skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dude, thank you, less is exactly what I've been looking for. It uses existing syntax and adds exactly what is necessary, macros are not. This I can teach to my designers, macros would only confuse them as would a different syntax.
In long run open platform is the way to move forward
In conclusion, I thought that Hacker News would be immune from Haskell group think, but I was unfortunately wrong.

I'm not Hacker News, I'm one poster.
I tend to agree with this user. I don't think there is a startup culture or mentality here in Chicago. Most people who want to start tech startups move out to CA.
I don't know why I continue to engage you, but...

I really like this Haskell group-think here.

There is no group-think here. You made your argument. Nobody cares.

Where we stand now: you think Haskell is unusable because of the three points you mention. I disagree. That is all we have. You could be doing the community a huge favor by pointing these things out, and "we" are just to dumb to realize you're right. But probably not. These are just your pet annoyances that you feel like talking about.

(I have my own pet annoyances, especially with libraries that unnecessarily use IO when they could use ST or even hide the IO completely. Notice how I don't whine about this stuff, but rather simply try to avoid this in my own code.)

You don't like Haskell or OCaml, clearly. So don't use them! (But realize that nobody really cares.)

And drawing an arbitrary line where purity can begin and end does not change the definition of side effects.

The point is you write code as though there are no side effects. There are side effects, but they are hidden from the programmer by the runtime system and by the libraries in use.

Abstraction is the key to staying sane as a programmer.
I read this interview of JWZ by Peter Siebel, joel missed something, but there are few thing in interview which i couldn't understand or better say trying to understand

This is my post regarding that
http://weddew.com/blog/2009/09/productivity/why-so-much-rush...
> And all the examples from Beck's TDD book were in Java.

One has to make a living.

> but their numbers are surely dwarfed by the number of people programming in that style in Java and .NET.

Doubtful. To quote Kent himself, "Even allowing for my marketing and sales mistakes, the data suggests that there are at most a few thousand Java programmers actively practicing TDD." Which is why he stopped developing jUnitMax http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=291

Java just doesn't have a TDD culture, nor does C# really.
I think it's more about learning to be more in tune with one's own biological processes and rhythms and exercise is one way of achieving it.
Criterion, a new benchmarking library .. easy to use, informative, and robust
A new object database for Python 
see the pypi page at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dobbin
I still can't see that in it (I guess I know who jwz is, and know who joel is, and what he has said about jwz in the past and that colours it for me, but I am POSITIVE that was not the intent).
I would have done it as follows:

<div class="box hot"> and <div class="box cold">, hot is selected and cold it has been dropped in a 'recycle' container.

I also try to minimize id's, for example I could have <li class="cold"> as well.

I do agree with you that one should not just map all the CSS attributes into classes. Perhaps my example was not a good one. However, three or four additional sets of classes, has increased my own productivity, especially during development. I keep a partial CSS file with 5, 6 generic sets. Most large newspaper sites use this method. It all depends in what one needs to do. In this method the style sheet is 'more abstracted', it does not know about a box.cold. If you skinning a wordpress template, you better off to offer the box.cold in the stylesheet, but then you must provide a second style sheet to offer the box.hot! This method also allows a bit of presentational flexibility for new page designs, without playing with the main CSS files or adding another CSS file. Somewhere, along the line there is a golden line I guess.
did you try to run this by PickFu to see what happens? http://pickfu.com/
If you were to use this entanglement to transport information (by periodically changing the flow, from that case) - would the change of the entangled thing be instantaneous or limited to speed/distance between them by C? (excuse my naivete).
I've been always thinking that it has a pattern. But never got to examine it closely.

My bird brain says boredom/depression goes in a sine wave (x-time, y-boredom/depression). And I have no explanation for it.
Download High Quality Desktop Wallpapers : Set 4 (Sep 2009) | Tech Bucket
20% tip in your country? Ouch. I’m guessing US: is it true that waiters/waitresses can be paid below the minimum wage on the assumption that tips can bring it up?
A bit off topic but I'll ask hoping to take advantage of all of the Aussie HNers who will surely drop by---

How are the startup scenes in Melbourne and Sydney?

Are they startup up friendly cities? Is the technology meet-up phenomenon present there as it is in the States?

(All this talk of sunshine has rekindled my desire to get out of Chicago before winter comes...)
To be fair, QuickTime is used on a widespread basis as an audio/video manipulation library -- it's rather more than a player. However, the DRM-handling components are completely inert unless you're specifically working with protected media files.

iTunes, on the other hand, can be disposed of entirely. There are a few isolated hooks into it (the "Media" section of the Open dialog, for instance), but certainly nothing essential.
Is there a good anti-iPhone rant somewhere that avoids logical fallacies and would help me understand why some people are averse to iPhone development? I don't get it.

