skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are Economists Cheap? Or Do We Just Believe in Comparative Advantage?
Ask HN: Most applicable functional language to learn?
I've been reading through a Haskell introduction for C programmers, here: http://www.haskell.org/~pairwise/intro/section1.html.

Before reading through this, I understood the concept. I understood expressiveness, no declarations, functions are data and data are functions, etc. I understand the concept and how side-effect free code creates wins, and even could see how this concept could be used for web programming.

But I'm not certain if I should keep plugging away with this tutorial, or if theres something better out there with Lisp or Scheme, and where my time is best spent.

Any tutorials that take a relaxed presentation style and try not to keep it completely mathematical (my CS set theory books bored the crap out of me and sometimes got very confusing), would be best.

Functional programming is something missing from my skill set and its beginning to bother me that I'm not slightly proficient in at least one good one.

Thanks guys!
I'm really surprised that the mic input is DC coupled. That's _very_ odd. But then I've not seen the schematics (anyone got a link?), so maybe it is.

I'd certainly consider a low power rail-to-rail op-amp and dump the 9V batteries.
The android keyboard is in fact multi-touch.
It's a cloud provider that doesn't use Virtualization. You don't need Xen or OpenVZ to have a handful of boxes and an API to address them as a distributed redundant machines. (Does anyone even know what Beowulf clusters are anymore?)
http error when submitting?
The temperature of the diode will change right along with the temperature of all the other hardware, it's not as though you'll go out of your way to get the diode heated up.

The way it's drawn is not the way it is built, the diode would normally sit near the computer end of things, not right on top of the sensor.

The thermal drift of the other circuit is at least as large as that of a diode at room temperature, probably a whole lot larger.
Working on an update to http://stormpulse.com that will give us city-level maps and general/severe weather forecasts.
TMobile service is great in big cities. When I go home its 1g and Roaming(free). The real nice point is the great prices and excellent customer service. Today I called to see when my upgrade date is and I had a person on the phone and was done in 1 minute.
Just wanted to add , there are 2 features that i am most excited about (at least for the first release):

a) Speed
The web front-end and the back-end processing engine have been written keeping in mind processing time, everything is optimised to get data quickly in front of the user.

b) Scripted Rule-based pricing
A user can script the pricing engine by specifying rules written in a custom-DSL. My first attempt at doing a proper DSL.
Listen to me - your users
A stateless election web service for more complicated aggregate methods (like Schulze STV): http://vote.cognitivesandbox.com

A simple illustration of a possible use for the service: http://www.modernballots.com
Yes, very tedious, and always lags behind the latest version -- maybe that should be your next business. :D
That's quite an amusing extrapolation.

(Kinda O/T) I amused my girlfriend the other day by taking a permanent marker to our mattress. On one side, I wrote "top to bottom" in the top-left and bottom-right corners, facing the edges. On the other side, I wrote "side to side".

Each time you flip, you just look at the bottom corner and it tells you what to do next.
The coming $2 trillion underfunded public pension crisis
well, there are styluses for built for capacitive screens, check the local Apple store POS.
The link on the referenced page (http://chords.fm/online/web/) to "Chords! for WinAMP" yields an error:

We can't find page you have requested.
You can with wacom screens which are capacitive and support both stylus and fingers
Spring 2010 is only a few months away =)
Ask HN: Founder shares allocation and dilution
I am establishing a company and want to allocate shares among a number of cofounders. It may be necessary to bring on additional people during the formative stage, before the company is able to raise capital or produce revenue. Since we are not yet in a position to pay salary, it seems logical to offer equity as reimbursement for their services.

I would like to find out the industry-standard to address this. In my mind there are two options:

(1) reserve a pool of shares out of the original 100%, say 20%

(2) divide the entire 100% between the founders and dilute equally when new people are given equity

I know that the latter is typical when funding is involved, but can the same scheme be used when granting shares in exchange for services? If so, how does this work from a legal/paperwork point of view?

