skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the problem is that NULL is used to convey meaning. e.g. "login" returns NULL if the user isn't logged in.

So NULL can mean dozens of things. You can return something more valid (e.g. "Guest", or even "NotApplicable"), but doesn't get rid of the checks... Can result in more readable code though.

This is a good reference too:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billi...
Edit: Plus there is a discussion on this talk here: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3186
TVS to Launch 100cc Bike & Scooter in India Soon
Very nice. I think my girlfriend of two years is catching on, although I could easily see her making the KGB/KVM mistake... and it being useful because I'd forgotten about it. :)
Asain packing machinery
Asian Packing Machinery has in these few years developed a firm reputation as one of India's most reliable supplier & exporter of all type of packaging machinery & food processing plants viz. ketchup process plant, dates processing plant. Our stress is on delivering quality both in our product & in our service. Our growing list of blue-chip clients have favored us with their repeat business year after year.
Who will teach me to write/code? The page, the page, that eternal blankness...
URLs of great websites that you've previously been involved with.
I am half the way of SICP and I also have my hand on clojure. It would be a good experiment to solve the problems with clojure.
Academics is the least important thing to me. It's like having an "A+" certification - it doesn't mean a damn thing in terms of how smart you are or what you are truly capable of.
An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory - Vazirani and Kearns
I chose the one that seemed closer to vanilla OpenGL, because that's all I really wanted. I don't claim to be an expert, though. What would LWJGL give me that JOGL doesn't?
I haven't liked it as much as GEB. At times, it strikes me as too clever (puns and autobiographical digressions all over the place). It's definitely interesting and thought-provoking, though. With translation as its main topic (not so interesting to me), it explores lots of tangents (of more interest to me): syntax and semantics, medium and message, constraint and discovery, all with loads of interesting examples. Most of all, it's a book about words, for people who love words. The main thing I get out of it is an appreciation for just how sophisticated the verbal part of the human mind is.
Rereading How to Win Friends and Influence People (once again). That book never ages. May very well be the best book ever written. I'm guessing most of you have read it, but if you haven't, I urge you to order it right away! It will be your best purchase in a long time.

Also just finished Genome (http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-Chapters-...). Good read, but there are better books in the category.
They are targeted at different ages(at least that is how I interpret them). My 18 month old and 3 year old both love Word World and Super Why. I had expected my 3 year old to move on to something like Reading Rainbow in the near future, but it is too old for the 18 month old.
The best solution I've seen is a Maybe Monad.

The problem is that unless your language has support baked in (a la Haskell) the syntax has way too much overhead.

If you haven't played with Haskell, I thought this was a pretty good explanation: http://paulbarry.com/articles/2009/07/17/emulating-haskells-...
This sounds like bad advice to me. Doesn't this mean that the VP would be the sort of person who would do "anything" to close the deal? Including lying to the customer?

I've worked with such people before and it was not fun. I was stuck explaining to the customer why the product he bought doesn't do what the sales guy promised.

Call me naive, but I still believe that a sales person is someone who works with the customer to try and solve his problem with whatever he is selling.
I'm not an expert either, but a while back I spent over a year looking into the whole Java OpenGL gaming thing. I started out working with the Xith3D library and made some contributions to it, but soon it became painfully clear that the best 3D library for Java was jMonkeyEngine, and it used lwjgl.

Looking further into it I think I found that JOGL seemed to be a somewhat abandoned project (sortof like Java3D), and that the real action was with LWJGL/jMonkeyEngine. Both had a far larger and more active community, and LWJGL supported more OpenGL features, and LWJGL may have been faster than JOGL too, although again, you're bringing up a fairly old memories, so I can't say they're perfectly accurate, I may in fact be spewing nonsense.

I'd say take a look at both and compare.
It explains the mathematics describing drugs' passage into, through, and out of the body.

There are lots of books about pharmacokinetics, but this one is notable for being so clear, direct, precise, and readable. It explains the main causal factors, the not-so-obvious causal factors, the reasons behind peculiar notions in the field (e.g. a drug's "volume of distribution" might be much more than the volume of your body), and how to actually crunch the numbers. It doesn't just present results, it shows you the reasoning.

