skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To make a general statement like that based on a study purely on USA, seems wrong.

I used to live in Denmark where they (according studies I won't bother digging up now) have both the happiest people on the planet AND pay the highest percentage in tax.
Generally I'm in favour of this kind of thing, although the proposal is astonishingly vague. There probably are ways in which the web can be harnessed to facilitate smarter collective decision making and identification of problem areas.

However, I'm also wary that political parties often come up with popular proposals pre-election, only to discreetly dump them once safely in government.
Agree.

I'd put both words -- "the terrorists" -- in quotes. There definitely are individual terrorists in the world, but the notion of a unified red team of "the terrorists" has motivated a lot of bad decisions.
This is one of the tragedies of the internet, first when people had to write "books" to write , it was a fairly hard thing to do.So only people who had real commitment to write would write and by virtue of which the "quality" of the writing would be at least average.

But with internet any body can write about anything and it is just a waste of time sifting through everything to find something useful.So pretty much I stick to reading stuff that is more concrete like "How does heap sort work" or "How to fix problem xyz with sound drivers on Linux"
Reminds me of East Germany.

I like the idea of crowdsourcing menial tasks, but crowsourcing what's fundamentally a judgement call is a horrifying prospect.

The presented scenario is of a nervous foreigner who might happen to be asocial, and might have different cultural norms. He has claustrophobia but, like everyone else on that plane, has somewhere to be. So he's nervous and sweating. He gets airsick. Then he gets a body search because a few rich, white, self-important xenophobes notice he's not like them. Sounds like a recipe for in-air bullying, to me.
Like in tennis, the point is not to try to hit a winner when the question gets asked but to stay in the game. Volley it back by focusing on something you'd like to know about her.

For example:

Her: "What do you do for a living?"

You: "I write software that thousands of people use every day to get their own jobs done. And my real passion is cooking. I love French cooking from scratch.(pause)What do you enjoy doing?"

OR

Her: "What do you do for a living?"

You: "I write software. Office politics aside, I like the creative aspect of building something up, from a blank screen in my editor to something that people actually use on the Internet.(pause). What do you do to exercise your creativity?"
Diet Mountain Dew. Zero calories, all the speedy goodness. Nice and cold.

It makes some of the mundane line items or defect work seem like the next Google sometimes.

That, and going into the work thinking "this is the last code I will ever write" does the trick. Make your source code a work of art.
Orbit Downloader Start
tldr version: Cringely submitted a business plan to VCs via their website and hopes he gets a positive response.
Auto-save on web forms.
Build Brands with Luck and Persistence
Make a Mess, Clean it Up
Sounds like a reasonably good fit for at least one existing YC startup: http://inklingmarkets.com/
This story is (was?) taped to the side of the defender cabinet in a small arcade at the Googleplex. Something reminded me of it and made me smile, so I decided to share the smile with all of you :-)
States in this case is referring to US states, so I wouldn't say the statement is general.
would definitely be more fun getting killed by a monster than the floor edge.
What not work is to believe that one programming paradigm is the best solution for all the problems.
It does work, but you have to ease up on hardliner positions in order to get the benefits.

That's one of the best last lines in a blog post I've seen in awhile. Absolutely true about a whole lot of things!
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Why not post all the x-ray images on mechanical turk and give $1000 to anyone who can catch a weapon the TSA misses. That way we'll have an army of people trying to improve the TSA's awful success rate. I suspect the only reason we don't already do this is that it would expose the fact that the TSA catches only a tiny fraction of banned weapons.
Things like reddit or HN (or my own website) sound like they could be applied to this.

Submit each proposal as a story, then allow people to vote on it, comment on it, etc. etc.

I'll sell my site to the UK government for £1 million!
Interesting.

MySociety on the need for the government to figure out how to build a large-scale consultation system that works: http://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/07/top-5-internet-prioritie...

MySociety.org on why it wants £1m: http://www.mysociety.org/2009/02/19/why-i-want-a-million-qui...
She has a leadership role in a technology company. Society views leadership and technological prowess as masculine traits. So that's androgyny.

An androgynous person is one who has a mixture of masculine and feminine traits, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'd generally argue that it's a good thing, because gender roles/stereotypes are limiting and generally bogus. Most people who are worth a damn are fairly androgynous, because there are plenty of worthwhile traits on both sides of the stereotypical gender divide.
Sounds a lot like encapsulation to me, only without Objects to delimit the boundaries.
To make a general statement like that based on a study purely on USA, seems wrong.

On the contrary. The author seems to be trying only to apply her conclusions to America, so it would be appropriate.

