skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've worked in companies for other people; time and time again I would find myself in situations where some sort of decision had to be made; some sort of meeting would be called where I would say "my opinion is that we should do X", people above me would say "no, we should actually do Y", Y would be done, a few months down the line it would be discovered that Y was the wrong thing to do and that X should've actually been done, and we would spend a lot of time backing out Y and doing X.

It sucks to sit at work and think "God damn it, I said we should've done this 6 months ago, and no one listened, and now we are doing it anyway."

I am not purposefully trying to toot my own horn - I just discovered time and time again that often my intuitions are correct, and I should trust them more. Once that became obvious, doing a startup was the only avenue that I could find that would allow me to make my own decisions, bask in the glory that their correctness would bring, and assume the responsibility for the failure that their incorrectness would bring.
Your two questions seem to imply that programming isn't that closely related to mathematics. Programming may not be that important for the math learned in school, but in general math researchers do at least as much programming as computer science researchers.

It is interesting to look at what languages get used for what kinds of research, and how it is affected by the researcher's level of computer science education. For example, those doing numerical analysis kind of research tend strongly toward MATLAB, with Python getting a lot of use from those who are relatively well-educated about computer science, and the lower-level languages used by people with extreme performance needs or who haven't learned any of the newer options. On the other hand, I doubt that any of the numerical researchers I work with have even heard of Haskell, and while some may have heard of APL (though definitely not J), none could use it.
What kind of stuff do you use C# for? I can only imagine using it for interoperability and GUI code.
Fighter Pilot turned Tech Guru
What cars do pilots drive?
What foods do vintners eat?

I'd say it's more like asking "What cars do park rangers drive?" or "What foods do wrestlers eat?" because we're talking about groups of people with quite specific requirements. The question, while overly broad, isn't silly, because there's a lot of people who have no idea and have never heard of things like Maple, Magma. Heck, now I coem to think of it I've never heard of Maxima, so your answer taught me something new. And if you learn something new from the answer, it's probably not a silly question!
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The anecdote is a bit unfortunate (it's easy to confidently declare that someone is incompetent after they've made a huge mistake), but the point is basically valid: a small percentage of people have good taste that should be trusted above all else.

The problem is that most people don't have good taste, and those people nearly always have an inflated estimation of their own discriminatory ability. So at the end of the day, knowing that some teeny-tiny percentage of people is exceptionally gifted with good taste doesn't really help you much, because you can't reliably select for them in a group environment. And in my experience, the people with bad taste are almost certain to dominate any discussion, just by virtue of their overwhelming number.

I think the real lesson here is just one of those sad facts of life: if you work on a team that you haven't hand-selected, some of the people you work with are going to seem (or be) incompetent. Traditionally unspoken corollary: even if you selected the team, you might be incompetent.
Well, the set of all numbers is infinite, so you would wouldn't expect to find just any number appear in a lot of different contexts by chance.

Some numbers do tend to show up over and over again. That makes those numbers special. φ is such a special number.

But there are a lot of special things about 3 though too: It's an integer (which is a pretty special property for a number to have, considering there are an infinite number of real numbers between each integer). What's more, it's a very small integer (the fourth smallest) and it's the second smallest prime number. In fact, we could say that 3 is a very special number, in the scheme of things, and has lots of reasons to show up in particular contexts.

Now φ being the golden ratio is pretty much all that's unique about it. Otherwise, it's just one of the uncountably infinite set of real numbers between 1 and 2. So if you find φ show up some place, almost surely you're dealing with the golden ratio.

The same is true of π. It's just some real number that happens to be the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. I've heard of mathematicians working on problems and having π appear in their calculations, and then suddenly realizing that they're working on a harmonics problem.

The fallacy of numerology is getting attracted to numbers that have lots of reasons to show up in various problems (usually small integers, like 3) and then taking whatever one of their many properties is most convenient and treating it as an iron link to whatever they're trying to prove.
However, even if you are using a load factor like .72 or so to decide to grow, such a decision is still sensitive to flip-flopping if you use a very similar boundary for shrinking.
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Hacker News: Welcome
Software Sea Change
Very. Rails is extremely overdesigned internally to provide concise magic to the programmer using it.

