skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is one's motivation to start a stackexchange site? Sure, you want to make the obscure community you like better, but $130/mo is kind of a lot. Is there any reasonable way to recoup the money?
I think it comes down to history. Host names existed before domain names. When domains were bolted on they used the idea of a default domain for each host and that made sense to be on the end.

Consider:

telnet hosta # established way
telnet hosta.abc # domain bolted on back
telnet abc.hosta # domain bolted on front

Since people knew the host names and were used to dealing with them, the suffix was more natural since it kept the domain cruft out at the edge.
My suggestion, which I've only used a little so far, is that if you want to get "objects" back out of the database, instead of trying to map "tables" to objects, map queries to objects. Use standard code techniques to limit the amount of SQL you have to write; a "DSL" that works in $YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE but directly maps to SQL can be very helpful here.

(One of the ways that SQL shows its age is that it isn't very composable, which is a fatal flaw. This can at least be papered over in better languages, though it would be better if the actual DB language wasn't so... 70s.)

This avoids many problems with DSLs: Aggregate SQL functions work again and aren't that special. If you don't actually want a 1-to-1 mapping of rows to objects, you have the opportunity to do something more clever. The downside is that you need to think more about your interaction with the DB and that it takes a fairly mature programmer to avoid getting tightly coupled with the DB, not to mention a language with powerful enough abstractions to let you not be tightly coupled with the DB.

I suspect there's a good replacement library waiting in here. SQLAlchemy in Python has some aspects of this, I think, though the ORM heritage still shines through. It will never be as easy as ORMs promised to be, but it could very well end up being easier than ORMs actually are. Since ORMs have never delivered on their promise, I think we can stop holding things to that entirely-theoretical standard.
sweet.. 10 is a good number. Its also a number you can use to turn this into a business.

If you ever ditch the freemium model, say first 3 sites are free and the rest you charge for.

This will please the common joe schmoes like myself who have a couple of sites but might not want to pay (my uptime isn't super critical...yet). Secondly it'll show other business who have 5+ servers (like we do at work) that you're taking it seriously. And more importantly it'll bring in money for you to cover the costs and maybe turn it a real business.

Pingdom has other features that they charge for so it might be worthwhile looking there...if you ever want to run it as a business. I know on your site it says this was a past time project and maybe you'd prefer to keep it just that...which is totally cool
I'm updating the desktop from proof of concept to full app.
http://www.prototypic.net/rssbus/desktop/desktop.html
What, just because the current state of the popular ORMs kinda sucks, doesn't mean the concept of ORM are bad. I work in a variety of languages, and one of the first thing I try and master when starting a new language is getting/building a fast and efficient way to manage data stores.
I have no idea. UUCP (Usenet) addresses used to be (are?) "backwards" and ! separated. Maybe some historical references related to that would point you to more info.

If I were to guess though, I'd guess email addresses. me@machine being originally valid makes me@tld.machine harder to parse?
the software vendor is damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Not true - the biggest problem with Microsoft's add on was the lack of an easy method of uninstalling it. All I ask is that vendors do two things when installing add-ons to firefox:

1. Ask my permission before installing.

2. Let me easily uninstall the add-on.
I think creating a 100 year language would be cool, if it weren't for the fact that some geeks are the most fickle people in the world, who jump on the latest fad. They don't want a "100 year language", they want "The new awesome thing". Then 3 years later they want the next fashionable thing to be using.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter that much. It's just fashion.
I smile every time a journalist gushes about solar energy in Germany. I lived there for 3 years in several parts of the country. The southern most latitude in the country is approximately the same as Vancouver, and it can be overcast for weeks, even in the summer. Sure, Freiburg gets some good sunshine for a few weeks. What they're really talking about is German built solar farms in the Sahara!
that's something that should make its way into other languages.

