skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Down vote me for being glib but this article is just too long.
Your cleanup argument holds true for C and its ilk, but not for anything else. In C you DO have to do manual cleanup, but in any language with exceptions you can (and should) do that in a finally block. Or in C++, via one of the many scope-aware smart pointer classes. In higher level languages, it is idiomatically correct to have many exit points from a function.

As for being harder to debug... it depends. Again, if you MUST do manual resource deallocation, then I can see your case. Having duplicated cleanup code inside the control flow gets old fast. But if you've got exceptions, then such a rule leads very quickly to unnecessarily deep, convoluted control structures. I've flattened many such structures by a) factoring chunks out to separate functions and b) returning early when appropriate.

It is very common for a function/method to either throw an exception or return a default value based on some parameter. In these cases, it's pound-you-in-the-face clear to have a list of "if(check) return whatever;" clauses at the top. If you do this before resource allocation, you don't even need to worry about cleanup. This feels like a much "purer" way to write a function to me, almost like applying pattern matching before falling back to imperative mode.
I think you should make it way more obvious than this is "unpublished". Even after reading you saying it here, looking back at the page it took me several seconds to notice "homoiconic / dumping_ground / nobody_cares.md", which is the only clue that this isn't meant for general circulation.

You can't expect thousands of potential visitors automagically guessing the context of a post.
Pull upon
The services menu is an old NeXTstep feature that was half-heartedly carried over to MacOS X. (One aspect that was not carried forward: the services menu in NeXTstep appeared in the contextual menu that would pop up when right-clicking on something...no digging around through nested submenus.) In Snow Leopard, they revamped things so that only the relevant services show in a given context, and I think they gave the ability to assign keybindings to them, and put the back in the contextual menu where they belong.
That's really impressive. I'd interview anyone who showed such initiative. It's so common to interview "developers" who don't seem like they have any interest or passion about their work.
I've seen this happen to every other social news site. And I don't see anything inherent in the HN design that would prevent it from happening. Sadly I think this is just how these things go.
So basically this guy has come face to face with the world his generation built for my generation? With 2 or 3 years and that much free time he'd better start thinking like people like me if he wants to survive. Somewhere there is a very tiny violin playing a sad tune. He'll get no sympathy from the people making hay with the kind of money and time he has on his hands.
My crystal ball only goes so far out. But in the next five or ten years, I'd be quite surprised if Congress passes a plan that produces a very significant positive impact.

The core problem is that any policy that actually improves healthcare will by definition result in far lower healthcare spending. That means lots of doctors, nurses, insurance companies, etc will lose money and jobs. In a Congressional system, determined, concentrated factions will always beat the public as a whole. Very few people will vote out their own Congressman if healthcare reform fails. But if it succeeds, and results in cutting healthcare spending, then many nurses and doctors will switch their vote and stop donating money. Read "Government's End" by Jon Rauch. I interned on Capitol Hill, and his take on the problem is one of the most accurate - http://www.amazon.com/Governments-End-Jon-Rauch/dp/189162049...
I have no problems with the performance of SuddenLink, however I do absolutely hate their "helpful" redirects of domain typos to crap pages.
HN on the weekends is like a vision of the future HN on every day. It will be filled with general interested articles like this.
It's a very, "for want of a nail," sort of story.

I wonder how many things in life end up being like this. Of course, I suppose you could take the anthropomorphic viewpoint, but I'm not fond of that.
Fridge Magnets
Quality promotional fridge magnets, logo magnets, badges and name bars designed and delivered Australia wide, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide - 30 years in the business.
I've lived in DC suburb, tried a startup, but had a major problem finding like-minded entrepreneurs in the area. There are many high-tech folks there, but they don't want to take any risks starting or joining a startup. I have moved to the Silicon Valley in 2007 (used to be in SV from 2000 to 2004), and every other person I meet wants to do something on their own. The drive, desire, and willingness of people are just different between two regions.

I found this which might help.... http://techcocktail.com/home/
You're reading way too far into the content of my post. Keep It Simple.
Yes, this sounds like an occasion for social optimization rather than technical. See whether you and your friends can agree to a schedule that leaves you with a good block of uninterrupted time. Perhaps they would prefer to do things in the afternoon, leaving you the mornings free. Or they may be earlybirds, leaving you the evenings. This latter might be hard, though, as your work time would come at the end of the day and you might be tapped out.

