skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.”

Yeah, lack of infrastructure. In my opinion that's true of every facet of the worthwhile goals of our national (U.S.) life, from good healthcare to cutting edge science to excellence in education.

Somewhere along the way that same short-sightedness the author discusses of mis-emphasizing short-term profit (e.g. "tax cuts") started bankrupting our future. Now we're reaping what we sowed. Practically every revolutionary advantage we gained over the last century at least (e.g., public health initiatives and sanitation, public education in the early 20th century; establishment of publicly funded research; the space program, the internet) were all collectively funded programs by government - by us - the collective will of a people not held hostage by short-sighted "anti-government" rhetoric.
Idea Cellular Web Portal Hacked, Customers Info may be exposed
If you use the Facebook app and enable contact syncing, it prompts:

"If you enable this feature, all contacts from your device (name, email address, phone number) will be sent to Facebook and be subject to Facebook's Privacy Policy, and your friends' profile photos and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone address book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information."

I work at Facebook, but I am not involved in that team and from my perspective it looks like an honest attempt is being made to help people understand what is going to happen, and I don't see any "getting away with it without getting caught" going on.

I'm totally with you on how much of a problem this could be when someone is actually attempting to be malicious. I think Apple should probably protect the contact database in a similar way to how it protects your location from applications. It doesn't prevent an app that ostensibly is using your contacts for some good purpose (and getting your permission) from using it for bad ones, but it does reduce the likely distribution/success of the application.

The increasing prevalence of warnings and confirmations when signing up for a site, when downloading/connecting applications, or when enabling features has encouraged people to skim these attempts to educate them about what it going to happen without reading them. Trying to effectively communicate and emphasize the importance of the information contained in warnings and confirmations is a growing problem that I don't think anyone has cracked just yet, but I know people are concerned about it and working on it.
Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries’s Special Wedding Day
Kris and Kim’s wedding photos in a high security against the $ 1 million to be done today and will be published by the magazine. October 9 to 10, and on television to show all the wedding ceremony. They want their wedding special, but now I get the new media as fast as the human mind. Here are some important things about the bride and groom.
Would you (should he) ever commit to a VCS working at this speed?
"Functional programming is just the general notion of using more functions, and less computer-architectury things, to express your ideas."

Umm, no, that is not what functional programming is. Functional programming is, basically, programming without side-effects. A purely functional language will have variables that are completely immutable. This is a bit of a shift away from the way things are done in C or C++.

Speaking just for myself, I started into the programming world with Java (not counting QBasic), and I am finding it incredibly hard to wrap my brain around the idea of functional programming.

My understanding is that most programmers that have a background primarily working with non-functional languages have a challenging time initially grasping the concepts of functional programming. However, I would guess that a programmer that learns a functional programming style early on would probably have very little difficulty understanding non-functional constructs.

For more information, I would like to point you towards some easy reading:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_effect_(computer_science)

* http://learnyouahaskell.com/introduction#so-whats-haskell

Edit: To whoever down-voted me, I would appreciate some explanation of your views. The fact is that functional programming is not just using functions. The article plainly refers to functional programming languages and not simply using functions. There is a difference.
The Sports Industry's Obsession with Meaningless Metrics
I hate this "America is losing greatness from losing manufacturing" argument. Our citizens don't want to work in manufacturing, and the Chinese (and other foreign citizens) are willing to do it for less. Sure, why not, they deserve it!

The world would improve if we stopped thinking in a "us-vs-them" nationalist way. Think in a global way!:

* We're helping Chinese farmers get out of abject poverty into a slightly better situation.

* We're improving their economy

* We're making cheaper goods for Americans & other developed countries, which means that it will be accessible to poorer people (which is a good thing!)

* The company will gain more profit and be able to make more innovative toys for us!

If we want to go down the nationalist root, then why don't we just outlaw imports all together? Or at least pass some protectionist tariffs?

If we did that, with the foolish misconception that it would help our economy, we would goad other countries into passing tariffs, and the whole world economy would hurt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff provoked that kind of response and was a key factor in creating the Great Depression.
Notch now broadcasting Ludum 21 on justin.tv
All depends on how you measure progress. If someone starts asking "what's the next-gen product" at board meetings you may see some real progress.
Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for High-concurrency Servers)
Thanks! Just what I searched for!
But the analogy to chess is another sign of short-term thinking. There is no end of the game if the company is to survive.

