skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@I have an implicit backup of all my games

Until Steam 2 comes out and they discontinue Steam 1 servers.
Or the company gets bought by Fox/Disney/Sony etc and they disconnect the old cost base.

Imagine if you had to repurchase all your DVDs/CDs everytime a singer/actor switches agent/label?
Does event-based programming in javascript count? If so, then yes.

Also, it's ridiculously easy then. Setting up mutexes are a cinch with closures.
Pure functional programming's core delusion is pretty clear as well: all state is immutable.

There is no "state" in functional programming, there is function application. Your program is a function from some value (inputs) to some value (the result). You write that program by composing various smaller programs with operators like (.) and (>>=) (or if you like being generic, (>>>)). There is no data, there is just function application.

So then, "state" becomes an imaginary concept that sometimes makes things easier to think about; if there is a sequence of computations that logically operate on the same "thing", then you call that "thing" the state. The State monad is nothing but syntax sugar that lets you very explicitly pretend that there is a such thing as state; something you can "get" at and "put" into as needed. This abstraction, BTW, is no different than state in any other language (which is why it comes up so much in hastily-written Haskell programs; you can just cut-n-paste from C and change the spelling of some keywords), except instead of "get" and "put", you just use variable names and "=". Otherwise, exactly the same concept and semantics, and very similar syntax everywhere.

In procedural languages, state is important because the procedures abstract CPU instructions, which operate on little boxes called "registers". But in functional programming, your program is not a list of things to do to a register, it's just functions. So state is not really meaningful anymore. Don't program the machine, program your algorithm!

I've yet to be convinced that Haskell actually gains very much from its stateless-ness; I understand that in principle there are nice optimizations that it can enable, and parallelization becomes rather simple, but I'm not seeing it beat the pants off of impure functional languages in speed or clarity.

http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/fusion-makes-functio...

But nothing is ever going to "beat the pants off" hand-optimized assembly in a benchmark; there is only so much work a computer can do, after all. In the real world, however, people don't have time to spend hundreds (or thousands!) of hours optimizing four lines of code. In that case, you'll find that these theoretical optimizations are great -- you write code the natural way, and the optimizer turns that into something closer to the optimized-for-hundreds-of-hours assembly. C and Java compilers just can't do that because it can't make any assumptions about what you mean, it can only work with what you say (since those programming languages are basically high-level lists of instructions for the CPU to perform).
cause they thought about their opinion and have good reasons to believe it's correct.

and they are open to debate. they aren't being closed minded. what they don't want or like is for you to say/think "that's just your opinion" and both not give a counter argument and also not accept they are right.
Follow the instructions here to watch the video: http://ohryan.ca/blog/2009/08/15/how-to-watch-comedy-central...

Needs Firefox in order to install the Modify Headers extension.
I identified with the article. (And I don't identify with most nerds on TV.) Just because you don't get it doesn't make it a caricature.
Google’s App Store for Business to Launch Next Week
FreeVPN
I think it is more that a lot of people believe that everyone speaks in truths.
It's the reason why some people can listen to Fox News with a straight face. Fair and balanced yo.
The video on top seems newer than the one below (seen last fall?). I still keep debating whether it's going to be a good experience to deal with holding two screens at once, that along with what the hardware price might be at that point (1k+ for a tablet? Hey, tablet PC's sell for that much already)

Hopefully a vendor will pair this transreflective screen for a more natural drawing experience.
Please start throwing rocks at me, but I can also see a much simpler explanation behind the numbers than those constructed in the post.

Just don't throw rocks at OkCupid, it's their job to analyze the numbers and match all those people in the best way they can. It's a nice bonus for everyone who is still on the dating scene (or in the dating website business) that OkCupid actually publishes what they find.
OpenJS-project <http://www.openjs.org/>; might be of interest to HN peeps too.
I wasn't referring to the Daily Show, I was referring to the "real news" programs it was mocking.
Are you a Project Management Gantt Chart Slave?
You should tweet that, people would like to see it.
They had that power and more for Vancouver.
They even copyrighted a line from the national anthem.

What made Vancouver such a success is the low key policing. 6000 police + RCMP + army and they made 93 arrests (mostly drunk+disorderly), one policeman was slightly hurt when he broke a window stopping a fight.
The result is the best press for the VPD in living memory.

Now picture the Met's response to any sort of demo in London.
Now I can read all those bullet trains stories. I hear someday they may come to America.

http://www.popsci.com/results?query=bullet+trains
Web Laureate Insight, "It takes a Picnik"
Browsarity (YC W10) Allows You To Donate Affiliate Fees To Charity
Why on earth would you want to potentially disseminate false information without interruption?

