skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Food that is good for you is just more expensive than food that is bad for you.

It's not a relevant difference. Sugar and rice are the absolutely cheapest calories, and they're not so good for you. But a can of coconut milk is ~700 healthy and tasty calories for about a buck. Eggs are healthy and pennies a pop; you can even buy them already hard boiled. A can of sardines is a couple bucks. A can of sauerkraut is a buck and loaded with nutrition.

You have to be a moron to fail to put together a decent day's worth of food at a grocery store given $8. If you're willing to eat high starch you can eat for a couple bucks a day.
US kids don't idolize football players as much as they idolize cops and firefighters.

Adoring stars is something found in almost every country. It isn't what differentiates India and US: we both have stars that we worship.

What matters is coming down many notches at the everyday job level. What kind of everyday jobs do we(media, textbooks) idolize most? In the US, its firefighters and cops. In India, it's engineers and doctors.
Well, I've never seen that claim promoted seriously for the Jews who followed Yahweh. Yahweh has many names, granted, and there are many false gods mentioned in the OT, the point being they are not gods but people worshipped them as such.

Example, in Exodus 3:6 (NIV)

'Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.'

So Abraham, Jacob and Isaac were monotheists. Moses was a afraid to look at God, not to look at "a god". Monotheism.

The reference to the triune creator God as plural is not unsurprising.
If your main worry is that they will start trolling/flamming your community, you could try http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hell%20ban
Bing and Yahoo are both competent alternatives to Google in my experience.
I wished I could say that I had gotten past that hurdle but so far it hasn't 'clicked' yet.
I consider this great news, it gives me hope (I'm 42). I'm not buying the received wisdom that says that only very young entrepreneurs found tech startups.
What if my only other choice was sed or perl?
"1 line of LISP replaces 20 lines of C"

Might be true. But in my experience that single line takes as much time to think up as the 20 lines in C. So it doesn't really work as an argument for either.
Before you arrive at a judgement of the paradigm itself be sure that you know some of the standard ways to solve problems in the field.

Some basic things which i didn't knew in the begining :

Fast persistent data structures - Coming from imperative langs, one might be hesitant to write functions which take a million elt vector, modify it and return a new vector. It is important to know that any good implementation of functional data structures will allow you to do this in constant time & speed. (independent of the size of the data structure).

Editor combinators : If you arent aware of this & are modifying a data structure with several levels of nesting, imperative assignment will seem much more convenient, ie dont translate foo.bar[8]=3, into something of this pattern barNew = editVector(foo.bar, 8, 3), fooNew=editMap(foo, "bar", barNew). It gets worse with more levels. Instead, use an editor-combinator library which will allow to you specify the path within the data-structure and a new value just as in the imperative case.

Things to know which are not strictly FP related, but nevertheless very useful - pattern matching simplifies definitions a lot, typeclasses are usually more convenient than class hierarchies.

Someone has already pointed out advice on libraries, (Clojure or any using any popular language in a functional way).

The main thing which motivates all of this - composability. It is hard to combine procedures with side effects into compound procedures because one needs to keep track of whether the component procedures are interfering with each other. FP eliminates this friction in composition.
It's not limited; it's just defaulting to a simpler view. You can go to spreadsheet view from a link at the top.
"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?"

As someone who has programmed extensively in Arc... you're right. The language is very pretty and very concise, but to get things done, I find myself going back to Python (and to get things done quickly in the execution sense, C++). If only Arc weren't so slow and had more libraries...
Really? XML tags seem to me to be essentially balanced parentheses.
Not Always Right (http://notalwaysright.com/) has shown me that some customers cost you more than they'll make you, ans has convinced that keeping users who consistently waste time and resources is not the best strategy.
This was a great interview and was very inspiring to me. This is an awesome format and I would love to see more. Just finished Founders at Work as well... Thanks Jessica!
Yes, it's worth it.

Haskell: where the great ideas are coming from, although early implementation decisions have made those a bit painful to use (language extensions). It's probably the most "mind-bending" language out there so I recommend it for growth.

Ocaml: excellent and very simple language, with a kick-ass garbage collector. The worst thing about it is the associated build system, OMake, which is almost as ugly as Make. Most people who are turned off by Ocaml are actually turned off by the build environment or by the Ocaml team's resistance to improvement. (The standard libraries are really terrible; if I recall correctly, List.map isn't even tail-recursive).

