skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd agree to that, and solving problems in FP always made me think harder to get an elegant solution. Though, it also means that you're uncomfortably close to math. I think to fully exploit/understand FP, the programmer also needs to be good at understanding the mathematical models/formulas behind FP. Otherwise, I think he cannot truly exploit the potential of the tools he's using. I haven't spent a lot of time doing FP to justify that opinion fully, but whatever FP I did made me wish I took my math classes more seriously.
Will the real programmers please stand up?
'Google Me' is Not a Rumor, Will Launch in 2010
Facebook Adds Pages Without Confirmation
Yes getting legislation on your side and suing people will completely undo fundamental shifts that are happening in the real world. NOT.
Hotel Chains should be the ones at the front coming up with services like airbnb or integrating them. The hotel brand can offer as a front to loosely federated room providers and the hotel steps in by doing quality control and enforcing standards. In fact people in the hotel industry should be overjoyed that this model removes two of the big costs of running hotels - hotel staff and realty costs for the property. All the hotels have to do is to be umbrella brands and get "franchise" service providers.
> Neither of them will ever understand functional programming.

What makes you think so? What fundamental complexity in the paradigm is out of their reach? Do you really think that the concepts of imperative and OO programming are simpler? Why?
It's not and I'm pretty sure it's already illegal to operate these unlicensed hotels anyways.
Please remember that Orkut is still the most popular social networking website in Brazil, by far (and in India too, if I remember well.)

But yeah, I don't know anyone that is using Wave or Buzz.
Desire is the cause of all suffering, but there's also bacon.
Of course you can have hobbies.
I think part of the reason Buzz hasn't caught on is the privacy debacle at the start. It left people with a bad association with Buzz, and that's not something that's easy to shake.

Wave I see mostly as an experiment. It can do some cool stuff, but I've never really had a use for it. I did see it used for streaming commentary the Google I/O keynote (courtesy of Lifehacker), and it worked fantastically for that. In fact, I'd say that was the nicest live coverage method I've seen. However, I personally still have not found a use for Wave.
an hour or longer is just wasted time.

I think that's the point.
I started losing interest when LinkedIn turned into yet another Twitter status stream. I enjoyed it much more when it was pure, and focused on professional relationship growth (debatable, yes). In the most egotistical sense, it is still interesting to see who has been viewing your profile.
> Startup is just your job.

I disagree with calling it a "job". It makes it sound like something you don't want to have to do.

IMHO, I think you should be passionate about your startup. It shouldn't feel like a job but something that's enjoyable to work on.

But, back to the main question.. if playing the piano keeps you sane, do it. Stress relief is way more important and will pay dividends long term to both you and your startup.
The Wisdom of Erik Naggum
Every program is either a compiler, or an interpreter.

Compilers are just functions from input to output, so it is easy to write them in a functional way. For example code formatter, report generator, any program in which we are only interested in the final result, not in the intermediate steps, and nothing "new" can happen in the process of computation.

Interpreters are more imperative by nature, and it is more natural to write them in imperative way. For example real-time simulations (including games), interactive apps like offices suites, crud apps, etc.

In interpreters functional programming can be used in the small scale, to implement commands, but the result will be imperative interpreter with state and commands that modifies this state.

So oop is more suited to describe domain of most programs - users think about crud apps like this: "this button changes the name of selected student", "this button deletes student from base", "this button assigns student to course". Even if under the hood there is functional code, it is in reality interpreting imperative language and operating on state.

At least that's how I see it. YMMV.
The problem with this is that once you get beyond really, really trivial code for whichever landscape you happen to working with (this is defined by the design of the language - whatever it's designed to be able to do easily), things get hard and you end up doing something difficult anyway, we label this task 'programming'.

No silver bullet. Getting computers to run code correctly (for whatever version of 'correct' you subscribe to) is hard, there is simply no way round this.

It's almost like saying 'the future of engineering is when both my mum and my little brother can build cars. Neither of them will ever understand mechanics.'

