skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Compare and Contrast." They're on the chart to show what your options are when you select CA from CAP, and to provide a basis for comparison with the other options.
There's a difference between going to a potential investor in an attempt to sell your ideas, and putting it on the open internet for anybody to gank.
I usually don't care for screencasts about technology because they often treat the viewer like a dumbass. For example, they'll spend 30 seconds introducing themselves or explaining what they're going to do even if it's super trivial. I would suggest trying to be as concise, but still be as digestible as possible. If your screencast is actually useful and 5 minutes long, I might watch it again. If it's 10 minutes and just okay, no way am I going back to it.

Hope this helps. I'm also interested. I am learning ruby now and soon I want to start learning rails.
>>you're confusing me with someone that cares.

You wrote a reasoned discussion about a subject filled with propaganda and locked positions in your whole hemisphere; please give me people that don't care.

But, for Fuck's sake, keep a minimum of politeness -- especially in sensitive subjects like this. They are degenerated enough as they are before any keyboards are touched.

Edit: To be clear -- the f word was a bit of a joke, considering what I criticized. Enough of this, I've written all I can add.
Wadhwa says "Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists are often
national heroes. Here, our kids idolize football players and rock stars."

Yesterday, I had replied to Wadhwa's tweet saying that he was mistaken in this comparison.

In India, cricket players and movie stars are adored and idolized. OTH most Indians wouldn't even be able to name the top scientists/engineers in the country (let alone idolize them).

I think Wadhwa is pointing to a genuine issue (of rock stars and football players being more popular than engineers or scientists), but making bogus claims to raise fear (of Indian or Chinese competition) isn't the right way to address this issue - especially when it should be clear that India is very much alike the US in this respect (though it is "cricket player" instead of "football player" ...)
Brain scans 'can distinguish memories', say scientists
Yes. But not as worth it as hard-core advocates of FP like to think.

There is really only one difference between FP and traditional imperative programming (which I'll call IP). In IP you have direct control over where the results of computations are stored and in FP you don't. This is, of course, a two-edged sword. Control gives you both power and the ability to screw things up. Lack of control makes it easier for your compiler to perform certain kinds of optimizations.

The reason learning FP is worthwhile is not so much because FP is some kind of magic bullet, but because understanding the tradeoffs between having this kind of control and not having it is worthwhile in and of itself. If you understand those tradeoffs you will write better code in whatever language you use, even if it's assembler.
That reminds me of the time when a new neighbor moved in. The first thing he did after he mentioned that he was a doctor, was to inform us that he didn't want us coming to him for advice or prescriptions unless it was a crisis.

Later that year he came to me and complained that his computer was slow, and wondered if I could look at it...
Extraterrestrial life: I am a skeptic
Maybe it's just because I'm indoctrinated, but the orange carrots in the picture are the only ones that look tasty.
Internet 'in running' for Nobel Peace Prize
It's probably indoctrination. After all, what other orange foods do we eat? (except peppers, I guess)
It really depends. You don't sound particularly excited by the "piles of work" and "many projects to complete." Why do you want to finish them? When you think about starting to work on them, what do you feel and think about?
It would be interesting to know how many groups or classes of people have bridged the gap from insecurity to plenty without experiencing an obesity problem. Even Japan is struggling with a rise in obesity. Remember when the rich were all plump, and gout was a rich person's disease? Upper-class culture evolved to deal with the problem, but it didn't happen overnight. This looks like an instance where the upper classes took a few generations to adapt, but now we're looking at the poor (and also the middle class) and saying why don't you just catch the fuck up right now? Obviously people arriving at the problem later have more information to work with, but cultural change is hard. Give 'em a generation or two.

This article concentrates on the availability of food, but I think that's only one side of the problem. I remember an NPR segment a couple of years ago where they went to a food bank near a wealthy area and compared what people were donating to what people were taking from the food bank. The rich folks were donating whole-wheat bread, which ended up just sitting on the shelves. Either the poor folks didn't know what to do with it, or felt insulted that the rich folks were trying to change their eating habits, or they just didn't like it. The poor folks wanted white bread and canned vegetables. Just because you've got whole-grain bread and fresh vegetables doesn't mean you know what to do with them or how to get your kids to eat them. Better supply might help, though: provide healthy food, and maybe they'll figure out what to do with it, even if they didn't really want it in the first place.

Getting kids raised on junk to start eating healthy food is another problem: I don't have kids myself, but evidently kids are little nutritional self-harm monsters. If you give healthy food to a kid who is used to pizza rolls and potato chips, he won't eat it, and he'll get cranky and nasty because he hasn't eaten. He'll torture himself and everyone around him until he gets candy or a Coke or mac and cheese. If you've let your kids get accustomed to eating junk, there's going to be a hell of a lot of suffering -- for both parents and kids -- before healthy eating starts to feel normal. Maybe that's why the adjustment time is measured in generations.

