skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that if you need to get some technical information, you need to understand english. That's the main reason why i learned english. I'm Québécois (Canada).
The french web is not bad i think. But it's not the english Web. There's a lot less content in french. But there is still some nice communities and forums in some France-based portals.
And I find this to be a complete pain in the ass. Seriously, you can't even print out variables to see what went wrong when you are building/debugging. They're no longer in scope.
That's because you can make rational judgments about what's important to you, and have a feel for the insignificance of 0.5% delta in accident rate. (IOW, I agree with you, but I don't think that most airline ticket purchasers agree with either of us.)

If you say to Joe Public "this airline is 0.5% more likely to have a crash than the one that's $50 less; which one do you want your family to fly?", I doubt many people can easily say "Oh, the cheaper one is preferable." They may arrive there after some agony, but to instinctively know that an extra 1 in 200 on something that's already 1 in 3 million or so is not economically justified on an EV basis. (You'd have to value your life at $30 billion dollars for there to be an EV equivalence between those two choices.)

Nonetheless, I predict many more people would find ease in deciding to take "the safer, more expensive airline" than would find ease in taking "the less safe, but cheaper airline" for their family travel.
Tell HN: an important difference between SV and Boston
About 50 degrees.

Wow! It is cold here, especially after last week's awesome weather at home in Palo Alto.
I share your fears on the flame war types this can attract, but we weathered a few hundred submissions on economics, libertarianism, etc ok, so maybe this area can be explored with rational, cogent dialogue.
On the "getting started" page, there is a heading called "Register Machines". The first thing I thought of was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_machine . Given your audience, that choice of words might be confusing :)
You're absolutely right. Sorry, I had repressed those memories ;)
Any you booted the machine by togging in a program in octal directly into memory from the front panel.
To me, cloud-based storage is a convenience that should never be completely relied on or trusted to reliably store or give access to anything.

This is true, but unfortunately it is also true of a hard drive sitting in your home attached to your computer. Hard drives break; computers can go crazy and corrupt your hard drives; hard drives burn in fires and get zapped by electrical surges and become soaked in floods. Moreover, the slow upload bandwidth from your home severely restricts your access to the data stored there when you're on the road, even if you're a master of SSH tunneling and the power doesn't glitch.

The big thing that convinced me to embrace online backup is the burglary scenario. If a burglar enters your home, it doesn't matter how many copies of your data you have on local hard drives, or whether or not those hard drives are kept connected and running. The burglar is liable to take everything.

You can make offsite backups on physical hard drives that you physically move from place to place. I'm too cheap to pay S3 to store my ripped CDs and recorded TV shows, so that's what I do for such things. But it's a lot of work, and I'm always behind.

As for the encryption issue: Is all the data in your home encrypted? The odds of one of my local hard drives being stolen are probably larger than the odds of my encrypted data on S3 being cracked. Yet I don't encrypt my home drives (except for tiny bits of data like my stored passwords) because I fear that the odds of my misrecording the key, or of something getting corrupted, are in turn far larger than the odds of me really caring when a thief makes off with the top-secret MP3 files of my niece singing Happy Birthday.
New Family Of Antibacterial Agents Uncovered
Fidelity and startups like Thrive are trying to soothe bewildered investors
coffee shops.
The general impression so far seems to be that FC doesn't so much net you new users as it does increase engagement among current ones (if integrated well). That isn't surprising given what I've seen running my Facebook app (which is now at about 50k MAU after 2 months) and what I've seen of sites using FC.

Facebook Platform (and presumably Connect) is great for virality, but haphazardly slapping it onto something that wasn't designed for its strengths and weaknesses from the beginning nets you little. To use it properly, you have to design your app or site from the ground up around the platform. Otherwise you're wasting your time.

