skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Erlang stashes them in ETS, DETS, and Mnesia. Haskell shoves them into the IO and State monads (among others) and hopes you won't notice."

A global variable is a variable that is accessible and modifiable at all times in all parts of the program with no particular access control, since the idea of "access control" wasn't even around at the time. C, Python, and Perl all have global variables. Despite your contention, Erlang and Haskell do not.

Mnesia, ETS, and DETS all control access via message passing; it's a common misconception but you never get direct access to an Mnesia table and with ETS I think you get a choice of "direct access in one process only" or "ETS spawns a process to manage the table" (not sure about DETS, but I guarantee it still won't be global). How could you even get direct access to a table that may be on another physical server? Mnesia has transactions for Pete's sake; how much less "no particular access control" can you get?! The closest thing to global variables you can get in Erlang is the process dictionary, which is still process-local. Erlang is probably the hardest language I know to have a true global in, because even if you cheat and have a C extension that has a C global in it, odds are that Erlang will still access it via an Erlang process wrapped around it which still has the effect of de facto locking the value into atomic reads and writes.

Haskell's State monad does not have anything remotely resembling a "global" value; it is explicitly scoped, labelled by the type system so that you can't cheat your way into it, and it literally desugars into threading functional values through a series of function calls. If that's a global variable, then you've devalued the term "global variable" to the point where every parameter of every function call is a global variable. The IO monad can contain a global value by the definition I gave above, if and only if you use "unsafePerformIO", which is an escape hatch that loudly proclaims "I AM LEAVING PURE FUNCTIONAL BEHIND AND I AM ASKING FOR THE RESULTING PAIN", and, indeed, leaves pure functional behind and asks for the resulting pain. So while that does allow you a global variable, if you really push it, it will actually end up very hard to use due to the difficult-to-predict order of evaluation and isn't a useful thing to do with unsafePerformIO. Otherwise, you only get access to the variable in IO-labeled functions, which except in pathological programs won't be anything like "all functions" and is certainly not globally available to everything. And you'll still need to do some major-league cheating to get access to even the "global" variables I mention here without passing explicit references to them all around; I'm still not sure that's possible without a C extension though I don't know enough to rule it out completely.

I can't argue for the other languages you mention since I don't know them.

Your argument is flawed, since you have some sort of weirdly potent definition of "global variable" that results in numerous things that aren't "global" getting called "global".
I'm surprised by the lack of mention of X10 in there. Their 'pioneering' use of popups must still cause their name to instil bad thoughts in anyone that grew through the web's early years :)
Lots of those acronyms and abbreviations are microsoft internal, i think. They're not generic marketing. I also think they disclose a lot about the nature of internal senior management structure- who reports to who.

An example: "KT and SteveB" are probably Kevin Turner (COO) and Steve Ballmer.
>> Moving on, where did you ever get a $100K figure from?

> It came from the example.... As to whether it's reasonable, it came from an auction, which is the premise of the whole discussion.

Let me review your logic here. You got $100K from your example based on your theoretical auction and then you're arguing that $100K is too much and no company in their right mind would pay that much. From that you conclude that my proposal is bad.

Well if no company in their right mind would pay that much, then they wouldn't bid up the auction that much. Therefore what you've just argued is that your hypothetical auction came up with an unrealistically high number. At which point you're arguing against a straw man that you set up rather than my actual proposal.
The "minimalist" staircase in the picture accompanying the article is a horrible design, IMO. Each step is a very thin pure cantilever. In order to prevent the step from sagging and sloping unsafely towards the edge, it would have to be extraordinarily stiff and strong as compared to readily available building materials. This problem is compounded by the lack of guard rails. This is not a matter of form following function. This is form defying the primary function, while leaving out secondary ones, like safety.

A better design with almost the same effect: use a transparent panel, diagonally following the free edges of the steps, perhaps 1 foot wide, with cable support form the ceiling at the top. (Or a column from below.) This preserves the stark effect of the thin cantilevered steps jutting out from the wall, but gives us a more favorable geometry for structural support. The transparent material doesn't have to be extremely strong, since the geometry is favorable. Most of the force can still be borne by the step, but we can prevent sagging and discourage people from sitting on the edge.

Alternatively, cables can be used to transfer load to the step above and eventually to the landing, which can be supported by a single column or a cable to the ceiling. Since the steps will be much stronger cantilevers in the horizontal direction than in the vertical, due to their geometry, we can take advantage of this by converting part of their load into the horizontal direction. The cables will be inexpensive, very strong, and will also discourage foolish people from sitting on the edge.

