skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. No reason you couldn't do this in JS (see Smalltalk)

2. The new JS VMs do plenty of optimization

3. C has more libraries than Java. Lets use C for everything

4. Actually, there is a lot of evidence that maintainability is inversely related to the number of lines of code. The more lines, the more bugs. (I don't have time to find the studies. They are there if you Google them.)

I did read the article. I just wasn't interested in writing a treatise on the subject. Just wanted to give a counter point.
Searchable versions:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22all+experiments+in+psychol...

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

http://www.farnhamsfreehold.org/blog/?p=171

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&...

http://lanseybrothers.blogspot.com/2009/08/cargo-cult-scienc...
That's a good point, but the 'essence' of the page is the text, the rest of it is just a container.

Caching headers could easily take care of all the stuff surrounding the essential part. If the essential part has multiple components then it would make sense to use the latest one for that.

If a link to an auxiliary page changes in the navigation that's a job for the cache control headers.

Either way the page would get reloaded, but at least you'd have a good idea when the critical component of the page (it's reason for existing in the first place) was updated.
Yeah, what we really need is more of those late-breaking Erlang articles!
"deals worth... several million dollars a MONTH to Twitter"

Does that sound ridiculously high to anyone else? What is the likely ROI to google/ms on that? Maybe they don't really care :/
You certainly will be subjected to shitty McDonalds-type content if you keep reading TechCrunch.
using the same logic, couldn't they also take paper manufacturers to court, because someone wrote or drew something offensive on a piece of paper once upon a time? i don't understand the reasoning behind this.
Simple Top-Down Parsing in Python
"At roughly 250 lines of code (including the entire parser machinery), there are still a few things left to add before we can claim to fully support the Python 2.5 expression syntax, but we’ve covered a remarkably large part of the syntax with very little work."
Rationing, errors and mammogram math
It depends on your needs.

If you don't want to modify the widget appearances or behaviors, Ext-GWT is nice.

If you aren't building a large web-app, Ext-GWT is the way to go.

But if you're one of them people who prefer to do TDD, or unit-test etc, avoid Ext-GWT at all cost.

If you want to personalize your app, avoid Ext-GWT at all cost.

If you want a solid (library) Java code, avoid Ext-GWT at all cost.

I've been using their code since MyGWT 0.4 and right now we're trying to get rid of it so bad.
Can KKR Make Like Berkshire Hathaway?
How to Install XCache Administration Page in Ubuntu - LinuxTuts | Tutorials
It's possible that the women in English lit are taking a comparatively smaller cut in salary, but there aren't that many English lit jobs; far fewer than in the sciences. The competition for jobs is much greater, making the probability of finding a job even worse than in science.

While the "men prefer prestige to money" theory has some merit, the "women prefer security to money" is better established.
The silent revolution in energy efficiency
As the other poster said, it's better than living next to a coal burning plant. The coal burning plant would actually release more radioactive material into the environment than a nuclear power plant would.
Hughes disagrees: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Erlang-Haskell-John-Hughes

Click on: Do you miss them?

"In reality when you move beyond very simple properties, then you almost always need to specify generators. Generation is more complex than just saying, give me an int. [...] So as soon as you move beyond very simple properties, you have to write the generators in Haskell also, so that you have to write them in the Erlang version is not a disadvantage."
Reading is nothing more than a substitute for thought of one’s own. It means putting the mind into leading-strings.

Newton couldn't have invented classical mechanics without the ancient Greeks. In order to think, you need something to think about; you need input. Some of that input will be from watching apples fall off of trees. Some of it will be from information gathered from other people, presented in books.

What rubbish.
Nice example of interesting but vapid post leading to dense HN comment. Thanks.
So... you've never composed an essay in your head without writing it down?

Writing may help you organize your thoughts, but it's not necessary.
Βασιλόπιτα
Η πιο νόστιμη βασιλόπιτα!Δοκιμάστε να την φτιάξετε μόνοι σας με αυτή την τέλεια συνταγή τα φετινά Χριστούγεννα.
"And it will make you much less productive because you'll be spending all your time redoing something someone's already done, probably better than you ever could."

I mean, with that logic, you might as well write in assembly.
In this instance yes, but the EU keeping (or surrendering in the case of air travel) personal data from careless (or plain mischievous) hold by foreigners is a good thing.

I mean it's not only about gun nuts cowboys vs corrupted italians, it's also about integrating the culture when you enter a country. Germans have a German way of doing stuff, Italian too, French too. All are different.

