skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relying on the IDE to know which exceptions can be thrown is nicer I think.

The .NET pattern of inner exceptions is nice too (relevant to the article's example, you could throw an NHibernateException(inner exception:SQLForeignKeyViolatedException)).

It's nice I guess from a certainty and stability standpoint in Java to know that you won't have an exception crash your system, but even then you aren't going to be sure because some exceptions do crash your system because they aren't checked (e.g. null pointer, array index etc.).

In my opinion Java is a dead language anyway. The language's bloat (exceesive boiler-plate required for everything), lack of high-level functionality and general approach to boxing in the programmer mean that new programmers don't want to use it (most will learn it though).

The slow initialisation time (JVM problem) and lack of native interfaces (despite the work done here) mean that companies don't want to use it for customer products.

For internal apps, I'd wager that the company just wants something that most people know and that is quick to develop in, and while Java has some ground here I think other languages will be making strong headway too, especially when you have some control on the deployment platforms.

Java just strikes me as dissapointing now. It is probably single-handedly responsible for us getting over the fear of automatic memory management and GC. Similarly it's had massive influences on virtual machines and easy cross-platform deployment. Just about every CS student in the world knows Java. But right now it has failed to innovate with the resurgent popularity for language functionality, address the issue of bloat or develop on the issues that discourage people actually using it for cross-platform deployment.

In the mobile sector it's pretty strong, but Objective-C/iPhone will probably hurt that, and it's only strong because of the JVM's portability. On the web it had the potential to take out flash, but the incredible load time and associated lag of the JVM initialising has killed that chance.

Overall, Java is only afloat because it is too big to sink.
Still, I'd love to get a job using Common Lisp, which I haven't really touched since I studied. Why can't I do that?

I pay my bills writing Common Lisp code, full time. The fact that you're not an employed Lisper is your own fault, IMO, it takes guts to look someone in the eye and tell them their investment, in both time and money, is safe with you and your fringe programming language. It's allot of work, a lot of responsibility, and most certainly tons of fun.

Try it.

P.S. I am both lead developer and "CTO"; I have a team of web developers who consume my backend and architecture.
If you are interested in learning more about them, this is pretty much the best podcast on the Internet:

http://www.gnosticmedia.com/

And many of the talks on Pyschedelic Salon are also very good, especially the one by the Erowid founders which I submitted this morning, called The Role of Drug Geeks in Society, and also the talk by Dr. Andrew Weil.

Also check out some of the talks by Terence McKenna, the man was pretty much a living god:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c8an2XZ3MU
free vs paid is not the question i would be asking. I would be asking why? why use your service over another. Is it tailored for an industry? specific feature set?

Or are you just jumping on the trolley?
"They claim that eBay’s altering and misuse of their code could total to more than $75 million per day in damages, as each download of Skype is considered by them to be copyright infringement. If you do the math, that’s over $27 billion per year. How they came up with that extraordinary number we cannot even begin to comprehend."

I certainly don't know of any other industry that estimates damages based on each download.
I don't see how this is a useful replacement for just using Jajah, Skype, IM, or email.
Tailored for the same crowd 37signals appeals to - small to medium sized web savvy businesses and individuals.
Yes, exactly.

Occasionally, maybe 4-5 times a year, I get burned out on whatever current crazy startup idea I'm currently working on, and so I go looking for something different to do for a week or two.

I spend around 2 minutes looking on Elance, Rentacoder, etc, and immediately get discouraged (see above). Then, I spend some time looking at craigslist and maybe apply to 1 post in an evening's time (it's a lot of work getting your resume prepped to send). Then, a couple of days go by and I don't hear back from the one poster I applied to (I assume they are too swamped with awesome applicants to respond)...

So I go back to working on my project.
Is Java renaming better than Objective C renaming? I would imagine few people can answer that question with any authority.

Java/Mac programmers out there?
Money reduces loneliness and physical pain
Following trends: what to focus on
At present Chrome has 2.84% market share.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...
Your worries are unfounded. Release.

If it's great, you'll sell a lot of apps.
Valuing a business is like valuing a house. 1) If you have multiple buyers, you can usually sell for a higher price. 2) There are some features (add that new bathroom) which will increase the price you achieve, and 3) It's possible to overcapitalize on features that have less value than it costs to add them.

Revenue, and particularly the combination of profitability and cashflow positivity, is likely to attract more buyers, therefore increasing value 1).

