skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no guarantee that the Kolmogorov complexity of any interesting system will fit inside the rational parts of our heads. There pretty much is a guarantee that we will not be able to fully understand our own brains, using our brains; the part of our brain that can understand things is just dwarfed by the size of the rest of it. (We really do quite a lot with not very many free neurons.) Even if there is a generative theory that can explain human speech in less bits than a direct lookup table, there's no guarantee we can find it, and the null hypothesis must be that we won't because there is no such theory.

We should look for it, but we should not expect to find it.
> Why, if speech is simply a reaction to statistics we are tracking and behaviours that have been rewarded, would the first utterances have been made?

Why not? Look at it from the bottom up:

Communication is a fundament of life, from intra-cellular to inter-cellular to inter-organism interactions (another fundament is the ability to keep oneself in a low entropy state, at the expense of the rest of the world).

Human speech is an evolution of mammal communication. It grew up in complexity, from grunts and other basic noises, along with our way of living, up to what we have now.

> And how do we make completely novel utterances that attempt to express our otherwise abstract thoughts?

Speech is a big collage. New is either the result of

* a recombination of the sub-parts of past speech

* the definition of a new word in terms of older words, or sometimes arbitrarily (for proper nouns).

Nothing fancy AFAICT.
If they're your employer's trade secrets or intellectual property, they aren't. If you memorize a particularly interesting C function one of your coworkers writes, that's in your head too. But your company paid for that function, a notion you accepted when you signed your employment contract.

My point being, oversimplifying the issue by saying [pp] "I guess we don't own what's in our own heads" doesn't really move the discussion forward.
Nerdy office klout competition
nothing like having a social media influence competition in your office. Winner takes all.
It would be nice to know who those employers are so people don't waste time interviewing with them. Asking a prospective employee to be your friend on Facebook is a sneaky way of asking illegal interview questions. Federal and many state laws prohibit asking about race, marital status, place of birth, etc.
The Native Google products are far and few between. They are the Mountain View Raiders. Sometimes they buy a company, other times they buy the developers. For example even Chrome was created by ex FireFox developers. It's just that Mozilla is too weak and too dependent on Google's revenue to put up a fight.

In the payment business it's often the relationship with the merchants and processors, understanding how they work is even more important than the code or even the hardware. People are key in that business.

Forget about the industrial espionage, just hire a person who knows all the trade secrets. If PayPal and Google were a country there would be dead bodies on the streets of San Francisco.
Schwatz, Plausch, Plauderei, Tratsch? And as we're getting very informal here, local dialects take over. Which is one of the reason why "small talk", sounding a bit more high-brow, was so easily adopted.
I have the strangest feeling I'm probably feeding the troll, but...

Why would you bother with CPU switching and such when you could just install an old fashioned microphone? If you were actually inclined to eavesdrop, it seems like hardware-subverting your PC is a lot more expensive and fragile than software or a specialty purpose bug elsewhere in the room.
Mandatory function arguments:

function foo($arg1,$arg2) { return; }
foo('bar');

Warning: Missing argument 2 for foo()

Lame. But omitting arg2 is allowed if you give it a default value:

function foo($arg1,$arg2=FALSE) { return; }

Blah. Instead I'd rather make arg2 truly optional just by testing if it's defined.
Note that this does not import your friends' EMAIL ADDRESSES. Might be just be, but I find the pitch a little bit deceptive: to me, "Friends to Gmail" implies that you can subsequently email those friends.
Good job I spotted this as I had no idea the Translate API was being shut off in December. Just spent a looong time working this into something - gah. I assume the deprecation message must have been up some time (> 6 months)? Maybe I see what I want to see!