Looking forward to your comments!
I'm highly inspired by Josh Waitzkin, who inspired the book and movie "in search for Bobby Fischer" and then went to win 21 national championships and 2 world championships in Tai Chi Push Hands, a competitive kind of tai chi.

He explores how he's linked chess and tai chi with overall 'learning' in his book 'the art of learning' which I highly recommend.

He's alse been training BJJ and said he expects to be world champion by year 2010.
Flash's "allow" button is hidden for me (FF3.5, OS X): http://abstractnonsense.com/Screen_shot_2010-01-05_at_1.11.1...
Ahah, Apple does have different math
Working on the house I just bought with my wife. It's the grandest hack I've ever had to do. From crazy 22ft walls of glass that need replaced, a kitchen from the 50's that needs a remodel to the shoddy wiring throughout the house. There's tons to do, and little time to do it in.

This year I start a new position at the company I work for. Hopefully it'll bring more visibility and access to the people who make decisions. There's so much that needs fixing here, and with a little elbow grease I think I can fix it all.
http://www.snapproofing.com
Proof reading service for college students.

Also working on my BreezyFAQ app for plugging in searchable Frequently Asked Questions to your site.

Site is not live but it works fairly well at http://www.snapproofing.com/faq
http://np.ironhelmet.com

"Neptune's Pride is a multiplayer game of Strategy, Intrigue and Galactic
Conquest!

Neptunes Pride is real-time, but games are played over several weeks. Players log
in at any time of the day to check the progress of their fleets, view the
results of battles and issue new orders.

Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate.

It's the game you know and love with a twist. A 4x Strategy game with it's
complexity striped away to reveal a sophisticated game strategic command and
diplomacy.

How will you conquer the Galaxy?"
currently working on SWIX
http://www.swixhq.com

We are a social media metrics company and we just entered public beta.
I just tried to upload a song. It got to the end of the progress bar and then put up the message "HTTP Error". Is it really that hard to find mp3s online that you built a scam website to collect them :-) I'm sure it's cool. I'll try again tomorrow.
Does anyone know whether this has been done with hockey?
Unfortunately, no. I've been getting the plumbing together; a layer that abstracts the ajax and session stuff so that all I'm left with on the server side is a file descriptor (one per session) to read from and write to.

I have some JavaScript code that allows you to select "units" (I made some ugly debugging sprites in Gimp) and move around with them, and scroll around and stuff like that. But I have yet to bridge it with the mostly to-be-implemented server-side logic. The client-side part is just for "dead reckoning" and generally making things flow between game state updates from the server. So both sides will share some logic, and I'm still thinking about how to centralize this.

It might take me as much as half a year to get unit movement working across the network; once that is in place, the rest should be relatively easy.

Luckily it's all hobby. ;)
A wave killer using node.js, xmpp and websockets
Vendor response to vulnerability disclosure
Some great projects in here, I'd love to see a thread like this more often.

I'm working on a new eCommerce shopping cart - IONCart. Check everything out at GitHub - http://github.com/leftnode/ION-Cart or on my blog - http://leftnode.com/category/ioncart/

I want to release the minimum viable product as soon as possible, which will be open source, or you can pay for it and get all future commercial releases for free.
We're in the heart of the peninsula, Redwood City - pretty Decent digs (Former Excite/@Home) Area - in the neighborhood of $1.25/Square Foot/month. Our predecessor was was paying $0.95/square foot/month.

Based on my (rather limited sample) my analysis of the article is that the rates being quoted were per _year_, not per month.

$2.50/SqFt per month is pretty expensive unless you are in Downtown San Francisco.
And you know what? It's really really good. So is kosher Coke and Mountain Dew Throwback.
A PHP library built from the ground up for PHP 5.3:

http://www.RoundEights.com
A 2010 "Graphical Computing" Calendar
Well, that's exactly the point; followers in the database != followers that actually pay attention.
"Got my hands on" is not the best expression to use when talking about electrical equipment :)
Haha, thats a mighty fine article. Lots of words about how newspapers are overly verbose.
Exactly. This is a dynamic tool, a jail is a statically configured thing that generally needs architecture support from the jailed app to work.

