wallyhs

I think that's just his exaggerated writing style.

It's a feature for developers:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144096(VS.85).asp...

Maybe you'll enjoy this:

https://www.stilldrinking.org/5-reasons-waiting-tables-is-a-...

If I remember correctly, you can put [void] in front of a statement to prevent it from being included in the return.

I didn't think that you personally were accusing people. I hope I didn't give that impression. I probably could have written "we" instead of "you."

Someone trying to explain how Islam doesn't encourage terrorism is on the defensive. The accusation has already been made. But the accusation doesn't make sense if the religion has no life of its own and exists only in the medium of individuals.

It's tough to defend against an accusation that doesn't make sense. If we can't point out what is bad, what is there to defend? The whole thing has a guilty-until-proven-innocent feeling to it. If the prosecutor can't make a sound case, there should be no need for a defense in the first place.

Anecdotally, the people I know who claim that Islam encourages terrorism don't know much about it. What they do know is shallow and cherry-picked, and any decent explanation immediately goes into the "it's different, so it's bad" bucket. It must be very difficult to demonstrate anything to these people.

So you conclude that Islam encourages terrorism because, when you accuse someone of being a terrorist, they don't respond openly and enthusiastically? You've decided that a religion is guilty and want individuals to show proof of innocence?

Suppose that I live in an apartment with a wood stove, second-hand smoke from a room mate, and radon. If I get lung cancer, which one is to blame? How do you know?

We use an iPad based SASS POS, and editing the menu is a pain. Every time I start to edit something, I have to wait 60 seconds while it pulls in the list of every item on the menu. If I want to edit five specific menu items, I don't want to wait for the entire list of items to load five times. Updating prices or costs on our menu literally takes three of us an entire day to pull off. We've been meaning to clean out some discontinued items from the menu, but... that would take three of us an entire day to do.

We do retail alcohol in addition to restaurant food, so we have a lot of items on our menu. I don't like how the menu is organized, but it would be too slow and painful to reorganize at this point.

I would kill for an API so that I could make mass numbers of menu edits by script. I would require some sort of a testing environment for that, though.

When it comes to reintroducing wolves, everyone agrees the risk to humans is low.

The contention is between wildlife activists and ranchers. Wolves tend to feed on livestock. You can imagine how upset a rancher gets when his assets disappear in the middle of the night.

I wish I knew what this bear was thinking:

http://www.mtexpress.com/news/environment/bear-grabs-sleepin...

"A Boise hunter sustained minor wounds when a black bear grabbed him by the head while he was sleeping in the open along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River last week."

"He said that before the men went to sleep on the night of the attack, they had stowed all their food in a box on their raft."

"Jon Rachael, state wildlife manager for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, said unprovoked attacks by black bears are rare, and it’s impossible to say what motivated this one. He guessed that either the bear had become conditioned to people by finding food around them or perhaps was just curious, and grabbed Vouch’s head to see what it was."

A person who pulls a gun on an officer has already decided not to obey the laws. How would adding more laws make officers safer from such a person?

The salary isn't the point:

I immediately exclude discussion of company, title, and salary, because these are the things people think they want but can't really affect my decision.

So by stating that these three things, company, title, and salary, are already taken care of, it frees candidates to think about what really matters to them.

Say I build a house in a town near a forest in Idaho. Now, there are 20,000,000 acres of national forest in Idaho of which 200,000 are currently burning. So only 1% of the forest is burning and mostly in remote locations in which there are no roads. Even if one of the fires happens to be near me, I am not too worried: I have a metal roof and a fuel-free buffer zone around the house. Additionally, the local fire department has my back.

This is a one-time event for me, because the same forest won't burn again in my lifetime. The chance of my house being destroyed by a wildfire in any ten-year period is practically zero.

Note that high deserts also burn, and the wind moves those fires along at a frightening pace. Forest and desert are pretty much the only choices in places like Idaho or Montana.

You can remember it as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7: First month, second day, 3pm and four minutes and five seconds in the year '06, offset -7.

FWIW, you can install MSBuild without Visual Studio. It's part of the Windows SDK. If your target system is not supported, you have to run it on a supported system and choose the "Download for installation on a separate computer" option. Then copy the resulting msi and cab files to the server and run them. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12944502/build-asp-net-4-...

However, after I did this, I had to find build targets that Visual Studio installed and copy them from my workstation into the same directory on the server (i.e. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\WebApplications).

Sure, but what if my only Windows system won't boot? I am sure that I can access the registry from a Linux system somehow, but it's not as easy as invoking less or vim. That is especially true if the Linux system doesn't have a GUI. I don't need a GUI to read a text file.

You have to assume that code cleans itself up as the stack unwinds.

Exceptions or not, if you have an unknown error condition, how can you assume anything?

I apologize for the delayed response.

I agree that you have to weigh the advantages, but we are talking about a special type of database. Most configuration data is read-only during normal operation. It's not as if anyone stores customer data in /etc or the Windows registry.

Here is a reason: You can view the configuration files and logs of a damaged system by mounting its disk in another system and using any old text editor. There is no need to install special tools.

That's my point: in this situation, you can't display an error and keep going. How do you know that you are not in this situation when you catch an unknown exception?

You can only recover from such errors locally. The local context is not available in a global exception handler.

