skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's talking about the smallest and simplest of global variables in that quote, hence:

"it's completely doable to write [Pac-Man] in a purely functional style. The dependencies can be worked out; the data flow isn't really that bad. It still may be a messy endeavor, with lots of little bits of data to keep track of, and selectively moving parts out of the purely functional world will result in more manageable code. Now the obvious target is either the state of Pac-Man himself or the ghosts, but those are part of the core data flow of the program. Make those globally accessible and modifiable and all of a sudden a large part of the code has shifted from imperative to functional...and that wasn't the goal."

meaning that trying to make Pac-Man or ghosts into pieces of mutable state will result in them being manipulated entirely by being passed between functions, an even more functionally tangled program (in terms of less being able do some modifications to it as easily as could be done in a similar imperative program.)

Instead he's suggesting adding tiny self-managed globals for little values that truly are global (used almost everywhere) but aren't constant. Basically segregating tiny pieces of mutable state into their own little cubbyholes in order to simplify the logic.

Or at least that's how I'm reading it.
Giant body of water found in space, black hole claims it was just hydrating
I go with reading the manual. That is how I learned Fortran back in the day. I learned PHP by reading the php website. PHP for me was just Perl will all the logic ripped out and replaced with words.

I am not sure reading the manual is a good way if you don't already know a language.
PDF button for the article doesn't work and I couldn't find a link in the source or the JS. Annoying. Anyone stumble across the PDF version? Printing the page to PDF from the browser works to no avail either.
Social media gurus preach brand awareness and engagement, but the truth is most people care more about the actions of a common squirrel than you.

http://twitter.com/#!/common_squirrel
If your number of followers/friends/fans on Twitter/Facebook/Google+/etc. is how you measure your self worth, you might want to readjust your values.

HN Karma is a much better method. :P
Infinite (in the practical sense) lives for Infinite Mario; pop open your JS console and run:

Mario.MarioCharacter.Lives += 1024

Now the challenge is: how far can you get before the game locks up?
We want to write programs with Perl, not scripts
From the 1960s through the 1990s, venture capital was an excellent way to pursue these twin interests. From 1999 through the present, the industry has posted negative mean and median returns, with only a handful of funds having done very well. What happened?

That's the first paragraph of the article. That is to say... What are you talking about?
Anyone benched this against a binary protocol like thrift or protocol buffers?
Strict equals - it doesn't cast types.

Programming distinction, and no idea why the author used that. Mostly the same meaning though, for conversational purposes.
I've been using twitter since very early in its life, and I have to admit I never conceived of it in such an awful, high-school-popularity way. I use it as a mini-RSS feed to follow people and technologies I find interesting.

Honest Question: is the OP's view the mainstream or minority attitude of the twitterverse at-large?
If you only want to be on twitter for your ego and you don't actually have the ability to massage that ego, then who honestly cares.

The three suggestions in this post... just no. I get why people follow celebrities, I don't want to myself, but many people do so fair enough. But follow random people, and get random people to follow me? Twitter is a communication tool, just like email, Skype, whatever. It's quite possible for it to be useful with the people you actually know, you don't have to use it as service for finding people you don't know to make yourself look popular.
You just have to revoke the "per application" password you used on your phone.

My iPad 2 was recently stolen (sad face) and I just had to revoke the different passwords I used for the different apps (Reeder, Mail, Safari, etc.).
You can download your data from Google anytime: http://www.google.com/takeout/

When you sign-up for a Google account, there's a little something called a Terms of Service you agree to. You violate them? You sacrifice all rights to any data you may or may not have on their services. That's something every Google user agrees to from day one. If you don't like that punishment, you shouldn't have signed up.
I like the 13.2pt font - 12 or 16 would just be too obvious. But 13.2? Now that is security!
In graph speak, vertices are nodes (or objects) in the graph and edges are the links between nodes -- it's really quite easy once you become familiar with it.

This script will return a list of all the user's friends:

g.v(user_id).outE('friend').inV

All you're doing is starting with the user node v(user_id) and following the outgoing links that are labeled "friend" to the adjacent nodes (the "incoming vertices").

In a graph, each "edge" (each link) has an outgoing vertex and an incoming vertex. The outgoing vertex is where the edge starts from, and the incoming vertex is what the edge points to:

outgoing_vertex -- edge("friend") --> incoming_vertex

Here's a more concrete example...

james -- "friend" --> julie

In this example, "james" is the outgoing vertex, "julie" is the incoming vertex, and they are linked together by an edge labeled "friend".

Again "vertex" means the same thing as node so every user in the graph is a node (a vertex).
One of the most interesting things I ever saw about API design was a presentation by Casey Muratori called "Designing and Evaluating Reusable Components".

