skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please, if suicide has crossed your mind, please, please, please find help. I had a fraternity brother commit suicide and you have no idea how much you'll be missed.

Help is out there and it is free.

http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
Absolutely amazing! I think I'm right there with you on the music. It was just distracting, but the video is incredible!
With direct patent troll cost (loss of company values) calculated for the last years by BU at about half a trillion plus blocking of innovation, loss of jobs and indirect costs to companies at one point society has to question the priorities: To make (very) few much richer and loosing whole industries or to create an environment where the whole economy can prosper.
History has some good examples on that e.g. from the first industrial revolution that was led by the UK. After Prussia / Germany completely relaxed IP laws it became the leading industrial nation in Europe. The UK where strong special interest groups pushed through stringent IP & patent law lost it leadership role & dominance of the industry and has till today not been able to recover from that.

On patent trolls & the 500 billion:
The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1930272)
Abstract:
In the past, non-practicing entities (NPEs) - firms that license patents without producing goods - have facilitated technology markets and increased rents for small inventors. Is this also true for today’s NPEs? Or are they “patent trolls” who opportunistically litigate over software patents with unpredictable boundaries? Using stock market event studies around patent lawsuit filings, we find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies. Moreover, very little of this loss represents a transfer to small inventors. Instead, it implies reduced innovation incentives.
Money and the Crisis of Civilization
Browse for G Plan Furniture
I was once talking to a guy who had many years of consulting experience for one the big3. His opinion was somewhat that the most important aspect in consulting is to create a deeper level of connection. That the more people put an emphasis on network, the more value is in having people as clients who are truly passionated and willing to stand up.
Probably depends on the business/personality but I just felt mentioning it.
As s startup owner I feel like I am a sinking man and each floating wood chip around is a hope - Learning to float between moving from one wood chip to other is the key to me.

I guess I will fail that day when I will conclude that I am too tired of trying (not really, really tried -- and still failed).

I don't believe "The truth is ... that it takes a special and lucky person".
The truth is we need one or two hands on our shoulder and someone to stand during the darkest hours and say "darkest hours are always before the sun comes". ..sad to read about Ilya Zhitomirskiy.
Ok, so its the case that null is valid data and makes for a bad "invalid value".

Personally, this demonstrates a core reason why return values (and returning null in particular, in any language) are a bad way of handling errors - they're a leaky abstraction and too much inside knowledge is required to use them safely. For example, if I have code like

a = foo()
if (a is valid) bar(a)

I have to know about the possible values of a before I can pass it to bar. Exceptions are better because I don't have to know the internal details (foo and bar could be library functions that return some data I don't know all the valid values of):

try {
a = foo()
bar(a)
} catch (e) {
handle error here
}

But I also agree with the post that exceptions aren't always great either.

Instead of returning null, I like haskells Maybe. You either return a valid value (which can be null, in this case) or it returning Nothing, which can never be something which is also valid data. This removes the possible ambiguity of whether null is an error value or a valid value and the haskell compiler makes sure you hanbdle the error case, but its still a signal-error-through-return-value method of error handling and is not always ideal. I also like the ideas behind common lisps condition system, though I have never used it in real code. I like the idea of abstracting the error signalling, handling and routing into separate entities that can happen at various parts of the hierarchy. I also like Go's defer/panic/recover mechanism, though, again, I have never used it in real code, so don't know how well it works in reality.
Perhaps the explanation is in this Bruce Sterling story: http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/taklamakan.txt
Not unless it could order food for the dog, too, while it was at it. Oh, that didn't work out?
Return the first one. You always care more about the original error than an explanation of why you failed in cleaning up after it.
How To Think Like Bill Gates
SICP is still used at MIT at graduate level.
Segunda Jornada de eliminatorias Brasil 2014
One of my biggest pet peeves with crawling the web is using XPath. Not because I have strong feelings about XPath, just that I use css selector syntax so much, it's a pain I can't leverage that knowledge in this domain as well. Something like this is really awesome and going to make crawling the web more accessible.
This place is ripe for bots that speak Bocce.
Let me know when the change has happened...
It's quite heavy on texture bandwidth. I got very smooth 60 fps on Nvidia Quadro 2000M (should be similar to GeForce 460M) and somehow stuttering 30-35 fps on ATI Radeon 3650 Mobility.
It's very beautiful, but damn it slow down!

