skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's my understanding that one can use "goroutines" to implement your own rather powerful control structures. I'm not sure one really needs exceptions if you have goroutines, channels, and multiple return values. On the other hand, there are very compelling reasons for not having exceptions, given goroutines and channels."

The "goroutines" are just threads. They're not useful for building control structures. Unless you have continuations/a reified control stack or program in a monadic style (which would essentially be CPS in this case), you cannot "fake" exceptions.
Sharp eye Home - sharp eye
I agree with you totally, there is a cycle and walled garden social networking is the current phase and will fade into the background. Not go away mind you, because nothing ever really does,it just changes.

I think that personal websites will surge and be augmented with social networking modules that adhere to some sort of standard. Something like encrypted RSS linking private content for your 'friends' and public content for the rest of the people.

I think the popularity of social networking over the current definition of personal webpage is driven by three things, ease of use, the ability to define public/private content and cost.

There are plenty of niches in such a model, pure self owned/hosted (Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal etc with plugins), advertising supported we make it easy for you (Tripod, Geocities), free(Blogger, Livejournal), subscription (pay to ditch ads), and even old guys interconnecting with the new (a fancy Facebook Connect).

Benefits that I look forward to are my ability to control my interface and not have it change on someone elses whim, complete ownership of my personally generated content and an end to the serial monogamy of having to move to the new-new thing when the old-new thing inevitably dies.
Oops. I always assumed Hoare published in the 60s after I found out the factoid that CSP is (one of?) the most cited papers in CS.
"there are very compelling reasons for not having exceptions, given goroutines and channels"

This confuses me I would have thought the opposite would be true. The goroutine/channel concept seems Erlang like to me. Erlang uses exceptions, if a process crashes an exception is thrown to its parent which can then act appropriately. How does Go handle this, i.e. if a goroutine crashes who gets informed and how?
Do you redirect to the "the" domain?
This is not hacker news, no matter how strongly you may feel about the subject.
Google AdWords has a policy against "Negative option or unclear billing practices". There is also a section on "Support advertised prices, discounts, and free offers."

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?page=guid...

I'm going to assume that Scamville offers would fall under one of those categories. Hard to say without actual legal precedent.
No, it just consists of a silly phrase that only makes sense if you've seen the movie. Am I a bad neighbor? I'm assuming that since the site gets such a low number of visits I'm not doing any harm.
You know the guidelines as well as anyone else, let's keep the uninteresting meta-discussion as these two posts.
Feedback for simple product idea
My roommate Chris and I are big fans of Hacker News and we publish the BASES [Startup Digest]. The Digest is a weekly email update of the top tech and entrepreneurship events happening in the Valley and around the Bay area. Check out the latest digest (and our painfully simple website) at http://thestartupdigest.com. We have been brainstorming ideas to create more simple tools that would help startups succeed. Our latest one is for a "Competitive Digest" to offer alongside the events digest. I've included an outline of the Competitive Digest below. We would love to hear what you think!

Problem – Companies need to keep track of their competitors but don’t have the time to do it effectively. It is important to do so because investors/customers will expect you to know what your competitors are offering and it will help you with both generating feature ideas and competitive benchmarking.

Our Product - The Competitive Digest will provide you with a weekly update on what your competitors have been up to, how you stack up against them in key metrics, and how you might acquire insight on what they will do next.

How it Works - The Digest is separated into three sections: Headlines, You vs. Them, and Competitive Content. View an example here: http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=92be899ef5a892c60b4a6cd97&id=9abcf51997&e=

The Headlines section features the most important things your competitors did last week (from articles, press releases, etc.)

The You vs. Them section provides you with competitive metrics to compare your website traffic, customer engagement, and media coverage.

The Competitive Content section provides you with links to both yours and your competitors’ tweets and company blogs. It also links you to any job postings they have and shows you any LinkedIn connections you have to their current and past employees.

We now have some questions for you about this problem, the product, and the offering in general. Thanks for all your input and feedback in advance. If we generate a good response we will be sure to reward you with a first demo trial of the product at a steep discount :-)

Is tracking your competitors a problem for your company? If so, who is this specifically a problem for?

Would you be willing to spend money to solve this problem?

How much time (if any) does this person spend per week keeping track of your competitors?

What do you think overall about the product offering, and what features should the Competitive Digest have from Day 1?

What is the hardest part of tracking your competitors, and if you could change anything about that process what would it be?

Do you have a budget for this problem, and who would be the person in your company in charge of this?

If this product cost $100 a month would you buy and use it?

