skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try Haskell: An interactive tutorial in your browser
This is already on haskell.org and I know it was posted here in the early stages, but maybe a few maybe-interested-in-trying-Haskell-ers haven't heard of it and would like to try Haskell. As of this week there are 30 tutorial steps / 7 lessons, finishing at the type system (so far).

There's a lot more potential for this project (adding a CodeMirror editor with "loadable" code, allowing uploading of tutorials like a pastebin... but a tutorialbin, asking exercise questions which are then quickcheck'd, etc.), but I like to incrementally add and then get feedback.

For newbies to Haskell I would like your feedback/comments, if you have any. I'm hoping to reach fresh Haskell newbies here on Hacker News for an unbiased experience.

I asked a non-programmer friend to try it out a while ago and got some invaluable feedback. Send it to your friends, just to see how far they get! Post what they say! Anyone who's read something like Rocket Surgery Made Easy will be familiar with how invaluable feedback is.

I am also interested in hearing about general ideas on what you think would just be cool to see.

If you want to let me know about bugs please post them here: http://github.com/chrisdone/tryhaskell/issues Granted there are some browser/OS oddities but I can only test on so many! Bugfixes welcome! PM me on github.

Cheers!
I read that book when it came out more than a decade ago. There are newer and better books on the same subject,

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

indeed newer and better books than shown on the link I have just shared. One I particularly like, from a mainstream psychologist of considerable experience, is What Intelligence Tests Miss by Keith R. Stanovich.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

Stanovich includes a huge number of citations to current scholarly literature in his book, and amply makes the case that many important cognitive functions that make up "rationality" are missed by current IQ tests.
A long time ago, I tried to get torrenting to work, but it seems that Dropbox auto-deletes any .torrents. Has anyone managed to get this to actually work?
That's a really important question.

It should be possible to cross-file de-dup more than just images.

One important test to watch will be Ocarina's market success, or lack thereof.

EDIT: also, because of the growth of proprietary data stores in the cloud it becomes more and more lucrative to leverage this tech even if it's not a standard. E.g. if you were Amazon S3 compressing redundancies, you use JPEG on your interfaces but use a non-standardized algorithm on your backend.
This is already on haskell.org and I know it was posted here in the early stages, but maybe a few maybe-interested-in-trying-Haskell-ers haven't heard of it and would like to try Haskell. As of this week there are 30 tutorial steps / 7 lessons, finishing at the type system (so far).

There's a lot more potential for this project (adding a CodeMirror editor with "loadable" code, allowing uploading of tutorials like a pastebin... but a tutorialbin, asking exercise questions which are then quickcheck'd, etc.), but I like to incrementally add and then get feedback.

For newbies to Haskell I would like your feedback/comments, if you have any. I'm hoping to reach fresh Haskell newbies here on Hacker News for an unbiased experience.

I asked a non-programmer friend to try it out a while ago and got some invaluable feedback. Send it to your friends, just to see how far they get! Post what they say! Anyone who's read something like Rocket Surgery Made Easy will be familiar with how invaluable feedback is.

I am also interested in hearing about general ideas on what you think would just be cool to see.

If you want to let me know about bugs please post them here: http://github.com/chrisdone/tryhaskell/issues Granted there are some browser/OS oddities but I can only test on so many! Bugfixes welcome! PM me on github.

Cheers!
> They use Amazon's S3, so as far as not losing your files is concerned, you are as likely to lose files on dropbox as you are on any other services that relies on S3 for storage

Dropbox will sync on any computer you use though. That means that you have a copy per computer, plus the server.
Everybody on this site fancies themselves intelligent, prides themseleves and loves flattery. Everybody on this site is an atheist obsessed with evolution who won't admit they are NAZI's.

Read brave new world and chill.

I'll bet you think you'd love to talk with God about evolution, don't you? Be careful what you wish for.