Running this at half speed is so much more impressive.
Really interesting. I'm curious what their tools look like but the github repository the article links to is currently empty.
GAE-Flat-Web : a quick setup for hosting Static Web-App on Google AppEngine
Four Reasons to Not use try/catch
A follow- up article to the article on try/catch being an anti-pattern at https://groups.google.com/d/topic/nodejs/1ESsssIxrUU
My wife would like something that cleans up after the kids (safely, etc). I would like something that turns things off when people leave, but I suppose smart switches would do the job cheaper than a robot. Not as cool, though, especially if it were like an inexpensive little "monkey bot" about 3 feet tall :-)
Ah so basically everything is asynchronous communications?
While GitHub is great I think it is more likely that DropBox becomes a dominant blog engine.

Already there are things like TiddlyWiki and DropPages that do this and it's much more approachable for the average user.

I also think as DropBox teams improves and iterates it will be interesting to see more people using Dropbox for basic version control, probably not a good idea but I think it'll happen.
Lymphoma Survival
Why is everyone complaining that this isn't a lifestyle to idolize or emulate when the resounding sentiment here is that it isn't a lifestyle to IDOLIZE OR EMULATE?

We get it. I get it. You get it. Everyone gets it. I think plenty of the commenters here do a damn fine job of trivializing other readers' intelligence.

I'm also certain that Jack Dorsey doesn't work 16-hour days for the attention. We didn't know this up until now, and Twitter and Square have been running just fine. That's what matters, and if Dorsey feels like putting in that much time is necessary, so be it. If he burns out, he'll burn out; if he doesn't, good for him.
It seems that Ilya left behind a detailed suicide note.

http://oobly.com/?p=530/

I spoke to a person who was there when his mother called to check on him. Tragic.
I'm not a US resident but I've donated to the EFF. U.S. policy dictates what happens for many other countries and
it's not acceptable to have such policies become mainstream. http://eff.org
>What kind of lifestyle do you want?

A balanced one. I already spend a vast majority of my waking hours focused on "work". I also have my kids, my wife and other leisure activities that I find make my life worth living.

Given these pieces of life, which most entrepreneurs have - most entrepreneurs will not want to work 16 hours a day on their companies.
I agree, I think we underestimate how awesome these technologies could be if brought together into a coherent service.

I would like my kitchen to tell me what I can cook based on what's on hand, and then give me the recipe for it. And say if I decide on a menu for the next week have it auto order what I need from amazon and give me a list of what else I need to buy, and where its on sale. Sign me up.
Your point about scaffolding kind of distorts the point I was trying to make - it's a false dichotomy to say that you either build scaffolding or get things done, and I didn't intend to favor scaffolding over the other.

I think your point about error is more valid. When I wrote about errors, I was thinking about more serious errors, but I don't think I wrote that, and I think it changes my argument some.
That, and perhaps follow Andy Warhol`s advice:

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
Omzeil.com Fast online Proxy
tell me how to do proxy
Launch is a tool, not a goal – The Startup Toolkit Blog
Good idea. I've been using this to sort by time:

alias lt='ls -ltr'

And this to sort by name:

alias ll='ls -l'
Good practice to leave the manual on top of the appliance, e.g. fridge, water heater, furnace, etc. Or put them all in one drawer.
Jonny T -Nachos
Adwords can provide nearly instant gratification for driving traffic if that's all you're after.

However, it would be foolish to neglect the free and (arguably) better way to drive traffic: SEO.

