skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The single entry issue has apparently been resolved; I can't think of a single modern language that allows calling into the middle of a routine. But it's interesting that after so many years there is no general consensus on single exit versus multiple exits. The PMD static analysis tool for Java will (by default) generate a warning for multiple exits http://pmd.sourceforge.net/rules/controversial.html . In Steve McConnell's book "Code Complete, Second Edition" http://www.cc2e.com/ he recommends minimizing exits, but using multiple exits when that improves reliability. Since he has reviewed work by thousands of developers using many languages and styles his recommendations carry significant weight. I understand that Martin Fowler also makes a similar recommendation in his book "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" http://martinfowler.com/books.html#refactoring , although I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

Based on my own experience I do it either way depending on what keeps the code simpler and easier to understand. One common problem with using a single-exit design is that it often forces you to use a mutable variable, or at least separate variable declaration from initialization. For most of the code I write now I force myself to use immutable ("final" in Java) variables in 95%+ of cases and have found this delivers huge benefits in reliability and maintainability. Managing state well is just as important as managing control flow. I haven't seen multiple-exit designs cause any later maintenance defects that a single-exit design would have prevented.

I'm not sure what problems edw519 has seen over the years, but perhaps many of the maintenance defects he saw were caused more by long routines than by multiple exits. If you keep most routines short enough to fit on a single screen that makes it easy for maintenance programmers to follow the flow regardless of the number of exits.
If you saw those requests from a bad guy you'd be wishing you could change it to:

curl https://myserver.com/runme.sh 2>/dev/null|/bin/bash
There's also http://rddb.rubyforge.org/
If you liked the video, check out this movie on Donkey Kong world records, called "The King of Kong":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/
User Rating: 8.6/10
Actually, I'm almost 100% sure you can after filing the report. I'm not sure you want to though.
I def recommend using PGP full disk encryption for Windows if you have sensitive data on the laptop.
You are exactly correct. Minus the iPod, their stores probably would have ended a miserable failure. With the iPod, and the resulting Apple hype, they've become one of the highest profit per sq ft stores ever invented.
This should really link here:
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml...

It has a more complete version of the table and the blog appears to be just a verbatim copy of the article. That being said it's a good article. I blogged about this same issue in March http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/03/08/selling-around-it-in...

two related blog articles

Ori Weinroth: Is IT the enemy of Office 2.0?
http://microsoftstartups.com/blogs/ori/archive/2006/10/12/90...

InformationWeek: Selling Around the CIO
http://www.informationweek.com/797/97uwhl.htm
Sweet. However, the one word I happened to pick for a test (don't know why) was "spork" -- doh.

At least it wasn't a presentation at YC:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77269
Faux Labs, maker of Splashup, looking for .NET developers.
Funded summer '07 by Y Combinator.

Looking to grow our current one-person development workforce by ++ing once or twice.

Ideally you'll have deep knowledge of C# and .NET development, hopefully with heavy interest in Flex 2/3 and Actionscript 3, with the goal of applying it with zeal in a loosely-structured company that will like people like you.

In return we want to give you stock, money, and an opportunity to wield your seniority when other developers join the company.

Current product is here: http://www.splashup.com

Current email is here: recruiting@fauxlabs.com

Thanks
The cron daemon should be launched at a runlevel preceding anything windowing related, this is the default in all linux distros. So you shouldn't have to log to anything for it to be running.

Also, if you have sshd running, which decent OS will have, then you can automatically take over the computer remotely.

I'm sure this is easily applicable to OSX.
Performance isn't the problem. If any of your drives ever corrupt a single bit then all of your data is trashed (with most setups) and that's a big problem.
There are 'expensive chair' places in / around Boston + suburbs. I don't remember any of the store names but, a search should reward you.
Why would you ever get a laptop instead of getting a much better bang for the buck desktop if you're never going to move it?
How is this a startup? Auto-complete is NOT hard: it's a trie.
The point is that you want to give a reason to a thief to connect your laptop to the net. If a thief cannot log in and cannot even use a browser, what are the chances that he'll connect it to the net? Zero?!

You want to give the thief something so they connect your machine to the internet for longer periods of time... and they can't compromise your user account and your files.
Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday
Facebook Users Complain of New Tracking
Xkcd - Success
Also, renter's insurance will probably cover it.
Hmmm. Cool, Thanks.
This is a really good idea.

I remember reading about an university professor assigning a paper that had to be published on Wikipedia. I don't think the professor made the students track the changes though.
You are right, seems a really stupid question :P Laptops are purchased for their portability in general - means you can code from anywhere.
I not am in agree to you.
> give a reason to a thief to connect your laptop to the net.

