skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have had the unusual pleasure of being amongst two distinct groups of people over the last few months.

Firstly, a group of businessowners. 'local' businesses though most have strong ties to the local port or northern regions of France. Pre-brexit they were mostly close mouthed on the issue, though personal conversations indicated a lean to leave. Post brexit they are generally quite happy; their foreign affairs are relatively easy to keep in order and they have just gained leverage on the local stage.

The other group is composed of PhD students and their professors. I'm a casual aquaintance to these people, mainly on the student end, and have dropped in for lunch a few times (and after work pints). These guys are all anti brexit. I know from the way they make up stories about why people voted out and then insult them - its quite unpleasant. From what I gather very little of their funding comes from the EU, but I'm not familliar enough with their funding system to judge them on it.

It seems we have a shit ton of echo chambers in this country.
Seems like you are talking more about statistal notation than mathematical notation. Imo the topic is a tad off.
I worked 3 years in a Berlin startup. Here's some things I observed over that time.

First the city itself. Berlin changed drastically and is still changing. Cost of living, especially housing sky-rocketed over that time (1). The city has become hipster central with many ghettos forming (Neuköln) (2), which isn't necessarily a new problem but I saw it expand over those 3 years. If you love hipster culture its great, if not there's little escaping it unless you can get into a calm Viertel of which there are increasingly fewer. Also Berlin is increasingly poorer (3) and crime is steadily on the rise (4), and this is a palpable increase in comparison to just 4 years ago when I moved to Berlin.

But to qualify my statements, Berlin is a multicultural city like just about every other major city in Europe - you can find and do whatever you want or imagine. But the above are generally the things neglected by those trying to sell Berlin as an amazing place to live your life.

Secondly, the funding and general startup environment. Here Berlin is number one in Europe and was so even before the Brexit as the article mentions. There is definitely a huge startup network and hub of activity, so in terms of numbers and access to investors, cofounders, talent, there is a lot going on, but what I think is still lacking, and this article does a good job of mentioning it, are break-out homegrown successes - at least in terms of notoriety, i.e. Spotify. There are indeed moderate successes, companies that get bought out by US expanders or develop a moderately profitable business which are homegrown.

I think there are many reasons for this, one could be we haven't had enough time in Berlin, another one of the biggest factors I think, is that the European market is very hard to penetrate at such a high level, there are so many different cultures/languages, EU laws and country specific laws that expanding is more difficult than homogenous markets like the US or China (obviously), especially when you are a small team.

Anyways, the experience was amazing and if I could go back I wouldn't change anything. Still Berlin is not all a bed of roses, just as its not all work and no ecstatic elation and amazing exitement when you're building a new company.

1. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/studie-zum-wohnungsmarkt-i...

2. http://www.news.de/politik/855636121/problemviertel-in-deuts...

3. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/arbeit-und-armut-in-berli...

4. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/polizei-justiz/statistik-d...
> Guile Emacs is dead, isn't it?

Emacs-guile is working today. That's a first after many many years of talk and proof-of-concept stage efforts.

I hope the development will pick up speed once guile 2.2 and emacs 25.1 are out. Both projects underwent some big changes/improvements lately.

One sign of live is that bpt's improvements to guile elisp were rebased on a recentish guile-master. This branch lives in the main repository now.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guile.git/log/?h=wip-elisp

Also, I have seen some recent commits from emacs developers to guile. So the two projects are talking to each other.

Now, imho, the success if emacs-guile strongly depends on whether they manage to share the load across several developers. A more open development culture surely would help.
The post is a pretty childish rant. One of the great facets of mathematical writing (and not learning, unfortunately) is that you can explicitly define your own notation, and then use said notation whenever you want. The author even notes this in his final paragraph, but doesn't seem to see it as an advantage of mathematical writing.

Prior to modern notation, mathematics was written out in english in full. What we have now is significantly better than what existed before modern mathematical shorthand.

Also, the expectation is an operator and not a 'function' (in the sense that it does not take values in one of the canonical scalar fields e.g. R, C). The notation makes perfect sense in this setting. For example, the expression E[x^2] should be interpreted as E acting on the function x -> x^2 and not on a number x.
http://www.worldometers.info/
Why You Should Care About Pictures You Use
"These are just issues that someone unfamiliar with a field would face. None of them are problems for those of us in the field."

How is this argument different from defending code with bad variable naming by stating that it doesn't cause issues to anyone familiar with the code base?
Short answer: no (but I'm a big TM fan)

Long answer: Terra Mystica works precisely because it doesn't have combat. It's about gaining points to win, and to do that you have to do other things, each with their own costs and cost centers. It works because it's about management of what you've got, when you play what actions, and taking advantage of the strengths of your particular peoples.

