skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Functional language advocates have been making these kinds of claims for years but I don't think they have yet produced any hard evidence that languages like Haskell actually do increase programmer productivity in typical real-world scenarios. It may be that they do but I wouldn't be surprised if we find that the kinds of errors they minimize aren't the kind that often impede development in practice and that the strictures of FP languages, particularly lazy ones, make some common programming tasks significantly more difficult.

People also like to claim that functional languages are particularly well suited for concurrent programming, but, as Simon Peyton Jones has himself said, just getting rid of mutable state doesn't automatically make your code parallelizable.

People used to hold up Darcs as a Haskell success story but as far as I can tell people have hacked together DVCS systems in "inferior" languages like C and Python that are at least as robust and featureful.
My understanding is that this is pointless, or perhaps counter-productive.

While the patents are owned by Apple, they are not necessary to achieve the Mac OS X look, rather they are needed for old skool Windows style fonts. Think about how old this technology must be if the patents are expiring and what fonts looked like then.

I set Ubuntu to ignore hints entirely and it looks just like Mac OS X. Just compare a simple free font with no hints on Mac vs. Windows or read here about CSS fonts looking rubbish on Windows.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/blog/2009/11/what-to-expect-from...

This site tells you how to get the windows look on Linux, I've not tried it because that's the last thing I want but it talks about the patented code I think.

http://www.sharpfonts.com/
You're better off finding a skilled developer who also does design rather than vice-versa -- it will be easier for you to judge his design skills (which are his secondary) right off the bat from his work samples than it will be to judge his development skills.

My opinion is biased though, as I am a developer myself. I think intelligent developers have enough skills to pick up Photoshop/Illustrator and hack together great designs, granted you give them guidance, inspiration, and a few examples of styles that you dig.
Accepting your premise: maybe that need-for-reinvention makes it more valuable -- it can't be mass-produced by the printing press.

Contesting your premise: these intelligences are passed down in other ways -- including ways that we hyperlexics barely perceive well enough to properly value.
This is actually a Gizmodo article which MSN is reposting.
Be yourself, be honest, and put yourself out there.
Let people make their own decisions, you never know what will happen.
Nope, your revised code is correct.
Photo: iPad Temperature Warning Dialog
I can't possibly agree. The lack of visuals is one of the greatest selling points of books, for me. I get to do the imagining. My vision of the story is not constrained by what some director could imagine. Books with images are inherently inferior to books without images.
Perl: Kicking your languages ass since 1988
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -- Clay Shirky

This is brilliantly well put and one of the most important reasons capitalism works so much better than any other system: destruction of the preserving institutions is built in to the process.

"Too big to fail", on the other hand, is something completely different.
Anyone else feeling this the beginning for a wave of iPad complaints?
Who's using Google App Engine?
I'm looking for a scalable web hosting provider which is free or cheap at entry level, and which isn't a VPS (I don't want to bother with server maintenance). Google App Engine is the only one that comes to mind.

What big sites use Google App Engine? Have you tried it? Is it flexible enough to run big, serious projects on?
I'm not arguing that we should not simplify instruction at lower levels; I'm simply arguing that there are ways to simplify without creating inaccuracies: to avoid using leaky analogies, for instance.
Facebook Sues Data Geek, but That Doesn't Solve Its Privacy Problem
Can't really comment on the moral side of things, but from a practical perspective: surely there must be women out there in the same (tragic) situation? Have you looked for a "dating for the terminally ill" website or local group?
I don't see how it's a complaint. It's informative. Who expected that?
Man, all the best. I hope a miracle can save you. I admire your courage.
With the amount of people making comments on anti-iPad posts to the tune of "don't turn OpenSource/anti-DRM/technology into a religion," I feel obligated to point out that all of these "iPad is the future" posts are in the process of turning the iPad into a 'religion' as well.

The iPad will only get so far if Apple is the only manufacturer/distributor. That being said it would probably be more accurate to say:

Apple's iPad will take the computer world by storm.

(as in: will be a huge success, selling many units), or

Devices like Apple's iPad are the future.

To say "Apple's iPad is the future" paints of a picture of the future where Apple has replaced Microsoft as the 800lb. gorilla of the software industry, and all software that can be run on devices has to be approved by Apple.

[ Note: if you want to respond to this post with "if you don't like it don't buy it," please indicate whether or not you are in the "iPad will be the only device in the future" camp. If you are, you are effectively telling me to choose not to use computers if I don't like the iPad (since you feel that the iPad will be the only computer device in the future). ]
I'd advise against "going into asshole mode". She'll notice the illogical change in behaviour and very likely put two and two together when she finds out you died of a known illness a short time later. She'll know you weren't really an asshole and just feel guilty because she couldn't be there to give comfort in the end, and a lifetime of "I should have seen the signs" et al.
Exotic 'Electroweak' Star Predicted
Maybe a possible option is trying to find someone who faces a similar catch-22 situation to date too?

