skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one addressed the parallelization claim, so here goes:

The ability to parallelize purely functional code comes from the Church-Rosser theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Rosser_theorem), which states that you can do beta reductions in any order in the lambda calculus and get the same term.

The thing with tail-recursive code is precisely that there is only one way to do a reduction - the function has to call itself at the end. That's what makes tail-recursive code "iterative."

As soon as you introduce multiple reduction paths, you need a stack for the intermediate results - think of for example a recursive divide-and-conquer algorithm.

This Kornelius Fuhrer dude shouldn't be writing articles on parallel programming, he should be reading books about it.
It's miserable. The fact that it works (usually) just hides the fact that it's fragile and very leaky.

A friend of mine who does large-scale systems designs (he designs power and cooling systems for little things like international airports and the Gates Foundations new buildings) once said that our current power lines sacrifice close to 30% of the energy that they're supposed to be transmitting. By any rational measure in this day and age, that alone qualifies our grid as "crap" already, but the fact that a software bug shut down most of New England for several days three or four years ago doesn't cast any positive light on our pitifully outdated infrastructure.
An ugly, but insightful, oil spill infographic
Yes, but the non-Coke-owned competitors of Honest Tea won't have any difficulty in touting the absence of HFCS. This is a prisoner's dilemma; it does no good for just one competitor to stop pushing against HFCS, you need them all to collude to stop together.

There's also arrogance on the behalf of Coke's execs. Not only do they think that these beliefs aren't preordained, but they believe that they themselves are doing the ordaining. It seems like they are myopic to the problems of competing in the space Honest Tea is in, and more interested in defending their cash cow.
If you'd like to learn more about how autonomous cars will change the world, I strongly recommend the robocar essays of Brad Templeton: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

Highlights:

-Cars that don't crash due to human error would save 40,000 lives and a million injuries (NIH). Mostly young people, for whom car accidents are the leading cause of death among major categories.

-Not crashing would save 230 billion dollars of accident cost (NTSB). About 2-3% of GDP.

-Not driving would free up 50 billion hours (or 1 trillion dollars) of people's time. Around 8% of GDP.

-Electric cars (more feasible when the car can go to a service station when it's not being used, because one of the major problems with electric cars is that storing lots of energy in a battery is difficult) would save 50 billion gallons of imported gasoline, replaced with the equivalent of 5 billion "gallons" of domestic-source power plant fuel. Thus eliminating about 12-15% of the USA's CO2 emissions and nastier pollution.

-There would be a serious reduction in the urban land devoted to the ~600 million parking spaces, estimated to be up to 10% of urban land in many cities.
> I asked for a hard copy of this decision for reference to a lawyer.

Whoa, going adversarial and implicitly threatening is never going to help you get what you want.

> Apple minion snatched up my iPad again and disappeared into the back [No admittance!]. After another twenty minutes, he returned with "Robert H., Store Manager". Robert explained to me that any unauthorized software was a modification. All modifications completely void the warranty.

Totally predictable. When you're asking for a favor, ask for a favor, be meek, humble, beg and scrape a little maybe, and be gracioius. "Can I get a hard copy for a lawyer?" is going to get you stonewalled, especially when they don't have to help you.

> I asked if the iPad having been restored would not make this moot.

Too technical, and too late anyways. Stay friendly when you're asking for a favor. They might've even helped him out if he was really nice and cool about it. I bet if he'd said, "This is taking quite a while... is there any way I can get a lender iPad if you have such a thing while you guys try to give mine a fix? I'd mightily appreciate it, it'd mean a lot to me" - then maybe he could have been lent one while they put in some hours to try to fix his. The adversarial behavior means they starting going into CYA mode instead of trying to help you.
You are absolutely more capable than you think. I started freelancing with a decently sized startup based on the recommendation of a good friend who was an all out super star.

I was looking for freelancing work and failing miserably at it. Someone at this startup asked my friend if they knew anyone for "some short term CSS projects". He sent them to me.

