skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This fellow shouldn't call himself a computer science teacher, that's a completely different subject. He's a computing teacher.
Update your System Software
I have always wanted:

A. an easy way to call into Haskell or some other fp from python.

B. the ability to embedd the above so that I can have equations in a nice mathy looking form but the rest in python.

C. all of the above w/ R too.
Do you have a good peer-reviewed article that shows that tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature is a poor fit. I'd be interested in reading it.
I'm sure if he got a 'Please hold for the president' he wouldn't be doing any hanging up, some people's time is more important than his.
Great comment, as is the parent. But I'd question your Google history. PageRank was talked about from the beginning. The list went more like this:

1. Hey everybody, check out this new search engine with a genius algorithm called "PageRank" that returns much more relevant results!

2. ?

3. ?

In other words, Google is a prime example of what zaidf is saying. PageRank was a huge marketing hit. Over 10 years later, it's still the first thing anyone mentions when they talk about Google's competitive edge, yet this has been a fiction for ages and may largely have been so from the beginning. How much of a technical edge was it really, compared to the other things Google did right? That remains totally obscure (see 2 and 3 above).
Dynamic typing is certainly embeddable within Haskell. Just define a data type Dyn which is the sum of types Int, String, Float, [Dyn], and Dyn -> Dyn. You will see how much LISP is possible without much added syntactic cruft. But Haskell users don't need and want to operate in this way, because they can leverage the benefits of static typing.

An enumerated type (as you describe) is very simple to implement, but true dynamic typing is a bit more complicated, and there's some constructs from dynamically-typed languages which can't be expressed within the bounds of Haskell's type system.

The Data.Dynamic[1] module is a pretty good implementation of dynamic typing in Haskell, but it's still a bit awkward to use compared to a language which supports dynamic typing natively (eg Python).

[1] http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-4...
Well, stealth has its place. But in the end, you need all the marketing you can get.
Computer Science is just science at the start. We know a couple of things like Shannon's theorem and Amdahl's law, but that's about it. Unfortunately a lot of experimental computer engineering is also being sold as computer science.
Indeed. But at least that's more discouraged in scientific circles than in think tanks and PR/astroturfing campaigns financed by those who want to discredit science for financial gain.
There's an interview with Gen. Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47, where he's asked, is he ashamed of creating something that killed so many people? He replies, he created it to defend his country and his people from Fascists and he was proud of having done so.
I think you missed the point. My point was that you should be able to judge the argument without prejudice based on the speaker. If you are using credibility as your mode of discerning the truth, then I fear that you will be wrong about most things in life.
For the record:

After I posted this I changed tack with my researching and started looking specifically for movie poster DBs instead of general image services...

Pretty much straight away I found this:

http://www.movieposterdb.com/embedding

Anyone else that finds this, enjoy!
This is how science is supposed to work. Sure there are a few straw men/ad hominem attacks peppered in the article but the proper response to criticism isn't calling the other side "denialists" and feigning offense but to respond with data and counter arguments.

The problem that many of these scientists have themselves compounded is the shroud of secrecy they've put over their "normalized" and "value added" data and methodologies. Painting Armageddon like scenarios and then obstructing freedom of information act requests when people ask about how they came about their conclusions is at best bizarre. Meanwhile we have a myriad of rationalizations from their defenders that we should instead trust their peer review which at the very least, the CRU/UEA emails show are suspect at least in this field.

Instead we are bombarded by these scientists/politicians who are anything but impartial who seem to present us with a binary choice that either we radically change our way of life which has serious risks in making us and the rest of the world significantly economically poorer or armageddon... and then they're surprised at the resistance? (This also ignores the myriad of policy responses like carbon trading being mired in corruption and leakages that are being advocated by these very same people)

It would seem to me that there are two parts to the problem - first understanding conclusively what has been happening and what will happen and second deciding what the appropriate policy response will be. Personally, I think AGW is likely but I also think that we are on the cusp of a massive transition towards clean burning (and more importantly, cheap) natural gas and alternative energies which makes at least the emissions as generated by much of the Western world moot.
thx for the recs! blueberry garden looks interesting. i also liked Braid for the platform genre.

