skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of a an interview with Charles Eames. Eames was an industrial designer who is well known for his furniture. Even if you don't know his name his work will be familiar.

Q: Does design imply the idea of products that are necessarily useful?
Eames: Yes— even though the use might be surely subtle.

Q: It is able to cooperate in the creation of works reserved solely for pleasure?
Eames: Who would say that pleasure is not useful?

The point is—and perhaps I'm astronauting a bit—beauty is functional in it's own right. There has been some exploration into the relation between aesthetics and usability[1] that supports the intuitive notion that something visually attractive will be perceived as easier to use.

I disagree with the author's conclusion where he says that you should "make sure your product doesn't look terrible and move on". An investment in good visual design provides tremendous value which is not very evident at first sight.

[1] http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/paper/nt.htm
Drop the "Degree". Computer Science matters.
Depends on the kind of person you are. Under the pressure of a deadline, and the mantra of 'get things done', will you be able to step back and say, 'hey, what's the meta problem here?' 'Is there a better way?'

Some people just solve the same problems over and over again without realizing it.

Much of the theoretical underpinnings behind some of the stuff I use, I might not have ventured to look into it were it not for my college degree (nor could I have figured it out by myself). The more basic stuff you know, the easier it is to pick up the harder stuff. Trick is to know which stuff is the basic stuff first. In college you get a shortcut to the basic foundation stuff. If you have a nose for that sort of thing, then good, but it's very hard to do so in the beginning.

CS courses aren't designed to give you practical programming knowledge. It's designed to teach you theoretical underpinnings that you can carry throughout your career, regardless of what the technology du jour is in vogue.

Sometimes, it's just good to have had a brush with something, so you can pattern match and say...I remember seeing something similar before. Or even to know what something's called, so you can look it up later. Hard to search for things when you don't know what they're called.
But we are not taking into account cases where a CS degree does irrevocable harm.

For example, the tendency to religiously follow patterns, over-complicate things.

IMO these concepts come up all the time. A CS degree might help you to know what they are, but not when and how of applying them.

Also plenty of self-taught developers are aware of these patterns. I can't imagine a "good developer" who wouldn't know about FSM, or someone who would use redis without considering time complexity.
Beyond basic subsistence, most things we produce are status symbols that have zero net-effect--guy A's status goes up as a result of his purchase, guy B's status goes down.
I am currently dealing with this. I'm not sure about his specific tips, but the general feeling that this transition is not easy is something I don't feel I was adequately prepared for. I just finished my PhD and started working at a company, and I thought I would really enjoy the job since it's in a fun and exciting field, but honestly the experience has been pretty jarring. I've spent the last 7 years basically in charge of my own research projects, and all of a sudden being tasked to fix someone else's software that I'd never seen before and that was already at quite an advanced stage was just a bit difficult and a shock to my system. Not that I couldn't handle the work technically (I managed to commit a few pretty important bug fixes in my first week), but socially and mentally it was very difficult for me; suddenly not being around any of the people I have become good friends with, and being tied down to such a strict work schedule. 9-to-5 instead of waking up when I feel like it and taking a long coffee break with my friends in the afternoon. I am sort of starting to get used to it, but it sure hasn't been easy.
Oddly, I felt like I had much more free time after college. When work ended at 5pm, I suddenly had this huge 7 hour window of time where I had no homework to work on, no projects etc... I started reading for fun, working out, doing side projects, and I still had time!
Wait, GP is talking just about the first few weeks of college right?

If so, I can see some truth to this. I can't think of anytime in your life you'll ever again not only have no commitments, but also be surrounded by so many people who haven't yet formed (social) relationships. Makes sense to 100% focus on meeting people and building friendships -- it only gets harder going forward.
Scroll up a bit on that same page, and it sounds like there are serious abuses.
Sorry but a decade of experience is not allit is cracked up to be. Neither is college or determination or raw intelligence. People have good careers lacking one or two of those and if I had to choose college would be the one I could live without the easiest.
But Plato, Newton or Feynman show that a perfect hand can lead you to big things
I remember the BBC (or Ch4) made a set of documentaries a few years back that showed people having actual sex for educational purposes. I can't remember the name.

Most porn is certainly made for commercial rather than educational purposes though and idealized stuff with giant penises and huge cumshots seems to be more commercially successful.

Effectively it's more about fantasy and than reality.
I love these kinds of articles.

