skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it ironic that on an article about excessive punishment, your comment has been massively down-voted.

Even though I disagree with you, personally I think you raised a reasonable point.
There are some practical reasons, but if you haven't learned any of them, it's hard to recommend Caml. Both Haskell and Scheme (and I'd add Prolog) offer some interesting ways of reasoning about programs, even if you don't end up working with them in the end.

As for usage scenarios: Compared to Scheme, you might like the syntax more, it's statically typed and has a very fast compiler that doesn't even need to use C as an intermediate language. Haskell is much more pure regarding its functional nature and thus its way of interacting with a state-ful world can seem a bit intimidating. If you don't have a lot of math under your belt, Caml's way of interpreting code is a bit easier to mentally model.

I've always thought of ML as the C to Haskell/Miranda's Pascal, for better or worse…

Library-wise, Caml has a very good foundation for writing Unix software. Haskell has made major steps in catching up, Scheme is still a bit balkanized (going from your teaching language to the Chicken/Gambit/PLT infrastructure is not much easier thank taking up Common Lisp).

I'm still surprised at how far Haskell has come in recent years in getting more libraries. It used to be slightly below Common Lisp in that regard, if my memory serves me. Now Hackage is huge. GHC always was a pretty good compiler, so nothing major about the language or its implementation changed. I also know of no big poster boy use cases, compared to e.g. Erlang. Linux hackers impressed by xmonad?
llc? you may want to do a bit of research on company formation choices, depending on what direction you want to go in. if you want to raise funding and do things silicon valley style, an llc would be uncommon, imho.
I think the most interesting part of this is that he starts the painting very differently than I (a non-artistic person) would. Instead of starting with an outline of the head and filling it in, he starts with the large patches of color, gradually adding more detail. Very cool.
I used to believe, fervently and automatically, that democracy was the best system. Can you blame me? No-one in my society opposes democracy. No-one sane anyway.

In the last couple of years, I've encountered well-reasoned opposing views for the first time.

Let's back up, and consider how to get an effective x, where x is a cup of coffee or a laptop or anything else. One way might be to get everyone to vote on what kind of x they like, and then give that to everyone. This is of course a terrible system, and not Starbucks nor Apple have that kind of system.

Much better to have competition. I'd be terrible at making coffee or a laptop, and it's best that I'm not trusted to make those things, or to choose who would be good at making them. Nor ought I to be trusted with running a country or choosing who to run it.

So, I think an ideal world might be a world of many smaller governments, each competing for consumers/citizens. Apply the creativity and efficiency of startups to the governing industry. I want a world of Singapores and Hong Kongs and Liechtensteins, where I can pick my government provider approximately the same way I pick my ISP or my employer.

Of course there are problems. So solve them! What better decrepit, corrupt, monopolizing old industry to fix than the governing industry? A Peter Thiel-funded startup is trying (http://seasteading.org).

See also Arnold Kling on competitive government vs. democracy: http://smartdemocracy.com/papers/kling_competitive_governmen...

And also see the reading list at the Let A Thousand Nations Bloom blog: http://athousandnations.com/recommended/
In one case, Navigenics called a donor's risk of prostate cancer above average, while 23andMe and deCODE considered his risk average and Pathway judged it to be below average, the report said.

In another instance, a donor had a family history of heart disease, the report said, "yet all four companies predicted that she was at average risk for having a heart attack."

Both of these examples are incredibly weak evidence. You need statistics to find the accuracy of these products, not anecdotes. Anyway, your genes are a more accurate gauge of disease risk than family history. When a doctor asks about family history, they would prefer to take a look at your genome. It's easy to have a family history of heart attack while having an average risk yourself. If your ancestors had typical genes, but lived a different lifestyle that caused them to be more prone to heart attack, they'd have heart attacks. Hell, they could just be unlucky.
Are you talking about the Dyson Airblade? I'm not actually convinced that they work significantly better than the old-skool ones.

