skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Less of a concern. If Apple decides to go into the Medical gadgets field and updates their terms of service accordingly, you are basically hosed. There's no recourse. Not even an alternate 'off-Market install'.
They at least have copyright infringement, and could probably get a big enough fine to shut down wikileaks.
I don't think first ideas suck. First executions may suck, but first ideas? Not neccesarily. I've had loads of great ideas over my lifetime that I never followed through on. Energy drinks and juicebars (me: 1994 now: everywhere), Hooters in Japan (me:2003 now: someone is doing it just now), the design of the "Chrysler 300C" (me: 1992 in art class, Chrysler: 2002ish). Proof that ideas are cheap and if you're thinking of it, someone else probably is, too.

The real value is in execution and then only good execution.
Is a Project Manager who reads HN too technical?
Just for background, have almost 20 years experience with databases and OS programming in addition to having been a certified (PMP) Project Manager for almost 12 years (some of that is concurrent). While several of my past clients have commented on how much they appreciated that I could balance Business Needs with Technical Solutions, I've had a couple interviews now where I've been told I was "too technical".

I find myself wondering if I should just drop any of the technical positions still in my resume, hide my Nexus One (does anyone make a N1 phone case that makes it look like a BlackBerry?), and never admit to having actually written a few games (Android, Flash, Python) in my spare time? Oh and per the subject line, feign total ignorance of Hacker News by saying something like "isn't that sort of like Digg"?
Feynman's Grandmother.
"Even though you can learn it and then pass, the fact that you are past 8th grade and cannot means your education is deficient (mine as well)."

No, it means that people forget things that they don't use.

This test is testing specific content knowledge. Learning content doesn't matter. The content of your job or whatever changes depending on what you're doing. Like other people have said, if you were being taught these topics for the term leading up to the test, it's an easy test - there's no thinking involved, just memory.

What matters is the PROCESS of learning, and in that respect, I think the modern methods of education are far better than straight ROTE learning. (Though not optimal by any means)
Github: https://github.com/3n/MooTune
Comcast: We bent over backwards to help Level 3 (those bastards)
James Gosling on Apple, Apache, Google, Oracle and the Future of Java
> Or even the absolute absurdity of a package publishing system that mandates bumping your package version every time a dependency has a new release.

Wait, what? Do you have a link for this? It sounds alarming, and I haven't heard of it.
Nope, not US only.

For Google Apps I always put:

pub:"Google Inc."

... as the search term. Then you get a list of official Google Apps. It helps you find their apps that sometimes get lost among all the spam-apps using their keywords.

(I'm in AU and it let me find the Google Reader app)
James Gosling hates JSF
Though they are similar, Tropo offers more features, more stable support and scales better than Twilio. http://pin13.net/1qJ
This "list of trees of increasing size" data structure is not new. You can find plenty of these structures in Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures (look in the chapter about numerical representations). His random access lists have O(1) adding an element compared to this O(log n).
5 Better Ways to Read "Hacker News"
That was my first thought. A widget showing a random headline from your unread articles would be awesome. Sort've like the RSS widget.
Absolutely. I'll blindly upvote any post by a respected name, simply because I'm always, always going to read their post. And I assume others are like me, and will want to be informed when a new "Yegge" comes out.
> of those composite data types (which also includes assoc-lists and...?), it is the only one with O(logn) for any of its functions (particularly search).

I think you meant "all", not "any", since assoc list offers O(lg n) performance for one of its functions. In any case, this is incorrect. You can build any tree-like data structure you like with cons and nil, and, as pointed out elsewhere, Okasaki (as well as others before him), have demonstrated several tree-like data structures with O(lg n) cons, car, cdr, and nth equivalents.
IANA, ARIN, and the IPv4 run-out (part I of IV)
Well, actually, unless you've tried using Haskell you probably don't realize the it has a type system completely different from 'other languages'.

Really? Before I started using it, the only things I knew about Haskell were 1) it has a weird type system 2) it uses something called 'monads' and 3) doing IO is really really hard.

