skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Riemann is a giant ball of mutable state and IO, and makes extensive use of the STM: https://github.com/aphyr/riemann/blob/master/src/riemann/str...

The critical thing, as you observed, is to separate IO from retryable STM transactions with a barrier; e.g. by receiving data, doing an idempotent computation inside dosync or swap!, and then emitting results. Haskell has an advantage in that this separation is provable by the type system, whereas in Clojure you need to remember.

A contrived example:

(let [pizza (get-from-fridge)
meal (dosync
(alter eaten-foods conj pizza)
(deref eaten-foods))]
(tell-friend "So far I ate" meal))

where get-from-fridge and tell-friend are IO operations, and our list of eaten foods is mutated by pure functions.

In practice I don't find this particularly limiting: dosync and swap! are almost always short operations for performance reasons anyway. Then you return a consistent snapshot of the updated state from dosync--where multiple pieces of state are involved, you can use vectors or maps along with destructuring bind. Sometimes it's a tad unwieldy, but typically much shorter than the equivalent mutex dance.

There are other aspects of Clojure's concurrency libraries, like agents, futures, and promises, which are useful in IO. Specifically, agents give you asynchronous serializability, futures give you asynchronous concurrency, and promises allow for synchronous handoff of delayed values. Those are quite useful when working with IO, though for heavy lifting you may be better off using explicit queues and worker pools from java.util.concurrent.

Sometimes I think of Clojure (as an imperative language) as the dual of Haskell's lazy evaluation model. Clojure uses futures, promises, and lazy sequences to provide explicit laziness, where Haskell uses the IO monad to provide explicit ordering. Both have an STM for serializable, atomic mutability between threads.
I heard so much about death panels and blah blah blah but I absolutely want to sign a document that says that if keeping me alive is going to cost over x dollars, please pull the plug and save the money.

The x will probably change as I make more money. Right now, two million dollars is probably where I'd balk. (Pretty sad I know but I think the government could put that two million dollars to better use than to keeping me alive.)

I guess a death panel is inevitable. I am pretty sure I will change my mind and chicken out at the last minute and say "I want to live even if it costs ten million to keep me alive". Don't listen to the senile me! Let me die and use the money on what matters -- kids.

I don't have kids and don't plan on having any anytime soon.
(I'm sure you live somewhere else but) RS ships next day in Turkey :) Got one in 1.5 days, actually.
Agreed. Insuring against inevitability is silly, and health insurance shouldn't cover those events.

A friend of mine uses the analogy of "food insurance" to describe the dysfunctional nature of attempts to insure against the inevitable.
I would really draw a distinction between "as a person" and professional persona. I don't like a lot of things people say on the Internet, but I'd generally trust even those people to be reasonable people in other contexts. And there are people I respect professionally who turn out to be utterly obnoxious in real life or one on one social settings.
How to find the best people to work with (be one)
The Algorithmic Experience: Portal as Art
1. Oh please, this is just a truism expressing your general political views. Government does lots of things well. Every time there's a relevant accident, the NTSB is on the spot within 24 hours. The FAA does an amazing job. I could go on with many other examples; and where government is slow to respond, it's often because the rules require government to engage in a lengthy public consultation process or make it easy for third parties to litigate against the government (see: any case involving environmental review). It's not like waste, inefficiency, and so on are absent from the private sector.

2. The more your choices impact the lives of others (making yourself chronically ill and sucking up expensive medical resources, driving at 100mph in the rain), the more costs your bad choices impose on other people. Government is the agency we delegate some of our individual autonomy to in order to deal with such systemic problems. The alternative is everyone suing everyone else all the time.

3. I'll tell you the downsides: there are waiting lists for some procedures that are in high demand. There are about as many industrial disputes as before. Everybody blames the government for everything (like a tiny country hospital shutting down, nurses' pay, availability of some experimental treatment of unknown efficacy). A commonly-voiced fear is that if healthcare is cheap then everyone will crowd up doctor's waiting rooms all the time. This doesn't happen, because other than a tiny number of hypochondriacs nobody likes going to the doctor unnecessarily, for the same reason that most people don't engage in recreational dentistry.

The fact is that healthcare can't clear like a normal market for three reasons: a) there are genetic factors that you have no ability to control or predict that can make you sick unexpectedly; b) you typically don't have a choice about when you get sick so you can't defer your healthcare spending accordingly; c) most participants in the market are woefully under-informed because they don't have any kind of medical degree, and price theory demands market transparency for all participants in order for equilibrium to emerge and vendors to be price takers. What we have instead is a monstrously inefficient and unresponsive form of monopolistic competition, in which part of your healthcare costs go towards billboards and TV commercials for goods and services whose efficacy you are incapable of judging properly, massive layers of incomprehensible administration, and heads-I-win-tails-you-lose pricing that royally shafts the individual consumer in insurance and care markets.
Thursday, January 10: 1M/1M New Year Challenge 2013 Finals I
Got mine from http://www.mcmelectronics.com/
I assume that part of the cruft is having to support Windows ABI, etc. Is there a straightforward way to add that to Clang/LLVM? Then MS could stop working on C compilers and instead continue improving their already-amazing IDE tools.

