skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"JVM, doesn't completely support Non-Blocking IO"

Isn't java.nio supposed to provide non-blocking IO (at least for socket)?
Google to buy display ad company Teracent
Monads can do more than that, though; nondeterministic computation comes to mind, as does simple error handling through the Maybe monad, and you can do continuations through a monad.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but all the examples you cite are about hiding mutable state using monads.

1. Non deterministic computation -> remembering last value of m and n. I assume you are talikng pseudo random generators here.

2. error handling with Maybe -> remembering last value or Nothing. Almost like passing along a single error code variable.

3. continuations -> Remember what state your computation variable and PC were last at.

If I am seeing this wrong, then I will be happy to take a second look at monads :)
The two team arrangement has caused me no end of problems over the past 10 years of my life, beyond shoehorning. The separation of the database team from the development team introduces communication problems, priority mismatches, and fixes done on one side or the other that should have been made on the other side. If you are reading this and you have separate database and development teams, merge them now, or at the least, put control of the schema in the hands of the development team.
Be as that may, my original comment stands.
I'm having trouble envisioning a world where a majority of content creators are dumb enough license their content exclusively to a single search engine. If a clueless handful want to pay Microsoft to hasten their own death, then by all means let them.
From the article: "while Berkeley charges $5,858 (per year in tuition and fees)."

Where did he get that from? The Education Fee for the current fall semester alone is $3,444. Berkeley, like the other UCs, comes out to about $10k per year for state residents. (reference - http://registrar.berkeley.edu/Registration/feesched.html).
This is a great call by the TechStars team. I was class of 2008 in Boulder, and I can't speak highly enough of techstars. I recommend it to every entrepreneur I know...
The latest from Zynga, 100 million users and $1 billion valuation
XKCD #666
Google Gives A Slightly Crippled Maps Navigation To All Android Users
Rebutting Scoble: In-stream Twitter Ads... you're already doing them
A databases job is to handle Data and a relational database can do that just fine. When you want to handle really complex relationships you need to write code because the rules are not abstract. You can create a horribly complex view / stored procedure and pretend it's the databases job, or you accept that some rules are stored on the database but not implemented using the database. Edit: None of the "database alternatives" help you solve the checkout problem.

PS: It's like complaining that HS level Calculus does not let you solve a complex differential equation. Useful abstractions always have their limits because they are abstractions.
I read this article w/ very mixed reactions.

Part of me was all for the price discrimination to help "level the playing field."

Another part of me just cringed. By making price discrimination like this the norm, the incentive to work hard for your children is greatly diminished. I know my grandparents scratched and clawed their way for every penny they could earn/save to pay for my parent's/aunt's/uncle's educations. They in term did the same for myself, my siblings, and my cousins. I am doing the same for my future children (My friends often tell me to live a little and comment about my dumpy apartment, my used furniture, etc while my savings and investments grow. No, I never skip out on the bill, not chip in for drinks, group gifts, etc)

If there is going to be price discrimination as described in the linked article why should I live so frugally for my future childrens' education? My future kids rich peers' parents will cover the extra expenses while I live lavishly now! Why should I save now and be the sucker?

How can the system help those who are disadvantaged while not indirectly encouraging people to be financially irresponsible? My gut reaction is to make educational "cheaper" for the rich while still accessible to those who really want it. Yes, I know this thought is antithesis to the linked article.
Are Coders Nice?
Facebook App versus FB Connect?
This sounds more like sour grapes and less like analysis. The article doesn't even mention the FAFSA, but it does say that at UCB, "as tuitions have risen this past year, those from the poorest families saw their financial aid packages rise almost dollar for dollar". Do you have any data on how the FAFSA actually accounts for household debt or sibling tuition costs?
Henry Baker = Hans Boehm + Zed Shaw.
[ChromeOS] Self-Titled Planet
Ask HN: how many $100M companies emerge from Silicon Valley each year?
We're debating the startup climate in Scandinavia over at the Arctic Startup-blog and just as a comparison (to see how far behind we are :) it would be interesting to know how many startups valued above $100 million Silicon Valley produces per year.

Anyone knows or can give a rough estimate?

The SAI 50 would be an indication but I'd love your thoughts.

Edit: I don't mean that the company goes from 0 to $100 million in one year. I mean number of new startups per year, regardless of age, breaking through the $100M barrier.
The upside of a benevolent dictatorship, such as the moderators on HN, is that unsuitable submissions are killed, bad headlines changed, etc. This makes for a much better site, and keeps LOL cats, Ron Paul and politics out.

The downside is that you may not always agree with the moderators.

