skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His argument that a library that accepts an interface without declaring all possible exceptions a method of that interface might throw is badly designed is misguided. This assumes that the writer of the library can know all possible custom exceptions that code written by the user might throw, which is impossible. But it is perfectly valid if the code that calls the library passes in an instance implementing the interface that might throw a CantFrobnicateException that the library doesn't know anything about if the calling code knows what to do if the library call fails with that exception.

The real design error here are still checked exceptions. What you really want are dynamic exceptions with an optional whole program analyzer that detects possible code paths that could lead to uncaught exceptions.
Curious UX choices on the iPad
If you're going to make a claim like that, you ought to cite your sources.
That is essentially what this article is saying. It just gives a couple concrete examples of how to do this. I think the title of the article does it a disservice.
Thanks for bringing this up!

RabbitMQ Cloud Messaging is all over the industry media, but in fact, it is not a cloud messaging platform/solution at all. It is an open source version of a traditional message-oriented middleware solution based on the controversial AMQP standard that RedHat has patents pending on. SpringSource/VMWare would have to rearchitect the product to make it into an actual cloud messaging platform. As of now, it is a traditional system that you have to install, configure, and maintain yourself. You can run it on a hosted virtual server (sorry, a cloud server) at someone else's datacenter (Amazon, Rackspace, Terremark, ...) or run it in your office.

Useful links I found from a very quick search:
http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2009/03/red-hats-amqpxml-paten...

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/The-Red-Hat-Patent-Pro...

There are a few (I can count them on one hand) true cloud messaging platforms out there. Two of the big players support messages up to 8KBs in size, and two up and coming players support 1MG or more. All are pretty cool and have their pros and cons. A big differentiator is if they are REST services only or also provide local transactional queueing (a software + services approach).

Anyway, thanks for providing me an outlet for a quiet rant.
Damn, these guys are relentless, and have seemingly unlimited resources.

(My hat's off to them.)
This is not about web browsers at all.
Almost true. I believe it was mentioned as a way to solve conflicts, not to charge people on a regular basis.
It just strikes me as a terrible way to read. To continue the analogy, I could watch a movie in fast forward and still work out what was going on and what the notable scenes were ("gosh, they're chasing him through the sewers of Vienna!"). But I wouldn't have experienced the art of the film whatsoever. Reading faster is more difficult, but similarly unhelpful. I realized a long time ago that there was literally no point trying to speed up my reading pace, and nothing to be gained from speed reading. You need to give your imagination time to explore the detail and connotations of the descriptions, not merely the meaning of the words. Otherwise you're just as well reading the cliff-notes.
You are correct that the English idiom "It's raining" is just the normal way to say that in English. The corresponding Russian sentence Идет дождь would translate literally into English as "goes rain," while the Chinese sentence 下雨 would translate as "falls rain," with the unusual word order being an example of topicalization in those languages.
A cube has 8 vertices, not 4.
If you want a certification without knowledge, go to the University of Phoenix.

It's completely unreasonable to expect one of the most fundamental math courses (taught at a top 5 applied math school) to be an easy A. Particularly when the students are business, econ, CS and physical science majors, some of whom plan to work on a trading desk.

A specific complaint: I showed how to use linear algebra to construct synthetic derivatives (e.g., build a bull spread or iron condor from puts and calls). One of the business majors complained to me that it wasn't in the book and was too hard.
A few years ago I had a page on my website about how to use a certain open source library on Windows, since the maintainers didn't want to/couldn't provide support for Windows. Then a few months later, out of the blue, a guy emails me and says 'listen, I need a small program for Windows that does X, Y and Z and they are all related to the library you have on your website, can you write me a quotation on how much it would cost to develop this'. This guy wanted it for personal use; I did a back of the envelope calculation and it came into about 5 or 8 hours of work. I wanted to be paid a commercial fee of about 70 euros an hour at the time, but I figured that this guy wasn't going to pay several hundreds of euros for a small toy for personal use. It looked like a nice, interesting, small project though, so I basically told the guy 'here's the deal, I don't really have time to write this program and I don't want to commit to anything that I can't live up to. But, I will write this program for you and then release it as open source. The catch is that any time I put into this project is going to be time that I don't get to spend with my girlfriend. So what I'm asking you in return is that you think of a nice present for my girlfriend, she likes X, Y and Z, to make up for that.'

The guy was very surprised but after talking it over with his wife (brainstorming for ideas I guess) agreed. So I wrote the program, went back and forth with him a few times until it did what he wanted; had to switch libraries because the one I had on my website didn't work so in the end I think I put in about 10 or 12 hours. The guy was very happy with the result, I send him a version that did what he needed and then we left on vacation, and I sort of forgot about it.

