skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dunno what broken ORMs everyone is using, but every one I've ever used has given me enough control to pretty much exactly control what SQL is going to be run. So I get good performance on the database side, while still being able to implement my object-oriented program with objects.

FWIW, I use DBIx::Class.

I also agree that ORMs are a bad fit for many programs. Most of the applications that people are writing don't need a relational database at all, as arbitrary queries wouldn't make much sense. In that case, you might as well use an object database -- then there is no querying and there is no impedance mismatch. The result is an app that runs fast and is fast to implement.
May I just say that article could have been written in 2 pages and still made its point (probably more effectively).

On the topic, I don’t believe in transparency for people who actually “do things” (as opposed to say reporters whose job is essentially advisory). Because I believe in judging results. I would no sooner micromanage my representatives than I would my employees. I know what I want from my elected officials and I expect them to deliver it or convince me to want something different from them. If they try to convince me to want something different I expect them to justify it to me and I’ll decide whether their justifications are sufficient.

So while I’d prefer they not take money to have an opinion I don’t really care either way because the decision to support what they believe in is with me. If they start taking non-sense opinions, either because of pay offs or simply because they’ve lost their minds, that’s when it becomes my responsibility to vote them out.
Yes... but Qt sounds like cutie when you say it.

Its a huge nitpick, sure- but witty just doesn't make any sense. A person has no chance of correctly pronouncing the name when reading "Wt" for the first time.
I always see internet news about how Google is trying to save expenses and be better for the environment by reducing electricity use and increasing efficiency.

This guy has obviously taken things a step further.
Is there something wrong with that link? It is only two minutes long for me.
I'll see how far the free model takes me. If the monthly server costs starts to take away a considerable chunk of my salary I'll probably consider taking payments from the most active users.

As you've alluded to this marked is swamped with competition. Usability, pricing, and features are the only attack vectors as I see it.
I don't love it. The users of such a site want to use your UI as rarely as possible, but be full of trust and understanding of what it's going to do for them.

Before I'm going to do anything, you need to tell me about the requests you're going to make (frequency, user-agent, robots, etc like other people have pointed out). Then I want to know about your own server's reliability. There are no clues at all that you'll be around even for a week. One way to improve this would be to offer an optional RSS feed that has a post every day that my site is up. That way I would know your server hasn't stopped completely, but you aren't blasting me with emails. Or just decorate your page in a way that makes me think you have some reason to keep your own system running.

I am using a free competitor (http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/Watchdog.do) which sends me periodic uptime reports. I don't remember their setup UI being any more difficult than yours. Maybe it was, but I certainly don't remember! That's the nature of this app-- people almost never interact with it. Clearly on aboutmyip, they have several other things going on that could pay the bills.
I send the following user agent sting: "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Wasitup monitoring;http://wasitup.com). Checking the robots.txt file on registration is on my TODO list.
very ambitious.

from what i get from the examples (see e.g. hello world [1]) and the wiki, it abstracts away all html, javascript and css. you can stay in C++ if you want.

i can imagine the html interface could work for a desktopy-application on a portable device, where the server is localhost.

but i can't image doing a web20-y app with this. the CSS/JS is hidden away so deep and both are moving targets with current browser affairs.

[1] http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt#/src/hello
It's a minor miracle, but for once I agree with you.

The ORM we use at massify (which is open sourced at http://heavyfuckingmetal.com) I've never run into the issues I've seen everyone bitching about in these gloomy, doomsday posts about ORMs. Our ORM even works seamlessly with NoSQL KV stores, as well as things like Solr/Lucene. All very transparently, all very easily.
The most local comes first because the rest is optional. Both in real life (“give that to Peter”) and to some degree for computer network addresses.

You can email ‘peter’ which would be on same machine, ‘peter@arts’ which would be on the ‘arts’ machine on your LAN, or ‘peter@BigCo.com’ which would be on the WAN.

The http protocol takes existing domain names and tags on a path. The domain name system was already in place, so if anything had to be reversed, it would need to be the path, but that would be rather problematic.
He certainly is, but I suspect the YCombinator thread you linked to actually got the wrong person. All the facts the post cites are true, but the Steve Yegge blog he's responding to was talking about the engineering culture. While Jeff Dean's had a hand in basically every piece of engineering infrastructure at Google, another name comes to mind for someone who's had a hand in basically every piece of engineering culture.
It feels kind of crazy that I am already becoming a ludite at this young age but there you have it.

I don't think you are I think you're doing the smart thing. It's not a foregone conclusion that purely digital media is the future. In fact, I still think the smart money is on having physical copies and then using those for digital copies (e.g. ripping CDs rather than just buying tracks).

