skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a couple things that i have seen help get into a more functional state of mind:

make everything you can immutable. find a problem where you can build most of it without changing 'the state of the world'. function takes data, spits out answer which is feed into the next.

refactor commonalities from part 1 by passing around functions, closures, etc etc. all your good functional fun toys.

add your mutable core around the outside.
Perhaps creating real business value.
I'm kind of in the same boat. There are plenty of resources for learning Clojure, but I haven't found any that help with the transition from object oriented programming to functional programming. I read Programming Clojure and I feel like I know the language, but I'm still working on thinking in terms of functional programming. Interestingly, Programming in Scala has helped some. The hybrid functional/object oriented approach has helped introduce functional concepts with a language that doesn't seem so foreign. It can be difficult to pick up a completely different language (different from C-like languages, anyway) as well as a new programming model at the same time. JavaScript: The Good Parts is also good for the same reason.

There's also an F#/C# book scheduled to come out later this year that looks like it might be good for learning the functional thought process: http://www.amazon.com/Functional-Programming-Real-World-Exam...

I found this blog post from Stuart Halloway to be informative as well: http://blog.thinkrelevance.com/2008/9/25/pcl-clojure-chapter...
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We call it the Engineer's Ring in the US ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer%27s_Ring
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer
Apps 'to be as big as internet'
For me, #4 "Clarify EXACTLY what would make your day productive" comes before #1 "Get a good night’s sleep".

More specifically, I always have my to do list for the day completed before I go to bed the night before. And that list only has 1 item on it. But that item is thought out in complete detail, sometimes with marked up hard copy, sometimes with just a few scratch sheets. I internalize and dream about all of it.

Waiting to plan your day after you wake up is way too late. Your gazelle was eaten by a lion while you were in the shower.
I think most functional programmers don't use TDD. Instead, they write little functions (and macros) that do useful things and approach the problem bottom up, constantly trying things out on the REPL and rewriting the code they have already written.

This way of programming seems incompatible with TDD and I would recommend practicing it in order to start thinking functional.

Paul Graham talks about it here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html

I don't program in Lisp or any other functional language, but I use this style a lot programming in Python and code ends up being pretty functional.
I'll admit it: I come to the comments section first on every story I visit; I saw his comment and agreed. I didn't realize when I upvoted it that the linked story had the "Confirmed:" in the headline, or I wouldn't have upvoted it.

C'est la vie.
I'm sorry, but what a bunch of bullshit! From my personal experience there's only one way to have a productive day (whatever the hell that is): care about what you do. If you don't give a shit about what you do, no breakfast in the world will save you.
Microsoft's Project Tuva
When your brand becomes a verb
Pearl Harbor Attack No Surprise
Ten Day MBA is a great little book. I bought a bunch of copies for the engineers here and we ran a discussion group, chapter-by-chapter over a few weeks. The exercise really improved the quantity and quality of business ideas and useful input into strategy from the engineers.
I think I'd normally say "read SICP" but Clojure discourages recursion in favor of it's looping constructs (due to the non-ability to optimize it on the JVM I'm guessing).

That said, SICP will still teach you to think in terms of HOFs and functions as abstractions, so it'll definitely help out. And it's free online, so the only investment is time.
[U]ser-perceptible load times are dominated by front-end factors. Not your database! Not your application logic! Not your web framework! Not your idiom for string concatenation!

It is true that user-perceptible load times are dominated by front-end factors. However, whether the user perceives anything at all -- or if, instead, the web site has collapsed under load -- is dominated by back-end scalability.

Scalability is far more about keeping things running than it is about making things fast. People should pay attention to both front-end and back-end issues -- a website which is up but loads very slowly isn't very useful, but neither is a website which loads very fast but goes offline whenever it gets a lot of traffic.
It really depends, if the author was worrying about .1 of a second processing time on the back end for each script load you are exactly right.

If the server is crashing or only intermittently serving pages because of load there is nothing front end optimization can do about it.

I guess sometimes you also have to weigh up just adding some extra hardware to smooth a transition to a new back end, or even to buy some more time with the existing one.
If more people did proper restful applications, perhaps there would also be proper libraries for interacting with them? Perhaps something that looks like this (with a ruby flavor):

RestfulApi.new('http://api.twiddla.com/, :user => 'billy', :password => 'ILikeRainbows').post('Meetings')
Exactly. I'd estimate approximately a 10-fold increase in productivity if I removed the HN RSS feed from the top of my iGoogle page. But...
"Nobody is navigating."

Stronger: Nobody can navigate. The complexity of the task of navigation exceeds what one human can do by many orders of magnitude and remains firmly out of the grasp of even the best corporations or governments. Moreover, it's getting harder, not easier.

