skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be honest, I believe that all intelligence comes from innate motivations and practice. You suddenly become 10x more "intelligent" when you actually give a shit or get some innate joy or obsession relieved when you do it. If that is something that is constant within you, you become more and more practiced and a virtuious cycle results. Nothing is too hard to explain, it's just mathematicians are really horrible at communicating.
AI is, by definition, the set of problems that are not yet solvable by computers.

No it's not. At least, that's not how leading textbooks define it and it's not how McCarthy defined it. Moreover you promptly contradict it: beating the chess champ is hardly "not yet solvable by computers". Did it cease to be AI the moment it succeeded?

Those who do not prepare for the coming Singularity are going to be blindsided by it when it arrives.

This seems to me a religious sentiment expressed in religious language. Prepare ye the way of the Lord!
Brian's article is one of the best I've read on this subject in a long time. We seem to have lost that sense of wonder and curiousity somewhere along the line. There's one reason that I became a scientist. I wanted to answer one question "why"? We can always blame the media for sensationalizing science, or highlighting just the alarmist aspects, but there's a huge gap between science today and public awareness.

Part of it is that things have become more complex, and difficult to relate to. But that can be overcome, and it must be. As Prof. Greene says

"Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension."
Ask YC: Facebooker or rfacebook?
I plan to integrate a part of my existing rails-application with facebook and came across two frameworks to integrate with facebook: rfacebook and Facebooker? Has anybody experience with both? What are the pros and cons of each? Thanks for any recommendation!
Meanwhile, back at the lab, we need to come up with a programming environment that most people understand naturally. We need to do usability studies on the languages we develop just like we test applications we develop for users.

Isn't that how Vista was designed? Wouldn't it be a better idea to have a really curious and imaginative person (an artist, if you will) work on the language that will last 100 years?

On the other hand, I think this article borders on a good criticism of Arc: could it be that PG's focus on writing a language is misguided? Maybe it would be a better idea to focus on something more abstract: in particular, on inventing better fundamental representations for our programs (as Alan Kay did, when he thought about OOP)? I'd imagine Paul's response would be that macros -the "blurring of the line" between interpreter and interpreted- is the mind-opening change in representation. Does the problem lie in helping people cross this line?
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Um, so yeah-- they all scrape-- like I said.

But no, they don't scrape all sites.
Rails: MySQL over a SSH tunnel
I don't think this article is particularly well-written. However, I do agree with the conclusion. For web-based programming, object oriented programming is simply ridiculous in all but a small number of cases. That's why the Lampshade framework I wrote is purely procedural, and why I'm able to write software on top of it so quickly. Client-side GUI programming is a different story, in my opinion.

In general, just because you're capable of understanding complex, abstract concepts doesn't mean that it's always best to use them.
I would choose facebooker. Development of rfacebook is dead, even the previous maintainer suggests using facebooker. You'll find for most of it they're really similar, provide you with similar functionality, one's in current development and one's dead, you pick :).

I have a few applications up using rfacebook and won't change though (it's too much effort), though all new project's I start (for work of course) will be with facebooker.
did he mean "tap out"? as in UFC "tap out"?

can't get enough of Math (although I barely passed Linear Algebra and Numerical Analysis). Maybe it's the challenge. I shall try more of it when I take up a Masters in CS. :P
you're probably a victim of rote learning math classes. learning math for real (getting it) is not a linear process.
lots of aha moments where lots of concepts fall into place suddenly and then you move on to more advanced things.

that said, I would consider everything below calculus to be merely clever ways of tallying stones. algebra can be tricky at times (abstract algebra sucks) but it is really not that interesting in of itself (yes you can solve a lot of practical problems with it but the questions aren't generally interesting, so the answers aren't that interesting). you do need to have it down pat in order to "get" calculus however. And if you "get" at least the basic concept of calculus down a lot of things fall in to place.

OTOH I could be totally biased and/or wrong, but I personally didn't really see how math could describe complex systems in a way that let me get those complex systems until calc. Some really mind blowing aha moments.
It's also how Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 95, and most of their precursors were designed. There's just been an acceptance amongst OS designers that testing with real humans is the only way to know if things are actually easy.