You're free to argue your case of course, and personally I think that's a good thing. Which is why I upvoted you, even thought I don't personally agree with your arguments.
BBC News - Cern's Large Hadron Collider makes first collisions
Do you mean $0-100 million in a year? Or companies that started in the valley and reached $100 million regardless of companies age.
Hi Orlin

I hadn't been to fluidmix since you first mentioned it. the site looks really nice.
Identify and verify users based on how they type in GDM
You gotta sell him - you were outclassed/outgunned by a salesperson and now you have to outclass her. Make a presentation - put in stats and numbers that prove your case. Own the results - "This will work - I am willing to put my job on the line."

If you put together a quality presentation and offer to own the results and your CEO still doesn't go for it, one of two things is true:

1) You aren't as clever as you think you are (i.e. your CEO is correct)

2) Your CEO is clueless and you need to move on
sallywu, you've posted about 200 of these over the last two years. None of them has ever made it to the front page, and only a handful of people have ever given them a single vote. Maybe they're just not a good fit for this particular site?
Hi Jeremy

The information model takes some time to sink in - at least for most people (including me). Examples will help people to "get" it better. We have one coming out soon (next couple of weeks). I can give you an early look if you're ineterested.
Yeah, for sockets java.nio does that just fine, not for files. Of course, it's an improvement over plain java.io but still it's not non-blocking.
Miguel de Icaza on Silverlight: Universal GUI toolkit
From the individual's perspective, this is a valid point. However, the price discrimination decision is made by the institution, and it clearly has benefits to the institution.

In addition to raising more money, price discrimination also serves to attract better students by competing aggressively on price for students who are good but price sensitive. In this sense, the average student benefits from price discrimination.

Finally, even raising prices for the least price sensitive students increases the tuition to a small fraction of the true economic cost of education. For example, at the private school I attended the $30k/yr of tuition (this was 10yrs ago) covered approximately half of the $60k/yr per student it cost to run the school (the rest came out of the endowmment). There's a broader point here; the cost to California taxpayers of a UC education is well, well in excess of $10.3k/yr.
Clojure bindings
There is an opportunity cost in the money forgone by lending it to this "deadbeat", as a CC company might term him.
It was brought up as possibly-true in my 1980s high school, so I guess it was probably something he learned in high school or college in the 1950s or 1960s and never unlearned. People forget that so much more of what we thought we knew before google, wikipedia, and snopes was wrong. You have to work harder to be wrong on stuff like that, nowadays, since it's so easy to look up. In 1991, you had to go to or have a decent library to find out that that was well-known to be wrong, so a non-specialist might never question what they learned in long-ago school. Now, it's so easy to look up minor details as you write an essay that it seems willful if someone doesn't, but if you apply that standard to twentieth century essays, you'll come away with a view of the writers that's often unwarranted...

Next up: spellcheck. ;)
Twitter is all about the conversation
I think there's a better way if you're doing webapps. Since you can change the price for each customer in the backend code you can actually start doing statistics and find out at which pricepoint you maximise your profit.

More info here: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/01/getting-product-pricing-...

(Full disclosure: it's my own rarely updated blog)
Internal DSLs in Groovy, Ruby and Others
> With the recent arrival of object-oriented databases, the industry may finally achieve some of the promises which were made 20 years ago about the capabilities of computers to automate and improve organizations.

Oh No! i thought NoSQL/Key-value databases are the future
Now that will be specially interesting for people that want to develop using Chrome OS computers.
No, sorry, should have been clearer with what I meant. Of course hardly any company goes from 0 to 100 in just one year.

I mean startup companies breaking through the $100 million barrier - newcomers to the "$100 million league" per year.

OTOH, in order to qualify as a startup I guess you shouldn't be older than, say, 5 years (not that age is the only qualifier for a startup).
We're using Twilio at the moment to provide our paying customers a way of tracking incoming calls from their customers as part of our analytics package, and it's working really well for that. It's a neat system, and it's easy to work with.
Rhino does, but it's an order of magnitude slower than SquirrelFish/JavaScriptCore and V8.
What was Microsoft's product line in 1989? MS/DOS, Word, Excel and Windows 2.0?
If you know .NET, Do have a look at NinjaTrader and their forums. You will find quite a few folks who are in to automated trading.

I ventured into retail trading (manual) and lost around 5$. Email me if you are interested, I can give you more details (email address available in my profile).
Agile is not just about speed
The Frontal Cortex: Lying and Creativity
Do you have a better citation than Yahoo!? Because this one offers absolutely no explanation. And since it flies in the face of what I know about conservation of energy, I think it needs a pretty darned good explanation.

You'll note that your citation says "energy costs", rather than "energy consumption". This is likely true because the cost of energy is higher when delivered in the form of electricity than when delivered in the form of fuel oil. But that's a pure cost saving question. It says absolutely nothing about how "green" this is: the net effect on the environment of using the two types of bulbs independent of costs.