(But this could end up being doubly difficult for both the people too... don't really have a good perspective on this.)
Oh, please.

From your submission history I see that you like Apple... but not seeing that this could be seen as a negative thing is a bit over the top, don't you think?
"Blinking and beeping and flashing!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7DYbDoh0R8&feature=youtu...
The same dialog is on the iPhone also.

EDIT: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2101
Across the Country, Fans Gather for iPad
Gimme your credit card so I can do that. Since you don't think my money is worth anything I don't think yours is either.

I swear, I'll only use it for media I stream to my iPad
This is what happens when I don't have an iPhone. I knew that moisture could be a problem. I'd never heard of heat before.
Better to have loved and lost than never having loved at all.
What's an ipad? :p
As others mention, another potentially incorrect causation/correlation confusion. Smiling for you baseball photo is not necessarily indicative of smiling in general. Perhaps. But it's quite possible that the players who smiled for their photo were already well-established, could afford to seem less professional, etc. And if they were more successful by the time of that photo, then perhaps their careers on average were more successful, and hence they had easier, more-stress free and perhaps longer lives.

Or to continue the success-at-time-of-photo idea, maybe they smiled because the photographer smiled at them more, because the photographer was more familiar with them. Could by any number of reasons that the two things were correlated, all of which wouldn't necessarily imply that if you, reader, smile more, then you, reader, will live longer.

Though that's probably true. But yeah, easy to forget that a smile itself is very much an effect of something else. Concluding that if you 'smile more', something good will happen is sort of a false optimization. Smarter to figure out what you should be smiling about. And if you're not, be in search of why.

P.S. In other news, the New York Giants? Really? There's more concrete psychology in that Freudian slip. And then you look at who they chose for the info graphic. The Brooklin Dodgers? Nice try, Boston.
> Most RISC CPUs convert their RISC instructions into RISC internally, then run them!

A RISC processor is a processor with no microcode virtual machine level. These processors aren't RISC in anyone's view but marketing's. Likely, there are very few true RISC processors still being designed (for speed; processors for embedding are a different story.)
That quote was from Jobs in 1997. Now look where Apple is now and see if they've made any similar comments. Apple was more vulnerable back then.

The fact of the matter is Microsoft executives are still openly hostile towards free software, always threatening they own IP that overlaps with a lot of open source. This is why Amazon pays Microsoft for Linux patent coverage and why TomTom gets sued for using open source FAT32 drivers. So it makes sense to be wary.
honest question, do you think that Apple wouldn't have built the iPad if not for the Kindle?
Yeah, learn the basics of divide and conquer, greedy, and dynamic programming algorithms and you will be doing well. Of course to learn that you also need to learn how to apply those to basic data structures such as graphs, skip lists, and various n-ary trees.

The algorithms that the MIT lectures go over in the introduction to algorithms course should be a good stepping stone to knowing enough to get you by in an interview for a junior programming job.

MIT course: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

I guess I should amend this to say that if this is the first time going through the material you might just want to pay cursory attention to the big-oh notation proofs and just look at the overall speed of the algorithm. Ignore the proofs and look at the result. Though in a job scenario they will want to know the overall running time of the algorithm that you created so it is beneficial to know. (IE quick-sort is generally a good algorithm and will run in O(n logn) on the average but there is a degenerate case in which it will run O(n^2) namely a sorted list.
We have heard all of this before. With cdroms, interactive television, and the World Wide Web supposedly supplanting books. Perhaps the sea change has come, but that change is too late for me. I prefer the immersive quality of hundreds of pages of linear text from a single author.
How do you feel about cryonics? Is it something you would consider?
I've spoken with two people who fell completely in love with someone who died relatively shortly afterwards. Neither of them regretted the affair at all.

(Though the scenarios are different in one aspect; both died of accidents, not known illnesses.)
10 Google Chrome Extensions for Boosting Your Productivity
When I mentioned this to a particularly entrepreneurial friend a while back, that was his first instinct. However, I think it just exacerbates problems. For one, it severely restricts the pool of people so that the probability of finding someone I genuinely am interested in is far less likely. Secondly, for me part of this whole paradigm is having a family -- kids. (I'm 26, btw.) Having two parents who got disease at a young age is not great for a variety of reasons.

If the Chordoma Foundation or someone else could yield a breakthrough in treatment -- a real possibility -- my whole situation changes. For me, possibly more than for most people, this makes my argument stronger. They've been in operation for three years and already a lot has been learned. (More than in the past 20 years!) Consequently, I think the equation reduces to me getting to the bad point in sickness within three-to-five years, or them getting successful before then.