As seen from this side of the pond, free speech and gun fandom (and the mix of both) are just a costly (in human lives) buffoonery too, that makes no sense when compared to the prudery about sex.
I mean it's cultural differences and it touches business too, yes. A french company sending racy ads in he US would cause quite a stir, leaving a shitty video 2 months after it have been reported in Italy gets you in trouble. And when you set foot in a country you try to adapt. I've seen many companies "adapt" their prices "the european way" (that often mean 1€ = $1) maybe now it's time for adapting the rest too.
I also came from Python (and c#/java, c, js) and have dabbled with Haskell and Clojure a bit, with a tiny bit in scheme.

I personally think that learning both Haskell and Clojure concurrently has a lot of merit. Clojure is more pragmattic; while it encourages pure functional practices, it also accepts that doing IO and interacting with the ecosystem (including java) is necessary, so its straight forward. Haskell on the other hand is - IMO - a must learn for any programmer; It is chock full of brilliance, but its not so easy for someone unfamiliar with a type system as comprehensive to get going with. Many of the leasons you learn in Haskell will be applicable to clojure (and vice versa).

Additionally, to me clojure feels like what i wanted python3000 to be. Its got a nice little ecosystem of web tools growing too. I found haskells web stuff to be a bit imposing.

Summary: Learn clojure primarily, and augment it by working through haskell stuff like Real World Haskell.
Stiglitz: Too big to succeed
This site is perfectly readable. Would you care to let us know since when sites like these are out of fashion on a discussion board with the epithet "Hacker" in its name?
Well you can "borrow from the Fed" but you are right that it is different from the federal funds rate. You can borrow from the Fed at the discount window which traditionally is about a point higher than the federal funds rate (and as such only used in emergencies when banks won't even loan to each other overnight). Traditionally it was also an overnight loan that was audited by the fed and which U.S Treasuries were put up as collateral. Traditionally, there was also a large stigma attached to borrowing from the Fed as it was sort of a "last resort" option.

That's changed a bit now as the Fed has does whatever it can to increase liquidity. Less of a stigma, the discount window rate is about what the fed funds rate is, the time period of the loans is longer, etc.

So, you can borrow from the discount window (the fed) and you can do so at a rather low rate. However, the whole theory that the recent upsurge in banking profits is from buying treasuries is a bit silly.

For starters it isn't risk free to buy a 30 year treasury note when you are financing it with short term loans the rate of which could be changed at any time. If interest rates go up your 30 year treasury you bought isn't going to be worth much and may actually start to lose you money. Remember if you are 10x leveraged the market price of that 30 year treasury only has to drop a little for you to lose money. So instead, let's invest in short term treasury rates ( http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates/index.html) well except the return on short term treasury rates is about what you would pay at the discount window.

I guess you could invest in short term bonds or other investments, but it isn't going to be risk free then. And it really isn't a scandal that trying to set low interest rates will encourage lending/investing some of which could turn out to be speculative or would not have been made if interest rates were higher. It could also lead to inflation. Those are sort of the costs/benefits of cheap money.
Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
Someone should tell this guy about google docs..
Australia's libel laws are similar, but not quite so terrible. I'm tempted to say that they'd have filed in Britain if he wasn't British. If the goal is to intimidate him with bankruptcy, a country on the opposite side of the world is a better fit than one whose courts he could easily attend.

Yet another reason not to play Evony... as if one was needed.
This is actually one of my (few) pet peeves with the 37Signals crowd. I remember reading somewhere (possibly in their Getting Real book) the reasoning behind such design decisions as not including the year on the dates displayed in their web applications. The general reasoning as I remember it was "It doesn't matter."

It doesn't matter until it's 3-4 years later and I'm reading a post on Rails that may or may not actually still be relevant and trying to figure out what Rails version it pertains to. Sure the date doesn't matter so much when the content is new, but particularly when it comes to technical documentation, the date starts to matter more and more as the content ages.
i heard that for you to get the most out of clojure, you have to know java, is that true?
SCVHA: Recording Silicon Valley's History and the High-Technology Revolution
Only if the paper manufacturer then went and published the offensive words / drawings as well.
Obviously this is a matter of taste (and I'm starting to pile up down votes, so I may very well be in the minority).

I can't give you a date, but consider for example the ongoing discussion in the Perl community about the look of PerlMonks, the new Perl blogs site and the updates to the online Perldoc site and the main Perl site.

Again, I want to stress that I'm not talking about decorative fonts or elaborate colorschemes. A webpage with no margins and very tight line-spacing is not in my mind anywhere near perfectly readable.

As far as the hackers thing goes, I've rarely seen a hacker without a preference for a carefully-crafted PS1 (colors and all) or a good Vim/Emacs/TextMate theme. So it's not the case that hackers don't care at all about appearance in all circumstances.

