skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me get this straight: he's doing a a full circle -- without examining how the current situation came to be.

At some point we went for exception, because (warning: big simplification ahead!) library authors figured they can't trust client code to always check return value for reported error condition. We got automatic, forced checking injected by compiler -- `exceptions'. With all the pains of fugly syntax in certain languages, because in many projects the trade-off makes sense. With the reasonable default for unexpected and unhandled condition: error is logged and process is stopped.

Now the proposal -- `Let's have [[EDIT]]a tagged union: Either<error_code, return_value> ' takes us back to where we started -- client code is free to not check for errors. The process will not stop nor even print backtrace if the programmer forgets to check; the process will happily go on with invalid / unsupported / mangled / whatever data. No automatic propagation of error down the stack to outer handler in our function's caller. No stack unwind nor automatic object destruction. No hierarchy of error types (no specific errors derived from general ones). No nothing. And no discussion of those matters.

Oh, my. Reliability in software has just gotten a new name.

EDIT: fix'd mistake pointed out by tianyicui & thesz. Thanks!
Sweden held a referendum in 1980 about nuclear power, and the only choice was about how fast our nuclear power plants should be shut down.

It took twenty years until a reactor was closed, and five more years until one whole plant was closed.

During this time, Sweden's energy consumption has of course gone up, and although there's been some increase in wind and water power, the net result is that each time we close a nuclear reactor, we have to import a lot more electricty from Danish or German coal-powered plants.

So the net result for the environment is negative, but the environmentalist movement thinks it's a huge win.

I'm willing to wager that this German proposal will have the exact same end result. The only way to successfully switch to renewable energy is by making renewable energy cheaper than coal or nuclear.
Wikipedia is "the mainstream consensus", a compilation of knowledge that is generally agreed upon by reasonably sane and well-informed people, in a format accessible by the layman. I think that will continue to be valuable.

If you are a layman who wants to know "what is a computer" or "what is programming", then Wikipedia is a much better starting point than Stackoverflow or Don Knuths personal blog.
How bitcoin could fail.
Bit coin is an extremely interesting idea and one that I would love to see work. It's current value is around $8.50 (I'm not going to make any judgement on whether that is a fair value for it). While it's potential minimum is 0, it's potential maximum - assuming it takes over a large portion of the ~70 trillion USD in other currencies floating about the world is 70 trillion / 21 million = $USD 3 333 333.33 - say we round it down to 3 million.

If this happens then it would make buying bit coins at todays prices a very attractive investment and reading on hacker news it looks like quite a few people have decided this is a smart option. Before I put my money into something like bit coin, I'd like to hear possibilities on how it could fail. The P2Pness of it obviously adds a lot of robustness but the total system is only as strong as it's weakest point so it's good to think like a hacker .. or government as to where it might be attacked or fail naturally.

My thoughts (and I'd love to see these added too.)
1) The exchanges. If they are outlawed it will be quite hard to get money from a 'legitimate' bank into the bitcoin system. It would involve sending money to some kind of grey overseas institution and I think few people would be incented to do this.

2) Transaction volume. If Bitcoin becomes popular, there would be a lot of transactions happening around the world. These all need to be passed to all nodes in the network which is ok for a small number of transactions but will this scale well?

3) I'm no expert on macro-economics but I could imagine a situation where speculation on the currency makes it's value rise and fall very quickly as it is used more as an investment tool than a purchasing tool. This would make it less useful as a currency - who wants to sell a product and have the money you receive for it halve overnight?

Does anyone have any others - or even better reasons why my concerns are unfounded?
I don't agree that returning an Either is better than returning/throwing. It depends on what you do in the error case. If you try to recover, then Either is better. If you fail fast, then throwing is better.

The main problem with checked exceptions, at least in Java, is the clumsiness of doing things right. Ideally every function would expose exceptions corresponding to useful error cases. Instead, because there's so much boilerplate involved in creating new exception types and wrapping exceptions as the proper type, programmers are more likely to swallow or blindly propagate.

I believe making checked exceptions signifcantly better is as easy as adding two features to Java:

- Easy wrapping. 'wraps Type1 as Type2' for try blocks and function signatures.
- Easy inline defining of new exceptions. 'throws forge ParityMismatch extends IllegalArgumentException'
Vodafone Is Sending Special Offers so You Will Pay More
The Birth of Religion
Meanwhile Japan itself, which has weathered the effects of several nuclear disasters (Fukushima being the mildest), is doing no such thing.

And apparently Germany will continue to import power derived from nuclear plants.
Perhaps you should mention on the landing page that this requires a paid Instapaper account.
I doubt this is about "keeping Sony happy" specifically.

It might be that Sony is the entity that raised the infringements to their attention, if the reports of GPL infringement and other "non-commercial use" licensing issues are correct.

