skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is imperative programming more intuitive to people than functional programming? If so, is it because it matches the way our brains are configured, or because it’s simply the most common form of programming?

(I think) It's not because of brains or abundance, it's because of the human language.

> How far should we go to match people’s natural processes versus trying to change the way people think about programming?

Economically, it is your time (of one person only) versus the time of potentially thousands of users. What do you think?

> How impactful are comments in understanding a program? Variable names? Types? Control flow?

Ideally, I think, comments would not be contained in the source code, polluting the general vision of its structure, but would be placed outside, as documentation.

For variable names, as long as its meaning/use is made immediately clear on first sight, without needing to figure out its frequency pattern or see its declaration to figure it out (maybe placing it in a separate place from the code, again), the variable name shouldn't matter much (as long as its not purposefully unrelated or obscure).

I think it would be useful to have something like a "live documentation" in a REPL (commands like man commands documenting each part of the language (and program), each word an entry, non-sequentially accesible). That is something I would do if I were to design a programming language, a structure called a "dictionary" documenting each and every reserved/defined word in the environment.
> If this option doesn't work for you, don't do it.

No need to get overly defensive. I'm responding to your argument that this should be more widely known and accepted. Science gets harder to do every year as the the lowest hanging fruit keeps getting plucked. Your examples aren't convincing -- Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and things were different back then. Your other example according to Wikipedia is someone who got a PhD at MIT, and applied for grants and held faculty positions at a number of universities.

But hey, if you end up doing this successfully. Come back and tell us how it went. But in the meantime, I'm going to continue disagreeing with you, that this is a reasonable route to productively conduct research.
How does being on HN help? Your comments can't be deleted after a certain amount of time (a few hours).
I think the biggest pro for PHP is its simplicity. By default you don't have to care about the server. You just place some text-files in a web server directory and open a website, easy. And dynamic languages tend to be easier accessible for newbies too. It is also a con, as some things are just not available (e.g. multi-threading), but in general that lets you focus on the application logic and lowers the entry barrier.

Traditionally, a major pro for PHP was also its broad availability for web space but that doesn't seem to be so important nowadays anymore.

Putting node, python and Go in the same place against PHP is kinda hard as those three are very distinct from each other already ;-)
I thought people go with serverless so they don't have to deal with ops?
I'm seriously not sure if this is satire. It starts off with a simple example, and then goes down a rabbit-hole of massive complexity to ultimately do the same thing. This reminds me of the many OOP articles that were common shortly before the turn of the century, which would take as an example a perfectly straightforward and simple-to-understand piece of code and then bloat it into an asinine multilayered monstrosity by applying a generous amount of "OOP best practices and patterns" while straight-facedly enumerating all the alleged benefits.

When you first started with PHP, you may have used includes or requires statements throughout your app to bring in functionality or configuration from other PHP files. In general, we want to avoid that because it makes it much harder for a human to follow the code path and understand where dependencies lie.

Autoloading just means that when your application needs to use a class, PHP knows where to look for it and automatically loads it when it's called for.

How in $deity's name can you say that specifying immediately the exact path to the file included, in the file that includes it, is "much harder to follow" than hiding it behind the indirection of the autoloader and whatever it does!? Honestly, WTF!?

(Maybe the joke here is that everyone is just pretending to admire the emperor's new clothes, in which case I apologise.)

Edit: here's an example of the OOP articles I mentioned: https://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/patterns/ppoop.html
OpenTTD is great but I highly recommend checking out Jan Zelenys Mashinky on Steam if you want a more modern take on this game. He's doing railroads right now but has long term plans for multiple transportation options.
Wind noise is at least as loud as engine noise at least at highway speeds.

While I can clearly hear my (loud piped) Ducati at 120kmh (~70mph) - on my Honda VFR800 with stock piped the engine noise is completely overshadowed by wind noise.

As a hint about how loud that wind noise gets, up around 130-140kmh, if I've got my noise cancelling earbuds in, they start clipping. I've heard them do that a handful of times in non motorcycle riding instances, always in reaction to sounds loud enough that people around look around and cover their ears.

(These days I _always_ ride with earplugs or noise cancelling earbuds in. Even on my "quiet" bikes. Gotta save that hearing damage up for loud concerts... )
i agree with you. and most of the teaching in universities is absolutely pathetic. students primarily learn hopelessly alone through poor but overpriced books. the curriculum and professors are uninspiring, save for a few. it’s amazing what a good professor can do, but those are unfortunately rare.

as someone who keeps thinking if i should go back to finish my ph.d., i can’t help but think of how dogmatic most graduate programs are in addition to being logistical nightmares. there’s basically no time or space for one to explore one’s own thoughts and program unless it specifically matches up with what someone else (namely an advisor) wants to do. there’s so much hand holding through required coursework (and homework) that one can’t hardly think deeply about anything actually original.

the book disciplined minds touches upon this. that those born in institutions will carry that institutional conservatism with them. i have felt this. i went to talk about some of my ideas to a well known and respected researcher. before i could even finish my sentence that began with “i’m interested in...” he cut me off shaking his head and, literally, said “i don’t believe in it...”. goddamnit.
I know of ethics courses. Obviously there are moral implications for actions in many professions which aren't readily apparent.