When you think of it that way, the idea that programming is for everyone seems a little silly.
When they start trying to outlaw you, you know you've made a big dent in their bottom line.
How come dental work are so expensive? Is it a monopoly for the dental association to limit the number of dentists to avoid competition?
Alter-ego - A Reactive AI Library for Clojure
And I was thinking "college workers" meant student employees. I admit that I was looking for a way to boost my own income ...
Sun x86 chip
A lot could just be that the requirements are very different between HPC and typical message-passing business apps. In HPC, you want to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the cluster, by definition. If you could get rid of the message-passing overhead, that would be a huge speedup.

For most business processes, you don't care about performance all that much, you just want things to be easy to change. Message-passing works fairly well for that: it's easy to understand, composable, and let's you swap out one component for another as long as the interfaces are compatible.

BTW, message-passing isn't exactly untried. It's the basis for the service-oriented architectures that underlie Google, Amazon, FaceBook, and many other large businesses. It works very well for that problem domain.
I quit StackOverFlow once they devalued asking questions. No one on the site seemed to understand that incentivizing people to ask great questions was the most important thing. The site could have been a great starting point for learning esoteric topics like Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Grails, Scala, Lift, Go, Emacs Lisp, etc.

Basically, in general, you need one good question with 2 or 3 good answers [yes, some types are better with 100 answers].

"How do I reverse a string in Java?"
"How do I reverse a string in Haskell?"
"How do I ... in Haskell?"

The questions could have been linked to build a Rosetta Stone, as well as a complete beginner's guide to topic X. Actually, it could have been a guide from beginner to guru.
Teaching them in kindergarten. No kidding. We may stop at the basics, but every child of 12 should know how to make simple toy programs in a toy language, so they can feel that computers aren't magic.
He's not targeting cucumber, he's targeting GHC. It's much easier in Ruby than in Haskell.
Festering Code Bases and Budding Code Bases
If you have Gmail, you can actually use yourusername+someuniquestringidentifyingwhoyougaveyouraddressto@gmail.com which will still direct all email to your inbox. However, if you decide you no longer want email from a sender, you can simply add a filter that will auto-mark said emails as spam.

It's also pretty cool because you can easily tell who it was that sold your email. :)
That's very interesting. Can you elaborate? I assume your point is that the HPC people were forced into message-passing by the lack of large-scale shared memory, but would have preferred the latter because they found it easier to program for? And that this somewhat contradicts our fashionable ideas about how to write concurrent programs?

Also, is their situation analogous to multicore today? i.e. does many GB of RAM shared by many cores count as "large-scale shared memory" (or does it not, e.g. because of cache effects)?
Finding Great Developers (2006)
Talking is one of many forms of processing. I've had similar experiences while drafting an e-mail outlining the problem and everything I've tried to fix it. Hundreds of such e-mails have never been sent because in the process of writing things out, I realize a new attempt.

I have a coworker who processes everything externally. He even reads e-mail out loud to himself. He doesn't gain the same...clarity...that people are talking about in this thread.

So I really think it's a question of walking yourself through everything you know about the problem and everything you've tried. Regardless of whether it's verbal or not.
My Dad went to a zendo regularly for quite some time, when I was much younger. As a child, the concept of sitting and only sitting was mysterious to me, so I asked him why he did it. He told me that he wasn't sure, so he asked the head teacher at the zendo, and later recounted the exchange to me, which I have always valued as something of a modern koan in its own right:

Dad: "So, sitting will definitely produce positive results if you do it for long enough, right? What if I sat for 20 years?"

Master: "You mean, a guaranteed amount of enlightenment, however small?"

Dad: "Exactly."

Master: "The only thing I can guarantee you will get after 20 years of zazen is hemorrhoids."
Long meditation retreats for beginners are pretty standard.
Repeatedly sticking a toe in the water doesn't really do much, you need to dive right in.
Ridiculously sensationalist
This is where Scala fits wonderfully.
If You Have to Be Wrong, How Can You Admit It More Easily?
This is a really nice feature. Also a way to market it, because other services could use something like this. See craigslist for an example.

