skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I understand correctly, this allows the code catching an
exception to continue processing from the point the exception was thrown (i.e. the stack is not unwound). Does anyone know
if it is possible to perform this kind of exception handling in Haskell?
Yea that is a good question.

One answer: The built-in structure (the questions). I would make it so that there are 3 pre-built questions, with the option of adding more, but that all apps use those 3 questions. Or 3 questions and an open comment field. And then make it easier to answer them, and to go from product idea to the next product idea (so I can give feedback on 5 products in a minute).

But the main answer will be if you get some traction, ie. launch with a bunch of apps in there (email people who are building apps) and a bunch of people ready to review. I think that should be possible, loads of people love to opine on startup ideas.
I think it's impossible that all of your social interactions will stay unaffected.
How to Make Visa Obey Your Every Desire
Is there proof of this? I haven't heard from my payment gateway and I don't know where to get pci certified. It would smell like a scam to me but they don't seem to be selling anything.

Just to note, I have clients who get emails scaring them into "pci scans" even when they don't handle credit card information.
The iPhone is the first, and in some cases still the only, platform to target if you're doing anything in the mobile consumer space. RIM competes with businesses only, there is no meaningful "app market" there, nor with Windows Mobile. Android is doing well, but it remains a distant second.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/18636-where-does-that-2nd-b-...

Quote:

In the early 1860's, when oil production began, there was no standard container for oil, so oil and petroleum products were stored and transported in barrels of all different shapes and sizes (beer barrels, fish barrels, molasses barrels, turpentine barrels, etc.). By the early 1870's, the 42-gallon barrel had been adopted as the standard for oil trade. This was 2 gallons per barrel more than the 40-gallon standard used by many other industries at the time. The extra 2 gallons was to allow for evaporation and leaking during tranport (most barrels were made of wood). Standard Oil began manufacturing 42 gallon barrels that were blue to be used for transporting petroleum. The use of a blue barrel, abbreviated "bbl," guaranteed a buyer that this was a 42-gallon barrel.
The best open source database just got better, can't wait to use this in production.
I agree in most cases, but Cucumber is one of the few times when it really felt beneficial to me. In most cases, I'd rather have straightforward Ruby code like we all understand or a simple YAML config file. But for a declarative spec framework, Cucumber works nicely. Try looking at a Cucumber spec vs. a Steak one and I think you'll see what I mean.

Then again, I am a vegetarian.
So by your logic it's OK for the government to use education to relegate poor kids to dead end jobs because they live in a bad neighborhood? Very enlightened.

Edit: For anyone who downvotes this answer me one question: How is this not exactly what he's saying when he says:

The goal of public schools is to teach children to conform to the expectations of the work force, so depending on where the school is located the students may end up barely
Unfortunately, yes. We were affected in that Facility a few years back. One of the reasons I make sure we're in multiple datacenters for crucial systems today.
I've always assumed that "Sophisticated" Investors are those that have more money to invest/lose.
Professional Website Designing
There are many exams given where questions require not just study and understanding but also a high level of innate intelligence.

So no matter how hard the average student may study, he/she would have little chance of making progress on such questions.

This could be devastating mentally -- and perhaps science will show that it eventually results in permanent brain damage.
Wrong and wronger. Each of the console gaming companies you mentioned has more market share in consoles than Apple has in smart phones (and Apple's share of mobile phones as a whole is trivial). While the iPhone might garner 95% of Hacker News entries, it's only selling about 15% of smart phones. (That's a lot, especially at the markup Apple gets off of it, but it's less than any of the console makers has.)

Regardless, one does not need a monopoly to engage in anti-competitive actions and for them to be illegal.
3.3.1 is a section of the Terms of Use of developers seeking to use Apple's distribution channel. Apple isn't trying to make middle-ware-built iPhone apps illegal. It just doesn't want them on the app store. An important distinction between the car/part and printer/ink analogies.

Forcing Apple to repeal 3.3.1 doesn't allow offending software to be built and sold (as it already can be), it forces Apple to stock its shelves with it and thus take on users' expectations that Apple will support it (by making sure an OS update doesn't break hundreds of apps by running afoul of a popular middleware package).
The same thing happened to me the first time I was in in Hawaii. I was sitting by the beach and I wondered "why on earth are they lighting tiki torches in the middle of the day?"

