skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a programmer who has used variants of SML (F# is Microsofts variant), Haskell, and Python, I would say that in terms of concise expressiveness, you have a point that the functional languages match Python's. However, the true power of programming in Python is that the programming logic is easy to understand. If you are actually experienced in functional programming, you'll realize that it is, in all definitions, code. Python is more like english and thus, the appeal will always be there.
this is true for me ... though I'm still using Python for my next project

i think you must mean "false", then.
The customer sat for Linux netbooks was horrible and return rates were sky-high. Geeks like linux, but normal people prefer convenience which often times means nothing more than familiarity.
"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

-- Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

I suspect most physicists would sooner question their own sanity than question the Second Law, and with good reason.
Comparison of vCloud and EC2 APIs
Don't be Naive!
Laws and regulation have never _not_ been up for sale to the highest bidder. So your fictional doctor is only lobbying to reverse the result of previous lobbying.

Your fictional "once upon a time" must have been the time when people rode unicorns to work, and nobody ever hungered because elves in trees fed everybody. In the real world money is what makes laws, and Lessig is the closest thing we have to a super-her.
May I suggest Lua with metalua? It seems to have most of what you're looking for (and luajit is very fast).
What’s troubling about this research is that poverty tends to persist through generations, no matter how individuals try to improve their circumstances.

"Poor" young Americans are much wealthier than their grandfathers. The claim that "the poor stay poor" is largely an artifact of defining "poor" as "bottom 10% income".
I was going to ask whether annual expenditure has ever decreased year over year but I found the answer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

Looks like it's not unprecedented but debt over GDP hasn't decreased year-over-year since before Reagan, so it just hasn't happened in most of HN's visitors' lifetimes.
It would be great if you paired with some local community colleges.

In addition to "learn" "practice" "teach" and "explore" I would personally add "Play" it could be used as a portal for people looking to find pickup games of soccer of someone to play boardgames with. the LPTE all imply that there is some net knowledge transfer, I do many activities just for fun, and would like to meet other people outside of my normal group.

Site looks great, purple...a very non-traditional yet memorable shade.
The author complains about Medicare, Social Security, student loans, and the War on Drugs. Whether or not you agree with those programs, do you think it's practical to just stop them? While I agree with many libertarian sentiments, I rarely find a libertarian argument that even attempts to explain a transition process.
Even the Economist has clearly argued that being "pro-business' is not the same thing as being "pro-market".

Besides, I don't agree with you, because it doesn't take into account externalities. When "efficiency" takes the form of polluting the river because someone else will clean it up, it most assuredly is not a net improvement.
Yahoo.
Don't forget "negotiating skill", which on a thousands-of-dollars-per-minute-of-effort-expended basis is probably the most valuable thing you'll learn in your life. Many young engineers a few years out of college haven't learn fundamentals like "It is OK to say 'No' and ask for more money. That's how the game works. It isn't being 'greedy' or 'a difficult person'."
When you quote a high rate you can always come down if you discover you really want the work for some reason. Once you throw out a number, that's the ceiling.
I recommend you dig just a little deeper before slamming Adobe. On one hand you praise Android et al for releasing so many major revisions, yet slam them for not keeping up on each of those platforms and revisions (i.e. the moving target paradox).
From the "data is not the plural of anecdote department", I can say that personally, the more I use languages from the Lisp and ML families, the less desire I have to use Python, despite having spent a fair amount of time tinkering with it in the past. Alas, I currently use none of these at my day job, but any hobby projects I start in the future are very unlikely to be in Python.
Well, yes and no. Oddly enough, I think everyone is right in this section of the thread so far:

teilo said, "the safest speed is the average speed of traffic, regardless of the posted speed limit." This is true; it may not be the legal speed, but a vehicle doing 60 MPH on a highway where the average vehicle speed is 80 MPH is indeed a traffic hazard, regardless of the posted speed limit.

teilo also said, "If they could not drive comfortably at that speed, then they should stay in the right lane." This is what I was responding to when I said "it" was codified as law, and provided a citation.

hristov responded by arguing that this doesn't make it legal to go over the posted speed limit: "But nothing in this rule or any other rule gives you a right to drive above the speed limit even if everyone else is driving above the speed limit." And he's right, too. By my reading of that law, it merely says that slower traffic must move as far to the right as possible. I don't think "notwithstanding" in that case means that the drivers can ignore the posted limits, although that's certainly unclear and a point of interpretation.
Security through obscurity is inferior to security by design, and for that reason I agree that the voting policy should be transparent to all.

