skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every so often, spamhaus drops my mailserver/forwarder onto their policy blacklist. My mailserver forwards my mail on to where I actually pick it up, which unfortunately, uses the PBL. When that happens, I first have to notice (normally due to a lack of spam in my inbox), I have to jump through their hoops again.

Yeah, I could fix that, either by hosting my full stack of email, or not doing it at all. Either way, it's a pain.
Given that most code degrades into either wrapping checked exceptions into runtime exceptions or most methods having "throws Exception" declared...I think it's safe to say Checked Exceptions don't work well in the real world. There is a reason no other language created in computer history uses them.
I also want to put in a plug for my site: http://articulate-lisp.com/

:)
I'm quite a fan of the Forrst proposal http://forrst.com/posts/Rebranding_of_Bitcoin-Ft5.
From what the guy has said (one of the two guys), there was no warning, no complaint at the time. Just a picture taken. This lady had a size-able twitter audience that she tried to exploit. So it was unfair to the male who got let go for what seems a very minor thing.
By your own words Native Client is technically flawed: it's specific to x86 and ARM (and whatever other vaporware platforms they promise "next week" – PNaCl has been due for years already), and removing the VM, it's also insecure. So basically Native Client is ActiveX inside a VM.
By "retain its value" I meant >= not just == as opposed to inflationary fiat currencies which do not retain their value.

I suppose we could do B͐ instead. :)
Awesome selling point.

There are things that are missing that are nice about Riak. Mainly libraries, map reduce, 2i, and solr-like text search.

This project definitely interesting for what it is though.
There was a spate of articles last yearish that talked about how people who were grumpy or melancholy were actually far better at perceiving reality accurately and were thus better equipped to address problems.
I believe that to be status quo bias. I remember discussions with people who preferred Win3.1 to Win95.
Relevant regarding standards:
http://xkcd.com/927/
Give us back proper display panels
You know, sometimes the simpler solutions work best. I like this one.

I'm sitting here contrasting this against my normal approach* and the approach here is:

1) easier to explain to others
2) self documenting
3) just as effective as running a caching nameserver

* i have vm hosts configured in CM to have a bunch of promises applied, one of them is to run a caching nameserver, these hosts are the only ones allowed to do zone transfers. The vm instances running on top of these have a promise applied which has them use their underlying dom0 for dns queries.
Well they did not convince the "tech press" that they were the next Google.
Hear, hear.

People make hilarious claims about how Google has "gone evil". Hilarious. And often, backed up by completely delusional models of how law enforcement works, or how Google engineering works, etc. You're not a happy user, fine, that's a reasonable stance, but to say that that makes Google Evil is, in almost every case, insane.

On the other hand, I really agree that

> The interesting question isn’t “Is Google evil?” (answer: not particularly) but “What’s the downside if Google suddenly becomes evil?
1. To me, abstractly, a software engineer is someone who can going into a new language/situation and the result would be the best possible outcome given the supplied circumstances.

2. I think it would be fair to call yourself a software engineer once you have verified your ability to master multiple languages, and finished multiple projects, as the concepts behind them are the same.

There is no rule that dictates when someone becomes a software engineer. It happens when you're confident enough that you know your stuff, which is subjective. To me, it's when you can learn any language/project, given a reasonable (subjective to other SEs) amount of time.
Hello Europe
Pattern Matching with Fluent Syntax for .NET
I started to reply that Microsoft could fix that by providing high-performance CLR implementations on all the platforms the JVM runs on.

But it occurred to me that even if they did so, a lot of people wouldn't trust them to continue to support the other platforms indefinitely. The only way around that would be for them to spin off the entire .NET division.

Microsoft being Microsoft, of course, they would never do any of this.
Don't get dragged into this. Insist that they agree on a third-party lawyer to handle the split, and you give the keys to that lawyer. Let them sort it out.
java's main principle: preserving backwards compatibility. this is why the iterations are so small and take so long. java tip: don't look at other languages or you'll get depressed at how easy things could be or even should be
They won't be maintained by Shopify. Only the frontend & ruby backend will be under Shopify.
It depends a lot on scale. If you're just throwing together a web app that isn't going to have crazy amounts of traffic or business then maybe a big messy dependency chain is ok. But every one of those dependencies is a risk and a liability, and the more valuable and significant your project becomes the more important it is to lock down risk and reduce liabilities. Which means tracking down and eliminating dependencies.
Which one is Danielle getting a job with?
> And obviously I'm requesting legal docs ...

And it hasn't occurred to your to hire a lawyer? Do you know the term "due diligence"? In the present context, due diligence means getting competent legal counsel, not asking the opinion of HN readers.

