skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd suggest that the important thing is not how many lines a function has, but whether it represents a single, cohesive idea.

Haskell functions aren't shorter because someone decided one day that they should be, they are shorter because Haskell is relatively expressive in some areas. Concepts in suitable areas that would take several lines to represent in another language might take only a line or two in Haskell.

On the other hand, there are other areas where Haskell takes pretty much the same amount of lines as an imperative language, and still others where Haskell's model isn't such a good match and it might require more lines.
Also see this interview http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/nsmb/vol1_page1.jsp for how Mario was conceptualized. A lot of the functionality and visual features were due to constraints in the gaming systems back then and clever UX designs. E.g. why Mario wore overalls or why he's even a plumber.
For some perspective, see Paul Krugman:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/perspective-on-i...
You need a Frag Box from Falcon NW: http://www.falcon-nw.com/images/FragBox_OrangeFlames_hi.jpg Well, you probably don't need one, but you definitely want it!
I assume Dropbox and Loopt will change these numbers drastically. It is almost certain YC will have one 100M + exit from its pool of startups.
It was only partican legislation because the Republicans refused to make it bipartisan, instead as a matter of strategy decided to kill it, and failed.
As someone who has been both near-poor and affluent, I can tell you, I'm a hell of a lot happier with money. I live in a neighborhood today that is made up of relatively affluent people, and these people generally are certainly a lot happier than the folks I grew up with in the Bronx.

Now, most certainly the scale changes. That is, if you compare me to when I'm worth $1000 dollars to when I'm worth a million dollars, that's a 1000 times difference. But it's not the same 1000 times difference if I were to go to a billion dollars. The first 1000 times is worth a lot more. The difference between your first billion and your tenth billion has got to be vanishingly little. But that first 1000, from a $1000 to a million? Hoo hoo hoo!

I think anyone who says money doesn't make you happier should go a day with miss-meal cramps.
"We all make mistakes" said the dalek climbing off of the dustbin.
one of the most common no doubt being approval from peers.

Another is buying an Apple instead of a PC. I recently replaced one of each, and the difference in the quantity of decisions and amount of technical knowledge required to make them intelligently was staggering.

Once I decided to buy the Mac, the whole purchase took about 5 minutes. The PC took hours. Once again, choice was a nifty double-edged sword.
The iPad could act as table and any smart phone (iPhone/android) would connect to it with private set of hands/cards.
Build something real, use jQuery, and look at other peoples' code.
The price range is about half of what most people expected, so buying two isn't all that expensive.
The database is still aware of the fields, so MongoDB can build indices on certain fields if you wish. Admittedly I haven't deployed Mongo in an environment that really tested its performance, but we've been serving about 20k pageviews per day with no issues. Granted, this was a fairly basic application.

As for changing requirements, mongo handled those well too.

It's certainly not a silver bullet, but when I just need a basic object store the query performance trade-off is worth it.
I couldn't get past the ALL CAPS RESPONSES THAT ARE ALSO BOLDED. Gimme a break, it's not that serious.
Did you notice that AMD bought ATI?
I have two droids since I got one at a GTUG meeting. Since I'm on verizon's network I can talk and browse the web at the same time!
Ask HN: Micro formats? Or, how to make my site's google link look good?
This may be a very elementary question, but how does a site go about optimizing how it looks in google's search results? For example:

http://imgur.com/0eVWx

That isn't just a link with some text. That's a link, text, and options. Plus a search bar. I looked at the source of the page crawled by google but couldn't see any special META tags or anything. Can someone explain this to a newbie?
seattle is better
+1

98102 ftw.
It's way too late for that. Networks and hard disks have been using base 10 and software has been using base 2 for decades. IMO Ubuntu has magnified the confusion now that some software uses base 2 and some uses base 10.
One response to this is to plan your own changes in experience: given that you'll enjoy but then adapt quickly to improvements, you can increase your enjoyment over time by alternating between simple and indulgent lifestyles, with simplicity being the ice-water to complement the ice cream.

In a similar vein, another recommendation is to favor differential experiences over static improvements, e.g. traveling rather than buying a nicer car. Your expectation of enjoyment from the car is overestimated because you consider the enjoyment relative to your current state, discounting your own adjustment once you have it, while travel is continually changing by definition, both with your departure and your return.

Interesting subject, hacking your own enjoyment of life.
> ALTER takes ages to do because of the ACID constraints of MySQL.

No, I don't think it has much to with ACID. Rather, they made a simple single implementation of ALTER TABLE that copies the whole table out on any change whatsoever. Add a column? Recreate the table. Add a table comment? Recreate the table. Drop an index? Recreate the table.