But a business needs to do something to increase revenue. Twitter and Facebook are both aiming to do 2) ... and running the risk of doing 3).
I learned enough Lisp in 3 months to give up C++ completely. A year later it replaced Perl for me. I can wake up in the morning and do all computing within a single Lisp instance.
Diversity for its own sake doesn't seem that compelling: there was previously much more diversity in CPU architectures, and presumably there were valid "evolutionary" reasons for that changing (e.g. network effects WRT software support, economies of scale WRT building foundries).
CLIM is actually a GUI protocol; it has OpenGL, Cairo and Cocoa backends.
Fundamentally I want to be able to ask my programming language "what exceptions might propagate to here?" Having this ability allows me to make stronger claims that my program is correct, because then I can say that the only exceptions which can propagate to that point are of a type I have decided not to handle (like the filesystem being disconnected) and this can be a strong safety property.

I think Java has ruined checked exceptions for the rest of us, because this article makes good points and successfully knocks down Java's exception system. I don't think this invalidates the concept of checking one's exceptions, though!

What would I do instead? Since it's always the prerogative of the receiver of a possible exception to rethrow it uncheckedly, then why not allow the type system to promote (/demote) a checked exception to unchecked at the catchpoint, without requiring an actual catch block? Some system like that could reduce the syntax clutter which is the root of the author's beef.
Why would you verify it's existence? Just open it, you either get it or you don't. If you don't then catch the exception and do what you would have done if you'd have checked and it wasn't there. Honest question?
How did this get to #2 on HN? This guy is a known nutcase and a troll.
Have any of you tried it? I haven't played around with it, but it is supposed to be pretty good.
I am using Common Lisp to solve real problems (a distributed web app platform.) We should talk :-)
Condos Selection Guide
When we finally decide to invest in a condo, we will be faced with so many confusions with regard to the selection of the condos. Some of the best condos in Texas are Dallas condos, Houston condos Austin condos, Fort Worth condos and Victory Park condos. Pinning down the right condo to buy is always a time consume task. Here are few factors that will help you select the best Dallas condos or Houston condos in the shortest time possible.
No Firebug. No grease monkey. No Adblock plus. No delicious toolbar. Etc etc. (And too minimalistic for my tastes.)
i'm anxious to see hammer stabilize and get ported to other operating systems.
Maybe it pays to be a nut in this business, especially now that the computer industry is looking for an effective solution to the parallel programming problem. Being nutty helps you see things that normal folks can't see.
Yes - I have (correctable) Myopia. Anything more than about 20' out starts to get blurry. But, I run Terminal.App on my 17" MBP (1920x1200) resolution at Courier 10 point with zero eye strain. That lets me stack up Three (3) 80x24 Terminals on the right side of my LCD and use up only about 15-20% of my horizontal width .

I don't drive, so the distance vision doesn't make much of a difference, but for someone who works in front of an LCD for 12+ hours a day, being able to fully utilize my LCD is a major bonus - I wouldn't trade that for being able to see stuff 20' out.
The goals of Dragonfly have been so interesting, but I hope this isn't another HURD situation (where HURD is also a really awesome project that progresses in babysteps).
Relying on the IDE to know which exceptions can be thrown is nicer I think.

No. If you can't remember what it throws, you can't remember the documentation. If you can't remember the documentation, you don't fully know how to use it properly. Go read the documentation; IDEs are a crutch.

EDIT: I'm completely serious. http://docs.python.org/library/ and help() are my best friends, in that order.
Six years later and I'm still glad to be done with 251. Sorry you missed out on Rudich's magic tricks though.
I preferred Codeswarm; it better depicted what was getting edited a lot, and also general edit volume over time. If Grouce could add these things (or if Codewarm could make it clearer would was performing edits) that would be awesome.
Video On Demand, DVD & Toy Superstore
it's Lisp syntax that drives the JVM

See, this wouldn't bother me so much if it assumed the user knew the JVM instruction set and built up abstractions around it. But no, that's not what it does. It creates another "language", meaning "obscuring abstraction" that isn't friendly to inspection.
Alternate headline: It's good to be king.
Why use my service..?

Well it's more targeted to users of google apps with specific integration for that market.

It will also be quite different from the look and feel of 37signals apps. They have a nice feature set for sure but there is definitely some gaps in functionality in several of their apps which I think others could address...
Data Mining Community's Top Resource
Time for slutty domain registrars and confusing DNS hosts to die in a fire
The footnote is funny,

"""

This site is optimized for Lynx just because fuck you.

I’m told it also looks good in graphical browsers.

"""
I should expand upon my comment. Anyone who claims that, "I will argue further that moving to a signal-based, synchronous software model will not only result in an improvement of several orders of magnitude in productivity, but also in programs that are guaranteed free of defects, regardless of their complexity" is not to be taken seriously.

Anyone who is really interested in this model of computation would be far better off reading this: http://jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/

At least J. Paul Morrison doesn't claim that his approach is infallible. Indeed he goes to some length to point out the troublesome areas and techniques to address them.

