skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Exceptions are not a silver bullet.

There are a lot of things that aren't silver bullets. Oddly though, they are still helpful.

> One can't simply turn an assert into an exception and expect things to work.

Actually, if you did that, you'd expect them to fail... but with better semantics.

> That's a great way to add new and tricky bugs unrelated to the original issue.

Only if your runtime doesn't allow for the clean expression of stack unwinding semantics.

> To retrofit exceptions into the existing code at this point would be very difficult.

Yes, I don't think that was at all related to the original point though. It'd be hard to retrofit almost any new language feature in to the existing code.

> To have used exceptions from the beginning would require an amount of work roughly equivalent to returning error codes. They aren't fundamentally different from error codes in that way. Well, unless you're a cowboy who ignores errors.

Not at all. Error codes require error handling in every caller up the call chain. Exceptions at least allow you to put your error handling logic just where you have handlers.
If you write in imperative style (using expressions for their side effect and discarding their return values) then you separate statements with a ;. But for code written in functional style, there will be no ;'s.

Then ;; is used to separate statements at the top level. But in most of the cases when a new top level statement begins, OCaml can understand this anyway and you can omit the ;;. Or use the ;; if you prefer that style.

So, imperative code is as full of ;'s as C code, and toplevel use of ;; is a stylistic issue.

https://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/structure_of_ocaml_program...
It may be negligible, but for me it's evidence of a humility that I haven't seen before. "Old Microsoft" would never have publicly admitted that MSDN was inferior to SO, and if they admitted it privately their response would have been to build a replacement. Hell, Ballmer would have been throwing tables at anyone who suggested this during his tenure.
We are responsible for sex offenders
Selfish assholes always think they're the most oppressed group, regardless of race, gender, or religion. Suggesting otherwise seems to indicate a bias on your part.
Given the centuries-long political problems between the two nations, what else would you expect? Ireland has an intelligence agency too which I'm sure does its share of covert information-gathering (at least I hope so, or it wouldn't be much good): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Intelligence_%28...
I don't think the author's main problem is that communication is shifting to the digital, but rather some of the side-effects of that.

1. We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there.

2. More importantly, the web gives us a great way to find people like us. In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities, and there are serious downsides to this. (This is not explicitly brought up in the article, but is I think underlying several of his concerns.)

Also:

> Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Anything you can experience in "the real world" can be reproduced at arbitrarily-fine resolution in a sufficiently advanced digital system.

This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.
We do? I wrote my message on this from Australia, still frustrated by the level of convenience we have. It's actually worse in some places?
I dunno, it kind of fits the grainy WWII wartime photography source.
How to organize your own research symposium
They needn't be invoking a separate process. Could be just calling out to an API provided by a running PHP process, perhaps over HTTP.
Always happy to talk and help if we can ... Ori at fleaflicker.com
There is better solution: http://xkcd.com/810/
Interesting. I've worked in both the Midwest and in the Bay Area, but I've been too long in SF to compare fairly.

The stats are definitely worse than the general population here. Look at Google's diversity stats in their tech positions:

http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech

Although now that I look, that's no worse than the CS graduate numbers, which have been sliding for 30 years:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...

So maybe it's more a function of Google hiring young than being male-biased.

As to the culture, I think there is definitely a lot more humility in the midwest, which could help. I notice that people who think their evaluations are objective are more likely to display gender bias:

https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/uhlmann_et_2005....

And yes, I think there's definitely some shipping of toxic people going on. I was here for Bubble 1.0; a lot of opportunistic people turned up during the boom and then left when the bust came. I would not mind another bubble popping to cool things off and send the greedy back to Wall Street.
I have the distinct memory of being in a college class with someone who had never used a CLI (no understanding of how to navigate from /home/foo to a project directory, only most tenuous understanding of what a directory was), who didn't understand what a variable was, and who couldn't understand why x = 7 + 2 when x already was 10. I have a lot of sympathy for folks who feel like the geeks-doing-this-since-age-7 have a pretty commanding advantage coming into CS101. (I just don't think that advantage is morally problematic.)
To support your suggestion, look at the decline of benefit societies, fraternal orders, clubs and the like. Things that have impacted them are: threat from broad anti-discrimination penalty powers; displacement of things like aid/insurance with government programs that are more widely available but administered by distant, impersonal bureaucracies; a general American "anti-exclusivity" attitude; stricter enforcement of separation of church and state issues.

I'm not necessarily suggesting we should go back, after all those changes were made for good reasons. But it could be that those changes also had serious negative effects that have to be factored into social planning.

