skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen a pretty big move in popular libraries to fluent interfaces. It does a pretty good job of getting over the verbosity in Java (at least where the verbosity hurts readability).

Examples like Guava:

Cache<String, User> userCache = CacheBuilder.newBuilder()
.initialCapacity(7)
.expireAfterWrite(20, TimeUnit.MINUTES)
.build();

Or Hamcrest:

assertThat(result, containsString("OK"));

Or Rest-Assured:

expect().statusCode(200).when().get("/user/1");
I will admit to having been pretty cynical about the London Olympics before they started. However, since it started I've enjoyed every minute on it, to the extent that (as a Brit in the US) I decided to get a last minute flight to come back this week to enjoy the atmosphere and see the closing ceremony.

In more relevance to the article: I'm pleased that there are enough British people out there willing to shed the stereotype of being negative about everything, because I was guilty of it. I'd actually love to do it if I had the time (I wonder what proportion are retirees? I've seen a few). Although working as a developer is clearly superior in almost every way to the grocery store job I had at the age of sixteen, I do still miss the personal interaction you get when you're meeting new people every day.
or ObjectName.getBuilder("Alfred E. Neumann", "http://blog.schauderhaft.de, 42, "c:\\temp\\x.txt", 23).build(); maybe?

It's not addressing named parameters issue, but I find it better like this.
In a mathematical sense, how is what has happened with the US banks any different than living under a monarchy where the king can take risks at the expense of the ruled? Isn't escape from this kind of tyranny the reason the first colonists left England?

I'm feeling very John Galt here. 10% of the country is getting unemployment. N% additionally is getting subsidized rent, subsidized farmland, subsidized food, subsidized corporations and banks.

I'm an Entrepreneur and I need every penny. Every penny I keep is reinvested into a business that creates value for the world. HFT doesn't create value for the world. Food Stamps. I don't get bailed out when the weather is bad and my garden dies. I don't have any debt. I don't have a car payment or a house payment.

I'm responsible -- and I'm starting to wonder, really, what's in it for me? We are in a drought and our city has banned outside water usage. We can't fill pools, wash cars, or even water our garden, yet, last night, I go for a walk with my wife and what do I see? Two little kids playing in a big pool of fresh clean city drinking water. People don't care enough.

How are we going to fix our society? It's broken fundamentally. It's like people have disconnected from their role in a larger group of people around them. We get food from a store sold by someone we only know by a plastic name tag. We don't grow anything. We don't know anyone except those who work in the next cube and our family and friends who we don't really depend on unless we are a struggling recent college grad who can't find a job and moves home and those stories are mostly not enjoyable tales told by the disgruntled.

The banks have caused immeasurable suffering to millions, tens, no HUNDREDS of millions of people, perhaps even BILLIONS of people -- and the only banking employee arrested or tried or even simply just stopped from doing what they did to cause that pain is a programmer who took some code from Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs itself was cleared of ANY wrong doing in this mess: http://www.keyc.tv/story/19239634/goldman-sachs-cleared-in-s...

We have to fix it. It has to be fixed. We can't keep going down this road, but I don't see anything really changing. Why isn't anything really changing? Why aren't we having serious existential conversations that really deeply change our society to one that will not collapse?

Do we really think telling the banks to do it will work? Do we really still trust them?

I'm really dismayed by all this.
Ubuntu patches the kernel, and glibc. They are not binary compatible. Ubuntu's stuff is synced from debian unstable, which is a moving target.

So, for a dynamically linked application, you need to build specifically for Ubuntu. With a statically linked app, that is distrobuted with its libraries .. you can make a generic linux application that should work just about everywhere.

Mint is a completely different story. They don't patch the kernel, or stuff like that. They just preinstall different packages from the Ubuntu repo, and have a different default user-skeleton. (different default settings in userspace). They also add some extra GUI tools and scripts.

