skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depends how you write your code. Actually Erlang is pretty good at avoiding undefined states (which can be thought of as undefined behaviour) by putting everything in an OTP framework. There's no custom "I'll just handle this earlier here in a tricky way" - if you stick to OTP you'll have message handlers and state machines. That's really awesome if you're programming network daemons. You can pretty much follow the state machine diagram and make sure that unless some progression is possible, it will not occur in practice.

Testing based on OTP service trees also makes the verification fit the possible transitions in a much closer way than trying to cover all the branches in an OO app.

So yes, I'd say it's actually quite a good response to an "exception handling all over the place" problem. You simply don't do that. Instead your exceptions finish at the FSM level and progress you to one of the error states on your diagram. You know exactly what state you're in at that point so the behaviour is pretty well defined at almost every step.

However zeromq is a library that was supposed to be portable, rather than a daemon itself, so from that perspective, it's a very bad fit for ZMQ.
Maybe the offerings are better at the highend but some quick calculations has me paying about 33% more for their x-small vs EC2.

Are they offering something else (Cus. service, HA, uptime?) that I can't currently get on AWS?
I like your general icons, but your phone is already obsolete. I'm also not sure why the last two represent real world devices rather than abstract concepts, given that your other icons are pretty intuitive.
Hey Sasha, As mentioned elsewhere on this thread, I'm aggressively working through the courses and have found it immensely helpful. A couple of suggestions:

1) It would be great to highlight on the site some success stories as these develop. I'm learning a lot but my concern is how translatable my learnings will ultimately be to developing real products. It would be great to see the outputs created by people that have worked their way through the courses.

2) How about a demo day for 'grads' who produce companies / products (a la incubator programs)? Seems like this would be a great opportunity for exposure and publicity (Just keep me in mind please so that I can get in on this once I turn my learning into a tangible product :))
Why wouldn't a stand-alone application or device serve this purpose much better? The requirement of a confirmation code generated by a simple piece of electronics not more sophisticated than a pocket calculator or a mobile app could side-step this completely.
For me the point is less about: IE is no longer that bad. It's true that IE9 and IE10 are much better and supporting IE is no longer a 2x web-dev penalty, but that's not the point.

The point is: when the vampire is exhibiting weakness you drive a stake through its heart. The vampire turned a bunch of your fellow townspeople into vampires; saying the bite is no longer so bad doesn't mean that the vampire is now to be respected.

It's also not about punishing Microsoft. [Sure, the warm glow of schadenfreude feels nice.] It is about demonstrating to the tech community the long term costs of SHITTING IN OUR SANDBOX. Those of us who were developing web sites during the IE6 days want to show Google, Facebook, Apple, Zynga, Adobe, etc what happens when you Embrace and Extend web standards.

You don't know frustration until you get your website all sorted in FF 2, then open up IE 6 only to see a completely jacked website, only to realize you basically have no web development tools for IE 6 and you'll be spending the next 2 days blibdly fiddling with margins, padding, how-to-force-zoom, etc.
Users are anything but loyal. Mobile users have a bit better loyalty than web users, but lets face it - it's a free service with very little strings attached, and all of the lock-in that Facebook has tried to create has just frustrated users.
Yeah I wish people would just use Erlang instead of reinventing this stuff over and over again in their favorite language/framework/vm etc. When I think of all the work going into Node instead of Erlang it makes me want to cry.
Nothing new here, this is what happens when politicians make their work easier by making everyone else's harder, case in point in Argentina because politicians there can't bother to fix the deficit they raised taxation to almost 60% across the board.

Result? everyone from rich to poor evades taxes and the grey market is over half the economy, with (some say) 2/3 of unskilled workers being paid cash-in-hand, no questions asked.

Because customs charge a similar 60% on imports plus a 27% VAT on top almost everybody in the country buys stuff from smugglers, from shoes and clothes to computers and even cars. Piracy and counterfeiting are so out of control that some companies are shutting down, leaving people on the street.

So at the end that country losses more money and has an even bigger deficit than if they had much lower taxes, why? because evading taxes is hard and risky, you are not going to bother doing it if it barely improves your numbers.

But at 60% taxation you might go broke if you don't evade! see the problem?

Lots of policies are ridiculous, but others are far beyond that: unrealistic, you simply can't ask that much and expect the economy to keep going.

EDIT: if you want to know more about the anti-business craziness going on in Argentina read this http://bit.ly/lUbWOo
When even Germany has a comparatively flexible labor code, you're doing something wrong.
The Newtonian Casino is a book that tells Farmer's story. It is fascinating and I've read it twice: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Newtonian-Casino-Thomas-Bass/dp/...
I feel like people are lying to the,selves about IE9. It's still not good enough! The key words you used were that hard implying you know it's still just a little tough. Ever try to get a gradient to work in IE9? First off, when it works it doesn't render anything like it renders in any other browser, and second, you still have to jump through hoops or all your gradients will be blue even if they're not meant to be blue. Ever had to mess with progIdMicrosoft.blah.anotherThing("someMoreStuffHere");? I have. It's why IE9 still sucks.

