skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know about Mozart, but everything I've read about OCaml suggests that the O in OCaml is second class. I've even heard it quoted that the creator of OCaml doesn't use any of the OO features in OCaml and that most people view them as a failed experiment on the language. Pages like http://stackoverflow.com/questions/535481/classic-singleton-... are very telling of the attitude of the OCaml community about its OO features.

Scala is the first language I've seen where the OO and functional features are on an even plane and even play nicely together, and where the community is accepting of both styles of programming.
Will Classical Music Survive the Future?
I guess there's just no accounting for bad taste. But we knew that already ;)
Fitness4Her
Nice cast... really enjoyed it. There were some really interesting topics covered. Hope there is a re-broadcast link so I can catch the first 20 min I missed!
SeaMicro builds box with 512 Atom CPUs
Instead of selling tickets and passes directly, sell bonds that pay interest in tickets / passes: you pay $1000, you get ten rides per month. These bonds would be transferable. That way, it's restricted to people who can put together, say, $1000 in cash. It wouldn't be hard to borrow that much, if you didn't have it on hand, unless you were a total failure.

Tourists would just put up the money as a deposit, and get it back at the end of their trip.
Even worse, having reviewed the code that leaked during Climategate, it's pretty clear that the researchers are not competent programmers. The revelation that was most off putting was the "commented out" code that injected arbitrary values that was "just used for testing". Testing is great, but it has no place in the production code. If the researchers method of testing is to write test code in the production code, run it once to make sure things "work", then comment it out, we certainly shouldn't be making any decisions based on predictions made by that code. Their testing framework is apparently comments in the code.

For a project I'm currently working on, I have a 5:1 test to code ratio, largely because I'll be processing credit cards. While my project will probably only ever deal with a few hundred thousand dollars in transactions, I need to be sure that those transactions will be properly handled. In comparison, these researchers are encouraging a trillion dollar piece of legislation, and their testing methodology is intuition and spaghetti code.

Further troubling is the assertion that this is science. As far as I can tell it isn't testable or repeatable. As I recall, that's a pretty big part of what science is.
// 24 months from now, the two stocks will have changed places and Apple will be at $585 and Google will be at $210.

I can't believe someone is writing an article in a finance site that doesn't know what stock prices mean, in absolute terms.
I think it will be rebroadcast at the original link around 2:30PST and it will also eventually be posted on Mixergy.com (probably within the next 24 hours).
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
Dave Morin: The Next Chapter
IIS Application Warm-Up Module
Very interesting. Thanks for the tip.

Section 230 for the curious:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...
I'm not super-educated here (learned from a friend of mine), but here are some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service (about $74/passenger subsidy for small airports in rural areas.

http://www.dot.gov/bib2009/htm/FAA.html -- the FAA 2009 budget, includes:

$9.7 billion for Air traffic organization
$2.1 billion for Safety & Operations
$2.8 billion for Airport grants
Here's an unpleasant thought; what are the rules for drinking your own urine? Some apparently do this for fun, but what about for survival situations?

If you're able to find enough edible plants (via watching other animals), it might also be worth trying to cultivate them, but this depends on your broader circumstances.
This quote seems particularly dated to me. Thanks to SBCL, PLT Scheme, Arc, and Clojure- Lisp these days is very much catering to "mere mortals". It's lovely to follow a news link from HN and see all those wonderful s-expressions :)
I guess, then, Rich Hickey is dragging Java the rest of the way to Lisp.
I'm not sure "open" is the idea I'm going for here, rather OSX exposes a larger existing ecosystem of tools, libraries, applications, all of which are open source. Now the topic of the original article was about a closed environment versus an open one, and it certainly seems to me that since OSX is unix, that it's part of a larger, open environment, and I think that's why their desktop market share has increased since OS9 and below.
While many people hiring contractors won't go for this- it's a good cause to ask for 50% upfront and for the remainder payment to be held in escrow. It doesn't hurt to ask at least. Of course it is hard to tell what your total number of billed hours will be, but always ask for 50% deposit of whatever your estimate of the job is.
Yeah, this is ridiculous because all the cool apps in the world can't overcome the fact that they are only available on a single device. What makes web applications great is the platform and location agnostic nature of them.
Apple tablet to be called "Canvas" ?
I've found that I have to go through periods of doing (hustling), and then periods of research/learning when stuck, going back to doing once unstuck. The cycle repeats itself.

Transitioning between the two can be difficult. It's like switching between a "job" and being in academia. They're similar but two totally different worlds. One gives you hands-on experience, and the other book smarts. Separately neither paints a full picture, but combined they certainly do.
I released a GAE app which does something similar. However it differs in that it is automated and it emails you a daily digest of your sales, upgrades and current rankings. In the email are also graphs of your sale and upgrade history. I've been using it successfully for several months now.
It's also written in Python and on GitHub. :)
http://github.com/baz/app-sales-machine
Google probably is not scared, but what I found out, unexpectedly, that Google's services are indispensable less and less for me.

