skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does it matter if "these codebases aren't very good"? Have you ever actually seen a good code base? Most code I've seen has some poorly written corners; something where someone was in a hurry, or didn't know what they were doing, or someone inexperienced with the project started working on it, or the like.

The point is, these were real-world codebases with substantial unit tests, and they had type errors that weren't caught by these unit tests.

Honestly, in several groups I've worked with, I've had trouble getting people to add unit tests even to code in dynamic languages. A codebase which already has substantial unit tests is likely to be better than average, on that basis alone.

This is about saying, in the messy real world, do unit tests actually make type safety obsolete. And the answer is, no, they don't, even code with fairly good test coverage can be improved by adding typechecking. Now, there is the question of whether writing in the dynamic language allowed people to write code faster (it's generally a lot easier to translate correct code once it's written than to write it in the first place); or whether some of the more highly dynamic features of dynamic languages benefit writing or deploying code.
Personally I like Scala but I think it's too complex and a little too clever to escape the FP niche. I'd be happy to be wrong about this.
If the concern is of a mistake causing the deletion of the zone a replicated zone file will be lost just as well. To avoid this you'll need two name-servers and update each of them independently.

Keeping not too long DNS caching times would help recovery, too short and it will be a drag on the site performance so a few (6?) hours should be fine to reduce recovery time.
Hidden web root shell on TP-Link routers (works on popular TL-WR1043ND)
If most code doesn't use "dynamacism" (we'll pretend it is a word), then it isn't an important value for most people. You are suggesting people should use dynamic languages to gain no benefit because some other software might in theory benefit from it.
These are mostly redirects to new domains from Geocities. I didn't realize that Google did that, which is interesting. It's also interesting the number of people who migrated off Geocities, but still kept their old geocities pages to redirect to their new ones. Can't make people update those bookmarks...
Static types or static analysis?

* KLEE: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of
High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs
http://llvm.org/pubs/2008-12-OSDI-KLEE.html
* Erlang Dialyzer
http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/dialyzer.html
* Datalog based systems
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse914/Overheads/mmcgill-java-static-race-detector.pdf

If you want static analysis hard coded into your language - what feature set do you want to support? The following support different styles of programming thus have very different static type systems.

* Standard ML / OCaml
* Haskell
* Scala
* Typed Racket
* Qi

And there's still the question that some kinds of extremely useful programs are very difficult to write in popular languages with strong static typing. miniKanren, a flexible embedding of Prolog and Constraint Logic Programming into Lisp, comes to mind here. I've seen versions of miniKanren written in Haskell and it abandons the most powerful feature of miniKanren - it can be trivially applied back on the language it is written in!
Oops, quite right. I missed the "equal or greater in magnitude" line when I was reading that section.
The idea that tuition increases are just to make up for deep cuts in state funding is mostly a myth. State funding was cut during the Great Recession, yes, but even if state subsidies had kept pace with enrollment growth and inflation, tuition would still have had to double.

The problem is that expenditure growth is outstripping all non-tuition sources of revenue. E.g. research grants, which account for 1/4 of the budget, have increased only 60%. Endowment income, of course, has not kept pace either given the state of the markets. The University has grown expenditures far faster than its growth in revenues, and has made up for the difference by tripling tuitions.
I also have a Galaxy tablet, and had an iPad before. As best I can tell, there's no real substantive difference between them in my usage. Both are good, portable sources of Netflix.
I think this has been true for a few years. Going by The Sunday Times Rich List, The Queen's personal wealth is relatively "unimpressive" at around £300m which puts her somewhere in the 200-300s in ranking.

Update: Here we go, the BBC reported on Rowling topping Queen Elizabeth II back in 2003 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2979033.stm
English speakers learning German gain more from learning another language than the ability to speak the language to its native speakers. I know I've benefited from learning German. As my German teacher said, "I dare anyone to learn a language and not learn anything about its culture or history and more."

