skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand how people keep failing to understand monads. Maybe it's the line noise operator `>>=' ?

Lets define a simple type, `Maybe', which can store either a value or an absence of value:

data Maybe a = Just a | Nothing
deriving (Show)

And define a function which compares a number against a limit, and returns `Nothing' if the value is out of range:

clamp :: Ord a => a -> a -> Maybe a
clamp limit x = if x > limit then Nothing else Just x

Easy enough. Now, how should the number be compared against multiple limits?

One way is to just brute-force it:

multiclamp :: Ord a => a -> a -> a -> Maybe a
multiclamp lim1 lim2 x = case clamp lim1 x of
Nothing -> Nothing
Just x' -> clamp lim2 x'

But this is ugly. Lets use monads to simplify it.

First, take a look at the core Monad operations. I'm going to use `build' and `bind' instead of `return' and `>>=', because they're probably more familiar to most readers.

class Monad m where
build :: a -> m a
bind :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b

Next, we'll define an instance of the `Monad' typeclass for `Maybe'. It will use the same semantics as the `multiclamp' example -- that is, if the first test returns `Nothing', the entire computation will return `Nothing':

instance Monad Maybe where
build x = Just x

bind Nothing _ = Nothing
bind (Just x) f = f x

Using this definition, `multiclamp' can be written thus:

multiclamp2 :: Ord a => a -> a -> a -> Maybe a
multiclamp2 lim1 lim2 x = bind
(clamp lim1 x)
(\x' -> clamp lim2 x')

Although ugly, this notation is sufficiently generic that the compiler can generate it from an imperative notation. Lets look at two more examples. First, `multiclamp2' written using "real" monads. Notice that this is exactly the same as before, except `bind' is an operator named `>>=':

multiclamp3 :: Ord a => a -> a -> a -> Maybe a
multiclamp3 lim1 lim2 x =
(clamp lim1 x) >>=
(\x' -> clamp lim2 x')

And finally, using the imperative-style `do' notation. Note that although this is imperative, it is not impure -- this is semantically equal to `multiclamp3':

multiclamp4 :: Ord a => a -> a -> a -> Maybe a
multiclamp4 lim1 lim2 x = do
x' <- clamp lim1 x
clamp lim2 x'

This is, obviously, a superficial example -- you'd never see such verbose code in code written by an experienced programmer. But the verbosity helps to visualize what the compiler is doing.

For completeness, here's a "cleaner" version, which takes advantage of currying and the combinator `.':

multiclamp5 :: Ord a => a -> a -> a -> Maybe a
multiclamp5 lim1 lim2 = (clamp lim2 =<<) . clamp lim1
perhaps subscription model (that affects everyone) is not the right model. Perhaps you can find something that 1% of your viewership would pay $1000 for... Check out Justin Smith's InsideFacebook which charges for premium research reports. I think there might be enough VCs, tech research analysts, etc. who would pay that sort of premium for mixergy to get an inside scoop.
Your analogy between all-male developer/ops teams and all-female marketing/PR teams is really apt -- both groups feel alienated by the other, but neither will internalize how alienating they themselves are to the other.
The common sense sense.

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=github.com%2C+sourceforg...
Does anyone have any suggestions for beginner Haskell projects?

I've read through some Haskell material before and tried following tutorials, but I always end up dropping it because I can't think of anything for which I would use it.

I have no problem with functional and functional-esque programming (Erlang, Common Lisp, etc.), but I just can't come up with anything to do in Haskell. :(

EDIT:

Thanks for the great suggestions, everyone! I think I'll do some crpyo-based maths work in Haskell since that is what holds my interest at the moment. :-)
If this is what school administrators do in the suburbs outside Philadelphia -- birthplace of the constitution! home of the Liberty Bell! -- imagine what countries like Libya or Nicaragua will try to do via their OLPC units.
Online map of Port Elizabeth and Addo hotels
That's a pretty nasty accusation to make without evidence.
I am not sure, but it's worth checking: You do know that link is a joke, right? "Senior Haskell programmer" is where reality stops (give or take an entry or two, not counting the last "tenured professor" one), and if you can't get "foldr" you're ill-equipped to deal with more advanced Javascript techniques either.
Hot shit! This was something on my list of things to build for myself. Now I don't have to.
Here is a more detailed explanation of how this works.

