skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see what you mean. This is about very complex structures and interactions.

But in fact, I believe with enough time you can get used to any level complexity and find your way through it. It is a bit like a big city: however complex it is (intertwined roads, subways, highways, etc.), if you live there long enough, you will get a precise mental model. Same with software projects: after some time, abstraction will not be those foreign short lived unstable concretions that you hold in your head and that vanish away if someone says hello. They will be good old friends and the sole invocation of their name will instantly call a lot of solid knowledge to the bar.

So in this line, I'd say clever guys are just faster and more agile (maybe both are the same thing). Above a certain level of tolerance to abstract thinking, anyone can understand and work on big complex projects, given enough time.

There is another difference between good and great developers, though. It is the "best path-finding skill". For instance, given enough time, I would probably be able to write a Python script solving most sudokus, but I fear I wouldn't find as elegant and straightforward a path as Norvig's. http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
Real Madrid vs Mallorca en vivo
"poor system design"

Agree, bur if you don't know how that relatest to math, then you will not discover how math fixes "poor system design" and, as a side effect "incorrect requirements"
There are a couple issues here.

The first one is whether copyright infringement as I think she was part of really hurts content producers. If someone is unwilling to pay a couple dollars for a movie in iTunes, you are not likely to buy the DVD either, thus, it's not a lost sale. If, OTOH, the work gets more exposure thanks to alternative distribution networks and that generates more customer engagement, the content producer wins in the end.

The second is whether books, movies, music and games whose primary purpose is to make a profit can be considered art. I think they can't. The primary purpose - and usefulness - of art is to transform the people who experience it. I don't think laws should protect the business model of selling art and experiences, but their usefulness.

A third question is whether it's even possible to prevent the duplication of digital goods. Most probably it isn't. Businesses must adapt to new realities - should typewriter makers be afforded the right to ban computer sales because they hurt the already established business?

Another one is whether they were turning in a profit. If they were, part of it belongs, rightfully, to the content producers.

Finally, there is her attitude towards law enforcement. I understand her frustration with what she considers unfair laws and processes. I am not sure her attitude is constructive and that sending her to jail was the best way to deal with it. If I were the judge, I'd like to lecture her about what she's doing that can be misinterpreted as threats. Jails are very tense environments and they don't need more agitation than they already have.
As long as it is illegal, it is technically correct for them to be punished. Some laws, however, are too absurd to remain.

Piracy, for me is certainly not about not wanting to pay. It's about the feeling that the money I pay mostly doesn't go to creators, but to the companies in-between who doesn't deserve it. I don't want to support such an industry.

It also the fact that I want to push for legal alternatives which are as easy-to-use as piracy today. I want to press a link and have a 1080p DRM-free film download in minutes. The cost is not the issue.

I hope that, within 20 years, sharing will be legal. Just because it's written as illegal in the law today, it's not set in stone. Things can change, and for the sake of the creative people, I hope it does.
They have pretty much washed their hands of me, this all happened in Oct. I've been mostly whining and dabbling in mobile stuff since then.
RIP USA. You have a fraction of the economic growth and almost all of the bullshit that comes with a "developing nation".
I find funny how people want languages to be "friendlier"

It is often an egocentric excuse to not lean new tools... As if programming was about making he programmer comfortable, as opposed to producing the best result possible.
"This is also why programmers who use typed functional languages frequently brag about their low bug count yet eschew methodologies like test driven development: tests pale in comparison to the power of actual models."

I've written complex systems. Games. Graphics modelling tools. Network game engines. I've seen a lot of code.

I've never seen anything that complex written in a functional language.

Why?

My hunch is that models are powerful, but brittle: they don't stand up against constantly changing requirements. A great quote I read the other day was "If it compiles, it works". Great. Now change the requirements. The "beauty" of imperative languages is that they continue to compile and continue to provide some value of "work" even while they are morphing from one requirement set to the next. Functional languages are cast-iron. Imperative languages are steel.

UPDATE: I should also be clear: I think in models all the time. I just don't have to get it down perfectly on paper for the code to compile. I used to hear, back in the day, C++ programmers opining that we should all use C++ because object-oriented programming is superior. Regardless of whether or not OO is superior, they completely failed to comprehend how one could do object-oriented programming in assembly language, or that we'd been doing it the whole time.

So its entirely possible that there's something I dont get about functional programming that means I don't understand what I'm missing. But its also possible that I understand the theory better than you and so I don't see the distinction you are making because there isn't one. To discern which is true, however, I'm going to need concrete examples, not opinion pieces.
gathering requirements has more in common with psychology, sociology and communication skills than mathematics. to make good software, you need to know what it needs to do much better than your customer, unless it's a really small thing.
Picture this for a moment:

It's your Birthday. Your friends invited you to the nicest restaurant in town. Very nice venue, food is great. End of meal... time for dessert. Your friends love you and, together, singe you the nicest rendition of 'Happy Birthday To You' you ever heard. Life is good.

