skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> because computation is not (classical) math

Of course, computation is more foundational. It's mathematics that's just applied computation.

> as it does not preserve equality under substitution

You just need to stop using broken models.

> but the recognition that their entire justification is not mathematical but pragmatic

I don't see a distinction. To me, nothing is more pragmatic to use than a reliable mathematical model.

> the (leaky) abstraction of those models

Other than the finiteness of real computers, what else is leaky? Mind you, abstracting over the finiteness of the computer is an idea that even... uh... “less mathematically gifted” languages (such as Java) acknowledge as good.

> such as empirical results showing a certain "affinity" to human cognition

Experience shows that humans are incapable of understanding computation at all. But computation is here to stay, so the best we can do is rise to the challenge. Denying the nature of computation is denying reality itself.
A lot of math detail, but a naive reader reading it will still make the mistake outlined in http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html. And a less naive reader will still be left with no guidance on how to make real-world decisions if you weren't so lucky as to get a strong statistical result.

Here is a much, much simpler strategy that I can suggest for business users.

1. Figure out the longest that you can afford to run your test for.

2. Figure out the number of conversions N you expect in that time.

3. Start running your test, randomly splitting visitors into A and B.

4. Stop the test as soon as one version has sqrt(N) more conversions than the other. Else wait until you get to N conversions between them, and go with what is ahead.

Here are some comments on the procedure.

Stopping before N/2 total conversions is roughly the same certainty as stopping at 95% confidence. Stopping after that is an admission that you are crossing your fingers and going with an educated guess, and it is not feasible to collect enough data to get a better answer.

If one version has a conversion rate which is (1 + 2/sqrt(n)) better than the other, you pretty reliably choose right. The flip side of this is that you'll make a lot of mistakes if you get much below that threshold. If those potential errors are too big, then A/B testing is not going to work well for you because you don't have enough data for statistics.
It works amazingly well!
People suppose this, but that's not quite how it happened. C came from B, and B had ++ also. But B came before the PDP-11. The PDP-7 had hardware that supported auto-increment-by-one, and Ritchie suggests that's where ++ came from.

The PDP-7 assembler manual is at http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp7/PD..., but I can't see any reference to this auto-increment hardware, or to an assembler directive using it. What I'm getting at is that there appears not to have been an assembly language construct for auto-increment on the PDP-7 at all, even though its hardware supported it.

The hardware "auto-indexing" is described at page 3-12 of the PDP-7 architecture document, http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp7/F-... . It is enabled only for about 8 special memory addresses in each 8K of address space, so it is weird and handicapped by comparison with the PDP-11.

See Ritchie's history (http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html) --

"Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed.

"The PDP-7, however, did have a few `auto-increment' memory cells, with the property that an indirect memory reference through them incremented the cell. This feature probably suggested such operators to Thompson; the generalization to make them both prefix and postfix was his own. Indeed, the auto-increment cells were not used directly in implementation of the operators, and a stronger motivation for the innovation was probably his observation that the translation of ++x was smaller than that of x=x+1."
There are millions of people in US with anti-biotic resistant illness.

There are millions of people in EU with anti-biotic illness.

These are serious, life-threatening, life-limiting illnesses where the seller can set high prices.

This is far from "near zero" sales.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/amr-report...
Well, it all starts with JS not having the best stacktraces (although they have gotten a lot better in the last years).
Doing stuff because that's the way elisp does it is a surefire route to unintentional autoemacsulation.
That general technique pushes the problem around, where an implementation error will still result in a use-after-free (where you access a dead/reused array element). This could be fixed by paying for a runtime version check. Also, because it uses a Vec, it doesn't have O(1) performance, either. This could also be fixed by using a different underlying data structure.
Clojure startup time is less of an issue with clojurescript. The idea is is you start the compiler and run it in watch mode.
Artists tend to have mountain-sized egos. Few of the singers-songwriters admit even to themselves that songwriting is a craft, not fine art, and when they speak, it can be hard not to feel slightly bemused. When you look at nice songs the same way you would look at a well-made shoe, or a well-designed typeface, it is easy to appreciate them without feeling silly.
Then I won't be giving this to my 9th grader. Everything he's given (by teachers) must be done.
Creating Modals in AngularJS
Maybe, maybe not. Franz Kafka wanted all of his unpublished manuscripts to be burned after his death, but that didn't happen.
Does anybody take the encryption support in attic/borg seriously? They seem to be implementing their own AE construction. Maybe they did it right, but it makes be a bit uneasy. While they're at it wrapping OpenSSL, I don't know why they wouldn't use one of OpenSSL's AEAD EVPs...
This is hardly a proof -- just a way of modeling the phenomenon described with mathematical equations.
Initial commit was made 4,5 ago...
Is it normal it takes so long for a language to become Open Source?

commit 18844bc65229786b96b89a9fc7739c0fc897905e

Author: Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com>

AuthorDate: Sat Jul 17 23:50:59 2010 +0000

Commit: Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com>

CommitDate: Sat Jul 17 23:50:59 2010 +0000

initial swift test
Yes we have a lot to learn about all the interactions between proteins in a cell, but this typically does not fall under the heading of biochemistry.

