skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting read, especially with respect to rewriting source code.

One reason why monadic control flow works so well in Haskell is because the sugar and implementation are completely decoupled. The sugar layer simply rewrites "do { x <- foo; bar x }" to "foo >>= \x -> bar x". Very easy to do and undo, and it provides no semantics of its own; the transformed and untransformed versions are exactly equivalent. The actual control of the control flow is in the >>= function, and function calls are very easy to reason about compared to arbitrary source code rewriting. You are, after all, just passing some data to a function, which returns a result, which is passed to another function.

Simple and powerful.

This is hard to do in Ruby and Perl because code depends too much on the code(+); control flow is not function applications, it's a magic oracle that looks at the text of your program and uses that as a guide on what to do next. This makes modifying the control flow difficult; you have to understand the text, and then use that understanding to transform the text, which almost requires you to be as clever as the magical oracle itself. The end result is something that works really well... until something that the transformer didn't expect happens, and then you are SOL until you can find enough cleverness to work around that problem. Repeat until your rewriter is essentially a compiler for its own special programming language.

(+) Example: "my $foo; $foo = 42" compiles, "my $foo;" compiles, but "$foo = 42" does not compile. "$foo = 42" is only valid code in the presence of a "my $foo" somewhere before it. Hard to reason about!
I should not be forbidden because i'm a human. A company is inhuman. It may be like a human because it has corporate bylaws that can potentially change, but it is not a human. It does not have equal rights granted by the government. THe government serves humans.
Yeah, and now it is technically called ECMAScript as well. No marketing types had anything to do with that one! :)
Isn't "Dumbing it down" exactly what apple is doing with the iPad, which will almost certainly be a runaway success?
Yes, the reasoning is bogus because Exxon can't take public office. Full stop.

You - and many other people in this discussion - are confusing different legal concepts of "person" as well as "citizen". People like those in the linked story are working to encourage that confusion.
I don't get the outrage. Don't like it? Don't use it.
Quite remarkable. However, the question has to be asked, is this a preprogrammed response or a genuine sign of consciousness?

I can respond and communicate fluently in my sleep, however I never wake up from my sleeping communication. Why are these signs not seen in people who are in vegetative states but received no damage to the language centres of their brains?
OK, maybe that's not fair. I hate the browsers' implementations of it for sure, but I'm also not a fan of prototype-based OO systems, either.
Thanks for the pointers. I really dislike the scoping rules, and prototypes.
I don't know where you're going. What do you mean it implies?
Support of a positive user experience seems unlikely.
And this could be the Berlusconi response to such claim:

"The left wing it's trying to ruin the country by make non-sense claims". If you watch the Italian television, you can see that he appends that sentence on every response.[Disclaimer: I'm not right/center/left/you-name-it winged]
http://packages.debian.org/sid/tmux lists the deps and different arch's too.
Yes I dislike the DOM. Maybe I it's that JS is TOO simple (or not simple enough?). I find myself having to constantly match brackets and braces. And the browsers provide little help in the area of syntax checking.

Yes, I'm aware of Firebug; it's nice (although it seems to have gotten buggier).
So, the summary doesn't make this clear, and if you were to use the colloquial definition of teleportation the title of the article would simply be wrong.

Quantum teleportation is nothing like teleportation in shows and movies. The big difference is that you have to already have something on the other side. In other words, you can't teleport a rat to mars because there is no rat on mars. Yet. :-p

Further, that rat would have to be entangled with another rat on mars, not something trivially accomplished. At least that's my understanding of it.

Here's an article on QM teleportation that's easier to grok (although not about teleporting energy specifically):

http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/telepo...
Points for "initialism". I was about to write you off as a neologist, but then I learned that most acronyms are actually initialisms.
Similar to what's going on in China.

And on Italian News TVs there was NOT a word about this decree.
I guess I would be concerned about compiling to JS because you're adding another layer of abstraction on an already fussy language (when being interpreted by the browser). It's hard enough to find bugs as it is.

I'm a big fan of Haskell, too. The type system alone makes it a wonderful language to work in.
I'm not going to vote in the poll, because "too much" is a completely subjective standard. I will say that it definitely increases it by large margin. Maybe an order of magnitude or more.

