skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To expand on this a bit:

with open("some.filename") as f:
...

f is an opened file which is automatically closed. This isn't strictly necessary in Python, since files are flushed and closed when reaped, including in case of exception, but it's useful. You can also do this with all of the threading primitives:

with threading.Lock():
do_that_one_contentious_thing()

Useless syntactic sugar? Maybe. It's an explicit scope which makes certain guarantees, though, so it's not just fluff.

What was his other example? DB connections? Well, in Python, the DB API requires that DB connections not easily leak, but if you're stuck with a crappy driver, you can still auto-close your connections:

with contextlib.closing(dbapi.Connection(...)) as handle:
cursor = handle.cursor()
...

So it's definitely possible.

I think it's unfair of him to pick on Ruby and Python just because their syntax is more oriented towards assuming the garbage collector is non-sucky and exceptions aren't expensive.

Edit: Fixed formatting.
I am testing learnboost.com to manage a class. It works ok. But I have found a couple of wrinkles. I hope it is just a matter of time.
5 years difference in lifespan? That is pretty remarkable. I'm surprised this result has not gotten more attention.
Yes - the actual HTTP parsing code was written a long time ago, and I'd been meaning to improve it. Thanks for the links.
This doesn't help very much, but it worked for me (drag from file explorer in W2K8R2 into Chrome 11.0.696.60). Do you have UAC turned on?
'Dwarf' black holes might help explain dark matter
The ultimate Dilbert moment: 100% Customer Dissatisfaction
Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Pirahã don't have numbers
wow, thanks for the links. These are the ones mentioned in the comments

http://mixergy.com

http://lanyrd.com/video/

http://www.youtube.com/user/ideaCityOnline

https://www.youtube.com/atgoogletalks

http://longnow.org/seminars/

http://www.gelconference.com/videos/

http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/

http://fora.tv/

http://www.sptnk.org

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-collections-of-thoug...

http://videolectures.net/

http://bigthink.com/

http://igniteshow.com/

http://www.dolectures.com/

http://academicearth.org/
Same. What about all those people still on 1.5-6mbit DSL, or... shudder dialup?
It has to also depend on the category you are in. A lot more people will be interested in a easy to use photo editor over some iOS beta delivery software.
It's likely the average of people in the US who have run the speed test.
To be honest I can't remember. This was 10 - 12 years ago though so what was absurd then is probably pretty standard now. It was a heck of a lot quicker than the T1 line we had in the Physics dept back in London :)
>why doesn't Facebook have tech in place that stop apps when their post frequency to walls gets out of hand

Because Facebook is an advertizing platform. Apps can send as much garbage as they want and you can just ban the app from from your feed.
ACCU 2011 conference vidoes
I would think much more effective approach would be to vote with your feet. Move your office out of the city, and let the distributionists in the city hole make their own decisions. Maybe send them a letter informing them you moved and why.
iPhone on AT&T? At SXSW, I read they do add some extra cells for that period. I wonder how they make a decision to do that? If you can't tweet they don't get bad press about poor coverage.
I agree completely. We just gave a big tax break to Twitter (and everyone else who happened to be in the area) - I don't want to see SF city hall turn in to a mini D.C. run by business lobbyists looking for deals.

This whole argument that "business is going to leave unless we cut their taxes" strikes me as just false. San Francisco's economy is booming, and there's a lot of talent here because it's a great place to live
My first job was in that era at my hometown ISP. I got a discount on shotgun modems. We could pirate Doom and Photoshop 3 on the T1. Nothing ever seemed that fast, even now when I have a 35 mbps fios line.
This is not a tax cut. San Francisco is the only major city in the US that taxes the company for an employee's personal gain on stock options.

This is eliminating a tax that was very, very poorly thought out as it effectively precludes any company from going public in the city of San Francisco. A company doing an $100M IPO might effectively be required to pay all $100M raised to the city of San Francisco as tax on the stock options gains of employees.

