skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haskell: lazy and essentially pure. In Haskell, an Int is a lazy thunk that returns an Int, so if you write "a = 5 + 6" you're actually creating a thunk that will compute 5 + 6 if needed. For side effects, you use the IO monad and construct an IO Int, a type of a thunk that does I/O (all side effects are treated as IO) and returns an Int. Note that the Int can be evaluated once and its value stored, but the IO Int has to be evaluated again and again (because it may change, and if it's being eval'd multiple times that means we want to enact its side effects multiple times).

Ocaml: strict and impure if needed, but has everything you need to write great functional code (and not much more, which makes Ocaml actually fun to read; I can't say the same of that horror they call C++). I tend to think of it as a functional C. It's a bare-bones, simple language but it's awesome.

Haskell uses type classes for what Ocaml achieves more generally (but also with more work) with functors. Type classes are prettier. Functors handle complex cases (multiple related types) better. Hard call which is "better".

Haskell is more mind-blowing, Ocaml is more practical for most purposes, but probably not as practical as Scala. I like them both (and Scala).

Sadly, I wouldn't bet on either reaching the mainstream. Haskell is lazy, which makes it really hard to reason about memory usage. Ocaml's a great language, but the libraries available are quite poor and the effort to get it ready for multicore is DOA. I wish these languages have more of a future than I think they actually do. Now we're in the "raiding phase" where languages like Scala are borrowing awesomeness from them just like Ruby and Python did to Lisp 15 years ago.

On that, I think Scala's actually a good bet for the next 5 years, and not a bad language at all, although it's hard to learn because most of the online resources are pretty poor. (Odersky's Scala book is great.)
How Hollywood Lost the PR Battle Over SOPA
That are "primarily designed or operated" for pirating, and have "only limited purpose or use other than" pirating? What are some examples of such sites?
We at http://www.osnews.com used it as well (we're back up after 24hrs in UTC time). You can still view our version at http://www.osnews.com/?sopa=1 (for posterity).

Great work by Zachary Johnson.
We look forward to reading about your successful recovery on HN during your next stretch. Good luck!
I've just picked up OpenSourceLegislation.org & .net so this can have an official home.
Jeff Atwood on SOPA and PIPA
Introducing Ginger | Blog | Django Development | Lincoln Loop
Whilst I was an intern at Google I worked with Hilbert Curves. Range queries are something BigTable and Cassandra excel at and are the core database component of any Hilbert Curve based spatial index.

The real issue is building the database queries. Google released Uzaygezen[1], a Java library for multi-dimensional indexing, that handles the majority of this for you.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/uzaygezen/
Thinking back on all the colleagues I've had who seemed to believe that 'debugging' is just another word for 'getting it to compile', that inverse relationship does not surprise me at all.
The barriers for the consumer to pay full price for a music album includes high pricing and an uncertainty of the quality of the entire record, thus many pirate their music for free. This puts the artists at an unfair disadvantage because, despite the reality of the vulnerability of music files to be easily duplicated and shared, and regardless of what their incentives for making music are, they do deserve to be paid for their labor.

No one's going to argue that consumers want to save money. They want quality products, but they don't want to pay too much for it. When did we get into the convention of charging 99 cents per song? That seems to be the standard cost these days from iTunes to Amazon. Why are most albums $14+? To cover the cost of recording, packaging, distribution, and all the bureaucratic middlemen-ing in the music industry? Consumers are de-incentivized to obtain their copy legally when they know that they can just get it for free. So why not meet both parties half-way? In the new era of online music distribution, artists don't need to heavily rely on agents or record companies to push their products. They just need an avid fanbase willing to make their content viral. Success would then be more dependent on quality as well than on connections and affiliation with big names in the industry, which have given us so many abhorrent "stars." Eliminate these expenses, and I believe artists can afford to charge under $5 or even $2 for a full-length album. This makes it much more palatable and economically feasible for fans to make legal purchases to more of their favorite bands. It will alleviate moral guilt by giving them an alternative to high-pricing and pirating. And even if they had downloaded it for free previously (to listen through and make sure they actually like the product), they can still reasonably buy the album again from the artist at a low cost. This is different from the Paypal donation system too as it will allow artists to retain rights to charge what they want for their product.

In a business sense this makes a lot of sense too. As Theodore Levitt has said, "The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. To do that you have to deliver goods and services that people want and value at prices that are attractive."
Quite a lot windows-only software works with Wine, .net stuff runs on Mono and there is still ReactOS -- open source OS written from scratch, binary compatible with Windows.
If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?
It would be part of the upcoming Hardcore mode, in which not only are intellisense and on-the-fly error checking disabled, but if your code fails to compile first time, it deletes the entire source tree.
We need S.O.P.A:

Stop Outrageous Political Assholes.