God says...
lo pear numbering wilfully informing conquered revenged
odours Euodius needed easily experiments harmoniseth sentiment
permission shadow temporal confine conversation suppliant
charges transforming freeman assented of predestinated
syllable encumbrances considerable enact concernment faith
vaunt joined chance overboldness leaps balm meek USA ranged
namely Take wear restricted underwent Loving viper S skirmishes
Vanilla appearing forgiving washing gradually pilgrim
style knocked party bottom relaxedly law endeavoured Etexts
beseech

Brave New World is Christian:
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/1corinthians/1corinthians12.h...
Yeah, universities certainly never overstate the value of a degree.

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"
I see. Must have interpreted their net deficits as gross deficits per year instead. Thanks for clearing it up.
How can you contradict that the mechanic is better at analyzing car problems and riddles, while being worse at IQ tests?
I also wonder if it would be possible to establish a set of well known reference bits to compress against.

E.g. if you shipped an additional 10 MB of "data" with every browser, could you reduce the average image size on the internet by X% by leveraging that 10 MB?

(I have no idea; just an interesting thought exercise. Could make a cool masters thesis for someone.)
in my opinion, the standard IQ tests of today are moreso a test of how quickly you can learn or adapt and solve, rather than of what knowledge you have.

Your opinion is mistaken in part. Most IQ tests include items that are explicitly based on learned knowledge, and all are embedded in a cultural context. See IQ testing 101 by Alan S. Kaufman (the author of several IQ tests)

http://www.springerpub.com/product/9780826106292

http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Testing-101-Psych/dp/0826106293

for more information on item content of IQ tests and corrections of many common misconceptions about IQ testing.
Cool! Try Ruby was what convinced me to learn Ruby. Hopefully this will do the same for haskell.

Is there a way to bind variables? I can do things like "let a = 3 in a", but it seems that no state is stored between expressions?
Awesome! I would agree with everyone here. The first thing that comes to my mind is if there was a web app that you could easily plug into. It may not be a high concern but a certain demographic might prefer that.
How did she perform at her job for 28 years? If OK, that performance is a far better guide to her quality than any bits of paper she may or may not have. If not OK, they should have sacked her.

Once an employee has been working at an employer for a reasonable length of time (certainly a lot less than 28 years), the employer has adequate knowledge of how that employee performs at their job; and if the employee isn't up to it, they have the opportunity to end the employment. Therefore I think that after a certain interval (say a year or 2), an employer should not be able to use the accuracy or otherwise of an employee's CV to sack them.
Web Laureate Insight, "MixedInk: by myself sometimes good old hard work isn't..
Thanks, that's a great idea, I will use this approach for my next app.
This syntax is similiar to Stephen Colebourne's FCM proposal: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddhp95vd_6hg3qhc

That proposal also used the "#" symbol, with the following rationale: "The symbol is already used within Javadoc to separate the class name from the method name in exactly this manner. The method literal syntax merely brings the Javadoc convention into Java source code."

It's a reasonable choice for full first-class methods; it doesn't fit quite as nicely if Oracle only introduces closures as a syntax sugar for anonymous classes.

But I think it's OK anyway -- it's concise and even looks a bit like clojure :-)
whilst my IQ should have remained constant

IQ scores can and do change over the course of life.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1158919
What's your passion? Are you a fan of cryptography, fishing or religious fanatic? If you're looking for an interesting problem to attempt to fix in your spare time, make it something you care about! There's unlimited problems in the world and countless solutions.

(I'll be the "fiddly CSS guy" if you end up doing something fun that could use a little UI design).
I am everything but an apple fan and I agree with you. iPad changed the way we interact with computers, same as iPhone changed the way we used the phone and iPod the way we deal with music. That said: I don't have an iphone but a nexus one and I will be getting an android tablet when they will come out. Kudos to Apple for being able to show the way so many times over and over - but I still prefer open source and freedom.
Woman sues Google after being hit by a car while using walking directions
Re patents: If FB really did essentially 'copy' LB's feature (as opposed to independently inventing it without having first known about it), then they wouldn't be able to get a US patent. See 35 USC 102(f) at http://goo.gl/36yy.