Central point of control == bad?

I don't buy it. JWZ is a central point of control for DNA Lounge, I assume; PG is a close to a central point of control for YC news; Linus is a central point of control for Linux kernel enhancements -- or was, for a while; I haven't been keeping up so if I'm wrong, please understand the general point, which is: we happily accept central control as long as there is good will.

DRM == bad?

Again, though I agree, Apple's implementation of DRM for Apps has gotten it far closer to right than any other, with family sharing of one purchase on multiple devices, refunds, DRM-free music, free updates, remembering your purchase so you can re-download purchased items for free (remember the phone companies' model, buy a game, run out of memory, delete it, then if you want it later you have to buy it again?). Definitely iPhone is not free, in the freedom sense, and downright scary, in the your-app-can-be-yanked-at-any-time sense, but I believe the same is true on Android; we just haven't seen the test case yet.

iPhone is not open == bad

OK... but it's a platform. Lots of platforms are open only down to certain layers. Google is a platform. But it only exposes certain parts of itself for developers to use. And we understand that. So why do we not understand it when it comes to a phone? Maybe because it's such a personal device?

It doesn't let us do everything == bad

I think this comes closest to being an answer. This would be the answer for me. But, neither does any other device. I continue to think that Android developers are naive to assume they are not going to bump up against limits imposed by carriers and by Google. They just don't have the critical mass to have hit all the nooks and crannies yet.

Apple is not friendly to open source == bad.

Grand Central Dispatch, LLVM, Clang (probably there are more) all would indicate otherwise.

So, what am I missing? Not trying to troll here. I'm sure I have exhibited some ignorance in this long post, seriously. Why are (some small number of smart) people pounding their heads against the wall rather than develop for iPhone?
Aaaaand this is why I don't take the Free Software Foundation seriously anymore.
How much oil lies in reserve? The 1.258 trillion-barrel question
Sure but then you lose the hired guns that Apple has to keep the spam/malware/spyware out.

Quality control is definitely an essential feature for me. It just seems like Apple hasn't figured out all of the bumps yet in providing it.
China in talks to buy one-sixth of Nigeria’s oil reserves
> - iTunes updates that [...] only allowed iTunes libraries running current DRM versions to play DRMed music.

To put a finer point on it, "iTunes updates which modified the store communications protocols and/or keystore format in non-backwards-compatible ways". The purpose of these updates was specifically to disable applications which bypassed DRM restrictions -- which I strongly suspect that Apple is contractually bound to do.
Federal Judge Rules Video Games are Protected "Expressive Works"
Can you write apps yourself without using some Nokia code signing tool?
It's not the centralized control but rather how Apple is applying it to further their business agenda at the expense of their users' access to an awesome Google technology.
I'm basically depressed 70% of the time and feeling terrible and unproductive, but it seems like the work I get done during the rest of that time makes up for it. Passive income is good for that reason.
How Internet Reporting Is Beating the New York Times
I was debating type systems with a fellow student the other day, and there seemed to be a sort of disconnect in the meanings of the different labels we applied to one another's preferences and arguments. This article definitely helped me see more of the other side of the debate (Mine being that of a hardcore Rubyist amd his of Java) and understand the disconnect we were having in discussion.

A worthwhile read for sure.
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Keyword Meta Tags and Google Rankings
What is the importance of Keyword Meta Tags in SEO? According to Google they do not consider keyword Meta Tag for ranking in Google, whereas, Bing and Yahoo have a different approach towards keyword meta tag. Yahoo and Bing are still using Keyword meta tags for ranking websites in their search engines.
Thanks for your suggestions. I really appreciate them.

I wanted to do this project from scratch (instead of using WordPress or Drupal), because I felt that down the line, it would be easier to add features which might not align well with an existing CMS type of system. Right now this website is implemented in Django and Python.

Another motivation was, it would help me learn some design skills.

I agree that while re setting everything to WordPress will give the website a much more professional look, I would still like to do it myself, if only for the learning experience.
When you develop for these platforms, does your code have to be signed before you can give your app to other people to run?

If yes, who controls access to the capability of issuing/revoking certificates?
I'd potentially be interested. Kind of between projects right now. Send me an email at andrewmbenton -at- gmail.
Thanks for the kind words and suggestions. I totally agree about the bad design. Actually this is my improved design :-)

I will continue to work on the design and make it better...
I like and appreciate the motivating aspect of this article from the perspective of the startup founder. As for the perspective of all those looking in from the outside, one has to realize their criticism comes as a result of the fact that most startups eventually fail, as it is extremely difficult for a startup to succeed over the long term. However, I do agree with the author that one must focus on the task at hand in the process of cultivating a startup because sometimes one person may see something special that millions or even billions do not.
Study groups is a wonderful idea. I have thought about this, but could not figure out, what I can add to a study group, which does not already exist in a mailing list. Can you give some suggestions please?
Thanks for the link to academicearth.org/
Your two points are contradictory.

