skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, subatomic particles are the foundation for reality, but as humans we don't walk around thinking about the world in terms of each object's subatomic structure - it's simply too low a level for most activities. We operate at the level of thought, images, words, concepts - abstractions. Why should we be spending a lot time of programming at the level of the computer's fundamental structure or even be using idioms from that level? This is not to say we as researchers and practitioners should not comprehend this level and occasionally operate at it- but most of the time we should be expressing our ideas in the most expressive way possible.

Also I'd like point out it's not like functional programming is a fad. It's roots go back almost 50+ years alongside structured programming. These paradigms have coexisted and influenced each other significantly over this time and as evidenced by the current of crop of interesting programming languages, there's lot more evolving to look forward to.
General Motors Files For Bankruptcy (Chapter 11)
Sorry about the 500 issues. I'm working on fixing it at the moment. It's running on a 256MB slice with 2 other sites.

It only works for python packages currently. You can point it at any git repository that has a python package in it (watch the screencast).
Growing Social Networks: How Facebook, Twitter… grew their network
Really? Not the "20-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling windows that expose the entire San Francisco Bay"?
While the site is down, take a look at the demonstration video: http://vimeo.com/4936426?pg=embed&sec=
Moore's law doesn't have to do with processor speed. It has to do with the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.

Speed gains have been a side effect of this.
I suspect that you represent a small (significant?) market segment as I have not seen many IT book titles or series that meet your requirements. O'Reilly have a series, "Essentials" that appear to have started off with this intention but later titles are bloated.
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I don't think there was any "one true way"-ness in this article. It described a different way to write programs, and argued it's better. Don't let the use of the word "pure" fool you, I also expected an argument about "pure" functional languages vs mixed, but it was not the case. Pure programming, in this context, means locally side-effect free programming, using immutable data structures. It said nothing about using imperative programming in other parts of the software, or even about using non-immutable variables inside a function.
I have yet to find a comparable alternative to Photoshop. There are many attempts at duplicating it, but none of them are nearly as powerful as Photoshop.

I believe there are some "lite" versions of photoshop out there for cheaper prices, though...
I hope an iPhone app is on that list. :)
Jeff Atwood should be prohibited from ever putting the letter "N" next to the letter "P".
Most applications can't benefit from a parallelism on more than 4-8 cores.

But since the vast majority of people do not run one or two applications per computer, that doesn't matter that much. I'll go out on a limb and predict that the day is coming when no one ever closes an application. Actually, my parents are already there on their Mac Mini -- they only close windows, never applications, until a software update requires a reboot.
I've often felt that the best part of BMW's 325 is simply the lack of poor parts. The biggest annoyance that comes to mind is that the last door is hard to close because the cabin is air tight. Granted, I like a specific model year above others, but its interesting to note that slight luxury and a lack of deficiencies has produced a car with a legacy.
Summary: Jeff quotes what several blogs (and XKCD) have said about P = NP. As such, he gets it mostly right, but doesn't add much to the discussion.
I just copied and pasted a blog post I was writing into this and it worked incredibly well, a few minor issues with the tinymce editor, and one or two naive suggestions. however it picked up a lot of good suggestions.
Hollywood's Little Secret
Why would that be blocked?
Computer gamemakers eye social networks
even with computers that operated at, say .. the speed of light.

As opposed to our modern day computers, driven by steam and turtles.
I've got to say I'm impressed. They've got they're work cut out for them competing with Google's trust and market share, but there are a lot of useful tools built into the main pages.

And don't discount how many people will use Bing for the pretty pictures. Every single one I've seen has been stunning.
Site should be working again. To get an idea of what it does, check out this page:

http://pypants.org/projects/amqplib/0.6/evaluations/226/
Why Opera 10’s User Agent Smells Bad
That's not right. Many countries have a very unlevel playing field.
Why Browser Sniffing Stinks
The girl who cried Webmaster
...at 99cts.

Now that's disrupting.
But I wonder if "procedural programming is the foundation upon which all other edifices are constructed" is necessarily true. Could we not build a computer that was truly functional throughout?

Not to sound rude here, but I'm going to guess you have never done any low-level programming, with assembly, mnemonic and embedded microprocessors, circuit-design etc etc: Things which require that you fundamentally understand how computers work.

Not to say we shouldn't have ambition, but given today's technology a computer being "functional throughout" would be a VM running on top of 100% procedural logic.

His point is very much valid.
Link to single page version:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html?pagewant...