I know about partial function application, and I'm already sold on the merits of higher-order functions, et al. (A one-two punch of Haskell and Clojure sold me.) Maybe that's why it's nice to see other ways of describing or encoding these concepts— it was a neat little "aha" moment when we got to pluck. Immediately it reminded me of how, in Clojure, keywords are functions.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Clojure has symbolic keys like in Ruby (e.g. :foo), called keywords. So given the 'inventories' variable in the pluck() example, you could write:

(map #(get % :oranges) inventories)

The #(get % :oranges) syntax is an anonymous function, invoking get to retrieve :oranges from each inventory in inventories. But it turns out you don't even need to do that. You can just do this instead:

(map :oranges inventories)

Anyway, I guess what's funny to me is that I used JS for a little while, and I liked it pretty well. It's only in retrospect that I start to see the extent to which it seeded my brain with these patterns.
> That's nothing in a campaign that raised over $1 billion.

Well, he sure got bought fucking big time though.
First Page Google
Can get on the primary Initial Webpage regarding Search engines QUICKLY! Hassle-free Insider SEO Services, all of us endeavor to obtain for you personally an initial Webpage Search engines itemizing, plus the some other Yahoo and google.
Meta+Click on a function to take you to that function's implementation is easily one of the most production enhancing benefits of an IDE in larger code bases.

Also, don't knock the ability of some IDEs to show function documentation on mouseover - this can save a huge amount of time in reading API docs.
It only really makes sense when PHP is used in a shell. If nothing else, its strange that a lot of PHP implementations have them turned on by default.
Are there any benchmarks available that compare Rakudo's performance with PHP, Python and Ruby?
Totally agree, everything in moderation, though.

I'd rather live with the regret of 'Oh I wish I hadn't done this/that/the other' than being 50 and looking back on my life regretting I didn't enjoy myself more.
I agree, but there has in the UK been at least one posthumous
mass pardon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_Act_2006#Pardon
I think it would more strongly correlate with the type system of the language you're using.
It makes the case that instead of people studying superficial and largely pointless things like treehouse and codeacademy they should instead take MIT OCW.
Many, many people who get degrees from CS programs won't step back to think about the problem, will solve the same problems over and over again, will not really understand the theoretical underpinnings of what they are doing, and so on.
Agreed. I would absolutely pay for the service.
My only interest is to stream my music collection from PC to my Android phone.
Audiogalaxy beats every other solution by far. It's the only one that has a decent mobile UI to be able to browse by artist or genre.
I'm not a fan of cloud based streaming. The responsiveness is usually not good. Google Music suffers from this.
I would guess that Dropbox will rebrand the AG mobile app, remove the streaming service, and force everything to cloud based.
Time to look for an AG alternative, but I have yet to find a single one that even comes close to AG for streaming from PC to phone.
Tonido looks ok, but the mobile app only allows you to sequentially play the songs in a single folder, which is almost useless.
I'd love to hear other alternatives that include a good mobile app like AG has (had).
:)
It's not any more possible to get into a black hole interior than it is to get out because black holes don't have an interior.
You can make gasoline out of nuclear power, too, from atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Last I looked, a hydrogen fuel cycle was slightly more efficient than a gasoline fuel cycle. But it's a lot easier to handle gasoline than hydrogen. We already have the equipment to move and store gasoline all over the country, no cryogenics needed.

(I say "gasoline" but things like methanol are also suitable.)
It's like watching a Jedi construct his own light-saber.
I use an IDE(PHPStorm) under OSX( 3 monitor mac pro).. I'm not super thrilled at the IDE's performance under my laptops specs.. but I do get by when I absolutely have to. I write in PHP(i know.. trust me i know... especially around here), tons of javascript etc. but I feel like the code completion in PHP really helps me keep less in my head that isn't really that important. I've heard great things about sublimeText but I haven't really felt a pressing need for it.. yet.
Breeds with really severe genetic problems that make them miserable and completely unviable outside human care should be allowed to go extinct. It's not ethical.
Motiongraph demo movie
These are all neat, but they require some effort to bootstrap. The neat thing about Brython is that you can start writing Python immediately. I’ve played with ClojureScript and it takes a while to get the QuickStart to work.

I think Brython is cool, not from an efficiency or machine-performance point of view, but from a human point of view. It makes it easy to start hacking. The barrier to entry is non-existent.
I've always considered a degree to be a ticket to an interview. It's proof that you're somewhat knowledgeable about a broad range of topics relating to a single subject matter (in this case, computer science). You don't really know enough to be an expert on it -- at least not any more so than anyone else with that degree, and certainly not to the level of professors. Post-grad degrees are where you become experts... but I digress.

I consider a degree to be proof that a) you can be trained, b) you can start and complete a program of study (i.e., project), and c) you have a good idea of what you're talking about.

It doesn't mean you are any good at it (or even above average, really). It doesn't mean that you're a programmer or a scientist. It just means that you're trainable.

And in that regard, the major you choose doesn't really matter one bit. You can get a degree in biology or theater or business, and you'd still be trainable. You might not have the fundamentals, but those are easily taught. If you can learn bio-chemistry, then you can learn FSMs and pick up the fundamentals of programming.

