skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most bothersome thing is that at least one other language has a working version of what Go tried to go for: Erlang.

Erlang has exceptions (as go does, but does not pretend it doesn't have them), but they're generally "faults": developers don't normally throw or catch exceptions within a process, they're left to kill the process and signal to the supervision tree.

Instead, erlang functions return ad-hoc tagged unions, tagged with the atoms `ok` for success or `error` for failure, and this union is pattern-matched on. The pattern match can be a case for handling the error:

case might_break(Something) of
{ok, Value} -> handle_correct_case(Value);
{error, Reason} -> handle_error(Reason)
end

but if a developer doesn't want to handle the error and wants things to blow up in case of error, it's as simple as:

{ok, Value} = might_break(something)

If `might_break` returns an error-tagged tuple, this will throw a badmatch.
A perfect day for democracy
Perhaps it's fitting that the website is tiamat.tsotech.com and the offending animation appears to be in a file called tiamat.js:

"In Babylonian myths, Tiamat is a huge, bloated female dragon that personifies the saltwater ocean, the water of Chaos."

Source: http://www.pantheon.org/articles/t/tiamat.html
The kind of email talked about by the OP, will not be for everybody -- it will be for those who get a lot of email and who have a large amount of social capital.

And frankly if you want to contact them, this kind of velvet rope is precisely what they want.
they even adress you as Herr Magister, not only Dr. :D
It doesn't matter if somebody knows Turbo Pascal 4.0 or Modula 2 if you can't use it.

We are repeating history because the old ways were forgotten or replaced.
"For that matter, there are going to be many places in many projects where nil pointers are going to be exceptional enough that it is OK to shut down when they occur. There's not always a need to check and handle at points where will be a rare event and not such a big deal when it does happen."

It seems strange to me to create a modern statically typed language that by design doesn't prevent the most common type error (null passed to a function that doesn't handle null), especially when it's so easy to add null safety to the type system.

In C/C++/Java, I need to document in relatively verbose English if a public function/method I write won't handle null. References/pointers that by default aren't nullable are safer, but they also optimize (less documentation and perhaps less machine code) for the common case of functions that don't want to have to deal with null.

I agree that in many many circumstances, nulls are exceptional cases, and I think this is a good thing. At least in the C++ code I write, nulls are rare, so I handle nulls (perhaps by throwing) a small number of places at the borders and then create references from the pointers for internal use. (It's great that null references are undefined behavior in C++.) That way, I get nice stack traces near where unexpected nulls are introduced and I don't have to feel guilty/lazy about not properly handling nulls in my code.

You seem to think non-nullable references force the programmer to use extra checks all over the place. The opposite is true, at least when writing code that someone else might possibly call.
We live in a scary world either way.
I have asked before, but why would you want to live in countries where this train of thought is a possible reality? Although chances are not great 'it will happen to you', anything over 0% is far too great for my taste.
> You don't patent things, you patent methods.

That may be true now. There was a time, not so long ago, that a patent was denied to any idea that had not been reduced to practice, in a working physical embodiment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice

Quote: "In United States patent law, the reduction to practice is a concept meaning the embodiment of the concept of an invention. The date of this embodiment is critical to the determination of priority between inventors in an interference proceeding."

(I hasten to add that the above rule about priority no longer applies. Because of recent changes, the U.S. is changing to a first-to-file system.)

Quote: "A 'working model' is usually a strong evidence to demonstrate actual reduction to practice. Unlike patent models of the 18th and 19th century, a working model is no longer a requirement of the U.S. patent law."

All this has been swept away by changes in the law, and we have the present patent system in which the patent office rubber-stamps virtually anything, and claimants work things out in court.
en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Pionen
Does that project have a bug bubble?
The big question is, how to solve it? How to improve the communication between programmers and lawyers? How to lessen the burden on the people that provide patents? How to involve the vote of the general public? Can there be a class of 'defending' patents instead of 'attacking' ones with which you can sue? Can there be specific IT judge educations?
That's basically what Zajdel describes in his dystopian vision: the basic "red" points that you get allow for a basic existence (e.g. food and shelter) without performing any work at all. So one might say it isn't really a wage.
Upon visiting that blog.crypto.cat URL, Chrome tells me "Incorrect certificate for host / Error 150 (net::ERR_SSL_PINNED_KEY_NOT_IN_CERT_CHAIN): The server's certificate appears to be a forgery."

The main crypto.cat page loads fine over HTTPS (certificate has sha1 thumbprint ‎d1aa1c1037202e359f224e407d7f84a0e8a94dd7 which i see is advertised on the erroring blog.crypto.cat page).

