skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I've read, a lot of studies of "indigenous peoples" contradicts what you are saying. Especially regarding the time spent on necessities. I read an ethnographical book about how tribal peoples in the jungle 'worked' for at most half the day on their basic needs.

Granted, the jungle is also plentiful (altho hazardous.)

But the masses of people who have to walk hours for water, in Africa and parts of the Middle East, is also a modern thing. Before modernish times, that would be totally untenable. Either they would move on, or they would all die, rather than this in-between state they occupy now.

The majority of cultures since the Great Leap Forward seemed to have created quite a bit of art, music and myths, but many of them were trasient and impermanent and so left no trace. And apparently a lot of it was "practical," in terms of beautiful clothing, vessels, "magical" items and weapons.

But I don't think I'd call those things uncreative because they were also useful.
Referential integrity in code-under-test is convenient for unit testing, so unit tests encourage (re)discovery of functional style by programmers who are working in non-functional languages.

But unit tests also have value in programs that are written in functional languages and in a functional style. Unit tests reinforce essential properties of the program and thereby formalize the accidental/essential boundary. They can provide guidance about how API elements are intended to be used together. They can present elements and properties of a program in an order that is best for explanation (they can be a crude form of literate programming). So, it's wrong to reduce unit testing to functional programming.
Fast-Spreading Phishing Scam Hits Gmail Users
I bought OmniGraffle a while back and haven't looked back; excellent product.
Where is the Wifi? This thing is great, and I have an awesome application for it, but it needs to connect to my home wireless network. ;)
A tale of three code generators
Web3.0
That would be my point. I mean, when did it become considered "hard" to ignore trolls?

Also I have a rule of not making a blog post unless I have at least a few paragraphs to write on a subject. So his "no comments" stance limits discussion in that way as well.

I hate to say it but I’ve found most of these "hit and run"" trolls usually leave comments that, while rude, have a grain of truth to them. They’re usually saying the thing that bloggers, who tend to worry about their reputation in the blogosphere, won’t say.

All in all I think the whole "no comments" stance is unwise if you actually want a true debate.
If he felt he didn't get done the things he wanted to do because he was constantly flitting around on a hundred projects, wouldn't you call that a procrastinator?

I would. I'm the same way. Most people wouldn't call me a procrastinator looking at my output, but I know how I feel.

It's hubris to claim to know how Leonardo felt, of course, unless he wrote it down himself, but I don't think the article's nearly as big a stretch as you think it is.
There is USB Host so there is always the option of a USB based Wifi card. Not fast but possible.
I'd say that it's true that the closer you get to pure functional programming (no state or side effects), the more unit testable your code becomes.

I'd have to take issue, however, with the author's implication that Java programmers who unit tests are idiots who don't realize they're reinventing the wheel. Good developers in any language recognize the importance of avoiding side effects, isolating parts of the system from each other (including minimizing state), etc. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that testable code has some common characteristics across all programming languages. There are differences unique to the language as well, though, and unit testing in Java also tends to involve use of things like interfaces and polymorphism that are distinctly OO concepts as well.

And of course, unit testing isn't just for those "overly complicated" Java applications; it's for any type of system in any language. The author seems to me to imply that somehow unit testing is uniquely a requirement of Java systems that Erlang systems somehow don't need.
As a video on it's own merits, I liked it.

But I watched it after reading the post, which was already an abbreviated form of the interview. I only watched the video because the post had already interested me, but watching the video after reading the post didn't really add anything. Given this presentation, I think it would have made sense to embed the full video instead.
I'll have to tell those haskell guys to throw quickcheck away then, since they don't need unit testing...
The condensation happens because, if people can easily reach their families and friends, they are more willing to relocate.

I don't think fast rail travel is "phenomenally expensive" compared to our current infrastructure of highways and airports, which are inappropriate and expensive (but used, due to a lack of alternatives) for mid-distance travel.
Let's not forget that the invention of bureaucracy was hailed as a beautiful and wonderful thing, in order to prevent rich people from buying positions in govt and also getting personal favors out of other govt officials.
I'm particularly fond of Quake Live because a) I was heavy into competitive gaming back in the day and b) I dropped everything in my life and moved to California to work for the startup whose products influenced the creation of Quake Live. Assuming they still use the same (or similar) technology stack, it's running on an Oracle DB and using Jabber and a few other things at the transport & display layer.

