skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If every major problem in the United States were already solved, it would be more reasonable to then try to help others solve their problems.

> If you have people suffering right in front of you, it just makes sense logistically to help them first.

> there isn't any sane reason why an American would prioritize the needs of another country before his own

You're making several statements basically asserting that proximity is the only relevant factor when determining how easy it is to help one person or grow an economy. But we're not all paramedics. I'd argue that the American economy has already grown so much, and people are already given so many opportunities here, that making improvements here is going to be way more expensive in terms of natural resources and manpower, than improving an area where much simpler problems are still unsolved.

For example, spending $1M fighting malaria in Africa improves the GDP of Africa by $12M.[1]

> Helping our own homeless and unemployed would aid in stimulating the American economy.

This seems to be evidence of national bias. Why should I care about the American economy in particular?

1. http://www.rbm.who.int/cmc_upload/0/000/015/330/415680a_r.pd...
Does anyone mind copy/pasting the article to pastebin? Wouldn't mind reading it
I think most people have been brain damaged by checked exceptions in Java. It comes with this expectation that need to have to catch block in almost every single function. But if you do that, you've just recreated error codes and multiple returns!

Exceptions are meant be thrown frequently and caught very infrequently. Catch in the few places where recovery is possible and where you can log the error. That's it.
And it's certainly ethical to try to increase the standard of living in your own country, regardless of how bad off others might be.

I'm really weary of paying taxes to kill poor brown people on the other side of the world. I would be more than happy to pay taxes for a guaranteed income.
It's possible for a library to return an error to indicate that a file is not found when you try and open a non-existent file. Then it's possible for a function that calls the open file function to decide whether that error should be translated into an exception i.e. should that file being missing break out of the current execution? There's no race condition there.

I don't think anyone reasonably expects a library to know the context of the file being opened and its importance in the logic of the rest of the program.
SEEKING WORK - Eindhoven, The Netherlands / Remote

Experienced software developer with team lead experience and a hacker attitude. I'm a full-stack web developer and embedded software engineer with 12 years of professional experience doing small and large projects with a large variety of platforms and technologies.

Specialized in C#/.NET in recent years, but unlike too many .NET devs, my scope is not limited to Microsoft's "technologie du jour". I'm familiar with Microsoft's standard technologies as well as the great open source alternatives out there. Experience with making cross-platform mobile apps with Xamarin (MonoTouch / MonoDroid) and with making .NET software that runs great on Mono/Linux.

Proficient in:

* C# / .NET
* C / C++ (Win32 API, microcontrollers, Linux)
* JavaScript / TypeScript / CoffeeScript
* PHP
* Python
* Ruby

Most of my work has been unfortunately closed-source proprietary stuff, but for a peek at my code, see:

https://github.com/eteeselink/fakethat (down-to-earth C# mocking framework)

https://github.com/eteeselink/YieldMachine (C# state machines)

https://github.com/eteeselink/cdhere (little C++ console tool that talks to Windows Explorer)

Something of a CV can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/egbert.

I can work on-site in the Netherlands, or remotely. I started freelancing only recently, so my portfolio isn't as well presented as yet I'd like it to. Nevertheless, you can find contact info on my brand new placeholder website at http://superset.eu.
http://pastebin.com/PdwfGr8c
A controversial law banning Vietnamese online users from discussing current affairs has come into effect.

The decree, known as Decree 72, says blogs and social websites should not be used to share news articles, but only personal information.

The law also requires foreign internet companies to keep their local servers inside Vietnam.

It has been criticised by internet companies and human rights groups, as well as the US government.

Vietnam is a one-party communist state and the authorities maintain a tight grip on the media.

Dozens of activists, including bloggers, have been convicted for anti-state activity in the country this year.

The new law specifies that social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook should only be used "to provide and exchange personal information".

It also prohibits the online publication of material that "opposes" the Vietnamese government or "harms national security".

Last month the US embassy in Hanoi said it was "deeply concerned by the decree's provisions", arguing that "fundamental freedoms apply online just as they do offline".

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group that campaigns for press freedom worldwide, has said the decree will leave Vietnamese people "permanently deprived of the independent and outspoken information that normally circulates in blogs and forums".

The Asia Internet Coalition, an industry group that represents companies including Google and Facebook, said the move would "stifle innovation and discourage businesses from operating in Vietnam".
A look at Storyful's Open Newsroom verification project
I think Common Lisp has a good approach with its restarts system. I try to write something to a file but there is not a enough disk space? How about telling the user, then invoking a restart when the user says, "There is more space available!" and continuing execution as if nothing went wrong? The problem with exceptions is that there is no way to recover from them in most languages, because the exception handler is found by unwinding the stack.

