skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can break functional languages down into two basic categories: Typed and Untyped. The typed ones derive from ML, and the untyped ones derive from Lisp.

Many of the 'killer features' of untyped functional languages have migrated their way into today's 'dynamic' languages like ruby, python, etc. You can use a REPL, you don't need to spend 15 minutes compiling, no static typing, etc. So in terms of 'new' things you'll learn from Clojure, you have s-exps and macros. This allows you to manipulate code as data, because the code is data.

The typed functional languages have an advanced type system, as the name indicates. In 'normal' languages, you have what I casually refer to as 'primitive types' Integers, Floats, Doubles, etc, and after that you're on your own. Typed functional languages have ADT's that allow you to model complicated systems via the types. Probably the standard example of a real-life use of this is that you can write code that will throw an error at compile time if you try to inadvertently try to add Feet and Meters. They also have pattern matching, which is pretty handy. Imagine a big if-elsif statement that will throw a compile time error if you handle bank transfers up to a million dollars, and transfers over two million dollars, but not ones that are between one and two-million dollars. You can think of both of these features as typedefs and case/if-elsif statements on crack. That's the kind of stuff you'll get from F#.

I personally think the typed functional languages have much more compelling features in this day and age. Like I said above, the features that I really dug in Lisps have made their way into most dynamic languages, and don't seem as mind-blowing as they once did. But if you really want to go crazy, it's probably worth learning at least one language from each functional sub-family at some point in time.
What evidence do you believe people will take seriously now?

Its strange. I believe in vaccines, following my doctors advice, and recycling. But, then I go to the gas station and see signs that my cellphone could cause an explosion. I remember the "going into an ice age talk" from the 1970's and the plans to heat the earth. I also remember the hate on for nuclear. Most people I know also see the "security theater" at the airport as not really addressing any real problems. Never mind the constant "you are a nut!" when people ask about the data collection, the e-mail investigation, and which politicians make money from wind as opposed to other new attempts. Also, all that "Hydrogen Economy" talk seems to have died pretty fast.

Solar and wind won't work. They are not constant as burning coal or oil, and we don't seem to have massive electrical storage technology to compensate. There aren't enough rivers to damn for power and those that are cause their own set of problems. Nuclear probably would have been ready along with a better electrical grid, but hollywood and certain environmental groups blew that.

Add to this, a whole new group of people (the "third world") that is just being able to take advantage of the products, energy creation, and manufacturing techniques that allowed the "first world" to get where they are. Now, we are telling them to not use those because they are harmful, while not providing an actual alternative.

The US is a road, liquid fuel, central electrical production country. No amount of yelling will get rid of roads. Liquid fuel might be replaceable, but it needs to be something as convenient, cheap, and easily taxed (in small chunk / not one big bill). The central grid needs to be improved and we need real, full-time replacements for coal and gas.

The worst part is whatever solution we come up with better be good enough for the third world to skip to.
You seem to be missing the point.

There are no guarantees. Ever. Our lives are ruled chance. You can't duplicate my life, but you can create an interesting life of your own.
Wow, what a bad experience. Good to see you get over it without holding a grudge. That said I hope the person has learned their lesson and did not see your decision to walk away from it as an encouragement for a repeat performance.
That's not relevant, sadly. It's just a matter of finding the point that will minimise wasted time (in both directions).
On a stack of books, though, it does make a difference. Books below the top book do not have a readable cover.

All English-language books I've ever seen beside foreign-language books (so that I could notice the distinction) read from top to bottom. It's not just the US.
Well said. I'd love to hear a YC perspective on this point. Obviously they get tons of applications, some with real traction and some that are just kernels of ideas. I wonder if they pass on companies that they feel simply don't need them?
BTW, a few links related to divorce eBooks, which should give you an idea of what topics are being covered (including some of the details, which you can then add to your own, as appropriate). Also, you'll get a sense of pricing, length and the types of sales-pitches being used.

http://www.dealwithdivorce.com/steps-planning/divorce-secret...

http://howtodivorce.us/

http://www.divorcesupport.com/divorce/Divorce-eBooks-1762.ht...

