skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could someone translate that into ordinary English? It's hard to get even a feel for the core idea here.
I am something like an intermediate programmer and this is useful.

I want to understand how FP replaces OOP in a similarly concise example. I have a sense that it involves a reconsideration of why OOP is useful, and solving that issue with a widely new approach, but I am not there yet myself. I’d love to see something like these Python comparisons but involving the demolition of an OOP implementation.
It probably only works on people who don't get that reaction often. I've been a physicist and a computer engineer the "that's sounds hard" reaction is a bit embarrassing. Also it can be a conversation closer because of the subtext that "I won't understand anything meaningful that you have to say about it".

So I certainly wouldn't use this technique on say a neurosurgeon I meet at some random party.
If this is true, it paints a rather ugly picture of the future. "1984" comes to mind, but not in the sense that it's cruel - just in sense that humans don't hold their destiny in their own hands. It looks like even a powerful government like UK can't protect their citizens against large corporations in a field which is deeply personal - health.

I must say I never thought about it before, but Deep Mind really doesn't seem trustworthy entity to me. Owned by an advertising agency and willing to pull deals like this? Not good.
The author segues, apparently unselfconsciously, from a critique of unverified notions that became accepted as if established fact, to uncritically accepting a number of speculative extrapolations from these results. Those speculations are interesting, well-founded and plausible, but not yet verified.

The fact that an important discovery was recently made by puréeing brains indicates how incomplete our knowledge of them is.
Not sure why people are so skeptical. I'm hoping for ICO to become a successful model for open source projects. Maybe more projects will be able to sustain themselves with ICOs, Patreon, donations.
Markdown VS Sundown
I haven't yet finished reading the article, but it's a lot more educational and interesting than I expected. As a casual Ruby user, I expected maybe a bunch of bullet points about minor annoyances and issues of taste, but this is a thoughtful, enlightening piece.
I always envy people who can work on something that can be expressed with math or some other kind of consistent logic. Most company problems are inherently messy and you just end up with a litany of convoluted code.
The only meeting style I ever actually liked was the daily (!) 10 o'clock in the morning 5 minute meeting. It had two (unstated) goals:

got everyone in by 10AM
made sure everyone saw each once a day

This isn't something you can do, month in month out, forever. But it works for projects under pressure. Otherwise I largely agree with the FA. Meetings suck up everyone's time and puts them in a room with a depleting oxygen supply.

The worst meetings are exercises and displays of power. Perhaps these are necessary but never at the project level. Some middling managers need to remind themselves they are in charge of something. Seriously, if as a manager you can't write down what your group accomplished over that hour then you just wasted an hour of your group's time.

I worked for a company once where my boss had one of those sorts of meetings. One time, knowing that I was in for an hour of yammering, I told him right before the meeting I had to take care of something. I went out, hopped in my car, drove to a gym, played an hour of pickup basketball, drove back and when I saw my boss I told him I'd taken care of that thing. I also got a lot done that day.
One-on-one meetings are the single most under-rated (because they are the single most useful) tool for any modern professional.

There is a clear technique on how to make these meetings successful that I don’t see being discussed or shared.
What has been the most successful use of smart contracts so far?
UFO literally stands for unidentified flying object. So meaning these weren't optical illusions or visual hallucinations.

People are saying that UFO just means an unidentified flying object (not alien spacecraft as in the popular meaning) and so this is a non-story. My joke is that even if UFOs just turn out to be flocks of birds or unreported aircraft, it's still at least a little significant, because it means something's up there.
The freelancers „fuck you, pay me“ is based on very clear contracts and respectful communication, even when things go bad. This is not what’s happening here AFAICS.
Hi! I appreciate your honesty.
Of course arriving at the Mathematical formula is the hard part, that's what it means to actually solve the problem.
I consider the fact that you can't code your solution in this style until you have done so as a feature: you can't write code if you haven't really understood and solved the problem. (As opposed to imperative style which let's you implement a half done solution with hidden bugs, not covering all corner cases)
Home 3D printers. I think they should still be around but I imagined that they would be more widespread and practical.
Guys, what do you think about universal basic income?
Where in the article? I don’t see it anywhere.
What Each Myers-Briggs Type Is Like During Childhood – Astroligion.com
Scotland saying F-U to the UK and joining the EU would be so neat!
Thank you Matz & co. <3
It does, because you can figure out how to make all this stuff work[1] without spending hundreds of billions of dollars going to Mars. You'll also probably discover that you don't actually want to establish a Mars colony.