It's the first time I saw anyone acknowledge this profound insight: sometimes, writing a practically useful API entirely at the same level of abstraction simply isn't possible.

Looks like it's available here, now:

http://mollyrocket.com/9438
Unicode Support Shootout: The Good, The Bad, and the (mostly) Ugly [pdf]
Would anyone buy a simple desktop app to backup gmail to the desktop?

I thought of adding features like search and mail viewer. Then I realized I could just use a full email client. :P
Oldest University in the World
The author actually mentions "Bare[sic] in mind that there are multiple paths to becoming a programmer, and this is just my way of being a programmer."
Greg Wilson often mentions that very few programming courses will incorporate the study of existing, proven programs and their code. This probably applies equally to self-taught programmers, and many programming books.

I recently bought and read Wilson's recent publication, The Architecture of Open Source Applications (http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html). It focuses more on the architecture design for some well-known programs (Eclipse, Sendmail, Mecurial et al), but does include some code samples. The best aspect of it, IMHO, is that it focuses on the decisions the programmers faced when designing their code, and the tradeoffs they made.

The NoSQL chapter, in particular, is a really good read and should be referred to by all parties before any NoSQL / SQL flamewar begins.
I would have posted the HTML but, ironically, it wouldn't render right in my browser.
Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead
The same argument could be made about structured programming: "Why should I restrict my programs to have one entry point, one exit point and a single flow?"

The answer is "Because it helps you to manage complexity in the long run".

To continue the "just add a simple global" analogy: after a while you add another, then you peek from a completely different function inside the global variable, modify it if the day is odd and soon you have made a mess of your program.
In this case globals are simply a patch to an outdated design.

"It [all the restrictions] says a lot about what functional programming isn’t (it has no assignment, no side eﬀects, no ﬂow of control) but not much about what it is. The functional programmer sounds rather like a mediæval monk, denying himself the pleasures of life in the hope that it will make him virtuous. To those more interested in material beneﬁts, these “advantages” are totally unconvincing."[1]

But the new kinds of glue functional programming brings about are usually worth the squeeze (for some kind of programs in some kind of situations, maybe).

[1] http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.pdf
Both, though here the latter is the relevant case.
Well your first round of 36 is your early adopter group which you survey, and prioritize problems/solutions. You then iterate your product with what you just learned. The feedback loop. Infact, Ries and Ash say you could do it with just 5 ppl. So you should be testing a new landing page or product by now, not waiting for another 64 ppl to 'signup'.
Sounds like Twitter is really an MMORPG with a uniquely minimalist set of gameplay mechanics.
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The modularity advantage of shared state's "spooky action at a distance" when properly employed is not a fresh insight. It's even addressed in good textbooks on programming such as van Roy and Haridi's Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming. Here's an old related LtU post by van Roy: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message9361.html. Another dramatic example (which is one of the book's exercises) is revocable capabilities.
> Don't become a domain expert, as advised, and then convince one's self that that domain is The One True Path

I first parsed this as "Don't become a domain expert, as advised. Also don't convince one's self that that domain is The One True Path".

Lest someone else confuse it the same way, this does not imply that becoming a domain expert is wrong; it means that after you become a domain expert, you should still keep an open mind.
Right now it's purely a product. There is no distribution built into it. It's more for those will followers/fans already.

Though if I execute, I could see myself building a distribution platform into it.
You believe that 20% of students everywhere cheat, then? Parables aren't exactly the best way to convey information; when I read through it, I interpreted the city as being NYU and the neighborhood as being your class, not the city as being an amalgamation of every university and college and the neighborhood as NYU.
Most traffic is on gumroad.appspot.com links for security.
Vulnerability exposes Apple MacBook batteries to 'bricking,' malware
That's a very long winded way of saying nothing.
The press release from JPL, which is more thorough and detailed:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-223
Wow, I'm torn between laughter and sadness. Laughter because svm's are used everywhere, seriously google scholar returns 1.5 million papers mentioning support vector machines. Good luck suing everyone of those. And sadness, although unlikely, this could have a huge chilling effect on Machine Learning, Computer Vision, NLP, etc.
Amy Winehouse found dead, aged 27
Seconding my sibling richchan that it doesn't necessarily need to be "good" code, I'd suggest starting by reading the libraries — or even just the specific classes or functions — you like to use.

You already know what they're supposed to do, so they'll be a lot easier to figure out at first— and once you do, it will provide the immediate benefit of understanding your tools.

