skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Erlang modules hold nothing but functions. In most popular languages there can be mutable data, too, either public or private; this extra complication is what would tip it over from interesting to silly in my mind. For Erlang it strikes me as worth exploring, and then maybe the result could be generalized to other languages.

He considers private implementation-only functions using letrec, but what about multiple public functions sharing the same privates? You can model them as an object (or rather a nullary function returning a tuple or some other representation of a table, since Erlang modules have functions only). Hurrah, we've reified modules, oh well.

I'll bet these points are addressed in the long followup thread.

(Obligatory mention of Zooko's triangle: http://www.zooko.com/distnames.html )
Umm, I think you misunderstood his point. I guess he was trying to make the point that a 110k salary will barely (if at all) cover the sorts of expenses he described.

Which is actually true, unless you go through contortions like interpreting "foreign vacation" to mean shacking with friends in a different country. Btw, AFAIK, new condos do cost more than older ones.
Very interesting. It doesn't surprise me that a vast array of permits would be required, as it should be. We all know how companies will treat water resources if they're not scrutinized. I do see water cooling as a potential mitigation of large quantities of CO2. The need for datacenters will only grow, and we need to find energy-efficient ways of cooling them. Perhaps sticking to seawater in this case just makes more sense.
Certainly. The language looks crowded to me because it looks like a mixture of several different languages at once (well, two at least).

You're using a markup language to define the user interface - why? If the point was to make it look more familiar to web developers then why not just let them use HTML (as in, HTML separated in it's own document)? I know, the idea of Opa is to be one language to develop the whole stack, but what you get here is an incosistent look of your language.
If you're going to let the developers define GUI along with the rest of your logic, it would be much better if it was done in a consistent way.

On the other hand, one could argue that an XML-like language is better for GUI development because it lends itself naturally to hierarchical structures (which a GUI certainly is). And I can actually agree with this. But in that case, I would definitely keep it separated from the rest of the code. Maybe this is just me, but I prefer the concept of separation of presentation and logic.

Usually, one of the best things a web company can do is to not make their developers wear the hat of a web designer, but instead hire an actual web designer who knows her job and who can create a great GUI. But I get the feeling that this person would be very confused if she had to work with
Opa. Let the designers work with what they know best, HTML and CSS, and let the developers work on creating a logic behind this presentation layer.

So, I hope this comment clarified a bit what I meant when I said that Opa looks crowded. Of course, these are only my personal views and preferences and are meant as constructive criticism.
Why the New York Times Replaced Its Twitter 'Cyborg' With Real People This Week
That's absolutely right. And even if it sounds slightly outlandish here, I think, that's how most businesses are actually created.
Nah. It should show up in a central inbox so you don't miss them. It could be a long private thread or something though.
Sort of, except that this is a hosted web service, which Solandra is not. At least as far as I know.
Looks like TODO list for textmate. After trying nearly everything under the sun and have found this as the only way of reproducing the idea "flow" of writing on paper.
Text-only version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPFggJc...
But you see that 10K you saved shouldn't be the money you use to invest and Bootstrap. That 10K should be the cash you keep around for emergency.

But frankly I'd probably do exactly what you have done personally so take that advice with a grain of salt.
I suggest you sit her down and talk to her like the person who wears the pants. In other words, grow a pair of hot damn brass balls. Next week she will love you even more for your new unknown-to-her-bad-attitude.
I imagine this is compounded by the subject matter being measured. A simple "click and lock the measurement" button would be invaluable when trying to measure the height of a squirming child.

Simple, easy to read numbers that eliminate guesswork would seem to make a nurse's job much simpler (or allow them to utilize people who are not registered nurses to collect this data). There have been similar advances in scales, blood pressure cuffs, heart rate monitors, etc. All are readable using analog gauges, yet they progressed to digital devices.
Certainly not all behavior is the direct result of genes; I don't think this is the common viewpoint. For example there are genes that enable learning. This is extremely useful since disseminating behavior by learning is much faster than doing it through evolution. The rapid changes in human behavior in the last few decades (at least) can be explained in this way, and not by natural selection which is too slow.

Genes that encode specific behaviors are just the simplest possible mechanism that works, and they do account for a vast number of phenomena. I think Occam's razor applies: If you suggest a more complicated mechanism, you should have some supporting evidence.
Review my startup idea: Multiplayer game servers on demand
Hi HN,

I have just put up the landing page for my soon-to-launch startup, Cloudfrag.com, and I would really appreciate some feedback. Many of the ShowHNs of late have suffered from a distinct lack of detail in their landing pages. I am hoping mine does not suffer from the same problem.

http://www.cloudfrag.com

The traditional model in game server hosting (for PC games such as Minecraft, Left 4 Dead, etc.) is to charge a flat monthly fee, regardless of how often the server is used. As you are tied to one particular game when renting a server (or must pay a fee to change games) this becomes less cost-effective if you play a variety of games.

