skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oddly, I have seldom seen an empty catch {} without a comment, though often it was simply to point out that, yes, this is intentional. Even that is better than leaving me wondering if the code is just unfinished.
Oh, hey, I'm on Hacker News.

I'm surprised and a little embarrassed to see my site here, but I'll take the opportunity to address some of the things y'all have mentioned.

To people proposing language alternatives: a totally fair point, and more power to you. I made this site back in college when I was studying Sanskrit for the first time, and I was disappointed by the lack of resources available online. The site started as a series of study notes and sort of mutated into a "course" ... but that course is incomplete and has been in desperate need of repair for some time.

About the PHP errors: yeah, sorry about that! I started out with PHP because I knew pretty much nothing about web programming and needed something that "just worked." The new version of the site, which has been in development hell for a year, is in Flask (Python). I haven't touched the PHP stuff in two years, and I usually need gloves and a whole lot of disinfectant to do so.

Why learn online: because the books are usually disappointing or expensive.

Why Sanskrit: I just find it particularly beautiful. The statement that r0h1n took issue with is stated grandiosely, but I stand by it.

On "Hindutva nonsense": I empathize strongly with their motivations, but I agree that most of the ink spilled in the name of Sanskrit is vacuous and hyperbolic.

For those wondering about the fuss: I particularly enjoy kāvya [1], usually because it's just beautiful poetry [2] but also because it shows off some fancy linguistic acrobatics, the likes of which I haven't seen in any other language [3].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavya
[2]: Citation needed, but I like Kālidāsa in particular. One of the least horrible translations of one of his most beautiful works: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sha/sha17.htm
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishupala_Vadha#Linguistic_ing... for some examples.
I was actually a presenter at one of these before. They used App Inventor http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/ It's actually a good experience for the girls if you plan for it in advance and have at least some knowledge of app-Inventor (I assume they almost always use that).
"The design of Everyday things" Donald A. Normann
What would make you happy here?

Would open sourcing the C# compiler be enough? Open sourcing .NET? Providing .NET support and development for Linux?

I'm honestly just curious, not to put you on the spot.
Interesting. Looks like the most potentially dangerous extensions are the ones pulling stuff from other websites to inject into the current site, and ones doing text processing/conversion on document contents. I don't have any extensions that do that, so hopefully I'm safe...
"The Box" Marc Levinson
Yep.

"... But in the worst case all your elements might be grouped into a single layer and the browser has to repaint every single element. And, when it’s done, it still needs to upload everything to the GPU. All of this is work occurs for every GIF frame..."

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/animated-gifs/
who needs another Windows only new programming language?
It's hard to choose a single book, as I've read (or listened to) a number of books this year.

I'll choose Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebo...).

The way it changed my life was to make me actually think more about the way my mind operates, the decisions I make and the way these decisions affect my life. As a consequence, there were a few books I read later that were loosely related to this one in the way that they all refer to the way people think.

Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice

Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works

Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan; and Fooled by Randomness

Leonard Mlodinov - The Drunkard's Walk (quite similar to Fooled by Randomness)

Carol Dweck - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Neil Postman / Andrew Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death

Rolf Dobelli - The Art of Thinking Clearly (just started)

On my reading list now:

Quiet by Susan Cain - mentioned already

The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday

Also, did not quite change my life, but very recommended:

Neal Stephenson - Anathem.

You may have to struggle through the beginning, but as soon as I understood the way the world he devised operates, I was thrilled completely.
I couldn't agree more.

That said, I think hidden in your last sentence is the fact that working with C# in an IDE with a statically typed language is such a pleasure.

For most mundane code (loops, linq, if/else), Resharper will literally autocomplete everything.

I really wish other languages offered such tooling at times.

I don't think any other language/IDE combo comes close (in my opinion).
People keep using C++ because there aren't any real competitors in its niche. It offers the same performance level as C, while having substantial improvements: namespaces, templates, RAII, operator overloading, type-safe containers.

These are things that can help raise the abstraction level, while not giving up performance.
Academics Who Defend Wall St. Reap Reward
Question: I would love to have the following setup: a chromecast-style dongle running some emulator with a bunch of roms, plugged into the HDMI port of a tv; a couple of wifi controllers to play.
Is it possible?
Ah, it was people like you who did this even when, as you said it should never happen, that caused me many a late night... 'cause it did and that empty catch block hid it.

Don't leave empty catch blocks. At least put in some form of logging of the exception, just in case.
"Seeking Wisdom - From Darwin to Munger" - by Peter Bevlin

What struck me about this book is that it's a summary of insights about how to think better from some of the best thinkers ever (Munger to Twain to Einstein to Feynman).