The sun just fell out of the sky around ten minutes later. Very jarring indeed.
Deepwater Horizon-- Discussion of What Actually Happened
Google Acquires BumpTop
The U.K. National Health Service Act of 1946
I wonder if we'll also see an inquiry into 3.3.9, which is about data collection and impacts mobile ad networks. If Apple's own mobile ad network can leverage data for targeting that other ad networks can't, I really can't see those ad networks just acquiescing without exploring their legal options.
Very good, although you can have both at once, e.g. the 1929 crash had some aspects of an high tech equity bubble in radio. I suspect the credit bubble part of it was overwhelmingly dominant, though.
The major issue with this is finding a good formalization of "difficult" and especially "too difficult". At this university course, theoretical computer science or electronical engineering have devastating success quotas. I found at least the first one easy. I also had to check an exam if it was too difficult or too long. It took me around 20 minutes to finish. There were people who needed more than the allocated 2 hours. Thus, I just cannot see how this could work out.
> Are you serious?
Yes.
> All the other browser vendors also have blogs,
So? What does a blog have to do with proper rendering?
> on which they have routinely discussed the details of web rendering for years.
Great. They talk about rendering.
> How does Microsoft also adopting this practice within the last year or two make them unique?
It doesn't. What makes you think it does?

The impressive thing I was referring to was the actual rendering results. To be fair, I was mostly comparing what IE9 is going to do with what Chrome/Firefox/etc are doing now, but still. IE9's implementation of something looks impressive.
Solving ASCII mazes in Python (video)
This was posted before, but we no longer require email registration. Download away! :)
Wait, what?

You want to clutter up the window title bar with more garbage?

This is why Mac OS X is the only viable desktop Unix. Apple knows how to distinguish between the simple, elegant, and useful and the eye candy which distracts and interferes with attention.
Wrong metric. You may as well choose "Shiny plastic devices market" as "smartphone market," because neither directly affects third-party devs. What matters here is app market, and Apple is utterly dominant there.
But what is the message that students get from social promotion? How about that there is no incentive to learn

An educational system that incentivizes learning via fear of failure (public humiliation in this case) is broken.

This false dichotomy of social promotion versus holding students back ignores the necessity of finding new ways to engage struggling students. Of course promoting kids to face material for which they are not prepared is going to be a problem. But having them repeat the material in the same manner and expecting them to catch on the second time around is lunacy as well.

The biggest problem that I see in education is the focus on measuring achievement in an easily-measured, narrowly-defined way. That such a system has become gamed to the point that even the successful students aren't really learning should be no surprise.

What's the solution? I know there aren't easy answers, but it has to start with making learning and teaching fun. The happiest moment in a teacher's day is when the light switches on for a student. Though it is cliche, learning is fun, but the caveat is that it's the most fun when the lesson is applied.
<i>I'm the opposite. I was born and brought up in India...</i>

Lest anyone draw any unwarranted inferences here, it's not impossible in India to have an environment where everyone simply speaks the truth. I have myself as an example. Grew up and was educated in an environment of complete meritocracy and honesty and only beyond my teenage years, realized how the real world works.
> 1. Can the macros execute code while expanding?

Probably, since this 'expansion' occurs during runtime.

> 2. Is there any way to use gensyms?

Gensym-type functionality could probably be added.

> 3. In Common Lisp, the add-macro would probably use quasiquote and unquote, like this: (defmacro add (x y) `(+ ,x ,y))
> Is there any way to use quoting?

Not likely, since Python itself treats code and data differently.

The main benefit is in creating new statements, expressions and blocks to allow for new abstractions. But this is not quite the same as Lisp macros.
And is infinitely more fun than Halo.
The author of “The Core Competence of the Corporation” (1990 and very important) and:

"“The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits” (2004) was a counterblast against two types of intellectual laziness: that of corporate titans who were ignoring the bulk of humanity and that of humanitarians who regarded profit as a dirty word. He argued that the world’s poor represented trillions of dollars’ worth of pent-up spending power."
When demand becomes tight, the price driver is not so much the cost to produce as it is the rate of production. Can we produce five or ten million barrels of oil-from-coal a day? Can we replace a two or three percent annual drop in oil production rates through some combination of conserving and replacement without recessionary demand destruction? I'm not so sure.
The use case I'm thinking of is when you want a low-profile way to survey potential users, perhaps through ads on facebook, or linked in.

Have a play with it. Here's a url to set up your own survey:

http://www.seotomata.com/beta.php

If this doesn't really help you with your startup, tell me what would, and I'll pivot.

By the way, since all the comments are coming from HNers, it's only fair to share their comments here:

http://www.seotomata.com/response.php?code=ab3kc
Perhaps science will show that pigs have wings, and perhaps if a student is "devastated mentally" when he finds out that he isn't easily capable of grasping some particular academic subfield, he should take up a trade instead of going to college.
The subject is incredibly rich, and it will take time to master basic principles. The Chinese Remainder Theorem is a good example - it requires no previous math but the concepts used to prove it are fundamental to the subject. You will need to take several courses to get enough experience to do anything useful, because you're not just learning formulas.
Ask HN: Use app first, register later
I'm looking for web applications that users can use without registration, just by visiting the site, and make you register later after you spent some time. Any good examples?
No need to guess. Oil production has been flat around 85 million barrels a day for the past four years.
Are you joking? If you aren't smart enough, then maybe you just shouldn't be in that course. There is no god given right to pass any exam.
Web Laureate Insight, "Plurk: The Plurks are Flying"
The distinction Apple is making is thus:

A "bad" behavior written into an app by hand may break on a new update, but it affects only itself.