Saying IE9 is up to snuff is like saying your scumbag uncle is cool now because instead of shooting heroin all day long he's just a raging alcoholic. I mean, yeah IE improved significantly but when you remember IE6 - 8 it's easy to look like you've improved. Are we praising IE because it just doesn't suck as much? Come on, every other browser on earth has been running circles around it for years and it's still playing catchup and it just refuses to ditch that whole "progId" thing. They go around saying "well, we do what the other guys do except we made it impossible to remember or comprehend how to do in our browser".

And I like how the guy who hasn't had to support IE for a few versions writes a post about how we're lazy. It would've meant a lot more coming from someone with experience. Recent experience, that is.
Thanks for your remark.

As for manual metadata, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3953644

As for incompatible schemas, we're not aiming to build one big ontology for the world, but we are aiming to facilitate a large number of datasets that are useful by themselves. We're working towards being able to link various Silk sites to each other and will try to find ways to make as many as schemas fit into each other.
I sold a silly blog for $15,000 just before they changed their name to flippa.
At least it wasn't the sort of national pride where you want everyone in the world to use your national standard.

Remember the Clipper chip?
I think the question of if the users are loyal is still up in the air. Facebook hasn't been around long enough on this massive scale to prove if the users are loyal. I personally don't think it's user base is loyal. The younger, more tech-savy generation on FB will jump ship as soon as something better comes along like some were doing already to Instagram or Twitter. The older generation might not necessarily be loyal to FB either, they are just too scared to move, or don't have the ability.
The strength of icons lies in recognition, not recollection, so your experiment doesn't prove anything. Essentially, I have no idea off the top of my head what the <arcane image processing tool> icon looks like in Photoshop, but put me in front of an open Photoshop and I'll recognize it in a split second.

A lot of this has to do with placement, yes, but I'm sure even without that, you can scan a mass of icons much more easily than a mass of text.
Take a look at how Denmark handles it. Companies are basically free to hire/fire as they wish, but there is strong social security, meaning if you loose a job, you're not without income.

The problem with such stringent firing laws is that they only give security to the people who are currently employed. However, they do not necessarily benefit the society, i.e. new workers won't be hired when they're needed, and companies won't expand, and the economy won't develop as rapidly, simply because it's too hard to fire someone when you don't need them anymore.
We don't ever actually touch any of your calendar events except to display them in the extension. The 'spam' bit only occurs if you create a new event and invite people - really sorry about that, you can turn that off in the settings, we'll very likely turn that off by default in the next release.

Feel free to email us any feedback, our goal's to make this as awesome as possible, not to screw with your calendar!
Product Graphics: 6 Techniques To Make Images More Informative
> But my problem is that most people wouldn't even think of subclassing QuerySet.

I'd argue that's a documentation issue. QuerySet is Django's abstraction of a set of filterable database results. Keeping this conceptually separate from other parts of the ORM, such as the model class, is valuable IMO, and I'm not sure we gain much by trying to hide the details. One of the things I love about Django's philosophy is that it generally provides shortcuts that encapsulate common patterns without obscuring them.

There's a fine line between discussing the minutiae of API design and bikeshedding, and I think that anything Django can do to help here is valuable, so I won't push the issue any further. Let's pick it up again on the mailing list or Trac at an appropriate time.
That's awesome, I'm already looking into crossroads-io. I like C because it's that much more readable: There is no magic, you always know where things are and where they are going, in terms of memory and control flow. C++ seems very convenient at first, all the nice standard libraries do have attraction for me but in the end you end up with tons of weird hierarchy magic, friend classes, nested classes, copy constructors and destructors firing at the weirdest places. Now everybody says: "Well you don't have to use those!". Well, true but in practice it doesn't turn out that way.
Anybeat,anybeat social network,anybeat shut down.
It's rather easy for Microsoft to justify copying Apple when Apple keeps posting results like this: http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/24/apple-q2-2012-earnings-re...
How? If Instagram charges for anything or adds ads to their interface people will shift to different photo sharing service, plain and simple.
The economic illiteracy on HN is a little baffling. The incentive to live in your utopia is apparently not sufficient enough for those entrepreneurs who are probably much more concerned about breaking even.
I've been playing with the private beta for a few weeks now, and I'm impressed with how quickly they are adding features.

OpenStack (which HPCloud is based on) has a long way to go, but I think this is a promising (if overdue) start.