Especially in books. There's an argument against full CDs because you might only want 1 or 2 tracks. The same can't be said for most books (who would buy Chapter 2 and 6 of a book individually)

Most technical book manufacturers are already starting to include free e-books with their paper copies. I personally think that's the way to go (at least for the next couple decades or so, who knows after that)
Interesting. I was working on the PSP problem for the "Son Of Darts" contest (http://www.azspcs.net/Contest/SonOfDarts/). The contest asks solution for the third case (h << k) where the paper is slim.
RIM makes fantastic hardware but their software has become a liability. Who would buy a SmartPhone that doesn't include a fast modern web browser?
MathML is coming in webkit. It shouldn't be long before most browsers have support for that spec.
Someone get this man to a Whole Foods, stat!
There's a distinction though. Acrobat, Java, and others all asked to be let into Firefox. They update silently after that but they initially asked permission. If Microsoft made a .Net Assistant plug-in I can't imagine people would be upset.

But using Windows update (which most expect to update "Windows" not your other programs) is, imho, considered sneaking it in.
Visiting for the first time I was sure to see more high school geometry and first year calculus questions. I am delighted to see a much deeper discussion taking place.
There's also a Java version (I haven't tried either).
http://www.webtoolkit.eu/jwt#/
Gary Burd Exits Facebook Two Months After FriendFeed Acquisition
It would be interesting to know if paul9290's Hero had the latest software update on it. The update certainly helped my Hero feel snappier, and has improved battery life a bit. Pre-update I was pretty happy with the Hero, though it was a little laggy at times, post update it's much smoother.

That said, I don't run many widgets which constantly update. When I was running a lot of widgets some of them slowed the phone down a lot more than others and it feels to me like one or two dodgy widgets could destroy the experience of using this phone.

As I've been very busy recently I've turned off a lot of the things that update constantly on my phone as I found them a distraction. From that angle, I can understand some of the thinking behind the iPhone not having programmes running in the background, though that's a different conversation.
Java has no type safety, since every object can be null, and methods can't be called on null. This means your program can blow up at runtime due to type errors.
Because the reader doesn't know the language it's written in. Note that "illegible" is a property of the reader, in this case, not of the code itself.
Imagine powering a google datacenter from potatoes :)

Check out potato #3.
You are spot on regarding the lack of explanation of how Wasitup goes about monitoring your site and why it won't miss a tragic downtime on your site. I'll probably add info about my polling interval and the distributed nature of the back-end. Currently it's only distributed within the same data center (on separate racks and power mains). I was meaning to make it geographically distributed across different providers (to be better protected against large DDOS attacks against all data centers of a single provider). Sadly I've not had the time to do this yet and decided to just "launch" it anyway as it has been to long in the making already.

I really like the idea of the RSS feed to give some peace of mind to users. Thanks for that! I might implement such functionality soon.
Wow, that's amazing to watch. You can really feel it.

You know, normally I have to admit I'd mock someone saying a graphic made them "feel it" but I have to say you're right. The last few frames when the circles are just getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

It really does evoke an emotional response. Whoever had the idea for this graphic deserves a metal.
‘Known Software Bug’ Disrupts Brain-Tumor Zapping
If you're in Java, just use BeanResultHandler. We use helper functions that simply wrap the low level queries using beanhandler. So all my queries end up looking like:

List<MyObject> myobjects = dbUtils.select("SELECT name,age FROM (some complex query ... )", params, MyObject.class)

BeanHandler will automatically fill any property in MyObject with a column of a matching name from the select statement.
Review Disclosure: Separate Treatment for Bloggers and Traditional Media
I'll look into giving some clearer explanation. The feature does a simple non-regex match of the provided string against the returned HTTP body. I don't think I'll be implementing regex matching since such a feature would be hard to protect against pathological DOS attacks (as I mentioned in another thread).
If it's an idiom that isn't meant to have anything to do with real autism, then I genuinely missed that memo.

And the title wasn't really intended as linkbait; I was annoyed with Atwood after seeing that phrase because I genuinely like his writing and expect better from him. After seeing his post about autism that someone linked above, though, I do regret the title, and if I'd seen that before (which I should have), I would have gone with something a lot less inflamatory.
good job. had to read it all :)

> It has been heavily optimized for speed, in order to get
> the response time below TCP's default retransmission timeout.
> That 'thin' scripting layer has been used to program some pretty impressive stuff in the engineering and architectural world.

Yes, I've seen people work wonders with AutoLisp. There was - probably still is - an application used for designing clothes. The designer creates, I think, a "size 8" and a lisp script generates the other sizes.

AutoLisp being lisp-like is really a happy accident. The Autodeskers chose Xlisp IIRC because it was free and embeddable. If they could have embedded a C-like language interpreter, they would have.