A few courses are not going to fix these problems by a long shot.

Peter Thiel, went to Stanford and got not only his BA there, but also a JD. Alex Karp has a JD from Stanford. Harvard MBAs care about one thing (hint: it isn't you). Construction and large infrastructure projects are rife with corruption. Our political system is corrupt. Barack Obama didn't stand up to the status quo of institutional behavior. Doctors prescribe opioids to white trash and speed to kids. Prosecutors are "tough on crime" solely for their own career advancement. The Milgram and Stanford prison experiments... This isn't confined to tech, or people without higher education.
It's happening, off and on:

http://www.businessinsider.com/christian-ott-caltech-profess...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/15/uc-davis-prof...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

I think a lot of people in academia would be happy if the rampant sexual abuse would get some attention. I think we know that attention on the psychological and physical abuse is a pipe dream. It would be super good to get the rapists out, though.
The GDPR purports to apply to any EU person, no matter where they are. That's one of the many problems with it.

However, it is already the case that the EU casts a wide net. blekko got a demand for info from the EU regarding Google's dominance of the search space in relation to mobile apps. Most of the questions were about opinions, not facts. After consulting with our lawyers, they said that the small amount of advertising income we had from the EU was enough that the EU could demand that we answer, but we could ignore the first one and see if they asked again more firmly.
Someone should mention also that in the downloadable facebook archive, in the html/ folder, there is a file called contact_info.htm and its a pretty large file. It is apparently every google contact you ever had, all synced to facebook, for every device you ever logged into. So, if you ever might have used a friends device to check your facebook account using then facebook app, then all of that persons contacts are there too, as well as their sms history metadata and call history metadata.
Click fraud on desktop is obviously much easier than on mobile.

Even on mobile, ideally (for the fraudster) it would be done in an emulator. There are probably tricks that can be done to detect emulators though. I would consider those flaws in the emulator that should be fixed.
Facial recognition means all pictures with a face are personal data?
In Australia presenting at ER is free, for any reason.
You mean they follow what many people consider best practices?

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1592...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820466/never-delete-entr...

https://serverfault.com/questions/31455/should-i-ever-delete...

https://www.infoq.com/news/2009/09/Do-Not-Delete-Data

http://udidahan.com/2009/09/01/dont-delete-just-dont/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2549839/are-soft-deletes...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/soft-delete-for-azure...

I find it fascinating how much shock there is that Facebook is doing what nearly everyone else is doing, and what many people here have likely implemented.
This guy most likely has no presence or assets in EU. So they will have no success in trying to enforce it.
Yes, I've done that quite a few times too. Write code for 1-2 months straight without ever compiling. When I'm done, it generally compiles and runs fine after about 20 minutes of fixing silly bugs. That requires designing the system on paper (actual paper) in quite a lot of detail first. But other times I start with a skeletal outline of input - middle - output, and evolve the middle in small increments, refactoring along the way. In either case, I always write about 5 drafts of everything at every level - the method level, the class level, and the system level. And I consider that my secret weapon - the writing of 5, sometimes 10, drafts.

Understanding the problem is key, as others have said. It's my belief that we seldom understand the problem in any detail until we've basically written a working system, and we'd do that fact the most justice by beginning a second draft as soon as the first working version is 'done'. That generally won't fly in the workplace, and that's one of the main reasons I avoid the workplace.
I will rephrase then. Is Facebook primarily a technology company or a media company?
What the fuck does this have to do with hacking
Agreed. I made the edit.
Have you used wasabi? Is it usable in the US? I've tried it once before, and today, but the speeds are still completely unusable for me (in Northern EU). Would be awesome if they had some regions closer to me.
Display=none is more appropriate
All downloadable items on the Internet Archive have a link like that.
A for profit company makes a copy of user data, fights Facebook’s requests to delete that data, tries to monetise it, and then then that fails (possibly because of incoming privacy legislation) freely distributes it as a data dump.

Who is the bad guy here?
Neat! I always wondered how hard it would be to build a machine to play those reaction-based ticket and prize redemption games.
I didn't -- past a certain, limited point, perhaps -- for a number of years subsequent to his passing.

Now, I'm starting to wonder.