They could have identified cases where in principle the table & metadata could be modified in-place, but that would be a lot harder than a simple copy. It would probably necessitate changes to the legacy architecture, which in turn would require a host of other changes.
I predict a future where people, frustrated by the ambiguity, lack of direction, and disconnection from cultural traditions seemingly inherent in modern life, just play games all day.
You're comparing two completely different businesses on disparate metrics.

How many 'users' does WalMart have worldwide? I'd say at least 500 million on whom they keep a purchase record. Then there's products, credit card numbers, suppliers, etc.
Hey where is the option for electronics/robotics?
52 ways to make the world a better place
There are actually schools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school) that attempt to teach K-12 this way. It would be interesting to read a study of how Sudbury alumni perform after they graduate, but I can't find one right now.
Aniruddh D. Patel's Neuroscience Publications in PDF
I was tossing this question around with a friend.

A thick paperback can easily be two pounds.

But paperback can folded or even dropped. You don't need to free one hand to interact with it.

Amazon Kindle is 10 onces. The controls are to the bottom and the side. It's specifically limited to reading.

If a iPad user has to select an icon in the middle of screen on a regular basis, it will be an ergonomic challenge.

Remember, a standard desktop or lap is actually already hard on the body.
I have never voted on EVERY comment until this thread. I just spent over 2 hours reading the original article and the 100 or so comments. What a great article, and what great comments and discussion. Excellent read!
What? That the guy who basically invented the PC by hacking together parts of other devices likes to carry lots of technology with him?

I don't see the problem at all, it fits his profile.

Now if it was someone like your average soccer mum who had this, then there is a problem.
My grandmother. She had asked about the internet and emailing and I decided to purchase one of these for her.

It was a tossup between a PC with all the peripherals or the ipad where she just touches the screen.

I thought the latter would be easier for her and a much less threatening.

(That being said, I haven't purchased one for myself. I already have enough devices that are adequate that perform the job the ipad does, so I don't see the need for one yet. Maybe in the future if I need to replace a few things)
There is a book about Indians and arguments, thought you might like it ;-). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Argumentative_Indian
The author's criticism of Fowler's refactoring:

But look at the cost: to understand how rentals are calculated, we now have to read six classes instead of one method... Fowler evidently finds it easier to read many small methods than a few larger ones; I find the opposite.

This raises the question, do we all have our own definition of good code?

Several books have tried to formalize what is good code (he mentions Refactoring, Code Complete also comes to mind). I enjoyed those books, but I'm often reminded of what my CS professor once told me: good code is a matter of taste.

In the example he cites from Refactoring, my taste is more like Fowler's. I think it's easier for bugs to hide in long methods than short ones. Plus, Fowler extracted some distinct concepts into their own classes-- things like prices. Price formulas are likely to change, so I say the cost of extracting that class is well worth it.

It seems to me that ultimately, Fowler and others are not claiming to have found the secret to "good code;" rather, they are trying to influence people's taste for what they consider good code.
How does Obama plan to double exports in the next 5 years? Lets start by tarnishing the reputation of the competition. Make them appear unsafe for business. Feed in negative news stories regularly so it becomes common knowledge.
> What was pre-colonial Africa evolving towards? And what is your evidence?

It is unknowable. By way of proof of difference I offer the assertion that it is unlikely that a society would be unlikely to arrange itself as a colonial subordinate on its own.
I have a friend who plays WOW on his netbook, so they have other uses too.
Number one distro, maybe, but no Linux distro will ever be the number one OS.

It's not Mac, for those people.

It doesn't run Outlook or MS Office, for those people. OpenOffice is not MS Office, no matter how good it is. Anything run within wine is merely a niche within a niche.

And it doesn't run whatever is the current set of MS enterprise apps and frameworks, for those people.

Linux will be a widely used server OS and a niche desktop OS, for the foreseeable future. iPads and smart phones will obliterate the desktop market before we ever see The Year of the Linux Desktop.
For the stock quote, you get it by going public.

The other bits - sitelinks, search box, summary, etc. - are derived algorithmically, presumably based on where within your site visitors go. The way to get them is to become popular enough that Google can figure out which portion of your site is the most popular with visitors.