Like the sarcastic laws of thermodynamics that end with "You can't get out of the game", we're on a wild ride, nobody is in control, and there isn't anything you can do about that fact.

(In truth, it has always been this way. Control over technology has always been an illusion. It's just that now that illusion is all up in your face and you can't ignore it.)
I am better at 5 ways to start a productive afternoon/night. In the morning I just have too much little stuff to get out of the way before I feel that I am going to get a big enough block of time to do meaningful work. Once I have the other stuff out of the way, I can dive into coding without distraction from, say 11-6. On the other hand, if there was a bug I couldn't fix the night before, looking at that first thing in the morning seems to work as if I'd been solving it in my dreams.
I'm the author and I was talking more about not being able to load parts of the web due to timeouts with the backend. I run a very cpu hungry site and some parts took a lot to get computed and served. So again, I'm sorry for the confusion but I was talking about backend derived problems, not front-end although as I said previously, I'm well aware of them too :) But those don't take forever to fix, backend (usually) does
What about "Sit in front of the computer," "Type some stuff," and "Don't stop breathing"?

When I'm "in the zone", there is no better advice.

When I'm not in the zone, there is no worse advice.

Don't be fooled into thinking that "time in front of computer" = "work done". I've made that mistake too many times.

When I'm not making good progress in front of the computer (and I admit that this is sometimes very hard to tell), that's when it's time to get up and get away. Take a walk, go to the sofa with pencil and paper, hell, go to lunch, anything but continuing to sit and code in circles all day.

Even though OP's advice was very basic, I'd like to think of it as "how to get into the zone". Once I'm there, I don't need any advice. When I'm not in the zone, I'd do almost anything to get back there.
Thanks! Lets hope so!
I am feeling extra cynical at the moment so I can't hold myself back:

All of this talk about "follow your passion, the money will come" is starting to sound a little infomercial-ish. It's also a little ironic considering that this guy says in his talk that we should all go out and follow our passion. What if my passion is building an aggregator that aggregates aggregators? There's clearly more going on in the background than people are letting on. I know plenty of people who followed their passion and filed for bankruptcy. I know web 2.0 is over and we need a web 3.0 mantra, but please, let's avoid this crap about how the web is all about fluffy clouds and passion that deliver piles of money for attempting to save starving babies. A little perspective please.
As Wired writes, it is a conceptual piece. I see the vision technology comes from Polar Rose. I've worked with them for a couple of years as their lead architect. Until they funding dried up. I think they are running on fumes now.

Vision technology is really tough to sell. Finding faces is simple, everybody is doing that these days, but actually recognizing a face is a whole different game. It is really hard and you need a lot of cpu power and storage to match someone in near realtime. At Polar Rose we got good results with stock photos. But throwing 'internet quality' photos at it resulted in just terrible accuracy.

What they do in the demo cannot work just on the phone. It will need a support infrastructure that receives the mugshot, processes it and then matches it against other faces in the database. Nobody really gets this part right yet.
Apps "to be as big as internet", says CEO of a "leading independent application store". PR puff piece.
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I second the call to SICP; it is, admittedly, very hard to deal with not using recursion after reading the first few chapters, but even outside of that, it will change the way you program.

Reading SICP is like taking a freezing shower; it's a bit of a shock at first, but afterward everything is crisp and clear. Colors are brighter and love is lovelier after you read SICP.

Ok, maybe it's not gold-and-bunnies good, but it's pretty good, and should help remove your cognitive stumbling block.
I use PGP all the time when sending around sensitive info and also to encrypt personal pictures and videos. It's surprising how little people use it, tho. People should care more about their privacy.
Using custom XML is perfectly fine. It may not be the way you'd do it (or me for that matter), but there is nothing wrong with XML as a representation for data.

In fact, this is what XML was actually designed for.
Real URLs have no guarantee of that either. http://whitehouse.com doesn't get me the same sexy pics it did 10 years ago.

That aside, you're right that an extra layer in there just adds more room for things to go wrong.
Most expensive javascript ever
Basically, OP's saying that there is a group of neurons that fire when the person thinks about water. I wouldn't have it any other way.
The 10-year-old who helped Apollo 11
And here in Canada we pay 30$/MB for over-the-air data, and a 5Mb (that's mega-bit, not byte) internet connection is almost 50$ per month. That's also pretty much the fastest you can get even in the capital (Ottawa). God I feel like I'm living in a third-world country.
"If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://www.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How They Built it: The Software of Apollo 11
What a cool idea. Somewhere between "build something in a weekend" and a 3 to 6 month incubator or accelerator. This may be ideal for someone who has too much to do in a weekend but isn't ready for a longer commitment. I hope they give public updates about the results. I'd love to see what comes out of this.
Use clojure.test for TDD. There's a bit of documentation here:

http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html#Testing
Really? Conspiracy theories? This site at a glance appears to also deny the holocaust.