The hardware gains have been pretty incredible, with the custom ARM systems. The privacy stance seems (because I don't really know it in depth) to be a welcome turn.

But some other aspects are seeming to slip, repeatedly. For one thing, there seem to be more and more complaints and problems with regard to the software.

And it took Apple too long to take ownership of some hardware problems, until they figured out the magnitude of the negative PR.

Jobs wasn't perfect. But his ability to be critical and call BS and say "fix it", was very useful.

(Even if iTunes never benefited. I've never used it, except to help a friend digitize some personal media, one time, where the results landed in iTunes, IIRC. I wasn't thrilled with it (kind of frustrating and limited interface, as I recall), but we were able to get the job done.)
My dad used to tell a story about when he got a hearing test as part of an employment medical fairly late in life, and the audiologist asks him "You're left handed, aren't you?" because he could see the typical signs of rifle shooting related hearing loss in his left ear. Turns out dad wasn't actually left handed, but shot a rifle at school cadets 30 years earlier left handed because he could only close his right eye independently - it was easier to just shoot left handed than to try to learn how to look through the sights with his right eye.
Secretly? Secretly from whom?

There is nothing I've come across, ever, that has lead me to believe that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., ever delete anything, ever. Not even to clean up space as some people on this thread are suggesting. Hard drive space is cheap and data is valuable. This isn't a secret, this is a fairly obvious business practice that all the big players, and most competent small players, are engaging in.
Allow me to ask the obvious question.

Who doesn't do the something like this?

Not to alleviate facebook of blame, but who's to say data on almost every other social media service isn't also just flagged for deletion?
The simpler the abstraction, the more likely the end product will not be a disaster if it is a critical system.

Frameworks are development speed enhancements but frequently are not "better" in terms of mechanical function. Even "major" PHP applications built on frameworks (i.e. Magento 2) frequently lose site of those abstractions and create fundamentally flawed products where the solution is you need a software developer to spend hours on it just to make the thing "work" as advertised.

This rush to abstract everything is good for developer productivity, to a point, but I've rarely seen it result in a better/saner product.
At the very least, you need someone to bounce ideas off of. I used to think I was an introvert, until I went to grad school and tried living in my own head for months at a time.

I clicked on that link and I noticed that Darwin and Kraichnan both had institutional affiliations.

Maybe possible if you're paying your own way. Lots of newly-minted professors need those small grants to get their research going. Find one who can see you as a colleague and not as an ATM.
“Just call us Googz” – Google assistant now responds to Australian slang
I dunno. It's been years since I worried about updating a workstation to the latest Debian stable. Or server for that matter. So it's certainly not a question of resources.

[ed: not that Debian hasn't had issues. Broken openssl/ssh key generation being perhaps one of the worst security issues in recent memory]
>. there’s so much hand holding through required coursework (and homework) that one can’t hardly think deeply about anything actually original.

Take an actual graduate course in pure mathematics, very little hand holding.

>there’s basically no time or space for one to explore one’s own thoughts and program unless it specifically matches up with what someone else (namely an advisor) wants to do.

Not necessarily true. Find an adviser that will support YOUR interest (they exist). Sounds like you have some biases against PhD programs without actual experience of being in a good one.
Let us analyze this further. Suppose that Alice browses 4chan. 4chan uses a Google image-classifying captcha. Alice is viewing user-generated content posted for free, including 4chan advertisements. When Alice chooses to post, she completes a captcha for Google and her post is sent to 4chan.

Who gets paid for 4chan's content? Alice does not profit. 4chan's users do not profit. 4chan 'profits' via advertising revenue but they actually operate at a loss.

Who is left to get paid? Google. Google gets a human-completed captcha for its machine-learning projects.

I look forward to the demise of the Web and its replacement with a content-addressed alternative where your views will be technologically obsolete.
Spyglass, which licensed its browser to Microsoft in return for a percentage
of each sale; Microsoft turned the browser into Internet Explorer and bundled
it with Windows, giving it away to gain market share but effectively
destroying any chance of Spyglass making money from the deal they had signed
with Microsoft; Spyglass sued for deception and won a $8 million settlement.

Woah!
I can confirm that drivers often are fine to do this. But someone needs to pick up the items, the driver should not be expected to make a delivery themselves.
Google deletes your data within I think 64 days if you request them to or delete your account.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046
I hate how Miley Cyrus ruined photos by making young people think it is funny to stick your tounge out.
Yes, anyone can upload anything.

1. I have seen "The item is not available due to issues with the item's content" many times while poking around. It's the Internet Archive's version of SIGSEGV or "Bad command or file name." This is due to DMCA mostly.