Company execs are optimizing for their own good. They won't be around forever, so they need an exit strategy (end game) that works out for them. If it takes the company down, well so be it. Was it a good idea for Groupon investors to take a bunch of money out of the pool in the last round of financing? You can bet they see an end to the game.
But, then, why would they need you? All you end up with are companies that can't make stuff competing against companies that can.
it's worth noticing that ASUS didn't have to be scheming for the end result for that to happen - each stage involved them acquiring a bit more business, and making a bit more money. Their actions needn't have been the result of long-term thinking.
... and it is just JS/HTML/CSS so it will run on any webkit browser and you can use it to write nice-looking mobile apps for iPhone, Android, etc...
That's him. I'm not him.

I've got dozens of ideas that I've never had time to work on, because of long work hours and taking care of kids. I could work on those for years, easily. Some of them might become "work", if they caught on, but for the most part I'd be satisfying my curiosity and want to learn new things.
神仙道
In case anyone wants to get fulcrum up and running under ruby 1.9 I've patched a couple issues in my pending pull request: https://github.com/malclocke/fulcrum/pull/5
People have car batteries. Just make sure they have a way to hook up to them.

In the "first" and "second" world, they are in their cars. In the "third" world, they are charged somewhere and transported to the home (unless they are wealthy enough to have a generator).

I'm in the U.S., and with this year's crazy weather, I've observed more and more people who have "thrown their hands up" and purchased a small, gasoline powered Honda or similar generator. When the power goes out, the neighborhood starts humming with the sound of generators.

(I hear it somewhat in despair; it makes me worry we are truly heading in the "everybody for themselves" direction, as opposed to actually maintaining our infrastructure. Similar to how people describe the SUV trend in terms of "a way to deal with all the potholes and the streets that don't get plowed after snowstorms, anymore".)
Pivotal Tracker embodies a philosophy of sorts. It's surprisingly useful if you totally ignore that philosophy, but it's much better if you embrace it. Their help page https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help is a somewhat revealing, as they include FAQs that provide insight into the philosophy.

Maybe someone else has a better link to an overview or some kind of "ah-ha moment" story.
It depends. A C function is actually a procedure: a list of statements that have some effect on the computer, and then (maybe) shove some return value through the stack at the end. A function in languages like Clean or Haskell or Clojure or Agda or Coq can only return values, and have no effect on the machine (like mutating memory). Of course, this construct is used only as a way to express ideas. The notion of a function that has no other effect on the machine is actually a lie. The time it takes to evaluate the function is a real effect. So is the memory it uses. It's not a perfect abstraction (none are) but for many types of problems, pure functions can work as a tool to help a programmer.

Sorry, typed this on a phone, hard to edit.
I got a 32GB one (and a ream of paper) for $133 last night. I'm pretty much going to be using it as an instapaper client, so it will be great. :)
Okay. Let's take Andie. Google+ doesn't want to be your PR tool. It's not for pushing a message. It's for talking to the friends and family and coworkers who you trust with your real name.

Gwyneth. Google+ is not deviantart or IRC. You are absolutely entitled to a second life (inside and outside of
Second Life) but that's not what Google is trying to enable.

Talel. Google+ is only interested in Talel. The person with Talel's ideas doesn't have coworkers or friends; Talel does. That person belongs on Blogger or Wordpress.

Jin Shei. Facebook and Google+ are for your friends, family, and coworkers. Blogger and Wordpress are for the web at large. I would share your outrage if if you needed to use your real name to blog, but that's not what's happening here. You're only being forced to use your real name to share vacation photos with your parents.

Fyodor. Absolutely! Everyone deserves privacy. Google+ is for your friends, family, and coworkers. You don't have to make your real name public to get a Linode and slap Apache and Wordpress on it.

I believe most of this outrage comes from people misunderstanding what Google+ is and isn't.
China is making 'stuff' but they're not developing ideas or creating the software. Our strength is in management, finance, design and software development. I don't think we should shed any tears for a lost manufacturing industry-- hopefully it'll encourage more people to pursue these more intellectual careers.
Guys... The idiot who killed WebOS came from SAP. If you think Microsoft is evil, they are 10 times worse.

> Release Enyo under a liberal open source license (Apache, MIT, etc)

Why not GPL? That would ensure no competing platform could grab it and run.
That's because arrays do get more complicated than flat lists like the example I gave above. You can actually have multiple organized data points in each position of the array as well, making arrays function more as a 2D relational database than as a flat list of data.