Anyone here able to comment on what difficulties the VS team faces?
Yes, I read the article. Pushing basic functionality to a plugin is not a solution, as themes would still need to be rewritten to use the plugin.

Putting basic functionality in a plugin works with RoR because developers are used to it, but it is guaranteed to break if attempted with WordPress.
While most employers do offer an "extra frills" health plan as part of employment, private insurance at fairly good rates is available to everyone. I could call up Blue Cross this afternoon and get a private health plan equivalent to my employer's if I chose to.

EDIT: I still really like the Australian system and wouldn't be upset if we started incorporating some of the ideas it contains. I just wanted to point out that for at least this one case the Canadian situation isn't quite as bad as it would appear.
I buy blurays exclusively now; I tried buying online, but I have not been particularly impressed by the quality. Bluray discs approach cost parity after they have been out a year or two, so I don't pay all that much more either.
It only makes it slightly better if it's your company, but even if it's your own company something out of your control can fuck it up. We often forget that you can get kicked out of your own company. Apple, Cisco, etc. I once did an amazing startup that was working in the online pokern space, we were making good money and everyone loved what we were doing. Congress fucked that up!

The world is full of uncertainty, and the grass isn't that much greener with your own company, if it is even greener at all.
How to Stay Productive, Even When the Power Goes Out
I had seen a similar story few months back about lego, if true, lego is a really nice company then.
How close are you sitting to your TV that you can't see the whole screen through the glasses?
A good book to continue your reading is The Healing of America by T.R. Reid. The author traveled to eight countries, checking out treatment options for his bum shoulder and learning about their healthcare systems.

Canada was one and did have some advantages. He also went to the U.K. But the best systems were in France, Germany, and Japan. They all have private (but nonprofit) insurance, a mandate, and no exclusions for preexisting conditions.

But they also have good electronic medical records systems, a government-controlled price list, and no claim denials allowed for anything on the list. Many German doctors don't even hire office staff. They swipe your card, your medical records pop up on screen, and whatever they do they're guaranteed to get paid in a week, no questions asked.

(On the other hand, another good book is Best Care Anywhere, which advocates extending the V.A. model to everyone. A nice bit from that book is the VistA medical records system, which V.A. doctors and interns built and opensourced. It's been adopted by several national healthcare systems.)
They could have branded it almost as a Photoshop Lite, a friend remarked if it was legitimate then it becomes the drug dealer model, cheap entry to get you hooked then the prices go up. Could have helped Adobe capitalise off the large base of people who pirate it because they can't afford it.
Too bad you chose to misread the comment :/

The choice is in your actions, not your feelings.
Even with HD, it's worth noting how little 1080 content is consumed.

This isn't a consumer choice, from what I can tell. Existing distribution networks don't want to deal with the data rates, and 1080p video is actually pretty taxing so a lot of slightly older hardware is too slow.
Well considering the pi can't run Netflix I would have to disagree with you. There are tons of hardware projects using the pi. I know of a few people locally that just got a pi and basic electronics kit to learn with.

Arduino arduino arduino
Nice work, guys!
The transitive insight here is that operating the company for the long haul comes from the top, so when I was at Intel there was never any doubt in my mind that Intel planned to be around 100 years from now, so being a middle manager there would (and for some has) been a lifes work. My manager there, the guy who hired me in 84 retired after having been there for 30 years (he had started in 1980).
You can get COBRA so it's not that you won't have insurance but rather that you will pay for it yourself. And have 18 months to find a longer term option if you can. It's what I did although I am single without kids so my rate was significantly lower.

Of course that is exactly what your employer paid on your behalf before. So you're basically complaining that other people will now no longer be subsidizing your medical costs. A private system won't help you much. A public one will but merely because people who pay taxes will now be subsidizing you.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. You think it is not an accident? (They changed the URL, by the way. The one all the blogs were linking to is 404.)
The system has been screwed up to the point where it certainly appears as if we need it, as if that is the most just solution to the problems. However, that appearance is a mirage.

Unfortunately, we are so far down the path of doing things the wrong way that stating the proper solution only leads to misunderstanding. Think of a complex software system that has hack piled upon hack, and where the only programmers left are those who've been the ones piling on the hacks. These are not the people who can understand that what they've been doing is wrong.

Our system is the final consequence of people who, among other things, want safety guaranteed by the government. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees in life, so they are chasing a fantasy, and fantasies can become hideously expensive, as this one has. It is tragic that they do not comprehend what they are doing to themselves, but it is even more tragic that what they are doing isn't only to themselves, but to those of us who understand as well.
The paradox of choice.