The author of the OP, Louis Savain, has some other strange ideas also: http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2008/01/laugh_along_wi...
If copycat apps could succeed, there would be millions of Twitter and facebook clones since it is not that hard to duplicate their technology.

What make 37 signals successful are not just their app, but their brilliant marketing skills,well known blogs and fantastic designs. These set of skills are not that easy to copy.
Can't get it to run in VirtualBox on an MBP.
While it may be optimal in most situations to duplicate the prior art of other applications with similar feature sets, it is definitely not something that should be easily decided upon. Keeping the mind open to alternative methods is crucial to the evolutionary progression of computer applications and many other matters in general. While replicating the prior art of other applications may be the safest route to ensure users understand how to use your product, it also limits the possible competitive advantages that may be discovered while developing your application. Some of the most innovative products and services come as a result of thinking outside the box and pursuing a rational risk for the sake of improving a certain difficulty consumers currently have.
can you shoot up a link to the CAP paradox?
Actual pictures of electron densities (orbitals)
This is a common problem that I have heard many folks describe with tools like PowerPoint and Word Processing software. People tend to putz around with formatting and layout and get distracted from the actual content.

This even goes back to tools as early as the hypertext tool Notecards. I remember they had a qualitative study where they found that people got really sidetracked trying to think of the name for a Notecard. I think the title of the paper with the study was "Reflections on NoteCards: seven issues for the next generation of hypermedia systems". I can't seem to find an electronic copy online.

Anyway, I have found a similar thing with the naming in my own programming. It is very hard to break habits with stuff like this. For example, for writing tasks, I finally had to switch to something like Notepad to write the first draft so I wouldn't be tempted to muck with formatting, spell check, grammar check, etc.
Well, you obviously know what you're talking about.
I think knowing every exception a method can throw and knowing the method are different things. I want to be able to write code, while I'm in the zone and thinking about the business problem, not have to jump and navigate a web site for every method call.

And I didn't say you can't check the domentation from the IDE (through a nice context link) but I still think mouseover on a method that lists exceptions (as Visual Studio does) is the ideal solution as it gives me the information I need as I code.

NB: VS exception info is comment documentation based, I have no idea why the compiler doesn't generate this information as much as possible becuase then you are getting some of the advantage of checked exceptions without the cost.

As a counterpoint to knowing the documentation, consider the System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke method in .NET which I have in front of me, are you going to remember all these exceptions:

// Exceptions:
// System.Reflection.TargetException:
// The obj parameter is null and the method is not static. -or- The method
// is not declared or inherited by the class of obj. -or- A static constructor
// is invoked, and obj is neither null nor an instance of the class that declared
// the constructor.
//
// System.ArgumentException:
// The elements of the parameters array do not match the signature of the method
// or constructor reflected by this instance.
//
// System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException:
// The invoked method or constructor throws an exception.
//
// System.Reflection.TargetParameterCountException:
// The parameters array does not have the correct number of arguments.
//
// System.MethodAccessException:
// The caller does not have permission to execute the constructor.
//
// System.InvalidOperationException:
// The type that declares the method is an open generic type. That is, the System.Type.ContainsGenericParameters
// property returns true for the declaring type.
Great! Now I can get a "GOVERNMENT PROFESSIONAL EDITION - CALL C" for only $746.91 [1]. But seriously, the front page looks half-decent (ignoring the JPEG artifacts), but the rest of the site is like a very, very bad joke.

1. https://apps.gov/cloud/advantage/catalog/product_detail.do?B...
http://devblog.streamy.com/2009/08/24/cap-theorem/

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.20.1...

CAP is absolutely not a paradox; it is just a conjecture or a theorem.

As far as CAP and distributed databases, it is worth noting that a lot of distributed DBs don't actually need to be partition-tolerant.
This post triggers one of my major statistics peeves:

A rank order list without variance is meaningless. The differences between the categories are very small. They are most likely not statistically significant.
Not really. Most of the core devs run it on bare metal. So far, I've tried it on my custom built PC, a Dell Inspiron and a Toshiba Satellite. Works perfectly.
Yeah happiness isn't something (in my short experience) that comes with the early days of starting a business/being self-employed.

Perhaps once you are established and successful sure, but until then.
Better than an exposition with no raw data at least.
Also works for PCL to HP printers - If you're on a windows network you can simply open the printer "//server/xyz" and send the PCL through.

Many years ago I used this to print documents from a Java backend (which didn't support printing without a GUI+Print Dialog)... Manually generated the PCL. Bit of a hack, but did the trick.
Goodbye AT&T Voicemail, Hello Google Voicemail
Causes of anxiety attacks
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Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared the way for Jobs's second coming at Apple. How different the tech world would be today if Gassée had said yes to Apple's initial acquisition offer. I wonder how often he thinks about the breakdown of that deal, lo these many years later.
Hacker News After Dark: crackpots welcome.
I would also add tree style tab.
Clojure catches all exceptions from Java methods, rethrowing them as runtime exceptions. In other words, it gets rid of checked exceptions. (It has to, if you think about it.)