In the past decade, Google search had been essential for my internet life. But in the last months, when I was to find out what is happening now in certain area, Twitter search does it for me; if I want to watch some area for longer time, I subscribe to a few rss feeds. If i want to find out basic facts about something totally new to me, Wikipedia will serve that. And in rare cases, when I need to find out something specific, I use Google. But even in this area, Bing is catching up.

Then, I use a few Google services like GMail or Greader, since I found them to be the best, but if some better clients will arrive, I'll switch.

To sum it up, it seems to me that Google doesn't have anything truly irreplaceable now - they were ahead of the game with the general search, but they couldn't maintain their focus on it, so the margin isn't that big currently.

Now, it seems to me that the main battle is fought about what will be the ultimate Internet platform in terms of hardware+software. Here, Apple and Microsoft are the biggest animals so far, with Google and maybe Amazon trying to participate. But in the grand scheme of things, Google already isn't the main Internet player it maybe used to.
I feel sorry for OP. It really sucks to be waiting on the receiving end of an invoice with no hope in sight of getting your hard-earned money. It really sucks to be in that position.

I don't know the specifics of this case, but I have encountered some of the same red flags that the author found. I worked as a remote contractor for a company, was interviewed over Skype by the CTO, had most of my interaction with the technical manager over Skype. I worked mostly by myself outside the scope of the other developers. Best of all, the codebase was mostly written by offshored developers.

This all sounds like a recipe for disaster, but instead it was an amazing experience. The tech manager was incredibly competent and great at managing umpteen developers in 4 countries. The codebase was reasonable to work with and I was able to move really quickly to get things done.

Maybe I got lucky, or maybe these red flags don't have any bearing. I only have anecdotes, so I don't know the answer.
Technically, the article is about the quality of journalism in the WSJ (plus of course the impact that politics has had on that quality), and the poster responded with a comment on the author's politics and completely ignored the issue of content quality.

You can't talk about journalism by talking only about politics.
If mobile devices "would overtake PCs" then why does everyone still have a PC?
I did a 3 month contract gig with a local robotics firm a while back. I developed a few cool features for them, but the reason they fell in love with me was that I worked up extensive testing checklists. During testing I'd be the one with the checklist hardcopy (printed out from the internal wiki) in my lap and a walky talky in one hand.

"Range safety officer, do we have your OK? Safety driver, do we have your OK? Safety driver, throw the switch to manual. Safety driver, is steeting calibrated? Remote operator, unpark the robot. Remote operator, confirm feature X is turned off. Safety driver, confirm vehicle feature Y is on..."

Without the checklist, a trial-and-error run through of a certain feature took 3 hours. With the checklist we could do it in 3 minutes.

I came back from an intense demo of the robot to third parties and decided to decompress in my woodworking shop...and next to my lathe was a checklist I had written up a while earlier on how to make a certain Christmas stocking stuffer

http://smartflix.com/projects/3

...which is when I realized that there's something about checklist that permeates my personality!
Apple released the SDK 8 months after the iPhone 2G launch. That's not an unreasonable amount of time. I think their intent was always to allow third party applications but they wanted to produce a really good SDK first and not rush something to market. This is one of the reasons the iPhone App Store has been so successful.
I've been looking for a hot new web app where you enter your email address into a box. Do you have an iphone app? Sometimes I like to enter my email into a box from the road.
How Buddypoke Scales on Facebook Using Google App Engine
Ban on unscientific "bomb detector" after $85M sales
The short answer is yes, and I, like the author, don't really understand why so many people spend so much time trying to show that Cantor's proofs are wrong.

Cantor's second proof generalises to show that given any set, X, the collection of functions

{ f: X -> {0,1} }

is of size strictly larger than X.

|{f: X -> {0,1}}| > |X|

The proof that the reals are uncountable is just this, with the set X as the set of natural numbers.
Yes, the universal symbol is to make an X in an open area with branches or something. A smoky fire is also a good idea.
Sadly, when CODASYL committee was formed to develop a programming language ideally suited for business data processing needs they were looking at a language that 'normal operators' could learn and that it would be similar to a human language that is why you get Cobol syntax like:

ADD YEARS TO AGE

A similar motivation was for SQL. We will give you a database and a query language that anyone can use:

SELECT title FROM Book .....

During the early days of computing the thought prevailed - pretty much like now - that it was a matter of 10 years before computers would be able to talk in natural languages and AI was around the corner.