Did anyone here see the letter from the CEO of the MPAA (who happens to also be a senator) chriss dodd today, which said that this SOPA blackouts are a gimmick and that we are corporate pawns for blacking out in protest?

Is it enraging to anyone else that he is allowed to be the CEO of the MPAA AND a senator at the same time where he can both write and benefit from legislation in his interests?
I'm actually pirating the version of windows i am using to write this. I bought this laptop which came with a super bloated version of windows 7 64 home edition. no media was provided. you can create your own but it includes the bloatware that comes with it originally installed which defeats the puprose. therefore i went to my favorite torrent site and download windows 7 64 bit home edition and installed it.

i know its not exactly microsoft's fault their os gets so much bloat.. but the experience i was getting from new machine was nowhere near the one i am getting after the clean install.
Wonderella posted a news post, along with this comic: http://nonadventures.com/2012/01/18/soon/
Speaking as a journalist, they're never going to take sides, and you're not going to convince them. What you should do is convince them to look into the correlation between cosponsors of SOPA/PIPA and entertainment industry donations in a comprehensive way.

You could also wonder aloud to them how it is that an issue that doesn't even register on voters' radar got on the legeslative fast track, and who caused that to happen.

What meetup is this? Is it in the bay area?
A bit late, but I'm also a huge fan of Taskwarrior- and on a slightly related note, I wrote the oh-my-zsh plugin and was always a bit curious as to whether anyone actually used it. Glad to hear that at least one other person finds it useful.

I do find myself using Taskwarrior's shell mode[1] almost exclusively these days though, as it significantly cuts down on the number of keystrokes necessary to interact with my todo list. If you wrap task shell in rlwrap[2] you can still get autocompletion from within the shell.

[1] `task shell`

[2] I use 'ts' aliased to `rlwrap -i -r -C task task shell` for this
Film studios specifically try to organize things so that the company that creates the content never turns a profit.

Supplying a Wikipedia link today seems silly, but you could Google "Hollywood Accounting".

(oh what the hey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting)
Event driven is very likely more reliable. It's also less intuitive, up to a point. But event driven systems can be very nearly deterministic.

It's nice to see preemptive multitasking given yet another black eye. If you really are interested in determinism and throughput, event driven probably yields the best results. But much of that is design discipline - in my opinion, for high reliability, use cases by message sequence chart is certainly up there as a paradigm. It's much easier to audit for "correctness" ( and so long as you completely enumerate all preconditions, it gets asymptotically close to correct behavior ). One could do worse than a Rhapsody approach to design, even if you don't generate code from it.

This being said, I can see how threading might be a better choice for rich multiprocessor systems, if one can design a cache regime to take advantage of the location of state.
Just a note about copyright law: You can't legally place something in the public domain (even saying you want it public domain is meaningless). The best you can do is license it permissively giving up your five rights to copyright with a clear, perpetual and irrevocable license. The Apache license is a good one to use.

This code as it stands is still fully copyrighted and copying it is technically a felony.
Here's an HTML5 blackout that I found pretty impressive as well: http://acko.net/

Never saw the site before the blackout though, so I'm not sure if it is just a slight modification to their original homepage.
"In a manner that" modifies "offering goods or services". The structure of this is:

The site is illegal if it is primarily designed for use in X

where X is "offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates...".
I think this is why people have such high regard for labels in fashion.

Fashion is also a very visible way to display wealth whilst software is not, "aaah but was your copy of Office 2010 compiled by Steve Ballmer himself".. just doesn't happen.

If we got rid of software copyright what would actually happen would be that all commercial software would be moved into a SaaS model and companies would keep their servers and code under lock and key so that nobody could get physical access to it. This would probably give you less freedom rather than more.

Perhaps some movies would also be screened only at cinemas so that nobody ended up with a DVD that they could copy.
What do you mean by "not particularly limited" in scope? It seems to me the intent of the provision is that more is required to run afoul of the provision, e.g., that a site also be "designed or operated primarily for the purpose" of enabling or facilitating illegal activity.

I give you that the provision is ambiguous. If so, then that is the problem. Say "The provision is ambiguous." Don't say that it clearly allows third parties to shut down sites like Youtube or Khan Academy. Whether it does or not depends on which way you resolve the ambiguity. (I don't think anyone really believes the current ambiguity would be resolved in court as you or Sal Khan say it must be. The problem is that there is a small risk it could be interpreted that way, which is too much risk to take with something so important.)