And if you don't get competent legal advice, because you are blocking both parties, in the long run they will both win, and you will lose.
Very interesting read. So, nothing new on the Swing side?
In some fields, like developing avionics or medical systems, "software engineers" deal with formal system requirements, intense software verification & certification, maintaining traceability and accountability... I do not see how this is not "real" engineering on level with building bridges and constructing skyscrapers. The artifacts may be digital, but the work involved is similar.

In my own bubble of reality, if you can point to a design document for your software project that explains what goals your project will meet, what implementation decisions you made and why, and enough architectural information for someone new to your project to have a good chance of jumping in and helping to carry the vision (and fix the bugs), I'd be inclined to think of that as software engineering. Whereas if you drank some Jolt and hammered out some code off the top of your head, I might not be inclined to think of that as software engineering. And of course, there's a whole spectrum of project styles in between.
I haven't used Go yet, but love Erlang.

Honestly can't imagine a better way to build fault tolerant applications without the help of a supervision tree, errors that bubble up, and fast process restarts.

Would love to try out Scala or Go though, but Erlang has served me well so far.
Not sure what they offer that's similar to OTP.
Please read TAPL again.

A type system is a tractable syntactic method for proving the absence of certain program behaviors by classifying phrases according to the kinds of values they compute.

The word “static” is sometimes added explicitly--we speak of a “statically typed programming language,” for example--to distinguish the sorts of compile-time analyses we are considering here from the dynamic or latent typing found in languages such as Scheme (Sussman and Steele, 1975; Kelsey, Clinger, and Rees, 1998; Dybvig, 1996), where run-time type tags are used to distinguish diﬀerent kinds of structures in the heap. Terms like “dynamically typed” are arguably misnomers and should probably be replaced by “dynamically checked,” but the usage is standard.

Perhaps I should have been more clear that we use the words "dynamically typed" because they have entered the lexicon, but they are misnomers -- they do not properly capture what type theorists mean when they say "type".
Interestingly enough, how do rapid 7 think that they're able to do this sort of thing? It goes against Amazon's terms of service and AUP, not to mention against the people who have the data in insecurely configured buckets. In light of Weev's sentencing and the sad case of Aaron Swartz, is there one law for security companies and one law for individuals?

I appreciate that one can say they're carrying out important research, but did they notify the people with open buckets or are they more interested in PR?
🐙🐙🐙 Yes!
Same old hype. Erlang is good I guess, and I've used it in production a couple of times. But it's just a language that solves 3 problems but creates another 30. Just like C++11, Dart, Go, etc.

This kind of belligerent rhetoric (we're solving the right problems, everyone else is dumb) is the kind of drivel that gives momentum to language zealots that think language X is better than language Y.

I've contributed to Google Go in the early phases and I was naïve and really believed that Go was the "next big thing." But it turned out to be yet another general-purpose language with some things that were really interesting (goroutines, garbage collection, etc.) but some things that were just same-old same-old. Now, I'm editing a book about Dart and I've since lost my enthusiasm for new languages; I can already see that Dart solves some problems but often creates new ones.

And in a lot of ways Erlang sucks, too. The syntax is outdated and stupid (Prolog lol), it has weird type coercion, memory management isn't handled that well (and many more). Of course, since Facebook uses it, people think it's a magic bullet (Erlang is to Facebook like Python is to Google).

The article also forces readers to attack a straw man. Often times, algorithms simply cannot be parallelized. The Fibonacci sequence is a popular example (unless you use something called a prefix sum -- but that's a special case). So in many ways, the rhetorical question posed by the article -- "but will your servers with 24 cores be 24 times faster?" -- is just silly.
A large pain point for me is remembering the huge number of useful commands in R - I use at least 5-10x as many keywords in R as I did in C++. As I mention in another comment I basically need a reference (usually google and ?) at all times to keep track of these commands and their parameters. In many ways it's great that all these functions exist because I can analyze datasets an order of magnitude more quickly (in development time) than I could in a more traditional language, but developing in R is far more stressful to me. When I'm writing production-level code I constantly have to worry about readability and whether someone else who is reading my code will intuitively understand what I'm doing. With so many commands and so many ways to do things this can be challenging. I find my R code is often lower 'quality' than what I write in something like Python or C.

There are many little idiosyncrasies in R's syntax, I feel like I never grokked the language. For example, pretty much anytime I see '~' I have to relearn what is going on. From a mathematical perspective I appreciate that vectors are indexed from 1 instead of 0, but from a programming perspective it can be annoying.

BTW, thanks for contributing so many great things to R, I owe a lot of what I do to you.
Mercedes unveils Tesla-powered electric car
This just in: Non-developer Adria Richards believes she did nothing wrong, plans to continue "building bridges" for use only by women, black people, and other Adria-approved minority groups on behalf of the developer community.