It's quite short, too: 170 pages. Nothing like those gigantic textbooks that say much less.
After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm
For some reason things with similar names land in the same hash bucket in my memory, and I say one when meaning the other. I usually catch myself about it, but man it's embarassing.
I fail to see the problem: A NPE is thrown if the code tries to access an object, but there's no object.Using a standard behavior here would conceal that there's a flaw in the program logic.
I play paintball every single weekend, although I always rent everything (including jacket). I even have a team I play on... but it's not a hobby since I don't buy the stuff on my own? Or does it only apply to biking and diving?
TuneUp Utilities 2009  Free Download
really? you'd rather that someone goes hungry than you having to download ie8?
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it further. The code that binds Penumbra to JOGL is pretty small, so it would be easy to swap something else in if it seems clearly superior.
I believe that with multipart-formdata encoding turned on, you could send your entire FTP exploit in one form variable, newlines and all, because they won't be escaped on the wire.
The incurable new Bay Area bachelor
Great! Thanks for considering it, and if it's that easy then Penumbra would be even more appealing for supporting both. I'm hoping to get back into the Java world through Clojure, so I'm very happy to see that a project like Penumbra is there!
Link for the interview?
That there is no object is the problem.
There is actually loads of sites out there, that duplicate the iphone functionality, when in mobile mode. There are other toolkits to make your web more iphone-like. It has its advantages and disadvantages. Most people don't even know what the different is between a web app and an iphone app, so I think it is a reasonably safe bet.
Me too. Finished up to 9 chapters.
Real World Haskell

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/
The God Delusion was the first Dawkins book I read -- a Christmas gift from my mother. When I told her what it was about, she got made and said "that's not in the spirit of Christmas."
I'm currently reading Infinite Jest along with the rest of the "Infinite Summer" crowd at http://infinitesummer.org. I love the book so far. Prior to this, I read "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" and when this summer reading group is over, I want to read Pynchon's newest novel "Inherent Vice" for some lighter fare.
Nulls are often used to signify that an object can't be returned for some reason, often not actually worth an exception. (Hence null is actually a valid result).
You have some sort of side projects that you've been working on. I've talked to people in start ups who say they won't even consider candidates who don't have this.
According to his benchmarks, compilation of C code (Pidgin at least) doesn't seem to benefit from SSD, even the 5400RPM drive performs the same.

SSD for developers is usually waste of money from technical POV, as the working set usually fits in the fs page cache.

30" IPS panels, OTOH, would be money well spent.
Skype Sale To Investor Group Led By Andreessen Horowitz Confirmed
In 2007 I was involved in a major automobile accident. I fractured my neck at C6-C7 and completely shattered my right leg just above the ankle. I broke both bones completely, resulting in having a rod and screws implanted in the bone.

It was 12 weeks with the neck brace on, and 14 weeks before I could walk unassisted with a cane. Full healing and recovery took even longer then that.

The first thing you need to realize is that you don't have to hack your body - based on your tech details the doctors have already done that for you. Welcome to the bionic club! The practice of medicine in general is akin to hacking - it either helps the body do something better, or coaxes it into doing something it wouldn't otherwise do.

Your diet should be as normal and healthy as it can be. You don't need to do anything special. If something was out of whack that you needed, it would probably be detected by now. I was low on potassium and sodium after my emergency surgery and they wouldn't let me leave until it was corrected. FYI - IV potassium burns :).

Your physical therapist can assist you with exercise. In general they'll want you to do a variety of things in the office and give you some exercises for daily homework. Do them! Your therapist should be able to put together some appropriate exercises if you want to go beyond the basics.

The most important thing for you right now is to be extremely comfortable with your doctors and physical therapist. You need to be able to tell them everything and anything without fear or embarrassment. Sometimes the best test a doctor can do is to ask what you are feeling, and pushing through the pain in PT doesn't make you a hero. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Be careful with painkillers. They are important, but they can be addictive. It might not be a bad idea to have someone keep an eye on the bottle and make sure you stay within the prescribed limits.

I'm not sure what devices you could use to watch yourself heal, but you can probably get your X-Rays and other test images on CD when they are taken. I've even got a bunch of physical X-Ray, CT and MRI films.

To help heal my leg, which broke in a spot at great risk for nonunion, they put me on an ultrasound bone healer. Nifty little gadget - I still have it!

http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/25/portable-bone-healing-sys...
"The difference in performance is because the Clojure code is targeting the GPU rather than the CPU."

In that case wouldn't a fairer comparison be between java code that targets the GPU and factor code that also targets the GPU.
Right now its seems that the only valid conclusions is code that targets the GPU is better than code that targets the CPU (for certain kinds of tasks).
You're right in that the credential doesn't mean much.

But what the candidate describes having done in academia is enormously expository -- what research did they do? with whom? did they publish? did they attempt substantial development projects? with a group of people? did they have jobs? did they teach?
Gordon Moore was 39 years old when he co-founded Intel, for example. Script kiddies these days.... they think all it takes is knowing how to write code. Oh, the arrogance of youth...
Sadly, that's not true. They do know lisp which has much better ways of dealing with nil. Lisp methods can even declare a nil handler function. Other languages allow defining special functions to handle null, it's not rocket science, but it would complicate java a lot to fix it now.
In my experience NPE is the most common java exception and a huge waste of programmer time.
Japan's DPJ landslide victory
early stage sales, or before sales was a repeatable process. The lean-startup-circle group talks a lot about this, join that group and search the archives.
Why do they they say it was such a bad deal? $900 million yearly on $3 billion seems quite good to me.