I haven't looked into connect much yet, but I'm guessing that if it allows for solid virality (invites, notifications, profile boxes, mini feed entries, etc.) people just haven't quite built the app that takes advantage of it yet. They're just adding it onto their blogs and social news sites and hoping, and unsurprisingly they're not getting much in return. Look through the portfolios of contractors who build Facebook apps and you'll see a lot of that. Some newspaper thinks they can just stick sports scores in a Facebook app and it will go viral. Those apps always have 12 active users.

So I guess my advice would be don't do it half-baked, or you won't get much from it. If you're going to integrate it, rework your entire product to use the viral hooks you get from it. It doesn't seem to be that much easier for a user than a streamlined signup process anyway.
Graduated in '06.
Device helped ensure US Airways plane would float
"... and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza."

I care a lot about certain political issues but I would not try to talk about them on HN, and I bet you wouldn't either.

It seems weird -- almost sycophantic -- to so readily apply a different standard to Paul Graham. The only way I think one can attempt to justify a different standard for him is by invoking the American (only?) expression, 'his house, his rules'. In this way of thinking, he built the site, and we are his guests. But even this seems like a pretty attenuated rationale, to me.
"Sweet, let's start discussing whether white phosphorous could be a good basis for an online start-up."

O give me a break - so it's perfectly fine when you make a smart-ass comment, but there's something wrong when I do?

Fine, if this type of article elicits that much emotion from certain members of hacker news, then I'll try not to upmod / participate in the discussion in the future.

Personally since I can detach myself from, obj analyze & discuss controversial topics (rampant piracy, totalitarianism, torture, the conduction of 'reverse-genocide') regarding my country of origin; I just thought the overwhelming maj people here can do the same. I'm beginning to feel I'm somewhat wrong
Belkin caught using Amazon Mechanical Turk to post fake reviews for its products
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Dortmund, Germany.
University of Virginia
Of course there isn't. I love smart-ass comments, as you can see from my comment history.
EPFL (graduate school alum)
The circulation losses are a smoke screen--newspapers got really bloated during the last 8 years due the the housing bubble (every opened a newspaper to see who pays for it? realtors and car dealerships; neither of which is having a good time right now.)
Ok, and the noises of other customers do not distract you? I have to try this i guess. Thanks!
I agree that the Gaza events are very serious and deserve to spill out, but this article isn't particularly good. It's a rather low quality mainstream media article, quoting very biased sources without any mention about who these people are. It's not something that any specialist would read under normal circumstances.
Canal ice helps Dutch rediscover national identity
'Amazing' worm attack infects 9 million PCs
Brooklyn College -- Brooklyn, NY
Is there any specific reason why you decided to do it on one of the coldest days in the year?
'94-'98.

What's the good word?
Helluva school.

MGT, Spring 09 - Just over 100 more days!
There is more to consider with exception handling than just the performance of when the exception is thrown. There can also be performance penalties with respect to setting the stack up to be exception recoverable.

Also, there are some domains where the speed of recovery of an exceptional condition can be important.

You can't just use a tired old quote to hand-wave away optimization when it is important. You have no control over optimization of the language itself, so often it is important to consider performance aspects of a language when selecting a tool for a job.
It's probably worth noting, now that this story has been on here for a few hours, that it has produced very little worthwhile discussion - just one mention of some interesting facts about white phosphorous weapons, and a bunch of flame wars about whether this topic is appropriate for HN. Imho that's a good indication that this topic was in fact not appropriate.
You really hit the nail on the head. There's a solid business plan coupled with the three things backup needs. One thing to add: Tarsnap is even better than incrementals. It's snapshots that don't take up more space. That means that you can do things like delete an old archive since the newer ones don't rely on it for restore. Each archive works like a full backup even though it doesn't take up the storage space of a full backup!

