skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask: Functional Programming: Where to Start?
The, "Why I Hate Lisp" post that's been on the top of the page all day finally prodded me to start reading PG's writings on Lisp. I have a BS in Math, so my curiosity is piqued and I want to start learning functional programming.

Currently I develop in C#, Javascript, Python, PHP, and Java (ordered by proficiency).

I want to get suggestions from the HN community on which functional language (or language that supports functional-esque programming) is the best place to start with the criteria for "best" being, you can also recommend a well written book to go along with the language and that the language might allow me to leverage my current experience (unless the pure kick-ass-ness of the language outweighs any benefit I might gain by leveraging my experience. i.e. Scheme > F#).

Thanks!
At my former employer we did some work integrating QuickBooks with several existing systems.

I wanted: Documentation; Intuit gave: Cut-and-paste C# examples.

I wanted: an easily parse-able format; Intuit gave: almost-XML-but-not-quite (order of elements is important!)

I wanted: a Linux server; Intuit gave: something that was almost but not entirely incapable of operating for six hours at a stretch without dying silently.

I wanted: descriptive error messages; Intuit gave: "Yeah error $RANDOM? That means restart the server."

To be fair the client-server API was reasonably sane, it was the interchange format itself that was bonkers.

I'd love to calculate the number of developer hours it cost working around those misfeatures just to get a reasonable facsimile of RPC working.

Anyway, I hate QuickBooks.
I agree, I edited it to clean it up a bit
Not necessarily, but favoring intellectually rewarding stuff is a good way to keep the front page from getting saturated with e.g. lolcats.
Lunchtime - doubly so.
Scalp Infections - Symptoms
There are many definitions and symptoms commonly described as "scalp infections". There are in fact quite a few quite different reasons why your scalp may be sore, itchy, inflamed burning red or infected.
The Six Webs by Bill Joy
I have no plans to commercialize many of my ideas. Hundreds just sit in envelopes & notebooks.

I can't figure out the "hack" you speak of in your profile. Viewing source makes no difference - there is no additional information to work with? Perhaps I am missing something?
DNSCurve: DJB's proposal for securing DNS
The Presentation-Layer Arms Race?
Beyond the floating-point problems, there's also the automatic name capitalization, the automatic replacement of "teh" for "the", the automatic conversions of numbers into dates, and many more.

Everyday practice gets me a bit more and more annoyed at all the automatisms that software office packages come with. And they are nearly all on by default! It takes a skilled person about 10 minutes to disable nearly all automatisms in MSWord or in OpenOffice Write, in several menus. In MSExcel, I don't even know where to look myself (having switched to Gnumerics long ago).

We would all appreciate one single button that says: "Don't do anything unless I told you to."
If you are doing any sort of data analysis you really need to avoid spreadsheets.

Unfortunately, most data analysis is just as bad. I have worked with SAS & R code, thousands of lines long, all without a single test. Basically a big series of hacks. Mostly, statisticians I have worked with have no concept of testing, or even why it's necessary.

I shudder to think of the gross error in research results from all I have seen!
>> Saying that time might be an illusion is saying that time might not be "real".

No, the word "illusion" references an artifact that is both real and effective, yet whose true nature is misunderstood.

Moreover, for X to be an illusion, it necessarily must exist in some way.
I have a brilliant proof of this, but I'm so busy it'll have to wait until tomorrow.
Thats Why No-One Will Remember Your Name
All Computer Science is either assembly programming or garbage collecting.
Basic summary: DNSSEC adds new DNS records in order to provide end-to-end security; DNSCurve adds protocol level security instead, but does so in a far more cryptographically sound way.

Personally I'm not happy with either solution. Getting the cryptography right is important, but end-to-end security is also important -- the ideal outcome here would be if a new DNSSEC2 was created which used djb's curve25519 instead of RSA1024, but I don't think this is very likely to happen any time soon.
I suspect #tweetmyjobs is trending simply because TweetMyJobs' many accounts hashtag it to every post they make. Their posts are automatically-generated got-to-fit-in-140 gobbledygook, and several of their accounts that I checked have been suspended presumably for their repetitive nonsense content. It looks like a developed-by-the-lowest-bidder infrastructure designed by people who haven't really thought things through (you're expected to register an account in order to see the list of Twitter accounts? And can only browse job descriptions by visiting those Twitter accounts and then clicking a shortlink that then links back to the site?). TweetMyJobs is, as far as I can tell, a mess. They're getting publicity only because their hashtag hit some Twitter mindshare event horizon and gave people something to talk about without needing to investigate too much on their own.

So, uh, I appreciate that you're focusing on making yours more useful. Long-term approval usually comes from products made with care.

