skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a long time Java programmer, who has been writing C# for the last year and a half, I think leaving out checked exceptions from C# may have been a bad idea. What they've done is to identify that checked exceptions are a pain in many cases and simply removed them without providing a proper replacement. This particular quote demonstrates what I mean:

"To work around [the need to declare what you intend to do with each exception] people do ridiculous things. For example, they decorate every method with, "throws Exception." That just completely defeats the feature, and you just made the programmer write more gobbledy gunk. That doesn't help anybody."

Ok, so what you did instead was to effectively put "throws Exception" on every method by default. You actually implemented the workaround you've just criticised into the language?

And what's the effect of this - whenever you call a method in an API, you have no idea what could go wrong with it, so you can't write code to handle it. It wouldn't be so bad if a method's potential exceptions were documented, but they never are. So you end up in a situation where you just code for the simple "happy case", run it, see what breaks, put some exception handling in (for just Exception) where you can, run it again, etc. It's a dreadful way to write code.

I'm not saying Java's checked exceptions were great - far from it - but C#'s "solution" is terrible. The number of times you end up with a NullException because some method failed somewhere deep in your code and something else didn't get initialised is unreal. If you don't believe me, try working with Sharepoint for a few minutes, and that's Microsoft code.

[edit - spelling]
Auto-Hypnose-Sante.com
Libc++ Has Landed
Dog pose
Exhale and lift your knees off the ground and adjust your body to a relaxing position. Lengthen your tail bone and press it towards the pubis. Press your pelvis upwards and hold your buttocks firmly. Keep your knees relaxed and do not tighten them too much.
The Right | Gomestic
For bonus points, get a compiler building with Emscripten and compile the code locally in the browser.
Facebook CFO Fumbled Number of Shares Offered in IPO
Appreciate the comment - I didn't mean it as fear mongering, just pointing out that the landscape will likely change over the next two years. Great developers will still be great developers and will have tons of job offers, I just imagine there will be a bit of a squeeze in the middle. I may be wrong. As for developers starting something on their own, I'm all for it if they've got the idea. They'll run into the same challenges any single founder will, but will definitely start from a better spot than a non-technical founder. I was more targeting this towards people who didn't have the idea yet and were looking to join something.
they ranked at #992 in Quantcast last week; they're got the Quantcast tracking code too, so the traffic numbers aren't crazy
> Candice could have used a good fence between her charity and her infringing account.

Agreed, but GoDaddy could have also taken option 2) from dangrossman's post above, which happens all the time with "live" servers anyway, every time people change their own configurations through the web "control panel" for their hosting provider. For the kind of plan it looks like she had, her URLs were most likely being served by the same Apache instance as the URLs for dozens of other customers; so any time any customer changes their setup, the "web server" has to reconfigure itself. That's why servers like Apache do that on the fly, without requiring a restart.
Sometimes telling your story inspires people to start their own stuff.

People fearing someone will steal their idea forget that the execution is the hardest part and most of the times clones don't have the same success.
Which can be clearly viewed by the community.
Question:

I recently got these two books
- Test Driven: TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers
- Agile Java™: Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development

I'm an experienced programmer but new to Java and TDD. Do I need the book that is reviewed here? I considered it back when I was buying the other two books.
It is MUCH more than a tracking cookie. The more useful XFBML version is a snippet of JavaScript. JavaScript can do a lot more than a cookie.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/?...

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>

Go to http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1 and be horrified.
A small hit in his bingo card business has made for a big difference in consulting. Kind of like how Google open source a lot, but you will never see any code from the core Google search and Adwords that is bringing in the money.

So talk all you want in an open forum, just avoid talking to much about the core stuff that gives you a competitive advantage.
I ask because I'm solving the "cloud API" problem right now too - but my context and environment require that we can solve the problem with internet technologies and not compiled C code. I can't really go into too much detail yet.
XML to HTML with JSTL and XSLT
It's really, really hard to figure out how to get absolutely every possible thing you might ever want to be accessible all the time. It's really, really easy in a given instance, with hindsight, to say - "Why not just transmit that all anyway?"

Yes, it's a good question, but it's a better question when you think to ask it 10 years before you need the data.

I work remotely with safety-critical systems, and sometimes I curse the lack of foresight on the part of the engineers and designers who came before me. Then I wonder what equipment people will be using 5 years from now to interface with the systems I'm trying to get out the door on time and on budget.
The app currently runs only on WebKit-based browsers.
There are also OSX [1] and Ubuntu [2] versions which share the same code base.