Personally, my parents had some crude notion of healthy eating, so I didn't get soda, candy, or sugary cereal, but we ate a lot of pancakes, french toast, spaghetti, bread and butter, bacon, buttery popcorn, etc. Those are foods that it's easy to gorge on, quantities were not consistently limited, and I liked eating, so I ate way too much. My parents maintained discipline and knew it was important that I ate a healthy diet; they just didn't have a good enough understanding of nutrition. Hopefully with my own kids I'll maintain what they achieved and add a better understanding of nutrition.
'Dictator' is not a synonym for 'unelected' or even 'unpopular'. It has more to do with the leader's ability to rule arbitrarily by their own personal decree.
which other search engines are you using?
When it Comes to Web Scale Go Cheap, Go Custom or Go Home
While I prefer written content eventually, screencasts can be a great way to get the motivation and be forced to see the introductory stuff on a topic. A long article is easy to ignore but if you dedicate 10 minutes to a well produced screencast, it can certainly whet the appetite to go out and learn more.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Unix_directory_structure

/usr -- originally the directory holding user home directories, its use has changed, and it now holds executables, libraries, and shared resources that are not system critical: X11, KDE, PERL, etc. (The name "Unix System Resources" is a post hoc backronym.)
It is also the final day of Nerdigras: http://www.google.com/search?q=nerdigras
Thanks for that link -- the video is even more fascinating.
Yes, Apple continues to innovate in new areas, but being a leader doesn't seem to be enough for them/Jobs if they are going to attempt to keep their leadership in markets that are becoming a commodity by enforcing patents on what amounts to commodity technologies.

It can actually be a pretty wilily to upset one industry, let everyone spend their time catching up and dealing with it becoming a commodity, while you move on to upset the next industry. Apple is doing that with the iPad, and they still have, and will continue to have, a lead position in the smart phone market letting them have some influence over where that industry is headed, especially with things like the App store and their market penetration. But how much time and effort is it worth looking back at previous industries they've upset while they upset the next industry? Apple has had more success at exploiting their good brand name to enter markets that they wouldn't necessarily have been in and upsetting them, complaining about other companies copying them, after they've already reaped the rewards for their effort (and continue to do so), is not the mark of a true leader.
Nobel of computing to MS researcher who helped build arguably world's first PC
I use Bing, Google, and Yahoo with good results. I occasionally use Cuil but its results are usually not very good.
that's how mixergy does it
I don't spend my spare time posting 'Ask HN' questions.

You do spend your spare time answering them, though... interesting.
this is my favorite xkcd of all time, after playing with list comprehensions in python, this all clicked, startlingly ... previously i had been enamored with things like mvc, but after understanding the lisp fundamentals, man, everything is wonderful, and it felt a lot like this comic
Responses to this RFI should be submitted by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on April 15, 2010

Tax day. Hilarious!@ Not only do they want to take 50% of our hard earned dollars, they want to take our knowledge for free!

Here's an idea, stop wasting our brainwaves with your ridiculous tax forms.
There is a lot of interesting code in here; I took the liberty to beautify the JavaScript here, http://pastebin.com/zVe5a1Fi

This got me so excited I've decided to dedicate my spring break to getting acquainted with HTML5 by learning to us http://processingjs.org

I think HTML5 could quite likely liberate JavaScript from the DOM altogether and provide the necessary foundation for revolutionizing 'the manner' in which we develop the browser as a client-side application on 'some system' while further streamlining the web-server as a means of storage. I mean HTML5 could very well be the solution for writing formidable JavaScript that can do so much more besides molesting the DOM. ;)
It's certainly worth learning, but I make no secret of my fondness for having local state when programming. It's critically important to consider the breadth and quality of libraries available for your particular task as well as the tools available. With eclipse+maven+continuum+junit+jprofiler I can generate a hell of a lot of java very quickly, even if I didn't have access to my library of code segments.
What about oranges?
Google wasn't an obvious success in the beginning.

My take on this is.

If your idea is good you might as well put it out there as you won't be the only one who have thought about it.

If your idea is brilliant it will have no takers as brilliant ideas seem to be less obvious in the now and will only with time and in retrospect be obvious.
does the bottom right "hinge" of each digit have two "fingers" for aesthetics (so that there is always one hidden)?
If you are to do a truly high quality screencast, you would need to have a script (and code) written ahead of time anyway. Otherwise you would fall afoul of the other complaints in this thread -- overly long, rambling and unfocused.
If you like this one, check out the QlockTwo clock as well:

# http://www.qlocktwo.com - the original, 900 euros a piece

# http://zachchadwick.com/klok - the Javascript version

# http://www.flickr.com/photos/19203306@N00/sets/7215762299881... - the Arduino remake
We have this on a daily basis.

We deal with it like this:

- first we write the email that we would like to write telling them exactly how we feel

- we then delete this email

- we then write an overly friendly email which takes care of the users complaint and adds sugar on top as well as a pony.

