skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Couples who choose not to have kids also have better, more satisfying marriages than couples who have kids.

Well, of course, given that some couples have kids by accident. If you agree to wait on having kids for five years, then -- whoops! -- pregnancy, that would have a bad effect on satisfaction. Also there's the fact that couples who choose not to have kids have thought about and discussed their opinions on children. Couples who do that are likely to communicate better -- another reason they'd be more satisfied. I looked at the cited study, but could only read the first page. I didn't see anything saying they did anything to address this. Of course, I didn't see anything saying they didn't.
After playing for 10 minutes I thought "this is EXACTLY the kind of insane time-waster that I would like to read more content from..." So I tried to remove the # from the title bar as to navigate to your home page.

Turns out that that's harder than the actual game. I won in the end though.
haha its a tumblr blog; I dont pay the bandwidth bill :)
This may surprise some, but implementing blocking semantics on top of non-blocking semantics in node.js is impossible.
shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttttttt!

Looks like Mayor Carcetti really is turning things around.
That's pretty clever. I could see using location.hash for posting scrolling banner messages in the URL bar, ads ... all kinds of stuff that I'm really not looking forward to.
Comments like these make me wonder to what extent Zuckerberg is a two-dimensional figurehead. Maybe not as incompetent as some of our politicians, but nonetheless now the focal point for a lot of significant activity that is, at the least, outside his domain of expertise.

(How much of it is still him, and how much (to what extent) is he, at this point, simply along for the ride?)
I keep seeing posts about large organisations (off the top of my head, python and mozilla) consider bzr, and then discount it.

This mostly seems to be because of its performance.

Having used git and bzr extensively (and a bit of mercurial), I've found it's performance to be perfectly fine for general use on reasonably sized projects, and the ease-of-use to be far superior. Figuring out how to get Bazaar to do something you haven't done before is much easier than trying to track down a Git feature. Although I will admit that Git is improving in this regard, while Bazaar continues to improve it's performance and focus on interoperability.

Anyway, in summary: I really don't get why more people aren't using Bazaar.
You're thinking of "checked exceptions" and C++ already has them (pre 0X) via the "throws" clause on method declarations.

Checked exceptions is a hotly debatted topic and I think the world has kinda finally come around to deciding that the are a bad idea overall. Google it and see for yourself.
Warner to Offer Movies Through Facebook
Programmable Web: 3000 APIs and Growing
thats true; good catch! but people tend to wave that one away as long as it isn't horribly slow. Something to consider for sure!
It's Turing machines all the way down.
I've had trouble learning CoffeeScript due to the compiler not providing any help whatsoever when you make a mistake.

I was writing a web server that just wouldn't compile, looked the code over several times and eventually gave up and did it in javascript instead. Later found out that Gedit was displaying a tab that vim showed as just being a space. Never tested if that was the only problem or not.
I like the game.

I also played with browser history to create something more useful http://bsearch.heroku.com/ i.e. access other search engines by clicking back button while on Google.
Good idea, thanks. Done.
Porting ed to the URL bar would be a triumph!
when is the binary size a more important factor than both execution speed and ease of development?

Binary size (or maybe more accurately in this case, binary code layout) can be highly relevant for speed due to the instruction cache.

As for ease of development, there are issues with C++ exceptions regarding this as well: some C++ libraries aren't exception safe, and neither are practically all C libraries. This is something you need to worry about whenever you pass a function pointer into a library, as there might be an exception-unsafe function higher up in the stack. Propagating an exception up through it is potentially extremely dangerous.

That said, using exceptions can still be a good idea, especially if your code doesn't need to be portable or if you know the platforms in advance, and you are careful about passing around function pointers. All you need to do is ensure that any of your code that might be called from third-party code with questionable exception semantics won't throw or propagate any exceptions, e.g. by installing a catch-all exception handler in it.
Parody has a referent, the title here is more accurately called "sarcastic."
ifconfig eth0 down ?
Thanks to your work my browser history in firefox have hundreds - if not thousands - of lines more just for your site.
Chrome doesn't have retained layers, so it has to redraw the entire page every time you scroll. In fact, no shipping browser has retained layers except Safari in limited circumstances (not scrolling AFAIK), although Firefox 4 will have it soon.
How to evangelize your startup at SXSW with E-Mail by SMS
I think there is a need for a systems programming language with rich abstraction support. That is the niche C++ fills right now, despite its warts. I was skeptical of D, but reading through the book I linked in a sibling post, I think they have made some good design decisions. If you don't need to do systems programming with high-level abstractions, then you don't need D or C++.
Language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language

