skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A nice analogy, but I would argue that as monads are at a higher level of abstraction than nullables it's more akin to "but what is this if stuff?" It is the f(v) if v else None which is analogous to GOTO, not the simpler and more direct v >>= f.
So, what’s it with all the bacon love? I don’t get it. I love grilled chicken breast and beef tenderloin, the only thing bacon has going for it is that it‘s cheap, fast and easy to make.
M-Pulse #7: Mobile voice w Kenn Harper of Nuance + Androids growth + no more ads
Same can be said about AT&T, Verizon, O2, DTAG/T-Mobile, Rogers, etc. There's no universally good telecom, and someone is always going to be complaining about them.
Building Boot2Gecko on your own computer
Install pear on mac osx lion
Thank you! I've been looking for a condensed yet thorough overview of bash for quite some time. I use bash only sporadically and I am never successful when googling easy things like how to test for equality of numbers.
> I'd imagine the dynamic range sucks though if each pixel is so small that it saturates quickly.

Well, if you replace a single sensor with four sensors that saturate more easily, observe that the chance that all four sensors saturate may be less than the chance that the original, larger sensor saturates. Answering the question, "how much light actually fell on these four sensors" becomes a more difficult problem and may yield greater error but is still tractable.

For you with a math background:

Let X_i be the amount of light that actually falls on sensor i, for i=1..4, and let e_i be the amount of uncorrelated noise. The sensor readouts are Y_i, where Y_i = min(X_i + e_i, sat) and sat is the saturation. Let X=sum(X_i). We know that X and each X_i follow approximately a Poisson distribution and we wish to know the parameter of the distribution for X.

Obviously, if Y_i = sat for all i then we are SOL. However, if not, then we can always use some kind of reasonable estimator for the desired parameter.
Hi! I played this game on my iPod touch when it first launched. I got my WP7 last month and I search for good games to try out very frequently. And I've never come across this game while casually browsing the marketplace. Maybe this is a problem of discoverablity?

Is it possible for you to allocate time to market it better? Sad to see a well made game getting lost in the marketplace.
It Pandamonium on #pinterest
The reason I employ "emotional rhetoric" is because most people here have employed unemotional or "rational" rhetoric. This isn't statistics. This isn't an optimization problem. What I'm trying to do is to show that when you deal with actual people, people who have so far gotten the short end of the stick at everything, people with desires, people capable of feeling pain - you must at least consider an "emotional" approach.

And I don't need to win an argument here - I've already won. The simple fact is that people earning below average (or, rather, below median) in America are worse off than almost anywhere else in the western world. And that's the majority of the population. I was simply expressing my amazement that a certain world outlook - which I'm not even trying to argue 'cause this is not the place - that has traditionally been common among certain American social groups, has taken hold of SV entrepreneurs. I find this surprising because Northern California has had, for a long time, much sympathy for the counter-culture movement and to ideas of social justice. I also find it interesting that it seems like this approach is expressed here not because of some deeply held beliefs, some ideological values, but simply because of a technical, mathematical way of looking at the world. I was amazed and saddened at the dehumanization expressed here.

Now, I wasn't trying to change anyone's mind on politics, but just in case someone was expressing his views simply because he's grown accustomed to looking at the world through equations and algorithms, I was hoping maybe my words could jar him out of his technical sleep. Saying "Hey here's a way some people can make some money, maybe some will find it acceptable" without considering whether or not the idea is ethical, whether or not it is humane, seems so... callous. Of course someone will find it acceptable - like I said someplace else, someone will find it acceptable to sell his own organs for money; someone will agree to go into slavery so that he'll have something to eat - but that doesn't
make it right. And I'm not even saying you should take my definitions for right and wrong. Use your own. But the first question you should ask yourself is "is this right?" and not, "will this work?"