Slightly off topic the traditional divisions between different areas of biological sciences that built up in the 20th C have all broken down with the rise of molecular biology. Once biochemistry was a different field to say microbiology, now both are part of the super-field of molecular sciences.
> Yes. Anointing "+ 1" as a thing that needs special syntax is weird.

Its not a special syntax for "+1", its a special syntax for the combination of assignment and increment/decrement.

The postfix versions (increment/decrement variable and then return the value that was present before the increment/decrement), particularly, are equivalent to:

_x = x; x += 1; _x

In an environment where that pattern of operations is common, I can see the value of having a concise mechanism for expressing it.

OTOH, there's a cost to it, too, and I'm mostly happier without them around.
What other term do you use to describe his failure to see modern smartphones coming, even after Apple waved one under his nose?

That said, while I've often been critical of Ballmer, I've been reconsidering my attitude towards him now that I've seen the aggressively-invasive direction in which Satya Nadella is taking Windows. Under Ballmer's leadership, Windows 7 never popped up unsolicited ads for Metro on the toolbar, much less ads that I couldn't turn off.
Disk Encryption: The Good and the Slow
> I fully agree that Go is a poor language if you are building a large, monolithic application.

I find that statement hilarious considering that it was explicitly one of the design considerations[1] for Go. So they either failed massively, or there's a difference in perspective on what a good language for programming in the large is.

From Rob Pike's talk[1]:

> Go was designed to address the problems faced in software development at Google, which led to a language that is not a breakthrough research language but is nonetheless an excellent tool for engineering large software projects.

1. https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
> If you single-handedly list Python and C++ together, Matlab should have some ridiculously low entry barrier.

The ridiculously low entry barrier exists wrt importing data and plotting/displaying results.
You need mutability to write for loops.
I have to say their registration form is one of the most awful I've ever had to fill.
>A computer that supports streaming media files

>PC & Mac Users: Download and install the latest version of Silverlight

And the rest of us?
I'm curious why Facebook was willing to sacrifice delivering adaptive stream to get better latency. I guess they explain that for "Live for People," it makes more sense to have less latency through RTMP, as opposed to possibly worse video or connection. However, I know Periscope is using HLS for all of their stream, save for Android where it looks like RTSP.

Anyone have any thoughts or insights on Facebook's decision to use RTMP as opposed to HLS?
i++ is different from i += 1 in this way: += could be i += 2 or i += j or something else. I have to pay attention to be sure. But i++ can only add one.
More Important than ALPHABET?
A lot of packages can be compiled with a more modern version, though, even if it means more work.
Banking and fintech: An unlikely romance blossoms for startups
It's not the same claim. The claim against Microsoft was that browser and OS dominance had killed competition ("cutting off the oxygen supply" of other browser makers) and was literally distorting the industry.

Browser dominance on its own was not the problem. The problem was that Microsoft's strategy was deliberately anti-competitive and monopolistic, and the browser was one symptom of that - not just because it gave MS massive market share, but because it created a technological chokepoint which limited the commercial potential of everyone working in the PC and Internet industries.

Remember, MS spent a lot of time and money promoting site/browser technologies like ActiveX that only really worked on Windows PCs, and seem to have been an attempt to look out everyone else.

It's hard to argue that iOS or Android are anywhere close to doing the same. Both may be walled gardens, and both have toxic effects. But they're not de facto standards setters, and they can't use their influence to kill competing products at equivalent scale. (They can and have killed or assimilated smaller products - but that's plain unethical behaviour, not clear evidence of monopoly. Taking steps to crush Twitter, WhatsApp, or Facebook would probably count as monopolistic. Killing SmallAppCo is just shady; sad, but true.)

If it was found that Apple and Google were colluding, that would be a serious problem - just as both had problems when it was proved they'd made secret agreements about employee mobility and salary negotiations.
> For a language to beat out Matlab it will need to be based on other factors than cost.

There are plenty of cases in which Matlab's cost is a big factor. Maybe not at your company, but some of Octave's most ardent paying customers have been those disgruntled with Matlab's price tag.
(still) VR for the masses!
Reading is more important than writing. If you leave them in they're one more special case that everyone has to memorize before they can maintain someone else's code.
Yes this is because we have not been developing new antibiotics because of the non-use problem. Now of course because all the antibiotic divisions have been shut down we don't have the infrastructure to bring new antibiotics to market at the rate we need. You have to make the decision to develop a new antibiotic 15 years before you need it.