Discuss the merits of tax cuts elsewhere -- this is an obvious situation where this tax never should have been in the first place, and will be doing a considerable amount of harm to San Francisco if it is not repealed.
Even in the iOS App Store, there's a world of difference between sixth place and first place in terms of revenue. (I've charted in the US in both positions for the productivity category.)

It took Pixelmator 20 days to take a million dollars on the Mac App Store[1], so his suspicion that 'the stats aren't that great' might be true for most people, but it's not true for everyone.

This isn't surprising, though, because the Mac App Store will be subject to the same formula for profit as the iOS App Store:

1. Build something unique with mass appeal.
2. Polish it until it shines.
3. Market it to a big list of loyal fans.
4. If you don't have a big list, build one or piggyback someone else's.
5. Update your app, improve it, and do one thing every day to spread the word.

Consistently, the apps doing well appear to get steps 1-to-5 right, which often results in Apple featuring them. Earning $15/day isn't reason to give up, though. It's a great starting point; there's plenty of room to grow from there.

[1]: http://www.pixelmator.com/weblog/
Sure, copy-paste, but if you monitor the outgoing query via Firebug, you can get the raw password. (This is confirmed with the gmail password input.) I have also in the past used various Windows tools for finding the value of a text box or for toggling the hiddenness of the text. Basically, if someone has access to the machine where your password is stored in any form, all bets are off.
It's easy to get spoiled. 12 years ago my computer was two hops away from an OC-192 and back then I didn't even have anything interesting to try and download (I think I mostly downloaded SunOS ISO's).
Hello Yxven, I'm sort of in the same boat as you... I have been working on my start-up for a few months now, but I'm basically at a point where there's too much to do by myself. I'm more or less committed to seeing my project through, but I give each other a little advice or whatever.
Yeah, that's the idea of CAPTCHAs. In reality they can be solved by bots, given enough computing power and several attempts.
I work on one of the top 100 free apps in the mac app store (its been as high as the top 20s). Our volume is surprisingly low considering we are ranked so high in the overall category. I guess its telling about the overall volume in the store.
That rating is for Google as an ISP. They provide free WiFi to the city of Mountain View which isn't always fast depending on where you are. That probably accounts for the low rating.
Gumstix is way overpriced. If this really does come out for $25, it will be really disrupt the hobbyist embedded market. The closest similar systems are Bifferboards (http://bifferos.bizhat.com/ 35 pounds for 150mhz 486) or the Teensy++ ($24 for an AVR).
Definitely not just you. I can't select any of the text either!
You can't expect to make much money on the Mac App Store with an app priced at $2 in a niche category. You'll never get the volume of downloads necessary to be profitable, unlike on iOS, whose market is many times larger than the Mac.

My Mac App Store experience has been rather different. I have several applications in the store ranging from $5-$20, and daily revenue is usually in the $100-$200 range. The Mac App Store has brought much greater exposure and increased sales.

To generate income on the Mac App Store, you really need to be aiming for products that can be sold in the $20 range if your product is in one of the smaller categories.
The progress in free education is astounding.
The second example should actually be

class C {
void mightFail() { ... }
~C() { doCleanup(); }
};

C c;
c.mightFail();

Anyway, I hate this slide deck so much.

1. The author's point could be made in far fewer slides. As in, like, two slides. I hate presentations that are disrespectful of the audience's time for the sake of being cute.

2. I am generally unimpressed by arguments of the form:
(a) Language X has flaw Y.
(b) Therefore language X is unsuitable for development.
This can be instantiated for every language X for some flaw Y and is not an argument against any language. You need to additionally make the argument:
(c) Y is so serious that it outweighs the considerations in favor of X and against the other languages one might reasonably use.
Of course (c) is an incredibly high bar, which is why most anti-language zealot arguments do not even attempt to make it, and also why most anti-language zealotry is silly.

In order to do (c) in this case, you would have to make the case that writing finally clauses is worse overall than, e.g. debugging memory corruption errors, and writing copy constructors and overloaded assignment operators, and all the other baggage of C++, rather than handwaving them away with "the downsides have been exaggerated".

