skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good. And I apologize if that came off as disparaging, my fantasy football team is getting crushed today and I'm grumpy :)

I just want to see people make lots of money making awesome things, so make sure to factor that in before it's too late.
By that logic everybody would still be using Yahoo search
I find it insane that the interest rates are so high (capped at 8.5%) for a loan that is next to impossible to avoid repaying, and is government guaranteed.
It's not "tempting to ignore errors". You're the programmer, if you want to ignore it, do so. I don't know why you'd want to ignore the returned value and possible error on a GET request - given that 1) it can fail for so many reasons, and 2) the suggestion that you might be "GETTING" something. Ignoring the error of a print statement is more acceptable since it's unlikely to occur and there's rarely a lot you can do about it anyway.

Error handling is explicit, like the quote you quoted said it should be. If you ignore the returns (either explicitly or implicitly) you pay the price in debugging.

"leaving me confused as to which error happens when" Panics happen when something very bad happens. You shouldn't be accessing off the end of an array, it signals that you've probably programmed it incorrectly, rather than it being a problem with your input (~ish). Same with divide-by-zero and type assertions. However, they provide another control path that in a limited number of situations, can give elegant results.
I've come to realize that writing good code also involves good storytelling. There may be a thousand ways to get the job done, but the better coder will arrange and cluster things in ways that "flow" for the next human reader. Good coders also keep the next reader in mind, and don't use fancy-obscure ways to accomplish what could be done with more common techniques.
When in a hole, stop digging.

Always good advice.

When the speed limit went up on
four stretches of road between Nephi and
Cedar City, accidents went down by 20 percent,
according to the three-year study by UDOT.

http://fox13now.com/2012/09/19/freeway-speed-limit-may-incre...
You mean, it will be an effective tool of systemic oppression that is continually improved, despite being a glaring reminder of the contradictions of the government's propaganda and will only be dismantled once the patron state of which your country is a client begins to collapse?
True. And the original commentator is plain wrong. There is certainly value in a working solution to gesture recognition problem.
Americans are getting too much sleep
I did, thanks for posting.
Who wants to start a Gen Y-focused employment discrimination firm with me?
The more I think about it. The more I think I'll just get the Mims collection.
There is a lot of fluff in this article, but the idea he leads up to and presents at the end is pretty fascinating.

I have tried to understand a large Linux kernel patch series by starting at the beginning and trying to go through the commits. I didn't make it far. Maybe I would have, if I had had a good tool to help (besides just git).
Your statement seems self-contradictory. Should we strive to learn new things, or should we not jump on the next bandwagon? Are you saying that we should try new things but not really try them very hard, or what?

There is such a thing as progress, and in my opinion the way you get it is by spending lots of time trying new things and seeing which ones work. So I'm in favor of "leaving a language that was working well for them just because of some hype."
I've seen a lot GAs tuning parmeters for other algorithms. Someone already mentioned it here: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4561167.

But I agree, that they are not a silver bullet for any kind of problem and for most problems there is almost always a way smarter and more efficient algorithm.
I did not hold this presentation to show that GAs were the best solution for any problem. My intention was to teach sth. that I myself liked in university. Especially I thought that the way we were taught GAs in university was too complicated and complex.
Prohibitive is too strong I think. The patch to 1.4 discussed in a blog post by Beazley came with a 2x slow down, but that was an initial patch without much work on optimization. Besides that, I think 2x slowdown isn't that bad considering the language is not used for its raw efficiency anyway.
Thanks for being a good sport. The HN crowd can be quite rough. Don't take it personally. I'd take feedback from non-technical users more seriously as they don't have a tendency toward know-it-all-ism and contrarianism like the HN crowd does (myself included I suppose).

To refute the parent, the problem exists. I have a keyword sans playback buttons. I've often wanted a quick way to pause music. Even on my Mac where there are playback buttons, sometimes ill be listening to Spotify, try to pause the song using the keyboard, then iTunes tries to open instead. I'm not sure if your app addresses that problem but it'd be cool if it did.
But the statement is not applicable to PayPal nor many of Thiel's "Web 2.0" investments. Yet it is used in the column as if it were. NB Section III. Do you understand?
>Don't end up like Brian, get yourself some marketable skills other than running around a warehouse to pick orders. Or you might very well find yourself fired just when you need your job the most - for instance when your wife has just delivered a baby (which with any normal company run by people with some heart would result in paid leave).

Or move to a better country, one where that's legally guaranteed. Seriously, it's stories like this that keep me out of the US.
Why not post three tips on the page to offer some examples of what entrepreneurs will get?
Nice work...but this is not a perfect database of countries.

* Territories such as Réunion are listed as countries

* Countries that ceased to exist are not listed (Yugoslavia, Soviet Union) although the world's most recent new country (South Sudan) is listed.

