skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haskell code to do I/O (i.e., Monads) isn't a pretty or elegant as purely functional Haskell code

are you using "do" notation? ITS JUST SUGAR. you can use >>=, >>, return etc directly and voila, Monads are as functional as the rest of haskell
Known Installation Issues With ASP.NET MVC
what can ocaml do that haskell can't? indeed these days its the other way around. the volume of submissions on hackage is far in excess of anything you see in ocaml land. on a language level they are equally capable, on a library level, haskell wins.
I thought Techcrunch made a good point that even though it might only be a small change in what appears as news, it's a huge change fundamentally. I prefer Techmeme to stay fully automated.
Why do you think Clojure wasn't mentioned? Not mature enough?
There are lots of small pharmaceutical companies already; they are a major focus of current VC funding, in fact. The majority of "biotech" firms are actually working on pharmaceuticals, not food crops or spider-goats or biological weapons.
It looks like an employee at their hosting company decided it would be interesting to dump one of their customer's DBs to their personal directory...

Someone's getting fired/sued.
in a world where africans can't have clean water, most american college students gather major debt while going... and colleges are raising tuition 15% a year

- I have a hard time feeling bad for them :?/
(probably a character flaw)
FP is the future of programming, and always will be.

The argument that many-core will lead to FP adoption used to appeal to me, but then I studied Erlang, and saw that its concurrency power was due to shared-nothing pure-message passing, and not due to it being functional. FP is a way to not need to share memory, but Erlang doesn't actually use that for concurrency. The thinking seems to be that inter-core communication should be coarser-grained (e.g. at the module level, not the level of recursion over a list), because it will always be slower than communication within a core.

Also, surprisingly to me, the over-hyped web services, SOA and ESB etc arguably also aim at pure-message passing concurrency.
this is where the men (large scale data analysis) and boys (webmonkeys) will be separated. the webmonkeys will note that processors like the intel i7 coupled with huge outbound connections, ssds, and lots of memory give them permission to be dumber than ever. so go ahead and write your social network in VB, it really doesn't matter at this point. you care about FP if you do real programming on clusters and multicores that is nontrivial. that is where FP will shine and you already see this today...its called mapreduce
A Prolog program is not specified in terms of a "sequence of steps", for example. Of course, the implementation involves a sequence of operations (because it is typically going to be evaluated on a Von Neumann-style machine), but that has nothing to do with the semantics of the program.

OO does not require that your code be executed any more sequentially than does a functional language.

If by "OO", you mean mainstream OO languages like Smalltalk or Java, then they absolutely do have a more operational definition than a pure functional language does. Objects send messages to other objects; as a result of receiving a message, the internal state of an object changes.
Extreme makeover: Computer science edition
Hey FiReaNG3L, I've been scratching my head about this for a while. Over on eScienceNews, some of your news items are full stories. Some are just summaries. When I follow your source links below the full stories I find sites offering summary-only RSS feeds. How are you getting the full versions of those stories? Are you scraping the HTML from the feed item URL?
clojure has a cool syntax but i'm not sure it gets the performance boost on multicore that haskell would. in the end, clojure just makes .class files. its the jvm that must perform on multicore. i'm not sure to what extend multicore support is there.
They say a user of the software can easily plunk an image on almost any planar surface in a video, whether wall, floor or ceiling. And the embedded images don't have to be still photos—you can insert a video inside a video. </quote>

A new way to place ads for video-hosting services. It might be great news for youtube-like sites.
Agreed. Each metric has it flaws. Two differently biased metrics are better than one.
Top NZ Websites make it on Alltop.com
PHP Advent Calendar 2008
Why We Shouldn't Trust Social Media Startups
argh,... this is why VC firms don't agree to confidentiality.

since its a 100m fund, they should give the 75 of us they breached with $25k-$100k as an i'm sorry.
I think it's interesting that Arrington assumes that humans remove objectivity. The BBC for example was always seen as an objective observer of news in the UK. If an editor merely caught "temporal" errors then I don't see a problem.
7 year old Interview of Nassim Taleb (author of Black Swan)
"Also note that as of Python 2.6, the functionality of turtle has been greatly enhanced."
It's actually pretty easy in Java. Create objects that initialize all their internal state in the constructor, and never mutate it in public methods. If a method must mutate state, have it return a new object.

Several well-known Java gurus have advocated this, eg. Joshua Bloch. I worked with Ken Arnold for a bit, and a lot of the code he wrote was in this style.

The problem is that you're usually using Java because you want access to all those Java libraries, and the vast majority of Java libraries do not use this style. So you get state leaking into your program even if your own code doesn't do it.