Why has the certificate changed? Why did the CA signing the SSL certificate change? Is there any forwarding message signed by the original certificate?
Nonsense. Go's cgo facility is a fantastically productive way to wrap C code.

I've written a lot wrappers using Python's C API and a bunch wrappers using cgo and cgo is light years ahead.

For a real-world comparison see this Sqlite wrapper for Go at http://code.google.com/p/gosqlite/source/browse/sqlite/sqlit... and compare it to a similar wrapper for Python at http://code.google.com/p/pysqlite/source/browse/#hg%2Fsrc. The Go wrapper isn't a "magic demo", it's code that works reliably in production.

The bottom line is that cgo lets me quickly write production quality C wrappers for Go using Go itself.
Isn't it a little early to discount 3D printers? I remember in the late 70s, early 80s, dot matrix printers. Low-res, > 1 minute per page, monochrome, fanfold paper with feeds you have to tear off. Then it went laser, 300dpi, 600dpi, 1200dpi, 2400dpi, ink-jet, ink-jet color, prices went from $4k for laser printer to $80 for a scanner+fax+copy+color printer with auto-feed for scanning. Put photo paper in it and they'll print better than magazine quality color at 5760x1440dpi. Photo galleries now display ink-jet printed photos.

We're in that 1980s level of 3D printer. Give it 10-20 years and who knows. Maybe they'll be able to spew out 15 steel nails per minute or print 28 different materials. In fact given they can currently print organs maybe they'll be able to print wood. I have no idea where it will go but it certainly seems silly to think that today's 3D printers is the end of 3D printer tech. That's like my high school teachers who used to tell me printers would never replace typewriters because typing looked good and 9pixel low-res dot matrix printers looked like ass.
Actually they're not agents, but officers. IIRC the agents are the informants who are not working for the agency.
There’s a local business revolution on the horizon, and we can make it happen
I think you're going a little over the top there.
Got a chance to try out the pro. Was really excited since I've litterly been waiting for something like this for 10 years starting with a tc1000 and 3 more tablets since then. I have many iPads but they are really just toys. unfortunately the pro needs just a bit more to get to the dream ms had since their first tablets. It needs more buttons, a back button and a page up/down scroll buttons on the side like a lot of tablets have. what's with the single front button? This isn't an iPad,even android has 4. The stand needs maybe 3 levels of adjustment. Size and weight of the rt are almost perfect maybe haswell can get us there. And one more thing, enough with this 16:9 aspect ratio, we aren't going to be watching tv shows on this thing (not that much anyways) give us 4:3 or 5:4 back so we can get some work done.
Umm, backup and format you computer?
How men and women organize their (online) social networks differently
EightSpots - Personalised bar and restaurant recommendations
Why school sucks
> Can anyone suggest other such theorems, in any areas of mathematics?

I vote for the conjecture of the infinity of Mersenne primes, the "Lenstra–Pomerance–Wagstaff conjecture":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_conjectures#Lenstra.E2...

The topic is open, we're nowhere near outlining a proof, but their infinity seems likely.
This was a fantastic and creative hack. Would traceroute again. A++++++
Landing on the Moon without a Rocket
Dear Editors: Reflections from a scientist-reporter
I feel that Assange dodged a few very serious questions posed by Maher.

What if Wikileaks does leak out documents that could escalate a conflict?
sure, I refer to computer science btw.

Detrimental effects that I could witness:
- Prof. are secured in their large offices, hard to get in touch with. This leads to useless work or idle students, waiting for feedback, or picking up the wrong problem, solution or conference.
- Full dependency on the Prof (e.g. for funding, to get a position, ...)
- Students don't voice their concern much, as they need Prof. support.

Don't get me wrong, overall, the system works, and the same observations could be made elsewhere as well (e.g. France, US, ...). Although I'd say the magnitude differs.

With colleagues, we used to make this joke that a 'deadline' in the US would always be slowly pushed back until the project can be stamped as a success (best for everyone, motivates teams, etc...) whereas in Germany the deadline is so deadly that the team hits the wall and leaves blood strains on it, until the next deadline comes up :)
Haha! You are so right (unfortunately).
There are very few problem domains where "do something, even if it's the wrong thing" is better than refusing to run. Perl and PHP have both rightly been criticized for this sort of thinking.

I write automated trading software. If I created a bug, I'd much prefer my program just stop working rather than no-op out a hedging routine or no-op out a regulatory compliance routine. There are also plenty of safety-critical applications where a machine would be perfectly safe if it just stopped working, but would kill someone if it no-opped out a routine. I could see a photo hosting site accidentally giving people without accounts access to everyone's private photos because a filtering routine got no-opped out.