Note that the last item on the list of divorce eBooks is this:

http://www.divorcesupport.com/divorce/Getting-Divorced-Witho... . It's 176 pages and priced at $25.95

Also, check this out: http://www.divorcesupport.com/divorce/Avoiding-Divorce-Litig...

That article links to this audio CD, "How to Divorce As Friends":

https://ssl.divorcesource.com/cgi-bin/cmt/book/cat19/divorce...
You can often tell more about a person by their questions than by their answers
Ah, that's very interesting, thank you. I assume Scala is typed, then?
>"Ironically, our ancestors said analogous things. Are we truly that different?"

The difference between human society before 1800 and today is huge.
By your definition of professional I don't understand why you want punctuality. Three months into the last job I had, I told the company: "I'm more productive when I'm more productive. I'm not going to abuse off course, but I'm not getting here at 8am sharp every day." They said I could come at any time I wanted, or telecommute if I wanted, as long as I got things done. One time I spent 4 days in the office only surfacing from my desk for food and smokes because someone screwed a deadline. I made 2 weeks wort of work on three days. I got a bonus, an all paid weekend retreat, and they payed me back the amount of redbull and coffee I had.

Why do you care if someone is in through the door of the office at 9am or at 12pm as long as their work doesn't suffer from it? In the case of meetings and the such I do understand the need to have everyone be punctual though, and that should be stated before hand. If you have a meeting, be there on time, if nothing time sensitive is on the calendar, then let people do what they find more productive, within reason off course.
Mixergy & Dan Martell - Bootstrap Case Study
Of course, just give me some time to compose something thoughtful and deal with this deluge.

Oh and no, thank you.
Coke Zero for programming and for relaxing, a good rum and coke. I found a nice rum called Barcelo. It has the best taste.
> I'm not intimately familiar with the taxi laws, but I bet they don't specify what private organizations can do.

Huh? They have to. They don't let private limo organizations pick you up without a 1-hour reservation, for example, as stated in the article.

Furthermore, Ubercab already is a private organization.

I'm sure I'm missing something, can you explain why it would somehow become legal if it was a members-only organization?
> It's also strange that they default to 1.5 instead of 1.6.

What are you looking at? 10.6 doesn't even ship Java 1.5.
Unlike Digg, Facebook lacks a viable alternative and is deeply reliant on the network effect, meaning you need critical mass to migrate for the alternative to be useful. Because of this Facebook's growth, in the face of customer dissatisfaction in some cases, has been a hockey stick.
Very nice. I find your project better than the on posted. It's the more minimalistic approach that I liked. Very good work.
The fail free fall the site has fallen victim too is a direct result of corporate media influence IMO. It wasn't too long after Kevin's Forbe's cover shot and the bigtime acquisition talk that suddenly the algorithms started to favor mainstream shit and those hard hitting bombshell articles that made the site so great were burried or non-existent.

I was Digging since the early days. Even had a page of mine hit the front page. It WAS a good site at one time. Before it got infected with mainstream fluff.
I actually had this idea when I had dropped out of web design and became a taxi driver for a few years in 2001. It's a natural. However:
"Taxi dispatchers make money on tips..."
is an incorrect statement. Taxi dispatchers make money on BRIBES. Drivers do not tip out dispatchers. Nor do drivers' tips go to the company. What dispatchers euphemistically refer to as "tips" are actually bribes paid to them by some cab drivers to refer the best fares to those drivers - usually at the expense of the passenger, who has to wait outside longer for their cab because a closer driver was not dispatched.
The exact reason why UberCab or similar services ARE such a good idea is that they can improve the customer experience by cutting out dispatcher corruption.
Thanks for the correction. I admit I've not fiddled with Haskell's equivalents to Active Patterns to any great extent - as since I mention in the original comment I didn't hugely see the motivation in that context. I really only mentioned them since I assumed more people would be familiar with haskell.
A big cost is employees. Last time I checked (months ago) there were about 70 employees at Digg. Each employee will cost about $100,000 when you put employee taxes and benefits into play. That's $7M, half the budget. The execs and top-shot coders will likely push that number up a bit.
"Taxi dispatchers make money on tips. Ubercab threatens dispatchers’ way of earning a living.
Limos have to prebook an hour in advance, only licensed taxis can pick someone up right away by San Francisco law, yet Ubercab picks people up right away, yet doesn’t have a taxi license."
Not like you can get a taxi in under an hour in SF anyways ;)

