skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No syntactically lightweight way of writing anonymous recursive functions? I can't make myself care about that; I just spent 30 seconds trying, and failed. That's just not a use case worth optimizing for in a practical systems language.

Also, it's true that the Go spec doesn't guarantee tail calls are optimized. If Go were designed to be a functional language, that'd be problematic. However, guaranteeing TCO isn't free in implementation, and in the presence of features like "defer", it becomes non-trivial to understand when it is happening. So, while I like TCO as much as the next guy, I agree with the Go designers decision not to require it. Just like with a pile of other languages, the lack hasn't stopped people from writing good code, and not even stopped them from writing useful recursive code. I think there's some code in the Go standard library (parsing code, mostly) that uses trampolining to simulate it, and that code would be better off if it could just do a tail call, but on the balance that code still works well and isn't convoluted.

Anyway, not a bad blog post; I agree with most of it. But, as someone who has written a fair bit of code in functional languages and a fair bit of Go, I find that the more Go I write the less I care about the language features (or lack thereof) that I was horrified by at first, and the more I see most other languages as overcomplicated. Go isn't a very good language in theory, but it's a great language in practice, and practice is all I care about, so I like it quite a bit.
I have been rejected from Google on two separate occasions after 19+ interviews
Watch out Google might already own App Market. With all these shitty trademarks pretty soon you'll be limited to Place Where You Can Exchange Money For Computer Applications®
> I do really wish the designers had a bit more erlang experience.

I feel the same way. I had this hope that this would be what I would learn instead of Erlang. You know it has goroutines and channels -- kind of like processes and casts. Well except that it is not the same. Erlang's processes that have explicit pids and messages are cast to those processes by referring to their pid, make a lot more sense to me than a bunch of channels. Maybe it is just me, but I really just prefer the Erlang way. (Is the the "actor" vs "CSP" paradigms?).

Then it is what you mentioned, exit signals. Anyone who wants to promote concurrency as first order feature in the language and expects it to be useful in the real world, would have to have something like supervision trees & OTP. In other words when you have lots of little goroutines doing stuff concurrently, it is expected some will just crash and then you'd want to do something reasonable, which is not always to just crash the whole application (OS process).
Ra himself would be proud.
Analysis textbook: for those who want to know the Reals
quote from preface:
'One motive for my writing this text is to make available in fairly simple form material that I think of as “calculus done right.” I have tried to write a text which will be helpful to a determined student with an average background. (I seriously doubt that it will be of much use to the chronically lazy or totally unengaged.)'

A summer spent working through this material would not be wasted time.
A First Step Toward A New Form of Life
I've been rejected from Google on two separate occasions after 19+ interviews.
I have generally replied to the question "What are your credentials?" with a simple, confident, "None."
Also, if the guy gets angry, she can't retreat inside and lock the door.
Not working on iPad
EyeNetra – Your $2 Eye Testing Tool That Works
I guess it is something like the Valley of The Uncanny for languages. Yes, it looks deceivingly similar to C++, C & Java, but is not any of those. When your eyes see the syntax, your brain expects the functionality to be the same. However Go does introduce fairly radical new paradigms (goroutines, type inference...) that really upsets that initial feeling of familiarity.

I (unlike the majority) like Erlang's completely strange and radical syntax. When I see, it tells me that "there is something completely new happening here, don't expect this to be C++ plus processes" or something like that.
CoffeeScript Tracker
Nothing. Both are the same bug.
No, Settings/Configuration is a classic example of where using a Singleton horribly breaks testability, because you can't run multiple "application runs" in the same "test run" without completely exiting and rebuilding the app runtime environment.
If you aren't writing an actual hardware device driver for a specific peripheral port, you are abusing Singleton.
What If Housing Never Bounces Back?
I checked your HN karma after reading your comment. It's no surprise that you are a newbie. Ability to reason well is the only credential needed around here.
You keep forgetting to mention your close personal relationship to Kayla. Or how you work for Wikileaks.
If you use Guice you aren't using a singleton anymore.
Guice is creating an instance and passing it to multiple classes as a dependency. This is different from any class just referencing a Singleton by importing it statically.

It's a slightly subtle distinction, and you still have the risks associated with non-local mutable objects, but at least you can track (using the Annotation API) which classes are using the shared state; it's better than letting any line of code anywhere in the middle of any method sneakily and suddenly grab access to shared state.
I'm a full time OCaml dev these days and I run into OCaml's 'lack of lightweight anonymous recursive functions' maybe three times a year. It costs 3 lines of code to declare the function (called loop() or whatever) and then call it. I've never realized I was supposed to want to switch languages because of it.