On the other hand, I could be mixing up cause and effect.
Right. I understand that neither is "perfect".

However, the imperfections are in such wildly divergent areas that the comparison is irrelevant to the main issues.

I like Linux, and use it on a regular basis. I do think, though, that if money isn't a major issue the investment in a MacOS X machine is worthwhile. You can always run Linux in a VM.

Personally I think the Hackintosh route is ethical given Apple's intransigence on hardware choice. It is the largest company in the world by market cap, surely it could release the xMac...
It's certainly bad when it's concerning physical medicine.
It would curated content. Up and coming brands we've chosen to work with.
although instant messaging is excellent for fast communication, it's still hard to track around topics or "conversations".
The Firefox addon install timer delay
Ripple 2nd Most Active Developer Activity After Bitcoin?
With open access on publication dates, there's no incentive for university to pay the extortionate subscription fees.

All that's left is the upfront author's cost. That's often north of 1000$ now.
I think you are being too harsh, but generally on the right track. There is a valuable lesson to be learned about civility, but the place to start is inside the classroom, between teacher and student, and between the students. In the teacher's mind, the children are bad. But the real situation is that the students are sick. This is very much like the change starting to come with regards to treating drugs as a health issue, not a criminal one.

The right place to start is with equanimity and respect for society. Equanimity because interacting with people in real life is sometimes rather painful, and you can't take things back. Respect for society is similar to respect for the parents: this crazy, evil, dysfunctional society sort-of raised you (and your parents). Society is responsible for providing you with literally everything you know - even the basis for the views you have that loath society. This requires a kind of humility that is very difficult to impart. Usually it comes (if it comes) after a person has been self-sufficient and recognizes the very real trade-offs they might have to make in order to achieve even a fraction of their goals (which is precisely what happened to their parents, most likely).

Of course, all of this is far too much to ask of a single class. He sort of jumped at the students from one, relatively random direction (there are lots of other problems that weakness and disrespect engender, like lack of self-control, depression, etc) and certainly there are not shortage of well-meaning people honing in on some narrow error mode that is really a symptom of something much deeper that takes years of effort to overcome. In any event, a teacher who grows so easily angry when his students demonstrate ignorance of the very thing he's trying to teach might consider the real possibility that he's not fit to be teaching.
Thank you, I hadn't considered that FP can evaluate in arbitrary order or simultaneously. That makes sense, because if there are no dependencies between code paths (so no side effects) then there's no reason they can't be executed at the same time. They didn't mention that back in the Scheme course I took in college, and I think something vitally important was lost on us (although in fairness they did emphasize that the code was evaluated, not run sequentially).

Seeing how monads reintroduce temporal dependence is also an astounding insight, and I can't believe that I've never seen them described that way. That means that the monad has more in common with, say, the mutex, than it does with I/O. I've always tried to approach them with metaphors like sockets and utterly failed to grok anything for more than a couple of days.

I'm thinking that if Haskell is an "impure" functional language, then I would like to see a "pure" imperative language. I envision it as similar to Go but multithreaded and basically every function in the language would be its own process, communicating with sockets (so basically a shell with C-style syntax). The overhead could be largely eliminated with a stackless context switcher. It wouldn't be able to achieve the optimization of FP but it might be more approachable to the mainstream and by extension maybe iterate faster and lead to higher productivity. I’d like to see it take the place of OpenCL/CUDA and SIMD because I find them tedious compared to more elegant languages like MATLAB/Octave.
Nvidia hasn't submitted any platform patches, nor device tree contents, for mainline yet.

Nearly all the drivers carry over just fine between 32- and 64-bit, and they've been actively moving a bunch of the little glue code out of arch/arm lately, so there's not a _whole_ lot left to do.

I haven't seen anything posted yet so it's not looking all that promising that it'll make 3.19 either (but it's still possible).
I couldn't help but notice the 2006 MacBook Pro with front-loading CD-ROM drive.
Nickel.js: An expressjs inspired web framework for Rust
Arrow is far from "production" ready with severe limitations, bugs, incompatibilities and the maintainers appear to be unresponsive. It made a big splash here, but an unwarranted one.
There are two types of syntax highlighting: static and dynamic. Static is like GitHub/Gist/Pastebin, dynamic is like Atom/TM/Sublime. Static highlights the file straight through, and the result can be cached indefinitely. Dynamic highlighting in a text editor parses as little of the document as is theoretically possible, in response to an insertion, deletion or replacement.