Seriously, this just validates their model and I hope they can figure this out.
I've read that coconut water also helps but quite honestly, that could just be the coconut consortium promoting bunk 'science.'
I agree. I've had marathon all night coding sessions, but the next day is almost always wasted. I find now its better to step away once I find myself losing my train of thought.
They have about 70 employees for some reason
You are absolutely right. But being a 'professional' is more than just having a good personality.

Where do they hang their shingle? What do they associate with?
One thing I like about go is that even a beginner like me can follow an expert game. Although I’m many orders of magnitude from being able to generate it, I can appreciate (“verify”) the quality of play in http://senseis.xmp.net/?FamousGoGames . I’m not sure that’s as true of something like chess or Scrabble, which seem to get abstruse and memorization-based at high levels.

Go has a kind of deceptive shallowness. The rules are extremely simple[0]. You can see 90% of what’s going on on a given board in a few seconds. (The board looks like a simplified illustration of something else – like the phase portrait of an uglier game.) Another beginner and I can play a game that looks roughly like a game between masters, and with a heavy enough handicap we can even play a satisfying game with them.

What’s fascinating and addictive is that there’s no big secret. Learning go, for me, is reminding myself that it’s simpler than it looks. All I have to do is surround territory. It’s very, very hard. The last 10% of understanding a board takes decades.

0. The Tromp-Taylor rules, which you mentioned and serve as an excellent introduction for the curious hacker, are at http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/go.html . Notice the 150-line Haskell version.
I was under the impression that most satellite internet setups used regular phone lines instead of actually using a satellite uplink. Are we not talking about consumer setups here?
Maybe I'm just misinformed but... basically they're running a taxi service without a license to do that, then acting surprised when the city calls them on it?

There's a taxi company I use whenever I'm in London called Addison Lee, and they've done the same as UberCab - using nice technology to know where you are, where the nearest available cars are, how long it will take for a car to get to you... In actual fact, at least based on http://www.ubercab.com/learn, AdLee is better: it has all the benefits of UberCab, plus they tell you the price of the journey before you book the car (it won't become more expensive if you get stuck in traffic, or if the driver takes a longer route), which always works out cheaper than a black cab, in my experience. Oh, and in adition to letting you pay with the credit card on your account, you can chose to pay by cash if you so wish.

Anyway, my point? Seems that Addison Lee have been (albeit in a different city/country) doing what UberCab is doing, slightly better, and for quite a bit longer: and they actually bothered to pay to be a licensed taxi provider, meaning that the London officials don't have a problem with them.
Right. Which has a tendency to reduce all discussion to the lowest common denominator.
Well first of all, this statement is complete BS.

"Alarmism" is a loaded term...of course it has a bad track record. If it turned out well, it wouldn't be called "alarmism" but foresight.

So, no duh. It's like saying "Murder has a really bad track record".

It's highly arguable that this is "alarm-ism"...that would imply it's a knee-jerk uninformed reaction, when in fact this is a scientific consensus coming from years of research.

So what matters is: this is science.

You can apply some loaded term to it...but it is science.

...and science has a pretty good track record overall. Also, science is constantly improving it's own ability and therefore track record.