2. The kinds of dark items on the IA are extraordinary, for example https://archive.org/details/%77%68%61%74%63%64%63%72%61%77%6... (not NSFW; I've obfuscated the URL so it doesn't get indexed). If this makes no sense to you that's okay.
I know you were quoting the OP, I was just adding to your post that professors don't get the summer off based on my personal experience.
My apologies, dang. I did not realize and/or forgot that was against the guidelines. Will not happen again.
Even if everyone is in on the joke, it's good to have comments like this explaining to newcomers that this is not how things should work.

Disclaimer: I've not written much php nor read the article. Just replying to this one comment because the OOP analogy spoke to me.
The opinionated flavour makes a lot more sense in a large team - I can pickup a Laravel App, and if it has followed convention, run composer install and be productive within a matter of minutes.
> -OVH is super-confusing. Interface, website, billing, everything.

This times a hundred. I'd keep running into tasks that DIDN'T WORK on the web UI and was told to use the API, but then the API didn't work because of the region I was in and I had to use an older version or a different command that did seemingly the same thing or...
Clearly there is a big disconnect here. It seems somebody is suggesting there should be a correlation between a user removing content from their account and Facebook destroying some of Facebook property.

Anything submitted to Facebook is the property of Facebook. Users have no business telling Facebook to destroy Facebook property.
This toilet lid clearly messed with the wrong guy !
This varies by field, and it varies very closely in proportion to the employability of a master's degree in that field. A master's degree in biology does not have the job prospects of a master's degree in computer science, so biology PIs have far more leverage to keep their poorly-paid grad students (and postdocs) working for them.
‘The China Hustle’, a finance documentary
It seems to me that the languages we write programs in today are generally at the wrong level of abstraction in one way or another. Imagine if we wrote long-lived programs in a sort of lingua franca pseudocode, and then compilers competed with each other over the years to produce ever more efficient machine code from that well-established pseudocode. In this fantasy world, for example, Adobe Photoshop isn't written in C++. It's written in logic. They keep writing new features in logic-language, and at the same time their compiler team keeps working to make a better compiler that produces a better compilation target.
> education in itself must be a strong goal for our nation

Too bad it isn't. Education is being used as a yardstick to isolate the poor from the economy. Don't have a BS? Guess you aren't qualified to work at McDonalds.

And for those that do get those degrees, like you said, haikus aren't a viable job. For all the history and literature majors of the world a lot of them were spoon fed what their parents thought - "get a degree, any degree, and you are ahead in the world" just to find out that "ahead" didn't mean comfortable living. It just meant you had higher priority for the limited pie of work than those who didn't have that generic piece of paper.

If you want people not to be ruled by the dollar, change society so your ability to be safe and secure in your day to day survival isn't bound so tightly to the pursuit and amassment of said dollar.
TT faculty at SLACs don't take graduate students (by and large) and still get tenure...
Suicide is a permanent solution for a temporary probably.
Not sure how it would be in other dialects, but I expect most British English speakers would think it a bit shit.
Almost all good independent researchers had some sort of institutional support at some point during their careers. What makes them mainly independent researchers is that they spent a large fraction of their careers without institutional support, not that they never had any.
Malwarebytes Premium 3.4.5.2467 Keygen Full Version
Probably should report that as spam somewhere. Block that number.
This probably seems strange to non US readers.

Not that we couldn't get access to "ammo" at all here in Australia in the 70's, but my sources were mostly nail gun cartridges (stolen from building sites) and shotgun blanks used for the local sailing club's starting cannon. We'd also steal those explosive things rail workers put on tracks to warn of inbound trains.

One thing living in a country with somewhat stricter control on guns and ammunition (at least for us "city boys") - it meant we learned how to make our own explosives. We'd steal pretty much any sodium ad potassium nitrate the chemistry labs had for making gunpower - and there was significant "liberation" of nitric and sulfuric acid from the school chemistry labs too, and we had more or less success in producing home made gun cotton, tnt, and nitroglycerine. It eventually led to careers in chemistry for two of my high school co-conspirators from the time.
Thank you. You stated what I was thinking much more clearly than I was able. I strongly prefer explicit code that states clearly what is happening without having to guess.
Why? Let's start with:

1. More students than advisors, so a built-in pyramid scheme unless academia expands exponentially forever.

2. Fully backloaded reward system, so a built-in lock-in until the end, and the evaluation/reward isn't under your control.

3. For some, spend years doing work but only a small piece is relevant to the reward.

4. For some, zero actual training for the eventual academic job, if they get it.

5. It's a job where you do all the work and take all the risk, but are paid like shit and treated like a favor is done to "train you".

In other words, the whole thing is set up to destroy the self worth of a normal person and take away their agency and independent identity. Without coping strategies, I would expect them to develop mental issues.