skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>So by the intuitive explanation we can make this single line any dimension that we want.

And if this makes sense in the given context - sure, why not?

You seem to be missing my point. What I'm saying is that it's useless to have totally generalized abstractions (outside of pure math) since more often than not, they are so far removed from reality that most people can no longer make any connection to use cases.

My entire argument is that there's a heavy communication failure between mathematicians and scientists of every other field where math is used as a tool. Sure, it's convenient for a mathematicians to be able to use shorthand gibberish to talk to other mathematicians. It doesn't justify pushing this jargon on other fields.

Besides which, convenience is no excuse for making something hard to understand. Sure it's convenient to name all your variables in a program a, b, c etc but you're going to get lynched by any programmer that tries to read your code later, including yourself.

When it comes to a point where gibberish becomes the only way to explain mathematical abstractions, then you should step back and ask yourself "where the hell did this go wrong?".

>This isn't just a problem within mathematics. For a simple programming example:[...]

I believe in giving simple explanations and expanding them whenever there's a loophole that needs to be fixed. You don't make programs that cover every single niche use case, either (if you don't have to, that is). That's the problem with math - the generalizations, while useful in math itself, are sheer overkill in many situations outside of math.

Lastly, sorry taking this out of order, but:

>An isolated concept is worthless.

So is a generalized abstraction without any context. I'm saying that the sweet spot is somewhere in between for most people to understand and apply concepts, and that it's better to generalize upwards from reality and actual use cases instead of starting utterly removed from reality and trying to apply the generalizations downwards.
I use it several times a day too. Uses cases where it's superior to hunting and pecking is...

Grabbing temperature information before stepping outside, Setting an alarm, Asking Siri to text X friend when driving, Ask Siri for my bank balance while driving to a store & Ask Siri to play iTunes music while driving.

Other uses though not everyday but two or more times a week are..

Ask her for directions when driving or when Im a passenger, Ask her to search the web for X topic & Talking to her while driving for fun to chase time away.

To me this is trans-formative tech and it needs to be built into our cars.
Yeah, my point wasn't so much that there are not exceptions, but that there are frequent patterns in the English language.

Rather than throwing up your hands in defeat and saying, "The English language is totally inconsistent; the only way to learn it is to memorize each arbitrary word form," the key is to familiarize yourself with these patterns so that at a minimum you can make a better guess next time.

Hopefully, WA learned today not just that the plural of "life" is "lives" but that, in general, when a noun ends in -f or -fe it usually changes to -ve. So if tomorrow he sees a sign that says "5 loaves of bread for $1" it won't catch him off guard like the title of this submission did.
This presents a very thorny language design problem. Lists have this very nice property that they are ordered, which lets you attach implied semantics to the position of an element, e.g.:

(defun foo (a b c) ...)

We know this is a function defining because the symbol DEFUN is in the FIRST position of the list.

Associative arrays are unordered, so you have to explicitly label everything:

{ top-level-form : defun, arguments : { 1 : a, 2 : b, 3 : c }, ... }

Or something like that. You can see where that would get annoying.

Exercise for the reader: what happens if you base a Lisp-like language on vectors instead of cons cells?
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There are often too many applicants to spend more than 5-10 minutes looking at any one person's resume and open source projects. I usually spend a few minutes on the resume looking for interesting projects or relevant work experience, and then a few minutes looking at an applicant's GitHub page (if it's provided).

Things I look at on a GitHub page:

- # of projects that are not forks. The person might have done a lot of work on the forks, but it's too time-consuming to figure out what code is theirs and what code is pulled from someone else.

- The nature of the projects. Are they mostly trivial ("My .bashrc file") or awesome ("In-memory distributed search engine with replication")?

- Whether the person has good documentation skills. I look at a few sample commit messages, project README files, docs within a few random source files, etc.

- Good coding skills: decent style, no red flags in terms of quality, well-polished code, decent error-handling, etc.

From my perspective, a bad job on open source projects is a red flag, a good job can really help you distinguish yourself, and anything else doesn't significantly help or hurt your application.
(cranky

You know, we have the upvote arrow for things that excite you, and the “Go read something else and comment on it” feature for things that don’t float your boat.

Clearly this is not spam and it is not off-topic. So:

You asked the OP and/or your fellow HNers why they upvoted this onto the front page. I ask you, why this comment, what value does it add to my life to read about how smart and educated you are?

What about all the people who haven’t seen an implementation of McCarthy’s Lisp? Do they not deserve to find this interesting? Should they turn in their HN accounts and head over to reddit?