I hadn't done CSS in over 2 years (and only then I barely knew enough to do squat) My friend reassured me that I could do it. He also encouragingly said "don't screw this up".

I started the same day of the recommendation. The "short term projects" they originally wanted turned into 2.5 years and over 125k in income for me - about 15 hours / week. I've now gone on to get strong recommendations from every person of the team I started working with at the startup, as well as a new contract with some of them after they'd moved on to a new place.

Something I believe strongly that helped me was I was totally obsessed with turning things around as fast as humanly possible. I responded to emails, calls, etc within an hour and would often complete a project in not much more time.
You're on a great track with this comment. It is also important to not forget that instantiating objects is a part of our domains not just some wart to be hidden.
Great advice! I'll try that once I'm done with everyone who has tried to contact me (It's already quite a lot to just evaluate all the requests).
There's an existing and established competitor in the mailed DVDs business: http://www.zip.ca/

Postal service has always been good for; depends how far back you're talking.
Ahh someone who has thought past the surface, "can do what we currently do better" of this to some of the more disruptive changes that autonomous car technology might bring.

The use of the car's logs to meter all parking in a city is nice. Some new gaming of systems will begin. The price of parking gets weighed against the cost of just driving the car in circles for the duration of the stay, and the defector strategies, like shifting the car between locations which have a "cars can wait X minutes for free to do a pickup" rule, need to be watched for.

A business model that might well feel the mixed bite of autonomous vehicles is roadside hotel/motels. If you invest in an autonomous car with "sleeper options" (or rent a sleeper car, bed(s) on smart wheels), any town within about 8 hours drive becomes psychologically much closer to home, just a night's sleep away. It becomes closer to absurd to ever stop at any hotel between you and your destination or to take such trips so that they use your waking time. But then hotels at the destination can cater to the "just want a safe parking area and a shower/bathroom in the morning" crowd. Opportunities here too for the car rental companies to provide end-to-end "sleeper car solutions"; competition and/or cross-promotion between car rental companies and hotels/parking-and-bathrooms chains.

Towns geographically central between large farther-flung working cities could become hubs for meetings, think Voronoi diagram. Or they can choose, instead, to cater to the weekend tourism crowds from those large cities. Somewhere around Eureka California will become the easy weekend meet-up mecca for practically the whole west coast.
That's a great graph. The best thing they could do with it would be to just hand out a copy to every 9th-grade student.
This one (disclosure: I maintain it) links directly to the HN page: http://twitter.com/HNComments
Bear in mind that you have to have a "need to know" in addition to your clearance. We can speculate that there are also levels beyond top secret. In particular, eyes-only for the most sensitive stuff [1], and (what I have seen called but can't find a reference for) code-word secrecy for particular projects/operations.

[1] Which is where the Bond film For Your Eyes Only gets its title.
Russia's Sukhoi signs $951 mln Superjet deal
I agree with you about the overblown part, but I do think it has a part in a design article. The selection of information is an important factor in the final output from a design perspective. Design is not just look and layout without consideration of content and content selection.

That being said, I kinda like being able to exclude certain sources, but mostly for a different reason then to create and echo chamber. I like excluding sites that have poor viewing experience.
I don't agree. I think they want to sell the brand of sugar water with the highest profit margins.
You are likely correct that it's unlikely any of these companies' futures will change appreciably because of this coverage. However, PR can definitely make a real difference in a business--see Aaron Patzer's thoughts on this (no particular source, but he talks about it a lot). To take your airline example, Virgin America invested a ton in PR when they launched.

Also, I think writing off successful PR (even in this particular article) as being a company with or without a human interest angle is wrong. I don't think there's anything particularly human interest-y about Posterous, or syncing cell phone data to computers. Certainly the fundamentals of the businesses are not the high order bit either, but that doesn't seem any more like any inherently good decision basis than many other things.
Yes, in Lisp there's no real difference between * or car.