#3 turned out to be false, #2 was true but not as scary as the hype, and #1 was true.

It's not surprising that non-users know about the "odd" type system; types are one of the few ways arbitrary languages can be compared, so I know the type systems of many languages I've never so much as written Hello World in.

About Blub: That's a stick you can use to beat anybody who criticizes any other language.

Not so; one can use it to criticize anybody who claims a language is bad because it is more expressive than usual.

For example, there are languages with more expressive type systems than even Haskell; if a programmer used to such language called Haskell inexpressive, it wouldn't make any sense to argue against them with Blub (regardless of whether he's correct).
prove him wrong?
If you don't find this funny, then you really need to examine your sense of humour, because this is not about making fun of haskell. It's barely about haskell at all. It is fantastically well constructed exercise in comic writing.

Stop thinking about the programming language wars for one minute and reread the text again, and look at the multileveled semantic games the author is playing. I thought most here were good at that?

Doug Hofstadter would be proud.
Simple: by their standards, he's not a loyal repeat customer.

People who the airlines care about - and will move heaven and earth for - are their top-tier frequent flyers, guys who fly 100K+ miles per year. If someone picks up that many flights, it means they do most of their flights for business (very few people fly for pleasure that far), which means they're buying much higher-priced tickets than people who are traveling for pleasure, and are the ones whose presence makes a flight turn a profit.

An example: if you're Super-Elite on Air Canada (95 flights or 100K miles per year) you have guaranteed flight availability up to six hours before departure. What does that mean? If you want to fly on a flight that's fully sold out - any flight - and call AC more than six hours before take-off, they will kick someone (or two people, as you can bring your companion too) off the plane so that you can get on. You will also get different call-center numbers, access to more rewards flights, more upgrade certificates than you can possibly use, and free upgrades when you choose not to use a certificate.

Legacy carriers, for the most part, do treat their frequent/loyal customers quite well. It's just that when you have that many routes and that many flights "frequent" is a lot more than most people who aren't business travelers think it is.
Thanks HN: Goodbye, Golden Handcuffs
I'm a YC '08 Reject underwhelmed by my safe, boring corporate gig. Regular scans of HN remind me of the excellent things happening elsewhere. I was particularly struck by the theory that the best example you can set for your kids (0 so far) is to pursue your dreams, not an income.

I quit today, bought the supportive girlfriend a ring, and will start January 2011 as my own boss. I'm giving myself six months to bootstrap. Thought you should be the first to know.

Let the fun begin.
Are you seriously suggesting that "Freedom Fries" is as serious as an open appeal to racism? You can have the last word; I'm done here.
Have you ever tried to write satire? Done well, it's exceptionally difficult. The post may be many things but thought free is certainly not one of them.
How to delete cookies, cache and history in all major browsers
I'd be interested in this. sachin@blueleaf.com
> How do these differ and what advantage do they offer over Chris Okasaki's Random Access Lists?

These are inferior, as Okasaki's structure offers O(1) worst-case cons, even when used in a functional setting. As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia page on Exponential-Golumb coding, trellises require Omega(lg n) for cons.
Actually, I probably would upvote those.

I don't see the target of this post being Haskell itself. I see it as being the Haskell community. I see the thesis as being that Haskell has an undeservedly bad reputation and that its community doesn't really do anything to help by being elitist and disconnected from industry.
>If you can do that, users will love it and buy your product.

I'm trying now to remember a story relayed here about a company who developed a product that bested Apple, Apple considered buying them/it but the negotiator dropped the ball or something and then Apple wiped them out by besting them.

Anyway, if you beat Apple then they'll either lock you out (why handicap it if they'd let you carry on) or integrate your idea working around your IP. You're going to need lots of IP/anti-monopoly lawyers. You might get bought out too, especially if it's cheaper than there end of the court cases ... I guess what I'm saying is that building hardware on top of Apple's platform seems it would always be limited in some way.