Decision problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_problem

Decider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_that_always_halts

These are fairly foundational concepts when talking about computational complexity.
Asia steroids site owns Charlie Sheen’s Tiger Blood
The Insanity Of Apple’s Failure
I killed 4 in 23 seconds. Getting back to this post wasn't easy, though I can't say I wasn't warned!
Facebook: Real-Time Analytics For Social Plugins
At my day job we're making the move from XP to Windows 7 because the large number of cumulative patches to XP have, over time, caused all of the machines to run really really slow. Our ICT department has a really cute name for this OS upgrade project: "CPR" (for "Client Platform Refresh").
Cool concept, just make sure you open it in a new window or you'll never make it back to HN!
Try to have a team of developers working on various parts, you modify a function to add some code to it, another developer moves the function to the bottom of the file, and yet another developer modifies the code to fix an off by one error.

We have a team working on various parts of code every day. Like literally every day. Merge conflicts do occur, but they're not the common case. It occurs infrequently enough that its not a big deal. And probably a quarter of the time the conflict is something you didn't want merged.

I proceeded to move a whole bunch of stuff around to clean up the entire source tree, in the mean time he had added two more files and made modifications to some of the ones I had moved. I then proceeded to merge in his changes, git happily merged in his changes to the now moved files, and added the new files into the original location I had just moved, I moved them, committed and everything was happy. We tried the same thing in Subversion not too long ago and it was a complete mess leaving huge merge issues that took a developer a while to figure out what was going on.

That I do see happen. SVN doesn't like changes to directory structure... merges or not.
EightBit Aims To Make SXSW A Lot More Fun
Ah - finally I found the balance sheets I was thinking of (some Deutsche Bank stuff from 2009). Turns out I was misremembering; it was equity capital that falls under liabilities, which is counterintuitive to me. Capital is, after all, something I have - but I suppose since it's an investment, it represents something I owe.

And I see capital is shown in the balance sheet in the original post as well - but what struck me as counterintuitive in the original post is representing sales as, effectively, a cash flow towards the customers. If not a fiction, surely you have to grant it's an abstraction.
As does Chromium OS, meanwhile Chromium uses subversion.
New Yankee Tries Other Corner Spot
New Site Focuses on NYC Tech Scene: What do you think?
Comparison of JavaScript loaders
First of all, Sphinx is fantastic and a majority of people will find it suitable for full-text search, but there are some weaknesses that might make Solr (Lucene, really) more powerful and appropriate for full-text:

1.'did-you-mean' support

2. facets

3. replication

4. spell checking

5. auto-complete is easier to implement with Solr

6. Sphinx doesn't return whole documents, only the doc id

7. Sphinx doc ids must be integers
I can't shake the feeling that people that like CoffeeScript are those that don't "get" JavaScript (e.g. CoffeeScript's notion of a class, whereas JavaScript has none -- let go an embrace the prototypal object model). Further, most (if not all) of the examples of the problems with JavaScript are null and void. A language that combines paradigms? Most do. Sure, the name sucks, but that's hardly an issue.

I understand that syntax may be more convenient for some, but this is indirection, and is a source of complexity that may impede collaboration from other devs more familiar with JavaScript.
Sure they have.

My 486 built in 1993 had 8 KB cache, 4 MB RAM, and a 120 MB HD.

My desktop built in 2009 has 2 MB cache, 2 GB RAM, and a 250 GB HD.

Okay, the cache has lagged behind by one or three doublings compared to the other storage types. But that's still pretty close to proportional in a world of exponential gains.
I'm probably tilting at windmills, but it's Turing Equivalent, not Turing Complete.
The problem is the bias inherent in the sample. The Joel on Software development community, Kiln mailing list, and StackOverflow all have something in common - they were started by Joel, and their initial userbase comes largely from followers of his blog.

I wonder what the results would've been had GitHub polled their userbase? Or if you asked a random sample of Googlers (hint: 100% would say "Perforce professionally", and then a good chunk would say "Git personally")? Or if Fortune magazine had had CIOs poll the individual employees of their firms (I bet you'd see a whole lot more Perforce, and a fair bit of "What's version control?")?
"modern C++" has changed meanings so many times in the past 10 years that it's not funny anymore. there's always some "modern" solution in C++ that ends up causing more problems, leading to further "modern" solutions that end up... you get my point.

some folks have decided to get off the C++ feature treadmill and go back to, well... getting things done with solid languages (e.g. C) instead of learning about the latest C++ non-solutions to non-problems.
From my experience with Node.js, your interpretation is correct. I also share your optimism for finding a general solution to this problem, but that's exactly what jerf said isn't worth the complexity once you implement it.