How do you think javac knows when you get the types wrong? It's inferring types internally, it just makes you repeat yourself out of fealty to Bondage and Discipline.
That's totally reasonable. You might offer two emails for an outage, one to their email and one for SMS.
Please read up on your type theory. A tuple is easily typed as a product type. Most functional languages have these, so the impedance mismatch is greatest when you consider a language which has no product types, as in e.g. Java.

Ocaml has PG'Ocaml for instance:

"PG'OCaml provides an interface to PostgreSQL databases for Ocaml applications. It extends the Ocaml syntax, enabling the embedding of SQL statements inside the Ocaml code, and checking at compile-time the consistency between the programme and the DB."

You still need to work with the concept of the database returning a set of data rather than a single row, but that can be done with a little code as well.
I haven't watched the video but her stuff is 90% fluff. "But she is a [good-looking] woman who writes programming books!" is always the implied disclaimer, but sorry, that does not make the books any less dumb, condescending or speculative.

Also, she's been milking those "death treats" for all they could take (who HASN'T gotten anonymous death threats on the internet).
Agreed. Not so much "a burden" as something that you will never be able to teach a large number of people.
> Thompson found that the iframes had been injected into the apps' code due to infected software on the developers' PCs.

So, he's saying that somebody created a virus that looks for html files on a harddrive, so it can inject iframes into them, in the hopes that the person is a developer that will upload them to the web?

That seems like a lot of work for a pretty tiny probability event. It must have been something they just threw in as a feature on another virus.
Cheaper than coal if you've already built the thing.It's a sunk cost, sure, but for policy going forward you can't ignore it.
-way- is not the problem here. The java.lang.Exception is. :-)
Throw specialized "Runtime Exceptions" would be the way to go. For example throw IllegalArgumentException runtime exception if function call receives inappropriate arguments.

You can also define your own specific (app-level) exception by proxying the RuntimeException or other relevant using the clojure's proxy macro.
One other suggestion -

One problem with these sorts of services is that when they're working, nothing happens, so if I don't get mails for a week, I don't know if that's because everything's been working or if you've stopped running the service.

There are lots of complex answers, but an easy one is just to have a "last checked" for each URL - it's ok if I have to go on-demand to make sure things are running. (A weekly/monthly update is nice too, just more work.)
Has anyone written a browser plugin that makes it seem like everything is reversed (or 'correct' if that's your view)?
You'd have to be certified to want one.

(I'll get my coat.)
"...instead of trying to map "tables" to objects, map queries to objects..."

Brilliant! My solution to this problem using Propel was to make fake objects that map to views rather than tables. It's worked out splendidly so far.

I'm not sure what performance is going to be like in the long term, but it sure beats the O(n) queries that were written before I got there.
Expanding on that idea a little. Store the proof of operation on the clients own server.

Let them enter a url to a script on their own server, that you will POST to, whenever you check their server. The user can log POST's to a text file, DB, etc., so they know that you are actually monitoring them.

When they see that you haven't POSTed to that file for a while, they know you're out of business, and they are unprotected.

On second thought, make it easy on yourself, and use GET. It's not like there's anything confidential about it.
Thus, in Haskell it is considered good practice to always label your functions with their type signatures.

Haskell is 20 years old, and this has been made 'good practice' only very recently -- I'd date it to dons's revival blitz a few years ago. A professor of mine who'd been using Haskell from the beginning was annoyed by their use.
I agree with C++ being a sledgehammer/chainsaw for web development.

However, I was looking at emweb.de, the website of the creators of this toolkit and they seem to be oriented towards web app development for embedded devices.

It does make sense to use C++ embedded devices because:

* You control the environment completely
* CPU cycles are not cheap
* "embedded" developers are already comfortable with C/C++
* One less "framework" to ship-out/maintain.

edit: formatting
Finland, reactor under construction. Estimated cost 4.5 Billion Euro.

Just to build one.
great feature and thanks for adding it so fast.

