. Every developed country has this. The only variant is the extent of those stipulations, not their existence.

I believe the right to privacy is important enough that it's something that an employee should not be obliged to forfeit it in an employment contract. And since it's clear that personal and professional spheres overlap in the workplace, no, I don't think the company should have unrestricted access to an employee's data or actions in the workplace or through work-provided mediums. I don't think there should be microphones in every room; I don't believe that all thoughts discussed in the coffee corner are thusly entitled to the company. Even if they did buy the coffee and the chairs and are paying you at that time. And for me, and the legislators of many (most?) western countries, that clearly extends to internet access and company cell phones.
And malaria was only eliminated from the Soviet Union and large areas of Europe in the 1950s, after the advent of DDT.

This is an important fact that is only mentioned in this one sentence. The banning of DDT lead to millions of deaths in tropical areas (an "unintended consequence"). Limits on CO2 emissions and the resulting impact on energy production, manufacturing, and agriculture may well have unforeseen consequences, which will, like the DDT ban, probably affect developing nations more than anyone else.
Ask HN: Review our startup: Deniable Video
"I don't understand, why would anyone want to generate javascript from S-exprs? I understand this is fashionable in the CL world, but I've never seen any good justification for this practice outside of saying, "Now everything is in lisp.""

No, that is the justification behind things like GWT which are written by people who don't know web programming for people who don't want to learn web programming.

The point of having everything in Lisp is enabling the possibility of building your application in terms of domain concepts (I want to say "DSL" here, but the problem is that the term DSL has been coopted by Java morons who think it means something like scripting language).

The difference with other single-language systems like GWT is that this is done using macros - you're translating domain concepts directly to the JS+HTML+CSS target, instead of trying to shoe-horn them into some brain-damaged OO layer that may or may not need runtime support.

It's not about "abstracting the web," (abstracting to what? "Abstracting" JavaScript to Java is going from dumb to dumber); it's about the domain.
SecureIT sold ISS's stuff - but you're right - there is no genetic link. Jay did acknowledge that ISS made the market hot and showed the potential. Anyway, that is perhaps the most interesting part of the graph. Multiple root nodes sprung up as the market exploded - and the cluster sustained in Atlanta, whereas other dot com clusters did not. I don't think thats coincidental - I think security is a good fit for Atlanta, and so it prospered.

I haven't said so - but I take it for granted that Georgia Tech is behind all of this. It is widely acknowledged that a solid research university is a prerequisite for these clusters to form.

A founder map is just one way to look at this data. If you look at all employment overlap, funding, etc. the web gets very dense, and you see many more connections between these companies. The executive overlap in particular is very strong. When I started this, Linkedin's API was not open, and so I did this one manually because it is at a scale I could manually aggregate. Now that its open, other kinds of maps are possible.

This is just an introduction, I'm going to be digging in deeper in later articles.
Sex, Drugs, and things you can't read about, for Australian instances of "You"
My Mum just bought a Samsung M
That's actually not a terrible solution for the first world. Coastal areas tend to be wealthy and levees are not that expensive.
Beyond network monitoring ... root-cause analysis
Haha, seems like someone's getting a little worked up. I do research for the guy. Obviously I support what he does. After all, aren't you supposed to learn from the best professors at your university?

However, Von Ahn doesn't get to pick any class to teach. He received 251 while still a Grad Student and was rather "forced" to teach it. He created Science of the Web so I think he deserves to teach it if he wants to correct? And he absolutely hates AI and didn't, by any means, choose to teach it. What's interesting is that even you admit he's a great teacher, but he himself admits he hates teaching. Guess that means he must have some talent.

(as for TAs in Systems being dicks, I completely agree with you. 251 TAs too.)
AJAX is not about XML anymore. A lot of people use XHRs with JSON. AJAX now refers to the dynamic phenomenon. So their name is indeed appropriate. Evolution.
HN is for hackers, not just entrepreneurs. As a hacker, my interest in the technical aspects of this project slightly outweighs my disdain for its evil nature.
Yea it was meant to be a joke.
NEWSFLASH: Microsoft Acknowledges Theft of Code from Plurk
Net Neutrality Fight Again Sweeps Though FCC
"When I want to know how to write a transactional email, I wait for a magazine renewal letter. When I want to know what the “Pro” Account’s page should say, I wait for a membership drive letter to arrive (my home address has been cheerfully sold to a bunch of political committees, so I get a lot of these). And if I want to sell something and I can’t possibly relate to whoever would want to buy it—I keep an eye out for the envelope marked “You’re pre-approved!”"

I think the point was to re-purpose the techniques from direct-mail advertising to match the next generation of direct response marketing (like emails and sales landing pages). Use the tools from the mailers in your emails or sales pages instead. You can't really 'throw away' a sales landing page the same way you would an unsolicited credit card offer, especially since you navigated to it in the first place.
Scott, employees generally are only able to use their home Internet connections to violate confidentiality because their work computers and connections are poorly policed.

And, it is as a direct result of rampant abuse of company resources that companies are now deploying draconian security controls on worker machines, locking down USB connections and intercepting and parsing Word documents in the OS kernel. I've been involved in several deployments of these products (not a fan), and I can tell you that it's not an abstract concern that is driving their adoption. Bad stuff is routinely happening on company networks, and companies need to be able to protect themselves.

People have a right to privacy in personal affairs, but people need to make arrangements for their privacy when they're at the workplace. The idea that a Dell desktop that a Fortune 500 company provides you with becomes a bastion of personal privacy just because you decide to use it to check your GMail is untenable. Companies need workers to be able to handle sensitive information, and they need workers to be able to use computers and networks to do their job, and they cannot be expected to grin and bear it as their confidential information walks out the door and onto Yahoo Finance message boards.

Germany has powerful computer privacy laws. It is also not a great epicenter of tech entrepreneurship.
What a story! Thanks for the link.

If they really did find the solution to Spam and were killed for it, it's a wonder that someone with deep pockets, think Google or MSoft doesn't do this again with monstrous bandwidth and power behind it. It would be costly, but imagine the PR win for removing spam from the internet.
Undocumented Google Chart API for LaTeX:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chs=1x0&ch...
This sounds interesting. It's too bad that I don't want to spend 15 minutes on it. Video takes ages compared to text, and you can't skim it, easily excerpt it, or copy it.
When I run this on my G1 with the iPhone user-agent it doesn't look anything like this. I guess I don't see why they would specifically change it here.
This sounds like due diligence to protect shareholder interests.

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - overheard in an interview somewhere.
The biggest new features in SDK3.1 were related to video, the rest were minor additions. A lot of developers target 3.1 accidently though because it's the default.

Full list of API changes: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/releasenotes/Gener...
All that's missing is how to stay in business. I had high hopes for DayJet (ticket prices depended upon how flexible your travel schedule was---the more flexible, the cheaper, and you could be from the parking lot to the air in under 15 minutes) but alas, they didn't remain in business. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DayJet
Or to put it another way: Every week you become a more valuable part of the team as you learn about your niche and solution and as you build a product and relationships.