A few weeks later we came home and there was a small wooden box waiting for us; at first I didn't know what it could be, then I cracked it open and it had an iPod for my girlfriend (this was a few years ago when they were still several hundred euros) and a bottle of very nice champagne for the both of us, and a note saying how much he and his wife had appreciated the program and how they hoped we'd like the gifts.

Per hour I don't think I made that much, but it felt much better than any of the money I've ever made from the odd job through elance :)
You could try adding to the discussion rather than spouting off witty one-liners. I think I addressed the actual points in the article well enough. If you don't agree then respond in kind or not at all, rather than just showing your contempt. In some cases, not saying anything at all can serve to elevate the discussion.
There's a "serious economics" track for those who want to go to grad school, involving quant courses and math up to real analysis, and a watered-down/easy-A economics track for the mediocrities who want to be investment bankers.

Fun fact: the I-banks don't even look at students who did the watered-down track.
Well, if you want to get serious: Most professionals in the industry enjoy their work. They have "fun" as much as anyone can in any line of work.

I have fun programming, and I program for work. I have fun at work. I enjoy what I do.

Anyways, it was meant as a joke. That porn is fun and real sex is not.

Nevermind. =/
Progressive? The US doesn't allow medical trials on marijuana. It doesn't allow research on marijuana.

This woman is a statistical outlier -- a person in one of a tiny handful of US states where it's even possible under state law to have it prescribed, and with a doctor who may well be putting his career on the line by prescribing marijuana. (Actual prescription is illegal under Federal law. They can "recommend", but I'm not sure if merely "recommended" pot is kosher with particular State laws)

Legally, the feds could walk into her house at any time, confiscate much of her property, jail her and her husband and send the child to child services.

It's great that some States are willing to press this issue, but the nation as a whole deserves no such credit and nothing but scorn.

The Federal government is the very reason that this mother is doing bad science personally to try and find out what works, rather than having trained experts doing it faster, more accurately and for the benefit of the nation.
>Gruber is right. His specific answer comes from his correct knowledge. I know he is correct because he's specific.

Erm, that's a very odd way of putting it. I think the OP was just saying "Gruber's specific claims have been reliable in the past, and hence are quite likely to be correct now." That is perfectly reasonable and it's not circular. (It is, of course, an inductive form of appeal to authority, but there is nothing wrong with that.)
Also:

* A preposition is something you should not end a sentence with.

* Never use stupidistic adjective forms.

* All generalizations are bad.
I've lived in Texas for most of my life, imoving between Dallas and Austin, and I can attest to the spirit of what the cab driver told you; Austin is radically different from the rest of the state. Austin is a staunchly liberal college town while the rest of the state is extremely right-wing.
3D Video on Youtube.
This is just not true. The "revolving door"-system generally refers to the problem that private firms (the regulated) employ people who formerly worked for the regulator, thereby incentivizing regulators to regulate in favor of private firms so as to maximize their job prospects after their government term has ended. While it is true that candidates for governmental positons get temp positions at think tanks, think tanks themselves are neither regulated nor get paid by regulated firms to lobby the regulators to propose beneficial (to the regulated) regulations. So neither Cato nor AEI nor Brookings are part of the revolving door system.
Simple. He had a Lisa.
Maybe you know more about the airline industry than I do, but I disagree that ' airlines like to break out fees is so that they can offer a lower base ticket price'.

Airlines didn't lower the cost of tickets when they started charging for checked luggage. They started charging to increase revenue.

Your ticket price didn't decrease when airlines stopped serving meals, they just used the cost savings to reduce operating costs.

Let's not confuse competitive pricing with cost based price reductions. They are two different things.

Further more, you mention a person 'taking up more room in the cabin' should cost more. Well, I weigh less than the average American who the ticket price is charged for. Should I pay less as it costs less fuel, I take up less space, I move faster than the larger person sitting to my left?
I think the point being made is that giving your client the option to determine what your work is worth carries with it the hidden threat that you'll lost interest in doing work for them if they undervalue you. Only useful with existing relationships, but it's like getting validation that they value the work you've done.

The real problem I see with this is that occasionally clients will opt to do something fairly complicated from a technical perspective that will end up having a very small financial return. If the end results only improve their situation by $1000, but implementing it cost you $2000 based on your usual billing rate... well you're not going to get your money out of it.