(This is also why I'm less thrilled by Clojure than many other people are, even though I think it's a very well-designed language. The reason people are into Clojure is because it can use Java libraries and yet provides a mostly-functional language on top. But the problem isn't in Java-the-language, it's in Java libraries themselves. Unless you go rewrite the offending libraries - and this includes most of Swing, JSF, JFreeChart, the JavaBeans spec, and Calendar - you'll still run into problems. The only major libraries I've seen that use a relatively stateless style are Date and Java Collections Frameworks (both done by Josh Bloch, not surprisingly), JavaSpaces (done by Ken), and the basic String and Number classes.
They accidentally the whole applications!
But for most of the previous thousands of years, the rule "larger is better" apparently didn't apply to companies, just armies and the like.

The US didn't experience its dramatic economic growth in the 1800s by assembling a large and disciplined army; instead, it disassembled large and disciplined slave plantations, moving the agricultural center of the country to smaller, more productive farms in the North. (Farm productivity per acre continued to vary inversely with farm size, worldwide, until the 1970s.) I think it was its network of what we would now consider small industrial companies, coupled with its relatively low level of violence (due to geographic isolation), that enabled it to outstrip many of the Great Powers in economic growth.

By contrast, during the Edo period, Japan was an extremely large and disciplined organization --- which produced some remarkable art but also made it militarily and economically weak.

So I think the picture is much more complex than, "The success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations." I suspect Drucker and Coase's insights may help to provide a more nuanced view.
Or, just use the Unix mv, and let Git figure out what you did at the next "git add .".
available according to whois on namecheap:

goodlookingnames com

thenameforme com

namesnomsg com
And just in passing, the Tribune should have contacted me. ;-)
You're right, I left out this:

Step 6: ???

Step 7: Profit! (Again)
> there are two free (oss?) programs I'd recommend: Nessus and Snort

Yeah sure, let me know how that goes for you... Nessus doesn't test websites and isn't open source (it's free for home use), and Snort isn't a vulnerability scanner!

To the OP: If you want to test your website for security flaws, you can do the following (in no particular order):

- Read the OWASP Top 10: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2007

- Request a free scan from Qualys: http://www.qualys.com/forms/trials/qualysguard_trial/?lsid=6...

- Download and run w3af: http://w3af.sourceforge.net/

- Buy Burp v1.2 (when it comes out, soon. it's only about $150) and run Burp Scanner: http://portswigger.net/suite/

- Download Acunetix for a free XSS scanner: http://www.acunetix.com/cross-site-scripting/Copy-scanner.ht...

- Download SQLiX for a free SQL injection scanner: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_SQLiX_Project

- ratproxy is a largely passive web application security audit tool: http://code.google.com/p/ratproxy/ and http://isisblogs.poly.edu/2008/07/05/ratproxy-151-tutorial/

- Test it by hand yourself:

OWASP Testing Guide: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Testing_Projec...

OWASP Guide to Building Secure Web Applications: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Guide_Project

OWASP AppSec FAQ: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_AppSec_FAQ

> Hiring a security expert is generally like most other things you hire an expert for - expensive. There's a lot to making a website "safe" and it involves looking at many different aspects from all sorts of different aspects (time consuming).

Dude, wrong again. The OP probably doesn't have an overly complicated website given that its just him and his buddy coding for a startup. An expert will likely estimate the amount of time it takes to test his website in a matter of [single-digit] hours. Also, webapp testing is the least expensive type of security testing there is.
I think in this case twitter has a lot more leverage here. THey have a lot of traction, great reputation (especially after "fixing" their scalability issues) and no competitors (not talking about friendfeed yet). So they can afford to hold out to sweeten the deal a bit more.
The full versions are press releases we get from universities and the like. The summaries with links to full stories are copyrighted (or not, as some site editors do the same press release cut and paste as our automated service does).
Check out my answer to this guy's question about how to test the security of his website: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385093
Quick question: Is the RSS for PG's essays not working? I never got the update.
Stop the Bully (Monster Cable Products)
There's a famous economics essay about the size of the firm by Ronald Coase (winners of the Nobel prize for economics), in which he discusses why firms (companies, organizations) exist at all (instead of individual contractors), and the factors influencing their size.

summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

actual essay: http://web.cenet.org.cn/upfile/30998.pdf
"Search engines powered by crowdsourcing" :

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/21/powerset-testing-result...
An old story but one of my favorites =)
Strfriend: visualize regular expressions simply
awesome - thanks very much for your help
Is this based on any real information, or is it just a rehash of the WSJ article?

