skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Once you think of recursion as just another way to do for loops, it immediately is demystified.

I actually think this is not a good way to understand recursion. It's like saying "once you think of the lambda calculus as another way to build a Turing machine, it immediately is demystified." Yes, it's true that they're equally powerful, but their differences are what make one or the other more suitable to certain circumstances.

I think with recursion the best way to show this distinction is to look at navigation over a recursive structure, like a binary tree. You could implement any navigation over a binary tree with some nice loops, but they don't really mean anything in relation to the program: they're just a procedure to get the job done.

On the other hand, since binary trees are recursively defined (each node is either a leaf containing data or a branch containing two binary trees), using structural recursion to navigate the tree is significantly more straightforward than any looping construct. This is made super clear in a language like Haskell:

data BTree
= Leaf Int
| Branch Int BTree BTree

sumTree :: BTree -> Int
sumTree (Leaf v) = v
sumTree (Branch v l r) = v + (sumTree l) + (sumTree r)

But in, say, Python:

@dataclass
class BTree: pass

@dataclass
class Leaf(BTree):
v: int

@dataclass
class Branch(BTree):
v: int
l: BTree
r: BTree

def sum_tree(t: BTree) -> int:
stack = [t]
total = 0
while stack:
curr = stack.pop()
if isinstance(curr, Leaf):
total += curr.v
elif isinstance(curr, Branch):
total += curr.v
stack.append(curr.l)
stack.append(curr.r)
else:
raise RuntimeError("Invalid BTree subclass.)
return total

The Python solution isn't obviously correct. You'll have to read through that and make sure I implemented my traversal correctly — assuming you know what an iterative traversal looks like and you can recognize it without reading the code more fully first.

In contrast, the Haskell solution is clearly correct at a glance, I think. Ignoring the difference in length of code, the Haskell is clearly recursing over the structure of the tree. This is, in my opinion, significantly easier to reason about than any amount of looping.

I guess the caveat to all this is: recursion is well-suited for certain kinds of problems (such as navigating a recursive datatype), and loops are well-suited for different kinds of problems. But saying "they're equivalent so think of all recursion as loops" is missing the forest for the trees, I think.
> HN is a React app with custom fonts

I only see that HN runs on NGinx.
The "send later" feature in Gmail doesn't work outside of chrome and offline mode for drive.
Also don't forget Rob Mensching[0] in 2004.

[0]:http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2004/4/5/windows-installe...
Ok, we've switched the URL from https://math.mit.edu/~drew/ and removed the housing from 42 above.
While I don’t work on this at Apple, I’ve never once heard of anything being designed to punish a competitor like that.
personal blog or for work?
Traveling Hacks for Backpackers
The Rise and Fall of the Jeremy Renner App, Which Was a Real Thing
>“The Collective gave me that flexibility, but what kept me there – and I’ve extended my original contract – is the community and all the other things that come with it.”

Bit of a creepy sounding sentence with that name
So, does this mean life, the universe, and everything are all cubes?
I definitely feel this one. Slack reminds me of the open office plan, in that it seems like a solution to a bunch of problems, but in practice creates a whole new set. It's also a bit like having a candy dish within arm's reach. In theory, I should just be able to say no, but in practice I know I'm going to eat more candy than I want.

I'm definitely more productive the days when I keep Slack closed.
Do you have a better of wording for inclusion in paper abstracts / article summaries than what I said? I'd love to hear one, but p(x|H0) is just as bad as p = 0.05.
That appears to be about adult content (porn I assume).

I was referring to Carl Benjamin being removed. Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, who were two of Paterson biggest earners removed themselves as a result and encouraged others to do the same.

https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/17/jordan-peterson-sam-harri...
Thanks, this is helpful.

Why do we care if every integer not equal to 4 or 5 modulo 9 is the sum of three cubes? Just for fun?
Sweet , anybody that gives money to the nra in san fransisco should be eligible for property seizure by sherrif/police now. Ironically California has strict "proof required" Property seizure laws. Thinking peter theil would be a good candidate.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mercurynews.com/2019/04/21/...

️Patriot act! Donations to nra are tax deductible, so the state already has a record.
"They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language"

Wow, way to put down your engineers. What is the famously high hiring bar at Google for?
And the current situation with iOS is an even bigger catastrophe for society.

I don't think the problem is copying per se... the problem is that Apple is just too big, too powerful, to be good for society.

Apple should be broken up.
I don't know what this means - investors are on a constant search for yield especially now and that has taken them into riskier assets. The trend of the last decade is exactly opposite what you are saying.