[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/type-fu/id509818877

[2] https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/type-fu/
And all good ole' Erasmus would've had to do is figure out everything to do with the diamond industry on his own! Easy game, right?

But seriously, if you stumble into a diamond mind worth a couple billion that does all the work for itself maybe you can find a way to keep all that money to yourself. But I'm willing to bet you're talking about 1% cases here, not the standard type of story that is brought up on HN.
Read the linked MIT article. There's a clear difference between Facebook-style display advertising, and Google-style search advertising. Google ads are much more profitable because people already have the intent to buy.
I agree that you shouldn't go out to the extent of bragging - as jacquesm points out your business is still vulnerable. Don't let success give you an inflated opinion of yourself.

I disagree with prescribing the opposite extreme. The most successful products don't become successful because nobody has heard of them yet. It's selfish to not share what you've learned with others, and just as bad it deprives you of opportunities to learn from their feedback.

The best don't become that way by being kept secret. They're the best because they add value to the service by being good at what they do. If your level of dedication to making good product is clonable, you're dead already.
Ok, so what you did instead was to effectively put "throws Exception" on every method by default.

That implicit throws clause was already there in any language that contains unchecked exceptions for things like dereferencing a null pointer, or assertions, etc. So, no, that's not what removing checked exceptions does. Personally, I'm a big fan of Guava's Throwables class. The java I write these days transmutes all checked exceptions into unchecked wrappers at any API boundary that tries to force them on me. And, no, this doesn't mean I'm only coding for the happy case. Rather, I'm choosing where and how to handle the sadness.
That's similar to how Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities[1].

"The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly installments in Dickens' new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859"

Likely more people will read a book in short chunks because it looks less imposing. And it gives you an opportunity to "pivot" your story if it's not going well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities
He addresses your point in detail in the interview:

C# is basically silent on the checked exceptions issue. Once a better solution is known—and trust me we continue to think about it—we can go back and actually put something in place. I'm a strong believer that if you don't have anything right to say, or anything that moves the art forward, then you'd better just be completely silent and neutral, as opposed to trying to lay out a framework.

...

I'm a strong believer in being minimalistic. Unless you actually are going to solve the general problem, don't try and put in place a framework for solving a specific one, because you don't know what that framework should look like.
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In my experience many C# programmers simply fail to add much exception handling code at all because the compiler doesn't force them to. The net result is code which breaks in spectacular fashion when the first unexpected condition is met.

Checked exceptions are a nuisance (I'm actually glad Scala doesn't enforce them vs Java), but often leads to inexperienced C# devs writing very fragile apps.

With C# you have to examine docs and source to identify exceptions which could be thrown. Many programmers don't bother, leading to things breaking. In Java the compiler forces you to think about it. I'm not in favour of checked exceptions, but the arguments against them tend to be a bit simplistic.
German intelligence agencies can decrypt PGP (Google translate)
It’s confusing to have legal agreements that refer to non-existent entities. What would you think of a contract governed by the laws of the Kingdom of California?
Judge.me should have a public list of shamed people who haven't paid their bills

Would sort of work against their marketing claim that arbitration activity on their service is private.
Because you've in essence bypassed the entire checked-exception system anyway?
Thanks for the comment - lot of good stuff in here. As for the languages piece, broad knowledge on languages definitely shows something, I agree. And I want to know what the applicant knows. I just meant that I could get a lot of that from the github account (as you point out), and that it doesn't need to be displayed in a resume. A resume telling me you know things is one thing, a github acct showing me you know things is another.

The links note is a good point. I was tailoring this towards my specific startup, and really early startups in general making their first "tech" hire. Once you've got a CTO or someone technical on staff, they'll handle the technical hiring and will understand the process and applicants far better than a non-technical founder ever will.
So by saying that you think they went public too early, you are maybe implying that they could have made much more money later, or maybe implying that public perception of the stock will interfere with their ability to operate.

Are either of those things true? Is there some other difficulty?
It's obviously not what you meant, and it'll obviously take more than a week, but I think Mark Zuckerberg being in the news for getting one billion dollars, cash, for just a small portion of his stock in his hardly monetized social network is...just asking for trouble.
Facebook fiasco may close tech IPO door
am I the only one who couldn't watch the lifestream?
How? You acknowledged that the exception exists. You didn't do that by putting 'throws' on everything.
I know of three major London investment banks with Clojure teams.

You have to know where to look, but there certainly exists many very interesting cutting edge technical positions in finance, both traditional banks and hedge funds.
Audio on Safari for iOS is not crippled, in fact, Google Music[1] and other apps, for example GrooveShark[2] work on Safari.
[1] http://play.google.com/music/listen
[2] http://html5.grooveshark.com
Checked exceptions are fine.