Whether that is too much for your company or not will probably have to be decided by someone with a lot more information that you're providing here.
True. Blippy is probably just another part of a larger equation:

Blippy + ??? = Profit!
You avoided the actual issue. This isn't about founders. This is about engineers. Engineers aren't the ones getting the million dollar payout (if the startup lottery is in even in their favor). This is about engineers looking for work. The people founders need to pay a salary to. There haven't been million dollar payouts for engineers in a long time. The complaint is that founders continue to peddle the fantasy that engineers should remain underpaid because they might win big at some later date, in an effort to keep salaries low. That's a shame.
Tell HN: Sparkfun 2010 Autonomous Vehicle Competition
whyme, by 'anonymous usernames' do you mean all people post anonymously (without any identification, or the choice to do so), or are you asking about the difference between real names and web names, for example, your username (whyme) and mine (jacobaldridge)?
If there was a Pulitzer for startup interviews, I'd expect Andrew Warner to be nominated.
I'd also like to add:
> Similarly, your computer does not have any rights, but you do have the right to post hacker news comments using your computer (provided pg lets you).

You're supposed to only have one account. PG gives YOU a right to post hacker news comments, not your computer. The computer is a direct representation of you. A company is a distinct entity created from the collection of people. Your analogy is faulty.

> The charter was agreed to by all shareholders. Those who found it unacceptable chose not to buy shares.

Yet the charter which is agreed upon is a distinct entity concocted by human beings. At best it's a monster like frankenstein.

> The "company" is merely a legal facade to simplify interactions between the shareholders and other parties.

Yet the company is also a distinct entity.

Look the US government guarantees rights to individuals, not groups or corporations. Groups that come together for a common interest only amplify their voice by the collective pooling of their individual voices. A corporation pools those individual voices into a mob, which does something else independent of any one person's will. It's a distinct entity. It is not a human. It does not have rights like a citizen.

I can't stress this enough: the government guarantees certain right to individual people, not groups that can be arbitrarily formed.
Prototype (like jQuery) has really easy DOM access. $$("div.className[attributeName=value]").pluck("innerHTML") does what you expect.
Does it work here?
They are not what Lisp macros do.

True.

What ruby does to present micro-DSLs are what any language that lets the programmer influence the scope of single dispatch and has a lightweight syntax for function calls can do.

They are not what Lisp macros do, and do not even approach all the common "easy" uses cases for macros. Further, they also incur a much larger runtime performance penalty, whereas macros incur none.

I think that part of the problem is that no one (whom I've seen, at least) has explained in a brief, easy to follow manner just what the Lisp macros get you beyond all of the parse tree manipulation, code generation, and "metaprogramming" you can already do with Ruby. If you could explain the extra benefit succinctly, I'd love to hear it. In other words, I'd love to see an essay or blog post that makes me wish Ruby had true, Lisp-style macros.

Performance, by the way, won't be enough: language implementations are always getting better.
Correction:
Wenn hinter fliegen fliegen fliegen, fliegen fliegen fliegen nach.

It's actually quite sensible in German. Transliterated, it's "When behind flies flies fly, the flies after-fly the flies." Translated it would be more like "When flies fly behind flies, flies are following flies."

To "after-fly" is to follow, but by flight. And of course, per usual in German, that verb is split apart with the "after" prefix stuck at the end, which is how you end up -- quite naturally! -- with six fliegens in a row.

Confer this gem from Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language":

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab -- which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:

"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, PARTED."
Wow, fantastic read.

From the concluding section:

So Mermin was on the right track, but he didn’t get it quite right: not only is the
moon is not really there when nobody looks, but it isn't really there even when
you do look! "Physical reality" is not "real", but information-theoretical reality is.
We are not physical entities, but informational ones. We are made of, to quote
Mermin, "correlations without correlata." We are not made of atoms, we are made
of (quantum) bits. At the risk of stretching a metaphor beyond its breaking point,
what we usually call reality is really a very high quality simulation running on a
quantum computer.

This is a very counterintuitive view of the world, but the mathematics of Quantum
Mechanics tell us unambiguously that it is correct, just as the mathematics of
relativity tell us that there is no absolute time and space. Entanglement, far from
being an obscure curiosity of QM, is in fact at its very heart. Entanglement is the
reason that measurement is possible, and thus the reason that the Universe is
comprehensible.
I was just thinking the same thing... the 20ms difference only matters if the start time of the action is less than 20ms before the start time of the reaction.

Just because you can do something faster, it doesn't always mean you finish faster.
Revisiting EC2 Instance IDs
The article seems to suggest it's impossible to communicate faster than light speed using entanglement b/c they need to know a bit of information at the sender's side which can't be sent using the entanglement phenomenon itself.

That's something I'd like to understand better..

Is it really impossible to distinguish between an 'On' state and an 'Off' state at the receiver's end without this piece of information? Is it our ability to measure the observation that hinders this or is this a law of physics that will 'never' be broken?
Newspapers are bad for the newspaper business.

They're as panicky as all the other media companies, though at least most newspaper companies have functional websites. They fight change so hard they end up being left in the dust by it.

