skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally I would think optional values are not indicating errors but to indicate an absence of something. A null database result would be the item was not found rather than an issue communicating with the database. Moving that to try / catch error would increase the possibility that another unexpected operation is inadvertantly caught. Somewhat similar examples can be found for Result but I do conced you have a better case.
There is the issue of cascading failures also here : several of my friends working for majors European power grid suppliers still have nightmares from the 2006 power outage.

A vessel ship cut a power line in Germany, which triggered a domino-like power outage throughout all Europe (up to Portugal IIRC) making 15 millions of home go dark for several hours.

Solar (and worse, Wind) power is not constant : it adds a source of unstability in the mix.
I remember the same thing, but it may be a case by case option. Many coursera courses had subtle differences (grading rules and process).
And then there are the people who will round that figure up. I've heard some Green campaigners calling it a £100bn project...
The example doesn't really change.

> "The code was broken" instead of "You broke the code" serves the same function.
you're missing the biggest cost of all. how do you price the cost of the waste fuel?
There are multiple unicode characters that are whitespace. I have a plugin for IntelliJ just to spot these darn things. So you could actually encode more.

Also of course there are multiple .'s and ;'s in unicode so you could encode more data in punctuation characters like them.
Maybe at one point, considering our era, people reach full independence and can pick a book and a problem, with an ad-hoc study group and/or co-working space and just do it.
This quote strikes me most:
"Here I am walking around making $1 million a year, and I'm working shoulder to shoulder with people in her situation who are every bit as good and valuable as I am."

I wish more people would realize that those earning less than themselves are not necessarily less deserving but merely less valuable in a marketed job force.
The biggest problem with nuclear power generation is external to the technology, it depends on the legal and regulatory regime, and how good a safety culture the country can develop for it.

On the latter factor, Japan has amply demonstrated over 3+ decades they have absolutely no business doing anything in this area (a judgement I reached long before Fukushima). To compare to a vaguely comparable culture, the PRC seems to be doing well, but wonder if that's due to a much greater lack of transparency.

While I haven't looked at it closely, France sure seems to be doing well (76% of their electricity production, at good points and with lots of exports), but the usual political suspects propose to fix that. Canada as well??

The US finished going bat-shit crazy on the subject under Carter (perhaps because he was on the cleanup crew of this first generation (1947) reactor after it suffered a meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRX, and, yeah, it's another reactor with a positive void coefficient). You're not going to see economic nuclear power in the US for the foreseeable future unless you foresee a counter-revolution that removes power from the NIMBYs and BANANAs.
Carly Fiorina Was Contradictory Figure at Hewlett-Packard
Why you shouldn't be afraid to switch team
Streamlining Elasticsearch Deployments with ELK and the Cloud
A list has zero or more elements where as Optional is zero or one. The later case seems common enough in my experience to warrant an additional language feature
Is anyone aware of legally (US and/or British law, specifically) "strong" stenographic techniques? Meaning a court would allow that this object is assigned to this person because of a stenographic key embedded in the object?
I've never seen it with the dots, but you do see y and a broken-U fairly often. Examples, including y with dots, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29
We Still Don't Know Jack About 'Cognitive Enhancement'
This also reminds me of the Whitespace programming language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...
Here's example of using Arabic script to transcribe an European language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arebica
DOJ: Apple owns your iPhone's software, so it should have a backdoor
We should kill these award mills once and for all
Have I misunderstood?
Does everyone get the $70k so a software engineer is getting as much as a data entry or a receptionist?

And how much does it scale? Will it work when the company is forced to look into profit? Right now they seem to have revenue but no profits.

How will retaining employees work when someone who has to work over time to deal with bugs is getting paid as much as the person's job it is to hold meetings.

"right-wing backlash" - anyone who might suspect that this isn't sustainable and will probably end up going away in the long run. Sounds like a PR fluff piece.

Even dev salaries today isn't sustainable and will eventually crash.
> That hasn't been a problem for me in practice.

It has for me. Functions have multiple return points, some of them returning "null". Lead developer insists we use Optional<> to clarify that these functions can return null. People go over the function, replacing each instance of "return null" with "return Optional.empty()", but forget some instances. Now we have Optionals that are sometimes null.
> Why the downvotes?

Because it's not an IMF loan?
The Awesomeness of Owncloud
Darkside by Tom Stoppard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkside_%28radio_play%29) is a short radio play that explores this.

It's set to Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. It's all a bit silly but I quite enjoyed it. It's available on Spotify.
Aren't environment variables kind of a bad thing in Windows? They're global so installing an application that twiddles with them could break another application. Isn't that what we had the registry for and now AppData?

