skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do Java at the day job. If we hired you as a new employee, and in the course of cutting your teeth on our Java framework you made those errors, I think Eclipse would have caught exactly one of them.

Routes.rb errors 1 and 2: sorry, this is either handled in a configuration file or the database, which is loaded from an XLS file in our framework. None of this is checked.

Linking to non-existent pages: we don't actually have a URL generation helper, but if we did, it would be in the JSP and thus not subject to fast checking. Since in Java you'd be passing a string as a parameter rather than an automatically generated method, you'd get nothing useful here prior to actually clicking on the link and finding it didn't go anywhere.

Misspelling confirm: This would be caught in your JSP compile step prior to deploying the server, although you'd still waste a minute.

Mistyped property names: OH GOD do I hate this one. You'll get as far as any page done by that action without error. Then the action gets loaded and the fun begins. Typically you'll get an error telling you that a form is not defined , which is your cue that says "Check the contents of the annotations for this action, something is borked", but if you don't know that symptom or (worse) if you borked something in one of the fields where the page can still load, you'd either waste a lot of time or miss the bug entirely. (For example, in our system, one way of causing this bug would leave "name" totally unchecked but let the form submission succeed for good input. Since many of our outsourcers don't bother testing with bad input...)

Misspelled formats: We don't even have this feature. (P.S. I don't know why Rails books and tutorials always emphasize this so much, since most people don't need it. I always just delete that code from my own Rails methods.)

Botching the key to a parameters access: Since the key is a string and there is no way to tell whether Map#contains("arbitrary string") at compile time, you'll get as far as execution before seeing any error here. It will probably be a NullPointerException.
Don't get your hopes up. The article states: "according to Samsung senior vice president Don Joo Lee"

Or you can go to http://www.bada.com/ which says "copyright Samsung" at the bottom. And according to whois, registered by Samsung at their corporate address near Seoul, nameserver red.samsung.co.kr ...
The bigger problem you're facing is that ASP.NET has been forcing you to use the, shotgun-in-mouth worthy, event driven model (I've done .net web dev).

The rest of the universe has been using MVC for five or 6 years to do web development. Praise be to Microsoft for figuring it out.
The error messages could use some love, but the article is crap. He didn't break Rails in any predictable ways. Who breaks stuff accidentally by misspelling things? Spellcheck can be turned on just about everywhere in any modern IDE or Editor.
If you're not a Ruby/Rails dev, it doesn't seem reasonable to expect that all the framework's errors will make sense to you. If you took the time to learn how requests are routed in an MVC framework, this particular error would probably make perfect sense to you.
I think an online advertising "subprime crisis" is somewhat likely. In an article of my own I phrase it differently- online advertising as a "market for lemons" http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2008/05/is-search-advertising... .
It's worse in Ruby though, because the "use maps for optional parameters" approach means you have to manually check for invalid keys in the map, whereas the same approach in a language that supports native named parameters would throw an exception about the invalid parameter. Several of the errors in this article would be caught by this.
SQL is the rosetta stone between many data storage engines. If NoSQL is going to succeed, I would argue that they will need to standardize their query languages.

There countless paradigms that prove my point. The web won out over the desktop. Relational won out over flat files. XML over other formats.

If the paradigm of NoSQL will succeed, customers will want some belief that they can ultimately escape the clutches of a particular vendor's product.
Tell HN: Watch 7 Startups Present Live
Couldn't help but notice this is by far the most commented post on the front page, and by an order/magnitude more than most others.
One of Sam Walton's 5 children was a VC in solar energy before he passed away young, another owns Arvest Bank, and another is still running Walmart...

I also bet a majority of their wealth is still in that stock, as major sell-offs of insider holdings suggests a company may not continue to produce growing profits - which hasn't been the case. However, I'm sure some still have quite a bit with extremely capable money managers.

I would not call that wealth stagnating in the least bit.
Pluto 2015: Journey to the Rim of the Solar System
Writing great documentation: what to write
Mono Tools for Visual Studio
The "Tooth Lady" who came to my school and taught us how to brush and showed us those gross movies of squirming plaque bacteria told us that any sugar at all in cereal is pretty bad. I was worried because I added sugar to my cereals that didn't have it. Mom never bought cereals with sugar added.

I said, "I like to add sugar to my rice crispies" and she said, "You couldn't add enough sugar to your rice crispies to equal the amount in the frosted kind."

And now, it's hard to buy even adult cereals without sugar in them. They are all so sweet. It can't be good.
Thanks for the advice. How do you suggest I get out of this jam?
I'd really like access to their nutritional information, so I could create a better meal planner and logger for myself.
But then those funds are managed in a family office and provide liquidity/investments/etc. and that capital on its own can provide value.
Which is to say, they are well diversified. With increasing diversity and massive assets it becomes more and more difficult it to earn exceptional rewards. Does most paths of asset returns exceed inflation and familial growth?