Quit complaining about how you find it hard to be unique. Everyone has that problem. Try doing what used to work, and still does: stand out in the crowd by doing it better than the crowd.
Your humanity is entirely orthogonal to the argument you made:

"Not only that, but if I make money selling porn, do you want me to use my power accrued from people's lust to be used to promote some agenda completely unrelated like say... teaching creationism? People need porn, but most people don't want creationism. So should porno buyers be forced to indirectly support creationism?"

Even if you're just a clerk in a porn store or a model on a porn site, customers are equally "forced" to support whatever you do with your paycheck.
I have yet to see a Ruby "DSL" that didn't feel like Ruby. That is,

unless you.talk :like => "this"
Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News Aggregators
Any Australian HN readers could explain why Australia (or at least its government) seems to be obsessed with controlling the Internet? Australia seems like a pretty open country otherwise.
JVisualVM and Clojure
whyme vs. jacobaldridge.
>> The vast majority of students are there to get the piece of paper...

And, in BYU's case, to meet other Mormons.
Does anyone use screen and vim to pair program? Me and my co-founder tried to by ssh'ing into a common box, doing
1) screen -S pairprog
2) ctrl+a :multiuser on
3) ctrl-a :acladd username. However the second person always gets an error with something regarding multiuser
Not necessarily, it depends what causes the defender to draw. It may take you ~200ms to react, however it also takes the drawer time to act on their decision, and may take longer as there's an incentive to aim as there's no point in shooting first and missing.

Button pressing /= drawing and aiming.

The defender has less incentive to aim, and besides your brain already has the calculations made. In hunting the snapshot is a frequent killer due simply to reaction with no conscious aiming. IIRC the NRA has ~40,000 bullseye shooters who have to have rapidfire accuracy on multiple targets to attain the grade. This requires the ability to make snapshots.

I'm not going to believe any result on gunslinging until someone picks up a properly weighted pistol that has to be aimed and fired (whether it be a blank or using an LED sighter). Otherwise it's not scientific, you're fucking with the variables and the very nature of the experiment.
I think it's more a matter of strong moderation. HN is a strongly self-policing site and it works very well here. Drive by commenting doesnt make it. Another site with a high signal to noise ratio is Charlie Stross's http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/. He has a strong moderation policy (read it) and deletes anything he doesnt like.

EDIT: I just went over to Charlie's blog. He notes a comment by Jaron Lanier that "drive-by anonymity fosters vicious pack behavior on the net.
Corruption? I remember hearing that at least one of the Australian states/provinces had massive police corruption that was discovered back in the 80's or so, and many of the people involved still hold positions. (Please correct me if I'm wrong)

Maybe government corruption is rampant? IIRC in Italy there is a lot of corruption in the government, but people just accept it as a fact of life.
> some_method "hey" { |v| print v }

I'm sure ruby is great once you're initiated, but despite >10 years of programming and having learned basic, c, pascal, lisp, java, c++, python, perl, bash, php and javascript, I have no idea what code does.

Don't mean to harsh, just an observation.
I'd be wary of it, I haven't read the whole thing but it seems suspicious, least of which is that he comes off as if he fully understands QM.

I only know so much about QM, but I do know that no one fully understands it, and that in attempting to sound deep, the author of this paper misattributed a classic Zen koan to Douglas Hofstadter.
Restrictions on corporations prevent the owners from using some of their property to participate in politics.

Similarly, computers aren't people. So does a restriction on "speech by computers" violate your rights? I.e., a law saying "you can't use your computer to advocate for or against the election of a politician?"
Aiming isn't taken into consideration with a button press, so I wouldn't exactly call this study accurate. Bohr did a more scientifically valid test without anything more than a pair of pop guns.
Good call. Thanks for the feedback -- will keep that in mind next time I'm tempted to post a one-liner.
Working for a test and measurement company I would be curious to see the non generalized version of this report. One with tests and measurements, possibly some data and techniques.
I would consider it the current #1 podcast for tech entrepreneurs.
That's an interesting parallel. What would happen is a multi-national corporation ran for office? How would that affect relations between foreign operations and the government of the jurisdictions where they reside?
This doesnt seem like the hacker news (tm) way of thinking. I expected wonderful code. That post was just lame.
Distopian view: Now Google can fight China with armies. And so can Microsoft|Apple fight Apple|Microsoft
Cube5: Webkit CSS based 3D cube layout.
What's your own opinion ? Does it serves you ? Did you have a look ? Which episodes ?

After those questions: I find some episodes quite thought-provoking (some others not).

But in general, it certainly is an interesting resource IMO.
I love love love screen, but ctrl-a is a terrible binding. ctrl-] works well for me.