Even if FB did independently invent the feature, LB's US-hosted and US-available feature might count as "prior art" that knocked out FB's ability to get a patent.

Of course, much depends on just what FB would try to claim.
Yet another example is the Salem Conjecture which notes that a large fraction of creationists with advanced degrees are engineers. Obviously, if you understand differential equations and studied heat transfer, you're perfectly well equipped to assess genomics and microphysiology!

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
BUACA Profile 2010 - Bikers United Against Child Abuse
I found http://www.korokithakis.net/node/116 to be closer to my experiences.
"Believe me."

Why should I believe you?
While not the original poster, I'm sure there's others of us that wouldn't mind seeing that code (myself included). I wouldn't mind stepping away from MailChimp either (although I've got no complaints with spam levels).
The point of firing her isn't to get rid of a bad worker; it is based on game theory. The firing hurts both MIT and the dean, but it should dissuade people from lying in these kinds of situations.
It's interesting that that "quotation" from Albert Einstein, a sentiment I would love to attribute to him, because it encapsulates an idea I share about the importance of creativity, seems never to be traced to one of Einstein's actual writings. Has anyone ever checked the latest edition of Quotable Einstein

http://www.amazon.com/New-Quotable-Einstein-Alice-Calaprice/...

(I have checked the preceding edition)

http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Einstein-Albert/dp/0691026963...

to see if that is a genuine Einstein quotation? In the English-speaking world, Einstein is second only to Mark Twain in having sayings attributed to him that he never said.

http://www.amazon.com/Quote-Sleuth-Manual-Tracer-Quotations/...
Ask HN: Identifying target market before you have a market
Hi guys, was wondering if any of you had any insight on how to look at this. My startup is basically a service that lets you share links by creating a link blog.

We're starting to promote, and I started wondering: well, what kind of people do I target to use this? Bloggers? People who use competing/overlapping services? Even if I wanted to try and lure Digg'ers for example, I'm troubled because I don't know what kind of people they are, or have to find them specifically enough.

It lead me to wonder how services like Twitter, Digg, and Reddit promoted early. They really didn't have anybody specific to target, so how did they get people to try their services? At the earliest stage when you have no users and nobody knows your product. How, and who, do you get the word out to?

Thanks
I like it. With the size of hard drives now, it seems like that would be a good trade-off against bandwidth (which is scarcer). It would save bandwidth and speed things up, two things much more desirable than a few more megs of HDD.

I suggest that you make a blog post or Tell HN about this and post it as a top level submission. I'd love to hear more opinions about this.
Louise Bourgeouis, sculptor, dies at 98
I think the most important part is - "but the bigger benefit is you know how the entire system is architected and the code you’ve written impacts millions of people".

Seriously, you feel empowered when you know why the system is architected this way and not that way. Its immense satisfaction when you can see through how the entire flow works, how a new feature fits into the bigger product vision, how to debug complex issues by traversing through bunch of different code hierarchies/directories, etc.

You get this kind of wisdom only when you're in the those first few.

On the side note, it would be great to hear first-hand stories from her about how she got hired, how much salary + equity (in approx. range) she received, how was the performance rewards system for an early engineer.
I think Go might become a viable alternative to C for systems programming.
I went to the Wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins#Neuroscience

to make sure you were referring to the author whose book I have perused before. I will note for the record that Hawkins has not won wide acceptance for his view of intelligence among other researchers to date.
If you list it on your CV, someone may "remember" that they thought you were really smart but likely won't remember what gave them that impression. That is a win.

If you go to a Mensa social gathering, you may develop a meaningful relationship loosely predicated on having something positive in common. That would be a win.

