skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is interesting. Maps are themselves functions, taking the key as a parameter and returning its associated value. So when your basic data type is a map, the language is arguably more "functional" than the usual functions + lists combination.
Hrmmm..

I don't know, that is a lot to ask. You yourself state that you can't understand this example in Clojure, which as you admit is almost trivially simple. Again, I'm 99% positive the Clojure as written is exactly equivalent to the full Java versions, so he really couldn't be clearer on this particular example.

It is a hard task in the end as an author, to come up with an example that CAN be understood by someone who likely only knows one of the languages talked about, yet still provide some comparison. I think he deserves some credit in that he does try to make them exactly the same code (probably very similar bytecode even), just expressed in that language.

To your contrived point, I would say running through the elements in a list and operating on them is far from contrived, rather it is one of the most common operations we do day to day. That Java is particularly verbose about that isn't the fault of Clojure.

To keep this constructive, what piece of Java code / functionality would you use as an example?
Chrome's Latest Music Experiment: 3D Dreams
>Lessons learned: nuclear power is pretty darn safe, although you shouldn't build 50s-style reactors near the coast in a tsunami zone. If you do, don't live nearby. No surprises there.

I would say that it was a surprise to everyone involved. Or are you saying that everyone who lives near a nuclear reactor shouldn't be surprised when their homes become uninhabitable? I wonder if the nuclear industry would agree with that statement.
Nanosatellites part of Endeavour payload
> Another interesting factoid about Peixe Urbano: They’ve imported a dozen American engineers, product managers and designers.

Oh, wow. Are we (Brazilian engineers) that inferior to the American ones?

Peixe Urbano is one of the few well-designed websites in Brazil, I'm sad that it wasn't made by us.
I love the Spitfire as an aircraft and a legend, but the simple fact of the matter is that had as much to do with the outcome of the Battle of Britain as Ava Braun's skirt.

If the entire RAF had been equipped with Hurricanes, and not a single Spitfire seen combat until the fall, the result would have been exactly the same.

The UK had numerous advantages over the Germans during this battle. All of them combined to create the outcome we now know as history.
Reminds me a lot of Porsche's situation a few years ago in the sports car market.
Agreed. It's striking how many intelligent, rationally-identified people can't see their shared blind spot even when the evidence is captured on the page. Anybody who was involved in the discussions would do well to go back and reread what you said and when you said it, and think about how it looks based on where we are now.
Is it possible for Microsoft to buy only the smartphone unit from Nokia, and let Nokia manufacture and sell feature phones? That would make more sense for Microsoft, but I am not sure it is possible for a lot of reasons (legal, patents, competition, brand dilution).
If the expectations of rising sealevels due to global warming prove correct at all people will laugh at the amounts we lost to nuclear power.
It's The Society of Drivel effect.

Morning radio shows on rock/alt stations perfected it a long time ago -- focus your segments around sex and alcohol. Throw in fart jokes too for good measure. Hoards of simple people will flock to you.

We've moved on though. More dangerous than airwave broadcast drivel is our newfound self-participatory drivel. reddit lets you think you're being clever. HN lets you think you're being smart. Brain rot personalized to your interests. It slips around your "I'm wasting my life" filters for hours (days?) at a time.

Sometimes it's good. You want to turn your brain off. Browsing reddit is cheaper than antidepressants. You just have to guard against too much looping. Infinite loops of social media consumption are hazardous to your health. Everything in moderation, including moderation.

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
While I agree that the second case is often the norm, I do have one counter-example -- I used to work for Riverbed Technology, a 9 year old company which does WAN optimization and competes against Cisco and Bluecoat, among others. Riverbed is (or was?) generally regarded as the tech leader in the market and its head start is based on a patented compression scheme. There's no question that the patent is a big part of what allowed the company to survive the entrance of 800-lb gorillas into the market and I'm fairly certain that if software patents were abolished today, that algorithm would be in Cisco's WAN solution tomorrow.

I still think the software patent system as it stands now needs serious reform but you know, that saying about a broken clock and all.
New bill upgrades unauthorized Internet streaming to a felony
The Person example also seems overly verbose. Does the equivalent Clojure example have private attributes name and age? It looks like the author is accessing the name and age attribute directly instead of using getter methods as defined in the Java version.

class Person {
String name;
int age;
Person(String name, int age) {this.name = name; this.age = age}
}

This is still more verbose than the (defrecord person [name age]) but still, I agree with the dodgy examples used.

Disclaimer : I don't know Clojure or similar and therefore I could be missing something. I did a quick search for defining private attributes in Clojure but didn't find any good hits.
Winklevii lose appeal, plan to appeal
URL Shorteners Skew Twitter Stats
Nothing indicates major product launch (ie, no leaks or rumours like any other major product launch). Maybe some kind of party and/or fun-time goodies for people to go and play with?
I'm not sure that's much different than the state of things today. The status quo version of your scenario is that startup has an idea, patents it, spends 2 years implementing it then launches. Today, even before startup launches, Big Company can see the patent, build a similar system that's just different enough to not violate the patent.

