skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the language that gets Exceptions right is Common Lisp because of the restarts. With other languages handling exceptions is complicated. You either need to know internals of the code you are using or you simply bail out and print and error. With restarts you can simply offer ways to fix it and keep the logic where it belongs, close to the "throw".
Herd immunity: cow virus successfully targeted for extinction
It translates Java to Objective-C code without GC support (uses reference counting which you need to annotate). It doesn't define any UI so effectively you need to work on a Mac just without all the wonderful tools for UI building that apple provides and without any of the WORA you get from Java. When something doesn't work you are still stuck debugging in Objective-C. And googling stack overflow trying to understand how to translate Objective-C code to your problem.

Codename One solves all of the above issues by giving "actual WORA" which is the true value of Java.
They would rather do that then open an exploit possibility. As a user, I prefer that trade-off. It would bother me if I relied on PhoneGap or something similar, but in practice, the performance really isn't that bad.
That's pretty amazing, and it's really too bad that this technique wasn't actually available years before... (or was it?)
It's a story about Madison Ruby, which is a tech conference that requires travelling to Madison and involves talks about Ruby. I think this is the appropriate keyword density. Sometimes good content is just that, no SEO required. SEO is for people who can't write.
Google strong-arms Acer
The free community edition [0] supports Android just fine. I used it for a while for my own personal projects and found it very snappy indeed.

[0] http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_m...
I am not surprised at all.
Recession is hard for everyone, even for a $600bn company ;-) I am sure this adapter costs them around 50c to build.
errno is thread locale in most modern implementations
One particular mobile device has already reached that point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
Introduction to Media Types and Media Queries
Another Ian here, also using pdf.js. Been working on a paperless office app that allows contracts to be signed on an iPad. It works surprisingly well.
"only"??

If your point is that there will be 3X as many Android devices, fine.

but a market of 1 billion? I'll take it.
GIF... that's soooo geocities...

Very clever
I'd really like to see a labelled version of one of these images.
The Blog Compass and the 12 blog types
It always was actually. I even tried this on IE6 and it works
In the launch presentation, I think i saw a lanyard with a notch-like button on the new iPod. So yes, looks like they like your feedback :-) and may be first trying it out on the iPod and if it works well on that, they may even do it eventually on the iphone.
Nice try at what? Yet another post by 001sky that insinuates everything and states nothing!
Why innovative app developers choose Android first
Do you have a link to the CL approach?

Edit: A quick search turn up this interesting LtU discussion: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1544
Google's app could also be a supplier of transit info for the built-in (Apple) Maps application.
Show HN: Authpad - Elegant way to publish
Learn to code, get a job.
I have first seen this a year ago (when it was publicly announced, IIRC). It was a cute tech demo but easily broken, and quite slow.

This ... is mind blowing.
I may be biased cause I've been using iTunes since I can remember, but it doesn't seem complicated to me.

I've tried a lot of stuff, but nothing can manage well libraries over 10GB. There may be alternatives now, I haven't really looked for one in years (as I said, works for me and I like it).
I would be more surprised if they did. Apple keeps running and doesn't look back: they didn't include an external floppy drive when they axed it. Adapters give the community an excuse not to change. If you're dropping a couple hundred on a phone and you have a library of old accessories, what's another couple bucks?
There's no fixed time, mostly because it's done voluntarily around work schedules, I believe. So far it's been about once every one or two months.
S/he switched, so it was not for her/him. S/he spent some money on things you kinda expect to work, s/he may have the go to say why s/he switched and paid the price for not knowing beforehand, literally.
I hear people lamenting things like the fact that they won't be able to wirelessly charge the iPhone 5

I suspect Apple is holding off on wireless charging until they can get all their ducks in a line as it where. Placing your phone on a brick isn't a huge win compared to pugging your phone in. Placing your iPhone, Macbook, iPad and any other battery powered Apple device anywhere on your desk (or at least a large part of your desk) and having them automatically charge would be a pretty huge win.
Why not fire up the 3D printing market?
Palm might have had a chance with different leadership and no Leo... =(

Just thinking about it bums me out how a single bad person at the helm can so royally mess things up.
The obvious problem with the multiple return paradigm is that Go returns:

result AND error

whereas it would make much more sense to return:

result OR error

After all, if the error is true the result is invalid. This is one thing exceptions basically gets right. Go, much like the errno paradigm, relies on the programmer's diligence to know when it is safe to use the result. A better designed language takes away the option of accidentally doing something wrong.

Besides exceptions, this better approach can be accomplished by returning a union type variable that knows its current type (languages outside the C lineage call this sum types or tagged unions).

var foo = Bar();
if( typeof(foo) == Error ) {
// handle error
}
else {
// result is safe to use
}
Ask HN: Idea switching - How to stay focused?
TL:DR I've too many projects - how do you stick to one?