Path is a bit different because it's helpful being global so any command prompt can use it. Though the start menu search bar doesn't seem to so wouldn't it be better moved to a setting in the command prompt and Powershell applications themselves?
The problem is that this only works if you where signed up for the course when it was active. If you find an interesting course in their archives that has already closed, you often cannot look at the course material.
Konstruktor Inc.
I thought Optional was mostly for the steam API, and not just general usage?
I've only used the Guava version of Optional, which appears to have a slightly different API than Java 8's. (You can tell there's a Java 8 committee, that's for sure.)

The biggest problem I found in applying Optional is that Optional is very much a Haskell-y concept to me, and Java programmers and Haskell programmers don't really overlap much. Therefore, to me, Optional is just a functor like a list or a set. So doing Optional.asSet() and iterating over the result is, to me, the correct way way of handling an optional value. If there's something in there, the loop runs once. If there's not anything in there, the loop runs zero times. This is exactly like "fmap" in Haskell:

Prelude Data.Functor> fmap (+1) $ Just 42
Just 43
Prelude Data.Functor> fmap (+1) $ Nothing
Nothing

(Except that Haskell automatically preserves the type safety, whereas you have to re-wrap the value if you're using Java. Functional programming in Java never works, and this where the Optional idea starts to go wrong.)

But I got "I don't really understand this" in code reviews every time I did that; the Java way is to check if it's set, then do a type-unsafe unboxing. Thus, like the article said, completely defeating the purpose of the Optional type.

That said, it's pretty rare to need exactly 0 or 1 of something. If you're doing a database query, you can probably make the API return a set of rows. Then it's natural to loop over the results and nobody raises their eyebrows.
Russian Ships Near Undersea Internet Cables Are Too Close for U.S. Comfort
The Future of Augmented and Virtual Reality
Grossly overstated. E.g. leave it alone for 600 years and it's no worse than the ore from which it was mined (which, I grant you, you don't want to be rolling around in). Or feed it to breeder reactors, all that's used up is the U-235, there's still plenty of tasty U-238 that you can do all sorts of stuff with, and they also help address the nasty actinides etc.

Don't confuse the bat-shit crazy regulatory regime for this in the US with anything rational or useful. We're wealthy enough for now to indulge in it, we'll see when things get tighter.
The Death of the Monolithic SaaS Product
Why `const int main = 195;` is a valid program
I'm going to pull a Jedi mind trick here...

<waves hand> There is no problem with editing environment variables in Linux.

<waves hand> You're going to go back to your terminal and re-think how you use environment variables.

Seriously, nobody has this problem on Linux desktops because folks usually--if they're going to mess with environment variables at all--they're going to do it right after getting a new home directory (i.e. a new desktop where logging out and back in one time isn't a concern) or they're going to set them in a script of some sort. As in, start_server.sh or, "oh fuck this I'll just write a small shell script that sets PATH and launches what I want" which is perfectly normal and reasonable; if your application needs certain environment variables set to function properly why would you want to leave such things to chance? Just set it in the script that launches your app.

Unlike Windows, a Linux desktop has no mandatory distinction between a shell script and a binary in order for it to be executed. If it's set as executable it's executable; simple as that. The user probably won't know or care that /usr/bin/yourapp is really a shell script that sets up some environment variables before launching /opt/you/bin/youractualapp

Not only that but you don't have to log out and log back in--that's just the cop-out, "I'm lazy" way of applying such changes to your desktop. You could just restart your launcher. I use KDE's Plasma desktop so that would be:

killall plasmashell
kstart plasmashell

If you're SSH'd into your Linux box it's even easier: . ~/.bashrc
I think it's an even worse investment than that.

I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss.

Also, wind, solar and other renewable are able to be produced with a much smaller capital cost, and are only getting cheaper. Many of the tech issues are being fixed. For example, critical steam is now possible with CSP and mass production is making the systems cheaper.

The production risks for nuclear are really high, because of the high capital costs. As demonstrated by this project stalling for over a decade.

Also, uranium costs are not fixed. Over the last 18 years have changed a number of times. The price difference has been 3x (not even adjusting for inflation).

Finally, many nuclear power plants have been closed down early to fix up (14% have been closed for more than a year). Including of course Fukushima, but also other ones around the world and in the USA. There was a report of 14 plants in the USA which will likely close early. That is around 14% of plants (so far) closing earlier than planned. (There are 99 plants in the USA).

If there is a problem because the high capital costs, it seems many of the plants get closed. 100 orders for plants in the USA were cancelled, bankrupting companies.
It is a minimum wage, everyone is not paid the same.
Is it too much space?

Rooftop solar generally uses ~0 new space, and there is quite some reason to believe that prices will continue to drop so that people in sunny regions will install it simply to save money.

It probably isn't the solution to industrial power demand, the local mill here uses more power than the rest of the county, but so what?
Curated List of ES6 resources
Which is great if the train goes from A to B and you need to go from A to B. If you're a contractor like me bouncing between customers all day, a train just isn't going to cut it.