But, you are right about BASIC that was my first language as well, quickly dropped for Turbo Pascal which was the sort of the in-thing for a while.
It's funny that I still remember my icq number without hesitation. I haven't used it in years, but I think it's like your first phone number or something that you just don't forget.

Edit: 19662##
Google has a massive advantage because A) The barrier to entry is low because most of the services are free and B) Just because somebody owns an Apple device doesn't mean they can't use Google.

There's some overlap but the companies just don't do the same things. Unless they decide to lock themselves in a segment of the market that overlaps completely, there's no reason they can't both be successful.
If that's true, all the people with html5-related canvas domains just won the lottery (canvasgames.com, etc).
A judicial decision that states that "The interests of the Party-State take priority [over the Constitution]" seems legitimate to you? Are you being sarcastic?
Yes, I've recently become a vitamin D convert and have learned quite a bit about it through William Davis' Heart Scan Blog: http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/

It turns out that as you age, your ability to absorb vitamin D through sunlight decreases, so past 40, you probably need supplementation.

I simultaneously did two things starting Jan 1: I stopped eating wheat and started taking vitamin D. Although I can't pinpoint which of these is the determining factor, I can report that I have much more energy (no post lunch drag, nor desire to nap after work) as a result. I also seem to sleep better. Check out:

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/getting-vitamin-d-...

http://www.thevitamindcure.com/blog/
"And checklists lack flexibility. They might be useful for simple procedures like central line insertion, but they are hardly a panacea for the myriad ills of modern medicine. Patients are too varied, their physiologies too diverse and our knowledge still too limited."

The problem is that everyone (including doctors) overestimates both their ability to diagnose based on instinct, and the percentage of patients who deviate from the norm.

For heart attacks, they found that a 3 step checklist was X% effective in diagnosing a heart attack, while the doctor alone was Y%, and X was much higher than Y. Yes, sometimes the doctor would use his expertise to catch something the checklist would miss, but over time the math was with the checklist.
The Life and Death of Alan Carton
This particular comment isn't being modded down for the content of your argument, it's being modded down because you're talking about yourself, and not the issue.

Also, being modded down is not even comparable to censorship.
> Git also has more flavors of branch (tracking or non)

Use the default.

> and repository (bare or not)

Use the default.

> more ways to edit changes (cherrypicking, rebasing)

Use the same ones you use in svn.

> more moving parts

git has four object types that are put together very naturally (tags contain commits which each contain a reference to a parent commit and a tree which contains a collection of other trees and blobs).

This means that when something goes wrong, I can fix it.

svn has at least two server-side object formats, and various version changes that make some features available or not based on client and server capabilities.

Backups are harder, repair is harder, history traversal is harder, sending changes around is at the very least slower.

In my experience, interacting with git is no harder. I've taught many people how to use it and the only people who were remotely confused were those with a svn background, as the svn unlearning process generally takes more time than the git learning process.
You're absolutely right. As I see it, the complacency you describe is the number one reason why many people in modern societies never emerge beyond being "average". They lose the drive to learn new things, challenge themselves, and continuously improve. Once becoming established it's very easy to sit back, relax, and coast along through life.

A motto I try to live by is this: If you have a choice between doing an easy thing and a hard thing, do the hard thing if you want to be great.
Ugh...does it come with your very own standard issue citizen's pants and shoes?
Massive Data Storage and Analysis--FlightCaster (YC S09)
The future of public transit once prominently featured a monorail, but that glamorous view of the future soon lost out to the utility of a car. Current public transportation simply cannot compete with that level of convenience. What should follow from that is a plan to make public transportation more convenient.

Follow the adage of giving people what they want - make the subway more convenient by automating the system. Follow that up with MUCH smaller subway cars. I'm imagining subway cars that are the size of a compact car. I go to the subway station, get in a subway car, and tell it my destination, and it takes me there in the most efficient way and not stopping at stops in between.

Of course, the cost just to renovate all subway stations to have 4 lines so that some cars can wait at the station while others zip past would be unimaginable, and I can't imagine citizens of any municipality voting to fund this.

That is, however, my view of how public transportation would create more value.
I think this ongoing discussion is fascinating, and I don't disagree with you.

But (and you knew that was coming), re-running someone else's code, or reproducing someone else's experiment is verification. It doesn't mean that what they did is valid, but it verifies that they did do what they said they did.
This doesn't seem like the whole story. President's can't issue 'rulings'. They set policy and those policies are subject to examination under the law by the judicial branch so this whole story seems a bit off-axis.
Well, the OLC issued the ruling as a means of ass-covering, it's a legal brief detailing the basis of why they think this is legal.

The fact that they're doing such should trouble anyone with half a brain, but it also comes as no surprise at this point.
> Companies like centrally controlled and backed up solutions

git wins fast over svn for backups.

git backups are redundant, always up-to-date, easily verifiable, and easy to turn into proper master repositories.

