skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you mean just export facebook account to this new social network? facebook would eventually block it...
Salesforce is king of customization, but there are many niche (small) players that may be considered 'better' in their respective fields.
Thanks for that.

I did know about the do syntax in Haskell, but I didn't think it really made the language usefully imperative. Sure, it's okay if you're trying to kick off two or three unrelated calculations, maybe if you're after side effects. But I didn't find it much to fall back on when trying to do something complicated and having a hard time thinking about how to break down the problem without for loops and case statements and value accumulators. Maybe it's more robust than I know, but it seems like such a small piece of such a big language. Calling Haskell imperative on account of that seems like calling perl OO because you can kinda sorta do basic OO stuff most of the time.

I am also having trouble understanding the claim that the ideas are orthogonal. I can see plainly enough that they aren't literally the same thing: an imperative language breaks a problem down into simpler steps, while a declarative one breaks a problem down into simpler definitions. And a stateful language accumulates progress in changing values, while a functional language does so by resolving expressions.

So far so good, but I can't really decouple the concepts. How would you break a problem down by time, but track results through logical resolution? Isn't the point of a step or instruction to leave something about the state of the program changed--I mean, isn't it inherently stateful?

It seems to me the advantage of imperative programming is that the steps are logically decoupled, just as the advantage of declarative programming is that the pieces are temporally decoupled. So how in the world would you make a declarative program accumulate progress via state?
Dude, yes. HN style - with Color and a web bubble to boot!
Just curious: did you solve that problem? :)
1. Yes. I said that I have nothing to do there, I don't see the point of coming just to hangout. The reply was that they'll find something for me to do. The manager took it as their fault, as if if they're unable to find work for everyone until they collapse on the couch they're not doing their job.

2. No. I hate it.

3. I don't mind being fired. If I work 40hrs/wk I'll keep getting terrorized with voicemails and text messages in the evening and on weekend. It sucks.

4. I signed up for a bunch of art classes at colleges in the evening, but quitting will allow me to expand that into day as well.
Concerned? Yes. Panicked? Probably not. I think the media's presentation of the situation is more the latter.
Orkut is quite strong in India... but theres plenty of market still to capture there so I Wouldn't be surprised if a couple of networks tried to capture that market...
> I think its a good move but it isn't new. I think UC Berkeley moved the first CS class for CS/EECS majors to functional concepts and Scheme in 1989 and MIT even earlier, though the latter abandoned it later.

Yeah, but those aren't really the same reasons CMU is switching over. Scheme was historically taught because it offers the opportunity to teach computer science, as opposed to merely teaching programming. Most freshman "CS" courses are oriented around the latter.

The shift into Java/Python/$OOP_LANGUAGE was precipitated by the demands of the real world (eg, the job market). CMU is leading the pack in that respect -- it just so happens that FP is a better fit for the type of work their students will need to do, given the growth of multicore and distributed systems.

OOP has its place, but it is far from a panacea. I'm glad to see at least one school isn't hammering that into freshmen anymore.
There's a PDF presentation about the next generation CRM - http://www.textminingnews.com/presentations/SPSS.pdf

Additionally, here are 6 idea's for the next generation CRM - http://www.customerthink.com/blog/six_ideas_for_next_generat...
Ah, I see. I was thinking more about the general concept of safety than this specific situation. I see what you mean.
you may be right but there are others who say that everything is moving towards a more universal location.
Have you seen the actual numbers of this, and seen them put into perspective? I'd strongly recommend looking at http://xkcd.org/radiation/ -- he puts the data into an easy to relate to format.
So... at what point do you become expendable?
I hear Facebook has internal guidelines that say they can't grow by more than 60% y/y.
Setting up a new or reformatted development machine, or as a workaround for legacy projects where using gemfiles and Bundler is impractical.
impressions are still in favor of facebook..
I totally agree with the article, but don't expect to get a lot of up votes in here for it. It is not a popular trend.
Great book. If you like that (or really, even if you don't), I'd also recommend "Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior" by Geoffrey Miller.

It goes into the more general evolutionary psychology behind why anyone buys anything. I particularly enjoyed his early anecdote about what early humans would think if you tried to explain to them our concepts of 'money' and 'shopping'.

http://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/...

*Caveat: I haven't read many other books about consumer behavior, so I can't say how good this is relatively speaking.
The biggest problem with that chart is that it mixes different time scales, which it only indicates in the text, not in the visual comparisons.