Eliminating teaching a language due to economic reasons is extremely shortsighted. What point is a school if it doesn't actually teach a fairly major language?
Interesting. I never perceived Scala to be in a functional niche. As far as I know most people consider it to be an object-oriented language first and foremost, with functional features.

Removing inheritance would have made the language (and every other language, too) a lot easier, but seeing that people cope with C# or Java quite well I'm not sure about the merit of the "complex" claim.

Comparing the C# and the Scala spec is very enlightening, even though they have different writing styles of course (so I won't bother bringing up page numbers).

Checking and realizing which "features" are in one language, but not in the other, is very helpful to gain some insight into this topic.

What do you think?
Watch Brave Online
Watch Brave screenplay is by Mark Andrews, Steve Purcell, Brenda Chapman, and Irene Mecchi which is edited by Nicholas C. Smith. The film is distributed by Walt Disney Pictures under Pixas studio which is due to be launch in theaters on June 10, 2012 in Seattle International Film Festival and the 22nd of June, 2012 in the United States.
Are we really talking about type checking or the larger circle of validation (of which type checking is just a small part)?

( Bugs found by unit tests ( ) Bugs found by input validation )

Or in other words...

String s = "lastname'; drop table user--";

...is still a perfectly acceptable string.

It seems to me that type checking is the simplest form of validation (are you an int, are you a String) and nothing more. It wont tell you if that int is positive or negative or if that string is an email.

When dealing with either static/dynamic languages I think more unit tests should be spent validating.
I wanted to address his third point, productivity. Android is sorely lacking in productivity apps, and some enterprise technologies (Cisco IPSec VPN). Unfortunately, while the iPad is improving, its still pretty weak in that area. Of the 225k iPad specific apps, there are only a handful that try to replicate the complexity of a desktop app. Most apps aren't that ambitious. Omnigroup deserves special recognition--OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, and OmniFocus, are full scale applications. Apple, of course, has the iWork apps plus iMovie and iPhoto. And there are some others--Diet Coda, Photoshop Touch, etc.
Pretty much zero content except for the video mashable did not make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME (which is cut in the worst way possible, all pauses were removed and it is really obvious. Feels like hectic verbal hiccup.)
This one works, it even has a tracking pixel :) http://www.geocities.com/epark/
Insights from a mid-sized game dev on how to succeed in the mobile gaming market
I don't have a response to that, other than to say, now you know why I decided to write compilers instead of pursue a graduate degree in computer science.
> Anyway, it occurred to me that with Clojure it could easily happen that I trade bugs caused by state problems to bugs cause by type problems.

With Haskell, on the other hand, you may not need to trade :)
Books ain't music
OCaml's nephew, F# does have bounded polymorphism though. Although it inherits that from the OOP side of its family.
I like C# these days quite a bit, after ~10 years in both Java and C#, and now ~7 in Ruby, my language preference is Ruby first, then C#. I do a lot of Android development these days too, so I retain a strong connection to Java.

But when I have to move from Rails to, say, ASP MVC (which is quite good, btw), generics are actually one of my biggest frustrations. Even with some of the quasi-dynamic typing available in C#, and even though I believe I have a pretty strong grasp of advanced generics concepts (in? out? Generic methods? Wildcards? Argh!) to me they introduce a maddening level of conceptual complexity and un-readability that are simply not worth the trouble.
I'm American and I use my microwave regularly, but not for boiling water (when I make coffee using my Aeropress or French press, not tea - and don't get me started about drip coffee). For that, I use a kettle on my gas range. It's not much longer, and I can ask if anyone else wants coffee and boil more water easily.

The time it takes to boil the water is about the same amount of time it takes for me to grind my coffee beans and set up the Aeropress, so it works out.
Just went over to PIRC, very cool! I'd love to have a short chat some time. I'm interested in the UK market because a very high percentage of the ownership in public companies is known. Nothing like tiny error bars :P

That's an interesting idea with the pension funds. It might cause a hiccup in the analysis bybincreasing the percentage of unknown stockholders, Proxy Solicitor would love it since the retail campaigns are highly profitable.

