skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Er, to be clear, your example uses a closure. Your real question is, can this be done without `Symbol`?

And it can, since the symbol is just a secret stored in a closure and there are other sorts of secrets. Aside from the "Math.random() + {enumerable: false}" suggestion found elsewhere, you can reproduce the precise[0] semantics of your example using something like:

// Please do not actually write code like this
var Person = (function() {
var names = [];
function Person(name) {
this.key = names.length;
names[this.key] = name;
}
Person.prototype.sameName = function(other) {
return names[other.key] === names[this.key];
};
return Person;
})();

Which is the ES3 generated by this CoffeeScript:

class Person
names = []
constructor: (name)->
@key = names.length
names[@key] = name
sameName: (other)->
names[other.key] is names[@key]

Of course these implementations do something dramatically different behind the scenes, and I emphatically don't think people should follow this example, but the interface is the same. Edit: Except that I left `.key` as an editable property, which is problematic. We'll leave that bit as an exercise, though.

Whether `names[this.key]` is as "nice" to work with as `this[nameKey]` is, uh, left up to the reader; personally, count me in the camp that doing either of those things is nuttypants compared to `this._name`.

[0]: Assuming that `otherPerson` in your constructor is a typo, of course ;P
Would hate to be caught in that game
But will he outplay you using more notes, or the right notes?
I think this will break your ToS with reddit and result in a ban on the account. That said, I don't know. It's kinda cool though.
Wasn't President John Adams the defense lawyer representing the British Soldiers at the Boston Massacre?
> I can't see it happening, myself.

It's already been happening for some time, and we're quite far in the process. The mainstream population stops buying computers in favour of mobile devices - tablets and smartphones, which are locked down and dumbed down. Then you have DRM, and the cloud. I fear the next step will be professionalization of software engineering - you may suddenly find yourself in need of an engineering license to be able to legally use a Turing-complete language.
Truly shocking they haven't discovered "out of country tuition". That is the big scam here in the US, most of the state schools have out of state fee's that are 2x-5x as high as the instate ones. The excuse of course is saving money and how the students parents don't pay taxes (ignoring they pay taxes elsewhere).

The best part of course, is the lame/insane rules they come up with to determine if your instate or out of state. Mostly because in the US just having a utility bill from a rental or what not is enough to transfer a drivers license/residency. Amusingly enough, most of these states actually require in state vehicle registrations for said students in order to get the tax money...
It could also be used to target genes for producing toxins (like the verotoxin produced by enterohemorrhagic
Escherichia coli). Which would be less of an uphill battle against selection pressure for antibiotic resistance and still make the bacteria mostly harmless to humans.
A stenographed image embedded in a Word document, printed and faxed to a document archive that scans and digitizes it, embeds the scan in a PDF, and emails it back to you.
"Comprehensive serological profiling of human populations using a synthetic human virome"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption
> most implausible data storage medium

That still works well!

It's easy to make something bizarre and unusable. Have it bizarre and surprisingly usable. :D
If I find out this took a research team and five years...

(ref: http://xkcd.com/1425/ )
Airbnb clearly has product aspirations beyond home/room/yurt rentals.
Darn, that rules mine out, then.

Fax is about as unusable as you can get...
"How about finding ways to compensate those who already produce valuable content in the commons, so they can have more time to do what they already do well?"

The tech community has seen to it that this doesn't happen with: file sharing of copyrighted material and adblock.

You can't first destroy entire industries in the name of 'freedom of speech' and then cry about how you can't make money in those industries any longer.

Content is now cheap and it's only getting worse. Which means content providers will be forced to take on jobs that they don't actually want to do (or are necessarily good at) to survive.
"the only remaining viable non-Unix platform"

Why do you think that is? As in, why is everyone else on unix (like toolchains)? Why do you think pretty much the entire tech-stack of mobile and web companies has moved to Linux or BSD as the default choice.

The reason is clear. The unix "small tools connected by text based pipes" philosophy has won. Whether disaffected powershell users find it clunky or not is not the point. Unix tools are the lingua-franca of developers everywhere.

There are many reasons for this but the most important is that the commandline toolset for managing a machine from a remote terminal has always been the most important UI for unix over the last forty years. You can call it "dated". The industry calls it "the standard".

The irony here is that Microsoft itself has come to the realization that they have to follow where the developer ecosystem is inexorably marching en mass. There will of course be a certain percent of holdouts clinging to their powershells. But now they'll be fighting against not only the linux'er and BSD'rs. But Microsoft management itself.
Com amor, gabi
Pretty clever. If it was stored in reddit's wiki system instead of comments, it could have a revision history!
Shame an encryption key is REQUIRED, could be a useful way to transfer files between Reddit users. Of course the file has to be encoded, but the encryption should be an optional extra.
Credentials vs portfolios isn't an either or argument. And "worse" is a loaded term.

