skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why?

Obviously I can't know it for sure, but my argument hinges on parallelism. Imperative programming isn't so well suited to parallelism as you probably know, and Python is sticking firmly to the imperative pseudo-code area of programming (which it does very well). Even for the scripting tasks I think in 10 years time it'll just be unacceptable to have so many cores under-utilised and functional languages make parallelism so much easier that it'll be a fairly easy choice to start coding a new project in those languages instead of Python. And then on top of this main argument, I'll just say you never know - I don't think people would have predicted the decline Perl has had to such a big degree (sure its not dead but its going that way). Python won't be here in 100 years (or 200, or 300..), I'm 100% sure. So I'm just arguing that the actual number of years left of Python is likely to be within 30 years. No-one knows the exact length, but my prediction is that its within that range.

> What makes Scheme and Haskell "long-term" languages?

They're just very simple and pure, and that's important for longevity because they aren't likely to be replaced in a kind of "major revision change" by a similar but better language, because they don't really need a big revision change, they're very good (or should I say "good enough") already. Python just doesn't so obviously provide the best language of its kind (dynamic, OOP, imperative) and is prone to be replaced by a different kind of language or a slightly different language of the same kind.

Both my answers are long enough that no doubt there'll be holes to pick in them. Eg. Should I have said "Scheme"? Well I don't think Scheme will ever make it big, but I do still think it'll be around in the long term to much the same degree it is now.

* By long term I meant at least 100 years for both Scheme and Haskell.

*Edit: That was a bit big, I'd like to correct it to "at least 30 years, and quite likely 100 years"
when doing nlp is there a standardized system or practice for encoding this data (which word(s) where emphasized)?

what is the logical framework for this? at first I thought you could only have one emphasized word per statement, but though its a bit more nuanced but you can also have two at a time (ie "my" and "money")
It might be. I'm reminded of a story I read about Palm designing their early PDFs. At that point, they had only experienced marginal success interpreting written text. There were a lot of ambiguities, and the actual style varied a lot from person to person, so it tended to fail outside of carefully controlled tests.

Eventually, someone hit on the idea of forcing the users into a custom set of symbols that was close enough to normal to be usable, but was different enough that it forced everyone into a common style that was easier to parse.

Of course, the tricky part is to come up with a method that is expressive enough to be useful without ending up with one of those "natural" programming languages.
Very much agreed on all points. Also it should be noted that just doing the nice thing by contacting the business and letting them know you have a problem can be a lot faster and nicer than the whole chargeback process.

Like I said, I used to go this route but I stopped when I realized how bad it was. Now that I let the business know first (and I appreciate when customers at my businesses do the same), most of them have fixed the problem and usually thrown something extra in too - free shipping, store credit, extra products, and what have you. No need to even threaten a chargeback unless it's been like a week or two since the problem started and nobody's even replied back.
Enriched Peanut Butter
Twitter's low retention rate could limit growth
The word "buffalo" has officially lost its meaning after reading that article.
Couldn't you just call directory assistance? Usually free the first few usages and most people aren't calling different countries enough that they won't remember the codes for the most recently called ones.
Your Coffee Shop Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit
I think this submission is an abuse both of Wikipedia and of Hacker News.
The Kindness of strangers can defeat proprietary cloud computing
I'm down for something in early May. Also, are we a 21+ crowd? I might prefer a bar to a coffee shop.
Do you mean you-singular, or are you addressing everybody in the thread who used a pronoun that could have referred to teachers. I think he meant that they fed the monkeys bananas because the teachers were hungry.
Google Now Charts Unemployment And Other Public Data In Search Results
You've got some of the best links around. How are you coming across them?
Entrepreneurs Cut Own Pay to Stay Alive
Outraged by Executive Compensation? Put Entrepreneurs In Charge.
thanks, i needed it!
I continue to be dumbfounded the the deletionist philosophy.

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mergism )

If Hacker News is not relevant to someone, they'll never search on the term or look for a definition.

If Hacker News is relevant to someone (they overheard a reference to it, or saw a link, or checked out the website and still don't get "what it's all about", or "who started it") then an article is quite relevant.

If we're talking about a non-searchable Borges library, then I understand why people might want to winnow the books, so as to increase the information density of what's left.

...but in an age of infinite storage and effective search, what's the theory for deleting information?

I've never heard an argument for why deletionism provides more utility than alternatives.
YARGH. Okay so this is one of the primary areas of research that one of my professors from university studies ( http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~croberts/ ).

None of the explanations that people have written here are entirely correct or reflect what's actually going on.

The phenomenon that's being discussed here is something called Contrastive Stress. It is a part of an interesting area of research on Linguistic Focus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)) that sits at the juncture of Semantics (meaning in abstract), Pragmatics (meaning in context), and Autosemgental Phonology (mental representation of sounds and their production of non-phoneme related stuff).