Still, as I understand it, making those tiny powerful fans is non-trivial, and it was more a case of the invention driving the application instead of vice versa. It was a case where Dyson (no relation to Freeman, tragically) started building tiny powerful motors for their vacuum cleaners and then went looking for other applications.

Or perhaps it's just a case of a "no hair on fire" demand. People just haven't been spending the last thirty years thinking "Man, I wish this hand dryer worked better", let alone "I wish I could pay a lot more for the dryers in my public bathrooms so that my customers could dry their hands marginally faster".
These are quite nice. Only one thing gives away their age. Every choice is fluid. The Web seems to have reached an informal consensus that having a maximum or fixed width for lines of text is a "Good Thing™"
"Projects will take either 3 times as long or 10 time as long - which is exactly the time it takes you to become disinterested, and interested in your next project."

In the forward to the 1995 version of the Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks talks about the axes of expanding a software program. On one axis you go from a program to a "programming product", and that takes 3x effort. On the other axis you turn a program into a "programming system" and that takes also takes 3x effort. To go from a "program" to a "programming system product" takes 9x effort.

So I was struck by how close the numbers were.
Hell, if you're in Washington, Amazon will ship from an out-of-state warehouse so that you still don't have to pay.
Britain's strategies were unsustainable. Without Forex traders, such strategies would just be used more, leading to more economic distortion. In forex, as in other markets, you can't push prices further away from their real values unless someone else is going to do the same after you.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand

How many laws are really necessary? It's like hate crimes. Is not every crime a hate crime of some sort? Do we really need a specific hate crime? No. But what is happening is the public crying out for the government to do something about the crime in the nation. Since the government cannot take any proactive action the only thing left is to make more laws.

Where the problem lies is not the lack of laws but the lack of teeth in the laws. Real punishments need to happen when laws are broken. Chain gangs, whipping and execution need to happen simply to tell every potential lawbreaker that there will be real punishments when laws are broken. As it is now, there are people that commit crimes just to be sent to jail because of the lax atmosphere in the penal system.
Killed by Code: Software Transparency
720P HD Android Tablet PC with HDMI output? Babiken L707
First Android Tablet PC w/ HDMI output
Android Netbook w/ CUP ARM926EJ, 600MHZ L707
720P HD Android Tablet PC Smart Pad w/ Ypdpr Output to TV

We now have many similar android tablet pcs but there is just just little difference between them. What's special for this Babiken L707? It has something unique indeed on this L707 and it has a HDMI output port, which you can connect to your HD TV etc to watch 720p HD videos. You can find not this HD output capability on any other existing China android MID except this one. What's more, we found the touch speed is not so bad though the device memory is just 128M; maybe it is because CUP and touch screen are nice as CUP processor is Rockchip 2808.

Features:
* Chipset: Rockchip 2808
* HDMI Port
* USB Port
* Mini USB Port
* Built-in WIFI
* Support 3G Modem (external)
* Support Ethernet
* 600MHz+600MHz (DSP) CPU
* Audio format: MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, APG, OGG, FLAC
* Video format: AVI, RM/RMVB, MP4, 3GP, MKV, MOV, WMV
* Picture format: JPEG, BMP

http://www.babikenshop.com/first-720p-hd-android-mid-tablet-pc-w-hdmi-output-7-touch-lcd-p-556.html
The Largest Organism on Earth
Thank you HeyLaughingBoy. Yes, vWorker is changing to reflect the diversity of the many talented workers on the site. Read all about it at http://blog.vworker.com/2010/04/about-our-name-change-from-r...
Ask HN: Books To Learn Web Design (HTML/CSS/XML/PHP) 
Ive been learning all I can about Web development / design for some time now but I need some book recommendations from other Web Designers in able further my knowledge and get my ideas off the ground.

What would you recommend to someone who is trying to get his first commercial, revenue generating website online?
#6. Oh the shame.