(All of this is not to say that I cede the "rational" argument, or agree that unregulated free-market capitalism has actual economic merit - I don't. It's just more important for me to address the lack of ethical thinking, or the precedence of economic thinking to it rather than argue economics)
Yep, you can build the code on your own computer right now: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Hacking

Of course the bigger question is how soon some actual hardware will ship.
I use Rescue Time, and I've seen some benefit. Specifically, I closed my Facebook & LiveJournal accounts after I saw how much time I was spending on them. But you don't need RescueTime to figure that out ;)

Vitamin-R for Mac ( http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/ ) has tools for tracking concentration levels throughout the day/week. Currently it's showing that my concentration is worst on days when I exercise. That was a surprise.

Tracking data is interesting, but it's easy to spend too much time looking at the data instead of deriving value from it.
Arduino RFID shield | Open Electronics
Great demos. I didn't know Chrome had landed webcam support. What a great way to start the morning
So what part you don't agree with? As I said, "They never touted .NET as a replacement for C++ for actual Windows apps" -- actual as in "not corporate".

So, we're in agreement here.

They did told them to replace old MFC with .NET, but only for corporate desktop applications, not actual shrink-wrapped desktop apps.
At the risk of sounding like a whinging old man, but do we really need 1Gbit to the home at the moment?

If you take the UK as an example, a lot of the country (outside major cities and metropolitan areas) is still stuck on 512kbit. The same is true worldwide with even parts of SA on dialup. Shouldn't we be concentrating on throwing more resources into getting these connections usable rather than feeding crazy large bandwidth to the rich?

As the broadband speeds are controlled pretty much by consumer demand, isn't it better to have more people than an elite few?

On the same subject, I'm sitting here on approximately 12Mbits and I genuinely have no problems with it streaming HD iPlayer and with three computers on it. I don't need any faster and it costs a whopping $20 a month equiv (unmetered consumption).

Also, if you consider the cost of bandwidth and caps thrown on people in Europe, a gig connection would suck up your entire allocation in about 48 seconds...
As a singaporean parent, i find it appalling that the world puts our maths textbook on the pedestal. The current textbooks are nothing like what I used as a child, and the techniques used to solve problems, extremely contrived. I see it exactly as products of M.Eds, who at best has experience teaching maths ONLY to gifted kids.
#WikiLeaks publishes millions of Hacked Stratfor E-mails #gifiles
It does come with an overhead for a beginner, to be sure. But because it is a consistent abstraction we can build idioms on top of the concept of a monad, and in doing so it actually becomes easier to reason about. The best things in life have a learning curve.

Edit: Wow, I was downvoted for this?
The collaborative mind
Ask HN: A good charity to contribute to?
I have a good friend who is a software engineer and is very dedicated to the open source movement. Is there a good charity to contribute to in honor of his birthday?
This Week in Location Based Marketing - #66: Google Latitude, RAV4 + banjo
Sorry for not being clear. That's just the (abbreviated) type signature of >>=, which is formally written as

(>>=) :: Monad m => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b

It's not the definition of >>=, though. The definition is left up to the specific Monad instance that's defining it (which is basically the larger point that I was trying to make).

In English, that type signature basically says that >>= is a function which takes a monad and a function that operates on the monad's "contents" as its arguments, and returns the result of applying the function to the monad's contents. Any data type for which that abstract structure makes sense (and that also complies with the basic "monad laws") can be made an instance of Monad and provide its own definition for how >>= operates. That definition can be wildly different for different data types; the specific definition that the article focuses on is the one for the Maybe type.
I congratulate them on acheiving your goal of writing an app in such a short time, but I whole-heartedly condemn this app's principle idea. Far from being a force for good it feeds into the incredible paranoia that seems to be prevail in the United States, that everyone is out to get them, and that there are such things as "good areas" and "bad areas".

The problem is that, besides the paranoia, the problem is TRUE in many parts of the United States.

Most Europeans wouldn't understand the extent of that --well, some would, like British or French, which have similar "dangerous" areas.
Killing Your Startup By Listening to Customers
Ah, the perils of "having to" listen to the feedback!

