skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The title of this article, for example. The idea of this article is that functional programming is hard, because it forces you to think in a new way. But here, calling functional programming hard is just used to pat oneself on the back. Great, this article says you can map a function over a collection and then sum it. You don't need to think of yourself as some elite programmer that casts a shadow over procedural programmers. It's not true.

Functional programming is just the general notion of using more functions, and less computer-architectury things, to express your ideas. It's not necessarily about map/reduce, monads, or whatever. Encode your ideas mostly as functions where possible. That's it.

It's bad to say that functional programming is hard on purpose, or that it makes you a part of some elite cadre. Functional programming should be, and usually is, no harder than any other way to explicitly write down your ideas. The whole point is to make it more simple to express your ideas in a way that can be evaluated by a computer. Functional programming isn't hard. Programming is hard.
Someone needs to turn on caching.

In the meantime I'll share a doesn't-own-a-tablet-but-has-a-work-iPad guy's quest to get a $99 TouchPad on Friday night. I arrived home from work and saw the firesale news on the twitternetz. I immediately left my house and walked to the local Futureshop, not really expecting there to be any. They were out and directed me to Staples, who was also out. Meanwhile my friend was driving to the Futureshop and Costco just outside town. FS was out and Costco had 5 of them, stil priced at $500, but employees had taken them off the shelf since they were dropping the price the following day and they wanted to claim them.

I then checked The Source before giving up. London Drugs was surely out by that time, around 8:30 pm, and that was my last bet. One of the guys at The Source was willing to sell me his used 16 gb TouchPad for $200.

So I just came home, gave up, and am now lamenting all the TouchPads on eBay and Craigslist. I was apparently one of the few who actually wanted one. Hopefully nobody buys them and the price drops back down now that these people will be stuck with TouchPads they didn't actually want. I shouldn't complain too loudly though because my plan was to buy a 32 GB and 2x 16 GBs, then sell the 16 GBs at a profit to pay for my 32 GB.

(If you're curious, I'm furnishing a new place so I don't have a lot of disposable cash otherwise I would have just a bought a TouchPad at full price.)
Ha! That's nothing. One time I got 12 yatzees in a row. One day I was playing Yatzee and got 2 in a row. That was exciting but I was impatient so I wrote a program to play for me. Eventually my program made 7 in a row but that was still taking too long. I calculated how long it would take to have a greater than 99% chance of getting twelve in a row and decided I needed to get a life more than I needed to keep the program running. Then I figured as long as it was really the computer doing it and not me it wasn't too much to imagine a Platonic universe where my program already had been run an infinitely long guaranteeing that I got 12 in a row. I don't have a video of it though so kudos to SingingBanana.
No that's not what I'm talking about. The last thing you should do is reinvent the OS. Simply, make web apps run like and behave like native OS apps instead of like web sites.
"Will MDA lead to the obsolescence of programmers?"

20 years later, I'm still waiting for an "MDA analyst" to put me out of a job.
Talk about fragmentation.

No, what I want is one service, one login that works across all my devices where all I do is login and I'm set. No extra set up. No plethora of services to rely on.

I would love to see iCloud become this. If so, it has a chance at being a killer service.
Zynga Sued Over 'Prize Redemption' Patents
I always thought the dollar sign originated as a variable marker because it was used in BASIC to mark a string. Is there an earlier origin?
so, the price is back to $499? :)
http://i.imgur.com/SnLjT.png
I agree with the professor's sentiment. Technology is and will continue to change education. Non-research professors will decline in demand.

But he sites a common misinterpretation of Moore's Law as his evidence. Moore's Law doesn't say computing power (or speed) will double every 1 1/2 years, but the number transistors in microprocessors will double. But because of heat concerns we've had to move to multi-core processors, and the speed has hit a plateau. People might think "I've got two cores, so I'm twice as fast", which is completely incorrect.

Computing power is increasing, but there is no evidence that in 20 years it will increase 2^20.

edit: actually, he's wrong on the 2^20 too. It's every 1 1/2 years, so it's more like 2^13= 8192 (let's say 10,000) times faster.
> After a few such generations, we will be left with a much smaller population with many fewer women but nearly all of whom WANT to have children. Then the population will start growing again.

This is a fascinating and well-thought-out analysis, but it seems to make two potentially-dangerous assumptions:

1) It assumes that those women who really WANT to have children, have this desire mainly because of their genetic heritage.

Unfortunately, we don't know enough about human motivation to be able to say this with any confidence.

Even if the vast majority of a generation of women really wanted to have children, I don't know how we could confidently predict that their daughters would feel the same way.

