skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Goto is bad" is something that professors tell first year computer science students because as computer scientists, the students will find novel ways of abusing them.

Using goto for error cleanup is pretty standard, easily readable, and understandable.

It avoids ugly braces and depth.

So, are gotos bad? It depends.
Computers are People, Too: Disney documentary about computer art in 1982
Perhaps those of us that prefer encrypted email should begin lobbying companies to encrypt transactional emails.
First off, I am not with Clever but I have spent a fair amount of time looking at their platform.

Being in the industry, I think the 25% number is high. It is a significant frustration especially in lower grades if kids have different username/passwords for every education app they are using during their school week. I think this is a pretty good idea and it helps. However as schools move to Chromebooks more and more I do wonder if schools will push more for vendors to just integrate directly with Google's login since all users have to have a Google account to use the Chromebook. Maybe Clever supports this? I haven't looked into it lately.

The way they improve efficiency is due to fact that schools will no longer need to upload CSV files nightly to vendors servers to update their student rosters. Many inner city schools have a very high degree of student transience (meaning kids move schools a lot) and this is a huge pain to update across multiple vendors every day. A lot of vendors support the upload of CSV files to provide an updated list of student rosters. Imagine how much easier it is for the schools if they don't have to do any of that or only have to integrate with one vendor. I can't speak to the security side and how they improve that really.

They do charge the vendors at the school level and for many vendors their fees can really eat into their margins and so I still think you see a lot of vendors relying on CSV files. Schools are used to doing this and so setting up one more job to upload the same file every night is not a huge burden to them.
Ha. Nothing to say about Jarvys, so completely unrelated but your comment reminds me of a friend from highschool (this is in Europe) who I lost contact with and then reconnected with years later. Asked him "So, what do you do?". Him: "Well I do business". Me: "What do you mean, business?". Him: "You know, everything, party balloons, renting apartments, writing fake visa aplications for people, computer repair [+ a few others]".
>When you add in additional steps required to unlock funds and have the recipient transmit acknowledgement, it can take weeks to set up, fund, and use an escrow agreement. It still costs a lot of money, especially for international wires.

What are these extra steps you're talking about? If I wire money to you as my escrow agent it will probably get to you next business day. You then verify whatever and send the escrow to the seller that will take another business day. Where are the weeks coming from?

>And fees. $40 on a $1000 wire is %4. $1000 is a small amount of money to wire.

Get a different bank if you're paying $40 for domestic transfers. Hell even if you're getting charged that much for international transfers.

>Here we are talking about turn around times in under an hour, and fees under %1, even for small transactions.

Except we aren't talking about comparable things since the end result is generally local currency not bitcoin you have to add in the steps and fees to convert it as well.
Around 1980 the USD central bank interest rates were raised to above 20%.

In the end of the 80es when the Swedes had their big banking crisis, interbank rates were above 30% and the Swedish krona halved compared to the neighbouring Scandinavian countries.

The late 90es had the Asian currency crisis where most South East Asian currencies where more than halved against the dollar. That crisis more or less led to the unfolding of the biggest hedge fund at that time (LCTM) which had to be bailed out by the FED.

Thru the 90es the Russians defaulted and the ruble collapsed manifold.

I am curious on how Russians sees the current situation?

Is this the west/USA waging currency war against Russia?

Is this a return to "normal" with things being like they were in the 90es? Or Russia being isolated as under the Soviet union?

I met a few Russians on my travels. And I always enjoyed the company of those I got to know. My impression is that Russia has an young (age 20-30) emerging middle class who are smart, reasonable and completely unlike the image we have in the west of druken, violent crooks with bad taste.

I would hate to see Russia return to isolation.
Foundation for Sites 5.5 is Here
Who needs an operating system if you can write your own? Then you might as well write a browser, and develop a web language for it, and then you can write your own jQuery type library in that language. Because, why not, you don't NEED to use all these excellent tools already available for which I provide no reason not to actually use them.

I'm just saying, you don't need them.
This is a new idea. Wondering where I should take it next. I would appreciate feedback.
without a goto, you have to rely on functions/return values/pointers, which implies a function call (sometimes billions of times), which can have performance and design implications.
> In 2012, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled the legislature had failed to uphold its “paramount duty” to fully fund the state’s educational system.

For those in other states who might be wondering why the Court would find that the legislature had a "paramount duty", it's in the State Constitution [1]:

------------------

ARTICLE IX
EDUCATION

SECTION 1 PREAMBLE. It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.

SECTION 2 PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM. The legislature shall provide for a general and uniform system of public schools. The public school system shall include common schools, and such high schools, normal schools, and technical schools as may hereafter be established. But the entire revenue derived from the common school fund and the state tax for common schools shall be exclusively applied to the support of the common schools.