I'm currently at a point where if I could launch a product and it made a modest profit (a few thousand) it would be life changing for me.

It's a feeling of so near, yet so far making me restless. The thought of potential profit seems to be clouding my focus so that I can't push forward with one project. I'm pulled in all directions, convinced I shouldn't be putting my eggs all in one basket.

I do spend quite a bit of time on my ideas but because it's spread across so many little progress is made.

I've got plenty of ideas

I've got a reasonable skills & I'm excited to learn

I've got the free time & motivation to do it

For a few months this year I decided I should forget about the money side of it and I focused on my interests & passions.

I was able to get two projects launched which have proved very popular & made me very happy - yet these have all been set up out of my own pocket and I'm still paying to keep them running.

How do you decide which projects to cut and which to keep?

Any methods to focus the mind?
A 61-million-person experiment on Facebook shows factors affecting voting
Just as a note to anyone with the same problem, I had difficulty renting a movie recently on my iPad because I was told I have no storage space available. This was unusual because I have hardly any photos on my iPad and almost no music. I later realized that movies that you rent, even after they expire, remain on your device and take up storage until you actually delete them.
Me too! I read the "So i get around 2.500 items/day in my Twitter stream, which is quite a lot!" and thought, "Does he mean mentions or what? Why would he output the number to three significant features."

I shrugged it off and continued to be amazed by the data this app can collect and promptly signed up for the beta.
Self-Taught Developers: Are You Missing Your Foundation?
Couldn't you read the same data from the PS/2 port instead? I'd imagine that would be much better documented, and wouldn't need hacking the hardware.
Don't Prioritize Features
PHP 5.5 Secure Hashing API for Scala
Simple password is a password management library for the JVM, which aims to be easy and secure. It is inspired by the PHP 5.5 Secure Hashing API. Check the wiki for usage.
Well it was revolutionary without any doubt.

I believe software patents should not be granted but Apple really created a revolution. To say the contrary is denial.

It was so revolutionary it was not necessary to have MMS to be a total hit, like it was.

Have you used a LG Prada, we had to do software for it for a big Telcom company. Those companies would decide witch software would run on your phone, and it was total crap.

Android is just a literal copy of Apple iOS, please give credit when credit is due.
Scientists Now Uncertain About Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
This blog post is not a good quantified self post. A self quantified post should at least details the goal of what he's trying to accomplish, what intervention he's taking, and if he achieves his goal in the end. Otherwise, the information is just a curiosity.

Even my incomplete self-quantified post at http://kibabase.com/articles/notes-and-thoughts#self-quantif... contains information about the intervention I am taking(walking 10K steps) and my goal(achieving a BMI of 24.9 or weight of 159 pounds).
Thanks! See, I should complain more there is probably a solution for all these things, even though it's not that obvious to me.
Hacker News should be renamed to Consumer News with this kind of articles. Please stop upvoting such *@$#! ...
> sadly we are in mid September here in the northern hemisphere.

I am in the south and can confirm we are also in September, will report back with news.

/snark
These pictures are simply amazing. It's mind-boggling how far science and the necessary technology has progressed that we're able to do such a thing.
The real underlying point here is that owners of machines and stocks of resources are under no obligation to provide a penny to others under any circumstances, and that thinking they are is tantamount to Stalinesque genocide.

However, taxes are legitimate and have been around forever. I imagine that you regard this status quo as slavery. Also, limited work-weeks have been around forever. I gather that you regard this as freeloading. And these things ultimately provide for public goods, without any Stalinesque genocides being perpetrated against 'job creators'. At the same time, taxes do not get collected without legally accountable economic activity.

Indeed, as productivity increases, we should see benefits such as people not being forced to immediately begin starving in the street because their job became economically unnecessary, and people not being forced to work 80-hour weeks to provide for the profit of somebody else. If overall productivity increases only come with less social security and more compulsory work for one class, that is because another class is applying coercion to steal labor, which is not morally any better than stealing capital.

This observation does not require one to be a Bolshevik, nor does it entail that any mass killings will occur. Nor does it involve revolution. The status quo of several decades in the western world is already something of a balance between workers and capitalists. Now you are peddling the idea that this arrangement has been unfair to the capitalists who have been tremendously enriched by it.

That isn't correct. It is in the interests of capitalists not to kill and overwork the people whose time is required to produce anything, and not to strangle the average consumers whose spending power drives the economy. The problem is that short-term thinking and ideologues such as yourself are working to convince capital holders otherwise, that they should cash out as quickly as possible without regard to the social impact of what they are doing.

