skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The symbology used to form each proof is universally accepted and agreed upon. The symbol "=", for example, is taken not as a verb (a becomes b), but as a statement of truth (a IS b). Likewise, "+" has a specific meaning. The juxtaposition of terms is implicitly understood (e.g., all mankind agrees to interpret it as) as multiplication of some form (which is generalized in higher mathematics to function composition, which makes sense once it's explained). It is the ultimate language, where one symbol has one, and only one, meaning.

It is the structure which is a human phenomenon. The fact that you can express any algebraic expression in reverse polish notation is a great example of this. 1 2 + 3 4 <asterisk> / has the same meaning as (1+2)/(3*4). (Sorry for the <asterisk> thing -- the markup system of this blog is positively broken since it doesn't provide a means of escaping the markup characters.) The symbols, and hence the meaning behind them, remain the same.
Really good C++ programmers are often unwilling to give up the control and power (in practical terms) of the language + libraries. Any piece of code written in a higher level language can always be 'improved' upon / optimized in C/C++, while still remaining reasonably generic. This over time pretty much guarantees that 'timeless' code, like math and graphics libraries, ip stacks etc. will have their canonical representations in C or C++, with 'easier' languages simply linking to those, instead of bothering to provide their lesser own. Soo, those who want to write timeless code do it in C / C++, hard or not.

I think Haskell's appeal lies in being everybody's favorite local maximum, while remaining only a very select few's global one.
"The implementation is not inherently interesting. It's just a means to an end."

If no one on your team finds implementation details inherently interesting, your implementation is likely to suffer, perhaps to the point of being uncompetitive.
Having studied philosophy (and maths and CS) myself, I mostly agree with your essay. However, here are a few things in defense of studying philosophy:

1. Just as it can be useful to be able to consider what makes a _good_ burrito, it can be useful to consider what makes a _tortilla_ (as opposed to pita or lavash or other flat breads). A large part of metaphysics is about carving up and categorising concepts and analysing and clarifying distinctions. These skills (taken in moderation) turn out to be quite useful in everyday life.

2. Symbolic logic is great exercise for the brain. Analytic philosophy is great for learning to write precisely. Becoming a better thinker and writer will serve you well. (Philosophy is a good way to get these skills, but not the only way.)

3. Philosophy is the subject which encompasses studies that are not yet mature enough to be their own disciplines. Some such subjects may never mature, but others will (think Kuhnian protoscience, iff you like Kuhn). Most maths and sciences have spun off from philosophy. The boundaries are fascinating: go read the so-called natural philosophers (the term "scientists" is anachronistic) like Descartes, Galileo, Huygens, Newton, and Leibniz.

4. There's a wealth of "philosophy of $foo" subjects to study. The degree of BS involved in Phil($foo) seems proportional to the degree of BS in $foo. Pick the right $foo, and study _both_ $foo and Phil($foo), and you've likely found someting meaningful to study.
The way I'm trying to change the world with my skill set is to design an open, decentralized monetary system that could eventually subsume the existing centralized hierarchical system:

http://ripple.sf.net/

Talk is cheap. Let's write some code.
What makes this a Facebook app? Shouldn't it just be a webpage? Perhaps a webpage with an option to put the video you generate into your Facebook profile.

Shouldn't a Facebook app make use of Facebook specific features?
> Languages like C++ and Java are difficult simply because they're big and inconsistent - memorizing them is not very rewarding.

Your 'programming body memory' memorizes the language, and the mines, no biggie - you just program a certain way. What /sucks/ about C++ is the amount of boilerplate you have to write - in, probably, most interactions with the STL, and in class definitions, there's a thought-interfering degree of mandatory (or 'good style mandatory') boilerplate. At least 'for' loops will get cleaner with C++-0x.
I've been looking at reading Robert Solomon's books, and video / audio course on Existentialism. I've only read one book of his (on a very different subject) but I can vouch that he's an in-depth, human writer who brings literature, psychology and philosophy (and just plain common human experience) to his writing.