If you have the credential of an undergrad degree at MIT with a good GPA, combined with a credential of working for Google for 5 years, there is a very high likelihood you are a good engineer.

On the other hand if you have made serious contributions to the Linux kernel, there is a very high likelihood you are a good engineer.

But most developers don't go to MIT and work at Google. And they also don't make serious contributions to large open source projects. For most developers credentials and portfolios are not effective methods of hiring.
Of course the "what-if" argument falls flat on its face because we can always go further to create more safety, and if you first use that argument you need to justify why you stop just there.

E.g. why is terror getting this level of attention vs. child murder, which in terms of numbers of victims is a far bigger problem?

By the "what if" logic, these people ought to be prepared to go far in curtailing privacy to get at child abuse given the magnitude of the problem compared to terror.

We know how to profile the likely perpetrators very well too. The vast majority of such crimes are carried out by a few very specific groups of people, namely dads, brothers and other close male family members.

Surely if the - on average - few terror deaths are worth these types of sacrifices, the many hundred child murders and thousands upon thousands of abuse victims would justify far more extensive curtailment of privacy?

It quickly becomes very clear that the "what if" argument is rationalisation: if harm reduction was as important to them as they like to imply, they would not be spending their attention on terror.

What the "anti-terror crowd" need to be made to answer when they ask for more rights is what makes terrorism different, and why are they not spending their energy on the many problems that have far more serious effects.
Chinese hackers under investigation after massive U.S. data breach
I don't see how this is any different than any other business. When business costs go up, they are passed onto the customer.
I know about Germany: Yes, they can. There are some limits in how many hours/year you are allowed to work. I think it is the equivalent of 2-3 months fulltime/year).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9661848

I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
What's the Deal with Windows 10 for the Non-Technical Friend
Chinese hackers breach federal government’s personnel office
I suspect if you'd try to hack his bank account, you'd soon be staring at the business end of a rifle barrel.
Don't learn anything specific but be sure to be ready to learn everything when needed.
I had to learn linear algebra when I was a 3D engine developer, then I had to learn statistics (or maybe learn to understand the notations of it so I could use scientific papers in my work).

In the end I think it was best not to have lost hours, days, weeks of my time on things I "could have used". I find it best to be prepared to learn anything.
I disable wifi everywhere but my home network. Even work (mainly because of reasonable traffic shaping on work wifi that doesn't align with my needs).

On iOS only the connected wifi will expose the BSSID.

Turn off promiscuous mode on iOS, don't join random networks, and you can't be tracked this way.
There's nothing in the world that can provide "freedom from terrorism" which makes it even an even uglier lie. Even if it could, I'd still be against it though, because there are many ways to fight terrorism that don't involve sacrificing the freedom our ancestors bought with blood. The FBI needs leadership that understand how to operate within American principles.
Larry Ellison is closely associated with a prominent technology company.
I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to take encrypted text and transform it into something indistinguishable from the already unintelligible spam emails that pass through global networks en masse every day.
US officials report massive breach of federal personnel data
Here's my entry.

https://github.com/ryancdotorg/dnsstore
I like the proof of concept, but I hate that anyone would abuse Reddit this way.
This fits in very neatly with Casey Muratori's "Compression Oriented Programming" which is essentially Write your usage code first, keep YAGNI in mind, then Refactor.

I was once asked in an interview whether, on a new project, I would start with a monolithic app or some sort of SOA. ("Microservices Architecture" is the new SOA)

I answered that I would start with a monolith because usually you're trying to find product/market fit as quickly as possible, and having an SOA would likely slow you down due to its upfront cost. (How many services? Any redundancy? What do they do? How many databases? How do you keep them up? How do you diagnose when they're failing? etc)

They responded that they always do SOA, that the benefits are clear, that monolithic apps are idiotic, etc.

I didn't want the job... but I was confused about our differing opinions.

What I've learned since then is basically: are you constructing a building, or making an art installation?

Construction is thousands of years old. Contractors have huge tables of how long each part of the process takes, in what order, down to the quarter-hour (in some cases) and are fairly accurate in their estimations. (They're still hilariously wrong on occasion either in time or budget, building anything is pretty difficult)

In this case, architecting SOA would work out since you've done it before. You know about how long it takes, what the pitfalls are, what support infrastructure you need, etc.

When you're making art, making something new, with new materials, without a manual, with only some best practices in mind, time becomes essentially unbounded.

Upfront architecture in this case would be poorly suited to the situation - you'll probably end up changing it a lot, and each time you introduce a bit of "rigor" to the system it becomes a bit more difficult to change. Especially over socket boundaries and different API versions.