2) The analysis assumes that such a genetic trait is inherited maternally. If instead the trait comes from a mix of the mother's and father's genes, or even from the father alone (let alone a combination of genetics and environment), we probably won't know how to predict what will happen N generations on.
I try to learn online but I find it really hard. It is very distracting. I find a real person teaching me to be much more effective.
He seems to be using vim emulation on Eclipse, no?
I like to think my HN comments are more likely to be believed by others and useful to them because of my cogent observations or clear writing style, than because of my name which is probably not known to most people, or my degrees which are not relevant to most topics.
I watch people use software all day long, and this comes up all the time. 90% sounds about right.
If you stopped using the Internet for a month, who would miss you?
FoldIt (http://fold.it/portal/) is similar. Humans tend to find a better starting structure while computers are better at refining that structure.
"...one day your washing machine, stove, or even car infotainment system will run on webOS"[1]

If this is truly the direction they're heading then webOS is dead to me anyhow. Any further courting of developers is just salt in the wound.

edit: Don't get me wrong, I'm all for open sourcing Enyo and webOS, I just get the complete opposite vibe from HP's actions this week. They've basically said "screw you" both to die hard consumers and developers of the webOS platform.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/16/hp-looking-to-appliances-au...
Unlimited is more like $15 - $20 / phone.

My parents, on Verizon, have a family plan. Due to business partners who insist on texting all the time, they have unlimited texting added to the account. $30/month, across two phones.

AT&T, as has been reported ad infinitum, is eliminating their $10 per 1000 texts per month plan. Unlimited texts, now your only option, is $20/month (I have no clue about their family plans).

Given that the FCC, FTC, and whoever spend zero time looking into this, I'd say the consumer is simply and increasingly screwed.

As I understand it, text messages started as a side effect. Someone noticed that there was spare room in the status messages flying between towers and phones, and thought, hmm, what can we do with that? (Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I recall it.)
Getting a job as a mid-level manager in government service is very difficult without a degree, unless you are old enough to grandfather in when things were different. And even if you do get a job, there will be a noticeable level of weirdness around you because you didn't finish college.

Note that you don't have to go to a particularly good school -- it is government service, after all.

I think a similar thing is true -- I would be interested in knowing how many people at supervisor or above at, say, Netflix (or an oil company) don't have a degree? I don't know... hopefully other people can share anecdotal evidence ;)
Is that optimal when feedback is more IMp like early stage startup?
Scoble got his facts wrong, and wrote a followup: https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/birhHh9j...
I don't see why you need to wait, though. The time it takes to set everything up is O(number of devices * number of services), both of which are pretty small, and the benefits you get are O(time you use the device), which is pretty large.

iCloud will never become killer as long as it's locked to one vendor's platforms. The reason why Firefox Sync, Dropbox and IMAP all work is that they're all available across a large number of platforms.
But you very likely will if your rewards for playing chess are only based on the results of your next ten moves.

That's one of the key issues here: almost everyone optimizes for the short term win, because that's how they maximize their compensation. By the time the long-term consequences of their decisions are known they've moved onwards and upwards.
I disagree with his argument. While it is certainly quite possible that there will be a collapse in education for the liberal arts, the field of engineering will need higher education for a long time to come. Of course, many classes may be taken online, which lessens the necessity. However, I have yet to see an online lab course. Equipment is expensive, and proper training is important. I can't imagine that many people would hire an engineer who had no experience outside of online classes, regardless of whether or not they obtained a degree.

Beyond the basics of education, graduate studies are something you can't just "do online" (yet). You may need a lab, need a professor to work with, and you certainly need funding for whatever you are researching. While education as we know it is bound to change, I think that the technical side of most universities is in no immediate danger.
According to Robert Wright in his book Non-Zero, future generations of both the conquering bordering tribe and the conquered old civilization (at least, those who survive) will derive benefits from the resulting cross-fertilization of cultures. That, he says, drives the combined civilization further up evolution's escalator. An example that comes to mind is England after the Norman Conquest.
Or just install Cygwin or Copssh and do `ssh -D 8080 user@remote`. Better yet, ditch Windows
Out of interest, what was the theoretical gain of the optimized panel vs. the flat ones?
One tricky thing about this is that demographically, most people that end up in "white collar" jobs do get degrees. But I think that's post-hoc evidence for the implied requirement of a degree. Those same people might have done just as well (or even better, considering the 4 years opportunity cost of a degree) without college.
Milling Machine Made Entirely From Lego
There might be verbiage like "B.A. or equivalent experience" on the description, but if it is a managerial position I think 90% is B.A, 10% is equivalent experience. So, there may be no literal requirement, but there is still a de facto requirement.