So as others have pointed out, it's not a computer science degree that matters. It's trainability and the capacity and desire to learn that matter. I'd hire a hard-working, self-directed, knowledge-hungry theatre major over an entitled, I-don't-want-to-do-anything-but-program CS major any day of the week.
We will never achieve artificial intelligence unless we create a program that can differentiate good from evil, pleasure from pain, positive from negative.

The basic building blocks of life.

If we continue making faster and faster machines at calculating formulas and storing knowledge we will have just that, a giant calculator.
Slick, thanks.
If he was someone who gets things done, I wouldn't really care if he doesn't know much about data structures.
Very often state machines are the best representation for domain objects which have a life cycle. If you have a lot of user submitted content shared among other users, a common set of states could be:

"new", "approved-by-other-user", "verified-by-admin", "hidden", "promoted".

I agree that at the HTTP level you shouldn't be using FSMs.
Interesting. I personally find NSAttributedStrung raw to be pretty easy to use, but I understand how this is appealing for web developers.
Vehicle-to-grid always strikes me as nutty. People don't want the batteries on their cars being put under strain to power a building's lights.

Car batteries have much different design constraints than grid back-up systems.
you're talking about what it means to be human, not what it means to be intelligent. you can't judge good from evil if you're not intelligent, so AI's first goal should be just that: intelligence, not morals
display_errors can be convenient on non-production sites. I think a lot of beginners are trying to hack stuff on shared hosting, and transfer their php files in via FTP and don't understand how to access logs and do appreciate this feature.

It's just too bad they are hacking on their live site, and/or not ever turning it off after they don't need it.

Don't get me wrong, FTP/live editing a site on production / shared hosting are all crappy ways of doing things for serious development but I can see how it might be useful for beginners.

We've all been there, yeah? even if it was back when php 3 and 4 were common.
ignores easement costs, acquisition costs, and legal costs in

That's actually pretty common among scientists who are imagining they are designing utopia.
I use PhpStorm for working on very large web projects. When working with smaller frameworks or just writing a script or something, I prefer the aesthetics and simplicity of Sublime Text.

When working on large projects I find that having a good debugger can save a lot of time. The first thing I do when installing PhpStorm though, is reconfigure the look and feel of it. I definitely agree that "less is more" when it comes to having a clean environment, but I have also seen way too many developers using Vim or Sublime that take twice as long to do something because they are not using a real debugger, and they have to look-up every function definition, when PhpStorm would just autocomplete the function names and let you know what the params should be.

As RyanZAG pointed out, being able to click on a function and go right to it is an awesome benefit of IDE's as well as function definitions, autocomplete doc comments, and simply a better understanding of language constructs (it can show you errors based on syntactical error).
I mainly do .NET development and must admit Visual Studio is the best IDE around (especially with Resharper and other plugins/extensions). I would rate the jetbrains IDE's best in their class (IntelliJ idea, pycharm, rubymine, webstorm etc). I also found the eclipse distros pretty good as well (ex. Galileo).

Overall there are some pretty good IDE's around, just need to shop around a bit.

I personally use notepad++ as a text editor, although lately I have been favoring sublime text 2. Geany on Linux seems pretty solid as well.

The point stays that IDE's generally favor statically typed languages while text editors are generally used for dynamic, scripting and low level languages.
sublime nuff said
The problem is that people have conflicting demands. They want all errors - even most unobvious ones in most deep functions, in all outputs - be immediately shown to them with all details, without having to do even minimal amount of work, and then they want the whole system also be secure. It can not work this way. If you want errors on the output, it can not be secure. If you want secure defaults, you can not have server spewing errors to the output.

So we have a choice here - do we prefer, convenience or security? Given that inconvenience is much less dangerous than insecurity, the choice for PHP developers was security. In ideal world, where nobody runs their production servers with display_errors=on and everybody understand the consequences of their actions, this hack would not be needed. We live however in a real world, where thousands of production sites are run with dislpay_errors, so we need to account for this reality. It means somebody has to check their error log from time to time. If it's too hard to do - install custom error handler and override the default behavior.
You likely don't want to use a state machine to manage the state of the application here, but there are many other places a state machine comes in handy. If one of your models has several boolean variables, it may benefit from a state machine. Even HTTP parsing itself is often done with a state machine. None of those impact the statelessness of the connections.
>so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs

So this means that this will probably appeal to the free software people that only use 100% free computers?
Redisco - Python Containers and Simple Models for Redis
Actually he is correct, if everything is virtualized (and therefore abundant) , then the price of everything drops to zero.
I’d rather have a partial and easy-to-use implementation of Python in the browser that exists right now than a perfect implementation that doesn’t exist.
thanks, please do.
OMG this is so cool!
Good and evil is subjective, and therefore not a "basic building block of life".

