skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It’s a paradox.

You take as a given that paradoxes are or at least should be "un-answerable". This Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox#Possible_resolutio...) mentions a list of guys that tried to answer it, but anyway, this problem is way over my head, I should go back to writing Drupal modules before I also start rambling about Solipsism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism#Gorgias_.28of_Leontin...) :)
Well you can't have all 1 or the other. Everything in the world requires balance, and education is the same. You can't have tool-knowledge without concept-knowledge and vice versa. One without the other is useless.
Article Summary:

1) Node.JS or other JavaScript platforms are NOT ready for prime-time. Only good for experimentation or prototyping.

2) For coding in callback style that javascript on servers needs, extreme discipline is required. Else, it will make your code hard to debug or maintain aka "callback hell".

3) Currently, projects like Node.js are not maintaining compatibility & things break often. that's not their current focus. This makes them unfriendly to enterprises.

4) Current state of Documentation is poor as the project are constantly changing at rapid pace. Tutorials just scratch the surface.

5) Event loop Style of programming is worth looking at for building real-time applications with thousands of concurrent users.

6) Some of ideas from Node.JS & other Javascript server side frameworks might be adopted into other languages.
Articles about why anything you can do in a "simpler" text editor can and should be done in emacs strongly resemble articles about why anything you can do in a less powerful programming language can and should be done in Lisp.

I don't think it's a coïncidence.
I'm not directing this at you personally, even though I am responding to your comment, but do we really need "tl;dr" type comments here on Hacker News?
You can/could in the US - Nokia stores sell them (if they're not closed down now)
I just wrote a comment yesterday about how I remove pain-points so I can work more efficiently... This is pretty close. Nice to know the concept has been around for so long.

Wish more people would think about it.
I use Emacs for coding, wanderlust mail, rcirc and jabber-el. All which are provided as packages in the distros I run.

I've been trying to get into clojure which entails installing clojure-mode, swank-clojure, leiningen (which brings the pain of maven) and slime. This is where emacs has always broken down for me. Once I step outside the distro provided packages I find broken tutorials, unspecific versions, and instructions written like:

First install package.el.
Add to your .emacs: (add-to-list 'package-archives '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/"))
C-x C-e to evaluate it, and you're good to go!

http://marmalade-repo.org/

Except that didn't work in two of the three emacs installs I have. Any time I need to download an elisp file I dread reading the instructions. Too often the author forgot that he loads some other required package in his 1000 line .emacs/init.el file. Then you end up with half a set of instructions.

I think the only solution to the problem would be package maintainers providing instructions for how to install their package in a specific vanilla version of emacs from scratch with no other changes. But if they have to give up their custom emacs configs they won't be able to write up an explanation.
Does anyone know in what capacity Microsoft is using FogBugz?
Oh sorry, misread that as App Store not Apple Store.
...and following usual RIAA logic that's 150 million times some 30 dollar for a concert recording on DVD, so 4.5 Billion to the pirates!
>He doesn't care how the tides work, tell him why they work. Why is the moon at the right distance to provide a gentle tide, and exert a stabilizing effect on earth's axis of rotation, thus protecting life here? Why does gravity work the way it does? Why does anything at all exist rather than not exist? O'Reilly is correct that these questions can only be addressed by mythmaking, religion or philosophy, not by science.

Science doesn't really aim to answer the 'why'-questions, but rather the 'how'-questions. The scientific method boils down to falsifying hypothesis, and it's a lot easier with 'how does the tide work?' than 'why does the tide work (the way it does)?'.

Science can't say anything about 'Why does anything at all exist rather than not exist?', because there is no way to test any of the answers. So it's left to mythology, religion or philosophy to answer.
Yes, and the rest of us will still wonder why.
In my eyes a very misleading title.

The conclusion is: to solve a problem you need a tool with which you can iterate fast.

The author states that we don't understand we need such tool...
It's not access to networks. It's not doing anything with the opportunity when they do have access. I see this a lot: those who view access as a mere possession go nowhere; those who view access as a means to an end advance. This, in the popular discussions of how to aid the poor, is woefully under-addressed - probably because for all the things you can do for someone (and feel good about doing), the one critical core factor is self-motivation: you can't make someone do what they need to for their own good.

This nation provides tremendous access to networks and other opportunities for the poor. Maybe not unlimited access to the top networks from the bottom (the classic "can't afford Harvard" red herring), but there is more than enough access to get out of poverty. The funding is there, the doors are open, the paths are clear, assistance is eager - but if someone won't take the steps that only they themselves can take, they won't get anywhere.