Programming languages are unique, however, in that the people building them are often also the users (and the more this is true, the better the language tends to be). C was designed to build UNIX, while ADA was designed for a customer...and we know which one survived.

But, I also simply can't buy the "people understand naturally" logic. People understand very little "naturally"...and even if you include pre-existing knowledge (like English, or spatial skills) in this "natural" knowledge you still end up with a pretty horrendous and limited programming language. Explaining an algorithm in English almost always takes a lot more "code" than writing it in a decent high level language.
For web-based programming, object oriented programming is simply ridiculous in all but a small number of cases.

Agreed. Functional programming seems to make a lot more sense. Fundamentally, isn't a web server just a function f: url -> html? Sure, databases and sessions complicate things, but even in these cases, functional structures seem a lot more elegant (in a mathematical sense) than OOP ones.
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Ask YC: Follow users on HN?
Dismissing the potential twitter analogies that will certainly arise, this would be an interesting feature to follow submissions, comments, and threads of one's favorite users.

I'm sure many would be (or probably are manually) following PG and others on the top 100, but it would help create quasi-groups of interest -- say a certain user is consistently submitting articles on a subject of interest --, without filtering the community at large.

Thoughts and comments?
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Math is pointless if you are not planning to apply it at some point in your later career. Learning algebraic topology when you are studying digital circuits is like learning literary analysis - it may make you feel smart, but it's a damn waste of time.
Hacker News Is Failing Us.

This link is currently in the #2 position on the front page. I wonder if the people who up voted it actually read it or just agreed with the thesis?
testing with real humans is the only way to know if things are actually easy

Yes, yes, of course, sorry for being unclear - I just meant that we shouldn't rely on design-by-focus-groups or design-by-committee exclusively, that imaginative solutions require creativity, and for that you need someone with taste.

People understand very little "naturally"...

Well, OOP utilizes our spacial skills, at least in the form of all those pretty UML graphs? There is certainly a lot of thinking left to do about how exactly we understand programming languages, both on macro and micro levels - what metaphors we use to understand scope, objects, functional concepts, etc. It's from this thinking that new language designs will arise.
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wumi replace wumi with pg or rms or whomever.
that still doesn't solve the problems of different devices having different capacities.

For example, my entire music collection is ~100GB (on my file server at home). On my laptop, I can afford to devote ~40GB to music, and on my iPod I can get ~30GB. The only way I can think of to solve this sort of problem (i.e., guarantee that I always have access to the song I'm looking for) is to have network access. And then I get 'synchronization' for free since all my data is in one place anyways.
certainly, but was just considering a favorites or saved of some sort, even if it's internal like my saved subs i've upmodded.
I cringed at the comparison to mathematical proofs and the "multidimensional" aspects of programming (whatever that means), but the thesis was good, and I'm interested in how the HN community can expound on it... hence, the upvote.
I had been waiting for someone to write this article...TOP NOTCH reporting!
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I don't think this is true - or at minimum, higher math/theory certainly comes easier to some people than others, and there probably comes a level of intelligence where you were progressing slowly enough that it really wouldn't make a good career option for you.

I hit my brick wall in theoretical classes when I felt like I would understand everything I had been taught up to that point, but to actually construct a proof to solve certain problems I had to come up with some flash of insight which just wouldn't come to me. I simply wouldn't know where to start.

I don't think that this is uncommon. When many people write about famous mathematicians and how they solve extremely difficult problems, it usually happens that they have a certain intuition or insight which didn't really follow logically from the problem as stated up until that point. Perhaps anybody could put enough effort into these problems that these insights would come to them as well, but I think this is doubtful considering just how brilliant these insights are.