If you want to play with OpenStack for free I can recommend https://trystack.org/
This ^
If a language feature doesn't work for you, you don't need to use it. In this case not using it is writing c, but this is true to every program language.
When I use a oo language I always use composition and ignore inheritance.
Unfortunately you can't avoid dealing with those complexities if you use a library, but if the advantages of using a language/platform outweighs the advantages, is awlays possible to work around it.
Since the workers in both shops were, as you say, equally skilled, what was the wage differential between the French and Eastern European workers performing equivalent jobs.

They weren't being paid the same wages, were they?

I'm doubtful that the workers in the Eastern Euro locations truly were as skilled as their French counterparts because I have heard the same said by suits w/re to US workers and workers in various parts of the Far East and have had the opportunity to visit manufacturing locations in both and it never turned out to be the truth.

Also, with regards to productivity of an enterprise being a function of the management, I would say that poor management is certainly capable of driving worker productivity into the ground but that the most can-do, gung-ho managers in the world cannot do much with low/un-skilled workers.
The idolization of Steve Jobs has a lot of issues, and this might be a good example of one. We don't know whether Apple succeeded in spite of or because of Steve's management behaviors.

It's also worth noting that the original Mac (the same time period most of those 'crazy Steve' stories originate from) was a huge commercial 'meh'.
I'm nearly 40 and I've never seen one of those old-fashioned microphones. According to the author, it seems I should have trouble recognising it.
You're not missing anything, except, perhaps that simple is ok. For some people projects like this are quite complex, for others trivial. My personal purpose in building this is that it was fun, the blog post is there so that others can see how they themselves might build something like this.
No, this is a translation of a non-free French language book that was funded via a kickstarter-like site.

http://www.ulule.com/debian-handbook/
> a) Developing on windows is absolutely attrocious. If MS wants me to develop on windows, PUT SOME FUCKING EFFORT INTO IT.

Eh?

I guess you entirely missed out on the .NET Framework, Powershell, and recent Visual Studios. These are excellent dev tools, in ways the average Emacser will find hard to appreciate.

(much in the way the average Visual Studio nerd will find a decent terminal hard to appreciate)

From the rest of your message, I gather that the real reason you don't like to dev on Windows is because it's not Unixy. That's fine, and it's a matter of taste, but don't say that Windows is a bad platform to develop on just because you like typing in 70-character commands rather than clicking places. That's really mostly a matter of taste. Rants like these just make you sound ignorant.
on the exception handler part, i don't think you're forced to use c++'s try-throw-catch, you can still safely use the C-style exception methods, after all, c can be used as a subset of c++, though not 100% of the time.
The thing is, if you use the subset of C++ people usually recommend, you're hardly better off than with C. Turning off exceptions means you can't use the STL (alloc errors throw) and you can't do any non-trivial work in your constructor so you have to manually initialize everything anyway.
It's sad to see otherwise talented developers focusing on the process more than the product, and putting their craft above the user experience. After all, it's all about the users. Doing good work and making excuses don't mix.

If you use any excuse not to test on any browsers in any Windows environments, you're ignoring the fact that the vast majority of users are on the Windows platform -- ~90% worldwide, ~81% in the US. I'm talking OS, not browser. (If you think there's not much difference, try borrowing a Windows machine and viewing the way most @font-face rendering works on that platform.)

And if you prescribe to the thought "my users are mostly on Mac," your growth will be severely limited if you're ignoring 80-90% of the users out there.

Development & testing are two separate tasks. Don't confuse their respective toolsets.
Our goal on the client-side (compared to CouchDB) was simpler, more lightweight libraries that work well with existing tools that developers already use, like Core Data on iOS and sqlite/ContentProviders on Android.

Whereas CouchDB does master-master replication among instances of itself, Simperium can accomplish something similar with any database: e.g. sqlite on iOS, to MongoDB in our backend, and to whatever database you use in your own backend.
I'm curious how he tackled the issue of the random number generator in the arduino. The fairly simple one included in avr-libc would be prone to repeating after a power off.

There's two ways I can think of to deal with that, save the state in the EEPROM so that it doesn't repeat, or add a hardware based random number generator, i'd like to know which he ended up going with.
You can have the cake and eat it too: just make the government responsible for social safety net. It's separation of concerns at the most basic level - let the companies worry about the economy/profit, and the government worry about the society/people.

AFAIK, that's how they do it in Denmark. It's very easy to fire people (and therefore easy to hire them), but the taxes are very high, so the government has enough money to provide social security for the ones who have lost their jobs.
> not using it is writing c

But that's not true. Giving up on exception handling and initialization code in constructors still leaves tons of super useful C++ to use. Generic programming, the standard library, what's left of OOP rather than crazy function pointer stuff, etc.
"...businesses, too, are hamstrung when it comes to innovation."