The "money quote" says nothing about 20% time. It says that the company won't instantly allocate 20 engineers to somebody's 20% project. Which is really just sound business sense - what other startup gets 20 engineers to fool around with before they even have a product?

The impression I got when I visited the Google campus two weeks ago was nothing like this article suggests, and the Googlers in the comments seems to indicate it's basically made-up too.
"... In a sign of the economic times, Harvard has sent a letter to its deans saying that the university’s $36.9 billion endowment fund lost 22 percent of its value in the last four months and could decline as much as 30 percent ..."

Porsche hacks the market better than Harvard ~ http://www.stubbornmule.net/2008/11/volkswagen/
Oldie but a goodie. Highly recommend reading this but if you don't want to..

SPOILER - though you should be reading the article first anyway if you care!

An accidental downgrade of Sendmail made Sendmail have a zero second timeout on sending mail that ultimately worked out at 3 milliseconds, just enough to hit servers within a certain radius..

I bet there are several pieces of software that could have a zero timeout triggered in a similar way. The difficulty of figuring it out? About the same as with this guy ;-)
If I can get a clarification, how well does the law of large numbers apply to a non-random sample?

In other words, 10k paying users are self-selected into the service, which would include biases in measurements. Thus, depending on the variation of the user population, it could theretically be possile for small stimuli having large effect to a user base. If the users are similar, but are part of a niche, if that niche gets hit, the business could be wiped out.
From what I've seen of bzr and git, if you're competent with one, learning the other won't change your life the way a switch from cvs to bzr might. The way git figures out what you've done to a directory tree using sha1 hashes is interesting; incidentally it won't automatically add an empty directory. In bzr, you tell the VCS what you're doing so it can track operations better; git generally doesn't care about anything but the contents of the files in your tree. The staging area and in-place branching in git are pretty cool, but not essential, and I suspect they'll be picked up by bzr and hg in due course.

Mark Shuttleworth wrote a series in his blog about what he cares about in version control, and why he picked bzr for Ubuntu and Launchpad, which is an interesting counterpoint to the git lovefest we've been seeing here.
CSS Angles: Just the Edge Your Web Page Needs
Whew, leaving emacs open for three months? That's intense. I've had uptimes of up to a year, but I knew I was totally wrong to do so and it wasn't in a corporate environment as this sounds to be ;-)
In general I can't tell if Google is in trouble or not. One day they are the gatekeepers of the internet and the next day they are trying to make ends meet. They still make billions a year don't they? Yahoo has gone downhill...MS isn't a threat search-wise.
The OpenID Foundation Needs You
Yeah, I'm sure their limited partners would be thrilled with that idea.
Very nice. If any folks interested in Ruby are reading the article and feeling jealous, make sure to check out RubyInline ( http://www.zenspider.com/ZSS/Products/RubyInline/ ) - it's pretty solid.

Might do a direct comparison of the efficiency of the bridging between RubyInline and Cinpy if I get some time. I suspect Python would win just because Ruby's object bridging is quite intense..
my shell doesn't have "units":
http://www.google.com/search?q=.003+lightseconds+in+miles
It doesn't. If your sample is non-random, it's quite possible for you to lose your 17,333 users in short order, if some external force acts upon them all.

That's basically what happened with the subprime crisis - a lot of supposedly "independent" homeowners all defaulted at once, which played havoc on the computer models for valuing CDOs. They all had the unknown common factor that the loans were based on permanent home appreciation, and so couldn't be sustained on income alone. So when house prices started declining, bye-bye subprime loans.

How secure this makes your customers depends on why they're choosing your service. It's very unlikely that 37signals or FogBugz would lose all their customers at once (unless a great new competitor sprung up), because they're all separate, independent businesses with their own reasons for purchasing the product. It's fairly likely that Twitter or FaceBook could lose all their customers, if there was some reason for an exodus to start, because most of their users are only on the service because their friends are.
He says the company is "not going to give" an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. "When the cycle comes back," he says, "we will be able to fund his brilliant vision."

Hardly forward thinking. Previous articles have claimed that some of Google's best developments have come out of that 20% time. By cutting it, they're basically cutting their R&D significantly.

Google's doing what panicked investors are doing.. pulling out resources in a low market, instead of investing while low to reap when the market picks up! I smell an opportunity.. If you're a startup with a year's money in the bank or an independent developer who can work hard for the next year on some exciting new stuff, you could get a real jump on Google in some areas if they keep this up.
Yes. As Adam Smith sort of points out, they also make greater specialization possible. When you get access to a larger market (through dropping trade barriers, improved transportation technology, population growth, or whatever) you can either expand your business or increase its specialization (making it, one hopes, more efficient).