It happens to work, usually providing a steady stream of warm fuzzies.
Right now, I am writing a trading system using Trading Technologies' API. In my MSFE program we use XTrader to do a lot of our simulated trading. I thought it would be interesting challenge to create a black box to bone up on my C# skills.

EDIT: As for the GUI comment, I am actually trying to stay away from a bloated GUI as speed is key in this business.

Also, when we, as a program, went to Chicago during late October, so many people said that C# was becoming an important language to know if you plan on doing quant work. Up until that point, I had been focused primarily on C and C++. I thought it would be wise to do some work with C# if people at quant shops were telling me this is something I need to know.
Let's assume that the fraction of people in prison has grown over the last 70 years. This is either because sentencing has got harsher or because people are committing more crimes. Anecdotally, though, sentencing seems to have got less harsh -- for instance in the 1950s the Boggs act resulted in minimum mandatory sentences of 5-20 years for a first drug offense. Thus, we must conclude that people are committing more crimes than before.

Now, either they're committing more crimes because sentencing has got less harsh, or they're committing more crimes because of other social factors (eg the growth of gang culture, drug culture, et cetera). Either way it's not clear to me that making sentencing even less harsh than it already is will solve anything.
Indeed. Imagine if everybody got along and actually worked together as a race to further technology. I bet we'd be living on a cluster of awesome planets somewhere, with extremely large lifespans.
Personally I think "never give up" should be the one tip given to founders if there can only be one.
Luckily we have good dating techniques to avoid this :)
Coq is the only real Mathematics language I've ever played with.

Everything else just feels like it's ultimately Arithmetic, even when doing Symbolic Algebra natively in Haskell or Lisp or Mathematica.
> he accidentally committed a horrible piece of code that worked great on the staging server for a few days, but when it was auto-updated to the production hardware devices, it broke them all

this anecdote says more about their pipeline than some random engineer. it shouldn't be possible for code to reach customers without multiple engineers becoming accountable for it via reviews.
I'm not saying you're wrong. What I am saying is that putting more power in the hands of patients is a good thing.

I'm also saying that in my experience, there seems to be a tendency for doctors to ignore the patient saying "but it has stripes". For a case in point, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668195
Submitted to reddit many, many times! Writing yet another blog post about this thing is a small cottage industry unto itself.
Nicely explained. Thanks.
Quantitative analysts used to use Smalltalk quite a bit. There's still a bit of that. Ruby's taking up some of that territory now. C++ was there too, and is still going strong.
So how has it been working out for you?
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With recession, everyone is forced to look for some second source of income to ensure that they stay out of debt. As a result finding part time jobs in London has become highly challenging as all the part time evening jobs get filled faster than before. The number of job vacancies in London is becoming very limited with less number of people willing to switch jobs or let go of their current jobs. Moreover, recession taking its toll, companies are slowing down their expansion plans and slowing down their recruitment drives.
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I think it comes down to no matter how logical you think you are, in a fear situation it's easy to protect yourself, take the personal loss of not putting yourself out there, despite the logical fact that you'd be better off in the long term by acting. Of course, sometimes you do act, against your rational holdbackness. That is the paradox of bring human. Sometimes it is better that we just act than think.
Yeah, as a team we can maximize our output.
I hope that I will have the opportunity to visit and participate in canal skating.
In the case of non-socialized health care, that's cost-prohibitive for many people. In the case of socialized health care, it often involves an unreasonable wait.
Many epidemiologists seem to prefer Stata. I don't know why. It's like some SQL shell out of the early 80's.

I think that languages that didn't support "conventional" operator precedence lost out because that went against the expectations of science/tech types. (Smalltalk & Lisp in particular)
No matter how high up you go in a company, you're always ultimately building out someone else's ideas. My happiness has a direct connection with seeing my own ideas come to fruition.

The full process of coming up with an idea, planning and designing, grinding through all of the shit that comes along with actually tying up all of the loose ends and making it go live, and then being able to say "Yep, that is all my idea, I made it happen" is perfection in my mind.

You don't want to look back at yourself 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now and realize you're doing the same job you started doing. Take the leap, if it fails you'll always have that impressive resume to fall back on anyways.

