skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they are ways of thinking.

I'm on to that, as you know from our email exchanges, but I don't like the idea of presenting the one as 'better' than the other.

Both FP and IP have earned their place in the toolbox, and even though I'm much more familiar and comfortable with the 'IP' portion of it I can see the power of some of the concepts behind FP. But I find it very hard to believe that FP is so much better than IP that it warrants talking down to the people using it.

> As I continue to learn more about them, so I continue to become a better programmer even in languages that don't exactly match the paradigms.

Agreed, and even while I definitely have not 'grokked' functional programming yet to the point where it would make sense for me to write some small utility in an FP language I can see how just learning about FP has influenced my coding style in other languages.

> Who knows what remains to be discovered or invented that will expand our thinking further.

Working on that :)

It's mostly a matter of constraints on this end, I probably took on more than I can handle in terms of work that simply needs doing and I hoped that through FP I would find some shortcut allowing me to become more productive. It has worked in a sense, some of the code I wrote for other projects has become more clean because of reading about and playing with FP, but in a concrete sense where I can substitute a functional language for an imperative one and get more mileage out of my days it hasn't (yet).

But I'm optimistic that one day it will, and as long as I can see it influence my thinking in a positive way I'll continue to study it.

One of the biggest eye openers so far was 'memoization', I'm not even sure that I understand it well enough to paraphrase it, but when looking at the source of hashlife it suddenly clicked: When you work in a functional way and you are guaranteed that there are no side effects stemming from lower layers you can replace the call to a function with a bunch of arguments, no matter how complex with its result. That literally blew my mind, even though in hindsight it is a blindingly obvious thing.

That such a 'small' thing as side effects could have such polluting effects on higher level code that a thing like memoization is impossible gave me a lot of energy to continue my 'quest' :)
Abstraction and a good evaluation model go a long way towards helping you in thinking quickly. A subset of Common Lisp is to C what jQuery is to vanilla javascript; You can easily see a line of jQuery replacing 20 lines of cruft, and it doesn't take that long to think it up.
> It's not very constructive or interesting to wrap up the whole problem in the word "stupid."

It's highly constructive when the prevailing mode of discussing the issue blames public policy and business practices, as this article does. I stand by my assertion that it's mostly personal failings. Therefore, nothing needs to be done. It's a free country. Let people make their choices and suffer the consequences.

I'll make allowances that agriculture policy (subsidies for grains and soy) and bad diet advice from the government probably play a role. But it's not the predominant issue.
Hyde - a static website generator powered by Python & Django
Not Always Right | Funny & Stupid Customer Quotes
That may be, but if you're using good abstractions, it's easy to think of that single line in terms of arguments, side effects and return value. It becomes a good deal simpler to understand later when you're revisiting your code after six months.
Where is his spreadsheet?
Show that it's profitable!
At some point, they will realize that this is happening, and there will be outrage when they communicate about it to their friends via an outside channel. Be prepared for a lot of splashback.
Yeah, and remember the green (and purple) Heinz sales? They didn't last long.

At the cost of duplicating my other comment, it fits here perfectly:

I hate to cry conspiracy theory, but I really do think that American culture in particular has been groomed to think and eat this way by food suppliers. When you can color / bleach something, you can hide flaws.
The canonical first-project in Lisp is an interpreter for the Language itself. Write one now, keeping SICP very close by ;-)
I am also interested only in the ordering of comments within a given discussion thread. The number of points that my user account gets does not matter to me.

Same with my submissions - I only care about up-votes there because I want more people to see what I have posted and benefit from it.
Many gems on that site

Here is one more

http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/141/
Plus it's not entirely unheard of to do the core of the application in C, and offer a C++ API to users. There is a good reason to have both expertise inhouse.
enforcing patents on what amounts to commodity technologies

Such as?
That sounds interesting. Are those features in the public source code?
From Israel, a radical way to boost organ donation
Boiling down political discussion to 140-character tweets? I guess that's no worse than what we used to have...
The Internet and Self-Control: An App To the Rescue
My bad. Editing the original comment. You're completely right, I forgot the case of master failing before all writes made to it are replicated.
No, PG keeps a lot of the secret sauce out of the public release in order to make it a bit harder for those that want to game the system.
I second taking a look at Clojure.

Also, your comment of:

The world is imperative! Things have state! We do not live in an imaginary fluffy world of mathematical elegance & correctness.