Funnily enough, the same project also uses the Feedburner API, which will be axed too.
Another Dutchie in the UK here. Your experiences sound very familiar. People passing me in my office would mumble a quick "heyyoualrighthowyoudoing", and I would stand still and say something like "yeah I'm good! How are you doing today?" They'd be terrified.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what modern generative linguistics is all about (to be fair, it is extremely widespread). The aim of this branch of science is expressly not to "learn to produce and interpret varied utterances" (called E-language in the jargon), but to understand the cognitive processes behind the production and interpretation of utterances (called I-language). Now you may agree or disagree with the methods and assumptions used in the pursuit of this goal, but it is patently unfair to accuse the field of failing to do something it never set out to do.
Does anyone know of a resource that lists theaters based on projection and sound quality? I'd like to find out which theaters in Manhattan are worth going to.
things about php that make me sad:

1. it exists

2. it's used

3. many of its users make more money than me

4. it has poisoned the market, clients have learned to expect and even demand php-braindeath
I see this as a feature. (I'd never thought I come around to defend PHP. Issue #21 has bitten me in practice.)
Most Dutch people I've met in the US seemed rather cynical. They were all quite likable and I enjoyed spending time with them but the way you interpret "how are you doing" makes me wonder if I was just wrongly interpreting them. It always made me wonder if they were unhappy people.
Goddamn, that last sentence is a profound statement. I see it happen around me over and over again. Very well said.
Also dont forget to ask for a picture of their wife, of the employer/interviewer. They may tell you its not work-related, but a profile of you is related to the position, you tell them you want to know how the wife looks since thats related to who and what type of interviewer/employer you are getting. Before they kick you out, ask if his daughters have good teeth and/or boobs.
Simple text editor = simple + powerful
Emacs = complex + powerful
Lisp = simple + powerful
Blub = complex + powerful

Given this your association doesn't make much sense.

I think most people prefer simple + powerful. And this isn't black and white - Blub can often be simpler for X simple task. However the real yard stick is whether as your problem domain gets more complex does Blub suddenly lose its veneer of simplicity?

I always bring up Alan Kay in these kind of threads but his observations are always so damn salient - agglutinative PLs (features) vs style PLs (simple principles).
Concise. Documented, standard and configurable handling of existing variables (may be used for default values etc.) via EXTR_OVERWRITE, EXTR_SKIP, etc. Documented, standard behavior of compact() in regard to missing variables. No manual associating of foo with $foo -- less places for mundane errors.

Oh, and there's even that EXTR_IF_EXISTS -- so my silly idea to sanitize with array_intersect_keys() was totally unneeded. Make it

$foo = 123;
$bar = getSomeBar();
$coot = 'boot';
myFunc(compact('foo', 'bar', 'coot'));

function myFunc($kwargs) {
$foo = 1;
$bar = 'xyz';
extract($kwargs, EXTR_IF_EXISTS); /* sanitization: $coot will NOT get extracted
because the function doesn't expect / support that argument */
...
}
Comb Over Charlie - Air 2.6 cross platform performance
What any startup can learn from Starbucks
Ask HN: about coffee
- Do you drink coffee? How much and why?
- What effects does it have on you?
- Did you know that over 50% of Americans drink between 3-4 cups a day?

Personally I find it can work wonders when I need to squeeze out some work I really don't feel like doing... But I don't rely on it, I always try and take a few days to a week to detox once in a while. Also I'm a little concerned how it's affecting my weightlifting.
But it's not as if Lodsys doesn't know this.

I doubt they'll say "oh, my bad" and walk away now. They have a reason for sending these letters to small dev shops, knowing full well Google and Apple have licensed their patents, and we really haven't seen what that reason is yet.

What is really going on here????
A simple statistical model is probably not the only thing human infants are using when they learn language. Linguists make a pretty good case that there must be some structure in-place for infants to acquire language robustly, quickly, and with the kinds of noisy input (overheard speech) they have to work with.

It's not my field so I can't give examples off the top of my head, but the argument involves rapid acquisition of syntax and near-complete absence of errors that you'd expect to see in a simple statistical model.
Thanks for your clojure work. I'm using a lot of your stuff and I am grateful you take the time to write and release it.

