skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of people think that the goal of the book was to explain Gödel's theorem. Some even think the book shows that "mathematics, art and music are the same". In fact, as Hofstadter says in the preface (to the 20th Anniversary Edition I think), this is utter nonsense and he intended no such thing: his goal with the book was to build up a certain philosophical argument about what consciousness is (and his answer was something like self-reference, or transcending "levels").

I might be misquoting this, because, like most people, I found the way he builds up this argument more fun and memorable and interesting than the argument itself.

Do not read the book to understand Gödel's theorem, or Escher, or Bach. In fact, Hofstadter is not even really interested in Gödel's theorem itself: his interest is more in the particular trick that Gödel used to prove the theorem (Gödel numbering), which allows Gödel to encode statements about the system as arithmetic statements (within the system). And although the explanation in GEB is surely not the best explanations of Gödel's theorem, it is one of the most enjoyable musings on things "like" Gödel numbering — something you won't find in other places that are more interested in Gödel's theorem itself.

I think if one tries to read the book expecting to learn or understand something, one can get frustrated. But like other Pulitzer-Prize winners for nonfiction (say The Soul of a New Machine), any learning is only incidental; what one can enjoy is the way the book is constructed. It is a work of literature, not mathematics. The dialogues are my favourite parts of the book — sure they may not be realistic, but they take surprising turns, they often have a lot hidden in them (I remember reading one half way through and suddenly suspecting something, then noticing that they formed an acrostic, reading the first letters down the page). Other things I most loved about the book is the way it is self-referential, the way everything fits together, elaborate puns seem to be set up over a course of 300 pages, etc.

All in all, it is a book just simply of Hofstadter having fun.

(I had the same impression of Hofstadter's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin — I've read at least three other translations; Hofstadter's may not be most literal but it's surely enjoyable and with the most outrageous rhymes: who else would rhyme "debts" with "Till his creditors cast their nyets"! You can read online an article he wrote [1] before starting his own translation, then a very critical review of his translation [2] but whose "bad" examples (and the whole first chapter linked there) show what's actually fun.)

You can see him enjoying himself, and you can go along if you'd like to have fun as well, forgiving a few things here and there, skipping parts that you don't find as much fun.

[1]: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/r...

[2]: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/12/r...
Assuming everyone is as capable, yes.
Chinese real estate prices are SV level already in some cities that are popular with tech. However, they lean more on dense open offices and even converted underground shopping malls. They also tend to put development centers way out in the suburbs away from expensive city centers (well, it depends, for every Lenovo that is almost out to changping, there is a Microsoft in the heart of Zhongguancun).

High office prices only applies to Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai (and maybe GZ and HZ).

As for labor, good programmers and managers are definitely not cheap in China, even if cheaper than SV.
FreeBSD Desktop – Part 13 – Configuration – Dzen2
I am not sure what historians / sociologists call it, but there seems to be a window of time where artifacts / philosophies become not just obsolete, but are considered deserving of obliteration.
Same same. And have reread any number of times over the years.
Asian-Americans on being “likable” in the modern workplace
It's harmless bikeshedding.
Are you talking about grokking the language and its more excotic concepts or writing code on it?

I have almost 30 years of C++ experience and about 6 months of Rust.
My gut feeling is that the languages are equally difficult to understand but that the experience of writing code in them is very different.

I'm sure Rust will have its own set of surprises as I keep using it.

But I can't believe they will be nearly as bad as those that C++ comes with. ;)
My favorite is how if you check out any oil companies website, pretend you knew nothing about them and you’d think they were green peace by the messaging on their site.
As far as I know, Sony is the only high end mfg that doesn't put ads in their current TV offerings.

My $DEITY, it's gotten that bad? Not that I'd connect a modern TV to a network connection, but yeesh, it's almost like they don't want me to buy another TV when this (thankfully, relatively new) one dies. But I'd guess there are a lot more folks willing to put up with it than there are cranky old farts like me.
A Canadian friend just experienced this, too. He had many years with the same employer and was recently fired for nebulous reasons and offered a paltry severance package. He's currently in the process of suing. I do not know _anything_ about Canadian labor laws but I did find it _very_ interesting that he went through this experience as a Canadian with a Canadian company in Canada (BC). It goes against everything that I thought that I knew about the treatment of workers there (no surprises there, of course, as I am a naive person, but still...).
This is explicitly why the last TV I bought was a dumb TV. One less privacy nightmare to worry about. Of course, that just shifts the problem to the black box on the other side of the HDMI cable, but I can watch as much over-the-air TV as I want without anyone harvesting my viewing habits.