Pleasure and pain require emotion, something most researchers don't assume an AI will have.

What do you mean by "positive and negative"? Like, positive and negative numbers? Good and bad business decisions? We already have computers that can do that.
I don't want to work for a boss. I want to control my own destiny.
If not more ambitious, considering the small, unfriendly nature of laptop hardware. Good luck to OP!
We aim to please :-)
Many of the venues that display white tigers have a long
history of shading the truth about their mutants.

IIRC in the Singapore Zoo (the last one I went to this summer) had some extensive information about the origins of the white tigers, no shading this. Would've been interesting to see some more examples of different takes of the zoos in the article.
It depends on the University. I am from University of Ottawa, and I wish I took Computer Science instead of Software Engineering. They made me take Geology/Evolution/Italian Cinema while I begged the dean I would like to take Computer Graphics/Artificial Intelligence/Cryptography etc. Software Engineers in my University let the student focus on the higher level vision to know everything, but I kid you not, I totally forgot everything I learned in Geology/Evolution/Italian Cinema/etc. So if I took Computer Science, then I would have done the fun stuff, the important stuff that would help me prepare for job hunting. Instead, I just focused on Open Source, and personal projects to prepare, and that worked.
Please get over yourself.
Disk Encryption (ArchWiki)
The functions covered in the article, if anyone wants to play around with them: https://github.com/jrajav/rcombinator
:) super thank's!
Chinese space probe flies by asteroid Toutatis
I don't disagree with you starting from the third sentence, but those first two are remarkably self-congratulatory. It's not clear how being a CS type who follows startups leads you to understand human societies better than anyone else.
It used to be the opposite. You could tell which was the "better" product by choosing the one with the worst appearance. The train of thought went something like, assuming the companies paid the similar amount to develop the products and the design and engineering cost a significant amount of money, then the company that didn't put the money in design put it in engineering. So uglier products were better engineered, prettier products were crap. Lenovo/IBM laptops are one of my favorite surviving examples of this phenomenon.
Does anyone else think Nasa should be figuring out how to setup colonies on new worlds.. I mean the question of life on Mars (or anywhere else) is a good one, but we'll be able to figure all that out a lot easier if we're there in person. It's no going anywhere.
Or they could do what cattlemen do: systematic outbreeding, and culling of defectives. Excessive inbreeding is not the only choice.
Thanks for the comments - glad you liked it! We're working on the offline integration and user customisation features, they're in the pipeline.
Actually, some of the singularity people regard the singularity both inevitably happening soon(ish), and their worst nightmare. Not desirable at all.

The superintelligent machines will take over the world and probably destroy humankind as a side effect. Consequently, they think that we urgently need philosophical musings over possible ways to ensure that the inevitably created superintelligent AI overlords would be build using principles that make them friendly to humankind. This is (according to them) the only hope to save humankind from extinction in near future.
Heh, I misread the title as "Realtime statistics of Haskell programmers" and was expecting a study of how haskell programmers work.

I'd actually be really interested to see a study comparing the brain activity of a haskell programmer vs a smalltalk programmer. FP and OOP are such different models, I bet there would be some interesting differences in which parts of the brain light up.
Google search now gets 2.5 million copyright removal requests a week
Why not start your own startup?
First, I don't feel this answers angersock's question concerning concrete applications of cognitive neuroscience to artificial intelligence.

Second, despite running into it time and again over the years, Searle's Chinese room argument still does not much impress me. It seems to me clear that the setup just hides the difficulty and complexity of understanding in the magical lookup table of the book. Since you've probably encountered this sort of response, as well as the analogy from the Chinese room back to the human brain itself, I'm curious what you find useful and compelling in Searle's argument.

I remain interested in biological approaches to cognition and the potential for insights from brain modelling, but I don't see how it's useful to disparage mathematical and statistical approaches, especially without concrete feats to back up the criticism.
emacs can do this too and gives you complete control over everything. You can even go to the lisp source of the editor commands very easyly.
It's good that we're better at visual design. And we don't judge book with their cover, but the cover could definitely give us a good idea on how the book is minded. The final judgment is when you have read the book.
The same for a website. You can feel totally uncomfortable with a visual design, so there are lot of chances that you won't stay on the site, even if the service is great.
You have to take care of both, that's it.
I think what OP is trying to say is that there are some things that he would never bother trying to learn on his own because they're just so random, _but_ thanks to what he learned getting his degree, he was able to recall and apply a small concept which really made a big difference.

In my humble opinion anyone can learn to program in any language and most people can produce quite a few examples, but good programers know how to apply theory which helps them produce faster and more reliable code.