Edit: Apparently it's not just popularity, it sounds like they parse navigational structure - breadcrumbs, menus, navlinks, etc. - to infer them. So make your site clean and well-designed, and get popular, and then they should show up.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...
Epic win Let’s make the real world more like a game.
I would find it difficult to go back to using only one SmartPhone. I carry two phones (work/personal) and often use both at the same time for different reasons. Usually it's as simple as needing to look at one e-mail for reference and write another -- or I run IM on one and browse the web on another. Even though the Android phone multi-tasks it's too bulky and unusable to really jump between apps for multi-tasking mostly due to the lack of a taskbar or dock but also because the built-in apps simply aren't friendly to it. You can't "alt-tab" between two e-mail messages for example. The app simply isn't designed for that. Network redundancy has saved me a couple times too. I can be pretty confident I won't be without coverage anywhere I go.
Disappointing, the lyrics do not pertain to HTML syntax.
"You seem to have this idea that when we legalize all drugs, all drug-related violence will stop and we won't have any other problems. It's not as simple or as easy as this."

No. Read my comment above and you'll see that that's not my idea. I'm just saying that dumb people should be allowed to remove themselves from the genetic pool.
> If you assume that it's just British rule, that assumes that it's random.

That is a very insightful point. That single sentence severely weakens grandparent's argument -- the un-stated assumption that the British rolled a die, and randomly picked among a set of uniformly desolate and completely undeveloped countries in order to colonize them.
Keep up the good work. If you ever want some more thoughts/comments or someone to bounce ideas off feel free to drop me a message at schaecher.michael at gmail
You know, I had bzr 1.17 or similar. I upgraded to 2.1 and got the same time (slightly over 25 seconds). git version is 1.7.0.3. Both on my mac (I don't do Windows). In both cases, it was whatever "<cmd> clone <url>" does by default. So pretty much, all defaults all around.

I mentioned this because someone else was saying it was as fast. I don't know anything about the n= things... I just ran "bzr log > /dev/null" and "git log > /dev/null" (my shell automatically times all commands).

I tend to use and search logs a lot in my projects. With 2s to generate a log output, you won't think about the cost of looking through the whole thing for something (I did similar in an active hg project earlier today).

I do get your point. It's not a... holistic benchmark. In another thread, someone called fowl on the article discussing size vs. bytes transferred. I thought it'd be better to think of that as time. Cloning roughly the same content via bzr and git (memcached master branch -- which is cloned at lp and contains just about the same history, though is somehow smaller at lp) takes a bit over 20 seconds and a bit under 4 seconds respectively.

I suppose it's valid to argue that you don't clone much, either. At some point, one would wonder whether you avoid certain things because they're slow.
I wish I had the "How do you stop people from refactoring too much?" problem. :)
I wish my app was anything near that sticky. The vast majority of my users are filling an immediate need, so I get something like 75% of sales within 24 hours of trial signup, 85% within a week, and 95% within a month. (Despite being surprisingly regular, those are the actual numbers straight out of my Rails console.)

I suppose that is the "trial user as picked flower" model, as opposed to the "trial user as fine wine" model.
i like the liberal point of view. But also find amusing in this writting the pictoresque display on how the protestants equate money to a god.
Ideas for Planning an Essay
When you are asked to write an essay –no matter if it is a 500, 1000 or 5000 words long-, the best you can do is to always start with a plan. Planning an essay makes things much easier.
jrockway is talking about the limitations of the iPad, not of netbooks.
It's an interesting experiment as far as I can see. Something on similar lines as http://phpjs.org/
DateBrowsr Startup - Help us grade 3M online dating photos
World's fastest Intel Xeon 5680 setup benchmarked
I was looking for something like this. Thanks!
that sounds even smarter if you take into account that he probably has dividend shares on apple
Virtualization, clustering, availability
How can you know that driving isn't fun if you don't have a license? There are many people (e.g. all of Finland) who find it quite fun :)
Hi, can you point us to the Henry Baker literature you mentioned? Thanks.

Edit : I found his page but am not sure which paper(s) you are specifically referring to.
Mekong tours
I tend to think that Google Chrome wasn't so much meant to be a super-secure browser for today but a pseudo OS for tomorrow...
Antonio, are you referring to the lack of the real human contact? I think the bonds in human relationship should be there, then emails and other things help with efficiency. She talked about this on building relationship by giving/helping others first.
"... Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: this is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet. If I wasn't offering punch lines, I'd never be standing there with egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. I would move through my act without pausing for the laugh, as though everything were an aside. Eventually, I thought, the laughs would be playing catch-up to what I was doing. Everything would be either delivered in passing, or the opposite, an elaborate presentation that climaxed in pointlessness. Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn't care if they laughed at all and that this act was going on with or without them ..."

Steve Martin describing how he hacks an audience for laughter (emotion) through telling stories. It's not often you get the theory behind the performance, so to me it was worth reading. Pitching is performance. Pay attention to the 'people hacks'.
why would you think someone in gov is that clever to begin with?
Mekong tour
> On the other hand base 2 should've been confusing average Joe for a long time now

Base 2 became not just confusing but seemingly 'fraudulent' when it comes to buying terabyte sized storage media. A user would expect to get 1TiB but is actually getting 1TB.