It's true that I'm guessing at the numbers. (Who isn't? The post you reference doesn't include any data.) But that doesn't affect the point that the OP is obviously wrong to say "the whole unit testing movement basically came out of dynamically typed languages".
Well to be fair to Palm, it sounds like their app submission & review process is very much a work in progress. Fortunately processes like these seem to converge towards sanity and pragmatism over time.
It's not that everyone doesn't love and appreciate the village handyman. They really like having him around. They just don't respect him very much.
Did the ruckus over WaPo’s Twitter policy exposes social media's bubble?
Trying to create an account gives a "sendmail is fubar" with instructions to email you. Am using a .edu address.
Unfortunately, the author seems to be on the verge of falling into one of the fallacies he rightly points out: assuming that one of the main purposes of unit testing is to act as a surrogate for static analysis. I've seen code written in dynamically-typed languages which tries to do this, and such code pretty much universally falls into the category of "using dynamically-typed languages poorly" (particularly since pretty much every popular dynamically-typed language has lint tools which will catch the sorts of things paranoid static-typing aficionados try to test for).

What unit tests are good at, and what they should be used for, is verifying behavior and integration, something that static type systems notably still aren't particularly good at (and likely will never be good enough at for practical purposes -- I believe quite firmly that there's a diminishing-returns effect from ever-more-powerful type systems).

In general, though, I like to think of static type systems existing in relation to their programming languages in much the same way that metalanguages exist in relation to object languages in logic: the type system is essentially a separate language in which you can express and then verify statements about the program, just as a metalanguage allows you to express and verify statements about its object language.

This carries with it, of course, various implications for the limits of type systems (particularly since metalanguages are notoriously prone to infinite regress -- eventually you need a metametalanguage to make statements about the metalanguage, then a metametametalanguage and so on); I'm fairly certain that any sufficiently powerful type system would need to end up being a Turing-complete programming model in its own right, and since I've already got one of those (I'm writing my program in it) I generally pass on that and just write the unit tests :)
Mindful meditation is the only mental exercise that has helped get my life back.

I try to meditate for 20-30 minutes every day practicing my breathing and letting thoughts flow in and out. During this time there's no fighting emotions; if I feel like punching someone, I allow myself to envision it, let the emotion consume me, and then be done with it. Thoughts and emotions seem to disappear on their own if given the room to "make an appearance."

"As you gain experience with this type of meditation, you will gain the understanding that your true essence -
your essential spirit - is not the contents of your mind, but rather the observer of the contents."
http://themindfulnessblog.com/mindfulness-meditation-a-path-...

It's worth exploring other ways of interacting with your emotions. Mindful meditation has been successful for me. If you're interested, the book "The Mindful Way through Depression" is a great starting point.
http://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Way-through-Depression-Unhappi...
I hope life has given you some other super easy trick in compensation :)
Github: Speed Matters
We've used the css2sass tool for a smooth transition as well! The tool is included in the haml distribution.
Statistics has a pretty interesting stigma in science. It's something you're not allowed to question. Generally.

You can question if someone's models are right. You can question if their controls narrowed the experiment well enough. You can question if their interpretation makes any sense. What you can't question is if something like a t-test, LLS, or ANOVA is the best way to pull meaningful parameters out of the data. Just look at how much resistance Bayesian methods face in publication.

This is a fundamental friction that statistics has to overcome as long as its still called statistics. I think of ML as the parts of statistical research that escaped through the window opened by Shannon back when he invented information theory. It's a bird now, free to invent its words for the world and try crazy stuff that the religion of "Statistics" could never accept.

This isn't to say that Statistics isn't growing. The article itself does a good job pointing out just how similar recent Stat has been to ML. However, if you see a research paper in some of the more core, less data intensive sciences that dares to drop "SVM", "Ridge Regression", "Clustering", "Bayes", or god forbid "Machine Learning" itself you see scowls: isn't your data normal enough? Why do you need to do something fancy when I can work out the z-score of that result right here on my pocket calculator/slide rule.

(Lets go ahead and concede that ML certainly has a lot of broken yet overhyped parts which helps form the nucleus of an argument not to infect scientific knowledge with some untested infrastructure. Growing pains.)