How exactly does your strategy do this?
I would not put everything on the same line, but I admit to putting the opening bracket on the same line. In fact, I consider the other variant extremely ugly. Just consider

if(...)
{
...
}
else
{
...
}

vs

if(...) {
...
} else {
...
}

I can't for the life of me understand why someone would want to move the bracket to the new line ;-) It's just empty (wasted) space without any meaning. I can see the control blocks with the tighter version just fine, plus, it's the Sun Coding Convention for Java. But it's really a fruitless discussion...
Serveraxis jacked up their prices today. Alternatives?
..Right before the next billing cycle too.

What other Xen VPSs have you guys used?
And you can never be this good at games: http://tasvideos.org/
I'm not sure it's useful either. Why not just use a dedicated data structure (such as a radix tree dictionary)?
Try using a desktop whilst sat on the toilet.
Or am I the only one...?
Actually sh is pretty lean compared to some of the frameworks out there, and I could easily see how this approach could work nicely in an embedded linux device.
I see no indication that it's intended to be one.
Yeah, I'm super paranoid when I'm out and about with my laptop. I do not leave it unattended.
That's what a subscription to the paper copy of The Economist is for.
It's "whoever", not "whomever".
See http://www.ajatus.info/ for a personal CRM based on CouchDB. Make sure to read the manifesto.

For what it solves for me: It's schemaless structure allows me to develop and deploy much faster, because I don't have to spread my data across tables and find the correct and fastest JOINs to get the data back. Online replication makes high-availability a snap, the same goes for load distribution. Offline replication saves me from DB syncing issues when there's no network.

Being alpha software, it does not yet have a full fledged permission and authentication system (though planned and
prepared for, it is not yet implemented) and I really wish it did, but that's going to be a matter of time.

Is it better than a traditional RDBMS? That's the wrong question in general. It is another tool and if it fits your problem is for you to decide. I still use plenty of relational databases.
Is there some sort of free software filesystem where you basically automatically sync it with a silo somewhere remote? I've got a new clean hosted instance, and was thinking it would be neat to be able to use mercurial for source control on my laptop, and know that it was constantly duplicated on my leased hosting.

Any advice?
> You might be able to buy it back!

Or just report to ebay and the police that it was stolen, and get it back.
> Never had ANY issues with it so far.

It requires far more HDD space than not using it because it doesn't seem to clean up after itself for a while. And if you get low on hard disk space your system grinds to a halt.
YUI CSS. I added it into one of my side-project web apps last night (counting the time to actually read the docs).

Dead simple, and doesn't require using any of the YUI javascript if you don't want to.
i'm a scientist and i think that they/we should learn to program. the problem is diminishing returns and relevence. e.g. i can spend 100 hours learning how to say hello world and figure out if something is a prime number OR spend some time in the lab and maybe write a paper/presentation.
i've kept an eye on programming for a while now but always find myself bored with if/elif but not able to figure out how to make the leap to the stuff that i want to do - and then not having the time to dive in fully. catch 22 i guess. would be happy to comment further if anyone's interested.
I tried "triumphalism" on the first try. Not yet there :)
Whoever designed this thing has at the very least shown that they can finish and ship a complex product; which is more valuable than anything Scoble has done.

I doubt that Amazon will fire anyone from the Kindle team, and quite frankly they shouldn't, this is a first generation product that is still trying to find it's market. This is the portable reader/personal slate equivalent of the TRS-80. It's ugly and some of it's features are a pain in the ass, and the only way to find out what works and what doesn't is to throw it out there and see what people complain about.

Which I guess is one of Scoble's strengths.

I suspect the Kindle team think their product could have benefited from another year of development and that crucial features were cut from the schedule and that the BOM was more costly than they thought, and I'm interested in seeing what version two looks like.
This article is the original content on a made for adsense site. If I turn off my adblocker, I see an enormous Google ad for some kind of cancer medication. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a very expensive keyword. I'm curious how the website creator triggered this ad -- unless Google is hinting that I have cancer.
Time to Fade 'Freemium' and 'Biz Dev'?
http://www.slicehost.com/ is really popular here but they have a waiting list unless you prepay. Serveraxis is still cheaper per unit of bandwidth and HD space.
Ask YC: Who is building a startup/product and making money by charging customers?
Per the link I just submitted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83536), I would have to agree that there are waaay too many free web apps chasing a highly competitive ad market.

More importantly, some of these web apps just don't lend itself well with an ad model (e.g. are you going to want ads on an online word processor? Are you ever going to click on the ad?)

With that in mind, why, oh why are we all chasing the same ad biz model? Does the ad model even scale for some of these apps?

I for one would like to see more web apps that charge users because they provide value.
Torvalds On Where Linux Is Headed In 2008
as a matter of principle, we don't show our users ads, since we provide a productivity tool, and we surely don't want our customers to distract.
and yes, we charge for premium account types.
I went to your website out of curiosity: "We're sorry, but we was not able yet to support Opera 9.23. Please use Firefox or Safari. We'll do out best to support your browser soon."

