skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It puts Italian companies at a significant disadvantage in online advertising, which is fascinating. I wonder how many marginal companies will be incorporated outside Italy's borders because of this law. It will be fascinating to see the analysis come down in ten or fifteen years (assuming the law lasts that long).
Well, as far as I know, environmentalists who spike trees let the logging companies know. Their goal is to save the trees after all NOT kill lumberjacks.

Any evidence that these "vicious extremists" have actually killed anybody? As in any at all? Because I can't find any references.
As others have said, immutability and referential transparency enable you to reason about your programs much more cleanly that you are generally able to in imperative code. Functional programming also forces you to think about problems in a recursive manner, which is inherently very valuable, as the idea of solving problems by recursion is extremely powerful. Take a simple problem like this: given k different denominations of coins, how many ways can you make change for n dollars? (This is a problem from SICP, which also seems to come up on HN a lot). The functional code for this is about 10 lines. I don't even know how you would solve this imperatively...

You may look at this example and think it's contrived, that "real world problems" aren't anything like counting ways to make change. But just because you haven't encountered it in your daily work doesn't mean that other people haven't, or that it's not valuable as a tool in itself. And ultimately, having conceptual tools for thinking about problems is always going to be a good thing.

Btw, I find it slightly amusing that you don't want "to write programs like I'm writing on a Turing machine" since imperative programming maps pretty directly onto TMs as a model of computation...but I digress :)
I've never read anything more douchey in my life. Are they trying to appeal to the "hip-hop" crowd with the feigned street talk?
State rarely varies with time other than the wall clock, mostly in between time X and Y some events happened.

With FP systems you generally have to model these things explicitly and attach a particular time to a particular state which makes the entire system much easier to reason about.

Cached state really bothers me because invariably even after caching it, the state can't be reused because of the difficulty of reasoning about the whole system.

I think in reality the appeal of FP is that the people who use it are generally more experienced programmers who tend not to make too much mess in non-FP languages anyway. The benefits are more the peer group than anything else.
Paywalled articles should be banned.
The algorithm can easily be rewritten as:

[barely understandable one-liner version of X code sample]

So the entire premise of flawed. Author should really learn about [X] before bashing it. Besides, [Y] doesn't even have [feature].
I do see what you mean.

The dark sidebar doesn't do it for me, it doesn't look like its part of the page and as a result may be ignored.
This quote from the article makes a really crucial distinction between mobs of the past versus today:

"[I]n the past it was often the poor who rallied against the rich and powerful. But today’s riots are different in that it is the powerful, specifically those with the largest followings online, that could help quell these eruptions, yet instead douse them with more anger and hate."
Raindrops that refract and merge (canvas, js)
I have a personal policy of upvoting an article before reading it, and after careful consideration I'm going to change that (at least for wsj.com links).
This is only the tip of the iceberg. I would say the bigger issue and thr lower hanging fruit is that we don't use Chip+Pin or Chip+Signature here in the US. Using either tech will go much further than just having police departments investigate after the fact.
There's a good chance that artisans, small businesses, and big companies will pay most of this additional tax, since it adds a percentage to all online advertising purchases in the country. It's not like internet advertising companies are just going to hold their prices constant and pay an additional portion of them in taxes. The local Italian companies created by this law will sell the ads at a markup which is nearly the same as the tax plus the new overhead of administering the Italian companies.
Which message are you referring to?
C code can be unreadable and sometime pure poetry. Lisps are the same. One difference though, s-exps are the most editable thing in the universe, paredit-like interaction makes you forget the superficial lack of readability.
Be honest with yourself. Have enough hubris to think you can do a better job than the guy that came before you, but tempered with the humility of knowing that he also was a very smart person. Try not to personalize feedback, because it's the fertilizer that will help you grow. Learn to ignore half the feedback you get. After years and years, you will see patterns that others don't see. Don't be afraid to have a respectful argument over implementation. If everyone agrees right off the bat, then you have the wrong team, or nobody cares.
"Israel is one of the last countries in the world where the Tender Years Doctrine is still in force, if not the last. While the clause reflects an old world order in which mothers were expected to be homemakers and fathers were breadwinners, many feminist politicians and women's groups refuse to have it amended, claiming that the time is not yet ripe for such a change and that men will take advantage of it to put pressure on women in divorce." - http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/174956#.Urn...

I also read with some horror this for a self-claimed feminist:

"Yet under no-fault divorce, a woman can find herself essentially a single mom, drained of family resources by court costs and lawyer fees, and suddenly required to work against her will and sacrifice time with her children."
- http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/05/10031/

Hopefully all the above is today a minority view, but it should not be glossed completely over. Feminists and fathers right groups should under all circumstances agree on gender equality, which mean equal time with children and equal requirement to work in an effort to support their own children.
I keep meaning to use project Euler for this purpose
> 75,000 men were convicted under the same law, of whom 26,000 are still alive. [1]

They can apply to have their convictions disregarded, though. (It's also 16,000 of them.)