I'm going to check out this tmux thing.
Think about it, folks. A corporation is a tool, like a car. There are laws that apply specifically to operating cars - you can get ticketed or arrested for breaking them. However, laws that said, "You can't use your car to drive to court in order to contest a traffic ticket or to drive to voting locations to vote for fewer no-parking zones" would obviously be abusive.
The US will eventually decline economically relative to China, but the US has other advantages, besides military tech. The US has exported its political model to Western Europe over the past 100 years. A lot of middle-class people in China want to live in the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe, and will do so as fast as those countries let them in. The English-speaking countries will let them in the quickest, perhaps to buy those empty houses. Such emigration out of China, coupled with their one-child policy, means China will hit a demographic wall quicker than Japan ever did.

And of course, because of Western countries' tradition of federation and democracy, the US and Canada can slowly merge with the EU, treaty by treaty, just as fast as it needs to to counterbalance China. NATO is just the beginning of this. I'd imagine Russia will eventually, perhaps in 20 or 30 yrs, join the EU, Euro, and even the Schengen zone one day. Such a combined US/Canada & EU/Russia would have well over a billion people, with most people probably speaking English, and be centred around the Arctic Ocean, which by then would be the best land on the planet because of climate change.

But who's China going to federate with? They've had trouble keeping their Western provinces in check, and keeping their own people inside the country. They'll probably get Mongolia, maybe even Burma, within 50 yrs, but none of their other neighbors will trust them enough to let them too close. Russia will look to Europe to help defend its Siberian resources before it lets China in. Perhaps their immigrants to the West will stay loyal as part-time spies, but their children certainly won't.

In 50 yrs, a combined US/EU/Russia will be top dog, with China lagging in 2nd place, and Japan, India, Brazil, in the third tier.
Sneak Peek of My 3d Scheme Game (and request for support)
I certainly can't attest to its correctness, but I found it insightful and thought-provoking.

As to the misattribution, the paper reads:

The best I can offer as an answer to that question is a Zen koan from Douglas
Hofstadter:

It seems to me he is describing Hofstadter as the conduit and not the origin.
Then I would err on the side of 'Yes', but say it ultimately depends. I wouldn't know swombat or patio11 if they walked passed me in the street, but discussion works fine and those of us that want to share our real identity do.

On my own business' site (Shirlaws Online), I encourage everybody to use their real name. We're a B2B professional services type firm, and our clients expect that Jacob Aldridge on LinkedIn will be on Shirlaws Online as 'Jacob Aldridge' not 'a1bizcoach'.
The problem lies in a small number of politicians holding the swing vote in our policy making. Unfortunately one of the main players is "Family First", a conservative Christian political group who are basically trying to impose 'good christian values' on all Australians. So to get a major parties policies through, they do 'deals' with these minor groups, like supporting extreme censorship.

You can read more about this wonderful group here http://www.familyfirst.org.au/Policies.htm

Some things they oppose include abortion, euthenasia, cloning, needle exchange programs for drug users, unfiltered internet pornography...

It saddens me that our current politicians do not see the damage such policies will have in the future. They are trading our future freedom to ensure their current political aspirations are met.
Rails 3.0.0.beta
I am not going to vote on the poll, because I think the trolling is a side-issue, once you mentioned a company forum.

If you have a company forum, you should have real names - doesn't have to be their full names if you are a small commpany - forex if someone's known as "Joe S. from Accounting" let them register as "Joe S. from Accounting" if that is what they want, rather than insisting on "Joseph Smith III" or whatever they are on your payroll. But don't let people pick random names because that, I think, lulls them into a false sense of security.

When you are working, you are your professional self, and you are expected to keep some aspects of your private self at bay (yes, even in some of those informal and I am sure fabulous startups you may work at). Insisting that people keep identifiable work names helps them remember that posting on a company forum is still being at work.
It implies that the coercive power of the collective (as materialized in the form of "government") must necessarily be limited in order to preserve individual liberty.
BlueWasp: an alternative (and incomplete) Facebook client for webOS
It's extremely worthwhile.
You've been a systems administrator since you were 12? That's hardcore.
I am not worried about "too much" being a subjective standard. I am ok with biased opinions based upon personal experience and independent ideas.
How many lines of Java would this take?
I thought that the whole point was that you invariably change the state of a quantum particle just by observing it. The particles are so small that just waiting for a photon to reflect off of it so you can observe it changes its state.
I just uploaded a newer version to the market that should work with Android 1.6 (G1). However, I couldn't compile for 1.1 and 1.5. The compiler complained about my "res" folder. If folks want to point me in the right direction, how to learn more about this stuff, how to handle versioning with Android and the Market, I'm open.