skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The example code is not using a new exception, it's handling the callee's, the same way that your code does not use a new return code but relies on whatever the callee returns and does not include the code for "callSql".

I assume you are right about C++ exceptions (the little C++ I do doesn't use them). Modern managed languages incorporate the stack trace in the exception (including Java).

I'm not sure how you propose to have both return code and error message in C++, return a struct with an error and a message? This also does not answer my points 2 and 3 about handling errors occurring at different layers and compile-time checking.
I guess technically True==1 and False==0 in python and it is considered "pythonic" but personally I think it's "ugly".
>I used Google's new Go language for two days.

I don't mean to be rude but, please don't write about about things you've only used for two days. This is a massive problem for all new things. Initial impressions mean a lot, and you honestly can't grok a new language in 2 days to effectively blog about it. If everyone here tried to go out and criticize Haskell after two days of usage, I don't even think they'd understand enough to criticize it beyond "it's too complex".

Lots of the decisions made for the Go language aren't for the hobbyist. It's targeting building large, powerful, heavily code-reviewed systems because C++ with an enforced style guide is a nuisance. Let's look at an example decision: the "use requirement" is actually godsend for removing unused dependencies. Go compiles as fast as it does partially because of its powerful dependency resolution. Rob Pike has a story about an engineer accidentally compiling a library 80,000 times in the same C++ build without knowing for years. The author of this blog got mad because it was inconvenient to debug with print. Now if only he hadn't been using the language for two days, he'd know that the Go compilers don't have to, but implement a builtin called print and println specifically for debugging. You don't need to import fmt to debug with print/println.
I think many web products (and others) can learn a lot from this! What do you think?
While I'm not an Apple zealot by any stretch of the imagination, the biggest complaint is the lack of additional browsers.

You can get Chrome on iOS now (thankfully).

I just wish that Samsung or someone else would up their game hardware wise. I love Android, but I do not like any of the hardware choices.
This looks like a great way to build iOS games in HTML5.

If he could to get this to work as an Android project it could be used to build games for OUYA.
Are you sure about that? A simple google search for "samsung sells most phones" says otherwise.
I haven't done any formal benchmarks. A quick test with 1000 sprites runs with 60fps on the iPhone4s.

Also try loading this in Mobile Safari and compare it to the video: http://www.phoboslab.org/crap/bezier/
Here is a way to bribe journals, by purchasing large quantities of "reprints":

http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2012/07/03/richard-smith-medical-jo...

With so much money at stake, all this should surprise no one. And anyone with an ounce of brains should be very cautious about drugs.
I disagree, I think filter/length models the meaning better.
Yup, can't agree more. This article is a joke.
If you want to know why a car running android is a bad idea, take a ride in an 8 year old BMW/Mercedes with (back then) state of the art navigation system. While the car itself is probably still nice, the "smart" part just feels horribly outdated - because it is. The length of these two innovation cycles differs by a factor 3-5. For the same reason, a "smart" fridge running Android isn't, either.

If, on the other hand, you propose introducing a reasonably standardised protocol for interfacing your phone with the in-car audio, video and input systems (plus readouts from the internal sensors), I definitively agree. This allows you to update the "smart" bit every two years on contract, but you can use the controller and screen (with longer innovation cycles, even though they are still below the typical ttl of cars) integrated in the car.
"Pharma companies develop molecules that never even make it to the animal testing stage."

In the US the vast majority of pre-clinical work is done by universities. Pharma companies usually license the patent from the universities once it is ready for clinical testing, under the Bayh-Dohl act:
He mentions that you can get additional browsers but that you can't set them as the default when you click on a link.

I really wish iOS would get Android Intents.
Braun vs. Apple: Is copying designs theft or innovation?
Peer review is done for free by the community in any case, so this would not be a major problem. Most suggestions for a post-journal system I have seen so far are about setting up electronic journals with editorial boards that send out submissions for peer review as usual.

Moving away from journals seems to be largerly an issue of missing consensus and inertia. Also, where you publish is important for hiring committees, existing journals have a lot of credibility, newly sprung up ones not so much.
Moving more people into an _early 1900s_ city wasn't the best option, unless you wanted a non-farm job. And then the GI bill (given predominately to white veterans over black veterans) jumpstarted white flight and the beginnings of suburbia.
That's a great essay, and one I'm glad to have in my arsenal — I mean, glad to be able to recommend to others.
This project is very much iOS specific. It's written in Objective-C and uses JavaScriptCore (Apple's JS engine). So porting this over to Android would be a lot of work.