Scythe by comparison is very beautifully produced, and overall it's a good game, but not a truly excellent one. It's just not at the same level as something like TM or Kemet, for something else similar.

My main gripe with it is that too much of the game is dictated at the start. It'd be like playing chess with the first 5 moves dictated to both sides.

TM has a similar setup in that it's a static starting map, with factions that have static benefits, but the map starts changing fast because of what's available with bonus cards each turn, what can go where (or not), so you have to improvise. There's no real benefit to improvising on Scythe - indeed it's generally going to make things go worse for you. You're sort of railroaded into a certain way of playing.

Overall I'd give it a 7.5/10
Well, when I write TeX (and I stick to the "good practice" of defining "semantic" macros for common symbols), I often notice myself finding the TeX source code more readable than the PDF it produces.
Even if you don't have an EU passport or a degree it's not hard. There are programs that target entrepreneurs especially and at least one HN'er made it into Germany for several years running now working on his start-up. The start-up even got some German government funding.

Learning German is useful on many levels, it will make it easier to get through everyday life (though Germans in general will speak English quite well official stuff tends to be in German only), it will also allow you better access to the German market.
I am non-German living and working for a startup in Berlin and so far my biggest struggle is the language barrier. If you don't know German you will be fine in your work but outside you will feel as a stranger. You usually feel it when you go to a doctor, you shop for something more complex, you use services where you need to communicate or you go to government offices or when you look for a flat.

It is possible to learn German but it requires huge effort and dedication and not many people are capable of that.
What is missing is a justification for each of the counters (where do these numbers come from?) preferably with reference to the source.
I have similar feelings with music notation too. we never applied our "user experience" standards to mathematical notation and music notation. If these things were invented today, we might come up with better ideas.

One painful experience I have reading math is telling which variables are "vectors" and which are "scalars". another is the similar looks of certain greek characters and english characters, such as alpha and a.
Seem like you are talking more about statistical notation than mathematical notation. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I just think the topic is a tad off.
>>> It seems we have a shit ton of echo chambers in this country.

Good to see your comprehensive survey supported your view :-D
> Not sure why you're bringing up Scala-Native again

Weren't talking about that?

> @tailrec has existed since 2.8

Yes?

> I was thinking (given your mention) that maybe Scala-Native had done away with the problem

It uses fastcc, and yes it does. I don't understand the issue.
Is there anywhere else where learning the local language doesn't play the same role?
Trending Cultures is a leading online Fashion and Accessories store
OpenCurrencies – Free Currency Exchange API
Bret Victor, Inventing on Principle (2012) [video]
Exactly. That was the main reason why I left Germany. If you want to stay, it should be your first priority to learn german.
Thanks. I couldn't have said that any better!
2204 pounds of gold. Such an exact number. Except when you change it to kilograms...
Which version of sbt-android do you use?
VS Code Tips and Tricks
Just a heads up that changing the HTTP protocol can break a load balancer. Experienced this one time while using Amazon's ELB: the response had invalid HTTP and the ELB instances would silently lock up and stop responding, eventually draining the pool. Was not fun to debug.
Among the Lizard People: Silent Connections at the Reptile Expo
Numbeo agrees:

Consumer Prices in Berlin are 30.83% lower than in San Francisco, CA

Consumer Prices Including Rent in Berlin are 56.36% lower than in San Francisco, CA

Rent Prices in Berlin are 78.16% lower than in San Francisco, CA

Restaurant Prices in Berlin are 36.88% lower than in San Francisco, CA

Groceries Prices in Berlin are 49.39% lower than in San Francisco, CA

Local Purchasing Power in Berlin is 16.50% higher than in San Francisco, CA

(http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...)
Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 launched 20 years ago this week
Sounds like a lot. For a comparison, how many startups are there in Silicon Valley?
Well I would say that there is huge lack of talent because the salaries are ~ 60k. Funny how everything is "average" and you can negotiate ~10% more but that's usually it.

Btw, if you google "senior developer salary berlin", you will get `Berlin earns an average salary of €57,355 per year`. [1]

1 : https://www.google.de/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...
How the Berlin startup scene is wasting its potential
> Mild, mild stuff compared to the Great Leap Forward,

Err, that was the whole point.
Easy to Miss Code Smells
I really like the art, reminds of Simon Stålenhag.
> FreeBSD has for years had some features that are only now reaching 'mainstream' popularity

It's also lacking a bunch of features that reached "mainstream popularity" a long time ago.

Example: ASLR, the most important exploit mitigation technique

- 2001 - PaX Linux
- 2003 - OpenBSD
- 2005 - Upstream Linux
- 2007 - Windows
- 2007 - OS X
- 2011 - iOS
- 2016 - NetBSD

FreeBSD is still lacking ASLR support despite a number of attempts and an actively maintained fork.

