skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is so important to realize where you stand in life. I'm sure many of us would have loved to be in place of Ilya; In news all over at the age of 21. Perhaps he did not realize this. A great loss.
Tennessee: The Startup State
No, the way to handle that pattern is with nested gotos:

a = acquire(A);
if (!a) goto err_a;

b = acquire(B);
if (!b) goto err_b;

c = acquire(C);
if (!c) goto err_c;

do_stuff(a,b,c);

err_c:
release(b);
err_b:
release(a);
err_a:
return;

This is precisely why goto is not universally evil.
But you're right that I've never worried about being nuked.

It's really a weird way to live. I grew up with this idea that everything could just be gone just like that: family, hearth, civilization.

Things became odder, personally, when I joined the Marines. Suddenly it looked like being in the military gave one a better chance of surviving World War III than staying on the home front.

Assuming one wasn't at an SAC base, or stationed near a target.

Then one day ... the threat just vanished. Very odd.

Thomas Jefferson's quote about the moral effects of dependence on manufacture.

On the other hand we can't all be farmers. And life on a farm back in those days wasn't idyllic just .. necessary.

For all of Jefferson's love affair with the yeoman farmer, he himself wasn't one, wouldn't have been able to think his grand thoughts, read his books if he had to spend 15 hours a day behind a plow.
Diaspora co-founder, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, dies at 22
Get a Logo for $5 for your startup
That is quite funny. A nice upbeat tone to the rest of the comments :)
Why isnt there a crowdsourced lobbying startup? Essentially everyone votes on a particular topic and also donates money for that cause. If the cause collects enough money its sent to a non profit which actually has some lobbying clout to fight the battle on Capitol hill.

Teh startup can take a small %age and ensure that people can quickly swarm together and effectively beat shit bills like this.

Is there a problem with this idea?
Google Groups has also received the Google+ treatment
I read recently that mongo has a global lock on write. That was news to me, does anyone have more info?
I completely agree, except in the case of VCs.

When you're dealing with partners or customers, "bringing the CTO" in to a conversation sends a message to them that you are serious about the partnership. You may be the only person on the tech team, or maybe one of 2 or 3, but it doesn't matter, because the partner or customer may not know that.

In the case of VCs, however, one of their first questions will be "who is your team?". This means that even if you name yourself "CTO, Research Architect, and Head of Product" they'll see you as "member of the technical team".
If you want to understand Steve Jobs read the description of Narcisstic personality disorder. I would guess the tears were drawn from rage and envy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disord...
"Where you stand" and being in the news tend not to mean much to suicidal people. I deeply sympathize with all involved, Ilya included.
Santa would be most upset.
Some linking love to MDN and highlighting the wiki property would be nice.
That’s because we don’t cure cancer, we find ways to successfully treat cancers.

There are many different kinds of cancer and we do indeed find ways to better treat one kind or another kind all the time. There will likely never be one magic bullet that allows us to treat all different kinds of cancers.
The Eatery surpasses one million food ratings
You're going to hate this answer, but it depends.

Reddit has good CPC and engagement rates, so long as you have content or an application that appeals to that crowd. (See Gabriel Weinberg's post on the topic).

StumbleUpon has a more mass-market appeal, but relatively high cost-per-view with low engagement.

Adwords is expensive unless you spend a long time honing in on niche keywords. Even then it is expensive.

There was a great post on ASmartBear this morning (guest post) about how effective cold-calling can be. And that's essentially free (not counting your labor hours).