I've been tossing around the idea of partnering with a website like moxyvote that has retail investors following these issues. I think it would be interesting to let them indicate their intended vote then calculate their collective power. I think it would be motivating and increase turnout.

In answer to you question about the Dow I have not run them as a set, but I've never worked on a company yet that didn't have at least one shareholder that met that criteria.

Email me at T@RotaryGallop.com if you'd like to chat.
If only one suffered, that would be optimal. In my experience what ended up happening is all suffered. In noticing that one part of my life was starting to falter I would soon over compensate. What would happen is a juggling act, that ends with total burnout. In the mean time you disappoint a lot of people.

Side-projects are good, but you have to be careful about it.
What are good side projects? I get this "cool stuff that I don't get to do at work" idea, but I think it's vitally important to have side projects that have a different gratification profile than one's main work. If you work as a developer of any kind, most work will be on massive projects spanning at least months, often years. For a side project to be fun, I think its important to have a different pace. For example trying out a new technology and doing some cool hack quickly, in a few hours, rather than "doing it right" slowly and meticulously. Maybe side projects should be mainly about learning or trying out things rather than doing things, exploration not exploitation of existing skills.
> It sucks that they’re built in factories in South China that have to rig anti-suicide nets on their buildings.

I don't know about the other statements, but the suicide rates at those factories are actually lower than the nationwide suicide rate in China. It's easy to come up with pithy one liners about the working conditions in third world sweatshops, but the actual picture is a bit more nuanced than that.
interestingly, here in Australia an electric kettle is one of the required basics of any kitchen. Even the cheapest nastiest hotel room will contain a toaster and an electric kettle
I would feel bad editing my comment now that you've replied, but my original intent was to say that type-checking is "free." At some point the quotes were lost.

To get as close to the land-mine as I am willing: I like C. I like Python. I like Ruby. But most of all, I like using the right tool for the job.
No, this is just common ignorance of static typing. That string is a perfectly acceptable String. But it isn't a perfectly acceptable Query, and you can't pass a String to the database, only a Query. In order to turn a String into a Query, it has to be passed to a function that escapes problem characters safely. You need to use such a function regardless of dynamic vs static typing, but static typing enforces that you always use that function, and can't forget and accidently submit an unescaped string to the database.
The classic case is the underproductive but friendly and intelligent person who has a good rapport with everyone in the office, good answers/comments in discussions with coworkers, willingness to do miscellaneous odd jobs and help people out, etc.

In that case, I'd question if that person is truly unproductive. More likely management just doesn't understand how to properly value their actual role, which may not be reflected by their job title. In that case, instead of firing them, it might be better to either:

A. understand the actual value they deliver and leave well enough alone

or

B. create a new title for them, which reflects the value they produce and then hire somebody else for their old position.
This is why I love HN. I'll be in touch!
The iPod's Dark UI Pattern
I like the use of a coffee table instead of a side table - more room. As seen here:
http://rockmaninoff.posterous.com/standing-desk-v2-and-hopef...
This is a great source. Specially, couldn't believe my eyes on this - http://codepen.io/dylnhdsn/pen/iphone/23 (CSS made iPhone)
Depending on your technical ability you may want to take a look at Linode.
Are you basing this on an analysis of UVA's budget? Someone cited somewhere that the Germanic Studies department had like 15 professors. If they faced declining enrollments, they very well could be in a situation where the size of the department isn't justified by the number of students it is teaching.
Microsoft are doing it right with Surface
So is it a university's job to teach "German for business"?

Suppose the CS dept just did Exchange-server admin 101 - people would complain that it wasn't the proper role of a research university.