Usually they get the message and they'll apologize for their behaviour

One exception is made for people that threaten legal action, these are without exception barred from the service and requested to follow through. I really can't stand it when people pull out their 'lawyer gun' at the first opportunity, and it raises an immediate red flag, these are real trouble makers, and will continue to be so in the future, so we see no reason to have them in our userbase.

To date nobody has ever followed through on our invitation to press suit.

I really wonder what is wrong with those types, by the time I threaten to sick a lawyer on to someone I'm 100% prepared to go through with it, and I reserve that for those times where such action is really warranted, such as outright fraud.

Wackos are a fact of life, as the profile of your site increases you'll have to deal with some of that anyway, better be prepared and use your support queue as the selector determining which 'wackos' are only temporarily deranged and which are really firing on 3 or less pistons. Those you can do without, even if they try to make more trouble later.

A nice example from HN is the user 'arrington', a complete douchebag that made it his mission to destroy HN after being kicked off. It was 'before my time', but I've seen some of the fallout from it and it wasn't pretty, but it did go away after some hacks that made the site more robust against that sort of thing. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!
google sucks now. all my results are from 4 years ago and are mostly SEO bullshit
Is there such a thing as too much customer service?
thinking is a doing as well?
I would be interested in discussing ideas with people, however it would need to be in a more private setting.
I saw that item on the list and thought that it resembled the website I recently launched: http://www.crunchcourse.com/ Is that similar to what you were thinking? I'd be interested to get your feedback on it.
Phrack #67 - Call for Papers
Radio Shack Employee Charged with Hitting Customer
The only thing I can think of is canned fruit/peppers but they are definitely more expensive than the caloric equivalent of junk food.

Well yeah, but this is a study on obesity, which means they're getting too many calories compared to nutrients. And quite frankly, if they can't control themselves in the starve-binge cycle, which probably contributes significantly to the lack of food money, and can't tell that something harming them is harming them, then any evolutionary standpoint sort of demands they stay there. Meanwhile, those typically-poorest locations are most heavily targeted for food kitchens and support money, but many are too proud to take help that's offered.

And, if there's not a portion of stupidity, how do some get out of poverty? And explain the increased drug and alcohol use in such areas.
Linkbait. "Twitter and things like Twitter" --- a much less controversial and newsworthy assertion.
I'm waiting for a similar (cheaper) device that runs android. I wont commit to apples tyranny.
If I were Evan Williams, I would say that Twitter is fundamental to just about everything.
Thanks for providing ready to use introduction for user support staff manual.
Apple might then owe lots of money to palm if that would be the case.
You mean something like "store all keys with an even hash value on server X, and all keys with an odd hash value on server Y"? You can do this yourself in your application: Just hash the value and then send the request to the corresponding server.
Um, yeah, I kinda know that. So Pi is 2.0100314 now?

The point was they're using USA date order as opposed to one of the more international conventions, as they use on their website. A petty point, but hey this is teh intarwebs.
And now that has abolished the constitutional safeguard against the number of presidency terms, he can win elections as long as he will.
now that the tech that made them different to begin with is commodity

I was referring to the strategy, not any technology. What are you referring to, specifically?
lol that's so obvious I completely overlooked it. The first thing that came to my mind was pumpkins, which I don't like.
Yea I've heard the blub story told over many times.

I understand functional programming perfectly well. It's just that for most of the time, it's easier to think imperatively. Yes, there are some special problems (Towers of Hanoi, Ackermann's) where functional programming is truly the way to go. But in most cases it isn't.

FYI I use gotos in my C programs when I see it's the easiest & clearest to get something done. I think you should go with what best suits the situation.

What troubles me though is when you go out of your way to do everything functional-style, even when you know there are easier ways of doing it. And the problem is this happens way too often to be ignored. Some functional programmers just push the functional idiom into everything they do, to such a point that understanding their code is like solving a sudoku puzzle.
Oranges, cantaloupe, sweet potatoes, squash, apricots, mango, peaches, papaya, pumpkin, and Kraft macaroni & cheese.
makes me feel bad for PG and and YC team: reading just those 20 or so responses is painful.
Counterpoint:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429140849.ht...
I wanted to write about Clojure and the fact that it has access to all of Java libraries, but you overdid me. So I'll mention F# which is in a similar position in the .NET world.
Yeah, that's basically his job, isn't it?
Partition tolerance in CAP means tolerance to a network partition. An example of a network partition is when two nodes can't talk to each other, but there are clients able to talk to either one or both of those nodes. If you've ever used IRC and experienced a netsplit, this is a great example of that.