For static there's tons of choices. Pygments, prism.js, GeSHi for PHP, etc. Any idiot can write a static highlighting system. But none of these can be used in-editor.

For dynamic highlighting, there is only one game in town and that's tmbundles. Only TextMate has support for the 100s of languages in existence, including the new ones that pop up each day.

I would love to replace tmbundles. I know just how to implement it. But the problem is, who is going to write all the long-tail language support? VHDL, Pascal, GAP, AtScript, Julia, ...

- - -

Interesting you mention BBEdit. I have a test file I call "the behemoth" which consists of a python file with 32000 copies of this:

""" """

The challenge is to insert """ at the top of the file and see how the text editor cries in pain. It's torture to a syntax highlighter.

To pass, the editor must

1. Load the file quickly

2. Have smooth scrolling inside the file, even after making the change.

3. Color the quotes properly through the end of the file, before and after.

To my knowledge BBEdit is the only editor to pass the test. Emacs is a good 2nd place.
Does this work in the browser?
I would disagree with this assessment. If X is not a science, it does not follow that X is a pseudoscience.
"Though I do not fully agree with everything here, and I'm not sure that the author is wholly maligning the state of affairs in his thesis, we should remember there is a degree of immunity to ultra-logical semiotics in literature and (continental) philosophy that imparts subjective states that reinforce one's humanity (and maybe even intangibly touches holy-grail-ontology), and that is by no means an endorsement of at best childish, at worst deleterious, obfuscation."

Troll detected.
When was the last time you published in a traditional journal? Last I saw an invoice was 4 years ago and we paid to be published in journals that were pay-only.
Use BitBucket for private repos? Be careful
I want to add, that many great ideas are identified as such years after they have been formulated. Sometimes only the historical context makes an idea great. Kafka died in 1924, years before the NS regime took over, which bureaucracy he illustrated so brilliantly. All his writings were published after his death. So the ideas clearly were present before, they just stayed unnoticed and only in hindsight became famous for the fact, that there were indeed people who knew better before and the catastrophe could have been avoided.

The past is always glorified or at least seen as more significant, because only these parts stick. Its harder to spot a significant piece in real time, because the signal to noise is much worse.
Sony stopped by hackers
On the other hand, in the past few years I've found that all of the most useful Stack Overflow or P.SE pages I've found when Googling for information have turned out to be questions with 25+ upvotes, with answers having 50ish upvotes. And all closed as "not constructive."

It's certainly staying on track, but it's worth noting that many track-related analogies are pejoratives that focus on the way that you can't steer vehicles that go on tracks. I suspect an inordinate amount of incoming traffic to Stack Exchange is for information that only Stack Exchange apparently thinks (not just by the closing, but by the choice of words in explaining the reason for the closing) is not particularly valuable. Methinks that's evidence that the community governance has become an echo chamber - otherwise one should think that the people running this company would have identified a gap in the market that they could be exploiting by now.
Great little product! Would love to chat with you [@drglitch on twitter] more about how you're doing text parsing, etc - very much along the lines of what i'm after for an unrelated project.

More importantly, i love the about/press kit page - the guy using the phone "off the grid" with his hand fully stretched out is hysterical :)
That hiding answers to people who aren't logged in is user-hostile.
It's a problem. Until people have standardized on which 'better standard library' to use, programs will keep building from these too low level building blocks.
Yes it's called FreeBSD ports :-)

(Not sure if this is an option, but could be easily added)
It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, should.

But why are we talking about shoulds that will never get done when a really good answer is already here? You've got users actively providing good content and your response is to reprimand them and tell them that content should be over here instead? You know, we have these things called links on the world wide web. The internet isn't running out of them.

Sometimes it feels like the mods are building a really tidy card catalog at the expense of the books in the collection.
I know that this was a joke, but in all seriousness, you should better bookmark any question you find useful/interesting.
"plonk"??? usenet's been dead for years.
No need to single out women in this context. If you want to be a father that's there for your children, both on the infant stage and later stages of their lives...being in a top-level leadership position is simply not possible. Ditto for most other career paths that require your undivided attention.

Cultural norms is the only reason we single out women in this context. A lot of people don't appreciate the level of dysfunction that can occur in other areas of life simply from being ambitious and hard-working. I personally know many professionals that I greatly admire and respect (while acknowledging that I would never make the sacrifices they do to be where they are), but I'm sure as hell glad I'm not married to them.
Whilst I feel this is a step in the right direction, some have already argued[0] that it goes too far and sets up the wrong incentives.