Edit: Er, $600, $900 was the writedown.
If you make Google Maps and Gmail, it's OK that you don't do fail whale/pillow throwing.
http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html
Every HN story you recently read; courtesy of your Web browser's history
Advice on Starting a Craft Business
Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America
your brain uses soundex instead of strcmp.
Strange. Nulls, as the author describes them, are incredibly useful. Being able to test for existence and branch accordingly saves us a ton of extra ".IsNull" properties that we'd otherwise need to tack on to every class so that we could tell whether we were looking at a real instance, or just a dummy that the compiler initialized without asking.

His 'solution' to the Null Pointer Exception trades that easy to identify and fix runtime error for an entire class of subtle logic errors that are pretty much guaranteed to arise when you have a bunch of improperly-initialized-yet-alive objects sprouting up every time you declare them.

No thank you.

My suggestion is to use an IDE that notices potential Null Pointer Exceptions for you and lets you know about them. VS.NET does this, as does every Java IDE worth its salt. This is simply not an issue if you use modern tools. Please don't go adding language features to "fix" a problem that went away ten years ago.
Psycho-Cybernetics
http://www.amazon.com/Psycho-Cybernetics-New-More-Living-Lif...

probably the best self-help book I've ever read.. Teaches a lot about how to think.
How to Upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard
I mentioned in the post that it wasn't an apples to apples comparison.

That being said, I think that ease of development is a more practical metric for comparison than the underlying methods. Clojure lends itself to translation into GLSL, which has useful vector functionality, so it ends up being simpler and more concise to target the GPU than it would be to write it in plain Clojure. You could certainly use the GPU in other languages and achieve equal or better performance, but in the vast majority of cases it would not be the path of least resistance.
I think that depends how transparent you are on your business practices. Running anything on a single server is dumb, but if you are one man shop running on EC2 and you are clear about that I don't think it's a big deal.

Explain what you do, and why it's good. Explain how you've thought about BCP and making sure everything will stay up (essential for a service).

Companies routinely hire individual consultants at $2k/day and follow their advice. I don't think that trusting a well respected individual in the industry is so much the problem, as trusting someone who's capability is unknown.

If you show the capabilities of you and your systems up front, without BS, then people will take you on for projects that are appropriate to that level of risk. Which may be quite as much as you can handle.
Why do you try to read from four books every day?
Fridge van conversions
I had the pleasure of working with John a few years ago in Boston. Very smart guy. A bit quirky, but aren't we all in some way? :-) His reviews have always been of special interest to me because he peers into the cracks that most reviewers don't even notice, must less explore.
I only read the first chapter of Malcolm X's autobiography before I lost my copy, but boy was it ever worth reading.

I think everyone should take an hour to sit down and read the first chapter, even if they don't like books.
I downloaded the Iris Browser which is based on webkit which was hard to find because Rim bought Torch Mobile and you can't download it from their site anymore. That may have been the last hope for a decent browser on Windows Mobile. Anyway, some of the features worked but it doesn't look as good as the video. Sometimes the back button didn't work and the About window wouldn't close. Mostly everything else worked but Page Flip. Keep up the good work.
Interesting and unusual books for a hacker. Can you give us a quick mini-review of what you think so far?
His name is mispelled as ‘Jesse Van Kuijk’, it's actually ‘Jesse van Kuijk’.
Hard to believe Apple wouldn't work with Adobe closely to make sure their CS product suite works with the OS before its release! You see kids, back in the day, Microsoft made sure the software of all their big software vendors where working with any new version of Windows before they released it: vendors got advance OS disks, and sometimes MS worked in close conjunction with them to make sure none of the API they depended on were broken.
" Clojure lends itself to translation into GLSL, "

How so more than factor? Factor (like Forth) is just a set of words and it is easy to conceive of a GLSL vocabulary for it(I use "vocabulary" in the Forth/Factor sense).

How is "10 sq 5 - ." (Factor/Forth) "less translatable" than "(- (square 10) 5)" [Clojure/lisp]?

" You could certainly use the GPU in other languages and achieve equal or better performance, but in the vast majority of cases it would not be the path of least resistance."

Well here we aren't talking of most cases ( :-) )but specifically Factor vs Clojure. I hope you take the time to explain why you think Clojure is superior to Factor in this respect (if that is the point you were making). Comparing metrics of languages compiling to different chips make little sense.

