skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you claim to have proved a big new result, and you don't already have the credentials that will ensure you get taken seriously, then it is up to you to write in such a way that makes it easy for other academics to verify your work. Part of being an academic is interacting with other academics.

This reminds me of the introduction to Thomas Kuhn's The Road Since Structure:

"Kuhn develops further the theme, which again goes back to Structure, that science is fundamentally a social undertaking. This shows up especially in times of trouble, with the potential for more or less radical change. It is only because individuals working in a common research tradition are able to arrive at differing judgments concerning the degree of seriousness of the various difficulties they collectively face that some of them will be moved individually to explore alternative (often—as Kuhn likes to emphasize—seemingly nonsensical) possibilities, while others will attempt doggedly to resolve the problem within the current framework" {Conant and Haugeland "Road"@3}.
Yes, we need another $150/hr specialist sitting there to talk you down for the ~30 seconds you'll be awake before the anesthesiologist can put you back under, in the 0.1% chance that you wake up during the procedure. And we wonder why our health care is stupid expensive!
No one will ever bother to read this work.

Yeah... but what if? Aren't you the least bit curious?
You can get as much out of the community as you want to, the language doesn't force you to adopt what the community believes is right.

With any language you have the freedom to write want you want to write, pick from the sources you feel are the best.
What is worse is when they provide a seemingly useful link, but all that link does is take you to some absurdly ad-laden page that displays "search results" of their site that just says "No results found".
Master binary
Not for a group trying to maintain status quo and control..
I noticed this too, and I agree with Mosbo's take on it.
Learning Git | Experimenting Life
I tend to just carry my phone anyways.. I find the N7 more practical to use than my N4, screen size really helps, even commented after getting the N7 (before the HSPA version was available) that I'd love it as a phone, combined with a headset... I tried GrooveIP on it even.. though it does work, I will probably stick to what I have a couple years before doing another hardware cycle.. the N7 did convince me that a nice tablet could be done, and bought the N4.
I mean this with all sincerity, but did I understand this correctly? Using Terminal to sift thru HN articles, only to open them up in a web browser via the "c" key or the Enter key? I fail see the point. If you have a browser, you don't need the less usable Terminal version.

I tried thinking about who could be the target audience for something like this and had images of 1960s-era IBMers who worked exclusively with character-based terminals hooked to the mainframes (ignore the lack of browsers in that time period for the moment). But today, barring specialized defense related jobs and the like, everyone has a browser. Hell, many of us have browsers in our pockets via smartphones.

I guess I just don't understand the fetish with 1960s-era technologies in 2013 (up to and including vi/vim vs. more powerful editors). Is it nostalgia?
This has nothing to do with comments. The emphasis on comments is little more than an attempt to get on the "social media is harmful" bandwagon.

As the principal researcher herself acknowledges:

> Brossard admitted she was "bothered" by the study results but not particularly surprised. "In a discussion, when you see people frowning, it influences how you feel about the discussion," she said. "So how does that translate to the online community?"

Imagine that you were introduced to a product while visiting a web page that was full of blinking text and full-page Flash ads. Compare that to a product you were introduced to while visiting a clean and well-formatted web page. Which product do you think will leave you with a favorable impression of it? It's a matter of basic human psychology. We respond to the whole experience, not just the propositional content of an article.

Rude comments ruin your first impression of a technology. Huh, nothing surprising about it. You could probably achieve the same result by replacing those manufactured comments with super annoying ads, horrible web design, or any of the million other ways in which you can spoil a person's browsing experience. But as it happens, complaining about the harmful effect of pop-up ads on news sites is much less sexy than complaining about the purportedly ill effects of participatory online discussion.
It's expected to cost more than what you'd think it's worth if you're just making one. A significant chunk of the cost is on general stuff: wire, glue, solder, etc.