If this product does not seem interesting to you, do you know anyone who would want something like this?

Thanks again,
Chris & Brendan
Why is this a bad thing? Seems like developers should jump at the chance for honest feedback.
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Just out of curiosity, where do you get your data?
Sosial bookmarking
Well, my other email client of choice is pine (I set it to green text on black). The GMail theme was a welcome surprise. The black screen is easier on the eyes at night. Dunno, to each his own :)
Hmmm, thinking here. It's basically distributed Friendfeed which already seems to have all the functionality I'm describing.Except you can host your own stuff and adhere to a common API.
Stallman and the tragedy of the commons? Irony? Or just zealots?
If you want, you can reach us at:

chris [dot] mccann [at] bases [dot] stanford [dot] edu

or

brendan [at] thestartupdigest [dot] com

thanks!
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newsycombinator.com is available... ;)
I want to know why there isn't a dedicated site to "follow bands", know when they are playing in my neighborhood, and share with friends bands and songs we both like.
Yes - if you buy the misspelled domain, you would most likely 301 Redirect to your main site.

My point was whether that was worth doing. In those two instances (where loss of customer or loss of brand strength was likely), I would suggest yes.

If you're Facebook, Facebok.com won't be worth much - people will note the spelling error or hit Google and be properly directed. If you're Xobni, then Zobni.com might be worth it (so you don't lose potential clients who've kinda heard about you), and if you're Disney and you know Walt Dinsey is a massive South American porn star, then grabbing Dinsey.com would be wise.
I've never understood why pizza places don't rent movies.

"Oh crap, I have a late movie sitting here collecting fines. I'll just order another pizza so they'll pick it up..."
Ask HN: how do you avoid burnout and getting taken advantage of?
I'm 3 years out of college. The first year my product made the CEO a million dollars while I made less than $50k in salary and 0.01% equity. Ugh. I moved to another company which paid double that, and worked like a dog (80 hours weeks) for nearly two years, and was one of the most productive engineers. One of my products helped bring in over 6 million in VC investment money. After two years I asked for a raise, and didn't receive one, being told "we can't give raises during layoffs."

When I told them I was quitting, they offered me a giant (>25%) raise, but I couldn't stomach the thought of staying after accepting another offer, so I moved to another startup. I took my first project from $50 to $700+ daily revenue in 2 months by working 100 hours weeks. Yet because I take a modest salary, and have significant but non-founder equity (1-2%) to be vested over 4 years, I feel like I'm just making other people rich. I'm starting to become depressed. My sex life with my girlfriend has become non-existent. I dream about the rewards of hard work--I want to travel, to live the good life--but then I look at my life and see my twenties beginning to slip away, with a high likelihood of nothing but memories of hard work and my morning coffee to replace them. My company would have to be acquired for $10 million, at the very least, to make a very modest improvement to my lifestyle, and over $50 million to make any significant difference.

Am I being too impatient, or am I simply having my twenties milked by charismatic CEOs who know how to exploit eager young workers, and how can I even tell the difference? What is the best thing I can do, right now, to take control of my professional life? Is it okay to ask for more salary just two months into a position? I feel exhausted and exploited.
I don't see much logic behind capital punishment. Wouldn't someone who is irrational enough to take another humans life in a pre-meditated way not value their own much? Maybe after the fact they regret it and fear death but it's already too late. The risk of executing any innocent person is so incompatible with basic human rights that whatever joy the victims family gets out of a revenge killing simply isn't worth it. I'm also a bit terrified by the radical Christian fundamentalists that can somehow rationalize taking another humans life in this context. It's far too close to the mindset of a suicide bomber who can twist religion into being compatible with their own hatred and anger.
Oh great, now I need an app for every single website I visit. Oh you don't have one for my phone yet? Oh you are never going to support my phone?

Wait, you've stopped using HTML for your own proprietary markup?

Seriously? This is dumb.
I recommend the Economist Style Guide. My friends who are print journalists regard it highly. A slim novella of the guide is available for offline reference.

"This guide is based on the style book which is given to all journalists at The Economist." http://www.economist.com/research/styleguide/
Software engineers != engineers. Please stop abusing the word.
I am very dubious of the pictures. For example why the jet black skin? Neanderthals were cold adapted creatures.
A Widget to embed up-to-date code from Github on a page
this is an interesting development, but i don't like the submission format. you should have submitted it as a link, and put your own feelings into a comment.
I've thought about number two as well. How about a combination of caching all pages you read and how long you are spending on each page (and maybe if you scrolled as well)?