I'm surprised that VC hasn't been banging down Colin's door. He has a workable business plan and a product that's wonderful. Tarsnap, in my opinion, should also have broad appeal to businesses. I know my company does a disk->tape thing, but often the tapes aren't so reliable, the whole setup is labor intensive, and it's stored in one location. Businesses are less hesitant to pay than consumers are and Tarsnap offers a lot of value.
Yeah, there's an element of 'his house, his rules'. But mostly it's just too taxing to continue caring. If he wants one high-quality political article on the site, fine, it doesn't really matter. The site didn't explode as a result. And there are a lot of interesting things to do besides trying to win a debate. Right now, you could be conversing with someone through a Mac Mini: http://coworkthailand.com/say/

I'm also tired of coming off sounding like a negative person. "you support a political submission!" "stop group-downvoting this guy for his opinion!" "we can't click through a killed submission!" "you disabled someone's account for possibly dubious reasons!" -- these are not my issues, and it's hard to feel like any of them actually matter in the big picture, and if they don't matter, why care? And it feels against my character to speak like that anyway.

So I've decided to find out where the site will steer us rather than wrestling to steer the site.
INSA of Rennes in France (National Institute of Applied Science), graduated 2005
+ Rochester Institute of Technology for 6 month as an exchange student

The courses between both were pretty different and kind of complementary...
I would guess that a signifigant number of people that read techcrunch have never heard of michael arrington, they just casually read it for the tech news.
thanks for that, agree with u actually there is a class of user who would be put off by FC on a site. So we would only offer it as an option, in addition to our current account system, not the only choice..
Choosing a Rhodes Scholarship over the NFL?
Yes, that is annoying. It also consumes a lot more memory to handle exceptions in the way Lisp does. That's neither good nor bad, just an observation.
Yes, Jobs has been great for Apple, but all the focus on Jobs obscures the fact that he has worked with and been supported by a number of other competent people within the company. Who's to say that much of Apple's success could have come about Without their help? I've seen a few articles profiling these people (Cook plus about 5 others), but that's it.

Dr. Tantillo ('the marketing doctor') did a post back in July on his branding blog - http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv - asserting that Apple and Jobs are two separate brands. Tantillo argues that Jobs should have a succession plan. I don't necessarily agree, but I do think he makes a good point about Jobs and Apple being two separate brands--Apple would be different without Jobs, but different is not always bad.
http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2008/07/24/brand-advisory.asp...
the first 3 minutes are the hardest, after that you'll adjust no matter how cold it is
Whee current student.
Milwaukee School of Engineering
This would be an effective way to tarnish the reputation of a competitor.
Don't get open-ear headphones. I received some nice entry-level ones (Grado SR60), and they sound wonderful - but background noise is a problem. The coffee shop-office strategy takes some experimentation to get right.
Glasgow
good suggestion, agree initially we'd be looking at it more for getting friends of our already active users aware of it, and then if they join, they can see on facebook the updates off site which will drive return visits. so it's incremental off existing users rater than driving huge viral growth of random people to our site at the start at least
I've enjoyed the "cold" (by which I mean normal) winter weather. These past few days have reminded me of Minnesota and brought back fond memories.
What do you mean by "this" - Java's unwinding of the stack? Because in Lisp you just visit whatever stack frame you want and see everything that's in scope.

The real problem with Lisp environments (at least the open-source ones) is the lack of acceptable modern debuggers.
The title of this HN submission is subtly misleading. The original post discusses the fact that Java's exceptions are slow, but merely as a symptom of the main problem: Java mixes up the issues of (a) finding some code that knows how to handle an exceptional condition and (b) backing up the call stack until it can find some code to continue executing. In Java, (b) is unavoidable, so the context of every exception is destroyed before the exception handler can examine it.

As noted elsewhere in this discussion, this means that Java exceptions aren't resumable [1] and that a Java exception can't examine all the variables that were alive when the exception was thrown and take action (like: logging) based on the values of those variables [2]. Plus there may be memory-usage implications. All of which are dimensions of suck that are independent of the speed issue.

---

[1] Not that I really know what this means, having never learned a language where this was possible.