So offer the service free to users looking to avoid spam, and sell to businesses looking to provide anonymous communications.
\marquee{ }
Funny how "Not written in Flash" has become a feature. http://mocksup.com/compare
The Art of Computer Programming will not get finished.
How to Improve Google Ranking of your Blog
Nothing is as effective as government when it comes to curbing innovation.
On the welfare state, generosity, and the education of the heart
How safe are you in the 'identity ecosystem?'
lol and this is why I haven't done this yet...
Unfortunately, location has a huge impact on finding a co-founder. I live in Detroit and I am having the same problem trying to find anyone motivated enough to build a startup with.

One idea I am considering is to partner up with someone online to begin development on the project. If the two of you can work together and build a reasonable prototype, then consider an eventual move to silicon valley and applying for funding and such.
Also amazed that neighborhood groups have "Illegal Hotels Committee"s

NYC is close quarters. It's not necessarily cool to have a different set of partying neighbors every day of the week.
I have trouble understanding why some companies have a hard time owning up to a mistake. When you own up to a mistake, especially to your customers, it humanizes your business and most of your customers usually won't hold the initial mistake against you (obviously it depends on the severity of the screw-up.)

What good can come from trying to pull a Jedi mind-trick on all of their affected customers and anyone else who is paying attention?
But they were upfront about that.

I "work" from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m, but in fact I'm very unproductive, especially in the morning, and I get only a few blocks of 2-3 hrs where I am productive (maybe 5 out of the 10 hours total in a good day).

I was a lot more productive with other time arrangements (and space, I'm in an open office with 7 other developers, which kills my chances of being "in the zone" unless I wear headphones).
Yes, and they'll do it themselves with their hubris.
I think it's ridiculous to rename dates just to remove their religious connotations, especially when the reference point is still the (slightly inaccurate) birth of Christ. If someone wanted to start with a new system, where year 0 is the Big Bang, that would be reasonable - it would put all dates on the same time scale instead of having to convert between BC and AD. But if you're going to keep the religious reference point, why pretend it's something else? Prejudice is the only reason that I can see.

Of course, when we revise our estimates of when that happened, it would screw everything up again...
When SPJ is talking about concurrency, he is most likely talking about shared state with software transactional memory.

If you read the interview he is talking about the kind of implicit concurrency FP advocates often suggest you get for free with FP.

I suppose Haskell initially wasn't a concurrent language at all. It was a purely functional language and we had the idea from the beginning that a purely functional language was a good substrate for doing concurrency on. But it turned out to be a lot harder to turn that into reality than I think we really expected because we thought "If you got e1+e2 then you can evaluate e1 at the same time as e2 and everything will be wonderful because they can't affect each other because it's pure."

They had to add things like STM and explicit concurrency management because you don't get this for free just because you're doing FP.
I know I am going to get down voted probably here.
But seriously, if you are starting out, Java might be a very good thing to start with too.
As a language, it's very mature. The documentation is pretty good.
I know setup might be a a little tricky for a noob, but it's not that bad.
Although, I agree, if you are focusing on ROI, Ruby or python, or even PHP are more inviting.
And you can probably do a lot more faster that way.

But for learning things inside out, Java might be a very good choice.
Good books, great amounts of algorithms, in fact great algorithm books too.
One really good one is Effective Java, sEcond edition.
Another algorithm related (short but solid) book is Data structures and algorithm analysis in Java.

Now, don't take me wrong. I might be a little biased, because I find it easier to do a lot more in Java on Eclipse IDE, than anything else.

Started a startup right after MS, didn't go so well.
Still stuck in Dallas, TX. Would love to move to CA, but immigration issues plus financial burdens.