I would check out article by Rick Hickey on state on the Clojure website:

http://clojure.org/state

It will get you thinking about how often your objects really need to have "state".
Since Riak has tunable NRW parameters, it could be in any of these groups.
Use flash cookies. Set them to recreate themselves to sync when the user clears their browser cookies. That has proven tremendously effective for me. Flash cookies get a bad rap -- but they're a very effective way to keep people out.
I'd like to see a "blub" retrospective. The original "blub" article was written pre-YC. YC has funded lots of blub programmers, and pg's Lisp advocacy seems to have been toned down since then.
The company I work at uses Java as its 'main' language. In the past year my team has been increasingly using Scala for new development. One of the most useful features of Scala is the functional treatment of collections. Most of the programming we do (that everyone does?) is really just manipulation of collections, so being able to map/filter/reduce/group collections in a couple of lines of code, rather than the verbose Java equivalent, is a big win.

I don't want to weigh in on the general 'are functional languages' better debate (as I don't have enough experience of them), just wanted to share that as a data point.
Perl and GHC are the two packages I've had the most problems with as well. Some other languages seem to have a foo_select package which will allow you to switch the primary version, but 'perl5' seems fixed at 5.8.something, which is pretty horrible.

There's a ticket with a lot of activity at http://trac.macports.org/ticket/16830 but afaik there's still no easy way to stop it trying to rip out your new perl 5.10 without manually fixing deps everywhere.

GHC I just installed from a binary package :-)
How is that not just:

cat(file).grep('XYZ').sort... ?
Beyond being an interesting quip on business ideas, I love the interesting site design and the $2400 dream keyboard [1].

As for ice cubes for the $10 bottle of water - the ice cubes need to be packaged and delivered with the water. Sounds like a good way to differentiate yourself from other brands of expensive water.

[1] http://store.artlebedev.com/computer_add-ons/optimus-maximus...
Everyone can see that my post is just an anecdote. My point wasn't so much that seatbelts save lives as much as "you too might be in a crash through no fault of your own."

Note, that is also obvious from statistics, but perhaps not intuitively.

I seriously doubt that a seatbelt would cause more damage than the lack of one in all but the most extraordinary of cases. A poorly fitted seatbelt might, or perhaps late in pregnancy. However the damage caused by leaving your seat and colliding almost randomly with the car seems more extreme.

Some interesting reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

One data point that backs you up:

The UK extended compulsory seatbelt wearing to child passengers under the age of 14 in 1989. It was observed that this measure was accompanied by a 10% increase in fatalities and a 12% increase in injuries among the target population.[19] In crashes, small children who wear adult seatbelts can suffer "seat-belt syndrome" injuries including severed intestines, ruptured diaphragms and spinal damage. There is also research suggesting that children in inappropriate restraints are at significantly increased risk of head injury,[20] one of the authors of this research has been quoted as claiming that "The early graduation of kids into adult lap and shoulder belts is a leading cause of child-occupant injuries and deaths."[21] As a result of such findings, many jurisdictions now advocate or require child passengers to use specially designed child restraints.
Ask HN: Account password recovery?
Password recovery seems to be a fairly popular request here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

Any word on when password recovery will be available on HN? I setup my account on a work laptop long ago and am no longer at that job. I'd love to get my account back if possible.
I've had "heirloom" carrots a few times in Portland, OR. White and red ones, and all sorts of funky shapes. So they're coming back, the way heirloom varieties of other commoditized vegetables and fruits have (tomatoes, peppers, apples, berries, wild greens ...)
Accessibility and open-source: I'm learning by giving an unconference talk
a. You do know how clan societies work?

b. Check climate data; Iceland was (and is) a hard place for farming, etc. Check population density and add that to that until quite recently, Malthus' description of human deaths/births ruled (the "Essay on the Principle of Population" in itself also answers your theory that people don't generally emigrate to places where life is harder).
Password recovery. Please?
Procrastination, deadlines & performance (pdf,128Kb)
80% of that line's lifetime is in maintanence mode. Which option -- maintaining 20 lines of C or 1 line of lisp -- would you prefer to maintain?
>Remember when the rich were all plump

I don't think that was ever true. The converse might have been true, but just look at old pictures - not a whole lot of fat people, and certainly not many morbidly obese people.

Obesity has been an epidemic since 1980 or so. It must be something that changed around then. In other news, high fructose corn syrup hit the market in 1975.
For that reason, rural counties are very much not in favor of DST.
How is "split" more informative? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to expect the interested reader/developer to do the minimum required effort* to tap the substantial body of work on this topic? This mini rant isn't directed at you, but must we dumb down everything? You would expect any one opining on or making a decision regarding distributed systems and CAP to at least understand the basic ideas.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...
Short answer: yes. If your code is so imperative, then it can probably be abstracted up a bit. That's been my experience so far.
My Nexus One is slimmer and lighter than an iPhone with a larger screen and replaceable battery (with a super solid battery cover, none the less). Apple has some of the best product designers in the industry - I'm going to go out on a limb and say that "technical infeasibility" is not a valid excuse here.
Funny, from another post, In his classic book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove details the story of leading Intel through the dramatic transition from the memory business to the microprocessor business.