(Ignoring the very high probability of recurrence, I am perfectly healthy and have been since my surgery five years ago. Considering the median time to recurrence is 9-12 months and median survival time is 6 years, I am in a favorable and lucky bracket.)
Editorialize the title much? Can you just switch this back to the NYT's title?
I believe in advoacy by doing things, and yes, arguments without dollar figures attached are less convincing.

Studies on programmer productivity are rare, but a different argument might be found in where Haskell (for example) is used when correctness matters. For example, in hydraulic control of vehicles at Eaton, or secure cryptographic algorithms at Galois. Python isn't going to fly when you need to convince people of correctness, while Haskell (for example) does have tools and approaches that work.

I wrote a post last year on the collective experiences of engineers at Galois after using Haskell for the past decade, which has some nice anecdotes, http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/04/27/engineering-large-proj...

The other data point is the way finance has jumped on functional programming -- often because they can see a (huge) dollar figure in (small?) improvements in productivity or correctness. Jane Street, Barclay's, Credit Suisse, ABN Amro, Standard Chartered, JP Morgan and others (http://cufp.org) don't use FP because it is a fad.
Show HN: Weekend project, "I love you, but"
I built a little app that lets people anonymously send messages to other people -- though, I purposely tried to target it towards people that might really like this sort of stuff. :)

Truthfully, I think I overheard some high schoolers saying "I love you, but..." a million times at a coffee shop yesterday but I digress.

Would you guys mind harassing your friends in the interest of helping me iron out some kinks?

http://www.ilubut.com
The release date of anything always coincides with the beginning of the complaints.
Posting this is a good start. Finding talented people(not friends or acquaintances prior) randomly to help develop an idea for free is very challenging. Even more so if you have no technical skills. If you do or do not have technical skills just start up this project on the side. A few hours every weekend. It may take longer but you will be glad you did this! If you have no technical skills go to odesk.com and hire someone. This is what I did and along the way I taught myself front end languages and the person I hired in India is now my partner & friend.

Good luck!
The title is a summarized quote. I wanted to use the entire quote as the title but there is an 80 character limit. Here is the quote:

"Many of the people waiting for the iPad had a vague sense that they were involved in yet another big Apple moment, although they could not precisely say how they would use the tablet computer"

So no I didn't really editorialize, because it's the quote that I thought was significant.

I guess my objective was to spark a discussion about why people are buying this thing if they don't know how they will use it. Because it's a big apple moment?
The sentiment is expressed in the article's fourth paragraph, so at least it's not a misrepresentation.

It is not, however, a very interesting article.
Perl -- the world's premier write-only language.
> it loses any speed advantage if it takes 10x as long to get the next instruction from memory.

I'm just thinking out loud... but what if instructions in memory were simply compressed, and the CU's decode step were a decompression algorithm, rather than lots of opcode-specific lookups? It would still be a RISC processor, basically, just with a decompression coprocessor.
A iPad which is constantly too hot could be seen as a negative thing. The existence of temperature sensors inside the device and the existence of a warning dialog? Uhm, hardly, I guess?
What about all of the energy savings that computers bring us, Greenpeace?

It's a lot more efficient to make a couple Google searches than to drive to the library.

It's a lot more efficient to buy something on Amazon and have it delivered by UPS, which can combine trips like crazy, than to drive to the store--or possibly several stores--to buy it.

It's a lot more efficient that I used Campfire as an integral part of working remotely last summer rather than if I had had to fly across the country for the job.

Sure, it is still important to reduce energy consumption, and lots of computing doesn't directly replace more energy-intensive tasks (sending a tweet rather than ... driving to all of my friends' houses to tell them a very short message and then leave?), but computing has lead to lots of gains.
This seems to be directed at the gaggle of ideological extremists that have hounded and insulted de Icaza for years because he dared suggest that Microsoft had a pretty good idea with .NET and C#. Sadly though, it's precisely those people who will pay the least attention to this.
Ask HN: Would you like to receive current movie trailers by email ? 
Dear HN community,

I have been thinking about the idea of building a quick app, that will send you new movie trailers to your inbox.

Would you use it ?

Thanks
You should write a blog post with your thoughts about the launch in it, and submit that, instead of submitting other stories with a spin on it.
Isn't hinting taken into account even with sub-pixel antialiasing? I believe that's why Windows fonts appear more crisp

http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0120a86...
vs
http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0120a86...