If you're looking for more book recs, Farnam Street (blog dedicated to extracting wisdom from the best of what other people have figured out) is another great resource - http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/
RetroShare has VoIP and is:

- 100% distributed / peer-to-peer

- public key encrypted

- open source

http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/
The most common code I write in C# is in switches on enums:

default:
throw new InvalidOperationException("Should never happen!");
Agreed. His Boost complaints are odd, too; even in 2010 it certainly didn't take "forever" to build Boost and its templates are for the most part very logical and essentially hidden to you (see for example boost::format, which does pretty much exactly what he says he wants out of a formatter).

He's got a point that for mongrel2 the full feature set of C++ doesn't necessarily make sense, but having it available when I want it is really valuable to me. For my game, I literally couldn't do what I'm doing without some really big, really gross crap that would be multiple times the code I have. (Faking polymorphism with state machines makes everyone sad.)
OT: The URL is http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/12/how-blender-starte...

I've never seen "index.php" in the middle of a URL like that. Very quirky.
This Is What Disability Binarism Looks Like
The whole time I was reading this I couldn't help think of all the "ported x to 30 lines of javascript" headlines. By that I mean, just because it can be done in a language, doesn't mean it's the best fit.

I think his best point was about dropping in boost. It doesn't make sense to add more code, increase compile times, and complicated stack traces just to use C++. I have to admit, I go out of my way to use newer tech sometimes even though I know it'll slow me down. But, we (I) need to remember something about Software Engineering -- at the bottom line, we're building software. Its language and design should reflect the best possible result, and while that doesn't always mean speed, it does mean using the best tools to solve that problem.
Paul Graham Proves Sexism in Tech Is Still a Problem
This was my first thought as well - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. Sure there's kids that treat it as high school part 2, but in my experience there's plenty of that at 4-year schools as well.

I got into my junior college's honors program, which meant free tuition for 2 years. In addition I participated in a local Fortune 100 company's student trainee program working 20 hours a week getting professional experience. It was a great jump-start to my college and professional career.

Even without free tuition, it seems like a no-brainer to me. Junior college professors can tell which students are there to learn. I had great relationships and learned a lot from both my junior college and university professors. To me the university atmosphere/experience isn't worth the extra cost.
I'll chip in, but only because you asked, not because I think this will accomplish anything.
Modern goes out of date. You don't call things modern, other people call your things modern.

'Module' is more likely. As in 'app' for 'application'. A 'module' implies something that works with other things so a 'calendar module' could work with a 'contacts module' in a 'modular way'. Apps just do their own thing and are standalone, modules integrate into a whole.

Anyway, this is a speculative story about nothing more than a filing for a name. They should put filings in there for things like 'rocket ship' just to get bloggers talking even more speculative nonsense.
Probably the name of the new programming language.
Modulo? Modern?
Filter capacitors producing excessive heat due to inrush current? That would be bad filter capacitors indeed ;-)

The claim was that an SSD somehow converted more electric energy into heat immediately after power-up which would damage the SSD, so real consumption, not just a current peak that goes into storage for later consumption. Normal-ESR electrolytics might have a heat problem when used at a few kHz in switching applications, but certainly not at 0.1 Hz.
AppJS - build desktop applications using Node.js
Joel Spolsky's thoughts on exceptions (ie. "They're no better than gotos") shares a similar perspective: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2003/10/13.html
I'm old enough to remember what MB and GB meant before sleazy marketers started to redefine them. They should have been sued for deceptive advertising. Instead the computer press of the time was spineless, because guess who paid for the ads.

So I refuse to be a wuss and use MiB and GiB.

(Also, get off my lawn.)
Tips on Computing with Big Data in R
Yeah, Rust is really interesting, and something I'd like to try on a real project. Hopefully I'll be able to do something with it this spring. But it's certainly more appealing as a replacement than, say, Go, which I don't think is really even that interesting as a language (but this is a personal opinion which I'm not willing to argue about on the internet).

Rust also would immediately solve some things I find particulary annoying about C++ (lack of sum types, inability to create new types that behave identically to old types, etc).

One thing that I think would be nice to have in a hypothetical language is vector support for integral types, the same way OpenCL has.

The Eigen library for C++ is IMO a really good example of the "Edward C++hands" phenomenon. It's a terrific library, using C++ template magic to produce optimized assembly for your platform, to achieve performance you just can't get with C. On the other hand, it can be annoying to use, since there are places where the C++ warts come out, and the developers have to put in an extraordinary amount of effort just to get there. If you had this kind of thing built into the language, it's much easier for everyone involved: compiler authors, programmers, library developers, etc.
Ok. I'll drop the feigned outrage and state my point objectively, without indicting PG.