Possible cost cutting options I thought of:

Since it's only playing one song, you actually wouldn't need the MP3 shield. There are many tutorials online for wav playback on Arduino without a shield and the Arduino can easily read a SD card using a logic level converter ($1, max). The sound quality will be low but it's cheap! Ultrasonic sensors are cheap on eBay, you could also go with a passive IR sensor.

Of course you could build your own Arduino compatible board for about $10 but you'd need a way to program it (ICSP isn't exactly cheap either).
Regardless of what isn't being replaced, and what is being replaced, it is still ugly as hell. Being marginally better than what it actually is replacing is a pretty poor defense.
Anyway, I wrote this post as a precursor to a more substantial set of writings explaining how to practically use these upcoming languages. Most of what I am trying to show here is that while we use specialized algorithms for most of our machine learning at this moment, it is only a temporary solution before it becomes feasible to just specify your models in one of these languages. The point of the code is to show that many really complicated models with high specialized libraries for just them is less than 10 lines of code in this framework.

For a really good introduction to this topic I recommend of Josh Tenenbaum's Growing a Mind talks, http://videolectures.net/aaai2012_tenenbaum_grow_mind/

I never realized this article would be read by regular folks and am incredibly confused why something I wrote 6 months ago is suddenly all over the internet now.
I'm not so sure - looks like the law might very well be in their favor. (You could argue about the merits of the law, but not the lawsuit).

http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXV/... -
(c) It shall be deemed a violation of subsection (a) of section 3 for a manufacturer, distributor or franchisor representative:

(10) to own or operate, either directly or indirectly through any subsidiary, parent company or firm, a motor vehicle dealership located in the commonwealth of the same line make as any of the vehicles manufactured, assembled or distributed by the manufacturer or distributor.

(It goes on with a bunch of exceptions that I'm not qualified to evaluate)

WRT standing, Section 6 of the chapter, part E allows other dealerships to sue to stop the establishment of franchises (which this arguably may be) and section F specifically states that "the fact that a protesting dealer has standing shall not be considered by the court in assessing the merits of the protest;"

They may very well have a strong case.
It's hard to say if G+ long-term game is brilliant. Although its easy to say Android and Chrome are obvious longterm winners.

G+ still seems forced down our throats. It's the only google product that I've felt forced to use. Just goes to show you how desperate google is to get involved in the social game. We willingly use Chrome, Google, gmail, and android because they are great products.

I still don't think G+ offers something in social that we don't already have. Though G+ is a nice product. Ultimately I think it will find its niche and never become as big as Facebook.
Can't wait to see the blog. What's the link?
That's why my mom doesn't like rap music. Some of the people say curses and they talk about sex. It's also probably not worth visiting Texas because Bush lives there.
The formatting utility is really just a side effect of the decisions to Go team made regarding syntax and semantics in the language. There's also a tool to automatically update your code if the language changes (this was important during the days of rapid churn, where your programs would break every week).

They made some very opinionated choices and have largely stuck by them. You can't have an unused variable, it just won't compile. What a pain, right? Well, if there's one thing I've learned from compiling open source code, it's that you CANNOT trust programmers to clean up their code before releasing it--just play "count the unused variable warnings" next time you compile pretty much any Linux program.
* eXistenZ (Another Cronenberg movie)
Before putting too much stock in this, break out your copy of _The Myth of Repressed Memory_ by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. The simple fact is that if you don't remember something that happened to you twenty years ago today, you're not going to remember it better twenty years from now. It will instead become easier and easier for other people to insinuate contrafactual details. It's actually quite easy to implant false memories, especially with the kind of leading questions Ms. Campbell's anesthesiologist friend would be likely to throw at her by trying to reveal his/her specialist knowledge. It's the same phenomenon that led to the big "satanism" scares late last century and it's the same reason normal people who go to "therapists" who specialize in "alien abduction" wind up "remembering" abduction events once in session. Leading questions. In fact, her memory of someone standing over her is a very common phenomenon, usually attended by sleep paralysis, and is also thought to be the basis for alien abduction stories.