There is absolutely nothing irresponsible about your idea. You are not the one terming something good and bad. If the data says so, if people say so, if the reports and incidents so, then it is just right that somebody let that be known, so that stakeholders can make an informed decision.

A local is usually going to know what are the spots to avoid at what time of the day, it is the outsider who does not. All you are doing is giving that same information to the outsider that the local has, and I think that is completely fair. If in the process, a particular neighbourhood or area shows up as unsafe, then that is nothing but the hard truth becoming known. Hard, but the truth. People need to learn to live with it.
My god I remember that guy from the late 90's. There was an Internet fad around then.

Now I feel old.
Don't tell me you too bought into the "cows pollute" BS? That's how farting is called now?
And android needs some blame for not allowing their users to opt out of granting that permission

I also wonder why this is not possible. The user should be the one to have the final say on the permissions an application gets, not the application.
Everything in life is 50/50, either it happens or it doesn't. The statistics industry is just trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE.
m a: means a type which take a parameter (another type).

For example,

data Maybe a = Nothing | Just a

- The m is for "Maybe"
- The a is for "a"

For example:

(>>=) (Just 3) (\ x -> Just (show x))

should returns: Just "3".

(>>=) Nothing (\x -> Just (show x))

better written

Nothing >>= (\x -> Just (show x))

should returns: Nothing
I think that his point was that you wouldn't walk around the office pointing at everyone with a cup of coffee and saying "that crosses the line".

In reply to your original comment - for work you don't care about, I'd agree with you, but plenty of people who do stuff like this, particularly I assume when it comes to HN readers, really do care about their work. For example there's plenty of times I'll work more hours than I technically have to because I want to, and so if I were to take drugs to help that, it wouldn't neccesarily be a case of "get a new job". Incidentally I do smoke, because I enjoy it more than I care about the health risks right now.
Someone brought this up last time we talked about this on HN so I thought I would mention it here. Modafinil is technically a _stimulant_, not a cognitive enhancer (like piracetam).
I'm just getting it now. Google for something called Typeclassopedia and read about Functors, and then Applicative functors. Those are much easier to understand right away, and they set the stage for monads. Applicative functors relate to functors in an obvious way (you could probably implement one in terms of the other). Monads relate to applicative functors in a less obvious way, to me anyway, but at least it's analogous enough that it helped a whole lot (particularly that return and pure were the same thing)

I read about the first two on the typeclassopedia page, and was somewhat unsatisfied with its explanation of monads. I then went to Learn You a Haskell's page on all three of these and skipped to monads, and I was happy with it. I bet you could just read about all three on the Learn You page, the guy does a great job.
Small nitpick:

for file in .java; do javac $file; done

This will break if the filename contains funky characters like newline or whitespaces. You should prefer using find instead:

find . -name '.java' -exec javac {} \+

Also, I would suggest adding a pragaraph about proper quoting, I usually find it to be an issue beginners struggle with the most.
If "I've never heard a good argument", "a completely academic waste of time" and "why should anyone non-academic building actual systems care what it means" aren't implications that your experience is valid and others' experiences aren't, then I concede and am happy to admit that you have totally Won The Argument if it makes you feel better

In either case, I'm done here.
Really though I think for large clients is that it is the right way to go. For small clients, typically you have a pretty good idea of what they need. For large clients it can prevent swamp projects.

Really for the big customers, the key to doing a project evaluation is to deliver independent value in the evaluation. The evaluation may come in handy even if they do not choose to close. So here you are bringing people in, you are finding out exactly what the problems are and why, and giving the customers tools to think about those problems. Who knows, the evaluation might even cause them to rethink the project direction entirely?

