skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh, Visual Basic 20008/9.0 has lambda expressions built right in.

Dim mapped = New Integer() {1, 2, 3, 4}.Select(Function(n) n * 2)
Dim myFunc = Function(x) mapped.ToList.IndexOf(x)
Console.WriteLine(myFunc(4)) ' prints 1 (i.e. second element, since mapped == {2,4,6,8}

.NET (and therefore Visual Basic) has had delegates, which are basically typesafe function pointers, since 2005.

If you want real functional programming on the CLR, there's always F#, which is firmly in the ML family.

AFAIK on the CLR closures are converted into classes with a single randomly named method (and since invoking a method on a class is designed to be quite efficient, that means you shoulodn't pay much of a performance penalty). In other words, it mechanically, automatically does what Java programmers would do by hand.
I wish it was only how it looks, but it's also how it sounds.
Launch of Elon Musk's Private Rocket Fails; Three Satellites Were Onboard
A far far star
Crumbs or real money?
Exxon just made the largest quarterly profit for any company EVER, and it just broke its own record for doing so. Many of the startup are chasing ad dollars, which seems like just so many birds fighting over crumbs. Is there any way to make money writing software for the oil industry?
"Book and magazine producers will save shipping money by printing and binding the materials near to their consumers."

Or hopefully, they'll transition to digital formats a lot faster and skip over this step.
Verizon Denies DSL Because of Subscriber's Name
GRAG - The GRails Application Generator
I can't wait to find out the problems this creates -- more fodder for "Why PHP sucks" lists, I'm sure. Maybe they'll fix the documentation for the create_function function and remove the implication that it creates lambdas.
Starting with an environment friendly note by babyshere.com
When a new baby is born, the entire family rejoices because we have brought in a new life into this world. When an addition is made to the world’s population we are going to need extra resources to supply to the needs of this new member. How are we going to handle it? Population and resources of the world are traveling in the exactly opposite directions of the graph.
Nearly Waterless Washing Machine to Debut in 2009
An interesting look "behind the scenes" when it comes to VC money concerns. I love that there are some people out there willing to share their thinking.
I'm speechless...
AutoAdmit trolls to be outed
That's too bad. I really want to see them succeed, but it's a whole series of difficult engineering problems.

I'm glad to hear they've got cash to keep them going for a while, but they need to start racking up successes soon.
I use Greaseemonkey with YCFix installed (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8242). There's an option that allows you to add a search bar along the top.
Of course, the web is almost, but not entirely different from a physical storefront.

If someone enters a Starbucks, it is almost absolutely done with the expressed intent of making a purchase (or chatting with a friend who is making a purchase). Not very many people enter a physical storefront (especially not one that sells coffee) if they don't intend on purchasing something.

With the web, it's really easy to just stumble on something or check something out without having any intentions on purchasing something.

Maybe after a while it will just level itself out - right now the web is like a whole bunch of new niche stores opened up in your neighborhood and you have no idea what any of them are selling.
Girls are bad programmers? What is this, grade school?
In a garbage collected language it is way easier than having to trace malloc()/free() calls and then run perl scripts. The sandbox the program is running in can just be changed accordingly, see

http://guppy-pe.sourceforge.net/#Heapy

for a Python heap profiler. As for C, my weapon of choice is Valgrind. It sandboxes the application and can also do some simple cache profiling etc. It is pretty easy to run as well as there are no need to link any special memory allocator into your program.
The claim that many eyes makes bugs shallow is based on the number of eyes looking at the code, not the users.

It's not a dirty secret that there are relatively few developers for an open source project vs the number of users. This is well known, and documented in CREDITS and Changelog files. The "low" number of people working on open source is often trotted out during a FUD campaign, as if to imply that large software companies have millions of "experts" looking at and developing the code.

Give me a handful of guys who _publicly_ worked on a set of code and know it inside and out any day, over a hundred thousand developers who hide behind some corporate name and spin department and who only ever touched one part of it.