* Kosovo is listed, although not recognised by all the world. Transnistria is not listed, even though it has de facto sovereignty.

* Total land area is a disputable amount in several circumstances.

There are several more such examples I could list.

Yes I'm being pedantic. But I have a special interest in this area, and I'm aware of just how hard it is. People are born in one country (Soviet Union) and die in another (Ukraine), even though they never moved from their home city (Odessa).
I suppose it's all a matter of taste. The error handling design decision is one thing I really like about Go. I write high reliability embedded software and "throw/catch" just doesn't cut it for me since it obscures possible error conditions thrown from subroutines. I want to have to explicitly deal with those errors whenever they might occur and error returns are a good way of doing that.

For every language feature someone likes there's someone else who hates it, and vice-versa.
Early Firefox felt really responsive and it was more functional and safe than IE.

What happened? I still use it, but I definitely don't feel the same about it.
"in that case you might as well have must-be-caught exceptions"

Errors aren't the same things as exceptions.
I suppose, but at the end of the day it's still 17-18 year old kids getting handed thousands of dollars to make a big (and most likely extremely uninformed) career choice decision. I think there needs to be a lot more education (irony) targeted at how to make a fiscally responsible degree choice when entering college.

All of these kids majoring in creative writing and then protesting wall street because they can't get a job to pay off their loans should garner no sympathy as they made a bad fiscal decision that got them into that mess in the first place. But since they were just kids when making the decision it's hard to fault them entirely...I think the system itself needs to be doing a better job telling people they're being dummies and helping them correct their course before becoming a debt statistic.
Because all of the rest of the ecosystem uses a different way, and switching between two different styles isn't fun.
I have several courses. We're heavy on the hardware side of things; but, I teach one course that is basically a K&R course for all practical purposes. Thanks for posting.
Maybe this is a dumb quesion , but I don't get how you would write code without thinking about your data structures?

Most of the code I write is manipulating a data structure in some way, I have no idea how I would even know where to begin with at least some idea about which structure I should be using.
The author of the blog post is overlooking a major feature here. Go does multiple return types, so you can do things like this:
i, err := getValue()
however if you want to ignore a return variable or in this case the returned error you use an underscore like this (same as in haskell):
i, _ := getValue()

This is Go's mechanism for handling (or ignoring errors) which imho is really nice because you don't have to learn anything extra, like throwing/catching error mechanisms
It's a new programming language rather than a tool to generate C code that ties in with the CPython API.
The Death of Ego for iOS
What would forking the language do to solve that? What changes would you actually make? Would it just be a matter of giving it a new name so that people didn't expect idiomatic Go things to work with it?

Are we talking about just forking its standard library and not actually changing the language?
This would be a great theory, if the facts in anyway supported it. The counter-examples in the data are not hidden, however: US government @ $1T per year in defecit. Fed in third phase of QE (money printing). These policies are meant to prevent debt write-offs (reductions in par value). And are a giant subsidy to lenders at the expense of debtors and taxpayers. Business risk currently has only orthogonal corrleation with debt pricing (or, by extension, pricing any part of the capital structure...including equity). See for example:

http://dealbreaker.com/2012/08/lets-spot-a-high-yield-bubble...

tl;dr http://cdn.dealbreaker.com/uploads/2012/08/MattKing2-620x439...
How is this the top voted comment?

Anyway, working on software that takes abstract input to a camera as an interface is awesome, no matter what particular bits of functionality they start off with.
I agree - life is becoming more transparent, but this is corresponding with a collective growth in our emotional intelligence, so hopefully as we share more we're also more empathetic to the human condition. We none of us are perfect. The article raises important points about the legacy of our digital footprint…but I'm not sure how self-censored I'd like to see the online world. If we were all too scared of the ramifications from sharing our thoughts and experiences online I'd miss the rich tapestry of debate and opinions!
We are in a mobile bubble
Seriously. The bash-everything mentality is bad - for the Hacker News community, but also for the startup community as a whole. No one is going to create anything new if they're afraid to try.

Beyond that, I don't come to this site to read people insult everyone else. Can you imagine going to a developer meetup where everyone just walks around and criticizes everyone else? But somehow people think that sort of thing is okay online.

As far as I'm concerned, people like this represent the worst form of hackers, and should not be welcome on this site.
Thanks so much. We think it addresses that issue. Try it and let us know.
That's the same way the Cray-1 does it. It uses 3 passes of newton's method (and I think is accurate to 28 bits for the first time through).
It's pretty risky and grim to try to predict where war will break out but my money would be on Pakistan/India. Extra nasty because both are atomic powers.
$300k and a $1m signing bonus would be more reasonable for this exceptionally narrow and valuable skill set. As you correctly point out, $85k is not in any way congruent with "aggressive recruitment". In the Bay area, it doesn't even qualify as a mediocre salary for recent grads with no specialization.
This should have been done before actually releasing the product to M of people.
By default it creates a time based view to see which persons edited which files and a overview over the files at that point of time.
It does not put the emphasis on the code changes but on the dynamics of the participants.
To generate an overview over the paticipants commits the generated logs were parsed. Sourcecode in this file: https://github.com/educs/Documentation/blob/master/gource/ma...