The problem is, that they are not composable and most languages have no syntactic sugar for dealing with them as Monads.

Other checked error mechanisms like Either or are much easier to manage.

I do hope e.g. Java sometimes in the future gets syntactic sugar to deal with checked exceptions as Monads.
I can't help feel that warnings and/or a strict mode to enable something similar to checked exceptions would be of help for those that wanted it.

Regarding null exceptions, they are runtime exceptions in Java so it's much the same there. It would be very annoying if they were checked exceptions.
Well, the open-plan office trend also slowly got bigger. That didn't make it universally loved.
Exactly. I've been using Java for 13 years and have yet to see a method signature with more than a handful of exception types thrown, let alone 40 or 80. I've told you a millions times not to exaggerate ;)
I remember one time during compilers class I tried to figure out the largest prime number in the denominator that GCC would replace with multiplication and bit shifts. I got up to a number in five digits and stopped counting. Just goes to show the amount of work that goes into compilers and the importance of speed for some program writers.
Google a movie name followed by 'director', 'running time', 'release date', etc
Meaning your product could be even more successful that it was/is...
Advice is like a band aid. Being successful is a process or a machine. It is nice giving and taking advice but in general i t it only serves mostly social purpose. I can't remember on what blog I read - most people aren't genuine when giving advice, but rather distort the story to serve as a badge of pride. It is better to give sounding advice rather then honest one for the advice giver.

As such only to find successful way to "dig" is to try it personally and find out your own way.

Advices are like recipes might be nice starting points since they give you some confidence that someone invested some time into them and in the end you have to make them your own.

Digging doesn't always apply to informational markekets - internet, software etc. As those shift so fast that anything is outdated before you ever know it.

Advice can be good, remember it - if it is a good story. Retell it, it might lead to some informal contact(anecdotes anyone?). Often other part of business is being well known - to be acquired / get new contacts / support.

my 2c
Always be learning.

Don't learn Rails to make a career out of it (although that may end up happening!), learn Rails to expand your mental models.

And don't just learn Rails!

Learn Django. Learn Sinata. Learn Erlang-Web or Nitrogen. Learn Smalltalk. Learn TeX. Learn JavaScript (actual JavaScript). Learn Node.js. Learn Meteor.

Learning a language doesn't mean "ditching" anything. You're adding!

And one more thing: Ruby[sic] is far from the latest online fad. That would be JavaScript and Node. Rails was the latest online fad back in 2007.
The part about being holed up in an apartment resonated with me. I worked for a startup in the valley and then moved to India to start a new company. So being in a place where running a tech company is not the default is a lot of friction!

Its talks and videos which help I think.
Ladyada's workshop in LEGO - help make it happen
Little do you realize, the "standard type of story (of stumbling on a winning formula) that is brought up on HN" is the 1% of cases...
I made them so I could get something built quickly, and the development team I clicked with happened to build Ruby applications. I'd certainly be open to a change once I hire a CTO. I honestly don't know how hard it is to switch from one platform to the next, I assumed "very" so I looked for Ruby devs only. Maybe a bad assumption?
Well if this shepherd didn't know anything about the mining industry, what about owning property?

He could have bought the mineral rights to the land, have a survey taken, realize there are billions in diamonds in them's hills, and have complete control of the entire mining operation and its profits.

Notre sure if the example is relevant, as I'm largely basing it on US law. But your argument doesn't really stand as an excuse to tell someone else.
"A common misconception from fearmongers is that your data is being sold. It is not."

I'm calling "Srawman" on this.

The correct conception is that it could be sold and the Market Economics Fairy has predicted that it will be sold as soon as a willing buyer and willing seller agree on a price. Indeed, if Facebook fails, all their data will almost certainly be sold along with the rest of their assets.

Likewise, Google has an increasingly strong incentive to sell user data as its perceived value increases and the cash flow per "unit" decreases. That Google sees this as a distinct probability is clear from their privacy policy which gives them the right to use user data "to develop new services." No one should be surprised by this because failing to reserve rights to a potential revenue stream would be irresponsible behavior by Google management.

If the thesis of the article is correct, sale of data is increasingly likely as the online advertising model pivots away from personalized advertising and the attractiveness of creating alternative revenue streams from the data increases.
It depends what standards you hold the library to. Null pointer exceptions and other runtime exceptions are can be treated as errors - something which needs fixing in the code, rather than something that can be handled. A world of difference.
This strikes me as odd: "After a complaint from one of our users [...], we realized that the very same thing could happen to someone else"

One user complains about something that might have happened by his own doing and the OP starts implementing a feature, that not circumvents the end result (can't save the content)
but notifies the user that the software is broken somehow.