What we need as consumers are laws that would allow the owners of smart televisions, network-connected devices, and any other physical products with included software, to more easily control the behavior of the hardware that they own, without resorting to rooting and jailbreaking to "pwn ur own" property. (Including refusal to honor DRM restrictions.) I don't know why "you can't have your cake, and eat it too" is not an actual legal principle, but you can't sell a hardware device to the consumer and still control what they can or cannot do with it.
Jumping to Windows 10 is a somewhat bizarre segue from Smart TVs seeing more than they should.
Backward Thinking in Problem Solving
They could. Get somebody from out of state, and give them just a raw map with population counts/density/whatever. Heck, do this 3 times, and then get local party affiliates to look them over, and each party can eliminate one of them so the most middle-ground is selected.
Ask HN: What strategies do you use to accelerate your learning as veteran dev?
Hi HN -

A new developer can pick up any decent programming book or take any decent online course and reasonably expect to be introduced to many new concepts to chew through.

However, as time goes by and the new developer masters the common introductory concepts, such endeavors become less efficient.

What strategies do you leverage to overcome this challenge? Additionally, as a veteran developer, how do you use your self-study minutes most efficiently?

Thanks!

In peace,
Mike
Does it truly forget? A lot of the past knowledge is locked away or it was only experienced by 1000 programmers back in the 70s. It stands to reason that the huge amounts of programmers today have to learn their own lessons.

I think maybe in 2050 or so we will reach software development maturity, once the base of experienced developers is not dwarfed by the generation of developers joining the work force in one single year.

Keep in mind that the number of programmers is not only increasing moderately in developed countries, but much more so in developing countries, where hundreds of millions of people are joining the global middle class.
Non-electron client would certainly be a big winner for Discord. They should hire the guy and rewrite their memory-hogging app.
>and the free version (IDEA) cannot comapre to Eclipse.

I already adressed it in my original comment, is not good enougth.
Play 16-bit Beat now for free
Is it such a great thing to be born that we are doing something good for our children by causing them to come into existence?

I mean, c'mon. The only way for there to be something good, or great, from a first-person experience, is for there to be a first person to actually do the experiencing.

Caveat, of course, bringing something into an existence that is only suffering is probably not so great. This is why we need to treat our food animals well (not to mention our kids!)
They'll never stop.

And, they're using your own money against you. Sales revenue, all the higher and more profitable as they tighten their control.

Your tax dollars. Here in the U.S., there is an ongoing conversation about the continued efforts to "criminalize" IP infringement. Not only do the "big players" already have the advantage in terms of the ability to pay -- potentially endlessly -- for attorneys. They are trying to get the government, with its deep pockets and salaried attorneys, to take over prosecution of civil law infringements.

Which also means less government attention to crime that may actually concern you, its citizens, more.

Now, if the world were getting better, one might debate whether these are useful changes. Instead, it seems most people who take the time to understand this, and who aren't benefiting from tacking on another 20 years to Micky Mouse's exclusivity, find the changes both absurd and a hindrance to real productivity and creativity.

Workers in the U.S. have had to compete not only against lower wages, but also against lower costs of producers who don't respect and pay for the IP they use. Some of the same companies that scream bloody murder about infringement in the U.S., turn around and use those producers abroad because of their lower costs.

They're using your own money against you.

(And, I've got nothing against the rest of the world catching up. I do resent and oppose the arbitrage practiced by such entities, in combination with convenient legal and political collusion, to greatly enrich themselves while perhaps even impeding real progress.)

P.S. Regarding the "tricks" used to escalate their control, mentioned by the parent commenter. One of those is the current proliferation of "trade agreements". One member is convinced, bribed, coerced to increase an IP "right". The trade agreement includes an automatic mechanism for "harmonization" between members. The other member states use said "harmonization" as the cause that increases that right in their own state.

People living in the latter may never have agreed to e.g. another extension to length of copyright. But suddenly they have it, via "harmonization". And politicians saying, "The treaty made us do it."

This has all been discussed before, on the Web. But I haven't seen it surface prominently, in a while, and it bears repeating for those who are just becoming familiar with the issue.
> their expertise seems orthogonal to running large, diverse content business.

They also have Jimmy Iovine and a bunch of former Hollywood execs running the business side of things. I was just trying to point out that of the major tech companies, Apple probably has the best “cultural” bona fides by a wide margin.

> also has an interesting parallel with Apple starting to obsess about odd things customers don't really care about

Can you give some examples of what you see fitting into this category?
In that context a feedreader (like feedburner) is a Subscriber, right? But then millions of users have still to potentially pull the data from the feedreader, because they can't implement WebSub, because they have limited connectivity and can only pull content. In the end, how is that different than a blog pushing a RSS file to a CDN?
I'm a long time Scala guy, and for some reason at the gigs I've been working at Kotlin is far more marketable than Scala. This confuses me, as the style of Scala we've been writing is almost identical to the Kotlin code.

