skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of that you can ever really move into software. At least not decently.

For pure switches, you might be right (for a while at least). But there is plenty of higher level stuff that is at least partially implemented in silicon (and/or inaccessible software) that is about to be eaten by software.

Things like load-balancing, for example: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/05/20/SoftwareLoadBala...
Android Hardware Repair Cost Carriers Billions Each Year &#8211; Report
Unfortunately I tend to use a number of different devices to connect to work with.

So no tiddlywiki for me :(
Isaacs is spot-on, and this is one reason why I love Objective-C. NSException is for programming errors, which should be rare. You can use try/catch, but you almost never do. NSError is for expected application-level errors.
The apps will come and they will be better designed.

I do not know if anybody here has tried the Microsoft developer tools but they are more advanced than anything even Apple has.

Expression Blend for example is something Android developers need badly. I hope that with Adobe letting go of Flex that Google is going to poach a lot of their IDE team like they did with Chet Haase.

What they are missing was a more open API and a more in your face marketing attitude. Nokia will bring that to the table.

Microsoft has deep pockets and they need to be in mobile to stay relevant (even if they earn more money suing Android manufacturers). You next phone will be a Windows Phone.
The first thing I searched for (background-color) wasn't found. Uhh...
I clearly didn't do a great job writing my post—my apologies. I was simply saying that Peldi and Balsamiq helped me get the ball rolling on a positive note. Who knows what would have happened had I waited to act on Quipol—there's a real possibility that I wouldn't have ever done so. Sometimes, inspiration and ideas pass, and, for better or worse, they never come back.
Sterlings are normally run on solar heat.
The creator should really put the search field in the persistent top-bar.
New Android Trojan Masquerades as Google Library
That wouldn't work either since this power isn't clean and steady. Same goes for SV and wind. All these solutions need batteries to even the flow of power.
I don't see it as nasty, just an observation of various facts that lead me to believe (perhaps incorrectly) that the post has ulterior motives. But since you ask, this is what lead me to comment how I did.

- HN is about sharing and opinions, so I decide to share mine.

- The poster opened an HN account 4 days ago and the startup was launched 5 days ago.

- "Open Letter" titled posts almost always leads to someone bashing a product or individual. Imagine how relieved HN will be when they see that it is indeed a "heart warming" thank you letter...did you feel good reading this?

- Without the product the startup wouldn't be here. All credit goes to Balsamiq while conveniently encouraging you to view the startup.

- And, as a software developer (who has one more than once been NOT paid for services rendered) this one really raises my suspicion. The poster received the software 8 monts ago and will get the $79 to Balsamic ASAP.

Anyway, right or wrong, that is how I came to my original comment. I'll take my down votes if necessary.

edit: formatting
All change for Flash
I implemented this in the core data structures for IE5. We were very memory constrained as we had to run on Win95 machines with something like 12MB of RAM. I was counting bits.

The base level of the tree wasn't really a node DOM but rather a stream of document events (start element, text, end element, etc). We put these in a binary tree that was balanced as a splay tree. To drive memory usage down I reduced the {parent, left, right} pointers down to {child, next, left_child_bit, next_is_parent_bit}. 'child' pointed to the the first child. I knew if it was the left or the right child based on the left_child_bit. 'next' pointed either to the sibling or the parent, depending on the 'next_is_parent_bit'. However, to really realize the savings, I needed to hide these bits in the pointers themselves.

Other tricks that we used to save memory:

1) Put rare data into a hash table indexed off of the 'this' pointer of the object. Have a bit to indicate if it was there or not. We called these lookaside pointers.

2) Embed objects in other objects to save pointers back and forth. The embedded object would do math on its this pointer (based on bits for which embedded member it is) to get the this pointer of the parent object.

I'm not sure, but I suspect that one of the reasons I think that current IE is slower now than it should be is that a lot of these optimizations are no longer necessary and cause more problems than they solve.
how is it better than google -> check the first result?
Microsoft has deep pockets and they need to be in mobile to stay relevant (even if they earn more money suing Android manufacturers).

This isn't an argument when their competition has deeper pockets...
Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E CPU
Super-slippery material could mean end to having to wait for ketchup
Gaming?
Seo Cardiff Wales
From what I undersand, Buffet has always avoided technology companies because he believe he didn't understand them well enough in order to invest.

Someone at IBM must have changed his mind?
The best part about exceptions (unchecked), is that they allow an exception to automatically bubble upward to the level of code that actually should be responsible for taking action, without having to write a ton of boilerplate code all the way down the call chain.

Even better, when stack traces in exception logs are examined, it's easy to see where in the call chain things are going wrong.

During a database transaction for example, something might go wrong 5 method calls deep, and I should roll back the transaction.