"In the mean time, the link to package.el for Emacs 23 is right at the top of marmalade-repo.org: http://bit.ly/pkg-el23

You know that, but nothing on the page indicates it. In fact, that page leads me to believe it is the same version as tromey.com hosts. It isn't made clear that marmalade is a fork rather than an additional repository.

Plus that package.el does not integrate (or include instructions on how to integrate) with Emacs the same way the one from tromey.com does when you run the code on http://tromey.com/elpa/install.html
This horse has been beaten, mutilated, and buried.
IMO this is the best quote from the article, and pretty much gets to the heart of it:

The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry ... is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

---

In other words, as I read it: create content which is meaningful to you and engages your passions, then publish it.
Amy Winehouse Buys Booze on the Way to Rehab | NEWS 365
What would the ideal language return for your function call foo('bar'). It would seem to me that missing an argument should return some sort of notice, like in the case where someone else is using it.
I really don't mind this, I have more more control because of it. If I want the function to error out upon arg omissions, I will demand arguments.

If I don't require args: function foo($arg1=null, $arg2=null) {return;}
foo(); // return no error

This is great for me, when I am writing an API and have some args that are required and others that are optional.
Such a luxury is not available to most people who are desperately trying to pay the bills without being buried under a mountain of debt
I taught myself GWBasic on an old computer, and wrote awful spaghetti code. I actually wrote a game where every map square had twelve lines of code "Print '....XX...X....X'" that would together print what that piece of the world map looked like. The allowed line numbers went up to 65,535, and as I was planning the game I planned out how I would use all of them.

Then I learned Pascal, in high school, and learned basic things like procedures and local variables. With that, I learned that you should never have to do anything more than once. Everything I subsequently learned was basically technique for following this rule.
But isn't that a testament to Farmville rather than Facebook?

My grandma is on Facebook because I am and others she knows are. This is ultimately what sustains Facebook's success: The network effect. It's the "cool" thing to do. It's where everybody is, so you need to be.

Despite that, the network effect is very volatile. It's not something you can easily sustain. MySpace was where everybody was at one point too.

Facebook is fooling themselves if they think privacy isn't one of the areas they need to innovate.
I would suggest getting the "Camel in Action" book from Manning. I always find that it's better to learn something that has real implementation behind it - you see the theory, now here's the code to do it.
EU Cookie Legislation - Opinion of a UK Web Developer
am I the only one who finds it ridiculous that a guy who has never had a real job, who drops out of college, has no family of his own presumes to understand the importance of privacy?
Yes. Though Matlab has gotten massively better in recent years. It's just that the defaults, for backwards compatibility are still The Wrong Thing (TM). Look at function handles, and cells for string handling.
Ask HN: Small Business Accounting Solutions?
Hi, I'm looking for a web service or desktop based accounting solution for a one person business with clients, customer relationships, etc. Nothing too fancy needed, just something that works.
Getting started with Script#
While a couple look mildly interesting, they are hardly going to 'fry' anyone's mind.
Dear God, I don't recognise a single one of those. But what about people from areas that might have local slang but don't have a dialect, like Niedersachsen or (bits of) the Rhineland? And what about the university attending classes, who are much more likely to become free-floating German instead of being rooted to anyplace particular?
As long as financial disaster is "unavoidable", he'll continue to make the only "smart" choice and immediately spend the little money that he does have before he loses that, too.

I think this is a great insight into why making sound decisions and delaying gratification seems to be such a problem for him and many people stuck in an endless cycle of bring poor.
Not really. Modafanil seems to work better and have fewer side effects.
I hate PHP, but this article isn't very good. It's strange that there is an "implications for the internals" reason. Guess what, you can just read the internals. It's open source.