Imagine you have a pixel image, with missing data, and with noise. Imagine you know a-priori that the image was generated simply by placing a few white circles against a black background. Then data was lost/discarded, and white noise was added to the remaining data.

(The white circles are cross sections of the patient's blood vessels or some such feature (bile ducts, in this case), and contain a contrast agent. The contrast agent appears white on the MRI, everything else appears black. )

Now that you know the pixel image has such a simple form, you don't need to do fancy noise removal to clean it up. All you need to do is figure out where the white circles are. Once you know where the are, you can just redraw the image based on your calculated locations of circles instead of reprocessing the old one.

You can play the same trick in k-space, which gives you a potent MRI reconstruction algorithm.

In practice, this doesn't work as well for more complicated images such as brains or abdomens. There is just much more to draw, and the images cease to be sparse.
Jason - the "seo is bs" line was heard at every seo conference you headlined when you launched mahalo.
I'm glad to see you're doing something to make some money off of Mixergy, Andrew. If it means that you've got an incentive to keep doing these interviews, then it's worth it.

Is $25 a month the right price? I have no idea. But I appreciate the straightforward nature of asking for a subscription. There are some good suggestions on your site as well, such as charging per interview in iTunes.

If you haven't thought about it already, it might be interesting for you to partner up with sites like StartupToDo.com as well, or something like that.

I've already watched most of your videos, so I don't know if I'm the right target audience for what you're selling right now.

There is something I would pay more than $25 a month for though, but it would probably require more than just your work to make it happen - If I heard about a private mailing list that contained tips, advice, anecdotes, whatever that came from people like you, patio11, Jason Cohen, maybe maxklein (I'm undecided at the moment ;)), etc and I knew that the information sent out to that list wouldn't get made public for at least a month, I'd probably sprain my elbow trying to get my credit card out fast enough to start giving you my info.

Maybe that's a model for you as well - private memberships get early access to interviews, not archive access. I mean, these things contain actionable information; I would think their greatest value would be right when they're made.

Anyways, I'm sure you'll hit the right formula eventually. Nobody likes it when something that used to be free starts costing money; but if the product is good enough they'll get over it.
As a "man on the ground" with a team to manage/hire/fire I have found what Eric says in his post to be quite true. It has been very helpful for my team have a wide range of races, disciplines and of course genders.

I don't see anything revolutionary in what Eric espouses and in practice I've found them to be quite successful in helping my team keep moving in the right direction.

ps. I come from a technical not business background but have taken on more of that role as the years have progressed.
were the screenshots with internal YC emails intentional?
The developer posted on Reddit that this was a premature release. (Clarification: That is to say, he did something like email the link to a buddy and it unexpectedly ended up on Reddit, not that it was formally released and then regretted.)

To be honest, if you're at the point where you want that sort of thing, I'd generally suggest simply downloading ghci. ISTM that all these "try it online" things are good for are making the decision of whether you want to bother with that step. (Perhaps I'm spoiled on Linux where downloading GHC or Ruby is hardly any harder than visiting a web page anyhow.)
This is really horrible.

But it's largely getting this level of attention because of the shock value (ooh, pictures!). In fact, this is just one more predictable step in the entrenchment of the police state that compulsory school by its nature is.
You can at least do this:

> let x = 10 ; y = 5 ; in x + y
=> 15
:: (Num t) => t
There's a site that do exactly this, but I can't remember it's name right now.
I just found http://outright.com/ Looks promising. It's free and it imports my Freshbooks invoices.
Before now, I hadn't realized that some people believe that loading a copyrighted work into RAM should be legally considered to be a reproduction of said work...
كشف قراصنة اللينكس - خدمات العرب
Honestly, I've never had a problem with hitting the buttons the entire time I've had my Nexus One (a couple weeks after launch). I'm in love with it; don't let other people's fat fingers influence your decision, unless you too have fat fingers...
In this case, you don't "get rid" of 90% of the image--you simply never acquire it in the first place.