The idea is to save enough data that you can have an algorithm that will automatically differentiate between stuff you closed within a couple of seconds and didn't really read and stuff that interested you and you actually read through. And the reason for doing this automatically is it seems very difficult to have the discipline take an action every time you see a page that you may want to save so that you can search through again (such as clicking a box for every such page).

Whatever mechanism it is, it needs to account for stuff read through readers and over multiple computers/devices too. I don't want to miss a search result just because I was reading it on an iPhone or in my Google Reader.

Or instead of caching locally, a search interface that would accept a long list of urls to look through.
Slightly o/t: Does the font on his site look awful to anyone else? In opera, the site looks like this for me, which is horrible. I have to mash the readability script bookmarklet to read it: http://imgur.com/ODnjY.png
I assume they have some arrangement with the government to not funnel any traffic through their local joke-of-censorship proxies.
He's worth listening to even if you disagree with him, IMO.
Aside from examples, my post was hardly specific to software. It would apply to any group of engineers. It might even apply to other industries.
Sure it sucks now, but in 2004 it just blew away Friendster which what my social network was using at the time.

Watch Facebook pages eventually add music and other content. Watch some light themeing appear for your personal page.

What Facebook is doing right is keeping people separated from things like bands and companies and going real slow on development and keeping control while they expand their userbase.
If the client is on Mac OS X, why do they need to create a zip file at all? You can use something like DropDMG <http://c-command.com/dropdmg/>; to create an encrypted .dmg file by dropping files/folders on it. Alternatively, if the client is on Windows, have them use a Windows ZIP utility, and then unzip on the Mac side with The Unarchiver <http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/....
About a year ago; I'm no longer with the company. It was http://chi.mp/
Inmotion hosting uptime & Inmotion hosting review for September 2009
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Slightly off-topic, indeed :)

But yes, I have the same problem. I'm using Opera too, and use shift+g to disable stylesheets when reading that page. (You need to enable single-key shortcuts for this to work)
Why git is better than X
I just checked out The Sixty One and it looks great, but it did not exist when the the Myspace band rush started.

Edit-- The Sixty One is amazing. What a beautiful UI, it works likes a charm. I am gonna join and recommend the hell out of it.

Edit,Edit-- It let me sign up without stopping the song I was playing or losing track of the songs I had already listened to. Very pro, this is how you do it right.
Panhandling and Policy
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Venture-backed startup (Stealth Project Oscar) looking for Hacker co-founder
If you consider yourself to be a true YC-grade hacker, then we want to talk to you! We are looking for an all-around hacker with experience in multiple aspects of web and mobile development to join the founding team of startup as the Lead technical co-founder.

We are a concept-stage startup (seed funding raised from Palo Alto-based fund) looking for someone with a strong engineering background who enjoys solving hard programming problems in a fast paced and fun environment.

What we're looking for:

You will be the lead technical co-founder for this startup. You will build most of the infrastructure from the ground up with support from two other co-founders working in preferably PHP, Python, or Ruby. We are looking for a full-time co-founder willing to work in our office in either Palo Alto or Mountain View.

Responsibilities:

- Lead mobile and web development efforts for concept-stage startup
- Contribute to product design and implementation discussions, be the go-to guy for all product technology considerations
- Rapidly prototype and write lots of high quality/scalable code and iterate quickly based on customer feedback
- Help scale the technology across multiple platforms

Qualifications:

We’re looking for an entrepreneurial co-founder
- Love to build stuff! - please point us to projects you've already worked on.
- Ready and able to learn new programming languages quickly where required.
- Understanding of scalability, systems engineering and algorithms.
- Proven track record of solving challenging coding problems.
- Experience in mobile development (iPhone, Blackberry, Android) a plus
- Exposure to computer vision concepts and principles a plus

Compensation: Salary, Co-founder stock options, and healthcare stipend. This posting is not for an engineering hire, it is for a true hacking co-founder. Think you’d be interested? Drop us a line with your resume at project.oscar@gmail.com
#2 - I believe mozilla is working on it already - http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop
Programming Language Lifecycles - Where's Java At? (2002)
For that analogy to work at all, votebox's UI would have to be a set of shared files that are automatically synced to your filesystem, with a primitive online file browser UI, but only local editing. It would also have to be a completely independent site, with different user accounts and separate quota.
That's what I mean, the 'loser' is the one who chooses to not play the game when he knows the house (sociopaths) sets the rules to always come out on top.
Understanding this level of communication becomes simpler if you understand the dynamics at play in office relationships.

Listen to gossip, try to understand the way your boss feels about his boss. About his peers. About his portfolio. And look for leverage.