The chance of code having bugs is more likely directly correlated to the complexity of the code, not its size. The change of finding the bugs in the code to fix them (not finding that they exist) is more likely directly correlated to the amount of code.
How Close Were Glam And Revolution Health To Merging?
The chart also says nothing about the ages of the t-shirt requesters, or if people decided to get larger ones the second time around to offset shrinkage they were not aware would happen with their previous choice.
Postfix Virtual Hosting With LDAP Backend With Dovecot (IMAP/POP3) On Ubuntu 8.04
Website Dedicated to Chandeliers
Was looking for a site about chandeliers and found this one. Had everything I needed.
Oh, did I get downvoted because the create_function function actually does create lambdas?
I wonder what percentage of people enter a department store, or a video games shop, and leave empty handed..

I'm sure it's higher than 1-3%
Soul Bowl Results- Huntington Beach, CA : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Comunity
A builtin minor mode (M-x orgtbl-mode) in Emacs is worth a try too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM (Emacs Org-mode)
thanks this was a great relief!
Gold, world's most expensive food
To me, this is stating the obvious.

The best way to learn is by doing, and the best way to get better is to (happily) make mistakes and learn.

Nobody/nothing is perfect, and often (perceived/contextual) perfection is derived from iteration. And the hardest part about iteration is often making the start.
Should computing habits have any bearing on fitness to be commander in chief?
Jeff likes to give his posts misleading titles.

Iteration (which is what he's referring to when he says "quantity") is an essential part of quality software. But "quantity over quality" suggests perpetually producing lots of crap without regard to outcomes.

Still, his call to prefer working, shipping code over paralysis-through-analysis is very good.
Hopefully not. I enjoy printed magazines.
Now he wants to change how Americans shop
Venture Fund Economics: Gross and Net Returns
Introduction to Test Driven Design
hmm, that's a bit of a flaw in my plan.
the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Is it narcissism when authors believe their readers are so stupid that they'll drink everything they write ? Don't we deserve at least some sort of credible example, even if it's obviously made up and exagerated to fit the author's narrowed perception of reality ?
You can't do "include Singleton" until you've identified the "Singleton" pattern. The author says that identifying high level patterns is a) the point of the book (for OO languages), and b) that identifying patterns is a good thing.

The author is perfectly right to say that interpreting a book which catalogues patterns in existing software as a prescription for how to implement new software is a great misunderstanding, as you've demonstrated in the post above.
I seem to remember reading about the Dynabook and how it was put together.

I was fascinated by it and was wondering if I can use this document to help me...
Misleading title.

More accurate: Quantity Causes Quality.
I'd be reluctant to count gold as a food, only because it adds nothing to the taste. It's purely decorative. I once had a drink with gold flakes in it and it was a huge letdown.

Using a per-pound basis to measure the expensiveness of food strikes me as odd; a per-serving metric would be better. After all, high-end white teas can cost $1000+ per pound, but since a serving is 2-2.5g, they're still affordable.

Also, I don't know if foie gras will be a French delicacy for much longer, because I believe it will be banned in the EU soon. Good riddance to it; blech!
The brain can get a lot done, and leave you a little smarter, when it sleeps
Wow, I thought this was going to be a linkbait-like read, but it was actually really interesting.

Here's to hoping he launches an anonymous blog in the future even if he is troubled by the negativity.
After reading the entire post, one sentence still stuck out for me:

My late mother, aleha ha-shalom, told me repeatedly that I had a religious obligation to learn every day, and I have honored her memory by doing exactly that.

What a pleasure for me to read a statement like that on a hn post, for 2 different reasons:

1. It's nice to see a tidbit of wisdom spawned from a viewpoint rarely discussed or understood here. (I really don't want to start a debate or discussion here, just want to recognize a really cool thought.)

2. Sometimes I think half the reason anyone attempts anything creative is just to say, "Look Ma at what I did!" Even though my mother doesn't really understand what I do, that's still a big part of it for me.