Hacker news for sure.
We will! Hopefully the teams will post their advances on the blog, so that everyone can see them :) Let's see how it works out, as it's the first edition and we're still working on it :)

Thanks for the comment! Nice to see people like the idea :D
Well, yeah. I knew that from watching Homer's antics on the Simpsons. This doesn't dp anything to explain why if you incessantly think "Don't do x; don't do x" then you wind up doing x. But maybe I'm expecting too much from an article in the Sports section.
> When I'm "in the zone", there is no better advice.

> When I'm not in the zone, there is no worse advice.

Oh, sorry, I should have used more outlandish examples. I was intending to be completely facetious w/ my suggestions.
Conspiracy theories on Pearl Harbor have been batted around and rejected, over and over, for decades. Why should I believe this third-hand crank account over any other?

http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_h...

I have no love for FDR, but there is no evidence that he was a traitor.
Plants are a gateway biomass. One minute you're snacking on some grass clippings, then before you know it you're eating whole families alive.
I've just started really trying to dig into Lisp. I've got a long way to go, so please excuse me for my ignorance.

Could a modern day operating system be written in Common Lisp? Could highly numeric code (for quant work) run as fast as C/C++?
Ack - better than grep, a power search tool for programmers
Ask HN: YC & other programs - is this data correct?
As part of my master's dissertation (which I'm writing on YC & similar programs) I'm trying to collect data on all of the startup incubators/programs that exist and all of the companies that have been funded through them. I hope this is at least interesting, if not helpful.

Here is the link to the list of programs:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dmqzzmg_12fcp7g7c8

Here is the link to the list of funded companies (different sheet for each program):
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=t_toYuVyy6fci0MAiIaZ30A

While I've done my best to make these accurate, I know there are still errors. (And the acquisition prices are just guesses.) I'd appreciate it if you could let me know where I screwed up (either here or at jed [dot] christiansen [at] gmail).

Once it's more accurate I'll post some additional statistics/analysis.
Structure and randomness in the prime numbers « What’s new
Too many anecdotes, not enough data - Bokardo
"One is the recent wave of neural/psychological research about how our experience of ourselves and reality is constructed in ways that don't at all correspond to our beliefs. There are a great many such findings and from what I've gleaned, they consistently refute our concept of ourselves as rational actors making controlled decisions as we move through objective reality. (I'm still waiting for someone to write a good general survey of this material. There's a crying need for one, though it might not be very popular.)"

I know I'm late to the game here, but you might be interested in reading this:

http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the-semant...

It's a write-up of a talk given by author R. Scott Bakker, an almost-but-so-fed-up-with-it-that-he-gave-it-up PhD in Philosophy about the experiential consequences of neuroscience.

However, I will argue that this differs significantly from postmodern philosophy in one key respect: while anti-foundationalism certainly is a hallmark of the school of thought, it is never founded on objective scepticism, like science. Even the points made by neuroscience (and Scott Bakker) will have to be undermined by postmodernism, as any one viewpoint (or Meta Narrative) inflects any other viewpoint and has nothing behind it but the authority of people in power.

I have a BA in English, and to the best of my knowledge and training, postmodernism is a manifestly worthless endeavour. When concepts like knowledge, empiricism, veracity, and progress become nothing but whips in the hands of the powerful, you've effectively gotten yourself into a rut you can't get out of. As a result, English departments are dying all over the US. For a detailed look at this, get Jonathan Gottschall's brilliant "Literature, Science, and a New Humanities."
The difference between semi-conductors and solar/battery tech is that you are already working at the molecular level with solar panels/batteries and have to change materials to get different results, this is complex as we don't have analytical models of this sort of thing.

With semi-conductors things materials don't need to be changed so much. We are still working with doped silicon (although we do need to make variations with SOI), we are just shrinking something we understand well.
The IHR is a known holocaust denial and Nazi apologist group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Historical_Review
Could a modern day operating system be written in Common Lisp? Yes.

Could highly numeric code (for quant work) run as fast as C/C++?

Yes, outside of extream optomizations. A good rule of thumb might be if you are are using inline ASM then no, otherwize yes.

PS: Common LISP is not the fastest LISP dielect, for quant work you might want something custom like GOAL. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp)
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Modern Education vs. Placebo
Ask HN: Should I Build These Startups?
Hi everyone,

I am writing this to ask for your help. Please read through this if you can.

I am a young entrepreneur who just resigned from my banking job in the US and try to begin my entrepreneurship journey in my home country, Hong Kong. Since there are not too many link-minded entrepreneurs here, I really hope the community here can give me some advice.