I personally don't place much stock in the IQ tests but don't think there is anything wrong with joining. It's not much different than joining an alumni association or any other affinity group.
That might work, but hardly all people have a credit card.

And the post office certainly has no need to know it.
"What I can't understand is biology; it is unimaginably complex"

Not understanding it does not imply mean that extraordinary work is being done in biology, either. My guess would be that only "incremental" advances are happening in biology, too, just because that is true of most fields of human endeavor. It is only looking backwards at the cumulative progress of many incremental steps when you can see that an amazing amount of progress has occurred.
Nonsense. The link is there for a reason or it is there superfluously. It's up to the user/reader to decide to follow the link.

Having said that, it is poor writing to simply link to an aside and not summarize or succinctly quote, in the body of your text, the link's referent. This means that the reader _must_ go off on the link to in order to understand your point. This I find very annoying and widely practiced. (It is also widely practiced to assume that a reader already is familiar with another piece or concept and _not_ linking to further information...)

The bigger problem is that our browsers and web pages are poorly designed for such types of referencing. Earlier, pre-web, browsers tried a number of models, but all required lots of screen real estate. See Ted Nelson's writings for further examples (wink...)
I think that Andreesen sorta assumes that anyone who's watching/reading his stuff is interested in the big hits. This talk was given at the "Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders" series, for example.

If that's not your goal, you should probably seek out other entrepreneurs who're in an area more like your own. That's sorta implied though - does it have to be spelled out?

I also wouldn't be surprised if DHH also said that the market was important. Without a market, you have nobody to buy your product, which doesn't make it much of a product after all. If you're willing to settle for a smaller market, there're more of them that you can go after and less competition for each, but that still doesn't absolve you from finding one.
See also this press release: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2010/2010053...
Sure - it's a WTF. But if you want to show that X is better than Y to professionals, you don't say "Y sucks omgwtfbbq". We're (mostly) capable of reading lists of dependencies and a summary like "dependencies of X are: ... and weight ...MB, while dependencies of Y are: ... and weight ...MB, but we don't see the reason for dependencies: ...". Pointing fingers and laughing usually makes people aggressive, instead of showing a valid point. It's not dumb - there's a reason why it's installed as a dependency, even though it has bad sides too.

Latch wrote "The goal is to show Windows folk" - there are ways to show things without ridiculing the opposition. It's HN, not some other service, so let's try to keep the level high.
This was news to me. Imagine that world! From the article:

Tsar Nicholas II approved a planned tunnel in 1905. Its cost was estimated at $65,000,000, and $300M including all the railroads. These hopes were dashed with the outbreak of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
There was some really forward-thinking work on Fractal Image Compression in the late 90s, but largely due to time-efficiency, plummeting storage costs, and patent encumbrances, it's never caught on.
"Before we start to actually use C++, we need to determine a set of coding standards that will apply to use of C++ within GCC."

So we have another two months of bike shedding right here.
Link to the original article copied by the submitted blog post:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/05/29/if-google-told-you-to...
and don't mark the box titled 'Let him keep the files'
http://lesswrong.com/lw/tx/optimization/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/va/measuring_optimization_power/

Eliezer Yudkowsky described this pretty well.
As an alternate to Truecrypt volumes, I use Windows Scheduler to run batch files that create 7-zip archives and copy them to my Dropbox folder. 7-zip can create AES-256 encrypted archives.
Until the machine(s) can learn without human help. Maybe they will learn our tacit knowledge, or even stranger, develop tacit knowledge between itselves.
IIRC JPEG 2000 has some patent FUD and JPEG XR has "it's from Microsoft" FUD.
Measuring Optimization Power[2008]
"On top of the basics I want to save $500 (minimum) each month and have $2k or so in the "misc" category."

