skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ran into a problem at a previous job with the catch-code in the "global" try block in an ASP.Net app, itself throwing an exception. IIS just dies with a 8-digit hex code that according to MSDN means pretty much whatever ("try some or all of these 15 different possible solutions").

It took a few days working the support, and I did get on a conference call with some brilliant people, and they figured it out quickly - using a (forget its name) debugger that talks directly to the CRL (which the one in Visual Studio apparently doesn't).

All this because (I think) something somewhere in that stack decided to "protect" me from the cause of the error.

This is generally my problem with Microsoft. No so much the arbitrary discussion of whether or not it sucks, but the difficulty of getting under its helmet, which tends to make problems much bigger than they ought to be.
And yes, I DO know it's incredibly bad design to put so much code in a global catch-block that it can fail.
Mr O'Leary is an interesting case when it comes to finding what you love. I would argue, from what I've seen his company do, and from interviews with him that what he <i>loves</i> is to be the maverick.
-To play with the EU bureaucrats i Brussels
-Mock Nicolas Sarkozy with adverts
-Get small cities to actually pay Ryanair to get routes to their airports
-Bypass the unions by having cabin crews from Eastern Europe.
I think O'Leary could have done the same with another industry if he wanted to. Doing what you love doesn't necessarily have to mean that you love the trade, but the feeling and excitement you get from doing it.
Well... other problems aside, SV has some things going for it that won't change, like climate and topography, that Detroit will never have.
Looks very cool. However, in the age of cloud computing, if you need to constantly look at "ps aux" on each server you run, you are doing it wrong.
Disable submit buttons after clicking once to prevent accidental double posts or do it with code on the backend either way or maybe both.
Commodore 64 emulator brings retro joy to Symbian S60
It sounds like he just wants to abolish everything. What's the evidence that these are good ideas?
Exactly - even if the tech economy completely disappeared, people would still want to live there.
"Now is precisely the moment to make the change to a low-carbon economy"
Video: Green industrial revolution. Never mind the downturn, a green economic revolution must be launched within months, one of the world's top economists has told New Scientist.
Is Twitter Killing Blogs and Blogging?
SV has some things going for it [...] topography, that Detroit will never have.

SV is a port area located next to a bay. Detroit is a port city located next to a river. How is SV's topography better than Detroit's?
Non linkjacked version:

http://koti.mbnet.fi/haviital/index.shtml?projects_frodo
laptop's keyboard is pretty warm ... could save your cold, dead fingers
Responsible fiscal policy means spending less money. It means eliminating the IRS. It means the elimination of fiat currency. It means not spending money on guns, military bases, and other things that we just don't need.

Ron Paul gets his economic views from the Austrian School of Economics. There are lots of economists who agree with those ideas. Many popular economists agree with his views including Milton Freidman, Peter Schiff, and more... A lot of what Ron Paul believes about economics are well though out ideas presented by other people, they aren't ideas he just "thought up." For example, every fiat currency ever in the history of the world has eventually collapsed. Sure, the US Dollar may prove to be the one that doesn't collapse, but history doesn't seem to indicate that is the case.

Obama may be a shining star. I hope he is. Even if he is, even if Ron Paul was up there, we wouldn't know for sure if it was the President who fixed it or not. Bush did a lot of damage and the greedy bankers he enabled did a lot of damage, I'm not sure even Ron Paul could fix it. It'll take all of us working really hard to fix it.

We are so in debt it's unfathomable. The younger generation is going to have to work really really hard to get us out of this mess. Let's hope Obama can rally the troops!
This is exactly what happened to me. I bought a cheap laptop to ensure my mojo worked in Vista. I made it a dual-boot with fedora to play with linux, and now it's my main rig.

I only really boot the xp machine so the rest of the household can reach a printer, when necessary.
A few other people already mentioned network effects: It's why Ebay rules over auctions. If you're looking to sell something, you want to go to the place that already has the most buyers. If you're looking to buy something, you want to go to the place with the most sellers/selection. It's cyclical - the bigger the network gets, the more people want to and even have to use that network to be a serious player.