The parser emits weird error messages because it is a very simple yacc grammar. (And because they turn off yacc's "produce better error messages" mode.) If you want good error messages, it's going to cost you -- just read perl's toke.c if you don't believe me. Good error messages cost a lot.
Try out xiki (http://xiki.org) its a wrapper on top of emacs that adds a bunch of shortcuts, and its built using el4r so all the extensions are ruby based.
Anonymous Takes Down U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Supporter Websties
I totally understood your intention and agree. I didn't mean to recharacterize your comment as saying that college and internships were just a place to meet people with money; I meant to add that they were also maybe the best place to meet people with money.
Are you serious? You can't figure out why this is?

Seems logical to me. These defenders are presumably professional PHP developers. They're presumably supporting their families by coding PHP. The more widely-spread the language is, the more it's used for new projects, the more lucrative and interesting their work will be.

And here you are, making a fuss, and many of these people may know ONLY PHP. And you're trying to argue that their most valuable skill should be put on the trash heap.

That's why THEY fight so hard: They're feeding themselves with the language.

Now, why do YOU fight so hard against them?
Your definition of design includes style, since style can (and often is) a solution to a problem as well. Not everything is wireframes and usability, and this is coming from someone who's first book on the job was Jakob Nielsen's.

Ever read Blink? Or those studies about how people make an unconscious decision about a website in less than a second?

Style and polish expresses a level of quality (at the very least) and can also communicate the type of site. Is this a kid-friendly Disney site? Is it a serious financial tool? Is it a mysterious stealth mode startup?
Get static map images for your next html5 geolocation application
Interesting.
For what it's worth, I plan to give Emacs another go pretty soon here, but I'll be sticking with Common Lisp. I'm kind of done my courting period with Clojure.
How does scala make this more confusing?

Either the types that are returned are scala collections, or they're java collections. If you want to treat java collections like scala collections you can always `import JavaConversions._` and huzzah, shallow conversions and collection uniformity.

Finally, if something has the possibility of being null, you can use the option construct, e.g.

if (Option(someListThatMightBeNull).getOrElse(List()).isEmpty) { ... }

Or more likely:

Option(someListThatMightBeNull) match {
case Some(list) => // do something...
case None => // do something else...
}

More than likely if you're dealing with scala libs, things that can be "null" are returning options anyway.
Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg [Malcolm Gladwell in 1999 on Networking]
Sorry but this is nonsense.
"a pointer is just data that tells you where something is." Once I had that thought, programming was just so simple in concept.

Second one was when I realized that there are a shitton of libraries for doing things. Until then I just didn't realize it, I don't know why. Once this happened I just understood the beauty of abstraction, toolage, and code reuse.

The final one is when I realized that my code is only awesome if my co-worker can take it over 100% and not hit me with a baseball bat. Funny story, good lesson.
public/protected/private is a dumb idea in dynamic languages. If you don't want someone calling your method, prefix it with an underscore and say "the results are undefined if you call methods that start with an underscore". Done. Easier to maintain, easier to test, less code to type in.

Come to think of it... public/protected/private is a dumb idea in C++ and Java, too.
"you could say that all other web platforms are blub because they don't see the value that PHP brings to the table."

I do not recall at any point in Beating the Averages [1] in which pg used "ease of installation" as part of the definition of a blub language.

Blub has a specific meaning. It's not a synonym for "bad".

There are plenty of other technologies that are as reliable as PHP. Ruby was not really one of them. Ruby went through a bad hype cycle a couple of years ago and was never quite as good as it was sold to be, especially on the reliability front. It's a great anecdote but a bad argument.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
I follow the structure of your argument. Going with autos, Detroit's move away from low-margin compact cars enabled Toyota to make Lexus. Let's grant this as true. But does it imply that sticking with low-margin compact cars would have protected their market for luxury cars? What if--like Windows 7 so far--they failed to make significant headway with the low-margin compact cars? What if they lost time and management attention trying to do so much?