That said, I have not noticed the quality issues the original author laments.
Links of London Bracelets
Are you saying 65-75k is 'poor' in SF? Or are you excluding the best bartenders from that category?
No argument with the above, except ... if you aren't paying into the fisc, you just might find that your posture is not so great. In Jerry Pournelle's CoDominion future history "Taxpayers" were in a class way above those who lived in "welfare islands".

I wouldn't assume our current political order survives this looming mess (heck, many including me argue it didn't survive the Civil War or FDR).
Really? Has the mobile market eclipsed the laptop and desktop markets already? I wonder if Apple's core business is now Macintosh or the iPhone.
The problem for Amazon is that they don't have much unique value to provide besides their brand and scale. The good experience, the Kindle etc., can all be replicated.

If Amazon starts squeezing the publishers, some of them might leave and open the door for niche competitors selling things at high prices that you can't get elsewhere. Once that happens, Amazon loses something important: That you don't ever have to go elsewhere.

So the fact that Amazon is so dominant and needs to stay dominant can be used against them. This gives publishers somewhat more leverage than you'd think.
This is kind of my point. I rolled my eyes when the author complained about "Laws... regulating child labor." You said, "child labor laws," which I would argue has a significantly different meaning than the authors phrase. But I'm comfortably agreeing to disagree on the connotation.

Perhaps I would have understood the author's point more had he even bothered to explain what laws regulating child labor he was talking about and why they're a problem. Instead, he just skipped that and focused on minimum wage.
For anyone curious about the link, to save you the time and trouble: it's an empty search for "sex" at HeyKiki. That will make some even more curious, but it's not really worth the click (sorry jawngee).
> I also prefer OWA to gmail, but don't use either.

Have you ever had to do a search?
Can you use traceroute to determine where the lag is being incurred?
When you put it like that, I sound like a socialist, and not the unrepentent capitalist I hold myself out as.

This certainly could be seen as no different than the government taking the tax receipts and simply paying down your debt for you. In that case, you are right, they are subsidizing, but the interest is being paid to the debt holders, so at least you retain some semlance of a business transaction. Perhaps the debt holders would reduce interest rates knowing that they have first lein on income streams.

The current plans have such things as debt forgiveness, which could potentially incent the wrong behavior, as opposed to this idea which would (in theory) incent you to get a job paying down debt as quickly as possible.
I support Lessig

I support him because what he is trying to do is MONUMENTAL. When laws are purchased by the highest bidder they allow people to subvert the free market. When laws are purchased then the democratic voice of the people has no chance! Lessig is trying to bring free speech, and free markets, to the US. I support Lessig!
A better question might be "Do you really think it's practical to continue them?", but to answer you: yes.

As for transition processes, to be blunt, many random libertarians online don't bother discussing them because they know it will probably never come to that. If you want good discussion of such things, places like the Mises Institute and Cato.org (full of policy wonks) would be good starting points.
I think (and I can only guess) that part of the process of testing is just doing things based on what Paul wants to see, then determining if the results meet his goals or not, but without having to ask permission from the user community or tell them everything that's going on. Just the fact that he's testing at all would indicate that he's keeping an eye on whether his tests are giving him the desired results. If not, I'm sure he'll keep iterating and trying new things.

I can certainly appreciate your frustration, and I'm not just brushing that aside, but I think for anyone (yourself included) who has been here awhile, it's obvious that Paul is always trying new things, and ALWAYS to make the site better, so it's just a matter of dealing with the changes as he makes them with an understanding that everyone has the same ultimate goal. If he makes changes without announcing them, it's just a quirk that members of the community need to be aware of, and just learn to live with.
> Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?

I see a lot of great stuff coming out of MSR; their Simons are almost single-handedly responsible for GHC's internals and over the last 2 decades making Haskell a usable, nay, fast, language. But what OSs is Haskell principally developed & used on? Linux or OSX.
Steve Jobs claims you will get "the entire internet" on the iPad, even though Flash, Silverlight, and other technologies are not present.

Who's being dishonest about this? Is Adobe really pulling a strawman? I support Adobe's claim of Apple's passive interference in OSX since it obviously exists in the iPhone OS.
That's not a very telling point, since we were the industrial nation least trashed by WWI, and were considerably strengthened by how the war compressed say half a century's worth of technological progress into a half a decade.