The reason is that MRI sampling is prohibitively time-expensive: you need to keep the sample still for a long time to sample many points. In the article's case, that would require the patient to end up dead. ;) Sparsely sampling the volume takes much less time and allows for a reasonable reconstruction.

I'm not intimately familiar with MRI processing, but there may also be some intricacy of the imaging process (possibly related to the time-to-spatial-frequency conversion?) that makes the lower-res sampling especially suited for this algorithm.
It's not a matter of skillsets; it's a matter of communication.

Having a co-founder lets you bounce ideas off one another. It lets everything you do take on its own natural evolution. It's hard to explain unless you have a co-founder that you can easily and quickly communicate with, but I'll try.

You could compare it the show House MD. House is a brilliant medical mind, and much better than anyone on his team. Why does he even have a team, you ask? To throw ideas back and forth. When he can't access his team, he'll go to anyone to keep the idea in the air. He's even used a bum and an ex-con.

As an individual, you can train in all the skillsets in the world. You can become better at front-end, back-end, business development, selling, talking to people... everything. You can be even be better at coming up with ideas.

But you'll never be better at developing ideas.

That's the strength of multiple founders.
The external UI looks like Picwing and Etherpad had a baby.
Something with lots of threads.
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/02/22/etacts/
Depends if both codecs need to be implemented by every site. If Flash or HTML 5 supported both, content owners would be able to choose one or the other.
I usually start picking up new languages by taking something I've written and translating it into the new language.
Baffling. So, if you like one thing, you can't express your opinions about some similar thing? Isn't that specifically why we even have disclosure statements like the one he made?

If you like, take his review as "this is how far the Nexus One diverges from my favorite industrial design philosophy, as embodied by Apple".
No need to apologize. We're all friends here right? Besides, the odds are good you'll get to return the "favor" one of these days. :-)

BTW... The mis-information about how Android background apps work is pretty widespread, so I wouldn't feel bad about having it incorrect. Heck, that's what I believed the situation was until I got an Android phone. :-)
Yes, and to be fair, it's not as though nothing has happened, or nothing has changed.

But I would have expected far more general social awareness about the pros and cons of assorted drugs, and the problems with prohibition.

While there has been some progress, most of society has a fairly reactionary view (at least publicly) on recreational drug use.
The internal UI looks a lot like Etherpad too.
"I was just following orders" to set up a system that would inevitably create child porn does not sound like a sufficient defense to me.

The software in question would phone home whenever the laptop was connected from other than the school's LAN and start making pictures; at that point, the only thing the system could do would be to allow retention of them or not.
It turns out that the gains from only computing the paths of a subset of the rays are offset by the cost of recovering the compressively sensed data.

I could be wrong, though -- I only did this back-of-the-envelope a few months ago. I never really tried that hard to make it work.
It's a well-earned reputation. The majority of all my discretionary spending goes through Amazon these days; with the exception of 1 specialty item recently, I can't remember the last time I had something shipped from another company.

It's great that things work so well when ordering from Amazon; but what's really great is when things don't work well. They have some of the absolute best customer service I have ever dealt with. They make it so easy to return things that I never think twice about it. I had some packages disappear a few years back and they handled it so well that I told all of my friends and family about it for months.
I think you have another challenge when dealing with something like rating hosting.
The problem, I believe, comes in where you will likely have many people leaving reviews after a bad experience, rather than a good one.
For any negative experience, a person will tell 10 people, for a positive experience, they will share with 2 people.