Below are 3 of my business ideas and I hope you can give me some comments:

1) A Fun & Easy Online HR System (pls go to the specific site for detailed ideas)

http://talentloose.com/

Why:
- People hate HR
- But people are the most important asset
- Have to do HR right

2) A Math Typing App & Learning Community

http://mathtribes.com/

Why:
- Hard to communicate Math online
- Children hate Math
- Create a fun environment for them to learn

3) Online Problem Solving Tools (Decision Tree...etc)

Why:
- Decision Tree is very useful
- People ignore these simple but powerful tools
- Enable people to learn from others' thought process

http://handytree.com/

4) Please Vote

If you don't want to post your comments here, can you simply vote for the best ideas on the following page? Thanks!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=miJq7VOY6AvLHBYxjxk6hg_3d_3d

FYI, I have also used Google Adword to drive traffic to those pages. If I have any responses, I will post the result here later.

For every entrepreneur here, thanks for setting a path for me to try to follow. I will never forget people helping me to achieve my dream.

All the best,

Vincent Chan
http://twitter.com/VincentChan
Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos
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Subnetting Made Easy(for Network Engineers)
I'm thinking the minimal set is a virtual machine with IE8 (which has a IE7 mode) and IE6 running on IEsforLinux ( http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page ). Since that way you only have one virtual machine running and that saves memory.
I used to be a big pair programming zealot, but I've backed off, since I've seen it fail with so many people at so many places. Having said that, the times I've worked in good pair programming environments have been the happiest, most productive times of my life (at work, anyway).

So then, what constitutes "good"? This article seems to focus on the code, which I think can matter, but I believe is much less important than the people having the ability to pair effectively, which in my experience consists of two things: (1) the ability to clearly articulate what one is thinking, in real-time, and (2) the ability to allow your partner's ideas to be better than your own. It also helps if you don't get annoyed by someone asking you questions while you code, but that's less important, because you'll get over that if you and your coding partner have (1) and (2).
EXACTLY. It's not that radical. Sad to see ieee drinking too much Kool-Aide.
I thought this article was rather interesting especially this line:

Also, it can be difficult to persuade a talent photographer to go along with that approach [of supplying a CC licensed photo] because one free photograph can drive out all the others,...

I would think it would be relatively easy to hire a talent photographer to explicitly take a series of photos to be released under creative commons.

Even if for some reason many of the traditional talent photographers refused, if they were so keen on getting a better photo for use on wikipedia it seems like it would be easy to hire talented amateurs or lower tier professional photographers that would love the exposure that would come with having it used for wikipedia, even if they had to lose control over it to get that.
Notes: I don't mean to advertise my pages here. Actually I haven't finalized those product names yet. I just want to see if any entrepreneurs here can give me some advice. Thanks.

This is the link of the surveymonkey page:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=miJq7VOY6AvLHBYxjxk6hg...
I agree, strongly. The best imperative Java code I ever wrote was after I worked through exercises in SICP. The book just taught me new ways to think. I'd also recommend "The Little Schemer", for the same reason.
"Scalability is far more about keeping things running than it is about making things fast"

The need to state these facts is further evidence that this is an arts and crafts industry (and not scientific). Imagine physicist saying "Inertia should not be confused with momentum".
You linked to Rainer's home box on a DSL line, I hope you're happy parenthesis :-/

Folks, please please don't crawl that site. If you see a document you like wait a few days and download it then, or just browse it there slowly.

[Edit: He is running good ole CL-HTTP on LispWorks it seems. Rainer also has the occassional Lisp machine serving pages sometimes; that I wouldn't want slashdoted ;-]
The main off-the-cuff response I have is that the tail will wag the dog. The deep conversations the presenter seeks for the future will be had by a small subset of youtubers/netizens etc. But the neat thing is that those conversations will be public, discoverable, and joinable. So aspirants to depth will be able to find peers. Fragmentation is inevitable, and will increase, but so too will the awareness of fragmentation. Each deeply engaged person will know that their area of engagement is just a pocket, and island, and they will know they can traverse to other nearby (or distant) islands as they please.

This is all true currently, and will probably get more true going forward.

Side note/example: Deep thinkers about the news do not really watch network television any more, except as a window into what shallow thinkers are consuming.

------

notes

Digital Ethnography "Toward a New Future of 'Whatever'"
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=230

"New media might be changing the search for the authentic self." 13:56

"Not you, but this." 18:36

"They all speak video." 29:57

"They wouldn't state these things if they felt they already existed." ~30:17
But then where would find tips on how to be productive?

:)
YouTube Experimenting With 3D Web Videos