One key advantage to doing project evaluations and charging for them is that you are suddenly a lot more free to tell the customer "We are happy to do this for you, but in our estimate, you don't need a fancy new CMS system at this point. The first thing you need to do is get some more editors and work on your editorial processes. Once those are under control, we can talk about a CMS."
Hunting Zombie Memory Leaks in Firefox
The lens is actually relatively bright, f/2.8. And based on the samples, it's sharp enough even wide open.

> So, if you're shopping for a camera, what determines how your photos come out in anything but the brightest sunlight is actually the lens.

Actually I think that sensor is especially important in low light situations, because you need high sensitivity and low noise. So imho when the lens is good enough then what determines how your photos come out in anything but the brightest sunlight is actually the *sensor.
Exercise in the morning, or at least before noon, for 30 minutes or more, and eat a decent meal just after. You'll find that'll give you energy throughout the day, including after a long day at work. Then, pick one thing, focus on it, and achieve clear goals. Refer to what the original article terms success spirals.

[1] How Exercise Fuels the Brain http://goo.gl/RjGe0
[2] Exercise reduces stress http://goo.gl/C6ztV
[3] Exercise improves brain function in young people http://goo.gl/NeN0M
Nokia Releases A 41 MP Camera Phone – Nokia 808 PureView
RIAA (sort of) responds to SOPA critics, says copyright "offers little...
Well, that's the idea of monads -- you can see them everywhere because their original purpose is to express imperative programming mathematically. It's like thinking that all numbers can be represented with digits; of course -- digits were invented to represent all numbers.

But the thing that makes Haskell unique is not that you have explicit monads. It's that you can (1) use monads other than the IO monad (like Maybe, [], STM, ST), and (2) that you can choose to use no monads at all in a given function.

To put it another way, Haskell is unique because it allows you write functions without using monads, but in other languages you can't turn them off. Like nullable types, which can't be turned off in Java (ever debug NullPointerExceptions?) or Python, but which have to be enabled on a case-by-case basis in Haskell.
> Scientific software sucks. It's stuck 20 years ago. Usually a pain in the ass. Barely works. Crashes. Proprietary. Hacked together. And worst of all - ridiculously expensive.

All excellent reasons to move to open source!
The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg
Resolving power. Take a photo of test pattern, and measure how many lines/mm you can see.
Is There Ever A Justification For Responsive Text?
Why I'm not an open source person any more
Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason most people have trouble understanding monads in Haskell is because they haven't learned what typeclasses are yet. Once you know what a typeclass is, the rest is pretty straightforward.

I tried to explain it here ( http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/erzh1/monads_ar... ) a while ago, which might be helpful for some people. Although, the version of List's >>= function is much easier to understand here ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Advanced_monads#The_Lis... ) than the one I pulled out of GHC's library code.
Is simplicity a USP in a SaaS business?
Why pull a quote out of context to nitpick it? The article goes on to explain how common it is to check if an object is None and act differently, which is what gives us the same monadic structure as the Maybe monad in Haskell.
It's actually more insightful to see the full type signature:

(>>=) :: Monad m => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b

So, >>= is a function that takes:

- A value a in a monadic type m

- A function (a -> m b): a function that takes a value a and returns a value b wrapped in the monadic type m.

And it returns:

- A value b wrapped in the monadic type m.

It helps to look at the definition of (>>=) for a particular monad. The article mostly discusses computations that can fail (None vs an object in Python). The corresponding Haskell monads are Maybe and Either. The signature for (>>=) in the Maybe monad is:

(>>=) :: Maybe a -> (a -> Maybe b) -> Maybe b

What the grandparent points out is that a monad defines a structure (how to combine expressions that result in wrapped values), but not semantics. The semantics are defined in the definition of a particular monad. E.g. the Maybe monad models failure in computation, while a monad such as MonadRandom does something different altogether (providing random numbers, while threading the state of the random number generator).
This is precisely what is wrong with the Paywall -- people in the Uni don't know it is there.

Donald Knuth embarassed himself a few years ago when he told people that the library at the Uni was worthless because he can just sit as his computer and view all the literature for free.