I see stark examples of this over and over. It's not lack of access, it's lack of personal motivation.
> There are several ways one could model language, from a top down purely statistical approach that Norvig likes, something in the middle which Chomsky proposes, to a bottom up neural model of chemical interactions.

Yeah, I was just trying to take a step back (and maybe I was too OT, I agree), but at some point we should start asking ourselves more fundamental questions. Anyway, this discussion is way over my head, I'm just glad that HN users think there's an answer for everything, is like Godel or Kant have never written anything in their entire lives.
No, where did you get that from? I am suggesting that there are other countries where it is required to hold on the paper copy of certain documents for tax purposes.
Things are never easy, when you start to break things down to the atomic level.

For example, if my wife were to commit a crime, they'd take her away from me without giving me any kind of hearing to protect my interests in her. And believe me, my interest in her is much stronger than in any domain name, or a car.

The only difference in this hypothetical is that she, being human, gets to have her own hearing. But with inanimate objects (or intangibles), there's not even an obligation to give the object a hearing.

Disclaimer once again: I disagree with my own logic here, I'm just trying to play devil's advocate, illustrating the course that an argument might take.
> What makes you think that somebody's going to actually read the site's warning (...)? If they don't already care enough about web privacy issues, they're not going to take the time to read about them now.

If what you say is correct (that users don't care), they'll just click on Accept, right? And you have their consent. You've given them the option to make an informed choice. Your duty has been performed.

> Third, the regulation completely forbids a potential business model built around targeted advertising.

It forbids potential business models built around targeted advertising not based on visitor knowledge and consent (so it forbids business models that wilfully violate the privacy of site visitors without their knowledge, and without their consent). Again, if users don't care (as you point out), the gaining of consent isn't going to be an issue, so these business models will retain their viability.

So given your statement that users don't care about third party tracking or profiling, none of what you outline are really issues.
Chomsky's one paragraph quote at the beginning of this article is more clear and thoughtful than the rest of this. I feel the author's missing the point.

In the case of language, observing and reporting statistical probabilities in written/spoken language output does very little to explain the cognitive systems used in acquiring and using language. Even one statistical anomaly serves to show that statistical learning is NOT the entire picture when it comes to language development.

There was another article on HN a while back that had another great quote from Chomsky that does well to illustrate what I feel is his main point here: "Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim; nor does it fail to establish the fact". Creating a computer that can produce millions of grammatical utterances does little to show that we understand language systems. Now, if a computer could - like humans - learn to produce infinite, novel, contextual, and meaningful grammatical utterances, that's a different story. But that story will take a lot more than statistical learning to write.
Pitchie: Getting Started
Pitchie (UK startup) tells us what they're actually working on.
My bad, I misread your comment as "It took 15 tries to land on the moon".
> In this context, an undervalued IPO every once in a while is more like a perk to a valued customer -- it's the equivalent of the bouquet of flowers or bottle of wine a company might send to a regular Joe.

Yes, but that perk is paid for by LinkedIn.
Coroutine stack switching doesn't need assembler in many C implementations:
http://fanf.livejournal.com/105413.html?nc=6
>but I've never managed to confuse an American cashier by overpaying in some complicated way in order to get fewer coins in change.

You have better luck than me. I have an issue nearly every time I do this in the states. I always just smile and say "type it into the machine and you'll see".
"With many of them you risk violence, drugs, abuse, sexual abuse, racism, etc."

This modern bugbear of racism is getting ridiculous. Did you really just equate "racism" with sexual abuse? What does racism even mean anymore? Is it only institutional discrimination, e.g. the refusal of the publicly funded government to hire some races? That's where it started. Now, you can be a racist if you have a type you prefer to date that doesn't suit the whims of your accuser.

Way to not "risk racism."
> First, you're forcing anyone with a web presence that currently has cookies (and that's probably most of us) to spend time and developer resources addressing this -- time that we could spend really servicing our customers.

I don't accept your premise that "most of us" are using cookies.

In any case, many sites don't need cookies or similar technologies at all, and most of those that do only need them for session data like whether a user is logged in or what is in their shopping cart. Such use is exempt from these new regulations anyway.

I find it interesting that you have such a strong view about regulations that require some trivial effort on the part of legitimate businesses, while at the same time having no problem with a business model that is fundamentally built on harassing all users and making their browsing experience worse. How is your position not hypocritical?

> You're preventing people from doing business one way not because it's wrong, but simply because you find it distasteful.

While you, on the other hand, are suggesting there is nothing wrong with a busines model based on practices that consumers widely dislike but currently cannot do anything about.