Today, Startup can sue, alleging patent violation, but most startups don't have the cash on hand for an extended patent battle anyways.
You didn't read the article. They offer 5 day (few days off plus weekend) contracts, or even weekend contracts. They will wait until you have a vacation.

If your company is a total bore and no one in the bay area thinks what you're doing is at all exciting, then you're right. The ONLY thing you have to offer is a signed contract with a very high number on it.

But if you're actually doing something personally exciting to someone, they will absolutely take a few days out of their routine (with compensation) to explore that. Honestly, if someone isn't excited enough about my company to put a few days into it without a full time contract, I don't want them in my company.

I've put a few YEARS of my life into my company without such a contract. I'd expect my employees to have at least a fraction of that passion.
Saversnews.Co.Uk - Investment News In UK Advice For The UK
More important, you can't use it to pay your taxes.
As an aside, there are currently 6221100 bitcoins in circulation (not counting ones that were lost, I suppose) and they are currently trading at around $7.50, which means Bitcoin has an implied market capitalization of around $46 million.

Not enough to take over any banking systems anytime soon, but that is an awful lot of momentum for a weird crazy open source P2P thing.
I'm having trouble thinking of any situations where you're free to use any alphanumerics, but you absolutely can't use anything else. The closest thing that comes to mind is DNS, and that's a 36-character set, not 62.

Ascii85 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base85) uses a similar concept, but using the majority of the printable ASCII characters. It gets a hard-to-beat 20% expansion on binary data (4 bytes in 5 chars) without requiring bigint math.
I think this question would be more appropiate in http://stackoverflow.com than here. Your doubts are pretty technical for the scope of this community.
I agree that its overkill for the use case mentioned in the article, a Makefile would be more than sufficient. I do the same for my vim configuration using `make`: https://github.com/aonic/vim-settings/blob/master/Makefile

Usage:

git clone https://github.com/aonic/vim-settings.git
cd vim-settings
make

Remove:

make clean
I'm guilty too. I have some patents granted and I don't even know what it is about base on the description written by lawyers.
If we drop the concerns over legality, what about starting rumors that there's a secret offshore blind trust, contributed to by both deep-pocketed victims of patent trolls and open-source developers. A trust which exists to take the other side of anonymous bets regarding the death or disappearance of patent trolls.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ebza6ck1.aspx
This is a technology I've been watching for the last 15 years. Once you reach a particular amount of compute at the scale of a playing card, you start having the ability to create 'meta' satellites out of clusters. Thin whisker like conductors trailing like long cilia beyond one of these can use the magnetic field of the earth to do station keeping and move around without fuel (using only electricity from solar cells to add charge to the whiskers.)

The 'smart dust' people and others are working along these lines and could create a new market for satellite delivery which consists of filling various voids in an otherwise 'full' launch with nano-satellites which, once deployed, would work their way toward the rest of the group and then join into their network.
Ask for compensation.
Apple is foreclosing.
Better is relative.

While I love reading well researched and thoughtful pieces on certain topics, I also like the fact that, for instance, on HN there are quite a few off the cuff "idea" posts that are half-baked but meant to inspire conversation and discussion than to be authoritative treatises on the subject.

Merlin wanted to stop consuming and producing half-baked ideas and content, and that is his call.
So what? Sloppy thinking on the other side doesn't excuse sloppy thinking on yours. Nuclear advocates should be talking about how nuclear can move forward in the light of the dangers that are more obvious than ever now, not playing a game of "yeah but you're dumb too" with the anti-nuke crowd.
:) Only if it "produces (or encourages) anything short of your “A” game."
Looks incredible. Anyone got experience with DAS?
Excellent questions. I have no idea, just positing some ideas for reform that differ from the impracticable (and not going to happen) abolition.

Licensing of a patent by the original assignee for specific use of for immediate manufacture makes sense to me.
I articulated my reasoning in the following sentence.

You assume that the people in the position to make decisions are competent.

Not at all; there's a large volume of patent litigation, and it's reasonable to assume that at least some of the decision makers are competent to evaluate such elementary arguments. Your argument requires universal incompetence by litigators and/or decision-makers.
I don't know about that, but anyone who writes a comment on this article totally missed the point.

Err.
Free Dorothy: Using Social Media to Free a Journalist
Does it? I still see numbers normally in all my 3 browsers (Chrome, Opera, Safari).
I added Crafting Rails Applications by Jose Valim to my collection. I'm sure I'll love it.
They said that based on the information that was available at the time, which was reasonably comforting, given the circumstances. Those that said that it was a major disaster were speculating wildly, mostly based on unofficial (and mostly wrong, even in hindsight) information. That they were right in hindsight doesn't change that.
As a defensive fighter, we can forgive its lack of range. There are a few negatives: carburetor rather than fuel injection (negative G's), no deflection-capable gunsight and a weak punch (rifle-caliber MG, although a lot of them). All of these were addressed in the years past '40.