Another recommendation might be meditation, rather than additional overt effort. It would take practice, but 5 to 10 minutes of quieting the mind might allow the context you want regain to emerge more quickly. I'm not too experienced in this personally, however, although I do find lost context returning to me once my physical environment quietens.
You'd be right, of course, but the original article concedes this point. He's talking about situations like

if (a < b)
return a
return b

vs.

if (a < b)
return a
else
return b

vs

return ( (a < b) ? a : b)
You grasped the concept that I was trying to convey, right on.
Guard clauses are a particular case of if statements. I agree with omitting elses when using guard clauses. A blanket rule that eliminates elses after returns doesn't make any sense.
Some clarifications:

1. We only used code from the guy who won, and he never saw the other submissions.

2. The interview project was time boxed to 24 hours. The guy who won did it in about 9 hours.

The actual feature is big, and has lots of edge cases: our devices need to be able to update themselves when new versions become available, roll back if there's an error, archive past versions, and never, ever end up in a state where they're bricked. The applicants did a small toy implementation of this functionality. The guy who won wrote good enough initial code to be used as a foundation for the rest.
Asking this question is ignoring equally significant advances in human history. The invention of the computer is basically dependent on the invention of agriculture, if you go far enough back. Most people don't seriously contemplate if we are perhaps too dependent on agriculture and what it would be like to go back to being hunter-gatherers, though I've met at least that did. Also, the idea of all our technology ceasing to work is about as unlikely as all our agriculture ceasing to work.

I'm not saying it's bad to ask these questions. It's not. It's good to ask them. But we need to keep in mind the broader context.

(Some other inventions to consider: the steam and later internal combustion engine, the electrical generator on which all modern technology depends and the related battery, the printing press, pasteurization... the list goes on.)
For a Quick Exit, Just Block the Fire Door
I prefer to return as early as possible and I dislike unnecessary else clauses. And unnecessary braces. I especially hate really long functions where there's only one return but a bunch of baggage and nested conditionals along the way to pull it off. Like mullr said, only handy if your language doesn't support guards.

Most of the people who code this way that I've met don't do it b/c they're trying to be 'pure.' Most of them say it was coding standard some manager mentioned somewhere else long ago and now they just do it w/o thinking.
Yes, you are. He didn't know this was going to hit him. Just imagine the psychological impact of having everything you know change, and basically being told that 30 years of experience is worthless. How many years of savings do you really expect someone to have?
It's quite likely, as others have pointed out, that you're interpreting the exchange a little too literally.
Gruber's retort is quite weak though, not so much because it's mean-spirited or logically flawed - it's just not nearly as well-written and amusing as the original. This outcome should have been obvious to Gruber - Lyons writes a popular humor blog, Gruber does not. Trying to respond in kind, however good naturedly, ends up simply restating that well-known fact.
I don't know about testing continuously throughout the day, but you can do on-demand tests at speedtest.net or dslreports.com

I have cox and it's hit or miss, depending on the day.
No it's not

http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
Are you suggesting that it's full of security holes?
Applying science to things most people don't even think about = awesome.
The Limits of Quantum Computers by Scott Aaronson [pdf]
He's suggesting he is a good C++ coder.
I don't know if I'm a 'superstar', though I don't particularly favor the term, but I'll offer my own view on the onerous hiring process.

I won't do it. That is to say, I won't do it for just any company. I try to determine if a company has their act together by interviewing them back. I don't mind (and expect) some degree of white board coding or something, but there's a level of nuttiness that isn't worth my time for a company that maybe would be good, maybe not. If it's 'just a job' I have other options.

You can get away with more onerous hiring barriers if you pay a better salary or are otherwise a more attractive candidate (top reputation, etc) for employment. If you really are getting much better hires, you should be able to pay better I suppose. I think paying for code samples, or contracting for a few hours of work, etc, are also more respectful ways to get work from a non-employee and signals to the candidate that you're serious and they're at the final step.
In The Salmon of Doubt (I think), there's a transcript of a talk that the staunchly atheist Douglas Adams gave, and one of the things he mentions is the concept of Feng Shui, which he explains as the notion that the contents of your house should be arranged such that a Chinese dragon would be able to walk through it without scraping itself on corners or getting stuck in dead-ends. Clearly, to a rational scientific mind, the idea that your belongings should be organised for the benefit of magic invisible dragons is ridiculous.

And yet... there's no doubt that some particular furniture layouts are more convenient or more aesthetically pleasing than others, and without a rigorous, mathematical function for deciding the optimum layout, perhaps the metaphor of a dragon walking around the house is a useful one - that is, it's not true in a scientific sense, but it's a concept that turns a relatively abstract and complicated problem-space into something concrete enough for the human mind to grapple with.

I take this notion of "daemons" or "geniuses" to be something similar - it certainly doesn't pass Occam's Razor, but in this case we're not looking to discern Ultimate Truth. We just want to find a way of looking at the world that defuses the complex and oppressively powerful psychological feedback-loops that seem to be associated with creative vocations.
Now if only I could get my mic to work with Linux.
The ternary operator is perfectly readable if you spend even the slightest amount of time getting used to it.

