skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Vague value judgments ("only for exceptional conditions") are the inevitable result of a failure to reason.

The semantic function of exceptions is just a way for summing additional values onto the return type of a function because it has results that are not contained within the primary type. In this way, they are a more general and better typed version of NULL (which has it's places - contrary to the modern dogma, these sort of features are needed due to inherent complexity). The standard ways of attempting to avoid this are to either use sentinel values that exist in your standard return type like fd == -1 for an error (thereby making your program less typed), or to create a top-level sum type for every aggregated function return type (cluttering your program with nominal types). Multiple values make the most sense, but those are ad-hoc product types, so you're eschewing the type system in favor of informal invariants.

The syntactic function of exceptions is to avoid constantly repeating (check for error, return error), which often leads to the poor practices of ignoring errors or calling a global exit(). One goal of programming languages is to automate, so it makes sense to capture this oft-repeated pattern. But problems arise when people end up forgetting that every function can have a possible return immediately following it.

It seems some syntactic middleground is needed to signal the complete return type of a function definition, and the possibility that a given function call may quick-return. Honestly (and I hate to say it), but Java probably started down the right track with checked exceptions, but being a B&D language it ended up being waaaay too verbose. And lacking a way to aggregate types along anything but the baked-in hierarchy, people fell into using generic and uninformative 'throws Exception'. And open types make it so there's little point trying to enumerate exhaustive causes. But that doesn't mean that one can't start with the idea of non-silent but syntactically lightweight exceptions and come up with something that avoids a lot of the pitfalls.
I typed out a long reply but realized I essentially agree with everything you said.

Well said.
"9 million" would work, too.
UpOut - SoMA San Francisco. No Remote.

Merchant Relations 3 Month Internship

UpOut is a discriminating guide to the best weird parties, underground culture and unique happenings in your city. Our mission is to help make that epic night out, perfect first date or relaxing afternoon happen. We are a small passionate team started by two best friends in their dorm room. We've been through Tandem's incubator and are backed by some of Silicon Valley's best investors.

What You'll Do
Since the early days of UpOut, we've worked to help the culture maestros of San Francisco, the event organizers. These awesome people put together the events and activities that define the culture of our beautiful city. As part of the Merchant Relations Team, you'll focus on building strong lasting relationships with local merchants. You will work directly with merchants to help make their events amazing. Although your core competency will be in creating persuasive promotion campaigns, you'll also use our vast event expertise to advise them in their event making decisions. Your core responsibilities will be:

- Advise event organizers. You'll be working one on one with event organizers suggesting better event names, images and putting together promotion plans.
- Learn and perform analysis. Use data to build better processes within the Merchant Relations team. You'll be able to affect the tools we build, the process and more.
- Research the event business. Read, think and write about the event industry to get insider insights into the business. Of course, you'll also go to a ton of events.

You have great communication skills, attention to detail and boatloads of creativity. You're that friend who plans for everyone else. Previous sales experience is a huge plus. You're hungry to learn more and think that a small (but fast growing) team is the best place to do that.

This is a paid full time 3 month internship (2 weeks training + 10 weeks work). A full time position may be offered at the end of the internship based on performance.

Please apply at http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/upoutinc/merchant-relations-int...
"Exceptions should indicate a major error that you can't easily recover from"

Maybe in Java and C++, but in Common Lisp we have restarts that allow you to recover from an exception. I like to use the example of attempting to write to a file when the disk is full, because:

1. It is possible to recover from the exception (e.g. ask the user to delete some files)

2. It makes no sense for the I/O library to do all the things needed to recover

3. It is a maintenance headache for client code to do all the things needed to recover

With restarts things would look like this: the I/O library would set up a restart for write that would retry the operation, the client code would catch the exception, prompt the user to free some space, and when the user indicates the space is free the restart is invoked. The I/O library knows the right way to restart the operation, and client code knows whether or not that should happen, and you get code that does not just quit over a disk being full.
Are you building a self-driving lawn mower?
Is that really the case? Would Denny's really be paying servers $20 an hour if not for tips?
I've encountered a bug like that when the callee was converted from taking a pointer to taking a bool and the caller was not updated because it compiled fine...
According to popular mechanics (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/forensics/432...):