One little note: there's nothing in the user experience that tells me if you tie all of the monitors to the email address (i.e. is email address a unique key), so after I add the first one, I don't know if I always have to click through to settings to add another, or if I can do it from the home page.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RavioliCode
SemWeb Installfest
I guess it's a testament to how powerful small hardware is getting that C++ is actually an option in the embedded space. I can see some of the greybeard asm programmers having a stroke right now.
I've emailed FogCreek about this a few days ago, and they stated that Stack Exchange is geared towards corporations currently, but they have been getting a lot of emails about offering a lower cost versions for a more hobby centered site (think photography). They do allow for custom HTML to be added into parts of the site, so you could add ads to generate some revenue.

It's also worth noting that Stack Exchange is free during the beta period (because they haven't implemented the code for fees, Joel had stated that in one of the Stack Overflow podcasts)
Ah right! Apologies, I took it to mean that there was a better way of throwing an exception, not that particular one.

Of course, that makes perfect sense.
Please read http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html -- None of [safety, strict, dynamic, typing] mean what you think they mean.

Your most fundamental error is that 'dynamic' and 'strict' are not mutually exclusive in the slightest. In fact, almost all dynamically type-checked language implementations are vastly more strict (and safe) than any of the non-HM static type checking implementations.
Sure remove the need for cooling is the best option, but even at 40 deg C operating temperature you will need some cooling in most locations.
That's just due to python's batteries-included mentality. Those guys are proud that there's libraries to do damn near anything. If you pick your libraries well, it's astonishing how little python you actually need to write sometimes.
Nokia/Trolltech pronounce it "cute."
The guy is definitely incredible:

http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=220031
Shepard "Obama 'Hope' poster" Fairey just blew his copyright case
Distributed Hash Tables and the Postage Stamp Problem
"I think print magazines as we know them will cease to exist."
Type safety does not require illegible code. You could express this more nicely in, even, Scala.
I say fish! I used to have a small acquarium with a couple goldfish
But...but...I come from a country where wire transfers are free. Surely it's possible here too? Please? Why am I still writing a check for my rent?
Different types of Garbage Collectors in the JVM and their combinations
If I were an evil hacker mastermind, I would definitely analyze the hard drives of all the computers in my botnet, trying to profile who I had ensnared. Maybe certain library and header files are a telltale sign of a Facebook developer.
My only gripe with ORMs is that most of them sooner or later start to feel like a straightjacket compared to just writing the SQL.

For a real sense of the horrors behind the scenes have a look at what actually gets passed to your db engine on the backside of the ORM.
This is a reasonable article, and Vivek Wadhwa is certainly entitle to express an opinion, but I do strongly object to his statement that "xenophobes will cheer" these findings.

He didn't quite claim that the only people who might disagree with him are xenophobes, but I do think he implies it.

People who have read my posts on hn are probably aware that I take a less enthusiastic view of the high tech visa programs, especially the H1B. I resent the implication that this makes me a xenophobe, as I absolutely believe that a healthy, substantial percentage of foreign nationals at our universities and in our high tech work force is without question a good and positive thing. But I think we pushed it to the point where these visas were used by high tech as a crutch, and allowed engineering careers to slowly become uncompetitive with law, mba, medicine, and so forth (a RAND institute study recently confirmed this, suggesting that the "low interest of US students in science/engineering will reverse when pay and other work conditions improve" (yes, I'm paraphrasing)

I'm not as optimistic, because you can't just revive these professions once they are decimated.. Americans were deterred from engineering to the point where they lost all interest, and these visa programs were the only way to get students. But guess what? The day will come (and soon, it appears) where we can offer as many visas and green cards as we like, but we won't find any takers.

Eventually, someone has to recognize that it wasn't wise to allow Americans to become a small minority in american engineering ms/ph.d programs, because nobody is more likely to stay in the US.
Actually, com.google.www/root/sub/subsub would make the most sense.