I miss the sharp glyphs :-/ Now that Win7 has vertical subpixel antialiasing for smoother scrolling, I really feel OSX needs an improvement of it's font rendering system.
The "Themes by Google" ones are a little better.
I'd call Apple products "hot-house orchids" except that orchids like it hot and humid. I once had to return a Nano that had water damage-- except that I hadn't gotten it wet. The support bob on the phone said it could be water damaged by keeping it in a pocket while working out. Isn't that a common use case for an iPod Nano?
Every beginning is an ending and every ending is a beginning. Every time you gain something, you set yourself up for pain when you lose it. Every time you lose something, you've made more room in your life for a new blessing to come. Life is an ebb and flow of pain, pleasure, suffering, ease, gain and loss. Fighting necessary suffering of life only amplifies the suffering. My advice is that if you want companionship, then pursue it. As long as you are open and honest with your would-be lover it should work.
The fact still remains that wchar_t is still a royal pain to use across platforms. Sure, it defines the size of a single character consistently within the platform. But it doesn't define what encoding that is. USC-2? USC-4? And the fact is: different compilers define it differently, which sucks in practice.
Spin implies misrepresentation. As the other comment noted I did not misrepresent anything.
WTF, man? What kind of bullshit comment is that? You come here asking for advice and I post what I thought was an attempt at helping and you shit on my business? That is low class.
Here's another catch-22: the depth of grief that someone experiences when losing a loved one is equal to the height of joy that they experienced when the lover was alive.

The solution is not to avoid deep love, it's to love deeply and be okay with grieving deeply.
The correctness argument is interesting, but certainly plenty of critical-to-be-correct software has been written in imperative languages too. I'd like to see something closer to hard numbers on bug counts, man hours etc on similar projects in Haskell or ML vs C++ or Java, for instance. I realize it's hard to find a truly apples to apples comparison here.

The uptake of FP in finance is interesting. I'd like to hear more about exactly how FP is being used in these contexts. Is it used in a narrow, specialized domain or broadly? To what extent are the advantages of FP in this domain realizable in others? Is FP only suitable for small, elite teams or can mainstream programmers pick it up with the right training? To what extent does the less mature or less conventional toolchain offset the advantages of the language itself?
This is a generalization of Neil K's law of software consultancy: "Any firm that calls itself a solutions provider is actually a problem provider".

I mean that literally. The consultant offers a solution to an acute problem, in exchange for the client voluntarily accepting a chronic problem.

Typically, only open source or open standard technologies actually solve problems.
I was thinking the same. Also, all kind of bets among friends could be quickly resolved with this service. There are really infinite use cases here (you could check the weather with this for instance), not to mention the "dark" side ... you know "I want a picture of boobies and the Eiffel towel in the background" :)
Submitter must be working for Fox News.
Sorry, but I don't really understand your post.

The fact that an idea is old doesn't mean it's outdated or useless - the patents in question cover functionality that is a major part of Apple's TrueType file format, and FreeType was using an algorithmic workaround to get a similar effect while avoiding the patent (see: http://www.freetype.org/patents.html). It's also likely that these patents also apply to the later OpenType format, which was derived from TrueType.

The cause of "fuzzy fonts" complaints in Windows is ClearType, which is a implementation of sub-pixel rendering, which is rather different from the broader concept of hinting.

The Sharp Fonts website seems to be simply about installing Microsoft's Webfonts on Linux, although it does mention the issue of them looking poor if BCI is disabled in FreeType due to these now-expired patents.
language's (or languages')
I have seen this warning once in almost three years of iPhone use, after the phone had been in a hot car. I don't think we can assume that the iPad is faulty simply from the existence of this message.
A few qualms I have after attempting to use it as my default for a while:

- the layout and font of the results page really bugs me. Century Gothic and Trebuchet are a lot harder to read than Helvetica/Arial, and it just looks goofy for something I need to read quickly and dispassionately about 100 times per day. I really suggest something more utilitarian, e.g., Verdana of HN/reddit would be much better.

- The infinite scroll seems like a good idea in theory, but in reality the growing length of the page makes it harder for me to sense the rank of the current link I'm looking at or where I am on the page. Both Google and Bing tried this kind of display, and abandoned it after a while... Could you at least number your result links?

- To add to that, your headings like "In abbreviations and acronyms", "Other Uses" and "Web links" that divide your infinite list are very small, the same color as other text, and easy to miss. The sections that narrow my search look almost identical to the actual web links. This makes me do some disruptive context checking to discern whether I am going to another web page or searching for something else on DuckDuckGo. Note how your and Google's "Did you mean:" statement is bright red, you should apply the same elevated importance to your disambiguation sections.

- I can't search for an address and immediately see a map of the location.

- You don't suggest image results for things that people almost certainly want images for, e.g., animals, celebrities, or landmarks. I then have to switch to another search engine for that which is an extra step.

Overall, I like what you're doing, I just feel like you need to make some serious improvements to match with the UX of Google or Bing! I can't knock your results or your privacy policy; both those things have seemed to be pretty good so far.
Globish: the worldwide dialect of the third millennium
What do you mean? Can't a bad-ass be a good guy?