Is it infallible? no...but if you want to start pulling out stuff about "track records" it's pretty silly to bet against the science.
Anybody notice that OP asked "How to tell quickly...?"
to compare, Reddit has like, 5. Digg is overfunded.
Check out this example someone posted awhile back. I think it could be modified to do what you need:

http://www.xarg.org/project/jquery-webcam-plugin/
If by typed I assume you mean "statically typed", then yes.
Your family has some serious history. I consider the guns that killed Arch Duke Ferdinand to be some of the most important objects in the physical world (outside the much more important realm of ideas). I visited the war museum in Vienna where they are kept, alongside the car the duke was riding in and his uniform, a year ago. All the events of 20th century as we know it are shaped by a few objects in that room. Sure some will say they are "merely" the sparks that lit the potential energy in the powderkegs of history but, nevertheless, they are the sparks that did it.
I'm not sure what answer you're looking for me to say. Networking is simply a tool, and like any tool it only provides the potential to be of benefit. But having the tool available is certainly advantageous.

As for apathetic people I'm not sure where you get that. I was able to find a clip that shook me a bit as a freedom loving American. It was during the protests in Iran where a woman openly cries out for help against her oppressive government's actions. Watch it and tell me you consider her and those like her apathetic.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/scarce/cnn-interviews-ir...

As emotional as that is, I feel powerless and sad that there is nothing I could do, or expect my government to do. The issue in Iran is political, and it's something that has to be worked out by the Iranian people themselves, possibly like Americans worked it out with the oppressive British government during the Revolutionary War. However, as I've explained above, I don't see that as improving the condition unless the result of any revolt is a constitution being drawn up, as ours was, which is designed to protect citizens' rights and freedoms.
I didn't get all emotional about a guy gaming Gowalla. I wasn't about to go drop an f-bomb on him and his family, but I did come close to joking with him about it.

I was just commenting that it was weird to actually see a guy that does hundreds of driveby automated checkins a day actually inside the place he checked into.
Have you tried Kraken rum? It's a spiced rum that is head and shoulders above the competition in that price range(~$20 bottle)
But to be fair, Reddit is able to leverage the infrastructure of Conde Nast. The 5 employees doesn't count HR, accounting, administration, etc. Of course, that probably doesn't necessitate 65 extra employees either...
I think there is a pattern across both UberCan and AirBnb where both are facing opposition from existing, regulated industries (taxi services and hotels respectively).

Among all the posturing essentially meant to protect their existing businesses, I do think they have one valid point - that they both skirt around laws and regs in place. Though a lot of these laws and regulations are outdated/driven by special interests, some of them are in place for a reason. For example, not having hotels in residential areas so that neighbors aren't disturbed. Or having safety training for drivers of cabs.

I do worry about the risk that UberCab/AirBnb could cause to its users (or others indirectly impacted).

In both cases, the existing industries aren't doing themselves any favors. The argument around existing dispatchers maybe not making a living anymore - if someone else provides a better service than I do, it isn't their fault if I can't make money anymore. Reading the comments on the cab drivers' blog [1] is a bit sad. One of the commenters recognizes how good Ubercab is but uses that as an argument on why they should be shut down, instead of going "Hey, what if we started doing some of the things they do and improve?"

http://phantomcabdriverphites.blogspot.com/2010/09/tac-iii-p...
To find conversations like these on the internet makes me happy.
This seems like the perfect business to run from outside of the US. To run a traditional taxi company, you need to have a presence in the area where the taxicabs are. To run a website that connects two people together, you can be anywhere. And you are outside of the legal reach of the City of San Francisco.

Sure, the users will be violating some city regulation, but that, like file sharing, is unprofitable to follow up on. (AirBnB is in a similar situation. No need to give the irritated local governments a legal target.)
It's usable but far from ideal. A pen and a pad of paper is usable to write some code in, but I wouldn't recommend it either.
Beer and Chips Or, Outsourcing For Fun And Profit
Trying to Improve CouchDB's Performance with NIFs
saw the stream of your talk at MIT recently. good stuff.
Bi-rite Creamery cupcakes.

Delish.