Edit: Here's a good comparison site: http://diveintomark.org/ The layout is dead simple, but the margins, font choice and line spacing make a huge difference.
"The only surprises are the history you don't know." Harry Truman

There is a lot of good stuff here, you get a sense of the repeating cycles of innovation and entrepreneurship.
It doesn't stop at the apostrophes, unfortunately:

"There is a great deal of information worth paying for, but for the most part, it’s hard to understand why anyone would be incentivized to pay for the news for news is as free as the freedom of speech."

There seems to be some misunderstanding about the meaning of the word 'free' in those two vastly different contexts.

The fact that others are reporting the same news is no reason to draw this parallel, after all that says nothing about the quality, the convenience and the timing of the reporting.

Things like the google phone are much more suitable to blog style reporting than say investigating a political scandal, on-site reporting and analysis. That's where you can create real value as a newspaper, fluff articles about gadgets not so much, the barrier to entry is way too low. Especially if those articles are speculative in nature.
I wonder how much of those ideas are merely a reflection of the society he lived in rather than his own thoughts?
Newspapers have often done this.
Boeing's 787 Dreamliner To Attempt First Flight Next Week
Anyone know of slick jQuery UI widgets like Facebook and Twitter?
I'm interested particularly in finding something that lets me implement the slick "pick a list" button/widget thing with the "add a new list" item at the bottom. Both Facebook and Twitter seem to use a similar approach.
No, you just need to be willing to learn some java APIs (honestly though, not that hard. mostly they are larger, more long-winded versions of things you are used to in python).

In particular for web stuff you could probably exist within the clojure eco system. The clojure-contribs package is getting pretty comprehensive these days.

Clojure's interop stuff makes calling java seem fairly native. Obviously you get stateful behavior and need to be careful, but thats no worse than python or c. Currently clojure's tools for creating classes is a little frustrating but thats being replaced with some very nice facilities in 1.1.

I'd say the number one thing you'll need to do is get familiar with the javadoc.

For the reference, i programmed java at uni (2001-2004) with Java 1.4. I havent written a java program since then, but i havent found it any hinderance at all in my experiments with clojure.
Hm. I'd agree there. It's always very important to write a decent Arbitrary typeclass instance. I've never found it terribly hard -- it's always exactly as hard as trying to decide what the potential input space you support should be -- and I don't expect it to be in Erlang either.

The difference is that once you start combining Arbitrary instances you need to have strict, careful control over these input spaces, something "trivial" when you're abusing the Hindley-Miller type system. I've never written QC tests in Erlang, let alone at higher levels of complexity, but I can only imagine that it's a short while before you're forced to manually do inference a static type system auto-infers.
No, we don't and i never said we did - but articles summarising the points that are already present as summaries in the GWT 2.0 release notes definitely do not add anything to the discourse.
Would you care to elaborate more about why fractional reserve banking isn't the primary satire of the article?
Because the more I read, the more I frown at your lack of distinction between the bond selling government and the money printing fed
The Federal Reserve System is run by a Board of Governors. The Governors are appointed by the President. They must be confirmed by the Senate. The Board of Governors is accountable to the House of Representatives and must give them an annual report of the Fed's operations.

If the Federal Reserve System were private, then the people who govern it would ultimately be accountable to private shareholders and not to Congress who represent the People.

However, the individual member banks are private, which is why it is a grey area.

Much of the confusion comes from the fact that "the Fed" can be used to mean the Federal Reserve System as a whole or the Board of Governors ("the Fed decided to raise interest rates") or the member banks depending on the context.
If the human brain functions more or less according to classical physics, with causality running forwards in time, then "one's nature" is just a very complicated function of the local state of the universe - the previous state of one's brain (including the encoding of the consciousness function itself) plus incoming sensory data.

More than once you've probably made a decision, at least in part, by psychoanalyzing yourself (and maybe psychoanalyzing the way that you're psychoanalyzing yourself) - so imagine being able to psychoanalyze yourself in real time, with (near-)perfect accuracy. (There might be information-theoretic problems with trying to simulate your whole brain inside of itself at speed.)

If one is the kind of person who has given serious thought to one's motivations in life (which must include coming to the realization that they are, in a certain fundamental sense, arbitrary) then I don't know that they would necessarily change all that much under these conditions.
Actually that error is being thrown when the shell command hits EventMachine::popen

hmm...
Mistakes Entrepreneurs Often Make When Raising Capital
If you buy a notepad, the paper manufacturer doesn't own it anymore and has no control over it.

Google cannot claim it doesn't have control over its own servers.