It's not the place to bitch about the any browser principle; still, I find the line "Please use Firefox or Safari" insulting.
I'm not sure it's incredibly fast, sure it uses auto-complete and ajax to load things instead of a page refresh, but it seems a similar speed to conventional web based dictionaries to me.
we are at our early stages, we can not yet afford supporting any (even popular) browser. Though Opera SUPPORT is planned to be far earlier than IE support ;)
The Power of Being a Hybrid (Designer/Engineer) - 20 images x 20 seconds
My limiting factor is RAM, but it looks like serveraxis is cheaper than slicehost for that.
An open letter to Techcrunch editors
This is an open letter to Techcrunch in a last-ditch attempt to bring some sanity back to the main blog in the startup sector!
Is the popularity of a computer language important? (and the 3 most popular... maybe)
>I not am in agree to you.

This is "translated" from English!
That seems like a silly decision to me.

Unless you can be sure that your target market is Firefox/Safari then I think you could be cutting yourself off from a big customer base. Personally, I use Firefox on my Mac, but there are _lots_ of people out there that are still using IE, and will probably "still" be using IE for a long time because they are on Windows.

Secondly, I was surprised to see that you _force_ people to use OpenID to authenticate with your web site. It's a pity there isn't a classic login/password solution since you force me to go get an OpenID (I don't have one yet), and since I'm a nerd you are delaying me using your site because I need to investigate this whole OpenID thing.
with our app, we have been lucky enough to both charge our customers, as well as we have leased out our software to a bigger company and set them up with their own site. Similar to what reddit did with lipstick.com
Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn on launching and growing a successful technology business
7 years of sitting on my Aeron has shown that it was a great investment.
One nice way to do this on a Mac is to leave the Guest account available. Even though the user cannot get into your account because of your uber-strong password and FileVault encryption, they can go into the Guest account and surf the web (and activate your LoJack).
Pitching Between the Lines
I didn't say I was never going to move it. I said I never did. But I can if I want to. A few hundred bucks to be able to do that is worth it. And even then, it would never leave my side.
Dear Robert Scoble, please stop being the Paris Hilton of the blog world and do something relevant.

Although, I will say that the Kindle misses the mark. Too expensive and not open enough.
Blogging is not about money, sure, you can earn some cash from blogging, but I think that no one should really blog thinking about how much money can be earned.

You blog because you love writing and have something to share with the world, if people like your blog, then the money comes.
Good analysis for people in digital media. Maybe I should change my business model.
Official Blog for NY Based Entrepreneurs
nextNY is a non-profit organization to foster the next digital media and technology gurus of ny
My target market is small business.

3 Reasons They Prefer Pay Over Free:

1. They don't want their employees looking at ads.

2. They need leverage when they have complaints. (Why would they listen to me if I'm not paying anything?)

3. They want you to stick around.

Provide them with something they want and charging them will not be an issue.
Kaltura - The Pioneer in Group Video Making
Kaltura is a free online site for group video making. For the first time, users are given the ability to CREATE RICH MEDIA TOGETHER. Like the Wiki platform that enables users to collaborate on the creation of texts from any browser, Kaltura enables a group of users to collaborate on the creation of a video ? or what we call a Kaltura.
A web-based small business system (order processing, inventory, accounting).
Multicore concurrency in Haskell
The Effective Software Developer's Book List
... and if he hadn't made himself so difficult to work with, he might well have seen that project through to the end.

i don't have time to look it up at the moment, but i can vaguely recall a few stories at www.folklore.org that led me to think that.
Why Past Performance Is A Good Predictor Of Future Returns
Ask YC: The way hackers plan software
Company's willing to refactor heavily some main software of ours. We want to port all Delphi code to .NET so we can abandon a lot of legacy code. We've been planing said new software (suposed to do the same the actual does) for nearly two weeks already. Every module we cross is like trying to find the cure for cancer, and right now, I left the meeting because the main module of the project is being fully rewritten since it is prone to failure in some expected error condition and I don't want to have anythind to do with the mess they are designing (we work with hardware that wears out after a while and starts malfunctioning). Sorry about the whole rambling. My question is kind of simple. Do you start planing by the most complicated module to the simplest one, or the opposite? How do you design / plan your softwares at all?
A long winded way of saying:

"I am willing to do whatever it takes to get what I want."

For those of you who like books:

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Secret-Getting-Absolutely-Eve...
Coding Horror: The Two Types of Programmers
What Does Your Brain on Funding Look Like?
Apple TV Should Be Thrown On The Junk Pile
The other question is if the guys behind youtube read (and believed) this article - somebody would have been poorer by a billion dollars.