If i'm wrong, I want to be corrected. If someone else has an opinion on something i'm talking about that is so important that they feel they have to interrupt then AWESOME. We have a discussion on our hands. :)
Chile got recently in the "rich countries club" OECD http://www.oecd.org/document/26/0,3343,en_33873108_39418658_... so I guess it can be officially considered first world now.
Now you can run Rails 3 on heroku! Pretty slick, and the upgrade process to the new deploy stacks is simple.
... provided you're allowed to continue your train of thought after the quick interruption/correction. Getting interrupted just because somebody wants to explore a different tangent can be very annoying.
I basically enjoyed the article, but not this message which I felt was underlying: nerds are too smart to "get" society, because social customs make no sense and only ordinary dumb people can tolerate their absurdity.

Society does have a logic to it - there are just a ton of axioms, and much empiricism is required to catch the nuances. But clearly empiricism is at least as important as theory when dealing with real-world phenomena: you have to stop and observe closely how gravity works, otherwise you may deduce very wrong conclusions from seemingly sound premises. (@aristotle i still luv u)
I still remember when Javascript was a fairly ugly language that felt like the PHP of client-side programming.

I revisited Javascript a few years ago and I was pleasantly surprised. It's come a long way, and it does make event-based programming easy.
"We need an intellectual challenge"- S. Hawking
I'm not sure why you're sorry? Yes, I'm not American so may be there is something that I don't know? Just plain curious ;)
Really interesting presentation on exporting vector graphics from Illustrator and Flash to HTML5 Canvas. The Flash part is near the end.

This certainly addresses the iPhone/iPad Flash issue.
Congrats! Posterous is a downright fantastic product and they very much deserve this after the hard work they've put in. To anyone from Posterous here on HN: Keep up the good work.
Mark Zuckerberg Will Personally Hack Your Facebook Account
Pushing code to the "production repo" is a deliberate operation. Running "git push production" is as explicit as "./deploy-to-production.sh".

Also, nothing against scripting. Mercurial needed a small hook, too. But Git's default push behaviour is not only worthless, it's dangerous and risks unexpected reverts of changesets. I already explained this in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1158563

Git should either have a sane default implementation, or should refuse to push to non-bare repositories. But its current implementation doesn't make any sense. Providing dangerous defaults because people shouldn't use it anyway? That's plain ignorance.

(However, I agree that automatic deployment is indeed a bad idea, no matter whether it uses push or pull. But that's off-topic.)
Heroku (YC W08) Public Beta: Deployment Stacks
"As noted before, brakes always win out over engines, even at full throttle; that has been tested and proved many times in the past 20 years, including recent Car and Driver tests on Toyotas."

This is not necessarily true. It's entirely dependent on the brakes involved and the engine involved; any given vehicle could go either way. I personally have witnessed steel brake rotors melted and dripping off the vehicle; the brakes had locked up at highway speed and the driver had continued driving, reporting afterwards that the vehicle seemed a little sluggish but not excessively so, so he hadn't stopped. For that vehicle: the brakes lost. For other vehicles, perhaps ones with dinky engines and big fat brakes: the brakes may win. It's certainly not the sort of thing where one can say "brakes always win".

Car and Driver's article ( http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_u... ) seems to assume that Toyotas don't cut the engine power when the brakes are applied, but their own tests belie that. I would guess that Toyota's software cuts the power LESS than the competition's software does. But if you're stopping from 70mph with and without the throttle at full, and you notice a minimal difference - as C&D did - I can guarantee you that the throttle is being reduced when the brakes are applied. Maybe not to zero, but reduced.
That's interesting - I believe it is used to continue partial downloads in dumb http mode. Technically, you can figure out the bytes needed out of the packfile from the index that is downloaded, so I suppose it is possible. However, it would still be way slower than smart-http, because you would have to walk the refs one by one on the client side - one GET, figure out the next object, another GET, etc. With smart-http, you do a short back and forth until the server can figure out the entire list of objects you need and then build a custom packfile for you.

And it still wouldn't help push in any way.
Posterous (YC S08) raises ~4.4M from Redpoint, Trinity, and angels
You may know these things, but to be clear: Nothing in Haskell stops you from using the usual functional mechanisms for passing state as explicit parameters to functions. The State monad is not necessary. In fact you can pretty much ignore the fact it exists if you want from what I can see. It's just useful because it's simpler than passing the state of the computation around.

You say that in Haskell it's harder, so I conclude you must not be talking about "the state of a computation" the way I am, but just talking about state in general, including the stuff you'd have to access through IO. I still fail to see how this is harder than in any other functional langauge, excepting that there's no convenient "final global fallback". Haskell isn't quite unique in that (Erlang arguably falls here too), but it is very unusual. My perspective may be skewed by my fairly extensive work in Erlang, I've learned how to deal with this issue. But other than the lack of a true global state I'm not sure what you could be thinking of that's really any harder.