An autonomous car lets me get work done while I travel just like the train. Only it actually gets me from one stop to the next. Taking a train 90% of the way there, then spending an hour walking or finding a taxi to get the last 10% is borderline useless. Great if you sit at a desk all day I suppose.
Your comment is a fantastic example of why laypeople are not equipped to properly evaluate the risk profile of nuclear power.
How Patents Can Help in Better Business Decision Making
They've set a target but not allocated any money, in the middle of an economic crisis and strong opposition to budget deficit spending. That means it's probably not going to happen.
The very interesting feature, in my opinion, is the in-built Pandoc support.
Yeah, not sure why completion matters.

All that matters is whether the user found some useful information in it, and just fully watching one video lecture should be enough for that metric.
I read this in 1995 in a freezing cold bedroom lying atop a pale pink candlewick bedspread with the dismal damp Irish night wind howling outside. Pages from Benito Cereno were falling periodically out from the thirty year old penguin paperback. I was on a very mild acid trip (first and last). It was wonderful.

Reading it on a screen with these dull minded annotations? I'd hate for this to be anyone's first experience of it...
Fare il Backup di files con PHP e la API di copy.com
std::string always is a value, boost::optional<std::string> isn't (similar to std::string, just a lot safer).
The problem is that Java only has boost::optional<std::string>, which can be null, empty or a value.
'Rich kids don't feel compelled to enlist just to make financial ends meet.'

Statistics only tell you the demographics of enlisting, not -why- they're enlisting. Plenty of people enlist because of reasons other than "I have no other options available to me". My point was that "I have no other options available to me" is only ever true for poor people.
Rabat is ridiculously small compared to the Moroccan desert. I don't think space is a problem there.
Similar to https://www.changedetection.com
Yup. Not exactly breaking news, but it bears repeating.
If you come from ML or Haskell and start using boost or Java's option, you actually feel ripped off.

Some people claim it's a sort of documentation denoting 'intent', but I don't want documentation. I don't want options to infect the whole codebase, I just want to pattern match once and extract the value, and never have to check again for None or null.

The problem in Java is the type system has references.
X static use_it(X x){ ....}

really has a signature something like this:
use_it : X ref -> X ref

no little library is going to fix that.
Processed meat can cause cancer, red meat probably can – WHO
This might be a good start: http://tractionbook.com/traction.pdf
I'm looking forward to this in PHP7. My current workaround, which exists for the same reason as the coalesce operator (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/isset_ternary) is a custom function:

$v = @first($var1, $var2, 'some-default');

which will simply return the first parameter that has a non-null, non-empty-string value.
>>Have I misunderstood?

You indeed have. $70k is the minimum salary. It is possible to make more.
If you want a stable version, you can't necessarily just git clone. (Maybe if the default branch is kept stable, but I wouldn't trust that by default.) You also have to find the right branch/tag and do a checkout.
All of these problems seem trivial to me. The problem with Optional is that it isn't baked into the API, nor can it ever be, so any use of Optional is after the fact, applied only by the application, which means you need to wrap api calls in Optionals manually, which is something that gets real old, real quick.
Meh... GUI sux for this anyway, Windows is ahead of this generally then other Linux like OSes.

This drives me nuts on Linux: env. vars aren't systemically available as on Windows where you even have an option to broadcast change so that even running applications can update. I wonder why there isn't POSIX standard for this, perhaps /etc/environment would be good choice if standardized.

On Windows, you don't really need any than that. To get PATH env var the way it is now in Win 10 just do in any windows

PS> $Env:Path -split ';'

Setting the var in the system is equally fast and you can make stuff even better - for instance my POSH function keeps backup of old env var value, i.e. if i change the PATH today I would also have PATH_2015_10_26 with old value.

So please Windows admins, stop being fucking clickzor n00bs and start using Powershell. Its embarrassing.

As a related note, the most awesome of all editors on Windows is Total Commander "Environment Variables" plugin - you can do all kinds of stuff there (regex search/replace, backup/restore as simple file copy, fuzzy search, bookmarks ..)﻿
I have been using a percentage value to set width size for four year, since the day I first used HTML. I used to get confused with pixel. Percentage provides me a better estimate always.
I often keep revising until a text-to-speech program is able to read my writing in a way that sounds natural. Following that approach led to great results in university writing courses and, recently, got me through the process of writing and officiating a wedding.