/
<--*
/
<--*
This trend also extends to any new framework or library someone writes. The code is always "fast and lightweight".
5 focal mechanisms
Yep. The test gear subsidiary (spin off?) is called Agilent. It's probably the last remaining vestige of the HP of yore.
So, you wanna network online too?
the links have .aspx at the end, so I'm almost certain it is .NET.
It may be true the government does not redistribute wealth in a way that provides value to the purpose of an estate tax. I would hardly call it evil though. If other aspects of society and government were managed well, an estate tax might be a valuable part of the machinery.

Without regard to the efficiency and quality of government, when you die, "your" estate gets taxed 100%, not 55%. This happens without government intervention. I know many high net-worth people that get upset about estate taxes. I know many that don't care. The key difference between these two types is the later accepts you can't take it with you. The former is still holding on to some feeling that they can control things after they die.
Changes to Payment Methods // Runes of Magic // Frogster
Well, that's not really the gist of the debate going on here. Gates and Buffet have given away the vast majority of their money to charity. That's very different than attempting to work around the estate tax through insurance, trusts, etc in order to pass as much money as possible on to your heirs.
Why want to encumber an aristocracy, not creators of wealth. The creators in question are dead. Thomas Paine covers this in his pamhlet _Rights of Man_.
Changing the data format to JSON isn't the solution to most problems involving DB models. Providing a group of operations on that data is: diffs, negation-diffs, and composition of diffs.
Anyone who has been bitten by that one a couple times will just do the sane thing and escape the underscores or use backtick code tags around the words you need to have underscores in.

It would only be _obviously_ wrong if it didn't even let you workaround the format characters.
The best example demonstrating that I've seen for how easy it is to just not "get" minimalism is the famous "what if Microsoft designed the iPod box" video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298.

The whole goal of Markdown is to be a simple, easy and stable piece of syntax that lots of websites can converge on. The last thing you need is to have multiple versions of it and users having to think about which markup rules a given site is using.
> The super rich aren't subject to the estate tax because they've arranged their estates so it doesn't apply. For example, neither Buffet's nor Gate's estates will pay a dime.

Surely that's the problem? Why should an estate with $10 million have to pay this tax if an estate with $10 billion doesn't?
How can a corpse deploy wealth? If they wanted to do something with that wealth, which I agree they have the right to do, wouldn't it make sense to do it while they still have the ability to have thoughts?

It makes more sense to me for the government to get it, because that reduces the need for them to take wealth from people who are alive and might be able to use their wealth.
No. Hemmingway is usually used as a model for direct and concise writing while Tolkein is often used at the other end of the spectrum. Both are widely considered masters of the language.

I prefer reading and writing the Tolkein end, verbose colorful, almost baroque, writing that exercises the language without feeling archaic vs the Hemmingway method which I always felt was overly restricted and terse.
Ask HN: How do you get in your "productive" mode?
I'm struggling with getting in my productive mode. For some reason, I can work for 10 straight hours if I'm at school, with my peers(I attend high school). Though, when home, I find it very hard to work at least 1h.

Suggestions? Thanks.
Windows Mobile and Xbox Live coming together
Well, regarding your first point, credible organizations accrediting universities are the ones who are to say what a PhD program entails. These diploma mills are unaccredited (or accredited via corrupt organizations) and try to either hide, lie about, or whitewash that fact.
The Known Universe [video]
I'm not sure why you think escaping is an obvious and suitable concept for a simple markup language like Markdown.
Yep, all of our JobAlchemist products are - Startuply, JobSyndicate, etc.
A beautiful info video put together by the American Museum of Natural History.
Sure. Until we have a better organization, whose primary concern is the overall health of society, to distribute it.

Government is certainly a flawed organization. But we currently trust them with all our other tax dollars. I don't see any reason to hold estate tax dollars to a different standard than any other government revenue.
The argument is that they already own it. My kids have rooms in my house now. You are saying they should have to give money to other people (i.e., be taxed) for those rooms when I die? They are getting food and education costs based on the profits from my company- I die so they must be taxed on that on top of the income tax? It's not income from an inheritance, it's a continuation of what they are already getting tax free. My death shouldn't have anything to do with it.
The Next White Whale
What Is Your Personal Profit Per Hour?
As opposed to those good taxes?
Quantifications like these drive what we do from serious play into solemnity.
I like the following better:

column name | generalized type | validation rule | hidden?
------------------------------------------------------------------
first_name | text | name_regex | false
last_name | text | name_regex | false
middle_name | text | name_regex | false
birth_date | date | over_18 | false
location | [double,double] | undefined | true
addresses | | has_many | false

Parsing it into JSON-equivalent is a programming exercise you can give your interviewees.

