skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, you're conflating two features. He's not talking about `unwind-protect', which he hasn't even used in his example (that would be the equivalent of `try' ... `finally'). He's talking about the fact that in Lisp, you can make a single abstraction that encapulates the entire pattern of opening the file before doing something and closing it afterwards. This is not that common a language feature, though it is catching on. Python's `with' was introduced in 2.5, which came out a few months after his post was written. Scala's "automatic closures" (I would say "automatic lambdas") show another way to provide this functionality, more general than Python's `with'; I think the blogger can be forgiven for not having heard of Scala in 2006. Java has no elegant way to do this.
3D Game Physics Simulation
King Conservation District to try online election
Or, more simply:

case $stdin.gets.chomp
when lambda {|matchobj| matchobj.count("!") > 1 }
puts "Quitcher yelling!"
when "hi"
puts "Hi yourself"
end
It depends on the rough patch. I've had great success with shaking things up when my rough patch was directly due to stagnation.

Of course, I'm not talking about going CRAZY and committing a few felonies or anything. Just things like moving, selling my motorcycle and buying a different one, even simply culling my wardrobe or collection of miscellaneous stuff. It all helps get you out of a rut & start moving forward again.
Obama Budget Includes $126 Million for Exascale Computing
Hi! I'm really excited my post made it to Hacker News, and am glad to discuss it.

Personally, I'm interested in ways to avoid the systemic problem next time around. But people here might benefit more from ways to distinguish the useful bits of Agile methods from the sea of bullshit, and how to defend against the latter
Good one...Hacker news makes hackers to figure it out themselves!!
What I don't get is why the police had to wake them up with a gun pointed to his head. Is this standard procedure for hackers, or criminals in general? Is it because some time ago it was decided that hackers are terrorists?

Suppose I cheated on my taxes (which I would of course never do, but I think many people consider that fair game), would the police also wake me with a gun pointed at my head?
This does the job!
I meditated for the throughout grad school to keep my sanity, but slowly transitioned into running with no music and no talking if I am running in a group as my form of meditation. Basically I combined my mediation time with my running time. It wasn't a conscious change, but I found that actively not thinking during long (13 mile+)runs gave me the mental benefits of meditating (focus, relaxation, spurred creativity) but also gave me the benefits of being an active runner.

You might say how can you focus on not thinking during a rain, well like anything it takes practice--it won't happen over night.
What's the correct figure, then?
Hey. I grew up in SF, moved to Montreal in 2002. So, you know, we probably crossed around Iowa City or so.

There's a lot to unpack in your comment. Is there enough similarity between Open Source companies that they will benefit from being near other OSS companies? I think so, for a few reasons.

1. Local investors will have experience with Open Source (we've seen this here in Montreal; our big seed investor MSU has invested in 3 OSS companies).

2. Local service providers (accountants, lawyers, consultants) are aware of and can work with Open Source business models, licenses, etc.

3. A pool of business talent -- people who know how to commercialize Open Source.

4. A pool of Open-Source-sensitive technical talent. It's hard to make Open Source work from a technical level. Some people have the chops for it -- others don't. The ones who do a good job make it look easy; and then there's the hundreds of thousands of 1-person projects on sourceforge.net.

I think that making a successful Open Source company is as different from making a shrink-wrap software company as making a Web company is. It's a sufficiently different model that you have to have a much different team to pursue it.
The high-performance technology stack for Bagcheck
I realize that. It's very common, especially for people who do not have a teacher/community to guide them. papaf didn't give many details so I can't really say much more.
Really neat idea. You should explain the backstage though, for a less deceptive experience.
Still not convinced. I find Lisp interesting and even bought The Scheme Programming Language but can't convince myself it's more useful to me than other languages. I have been told about the power of macros before though, so to that chapter I go.
thank you, my bad, momentarily confused flag w/ downvote from reading the threads about downvotes
Yeah, we can't wait for diskstore. If you imagine the analytics use case for a moment: super high speed is great, but I'd imagine 99% of the read requests don't ask for anything older than a month. Older data could easy be pushed out to disk, saving us a lot of RAM. For now we can still operate pretty easily in RAM (we have a few machines dedicated to analytics and they're just storing counters or sets of small values), but it'd be great to know we can grow a lot more without needing to put more of our shards on their own physical machines.