Also, I assume SOPA-advocates would be willing to make this provision more clear, to remove the ambiguity. What is your response if the SOPA-advocates amend the language to unambiguously limit the language to avoid the criticism that "it allows shutdown of _any_ site that merely enables or facilitates", so it clearly also requires that the site have been designed with the purpose of aiding that illegal activity? What is your criticism then? Is SOPA okay then?
> What other startups are working in novel ways to monetize intellectual property?

Selling DRM-free downloads is working extremely well for many; Bandcamp comes to mind. Plenty of indie content creators do just fine handling piracy by ignoring it.
If it's a really good root kit, how would you know you have been infected?
Really interesting article, and I particularly like the opening paragraph. Impressed how the pirate bay stand out as having such a well reasoned stance with regard to SOPA. Much better than simply attacking the bill.

"Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person
to own the copyright to a motion picture."
The same could be said of Reddit, but it is a symbolic gesture and really encourages you to call up your representative.
Roundup of Thunderbolt Devices
I think the most impressive are the publishers and the webcomic artists. Having actual content creators and distributors opposing the acts gives much more authority to the entire blackout.
Did you learn to draw from Commander Mark? :-)
Letter from Sen Wyden to the Internet
Stealing is taking something unlawfully. Copyright infringement is copying or duplicating something without the owners approval.

The difference is that if I steal your car, you have to pay to replace it. If I duplicate your car unlawfully, you still have a car but now so do I.

I understand why taking a CD from a HMV is stealing, because it deprives the store owner and content owner from making profit from their expense.

I don't understand why people call it stealing when I don't deprive the content owner/publisher from making profit and causing them no expense.
The Tragedy of Political Advocacy
I love that while most people would remark "Oh, that's cool", I (and I imagine a majority of us here...) immediately hit Ctrl+Shift+I and tried to figure out how it was working... Hah. :)
That feed is filtered. Saying "half of them" is not telling the truth.

Here's a saner stream of tweets: https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23wikipediablackout
Really interesting article, and I particularly like the opening paragraph. Impressed how the pirate bay stand out as having such a well reasoned stance with regard to SOPA. Much better than simply attacking the bill in my opinion.

"Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture."
All colors on COLOURLovers converted to black to protest SOPA/PIPA
Which IRC channel would that happen to be? I would love to see the logs of the last few days.
It is. All the elements are the same; they just changed the colors to black.
Funded by isn't the same as created by. Granted, without these companies there to throw massive amounts of money at writers/directors/actors, then we probably wouldn't have much of the content that we do today (at least not how it is). That doesn't mean that culture can't exist without them.

Anyway, these companies (on the music side in particular) love to talk about the "poor starving artists", but fail to change their own habits to give those artists a better deal.

They aren't content creators. They're content funders and distributors, but the content would still be created in some form without them. In this sense, the pirate community does actually perform one of the actions (distribution), and seems to perform it much more efficiently than the big companies. They just haven't got the 'funding' part figured out yet, but when they do, that will truly signal the death of the majors.

(P.S. No, it won't - nothing will truly kill them, but it will at least give them genuine competition)
I get the error message "Please select at least one legislator." Sure thing, but where do I select them from? I don't see any listed anywhere.

Edit: I tried again and it worked. The problem was probably an unanswered JSON request for the legislator list, since the server was bogged down. The no-legislator-selected condition should be updated to ensure that the legislator list has been received prior to assuming it's a user error.
So if someone wants to implement EtherPad or Google Wave, they don't have to write a complex system utilizing Operational Transformation algorithms?

Or... don't have to deal with concurrent editing/locking mechanism? WebSockets do that for us?
Better permalink to Sal Khan's explanation of SOPA

http://khanacademy.org/video?v=tzqMoOk9NWc
I never implied closure behaviour would change, only the variable scoping is inconsistent. I agree it makes sense, but it's still going to cause surprises.
Still encourages in the sense of wanting to obtain all of them, which can be pretty powerful, although I'm sure anyone would just do those for jokes (you could even write a script to win those achievements for you! :).

If I saw achievements in my text editor though, I'd feel it's a bit patronizing personally. What I want in new releases is to help me do my work faster and better, anything else just gets in the way.
I don't really understand how they can have such a radical view... If the pirate bay were to be the only media distribution system left after all of the traditional "Hollywood" corporations went out of business (b/c of the pirate bay), there would be no more movies which the pirate bay could distribute. I don't know about you guys, but I do like my movies. EDIT: Please note this was just I thought an interesting topic to think about - I by no means think this is going to happen. TPB's statement gave me the feeling that they didn't want the traditional Hollywood to exist any longer, which is why I brought this up.