I'll grant you that there are a few small domains where this would be desirable behavior, but I think if it's that much of an advantage, those domains should have domain-specific languages. Skipping method calls on null objects is a terrible feature for a general purpose programming language.
It's hard to distinguish bias from genuine preconceptions based on experience - for that one would need gender neutral data that is impossible to obtain. The reverse kind of gender bias could be found in divorce custody cases for example.

Maybe one could do an experiment in online job marketplaces: change the gender of a large number of work providers and observe how payouts change.

In any case this was a shallow and one-sided article. [But suitable for Sunday morning heated arguments over coffee and
cookies]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.174-1617.2000.t...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230359240457736...
Research and development success can accurately determine quality of teaching. All these are good, but which one is best can be told by course reviews of students. Car race winning doesnt help in this.
So, they're asking for theorems (hence proven) that seem obvious but are hard to prove, and you offer something that is not obvious, and unproven?
I recommend NoScript.
publicity stunt is public.
There's a problem with this idea -- as you decelerate out of orbit, in order to reduce the craft's velocity so the inflated-bag method will work, the craft's angle with respect to the surface naturally changes and becomes nearly vertical. This is unavoidable.

Remember the early Mars missions that used the inflated-bag method? They had to expend a lot of fuel to slow down enough to safely approach the surface, at which point the air-bag method was used (and worked). But this only reduced the amount of fuel required to get to the surface, it didn't significantly change that cost and burden.

Just do some numerical orbital simulations -- see what happens when you slowly reduce the velocity and altitude of a craft orbiting the moon so it is able to graze the surface. See what happens when you impact the surface at shallow angles. Hint: the craft's velocity is still extremely high and the air bags have to absorb too much energy -- they will self-destruct.

In a hypothetical approach to a perfectly smooth plains area (the moon has plenty of those), in which there are no altitude irregularities and the craft can approach at nearly orbital speed and impact the surface at a very shallow angle, the craft would begin to roll along the surface at such a high velocity that the centripetal forces would tear the craft apart.

Speaking as a former NASA Space Shuttle engineer.
I almost wish the author had included this trope too: "If I begin a conversation about sexism I am experiencing, that means that sexism against men must immediately become part of the focus of the conversation".

It's not that those issues are unimportant, but does it not strike you as strange that the very first comment doesn't discuss the content of the article directly, but does make sure to bring up sexism against men? It's not the first time this has happened, either, on HN or elsewhere.

(And, sure, this may be the first time you've brought it up. But just like the other issues she's bringing up, the "what about the men who are discriminated against?" response is a durable and ubiquitous trend. Check any other HN thread that mentions sexism if you don't believe me. It therefore becomes very annoying to people trying to have a conversation about the persistent sexism against women in technology/maths/science spaces.)
No, my main point was that it's not pure bias, there might be real reasons why women get paid less and men are considered bad fathers (personally, i don't agree with both statements, but see the wsj article). I suggest, if we want to get rid of this bias, change the underlying situation that perpetuates it (e.g. not by introducing gender quotas, but by making childraising less time-consuming, or educating men to be better fathers and getting rid of ridiculous stereotypes that are perpetuated in mass culture).
An RSA animation of a talk by Ken Robinson.

AKA: Changing Education Paradigms.

In case this doesn't get much discussion and you're wondering why, many people here on HN will have seen it before. That last substantial discussion was here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1805419

Some previous submissions, most without comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791749

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800876

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1802072

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1805419 <- This has the most comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1858254

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882297

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1886532

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025766

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033198

There are more:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3A%28...
I have a feeling that if you leak-analyze-report (aka, do solid journalism) early and often, that on balance more conflicts are prevented than are caused.
I hate Monsanto as much as everyone else but I agree with them in this case.
If farmers are permitted to replant seeds then how are companies making the seeds supposed to make money ?

I believe GM are a chance to humanity, with the potential to feed more and more people.

But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ?

And as far as I know, these seeds allow farmers to use massive doses of roundup, if this guy used some roundup on his crops it's fair to say he perfectly knows these were gm seeds and that he wasn't allowed to use it for free.

If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it and do like farmers always did, with standard seeds.
it took a minute to start up for me.
The Lenstra–Pomerance–Wagstaff conjecture seems obvious, and it's hard to prove. What did I miss?

Given that there are an infinity of primes, then it seems obvious that an infinite subset will be Mersenne primes. To dispute this, one would need to imagine a mechanism that would prevent an infinite set of primes from possessing an infinite subset of Mersenne primes.

But proving this is much harder than stating it.
Frankly, I think a lot of the people currently working with C/C++ are avoiding Go because of the garbage collector. You can't trust a garbage collector; you don't know when it will run, how long it'll take, or how quickly it will free the memory you used. C/C++ programmers are used to having complete control over all of this. Sure, you could familiarize yourself with the internals of whichever GC you're working with, but at that point you might as well have invested the same amount of time writing the program in a language without a GC.
Gender bias will never cease to exist, and for good reasons, the fight for equality happened many times before in history, and never ended well.