------------------

[1] http://leg.wa.gov/LawsAndAgencyRules/Pages/constitution.aspx
Amazon's compensation is not much different than other tech firms in seattle (at least according to glassdoor).
The original context of the "GOTO considered harmful" is lost on most of us, as at the time there were large swaths of developers that were trained before structured programming took off, so people were using global variables and GOTOs instead of procedures and functions. GOTO has its place, specially in C.

It is sinful to jump into a different function and pass around information as global state. GOTO as functionality is tangential in this matter.
Falcon 9 attempts ocean platform landing
It means that if they can keep half the visitors going to a paid model, they need to charge 2 USD a year to make 3M. Not counting what they save on not having to run or sell ads. Who here wouldn't pay quite a lot more than that not jus for Dr. Dobbs - but a much more independent (or obly beholden to its readership) Dr. Dobbs?
How to Become a Successful Nail Technician?
Your citations directly contradict your fantasy that this revolves around Bashar or punishing Russia. Bloomberg says the Saudis raised production only half a percent to defend their market share from the U.S., Russia and Canada's continued increases, basically what I said above. The price doesn't drop 20% because one supplier who has 12% market share increased their supply 0.5%.
Hah, I read this as Firebase.. I was bracing myself for the google hate.
>By what process that you have ever done does a chargeback take 2 seconds

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

>Meticulously file your receipt for purchase.

I use gmail and type in the domain of the company and I have my receipt. If you can't do that you should upgrade your email provider.
For all the malice directed at domainers, I find it infinitely easier dealing with them and getting them to sell than the random one off in general. By volume they are more realistic, some of the biggest companies have prices listed up front. Sometimes you just want to buy it and move on to more important things.
It's better to just use one of the jquery versions hosted on the google developer cdn: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide If you link to a popular jquery version, I bet the odds of the user already having the library cached is approaching 95%+ so your dependency is essentially free as no requests will be made in that case.
Kubernetes on Mesos makes sense to me. When you run Kubernetes on GCE, you have all of Google's infrastructure... but if you run it anywhere else, how do you get scale and HA without Mesos? (Let's be frank: when is anybody going to run 100% of their workloads on GCE). I think Kubernetes on Mesos fills the 90% gap of all Kubernetes apps running outside of Google and maybe even on Google for app portability.
Same here, I always liked to support sites by having ads on or buying things I like on them.

But I have recently switched to ad blocking as well due to tracking and worse due to broadband caps.

I refuse to fill up my 400GB Cox cap with ads except on sites that deserve it. The content and marketing industries need to lobby hard against broadband caps to limit cuts into their industries, the broadband mafia wants their cut of every download and all ads run.
Did the same exact thing. Have a bunch of personal projects on FB and my heart skipped a beat.
I love Mondays! Take it positively.
>Systems that enforce lock-in of mediators will be pushed out of the market when more open systems come online.

Unless they're governments /s
It's not obvious to me why you can't share lessons from a failed business model?
So what does this offer that a distributed system like shibboleth doesn't offer?
True, if the process just involves asking the author then I have no issues with that, and it should be easy to resolve.

I do think it is difficult for anyone other than the author to answer that question though. For me, only the "red-head scarf" example would be a mistake, but others in this thread indicated that 3 or 4 of the examples were wrong for them.
By coincidence, I happen to have backups of /dev/null. Of every computer, every nanosecond since the beginning of the Universe. From this and all possible Universes.
Before that, even, it's very concerning that chroot()-jailed applications cannot access /dev/null in 2014!
'Pity' would be a Britishism in this context, yes.
Haven't heard anyone mention taking notes on a voice recorder. I have never done it, but wonder if this is efficient or not.

As for pen vs keyboard, I'm definitely for the pen, specially when thinking. On a small page, I can start with words, switch to a diagram, putting few arrows here and there linking parts , put a formula easily, it's basically too hard to do that much on a computer (as quickly).

Although, after scribbling things, I usually put a clean version on file somewhere.
I happen to be Matt Connor :-) My username also happens to be "XERQ," and my profile lists SSD Nodes, JARVYS, and XERQ. I'm transparent when it comes to the projects I'm a part of, if that's a concern.

If the main concern of this post is pricing: our service isn't the cheapest, nor do we want it to be. We want JARVYS to provide the most value and peace of mind to our customers. It allows us to focus on delivering quality instead of searching for the next buck. Is the loss of your data worth the money you'd be saving from choosing one providing over another?

We actually called up iDrive to learn more about their Linux product and to ask them for help installing it, and their response was to read the documentation. Linux felt almost like an afterthought with them, with their core product being Mac and Windows. Instead of us half-way supporting Windows, Mac, Linux, and everything else, we want to be the best Linux backup service available and to focus solely on it.
The only future for journalism might be reader revenue. Without it, everyone in this field were in danger of becoming a public relations or advertising company disguised as journalism.