This was an illegal performance. Secret police comes in, puts your friends in prison (they stole & performed the song) and also you and everyone in the restaurant at that time go to prison as well because you got the song without paying the creators.

Of course, according to the New extended SuperSOPA law, the restaurant is closed down, and it's owner is sent to prison as well, because he should not have allowed all this to happen in the first place.

Do you really want to live in that Orwellian world?
I see that the data sets which interests me the most aren't as useful as I would like, because they are out of date. The Genbank release is "Last Updated:	December 9, 2009 2:49 AM GMT", and PubChem is "Last Modified: Jun 4, 2009 20:21 PM GMT". Both of these datasets are modified continuously.

On the plus side, Ensembl is up-to-date.
pg is right to say you shouldn't let clones be a big distraction. This is especially true for Pinterest because we're a small team and we have a lot of work to do. We're trying to build something important that makes life better for lots of people. If you want to help us, you should write to me.

Lots of people on this thread say that clones are inevitable and profitable. That might be true, but at least for me, it would be a sad way to spend my time. I'd hate to tell my kids that I used my best years copying other peoples' products instead of trying to create new ones.
"We work in an environment where hearsay and taste drive change instead of studies and models. We are stumbling in the dark."

I completely agree. Programming became a lot less fun once I entered industry and realised most decisions are driven by fashion and office politics. It's not so bad when it's you and a couple of friends hacking all night on a project because you likely have closely aligned interests. Being an employee, however, means you're a slave to other people's ideals.

I suppose this is why most of us are interested in startups.