The Commercial domain.
The Google host/company.
The www service/sub-domain.
The path.
Interview with Tim Berners-Lee where he says he regrets this:

http://www.impactlab.com/2006/03/25/interview-with-tim-berne...

Looking at what he accomplished, I forgive him.
That's exactly what is in my mind! The mismatch of domain name order and path order really bothers me for a while and I just couldn't find a sound reason for that.

For the date format, AFAIK, only English speaking countries use MM/DD/YY, possibly due to the same order in plain writing style, e.g. October 17, 2009. This is completely insane for virtually other parts of the world because logically it's either YY/MM/DD (big to small) or DD/MM/YY (small to big), but NEVER MIXED!
I'll give the "last checked" idea some thought. I'd need to store some additional data as I'm currently storing only abnormal behavior.

Regarding the weekly/monthly update: this is something I'm averse to. Other services do this and it kind of bugs me each time I get these.
So this is a mistake ...
I've been thinking of implementing webhooks as an additional form of notification, but not as a a presence mechanism. I like the idea, but given the simple nature of the service I'd have to give it some thought before implementing something like this.
Another option might be a weekly uptime report. That way I still know you're in business and I get some useful information.
"wakes me up in the middle of the day". that's awesome.
That would be pretty invasive, because plenty of the places where the urls appear are not so easy to get to.

Statusbar, url bar, hovers over links, view source etc.
From a legal point of view, how can they justify silently and without my approval, modifying non-Microsoft software running on my computer ?
The added disadvantage of the current scheme is that it allows all kinds of phishing tricks that would have been a lot harder to get away with if the domain elements would be in the reverse order.

htp://twitter.com.someidiotdomain.info/enteryourpaswordhere

would stand out immediately.

(only one 't' so HN doesn't turn it into a link).
"that's something that should make its way into other languages"

It's starting to, to some extent. C#, for example, has had inferred types available since 3.0, though it still requires using the "var" keyword when declaring variables.
The Death of Traditional Media
This guy doesn't have any idea about Functional programming. I don't understand why people are encouraging him by voting up. Very strange.
They weren't really addresses; it was a series of hosts. It was thus more like a route.
From my experience, the syntactic gap is wider than the semantic one. I suggest first, perhaps, translating Python into faux S-exprs (should be easy, given the indentation style). From there one might emphasize declarative vs. imperative, and functional as a subset of the former.
The contains/doesn't contain feature was inspired by all the badly implemented sites I've seen which does not care to return proper HTTP status codes. I actually meant to implement regex matching as well, but sadly such a feature would be hard to protect against pathological DOS attacks.

The "2 click unsubscribe" part was meant to convey the ease of deleting the monitoring subscription if you for some reason would find them bothersome. Why did it not make sense to you?
you'd have to have at least a protocol/host/path separator.

http/com/ibm/www/80/somepath/somefile -> is this referring to http://ibm.com/www... or http://www.ibm.com/80...

Instead, I would imagine it should be something like:

com.ibm:http/80:/somepath

You could even do a lookup to com.ibm and ask for http SRV record to find the actual host to connect to.
Sounds like a premium feature to me ;-)
com.google:http/80:/path/to/the/file perhaps?
i actually don't understand this feature and would have liked some explanation. do i provide a regex that should match the http response? or do i provide a header code or tyep?
I'm with you. I think the simplest solution is best here. I do expect you'll run into scenarios where last-checked-time will be data you'll want anyway...
I really value your opinion on most programming matters but I have to respectfully disagree. I can understand someone having a problem with c#'s syntax in general. But in this case I had more trouble with verifying the algorithm than with the type annotations. They might require some carefull reading but you have to keep track of only two types so the cognitive load is minimal. More importantly, writing these function definitions makes using the functions really easy (auto complete support etc.)

that being said I don't really like the tone of the code's author who poses the question on his blog with fake honesty hoping everyone will laurel his clever solution.
They didn't modify FF. FF includes a way to use plugins. They just put a plugin in a specified place. They didn't really change anything about other programs.
They might be, but they are properly too conservative to support a startup culture.
Whatever you end up getting, make sure to maximize your RAM and your display real estate.
actually, only USA does the rediculous MM/DD/YY. the UK is DD/MM/YY
Do you uniquely identify your polling agent to the server being polled ? Do you check for robots.txt ?