I'm an editor at Programmer Magazine in China (http://special.csdn.net/programmercovers/), as a coincidence, after 14 years operation, we just release the last print issue last week and withdrawal towards the electronic version only. I think we share the similar experience and feeling about how the tech medias evolved recently.

But media is still a very active field, if you have read the New York Times innovation report that leaked earlier this year, you may get a mixed feeling that with the risks, there are still opportunities to build an independent site with in-depth articles, code, algorithms, and reliable product reviews, which quality media should have.

But unfortunately, most decisions were not made by the ones who love this career, have ability and skill to lead the change, and do not fear to face the risks.
And C doesn't have exceptions, which otherwise would cover a lot of where goto's are used.
Growing up in the 80s, that's how a lot of books taught us BASIC, because they catered to a lowest-common-denominator implementation. Fortunately, I was using BBC BASIC, with functions, procedures and REPEAT-UNTIL (and later WHILE and CASE), and the BBC-specific books taught structured programming.
Although I still handwrite/sketch math I'm actively working on, I always LaTeX it afterwards.

As a math student I take typed notes into LaTeX (in emacs) during lectures. Even with the extra typing for symbols it's still faster for me to type and I'm only a ~120 wpm typist. The only thing I take down on paper are diagrams/figures.
Yeah, I've been on teams that have used this kind of error handling extensively, at several different companies. It's lightweight, very little is being done behind your back (do you know when your destructors are being called? really?) and it's easily inspected.

Also, never pass up the opportunity to troll a god-fearing "goto puritan" :-)
http://onlinehut.org/2011/10/goto-is-not-evil-okay/
>It is sinful to jump into a different function

So sinful you can't in C
As a former high school teacher, assuming classes are between 45 and 60 minutes, this sounds absolutely reasonable to me. If one kid can't log on, you might be able to move ahead and deal with it later. If two or more are stuck, forget it. They'll be unable to focus, very frustrated, and it will take the class completely off track.
Actually, one suggestion has been colonizing Venus in floating cities: http://www.universetoday.com/15570/colonizing-venus-with-flo...
Please get some experience writing kernel and driver code before making inane statements.
> I think that what killed Dr. Dobbs is ultimately that the Internet sparked a huge availability of quality programming info online, which drove the price of this info through the floor.

I think it broke the market - but at the same time, very little online is of the same quality IMNHO. But some of it is just good enough that too many seem to stop paying for the really good stuff. Or paying for the privilege to get the ads that come with the really good stuff, more like. I'm actually a little shocked that something like DDJ would be happy on 3M revenue - feels like that should be easy to rack in on subscriptions for such a solid brand. I guess it isn't
Eva is an option in general, just not for that planned mission. The problem with Venus isnt the temperature and pressure, it's that the ground is too far down. At air ship altitude it's comfortable except for the acid.
That font is terrible. Please bring back sans serif.
Great filter theory is nonsense. The period between intelligent life evolving and it taking over the universe at near the speed of light is so short, in cosmic time, that any civilization anywhere should expect to see an empty universe (in their light cone).
My guess is the main advantage is feasibility - a manned airship-like laboratory in the upper atmosphere of Venus is something we could likely accomplish sooner than a manned mission to Mars, if we chose to make that a priority. Though the scientific benefit of such an effort would largely be secondary to other considerations. But that is fairly normal in the politics of human spaceflight.
> The group that learned to write letters by hand were better at recognising them than the group that learned to type them on a computer.

I have noticed for the physical act of writing with a pen on paper concepts and diagrams helps me internalize and learn them more. There is some kind of an improved feedback mechanism of sorts. Than, say if I do it in an editor, mind mapping software, or some kind of diagram creating app.

When I program and design I always think with paper and pen (or whiteboard if in a group). A lot of it is not really "writing or typing" as in actaully writing code, but mostly it is scribbling blocks, arrows, labels. Maybe an API description.

For price + "user experience" ( here = responsiveness, latency ). Nothing compares to pen, paper or whiteboard and marker.
As someone who taught a high school programming class for a year, 25% is high, but not as far off as you'd think.

In general, "boot up time" for most students was usually fast, but the problem is that the edge cases (students who forgot their password, typed the wrong URL, didn't follow instructions properly, had a technical error) required individual attention, and would quickly eat up time. Many of these problems came from sending students to a web site they hadn't used before, or logging into a service they didn't use often.

I don't work for Clever (I'd disclaim it if I did. I currently work for a different educational tech company) but I can definitely see how a single sign-on for everything would be helpful to teachers.
I actually find serif fonts easier to read for long texts. So I'm loving this one! ;)
GOTO statements are not bad, they make your code run 10% faster while taking just 10 times as long to debug.