Pud has a great write-up on this topic: http://pud.com/post/5239917032/users

This is something I struggle with too, so I'll be interested to see the other responses.
*just to confirm to anyone who read this and was concerned about my well-being: I am not suicidal. I appreciate the responses though and am glad to have contributed to this conversation. I think the stigma around mental health discussions is horrible and to see these things discussed in a public forum is fantastic, though the circumstances leading to this discussion are obviously very sad and grim. Hopefully events like this will open more people's eyes to the realization that depression is very common (especially amongst techies and startup founders) and it becomes easier for people to discuss this stuff moving forward as it literally can save lives if it's discussed more freely.
Small is beautiful … but Schumacher's economics of scale runs deeper
Shopping Discovery App Zoomingo Raises $1.3 Million
how is 24/7 phone support a "weak effort"? it's exactly what everybody has been asking for.
5) Is what bothers me the most. If the US goes to hell, I have no doubt the first world will follow.
In New Zealand I do remember a instance where a politician voted against what they personally believe in due to what their electorate wanted. Sadly the details escape me at the moment.
Underpayment/Overpayment and PAYE Notices – Help From Taxing Nannies
"...think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special."
-Jim Valvano

It's certain that Jobs thought a lot. This article says he cried. Was there any laughter in Jobs' life?
If you are a US citizen, you can take action right here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally...
I'm using it. I have a habit of posting list of links in my blog so this tool really helped me get things done faster :)
You can go to OpenCongress.org and "vote". They'll help you find your congressional district representatives and draft/email a letter to each for you.

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/show
> I can decide to make something in my code exceptional, sure. I can't decide to make something in the library not-exceptional, though.

Making something in the library non-exceptional is equivalent to discarding an error. Catch the exception and discard it. Done. Do this at whatever level you feel is appropriate (or don't, and handle the exception in a more reasonable fashion).

> In other words, somebody thought it was reasonable to force .NET users to catch some exceptions immediately.

What do you suppose should be done? The other option seems to be to continue in a erroneous state. I'm probably not familiar with every possible error-handling methodology, but it seems the main ones are "error codes" (those worked so great in C, right), "exceptions" (annoying, but error handling in general is annoying), and "injected handling" (where the caller can inject error handling code somehow; but this is more complicated and requires deeper knowledge about the callee). Is there a better option?

> No, but there's not much point in using .NET if I'm not using the library that comes with it. And the design of the library does tie my hands in some cases.

My point is that you are not tied by .Net any more than you are tied by any other exception-handling language. You can handle exceptions where and how you feel is appropriate.

> I think the author makes a great point about libraries that use exception handling blurring the line between bugs and expected problems. That's exactly how I feel about the C# work I've done.

I think this is a bit of a red herring. An exceptional condition is simply a special case. A bug in the code is an exceptional condition. A problem parsing a number is an exceptional condition. Modern languages generally have specific exceptions to allow you to handle different situations with custom logic, but it's important to note that the runtime can't reliably distinguish between "bugs" and "expected problems". Did your number parsing fail because the user entered an invalid value or because your code grabbed column 3 instead of 4?
Bankruptcy Down in Western New York
A month with the iPhone 4S
My stance on the Apple patent mess has been that they're making legal use of bad patent laws. Hate the laws that allow those patents, not the patent-holders.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is going above and beyond just exercising patent rights that shouldn't exist. Asking someone to sign an NDA before you will tell them which of your patents they're infringing is so despicable that this should be an automatic win for B&N due to the doctrine of unclean hands.
This should be on top. It explains what this area is and its scale.
1. Product tying, especially if there are threats w.r.t. Windows Licenses, is illegal if you are a monopoly.

2. The choice of the Nook OS does affect their profitability, cost control is the primary way a company can gain price flexibility / increase margins. Using Android means no license fees, no restrictions on how you implement it (apart from those you impose on yourself and / or technical limitations). B&N will probably have a large sunk cost on research, development, and operations by going with Android; doubling or more of that sunk cost because of a "bully" will put the back up on more than one or two execs. B&N are probably feeling they are at the point that it might be cheaper to litigate, or they feel that this might be a bet the company moment.