I'm going to show her some really cool UI stuff I did last week. She'll say, "That's nice honey." That alone will fuel my rockets for another week or so.
Well, create_function() does create a new, randomly-named function in the global scope, meaning that it will not fall out scope at any point, so that you can use it as a real lambda. And because of the way that create_function() uses a string to build the function contents, by generating a new function everytime you call it, in effect you get "real" closures too. It could most certainly be improved to be more "natural" and complete, but that's probably going to break backward-compati.... oh wait, this is PHP.
I am also not a professional web designer, although I have done some freelance work.

In my experience, if you don't have a problem just writing the css yourself, you may as well just do that. Read the css specs, and do it yourself, and you should end up with cleaner, more concise css rules than you would otherwise.

I would guess that a css framework would be useful if you either didn't have much experience with css and really needed to get something done, or were doing something very complex with it.
I think it would depend on where it was, although I really have no clue.

For example, I would expect a video game store in the mall to have a much higher percentage of people not buying anything than an isolated / strip mall store due to the amount of foot traffic that would be entering out of sheer boredom or out of curiosity.

Storefronts in a mall come quite a bit closer to being good as a comparison for stores on the web.
Because they were using subversion, not git.
As I've always said, the difference between the expert programmer and the novice isn't that the expert is smarter, he just did the same stupid mistakes so many times, he knows his way out.
Is this really that surprising to people? Many of the solutions to the problems I think about during the day come to me right as I fall asleep.

It's always just been a given for me.
IPhoneDevCamp2
If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?
Up-voted for tecno-geek factor, with the caution that the discussion doesn't devolve into election year politics. The article seemed to ask the question "does the use of technology matter in your presidential candidate" and then spent the rest of the space discussing McCain in a negative light.

To rephrase the question, does technology significantly change the principles on which a country or political party is founded? I'd guess mostly no -- but 10% of the time it does. The most recent example is the issue of anonymity in daily life, which wasn't even an issue on the radar 50 years ago. Privacy of medical data is a close second.

A second question may also be asked: is a president a better manager when he uses technology more fully? I think yes, but there are a lot of considerations and it gets murky quickly. Especially in our age it's easy to observe a lot of people plugged into email, twitter, blogging, WoW, and all sorts of other technology and not being very effective at much of anything.

This leads to the most interesting implied question: to what degree do we use computers that make us better, and to what degree are we simply wasting time?

Gee. Seems like I had some programming I was supposed to be doing this morning.
Ten things the world can learn from open source
10 MySQL variables that you should monitor
Quantity implies practice, which leads to quality.
Congrats on the project! It does seem a little obscure but as I understand it, it has a lot of academic interest.

The only thing that made me wince was when you put your source repository on your server. Probably a bad idea, as you found out. You really want your production server configured and streamlined to do one thing -- make money. (Or provide value to users, to be more precise) Think of it as a big cash register. Try to keep it as clean as possible.
11 Habits of the Worst Boss I Ever Had - David Silverman
New hire cannon fodder
when social media tools like blog readers and twitter/summize start letting you follow keywords in addition to posters, then that will change.

a good example of that is outside.in i follow my neighborhood and found out this morning that a kid fell 13 stories in a bulding next to mine and lived

http://gothamist.com/2008/08/02/soot_saved_girl_in_180foot_f...

i don't normally read gothamist but because that story was geotagged by outside.in and i follow that tag, i read it

same is true with twitter/summize. they will allow users to follow keywords soon. so if you live in new paltz, you might choose to follow that word. and so if someone with one follower asks where to get a good cup of coffee in new paltz, they will likely get an answer

this is all about where things are headed, not where they are right now
The Rubyist (Online Magazine)
Actually, the preference for Iteration is really just another form of "Evolution is Smarter Than You." Or, if you will: You'll never learn as much about [X] by just thinking about it, as opposed to actually doing [X] a whole bunch! (While thinking about it.)
The XY Games
"...Free software seems to have better usability..."