But they are Ubuntu, just like HP Windows is just Windows and run Windows applications.
Right now the 'Successful' word is glaring at me for each project [0]. I'd like to see the project title instead of whether it was successful or not. Try swapping the word 'Successful' with the project title?

[0]http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/browse/successful/
We can try to reinvent longstanding law here on HN, or we can look for a library on CPAN (or in a law library?) that already implements it. These questions have come up many times before, with many sets of specifics. This is what many smart people came up with, which has stood the test of time.

Trying to unravel longstanding law is kind of like poking at a piece of code that's been running for 20 years and deciding you can do better. Then realizing that the only way to make it better is to rewrite it from scratch, because there are reasons for all of the funkiness in the code. And rewriting fails spectacularly in code much of the time (see TextMate 2, for instance). Imagine how much success non-programmers would have at rewriting a complex system from scratch. That's roughly how much success I'd expect HN users to achieve at rewriting longstanding law.

I'm just saying, the outcomes may seem capricious, but picking at one string isn't going to improve things. If you think otherwise, you may have a bright career in the legislature.
Hmm, is an "events" category possible?
You're right, but then I use vi.

I don't work in vi if I don't have to though, and I like editors that feel natural, are a pleasure, leverage the virtues of the OS I use, and interact with the shell. Textmate 1 has been able to do all that. It's just my preference, nothing more.
I'm not aware of an actual decision being made with regard to desktop support yet but I think it is inevitable.
Can logos be added via dst files?
I think there's a kernel of truth to that but it's not entirely right. I use Pycharm for my python coding and still like named parameters because it makes clear at a glance what each parameter is in the function call. Otherwise, I'd need to click through to each function definition or use the "show doc" command to figure it out. It's much better to be able to scan through the code and understand it without intervention from IDE features.
it's sci fi, but we haven't ruled out that human brains can't acquire knowledge at rates orders of magnitudes faster than current learning methods. Big advances in neuroscience and linguistics could make this possible.

Right now, the limits on our bandwidth is language and our sensory inputs. It's not completely ridiculous to think we could encode certain kinds of knowledge in more compact forms, and transmit them via an artificial sensory process that has higher higher bandwidth that audio/visual language based learning...
Oracle is 'taking good care of Java post-Sun'
Named parameters would result in more readable, compact, and efficient code compared to the latter approach.

But yes, long parameter lists (whether represented as argument structs or not) generally indicate a problem.
Are you saying people should not be afraid of failure?
You're lucky you can view any of it. In China nothing from gplus arrives.
Possible workarounds include logfile streaming (say via a pipe on the filesystem) but that introduces much larger problems and would in no way be compatible with the app rolling its log files.

What you call a workaround (streaming to a central location via syslog or scribe) happens to be the standard approach in my corner of the world. Analytics and monitoring operate naturally on the stream because, as you point out, sampling on rolling logfiles is not exactly reasonable, neither is scattering logfiles across application servers.

I'm leaving this discussion at this point because I'm not interested in your condescending tone and insults. It appears you haven't even centralized your logging, yet feel entitled to give ops-advice that is at odds with how the rest of the world operates.
I've noticed this divide for a long time, but the way I've always plotted the axis is "urban" vs "rural".

urban - accepts a certain amount of chaos for the benefits of reducing redundancy, wants to centralize code, reuse via shared centralized code

