skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "you can write inefficient functional code that constantly manufactures and throws away closures ... just as easily as you can write inefficient object-oriented code that constantly manufactures and throws away objects."

Very true, except that it doesn't happen in practice.

There's a more elaborate discussion in Joshua Suereth's book "Scala in Depth" on this very topic, because Scala has the exact same problem. A boatload of OO Java guys are now migrating to Scala, bringing their OO with them. Teaching them Scala is trivial, teaching them FP is not.

The example Joshua gives is
"a cat catches a bird and eats it".

How should programmers model that ?

What programmers should do is focus on the verbs. So first define a catch function and an eat function. Then compose them like this: catch(...) andThen eat(...). Define a Cat trait and a Rat trait & you are in business.

What most programmers will do is focus on the nouns. So they will first define a class Cat {} with two methods catch() and eat(), then a class Bird {}, then wonder about whether there must be some class Animal {} which Cat & Bird must inherit from, except that birds aren't really animals, so...finally they'll create a cat object and a bird object and call cat.catch(bird) and then cat.eat(bird). When the program runs, there'll be many cats & many more birds & all these little objects will unnecessarily bring things to a crawl.

This has nothing to do with CoffeeScript the language, which ofcourse supports FP as much as it does OO. Its just that in practice people latch on to the OO aspects of CoffeeScript because that's just how most people process problems.
Your Code Base is Your Book
Further evidence that Apple has its thumb on the scale: special screws that can't be turned by readily-obtainable screwdrivers.
Well, it might. I guess it depends on your profession. If your profession is hardware hacking, IT, or maybe RAM disk upgrading, it seems like that would be included. So I suppose the "Pro" in "Macbook Pro" implicitly excludes those professions.
Apple 1 sold for $374,500 (at auction)
Many of Apple's suppliers are also competitors. Samsung, for example, supplies a lot of iPhone parts while also selling iPhone competitors. I doubt it would be that difficult for others to source an equivalent display, if they're willing to pay an equivalent price,
Cache manifests are not guaranteed to provide much storage space and are not guaranteed to provide even permanent storage. They are not adequate to provide a full-fledged application in the absence of a network connection. Now delete this silly retort.
Traditional Mail is More Efficient Than Online Advertising Methods
"(Interestingly, the subsequent blog post contains a screenshot of a statement by FunnyJunk that, under FunnyJunk’s own logic, would constitute defamation: "[t]he Oatmeal wants to sue funnyjunk andshut it down!" The Oatmeal never threatened to sue FunnyJunk, nor did he ever indicate thathe wanted to shut down FunnyJunk’s website.)"

Damn. You need some ice for that burn?!
Once I had more than about 4-5 years of experience, I never saw the need for working with a recruiter. I tried a few and they always sent me to those kind of shops where you can just smell in the air that everyone hates their jobs and the devs are just code monkeys churning out whatever garbage some product guy pitched. If I want a job at a company, I apply. There's enough demand (and I'm confident enough in my skill set) that I don't see how a recruiter could help me.

Frankly in my mind, if I hear about a company through a recruiter, I figure it must suck to work there, or else they'd be able to find people on their own.
Ruby: Is &! documented anywhere?
A while back, due to a typo, I realized you could use &! in ruby statements:

if this? &! that?

was the same as

if this? && !that?

I've scoured all of the ruby operator docs I can find with no mention of it anywhere.

Interestingly, this works:

if this? & ! that?

but this does not:

if this? & & that?

If I ack the ruby source, I don't see &!, but I do see a ton of &&!

Wat? Now I'm curious. Anyone know the innards of ruby enough to enlighten me?
So much for that whole "you can do anything you set your mind to" bullshit they spout in most public schools (I'm assuming Scotland is the same way as in the US).

Funny how the powerholders are all talk until somebody puts their money where their mouth is (no pun intended). Here's to you, assholes in charge.
"In fact, only the one who is more beginner friendly will survive in the long run"

That makes no sense to me. In any industry with a sizeable number of workers, there is a huge range of tools, from the entry level easy-to-use up to the fantastically intricate and arcane. Tools that are not "beginner friendly" are that way for a reason.

As an example, assembly code is never going away; for the obvious reason that if nobody understands it, nobody can write compilers, and also because there are cases where knowing assembly is useful and helps to make better code, whether it's taking apart the code to really, truly get every last clock-cycle of power out of the thing, or to take apart code in the search for arcane bugs and wonderfully subtle interactions causing unexpected behaviour. Assembly is old, and will never go away, and is (for most meanings of the phrase) not beginner-friendly.