Not sure about that. Dia vs. Visio? Visio wins. Maya 3D vs. Blender? Many say Maya 3D wins. GIMP vs. Photoshop? I'd say that one was really a tie with a large pool of people just used to the way Photoshop does things. OpenOffice vs. Word? OpenOffice still has lots of interface snafus compared to Word. (But AbiWord doesn't have those.)

I contend that Open Source / Free Software almost never achieves the same level of GUI polish as the best proprietary apps without someone being paid to do it. The market forces in the volunteer-only situation almost never push it to that level.

If you contend that Open/Free and Proprietary apps as a whole are around the same average level, I would generally agree. But let's be honest here: that's setting the bar way too low. Everyone should be aiming for the top few %. And when it comes to that, the Proprietary stuff has the lion's share.
Pattern for Pattern
Taking social networks abroad - Why MySpace and Facebook are failing in Japan
Highly innovative Y Combinator startups
We were fairly discouraged when the w3c took the Ogg codecs out of the HTML 5 drafts. I'm very happy to see the browsers are supporting them anyway.

Monty is hard at work rewriting the theora encoder we originally ported from On2. If the leaps and bounds we made with Vorbis are any indication, I think Theora is going to see significant quality and speed improvements.
Mathematically Enhanced Origami
My mother's favorite phrases directed at me growing up were "Tell me something I don't know" and "If the book is so interesting, why are you talking to me about it as opposed to reading it."

Always annoying, but motivating too.
This isn't about the time "right as you fall asleep". If it were, it would fit just fine with various earlier theories of sleep: the ones that concluded that sleep was just an extreme form of rest, a chance to let all those overworked neurons cool down and heal, and that you could get most of the benefits of sleep by, say, meditating.

But the new data is beginning to home in on what sleep accomplishes. And, in fact, your brain is doing a lot of work while you sleep. If I were to indulge in some CS-freshman handwaving, I'd say that the sleeping brain is doing garbage collection, lossy compression, and search indexing and optimization.

Is that surprising? I'd say that the really surprising thing is that we've gone through life up to now without really having any data on what sleep is for. So the new theory that sleep is primarily about memory management is more gratifying than surprising. It's about time we figured this out!
blogs that focus on mySQL tuning, database design, and linux-tuning aspects, and reward careful reading

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/

http://dammit.lt/stream/mysql/

http://ebergen.net/wordpress/

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/

http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/
Voted up for being right. (However sadly.)
Anyone getting constant youtube 'sorry video no longer available' problems?
For the last few month I'm getting the 'were sorry this video is no longer available' for almost every video on youtube. Sometimes refreshing a few times work, but lately even that doesnt fix it.
For example this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M

(and its not just me. pretty much everyone around me here in South Africa report the same issues)
Breakthrough technologies
Bees and Hyves
The elevator pitched me a curve ball...
Language Log
Clearly it's because Mixi is written in Perl, and Japanese people love Perl!
These moments of clarity usually come to me while I'm in the restroom.
Onvert - Online Extrovert
thios document is promagnificient and we are al;so poor youth from uganda,looking for financial aid fior our project so help us get new donors.
thaks anguriamichael
2562854991
mkanguria@yahoo.com
Startups bring Web 2.0 to Chinese masses
Load the next card in the background so I don't have to wait for the next card to appear when I continue. (I know that the next cards depend on what you achieved in the past, but you could still calculate the next card on the past achievements without considering the last answer).
Warning Sign: Metered Broadband Already a Hassle
This explains how the plastic chips remove dirt, but what about stains and smells?
The three B's of creativity: bus, bath, bed
Those HTML 5 drafts shouldn't have had in the first place ANY specification of a particular video codec, open or closed source - that would be restrictive.
The book can be downloaded in PDF format from http://www.acm.org/classics/
Justin.tv is not a YouTube clone; it's a site for live video. This article is poorly researched in general.
Yes but it requires you to achieve a huge userbase before you start seeing any significant profit, and honestly I don't see his startup being able to do that, because I'm guessing his niche is very small
That's why it's a blog, not a research paper. :-p