And what's with the BSD vs. Linux bit? FreeBSD and Linux are, in fact, precisely the two launch platforms for this tool. I don't see any favoritism at all...
View140 (Twitter Image Search)
He meant bubble as in bubble boy.
I'm planning to invest some serious time in Clojure this year because I think it is currently the 'best of breed' functional language when it comes to writing web applications (which is why I'm interested in it).
python doctest in lisp
Since applications store most of their resources on the SD card the ROM size isn't a huge deal for potential application room. The binaries themselves are fairly small. But yeah, at least ship a 16GB card in the thing. It just looks bad to say 4GB on a spec sheet for a SmartPhone these days.
While I think that this is usually the right strategy for most people, I can't help but think of Apple's products, which are developed in the bubbliest bubble of all.
photos: http://www.skiff.com/skiff-reader_photos.html

specs: http://www.skiff.com/skiff-reader_tech-specs.html
Yes. You could look to our product Chords! Winamp that transcripts completely on your PC.
Cost. USB is a very complex protocol that requires a controller. For most embedded systems a serial port, which is very very cheap and dead simple to implement, is sufficient.

There's really no need for a USB port on the Roomba, so it's silly to incur additional costs on every single unit to add it.
Placeholder
Mind the gap.
Can functional programming be liberated from the von Neumann paradigm?
It's related, yes. Both are classified as "Humanitarian FOSS Projects" and Sahana has been worked on in previous years by people participating in the HFOSS Project summer internship, which is where we started Collabbit.

I'm not intimately familiar with Sahana, but from what I understand it's a fairly large system and can do a lot of specific things. Consequently, most of its deployments have been at sites of major disasters or for very large agencies.

Collabbit takes a different approach. Our goal is to facilitate communication inside groups and between groups, rather than to provide a means of accomplishing specific tasks. That means that Collabbit is quite simple and broad right now. While our initial use case was volunteer organizations communicating in New York City, we're hoping it can be a valuable tool for smaller groups as well.
I really do not understand what all the fuss was about. It's just another HTC Android phone. What does Google really even have to do with it (any more than all the other Android phones)? It seems like HTC could've just held their own press conference without involving Google but of course then there'd be no hype!
Swype soft keyboard for Android now in beta
I interviewed these guys at Structure 2008 for my blog. They were pretty nice and rather reasonable people. They seemed to have an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. To be fair, they're not targeted at the Web 2.0 market that EC2 has targeted. They're more suited as an alternative to dedicated servers, and seemed to be targeting traditional businesses who are bad at capacity planning.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29307 was the interview if anyone's interested.
Ah, totally forgot about clojure. My functional prowess is so low its sad.

Does anyone have good links? I'm looking for a good mix of theoretical and practical application.
As long as Second Life can continue to exist (ie make money) then it won't be a dead end.

It's quite possible that the online world will stop having single hyped winners but a series of semi-successful ventures.

The change might happen once the majority of the human populace is online. Folks online will likely continue the habits they formed initially until something much, much better comes along. This will be higher bar than the online-versus-not-online bar.
Indeed, I have some new ideas for playtime tonight.
I managed to avoid that while it was switched on.

If my mom had known what I was up to with that thing it would have been gone in a heartbeat.

It's a small miracle I got this old anyway, considering the fact that I chopped the top of a BLX15 with a dremel to see what it looks like inside.

I was young, stupid and apparently very lucky.
Moonlighting to Full-time venture. How successful have you been?
This is probably something a lot of first-time entrepreneurs face. You have an idea. You start working on it, toiling away nights and weekends. But you realize you need to devote far more time and effort to really elevate your startup to a greater level. Execution is the key that unlocks the door. To execute you need to promote, listen to your customers, spend countless waking hours thinking and working on it, invest, pitch, hire, and much more.

Working a full-time gig gives you only so much time and mental bandwidth to do this - your odds of failing I suppose go up exponentially. Probably the worst and saddest outcome being your startup and energy just fizzling away.