haha. i read penny arcade (not for the gamer jokes, tho ?!) and didn't realize they had a game.
Google Open Source Blog: London Open Source Jam 15
SSJS eh.. I see the site is served up with Jetty. Must be Rhino inside. Narwhal? AppJet?
And you don't think that the billions of dollars at stake in carbon trading don't result in proponents attempting to discredit critics?
Stephen Fry: Poles, Politeness, Politics, and Twitter (Oct. '09)
Google XML Document Format Style Guide (2008)
ArXiv usually has most of the scientific papers that I read. Google Scholar gets the rest. But probably the best place is looking up the author an finding his personal website and downloading papers.
EDIT: Also check with your university if they have an agreement for papers.
Appears as Escape Pod episode 200: http://escapepod.org/2009/07/02/ep-200-all-you-zombies/ for people that would rather listen than read.
I was going to comment that this borders on ad hominem:

> FoxNews.com tells us that we finally have a 'smoking gun'--proof that scientists are manufacturing a global warming crisis so that they can… they can…

You know, calling out political theater instead of acknowledging that reasonable people are concerned when they see scientific misconduct. I was going to explain that this sort of Fox News reference is not so good for the discussion - let the points stand, noting that one critic of yours is abrasive does not make the criticisms invalid.

But, then I came upon this a little lower, which is a bit less subtle about it:

> It's interesting stuff ... not interesting in the way that the rabid anti-science fuckhead (pardon me!) reality-denying luddite denialsphere types are saying, though.

Why might the science be wrong? Because it's moved from science to an identity issue. Us vs. them. This guy isn't helping.
With PageRank, I think google gets a lot of leverage from misinformation, which can be as important as the information.

Few people really know much about PageRank beyond the general idea. In Google's case, I think they talked about PageRank more because they had written a paper on it and it was already public whether they talked or not.

But if you observe, beyond the original paper, little is known about PageRank from Google. There are plenty of guesses--right and wrong--that can be pieced together to form a narrative of the changes and evolution in PageRank. But nothing official from Google. And probably for a reason.
Summarized real well on Twitter:

@GeorgeReese: The real reason that stealth mode is daft is that there's no such thing as a unique idea.

@GeorgeReese: If your idea is unique, it's very probably a stupid idea.
I think the EU is great, but I wonder how much of that peace can be attributed to both the United States and USSR both having large armies camped through Europe for most of that time.
filetype:pdf title
I've never understood the appeal of embedded labels ("email" inside the email input field instead of next to it). In general it doesn't look any better, and the space saving is minimal. It's also an accessibility nightmare, and as the article mentions, quite confusing once you've already focused the input field.
That, or the guy coming on the line owes him money.

A lot of these rules are relative.
Copenhagen climate deal meets qualified UN welcome
I say you should choose which classes best support laptop notes (if you really want to use your laptop) and for those classes with a large amount of math/graphics just write in a normal notebook, it is faster and easier.
there should be automated service for this... esp. for customer service calls.
Our university doesn't even offer this while you're studying there, most unfortunately.
Author's personal websites...
Yes, and not only PageRank: they've done the same thing with BigTable, GFS, etc. They're masters of selective disclosure. Two things one often hears about Google is how open they are and how secretive they are, and what's remarkable is that both are true.
Isn't it just possible that these Hindley-Milner languages are the next step in the progression that LISP started?

It's possible they've discovered interesting ideas, but they're not on the line of development Lisp started. They grow more out of the Algol tradition.

I don't think anyone has ever proclaimed "we're finally done with our 100 year language." That would be extremely unlikely. The question is more which present languages are on the path to it.
I've heard of By His Bootstraps but it appears I had never actually read it - thanks!
The current views in climatology were developed long before there were "billions at stake".

Meanwhile, if there are "billions at stake" in the "green" industry, there are trillions at stake in those industries that would like to not have to install complicated and expensive filters for their manufacturing exhaust, and for the automotive industry which would surely love not to have to meet quite so stringent air quality standards.

Can we at least agree that arguing about monetary motivation is problematic at best, and probably stupid, and stick to the actual science here?
Networking: The last bastion of mainframe computing
You seem to be another carrier of the recent disease infecting HN, where users are commenting on articles that they didn't bother reading.
The point was your in-memory database is an external, non-python program, and you run lots of python clients.

The way most web applications are structured, for instance.
So,

1. PageRank
2. ???
3. Profit

I solved one of them...

(Worth the potential downvotes.)
Stephen Fry has an inimitable (though sometimes rambling) writing style that is immensely pleasurable to read.

In effect, this piece describes the social phenomenon that is "Twitter" from the perspective of someone who "dipped his toe" into it a year before this writing and emerged with around 1M followers. Full of interesting insights about how Twitter as a new development affects and alters politics, society, etc. much the same way as the emergence of the popular press first did a couple of centuries ago. Well worth reading for these observations alone.