The only advantage to a language being "beginner friendly" is that beginners can learn it fast. What you then get are inexperienced programmers who know just enough to be dangerous (this is not an attack on them; it's the case in any industry with a low barrier to entry, and a stepping stone to being better). One expert, experienced programmer with knowledge of a "beginner unfriendly" language is worth literally dozens of first-day coders wielding their hand-holding, garbage-collecting, counting-begins-at-one modern version of BASIC. That is never going to change, and every first-day coder wants to become that expert.

Even if somehow all the non-"beginner friendly" languages died, the very next day someone who'd been coding in this "beginner friendly" language for a decade would finally get sick of it and start designing a language she can truly express herself in without having all the hand-holding that holds her back.
I found this snippet from 24 May on BusinessWeek:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/greeces-brai...

> By the end of 2011, Yanis Varoufakis was a celebrity. The director of the Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Athens, Varoufakis had been arguing for two years that Greece was insolvent and the country should default while staying in the euro region ... In 2006, Varoufakis gave a talk in Athens predicting a financial crisis that would start in U.S. real estate, move through Wall Street, and on to Greece.
> "But why would they turn the Mac Book pro into a MacBook Air with higher specs?"

They didn't. You can still get an old-style macbook pro with updated internals. They're offering a new option that looks a lot like a MBP-Air. Doing essentially what you seem to suggest: giving people a choice of a new thing and not taking any old things away.

And if/when most pros demonstrate that they don't care about the modicum of hardware-accessibility in the old-style pro design, Apple will simply be dropping the product that its customers do not prefer. As it always does. As it did with the 17" MBP. A beast that increasingly few Apple customers had any interest in.
Yeah, my attitude too.

You know, in "dumb punter" mode, I don't care what the small print says and what the fine arguments are. As a punter, if my machine brakes, I want it replaced or fixed, not a legal mumbo jumbo debate. When I buy a PC, I don't want to need a lawyer with me. Basically, it's too much thinking and grief for something so, so simple. Whatever the savings might be, it's simply not worth it.
That's the point: I don't think he's very aware. I don't think he knew how popular The Oatmeal was. I don't think he knew anything its fans (of which I am not one, incidentally).

I also don't think he fully appreciates the complexity of how the web works. I'm sure through his sex.com case he's pretty familiar with how domain names work and the legal recourse for dealing with those, but he just seems totally out of his depth discussing libel.

As for the "punch it into Google", it's hilariously colloquial at best and ignorant of the way which Google works at worst.
Optimize for Motivation
I've really only seen the 'triple bar' used outside of facebook for meaning 'if and only if' in symbolic logic.
This analysis misses a very important point - Marsha benefits from John lifting the seat since this avoids it getting dirty
(assuming they take turns using the toilet and John is not a very accurate shooter).

Moreover, John is probably going to perform #1 more frequently then #2 - by a factor of 3-4? Thus, we can further stipulate that his default state should be 'seat up' and ask whether Marsha should be made to lift the seat up after she is done.
I never said that. You're providing a false dichotomy. What I want is an open source version of Speak for Yourself and the people who assert patent rights over this sort of software to go fuck themselves. That would be the best thing for kids like Maya.
Pain of family estrangement accentuated by Facebook
I feel like compiling isn't a big problem, because you can always wait a little longer...
A Hard-to-Hack Password Contains Just 4 Words
I understood that the initial criticism was that the phrase 'Punch into Google' was not sufficiently clear or at least was too informal for legal correspondence.

Even if this was restated in formal terms the same deficiency you describe would still be applicable.

If the original criticism was that the phrase did not disclose sufficient information to identify the particular circumstances surrounding the search results, then the reality is that even if this information was supplied, it would not assist.

The appearance of a post in search results is not the actionable matter, but rather the underlying cause of such appearance (for example a defamatory post referring to x, which then appears in search result for x).

Here, the alleged issue was the reference to FJ on The Oatmeal's site which was in fact completely legitimate.

Disclosing the specific circumstances surrounding the search would only have served to dilute the point of the letter, which as has been mentioned was intended more as a shakedown (albeit a completely flawed attempt at a shakedown).
If you don't consider that hard work or decision-making abilities at least factor into the subsequent states of existence in which people find themselves, what good would data points or arguments be?