Also, sounds like a lawsuit is brewing:

"I cannot comment at this time on the specifics of what occurred at PyCon on March 17, and the subsequent events of the following days, but I can offer some general thoughts"
I don't disagree with you about professional etiquette, but to the extent that this is a forum about entrepreneurship, surely we might permit, or even encourage, not to mention applaud, a slight nudging of the boundaries?
It's a culture thing, and mob mentality. A few leaders set the tone and then everyone runs with it, eager to make their mark. Every major event, especially those with strong emotional content, starts with a trigger post, followed by a deluge of "my take on X" posts, complete with 600+ thread comments, after which it slowly fades away, with only a few hardcore people shouting "why doesn't anyone care about X anymore!?"

That's human. That's culture. The negativity will eventually fade once the general startup mood improves from massive infusions of cheap money again, at which point the same fad cycle will continue to occur, but with a much rosier tint.
After losing faith in Unity (the workflow sucks) I reluctantly switched to Gnome Shell. Originally I thought I would have been back to Xfce or Openbox or WindowMaker in an instant.

I was wrong. Gnome Shell has turned out to be quite the bit of kit. It's polished, fast, smooth, and now really stable. The workflow is also incredibly productive and fast.

The only thing I miss is a minimize button, but because the workspace system is so great in Gnome Shell, I don't find myself wanting it all too often, and when I do, I just add another workspace or switch focus.

It's amazing how much thought seems to have been put into this interface. It's equally amazing how many are so quick to shun it.
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I hope Google is working on this. We'd all enjoy the better search and information system.
I'm confused. If this is some sort of Hollywood Stock Exchage where you can magically invest into fake stock of startups, then I'm wrong. What I'm getting at is I too have a shortlist of the next Dropbox(es) who I would love to seed or jump into a Series A with, if I were accredited. But I have no reputation and no celebrity, and thus would be passed over as an early investor.
> This kind of belligerent rhetoric

For some context:

http://joearms.github.com/2013/03/27/promoting-erlang.html

He's new at "rah rah!" promotion of his language, so cut him a bit of slack.
You may or may not consider it a "major next-gen UI", but I'd throw Ubuntu's Unity in that list as well.

While I'm on the topic, I love the way Unity consolidates system bar, app title bar, and app menu bar. This single screen real estate saving technique is what keeps me using Unity. Every time I switch into Gnome, *box, etc., open Firefox, and see 3 bars all taking up screen real estate, I go back to Unity.

Are there any other shells/window managers/whatever that do this same bar consolidation???
you meant port 53, i presume?
Author here. I completely agree with you that those are real problems. I have a great wife (and sisters) who have experienced varying levels of sexism in the technical world as well, and it really bothers me.

I didn't mean in my article that we should all be blind to the bad things going on, I just feel like people quickly jump to negative conclusions and go into pitchfork mode all too quickly. Constantly focusing on the negatives can be a real emotional drain. It's a lot easier to focus on the positives and solving problems. For instance, it's quite great that PyCon this year had over 20% female attendees! That's a big accomplishment compared to previous years' stats. In addition, the code of conduct and public outreach made a lot of people feel welcome and safe attending the event, which is a big win for everyone!

When bad things happen, they must certainly be brought to light -- but discussion around these problems could be far more constructive if people were to focus their efforts and energy on resolving issues and working together rather than blaming one another and becoming defensive or close-minded.

The first step to solving problems is always to identify the problem, but the attitude you take to solving problems can make a huge difference both to yourself and to your peers.

Thank you for the comment, I'm really surprised to see so many interesting viewpoints about this topic.
How exactly is that by my own words? You also seem to be confusing quite a few technical topics.

First, you're equating ARM and x86 with Microsoft Windows. Those are all "platforms", but they exist at very different levels of the technology stack, and the impact of relying on them is quite different.

Samsung and Apple can both ship compatible ARM devices. Only Microsoft could ship an ActiveX runtime.

Second, you're throwing out "security" as a red herring without actually explaining what is insecure. Exactly what are you talking about?

Lastly, if PNaCL is not viable, then NaCL is not viable. Thus, Google is holding off on NaCL until PNaCL is viable. In the meantime, I'm targeting mobile and desktop applications -- today -- which is entirely consistent with my earlier stated position.
The part where it's of no material consequence with regard to this discussion.

Edit: BTW, while you're burrowing down into irrelevant minutiae to make who-knows-what point, why not see my questions above regarding your material misread of the actual article. That, and my points regarding your glossing over of the actual problems with this issue.
The author has been wronged.

However, this unfortunate mess points to problems with various Wikipedia policies, including the inability of most companies, organizations and topics to have Wikipedia pages unless they are created by unbiased parties citing established mass media sources or scholarship.

Regardless of its size or stature, if the organization/company/topic has never generated press coverage, and if no neutral editors care enough about it to create an article, then there won't be any article ... or eventually the Wikipedia police will delete it.