Beside, the Economist had this ages ago, and it was submitted to much discussion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490292

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1...

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554977

Having said that, it was submitted so long ago it looks like it's no longer possible to add comments there, so it may as well be discussed again here.
That's impossible! We had a test where we had to prove P =/= NP! :p
I still miss my plain, black Pumas with the silver leather stripe.
Here's a quick GreaseMonkey script to "fix" the results page layout for chronic Google addicts:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50649

Basically moved the results more against the left side and the "aside" bar is moved to the right.

Layout may be a little touchy as I did this more for demonstration than anything else.
Personally I don't care that much. Current processors are plenty fast as it is. I mean, it's always nice to have faster ones and I don't think there will ever be a point where everyone is satisfied and we stop improving them, but I'm just not CRAVING for more speed so much.

However, what I'd LOVE to have is ubiquitous availability of very fast persistent storage. It's really a pain to deal with the relative slowness of hard disks.

Something like memristors would be a solution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
I hope the article wasn't deployed with Rails, right now the site is down.
s/much/anything/
So then it's still at the early adopter stage. (An analogous point to just before Napster 0.1) When eBook readers (or whatever grows out of their technology) become as mainstream as iPods, we will have reached the point I'm thinking about. Tablet computing will finally have arrived. (Alan Kay's "Dynabook.")

Technology seeps into the culture only after decades and lots of false starts. (Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet.")
It's true. The next time I find a pair of shoes I like, I'm buying 20 pairs. I'll be buried with the 20th.
I think we are entering an age of consciousness.

In the same way, we are always in "Eternal September." Also, Gallium Arsenide: The Technology of the Future. Always Was. Always Will Be.

Maybe we'll hit a wall at the Singularity. I think it will be like hitting a too-low speedbump at highway speed: by then we'll be going too fast to notice it much.
This really can't be emphasized enough. I repeatedly fell into this trap of thinking, "If I just master this one more discipline, I'll finally know enough to build what I want". What you end up with is a daunting pile of textbooks to read and no real progress. It's a very insidious form of procrastination because it seems like a good and worthwhile thing to do. Of course, it IS good and worthwhile to learn new things, but learning alone doesn't produce any tangible results.

In the end, you can get a lot further than you think by just puzzling things out for yourself. Try something, see where it fails and adjust as necessary. You'll learn as you go and you'll have the advantage of knowing that what you learned is actually useful knowledge, because it solved a real life problem you encountered.
I'm actually working on integrating this into my site right now because the writing of our users will affect our public credibility, so this type of tool is crucial. Thanks for all the amazing work raffi!
> So his argument was unclear?

I didn't think so. Then again, I read the story as written instead of treating it as a basketball lesson and changing the facts to fit my world view.

I've no doubt that a full court press can be broken with sufficient skill and althetic ability and that a broken press is worse than no press. (I suspect that that's why NBA teams rarely use the press.)

However, if your opponents don't have that skill/ability, using the press apparently does put them at a disadvantage. That disadvantage may be sufficient to make up for other advantages that they have.

I find the "optimal" talk somewhat amusing.

We're talking about playing an opponent that has made certain decisions. You can win by taking advantage of those decisions. It doesn't matter what would happen against a different opponent until you run into said opponent.

That's especially true of perfect opponents. The fact that one strategy would fail worse than another against a perfect opponent doesn't matter unless you're playing a perfect opponent. Since they rarely exist and you're going to lose anyway, worrying about them seems dumb.

In some sense, there are no points for approximating optimality.

You're rarely playing an optimal opponent and there are no points for "optimality".
Try being an African American in the US? There's always history and other contingent circumstances to consider. In that light it is unfair to compare a Chinese immigrant in the US with a Moroccan immigrant in France. At least compare them to a Chinese immigrant in France.

BTW, I think Turks in Germany are actually doing very well.
Many people have thought about it, but I haven't heard of any solid implementations other than possibly the RoR client-side validation plugin mentioned by roryokane [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635997]. A recent article in CACM describes a promising approach with less promising syntax: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1461928.1461949
ooh how embarrassing. Looks like my little DreamHost account can't handle even trivial traffic :(

I thought I had wp-super-cache enabled but maybe not. I'm giving it a reboot now so we'll see if that fixes things.
Thanks for the correction, voltageek! And Smashing Mag is an excellent resource indeed.
Common Solecisms - Words you are almost certainly using incorrectly
Hopefully the "opinion leaders" that read this article will have the the nous to pick the writer's argument apart in this very conservative article.