What I do not like about the "check return values" approach is:

1. It means that client code must understand how to handle error conditions. No disk space? Well whoever called the top-level function that invoked write needs to figure out what to do if there is any chance of recovery. It is a maintenance headache that can quickly accumulate bugs.

2. In both Java and C++ there are functions that cannot return values: constructors, and in C++ destructors. No, it is not acceptable for a program to crash just because a constructor call failed. No, it is not any better to have every class have a special variable that indicates that the constructor failed. No, having empty constructors is not the answer, and it is certainly not going to help with destructor calls (the C++ standard library actually requires some destructors to silently fail because of the issues with error reporting).
You're assuming that there is an equitable distribution of power, authority and responsibility, or that management is interested in mutual understanding and cooperation. That is often not the case. In fact, my experience is that management typically view employees essentially as either potential competition for their jobs or else inferiors to be treated as such.
Really, what it comes down to is that with a language like Clojure, that has very isolated side effects and works primarily with pure functions, getting to high test coverage requires a lot less testing code.
If you are running Windows 7, you can run XP legally for free: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958559
Should be tagged [opinion]. This is not a news piece.
The reason this exists is that the Dutch Government is forcing municipalities to put every address/building into a central database, the "Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen"(BAG, "Registration of addresses and building")

It has uncovered some interesting issues with addresses - some student housing for instance has complicated numbering schemes that don't fit in the database (i.e 10 B 5). Municipalities that don't cooperate are cut national contributions.
You're in London, come join us, we're after some shit hot talent!

Reply and I'll provide details if you're interested!
A successor to 3M? I suppose there's always the old "MM" notation, or it could be written "9m".
> you are trying to open a file for reading. The file does not exist. Is this exceptional?

It's actually handy to have an API that includes both situations. For example, parse and tryParse in C#. Parse will trigger an exception if it fails but tryParse will not. When used in your code, this actually documents what the programmer is expected. If an open and tryOpen operations existed, you would know whether or not the programmer expects the file to exist or not.
It only happens once a month and I find it really useful while I'm job hunting myself. If you aren't in a tech center, you have very few lines of communication into them, and the hn monthly job lists usually get more signal to noise than every other online job board.
WebAction (www.webaction.com) in Downtown Palo Alto - Full Time- Hiring Front-End/UI Developers and Platform Engineers

Jobs@WebAction.com

WebAction is an enterprise infrastructure software company based in the Palo Alto, providing a platform that will enable the next generation of real-time, data driven applications. We acquire and crunch all types of mission critical data found in enterprise companies and turn it in to alerts and beautiful dashboards. Our platform is real-time from end-to-end.

We offer a competitive salary, excellent benefits package, generous equity for the right candidates, beer fridays, and (of course) a kitchen stocked with snacks and drinks. If you want to join our cutting-edge team, grow as we do and share the excitement of an early start-up environment please apply today. We're currently hiring Front-end and Platform Engineers

Desired Skills & Experience for Front-end Position:

-JavaScript knowledge necessary

-Experience with HTML5/CSS3

-Experience with JavaScript frameworks (jQuery, Backbone, etc.)

-Experience or interest in learning visualization frameworks (d3, processing.js)

-Excellent communication skills, both written and oral

-Must be able to function well in an early stage startup environment

-Must be able to multi-task

Pluses:

-Experience in user interaction design and user experience

-Knowledge of back-end web frameworks

-iOS or Android experience

-A passion for design

For the Platform Engineering position, we ask that you have experience writing clean code in Java and have a strong desire and skills to implement parts of a distributed, highly optimized data processing infrastructure.

Skills you should have or at least be interested in learning:

Large-scale distributed systems, Highly available, highly scalable architectures, Hadoop (MapReduce / Pig / Zookeeper), Data Serialization (Avro / Thrift / Protocol Buffers), Bytecode generation and injection, NoSQL / BigData (MongoDB / Cassandra / HBase), Real-time messaging (0MQ / Kestrel / Kafka or similar), Real-time event processing, Continuous Queries

If this sounds like you, shoot us an e-mail at jobs@WebAction.com. If you're not an exact match (according to this job post) but still feel like you could contribute...feel free to shoot us an e-mail regardless.
Intellectually I like the idea of nuclear power. It should be safe, cheap, and environmentally clean.

Unfortunately I think the evidence shows that humanity is not intelligent enough to pull it off.
The advantage of exceptions is the ability to pass back the error and make mandatory dealing it (even if ignoring).

Exist a way to have both styles, cleanly?

I have thinking in how could look a language where objects, like in UNIX pipes, have stdout & stderr, and if stderr is consumed (returning codes) the exception is handled, but if stderr is not consumed, then raise it?
I guess that depends on how much of your suite is in flux. We have largely example-driven tests, and our suite is pretty big: about 16kLOC. I can't think of a case where a significant amount of time was spent fixing the test suite (and in those cases, it was generally useful to think about why).