Note that Wikipedia guidelines(1) define allowable press sources as substantial coverage, not a passing reference. A blog or forum post written by a knowledgeable user doesn't count, while an article written by a reporter talking with a company's PR team will.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_...
It's also important to note how important positive behavior is on those around you. One thing I've learned since programming professionally is that it's a team sport -- doesn't have to be, but in most cases you'll develop along with others. When you develops habits of cynicism and negativity it spreads. To those junior, to your direct peers, and especially to non-technical teammates.

I've found that by setting a positive tone, especially in somewhat negative situations, speaks volumes. Cynicism is easy. Pushing those feelings aside and remaining stoic in tough times helps tremendously.
This is stupid and nobody likes it. Go back to your terrible life as a terrible person who nobody likes.

But in all seriousness, I think you do have to take the negative with the positive, so long as both are constructive. It'd be stupid to take something sexist and cast it aside and make jokes about it as if it doesn't matter. Because it does matter. The technical community is negative because it has certain requirements that are not met. The government is doing bad things, as are private corporations. We cannot ignore these things because they are negative. But I agree that we should find positives. The trick is that, in good discussion, positive and negative are unimportant. What matters is constructiveness.

Saying 'This is great!' is just as useless as saying 'This sucks!'. Positive conversation is fine, but it is not necessary in intelligent discussion, because not every topic is inherently positive.
Well, of course it's status quo bias. I think the deeper question is whether the bias is justified or not. In 1995 the desktop UI paradigm was still in flux. The paradigm that the world settled on in the mid-90's hasn't changed much in the last 18 years.

Except now it is, driven largely by innovation in device UIs that are not desktop PCs. I think there's a real and valid question as to whether trying to unify a desktop and "tablet" UI makes sense.

That said, I will say that of the recent attempts to come up with a new UI paradigm, I like Gnome 3 the best and it's what I use daily.
Business Lessons From LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman
I think it's an interesting phenomenon in the sociology of programming languages.

A powerful new feature is introduced in a niche language, and novices abuse it. The feature gets a bad reputation. Yet eventually, as new languages adopt it, the community learns how to use it and how not to use it, and people become accustomed to it, and come to agree that it's not such a bad thing.

I'd say that's happened, to some degree, with garbage collection and lambda expressions. We seem to be in the middle of the process with operator overloading, and still in the early stages with Lisp-style macros (I can hope, anyway :-).
Yeah there are tons of places that CPU performance matters, but my point is that Mozilla and WebKit's engines are doing a good job of native compilation already.

If you could make a CoffeeScript compiler that would output asm.js, then great. But I'm not sure that's possible. I think that you either have to go from C/C++ code through the emscripten or right directly using the asm.js stuff in JavaScript.
About that: note that in the ISO standard for those 3 letter currency codes, the first two letters represent the country or union that issues the currency. For instance, there will not be another GB* currency that is not british. And BT* correspond to Bhutan, IIRC. So BTC is problematic.
I think there will be - maybe not at the ARM popularity level, or even x86's level, but it's been acquired by Imagination and I'm sure they have pretty big plans for it.
I wish I could do this, but I know I won't make the deadline if I do.
Lovely. Are the developers around? My initial thoughts:

- The overall organization is good.

- Showing temperatures as shifting bars is very informative.

- The maps are beautiful. (The whole thing is beautiful, actually.)

- But what do the colors mean?

- Also, I want to click and drag the map. A lot.

- The F/C button is good, but I had to look for it, to be clear on what the temperature scale was. It would be good to indicate in the temperature itself which scale is being used. E.g., you could put a little "F" or "C" after it.

- Is there a more visual way of expressing cloud cover and precipitation forecasts? Maybe something roughly along the lines of the temperature bars? Or at least make the cloud icon darker for more clouds ....
Few quick points

Erlang doesn't have threads - it has processes. Thread's share state, processes don't. The processes are created within the Erlang cluster - they can't be operating system processes because they might be running on a different instance of the operating system.

Try and Catch are actually very rare constructs in Erlang - usually only at the boundaries of the system with the rest of the world. In my 10 years experience there is about 1 try/catch per 20k - 25k lines of production code.

Erlang doesn't handle errors - you let your process crash and let OTP restart it.

The article seriously underestimates the importance of OTP.

An Operating System is a set of libraries that means your unwritten application can do things like write to persistent storage, speak to a network, run in a cronjob, have a GUI, etc, etc...

To have a reliable computer system you need at least 2 computers and OTP is an Application System than runs across multiple physical boxes. This means that your unwritten software can failover if a box dies, recover in the presence of gross errors, cluster up, etc, etc... (Google App Engine is another example of an A/S).

The first cluster we ever deployed was a shambles. We moved a webserver from a London box to a Californian one and its performance went through the floor. Because of a typo we had actually only moved the web bit leaving the database running in London.
How Audible prevents customers from canceling their subscription. [2011]