rural - wants to be isolated, wants to "see" everything, wants to have control over everything, reuse via cut-and-paste
Free eBook: Defensive Database Programming with SQL Server | SQL Aloha
Explaining Your Product | Strong Opinions
IPhone and iPad Simulator and Responsive Design Tool
SUSE and Secure Boot: a proposal not just for SUSE
Solid suggestion. I suppose that the length and colour of the progress bar is probably enough to signal whether a project was successful or not. Thanks.
'this' in the watch expressions and the element id trick are handy!
Windows-Based, so maybe not that interesting to many on HN :)
Verizon Offers High-Use Data Plans, Inadvertently Points Out Enormous Rip-Off
Not sure what you mean by this? What would be in the "events" category? Currently, the category list mirrors Kickstarter's own.
Thoughts On Space Shuttle Code Process
Woah. The water mains are 800 feet down? How does that work? How did they even get there?
Very surprised to see what a centrist I am; my unscientific number is -5). I would have pegged myself as much more liberal, but when it comes to specific points having to do with design and deployment, I'm more conservative than I would have thought.
Yes, software engineering will never be engineering as long as so much of it s just people's unsubstantiated opinions.
Working as a Freelancer with No Speed Limit
It's not the first smarter than human AI that is the threat. It's the first self-improving AI that people have to worry about. It can start out at a much lower than human intelligence (whatever that means) but as long it can keep improving it could turn into the nightmare scenario.

The safeguards need to be built into the self improving AI, no matter how 'dumb' it starts out as.
Who cares if it's old? The information is still as relevant as it is interesting.
PG, could we get a live stream of the event?
This, like many of the proposed solutions here exposes the issue that putting the (not particularly) long list of parameters into the ctor, that of not every being able to call doSomething without all the required values. What is the caller of your builder doesn't remember to set the zip and the doSomething method then uses it? You've only really added syntactic sugar and sacrificed functionality.
Si! pragmatism/idealism would be a much better framework to write that rant on top...
For me, this story was most interesting because it demonstrates the impact of social class in America, something that's rarely discussed. Try to picture the same story if the author's father was a millwright or a construction worker.

Not at all a criticism of the author - we absolutely should work with the advantages we're given!
The most interesting I found was the steam pipes.
Offhand and very quickly and perhaps with a bit too much gloss:

* Ability to quickly learn new languages

* Ability to quickly understand and use appropriate design patterns where sensible (even if they are unaware of the whole idea of design patterns and just do it by doing what's sensible to them from experience).

* Ability to use or adopt new stack technologies (IE maybe they're an expert in PostgreSQL or Cassandra, but if for some reason they have to use MySql or Hadoop it's not a big ordeal). Same thing for coming to grips with stuff like 3rd party APIs.

* Balance documentation and clear design approach with ability to accomplish things quickly.

* Are able to avoid poor design and extreme inefficiencies, while also being able to recognize that not everything needs to have groundbreaking performance or architecture.

* Are accustomed to creating good baseline unit tests.

* Ability to code clearly and quickly.

* Able to work well with a team and effectively communicate.

* Some ability to express design and implementation opinions graphically.

* Ability to learn and adapt and use documentation/google and knows when to ask and when to look something up.

Of course this isn't to say that there's no such thing as valid job requirements. But odds are if you're looking for a PHP dev, for example, you don't really need a 'PHP Dev,' though they might be a bit cheaper than other kinds.

Rehash of what I don't think is usually super important:

* Ability to program natively in a language on a whiteboard (though ability to use psuedocode on a whiteboard is good).

* Familiarity with specific development methodologies (the way a team works can usually be picked up quickly).

* (Most of the time) Tons of experience with a specific language. In general, the more general purpose the language, the less experience matters (I think), though there are some other factors that go into play. It does depend on what/where the programmer will be working on. But in general, I'd say a brilliant programmer who hasn't used your language or stack a lot might be more valuable than someone who does -- the heretic's nectar can be sweet indeed.

* Implementation knowledge of the head of some obscure algorithm or data structure. Maybe you should know of the algorithm. But there's no reason a good programmer necessarily knows every algorithm and its implementation details off their head. Likewise, odds are, that for the average programming job, the programmer will not be implementing a high-performance version of any algorithm because they'll be using core functionality in the language, its libraries, or their tech stack :( . And the exceptions to the rule will require some R+D time anyway.
I'm guessing they probably got there before everything on top was built, but how do they get down there now for repairs and such?
Datomic: Atomic Chocolate
A field is a structure that behaves very much like the reals (under the usual operations). That is, it's a set of elements with an addition operation with an identity called 0 (special elements are named after their numeric equivalents, but that doesn't mean they're always the same thing), a multiplication with an identity called 1, and the two interact "properly". That is, they distribute and the additive identity is the multiplicative zero. Further, inverses exist for all elements, with respect to both addition and multiplication (except 0).