At this point I'm chalking it up to 'better tooling', especially in IntelliJ. And underscores. People seem to hate underscores. Well, and the Google-stamp of approval I suppose.

Scala definitely does provide way more ways to overcomplicate your code, but with a dose of discipline it's quite manageable.

For me, Kotlin does feel like a step back. At the same time the fact that more people are enthusiastically adopting it means I spend less time selling and more time coding - so in that sense I'm actually a reasonably big fan.
Changing direction of function type in Haskell
Ha! Not sure if you've seen it, but we offer native SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux. Our Web SDK also has a version that uses PSPDFKit Server via a Docker container to get faster performance.

The performance difference to native is smaller than you might think though - see our post from a few months back: https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2017/webassembly-a-new-hope/

PSPDFKit for Web Standalone is a great choice for an easy-to-deploy web viewer, annotation editor and form filler, and performance is great. Definitely better than pdf.js - which is typically where people start with, before they upgrade to PSPDFKit for Web.
It's incredibly ironic that the author mistakes the dialogue of characters for the opinions of the author in the Tortoise and Achilles' remarks on 4:33.
This is one of the more extreme proposals for dealing with Climate Change. Basically gigantic panels in orbit that block a percentage of the solar radiation. A similar idea is releasing a layer of very light but highly reflective dust into the upper atmosphere. There are a lot of far reaching consequences of these schemes, but they should be achievable with relatively near-term technology and are probably easier/cheaper than capturing carbon. A band-aid fix to a long term problem.
Carbon Nano Tubes
> I broke a bone, total of $80 in copay.

And if I break a bone, or my partner breaks a bone, there's _no_ copay. I can certainly think of things I'd rather do with $80 than pay for the privilege of claiming on insurance.
Yes, I understand that. And what I'm saying is: you can't do that. The halting problem is formally equivalent to proving arbitrary mathematical theorems. For every program, there is a corresponding theorem which is true IFF the program halts, and for every theorem there is a corresponding program that halts IFF the theorem is true. So the question: for what programs can the halting problem be decided? is formally equivalent to the question: what theorems can we prove? And we can't prove any useful theorems about that because if we could, we could solve the halting problem!

[UPDATE] I want to revise my claim that if we could prove interesting theorems about which programs have decidable halting properties that we could solve the halting problem itself. That's not true, because the word "interesting" is too poorly defined. But what is true is that if we could do this then we could prove theorems that we could not previously prove (that has to be true for any reasonable definition of "interesting"). Furthermore, we could now prove these theorems in a purely mechanistic way with no need for human creativity. By any stretch of the imagination that would be a major breakthrough.
I enjoy Kotlin, but what is missing is a book: "Kotlin for Beginners".

The current state, as I see it, is: Developers learn Kotlin, not Beginners

So it is not easy to find good learning material to start as a beginner into programming with Kotlin as your first language.

If you have some resources for me that would be nice - so I can convert more people.
Why the hell is this popular on Hacker News?
Rodney Brooks gave an interview that was recently reposted on ArsTechnica. He has so much real world experience productizing AI and robotics that no one else really compares. He is not pessimistic just realistic about self driving cars. And he has great reasons why true autonomy is going to take a long time.
I find the latter to be too tedious usually. If they don't at least start out as the former then the latter will never be finished by me. I think that those two kinds are poles of a spectrum and I believe there is a falloff point not too far past the middle that I find acceptable.

I think it is interesting you say the one end is incredible but the other end is "still great". Does that mean you enjoy them less?
Unlike the US Congress, The European Parliament cannot initiate legislation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_initiative_(legislati...
I'm curious who is estimating 0.2 million (200k) years. That is not very long ago. As a point of comparison, there are populations of humans who have been genetically isolated for that long (the Khoisan in southern Africa).
How do you count VMs?
Right? The built in safari reader does everything correctly and interacts with the rest of the OS properly. I assume that the built in chrome one also Just Works (tm).

Also why would I want to download an entire pdf engine when i already have an AOT version? (Stealing that phrasing by the way :) )
yes, c++ is the cruelest most insane joke, on the same level of perhaps embedding malware inside a compiler and distributing it to the developers. no really, it was a nice try making an object-oriented language on top of c, but then why not build on top of the superior oo features of smalltalk or lisp?
I don't think you are understanding how they are identifying content. It doesn't need to playing via the built in 'app'. Basically they are fingerprinting the video feed which passes through the video processors in the TV regardless of the source (internal, external, whatever). This is a video analog of what apps like Shazam do to identify songs. If you are playing content from any source on one of these devices they can detect what the content is and report back on it. About the only way you could avoid this is to never connect the TV to your network, but even that may not be sufficient.
Spiders can use electricity in the air to balloon for kilometres
> The subscriber must be directly network-accessible and is identified by its Subscriber Callback URL

Does this mean the subscriber needs to have a forwarded port open to the internet for this to work? Without IPv6, users behind NAT (and specifically behind CGNAT) wouldn't be able to use it.
People often think of C++ as a Object Oriented Language. That's understandable, as it was the key feature back in the earliest days. OOP got hyped and over used. Now OOP is (almost) considered harmful in C++ community.