Male and female are very dismorphic, we cannot change that easily, male and female have very specialized roles and purposes.

Yes, I am happy that people now in general have more equal opportunity than ever, and that we can have awesome workers on some areas from any background, but we should not push it too much now, society now is already very different, and failing in some aspects, more equality won't make things better, but can make things worse, much worse.

Understand that past societies were not forced to be the way they were, they just changed until they settled on something that works, and it worked for good reasons.

Why several societies in the world are severely against gays, especially male ones? It is because it was very important on these societies to have children, not having children was unacceptable. Today having children became too expensive, so the focus of relationships changed, and now several countries even allow gay marriage or civil union, but the need to maintain your population don't changed.

Some people will argue about over population, yes, I agree that it is a danger, but we must remember that we are not even replacing our populations, we are outright declining, and the result will be some cultures disappearing, and others with higher birth rates taking their place.

The funny thing about equality seeking cultures, is that they tend to erase themselves and give way to totally non equal cultures to take their place.

People forget that we still live in a world, where in many contexts, might make right.
Let me delve into the speculation about culture a bit more: Back in the day of the emperors/kings, titles and medals were were an extremely cheap way of rewarding somebody without actually paying them. What this incentive system needed to work was a society that respected those titles, so you were and and even today are allowed to use those titles (examples: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichtakademischer_Titel). This attitude was probably transferred to academic titles at some point.

In Austria, which has even more artifacts of its imperial time, this title-mania was followed so diligently that even the wife of the doctor was called Frau Doctor until a few decades ago. Also, every academic title at least equivalent to a master's degree is still used with your name in any formal dealings (they will call somebody up as Frau Magister Maier in a waiting room etc.). In Germany, they do this only with PhDs, so there is Herr Doktor but not Herr Diplom Psychologe.

Judging from the mini-bios of authors on books, though, the Germans seem as title-crazy as Austrians. The guy who cannot call himself "Diplom Psychologe Hans Maier" on the title page of the book will almost certainly start his bio with "Hans Maier is Diplom Psychologe ..." because this way, he is only describing academic achievement (OK) and not using it as a title (not OK). So people who worry about status love titles but can only actually use anything from a PhD upwards with their names. Go figure...
Any reviews out there that address how developer tool chains look? How does Unity 3D do? How about Linux on a VM for web development work? Maybe even some feedback on how something like nodejs running at the command line and serving web requests for a dev environment looks?
This whole discussion reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Sadly no such reference has been made yet. Maybe that's because not a lot of Germans have read it. Anyway, it sheds the whole discussion in a new light. The person in charge of education and research should not plagiarize, no doubt, but in general, if a person proves consistently that they can do their job, isn't the degree system that's supposed to determine who is able to do a particular job a little too rigid and deserves to be undermined? On the other hand there's the real hard work of those who don't cheat, and they'll demand justice. A difficult problem.
Get rid of the AST and trim it to 25,000 lines of code?

Yer a fucken shrink. Over yer head. I wish God would just kill you, nigger.

nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger
> What did I miss?

They're asking for theorems, which means things that have been proven.

> ... it seems obvious that an infinite subset
> will be Mersenne primes.

Not to me - I can easily picture these things petering out after a time. For example, it is suggested that there are only finitely many Fermat primes.
Don't assume they act intelligently, just because they have "intelligence" in the name. Many people who make the decisions aren't IT experts at all.
The average man is pumped full of a hormone called testosterone. This leads them to take more risks and have a generally more aggressive way of doing things. This fact has been scientifically proven over and over again.

In a fast moving market with high competition you need these qualities hence it is no secret why in average males are more employable in tech than women. This is a healthy market response and has nothing to do with sexism.
You have (I hope unwittingly?) just fulfilled one of the specific tropes she does mention.
I love HN, I make a huge post, and when the page finishes loading the tread again it is already downvoted
- The fight for gender equality is exclusively 20th century thing (correction 18+ century and limited to the industrial world); never happened before

- Gender equality wasn't imposed in society by an external entity, it was brought about because it was essential (not only on moral grounds but economic as well)

- Most societies for most of history were less hostile to homo/bi-sexuality than the modern (pre-1970s) West (Even in today's islamic countries there's a dont-ask-dont-tell attitude)

You also seem to forget that the Western culture was not invented or developed by the same ethnic groups who maintain it nowadays.

[edited for corrections]
> They're asking for theorems, which means things that have been proven.

I managed to miss that. My bad.