(SF Mission)
Here's an imagemagick example; over six minutes with xargs, under 20 seconds with parallel

$ ls *.png |wc -l
3580

$ time ls|sed 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/'|parallel convert {}.png {}.ppm
ls --color 0.00s user 0.01s system 63% cpu 0.016 total
sed 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/' 0.01s user 0.00s system 39% cpu 0.025 total
parallel convert {}.png {}.ppm 97.39s user 61.87s system 890% cpu 17.883 total

$ time ls|sed 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/'|xargs -I {} convert {}.png {}.ppm
ls --color 0.01s user 0.00s system 63% cpu 0.016 total
sed 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/' 0.01s user 0.00s system 39% cpu 0.025 total
xargs -I {} convert {}.png {}.ppm 93.08s user 47.88s system 38% cpu 6:10.88 total
Just sent you an email - we need help with http://disqourse.com - a lot of help! :)

Thanks in advance for your feedback.
People actually read his blog intentionally?
I used it for a while a few years ago. Like O'Caml or Haskel , F# is a language that forces you think through your problem up front. For example you must get your types exactly right before the program compiles. In return, you get fewer runtime errors, e.g. fewer null pointer exceptions.

I stopped using it when I changed jobs and left the Windows platform.

I don't really miss F#. It was fun to learn and use, but wasn't helping me write better programs quicker than C# or Python.
Brian Chesky's talk at Startup School covered a lot of this--Airbnb had launched more than once and made a couple of successful PR stunts before applying to YC, but YC was still a crucial ingredient in carrying them on to success.

Also, everyone who's gone through the YC interview process and written about it says that, if they had any intentions to pitch at all, they were quickly derailed by questions.
Future society: an optimum strategy for flourishing
Stephen Fry on language prescriptivists
I'm not punctual at the start of work. If work starts at 9:30am, I'll usually be in by 10:10 or so. I couldn't care less if people come in at 11 am, just as along as they get their work done.

However, if one is late to a meeting (internal or client side... or even the job interview), then I think that is a red flag, specifically if there is no good reason to do so or if they don't give a heads up.
A lot is personnel costs, I think. They had at least 70 people in May [1]. Estimating $200,000 per employee per year, that's 14 million. I'm not really sure how accurate $200,000 is, but between benefits, events, office space (in SF), and other associated expenses, employees cost a lot more than just their salary.

Is there any reason digg should have that many employees? Probably not.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/digg-cuts-10-of-staff/

edit: Oops, kind of slow on the trigger--other people said the same thing.
Thank you MP.
Hi, I'd be very grateful to you for your feedback and thoughts on http://grep42.com.

Thanks! :-)
Well gee, this looks familiar: http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/images/branches.png
For me, a designer is professional if he tells me "if you add one more thing in the menu, it won't work" or "remove that 'more' link after each paragraph" instead of "you should really use another tone of blue" or "I don't like the font you are using".
I have no idea about programming, but I guess a professional in that field would be arguing about the software architecture, instead of what to use - php or ruby.

So generally, professionals are people who help you achieve whatever goal you have, instead of arguing what tools to use.
Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, there's now an industry built on telling children their dreams really can come true if they accrue enough ycombinator karma. Way to harness that aptitude, baby.

edit: yeah, rate me down for telling you what you didn't want to hear. I'm not the one who throws $18k at a time down a well just to get a high school kid to suck up to me and think I'm a god.
List of Game Design Anti-Patterns
Overlapping Windows is a non-issue. Windows and full-screen intermingle with the new Mission Control.

Windows and Linux get Java from Oracle; why not OS X?
I just asked for help with http://tabtrick.com/

Thanks for offering your help. I am sure good things will come to you!
Easiest way to pick up the basic rules and gameplay is through:

The Interactive Way to Go: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/

Its also available in 32 other languages: http://playgo.to/iwtg/

--

Beyond that I recommend 9x9 games, on Windows download yourself a free copy of iGoWin: http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html or on OSX or Linux check out GnuGo.

--

There's also a Linux live cd/distro with lots of learning tools by the name of Hikarunix: http://senseis.xmp.net/?Hikarunix
I can open a private, members only club which serves alcohol past the traditional last-call time. In the same way, Ubercab could charge a membership fee, and then only people who are members can be picked up by Ubercab. (I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if this is actually possible, I'm just trying to rephrase tswicegood's argument.)