While searching for a job, I physically am usually limited to a few applicable dimensions (physical location, field, experience range). If I could tailor the experience on Twhired to target those dimensions then it would make my interactions much more effective. A focus on mining or transcribing accurate location and field metadata plus an interface for drilling down based on those would be a good way to fit my needs as a user.
Since you explicitly mentioned C# and F#, I'd suggest OCaml. There's a free translation of a French O'Reilly book, _Developing applications with Objective Caml_, at http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/ (the site seems to be down for me at the moment). The first few chapters focus on functional programming, then imperative programming, then compare their strengths, weaknesses, and when using each is most appropriate. (OOP and others are covered later in the book.) It's a pretty good intro to FP, imho.

Once you know FP techniques, you can apply them in many languages people don't tend to think of as functional (though tail-call optimization helps, and support for higher-order functions is all but necessary); I write strongly FP-influenced code in Lua, for example.

Scheme is also an utterly fantastic language, but I'm going to defer recommendations there to others. (Except: I really like Chicken - http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/)
TV/Movies talent is a winner-take-all business right now. If people start making cheaper productions the talent payment tail would get heavier.

And/or talent would be payed with equity.
Except coffee shops are for-profit.

Theoretically speaking. See:

http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/?dupe=with_honor +

"I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

+ No clue what that query parameter is doing there, but I got to it with Google.
Or, to bastardize Greenspun's Tenth Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_Tenth_Rule):

All programming is either in Lisp or reimplementing it.
Anti-religious motivated downmods? Not cool, and not in the spirit of HN. Plus the idea that the whole world is a computer simulation is not religious and might also explain things.
It definitely won't hurt to encourage people to buy more hardware, but the hardware doesn't matter nearly as much as the content. Kindle being a universal eBook manager type software brand is far more valuable to Amazon than keeping the books exclusive to the hardware.
The kindle is not selling and has no future.

This is a great move for Amazon, leave the hardware (low profit, high maintenance) and focus on eBooks (high profit, low maintenance)

Sound strategy in the long run.
Erlang is a nice, practical one that has some very evident sweet spots and is good in the real world. Haskell seems to be where a lot of the academic world is at, if you're going for something that's more a learning experience rather than something strictly practical (not to say you can't do real world stuff with Haskell, but historically, that hasn't been its emphasis).
How can an entity that is outside of time think us "continously"?
This paper is from 2004, any updates? Did microsoft add an option to disable the conversion? Are public databases cleaner?
Delaware if you want to take external investment or are looking for an IPO. Nevada if you're self-funded.
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We are still far from the HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's "2001". However, once we are able to be understood emotionally and spoken to with humanesque emotions, the line between personal and impersonal software will become greyer.

Check out this online demo of the near current state-of-the-science in real-time speech synthesis (in many languages). It does not do natural pauses, for one thing, and there is a noticeable lack of tone and emotion. However, once real-time speech synthesis gets to the level of National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts" or books-on-tape, we'll be talking to our AI psychologists.

TTS demo (Flash based)

http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo...

NPR's Selected Shorts

http://www.symphonyspace.org/shorts
"Don't do anything unless I told you to."

For a moment there you made me have a bad flashback to Microsoft Frontpage circa 1997.
That particular disincentive is already handled properly by the decreasing marginal value of money. Unfortunately, taxes add even further pressure.

Most people won't change their habits, but it is always the marginal earner who has to decide Do I work x% harder for x% less money?
Hacking an old VCR - Tons of cool stuff inside your VCR
Picking areas is important in job searches. You do need to find ways to integrate it.

You need to look at similar features on major job search engines and integrate a few of them if possible. I knwo it won't work as well, but that woud be nice.

Also, the ability to turn a search result (i.e. design San Francisco) into an RSS feed.
Please fix irrelevant results. Search for 'rfid tutorial' gives a Java JDBC page at the top.

Also, layout is not a differentiation so please stick to google style and stop wasting time on it.
Right, that was the last thing I heard as well. Guess I'm not up to date on all the latest t-shirt hell news.

Perhaps this is a prank also. Maybe they'll hire a web designer and then announce a layoff of 50% of their staff to cut costs.
The problem is that the marginal value of the employee to the company is relatively low compared to the amount of extra in taxes they'd have to pay if they wanted to give that employee a raise.

It is often a much better idea for both the company and the worker to use some non-monetary compensation, because the benefit and cost fits within both of their marginal value curves. Otherwise the employee would only see a few more cents, and the company would be paying significantly more taxes (withheld) that they may not be willing to pay.
Two of the most workable suggestions there seem to be getting it onto 4chan, and getting it to the pirate bay guys (via irc). Whatever your views on the pirate bay (pirates!) and 4chan (pedos!), it seems to me that they provide an important service.