Which, by the way, is ironically the biggest flaw of this slide deck: the author vastly exaggerates the downsides of finally. try/finally is no worse than checking the result codes of C syscalls, and it is sometimes better. I don't recall the C style of programming stopping Ken Thompson from building great things and I doubt that try/finally is actually what stops Java programmers from building great things.
I understand why they have to use fake 555 numbers in the movies, even though it's a bit jarring ("Oh look he's dialing one of those fake movie phone numbers") but why do movie and game producers always feel compelled to invent phoney Middle East countries (and conversely not invent countries in Europe or Asia)? http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Fictional_Middle_Eastern_C... Maybe it doesn't matter to the geographically challenged masses (especially in the US) but there are some of us who know our maps.
Apple not providing LGPL webkit source code for latest iOS 4.3.x
Achieving a prominent position in the Mac App Store in a category like Developer Tools isn't worth many sales. That doesn't surprise me in the least.
An effect is worth it. For now, ~52% of users on Tagmask are registered through third-party accounts (most of them use Google account).
The Twitter tax cut is very different than this. That was an actual income tax cut that the city enacted to keep Twitter in SF.

This is a measure that is repealing a very poorly thought out tax on stock options that would preclude any company from going public in San Francisco.

I would tend to agree with you on tax cuts -- everybody should pay their fair share -- but I disagree that keeping a poorly thought out, highly unusual and unique tax in place that would severely affect the SF economy is the right solution.
Yeah, I think a blog post would be interesting. We scaled from having 1 server to now application spread across 19 servers (most are Apache 2G RAM; 2 varnish caches 4G each; 1 load balancer 4G. We are going to add one more load balancer soon.)
The bandwidth each computer has access to is almost certainly not the entire bandwidth that Google gives its employees access to - if so, the per person bandwidth would be quite low.

Of course, not being a Google employee, I wouldn't know for sure.
He hasn't really achieved a very prominent position in the mac app store though. The post there shows he is 6 in the 'developer tools' category. I suspect this is one of the least used / lowest sales of any of the sub-categories. Most developers probably aren't looking in the app store for their tools, they already have them, and even if they are, developers make up a small percentage of mac users. Perhaps, only 1% of all mac owners are potential customers... Even less really because they must be mobile developers to make use of his application.

His sales vs position has nothing to do with the appStore and everything to do with being in an extremely tiny niche market.
I haven't gotten this to work once. Cool idea though.
I'm really curious where that speedtest is going, given the 3 mSec ping time.
Matt Zimmerman Leaving Canonical
Similar to Mixergy and the interviews done by The Startup Foundry.

http://www.beyondthepedway.com/
The Real Rock Stars of Technology
As a kid, I was always paranoid about the kind of things Google can do. They can effectively build an accurate psychological profile on absolutely anyone on the internet. They track your search history, email, contacts, even your telephone number. They have all your docs, and now, with Chrome they CAN track your browsing history. And with things going paperless, they know everything about you.

Then their goals: build a database of genome of every person on the planet!!

My problem wasn`t the consolidation of data itself but the motivations of the people doing so and the easy target such service providers may make for crackers. Google is still run by ideal-respecting founders today. This won`t always be the case for a publicly-traded company. For a mild example: What is going to stop Google from selling potential clients to marketing firms when it goes in search for a new revenue stream?
Humane Informatics
It's not an OS, it's a text editor.
I'll be over shortly to piss on your car.

Does that make any sense to you? The cat's happiness cannot come at the expense of damage to someone else's property.
Mr. Svigals called me out of the blue about FaceCash a few months ago. He introduced himself as the father of the plastic payment card, which he developed at IBM. It sounded to me like he wanted a seat on our Board of Directors. This seemed strange because he hadn't even signed up for the product, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and at least meet with him.