This means you need to be anticipate it and be picky about what projects qualify for this type of pricing. You need to be able to validate ahead of time that the return will actually be worth the amount of work... which is a really good idea anyways, because it means you have to wrap your head around the actual value of your end product and really understand the problem you're solving. It increases your involvement with the client's business, which many clients and even some developers don't realize is always necessary in order to deliver a quality product.
How would this work?
Ok, so the decision is announced and there are three big regulators on the government list, "Toughy Inc.", "FASB" and "Wimpy Co." Here's how your scenario would play out with the big tech companies:
Microsoft announces that they've chosen Wimpy to preserves their ability to innovate.
IBM announces they've chosen Wimpy so that they can continue to be responsive to their customers.
Google implies they wanted to choose Toughy but were forced to choose Wimpy by the competitive environment.
HP chooses Wimpy and mentions something about being founded in a garage in California.
Apple chooses the iconoclastic boutique regulator WimpyTwo. (WimpyTwo prints their standards on much nicer paper.)
Every other tech company chooses Wimpy since it's obvious the market has spoken.
Toughy Inc. lays off most of their staff.

Five years later it's revealed that upper management at Microsoft were including their giant egos as depreciable assets. The executives of Microsoft and Wimpy Co. are hauled before Congress and claim that nobody could have forseen what would happen, besides everybody was doing it, it was legal at the time, and it was the work of a few bad apples. A few mid-level executives get fired. WimpyTwo grows considerably and some former employees of Wimpy Co start Softie, LLC. Toughy Inc is never seriously considered since it's a niche player.
Duh, it's a planar cube!
Rails Fails (rubyonrails.org being squatted)
I think you didn't learn Javascript but you picked from from the streets and that is why you didn't know what you mentioned.
Five Ways Social Networks And Their Users Butt Heads
... http://gizmodo.com/5520669/it-was-gray-powells-birthday

... really? did you kick him enough while he was down? It's just unethical to exploit someone this much just for your ad clicks.
Elliotte Rusty Harold is wrong.

Checked exceptions are problematic because they version poorly, they implicitly presume the wrong model of exception handling, and more importantly, they prematurely decide the application's desired policy for error handling by encoding the "checkedness" in the type itself, where it is not available for configuration by the programmer.

The poor versioning is obvious. The OP says "The superclass/interface was not designed properly for extension. Specifically it did not take into account the exceptions overriders/implementers might reasonably want to throw" - and the only problem with that is the well-known difficulty in predicting the future.

But actually, it's more subtle: exceptions are usually a desired encapsulation violation. When programming to an abstract interface, you don't want to know the details of how it's implemented, but all the ways it can fail are a function of how it's implemented. You can't reasonably require the design of the most abstract levels of the system to predict every possible low-level implementation failure and state them out long-hand; the only reasonable implementation would be "throws Exception", which defeats the whole point of checked exceptions.

By presuming the wrong model of handling, I'm referring to the burden of creating a tunnel through the type system for your exception type between the point of the throw and the point of the catch. This burden is set up to optimize for catching sooner rather than later. But the thing is, usually you never want to catch; usually, the only exception catching you want done is at the highest levels of the system, in an event loop or request dispatcher. If you were expecting an exception you'd want to catch, the situation isn't exceptional; instead, you shouldn't be using an API that throws. .NET's pattern of e.g. Int32.Parse() vs Int32.TryParse() exemplifies this.

The OP tries to argue against this with the distinction between runtime errors and exceptions: "checked exceptions do not require the programmer to provide handlers in situations where no meaningful action can be taken. When no meaningful action can be taken Java programs throw Errors". And this brings me to my third point. The determination for whether meaningful action can be taken varies from program to program, and is encoded in the very exception handlers themselves - i.e. it's the programmer who makes that choice, not the people who defined the relevant exception types.

His examples of error - out of memory error, stack overflow, class not found, etc. - actually make more sense as reasons to completely terminate the application, rather than make any attempt to catch. They're not really errors so much as panics.
You try Eventbrite http://www.eventbrite.com/t/how-to-sell-tickets-online
If Oracle has any desire to popularize ODF, this is about the dumbest thing they could possibly do. It doesn't even seem likely to result in much short-term profit.
"Associative arrays" is a confusing name for objects

That line makes me think the author doesn't know what an associate array is.
Well, that kills that.
Quick link to the WHOIS record:
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/rubyonrails.org
ReverbNation is Hiring Engineers
Hey Hacker News, ReverbNation is hiring for the positions of Mobile App Developer and Systems Support Engineer. ReverbNation.com is the leading online music marketing platform used by over 600,000 artists, managers, record labels, and venues to grow their reach, influence, and business across the internet. If you are interested please email us at jobs [at] reverbnation [dot] com.

The Positions:

MOBILE APP DEVELOPER

Like Music?
Want to work at an energetic music Web 2.0 company? We are looking for an accomplished mobile app developer to join our team.

Job Requirements
• Experience developing iPhone applications.
• Extensive knowledge of iPhone SDK, XCode, Objective-C and Cocoa.
• Proficiency with XML parsing.
• Experience with developing Android applications a big plus.
• Proficiency with SQL also a big plus.