The article paints a very clear cause-and-effect relationship between the surgery, trauma, and her life's troubles. I doubt that in reality the effects were so clear cut. We're not seeing the whole story, just the part that makes a coherent narrative. Whatever happened—this, or something else—certainly has produced an emotional trauma which is something Ms. Campbell needs to address in her own life. But I doubt very seriously that the right response is to get everyone worked up about something that may or may not be to blame.
why isn't icsp cheap? can't you just make a usbtiny with $10 in parts? my icsp consists of 1 tiny85 chip, 3 resistors, 2 diodes, and 1 usb cable.
I have been doing this for a while; I wrote a blog post about it:

http://www.writemoretests.com/2012/02/how-to-remember-everyt...
"Hello, friends and uncles!" https://vimeo.com/5047563
> Go nails code [cut] documentation better than any other language I'm aware of.

That's because you haven't seen PHP's documentation.

Look at your Go's list example.

It doesn't even show how to create a list and fill it with items.

It doesn't have users' comments.

It doesn't explain much about the data structure. Can it be a circular doubly link list, for instance?

Is there a method to empty the list, or quickly insert more than one element?

Instead it has strangely named sections (like "type Element") that aren't obvious to somebody new to the language.

Sorry, but this documentation is shit.
Public Print Queue SPOOL/TEST 2012-12-09T14:12Z SPOOL/IDEAS 2012-12-13T23:26Z SPOOL/NOTES 2012-12-19T00:28Z
Or, people saw an inaccurate before and after set, compared apples to orange soda, and freaked out.
I think you can get one of those sonar sensors for $6 on amazon. They're cheap. I don't think the obvious solution is to use a general purpose computing machine...
I have to disagree, at least about the LoTR films (I haven't seen The Hobbit yet). I think Jackson "adapted" the story out of all recognition. It may well have drawn a larger audience, but the Middle-Earth that the audience is seeing is not the Middle-Earth that Tolkien wrote about.

<SPOILERS FOLLOW>

Just a few points:

(1) The elves in the movies are way too immature. For example, Elrond, who is something like 6500 years old at the time of the War of the Ring, acts in the movies like an angst-ridden middle-aged father in a second-rate TV drama about Arwen wanting to marry Aragorn.

(2) Way too much screen time is spent on stuff that isn't even depicted in the books and adds nothing to the story, such as Saruman breeding the orcs.

(3) There are some major plot changes that make no sense: for example, the part in The Two Towers movie where Aragorn apparently falls off a cliff and is lost. (When I watched the movie in the theater with a friend, who had already seen it and who has been reading Tolkien as long as I have, he told me when it got to this point, "Here's the part you're going to hate.")

(4) The Scouring of the Shire is completely missing; that's an integral part of the plot in the books and omitting it takes away a lot.

Again, if someone is just taking the movies as their own story, without knowing anything about the books, I can see how they would like it; but they're not seeing the same world that Tolkien wrote about.
An absurd law does not render an absurd lawsuit sane.
We should go to Ceres
It did heavily influence CoffeeScript, so there's that.
But he's actually right.

Do you realize how many people hated the Pepsi logo when it was re-designed? Now look at it versus the old logo years after we've become accustomed to it: the old logo absolutely looks like it's a stodgy 80s design. And that was the point of the logo redesign: to make it feel dynamic and modern.

I'd even be surprised of 90% of people polled in the early 80s would've said it made sense for a tech company to a) use a fruit as their logo and b) have it placed on computer equipment.

People often gravitate towards what they are comfortable and familiar with. That's why I try to not evaluate everything by my gut until I see the full picture and rationale.