In fact later, AutoDesk introduced other languages and tried to push users onto them. But AutoLisp already had huge momentum.
You are confusing actual programmers with web 2.0 fanbois with blogs. Some people value stability and incremental improvement, but those people don't seem to write as much as the "throw everything away and use this language I read about on /b/ last night".

There is probably not a market for the 100 year language, as we don't know enough about programming to predict that far into the future. But all the languages we use today are probably "25 year langauges", which is getting there.
And it's odd that they both replace it with something exactly equivalent.
Sorry, I get what you meant now. My normal email would of course be mangled by the SMS limit. I'll look into it.
Akmani Hotel Jakarta
Asia Bagus, Indonesian Cuisine
Disappearing. Unfortunately, shard is still waiting for him to learn the reciprocal trick. :-D
My objection to H1Bs is that they're not used to benefit the US. I think that they should be used to encourage brain-drain to the US.

I think that it's reasonable to ask whether America should pay to educate folks who won't stay here and contribute.
The Internet is Becoming More Energy Efficient, But Total Energy Use is Climbing
I don't think that there's anything inherently more sensible about going from least to most specific instead of the opposite, as long as it's consistent.
This is not enough: you should also set up references to other objects (by id) and deal with underscore_database_names vs camelCaseJavaNames.
CappuccinoFlow: A Cappuccino Community Link Blog
You don't have to do any of this. You can leave food out for them (which is what I do), and you can use clumping litter, which involves about 30 seconds of scooping a day. Then you will have a happy cat that only annoys you when she wants to sleep on your face.
If everyone understood everyone else all the time, we wouldn't have wars, politics, crime, etc. :-)
Dan Simmons: Hyperion? Nope

Terry Brooks Shannara? Nope

What IS available on Kindle?
Wow.

Why would a bug like that not lead to an instant communication to halt all use of the devices until a patch could be distributed ?

Good thing the couch wasn't driven by a worm-wheel or there would have been no way to pull that person out.

An emergency switch should be independent of software anyway, that's the norm in machining tools, the 'e-stop' circuitry has to be set up according to very specific rules to be approved, you'd expect more stringent controls on hospital equipment.
Why there aren't more software startups in India
You can of course make a long list of additional preconditions, starting with "good governance".

It isn't relevant to my counter argument that Gates' grants in fact works towards stopping the population growth you feared.
Someone above posted the interview with Tim Berners-Lee, I take it that's citation enough ?

The relevant quote:

"Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?

I would have skipped on the double slash - there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order - in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http:/uk.org.bcs/members. The last two terms of this example could both be servers if necessary."
Yeah you're probably right about the fickle people being far more vocal than the ones just using the same language.

I'm not convinced languages are really something that need constant improvement and evolution though. There's a lot to be said for all generally using the same language over a long period of time. I'd say that's more important than which particular language it is.

A language exists to communicate ideas. Obviously you don't want a language that is ambiguous, or overly verbose. You also want a language that can express most ideas you want to express in a simple way.

But IMHO, that's been achieved already - several times over. If we never improved any computer language, and just continued using the ones we have, we'd still be able to express the ideas we have in them.

I agree @ 25 years. Further than that, maybe we won't use any programming languages at all. Who knows.
Mapping queries to objects is something I do with my datastore layer. Models that are inserted are first pickled and zlib compressed. When objects are pulled from the table they are returned as python dicts. To map them back into an object state I just pass the dict as kwargs and initialize the model.
a few years ago Germany built a coal power plant with two times 920MW for 2.4 billion Euro.

Well, prices of nuclear power plants are so huge that only a few have been built in the last twenty years. Even in France there was little action building new nuclear reactors.

There is little chance that a new nuclear power station will be built in Germany, again.

The whole technology is simply to expensive. Mining uranium is expensive and generates huge amounts of waste. Getting rid of the waste is expensive. The nuclear industry has been financed by the taxpayer with billions and billions here in Germany. Currently we are looking into cleaning a research disposal site for a billion plus.

The future is described in the article and it is not nuclear. It is decentralized production of electricity and heat, energy efficiency, wind solar, biogas, etc.

If France wants to invest even more into nuclear energy, let's see how they deal with the costs. They could park the waste cheap in Siberia... oh, they are doing it already. Let's see how long that works. The price is huge environmental damage.
Do all medical devices have faulty software, or just ones that shoot radiation at the patient?

But anyway, I wonder what programming techniques are in use for these devices. They sound like they are very expensive but don't need much computational power, which is a good case for using a very high-level language. It may run slowly, but it's easier to get right. (The Therac-25 was controlled by a complicated application written in a very low-level language. A simple programming oversight which the language made very easy killed several people. Using a higher-level language would have prevented this bug.)
Glad you liked both the app and my blog!

A website is down if it does not return a 200 OK HTTP status code and if the response body does not contain the text provided at registration (if such were provided).