There are also studies of rats where the paranoid rats who lurk in corners and study the environment more are more likely to survive than those who are not paranoid.

So, yes, I'm paranoid -- and proud of it!
Is your code open source? I googled about this once, but couldn't find anything. I posted on stackoverflow and I was instructed to build one myself using flex. Fair enough, but I never did.
Ask HN: Would you buy webapps?
I'm not sure about my position on buying and selling webapps. This comes to mind due to the recent 250k sale of retweet.

What I'm thinking is about the practicality of it all: content sites and blogs are simple: anyone can take over.

But webapps deal with languages, and frameworks, and good or bad code.

What's your stance on buying and selling webapps in the short term?
The Drake equation is an awesome educational tool.

It leads you to think thoughts like this: The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Prokaryotic life is currently estimated to have formed 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago -- not really that long after Earth formed.

Now consider: Extrapolating from a few photos taken by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field camera, scientists currently think that there are on the order of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Ours is an average galaxy, with about 200 billion stars. That implies that there are at least 10^22 stars in the universe.

In other words: For every single second that the Earth has been in existence, there are about 70,000 stars in the universe. Maybe more.

So it's not exactly difficult to believe that life, however rare it may be, probably exists in at least two places in the universe. Though we may well never know for sure.
I think Wadhwa is correct. I noticed the same since I moved here in 2001 as an Undergrad for CS.

- Indians in India do enjoy(or say Worship) Cricket, but out of a population of 1+ Billion ONLY 11 Indians make it to the International team and that's where all the money is (or atleast used to be since India started IPL since last year)

- In the US, the population is way less and you have multiple sport avenues (Football, Basketball, Baseball, + many more) with multiple teams. So the success factor in pursuing a sports dream is more practical. And even if you don't reach the top, you can still find a descent job with a BS degree, assuming you completed. On the contrary, in India you are pretty much doomed if you put all your energies into sports and it does not pan out your way. The Ratio of the Number of Educated Population to the Number of Jobs is very high.

The top scientists from BARC, ISRO are very well known are literally treated like national heroes. And so are the 11 cricketers from the Indian National Team. Most people don't know the name of Hockey Players(apparently our National Game), ... at the most only 1 person per sport (other sports) might be known by people.

===

I noted another point from the article.

Craig Barret is very right when he says American Kids run after Interest and Indian's go more after the money. It's the same population and competition issue. If India had a 'normal' population, I am pretty sure many would have pursued their interest rather than the Success Formula ...

Engineering (preferred IIT) + MBA (from IIM) = Nice Paying Job

PS: In HS = You NEED to have Physics, Maths, Science to be eligible for Engineering School. This is the same as Freshman level material we do in colleges out here.

Too be honest I think if you(most Indians) end up doing an MBA right after Engineering without any work experience, what is the whole point of slogging through Highschool to get into the Top Engineering Colleges to only end up being into Business School. And Yes, similarly applying to Grad School in US is another way to chase that dream and then apply for PhD. On the contrary my american friends in Undergrad here ONLY pursued a masters/phd if they had a genuine interest in it.

Now with a lot of Immigrants coming, it's indirectly creating the same problem we have in India. Too many educated people, so more competition for the number of jobs and hence people born here might also have to someday stop focusing on their dreams(sports, music, etc whatever it be) and live in a cut throat environment making sure they have a job, which is really sad.
All of our abusive ones are forwarded to me; I write sugar sweet emails and try to fix their problem like any other support email. But sign it like this:

Tom

XXX Product Manager / Team Lead

P.S. Please take a quick look at this friendly FAQ <link> on how we suggest users contact staff members. We try our best to answer queries and fix problems as fast as possible; however, I inform staff they have a right not to suffer verbal abuse, which is why I have personally dealt with your email"

Usually you get a really bashful apology (and anyone that follows up the abuse gets a terse "you had a last chance, sorry" email and a perma ban :))

i.e. I know people get pissed and write emails they later regret (everyone does it) - but twice uses up their credit :)
That depends on whether or not you're able to comprehend the line of lisp as quickly as the 20 lines of C. Conciseness doesn't equal clarity.
This is offtopic, but I'm really impressed with whoever designed InfoQ's interface for watching presentations and interviews. Being able to watch the slides and the presenter simultaneously in separate panes is an approach I wish more sites would copy.

