skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The this the original author is referring to is macros, of which, with-net-file is merely an example.

The author makes this clear later in the post: "Once you have caught the programmer’s interest with simple macros show them some other cool things they can do, like language extensions. Experienced programmers are always looking for more control, and macros give it to them."
In Smalltalk, it's just a normal function you can add to Filename:

doWithStreamThenClose: aBlock
| fileStream |
fileStream := self newReadWriteStream.
^[aBlock value: fileStream]
ensure: [fileStream close]

This allows one to do:

(Filename named: 'mypath/foo.dat')
doWithStreamThenClose: [ :fileStream |
"do whatever you want with fileStream"
"it shall be closed"
].
Here's a direct link to geohot's blog posting: http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/02/first-round-of-don...
The best way to pick a good agent is to interview with several and see what gigs they throw your way. I've gotten a bad vibe off agencies with good clients, and vice versa, so I would ignore any secondary signifiers and look solely at what interviews they send you on. Having said that, I would avoid the big temp agencies. They are clearing houses for cheap temp labor so they waste your time on those stupid in-house computer tests but they don't have good clients for tech.

To answer your second question, I've never seen a recruiter that does full-time or contractor but not both. They always try to steer you toward full-time however those full-time positions usually start as contractor-to-hire anyway.

It's really quite easy to find good recruiters in NYC. They are usually subscribed to technical mailing lists and LinkedIn groups. Broadcast your availability and see who contacts you.

One last bit of advice: check out Freelancers Union for health insurance. The options aren't stellar but still better than anywhere else.

What kind of work do you do, if you don't mind my asking?
thanks for this reminder. I've witnessed good things from meditation as well but find it very difficult to do. I am inspired to try again.
Imagine a small company, that is profitable. Now imagine that that company can also provide a service for free that in the opinion of the people of this company would make the world a better place and this service does cost much (relative to the profits). Why would this small company not provide this service? As the company grows and goes public, there is more scrutiny over how the company spends its money. However, why not spend that <made_up_number>0.000001%</made_up_number> of the profits on something like this?
Produce a per-day activity report from the log of the current git repository
this is in reference to macros, of which "with-net-file" is just an example.
I guess that's supposed to be rhetorical, but I recall that Amex and Visa both waived fees for donations to Haiti after the earthquake.
You lost me at "real computer." In my own experience, one of the biggest reasons that normal customers like the iPad is _because_ it's not like their desktop computer.

The obsession with emulating a desktop/laptop experience is mainly the domain of those of us who are already experts in that experience; for average users who may generally dislike the "real computer", it's not a selling point.
I got chrome here somewhere, thanks for the TIP.
Wait, wasn't R&D the piece of a corporation's work that was going to stay in the US, because every worker here was talented, good at problem solving and so forth?
Would anecdotes help? My sister is bipolar, and medication has helped her immensely. My wife had a pretty bad bout of anxiety / depression that pretty much tanked two years until I convinced her to try some medication - a year of it helped get her over the edge, and she's off and doing much better.

Now I'll proceed to shoot somewhere near my foot, maybe hitting it :) I'd rather be understood and disagreed with than misunderstood and have fake happiness. And I would honestly be curious what your take is on this, I obviously haven't experienced everything there is in the world. There's no hard feelings here, I've seen that stance before, and I hate it too. It does indeed prevent people from getting help.

My main view with anything that tweaks your brain is that your brain is enormously flexible. Barring issues where you're not making enough / too much of a certain chemical (ie, largely genetic), you quite literally did this to yourself (as bad as that sounds). Your life habits have caused you to get stuck in the loop of depression / anxiety, and it builds on itself, pretty frequently until it controls you unless you are lucky enough to find a way to break out before then. Or someone drags you out. Drugs help get you out of that loop, but if your habits don't change you'll train your brain to go back to where it was in spite of the drugs (and this happens, it's not just dualism / zomg-natural-only. That's part of what causes psychological addictions, and depression is highly addictive). Again, unless there's a more permanent biological problem - then you're using drugs to reach normalcy, which is where your body / brain wants to be anyway. But enforced normalcy while you keep pulling yourself away from it is doomed to failure and high costs.

There are plenty of cases of, say, insufficient dopamine production due to genetics. And cases where depression / anxiety have caused chemical imbalances (ie: nearly all, especially severe cases). And the existence of medications to help that is utterly wonderful. But using drugs to ignore a problem isn't a solution. To solve a problem, yes, but that's not how many (possibly most) people use them, in part because of how quickly these medications are leapt at. Can't focus? Try hyperactivity drugs. Can't sleep? Try sleep aids. Can't be happy? Try antidepressants. Therapy, on the other hand, gets nowhere near as much medical support, despite similar success rates and often longer-term solutions. It has plenty of failures as well, everyone's different and there are plenty of bad therapists out there; I'm merely saying that it gets far less support than drugs do.
Boxing as in being repeatedly hit in the head with considerable strength? I have my doubts about this being a healthy lifestyle, but I would be interested to see statistics on longevity among people who were active boxers compared to the rest of population.
Tell me about it. Back in the day my (future) wife and I would burn a Saturday playing.
Sad, but many people saw this coming when Apple announced the new terms. It's just another step for Apple being more restrictive. What's next?
I remember how inscrutable things like the reason the maximum number of rupees was 255 became clear to me once I learned more about computer programming and things like 8-bit unsigned integers.
> At $10/person/year, SharePoint is a steal.