There is the possibility that the heat generation by my furnace is much more efficient than that from the electricity by way of the bulb, but I doubt that is significant (unless I have a heat pump and live in a temperate area where that can work very well?).
Yep, same here. I got sick of the spam, and just started using local florists in my parents home town. They were more than happy to set me up over the phone.
The role of the database in the financial crisis
When I get a new customer, I usually tell her something like this:

"It is very possible that sooner or later we will not have the same opinion on a topic.

I am always open to change my mind, but until this happens, I will fight for my opinion.

But: Any time during the discussion you have the right to stop me with the words 'I am the boss and now playing my boss-card.'. I will accept that without any harsh feelings, as it is your business and not mine.

I see it as an obligation to prevent you from doing, what I consider to be wrong. But in the end you have the last word, even if I totally disagree, I will do my best to help going your way."

This worked several times. I have the feeling that it even helps to calm down a heated discussion when I say, 'hey, you are free to play your card..'. I guess this makes my customer feel that I do not argue just to be against her but to help.

Another thing: It happens that I do change my mind, as I was not aware of the whole picture. This might not be true for your situation, but I try first to understand why somebody has a different opinion on a topic.

And: Sometimes you just have to accept that you can not rescue everybody.
"Our tests show that users of the Telephone need not learn any "code," having only to shout in the plain English understood by all but imbeciles, foreigners, and the Chinese."
I couldn't disagree more. The lack of conversations is what makes Twitter usable. Otherwise, it would turn into a giant partyline with a very low signal to noise ratio.
Since I'm from Scandinavia I'd love to know where the Arctic Startup-blog is. Do you have a link?
I think the garbage collector will prohibit this (that and it's very academic)
Designers and Engineers: build products that reach an audience of 30 million at Justin.tv {SF}
You are right that search engines have made some advances in the courts in recent years, but the bases for their wins are thin and not the same in all countries. Barring legal action a site can block Google's known IPs entirely, forcing a search engine to either give up or use subterfuges that are probably not practical for a large public company to use.

If a site really really wants to block a particular engine run by a for-profit company, or make it impractical (either legally or technically) they can.
"The game, which lets people manage a virtual farm, has more than 65 million users. That compares with more than 52.6 million units sold worldwide for the Wii, the most among consoles."

This also struck me. How is 65 million free users even comparable to selling 52.6 million consoles at $xxx a piece. It's obvious free games would attract more users much easier, but which would be more valuable to a purchasing company? (Not saying Nintendo will be bought, but you know).
Gee, I wonder what domain name the site called "arctic startup" can have. ;)

http://www.arcticstartup.com/
That theory was rejected one year after this letter.
There's no "remembering" the last value or Nothing; it immediately short-circuits, and not because Haskell is lazy, but because that's how monads are defined.

If you don't understand why "monads are programmable semi-colons", take that second look. See also the list monad; the key is not the "storing in a list" but the way it does "nondeterministic computations".
Prexy's Pasture at the University of Wyoming was designed like this.
http://www.uwyo.edu/tour/Prexy.asp

The only difference being, they used the trails in the snow across it to decide where to put the walkways. :)
Good call. My local florist here went out of business.
Do these marketers actually sell anything? What do they claim that the consumers get out of the $9-12/month they pay for this "loyalty program"?
We provided an brief overview of how Twilio uses AWS here http://www.slideshare.net/twilio/twilio-voice-applications-w...
The Paramount case was more about vertical integration than exclusive deals. Since Microsoft and News Corp are two completely separate companies I don't really see how that case applies.

Had Microsoft been making msnbc content exclusively available through bing then there might have been a case, but making a deal with News Corp shouldn't step on any of the ground covered by the Paramount case.
Most awesome thing ever.
Who Needs the Grid? [Bloom boxes]
PostgreSQL was not an object-oriented database, it was an object-relational database. Despite not living up to some people's exceptions that that it would replace the relational database object-oriented databases were not a "huge failure". They are useful for applications where relational databases were not suitable, for example CAD (as mentioned in the article).
3) You are as clever as you think you are, but your convincing-skills are not the best.

Worst case scenario: CEO is correct, but your awesome presentation skills changed his mind. :)

scnr
Leaked Video: Swyping Versus iPhone Typing.  (Swype For Android Is Next).
Stoned Vienna bootkit
"We had difficulty reaching other users on the Bell apparatus, which Alexander Graham admits will have limited utility until they build a second Telephone."
They're no more about hiding mutable state than imperative languages are about hiding the purely-functional representation of state transfer semantics :)

All you've done is listed alternative ways of implementing things, which is obviously possible in a range of paradigms (albeit with semantics that are usually harder to reason about in an imperative setting).
> How can the system help those who are disadvantaged while not indirectly encouraging people to be financially irresponsible?