If you look at modern C++ libraries (like boost), you will see a lot of templates and free functions, and not a lot of inheritance or dynamic polymorphism.
This would still be useful to guess-and-check against what questions you come up with versus all possible questions vis a vis the program.

Also, damn, I've been looking for something like this for ages.
I'm glad to read these because I've been feeling like and been treated like I'm on crazy pills for thinking we aren't even remotely close to autonomous vehicles.
The movie industry is even worse about this. Heaven forbid a studio actually invest money in a new title. I'm so tired of all this shitty superhero crap
Did you mean ebooks and blogs by books? IEEE and other research papers in electronic form?

I haven't found a book even close to state of the art... For a reasonable price.

Springer research collections come close but they're very expensive. Journals are expensive and worse...
From what I can tell the book has no real beginning or end, but three threads each of which start and end in different places, none of which start or end at the beginning or ending of the book. That chapter seems to be the end of one of those threads as the rest of the chapter after that statement doesn't really make sense.
So you're telling me that the producers of The Emoji Movie and the 20+ seasons of Survivor get culture, and realize that content is about quality?

US movie studios and television production are more costly than they need to be, because they need to pay for the barnacles and rent-seeking cruft that attached themselves to the industry when they were operating for a half century with an oligopoly on distribution.

When challenged by upstarts, they reduced costs by making crap reality shows and squeezing established franchises to death theaters. They are a business, and at this point, they will be squeezed by Amazon & Netflix.
I don't think it makes sense to adjust per capita. The biggest startup hubs used to be Silicon Valley, New York, London and Berlin. Germany and the UK might just come out ahead of the US because their startup hubs are in smaller countries than SV.
What is required to run this on own web server? Is there something else to it, such as node?
I tend to agree. Waymo ordered 62,000 Chrysler Pacificas with delivery slated for late 2018. Base retail on the hybrid model
is $40,000USD. Even if they got an unbelievably generous 50% discount, that means they're $1.24B USD serious, excluding the cost of the additional autonomous driving equipment. So this will either be one of the biggest debacles in Google/Alphabet's history, or they really are ready to go.
Clojure tried that and it was a step too big. And we better not talk about the baroque abomination named Scala. I think Kotlin is in the sweet spot.
You're a lucky person to have a partner who appreciates this!
Seattle is (or was) great at many things but as someone who has lived here all my life, I disagree with this categorization. From what I know of Portland, it describes that city even less well.

We're politically liberal (sometimes to a fault), not any more optimistic than average (and quite possibly less), and definitely not what I'd call "energetic". It'd be more accurate to say the PNW has positioned itself as the laid-back alternative to SF. I've known a couple companies who have left the area because they couldn't find enough people here in their particular field who wanted to really work hard.

On these particular axes (which may or may not be important to you), Seattle/Portland simply aren't in the same league as San Francisco or New York City. People in those cities are mercilessly open, optimistic, and energetic.
Time to put the TV on the guest network.
The most populous country in the world has invested more in startups than a small region of the US.

Honestly, why is this news?
I guess C++ -> Golang is debatable, maybe Python -> Golang?
Let's say, like many people, you enjoy the occasional article from The Onion. You can very easily continue enjoying them without reading Animal Farm, Gulliver's Travels or the collected works of Aristophanes.

TAOCP, to me, is in a similar category - it's worth remembering Knuth essentially carved the field of study out himself. If you need a reference or textbook, there are by now better places to start. If you are interested in the field, you should definitely get a hold of TAOCP as well. But you can be a perfectly fine and educated programmer (let alone person) and never touch the thing.
The labor unions did not have control, but were striking to get that control. Maybe if they don't take the higher wages then end up with nothing, busted and broken. Complicated humans.
> It’s been about 3 years now, with a 10+ person team now, so maybe I should write it all up somewhere.

If you want, we could put this up on the React Native Blog. Would make for an interesting read !!
Would that have helped the non-mathematicians that read it? I'm in that camp and never quite grasped the whole Lambda thing.

(Maybe you know of something I could read that would fix that?)
That mechanic is my favorite part of the souls series. I love the surprise of hitting a trap or particularly nasty ambush for the first time and getting destroyed. the next time through you get to know the future before it happens and have learned from it