As a product of the '30's, it was quite a piece of work. Along with the Zero, the best pre-war fighters out there.
Ask HN: Value in Stanford Professional Cert
I've been looking around for courses in machine learning and computer science to help career-wise. Specifically, I'm interested in being a data scientist at a startup. I came across the Stanford Center for Professional Development's certification in Data Mining and Applications (http://scpd.stanford.edu/public/category/courseCategoryCertificateProfile.do?method=load&certificateId=1209602#searchResults), which seems to be right up my alley. But the cost is around $11,000 and for me this is hardly a trivial amount. My question is, then, what would be the value in such a certificate? Would any startups (or even more established tech companies) be impressed? Or, is it just a cash cow for the university? This question also applies to similar professional certifications from other "name-brand" universities.

Preemptive thanks!
You have to understand, though, that legalese isn't English. It may look like English, and even work like English in ways, but its not English. Saying that legalese and English ought to be equivalent because they share words and syntax is like saying C++ and Java ought to be equivalent because they share keywords and syntax.
Providing a great customer experience even when things go wrong
I'm pretty sure the canonical use case for this would be for including complex binary data in a URL. A URL shortener might be a good example.
I like reading people write about how people shouldn't write insignificant shit. While I agree with him, it's always slightly ironic.
Another method is to automatically serve certain file extensions as static:

location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|zip|ico|xml|pdf|html)$ {
access_log off;
expires 30d;
break;
}
Um, since when do you have to lock your cell phone in a safe, sign an NDA, and get password-protected training files from Apple for a "fun-time party"?

Not even Apple is that paranoid.
I just reloaded the code with 350 more invites.
Is Max's code considered to be good or bad?
Well, flickr is easily pronouncable, while this one doesnt have a single vowel :)
IOS RAGE rendered with WebGL
Very interesting to see this article on HN. Guess we're having a Merlin run here?

I'd actually go as far as to say that "Better" has shaped my thinking about social networking and the Internet in general. Attention is a finite resource -- even moreso for those who struggle to focus -- and as someone with an economics background I'm tempted to consider the marginal benefit vs. marginal cost of the things I read about on the Internet.

Usually these comparisons usually come out strongly negative, even when we're talking about Hacker News. We would get much more out of a chapter of CLRS or an OSS patch than something from Techcrunch or Daring Fireball.

Just something to consider.
That's the crux, meat, soul, and artichoke heart of the matter right there. Use drivel as associative binding to generate new viewpoints (tip: clever books work well for this too). Don't use the drivel as an end in and of itself.
.

_
I'd guess that the owner's 28 years in business has given her an offline customer base that she should try to connect with online. Bring those people to her website to write testimonials, generate conversation and buzz via Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Most startups would love to have a fan club on Day 1, instead of shouting desperately into the void. Start there.

Also, consider seeding some video content on YouTube, eHow or the like.
So, basically, Mono's dead.
I think an important part that is perhaps underemphasized is that Apple has proven that Apple can do this. It's Apple's singular focus on quality that enables it, and it's surely the hard way to do it.

And Apple can do it precisely because it's hard. If it was simply a matter of targeting the high end, everyone would be doing it.

Fighting for market share and making infinitesimal margins across a large market share is the relatively easy and obvious way to do things, and it involves relatively easy and obvious processes of copying/iteration.
I have been working on something else in the Twitter-space and then saw a blog post about a concept like this. I decided to take a quick break from my actual project and code up Crowdwoo. It's a simple lottery-esque site except it costs nothing. It's just a fun experiment in potentially viral concepts.
http://atlantic.net/cloud. Servers are available in seconds, billed hourly, with a free trial good for $15USD.
Exactly. Navel gazing at its finest, something the Merlin does with some frequency. Though to his credit, he does do it well.
Chicken and egg to the max. Unfortunately, I just don't see this gaining any sort of significant traction (which it requires to be remotely useful).

Kudos to the team though for seeing their (great in theory) idea to fruition!
It is just a rumor, but it's interesting that it seems to line up with stories that were floating around a couple weeks ago about Apple retail employees being told that they weren't going to be able to book vacation days in late May.

Usually those kinds of black-out dates have signalled product launches.
Okay, I wasn't aware of that. I still think modern editors are simpler and easier to deal with than Emacs and Vim, but that's a different story.
See also: http://healthmonth.com/
Nintendo has similar strategies.

