skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Truck drivers will likely to find other things to do since there will be sufficient capital to pay for jobs

I think some types of road transport jobs will defy automation for far longer than others. Consider for example a removalist – driving a truck from A to B is far easier to automate than loading and unloading furniture and household effects. By contrast, moving goods between warehouses could be fully automated, since the loading dock at each end could be purpose built to support robotic loading/unloading.
> If we continue to refuse (as many have since the 1970s) addressing the labor shortage problem with our established institutions, people like me will be forced to address it technologically ...

What would keep you from addressing it technologically even when it is addressed with your so-called established institutions?

- When tractors were widely available and cheap, did land-owners refuse to buy them, and kept hiring farm employees?

- Did they ask for established institutions to help them out, instead of buying a bunch of tractors, hiring a fraction of the previous number of employees for driving the tractors, and never having to look back?

- Are there farm owners out there who still long for the days established institutions solved their labor shortage problems so they don't have to buy tractors?

Have you seen CGPGrey's Humans Need Not Apply? (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)
As a CS researcher I probably wouldn't have raised my hand, thinking it was some sort of a trick or that the speaker was making a point about how simple concepts are sometimes conveyed in confusing ways.

I appreciate mathematics, but because I don't use this notation on a regular basis, I wouldn't have been confident enough to raise my hand.
∀+∃+{|} are the epitome of clarity over compression. Mathematicians like them for the same reason why many programmers like sophisticated static typing. They might not always improve the clarity of toy examples to beginners, but they certainly help improve the clarity of untamed, wart-ridden, real life problems to initiates.

I think the first time I truly appreciated the power of ∀ and ∃ was during functional analysis when I found myself juggling an overwhelming number of different notions of continuity, convergence, smoothness and the like. ∀ and ∃ drew out the subtle distinctions that the blurry, imprecise words of the English language conspired to hide. They let me break down logic hairballs completely indigestible to my mammalian intuition into small chunks that I could individually process. Same idea as algebra.

That's their purpose, and they're very good at it. Nothing I've encountered in the world of programming languages really comes close to doing their job. Don't fall in to the trap of assuming they're pointless just because they don't apply to your problems.
Graphviz is under the Eclipse Public License, which allows commercial use.
Then you're missing out on a really excellent site.
Many disagree. Consider the possibility that they might not be wrong in so doing.
You have to be kidding.

Mathematical and sheet music are both organically grown. They're like C++ for math and music, but with about fifty times more cruft. Our forebears just kept adding on to and expanding purely crap syntax because getting people to change the existing way they do things is nigh impossible. Going on to hail this as "refined" is beyond me.

EDIT: Sometimes, in maths, different disciplines have conflicting syntax. Rather than fixing this, we just resorted to overloading (see i vs. i in maths and physics). If any programmer encountered that kind of thing in a computer language they would describe it as clearly evil.

EDIT: For a funny take on musical notes, see: https://youtu.be/-3WuQxnA7Hg
This might not exist, but could you recommend a text that _does_ cover refactoring for a functional and immutable approach? I would be interested in reading something like that.
I guess that's why he talks about applications and not functions, so that guarantees there is a single x for each y.
How Will Technology Equip Us with More Abilities Than a Human?
How can we improve this marketing tool for our in-app purchase booster?
"Google may be within its right to take an action — perhaps ban violators from buying more phones or ask them to export their data and move to another provider — but it shouldn’t have the right to completely shut off someone’s digital life instantly, with no warning."

While I don't disagree with the authors position here, if TC want to be seen as a source of quality journalism they really should ensure their "journalists" keep their personal opinions to themselves.
That was the approach I took before inventing PowerShell. We didn't WANT to invent a shell - we were forced into it.

The problem was that Bash on Windows wasn't effective. At the heart of the matter is the difference in architecture between Unix and Windows. In Unix, most everything is a file so if you can modify files and restart processes, you can manage everything. In Windows, most everything is an API so tools that manipulate files don't do much for you.

Ergo - we needed an admin automation model which supported an API oriented architecture. Thus PowerShell.

NOTE - Bash on Windows today has a very different focus - it is not about managing Windows (which it still doesn't do) - it is about using OSS tools to develop OSS Software. It does a great job at that.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
> The lingo is half the battle for most things but for math it seems like the lingo is the entire battle.

There's a kernel of truth there.

To abuse the DSL metaphor further, even mildly complicated mathematics concepts are only expressible using layer upon layer of ever-more-abstracted DSLs. Lower-level expansions of the building blocks to improve clarity for reading would be useless in practice, since mathematics is intended to be written and understood by humans and such an expansion would exceed our ability to keep the entire intended concept in our working memory.