Patio11 has a blog full of information about enhancing your SEO, creating targeted content, and building your site to generate a lot of traffic without the need to spend money.

Edit: Start Here - http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
I know it seems like a ton of stuff to read, but it is absolutely worth it.
Albert Hofmann asked Steve Jobs to help support LSD related research
It's true that the impact of a single individual is very small, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything. I guess it's similar to the whole Nike fiasco where many people stopped buying their products due to their factories employing underpaid children. It's a matter of principle.

Personally, I avoid Microsoft products whenever I can simply before I don't need to use them anymore. There's plenty of great alternatives that are better in many respects.
Its quite the chance that that paper on Patent trolls was written by my Patent Law Prof from BU. Who takes in mind a well balanced view on this difficult subject.

Also some great TIL about German vs Uk innovation.

Even most patent attny's that are more than happy making money off this broken systems excesses agree that there many serious problems abound
Yeah, but in this case, the removed part was small, not related to the rest of the article, and the most common reaction to it would be "you should remove this".

I was actually not aware that there was an accepted finality to online writing though, so that is something I should keep in mind.
Herman Cain’s 404 error page
Not available yet here in France.

I'm still amazed they actually pulled it off. How did they get the majors to agree on Apple-sanctified pirated music laundering?
Got big data? Crunch it with Google’s BigQuery
Is there a possibility to craft a Siri server reply with malicious code? Shouldn't be too hard for the applidium guys to attempt (maybe even use a fuzzer?)
Yeah, that's why I talk about stealing it at the language level. Although it's possible to use this based on conventions, the real power comes from being able to use it to cover weird conditions while gluing various libraries together. If your language already has a relatively similar tool (i.e. "traditional" exceptions) there's basically no chance that anything you pick up will support conditions.

That said, it's a wonderful model to know about/follow if you come into the rare case that makes reimplementing it where you can useful.
Roughly it will take about a year minimum of lawyering until the argument reaches the desk of a judge. Especially since patents are federal cases. You have prepare arguments, answer all requests, prove jurisdiction, etc and take depositions of everything. A partners time is north of 500$ an hour that adds up verrry quickly when you have a team working for you
Does this basically mean that CL provides a mechanism that's lower level than what is otherwise equivalent to exceptions/warnings, and that this in turn enables things like restarts? Is this analogous to the relationship between higher level control structures such as if/for/while/break/continue vs the lower-level goto? Lastly, can some of these features not be implemented with exceptions?:

def parse_log_file(f):
result = []
for line in f.readlines(): # Fails for large files
parsed_line = None
retries = 0
while retries < 5:
try:
result.append(parse_log_entry(line))
break
except MalformedLogEntry:
line = fix(line)
retries += 1
return result
What about commercial fridges like restaurants? Or work place refrigerators? I can see the set-it-and-forget-it feature working well in these scenarios.
Didn't liked the list, why should I have 3 smartphones (MUST have list)? In addition to it, I'd prefer to have a Kindle than Nook.
Reminds me of Pipe[1]

[1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pipe/
I'm kinda wondering why Apple bothered using HTTP for something that really doesn't use anything recognizable as proper HTTP. Was it just for HTTPS?
The article claims lower prices mean less profit / less incentive for dealers, and that sounds logical, but I would think that an important knock on effect is that the incentive for corrupt police officers is lower and there is less money available to buy off politicians/judges/contract killers/etc.
If you offer the student credit and make sure you abide by the schools rules so that the student can receive credit than legally you can employ the intern without monetary compensation. This should get you on your way!
Brainstorming for Japan: Distributed Global Collaboration for Disaster Response
Property Based Testing (audio discussion)
I didn't realize it was still the fall of 2002 (when that syllabus was from).
Awesome will do! I think we have a great product and a very skilled person on our team with whom the interns will primarily work with. So a great experience for some college kids.
No disrespect to the panelists, but I didn't find that very compelling. The moderator was also a bit rude to Hickey's first answer ("Saw that coming.")