Also, I haven't seen anything that works better. Generative tests are nice in theory, but I haven't seem the be that useful for anything other than short, pure, functions.
Just because some people have committed violence in the name of defending the environment, why does that relate to greenpeace. As far as I know they are are non-violent.

This is what is wrong with the label terrorist - it mixes up people happy to shoot at crowds and bomb markets with all sorts of other people the government finds threatening. The aim of its use is to label people as beyond the pale and therefore not worthy of the protection of our laws. We should be very wary when this label is used.

That these powers have been abused for detaining and searching members of greenpeace, or film makers like Poitras, is a very persuasive argument for me that the government should not have these powers of arbitrary arrest or detention at all.
I have the same, but I use cd[a]+:

alias cda='cd ../'
alias cdaa='cd ../../'
alias cdaaa='cd ../../../'

I guess I was influenced by Lisp at the time, with car, cdr, cdar, cddr, etc ;-)
Do you know where to find the recording? Converting macros to python sounds extremely useful
There is a open sourced screen reader called NVDA, which really puts this to good use.
Nonsense.

Is the network up?

Is the connection to SQL up?

Did someone just turn off the SQL machine half way through the query?

Can we find the server?

Are there any rows?

Did the SQL compile?

Do I have rights on this table?

Have you just terminated me as a result of a deadlock?

Did you return a Null when I was expecting a value?

Did you return a float when I was expecting an int?

Did my value just overflow?

Did you just return 0 and I tried to use it in division?

Did I just try to access the session but some other idiot clear it?

Did I just try to call a method on an object that is in fact null?

And that's all possible in a three liner off the top of my head. I'm sure there's plenty more than that that are possible! I didn't even start on the file ones...
Great article. I'm working on a procedural (but stable) color library right now and I'm hoping it's useful for somebody. Color perception is a lot more complicated than I could have ever imagined.
True, but the take-way is:

> Carla del Ponte, a member of the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, told Swiss TV there were “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof,” that rebels seeking to oust Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad had used the nerve agent.

This means: it's not impossible that rebels have access to some chemical weapon.

The US gov keeps repeating "we have evidence that it has happened" but a) they have never shown it, and most of all: b) they don't say "we have evidence that shows it was Assad".
Thanks, that's very interesting and shows that it may not have anything to do with sex or nudity at all.
What I do for my production apps is. For dev, i simply use all the individual files. For staging, I minify and concatenate and push it to an S3 bucket, and read it directly from there. For production, on CDN, because of caching, I add a version number to my js and css file name. This way I alway s guarantee that the user is using the correct version of my client code. I have grunt tasks to do all of these automatically, and it has worked really well for me.
ZipRecruiter (https://www.ziprecruiter.com/) - Santa Monica, CA

We're a bootstrapped startup (~40 full time employees) focused on improving how employers and job seekers find each other using the internet.

We're looking for software engineers (perl and/on python) and devops (linux/AWS/mysql/DynamoDB). We prefer candidates local to the Los Angeles area, but are open to remote work for great candidates, and have a handful of remote workers already (including myself).

We have the culture and perks you'd expect from a VC funded startup, without the burn rate. Our compensation is competitive with large tech companies. We're not big enough (yet) to have much of a bureaucracy, and we're focused on keeping that to a minimum.

If you're interested in learning more, you can contact me (I'm a cofounder - will@ziprecruiter.com) or apply here:

http://www.ziprecruiter.com/job/Software-Engineer-perl-and-o...
Windows 8 rockets to 7.41% market share as Windows XP falls below 35%
You either don't know what slavery is, or you didn't read what I wrote. No one is owned by anyone else. No one is forced to work.

I'd rather support poor unemployed people and get new public works than simply support poor unemployed people.
The rule is that all functions should return a valid result or not return at all. Aka the Samurai Principle: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SamuraiPrinciple

However, an important point is that a "valid result" maybe a status indicating what went wrong. For example, a function that reads an http url may return (OK, 200), (NOT_FOUND, 404), (REDIRECT, 301) and so on. But in addition to that, the function may also throw an exception if a dns lookup error occurred for example.