I didn't love the logo but I thought the identity system was very strong and vastly aesthetically cooler than the majority of shitty academic identity systems I'm familiar with in North America where no one tries ANYTHING different. One could toss a few dozen university logos together from Canada and the United States and they'd probably just mesh into one blob.
I spend most of my day in a terminal. I might use this just to have one less context switch. But I agree that opening the actual article in the browser sort of defeats the point.

As far as vi/vim versus "more powerful" editors... you mean emacs right? Because IDEs aren't necessarily more powerful than vim/emacs, they are just easier to learn.
For Startups In Search Of A Celebrity Partner, Go Beyond The Name
Ask HN: Tracking software for tracking all outbound links on a site?
Anyone know of a tracking software that I can integrate with every link on my site being clicked on (auto coded in)?

Some something like Hacker News and there are links being generated all the time, I want to be able to track number of clicks and various data surrounding that. Most web analytics kind of track somewhat like it but I am looking for specifically link tracking structure. Open source would be great.

Bit.ly analytics type is a bit lacking.
I only develop on Linux, think you got confused by the way I phrased it. I meant that hardly anyone uses the OpenJDK package, not that hardly anyone uses Linux.
Ask HN: Whats a good resource to learn rails active associations?
Hi HN,

I'm in the process of learning rails and I've studied basic sql at university but I'm having a really hard time getting my head around rails active association.

For instance I'm trying to build a twitter clone. Where users can follow other users and have a homefeed populated with tweets from other users. But I can't seem to get the association of the relation mapped in my head.

If anybody could share their experience with learning Rails assocations or have any resources about it that would be fantastic.

Thanks so much
Not what I would call fresh or all that new...
>> A system's entropy in statisical mechanics is k log W, where k is Boltzmann's constant and W is the number of microstates. The microstate is a configuration of, say, electrons in energy levels.

We are not freshman, in natural units (pretty much any system of natural units) Boltzmann's constant is 1. And entropy is measured in bits ('nats', but ln 2 is also equal to 1) ;) . For a system with two microstates entropy would be 1 bit.
The British and their bizarre view of Americans
Many of the folks using Scala are experienced Java developers, your posts seem to be based on personal speculation rather than actual facts.
The JVM does not support this, but the CLR does.
I had the same gut reaction, but after seeing it's application I actually like it. I don't love it, but it's definitely fresher than the vast majority of academic identities. And it's not replacing the crest which remains it's separate entity.
* Living in USA
I think Lenovo wants to be associated more with machines like the Yoga, even though the dependable ThinkPad workhorses are who brought them to the dance.
Sublime is good, I wish I had a mac where I could try Coda too.
| a factory cannot own a store, and a dealer can sue
| for injunctive relief if they feel the public is being
| harmed.

I wonder how they feel that the public is being harmed. Seems to me more like they don't like the competition.
Wait, why hasn't someone made a kit for this and offered people free home phone service without a monthly fee?
As others have mentioned, its less about the syntax of a language and more about the plethora of libraries that is the real boon when it comes to using a programming language. It has been said that the majority of a tough problem is worked out unconsciously. If we eschew memorization for "just in time" methods, we are essentially putting a hard limit on the type and difficulty of problems we're capable of solving.

I personally think the amount of library functions memorized is the biggest difference between average programmers and the so-called 10x programmers. An extremely high level of fluency with a programming language environment is invaluable when it comes to efficiency and code quality. It is analogous to conversing in a language where one has to look up every other word compared to a native speaker who has a deep fluency. It's not just a matter of speed; the depth and quality of thought is orders of magnitude greater in the fluent speaker. The more of the heavy lifting you can do unconsciously, a vastly higher level of output one is able to produce for the same amount of mental effort. We accept this in just about every profession, yet we resist when it comes to programming. Personally, I'm glad my doctor memorizes a large amount of the facts he uses in his day-to-day work.

