skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The idea behind a monad is to factor out the plumbing code so that its complexity is hidden, leaving only the composition of the functions visible.

cue light bulb coming on

Thanks so much for this article; I've been trying to understand monads forever now. The closest I got was the "burrito" analogy, but I always wanted a more mathematically sound intuition.

For helpful reference, here's a collection of monad tutorials and related pedagogy:

- Monads are burritos [https://speakerdeck.com/u/dimituri/p/a-monad-is-just-a-burri...] (slide deck)

- No, they really aren't [http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuitio...]

- Well yeah, they kinda are [http://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html]

- But anyway, you probably have already invented them yourself; you just didn't realize it [http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...]

- And even if you didn't, you can always learn about it from that crowd-sourced fountain of programmer knowledge, StackOverflow (and this question hasn't even been closed as "not constructive"!) [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/44965/what-is-a-monad]

- Of course, once you understand basic category theory, you should be set anyway. What are you, some kind of Java programmer? [http://reperiendi.wordpress.com/2007/11/03/category-theory-f...]

- But really, a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem? [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3870088/a-monad-is-just-a...]
> why isn't the longevity of sustained use a possible and, in my opinion, a more likely causal explanation?

Because the experimental subjects aren't being told to smoke pot, they are being asked whether they do. This means there is no control in the study -- it's not science, it's stamp collecting.

An obvious explanation for the study outcome is that people who smoke pot might avoid intellectually stimulating activities, which would change their measured IQ. And is that possible -- do our choices affect our IQ? In a word, yes:

http://www.nais.org/publications/ismagazinearticle.cfm?ItemN...

The only way to control for this factor would be to control the subjects' drug-use behavior, but that is unethical and has never been done.

The linked study is typical of "psychological science" -- that is, science in name only.
Only for the investors, and that is the beauty of the system.
Some people are very, very, very selective when they quote Knuth
“Growth Hacking” is BS
This website is important. Even in it's current stage, this is one of the long-term solutions to the main problems of FOSS.

Kudos to the owner for dogfooding it.
Creator and submitter here. I want to say a few words to anyone who has feedback.

First off, I have to admit that I'm incredibly intimidated by every other person here after seeing some of the most amazing projects ever launch here. Even people's weekend projects dazzle me so humbly submitting this and hoping for feedback on my idea is fucking scary. That said, I'm prepared for negative feedback. I'm a realist. I know there will be tons of polish I missed or the idea itself may not strike a chord with a single person. That's alright.

What I hope to get from this is validation in the form of just 10 people who say they would use this. I'm aware of the ridiculous simplicity of this idea. I know why people wouldn't want to use this, why there are other services and apps that are better or do the same thing. But I didn't make it for those people. This was made for people like me who aren't looking for a replacement of their physical notebooks but, don't want to use a blogging service as a digital notebook but also want the option to publish publicly.

Think of this concept as a reverse blog where the ratio of public to private posts is exactly opposite that of a blog. Part blog, part scrapbook, part todo list but all private (except when it's not).

That's pretty much my line of thinking here. I may be wrong, crazy, deluded, or some combination thereof. If this gets picked up then I may find out for sure.
That is a completely valid and rigorous proof.

The difficulty with reading more "formal" proofs is that they try to make each statement as consise as possible, because it makes it easier to manipulate the results, and hold more of the proof in your head at a time.

For perspective, consider the quadratic equation. This equation was first discovered in 628 AD, India. An English translation (from 1817) reads:
"To the absolute number multiplied by four times the [coefficient of the] square, add the square of the [coefficient of the] middle term; the square root of the same, less the [coefficient of the] middle term, being divided by twice the [coefficient of the] square is the value"

Or, as modern mathematicians would right, x=(sqrt(4ac+b^2)-b)/2a.

The equation is slightly different for two reasons. First, it applied to equations of the from ax^2+bx=c, as apposed to ax^2+bx+c=0, so the sign of 4ac is inverted. It also misses the second answer provided by the '±'.

The original paragraph form is probably easier for someone unfamiliar with anything beyond arithmetic, however the modern form is far easier to reason about, and use to those who invest the time to learn the notation.
I really wish there was something like f.lux (http://stereopsis.com/flux/) for iOS, or at least without having to jailbreak and do whatever else, because then I might be able to use my iPad in bed to read a bit before sleeping.

Having it on my laptop had made a big difference -- I "felt tired" when the display temperature was adjusted at nighttime. Before that, I could happily stare at that blue light and stay awake as long as I wanted, at the expense of my productivity the next day.
9:00 PM? Is this what hard work is considered nowadays? Going home that late everyday? Geez, I'd rather be called lazy.
I did this for iOS 2 years ago for a hackathon. http://cssapply.github.com/CSSApply/

It's not entirely done but it's a good start for someone.

