skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, to be more precise, the expression would be "we articulate our thoughts with words". Words are not equal to our thoughts, but they are the product, and the interface, and used to represent, and treated as if they are it. So we share our thoughts with words, not with "focusing" or "knowing". And we do this even with ourselves. Notes to self are in words. We may start with something else, but to be able to express whatever that "was" or "is" is where words come in.

But why words are important here is also because we are talking about computation. To reason, we need something to hold on to and reason with. We need to be able to move things around and then feed back into our minds or minds of others. This is the computation. And computation is done with abstractions. Words are all abstractions. And abstractions are constructed from experience. And that is how they all connect, and why words, even though they may just be words, can be asserted as true or not true. But the truth value of a statement can only be known by computation. Truth is the result of computation which requires abstraction.

We could make the distinction between intentional computation and computation done under the hood. Our brain does a lot of prep work before we even see anything. But for the most part, when we say "thinking" it is safe to say we are referring to the deliberate kind (or maybe not, and that is where we aren't quite meeting eye to eye). The deliberate kind will conclude with words to be shared and be computable.
WOW this casts a whole new light on the idea of bank accounts for me, basically rent seeking via excess bank account ><
This is pretty cool!

Feature request: Allow me to filter by technologies that a company doesn't use.
PHP devs aren't expensive. Even good ones.

It's easier to reroll in another language and retrain or recruit? No. So you probably mean for a new project. So now you've more maintenance and learning curve unless you just happen to have enough skilled in $NEWTHING. Not really easier.

PHP is an inconsistent mess, everyone knows that, but it's cheap, widely understood, and it's perfectly possible to write decent maintainable code. There's ways to mitigate the chaos.
I find higher quality food to be a case of rapidly diminishing returns. When I'm cooking for myself, occasionally I'll take the time to make everything from scratch with fresh ingredients and it will be nicer, but it's only 10-20% nicer (if that can be quantified) for several times more effort.
Others replying to you are wrong in suggesting that evidence for dark matter comes only intragalactic scales. In fact, there is evidence for dark matter at the much larger scales on which galaxies and galaxy cluster clump.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evid...

The average mass density of the universe is known within a few percent.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/denpar.html

From reading the article, I believe this is literally just a finding about how many galaxies into which the known amount of matter was clumped in the distant past, i.e., more galaxies with less average mass.
PHP got traction because it was easier for hosting companies to set up shared PHP hosting and it was easier for non developers to add basic code to HTML pages. PHP was also at the right moment at the right time,just like MySQL and some people made it easy to install it on Windows, a platform too often ignored by language maintainers (try to write Ruby on windows, a (slow) pain in the ass).
The global burden of disease
On medieval rents ruling out any savings, you're probably thinking of the rack-renting of the Border clearances in the 1700s. There was room for upward mobility in the Middle Ages; for one example, look up the Paston letters and the biographies of the family, who rose from yeomen to gentry and I think minor nobility. Yeomen were freeholders, approximately, but we have records of serfs rising to yeoman status.

See Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, for a great deal of discussion in passing; or look up A Farewell to Alms, although the situation wasn't as rosy as that book claims.
I don't know if Dunning Kruger actually applies well here.

Parent is not assuming they are an expert/professional at baking, rather, Parent is assuming baking isn't difficult.
> It took less than a week to migrate our codebase (a 10 years old PHP monolith)...

> And it took 4 hours to migrate our custom extensions.

That seems like a very small amount of work; I'm impressed at how smooth a transition that must've been.

I'm also quite surprised that

> we can handle twice more traffic with same infrastructure.

Wow, I didn't think that PHP application code would be such a bottleneck. Maybe it's not that, but if the entire codebase is written in PHP, and you replace it all in one shot, you just get such an improvement. But I thought DBs, etc. would play a bigger role.
Ive been hearing nothing but good things about Elixir, I may have to check it out.

Any recommended places to start with?
Indeed. It's actually my preferred language for writing code. It may not have as many libraries, and it might not be as mature as, say, CL, but it's just so pleasant to program in.
We're nature in recursion!
Every time I dip my toes in some creative field that others take seriously, I find way more depth than was apparent from the outside.

I have yet to find a hobby worth doing where I don't consistently think, "Wow, I'm so much better at this than I was last year/month/week." And I keep feeling that way no matter how much time I put into it.

Over hundreds of years, thousands of people have dedicated their lives to pastry making. You are positing that after the first day on the job, every one of them had plateaued and the rest of their career was just drudgery and repetition. I find that highly unlikely.