Why would Sony be defending GPLed code? Possibly following "the enemy of my enemy can at least be used to inconvenience my enemy" rule. Though there is no evidence that a high profile company is behind the take-down at all - it could well be that one or more of the open source projects caught wind of their code being used in breach of their chosen license and complained to Google and that the timing of Xperia's launch is a coincidence.
#1 sounds nice, but I'd guess we're limited by the mechanical precision of the needle to track single-atom wide surfaces.
GeekStack: Trading Card Game Featuring The Heroes of Science and Technology
How about $10/month to view comment scores?
Meaningful Play: Getting Gamification Right (Google Tech Talk)
It looks like MS has made a deal out of Nokia's death
Grammar, Semantics, Knowledge and Fractals
What I suspect will happen is more power will be imported from nations that flagrantly pollute the environment.

The Chinese might be on to something with putting the engineers in charge. Sometimes the public really doesn't know what the fuck they're doing, and should be completely ignored.
I'm enjoying one of the comments on HaD, along the lines of "Let's configure it to tell the truth."

That's probably the most disruptive way you could use the thing.

Also, cross-injecting articles from sources of opposing bias could be a winner as well.

EDIT: Direct link to (very elaborate) build guide: http://newstweek.com/howto
That's more or less the idea, but sbit3 also allows you to easily share the file with others. If you need to share your file, just IM someone the link. At work, I'll often need to get a file to someone who doesn't have access to a server or I'll need to get a file to more than one person.
Rdio is faster and scans and replicates your iTunes library almost instantly. But I hope Rdio isn't bought by google.
I cannot agree. You are stuck in a view that energy needs to be cheap and that energy must be available despite the costs of nuclear reactors for nature and future generations.
This is the classical view of people who see technical progress as a kind of god given fact or as the natural direction humanity must take.
Right. The internet has taken away the need for a large part of the reasons for driving or (non-entertainment) travelling.

Making more use of telecommuting will drive down the number of accidents without the potential risks and liability issues of driverless cars.

Not that driverless cars aren't neat, but I agree it is the solution to the wrong problem.
Look on the bright side! :-)

German coal plants have better cleaning after DDR, so the extra German coal plants won't generate lots of environmental problems with acidic rain over Sweden...
MapReduce Is Not The Answer
There are environments to which you can't directly SSH. Imagine that you had to SSH through a port-knocking single bastion server before you can reach actual production servers.
I bet Google will come up with Chrome for phones and let Nvidia fully run on its new OS. I can foresee Android killing more than 2 cores out of Kal-El' 4...
I guess it is pretty obvious that a non-nuclear energy strategy will definitely result in higher energy prices in the short term. That said, some people might be comfortable with this as long as the price increase is moderate.

In the long run however, renewable energy sources are absolutely the way to go. It might actually pay off nicely to invest a lot of resources in renewable energy early on and come out ahead of the pack once coal, uranium, gas and oil become more expensive.

Whether or not Germany will actually be able to carry this off and reap the benefits of it will remain to be seen, though.
Let's see how long this decision holds up, In 2000 they decided to switch off old plants by 2011 (labor+green party). This was anulled by end of 2010 by the conservatives. Only because of Fukushima (and pending elections) did they anull this again. The green party has been winning in the last elections since Fukushima, and the ruling conservatives have lost ground. This is their opportunistic way of trying to avoid becoming meaningless.

In 5 years, energy prices will be high, Fukushima will be forgotten, new reactor designs may be available (pushed by Chinese who will have to depend on nuclear?) Let's see what happens then.
We are (probably) willing to set aside places for Luddites to live. For now, you can go to North Korea or some other nice place without much energy use...

(Be careful when choosing, poor countries have lots of environmental destruction which they can't afford to clean -- it might be bad for your health.)

:-)

Edit: It is not a false dichotomy; I compared to the only known low-energy societies. My point is that there is no low energy using society, where anyone would want to live (except the local junta). (And the expensive alternative to nuclear is coal, which is arguably worse with its climate effects.)
You might want to have a look at Xtend2. Xtend2 is a complete language build with the upcoming Xtext version 2.0.

Xtend2 offers dynamic dispatch functions and binds and compiles to Java. Furthermore, it inherits other nice language features like operator overloading, closures, higher-order functions and a rich switch statement from the expression language library Xbase (also part of Xtext 2.0).

You can define your own fully-flegded languages with Xtext easily by extending Xbase. Adding concepts or using just a subset of the expression language is possible.

There's a lot of information about Xtend2/Xbase at Sven's blog, e.g.
http://blog.efftinge.de/2011/04/eclipse-xtend-beta-available...