Cloudfrag is my attempt at solving this problem for myself and other gamers - the site lets people run their own servers, but they only pay for the time the server is actually running. This should make it a lot cheaper to have your own game server, especially if you either don't play much, or play a wide variety of games. It is currently in closed beta, and will be going to public beta soon.

I am keen to receive feedback on the landing page and the idea itself, so do let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Mike
I went to a talk he gave a year or so ago on a set of libraries he'd written. He was just like that in person. A complete mad professor.

He showed us his early design documents of erlang, including original compile times and performance measurements. Awesome stuff.

He does sound British, but there's a certain foreign-ness about the way he speaks (probably picked up from Ericsson).
Does anybody remember Apple Dylan (http://wiki.opendylan.org/wiki/view.dsp?title=Apple%20Dylan)? I never used it myself, but I remember reading a lot about it in the late 1990's because I was using Macintosh Common Lisp at the time. In the Apple Dylan IDE, every function, class, and module was an object in an object database; there were no files at all. The IDE was at least 10 years ahead of its time, and as a result the performance was terrible. But it's surprising that nobody has revived the idea of a source database.
Ask HN: What are your thoughts on Gnome 3?
If you are using Gnome 3, what are your thoughts?
Research: Employees solve others' problems faster & more creatively
"...seem to assume..." is an assumption in itself. You're describing people that don't believe others can get ideas. That's not describing idea guys -- that's describing asshats. If you can't tell asshats from good idea guys, you've got a problem.
0 day?
Your idealist view of the perfect article is something that quickly goes out the window, when you begin to write for a magazine or newspaper.

The character limit on articles alone is enough to break the hopes of many people.
I took 'on top of an emergency fund' to mean that the money being set aside for those things was not part of the emergency fund.
Assuming the prize-linked account providers don't rake the prize pool, it's an even money bet.
Here's the article formatted in ViewText: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebcache.google....
Quitting smoking may seem obvious, but it's important to consider the context. Middle class people grow up in homes that are very anti-smoking. In the rare case that a middle class family isn't anti-smoking, middle class schools certainly are. Hell, I was indoctrinated with anti-smoking feelings starting from age 10 in school. Whereas a lot of poor people are probably being given cigarettes at age 10. Combine this with the highly addictive properties of cigarettes and I'm not convinced quitting smoking is a reasonable money management strategy to suggest unless we provide some sort of support program or infrastructure. If there are free programs available to teach how to fight addiction, then sure I'm on board.
Bill collectors can't harass you for medical debts

A Google search lead me to the Illinois State AG's website, which claims bill collectors certainly can attempt to collect medical debts. So your claim might only be true in some states (or none at all...)
Nice book plug. I'm reminded of the old CSS Box Model hack for earlier versions of IE.

For those not already familiar, Paul is the maintainer of HTML5 Boilerplate: http://html5boilerplate.com/
Yeah, that's about where I stand -- looks fun but I don't want to bother managing it beyond asking "what does user Foo look like?" where Foo == me.
I wonder how commonplace this is across media outlets.
I've been a long time user of VLC media player and unsure if it'd be worthwhile to make the switch. Did anyone transition from VLC to Miro?
Nobody wants to take a look at pintos?
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/10wi-cs140/pintos/pintos.html
Well, you would want to get notifications for normal replies too, no?
Good point. I suppose the ubiquity of the sounds themselves helps to make them disconcerting.

Then again, maybe using Windows isn't a terribly positive association for some to have either.
Increased power usage causes feds to confuse Bitcoin miner for pot grower
This sounds like so much bullshit. Aside from it being physically impossible to add so much muscle in such a short time, here's a few things that jump right out as being obviously fake:

Suit size went from 40 short to 44 regular. The short and regular is the sleeve length. I'm not seeing how this changes regardless of how much muscle you put on.

The before photos look obviously bad, visible shadow. The after pictures look much better, better lighting.

No tan in the before pic but tan and hairless in the after. Bodybuilders do this to give the appearance of more muscle.

The distance from camera changes in the before pics. Gives the appearance of being smaller or it stretches him out so he looks skinnier.
Well, I didnt sign any contract with this guy. I guess I'll head over to yelp now. :> I cant speak for his abilities as a dentist but having to sign something like this is good enough reason to find a different dentist.
The funny thing is that this will lead to many more anonymous reviews — which will be much more nasty than folks who sign their actual name to a comment. So negative reviews will always outweigh any positive feedback. What's sad is that you can take negative feedback and use it to improve your practice (if you care about those things)...
I'd like to hear grellas' thoughts on this.

