skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest advantage I've noticed so far is that once it works it just keeps on working, it is almost like it is hard to create bugs in functional code than it is in imperative code.

This must have something to do with the lack of side effects.

For some fun I coded up a small site in PHP in a functional style (I can see a lot of HN'ers gouge out their eyeballs at this sentence, apologies, it was just an experiment), and it gave me a lot more practice in reading functional code.

But the side effect free trick had - pun intended - a side effect by itself, the code worked the first time out after writing it, and that's unusual for a 1500 lines or so project, once the minor syntactical problems were dealt with (mostly quoting issues).

That really was unexpected, if there is any concrete explanation for that (other than blind luck) I'd like to hear it, and if this is more common in the 'functional world'.
I had not even heard of the site before it was posted here. I'm almost ready to check out with a decent order.
This morning I updated the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book (http://www.railstutorial.org/) accordingly. Happily, since the changes between versions were minor, this mainly involved

s/2\.3\.5/2\.3\.6/

:-)
Welcome to HN, the meeting place of finest fashion tastes and trend setters.
Funny you should mention forth, I never even thought of forth that way (I did some forth long ago), but I can see the parallel, with the stack being the 'intermediate' that gets passed from function to function.

Never heard of 'factor' yet, I'll have a look at it.

Thanks!
I really don't get why people don't like the Sense UI?
I've had the G1 and now the N1, but i think the Sense UI i've tested on the G1 with some Hero-ROM was awesome.. it just was far too slow for the G1.
There Once Was an Ugly Duckling
Potential employers perceived my four years in Microsoft as being extremely valuable when I left in 2007.

Just make sure you leave on good terms. I still chat with my last manager on occasion, and expect that I could get back in without too much trouble if things ever got really hairy out here.

Also, I looked at your LinkedIn profile, and recommend describing your accomplishments in less HR-centric terms: an 'exceeded' contribution rating is great, but it might not mean much to a hiring manager at a Madrona portfolio company. Like alain said elsewhere, be more specific with what you achieved.
I think there are too many stories, it's like a firehose. We should concentrate on killing more bad stores so the amount of stuff on Hacker News is a reasonable amount for someone to read.

Quality, not quantity.
I have some influence over certain hiring decisions at a startup. I'd look at experience like that and think "this guy is probably pretty awesome." The MS name might be a bit tainted, but there's no doubt that they have a lot of very talented engineers, and if you really did pioneer the use of data semantics within Bing, well that's pretty impressive.

That said, we'd look at that experience and guess that you would probably not be interested in working at our startup-sized salaries, so I wouldn't expect much effort to recruit you in the first place. The other thing we'd need to make sure about is that you're not stuck doing things "The Microsoft Way (tm)"; you'd be joining a very different culture and if you're not going to fit in, it's not going to work.
Towards Cloud Supercomputing
How does a team of 35 design for 400 million Facebook users?
Factor is interesting, because it tries to be Lisp in concatentive form. Because of this, it has a lot of interesting and powerful abstractions that make you rely on the order of the stack a lot lot less (as they like to say idiomatic factor doesnt use the stack and Factor has more in common with Lisp than with Forth). Its well worth a try, though its got a pretty steep learning curve.
I am assuming that it's the public school system we're talking about here. The $20,000 is from our taxes.
You can very well choose to stay at home and educate your children yourself and pocket the $20k, if that works for you.
In my opinion, we seldom learn everything from 1 or 2 sources.
You can provide your offspring with math & science but what if your offspring is also interested in music, language, literature, drama etc.? Or any other subject that is not offered in the school system?

I am just advocating for the child. As parents we're in the best position(mostly) to judge what our children's needs are.
Web 2.0 companies settling in San Francisco
funny he is using gmail rather than mobileme
for me #1 thing is to use google to see how many searches are there a month for relevant keywords.

If you know that 18,100 people a month search for "website monitoring" you know that there is some market for it.

Then of course you gotta check for other competition on that keyword to make sure there isn't someone doing the same exact thing you plan to do
I think it is going to be an iPod Touch with 3G, a video camera and OS4.0 for ~$300. I haven't heard any rumors of it yet, but I think it can be disruptive.
I think at a company like Microsoft you have a lot to do with whether or not the work is boring. There is a lot of political/organizational dysfunction that comes with a massive company that can make things a little tedious or boring. My experience has been generally positive and I have been able to focus on interesting problems for most of my time here.
After money has changed hands, here in Ontario at least, it is a violation of the consumer Protection Act to withhold the goods and renegotiate the price and a company is legally liable up to $250,000 for each infraction in punitive damages.

If they take your money and don't have the item, they have to refund you or provide a like product at the same or discounted price, cannot be more than 10% more than the listed price or it violates another subsection of the law for price estimates. Or they're back into the above and $250,000 in punitive damages.

If they don't take your money, they're open for a suit for advertising the product and not providing it at the listed price. At this point it is merely on the judges discretion, and doesn't fall under the CPA. However, considering every product was capped at $50 and no one noticed, they would really be up shit creek without a paddle. It's a gross mistake and they made no attempt to reconcile the error (you know by shutting down the site) until 6am because they made no effort to check their pricing accuracy.

Like I said, they'd be open to a $1.6m lawsuit + the cost of legal fees and considering they obviously made no effort to check their prices, I don't see how they would have a defence. This isn't one little item that slipped through the net, it's the whole fucking store including the vinyl floor tiles!

There's no guarantee they would have to pay, it would be entirely up to a judge, but considering they obviously have no practices or policies in place to ensure these things are caught means they'd have no defence in court saying 'it was a mistake' because it wasn't, it was a complete lack of a price accuracy policy.
Oh gosh. You just programmed a 13 year old.
Spring Surf meets Clojure
Put together a View and, optionally, a Controller to implement a web API, provide them in the classpath together with a small XML descriptor, and your REST API is deployed right away. In the SpringSurf parlance, this is called called WebScript. I developed support for Clojure backed WebScripts, mostly for fun.
Thanks for that feedback. I do plan on a pretty extensive refactoring of my resume as I get closer to my 5 years.
You mean like... an iPhone?
Ask HN: How do I get out of my unhappy coding job?
Hi all,

I need your advice; I'm working in an internal IT department at a non-software company which is, as you can guess, far from ideal. I live + work in the UK.

I am starting to feel very depressed about my situation and am desperate to find a way out. I've
applied to a job at a decent software company which unfortunately I didn't get (though it certainly gave me an idea of what to improve if I were to apply again, so was positive overall.)

I'm working on developing a programming language; it's extremely early days but I have certain convictions about what is important in a language and in the hacker tradition want to make something that fits those convictions.

I, much to my regret, don't have a degree in Computer Science (though I do have an engineering degree) - though I grew up loving programming I, for somewhat complicated reasons, ended up choosing the wrong subject.

As far as I can see the following steps are the way out. I'd be very grateful for any advice/criticism you care to offer about these steps, also with any suggestions you can offer me in finding a happier coding existence:-

+ Work hard on my language project; if I can actually do something with this I will have something very nice to put on my CV. Programming languages, compilers, parsing, etc. are really my passion; they are the one thing I'd like to get into more than anything else.

+ Develop knowledge of algorithms, big O, etc. - the kind of stuff I would have picked up on a computer science course, as well as being the kind of stuff asked at interviews.

+ Get involved with open source - I am especially interested in LLVM as it ties in nicely with my language project.

+ Practice, practice, practice - Practice coding, consciously trying to improve as much as I can.

And the most recent, most radical thought:-

+ Ditch the idea of going to work on someone else's stuff and get going on a Micro ISV. Keep the day job and work all the hours outside of work to put a product together. I'd like to somehow link this to my passion for programming languages, etc. - perhaps that old programmer startup cliche of a development tool of some kind?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me, it's really appreciated. Feel free to criticise + tear my ideas apart, by the way! Always happy for (constructive) criticism.

(I am using a different HN login from usual for obvious reasons.)
An UPDATE sql statement with a forgotten WHERE clause
A smaller 3G iPad. No voice plan, no contract, just data.

Edit: iPad without 3G is $129 cheaper. iPod Touch is $229 cheapest. Adding a 3G chip to it should make it <$350.
I personally find unseen UAV's raining missiles down on our heads to be much more terrifying. I'm actually quite excited about this tech. The first thing I thought when I saw this video was one of these things walking on the surface of Mars.
Good thing that they found it that early too. May have cost them a lot more if they found it later.
How can you be sad at the end of such a brilliant and full life? I'd give anything to have a tenth of his accomplishments to my name when I die. He introduced so many people to the beauty and sheer FUN of mathematics, it's hard to estimate his overall influence on the world today.

So how can you be sad? And yet I am. Rest in peace, Martin.
What is the song in this game?
That is only a matter of time. Then we will have the "rat thing" from Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash. It was scary to watch the video.
I could live with 3 or 4 Martin Gardner threads that link to each other, he certainly deserved it.
Facebook and the Extra-National Currency
Tim Ferriss on Angel Investing [video]
Just an FYI, here is the relevant terms and conditions:

"TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS

In the event a product is listed at an incorrect price or with incorrect information due to typographical error or error in pricing or product information received from our suppliers, we shall have the right to refuse or cancel any orders placed for product listed at the incorrect price. We shall have the right to refuse or cancel any such orders whether or not the order has been confirmed and your credit card charged. If your credit card has already been charged for the purchase and your order is canceled, we shall immediately issue a credit to your credit card account in the amount of the charge."

http://www.6pm.com/terms-of-use

If you are going to talk like a lawyer you should act like a lawyer and read the fine print.
Good point regarding .NET. I have been working hard to have significant expertise beyond .NET even though we are rather .NET focused in my day to day work at Microsoft.
Warning: Another content-free post.
I know here in Ontario, they can cancel but they are legally open for violating the consumer protection act for misleading practices and a mistake is no protection in court.

An agreement between stores, and I believe one Amazon.ca upholds, is that they offer you the product at the original price with a $10 discount/credit (if it costs more than $10 - free if it costs less than $10). However, this is just a practice to placate the consumer as on gross mispricings like a $1000 TV for $5 people know they're taking advantage and will either be happy to take the $10 off, or will cancel the agreement thus removing all legal liability on the company. However, if the $5 had entered the till and a manager came running out trying to stop you leave with the TV, well you just got a $5 TV and if they stop you, they get up to a $250,000 fine and you get yourself a TV. Quite ironically though, if you notify the cashier of the mispricing, most store policies will give you the item for free regardless of price! So the people walking away with the $10 credit are really losing much more than if they had honestly notified a manager.

One of the caveats is that the agreement is generally to sell X number of products at $Y price, and if they don't have the quantity of products to supply the amount of orders they can actually cancel the orders and later reoffer them at a corrected price, which is probably what Argos got away with.
1. Top-level requirements: What problem or problems is this application going to solve, and for whom? If you can't answer these questions clearly, you aren't building a serious application, you're just playing around. (This does not mean that you can't change your goals later, but you should always be building towards a clear, specific target.)

2. Functional requirements: What are the use cases, and how will the user interact with the application in each of them? Use storyboards, mock-ups, whatever helps you to understand what the application will do from the user's point of view.

3. High-level design: How will you model the data and functionality you've identified in the previous steps? Typically for a web app, a lot of this will be about setting up a data store server-side and figuring out how to implement any interactive behaviour client-side. You don't have to work out all the little details at this stage, but you need to choose a viable technology stack and know how the big picture is going to look.

4. Start prototyping: Set up the basics, enough to represent one key feature or perhaps a small group of related features, and create enough of the model/database behind the scenes to support it. Again, you don't have to code up every last bit of HTML and CSS at first, but you need to have a general idea of how things are going to fit together.

5. Refine what you've got and add further features and more details to the model, until you start to see how things are coming together. Go back often to check that the design and implementation are still meeting the requirements. Go back to the requirements themselves and make sure they are still appropriate as you gain experience in the field and/or you receive feedback from users/prospects.

It's very trendy to just dive in at about step 4 and starting hacking away, at least among the young, entrepreneurial types who seem to dominate forums like HN. By all means try it: if nothing else, you will learn why steps 1-3 are important.

Still, please don't bet your life savings on the project getting anywhere if you don't at least know where you think you're going before you start. You might well find that you change direction on the way, but aside from a few high profile exceptions, it is relatively rare in reality to see a successful business where someone just started coding something up one day and fluked their way into running a serious, profitable business before time and money ran out. Good ideas aren't worth much without a good implementation, but implementations aren't worth anything at all if they solve a problem no-one has.
Can't say making money is a very big motivator when it comes to using web services. People use digg, facebook, flickr, twitter, etc. all for free because it adds value to the time they spend online.
60 Temptingly Designed Alcoholic Beverages
Terms and conditions aren't legally binding, perhaps you should read the law.
Are you a Canadian lawyer? The alleged laws you describe are quite far from the practice in other common law countries, but are quite similar to the misconceptions non-lawyers have about the law in most other common law countries, so I'm skeptical.
When do you throw a CEO’s privacy under the bus?
I sent him an email thanking him for his contributions and groveling for his insight ;).
could it have been an intentionally planned ... mistake?
There isn't a media storm.

Heh. I guess it was a storm in the internet teacup I inhabit.
I'd be interested to learn where the BINARY data is coming from in the first place. For reasons I outlined in a recent blog post force_encoding is almost never a reliable general-purpose solution
The Markov Chain: http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/markovchain.htm...
Having worked at Microsoft should get you an interview just about anywhere. And anyone who considers it a negative is, frankly, an idiot.
Ask HN: A programmer and engineer to make a competing consumer device (advice)
Specifically I'm thinking about a GSM phone. Something marketed at people who miss the old Nokia 3210 phone.

