skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your example is a sort of strawman argument, probably constructed without you being aware of it. "2.days.from_now" is indeed not free of side-effects, however "now" is a function that depends on the computer's internal clock and is generally understood what it does, the clock being a sort of global state that mutates and is generally available, whereas "2.days.from_last_update" implies usage of local mutable state, passed implicitly and highly dependent on the context you're in.

Also, this example is simply wrong ...

case POST(Path("/api/auth")) & Authenticate(user) =>

It's wrong, because this is a route matcher, so if the user is not authenticated, the server would throw an HTTP 404 Not Found status. HTTP 404 Not Found is not meant to be thrown in case the user is not authenticated. There are more relevant, more correct status codes for that, like 401 Unauthorized or 403 Forbidden, or heck, in case of classic websites, a 302 redirect to a login page is in order. So you're basically giving broken examples and calling them "magic", but the examples are obviously broken, the first one in terms of API design, the second one in terms of functionality.

I really do understand your hint. But the examples you're giving are bad because they rely on totally non-obvious mutable state that's passed implicitly. This is indeed "magic", however it has nothing to do with syntactic sugar.

Btw, in Scala 2.10, thanks to String interpolation, you can also construct route-matchers such as this on [1]:

case POST(p"/api/calls/$name/") =>

Doesn't work by default, you really have to build your own stuff for this to work (see the linked example). Or if you want to throw in regular expressions, you can either do this:

case POST(p"/api/calls/${Integer(id)}/") =>

Or you can have like a mini-DSL with regular expressions built-in:

case POST(p"/api/calls/$id<\d+>/?") => // note the optional ending slash

Yeah, you can do this. And it's certainly much nicer to me, more flexible and you can also make it faster than pattern-matching on Lists, as in your Unfiltered example. Is this magic? I don't see a local, mutable and implicitly-passed context, so for me it doesn't qualify.

Also, whenever I see "2.days" or "4.kilobytes" in Scala code, it's certainly nicer than seeing "172800 /* 2 days in secs /" or "4096 / 4 kb */". Given that these are statically type-checked extension functions that do not modify the original Int type and that do not rely on some mutable local state passed implicitly, is this magic? My IDE doesn't think so.

[1] https://github.com/alexandru/shifter/blob/master/web-api/src...
iPad and Android: Kingdom Rush Frontiers, Deep Dungeons of Doom, Colossotron, Anomaly Warzone Earth, Game Dev Story

Mac: Bastion, Ultima 7 again, King's Bounty, C&C Zero:Hour (<3 the general's challenge) again
"The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty" by Peter Singer. After reading this I dramatically increased the amount of money that I donate and began supporting several new charities.

"Lying" by Sam Harris. This is really just a long essay, but it changed the way I think about communication. It convinced me that honesty really is the best policy.
Right, I've edited the post. Thanks for pointing that out.
There is perhaps no compliment greater than a criticism from the econostrologist in chief, Paul Krugman.

He is right about one thing tho. Bitcoin IS a bubble. But that is not a pejorative. Any good that becomes money will have a price that is far higher than is warranted by its use demand. It doesn't matter whether the floor price is 10% of the monetary premium, 1% or 0%. The monetary premium is based not on the good's use value, but its serviceability as money. I.e., is it fungible, divisible, transportable, verifiable etc. And along all these attributes bitcoin shines - even more than gold.

The best explanation of this so-called "bubble theory of money" is proffered by Moldbug. To wit:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-mone...

and

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoin...
"Looks like me" has a strong psychological impact, especially in environments where the "default" tends to be not-like-me.
An attender is someone to attends to the attendees. The other meaning of attend: to take care of, to look after.
I am curious, impact How?
I'd totally live in a 200sqft apt in SF if someone were to offer one this well thought-out.
I'm Black and used to being on the Internet. I just hope it doesn't discourage any young women or minorities from going into a STEM field. I wish I could tell them it gets better but it really doesn't.
Reddit has always been anti-ads especially since they feel strongly that their userbase hates ads and would actually revolt in a mass uprising if Reddit started getting more aggressive with the ads they show.

I'm actually with you about them finding more cost effective ways to serve all that content. I wonder if they should think about using peer-to-peer caching using HTML5/webworkers and other distributed caching methods. Given that the community has strong support for reddit (they even give money freely via the donation bar), maybe they would be okay with allowing spare bandwidth to be used to keep the site running.

On the ads side, I think the proprietary system they have is not doing them any favors when it comes to getting a piece of the ad spend pie during RFPs. I don't even know how an advertiser would begin to figure out which subreddits they should target w/o having to sit down and dive into all the stats. The other core issue I think is that reddit specifically touts the fact that you target by subreddit not by demographics/users/behavior, etc. but I think that data is extremely important to most advertisers.
My understanding about the advertising ecosystem on Reddit is such that the returns on the actual advertising platform are far, far worse than grassroots marketing (not even talking about sneaky stuff -- participating in the community, doing AMAs, generally just hanging around).
Who said it's not ok to have a white girls code charity?