One way you could beat Craigslist: Start in one local region and build a hell of a community around it. Maybe have parties or events. Get everyone in the city talking about it, and own that city. Make it so that everyone in that city chooses the new local competitor over Craigslist.

Another: Find one thing Craigslist is doing really poorly, and do that really, really well. Focus only on that and branch out from there.

If you want to fight an empire, you don't march out the same sets of troops as them into the plains to fight. You go find a tiny, isolated, already unhappy part of their empire, and you raise hell there. Build support for the cause. Get more troops, supplies, allies, experience. Realistically speaking, there won't be a "craigslist killer" that comes out of nowhere with better classifieds unless it's backed by someone that already runs things. Someone like Google might be able to do it by making a push on sites that people already use a lot, similar to the way they're pushing Chrome right now. But if you're starting from scratch?

Then think small. What or where is Craigslist failing? Go there. Take over that place. Then branch out.
Stores like Circuit City don't really make much money on electronics (computers, TVs, camcorders, digital cameras). Most of those items have fairly low margins. Most of the high margins are in things like accessories. This is usually reflected in their employee discount policy and also at times like these when stores are closing. The only thing you'll find significant discounts at Circuit City is cables and other accessories, but these are the same items that you can always buy online at low prices.

Also, my feeling is that in a sale like this most of the big ticket items will be purchased at relatively low discounts by people that aren't usually comfortable with buying things online. So to them 5% of a TV at CircuitCity looks like a really good deal even though Amazon sells it for 10% cheaper.
Virtual real estates ... you never know when the boom is going to happen!
I can see the position of Mac as a consumer electronics brand has a lot of synergy with the name mac.tv, and moreover I could imagine some hardcore mac fanatic may buy it just for his love for the platform. Startup.tv has only geeky connotations, and Flex.tv doesn't evoke any responses (flex being little known beyond the developers world - Adobe, take notice).
Hmmm ... may be Adobe should buy flex.tv, Apple should buy mac.tv and YC should buy startup.tv to do a video version of HN.
I didn't write a lot of the libraries. Maybe 50% of the code is mine, most the algorithm implementations, the rest of the stuff is picked up from previous projects or existing utilities that lisp programmer's have written.

The reason one uses lisp is because the team is small. Very small like 1 person. So sharing isn't really that much of a concern.

I agree that it makes it harder to start. Which means that very few people stick with it.
Well... While coding mostly in Python, I am still a programmer. I am only using a more refined tool more adequate to my needs than C would ever be.

Obviously, I disagree with the "C programmers have to be masochists" view of the article. C is powerful and can be cruel and unforgiving, but once you get it (and it's not that hard), you can appreciate how powerful it really is.

As for the pain of going from interactive-prompt-nirvana to edit-compile-link-run-wonderwtf-reboot hell, it took me years to learn C++ because I was introduced to OOP in Smalltalk and then wrote some stuff in Actor. C++ most definitely, did not look like a step in the right direction. In fact, it wasn't.

For years, I used the following tagline in my BBS messages:

"Hello World in Assembly: 30 bytes, Hello World in Turbo Pascal: 10K, Hello World in C: STACK-OVERFLOW: SYSTEM HALTED"
Ah, except... there is no such thing as an "average case" or or a "typical" case in computational workloads. If you want to quote a number, the best-case is the only one that has any meaning whatsoever. The next best thing is to "cluster" or qualify the number (ie, "for memory-bound applications") but even that tends to be nearly impossible to generalize.