That said, you are correct that rising money supply doesn't automatically translate into rising prices
on default config: yeah, I'm not sure what the best story is here. I would like the out of the box experience to be nice, and I want to be able to configure anything, but I also want to be able to ship nice improvements to the defaults without making all users update their own config. For example, I just pushed a commit that adds a default ignore for a new start menu process in 1903. If I place that ignore in the "template" for the config file, then all users with a custom config will need to somehow diff their config with the default. I am 10000% open to suggestions on how to make this better.

On direction changes, I've gotten this request a few times. It should be pretty easy, but I haven't gotten around to it: https://github.com/rickbutton/workspacer/issues/43

On the fly layouts would be neat. Since layouts are just an instance of ILayoutEngine, you could probably just write a bunch of custom code to allow you to make splits however you want. I would be super interested in seeing what this looks like!

wlines is awesome! There is a feature in workspacer similar to dmenu called "menus", but there are a few bugs, mostly around it sometimes not showing up in focus, which is a pain. I have some config on my work machine that lets me press alt-shift-p and navigate to a bunch of work projects I maintain, only typing the first few characters of the project I'm looking for.
It seems to be readable on iOS Safari. Scrolling sideways works fine. Worse than a regular quote, but not actually that bad. It is a client issue if it’s more broken than that.
I've seen this a lot. Where it is broken down so much that it involves mental gymnastics to follow whats going on. It also results in Spaghetti-code with fragmented functionality.

In my experience, projects using Java are the worst offenders here.
I see! I'm math-dumb and always struggle with that sort of research. I need to see practical applications for what seems TO ME like ridiculous questions (I'm not implying they are, I have a feeling PhD+ level people don't usually waste time on pointless stuff). Thanks for the elaborate answer!
If it was hybrid, but those seem less common now. Everything is pointing towards fully electric.
Sounds too good to be true. What challenges have you faced by using Kubernetes?
> If recursion is difficult to grasp, I'm afraid it's not going to get any easier from there.

I strongly disagree. Many people have never had to reason about recursion so explicitly before going into CS. Just because it's difficult to understand explicitly at first doesn't mean they won't get better.

If they never understand recursion, then that's a problem, but I think that probably says more about the teacher than the student.
Is there an easily accessible version of this article? I don't want to log in to NYT.
Looks like Magento2 could make use of this, every part of it is too over-engineered, adding un-necessary complexity to make it look like enterprise ready application
You're right. Americans are just too stupid to recognize the brilliance of the metric system. There could be no other explanation.
Excel is probably coercing them to floating point, instead of using infinite-precision integers. Wolfram-Alpha gets it right: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28-80538738812075974%...
I am pretty surprised to see no discussion of statistical power in the article and very little mention in the comments here. To me, having more statistical power solves many of the issues mentioned in the article. Many of the rest can be handled with use of Bayesian priors, context-specific p-values thresholds (.01, .1, etc.), and replication.

There's decent working guidelines for statistical power, but a lot of the issues (especially around replication) I see are mainly due to sample sizes being too small to adequately detect effects, especially if those effects are small.
Snarkily putting someone down because of his credentials is certainly a shallow dismissal, and just the sort of thing that guideline asks you not to do here.
The inflation marker does what it is designed to do - if it didn't, markets would properly price in that information
Sway is a Wayland only WM and doesn't suffer of any the shortcomings you describe.
I've never used Notepad2. How is it better than notepad++?
Thanks for posting, that was a good read!

Related tidbits for Chris Roberts' current project, the long in development and hopefully finished some day Star Citizen. They've referenced both Origin and EA as companies in the Star Citizen universe, it's a cute little easter egg of industry history.

"Origin Jumpworks" as one of the ship manufacturers, and "Electronic Access" as makers of the Star Marine (first person shooter) and Arena Commander (ship combat arena) modes which are positioned as in-universe video games.

I missed out on a lot of the older spaceship games, I ought to pick those up on GoG and give them a try sometime.
Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)
A simulator for hierarchical state machines that lets you empirically test your system behaviour and then take the model and use it to generate the end use code.

I built it specifically for use in designing complex burner management systems sequencing for the LiOH plant we design, but I made it general enough you can use it for any sequenced system, or even business process.

Bonus, built in OPC server so it can bolt on to a HMI for testing/training, or bolt it onto an existing running system inputs in parallel to shadow an existing system with your proposed cut-over system.

For the v-model, when implementing IEC61508 or 61511, it means that now effectively the specification is the product and the v is very shallow.
Works in Windows calculator.
Garageband definitely existed. I remember my music teacher showing me in about 1993/94. It was very simple, and we usually used cubase, but it was a thing. That's why I'm asking! It seems to have disappeared into the music software black hole and I have definite memories of it existing many years before Apple released their version of it. I'm talking well before osx came out! I do tend to think it was a mac program though, as we had Ataris and macs in the music lab and I usually used the Atari with a Roland sound canvas module (can't remember which one) and garageband wasn't something I remember using with any frequency.
Thats how I see career levels in my company..