[1] We don't actually know how to make it work. The Biosphere 2 project was a spectacular failure, and it operated with a much less difficult set of constraints.
it's a trick!
See also this art project, which relates the fictional astral city of Nosso Lar (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosso_Lar) to Brasilia:
http://www.jonasstaal.nl/projects/nosso-lar-brasilia/
> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

This is brilliant.
I guess, but then it's also kind of uninteresting. Lists in Python are an array of pointers. That Python implements assignment differently is kind of an odd detail, but altering the value of one of the variables doesn't alter the value of the other. It's just sort of an under-the-hood implementation detail visible only through Python's introspection tools, not something that actually affects code. I tried it myself:

a, b = [1, 1]
a = 2
print(a is b)

and got an output of false.
Thanks, fixing it
How do you mean?

I don't find myself scribbling down mathematical equations when doing things like chaining promises in javascript or transforming sequences with LINQ or marking fields as const. I realise functional programming can go in very different directions to things less mundane, but the general principle of avoiding side effects has been a huge win for me when programming in any language, even C++. It's just easier to debug or write something when you can fix some constraints, ie "this method is referentially transparent".

Those are pretty low hanging fruit, but they help a lot.
The UK led by the Tories has been crushing the NHS and opening the way to privatization for quite a while. The UK, far from trying to protect their citizens, is trying to monetize them further.
Didn’t the AS/400 (IBM iSeries today) pioneer this architecture with its single-level store?
"What more valuable allocation of your time could there be than in talking directly to people?"

Taking action, based on the what you've learned while talking directly to people.

A manager's output is the the output of the teams under his or her supervision or influence[1]. That means you have to find the highest-leverage activities: sometimes that's a one-on-one conversation, up, down or sideways. Sometimes it means sitting down and drafting an email or other written document that compiles all the little details you've learned into something meaningful and actionable for the people around you. Sometimes it's about being in front of a group and enabling a conversation that you're not directly at the center of, but which wouldn't happen well without you present.

Which isn't to say your manager at the time was right to dismiss your concerns, or was doing the most high-leverage things they could do. But the perspective might be useful.

[1] High Output Management, Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel). One of several great management books that help clarify "what management is and is not". And if you have never read anything in the genre, I'd start with Managing Humans, by Michael Lopp (randsinrepose.com). Life-changing for me when I was trying to figure out the same thing, before I started doing it myself.
The Blackadder episode in question is renowned for being seen as so poignant it was repeated as part of BBCs Armistice Day coverage that year. I can't find viewership numbers but I'd be surprised if the Paul McCartney video in question has been viewed anywhere near as much. If anything many have accused the Blackadder series in question of largely shaping modern perception of WWI

You don't remember it depicting a football game because it didn't - it comes up as one of the characters reminisces about the Christmas truce.

That said the article gives that as just one of a number of examples of how the story has been perpetuated.
If you only do C you know this stuff. It gets confusing when you use a few other languages that all have slightly different semantics.
Ya, if you read my other comments, I never said "try harder" and I wanted to clarify that. I agree with that assessment for similar reasons you point out here.

But, it doesn't mean you can't do something to improve anything in your life.

But I found that usually people that are stuck end up thinking "it won't help me", but how do you know for sure? Sometimes you can't just do some new thing a little, sometimes you have to do it for a long time before you see results.

And, you are always right by saying "this may not work for others, just because it worked for you". But there are some universal things that work for everyone. If you eat you live, if you stop eating you die. If we starting working our way up from there, the logic tree splits and gets more complicated, but no matter what, you will be on the same branch with someone else. No one is truly alone here in their problems, we just need to find those other people, find out how they succeeded. Asking for help is a good start.
Ok the flip side, I've worked in jobs that fired people on the spot when giving their two weeks and this is hardly unusual. The advice in the article might make sense if the policies of the company are written down and the employee has reasonable cause to believe the company will follow them. Otherwise, the employee would be a total fool for following the advice here. It's not about starting the new job as early as possible. It's about not losing on two weeks of pay. Period. And more than two weeks? Yeah my current company wants four yet they won't pay a single cent in severance. They'll be lucky to get two. Sometimes there's also the revenge factor, though hopefully not in this particular case, one never knows. I do know that there's no loyalty from employers though and following the advice here is likely to lead to some unexpected and negative results for the employee in many cases.
If you can write frontend code in typescript or elm, why not rust indeed?
Scotland united in curiosity as councils trial universal basic income
To me, the worst part is that it introduces a library dependency, which itself can introduce security issues unless they intend to audit it. I don't under this choice at all.
Not quite. People don't get to choose work hours per week, but they can choose work hours per lifetime. I worked about 16,000 hours and retired.
> For many people, concrete examples can help them understand an abstract idea.