So, contrastive stress ties directly into the notion that sentences are stated in response to either explicit or implicit questions. In fact the location of the emphatic stress is directly related to what question the speaker is trying to answer.

So, you can actually do this with nearly any sentence, simply by placing the stress on a different word.

Badger's account is mostly correct, but it's tied in a little closer with grammar than his examples actually intimate. I'd say that there's a much wider range of possible candidates for say:

Did you say she stole your money?
I didn't say she stole my money, i know/saw/heard/thought/wrote/hinted/testified/dreamed it!

"It" in this context is the entire grammatical structure "she stole my money". The reason why this is important is because of the notion of what can be stressed and what the stress is actually applied/scoped to.

=========================================

You can do this with other sentences as well:

George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Is jeb bush the 43rd president of the united states?"

No, George Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Is George Washington the 43rd President of the United States?"

No, George Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"George Bush isn't the 43rd President of the United States, right?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was there more than one 43rd president of the united states?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was George W. Bush the 44th President of the United States?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

"Was George W. Bush the 43rd Vice President of the United States?"

No, George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

(okay, so "of" is a function word that we can't contrast against anything else)

"Was George W. Bush the 43rd President of the United Arab Emerates?"

No George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States.

etc.

So this really is a general phenomenon that you not only see every day, but really use on a constant basis. Every sentence has grammatical stress, it's how we know what other people are focusing on when they speak.
Look into online self-paced learning that your school will accept for credit. EPGY has individual classes as well as a degree-granting online high school.

Learn how to attract girls (or boys as you prefer). Read about building self-confidence without becoming self-absorbed. Watch and learn from people who get dates without seeming like jerks. Learn how to make strangers laugh and soon you'll be making everyone laugh. Also learn why you should care about physical fitness: not only will it automatically make you more attractive, but the chemical process it gets going is like marijuana and cocaine and xanax combined, without any of the side effects. It'll make you more energetic and positive, and more able to focus creatively on intellectual things for longer periods of time.

Stay engaged with smart people from other places and times (e.g. your Graham reading, online forums etc.)

Bypass your teachers by reading the material in your own way, and doing your own thing in class rather than paying attention. Go beyond the textbooks to original sources or other books on the matter -- that alone will make things 10 times as interesting.
A paragraph long? You can't think of interesting people, comments, events, arguments, success stories that have featured here?

I don't know if it belongs on wikipedia, but it'd be nice to have some history/commentary somewhere.
Sorry to say, but I believe that our name is holding us back. We joke about it, but to the other 99%, there's nothing funny about "hacking". With another name (Programmer News? Coder News?) we could have a more mainstream presence.

Then again, maybe this is exactly the way pg & friends want it.
Ooooh. Why gaze at our own navels, when we can ask other people to make a collaborative fingerpainting of our collective navel, and stare at that instead?
> Reductio Ad Absurdum is an absurd line of argument.

It's an effective means of chopping down very general arguments. For example, the bread argument would be relevant if someone had argued that every offended person should be appeased, always.
> Either way, your response was snide and still hasn't addressed what I said in that point.

Well, for what it's worth, I wasn't trying to be snide. If the problem was solved, it really would be egalitarian bliss. I really don't know how this could be taken as "dickery".

My response to your proposed solution, if you're interested, is that it's unworkable. I actually skipped most of it my first time through, because the first thing you said about it was "First, get the other kids to realize why nerd things are cool" with no explanation as to how this could possibly be done. Convince me that you can dictate what is cool and what is not on a large scale, and then I'll give some weight to your plan.

See, even now, my talking about this comes off as confrontational, to no effect. I still think it was better for the original conversation to leave it out.

> You've stood out to me as one of the people who's most deliberately ignoring the things that I'm saying

Have I ignored something else that annoys you?

> By that standard I'm blaming the nerds for deliberately setting up a situation wherein they're persecuted, when they could easily avoid the entire situation by not being so deliberately hostile. Does that work?

Sure. The way it's written, it seems like you are referring to all nerds, but I will assume that this is not the case.

Anyway, apology accepted.
Most speakers would prepare talking notes either in another set of more detailed slides or some form of lists/text. I know I do. I wished people shared those instead.
Flag it then?
I have no idea what you're talking about. But, nevertheless: It doesn't matter who you offend or why. If a person comes up to you and says "I'm not really a person; I'm really a tower of cats in a cunningly designed human suit, and your LOLcat photos offended me," the correct answer is still "Gosh, I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean to offend. I really had no idea that cats would take my presentation in that way."

After which you back carefully away and hope they don't come to your next talk.