It's a classic fight between tradition and innovation with all the usual arguments available, but what makes this different is that such a huge community of people who thrive off the image of really, really knowing things pretty much take the frequentist methodologies as an unimpeachable gold standard. Things can get dicey when you start to ask what the actual meaning of a p-value is, how we really know anything about "estimators", why people work so hard not to use computers. It works! Stop asking questions.
Apple pushes unwanted enterprise tool to Windows users
see the pypi page at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dobbin
Yes, I imagine that users not being afraid that the software they install is malware does quite well for overall sales.
Yes, that is the case. I think it's dumb and wrongheaded, but it is what it is.
Basically, that means you won't develop for any proprietary platform.
Isn't Quark still around to compete with them?
I pay about 500 euros annually for this, that includes my personal tax filings.

The office that does this for me has in the past also provided payroll services (when I had employees), and gives me tax advice. It's run by an elderly gentleman who knows his stuff very well and he's saved lots of money over the years.
That's the reason why I do not do freebies anymore, unless they're very small, for companies that I do other work for as well, and I see them as part of the service.

As soon as someone wants more than 2 hours of my work the meter is running. It helps to separate the real customers from the 'users', and I don't mean 'users' as in end users, I mean it in the sense of people using other people.
Once every 5-10 years.
"Basically, that means you won't develop for a proprietary platform."

Last I heard, you didn't have to pay Microsoft to write a "ToDo List" app for Win XP (or a Win ME phone).
>I don't buy it. JWZ is a central point of control for DNA Lounge, I assume; PG is a close to a central point of control for YC news; Linus is a central point of control for Linux kernel enhancements -- or was, for a while; I haven't been keeping up so if I'm wrong, please understand the general point, which is: we happily accept central control as long as there is good will.

I think what you're looking for is right here:

>as long as there is good will.

I don't think nearly as many people would be angry over the App Store if the approval process were sane.

Also...

>OK... but it's a platform.

Sure, but before the iPhone, application development for phones was, in general, significantly more open. If I wanted to deploy a Symbian OS application three years ago, I wrote it and let people download it. Windows Mobile was similar. It's not the fact that it's not open, but it's the fact that it moves the industry towards less openness that's concerning.
Based on what I've read:

Apple's decision-making process on what gets into the App Store is completely opaque, and has a hugely variable turn-around rate. Developers need to push updates out quickly, and Apple's approval process is actively hampering such efforts.

There have been many posts detailing horrible cases of delays in approval, where the developer has been unable to have anyone to contact at Apple. Also, there has been no word from Apple as to what they are doing, if anything, to fix the long and inconsistent approval process
Watch AZ Alkmaar v Standard Liège Live
AZ Alkmaar coach Ronald Koeman said his side “are longing for a victory” as the Dutch champions host R. Standard de Lige looking for liftoff after a difficult start to the season both in Europe and on the domestic front. AZ are eight points off the lead in the Eredivisie and lost their Group H opener at Olympiacos FC.
I'm a fan of Comcast -- namely their total lack of countermeasures aimed at cable modem modification.

Unlike some of the Cable ISPs in Europe, they don't:

* Make any attempt to fingerprint / forcibly upgrade your firmware
* Restrict routing to unauthenticated modem MAC addresses
* All they do is give you a walledgarden config
* The MAC address database is global and lock-free
* The only real authentication is locally in Layer 2
* Ever change the locations/names of their config files
I have no idea why everyone hates Comcast so much. I've lived in SF for more than three years and had Comcast the whole time. I have had exactly zero issues, from reliability to speed to torrenting to customer service. It could be a bit cheaper and a bit faster, I guess, but I never really think about it, which is 95% of what I want from my internet provider.
Looking forward to meeting more of Melbourne's web/tech startups.
"So, what am I missing? Why are (some small number of smart) people pounding their heads against the wall rather than develop for iPhone?"

Annual development fees == bad !

I hope that helped you understand why a few of us have reservations about developing for the IPhone.

I developed Win32 apps once, including for WinME phones. I didn't have to pay annual fees to Microsoft.
I (for one) will never develop for the IPhone as long as they charge annual development fees - basically I have to rent the right to develop from Apple annually.

No Thanks!
> but you must have their dev kit to actually transfer this over the wire to your iPhone

That pretty much sums up the problem, in my opinion. Those things aren't cheap, and if it's mine, I should get to install what I want on it. I can understand weeding things out of their store - that's fine - they want to control the quality. However, if I want to put something on my own device via a usb cable, I ought to be able to.
Reading the article and the comments, Its a shame with any advancement in Education, online or off. We cant look to quantify someones learning experience without tests and exams.

* Where is the acknowledgement for?

"self motivated" study

"curiosity"

"learning for life, not just for an exam next week"

With that aside, I think online education should complement or co-exist tightly with face to face education. Best of both worlds. The time my children ( which I dont have ) are old enough to be at school. The tech, internet and daily living is going to be vastly different from when I went to school. Should be interesting assuming we get some great forward thinkers on the job!
In C# how can you find the mime type of a file based on the file signature