It seems that closing marginal depts, rather than just milking them as cash cows is a noble strategy - whatever the rest of the UVa management's actions

And does a university need to teach every subject?
Should UVa have (for example) an Oceanography dept? Is there much point in having a one person dept teaching Vulcanology when students would be better going somewhere else that specializes in it?

10 years ago the Netherlands started this process for their entire country. They picked the subjects that their universities did very well at and decided to close all the other research depts. There was no point in having the 100th ranked dept of tropical medicine when students could go somewhere else to learn that and you could use the money to support the worlds top dept in some other topic
The joy of using the iPad comes exactly from the fact that it is a "single app visible at once" device. I would argue that most of the things I mentioned are actually more efficient on the iPad than as a window on a laptop/computer display. The focus a single "window" makes it a lot better for reading, browsing, pictures, video and other ways of consuming content.

Sure, you might consider the iPad as a luxury for the minority who also needs a regular computer/laptop since the iPad isn't sufficient for them - and you're right. A few hundred dollars is not much though for a "luxury device" that'll you'll use several hours a day for years.

It's obviously also way more portable than a laptop. The Macbook Air 11' is very light, but it's still double the price and almost double the weight of the iPad, which makes the iPad a better choice in my view for the bigger than smartphone device you'll take with you everywhere.

I'm not claiming that the iPad is the best game device, not at all (it's great for casual games though). The Virtual Window mode in Rage HD is incredibly immersive and exhausting since it's like virtual reality, but I never intended that sentence to sound as the iPad was the best platform for immersive games. It's not.
Yes, I know. Haskell is a very cool language as well.
Anxiety Can Bring Out the Best
thanks for the link, looks great! If you want a video of the drone itself take a look in here - http://www.omstudios.de/OMCOPTER-Flying-Epic

Looks impressive
The "Paypal Mafia" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia ) seem to me a good counter-example, if we are in the anecdotal evidence range.

But more importantly, I think the whole "VC prefer serial-entrepreneur", is not because serial-entrepreneur are "alway right" but rather because their track record prove that they have a better chance than first time entrepreneur. Which is alway important when you are investing...
It's usually the return on endowment investments.
Every time the market dips - universities go on a manic cost cutting exercise.
Ars Liveblog: Microsoft to announce future of Windows Phone
He qualified with "reasonably convinced", and you countered with an unreasonable example. That is the definition of attacking a strawman.
Admittedly, he's relying on anecdotal evidence, but the conclusions he reaches don't strike me as unreasonable, and if the lackluster sales of Android tables are any indication, his experience is more likely to be generalizable than yours.

Also, I don't think he ever argues that anyone should give up (where are you getting that?). Rather, he suggests that Google should get their asses in gear and improve their offerings on a few specific fronts if they hope to compete with Apple and MS.
Yes, but you do generally need a case anyway -- modern glass screens are reasonably sturdy, but they can be broken.

The surface has a case that doubles as a keyboard, but if you need the kickstand without a keyboard you have to remove it entirely (or so it seemed from the keynote). That's a pain -- it's one of my most common uses of the iPad with smart cover.
American outlets are 15 or 20 Amps, AFAIK.
I have an iPhone, iPad, and 13" MacBook Air. Each device fits a very specific use profile and has a place in my particular lifestyle. This is by design.

Android phone and tablet manufacturers are busy destroying the ecosystem by having a wide array of sizes and capabilities.

Android phones are increasingly cannibalizing the Android tablet market.

And Android tablets are, for some unknown reason, trying to shrink down to phone size (see the rise of ~7 inch tablets).

Leading to a confusing mess of 3.5-5.3 inch phones and 7-12 inch tablets. Eventually there's going to be a blend of devices straight thru 3.5 - 10".

And since we as developers know the android fragmentation problem is very real (I used to develop android apps for two years), it's going to produce a downward spiral of app quality as developers focus on certain form factors to the detriment of others.

