skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The U.S. Economy according to Thiel
Peter Thiel says the U.S. may be facing several years of slow growth or stagnation. However, in a globalized and very competitive world, there are surprisingly big constraints on political action that can lead us toward being less capitalist and less competitive. In short, we will compete, although it will be an increasingly difficult slog unless our technological means elevate dramatically.
Petrodollar Warfare & Collapse of U.S. Dollar Imperialism
From an international perspective the EU economy is much more fiscally balanced than the US. The EU does more trade with OPEC than the US and would certainly welcome a monopoly petroeuro exchange system. This would have the same effect as subsidizing the EU economy and the ECB is already creating monetary debt instruments (Euro bonds) to absorb the coming influx of petroeuros. The EU is now the largest economy in the world (not the US) and China’s largest trading partner is the EU (not the US). When America’s financial house of cards collapse the UK may have little choice but to finally join the Eurozone for survival. European economist Dr. Krassimir Petrov keenly observed that “the British most likely did not adopt the euro [in1999] namely because the Americans must have pressured them not to otherwise the London IPE would have had to switch to euros, thus mortally wounding the dollar and their strategic partner.”[40] The petroeuro challenge
The view from Silicon Valley
True characterizations of all the current environment, but the most interesting part of the article:

But while death and failure are part of the Valley psyche, so too is optimism. Peter Thiel thinks people are overreacting to the crisis. "I strongly think that for the next few months, equities, especially financial stocks, move higher," he says. "People are just way too bearish on the U.S. right now."

He's even more bullish on the Valley. "We have this leverage finance bubble like we had in the '20s, and there's an argument that we're headed to something comparable to the '30s," he says. "Where was the best place to be in the '30s? Probably Los Angeles. It was the hub of new media and technology, with the radio and the airplane. Silicon Valley is the L.A. of the 1930s.
Michael Arrington speaks with Peter Thiel
The lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed.

The CEO’s salary sets a cap for everyone else. If it is set at a high level, you end up burning a whole lot more money. It aligns his interest with the equity holders. But [beyond that], it goes to whether the mission of the company is to build something new or just collect paychecks.

In practice we have found that if you only ask one question, ask that.
Michael Moritz on Arthur Rock: "The Best Long-Ball Hitter Around"
Unlike other venture capitalists. Rock has few private investors as clients and hence is under little outside pressure. Rock invests slices of his own fortune and the money of a few close friends, limiting himself to three or four deals a year. He makes sure that the companies he finances are close to his office so that he does not have to travel much. Rock looks for ideas, people and products that together can form the keystones for major new industries. He is almost always one step ahead of fashion and never expects a quick payoff. He makes up his mind swiftly, acts decisively, moves quietly and seems to have an impeccable sense for where technology and markets will meet. Says California Financier Max Palevsky, who made a fortune as a founder of Scientific Data Systems, a mainframe computer maker that Xerox acquired in 1969 for $950 million: "Arthur has an incredible intuition. His nose never ceases to amaze me."
"Facebook causes cancer"
Most people these days are lamenting about the death of innovation in the valley. It reminds me of when Arthur Rock said that innovation was dead right before the internet started taking off.

"He predicts few dramatic technological breakthroughs in the next several years, but expects that recent inventions will enable dozens of companies to push electronics into every aspect of life."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949965-1,00...

Many people copy success so tons of "me-too" companies get started, but technology just like all industries are dominated by black swans.
He's talking about this:

http://www2.userful.com/company/linux-desktop-virtualization
Rule #10 -- Avoid distractions.

This is the real startup killer for our last startup. But it goes with other problems like get ramen profitable. Since you are not profitable and you need to eat, you will be very easy to be distracted..

Do you know, what are living expenses in SFO? There are about USD 500/month in Czech Republic :)
The 10 Most Disgusting Delicacies to Try Before You Die - Would You Eat These? 
All the vital organs of just about any species have been consumed at one time or another and some of them are rich in the best dietary nutrients. Amazonian ants, half-cooked fetal eggs, wriggly worms of all kinds and stages of life, hoofs, beaks, ears, and eyeballs have all been efficiently put to good culinary use.
> I'd encourage him to build something so awesome with a functional language that the rest of us can't help but be blown away.

Functional language helps a lot in building of side effect free code. But such code can be written even in pure assembler. I writing in such style in any language, including Bash.

Sometimes I need to refactor somebody else code. Code functionality remains exact same after refactoring. Things that changed are: better code clarity, better reusability, and better testability as part of reusability.