We already run the latest from the 2.2 branch, I can/should go into how easy that is in a followup.
I imagine doctors would gladly trade this maturity to the luxury software engineers have: having build everything themselves.

Alas, a lot in modern medicine is not really much better than putting leeches, hence the articles "X is good for your health" and then two weeks later "or maybe not".

You can compare medics to a bunch of programmers which have to maintain billions copies of self-replicating and self-modifying program with billions year old legacy code. No source code is available, only obsfucated fragments without clear understanding which bits are significant and which just junk. Disassembly is hard, and no debug is possible, so the only way to figure out how the system works is try to modify a bit and look how the output changes.

Some defects manifest quite often and there are few bugfixes ready, but how they work and what side-effects they have is not always clear.

Systems are very fragile and must be treated very carefully in order to avoid fatal crash. Hence the "maturity" of the field — one has to be very careful when dealing with the staff not fully understood.
I actually made two cool connections through it. Good job, Pierre!
BMW Launches Tech Venture Fund & New, Green Sub-Brand
Selecting a new programming language to learn
I don't fully buy this concept of "morally wrong".

So you're totally okay with me beating your [underspecified relative] so badly they're in chronic pain for the rest of their lives then?
Check out http://www.commodore16.com/php/images/books/downloads/Comput...

Basically a BASIC listing that you typed in, instructions how to to tweak the app for various microcomputer flavors of BASIC and then challenges/hint of tweaks you could make to the game.

The later ones like this one http://www.commodore16.com/php/images/books/WriteyourownAdve... were way more in-depth
I think he meant that the Xoom is capable of replacing a desktop or laptop; not that it emulates them.
Regarding Ruby's attr_accessor automatically 'generating' getters and setters:

If all you're doing is returning the internal value, or setting it blindly to the value provided, why bother? Why not just directly access the member variable if you're not doing any parameter validation or business logic?

Does Ruby provide some syntactically elegant mechanism for adding logic to the getters and setters? Because as it stands, it looks like Ruby has an elegant solution for a problem that didn't actually exist.
I see references to fixing problems on Windows, but there's no mention of Windows support or installation, nor does the hello-world example run (I get the same failed import on the fcntl module that I always have, even after upgrading).

Does it run under Cygwin?
The consumer financial industry is incredibly regulated. Think how many permits you need to open a bank and then think how many you need to create a website or start a tech company. I don't think it's fair to compare it to software or many other industries.
Thank you. I appreciate the correction and clarification.
Results Only Work Environment vs. Company Culture
Probably thinking of something like http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/01/7251...

and if memory serves me correctly, he was eventually caught shuffling credit cards that they captured back out for a tidy profit.
Nokia and the Inexplicable Surrender to Microsoft
I can't help but wonder if Apple would allow developers to follow the letter of the law, but attempt to circumvent the revenue drain via UI. Which is to say: Provide subscription options through both web and iOS APIs, but specifically advise users that signing up through iOS is damaging to the survival of the service, and strongly encouraging them to use a user-friendly UIWebView to sign up instead. Perhaps even non-monetary rewards could be attached to avoiding the iOS signup process (badges, points, etc.)