One implementation that's good for 80% of users will gain more traction than 10 implementations where each user has to figure out which one to use.

Lisp attracts maximizers, while satisficers are more successful at delivering software to real people.
Visionaries: Zipcar Founder Sees Success In Sharing.
There must be a better way for the Awl author to title the article. Maybe, "Should San Francisco be Silicon Valley's Brooklyn?". Or maybe, "Why Is Silicon Valley Not A Major Metro Area?".
41 Examples of Sketches and Drawings in Website Layouts
Can someone comment on seafile please?
- oss Dropbox alternative
- seems to be better than owncloud, sparcleshare
- (see seafile.com/en/private/ and
github.com/haiwen/seafile)
1) Given that the health insurance companies in America make billions in profit every year, I'm confident the government can be more efficient than that.

2) This is a naive line of reasoning. The (socialist) FDA already stops you from buying food with lead in it. The (socialist) DMV forces you to wear a seat-belt and wear a motorbike helmet and the (socialist) Police stop you beating people up on the street whenever you want.

You are basically saying you don't want "big government" to tell you want you can't do, even though those rules and limitations would make your society better for everyone overall. Everyone's happiness would go up. This is very selfish and shortsighted.

3) It's very simple. Everyone is equal. A billionaire is treated the same as a homeless person. A strongly classed society (like America) does not like this idea, because Americans define success as "better than other people". Public healthcare would take away this distinction.
I've found that thinking of the next 5, 10, and 50 years is a useful mental trick. It puts me in a frame of mind that helps me make better decisions: will working myself to death on feature X help me 10 years from now? (Very rarely, the answer is yes.) Does it make sense to spend more time socializing, studying, or working? I don't want to exercise now, but how will going to the gym affect me in 5 years?

The funny thing is that I make better decisions even with extremely short term projects. If I'm working on a 1-month software project, I'll get it done better and faster if I have the perspective that I'll be using it for 10 years than if I have the perspective that I'll be using it for 6 months.

So it may be worth putting yourself in a long-term state of mind, even when it's not necessarily true.
I just had a slight disagreement with the "pretty much impossible" claim.

Thanks for pointing that out. Being a scientist, I too would take issue with this :) hence, I'm extremely interested in discovering whether this would be a workable, real-world solition for the problem I described.

I'm out of time right now, but would you mind emailing me? (Address is on my profile page.) I'd really love to get your thoughts about a couple followup questions that I have.

Thanks again!
pretty rare in US/Europe to have powercut, almost the same tricks used everyday in Asia/South America/Africa

just saying
Watch out, Ember is coming!

Seriously, if you are using Backbone for somewhat big apps, stop it and start learning Ember. The API will stabilize soon as the 1.0.0 version gets released, and the show will begin.
Show HN: Fluxmonkey, Because nobody likes manually updating screenshots
This describes why I have such a hard time learning new languages. I want to learn Haskell, but I always end up giving up, because whatever I'm trying to do in Haskell, I can do in Python very easily.
Ask HN: Do you use a glossy screen? Has your eyesight gotten worse?
Yeah, I saw that too. I think you're referring to:

Lego tracks down rare train set for Asperger's boy, 11, who saved up for it for two years only to discover it was no longer made

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2241454/Now-thats-cu...
It didn't matter, the reference frame was aligned with php for most things, it seems to me that it was more "valuable" to have bad glue between curl, mysql, foo, than have a good linguistic substrate and good stdlib.
Hijack any launchrock page in 1 minute
Wouldn't either 1) fixing the "technical glitch" that caused them to shut down the activation server or 2) just giving away CS2 for free be better solutions than this?
It is (explicitly, as a planned-and-tested-for-outcome) to cause players to not automatically attach "$3.50" to an in-game purchase which costs "3 dragon egs", thus not activating as much resistance to purchasing as it would if the prices were trivially calculable. (For instance, if you sold 10 dragon eggs for $10.)

You want to make it very obvious to people what they're paying for eggs, but very, very, very easy to spend eggs once they have them, both because a) it's in your best interest that they run out of eggs and re-buy them and b) because you will not be able to recognize revenues for eggs which are bought but not converted into in-game assets. (Revenue recognition for this is a deep and weird topic. Ask me some other time.)
MK808's might be a better alternative for that, with built-in wifi and male hdmi dongle type design.

My son (6) got his pi as his first computer, we built a lego case for it and he gets excited everytime he connects peripherals. It may not be hw hacking for us, but it is for little folks.
Your account is a week old with 9 posts!
The difference between marginal tax rates and effective tax rates is the difference between night and day.