Women aren't in technology because gender norms enforce at a young age that technology is not for girls. The industry perpetuates this norm by being dominated by men who do not make an effort to change the culture to be less of a "boys club." Women who do join technology have their qualifications and contributions second guessed, and have to endure work environments that are more like a fraternity house than an office, including greater chances of sexual harassment. The solution to this problem is going to have to come from within the industry. People within the industry will need to make an active effort to fix the problem, rather than just lamenting the status quo and shifting the blame to society and education.
> Yes, but this "model minority" had to work for it, hard-work, perseverance and grit. It's not like, a group of elites decided one fine day "OK, today we anoint Asians"

The comparative difference is closer to the latter than the former, actually, though neither is complete and the reality is more complex: the difference in racial stereotypes is not mostly due to real differences in the groups to whom various racial identities are ascribed, but due to different perceptions that are a combination of deliberate engineering (in the case of Asians, by elites who had a positive interest in importing their labor to undercut domestic wages for the "hard working" bit -- in the case of persons of African descent, by elites who had an interest in keeping them in "their place") and different responses of not-necessarily-representative subsets in often non-equivalent circumstances, plus subsequent reinforcement through confirmation bias.

Sure, there are plenty of hard working, intelligent persons of asian descent in the US -- also plenty of hard working, intelligent people of hispanic or african descent in the US.
Is anyone else troubled by this?

"Black Girls CODE is an international non-profit organization with local chapters in San Francisco, Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and New York. They teach girls of color (ages 7-17) to become the masters of their technological futures by teaching them classes in game design, web development, robotics and more!"

Why not teach all girls or call it, 'Impoverished Girls Code?'
This is so awesome. I'm stoked just knowing this is happening .
If you want to spike traffic, you can always follow the good example of Ron Paul & Associates, and start peppering your articles with random racial, homophobic and other gratuitous provocations. Don't overthink it, and don't make it too obvious; instead aim for approaches more oblique and back-handed, in the spirt of, e.g.:

“If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”

You can also try opening with catchy titles like "The Disappearing White Majority." The idea is that, sure, such tactics will probably offend some people, but they will also generate controversy and get you talked about. And if you get flack from anyone over it, you can always claim it was the work of junior staffers, and that you had "honestly do not know" who might have said those things.
awesome, brings back so many memories.
Saving the Lost Art of Conversation
This project has been dead for a long while.. Here is the replacement:

http://deskshell.org/
The Master Key System by Ruth Miller and Charles F Hannel

Life changing book. Helped every facet of my life.
Rust is surprisingly expressive
[Show NH] Weber - high performance web framework for ElixirLang and Erlang VM
I have to name two in a tie: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, and Masters of Doom by David Kushner. Both Jobs and John Carmack have been huge sources of inspiration since I've read these books, and in very different ways. And that effect has lasted long since I finished the books, which is rare.
My thought would be to add an assertion that always fails inside the catch block, but this probably only makes sense if you use assertions already, as they have to be turned on explicitly in Java.
I think of the educational path that you’re taking as the “auto-didact web development model”. There are several factors that make this path viable (educationally and as a conduit to employment), including:

• a vibrant sector of the economy driving job growth;

• wide sharing of domain knowledge within an online community;

• accepted patterns of skill demonstration and social proof (beyond the traditional credential of a degree);

• low startup and ongoing cost of materials (computer ownership and access to commodity servers);

• willingness of professionals to act as mentors (whether through profit motives or generosity).

As a lifelong autodidact with an educational path that has been less structured than the above, I’m interested to see if elements of this pattern can work for self guided education in other fields... creating systems of non traditional educational guidance and credentialing. Part of the "the unbundling of the American university”, as you put it.

[Edit: formatting]
The R500 had a flimsy plastic case, smaller screen, and a 40% smaller battery. The battey is the most space consuming component in a laptop, so trading it off can save weight and space for more features, but its just a different design choice.
Years ago I found the source of my troubles which took longer than it should have because Tomcat had an empty catch around InterruptedException with a "this will never happen" comment.
I love this... wish I was in the delivery area (about 2,000 miles away in Louisville, KY) as my wife and I have been wanting to expand our selection of plants, but neither of us have the knowledge off hand nor the time to invest in learning right now. Lots of things to learn higher up on the list still. This certainly solves a problem we have.
One of the reasons I'd like to, time permitting, learn Sanskrit would be to enjoy the Upanishads, which my favorite philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, regarded so highly:

"If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century (1818) may claim before all previous centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those deductions themselves are by no means to be found there."
Ipad app won't let me edit but i wanted to add "On writing well" by William Zinsser. What a book!
pedrocr said that LZMA decompression is faster, but that sometimes LZMA compression is slower.
I'm also from that time, it was lovely to see Blender grow. I still remember being online one afternoon (yes, in those times being online was something rare), just to download Blender 2.0 when they implemented huge interface changes and the first game engine.