The 1on1 or 1on2 interviews that InfoQ films at conferences often have a good pace with a mix of questions.
Many customers already have BES installed. Why doesn't the phone talk to the BES directly? What value is RIM's centralized data center adding?
Not exactly. This is a syllabus from a course taught in 2002.

- The syllabus refers to SICP as the standard text for the intro-level undergrad course, which it then was.

- It says "All students are encouraged to acquaint themselves with" SICP.

- but the course itself was taught in SCHEME+, and the assignments provided have nothing to do with SICP.
LTL Types FRP: Logical Types with FRP Proofs [pdf]
I traditionally use 'ls -lart' because I like the LART reference.
Yes, I know that is complex, that's why I sidestepped the issue by saying "less addictive than coffee". That's pretty easy to determine in a controlled double blind and most people agree with it intuitively.
Yup reached out to the local schools career postings today. Hopefully we can incite some talented interns as I think we have some great experiences for them.
Consumer Finance 2.0: Transferwise, Simple, Wonga disrupt banking
Thats proper HN thinking out of the box that I like
<spolier> guess who doesn't verify the root CA.
Think of all the fun to be had with a Siri man-in-the-middle
There have been several attempts, and they usually quickly turn into nonprofits or PACs themselves. They tend to reflect particular points of view because people who want socialist-type policies are unlikely to use a crowdsourcing mechanism that's already popular with, say, the Tea Party crowd.

I have often wondered why someone doesn't just set up Republican and Democratic versions of the same service, with appropriate color schemes and so on.
Neither of these ideas make much sense and are both based upon agrarian ideas of economics. The agrarian idea is basically that is only so much land, and he who controls the most of it will be richest.

The new economy is a situation where each new idea creates new opportunities and the only real scarcity is that of attention. Attention is largely an intangible asset, certainly not ownable or protectable and the only real moats you can build with regard to attention are that of network effect.
Def let's talk we like all the HN minded people we can get. Send me your email and I will contact you with some ideas. =)
Apple iPhone 4S Siri stuff.tv (한글
Young programmer working on an open source competitor to large company suddenly dies.

Insensitive perhaps, and I don't believe anything similar happened, but FWIW I had the same thought.
Too bad I can't watch the spaghetti cannon at work during lunch. I know it's silly, but silly is fun.

Stuff like YouTube (as well as Netflix) is helping to kill broadcast TV (alright, reality TV and other low value cruft is also helping to kill broadcast, as well as fixed show schedules). Long term, internet video is more democratic, as well as flexible and fun. Perhaps stuff like YouTube will have more effect on society that internet-fridges and AI cars?
Probably so it'll work through strict proxies.
16 core x86 cpus from AMD
Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in megabytes. (FTFY)
They're fixing it soon: https://twitter.com/#!/applidium/status/136175883055661057
Maybe, but then you need to manually add your own root CA to the iPhone, or the cert verification will fail, so it's not a security issue.
Alternate Definition of Irony
I know this is an open forum but these threads are getting hard to read. Copycat suicides are a real phenomenon and some responses, however genuine and well intentioned, can make them more likely to occur.

Department of Health Recommendations for Covering Suicide. Do not apportion blame. Do not give simple reasons. Do not glorify.

Read more here:

http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/resource...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/126241/WHO-Media-Guide-for-Suicide...
Great as I said all HN folks are welcome! Let me know how to get in touch.
Your code is not equivalent. There is a separation of concerns that is possible with conditions/restarts that is not possible with exceptions.

The calling code can choose the appropriate restarts base on information that the callee code does not - and should not - have access to.
Diaspora commit: "Image for Ilya" https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commit/0c33791069010869...
If there is more than one human being, there is a hierarchy.

As for the rest I think whatever you Americans like to bomb is out of topic.
Since it's HTTPS, those proxies can't see the traffic anyway, so as long as they used SSL on port 443, they could use any protocol on top.
I had the same idea and submitted on saturday, here's mine.

https://github.com/rjenkins/instagram-html5-unshredder

demo page: http://memoization.com/unshred.html

I added drag and drop support, Tokyo image can be found here http://bit.ly/sQPUje.