Good luck.
I know a bona-fide ex-NASA rocket scientist who uses Matlab. He finds that it's much more productive than C, which he used to use heavily. His NASA job basically involved numerical methods for integration to track the trajectory of the Space Shuttle.
The dynamics of AdaBoost
One can claim that a large part of scientific progress came from conflict though.

A bit of friendly competition helps innovation as well.
i would love to read this except i am using windows mobile and am shown some "use a different browser!" page instead. this is annoying
Fuck Yes!

I have a quixotic project I've been tilting at off and on for 5 years now, where all the existing solutions make poor use of relational databases (usually SQLite), but the problem maps directly onto an EAV graph database. I was worried I'd have to write my own query metalanguage, but now I don't have to!

It's depressing how much the W3C salted the earth with the way they tied RDF to the twin loadstones of terrible XML tree serialization and SemWeb wankery. I couldn't find any way to get anything useful done with their SPARQL either.

EAV graph databases might have their day in the sun thanks to the NoSQL hype-wave. AppEngine's BigTable-backed datastore is a terrific exemplar, hopefully other players can come up with similarly compelling APIs and hosting stories.
Um...actually the concept of leap years were enshrined in the Julian Calendar a mere 100 years after this device was created, and although this subsequently mutated into the Gregorian calendar (with adjustments for centenary years) the basic idea was contemporary with this device.

Aristarchus, who lived through most of the 3rd century BC, identified the length of the sidereal year with reasonable accuracy and is also the first person that we know of who argued that the earth rotated around the sun, among other insights. Knowing the exact periods of the terrestrial and lunar orbits would obviously have been a necessity for constructing this wondrous machine.
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At the risk of being pedantic, the study you cite is about educational attainment vs incarceration, not education vs crime.
This kind of posts just show how good the perl community is in terms of marketing. Not loud or shrill, just sharing a cup of fresh mint tea at an oasis.
Hashtags have nothing to do with search, and everything to do with drawing attention to bandwagon-hopping.
Actually, the full quote:

Secondly, I've realised that when I don't write tests I code too fast. TDD acts as a constraint on myself, something which stops me from running ahead of myself and forces me to stick around a particular problem area for long enough to understand it better, and often learn something that otherwise I'd have missed.

I don't remember ever reading a blog claiming that would be an advantage of TDD before I started.

Extreme Programming was cognizant of this effect quite a while ago. (Actually all of the parts of XP were supposed to have beneficial side effects that reinforced the other parts.)
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He's blocking Opera?
I disagree that letting people order lab tests for themselves is, on balance, a good thing for the population's health. I agree that it is something that should nevertheless be allowed, in many cases, under the aegis of individual freedom.
And this is trivially avoided by any simple hysteresis protection scheme. Use a different factor for shrinking or growing, or a different threshold.
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How Europe Missed The Transistor
As an aside, in the heavy bleeding described in the post that you linked to sounds like classical endometriosis, particularly since it was resolved by GnRH. If so, it is rather surprising that your doctors did not figure this out; most medical students could.
Don't forget the text to speech functionality for the recipient!
The core of Scribd’s model is the lowest form of leeching (YC W07)
I think it's a pretty clever idea though a gross violation of privacy.
Back in the day when IE first implemented favicon.ico, it was common to track your logs for favicon.ico loads since they'd only be loaded when someone added your site to their Favorites. Sadly that doesn't work anymore :-(
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As information disseminates, this market will correct itself (assuming there are no caps/regulations on number of attendees.)
I had some trouble parsing the text and the language used.

There has to be a better way to make that point.
On Rotating The Dishes
Examples a plenty, if you post any pdf on news.yc you'll find that the right hand portion now links to scribd, which will do its best to mutilate the pdf after copying it to their own servers.

It's basically an in-browser pdf reader based on structural copyright violation.
If only I used HG. If someone made this for darcs it would be a movie of watching a merge fail though.
"Omit everything needless".
Summary of arguments: Scrib is bad because they "steal" content like youtube. They don't actually respect copyright and make you register to get content.

I don't see how this argument works when you see the success of youtube and how popular it is. If content partners would talk with scribd and they do a content recognition system both parties could reach more users and profit.
Seeing Old Age as a Never-Ending Adventure
The 'content partners' are most of the time people what write papers for scientific research and things like that and they haven't a clue that scribd hosts their stuff until they google for it (and plenty of them never will). If I remember correctly they also will happily re-host a pdf after you've asked to remove it (in spite of claims to the contrary).