Proficiency in mathematics is proficiency with understanding and extending the lingo itself. Mathematics /is/ the lingo, which is why it can't be unraveled from it.

>"how I learned it so it must be the best"

Not at all. It is, however, a very practical approach to getting someone up to speed to be able to do actual mathematics (as opposed to the basic symbol manipulations that most people confuse with actual mathematics.)
And that's why I'd rather build my own security camera using an RPi and its infrared camera module. I can even make it weather-resistant by picking/3D-printing the correct enclosure.
I've sent email at info@ghostnoteapp.com requesting update on Windows version.

Really want try it out as soon as it's ready.
I'm not so sure that's true. Especially, when you leave the ad-tech arena move on to the app monitoring arena where none of the PII data would leave the house (or there is certainly less of an incentive for the PII data to leave the house).
I've noticed that Grace Hopper and sometimes Ada Lovelace are the only women in computing people ever talk about. I'm glad I got to know about Margaret Hamilton, but this is the first time I've heard of her at all.

There's so many awards, events, and groups named after Hopper or Lovelace that you'd think they're the only two women in computing :/
Apparently, the first thing is the difficulties it presents for typing. I think that is about all we need to know about this argument.
Ok, this is completely off topic and unrelated to the topic of discussion, but NICE Dune reference man. NICE!
Well firstly industrialization was pretty awful for the people living through it. The collapse of rural economies pushed teeming millions into cities where they became an enormously cheap reserve army of labor. Go read Friedrich Engels describe Manchester in the 1840s. One thing that stuck with me was people laying in the alleyways starving to death because they couldn't find work.

Secondly, no investment manager would be fulfilling his fiduciary duty if he didn't warn you that past performance does not guarantee future results. Just because the industrial revolution eventually ended up producing a different sort of job to employ all of humanity doesn't mean changes currently afoot will do the same.
This is Leslie Lamport's writing, and he's complaining that nobody uses his TLA+ formal specification language. (Here's the TLA book.[1] Read the introduction, and it's much the same rant.)

I used to work on formal specifications and program proofs, around the time Lamport was developing temporal logic. I took the position that, rather than trying to make programmers learn math, we should automate and divide up the problem so that they didn't have to.[2][3] This meant minimizing the formalism and making the verification information look like ordinary programming. It also meant carving out the harder math problems into a separate system where someone using a theorem prover would prove the necessary theorems in a way which allowed their use and reuse by ordinary programmers. The underlying math is still there, but not in your face so much.

There's a mathematician mindset: Terseness is good. Cleverness is good. Elegance is good. Generality is good. Case analysis is ugly. This is unhelpful for program verification.

Program verification generates huge numbers of formulas to be proven. Most of the formulas are very dumb, and can be dealt with automatically by a simple theorem prover.
Where it's necessary to prove something hard, our approach was to encourage users to write more assertions in the code to narrow the thing to be proven, until they were down to "assert(expra); assert(exprb);" Getting to that point is much like ordinary debugging.

Now they just needed a theorem, independent of the program, that could prove "exprb" given "expra". That job could be handed off to a theorem-proving expert. A library of proved and machine-checked theorems would be built up. Some would be general, some project-specific. This is the software engineer's approach to the problem.

The mathematician's approach is to capture much of the program semantics in mathematical form and work on them as big math formulas. Most of the work is done in the formula space, where mathematicians are comfortable, not the code space, where programmers are comfortable. This seems to hold back the use of formal methods in program verification.

Much effort has gone into trying into trying to find some clever way to make program verification elegant. "A great variety of program logics are in use in computer science for the specification of (software and/or hardware) systems; for example: modal and temporal logics, dynamic logic, Hoare logic, separation logic, spatial logic, nominal logic, lax logic, linear logic, intuitionistic type theory, LCF."[4] We used to call this the "logic of the month club".

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/bo...
[2] http://www.animats.com/papers/verifier/verifiermanual.pdf
[3] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=567074
[4] http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/als/PSPL2010/
> that equation borders on parody in attempting to relay a rather simple concept.

I can assure you the only parody I found was how simple it was compared to how big of a fuss is being made. The notation conveyed the concept of an onto function in exactly the right number of symbols. Every logic step was there, bared to the eye:

A mapping from [1...N] to [1...N] such that for every output, there is an input that maps to it.

As a sarcastic quip, what's so complicated about saying f[x]=y? (Equation wasn't the right word for you to use there).

> We dont expect CS people to communicate concepts through compiled, machine language style syntax

That is a complete misunderstanding of what this is. The symbols (and concepts) on this webpage are roughly equivalent to big-O notation in the Computer Science curriculum, in that they are taught in the first undergraduate course that tries to establish some theoretical basis for the subject.
I was insulting his argument, not the person.