The only case that actually matters is _your_ case and the only way you'll know is to benchmark it yourself.
Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'
Seth's Blog: The goals you never hear about
Ask HN: Payment options for online services?
Hi,

I'm launching an online service soon and was wondering what is the best way to collect small payments ($1-5) from users in the US?
Premium SMS is often used in Europe, but my understanding is that this is not so popular in the US - is this correct?
Anyway, what is the option that makes it the easiest for users to pay me?
Thanks!
couple years ago netbook was luxury

asus makes luxury into commodity

the price of netbooks should drop (esp over last 2 yrs) but didn't, suggesting there's a lot of demands
IMO, knowing C is absolutely essential for a true understanding of how modern computer systems work. It should not be avoided, even if it is "hard".
"You want a team of people who aren’t bringing you every little thing, but if you successfully build this team, your reward is that what is ends up in your office is uniquely kooky."
Silicon Valley is its own culture. If it were to actually die, it would be gone forever - there would be no replacement. There are enough people dedicated to the preservation of this culture to ensure that it will survive, even in the face of such dire economic straits (which will get worse). Every other place on Earth is, well, culturally unable to replicate the advantages of Silicon Valley. You can't buy it, you can't build it... Attempts to do so look like faux Roman statues in the backyard of a McMansion.

That being said, I really wish I could build a time machine and transport myself to Silicon Valley circa 1999. Felt as though it was the center of the universe, a place where you could become a mogul overnight, and where anything was just a Series A away from becoming reality. Yeah, it was totally ridiculous, but I find ridiculous things to be quite enjoyable.
10-12 years ago I was hearing people say that exact same thing about asm when I was first learning C. I wonder what they will be saying in 10 years is essential?
I went to Circuit City the first day of the supposed fire sale and I was thoroughly disappointed. I've never EVER been a fan of Circuit City, their prices were never competitive and the stores have not been good experiences for me. So I was going purely to hunt deals.

The only deals I found were on burnable media, and on a crappy movie which I love dearly. I stood in their SINGLE checkout line as it was nearly thirty feet long, waited fifteen seconds, then deposited said merchandise on the nearest shelf and departed the store.

This is why the company is failing. They suck at life.
US 2008 nuclear energy production tops 800 billion kilowatt-hours
Microsoft has been successful largely because the cost of their product was hidden in the cost of the computers on which it is pre-installed. $200 total price point does not leave them much room to hide. Because consumers have been trained not to think of the operating system as a separate cost, but just part of the computer, I don't think you can convince them now that the operating system, by itself, is worth as much of the rest of the computer combined.

This is not quite as true for businesses, but even there the cost of site licenses for the Microsoft product stack needs to be questioned for employees whose needs are web browsing, email, and basic document editing. And, of course, the article shows that newer companies are coming to that conclusion already.
Uhm. Maybe 25 years ago. That was when you had to actually check the output from time to time because the compilers were so bugged and often terrible at their job. 10 years ago you needed to learn C to understand how Perl worked.

In 10 years "they" will still be saying learn C because C is nothing but a glorified assembly language with some syntactic sugar. C shows you how your computer works. There is very little to gain by using assembly over C (with the special exception of specialized instruction sets, like SIMD).

Until the computer changes so fundamentally that a simple imperative language no longer matches the hardware, or some other simple imperative language does a better job (unlikely), learning C will always be good advice.
Anecdote: when I started uni in 1999, and went to the freshers fair, there were four major high street banks with stalls offering credit cards. The average credit card debt is now £2,000. I've never had a personal credit card, only a business card, but the complete lack of education/awareness in the UK over credit card debt is worrying.
i know this has been discussed ad nauseam, but when will "they" learn that forcing a user to create an account is a bad idea? i was intrigued until i tried to ask chacha a question ("will chacha survive the recession?") and it bogarted my answer with a sign-up screen. that's the first and likely the last time i'll make an attempt to try the service.
Apple’s Years With and Without Steve Jobs - Interactive Feature
The 4 Types Of Exits: Secondary
Our full prototype is earning revenue. Javascript is extending into desktop applications through Webkit and I'd say HTML/CSS/Javascript is the core GUI skillset for anyone who wants to work on next-gen cross platform applications.

If you're working for other people be a specialist. If you're working for yourself you have to be a generalist. Very difficult to effectively manage and coordinate something you don't really understand.
> There's no rules on data though so people get screwed that way.

To the max.