After meeting Mr. Svigals, who was quite dismissive of everything we were doing, I did some more research into his claims. He may have authored 25 books (Amazon.com lists 17 of them), but none of them are available for purchase in stores, and many are no longer in print. The vast majority are more like updated pamphlets than books, and they are mostly about smart cards. See http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_seeall_2?rh=k%3ASv..., which have not become prevalent in the U.S. despite his predictions (which seem to go back years).

Mr. Svigals also did not single-handedly invent the plastic payment card, though I'm sure he played a supportive role at IBM. He has edited the Wikipedia entry on the subject to insert himself into the card's history, but it's very hard to tell if his description is accurate without independent verification from someone else at IBM at the time. As best I can tell he worked in the Asia Pacific division but was not on the core team developing the technology.

I wish him well, but would warn people that he has a tendency to inflate his claims, which shouldn't be necessary given all that he knows anyhow.
Machine Learning: A Love Story
PaperPhone: Understanding Bend Gestures with Flexible Displays
Not if they're done as split/segmented stacks (http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SplitStacks)-- basically, you have a collection of 4KB stack pages for each thread instead of one large up-front allocation, and you grow it as needed. It costs a few instructions per function entry/exit, but overall cost is negligible and it allows you to run thousands of coroutines without issues.
Google will shoot your business
We used to be colocated at HE in Fremont. Real nice building. They have a track record of power outages going back several years.
"You'll never get the volume of downloads necessary to be profitable, unlike on iOS, whose market is many times larger than the Mac."

We all know this stuff but it still amazes me, not so many years ago it would be nonsense...
IPL 4, 46th match: Deccan v Delhi at Hyderabad, May 5, 2011 Match Photo Gallery
Does not work on android chrome. Can't even scroll
I have no idea who he was, but I was in tears by the end. Condolences to all who knew him.
Why the 13″ Air Is Better Than the 13″ Pro
It would be a good way to publish something that has no value.
Any use for a Brit with a hypnotic voice?
I have a very hypnotic voice.

Some of my voice files are on the Freesound archive, where I keep some of my poetry recitals and other audio files.

But lately, I have been experimenting with hypnotic inductions - and I have produced some remarkable successes with these.

So I find myself wondering whether anyone out there would find a use for a Brit with a very hypnotic voice.

My Freesound URL:- http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=472714
The great thing and the worst thing about benchmarks is that vendors optimize to them :-)

IE9 claims speed, but the only benchmark it performs better than other browsers on is the SunSpider benchmark. If it is so fast, why does it only do well on a single benchmark? It has already been documented that trivial changes to SS make IE9's performance change dramatically: http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/11/16/reporting-a-bug...

Personally, I believe SunSpider is just too-easy-to-game. Historically, this problem comes up now and then with compiler vendors and benchmarks. The only solution is to have long-running benchmarks which exercise many parts of the JS engine so that gaming is not so easy.
It also supports the zen-coding plugin, which is nice.
Right. If your goal is education PowerPoint is fine. And I'd argue that it should be a video. No need for me to go to a room to listen to a presentation when you want me to attend. The modern conference where all presentations are on the web is ideal.

Now if you want discussions, that's a whole different matter. I've used PowerPoint for discussions. Usually one slide to frame the discussion and a second slide I leave up that has the goal of the discussion -- that is, what are we here to answer. You could just as easily do it with a printout or on a whiteboard, but a PowerPoint is often logistically easier. The keypoint though is that a discussion should have a clear goal. If you can't put the goal of the discussion down in a sentence you probably aren't crisp yet as to what you're doing.
Sorry for my ignorance, but could somebody point me to a more mature well-tested C++ webserver, as mentioned?
Let this be a warning to the mobile platform app devs: this is your future. Get all the gold you can, while you can.
I just accidentally down voted this when I meant to up vote. IPad, small arrows, big fingers. Sorry about that.