'No studies have proved definitively that fingerprints are unique. Likewise, it is unclear if prints change over time or vary depending on the amount of pressure applied. Statistical models and pattern-recognition software could go a long way toward answering these questions. Additionally, research is needed to expose error rates. The ACE-V method depends on two or more examiners reaching the same subjective conclusion, but doesn't require them to reach it the same way. In one recent experiment, veteran examiners looking twice at the same print came to different conclusions each time. "
Following @garybernhardt (the presenter) on Twitter is the best decision I've made.
You can see the oldest inner cities and each 'ring' of newer buildings around it. Example: Amsterdam: http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/?utm_source=buffer&utm... Very cool.
From age 14 to 31 I worked for my uncle who had a coin-op business from what I recall the Dragon's Lair arcade game used the CED but it may have been a Video Laser Disc player I can't remember but I do know the thing was huge and never worked.
Check out all the colours in Rotterdam: http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/#51.9159,4.4974,14

Kind of gives you an idea of how large parts of it were destroyed during the second World War and then has had multiple levels of reconstruction and changes taking place throughout the decades since.
Check your mail.

PS: Very interesting ancestry, wish I had more knowledge into my own. It led me to think that you might be related to the Ferrari Company somehow.
It's gotten better the last few years, but I still see that exact warning all the time in open-source projects. Nobody cares about warnings until someone mandates -Werror.
AWESOME. Huge Kudos for that Matt !
Wow. Even the garage of my parent's house is on it, which isn't finished yet!
"Sears should have morphed into Amazon."

They were so close. They started the Discover CC, the Prodigy computer network, and were the largest retailer nationwide. They shut down mail orders two years before Amazon launched.

http://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys-Decline...
The fact that our elected representatives have voted themselves so many perks, as well as raises, highlights the double standard which has become prevalent in the USA.

Exempt from the Obama care fiasco, retirement eligibility after a ridiculously short period of employment, an enviably short work "year."

It makes me wonder why I didn't go into politics...
30 years from now, some future "Wired" will give the Sears Catalog treatment to today's Wired.
They are at least obviously too young to realize that a Betamax VCR would not be described as a "VHS - Beta".
Check your mail (I'll probably land in your spam folder).

PS: Very interesting ancestry, wish I had more knowledge into my own. It led me to think that you might be related to the Ferrari Company somehow.
Addepar is Hiring - Security Engineer - Mountain View, Ca

We are engineers rebuilding the infrastructure that powers global finance. The current technology in the space is broken and opaque; it empowers scandals like Bernie Madoff to go on for a decade while $64 billion vanishes from the economy, affecting endowments, institutions, and notable individuals. Our platform provides increased transparency, allowing for better decisions and furthering meritocracy in the multi-trillion dollar wealth management industry. We free data from disparate silos and build tools for advanced analysis and decision-making.

We are looking for a Security Engineer to focus on improving our engineering from a security perspective. If you enjoy breaking stuff and have a passion for building with a security bent, we’d love to tell you more!
Smart peers, great perks, building and breaking software to ensure transparency and security.

Join us at https://addepar.com/careers/ or careers [at] addepar [dot] com.
Various autonomous outdoor power equipment - I can't speak to particular products.
SEEKING WORK - Los Angeles or Remote
Ruby on Rails Developer + Hardware Hacker (I especially love projects that involve both!)
Bread & Butter Stack: Rails, PostgreSQL, Heroku, with ZURB Foundation on the front-end. I also do A/B testing work. (Visual Website Optimizer)
Mention you're from HN for a free 45 minute Skype/G+ Hangout consultation where we can discuss your project and the best way to reach/exceed your goals :)
Statistics about how much time medieval peasants spent working can be misleading, because a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses. They had to make most of the things they used themselves. So when "work" was over they didn't go home and watch TV.

It's hard to be sure exactly what life was like for preindustrial agricultural workers, but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh.
Awesome. Here's a building that was built in 1300
https://www.google.com/maps/preview?authuser=0#!q=Keizer+Kar...
Cue DMCA takedown in 3... 2... 1...
I'm in Saigon. Use 8.8.8.8 for your DNS, unless you are accessing via 3G.

I use unblock-us.com for my home network.

Honestly, I don't see how they plan on enforcing this except for having a look see at already well known dissident bloggers.