Even if you do manage the callback complexity issue, there is still the issue of exception handling, which jerf also explains here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150800

That said, jerf hasn't proven that trying is not a rite of passage. Sorry for the double negative.
There's so damn much useless, feel-good, vague gibberish written about startups that combating the problem by writing more of the stuff is not exactly the solution I'd prefer.

A startup is like a burrito. Wait, no. That's monads.
I don't know that it's accurate to compare C++ exception specifications with Java-style checked exceptions. Exception specifications aren't checked at compile time and typically don't do what you want at runtime.
Agreed. I have a big enough loan (not absolutely huge, but big enough to be serious) right now which locks me into my current job. Do not get into debt unless you absolutely have to people, unless you enjoy stress + being forced to stay in situations you don't want to. It's never worth it.
Pic A Fight for Android
T-Mobile is the only good US carrier. Don't know what I'd do if they merged with a company as poor as Sprint.
Facebook is popular for that, but personally I use Twitter, Google and Yahoo (via their openid services) for login to several sites, including this one. Facebook has by no means won the contest to provide a 'single login'. I don't think anybody is going to.

Facebook is my last choice for signing into a site, as they give the site access to more data then is needed.
In web development, outside of large corporations, I'd say that near-realtime deployment is the norm. Fix the bug, test the bugfix, deploy to servers, all in the same day. git does work well for this. In Open Source projects, as well, folks tend to work directly on HEAD and only go back to old branches/tags for security fixes (if at all). Again, git is tight for this kind of work; which shouldn't be a surprise since it was built for Linux kernel development.

Embedded systems have to be damned-near perfect before you ship. Web systems, not so much.
I have to agree. This post and the survey results do not really meet my standards for accuracy, so I've taken then down while we rework it.
Wow, that's a lot of material to digest, thanks!

Let me start at the end - the idea isn't actually original. I remember Compuserve offering a similar service around the late 80's! I agree this all succeeds or fails based on execution.

> ... make sure you're doing address cleansing for the extra postage discounts.

Yes, this is actually addressed in our FAQ - we do address validation.

> Make a utility print driver so I can "Print To Postal Shout" -- this is VERY easy to do, at least on windows...

Could you please elaborate on this? I was always under the impression that building print drivers was a very expensive undertaking.

> ...Upon completion, create an XML doc (or similar) and call a web service ...

We actually do this now with our Word add-in which makes it easy to submit letters to distribution lists. Instead of running a mail merge in Word, the document and list are uploaded via Web Service.

> ...If you could somehow incorporate electronic signature / notary / SOMETHING into the documents...

This is very forward-looking at this stage of our project. I'll keep this in mind for later.

> Offer stationary / letterhead for the customers to design and use...

Great idea! With digital printing it's possible to print letterhead on the fly.

> You could offer discounts on the actual costs if the user was willing to have ads printed...

We haven't been successful in generating additional sales from similar initiatives in the past. I'll need to revisit this option.

> target Salesforce.com...

We do this with our postalmethods product, but haven't been diligent enough in execution. Will need to put more energy into this.

Thanks for all the suggestions! It would be great if you could clarify on the printer driver question above.
But, isn't Slashdot dominated by Windows-haters? Maybe it's changed since I frequented the place a few years ago.
As if tumblr's paying $0.50 / GB for bandwidth.

I'd be surprised if they're paying anywhere near that, prolly more like $0.04GB.
Yes. How can he possibly say that "exceptions are faster" without such timings? C++ style, unwind-the-stack-and-call-destructor exceptions must really have a high run-time cost when an exception occurs. Also, his instruction count misses the instructions that occur at run-time handling an exception. Even when an exception doesn't occur, it isn't obvious that some run-time code doesn't get excuted.
> Also, I don't even know what "Git's UI" is, but I'm sure you're right about it sucking.

FWIW, I meant the CLI. I have rarely seen an interface that manages to make a relatively simple idea seem so complicated.

> I'd be curious about the details of your data loss bug.

It must have been a couple of years ago, so I can't remember the exact details and I imagine it's been fixed by now anyway. Basically, there was a problem (duly documented in their bug tracker; it wasn't user error) where Git would refuse to update one copy of a repository from another properly. If memory serves, it was related to switching between branches in some way.

It's possible that I was being unfair in calling it a data loss bug in Git, because I have a vague memory that they determined the remote repository itself wasn't corrupted if you knew how to rescue it. However, the effect was that the local working copy on my development machine didn't have the data in it that it should have, and ultimately I don't really care why my data isn't there, only that it isn't.
In my experience, with modern versions of windows, support is a wash for technical users.

I used a windows 2k3/2k8 machine every day for 3.5 years at the same company developing software, and never had a support issue with it. On the other hand, I solely use Macs at home (and, since leaving the aforementioned job to work on my own company), and have also never had a support issue.