The higher someone is the less overall they know. I know regulars that I would put way higher than some of our experts. And its not only technical knowledge but also problem solving, attitude and craftsmanship.

Thats what happens when promotions are given based on "years worked" or "office politics" instead of work excellence.

Sad reality in a lot of companies in IT.
Please do me the favor of engaging with what I wrote.
This is a really good point.

In fact, failures to reproduce "landmark" experiments have low significance (statistics word) because they find a result that is highly probable if the null hypothesis is true. But failures to reproduce have high significance (colloquial English word) because they indicate that widely-held beliefs are wrong. So in some of the most important cases, the statistics and colloquial English meanings of the words are exactly the opposite.

I don't know if there's a good solution to this, though--it's hard to change organically-emergent trends in language even if we did come up with a better term.
Show HN: I actually read the “Do Elephants Have Souls?” article
I attended this. Here are a few notes:

* This was organized like any other guest talk held at Microsoft Research, of which there are ~5/week, mostly by academic guests.

* His host was Microsoft's Chief Economist, Michael Schwarz. Michael did his PhD work on free software and got to know Stallman then.

* After hooking his computer up to the projector 10-15 minutes before the talk began he displayed a quite provocative political cartoon of his regarding the invasion of Iraq.

* As mentioned elsewhere he prefaced his talk with a number of requests for Microsoft.

* At one point he did state "Sometimes there is a use for windows."

* That statement was immediately preceded by "It's getting rather hot in here. Can we do something like adjust the temperature or open some windows?" :)

* Someone in Q&A questioned whether he would have come to Microsoft a few years ago and asked what has changed for him. He said he's just hadn't been invited and would have been happy to if he had been.

For those in the Seattle area, he appears to be speaking at the central branch of the Seattle library this afternoon: https://www.fsf.org/events/richard-stallman-free-software-an...

Related article from 2005: http://suseroot.com/rms.php (note well the date)
Then the format would have to change. They are optimized to sell skittles and slurpees as fast as possible, there would be no point in spending 15 more minutes at a current gas station convenience store.

Makes more sense to put chargers in places people park, like grocery stores.
I don't see any anti-tech stance in this. The tech giants are quasi monopolists who leverage both their size and information advantage to actively destroy competition. Privacy is a civilian casualty of the attempts to cement that position.

Contrary to popular believe the real problem with privacy violations isn't "that some creep might be listening in on your most private moments – the real problem is the power that stems from that information asymmetry on a societal level. In a democracy systems like these are the ones that never should have been – read this in the most frankensteinian tone you can imagine.

That being said: this ismy opinion and at the same time I am a DIY persons, I build soft and hardware – but being a good tech person also means that you shouldn't blindly praise every "smart" thing that has a microcontroller in it, if it performs worse than the 30 year old version of the same thing your grandma has in her kitchen. Being a good tech person means realizing that electronic voting has fundamental conceptual flaws that the oldschool paper version hasn't or realizing that sometimes a sleek and modern looking touchscreen isn't the best interface to choose for your application.

In short: if you love tech, don't lie to yourself about what it is and what it isn't. If you love tech, have the respect to see it for what it is and what (in the right hands) it could be.
Hey, HN!

I’m the cofounder and sole developer of Readup, a social reading platform built around the central tenet that reading an article to completion should be an essential prerequisite for sharing, commenting on or rating it.

The link I shared is to my profile page which shows a reverse-chronological list of articles that I’ve posted. In order to post an article, one has to read it in our iOS app or in Chrome with our browser extension installed. We measure the exposure time of the words within the device’s viewport in order to determine how much of the article has been read.

My motivation for reading the “Do Elephants Have Souls?” article came from the mention of it in the New Yorker article “The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News” in which the author cites its posting to HN as an example of what happens when users rush to the comments section without having actually read the article.

Would love your feedback on the product and I’d be happy to answer any and all questions!

Jeff
Raspberry Pi’s Eben Upton talks thermals, stores and who's buying the kit
This was cathartic to read, even though it’s short. Big tech has become evil. It’s mostly banal, of course (“You want to sell the fact that I like football and puppies to ad companies? Sure, who cares?”), but it’s still a net negative for society. And it’s not tech’s fault per se, but rather the unfettered and uninhibited pursuit of ever more capital. Tech can be a tool for good, but when driven by the profit machine, the incentives make it a tool for evil.

We have to face it: we’re not helping the world.
Substitute any other race and ny mag would be accused of racism. Asian is the new white. Its time Asians stand up to the blatant racism of the media.