Anyway, I'm genuinely interested in the following:

What are these "universe glitches", when one gets logged out by the browser? Session Cookie vanishes? Server restart invalidates some kind of access token?
Richard Florida Is Wrong About Creative Cities
The Java Programming Language's checked exception feature is fundamentally broken. All newer Java specifications have acknowledged this and utilize un-checked exceptions.
Alternating which hand uses the mouse fixed a lot of my issues. I use it on my left during the day and right at night. I leave the buttons all set to right handed use.
Maybe word of mouth is an effect, but I doubt it's a significant one.

If I recall correctly- most of his traffic comes in through long tail keyword searches, which he constructs mini-sites for (e.g. Halloween Bingo Card maker). In these cases I expect that keyword matches, and relevant content are a lot more relevant than links from tech sites (which mostly go to his blog, on a separate domain)
did you managed to create the docs for ruby 1.8 and rails 2.3? i'm interested in the same thing
I haven't heard phrases like that since browsing book covers years ago. In large part -- although perhaps just online -- the programming community seems to have moved on from the "Hey, this is so easy! Buy my book!" phase.

We now have tutorials that try to make the case "Hey, this is so simple and intuitive if you are already a programmer with a solid foundation in the language that we designed our tool for!"

And we have the Learn X the Hard Way books, starting with the awesome: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
I guess this blocking by the browsers will eventually happen. But then it is not impossible to move the tracking to the server of the web site, instead of the client. I guess that is what would happen over time, although I admit it would require more effort by the site owners.
I kind of agree that Java's approach forces people to think about error handling. But really that's it's only virtue. Once people do think about error handling in their program, the best approach almost inevitably involves subverting the checked exception feature.
Yes - there is a lot about the traditional 9-5 5-day week, 1-desk-space mindset which could do with a rethink (especially in big corporate firms).

Its headlines like 'x fewer desks' which really annoy me though. This is putting the focus on changing your workplace as a way to save money, which is bad. Far more important is showing employees a good environment and keeping them happy. Building and land costs are actually fairly low compared to the damage that trying to penny-pinch (or just not thinking it through) can do...

(disclaimer: I design buildings for a living, though workspace design like this is not my field)
The HN login page seems highly insecure- Can any of you pros give an assessment?
I noticed that the login page for HN doesn't have any meaningful security, with no use of SSL: http://news.ycombinator.com/newslogin?whence=news

It seems it would be trivial for someone sniffing packets on the network to steal your HN password- Am I right about this?

I'm not asking this because I'm a stickler for web security: Actually, I'm asking because I'm creating my own website right now and would love to get away with such a crude, easy to program login mechanism :-)
This doesn't have to be a case of poor targeting by FB; it could be broadcast targeting by the advertiser who isn't as selective as we would expect.

And for brand awareness advertising, I could see that it might be worth it, depending upon the cost. I have no intention of using eHarmony (happily married here), but I'm aware of them due to both online and offline advertising. If a coworker asks me about online dating, I'm sure I'll remember eHarmony. That brand awareness has obvious value to advertisers, and if the cost is in line with their budget, it explains the "mis-targeted" ads.
I visited HP's Houston campus a couple years back. The non-sales folks all seemed rather down and weary. There was a complete lack of energy in the offices then. I can only imagine the mood now.
Are you worried that the libertarian bent of your arbitrators combined with the ex aequo et bono arbitration could lead to the perception of your judgments being perceived as politically biased, especially when it comes to controversial issues such as IP?
I expect I would get stuck wondering if I'd be out on my ear if I answered that you could put all the marbles in one bucket, take them back out, and then put one red marble in each bucket.
Yes unchecked exceptions are nice. However it would be nice if the compiler could enforce documentation of possible exceptions raised by a method. Something like the throws keyword of Java with unchecked exceptions.

That way you (through the IDE) could know at any point of your code what exceptions could happen (and not have to guess or go through all the called code to identify them).
Does anyone know if this is true? Is it a side-channel attack? The translated English is pretty hard to make sense of.
Apple Design Chief Knighted
That's what I was wondering, they solved user's problem, but not their problem.

To me, it sounds like they might be expiring the session due to inactivity, while the user is actively writing something.

EDIT: Typo
An Awesome, Concrete, 5-part Responsive Design Tutorial
Is it true that you can't tweet “Get Better.”