The reason we have consumer protection laws is precisely so consumers win and abusive businesses lose in this sort of situation, and while I question the details of these new regulations, I see nothing wrong with the principle behind them.
Amazon opens Mac software store with downloads
>> But for others, it's because they have some sort of vision for how they want to change an industry or society; and they want to leave a legacy of having done so, not just make money.

Absolutely, and if that is the prime motivation then they should start a charity not a business. It's more tax-efficient for starters, and also more likely to attract like-minded people to contribute resources (time and/or money).

Open-Source projects for example are often clearly "not for profit" and incorporate, or align themselves with not-for-profit structures. The FSF, Mozilla foundation and a score of others spring to mind.

For the small businessmen you know, who do not care about the money (beyond their salary), who are out to build a legacy, they _should not_ use a business structure. If they do, well that still doesn't make them a "business".

If they're aiming to start from scratch, and create a giant business, so they have "succeeded" (think Hewlett, Packard, Johnson, Ford et al) then that creation still serves the needs of the owner - those needs are just not cash. It might be good for customers along the way, but the business exists for the owners' glory, not the customers.

Of course the vast majority of small businesses are absolutely, 100%, businesses. A small business may fit a person better than a big business, but it's still a business. If you take away the money aspect from most small businesses, they close their doors.

It's exactly like the OP said - the business exists to fulfill the needs of the owner and the team (if there is a team). Those needs are usually cash, but include other things like flexible hours, and not-having-a-boss and so on. When the needs of the customer clash with the needs of the business, the business always wins.

And of course there are _bad_ business people out there. There are those that will take calls at 1am because the customer demands it (so they say) but they don't place a value on it, or require the customer to pay that value. That's bad business, and of course it's very common. But you can't use that as a data point for arguing that businesses exist for the benefit of customers. Some owners even use their relative lack of success as evidence of their altruism. In which case recommend to them that they start a charity, get a board to oversee their salary, and get out of the way.
A similar example. Suppose you wanted to be an investor in a private company. In many localities you actually can't invest unless you have a certain level of net worth (something I've personally had to deal with at various levels of frustration until I just decided to found my own company).

Everybody says the way to become wealthy is to let money make money for you, but you can find yourself locked out of most of the opportunities where that might happen at a growth percentage to be interesting simply because you don't start with enough money to get in the game.
As a counter point, I have used ActiveMQ for a pub/sub architecture and it worked great (millions of messages a day, which was benchmarked as only about 10% of potential on a single broker). We did treat it as an API rather than a deployable component though. We wrapped the broker in our own service architecture (you can instantiate a broker like any POJO) and disabled persistency. Queues were used only very lightly. So maybe we dodged a bullet there... :-).
As with most client interactions, this could go really well, or really poorly, depending on the client.

I think it also matters what the goal is. If you're doing back-end work that the client can't really see, I doubt it will be useful at all. If you're designing the user interface and experience, I think this would be invaluable.
I am ashamed, but part of the reason I read HN is for the tl;dr comments...
Thanks for letting me know. It works well for me in Chrome for OSX (11.0.696.71), also tested on Windows 7. What version are you using it on?

Thanks for providing some more info.
I'm with you. Making Vim look pretty involves adding ":color <whatever>" to your .vimrc. Making Emacs look pretty involves installing color-theme, hopefully compiling it so it doesn't take forever to load, editing your .emacs.d/init.el since you can't customize that via customize-apropos (AFAIK), and so on. Likewise, I'm with you that the default regex implementation is...surreal, at best. Having reb-re-syntax be 'string should be the default.

On the bright side, look at what we're discussing here: the default regex syntax and pretty colors. Compare that to about five years ago, when we'd be instead discussing how to compile Emacs in a way that had fricking TrueType font support. Emacs has come a long way.
Interview with kid who learnt several languages to sell his goods
Can't we all just ignore it? What are they going to do? Send us all to prison?!

The law is based on consent. Social Contract. All of that...
Fair enough. No harm done.
> do we really need "tl;dr" type comments here on Hacker News

Yes we do. They serve to save people time.
Wow, I hope this is not the first comment I see here because of upvotes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
Hack the Dream: Control, Natural Consequences and Grace
Please Remember Our Veterans This Weekend
I can't speak for HN, but I appreciate them. It's nice to see what other people get out of the articles. Usually the discussions here are more interesting than the article so it also allows me to understand what everyone is talking about without having to read sometimes lengthy articles.
From the article it describes the assembly programmer as an: "experienced assembly developer"

From the article it describes the ADA programmer as: "This developer had very limited Ada experience, having written only one Ada program, consisting of approximately 5000 lines of code, while working for a previous employer."