You may also be interested in this post by Zed Shaw: http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html

~~~

Surely the first person to write an algorithm wasn't Babbage or Lovelace, but more likely to have been the middle-eastern mathematician the word was named after? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C...
Most programmers know about SQL statements... But rarely identify it with set theory and that difference has a big impact on how you design and program databases. Being able to get by without that understanding is no excuse.
why do most programmers work so hard at pretending they're engineers?

In my experience, this is a regional thing. For my first ten years in the industry (on the east coast), I never met another programmer who called herself an engineer. We were "analysts," "developers," or "programmers." Then I took a job with a local company with a tech office in SV, and everybody, including some of the testers, were "engineers" (hey, even I'm an engineer now!).
Microsoft is Google's direct competitor in regards to mobile search...or search in general for that matter. As for Apple, I don't see them entering search because search, in general, suffers from the level of curation Apple tends to association with its brand.
There are a great many native English speakers who make exactly the same association.
Well... You can always meet new friends. Don't whine - it's not their fault you fell through the cracks of a very broken system. It's not yours either, BTW.

Doesn't help much, I know. :-(

My suggestion? If salaries in India are so low, the cost of living must be very low too. You can base yourself in India and sell products and services on other markets. That's just the obvious embryo of a possibly stupid idea, but it's a start. You can also find other people in your situation or accept (that's hard) a trainee position in one of those UAE companies who demand years of Java or VB experience.
You're all getting insane on these copyright c*ap. Soon you will be killing people for/against this anti-copyright cause.

As IP is not a human right, non-IP is also not a human right.
Did you read the article, or are you just commenting based on the misleading headline?
I disagree. Generally I see this problem when trying to program in a functional languaged with an imperative thinking. This is not a weakness of the language, but of the developer.

I think the hunch of the original article is that few programmers understand the correlation between math and software, hence the lack of use.
People might not agree with every law in their country.
Isn't it up to the creators to fight for more compensation? We, as consumers, shouldn't be justifying our actions by picking up a fight we were never asked to join. We've provided the technology to circumvent the middlemen, proven its preference among users. However, as it stands now, less money goes to the creators when you pirate than when you play by their game. Don't claim to be fighting in their name.

I agree, though, that this industry is rotten... A pirated copy of any game, music, or video is not only cheaper and more convenient, but its of better quality (DRM-free). You can't win a fight where you attack both pirates and consumers.
Did I just watch an ad for money laundering?
Particle-free silver ink prints small, high-performance electronics
I think the point is that there's something intrinsically verifiable about a mathematical model since you're dealing with quantifiable output.

Other cases I can think of are systems where high-throughput or low latency are major requirements but there aren't many of those. Most of what we do is about getting more users or making more profit - good engineering performance and decisions are not directly related to these.
Trucos para saber si tu pareja te engaña
Then show me a counter example and by that I mean name a specific, complex, in-production project written in a functional language.

Also, can you define "this problem" because I'm not sure which one you are referring to.
It really comes down to the people in the group.

I've been grouped with people who always try to find a reason for something not to work. Their worldview seems very limited in that they never push the status quo; they don't seem to look very far into the future and they can't seem to recognize what's possible with some hard work. Maybe they are afraid to step outside of their comfort zone. They would probably call themselves realists. Coincidentally enough, through my personal experience, I've found that these types of people tend to be "control freaks". (Sorry for lack of a better word.) There's definitely some correlation between trying to control situations and only attempting what is a sure thing.

I've also been grouped with people who, like me, are constantly trying to do things differently for the better. For every idea, they try to figure out how and why it will work, if it isn't immediately obvious; but if they don't also take time to determine whether or not it is the best solution, it could be detrimental in the long run. This is where the qualities of each person within the group becomes important. Not everyone can find the balance between dreams and reality; more often than not people lean towards one side so they need to be paired with someone on the other.

Too many realists in a group and you'll see little to no innovation. Too many dreamers in a group and you may never see the project's completion. Although I personally would put my money on the latter any day.

But if one person can find that balance by themselves, I think that's when creativity (and sometimes productivity) exceeds that of a group.
"Untitled document" as title... way to go. :/

Still a cute robot collects stories... unbelieveably cool!
Aakash Tablet (35$)review by an early adopter - Disappointed
Correct. This does not oppose my original statement.

Math is not just arithmetic or geometry. Is also a way of thinking and a way to sort and structure your analysis. Which helps you to know how to use psychology to ask the right questions, which leads to understand what needs to be done better than the customer.
In my opinion it needs some polishing but it worth every penny. It can be only device for millions who may never use a computer otherwise.
I agree - I've turned it off in the settings.
Download Yamicsoft Windows 7 Manager v3.0.8 - CORE | Andra Little Notes
I think you can learn SQL as SQL, without math background. OTOH just knowing mathematical model of SQL is not enough to write good SQL.

SQL in practice is not a purely mathematical construct: you have to know how to make use of spinning platters, indices, caches, locks, network connections, intricacies of data types and bunch of quirks and bugs of the RDBMS.

I've learned SQL before learning set theory properly. It turned out that I did understand (SQL-related parts of) it, I just didn't know it was called set theory :)
Video games are all about high-throughput and low latency. Nobody writing commercial games in functional languages that I'm aware of.
Convicts sentenced lose a fraction of their rights, including the right to free speech.

"Under Turner, prisoner communication may be monitored and regulated, and the content of the communication (i.e., the legal advice) makes no difference in the assessment of the legality of the regulation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaw_v._Murphy
What makes me sad in reading this article is that the man set out to respect people's good nature with his honor system, but (at least in the telling) became a bit of a nag, obsessed with measuring and haranguing cheats.
I am going to think beyond my programming, as it were, for a moment and make myself vulnerable.

