skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I should preface this by noting that I haven't looked into the situation recently, and the problem may have been fixed, but it really soured me on Haskell. (At a glance, it looks the same, and discussions with a presenter at a local barcamp implied no real change.) I stopped worrying about it because I'm quite content with Lua for small personal projects, and OCaml and Erlang seem to be more my style than Haskell for larger ones.

So, that said: I primarily use OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and bootstrapping recent versions of GHC from source has been broken for a long time. OpenBSD's current GHC is 6.6.1, and FreeBSD's is 6.8.x, but (last time I checked) was marked as broken. While porting language runtimes to OpenBSD can be tricky due to e.g. its randomized malloc, an open-source language that doesn't even build from source on FreeBSD probably doesn't place much of a priority on portability. GHC 6.6.1's ghci segfaults on my openbsd/amd64 system, too.

Just after I got settled with XMonad, GHC updated without a clear plan for source bootstrapping. I get the impression that a lot of people just use Debian/Arch/etc., like dons did[1]. (I'm a (somewhat minor) OpenBSD porter, so I probably care about this more than many people.)

[1]: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/haskell_openbsd.html - He switched to using Arch in ~2005.

Here's a Hackage bug ticket, closed after a year and a half with the note that they're probably just not going to support building that way anymore:(http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1346). It's not hard to find griping about the situation on the openbsd-ports list.

While GHC is just one compiler (and I've put some time into helping with updating Common Lisp and Scheme ports in the past, due to similar issues), Haskell programmers seem to assume a recent version of GHC and its extensions, making "whatever GHC does" a de-facto standard. That rules it out for me entirely, and I wonder if anybody else feels the same.
That sounds like a worthy approach. Any practical ideas on how to actually do it?

One possibility would be to allow a section of a country to secede if 60% of the population votes to do so. That might eliminate a popular reason for war in some situations.
I am so glad that I am taking all Online courses.
1 Reason I Was Forced to Overcome My Chrome Addiction:

It keeps freezing, requiring a power-off restart, with more than about twenty-five tabs. Sad to say, both FF and IE8 are much more stable with lots of tabs.
'C64 games' is a subset of 'arbitrary applications'. You are a member of the set of Apple fanboys.
Hi Steve,

I write a blog about custom manufacturing and 3D printing, If you ever want a write up just let me know.
Bezos Expeditions Part of $7M Round for Heartland Robotics
Anigbrowl, check out http://www.replicatorinc.com Not always cutting edge, but I do try to add analysis about 3D printing/custom manufacturing that you don't see with the typical cut and paste from press release stories.
Rule of thumb is that short term memory can hold 7 +/-2 items. ("Items" is variously defined.)

Edit: if you can explain why you downvote something like this, I'm very open to hearing it.
Formal analysis is a fact of life in many industries.
Aviation, rail/transportation, medical systems and some power systems.

All these industries have one thing in common - a lot of money to throw around. So the technology and techniques are there, they just have to be brought down to the masses.
There are signs of that happening, it just may take more time than you expect.
Do you run anti-virus on your mac?
I don't think it'll take more time than I expect, but I take your point.

Like I said, I think formal analysis of software development is a laudable goal that should be pursued. But in many ways, software is so much more complex than other engineering fields that it becomes increasingly difficult if the development is not carefully controlled (something that Dijkstra is a big believer in). I know that Dijkstra recognizes that it is not an easy problem to solve, and that he feels that computer scientists have not adequately researched this area. My main point was more about his general attitude to computer engineers than to his actual point.

He addresses this well in this EWD Manuscript:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1304...
Are these issues primarily on 64bit machines, of which my Macbook Pro isn't one?
It's a great stance for a language that focusing primarily on research and innovation, but it does put a damper on getting things done sometimes. Some stability and concessions to practicality go a long way.

I think that having a clean break at major revisions (e.g. Python 3, Lua 4.0 to Lua 5.0) and cleaning up cruft is probably a reasonable approach, as long as it's handled carefully and half the community doesn't stay with the old version. (It was easier with Lua because it's so small, and usually embedded in something else.)
Years of using ^C ^V have probably biased my opinion =)

I might add that for me the #1 feature that I'm really addicted to is the address bar doubling as a search bar. It just feels right.
"... Knowing machine code isn't an academic endeavor for many programmers, much like knowing Latin isn't an academic endeavor for doctors* FTFY..."*

Poor choice of phrase: Latin, the language is a prereq for Natural Scientists describing phylum. For Doctors Latin is used every day because the physical structure of humans is described in and derived from Latin. This isn't an just an academic pursuit.

I understand what you're getting at btw. But programmers who don't understand MIX probably don't know about Knuth. When I'm writing to HN and use the phrase "programmers" and "writers" I'm neither referring to "Accountants programming Excel" nor "Shakespeare as translated by Lolcats".
I think his point was that even the sites that host specific implementations of Lisp often don't have a direct link to the download.
I usually have about 5 instances of Chrome open at a time with at least 10 tabs each. Usually it's pretty stable.