What's interesting is that in the 20th Century the big trend was that people expanded their businesses; now, it seems that people are instead specializing more. Presumably some of the reasons for this are to be found in The Nature of the Firm, but while I don't think Coase has the whole story, I think his viewpoint is helpful here. It's not that people are collaborating in smaller groups than before; we're all still collaborating with everyone else in the economy. It's that the nature of that collaboration is changing from intra-company collaboration to inter-company collaboration. Coase focuses on inter-company collaboration through market mechanisms, but another important kind of collaboration is non-market exchange of information. The vast common body of free software and knowledge that we all share access to is a major reason that we can launch an innovative web site today with one or two people working together for a few months.

If you wanted to launch Reddit (or HN) in 1990, you would have had to write client software, set up a modem bank, and ship starter kits to our clients with a CD-ROM and a modem inside. The fact that you can just buy access to the internet cheaply instead is collaboration through the market. So is being able to buy a multi-gigahertz machine with gigabytes of RAM for US$500.

But in 1990, you would have had to do a lot more. You would have had to drop US$500 on a compiler from Borland or somebody and write your code in C++. (If you preferred Lisp, you could drop US$3000 or so on a MacIvory from Symbolics instead; they weren't dead at the time. Or Lucid Common Lisp on a Sun, maybe; how much did that cost?) Now we can write our software in PLT Scheme or Python instead.

If you wanted to do cool AJAXy effects, even assuming that you could transfer the Web software of 2000 back to 1990, you'd still need to implement all the AJAXy stuff yourself, as I did in 2000, instead of just using Prototype or MochiKit or jQuery. A couple of years earlier, you would have had to use Java.

And today, you can run the whole thing on Linux. In 1990, you would have had to buy SunOS, or HP-UX, or Ultrix, or some other such horrible abortion, and the minimum price for that hardware was around $5000. And you probably would have had to recompile your kernel.

And when you have trouble load-balancing, you can Google to find out how people set up reverse proxies and round-robin DNS and the like, rather than inventing it for the first time and publishing a paper about it.

This growth of the information commons means that you can afford to be much more specialized today. You can focus on the unique aspects of your site, rather than figuring out how to run the first or second global information service.
I don't think these kinds of facilities swap hard drives. If one fails, you have others. By the time a lot of them fail, the whole container is probably obsolete anyway... you swap it out for a new one shipped from wherever they're manufactured.

Why would you get increased failure rate without the roof? Shipping containers are designed to be weatherproof.

One of the the biggest advantages with the containers is that you can manufacture entire containers of servers wherever it's cheapest and ship them anywhere in the world for about $3000. Think how much you save on the labor of racking up servers if you can do it in China. The server never has to see the inside of a cardboard box, either.
No, it did apply to companies too: larger commercial operations tended to be more successful than small ones. It's just that the big ones weren't very big by modern standards. (Neither were armies, though.)

Edo Japan is a pretty unique case. A famous historical curiosity, in fact. And indeed the power latent in Japanese society became visible in its unprecedentedly rapid industrialization in the second half of the 19th century.
Counter-counter-argument: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/09/business/fi-moneyblo...

Google News has had issues, too (see link above in which Google News published a 6-year old story this past September). It's the nature of the beast: machines make mistakes. But people make mistakes, too. Screw ups are unavoidable.
Tips and "10 resources to help you do X" content will be the detritus of the social bookmarking age.

Though just because they're reasonably easy to produce and provide little insight doesn't eliminate their value. Tips and resource posts can act like a "swipe file" of ideas, providing inspiration and provoking different ways of thinking about things.

I might be a complete Photoshop pro, but if I see some tips that do things in a slightly different way, those tips could inspire me to come up with new techniques of my own. That's why all those "design gallery" sites exist.. not so people copy / steal designs, but so creative people can be inspired.

So, sure, real advice requires real insight, but there's still serious value in all the tiny bits and pieces that get our minds thinking.
What's the workflow look like on those releases? Do they e-mail them to you and get "sucked in?" Do they have a special feed? Do they fill in a form?
You have to do some serious reading just to figure out what Waegis is. This is a great example of when a seemingly good service isn't explained concisely.. fix that, and this could be huge(r)!
Good. Let Python take over the dynamic scripting language space completely.

Who says Python programmers are all jerks?

That they're cold, humorless perfectionists who alienate new and prospective users?

That they have inferiority issues because they're not as popular as they are right?

That they occasionally lapse into self-parody?