Say what you will about Apple's "openness", but Apple's insistance on maintaining distinct product positions has absolutely proven itself in the market. Android's ecosystem is a disaster.
NASA Releases White Marble, an Amazing Hi-Res Image of the Arctic
> Is [JavaScript] really an issue in 2012? I mean, people can hardly use Twitter.com itself without JS turned on.

That's an indictment on Twitter's shoddy front-end code. The clean-up has already begun, but I don't know how much progress has been made at Twitter.

As was outlined earlier, reliance on scripting is going to bite an author inevitably.
> For example, with unit tests, you now have more (possibly buggy) code to maintain.

Well, that's no problem. Just hit them with a bunch of unit tests...
> but static typing enforces that you always use that function, and can't forget and accidently submit an unescaped string to the database.

So you're saying it is impossible to do this without static typing?
No, it is not.

We are too big, too diverse, too smart, too dumb, too divided, too comfortable.

Look at election numbers. Less than half the population votes, and the voters are pretty much always 50/50 divided. Not to mention the major sources of media are controlled by the rich. Pretty damn perfect recipe for suppression of any kind of popular uprising. The "next big change" will come from an external source not an internal one.
Both times I've opted out (out of the two I was about to enter a scanner), nobody touched my junk. The TSA officer explained how he would pat me down next, and I think he did the buttocks with the back of the hand, but neither came near the groin.

I don't think TSA officers like touching our junk any more than we do, really... Anyway, luckily I don't have to fly to the US often. I find even taking off my shoes degrading.
related:

http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=3...

http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/a_modest_atte...

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/12/27/Type-Syste...

http://blog.jcoglan.com/2011/12/29/black-box-criteria/

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/slides/Types.ppt
I've found Scala to combine the best of both worlds, non-verbose and statically typed.
The advantage of statically typed languages has a lot less to do with tests and everything to do with tools. IDE's can do very little when no type information is available, and most automatic refactorings require human supervision when performed on dynamically typed languages (read this for details: http://beust.com/weblog/2006/10/01/dynamic-language-refactor... ).
Scientists share their baffled reactions on the science in Prometheus
Madoff's 'customers' mostly believed that he must be doing something not quite kosher, but they thought they could still make money off of it.

This is a significant thing. My anecdotal understanding (from talking to my wall st friends) is that his clients basically thought he was screwing someone else (with his trading operations) so that his fund could do so well.

I wonder if this effect also takes hold in Nigerian emails scams. Would their success rate go up if they implied they were screwing someone else out of the money?
The better programmer you are, the less you need static types.

But a group of ten programmers create a codebase that is only as good as the worst programmer's code.
The Robot Lifeguard
Worst Pitch Deck or Good one?
I had a look at a Galaxy Tab the other day in the store, and scrolling/switching apps felt very choppy. However, my Transformer Prime is very fluid and responsive. I could not be more satisfied from my purchase, and am very glad I sold my iPad.
> I'm keeping an eye on Haskell for iOS.

Really? Is that even possible? Can't imagine Apple being okay with that.
Introducing The New IFTTT
Amazon Appstore Getting Ready for International App Distribution
"I have a little widget which keeps an eye on mentions of my name"

The only one that I found was http://www.brandseye.com/
patio11, what widget to you use?
Is your humanscale keyboard tray on a track? They make different size tracks that are interchangeable. One source: http://www.thehumansolution.com/humanscale-keyboard-tray-tra...

GeekDesk provides the dimensions of the desks, the large may not be able to accommodate your existing track, as the desk hardware mounts across the underside of the desk near the back. My 'small' frame takes up about 10" from the back of the desk, so I just got a 14" humanscale track. (My desk is only 25" wide)

This is slightly imperfect, as my tray can not fully retract under the desk, but the benefit of freeing the work surface and enabling more adjustment outweighs this concern.
That's funny.

I find using a microwave to boil water so... strange and unnatural. I'm not sure why, but its just odd. That's what a kettle is for!
Opa Developer Challenge