skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But sometimes, breaking down the same problem from multiple viewpoints helps readers to understand what's going on.

I think 43% of the confusion about monads is due to the sheer number of "monad tutorials", each explaining two or three functions (return/bind, pure/fmap/join) with different, overly-complex analogies. (A monad is like a burrito, a monad is like a space suit, a monad is like a nuclear waste container...)

The tutorials start with some analogy, and then inevitably explain how "the list monad" and "the maybe monad" work. At the end you know that monads are like burritos, how to apply a function to every value in a list, and how to return failure from a function. But you still don't know anything about monads, or more importantly why monads.

If I were to write a monad tutorial, it would include these key points:

1) A monad is not a thing, it's a property of other things. Maybe is a thing. A list is a thing. Both are monads. (My bike is a thing. My wall is a thing. Both are blue.)

2) The abstract concept of a monad lets you reuse code. If you want to apply a function to every value of a list, you could do that without monads. If you want functions to be able to fail, and you want the failures to be composable, you could do that without monads. But what you can't do without monads is write a function like liftM2. With monads, you can turn a normal function into one that works on lists. Or that works on IO. Or that works on computations that can fail. You get to use the same function for all three types. That's the point of monads.

(Then there will be a code example:

2 + 3 --> 5
liftM2 (+) (Just 2) (Just 3) --> Just 5
liftM2 (+) Nothing (Just 3) --> Nothing
liftM2 (+) (Just 2) Nothing --> Nothing
liftM2 (+) [1,2] [3,4] --> [4,5,5,6]
liftM2 (+) readLn readLn --> 1 <ENT> 2 <ENT> --> 3

Then it all makes sense!)
Yes. It used to show up in Google search results as expertsexchange.com. After being thoroughly razzed, they made it redirect to experts-exchange.com.

Since it was called expertsexchange.com at the time I blocked it in the Yahoo! search results, I took the liberty of referring to it by its old name.
Oh, come on, folks...do you really think that the authors of a paper on the website of the New York Federal Reserve Bank aren't aware of the same bit of pop economics that any armchair economist can read on Wikipedia?

I suspect that the original paper merits a refutation of slightly greater weight than the parent comment.
I can't wait for someone to combine this with a glasses based HUD. If one could feed their algorithm the Facebook corpus of pictures to train it on, you could recognize a significant percentage of random people on the street.
This absolutely works. The road I bicycle to work on is about the width of one large delivery truck. A normal car barely has clearance for two people on its side. The end result is that cars drive no faster than me on my bicycle, and sometimes much much slower.
No, I'm pretty sure the author is simply not a native speaker of English. Still, that doesn't mean he can't make some good points despite a few minor grammatical errors.
Would you use it for Python? It probably wouldn't be that hard to port.

- author
"It may seem like selling for millions to Google is a foregone conclusion given how brilliant you are, but it’s not. ...If you can trade a little bit of equity to nudge up your shot at success by a few percentage points, you should do so."

I love this point. Many people I've talked to dislike going the YC route because it's "so little money for the amount of equity they take" as if their idea (which has been a PT thing for over a year and there's still no MVP) is pre-destined to be the next $750MM hit and the sacrificing of 6-8% is a dumb idea.

It's what I like to call a false statistic or misleading math. If your startup never goes anywhere then it's pretty much worth $0 even if it's $750MM in your head. PG has a great article about how YC is not about the money (except in the analogous sense that one is funding a poor grad student).
On a related topic... does anyone have recommendations for a more traditional colocation provider in the Boston area?
I've spent quite a bit of time driving in Germany. I have some random observations about German Autobahnen leading to no specific conclusion.

* Autobahns have narrower lanes, and fewer of them relative to US Interstates. The most I've seen is four per side near Berlin. Two is standard, even in fairly high-traffic areas. Three is becoming a little more common than it was a few years ago, but it's still quite rare.

* Lane discipline is usually quite good. Passing on the right is illegal except for in traffic jams, and it's fairly rare that anyone does. Failing to cede the left lane to passing traffic when the right lane in clear is also quite rare.