If his argument is offended, I apologize. I don't think it's possible.
It doesn't make any sense to let a few people control the machinery.

In a feudal structure, the lord guides the violence that asserts the control. If you are just talking about machinery, it's going to be awful tough for a small group to continuously resist the forces of millions that move against them. They might build machines of violence, but it is not so likely that they will be able to stop others from building them too (in which case we need a political solution, force won't decide the issue)
I do pretty much everything wrong in terms of ergonomic working. No wrist rest, no typing technique, sit however fits the day. The only thing I don't have in common with the OP is that I'm constantly hot. Sitting in a room with no heating at 1000m above sea in the Alps right now, wearing a light track suit and only registering a mild cold. I haven't turned on heating in ages, actually.

The article does suggest psychosomatic causes more than anything, imho. Especially people with neither medical training (me included) or prior contact with that phenomenon (me excluded) often seem to think about this as a question of willpower, a conscious decision or a few sessions with a therapist. I beg to differ. If your hands pain you to the point of forcing you to change careers and there's no physiologically pinpointable reason, I don't see how the most complex parts of our bodies could not play a leading role.
"When Mexico sends its people" was in reference to illegal aliens. You can't simply say, "you can argue it was out of context." That's idiotic. I can quote you as saying 'Canadians that visit America are rapists' above as well, just like you can quote me as saying it. It doesn't mean I was saying that all Canadians that visit America are rapists.
Please Change My Password When I Go on Vacation
When I went through Uni we learnt several different types of Math including discrete math, advanced calculus, and probability and stats. The math described in the article falls under discrete math.
The notation used is similar to that used within formal methods.

However, since Uni I have rarely needed to use the math notation, and so I am unable to understand it without "interpreting" it. Such notations have most relevance to understanding database schemas and other set theory type problems, however, generally speaking, in software development using such a notation is unneeded.

In summary, the reason computer scientists don't know math is not because they haven't been taught it, but rather that the notations are not very relevant, and therefore soon forgotten.
The longest one-handed QWERTY words are "sweaterdresses" and "stewardesses" as far as I know.

But anyway, as a programmer, you spend more time hitting key chords and special characters, which aren't much better in Dvorak and are probably part of why programmers are so prone to RSI despite in absolute terms not typing that much compared to, say, a secretary.
This should be at the end of every article.

"basically...."
Used to have serious wrist/arm pain. Used to spend a lot of keyboard time, but also used to exercise a lot.

Anecdotal, but what worked for me was stopping walking around with my hands in my pockets. Seriously! Must've been something to do with body tension - once I figured out that letting my arms swing freely when I walked places, instead of keeping them rigidly in my pockets, the pain went away and hasn't come back.
Also, CNN said it's illegal to look at wikileaks and only CNN can read them and then tell it to people. This is literally what their announcer said. If this is not fake, I dunno what is.
Does anyone else feel like the font made it harder to read? It doesn't look like latex. :P I have no problem reading math formulas, but this particular one is harder to read than normal for some reason.

Who am I to argue with Leslie Lamport, but still I reject the premise. Computer scientists do learn math, regardless of whether they read Greek-letter math notation. Write a function with a for loop or array map, and you've used all the same math concepts as this example formula.

All the best math comes with pictures anyway. ;)
Here is some math notation. What does it mean?

x

It means nothing. Or it could mean anything. The surrounding text is what explains the meaning you're supposed to derive from mathematical glyphs. Of course there are conventions. "x + y" usually means what most people would assume it does. And sometimes it doesn't. Read the paper to be sure.

I haven't finished watching the talk yet, but he seems to be arguing that programming languages aren't expressive enough for mathematical purposes. I suspect he's not counting all of the wordy scaffolding necessary to support those terse equations. Can it all be combined into a formal language that stands on its own? If so, might it look like a programming language?
To add another question from an sre (swe), tools and infrastructure is a subset of my daily responsibilities (60%). Reading the couple comments it's hard to see where the line falls between these two roles. I'm on a smaller team so perhaps I just find myself handling both roles or.. ?
Like Facebook?
Schedule a Motivated Quote Notification Every Day (Part 1)
“Interview with Lee Roberts”
Hamilton had possibly the most exciting and demanding job ever in computer science and engineering. It must have been so much fun. About as full stack as it gets.

Bletchley Park and the Manhattan project were great computing projects too, but Apollo is my favorite since they had such a tiny mass and power budget, real time constraints and the runtime consequences were so personal. Damn that was a great project.