I think that the point is that financially irresponsible people will always be so. These people exist at all income levels. The person that 'lives it up' today usually is the person that isn't too interested in planning for the future.
Please enter the first 1727 digits of e
True, but the phrase you quote has a merely rethoric use anyway. The OP wasn't basing any of his argumentation on that broken thesis.
Do elections in developing countries improve economic policy?
Telephone Analyzer/Tap Deactivator (Professional)
Summary: "Webapps are almost as good as Native Apps in many ways."

The author reveals no advantages of webapps over a good AppStore that allows 3rd-party software sources. He is simply angry that he doesn't get enough attention as a web developer, not especially different from the complaint of a three year old child, though with the language of a nine year old.
Insurance coverage denied because of Facebook photos
Like some of you, I disagree with the idea of propping up stuff for the purpose of making your prospects believe that you're up to something helpful. I call it "the feel good factor" entrepreneurship is supposed to be hard work nothing simple.

Like the guy who used markups in the 90's, I come from the school that seeks a point of pain and then start working your way into solutions.

I learned this from the advertising agencies where I worked a few years ago. Client came in with a problem, specified the problem and the particular need for a solution and wrote this out in something called "a creative brief" we took this info, worked our way into sketches, prototypes and then convinced the client that we had a solution.

Convincing the client meant conducting independent customer research and validation.

Lots of iterations where done but at no point did we push, shove or even seek to misled clients for the sake of validating our ideas without hard work done.

I like customer validation. I use it everyday. But I want to do my research and some hard work and then let the customer guide my way. Real MVP and real customers and then we can do all the supper stuff. But you have to be willing to do the hard work and the phony part makes me uncomfortable.
Likewise, I can anecdotally add that in implementing various analytics packages for a variety of ecom sites, I've noticed that Cyber Monday is a -very- notable bump in traffic that stands out clearly when you're looking over traffic from the past couple of years.

Was it like this before "Cyber Monday" was marketed as such? I have no idea, but there is definitely data out there to back this up. If you're an online retailer and you're not seeing a spike in traffic that day, you're doing something wrong.
Repeal of Regulation D is huge and would, if effected, be highly negative for startup financing.

Before Reg D, the only way to handle an inter-state offering of stock in an early-stage company was to rely on so-called Section 4(2), a part of the Securities Act of 1933 that specified a bunch of murky factors for what constituted an "exempt" offering. If you failed to meet those requirements for your company when it issued stock to investors, not only your company but all of its controlling management could be sued and be required to refund all monies to investors for any non-compliant offering. The results were often highly surprising, e.g., where an issuer was found to have done a "public offering" when it issued stock to 20 investors or so.

Regulation D changed this whole landscape by defining a set of "safe harbor" requirements that, if met, assured the issuer and its management that the securities law rules were met. It has been a huge success in bringing certainty and clarity to an area that desperately needed it.

This is a surprise to me to learn that a Reg D repeal is to be found in Senator Dodd's proposed legislation. There have been absolutely no pending efforts to repeal Reg D and it is insane to do it, at least from the standpoint of startups and their investors.

The only thing could guess is that Senator Dodd is trying to slip this in as a favor to the trial lawyers. It would be highly dismaying, and quite shocking, if something like this does pass. It would definitely hurt startup funding in significant ways.
I guess I deserve the ridicule :-)
Depends on where the 4-of-a-kind is happening. If I have 5-5 and board flops 7 J Q, I'm not likely to hold on to that pair, even though I could get two 5s. People playing "low pairs" with more regularity could easily lead to more 4 of a kind hits. Hell, playing 2-7 all the time can see 3 more deuces on the board.
It pays to read to the end:

in reverse order. Starting from the 1st occurrence of the digit sequence, 53961271991.
Heh, thanks for the well-deserved and well-delivered smackdown. I'll concede that point, but obviously there are others that have been mentioned.
It said that they tempt the customers to enter their email address with a promise of a coupon or discount. Maybe they email the customers with discounts? Or maybe they're even sneakier, and only give the discounts to customers that go to their website and plug in their email address.
I got an early invite to GMail, and it was pretty much functional out of the box. I wish I could say the same of Wave.
"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

Pretty simple.
At first it sounds like a Google job application, but it appears to be some sort of CAPTCHA to prevent people from reporting too many botnets.
> The whole point of hashes is that small changes in input affect large changes in output.

I think you mean "effect" here.
It is about state not necessarily mutable state. Monads are rather abstract and not really worth all the attention they get. A monad is simply: a type constructor, a function that puts a value into the type constructor, and a function that pulls the value from the type constructor and pass it on to the next function(often referred to as return and bind respectively). Then depending on how you define the type constructor and functions to push and pull you get different Monads. Monads are no different than Objects or design patterns, they are a code organization technique that happens to fit functional programming well.
What you should know about Volume Shadow Copy/System Restore in Windows 7/Vista