* Drivers wishing to pass often become impatient with anyone using the left lane to pass at a slightly lower speed than they would prefer.

* Traffic jams are exceedingly common, often due to construction zones, which have even narrower lanes and very low speed limits. During a traffic jam, traffic comes to a stop, and occasionally moves for short periods of time at low speeds. During an extended stop, it is common for drivers to get out of their cars and chat, referred to as an Autobahn party.

* Very slight imperfections in the pavement usually lead to a Straßen shäden (damaged street) sign and soon after, a complete rebuild of that section of highway. It's rare to drive for an hour without encountering a construction zone.

* Most cars drive at speeds between 80 and 90 mph when there is no speed limit. Truck and cars pulling trailers are limited by law to 60 mph. On occasion, a car, usually a high-end German make will drive by in the left lane at around 150 mph.

* I have never seen an accident on an unlimited-speed section of Autobahn.
I want to run for governor

Isn't what you describe a legislative, not executive function?
Chuck Norris is not a Linux virus
(note: HN mangles <*>, so I'm using <∗> instead

Isn't #2 a property of functors in general? I know I usually use <$> and <∗> rather than the liftM family because they don't limit the number of parameters.

(+) <$> (Just 2) <∗> (Just 3)
(+) <$> [1,2] <∗> [3,4]
(+) <$> readLn <∗> readLn
Jeff Atwood?
This is a ludicrous expectation for a site that's still in alpha.
I'm firmly and un-ironically set on "Brilliant". I looked at it and went blaah for a moment or three, but noticed that yeah, despite it superficially looking like a mid-90s amateur flashback, it was actually thoughtfully - if intensely - laid out.

Further, the site is memorable and has an assload of personality; I had to immediately share it with a friend. If either of us are ever on that side of the pond and needing a car, he or I will have no choice but to remember it.
I think the best way of looking at monads for most programmers is the one described in http://blog.sigfpe.com/2010/01/monads-are-trees-with-graftin... (which links to the actual PDF https://dl.dropbox.com/u/828035/Monads/monads.pdf ).
Me too! If you (i.e. andr) want to send some along to a broke student (i.e. me) who’s been saying he’d get around to buying an arduino board or two & building something neat with a musician friend for months now, shoot me an email. :-)
Ask HN: I've been collecting Webform-spam for a year - what could I use it for?
Ok, this will sound stupid.

I've always noticed how much spam every single web-form you make tends to get if you don't implement a captcha or something like that. So I started recording some of that spam through a completely open web form

Now I have 729k entries and the DB is growing faster and faster. Does HN have any idea what that "data" can be used for?

A little more info here: http://arnorhs.com/2010/02/23/stats-on-spam/
Apple's COO: Why We're not Microsoft
Compared to the United States (Northern California)

Lane Discipline is almost non-existent. People think nothing of passing on the Right, and it's frequently done (They get used to it during Rush hour Traffic, where you have to pass on the right, and then extend that bad habit to open highway conditions). Most drivers aren't even aware they should cede the left lane to passing traffic - even when the right lane is _completely vacant_. This, by the way, is not an American habit - I understand that drivers from Texas can't stand the poor highway driving habits of Northern Californians (particularly those from the Bay Area)

[Edit - After a few seconds though I realized that the Northern Californians unwillingness to cede the left lane is probably a major contributing factor the frequency of people passing on the right - the two behaviors have probably co-evolved]
Ask HN: Can I surf your couch? (Seattle YC meetup)
I'll be coming into town for the meetup on Thursday, and I'm looking for a couch to crash/surf. I'll be in town Wednesday night through Sunday night, but any single day of letting me stay on your couch would be super helpful.
Things I like: hiking, kayaking, poker, microbrews, Django, CSS, design, personal hygiene, not smoking, startups.

I have an eye for design, I'm great at giving user-oriented feedback, and I love talking about new projects. Need feedback on yours? I'd be happy to supply it.

I don't know if anyone else is coming into Seattle for this, but if you are, please feel free to use this topic too.