That's dangerous thinking and I urge you to become more educated in this area.
It matters since we (parent comment and the article) are talking about market share of phones.
I'm from the south as well ;)
GoDaddy Outage a Harsh Reminder of the Need for DNS Redundancy
Intel Says Clover Trail Atom CPU Won't Work With Linux
Signal Refresh iPhone -better network signal without rebooting your device
If you travel a lot and your iPhone doesn't always get a sufficient network signal, there is a way to improve it. Imagine you moving around with your iPhone and the device keeps trying to connect by locating the nearest cell phone tower. You can't obtain a better signal but in a way: rebooting the device. Signal Refresh refreshes the connection periodically, making your phone to reconnect with the nearest cell phone tower.
There is no silver bullet when it comes to growth. Corruption is probably the largest roadblock to growth, as evidenced by China's relatively slow rise to power compared with the Post WWII wave of Asian economic growth. Infrastructure and Education are necessary, but over investment in either tends to create stagnation. Much like the balancing act between slowing wealth to accumulate and allowing an Aristocracy to form and block progress.

PS: There is plenty of talk about the value of rich people investing in the next waves of technology. However, Moving into the realm of 8+ figure incomes only a tiny fraction of that spending ends up on the type of mass producible goods that lead to economic growth, instead buying things like gardens or Yachts that quickly lose value.
If realtime messaging is a new and cool thing, what were chat rooms back in the day? not realtime? Am I missing something? I don't remember needing reloading those pages...

All that aside, this is amazing.
Fexl update
3 of the Top 6 Selling Apple connected Devices are made by French startups
Conceptually that makes sense, but having to explicitly check the type of the return value every time is just hideous.
So. Write your templates in your server-side templating language. That way you can serve full html for initial page loads and compiled-to-javascript versions to allow Ajax updates.

Something like this: https://github.com/comolongo/Yz-Javascript-Django-Template-C...
does it work in email clients?
Ask WTF: Learning The Business
Or [Xamarin](http://xamarin.com/) for C#'ers.

Note to pg: support subset of markdown for HN v2?
The binary ?: operator is great for providing a fallback for NULL pointers, especially in Objective-C where nil is everywhere. Kind of like || in JavaScript.
XML isn't a hipster technology though! How can I be a good hacker if I can't be a hipster too?
Literary Agent Attacked By Rejected Writer Who Stalked Her Online
Ok that makes sense, but isn't that just change for the sake of it. Again, I question if there is a clearly superior alternative that they are deliberately avoiding.
Intel had the power to ask for that in the negotiations and did not. Deciding to still ship the product in these conditions is therefore purely an Intel decision.
Quite simply, bloat. It took up massively more drive space than XP and was slower at many things.
Good pick up, fixed that error now. Thanks for the link too!
That was my submission, not the author's words.
How can they give up on $100M or so, who can justify that. I mean from a biz perspective they don't have any reason to give that money up, and it is not something new, they had a hard time giving bumpers to people when there was that whole fiasco with the death grip as well.
I disagree. Java tried to make you handle the error (checked exceptions) and all that happened was people were irritated by it and caught and ignored them. I think at some point you have to expect the programmer to take some initiative in dealing with errors.
Old story posted several times.
Hacker news vs reddit for product launches
There is a substantial difference: the $7,250 from the state doesn't come out of thin air, it comes out of the pockets of the Michigan taxpayers. The $8,400 per year for college comes out of the "Kalamazoo Promise" donation, not out of taxpayers' pockets.

I am not aware of any state that has been able to convince taxpayers to fund the additional four years[1]. The "Kalamazoo Promise" sidesteps that issue via private funding[2].

[1] States typically (heavily) subsidize college tuition for in-state students.

[2] The "Kalamazoo Promise" implicitly relies on Michigan state college tuition subsidies to achieve their tuition payment promise. https://www.kalamazoopromise.com/ParticipatingCollegesUniver...
iStreamPlanet Selects CloudSigma for Video Streaming and Transcoding Services
17 dimes, 21 nickels, and no decisions.
errno is generally defined to be a macro like: (errno_location()), at least when you use the -pthread option with gcc.

The odd constructoin (the function returning an int which is dereferenced) allows the errno macro to work as an "lvalue", i.e. that you can still say "errno = 0" to clear its value.
Regarding "Just like many graphics chips, this processor does some black magic to boost performance and Intel doesn't want to give any clues to competitors..."

One reason it's common for GPU makers to be secretive is that there is a very big risk that GPUs and their drivers violate patents, and the makers of these products want to make it as difficult as possible to ascertain whether patents are being violated. They won't even broach the topic because that would draw them in to willful infringement.

So a proprietary OS maker like Microsoft can conclude a deal with IMGTek and give them all the secrecy they want, and Linux is left out.