Asians are where we are because of a superior work ethic. Sorry white people
No, it's the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.
I wouldn't even say "stop malfeasance". The idea (I am the author) is that the business world is full of people who don't know exactly what is going on. That is due to the fact that, compared to school, business in general is dynamic. And I think the technology business is more dynamic than most other sectors.

When I was a new developer (the topic of that entire blog is advice to new developers) that was a surprise.

> not only are the solutions never clear, the problems are never clear either.

Love that description!
Good Reading – 10th Anniversary Edition
IMHO the safest option is to drop it in the about screen or somewhere in the documentation, like Microsoft does, "This software includes portions of XYZ...". It doesn't really matter which line is what, imho, at the end of the day an actual trial would run some automated comparison analysis and pull out the relevant bits anyway. It's mostly about the spirit.
Sure, but the perspective isn't novel either. It isn't presenting a new argument. It isn't presenting an interesting perspective. It's just regurgitating an obvious one. The article exists to bash Facebook and for no other substantive reason.
Sorry to tell you that KDE on Wayland will not make you happy any more.
True, you need pointers to implement binary trees. But you just need chalk to draw one, and to explain a recursive algorithm that acts on it.
> Assume your company is going to be around for 25 years, and treat the first few years accordingly.

This statement makes sense in the smaller context of the point the author is trying to make, but is IMO pretty bad advice taken generally, and it smacks of survivorship bias. It's a good way to overengineer, overplan, and run out of money without delivering much, from my experience.
> If I couldn't walk to the nice mall[1], I wouldn't visit either.

This echoes my experience. I live in a city with excellent transit but I happen to live a solid 15 minute walk from the transit / urban part of the city and instead I live near a big road. Naturally, the big road is lined with big box stores.

One of them is a Micro Center and I quite like having so many computer parts and electronics in one place just a 3 minute walk down the road. However, if it wasn't so conveniently placed near my home, I would instead order everything online (even if I owned a car, which I do not).
We disagree fundamentally on basically every point you've made. I do not have the time or energy to debate you on any of this. You have no convinced me of the existence of liberty or freedom actually existing outside of the minds of men, and have continued to show what I believe to be the logistic contortions needed to continue to believe in these concepts actually being implemented in the real world. None of this makes you a bad person, and I wish you well in life.
won't corals adapted to tropical waters colonize currently colder waters that are at that point perfectly suited?

What, they just call up American Vanlines to come pack their shit and move them 10 degrees north? No, temperature change will happen quickly enough that the coral will die before they migrate.
MFA. Security questions are easily socially engineered, especially when you need to choose from a list. What city was I born? One of the easiest things to find out about a person.
If you make the system secure but unusable, the users will find a way to make it usable but insecure.
personal experience only, but like Dockerfiles, terraform is only good for provisioning until its not.

Once your VM or container hits a complexity point above trivial, ansible is very much a useful tool for provisioning container states, and specifically for patching container images to, eg. include security updates.

...beyond that, as in, the intended use case of dynamically updating multiple live machines in parallel... dunno, I don’t use ansible for that... but it beats the hell of out having a single monolithic batch script to setup a container. I use it for that purpose all of the time.
Why the /s? It would actually be a good idea. The whole point of open licenses is that they work inside the established framework of copyright laws.
Standing around for 30 minutes waiting for my car to recharge while my children beg me to buy them "entertainment" and snacks sounds like torture.
India to Attempt Moon Landing at the Lunar South Pole Today
A Pastor Dies During 30TH Days of Fasting and Prayer
> co-living is billed as a solution to the housing crisis – but others say it’s simply an attempt to cash in on it

I mean, why not both? I think the problem is real, and I think modern housing approaches are driven by patterns and drives that are woefully outdated. I think there must be more humane, more collaborative ways to live.

On the other hand, I can name a lot of companies that market to real problems but clearly care much more about massive revenue than making any real difference.
Well Amazon encourages people to make purchases they wouldn't normally make so yeah I would say they do
Fair enough. I should have said "is most appropriate" rather than "must be used".
Are there EU sanctions against Huawei? Because the US lifted the ban on US companies selling to Huawei before it really came into effect.
RIP President Mugabe!
Why are you so bitter? I asked this genuinely. I doubt PhD+ people do that type of research "just for fun", or do that like someone like me drinks a beer. Someone answered elaborately, and I'm glad they did. Thanks anyway.
I think the best term would have been statistically surprising, because it strongly hint at the fact that the result would be surprising under the null hypothesis, witch really is all that "statistically significant" really means. Sometimes surprising results happen, but all other things being equal they might hint at the null hypothesis being false. I could also live with "statistically interesting". "Detectable", suggested in another comment, seems to have some of the same issues as significant, it is too strong and seems to imply that now we know something is really there.
you have to spend money to make money