Mine's called "support" (.pm, .c, .py etc)
Ask HN: What would you do?
If you were given the choice of having:

A. 10% ownership

or

B. 10% profit, increasing to 20% over the next 8 years and a clause for the same % if the company is sold.

What would you choose?

Both options would be an officer position in the company.
Breaking News, Nokia
Deadlines. Find an excuse to set a hard deadline with real consequences up front and stick to it. The results are dramatic.
What is the Australian government's political rational behind implementing this plan? I highly doubt Australia has a contingent of voters who demand Internet censorship, and unlike China it's not like there's some sort of regime that needs to purge unfriendly ideas from circulating. This whole endeavor seems completely unnecessary. Any Australians know what the heck is behind this?
Hackers and Founders is a great group that meets up every other week. I've been to two of their events and everyone has been really awesome. There is a meetup this upcoming thursday in SF.

http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/
bye bye democracy, it was nice to have known you...
Yikes. I see Isilon and I think someone just spent 500k where they could have spent 75k and used MogileFS or similar. I suppose 37 signal's profit margins are good enough that it doesn't matter, but I'm glad it's not my money.

Moving to their own servers makes sense though. No doubt that's going to save them over paying a huge premiuim for Rackspace. With three full-time people it's a good move.
Exactly. I'm pretty sure Hitler had exposure to neither video games or the Internet and yet look what he went on to do.
Note that this document and story are actually about a recent EU-style data retention proposal, not the internet filtering / web censorship policy (which has been bumbling along for quite a while now).
That URL is actually: http://www.abtestS.com/
Rough price I can find online for 'normal' hand dryers is ~$200 bucks. The Dyson Airblade you're referencing is $1,400. That price includes the cost of non-trival engineering (and a good bit of marketing). Sounds like the setup for a great pitch.

Hi, we're going to revolutionize hand-drying with an hand dryer. Oh yeah, and it's going to be super expensive because we need to use quality parts for it to work well. So, uh, you interested in funding us?

Took 30-years for someone to front the cash to do the development.
...except it's not durable. If your server (clojure) crashes, you lose the data in memory.
Is that Hacker News web page optimized for iPad? Yes it is
Thank you, I can read marketing-speak.
Behind-the-Scenes Glimpses of Google
Imagine using a second iPad for the color palette
I just realized that Aza Raskin is Jef Raskin's son. One of Jef's main locus of attention was the zooming user interface (ZUI). This centers around the fact that an interface doesn't really have to have borders at all, just the ability to zoom. Zoom in to get detail; zoom out to view more of the world. Tab Candy is Jef's ZUI brought to the web browser. Cool!
I can't see why anyone in the US does those jobs - they just don't pay enough. You're better off making a good website and firing up the AdWords. Better yet, just hammer away at in person networking events to land some real contracts for real money. It's hard work, but the hourly rate has got to be 10-20x.

If you need a portfolio, just build some stuff. It doesn't have to be commercially successful for you to show it off to clients - it just has to look good and work. You may even make some cash in the process.
I would think that option A would be far more likely to be worth more. I can imagine that the company could increase greatly in value before turning a profit.
It's quite durable. CouchDB has pure tail append storage and will fsync every update and batch concurrent updates into a single commit. It can get fairly close to a drives max sustained write speed.
For web design, I would recommend against a book.
Create a delicious account and start tagging well designed sites as "inspiration".

Then steal, steal, steal.

http://colly.com/

http://riotindustries.com/

http://siteinspire.net/showcase/category/style/black_and_whi...

http://www.weareagoodcompany.com/

http://cssremix.com/visit/giant-peach-design/
isn't INT_MAX the largest value that could be returned?

From the article: "... assuming C to have integral types that can hold arbitrarily large integers."