In Haskell, which has more syntax, you can use * in infix notation, but so you can with other function. E.g. the function `on`. Quoting from the documentation:

on :: (b -> b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> a -> a -> c
(*) `on` f = \x y -> f x * f y.

Typical usage: Data.List.sortBy (compare `on` fst).
Linux Distro Review: Mandriva 2010.1
Google quietly kills its once-hyped Nexus One phone
My favourite version was the video of the guy who goes and stands next to the "FREE HUGS" guy offering "PREMIUM HUGS: $2".

I think he makes about $32 in the first hour.
Did you, by chance, drop out of school?
What you say was more or less true in 2000. Things have changed a bit since then. The fact that many recent laws and programs obviously defy the first ten amendments to the US Constitution have gone "unnoticed" by the SCOTUS, and both major brands (D & R) seem content with how things have developed the last decade.

"We the rabble" are likely in for a 10 year slog to fix things, if we are lucky: paper ballots; some kind of coalition or runoff voting rule changes to take down the "two" party system; reestablishment of the rule of law.
That's not a good answer here.

A mountain range isn't sucking the energy out of the system and sending into another one. The mountain range sucks the energy out of the air and transfers it elsewhere -- leading to the violent and unpredictable weather that large mountain ranges are known for.

Turbines suck the energy out of the air and don't put it back in the same place.

I don't think that we'll be able to draw enough energy out of the air to make more than micro-climate level changes, but then if you look at what's happening to the eastern Washington water table and the massive reservoirs on the Columbia River, the massive reservoirs on the Colorado, and so on, things start to look a little bit less promising.
Book: Symbolic Logic by Lewis Carroll
Everyone: I'm sorry if you've emailed me and I'm taking more than an hour to reply now. It's taking me a little time to evaluate all the requests I'm getting.

More requests are welcome, but I am unlikely to be able to actually do more until later. If you contact me though, when I am done with the work I take up now, I can start with yours. You'll get a reply from me regardless of course.
From the link you quote:

"Even though they contain the same amount of tea, the one of the left looks larger!"

You won't buy it because... you want your bottles to look small? It doesn't seem to be a problem to me unless the two are sold side by side at different prices. The bottle contains 500ml, which in Europe is the normal size for e.g. a bottle of Coke. I don't know what it's competing with in the US.

It seems that the design is for stacking the bottles.
Well is this part of that 30 under 30 thing they do?

There's nothing wrong with focusing on a particular demographic.
And if for some reason you can't run readability or prefer just linking directly to the extracted text, you can use my reader (based off of readability):

http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjeffkreeftmeijer...

If you are on a mobile phone, you can view a mobile version of HN that also provides a link to my reader here: http://toadjaw.com/hn
Conversion Rate Lessons for Newspaper Paywalls
Thanks — that's great to hear. :)
Working on OSS "for free" is different than working for some guy's startup without pay. At least with OSS, you can usually find a link to the commits you contributed, provide an explanation of how you solved that particular problem and why, and stick it in a portfolio.

You can't do that with proprietary software that may or may not even be running in a year from now.
Maybe I lack imagination or maybe A/B testing is dull, but I can't get to understand what a "hook" can be. Would you have any imaginary example for me? Do you mean something like 'mine was a small business, but when I used VWO my sales increased by 20% and finally I could afford a new server to expand the business'? Well there are such case studies available on the site. What sort of hook are you talking about here?
Being "successful" isn't necessarily the point, and I don't think it needs to be. If the goal were to write about the most successful companies, there would probably never be a startup mentioned--and it would probably be an article you had no interest in reading. "Google, still huge. Exxon, yup they make a ton of money. Etc etc."
More choice is less choice: The strange economics of a-la-carte cable
Isn't this pretty obvious?