Congrats Ton and all!
Poll: OAuth 1.0a or OAuth 2.0 in a Docker container? 
We are working on creating a Docker container that makes it easy to become an OAuth provider.

What would you prefer for your apps and why: OAuth 1.0a, OAuth 2.0 or some other protocol?

If you want some other protocol, please add it in the comments

Disclosure : I'm the creator of the open source daemon oauthd and founder of oauth.io.
I read a lot of books this year, a lot that were great. But the one that gave me a stronger impression in my real life and the future of it is Accelerando, from Charles Stross (you can read it here http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... or buy it from amazon).

The always increasing rate of change in technology, from a close and foreseable future to a not so far away but almost not recognizable one made me rethink how fast are things changing now, and how much they will change pretty soon. Probably we won't get "there", but got the impression that a lot will change the next 1, 5 and 10 years.
Looks like I get to be the first one to throw out a fiction book:

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.
Did you even read the article? The entire point made is that not everyone has the opportunity to do college straight out of high school for any number of reasons, and those students, often without strong life/career/academic guidance, don't succeed in the current community college systems. The author examines the success of a new system with a strong emphasis on advising, guidance, and providing poor students the things they need - book loans, money, etc. - so they can effectively succeed at a CC.

> Like pretty much everything else in life, you will get out what you put in.

This is exactly the kind of idea the article is largely running counter to. Putting in the time and the effort isn't going to take you as far as you need to go if you have to figure out everything yourself from scratch; if you have no idea what to major in, or how to pick a major, or what majors are worthwhile; or if you have to take care of a kid, or work a job, and take remedial classes at the same time; if you don't have peers you can turn to that can provide good advice...

Kids from the burbs grow up with certain skills and attitudes and approaches indoctrinated into them from the start, and the "do everything yourself" approach may work for them because they have that prior grounding. That doesn't mean it will work for everyone.
Since mega- and giga- haf well-established meanings as prefixes to measures, and the original common usages of MB and GB were inconsistent with those meanings, I prefer MiB and GiB for those uses, even though it took marketers using the correct versions for devious reasons to get terms popularized that distinguished the base-2 prefixes from the close-but-not-the-same base-10 prefixes.
>"the full feature set of C++ doesn't necessarily make sense, but having it available when I want it is really valuable to me"

Exactly my point. In C++ you have all those tools available and you won't pay for them until you start using them.
Gotta love US and its inverse racism. "White girls code" would be persecuted like KKK is back in business, but "Black girls code" is all good. That's not right.
AntiFragile - Nassim Taleb
Yep, racism goes both ways.
The Jobs bio was a great read, I really enjoyed it. I'm currently reading Jim Henson's bio. It's really interesting how both of them accomplished a lot and had a lot of incredible influence within their domains, but in completely different ways. Jobs was demanding and a tyrant, where Henson was gentle and compassionate. It's interesting to see where these traits worked and didn't work for each of them.
It looks like you have a very narrow perspective on C#.

I've never tried running .net on a non-windows platform, so I can't comment in that space. I'll leave that to someone else.

As someone who's built bespoke big data applications, scientific computing (if we're both talking about large scale computation for analytics), desktop applications, server applications/services, and web sites (one of which is within the US top 150 on alexa) in c#; I'll have to disagree that anyone working in the language is stuck with LoB applications and ETL tools.
Fooled By Randomness
And laptop screens are not exactly readable in bright sunlight.
I am a member of Geekdom in San Francisco and they just hosted an event there recently. It appeared to be an alive and vibrant organization from what I saw. Great turnout too. Prior to that event I had no idea Black Girls Code existed. Thanks for bringing this to Hacker News for people to see.

Here is a video of Rackspace S.F. showing their support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08Kv1Q2noU4
I remember way back when, how 3ds max was something like 600 megs and blender could fit onto a floppy disk. Some really amazing stuff. Now blender seems to be 60 megs, but I imagine comparative things like maya are probably far in the gigabytes now