Not that I put it past Apple to reject it anyway. Just wondering how far that line could be pushed.
We can give Alan Greenspan most of the credit for that. Given the fallout, I am not sure it's much of an honor.
It's also linked in the footer.
I made a round of 20 good firm inquiries and no one defers. It is difficult to get an intro when you are from another country, although I have a potential patent to go along my business plan. Thank you for the feedback! I am posting first time, although I read HN almost daily and I didn't realize how difficult it is to get some traction on a question!
Unrealized Projects
Quite true, indeed the biggest financial thefts may even go completely unpunished: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-stre...
tldr (even though it is short, but i skimmed it) basically, everyone continues to wake up to the MPAA monopoly that exchanged an otherwise healthy market for a system that just took advantage of the lack of speed and ease in video distribution.
This is a feature of GNU `getopt`, and I think it's supported by most BSD getopts. It's also recommended behavior by the SUS, see guideline 10: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_...

So it's not mandated, but it's the behavior of nearly all modern UNIX systems.
I think it's @CapsLock
Would love to hear your input on my article!
I wonder how their motion tracking compares with PrimeSense's OpenNI and NITE. Does anybody know if this SDK provides full access to player tracking and gesture information, or is it basically like libfreenect, allowing access to the raw data?
Ask HN: Review my new mobile app startup, SingleSquare - singlesq.com
We just launched our new app SingleSquare. It is a Foursquare app for singles to help them locate and communicate with one another. We have been getting some good traffic, and are already working on some updates so looking for some good feedback. Here are some links for more information.

App's website: www.singlesq.com
App's iTunes Page: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/singlesquare/id414357191?mt=8&ls=1
The problem is that even answering that question just leads to another question. It ends up the way conversations go with inquisitive children - an endless stream of "why"s with no real end because we don't know everything. At some point you just have to reach a satisfactory answer and realize that the more you learn the more you come to understand how little you know.
Ask HN for feedback: Putting together testing materials for Python programmers
Out of all the ways they could have caught you, a job offer? That's hilarious.
Besides all this, a CS degree, from what I hear (I don't have one) often teaches you a lot of concepts but not a lot of practical skills. Which isn't to say it isn't valuable, but it may not have prepared you fully for work. You may not know anything about version control, for example, or agile development.

Plus, it's always possible that you got your CS degree and aren't actually all that smart. I'm not a genius, but when I'd been programming for maybe a year, my ex-Googler friend asked me a Google interview question and said I did better than a PhD in CS that he'd recently interviewed.

So education and credentials don't always prove that you can solve problems or do everyday work in this field. Which is why I'm GLAD when an interviewer wants me to solve real problems in the interview. If I don't have to, chances are my coworkers didn't have to, either...
Planet could be 'unrecognizable' by 2050
- crushing conformity ? check.

Really? Conformity is the last thing I think of in this town. Have you been to San Francisco?

- love of me-too and sequels ? check.

Google, Facebook, sequels. LinkedIn, sequel. Check.

Zynga, Netflix, Pandora, Yelp, YouTube, PayPal... not so much.

Iteration and competition on business plan and product is good business. How many people are there making scads of money off of selling cereal? How many types of cars are there? How many banks? How many types of shoes? Are these "me too" businesses? Sure. But, the "me too" of Silicon Valley doesn't succeed unless the follow on company creates significant value over and above what the previous company did. (Google created a ton more value than Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, etc..)

- living off the glory days of the past ? check.

Really? I have 2,500 members at Hackers & Founders that are focused on being the next thing, and are quite bored with the "glory days" of Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc... There's tons of innovation happening. You just don't read about it all.

- patronage and network trump talent and originality ? check.

False. You don't make it in this town unless you can produce. No one cares where you went to school or who your daddy is. I have an Associates Degree in Nursing from a community college in the suburbs of Minneapolis, and I run the largest network of startup geeks in the Valley.

- overwhelming sense of self-importance ? check.

The market capitalization of all the companies within 1 mile of highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose is $500 Billon. The San Francisco Bay area is one of the 20 largest economies in the world. So, yeah. It's kind of important. Self-important? Maybe.

- lack of common sense economics ? check.

Last I checked, Hollywood and Silicon Valley weren't hurting in the money making department. How is that a lack of common sense economics?