For example, I could make an address book array with multiple data points as such:

var addressbook = [{"firstname": "John", "lastname": "Doe", "phone": "555-555-5555", "email": "johndoe@host.com"}, {"firstname": "Jane", "lastname": "Smith", "phone": "666-666-6666", "email": "janesmith@host.com"}]

Then, I can retrieve a piece of information like Jane's phone number like this:

var janesnumber = addressbook[1].phone

Arrays are very powerful tools, especially once you start referencing other arrays in them, as it allows complex organization of data without always needing to resort to a database solution, with a whole new language to learn.
For contemporary economists (e.g. Adam Smith), transportation horses were capital, not labor.
"it was designed to make the uber-geeks of this world, those people that you walk around the block just to avoid saying hello to because you know they are deeply and profoundly anti-social, feel good about themselves, to feel special, as though they have the "upper hand" that other normal people who deliberately choose other languages over purely functional ones."

What is the point of this vitriol? Makes you seem fairly anti-social yourself.
This is a kewl. Instead of using cron why not use a task queue like beanstalk for the recurring tasks etc?
Anyone live-blogging this?
AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL
AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL , AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL , AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL ,
AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL , AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL ,
AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL , http://www.psdmate.com/2011/08/20/americas-next-top-model/
Naturally, thanks to the nature of dynamic programming, it won't find gems like:

$a = 'awesome';
$func = $a . 'Func';
$func();

so if you're using this on a project that was written by someone else, then don't just blindly delete everything. But this should be expected.
They're in business, too. I've too often seen where management pursues some meaningless metric with no understanding of how that number is arrived at.

Sometimes, I think that the ability to make fancy yet meaningless spreadsheets is, at least as far as management is concerned, my most valuable technical skill. And that depresses me.
Two things: this is one of the trolliest posts I have seen on HN on a while, save for my own (now deleted) counter-troll. The fact that it keeps getting upvoted is astounding. Seriously, associating a certain technique with uber geeks/neckbeards/nerds is actually a valid argument for discounting it?

It's true that FP is presented too often as a remedy for the common ailment of programming of not producing software that you can understand quickly enough. Also known as 'productivity'. But just because it's over-enthusiastically promoted it doesn't mean there's no truth to the claims. It's mostly that

a. you can compose your software nicely from parameterizable operations over common structures (map, reduce, filter, take, etc.)

b. mutable state can make programs messy so you should avoid it

But of course you don't care. At all. After all, if you did, you wouldn't be quickly hand waiving the whole issue with a fleeting reference to 'recursion', as if it was the dominant instrument in functional programming. You learn _very_ early that writing recursive functions is just more work than throwing together a bunch of functions over a sequence or some such if needed.
> Our strength is in management, finance, design and software development.

Why do you think it would be hard for them to develop those strengths? What if those strengths derive from having a strong manufacturing base?

As their own consumption rises, local companies have a much better chance to design products tailored to the needs of their own expanding markets, effectively expanding them further.

And, as for software development, you'd be surprised by how much is developed outside the US.
I don't ninja downvote, but if I had to guess I'd say it's because if you're finding functional programming incredibly difficult, you maybe shouldn't be lecturing on what it is.

As my cousin points out, it's true that it's easy to think of functions as just being macros in a language like C. If you call a function which doesn't have a return value, and which modifies some global state, that's not a "real" function, just a stored procedure.

However, if you write a C function which doesn't modify global state, but simply takes an input and returns an output, as even novice programmers do all the time, hey presto— that's the functional paradigm! There's nothing mystical about it, and what the GP is saying is that telling people who have done this that functional programming is something different is fundamentally confusing.
That's about right. A "function" in functional programming is supposed to be just like the functions you remember from grade-school algebra class, e.g.,

f(x) = 2x + 5

If you look at that function, you'll notice that for any given value of 'x', the function always produces the same output value. For example, no matter how many times you try it, plugging in 3 for 'x' always returns 11. This means that f(x) is a "pure" function.

The only difference between the trivial example with f(x) above, and say, Haskell, is that the functions you're working with in Haskell are much more complicated. Boil it down though, and they're still pure, mathematical functions nonetheless.

Now, you can (should?) write purely functional programs in C if you follow the same principals. The main difference is that C doesn't force you do write your code this way, and since writing purely functional code can be a bit tedious, most people don't.

This leads to impure functions in your code, like when you read a file from disk -- if the file is there, the function does one thing; if not, it may do something else (like crash). Since the output of an impure function can vary depending on when/where/why/how it's executed, it can be much harder to find bugs in it, since the code may compile and run just fine until the moment it doesn't.

Anyway, that's the basic rundown on FP. I'm not an FP expert, so if I've missed anything, someone please correct me.
Are you kidding?

The proposal isn't to force you to learn two names for every person, one for "real life" and one for when you're using a computer. That's a straw man.

Facebook began as a network for Harvard students, then island networks for other universities, and so on, and it only got merged into one monster network later on. Because of that history, it tends to be a social network for people to connect to school friends, family, work colleagues, etc. (i.e. people you've met in real life).