Note: Sorry for the repost! I thought I'd get to this early in the day since I'm in a time crunch. Unfortunately that time was probably bad for west coasters.
FDA considers regulation of e-health systems
Wall Street bonuses leap by 17% in 2009
No matter how friendly you try to make it, there will always be people who are nervous in interviews. It's amplified by the fact you're asking questions they probably haven't thought about before. There's not much you can really do to stop the feeling of dread that some people are bound to feel.
Video Games: Rated M for Mature
That's actually rather reassuring, since I really hate giving demos/presentations and am much better with interaction and questions.

Also, since my primary interests lie in infrastructure and performance, if a demo takes 10 minutes, then I've already failed.
This paper describes the one idea that I have repeatedly tried to explain on HN:

Demand is not unlimited.

When you have a flame-bait title like this, the many die-hard libertarian/Austrians here will be sure to pull out the "broken window fallacy" and other knee-jerk retorts as evidenced by the other highly voted comments here.
Why VC Bloat is Bad for Everyone
Why you should never, ever, ever use fibonacci for benchmarking
Sure there is. There's also plenty of risk for not doing XYZ. In America, anyone can sue at any time for any reason. You are always at legal risk. So the advice that lawyers give "always talk to your attorney before..." is technically correct no matter what. It just happens to be self-serving (for the lawyer), impractical and needlessly expensive. Kind of like "you are always at risk of a head injury, never leave the house without wearing a kevlar helmet".
When I was figuring out what a monad was the biggest impediments were:

1) Superfluous analogies

2) Usage of do-syntax rather than bind and return.

Do-syntax, which sweeps the best example of how a monad _actually_ works under the rug, used in conjunction with the phrase "inside a monad", can cause beginners over-complicate and mysticize the idea of a monad.

I have not yet read the above tutorial, but the best one I have seen to date is http://ertes.de/articles/monads.html
North Korean word processors and character encoding standards
If SO really becomes the Go To place for background checking a job applicant's skill, people's posts on it will just become more self-serving. Instead of posting to genuinely find something out, you post a question for the sake of trying to appear smart.

It reminds me of a college course I'm taking. The other day we had someone filming a documentary shoot some of the class. The discussion that day was as vibrant as ever. Everybody wanted to survive the cutting room floor, including me.
Get ready for higher mortgage rates
Not sure I get it. It seems to me that the headers are always going to be the same when I use your page (maybe an exception would be the referer.)

For technical feedback: you have a bug. The request isn't displaying properly. It showed mine as:

GET HTTP/1.1
accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
accept-encoding: gzip,deflate
accept-language: en-us,en;q=0.5
connection: keep-alive
host: whatheaders.com
keep-alive: 115
referer: http://news.ycombinator.com/
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Notice the "GET HTTP/1.1". It should probably read "GET / HTTP/1.1"
Re: "The title is slightly incorrect--there has never been a time in montana that there is no speed limit"

== SNIP ==

During a challenge of such a ticket in 1998, the Montana Supreme Court declared the Reasonable and Prudent Speed Limit unconstitutional, on the basis of vagueness. Remember the Governor, Judges, Highway Patrol et al wanted speed limits, rather than ruling the way the MHP was enforcing them was wrong, the Court struck down the law altogether so they would be forced to have speed limits, thereby circumventing the legislature's blocking of their collective efforts.

To their chagrin, during this last 5 months of no law whatsoever Montana reported its modern low in fatal accidents.

== SNIP ==
A clearer title might have been "Why the web is not ready for the iPad (yet)", as people have seized upon this as some kind of attack on the iPad, when it's nothing of the sort.
I think a lot of us are expecting something to finally kill off IE6 and I don't think that's really going to happen. I think the watershed will be when most developers just stop caring. I think that this move is an indication that more of us should consider that option. Google is an incredibly smart company with a truly vast user base and this announcement shows that they just don't care about alienating IE6 users. Given their obsessive attitude to testing, I can only assume that they've worked out that pissing off the few remaining IE6 users with nag screens and bugs is cheaper than continuing to support them.