Clojure: Great compromise between power of language and library support, because it runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It's a Lisp, so it's dynamically typed. It also has some warts related to its Java roots; for example, 43 and (biginteger 43) count as separate keys in a map. However, these are easy to work around.
why would you have to bump everyone else's salary? its a market, not some kind of government job
Is In-Flight Wi-Fi The End For Airline Magazines?
Personally, of all PGs writing (that I've read, and that's definitely not all of it) I like that bit the least.

Maybe that's because I'm a 'Blub' programmer, in spite of some real effort to 'dig' the functional programming method, maybe it is because I think that it exposes a sort of smug attitude towards those that program in 'lesser' languages.

There is a taste of an attitude there that I can't rhyme with the other things that PG wrote.

You don't show the advantages of a language or a technique by making the argument about people, especially not by talking down to them from that high up.
I should also have said - this trick doesn't rely on the limit of the number of digits, it works with any number of digits. Use an arbitrary precision package or sensible language, multiply numbers together for as long as you like, then tell me all but one of the digits in the answer, and 95% of the time I can tell you the one you left out.
Most people aren't afraid of postal services, whereas many get totally frightened by the idea of servicing a computer-like thingie, software or hardware. Those computer-unenthousiasts are iPad's primary target; besides, they probably represent a bigger and easier market than geeks.
Is Innovation Fair?
I have a forum that allows anonymous posts. I have a list of banned IPs, sets of IPs that must register to post, various banned words (spam, mostly), banned user agent strings, etc but there are still griefers that get a new IP and return. Any tips on how to block them more aggressively?
This doesn't look entirely right to me.

Some comments:

Some RDBMS actual perform background asynchronous replication. If you're doing your reads from slaved replicas, you've got an "eventually consistent" system ("A{possibly, P}"). If you're only doing reads from the master node, you're no longer highly available. If you're "promoting" slaves in the case of a master failing, you're _AT_ best back to the case of eventual consistency (if the master comes back and the replication backlog is replayed correctly) or you might not be consistent at all. To echo others, let's call this "potential consistency".

Eventual consistency isn't something Amazon decided to make up, we've dealt with eventually consistent systems on a daily basis long before (DNS, usenet, some distributed file systems, etc...).

BigTable and co. are not "CP" and much more true to the "CA" definition than say MySQL replication or Postgres + Slony. They use protocols like Paxos with leases (BigTable) and Zab (used by ZooKeeper based systems). These are modified 3PC protocols: unlike 2PC protocols, they still guarantee fault tolerance ("A") even if the coordinator node fails; unlike pure 3PC protocols they offer certain guarantees of liveliness (e.g., through the use of leases) and even some degree of partition tolerance. Still, Google had to build Spanner on top of BigTable to provide partition tolerance / true multi-datacenter operation.
This is neat, I've been thinking about building a mechanical version of this since I was child (I used to stare at digital clocks for long periods of time, just to watch the numbers change).
The best way I can think of to get out of this situation quickly, and relatively painlessly, is asking this question:

"I get paid to do this kind of work. Why would I do this for you for free?"
I've thought about this, but it basically means I'm programming features for assholes. I don't want to get in a war like that, but I may have to, I guess.
I say, start with the SaaS app. The blog thing has been done to death. Also, can you do a non screencast blog post of it as you go?
I heard Frank Drake say that he thought of the "Drake equation" as a way of parameterizing our ignorance, not as a way to "prove that there must be life". Basically, it consists of a bunch of factors and for most of them we come to the conclusion that we have no idea what the value is...
I run a little script that tails the httpd log and that figures out which IPs show 'unrealistic' user activity.

Unrealistic are bots (high frequency requests without interaction, as well as requesting links that are invisible to normal users) and unrealistic is a new IP that immediately wants to sign up without seeing some pages first.
So it is a real issue and saying "they are poor because they are stupid" is pretty fucked up.

Wrong. I manage just fine. I have very little money for food. It can be done if you know what to buy and how to cook. You need to set aside eating some of the things you want and you will need to suck it up and carry food with you. I use my friend's kitchen when I can't get back to my place to cook. Sometimes you might have to skip some of the food you would enjoy.

If you don't know how to cook and you're poor you better learn to cook. You have no excuse not to learn. If you don't know how to buy food start asking people that have their act together. Seek help anywhere you can find it. (I've been lucky to have a friend that does some rather nice cooking. My mom is also great at cooking and I had her teach me.)