So very reals-like. Finite fields are then fields with a finite number of elements. Can you think of any examples?

The easiest way to read the OP is to read the field F as if it were the reals, except with a finite number of elements.

Let me know if that helps.
I think I have to side on the "this is a bad post" on Hacker News.

You might be an extremely bright, great person, but you seem to have an extremely large "safety net" so it's a lot easier to have testicular fortitude.
I love the framing of the statement.

"This might sound ridiculous, but we've announced death benefits at Google."

From that point on, you're led to believe that Google is such a great company that it's willing to hurt itself to be good to its employees. Much better than "We automatically contribute $10 a month into a life insurance policy for everyone."

To me, it's a great example of showing the benefits instead of just the features, mixed with an elegant form of Crazy Mike's Discount TV Warehouse, with prices so low, we must be crazy.
Hackers collect significant account details from Blizzard servers
One of the founders here - people kept confusing us with IronPython, and/or assuming we use IronPython.
Dropbox syncing to 3 machines, one of which is a linux server in my closet. The linux server makes snapshots of the folder and saves rolling daily, weekly and monthly snapshots to a RAID1 array. (see http://neverusethisfont.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-back-up-drop...) The RAID1 array is then backed up to a separate RAID1 array nightly.

Thia has been working pretty well for me and is a good balance between automation and sufficient redundancy.
The report says that people require life insurance, because the financial burden on their family after death is too high for them to afford.

It also says that purchasing life insurance is a cheaper alternative than building the required savings to cover the family's financial burden after losing the main breadwinner.

The report was written by Swiss Re.
Great resource. Would it be possible to have search functionality?
Google's Voice Search For iOS Makes Siri Look Like She's Going Nowhere
It's time to reformat data privacy for the 21st century
But it also means that you are introducing a lot of extra classes that do almost nothing but wrap primitives and provide little or no additional behaviour.

If you do need to pass in additional information, refactor and change the primitive to an object when you really need to, not because you might need it at some point in the future (and the chances are you won't).
I agree with the general issue of the cost of defending oneself. But today, in New York alone, hundreds of poor people will be arrested and charged with crimes they may not be guilty of. Many will have been singled out because of their appearance. They will not have access to attorneys (except the public defender flunkies), and most will serve jail time. I have a lot more concern and sympathy for the breakage of the system for these guys than for the multimillionaire banker who was charged essentially only because he got caught.
Industrial designers take on the Unibody iPhone
I'm trying ST2 and Chocolat. I'm tending to like Chocolat better. It follows the UI conventions of OS X, whereas ST2 doesn't.

For example, ST2 doesn't let me select the folder inside a project. It only lets me reveal or hide its contents, and rather briskly, at that.

ST2 has no passion for the subtleties of user interface and the joy it can bring. I don't think a lot of people get it.

I also don't need ST2's thumbnail view of the document constantly showing me where I am in it taking up real-estate in the project window. That's clever, but a distraction, at best.
What confounds me is that while I'm a liberal by every other measure Yegge proposes, I still love Clojure.
That has nothing to do with primitive types. Otherwise in Java it would mean you shouldn't return a String ever because it's not primitive! It has nothing to do with primitive types whatsoever. It's about encapsulation, i.e. you should not depend on the internal structure of an object.