We need to develop new antibiotics before we have a problem and where they will sit on the shelf, rather than wait until we have none and then panic.
I strongly disagree with this. Being able to do a very simple task like increment or decrement a number inline is useful and reduces clutter and I've always found the idea that the operator complicates things ridiculous. The way they work has always been obvious to me since I first learned to program in PHP as a tween.
Any word on *.mydomain.tld certs from letsencrypt? That's the only thing stopping me from installing it today.
What's the best way to edit remote configuration files locally?
As far as I can tell the safest/best way to remotely edit root-owned config files is using etckeeper, cloning & pushing. Any better options?
Yes, this exactly! While rarely a good idea, it does give you super powers when dealing with specialized libraries, or when writing your own :)
I think your perspective is too small. R is a DSL for data and statistics. Matlab is used in academia and industry across all engineering disciplines, where data and statistics is but a small subset of its total capabilities.

You will never be able to use R to model a Kalman filter, calculate stresses in a beam, or simulate engine control logic.

I refer you to Matlab's toolbox list. http://www.mathworks.com/products/
Because beginners could get confused when seeing the operators in other people's code, for example.

I remember the day I first saw a '++'. It was a rainy night, and I was inspecting a colleague's for loop, when suddenly a '++' operator appeared. I asked myself, "What in the holy bacon of Zeus is that?" So I looked it up in my book. My head almost exploded, and I asked myself if I should quit programming immediately. It was simply too complicated. After four months of agony and pain I finally recovered and started programming again. And yet... Sometimes, when it's raining outside, the memories come back. Programming... No, my life will never be the same again.
> Singer and many (but not all) of the figures whose stories feature in Strangers Drowning are committed Kantians in their ethics

I choked on my drink. Peter Singer has been famous for decades as possibly the singularly least Kantian (and most consequentialist) philosopher on the planet.
Also, the critical element for machine-learning models is training & testing data. Many startups lack access to large quantities of data; since data is proprietary and often expensive, it's really a competitive advantage for large established companies, not startups. If your startup is focused around a machine-learning model, your first priority should be to acquire lots of data - and usually, if you can acquire lots of data, you have a valuable product in its own right without the machine-learning.

Totally agree about ML being an enabler to make great products better, not to bring new products into existence.
Is the internet replacing teachers?
At $2B, I think the money talks. There's certainly some threshold where dollar amount matters. It's trivial to throw away a dollar. There are very few places that can afford to be as flippant with $2B. At some point, you're voting with dollars, and the percentage becomes much less relevant.
Heh. I submitted the Steam hardware survey again last week and one of the questions asked what my connection speed was. The fastest entry was "LAN>10M"

https://i.imgur.com/aU1oQQS.png
Not only are they asking for an extraordinarily large amount of information, but it's 2015 and they have encoding issues.
SMR drives are designed to be used in low-write environments such as archival, so bad performance for small random writes is to be expected.
It's good to see people that have a goal beyond wanting their personal project to succeed, but rather to keep the original reason they started the project at the for front.

Too often large enterprises and projects forget the reason they were started and simply try to keep themselves relevant.
Typing is not the bottleneck.
There's no "normal" or not "normal". There are projects that became open source after a decade or more of existance.

Open Office for example had a long life as the proprietary "Star Office". Blender too IIRC.
For the price you pay for one, you can get a really nice designer watch

To flip around, you mean for all the money I pay for that designer watch, all it does is tell time? Hell, I've got my phone for that. An expensive device that takes up space on my wrist just to tell time in a world full of clocks is just a silly gimmick, but so many people have buyer's remorse about it, that they forced themselves into the habit of using it.

Of course, I don't believe any of that. Different strokes and all, and if folks want to blow cash on time-telling jewelry that can't even tell me what the weather is tomorrow, more power to them.

Signed, happy Pebble Time owner
Do you believe teaching critical thinking in schools is worthwhile?

To be clear on what critical thinking is and can do:

http://youtu.be/6OLPL5p0fMg
The missing piece to changing the university culture (2013)
I have the complete opposite view. Early smart watches sucked because they just tried to be an android phone on your wrist. The most popular smart watch, the pebble (disclaimer: I own one) is also by far the least featureful. People don't want or need a second phone, they want the ability to get notifications, control their music, and tell time without having to take their phone out of their pocket.
> If we’re going to move the entire Web to HTTPS ...