One of the key points of the article is that the code produced by the inexperienced ADA developer beat the experienced Assembly developer. I think a lot of people will struggle with this (because they think "well, logically the code gets turned into assembly anyway when it is compiled, so a sufficiently advanced assembly programmer _must_ be at least as good as a compiler), but the same claims (high level languages beating assembly) have been floating around for years.

In this case study at least, jumping straight to assembly (for size/performance reasons) turned out to be a premature optimisation of the sort we should avoid.
He came to the startling realization that people
were solving the wrong problem. “The problem is,” he
said, “that we don’t understand the problem.”

I don't see how the title follows from what MacCready said or did.

Not understanding the problem and solving the wrong problem are 2 very distinct things.
W3C officially opens HTML5 to scrutiny
If you can find a solution it’s no longer a paradox. Paradoxes are defined† as un-answerable. Whoever created the paradox made a mistake and merely created something that looks like a paradox.

“Paradox” is just a word. There is nothing special about something being a paradox (except that paradoxes are cool to think about).

†That’s at least a common definition. That’s where I’m getting such crazy ideas like “paradoxes have no answer.” You are free to define “paradox” some other way. Be assured that it was never my intention to claim that the definition I used is in some sense the true definition. Definitions are all about communication (you need to agree on definitions in order to be able to talk to each other), not tools for finding the truth.
I was taught Ada95 by John McCormick, who wrote several textbooks on Ada.

Though I can't claim any professional experience, lots of my college education was straight from DoD/Navy expats who wrote military software.

There are lots of firms in the midwest that write this kind of software. John Deere, Lockheed, etc.
This essay made me think: Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/tiki/la+lojban.+mo), among constructed languages, is the categorial language par excellence. Every word has a well-defined range of meaning; the grammar can be parsed by the same kinds of parsers used for programming languages; potential sources of ambiguity, like plural references, associativity of modifiers, and negation, have been rigorously (or tediously, depending on how you roll) nailed down.

Can there be such a thing as a conlang that demonstrates the ideal statistical grammar and semantics? (“All the words in this list are 60% likely to be used as nouns and 40% likely to be used as verbs....” But in the absence of a pre-existing linguistic community, how could you get students of the language to use them in the right proportions?)
Grokster image - Top most influential music sites (photos) - CNET News
Humans are capable of using echo location.
It sounds to me like no one is going to remember you at all. Are you working for your own company? If not it sounds like your whole life is nothing more than making some rich people even richer. If you are remembered at all, it will be for being the miserable person with no life who was literally at work every day. You'll make a great anti-role model.
.NET is not Java, and things that are a good idea in Java are not always a good idea in .NET. Then again, I don't think it would make for a very good JVM tool, either. Hard-coded compiler paths. Assumption of Windows as a platform--come on, that's easy to avoid, and close to inexcusable with the existence of Mono. How does this even consume basic GAC resources without a defined reference somewhere?

The code smells, too. If you don't pass in a command-line argument it's going to barf with an exception. WTF?

Meh--I guess I just don't see the point. If you want to "STFU and code" (what a miserable attempt at a catchphrase), shouldn't you have something that actually works? If I want to "STFU and code" isn't it likely that I might dare to want System.Drawing?

Does the dude not know about msbuild/xbuild or something?
Craft engaging personas for UX design using Smurfs. Not as crazy as it sounds.
I hadn't known much about Ada other than that it's very old (as programming languages go) and it has a kind of nonspecific bad reputation, but I looked it up on Wikipedia and it actually doesn't look like an unpleasant language at all from the article. I particularly like its built-in message-passing system for concurrency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)#Conc...

On projects like this I would worry more about accumulated technical debt from decades of modification than the language they're written in. (I suppose the language can complicate the task of hiring programmers who are skilled with its idiosyncrasies, but that's hardly an insurmountable or crippling problem.)
Hmm... could this open up some kind of anti-trust suit since only Apple is able to have an app store on iOS?
How hard is to port software written for OSX to GNUstep?
The ridiculous part was picking one word out of a very thoughtful post (and one written as a first person account, not conjecture) and attacking that rather than the overall point. The first time I read his story I didn't even notice that he had mentioned racism in it, it was largely immaterial.

But quoting only that part makes it sound like he is blaming racism as the cause for poverty, which he clearly isn't.

If I had a penny for every time I heard something to the effect of 'if only poor people stopped complaining/blaming racism and started pulling themselves out of poverty, there would be no more poverty', I'd have enough to help people get out of poverty.

Although I guess there is no point in arguing with throw-away accounts.
That's what I meant about "without parachutes" - that they couldn't use them without atmosphere.
Hmm, looks interesting. How did you set that up? Pretty much http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-jekyll.html ?