If I'm forced to either use checked exceptions or use if statements to check whether there was success at each level, then that's a lot of repeated boilerplate try/catch/rethrow or if(success) code which unchecked exceptions free me up from having to write.

If all I receive at the transaction level is a failure code, then what do I log, other than "something went wrong?!". With exceptions, all the work is done for me. I just log the exception stack trace and I can easily see what needs to be fixed.

Much of the time, exceptions are useful because they are thrown becuase of something you didn't anticipate happening, as opposed to something you had planned for when writing the code. And when that unanticipated thing does happen, there is nothing more beautiful than an automatically generated stack trace telling you exactly what happened.
How would you know if it is top secret? Most top secret tech never gets seen outside of the top secret circles. Unless you have a TS/SCI clearance, the best you can do is speculate on what exists now. Obviously not all fields are covered in the government, but things that are very important to them (signal intelligence, networking, logistical management, satellite communication) are all very well ahead of the consumer/public space in my experiences.
Variant idea: a small portable version for camping. Stick one end in a fire, USB plug for power connector at the other. 2.5W shouldn't be hard to get under conditions where "unreliable" is normal.
How to build BeagleBoard based WiFi robot
Klout Updates Privacy Features. Is it Enough?
You mean collections.defaultdict http://docs.python.org/library/collections.html#collections....
Thank you for the link on Poincare. It was much more interesting than the original article.
This is a really dirty hack to do and it only works if your addresses are always aligned to a 2^n byte boundary. That said, there are plenty of cases where this dirty hack is perfect for the job.

Atomic lock free data structures is one example. Tagging the pointers can be used notify that a node is going to be deleted in order to avoid the ABA problem (as mentioned in the article). Tagging pointers is absolutely essential for more complex lock free data structures, like doubly linked lists.

This can also be used in a garbage collector to add a few bits of metadata. In a GC you can (and probably should) decide to use memory objects with proper alignment, which leaves you with a few bits to store data in. A perfect solution to implement something like Lisp cons cells.
Hell yeah, thank you. I've been so tired of googling up "css background" and click 2-3 website and hope they'd show what I want.
not that far.. if you take a look at www.operationcofounder.com you will see i just got a WordPress template to host all my names/logos i own... i have like A.D.D. when it comes to my ideas i will come up with the idea write everything i can think of from functions to marketing to design and as soon i get another idea which is always at a point of getting programming.. i move on and do the same thing over and over.. so i am looking for a cofounder to be each others yin and yang to help balance each other out and keep me focused.. i know i can do it when it come to working on it once programming begins.. just hard cause it always starts there.. i have try many many times to pay people to do stuff but i usually get ripped off or it takes forever to hear back from them or they attempt to do something and it takes 8 months just to get a design mockup.. that's why i learned illustrator along time ago on my own got tired of waiting for other to turn over a job figure since i already have the vision who better else to design it then me. :)
And you know what? In my experience it's not less robust.

So my code hasn't had every possible failure case thought through and explicitly handled in advance. That's good. Firstly some of those errors are so rare they'll almost certainly never occur in my program's lifetime; by not having to handle them explicitly and individually I save time and money. Secondly I can guarantee that, no matter how good I think I am, the program will eventually find a way of crashing I'd not considered; this approach gives me a clean means of handling unforeseen errors as well.

A bad programmer can write bad code in any pattern and with any tools. A bad C programmer using return values can create so many different standards for how to handle errors that you might as well get out the divining rods to read the code. Personally, done right (as with anything) I happen to like try...catch.
Flawed Analysis: On Clouds “Playing Nice”
This site would be even better if they included compatibility. Maybe there could be an API call to http://caniuse.com/ ?
I think the author is misleading when he says that Python leads to more flow. Flow requires that some conditions hold, one of which is that it is just challenging enough to push conscious thoughts out. I experience flow much more in C++ than in Python, I actually enjoy the complexity. Most people don't get flow from testing because it isn't challenging enough. So what he is doing is lowering the challenge by documenting and removing what he views as "obstacles." He is on the right track, being aware of being in flow, what works for him. I imagine there will be a time when the things he mentions will actually knock him out of flow, and instead he will skip over them without thinking about them.
I've done this (read: had to do this to save my sanity) for years now. Learnings: Most inks (like inkjet printers, pen inks, and even pencils) fade (esp if in light for extended time) and laser toner will stick to other surfaces in heat, so like another poster mentioned, sharpie perm marker is usually the best option. Yellow sticky notes do not stick after years, sadly. Duct tape is great, electrical tape often gets gummy and peels (at least, the cheap kind I buy).
This is exactly what I came here to say. NSException and NSError combined with the fact that you can send messages to nil objects and just get nil objects back lead to much "cleaner" code in my opinion.
Take An Inventory Of Your Strengths
Bottom Sponsored Ads on Google — How Effective Are They?
Is Solaris 11 good enough to be relevant?
Weblogic to Tomcat Migration - Problems and Learnings
Man Calls 911 to fix Broken iPhone
> Look at how much rock stable C software we have out there.