The video explains it more: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/16073539/highlight/187549
I personally switched back from my nexus 7 to my galaxy nexus for night time reading just for this reason. It's not just the size, the darker blacks of the oled screen also help.

It also helps that the size of the phone is better for novel reading, in my opinion. It's worse for practically everything else, but the ability to fall asleep quicker more than makes up for it.
There's an app to 'fix' this, called Flux, but it's only for jailbrokn iPads. Pity, the Mac app is great.
Cheaper than a hit to a static text file? It's cached in RAM too.
I don't follow how writing `printf` and watching the output in the console is 100% code when a debugger will stop at `debug(ger);` and show you the surrounding code in context with the output (and more output is accessible in far less time).
If you define 'feel pain' correctly, single-celled organisms have been observed to feel pain in that they move away from noxious chemicals.
The new CSS3 flexible box layout changes all that. It's incredibly rich and designed to obviate the need for clumsy CSS layout hacks. Check it out if you haven't already... it is the missing piece for app-like layouts for the web. The incredibly complex layouts that can be achieved with minimal CSS and no JS is astounding. Pair this with text-overflow and with ~ 50 lines of CSS and some very basic html you can achieve wonders.

Not only that but it's usable today. Both webkit and gecko have very close implementations with only minor edge cases, none of which are insurmountable.

Not sure about iOS support for the new layout modes.
> If Aliens visit us, they will likely classify us as "Non thinking creatures"

No. Obviously not. We obviously manipulate our environment in complex ways.

> "plants calculate the best course of action to achieve a goal just like humans do.".

If you truly believed this you could never justify eating them.
i've got some thoughts around brands.

I believe, one of the big parts of getting a customer is the trust factor. If you don't trust a vendor, there is no way that you will fork over cash.

So how do we overcome the trust factor.
If we are dealing in person, the vendor talks to the potential customer face to face and builds rapport.
In this scenario, a new customer is created because they have grown to trust the vendor personally.

If the face the customer is talking to changes, then the trust needs to be re-established. ( eg new management or sales person )

I think a brand works the same way. Instead of growing to trust a person, you grow to trust the company/brand. The initial marketing of the brand is how the potential customer grows to trust the vendor and then after each successful purchase, the trust is reinforced.

it is easy to buy a bottle of coke, because you trust that you will get what you expect at a price you expect, you trust that is what will happen.
It is hard to buy a bottle of "john smiths elixir" because you dont know or trust them. john smith has to convince you about himself and the elixir before you will buy ( for the majority of cases )
I assume this won't work with Pow as it would require binding.remote_pry?
This should not be surprising to any of you.
Curiosity Required
Great job by the way!
How many of those apps are people using T or running ThinkUp instances?

It's doubtful that many of these apps offer any functionality that could qualify them as a client.
What would you have done differently? (I'm serious. I'd like to know.)

One of the tough things for anyone aiming to replicate Facebook is that Facebook used some devious methods to get up and running. Zuckerberg misapproprited hundreds of photos of his classmates and their personal information, and then sent them provocative emails that would cause most students to check on what's been posted about them, or what's been posted about others, i.e., they would visit the site.

It's like the story of the YouTube guys posting some of their own videos to get things started. Then they eventually had to upload some copyrighted content. They took a risk.

Then there's the story of Bittorrent. I believe Bram Cohen initially seeded some porn to get things kicked off.

Or the guy from ThatHigh who recently told of how he had to create fake profiles.

It seems that it is quite difficult for user contribution and sharing solutions to start from zero. Alas, you need to have content on offer from day #1. And it needs to be compelling content, in terms of quality, quantity or both.

Zuckerberg broke the rules. He stole student's personal profiles from the university's network. And he got away with it. Luck was in his favor and he knows it. Others who would try this now might not be so lucky.

Diaspora relies on people to submit their own content, but it had no compelling content to begin with. Not only did they start with no content that would draw people in, but if I'm not mistaken they expect people to run their own web servers. This is not impossible to imagine but why web servers? I guess because they want to replicate Facebook.

Solution: Don't replicate Facebook. Build something a little different. Stop thinking only in terms of web servers and web clients. Think peer-to-peer. Think in terms of application-agnostic _connections_, not applications. Do this and you instantly have something that is 100x more useful than Facebook. Because it does not have to operate within the contraints of web servers and web browsers.

But there's still that problem of compelling content...
Well surely any demonstrations of these ideas by other parties weren't thrown together at the last second either, so what's your point?

Even in the worst case, they hint at the possibility of independent invention; imagine that.
I'm philosophically opposed to the phrase "calories in, calories out". True, we can't violate thermodynamics. However, the real important thing is calories absorbed, and how those calories affect metabolism, calories out.