Otherwise, this comment makes me more interested in Go than I have been before. OCaml has a bazillion features that I never use, and since every OCaml program can look completely different by using those features, the libraries outside the standard lib are all but incompatible with my code.
I'll say it now: Mike Bostock is easily on par with Ashkenas, Holowaychuck, or Dahl as far as productivity and genius. d3 is a mindtrip but über-powerful in much the same way as Backbone, and Polymaps is the future.
If you mean this: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/More_C%2B%2B_Idioms/Named_Const...
, which is called a Factory, in Java, then no.

A Named Constructor / Factory creates a new instance on demand. A mingleton hands out references to the same instance each time it is called.
Are We On the Verge of an Energy Breakthrough?
I'd love to know what your go-to dishes are when you cook for yourself, especially when you're feeling lazy - I suspect a lot of us could really stand to add a couple of super simple but delicious dishes to our repertoire.

I loved the book, btw, one of the most interesting cooking books I've ever read!
Oh yes, some will want a certain type of advice but they still want the consultant to tell them that. But it seems to me that the idea here is that if the best you can do is wait for a chance to do damage control then you should try somewhere else.
Why don't you pass the session data as an argument to methods that need it?
It is worth noting that people tend to continually upgrade their houses, until after they reach a certain age, their kids move out, and they realize that they don't need that much house any more. Then they downgrade.

Demographics say that the baby boom is about to move past that critical phase. This may result in a long-term decrease in housing needs for demographic reasons. What will that do to house prices?
Boston/Cambridge is an academically oriented area, not as startup/private sector focused. Of course MIT-land would be obsessed with credentials.
And with structured programming, it's only one extra argument per function call, StuffThisFunctionNeeds (plus a structure definition for each different flavor of StuffThisFunctionNeeds)
I challenge you to come up with a matcher for a technology detectable on HN. It's hard!
On mine it's 0.250
Ask HN: Any litigation insurance recommendations?
Anyone have any good recommendations for litigation insurance? I hear that they can cover lawyer and court fees but you're still liable for damages if you lose a case. I'm also wondering how much would litigation insurance be for a small company. With all these patent trolls around I'm wanting to explore options of protection.
There are many instances where you need just one instance of a class, not just a hardware device driver (for instance, when you need GPS location coordinates on a mobile device across several different classes).
I wouldn't call either Haskell or Scala academic. However, here a quick shoot from the hip stereotyping of each.

Scala gives me the impression it wants to be Java's C++. C++ is largely an extension of C. Sure you can use it entirely differently than C, but that C-ish core is still there. And Scala gives me that same feeling in relation to Java.

On the other hand, Haskell suffers from being a "pure" language. I mean "pure" in a wider sense than "functional". I mean "pure" as in being built entirely around a concept. For Haskell that concept is "functional programming". For Lisp, it's the "cons cell". And for Forth, it's the "stack machine". The benefit to being a "pure" language is there are all sorts of synergies you can take advantage of. The down side is when something doesn't quite line up, it gets ugly fast.
Eyup.
Whats a gaming lab and what do you do there?
Running out of disk space is probably the single biggest category of server problem that occurs.
We just don't need fancy digs anymore

Then grab the bull by the horns and make small sensible houses.
Watch jim morrison online
watch jim morrison online
The music is just like life in creativity in music with great artists and it is music which will mainly be discussed by them and this is the success of a young man who is part of the younger generation to come the late 1960s also his music as well as one of the psycho-analytical perception of those who will deliver what is real like Jim Morrison is
exactly the same as my plugin from the other day:

http://nikcub.appspot.com/blockplus-a-browser-extension-to-b...

except mine only attaches itself to google.com requests, not every single tab and page (not sure why they did that)
I'm sorry but your comment came off as condescending.

The graph I linked coincides with my needs, it was specially crafted to demonstrate that, not to show off some silly notion of elegance with no ounce of application. Sorry for not making that clear.

As for: Elegance is not just whether something is "pretty," as in, hey look, integers! It's also whether it has strong meaning. -- please try applying that value to your opinions about giving up pi for tau. I'm not the one guilty of that kind of thinking, you are.
False: http://arstechnica.com/cpu/2q99/bxhack/hacking-bx-2.html
A git implementation in pure JavaScript
I still have this happen, and every time I tell myself right, today I'm going to put in a warning system that'll stop this happening .... and then I clear up a ton of space and move on.

HTTP.sys logging has been a real pain in my ass, every time I deploy a new server I forget to disable it and we do so much traffic it fills the drive completely overnight.
Except, wasn't Google's final bid also in concert with Intel? And how many bids were there from the Apple, RIM, etc consortium? The math in the article isn't meant to be definitive, but rather to illustrate that what Google originally valued at $900M was finally sold for $4.5B. This is a big difference. It shows that not letting Google get the patents was worth more to the group than the actual patents themselves. That should raise red flags.
Facebook 07
Your host isn't bound by the first amendment unless it's a US government entity (which I find extremely unlikely). The US First Amendment restricts government restrictions on speech, not private entities.