I started out as a C++ job in my current company that hired me, with some more AMPL (Mixed integer programming). Read Ruby on Rails book, Agile programmingusing ROR or something by DHH (David heinemeir hanson). Loved it, but found ROR a little limiting for what I am doing.
But my day job ended up being in Java.
I do prolog hacking, although haven;t really done that in while.
And still for fun, and continuing my startup on side, and completing a dream of solving a bunch of NP complete problems in seconds, still using a mix of C#, Excel, PHP, Prolog.
Very soon jumping onto Javascript or Jquery probably, since I wanna move into making a real Web GUI, instead of a C# GUI.

So, yeah after all this, I found easiet and very helpful where C# on Visual studio and Java on Eclipse IDE.
Loved ROR, found it quite easy too, esp the book is great.
For PHP, I still am doing structural coding, although sometime in future I am def reading PHP Objects, Patterns and Practices .

I wish that would help you pick one.
Because you sound a lot like me, I was so confused in college, no idea where the world is going.
Personally, my research and doing my startup later opened my eyes to the real world.
Of course, Paul Graham essays and HN were so much more helpful too.

Of that reminds me, go read PG's(Paul graham) essays first.
I think you need to understand programming in general first, the startups and then pick up a language to learn.

Oh, Oh, MUST READ for you....I wish this came out when I was in high school or early college.

This will give you a little more perspective.

http://www.paulgraham.com/int.html
It's true that none of those attempts have created a language that everyone can use, but many of them have lowered the barriers. You might not use Access, but a lot of people do. And a lot of people who can't grok the complexity of C++ can put together simple GUI apps in Visual Basic to accomplish simple tasks.

I'm not suggesting that everyone will ever be able to implement quicksort or write a parser, but there is no fundamental reason that high-level programming will always be inaccessible to the masses.
Maybe it's because I went through a similar experience with meditation, or maybe the author used some clever foreshadowing that I can't consciously pick up on, but for some reason... I knew, as I read his recounting of the misery, that he would come around on page two. The description of pain in the neck and shoulders felt right, in that sense that the author seemed to be saying, "This is when I began to feel the stress I have carried with me for so many years."
I'm mostly interested that this doesn't touch on the more basic issue:

AirBNB is illegal not only due to short term hotel law, but also due to sublease law in NYC. You CANNOT sublet an apartment for more than it is worth in New York. I've met and heard of more than a few people who rent apartments and use AirBNB as a primary source of (as OP points out, untaxed) income. I'm surprised NYC landlords aren't more up in arms about this.

I don't agree with making it illegal outright, but I actually am kind of in favor of regulating and taxing this better, for the issues the OP talks about as well as the sublease issues.

Edit: After thinking about this a little more I realize the OP goes 90% of the way but doesn't quite cross the finish line with the argument. AirBNB IS the regulatory institution, and is doing a better job than the govt. My sublease point still stands.
I'm skeptical of the assumption made in so many of these articles: that Google will surely be annihilated by Facebook if they don't act quickly to usurp their social networking crown.

Social networks come, and social networks go. Sure, Facebook is run rather more competently than, say, MySpace ever was. But it isn't at all clear how big uniques and a whole lot of people playing Farmville equate to being a contender for Google-killing internet domination. I suspect that a lot of this breathless punditry is going look very silly ~5 years from now.
Why not put the idea out there and ask for help in building it?
Make My Website Viral
Simple Texas Holdem Poker advice!
Is the rental contract between the customer and the room provider or between the customer and airbnb?

One way to approach enforcement would to be to set a threshold on the number of units a room provider can offer without being subject to the hotel regulations. AirBnB can easily enforce such restrictions.
Agreed. Unlike Facebook, Google let's you pull out all of your data from their services: http://www.dataliberation.org/
I don't have a direct answer to the first part of your question, but as for the, "if anything?" part...