It is unfortunate that just about every new language brings with it a new set of standard libraries that we must learn to use effectively. We give up so much expertise and efficiency when we don't allow ourselves to build up a high level of familiarity with them. I can imagine a future where there is a standard library of methods that every programmer attempts to memorize and that every new programming language is programmed specifically for this standard library. We are already seeing this with language frameworks like the JVM and .NET, but we need to go even further. Hopefully libraries themselves will be created specifically to be easy to memorize.
The wording doesn't make sense. It basically says no manufacturer can operate a dealership that's located in the "commonwealth of the same line make" - what the hell does that mean?

I interpret it as meaning no manufacturer can operate a dealership within the same territory as an existing dealership that sells the manufacturer's make.

So if that's correct, then the judge did the right thing. Since Tesla doesn't have any dealers to compete with.
Natural flavor
Would be nice to change the timezone.
Seems like a less than efficient way to learn and remember a programming language. Unlike natural languages, we can write programs with programming languages. We can run these programs, and if they still work, then they're probably still correct*. You can't do that with written/natural language.

As far as remembering programming language constructs and vocabulary, the way to do it is do projects. You use what you learned, and naturally, you're going to come back to it when you have to fix a bug or implement a new feature. All the while, you're building something good, too.

Another thing. If you're using a well-designed language, the concepts will incrementally build on themselves. They won't just be a bucket of orthogonal concepts, (like PHP, which seems to be mentioned in the article). Therefore, by learning fundamentals, you can more easily understand and decipher more advanced concepts. So, maybe you did forget what something does. But after a few minutes entering commands into a repl, you fully understand it again, because of your crystallized knowledge of other concepts.

I can't imagine a worse way to learn a new programming language than brute memorization.
"you mean emacs right?"

Lol. I'm not taking that bait. :-)

FWIW, I had never tried emacs before and decided last week, ironically, to try it for the first time. I fired it up, poked around, tried to do something useful and then wanted to quit. I couldn't find a way to quit the app. As best as I can remember, I don't remember seeing an obvious way to exit so I closed the entire Terminal window. lol

But that same exercise on TextMate was not even close. I was immediately productive in TextMate, having never used it before, and was able to get things done. Even better, I was able to exit "properly" without killing the program.

TextMate required no memorization of any kind. But it also doesn't make one out to be a genius for simply being able to use it. Those archaic command-line editors do. My gf has to use nano because she can't navigate using vi. I use vi (barely), and I can't navigate it either. lol. vi, for me, is like a one night stand...get in and out as fast as possible. I hate using it. But many people swear by it...in 2013. Because ":wq" is so obvious.
A big part of why the faculty body of the UC system was upset is that not one of the 9 art and design departments were ever consulted about an identity change. Neither were the thousand or so art/design graduate students.

I used to be adjunct faculty in art at a UC. It is the worst of presumptive bureaucracies.
If I had to use a PC, I'd use a ThinkPad. This was true before Lenovo took over the branding from IBM (they were already the manufacturer from what I understand), and it's true now that Lenovo is removing their branding from it. It's a solid machine and a great brand.
this is worse than the GAP logo redesign fail.
Snatching reputations at StackOverflow like a boss
That gradient makes my eyes want to vomit, no matter what it is being used for. This logo is ugly regardless of application.
The trouble with probabilistic programming is it requires very unnatural control flow to run inference on the models. Now there any solutions like Factorie, Figaro and Infer.NET where they are just a library you call into your code. The trouble is because of the representation you end up with much more verbose code.

The cost of learning a new language isn't one you can avoid even if it weren't a language. To write these programs in any system you have to get used to thinking of your data as generated by this unobserved process. Thinking in that way isn't something you can avoid and is actually the main stumbling block.
Utterly absurd.

That logo might work fine for a corner store, but not for an education institution, especially one like the UC.
Come on, be reasonable! That's not the only reason it was a waste of time and money.
Oh just what i was looking for. I was actually meaning to post an Ask question for this a couple of days ago, as i've been wondering about giving a [long] shot at MIT next year and i was looking for reference material for SAT's and stuff.