So to make a blanket statement: If you are poor and you don't take steps to improve yourself you will stay poor and you are an idiot. There are exceptions but they are just that, exceptions.
I like that there are so many quotes, but does anyone else notice they're all tweet-sized? I would prefer them in some sort of context or accompanying an actual dialogue.
HN is full of programming features for assholes, it seems to have served the community well, even if it isn't always 100% transparent and in the case of false positives it requires manual undoing.
My local Apple dealer recycles old batteries. You're going in there to buy a new one, you give them the old one while you're there.
I hear what you say, but there was a time when I thought imperative, non-structured programming was all there was, and anything like structured programming, then later OOP, then later FP, was just more complexity that was unnecessary. As I've grown to become more comfortable with each of those I've realised that they are more than just extra bells and whistles - they are ways of thinking.

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. Learning structured programming has made my assembly coding better, even when I use all the nasty tricks available. Learning about FP, logic and constraint programming has made my C++ and Python coding better.

I'm sure I don't yet know everything, or even half of everything. I don't (often) use a pure FPL, but knowing, really knowing, about pure FP has made my thinking better.

Who knows what remains to be discovered or invented that will expand our thinking further.
So if it has minor water damage you cannot get a new battery?
This is indeed a very good one, but as someone exposed to LISP at a tender age (first year in college) and who then had a chance to play the game professionally for a little while on Lisp Machines (LMI) and conventional hardware (GoldHill), Lisp Cycles will always be my favorite: http://xkcd.com/297/
Thanks. I've been following some of this policy, but a little altered. I make it clear that they didn't reach some customer service drone, but instead the guy who runs the site. I try to solve the problem, but lay down the law at the same time making it clear that we don't allow any crap in our community.

I also make a distinction between panic and rage. Panicked users will say, "It's broken! Why won't you let me log in!" while the enraged ones will just toss out a string of profanity.

We've never had anybody threaten legal action, but it's good to know to call them on it. I'll remember that.
It's impossible for 1 line to contain as many bugs as 20 lines may. Should make debugging time shorter, shouldn't it?
Some foodstuffs company whose name I've forgotten tried to introduce yellow ketchup in my area a couple of years ago, but they failed pretty badly. I bought a bottle, and while it tasted just like the the red stuff, it just didn't look right. My 5 year old niece just flat out refused to eat it.
Libraries have been the focus of the Haskell community for the past 2 years, there's now:

* 1918 libraries for Haskell (according to http://hackage.haskell.org)

for comparison, there are 1420 Erlang libraries (according to http://projects.trapexit.org/web/)

Was there something you were looking for that's not on Hackage?
> Sugar and rice are the absolutely cheapest calories

You can bulk bags of rice as needed to supplement smaller amounts of healthier foods if you need to save money. (Stay away from the sugar) A diet of rice, beans, and vegetables may be boring but with little research you can live on it just fine.
Good resource sink for startup talent.
what the whole thing says to me is in the definition of lisp: a list processor. everything is a list. this post is a list of letters and whitespace and punctuation. the page is a list of html elements, the browser is a list of gui components. the os is a list of running and available applications, etc etc. anyway, once you see things as a list, then everything is a list. using hadoop or amazon web services is a list of machines. every function you write can consume and produce a list. hope this helps, and good luck, maybe you're looking to click with something else, and that's way cool(er)
It's not very constructive or interesting to wrap up the whole problem in the word "stupid." What is the nature of this stupidity? Why are they stupid? What can be done about it, considering that we have to live in the same society as all these dumbshits? Maybe you should apply for a government grant to pay you to go around and personally slap each fat person and tell them they're stupid.

I can tell you it was damned hard to change the way I ate, and I'm not stupid. At least, I'm not stupid in the "underclass too stupid to do the obvious things that will fix their lives" kind of way that you're talking about. Intelligence wasn't the solution to the problem; long-term focus on accustoming myself to a different way of living was. For about eighteen months, maybe closer to two years, I paid more attention to losing weight than I did to anything else, including my personal life and professional development. And guess what? Even now I have to pay a certain amount of attention to maintain my weight. It just won't go on autopilot. I'm still smart enough and knowledgeable enough, but it's a small constant drain on my energy to execute.

The drain on my energy is much lower now, but I was lucky to be able to devote so much time and energy to get to where I am now. I was even unemployed for a significant amount of that time, which I could afford thanks to working in a pretty high-paying profession, and which was a big help in being able to focus on changing my lifestyle. Plus I happened to have a friend who decided to turn me into a running partner at exactly the right time. How lucky could I get?

All that happened in my mid-twenties, so I spent more than a decade being fat and bright (at least by IQ-type standards: test scores, grades, academic competitions, etc.) before I made any lasting progress on my weight.
So the question is who will the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter of commerce be?

It might be facebook. fbConnect + fbCredits = social buying. Both of these exist but have yet to be combined.
Indoctrination. Look at how much color is added to food. The reddest ketchups sell better, as do the yellowest mustards, and the whitest breads.