3. If you are going to take a punt on some anti-trust action you don't instruct teams like Cravath; you go to them if you feel you have a good chance to prevail or have more money than sense; B&N at first blush don't strike me as the second.
Currently, there is a global read/write lock. MongoDB does extensive yielding and tracking of on vs. off disk to mitigate the effects of this. In subsequent versions (2.2) , we'll be lowering the scope of this lock as well.
Hadoop, Hive, and EMR - Hadoop World 2011
Warren Buffett buys IBM stake with $10.7bn investment
How I (Jak Shively) got Fired from a Crappy Little Tech Company
You'd better believe that companies like Amazon, RIM, and all the others have very strict change management procedures. Changes to critical systems are generally planned weeks - sometimes months - in advance, and even simple changes often require multiple levels of approval. Even then, sometimes something gets missed, a component acts slightly differently than expected, or somebody makes a mistake.

All of the mistakes the article discussed were network related, and yes, when you're dealing with networks like Amazon's or RIM's, where there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of devices connected, they are definitely more complicated than a nuclear plant.
A gastronomic guide to Skyrim: Kill Screen - Things I Ate in Skyrim
MozFest
Questions about this site
I have some questions about this site.

http://www.aglobalcurrency.com/

I need a 'hacker' to answer some specific questions for me. Anybody have the skills?
Google Earth -> View -> Historical Imagery

A lot of the sites have been there over 5 years.
Some of the older imagery has inadequate imagery to tell.
It doesn't make sense with regular goods, either. Or with anything, actually.
I've played with a lot of desktops. twm, fvwm, fvwm2, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, icewm, various *boxes, GNOME and KDE through the ages, and XFCE4.

The latter is probably the closest to a replacement to WindowMaker that I've found, but it has two serious deficits:

1: No "raise on circulate" (with window contents visible) when you're alt-tab circulating through windows. Makes it really hard to find what you're looking for.

2: No pinnable window list. In WindowMaker, any arbitrary menu (or sub-menu) may be pinned to the root window. F11 (or middle mouse on root) brings up a menu of all open windows (the windowlist), which can be navigated (arrow keys or mouse), and if pinned, stays persistent while you hunt down the particular window you're looking for. Very useful when needed.
Don't get sucked into defeatism. The system is designed to be able to ignore the average person, sure, but here's the thing: you're not the average person.

Be smart, be motivated, and figure out how things actually work. Then apply the maximum amount of force to the place it can do the most good.

I'm not sure that place is actually phone calls, but there's a reason phone calls are suggested so often. They do work. You might be able to find something better though and if you do let us know.

Edit: Well that was dumb. I replied from memory without reading the thread again. I totally agree about email.
This is about a company named Oneupweb. The author doesn't say that out of fear of being sued, but many will attest to the accuracy of his words. Once you read this you will be thankful for where ever you currently work.
Web programming language Opa will support CouchDB & MongoDB.
One of the reasons for MS being able to extract such amounts (same as their whole OS lic costs) from HW manufactures like HTC & Samsung is the continuing almost monopoly of MS Windows as a desktop OS in business environments. And – as said - MS Windows only supports MS patented file systems directly (fat, fat32, NTFS). So as a HW manufacturer if you take the simple route you use one of those fs on your devices. That's how this story is told reg FAT patents.

Samsung, HTC e.a. how about writing a Windows driver & Front-end app (e.g. similar to the Nokia or Blackberry desktop apps) that can read a non MS patented file system from your devices – would that not be much cheaper or is their more to this story?
I don't expect this bill to pass as it is. Enough large, powerful corporations should be against it (most Internet companies).

Much more likely: the major provisions will be added as riders to a bill that passes in haste, to get a few congressional votes.
Need a 'hacker'
I have specific questions about this site:

http://www.aglobalcurrency.com/

and would appreciate communicating with somebody with the right skill-set to help.
Kindle Fire first impressions
Department of Health Recommendations for Media Covering Suicide
There has been a lot of flak around free (non-paid) internships lately. As a bootstrapper, I cannot afford to pay an intern. How should I handle getting an intern on-board?
Differentiation Strategy: The Successful Approach
In this instance what is holding them back isn't necessarily that you are European. They are probably more concerned with some or all of the following (plus what I forget).