A "bad" behavior written into middleware may break on a new update, and may take out dozens, hundreds or perhaps thousands of apps.

No-one would expect Apple to take special pains to avoid breaking a handful of random apps in the app store. But if some middleware bug effected thousands of apps, they would.

To deny that is to refuse to learn from all the intentionally-protected bugs and legacy behaviors in modern desktop operating systems, that linger solely because the platform provider doesn't want to break large swaths of legacy apps.
my ikea jerker is at standing height. i stand or use an architect's stool.

my home office:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4063/4575283982_937809715b_b....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/4575283296/in/ph...
His initial statement, "It takes seven years for each and every atom in your body to be replaced by another." sounds like an urban myth, and he provides zero documentation for it.
Ask HN: Review my Facebook Graph API Client, RestFB (Java)
Focusing attention/resources onto the worst students will raise the median/mean quality of education at the expense of the quality of the 90'th percentile.

For an egalitarian [1], this should probably be a good thing.

[1] I use the word "egalitarian" in the liberal sense of favoring equal outcomes for all people/groups.
It's a question of whether you want regulatory intervention preventing the possibility of there being "closed" systems in addition to there being "open" systems. If you prevent Apple from going their "closed" route, you lose the possibility of any benefits that might come from such a different model. When people say "let the market sort it out", they mean that if Apple's model puts out a significantly worse product than the more open models, they'll be forced to open up or die. So it's a question of whether all platforms have to be open: this would arguably lead to increased competition within each platform, but with less distinction between platforms and would prevent the possibility of exploring different models for whole platforms (and letting those models compete).
Yep. I would say it was in purpose, but it would be wishful thinking again expecting people to believe.
If I can create an app, I can create a simple landing page to gauge users feedback on a video or screenshots.

The question is, how many non-technical people are creating online businesses AND would need a service to help test their idea?

Also, isn't this a similar problem KISSMetrics is trying to tackle?
Sorry about the pay-link; I honestly just sent the first thing that came back from Google for learning styles.

I looked the links suggested in the other comments and they seem like a good start. There are many resources and applets, it seems, to help you learn math.
You might also find this book interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From

One concrete suggestion: maybe start a blog talking about your experiences?
He should thank you for making him free.

Short story:I have a friend that had an average score of 98.5%. Can you imagine the pressure on him for every exam? A small mistake could cost him big. I on the other hand lost my "viriginty" long before, so I could actually focus on learning rather than on keeping a perfect score.
Apple has an absolute monopoly on App Stores on iPhone devices.

That may not qualify as a "relevant market" for determining monopoly status. (The Conclusions of Law from the MS v DOJ case makes interesting reading along these lines).

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f218600/218633.htm

Whether this zone of commercial activity actually qualifies as a market...depends on whether it includes all products "reasonably interchangeable by consumers for the same purposes." ..."Because the ability of consumers to turn to other suppliers restrains a firm from raising prices above the competitive level, the definition of the 'relevant market' rests on a determination of available substitutes."

So if a plaintiff were to try to argue that Apple is the sole supplier of App Stores for iPhones, it would become germane that nothing is charged for access to this service, and that if access became expensive consumers could flee to other smart phones.
Remember when school was hard?

Remember when you had to study for tests?

Remember when you knuckled down and did the work, or else flunked and were held back?

Yeah, say goodbye to all that and hello to the self-esteem regime. Emitting busloads of incompetents who feel good about themselves. Since the thing to aspire to nowadays is to get on a reality show, I guess they'll have all the skills they need regardless.

God bless America, huh?
I can see where you are coming from. Recently we let go of someone and the person complained about my weaknesses. I said "that's why I hired you, remember?". I tend to be ruthlessly blunt about my weaknesses.
That quote doesn't explain why the abbreviation was used about a hundred years before stabndard oil introduced the blue barrel, as claimed by the wikipedia quote in the comment you ansered to. In fact, your quote just reiterates the claim that wikipedia said was probably false, so to make your argument you should instead show that the citations from the late 1700s are wrong.

EDIT: This will be difficult, as it is quite easy to find citations for "bbl oil" from before 1850 using google books, the first I found was on p. 239 of a book called "Railway engines and cars" from 1832. So the blue barrel legend can be firmly laid to rest in peas.
A useful metric for me: when someone says X is to be disregarded, disregard them. The problem is not with the word. The problem is with how individuals and companies use the word and how well they understand and apply the underlying concept.