<PostureTalk>I find it exhausting and truly boring so I don't do it. But maybe that's because my personality doesn't enjoy power plays and I want a happy life over a rich/powerful one.</PostureTalk>
Real Estate Distress Or Opportunity
The CSS declaration is:

font-family: 'Sabon LT Std', 'Hoefler Text', 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', serif;

Which of those fonts are you actually seeing?
jquery,

I think the answer to your question is quite clear to me. Be the founder or part of the founding team at your next startup. What's been holding you back, you seem to be a good enough engineer to either be part of an upcoming YC class or do it on your own? You'll work just as hard, but I think the satisfaction will be much greater, and of course a financial upside if it works out!

Good Luck
Take more risks.

There's this idea that's beaten into us as children: our success depends upon how hard we work. That's only true insofar as zero effort probably equals zero reward. In reality, your reward is much more proportional to the risks you take (and of course, you have to be lucky and skillful enough to see that risk pan out).

You have to understand the bargain that you are making when you accept an employment offer. You are pledging your effort in exchange for a mostly-fixed amount of cash. In return, the company bears the (not insignificant) risk that your project will be a failure in the marketplace.

My last project made more money for the company than I will ever earn in wages during my lifetime. However, there's a good chance that my current project will lose more money for the company than my last project made. And then future projects that it enables will hopefully make all that back. At my previous employer, I completed two projects that were big successes inside the company and big failures in the marketplace. The point is that my employer is bearing the risk, not I. I knew that was the tradeoff that I made when I accepted their offer.

If I were in your position (and I have been, several times), I'd ask myself: given the startup ideas I have, what are my chances of success? And what can possible employment opportunities give me that will increase those chances of success for future startup ideas? Part of playing your hand well is knowing when to fold, and part is knowing when you're right and everyone else is wrong and you ought to double-down.

In other words, you should think more like a hedge fund manager and less like a programmer.
IBM 1401 50th anniversary
Thanks chipsy, I think you answered the question perfectly =)

To expand, bananas may be relatively high sugar/energy compared to other natural foods (green vegetables), but they cannot compare with the super concentrated foods we have created such as Twinkies =)
India is a next exporter of IP
programming languages influence how you think about programming to such a degree that it's difficult to reason objectively about them.

it's rare for me to watch long videos, because they are information-poor for the time investment, but i watched rob pike talk for an hour about go this evening. a lot of it is really interesting, but a lot of things about the syntax made me think: ow, that's going to be painful for me if it becomes successful.

rob's talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s
Oh definitely. More opponents to train against.
Well, success for a short time :) of course after that two days you have to do something else and continue to make good investments...
Why Singapore, why not HK?
I sent this article and the article, "Nerd and his cave", to my wife a couple of months back. She understands me completely now and is so much better at leaving me alone to feed my inner nerd.
It seems like whenever consumers have an ostensible choice in something, but do not pay the full price for the thing they're buying, they end up not acting in their best interest because the costs are distorted. Whether it's health insurance, airplane tickets, or cell phones.

In this case, for instance, Apple can say an iPhone costs $600, because, to a consumer, it costs $200. The amount that Apple gets for the device could just have easily been $500 or $800 because, well, that's not what you're paying when you buy one.
If you got charisma and charm, it's a non-factor. Wait, maybe I'm only part nerd ... :D
I have a very recent vintage T400 - the keyboard is still mushy, and the casing still feels downright cheap and flimsy. There's simply no comparison - on the one hand you're building a machine out of plastic panels wrapped on a metal frame - on the other hand you're building a machine out of a one-piece aluminum construction.

I push on a unibody Mac keyboard - nothing flexes. It's rock solid. I push on a T400's keyboard, or bezel, or any body component that isn't supposed to twist and bend - and it does.
Affordable Health Care
Affordable Health Care - insurance coverage that provides protection for your family and not breaking the bank.
Why I disagree with @Arrington about Droid
A nice non emotive conclusion that can be paraphrased as:

The "Droid" is the better phone while the iPhone is the better facebook and Twitter client.

That sorts it for me nicely.
Unsure (I'm not great at eyeballing fonts), is there an easy way to check?
You wait 2 seconds for a page load? You're amazingly generous.
You clearly took my analogy too far. I was referring to the concept of a closely-knit system of user feedback and voting, not a clone of the site directed toward the purpose of meta-discussion.
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How is this possible? Isn't Starcraft closed source? Did they hack the binaries to allow exposing an API or something? If so isn't this project illegal? Or did Starcraft provide a C++ API all along?