Of course Google have other interests in pushing modern browsers, but I would be flabbergasted if they haven't done a rigourous cost/benefit analysis on the decision. Given their economies of scale, I think this is an indication to those of us with more limited resources that we should just ignore IE6 users unless we have strong evidence that they matter. In the Pareto sense, it's just not a good use of developer time.

I have no evidence for it, but I have an intuitive expectation that IE6 users are generally bad customers - I would expect that they demand more customer support, are less likely to pay for online services, are more likely to contribute negatively to communities etc. Of course there are plenty of users who are stuck on IE6 because of bad corporate IT policy, but there are plenty who are too lazy or uninformed to upgrade their browser and frankly I don't want that kind of person as a customer.
You definitely pick up some nice skill sets in law school. If you managed to get out without crushing student loans that forces you to work for BigLaw, you can definitely use your legal skills in many exciting fields. Congrats and good luck Jesse. :)
Because engineers don't go to an extra 3-4 years of school and go into 200k of debt to get there.

Someone has to prop up the "higher" education system.
Also working from memory. Before the speed limit went away the ticket was only something like $5 as an F.U. to the feds. So effectively, there wasn't much of a deterrent then. After the limit went away you would get hit not with speeding, but reckless driving if you were going too fast, and that's much worse than a speeding ticket. Today, the speed limit signs are back up. There are a lot of very dangerous roads in Montana where you just can't go without a speed limit.

Maybe the reason the fatalities went up is because people feel they have to stick close to the limit even where it's not a smart thing to do. However, people in Montana should know all "reasonable and prudent" because of the horrible road conditions in the winter.
Depends on how you think of CRUD.

CRUD is actually just what were called 'expert systems' in the 80s. Once you realize that, you can see that it is actually the most interesting type code.

The real problem with programmers is that they don't specialize in a specific type of application and become domain experts in it. Choose a field, such accounting, or hr, or finance, and become an expert in it throughout your career, so that you develop the most featureful CRUD application of that type in the fastest time (or base a startup around it).

Knowing java, php, sql, etc. is like an accountant claiming he just knows bookkeeping. A really valuable accountant is someone who might be a specialist in taxes for medium sized manufacturing firms in california for example.
Mentors are great, but cash is king. Unless they can credibly get real angels to write first checks, it'll end up limping along, the same as LaunchBox Digital and DreamIt Ventures. Sam Yagan and Troy Henikoff are the real deal and both gave me great advice when I was doing my startup in Chicago, but at the end of the day, I judge accelerators and mentors by their ability to get startups credible angel flow. YC and TS are the only programs that have solved this problem.

That said, summer in Chicago is the closest thing to heaven on God's green earth and $20K is $20K. Nothing stopping you from leaving Chitown after the program's over.
> It's a nice change from the first part of this decade, when it was 37 Signals and then... nobody.

Not true: Orbitz, Feedburner, TicketsNow, many others
Demand may not be unlimited, but mass-(over)production sure tries to make it so. It's easy to artificially create demand that wouldn't have otherwise been there in a free(thinking) market.
And if they try anything, I'll be talking to my bank's fraud department within the hour.
Oh, no. I like the foldM implementation. I like Kleisli arrows, too, but this application isn't even on the same planet of generality from where Kleisli lives on.
I don't think mint should add any features like the ones discussed in the article.

I currently use mint and am very happy with it. I chose to use mint.com over some other sites with similar features because of its simplicity. I find the interface and features incredibly intuitive and easy to use. I think that allowing developers to create "apps" for mint.com could potentially pollute the interface and add a lot of unnecessary confusion to the whole service.
Not as short as the clojure from the article, but easier to understand (maybe):

user> (time (let [limit (.pow (BigInteger/TEN) 999)]
(loop [a 0 b 1 i 1]
(if (< b limit)
(recur b (+ a b) (inc i))
i))))
"Elapsed time: 3.554351 msecs"
4782
i had fun with our interview. i think the author is referring to the interview as being more of a dialogue and less of a monologue (steve jobs just talks at you).
For those without acm access, also available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/texas.aaai06.pdf
The value of money is at least in some ways derived from laws.
Compressed Sensing fills in the blanks
It's easy for you to give me "weight" or certain percentages, but that's not as easy to decipher as a buyer as the memory, bandwidth, and disk space limits.