Unit tests creates additional contexts, in which main code can be used, thus they force to improve reusability of the code, thus code forced to make less or none side effects, thus programmer forced to rewrite code in functional style.
This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet and IRC. People had personal home pages instead of MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Whatever accounts. You hosted your own scanned photos.
Well, that's a nice intro to DRAM, but I'm unclear as to its relevance to database/file structure [whether on hard disk or RAM].
Why don't you try building a blogging tool in Arc? You could take it as a challenge and try to finish in N hours.
The Rules of an Entrepreneur
Government's bailout package is inclined towards SUSTAINING the jobs instead of CREATING jobs.
Wow! That's amazing. I guess I need to be learning more about pros/cons of such strategies for data storage.

Thanks for tip on viaweb. Wikipedia article on that led me to pg's interesting article ( http://paulgraham.com/vwplan.html ) on original 1995 viaweb business plan. I'll head off and do searches on 'viaweb'/'webgen' and data structure.
Optimizing Code for Speed
http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/optimizing-co...
Microsoft Surface Alternative Images with Contextual Objects
Bloggers Paradise: A lot of hops but no sale
Doesn't something like OAuth solve this problem ?
Do read about what the music industry of the early 1900s had to say about the player piano:

http://www.eetimes.com/disruption/essays/vonlohmann.jhtml
Lists are a major part of functional programming, you could use arraylists and just make a new one every time you need to "change" data, but they're essentially lists (just not as clear).
The Windows-versus-Linux server face-off
So it turns out that when viaweb was sold to Yahoo pg learned that Yahoo was also using flat files. But "that was 1995 and there were no free db solutions," as someone pointed out.

Couple years ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608 noted that Lisp works very well with flat files:: the plot thickens. Alas, what's a baby boomer accustomed to simple PHP/MySQL solutions to do... try to wrap his head around a completely new file and language approach?
I think Blount is overestimating the capacities of text-to-speech technology. Sure, there may be speech synthesizers that can cough and say "umm" and do other human-cadence-like things, but I suspect that inferring all those details of intonation from the normal punctuated text of a novel is beyond the capacity of present technology, and may even be AI-complete.

If the digital files on the Kindle contained lots of metadata, added by a human editor, to assist the text-to-speech system, then Blount would have more of a case.
Appcelerator Releases Preview Of Open Source Platform Titanium, Adds Bells And Whistles
They're in room 108 West Village H on thursdays at 11:35 (440 Huntington Ave. 02115). It's the really really big building with the glass across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts.

Unfortunately, the speaker this week doesn't look like he'll be coming this week. We're showing the documentary Code Rush instead (http://acm.ccs.neu.edu/?q=node/661).
Verifying Code When Software Reliability is Critical
The illustrious corporate raider's name is actually spelled "Icahn". Yes, Icahn! (sorry, could not help it)
Overall I enjoy the Safari 4 beta. It runs much faster and as it mirrors more closely the Chrome interface (which I prefer with the tabs long the top) I'm quite happy with it.

I have crashed it a few times, but those usually surrounded Flash interactions and I dutifully reported such incidents.

I wrote a very short review of it on my site: http://www.trickjarrett.com/2009/02/24/my-thoughts-about-saf...
. . . which is behind a $10 paywall.
You could always get the source code... But the speed mostly comes from being in memory (or at least that's my guess). That pretty much trumps any structure:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468611

Also, it's fairly slow for some operations:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davidw

Seems to be quite slow, for instance.
This is not his argument.

Separate revenue streams for audio books is not just a quaint custom in the publishing world, but a consequence of copyright law, which treats text and audio rights as properties that may be licensed separately. He's arguing that his constituents' property is being taken from them without their consent. I think his case is weak, but it's not dumb.
You're right about the designer/coder separation. I didn't think of that because I have never worked in an environment where designers created functional UIs.

Yes there is abstraction in templates. Templates typically let you indicate (visually or otherwise) what the static parts look like and where the dynamic parts go. That's it. We have done that forever. There's no progress. Templates don't describe interaction and that's what UIs are there for and it's the growing part of UI design.

Tool vendors have tried for many years to describe the interaction parts visually as well. But interaction is not inherently visual. A condition is not visual. A data transformation is not visual. Even the difference between two visual states is not visual itself.

It's a logical abstraction that manipulates visual objects. Mixing logic that manipulates visuals with the visuals themselves is not useful, and in terms of established software design principles it violates the separation of concerns.

Painting logic with a GUI builder is like entering a sine function by drawing squiggly lines on the screen.

Maybe we could create a better visual version of abstraction, but I don't feel it's the most promising direction to take in order to make abstraction more powerful.
My new apartment is starting to look a bit like this. 3 laptops, 2 netbooks, a big desktop, scanners, printers, etc... and there's only 2 of us. Time for a clean out :)
I don't mean to be snarky, but that sounds a lot like passing a closure and maybe some other state in.

I don't really agree with the OP's point in any case. Even if I have an entirely purely functional library, I still need to unit test it to make sure it does what I think it will and that it observes the edge cases I know of correctly and further so that I can regress it if I need to make changes, maybe for performance reasons at some point.