Yeah, not quite the same, but better than I expected honestly. :)
Thanks for this. I also put together a Clojure example based on a starting point someone else shared on Github.

Clojure: https://gist.github.com/amontalenti/8117294
> ...frys actually challenged my chargeback...

Side note: if you have a fraudulent transaction on your credit card, don't call your credit card company and "dispute" a charge or ask for a "chargeback". Instead, call them and tell them you had a fraudulent transaction.

I had a clearly fraudulent charge on my Amex a few years ago (a Wal-Mart gift card was shipped to somewhere in Central California). I called Amex and asked to dispute the charge. Wal-Mart then provided Amex with the tracking info showing the package was signed for, and so they said that they had rendered the services paid for, and the case was closed in the merchant's favor.

It turns out that "fraud" is the magic word, not "dispute". I called Amex back and got into the fraud process instead, which of course fixed the issue.
disagree. the reason oil isn't being conserved is that it's too cheap. the only cost in the price of oil is extraction cost and sometimes maybe some tax; depends who's paying. cost of pollution and oil replacement research? probably 'optimized' out.
Well, some toughts are easier to represent in abstract algebra. Really.

Functional programming is too generical a label to make it possible to answer your question. It may apply to anything from C-like functions to no side effect languages, but I guess most people around here use the term to mean Lisp.

If that's what you meant, Lisp'll give you a huge amount of reflexivity that you can use to change the language so it better fits your problem. In addition, Lisp has a very simple environment, what makes it the go-to language when you must embbeb an interpreter.

Now, if you were thinking about Haskell, it has a very powerfull type system that helps creating bug-fre software, and makes type-driven programming possible. It also has explicit side effects, what makes it possible for the compiler to paralelize your program for you, and a quite good optimizer (but not as good as you'll get by manually writting low level code).

And there are plenty of other languages people call functional. Each of them have some interesting aspects that may be usefull for solving a problem. Again, it's a very generic label, and a quite old one, so that all current languages already adopt functional features - in consequence it's not a very usefull label.
A camel that drives the car with biochips infused in it's brain!
That depends on your skills. The time constraint you provided leaves little room for other solutions you aren't already familiar with.

That said, for your use case (since you're thinking of symfony2, it's clear that performance isn't an issue/concern: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=i7...) I think Django is almost certainly a superior alternative. It comes with a built-in authentication and group/role-based authorization system, a built-in 'admin' system that can be used to serve up basic CRUD forms for your models with minimal effort, and the ability to code custom 'reports' as add-ins to the built-in admin system with only minimal additional effort. If your models aren't terribly complex you could have a test-ready basic CRUD app matching your description in less than 30 minutes, 90% or more of the code for which will have been generated (or come pre-packaged) for you.
Treasuries Wild? Wait Until the Fed Really Tapers
There is at least Alfred Spector who is a VP and in charge of research: http://www.theguardian.com/activate/alfred-spector

But yeah, Norvig is probably a little bit more than "a" director :)
So, you want to crypto
Estrogen and progestin are given in slow-release IUDs or subdermal methods. Is science not able to apply the same?
Now all that they need is to get it FDA approved to market in the US market. We need a sure shot remedy for diabetes which is alternatively known as "The Plague of Our Time" Read this article: http://blog.seattlepi.com/timigustafsonrd/2012/02/28/obesity...
> I'd say the 'numberToRank' parts are probably code smells, but given that its Christmas Eve, I really can't be bothered to think of a better solution right now.

object Cards {
sealed trait Suit
case object Spades extends Suit
case object Clubs extends Suit
case object Hearts extends Suit
case object Diamonds extends Suit

sealed trait Rank
trait FaceCard extends Rank

case object Jack extends FaceCard
case object Queen extends FaceCard
case object King extends FaceCard
case object Ace extends FaceCard

case class ValueCard(n: Int) extends Rank

case class Card(rank: Rank, suit: Suit)

type Deck = IndexedSeq[Card]

val faceCardRanks = IndexedSeq(Jack,Queen,King,Ace)
val valueCardRanks = for (rank <- 2 to 10) yield ValueCard(rank)
val ranks = IndexedSeq.concat(valueCardRanks,faceCardRanks)
val suits = IndexedSeq(Spades,Clubs,Diamonds,Hearts)

def apply(): Deck = for(rank <- ranks; suit <- suits) yield Card(rank, suit)
}
Looks like they hate free trade.
23 states have not expanded Medicare and do not plan to. 25 and DC have expanded it for 2014, and 2 more are going to but post-2014.
not anonymous and i'm not sure if the date is right. upvoted anyway. see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum#Dev...
Even if you can't go any functional, knowing FP has benefits. As an example, 25 years ago I did work on 8-bit video games. About as far from FP as you can get. Back then, I filled many sheets of paper convincing myself that rearranging my code and data in certain beneficial ways would actually work. I could have eliminated much of this drudgery had I known then what I know today about FP. See [1] for one example in which knowing two things – (1) what an involution was and (2) that applying (reverse ⋅ concat) is the same as applying (concat ⋅ reverse ⋅ map reverse) – would have let me go immediately to the preprocessing solution that I had to painstakingly work out on paper.