I like spacing my parens too, but what you wrote isn't as readable to me as:

( (y > x) || (x < 10) )

Spacing inside your terminal pair of parens only makes your atomic expressions harder to read.

I also like multiline expressions:

if ( (x == 10) ||
(y == 10) ||
(x > y) )
{
.....
}
Yuueurrgh.

Without early return, you wind up with multiple-nested if statements that make the code absolutely unreadable. Early return is almost always used as the error path -- if you need to perform cleanup, then instead of returning, use goto to jump to a single end-of-function cleanup handler.

There's nothing wrong with using goto for this purpose, and it means I can actually read -- at a glance -- code that requires more than a few preconditions at the start of the function.
That's true, and I do use that approach ("RAII") in languages like C++. It definitely makes cleanup less of a problem. It also means that setup should be done no earlier than necessary, declaring variables very close to their first use (otherwise, a setup/cleanup cost may be paid for no reason).

Exceptions act like early returns themselves, but I will use them for truly exceptional cases (only). In other words, if a function can return 3 values, I consider those the "normal" cases that should weave through to the end of the function; if the function runs out of memory, I think that's an exceptional case that can return immediately.
I don't think many people want to buy insurance whose maximum possible payout comes down to a couple of hundred bucks. People generally only insure against risks which they can't afford.
What is the distinction between those two situations? (i.e. those in which the article "concedes the point"?)
Maybe. Even if Fake Steve is a character, Dan Lyons wrote the words. If he wasn't prepared to take some flack back, he shouldn't have started Fake Steve in the first place. I'm willing to bet both writers are fine with the exchange, possibly even amused by each other. Frankly, we'd all be lucky to be roasted by either one of these guys someday.
We have held to ideals created long ago, in different times and places, the very best ideals we could find. We have carried these banners unstained to this new place, we now plant them and hope to see them floating in the wind. But it is dark and quiet and lonely here, and not yet dawn.

I'll drink to that.
A few suggestions (hardly comprehensive):

Less is more, in terms of luggage.

If you have a U.S. type fashion sense (if you are Canadian, hopefully living under the maple leaf has provided some protection ;-), realize that the rest of the world tends to dress a bit "better". Not necessarily expensively, but e.g. slacks, a shirt with a collar, and leather shoes rather than jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. Although this may have changed in the last 10 or 20 years. I don't say this by way of worrying about appearance for its own sake, but rather just as a matter of better fitting in and not standing out quite as much. If you can afford to and will be in an area long enough to warrant, have someone help you pick out a few local wardrobe items.

Listen to local music to help train your ear (of whatever genre, but preferably with some lyrics). Even if you never master the language, you'll have a better feel for it. Ask people to explain the songs to you.

Have a reliable contact to check in with. Someone not too uptight, but who is capable and who can and will get the ball rolling if you need some sort of bailing out or rescue. Not that that's likely, but having arrangements in place may help you rest easier. In less secure areas, it may be worth registering with your government's local consulate.

Drop us a line now and then and tell us how it's going.
Information about Chat Rooms
Functions that have become too complicated should look ugly, so that they're likely to be split into simpler parts (for true readability).

When making that split, it is also helpful to have relevant cleanup code nearby: odds are everything is already in the inner block, instead of having to remove extra code at the end of the function.
Perhaps it would be difficult to understand what she is talking about if you had never experienced similar personal dilemmas...
Depression is very much a malfunction. When I was depressed, I wasn't functioning, and now that I take drugs every day to control it (over-the-counter drugs, btw), I function quite well.

What is true is that being just shy of depression is probably adaptive and beneficial, which is why there are many examples of brilliant people who spent part of their lives depressed. It also explains why genes "for depression" haven't been selected out of the gene pool - it is likely that they are beneficial for the majority of carriers (makes you work harder, you're less satisfied with what you have, etc...) but if you have too many of these genes, then you just hate life and want to kill yourself, at least sometimes.

BTW the Wikipedia article on depression is very good and has links to some relatively accessible journal articles on current thinking about depression.
because if they are at the same level, then the same level job goes to the Indian, because he can get paid half as much. When there is economic prosperity, noone really cares about immigrants because there are jobs aplenty for everyone, but when there is a down turn, people start wondering...why should we import 100,000 people who are not better than the thousands of our own unemployed people.

The geniuses are welcome, it's the lesser skilled people, who are imported solely to drive down wages and take jobs away from Americans that people have problems with.

Who said they are more skilled? You ever read code written by someone on an H1B?

Because they aren't producing great stuff, most programming jobs aren't at Google, they are at places where you maintain some crappy code written 10 years ago. This mundane crap can be worked on by the thousands of American programmers that are unemployed, because they aren't willing to work for $40K/yr like their H1B counterparts
Spring 3.0 – The Next Generation
Jill Taylor's talk is awesome, I agree.