The piece also includes a funny depiction of a major faux pas by the author (in an interview, about Poland and Auschwitz) and contains a classy apology over the issue - in effect, serving as a model for how a celebrity should properly apologize in such a case and standing in stark contrast to the non-genuine apology one gets routinely these days from politicians, celebrities, and other public figures.

A long and fascinating piece for those who love Mr. Fry's writing style and insights (and I do, even though I often disagree with him on substance).
I see where you're coming from, but 'lying' implies maliciousness. Somebody making up directions in cultures where not knowing is shameful isn't malicious, it's wanting to not be embarrassed.

The trick is to make sure the person feels they won't be embarrassed if they don't know the answer.
a) One of the worst aspects of ClimateGate is how that group was keeping people less fervent than them out of the peer-reviewed literature.

b) All you have to do is look at how their tree-ring data (MXD to be precise) diverges from recorded temperatures starting in 1960, it declines, to be precise, to know why they felt they had to "hide the decline". Heck, look at the chart where they cut off the green line that represents this data just as it's starting to fall and conveniently where it's in a thicket of other lines so that you won't easily notice the cutoff.
If anything, I would expect the relatively recent divergence of correlation between tree-ring measurements and other climate measurements to bolster claims of an unstable climate, rather than suggest cooling.

Here we have a situation where plant behavior closely follows other measurements of the climate for a very long time, and then recently ... they don't. The most likely explanation here -- still being studied, mind you -- is that there has been a significant change in the interaction between trees and environment in certain areas.
Pray tell, how do you know I didn't read it? (In all fairness, I read some, skimmed the rest.)
Not to disagree with you that ad hominem attacks aren't helpful, but the article laid out a lot of interesting data based arguments which you yourself completely ignored. Intentionally or not, you instead preceded to cast "the science" into doubt in an ad hominem fashion. Ad hominem attacks are besides the point, and degrade conversion, but just because people use them doesn't make everything they say wrong.
I had the same thought. The answer is there is no one thing that does/did it. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that Germany and France are closer to partners than combatants.
Mac OS Evolution: From System 1.0 to Snow Leopard
That's a very valid point. So I think we have these two types of metaprogramming, the runtime type and the compile time type. The latter is compatible with static typing but the former clearly is not.
The only way you will see FP doing massive parallelism at speeds even close to current best is if they wrap the C MPI interface, and I have yet to see any functional message-passing APIs which aren't tarted-up imperative environments

True, I would not be surprised if it evolved that way, but according to my (modest) knowlegde, it is possible for imperative routines to have a purely functional interface. The extreme case of course is the fact that any functional high-level code needs to be translated to assembly code to run at all, but I don't see why that boundary can't be on a higher level; As long as the developer programs functionally (and derives the benefits from that), does it matter that his code is being translated first into imperative MPI-ified C, and then assembly?

This is all provided, of course, that you can actually leverage the parallelism-related benefits of FP this way, which I guess is not known as of yet. You mentioned "functional message-passing APIs which [are] tarted-up imperative environments", care to give an example? I'm intrigued...

As for MapReduce, of course it's different from what the average HPC machine is used for, but being an embarrassingly parallel problem, it's one of the first problems where the FP approach has been shown to work. In other (eg typical HPC) applications, there's lots of work ahead in rethinking the algorithms so they can be expressed functionally, before you can even begin contemplating how to use the hardware.
This argument was framed in an "us vs. them" context a long time ago; that indeed has been one of the primary tactics and successes of the media engine of the right wing. It was obvious in Rush Limbaugh's earliest shows, and it's obvious in Fox News today.

I don't think it's altogether wrong for some people to be getting frustrated by this.
Sure (though the millions at stake in academic research particularly given the political climate as the leaked emails illustrate are also of significance) - but let's first separate the conversation to understanding that (1) what's the problem and (2) what we should do about it are two separate issues.

Let's also understand that much of the western world like the US are about to show significant declines in carbon emissions irrespective of what Fox news or any other polemics - pro or con say. (ref: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/15/us-decline...)
It's nearly impossible to hire good developers. Just as you've noticed.

It's also really easy to find a job if you're a good developer and have the references and public-facing projects to prove it.

It's the other 90% of the guys who have all the trouble finding jobs and who contribute to this sense that "there are no jobs out there". That's not actually true, but it may as well be for them.

Shame too, since a lot of those 90%'ers are actually pretty good. They just don't have a ton of experience, enough good references, or a single big hit they've built that they can show off.
The most dangerous part of being in stealth mode for a long time is the long time, not the stealth mode.

If you launch fast, as you should, the question of how secretive to be before launching shrinks in importance.