But yeah, I'm not upvoting this.
Sometimes when you return to a problem after a rest, you find your unconscious mind has left an answer waiting for you.

http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html
My mom's was "Make something people want"
Reddit vs Hacker News traffic
Ask HN: Sidezoomer or Line Waiter
On the freeway during an obvious merge situation, do you zoom up the empty lane to the end and cut in or do you patiently wait in line and try to freeze the zoomers out?

I've been studying the theories http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/links.html (or more articulately described http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03traffic-t.html), but was curious how the YC crowd approaches this problem.
download an .flv player and try keepvid.com :)
My comment was regarding the statement:

"The one caveat was that each project must have to have a clear and realistic path to monetization (for example: subscription, not advertisement)"

I don't think an advertising monetized startup is unclear or unrealistic and it means that you discount a lot of ideas from the start.
Yes but you are talking about abstraction power which is ofc important.

But 4 lines vs 5 lines doesn't really say that, if it did then we would all be using Perl.
I disagree with your central thesis. Programming is the stringing together of predefined constructs.

I see what you mean. Yes, but in not the sense I meant. My point is that the predefined constructs in the GoF book are at varying levels of abstraction and granularity, and mostly can't effectively be strung together in the way the book implied. That's my attempt to explain why people mostly created messes when they tried (an empirical observation).

If DP were actually about "indirection and abstract techniques" per se, that would be fine. But it's more than that. It's a cookbook of specific clumps of indirection and abstraction. And I don't think programs can be decomposed into those clumps or composed out of them.
This appears to be a design pattern on a number of blogs. You know how "Top 10" type lists are so popular and easy to do? It appears this pattern is also popular, and even easier to do.

1. Take list someone else researched(successful YC startups).

2. Write first idea that comes to mind for each one(generally something obvious, wrong, and controversial).

3. Hit publish.

You get to capitalize on a number of proven traffic techniques--lists, pingbacks, and controversy--for only a few minutes of work.
So, do the customers get their money back? Why would any company rely on a yet to be successful rocket to launch them into space?

Don't get me wrong it's a cool idea but wouldn't you want some reasonable assurance of success ie: past success before you forked over your cash?
Don't bother reading the first 20 paragraphs of pretty meaningless exposition, start reading at "It hit like a meteorite."
Innovative? I don't see a single innovative startup on the list.

For example: Wikis in general might be innovative, but a Wiki-style website builder is not.
Requiring a baseline open source codec wouldn't be very restrictive, any more so than the way standards set other requirements for wide interoperability.
Paul Graham, Changing the World and "Built to Flip" Startups
Kill this? What's the point?
That's a cool idea but I think most people would be hesitant to let the students decide what to learn since they might fear the students just want to relax. It would never fly in a standard curriculum here (US) due to the focus on standardized test scores.

It seems a lot of these new ideas and processes can only be implemented in these types of fringe schools, like the one you mentioned.
I'm glad you wrote this, because I assumed from the title that the post would be a lame argument about how blogs in general were becoming obsolete now that we're in Web 3.2b or whatever. But I clicked on it after reading your comment and - you're right, it's intelligent and wonderfully written, if sad. I'm not surprised Google hired this guy.
Sure. But maybe there's a way to a) see what local people want or need, and b) bring that to the attention of people with the proper skills to capitalize on it. And maybe make a buck as the middleman. :)
Freedom of opinion, open debating, non-fundamentalism. While the post is not 100% spot on, it has some valid points.
Usually I err on the side of not killing stuff critical of YC no matter how crappy it is, but this seems so dumb that it can only be a deliberate troll. I could see how someone might mistake Reddit for a Digg clone, but to claim that Justin.TV is a YouTube clone you'd have to be willfully blind.
An Introduction to AIR