However, my grandmother has recently gotten ahold of a vista laptop and a MacBook laptop. She has really shown a greater affinity to the Mac.
Boston, which is almost exactly the same populations as Baltimore, had 72 murders last year.

If New York had the murder rate that Baltimore does that would mean over 3000 people murdered in a year.

Baltimore has a serious violence problem no matter how you try to rationalize it.
I struggle to find a different interpretation of your statement even with the word substitution you suggest.

I've seen astonishing creativity from the Flash community over the years in the areas of games, UI experiments, generative art to name a few. Do you remember when Javascript had the same soiled reputation? DHTML anyone?
EuroPython 2011 Registration is Open
More a general observation than an attempt to state a fact.

Consider the features which would inform a guess of gender based on only a silhouette:

Skirt, Long hair, Breasts, High heels?

I can only seem to think of attributes whose presence would make me guess Female, and absence would make me guess Male.

I'm open to suggestions of the shape of an androgynous figure, perhaps this is a case of me projecting my though process onto others incorrectly.
"To the author:

You have been warned. Take down this article based on lies or else we will sue you. You have 24 hours to comply.

Sincerely,
Apple Customer Relations
Posted By Apple CR, Cupertino, CA: March 7, 2011 5:41 PM "

fanbois are always entertaining.

Those comments there are the bread and butter of this article. I am pretty sure that, even lolcats won't hold a candle against those commenters.
CoffeeScript is javascript so prototypal objects still work as expected. They just went ahead and threw in classes if you want them, since there are already many javascript libraries that provide them for people who either are used to / want classes or to make it easier to port existing code.
Agreed. The compiler definitely isn't as helpful as it could be in giving information about errors. On the other hand, a lot of the errors it hits at compile-time are things you wouldn't have noticed until run-time if you were writing JavaScript.
Good point :)

Here's a different take, then, and probably harder to verify, but I am guessing is true:

Cache utilization has increased much more than RAM or HD, not just because programs are handling more data but also because of increases in program size and number of programs being run simultaneously.

Your hard drive is probably not full... RAM could be, depends on your workload... but I bet most caches are churning like mad, more than they used to be.
Looking to the skills of Humanism for the UX profession
My inspiration for today was the article by David Brooks “The New Humanism” in the NY Times in which he discusses the emergence of a new understanding and appreciation of human nature. It is a very short article but full of food for thought, particularly when considering the discussion of what makes a good UX Designer. This question has been answered in both broad and specific ways. On 52 Weeks of UX, Joshua Porter answered it by stating “The big difference between someone who is a UX professional and someone who isn’t comes back to that word: responsibility.”

While I agree with this answer, I think it’s important to recognize that the qualities described in David Brook’s article can also differentiate a great designer from a mediocre one. Designers create products and experiences, not solely for ourselves, but for the community at large. Because of that, practicing and honing the following skills should also be the focus of any UX professional:
Attunement

The ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
Equipoise

The ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
Metis

The ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
Sympathy

The ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Limerence

This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

Many of these skills are now being taught in many of the newer design programs as part of incorporating design research processes into traditional design curriculum. I’ve noticed that many (not all) designers naturally tend to have these qualities. We inherently strive to understand of other points of view so that our work connects with people, moves, inspires or improves their lives. So I feel that nurturing these tendencies can only be a good thing but as with anything it should be done with a focus on moderation along with practicing the ability to distill meaningful observations that can be applied to project at hand. Without that ability, what we see through those lenses gets lost in translation.
Ouch, my history! Seriously, this was an experience. I might go as far as calling it art.
Motivating Employees: It’s Not Just About the Money
Can you not do a stash --patch multiple times and give each patch a unique message? That would solve the many unrelated hacks problem I would think.
Nice article but as far as I'm concerned you don't need to _prove_ this as it is a logical fallacy to start with.

If an exception is being thrown then something is wrong, if something isn't wrong then you implemented your exceptions incorrectly as exceptions shouldn't exist in normal program flow.

So to recap, you're writing a crap ton of more code just so you can return your error code _slightly_ faster than it would take an exception. You're optimising your failure cases, which (in the _vast_ majority of cases) is UTTERLY ABSURD.
Proof: http://f.cl.ly/items/0T010H1W0X2r3w1B2z3K/keyboard.html
This example, while nifty, doesn't show that HTML+CSS is Turing complete, because the user still has to provide the looping.

That's like saying that my computer isn't a Turing machine (modulo finiteness of memory) because I need to plug it into a socket to run it. Turing machines are a very abstract notion of computation (and one of the most general ones we know of), and a lot of things can be used to simulate one. Turns out HTML+CSS3 is yet another such thing.