I'm only just getting into baking, but I've been cooking burgers for about a decade. The ones I made this week were better than most of the ones I've ever made. I learned some new stuff (this time that a thicker piece of cheese doesn't overwhelm if it's had a little more time to soften from the heat).
I second this, I'd love to put e.g. -Java in a search.
Of the four disadvantages of PHP mentioned in the article, in my opinion, the worst by far is the first, i.e. confusing comparison rules. The article however fails to explain that clearly: the worst thing is not that comparison rules are just confusing (heck, many things are confusing at first, but eventually you work them out); the worst thing is that those rules are intransitive (!!!), as explained very well here: http://phpsadness.com/sad/52

The second disadvantage, passing by reference vs. by value, honestly can or cannot be confusing, depending on which other languages you are accustomed to. So I would say it is a debatable point.

The third point, the language being failure-adverse, is a choice made by design, this is also a debatable point, but it's in line with the fact that PHP was created as a utilitarian language as Lerdorf explained numerous times, e.g. here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anr7DQnMMs0

The last point, inconsistencies in the standard library, is obviously true but I would say it is very common in languages that have been around long enough to have subsequent approaches layered in the standard library. Some languages resolve this by making breaking changes and keeping consistency (think Python 2 vs Python 3), some others just show their age by having libraries that were developed at different point in time (Perl, R and Java come to mind), this is also explained by Lerdorf in the video linked above.
Top airlines look to no-frills fares to win back travelers to Europe
My point that the author of the post misinterpreted the interview (which was apparently not at all for a Director-level position), my point that we only have one side of the story, and my point that the paraphrasing was done intentionally in such a way as to make the interviewer look bad instead of the interviewee. Or, if you want to simplify it, my point that this person is clearly not Director material, as they would like everyone to think.

Also, you're moving the goalposts here. At the time this was posted, the author of the post claimed it was an interview for Director, people were claiming that the interviewer acted exactly as written, and I, along with others, were claiming that either the author left out information, misunderstood it, or edited it.
Nature has had a lot longer than we have. And its first few years weren't that impressive either.
Maybe they can't afford a difference. :(
Wordpress is a single example and a project being 'interesting' does not equate to success.
And, we came up with an emulation of a product of billions of years of evolution in this case.
You can look at any country and claim they where not a democracy even the US (lacks direct voting, only 2 party's, gerrymandering is endemic, etc).

Egypt held several elections from 1924 - 1950 with multiple party's participating. Iran was a democracy in 1953 prior to the CIA coup. Russa had real elections after the USSR's fall.

Now, if you say they need to hold elections X, times and hand over power several times before it's a real democracy that's IMO fair. But, you can still find plenty of examples including ancient Rome.
>Think about how ActiveRecord in Rails reads from the DB schema to generate it's magic methods, etc.

All the magic you ever need can be dynamically created in __get, __set and __call. It works, it works well, and it makes not only reasoning, but also deployment an order of magnitude simpler.

>Code paths, auto-loaders, database connections, config files, etc.

Use a single code path, a single autoloader and a single database connection. Cache the opcodes of stuff you load. Write config files and templates in pure PHP, so they're cached as well. Done.

I've never, ever had problems with bringing PHP page generation time below .1 seconds. Usually it took something like .03 seconds on crappy hardware. And that was without extensive caching of DB results or anything else that's particularly clever.
Ah I see. Thanks!
From this and other accounts, it is clear that a lot of the low cost in China is due to that fact that transaction costs (the cost of writing contracts, lawyers, specifications) are reduced by replacing formal contracts by interpersonal relations[0]. So if someone screws you[1], it will hurt their relationship with you and their reputation.

Of course there are other considerations like cheap labour and the ability to rip-off Western IP (though I don't think those goods make it to the West). But these can't explain why China in particular is so dominant in manufacturing.

[0] I'm told that the term "guanxi" has two meanings. First as a generic term for "connection" or "relationship" and second as a proper noun for the way people indirectly bribe government officials. Here only the first meaning would apply since I'm talking about B2B relationships. And since it's a generic term, there is no reason to use the Chinese word.

[1] Or screws you more than is considered fair game.
This is awesome! Can you describe how you implemented the WebGL ops a bit more? Did you have to write your own convolution kernel with GLSL for example?
Yep, those engineers they took on in the last ten years must suck, they've only managed to develop technologies that grew Google's annual revenue from 10 billion dollars in 2006 to 75 billion in 2015. That's the kind of track record that has to make you question the hiring process, right?
We sold it as a "security precaution, if you create an online access account in our branch, hackers won't be able to create one for you."