Our advice is generally: you can tell people about some of your plans, and others you should keep secret, but above all, transform them into actions as soon as possible.
That's very interesting. We're doing something similar. I'm curious as to how you reconcile your "intermediate data structures" with one of the principles in the OP, that of minimizing the transformations you have to do on your data in the first place. The latter is a profound insight that I am slowly digesting. One thing it throws out the door, for example, is layered architectures. Not a small deal! Yet it makes sense to me, because my experience with layered architectures has been that the more nicely modular and well-defined you make each layer, the more bloated and nasty the mappings between layers become.

Sometimes I think I'm chasing pure functional programming

No question this is more suited to FP than OO.

Edit: this really is a rich subject. It's interesting that a lot of this discourse is coming out of the game dev world, because that's a section of the software universe which is relatively free of pseudo-technical bullshit (probably because it's so ruthlessly competitive and the demands on the apps are so high).
I don't have one. That's sort of the problem, though, isn't it?

With the climatologists interfering so strongly in the way this is supposed to work, by selecting which peers do their reviews, and by applying political pressure to the journals, the whole "look it up in the established body of work" approach has been sabotaged.

EDIT: I forgot an important one. The collusion aspect that the emails revealed. We're not going to put this result in our paper, even though we believe it, because it messes up Scientist B's premise.
They were very talked about when Moskovitz left Facebook to start it. They're basically doing Facebook-for-enterprise.
Thanks (sincerely) for being honest about that, at least.

There were two clues: one, your comment timestamp was not far removed from the time that the article was posted. I read pretty quickly, but it still took me some time to fully read and digest the entire article.

Second, there was your statement: "their tree-ring data is not a useful proxy for temperature". The article specifically mentioned that tree-ring data correlated with other proxies for temperature measurements, as well as going into other details (like the difference between measuring ring thickness and ring density, and the fact that there has only somewhat recently been a divergence between the measurements). Basically, the article answered your statement, I think.
I have spent some hundreds of hours listening to arguments for global warming, er Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change or AGW or ACC (or whatever the PC acronym is this week)

The problem that I keep getting back to is best phrased like this: archaeological climate record extrapolation is nowhere near as sure-fire as supporters make it out to be. I have many more problems, but this one addresses the current article.

I understand these are honest, hard-working scientists, and they know a heckuva lot more than I do about their particular area, but as an intelligent person I can make fairly informed guesses based on the standards of proof required and the types of phrases being used. There a lot of "it appears" and "it seems" in there, phrases that mean that while consensus has been achieved (we'll take that as a given for this comment) it's nowhere near a slam-dunk. There's also quite a bit of ad-hominem character assassination going on, even in this piece. I find that folks who have to result to labeling and name-calling usually are insecure about their position.

Especially troubling is the way the current divergence is addressed. The argument looks to me like "we can use this data as a proxy for all periods except those where we have direct measurements to verify correlation" I find that weak at best.

To me, the layman, tree-ring data is going to show you how well a certain tree grew in a certain place over time. That might or might not have implications for the larger area or the entire planet. Like so many other pieces of this argument, it depends on having a control group and repeatable experiments -- none of which are doable. So it boils down to speculation. Speculation by great, intelligent people, perhaps, but speculation nonetheless.

I know some folks will say "no matter what the proof you're never going to believe" I don't know how to respond to that, except to point out that I've always been more interested in the character of the debate around GW and the political implications of letting scientific consensus drive public policy more than I have the actual facts on the ground. I have no more emotion invested in whether the planet is cooling or warming than I do variations of the gravitational constant around the time of the big bang. Whichever way the facts lead will not change my underlying concern. So I really don't have a dog in this fight as far as the science goes, at least not to the degree that some others do.
Which "other measurements of the climate" are you referring to exactly? CO2 level is not a measurement of climate, of course. It seems to be correlated, but it's unknown if its phase is leading or lagging. So, what measurements are you referring to?
More accurately, it draws into question the accuracy of tree-ring measurements as a proxy for temperature.

We do not have a situation "where plant behavior closely follows other measurements of the climate for a very long time". Instead we have a situation where one of the principle components of a small subset of tree-ring data generally follows other measurements of the climate for a very short time. And where even with all of that we still have "divergence" problems. These problems draw into question the validity of such measurements as a proxy for historical climate. If they do not track global temperature even a little accurately today how can we have any confidence that they do so in times long past when we don't have temperature records to check their accuracy?

The answer is that we don't. And every indication seems to be that many of these proxy reconstructions from the CRU are wholly inaccurate representations of historical climate.