I also recall a recent interview I watched on their site: there was a list of topic summaries below the video, and you could click on any of the topics in the list to skip right to that point in the video. It's a very functional user interface as these things go.
Modern Love: Scientific Insights from 21st Century Dating
I don't mean to be pessimistic here, but a 50MM plant to recover phosphorous from water or breeding hypo-allergenic dust mites?
From an ethical perspective, I think it just depends on how you will use the leads. If you make sure you're giving the leads to a scrupulous company who will offer the customer a valuable service that (s)he was looking for, then I don't see any ethical problem there.

From a business perspective, I think you'd need to figure out who would buy the leads after you've generated them. Perhaps you should start by coming up with a niche with a dearth of lead generators, find a company targeting that niche, and ask them if they would be interested in buying leads. By ensuring there is "customer" for your leads you can save yourself wasted time. Customer development (a la Steve Blank) for lead generation, so to speak ;)
> the other side

As long as there are sides there are wars. The thing to recognize is that there are no sides, that we're all in the same boat and that we all have something to contribute. Convincing someone of the validity of an argument - especially against the 'unbelievers' - takes time, patience and diplomacy, not a war.

I agree that trying out a new language or technique can make life measurably better, but if you were a FP 'die hard' that has never written a line of imperative code in their whole lives you'd probably stand just as much to gain. This whole FP is 'better' argument is getting a little tired, better means 'always better' and that is not something that I consider proven - for now.
The qualities this article talks about (being compelling, caring about your employees, executing) are all essential. But you can't expect just one person to embody all three. Your founders/management team should collectively provide them.
That fills the same space as to what I was thinking about, cool! I'll have to try setting a course up.

I thought of some form of karma might be needed to avoid people joining a class and spamming the forum. But that is probably a issue for later.

More communication methods would be good. IRC server with a web client, and per class chat rooms that saved the chat logs.

The major suggestion I have at this stage is to separate the module from the class. So that different groups can follow the same module. Too many people following the same class would generate too much traffic.

I'd also though it would be nice to signal that you were willing to run a course if enough other people wanted to join a subject.

I also think that some way to create tests would be useful. Of course it wouldn't be under exam conditions, but it would be a nice way of seeing how you were doing.

You are basically setting up a community of some sort, which has the basic problems of.

1. Too quiet
2. Too Noisy
3. Attracts spammers/trolls

Be prepared to deal with these as you go forward.
To get it exactly right would be luck, they're going for 95% correct. Tables. They're limiting the search space considerably in the setup (I skimmed) such that it appears you're supplying random numbers to them but they're quite narrowly defined and all but one of the digits provides enough of a key to lookup the last digit.

For example in the range (1000000,1000040) only 1000000 can be produced from multiplying single digits; there are 4 primes in that range FWIW.

Add in some test data, and perhaps something like Benford's law and bobs your uncle.

FWIW, I'm not telling you it's obvious, nor that you have to think it's lame too.
Your example is way different. You're operating on objects instead of return values. Rewriting what you gave:

using namespace UnixUtilities;
sort(grep(cat(filename), 'XYZ'));

No object necessary. No storage necessary. For your example to work the object needs to store the result of each method call in some member variable. Why is that a bad thing? Because it's harder to reason about member variables (that could change) than return values (which will always be the same if there is no state).
Food that is good for you is just more expensive than food that is bad for you.

Any person who is obese is eating more food than they need. With the same amount of money, they can eat fewer calories but get better nutrition.

Incidentally, poverty is not the issue. Most graduate students are poor (or very close to it), but obesity is not particularly prevalent in grad school. Based on my personal experience, I'd guess that more poor students eat overpriced organic granola than big macs.
From experience I can tell you the lack of libraries in these languages kills off almost any code size advantage you get from using them. So I ask you all, be honest to yourself; is using such a language worth it?

Save lines of code != get work done quicker. What might appear as a paradox should be obvious: we spend more time debugging, modifying, expanding and organizing than writing.

IMO, imperative programming cleanly maps out to the real world.

More so does CUDA with a random number generator. You can't get more precise than quantum (yet).

Truth is it's so much more easier to think imperative.

That's like saying it's easier for a Chinese to speak Mandarin than for a French.

So, Is functional programming really worth it?

To use, it depends. To learn, yes. One can't learn too much in life.
Well, the MySQL API is C++...so....
Sketching on the iPhone
Thanks for that. I'll try to find a glucose-based drink now (if possible).
There was a good lecture titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig, a professor at UCSF, where he argues that HFCS is poisonous. What I found most interesting was that although HFCS is a sugar, it supposedly is primarily metabolized to fat. It seems pretty easy to then link low-income, food insecure (hungry) people with obesity.

The video is worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM