skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The languages are just too complex, too terse, and absolutely full of academic shitheaddery. I mean, seriously, what the hell."

The author links to the formal specification of Haskell and decides pattern matching is "academic shitheaddery"?

Is the formal specification of Java any better? http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/gramma...
All their cameras should communicate, but where they're under attack, where their lunch is going to get eaten if they don't do something soon, is at the low end.
I'm not sure that such a device exists.
Yes, there's one page that's too wide, thanks for pointing it out. Eventually those background images will be images and text, I just didn't have time to get it in before launch. I'll work on it.
This is misleading. The 1.9% interchange fee is going the MINIMUM of many many different interchange fees especially Amex's and the vast number of 'rewards' cards. For online 'e-retail', expect at least 2.5% as well as many new and exciting monthly fees that have been recently added by visa/mc and your processor.

Going with a merchant account probably wont save you money, but it does increase your purchase rate since many people may not have a paypal account and don't want to deal with getting one.
Dude, it's Knuth.

OTOH, maybe Twitter will continue their overengineering by porting everything to MMIX.
I suspect this works best in an environment where your responsibilities are murky at best -- it's a bull market in educations, charge whatever you want and enrollment goes up.
Couldn't work for me because I use the micropayment mode in paypal and charge $2. Both of those don't seem to be options.
By just about any definition of the word "drug" (except common-use, which isn't acceptable as it changes rapidly), water is also a drug.

People drown in water. Choke on water. There's water poisoning if you have too much of it.
In this interview:
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/armstrong-peyton-jones-erlan...

Simon Peyton-Jones, the father of Haskell himself, dismisses the idea that avoiding mutable state automatically buys you easy concurrency:

But it turned out to be very hard to turn that into actual wall clock speedups on processes, leaving aside all issues of robustness or that kind of stuff, because if you do that style of concurrency you get lots of very tiny fine-grained processes and you get no locality and you get very difficult scheduling problems. The overheads overwhelm the benefits,

There are some useful and novel ideas in the FP languages but they're no silver bullet. Whatever the conventional solution for concurrent programming turns out to be, it will have to be exploited in languages more accessible to the median programmer than Haskell.
Ask HN: What will it take to topple Facebook (if anything)?
With ongoing rumors about Google potentially working on a Facebook clone as well as the rise of other social endeavors like Twitter or FourSquare, it's cool to look at how this could affect Facebook.

Facebook's undeniably leading the Social Networking space. Is this going to be permanent?

Can it be toppled? What would it take to do so?
I actually use the iPhone primarily as a mobile web browser + a couple of apps, with a cheap nokia phone for voice. I swap out the iPhone's SIM abroad, so the only time I make voice calls with it is when I make local calls abroad to avoid roaming charges. As far as I can tell I'm far from the only one doing that.
Xdebug 2.1 Released
I know it's not very hacker oriented, but it does concern Airbnb as well as the government stepping in to control would-be entrepreneurs/cash-strapped citizens.
Rates are important but not everything.

In PayPal's court, they don't have a merchant reserve - typically your merchant account will require 5 - 10% of your monthly processing to be held for up to 6 months after your last transaction is processed.

On the other end of things most Merchant accounts offer substantially better chargeback resolution, customer service, and flexibility.
Something wrong with the font size/line height here. Browser is epiphany 2.30.2 using webkit 1.2.1.

http://i.imgur.com/rK3gD.png
Buzzwords and the Paradox of Credibility
What's the purpose of this besides having us speculate? Just have a post tomorrow with whatever Knuth announced and it's enough to have a good discussion.
Can't resist... FaceCash (http://www.facecash.com) is cheaper than both options at 1.5% flat, though we haven't launched an internet payment solution yet.
When the Day After Tomorrow Has Come
The title of his article is that functional languages are overrated and he specifically points out that functional techniques are available in other languages, so I don't think you can say he's confusing the two concepts.
Twitter Operations - Presentation at Velocity (Youtube video)
FIFA President Apologizes & Considers Using Technology To Assist Referees
Anyone else concerned about privacy? Google already has heaps of your search data, can track browsing history with the doubleclick and adsense network already. With social network data, they can directly tie in who you associate with, age, birthdate, etc.
Given the choice between elegant high-level code that generates verbose and ugly HTML versus complicated and ugly high-level code that generates very tight HTML, I know which I'd choose.
Step 3.5) selectively reduce sample size by a factor of 1000(0? 00?).
MIT boffins exhibit self-forming 'programmable matter'
"The latter may be woolly and untested feelgood hippy claptrap"

You seriously think that no one has ever tested the efficacy of herbs?
Actually, you are exactly right to be worried. I know because I spent 4 months researching small arms violence (for the Boulder future salon). The Small Arms Survey is an extensive series of research publications from a UN-funded research group in Geneva. And according to them, the single strongest predictor of small arms violence is wealth inequality. The #2 factor is poverty, in absolute terms. My take on this is that inequality creates resentment, and poverty in absolute terms (going hungry) creates desperation. Desperation+resentment is a deadly combination. After that, social attitudes about violence play a big role (For example, Japan since WWII has developed cultural attitudes that inhibit violence, but Latin America hasn't.) Another predictive factor is males ages 15 to 30 who are "unemployed and not in school." Drug trafficking is also a strong correlate with small arms violence. In some parts of Mexico today (cities like Juárez that directly border the US) you can see all these factors at work: higher inequality than the US, higher poverty in absolute terms, weaker cultural attitudes inhibiting violence, and serious drug trafficking, with young unemployed male sicarios.
...what's wrong with Erlang?

Strings:

1> [98, 114, 111, 107, 101, 110] == "broken".
true

Records are not real records, just compile time labels placed on top of tuples. The syntax, seriously, three different line terminators?

Python and Haskell both make great go-to languages, and you can solve a wide variety of problems in them. Erlang is the language you suffer with when you truly need massive concurrency and distribution.
... and had the longest most awesome RAVE evar!!!! </ sarcasm>
My (unscientific) observation is that LinkedIn activities varies with age demographics. LinkedIn contacts and info are actively updated by the over ~30 crowd. Under 30 crowds tend to have less distinction between work/friends thus work contact info is done on facebook (or other general soNet).
Becuase they would then be committing to a manual review process and all the scaling problems that would incur.
Sliders are nice large targets and look very touchable, but don't actually work at all on my iPad.
Maybe he's created an earthquake algorithm?
On the other hand, it can take a long time for ideas to be accepted. Even Pasteur was a radical in his day; and I can't find him on Wikipedia, but there was a French doctor who introduced the idea of washing one's hands -- I think in carbolic acid? -- before delivering a child. This worked very well; but the doctors thought it was a nuisance and produced no benefit, and kicked him out.

I'm not defending homeopathy, which I'm pretty deeply suspicious of; it _might_ merit further investigation, but homeopathic medicines certainly shouldn't be sold as medicines until they start performing a whole lot better than they have so far. I just want to point out that the medical field, and most scientific fields, are resistant to adopting new ideas even when those ideas do work.

Another example of that slowness: post-traumatic stress disorder, which was only accepted by the APA in DSM-IV (1980) after a long struggle.
Picking a nit, but SSRIs don't actually act on serotonin receptors. Although the action of SSRIs isn't completely understood, they generally work by increasing the level of serotonin in the brain by reducing reuptake.
How much money was spent on 40,000 pills? It must be at least a down payment on a house. How did he keep a job with the residual mental effects of the drugs? Or maybe it was family money.
Good point! Cringely was talking about the disadvantages of huge social graphs recently, too (http://www.cringely.com/2010/05/lets-get-small/). I don't think so. I think the interesting messages coming from the 80% I communicate 20% of the time may be even more valuable, e.g. to casually keep in touch, learn interesting stuff, etc.

A social app is not just status messages.How will the Google social app easily absorb all the photos, etc. I'm sharing in FB? What if the friends I enjoy on FB decide not to join the Google thing? I think tehse are huge drawbacks. Look at Plaxo, Ning, etc. They are just wannabes in this space.

You are right about MySpace and FB, but the crowds they were catering to quickly diverged. That also explains how LinkedIn can thrive independent of FB.
I'd like to add a little bit to this discussion. Disclaimer: I wrote most of the site's code and worked extensively with Mark for the past few months.

To start, Mark is a great co-founder. He doesn't code, but he always has a strong vision about the product. Yes, at first I thought that a visionary co-founder was a glorified way of saying over-zealous MBA, but Mark has the ability to see both the forest and the trees when it comes to building a product and developing software on a constrained schedule. The two of us worked extensively on the product, building and scaling it from a simple flatpage app to something that appealed to college kids around the US while handling 22 concurrent req/sec.

I left FratMusic for two reasons. First, I didn't have enough time to dedicate to developing the site. Second, I was concerned with some of the legal issues that the site could be facing. Despite this, I know Mark has been working diligently to find a way to make the site work. If I had more time, I definitely would have stuck with the project.

Technically, the site is pretty fun. I wrote it all in Django and it comes with some interesting problems, both tech and systems. From a technical perspective, I spent a fair bit of time trying to better recommend music to users, and to A/B test purchasing avenues through iTMS and Amazon. From a systems perspective, the site has a grown a lot. Last semester, we were doubling our slice's ram just about every three weeks. We switched from Apache to nginx and are now running in a full MySQL / python / fcgi / nginx / memcached environment. There are a lot of fun challenges in there to.

FratMusic is a household name on a lot of college campuses. Here's a twitter search: http://twitter.com/search?q=fratmusic. Our facebook page has about 25K fans and is growing. The site is very simple, but it works.

Anyways, if you have any questions, feel free to ping me as well. omar.bohsali@gmail.com.
Do you plan to add a mockupping tool? If not, perhaps you can call your site "make your mockups live" or protomockup.com (available) or "quickly prototype your mockups", etc.

I really like the design - it was easy to navigate and find stuff. But I had a hard time finding the signup button.

Mockups and Mocksup is a confusing read.
Haskell seems to have too many rough edges to make it nice for real-world work. The inconsistent error handling (errors vs maybe vs either), weak record syntax, and ruthlessly strict stance on mutability don't sound like things I want to wrestle with on a large scale.

Scala, on the other hand, seems to strike more reasonable compromises on these points and has all the java stuff to draw on when you need it.
Yeah, see, that's the trick. The users don't want to. They explicitly abdicated control

I think this is more a function of a lack of viable alternatives, where viability includes the functionality that comes from the network effect. The trick, of course is not to replace Facebook, but to become a hipster adjunct to Facebook.

But you simply cannot make a social network site work without giving away a shocking quantity of data.

You only have to give data away to your friends to make it work for you. Giving your data to the world (or to the part of it willing to pay) is only required for advertisers.

Users already chose. I think they chose wrong, but no Facebook-knockoff offering 'control' is going to change it. They want the integration and ease-of-use that requires Facebook have access to all that data.

The way to supplant Facebook is by not supplanting it. Become the defacto primary social tool for an influential subset of society -- a useful adjunct. If such a tool can be made, it will benefit from Facebook's network and not suffer from competing with it. The key is to grow out from a hipster/youth demographic and peacefully coexist for awhile. Once that is established, then go in for the kill by giving users things Facebook cannot or will not -- Facebook certainly has these weaknesses.

Imagine a tool that allows a hipster to stay in Facebook, but network with a subset of her/his graph with complete information control and privacy, conveniently and without duplicated effort. That would be killer and also very hard for FB to duplicate, as it runs counter to their DNA.
I think there's a correlation between "just updated my LinkedIn profile" and "I am about to change jobs".
Firing SilverLight/WPF Events from Ruby
Paddy Power offering markets on video games tournaments
Printed Envelopes Bring Color to Life
Life is a strange mix of everything. From happiness to enjoyment, from achievement to feelings, we face everything as it comes into our lives. The best thing about such things is that they become a memory worth cherishing after sometime.
Mostly joking, but it could be possible.

I just can't think of anything besides P=NP (or proving P!=NP) that Knuth is likely to announce that I'd consider earth-shattering.

In the end, it's likely to be a decent but not earth-shattering discovery. It better not be a TeX announcement.

If he walks out, says "42" and leaves, I'm selling my copies of "The Art of Computer Programming".
Most importantly,

It's time for one of the products that are in Apple's cross-hairs to do the necessary innovation before Apple does.

Yes please — and don't try to convince the world that you had it before Apple, because it doesn't matter unless someone actually wants it. It makes me sick that the only desirable tablet right now is the iPad, which was predicted by years of rumors. Nobody saw it coming?

I look forward to when it's as easy to make a startup around hardware as it is to make one around software.
I read the first half of the article just screaming "He's doing it wrong!" However I later realized that was the entire point of the article.
Ruby is also a prude compared to Perl. Perl's variables are global by default.
Ask HN: Can startup founders afford to spend time on "hobbies"?
I've been developing a Web application for the past three weeks or so, and as I near launch I find myself wondering whether this needs to take up all of my time in order for it to be successful. My number one priority is building this Web app into a viable startup, but I'm wondering if there's any room for a "hobby" in startup-life. One school of thought is that hobbies prevent you from burning out, but the other espouses the idea that the only startups that are successful are ones in which the founders are 100% committed.

I've been playing the piano for ten or eleven years now, and would like to keep practicing for 45 minutes - 1 hour each day. It's obviously doable at this stage, but if this start-up gets any traction, do I necessarily have to adopt an all-or-nothing approach?
30 days since the last blog post, and nearly $180,000 later we still wait for Diaspora. However, you can get a t-shirt they've apparently been pimping out on twitter (http://twitter.com/joindiaspora/statuses/16711664582).

I hate to be debbie downer on this one, but ~$180,000 is a lot of money to be contributed to a project like this, which from the technical aspects that we know so far (which of itself does not say a lot for something with it's ambitions, and given the name which seems to be almost a southpaw sucker punch to Facebook with the exodus/diaspora of users), might not even gain any sort of mainstream traction to be worthy of more than a cursory blog post from CNet once it launches.
> Going with a merchant account probably wont save you money, but it does increase your purchase rate since many people may not have a paypal account and don't want to deal with getting one.

You don't need a PayPal account to pay with PayPal.
Molecules typically found in blue jeans may lead to more efficient solar cells
You could get really close to this with an Eye-Fi (SD Card that will upload to wherever you want over WiFi) and a MiFi (mobile WiFi hotspot).
For the record I do work for the company that Paddy Power hired for consultancy, but I'm 99.9% sure no-one on HN would look to bet on it, didn't submit for that reason.

In my opinion it's pretty interesting that such a huge gambling company (300 shops across Great Britain and massive online site) has taken an interest in competitive gaming (esports) and is actually treating it as a real sport.

In case anyone's interested, that event is the Electronic Sports World Cup, one of two major annual world cup styled events (the other is World Cyber Games, by a different organisation) - and is offering over $200,000 in cash prizes to gamers this year. http://www.eswc.com/
Actually. ;)
Unfortunately, many customers don't know that.
No....what you're seeing is a side-effect of the fact that most critics of C++ these days don't actually know the language. It's still wrong to conflate C and C++, but since most students now come up learning Java, they rarely encounter C++ as its own language. It gets grouped together mentally with those "nasty, C-like languages", and the stereotypes linger.
Going with a merchant account probably wont save you money, but it does increase your purchase rate since many people may not have a paypal account and don't want to deal with getting one.

Actually you don't need a PayPal account to buy via PayPal -- you can use a credit card. However, this message does not always get through to the customer, and PayPal can be picky about some cards (or vice-versa).
If you use paypal as your payment processor, your customers don't need a paypal account. They can pay directly with credit card without signing up for Paypal.

I don't think anyone using Paypal thinks it's a cheaper solution, but it's probably the easiest and quickest integration solution.
Spies Next Door
Hi, thanks for the tips. When you say "influencers", do you mean bloggers/tweeters with a lot of followers?
What do you reckon is the ideal way for a beginner to get into meditation, then? Particularly if that beginner lives in a busy, noisy place like London and has a busy, time-consuming jobs like running a start-up.
I sent an email to my MP (Bob Rae). Never got a response, but I hope it was read. I really like how James Moore is willing to talk with his opposition-- even though his opposition, in this case, is not a constituent.
I have two friends also, but with benefits.

One named Strawberry and the other Jessica.

Strawberry came over yesterday without notice. While what I thought were Cuban cigars in her hand, weren't cigars at all. They actually had more uses than you could shake a stick at, so to speak. She has virtually no rules and no boundaries. We have great conversation, as long as we don't talk for too long. But our nights together are beyond belief. She's really easy to get to know -- and everyone spends at least a little time with her, but frankly you probably don't want her to meet your mother.

Jessica on the other hand calls me before she comes over. And before she heads over she asks what I'd like to eat. I wanted pizza on this night, and she got my alltime favorite pizza. We had some great conversation about why Pi really isn't, and took a long walk on the beach. She's the type of person you could spend your life with. Sure, every relationship has its share of problems, but with her you know you could work them out. Because despite the fact that she does have morals, principles, and rules, she is flexible and always evolving.

Just a tale of my two friends... with benefits.
> inconsistent error handling

I don't understand how offering several choices is synonymous with inconsistent. If you really really want "consistency", establish a policy for your code and stick with it. All three have distinct uses, and each is better for certain things than for others.

Anyhow, there's nothing particularly special about the Maybe or Either monads; you should be able to easily implement either of those yourself, and calling them a feature of the language---beyond the fact that they happen to be in the standard library---is somewhat specious.
How can you claim this if your numbers are purely guessed?
Anyone in Austin/San Antonio area looking for contract coding work?
The work load for supporting/improving my web app has (fortunately) outgrown the coding time of 1 person (me).

I have worked with a couple of good programmers remotely but I really need to find someone closer to my office so that we can actually sit down and discuss things face to face. It dawned on me that there might be some HN'ers somewhere near the Austin/San Antonio area (I'm in San Antonio).

If anyone is interested, feel free to email me. My email address is in my HN profile.
I think Mocksup is a great name. Mocks up. As in, upload your mockups. That's what I got from it anyway.
I'm not really sure of the benefits of these big one off things; after seven days meditating you come back into your regular life, surrounded by your old environment and soon end up reverting to your previous mental patterns.

It seems analogous to going on a running retreat, spending seven days running all day and then coming home and not running again.

It strikes me that it would be more worthwhile to cultivate the habit of meditating once a day rather than making a large unsustainable change.
From an Intern to Leader of Civilization V
It would be difficult to keep it discrete.
I was thinking of HTML 4 specs: clearly a formatting language that many people can use (with a reasonable degree of correctness), but the spec is not light reading. (The specs for HTML are no doubt far more comprehensible than Haskell's, but I would expect the formal specification of any language to be more painful to read than it is to work with the language. In my experience, that's the nature of the formality involved in a spec: in an effort to be maximally precise and detailed, they become less and less readable).
Not so much for the story, which we all probably know by now, but there are links to PDFs of the complaints at the bottom of the article which describe some of the technical details behind the case.
I've never seen anyone but a power user use msconfig and even I have to google the file names to discover what some of the stuff does. I'm thinking of something considerably more user friendly.