If you don't, you should in case if people are trying to monitor sites that are not theirs.
I understood it when I read it, but now that I look at it, I can see why it might be confusing. Someone could think it is saying "To click, unsubscribe" in IM-speak. Maybe it should be "Two-click unsubscribe."
Yep, email address is a unique key, so you can sign up from the home page with the same email address. As you've probably seen the link from the settings page actually takes you to the home page (with your email address as a query parameter which it fills in for you).

I'm not sure how I could make this clearer without cluttering the experience for the first time user. Maye store your email in a cookie and fill it in when you enter the home page?
> Remember, the single goal of the project is to get worst-case latency for all non-cpu-limited processes on the system as low as it possibly can get. Throughput, and even best- and average case latency are considered entirely expendable.

I've just been listing to lectures from MIT's introduction to algorithms, where more emphasis is placed on worst-case scenarios than otherwise, the reasoning being that these make guarantees possible. So more power to BFS.
Well, the C# 2.0 specification was written in 2002, but the compiler was only released in 2005, a year after Sun released J2SE 5.0. So from a implementation perspective, Java had generics before C#.
This is a very long comment for me to agree with everything, well done.
The question is how much an equivalent coal reactor will cost. If you have good references it would be interesting. Just by a blind Google I found this:

http://www.jsonline.com/business/29482814.html

> The 300-megawatt power plant, which would generate enough power to supply 150,000 homes, is now projected to cost $1.1 billion if it is built in southwestern Wisconsin and $1.2 billion if it is built in Portage, the utility said.

That is $4 million per MW (just building). The powerplant in Finland is the first EPR so cost and time overruns is expected. It is a large one though – 1600MW (and it costs according to WP $7billion). The cost will therefore be $4.37 million per MW – about the same as a coal plant (but with no carbon dioxide causing global warming, coal costs and coal transportation costs).

The problem comparing this is that building costs differ from country to country. The EPR is also the first reactor of a series and building prices increased in the 2000’s (which has now decreased).

According to WP, the two VVER power plants at Tianwan cost together $3.3 billion (1000MW each). This means that the capital cost is $1.65 million per MW.
Huh? Why is it illegible?
It is properly targeting the high-end embedded market, since there are only a few places I can imagine that you would want an embedded webserver.
Yeah, but this one isn't a joke.

It does remind me of Cobol on Cogs though.
I think it was joke.
24" is very affordable right now, E 199 a piece, not sure what they go for in the states, but I'd expect comparable or lower.
That's been predicted long ago by Nicholas Negroponte in 'being digital'.

Amazingly prescient book.
Cat. I have five. No need to go for a walk, won't disturb you, will use the litter box on their own (you don't have to teach them to do that)... Just adopt an adult cat. Two of my cats were adopted already grown and they're just as affectionate as the others (which is greatly affectionate, btw). It really comes from their personalities plus your input. Don't forget to neuter/spay the cat.
First of all I don't think this will become a Pingdom clone/killer. Ease of use, simple, and unobtrusive are values that I will continue to value when deciding on where to take the project.

If I do decide to take money for premium features (more monitorings, higher monitoring frequency, history/statistics) I think I will do so with the hope of getting enough subscriptions to cover the server costs. If it provides more revenue than that I could see myself providing SMS notices to non-paying and paying users alike.
That is so ironic. At the same time you have to wonder if maybe they did it on purpose. Now all we need is for Firefox to mess around with Chrome security and it will have gone full circle.