Buzzwords come in and out of fashion. Real substance sticks around.
My guess is that this is destined for a Android/ChromeOS tablet but it could also be a patent play. (I don't know if Bumptop has any patents but they have been around a while.)
It's not grandalf's logic, it's an accurate observation.
The specifics are different, no doubt - but the ethos is the same. Microsoft force you to use .Net (of some form) and their APIs because that fits their business model (i.e. ties you to the XBox). They're restricting me from using my platform portable pure C code, which is their choice. I obviously don't know, but suspect if large amounts of code started targeting XNA in a cross platform way, they'd come down on that too. I also don't know what the requirements of their commercial licence are (and unless you're an XBox developer, neither do you), but it's almost certainly more than just revenue sharing (they would never allow the publication of a "Crash a plane into the twin towers" game, for example). Moreover, I do know that Nintendo certain did (and I think still do) have strict policies on types of violence in games for their platforms.

Regardless, the general point stands. They're making choices based on what they think is best for their platform, and letting the market chose. This is how the free market is supposed to work. It breaks down when there are entrenched monopolies, or when other external factors prevent people from exercising their right to buy an alternative, or start a competitor - but that is demonstrably not the case here. So why not let the market decide?
I stumbled across this years ago: http://askdatabase.com/

But I wanted to focus this specifically on answering Steve Blank's questions in the "4 steps to Epiphany"

Update: Regarding KISSMetrics, I've been paying attention to Hiten's startup. They started off with tracking David McClure's conversion funnel, I thought I'd tackle it from the other end, using Steve Blank's customer development questions.

One thing I've learnt is that a rough mockup is not going to do to solicit good quality feedback. I'm going sleep on this and try something different.
Some of what you say is obviously true. John Taylor Gatto has written very eloquently on the historical roots of the public education system in the USA.

But when you look internationally, there are plenty of publicly provisioned education systems that deliver a far better education than the USA. (I am the product of one. I went to school in Canada, in a not particularly good neighbourhood.) How do you explain that?

Within the USA, once you control for parents' socio-economic status, measured educational outcomes are better in public schools than private. (Controlling for that factor is important because private schools have a different of wealth than public schools.) How do you explain that?

Public provisioning is not, a priori, an obviously bad thing to do.
The last paragraph made me laugh. It's so sad when the tools and technology are right in front of us but we are blocked by a corporations profit margins and beaurocracy (spelling?).
After watching the BS IE team spread about Chrome, they have lost whatever respect I had for them for trying to make IE a better browser.

http://geektechnica.com/2010/04/microsoft-continues-its-trad...

Its just a matter of time before their market share drops down to tens. Unfortunately they will never completely go away.
Also, many articles on startups assume the founders have no other responsibilities. Reality is a bit different. So yes, it would be great to hear more of these stories.
1337 Things is hacked...
Thank you for your comments!

There is already a freemium version. You can create basic one-time disposable sign up sheets for free. There is no limit to the number of sheets you can create and you don't need to register to create sign up sheets. If you need to edit your sign up sheets and other non-basic features, that's the only time you need to create an account. I guess the site doesn't clearly tell this message. I'll assess and redesign. Thanks again!
I love amichail's posts. A few more gems:

"There's quite a lot of pressure to excel in high school and university. I wonder if getting an education is more dangerous than say smoking. What do you think?"

"Should games get upset when not played much? For example, a tetris-type game could show sad faces in the blocks when it is neglected."

And, my favourite (edited for brevity):

"Students should be taught to lie and cheat. These things require intelligence. Encouraging students to lie and cheat in school would improve their thinking abilities... You could reward the students whose cheating was successful with bonus marks. To get these bonus marks, students would need to fully disclose how they cheated after they got away with it. Their cheating techniques would then be made known to all students, who could then use them as ideas for more elaborate techniques... In the end, students may end up smarter and more honest."
Thanks for the marginal information, but according to Wikipedia, the total LAUSD budget for 2008-2009 was $13,645,600,000. Divided by 700,000 pupils comes out to $19,493 per student!!!
The sad part of it all is that much of what should be going to the children of today was already spent on the children of yesterday. My own school district spent $1 million on a new sports complex then cut back on the library. People don't seem to prioritize like they should.
I think there's certainly a certain bar of quality apple has in terms of the human interface guidelines / look+feel of the app. The fart apps might be crap, but they still look like iPhone apps. I have no desire and i can understand apple's desire to not want apps that have that shitty flash/flex look on the iphone. Now... if the apps look the same, I don't think this matters.

Is it a valid theory to say: this is less about the back end/performance issues and more about the front end/look+feel of apps?
What Facebook reveals to the world