A single individual's hard work and good decisions don't contribute that much to their individual well-being. Our thriving is largely predicated on millions of people making good decisions and working hard over hundreds of years.
You will find it's not just the why, but also the how. Again, to put it in terms of a racial equivalent to make the point more clear, if I use a racial slur against somebody because they're pissing me off, I'm not insulting them/making fun of them because they are of that race. That does not make it okay, however. Motif isn't the only thing that matters, and that's the point.
Yep, I've been telling this to people for years, and they keep sticking their fingers in their ears because they think they're entitled to magic uptime by amazon.

The key to EBS is frequent S3 snapshots. The reliability issues of EBS only appears to the delta since your last S3 snapshot. Still... people use EBS w/o frequent S3 backups, amazingly.
There is one thing that to me indicates Apple has really thought through the consequences of this new design: The fact that the SSD is socketed and thus user removable. The machine retains that most critical aspect of home or in-store servicability.

Why this is important: the specific failure case where you have a faulty logic board, or any other failure that requires a full machine replacement. You still have the ability to pull out your drive and replace or wipe it before sending the machine back to Apple for either a complete replacement or "depot" repair. (No doubt there will be SSDs available with the new connector soon.)

So sure, we've lost the ability for the most common, fun, and economical upgrades, and that's a let down for those of us who like to tinker. But the construction of the machine still allows you to protect your personal data before sending your machine off to be repaired, and I have to believe that is the most critical issue for power users.
Texas weight loss procedures | Band surgery
Stomach banding surgery can provide a way out for people struggling with severe obesity. The surgery can be an option for severely obese people who have not been able to lose weight through diet and exercise alone.
Having this not directly link to the site & instead having to read this, copy & paste the url into the browser...unacceptable
I think Inception, Memento and The Dark Night show that Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker who is taken seriously.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/awards
Rev. Wayne's Pearly Gates is going to require some serious refactoring if the studio (and director) want to avoid legions of pissed off fundies protesting at local theaters.
"Sounds like the result of some extremely dumb law and management not having the guts to do the right thing and ignore it."

Am I reading this properly or did you suggest that Google should be above the law?
Yes, I'm well aware of the reasons why my computers get faster even at lower clock speeds. I think of the megahertz myth, I picture clock speeds staying the same and getting more done at those clock speeds (e.g., all my computers would forever be pegged at 2 GHz but would continue to get faster). It was only today that I realized that clock speeds (at least in my case) are going down (rather than staying constant) while computation ability and battery life continue to increase.
Odd that they are shutting this down. I thought there would be some value in the users etc?
Why Windows Metro Will Evolve
That machine is 2 pounds heavier, half again as thick, and has a shorter battery life; in other words, it's more like the cheaper model 15" Pro, which is also easily upgradeable, and also an inch thick and lighter at 5.5 lb.
Show HN: epistly, hand written notes for busy people
6ren: Perhaps the reason that discoveries don't seem to become exponentially rarer is that, in an infinite universe all possible probabilistic outcomes must occur. Thus, if there is a non-zero, finite chance of something being discovered it will and can be discovered in an infinite universe.

Each new discovery in such a universe will produce non-zero speculative probabilities of something new to discover -- resulting in an infinite stream of problems and solutions that present new problems.

It doesn't matter if the probabilities are speculative or eventually discovered to be real: when speculations are "proven" false, the proof of falsehood is itself a new discovery that also provokes further speculation.

I guess this would mean that technological progress is inevitable given an infinite universe where some technological progress has already occurred and where speculation or "imagination" or unguided thought exist.
This is a site my good friend and I just built, because we thought it might be a cool idea. Any feedback you could give us would be very helpful - thanks!

If you press ctrl+c on the payment page and enter coupon code "HACKERNEWS" we'll give you $10 off your order.
It was very sad when I realized Gibson's great line "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." had been completely lost on me because I assumed he meant bright blue instead of gray.
This is probably some of the best advertising Venkat can do for himself.
yukup.com - Aggregation of common thread-based sources (HN, reddit, google groups/mailing lists, etc) and have nice live updates in-browser w/ unread message support

umwut.com - A new kind of commenting site (not just link sharing) where rooms can be created. The great thing was the live system that was very intuitive to jump around many new comments in many threads very easily.

forsook.org (and forsook-lang.org/com) - A language/parser framework that transpiles to Java. The key is that you can easily add pieces basically allowing you to create your own language by checking checkboxes (still in the works).

sqlchop.com - Basically a free version of transaction-log-based CDC because I got tired of paying Attunity.