TL,DR: No code viewing tool.
Jey. Please let us know config of your system & version of flutter u are using. Thanks for the feedback.
I could see a run of the mill CRUD app PM making $85k, but someone who is being actively sought after by the most profitable company in the world because of demonstrated domain knowledge in an area where they have a clear need and who is expected to relocate to SV? $85k is laughable for that. Laughable!
Very true, and thanks for not taking offense at my comment.

Did you ever see the movie Legally Blonde? There was a funny scene where Elle was tired of being seen as a dumb blonde, so she bought a MacBook of whatever vintage they made back then and brought it to class. (She was wearing her Playboy bunny outfit when she bought the machine, but that's another story!)

She took the Mac to class and there was one great shot of the whole class from the front of the classroom - so what you saw was the top lids of everyone's laptops. They were all solid black - presumably ThinkPads but they hid the logos - and she had the one lone Apple logo. Guess she didn't fit in after all!

How times change... :-)
Will Apple be the first to break $1 trillion?
Thx man. No issues. My redskins are sucking as usual, so understand it. :-)
What a super dad!
Psh, obviously trigger_doomsday_device will only respond to an http POST.

Once again the president has been saved, thanks to HTTP Pedantry.
The whole Foxconn world reminds me of history lessons at primary school where we learned about the industrial revolution in the UK. Back then whole families lived and worked at a factory, the children too, before the onset of child labor laws.

Then one after the other factories became more machine centric and less labor intensive before they started moving east and the west became richer and less dependent on creating physical products.

Now we have become acclimatized to cheap production in the east at a time of great segregation between the rich and the poor. And protests and riots will have to continue until we realize that our luxury lives are still dependent on 10, 100, maybe 1000 other people who have to live in poverty.
Great idea for a post and great idea for a project. I have thought about something similar. Encouraging people to read code, by making it easier to do, is a worthy objective.
Apple bought three mapping companies: C3 Technologies, Poly9, and PlaceBase before this. I wonder what the heck happened on the data side.
I cant follow. Throw/Catch is as powerful as a error return value but it does not let you ignore errors without writing any code.
I'm curious to know what your business model is. Is the market for a utility, even on both platforms, really large enough to interest YC, or are you planning to fry bigger fish?
The only similarity is the balloon and maybe the setup. The article linked is more about the train than the balloon.

The child's connection to the train and bringing it to life through editing.
Scuffgate
It's a really interesting idea. That said, talk is cheap, and the github repo seems to be nothing more than a 100b README at the moment. I'm looking forward to seeing a HN submission in a few months with a release.
Also use much much much longer keys than even a dedicated ASIC manufactured with a futuristic 3 nm technology could crack. Since these spooks are storing the data forever (e.g. at the Stellar Wind facility in Utah), then in a scary future where the USA no longer represents freedom but is instead arresting citizens for political reasons, they could use faster future hardware (even quantum if that's possible) to crack your current data and get you for 30-year-past misdemeanors. I wish the founding fathers were still around to talk some sense into the current "big surveillance" faux-patriots.
Yes, I've worked in a few pretty bad places in the past (though not this bad).

Problem is that the main incentives for an employer to provide decent working conditions are so that A) They don't leave for a competitor and B) Make people happy and more productive.

A doesn't really apply, because if these people had options they wouldn't working there. Also it costs so little to train up a new hire and there is a constant pool of unskilled , unemployed people to pick from.

B doesn't really apply either, because these type of jobs suck almost by definition, there is also unlikely to be much difference between a more and less productive employee due to the repetitive nature of the job.

These people are also very unlikely to sue you for wrongful termination or whatever, so it means that it is worth it to get the small productivity increase you might get from being unreasonable.
Even if it was ethically okay, it's more likely to get you rejected for the job than hired, regardless of the lie. Why? HR isn't doing the checking. I did background checks for years at a major company. Our clients were both big and miniscule - you'd be surprised at how many very small business would be able to afford a reasonably priced non-subscription background screening service. If the degree was off by some years, the client wouldn't hire the person because they lied on their resume. It doesn't matter what the lie is, just that they lied, end of story.

Don't lie on resumes. It's not HR that'll be catching them. It'll be a company that's been instructed to just report back to the client with whether things were true or not. And we caught a lot of both innocent mistakes (off by 1 year or so), as well as outright fabrications.