I say 'influenced' because the tech we sold id Software for QL has been significantly altered and re-written by their very talented team. The cool thing is based on my experience beta testing Quake Live since Dec. 07, a lot of design principles still seem to be intact. You can see screenshots of our first B2C gaming product from 06/07 here, you may notice a few similarities such as the queue system:

http://startupdistrict.think27.com/colin/www/

The company had to close its doors b/c we ran out of money among other things... however, it was one of the best learning experiences of my life and I have absolutely no regrets. Very happy to see that Quake Live has finally come to life!
Better put 'functional programming is reinventing the way unit tests are written'.
Its extremely easier to 'think of' and create unit tests on business logic that avoids using state and mutable data, as do all functional languages.

On the other hand, this is pretty much offset because structuring a program ( the one on which the tests will be performed) using a pure functional style is very hard, especially when its syntax/compiler doesn't enforce it.

Languages like Java which have fields, getter/setter methods and similar syntax are mine-fields for introducing state and mutable data. Erlang really forces you to think in functional style given its 'message passing' style, so unit tests are a snap. In Java and other non-functional languages unit tests would be just as easy, the problem is avoiding state and mutable data.

Though I would still argue the effort forgone in unit testing, still needs to be invested designing the actual business logic taking care it doesn't introduce state and mutable data(non-functional behavior).
This actually is what drew me to functional programming in the first place. I'd recently been on a unit testing kick, and figured that if you get rid of mutable state and have function outputs depend only upon inputs, your code suddenly becomes much easier to unit test.
It has a JTAG port, which dates to the late 80's.
Security Research & Defense : More information about the new Excel vulnerability
"Give me any 1 feature, and I can zoom into it and force you to accept other features that need to go along with it, otherwise rendering it near useless."

Then why not define "feature" as "the smallest useful unit of work such that there are no other features necessary to achieve its usefulness"? Sort of like a minimal connected set in a graph.
You are great... seriously.

It looks crazy somehow... but when you live for the idea you want to implement, it gives your life so much of value, even if - sometimes - others would not really care about what you do...
Well...
So you don't want to pay for Adwords? :) hmmm

Here is what you should do:

1- Submit it to all the free search engines like Google, Yahoo, msn, and others...

2- Create a blog for your website, and post at least 1 entry/week.

3- Make your website's content available in RSS feeds.

4- Post your website everywhere on the internet.... forums, blogs, rss feed burners, and everywhere.

5- Make an invitation tool for your website, registeration system, and let users import their contacts to invite their friends to your website...

Try to make it social as much as you can... and update it's home page daily... that would be great.

Also don't forget to add rich information that would be really useful to users. Content is the king!

If you follow this recipe, you will have a good base of users within 6 or 7 months!
An interview with C.A.R. Hoare  (inventor of Quicksort, among other things)
Who invented the automobile?
MySpace Inches Closer To Offering Full-Fledged Webmail Service
I attempted to switch to pen when I was having issues with Perlbal. It was segfaulting under light load (light for me is heavy for most people) comparable to Perlbal, so I switched back. I can't say I reccomend it at all.
I see no connection between my comment and your reply.
The article links to this list of countries you wouldn't flee to if you were in that situation. It has a map, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extraditi...
Look up the technique of "dependency injection" sometime. This is all the rage among Java consultants, their favorite technique to make things testable. It's an elaborately disguised way of saying "let's rewrite this function so it obtains all its state from the caller". In other words, functional programming.

In cases where passing the same list of initialized objects up and down the call stack becomes tedious, Google's Java people have invented frameworks like Guice. This makes dependency injection appear to happen by magic.
What Do Schools Sell?
Harvard's admissions office follows progress of enrolled students
I sure hope so More acceptance of functional programming is always a good thing. I love coding for in Lisp but I haven't really made the leap to production code since I have to support 4 platforms with all code I write for work (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux on x86, Linux on ARM), and deploying Lisp code across all those platforms auto-magically reliably SUCKS. We write all our stuff on the JVM so this would be easy to bolt on and expose to new people.
Call for Participation: Writing Typed Scheme wrapper modules
Follow-up from the The Harvard Crimson:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=526749
A good chunk of it, many years ago...
ah yes, absolutely, excuse me...
Did you just read the headline? Maybe a better phrasing would be "The need for unit testing is causing OOP guys to write in a functional programming style."
If like me you're wondering how you could use some of the new datasets, here are some pointers:

http://www.freebase.com/view/freebase/featured_application

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/UseCases

Highlight: Powerset - semantic wikipedia/freebase search acquired by MSFT for $100mm
Well... we'll have to agree to disagree - and you really should check out the state of the art in Lisp compilers these days.