Not as poetic, but you said it yourself - 300 calories of oreos are not equal to the same calories of chicken. And wood sure has a lot of calories (right?) but chew it up and eat it and you're not gonna get many of them absorbed. And some food triggers more of an insulin response which affects what your body does with the calories. It conveys the wrong point to the person who doesn't learn more to say "calories in, calories out" even though at some level of course it's thermodynamically sound.
check out the CSS3 flexible box model... it'll blow your mind :)
Twitter Fights Back to Protect ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protester
> but how one might implement them matters just as much if not more IMO

This is a false choice. Learning monads through Haskell, you get the forest and the trees! That said, I get that there are legitimate differences of opinion and what worked for me will not necessarily work for others. I feel like some understanding of types (or categories, etc.) is necessary to fully grok monads. Both this article and your linked paper offer some basic explanation of the concept. Tutorials that are essentially implementations of bind are, in fact, missing the forest for the trees.
I don't even understand, what are "import fees"? Tariffs?

I keep forgetting that we don't have even remotely free trade, so absurd and economically senseless, sigh.
> subscription models are the future of digital content distribution

Yeah, in theory, but do not forget who you are dealing with. Majors and related industries depend on unit-by-unit sales model currently, and they will trying to avoid that conversion as much as they can. While I agree with you it makes sense.
It sounds like you've probably got a lot of insight to offer the community here, but you're doing yourself and us a disservice to resort to name calling like that. Just let your knowledge speak for itself and let's all remain civil. At the end of the day we're all in a pretty tight knot community here. Or maybe I'm just a crazy hippy :)
Try odesk.com (focus on eastern europeans, usually cheap and reliable)
> Art comes from creating something new and stepping outside the box

That's a big part of science, too.
F.lux is fantastic. I've been using it on all of my systems.

Are you aware of an equivelant for Android?
According to ESR, most FOSS developers are Libertarian-minded. Not the Ron Paul types, either; The ones that do vote overwhelmingly lean big L. While HN leans towards Socialist Liberalism overall (California, Saskatchewan), that also means that you're likely to find few people sympathetic to the aims of D.A.R.E. on this site.

All in all, a fantastic troll. Good work, sir.

On a semi-related note, I'd like to make the bold statement that half of the programs on your computer are the direct result of Cocaine, Amphetamines, and Cannabis. If you're a Linux user, this number is probably much higher. Most software developers, especially those working more-than-40-hour work weeks, are using some sort of amphetamine, usually Adderall, to keep focused and productive. The Californians here probably know at least one software developer with a Cannabis License. Drug use at EA and Adobe is legendary amongst former employees.

Am I wrong in my thinking?
If by "high risk" you mean, "orders of magnitude safer than any other common mode of transportation". (Flying having ~3 deaths per 10 billion passenger miles, with driving at ~1.6 deaths per hundred million passenger miles.)

Early on, EM radiation could have interfered with old-school VOR navigation. However, today everyone uses GPS navigation, and planes are huge flying EM-emitting computers anyway, so this is no longer a real issue. Communications are interference tolerant for the kinds of emissions we're talking about.

The explanation I'd heard for why the no-phones-in-flight rule is still around is that passengers really dislike people having cell phone conversations next to them. Thus, the airlines can provide a better customer experience by keeping phones off. This obviously doesn't extend to no electronics at take-off or landing, of course, which should just be allowed.
You're right, but it's frustrating to have people dismiss an entire field of research out-of-hand just because they read a book. Or two.
In technical rollouts, yes. But twitter's ticking people off with a bunch of new policies...
I read the interesting submitted article and its comments right after it was submitted here on Hacker News. The worst argument in the world (a general FORM of argument) is described this way in the submitted article:

"I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: 'X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn't.'"

This recalls many cases on Hacker News when someone has disagreed with someone else by saying, "Your argument is an example of [name of rhetorical or logical fallacy]." Perhaps it is carrying out the worst argument in the world to identify one part of someone's statement as a logical fallacy, if the fallacy doesn't vitiate the statement, and if sound evidence is still in view to support the statement. Sometimes facts of the world are as they are even if they are mentioned by people who argue inaptly, so it would indeed be a bad argument to ignore the message because of infelicities of expression by the messenger. If we look at pg's essay "How to Disagree,"

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

we see advice that a better way to disagree is

"Refuting the Central Point.

"The force of a refutation depends on what you refute. The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point."

So I guess my central point here [smile] is that while it may be interesting to identify a general form for many particularly bad arguments, it is even better to be specific in grappling with the evidence for the core factual assertions of the person with whom you disagree. That takes abundant knowledge of the world, and a willingness to look up facts. I always appreciate people on Hacker News who can point to carefully gathered facts, analyzed by people with appropriate domain-related knowledge, as we discuss issues here.
I use the Chainfire 3D driver + CF.lumen plugin. You need to have root though.
Pricing for what? Users? That would be an unequivocal death knell. Developers? Possibly. However, it's doubtful that Twitter stands to gain any significant revenue from charging for an API. Their audience for advertising is so much larger and more lucrative, a paid API would be of trivial importance to their bottom line and a waste of time.