No type system support... but no catch block, either.
This is alright, but not much better than spam control from 2000 which is silly because unlike spam, Facebook knows what updates come from third-party apps...

...there should just be an "off" button
The Instruction Set Architecture (e.g. x86) is pretty independent from the chip architecture nowadays.

Whilst this was a definitely trend over time, and there are earlier examples, AMD pretty much nailed it when they bolted x86 onto a RISC core.
if it were my product I would make it for a specific industry with features that match that industries need.

- music venues - promotional tools, scheduling, checklist, subcontractor communication, etc

- restaurants - recipes, scheduling, new hire forms, inventory etc

these are just off the top of my head

look at a smaller group but you could justify a higher price..

ps there is software for larger restaurants that cost 100k that is good but the cheap stuff stinks, additionally construction online accounting software is led by a company from deerfield il (suburb of Chicago) the name escapes me right now
Agreed. I wouldn't even attempt to copy them and would not consider this a copycat app. I only use them as a shining example of well marketed/executed office productivity apps, a large space in which I intend to play in.

I just wonder if they would have been more successful with a different revenue model...
at least it will give new shops something to start from instead of writing their own. +1 for google.
IE8 does one step further. It colorizes related tabs.
You could use RuntimeException as a superclass for your exceptions, or wrap checked exceptions in a RuntimeException. I'll often rethrow exceptions this way when I have to deal with something horribly wrong (like I/O or UI meltdown, etc.) in a place where I have to deal with the checked exception.. This is handled gracefully in the Eclipse workbench as a popup though, YMMV.

I would only recommend this as a last ditch effort to appease the Java compiler though, not an acceptable way to handle a common failure mode.

As a side note, does anyone else find the pattern (well, I would say headache) of dealing with checked exceptions similar to working with the IO monad in Haskell?
Ask HN: how do you regression test your web apps?
In working on Skulpt (.org) I'm growing a decent sized JavaScript code base. I have reasonable test coverage running on d8 (the V8 debug shell) and can run the tests quickly (< 10s) from the command line.

There's a minimal amount of DOM stuff in demo code that's entirely untested, and more importantly for this project, various levels of support and quirks in the browsers' JavaScript implementations that affects the core code.

Assuming a Linux dev environment (though I've got at least 4 XP licenses for VMs if necessary), my question:

How can I set up an unattended process (i.e. one command) that can reliably and quickly tell me whether everything's working on ie7, ie8, ff2, ff3, safari3, safari4, opera9, opera10, and chrome? (x OSs as appropriate)
The problem is that the apple version doesn't say "Microsoft" at the top.

I know, this is a stupid joke, but I'm only half kidding. A coworker stormed into my office today livid because he needed microsoft office, not open office.

"It's free! It's SHIT!", he screamed while throwing his hands into the air.

I walked into his department and had him show me, on one of the other machines (which had MS office installed) what he was trying to do.

I then walked over to his machine and pressed LITERALLY the exact same series of menus and buttons to get EXACTLY the same result. (it was excel vs OO.o calc).

He had never even tried.

Perhaps I should start lying to my users and telling them that Open Office costs $1000 per seat. I bet they would beg me for it then.

As far as mail clients go. Get thunderbird and stop even thinking about the fact that you're using a mail client.
Good question. That 1min 50sec was actually a cut down version of the full keynote, which ran for 2min 12 sec.
CloudKick.com account takeover.
Lisp and Games
Does it also pay to think Revelations contains secret truths about biology/physics and that almost all the great physicists of the 20th century were crackpots?
http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/nasty.htm
who thought covering half the screen was a good idea?
I wasn't trying to be cool, I was answering his question in a straight forward and honest manner. Other people seem to be more interested in trying to blow smoke up his ass talking about interesting problem domains and how money doesn't matter.
The fact that he holds hardware design up as some sort of perfect ideal makes me suspicious. The fact that he's advocating a visual programming language makes me more suspicious. Not only is typing much faster than clicking and dragging, but you can't search.

Even worse is his hatred for the phrase "no silver bullet". When people say that, they aren't saying that writing good software is impossible, they're saying that there is no substitute for working hard and paying attention to what you're doing, that mechanically copying strategies, processes, tools, etc., is not a panacea.

"But he acknowledges that, he's saying that it restricts the scope of improvements to evolutionary ones." No he's not, he's misunderstanding the problem. The problem isn't how to make reliable software, it's how to best understand a problem and describe a solution. That is going to be hard and error prone forever, just go ask a hardware designer.
Google Homepage Redesign