I mean, it is nice to reduce state in your code as much as possible, but its not always practical or efficient. I think it's great that people are getting more excited about Functional Programming because I believe that there are a lot of great techniques that become available when you understand it, but all that imperative knowledge is still going to have its place at the end of the day. After all, writing an in-place quicksort is always going to end up involving imperative directions to the computer!
"author's concern seems reasonable" though I read it as concerns implying you agree with the articles ideas. If your are only talking about that one point I am sorry.
I agree that avoiding side effects and global state is a well-known practice (and OO languages have access modifiers, like private, to support it). It's not unique to functional programming.

Interesting to me was that the reasoning of the article was strikingly close to Dijkstra's "Goto considered harmful", and it makes me wonder if there is some small step that OO languages could take to automatically enforce testable code, in the way that structured programming made gotos safer.

The problem is that side-effects and global state are very useful for making some problems simpler - which is why Erlang has its transactional database mnesia, and Lisp is not purely functional.

Is there a way to structure side-effect/global state to make it entirely testable, without destroying the benefits?
Sure, because all of technology and all of science don't really feed our soul: so, our souls grow thinner and thinner, and our heads feel more and more overweight.

It's like eating straw all day long: at the end you are full of nothing (really important).
Most powerful ever quantum chip undergoing tests
Google search: "your query looks similar to automated requests..." + captcha
Similar to what was going on after the Gmail outage, but now it's happening with Search. What's going on?
Articles like these makes me want to strangle the author.

No, Sir, my Indy with Ethernet and Mosaic/Netscape was quite up to the task. In fact, my telnet to the Sun and ftp and gopher pre-web was already immensely useful.

If it sucked for you 1996, maybe it was just you.
I like the idea of everything connected to the web. Your car, fridge, evet the musical band poster with rfid chip or QR code. What do you think about the next frontier?
my theory is that pg is a special case. i tried to learn lisp, given his appreciation for it, but i never could think of anything to do with it. most problems tend to strongly suggest a particular language, and in my case, that has never been lisp.

i started a big data-intensive project awhile ago, and thought about using flat files. i tend to use them myself, whenever possible. but i couldn't easily see a way around contention issues between many coordinated processes, so i punted and went with mysql.
10 reasons not to upgrade to Office 2007
Hi Colin, I referred to tarsnap and said it had a "good pedigree" on JWZ's blog. Yes, I was referring to your background and domain knowledge as FreeBSD Secuirity Officer. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007641.html#comment-...
A hoe is a garden tool.
No you can't. Maybe that's the way it should be, but you certainly can't read that book to an audience or crack the DRM and print out copies for your friends.
IB is a standard run-of-the-mill GUI builder. I found nothing in it that current versions of Microsoft tools don't do, quite the contrary. But the important thing is that separating code from the UI a bit better than VB did in 1992 is not what I mean by abstraction.

There are a few fundamental requirements for a language to allow for powerful abstractions. I think self-referentiality and closure (in the maths sense not in the CS sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(mathematics) ) are among those requirements.

GUI tools are ages behind what today's programming languages can do in terms of abstraction. So I don't see why it should be a good idea to limit the expressiveness of my toolset by inserting static blobs or nibs of visual somethings everywhere.

To make it perfectly clear: I want to be able to insert a function in place of any static structure, anywhere! I don't want barriers that make this process more difficult. And that's what GUI builders do.

You say I can define UI things in code as well. Great, I'll gladly take that offer, thank you very much ;-)
Badscience is almost always worth the time to read. Although it can be a bit depressing.

Taking a look at the article by Aric Sigman it does appear weak. Having said that it's worth reading if only for the accompanying images.
I don't think it's really an either/or choice. You can have loads of forks on Github but still have a central place for those who just want to download code. I think the really cool thing about Github is that it makes it easy to experiment with the code in public. It also makes it very easy to collect up any changes other people have made and integrate them into a single tree.

It will be interesting to see what happens with these projects. Hopefully there will be a few forks as people try things out then one person (or group of people) will step forward to manage an "official" release. Presumably that person would set up a website for them (or take over the existing one) and not use the Github project as the sole means of distribution.
Everything that’s wrong about Cappuccino, quoted from their own about page.
Louis CK is a comedian. I doubt he was truly trying to engage in discussion.
My ideal president
It does not question other peoples intelligence, but rather their knowledge of programming language paradigms.

You can program functionally in any language by eschewing side-effects whenever you can. Only that in some languages it is way easier to program functionally than others (ML, Scheme, Common Lisp, Erlang) and in some it is even forced (Haskell). The "idiot" here is the one that can't see or understand that it is easier to program functionally in functional languages and that it leads to better programs by doing so. To see this, you need knowledge of functional programming. And sadly, many people do not understand its finer points because they have not spent time writing non-trivial programs in functional languages.