Videos are a bit different, because people review as they are watching. However with something like hosting, you need to give considerable thought to how you get people to report positive or average experiences equally as often as negative ones.

That's just my initial reaction.
He addresses the point head-on: "Diverse teams make better decisions than homogenous ones. I won’t recap the academic research that underlies this assertion; for that, you should read James Surowecki’s excellent Wisdom of Crowds.
It seems to happen in rare cases, but:

(a) There's not a scarcity of applications
(b) YC is emphatic that you should have known your co-founders for a while
What you're asking is, describe a situation in which a startup crashed with a large outstanding hosting bill. I'm not going to, but I don't think it's hard to see how that could happen.

I could give other examples, but they hit somewhat closer to home.
I want this very, very badly. But they'd have to pay me a thousand dollars to get me to type my Google password in that box.
I hate to say this, but this would be an ideal addition to "labs" in gmail. I can't imagine it would take much for them to do either.
I went to the Wal-Mart in Mazatlan, MX and it seemed like a pretty nice store. Maybe just a little nicer than the ones in America but it seemed much nicer and better stocked than the other stores in the area.
There are dueling definitions of "diversity" going on. That book seems (judging from the amazon description) to be talking about diversity of opinion. Cultural/religious/racial diversity is a different thing.

http://www.amazon.com/Distrust-American-Style-Diversity-Conf...

And it results it flamboyantly insane thought patterns. Example,

http://blogs.reuters.com/frontrow/2009/11/08/general-casey-d...

“Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,” Casey said.

Read: "In our particular organization, diversity is more important than not being killed." Also read: "I'm a 4-star general, and anyone who disagrees with this particular insanity is going to be in a shit load of trouble."
FTA: Y Combinator refuses to work with individuals

YC FAQ:

Can a single person apply for funding?

Yes, but the odds of being accepted are much lower. A startup is too much work for one person.

It is my understanding that YC has funded several single-founder startups. I can recall someone listing a few of them recently.
Why hasn't this made it into Photoshop or GIMP yet? What would it take to implement this to enhance images?
The feeling I get when etacts shows me my most important contacts is like the feeling I get when I see a tag cloud of my tweets. Insightful meta data.
I don't think they would. It's like the game that motorcycle cops play where they bet each other that they can find something to write a ticket for on any random car. If they tried to turn on the camera and nothing came through, they could ask to inspect the laptop because of "a glitch they noticed", at which point they could probably find at least 1 thing that broke the rules -- "This is no good, the tape residue has damaged the internal gyro sprocket, and now the whole laptop must be replaced."
He can prove that, but he can't use LaTeX?
As far as I can tell, the only internal YC email there is Harj Taggar's, and he has posted it publically before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138652

The other two email addresses visible are the founders'.
"there's a lot more to vowels than relative pitch."

I agree with everything else you said, but your own words seem to bring us to the conclusion that pitch has nothing at all to do with distinguishing vowels (in languages in which pitch alone cannot be used to distinguish words).
"It's a good bet" is not the same as an accusation. I wouldn't vote to convict him yet if I were on a jury and all I knew was what has been in the media, but if I had to bet $100 I know which bet has a higher expected value. Would you really bet the other way? The guy was surreptitiously taking pictures of teens in their bedrooms FFS.

There's one thing we agree on - that's pretty nasty.
This is so true. I experienced this living in both NYC and San Francisco. They say NYC is so great because its "the city that never sleeps" etc. Well one night I was painting my apartment and needed a hammer at around midnight. There was no way I would have gotten that. Now I live in Phoenix and I go to Wal-Mart at 11:00 PM about once a week. I love it, I don't ever want to live in a place without Wal-Mart ever again.
This is a good thing. The public usually does not have access to such detailed data, so I'm glad that other companies are copying what OKCupid pioneered.
(Why this is safe)

We use the latest in bank-level 256-bit SSL encryption to protect your information, and your passwords are securely encrypted.

Etacts will never email your contacts without your
permission.