Also, bringing other variables into the regression (societal factors, etc.) would just muddy the waters. If we've got a sample that excludes some variables altogether, it would make sense to use it (with the caveat that we can't know what effect those other dimensions might have).
I also thought of the "panic button" idea, but then thought better of it since it would be comprehensively abused. You'd have kids pressing it, sleeping passengers accidentally knocking it and so on. It would be nearly impossible for the flight attendants to determine whether the button press was genuine, accidental, malicious or simply pressed by someone who was bored on an 8 hour trans-Atlantic flight and wanted the small amusement of watching his neighbour being body searched.
Phillips Exeter Academy

http://www.exeter.edu/

arguably has a more discussion-oriented approach to learning, definitely has smaller classes, and has a rich supply of elective classes. And it's for high school-age students rather than for college-age students. We are also a homeschooling family, but we thought long and hard about sending our oldest son to Exeter (which also has great financial aid) before continuing to homeschool him. We may revisit the issue of how to do secondary education with each of our other three children. Our oldest is now applying for colleges--every college on his application list is a research university with strong programs in mathematics and computer science (and, yes, lots of elective course possibilities).
AT&T asks FCC to set date to scrap old phone system
Game sounds all come from more or less the same big professional libraries, so frequently you do end up using the same sound as another game (or movie, tv show etc).
Sounds bogus to me. The article has a strong bias.

My guess is that big city stress is the cause for the "unhappiness" measured. It just so happens that big cities tend lean more democratic, and the countryside is more republican.
I remember the day when I figured out that multiplication is iterated addition. No one had ever bothered to explain that. We were just told to memorize tables. I was at the bus stop. "Three times three. OH! Add three together three times! Don't you get it? That's why it's called TIMES!" My fellow grade schoolers just looked at me. (I grew up in a truly podunk town!)
This suggests an alternative good explanation:
"Using data from the 2005-2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and a 2003 economics paper examining quality-of-life indicators"

This time period is when the Republicans were in peak power in the White House and Congress. I suggest that this political environment makes blue-state dwellers unhappy.
I asked my wife of twenty-six years, the mother of our four children, what she thought of this link, and she commented that maybe the link just shows that IQ and intelligence are not quite the same thing. It is paradoxical to suppose that high intelligence people might have less reproductive success than average intelligence people, but it's not too far of a stretch to suppose that IQ tests fail to capture all of the intelligent behavior necessary to enjoy reproductive success.

An older but much more thorough source on some of the same issues is

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success-Scientists-...

with some very good discussions of differential rates of reproduction by IQ score.
>Functions should only have side effects if and only if that's what the function is designed to do: e.g. perform IO, write to disk, et cetera. Then, "side effect" is a misnomer, because the alteration to state is intended.

In medicine, they have a saying, "There are no side effects, only effects." I first heard that from a psychiatrist, discussing how he initially selects antidepressants for his patients based on side effects, such as weight loss or gain. Viagra was originally a heart medication.

What the discussion really comes down to is, what is the intent of the programmer? If the reason for a function call is a return value, but there's also a state change, then a problem will almost always arise because you want one but not the other. That's why change of state and global variables are usually maligned, because it couples disparate behavior, sometimes in unintentional or obfuscated fashion.

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-query_separation

Eiffel is apparently designed such that anything with a return value causes no change of state, and vice-versa. It's an interesting idea because it means that a change state, like you said, is never a side-effect, but always the intention of the caller.

Like pretty much almost everything, anywhere, ever, it's probably better as a general programming practice rather than a language-enforced restriction. And that's basically what the author was saying about purity--it's better as a guideline than a commandment.
JSbin: collaborative Javascript editor/pastebin with major library support
A little exposure to the "Lord of the Flies" might be good seasoning, provided he's been given a few psychic defense lessons ahead of the time. (I was thrown into the boarding school situation with no defenses at all and had to cook up my own. A little guidance would've been worth a lot.)
Nothing new - even for fruit flies

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4200-cleverness-may-ca...
Why is it paradoxical to suppose that high intelligence people might have less reproductive success than average intelligence people?
When mini benchmarks are important
Joel's not really contributing anything here, and as I've said elsewhere, this is marketing-speak, not Microsoft-speak. At least, I never heard anyone talk like this when I was there over the summer. I learned some new words ("dogfooding") and people do call Ballmer "SteveB" (just as they often refer to coworkers by their email aliases), but I can assure you this posting is as incomprehensible to most Microsoft engineers as it is to you.
She strikes me as more androgynous than most of the female software engineers I know, and certainly more androgynous than the average female. Pictures don't tell the whole story. :-)
I wonder if it's the "Rich Financial Lives of Poor People" article. Hard to tell behind the paywall, but nothing else seems to make sense.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol326/issue5960/sindex.dt...
Ask HN: Real time PubSub-type notification API service?
I have a bunch of keyword/search terms I want to be notified of if they match anything published in the blogosphere or mainstream news.