I'm curious to know the experiences of some of who have started off moonlighting and successfully transitioned. If you haven't yet, what are your thoughts? What were your experiences? Did some of you quit your jobs to pursue the dream from day one?

If there has been an earlier discussion about this, I'd appreciate pointers.
Does Lua also have a GIL?
The description might be sufficient, but it's inaccurate. You can't say AT&T 850/1900 and T-Mo 1700/2100 in one sentence. It's not the same context. You can say AT&T 850/1900 and T-Mo 1700.

The point is it's more difficult for phone manufacturers to make world phones for AT&T because they have to use up two bands just for AT&T, and those two bands are not commonly used in Europe or Asia.
I'm working as an undergrad research assistant for a distributed systems ploject within UW's CSE department.

https://seattle.cs.washington.edu/
The problem in US isn't subsidization though.

The US problem is stupid carrier exclusivity!

Incredible how country that values freedom so much allows such lock-ins to exist!
When I read the title I interpreted it as "economic bubble", and even skimmed the table in the article and tried to make sense of it. Until I realized the bubble refers to the idiom "living in a bubble" as in shielded from outside influences. I think it's a perfectly good term to use for the argument, even if the word 'bubble' has been overshadowed by recent economic troubles.
Yes, as a direct consequence of the fact that I don't believe in One True Context, I think the proper solution to HTML 5 is to say "Look, tags can be anything, here's enough CSS to style your arbitrary tags" (which we pretty much have, CSS 3 removed the last browser-only magic by letting you futz with tables), and everything else should be a separate standard.

That said, I think this approach even sort of mostly works already, albeit with some pain and some JS hackery required. I just want it in the standard. And if we were doing that, I would ask for some events around tags, so I could in the <head> register a "tag creation" listener for, say, <calendar>, and so when that tag is encountered, use JS to populate it with stuff the browser understands.

Alas, I am not the standard maker.
> The alternative would be to actually balance the federal budget before taking into account entitlement surpluses

That's what I meant by a more accurate definition of deficit. You could call it "gross deficit" for instance, just like "gross debt" includes intra-government debt.

> It's a huge violation of the idea of a trust fund to invest that trust fund in loans to oneself.

Not if you're the most stable investment. I can't envision a future where the US government decides it won't meet its debt obligations but SS and Medicare survive because they were prudently invested elsewhere.
There you are answering your own question.

It seems another difference is that this time HTC is just a subcontractor, while Google really takes over marketing of N1.
I suppose the question is, why is the iPhone over $500 more than the iPod touch? Is there really that much hardware/software differentiation between the two to justify the increased price?

I suppose the ability to make calls and access data almost anywhere makes it that much more valuable to people, or they would not be able to price it as such.
I'm curious how quickly most users become frequent Twitter users. My own ramping up process went something along the lines of:

Year 0: Made an account, was almost never on the site.
Year 1: Started paying a bit more attention, used twitter.com primarily, posted statuses and built up followers
Year 2 (present): Basically always have a desktop twitter client open, tweet once or twice a day or so and in rare circumstances spam my followers with conference or *Camp type event updates.

I will be quite interested in seeing whether or not the impact of being on the Suggested User List is felt in a year or two as those new users start coming into their Twitter own.
Not in my experience. Hold down one key, then hit another, the second key doesn't register (like it does on the iPhone).
I find the new Swype soft keyboard is much faster on Droid than the hardware keyboard or any of the other soft keyboards. It's even faster the best hardware keyboard I have used, the Treo 650. Swype takes an entirely new approach of tracing over the keys instead of pressing them.

http://www.androidcentral.com/download-beta-version-swype-an...
Twitter Forbidden Passwords
We will look to that case. Meanwhile if you don't mind try again later.