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.
I sure hope so, airline magazines are 90% the same from one issue to the next, with a bit of variation thrown in to make it appear to be a periodical. Really it's just a lot of boilerplate, have a look at a typical sample and count how many pages (other than ads) are copy written especially for that issue.

I used to fly a lot, and I would simply buy a book or two at the point of departure and read those during the flight rather than stare at an endless procession of advertisements and the catalog of the 'duty free' (read: overpriced stuff that nobody needs, which, inexplainable seem to warrant flying all over the world in spite of never being sold) goods.

I'm so happy I'm not flying 100,000 miles+ per year any longer...

But with in-flight wifi that would make life a lot more bearable. For sure you'll be billed for it though.

And of course it will only last until the next terrorist attempt at blowing up an airliner using the energy in a li-po battery.
I haven't tried this yet but the docs look awesome. The Clojure community is attracting a lot of creative developers and projects.
"start recognizing that hiring content experts in K-12 is more important than hiring someone who has studied education pedagogy for 4 years. Just imagine how many folks interested in STEM want to take all those School of Education classes to get their teaching certificate."

This was the best comment in the entire article.

When my wife and I were in grad school (math for her, applied math for me) we were both interested in teaching. But the system put a lot of extra hurdles and disincentives in our way:

- Certification required an extra year and a half of lame classes, at great out-of-pocket expense.

- Teaching pays significantly less than engineering, and has less room for advancement and intellectual improvement.

- Teachers don't get a whole lot of respect from parents, students, or society in general.

- I spent some time in a public school classroom as a specialist, and was surprised by the lack of professionalism from teachers and administrators. I had an administrator warn me that if I didn't hold specific political views, I'd get yelled at. Sure enough, one teacher angrily demanded to know why I wasn't voting for her favorite candidate (though I'd never said anything to her about it -- that info was spread to her behind my back). It was made very clear to me that I wasn't personally welcome in that environment.

- Teaching (at least in the public schools) is heavily unionized. Advancement doesn't seem to be directly merit-based. Seniority, politics, and being in with certain "cliques" seem to be important.

After grad school, I spent four years teaching STEM concepts for a museum with a large K-12 outreach program. Based on teacher, parent, and student comments and on performance evaluations, I'm pretty sure I would have been a great classroom teacher. But it simply wasn't worth the extra time, money, and effort to get a low-paying, low-advancement job in a politically hostile environment.
Obviously, you're not a stoner.
I really don't think that's what he's saying. It looks to me like he's saying that social networking is going to be fundamental to government. Social networking is basically the vector by which the Internet influences politics. Reasonable people can argue about whether the Internet is going to be fundamental politics. It's not a crazy premise.

Twitter is currently the simplest social network we have. Unlike Facebook, which wants a profile and is built around aggressive network-building, Twitter requires zero initial effort. You join, you start publishing, and people either find you or they don't. I see the Twitter angle on this, too.
Language wars are for people who dislike watching other people seriously injure themselves in the workshop. When I advocate a language or technique, it's because I honestly believe that trying it out will make your life measurably better.

This becomes a "war" because the other side can't believe that there is something that they don't already know, and they will defend that illusion to the death. It's quite hilarious... in a sad, sad way...
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Wait, people still read the airline magazines? They didn't get killed off by iPhones, Kindles, iPods, laptops with DVD players, portable DVD players, laptops, CD walkmen, walkmen, paperback books, real magazines, and newspapers?
The article linked as the source (http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/history5.html) actually says that the William of Orange story is probably apocryphal:

"Though the stabilised orange carrot does date from around seventeenth century Netherlands, it is unlikely that honouring William of Orange had anything to do with it"
Thanks for checking it out :)
Failure prediction of dotcom companies using neural network–genetic programming
I think more-accessible concurrent programming is FP's killer app, things like riak, rabbitMQ,

here's a STM and/or actor/ message-passing vs. lock/monitor/mutex /semaphore reading list:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/Technology/Concurrency/

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2009/10/05/the-cambrian-period-of...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/28336206/Multicore-programming-in-...

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2008/09/jvm-language-su.h...

http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/pdf/36_Click_fastbcs.pdf
> If you're "promoting" slaves in the case of a master failing, you're again back to the case of eventual consistency.

I don't think so. If you use asynchronous replication and the master fails directly after acknowledging a new request but before forwarding it to the slaves, this request may be totally lost. So you'd have no consistency at all (or at least not eventual consistency).
Emacs for Python Programmers #2: Virtualenv, IPython & Daemon Mode