skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt about #2. #1 is the only issue.

As with everything gov, too much money leads to under the table deals.

It's ridiculous that we have 200 people constantly updating code for my sound card in Linux at 2 different projects, but no one can give out time to improve a vital system like this which eats billions of my taxes.

...just because someone went to college with someone else or somebody got golf membership somewhere for free.
One interesting thing to consider about the increase in Go's popularity is that it has been driven, to some extent, by programmers who really only had experience with PHP, Ruby, or JavaScript.

These are the kind of developers who have by now been burned by the inherent dangers and drawbacks of dynamic languages. They know enough to know that there must be a better way to develop safer, more reliable and better-performing software. They just aren't familiar enough with existing statically-typed compiled languages to know what's already possible.

Go may just be in the right place at the right time. It is simpler than languages like C, C++, Haskell, SML, and even Scala, for example. And it is getting a lot of hype just when these dynamic language refugees need something better, and are actively looking for it.

While it's good that Go offers a much better environment and infrastructure than many of these developers are accustomed to, this may also be harmful in some ways. It may be just "good enough", at least compared to the alternatives that they're familiar with, that they don't feel the need to explore more established languages which do offer much more.

Even if they don't move past Go any time soon, at least it's encouraging to see them using a more responsible language for larger-scale software projects.
google calendar doesn't work for you?
Indeed. The most value I got from from learning to customize Emacs wasn't the functionality I implemented but seeing how powerful a domain specific language can be. The ways that Emacs Lisp supports working with text, whether data or code or documents, showed me what I should be aspiring to when I create a DSL.
Fwiw, one of my relatives built a press release site. You could post press releases for free, and pay to put stars next to them. The more stars you buy, the higher it sorts. He sold the business for seven figures.

It's a little different from this patent because the "comments" aren't related to particular articles.
Except when it explains to one's inability to spell.
Yet, in c# if you do

int foo(obBob o) { o.x += 1; return o; }
...
Car.x = 3;
foo(Car);

Then Car.x = 4 which has confused a lot of new programmers. More importantly it's a more consice standard for cube(x) to cube(x) than to say x=cube(x).
You've never answered the phone, have you?

I was the CTO of a large publicly traded insurance company that had 3 call centers across the country and thousands of sales reps and customer service agents. I designed user interfaces and system architecture that enabled them to rapidly quote and service prospective customers and existing customers. I spent 1 day per week in one of our call centers every week with a headset on listening in on calls eight hours per day. I did that for 10 years.

I know call centers and I most likely know them better than you do. I think considering someone being given two months training "throwing them in" to be hyperbole.
Then pick a word that doesn't associate her abhorrent behavior with her sex.
> You HAVE to decide what you're going to do in case of an error.

This is not true in all cases:

func f() error { ... }

func main() {
f() // OK
fmt.Println("Uh-oh")
}
quick summary:

* no coding style flamewars
* it has familiar syntax
* builtin concurrency model
* it has gc
* it is fast
* static types that don't get in the way

If you compare this list to popular up-and-coming ecosystems from the 90s (java, python, C, C++, Ruby), okay, concurrency is a big win and everything else, maybe go is a little bit better.

If you compare to other popular up-and-coming ecosystems in 2013 that have a similar sized following as Go (Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Node, Rust)...

Well, at least Go beats Node. and Haskell appeared in 1990.
So the corrupt govt challenge is to be a benign allergy?
...providing to said reader a preview of said distinctive format comment...

Said US Patent system is, said, such a, said, bullshit.
That's clearly wrong. You just have to actually read studies to find clear warnings about the toxicity of GMO.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512...
GoingNative 2013 C++ Conference - Days 1 and 2 Schedule
VLC's Forum Possibly Hacked?
NSS?
Ok, done, I replaced "bitch" with "evil creature".
Perhaps not happy, but they do seem to send troops. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are ostensibly being fought by coalitions/NATO.
This 1000 times. I'd also add that the majority of the public doesn't notice Bootstrap, but just sees a decently designed website (i.e. Your not going to lose mainstream consumers by using Bootstrap, might actually gain some compared to self-designing).
So Arctic albedo causes the new scary feedback in the climate system? What happens when the old scary feedback mechanism (water vapor) condenses into opaque white clouds?

Neat design though.
Certainly. And I'm sure Chambliss was not fooled.
"So IMHO the right approach is a top-down rewrite..."

This is almost always an extremely bad idea:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I have no inside knowledge, but wouldn't be surprised at all if many of the problems of the new NYC 911 system is due to a decision to rewrite the code from scratch, losing much of the knowledge and bug fixes embedded in the old system's source code.
80% Of US Adults Are Near Poverty, Rely On Welfare, Or Are Unemployed
Only tangentially related: from the story,

> I told them then that “Whatever you do next, I’m ready to back you anytime.”