If any of the WakeMate guys could share their experience with marketing and designing. Did you hire an industrial designer? How big is your team? Did you have bad experiences with manufacturers before you found a good one?

Thanks in advance. Also if you know of other "Ask HN" in this veine please post the link.
I don't think there are negatives that you have to mitigate, but you really need to think about where you want to end up down the line.

Working 5 years at Microsoft says, "I'm perfectly happy doing solid software engineering/management work at an enormous company." If that's the image you want to project, then go for it. Just remember that the companies that are most impressed by that are the companies that are most similar to Microsoft.

That said, if you don't want to continue working for companies like Microsoft/IBM/whatever, you should probably start branching out now. Looks like you're finishing up 2 years by your linkedin profile. That's actually a great time to move on. As the grandparent said, what you get out of working for Microsoft for 2 years is basically what you would get from working there for 5 years. The difference is you have 3 extra years to improve your resume at other companies.
I usually love Sundays for working, because they are so uninterrupted that I can really knock things out. today I was traveling so... not so much.

Woke up at 7:30 to go into office, respond to some emails, printed out boarding pass, grabbed nicest laptop, went home and packed, went to airport, flew to Madrid (watched Dr. Who enroute for break), drank sangria with friends over tapas, took bus outside of Madrid, mingled with conference attendees, came back to hotel room and obsessed about my app stats with AppViz, read my tech blogs, responded to this, now perhaps sleep.

I use the pomodoro method (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com) when I'm in the fugue where I want to be productive but am somehow not managing to.
Are Zappos based in Ontario (I wasn't sure if that is why you mentioned there in particular?).

Ultimately it will depend on where the company is based; but for the most part mispriced items are usually explicitly accounted for in the Terms and Conditions of sale you agree to (I know that was part of what Argos used over here).

I seem to recall there was a legal argument over it.. because in the real world if a shop advertises a $10 for $1 there is no legal requirement (at least not here) for them to sell it at that price - if they notice. If they accept your offer to buy at the lower price then there is nothing they can do.

The argument was that digital sales worked in a different way (and that manually approving each sale like in a shop was infeasible) so I am pretty sure a lot of work went into making sure the law applied to when the item was shipped. I noticed Amazon still don't take money till they ship the item; so it could be this was never actually resolved.

(by the way I can't find any references to the laws you mention - got any links?)
What's Factor's approach to macros?
Without college you will hit an HR brick wall at some employers, but likely these will be ones you wouldn't want to work for anyway.

Sounds to me like your 5 years at MS is probably equal to or better than an undergraduate degree at least as far as technical competency is concerned.
Wife is out of town this weekend so I'm just trying to keep the kitchen clean and kids alive :)

Tomorrow I will make progress.
it's more correct to say that ms has "integrated" tcp/ip into windows.
At someone else's startup you're often required to do a variety of different things, which provides the sort of intellectual stimulation that extremely differentiated larger companies lack.
Randomness dominates startups in a way that makes your concern about first impressions unnecessary.
Terms and conditions are very much legally binding in the case we are discussing (online sales) - you are explicitly offered them as the contractual terms of sale.

What T&C can't do is rescind the basic consumer rights offered under law
I have, and I hate it. Here is a good article I share the same thoughts with: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330600
No question that 1.6MM could definitely buy much more exposure (the end goal of this exposure being customer acquisition and sales). Don't get me wrong, they did the right thing--however, this is no "happy accident".
then maybe I'd have little cyborg dog puppies.. how awesome would that be??
Futureshop has repeatedly refused to uphold mis-priced items in Ontario.
I don't understand why everyone assumes these emails from Steve Jobs are actually emails from Steve Jobs. What are the chances that he has the time to answers all of these emails? For this many to get posted online, there have to be even more that don't. I doubt it.
How Chrome to Phone Works
Working on your language project is probably not the best avenue to get you out of your job, since monetizing something like that is pretty difficult. It's been done but it had better be a 'game changer', another variation on some theme is not going to help you become independent.

The abstract knowledge you pick up (such as algorithms, you already refer to that) will help though, since it will allow you to build relatively complex stuff where 'cut-and-paste' types will have a disadvantage competing against you.

Open source is great way to advertise your skills, but only if you want to be re-hired somewhere, is that your intention or do you plan to become independent ?

The last item on your list sounds like the best bet in the shorter term. But maybe first you should exchange your job that you hate for a nicer one to get you out of the frame of mind you're in and in to a more healthy one.

Then from a position of strength you can make your decisions, usually that works better (at least, it does for me).

Good luck!
I like 'em.
Thought you meant founders with a non-tech product/service/field, which might also be an interesting survey.