I like how he repainted in place, makes for a cool demo.
Maybe I misunderstand it, but doesn't "retries" gets increased only on MalformedLogEntries? I mean, if there's no malformed log entries -- how will it ever exit?
> The government argued that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking.

> a judge subsequently threw out the verdict on grounds that the CFAA was constitutionally vague and that upholding the verdict would set a precedent for anyone who breaches similar contracts to be criminally prosecuted.

What happens when a judge with less sense sets a terrible precedent?
ComScore Releases Overview of European Internet Usage in September 2011
Nanotech and bio inspiration lead to development of extremely slippery surface
They're possibly just reusing their existing HTTP request libraries for creating the request. But bear in mind that with an HTTPS connection, once the secure session has been established you can send anything you like over it. There's nothing to enforce strict HTTP over an HTTPS connection.

That's how tools like Corkscrew can tunnel SSH (and practically any other TCP-based protocol) over an HTTPS connection.
It was a kit like one of these: http://www.ministeam.com/acatalog/Bohm_Stirling_Engines_and_...

I also tried to build one from scratch once, but only got a few parts in before I sold my lathe and mill. The kit was much easier...

Also look up flame eater or vacuum engines. Pretty neat.
down for me :(
5 Secret Mindset Success Strategies for Network Marketers
Found another one not far to the east of the "window" pattern:

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=40.455046,93.741875

Could this just be a glitch in image processing? Otherwise, there are quite a bit of things going on around this area.
C. Jolley: Facebook is not taking on Strobe itself
I know Ralph Leighton personally, and Gus is right. In fact, the same goes for The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Feynman gave the lectures, and other people took the transcripts and turned them into book.† This was harder than anyone expected it to be.

†I served as Caltech's editor for The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition, which came out in 2005.
You can add a root CA to both linux and os x. No problems. Though on an iPhone you'll have to jailbreak it first...so I guess apple didn't think of that, or they don't care.
Fixed. I changed how the data is appended to the result half way through writing it so there was no condition to break out of the loop. Now there is a break after the append.
Tell him that, as a college student with lots of social connections, if he neuters the internet like this you're going to have a whole lot of spare time--and you'll devote all of it to organizing protests against his re-election and/or any enterprise he chooses to pursue after leaving office.
Who's Sitting At Your Dinner Table?
> The calling code can choose the appropriate restarts base on information that the callee code does not - and should not - have access to.

In the common case, is that not equivalent to the caller catching specific errors by wrapping the callee in a try/except? Could you elaborate?
How to Live a Longer Life: Principles of Healthful Living
This is not my experience at all. Return codes are far too easy to ignore. I would argue that the fact that C software works after 20 years is because it's been debugged for 20 years, everything that can possibly happen to it has probably happened and been handled. It's not because error return codes are a fundamentally better way to do this.

I know it's kind of unhip right now, but I would argue that what you're asking for is better handled using checked exceptions. That really forces you to think about error conditions, and it's enforced by the language. I'm continuously baffled by the argument that this is a bad idea.
I just called mine. You should too.
I just emailed my representative and senators. I also called my representative and left a message with a very confused sounding secretary/intern/lackey. You should too. Do it. Do it now.
I'd like to hear more about this. I'm working on a javascript CSV reader that displays parallel coordinates + a data grid:

http://exposedata.com/parallel/upload.html
http://exposedata.com/parallel/ (if upload fails, this is what it looks like)

Once I get the CSV uploader more robust, I'll add additional charts that respond to interactive filters/aggregators, just as the table responds to the chart above.

The goal is a data exploration tool for non-programmers, but I'm keen to extend it for programmers who need more sophisticated ETL and are willing to do a little scripting.
So only one read at a time?
Disney Acquires Babble