The only people I see here are criticizing the existence of this charity for black girls, who are an already marginalized group. That's racism.
The underlying point is: you can't have a rational discussion with people who live out in fantasy cuckoo land.
I got this book 3 weeks ago. I agree it is a good book on motivation. It isn't very polished though, like some of the other popular psychology books out there. It isn't embellished with eloquent flowery writing or mind-blowing feats of accomplishments. This isn't a criticism but a strength. It reads more like a series of blog posts where the authour is discovering how to amp up his motivation using a set of hacks to tackle goals. The format makes it easy to walk away from the book and apply it to those unfinished tasks that have been hanging over your head for months. It's a great find and ranks high on the books I've read this year.
No, the floor is unrelated to the energy put into mining. The intrinsic value of Bitcoin is the ability to facilitate financial transactions.

Brinks' entire CIT vehicle business is based upon just a subset of this function, and we can agree their value is not zero.
To be frank, I am not sure of the specifics. At first I thought it was because anonymous functions have a notion of the lifetime of the variables they close over, which named functions do not. However, taking into account that named functions do not close over anything in first place, this suggests that one should be able to use a named function wherever an anonymous function is expected.
Perhaps your mistake is thinking about this as something specific to Reddit in the first place. I know there are some fairly prominent groups with axes to grind who act as though racism, sexism and the patriarchy sprung into existence fully formed with the creation of Reddit, but it's always been a reflection of wider society, nothing more.
He could be right, he'd just be missing the point. He's trying to jam a square peg into a circular hole and calling it "evil" for not fitting.

What I'd actually be interested in reading is a proposal from Krugman (or someone else) for a hashcash/cryptocoin/digital money scheme that addresses their concerns.

It would be hugely more interesting to hear economists discuss how new technology can advance antiquated, federated payment networks rather than pointing out well-known flaws in a very immature technology (that I'm still not entirely convinced they understand, technologically speaking).
Actually no, what he was proposing was to reskin the interface to make certain things more obvious and consistent. However, it's not as easy to peel a UI off an existing program as non-technical people might imagine. It was an excellent initiative and the effort is ongoing. http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/10/redefining-blender... and https://developer.blender.org/project/view/12/
Lobbying by the tax accountant and tax software industry: http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-...
>Reddit's real product has always been its hipness.

I disagree. Their strength (in my view) is that its a build your own community DIY. If you feel strongly about turnips then start a turnip subreddit. vb forum etc doesn't have that flexibility.

EDIT: FML...someone claimed /r/turnips already.
If I need customer service for a drive at all, my day is unlikely to get much worse.
What I am more troubled by is that of a 100 or so comments there are about 2 or 3 saying "this is cool how can I help." The rest are arguing the validity and political correctness of inviting black girls to code.
+1 Thinking, Fast and Slow. I was going to post that as the most influential book of the year.

(I started reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise when I got to a reference to Thinking, Fast and Slow. Switched and haven't gone back yet.)
> it's nobody's job but your own to make the environment into what you want it to be.

Isn't that what they're doing by creating an environment for black girls?
Microsoft would never promote Scala as it's a JVM language. NodeJS is likely given the recent relationship with Red Gate and effort surrounding Azure support.

As for business logic by an average developer - I would say the same thing about every language.
> You seem pretty accustomed to economics. Can you explain how exactly or why would anyone buy any items (that's what currencies are for after all) using a deflationary currency?

This is identical to arguing: Why would anyone buy computers when they are getting cheaper every year. At some point you make a choice where your preference for owning a computer is greater than your preference to save money.

> So actually, in my view, BTC as a currency is already failed. No one will be eager to buy online (perform an actual exchange) when he can buy the same items using USD, because BTC will possibly have a higher value tomorrow. While the USD almost certainly will not.

Gold is deflationary. When gold was the primary currency for the world commerce was very vibrant. Gold not being currency is a fairly recent development.
People currently purchase things online with bitcoins when they could use dollars but choose to use bitcoins. I think it's very early to write off bitcoins as a failed currency.
I'm glad this article makes the distinction between positive and normative economics.

I have no problem with paying taxes and obeying almost all laws in a democratic country, and I am persuaded that inflation in sensible times and amounts is a good thing for the world. The paranoia and anti-society feelings that run so high in the bitcoin community actually put me off it. (Although I also dislike the fact that the Credit Card companies have the power to extract rent from nearly all transactions in the economy too - the fact that the price is the same regardless of whether the merchant is paying a fee or not means that cash transactions are subsidising credit cards).