Now, I will grant you that both economies operate on economies of scale. And, that many company's business models only work at massive scale. But, there's sufficient risk capital to support that in both towns.

Maybe Silicon Valley is Hollywood for startups after all.
Insofar as words have meaning, reality has a nature. That's not dogmatic, that's simply true.
If your house is being foreclosed upon, look into filing a Lis Pends, foreclosurefish.com has brilliant information on the process, Filing that prevents most buyers from making bids on the house while you sort out your case. Always save all of the paperwork you get from your mortgage company, Hire a lawyer, don't file for Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy lawyers will tell you that's your only option because they want your business, but that will put you in financial jail for years! A lawyer can work wonders if they know what they're doing, and they can also get your legal fees back. Its rough to get laid off, but if you take hold of the situation, work on being marketable for a job, and educate yourself about foreclosure, you'll recover.
"What should I avoid?"

Does anyone have any further input this?

Also, can you break down which languages are good for which types of projects?

Thanks all!
How will OpenKinect community response this? Does this mean their work will no longer be needed? Will there be a license issue?
Sorry about that. FF has websocket support disabled for now, and I've been slow to move to socket.io. That, and plenty other updates, are in the works. :)
I've thought about picking up boxing. It seems like the desire to not be hit in the face would be good motivation to exercise regularly between matches. Like you though, I'm a bit worried about the risk of concussion and having my nose broken, and thus haven't taken the plunge.
You are right that it's much more difficult for immigrants. It is possible to send your kids to an English public school if you're on a temporary visa, but not as a permanent resident. If you can afford tuition, an alternative is to send them to an unsubsidized English-language private school while they learn French.

Either way, moving to Montreal requires that the whole family makes a commitment to learn French - kids included. It's not an effort that children generally appreciate until they're later in life. =)
Ah, yes, totally my fault, I glanced over it and thought it was an official release by Google.
Well, mortgage interest rates are based on inflation plus a couple points so the bank still comes out ahead. In the early 80s, inflation was around 10-15%, hence an 18% mortgage. Now, it's more like 3-4%, hence a 5-6% mortgage.

Maybe they've made some bookkeeping and overhead improvements that allow them to add a point less or something like that, but it's not like they had some genius idea that allowed them to lower from 18 to 5.. it's just tracking the inflation rate. (and/or the fed funds rate which is related to inflation).

(Side note: my ATM snark was stolen directly from Paul Volker, who was the guy who stopped inflation in the late 70s early 80s by jacking up the fed funds rate. Credit went to Reagan of course. Better hair.)
Sounds like Fight Club.
Duely noted. For the next version of the public board I'll do that!
I know about the subscription model; I'm a subscriber.
I'll be there representing http://thestartupfoundry.com so drop me an email at paul@codesketch.com if you're startup is going to be there!

Andrew Warner from http://mixergy.com will be there too! Don't miss it!
Steal a penny, you're a thief. Steal a nation, you're its chief.
Someone might think "I'd be fine with losing a little revenue per user if it means users are happier with our product", but feel pressure to instead tell investors "We're not going to do that because it would mean less revenue per user".

Some people think it looks weak/naive/unprofessional to seem "good" in this way.

I'm not sure that's what YC is talking about though.
Git Tip: How to "Merge" Specific Files from Another Branch
It won't, I'd imagine it will hinge on the same arguments that were used to get the exemption for the cell phone.
Banking innovation did not solve your parents 18% mortgage problem. Interest rate is mainly based on the economic situation and government manipulation.
Yes can be a good use case, but the new set of design decisions have new limitations, nothing is for free :)

Example: with VM there were a number of problems, like keys must be in memory, super slow persistence, and so forth, but there was no speed penalty if you always write against a small working set.

Instead with diskstore data is on disk. The RAM is just a cache, and if you configure store with 'cache-flush-delay 60' you are telling Redis that at max in 60 seconds every given key that is dirty should be flushed on disk.