For example so very many things came out of RADAR R&D ... *including microwave ovens :-), but also stuff that fed into the Whirlwind computer project (the first practical computer), etc. etc.
Functional programming simply isn't any better than the usual style of python development.

I have used much of itertools. When you need to do some complex iteration through lists, itertools is great. When you need to pull an address out of a web page, itertools does absolutely nothing to make that easier, nor does any other functional programming technique.

So here is the difference. Procedural style is better for dealing with a problem. Functional style is great for applying a solution to lots of pieces of data in a structure that can be iterated over or recursed into. The hard part is dealing with each problem, not the part where you apply it.
As I've said elsewhere, there's a third way, and it's perhaps the most general and closest to realization:

The natural counterforce to corrupting influences, all of them rather than just campaign finance, is robust citizen accountability. Clearly this accountability has left something to be desired. I would argue this has largely to do with rational ignorance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance) on behalf of voters, that they, having so much to do, aren't willing to wade through the maze of political discourse in order to really know who is worth voting for.

But what if it was dead-simple to know where your rep stood, on every issue, not just the obvious ones, and on every level, not just congress?

I'd argue that with ease, you could convert a substantial number who currently don't case votes, or else default to simple heuristics in deciding who to vote for: e.g. party or incumbency.

To that end, I've started a site: http://votereports.org which aims to be something like the github of political accountability. A simple, decentralized group of folks generating, exchanging and refining politician report cards based on objective criteria such as votes.

The project is just 2 months old, and there's plenty to do, but it should be ready well before November.

For better governance, I'd stake my bet on this before I would on a constitutional amendment or change of heart for politicians. After all:

> "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson

Really, can we expect to do very much better, in a world where we collect, analyze, and share more data on baseball than on our own government? (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/12/government-20-five-predicti...)
I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I can't imagine there are many sports analyses that aren't written for sports fans who have substantial knowledge of the rules, sides, strategies, etc.
I agree with Lessig.

Maybe all these "small government", "liberty" people responding can explain how it fits with their world view that the northern European countries, who are not known for the smallness of their governments, consistently manage to have the highest standard of living and the most well-functioning and democratic governments in the world?
You did consultancy? Can you post a few details? I'm 21 and making about $10/hour developing C++ software in a physics lab...
Seems to me that MS is struggling with bureaucracy, which is made worse by product-lines that are super-complexified by a need to be backwards, sideways and upside-down compatible with the rest of the universe. Factor in workplace politics and the job of bringing innovation to market is harder than hell.
Here's what puzzles me a bit- if you believe legislation and legislators are up for sale to the highest bidder...then why do believe a constitutional convention would not be the same, with much more serious consequences?

I think it's incredibly dangerous to imagine that a con-con would not be the target of truly massive amounts of influence peddling. And you can't limit the scope of a con-con either, so EVERYTHING is up for grabs.
I think we all have the same person in mind when reading the title of this submission...
Chandra said that he's amazed Apple's jumping "into a category that we've defined."

Well, firstly, that's what Apple kinda does. They redefine categories, and provide some of the greatest examples of First Mover Disadvantage.

Secondly, and mostly, the JooJoo hasn't defined anything except embarrassing partnership break-ups, and possibly a footnote in the phrase "I'll believe it when I see it".

But hey - if I knew the African for 'best of luck' I would insert it here.
Why Google Needs to Build an iTunes Competitor
Ask HN: Suggest an attorney? (Google is after us)
So, I just got a fun letter from Google, saying that my company, Sitezoogle.com, is infringing on their trademark. Specifically, their complaint is that our name is a combination of "website" and "google".

If that's not bad enough, my lawyer's firm represents Google in Canada and can't help due to conflict of interest. Ugh.

Does anyone have experience with a great US trademark lawyer and/or experience fighting a trademark dispute?

BTW: We make website building tools for niche markets. Our main product (which we have a US trademark for) is Bandzoogle.com, a website builder for musicians. We changed the company name to Sitezoogle, because we added a bunch of new non-band markets.

Help is appreciated!
You have to spend time thinking of what to say, whenever you want to say it. Fortunately, everyone has the same amount of time (well, per unit time anyway).