Sales may be an exception here -- though I would hazard a guess that to sell software for IBM to governments and businesses, my above comment would apply. To sell real estate, though, nobody really cares (same for cars, etc).
Why Apple will buy Twitter
Robert Scoble - Apology to Twitter. Chris Sacca, investor in Twitter, has…
That is the craziest awesome thing i've seen while watching. It never occurred to me, but its so simply brilliant!
China has long culture of believing in studying hard and becoming part of the system as the route to success. (The imperial exam system.) Although it no longer formerly exists, there are analogues and the influence is still there. It is ingrained from birth that you study hard, get into the right university then reap the rewards. Beijing locals I talked to were puzzled by the idea that government workers in the west could get in trouble by accepting gifts and favours. In China, that's the main reason you would follow that career path.

This doesn't lead to a very entrepreneurial culture, although there are many who will still try to start their own business. Then you start to hit the barriers discussed in the article. Another barrier you can hit is that if you start to become successful, the government will appoint a party member to your management. Further, if you are in certain fields, the government erects tax and regulatory obstacles that will create an advantage for state-owned enterprises.

It's unfortunate... there are enough in the under-35 age group, who might actually break out of the old culture and innovate. They face a lot of obstacles and that will be bad for China's long-term outlook.
http://www.alexmuir.com/2011/08/why-apple-will-buy-twitter/
Bumper.cc: Opensource, self hosted, bare bones followup.cc for privacy fanatics
Well, they have now created a potentially viable user base by putting hundreds of thousands of webOS devices in people's hands, who would have otherwise ignored platform. My feeling on this is that their gamble might lead to something interesting happening, worth keeping an eye on.
Yes, I'm quite sure that is the actual meaning. Back in the day there was 'ereg' as well, but that has been deprecated for a long time I think. IIRC, in 1998-1999 it was a commonly asked question when to use preg_ or ereg_ functions.

But I guess the php docs themselves have caused people to think that the p stands for 'perform' - from the php docs 'preg_match - Perform a regular expression match.'. So yeah.
I'm not expert enough to call you out on this, but isn't "function", the way it's used in "functional programming", working from a different and more strict definition of the word "function" that (say) a C programmer is used to? I don't know that you're wrong about this summary of FP, but it doesn't smell right to me.
yep, public companies have report cards every three months and need to show "progress".
In case people were wondering what Enyo is, it's HP/Palm's Framework for building WebOS apps (or generally mobile apps using HTML).
This morning in the US, there were people lining up outside of retailers before they opened. It was a mini-Black Friday.

AFAIK, the price drop happened for Canada on the 19th and in the US on the 20th. Some retailers are accepting the price drop and some are just shipping the units back to HP. Unknown when/if it'll happen in other countries.
a.) If adding leafs is has net gains, the tree will do this even if it's not the most efficient way (where say it could only have 50% of the leafs).
b.) A tree is fighting with it's environment for light and space, a linear setup of leaves might not be the best position to fight other plants for light.
c.) A tree needs to support all leafs with water, nutrients etc. A tree layout might be more efficient
No one's mentioned. Keys also serve as a shock absorber. I speculate that years of tapping/rapping/pounding on a glass or hard plastic surface might produce significant joint problems.

P.S. I'm referring not just, or primarily, to the force applied, but the the suddenness of the transition to full pressure (cushioned only by one's soft tissue).
I have a friend at a Fortune 500 where I used to work who started working as an administrative assistant (secretary) and now 4 years later is a project manager and is making more than I did as a fresh out of college as a junior dev. She only has a high school diploma. I can think of at least three other similar examples at the same financial institution.

There are lots of ways into "real" jobs without a degree if you're smart and you find the right path into the career you want (obviously this does not work for professions with licensing bodies).
WYSE PocketCloud RDP/VNC - Android application to access your computer remotely 
Has it ever happened with you that you are in middle of your presentation and you realize that you forgot some files on your Desktop? All your senior officials are there in the meeting and you are in an embarrassing situation. What will you do? Would you tell them that you were so careless that you couldn't even copy the files necessary for presentation? Let's think about one more scenario. You are traveling and suddenly get a call from your client that he needs some urgent documents and updates. What will you do? We all know what could be the result of saying "NO" to client or giving them excuses.
I don't think you have any real evidence for whether the association of white-collar job and degree is post-hoc or not? Do you? Without evidence, it's kind of a cheap shot.
I don't want to have to deal with pseudonyms to talk to people I know in real life just because I'm using a computer.

Facebook understood this, and Google does too.