As far as WF's interest goes- this is one of those situations where the bank's strategy relied on having customers use as many products as possible, the thought was that if you use many banking products, you're less likely to switch banks. So all sales goals were set around the number of products (we called them "solutions") you sold. This is a rational strategy, but since things like debit cards or online accounts counted as solutions and the sales pressure was immense, the system could be gamed by selling solutions that really didn't help the company's overall goals. It was a broken incentive system.
Google Cloud Platform HTTP(S) Load Balancers Returning 502 Errors
This is a bad one. All load balancers are down for us. And it's a multi zone failure.
Please do both of us a favor and never reply to me again. Given every exchange we've ever had, it's clear we see the world from such fundamentally incompatible premises that dialog is not possible. That being the case, any further engagement is clearly meant to antagonize.
My point is that the people don't care about the tech. They're worrying about the problem they're trying to solve. New companies that priotitize tech over finding and pleasing their customers don't live long enough to see the benefits. Just my observation. I've been through the "but if you don't build it right today you'll have to build it again tomorrow... that makes no sense" phase. I made some great code, but very few people are running it. My worst code is the code the most amount of people are running... it's because I got it done, and I got it rught before my budget ran out.
Really good summary of some of the problems. There is a deeper issue which is that unless your developers understand React best practices really, really well Relay provides opportunities to screw up in a pretty big way. It goes against the 'developer experience' priorities that React was designed around. It's hard to understand and promotes some bad practices for complex applications e.g. binding domain concerns to each component rather than encouraging presentation components. Relay's constraints mean it's hard to control the way the application updates and responds to users. I'm not saying it can't be done but it requires way too much detailed knowledge of the quirks. From an agile perspective it also couples the front end and back end development too tightly.

We have since moved to Redux and are going to back out Relay from the application we used it in. With all of Redux's issues (ceremony, boilerplate, etc) it provides a standard model for us to reason about, and a decoupling of data retrieval from presentation.
Wow today is PHP day on HN :)
The stock was being held up by Version's offer. They've asked for a discount of 1B, and are considering backing out altogether. The stock will probably respond then.

> "We're looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact they believe it's not," Silliman said. If Verizon concludes the breach had a material impact on Yahoo's business, then a key condition of the deal would not be met, he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/13...
So 2 trillion galaxies. Now let's multiply that by 1 trillion stars in the milky way galaxy alone [1]. And then multiply by 1.6 planets per star on average [2]. Sure is a whole lot of planets.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-sten-odenwald/number-of-sta...
[2] http://www.space.com/14200-160-billion-alien-planets-milky-g...
A Man Who Stood Up To Facebook
I'd love it if there was an equivalent service that shipped to the UK, perhaps aimed more at components. I'm always buying cheap stuff from china.
Freaky coincidence. Today I just happened to twice edit some PHP, for two separate tasks... but it's the first time I've touched PHP for about 10 years!

What goes around comes around. I'm editing my LinkedIn and dusting off the old O'Reillys...
There's nothing new about the current 'disconnect' between American elite and others; people pull out the same rhetoric every few years, it seems. And there is no long-term adherence of others to populism (which is being expressed by you as nationalism).

It's not a social truth, despite attempts to raise above reproach its horrible behavior and worse consequences, it's just an old political technique used by some political leaders for their own purposes, as Bob Dylan pointed out, a brushfire they set which now has turn into a raging, out of control forest fire. We can do something about it.

> These are just facts of nature

We can say murder and rape are facts of nature; is it 'elitist' to outlaw them? I don't feel they are 'facts' of my nature, in that they somehow inevitable, and neither is racism.

There are far better angels of our nature, and America was founded on them. 'All men are created equal' and liberty for those men (and women), not just people you happen to like. That has resonated with people's natures for centuries now; I think we can say it's not longer an 'experiment', as Lincoln called it, and it's attracted immigrants from every culture and inspired many more around the world. A lot of those populist 'white' people, as they call themselves, used to hate each other as Irish and Italians and Germans and Poles, Catholics and Protestants and Jews. It turned out those divisions weren't in their natures after all.
> That system lost, and it's never coming back

There's no reason it can't come back. It requires a massive amount of programming work and possibly new hardware but it's definitely possible and people are already working towards it. It's actually quite possible to build upon it and even surpass it.
There are memoization libraries for PHP but really it's just another cache implementation. Put it in RAM, put it on disk, put it in memcached or redis, I don't really see too much a difference between $cache->set($key, $value) in PHP vs cache[key] = value in node for instance.
I would have thought that Google and Facebook coming in would cause wages to rise?
I think the act that I can say something is right but also say something is wrong in a simple yet really abstract way says that none of you are right or wrong because your all just mentally jerking each other off unless your theorem s or whatever actually do something like create energy or make a new weapon or something. The physical world has a way of proving things that nerdy philosophers can't. Prove your theurums in the physical world with matter. Symbols on paper written ink doesn't prove shit. Neither do pixels on a computer.
I'm coming from a country where the military don't fire on the population at all, and are never called in to keep the peace... so the comparison is not so far different as you might think. Even if our military were called in to keep the peace, firing into the air to scare protesters (a college student protest at that!) into submission is something that would be abhorrent here.