I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff. Yet I find this interesting. Is there something wrong with me?

)
The DMCA was a whole bundle of legislation, and some of its effects were highly desirable -- in particular the safe harbor provisions. Without those[1] sites like youtube could never have existed.

You can read about the various portions of it on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...

Title I includes the anti-circumvention measures, which is what everyone loves to hate, but the act as a whole deals with a lot of other stuff. (Title V deals with copyright and boat hull designs, for instance!)

[1]Or something stronger, tis not like it was perfect!
server: http://github.com/seejohnrun/haste-server
client: http://github.com/seejohnrun/haste-client

more info: http://hastebin.com/about.md
No, there's a lot of parsing happening. It's just that you're using (part of) the Javascript parser to do it.
The last Mythbusters episode put Monty Hall to the test and passed. I have to say it was the first time I truly understood why Monty Hall works.
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The worse use of email: having automated build and test systems email every little status change and hiccup. I would much rather have a web app with a concise status/warning, etc. display. On the other hand, I like to work uninterrupted so I often turn off email clients, Skype, and my cellphone anyway.
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The system messages don't have a close button, they're usually used for important site status updates such as "There will be a short network wide outage starting on date at time for system maintenance".

The use of the tool for memorials to Steve Jobs or for political messages like this is extremely rare.

It's a good thing that you read the status messages. Normally, they're important.
Although some aspects of DMCA aren't bad, I believe this is also the Overton Window[1] in action. I wonder if all this outrage of SOPA might actually allow the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA) to pass "as a compromise".

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
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What's missing in the video is information about what Carrier IQ's application is sending back to them.

For example, if they get called on each keystroke then they may be simply keeping a count of number of key presses and providing that information so they can derive device usage.

The whole thing would be clarified if there was information about what is transmitted. The article states "This video has demonstrated a truly significant volume of information is being recorded." Actually it doesn't demonstrate that, it demonstrates that APIs get called in the Carrier IQ application that contain that information. That's not the same thing as recording or even parsing it.

For example, my antivirus software on my machine gets to see all my files, all my email and all my web browsing. Everything. Doesn't make it evil.
If I drink 5 gallons of water at once I would die. Does it mean I have to constantly think about dangers of water?

Same with privacy. We are nowhere near the levels of government surveillance which are seriously dangerous.

I'd prefer to see less of both.

And I prefer to be rich and work less, not to work a lot and be poor.

So what?

The amount of power that people grant to the government depends on the level of results people expect government to achieve.

The more power people give to the government, the better results government can achieve.

But with power comes an abuse.

So eventually public opinion settles on certain level of government power. You cannot really change that level overall (because crime would go up and public does not want that). But you can change what kind of power government has. You can give government more surveillance power and take away some power to limit people's actions.

The reason why it's possible is that more informed government would be able to accomplish the same positive effect by arresting 1 suspect instead of arresting 10.

Arresting 1 suspect requires 10 times less government ability to limit the freedom of our life.
Therefore we may grant government 10 times less power to mess with our lives by substituting it with better informational awareness of government agencies.

So within that model what would be your choice? Cut surveillance and increase ability of government to interfere with our lives?
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It could be potentially life threatening!!!!!!
Know anywhere I can download those vids from? Streaming is a bit slow from where I am..
Good call. I added issues, so file away. :)
I participated in the recent EFF push for contacting elected representatives regarding SOPA. I customized their pre-packaged letter greatly, adding both my experience and qualifications and expounding on the distrust from the tech industry to SOPA.

The response from my (Republican) Congressman was a form letter telling me I was wrong, and regurgitating a the pro-SOPA talking points.

I've been contemplating a rather severe letter in response, but I haven't gotten to it as I don't believe anything I can say to him will be effective.
Right from the technical details on that page (scroll about 1/3 of the way down):

"Application Permissions: (Help me understand what permissions mean)
Read only access to phone state.
Get information about the currently or recently running tasks: a thumbnail representation of the tasks, what activities are running in it, etc.
Write to external storage.
Open network sockets.
Access information about networks."
UNIX anticipated this long ago: http://www.linuxhaxor.net/?p=787
As a woman engineer, who's a really bad negotiator, I'm not surprised. I know "how" to be better, but I do wilt and get scared when I've gotten an offer - I think only once or twice I've ever made any sort of counter.

I don't know why I don't act in my own best interest though. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some societal element to it, but it really seems strange/weak/victim-ish to blame something external for what really does feel like a personal shortcoming - after all my own sister doesn't seem to have the same sort of "conditioning".