€7/MB when roaming is pretty average in western Europe. I havn't seen a pan-Europe flat-rate dataplan. That's not even the worst part, it that there's a minimum 50kb charge pr. connection. Ick.

Interesting thing is, they route the data via my "home" network, instead of just dumping it on the nearest internet connection.
TechJaws Logo Contest | TechJaws
Following the article to the youtube video and then following the link there leads you to this site: http://robot.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/news/2009/01/23/1567.ht...

Translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...

The opening paragraph includes the following, "announced it had jointly developed a remote-controlled robot that can be secured in the new phone"

Seems to be entirely remote controlled.
MS-DOS 5 Promo Video
Oops. Guess I should've made that clearer.
We are developing a web portal for the med students at our school (tmedweb.tulane.edu).

Firefox: 48.8%
IE: 32%
Safari: 16.3%
Chrome: 3%

IE would loose even more if the library wasn't full of MSFT Dells.

My wife uses Ubuntu on her laptop. It was quite painful to get started with it two years ago, but she had already been using OpenOffice (which was her choice, because she refused to buy MSFT Office and was prepared to use a text editor until I showed her OpenOffice). That would have been a huge leap, except she was already using Firefox. Which just wasn't all that big a leap.

We installed Ubuntu dual-boot because she could never get on the wireless network at work and I'd always come in, get on the network with my laptop, and then go online and look for how to fix her Windows problem. So she wanted to give that a try. And she didn't want to get on the internet. She really just wanted to send stuff to the printer.

She hasn't booted into windows in over a year. Totally her choice.

Now her girlfriends at work (~20 employees, 90% women, everyone uses their own laptop) are asking her questions about why her windows wobble and how it is she can fetch documents from home, and how to they get their wireless networks to pop out of a widget at the top.

Our kids have had more exposure to Linux than to Windows. My wife also uses her laptop to set up a movie for them to watch (the Smurfs and Bob the Builder are their favorites), when we drive to my parents' house (8 hours away). They play Sesame Street Workshop, Starfall, whatever.

Time. It takes time. Measured on a generational scale.
Only $26 billion of stimulus bill's $355B would be spent this fiscal year
Am I the only person who thinks the author really missed a headline opportunity by not using "iFart author thinks that Facebook policy stinks"?
Built-in Google Chat on my G1 has completely replaced text messaging for anyone else with a G1 (or anyone who is sitting in front of gmail).

Not only is it free (with unlimited data plans), it's better than SMS because it adds presence, away messages, and the ability to instantly take a PC-based IM chat on the road, or vice versa.
It sounds like [Ron Paul] just wants to abolish everything.

Do you mean the IRS is the same thing as everything?
www.metroflog.com/santi_lv
You betcha they'll start blocking you. There are plenty of services that offer a legit API interface to SMS though. You'll get a faster response time anyway.
It's often a better design to keep the parts that are largely set/need to be efficient in a "hard" language like C (or something like Common Lisp with type annotations), but keep the parts that need to be flexible in a "soft" language like an embedded Lua, Python, or Scheme, etc. You don't have to use just one language.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlternateHardAndSoftLayers
RIM(Blackberry) CEO: "buggy smartphone software is the new reality"
On the Internet, a university without a campus
Risk compensation is also called "moral hazzard": http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Mirrlees.html

Mirrlees also did highly theoretical work on another incentive problem: “moral hazard.” As is well known to those who study insurance, insurance coverage gives the beneficiary an incentive to take more risks than would be optimal. This is called “moral hazard.” Mirrlees’s insight, based on a complex mathematical model, is that the problem can be solved with an optimal combination of carrots and sticks. Insurance payments are essentially a carrot. But “sticks” could be designed also, so that an insured person who takes risks pays a penalty for doing so. With this combination of carrots and sticks, the insured person acts almost as if he is uninsured, and the insurer acts almost as if he were the insured.
Response to: Problems with Lisp
http://www.searchyc.com delivers:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432284
This is very similar to the (eventual) grand vision I had for ezLearnz, a project I worked on for a while. What is interesting is the revenue model: $15-$50 for enrollment to a given course, and $10 to $100 for the exams. (I assume this is on a per-course basis.) With my project, we were considering a $9.99/month tuition, regardless of the number of courses one takes or how long it takes to finish a given course.
Cutts discussed Knol just yesterday on his blog. He points out that the project is far exceeding Wikipedia's growth during the same age of the project.