Linux even has Kernel ASLR (even though its effectiveness is debatable and it's much better with the Grsecurity patchset).

I'm a FreeBSD user and run it on a number of firewalls, but FreeBSDs approach at security worries me and I consider porting everything to OpenBSD or Linux.

It did not even have signed packages until recently!
Nice design/layout
Pretty much every young person in the western world speaks English, so I'd say anywhere where that is the local language.
Here's an article on the same topic, but less euphoric:

http://www.thelocal.de/20160729/how-the-berlin-startup-scene...

The author's glorification of the middle management and how it adds "efficient communication" makes me a little skeptical. But the rest sounds accurate.
I'm a board game lover from way back - and I agree, this looks really complicated, and I never got that "I've got to play it" feeling from looking at the pics and the write up.

After all these years, I still drag out my ancient boxes of "Shogun" and "Axis & Allies" if I want to occupy 4 to 7 hours with my friends... Those games have the right level of strategy, fun, diplomacy, and ease of play as any game I've tried.
MY FIRST AND LAST VLOG
100 times this article. I just posted the article on HN [1]. The "startup-scene" is somehow fake around here.

1 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12196525
Ah, but then you can't have a job that lets you live near nature. Even most remote jobs (which have lots of other downsides, like stalling out career progress) require decent proximity to a major city or airport, and high-speed internet.
> And don't even get me started on the pulmonary embolism treatment studies. What a clinical mess that is.

Please, start.

I'm very interested and will read what you write with full attention.
Thank you for the feedback. I’ve deliberately not attempted to teach grammar or pronunciation with it since I’m aiming for people who already understand those things (i.e. intermediate learners) but who need help to go from intermediate to advanced Japanese (mostly a matter of building vocabulary) and for which there do not seem to be many educational resources. So right now my foremost goal is to get more books published to broaden the vocabulary presented in the books. Hope that explains its approach!
Accepting Dates in Web Pages
Thank you! This is a big pain point I've had for long time and didn't realize of the true cause until now. Anyone know of a Linux port? Or any plam to port it?
the current exhibitor (Mauritshuis in Den Haag) has produced a short "making of" video providing some more insights how the frames were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM5SVKsP-hg
Randomization definitely helps.

I also play Hearthstone, the Blizzard card game, and that's a pretty awful example, sometimes, of bad randomization with all those effect that can range from harmful to do nothing to win the game on the spot.

The randomization in Smallworld is good because you always have a certain amount of control over it and you can plan for it/around it. On top of that the power swings are not really extreme (some race - attribute combos are stronger than others but the overall power range is reasonably small).
I've got a hunch brexit basically isn't going to happen. The vote was advisory and our new PM was a remainer. It's incredibly difficult to really leave without screwing the economy. See http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/07/14/everything-you-ne...

The article concludes May will probably kick the problem into the long grass which she seems to be doing by saying it won't happen without Scottish agreement which probably won't happen.
I have taken ten years of math in school and then calculus, discrete math, linear algebra. That's all useless if I want to follow math in a simple research paper because they're using notation common in THAT field and it has nothing to do with the notation in another math field.

And it's all V hat superscript pi subscript h. It's not like code, where I get descriptive variable names. And you thought pi meant pi? No, it means policy in THIS context.
But nowhere near as much as headline writers are.
Special Edition: Join me on my 4th annual social media sabbatical
I was just going to mention music. I learned some piano as an adult. I was never able to accept that the same note positions on the treble staff had a different value on the bass staff. Yes, I understand why it's so, it's just terribly user-unfriendly.

Also, in keys other than C, I felt that it wouldn't kill them to mark every instance of the sharp and flat notes, instead of doing it once at the beginning and implying it everywhere else.
The thing is, people gravitate to languages where they can learn about the language and its ecosystem from people they can get along with. Many people avoid confrontation - especially when they're trying to learn about something.

If you don't get along with dudebros, you're going to avoid languages where the IRC channels and forums and random online discussion about the language is populated by dudebros - if you don't get along with people who speak aggressively, you're going to avoid languages which you see people speaking aggressively in support of - if you're really not a fan of active community management a la codes of conduct, you're going to avoid languages where their users speak in favour of such things.

Rinse and repeat a bunch of cycles, and whether there's a formal community or not, there's a type of person who permeates discussion of the language and its ecosystem, and is generally accepted by users of the language. Attempting to avoid them is difficult, because the existing language users see no problem, so you're stuck with a very limited number of places to learn, interact, and ask questions without coming across them.

I don't think the people in question represent the community as a whole, but they do represent what I'm signing up for when I need to communicate about the language with others - in Haskell's case, there's a higher chance than with most languages that I'm going to come across people who will proclaim I'm stupid if I don't immediately and from birth know why XYZ abstraction is amazing and universally good. And god forbid I disagree.
No ConfigurationManager in ASP.NET Core
So many things would have changed for the better in that war if the various actors had drawn clear lines in the sand in advance.