Are there tips out there to help getting over the fear of negotiating? Not really thinking about looking for something else at the moment, but there always seems to be a "next job" out there somewhere.
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It's not an easy fix, but there's been a lot of scholarly work that points to some of the "societal beliefs" you talk about reverse engineering (grad school protip: that reverse engineering is called "deconstructionism" and there's an entire discipline called "gender and women studies" that delves into it ;)). I haven't scanned all the comments yet but I suspect a good number of them call for things like "education" or "coaching" on negotiation -- basically, that "women should ask for more". The thing these solutions overlook is that the root of the problem is socialized, enforced gender roles and there are serious social consequences for women who overstep these boundaries.

An interesting recent study study studied the behavior of women when negotiating for themselves vs negotiating for others. When negotiating for themselves, they exhibited the kinds of behavior in the original link, ending up with salaries far below the men in the study. When they were asked to negotiate for someone else, however, they performed on par with the men. (link: http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/news/item/7223326/Role+of+Gende..., original: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/98/2/256/) And you know that oft-cited study that men think about sex way more than women? Well, they also think about sleep and food at about the same rate.. and way more than women. One way to interpret these results is that women are socialized to think less of their own needs (and to voice them less) -- and this is a societal norm that's heavily enforced with consequences for those who don't toe the line.

Think about how strong women are regarded vs men who exhibit the same behavior. A woman that does what she needs to get what she deserves runs the risk of being called a "bitch" or, at the very least, being thought of as unfeminine. Personally, I find fucking with gender norms an amusing hobby so I don't give a shit about the consequences.. but a lot of women aren't into that ;) Just remember this when thinking about possible solutions -- the root causes are way deeper than the appallingly patronizing "women need to be taught how to negotiate."
The fact is that very rarely do you get the sex and the brains in one package, in both women and cofounders. Learn to manage personalities and balance with your own, then go rule the world. Make sure he is committed to seeing this one idea through before hopping off to the next adventure.
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Yes, JS certainly is that (or comes close), which is the thing I like the most about JS and miss the most in Lisp - so much so that I wrote macros to allow me to use JS-style objects wherever possible. (I don't mean JS-style OO, which I avoid at all costs. Hate "this" and "prototype", love "a.b" and "a[b]".) The benefit of the hashmap for exploratory programming is so great that it raises the question of whether a fully regular/metaprogrammable Lisp could be evolved from it. Not clear if it would be practical, or add anything of value, but if it did it would be interesting.
Nice job shipping your 1.1! I'm always interested to see new developments with this project.
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Also,
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item2427755/?site...
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From a free market perspective, do the women then have a competitive advantage in being hired? (Since the company can get the job done for less). Also, why does the company simply hire at the lower end of the wage level since they can apparently get a lot of women and some men to work for that kind of pay?
Some other tidbits from elsewhere on their site:

Mobile Service Intelligence is the process of analyzing
data from phones to give you a uniquely powerful insight
into mobile service quality and user behavior.
[...]
We know you don't just want data, you want to solve
business problems and identify new business opportunities.
[...]
What's more, the combination of the MSIP and IQ Insight
lets you move seamlessly from broad trend data across
many users, through comparative groups down to diagnostic
data from individual devices. Now, not only can you
identify trends, you have the power to drill down to
specific instances[...]

While I understand the need for QoS metrics, this does seem a bit invasive if you didn't know it was happening.

An apparent example of some metrics they collect: http://www.carrieriq.com/overview/IQInsightExperienceManager...
What is a cap table?
Thank you for this. I slugged through the whole original article and felt like I was being beat up with words.

However, I still fail to comprehend how the "at least one is a boy" quirk maths out to a 1 in 3 chance that his second child is also a boy.

Taken literally, it does. I understand that, in a set of data, GB is different from BG. But for the sake of our comparison, the order the children were born in doesn't matter. We're seeking if the other child is a boy, or not.

In my mind, the bit about it being the younger or older sibling is irrelevant information. We're comparing gender, not age. Regardless of if she is the younger sister, or the older sister, she's still his sister, and therefore not a boy.

I think the introduction of age is convoluting the issue, unnecessarily.

I now standby, ready to be proven wrong. I'd really like to wrap my head around this one, but I must insist that the age information is irrelevant.
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Do tech companies _ever_ negotiate those other parts of the deal? My (limited, admittedly) experience so far is that the answer is "we will under no circumstances negotiate anything but pay in a job offer." (I think I may have even been blackballed at one company recently, which I won't name but I can almost guarantee you've used their product, for asking too many questions about negotiating vacation.)
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Show HN: We enjoy sharing music via YouTube, so we built this app.
True, I shouldn't argue like this. Thanks for pointing out that fallacy.