As for how you tell, a good rule of thumb is, the harder of a time you have telling how it works, the worse the code is. This is of course only a rule of thumb, but it applies doubly in the case of code where you understand well what it's supposed to be doing.
Looked at backbone.js and thought the same thing - overkill for what I needed. I'm always thinking "how will I scale this to portable devices", and one important consideration is code size. Plus IMHO HTML/JavaScript/CSS is quite MVC to begin with (HTML/CSS being the View, JavaScript of course is Controller logic, and just don't make the mistake of using the DOM as your data storage and use JavaScript objects for the Model). Maybe it depends on the complexity of the app, and I'd definitely look at agility.js first if I needed something since it's lighter than backbone.js ...
"The variant mentioning off-by-one errors may be pleasant, and useful for beginners, but is hardly a problem."

On the contrary-- I have seen many beginners struggle for a long time to fully grasp counting starting at 0, which leads to many off-by-one errors.
Just subscribed a short time ago and didn't have the same experience. I started following some interesting people, from my point of view, and I immediately got followers.

I suspect that some people follow new subscribers with similar interests so that they follow back expecting the new subscriber to see who they are.

The other thing I did was to tweet a private message to some known person who answered me. So this might have caught some attention too if it was seen by others. Since one has to follow both people involved in a "private" communication to see the exchange, this could motivate people to follow me.
I don't think seven "Become a domain expert" is a good idea and especially not something you should recommend. If yo really find the right thing you'll know, but it is very good to know a lot about everything.
This is Hacker News?

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Yeah, I was going to mention something to the effect of how dumb it is to hide your content behind a crummy text-scrolling interface when your users already have one they probably like pretty OK, but in this case I'm actually not too bent out of shape about it :P
The Acceleration of Addictiveness vs Willpower, Productivity, and Flow
How about following people you actually know, and then using twitter as a communication medium?
Functional programming works just fine.

If you want to take two isolated functions and make them behave in some complicated manner depending on how often one or both are called, simply refactor them into the state monad. I.e., replace f: a -> a with f: a -> State a, and do the same for g.

This is likely to break stuff. In C, good luck figuring out what might be broken as a result. In a pure functional language, you know the damage is limited to the state monad. Anything outside of state is safe.
Is This Really Entrepreneurship?
What dataset isn't relational? Seriously. Even a basic chat software, you think Redis would be great for that. But what about when you want to relate users to messages?

Actually, I've never worked on any project where our data set only needed simple key value mapping and no relationships at all.
Roger McNamee: Why Social Is Over
Physical objects can only be in one place at a time. Data on the other hand can be backed up while it is still being used by the service. And Google collects information about how to do this for their services in one place: the Data Liberation Front http://www.dataliberation.org/
I cannot show/prove anything but my experience for it, but I feel Spain is the same. People I speak to want a (cushy) job at a big or government corp, till 60-65 and that's it. Unemployment in Spain is (among?) the highest in the world, but there is enough work, just no willingness to actually work or be creative; steady gov job, or sit at home.
There are many ways. One example:

On GitHub click on Explore GitHub, Languages, your language, "most forked overall" and choose what interests you.

Or in other words look up popular programs written in the programming language of your choice. Just be sure to not look at code that's too old, as it's more likely that they contain a lot of stuff you wouldn't do anymore. Especially true in the Perl world.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so this is just a naive suggestion but I'd like to hear some informed discussion on the issue:

Couldn't a company like Intellectual Ventures be prosecuted under some form of antitrust law? There seems to be evidence of predatory behavior and the nature of how they do business seems to violate a few main goals of antitrust law, namely to prohibit agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business and to ban abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position.
Twitter isn't about having the maximum number of followers. It's just another way of communicating and get news and updates from people / groups / whatever more instantly.

If you find it painful to not have 180k followoers then you're kind of a looser. Sorry to say it like this. But this kind of attitude lead people to mass-follow anyone to have some follow-back and that's creating spam and it's kind of borring for normal-non-followers-needy twitter users.
I finally managed to get the page to load on my tablet, and yeah "et cetera" sums it up pretty nicely.
Ha! In THAT case, they did a great job!
Report: Amy Winehouse dead at 27
LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman: How to Benefit 100 Million People (Video)
Yes, I am familiar with that, thank you @rick888.
Fred Wilson has the answer to your question. Read it:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/techmeme-vs-hacker-news.html
I don't know if your statement applies to all soldiers universally. Or even to all injuries. I think it depends on the person and what happened to them.
Like all social media, its no fun if you have no friends.
I made a silly Mac vs. PC parody video with South Park characters for a college class final project that went viral and made me a few thousand dollars through various ad deals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_kGL3M5Cg
I'd say it's another instance of being too stupid to pay for it.