But have a look at CocoonJS; it's cross platform (but closed source): http://ludei.com/tech/cocoonjs
Maybe they got the idea from Google Code, which helpfully shows me a QR code for the tarball I'm about to download, for all those times I'm using the browser on my desktop and the IDE on my phone.
For a day of work, do you charge your hourly rate * 6 or something? I'd like to try it out with a new client but am not sure about the rate. Thanks
> Oh, and before calling this a conspiracy theory, take a look at the sister site of Pi Foundation. That’s right: instead of promiting free, open and royalty-free standards like WebM, the Foundation sells licenses for two proprietary and obsolete video encoders.

The Pi has picked up a pretty big following in the HTPC crowd. When you're using it as a HTPC, you need GPU acceleration to play any sort of HD content. Without these licensees, it's far less useful as a HTPC. Apparently "promoting" WebM means "make every reencode all their content into an open format".
I take issue with the anonymous "tip" format. I would always prefer a short, personal email -- to me, this is much more meaningful and reflective of why I do open-source. I also think that offering monetary tips encourages tip grubbing. I've already seen a bit of this from big names in the community and, for me, its a big turnoff. I give my code away, that's what OSS is all about. Thank me by writing an email, or better yet, contributing some patches!
Automatic Patch-Based Exploit Generation is Possible
Indian here,

One of my uncle is a nephrologist in the US. He recently came to India for a vacation and my talks with him were all about these issues. About how doctors work, their protocols, procedures and ethics etc and things like that. From what I could decipher doctors are not super humans how have miracle cures for every disease to exist on earth. What doctors are generally taught in medical school is to first learn about healthy bodies so that they can later to distinguish between a healthy and unhealthy body. Then they are taught pathology, stuff like dissecting dead humans and learning their internals. And then there are things like anatomy, metabolism, physiology etc. After all this they then go on to diseases and their cures.

In an ordinary medical school course. With all that heavy syllabus the actual disease-cure part is taught in a no more procedure than if-then-else decision tree scenarios. Its something like this, Imagine you are taught 100 different symptoms for fever. Combination of all those 100 scenarios in 'OR' and 'AND' conditions lead to various conditions of fever with various diseases. That's what we are talking about here. Imagine you having to remember all this, will it really possible? May be for an year or two but with time that sort of knowledge erodes quickly.

On top of this they are taught nothing much about the root cause of these diseases. Their cures. Are they addressing the root causes or just managing symptoms.

When they go on to their MD. Then comes little special training and details with investigation, practice and learning about a specific organ/part of the body. This is still understandable.

But in general most doctors work like a software cache. The diseases and cures they pull out are the ones cached with the recent patients they are treating.

So yes in general most doctors really work only like decision trees at the most abstract levels. Most don't have people skills, most just don't listen to patients completely. Its all working at the most abstract levels with guess work at times.

The break through stuff happening in medical science is not your physicians clinic. Its in things like vaccinations, surgical sciences, diagnosis and stuff like that.
Total clickbait with little substance, lets focus on something:

"So if Apple can’t keep one of its earliest employees happy...", that entire sentiment is based around the idea that Apple shouldn't do anything that's going to upset what's a very small (but vocal) group of users. That's stupid. That's some of the stupidest business advice ever.

Also, the falling on face test is a relatively good idea but it'll still hurt no matter the size unless it weighs sod all.
The hacker way extends beyond computing.
Also confusing because of his work with CBT and other talking therapies, which help reduce the use of medication.
Like the author says, I would argue that it depends on the experience. The first thing to determine is: what is the core experience you're going after. For example, if you're an e-commerce website and your visitors expect to be able to find things, follow things, and then buy things, a mobile website that leaves out key functionality is frustrating.

There have been many a time that I've searched desperately for the "desktop version" of the site because I need to do something that the mobile version doesn't allow me to.
I strongly doubt you would have gotten screenshots from the scammer but from another hapless victim who bought the laptop in a seemingly legit way. (fence) The very fact the scammer are already fine sending emails means they really don't need another laptop, they just want money. I can imagine in a lot of cases the laptop doesn't even get into the scammer's hands.
I guess at least the weaknees.com ecommerce website is hosted on a different site, so their blog getting a bit of traffic hasn't taken it down...
This guy sounds like my high school prom date...
Yea that annoyed me too. What if I can't afford and iPhone with Retina display?
This article is interesting. Have you seen the new MySpace interface? What are your thoughts? http://mashable.com/2012/09/24/new-myspace-video/
Wouldn't that make you think that we should revisit the sidebar to find a more effective way to navigate rather than simply telling the user that you shouldn't have any options?
How to generate UML Diagrams from Java code in Eclipse
UML diagrams compliment inline documentation ( javadoc ) and allow to better explore / understand a design. Moreover, you can print and bring them to table to discuss a design. In this post, we will install and use a plugin for Eclipse to produce jUnit lib class diagrams. Then, we will be able to generate UML diagrams by simply dragging and dropping classes into the editor. We can further manipulate the diagram by selecting which references, operations or attributes to display.
The Chasm Has Evolved - Geoffrey Moore's Talk at MaRS
Show HN: A Genetic approach to CSS compression
Thanks for the great response so far!