Pseudoynm communities can still be awesome for situations where you want your persona to stay within the internet. I love HN, and I wouldn't want to use my real name here. Same with most forums. But pseudonyms have no place in social networking. As Zuckerburg figured out from watching MySpace unfold, having Internet-only "friends" is sketchy, unfulfilling, and kind of dangerous; the mainstream wants to use the internet to connect to their real-life friends. That was the principle behind Facebook, and that's what Google+ is trying for.

There is still a segment of people that likes talking to anonymous strangers. Usually it's about some topic, but some people still have MySpace "friends." There is certainly a market there, but it's not for everyone. Google tends to build products for the widest possible audience, and I don't see why Google+ would be any different.
My favorite related demonstration is to do a "tournament" where you start with 64 people and eliminate the 1/2 who don't flip heads each round. Some "amazing" flipper will get through 5 to 7 rounds and win. Something to think about when you see a mutual fund manager who beats the market 7+ years in a row.
According to information given to people on deal sites that asked Amazon associates, Amazon will not be doing the price drop - they're returning all stock to HP.
Getting hired externally into a management role probably does require a degree, but many of these positions are filled internally, and if you are (e.g.) a star sales account manager or responsible for the company's most successful marketing program, the degree is probably a non-issue when you bid for the promotion.
Cornell students write algorithm to beat fake reviews
Renovation Paris
It depends on whether the amount of work available is constrained by the demand for goods or by the supply of raw materials. In the past, we've answered automation by increasing the rate at which we produce goods and, hence, consume raw materials. Just because we've always been able to do that doesn't mean we should assume we always will.
Count me in the boat that says thinking about this now is too little, too late. Will automation lead to economic collapse? What do you think led to the present economic collapse? The economy as a whole has bounced back, like it does. Why can't the people who were laid off find jobs?

You hear a lot of talk about welfare "paying people not to work"— I think that neglects the fact that, in the United States, jobs are welfare. The farmer who "grows" your corn gets paid to sit in an automated combine all day doing nothing. The factory worker gets paid to watch the robots all day to make sure they're doing it right, and most of the time, they are. Even the computerized desk jobs which are supposed to be the manual labor of our era: how many times have you worked with someone whose job was to sit there all day copying rows from one Excel sheet into another? How many times have you, as a programmer, written a ten-line perl script which makes an entire division obsolete, and watched as that division is tasked with the new job of running the perl script?

There isn't going to be another revolution; we're only incremental steps away from these people having literally nothing to do. The farmer isn't going to get a job designing combines. The factory worker isn't going to get a job designing robots. The old lady in the office is never going to learn Perl, and no one is going to get a job flipping burgers or washing dishes or stocking shelves.

They're going to go on welfare, or, if we haven't got our heads out of our asses by then, they are going to starve to death.
I think you're misunderstanding the aim of my essay. It's not to say that FP is uniformly superior to OOP. It's that there is value (and difficulty) in learning the functional abstractions. The same is true of most programming paradigms, but we live in a world where FP is one of the less understood and increasingly relevant tools.

Do you really think this is so controversial?
Agreed. The risk for innovating is too high. When there are ideas up for grabs in the US, why not just take it and localize it. This is simply a rational decision.
I don't think we need to cite sources to suggest that white collar jobs tend to be filled by people above the socioeconomic median, or the fact that the same demographic cohort overwhelmingly tends to go to college. The middle class goes to university (a) because it's a default, (b) because it's part of the middle class lifestyle, and (c) because it's perceived as necessary for a career. Only 1/3rd of those reasons are about credentials.†

Stipulating the fact that jobs are just statistically going to be filled by people who automatically got degrees, I don't think it's a stretch (or a cheap shot) to suggest that the relationship between jobs and school is tenuous.

Moreover, given the fact that white collar jobs in large companies tend to be managed conservatively, and the fact that people without degrees are outliers (because almost every applicant for any job went to college by default), some of the "credentialing effect" of a degree is actually just an observational bias.

† Note also the preponderance of college attendees who attain degrees that are almost objectively without credentialing merit, such as the liberal arts.††

†† "Without credentialing merit" being intended as an objective statement and not as an argument that people shouldn't get liberal arts degrees; I think most degrees are without credentialing merit.
Please, please do this HP. WebOS is really impressive in terms of technologies in my opinion. You can build entire Enyo apps in your browser, add a few hooks for WebOS services, and you're done. It's crazy easy, and Enyo makes it equally easy to have one app that works well on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. It's a shame to see HP pull the rug out from under it, but I'm really hoping they open source Enyo or better webOS.
The Dell anecdote at the beginning was particularly surprising. Hindsight is always clearer, and the author is intentionally summarizing to strengthen a point, but I was blown away at how calculating ASUS's actions were. The whole time I read that section I was thinking to myself, "Wow, so this is how empires fall: one ill-formed relationship at a time."