Does anyone know of a hosted service API I can use to subscribe to for real time notification of mentions of my keywords?

The traditional media notification space doesn't seem to be API orientated. But with services like Superfeedr and Spinn3r I assumed there would be a number of such services around -- but I can't find any!

Looking for free or paid-for options. Thanks!

(Google News/Blog search doesn't really cut it and isn't API driven - looking for REST or better XMPP orientated service)
I generally agree with the principle of command-query separation. One point where I would differ is that, when the command's effects aren't entirely known to the caller, it's often useful to return this information.

For example, a function that creates a user account with a unique numerical user ID, that isn't known until the account is created, can return the user's ID, e.g.

(create-user-account "Bob") => 9001

(defn create-acct-and-immediately-do-something [username]
(let [user-id (create-user-account username)]
(do-something-with-acct user-id)))
I agree with you, they're certainly Microsoft-internal terms. But more specifically, they're Microsoft marketing -internal.
For people interested in this stuff, Howard Gardner's book _The Unschooled Mind_ collects similar results from every discipline, from computer science to history.

http://books.google.com/books?id=DVB1n_KkYEQC

For more on CS, of course, you'll want to read http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf
I think you are correct that the language does think of all expressions in terms of thunks, but I'm guessing `4 + 5` won't actually be run at run-time!

Since it's pure a decent compiler should be able to simply replace any `x` with the number 9 - correct me if I'm wrong :)

Any primitive (C code) however won't run until run-time, which is probably the pressing reason putStr doesn't run until run-time (and that's a good thing :)
Tons of interpretation applied to mere ounces of data. She glosses over the fact that all of the five happiest states are in the sunny south and four of the five least happy states are in the North and, not surprisingly for the Wall Street Journal, concludes that the problem is taxation. In contrast, the New York Times version of this story has the following quote "Americans who described themselves as satisfied tended to live in places where the quality of life was good by most standards — where the sun shone a lot, the air was reasonably clear, housing didn’t leave you busted, traffic wasn’t too fierce and so on."
Not only was it poorly written, but the typesetting was all over the place. Egadz!
>regardless of what technology you choose that it is all but impossible to really understand all possible choices. Couple that with the inherent Microsoft desire to dogfood everything, and you get a lot of people understanding only the Microsoft way.

I don't actually think this is the case. More than half the people I met at Microsoft over the summer use iPhones (the rest generally had a Palm Pre or an Android phone; I met maybe 2-3 people with Windows Mobile), and many of them have Macbooks for their personal laptops. It was also quite common for people to use Google rather than Bing (though Softies are generally quite enthusiastic about Bing). Linux use probably is lower, simply because they use MS development tools to develop for MS platforms, but I certainly didn't get the impression that everyone at MS only uses MS products.

FWIW, I have heard from friends at Apple that using competitors' products there is frowned upon...
Why Buffett is Betting on the Railroads
I'm willing to bet the upvotes came from people with accounts less than six months old...
The Year's Biggest Ideas in Economics
I simply cannot _recall_ anything unless I understand it

I'm chiming in as well because that is exactly how my mind works. I can remember very little trivia or material I am fleetingly familiar with. However, I do extremely well when applying concepts, and later I can remember intricacies extremely well.

I also have great difficulty presenting material that I don't fully understand, yet when I understand it I am a great public speaker.
5 things that make your social network monetize like crap
Deciding What to "Watch" on Github
On this day in 1999...
The Hardest Working People on the Planet
No one is going to argue that your program doesn't work when it seems to work.

Unless you're using threads and locks. Then it's probably a safe bet that it will fail in ways you don't expect. ;)
Comet with Node.js and V8
If I understood the article right, they controlled for this. I think they used salary differentials to account for the myriad ways that one locale might be better than another.

So imagine that person X and person Y both live in state Z. They offer to Y $Q more dollars to move to New York. Because Y was willing to take the deal, we can assume that $Q is enough to make up for the cold weather, etc., in New York.

Afterwards if we ask X and Y about their happiness, and X is happier, how can we explain that? The OP offers some theories as to why that might be, and develops some arguments as to why higher taxes are one likely explanation.
You basically just restated the article without contradicting it.

The whole point is that striving harder to afford a comfortable standard of living in a higher tax, higher cost environment reduces happiness.
I have experience with Lisp, Java, Scheme and Clojure. I am surprised at how vehemently people are pushing back on James (the author). I tried coding in Clojure and found myself working very hard at things that would have been straight forward in Lisp. Could it have been done in Clojure - answer is "yes!". But i didnt want to get sidetracked thinking about how to make programming language work for me rather than actually work on the task.
I wouldn't trust the person who told you that, anymore.