Which would be what exactly. The work of Knuth and djb I'll grant you, but the rest?
My immediate thought when I saw this was:

Takes regular expressions as user input. Probably DOS'able.

After looking at it for a few seconds, I realised that it's doing the regex matching on the client side, so it's ok.

If you ever accept arbitrary regular expressions as user input, be very careful: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Regular_expression_Denial_of...
lol! True. I meant that they won't throw in the towel like HP did with WebOS devices. Even if the sales of the devices do not take off, they still can force manufacturers to produce Windows Phone devices, I am quite certain that the manufacturers they threatened to sue in the "Android maneuver" got a better deal if they accepted to produce Windows Phone handsets in the future. My tuppence worth.
Not unless you want to build up your audience for future products.
Why Is China Building These Gigantic Structures In the Middle of the Desert?
NSA gets their money whether you like it or not. They certainly have people in charge who talk to the legislative branch, but they aren't MBA/marketing people. The are usually ex-generals. Other agencies might seek outside contractors, but the NSA is one of the few who do most of their work themselves. I didn't work there, but that was my understanding at the time I worked in other parts of the government.
Hacked Sky News Twitter account falsely reports on Murdoch arrest
Scientific software solutions
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Leadership Word of the Day: SELF
>Also the battery died during a single flight from Europe to the US, when I needed it the most.

Really? I was playing "Galaxy of Fire 2" for a whole flight and the battery lasted from Germany to USA east coast.
Wasn't Google's homage to the OS X dock, done in 2005, also using pure CSS? http://www.macworld.com/article/43631/2005/03/googlex.html
Soooo refreshing to see a competitive feature comparison chart where the company posting the feature match ups doesn't have ALL green check boxes (and the competitors are "missing" features, of course.)
No he doesn't. defaultdict provides a default value for ALL missing values. His approach allows him to target one key in particular, and is a very common python idiom.
You're joking obviously, but I wonder if this has ever been successfully applied in some form or other.
The OSX look is pretty old at this point. They've managed to update it in spots but much of it is dreadfully ugly. Like this:

http://admintell.napco.com/ee/images/uploads/appletell/bill-...

Note that Metro is pretty old too, it started with Windows Media Center, but has changed a lot since then.
No, because most users will just use the browser that comes with the phone.

It's the same on desktop OSes: IE is the most popular browser on Windows, Safari is the most popular browser on OS X.
Yes, still IBM have been much better stock results than MSFT. Indeed, over this one year, the IBM stock has been doing better than AAPL.
The abstract uses the specific term "software patents" which excludes legitimate patents.
I came here to say this. Thumbs up on right, thumbs down on left. And, nice work!! The site looks great.
Revealing my ignorance on this topic: Why would IBM care who owns their stocks, assuming the specific shareholder doesn't try to take influence on the development/direction of the company?
Why do you do what you don’t love?
Christian Louboutin Flat Women
Only in certain cases, and he mentions that they do not understand it well enough so they are still experimenting.
One nitpicky-type thing for me in the article is saying that Sebastian Thrun invented the first driverless car. Yes, he was the head of the Standford team who won in 2005, but he was on the CMU team the competition before where Red Whitaker was the team lead. The fact that these teams were quite huge also prevents someone from saying that one person invented the driverless car. Being team lead on a team who wins the second competition certainly doesn't mean that person invented the tech. I know I'm being anal about it, but there were a lot of people who competed in the DGC, and it is quite annoying to hear people mention his name in that regard. Having talked to Sebastian a few times during the competition, I would think he thinks the same way.
Steam Database (gaming giant) Cracked (35+ million users)
Why, because he mentioned the name of his startup three times, without once even saying what it does?

What a discouraging thread.
It's not provocative, it just leaves off the conditional at the end.
Baruch dayan H'emet. This is very tragic. Nothing else to say. Rest in peace.
Strangely, I had the same reaction as yours in the beginning, each time I flipped a page on my Kindle I "saw" the dots flicking. Then, around one week after, I completely forgot, until you reminded me about the issue today.

So, in short, except if we have a very different neural system, which is not likely, the annoyance should disappear soon enough.
Sony and other computer manufacturers will charge you more to deliver the computer _without_ the "bonus" software they usually include.

(Yes, it's probably a matter of the bonus/bloatware/crapware makers paying the manufacturer to include it vs. customers paying more to not. Flip side is a lot of that stuff _is_ useful, but many users just don't want it there to start with.)
In a modern programming environment you can't think about every possible error. In particular, code often migrates into distributed systems where a whole new range of problems can happen.