Doesn't support IIS at all
I don't see what's so inaccuarate about the headline. He was sued because someone thought the new song sounded similar to his previous song. But the legal system concluded that it was not the same song. I'm having a hard time figuring out how you came to the conclusion that he was not sued for sounding like himself.
I put `task` in my .bashrc so it would run every time I open a terminal (which is a lot for me). Since TW sorts by urgency (which it determines on some values, and you can override it if you wish), that is as good as a reminder.
French Uber drivers have created their own Uber
We don't have `++` and `--` in Rust either, and I really don't mind. The amount of times I've went to do a `++` where a `+= 1` was clutter has been perhaps one or two times.

Then again, my most common use for `++` was `for (;;) {}` index, and we have better in these new languages like Rust and Swift.

There are millions of people in this world trying to learn to code and understand the layers upon layers of cruft and quirks we've added. I don't mind the `++` or `--` operators, but I certainly don't mind them being gone either. They add extra complexity to code which is already arguably too complex.

In any case, I favor understandability over guesswork, and `++` is another odd cornercase which you have to mentally `grep` over.
Wait, is it only a PC if it runs Windows?
Unless Google will provide Uber with its technology and cars - after all Uber is working on drive-less cars.
Hall made his first release as Moby in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobility_%28song%29 . I can't tell when Motte put out what, but at least from his wikipedia page, he only started making songs and using "Moby" in 1988. I don't know how popular he got where, but it doesn't seem obvious that Hall got the name from Motte.
I don't see Casandra on that list. Isn't that an Apache project?
You're right, there's a lot to be said for growing one's own culture by appropriating elements of other cultures that work. "Free riding" on Western culture is exactly what the Hawaiians should be doing in this instance. Instead they've chosen to shove a potato up the exhaust pipe, and nobody gets to ride.

It's pretty ironic of you to cite Muslim and Egyptian cultures in defense of your own point. What have they done for us in the last 500 years? How long are they going to "free ride," as you put it?
> Do you want to beat Uber? Pay the drivers better.

In a race towards a self-driving fleet, this does not appear to be the winning strategy.
>but seems like if anyone has scale problems, google would

Google doesn't use Go at such large scale though. Some projects here and there, and most of them small for all I've read. The most publicly celebrated ones being a MySQL front-end for YouTube and a caching-layer (?) for Google Downloads. Not exactly earth shattering applications.
yeah, very self consistent, pretend you care about the GPL, then decide it is the vendor you really care about. Who cares that Apple controls GPL software installed on almost every GNU/Linux machine?
I didn't realize you were the author! I figured out that I made a mistake by using the same key pair for Steps 1 and 2. The LetsEncrypt API returned an error that told me to use a different key for the CSR, and once I did that it worked.

Reading back through your instructions, I don't know how you could be more clear that ACCOUNT.KEY and DOMAIN.KEY should be different. It's just my fault for not reading slowly enough. :)

Thanks a bunch for making this tool, it made everything simple.
> You just need to stop using broken models.

No computation preserves equality under substitution. If your model assumes that equality, it is a useful, but leaky abstraction.

> Other than the finiteness of real computers, what else is leaky?

The assumption of equality between 2 + 2 and 4, which is true in classical math but false in computation (if 2+2 were equal to 4, then there would be no such thing as computation, whose entire work is to get from 2 + 2 to 4; also, getting from 2+2 to 4 does not imply the ability to get from 4 to 2+2).

> Experience shows that humans are incapable of understanding computation at all.

Experience shows that humans are capable of creating very impressive software (the most impressive exemplars are almost all in C, Java etc., BTW).
Hahaha, I'm amazed that the Rust developers were able to do that.

Saying it was "quite a pain" is the understatement of the year.
Thanks, but that part was literally quoted from the third paragraph of TFA.
The amount of "compile to JavaScript" tools is impressive

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu...
Anyone here us the productivity software brain.fm? It's totally changed me life
Why don't birdmongers setup a clearinghouse where they can trade parrots to fit the language profiles fit for their markets?

The premium should offset any transport costs as well as warehousing costs incurred by carrying inventory many months without moving it.
"These operators increase the burden to learn Swift as a first programming language"

Come on. There are legitimate reasons not to carry one language's expressions to another, but this isn't a good one. Most people first learn of ++/-- as "By the way, you can use ++ as a shortcut to add one" and leave it at that.
That's a refreshing attitude. I wish AWS had something like that warning... "If you only want a VPS to idle in IRC with... stop reading, this is not for you."
There is really no easy way to gain knowledge. Its painful and requires you to put in time learning outside of work. There are millions of blogs and tutorials that intro everything from html to MapReduce. The type of person that can jump into a new tech knowing nothing and start learning is the most valuable type.
"These operators increase the burden to learn Swift as a first programming language"

It looks like they may be trying to make it easier for current tweens that would have otherwise learned PHP.

Don't see the value in this. These operators are terse, well known, and are implemented in a wide array of languages.