Sure enough.

> Even if someone doesn't grasp the full abstract idea, at least they might have a concrete example that exemplifies the idea.

Examples are only useful inasmuch as they pave the road to understanding abstract definitions. On their own, examples are pretty much useless.

In any case, your comment has nothing to do with the original topic, namely, whether coloring different parts of mathematical definitions is particularly helpul. It seems to me that the real problem here is that a certain kind of people has great difficulty understanding the syntactic and semantic structure of mathematical definitions. Now:

(0) The syntactic structure of mathematical definitions is the usual syntactic structure of English, or whatever your first language is. If it hasn't been drilled into your head in elementary school, sue your elementary school.

(1) As for the semantic structure of mathematical definitions, well, I guess there is no way around thinking hard about it, annoying as though it may be.

> but it is true that complex nuggets of math have evolved to be simpler, more elegant and sometimes more powerful. I try not to pride myself to much for understanding something complicated and abstract

Simplicity usually comes from having better abstractions (e.g., how Stokes' theorem evolved to its modern version in terms of differential forms), not from rejecting abstractions altogether.
I agree completely. This behavior is internally consistent within Ruby and the standard library and allows for some of the terseness of Ruby that I love. Things like =~ which return the position of the first regex match on a string (which could be 0 position).
Nothing (?!).
Show HN: Rotten Apples
Just as much as a coin landing on its edge is ternary.
> "Checking out Red was on my roadmap and now it's firmly not."

What I'd suggest is that this DSL for blockchain contracts is not really part of the core Red language. It's worth being aware that Red does not have a module system yet, but there are plans for one before version 1.0. I'd fully expect work like this contract DSL to be spun off into a module once the module functionality is in place.
Understood. Just to be clear: I am saying that in most scenarios nobody understands the problem; people figure it out on the go.

Overall I really like the article because it spells what is an essential feature of fp for me much better than I could have. It is just that it is too far from reality of most programming jobs (unless you happen to be Peter Norvig, working on the Mars rover).
Famous "Don't Talk to the Police" lecture:
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE
Hi Jeremy,

I'm very sorry if I've misquoted you or quoted you out of context. I'd certainly correct them instantly if contacted. I've searched my email and I don't see any corrections, so I'm not sure how I can make amends.

I pull a lot of quotes from a lot of sources. Many thousands a year. My goal is always to highlight ideas that I think might help readers do their job better. Highlight is they key word here. That you say those sort of things often is not surprising. My hope is always readers will be made curious enough to follow the link and learn more on their own.

And unfortunately there is no "they" at HighScalability.com. There's only me and there's only ever been me. So all mistakes are mine and only mine. There's never been much money or time to be as comprehensive as I'd like.

I do the best I can, but I often fall short, no doubt. I'm not a journalist. I never said I was. I'm a programmer. Have been all my life. I started this blog a long time ago. It was just stuff I found interesting. For whatever reason it got popular for awhile so I tried to make something out of it. That, like most of the industry is petering out now, so we'll see what the future holds.

The point about interviews is a good one and one I've wrestled with. Over the years I've conducted a lot of interviews. Much less so lately, and that's for a reason. I've learned that presentations at major conferences are usually the best resources. Presenters put a huge amount of effort into making those talks. And everything they say is open and approved for public consumption by definition.

Interviews with someone like me are often a bother, a time sync, so I don't usually get as much out of them. Interviews have a high overhead, taking a lot of time to setup and there's often a lot of red tape and legal wrangling that must go on to get access and content approval. Which is again, why, presentations are such awesome resources.

This article was derived mostly from people working on a project making a major presentation or from primary sources writing an article. I couldn't do better than that.

And regardless, I would still make mistakes. Believe me. It's surprisingly hard to make sense of an interview and turn something from thread mode into document mode. That process is an error prone one because I have to fill in the gaps and there are always gaps.

It's rare that I've ever just published an interview. I don't think they are that useful in general. I want people to read a highly condensed document they can get something concrete out of with minimal effort or just ignore easily if it's not relevant to them. The strange style I've developed reflects that goal. This article was of course different because it has a different audience.

So again, I apologize. But I guarantee my mistakes are never intentional, never for money, and never for lack of caring or effort.
> Take POODR - it's more or less the community bible. If it's not written in POODR - don't do it. If it is - do it that way or else. It's POODR's way or the highway.