BTW, "feels like Java" is meant with respect to the editing experience :-) The language itself feels a lot better...
If there can be some kind of evaluation different for you and another guy some part of you will try to compete with that guy. In some people that instinct is stronger in some it is weaker. It is a normal drive like these for food, sex, safety.
I think you're getting a lot criticism because thinking in terms of "social inferiors" is foreign to many Americans, but quite common in the rest of the world in my experience. I don't really know anything about you, but I'd be surprised if you were raised in the US.
I agree. Computers used to be extremely expensive and unwieldy compared to other calculation devices. But they developed past that and their potential is mind-blowing.
A similar argument could be made for renewable energy technology.
Germany is a leader in solar power. They installed more panels last year than the rest of the world combined. They generate more electricity from solar than Fukushima did. If they can further establish themselves as leaders and experts in new-energy, it'll make them even more disproportionally well positioned to most of Europe.

However, it's a shame they see no future in nuclear. Seems like they are betting against something we've just scratched the surface of (my money is on Thorium)..for the wrong reasons. The damage from the oil and coal that they burn is far worse.
Closing nuclear powerplants early makes for a self-fulfilling prophecy as well, unfortunately.

The only solid argument against nuclear goes along the lines, ``nuclear power is too expensive because of the costs of disposal of wastes''.

Thing is, in normal operation the cost is amortized year by year. Normal life of a nuclear plant is a few decades; say 30 years. Could be longer, but the technological progress is so fast it just makes sensible to replace hardware before it's completely worn down.

But it becomes a hefty one-time fee if the plants are closed mid-life. The overall costs barely go down. The difference in amount of waste is small -- because large portion of nuclear wastes stems from decommissioning of the plant itself. The spent fuel itself is not that much. [1]

And the headlines in press go, ``See? It's too expensive''.

----

[1] been touring recently a nuclear powerplant in Greifswald, Germany, that undergoes decommissioning right now. Most of the waste is NOT the fuel, but infrastructure of the plant (granted, it was built with old technology).
Throughout the whole article no mention of any specific alternatives to be used? 23% is a big amount to make up to.

A relevant TED talk by Bill Gates (Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero): http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

In short, the most viable option currently, in his opinion, is the thorium reactors. Current uranium reactors can be converted to work with thorium.

"The main point of using thorium, in addition to the proliferation issues with uranium, is that there is 10 fold amount of it available compared to Uranium. If you take into account also the fact that we only use uranium-235 in our nuclear reactors, and this consitutes only 0.7% of the total amount of uranium, the increase is 100 fold.

Thorium reactors also operate by burning uranium. This is created from thorium by bombarding it with neutrons. This forms uranium 232, which is highly radioactive and is hence hard to deal. This is why U232 can't be used for nuclear weapons, it's hard to handle."
> Now the proposal -- `Let's have a tuple: Either<error_code, return_value> '

The Either data type is not a tuple.
May be you needed to reduce the TCP & UDP timeouts and update to latest v16785 SP2 of DD-WRT. Mine runs months without a reboot and I have half a dozen connected devices with infrequent bittorrenting going on.
How many people die from building and maintaining nuclear power plants?
I speak French and can say this doesn't ressemble any word and does not create any confusion. It's easily pronounceable and is overall very good in my opinion.
> "very good for getting stuff done fast, easy and good-enough"

You're saying PHP facilitates a faster development process than most other popular web development platforms? This was probably true, ten years ago.

Today, we have several platforms that facilitates a fast development process without the language weaknesses and inconsistencies that PHP is burdened with.
I agree..except that's assuming a static world for the next decade. Both China and India are intently looking into Thorium reactors (and the US sorta is)...that's where I'd put my money too.
Smells like vaporware. I never really trust it when people first make a blog and a domain and a fancy headline and a fancy logo, and write prose with lots of "will be's" and "will have's", all without showing anything substantial.
Right, you need to curate the data as you import it. I assumed that was assumed. You need to make it readable for humans and for search engines (SEO).
Django with nginx and gunicorn - ultimate simplicity
Paul,

over the years we all discussed a lot of times about the flaws we find using this kind of naive evaluation system. Now to get rid of some of the problems we obv. try to optimise the flawed model or the methods we apply to it. But didn't we learn here on HN that if your model is flawed in a way you can't accept, you should find another model?

Just an idea: Maybe a recommendation system would perform better then a voting system. Because we want to sort our posts and comments according to relevance to the reader. And of course there are articles, which are better then others in an object, global fashion. But most of the time 2 articles or comments of the same comment can have quite a big difference in relevance to 2 different people.