The power of monopoly for 15 years? Such a potent legal bludgeon needs to be administered very carefully. Instead of being designed carefully and insightfully, the current patent system is designed to be as bureaucratically obfuscated as possible. It just looks like a bunch of complicated stuff is happening, but what's really happening is that lawyers are being paid tons to shoot meaningless arcane gibberish back and forth.

It would be like licensing canisters of nerve poison, with the licensing process designed by a paranoid schizophrenic.
Thank you so much @smoove, I totally forgot to do this on the server for my own sake! Well the reason is, I am really looking at a long-term solution, not just for this Japan address job.

This desktop app technique I am using now is more geared towards my clients who cannot do that command/code (you are recommending) themselves. I am looking at how to do this kind of migration and synchronization of local and online (MySQL) databases automatically (or at least with a single click by my clients). My clients may not even know how to do FTP; even if I provide them with manuals to the technical steps, they might find it difficult. That’s why I am building these VB.NET migration/synchronization utilities that do flat-file migration and local-to-online (Intranet-to-Internet) table synchronization so that they can accomplish the task on their own.

I can setup MySQL Replication but they will have problem with primary IDs. Aside from that, I don’t know other tools/technique out there that can do these migration and synchronization.
Why would people follow someone that doesn't actually exist? Twitter is for people you already know, people they know, and then people that take your interest along the way. It builds on existing friendships, as opposed to starting with nothing. You might get lucky if you say good things to the right people, but if you have no friends in real life, don't expect to be Mr. Popular on Twitter.
Khan Academy exercise framework
"Buddycloud trademarks shape of circle."
It's one thing to be cynical, it's another thing to reflect that into a normative statement about how a broad group of talented people act. Awfully contentious, that. I suppose Martin Luther King did what he did for the sheer rush of it all, yes?
We're currently in a closed beta for devs. We have to change several things before launch it publicly.

Send an e-mail to jan-at-ducksboard.com asking for access.

Thanks for your interest :)
> Once obtained, they 'look down' on people who have 'less followers'.

It's only really douchebags who do this. The only thing that's good about more followers, is that more people will hear what you have to say. This is a good thing. "Status" in all shapes and forms is a pretty retarded social construct to say the least. I don't care if you have followers, have a nice car, have a cushy job or have an iPhone. I care about what someone does and says.
It's a good essay. The only problem is that it's Peter Thiel behind it.

The problem isn't just that "we got 140 characters." The problem is that Peter Thiel asked for it by investing in and therefore promulgating Mark Zuckerberg's vision of ubiquitous irrelevance. I think he's right that VC is destroying itself by investing in what I have often referred to as trivial nonsense, but he and his firm are part of the problem, not the solution. Just look at the portfolio companies: Winster? Quid? Slide? Path? GoWalla? And of course, Facebook? None of these companies improve my life or the lives of anyone I care about. Founders Fund has 22 consumer internet companies in its portfolio and one or two in the other categories listed on the web site.

Furthermore Thiel has stated that he wouldn't bother doing PayPal again if he knew what he knows about the payments industry today. This is of course the space that I'm working in. Bold words, Peter. If only there were more VCs willing to run and hide.

Frankly I'm sick of venture capital firms writing self-serving slogans, or in this case, entire essays. Actions speak louder than words. I'm doing serious work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years. It's going to take more than a manifesto to convince me that any investor is serious about the future.
Invaluable information!
Lean startups: Facing user reality sucks
Looks cool! Would you mind me picking your brain some time about how you set it up? My email is in my HN profile.
That's not my experience with T-Mobile. It uses the pretty non-standard 1700Mhz. I bought a HTC Wildfire a while ago and only got 2G. AT&T may be a different experience.
This is a matter of expectations. What did you expect?

I opened a twitter account when I noticed some people who had interesting things to say and who did this on twitter. My expectation was a little "news" feed. Then, while I was at it, I tweeted some things of my own, mostly expressions of political opinion and insights. I also retweeted some things I found interesting and worthy of attention. Suddenly, I had 3 followers. I did not expect that, but I thought that it was great that someone was listening to me. That did not change my expectations nor my behaviour.

Follower count? Who cares? I have 12 followers. Among them are a handful of people that I respect very much, and I feel quite honoured that they are willing to listen to what I say. This feels much more important to me than 100000 people following some sort of lolcats.
Reasons of availing the services of a Car Shipping company
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So people still don't understand Twitter after all this time huh?
Handing over the data is certainly not an acceptable response. If it's the sort of organization that makes saying no very hard, and leaving looks impractical, this may be the best option. Sometimes all you can do with a prestigious idiot is work around him.