But, though I've only read 2 of 5 pages of this piece, I think we're probably falling apart a bit as a society, because we don't have values beyond money and self. Which is strange, because all that disappears when you die. I think people don't think about that, when they're in their most productive years.
-1, extraneous use of \eq

$e^{i\pi}=-1$

: )

http://nirvana.informatik.uni-halle.de/~thuering/php/latex-o...

http://nirvana.informatik.uni-halle.de/~thuering/php/latex-o...

'LaTeX compiler' cloud app...very 2.0
Feeling old?
STL and boost are the future of C++.
I think thats what we got with the Paul Graham article; Philosophy of Computer Science ;)

The article says its not good enough for those of us otherwise interested in philosophy but dissappointed by its exactness, to back off from it. Rather we need to demand accuracy, precision, and practicality. And that for the sake of progress its important to recognize the field is in poor condition and not silently pass it off, in its current state, as having higher merit.
It's been a while.. I actually retyped that both ways and somehow decided the \eq was better. woops
Just out of curiosity, which is smarter, a fish or a salamander?
In addition to Sokal's hack on "Social Text", I believe that Rob Pike did a test in which random texts produced by running a Markov chain over Derrida were found to be indistinguishable by informed readers from actual Derrida. (I'm probably misremembering at least some details of the actual incident but the gist is, I'm pretty sure, true.)
I'm surprised that your essay doesn't deal directly with the branch of philosophy known as ethics, as practiced by such canonical philosophers as Kant, Hume, Bentham and Mill, and by contemporary philosophers like Peter Singer, Michael Walzer, Jonathan Glover, and John Rawls. Their work addresses some of the most general questions (what is a just action or a just society?), and it seems to meet your utility criterion: if you find it convincing, you have to do things differently.

Is this not an example, from within the mainstream of philosophy, of the thing you're calling for?
It is true that many works on philosophy are complicated because they fail to accurately define the meaning of the terms they are discussing. However, the solution proposed by this essay would result in the reduction of philosophy to self-improvement books like the 7 Habits of this and that.

In his book, Wittgenstein said that one must be silent on those things about which one cannot speak. The idea as advanced in his lecture on ethics is that some things simply cannot be expressed in human language and one should not try to speak about them. But is there really any harm in trying?

Anything useful that came out of philosophy is called something else: mathematics, science, etc. It has not failed. We should keep on trying.
I've done a bit of research -- the Pike incident involved Baudrillard, not Derrida.
Maxwell can get invalidated. Math can't.
May you live in interesting times?
Haskell is mathematical sound. At least it tries to be.
"I was a 19-year old trying to convince myself and others that I was a man. So, with the other performers, I became at least as profane - nay, foul mouthed and filthy minded, as the most immature of them. I worked hard to develop some fluidity and cleverness in my vulgarity and won my share of laughs from the others.Yet during this whole time I lived with my parents coming down the mountain at an insane speed late at night only to end up in a home where certain words were simply never said and I never said them. Not once did I slip and speak in front of my family the way I spoke constantly in front of the other performers of Sundance. This was not by any herculean effort either, I did not think about changing my behavior. When I was with my parents I wasn't the same person. I have seen this time and again with my friends, with other family members, our whole demeanor changes, our manners, our figures of speech, when we move from one context to another. Listen to someone you know when they pickup the telephone. You have special voices for different people. Our attitudes, our moods change depending on whom we are with."

-Orson Scott Card, Speaker For The Dead. (Introduction, pg 18)
wow hobbits were real, link to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis. I wonder what else from lord of the rings are real too.
Huh, I'll have to find out what made Heraclitus' notion of Logos so distinct then.
Ahem. Russell paradox.

Granted it's been a while, but one can never be too careful.
In French we say the IQ of an oyster :)
...loving wisdom!
Dude...get a grip...it's a programming language, not LSD.
Haskell is fun in that you get to write things using combinators, through abusing laziness, and in a style that feels very mathematical. It makes me program utility function combinators in other languages, which is excellent.