As far as Pi, there are various well-known proofs that the length of the decimal expansion of Pi is unbounded: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrational
I know nothing about the quality of these teachers, but I can say based on my experience and insight that the quality of the students matters most, followed closely by the quality of the parents and the home life and family culture they provide. Teachers are a bit down the list. Because a student can always learn outside school -- and really, will be or should, both before and after the primary school years. There's only a narrow window in a person's lifetime where there is forced public schooling, and that's the only period, at least for most people, where the teacher quality is going to matter.
I'm not advocating taking on technical debt, just arguing that sometimes the anti technical debt crusade turns into premature optimization and unnecessary concept creep.
What a weird problem. You're writing in C for a turing machine. Your program has to terminate but you can't use any real-world boundary like CPU time or memory, despite the fact that the most efficient ways of doing this sort of thing in C is to hack binary memory and cast a variable.

It seems like the people writing these programs had a much better idea of the problem definition than the description on the linked page.
Not smarter, just better-informed.
for (;;) printf("9");
If you had tens of thousands of customers, would you bet your company on a homebrew MogileFS setup? And are you sure you'd save enough money to justify a port?
My effort with Reddit, there is a post there with google's effort to do something similar and their performance issues.

http://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/ct13j/add...
The point of this article is queuing requestd at the webtier until you have enough to swamp the HTTP transport overhead to CouchDB. If the website crashes you are going to lose that data.
What's the incentive for having a hand dryer at all? No towels to replace, either for cost or maintenance reasons, I guess. This isn't exactly something for the high paying clientele. So you have cheap, replaceable junk that every pop & son contracter in the country can install or fix. High end locations will have towels, maybe even with a real attendant handing them to you.

But in recent years, being environmentally friendly is a big deal. Having fresh towels might be as expensive, but it seems like a waste. So suddenly there's money available to companies who try to build a better dryer.
241 teachers were not fired over low test scores. 76 were fired for not having proper credentials. 165 were fired for poor performance which takes into account factors in addition to test scores such as classroom evaluations.
What's crazy is expecting the user to manage codecs. Do you really want to have to explain to your parents the performance, compatibility, and most of all security implications of various codecs websites ask them to install? Let the browser developers do that work. Users can have ffvp8 in 6 weeks when Chrome's new release process cycles again; I think that's plenty fast.
I use "smart" to mean "rationally applying knowledge and avoiding bias." It requires you to have knowledge, as source material—so teachers are responsible for that—but it also requires that you transform and synthesize that knowledge in useful ways, which requires more than information, and is something schools are supposed to teach ("learning how to learn.")
Most of art school is unlearning the "natural" way one might draw and paint and relearning ways to look at things and build up paintings and drawings in a much more iterative and incremental manor.
No shame man, we're all in this together.
booooooooring
It's not compatible with Firefox 3.6.7. Will you be updating it?
A question, how many people have seen a "password sniffed on the wire" attack in the wild? Apart from unsecured hacker attended conference wifi networks, Ive not encountered one, or heard about one from friends/colleagues. There's cases like the TJMax credit card exploit where the attacker got sniffing code running inside their processing network, but do attacks on Internet traffic while in-the-fuzzy-cloud-on-the-diagram actually happen? I suspect highly targeted attacks might, but not the large scale impact of server intrusions exposing (even hashed) password databases... ( Ive had "low grade" passwords exposed a couple of times in the last few years that way...)
I think you will understand how offensive and unnecessary your first statement is after looking at this photo: http://www.hollow-hill.com/sabina/images/auschwitz-corpses.j...
It is often better for a company to raise money from the bond market, but only up to a point and only because of the tax implications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade-off_theory_of_capital_str...
oops, sorry about that. thanks for catching it :-)
8) Software is never finished. It is abandoned. ~Corey Sanders
The $35 laptop is here.
The Max Hamburger chain in Sweden uses the Dyson Airblade. Max is a very innovative fast food company. They put how much CO2 your burger costs on the main menu for example.