Corruption is outside the state of this discussion.

Why? If corruption leads to an exception, it seems relevant. Corruption could be the application's own fault, it could be failing hardware, it could be someone trying to exploit a vulnerability. It could be anything - a result of undefined behavior. Sorry if I'm using the term loosely.

If half your app just overwrote the other half of your app, no matter what we say here is going to make any difference.

If it overwrote the other half, it should crash immediately. I can't just display an error message and retry the operation in that case. If I don't know what exception I'm handling, how can I be sure that I won't cause more damage by handling it?

The other part (and in my opinion the important part) of exception handling is ensuring your stack unwinds correctly.

That is not what I was referring to. A program can still get into an inconsistent state with exceptions. For example, if a function updates half of some data structure and then throws, that data structure may be left in an inconsistent state. Of course you should not write functions that way, but it is an easy mistake to make. Do you really want your app to keep running in an inconsistent state?

I'm looking at it from a defensive, assume-the-worse perspective. If my application is in an inconsistent state, it should cease running immediately. If my application does not know which state it is in, it must assume that it is in an inconsistent state.

No, you shouldn't. What are you going to do any differently with that than you would FileIsLockedException or NetworkIsDownException or HarddriveIsCorruptException? You wouldn't do anything differently. Show the user the ErrorMessage in the dialog and allow them to restart whatever operation was in affect. Let them choose a shorter path, close Excel, plug their Ethernet cable back in, or whatever. Trying to play wack-a-mole is a fools errand.

I don't understand this viewpoint. If a file is locked, the user may be able to fix it, so go ahead and display an error. But if there is corruption, then what is the user going to do? You can't tell them, "Restore your system from backup, and then click OK." Your program has to crash before it causes more problems.

What if the situation is stack corruption or heap corruption? Or what if the error left the application in an inconsistent state? Continuing to run might corrupt the user's data. What if an attacker caused the corruption in order to gain unauthorized access? Logging or displaying the error might be exactly what they want.

I often see variations of this advice: If you don't know how to handle it, don't catch it. By definition, you don't know how to handle an unknown exception.

Put MSDN away, you don't need it.

I think it is a good idea to understand the behavior and failure modes of every API function that you call; this requires that you consult the documentation.

It's not just about the grass. When trees die, they become hazards and must be removed. That's expensive. Without trees, there are fewer birds. There is no shade. The sound of leaves is absent from the wind. Obviously, there are more important things for a society to worry about, but my point is that this issue is not just about grass.

People seek out natural things such as plants. They put them in their homes, they hang paintings of them on their walls, and they decorate their cubicles with them. I don't think it is surprising that people want green lawns. It is depressing to live in a brown world.

The answer seems to be to design _better_ lawns: plant grasses, shrubs, and trees which grow naturally in the area, do not require huge amounts of water, and are drought-resistant. I don't know about LA, but, in my area, this transition has been underway for years.

Since the site is Enterprise Craftsmanship, I read it from that angle. In my experience, deployments must be requested several days in advance and require approvals from managers, testers, analysts, and functional experts. Quick "emergency" changes require extra approvals and are reviewed periodically. Minor configuration changes don't have nearly as many restrictions.

In that type of environment, I think it is absolutely worth the flexibility. And "building in" that kind of flexibility means to, um, add a line to the existing configuration file.

You omitted that from your comment, but I agree. I was just pointing out the option, because it didn't sound as if you had tried it.

I did not mean to endorse anything.

Instead of throwing away your project structure, try creating a "go" subdirectory in your project and setting GOPATH to point to it. Yes, you need a separate GOPATH for each project, but it's no worse than needing a separate Python virtualenv for each project.

No, but you seemed to imply that one can only learn from certain people in certain contexts. I find that I gain surprising insight from unexpected people at unexpected times. HN is not an exception.

No, they can't, because the folks who are commenting at what you think is that level are actually completely unqualified to do so.

The folks who are qualified to write articles and papers on the topics that might interest you, do exactly that.

How could you possibly know who is qualified and who is not? Given that the authors of submitted articles frequently comment on HN themselves, it must be true that at least some HN comments are made by qualified people. But that assumes that writing an article is the sole requirement for being "qualified". Not all articles are written by qualified people. Additionally, many articles are watered down by journalists, and HN threads can provide broader perspectives.

There is no inherent value in wasting intellectual effort on an HN comment.

There is as much inherent value as there is in wasting intellectual effort in a conversation at a dinner party. If I am talking to someone whose life experience is completely different from mine, I am learning something even though they are not rising to the level of their capabilities. I am allowed to learn subjects superficially out of curiosity and without the blessing of an authority figure. I have to choose who to listen to and who to ignore just like I do with other sources of information such as HN submissions.

Asking for sources in response to an unfounded claim is common on HN. I've never seen anyone called naive, greedy, and lazy for it, though. At any rate, asking for a source does not preclude one from researching the topic separately.

I agree that HN should not be put on a pedestal. Neither should the submissions.

In my area, they use goats in town along heavily traveled bike and foot paths to control noxious weeds such as knapweed and leafy spurge. Goats are reported to be more effective than chemical herbicides and don't harm beneficial bugs, fungi, and bacteria. Children love to stop and watch the goats, too.