1TB = 1000^4 = 1000000000000B
1TiB = 1024^4 = 1099511627776B

That is quite a bit of a difference.

Am I the only computer geek who thinks that base 10 is more logical and consistent? If a byte (1B) is considered a unit, then 1KB should be 1000B, 1MB=1000^2B, 1GB=1000^3B, 1TB=1000^4B and so on?
It's definitely here to stay. Take for example Facebook gifts. Priced at just $1, if 35,000 people buy an FB gift everyday (out of 400m and growing), it translates into $1m of additional profit every month. We're talking about massive economies of scale. Whoever gets on the boat now has a chance to enjoy a near monopoly for sometime to come.
There was a similar story in the WSJ but I'm afraid its a bit early to say the world's most powerful economy has government debt that's about to take a nose-dive...

I mean seriously, the USA has about 23% of the world's accumulated GDP. Get real.
Seems like the ideal scenario is constantly accelerating wealth.
Does Form Follow Function?
i like the liberal point of view.

I do not know what so liberal about celebrating free market.

But also find amusing in this writting the pictoresque display on how the protestants equate money to a god.

I am not sure what you mean by this. He only mention a faith in free people, which probably mean that individuals have right to property, life, and liberty.
At the very poor extreme I agree, but I haven't found much of a correlation, and perhaps even a weak inverse correlation, once you get past "can afford to feed yourself". In particular, the people I know with professional jobs making $100k+ seem to mostly be less happy than the just-sort-of-making-it artist/musician types I know. And my Greek relatives are generally happier than my American relatives, despite being considerably poorer.

For my own part, I've been a grad student with a $20k stipend for years, and am pretty happy about it; I even feel reasonably well off, since there are tons of ways I could be more frugal if I really needed to (I spend a lot on beer and eating out). I guess having $30k or $40k or $100k might be nicer, but I can't imagine it'll be that big a difference? We'll see, I suppose.
@swombat Nice video :)

Very interesting.

I personally feel the user experience can be improved more by using draggable vectors for the onscreen drawing. Anti-aliasing would be big bonus too.
Peltier Associates Breaking and Fixing Wireless Security
Distributed CEO
In our team at Summify we are 3 technical co-founders. In this post I describe our "distributed CEO" system that makes things happen for the company in such a way that we all get to taste the CEO experience.
The tarnishing of China's reputation has been going on for decades. Is this some long term plan started by Reagan during the Cold War? Have you somehow been blind to any news regarding China all your life until now?
Straytex: Online procedural texture studio
Ask HN: Technology choices
I finished university last year, during that time I was always focused on open source technologies. Since leaving uni I tried to find full time work to get some experience before trying my hand at a startup, but I found it difficult to get work with open source technologies. So I started applying for graduate .NET positions, to my surprise I found it quite easy to get a full time role, the pay was even greater than what I expected it to be.

Anyway a few months on, I'm now really enjoying my work with the .NET framework, so much so that I don't really understand why most open source developers dismiss Microsoft's products? Is it the cost? I can understand why a startup might want to keep costs down, but there must be some historical aspect around Microsoft that I'm missing, my experience suggests to me that there tools are very good. Could someone please fill me in on what I'm missing?
You do adapt to travel as well, though. Seeing a new thing every day eventually does become "normal."
Do Experiences Or Material Goods Make Us Happier? (2009)
The actual study: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26169481/Happiness-for-Sale-Do-Exp...
Ah my apologies then, I misread it.
This is silly. He's on his way to make a good point, but fails when his main points become 1) no math 2) focus on stories and language early on.

The good point he could have arrived at is to put less emphasis on things a child is not immediately acquiring. It would be like trying to force-feed mashed potatoes down a drinking straw. Perhaps sometimes it's math. Perhaps sometimes it's music.

Instead, he just says, stories and language are the important part! Leave math for later!

What a buffoon. He started with a bigger picture that ended with a close-minded detail.

To the original author, remind yourself that "not everyone is you." Kids can grow up to be scientists, artists, doctors, lawyers, even gasp mathematicians! And we all take different paths, even at a young age.
Interestingly, the latter part of your argument may not hold true for certain types of experiences: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1224308
I've driven before, I just didn't get my license in the required timeframe.
You already pay for police to seek out and arrest drug users, courts to prosecute them, jails to hold them, and parole officers to keep track of them once they are out.

Treatment costs a hell of a lot less than that.

Sometimes being pragmatic is better than being idealistic.
Wish you were a genius? Just practise