What you can do is register a DMCA claims agent (see http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/ ). The DMCA provides a "safe harbor" for web sites. If you have a registered DMCA agent, there's a set process for the agent (which may well be you from what I recall) to receive a takedown request (content, text, images) and a time period to respond. You in turn will need to take some sort of action.

If you don't have a DMCA registered agent you don't necessarily lose "safe harbor" but it's more difficult to block a service provider from just defaulting to removing content and/or sites.
A counter argument to this was Carlos Ghosn's experience with Nissan. He said that one of Nissan's problems was engineers making cars for engineers, but that people did not want to buy.

In reality creating, marketing and being successful with a product requires diverse perspectives.

I think engineers beating up on MBA's is no different from MBA's beating up on "propellerheads." It's counter productive.

And just because you have an MBA, should you then be typecast by engineers? Why does having an MBA reduce someone's potential to be a passionate product person, or to have productive relationships with the makers?
If I remember Cliff Click's [Azul] lecture "A JVM does what?" correctly, each machine whether JVM or x86 defines what is managed by the machine and what isn't.

Just as x86 represents a machine which defines op codes only and leaves memory and process management to the operating system, the outcome of JVM's choices about taking responsibility for garbage collection, security, machine code generation is an interesting machine which can provide performance gains through time, just like Moore's law.

I don't work with the JVM at all, so all I know I learnt from Cliff's lecture. The slides are here http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/2... and video here: http://jeremymanson.blogspot.com/2011/04/cliff-click-in-jvm-...
Creating new languages doesn't create any value. It's not solving a problem. It's just solving the same problem that has already been solved countless times before.
This is illegal in many locales.
Except acting as thought Google thought the patents were worth $900M because that was their initial bid is daft -- you never lead with the maximum you're willing to pay, you lowball and try to stay as far away from your maximum as possible, since that is what you actually think it is worth, such that paying it would be breaking even, and paying more than it would be taking a loss.
To test the d3 matcher I just added, I tried the following URLs and get the error "Sorry, we were unable to reach the site":

http://whatdoyouworkfor.appspot.com/index.html

http://dustinphoto.iriscouch.com/gerrit/_design/app/index.ht...

I could reach them with no problems. These sites are just from some comments on this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746449
The problem is that the old business school courses taught a lot of flawed stuff, including stuff from Jack Welch like cutting costs by treating engineers etc as disposable.
And if it's not explicitly illegal, good luck getting it approved!
People tend not to downgrade, at least in CA because of Prop 13 [1] which, for those of you not familiar with CA politics, more or less freezes housing taxes while you own the home. Thus giving people who have large amounts of housing price appreciation an enormous incentive not to downsize -- if you've owned a home long enough, you could buy a home worth significantly less and end up paying significantly more in taxes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978...
This one actually has a bug in it - you evaluate _/6 and _++ without an intervening sequence point.
Bounces back to what? The crazy bubble days? Who thinks that's possible, or even desirable?
I would recommend just getting a Japanese lawyer who is more aware of this stuff and pay him to make it legal. Reading through the laws is difficult, even if you read the language fluently.

And I don't think Japanese officials would consider this a "disagreement", but more like "illegal activity to avoid taxes". Which would involve a fine and being deported, as any other crime would.
Sounds like you need to automate setting up a new server
Interesting. Given the minimum size of a Colossus cluster I find the explanation Vic gives unsatisfying. That being said I'm pretty impressed with the overall product, it is the best attempt yet to unseat Facebook, and I predict it will if Facebook can't come up with a credible response quickly.

The killer feature is that its blended with Gmail, and since a lot of people keep gmail open all the time it means you get notified and you see stuff. Not as common to keep one's facebook page open.
That's a good point, and poor cost accounting practices..

I have a friend (an engineer) who is doing his MBA right now. At his school he said there is a big focus on ethics and ethical behaviour. Based on what I've witnessed in business, I wish some of that was maintained once people entered the work world!
There is an offline Google Docs tool. It's called GDriveSync ( www.gdrivesync.com). It's a sync tool between local computer and Google Docs. When offline - it uploads/ syncs changes when back online. Of course the local computer editor has to be MS Office, Open Office anything other than Google Docs... but you get your changes in Google Docs - automatically.
Thanks! Unfortunately it's an academic thing so we're not hiring any outside help.
How Google+ can help brands and startups?
And of course such older graduates are what I refer to when I talk about the "legacy" MBA, as opposed to "modern".
I got that... was referring to the direct replies.
Interesting- I'll take a look at this and see if I can figure out what's going on. Thanks for the bug report.
> "What If Housing Never Bounces Back?"

Then I might actually be able to afford a home in a pleasant place to live.