Also, it's clearly not the absences causing people to fail to graduate. Just think about the people you know who skipped classes and days of school in 9th grade...
Pixastic: JavaScript Image Processing Library
You want non-lawyers drafting laws? There's a good reason why most congress people are lawyers. The law is very tricky and English is an ambiguous language that needs to be made crystal clear from a legal standpoint (which typically becomes unreadable to laypeople).

That said, I do think there's a place for engineers that happen to be interested in law and passionate about government. I would appreciate it if maybe 10% of congress were former engineers/scientists/developers.

Also, not voting is what corrupt politicians want you to do. Vote for a candidate you do support, even if you know they won't win.
Something like 100 - so it's only 2 or 3 stories per day would be nice.
Dude, if you have no experience and are willing to work for free, at least go on RentACoder or whatever it's called these days and bid really low on a few projects that interest you.

Trust me, someone will bite. That place is the Grand Central of bottom feeders.
Book: Compiler Construction, by Niklaus Wirth [pdf]
FanGamb is hiring two Rails devs in Dublin, Ireland
Do you mind sharing who you outsourced development to and how you went about finding a developer?
How Consumer Reports got Apple's attention when no one else could
Sounds like they are trying to spin off everything except for their Public Safety radio division.

They have been, and still are, talking about spinning off the smartphone division.
Makes you wonder how ActiveState got characterised as "an antispam software development company" when antispam is only one part of Sophos's product line, and nothing at all to do with ActiveState.
"However, rather than accepting connections using this socket, it is passed off to some number of child processes using net.Stream.write() (under the covers this uses sendmsg(2) and FDs are delivered using recvmsg(2)). Each of these processes in turn inserts the received file descriptor into its event loop and accepts incoming connections as they become available. The OS kernel itself is responsible for load balancing connections across processes."

Racing (ie thread-safe) accept() is a really good way to improve server throughput. Epoll is also awesome for being thread-safe.
I think press does something that advertising can never do: providing social proof. Advertising gets you eyeballs; press gets you eyeball + proof (that a startup is worth knowing more about).

But, yes I agree that pandering to a journalist's taste isn't a great idea. But that's not because I think it is against my philosophies (or such), rather it takes so much time to figure out what works for him/her. As I commented above, I still haven't found my hook. And I'm vaguely aware that the hook will vary from journalist to journalist.
Do you know where your lobbyist is?
Oh yeah, eh.
Practice habitually to Present English Term Paper
Students writing an English term paper can draw their topic from Language or Literature. The paper must impress the professor with the creative, language and the communication skills of the student. Here are some advices for writing an impressive English term paper.
In the example case, and many others, the tail-recursive version is the simple application of an accumulator. So for the factorial example, an accumulator version would be (in haskell since I don't know the example language very well):

fac1 0 = 1
fac1 n = (*) n (fac1 ((-) n 1))

-- tail-recursive
fac2 0 acc = acc
fac2 n acc = fac2 ((-)n 1) ((*) acc n)

To me, something in with a pattern of:

f v = g v (f (t v))

where f, g and t are functions (t is a transform on a, in the factorial case it is (-),

Can usually be turned into the form (mechanically even):

f v acc = f (t v) (g v acc)

Does this hold for all cases or am i missing something? If it does hold, could a language just implement the TCO for it, and therefore couldn't we just consider the very first implementation of fac1 to be tail-recursive?

edit: It is ugly but changed my exmple code to match the pattern i describe exactly.
>> "I don't think there's anything particularly human interest-y about Posterous, or syncing cell phone data to computers."