[2] This, on the other hand, would be win that I could understand.
I dont know, im naive enough to hope that a competitor wouldnt do this, at the same time I dont believe at belkin would do this in such an obvious manner.
At first I thought Haskell was cool, but then I realized that I only thought that because it was the latest cool thing to do in programming. Then I thought learning it would be a waste of time.

Then I randomly picked up the book "The Haskell School of Expression" by Paul Hudak (one of the designers of Haskell). It is a great introduction to the language. By page 30 it has already introduced the Haskell notions of bindings, functions, let, recursion and complex nested pattern matching in a very practical and understandable way. It also convinced me to continue learning Haskell because it clearly demonstrates some of the features that (to paraphrase the book) "you probably won't see in mainstream languages for ten years."
That's one of the classiest offices I've ever seen; just enough magic and wow, without going too over the top.

I thought Fog Creek was more or less a one-man operation; is this office being funded by VC money, or is Fog Bugz that successful?
CS '04
I live and work in an apartment and my nextdoor neighbors like to kick it with the good vibrations too. I used to go over there and ask them to turn it down. I've since given up. Now when I hear them kicking it I just start blasting some techno or classical music. Overall I'm not that ticked at them because they keep their noise to their post-work and before-bedtime hours. It still sucks though.

I like going to a coffee shop or tea house sometimes. There is a nice a teahouse walking distance from where I live. The only thing is as a bootstrapped type, I've cut out the luxury of $5-10/visit to the coffee shop/tea house. When I'm there, the noise isn't annoying and I enjoy being around the people.

For awhile I was heading to the library of the local University. They're open 24/7 and its a good mix of people and quietness. It was kind of fun taking my 12" PB and hacking code at 2am on campus. :) I'm graduated now but may pick that up in the future if my ID card still lets me in.

Working from the apartment, sucks, sort of. Try and make sure you're getting out of it regularly. I go work out almost every day. If there is a gym in walking distance, I recommend joining it. A regular gym visit does a lot to help force a sense of routine and it gives me a break to look forward to.

Also,I have two computers I use for different purposes. I use a small laptop for most consulting work I do. I tend to write specs and whitepapers so this suits me. I find being able to relocate to my couch, read, write, and take notes is a nice break from "the office" 10 feet away. I do all my startup work on my normal computer.

Good luck!
always good suggestion... well our current front page is pretty good to grab interest, but our registration flow has a lot of room to improve..

especially coz we require a plugin to use the site. we're working on that.

still thinking about whether to also drop the email/activation requirement, and make it optional to further reduce the barrier
Getting subtler, are we, gibsonf1?
whiskey = (fellow == jolly_good) ? clear : piss_on_em;

(99-04)
ouch!!!

When i said we can bring a solution, I certainly didn't keep in mind Power Rangers or Captain Planet. It was more like, why be a pessimist, when you can be optimist about things around which are not right.
ITESM Campus Zacatecas (Mexico)
Barneyisms – Words of Wisdom
Will there be another cold snap to freeze the canals of the Eleven Cities Tour? "Not in the coming weeks," Geurts said. "At the earliest, in February."

I'm crossing my fingers. During this last freeze I was at home with my sick girlfriend, watching all the news reports of people skating on the big canals. Here in Amsterdam there wasn't enough ice to skate on the canals, so I'd have to head north which wouldn't have been very nice :(

Would have been nice to see all the Dutchies out in skates, everyone seemed so happy about it. Plus, this poor Californian has never skated on natural ice!