It's not so fun the moment you want to use more than one Monad at once, though.
Ask YC news: What happened to socialmoth?
From some of my recent posts there - seems like the site died. I know there's the facebook app, and I know they're working on overhear.us

But where did the users go??
I like how the article claims that the humanities have a better view of the meaning of life...

"And in the process it has badly weakened the humanities, the disciplines with the oldest and deepest connection to this question"

Why does 'oldest' == 'best'? And how can he claim 'deepest'? Cosmology or math could certainly be reasonable contenders for this claim.

This article is flawed - college shouldn't exist to answer the 'meaning of life question' - it teaches people to be better learners, and to follow their interests.

But perhaps I missed something - I kind of stopped reading at that point.
24 years on - The man who saved millions of lives
For the truly paranoid only:

Witness the evolution of 'V-E+F=2' since Euler's time:

http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-Refutations-Logic-Mathematical-...

Is it right? Is it wrong? What does it mean to even BE a 'face' ?

Although I guess the worst thing that could happen in this situation is you change your explanation of the tattoo, and not the tattoo itself.
In German, we say the IQ of a Frenchman
Wikipedia says that a PE-ratio of 14 is average for public companies and that a ratio of 25 is plausible for a high growth company.
geez. Bezos is worth 9 billion??
The P/E for Apple is 40.72.
Interview with Sebastian Thrun on probabilistic robotics and the DARPA challenges
Joel talks about software development, where the real impact of individual contributions is hard to measure. Any metric you set will be inaccurate, and thus harmful, because people will be motivated to maximize the metric, rather than real value. You just have to find people you can trust and empower, then trust them and empower them.

Now, healthy days is quite a good heuristic to evaluate a doctor's performance, don't you think? How do you think it can be gamed; i.e., what exploits can you think of?
Erlang: my thoughts
Ask News.YC: What things do you hate and love of your blog platform?
I've been thinking about blogging, I use wordpress but there are a lot of annoying little things, however, I love the flexibility that plugins give.

What things do you hate and love of your blog platform?
Einsteinium? (yes, I'm away Einstein didn't discover that =P)
So the disconnect for me is: if you're able to produce a 6-figure annual revenue, why is it so hard for a company (with Rifkin and Park nonetheless) with 300,000 daily users to accomplish similar track records?
You can't follow every rule in the bible if they all conflict with each other; he had to leave out one of the testaments.
They have staff to pay, office space to rent, and VC money so that they won't need ads until the achieve the kind of returns their investors require. These companies are go big or go home, 6 figure annual revenue would pay for like one employee.

My only expense is my time and hosting costs.
Renowned pimp Paul Graham wants you to die slowly and surely
All that proves is that Baudrillard's message is invariant under Markov chains. I'd like see a mathematician produce an argument of such fine structure.
Hey I said I was sorry what is with the repeat downmoding? Karma police, jeez...
Wufoo and Weebly merge to form Tofu
LOL
"They say that any program of this sort must rest on religious beliefs, which have lost their status as a source of authority in higher education."

I suppose a religious person might think this.
What happened to Shoutfit?
http://www.shoutfit.com has been down for a very long time.
Odd, after I posted the exact same question about shoutfit, I saw this. Must be something in the air..
OTOH, gratuitous LaTeX notation is even dorkier.
Greasemonkey word-count script for your Y Combinator funding application
The instructions on the application form says "Please try to answer each question in less than 120 words." This Greasemonkey script displays the word count in the bottom right corner of the screen when you are typing in a textarea.
If nothing else, this will be something for groklaw to focus on now that SCO has finally lynched itself.
Free Will and Physics - 3 min video summary
Video-Based Document Tracking:  Unifying Your Physical and Electronic Desktops
There has always been a disconnect of this sort between pop science journalism and actual scientific papers. Medical and biotech researchers, in particular, have to be ultra-cautious in their pronouncements. There are a hundred thousand variables that could render this discovery useless for humans. But that sort of caution doesn't sell newspapers. The real tragedy is the inevitable disappointment and backlash it causes among the public when the promising discovery is perceived to "fail."
It's always a little amusing - and frustrating - how our language falls short when we try to describe quantum phenomena. Quarks don't have a "position in the neutron because their existence is expressible as a waveform, not a little marble looking thing. Interesting article, though - and fascinating that Fermi guessed at this decades ago.
Advice for a high school student
I am a high school student and aspiring startup entrepreneur and am wondering what additional advice all of you have?
Why do some people consider %w{ Haskell C++ Blub } difficult?