Academics generally don't realize that the library at their Uni cuts a million dollar check to Elsevier every year, in addition to a number of other publishers. As a result, they don't see that there is any problem.
EFF for sure.
What tools do you use for this kind of deciphering?, pencil and paper, some kind of mode for vim ( or any other editor), or special software?
You announced this project months ago and it is still "coming soon"...
Thanks for the heads up. Both of the clients I mentioned needed to support IE8, and I couldn't find any reliable info on AJAX support of PUT and DELETE. This seemed like the most reliable way to get it done. I'll do a follow-up post on testing the major browsers for PUT and DELETE.
The lesson to take from the Fountainhead is to stop looking to other people for validation for your choices. Make the decision for yourself instead of simply doing hat others expect of you.

Peter(to Howard Roark): How do you you always decide?
Howard Roark: How do you always let others decide for you?
I wrote a small program in Perl to do it. All I needed was the number frequencies and some way of doing substitutions.

When I did the New Scientist code breaking competition I just used an EMACS buffer and did M-% substitutions. http://blog.jgc.org/2011/06/how-to-break-new-scientist-ciphe... When I worked on the 'Reddit code' I think I just used EMACS again: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/12/breaking-reddit-code.html When I worked on how the Zodiac Killer enciphered the 408 message I started out by hand and then wrote a small program: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/06/how-zodiac-enciphered-zodiac-408...

For the hidden part of the GCHQ challenge that I discovered and reversed the key for I think I wrote some code in C: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/12/down-gchq-rabbit-hole-or-i-think...

In general, I like to stare at things, work by hand and write code to automate.
An Outsider Calls for a Teaching Revolution
Is this available on the App Store yet? Or is there an estimated date?
On Ruby you can use the Decimal class, although it's really slow
Modafinil is also compared to amphetamines (which are
often used either for recreation or to treat ADHD), since
its effect is somewhat similar. Generally, the comparison
states that amphetamines are bad for you and that
Modafinil is not as bad because it "works differently",
but there is probably more overlap than the proponents of
Modafinil would like you to think.

There is one massively huge difference between amphetamines and Modafinil.

Modafinil is not addictive.

I have a prescription for Modafinil (required in the US) and have been taking it for over 5 years. Getting the prescription was fairly simple and required going to a sleep doctor and getting a "sleep study".

I would never have thought of myself as narcoleptic, although I remember frequently being unable to stay awake in high school math class. I think some would characterize me as "a sleepy guy" and I do have to be careful while driving late at night.

I don't take it on weekends, or vacations. Even for up to 3 weeks or a month, I'll go without Modafinil.

Taking Modafinil keeps me alert and excited about my code and my business.

Not taking Modafinil helps me relax and not think about the stress of running a business. I enjoy things like TV and Movies a whole lot more. Playing with my kids is also more fun when not on Modafinil.

But when I need to get back to work, within an hour of taking Modafinil, I am excited about the code in front of me and can work productively for 12 or more hours per day. When evening comes and you know you need rest, there is no temptation to take more Modafinil and work through the night - although that would be possible.

On more than one occasion, I have forgotten to take Modafinil before work in the morning. These days were much less productive, filled with self-promoted distractions and much less excitement about my work. But more importantly, there is no urge or need to take Modafinil; so much so, that I am able to forget about it completely.

These non-addictive characteristics are completely unlike amphetamines (which I have also unfortunately tried in my more distant history).

Addiction is not something that is just in the mind. Everybody who takes amphetamines or smokes cigarettes on a daily basis, will eventually become addicted. Some are able to overcome that addiction, others are not, but the physical addiction is a certainty.

No one who takes amphetamines on a daily basis will ever forget not to take them, nor will they enjoy a 2 week vacation without them. Same goes for the smoker without cigarettes.

Modifinil is quite easily forgotten for long periods of time. I think it is important to note this difference.