The point of the sub-title is made that open source software has won the argument largely thanks to dot com boom and especially by companies like Google. The major reason for this is the openess of the data formats in open source software. So far, so good.

The writer then warns of the danger of data lock-in by "Cloud computing" evidenced by the trivial example of moving you MySpace profile to FaceBook and then making a claim moving from one service provider to another could be even more difficult than switching between software packages.

I refute this as any/most "cloud" service providers will understand that data ownership and availability is a key buying decision. As always, moving from one app to another is a huge pain and has spawned an industry in itself. Data Migration/ETL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load, anyone?
His last N posts pretty much add nothing to the conversation while making a few key sentences in bold.
I know, also working with Rails but couldn't miss it :D
PVI to buy E Ink for $215 million
Regular ASP.Net gives you this trough server-side validation controls, which is up to you to embed in your forms. This generates client-side Javascript with visual feedback for the user, where you are to some extent in control how the results will look.

If you tune up your ASP.Net to go include Enterprise Library you can use simple "proxy validation controls" which infers validation rules from attributes/annotations added to your base entity-classes. This again bleeds to the client-side allowing you to set validation rules once and only once. Even programmatic violation of these rules will result in errors. While rather enterprisey to work with, it is rather neat on a technical level.

I'd be surprised if you can't do the same with Java. If you are however stuck with some ghetto PHP framework chances are yes, you will have to double or tripple your validation-logic because the language is simply too lacking to allow for complex runtime reflection based auto-generated sub-classes based on class metadata.
I could try it, using a vpn, from the US and outside the US.

From the US you get powerset-like answers to questions like "president of x".
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I can sort of relate since I'm in the same boat with my startup. The key for me was to set some goals for each week, tell my friends about them (to help keep me honest) and then to simply get cracking. Beyond that, I'd suggest that keeping focused can be as simple as calling yourself out for BS'ing. :)

As for part-time UI work, drop me a line -- I may have some stuff for you: paul.singh [at] philtro.com
There are viable options for a subset of photoshop's functionality. As you note, you can get 80% of the functionality for a huge difference in price, which is fine if you don't need that last 20% for whatever reason.

You can try pixelmator(1) (mac only) or pixel(2) (cross platform).

1) http://www.pixelmator.com/

2) http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12
Nice loading screen on a game related site
I have indeed heard of Amdahls law, but his function includes a measure of logical dependency. That's what limits parallelism. The dependency between computing my risk for Parkinson's from my genes and computing yours from your genes is exactly 0.

I believe what we should really be interested in is running new types of applications, not speeding up word processing or other single user interactive tasks.
Link to the real Doculicious site:

http://www.doculicious.com/do/home
> My experience in California's public schools suggests that the teachers most likely to get fired are the better ones, and that the administrators making those decisions are obscenely incompetent.

I've no doubt that that's true, but it need not be a problem.

What if we let parents move their kids to a different school and found that, on average, parents move their kinds to better schools?

If we did, we'd find that schools that made bad decisions, regardless of reason, would tend to lose students to schools that make better decisions, improving the herd so to speak.

When kids can't move, bad decisions can survive more easily.

I want folks to try to implement better decision procedures. My point is that granting monopolies and freezing things is almost always a mistake because mistakes will be made. There are very good few things that work only in a monopoly.

Or, to put it another way, independent error recovery matters.
That's "nice", something someone would work hard for - hopefully the reward for a job well done. Company branded toilet paper is 'frivolous' and, as Ryan pointed out (I didn't want to say it), I'm not sure what kind of message it sends to have people cleaning their nether regions with your company's logo.
If you don't feel like proving that P=NP, a proof that there is no proof of P=NP within our current systems of mathematics would be insanely important.
They can do more than one thing! Why shouldn't they?
Well presumably you still have the ability to dream. For myself, I asked myself "what would you do if you had no fear" and I find that process useful. George Patton says " ... When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!"
Fundamentally there's one problem that plagues global warming research, and that's that we're grasping at a system so huge and complex that we have absolutely no understanding of it. Sure people believe they understand the system, but spend a month in England and watch how weather forecasts pan out.

I don't see how, when some of the biggest computer systems are being used to predict weather systems and we get it wrong, how scientists expect us to believe their computer models that follow less variables and use lots less processing power.

All evidence so far says global warming is real, however I can't help but feel all the computer models they use are complete bunk. It strikes me as fraud, it's a computer program and everyone here knows you can get a computer program to do whatever you want. I see it as highly susceptible of bias, which makes it very hard to ever believe their predictions.