I share this because many of the comments respond to the "write like you speak" advice with statements similar to "I don't speak well, so 'write like you talk' won't work for me". We spend every day of our lives consuming spoken language and reading written language to ourselves and, as a result, we are able to recognize speech that sounds clear and well spoken. Even if you struggle to speak improvisationally, listening to what you've written can help to evaluate the understandability and flow of your writing.
An AI system has become the third-most important signal to Google search results
You'd honestly be better to email hn@ycombinator.com than post comments on this story.
Try this one if you're on an ARM processor:

const int main = -516948194;
I completely agree. unwrap() is a huge mistake in Rust. There are brilliant ideas implemented in Rust (primarily the borrow checker) but their advantages seem to be wiped out by the kludge of unwrap.
> Maybe the rest of the dialog controls are all fixed dimensions and non-autosizable.

That's exactly the problem. Raw Win32 doesn't really have provisions for layouting containers and auto-resize behaviour. So you'd essentially have to handle WM_SIZE and reposition/resize all controls in the dialog. Such code is cumbersome to write, awkward to change and annoying to debug/test (e.g. you still need to check that you don't change something to negative sizes and/or constrain the window dimensions appropriately). And in the end you have a few hundred lines of code that are intricately linked to the current dialog layout and, in part, even replicate the layout. So you cannot even easily change the layout anymore. This is quite a bit of a cost associated with that.

Inventing layout containers on the Win32 side seems a pointless idea as well, considering that nearly no one except Microsoft actually uses the API at that level, so improvements here have little benefit for lots of work. Most people most likely use wrappers around it that offer such things (e.g. Windows Forms), or things that take care of their own rendering and offer layout containers (WPF, Swing, GTK, Qt, ...).

So I guess if MS offered the usual layout mechanisms in Win32 people would just shrug and ask »Why? I already have those things in the toolkit I use. Can't they devote development resources to actually important things?«.
I think that reacting to system change is opt-in.
You are correct. It is not carbon free. Nuclear power plants make about 90 - 140 g CO2 per kWh
electricity.

Uranium extraction, waste management, construction, and decommissioning being the biggest offenders in the whole process.
All valid points, thanks for the insight Mz
I never understood this as everyone gets $70K; I only understood it as the lowest paid full time employee gets $70K.

I understand in this situation, that some of the previously higher paid employees got upset [and left].
Marketing Is Everything – Regis McKenna
There are many more I think.
You're misunderstanding "if possible" here. It means "if it can be done while conveying all that you need to convey, and saying all that you mean." "Cut" doesn't do that.
Show HN: Classy – Ambient sound player ideal for work and relaxation
The docs are hosted by readthedocs, so for those looking, they can still be found here: http://django.readthedocs.org/en/1.8.x/
PS> $Env:Path - split ';'

The operator is -split, without the space. In any case, it won't work, because the path can contain quoted items that contain a semicolon.
Elon Musk: A Gigafactory in India would probably make sense
Yes, I think it is a case by case thing. The stanford courses are always available Im pretty sure, I know others fall out though. Also the fact you cant just click and download the whole course as a compressed file (like MIT) is a shame, especially for people with limited or no internet connections like where my family lives. There you really do need to be able to go to a library and download the course which you can then take home for your studies. People in tech forget this but believe it or not over half the world doesnt have internet (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm).
True, I guess. But then again Coursera isn't a library.

As other commenbters have said, course material can often be found on the net if you look in the right places.
Indeed. TMI was pretty close to a worst case disaster for a PWR with a partial, uncontrolled meltdown, with a lot of corium ending up on the bottom of the vessel where it did exactly what was planned, sat there not particularly bothering anyone except the company which would have really rather continued generating power from the reactor.

I'd have to double check, but as I recall if you were standing outside the containment vessel, you'd have received the dosage you'd get from sleeping with two other people (potassium-40) ... which we should clearly outlaw right now due to that grave danger (along with living in the Mile High city of Denver, commercial jetliner travel, and eating bananas).
Everything Is Terrible
Airbnb vs. Berlin
I'm pretty conservative, but I don't object to him doing this in any way. I also highly doubt it will be sustainable. Unless all along he really was paying below market for the work his employees are doing.

I also have no disagreement with the notion that higher paid employees will be more productive (though I've certainly seen individual examples where the opposite is true) but that doesn't mean it's affordable for the business owner in all situations. If I were paid $70,000/yr to bag groceries I'd be productive as hell but I'd also bankrupt my employer.

If it does end up working for him and he's more profitable and has happier employees and customers, wonderful. I don't understand why any free-market person would object to that, as long as it's his business decision and he's not being forced to pay what he pays. Clearly a $70,000 minimum wage would not work for any and all employment situations.
There seems to be some sentiment that it is a good thing that duplicates are posted if they eventually gain attention. Perhaps it would assuage the irritation of the initial posters (which I have often felt) if the dup detector awarded karma points to both the duplicate that caught everyone's attention as well as the previous (recent-ish) duplicates.
Coursera courses don't always close: I've been doing the compilers recently one and I've not come across any restrictions on access even though the last session was a year and a half ago.
Ah that's my bad, didn't catch those earlier posts