This is actually an interesting experiment. I'll run a crude test this weekend bootstrapping against the S&P500 to see how likely it is for wealth to propagate X generations into the future and report on Monday.
http://www.konigi.com/

http://www.patterntap.com/
For some bizarre reason my obsession today is with this thread and the idea of renaming Go to "Issue9"...

InformationWeek just caught on http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/web_services/sh...

And the hashtag #issue9 is growing in popularity on Twitter
But if they can add generics then they can solve that problem.

They don't need explicit 'generics' like in Java 1.5 -- they need to go back to the source, and adopt Haskell's type inference and parametric polymorphism. They already have basic type deduction, but it's only at the syntax level.

They should really add GADTs to the type system, with pattern-matching over them, but that doesn't fit at all with Protocol Buffers, so it might never make it.

Their 'case' statement is pattern matching already -- it doesn't do passthrough by default, it isn't a jump-table (not restricted to constants), and already has a special form for matching over types. They'd just have to cross the streams...
The environmental variable issue is quite minor, as are the three steps, and the architecturally-specific names of the compilation parts.

The semicolon issue is not really confusing--it says in one of the early pages that it is to be used as a statement separator, not as a statement terminator.

The exception mechanism isn't totally ruled out--they might do it, but it sounds like they well might not. And they have good reasons for not doing it.

The point labeled "Ambiguous assignment" isn't really ambiguous, it shows three ways to do the same thing.

I agree with the conclusion here, that many of things mentioned are likely to evolve.
What a fantastic article. I wonder how more rules-oriented gamebook series [1] would fare in this type of analysis. They do tend to lead to an "ideal" ending, as the author noted, so perhaps they wouldn't be as interesting. The progression graphs would be interesting to see, though.

[1] Such as Joe Dever's wonderful Lone Wolf series. The republished versions available at projectaon.org --- and apparently back in print now --- are just as much fun as I remember.
Ask HN: How would you license your software?
I never used any Ask HN credits before, but I really need some help here on a topic that might be of interest to some of you.

We are a software startup. For us, not only pricing is the issue, but the licensing scenario. Overall, the mixture of pricing and different licensing options become a confusing problem. E.g. how much software rights, and for what price?

We have a piece of reasonably complex code that is in prototype-to-product/near product stage. This is an embedded software product.

Normally similar products are licensed by big firms with a royalty-based license. For example, many devices get mass-produced, the software vendor gets a share.

The problem is, this information is kept secret and I don't know how much they charge as royalties. Worse, being clueless about competitors, we might just lose a lot solely on imprecise pricing. Should we charge 300k? Should we charge 70K? Or 1M? 1M for a license might sound a lot, but all are valid possibilities that other firms are charging. Even if I am not going to charge 1M, it would be nice to know if someone else is charging, so that I know how much of a difference I am making to the customer.

Here's another licensing scenario: Whatif another software firm would like to take the software, make a derivation of it and re-license it themselves? Should I charge them a whole lot more? How would we license it in this case, i.e how much rights should we give them...

It takes a geek very naturally to write the good software, but when it comes to selling it, it seems we completely lose the grips.
I'm not sure there's any reason for lawyers and money to be involved. A trademark in the U.S. protect marks used in commerce, so I would think that the authors of Go! would have to have used the name in a commercial venture prior to Google's announcement.

It appears that Google is not asserting trademark protection on the name, either, so there really doesn't seem to be any legal case at all - it looks like both parties can use it.

From uspto.gov:

A trademark includes any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination, used, or intended to be used, in commerce to identify and distinguish the goods of one manufacturer or seller from goods manufactured or sold by others, and to indicate the source of the goods.
as a beginner, things like scaffolds and other generated code pretty much completely eliminate these typo driven mistakes, they also make great starting points for understanding the framework. so that mitigates the problems mentioned for beginners, and by the time you are not a beginner hopefully those error messages make more sense. Personally, i found most of those error messages pretty good. im currently using spring/hibernate as well as RoR very heavily, and trust me i pull my hair out way more on the spring/hibernate side than the RoR side, come to think of it, i pull my hair out exclusively on the java side =)
At minimum, since you're in a hole, stop digging. If you've got fake names on your website, I second makecheck's advice to use "support@", "sales@", etc. instead. Transitioning out of fake names with customers you have an established relationship with may be a little more difficult.
In Japan, Even the Barcodes Are Well Designed
I find it interesting that (at least in the given extract) Buffett only highlights one of the two sources of unfair advantage (unfair starting conditions, but not unfair monopolies) that help people get exponentially rich with a non-corresponding increase - or even status quo - in the level of effort, quality of work, irreplaceability or risk to quality of life.

--

Banded tax - versus flat rate - is not fair. But neither will your fourth million dollars be.