Apparently even Intel can't get IMGTek to open up. Intel probably doesn't want to complicate their negotiating position with IMGTek by saying anything about whether Intel's GPUs might be sufficiently power-efficient to go into mobile parts. There is a lot of money, and a lot of product viability at stake. Intel GPUs have open source drivers.
> The only way to make that happen is to coerce people to stop at a level of particular of consumption, and that is something I want no part of.

What a non sequitur.

Suppose I draw the line of what is necessary very low: we should not turn bleeding people away from the emergency room; we should not literally allow people to starve in the streets without providing limited quantities of inferior food.

Providing these things in no way requires "coercing" everyone to settle for the emergency room and foodstamps.

Now suppose you draw the line higher. For a really communist example, suppose everyone may receive an apartment and a food stipend in return for a modest amount of work. This also does not require coercing everyone not to get more.

Because you can just make more money yourself, and trade it for the extra stuff that isn't being provided to you.

The place where 'coercion' enters in is taxes, which are a legitimate part of the US Constitution and have been collected for eons, even if you think they are immoral out of some Randian horror of Stalinism.
It would be nice to add a layer on top of this that did partial page updates, managed the json views and the history push-state too.

It might be possible to have code where you just transparently wrote normal server-side views and the framework intelligently decided whether to render on the server or client and handled all the plumbing for you.
A lot of those used a periodically refreshing frame or something similar.
HP's Meg Witman: We Have to Ultimately Offer a Smartphone
Hate getting feedback via emails for designs?
"Your browser appears to be out of date. We highly recommend you upgrade to avoid problems while you use our site."

Then it won't go to the page. I know I'm one of the few stuck with a browser version at work I have no control over, but come on.
My HTC thunderbolt blows dick. I've had dumb phones that were more functional half the time...
That is extremely clever, this just goes to show that if you know how something works inside and out you can come up with clever hacks.
So let me get this straight. You lost your account password, your email password, and your security questions and somehow Apple is at fault for making it easy to add gift cards to your account?
Rolio is an RSS reader for humans
I don't necessarily think they intend "realtime messaging" to be the focus here. We've had obvious IM for years and it didn't exactly lull as far as I know. Definitely cool that someone hacked around to learn the details about some bit of tech to make it do something it wasn't built for. I applaud this attitude.

That said, it seems that since the "digital revolution" we go through these re-inventions of basic ideas and tools quite frequently. We've had "email" since the time multiple people could use a computer; recently, I commented on HN about how someone reinvented server log analysis tools to find click fraud (they were outsourcing analytics and apparently were unaware that web server logs ever existed.)
Autoresponder Sequence
Wow! yet another HN meetup in Japan. It would be great if there is a meetup in Hokkaido where I currently live in.
Sad. Since I'm thinking that nuclear energy is the future.
I wrote the first (only?) GIF decoder for the Commodore 64 back in the day, including displaying animated frames. There was no 'live' delivery of images back then though; you had to download them in-full over FTP or a proprietary file transfer protocol before you started parsing. I suspect the encoding was too slow on most computers at the time to stream the file as it was encoded anyway. But yeah, the basic capability was present back then.

Once the WWW kicked off and GIFs started being served, and especially once cgi scripts started being written, someone could have had this idea and the software and hardware probably could have handled it. So we could have been doing this in the late 90's. I wish I had thought of it...
He Was Cheating On Her
India is hardly Sweden. But if it were, then there is no reason it could not apply Sweden's policies with the same success that Sweden has had. (While I don't think anyone thinks Sweden is perfect, it seems hard to dispute that most Swedes are doing better than most Indians.)
hacking at its finest. while real life use cases are debatable the implementation is very, very cool.
Fc*king paywalls. This is such an amazing article, if only they could not have paywalls for research articles. Its as if the licenses will make enough money to fund the research, stupidity I say.
It would be much cooler if you were to send the video stream to the gif instead of the booring old messages. Very cool though. Just think if something like this with video was invented back in the days of IE6 , it would have been the skype of its day.
The compiler output looks roughly like this:

var Jasinja = {
"filters": {
"attr": function(obj, name) { return obj[name]; }
},
"tests": {
"lower": function(val) { return val.toLowerCase() == val; }
},
"templates": {
"test": {
"macros": {},
"blocks": {},
"render": function(ctx, tmpl) {
return "a";
}
}
}
};

So you can easily add some filters by setting Jasinja.filters['myfilter'] to a function.
Chat rooms 10 years ago weren't using web standards like HTML, GIF and Javascript. They were writing either in Java or in Flash.

However MSIE6 also supports XmlHttpRequest (though an Active-X Control), which you can also use for real-time communication. Just setup a XmlHttpRequest and let the request idle on the server-side until new data become available.
And here is where US citizens can go to file an anti-trust complaint: http://www.justice.gov/atr/contact/newcase.html
Combine this with a client side JavaScript based OCR implementation, and you could even send TEXT in real-time.

Imagine the possibilities !!11!1