Take one of the ones that measures an hour's exposure and multiply it by 24. Or a day and multiply it by 365. Suddenly the visual comparisons look much, much different.
I think that the 'horrible' part is that the public at large is more than willing to act scared of it, but will make no attempt (and in some cases will actively resist attempts) to increase their understanding of the thing that they are so afraid of.
Not to mention that they covered up the Chernobyl accident for I can't remember how many days before even bothering to tell the locals that they're in danger.

In the nineties, families in the country around where I grew up, here in Ireland, hosted children from Chernobyl every summer, so that they could breath clean air and eat clean food. I've also seen documentaries about birth defects in the years after the accident. Perhaps there weren't too many fatalities, but a lot of lives were very badly affected by the radiation and a lot more people died due to slow, radiation induced diseases. For example, in the reports, how many people who died of cancer or other diseases since were counted?

So, I agree with you - downplaying the dangers of radiation is careless and playing with peoples lives.
You know, it sort of baffles me that we don't yet have a functional music locker. From 2005 to 2007 I worked for MP3tunes, who built a damn solid music locker. Despite a complete lack of tech budget, marketing budget, etc we managed to build a great service. In late 2005, after our massive push to pull this off, I was able to sync in all my music and play it all from "the cloud". Why, in 2011, do we not have this?

It's odd, but we spoke of Amazon and Google in hushed voices, as we saw them as our biggest competitors -- we figured that both of them would have services shortly, and we saw our early mover status as our predominant advantage. Yet nearly 6 years later, neither of them have anything comparable.

The tech was there then, and it's here in massive force now. Why does this not exist?
Yeah, this was one of my big complaints with that. However, it's not prevalent enough to disregard it. It's by no means scientific, but I think it gives a good high level orders-of-magnitude view, largely.
I would hardly count xkcd as a scientifically factual comic. Besides, as waterlesscloud said, he mixes up timescales (or in some cases uses simply uSv's, which, I hear, makes no sense without a timescale. Ie 5 uSv = wrong, 5 uSv/hour = ok).
IIRC Pripyat was evacuated 36 hours later.
> Why has Steve Jobs not bought a major record label ?

Didn't that whole Apple Computer vs Apple Corps (Records) debate make it impossible for Apple to sell music? They skirted by for a while after iTunes because they technically weren't selling their own music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

And it looks like they have brought it up a few times in the past few years.
How about all those people dying from cancer years later all over Russia and Central Europe? Radiation does not kill instantly, it causes cancer, which kills years later.

Stop spreading such nonsense articles, please! Just because the immediate impact is comparatively low, that doesn't mean it's harmless.
I'm not to familiar with evolutionary psychology, but this looks interesting (and it's on the Kindle for less the $10). Added it to my reading list--thanks!
I'm glad this site is here - I HATE CSS I know it's important, but I still hate it...

Here's my site. I basically beat on it, CSS wise, until it sort of worked.

http://www.jgsbws.com
In this case, he gives sources for all his data. And while he does mix up timescales, he's really not far off. It can be better, but it's not bad.
http://api.jquery.com/event.preventDefault/
There won't be any "facebook killer", instead the entire social netowrking buzz will gradually cool off over time. Facebook will remain the center piece "hub" of social networking, while audience interest will shift towards niche sites and apps, and most of them will be heavily integrated with / rely upon fb's api...
Ah, I think you're right.

Still, 36 hours in a very high radiation environment is a very long time. also, I'm not sure how long the people in Chernobyl itself were there before being told something was wrong.

Hell, the soviet union didn't admit anything was wrong until a couple of days after, when the radiation was noticed by engineers in Sweden[1].

[1] http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9604/26/chernobyl/230pm/index2.html
Operating systems seem to care a lot about write access , less about read access. As much as browsers should care about this an OS should do some sandboxing.
Insurance creates value, and so do banks. The problem really begins when the banks try to get more revenue than the value they can possibly generate. That's when it goes into bubbles and finally breaks. Insurance has its risks also, but the insurance system doesn't crash every couple years from itself (major natural events, terrorist attacks etc not taken into account).
Small C Projects
I've seen a similar titled article about the Fukoshima plant on HN called: "Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors."
A good friend's wife spent a good bit of time in Belarus recently (well, 2006-2007), primarily assisting children still affected by the Chernobyl disaster. The stories she told of kids powering through cancer would reduce most men to tears. Really amazing what's still going on over there, to this day. The incident at Chernobyl might have occurred in the Ukraine, but it was not the most affected. Sad, even if I am a highly pro-nuclear guy.
B is especially important for python people - it is my understanding that a lot of pypy current benchmarks are coming from unladen swallow.
Perhaps not. But not everyone has their chests puffed up about this. As it stands, they were rewarded for taking excess risk and are doing it again. What should be done next time?
It's all about licensing agreements between the record labels and the distributors (Apple and Amazon).