I do think FF still has an edge in the stability department however.
Very happy to hear this, as we have a solar startup building a massive production facility in Atlanta - http://suniva.com/
I think comments are good for adding perspective. You shouldn't expect an expert to arrive and give a concise, absolutely true and exhaustive explanation with that perspective. Spurring a community to dig deeper on something previously assumed true is a good thing, right?

The article cited does not claim we've improved cancer treatments - only that mortality from cancer for certain age groups has decreased according to their analysis, which could be from a number of reasons. To my knowledge, one of those reasons is not that a variety of prevalent cancers has been cured to any substantial degree. Also, just because you can find a published article that claims something doesn't mean it's true (although it is a much better chance in the scientific literature versus popular press due to peer review). Especially in an active area like cancer with 10k+ papers, you can basically find a paper that will support any viewpoint.

The NYT is running a great series on cancer treatment that gets into these matters, I should have cited before, here's one of them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/health/research/02cancerdr...
Unrealistic project estimates: The IT consultant as an enabler
This is nonsense. If it's as contagious as it's purported to be then washing your hands and staying home when you are sick are precisely the things that you should be doing. These simple measures have a real, measurable impact on public health. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_washing_with_soap
Isn't it more like an annual Seattle screening of Pulp Fiction switching to, I dunno, Die Hard? Perhaps a change for the worse, but one you are rarely (if ever) actually affected by, and one the majority of people who are affected by it wouldn't care about?

Movies are a tough example because a LOT more people care about movies than fonts -- so perhaps many people would care about that switch -- but you get the idea.
Interview Questions - Microsoft, etc.
Can anyone explain the difference between AHAH and JSON? If I'm reading it right, JSON would access data in a remote database, and it would be returned as javascript and could be inserted into the page. AHAH would access remote HTML and insert it into the page? Am I wrong on that?

If you used expires and caching on those static HTML pages, would that then lead to more efficient data pulling than querying a database with JSON?
Even better, he violated Creative Commons and didn't attribute the header image to me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timdorr/3726252344/
It's really not hard to avoid getting a virus when installing arbitrary apps, even on Windows, for which nearly all viruses are written - just download reputable apps from reputable sites. Not hard.

The iPhone has a full web browser, though, which is a much more likely point of entry for malicious code.
Seriously? "Uzbl - a browser that adheres to the Unix philosophy." You expect this to work on Windows?
Considering you're looking at potentially big, and have systems development experience, I'd suggest taking a look at Catalyst (it's perl, http://www.catalystframework.org/). The way it's designed, you can use any templating system you want (template toolkit, mason, etc.) and any DB backend you want. I've used it for some small projects and for some large projects, all with moderate success. Probably the best fit about it is that it doesn't force your app into being written a specific way. Once you have your foundation down, it's lightning quick for prototyping as well (and turning those prototypes into the fully functional, scalable system).
Spotify App Goes Live on iPhone and Android
This is a very one sided view. One major problem that web apps have over desktop apps is the ambiguity of purpose. If you alt+tab or use exposé and see the window for Word, you know that's a word processor. It's much less defined as a browser window with Google Docs open. Regardless of what the web browser can do, its main purpose is still to browse the web. It's a main reason why I use Pidign/Digsby/Adium over using Meebo (although Meebo is great for checkup on someone else's computer). Different strokes for different folks.

Desktop apps are also not limited within the browser window and in hardware configuration such as 3d acceleration, keyboard shortcuts, mouse clicks (right click on Flash?), etc.
SimpleScott's was terrific. I love the guy's website: http://www.simplescott.com/
I do not know if anybody does it, but b2c should be a really nice market to get in to, I can see bots paid for by the 'case', by savings realized or by sales made.

One possibility would be helpdesk stuff and diagnosis work, for instance in troubleshooting machinery.

Telesales might also be interesting but the 'close' would probably have to come from a human.
I don't use other browsers much (IE8 sometimes at work), but I'll add Opera 10 (and 9 iirc) to the list of browsers that can stably handle lots of tabs. Memory usage gets a bit crappy but nothing crashes.
You can try filling out their form there if you want to look at the actual text of the free report, rather than what the headline-writers spun it as. (I tried, but didn't get anything yet from them yet).
http://www.strandconsult.dk/sw3871.asp

There's also their own non-quantitative summary of the report:
http://www.strandreports.com/sw3501.asp
They lift every part from the magazine, add nothing, and crop down from the original. There was no point to its reposting.
I agree with you entirely. A huge problem is in mindset and culture.
I've mentioned formal methods here on HN before and been essentially
shouted down. Which seems odd considering the hacker-above-the-commoners ethos HN wears on its sleeve.