I don't think they'll charge for anything. Doing so would relegate them to the same, minuscule potential user base as App.net has.
Animation of custom shapes seems like it would get into <canvas> territory. The canvas drawing API shares many commonalities with CoreGraphics[1], and I assume that CoreGragphics played some part in its design. A web developer should have no trouble transitioning to CoreGraphics (which, I will add, is not an Objective-C framework) in such a case.

[1] If you look at the browser-based Javascript implementation of CoreGraphics (http://cappuccino.org/learn/documentation/group__coregraphic...), many of the CG functions are just straight-up bridges to the local functions.
I agree 100%. Squats (actually leg extensions and leg curls are better for runners) are the secret, the thing people who didn't bother to do the research don't know. They don't have the edge.

Paralysis via analysis is bad, I agree with the post's main point. But mindlessly grinding is equally bad.
Preparing for the iPhone Next: Rumors Analyzed
Rather than pooh-poohing this new word or dismissing it by claiming that people use it so they can avoid calling themselves marketers, ask yourself: "Why do people find this distinction useful?"

That would make for a much better article, IMO.

Here's a thread where I attempt to justify the term: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4309570
I find the lowest brightness setting on my Nexus S not dim enough for bedtime reading/browsing, anyone know any good apps?
For those that aren't aware, there's tools to help with this.

f.lux | Windows, OS X, iOS (jailbreak needed) | http://stereopsis.com/flux/
Redshift | Linux, Windows (experimental) | http://jonls.dk/redshift/
Lux | Android | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vito.lux

Lux isn't as nice as the others because it doesn't change colour temperature, it just puts a red/brown overlay over the screen. AFAIK there's no way to change the screen's colour temperature in Android.
With the talent Microsoft hires vs their products the ratio always came out so low I just shook my head. I always pictured a day of work at Microsoft as someone holding a chair over a grad students head making them refactor sol.exe
>I guess I'll never understand how, in this world, getting funded is some sort of end.

Most people have a goal of selling their company, no? I mean, our tax code is such that it makes far more sense to sell a company than to just take money out the usual way, even if you get the same amount of money total. If you sell the company, you pay a much lower capital gains rate, wheras if you take profit either as a distribution or as salary, you pay much more. (If you take profit as a dividend, you pay corp. income tax on it, then you pay capital gains on it; if you take it as salary/bonus, of course, you pay FICA and everything.)

You can sell a company based on it's current earnings, or you can sell a company based on it's anticipated future earnings. When you get investors, you are doing the latter.

Of course, then you need to figure out how to cash out; but certainly that's easier after getting funding than before.

Personally, I'd prefer to think of it as selling (perhaps only part of) the company rather than "taking funding" - I mean, I'd be okay saying I'd stick around and help out for a number of years (for enough money, of course,) but once you have investors, it's not really yours anymore anyhow; it's more clear to all involved, I think, if you think of it as a sale.

> Getting funded means you now have the cash to become a real business, rather than having a two-man team eating ramen and sleeping on the floor.

See, I don't understand how businesses that can't even bring in enough money to pay their founders get funding.
That sounds both promising and scary. Especially considering that octopart.com, featured in this article 5 years ago is on decline:
http://www.quantcast.com/octopart.com

Starting up is tough.
I think long-term follow-up on productivity "hacks" are really important. I've tried a bunch of them, and my experience with all of them so far has been that none of them can be sustained indefinitely.

Even Adderall use (which I haven't tried) eventually has side effects and physiological costs (as well as immediate costs in terms of creativity for many users).

It would be neat if there were a way to cheat the rules about how much the average person can produce in their lifetime. I think many of us have a tendency to look towards extraordinarily productive people and want to try to match their output. But, either they seem to have won the genetic lottery which allows them to get away with things that other mere mortals cannot, or they eventually pay the price in insanity or exhaustion or early demise.

I'm starting to come around to the idea that the best possible productivity "hack" is healthy living and a laser-like focus on just one or two projects at a time, and delegate everything else.
> Every company I've ever worked at - has claimed they pay Radford 50 [1] .

Did they also claim that they only hired average people? Or did they claim that they only hired above average people?

As Scott Adams pointed out, there are very few above average engineers who can't identify the larger of two numbers.
Totally agree ... the via tag was very useful for helping decide which automated, bot, spammer to avoid. It provided additional context for tweets.
If that's true then why not just give them the money? At least that way they could spend their time learning to do something productive.
Apple's win chills competition