(my point is that data format doesn't matter - JSON, YAML, XML, |'s and -'s are just different "colors" giving semantic meaning to your data: but it's what you can do with that data which is important)
Can we not just summarise this whole thing with the words:

Shared state should be avoided, if possible and pragmatic.
Now go do this in whatever language you wish.
It seems a bit of a stretch to apply data from American engineers (who very rarely attempt to blow up civilians) to Islamic terrorists. My school also had conservatives disproportionately represented on the faculty -- i.e. they were almost within a stone's throw of their representation in the general population, not the smallest minority on campus like they were in ArtSci. As a conservative with degrees in both making stuff and making stuff up, I always figured this was because nobody at the engineering school ever said, in as many words, "You're a Republican? Who let you in here?"
Adia: A Week With Clojure And MongoDB
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0912/09122601

The Pantsbomber (or whatever we're calling him) graduated from my old department! Ermm... This won't do anything for our reputation as being halfway competent engineers :-/
The estate shouldn't be taxed at all, but the beneficiaries should pay tax on what they receive: at 0% for charities, a low rate for otherwise poor beneficiaries, a high rate for already rich beneficiaries.
My experience negotiating repeating bills is that it's not rocket science. I renegotiated with Server Beach by sending a single email ("Hey, can you lower my server prices to match what you're advertising on your website?"). I renegotiated with my credit card by calling and saying ("Hey, can you lower my interest rate?"). The advanced credit card negotiation skill is to say "That's it? I need you to do more."

These are all things that can be done for $10/hour. The trickier negotiations are things like what you would do with Comcast, where there are deals to be had, but they often involve slight changes to your service. That either requires some judgment or someone who can take notes and get confirmation from you.
Gone Nomad? Try Coworking.
> 2. Be a Perception Change Agent. The CSI Lead needs to drive perception across a number of key audiences (IT Pros, Government Elites, BDMs, IT Journalists, etc.) Ability to implement programmatic marketing that will CHANGE THE WAY PEOPLE think about Microsoft, specifically those with a ‘hostile’ or negative perception of the Microsoft platform.

If I was Microsoft, and I wanted to change perceptions of my company, I'd start by changing the reality. Perceptions of MS are poor largely because the reality is poor. But MS want to change the one without the other. This is called bullshit, and is unlikely to work for an organisation as much in the public eye as MS.
Being involved in an Open Source project is expected for anyone that wants other people to use the code - implicit in publishing it. It doesn't imply working for free when asked, but it does require responding to email even if it's just to say 'sorry, I'm really busy right now'.

If he rules the project with an iron fist, that's still much better. People know if the project is alive or not, and can make the decision to fork the project easily.
I think the trick that almost everybody uses, even if they don't realize it, is to determine what the simplest (read: least time consuming) possible task to move their project forward is. Even if you spend time thinking about this and "not getting anything done", you're really getting planning done. When you've figured out what that task is it's easy to knock it out, and you'll probably do it pretty quickly because you've been thinking the problem through.

And don't read Hacker News :)
Intercourse and Intelligence
Deploying applications on Windows is pretty easy, but there are far fewer hosting options for Windows; and the options that are out there will either give you a very locked down environment or require you to have a dedicated box.

I'm using a Windows/Apache/Django/Postgres back end for http://newsley.com. It's all running on an EC2 Server 2003 instance. I've used their Windows slices for about a year, and I've been really really happy with them. It's a bit more expensive than a Linux VPS @ $80 a month, but I think it's worth it.

I would really like Amazon to support Server 2008 on EC2, especially to make PowerShell Remoting not such a hack. You can get it to work, but it's a little dicey.

Beyond that, it's kind of a pain in the ass to do a quick edit of a file to fix something when you're on the road if you don't have all of your tools available.

Granted, I'm developing using Python on Windows 7, but I have a full dev setup on a $300 Netbook that I installed Windows 7 on. I've been building Newsley while traveling 50k miles the past 4 months, and I haven't really had any problems.

I can run Win 7 Ultimate and my dev setup on a netbook pretty seamlessly. Would there be a reason that Visual Studio wouldn't run on a Netbook with 2GB ram?
> "Arguing that spoiled kids have not earned it is a lot easier than arguing that the government is deserving."

Isn't "the government is deserving" the crux of the Gates/Buffett argument? That government has provided them, as wealthy people, far greater services than the average person? (In the form of providing safety, protecting property, supplying an educated workforce, enforcing market rules, etc)

The general idea being that you simply can't become fabulously wealthy via anything short of barbarism without government, so the government does deserve something more to further these services that they're providing?
Favorite quote time: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead" wrote Blaise Pascal (or possibly Mark Twain, or Churchill).
How Jason Cohen Built And Sold Smart Bear Software
This was submitted 700+ days ago...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104964

Just because you add a ? to the end of the URL does not make it unique. This is obvious an attempt to build up one's karma.