The more people you have working on a project, the harder it gets for anything to get lost.
I think Seth has something in mind for this release, so I'll wait for the okay before publishing on my site. We were supposed to do this live with http://Justin.tv tonight, so I'm going to run it one more time today.
15 sites that went kaput in 2009 (images)
In other words, the DOJ is basically saying they have no intention of investigating or prosecuting these crimes alleged to have been committed by the FBI as reported in the NY Times and elsewhere.
As a dedicated concert goer I can tell you that the difference between a recording and a live performance is enormous. There is a sense of excitement and danger about a liver performance, a rough edge that never appears in a recording.

It's the difference between television and the cinema, or a driving game and driving for real.

Perhaps it's less true for orchestras, but I have exquisite recordings of chamber music, and I will still pay to go to live performances.

It's different.
Gawande's original article in the New Yorker is definitely worth a read: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...

Having said that, I'm pleased that this review mentions unintended consequences and the limits of this approach. Checklists are not by any means a panacea.
That's pretty good. My bank has something like that for their online data storage, except instead of a device that will give me the code (I could get that for $25 they say), they send me a sms with the code after I enter my password.
> Git has submodules, but it is not the same and more cumbersome (for example each time the remote repository is updated, you need to perform a local commit to bring your reference up to date with the remote).

It's simply not revision controlled if two different checkouts of the same version produce different source trees.

externals might be convenient for moving targets, but that's entirely wrong behavior for a revision control system.
i disagree (but still upvoted you from 0).

there are strengths and weaknesses for both types of stores. there are things you can do in a brick and mortar bookstore that you just simply can't do in amazon, and vice versa.
Ask HN: Review My Site - ScriptCanary
Beautiful Typographic Business Cards
Corporations as Uber-Citizens
Apparently you have an Internet connection. Look it up on Wikipedia.
One side of my brain accepts and understands the Maths but another corner of it can never understand the paradox as to how one infinity is greater than the other; since the reals are uncountable that is, there are strictly more real numbers than natural numbers, and both sets are infinite.
"In other words, as Stephen Colbert put it last year, 'Corporations are people too.'"

That's true.

So let's take this to it's logical conclusion as expressed here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-warmowski/corporate-murder...

"Shouldn't it follow that when a corporation is bankrupted -- killed -- that its management could be found guilty of the capital crime of murder?"
I love going to author events at book stores.

Recently saw Dawkins at the Tribeca B&N.

Sometimes I also like paging thru mags.
If I had to spend that much money on a portable cubicle, I would use a shipping container as my platform instead. They are cheep, strong, secure and there is a worldwide infrastructure in place to ship them as cheaply as possible. I could have the whole thing shipped anywhere in the world with ease.
> I think the biggest challenge with using Git in a large organization is training a large number of people to use it. You can do a fair amount of development on a Subversion project knowing just how to update and commit. The same does not hold true of Git.

Is that because you also have to know how to push?

You can push git down to the LCD and have the same dumb VCS workflows. I think some people get hung up on thinking that new features being available must mean that you need to incorporate those new features into your workflows.
Known Issue:
We're working on making this fully self-service, but for now the site accepts contact through the sign-up form. Payment happens via emailed invoice.
I've always argued that this fact was irrelevant, because although the set of 'all reals' are uncountable, the set of computable numbers IS countable. The fact that there are numbers which cannot be represented by computers is interesting but has 0 practical applications.
The phrase "go to the edges" actually comes from his book Free Prize Inside. The idea is that the products/companies with the best stories win, and the way to find the best stories is to go to the edges-- make your product very small or very big, very cheap or very expensive, very complicated or very simple, etc. He gives 30 or so categories, and there are a bunch of examples of how this works.

His next book is actually called Linchpin, it comes out in a week or so. IMHO it's his best since All Marketers Are Liars.
Posted a comment directly to Doug's blog but apparently he doesn't approve of it or think it adds to the discussion. I thought that I was actually supporting some of his argument. Here it is:

Hey Doug,
“Corporations” in the simplest sense are just groups of people acting together (usually towards shared goals). This is not bad or evil in and of itself. “Corporatism” as I would define it is the partnership/collusion between some of these groups and the state.

I do not believe we can or should stop cooperation between people, and placing limits on which actions cooperating groups are allowed to take is just as wrong as placing those restrictions on the people themselves.

There are many, many things wrong with the way we treat corporations here today, but this usually has to do with the privilege granted to many to be free from law and regulation that individuals and other groups of individuals who are not in partnership with the state are bound by.

*Edited to fix a typo.
Agreed.

Have you seen the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall? http://dch.berliner-philharmoniker.de/