But I don't think bitcoin has much chance of becoming a state currency, and I think it would go horribly if it did, so most of that anti-state rhetoric is irrelevant.

However, up until now, neither the government, nor the banks nor the credit card companies have provided me with an easy, cheap and safe way to make tiny transactions with my friends (and untrusted acquaintances) across the world.

Bitcoin is currently useful. I can take a picture of a QR code with my phone or fill in a simple form on a web page and safely transfer tiny sums of money with no or minimal fee reasonably quickly anywhere in the world. That is wonderful and creates a floor on the value of bitcoin, until better options are available.

Anyone who really doesn't want to see bitcoin succeeed (and that goes for Stross and Krugman) should make it a priority to work on making sure that dollars and pounds and euro balances are just as convenient, cheap and safe as bitcoin balances.
I'm not talking about a hypothetical doomsday scenario. Bitcoin is the crisis.

The idea that holding Bitcoin is a better idea than holding dollars is spreading. The more it spreads, the higher the value of Bitcoin will be, and the lower the value of the dollar will be. Eventually, we will hit a tipping point. That's the crisis. That's the hyperinflation.
3 key ideas from "The Second Machine Age"
You might not like it, but that doesn't make it wrong.
I've used this one before http://coffitivity.com
Bitcoin Is Evil
Its ridiculous to compare programming to professional sports. There are less than 500 NBA players, in a sport probably millions of people in the US can play adequately. They're the 0.01 if not 0.001%. Talented programmers aren't anywhere near that rare.
I get daily iOS notifications. I have a feeling if I didn't open the application then I would get an email which is a really nice way of handling notifications.
High hardware utilization is a good thing for efficiency because that enables ASICs to be produced that are growing increasingly more efficient.

Right now one of the main metrics people use when evaluating the profitability mining hardware is Ghash/Watt, so the market is naturally incentivizing low OpEx and therefore less power usage (per transaction processed not the nominal amount of power used).

Also, it's actually more efficient to have a smaller number of machines running at full utilization 24x7 than the typical massive datacenter that averages around 20-30% utilization [0]. That's because modern servers consume nearly as much power at 20-30% utilization as they do at 100%.

[0] - http://bnrg.eecs.berkeley.edu/~randy/Courses/CS294.F09/whare... (page 55)
He's not dignifying it because it's plainly absurd. There are hundreds of events aimed at helping white men to code.
Two words for ya reddit: "Feed Ads" (aka inserting ads in between pieces of organic content/stories)

It works for Facebook, it works for Twitter, it will work for you. The only thing is you have to be careful how you present it and design it into the existing platform.
The tech posts by their admins always make for good reading. Initially I thought "how hard can it be?", but they have to generate so much of their stuff dynamically that I'd be seriously impressed if they can make the numbers work. Especially since that dynamic complexity doesn't scale all that well.
You can use named functions interchangeably with anonymous functions, it's not just practical because of pointers.
I don't think it's your right to tell anyone whether or not they belong in a conversation. The post was made on a forum in which I'm a user. That gives me every right.

You can try to marginalize the opinions of those that disagree with you, but that's not a rational argument against them.
If you raise $3M on a note, you're already implicitly valuing your company at $10M - $15M since since each round is meant to take roughly 20% of your company. Investors wouldn't give you $3M unless they thought your company was worth $10M already and you wouldn't take it unless you thought there was a decent chance of bring your company to a 30M valuation by the time the money ran out.
Thinking is not a self help book. It's a memoir of sorts about a nobel prize winning economist and the way he and his mentor changed the field of decision theory through the combination of economics, psychology and statistical mathematics. It truly is eye opening and life changing.
I guess I don't understand why redundant power supplies aren't the answer in all of these cases. I'd rather nothing goes down in the event of a power failure, including the rest of the server. Even the low-end Synology RAID I use at home has two power supplies which I could (but don't bother to) plug into separate UPSes.
Nope. "White girls code" isn't being persecuted but "Black Girls Code" is here and now.
The bitcoin supply can't be trivially manipulated.

It's still vulnerable to computational attacks (no matter how impractical they may be) and miner collusion.
Love this argument: um, I looked up the word 'racism' in the dictionary and it says to exclude based on race, so that's what this event is: racist!

To that, I say, how convenient it is that you've just turned off the critical reasoning process in your brain for just this issue. Thanks for completely ignoring the history of racial subjugation and discrimination in this country and in the world.
Three cheers to the mod who changed the title from "Bitcoin is Evil", even though that's what NYT wants to call it. The author spends most of the piece explicitly telling us that he will not be making a morality judgement about the currency.

One quote in the article caught my eye:

> BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.