Opening files on the other hand, can fail unexpectedly for a billion different reasons. Most of which an opening function can't detect or do anything about and therefore can't return a valid result if they occur. Therefore it must throw an exception.
I agree, it's not posted so often to be an annoyance, and if it weren't for this HN thread, I probably wouldn't have spent 2 summers out of my small European country as an intern in a Canadian startup.
Nekorosu's reply is about how to simulate colorblindness (so you can test how accessible a design is), for which there are plenty of great tools. Recently, I've liked http://colororacle.org/

Yet that's not really an answer for how to optimize for color blindness. That I don't know and would be interested in an answer.
I forgot your use case. I apologize for my ignorance.
Note that "git rev-parse --show-cdup" return the empty string if you are at the top of the git repo. So "cdg" as defined above will drop you in the hope directory if you are already at the top of your git tree.
Leave. It's not your problem. You're not curing cancer (I assume) and your job means nothing to the universe, it's merely a way for you to gain energy until entropy wins and kills you. If you're old, then you'll have to focus and try harder than your younger colleagues, and you should start this very minute.

Seriously, the vast majority of our jobs mean nothing. There are other, less stupid places to work. The vast majority of our employers won't exist in 100 years. So be happy and leave.

Leave.
EventMobi - Toronto, Canada - Full-Stack / Infrastructure & Operations Engineers - http://www.eventmobi.com/about/careers/

--------------------------

EventMobi is an app building platform that allows event planners to create engaging apps for their event or conference in only a few minutes. We’re based in Toronto and are committed to using the mobile revolution to completely transform the events industry.

Our apps allow event planners to distribute content to their attendees, keep them engaged with the event, and help them learn and network with other attendees. EventMobi apps have been used at over 1500 events, 2 Million users, and are served for events in 15 languages across 5 continents.

We’re not your typical startup, we’re completely self-funded and yet with no outside capital we’re massively profitable and on an incredible growth path with companies like Intel, Disney and the Olympics IOC using us for their mobile event app needs.

We embraced HTML5, cloud architecture and cross-platform mobile web apps before any of them were fancy buzz words! Come and join Toronto’s fastest growing self-funded tech start-up and be part of something amazing.

--------------------------

We're looking for a Full-Stack Software Engineer and an Operations (DevOps) Engineer to join our team and help build out the platform we need to innovate this space. This is a very fast-paced role, and we need energetic individuals that can build large-scale SaaS systems, be part of and lead the growth of engineering team. This is a great career opportunity to grow with a young startup, get your hands dirty in all aspect of cloud services, mobile and web development and help with every aspect of a startups technology infrastructure.
Our stack looks like something like this:

- Heavy use of Javascript (we use Angular and Backbone)

- Python / Flask

- MySQL / Redis / MongoDB

- Dozens of nodes on AWS automated by Chef

- Jenkins for CI, Cucumber/RSpec/Karma for test automation

If you would like to chat further about the details feel free to email me at bijan@eventmobi.com
Wisconsin is home to some other interesting tech companies too. If you're into HPC, Cray has a big presence there. I think that a lot of job hunters make a mistake by only considering the "startup" scene like Silicon Valley, Boston, etc. when they really are looking for interesting tech jobs not necessarily startup work.
30 yrs ago, I was getting my information from Byte, Dr. Dobb's Journal, Creative Computing, and Antic[1]. I am still sad they all went away.

1) I was in the Atari 8-bit camp
Again, go read the links that the actual PhDs in psychology posted in replies to the parent thread. They provided documentation in the form of peer-reviewed studies that back the claims that this kind of personality is detectable despite your belief that they are not.
That's a massive number of travelers crossing the border and a small percentage of those have a bad intent. We often jump at the first opportunity to criticize about our "first world" rights but do we have a better solution to keep the country safe?
I bet many of you don't like the cops ticketing you for over-speeding either. But it keeps the roads safe... for the remaining & from the remaining 98%.
I would put "The Art of Game Design" at the front of the bookshelf of anyone that does game design work: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Game-Design-lenses/dp/01236949.... To me, this is the most valuable book I have on my bookshelf. Every time I pick it up, I scarcely read more than a few pages before I'm setting the book down to make a bunch of notes for new ideas I've had. The book is truly outstanding and practical, and will help give you a framework for figuring out what you want our game to be.

I've been developing games independently now for several years. Easily the most difficult part is the design. Merely implementing the game-- if only that was my biggest challenge!
I'm Vietnamese, can't find that law published anywhere on the internet, no press release whatsoever. Where is the official statement on this one?
Oh, I know what you're talking about now. Sometimes, Google Maps URLs will show up on the mobile web version, but sometimes they'll just redirect to a splash page for the mobile app.
Ah I know this story well and it sheds light on why we feel one way when someone presumably has no choice over actions (mentally ill) and another when we assume that they have a choice. To answer your question: I don't know. I can envision scenarios where I do empathize and sympathize with someone afflicted, and others not so much. It is mostly dependent on whether the afflicted is self-aware. I don't know how much pain and suffering people cause each other is our own choice or something that we could just 'cut away' with some surgery.