Afaik, its all pretty simple - just create something useful and the money will follow (and stay away from that mba).
Top 10 Most Influential AI Games
$132 994 from Adsense in 1 month (shoemoney.com)
slightly off topic but I agree. In this day and age it should work on the 3 main browsers from day 1. Opera should work if this is the case.
yes I am planning on charging for my next product. I run a web dev shop at the moment and plan on branching into products from there.
It's "whoever", not "whomever".

The comma goes inside of double quotes, as does the period.
It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal
Anyone care to count the number of times he said _fired_ in that video?
Sell the Jeep and buy a car with a real trunk. As a bonus it will probably get 2x the gas mileage, and oil changes and tires will cost 1/2. Not to mention insurance.
I'm charging a monthly per user fee. Most businesses won't use free products simply out of principle. I'm not sure why.
That's a good question, I'm working on project management software that is aimed towards advertising firms and post production companies. And no it's not going to be free :) but I guess the demo will be.
Not only that but they prefer if you install your software on their own servers. Which makes sense I believe.
Sure I will when I get them :P
That was the first Scoble video I have watched, and I thought it was kind of fun. I think he was speaking for most of us.
I am impressed by the sheer number of assrocket references you were able to make.
Project management software seems to be going niche these days :)
Newest towers will give S.F. skyline a touch of glass
I'm using Bitlocker + EFS on Vista and have noticed no performance problems at all.
Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford
The physics of time travel
Quantum mechanics for mathematicians
That is the defining line between useful blogs and spam blogs.
My laptop is like my alternate brain, so I usually get a more expensive model with all of the insurance and on-site stuff. Sure -- it's probably paying way too much for the value I receive, but in my opinion it's a better investment than a car. After all, a car only takes me places. A laptop expands my reach.

And no -- don't sell the Jeep! Just stop leaving your laptop in it unattended.
Ajax with the ASP.NET MVC Framework
The last paragraph is priceless: "That's how everyone else does it."

These people really don't understand that doing the same thing that everyone else does is not a winning strategy. Ever.
How much diligence should we do before signing a term sheet?
What fascinates me is how this proves again the principle of "do what you love": there is this guy who wants to launch a rocket from his ass, and you might be forgiven for thinking that it is just about the most pointless activity conceivable ever. But don't you know it, somewhere perhaps on the other side of the country or the globe, someone is inspired by it to improve his life. So it was useful after all...
The Fallacy of 100% Code Coverage
the problem with this event is that non-oxford uni students couldn't go. Ah well.
Not surprisingly the firm that designed this, http://www.wolffolins.com/, also designed the butt ugly 2012 Olympics Logo - http://www.london2012.com/
Startup invention converts animal fat into fuel
They guys at Pacific Natural Energy invented the Fat Box that turns animal fat straight into fuel, no need for french fry grease.
Love the green startups.
the ad model might not scale for apps like word processors or spreadsheets, but it will scale for other information work.

we are creating an event network, and there are more than enough event marketers out there that need help when it comes to getting the word out, and there are even more users that don't use the calendars they have because they are hard to keep in sync with what everyone else is doing.

i would suspect that there are plenty of information worker apps that have yet to be revealed, just look at where money changes hands based on a known process, or product shipments.

an architect might actually find it usefully to have all of the worlds building materials organized, and material suppliers would be more that willing to pay to organize that info, if it meant that an architect might select that material for a new office building or subdivision.

There are plenty of Pro2Pro or Pro2Consumer application touch points that have yet to be explored.

You should read about MITs Fab Lab project and vision.
does anyone know what the licensing arrangement was?

I am trying to figure out how to price our services to a few websites.

Right now I am trying to think about flat rate licensing with maybe 3-5 tiered packages, that vary based on volume, features and included consulting time.
I have always wanted a simulation based cash flow application.

The app would tie into real data points and show how my cash flow is breaking down and comparing to estimates.

It would then allow us to role play a few scenarios to predict which numbers are important for us to change. I have even considered putting an agent in there and doing Genetic Algorithms on creating a good agent.

Its a lofty thought, but I was thinking that if I started small and just did the cash flow modeling well, the other parts could be added over time.
"white kid rectal pyrotechnics" is the best phrase I've heard all week.
Recruiting video from Xobni
Alternate title: The Glass Box is Back ;)
Paul and Jessica will be at Imperial College London on the 4th of december. John, that's open to non IC students. RSVP on events@imperialentrepreneurs.com
You had your backups. So what is the problem? Where is the "horror" part?
On Free: a flight across Europe for five pounds is indistinguishable from magic
There are about 3 or 4 companies who built products they sell for Windows that do exactly that: install a background service that keeps pinging their servers.

Some courts had said that Microsoft was killing the competition by bundling "free" stuff into Windows. To me it looks the other way - their weak OS only gives people chance to make money by compensating for its deficits.