And, frankly, I think this 9X generation, which seems to be drowning in unprecedented narcissim will flip this whole place on its head when they get a bit older. Vietnam will be an even more interesting place than it is now when that comes to pass.
Archive.org has some Byte Magazine back issues (eg: http://archive.org/stream/BYTE-1993-05#page/n11/mode/2up)
Perhaps these posts (4-5 current "ask HN / who's hiring / ask PG") should go in a separate list, for example at the top right corner ...
only works for london. plus there is no way thats accurate, only shows 10 for london.
Moving into the Raleigh-Durham area from Long Island, New York has been an absolute blast. The community here is overly willing to help in any way, shape, or form. As new entrepreneurs, I feel as though we couldn't be in better situation to learn and grow.
This is really cool, but why don't the color gradations go back further? Is it a matter of how records were kept? I would have loved to see how many buildings survive from each century from, say, 700AD on. Pre-1850 as a category seems like such a waste for a map of the old world.
I actually bought "Cocos2d-X By Example Beginners Guide" and it was very easy to get up and running with a demo application. The samples included with the framework itself show off a features and nothing has been all that complex, and I have made a bunch of 2D test applications already (XCode + iPad simulator)
Does this harassment keep the country safe?
This closely resembles my experience getting my business established with Québec. Eventually I sent an email to the helpdesk complaining about all of the issues and in return they sent me an address to an office downtown. That office is the helpdesk and processing center.

Since then I go to the office every time, chat with the people, ask questions, fill out my forms, and they process it immediately.

It took over one year to finally gain access to all the components of the online system. I still can't read their PDFs because they require an Adobe plugin for PDF "security".

At any rate, see if you have the ability to go in person. Helps with the language barrier and probably more effective.
> This essay makes a fallacy case, "it is this way, therefore it must be this way". It takes a lot of liberties with evidence to come to a crazy conclusion.

"A trend doesn't make a law" is a better argument when the trend under discussion isn't many decades or centuries old, and it's even better when your counter-hypothesis isn't an anecdotally grounded commonsense expectation.

As for the rest of your post, I don't think the claim is that every facet of government or everything that government does is innovative, or even that the innovative things are all-around good. Yeah, local government and state owned oil companies are usually going to be the pits. That doesn't mean a lot of next-level technology isn't coming out of spy agencies and military aerospace.
He might mean that it should occur on the first Monday of the month (vs the 1st) so that there are many more eyeballs.
SEEKING WORK - Remote (based in San Francisco)

Where I've worked/studied: thoughtbot, ZURB, Coveo, Atlassian, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont McKenna College

Things I do: Back end dev, front end dev, full stack dev, design (I have a partner who designs), Packaged rails security audits

My usual stack includes: Ruby on Rails, HTML, HAML, CSS, SASS, Heroku, Angular.js, Javascript, jQuery, Postgres, Photoshop, git, Ruby, ZURB Foundation, Responsive design

I can also do: Backbone.js, PSD to HTML, Bootstrap, PHP, MySQL

I've worked with over 25 clients in 4 countries and am on the look out for interesting new projects. I won't belabor an explanation of my philosophy and experience on this thread, but please visit http://nealke.mp or email me if you are interested in learning more. You can contact me at me( at )nealke( . )mp

Aside from development, I also offer packaged Rails app/gem security audits.
Controlling Chromium in Haskell
This is exactly what I was going to say, cd +n and cd-n work amazingly.
But why is this preferable to an either monad? The majority of the time when a subfunction fails with error, I return the error from the function calling it, so I'd rather just have a do notation or something take care of that for me.
Lead Android Engineer, Bixby Apps - SF

Lead the Android Team at a Mobile Agency

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Join a team where making great apps and getting shit done is priority number 1. Bixby Apps was founded by developers and designed for developers. There are no development managers, meetings, or office politics. Bixby Apps is about letting the experts do what the experts do, code!

About Bixby Apps
Bixby Apps is a mobile development firm providing iOS, Android, and Windows Phone app development services to large brands, small businesses and agencies worldwide. Bixby Apps has built apps for major brands like BMW, Lenovo, & The Nielsen Company. We pride ourselves on our quality-first approach to development and design. You can find our work at: http://www.bixbyapps.com

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Teleporter: Take a 15-minute walk on the Golden Gate Bridge via a Double robotic
That would probably be related to the fact that Congress is s purely legislative body.
Maybe for tourist travel it's a cool way to spot old historic buildings you'd otherwise not find, but for real estate? I would expect that whatever real estate catalogue you browse will also list the build year. As another commenter said, that data is in public databases (called the "kadaster"), I would assume every real estate agent is aware and uses the kadaster-data :)

Which doesn't detract from the fact that this is a beautiful visualisation. And also I doubt the general public can query those data in the bulk amounts required for this map :)
I see a lot of buildings in the old inner city were built in the year 1005 CE. Is there any historical significance to that year? http://dev.citysdk.waag.org/buildings/?utm_source=buffer&utm...
So wait, I'm expected to take TempleOS at face value for what it is regardless of the mental health conditions of its creator, but I can't take his religious or racial rants at face value? Seems somewhat arbitrary from my position.