And why do they believe the difficulty is intrinsic to the language and not a result of their own preconceptions and assumptions?
At VentureCake we use WordPress.

Wordpress has very limited WYSIWYG support. Also there's no paste special, so when I paste a formatted doc without going via gedit I get a bunch of formatting I don't want.

Some of the plugins, like the captchas, should be there by default. Otherwise your blog will be inundated with Spam.

There doesn't seem to be a good way to mark comments by specific users so they're always highlighted. VentureCake has had comments by Alan Cox, the Twittr developers, and Mike DiPetrillo from VMware. There's no way to highlight these specific comments (or other, cool outstanding ones) by default. There's a plugin I tried, but I didn't work.

The ability of some users to post without moderation, or edit their comments anytime.

Plugins add their menus in different places. I can't always find out where a plugin has added itself until I read it's documentation.

I have to resize images for thumbnails and apply effects (like reflections) myself manually in GIMP first.
There is certainly a part of me that feels guilty, sometimes for not taking a more active, direct role in the improvement of people's lives, of our course as a species, of the world in general. Volunteering is wonderful, but clearly that's not what we are talking about here - this is about committing your mind, all the analytical problem solving skills at your disposal, all that drive and ambition, to something that benefits others.

But there is another part of me that believes, quite firmly, that you can't force people to be socially responsible and get good results. You can't demand that everyone order their lives for the common good (I seem to recall a guy named Karl had that notion a while back, and the practical application of his ideas didn't turn out so well.) Humans are, by nature, a competitive and self-interested species, and we ignore that reality at our peril. Does this mean we should all be heartless capitalists? No, I don't see it that way. I think it's possible to "trick" human nature, to align personal ambition with something that produces a net good for society. On a more specific note, I think people in our field are part of a valuable and necessary experiment - we are helping to organize the explosion of human knowledge more efficiently, defining a world that didn't even exist in Marx's industrial worker's paradigm, that might never have existed if we were all completely altruistic. So yes, even if what we create seems trivial on the surface, even if we are just saving .01% of the population 4 minutes a day, I think that's worth something. Because you never know what those extra four minutes will bring. Or what other innovations may spring from that little brainstorm you had one day in the laundromat at 1 AM.

Here endeth the rant.
I've often wondered about this while watching canine social groups in action. Despite the proverbial "dog eat dog", I've seen what appears to be an expectation of fairness and group order in dogs, even in a supposedly informal social group like pets at a dog park. I've often felt that animals with complex social structures might reveal the origins of "enlightened self interest." Cool stuff.
7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails - O'Reilly Ruby
... because of a 404? J/K

The correct link is here, please update it and delete me.
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_swit...

And it's odd that this post has 2 points while being a 404.
Philosophy is not about proving scientific theory as this article suggests. It is about understanding how to think (thereby understanding why there is scientific theory). Basing an initial premise or blame against Aristotle whose works are not complete and not understood in historical terms is like accusing a toddler of not understanding how to order a pizza.

It amazes me every now and then how smart people can get lost. I have and I'm not that smart. But I am smart enough to know that many of the attempted arguments in this essay are off.

Consolidating the history of a field of thought to a few authors and blaming one of the "fathers" as making a mistake is a false argument. It doesn't address the core framework of the field or address applied thinking. Philosophy is about logic and understanding how to get to a point where one human can explain to another in clear terms what that means.