I also wrote about some implementation details of the Canvas API and the challenges with OpenGL in my blog:

http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2012/09/ejecta
This article is a fucking joke
"Shouldn't other failed drugs count, though?"

Yes and no. Part of the issue is the pharma companies are only interested in testing new drugs that are under patent. Whereas these are by far the riskiest drugs to develop since much less is known about them. In contrast there are hundreds of other chemicals that have the potential to cure everything from cancer to PTSD, and they would cost only a few million dollars to turn into commercial drugs, but it's never done because there would be no profit in it. So yes failed drugs make sense to count from the viewpoint of the balance sheet of a pharma company, but it's not a very good answer to the question about how much it actually costs to develop an individual drug.
There's an old service station near me. It was once a fuel station, but was eventually turned into just-a-repair-garage. Transmissions, mainly. But they didn't remove the tanks when the locale switched gears. That garage is now defunct; there are potential entrepreneurs who want to use the space, but the cost of removing the old tanks and cleaning up the site for alternate zoning (one of the people looking at it was thinking about opening a cafe) is going to be prohibitively expensive.
> 'working' doesn't mean it can't work better.

And while modern phones have become rather good at zooming on the content (which does not mean the text gets big enough, far from it, I regularly encounter blogs I can't read without using readability other other equivalent tools, because the font is too small even zoomed in) scrolling is still rather fiddly, especially one-handed: it's not rare that the scrolling "starts wrong" and I end up decentered from the column I want to read, and now I have to fiddle with positioning and zooming to get back to reading.
Guy Kawasaki, Evangelist by profession. Nuff said.
If everything is important, then nothing is
I think you're being dramatic. Posting a too long comment in trying to make a point?
Sometimes what's best for society isn't what's best for the individual. Society benefits from having sadists removed from the equation. It doesn't matter much, from a societal standpoint, whether they're rehabilitated or incarcerated, as long as the sadistic entity is removed from the equation.

If there were no examples of sadists who could not be rehabilitated, your point would be obviously true. Unfortunately, there are many examples of sadists who resist rehabilitation. These people exist now, whether or not they could have been rehabilitated earlier by love and forgiveness. Even if you were strictly correct, you'd still have a bootstrapping problem, in the form of what to do with these people today.

I contend that there will always be people who become sadistic outside the reach of whatever institutions you attempt to create to shower love and forgiveness on them, and I further contend that many people who, once they become sadistic, cannot return to a state of empathy. For the first point, I only have to point to hunger. Food and shelter are obviously tractable problems, yet we continue to have a problem with hunger and homelessness. To think we can eradicate more complex social problems than those is really quite naive.

As to the second point I am open to scientific evidence to the contrary, but please bear in mind that from society's standpoint, a recidivism rate greater than zero may still be less preferable than lifelong incarceration for sadistic criminals. Most people would agree that once you've taken a few lives for the fun of it, it's not worth the risk to another member of society to "find out" whether you've been successfully rehabilitated.
Fix the machine, not the person
Docked and Bubble modes FTW Cool new rendering modes for tablets/smartphones
Yep. If someone is reading this comment, please install at least a simple caching system for wordpress. Hypercache is the simplest and does the job quite well with absolutely no hassle.

It will save you at least 90% of the 30-or-so DB queries per page.
How I invented Facebook. And completely failed to exploit it.
yes, but, in the language of conditional probability:

P(spammer|non-tor) is quite low (there are not that much spammers), while P(spammer|tor) is almost one (almost everyone coming from Tor is a spammer).
Bugger. There goes my pet project. Nice one phoboslab!
Kickstarter now identifies intellectual property disputes
Top Data Visualization Tools
couldn't disagree more with this article
Tesla just pushed OTA updates to its in-car software yesterday.
This is not a constructive comment.
It's hard to actually "give up citizenship". A British friend (who travels lots), said that if you are ever required to renounce British citizenship, you go down the local embassy/consulate, tell the offical that you are renouncing British citizenship, and hand over your passport. They do some writing, give you back your passport and a letter saying "$NAME has renounced their British citizenship at $DATE..." and wish you well.

You now have the proper paperwork, and your passport!