A corporation is somewhat handicapped in this regard, in that it doesn't actually have any time: it can only buy it from others. This does not strike me as a problem.
The only takeaway I got from this was that Arrigton was correct that they didn't have the cash to actually manufacture the product. I'll wait for the iPad.
The only reason I'm starting to leave Python is because of performance. When you see a program that used to take 2 hours to run in python now taking 10 minutes in Java, it kind of makes you realize you've been making a mistake by using it places it doesn't belong.
Unemployment tax or $20000 reasons not to hire someone
I got down voted if I found this funny?
http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/yahoo-spy.pdf
I just can't keep up with Hacker News anymore. I used to read /newcomments a lot but that doesn't work so well for me these days. The opaque voting policies don't really bother me, but I probably understand them more than most people. I wish there was some way to shrink Hacker News in a Dunbar's number sense, but that's as of yet an unsolved problem in social news.
I think that's a fair point; detail on which child labor laws he meant would strengthen his argument.
On the other hand, if the voting policies were known, people could more efficiently game the system.

If the voting policy is unknown (and PG is committed to keeping it unknown), perhaps fewer people will worry about it's functional form, fewer people will care about what their vote multiplier happens to be, and more people would get on with the incredibly simple business of submitting interesting links and voting up what they find interesting. Perhaps.

You should leave if the quality of the content deteriorates, not based on some background metric for an arbitrary scrip!
I have also observed this trend and commented on it here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1087287 where other HN users have also confirmed it.

My own Python code, over time, became more and more functional in style until eventually I jumped ship to Clojure and Yeti (and over the past week, F#).
Could someone explain exactly what the problem is for those of us that missed it? Either my lurking is too occasional or I'm oblivious.
Regarding file systems:

One absurdly frequent source of customer issues with Bingo Card Creator was "I have no effective mental model of the file system, data as separate from programs, and how the physical location of a file relates to my physical location in the world."

I have a huge number of customers who think that letters live in Word and bingo cards live in Bingo Card Creator. If you think like that, you might be unpleasantly surprised when you take your CD and install your Bingo Card Creator at school, and then Bingo Card Creator doesn't have your bingo cards in it any more. Actual quotes: "Did it lose them?", "I think my CD must have a virus." (People have been socialized to think that anything that goes wrong is, depending on the person, operator error or a virus/malware/etc.)

When I released the online version of Bingo Card Creator, which essentially dispenses with the file/folder metaphor, this issue vanished. poof Their bingo cards really do live in Bingo Card Creator, for all intents and purposes. (Putting "cloud" support in the downloadable version, on the other hand, was a crashing failure -- probably a failure of communication on my part.)

I think file systems are the new registry: something which should be hidden behind several signs saying "There be dragons here!" and which power users can be allowed to tweak, so that they can brag to their wives "Yep, it took me a while, but I opened up a folder on my C drive and found your file, then I copied it to your desktop. I'm good with computers, what can I say."
Contrary to modestly popular belief, "faith" is not best defined as "choosing to act as if you believe something you actually know is not true". That's a fun definition to smear someone with, but is not useful in understanding very many real phenomena. Faith is much better defined as something like "acting on the truth of a statement that you can not (effectively) 100% prove"; note it does not preclude having a Bayesian probability of greater than 0, it is simply what you act on. When I sit in a chair, I can not 100% prove it will not collapse on me (after all, I have sat in chairs that collapsed on me and my Bayesian probability that a generic chair will support me can not be 100%), but I have faith that it will not; that is, I act as if it will not collapse.

When presented with a perpetual motion device, I can have faith that it will not work. Thanks to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, my Bayesian confidence in that belief is quite high, so it is not as if my faith is stepping out on a limb. But I have not proved that the perpetual motion machine won't work by actually examining it and finding the flaw, I simply have very-well-founded faith that such a flaw exists. Faith is a perfectly appropriate word here.

(I parenthesized "effectively" up there to avoid a massive and irrelevant discussion of exactly what 100% means, though it still pokes through. But is interesting to note that since reaching 100% confidence is very difficult, "faith" comes up in virtually every decision you make.)
For instance, I don't think that continuing the War on Drugs is practical. But I recognize that ending it is a gradual process, not an overnight one. It's entirely impractical in many regards (economic, social, political) to just stop the War on Drugs overnight. In my opinion, people who are going to complain about something should offer some practical alternative.