There would seem to be a vested interest for the powers that be to shut these venues down. I think for this reason alone the rest of us ought to support them, even if we don't agree with _everything_ they stand for, or do, or enable.

ThePirateBay is in a position to make a fight for this (4chan woudn't last 10 minutes, Tor doesn't have the profile, resources or users), and I stand by them.
That is one of the funniest things I have read in a long long time. Although I do feel so sorry for them as an entrepreneur. It must be like some sort of terrible nightmare for them.
If time is an illusion that might explain why I feel like it disappears.
I still believe in film as an art form but for a commercial production webshow it may be overkill, especially as HD cameras get better.

I think that for content to be produced for online (not just as a novelty webisode but as an actual artform) people need to start thinking outside the 22 minute content 8 minute ad format for half hour blocks of television.

For example, a standard sitcom format goes like this.

Credits
Story (teaser / cold open)
Commercial
Story
Commercial
End of Story
Commercial
Tag
Credits

Its a relic that was built upon from the radio age, timing designed specifically for synchronous listeners. Now we're entering the Asynchronous age, I'm curious how the ability to skip commercials (Tivo) and the associated changes in timing (shorter ad blocks for online) affect how "funny" comedies are now (since timing is everything in comedy)

It would be interesting to see some A/B testing with recutting lengths of commercials for the exact same episodes with a randomised set of people and see if the net effect of how "funny" a show is is noticeable or negligible.

(sorry, just late night stream of conciousness rambling)
Don't use "twa" in app names. It's tired like the flickr r. Also, many people don't know how to spell "twhirl", despite many thousands of users. I'll look at the actual app shorlty.
> The kindle is not selling and has no future.

Numbers? That's a big statement that -- unless you're on Amazon's board, I guess -- you don't really have any idea is accurate.
"If I am going to produce art, I would do so in the material world."

Great works of art make one feel beauty. Is feeling beauty a spiritual event?

I do not know what one may mean by spirituality. Perhaps they regard spirituality in the religious sense, such as a belief in a god and that he will take care of them. However I consider spirituality to be something intrinsic in all human being and quite detached from religion.

Much as intellectual stimulation is the food of the brain so too beauty is the food of the heart and I believe it is in the heart where spirituality, as I see such term, reigns.

If spirituality is what I see it to be, then your argument seems to be flawed as you consider spirituality to be detached from the material world.

I do not see how one can distinguish easily the material world from the spiritual one. If the act of helping out a poor person is considered to be spiritual, such act is still carried out in the material world. It is a material act as you are helping him with material things. Same argument can be used when helping an old lady pass the road. So too the act of feeling beauty is experienced in the material world however the act itself is spiritual.
For some even making a difference in the material world is a spiritual act and certainly love is spiritual however facilitated through the material world.
All assumptions about generalizations are generalizations.
An Interview with Collective Intelligence in Action Author Satnam Alag
Ajax Data Controls and Effects to Work with Tables
A while ago, I heard a talk by the CEO of Wreck A Movie (http://www.wreckamovie.com/). They made a sci-fi movie in an open-source manner: People from anywhere contributed 3D models of spaceships and other graphical assets.

If you could tag your contributions with CC-Attribution licenses and have your name appear in the credits, that might be enough incentive for a lot of people to bring down production prices even more.
that page is borderline unreadable.
We like to laugh, and we would have laughed if the joke was original.

Laughing to the same joke over and over is retarded. We have seen this same (or variation of this same) joke many times before. Its getting old, tired and uninspiring.
I just downloaded it and took it for a test drive with my existing Kindle books. It's great, really.

The UI is distraction free (just a page of text). Page advances are done with the standard flick, and are actually faster than a kindle due to the e ink. Text looks good and sharp, and the syncing is great. I'm accessing the same content I was reading this morning and I'm on the same page. Really well done.

Obviously, there are many scenarios where the kindle is far better (any kind of longer reading) -- but I now have something I can pick up and read intermittently when I don't have my Kindle. Sweet.

Now, I really wish I could email articles / snippets. This applies to the Kindle as well. There are tons of articles in the New Yorker I'd love to forward.
Yeah...we do most aircraft structural analysis in excel. It scares the hell out of me.
Trying to make the trending list by spamming didn't occur to me before. Interesting thought, although personally I never look at the trending topics. But I guess we'll see more of that spam approach in the future.
Maybe time only exists if it can be observed.
Most people would say start with SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/), and I think I would agree. It really stresses higher order programming.

OCaml would be nice too, for you, since F# is at least as powerful as it, and you could start using that in your C# environment.
You're both (a little) wrong! :)

You can't call something an illusion just because its true nature is misunderstood. An illusion is something that looks deceptively like something else. A hologram of a table is an illusion, but just misunderstanding the nature of a table (e.g. misunderstanding the fundamental particles from which it's constructed) does not make it an illusion.