Comparing Clojure compiling to the GPU and Factor compiling to the CPU makes as much sense as comparing Clojure compiling to Intel and Factor comparing to something entirely different (say the ARM). Specific tasks will be faster on one or the other. So what? Two things differ(the language being compiled and the compiled to chip) making any "comparisons", at best dubious.
Similarly if you catch the Queen on one of her visits to schools, community centres, etc., you might very well be able to have a chat without being vetted.

It's only comparatively recently that letters, especially from a man to a woman, ceased to be signed "Your obedient servant." To this day business letters are signed "Yours faithfully". If you write that, do you really mean it? If you don't write that, you'll be considered an ignorant oik.

> I'm halfway convinced the only reason anyone still puts up with this shit is that Elizabeth in particular seems to be pretty cool.

Maybe, maybe not. It seems that you and most others are unaware that this is simply one miniscule example in an entire ocean of formal diplomatic and social protocol. Recently when giving a talk at one of the Livery companies in London there were similar forms to which one adhered.

In short, I think that the people who are pointing and laughing and saying it's stupid are those who don't actually know how it works and what it does. I'm not defending it or saying it's rational, I'm merely saying that looking in from the outside, you and others are speaking from a position of well-reasoned ignorance. I grew up in an informal country, similarly thinking that all this diplomatic protocol crap was an insult and a waste of time.

I was wrong.

Personally, I'm largely convinced that it's an unwillingness even to try to understand the historical and cultural reasons for this sort of "shit" that makes so many people in Europe so dismissive of so many Americans. I've lived in three different cultures and seen this in action. One culture looks at another not only with incomprehension, but an unwillingness to try to understand. The Europeans have a multitude of cultures on their doorstep, and many of them travel, so the situation isn't as bad. In the US there are cultural differences across the states, but nothing like the differences across the borders in Europe. As a consequence, it seems, people from the USA seem much less able to see, understand, and adapt to cultural differences.

Not all, of course, and perhaps not you. But think about it.

Hackers are historically reknowned for not accepting anything on faith, and thereby ensuring that while they manage to invent things no one else has thought of, they are equally constantly reinventing the wheel. That's changed a lot lately, but there is still an air of "If it's not done the way I think it should, then it's wrong." If you can accept that what someone else does actually works and has some benefits, even if you wouldn't do it like that, then you've taken a big step.

This is no longer Hacker News, but cultural differences exist in hacking, and understanding is always worth striving for.
Developers often do more than simply compile code. For example if I could cut the start up time of the app I'm developing in half that would be really quite nice indeed, even if compile times stay the same.
Is he really suggesting to replace all attempts to dereference null with no-ops? Weird.

I think there are two ways to deal with this. Either it is known at compile time that a particular variable must never be null. In that case the compiler should catch it like it does with C++ references.

If the decision is left until runtime, the only way to deal with it is to specify or compute a default value, which is very much complicated by the special cased 'this' parameter in OO languages.

It's kind of funny that basically everything Java has removed from C++ turns out to be important for a statically typed language. Java should have been a C++ virtual machine with garbage collection.
900m revenue or profit?

The article only mentioned Skype "is on track to take in more than $600 million in revenue this year."

If Skype is a low margin business than the profits might be very low. Given that they have such competitive pricing I can't imagine they have that high a margin.
Really? You took his comment literally? That's almost as unbelievable as the original claim. ;-)
In other words Microsoft kept crap that could have been refactored or implemented in a better way altogether, for the sole purpose of saving the likes of Adobe the "effort" to have to fix their dirty hacks. Given this helpful Microsoft attitude, one really wonders how did they get in the jam they are in today?
Me too. This book has taken me a long time to get through for some reason, but it's good, and I'm almost done :)
I almost never have null pointer exceptions. I adhere fairly strongly to Design By Contract, which means that I check for boundary conditions (null being the most comon) at method and constructor entry points and throw exceptions there and then. This means nulls are caught early rather than late (as parameters, rather than as state) and so the cause can be found right then and there.

NPE as a "problem" is vastly overrated. Just apply DBC wisely.
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Yehuda Katz about starting freelance career and being a happy person.
Ideas and Opinions - Albert Einstein
T-Mobile G2 Touch Unlocked
The HTC Hero is a rather striking handset, currently available in either white or graphite color schemes in the UK, with a characteristic ‘kink’ in its body, giving it a distinctive chin at the bottom. In the UK, the color you get depends on the network you choose. Orange UK are exclusively offering the graphite version, whereas T-Mobile UK are offering the white/silver version that we have, but are calling it the G2 Touch.
As far as I understand it, Factor has a regular grammar and macros, so I don't see any reason why it couldn't do exactly what I've done here with Clojure.

My comment above was referring more to Java, which is generally considered to be the apex of potential performance for Clojure, but which would completely incapable of something like this. I didn't mean to lump Factor and Java together, sorry for the imprecision.