E.g. the Germans believed the British wouldn't go to war with them over Belgium, the British knew Belgium was under threat in advance, but wouldn't draw a clear line in the sand telling the Germans that violating Belgium was an act of war.

Likely doing that would have kept Britain out of the war entirely since Germany would have attacked France directly.
> their foreign affairs are relatively easy to keep in order and they have just gained leverage on the local stage.

Just about this part: nothing has actually changed relatively significantly at all, yet. Article 50 has not even been triggered. The UK first has to notify the EU of intent to leave, then they have to actually leave, then the effects will slowly start trickling in (whatever they are), and in the mean time so many confounding factors will be mixed in that we will probably never find out what came whence.

> It seems we have a shit ton of echo chambers in this country.

Is that anything new? Humans everywhere always. And?
Netherlands should be better. But you still need to learn the language to get really integrated. Though there are people that've lived for 10+ years and don't know it there.
isn't it normal?
most of the world does not speak english as first language, especially in Europe, where each country, even the smallest, use its own language.
Funny, I said the same about Andrew Ng's ML course.

Ultimately, if what you're teaching is going to end up in software, why use math at all? Use code or pseudo code. I don't think it's bad to just give the working algorithm without having to prove the math.

Really how many students will end up being computer scientists anyway, and research and write about new methods of doing AI, and do the actual math? So few. I guess that's a simple criticism of academics.

It's just easier to work with code than mathematical notation most of the time, in my view. You can't replace math, of course, but when things are simple enough, it could be avoided. It's a matter of making math accessible to the most people.

Code is amazing because a computer can check to see if it works. A computer doesn't understand math.
Sounds like you like some games others won't, and others will like some games you don't. Surprise surprise.
> I know from the way they make up stories about why people voted out and then insult them - its quite unpleasant

You dismiss the possibility that they are right. Many people do support Brexit for wholly racist reasons (e.g. my father who wants to 'get the poles out').
1.6.1, I think, but I'm not sure. I was stupid enough to delete my project files...
I had the similar experience when I started to learn math, even the Common Lisp part. I knew how to program from young age and I thought math syntactically. From that mindset it was obviously painful.

But once you really start to understand math, you realize that mathematical notation is not very formal or rigorous. It's shorthand visual help to keep track actual mathematical objects behind the notation. S-expressions are perfect for formal definitions and programming. They are not so good for actually thinking mathematics. Mathematical notation can be dense and contain lots of information.

Notation is problematic for students because underlying concepts or notation is almost never explained well. For example, I don't remember anyone explaining what functional or implicit functions are before using them heavily. I had to figure them out myself.
She hasn't said that.

Sturgeon painted her comments that way, but what she said was a solution that worked for the whole nation, nothing about Scottish agreement or consent.

If Brexit doesn't happen then the mainstream will be handing power to UKIP who will, quite rightly, be able to say that democracy in the UK is a sham. I don't want that, Brexit must happen.
Pretty much everywhere in the world english is a second language...
How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
The UK is a net payer of the EU budget. It can replace all EU subsidies like for like and still save some money as a result of Brexit.
I understood math better once I used it for coding.

Linear algebra and matrices, for example, by creating a simple 3D simulation and later studying a circuit simulation.

Same with physics and other sciences, which are typically taught more like math calculation and/or memorization classes.

It would be nice to see more math documented and taught as code.
New animated show from the Daily Show host set to launch on HBO later this year
Bah. I came here with about ten words. The only verb I could conjugate on the day I arrived was erschrecken, a couple of months later I did well already.

The key, and I think this applies to any language, is not NOT BACK DOWN. Some things will be hugely painful, if you back down you just defer the pain. The Germans will want to be polite and helpful (and practise their own English), don't let them.

Some HNers will know about the Israeli language courses after the war, when Israel had a seven-digit number of immigrants, hardly any of which spoke modern Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is an invented language, BTW, so "hardly any" is not an exaggeration. The model that worked was three-week full-time courses where ONLY modern Hebrew was spoken. They didn't let anyone back down: Students went without food until they were able to order in a restaurant where the waiters were helpful but spoke no foreign languages (usually late on the first day).
Irrelevant really, as cross-EU collaborations have been hugely important to UK-based research. Additionally, we're a net beneficiary of EU research funding.
The denser the city, the closer we could have real nature close to the economic centre of the city.

Think of taking all the Bay Area, putting all the economic activity and people who want city living into a small area with 40 story towers, and the rest will be much more pleasant---with relatively easy commuting into the small core for the voluntary country bumpkins.
Some people use "rig" to mean "ring wihout negatives" and "rng" to mean "ring without identity".