Are your users satisfied?
I only coded during the Foursquare Hackathon. Not before.
Which means 1pm to 9pm.
The actors of SV are entrepreneurs and VCs. Think of all the "color" you get from TC and Gawker - it's basically identical to Hollywood paparazzi.
Sure, although at least for me, these posts are most useful for:

1. showing the different kinds of applications people are using redis for;

2. as individual anecdotes that are slowly-but-surely adding up to real data.
Hotmail One-Ups Gmail, Takes Facebook Chat Global
No, it's not: "There is no way to do this in a non Lisp language. The closest you can come is to create an object whose constructor sends the open command and destructor sends the closed command, but even this approach has problems."

Seems pretty clear he's talking about the opening/creating and closing/destroying resources.
So fun drawing trollfaces
Ask HN: why is Hacker News not searchable?
Why are the submission in hacker news are not searchable??
if search was available, i could search for my favorite company,language or technology...
i really love hacker news, but i miss certain news which i may love...
why are the submissions not categorized??
it would be better with news search.what say??
Ramakanth,
(http://www.twitter.com/ramakanth_d)
How does catching exceptions absolve us of the need to remember to close files?
Could I get some help reviewing / beta testing my new iPhone app?
I am just finishing 'Q Scan for Netflix'. It's my new iPhone app that let's you quickly scan retail Blu-ray and DVD barcodes to add movies to your Netflix Queue. You can also manage your queue within the app, check out new releases, and explore the Netflix movie catalog.

I would love to get some help from the Hacker News community (long-time lurker here!). I will likely be charging for the app, but would love to give it away to Hacker News members that are willing to provide some feedback.

Thank you, John
Sorry, but this is just: lame.
Zelda is one of my all time favorites. I love the series so much. Can't wait for the new game.

Seeing this, though, makes me want to make an adventure game. Hmm....
I'm definitely interested.

Also, out of curiosity, what do you use to render the actual charts? I'm working on an analytics package and can't decide on a charting engine that is clientside and reasonably performant.
The thing that motivated me to really write programs on my own and experiment with them was the fact that the mIRC chat client had a built-in scripting language (a custom language, which in retrospect was a mixture of nutty and interesting). As a high school student who frequented IRC, writing some scripts for my client was a compelling use-case.

I had been briefly introduced to Logo and BASIC as a kid, though, in some sort of after-school program.
I think the answer to that is they've made it a lot easier to borrow a lot of money very cheaply. I'm pretty sure when my parents got a mortgage 25-some years ago, the interest rate was around 18%. I wouldn't be able to afford my house at that rate. I'm sure this same cheap money has helped finance many people who build things, then helped them set up plants in China and Mexico as well.

Whether cheap money is a good or a bad thing in the long run, I guess that has yet to be seen.
This was a great write up. Redis and the community would benefit from having more writeups like this, detailing different successful real world ways to use it. One can read the Redis documentation and imagine many uses for its different data structures and commands, but to read about tried-and-working practices is fantastic. Of particular use, in my opinion, is seeing key naming/organization schemes that people are using effectively.

I personally would love to see the code for these and other use cases.
I might be wrong, but I thought that only parents from Anglo Canadian schools can select English schools? If those from UK, US, ... can pick English schools, that would remove a huge stumbling block.

Did some quick checking via Google, and what I found requires attending a Canadian english school (based on law 101).
Actually you get different types of people working with different languages. It does somewhat matter when you're hiring "X programmers". Good programmers can switch, but are often aware of these communities and keep certain languages at arms lengths because of this.
I'll be attending Superconf this weekend, excited to get some insight on startups from the guest speakers, and other attendees. Hopefully i'll find a good local dev too. :)
I voted you up, but I'm not quite sure that's the whole story.

I think Adobe absorbed a bad corporate culture when they acquired Macromedia, and that better accounts for why they're making such bad products now. On top of this, Adobe will never be a successful platform vendor because they suck at making platforms, and the market has too many platforms already.

Will competition somehow make Adobe good again? It might, but it's by no means certain. The long-term alternative for them is failure in the marketplace.