I think there's a lot to be said for people being trolled to band together, search for prior art, file reexamination requests, etc., but I'm not sure that you can just find a lot of other people to file declaratory judgement actions with you. At least, not very easily.

IANAL, so if you're going this route, you might want to ask a lawyer to explain MedImmune, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., 549 U.S. 118 (2007) to you. Patently-O has a nice write-up on that, incidentally, which you can read here: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/05/the-multi-fac-1.html

Basically, you have to have taken meaningful steps to do something that might be infringing. Also, the whole idea of it being a strategy works against you. The statute is permissive, so the court has discretion in terms of whether or not to hear your case. If they think you're doing it to bankrupt your opponent, well, let's just say that they probably won't look upon that favorably. Just because the law gets used as a cudgel doesn't mean that judges approve of this. It's just that some lawyers know how to make fairness really expensive.

I honestly think that the best course of action is to work together to invalidate the patents. Even if you really do bankrupt the troll, they'll probably just sell those patents to someone else, possibly even another troll, during bankruptcy.
Here's a few examples of these forms I found from googling:

http://lagunaskincenter.com/RegistrationForms.aspx

I agree to the mutual privacy agreement and authorize the office to retain full copyrights to any communication or online posts related to my treatment and services.

http://www.academylaser.com/user/PatientSignInForms.pdf

This doctor demands a five year gag order on all his patients!

http://www.rejuvalife.md/forms/patientreg09.pdf

This doctor seems to imply he would try to find loopholes in HIPAA to use your records for marketing if not for you agreeing to keep quiet on Yelp.
I can see this being really useful for some simple 3D transitions within web apps, along the lines of the cylindrical date picker in Safari on the iPhones.
I like the new Gnome Shell. It feels like Ubuntu's Unity shell, but Done Right. The Shell is kind of hard to describe, because it almost- but not quite- does away with the traditional desktop/window/taskbar model. It reminds me, in a way, of OS X. It's shiny and cohesive, but also functional.

I liked the fact that desktops are a fluid resource: you don't define that you want 4 desktops arranged on a 1x4 grid, you simply drag a window the next desktop down and it pops another one up below it. If you empty out a desktop, it disappears and the unused desktop moves up. The integrated messaging is useful for me, since I use Facebook and Google chats constantly. It's very out-of-the-way, but still right there when you need it.

In terms of dislikes, it felt very strange to not have a taskbar hanging out on the bottom of the screen. I think it's something that I'll just have to get used to (once I get a build for Ubuntu with the right theme), but I for one am not ready to entirely drop the window list. I understand the rationale for taking it away, since it is distracting, but it's also an indicator of how much work my system is/isn't doing at a given time.
You could attempt to direct a bunch of publicity towards the fact that the management company wants to broadcast the security footage on the Internet:

* 'Anonymously' put up a bunch of papers around your apartment complex to direct residents' attention to those terms in the lease contract.

* Notify the local media about it.

* Discuss the idea that someone could use it to determine when you are/aren't home in order to rob/assault you.

* If you want to fight dirty you could bring up the 'protect the children' angle and talk about online predators watching your children.
Google to Unveil Mobile Payments Platform
Some countries have institutions that you can forward a complaint to, but the result usually doesn't carry any significant impact other than acknowledging the transgression.
The Silicon Valley Myth [video]
Personally, I'd rather work with someone who knows their limits over someone who does a half-assed job (through lack of talent or ability). If only because I'd have to then later clean up said code.

I'll back this up with an anecdote. At a relatively small company I used to work for, the CEO was someone who used to code, some 17 years ago. However, he recently decided that he knows enough about coding to act as the lead developer for that company's flagship product. He then proceeded to drive development into the ground, arguing over the merits of using malloc instead of calloc, globals over locals, and the beauty of goto's.

He successfully runs several multi-million dollar companies, yet his smartest move was stepping back out of the development lead position, and back to that of managing the company.

Did knowing how to code get him where he is today? Ultimately, no. His business savy and contacts did that.
Supposedly they tone it down in their english publication. I only speak english though, and Al Jazeera FUD is hardly unheard of over here, so who knows.
I already work my buns off trying to strike it rich and the odds are terrible but playing the lottery gives me the hope that I could just get lucky one day. I figure I should exhaust all my opportunities if I'm going to make it.
Which is actually true, unless you go through contortions like interpreting "foreign vacation" to mean shacking with friends in a different country.