There's a lot of real science used in global warming research, like using ancient sediments and ice cores to extrapolate how much CO2 was in the atmosphere n centuries ago. However, then we get pseudoscience with computer models of systems infinitely more complex than anything we've ever dealt with; it's akin to comparing a stick figure and a full anatomical diagram of a human down to every capillary for modelling the human body. We're at the stick figure when it comes to the global environment and we're trying to predict somethings effect like we have the whole picture.
Why Car Insurance Rocks
Just another WordPress weblog.......
Do this: go to delicious.com/popular/design. Find a site of which you love the design. Kick up photoshop, then push the pixels of the other site around till it looks like what you want. Find several sites and mix the elements. Pay attention to the fonts.

When you're done, get someone to convert it to HTML. Doing so yourself is a waste of your time.
Cool product idea, I suck at writing.
Great idea for a start up Raffi! I hope a lot of sites integrate your technology, because writing and grammar on the Internet is atrocious. My only fear is that people who don't bother to learn appropriate English are the same ones who wouldn't even both to fix mistakes. [Non-native speakers excluded of course]
Excel really took off on the Mac platform -- at first

I remember that. I also remember that Excel was limited to using no more than 1MB of RAM. When they ported Excel to Windows, they fixed that so it could use as much RAM as your machine had, but strangely they didn't fix the Mac version. So, if you wanted to use Excel for very large spreadsheets, you had to use the Windows version or you had to go with a different Mac product.

But of course, if you wanted to share docs within an office, you would go with Excel and then gradually the Mac users in the office would be forced to switch to Windows :-)
Funny, but electricity does not move as fast as the speed of light in a vacuum, just a fairly reasonable fraction.
Find a partner. For me at least, having someone else to work with is quite motivating.
While I agree with your point at large, sometimes it's simply not feasible for local TV networks to air shows you might be interested in. I know this, since I live in Norway (population less than 5 million) and I tend to enjoy Japanese TV-shows.

There is no way any Norwegian networks will consider it profitable to air Japanese TV unsubbed here, and even the expanded market if they spent money on getting it subbed would still render it far less profitable than regular American shows (which are basically no-cost), simply because of the huge cultural collide.

As for Battlestar galactica that aired here about 2 years after it started airing in the US. If not downright offensive, that's pretty much a joke for anyone seriously interested in scifi.

What the TV industry should do is embrace the fact that the internet has turned about every single person on the planet global, and that whoever interested, no matter where they live, should be able to get (for pay if it needs to be) access to TV-programming across the internet. Just one legal option instead of getting your stuff trough usenet, BT or even more obscure P2P networks.
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Blogs related to debt solutions, bill consolidation loans etc.
Haha reminds me of the quote from Richard Nixon's Head in Futurama: Listen here Missy, computers may be twice as fast as they were in 1973...
I normally hate techcrunch, but that headline is awesome.
Do you mean that electrons do not travel at the speed of light in a vacuum? I understand the word "electricity" to mean the macro-effect that makes it appear that electrons are moving through a substance (in reality, something else is happening, of course).
Yuck. Yes, I must really resist the temptation to comment after all nighters. Manipulation == psychopathy, is a bit much.

I too assert however that manipulating the audience in spite of appealing to reason is unethical, and that some sort of notion that we should practice manipulation so as to strengthen ourselves to it is rubbish, if we consider manipulation to be unethical in the first place. Hence, if it's beneath us, even if using manipulation made us better at persuasion through appeals to ethos and pathos, or at least better apt at detecting and exposing manipulation, what what would be the point after having compromised our own values in the first place?
Don't confuse a framework with a template. I would not consider YUI a template, and even basic CSS layouts (the common 2-column, 3-column, etc.) are not complete templates. Using a true template the design decisions (graphics, colors, etc) are made for you.

I'd recommend determining what content you want on the site, find similar sites, and then that will provide a basis for design. Look at oswd.org and smashingmagazine.com as mentioned above. Do a google search for css templates, etc. Even consider templatemonster.com.
Apparently Bing Is Something Of A Hit
Worth reading, but note that it has a slight british slant, and some of the words are different in the US. (For example a Keen salesman.)
We often complain that certain link-baiting, populist posts are not worthy of HN's front page. The retort is usually along the lines that while the post is of little interest, the discussion around it may be valuable. I hope that we can reach that standard here. Just as the post adds little to anyone's understanding of tractability, flaming the post for that fact adds little to HN :-)