[0] http://www.digitopoly.org/2014/11/24/the-gates-foundations-o...
It used to be there were two variables one that was uncertain to the machine and the other that was known. The known variable was used to ensure you weren't making up your answer.

But for at least a couple of months now I haven't seen a two variable captcha. I can only assume every captcha has been solved and verified to a reasonable degree of certainty. If Google, who is probably most able to benefit off of captcha solutions is willing to move past it I can't really argue with them.
I introduced Phabricator to my company about 9 months ago. The trick with Phabricator is that each individual applet/tool is a little bit janky. Taken individually, there are better ticket management tools, better wikis, better code review tools, etc.

But Phabricator's power is in the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. As a unified ecosystem we've found huge power in our code reviews living next to our wiki living next to our user stories living next to our wireframes (pholio).

And yes -- even the business, operations, and account management departments are using it now too!
That's surprising, since their math and CS stuff is usually pretty good.
I found the mention of Mach's Principle beyond intriguing. How have I not heard of this?! I'm quite glad to ponder it [1]

You are standing in a field looking at the stars. Your arms are resting
freely at your side, and you see that the distant stars are not moving. Now
start spinning. The stars are whirling around you and your arms are pulled
away from your body. Why should your arms be pulled away when the stars are
whirling? Why should they be dangling freely when the stars don't move?

...There have been other attempts to formulate a theory which is more fully Machian, such as Brans–Dicke theory, but most physicists argue that none have been fully successful. At an exit poll of experts, held in Tubingen in 1993, when asked the question, 'Is general relativity perfectly Machian?', 3 respondents replied 'yes' and 22 replied 'no'. To the question, 'Is general relativity with appropriate boundary conditions of closure of some kind very Machian?' the result was 14 'yes' and 7 'no'.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle
>short-changes the students who do want to engage with him

I don't see how it does that at all. If the students were being loud or otherwise actively disruptive, I'd get your point. But if my neighbor has her nose buried in her cellphone, I fail to see how that impedes my ability to engage with the professor by taking notes, asking questions, etc.
> We live in "meatspace" to an extent no matter what, so it's unfortunate that we have a less fulfilling experience when we're there.

The distinction is an artifact of our tech still being pretty immature. There's no reason you couldn't experience remote and physically-present people simultaneously on even footing. We keep our digital world locked behind screens, but only for now.

> In a lot of ways our digital communities are much more uniform than our physical communities,

That generalizes even further: the more freedom and choice you give people, the more they sort themselves. I understand why that freaks some people out, but I find it hard to get worked up over more people getting more of what they want. There are better ways to keep the peace between disparate groups than by forcing them share close quarters.

> This is an extreme misapplication of technical mathematics to pop psychology.

I think it's pretty uncontroversial. Short of proposing a soul or some weird quantum-based source of consciousness, we all just process inputs, and we can't tell the difference between the original signal and once that's been digitally sampled at sufficiently high frequency and reconstructed.
Rainforest QA (YC S12) Is Hiring Engineers – SF and Remote
Pseudoscience is an un-scientific practice which people _generally assume_ to be scientific. Psychology most certainly applies, and I think the author's conclusions are the best he's got at the moment because science cannot help him.
That paper is awesome. I would rank it with Dawkin's The Selfish Gene as a transcendent perspective changer--insight through the written word that comes along a few times in a lifetime.
Most people have heard of Snowden, few have changed habits as a result
I don't think the comparison means that programmers can think better than non-programmers, but that computers can (for certain problems) and that programmers can take advantage of that.
Living in India you may find it reasonable to sell your services on odesk, elance, fiverr, etc. There is a site called warriorforum.com where people sell their skills too.
I had no idea Facebook's CSS was so minimal (less than a kilobyte!). Bravo, FB.
While I'm ranting, I'll just note that the position that there's a canonical way to ask every question and a that there exists a single acceptable answer is a fairly absurd proposition that, once accepted, leads to all kinds of equally absurd behavior.
I can't imagine effective online communication without Email. I use email daily for work and school.
Legacy Or Boring?

Line of Business, the CRUD that runs very large corp. Boring, repetitive, the COBOL^H^H^H^H^HJAVA of industry.
Speaking strictly to Einstein, he made testable predictions, and that's what made that work a part of the scientific process.

Whether something is science or not doesn't affect whether it's good or worthwhile knowledge, though! You wouldn't stop running user studies just because you're not going to get to population-level significance using them. There are many paths.
Throwing awesome meetups with a small team