Hopper was a giant of course. But Hamilton is less well known and I've been a fan since my youth.
I got over some bad RSI pain and then decided to start doing pushups again. It came back for several weeks. I probably over did it. I have some trouble with going all-out on workouts. I want to get back into strength training, but I am worried that upper body exercise will just re-aggravate my RSI.
I wish I could give 100 votes (as I get downvotes ha) to this ask! I love hearing old "war stories".
look at 1 for a more thorough analsis

crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-bans-users-inv...
A labor shortage means wages go up. If wages aren't going up then there's no labor shortage.

An alternate theory for why resources aren't being exploited is an aggregate demand shortfall. This would result in low capital utilization, low labor utilization and slow growth.

Which model better fits the facts in the world today: the one which supposes there's a labor shortage or the one that supposes a demand shortfall?
I was at a conference recently when someone said that Hamilton invented multi threading. Is that true? Does anyone know if that's what the prioritisation of critical systems this article talks about was?
Sure! Unless you have ever, even once, stopped to glance at the overwhelming majority of line-of-business programmers that outnumber your notion of "developers" five to one or more.

But good job with the warrantless and wrong contempt.
People talk about fake news as if it is a phenomenon of the Facebook / Internet age but traditional media outlets have been caught peddling outright false and fabricated stories to varying degrees. Heck half the reason we went to war in Iraq was because of the questionable reporting on "weapons of mass destruction" from the NYT. Then there was the fake document incident that forced Dan Rather to resign, the fabricated story that forced Brian Williams to step down. You could probably name many many more if you wanted to make an exhaustive list.
Go look at CNN's main instagram profile, and count how many posts are negative about Trump vs Clinton, respectively. I did not find a single negative post about Clinton, while numerous negative Trump posts. It is honestly astonishing to me that CNN could be so blatant about their bias. Nothing at all negative to report about Hillary when half the nation voted against her?
What a nightmare. The last programming job available is writing a cobol printer driver?
I agree with everything you say here, and you're well-spoken and civil, someone I would be happy to engage with. Right up until your last two sentences. Why are those necessary? What do you they add to your message? How welcome would you feel if you read something like this?

When conservatives feel themselves open to genuine dialogue, we'll be here. In the meantime, they may render themselves as irrelevant as they please.

I know there are some people out there that would say it wouldn't bother them. But is it really polite? Don't get me wrong. I see similar tone all around, and then see people act surprised when tensions rise and discourse suffers.

I want to have discussions with people who have a different perspective. HN has a lot of thoughtful people. And that includes you. I want to hear from you how you think about things, rather than hear it second or third hand. But I hate being subjected to dismissive statements like this. I suspect I'm not the only one.

I think this is a primary reason a lot of these types of posts get flagged by users. Not because the topic is uninteresting to a lot of people. It's because in their experience, the discussion that results is empirically not worth it.

Here's hoping for open, civil, constructive discussion.
async/await are ways to take functional constructs and make them imperative. So not really relevant in this case (and are actually the reverse)
I know I've posted this a few times but I don't think I've ever seen you in a thread about this. Do you have any simple way for a computer scientist to learn about proven methods.

More precisely, how do I engage in the dark incantations required to conjure up my own proven methods? For my critical code, right now I just write unit tests. Do you know some place that can shed some light as to what I actually do? I mean, I can just tell my coworkers "yea I formally proved this, it won't have bugs" but I don't think that's quite in good spirit.
its a custom https://www.mywot.com/ implementation which indeed dose not show validity but instead user ratings for there safety.

https://github.com/anantdgoel/HackPrincetonF16/blob/master/b...
Just reminding you, we have ~4 million blue state votes to count and we're at HRC's 62,829,832 votes compared to Trump's 61,488,190.

The spread is now massive. One of the largest in history for a losing candidate.
No, not backward, maybe my wording was simply ambiguous.

When I say "riding the wave", what I mean is that they are adding functional features as the regular OOP/imperative programmers in the mainstream are done "accepting" the previous ones they added, as opposed to adding everything in one shot and have people get overwhelmed.

I didn't mean they were following a wave or anything. Analogies are hard.
"0. Spend your free time building your network before you don't have free time anymore."
AI learns things humans didn't teach it
Thanks for the reply. I'm new to spy stuff and I'm perhaps to open to kooky theories.

I guess my thinking is that the CIA has generations of international manipulation under it's belt and the NSA has become a rising star in the internet era. It seems to me that the NSA would start stumbling into some pretty shady CIA business, stuff that the CIA would rather keep to itself.
It makes sense to me, although perhaps at a different level --- IMHO redundancy is bad in source code in general, and if you base your development methodologies and practices on assuming that it's not, you end up with things like Enterprise Java and C#: huge, eye-bleedingly verbose monstrosities to perform the simplest of tasks.