I would recommend swapping the save and misc amounts.
The Secrets of Coral Castle and pyramids EXPLAINED by Leedskalnin's theory
I very much doubt that this is true. Raw data by itself is almost never definitive. Meaningful conclusions often require that data be manipulated in fairly extreme ways. Each one of those manipulations provides fertile ground for denialist critique.

To give you one example with which I'm familiar, several research groups have attempted to measure the number of fatalities associated with the Iraq War. One of the standard techniques for doing so involves cluster sampling, i.e., picking a small number of locations and conducting multiple interviews near each cluster site. One research group doing this noticed that the mortality rate from their Fallujah cluster was much much much higher than any of the other clusters. So they purposefully excluded it from their analysis although they kept it as part of their raw data and explained why they removed it. As a result, their total death toll was much lower than it would have been. Denialists immediately criticized them for manipulating data so as to inflate the death toll. How did they do that? Very simply: if you omit the outlier, then the spread of the probability distribution shrinks dramatically. If you include the outlier, then the width of the distribution expands so far out that it encompasses zero excess deaths.

Now in either case, the distribution was screaming that there were many excess deaths, but these denialists claimed that scientists were reducing the average fatality count just so they could exclude the minute possibility that the war decreased death rates. Obviously, there is no way these scientists could win: if they include the outlier, then they're deliberately inflating the death toll, but if they exclude the outlier, then they're manipulating data to obscure the possibility that the war saved lives. If the scientists had just quietly dropped their Falujah data, this controversy never would have happened. In this case, releasing data just gave denialists fodor for crazy attacks.
Low Muscle Mass Linked To Type 2 Diabetes
> 1. No it's not. It's mediocre at best. See my previous post.

of course it is

> No you can't, not anymore than you can reuse Java code between client and server with GWT. The difference between a browser and a client environment is just so great.

pure bs, obviously you don't know what you are talking about. I am reusing extensively between server and client, not only for simple stuff like validations, but also to render graphics (have a server side canvas implementation that renders to svg), to perform web crawling (I use a simple version of envjs and jQuery/sizzle on the server side for crawling), i use the same template engine on server side and client side, etc, etc...

> 4. Ever heard of Jython?

Why would I be interested in Jython??!
Offloading Human Memory to the Cloud
How did she perform at her job for 28 years?

Her actual performance was at times quite controversial. I will defer to the MIT students and alumni here (remember, some of those will have been admitted when she was in charge of admission at MIT) to comment on what they think the pros and cons of her legacy are.
In my case: Change to buy iPad = Spendable Income * Priority or Interest * General profligacy.

I wouldn't mind an iPad, but I hate spending money. It is not so much an argument of value contra price in my case. I'm sure it will be a great toy, albeit one I am sure to find much more interesting in a second-generation edition. Not having any of the video-streaming tools outside of the U.S. is also a bummer.
It seems you haven't read much else there, and have missed the point; it's not about the scientific details of obesity. And what exactly would be the "linguistic meaning" of the word disease?
The telegraph is a footnote in history, but it certainly transformed communication. As did radio drama and penny dreadful novels.

Instead of having different media, we have a convergence of datatypes and a divergence of soft presentation gadgets, both "real" and "virtual." What effect would data glasses, that didn't make you look like a dork, combined with ambient networking have on media?

Throw in virtual reality and truely smart software agents and I've just described the anime _Dennō Coil_ which everyone interested in this topic should check out. (As well as the user interface and displays visible in _Pale Cocoon_.)
HTML5 Starter Pack
You should check out their blog, they really seem to be making an effort to do just that.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/
When I did experiments with RoR versus Haskell via FCGI, Haskell had around a two orders of magnitude performance advantage under load and only required a single OS process.
I have not read Stanovich's book but it does not appear to be an appropriate introduction to the subject of intelligence. I suspect you recommend these "newer and better" books because they suit your ideological purposes, not because they are better researched or more informative.
no prob, thanks to CommonJS it was extremely easy to switch from Narwhal to the RingoJS: www.ringojs.org