A CA system guarantees strong consistency, at the cost of not being able to process requests unless all nodes are able to talk to each other. An AP system is able to function during the network split, while being able to provide various forms of eventual consistency.

There's several forms of eventual consistency. There's the "weak eventual consistency", where you may not be able to read your writes. In the context of Dynamo-based key/value stores this actually only occurs as a failure condition: when the first node in the preference list for a key isn't available.

Another form of eventual consistency is "read-your-writes" consistency, where by you use a quorum of R reads, W writes out of a total of N replicas and set R + W > N. In this case you're guaranteed to be able to read your writes even if multiple nodes in the preference list for a key fail (as long as you're able to meet a quorum).
Very interested! So, when is this going to be up? :)
By the way, I can corroborate the 'assholes are never paying users' statistic, it's the freeloaders that seem to engender the jackasses. Paying members are almost always articulate and somewhat forgiving of errors on our end.
I think P should be an S ("split"), a lot of people seem to confuse partition in the context of "partitioning a database" with a network partition ("split-brain" scenario).

Perhaps a better example to use should be a distributed chat room.
My tech lead from two projects ago used post-its on a whiteboard, and one of the teams I work closely with still does. For search options, we used a 2D-grid, where the vertical axis was the component and the horizontal access was the state of done-ness (unassigned, being worked on, in code review, finished).

If you have a small, colocated team, this is basically ideal. There's low overhead, and the overhead consists of physically taking off a post-it and sticking it in the next column, which feels very satisfying. At a glance, you can see how done the project is - lots of post-its on the left means you have a while to go, lots of post-its on the right mean you're almost done. If you have components that need lots more attention, they'll show up as stragglers on the grid, and then you can either allocate more resources or cut the feature as appropriate. (In our project, that was usually self-allocation, because we didn't have particular engineers assigned to particular components, and each engineer was familiar with a few different components). If a lot of tasks get stuck in the code review stage, you know that it's time to lean on the code reviewers a bit.
I couldn't find any on yours either. We're not hiring right now but please contact me on bahadir@l4dev.org and lets keep in touch.
Perhaps, but he does seem to have a point.

If nothing else, the Obama administration seems to agree with William's comments. They have publicly signalled the importance they attach to Twitter (e.g during the Iran election trouble last year)
It's hard to generalize, but I would say there are at least 8 non-obscure FP's that either hook into java and .NET libs, or have some level of stdlib and community libs (I've only used 3, and I hear C# is getting some functional aspects, but I'm not following).

- lisps: scheme, CL esp. SBCL, clojure

- F#, scala

- erlang, ocaml, haskell

here's some books, freely available content, including for ocaml and haskell

http://www.freetechbooks.com/functional-programming-f34.html

but missing scala:
http://programmingscala.com/
It was April 1998, Google hadn't been incorporated yet (took until September), and Larry & Sergey did release their big idea: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
The world is imperative! Things have state! We do not live in an imaginary fluffy world of mathematical elegance & correctness.

Yes, all true. Also, the world is extremely concurrent, made up of billions of independent actors sending each other messages.

That's why we need to use Erlang, an imperative, stateful, mathematically inelegant language.
Well, yeah. But, did they go to yahoo to raise money for the company?
True. It even happens to priests and pastors. You wouldn't believe how many people you've never seen or heard of before will look you up and call you, saying how much they'd love a nice little wedding in your congregation's stone chapel. When you inform these people that you don't consider yourself a justice of the peace, the waters are deeply stirred.
Isn't beta carotene orange, and perhaps orange carrots are most popular because of this nutritional value?
One of the biggest expenses in current space operations is ground crew, which typically numbers in the thousands. Under the status quo there is simply no incentive to reduce this number, and there are often incentives to increase it to create new jobs. In the original space shuttle concept the ground crew was supposed to be no larger than a few hundred, but it didn't work out that way.

Commercializing rocketry should mean that ground crew size and turnaround times can be minimized, since there is a direct financial incentive to control costs.
i enjoyed this comment about the story on reddit:

Thoughts from a chemist here.

Orange carrots express beta carotene, purple carrots express anthocyanins, red carrots express lycopene in addition to some alpha- and beta-carotenes, and white carrots express few or no pigments.

I believe one way to produce an orange carrot from the conventional horticulture of purple, red, and white carrots, is to supress lycopene production in red carrots, leaving just carotene. Another way would be to take a faint orange (perhaps technically white) carrot and cause it to express those orange pigments at the high levels that purple carrots do.