Maybe. At least for the particular case of an online purchase from a South Korean vendor. But when you look at a company like Samsung Electronics, which is "the world's-largest IT producer" according to Wikipedia, and makes very popular Android devices, I'm not too concerned about innovation in South Korea.
must be a slow news day
I don't see it that way. I see it as a society that that imposes big rules on big companies in a way to help keep many companies smaller.

Maybe the details don't work out well. Perhaps 50 is too small. There are probably other issues in the details, but in principle, it seems interesting and useful.
Grep("File::Read");
I think adherence to "compliment publicly, criticize privately" is an absolute requirement of a good manager.
I'm not C++ savvy, but I know from reading Google's C++ style guide that they also disable exceptions. The guide leaves it at that and doesn't say anything more about how to deal with errors. Does anyone here know how these big Google C++ codebases handle errors instead?
It's unfortunate that the domain name is so spammy looking.
It reminded me of Verisign so I was expecting some kind of web verification tool. So logo and business do match well.

The only comments I'd make is the roundness/bubble style of the font make it look a bit on the comic sans side.

I'd say the tick is quite long, almost turning into a green shoot, which makes me think more of growing your business. I think it's because the point on the end of the tick doesn't match with the roundness of the font.

The good points are that it is recognisable and would work well in colour or on b&w documents too.
Just because C++ is a superset of C doesn't make it strictly better. The presence of additional features can be a liability. The obvious problem is that if you want to use the C subset in a multi-person project (whose team evolves over time), you have to create a way to enforce that. Another example is that it's more difficult to produce static analysis tools like lint. (As an example, lint in C detects unused stack variables. This is trivial for C. This is extremely difficult for C++ because the mere construction of the object on the stack often has important side effects.)
Has print gone digital? [Infographic]
Corporations are sociopathic by design. Don't hate Microsoft, Apple or Google (the players), hate the way we do business and our economic model (the game).
Good luck getting a job, though.
We'll have to write up an article about how it works. I'm sure we'll be iterating on the source quite a lot now that we have a nice working set of things...

Essentially though, we look at the modification to narrow down the potentially matching rules, then we use querySelectorAll/matchingfns at the appropriate spot in the tree. Each selector (like :-hitch-has) then has a filter function which merely returns true/false (just like jquery) and based on that we toggle an associated class on the element and the rest is just the browser's native CSS doing what it does.
Half Sculptured Travelers messing with your brain
'Dial' is a better word than 'knob'.

In British English the word has a variety of profane implications, inviting childish sniggers from grown men: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=knob

The following are quoted extracts from Roger's Profanisaurus:

"knob 1. n. Penis; prick; John Thomas. 2. v. To shag. As in “I knobbed the arse off her”.
knob cheese n. 1. Smeg-ma. 2. Foreskin feta found underneath Kojak’s roll-neck (qv) and around the banjo (qv) or cheese ridge. Also knob Stilton, knob yoghurt, Helmetdale (qv).
knob chopper n. Precariously balanced lavatory seat which falls down while you’re having a piss and therefore must be held up manually.
knob head . knob end n. Fuck wit; thick head; oaf.
knob jockey n. Someone who sits on a door handle whilst the door is in motion for sexual gratification.
knob shiner n. Someone who is always prepared to polish a pink oboe (qv)."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Profanisaurus
I really think the final nail in C++'s coffin is going to be its refusal to play ball in a polygot world. Most languages let you drop down into C pretty easily but C++'s weird name mangling, exceptions and complex, usually nonstandard ABI makes interfacing with C++ a major PITA. In the days when C++ was used soup-to-nuts this wasn't such a big deal but these days you almost always want some kind of higher level language on top.

Just look at all the contortions WinRT has to go through to expose its APIs versus the clean Foundation/Cocoa layering you see in iOS/OS X for a great example.
Clickable: http://appynote.com/

Feedback:

Be warned, I have a highly idiosyncratic point of view that lots of people don't agree with.

However ...

It tells me what it does, it doesn't tell me what problem it solves. I don't want to try to map your features to my problems, I want to see that you know what problems are, and that your app fixes them.

It also doesn't fit on my screen.
Not to mention NeXT, which also had its share of "crazy Steve" management, and which would have been an unmitigated failure if Apple hadn't bought them out.

If you're interested in that story, Randall Stross' book Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/068912135...) is a good telling of it. (It was written before Jobs' return to Apple and subsequent huge success, so it's a fascinating artifact of the time before he became Saint Steve.)
But you can't use the standard library, because it is all based on exceptions.
Humiliation is poison in a work environment. There is no quicker way to make people resent their jobs, stop interaction, create hate and mistrust and send a signal that "you don't matter".