But I digress, I think in the next few years as functional languages
become more mainstream we'll see a huge uptake in formal methods.
Not end to end mind you, but of the low level proover type tools.

Formal project planning and design languages still take too
much training to be widely accepted. Can you imaging a ruby hacker
analyzing and writing up his code in Z language before they code?
Neither can I. But any amount of progress on this front is a good thing.
Interface-wise, Firefox also wins in the "huge numbers of tabs" department; Tree-Style Tabs is an absolute must for anyone using 50-100+ tabs regularly.
I've pretty much switched to chrome for all daily browsing, with the exception being on Linux, where the builds don't yet handle flash as well as Firefox.

With that said, I'm missing two features that I've become accustomed in Firefox:

1. ctrl-1, ctrl-2, etc for switching tabs.

2. Forward-slash for searching
Not a great example as fewer people are using the phone book every year in favor of sites like YellowPages.com that look a lot more like what the "after" designs in this article were.
Number 1 reason I don't use chrome:
It (google) tries to impose it's will and existence on me.
Through paid articles like the linked one.

"1. Ludicrous Speed for fast fingers."
Same can be done in firefox using ctrl-c, ctrl-k, ctrl-v, alt-enter

"2. Each Tab is its own Process"
That might actually be a good thing to implement in firefox.
Although what he mentions has never happened to me. In my experience firefox rarely crashes.

"3. No bothersome updates on every other launch"
What he said. It can be turned off. Altough I haven't cause i find it to be a good thing. Yet another thing which runs itself. Though "sometimes you just want to check gmail and check it fast" (notice how the author says "check gmail" and not "check your email" or some other just-want-to-do-it-fast task) and if firefox starts talking about updates I just click skip/cancel and go on with it. Still fairly fast.
Most certainly this is not a point that rates high in my change-browser?-checklist.

"4. The stay-out-of-your-way look"
My firefox is themed to be uber minimalistic.
URL-bar, searchbar and a bookmarkbar consisting only of icons.

"5. Downloading…"
I just like the way all downloads are accessible through one dedicated window/area.
Continuar
So roughly how do people manage to classify them? I was under the impression they all mutated 100x an hour.
It's interesting that folks are still displaying info in prompts.

With TTYs and their CRT equivalents, there really wasn't any alternative. However, most folks have their command line in a window these days, and windows have other places to put state information.
Spotify iPhone App: First Impressions
The Self-Storage Self - Storing all the Stuff we Accumulate
I prefer to think of the distinction as fluid.

What one application considers metadata is another application's data.

From the apparently trivial (file sizes, line numbers) to the domain specific (date of joining social network; file server cluster that hosts this image), each tool doing the work has a very different viewpoint.

The motivation for abandoning the distinction is this fluidity, not that there is no distinction.

(Sidenote: I like the Clojure definition of metadata:

"It is used to convey information to the compiler about types, but can also be used by application developers for many purposes, annotating data sources, policy etc.

"An important thing to understand about metadata is that it is not considered to be part of the value of an object. As such, metadata does not impact equality (or hash codes). Two objects that differ only in metadata are equal.")
"That said, they should have probably implemented a better one right from day 1."

I still can't believe it's a good idea not to break behavior that depends on the predictability of a broken implementation of a random number generator. It's not like this code will be broken by fixing the RNG. It was broken from the start.
Capitalism is evil, says new Michael Moore film
"it’s the reason that U.S. phone numbers have seven digits"

I used to believe these sorts of things until living in China and noticing cell numbers are 11 in length and Chinese don't have a problem remembering loads of them. I saw an article not long ago pointing out that CJK languages have only one syllable per number word, which may enable them to deal with longer strings of them more easily.
I use Vimperator. I can search (including site-specific search keywords) or open a URL or file by hitting 'o' and starting to type.

No modifiers, no nonsense.

I love Vimperator.
I really don't get this. It is just a fr*kking phone. From a telco perspective there should be no difference between selling a Nokia smartphone or an iPhone. If there is then they are doing it wrong.
Michael Malone argues that this is not as rosy a picture as the BLS suggests see http://pajamasmedia.com/edgelings/2009/08/14/the-myth-of-val...

I took at quick look at BLS data just for Santa Clara county at http://www.bls.gov/cew/data.htm selecting all industries, all private firms for 2001 to 2008 (years that data is available). In that time frame private employment peaked at 955,067 in March of 2001 and declines 20% to 763,233 in March of 2003 with low point occurring January 2004 at 738,589 (a 22.66% drop in total employment) for a loss of 216,748 jobs. December 2008 estimates are 807,648 total private jobs in Santa Clara County which which still represents a loss of 147,419 jobs or 15.5% from the March 2001 high water mark.
so hard to find, for example, a file with "accounts" in its name and "automobiles" in the contents ... Consider the UNIX find command which searches based on file metadata and the grep command which searches file contents. Combining the two is not easy.

grep -i automobiles `find / -type f -name *accounts*`

Interestingly, Amazon are currently being sued because they threw away someone’s metadata in the process of removing a copy of Orwell’s 1984 from a Kindle. You can bet the metadata was removed automatically when the content was removed.