The error messages to the right are rendered out in a normal unordered list below each input. On document.ready they are retrieved with JavaScript, hidden, and copied into tool-tips provided by the BeautyTips jQuery plugin (http://www.lullabot.com/files/bt/bt-latest/DEMO/index.html).

The entire service is coded in Python. The website is running Werkzeug (http://werkzeug.pocoo.org) on mod_wsgi inside Apache with Nginx as a proxy and media server in front. Jinja2 (http://jinja.pocoo.org/2/) is used for templating both the web pages and the emails. WTForms is used for form handling and validation (http://wtforms.simplecodes.com/).

All data is stored in Tokyo Cabinet trough the Tokyo Tyrant network interface set up with multi-master replication.

Fabric (http://www.nongnu.org/fab/) is used for deployment and other kinds of distributed automation.
CD Baby’s Shipment Confirmation Email
I wrote a rather robust screenscraper in 65 lines when I first started at my company.

So yes, I know that the batteries-included mentality is there, I'm just saying that they don't need to announce it constantly on all my news aggregators. I can just google it if/when I need it.

And if you don't google for a library to solve a problem you're working on before you start coding, you're being a little more than silly.

Edit: Woof, somebody went on a code crusade and later found out a library existed methinks from the downvoting. ;)
Sorry, of course they are. I miss-phrased my sentence. I should have said "Lisp optimized, or Python optimized or Haskell optimized", or even "lovely language(s) optimized".

But I didn't start this: "Lovely languages like lisp, python, haskell" (sic).
An emergency switch should be independent of software anyway

Good advice. Essential for things that cut you or shoot radiation at you.

It would also be nice if consumer electronics devices did this. I remember badly reflashing my iPod once; the reflash locked up and the iPod was stuck displaying a message without the backlight on. There was no way to reboot it without waiting for the battery to drain itself (or to open the device up). This took a few days, but I did get it working again.

A simple hardware reset switch would have saved me a lot of time. I don't buy Apple products anymore.
Glad you're liking it. I have most of these features written down as possible improvements and/or premium features. But it's good to get some validation of my own crazy ideas.
OK, but it only means that you don't know much about C or PHP.
...via setting. But that last is trivial. Just add it.
This happened to me this week, slightly differently: I took my non-booting MacBook, on which Snow Leopard had been installed a few weeks ago, into the local Apple store [Note: the disk problem on the MacBook was made more critical by the fact that while investigating it, using my backup disk to boot from, I managed to drop the backup drive about 3 feet, killing it]. I'm not 100% sure what they did: the "Genius" I was interacting with was a fast typist. When I got home, after buying a new backup disk [3X the capacity, ~same price as the old one], the internal drive was not only unbootable, but my user account directory was empty. Luckily DiskWarrior came through, finding just about everything. Almost back to normal.
Helpful list. http://tinyurl.com/yhecylm
Best Programming Language for Startups
After reading this, I had to walk over to my bookshelves and look at my books to make sure they were all there. Chills down my spine.
This type of equipment has many failsafes and lockouts, but clearly the electronic emergency release and radiation door closing didn't work in this case. The scandal is that is was a known bug. Obviously this bug only occurred in a specific scenario, because the clinics are required to test the emergency procedures on a regular basis.

In this case the US regulatory agency, NRC, initiated an investigation and forced Elekta to fix it. It sounds like they assumed it wasn't critical enough from the initial report that all treatments with this model should stop before the patch was distributed (the incident happened months ago).
The Full BlogWorld Presentation
Having read that all the way through I'm still not sure what he actually _wants_.

Sure, there are good and bad effects from transparency. There are good and bad effects from _everything_.

But we get 11 pages of waffle, and nothing really useful out the other end.

Unless someone can enlighten me?
> We had fun, mind, it just wasn't very scalable.

How much "fun" did you have in mind? 2, 3, 100?
I know there's a list, but I still have to search it, and I couldn't find anything I wanted. To browse by author or genre would be nice.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1320
Also don't dismiss significant used books market. I hardly ever buy books over $5. Right now, digital books are priced like brand new books, and you can't resell them. There's some price discrimination in terms of how much time elapsed since release and popularity, but, given that I can buy a brand new book on eBay a few hours after it was published (or earlier), destruction of such market would be quite painful for many people. And so far I haven't seen even an inkling of a solution to this issue in any of digital goods categories.
If it was ordered com.google.www, you might not even need to use different characters for path separators than domain separators.

com.google.www.path.to.the.file

com/google/www/path/to/the/file
I also wanted to get a a ball python and name him Perl.
Early on in my career I read about some medical device software and decided that this was not something I wanted to be involved with. The idea of worrying that something I wrote could potentially kill people is not a pleasant one.
Twitter Launches Japanese Mobile Site