I'm not sure how to explain. Genius is a topic that can't be black and white, and can be debated/discussed all day. The part about being a mule etc, struck a chord.

I read her book, it was good, though I wouldn't say its the best travel/autobiographical book I've read. "Travels" by Michael Crichton is very very good, he was a great guy and had traveled to many places. He was trained to be a doctor, but his heart was into writing, he talks about that a lot. You could take a look at 'eat pray love' (though I'd recommend Crichton's book if you have to choose), to get a background on her, as a person.

In short, I don't know how to explain, I just happen to agree with her thoughts on the subject, and really enjoyed the talk.
Agreed, more editing does not eaqual more quality, or vice versa. This leveling off (or even contraction) may be a normal stage in the maturity of Wikipedia.

A bigger problem, I think, is that many articles reach a high level of quality, and then suffer a succession of edits that clutter up or otherwise reduce the quality of the article. Wikipedia needs a way to fight this article entropy.
You could be right. Maybe Lyons get together every Thursday at a bar and rib each other over who had the harsher blog post while they sip on Deus Brut Des Flandres. Maybe they have pet names for each other’s kids, and give them noogies at get-togethers.

Maybe it is all fun and games, but they don’t write about that stuff on their blogs so it’s impossible to tell. From my point of view Gruber’s reply doesn’t read as friendly or jocular. Lyons calls Gruber a egotistical, obnoxious fanboy and jokes that Apple hatched a wide-reaching conspiracy just to trick him into a journalistic mistake. Fair enough.

Gruber “jokes” that Lyons writes limp, insincere, watered-down articles for a failing magazine. Maybe Gruber misjudged his tone, but ouch. I’d be hurt if Gruber wrote that about me. I’d be hurt if a _friend_ wrote that about me.
What OTC drugs are there for depression?
Creation/Evolution
The TED talk mentioned reminds me of "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Hamming asserts that people who have done great work fail to "plant acorns." They chase another great revelation instead of stepping back to the fundamental level where they started, and spend the rest of their life only working on great problems, not useful subproblems. I see no reason an artist's success would be different.
I came out of this article with a new respect for John Walker of Autodesk. Here's his take on the collision of architecture astronauts and waterfall project planning:

John Walker, Xanadu's most powerful protector, later wrote that during the Autodesk years, the Xanadu team had "hyper-warped into the techno-hubris zone." Walker marveled at the programmers' apparent belief that they could create "in its entirety, a system that can store all the information in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over billions of years." Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.

"When this process fails," wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, "and it always does, that doesn't seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It's always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc. - precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place."

http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_108.html continues with:

Absolutely the only way I know to succeed with an innovative product is to throw something together quickly, push it out the door, persuade some lunatic early-adopters to start using it, and then rapidly evolve it on a quick turnaround cycle based on market acceptance and driven by a wish list from actual users.
The only issue I can see here is people not understanding the science of it, And only having it make them more anxious or induce panic at not being able to easily get to the exit.
Who's the ultimate?
Here in Sweden some government agencies and a foundation (who also handles the TLD) developed a program called tptest, which measures your speed against a server: http://tptest.sourceforge.net/
http://opensource.iis.se/trac/bbk/browser/trunk

Now there is also a flash application available (but probably not foss) http://www.bredbandskollen.se/ and commercial uptime monitors like http://www.pingdom.com
According to the CDC, rapid influenza tests have unknown specificity and sensitivity to distinguish between novel influenza A (H1N1), commonly known as swine flu, and typical seasonal influenza A. The only way to tell is through isolation and full viral culture, which can take up to 5 days.

If President Uribe just noticed symptoms on Friday, it is not likely he could have a confirmed H1N1 diagnosis by Sunday.

Having just been misdiagnosed with swine flu, I think it's possibly a misdiagnosis. Here is the CDC's take on interpreting rapid test results:

"Currently, novel influenza A (H1N1) virus will test positive for influenza A and negative for H1 and H3 by real-time RT-PCR. If reactivity of real-time RT-PCR for influenza A is strong (e.g. Ct <30) it is more suggestive of a novel influenza A (H1N1) virus" (http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/specimencollection.htm)

Doesn't sound very definite to me.
Then let's figure out a way to solve this inherent problem of social news sites. We're hackers, we can brainstorm and come up with some ideas.
Funny how I only even think of Bing when I come across a reference on ycombinator, Then forget about it all over again.

His biggest issue is that 90% of people have Google as their homepage, I don't even think about it when it opens anymore, Its just always there as I need it.
"John Walker -- November 5, 1993"

Yes, this is almost 16 years old. It gratified my intellectual curiosity, and I hope it suits yours.