After all, on a marginal-rate basis, the U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate in the world. On an effective-rate basis, the U.S. is competitive with nations which do not have a corporate income tax rate. Many large U.S. corporations have effective rates in the low single digits and in some cases have negative effective rates.
What It’s Like to Experience New Technology After 25 Years in Jail
"To the objective, cynical observer, 3D TV has always come across as a fad fabricated by TV makers and Hollywood to sell more TVs and Blu-ray discs."

I'm perhaps a subjective observer, working in the entertainment biz, though I consider myself cynical enough to pass similar judgment. 3D has been a fantastic way to build sizable margin into box office ticket prices, and presumably, the same logic compelled studios and electronics manufacturers to push 3D technology into the home: to keep the home video revenue stream alive for a few more, gloriously lucrative years.

Now I'll remove my cynic's cap. I think 3D is a very interesting piece of technology. I can count on five fingers the number of movies I've seen that make truly good use of 3D. Nonetheless, those that do seem to do it well. Say what you will about Dances With Aliens, errr, Avatar. But the use of 3D in that picture was pretty freaking cool. Same with (some) of the 3D in The Hobbit. When used to convey a sense of depth and scale, especially in wide shots over vertical landscapes, 3D can really bring a sense of majestic proportion to a big-budget film.

Does that mean I want to invest in a 3D TV for my home? No. The calculus that went into most consumers' purchases of 3D TVs was essentially "Eh, might as well." It was a hedge against the possibility that the future really would be all about 3D. If faced with a new TV purchase, some folks figured they might as well spring for the model with all the latest bells and whistles. If 3D ended up going nowhere, well, at least the TV could still play 2D at high def. There just weren't enough of these people to bankroll the 3D revolution, and/or enough people who could be convinced that a revolution was actually forthcoming.

As a consumer, as a production professional, and as a fanboy, I bear no animus toward 3D. I just think it will end up as another tool in the filmmaker's arsenal, rather than the Next Great Leap that Hollywood wanted people to think it was.
Also, there is nothing like the pressure of having to deliver on a project that someone is paying you for. Necessity is the best teacher.
>>"I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work."

It's crazy to me that a co-founder of a company would talk this way about their own business ... at least publicly.

For a company with paying customers, this kind of statement doesn't instill confidence in the long-term commitment of it's founders in the business.
Ask HN: How much would you pay to use HN?
Obviously, a community site like HN is a real boon for so many many people, developers, designers and artists. Hell, even a lot of online 'publications' are dependent on sites like HN (Eg. Techcrunch, Gizmodo, steal 90% of the stuff in here and sell it). So I was just wondering, if you had the opportunity to 'pay to use' a site like HN, where all the top news is right infront of you, with all the valuable insights, perspectives and feedback, how much would you pay to use a service like this?

I'm not going to work on it, I'm just curious to see if people would really pay to stay updated, these days. Especially when you have free 'feed-based' systems like Facebook doing a good job too.

Thanks
Not related, but also interesting. The railway U1 in Berlin going right through a house. Amazing when you are in front of the house's door. http://www.bahnbilder.de/1024/-hausdurchfahrt-im-uebergangsb...
New zero-background-required machine learning/AI courses are coming soon
Even seemingly modern, developed countries didn't have indoor plumbing in the 1930s.

My parents grew up in houses on modern (for the time) housing estates in England in the 1950s/1960s without indoor plumbing. Though it was indoor in the sense that the shed was attached to the house out back, but the plumbing was not inside the house until the late 1960s.

The number of dwellings in Japan with flush toilets increased from 45.9% in 1978 to 83.0% in 1998.

* Statistics Bureau, Japan.
Right, but your employer is still deducting that amount from your paycheck, so you are losing out.

(At the Canadian company I work for, they estimate the 'benefits' overhead is around 26% of my salary - Yes, that is extremely high, because I can't choose the plan or coverage, the company dictates it for me. Married people with 10 kids pay the same amount I do... so you can see I'm getting a shit deal and would much rather just have my own money to spend)
There's more to life than being happy
This probably depends on the environment (including alternatives) at the time.
CocoaPods Best Practices
So life/death insurance is silly?

No, insuring against an inevitability isn't silly because there are other factors to consider. Like when the inevitable occurs. Insurers are taking a risk that you put more in before that happens.
Companies make money off life insurance, even though mortality rates tend to 100% over time. It's similar with health insurance. This works due to several factors:

1. Insurance companies can invest payments from young people to cover costs when those people are older.

2. Not everyone gets old and sick. Healthy people who die in car accidents contribute much more than they take out.

3. While many people get old and sick, medical costs vary significantly and aren't very predictable for a given individual.

4. People are risk-averse. They would rather pay $1,500 every year than have a 1% chance of losing $100,000 in any given year. This is true even though 0.01 * $100,000 = $1,000 expected loss per year.
Let your products be sold by the very people who buy them from you.
Fair enough :) Sorry the reply here is late. I just logged in to check my profile.