If there are many writes it is easy to hit the I/O write speed limit, and the system starts to be I/O bound.

So diskstore is surely a solution when there is a big data problem where writes are rare compared to reads. If writes are really a lot, there is to consider the total I/O.

The ideal solution in your scenario is IMHO to take data about the latest N hours in an in-memory Redis instance. And move the historical data into a diskstore-enabled instance. This way you have a full win, as the diskstore instance will be used only for reads, so will provide the maximum benefits. While the in-memory instance will have the usual predictable and low latency characteristic of the usual default Redis configuration.
When do you expire your sessions?

If I recall correctly, Django defaults to a two week expiry after the last session change. Remember that Disqus is a rather large network. We have many millions of "active" sessions by the definition above. The load of requests/second and number of sessions in VM really brought out the issues we ran into. I imagine it'd work just fine for sessions for most sites - but I still lean toward projects that specifically aim to be disk-backed k/v stores (membase, etc).
Real men don't use floating point
The car salesman already makes a decent commission, but it's built in to the offered price of the car. With a house, the homeowner usually decides how much they want, and the agents' commissions are added to that. This all happens in the background with cars.
Write to the President webapp
I don't quite know how I learned to program. I was very young when I first started using Commodore BASIC on the PET. I remember learning BASIC before I had a computer of my own. I would write programs at home, then type them up at school on a BBC Micro.

I remember using the back of the manual for my friend's ZX Spectrum to learn how to write machine code (effectively in the form of poking bytes directly read from DATA statements, then saving the code out to tape). I wrote a tool to dump out the bytes from code I loaded - in effect using it as a disassembler. I actually cracked the Elite loader for Scooby Doo this way and found hidden messages in there.

Later my parents finally caved in and got me a Multiface 1 after I had my own spectrum, and I started cracking games, writing pokes for kids at school.

I eventually moved to an Amiga and picked up AMOS as I hated GW-BASIC. It was there I first tried Emacs, but preferred MicroEmacs. I learned enough 68k assembler to crack a few games using a friend's borrowed Action Replay but never had my own so didn't get enough time with it to do much. I wrote a few demos for the Amiga, but they weren't widely released (with me living in rural England with no direct BBS access anymore it wasn't like I could upload a DMS file somewhere), although some went around the local schools, colleges and towns.

I also wrote games for the Archimedes and Amiga. When I got a PC I started writing for that too. Eventually I got an Internet connection of my own. I hated the PC, wanted my miggy back but Commodore was long gone and this was the future. I eventually installed this new fangled Linux thing and it came with free compilers - sweet! Over the space of a few weeks I learnt how syscalls worked, how memory management worked and eventually started writing shellcode, then exploit code and tools. After I got married I started dropping off a bit, but I'm amazed at how many languages I can program in (I have no idea how many, but it's a lot), not including the dead ones.

So my general way of learning was reverse engineering the language (because I generally lacked documentation) but slowly became more along the lines of reading books, tutorials, and picking things up as I got access to the Internet.
Changing the rules once you have a large installed base is always a delicate issue. How many current iPad owners knew their Kindle app (and others) might be deactivated by Apple in a couple of months because Apple decided it wanted a 30% cut?
but can any Brits comment on whether going to London to become an actor is a "thing" in the UK?

I'm Irish, not a Brit, but if you want to do more or less anything seriously, at a top level, you head to London. This sucking vortex of a Queen City was attracting about 10% of every generation to it in the 1850s.

Every other city in the British Isles is an also ran, whether you are looking at culture, politics, finance... the list goes on.
As far as I can tell, Apple's new guidelines wouldn't let them put that app in the App Store anymore. Apple's guidelines say you have to sell through the app using their API and can't sell anywhere else. And you can't link to a place where customers can buy your service outside of Apple's control.
The Render Engine: Box2dWeb Physics Engine