PS - I've been programming since before Lisp was a teenager.
I yield to no one in the category of "Charge money for value", but I have to agree with Anderson on this one: Non-monetary value can still be turned into money. Its not rocket science.

The simplest case for it is search engine rankings: people like linking to free things. Accordingly, putting free things on your website gets you lot of links. Links get you search engine rankings.

I segment my market into two slices: one which is likely to need my application a lot more than they need their money, and one which is not. The free stuff is designed to satisfy the "I'll keep my money" segment (and thus get links from them) while piquing the interest of the "Please, SOMEBODY, help me" segment. The paid software is worth its price (and then some -- I just bumped prices by 20% and after seeing sales data I might do it again) to that segment.

Github does this really well, too: we'll give you access for free if you're an OSS project (ooh, look, you attract links in spades and don't care that your source is public) and we'll charge for access for private repositories, without which your boss would have a conniption fit if you are developing commercial software.

There are other ways to do it to. Demonstrated expertise (free) leads to perceived expertise (free) leads to consulting opportunities (decidedly unfree). Demonstrated expertise (free) leads to perceived expertise (free) leads to business opportunity (free) to improve your sale of widgets (unfree). Demonstrated expertise (free) leads to perceived expertise (free) leads to employment opportunity (unfree). etc.
I am one of the founders of http://fairsoftware.net (sorry for the late answer, you had to post this question just on President's weekend).

The processing fee we charge is irrelevant to whether we are a good place to find co-founders. Actually, you could use FairSoftware, find people, use our Software Bill of Rights to start your business, and never pay us a cent.

You only pay the processing fee if you use our payment backend. If your project consists of two people, then by all means, work out a deal by yourselves. But if you are trying to build something with a larger community of contributors, and having transparent sharing brings value and trust to your contributors, then you'll find out that our fees are reasonable.

And as someone pointed out, we don't actually charge much at all for ourselves, we mostly pass other people's fees (PayPal) to you so we don't lose money. We are working on lowering the total fees, and it has to do with ACH and treating non-US contributors differently than US contributors, but we will eventually, in order to save money for you.

There are scenarios where we are way cheaper than any alternative. If you are a couple of students with very little money to invest, we give you a legal structure, some amount of protection and privacy from your end users, for literally no money down.
In innovation, US said to be losing competitive edge
Technology: Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy.
Need a place to crash? Stay at the Hacker House
Boring it's not.

Frankly, I'm disappointed by this thread. HN's audience is supposedly smarter than your average Internet crowd. But all I'm hearing here is cheap bashing of the target that everyone loves to hate. Can anyone do better and post an intelligent comment that addresses the topic?

Again, TechCrunch is not boring. One of its strengths is not so much the "breaking news" aspect, but the tongue-in-cheek or tell-it-like-it-is.

In many news organizations, politically correct has removed any spark of interesting content. Not at TechCrunch. It's news with an attitude. You may or may not like the attitude, but at least there's one.

[disclaimer: you can accuse me of bias because of my company connections to TC, but it also means that I got to see some of the behind the scenes and I learned a lot doing so]
I've been thinking about it... too many ideas as it is already, though.
Saw the crimson article, very nice. Looks like they got to the scammer's blog (before that was shut down). His twitter account is still up, however.
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The use of oil additives has long been a controversial subject haunting the oil and automobile industries, respective stakeholders and not least the consumer.
Not really, contracts can't send in invalid data to see what happens and ensure the proper actions are taken.

Contracts don't prevent the need for tests, they simply augment them. Contracts only state assumptions about how code should behave, but they don't make sure those assumptions are correct, only tests can do that.
AP wins its lawsuit, can now sue competitors that cover its breaking news
Did you try getting it to fit? Even 'cheating' a bit by renaming the route and make the TTL 1 second I couldn't get it closer than -2 :/

I can get to +1 character left if I just make the route '/:n'! :)
I'm in good company.

In all seriousness, that sounds like ADD.
Because we shouldn't ever have any fun? We shouldn't check out Blake's cool little micro-framework? We shouldn't use our own blogs for things we find interesting?
The main point the guy makes is that "testable code" resembles functional programming. And testable code is code that doesn't suck. Maybe code that doesn't suck is code that resembles functional programming.

I guess you could argue that all the moronic OO voodoo theory books are trying to say this. I don't think so. I think he's a got a point.
The stock market loves Wednesdays
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Using MyPhoneExplorer for Backup your Sony Ericsson Mobile Phone Data
Write Upside Down
So... I am an avid TDD/Unit Test/BDD guy. I've been gravitating towards BDD lately and honestly I don't DI everything. Really if I'm just BDD-ing a layer I just need to DI the fringe dependencies, the things that would cause me to be dependent on other whole systems or sub-systems (think File I/O, Active Directory, Web Services, etc). My object still contains a lot of state.