I also agree with one comment from the previous submission: this is found on the bottom of every HN page... Are you kidding me!?
When Your Company Culture Isn't Ready for Social Media
People’s Processor: Embrace China’s Homegrown Computer Chips | Magazine
I agree with onewland: split your big task into small ones and solve them one by one.

My experience tells me that it works great, each completed task motivates me to next one and so on.
But the argument being made here is that spoiled kids are not deserving, so the estate tax is a just tax.

The point is: government is not deserving either, so the spoiled kids angle is bogus.

Pointing out that the government collects other taxes is simply not relevant to this aspect of the conversation.
I hope you take this as constructive criticism (and not me just being a jerk :), but I see a couple of problems:

1) JSON gives no benefit over a Ruby DSL (like ActiveRecord migrations). Is the schema file going to be consumed by client programs written in other languages? (Even so, in that case, you should probably just define ActiveRecord::Base.to_json_schema). Two languages are unnecessary when one will suffice.

2) When you start to define the schema in code[ft. 1], rather than in the database itself, you're leaving the Active Record pattern (as defined in PoEAA) and should probably look at other patterns (and the libraries that implement them). Data Mapper/DataMapper would probably be a good fit here.

Also, you're loosing the benefits that migrations give of dealing with changes to the schema over time non-destructively. Dr Nic's Sexy Migrations did something that would diff a single schema file with the existing DB schema, but this is not the default solution.

3) Automatically generating forms from a model has tempted many Rails developers over the years. A rudimentary method would be possible using the existing reflection data (i.e. no need for a JSON schema DSL) and some added metadata. Google "rails admin ui" for some examples.

However, "metadata" can easily turn into "writing forms in the model instead of the view" (I've seen it happen). That's why I'd avoid this.

Also any forms more advanced than a simple create/edit interface and you're probably going to end up writing a partial anyway, especially if you need to add markup for formatting (e.g. how do you control if the generated form vertically or horizontally oriented? Meant to go in a table with others or independent?).

ft. 1: Rails' Migrations are a special case. They should be a seen as a separate system from the ORM that was created later on to manage the complexity of changing schema. ActiveRecord classes still define their fields based on reflection from the database.
I can't force it, but sometimes I can trick myself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
Unless the tools/languages are tremendously better than what is available for free/cheaper, I don't particularly understand the value in:

- Risking Microsoft's ire by breaking the licenses

- Locking yourself in to long-term Microsoft licensing

This was a pattern I saw in many, many startups in the 90s -- organizations that relied first on UNIX systems for their servers (often times Solaris, Linux, and in the early-to-mid 90s, IRIX), would eventually adopt Microsoft products for some component of their infrastructure -- usually Exchange, based on heavy political pushes from the growing number of business users.

This always to the same effect -- the Microsoft products spread due to lock-in network effects until it began to near 100% MS on the desktop, e-mail, and corporate servers. Production servers generally remained UNIX due to the costs involved. The IT organization shifted to MS, costs went up as the staffing necessarily increased to support administering Windows systems, expensive political maneuvering arose between engineering and business as they both fought to move to systems that they thought better aligned with business priorities.

At the end of the day, everyone wound up locked to MS with heavily entrenched political interests in keeping the status quo (and the job security that went with it).

Having seen the fall-out from migrations to MS products in corporate IT, I can't imagine voluntarily implementing MS as the primary production and developer system at a startup. You're locking yourself out of alternative solutions, you're signing up for significantly increased capital and operational expenditures, and perhaps most importantly, you're excluding an entire class of software engineers that primarily work on UNIX-based (including Mac OS X and Linux) systems.
I can't think straight without my headphones and some decent music or white noise.

I use awesomewm, which, like ratpoison and ion, works hard to maximize every window and minimize distractions.

It's also good to designate one part of your room as the spot where you get your work done, and sit there if and only if you're going to do work, so that you pair sitting at your desk with getting work done. If you can't get into hack mode after about fifteen minutes of sitting in front of your work, get up and do something like solve a Rubik's cube, play Tetris until you lose, or just go get something to drink, but then sit down and try again.
Vacation policies, de facto, are a way of punishing "job hoppers": at most companies, you only get a decent allotment (4+ weeks) if you've been there forever. However, it's a reality of the modern economy that people change jobs more frequently in previous generations, and no one considers this a bad thing, so vacation policies are largely anachronistic.