Google+ has much different beginnings.

Twitter seems to be doing quite well allowing pseudonyms. Same with Hacker News. You wrote "pseudonyms have no place in social networking" but what is Hacker News if not (in part) a social network?

An anonymous comment isn't the same thing as a comment under a pseudonym. People tend to use the same pseudonym (or set of pseudonyms) everywhere they go: people can get a sense of who they are, what they believe. They can even use that pseudonym when not online (e.g. Mark Twain never had Internet access).

"Real names" and pseudonyms are just handles. They're like variable names when programming. The computer doesn't care what you call the variables. Why should you care whether someone goes by the name their parents gave them or something else? Shouldn't that be their choice?
YACPB - Yet Another Copy-n-Paste Book.. ^_^
This looks awesome. As somebody who has considered getting into iOS programming, but hasn't taken the dive yet (more focused on ruby based websites / mobile websites right now), thanks for making it open source.
1) Find a resource of necessity to the human condition.
2) Make it abundant through technological innovation.
3) Repeat.
It's understandable that businesses are seeking metrics to measure the effectiveness of their initiatives, but problematic when they give credence to completely useless numbers solely because they haven't yet identified effective metrics.
Why and how it is better than YUI? Because it is from Twitter? ^_^
SEEKING WORK (Bay Area California)
Former Apple web engineer looking for freelance work.
sills include:php, javascript, postgresSql, MySql....
Resume: http://hire.amesgames.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/NicholasStockResume.pdf
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasstock
Interesting.. just when I was about to pick up on Node.js too.
This is not true for gaming streams, and hasn't been for some time.
> Somewhere along the way that same short-sightedness the author discusses of mis-emphasizing short-term profit (e.g. "tax cuts") started bankrupting our future. Now we're reaping what we sowed. Practically every revolutionary advantage we gained over the last century at least (e.g., public health initiatives and sanitation, public education in the early 20th century; establishment of publicly funded research; the space program, the internet) were all collectively funded programs by government - by us - the collective will of a people not held hostage by short-sighted "anti-government" rhetoric.

The existence of good govt spending does not imply that govt spending is good.

Right now, the potential good spending is being crowded out by a lot of dumb spending. (That's nothing new - we blew hundreds of billions on Carter's synfuels project.)

That's why public employee pension reform in San Francisco is being driven by folks who like govt. They realize that you can't do good govt spending when 20% of your budget goes to pensions.

The same is true of SS (which is bigger) and ordinary healthcare.
You know, I've learned something today!

When some people talk about functional programming, they talk about monads and iterating with recursion and lambda calculus.

Other people talking about functional programming mean using data-oriented abstractions, where functions operate on data in well-defined ways, to avoid state and interlocked dependencies[3]. I've been calling the latter a "functional style", but clearly there is ambiguity and people get turned off and say things like "we're using an OO language why would i want FP"

in Avdi Grimm's talk "Confident Code"[2] he calls this style "narrative structure", compared to "haphazard structure"[4]. I like that; "functional" envokes all sorts of emotion about being hard to understand and unnecessary. "Narrative" or "confident" or "data-oriented" are more articulate, and don't evoke flame wars.

Avdi's example (code screenshot) is the most articulate example of this I've yet seen.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Cs-muD17ato/Tk6b1Rb9MwI/A...

And it's in ruby. Nothing hard here, but it meets a functional style per John D Cook's definition[1]: "OO makes code understandable by encapsulating moving parts. FP makes code understandable by minimizing moving parts." "functional in the small and OO in the large" seems a good path. The Scala community seems to get this, and seems to me Scala is mainstreaming much quicker than any of the pure functional languages.

[1] http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/03/object-oriented-vs-...
[2] http://avdi.org/talks/confident-code-2010-01-12/confident-co...
[3] http://www.dustingetz.com/how-to-become-an-expert-swegr
[4] http://www.dustingetz.com/confident-code-vs-timid-code
Just face the reality - comparing to Android, let alone iOS that thing does not exist. That is why HP dumped it. Even money cannot make it fly. ^_^
I thought most of webOS was built on somewhat high-level web technologies like node.js? Why would they use something like that in embedded systems?
Looked briefly at Snap, but without something like HAML (http://haml-lang.com/) and SASS (http://sass-lang.com/) it's not something I will use. Not going back to the stone age of writing XML-with-expansions templates ever again.
I agree. Minimizing state and side effects are at least as core to functional programming as "you should use lots of functions."
Just watch on twitch where there are no limits.
I have always liked to think of an international Rock-Paper-Scissors competition where everyone in the world participated.

One person in the world would win all of their matches in a row.