That is just my simple, unvalidated idea. It maybe totally wrong. I just use it as an argument to the idea that we should not discuss about things like "show comments yes/no" but "how do we better show a reader the stuff that is relevant to him?"
fortunately not as easy as c++
I have a 2003 WRX which I enjoy greatly. I haven't done any track days or anything with it because I'm too chicken and boring, but it's still great fun. :) Bought it brand new and it is 100% paid for, which is even better. :)
I like the idea of the Waiter Rule ; but here in France it would be quite difficult for a client to be more rude than the waiter. :)

2 anecdotes:
An American friend of mine wants to become a waitress when she's back to US, just to give people the experience she didn't have here in France.
Last time I was shocked to find such a soft-speaking waiter, and I though for a few seconds he was just joking.
Also, the swedes reversed their decision few years ago. Nowdays while they are not increasing nor decreasing nuclear power, they are OK with replacing the old reactors.
"In mathematics and computer science, a tuple is an ordered list of elements. [...] The term originated as an abstraction of the sequence: single, double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple, septuple, octuple, ..., n‑tuple, ..., where the prefixes are taken from the Latin names of the numerals. The unique 0‑tuple is called the null tuple. A 1‑tuple is called a singleton, a 2‑tuple is called a pair and a 3‑tuple is a triple or triplet."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple
Yeah, every time I see someone being rude to a waiter, my first thought isn't about the waiter rule, it's whether this person didn't watch fight club.
What do you mean? They still use Nvidia chips on Macbook and Macbook Air.
Visualisation of Machine Learning Algorithms
China has stopped waterfront nuclear power station approvals:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-suspends-waterfront-n...

and suspended all other development: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/16/china.nuclea...

Don't believe everything the nuclear power fans tell you. Sometimes the engineers really do know what they are doing.
"stroke their L-series lenses" priceless!
What is the best way to learn development on Android Platform?
I am a web developer and have never developed any mobile application. I want to learn mobile application development on Android Platform. What is the best approach to learn android development? Also any good books or reference site will be helpful.
I think you'll agree with me when I say that people only read the name after they've read the quote in your examples too.
Start here! -
http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world...
4) The world collectively shrugs and says "meh".

This is alluded to in your statement "While it's potential minimum is 0 [...]", but isn't listed explicitly. (Miss)applying the Y-Combinator whiteboard, bitcoin is in the initial peak of excitement, it is yet to prove that it can traverse the trough of sorrow.

http://www.inc.com/ss/can-paul-graham-mass-produce-start?sli...
As LLVM is used for everything from x86 to GPU code generation, I have some trust in it being able to hold up. But indeed, only time will tell.
Lasers used as a method of protest
> without examining how the current situation came to be.

The problem, in a nutshell, with just about everything in the field of Computer Science today. See: George Santayana.
How many people develop for ubuntu?
Have you spent any significant length of time in China?
On the waiting list. They make each car by hand, and dont rush the process, so the the demand far outstrips the supply (thus the multi-year waiting list)

Also for US citizens, there are tax advantages to taking delivery in Europe (the car will come into the country used).
"35mm film resolution is around 36MP" where did you get that? I've seen lots of numbers, here it is 175MP http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.htm in other articles, they mention another number, for the same film.
Cory Doctorow: 'Every pirate wants to be an admiral' [video]
anyone got the source for this?
Great pointer, thanks!

I don't have problem with doing a full circle -- actually, that's a good thing once in a while. Cue Apple using BSD and GNU for MacOS X.

I take issue with not considering what reasons got us where we are to-day, and what issues we bring back from the past. State of art (previous research and application work) should be laid out. Pros and cons have to be listed explicitly, or at least referenced. Weighted one against the other. I'd call that ``matter of scientific integrity'', if we were talking about Computer Science ;-)
> They generate more electricity from solar than Fukushima did.

The problem is that a country requires many Fukushimas (in Germany's case, 17). If renewables cannot fill the gap left by shutting down nuclear, you'll have to import your electricity from other countries generating it by the very method you phased out, or by even worse methods like coal. Being the leader in renewables doesn't change this fact.

> Seems like they are betting against something...

Political decisions are rarely that longsighted. One can hope, though.
At the time I wrote that, my thought was that the revolution would happen on the Internet, but it wouldn't happen on some giant, corporate-owned social application, but would happen on something smaller and more decentralized.

I was especially thinking of the way companies like Sony surpress information withDMCA takedowns and lawsuits, rather than actual revolutions. As far as actual revolutions are concerned, it did take place on Facebook and Youtube. But also on Twitter!
> That's one problem gcc has, that its architecture description is aged and doesn't have a good way of specifying some things that are very important for 2010s performance, so has had to undergo some major surgery (still in progress). LLVM currently avoids that partly by being newer.

LLVM also currently avoids that by not generating code that's as good for those 2010 architectures.

I would also be interested in hearing you expound upon those things that are "very important for 2010s performance".