What I've been trying to convey is that I've come with what I think is a sensible position, and often got responses that ranged from fervent opposition to (very occasionally) verbally violent backlash. Maybe it was just me incorrectly stating my point, though.
You can 1) throw in a suggestion, 2) blindly suggest whatever works for you as the best way, 3) learn about the goals, setup, and knowledge of the user as the first step. The point of the article is: 2) is a mistake.
Does hippie-expand have any real advantages over autocomplete-mode?
It's not as "bad" as the situation in the US, but software patents have been issued in the EU for decades. The question of which software patents are actually valid and enforceable has been giving everyone a headache for just as long.

The European Patent Convention is somewhat ambiguous in its effort to both ban pure software patents, and permit some things that we might think of as software patents, meanwhile each country puts its own unique spin on the issue (the European patent system is not as unified as people sometimes expect), and courts do not always behave consistently.

In a way, it's an even bigger mess than we have in the US, the mess just doesn't get dropped in burning paper bags on doorsteps quite as much.
Very good, I already had a lot of respect for SO now I have a lot more!
Email notifications when someone posts a response to one of your comments. Having to poll and scan the threads link is annoying.
You can make money with amazon affiliates, but it's such a small percentage of the sale. It's much better to come up with your own product or dropship something.

You take on more responsibility but you can also make more money.
I use it everyday when I'm riding my bike: 'Play song x', 'call mom'..
> kitchen, bathroom, fetch water, etc

& smoke! Anyone dares to admit?
To quote Dr. Peter Venkman, "I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! LET'S DO IT!"
A more paternal solution would be mandating equal pay for equal work and enforcing it across genders.

I like the idea of equal pay for equal work, but define "equal work"? In a factory job with quotas and quality control, this is probably pretty obvious, but once you step outside that realm it gets very touchy.

You could easily have two salespeople (and area where results are easy to measure) but where one works more hours and the other still sells substantially more. Are we measuring hours or results? And in sales we at least have a good measure for productivity, in programming it is often hard to measure.

For that matter, how do we define equal pay? I know people that turned down higher paying jobs because they liked some of the less obvious fringe benefits at their current job, such as having long periods on the clock where they could do their homework as long as they were there and ready when called on to work hard and fast. Is the ability to do homework on the clock a form of pay we should be counting? What about having a job where you go on business trips, but you get to go sight seeing in the evenings? Is the sight seeing pay? Someone might pass up more pay to get it. Or the fulfillment from doing a meaningful job instead of chasing money at any cost, or flexible hours.
Raganwald, you pretentious douche:

> I wrote an implementation of Scheme in Java with macros, tail call optimization, lambda hoisting, a bunch of stuff.

Greenspun’s Tenth Law is widely accepted, demonstrations of it in action add nothing of value to the programming community. Furthermore, writing a Scheme in Java is likely to be a project where you learned nothing of interest about Lisp or about Java.

—signed, Nikolai Bourbaki
Thanks for the recommendation. I just bought a copy to see what tips I can pick up.
Very cool :)

What's the battery life like?

I gather input is bluetooth and the side button, output is speaker (buzzer?), display and vibration? If this is the case then I'm sure a few more buttons would be useful, or possibly a basic touchscreen - something along the lines of splitting the screen into four reactive areas, obv not pixel-precision touchscreen as that would be silly.

Great product at a great price - best of luck with this!
> However, I still fail to comprehend how the "at least one is a boy" quirk maths out to a 1 in 3 chance that his second child is also a boy.

Can you program? If so, write a program which runs the following trial over and over:

1. Assign genders at random to two children

2. If at least one is a boy, increment tally T1

3. If both are boys, increment tally T2

You'll find that T2 / T1 approaches 1/3.
http://www.getinpulse.com/developers/faq/

Not much there but they mention an ARM7 microcontroller. I remember seeing one of their job postings here and they were asking for ARM experience as well.
Pixel Qi has been teasing us for 3 years now. It really makes me angry. Put up or shut up.
Odd they didn't do this on the day that every other site did. Or has it been up since then?
Could you allow (a b c) as a synonym for { 0 a 1 b 2 c }? That's more or less how JS deals with this, though JS feels messy under the hood.

what happens if you base a Lisp-like language on vectors instead of cons cells?

I want to know that too! One thing is that you lose cons and cdr (except by copying the vector), so you lose the ability to do most of the classic Lisp things efficiently. You must have something in mind other than this?
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