There's no trying to explain that stuff to HR when you're simply sent a rejection letter by a third-party.

Also, some of our clients were required by the government to account for where they've been for the past 5 or 10 years, and requiring paperwork proving where they were (even if unemployed) for any gaps in those employment. People were embarrassed to admit when they were unemployed and so left it unexplained... again costing them a job. Yes the paperwork explained to them beforehand they had to explain it.

And yes, we'd catch the "small stuff" - calling up a training school to verify someone had gone, and then double-checking government databases to verify the school itself was legitimate, running names and credit checks... and telling people "we don't want to hear your explanation for why your resume is inconsistent. Send us paperwork proving it, and then we'll find out on our own if that paperwork is valid" is all a liar would hear.

I do have to admit catching people in innocent mistakes was heartbreaking, and I'm glad I got out before they started offering the social network checking services. But to say someone's so experienced with lying they think they won't get caught... just means they haven't applied with a company that has a good service provider in the background.
Isn't it easy enough to just delete columns you don't need after importing one of the public sources?
That's not the same as handling an error in a central spot automatically.
> Verbose and repetitive error handling

If you were to handle the same error cases in Python that you gave examples for in Go, it would probably be even more verbose with the try/catch wrapped around.

> Errors passing silently – ticking time bombs to go

Are you kidding? Unless exceptions are documented well, which they rarely are, this is a much greater problem when using exceptions.
Ask HN: What happens to your domain if the registrar goes out of business?
No issues. Thx for it feedback.

Who know what will be there in 5 years? We just want solve for hardware that is already ubiquitous. If better cameras become widespread then we will switch to that hardware.

Yes, doing this on webcam is incredibly difficult but if we can do it then it can really improve HCI. We just thought its worth trying.

Thanks. Appreciate your candid feedback.
Tuiter Fighter
The error handling style is certainly different - but it's not so bad. It's a matter of style and getting used to stuff.

Maybe a better error handling mechanism is needed - but I'd prefer if it's not exception handling. Perhaps lisp style error handling? What ever that is - for I'm not familiar with it - but I keep hearing lispers brag about how awesome it is!
Very much agree that winning on value rather than price is critical, especially for B2B companies working to establish themselves in the market. Focusing on price is fraught with peril and impossible to maintain for long. (Note that cost vs. price is a key distinction here - selling a product that reduces cost for the customer is great, but that's very different from using price to differentiate against competitors.) Nailing the solution to a tough customer problem is a much better formula for sustained growth... not to mention higher margins.

The allusion to the whole product is a big deal, too, because this is how that value is perceived your customers. Getting the core functionality right is a big piece of the puzzle, but I have often been amazed how much importance customers place on other things like a less painful sales process, service, support, training, etc. Building a coherent package across several of these dimensions can be a great way to differentiate in a crowded market and avoid the slippery slope of discounts.
The data structure you choose will have a profound impact on the code you write, so choose wisely.
Misleading. These don't seem to even exist yet.
> If you were to handle the same error cases in Python that you gave examples for in Go, it would probably be even more verbose with the try/catch wrapped around.
Not sure what you are talking about:

try:

datastore.Get(c, key, record);

viewTemplate.Execute(w, record);

catch e:

appError(e);
That's been fixed now, thanks for the heads up.
A similar technique that's among my favorites: Write the inner loop first.

Useful in graphics work, perhaps not so much if writing a Web server or database engine.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-co...

Think exceptions, but instead of blowing away the stack on the way up to your exception handler, it gives you the option of resuming execution in some way where you left off. It also lets you encapsulate error handling better.
PG: I believe the startup school page has a bug
http://startupschool.org/
says "The application deadline has now passed. We'll respond to those who applied on September 30. "

I believe you meant September 20.
Flutter is something similar to the gesture pendant used on the Aware Home project at Georgia Tech [1]. The gesture pendant was engineered for those that lacked vision & mobility. One could use the gesture pendant to open blinds, turn on/off the tv, answer the phone, etc. If you're partially blind, it's probably hard to locate the tv remote to turn on the tv, but when you're wearing the pendant, you can do it anywhere. If you're elderly, it may be difficult to open the blinds. The pendant was interesting, but requires special hardware. Flutter can run on anyone's computer via the webcam.

[1] http://smartech.gatech.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1853/29822...
Reinventing society in the wake of big data
Great video and great father. I have an honest question though, what's the regulation for this kind of things? For example, what would have happened if the train in free fall had hurt someone?
It's interesting to know investors are still interested. The risk for them has shifted from "will this be successful", which they have experience in predicting, to "will this get shut down again", which they presumably don't.
Cool, but not cool enough to switch to iTunes for music playback. A Songbird plug-in and I would be using this daily, and I'd pay for it.