But I'm probably wrong.
Also worth reading: Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, 1934. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Civilization
The lack of an official response from Amazon is telling. I wonder if DHS just gave Amazon an ultimatum along the lines of host wikileaks and we'll raid your servers. (Also the DHS/Amazon communication, if there was any, is probably classified so Amazon can't even mention it).

Our government has come a long way since 2000.
That's just broken, and will lead to horrible bugs. There is a reason why normal Lisp lists end with NIL instead of storing the last element in the last cdr.
Clean Forrst.com
Here's hoping they succeed. Portland would make a great tech center. It certainly has that counter culture attitude. And it's highly livable.

Now they just need the jobs and talent - that's the hard part.
I'd like github to differentiate between private and public repos more, to make the private repo feel more secure. Now I have to look twice to make sure the repo is private. I would also like to have a way to say - this repo can NEVER be made public, and neither can forks.
Utterly insane. Neat. Holy shit. I don't know what to think.
An Interactive Mind Map of Western Philosophy
Had I gone to 8th grade in 1895, I would be familiar with all of the anachronisms.

Also, some of the questions are clearly lists that, were this "real", would be taught by rote memorization. The sort of thing you would be able to chant back without thinking if you were in the classroom where the lists were repeated over and over for you to "learn".
This was an artful response. Google took what was essentially a piece of negative press from the New York Times and used it as an argument against the call for transparency in the algorithm that so many major media sources are pushing for lately.
Maybe you are right, but the point is whether Amazon (or any other hosting company) should act as a judge and decide whether the leak was justified or not.
Could you have passed the 8th grade in 1895?

It's a dumb question that implies a conclusion that the text doesn't support. Snopes addresses the falseness of the implication adequately, and we're reproducing much of their reasoning here.
Launching a free weekly newsletter called NoSQL Weekly, which will feature curated news, articles, new releases, tools etc related to NoSQL. The first issue comes out tomorrow. You can go here, http://www.nosqlweekly.com/ to subscribe to NoSQL Weekly.
Rick Bookstaber: The three ages of information
I'm not arguing that 'trace' is subversive, rather, most of the time it's simply not necessary (or useful).

Haskell's not like other languages, where you have to build up massive unreadable piles of code to get anything done. It's easier to write properly, with small functions glued together; and when you've done that, debugging is a matter of either simply reading the code, or running it in GHCI (and then reading it). Import your function, pass it input, see what comes out; when it's wrong, you know what the problem is.

Debugging with prints is for stuff that isn't pure, behavior that is outside the Haskell runtime system and thus can't be reasoned about. Which means you're using IO, which means you can take advantage of 'print' or whatever.
>It's a massive title (for the C64), as one would expect after 20 years of development. Newcomer features 180+ characters to interact with (each with their own portraits), 10+ people who can join your party of six, 50+ areas created with 30+ graphic sets, 100+ cutscenes, 180,000+ words of in-game text, thousands of puzzles, and more all packed into 2 MB.

New C64 game, blah blah blah, 2MB!!!!!!one.

I note that 180k words (uncompressed) would be about 0.2MB.
Charging by users seems like the most obvious discriminator between casual and large budget, not number of repos.
I think my favorite part of this was:

It has culminated in the WebBase project whose aims are to maintain a local copy of the World Wide Web

Weird to think that a local copy of the internet was actually feasible only twelve years ago.
Some of the real story.

http://www.skandinaviflorida.com/web/sif.nsf/d6plinks/JEIE-8...
If Apple is handicapping it on purpose, why would they allow you to overcome it?
If I'm using both as a abstract data types, does predictable structure really help me at all?
Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple could never have imagined.

Also: Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple would never approve of. These apps we don't get to see. At least not yet.
Facebook may be sweating over the delay of Google Me
Is this a black eye for Amazon, or do they get a pass due to the pressure that we assume was applied to them as a company domiciled in the USA?
As far as I'm aware they're both different, Difference Engine founder Jon Bradford is the MD of Springboard, but I believe they're both going to continue independently of each other.