Fun thought exercise: replace "BitCoin" with "cash." Businesses across the country choose to have a cash-only policy (or destroy receipts, avoid use of electronic records, and so on) to avoid paying taxes and having their transactions monitored. That's not to say this is wise or ethical behavior, but it certainly happens, even without cryptocurrency. So why do critics describe BTC as a libertarian threat and in-person cash transfers as normal?
Why do you assume you have to be moderate to consider both sides? Doesn't it seem like once you objectively consider both sides often enough you begin to develop informed opinions that could make it hard to remain a moderate? But that doesn't mean you stop considering both sides.

(Also, this implication that moderates tend to be more reasonable is erroneous. Oftentimes the correct answer starts out as marginal aka "extreme" until it is slowly validated moves the whole discourse and moderate is redefined to where one extreme used to be. And oftentimes people are moderates out of ignorance; when you begin examining any given issue and have little knowledge it is natural to stake out a "on the one hand, on the other hand" position until you learn more. Then you cease to be a reasonable moderate, at precisely the moment your knowledge becomes formidable. But I am rambling and need to go outside now :)
As a C# developer I urge caution. When getters and setters become as trivial as

public int Age { get; set; }

Code becomes less OO and more procedural filled with anaemic models / bags of state. Practices like Tell don't Ask, Information Hiding and Rich Models, slip away.
The fact that wealthy people use tax loopholes is a bad thing. Making in possible for everybody to use tax loopholes is a really horrible idea.
Yes, and a white one at that, but I sit next to and chat with men and women of all races, and I watch the same occur in chairs/tables next to me. I've never seen anything that indicates white men are making others feel unwelcome.

Perception does not indicate reality. If you feel unwelcome and don't participate because of that, there's not much I can do to help you.
I live in a town with an unusually good community college. The new president just got fired because she enacted a graduation-centric agenda which antagonized both the faculty and the student body.

Part-timers enjoying themselves outnumber serious full-timers in this community, and a community college should, imo, embody its community's priorities. Being able to take great courses cheaply, on your own schedule, is fantastic.

I think programs like ASAP have a lot of merit, but the OP assumes that graduation's success and anything else is failure. I think they're using simple metrics to look at a complex space.
> No, every mobile can process a 80ties picture format in tiny resolutions. 90ies computers could do that without a problem without any allocation an needed only a fraction of their cpu

GIF's are really a nineties format (90ties??), the animation and alpha components weren't added to the standard until 1989, and adoption wasn't widespread until after then.

You're also overlooking the fact that you simply didn't get 4.5MB+ GIFs in the nineties like the example given because it would take ten minutes to download that on a 56K modem. I must resign myself to the fact some people never grew up with dial-up!

Animated gifs in 1995 were rather different to animated gifs now.
I think Bitcoin does have a soft floor because that cost would form the natural price target for a miner trying to trade, but the cost is avoidable by switching to proof of stake as done in PeerCoin and Nxt. The crypto problems solved in Bitcoin don't have the intrinsic utility of a precious metal; you could make a better argument for something like PrimeCoin, which attacks a major computation problem, having this kind of utility.

So as I see it Bitcoin is already obsolete; there are new coins that achieve the transaction capabilities for cheaper - they can be used in more potential applications, thus they're more interesting speculative instruments.

The specific benefit of proof of work mining comes in insuring more people have a chance to enter during initial distribution, but it still massively favors the early entrants and especially the people who have the hardware environment to mine efficiently.
I know what you mean about physical stuff. Many years ago, when I'd finish a cool software project, I couldn't really show it to anyone -- it was just a bunch of gibberish to them. But once I started some wood working... I can still to this day show people my home made computer desk, book cases, etc. But none of my early software hacks still survives.
Choose Yourself by James Altucher. I was already heading in the direction of the books theme. Reading it though gave me the extra push and had some good ideas for making the necessary changes. Basically, getting enough sleep, exercise, gratitude, mental challenge, and bringing people you love and who love you closer are what he found to be keys to happiness. And I have to agree. I was even able to get back into programming, after experiencing severe burnout years ago, by setting my priorities in a like manner. Choose Yourself!
What i'd like to see, and as far as i know it doesn't exist in any browser, is a way to prevent any extensions from running on certain sites. I want some things like adblock installed for general browsing, but there's no reason i need it running on my email, my banking, my employer's control panel. I can white-list sites inside of extensions, but that still leaves me trusting the extension to properly implement their white-listing feature. I'd much rather have chrome managing a list of sites where the extension doesn't get to run at all.
An event at which the participants are mostly white men will cater to the wishes of white men.
I'd argue that value / footprint (edit: had this backward) generated is higher for legacy systems than Bitcoin. (Unless you can totally eliminate CPU and GPU mining)