Meh, international vacations aren't necessarily all that expensive. $1000 for an airfare, another $1000 for a week's accommodation... that's six grand a year. Heck, let's make it ten grand, just so you don't have to skimp. And a lease on a new 5-series is, what, $600 a month? This is all perfectly affordable on a $110K salary.

I'd never advise anyone to lease a car rather than buying one with cash, but actually I reckon three international holidays a year is a great way to spend money. You only live once, and while you're probably doomed to spend your entire life within a six-mile deep approximately-spherical shell, it's full of interesting stuff so you might as well go and see as much as you can.
FYI, this demo silently fails on the current Safari version in OS X 10.6.7. On Chrome and Firefox it renders a mesh in the top right hand corner of the page. Whilst I acknowledge the authors says "Various browsers will have glitches with this hack, as it's really a severe and gross hack", I'm getting rather tired of these examples that are, at best, domain specific browser kludges rather than general interesting cases of HTML/JS usage.

By these standards, the much derided IE specific features were a great thing for the web. Welcome to HTML 5, where "Best viewed in XXX" is the old new rage. I thought we'd left this behind in 2005?
The Cartoon Guide to Surviving a Nuclear Bomb Test
You obviously don't visit much open source software websites. I thought this one wasn't bad at all compared to what I'm used to.
If your lease was not up for renewal, you probably could have gotten out of your lease by refusing to sign it. Refusing to sign it and taking your business elsewhere is one of the best ways to let them know that you won't stand for this type of thing. And then spread the word to anyone that will listen about why you don't recommend doing business with that establishment.
Samsung ordered to show its new prototypes to Apple
I'm not a Doctor but I seem to think if I were at least competent with a good bedside manner that the best play would be to encourage patient reviews. You are always going to get a few bad apples, but people appreciate transparency and I bet that would translate to more/better reviews.

I could be completely wrong though. You would probably want to A/B test it ;)
Yelp's ToS forbids writing a review based on someone else's experience -- to allow that would enable and encourage an echo chamber effect of one person's bad experience. There's a lot of mis-information floating around about what would cause a Yelp review to disappear, but a ToS violation like that is a perfectly valid reason. (disclaimer: I used to work at Yelp)
If Blackberry has lost its enterprise niche, and MS is struggling to find one of its own, it seems that HP/Palm and Meego are in even worse positions. I suppose at this point such second-stringers might as well give up on smartphones and find some other mobile platform to work towards, such as tablets.
My family is solidly middle class, have provided enormously for me so I've had advantages most of my college peers havn't, and make around 100k a year.

It's also been shown that while happiness increases drastically up to 60k a year in annual income (in the U.S.A.), happiness does not increase further after that point. I.E. People making 100k are on average no happier than people making 60k, and people making 200k are no happier than those making 100k.
It's quite possible that they could use the footage to help find assailants or other criminals, where the footage of you might pose a violation of the law.

What I'm saying is that there's not necessarily any shady motive behind it. The problem is - and has always been - how to determine this.
I'll venture a guess that you didn't read my profile.
People seem to be missing the most cogent point here...

"The agreement is based on a template supplied by an organization called Medical Justice, and similar agreements have been popping up in doctors' offices across the country. As we dug into the story, we began to wonder if Medical Justice was taking advantage of medical professionals' lack of sophistication about the law. Doctors and dentists are understandably worried about damage to their reputations from negative reviews, and medical privacy laws do make it tricky for them to respond when their work is unfairly maligned. Although Dr. Cirka declined repeated requests for an interview, his emailed statements (and the statements of his staff) suggest he doesn't understand the terms of the agreement he asks his patients to sign."

Doctors aren't lawyers. Most just want to stay in business and do their job without getting sued. That's where organizations like Medical Justice come in. Attacking the individual Doctors on an issue like this does no good. Because they weren't the people who thought up the chain of logic that led to the creation of this form. So they can't argue the pros and cons of its existence. Meaning they might agree with every counter point you present but still stick with the agreement because they are "trusting experts"

If Ars or anyone else wants to really make a difference in this arena they need to engage those "experts" and take the accusations to that organization (they clearly tried to do this, my issue is with their attack on the doctor)

The problem with the author calling-out an individual doctor is it makes a case for the agreement. By singling out one doctor and attacking him for an industry practice it says "patients can be irrational online" which will make doctors fear the online world more (and hence give more credence to organizations that claim the best way to deal with patients is to censor them)
In a startup, if you "know your limits", you almost certainly aren't going to accomplish as much as you can.

In an office environment, different roles are much more important.

It also means that he was able to learn to code, but not to the standard that your product required.
ThriftDB uses Facebook's Thrift serialization internally so the schema is completely flexible.