To answer your question: No. I'm not. If I was, I'd be having a lot more altercations with the homeless in LA and SF. Though to play devil's advocate I could totally make the argument that one should heed the words of the racist mentally ill, as bad things can happen: (See Hitler). Having said that, If someone commands that I should show or 'give' respect and somehow separate the wheat from the chaff in arbitrary fashion to the benefit of the doubt of the mentally ill because he 'clearly has no control' seems somewhat like a disservice with that special treatment tied in, that's just an acknowledgement that this is acceptable. My stance is that it's not, regardless of your condition. How you handle that and prevent it is beyond the scope of this.
Actually, the US, the UK and France had contracts with the Soviets that guaranteed them access to Berlin by air. They didn't have correspnding contracts for access via streets and railways, though, that's why the Soviets could block food trucks but not the airlift.

The contracts only allowed very specific air corridors (3, to be precise), which is one of the points why the airlift was so hard to implement at full capacity.

The Allied forces had quite extensive rights in all the other sectors, and not just in Berlin. For example, military vehicles were considered extraterritorial, and had to be let in. And that's what the US and the UK did: they drove into East Germany and rather openly spied on Soviet troop movements and maneuvers.
Figured I would add my own [7]. I know the example prompt might seem a bit specific, but it can come in really handy sometimes (for example, iterating through get parameters). Always a fan of idiomatic and one-liner python.

I should mention that I ended up using the fourth version (seemingly the slowest) but it is actually the fastest depending on your input -- as the length of the elements gets larger, the fourth method tends to vastly outperform the others.

[7] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16685545/elegantly-iterat...
Just how easy do you think it is to acquire enough C4 to get the same effect as a fully fueled jetliner without drawing unwanted attention?
I have to say, I much prefer people referring to it as Golang, otherwise it is impossible to search for.
An interesting idea. Actually, since various sources have gotten ahold of standard scripts, you could probably have a friend of a friend (you need someone unfamiliar) do the administration, although that won't help with the "trained interrogator" factor.

Amazon carries a $100 USB polygraph machine, but most of the reviews say it gives the same readings regardless of whether you attach it to a person. Assembling your own stuff might make more sense.
Are you saying that free market advocates don't cherry pick their examples, and ignore confounding factors in the examples they pick, to favor their narrative?

I think that historical evidence has shown that a mixed economy, with some of the taxes going to fund safety nets, nationalized health insurance (eg medicare) and education (eg vouchers), long term infrastructure projects (eg interstate highways), and subsidies for research projects (eg non fossil fuel based energy sources) does very well, and has been more stable than extremes of ideology, whether socialist or anarcho capitalist. So why not maintain what's been working well, and instead constantly advocate some ideologically pure utopian vision?
But he said there was something apparent from the responses, like there was a quality problem of some sort. There are over 50 posts in this thread, a lot of them from HN users with relatively high karma.
Ask HN:  Company treating me like employee not independent contractor.
Background:
I am an Independent Contractor and own a US-based LLC. I have a major client from a different country, who, about a year ago, established a US presence.

I now get paid once per month from the US-based Inc.

Story:
Over a year ago, the client asked me to make them my only client. I basically laughed it off and said ok...while keeping a handful of other clients that don't keep me very busy.

Earlier this year, the foreign portion of the company hired a CIO and I began reporting to him directly. Over the last few months, my independence has been taken away from me with this CIO dictating the # of hours I must work each day (8), how I am to accomplish the work and that I only work for them.

I feel that they've now broken at least three cardinal rules with regard to independent contracting work:

1. I am NOT free from another's right to direction and control.

2. I am NOT free from the manner or method used to accomplish the work.

3. I rely solely on them for my monthly income.

What are my options? I don't feel that I can say anything to them for fear of them "not needing my services anymore". I have no money saved up and finding a job in this economy has been really difficult for me.