Except, you know, when it actually requires backing them up? Specially this paragraph:

> the lawsuit torpedoed Modista’s financing. And since they didn’t have the money to hire lawyers to defend themselves, they had to accept a default judgment against the company

The guy gracefully pushes to the side that the reason they couldn't afford lawyers was because he personally pulled funding from them when his goose that laid the golden eggs turned to be just a very, very good goose.
I wonder if there is a patent on robbing a bank?
Having signed a number of these in the past I can predict what the official response will be. They will say that they are not forcing anyone and that the system is entirely voluntary. They'll say it's on by default merely to help protect children from accessing inappropriate content, and they'll say that the block lists are under constant review by a panel of independent experts.
Exactly. That is pretty much the opposite of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
None of that meets much of the training necessary to save lives. The insurance company has to keep current customers and make sure to gain new ones. That's it. Only monetary loss or gain.

The callers at 911 centers (and I'm guessing you still haven't listened to any of these calls) have to handle different systems (with no ability to modify the UIs) contact different services, handle vital data and filter it out from non-vital ones when anything critical lost would mean deaths (as it had been).

E.G. To become familiar with police, emergency medical and fire codes. Respond to caller situations appropriately, calmly and above all else, cogently. This is a far greater burden than any insurance operator will ever face in the line of work.

It's most definitely not hyperbole.
"designed" is the last word I would use to describe English :)
<sarcasm>

Oh yeah! I'm gonna get a patent on making patents on asserting patents. Then when your patent on asserting patents gets tried in court, I'm gonna claim prior art on your patent and get all the monies. Them I'm gonna get a patent on granting patents and sue the patent office and get royalties everytime they grant a patent.

</sarcasm>
Hutton's and RWH are really good books, but haskell and GHC have moved a lot since they were published. Hutton uses hugs and doesn't discuss GHC extensions like OverlappingInstances and NoMonomorphismRestriction, which are pretty important, and RWH was written against 6.10, I believe.

Since you can read RWH online, you should, but you should also check out the FPcomplete.com tutorials. Also Simon Thompson's 3rd edition Haskell book is good, probably the only thing I could call a gentle intro to haskell.

also: http://shuklan.com/haskell/

__________

Finally, there's some ridiculous number of tutorials on the haskell wiki

http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blow_your_mind

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category:Tutorials
Exactly. Economic incentives trump legal mandates.

Landley speaks to this in his Toybox presentation, noting that the forced source code contributions resulting from the Busybox lawsuits were absolutely worthless.
They're a surprisingly good source for major articles. If you had important information for a mass audience and wanted to reach that audience, it would be a good choice of publication.

I mean, they got rid of GEN McChrystal, among other things.
Approximately all of it is wrong. The USA is exceptional precisely because it's the most powerful, and nothing more.
Then I wonder if the knowledge of something being classified is itself classified? Would that not be an infinite recursion?
Good tips, thanks. Do you have any resources that you learned from? Trying to improve on this, too.
A Simple, Comprehensive Overview of Javascript
You're correct.

I used the term "Software Patent" in a broader sense to include patents "Business Methods".
Just an FYI, 2600hz, where I work, is building an free/open-source operating system for Telecom that could easily support nationwide IP-based 911 service.

I just don't have any lobbying money :).
"National security officials worried by rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice overlook threat of permanent global food shortages"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/may...
I don't think the college-educated middle class voting right-wing fascists into government is anything exclusive to the US. Seems pretty universal to me.
Or he sees only what he wants to see. "You don't do any of X, do you, because if you did that'd be embarrassing?". "No sir, of course not. Not right this instant".
Yeah that is a great idea, I am also working on making some basic improvements to spec files and maybe a tutorial about it. There seems to be a lot of tutorials (including Angular's Phonecat) that use global variables for the controllers, but not many that that don't. I have found the testing of the scope variables harder to find examples for
You've proven that no matter what I say, you will discount my experience and make guesses as to what I have or haven't done. Why would I continue writing to you? Have a nice day.
What a strange world we live in, there is a business that lets other businesses point out that their business is not doing business sometimes.
This is nonsense. You should judge the article on its own merit.
If you really really wanted to you could specially train someone to monitor calls for specific issues and that one person could potentially listen to every call three or four reps make. You'd have them listen to all of the calls at twice the speed and use playback software that cuts out any silence (if you're looking for dead air, that's easy enough to do with most call-analysis software without listening yourself).

That's basically just me spitballing the closest thing I could imagine to that, and I doubt they're doing either.