SYSTEMS SUPPORT ENGINEER

Like variety
We have a position that will start with a variety of different tasks and allow you to determine your own path. Your time will initially be split between system administration of our computers and some light web page development/testing. You'll work with our top engineers to improve your skills even further. As we grow, you too can grow into a more dedicated position that best suits you whether that be in development, system administration, quality assurance, or support.

Job Requirements
• 1 or more years experience
• Linux system administration or strong Unix skills
• Proficiency with SQL
• Experience with web-technologies
• Object-oriented development is a plus
The burden is on you to show that you actually did not misrepresent the author's points. You say the author complains about lax regulation leading to market failure. On the contrary, the author complains about too much static regulation, as any static rule just leads to it being circumvented. He proposes e.g. financial accounting rules based on general principles and duties.

Also, where are your sources for the fact that the SEC is or was at any time supposedly devoid of material funding?
No, it's not that simple. Doing this sort of thing changes the dynamics of the relationship between you and your customer. As it says in the article, if your job is a one off, don't do it.

But if you are looking for an on-going relationship, this changes the dynamics and gets much more money than simply hiking your rates.

It's related to the game where one person gets $10 and then has to share it with another, who has the option of rejecting it. If they reject it, you both lose all the money. The simple game theoretic analysis is that you should offer $1. They're better off accepting than rejecting, so they should accept.

But they don't. Experiments show that people will reject any amount below $3, and $3 itself is marginal. People have an inate sense of fairness, and if they think you're not acting fairly then they will punish you, even if it costs them money.

There is often more at stake than the obvious financials, and this is an example where that is being recognised and used.

EDIT:

+ http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=ultimatum+game

+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
Either that, or it inspires him to do better work than he otherwise would.
Rant: There is no point in hiding an entire article just because I disable JavaScript (noscript default block). View Source and ooh, there's the story. Even if somebody has a 'good reason' for doing this, it's annoying and i'll just work around it. I mean, if I have the peace of mind to disable javascript i'm just going to find another way to view your content without it.
Guess the number - a cute game theory puzzle
So what is your source?

The author is controlling for inflation, that's why he says, in 2005 dollars, meaning inflation adjusted dollars.

I don't think it's a particular good piece, since he doesn't cite the raw sources, which is what I'd want to look at. But it's enough to question your original statement that inflation adjusted, per student state funding of education has decreased over the past thirty years. Do you have a better source?

I do agree that net tuition has increased. But that's because the universities have allowed costs to increase at a much greater rate than inflation. The solution is to control costs, not to complain about under funding.
I had never heard of smarterfox before, and based on this page design, maybe I know way.

I have to scroll way down the page before I come across the '4.0 just released'. Everything up to that point is just ads or tells me to share smarterfox, but I don't even know what it is yet.
Google Mail Hacked?
Russian security company "Kaspersky lab" reports infiltration into a number of gmail accounts. Seems to range across all accounts with different passwords. Trojan? Gaia sources?

This report (and follow ups) in english:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=77127463d8f40cb6&hl=en

Kaspersky report (russian):
http://www.securelist.com/ru/blog/32625/Massovyy_vzlom_ili_Gmail_bag
US Supreme Court Voids Law Banning Videos of Animal Cruelty
That has been proven to be not true.

Radiohead made more money from the "pay what you like" download of their album "in Rainbows" than they did from the release of their previous album.

http://www.nme.com/news/radiohead/40444
Goodbye BOFH, Hello Cloud
The reason for the increase in tuition over inflation is because of the decrease in funding per student by the government. The gap that tuition is trying to overcome is twofold. It seeks to overcome inflationary adjustments and adjustments to the decrease in funding per student.

Higher education should not be free but should not be an undue burden on students. It's in society's long term interest to make higher education affordable. Your last paragraph is not justified by anything that I have written.
This report from Kaspersky lab is in russian, but there are reports in english see the google question and follow up comments:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=77127...

Could be a trojan stealing gmail passwords, or a Gaia-related hack? Any other sources?
School District Took 56,000 Webcam Photos
You're right about the definition of public good, but public goods are not the only area in which it's rational for the government to intervene in the market. Both health care and education have strong positive externalities, and would be under provisioned if left purely to the private market. Particularly in the case of education where many of those who benefit from education are budget and credit constrained, the under provision will be particularly severe.

That's why it makes sense for the government to intervene.
> Legally, the feds could walk into her house at any time, confiscate much of her property, jail her and her husband and send the child to child services.

I think it's safe to assume, given other laws currently on the books in the US, that this is always the case, no matter what you personally have or have not done.