So if your code gets executed millions of times per second, like in some OS kernel, it may be wise to use GOTOs.

Otherwise, stay away.
I find the term "colonization" offensive. So after having colonized all of the people of earth, white men want to colonize other planets next. The thirst for power of white men truly has no limits. Disgusting.
Harvey Silverglate is full of it and I wouldn't trust him to tell me the time. When you look into the cases he mentions you always find all kinds of incriminating detail that he left out of his articles. I've debunked some of his claims in detail before here on HN but I can't be bothered to dig that up again now. You should probably be able to find with a Google search though, I'm pretty sure they addressed this very WSJ article.
First of all, I'd like to offer my appreciation to the Dr. Dobb's staff, along with Andrew Binstock (I thoroughly enjoyed and found myself nodding my head at articles such as "Just Let Me Code"[1]).

I still have some of the magazines from 1994 floating around. It's amazing how nostalgic they are now—but the pouring back over those magazines brings me back to my younger days where computers were more mysterious, and creating things was more magical.

Dr Dobbs provided a great service. They offered informative articles on not only programming, but also on the user experience, design, IDEs, math, and the whole "programmer" gamut—and they did such a wide spread without losing quality. I do wish you could name an alternative to this, but I find myself coming up empty, as well.

The same as you mentioned in regards to events, these types of information are now spread througout multiple sites: HN for general 'tech' news, MOOCs for programming, sometimes Reddit for actual helpful information. I look forward to seeing if people will try to fill this gap of an all-in-one hub, that also has quite knowledgeable authors.

I do wonder, this article mentions Dr Dobbs staying constant; constant in delivering quality articles, constant in its design, and so forth. Would you say this is an issue of not adapting to current trends (or "with the times")? It seemed [to me] that the move from print to digital was a late move that could have been done in a better way. While the content is great, I've ironically found the online site not as engaging as having the print copies in hand. I do not know many people who subscribe to online only publications, and of the ones I do know, they usually will go through a service such as Amazon.

Also, while I understand the anecdote about ad revenue and clicking, it does bring up a fair point. I do not know many tech saavy people who knowingly click on advertisements (if they're not blocked, to begin with). In fact, as a technician at an old job, we were told to warn the general public about what sites they visit, and to make sure they're not clicking on ads, as they might be "unscrupulous" [former manager's words].

Could this offer an opportunity for a company to come along and create and display advertisements that the majority of people will know are safe? While Googles ads have their name displayed, I know many people who feel "odd" seeing text ads, and feel they're trying to trick them. There must be a better way to make the user feel comfortable clicking, as well as letting them know the content and site they will go to are safe. Flash ads, and a mile long URL being pointed to are not going to do it.

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/just-let-me-code/240168735
Why would they use their own tools and risk revealing them to the public when they can use a recognized existing tool and mask their full capabilities?
you are just trolling. the articles talk about cutting prices and increasing production by Saudi Arabia. you said there wasn't an increase of production and that SA is not able to move the price. false. move along. thanks.
isn't Freebase essentially what Import.io and Kimono are doing?
Ask HN: What code review tool do you use?
We're a small team looking for a good code review tool that allows us to move fast and break stuff.

Most of the tools out there seem to be focused on pull requests. Our team does do pull request reviews through Github, but we frequently will merge PRs that aren't "ready" for the sake of getting features out.

We've looked at Codiferrous (seems kind of unsupported) and Gerrit (but we don't want to host it ourselves) and a few others, but we're a bit at a loss.
A Parent's Guide to Introducing Engineering at Home [pdf]
Reading this I realized something - I no longer trust online advertising. At all. Some years ago, I recall shopping for plane tickets and cheerfully clicking on the advertised results on Google.

Now I actively avoid it. I've regularly seen what appear to be malicious ads on Gooogle itself. (Search for "SoftwareX" first advertised result is "SoftwareXDownloadFree.com" Yeah, legit. Sure.) As a matter of self-protection, I won't click on online ads.
I think what people are trying to say is that you shouldn't be taking too seriously all these advises about good and bad features in programming languages. Instead, try to understand the reasons behind such advises. All the bad things, that goto is blamed for, can be just as easily made with a bunch of methods in some object.
Your definition of exponential needs-sum-splaining.
The Echoes of Hearts Long Silenced
On error GOTO next
Ask HN: What's your favorite startup logo?
I've been advocating a Venus over Mars strategy for quite some time now. It is weird seeing your opinions hit the mainstream. On the one hand you are happy that other people have finally come around to your line of thinking, but on the other hand you worry that others will repeat the conclusion with little idea of the reasoning that went behind it.

I was also ahead of the curve on the simulation argument. When Elon Musk started talking about it I realized it was finally becoming mainstream. I'm hoping he gets on board with a Venus first space exploration too!