Sandi Metz would tell anyone espousing that the text written in POODR is to be taken at face value as gospel that they're completely wrong and completely missing the point. I've actually personally seen her correct this behavior at a conference and at a workshop and I've heard her say it many times in many places and mediums (podcasts, blogs, interviews).

Anyone who says "it's POODR or the highway" should be corrected, because they are very dangerous to any software engineering endeavor.
What are the top technologies whose value is yet to be realized?
A good analogy would be music notation (pentagram)
I could describe a piece of music in English prose, telling you were to put your fingers and for how long. The language itself would be easier to understand, but the efficiency of information transmission would be very low.

Chinese looks complicated, unless you know Chinese.

The ultimate criteria to judge a language should be how efficiently (concisely) it expresses the concepts of the subject matter.

At most, I will concede you:
Goodness_of_language = conciseness × parsing_speed_of_an_experienced_user
The Cleanest Village in India
Apply for a Personal Loan
I agree that change is really hard. I mentioned in another comment that making a choice that you know will end you up where you want to go can be very difficult physically. Just consider any addiction issues. So if you look at any life issue the same way an addict (who is determined to quit) looks at their problem, you may find the motivation to face it.

One way I started facing some of my problems was just to ask other people how they fixed theirs. Sometimes I liked to just hear stories of people fixing problems I have never had. (like quitting smoking) I heard stories ranging from "My boss said he'd pay for my seminar fees if I joined him at this anti-smoking retreat. And my husband copied everything I brought home from that, and we both quit smoking together." The husband said the thing that helped him was to go through the routine (or rite) of smoking, but without the cigarettes. He'd go outside, stand there for a bit, pretend to open a pack, pretend to smoke one, taking deep breaths. And then go back inside.

Who would think to do that on their own? Another guy I worked with said "I quit because my wife asked me to." There was a deeper story there, but he was a man of few words. None the less, he noted why another guy couldn't quit smoking in our work place. "Jim, he will never quit. Notice how when he tries to quit, all he says to himself is 'Man I really want a cigarette', he won't quit."

There are all kinds of subtle clues to human nature, and your/mine thought processes hidden in discussions like this. Watching some people fail and some people succeed. I found that with all the things I faced, that if I keep looking, and don't quit, I always find an answer to my problem that I can actually do. The conviction comes from my belief that it's possible and this gives me encouragement to act.
I do that too and most of the time it leads to good conversations.

Sometimes it gets awkward though and that is when the other person is really, really excited about what they do. If I just show my honest interest I feel disappointment on the other side that I do not share the same enthusiasm.
On the other hand I can't be frantic about something I didn't even know existed a few minutes ago. Positively interested yes, but really, truly emotional no. Faking excitement doesn't make me feel comfortable either.

Do you have any experience with that situation?
Goodbyeee's last 2 minutes are the greatest piece of television ever filmed featuring some of the greatest British talent ever. It did have lasting impact.
A British supermarket chain (Sainsbury's) created an expensive Christmas advert on this topic in 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWF2JBb1bvM
"That’s exactly Marx’s point when he discusses his theory of Surplus Value."

Actually, no. This has nothing to do with Marx "surplus value". And his idea of "surplus value" was wrong by several reasons. The funny thing about Marx is that he failed to understand capitalism as much as good ol' Ludwig von Mises.
How does one do that? Is there a filter you can use somewhere? I really hate Amazon's inability to filter.
I’m leaving architecture proper (staying in the design field, but working independently) for this reason. My labour is billed to clients at three times my hourly rate, I receive no benefits as a contracted employee (paid as a consultant), and regularly work overtime to execute someone else’s concepts. The latter would not be an issue if the industry-wide quality of work were better here in Canada, but the overwhelming majority of medium to large firms (where one would receive benefits) produce cookie-cutter buildings the mercy of cheap developers and clients.

Disregarding the quality of the work, the most obvious solution to the ubiquitous presence of overtime in the industry would be to hire more people, but there doesn’t seem to be enough money to go around - especially if you want to do something even slightly outside the norm.
> Higher wages may also support more smaller/domestically owned businesses, which tend to treat their employees more humanely than huge corporations.

I’m curious what you base that statement on, as I’ve generally not found it to be true during my career.
Thanks, (y)
An issue worth considering is that if one is not already in an environment that's genuinely supportive, it can be hard to tell the difference between those offering support and those trying to take advantage. As with the poor, a great deal of money is made (or labor/sex extracted) by exploiting people with mental and emotional problems. Not because they have a great deal of money, but because they so often lack the means to defend themselves against predators. It doesn't help that the practical realities of mental health care make it pretty easy to come away from even a "proper" course of treatment feeling exploited.
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