Pretty much the last decade of software engineering has been a slow realization how how untenable the use of large amounts of global state is.
I think one reason that crowd sourcing works as well as it does on the web is because there is an actual crowd. What this article is referring to is more like "small group sourcing".

The benefit of the crowd is that there are generally enough people to counter act false alarms, prejudices, etc (not always, but generally). The proposed system would have only a few people one which to draw information rather than the hundreds, thousands or millions that these kinds of operations usually are deployed towards. Basing information on just a handful of people exposes many flaws that are generally evened out over actual crowds of people.
My ability to parse English seems to malfunction, what does this mean:

> # Enrollment is free, just pay a USD $100 program offering fee at program exit.
Seems unrelated. The New Scientist article doesn't describe mate selection or reproduction.

In fact, it seems like they just bred fruit flies that over emphasize their past observations. They didn't make "clever" fruit flies.
Well, you forget one most important factor. In Tokyo, Japan, the bandwidth for broadband in households is around 100M bps. So the loading speed is in fact not a problem for them.

I think if we in U.S. enjoy the same bandwidth, we will see similar design decision.
How can publishing something like that help their efforts?

Likewise, were they responsible for the "Windows 7 Launch Party" video?
Inspecting dead Ruby process with GDB
I probably used ZipCar 100+ times this year, and I am not sure that I ever used a hybrid. I know I never used a Prius (none are ever available in the 8 lots within 2 blocks of my apartment)
I thought it was interesting, if not especially original. Am I missing something?
OK, but to be fair to MS, this appears to have been written by a nonnative English speaker. Indian, I think. So there's another factor at work.
It is paradoxical to suppose that high intelligence people might have less reproductive success

Maybe you mean counterintuitive? Here is one plausible argument:

"Reproductive success" depends first on making other people like you and second on taking very good care of your children. It's hard to see how deep analytical insight would make either task much easier, especially given that so much of sex and child-rearing runs on simple, emotional scripts.

On the other hand, tautology is possible if you're prepared to argue that intelligence causes a person to be significantly more popular, likable, and conscientious, it's hard to imagine positive mental traits that wouldn't be due to intelligence. In that case, all you're saying is that "success is caused by the agglomeration of factors that collectively cause success."
Yes.

And how does the LHC affect everyone's daily life? It does not. It's an investment in the future which may pay off. It's almost certain that focus on renewable energy, reduced pollution, and better use of resources will positively affect everyone's everyday life on a 5 year timescale. And I don't just mean "Everyone you know," I mean "Everyone on the planet."
The reactions to Hague's previous article reminded me of allergic responses - that is, in a programming community that has become utterly soaked with "more FP = better" commentary, any statement to the contrary must be shrugged off as irrelevant or incorrect. And so we see people falling over themselves to say that something must be wrong with Hague or his arguments.

He was clear enough in the first article that he was advocating compromise over purity, specifically addressing pure FP's faults as a tool for software development. The real problem is not with him, but that with FP we've hit that point where the hype has induced people to start bellowing various forms of "USE FP EVERYWHERE, FP>IMPERATIVE" meme from the rooftops. See the memes around TDD, design patterns, etc.

In conclusion, this is a prime indicator that the "interesting new stuff" in programming practice has gone elsewhere. Functional style is quickly entering the mainstream, it has its zealots, and it's well on its way to become just another tool. So the question is now, what's next?
You're right, of course, but sometimes globals can be the magic sauce you need to hack out something quickly. (I find global hate to be similar to 'goto' hate.)
I doubt MySociety is eligible. Tom Steinberg the founder of MySociety is a technology policy advisor for the Conservative Party - this would seem to be an obvious conflict of interests and a clear breach of anti-corruption laws (siphoning public money into a charity run by one of your advisors).
V8: an open source JavaScript engine
It's an editorial in a well known anti-tax paper. It's not "correcting" for anything, because it's not doing any science. It's combining some research (without links, so without any way for me to easily tell if it's in-context or not) from disparate sources to make a pretty typical point about "taxes are bad".

It only looks like "science" to you because it starts out talking about someone else's paper (and one that says nothing about tax at all, AFAICT).
"Sum" is written functionally, thus it is not dependent on the outside world. You used a functional stateless method to show that imperative stateful programming is safe.
Was it from that point on when you realized how smart you were and decided that anyone who questions Evolution is incapable of abstract reasoning?

Such scientific close-mindedness is cargo-cult science, my friend... I believe Feynman spoke on that one too.