Screw this entitlement attitude - people bought into houses thinking they'd be this great investment vehicle, instead of what it really is: a stable way to maintain value and a roof over your head. The previous generation caused the bubble, screwing the younger generation out of affordable housing. Where I grew up, the average detached home is now $1M+, in a country where the average income is ~$40K.

The market has finally returned to sensible levels, and one would hope in the future continues to be priced based on its utility as a home first, and as an investment second.

tl;dr: Screw the boomers - maybe some of us can actually afford to buy a roof over our heads now.
How to convert MTS to AVI with MTS to AVI Converter for Mac?
FYI, it only does reading but it's still very impressive. I've tried out the demo and it just works against small repos. It's very slow against larger ones.
Some quick napkin math on numbers:

If you're to believe Eric Schmidt when he says 'millions' and put that at 3 million users (being generous), guessing that each user uploads 20 megabytes of content (again, generous) thats:

3x10^6 × 20 MB

6x10^7 MB or

60TB

Sanity check or does that not seem like a lot of resources to allocate to a project of this size?

Edit: formatting
Boston/Cambridge is startup land on the east coast. I'd say about 90% of the job listings I see for startups or web companies are in boston or cambridge. Bigger "more corporate" companies are situated around route 128.
Hey Jon,

What is Shanghai like these days? In Beijing there is a ton of vacant commercial real estate, but most of it seems to be owned by organizations with no need to lease (else why not lower prices?). Where developments like SOHO are competing is by selling rather than leasing smaller condo-style units. And while the market for apartments has slowed down, there are still people buying. Fifth ring road near Echo's place is 30,000 RMB per square meter.

I wonder more what the actual cost structure is for the complexes cited in these videos. They should be the lowest of all since they're being built on satellite territories. That said, even in a worst case scenario of total default, I wouldn't expect banks to seize the property of people they've been pressured to lend money to. And I wouldn't expect the property to remain "unowned" if it seemed like that would happen. The developers would just sell the assets to a property management company and go nominally bankrupt.

Agree about the differences between China, US and EU too, but my guess is that banks are safe, and that as individual markets get overdeveloped local governments will start adopting property taxes to raise revenue. This is NOT going to be popular with people who've already taken out a 30-year mortgage to buy a 60 square meter apartment, but that coupled with price stagnation should curtail people's tendencies to treat real estate as assets for investment instead of places to live, and push prices to whatever is logical given demographic and migration trends. Soft landing?
They were showing it on a Windows Phone 7, not Android.
Useful for companies, expensive for regular users
Nice. but you have to click on the kid, NOT!
Thinking of a house as an investment is foolish. Do you think of your car that way? No. Homes are commodities that like your car depreciate in value. Building homes has like anything manufactured at scale, come down significantly in cost. This is making it possible to build many more homes at a much faster rate. The days of homes being an investment are long over and will probably never return.
I distrust articles from "the Fool" because they often do stuff like this; publish one article calling for a recovery in X, and one saying that X will tank. Ultimately, someone at fool.com will always have been right. That doesn't mean this article is wrong, but my guess is that it is just the article written in response to someone at the Fool saying, Hey, we need to write a pessimistic piece on real estate to counterbalance our recent upbeat assessment. What actually makes the article not credible, in my view, is that it takes no account of growing population, no account of economic growth, no account of future inflation, no account of the precipitous decline in housing starts in the last few years, and no account of the fact that people are inclined to forget the lessons of the latest bubble as soon as they smell a new one. It also takes no account of the fact that every time someone says "this time is different" they turn out to be wrong, but maybe this time is different.

(I own (so to speak) a house--how's that for disclosure!)
Sure, but pretty much any JVM language that compiles to bytecode can be translated to run on Dalvik VM using standard Android tools.
What I'm asking for is it the result usable.
I guess as long as everyone's asking...

cpryland@gmail.com

Thanks if anyone's got more left.
I've always thought the coverage of housing in the media is very one-sided. As in any market, there are buyers and sellers. Way too much coverage is spent worrying about the sellers and not being happy for the buyers. Counter-example: if car prices suddenly dropped by 50%, the media would cover it like the second coming.
How Engineers Create Artificial Sounds to Fool Us
Twitter? Hell, look at Hacker News' constant stream of Google+ submissions. It's just like when Wave came out. You heard about it constantly.
I'm not a Javascript expert and I don't know D3 so I may be missing something here. I'm trying to add a d3 matcher for http://underthesite.com/, referenced in a contemporary thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746864

Here's the matcher:

http://underthesite.com/technologies/d3/matchers/161

It fails to detect that http://keminglabs.com/ukuni/ uses d3. What's missing from the matcher? I notice that there's no script tag for d3 in the ukuni main page source.
I did it, and posted in that circle, but when am I supposed to get this to-do?
Is the idea that I review my own posts to see the to-do list?
if so, what happens if I have a bunch of other public circle posts? the tasks-list post will get pushed down....