Apple is trying to get a repeat-download license for songs sold on iTunes. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/04/apple_negotiat...
Nice site design but the $33 pin makes me cringe a little. Why does a token reminder cost so much on what otherwise appears to be a charitable gesture?
How to Win in the Bubble
I would highly discourage a non-technical person from trying to manage a foreign outsourced software project. For what it's worth, I've managed a few such projects over the years with developers in India and China. My experience has been that you absolutely must have a technical person in house who should expect to spend a significant amount of time very thoroughly documenting and verifying their work. For a smaller project, it really doesn't make sense because you'd be able to finish the project yourself in the amount of time it takes you to manage an outsourced team. For larger projects, expect them to spend and bill at least 2-3x the hours (and 2-3x the number of developers) that you'd find with a local dev team. Also, don't expect any creativity or initiative to fill in gaps in your requirements... you will have to be very specific and explain every minor detail of functionality and behavior in order to get the project done right.
Radiation has the ability to make entire areas uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Any mistakes in small countries like the UK could result in devastating effects on available land. Anything that dangerous should be handled exceptionally carefully.
In that case, what were you referring to when posting the chart: Fukushima or Chernobyl?

If Chernobyl, the article mentions only a small number of fatalities, but I've read in many places over the years that thousands of people (especially in Belarus, who got the worst of it) have since died from cancer and other radiation induced diseases. I've also seen documentaries about the many sick and deformed children that were born since, because of their parents high exposure to radiation.

Finally, when I was growing up, I saw many affected children first hand, as a lot of families in my school at the time would host children affected by the accident during the summer.

If you were referring to Fukushima, I agree that it doesn't come close to Chernobyl (that we know of, at least), but the linked article makes Chernobyl sound "not that bad" too, which I cannot agree with.
You could as well say managers got a bailout. Or plant workers got a bailout. Are engineers the ones to blame the most for GM?
Both my kids spent considerable time "role playing" and focusing on non-combative activities like chatting and trying out different variations of character choices so I'd say the answer is definitely yes, especially if the game builds on age-appropriate social curiosity or borrows from familiar cultural elements. My daughter especially loved things like playing "barbie" by showing us different combinations of clothes she obtained and playing pranks like walking around cities dressed as an NPC, hoping to fool other players with emotes.
Sure! I spent one semester back in college on a kick of reading about evpsych. Really, anything by Miller is great. Or Matt Ridley. Or Cosmides and Tooby. Or...

...Yeah. It's way too easy to get caught up in a cycle of more and more books.
Hopefully they'll be able to fit in their "radically improved" Maps and location services. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/25/apple_looking_...
Yes, I mostly understand the scale of radiation we're currently dealing with in Japan, and it's mostly on the "safer" side. However, my issue is with taking an accident that deformed countless children, caused countless cases of cancer, and in general completely devastated the lives of (hundreds of) thousands of people - and essentially using it in a "How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb" argument to get people to calm down. Yes, there is a level of overreaction any time a nuclear accident takes place (Japan, TMI come to mind), but I wish people wouldn't gloss over the suffering of so many people in order to make their point.
Quit. Right now. There's no reason to put up with that sort of crap.

(If that isn't enough for you, look at it this way: Your boss abuses his employees because he gets away with it. If you quit, there's a chance that you'll stop someone else being abused like this.)
The idea that we have a sufficient quantity of accurate data about Chernobyl to make sweeping claims about its impact on people living there, including how many died as a result, is frankly idiotic. We do not and never will have such data.

This is a pernicious meme that frequently recurs on this board. Reject it.

(The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, has occurred in the open within the context of a reasonably free society, so it may provide us with data that proves useful for future nuclear accidents.)
Open Source Software and its influence
I'd recommend The Oil Drum - http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7706#comments_top

There seem to be a small group of people who want to play the contrarian game and claim that people are overreacting to the potentially huge damage the contamination (as opposed to radiation) that Fukushima is going to result in.

It's easy to be holed up safe in Oxford and claim radiation is not an issue. Why doesn't this gentleman volunteer to assist at the plants if he thinks radiation is no danger at all.
Come on. The world doesn't revolve around programmers, despite what we read in the NYT and LA Times. It doesn't revolve around anyone. The fact that the fellow doesn't program doesn't mean that he's a newborn infant in the woods. It takes many hats to make most anything succeed.
Doing testing or design work is difficult for me on a laptop, but I find pure coding to be almost better because there is less real estate to invite distractions.
I believe most of the radiation was literally rained down on Belarus, so they got a much much worse dose of it than the Ukraine did.