This is a long haul project for Google. Their strategy has long been use Search as the base, see what users are searching for or going to, and begin building your own competitor to that market. They did it with Google News, and other projects. Knol is their entry into the competition with Wikipedia, something which isn't going to be won in the short term. So this is a project, like Google Reader, they're investing in and letting run.
Hackers breach Heartland Payment credit card system
"10-12 years ago I was hearing people say that exact same thing about asm when I was first learning C"

Learning assembly does teach you quite a bit. I think that at some point every programmer would benefit greatly from knowing (an) assembly language and C.

Is it absolutely essential? (Depending on what exactly you are doing) No. Is it very useful? Definitely.

For that matter, an understanding of digital electronics, sufficient to understand how the CPU , ALU, memory caches etc work, can be very useful as well.

My 2 cents.
I thought this would be about...

SNMP management is a damn fine tool for network computers, especially when it lets you reboot them remotely. I patch a game of Network Doom with sprites of the users' faces and get the kills piped to the SNMP reboot command...

I ring the users and tell them, to give them as much of a chance as you can get using the server copy of the game which only lets you pick up a handgun with one round of ammo. Still, a beancounter can get good at pistol shooting when two hours of spreadsheet work is at stake and you have to win a game in order to ungrey the SAVE button (another little patch).

By Friday, the results are in. Surprisingly enough, the NCs weren't a hit with the users and were replaced with PCs after only four days. Oh, and 327 kills...

http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard_1998-1b.html
Seriously, who gives a fuck?
Employees cannot choose the software they use. Much of it is unfamiliar to new staff. Anyone here ever used SAP? Oracle Applications?

Yes, there's the blue W and the green X. But for some reason Microsoft decided to take all the familiarity away from people in Office 2007. They have replaced all the menus, dialog boxes, names, icons, etc, with something completely new and unfamiliar.

No, not just different menu items or toolbox buttons, they have replaced these familiar controls themselves with a huge splurge of alien somethings that cover about a quarter of the screen with even more bloat than there was before.

In the next few years, companies will have to answer one question: Does it cost more to retrain our staff in Office 2007 and pay for the new version, or does it cost more to train them in OpenOffice and pay nothing for the software? Some may even ask whether something like google apps isn't sufficient.

The real issues are not familiarity or cost. The real issue is file formats and macros and glue code that companies rely on, and the fact that Microsoft shops have Microsoft trained and Microsoft loyal sysadmins who are anything but convinced of Linux superiority. They're not going to install Linux for you upon request. That's fantasy land.
I got Guitar Hero 3 (Legends of Rock) Wii for cheaper than I could anywhere else... 45. Most places go no lower than 55.

Other than that, nothing to see there, move along now.
Because its fucking hard to spell.
But they really break up the monotony of the bullets-for-each-thought Powerpoint presentations!

Or should I say:

* 3D charts
* good
* break up monotony of
* bulleted lists
* boring presentations
* unreadable
* less questions about data
* less uncomfortable moments
Singapore Debates Legalizing Payment to Voluntary Organ Donors
Larry Wall's epic Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting attempts to survey the scripting landscape and identify commonalities.

I would hardly call it an "epic". To the contrary people I spoke with who saw his state of the onion keynote that year said that unlike his prior presentations (which were often entertaining) that one was a disappointment especially considering the state of Perl at the time.
Oh, I read the article on my BlackBerry so I didn't see the pic. Thanks for pointing this out.
The highest point in the entire state of Michigan is lower than the hills west of SV.
Flurry signs up hundreds of iPhone and Android developers for its analytics tool