Put another way, when you reach a certain level of math it starts requiring a large degree of a particular kind of creativity, which simply not everyone has.
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It's not a comparison of GAE to AWS.
Object Orientation failed because it's too hard to understand? I blinked in incredulity. Object Orientation hasn't failed, but we're coming to appreciate its short comings as a sole design paradigm. For C programmers, C++ gave them access to variable execution via polymorphism (without ugly function pointers) and more flexible scoping via classes. In languages that provide first class and anonymous functions polymorphism is a lot less useful and closures provide better scoping flexibility than classes. Languages that have these features make it obvious how restrictive C++ is in binding this functionality in with the type system. In languages like ruby, python, javascript, lisp and smalltalk object orientation serves in its proper place as a type definition system and people use it appropriately. It's only C++ that has failed us.
When will blogs start using interactive visuals alongside their stories? | mathoda.com
Logging, in such a case, is usually done locally, not remotely. You're still not making much sense here, axod.
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I did understand a lot of maths, I just mean that I think the way we do maths often is not really understanding. If we have proved something with a hundred step proof, I might be able to verify every single step of the proof and conclude that it is correct. But we might not really have a feel for why it is correct. Can't really think of a good example right now :-/ I mean usually we jump through quite a few hoops to prove something - maybe there are other ways of looking at it that would make more sense.

One example might be the autistic people who just know if a number is prime or not. Not sure if they are really doing anything special, or just calculating really fast, though.
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Do you take adderal because you suffer from ADHD or you take it get focused?
I started making a simple app that scrapes your (or any other user's) HN activity and turns it into an RSS feed, but I didn't finish it, partly because I don't post here much. Following multiple users is a cool idea that didn't occur to me, though, and RSS would make that sort of thing a cinch, so I might pick it up again.
I think it would be more accurate to say that "AI is, in practice, the set of problems that are not yet solvable by computers". It's pretty cynical to call that the definition of AI, but I don't think that's an inaccurate characterization if you look at the domain of problems that people who consider themselves "AI researchers" has shifted over the years.
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So does that mean that if I had a Dabble DB instance that had many megabytes of data in it, you need enough RAM for the Dabble code plus all my data to be in memory at once (and so on for each customer), or can you do some lazy loading magic to only load part of my data?
And whatever you do, please, for the love of god, stay away from Facetime (some obscure library that some people used to develop an app I'm currently maintaining).

But yeah, Facebooker.
How is the thesis good? The thesis states: average developers are too dumb to grok object-oriented programming so that some alternative simpler method for data hiding and encapsulation needs to be adopted. Only the really smart people should be allowed to dabble in the dark arts of OOP, and only then if they've been properly mentored by an elite priesthood.
Or, we are failing ourselves, but otherwise you are completely right. There is nothing in the article explaining why author thinks that "Object Oriented Programming has Failed Us".

Anyway, this is a good way to trick Hacker News:

1. Write curious title with some programming term in it.
2. Write some random thoughts in the article body mentioning the term.
3. Submit to HN
4. Traffic!
I know nothing about the internals of any of the Ruby VM's so this may be a totally stupid question ...

How hard would be it be to 'marshal out' the entire running Ruby VM to a binary image and load it back in again like the way the Smalltalk VMs seem to do, or add the ability to marshal out objects as a memory image of some sort, meaning they can be marshalled out and in really efficiently (ie stuff a true Ruby object into Memcached instead of a string representation of it ...
"closures provide better scoping flexibility than classes. Languages that have these features make it obvious how restrictive C++ is in binding this functionality in with the type system."

C++ can/does do anonymous functions (for example, see boost lambda), and can even give you most of what you want from first-class functions and closures (using functors). The parts that you don't get are due mostly to the fact that C++ doesn't have built-in garbage collection. It's a speed limitation, not a type-safety limitation.

Now for my rant: there seems to be a backlash against type safety in this forum that I don't understand. Granted, if all you ever do is develop dinky webapps with your best friends, permissive languages allow for rapid development (mostly because they let you get away with murder). However, once you have more than a few developers and a few tens of thousand lines of code, the benefits of strict typing become rapidly apparent. The chaotic, free-for-all mentality of languages like Ruby is great for rapid prototyping, but it kinda sucks for developing in more formal scenarios.