Saying that time is an illusion is like saying that we appear to be living in a universe with time, but actually we don't. We are in fact experiencing something that looks like time, but isn't really time.

But obviously we do live in a universe with time, and the fact that time may turn out to be something strange or unexpected does not make it an illusion. It just means we misunderstood its true nature.
I know I'm biased towards 3D animation, but I can give you examples where thats simply not the case.

Take Pixar, It's the highest profile of the 3D animation studios and can you name any of the voice talent for WALL-E? There was no "top talent" there in any notable role, in fact, apart from one of Pixar's 4 main directors (Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo fame) I'm pretty sure anyone would be hard pressed to name anyone of note in a major role.

Now lets look at Dreamworks Animation, Arguably number 2 (even though they are more profitable than Pixar and also have the highest grossing animation film of all time in Shrek 2...)

Apart from voice talent in their films, can you name any of the talent in the films? Its a difficult task. The talent is shared among the many people that work there.

The reality is that voice talent is the "draw card" for 3D animation and is one of the minor expenditures for any 3D film.

So let's go back to Pixar, when Pixar was first producing their films, their distribution deals with Disney had them giving up 50% of the profits for the film.... They do all the hard work and only get back 50% of the money.

On that same business model, If you figure out a way to only monetise your film 50% of the the time and not care about it being pirated (even welcoming the filesharers as pseudo distribution/marketing) - you're off to a good start.

If you start reducing the workload on your animators/modellers (using limited cast/sets, animating more with mocap, scripting "extras"... essentially adopting a sitcom format) you can get away with doing episodic content with a significantly smaller team. Keep voice acting internal (even Pixar directors do voices on their films occasionally)... you're reducing costs further.

This I think is one of the ways out to cheaper productions and since online video has been notoriously hard to monetise - its a start.

I've also got a couple other ideas on ways to continue monetising off the model I'm proposing, but yeah, there is potential there.
I really liked Cuil's old layout, and I like the new one even more. But the poor relevancy of search results prevents me from using them.
This is the sort of error that worries me a lot about "programmable" business systems.

That people who don't know the domain and tools well enough, and don't have the pernickety edge-case worrying mindset will introduce errors like this. Writing a report that doesn't take into account a new database table, editing permissions and leaving a big hole in them, etc.

What I'm not sure about though, is whether it really matters. Whether the tradeoff with only allowing certain people to make changes saves enough trouble that it's worth the limitations. Businesses with people are very good at surviving errors, after all...
Do you Know What is SEO? Feel Free to Ask Us..
EO is a Techniques, its hard to give you a one liner or quick guidance but you can read link development and search engine optimization forums here at Digital Point and other material for a while to get some idea. after that if you have any specific question, feel free to ask and there are lot of people here would would like to help

Regards,
Arun,
That is just scary.
Hey, Alex Payne, Get Off Your High Horse
Ask HN: Website advice on Drilling Down fast...
The problem I have is I want to drill down very fast for the user in a web based environment.

Exp:

I have an organization I need to find located in Daytona Beach, Florida, USA.

If I gave the user a list or a map of countries they can look at, what is the fastest possible method to get to Daytona Beach?

I could go USA -> Florida -> Daytona Beach -> Organization. While doing so I create a new page each time. This example can be seen at craigslist.com because thats how they do their drill down.

I was sort of thinking like a list on the very left of the screen. The user clicks on the country and a new list gets generated via javascript to the very right of it of states. They then click on a State and a new list then again gets generated to the very right of that with cities. etc...

I would love to hear more ideas. I want the fastest user interaction drill down with it being extremely simple for the user.

So, what do you think?
Here's a spammy thing I've seen that I expect to see more of "@JoeBlow is giving away a Widget! Retweet this for a chance to win!"
I think, as pointed out in another comment, that this post isn't just lolcat-esque--it does paint a picture of programming in the 1980s, something many of us haven't experienced.
Shotput Ventures to Grow Tech Startups in Atlanta
Recap: 2009 Georgia Technology Summit
Sony Ericsson Themes : Light Flow-2
Wave collapse hasn't been taken seriously by physicists in years. It's been thoroughly debunked again and again (c.f. http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_toc.html, http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf). The press keeps reporting it because it's such a delicious mystery.
Jadoos creates a web universal remote control and social operating system
How to get more sales with your e-commerce site
Amazon to Sell Books for iPhones
SimpleCDN looks great at first glance and is a great offering.. BUT it doesn't perform reliably for a commercial project...we have had outages already this week 'stream not found' and today we can't even get a 256kb stream from the network..
High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing: Assembling larger products (with videos)