Incidentally, while I use and enjoy Haskell, I'm not besmitten with it. I'm truly interested in what you see as a problem, but I'm having trouble matching your accusations to my experiences.
I suspect the original submission said "John" and not the correct "Jon".
Attention Is the Real Resource
> You misunderstand what I'm saying.

I did misstate your position, but I still don't see how that position was in what you wrote.
This isn't explicit anywhere, but OkCupid is all about subgroups. For many people, there is an equal number of guys and girls in each sub-group, so message response rates are consistent and people are generally happy.

It seems like, for black girls, that there is not an equal subgroup; there aren't enough guys that find them interesting for all of them. So the girls desperately respond to every message, and the guys don't seem interested -- there is a large supply of girls they like, and a small supply of guys. Furthermore, this subgroup is easy to measure, because your gender and your race are in your profile. It is easy to count the number of messages that black girls write, because the database has an "is black" field in addition to a "number of messages written" field.

But... I think there are other subgroups that don't do too well on OkCupid like the, "hi u ar so hawt" group of guys. There just aren't many women on the site that like that, but there are a ton of guys like that. So OkCupid ends up being pretty bad for these guys. They send messages (if you can call them that) like crazy, but they never get any responses. This is harder to quantify, though, because there is no "sends thoughtless messages to anything that seems female" field in the database. Buy it's exactly the same effect; one group is in high supply, and the thing that group wants is in low supply. So the group in high supply gets a lot of rejected messages.

It's not about race, it's about supply and demand.

(And oh yeah, this is all from the perspective of a straight guy. I imagine the dynamics in the gay/lesbian communities are a little different, since in theory, everyone in the pool is equally attracted to everyone else.)
Of course, the language that is now called Javascript 2 is not the same language that Yegge was referring to.
I don't think ChatRoulette needs anyone's help in regards to demonizing it. It's pretty much as it was portrayed. If anything the Daily Show made it look better (The one time I tried it I saw double the cock and not a single mainstream news personality)
If A, B, C, and D truly are asynchronous then I believe you're going to need condition variables and (at a lower level) locks. I agree that such syntax should be baked in and handled at a lower level.

If you can guarantee that a given variable can only be modified by one process at a time, it is easy to do something to take care of this for individual processes, and wouldn't be hard to generalize.

(note, I was last using prototype.js, and my javascript is a bit rusty)

wait_list = [];

function wait_for(entry) {
wait_list.push(entry);
};

function done(entry) {
wait_list.splice(wait_list.indexOf(entry), 1);

if (wait_list.length == 0) {
do_C();
}
};

function do_A () {
wait_for("A");
// do stuff
done("A");
};
function do_B () {
wait_for("B");
// do stuff
done("B");
};

function do_C () {
// Stuff that comes after A and B
};
If "hideous" applies to anyone, shouldn't it apply to people who get the lowest grades on dating sites? Or should he just assume that the truly hideous won't even bother?
Call my a cynic or a hater, but I won't believe a word of it until I see a working prototype that resembles the mockups in functionality. Until that happens it's speculation, artist renderings and vaporware.
How is this different than Eric Kerr's Browse for a Cause?

http://browseforacause.com/

(Unless Eric is involved, of course.)
I'll take a stab at it.

1) Because society is predictable. Groups act in predictable ways. Everything that's predictable makes sense.

2) But good friends do.

3) A well socialized nerd can interact with different groups. He is comfortable with hostile nerd speak (where you must be able to back up every statement with layers of facts) and he's comfortable with small talk / casual conversations with "normal" people. Most socially well adjusted people on the other hand can _only_ talk in their setting. They're completely lost as soon as they're in an environment with different social rules. (Of course there are obvious exceptions)

4) I agree. But the difference between people who are socially really smooth and "most people" is probably just as big as the gap between "most people" and socially maladjusted outcasts. If I pay a little attention I see regular people make big social mistakes all the time.
thanks! we're psyched
It doesn't really matter which OS it's running if it does what I'm looking for. I know the iPad will have a wealth of apps that do what I want (or I'll write my own) it just won't have the pen input and the notebook feel I'm looking for.

I've had Windows Mobile devices before and been severely disappointed but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to give it another try, especially based on what I see in this video.
That's because all the black men who don't want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection. There simply is no real white corollary. Stormfront excluded, there aren't many "WhiteSingles" websites or "EliteIvory" dating sites. There is no Caucasian Dating Network, because the broader world is the Caucasian Dating Network. [..]

Disagree. The reason there are no popular white-focused dating sites is because they would be hounded or sued out of business! It's "racist" for white people to congregate on a race-dependent basis, but acceptable for people of other races. I guess it's our payback for our ancestors being idiots in the distant past.

That said, I think racial segregation is a "problem" (though it's not always "racist", per se). The existence of dating sites exclusively for certain races is the issue here.