For instance, a system might have plug-ins that get data from a CSV file, a relational database and a web service. One day somebody comes along and adds a plug-in that gets data from a noSQL database.

Add a new component to the system and you introduce not only new failure modes but new ways failure impacts the "system a s a whole."

The more decisions you make, the more you will make wrong decisions. Exceptions provide a reasonable default behavior that is "decision free" and reasonable ways to upgrade it.

20 year old C software lived in a simpler world; only specialized network utilities like telnet and tcpwrappers would have to face the consequences of a failing DNS lookup or the temporarily failure of a network switch in Toledo.
From not a very good trader:

I think, even if you include dividends, any money in MSFT has been completely stagnant for 10 years (and may have actually lost value). IBM stock paid dividends and nearly doubled in the same time period.
If he wanted to pump his startup, he'd have pumped his startup. As it stands, the only thing he had to say about it was his name. The post was about Peldi.

HN needs a lot of policing, but much, much less of this bogus fake kind.
> I much prefer php's json_decode function, since it just
returns `null` on invalid input.

A function which has the same result in case of an error as when given valid input (hint: 'null' is a valid json string) is neither good design, nor something I would actually 'prefer'.

Aside of that (and more to the point of the original article), I do believe that exceptions can be very useful the deeper the abstraction of your libraries gets.

If you are 'far down' the stack and you want to ensure that you are in a position where it's safe to proceed and making it very, very clear for the caller that something went wrong, trow() is the perfect tool in order not to be called with a garbage argument on a successive call to a different function (hint: error results tend to get ignored).

And if you are a user of a library, getting nice exceptions can be very handy too - sometimes even wrapping and re- throwing them.

A very good example of real code: In a command line script which processes a lot of text-data to import into a database delegates to various importer classes depending on import line type.

All these importer classes do their thing and whenever they come across an issue, they just throw an ImporterException with all the context that they know about.

The parent script only has to deal with one single case of Exception to produce nice error messages and show everything about the context where they happened.

I can make the importers as complicated as they need to be and I never have to check a single return value (or forget to check it). There is one central place to handle whatever kind of Error that can creep up.

This is very handy.

Granted, in JS/node where each callback cleans out the stack so that a thrown exception can't be handled by whatever caused the callback to be executed later), exceptions are useless and actually harmful because they can mess up the program flow (which assumes callback to be triggered eventually).

But exceptions being useless in one environment doesn't make the useless everywhere.
You'll never get 100% efficiency from power storage so the amount needed per day is much higher.

Lead acid batteries are 85-95% efficient for getting power in and back out. It doesn't change your sizing much.

That said, until a significant percentage of the utility's customers are using these devices, it makes no sense to use batteries. Just sell surpluses to the grid and buy back to handle peaks.

If you have no grid, then about $1000 of batteries will cover you, and need replacing every 5-10 years. Either way, your inverter is probably around $2000.

I'd have already clicked to buy in, except there is a missing chunk of the efficiency. Assuming I don't have a small lava flow next to a stream in my basement, what is the total projected efficiency of these units from fuel to electrical energy? They don't seem to be addressing burner efficiency. How will it compare to a small gasoline powered generator? (You can't buy a diesel genset this small.)
darned good browser.

…compared to IE7.
Is it not a mix of IE7 and IE9?
Bing Flatlines
The time lapse catches the strikes by chance. There are ~100 lightning flashes per second globally (80% are in-cloud flashes and 20% are cloud-to-ground flashes) and ~2000 thunderstorms occurring simultaneously on Earth. [1]

That's a huge opportunity to catch lightning flashes over a high quality time lapse from August to October 2011 (the time span of the video).

The astronauts' real-time views from the ISS' windows must be amazing. If I were up there in the ISS, I'd never get any work done because I'd be staring out the window the whole time!

[1] http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/wea00/wea00239.htm
This is really impressive. I would pay extra if their concept video did not have such attrocious background music...

I would like to know why/how they aim to replace PS3/Xbox360/Wii with this remote, at that point it smells a bit like over-aggressive kickstarter. Though I did pre-order the black one just in case!
Depression is a choice? You surely don't know how Depression work. You don't choose getting into a car accident, in the same way you don't choose Depression. Stuffs happen, not because people "chose" it.
IBM's business model is approximately

"We will solve your problems for piles and piles of money. Usually not problems that require technical breakthroughs or research level computer science knowledge, but ill-defined problems that involve many stakeholders, much politics, and complex business logic."

They make their money as a professional services company (a model Buffett has no trouble understanding) that uses technology.

That, at least, would be my take on it.