Unless anyones heard differently ?
Gawker,

I'm on the biz side with a fair understanding of tech. Give me a shout if you want to chat about some ideas, I have three or four with clear monetization and addressable market....

email @ my username at gmail.com
this a classic seo content generation move, called mad lib sites. You create a templated article, with variables for each piece of dynamic content. Usually, you will also create "spun" content so that each article created with the madlib template is even more unique.

Then, you can scrape or find large databases of consistent information and deploy very large sites.

The trouble is getting google to fully index these sites. It requires a good amount of link building both to the madlib pages and the home page to get enough juice for the crawlers to spend time on the site and get things indexed.

They can be very useful sites to build for a variety of reasons, and can actually add some value depending on the data you're publishing
Haskell being functional, that design decision makes some sense ;)
Free mac software for stats mapping
Oh, maybe. I assumed he'd just do the Sprinboard one.
I'm pretty sure they took that down as well. They initially defended it, but a few hours later they took it down.

As is their right. They're a private company, they're entitled to do whatever they want.
Holy cow. I took that test (it was called TAAS back then) and was basically just an easy day in school. It was nowhere near as tough as some of those questions look.
This feels like mostly a PR piece to me. And reports seem conflicting.

Google doesn't seem to say what they did beyond that they "developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience."

Danny Sullivan claims they are "Using Online Merchant Reviews As Ranking Signal" (http://searchengineland.com/google-now-using-online-merchant...).

Techcrunch claims Google "compiled a list of hundreds of merchants (including DecorMyEyes) that provided “bad user experience” and algorithmically forced them lower" (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/googl/).

edit: typo
It'll be a tough and long road, but if you're really set on it, you'll be happier than ever. Good luck, man.
US (federal) Government documents are not entitled to copyright protection within America.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#105
I was under the impression government materials are not protected by copyright. Even if they were the public interest argument (fair use) would trump copyright in this case.
Evolving Suburbia
GBs and TBs of data is common, not for this task. All you are doing is Word Sense Disambiguation and there are algorithms to do WSD that work with much much smaller training sets. Just don't think that the exponential increase in training data is justified...
Better Ways to Read "Hacker News"
> I know this is a big claim

Perhaps, but it needn't be to get the same asymptotic performance.

Okasaki's simplest random access list has performance proofs that depend only on the simplest properties of binary numbers, rather than those of the Exponential-Golumb coding, and the code is very easy to write:

data BRAL a = Empty
| Full (Maybe a) (BRAL (a,a))
deriving (Show)

cons :: a -> BRAL a -> BRAL a
cons x Empty = Full (Just x) Empty
cons x (Full Nothing ys) = Full (Just x) ys
cons x (Full (Just y) ys) = Full Nothing (cons (x,y) ys)

nth :: Integer -> BRAL a -> a
nth 0 (Full (Just x) _) = x
nth 0 (Full Nothing xs) = fst (nth 0 xs)
nth n (Full (Just _) xs) = nth (n-1) (Full Nothing xs)
nth n (Full Nothing xs) =
let pair = nth (n`div`2) xs
in if n`mod`2 == 0
then fst pair
else snd pair
Give My Smartphone More Sensors
Is that on a lasagna?? It is imperative I find out. My wife wants to vegan version right now......
Thanks for the clarification. You work with Tropo or Voxeo?

I actually had a (brief) twitter conversation with the CEO of Voxeo asking about standardizations. I like CCXML OK but really, it doesn't serve the same need as Tropo/Twilio. I'd like to see a more 'push' oriented standard get developed.