Your data is completely private and will not be shared
with other users.

To help you keep track of who you haven't spoken with, we fetch your email headers. We don't store the content of your emails or attachments. When you view an email in etacts, we fetch the email directly from your Gmail server and don't store it on our servers.

Uh. Hey, Etacts. Are you storing my password long term or not? That's my question. Glad you're doing the bank security encrypty thing. But you can't keep my Gmail password.
Also Harj's email isn't his real one. The one on the front page is harj@default.net (which is fake)
I also attempted to address this point head-on:

"To be clear, though, this diversity refers only to diversity of opinion, not necessarily to demographic diversity. So why is demographic diversity important?

"Demographic diversity is an indicator. It’s a reasonable inference that a group that is homogeneous in appearance was probably chosen by a biased selector."
Install xmonad and configure it properly
ITER and JET Try to Make Fusion a Reality
So, to see if I'm understanding: is the purpose of the Maybe monad to abstract the concept of "evaluate to Nothing if the previous expression evaluated to nothing?" Also, is 'build'/'return' being used implicity somewhere?
Avoiding local slang when writing is also "ill", my brother.
I am not unfamiliar with that research. I'm just not very impressed by it, particularly with the relevance of it to the issue at hand.

An awful lot of academic writing about diversity starts with the conclusion and then finds results to justify it. I mean, hypothetically supposing one were to do a double-blind study of pick-your-favorite-improvement and find, to your surprise, that it resulted in more skew, not less. ("We scrubbed all the resumes of any indication of race/gender and ended up inviting more white males to interviews?! Dude, WTF.")

Would you want that study to be in your CV when tenure decisions were being made, knowing what you do about the shadow beliefs of the people on your tenure committee? Bury that data and bury it deep if you value your career.

Incidentally, some sources of repeatable bias in academic studies are actually documented in the literature (whoa, meta!) For example, people have a tendency to not publish null results and just file them away in a desk drawer, which means the published literature in e.g. marketing systematically exaggerates the magnitude of effects. If your team is doing A/B testing and every test moves the needle something is almost certainly wrong, but in the literature something almost invariably moves the needle.
I thought about writing something to do this a few years ago. The issue which I ran into that always stopped me from doing it is that you need to integrate every medium a person uses for it to be really useful.

I also suspect that outside of business contacts I view lack of communication with someone as a signal that I'm not that interested in talking to them.
I'm a co-founder of eTacts. This is a legitimate concern and we do everything we can to address this issue: http://etacts.com/security/
He's got a single book of some of his essays (Hackers & Painters) for sale. He doesn't charge you for access to any of the essays on his site (which I believe is every one he's released). He doesn't even have ads on there.
we do keep your gmail password, but you have the ability at any time to delete your gmail password or your entire etacts account. We will try to make this more clear, thank you for the feedback.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)
I'm a fan of Mixergy interviews, but only occasionally check what's new- the incentive is not there when I'm not consciously planning on spending an hour. This model will make me more likely to check the site more often. The analytics will give a better picture (and I'm sure many of us would be very interested in seeing how traffic changes if Andrew would like to share that down the road), but count me as one user whose behavior will be influenced by this change.

I'm doubtful that I'll end up as a paid subscriber, but my sense is that subscriber revenue is relatively less important compared to the potentially powerful effect of creating the sense of urgency among users.
Can you elaborate a bit on this? Did you simply patch the GC? I've seen Evan Weaver's post (http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/04/09/ruby-gc-tunin...) on it, but that's it.
Sadly I'm in the same boat as you, if anyone nefarious got my gmail account I think I would have to start a new identity ;)
I think that might be better worded as "killing headcount".
Exactly, since email is not the only mode of online communication this isn't all encompassing.
He wrote it for a finance journal. That's how they do.
Ticket Scalping in NYC
Yeah, that little notice didn't really inspire much confidence for me. The biggest question is whether you trust them with your email & password, but unfortunately there's not much they can do to alleviate this fear.