yocalist.com - A HTML5/Canvas based karaoke system that anyone can easily use and allows you to overlay your own lyrics onto embedded videos from other sites (e.g. youtube)
Vizio reboots the PC: a quiet American success story takes on sleeping giants
Dear Apple, please drop NDA for Web Technologies
YA ESTÁ DISPONIBLE EL JAILBREAK PARA IOS 6 BETA
Ya está disponible el Jailbreak para iOS6 de parte de los del iPhone-Dev, la versión lanzada ha sido redsn0w 0.9.13dev1, es decir una versión para el recién lanzado sistema operativo iOS 6 beta, el cual solo está disponible para desarrolladores (aunque algunos usuarios han instalado iOS 6 usando algún truco, pues estos también pueden probar el Jailbreak).
Yeah, they'll DDOS his site for, like, a whole week or so.

shrug
No. The problem with ES4 was that JavaScript is at heart not a traditional procedural OOP language. It's a functional language, and ES4 was trying to change that, a huge step in the wrong direction. They wanted more Java and less Script, but thankfully ES5 has gone the other direction, and given use more Script and less Java.
Download Site Founder Receives 4.5 Year Jail Sentence, Forfeits $4.7m
The upgrade-ability aspect is not what gets me, it's the service-ability. Screens crack, Ram chips and SSDs fail. Under warranty, fine... but a LOT of these machines are going to see use well beyond warranty as Macs hold a resale value.

I would really think twice about buying a non-warrantied notebook (or new if I planned to keep it for years) where a back-light fail or crack means a whole new lid, and a bad RAM chip means a whole new logic board (and I'm sure not for the cost of the bad RAM chip). Do I want to potentially be without my notebook for days because its battery reached its known cycle limit?
The Streisand Effect: When censorship backfires
As with most things a 'living wage' is context dependent and changes as society changes their ideas of what people need to 'live'.
Why would they want to avoid legions of pissed off fundies protesting? You couldn't buy advertising that good for any amount of money.
It might make it easier to prove there is malicious intent. If I'm in a completely separate business and I make a remark about your business practices, one can see it as an outsider making a (negative) observation if the language is only mildly disparaging. If I'm in the same business as you, it might come off as more of an attempt at me undermining you or trying to gain some benefit.

Ultimately it probably doesn't make much difference, in that defamation is usually difficult to prove anyway, but the context could sway things a bit.
The upgraded configuration has a faster core i7 processor and 512GB SSD, but still 8GB RAM. Bumping RAM to 16GB is another $200.
Snow Crash was originally intended to be a graphic novel (see Stephenson's afterword). If that material still exists, it could work.
It's like copyright infringement against billionaire corporations in The West ...
> The economics of replacing an entire device are finally starting to make sense

How do they come off as sustainable and cool when their are responsible for all this trash production?
Car Cling 
We offer car cling and car window clings printing services.sireprinting.com offer window clings for cars at cheap price with free shipping.
> And Dropbox doesn't support restoration for folders

That's news to me. And to Dropbox: http://cl.ly/3y0r47461p443f3j300u
Oatmeal shouldnt have said they mirrored his site.
Show HN: WebGL + backbone + socket.io + last.fm = SolariBoard
"Doc, it really hurts me when I hit my hand with this hammer. What should I do?"

"Stop hitting yourself with a hammer."
Researchers break record, keep quantum computing qubit alive for 3 minutes
This may sound pedantic, but I wish that these type of technical screeds were created with the flexibility/power of online publishing in mind.

There needs to be more thought given to the use of non-prose in communicating these things. More tables, a la Ed Tufte's principle of direct comparison and small multiples, is a huge help. At the very least, it helps break up dense text and forces the author to be more aware of how to best not bury important statements and assertions.

But if you aren't going to go all-in and use tables/graphics because it's a bit of work...then at least use headings, bulleted lists, formatted-text...this is the web, after all.

Or, if you don't even want to do that, at least use line breaks like everyone learns about.

And if you plan on including code, please use a wide enough format (and of course, syntax highlighting, though that is additional overhead).

I don't mean to belittle this author's point on the basis of visual cues alone. It's just that I see a lot of great essays that could be so much more influential and effective with just some additional effort put into presentation.
Show HN: Metro inspired website
Thanks for the information - I will have a good read this evening :)
The original laptop in question was a Thinkpad. Thinkpads have restore disks. I always install my own OS and then use the restore disks to restore the system to its original purchased condition by using the restore disks.
I think most brands work this way.

With my Mac Air I have a Bootcamp dual boot with both OSX and Windows 7. One can restore Macs also to their original software installed status.