I wouldn't be surprised if they do run a whole lot more quality assurance checks on new reps than tenured ones, but that'd be pretty normal.
> ... avoid the unwanted (and undeserved) stigma for now

There is that paternalism again. It is not up to the producers of any product to decide if attention is undeserved. Consumers get to decide that. And yes some will be wrong etc. Shining a light and being truthful is the right way of doing things.

The hysteria is not against science - it is against paternalism hiding itself as "trust us because science". Science requires being open and honest.
Sounds like it doesn't need to be 100% reliable, though -- they have a painful backup system in place.

Also, replaying traffic from the old system into the new seems like a viable way to test out this sort of system. Or, they could have run both systems in parallel, and just sent a percentage of the traffic to the new system and slowly ramped up. I wonder why they chose to just cut over rather than doing a full and seemingly irreversible cutover.

Not that many startups would have done things that way, since the nature of startups tends towards the green field. But plenty of more-established tech companies would have, I imagine.
I am brazillian, and I hated what brazillians did.

They did invade places.

When I joined Orkut, I found many famous game developers, befriended them, and joined their communities, and had cool hacking discussions with fellow hackers.

Then brazillians joined those communities, wrote in portuguese even when moderators politely asked them to not to, and wrote in wrong portuguese even, it pissed off even other brazillians, I remember that in about 5 months after the initial "invasions" all my foreign hacker friends had quit, and communities were dead (yes, after the foreigners quit, brazillians stopped posting too...).

Brazillians DO like to troll around, there is plenty evidence of that.
This is the same Rolling Stone that placed the younger Tsarnaev on their front cover like some sort of rock icon. Fuck Rolling Stone and everything associated with it.
Please, this is an alpha. There are still things to polish even after a long week of hacking all together in berkley. Try not Tweet and CO. that it has been released, warn people that this is an alpha. But we gladly accept feedback (and fixes) on bugs and docs. Yes it will be on PiPy soon, but only when ready.

Telling to everyone to read the release when it is not done will make more harm than good as people continue to visit dev-doc afterward, and the current version is/will be inaccurate because of last minutes changes.

Thanks a lot for your enthousiasme.
That still does not make his point completely invalid.
"Coding" an App is not exactly rocket science, and as such explicitly linking your age/gender/orientation/other non-relevant feature with such a publication is reminiscent of bragging and quite frankly, I personally find it to be very annoying.
I know but you have to understand, Joel makes excellent points, but if most of the systems are written in COBOL it makes them hard to extend over time.

We're talking about software from 1984 in some cases although it's all littered with security holes, bad interfaces and slow response times.

In the case of NY, I could agree with you, but I would say that the problem was significantly overcomplicated. There are better systems that could be used to deliver something like this. I think that, yes, sometimes you do need to do a top-down rewrite, especially when everything is wrong.

I do agree with your point that the NY incident is likely attributable to poor software design, but I disagree with the conclusion that any rewrite would suffer from the same malady.
The American-Western European Values Gap
>> Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs.

Some good points were raised about this, and what I should've said instead is that it would be extremely difficult to suddenly absorb a lot of displaced government workers into private industry. But aside from the protections they receive of near-absolute job security in any market condition, I subscribe to the thesis that as government expands, rights are lost.
It seems like http://golang.org/pkg/os/#pkg-constants has O_APPEND and searching for 'Append file Golang' gives http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13513375/how-to-append-te... fairly on top.
Just like friends in school, if one standing up doesn't work, all of them standing up will. In this case, simply getting people you know to stop bullying or to voice their opinion against bullying can have a far greater effect than you think.
Building a METAR parser in Factor
> minglings

please define
Rust appears very promising, but having followed it for some time now, it's still severely lacking in terms of stability.

I'm talking about the stability of the language feature set and the amount of change it's undergoing, rather than the quality of the implementation or anything of that sort.

While it's good to see the language evolving and improving, this type of churn also means it isn't very practical to use.

For example, some experimental Rust code I wrote a mere 6 to 8 months ago is now basically unusable with recent versions of Rust due to language functionality changes, syntax changes, and library changes.

I keep hoping that it'll start to stabilize, even just on a feature set and standard library that may not be perfect, but will at least be usable for longer than a few months. Yet this doesn't seem to be happening. This lack of stability will start to significantly hurt its adoption at some point.

Go has taken a better approach, in my opinion. It isn't perfect, and it's lacking some important functionality, but at least there's a version that's usable, well-supported, and usable well into the future, even if the language does continue to evolve in incompatible ways.
Well, the good news is that we'll get a whole lot of land to colonize soon...
Did you know that about 0.3% of the US population has top secret clearance? That's a tiny number. But about 0.01% of the world population have US top secret clearance?

Woah, that's even tinier.
And here's the URL to the actual review and not the blog commenting the review:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/26/4558626/google-nexus-7-rev...
> I see it more as explicit. You HAVE to decide what you're going to do in case of an error.