You could e-mail me at kos@cbmsnetworks.com if HTTP problem will persist.
where can you get one?

yeah, that's about right price for newer smartphones.
If you type fast enough you'll often be pressing the second key with your other thumb before the first thumb has quite left the keyboard. The iPhone allows for this but the N1 doesn't (or doesn't appear to in limited testing).
Seriously? I despise this worn out arguement.

Sure, the parts might cost $155; but you can't do much without knowing how to connect the parts together, and without spending millions on finding the right combination of parts.

And then there's the software on top of that which others have noted.
Business ideas and opportunities for 2010
We will have a look.

If you will have this problem constantly just e-mail me at kos@cbmsnetworks.com
An interactive map of vanishing employment across US
Okay, yeah, you're right. But the takeaway is that while the two American networks are incompatible both the N1 and the iPhone should support world roaming equally well.
Another twist that I keep looking at is to do a data-only plan (TMO is $40/mo) and use it with VOIP.

http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/cell-phone-plans-detail.a...
Jerry Seinfeld's Productivity Secret
I doubt this is true anymore. Centrino is well-standardized (and what other laptop platform is there?), and Windows 7 is not as outdated as XP with respect to hardware support. Maybe if you saved fifty cents by getting "Dell Wireless" instead of the Intel chipset, you'll have problems... but I don't know anyone who does that. (Even Dell's site tries to talk you out of it.)

I have never used a machine with the default OS install on it, and I have never had any hardware support problems. (And this includes my XP machines at work. Definitely not the default HP Windows install, but the hardware works fine nonetheless.)
Whole Foods CEO Raises Eyebrows With Climate Change Doubt
http://tweeteorites.com/ - builds timelines of what your friends are favoriting on Twitter

http://amid.st/ - social placemarking app
Virtual WiFi : Connect to multiple WiFi networks with one WiFi card
It has been long known that one cannot rely on floating point for precise calculations, e.g. monetary values. One should use integers instead or some kind of other precise representation. But it does surprise me that even on the same CPU architecture you cannot expect every machine to produce the same results.
Apple has people falling in love with products it hasn't even started thinking about creating yet. They don't have these kinds of problems.
So the Google Voice app doesn't do any fancy VoIP, it just uses the phone as a phone? What happens if you just have WiFi and try to use GV?
No, but it is easy to pop in the OS install disk of your choice and blow away whatever crap came with the default install. (That's all this article is talking about.)

Most laptops have fine hardware, it's just that the default Windows installs come with a lot of ads to keep the price low (or more likely, the profit margin higher). Save yourself the trouble and delete the ads before they even get the chance to be executed.
I would disagree on comScore I think new forms of analytics and places like quantcast are going to eat away at their current lead.

I am not saying it will die off by any means, but I am not sure it can sustain the growth it will need to be a hot stock.
Exception multiprocessing does not use fork() (without exec()) because it has to be compatible with Windows.
Google won't make search recommendations for "Islam is"
Scheme is great since it's so breathtakingly simple, but the static functional languages like Haskell have pushed FP far beyond basic Scheme (then again, you can roll your own whatever with Scheme, although if you like static typing that would be a pain (to add)).

You should look at Clojure (http://clojure.org/), which pushes the FP aspect of Lisp hard, especially so that you can do interesting concurrency things. It's "secret sauce" is a data structure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_array_mapped_trie) that pretty neatly solves the trivial update problem (changes are O(n) where n is no greater than 32 and more likely 5-6).

Upon this foundation of practical immutable data several methods for dealing with concurrency are provided, e.g. actor like "agents" (not actors since they share the same address space, but that's safe) and an MVCC STM.

And of course it's a Lisp, which might be nice if you're tired of static typing and/or complex syntax (albeit more complex than earlier Lisps since vectors, hashes and sets are first class citizens and quite a bit of normal syntax uses vectors). The Clojure community is also nice, friendly and helpful, and doing interesting things like monads which have been adopted into the official contributed library.
Tell PG: When I submitted this article, HN stripped the "!" characters out of the title...but I was then able to edit the story and put them back in there. I suppose that means there's a small bug in there somewhere...
I think you're totally right. And I'm building it. :)