The human interest bit is that "These are all 'young' people (under 30 or something)". If it was just a list of "hot new startups" it wouldn't have that same angle.
there are two gnu utilites that are useful for writing: gnu style and gnu diction.
http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html

diction finds common mistakes.
style gives some metrics (may or may not be useful, YMMV).

they have a similar theme as this article.
I think your "hook" could be that you are a small (one-person ?) operation based in India, competing with much larger competitors (as far as I can tell from the website, sorry if I'm mistaken). Instead of downplaying it, maybe you could stress this angle of the story. It's risky though, maybe your customers expect to work with a larger company. Still the media might like this side of the story.
The bad move was taking the jailbroken ipad to the store without restoring it first.
I like thinking about re-implementing craigslist.. It's a good exercise to think about improving something really simple without making it too complicated. That said, I have a couple suggestions. First, the view I see when I click into a city isn't really simpler (or much different) than the CG pages. Second, I think the biggest challenge you'll have with a site like this is bootstrapping content. I would consider doing a couple things.. Maybe make recent posts in any category for a city prominent maybe.. to show activity. I'd also strongly consider whether or not you can make your tool backward compatible.. If posting on swippet could cross-post on craigslist for me.. that's a big win, right? Why not use swippet as my portal in that case... The other way would be handy too.. Show craigslist search results below your own while you're short on content.
1) Business is business. I find that companies and managers talk about loyalty from employees but if they're budget gets cut you're out the door in a heartbeat. You need to do what's right for you, in regards to stress level and your career, just like a business will do what's in it's best interest.

2) References aren't much to count on these days. Some large companies won't give them as a policy (good or bad). Furthermore, if they're going to give you a bad reference now, they will likely do it in 6 months too.

3) It's hard to predict who will freak out and who won't. I've seen people who normally freak out take it very calmly and even, nicely. And then I've seen someone who is normally calm (and who I'd done a lot for) get angry at me when I left with plenty of notice and not in a crunch time.

4) If the rats are already abandoning ship, go with them. When I have left a couple of places, it did trigger a couple of other people to quit and when I inquired back to the companies, it only got worse and worse. I've seen that happen for other people too. The moral of the story is get out while you can.
1) First thing I noticed was that it didn't auto select/suggest the nearest city for me. Going to craigslist.com automatically redirects me to washingtondc.craigslist.com (which I can then change if I want to).

2) I went to the last page and found Washington, DC. Upon clicking the text "Washington DC" in the City column I get the following error:

Invalid city

3) If I instead click the text "DC" in the State column, it navigates me to the following URL (which obviously doesn't actually do anything):

http://www.swippet.com/#"

After that, I gave up.

I think CraigsList is an interesting choice to target. They've been notoriously slow to adopt new features or update their look/feel. Perhaps this is the secret to their success, or perhaps it leaves them ripe for the picking. Either way, good luck and let me know when you've got DC working.
You are missing some basic stuff here. A mountain range is more, not less effective at 'sucking energy out of the air', it's basic physics. A windmill can only oppose the wind so much before it fails to work (see Betz' limit), a mountain range can suck 100% of the energy out of the air as you word it by simply converting the energy in the air to heat on impact (that's simplified but that's a good part of it).

As to your choice of words, turbines don't 'suck energy out of the air', they slow down the moving air. A mountain range does the exact same thing.
How do they market these sites? I'm sure the idea is that SEO will kick in as their content gets deeper, but I don't see how they'll get any content at all without promotion by people as prominent in the Gaming/Foodie/etc. communities as Joel and Jeff are in the software engineering world.
I suspect a better approach is to make expected tail recursion a language feature, and have the compiler emit an error if the returned expression is not in fact valid for a tail call.

Imagine if it were 'treturn' or something.

It's not something that bites people who have been around this mulberry bush before, but I think it can very likely catch problems that novices have, thinking they're writing an O(1) space solution but actually using O(n) stack.
Amazon has them, and cheaper than I've ever seen in a drug store. In fact, you can even set up a subscription service, though I don't remember how.
I know plenty of people with top secret clearance. Each knows very few secrets. (Or at least, so I assume. I don't know what they know, it's a secret.)

Even I used to have a lower-grade US government security clearance, and I'm a dirty foreigner.
Brand damage.
Or planted by the Honest Tea/Coke people as a bit of awesome PR for a brand they've invested in.