- Education? Where did you learn how to program/run a business (typically this can be counter-acted by evidence of success already)

- Location? Yes, you are visiting California and are "ready to move". But you haven't moved yet. You're still located in Europe - that's the bottom line

- Incorporation? You are not incorporated yet. You may say you are willing to, but they will typically not care much unless they know instantly you have the next Google/Facebook.

- Legal resident status? As you have neither moved to California nor incorporated there is no true indication if you will be allowed to get a visa to work in the U.S

I would suggest taking the plunge if you really need the capital. Get the visa, come to the U.S. set up your HQ out of your shared apartment and incorporate. Then look for VC.

Or just go to European VC firms - there are plenty of them.
Vint Cerf: The government is going overboard in Internet copyright control
Avoid dogma when herding cats
How Do You Make Your Own Web Page : Auto Build is ultimate Website Builder Tool 
Autobuildit Is A New, Powerful Website Builder For Internet Marketers. Now Anyone Can create own webpage Fast With No Technical Skills Needed!
Sometimes suicide is driven by analytically looking at your life and deciding it really is awful... but a huge amount of the time it is a psychological problem of depression, which isn't going to be instantly cured by thinking "I'm in the news", or even "I have great friends/family".
This whole thing makes me feel terrible.

I didn't know Ilya well, but I did know him. I wish I had known that he was in a bad situation personally that led to this. I wish I could have helped. My last trip to SF in September was really busy and I didn't get to hang out with him. He even offerred me his couch to crash on, but I didn't take him up on the offer.

We meant to do some pair programming back in July, but things got busy and I didn't followup on the invitation. He invited me to an awesome party in April, but I didn't end up going as I'd needed to fly from Ohio there, but I can't help wishing that I'd done it anyway.

So I just feel terrible frankly that I mistakenly turned down interacting with him. Would have we had some conversation that would have changed his opinion on things? Given him some new hope?

Clearly, I know this isn't anyone's fault, but in retrospect its hard not to wish that anyone was able to do more.

I suppose the only thing to do in the future is to always prioritize time with people as the #1 thing. In retrospect, nothing else I could have been doing was more important.
Sorry, but, aside from the obviously unimportant use of `in` (a reserved word), this gives a different type from what I think you meant:

x :: a
g :: a -> b -> c
in :: c -> d
th :: d -> e
thing :: a -> b -> e

and naïve eta-conversion will give you something that isn't well typed. Probably you meant

thing x = th . in . g $ x
Maybe you're right about them doing a check. It's been a while since I contacted a US representative (and I didn't claim to be a US citizen) but I remember that at the time I could simply enter any address / zip code in his/her contact form, so you could have easily claimed to be from their state.

And regarding the legality remember that this would be a foreign national contacting a US representative. It's not like they're going to go to the trouble of finding out who you really are and extraditing you for such a small matter.
Agreed. The Internet can be a harsh mistress. "In the news" can also mean "reading 1000's of mean-spirited comments."
At WePay, planning a 'balls to the wall' 2012
My three year-old daughter uses the same technique, she has no idea who Toyota is. Thankfully the root cause usually ends up being "BECAUSE I SAID SO".
MFÖ – Ve MFÖ albümü 2011 indir
I think it's better pedagogically just to acknowledge that, in common mathematical discourse, "the squaring function" doesn't have any symbolic name. Perhaps it's more illustrative to think of, for example, `f(x) = ln(x)` (the value of a function) versus `f = ln` (the function itself); and a good (college) mathematics teacher will make this distinction.
re: "I am ready to move to California and establish company there."