I enjoy Mr. Graham's articles and read all of them, in this case I would avoid reading this and instead read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance instead.
I think it's the lack of momentum and hype. Lack of momentum means that they possibly couldn't decide what else to add. Lack of hype because they don't seem to have done much marketing or they couldn't get people to spread word about their site.
So use some other framework for Ruby. Why would you switch languages because of one framework??
Actually, her theory of "mind" is probably the worst flaw. All the modern psychological research indicates that the rule-following, conscious mind you use to do formal "reason" is a tiny, weak, singly threaded, monitoring rather than commanding subsystem in a brain that is mostly fast, parallel, unconscious, and NOT rational.
The title's kind of misleading. It's not like the guy gave up on Rails, he even said that for future projects he would love to use Rails if it was designed for Rails for the ground up.

It sounds like he was trying to using Rails to retrofit on to an existing PHP DB schema, which is an obvious nightmare and probably a stupid idea in the first place.
Summary: (1) He's a better programmer now, having internalized RoR best practices, and can apply it to raw PHP code, (2) Decreased load issues, (3) All company code can be PHP, and it sounds like there was a lot of legacy code that didn't play well with Rails portion.

Would have been nice to read more about the mismatch points between Rails and legacy code. Was this a legacy DB structure that couldn't be loosely coupled to the Rails side, e.g., exposed as an internal REST service?

I also wonder if others can just as easily extend his code than if he had used a well-documented framework like Rails. In any case, it's impressive he rewrote the whole system (doesn't look like a small web app) in 2 months.
When I have seen large rewrites fail, it's often because of an all-or-nothing rather than iterative or staged approach. At my previous company, 2 different managers approached the migration of a massive VB6 project. The first tried a total rewrite in C#. The code was ingenious and better in many ways, but ultimately it failed after many wasted man-years, and he was let-go. There was just too much hidden wisdom in the spaghetti code to replace it quickly and easily. A wiser manager, and friend of mine, managed the rewrite, but in stages. He would carve out a chunk, and have it replaced. He's a director there now.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the 1 minute * 300 million argument because we fritter enough time away already (TV, internet, waiting in line, chewing too slowly, hitting snooze, etc.). A minute here or there will invariably be sucked up somewhere else.

I used to work at a large, very large, software company. I learned not to buy the argument of ("Hey, design this right and you'll save 1 minute on 450 million machines") as a motivating factor. You just don't notice small things enough, and there are a million small things every day. (Did you notice the new wide-mouth soda cans? They do save you time gulping. But would you be satisfied being their inventor?).

Personally, I'd prefer to have a large impact on a few people and grow from there. But that's just me.
I am a better coder now, thank you for reminding me.
I took the 120 words to be a suggestion.
If I remember, Askimet (anti-spam plugin) is included by default. Captchas for blog spam are usually a bad idea anyway, IMHO, because blog spammers are generally not targeting specific blogs, so even the smallest of obstacles is usually enough to make a spammer go somewhere else. Captchas just add an extra obstacle for the commenter.

Edit: just noticed that Askimet is only free for personal use, so I guess it doesn't help everyone that it is included by default.

Edit 2: by the way, I agree about the plugin menus.
What Languages Fix
(Blogspot) It has all the features I wanted. But it kinda looks like crap.
There is some info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56076
The main site is still growing, I think and the Facebook app is really successful. I'm not sure what you mean.
Strangely, it went 404 right after I read it the first time. The link must have been changed very shortly after this was posted.
I did the same thing with Paradise Lost to produce the "poem" at the start of ANSI Common Lisp. When read aloud it passed as poetry to a sample of 1 English Lit grad student.
herdrick: I posted "is the site dead? i made a post yesterday morning and it's still on the front page." on socialmoth about 12 hours ago - and it's still on there. I stopped going when the site became too popular - and now - my posts stay on the frontpage for 12-72 hours... I wondered if the mass of [contributing] users had left...