What's really needed is a service that does this while respecting the original writers copyright.

Maybe a flash (yuck, I can't believe I wrote that) app that you can embed in a page that will render the pdf while fetching it from the source with a fall-back cache in case of overload.

At least like that the original writer has some ideas of how popular his/her writing is and where it is cited.

edit: YouTube got big because it hosted stuff that was not available elsewhere on the net in an easy to consume format. Since pdf readers are available for just about every platform there is not much of an excuse to do it this way, after all the content is already available.

If scribd worked on a 'we'll host your pdf if you upload it first' that would be one thing but instead they lift them from other places on the web, usually the authors site.
This is must be a new trend of ego-stroking stories on HN: first there was the "Interview your potential employer" story, then yesterdays "Ask them for code samples", and now this.

Look, if you're unemployed in this market, you can play coy all you want and "tease" would be employers, but that will not in anyway rewrite the power inequality to your favor. If you want "power", start your own company, freelance, or work for yourself in any other form. But right now, going through these lengths to play "hard to get" just makes you look like one of those unattractive people at night clubs who think being obnoxious to you makes them sexy.
Reasonable point, but terrible article. Even setting aside the profanity, it's hardly readable.
Their Flash PDF reader also doesn't work at all on any of the Linux boxes I use. It actually got majorly worse when they made it less shitty on other platforms -- it doesn't accept mouse clicks at all!

They sent me an email and we had a long conversation with after I slagged on their reader here before, but the general conclusion was that they didn't view the Flash app as their core competency -- they're a community site, damnit!

I use the brilliant http://docs.google.com/viewer and I have no idea why the hell Scribd doesn't clone it.
> You seem to be asserting that there is little practical difference between a life sentence and a death sentence in terms of opportunities to right an unjust conviction. Can you support that with evidence?

Actually, I asserted that there is a difference, namely that if you're sentenced to death, lots of money will be spent after conviction on your case, both govt money and pro-bono. (The former is statutory.) If you're get a sentence of life without parole, there's no govt money and typically no private money either.

Do you really want to argue that point?

Folks on death row are not subject to violence from other inmates, so their only real risk is execution.

As to why prisons are violent, it doesn't actually matter. You're willing to use them, knowing that they're deadly.
I had to look up yoink: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yoink

Shit, ass, bullshit, and anus, I've heard before.
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Interesting. it does work for me (ff 3.5.6, flash 10)
http://docs.google.com/viewer is exactly what you're asking for, except for the shitty flash part. Add &embedded=true to the URL for a chromeless version to use in an <iframe>
Non-native speaker here, I had a few more that didn't make sense to me and that did not seem to be in any way helpful to the discussion.

Pretty juvenile.
* Fexprs are easier to write and more expressive than macros. They can be mapped, applied, wrapped around other functions, fexprs and built in primitives, in the case of Newlisp, even mutated during runtime. Fexprs are lot of fun. And the price is - dynamic scope. More about dynamic scope later.

* ORO is something in between "manual" memory management like in assembler in C and real GC. It is "more automatized" than former, and less automatized than later. Basically, i agree with you, GC has some important advantages, but ORO is - adequate - and I'd say, not completely without advantages in practice as well. (Theoretically, GC is not excluded in the form of libraries. In past there was little interest for that, but Greg's recent "Objective Newlisp" library provides simple, reference counting-based GC algorithm.)

* Dynamic scope - it gives more expressive power: the functions in dynamic scope are about equally expressive as macros, and they are the first class values. The problem with dynamic scope is - accidental name clashes, or "overshadowing." That is where static scope helps and I understand it is reasonable choice for languages like Ada, Eiffel and many others: safety over expressiveness. However, it was not original design goal of Lisp, supposed to be very adventurous language - and it is still visible: CL, Scheme and Clojure programmers have to face exactly the same problem if they write macros. The solutions: namespaces, gensyms and "hygiene" work on the same or similar way for Newlisp dynamic scope. So, it is not really consistent to complain against dynamic scope as unsafe, and to believe that macros are (or can be) "safe enough."
Absolutely no value in that post. NONE. I went looking for insight and was met with half a page of mediocre rant.