Or what if someone else--Hyundai or Kia, for example--beat them hollow on low-margin cars while Toyota moved upmarket and beat them on luxury cars anyways?

This is why I'm not sure that Windows 7 is the right move. I can see they are in trouble in mobile, but I can't see that Windows 7 is the right thing to do. It would be nice if they could gain a dominant position, but a lot of things would be nice.
Signs, Symptoms And Treatment For Pulmonary Tuberculosis
This is as minimum as an MVP can get. Why not spend some time with google api and import the email addresses directly? Here's one way to do it. http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/2.0/developers_gui...

Saving the contacts as a csv file is an add-on feature.
In exactly the same way that a brick and mortar store which happens to sell software can be called an app store, yes.
The Future of Memory Technology
Not only does Microsoft make more on Android than Windows Phone, they probably make more per Android phone than Google does.
Young and restless in Spain as jobless rate soars
I am glad that this sort of error is much harder to make in statically typed languages like Haskell.
Schools struggle to recover amid years of cuts
Could Lead Abatement Reduce Social Problems?
i thought this was a pretty mediocre post, it just had a few tips about how to improve your landing pages (pretty well-known ones too).

I'm calling shenanigans on the 352 votes, but I'm all ears to anyone who can explain why i'm wrong and what I missed.
I went to the site, but my spider sense immediately started tingling.
DNS filtering: absolutely the wrong way to defend copyrights
It has been that way for decades though, engineers are taught that if you come up against a similar problem that you have already solved for a previous company it is ethically wrong to give your solution to the new company.

I find it weird but it is understandable from a competition point of view. If it wasn't this way you would probably see a lot more eager competitive hiring for opposing companies in order to gain an edge.
You don't get it.

In my mind the important thing about "blub" is that there's a valuable feature a language has and the blubbers don't understand the valuable feature.

For instance, ALGOL-type languages use Chomsky's generative grammar to define a syntax that people find intuitive. LISP is blub because it rejects this major innovation.

Languages that are !PHP are blub because they don't recognize that "ease of installation" is a valuable feature.
Just What You Needed: Higher Taxes
> It's WAY more useful than "Illegal operation" or "Syntax error".

Wut.

"Syntax error on line 14" -- Okay, time to look at line 14 for a mistyped semicolon or something. These two words Mean Something.

"Unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM on line 14" -- means absolutely nothing unless you've already looked it up. It's essentially easily-googleable nonsense. It might as well say "Error 0x444F808E". You can google that, too, and it also tells you nothing useful.
Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures
Curious if you have a source of information that confirms that Google also has a license or agreement with either Lodsys or at least with Intellectual Ventures?

Edit: nevermind. They claim that both Microsoft and Google are both licensed for "their nameplate products and services", but again state that 3rd parties are not licensed.

So far no one has asked this, or speculated on it, but it’s a logical question for a business that has created applications on multiple platforms. _Google is licensed_ for its nameplate products and services. Also, _Microsoft is licensed_ for their nameplate products and services.

http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/q-what-about-other-oper...
The kind of intellectual cynicism you describe is often a prerogative and mode of those highly educated in the sciences, and therefore of a very small majority of humans generally, who otherwise in my experience do tend to think of themselves as agents free of statistical determinations and as having wills and minds rather than cogs of any sort.
Aussie student finds cosmos missing mass
I still prefer something like "illegal scope operator"
through the ancient and acceptable right of force-of-arms...

And that's exactly how the Communists, in turn, came to own it.
Programming languages are tools. Some tools are better than others, some are better for certain situations. For all non-contractors, no one is forcing you to write in one language over another (or stay employed at a php shop).

It seems like the only point of having threads like this is for the leet programmers to look down on php. What's the point? This isn't constructive, its condescending and back-patting.

(the reason this makes me mad is that the sadness list is just a bunch of minor gripes. Every language has minor problems. PHP has fundamental flaws and that causes sadness, not this crap.)