[1] http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-12-14-great-old-timey-gam...
I thought deeply about this when I read something that Bill Gates said answering a question a while ago. At some point he said that he could understand that people wants to be millionaire because the freedom that brings, but after a threshold the burger is the same for everybody.

Freedom in that context is a weird concept, specially when you see a lot of rich people that are slaves of money. I guess it depends on the personality.
Reading code is the best way to get better at programming. It's good to start with really smart, really good code, but you should also read bad and mediocre code (and more importantly, be able to figure out from reading why it is bad or whether it only seems bad at first glance.)

Reading code starts out being really hard, but with practice it can become almost as easy as reading prose. It's a winning proposition on all levels as you can pick up new techniques, understand how things are done (rather than just what they do), and see the trade offs and decisions that are actually made. Practicing code reading also improves debugging skills as you have to use the same skills to understand the what and the why of perfectly working but unfamiliar code.

Whenever anyone asks me what they should do to improve their programming, I usually suggest reading more source code. Another benefit is that code can't lie as easily or as convincingly as the documentation can.
10/10 would read again
Why Do Programmers Use Courier Typeface?
With the typical reaction. "Thousands of sites use PHP just fine". "I don't care about the quality of libraries or the design of a language, and if you do, you're a snob". Trite.

And I doubt I, and many here, will ever make or work with a company which can have the leisure to rewrite the language implementation.
It definitely comes off as a front. That's ironic because a lot of rap/hip hop is all about "I'm the real thing with the money, cars, women, etc. and the others are fake" lol.
That was an episode of the IT Crowd[1] showing a character on Countdown, like a character from The Big Bang Theory appearing on Jeopardy in the storyline of the show. As for the actual show, I am partial to the BBC "mashups" mixing "8 out of 10 cats", a comedy panel show, with Countdown.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1676563/

Actual Countdown Episode:

http://youtu.be/d1L8uBzW6hQ?t=45s

8 out of 10 cats does Countdown:

http://youtu.be/cu4chThprVk?t=8m6s
Starting a business begins as a unicorn job, and if you're lucky you find out that you also enjoy running a business. And get to keep your unicorn part-time job. Also, having other people help build your unicorn. I LOVE what I do every day - used to complain I wasn't coding enough, but it was because I was controlling the output too much and not delegating. It wasn't that I wanted to code more, it was just that I wasn't getting enough done. So I hired more staff and found I really like the balance of entrepreneurial life, helping my staff code their best (and towards our goals) and coding in the quiet hours.
Tying your country's future ability to support its population in any large part to the whims of companies that are non-local sees like a self-evidently bad idea for any number of reasons.

For starters, they have no skin in the game. Unlike local businesses, they don't care what happens, at all. At least the mildly local large companies have some cares about what happens to the country (because they own land, have in-country employees). But the large multinationals basically don't. The number of in-country employees is usually very small.

Second, you have no control over their performance or policy decisions. They can do things that are completely and totally devastating to you (like close down the local branch and stop paying taxes), and you can do nothing, since you have no physical control over anything. Plus, you know, you will now be dependent on their performance globally (this is likely to happen to any sufficiently large company anyway, but ...)

As a result, as you become more dependent on them for tax revenue, government will have to do more and more to appease them to keep that revenue flowing. You have to be very careful, because other than X amount of revenue, you literally have nothing they need. In a country like Italy, the amount of money is not large, so you can't just play hardball with them, because they'll just take their ball and go elsewhere, and you will be left high and dry. If a few multinationals do it, Italy may very well have to run and appease a number of other companies to keep their revenue in Italy.