[edit] not that I completely agree, just that I think it's an idea worth more exploration.
Stop meeting altogether.
I looked into this recently, and wasn't able to find a DockStar for sale locally. It seems that the reason you could buy them for so cheap was that they were being discontinued. Which is too bad, as it sounds like a very nice piece of hardware.
Fi Case Study: Messages for Japan
Movies online for free full movies
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You Like Watch movies american popular and hot trend internet online
That's just CYA.
We're having fewer and fewer group meetings with PowerPoint (a good thing) but more and more teleconferences where someone shares their desktop. For some reason that encourages people to share more spreadsheets, code, drawings, etc. but the flipside is that half the audience is surfing or doing their email.
Lol, what? Wait a minute? "the notion that programmers have few online spots for conversing and exchanging tips and hints"?

Does anyone entertain such an absurd notion? If anyone has online spots to "talk about how to code, program and develop just any old application or tool", it must be programmers. From the ancient age of Usenet to the more modern era of StackOverflow and, dare I say it, Hacker News, programmers have always had many spots to connect with other programmers online.

So how did this story get 6 points?
yes, but it is much more common for double quotes to be used in html
Embargos (at least the kind used in media / PR) don't make any sense in this time and age. It has no teeth, and the benefits of the embargo are dubious at best.

I wholeheartedly agree with the "randomly break embargo" strategy - because once you give a story to a reporter, you can't say - oh wait - don't publish it until we say so ... or until we farm out the "embargo breaking" lead position to the highest bidder (for favours, good reviews, gifts, etc).

Embargoes represent corruption and collusion in the media - and killing them makes media and news sources / makers more accountable.
This is a $100 mobile phone without the baseband, WiFi, Bluetooth, screen, casing, battery, sensors, buttons, microphone, and speaker. I guess $25 sounds about right.
Actually being featured is the single biggest factor to success in the App Store. Sure, having a good product is necessary for continued success, but many have done well initially just by having a contact on the review team and getting placed in a prominent position (Color comes to mind).
Their ping is 3ms. Pretty latency-free :)

(FWIW, my ping is 450ms)
places the internet above the sovereignty of any nation

How would that work?
High-Quality DNA
Same here, I get 100-200 downloads a week for [Space Gremlin](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/space-gremlin/id414515628?mt=...) and do just fine with revenue.
What you're describing works great on a small scale if you've got a few interested geeks to help out, but as soon as you have to support it in the large, homogeneity becomes very important.
Exceptions are little more than a formalization of a particular pattern of what Haskell might call the Either monad for return values, combined with pattern matching on the error type, and automatic unwinding. A condition system has positive value; but multiple return types with error codes alongside, like Go, are a regression from exceptions, IMO.
I remember awhile back another post kinda like this where it was a companies new front end dev training material. Anyone remember that or have a link? I've been trying to find it.
Hey,

If ur into audio, try http://said.fm/. The content is like a cross between TED and Fora.TV. Brilliant for on the go listening.
There are a lot of merchants on Amazon.com (the US site) that won't ship internationally. But you can still buy from them and get international shipping if you use a package forwarding service. Try http://bit.ly/gN2oGK You can save a ton of money for exactly the reasons you mentioned: prices on the US site are much cheaper, even with international shipping.
No, because ethically, not liking the way somebody prices a good or service doesn't give you a free pass to abuse other consumers of those goods or services.

If you believe obtaining the best possible price for a service by inconveniencing other consumers is ethical, I can save us a protracted and boring argument by stipulating that there is then nothing unethical about hidden-city itineraries.

But if you don't think that, then let me warn you that the instinct to fob off responsibility for people's actions to the big faceless corporation is natural and understandable, but also very hazardous to your moral health.
Sorry to surprise you, Maciej. As others on this thread have already have already surmised, we were not trying to change (or fork) SunSpider. We just wanted to demonstrate the impact of the smallest possible change when we make it a longer test.
The cost of bin Laden: $3 trillion over 15 years
Comparing Erlang and Node.js
Makes me feel like a tortoise by comparison http://www.speedtest.net/result/1284419120.png
Grigori Perelman claims he can control Universe