We need to go one way or the other. We ignore race and discourage its use as a demographic tool, or we celebrate it and allow people to silo as they see fit. Our society seems to have mostly chosen to ignore race and consider it a non-issue, so "Blacksinglesconnection" or "EliteNoire" (Are you shitting me? This really exists?) should be as distasteful to our society as a hypothetical "Whitesinglesconnection" would be.
Sounds like what you can still get in many European cities. Luckily. It’s a sad day whenever some ugly shopping monster is built outside old city centers. Sprawl is a blight which has to be fought vigorously.
for starters its viral.. it tracks not only how much you brought in, but how much everyone you've invited brought in, and how much everyone they've invited brought in etc.
Unfortunately it also makes you a fairly typical American.
I'll agree that when it is something that could be objectively proven it is a different league than when you are stating something subjective.

However, subjective statements can still grate people the wrong way. For example, if my wife were a redhead and you said, "Readheads are ugly." I would likely feel a bit unhappy that you just said my wife was ugly. If you said, "I think redheads are ugly." I would think, "That's fine, because I think my wife is hot."

And yes, I find "I heard that..." is a great way to bring up a counterpoint without making yourself out to be the opposition. It also allows you an easy out for dropping the subject if it doesn't look like they will change their mind or if you are wrong.
Wasn't the IE team essentially disbanded for a couple of years?
I thought some more about this, and I think the biggest problem is that they have no sense of proportions, they are completely unable to figure out how popular something on the internet is, they don't know the difference between stuff noone cares about, and stuff that is actually widespread. Everything gets painted with the same "Newest craze on the internet" brush.
In many venture-backed companies, the Series A (and B, C, ...) shareholders are guaranteed a certain number of board seats--solely by virtue of holding preferred stock. The founders (who hold common stock) have no control over how the preferred shareholders use their board seats.

If the preferred shareholders have an outright majority on the board, it's black and white that they can effectively fire the founders.
For smaller chips, borrow 18th-century tricks
Web Laureate Classic: "Threnody of Netscape"
It's fascinating how much positive-sounding language can amount to basically saying, "We fucked up on the whole suburban sprawl thing. It's pretty lame. Undo."

(Please note that, despite my tone in the above, I am very excited about the movement. :)
New Urbanism was one of the things that got me to take a hiatus from computers to get a degree in urban planning - I've read way too much about it and visited many of the featured communities. (My wife is a doll - "You want to visit a neighborhood outside of Gainesville? O...K...")

To address the major criticism (affordability and lack of economic mixing): each NU development requires haggling over special zoning, density, and street engineering, so there's a greater up front cost and risk for the developer which gets passed on to buyers. Second, there are very few NU housing units relative to standard suburban houses so demand outstrips supply, keeping prices high. Third, they make a conscious effort to be attractive and pleasant, both in the houses and neighborhood as a whole, so people are willing to pay higher prices. With explicit zoning approval, developers could build more units and there would be more competition so prices would go down. The end result would probably be prices about the same as standard houses, with a smaller lot, slightly smaller house, but in a more attractive, liveable neighborhood.

The biggest weakness I see is that they have only been done on the scale of a subdivision so it hasn't really effected shopping or employment patterns. Sure, many of them have pleasant town centers, but they get low traffic and are therefore much more suitable for professional offices or a few local things like a dry cleaner or child care.

New Urbanism is useful mainly as a showcase of how residential development could be. The work that has the potential to change the built environment much more are form-based zoning codes, also by Duany Plater-Zyberk. It basically specifies the envelope you're allowed to build in based on where you are but doesn't specify function. So in a dense district where 6 story buildings are allowed, it doesn't matter whether they are offices, condos, light manufacturing, etc, just as long as they're consistent with the form of the neighborhood and the road and transit capacity. Form based codes actually deal with the entire economy of residential, commercial, and office/light-industry, while New Urbanism only (in practice) deals with residential.

If a fast-growing municipality were to adopt these, it would give a good feel for what level of density and urbanity people were actually willing to buy. Urbanity and density that is a) low crime and b) has acceptable schools is extremely high priced because zoning has made it illegal to build almost everywhere.
The most honest technical assessment of the two I've seen yet came from the GoogleCode team when choosing which system to support: http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis
More on that in this episode of the wonderful radiolab:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/09/25
If I'm wrong or providing way too much redundant detail to someone who already knows the information then yes, absolutely. Why waste both of our time? The dynamics of every conversation are a bit different though. That's why it's hard to make set rules.
>like a doctor or dentist, along with decent benefits.

I contend your wife likely will have to work, but she needs nothing like a high paying professional career. You just have to be able to eek out and survive on mostly her income for some periods of time, especially if you can live in a low cost area.
No, they're not. They have staff reading reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, etc. in order to find interesting news leads to sensationalize. It's THEIR JOB.