I've often read this argument, but i don't see how that is an advantage over using exceptions.

With exceptions you don't have to decide what to do in every function call that might raise an error. You just have to know that they can raise one, and code accordingly. For example:

f = File.open(...)
foo(f)
bar(f)
f.close()

Is buggy if foo or bar could raise exceptions (the file would not be closed if an exception is raised there). Fixing it could imply adding a `finally` block around f.close() so the file always gets closed (same as Go's defer) or using a higher order function that already does that for us:

File.open(...) do |f|
foo(f)
bar(f)
end

The thing is, this code didn't need to worry about which of foo or bar was raising an error; it just needed to worry about closing the file if anything went wrong. And i could add a new baz(f) call in there, or maybe refactor the foo(f) and bar(f) calls into a foobar(f) function that does just that and the code will still be as linear. There'd be no need to add extra `if`s there nor in the refactored foobar(f) function.

> Usually it's as simple returning that error...

I'd say that it's rather "most of the time" than "usually". And exceptions give you exactly that default behaviour of propagating the error up the stack. Without having to obfuscate the logic of some intermediate code (that doesn't care about what error could happen, as long as they are propagated to the caller) with superfluous `if`s and `return`s.
Your statement is ridiculous. I could say anything and argue it should be judged on it's own merit, where are the sources? There were zero citations in this article.
It would fix most of it.
Or just be based in a non-US jurisdiction without any US offices or employees!
> India's media is the only one allowed to openly lie on television.

USA's FOX News sued in court for the right to lie... and they won.
Google his name... http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=pts&ei=HaH1UffJBMqf0Q...
Robots paint with flaws too, like humans
HHVM has a bytecode format, an intermediate language (though just via C++ AST's I believe), and a fairly clean FFI interface to C++. I would be really interested if FB opened up the details a tad more than the two txt files in docs and made it easier for non-PHP devs to play around with writing a frontend for a new/different language.
> Apparently a corporation can only be represented by an attorney in a litigation and cannot be represented by the founders or officers

Stuff like that is enraging. Free country, huh? You're not even allowed to represent yourself.
Is there a patent of patent system yet?
Question: If I build a start up here in Bolivia, it gets big among Latinamerican users - can I take a huge giant shit on the US patent system? Or does the patent system apply if my website application code is hosted on US servers?
I certainly hope not. The whole reason the higher education system is messed up is the government is pumping money into it.
FYI, if you want to learn more about a specific patent, you can read the examiner's reasons for allowance at the public pair website (http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair)

Looking at that site, the reasons for allowance are the claimed features of:

"...displaying to a reader, who can leave a reader comment in response to said online information, an offer associated with said online information, said offer being an offer to alter a reader comment from said free default format to a distinctive format for a fee"

*with a priority date of 6/6/2009
In this example longitude/latitude tuple is a single logical unit, and a perfect example for using arrays, though of course PostgreSQL already has this covered. However this isn’t comparable; it’s a single location, single column, not a list of locations. A list of locations gives you choice between using multi‐dimensional array ([[x,y], [x1, y1]…]) or a relational design, and we’re back at square one.

I think the crucial element here is whether the set is bounded. A set of coordinates is bounded, a set of tags usually is not.

I know I made this point about semantics in my last post, but I’m actually more concerned about the practical aspects of working with arrays used in this, in my opinion, relational (unbounded) case. It may be so that arrays in PostgreSQL will become so powerful as to provide complete alternative for forming relational models… however that wasn’t my experience so far. More complex joins require you to go through UNNEST() and essentially normalize the arrays into temporary tables, which makes for terrible performance.

The relational design has also other advantages, a composite primary key has unique guarantees, something that’s not yet possible for arrays, and separate table always gives you the flexibility of including additional metadata as your needs evolve.

For me the question really is ‘what are the practical advantages for using arrays over a relational design,’ and not the other way around. After all, PostgreSQL is still mostly a relational database. And of course, as others have pointed out, there are some advantages, but most of them would be considered (micro)optimizations, and I’d rather leave those to database developers.
The quoted bit was about growing conditions - ie instead of a field of only one species, combine multiple species. The species diversity helps control pests, and allows for a greater variety of birds etc. And is way harder to harvest.

Your point was about reproduction. Sexual reproduction doesn't have to be out in the wild - it is offspring combining DNA from parents producing something a little different. It is possible to try and introduce genes to make out in the field reproduction more likely to happen, and also to work out some lab based way of reproduction. Admittedly it is way harder than making cuttings, but does bring benefits.
It directly quotes a number of scientists. What more do you want? It's not an academic paper, of course there are no "citations".
How long have I been online?
The Haskell School of Music