Call it what you want, but what a ton of people are doing in downloading movies off the pirate bay is taking something that they haven't paid for. Maybe one can say that isn't stealing, but I find it hard to call it anything else.

Maybe I'm missing something in their stance?

EDIT: I know we're talking about the middleman and not the producing companies, but the pirate bay is still facilitating the act of taking revenues away from producers, right?
>
Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.

I don't understand -- aren't patents federally enforced?
> When I started making enough money to buy a car I put an end to my car stealing habit for some time.

> See how silly this sounds?

Yes, that completely hyperbolic, not analogous example sure does sound silly!
Man, I wish there were a real Pirate Party, so I could get someone to issue me a Letter of Marque to attack all those stupid Spanish Galleons sailing up and down the coast.
I called Sen. Cornyn's San Antonio office earlier today to voice my support for the Senator's opposition.

I'm the first to admit that he may or may not actually be in opposition, but calling and telling his office that I'm glad he's publicly stated such is still important.

Please, do the same if your senator has made a similar statement.
I'll admit I got a little "misty" reading that - what a roller coaster. I'd love to know a little bit more about the donor (e.g. who they are, how they were found, etc..) Godspeed Amit!
Should I go register 000000lovers.com?
I think the legal system deals with that.
If you believe that you are losing money due to somebody else stealing your intellectual property then you can sue.

I would not equate copying necessarily with stealing but each copy that is made of your software/music whatever will dilute it's value to an extent unless there is some compensation. Commercial software hopes you will compensate by paying money, OSS hopes you will compensate by providing code or some other service.
Just added a first draft of the amendment.
I realize this was probably inevitable, but I'm really disappointed by this move.

I applauded AT&T when they introduced the $15 data plan (for 200mb). The price was low enough that it helped my family go from 1 data plan to 4 data plans (out of 5 total lines).

In fact, that $15 plan has been one of the biggest reasons I've defended AT&T recently. Verizon and Sprint start their data plans at $30 last I checked, which quickly becomes prohibitively expensive for multiple lines on a family plan.

It's especially damning for AT&T because they refuse to allow any smartphones on their network without a data plan (even if you bring your own unsubsidized unlocked smartphone).

I realize $20 instead of $15 isn't a huge difference but it all adds up. Honestly, I was hoping they'd go in the opposite direction with a ~100mb plan for $10. Now that would've been a game changer.
Actually Chris Dodd is a former Senator of Connecticut. His term ended in 2010.
Paula Bean approves of this post.
if you're a consequentialist then you only care about outcomes. Every economic analysis I've seen indicates piracy rate does not affect the returns to creators.
A cold startup weekend in Seattle
These seem to be sending mixed messages. Some of these very much seem to be lampooning certain negative behaviors, some of them seem to be encouraging certain positive behaviors. Overall it seems to be ridiculous and an unhelpful distraction.
United States Senator from Connecticut
In office January 3, 1981 – January 3, 2011

On March 1, 2011, the Motion Picture Association of
America announced that Dodd will head that organization

He's not a senator anymore and was never senator and MPAA Chairman at the same time. I know wikipedia is "down" so it's harder to check facts. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Dodd?banner=false]
If they were the same thing, then that would mean downloading a copy of Star Wars is equivalent to pocketing the Star Wars DVD in your entertainment center.

When does the act of stealing occur? If I download a torrent and then delete it without watching/playing/listening, did I steal it? If so, then does that mean repeatedly copying the file to and from an external hard drive is repeated theft?

Does it become stealing only if I make use of the material? If I buy the movie and show it to ten house guests for free, are they thieves? They didn't pay to watch and the author would have preferred it if they did. If they aren't thieves, why would they become thieves if I uploaded ten copies to each friend instead of showing it to them in my living room? Of course, I would be infringing on the author's legal copyright, but I don't see where any stealing can be definitively identified.
ATS response times within the Azure data center are pretty impressive in my experience.

Your partition keys can be composite, have a look here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/11/...

I agree with your other pain points - in terms of not being able to get counts, secondary indices etc. However, you can easily simulate some of those - maintain your own summary tables, indices and so on. These ought to emerge as platform features pretty soon though. It's not perfect, but its feature set is close to Dynamo.

As for Mongo DB, I guess this service has been built from ground-up to provide the availability guarantees and automatic partition management features. I don't know if Mongo provides those. You could run Mongo yourself on Azure if you wanted to; there's even a supported solution done recently.
See also: http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/

The change wasn't the primary subject of that interview but Seibel is a Lisper so he was clearly interested in hearing about it and asks some interesting questions about it.
Protect IP and SOPA Break the Internet