From what I've read, the Soviet government used cloud seeding to force the radiation to be rained down on Belarus because they wanted to prevent it from reaching higher populated areas like Moscow. Unfortunately, afaik, they never told the Belarusian people about it so they never had a chance of evacuating beforehand. Its pretty sad.
If you see finance as infrastructure to help other businesses grow (as I do), then it's growth should result in the growth of other industries. Instead what we see is finance growing and other industries declining. To me that suggests a general dysfunction in the role of finance. It simply isn't doing the good it's supposed to.

Well, I don't know that I find that very persuasive. Industries rise and fall all the time, for many reasons; the world is a complex place. Perhaps a useful financial instrument now is keeping things from getting worse somewhere else. Or perhaps it will bear fruit in a decade, as one would generally expect with an investment. Such an argument seems hasty without a good understanding of what the relative growth rates of different industries under different conditions should be -- a rather tall order.

I do certainly see the moral distinction between George Soros' currency manipulation and Warren Buffett's shrewd investment, despite the fact that both men made their money with money. But I don't think it would make sense to reckon their true productivity by comparing their fortunes. Likewise, if one is going to suggest general dysfunction in the financial industry, I'm much more interested in what you think it's doing wrong specifically -- where the growth that you think is unhealthy is coming from -- than how big it is.

To talk in concrete terms, I think I read elsewhere that a lot of the recent growth in finance has been in insurance. It seems sensible to me that if a lot of people have lost money, insurance, and its role in mitigating financial risk, would be more important. Without it, we might see people completely unwilling to take on financial risk at all until they had more money, which would be devastating. At a first glance, I don't see anything unhealthy about such an industry's growth being decoupled from the rest of the economy--or even inversely correlated.

And as for the auto industry - they shouldn't have been bailed out either - that doesn't somehow make it better that the financial industry was.

Oh, indeed, I am not arguing that. Both were terribly bad. I was arguing only that a bad, but specific, historical event doesn't make the industry as a whole fundamentally bad. No one would say, "The government bailed out the auto industry -- making automobiles is fundamentally parasitic on society!" I mean, making those particular automobiles, sure. But all automobiles ever? That's overblown. But people do seem to take the financial bailouts as evidence that the industry as a whole is amoral.
Precisely. Saying that Chernobyl killed only 43 people is kind of like saying Hitler didn't really kill that many Jews.
These questions always seem so ridiculous. There are thousands of examples of projects that fall into systems programming.

Do one of these things: keyboard/mouse driver, hard drive diagnostics poller, implement raw sockets on windows, system call hooking pattern, a VM for a scripting language, a VM/crypter software protection scheme, etc.

There's all kinds of stuff.
... children still affected by the Chernobyl disaster. The stories she told of kids powering through cancer would reduce most men to tears.

You can go to hospitals anywhere in the world and hear exactly the same stories. Kids get cancer. It sucks, but it's a fact of life. Is there any evidence that these cancers were caused by Chernobyl?
Nobody is taking xkill or kill -9 away.
Hmm, no link to apply? Googling didn't help either. Anyone knows?
Sadly, very much so. A massive portion of the radiation went into Belarus, and they're still dealing with the results to this day, although things are finally dropping. I asked the same question, and she showed me a bunch of good evidence, although I have none on hand. Wish I did, rather than just telling a story.
منتديات ميدو ترحب بكم
Ubuntu/Canonical might have better luck by releasing a more rolling release distro to test these changes. The Daily build is fine and all, but it reflects the status of the trunk. Having a few branches that can go on wild adventures, killing off 'quit' buttons and rearranging the UI, might benefit them more than the cost of implementing it.

I'm specifically referencing the way Fedora tends to be the frontline for RedHat and CentOS updates, and isn't afraid to roll back when things go bad.
While quaint, I was expecting something slightly more interesting like an actual MP3 decoder in Javascript? The use of Localstorage is kind of neat though and doesn't get enough attention.
It wouldn't work better for Apple than what they currently do. Stuff that's pre-announced rarely lives up to expectations even when it's good because people embellish what they've heard in their own minds. There's too much at stake for it to discourage competition, but it would disappoint consumers.
Thanks for coming to my defense. It's true at this early stage I tend to feel like a worthless turd, however someone has to learn marketing, sales, finances and all the business shenanigans. A programmer could do that too, but since he is occupied with managing the important part, I figured I'd make myself somewhat relevant.
Radiation does not kill instantly, it causes cancer, which kills years later.

Radiation is a carcinogen, yes. But it turns out that radiation is a really puny carcinogen. A radiation dosage which will probably kill you if delivered rapidly -- 4 Sieverts -- has only a small chance of causing cancer -- about 10% (and an even lower chance of causing lethal cancer).