A more apt brick-and-mortars analogy would be a theater that would let anyone use its projector, as long as ads chosen by the theater are displayed alongside. Surely in most countries the theater would be liable for showing illegal movies, no matter what they'd written in their disclaimers.
I had a kind of program which would find primes higher than the Sieve of Eratosthenes (typically this only goes up to 4 billion because of 1 bit per integer), called a 'Leapfrog' sieve, but someone said it wasn't very interesting, and I can't tell if it's been done before.
>wasn't actually at the event where the infamous 'Ballmer mocks iPhone guy' incident happened

FWIW, I was at this event, and he was joking around.
The truth of the statement does not derive from being an inverse, converse, or contrapositive of the statement before it. Rather, it is inferred from what we defined "NPR" to mean.

Since "NPR" is defined as true if what follows it is never printed twice in succession, and "NPRNPR" is never printed as a given, then "NPRNPR" as a statement is true.
No. Google (and MS) can afford it, and the deal is worth it for the PR plus the head start on figuring out how to make money from the firehose. We have a few examples of people making money from Twitter -- the question now is how to follow that up so the platform itself can make money, and how its preferred partners can make money. This head start is worth the money, even if Twitter decides to open its firehose for free to all later.

If it doesn't work out, then the deal ends. I have no idea what the terms of the deal are, but suppose as a wild guess the deal costs Google $100 million over two or three years, then ends. That's not great, but Google can afford that for the chance of making lots more money. At the size Google is now, they need to find revenue opportunities and new markets measured in the billions to move their stock price, at which point $100 million sounds less of a big deal...yes, it's weird...
Facebook and Google: Contrasts in Privacy
I came here to say this too...
If you're looking for a practical language with which you can quickly build real-world applications, I would vote for Clojure, simply because it has a wealth of libraries readily available through Java. Having said that, I haven't got a lot of experience with Haskell and certainly not with its libraries, so I don't really know how it compares, besides the fact that Java has a huge amount of libraries for just about anything you could want.

This also means that you can write web apps in Clojure and deploy them on one of the many Java-based web platforms - that is, its reasonably easy to get your Clojure (or rather, JVM) based web app out there.

If you do decide to go for Clojure, the defacto web framework is Compojure, which is a very simple, but powerful and flexible, framework. It has some nifty features, such as allowing you to write HTML using s-expressions instead of XML tags resulting in much simpler and shorter HTML. Clojure also has a library which helps you to write Javascript in an integrated Clojure-esque s-expression based way called Scriptjure. All in all, Clojure + Compojure + Scriptjure provides a consistent and integrated framework for developing rich web apps. You can be up and running in Jetty within moments and with a few minutes of preparation, you can compile your app as a .war file ready for deployment in something like Apache Tomcat.

The only thing that takes some Java API knowledge is interfacing with a database, though afaik theres some Clojure wrappers for that too. If you don't mind looking through some Javadoc and want some NoSQL goodness, I'd recommend grabbing the MongoDB Java Driver. It happened to be the first Java API I tried to interface with in Clojure and I was pleasantly surprised at how hassle free and easy it was to get it to work.

Whatever you choose, good luck! It should be fun to get into functional programming after working with C and Python :-)
and they have special laws to be held accountable about that.
And most of what's left of SunOS is GPLv3.
This happened with Google Checkout when it opened up and didn't have any fees.
On a related note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
I didn't confuse completeness in the sense of the Completeness Theorem with the sense in the Incompleteness Theorem. I made two separate points. One point was to state what the Incompleteness Theorem means and the other was to show that what you wrote was wrong.

You made the claim:

"It says that in any sufficiently complex axiom system there will be statements that it can neither prove nor refute,...

This is clearly false unless you restrict yourself to recursively enumerable axiomatic systems. My proof of this was to take all true statements of the model of the integers under the second order system. That forms an axiomatic system in which all true statements are provable. That is all I have really said in this matter.

The recursively enumerable criterion is important because of how all this came about historically. Humans - Hilbert, Russell, etc. - had a perception of what the integers are. Their goal was to encapsulate mathematical truth 'algorithmically' (in a computable way) and Godel showed this wasn't possible. All true statements of the first order axioms are true in the model of the second order axioms. The reverse isn't true. The dream was crushed.

They didn't know before Godel that the natural numbers we all grew up with couldn't be modeled properly with a recursively enumerable set of axioms but that's what they wanted and were looking for.

EDIT: I conflated the terms 'refute' and 'disprove'. Sorry about that. There is a difference between proving ~A and finding a counterexample to A in some model. I read 'refute' as 'disprove'.