I also feel like bad code has a survivorship bias - you only hear about it because the company took off. To get the company to take off, the code perhaps was necessarily rushed just so the company could stay around long enough to make money.

"Ah, but if we could have done it right in the first place!"

You don't hear about the companies who die, no matter the quality of their code.
The next time HN readers run into the weeds and start complaining when some billionaire isn't solving world hunger, etc and is instead trying to solve a crazy technical problem, going to space, etc let's try and remember that most billionaires just have fun with their money
Please don't do this . . .
Well, a lot of computer science literally belongs to math, as in, is a strict subset of math. (Including the words I just said, see, about subsets.)

Specifically, a lot of computer science belongs to "discrete mathematics", (because there are discrete states not a continuous interval of possibilities, but still math). so even for everything where you thought you were just learning computer science - when you look at sorting, trees, big-O complexity, correctness, graphs, one-way functions, lexical parsing, network theory, control systems, error handling, compression, etc, you're really just ... straight-up doing math, by definition. (or using a library, compiler, operating system, network stack, database engine etc, etc, etc, by someone who has.) I mean that it is literally the field of mathematics. Like when you remove two 'not' in a row you are just straight-up literally doing math.

So firstly, I would say that these are just some of the things that are directly used by people practicing computer science, even if only second-hand - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_mathematics - As well as the more specific, Oh, I heard it's impossible to evaluate whether a function will terminate... oh...I heard you can't compress random data at ALL on average... oh the shannon limit means we could never get that much data across this channel... wait, can you get the signal back after a fast Fourier transform - of course! that's what an inverse fourier transform does.. ... can a simple regular expression match if parentheses are matched and only correctly nested - answer: not a REGULAR one - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/133601/can-regular-expres... etc. etc.

you see this stuff everywhere. but you just look it up and do it - well, it's math! basically all of the 'theoretical' stuff is. so it's not so much about finding parts of 'math' that a computer scientist should know...it's about realizing that most what you use (right down to boolean logic) is strictly math to begin with. you're literally (not metaphorically) doing math every single day, all day, every time you negate a boolean before returning it.

reasoning about database opreations? straight-up set theory.

so it's like your real question is, what is the math that I would find useful if I learned it? And the answer is - as a computer scientist, "computer science" is the math that you would find useful if you learned it . . .

the other stuff, like geometry or calculus, is interesting but a red herring - in a way they could be considered the application logic. your calculus equations are only useful if your functions implementing them bother to ever return a value... you can hardly write two loops without at least thinking about time complexity. bam, math. all the rest of computer science is math too. everything you do every day. it is just part of mathematics. so go ahead and learn more math - what part? the "computer science" part :)
Bit short currently. Looks like more detail from these sources:

http://mashable.com/2015/06/04/data-breach-hack/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chines...
You could always share the password, or even redistribute a modified version of the program with a hardcoded password.
I wonder if they could see through that given the inherent randomness of encrypted data. In such a world, "random is resistance".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE6RtzwVdHI
Founder of Enginuity Analytics here. You can ingest RSS and Tweets into our platform where we apply machine learning to provide social data, sentiment analysis, rankings, filters and demographic analysis of all the content for 27 languages. And easily export the data to Excel and more. http://theenginuity.com
nor rice. in the goddamn desert.
Are you saying that because someone might do something evil, we should all lose our right to privacy and anonymity to protect everyone from what the mad scientist might do?

Can you even show that taking my privacy away makes me markedly safer, because unless you can establish that first I'm not even listening.

That's not a world I want to live in thanks.
does reddit not have some sort of posting throughput limit?
I kept the training protocol very vague intentionally.

Some trainees would be better off simply stretching for a month before doing any resistance training.

These details need to be assessed on a case by case basis. This is just an overview.

Negative pull-ups or lat pull-down could be used until the required strength is there.
I really hope there's a new service that can pick up where Pipes left off, it was a huge shame how it fizzled out at yahoo.
This isn't quite the same; the parent is pointing out that you can implement `sameFirstName` without exposing `firstName` publicly at all, not even as a getter.
Unrelated, Hurd sounds like an ass.

> Unlike Ellison, Hurd played tennis throughout his youth. He was good enough to earn a full ride to Baylor and to play No. 1 for the team. Without any prodding at all, Hurd will pull out trophies earned at National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I championships. “You would never have seen one of these,” he says, knowing that I managed to play only Division III tennis. When the Indian Wells tournament is on, Hurd flies down from Oracle’s headquarters to mix business and pleasure. He speaks with customers and takes in the matches. He also plays at Porcupine Creek and can be found showing off his guns in a tank top.
#WearableTech fights crime
It's an unpopular opinion amongst techies, but I do think people should recognize the genuine nuances to this issue.