Any other hackers in Holland?
same here. GTHC.
The Economic Crisis Sucks; What You Can Do About it
Current Georgia Tech CS student
There's pretty strong indirect evidence for such periods in the fact that life is so much better than it was in say 500 AD. If things only got worse, they'd be pretty terrible by now, starting from that base.
Except cabbies, it seems. :/
NOKIA N97 TOUCH SCREEN (UNLOCKED)
Nokia N97 Touch Screen the next generation high end mobile phone from Nokia. Described by Nokia folks as a “handheld computer” this device is a pretty comfortable high-end phone. First N series phone with a qerty keyboard, It has touch screen.
this is done tons by big corporations. usually they pay a shop overseas to make accounts and post false praise. this is something i've looked extensibly into before, so when i get back tonight i'll go through my old notebooks and post some links.
Learning How To Benefit From Piracy Is Not The Same As Endorsing Piracy
Try Smalltalk, it has both a modern IDE/Debugger with automatic refactoring support and resumable/restartable exceptions/notifications.
Georgia Tech alum
I don't trust Belkin products myself. A few years ago Belkin sold a router that would periodically override your web browsing and display an ad for parental control software in your browser instead:

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1039_3-5104863.html

That said, it is good of palish to point out that this newest hasn't been 100% verified.
Same here. BS CompSci '06.
Exceptional doesn't mean once in a blue moon; it just means "not the normal flow", for example, it could mean missing data, which could be handled by returning and testing for a null in Java. Python has more efficient exception handling, so missing data is often handled by an exception. Programmers are encouraged to use this idiom. It has the advantage that the return value space is not cluttered by a distinguished error value. If a function returns an integer, is the error value 0, -1, or 9999?
The way I found my current co-founder is by attending a Ruby meetup in my area, and talking to the other members. Don't worry about paying people, or the economy; just get together for a weekend and start hacking on a small project. If things work out, you can just go from there; if not, rinse, lather, repeat :~).
thanks for the advice! It seems that we have the same kind of problem. :-S
University of Amsterdam
Sure... It's an interesting comparison, and there are trade offs with both systems. I can't see one as being clearly superior to the other though.
The point seemed fairly clear. Retraining on a Dvorak held no real advantage. The fact is that almost all people learn on QWERTY so the necessary retraining isn't worth it.

Not to mention the millions/billions of keyboards in existence that would need to be scrapped.
DM MS '08.
Light Lane concept would protect cyclists, bring Tron to life
This is not just about keyboard layouts. It's about the concept the poor products (VHS, Windows) win over superior products (Beta, Mac) because of a winner take all economy.

As you can guess the author shows this to be bunk science.
You mean The Dungeon? ;)
Indeed it is better than incrementals, being close to the behaviour of rsync which can also symlink to previous backups. Surprisingly, tarsnap is much easier to use than rsync: my perl script to work out what rsync should be doing is about 30 lines long, whereas the one to kick off tarsnap is about 3 lines.

As for VC, I can see why sometimes that's not always the best option, especially if the founder has to give up control in return for funds. However, I think it would be great to see more projects like this on HN, grounded in technical expertise and solid business needs.
When good assumptions go bad
The College of New Jersey.

Not too impressive after some of the names listed here. :-/
How To Make Money With Email List
Hmm... to my downmodders... I wasn't trolling... I actually appreciated the elegance of explaining a conversation that way.
Google SilentEar its a type of earplug, very effective. About $10 or £5. Not sure about the vibrations bit, but people have to routinely grab my shoulder to grab my attention, as I can't hear any noise or voice when I have them on.
On the contrary, one of the top 5 things I do want backed up is my MP3s; I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on them. But I probably don't want to back them up over the Internet.
... water pollution and ... have made [canal freezing] so rare...

What mechanism does water pollution have in freezing point depression? Surely they don't have enough dissolved solids to make a significant difference. A quick googling didn't reveal an easy answer. Perhaps this is "hacker knowledge".
Smalltalk does have some advantages over Lisp, including the ones you mention. But lack of a good debugger isn't enough to make me switch. I like Lisp a lot. Besides, switching to Smalltalk would be more work than writing (modernizing, really) a Lisp debugger.
...yeah?
Video of NY plane crash and rescue
.. and that was published, fittingly, 9 years ago.
Hmm... Colemak looks interesting. I've always had a hard time learning to use Dvorak, especially since everywhere else you work it's going to be Qwerty by default. Colemak is also public domain, according to Wikipedia. I might have to give it a try.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colemak#Colemak