From society's point of view, until we have more rationality and ideality of labour-reward on the income side, I don't think fairness arguments can really be mounted to the abolishment of taxes that make it unfairly expensive to be rich.

--

That said, with regards to inheritance tax, I have always really struggled to find any theoretical solution to the inconsistency I perceive in the system - children will always have unequal starts in life related to the efforts and success of their parents; be that in somewhat intangible notions like forming a great network of contacts, or right down to trying extra hard to woo a mother/father that will give the kids a great genotype. Why start - or stop - at money? Has political, social or economic science ever sought to justify that?
Is it really useful or meaningful to claim every feature that Python has is "Pythonic", though? Are dicts "Pythonic"? Awk had them a decade earlier. Is garbage collection "Pythonic"? Lisp had it long ago. Dynamic typing? Generators? Etc.

To my understanding (and admittedly, while I've been using Python since around 1.5, I've largely abandoned it for Lua), 'Pythonic' is usually used to refer to the clearly preferred way of doing something that may have multiple implementations - Python's community making explicit the observation of conventions such as "for (i=0; i<N, i++) {" in C.

Using a dict rather than an int-indexed list is Pythonic, for example, because that's just the way that it's done in idiomatic Python, and the community encourages having one preferred idiom for common tasks. I don't think the concept applies to language features such as garbage collection.
Hey Smokey, I was searching through HN posts and I saw that you went to Iowa State. If you don't mind, can I ask you a few questions? Probably by email.
Apparently, some of the difference in mortality profile is because there hasn't been a major H1N1 flu in quite a while, so older people have some immunity to H1N1 that younger people don't have because their immune systems have never faced such a virus.
Comparing "Smart" and "Dumb" Queries Using Google Suggest
Some popular/cool sites and the languages they use
I thought I'd get out and meet new people by working as a department store Santa. It's so different to what I'd normally do that it's bound to be... fun... right?
No that happened at HOPE 2006 :)

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/07/fbi_arr...
Thanks, I'll check that app. I have FAQ and help pages. And, when I see patterns in the questions I update the user interface to make it clearer and those emails stop. I've optimized it to a point where most of the questions are unique or are hard to optimize further.
Sorry, it was meant to be playful ribbing, obviously it doesn't come across in text.
Marketing itself is not immune to marketing; they go through waves of "methods" and "best practices" fads, usually initiated by a handful few industry gurus.

In the mid to late 90s, marketing became all about identifying with the customer's "core values" and "identity", they started making ads that neither told you what the product was, nor what it did, instead, they tried to make a brand "tribe", based on some weird interpretation of post-industrial anthropology, they tried to create a market segment where the brand was the central shared value of the "village", something more ideological than material. Marketing then became brand evangelism and market research was boiled down to studies of primitive emotions, love, fear, anxiety, comfort, family bonds, etc.

They swung back once again, and the new fad became humor, every ad had to make you laugh to create a private shared moment between customer and brand, so the next time you were at the store, you knew Frosted Flakes, Bud Light and Gillette Mach II were your buddies.

Then it's been about personalization and customization. Ads stopped telling you what the product was for, and instead, told you you could use it any way you wish.

Sometimes the ad would emphasize an sweepstakes prize over the quality of the actual product itself; you will be shown an image of you and your buddies rolling down Vegas Blvd on a topless '65 Camaro, smoking cigars and casino lights reflecting off of your Aviators as you stopped to grab a few ladies outside the Venetian and headed to a roof-top pool party where some sick tunes were being sliced by an underground dance DJ duo from Dusseldorf. Cut back to an image of four buddies on their couch in a frat pad, game controllers in hand, when one of them pops a bottle of Miller Light open and finds he won a free trip to Vegas for four.

You probably wont buy Miller to win the trip, but next time you're heading to downtown Cleveland in your buddy's 2004 Elantra, you will be stopping by 7/11 to grab a six pack and you will cruise down to the party, with the lights of chainstores and fast-food joints reflecting off of your Aviators. You will be associating Miller with "fun", "High Life". At least the people who the marketers study do. What matters is not that you find the imagery supperficial, yes, it's out of your reach and nigh near impossible to get there, but that you identify with the four dorm-room slackers in the end; "Oh, I too sit on my couch and play video games, Miller gets me".

Back in 2001 Smirnoff probably sponsored a local Baltimore rapper to sing about their product. Before then, Smirnoff has been a girly drink; a pre-mixed bottled drink of vodka, water and colored sweets. As soon as the song became a local hit in the D.C/Baltimore area, you saw all the hiphop guys started drinking Smirnoff. It caught like wildfire and people said they were "getting their noff on" .. street cred in 3 months! At the time, Budweiser was sponsoring basketball games, block parties and entire evening programming of radio shows. Smirnoff got more out of $10-50k out of that sponsorship than Bud.
I've no idea why you're being down-voted, let me try to add something which might clarify: yes, Warren Buffet's children are lucky to be the ones born into the family they're in. But from Mr. Buffet's perspective, there's little luck involved in having children. When he decides to have kids, someone is going to be born into that position: there's a ~100% chance that if Warren has children, they'll be born into his family.