Actually, I just looked, you responded on twitter too. So, any chance of trying to get a 'push' style API standardized? :)
Why All The VCs Are On Sand Hill Road
I think it is important to distinguish between the copyright doctrine of fair use, which means using copyrighted materials in a way which is fair, and the consumer's right to use their own hardware for things they want (which does not involve any copyright infringement, fair or otherwise). The latter may sound like 'fair use' of hardware, but I don't think they mean the same thing to the judge who is talking about the doctrine of Fair Use.
UPPSALA/STOCKHOLM - Sweden

Rails developers needed! Experience developing iphone/android apps a plus. Full-time or part-time (students welcome!).

joel.westerberg@streetmedia7.com
This is a 360 tour of the place
http://www.bahnhof.se/panorama/
Say you've got a package webbrowser, which depends on libhttp

The Haskell package versioning policy < http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Package_versioning_policy > says that your package metadata should specify a minimum and maximum bound on which version of libhttp you support; this way, if a new version of libhttp is released that is backwards-incompatible, they can bump the version and every dependent package will still build correctly.

Say the author of libhttp realizes he really needs to add another parameter to a function. That might break dependents, so it's backwards-incompatible. So he bumps the version from 2.3 to 2.4.

Like a good package author, your browser's dependencies look like this:

name: webbrowser
version: 1.0

build-depends:
libhttp >= 2.3 && < 2.4

Now you can be notified of the change via < http://packdeps.haskellers.com/ >, download his new package, test it, and verify it works. You didn't use that function, so the change doesn't apply to you. You can change your metadata to:

build-depends:
libhttp >= 2.3 && < 2.5

Except now there's a problem. Hackage doesn't support modifying already-uploaded packages; there's no way you can say "webbrowser-1.0 supports 2.3 and 2.4", because it already has a record for webbrowser-1.0. So you have to bump your version:

version: 1.0.0.1

And re-upload.

And your choice is 1) do this for every package and every dependency, or 2) ignore the versioning policy, hope no dependency changes break your packages.

It sucks.

The general feeling I get from core Haskell developers is that they work in finance, medical, or other fields where every dependency has to undergo a four-month certification process before it can be used. So they don't care about this, because they just never see it.

But for somebody who just wants to publish his stuff online and let others use it, it's a goddamn nightmare.

The other day, the developer of the 'text' package bumped his version to 0.11. As far as I can tell, it doesn't actually have any significant changes. All he did was fix an obscure edge condition when a particular function is passed invalid input. Everything that could build against 0.10, will build against 0.11.

Since I followed the package versioning policy, most of my packages < http://packdeps.haskellers.com/feed/?needle=John+Millikin > are set to refuse his new version. It's not too bad now, but sooner or later a user will upgrade their 'text' and then try to install one of my packages and then they will email me asking me why I am so mean and restrictive.

Which means sometime in the next week or to, I need to sit down for a few hours and recompile all my stuff, then bump the versions, then commit and tag and sign and push and sdist and upload. And somewhere in that hour I'm going to be thinking about just removing the bounds check, and letting my users deal with whatever hell befalls them if in three years there is a real breaking change somewhere.
Yes, and the "X can be used for bad" argument you put forward is one that could be used against any advance in technology, with or without open standards or APIs.

And your firewall example is not relevant. Hackers aren't using firewalls against the companies that employ them, they are circumventing the firewalls. What you said is more like "people can climb over fences easily, so we should stop building them around our yards"
> How are these better than balanced binary trees that keep subtree size in the node?

I suspect that cons will be )(1) amortized (when the trellis is used ephemerally), which is not true of your usual balanced binary trees.

There are many data structures that offer O(1) (amortized or worst-case) modification near the front, and several of them really are just balanced trees but with the pointers down the left spine reversed.

In fact, this is a key idea behind Hinze & Patterson's FingerTress, mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
I agree. I think the adoption of the term "gamification" has caused a rift because really, this isn't about making things in to games or creating fun - it's about creating motivation. I think a big part of the backlash against "gamification" is this misdirection implied in the term. The feedback and reward mechanisms used are things that were honed in games - the idea is to take the ideas behind motivational and reward systems from games and move them into things that specifically aren't games - not to make these non-games into games.

I say this as a founder of a "gamification" or "game mechanics" 3rd party service provider. Unfortunately, the term is now lodged in our vernacular, I'm afraid.
China Slaps $150 Tax on iPads