It may be "harder" to develop with strongly typed languages, but that's usually an indication that you're having to think a bit before you act. That's rarely a bad thing!
Waiting for the "Running a startup with your spouse" essay ;-)
For any programming, OOP brings some advantages. What you might be decrying is over-the-top abuse of OOP patterns. Certainly, for most programming, abuse of design patterns is unwarranted.

However, taking, as an example, Ruby, which is both a functional and OOP language, the OOP features make the language a lot nicer.

Anyway, that article is completely daft. And I refuse to take any advice about programming from someone who spells "linear" as "linier". Shame there's no down-mod button.
Ada has a pretty impressive record in safety critical systems; something that cannot be said of C. Aircraft software systems and many air traffic control systems in particular are all written in Ada.
I didn't say "millions", I said "a million". That's according to their own reports, and if there's 500'000 tweets, it's quite likely there's a million people sitting there with a tweeter client open (not everyone tweets every day).

Daniel
Facebook, the USSR, communism, and train tracks
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Same. Realized I wasn't going to go through life as either a mathematician or a physicist, so didn't pursue beyond Calc 2.
Easy answer: yes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152559
Why not try something novel: Initially place articles with a random number generator. It will ensure that the site's front page has a varied content.
Sounds like a buddy list on a web forum/message board. A couple days ago someone wanted to add avatars. Next week maybe we should just replace this whole thing with vBulletin.
And yet, somehow, I've never seen a single line of live ADA code...and there are literally hundreds of millions of lines of C code doing work right now. Not only that, someone is almost certainly starting a new program written in C right now...and now...and now...and now. And...you, guessed it, now.

I'm sure Ada had a useful life, possibly even in a niche where C would never be an effective tool. I was just saying that design-by-committee, even with a lot of user input, is probably not the right way to build a timeless programming language, and that building a language while using the language probably is.
I played around with both for a couple of hours before deciding on this library:

http://pushrod.wordpress.com/2007/08/15/the-how-and-why-of-m...

Currently using it to develop: http://apps.facebook.com/dormtrader

Feel free to shoot me an email if you run into any snags: thecompanygardener@gmail.com
This is hosted using http://www.slinkset.com, made by news.ycombinator.com users brett and johnb.

Right now we're using the auto-import RSS feature to get it so there are always a bunch of stories on the recent page. Add some wisdom of the crowds and we should get a great popular page, right?
There is a law about web sites that allow for social interaction, that over time all social sites approach the fullest functionality of social networking.

Anyone have a citation for this law?
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i didn't really mention anything about messaging, as in buddy lists, but simply to facilitate action that already happens -- manually following a user of interest to see their latest threads and submissions.
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Funny, I look at Ada every day ('cept it's called PL/SQL).
What were the reasons that you decided to write the wrapper code yourself (Facebooker e.g. looks pretty ruby-ish to me)?
Remember, whatever you start with will change. So make sure it's easy to change.
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More random hints about Tsumobi without any meat. Argh:-)
Well templates do let you do just about everything being a meta-programming language - however libraries rarely use them and they are very complicated to implement yourself.

I've not found static typing to be a big productivity win. I think it disallows a small subset of bugs. Like most people I've been a C++ programmer because it was the highest performance language with the best support for operating and window systems. I'm gleefully looking forward to it playing a smaller and smaller part of my programming work.
Humans are the moral animal.
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Fear

Uncertainty

Doubt

(but I'd like to test that maglev thing too)
As a fun project, one could mirror hacker news on Twitter...
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From TFA:

To be honest, I wasn’t even taking pleasure in my disposable income. Most of my extra cash went toward medicating my work stress. Because I wasn’t getting satisfaction from my job, I distracted myself with overpriced restaurants, tropical vacations and retail therapy. I traded up to a bigger, nicer apartment, but I didn’t spend much time in it because I was always at the office justifying my paycheck.

I hear you!
Second that... That book is a great starting point... to get you thinking
Good article, but getting seriously tired of those NYTimes login pages growl
The biggest thing you need to sort out when caching is exactly how well synced your cache needs to be.

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