These are just some of the simple reasons. The short answer is: If you do this, you may as well just hand them your government (or prepare for long term economic hardship).
This is a hard question to answer without knowing what types of problems your hacker friends like to solve. For example, quadcopters tend to cater to certain types of problems (mapping, precise control, etc), while fixed-wing aircraft tend to cater to a different group (autopilots, longer-distance flights, etc).
I guess they wont be launching SEOgenius.com anytime soon. All jokes aside, these kinds of actions are the result of pressure to get big fast. You can complain about what these competitor lyric sites are doing, but the truth is that some of these guys are the true growth hackers. They actually employ 1-2 elements that are 100% white-hat and I am positive it helps them achieve great rankings... aside for being around longer. It's not obvious but they have implemented some smart SEO strategies. But here's the thing... They learned these strategies by understanding how random users use their service. Nothing wrong with this. Perhaps, rapgenius should look a little closer and interact with competitor sites if they are frustrated with the competition.
RapGenius is certainly a lyrics site. Why should the user be brought to AZLyrics when RapGenius provides the same content (lyrics) as well as annotations?
Hiring platform engineers to help us shape the future of work (SF)
At Assembly (assemblymade.com), we're on a mission to empower the maker-class and help individuals lead a more fulfilling career. Assembly's collaborative platform enables the creation of a new class of software product; where anyone around the world can help collectively build, retain ownership, and receive proﬁt for their contributions.
We're looking for a Full-stack Engineer to help us build foundational pieces of the Assembly platform. You would have a direct hand in shaping the future of work and unlocking the power of independent creators. You help us craft user experiences and solve deeply technical challenges. Some of things we’re working on at the moment include a scalable financial system that records expenses and revenue for hundreds of products; reliably paying contributors, and creating APIs that make everything on our platform transparent and accessible to others.

We’re currently a small 4 person team in San Francisco that has recently secured a healthy financing from top-tier investors which will enable us to tackle the enormous challenges of creating a ‘meta’ company (a software company that creates software companies). We believe in progress over consensus, strong opinions weakly held, moving fast is best even if it breaks things, and we make what we measure - but you'll have the opportunity to add your own lessons to that list. We work alone and we work together; meaning we believe the best know how to get things done on their own, as well as how to work in a team. Everyone on the team is responsible for self directing their work and has a tremendous impact on our shared success.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

* Understand pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch frequently.

* Strong opinions on testing & code quality.

* Over 3 years experience with Ruby.

* Experience with Heroku, ElasticSearch, Postgres, or Redis a plus.

WHAT WE OFFER

* Free lunch and dinner.

* Endless snacks and beverages.

* Flexible work hours.

* Open vacation policy. We don't count days.

* If you're sick, just stay home and get better.

* Stand up desks, mac book pros, cinema displays...Buy or build your ideal work environment

* A sunny office space.

* Competitive salary and equity package.

* Health, dental and vision benefits.

* Team "Workations” where we all travel somewhere for a week for a change of environment

We’re located in Mission, San Francisco, CA. It would be great if you are local or willing to relocate (we'll cover the cost) but we’ll also open to telecommuting as long as you are located in the US and it is legal for you to work here.

Please apply by sending any work, resume, github username to jobs@assemblymade.com
Coming from a Java and Groovy background it took me a while to "unlearn" and I think this is what happens to you.

If you spend more than a few hours on Clojure (maybe you can create a small toy project) it make much more sense.

I'm experiencing quite the opposite, I'm learning Scala now and it all feels too cumbersome, and even the syntax of Scala bothers me now.
No, I would penalize them for building spammy backlinks the same way Google penalized their own chrome site.

The apology seems to indicate that they only think they did something grayhatish. In reality it was the worst kind of link spam...buying links.
I didn't see any inference from OP that because of this apology the site should be penalized. Perhaps OP thinks that the extremely shady spam tactics the site clearly uses in themselves deserve penalization up the wazoo.
Through the wheels of life
This story never ends until and unless people give up their carelessness
Um, again, that's not what's happening at all. Perhaps you need to read a bit about it before commenting? Are you American and haven't seen any of the news articles?

It's not that they're selling American ads.

They're selling essentially nation-less 'let's not pay any tax to anyone at all' ads.

They're not paying any tax on this stuff. They're not paying EU tax, they're not paying US tax, they're taking advantage of all the local infrastructures, the laws, the protections from harm, all of which cost the nations a shit load of money to maintain, and not paying a penny.

Just to be clear. On Italian sales, they aren't paying Italy taxes. They're not paying Ireland taxes where they claim the sales are to do a Double Irish. They're not paying Holland taxes where they route the money through to do the Dutch Sandwich. They're not paying the US taxes, they park the money in an offshore account and lobby congress to grant a tax asylum.

They are simply not paying taxes.

This is happening in all the EU countries.

And then every now and then they lobby the US congress for a massive tax holiday to bring the money back to America tax free.

And what really confuses me is that they then often have the cheek to claim that they are contributing to the countries they're scamming because they employ people and those people pay tax, which is disgusting as it's actually the tax of their employees that they're merrily claiming is their contribution!

This is as far as I understand the issue. I think in some places you should probably replace 'not paying' with 'paying a ridiculously small amount'.