Then do so. Your odds will increase from (probably) less than zero to more than zero.
The Human Sexperience
I'm not keen on exposing undefined to external code; it inflates it into a “valid” value like null has become.
In short. Do not apportion blame. Do not give simple reasons. Do not glorify.
Anti-Hacking Law Criminalizes Most Computer Users, Former Prosecutor Says
I'm talking about fully peer reviewed with conferences and the whole shebang ... Its really the only way to get that knowledge out into the public domain.
If you are on android, I made this quick app to go from zip code to a list of your representatives and a call button for each of them.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.politicall.android
The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part I - Dolphin
Popular Programs Full Of Holes – Subject To Email Viruses?
24 hours of Flickr photo sharing
I have the same need to Know this too...for this new site
that offers any Office or Room Painted For $39.00 http://canadianpaintprocom.weebly.com/ maybe we can link some how and get twice the Bang for our $200.00??? ...T.T.J
Gorgeous. Music was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Muted and played Tchaikovsky - Serenade for Strings in the bg for better experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsGRglp6tvs
Improving the Rails API documentation
Windows 8 will not automatically restart your computer to finalize patching
That would be a great weekend project for someone ;)

If a rating and/or description exists online somewhere, it/they can be retrieved and displayed. Then add a way to make ratings & reviews, give them all some sorting options, and you'll have a nice, useful tool for programmers.

I'd do it, but I already have a long list of weekend projects. :P
Airpush Interview: Android Developers & Users Both Win
There's what looks like a pretty tall tower just to the south of that circle. http://g.co/maps/ct7qm
Students Hack The Kinect To Allow Blind To Navigate
I think you're right. My perspective of IBM is from what I read in IT related magazines/articles while investors's (Berkshire in this case) view it from a different angle that makes more sense for them.

Mine probably too detail and too narrow and may not paint IBM as a whole.
BJJ in Caerphilly - a brand new website.
Check out this [1] post on the google earth forums from 2006. Has some more interesting ideas on what it could be, and potentially an answer for part of it. It also has a great KML (kmz) of the different features.

From [1]: "This Site was a Chinese missile test centre, and a lot of area is developed for tourists attraction. but some facility such as the fake runways are still under military control.

"1950s, this site was chose by Soviet scientists as the first Chinese nuclear weapon test site, but the Chinese authority refused this suggestion due to its small scale and location. and just used it as missile test facility."

Although, I'm not sure on the factuality of this statement, however has a link to a people.com.cn file about the area.

[1] http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&N...
How To Build a High Converting Landing Page
The 2 Step Quick Start Guide To Affiliate Marketing
In other news, google docs is one commit away from being the ultimate blog engine.
Not to comment on this specific case, but I really wish people didn't feel the need to listen to the kind of feedback you get from the general internet. It's such a waste of time and emotional energy.

Listen to the people you respect, ignore the rest. And if you do want to interact with the community, for heaven's sake, don't respond to the assholes. They're just background noise.
Yeah. Customer services makes you want to kill them, not yourself.
You miss the point. You would have already jumped off a cliff. This is one thing you do before. Of course try all the other things. But if you _are_ on the ledge, consider this before. If you think about it, is the consideration of this is similar to "who will find your body, how will they feel".
It's one additional stop gap to prevent the worse outcome.
Author here ;)

You are correct - it's not depth-of-field, it's fake "tilt-shift" effect that blurs screen non-uniformly based on vertical position of pixels, independently of content.

And I chose it exactly because it's much cheaper than real depth-of-field while looking "good enough" for some type of scenes (it's the same trick many photographers use to get "miniature" feel, instead of using real tilt-shit lenses they apply such blur in Photoshop).
Something I learned on HN a long, long,long time ago was that if you wanted really cheap, unfiltered traffic, you could buy quite a bit of it using Mechanical Turk. As the commenter said "It's pretty amazing what will happen if you throw up a few nickels". I've only used it once, but it worked.

But with only $200 you want to make sure every dollar -- every penny -- counts towards getting action. So I would use it on the most targetted ads I could get. For most fly-by-night web apps that only have a $200 ad budget, adwords would be the best way to do this.
Planning for Scale
Arduino for mere m0rtals - Part 1
The New Software Pricing Model: Can the Older Giants Compete