I have a faulty logic. When I post something controversial, I often feel insightful while drafting it, but my 'spider sense tingles' because I innately fear downvotes. If it does, then I get upset because I feel that I made myself vulnerable by sharing something I should have kept quiet since it was not popular. Since an account apparently becomes 'dead' after enough downvoting, this is roughly being punished, at least digitally.

The faulty logic really kicks in when I use the same expectation of group reaction to garner upvotes. I feel satisfied when I get 10 or 15 upvotes, even though those posts are very often just aligned with what I suspect is popular opinion. I feel great, but gloss over the reality that I didn't really add anything new. It's like eating some chicken mcnuggets - I didn't really get anything out of it but it felt good.

There's a sort of protective stance people use in online posts, a deflection of anticipated peer reaction. Comment armor. "I know I'll get downvoted for this", "I know I'll get a -1 flamebait", "karma be damned" etc. We see this posturing all the time on karma based websites. Watch, I'll do this exact procedure in my closing sentence.

I know we're not supposed to complain about downvoting but I believe that's in a meta sense and since this topic is about groupthink, I believe it's relevant to discuss as part of the topic.
I'm not sure. The OP raise the fact the SQL is modeled after set theory. I happen to have learnt set theory a very long time ago, and to use SQL as much as any web developper around. Then I read a book about foundations of SQL, and found out it can and should be seen as an implementation of the set theory.

And you know what? It was like a revelation to me. It is incredibly helpful. And, by the way, it make me laughing inside each time I query MySQL (because MySQL is sadly /not/ a correct implementation, while PostgreSQL is). The "dots connecting" between set theory and SQL made also much clearer to me the NULL "mess" and why it has to be like that.

So, on this part I'd push the same way as the author, and would go as far as saying that doing correctly a "button X pushed -> notify API Y + persist the action to Z" simple glue code thing /is/ requiring a mental activity that (probably) uses the same parts of your brain as any mathematics and the use them the same way.

However I don't get why the author seem to be ranting against Test Driven Development. In my experience it is unrelated to how you model you data and interactions, except TDD will do exactly as the author is advocating: it will force you to write stateless atomic functions, to make them testable.

NB: From all I have read about mathematics on HN, it seems to me possible that we are not talking about the same thing. Maybe you and many other refer to some "sin a + sin b = cos sin ..." memorization exercise, and some multiple choice questions one have to check as fast as possible in order to get some good enough ranking.

I am talking about a teacher spending around 20 hours a week during several years in front of young people, telling them step by step how the world can be described, analyzed, understood with their brain. It started with: first predicate, there is something, at least one thing. Let's take this thing in your hand, and nothing else: you have a set. In your other hand let's take nothing: you hold now another set, the empty one. Then you have two different things. And on this the teacher built the set theory. (I was educated in France, when math were still on their pedestal).
TI show platform for developers based on the OMAP 5 | World New Electronics
Regarding the "illegal downloading" point, simple question: how do you recognize when the music, movie, photograph, or text that you downloaded (or viewed in browser -- there's no technical difference) has been "properly" licensed?
Someone should make a short film about this scene, it would go pretty viral.
The White House's Response to SOPA
That and software-as-a-service just isn't Apple's business model. They just want to sell you stuff.
'Not being public' is an 'exclusivity club' ploy to make new members want to join and be apart of the fun.. The Winklevoss Brothers' idea of exclusivity for Harvar / .edu emails helped Facebook similarly with initial growth.
Well, personally I choose not to consume such content at all in most cases, but I sympathize with those who do pirate. If the artist get 5% of what I paid, and the rest of the money goes to those who promote SOPA, I'd rather torrent it. This is better in the long run, and I hope future creators will agree.

Those who lose are the current artists who remain with the big companies. Hopefully, they'll find a way out of that system.
Ok.

Javascript. It is closer to functional programming than to object oriented. But most developers don't see this and believe that since they can get by shoehorning "classes" into a prototype then they are back to what is familiar. Prototypes are templates, no classes. Once you develop in javascript with a functional mentality, boy it becomes easy and elegant.

Sql and set theory is another example.

On the more abstracted side... Requirements modeling and calculus. Calculus classes should change the way that you percive
From the Times article, it doesn't sound like this was about monitoring "political dissent" but rather about seeing how the public felt about things.

If I post something on my blog expressing my opinion on some issue, or I tweet about it, or otherwise broadcast it to the world, I'm happy if it is read by people who are in a position to decide that issue and might influence them to make the decision I want.
That's very true. Today's most intense jobs require originality in ideas and that's not possible in a group. Groups are good for commoditize-able jobs or jobs that can be partitioned orthogonally. Otherwise, for research or creative work, groupthink inescapably leads to lowest-common-denominator solutions that are almost invariably unexciting. You see the same pattern in research, where very few great discoveries are being made in pairs (and much fewer in more than 2 people groups).
I believe that is an extreme and cartoonish conclusion to draw from so little information. How do you know that is the experience the children have?

The sister comment from another teacher brings facts to the table that explain the intent of the exercise, which is limited in scope and aimed for a specific purpose. Good or bad it is a game to attempt to teach kids it is ok to admit they don't know and to ask for help from their peers. If you consider how often and how ennervating it is when our adult colleagues can't admit not knowing, I think you can understand why someone crafted this exercise.
pinblr.com is an exact clone as well.
That would be cool, as long as the 10,000$ license fee for "Happy Birthday" is paid to Warner...

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
Pressed reply instead of the word correction.

Calculus should change the way you understand and perceive the world around, if it didn't, either you got bad teachers and need to ask for your money back, or you were studying only for the test.

And there are a lot of examples, but you can see that AFTER you understand and apply the math behind the concept. Getting by without it is not a proof of its futility, it is only a defense mechanism of the ego.
Could someone enlighten me what all those vendors licensed from Microsoft?
@RetroShare users: Can we setup a hacker news community like thar on Google Plus [0] there? That might kick up adoption.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452912
I operated under my own name/logo, the customers did not know someone else was filling the orders, they only communicated with me.
The problem... Models are brittle. If they are, then they are not complete enough.
> via powerful search

I do the same but google mail's search is not really useful as it does not let you match substrings so it can be really, really frustrating unless you meticulously manage your inbox with tags.