As a simple example, when one wants to walk a dog, one would not command the dog's legs to walk directly; instead one commands the dog which then commands its own legs.

i.e. this is violating the law:
dog.getLegs().walk()

and should instead be written:
dog.walk()

with this implementation:

class Dog {
void walk() { legs.walk(); }
}
Search is on the roadmap, for sure. That said, Kickstarter's existing search function performs very well.

The primary purpose of TKBM is to collect Kickstarter projects together by outcome (success/failure) and goal -- two things that Kickstarter's site doesn't make easy.
Sticky polymer based on beatle's ability to walk underwater
Ah - that point got by me, Sorry. Now, the challenge is, on your resume (in this, and any other situation) is to differentiate between when the company was wonderful, and did good things, and when it was under new management, and, to capture how long you stuck around under the new management.

For example - I wonder if there was a time that Enron was a great company as well?
Typer from LayerVault
App Stores Must Showcase Open Source Apps
Yes... pretty well - caught a few issues before they went out.

Dropping the data - this is just the raw unfiltered stream. We save the interesting process data elsewhere and then ditch the raw events.
Direct link: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-...
> I think the best way to get a foot into this market would be to build an open-source replacement for Sharepoint

Hm, like http://www.alfresco.com/tour ?
I work for an insurance company that specializes on auto insurance. It'd be filthy rich if people only had an accident every 300,000 miles.

The company is pretty well off, but pays 95% of the premiums in claims payment.

Doing a very back-of-the-envelope calculation, 22.5% of our insured cars had a claims payment this year (august to august), so an average insured person has a traffic accident every 4 years or so, and does way less than 300,000 miles every 4 years (more like 100,000 being generous).
plan: tell government we'll crash the whole economy if you don't bail us out
Making these arbitrary categorizations into "liberal" and "conservative" for things where we have all of the data is pretty much useless.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_insid...
Measuring Startup Success by Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
You don't have to beat the actuaries. The actuaries just have to take less profit than what you would have paid in taxes for the plans.

With perfect prediction (actuary tables), you would break even minus the profit of the insurance company. Since you paid the premiums with before tax money and the benefit is tax free, you make money depending on the relationship between your tax rate and the insurance "tax."
Or you can do the same right from MS Excel (in Python) using DataNitro:
http://mit.edu/~victorj/www/blog/2012/08/06/Twitter-reader-i...
It's closer to an underground version of an aqueduct than to a normal water main, a long-distance tunnel being bored to bring water from upstate reservoirs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._...

I'm not 100% sure why it's that deep (and can't seem to find a solid explanation). What I can glean suggests that it's partly due to wanting it to be in more geologically stable bedrock that passes below any bodies of water and geological aberrations in the area. And partly so that it can be fed by gravity along a continual downwards slope, which causes it to be fairly deep by the end (then at the end the tunnel narrows, increasing pressure sufficiently to push water up a vertical shaft to the surface distribution network).
Introducing Absolute Deal Score
`$_` is coming to WebKit soon: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93377
No. You have to use llvm.
IMO it is not a matter of 'what if', but 'when they'. Digital is the new world, the new weapon and the next stage of nearly everything in human evolution. It is simply terrifying to know what could be done if terrorism or warfare was conducted with bytes not bombs. Technologically speaking, we have gone well beyond the know how it would take to destroy the planet without old fashioned weapons of mass destruction. A massive EMP, an intentional spiking of the grid, false data injections... so many possible ways to bring the planet to its knees with the push of a button.... scary
A Programmer Wakes
Congrats guys love this stuff have been using it for a couple of months. The people who work on the Excel team were really impressed when I demoed it to them. Best of luck!
Thoughts on the SUSE Secure Boot implementation
1Password: Two Factor or not Two Factor
Awesome work guys.
Wow. Great article. Love the love for bizodo and the alley NYC. Changing the world.
Erm, at least over here (Uruguay) we don't buy automatic transmission because it's more expensive.

If they were priced the same, I'd probably buy automatic.
It is built on java instead of python, but Processing seems to be similar to Nodebox - http://processing.org/