As for the dangerous meme of "the ovary lottery": even though it's true and useful in the context of talking about estate tax, it's a very dangerous idea. It's way too easy for that meme to inhibit the idea that "if you work hard and work smart, you can create wealth", which is at the heart of the American dream, and the work ethic of the American entrepreneur. I've known one too many upper middle class kids who slack off all the time, and feel Mr. Buffet's "ovary lottery" somehow implies that the existence of inherited wealth means creating your own wealth is pointless.
Something that strikes me about the language is that it was clearly designed by systems programmers as a replacement for C - but not a replacement for C++. The ability to return and concisely accept multiple values from a function simplifies procedural error checking considerably - exactly the kind of error checking that is all over systems code.
It's a religious thing. Writing actions that make sense both with XML output and with HTML output tends to force you to write REST-y web-service-y interfaces. I delete the code too, but I feel guilty for doing it.
You lose an object; unattached objects are loose.

Which doesn't cover every case I can think of, but demonstrates the difference. Also lose is a verb, loose is (almost always) an adjective.
You had to go ahead and ruin a funny joke by taking it seriously.
Apple is pretty good at staying ahead of the pack. A good example is the iPod line. The Classic was the original and the only iPod for several years. It was a high-end product selling for over $300. Eventually the market shifted towards smaller/cheaper players the Apple was able to make the Mini/Nano the most successful iPod while the Classic is now a niche product. Now the market is shifting towards convergence so the Nano gets more features and the Touch/iPhone become the future of the iPod. It will be interesting to see where they go from here. I don't think they'll make any big moves towards diversity until the market proves there is demand for it.
At a sausage fest like most hackers.
I agree, this approach looks insane to me.

I'm especially doubtful of it, because the article doesn't explain the problem with the obvious approach you suggested.

I feel bad to be so negative toward an idea I haven't fully explored, but I get the impression that the author of this article is trying hard to justify a bad approach rather than fixing the code.
Who hooked up the date, startupfriendfinder?
Even more amazing when you consider Apple has been artificially limiting themselves to only one carrier in the US. If they had launched a CDMA & GSM iPhone at the same time I don't think it's crazy to speculate their market-share could easily be 10% higher right now.
Space rock buzzes past Earth, just 15 hours after it was detected
Avoiding the Windows Fonts of Doom
As far as I can tell you have a choice of using HTML or XHTML syntax. The "it won't work" thing refers to trying to create what is ostensibly an HTML document but using XML syntax.

The kicker with going the XHTML path, though, is the expectation that the document will be served with a particular content-type header meant for XHTML/XML documents. This is no different than what's (supposedly) required for XHTML documents right now, yet very few people use the correct header (even people who chide others for not using XHTML).
Looping the Easy Way
Pretty good, recent, extended Eric Schmidt interview
True, but Ruby also allows for the Rails DSL to be fairly concise. If you assume a constant number of typos per typed word, the author would have made more errors in a more verbose language even if it had named params :)
Uh, not really. Anyone new to a framework should just stop learning at the first sign of frustration and write a blog post criticizing the framework.
Cool metaphor, I'll have to remember that.
When Google Does Maths Wrong
It seems incredible that they can't sacrifice some speed to parse on every read, and yet are also unwilling to sacrifice some disk space to cache several fully parsed versions.

Considering how quickly CPU and disk performance change, this type of tightrope-balanced optimization seems crazy. Or maybe they're way smarter than me.
Am I the only one who thinks articles like this are pure fluff? tl;dr -

"Successful people (like me) try real hard."

"Successful people (like me) hang out in my elite San Francisco pack of friends."

"Successful people (like me) have sparks in their eyes, but not stars."

this is not news or hacking, it's ego stroking. /flameoff
You could try and make membership a bit harder to achieve, similar to how demonoid will open and close memberships occasionally and have allowed them to maintain their unique culture (to say nothing of torrents).
It's relatively easy to make a SQL front-end for any single-node database.

For distributed databases it is harder.
Especially if you "mispell" the symbol :controller in the mapping file, apparently!
Yeah, it's not like any 49ers fans are worried.
Fantastic article. I just wanted to point out -- if you click on the links on the top left navigation, you can see the graphs/animations/etc for every book. This wasn't obvious until I read the entire article!
One of the commenters on this post made the salient point that the existence of the estate tax is probably one of the biggest drivers for the life insurance industry.
Another rich guy telling those not as lucky as him how lucky we are. Oh, and btw, pay your taxes.
Japanese headsets promise Terminator-style real-time information