So yes, Kent State was a mistake born from confusion, but there's still similarities in using the military and live rounds to control the population.

Or perhaps a different moral standpoint: in the same era, look at how the US military treated the very Vietnamese civilians that they were explicitly there to protect. I'm not saying the US is an autocratic junta, I'm just saying the glass houses/stones thing - how can the US be a staunch ally of such a place? Well, because the US is often A-OK with those kind of actions.
Consider using CSS-only icon approach: cssicon.space
Houdini Spent 4 Days Shaming Congress for Being in Thrall to Fortune-Tellers
> driving trips don't involve a monologue

You're not thinking when you're driving though. The term is highway hypnosis. When we know what we're doing, we become unconscious and unaware, granting us bandwidth to think of other things. When I drive I think of other things.

For the most part, I don't think we're referring to the same things with "thinking". If we were, we'd see we're contradicting a lot less.

> definition of computational thinking

Right. And disagreeing with this definition (or formulation) is where I started, so no surprise there. I would say the original article deviated from (or may have even been irrelevant with) the formal definition (or maybe not).

(edit: What I'm saying is, if you're thinking straight, it is already computational, so there is no need to make the distinction. I still stand by that statement after considering everything thoughtful posted here, by you and everyone else.)
> Why are there no other "competitors" in this space?

You can do the exact same thing with any language that supports CGI. You can compile a Go binary, put it on an Apache server and you'll get the "shared nothing lifecycle" just like PHP.
Mixed DPI should ultimately be fixed under Wayland. Not sure what the current status is either, but at least it should be possible in theory, whereas mixed DPI goes against X protocol too fundamentally to be worth hacking on.
So let's indulge this hypothetical scenario further, for fun.

Say one of the currently powerful countries establish a research station on the dark side of the Moon, and it becomes self-sustaining at some point, from say asteroid mining and 3D printing and growing synthesized food, powered by using whatever's on the moon for some nuclear whatchamacallit system.

What if that colony decides to become politically independent?

Would any of the nations back on Earth be able to project force on the far side of our moon? Won't it be very easy for the Moonians to just shoot down any approaching ships or ballistics?
Thanks for the information. It is legitimately interesting. But while it is a neat idea, the difference seems to be largely inside-baseball. Sure, we're dealing with text, but we can still inspect our code quite well, and we can do much of the same sort of stuff.

In any case, I don't really want my editor editing sexps. The moment my editor is working with sexps rather than characters, it's no longer a general-purpose tool.
The Asgardia website is pretty vague about its goals. They almost sound like the stereotype of mad scientists who want to skirt ethical regulations around research and experimentation:

http://asgardia.space/concept

Economical and political considerations often take precedence over purely scientific ones and ethical boundaries are considered necessary to sustain safety.

...

Asgardia will demonstrate to scientists throughout the world that independent, private and unrestricted research is possible.

...

Asgardia [...] will offer an independent platform
free from the constraint of a land-based country’s laws.

I'm not sure how helpful their satellite will be to this end, if they can't put scientists on it to perform their research. They'll still be bound by the laws of whichever country they reside within.
True. But they might have failed with any other choice. Technology is overrated. Yeah, it matters, Yeah it helps. But the right foundation won't save a shite product.
I worked in kitchens for 10 years. It's not that the task of making anything is all that difficult. It's that it takes practice to do able to bake 120 loaves of bread the same way, every night, getting it right the first time.
> A sufficiently good static type system won't make generic operations harder to implement.

This is true for the JVM definition of 'generics', but it doesn't mean that arbitrary operations on a collection of types can be easily expressed with a given (static) type system. Run time type information + a dynamic type can ameliorate some of this, but that's shoehorning optional types into a static type system, and I don't think that's quite what you meant.

Think about a generic operation to diff two data structures: you need access to the members of the struct in a generic way. I don't think this is easily solved with static types.
I don't think it matters whether you choose iOS or Rails, but it is probably best to choose one or the other so you have a clearer story to tell. Being able to say "I'm a Rails developer that will be graduating in May, and I've worked on X, Y, and Z" puts you way ahead of people who are still figuring out what they want to do.

As for finding work, I'd suggest choosing a handful of companies you're interested in and getting in touch with them now. You can talk to recruiters about when you should apply, ask about informational interviews, or if they have open-source projects, potentially start contributing to those.

If you live in the locale you'd like to end up in, I'd also suggest going to any meetups that interest you. Meetup.com is a great place to find these.