You should not respond with a passionate defense of free expression unless the person who approaches you is a cop trying to arrest you. [1] In general, nobody is trying to deny you the right to advertise your beliefs out loud. When they complain, you should assume that they are merely inviting you to walk back what you said before they commence avoiding you like the plague.

Of course, if you really hate cats, you can always just respond with "good, I'm glad I offended you, you terrifying feline monstrosity!" Because very few Rails consulting customers are cats, that might not cost you much. Although, come to think of it, some Rails customers probably do employ cats, or people who love cats and care about their feelings. And there are many others who will feel mighty uncomfortable when the managers of the framework that lies beneath their million-dollar website become more concerned with aggressively asserting the universal freedom to hate cats than with keeping people like Mike Gunderloy on the team. What kind of priority is that? Enough with the sophomoric flamewar, already!

---

[1] In which case, of course, you still shouldn't respond with a passionate defense. You should call up your lawyer and let her respond.
IBM: Watson takes on Jeopardy
Ignore Y Combinator at Your Own Risk
I wonder if we'll be able to have IBM:DeepQA and Wolfram:Alpha compete against each other at Jeopardy...
Google now searches public data
Tiling window managers in general are great if you like screen. Awesome and xmonad are two other prominent tiling WMs.
Then you should have placed the updated copy in your home directory, or in /usr/local, rather than replacing the one in /System. This is really no different than if you'd updated the Perl install in /usr on a Linux system, and the package manager later replaced that with an updated copy - in both cases, the vendor's supposed to be the only one touching those files.
See, even now, my talking about this comes off as confrontational, to no effect. I still think it was better for the original conversation to leave it out.

Nah, that's a completely sensible point. I don't think it's hard to make programming seem cool, though: there are some very awesome things that've been made. WeFeelFine comes to mind. Talk about how something beautiful like that was made and it'll at least make people realize more that programmers can be artists, too. (Not the best example, but it's what first comes to mind.)

Have I ignored something else that annoys you?

Nope.

Sure. The way it's written, it seems like you are referring to all nerds, but I will assume that this is not the case.

Yeah. I could revise this, but I don't think it would be worth it. It wasn't a major piece of writing, in any event.
I have thousands of links in my del.icio.us account. Once in a while I pick some of the best ones and submit them to HN if they're "hackerish" enough. Searching for stuff on Wordpress.com sometimes yields some true gems too.
I can see how your explanation is more complete, but is there anything wrong in badger7's post?
Whoops, I didn't even think about seeing the discussion from that point of view, probably because I'm never in a position of authority over children. It's interesting to note that nobody else here discusses the role of authority figures. It certainly never crossed my mind that parents and teachers were even relevant to the discussion. In my experience, adults were pretty much ignored because they either morally condemned all social jockeying and exclusion (when lecturing the bullies) or dismissed it as meaningless (when comforting the victims.)

My gut reaction to you, as a parent, taking part in this discussion is that people put in a position of authority over children seem to instinctively start denying their own human weaknesses. I'm interested to hear what you would say about that. When it comes to social bullying and exclusion, in my experience, adults never acknowledged that we were going through a difficult process of learning adult behaviors. Implicitly, they pretended that there was no grown-up way to do what we were doing, because social divisions and inequalities did not exist in the adult world.

I think we could have regarded adults as valuable sources of coaching if they had just been honest instead of trying to be perfect, inhumanly pure role models. You know, even socially dominant teenagers are clumsy and self-conscious. They would probably appreciate some tips on how to enforce social boundaries without being jerks about it. That would benefit everyone. As a parent, could you even do such a thing, or would it compromise your authority too much to admit that adults do the same things that teenagers do, only much more subtly and gracefully?
Erlang News
Sure... From my experience of Wikipedia though, it'll likely be deleted within the hour.
To be fair, they only came out with that post after the virtue of failing had been basically become received wisdom.

I'm still not sure what it means -- I hope it's fairly synonymous with "fail cheaply", or to me at least it's useless advice.
That's known as "neutral stress" and can just be an assertion of fact. The topic/question under discussion may be undefined, for example.

Sentences can also have multiple stresses, and you may have multiple topics under discussion. Sentences still have a primary stress, but can have secondary stresses as well.

Who sang what to whom?

Pat sang "I feel pretty" to Jackie!

Implicit here are three stresses, which may indicate the following:
Pat sang, can you believe it? I didn't know pat could sing!
Pat sang "i feel pretty", who would have know that Pat likes show tunes?
Pat sang "i feel pretty" to Jackie. Jackie was the wrong person to sing to, because Jackie hates the music from West Side Story.
It's nothing that you can't get without a .screenrc. Most of the magic involves a few commands:

1. "hardstatus always lastline": displays a line of information on the bottom row of the terminal.