If you know nothing about FP on the other hand, you could be lead into the concept of Dependency Injection, Design Patterns and whatnot, because your world is shaped around a statical subtyping system (In the case of Java). These concepts are not bad at all: they help Java programmers write better code (for most part) with fewer errors.
I hope it works out. If things go well, it may take place as you suggest... I think it's too early to tell, though.
Thoughts On The President's Speech Last Night
Maybe you should try reading a bit about dependency injection. It is a declarative way to assembly pieces of software (in this case, objects) that have no knowledge of each other. You can do it manually, but this is an easier way to do it.
Magento Commerce Security Vulnerabilities
Breathing is a major part of living, too. Java can do linked lists, yes.
I'm getting a bit tired of these ever-repeating "How to be successful"-cookbooks.

But at least there were some fun quotes in this one:

Even the planet Earth, if you get far enough into space, looks like a peaceful place.

A wise man keeps his own counsel.
A Tale of 140 Characters, Plus the Ones in Congress
Financial crisis, Human Rights and Conflict
Templates can be reused across projects, and there could be a hierarchy of inheritance (don't know if that's done though).

I agree that visual programming seems to be one of the great failed dreams - lots of academics and practitioners tried it, and it just doesn't seem to work. Although, the crop of XML-mappers (mapforce, biztalk mapper) do represent simple functions in a visual language, and seem to own that market. I agree it's not serious programming, but more "coding for non-coders" (and it's marketed as such). Yet, it has a place - this time, for business analysts. There are non-programmers everywhere who need to do some kind of coding - and creating a safe, useful tool for them is worthwhile. And maybe even for coders sometimes, if (and only if) the task really doesn't need serious programming. Examples: make; regular expressions; paths; printf/scanf; JSON; HTML (though these mini-languages aren't visual, they also aren't suitable for serious programming). I'd add SQL, bash, sed and awk, but they are powerful enough; just awkward.

I was intrigued by your suggestion that one can't abstract a visual language. While there are templates, maybe one can do better. The anchors and widgets changing the placement on resize are a kind of abstraction - but you're right, you can't make your own abstractions. No one's done it - it doesn't mean there isn't a way to do it. Maybe there is.

However, for interaction, I think you're pretty right. Although some standard styles of interaction, and standard ways of generalizing/abstracting them could be captured, you can't have create new styles or generalizations using this system. It isn't powerful enough.

> Maybe we could create a better visual version of abstraction, but I don't feel it's the most promising direction to take in order to make abstraction more powerful.

The thing about visual programming is that it helps people. I agree it's unlikely to make abstraction more powerful (though with pure research you don't know what you'll find). I think it would be really cool to create visual abstraction, that is usable and intuitive, when it seemed impossible.

PS: just a thought: if an "interaction" a kind of mapping where by if you do X, then Y happens, could that not be represented in the same visual way that XML mappers use (above)? Functional abstraction could also be represented as a visual mapping - but it certainly is not a natural or intuitive form for it.
Pirate Bay Trial Day 8: Pirates Kill the Music Biz
Highest paid jobs in the US
How2s.org for your How-Tos
You probably have a text file somewhere on your computer with a couple of How Tos. Why not share them with everyone else on the net? How2s.org wants to become the Wikipedia for How Tos and is looking for contributors who'd like to engage in a promising project.
Very cool. I would love to see this market converge with the Arduino scene to create some very novel uses for interaction. Heck, maybe this is the sort of device that could help launch the "Smart Grid" everyone's getting so worked up about.
Apologies - I read "in that the code doesn't live directly behind the GUI elements" as an inference that it lived somewhere else. I just wanted to add a clarification in case others read it the same way.
Wordpress Tutorials
Actually, there are two views of functional programming:

1) Default to functional ideas: Variables are immutable, recursion is encouraged, etc; but you can get access to imperative code when needed (Call this the Algoritmically functional languages)

2) Functional is the norm: You can't write non-pure functions with side-effects at all. These are the Pure Functional languages.

I am leaning towards 1 more than 2 personally, but many people would disagree with me on that one. The question is: Do you want a usable program written in class 1 or 2? Because there is a hell of a difference between them and how you build software for the two classes.

Interesting class 1 projects, where you can get the source code, are: ejabberd, mldonkey, unison, harmony/boomerang, coq, twelf, isabelle, coccinelle, and mlton.

Interesting class 2 projects could be xmonad, darcs, and GHC.

Of these projects, some would be easily implementible in imperative languages, some would be hard but doable and some would be insanely impossible to do. Please note that all things on the list are useful and elegant. But they might not have a user-base as big as other projects.
And MUDs!