It's a sure thing. Remember when people used to talk about what could possibly unseat MySpace, if anything?
or he just had a reputable dealer?
x is on my hell-no list, but I've known people that take it and buying from someone with connections is quite different than the randomness you'll get if you try to buy at a rave. There is a whole social hierarchy about manufacture and distribution of pure samples of stuff like that.
The illegal hotel problem (esp on the west side of NY) is indeed actually big enough to warrant a committee on the community board-- the west side is home to a lot of SRO's and seedy 'hotels' that cater to folks coming into NYC via the Port Authority bus terminal.
2 Weeks since I have asked for a refund and was told it would be coming shortly, still nothing. They can't even ship my own money back to me :\
A Closer Look at Tilera's Technology
Btw if the quotes got you interested in the wisdom Erik Naggum has to offer, then the ever resourceful Xach Beane has a page for you - http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/ . The page contains Erik Naggums postings on comp.lang.lisp which have a very high signal to noise ratio. Bonus points - the listings can be browsed chronologically and can be searched.
I'm three years into a CS degree, and have studied computers at every level from the logic gates to operating systems to high-level languages. I'm still not convinced that computers aren't magic.
TCE project: Co-design of ASIPs with LLVM-based compilation support
I'm using Google Webfonts to load up the Droid font, which non-iOS 4 Mobile Safari doesn't like. iOS 4 Mobile Safari can handle it though :)
as do I, SSRIs are terrifying, addictive and something I've avoided completely.
A slightly misleading headline... My first impression was, "Changing from 'ITA' to 'Hot Ticket' is a good move."
Well, almost: http://bit.ly/bcaonj
Yeah, our neighbor pretty blatantly runs an illegal hotel out of her house in Brooklyn. Usually it's fine but she often has young, European guests who like to party in her backyard (about 10 feet from our bedroom window) until 6am. Luckily this is reserved for weekend evenings (most days) so we don't complain; though if it got out of hand, it might be nice to have some alternative to (almost never enforced) noise ordinances.

That said, I'd rather live with this than cut off opportunities/efficiencies created by airbnb!
I wonder which is more painful? What you had, or what I had in Eastern Europe, which is the same old drill, but no anesthesia.

Incidentally, living in the west has totally pussyfied me. No offense meant to my (now) fellow westerners.
NYC is scam central when it comes to subleasing and renting out rooms. There are tons of people in rent controlled apartments who have no moral qualms about making a buck off of their sublettor or roommate. Another reason AirBNB is interesting because they are making it obvious who these people are and where they live...
I know a few volcanoes who would beg to differ.
Completely agree. The author mentions that he tried to learn Erlang and Haskell (we don't know how much he tried), uses the technical specs of Haskell and O'Caml, and then makes a side swat at Scala.

It looks like at the beginning of this year he had decided to learn Haskell as a way to explore functional programming: http://www.benrady.com/2010/01/language-of-the-year-2010.htm....

I simply don't think being unable to learn a language qualifies you to bash it. It'd be more fitting for him to post about the first point in whatever Haskell resource he is using where he became confused.
DreamHost - One Million Domains
Yeah, that's my understanding as well that x and lsd and shrooms build a massive tolerance quickly. I mean he's self reporting taking this much, if he was even taking x every few days, smoking weed daily, doing some lsd or heroin and we're gonna trust his account?

"uh yeah man, I took like 12 pills a day man, I'm so weird man..."
Unless you can show the "alternative medicine quacks" actually doing the "impossible", your point is irrelevant. Is there some wildly successful "alternative" medicine treatment that regrows teeth but has somehow eluded popularity for lo these many thousands of years?
Absolutely. The NYC real estate market is an absolute nightmare in so many ways. Right now it seems most akin to the DeBeers control over the diamond market (ie: an industry based on false scarcity).
3D displays and haptic interfaces come together in HIRO III
The day we are required to artificially manage the world's climate to survive is the day we become inevitably doomed.
On my winter break last year, I spent two weeks meditating, lucid dreaming, astral projecting, OOBing, and smoking pot :)

Scariest time of my life. Apparently meditation, when done with some skill is similar to third plateau of DXM. Doing it everyday made me feel extremely weird in normal life. Still recovering.