The Dyson Airblade fits right in with the image they are trying to present. Clean, modern, efficient and cool.
I'm not sure I understand. CouchDB won't lose any committed (fsynced) data when it crashes. And when configured, it won't return a success until it's committed. It's completely durable.

edit: Oh I see, the stuff written in the clojure side won't be committed. If he wanted to write each one synchronously to CouchDB, that would work and CouchDB would still batch up the concurrent updates while writing.
I am not so sure that is true. It is like saying, be polite to people in stores and restaurants and you are more likely to get what you want, but the fact is that you see pissed of people making a stink, and getting treated better for fear of pissing them off.

We wish it was true, but it ain't.
It's very important to treat people well. But you don't always have the money to hire the best people, especially if you're a bootstrapped startup. One of the hardest psychological things about starting a business for me was taking no pay for a long time while paying others decently for work. Having an employee make considerably more than you is not psychologically healthy. I found myself having to guard against irrational feelings of resentment when going through tough times.

Money solves a lot of problems, and I think this is an area where funding is actually useful. Still better to grind through doing all the work yourself and not give out equity though.
No. Don't do that. You never know who did what or why they did it. There may be some good reasons for bad code. Even worse, there may be a personal relationship that you inadvertently shit all over by suggesting the client ditch their programmers. Don't shy away form pointing out bad code that gets in your way (and why they need to pay you to fix it), but don't make it personal - there is no up side.
It's a hung parliament with the balance of power held by a small group of bible thumping right wingers.
They wish to show to their voters that they are doing something to fight the waves of terrorism and filth that are warping the tiny minds of vunerable australian children.

And to distract anyone from finding out about their affairs, dodgy real estate deals and child abuse.
Let me add some more information which is relevant. I have been with a company for 6 years now out of 8 years in business. We have grown from a bootstrapped operation running out of a garage to a company with a solid customer base and re-occurring revenue. We have no debt and are profitable. I didn’t start the company, only helped build it, so the owner is offering me options because of the value I bring. I see benefits for both options.
I wanted to hear some other opinions.
I think you will understand how analogy works by watching this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-fI3KEgy6c

edited to add:
Beware, for history repeats itself. Just because heinous crimes were documented in the past is no guarantee that they will not be repeated by spineless authoritarians.
"As requests come in, instead of connecting immediately to the database, why not queue them up until we have an optimal number and then do a bulk insert?"

Judging by the code, it looks like he stores about 50 documents before sending them to CouchDB. I believe the original poster was asking about the durability of Clojure STM, not Couch DB.
Yes Australians had the decency to slowly wipe out the indigenous people out of sight over a century rather than being all teutonic and efficient about it.
You forgot to put a atoi() call around your function :-)
It's a combination of Stephen Conroy's good intentions (wanting to block child porn) mixed with bad advice he's receiving (mandatory filter).

Add to that a dash of stubbornness (he refuses to back down, even though he's been shown better solutions) and probably just a hint of corruption (the whole channel 7 broadcasting fee debacle) and you have yourself a recipe for disaster.
The confusing thing is the people implementing the decisions seem to know very little about the way the web works. The filter itself is being brought under the premise of filtering out child porn and 'undesirable and illegal content', however minutes from a meeting earlier this year detailed that only around 30% of the filtered list dealt with this sort of material. There has been no explanation as to what the other 70% deals with; that part is what concerns me.
If Clojure crashes, not the database.
I see this as an immense opportunity to automate this via an software by your identity at purchase. Why can't this be part of the software transaction and automatically reported and available at the IRS real-time.

Our tax system is way too form and administrative based still. It is always delayed and never real-time. Get this stuff out of the way and automate it throughout the year. Hide income taxes and 1099s for contractors just like they hide sales tax in transactions, or just rid of the income tax altogether and go another direction.
Godwin's Law, never fails.
I don't understand. 10% ownership implies 10% of the profit and 10% of the sale. Why would A ever be better? All I can think of is capital gains tax.
What a troll you are! Oh! Yes! You are!