Signs of things turning around for Adobe will be when they:
> Make HTML5 the primary target for all Adobe software (make authoring for Flash not the default).
> Dump Air.
> Make the new Acrobat a slim wrapper around HTML5, facilitating a transition away from Acrobat toward standards.
> Stop trying to be cross-platform. Use native UI in all software. Dump the installer on platforms where installers aren't standard (Mac OS X).
> make completely new creative applications for iOS. An iOS-based desktop computer is probably coming. If Adobe was smart, it would try to make great native tools for creative professionals again.
> Fire the executives they picked up from Macromedia and lay off legacy staff.
HTML5 for web developers
If it's a small company with a small number of developers then you could argue that the benefits of being able to spec and manage your own workstation outway potential drawbacks.

There are however two significant problems with this approach:

Having centralised hardware means that repairs take a minimal amount of time - you're not going to keep stock of different types of PCI, PCI-e hardware, 5 different graphics cards or 4 different types of DIMM.

Having the developer handle the purchasing relationship reduces the opportunity for discounts (as well as control of software on the network). Margins on hardware are generally razor thin but having 8 different support contracts with 6 different suppliers is a potential logistical nightmare for a company. Even worse, if IT holds the relationship then that's 6 different suppliers for the same class of item that the relationship needs to be maintained with. The extra time used for that is time that could be spent supporting IT.

I realise your problem, but your problem is not that your computer is slow, it's that your compilation isn't distributed.
It's also less efficient for anyone who's listening to you. Gender-specific pronouns help ensure you're talking about the same person. Personally though, I find myself saying "that's what they said" (or similar, in a non-joke-related context) pretty often. Usually past-tense, for some reason. * shrug * to each their own.

I do boggle that "they" isn't technically acceptable for cases where gender isn't known, though. "He/she" seems like insanity, both in writing and in speaking, when "they" sits there waiting to be used. It's extremely rare that context isn't sufficient to determine if it's plural or not. Heck, Japanese essentially does without plurals entirely, and that's a functioning language.
Don't kid yourself. In Philly, it owes more to the apathy of the courts than any egalitarian motivations.
That's what the "flag" option is for. I just clicked that to flag this as spam.
Maybe there's not as much difference as you might think. Look up Paul Farnell and Litmus. You can listen to his Mixergy interview from January.
A mixture of (mostly) Flot with a touch of Raphael. I am but a lowly backend developer, I'll try to get my colleague dz to comment on the hows and whys.
Physicists Build Bigger 'Bottles' of Antimatter to Unlock Nature's Secrets
Curiosity: the trend (in this case) has reversed itself with time. Quite possibly due to your reply, but that's impossible to tell from a single instance. How many maintain that reversed-upvoting trend after a full day or two?
A company supporting their involved, early adopting developer base? What?

In all seriousness, its a huge marketing backfire for Sony to act in this manner, and a huge plus for Microsoft in it's respective choice. I understand the "magic black box" theory of product development as it referes to the 99% of the population that doesn't mod, but that 1% is a vital asset who's influence far exceeds their numbers.

These two populations are inherently different, and should be treated as such. It would be a bad marketing move in this day and age to force typical users to hack, and its an equally bad move to force hacker users to follow suit.
I've had luck with the Google operator "site:" as in "site:news.ycombinator.com" and then the rest of the terms + date range limits.
> Judges LOVE honesty, and so do cops.

Traffic tickets are not even in the same league as the kind of offenses that we're talking about here, but if they are any indication then I have to agree. I've gotten out of my last three traffic stops by simply telling the cop exactly what I did: driving in the HOV lane without a passenger, rolling through a stop sign, and doing 40 in a 25.

These people -- law enforcement and the court -- get jerked around all day by people who insult their intelligence with bullshit stories. It must be refreshing to hear someone clearly admit what they did with no attempt to evade responsibility.
I think they should use whatever verb results in the highest conversion rates. Who cares about semantics -- it's more important that the designers are getting paid.

Edit: typo.
Motorola Xoom to ship without Flash for battery reasons?
Anonymous' Letter to Westboro Church
We, the collective super-consciousness known as ANONYMOUS - the Voice of Free Speech & the Advocate of the People - have long heard you issue your venomous statements of hatred, and we have witnessed your flagrant and absurd displays of inimitable bigotry and intolerant fanaticism. We have always regarded you and your ilk as an assembly of graceless sociopaths and maniacal chauvinists & religious zealots, however benign, who act out for the sake of attention & in the name of religion.

Being such aggressive proponents for the Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Information as we are, we have hitherto allowed you to continue preaching your benighted gospel of hatred and your theatrical exhibitions of, not only your fascist views, but your utter lack of Christ-like attributes. You have condemned the men and women who serve, fight, and perish in the armed forces of your nation; you have prayed for and celebrated the deaths of young children, who are without fault; you have stood outside the United States National Holocaust Museum, condemning the men, women, and children who, despite their innocence, were annihilated by a tyrannical embodiment of fascism and unsubstantiated repugnance. Rather than allowing the deceased some degree of peace and respect, you instead choose to torment, harass, and assault those who grieve.