I think saying that unit tests cause us to reinvent FP is a bit of a stretch. I do think that saying that unit testing causes us to write better code and we borrow heavily from many programming paradigms (DBC, FP, OOP, DSLs, etc) in order to write that better code.
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That should be the 10 Worst Cities in the US.
Looks like you created an account just to leave this comment...ouch.

But seriously, thanks for the feedback. I was trying capture my feelings about FB before I lost them, and I'd be surprised if you were the only one who found the tone obnoxious.
This is one of my favorite Louis CK performances - he gets it perfectly.

Look at the number of people who complain that our president is corrupt, politics is doomed, the world is falling apart, etc. Politically speaking, things are more transparent now than ever before in history. Fewer people are being persecuted for their beliefs than ever before. On the whole, everybody is happier now than they were ten years ago, or ten years before that.

I'm usually guilty of being overly critical of things, and while I think that criticism has its place, there's a line between being critical of things to make it better and hating something because it doesn't reach a standard that couldn't have possibly existed even a year ago. A lot of people would be a lot happier if they could back off a little bit and see things for how they are rather than how they wish they were.
It would be a shame if the sordid nature of that post caused anyone to miss the slide from the Startups Metric presentation, which is excellent.

http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/numbers-not-napkins-sim...

It also includes the only pirate joke that will ever make you money.
Naver.com to release Opencast this Sunday
The Video-Injected Hive Mind
It's like the server equivalent of the netbook.
"you need to learn to accept that reality and your perception of reality are very different things." -- this can be extremely hard for people to overcome.

How can you change an organization to be more data and results oriented? I do not know. I think that kind of attitude needs to be in the corporate culture, or hammered into people from on high, in order for groups to get past the "highest paid person in the room" decision making process. Does anyone have any advice about this?
Be sure to have them show you the light fixture of death.
Ran IE6 one from Fusion and it basically shows a white screen on every page. Not so great.

Cool idea though. Hopefully the smooth the kinks over.
I'm just old enough to have experienced life without cellphones and the internet, and now I have the internet on my cellphone. Yes, I still complain. It's slow, the screen is small, there's no Flash, etc. But every now and then I really do step back and recall how amazing technology is.

Recently, my brother-in-law (who's from a different country) came to visit. He saw the small differences that having the internet in your pocket can make - get a map of downtown right away, figure out the best route to that lot you parked on, figure out the phone number and closing time of that restaurant two blocks away, find out that it's not going to snow tomorrow so you can plan accordingly, all while having coffee at some corner store.

Is it life changing? No. But it's that incremental step that just makes some things a little bit easier, a bit more convenient.

Yes, the goal posts keep moving. And all of us here want to create the next thing that moves it just a bit more once again.
The one difference is that everyone has and knows how to use a browser, or what to do if you tell them to open myfoo.com.

What percentage of the computer population knows what X Windows is, much less has any idea how to use it?
The Linux Netbook Nightmare:$435 million in vaporized MSFT 2008 profits
Great article. Thanks for sharing
Discontent and innovation often go hand in hand... if everyone were happy, people would stop making the amazing stuff.
You need to disable offline mode for it to work.
Louis CK is talking about the "hedonic treadmill" theory of happiness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Text to speech synthetizers
And then again, the United States has 200,000 professional artists, who earn a living from their craft:

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos092.htm#projections_data

It seems a recurrent mistake that people underestimate how truly unprecedented and awesome our society is.

Also, a large, dense population with lots of wealth is much more art-friendly than your sparse, idyllic native American population. The Indians didn't come up with Beethoven, and there's a reason for that.
Very useful for professional developers. Thanks
Question: is anyone using this as hosting instead of building a webapp. Is that against the terms? I've thought about just putting up a relatively simple slightly static django page and using google app engine as hosting.
Does anyone have any advice about this?

Best Buy apparently did it, and it has been described as a "revolution" spreading from below and a "virus" infecting one working group at a time.

I got my Big Freaking Enterprise Apps shop to take some baby steps into some directions I like by taking the discretion I have as a low-ranking engineer on the totem pole, using it, succeeding, and tying the success to business goals.

I "convert" other engineers by appealing to desire for efficiency and professional growth, and "convert" managers by demonstrating that the quirky "minor little engineering details" we're working on consistently generate savings.
Hardcore: Blob-Oriented Programming