Amazon attempt to define things with their "Compute Units" as being equivalent to a single core 1.0GHz 2007 Opteron (or whatever it is), but most VPS providers don't give good demonstrations or examples of the sort of power you're guaranteed to get. Pure megahertz don't help, but even something like "roughly equivalent to a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo" would be a massive help to buyers.

(Even Amazon's compute units can be hard to figure out. How does a 1 GHz Opteron from 2007 compare to, say, a 2GHz Core 2 Duo? These are things buyers are thinking about and looking up endless Tom's Hardware charts for :-))
Yeah but he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/88/built-to-last.html
The problem is that the many Austrian economists here feel they are smart enough to disregard the foundations of modern economics. And thus they will use the "broken window fallacy" to refute everything.

For everyone else here that has not jumped on the Austrian bandwagon, read the following to understand why you should not be parroting a school of thought that is based on what the founders think is "logical" rather than the scientific method:

http://www.gmu.edu/depts/economics/bcaplan/whyaust.htm
Committed to competing fairly
This makes me think of phishing websites hosted with Apache.
A Linux box running a hacked up version of Mac OS X would not be better than a Mac mini natively running Mac OS X, in my opinion.
Gamble was suggesting that is something that a lawyer would not say. so you are in agreement.
Law School programs are all 3 years. Graduating with 200K of debt is really unusual.
Demand is still very very far from unlimited, __especially__ when you take into account mass-production.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/07/h-m-wal-mart-clo...

In this example, if demand scaled along with production, there would be no need to junk clothes that didn't sell. According to you, they should've been sold! Instead, H&M is trying to maintain the scarcity/demand of their clothing by destroying excess products rather than give them to the poor. The people who have money simply don't need any more cheap clothes!
Wow, that looks much better! Does anyone know how much better it performs compared to the IE-based client?
Jesse, I'm curious as to what you're up to. Ping me at idoh@idoh.com. I'm also a non-practicing lawyer in tech.
Has Google become a big waste of time?
You clearly don't have any respect for the organization.(Which may or may not be warranted. It's not that I doubt your assessment, but it IS only 1 person's one-sided opinion. No offense)

If the organization is as large as your post implies, and you are working at the individual contributor level, then it's unrealistic to expect that you can effect any measurable change.

So, you should move on to something that better suits your talents and interests.

Also, it's good to get the random advice of the Intarwebs, but you probably also need to develop a gut feel for when the time is right to start packing as you progress through your career. Best to be able to see the signs of smoke before the fire is visible...

Good luck.
That's an excellent link; I've added it to the introduction.
We had a very good attorney who not only told us when he was "talking shortcuts" (forms, paralegals), he actually advised such methods to save costs when appropriate.
Watch Ling's pitch on the Dragons' Den here. Includes nuclear missile truck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtib4WZW_4M
That all sounds pretty par for the course when it comes to large companies, technical or otherwise. The sharp edge of the blade (the technical stuff done for customers) may be far from the daily operations in your department. The rest is just an ordinary BigCo.

You've discovered why many people don't like working at big companies. Sometimes, scheduling by hand is just easier that trying to find a system, then test and deploy it to an organization so large etc.

I can tell you what will happen in the next few years. They'll bumble along as they always have, getting no better, and maybe a little worse. If you stay you'll adapt by learing to manage disappointment. The hardest thing I ever learned at BigCo was "Yes, there's a better way to do this; No we are not going to do it."

Decide if you are prepared to work in this culture for the long haul. I personally decided that I could not, no matter what the risk I faced by choosing not to. Just don't stick it out hoping it will somehow get better. It won't.
Just the knowledge that you're on camera can make speakers and audience members less blunt.
p (Math.log(10)*999/Math.log(g=5**0.5/2+0.5)+g).ceil
Interactive paper