It probably won't ever happen, but as a "live and let live" kind of guy who nevertheless recognizes there are truly evil people out there, and the purpose of government almost above all else is to protect society from them, I think the policy which would make the most sense for this sort of thing would be for a government to simply come up with a sort of digital social contract with its citizens:

We couldn't care less if you're buying weed on the internet, or cocaine, or if you're selling them, or emailing your mistress, or pirating HD tentacle hentai. You can do these things in public or private, as you so choose. In the digital realm, we respect your privacy and subscribe to the principle of de minimis.

In return, we're going to require that encrypted internet traffic in our country be routed through our servers, with software that flags a limited amount of suspicious, IP-anonymized traffic for human review. If the algorithm turns out out to be wrong in your case and the email was only about the nuclear bomb-grade heroin you snorted off the Pakistani general's long-range missile during your secret gay tryst in Islamabad, we don't care. We'll destroy those records immediately, and there's no way for our human reviewers to see your IP address. We know exactly who reviewed your records and we'll throw the book at any one of them who leaks any private data.

And because we have lent our citizens this exceptional freedom to use the internet for any peaceful purpose, that means encrypted traffic that isn't routed through our servers must be treated as suspicious. It may or may not be legitimate, but much of it may well be related to terrorism or violent crime, or child pornography, or financial crime, or foreign agents. So, we will continue our policy as stated above; we won't punish you just for using encryption illegally, but doing so does give us reason for questioning you and requesting access to your private keys.
The 85k H1B figure is misleading. Disney doesn't employ these people, they outsource to HCL. HCL hires Indian workers. Who's to say they need H1Bs for these people at all. Also, for every Indian tech team lead in the US, they often hand the work off to a team of ten people back in India who don't need H1Bs at all. The average Indian programming wage I believe is about $3-4 hr.

The question is US companies outsourcing to companies with a primarily foreign workforce, and displacing US jobs. There have been estimates that outsourcing has caused the loss of 1.5-2 million US jobs since 2000. There's several considerations involved including the need to have skilled tech workers in the US, but its certainly a serious societal issue in the US.
I think one thing clear is that anyone who follows the news will be hard press to use technology that doesn't implement open source encryption. That's the only way we can be sure there isn't a black door. I think we should let every major tech company know that this isn't the time to reinvent the wheel or roll out their own in house solution, but to work on bettering proven open source technologies.
My personal favourite:

https://github.com/philipl/pifs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgpytjlW5wU
Can you make that fully automated from the end user's perspective?
Scientific and technological progress is inherently unpredictable, so betting on a miraculous discovery coming just in time to save your sorry ass is at best an unwise course of action. The "sky is falling" speeches are meant to direct public attention (and funding) to the research that can prevent the doomsday scenario, and also to discourage people from doing asinine things (like abuse of antibiotics).
It would make it much easier to avoid DRM, and to cheat in online games for sure. I'm guessing online gambling would be out the window. Also, I don't know if I would want to do any banking online.
> Freeing Java with the GPL was an amazing move by Sun and kudos to everyone who made that happen.

But due to recent legal rulings (and assuming they don't get overturned in the supreme court) Oracle has effectively locked Java back down. Even if it is GPL, Oracle has managed to copyright the APIs themselves, making the GPL-ness of the Java codebase more or less meaningless.

Sun did make Java free, no doubt about that, but under Oracle it is hard to argue that Java remains free. It is an Oracle product that Oracle owns, and if you try to fork it you will be sued (Oracle has made that point abundantly clear).

To be honest the GPL is now inadequate against this new type of copyright enforcement.
> talent always gravitates toward revenue centers it seems.

Ie the 'new management can't fire my entire division for being unprofitable' center. Seems like a smart move for the people who wrote Pipes but never found a business model for it.
Citation? Cause there has been plenty of Arab mathematicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medieval_Arab_mathema...
>I'd suggest trying to use a simpler model, and understand and accept its failure modes. Maybe your app has to go into read-only mode for a few hours if there's a server failure, etc.

I'm fine with failure modes like that. I just want it to be automated. I don't want to come home from a trip and find that my database master has fallen over and the database slave has been patiently waiting for me to manually promote it for the last few days. I could probably rig up some cron jobs and shell scripts to automate this, but this is what I'm looking for something to do for me that's hopefully written by people smarter than me.
This is pretty much exactly how binary newsgroups got started. Not to be all "I thought of it first" but I had thought it would be funny to do something similar on Twitter.
The Bitcoin blockchain works fine, but is fairly implausible for interesting amounts of data.
Nudgemail - Free Forever*
"Nashorn"? I guess someone made a shout-out to Rhino ...