Another interesting point about the Nintendo model, their approach is not only more innovative, but it's not cutting edge, and it's cheaper than the competition.
One more thing - it seems when I open the "quests" box, then close it, it won't open again without reloading the page.
I wrote this but had no intention of submitting it here. As a Bitcoin blogger, I feel cramped knowing that there's a good chance anything I write will be posted to HN.
Calculus and RSA -- two things that I think most of us would agree are "non-obvious" and were invented independently.. and may I add that the documented independent inventions were generally with a few years of each other? The evidence suggests that despite modern romantic notions of creative inspiration springing from individual genius, invention usually owes a lot to societal need and the current intellectual milieu.
Wouldn't the doctor or nurse who operated the ultrasound machine hold the copyright to the ultrasound image, not the manufacturer of the ultrasound machine? And furthermore, why would the daughter be named in the suit?
Not having worked, or knowing anyone who has worked in an Apple store, inferring the magnitude of the event given the procedure is difficult. Have they ever done this before? If so, what happened when they did?
If it was simply a matter of targeting the high end, everyone would be doing it.

Everybody is doing it, but their execution is abysmal. They're trying to go toe-to-toe with the leader in those segments without the business and development processes to support it. Apple has singularly focused their entire company on this problem and have the execution nailed. Motorola, Dell, etc. are distracted by the low-margin high volume part of their business and can't focus enough to get it right.
I used jEdit for many years on linux and windows, but development has been stalled for a long time. Presumably moment dropped off quickly after the author Slava moved on to other projects. It's a shame. I'm trying http://www.vicoapp.com/ instead these days. Not as good as jEdit, but at least people are actively maintaining the code.
Doesn't look like the Mono guys were able to keep the key IP. That's too bad. It's hard to see what Attachmate gains by keeping it.
Nintendo also makes a profit on every single console sold from the moment that they are released.
Parrotfish Twitter Previews Chrome Extension from Embedly
wait.. what? are you scanning stdout with your tests?
Hardly Working Startup Guys, a Y Combinator parody
McDonald's Partly Replacing Cashiers with Kiosks in Europe
Former Mono contributor myself from 2006-2008. Crazy day. It won't die. To many companies are invested in it. I always wished it would spin off earlier.

I wanted to meet up with Miguel when he was in SF a few days ago, but now I know why he was so busy.
If you want to learn low-level programming but aren't really enticed by networking / operating system hacking, I'd recommend writing a software rasterizer. It's a fun project, and it's satisfying at a visceral level to see your creation come to life.

And it will make you a better programmer for the rest of your life. If nothing else, you'll come away with a much more solid understanding of memory, CPU caching, etc.

Here's my (terrible) software rasterizer: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/programming/demos/viewer.zip (Windows only, sorry. But there's no reason why it has to be. All you need is the ability to make a pixel change color, and you can therefore write a software rasterizer.)
Bingo. A strong exit on a web startup is a great way to fund something more ambitious.
Governments aren't conscious. Politicans have been convinced to support policys that help large corporations. Whether the politicans do this knowingly in return for campaign donations, or unknowingly because lobbyists convinced them that the patent system is a good idea, is unclear.

The distinction is important, because if it is the latter we just heed to lobby the right people. If it is the former, we just don't have enough money.
Thanks gwern! Fantastic reference.
hrm. That's an interesting stance, and I don't know!
This is one aspect of this debate that I think hasn't been covered nearly enough. Nuclear opponents have successfully created an environment in which it is extremely difficult to construct new reactors, and then they are quick to decry failures of obsolete designs. The anti-nuke movement shares culpability in the Fukushima disaster precisely because they have done everything possible to ensure that we are stuck with older, far less safe designs.

If anything, Fukushima is an example of how little attention we should pay to the anti-nuclear movement, because an inevitable side effect of their cause is the prolonging of older reactor's lifespans, when much safer designs could be replacing them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#Implementations_and_hist...
Facebook's robots.txt
What is ment by software pattent ? Patenting a method used in software ?

People hear about patent trials but not when startups get their business model copied or stolen by bigger companies. They don't make any noise when they are smashed like moskitos. In one story I've hear of first hand witness from the bad guy side was that they didn't simply trick them into explaining their secret sauce recepie, they also phone the bank and their investors to stop fnancing them. They where big enough to do that. If they had pattented their method for mobile phone geolocalsation in 1999 in absence of gps at the time, things would have probbly run differently.

Patent troll is bad, but when it is for the initial idea of it, that is protecting its inventor during the process of creating the business around it, then I think it's fair.
Maybe 20 yeas is s bit long consdeing computing technology evolution.
MS should support them with some funding.
For Breezier Binary, Hire a Hipster
I've heard nothing but good things about it but the actual "maxcode" framework that was in place is just an XML front-end abstraction (custom tags and loop/conditional logic in templates).

There are far superior templating solutions out right now but his work is definitely great for its time.
I think it's a good time to reread http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html : ("A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting.")