Actually, they are restoring the file to anyone who wants it, including all notes.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/04/amazon-offers-to-give-bac...
The opposite of Ikea furniture, which sacrifices functionality (and robustness!) for aesthetics (and price).
For Firefox:

1. Double-click/highlight any word or phrase on a website
2. ^C
3. ^K
4. ^V
5. Alt-Enter (for results in a new tab)
Slideshow: What vendors consider sexy design
Actually, you didn't. I pointed out that you were demanding that I play rhetorical calvinball using your premises and rules. I then declined.

It's also interesting that your response to the fact that it's not the actual beneficiary who is using the knowledge, but a speculator, was to invoke realpolitik.

One problem with that is that the means produce the ends. The other is that the speculator doesn't have the characteristics that you use to justify your conclusion, but your conclusion is unchanged.
I don't usually like crossposting comments, but Reddit had a terrific response to this:

"Thank you Michael Moore, for contributing to the ongoing cartoonization of complex ideas into child sized, black and white morality plays. You and Glenn Beck do wonderful work nurturing our collective stupidity in the face of overwhelming opposition from such overrated concepts like moderation, and rationality, and calm discourse.

"We will continue to do our part to fake educated understanding, root for our own particular political persuasion, and demonize the opposing side till our only common trait with them is coincidental shared geography. Only then will the founding fathers' vision of a polarized, unstable collection of poorly governed states come to fruition."

Michael Moore oversimplifies problems to the point where his solutions are just as poorly-wrought. (Of course, here I go oversimplifying Moore, so...)
Can we hold back on namecalling? You made a good point without having to sully it with an attack.
I know this isn't a discussion of his subject matter but I love his presentation format.
"Don't make something unless it's both necessary and useful; But if it's both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful." - Shaker Dictum.

It's entirely possible that Craigslist is successful on account of its ugliness. It's also entirely possible that it's successful in spite of its ugliness. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Aesthetics are extremely important. One can certainly succeed without beautiful design, but more beautiful products are perceived to be more useable.

On the one hand, the right designer could significantly improve the look and feel of Craigslist, without affecting it's structure: a carefully applied colour scheme, better typography, whitespace and a fine attention to detail would help.

On the other hand, Craigslist is the mother of all outliers. Everything they do seems totally counter-intuitive.

Is there room for improvement? Definitely. Should it be improved? It's worthy of a debate.
"C64 games" is a closed set for which no new members are being created. All C64 games ever created could be distributed along with the emulator without making it the largest app in the store. Even if this weren't true, a whitelist of the hashes of known C64 games would suffice to ensure that every C64 game anyone would ever download a C64-game-playing-program for would be covered. Thus, it is not, in fact, a subset of arbitrary applications.

Apple has rules for what goes into their store, that they own, on their servers, that they run. You may not like them, they may be completely arbitrary, but it is always your option to not follow them. There are no consequences to jailbreaking your phone. There is no reason to whine at Apple for not allowing X application into their store when X is something, like a Turing-complete environment, that only people who are more likely than not to have jailbroken their phones in the first place would want.

Jailbreaking is simply the software-eqivalent of voiding your warranty, of saying "I'll take it from here, and take responsibility for anything I do to the phone or the network." If Apple could, they would likely put a switch in the settings saying "open phone to SSH access." However, providing such a switch would be sanctioning the usage of the switch, which would mean that they wouldn't be disclaiming responsibility for your actions on AT&T's precious network. Jailbreaking lets them do just that, and is an amiable position for all. Apple "fights back" just enough to make AT&T happy, but doesn't actively target anyone who has jailbroken their phone, and the jailbreakers get a pocket-sized computer with just enough continued effort to show that they really do want to keep their phone "on their terms" (because they could always let it lapse back to Apple's care simply by forgetting to re-break it after an update.)

The App Store is the place where everything is Apple's fault. Program crashed? Apple's fault. Inappropriate content? Apple's fault. Worm that DDoSes sites using AT&T's network? Apple's fault—and this is especially important, because that determines who AT&T gets to sue. If AT&T finds out that you jailbroke your phone and got the worm off Cydia, though, they get to sue you (and they probably won't bother since you're not worth anything.)
This is actually how mnemonic devices work (or so I hear): by encouraging your brain to "chunk" things such that each chunk has more information.
What makes you think that this is a paid article?
Lots of Hacker News users are musicians.

Citation? Not being confrontational or anything, just really curious.