Some countries essentially don't let you give up your citizenship. If you were a citizen of Iran and fled and got citizenship of another country, the Iranian government still views you as an Iranian citizen, and go back to Iran, then they might feel free to arrest you.
This argument might as well be, "When you implement things poorly, they will be poorly implemented."
I'm going to take exception to your 2nd point.

To start, regardless of whether the experiment pays off long-term, that does not negate the fact that it does require extra design and development time. There is much more code to handle, regardless of whether you use a framework or build it bespoke. Additionally, whether you design for mobile first, or last, there is more design time required. Period.

Second, both the author and OP have lumped 100% of all websites together, and generalized the argument. Sure, responsive may be worthwhile in some cases (as the post misses), but there are many cases where it isn't worthwhile.

My argument for using responsive is that yes, it's worthwhile, if and when the return is there. As a freelancer, this means I must be getting paid for the extra work. As a company owner, this means that we must see value from the resource spend, which could be in the form of better UX, more eyeballs, or more profits.
Data Breach Reveals 100k IEEE.org Members' Plaintext Passwords
I still get something like 100 visitors a day to an old blog post [1] I did on wordpress performance, and emails most weeks asking for additional information. It's slightly depressing that wordpress itself doesn't ship with a decent basic caching function out of the box

1 - http://www.ewanleith.com/blog/900/10-million-hits-a-day-with...
A token paycheck of $120k per year?! Nice to have!
It seems like a good idea, but I suspect hosting companies could either setup fake twitter accounts or get their employees to spam positive reviews. Where as normally they have the dirty practice of logging into a review site and generating plant reviews (something that shows intent), this way they can just claim "Hey, we were just posting positive reviews to all 10,0000 of our own twitter accounts, we had no idea they were being used on Review Signal!".

They say "All messages from people financially or otherwise connected to the company will not be counted in the reviews.", but how do they really know?
How To Mow Your Lawn With Solar Power
How to Relate Your Technology to Business Values
If the openness is increasing the number of citations of the articles in open journals it will affect the impact factors of the other journals and may force them to switch to open access later. I am really interested in the results as I have strictly now ideas in which way it will go. Are the non open high impact journals going to stay at the top?
> Wouldn't that make you think that we should revisit the sidebar

No.

The sidebar works and is effective when there's significant horizontal space, such as on a desktop screen with ample horizontal space. It just does not work when horizontal space is a premium, as is the case on smartphones (which generally barely fit a standard typographic line length at readable size in portrait)
There are several. Cheeaun's is fantastic: http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/landing/
It's still not open to all countries yet, but it should be available in Israel now. :)
This is an interesting thought - first because it's totally crazy but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea. I wonder what the fuel cost of making this trip would be, compared to the cost of a flight? I guess you could build highs speed rail at the same time.
“Hopeless” Foxconn Workers Are Making the iPhone 5
17 is OLD. This is a high school kid, and maybe he's immature, but he crossed a very serious line. The line between prank phone calls, and the types of coercive intimidation tactics he employed shouldn't be glossed over.

One other comment about this anecdote: I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Revealing your true identity online, on the internet can be very, VERY risky. Downright dangerous. The fact that Google+ and Facebook encourage this as a normal, casual practice is irresponsible.

The internet is high-powered super-charged tachnology, which needs to be respected as such. It's not like putting your name in the phone book. VIPs who retain attourneys, hire personal assistants, and hire other staff (possibly even professional security) have adequate countermeasure to cope with online stalkers. Average individuals do not.

Consider that in ye olden days, predating even dial-up, there were notorious problems with local TV stations who would hire pretty women as their meteorologists. These were professional broadcasters that had problems with public exposure.

Craigslist has a firm understanding of some of the cold realities of the internet, in particular, prostitution, and they advise their users with very little whitewash. Twitter, Facebook and Google+ should do the same.
> Not to defend or in any way condone the actions of the scammers (which I certainly don't), but I wonder how many of the counter-scammers do so out of high-mindedness, and how many are just looking for a chance to humiliate a relatively easy target - particularly after seeing some of the photos in the 'Trophy Room'.

I honestly had the same thought: is it right to make fun of people who are clearly poor, less fortunate and were born into that?

Then again, read some of those interviews with nigeria scammers and others and see for yourself what they are saying about "dumb", "greedy" Westerners and how high and mighty they feel about being able to do what they are doing. That really put it into perspective for me and then it is not making unfair fun of unfortunate people but making fun of shady, slimy assholes and trying to rid the world of some evil - and that is a good thing.
"Say your words" - Globally Scalable Social News System
Apple’s .mobi insanity