Your demonstrations and your unrelenting cascade of disparaging slurs, unfounded judgments, and prejudicial innuendos, which apparently apply to every individual numbered amongst the race of Man - except for yourselves - has frequently crossed the line which separates Freedom of Speech from deliberately utilizing the same tactics and methods of intimidation and mental & emotional abuse that have been previously exploited and employed by tyrants and dictators, fascists and terrorist organizations throughout history.

ANONYMOUS cannot abide this behavior any longer. The time for us to be idle spectators in your inhumane treatment of fellow Man has reached its apex, and we shall now be moved to action. Thus, we give you a warning: Cease & desist your protest campaign in the year 2011, return to your homes in Kansas, & close your public Web sites. Should you ignore this warning, you will meet with the vicious retaliatory arm of ANONYMOUS: We will target your public Websites, and the propaganda & detestable doctrine that you promote will be eradicated; the damage incurred will be irreversible, and neither your institution nor your congregation will ever be able to fully recover. It is in your best interest to comply now, while the option to do so is still being offered, because we will not relent until you cease the conduction & promotion of all your bigoted operations & doctrines. The warning has been given. What happens from here shall be determined by you.
> Currently, find/replace only lets you re-order or remove groups or insert static text.

I must be misunderstanding you, but that's obviously incorrect.

"foo 1 bar 2".gsub(/\d+/) {|m| m.to_i * 2 }

1.8 also. Does MatchEvaluator bring more to the table?
There is also this website available which does a great job : http://searchyc.com/
I fear this will ultimately hurt both parties. Strangely, I almost think Anonymous should know better and know the end game already, and it would be something not very productive. That church is just a bunch of troll nutbags, and shouldn't be fed.
When I first found Tumblr, I didn't really get it. I wondered why I'd use the service when other services like WordPress are out there. Then I saw the quick, small side of it and wondered why I'd replace Twitter with it. But there is a great point here... It's a very good "in between" for people who don't want something too simple (allows them more control over content), but don't want something overly complex to set up or maintain, either.
Their fonts are definitely worth paying for, though. If you're into that sort of thing...
Agreed, those are the same reasons I was happy to see the posts that came well before mine. People that know me well know I will poke holes in everything. We didn't decide on Redis (over tried and true PostgreSQL) for nothing. (We have also used and do use other NoSQL when truly applicable.) I love seeing smart use cases for new DBs.
For almost any man that point will be beyond 7 years.
Don't worry about it. It was pretty funny.

I'm going to probably release a NodeJS/Socket.IO version then do a blog post comparing the two and release all of the source code. Should have the Node one up in a day or two.
Why? Westboro is a small outfit with a lot of nuisance value but little force otherwise. Their message is hateful to others (they may disagree), but they don't control or have influence over any governments or militaries.
The day the movies died
I smell illusory superiority...
This isn't about exceptions, though it is certainly part of the problem. Try, catch, finally blocks are commonly used to ensure that resources are released once they are no longer used. It not only forces you to remember to close the resources, it also forces you to think about what happens if something in your code breaks, and you have these open resources still in use. It's practically the entire reason that the "finally" block exists.
I don't understand. You're saying why does Google support mapping of current events on their maps service?

It seems like a purely incidental usage. They want maps of everything, this happens to be one thing a user chose to map.

I certainly don't see any politics or explicit encouragement of protest, government change, etc.
@matchFWD is ;-)

send resume, links to code and why you think you'd be a valuable asset for a new startup at phil AT matchfwd.com

thxs
@philgo20
Throwing Star LAN Tap
> ... relatively little "per user" cost.

This makes a lot of assumptions about the business model of developers. For a BaseCamp-like product, it is mostly true, support costs notwithstanding. But a video- or music-streaming service that pays out to content providers on a per-item basis has much more in common with a brick-and-mortar retailer when it comes to profit margins.
Thank you for this post. This is what we need as a community to improve: use cases, and useful criticisms when things don't work well, so that we can find new strategies.

It's cool to see that Redis works well for many things, but it will be even cooler if diskstore, or any other approach, can made Redis more accessible even when the performance gain of being in-RAM is not enough for some kind of applications to justify the costs.

We are also working at cluster and faster .rdb persistence. So there are interesting things going, but fortunately we will have something new and stable in a few hours, as 2.2.0 stable is going live in very little time :)
In GNU tools at least (not sure if others follow this convention?), the option '--' indicates that subsequent parameters aren't to be interpreted as options. For example, this lets you cd into a directory named '-foo':

cd -- -foo
We have been using it for sessions (amongst tons of other stuff) at Shopify for half a year and found that we didn't have problems with increasing memory after we started setting expiration bits on the session keys.