2. "caption always": similar to hardstatus, except it's displayed at the bottom of each split window.

3. "backtick": lets you interpolate the output of shell commands into hardstatus and caption.
How Mathematics Became a Civil Rights Battleground
The best entrepreneurs know to not waste time reading this garbage and work on their startup instead.
True, also the definition of "aceing" should be adjusted for the AP exams. I took the Physics C Electricity & Magnetism exam without taking the class, you only need to get something like 65% of it right to get the highest score (which some shockingly small percentage of people even do). That isn't hard at all if you put your mind to it. When I got to college it knocked off a 4 credit class with a 3 hour lab each week. 2 weeks of studying saved me hundreds of hours of work in college.
No, i'm not saying that Badger's post is incorrect (it correctly defines the phenomenon). Some of the other posts on this thread are all over the place, and don't describe the phenomenon or what underlies it.

So sorry if i gave the impression that Badger7 is wrong, he's not, he just doesn't explain what's going on, or what the full scope of the phenomenon is :)
Deleted my last comment by mistake. Here's what I said:

"I think he meant the submission to Wikipedia, not the meta-submission on HN. Now if the Wikipedia page had a section about the HN discussion of the submission to Wikipedia, things would get more interesting."

I hope the wikipedia entry is deleted, it doesn't quite capture the essence of HN.
Maybe we can control the traffic dynamically. When traffic is low we can switch to "Coder News". As the server load grows larger the title can switch to "Disco News". As we approach redline, we'll see "Accounting News".
> There's something about the questioner being unwilling to help themselves.

Exactly. I run a tutorial site for younger webmasters so I get a lot of requests for help. I wouldn't do it if I objected (although it's far too out of date now) but there's a huge difference between someone who's been on my site, searched on Google, constructed some code that they think is on the right lines and struck a wall, and then someone who has thought "hmm, she codes, I'll just get her to do it".
Add this to your userContent.css (or equivalent):

pre { white-space: pre-wrap; }

Works wonders. :)
I generally agree with you. However, suppose there are good reasons behind the deletionist philosophy. What might they be? Some possibilities:

(1) Inclusion in Wikipedia is a statement in itself. It says, "This is notable." In the case of non-notable subjects, the statement is false, and so the problem is one of inaccuracy.

(2) Information on a non-notable topic is very difficult to check for accuracy, update, etc. Thus, the proliferation of non-notable topics would lead to lower overall quality.

(3) Pages on generally non-notable topics would tend to reflect the viewpoint of perhaps just one person who considers the topic important, or, similarly, one company. They would thus be prone to excessive POV stuff, advertising, etc.

In summary, every argument I can think of boils down to lack of notability -> poor quality.

And perhaps that does mean that there should be a notability standard on Wikipedia. On the other hand, I think it is clear that a large number of those people labeled "deletionist" have a notability standard that is significantly too high. (I also think it is very clear that HN is notable enough for inclusion; I'm rather baffled that anyone would think otherwise.)
I've always felt that anywhere you have an effective Reduction Ad Absurdum, there's a more effective alternative of some sort. It may be effective in some cases, but I am optimistic that it is rarely if ever the best argument.

I will be specific: By "best," I mean most fruitful, most provocative, most stimulating, most interesting. I accept that it is often effective in a demagogic sense.
Remember infamous Danish cartoons? Do you think cartoonist had to apologize? Boy, did he offend someone…
My point was, if someone is offended by that presentation, he (and I mean he) should have his head examined. There are people that can be offended by most ridiculous things and I am not going to consider myself responsible for all their quirks.
Too much fear to offend someone just dumbs us down, makes daring thing less likely (I think it has to be someone with DHH kind of personality to create RoR) and generally leads to kind of lukewarm relationships, hypocrisy and "thermal death" of society.

I am all for solving real problems, not imaginary ones. I have seen quite a few women in IT, and it did not look like they had any problems with it (suffice to say one was the head of the whole IT organization I was working for, other three - heads of departments). All were judged by the competence, not their sex.

It is interesting to see that the mere idea that _maybe_, just _maybe_ women in general are not inclined for this type of work (hint: dealing with abstractions, not real people and relations) is instantly rubber-stamped as sexist.
I am going to stretch it here, but why isn't anyone fighting to right the underrepresentation of males among persons giving birth?

And I don't buy the reality of some "feelings" that are so much on display in this case.
....four wheels better?

Joking aside, biking is actually a good option here in Vancouver. I actually see it as a form of multi-tasking; Commuting and exercising at the same time.
Note that in this case the group is launching from Denmark, so approvals and regulations are different than what Scaled Composites (a US company) had to go through.
Know when your email got to their Blackberry