skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know how Physics is sometimes viewed as a kind of ad-hoc applied Mathematics? For that reason, we often/usually consider maths the more fundamental discipline.

Mathematicians are generally doing ad-hoc applied computer programming in order to carry on mathematics at this point. Give the academy another 50-100 years to figure out what this means, if anything, about the fundamentals of each discipline.

I think we'll conclude that advances in the rest of mathematics are all built on computable mathematics now, including proof, making computation foundational until/unless someone finds a more powerful approach.

PS: There are no doubt mathematicians reading this, and the ad-hoc part may make you bristle. If you can point me to a paper that begins with a proof of correctness, of both the hardware and operating system which ran whatever code was involved, I'll take it back.
A significant part of my job is being available. I can leave a few minutes early if I check my email before the next day starts (ignoring social pressure; nobody's usually going to have questions at the very end of the day that can't wait for morning) or come in a half hour to occasionally an hour and a half late (nobody has immediate questions that early in the day), but mostly I need to be around during the times that everyone else is working.

If I'm having a slow period, or if I'm stuck and need time to percolate, I'll bring a book or spend more time than usual on HN.
"Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" --Oscar Wilde
I think it sounds like the author is experiencing angst about his own bullshit job.
Not everyone needs to code competently. Just like not everyone needs to speak Spanish competently. (Or can learn other languages competently)

But... Learning a little Spanish can increase one's appreciation for Spanish culture. Even attempting to learn some programming can make one much more effective when they hire or direct a programmer, or engage in discussions about online privacy, or ask someone to help analyze a problem.
That's fucking nonsense.

A botanist can't examine a plant and tell if it is a weed. A chemist can examine a liquid and determine if it is water.

This is because, despite being a common language term, "water" maps to a specific chemical compound.

"Weed" is a common language term that maps to nothing in a scientific context. RoundUp is an herbacide, it only becomes slective, i.e. "a weedkiller" when some plants are genetically modified and this because we define "weeds" as whatever plants Roundup kills.

The set of weeds for a horticulturist is different from the set of weeds for an agronomist and both are different from the set of weeds for an ecologist - and more importantly, the horticulturist's weeds and the ecologist's weeds will tend toward polar opposites.

The same is of course true with the agronomist. Thus a natural food bearing plant is described as a weed in the article.

The premises upon which the article are based are economic not scientific despite the name of the publication.
SaaS Branding | 6 Challenges of Killer Cloud Brands
Before we go too far, raising children is definitely not Biblically categorized as idle hands, but in fact praised and respected.

The old-school Puritan would prefer you spend time teaching and raising children than helping an ad company sell more clicks. Or generally make a Skinner box.

Don't know much about Soviet Russia but 19-teens Russian avant-garde art was pretty boss. To say nothing of Kandinsky.

My perspective is that idle hands are actually idle: not building, not thinking, not active, not contemplative, not searching, not trying, not even resting. But idle. Un(der) used. And rather hard to defend. Consumption is easier than creation.
Seriously. Now Chomsky is working his way onto the front page with some regularity?

Not to mention when I woke up this morning the top post was somebody writing for an online magazine of "Art-activism, eco-anarchism, subversion and sedition" positing a conspiracy by the plutocrats to put people in make-work jobs.

Alas, I lost my flagging privileges around the time we had a front page with half a dozen postings about a plane to Cuba that no one of interest was on.
Exactly.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/09/skill-disparities-i...
When Targeted Advertising Gets Too Personal [Cartoon]
I was really impressed at an O'Reilly conference to discover how on top of this sort of thing they are. Tim O'Reilly is huge on data and would be watching web-trends for emerging technologies like a hawk to decide what books to commission next.
> Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at

So, as a young person who might end up in a bullshit job, what are the best ways to enjoy it? It's not all bad, after all
I wrote this song as a response to a bullshit job I was doing for a period of time, thankfully I got my ass out because it drove me to write such thoughts....

Title: The Ballad of a 30 something Office Worker

https://soundcloud.com/swampscott/the-ballad-of-a-30-somethi...

Yeah, I was in an environment (as a result of consulting) that sucked the very life from my creative nature...
That's very interesting- I really like the buy/sell aspect for projects instead of just the usual "find a cofounder" thing.

First comment, however, is I don't see search anywhere- do you have to login to get this?
Part of the explanation lies in the hiring process. At the company I work we have a ton of useless people - 'office manager', 'coordinator' and other titles that don't mean anything - which make you wonder how they got the job in the first place. Usually answer is they are hired because they know someone at the company, and it's so easy to get somebody who has no skills to fit into paper pushing jobs. Of course there isn't anybody to oversee all this. The chief executives aren't checking if some guy in the building is really needed there. At every step down from CEO somebody is getting hired by someone because they need a job.
What? No. The whole point is that the bison from Buffalo is bullying. If you ignore case it makes no sense. You can remove all the capital B-uffalos but you can't remove all the buffalos.

Some nice random down voting going on. This moderation system is sooooo good.
Windows only reads clock at startup and writes it shutdown.
As someone getting into scala, where can I find the list of top available libs? For clojure I just browsed github, but I feel there probably is some resource out there I'm missing.
It's not economic at all, it's political (whether it is intentional or not is a different question). In evidence is all the violence that is brought to bear in sustaining the current economic status quo (i.e. the piles of regulations and laws).
7% of vehicles sold in California in 2013 are hybrid cars, 1.8% are plug-ins
The current update frequency for IE is a dramatic improvement over older versions.

The fact that you can't install IE11 on Windows 2000 is irrelevant. I can't install Safari on my Windows machine anymore either, and it's still a HTML5 browser (albeit a bad one, the last time I tried it on a Mac).

Users not installing updates isn't relevant either.

IE is a perfectly respectable HTML5 browser. It runs my HTML5 games better than Opera or Safari and has fairly comprehensive support for non-bleeding-edge features, especially if you look at 11 (coming out soon, I believe).
Ah. That's a good idea which I totally failed to follow.

Instead I flailed around blindly in the usual manner of trying to get PHP applications to work and seem to have fixed the problem. :-)

I should really move my blog to an environment I actually understand and have control over.
I agree, basic scripting and automation would be more useful to the general population. Rather than just learning to code, I think that many people people could benefit from learning how to use technology first, include some theory and logic courses that lead into CS.
We ARE working essentially 15 hour weeks (or trending towards that). But instead of each person working 15hour weeks, most people will just be unemployed. The average will end up around 15 hours.
Don't publish just to publish, only publish what you believe are great papers and don't bother playing the system.
Does it support Swagger now? For my last implementation, I wanted a good automatic API documentation, and I'd rather have the client code in a generated way, and of the three Scala microframeworks that I had a look at, only Scalatra had kinda solid Swagger support. Neither Spray nor Finagle did. Though in hindsight the Swagger release in the current Scalatra is a bit old and thus it has tons of bugs and issues that are fixed in current Swagger but I found it impossible to just update Swagger.
FYI Your site is blocked by my corporate firewall as a site containing "Malicious Sources".
Does node.js have the same problem with the big API changes in v8?
I hope that when it does get written, they don't make so many narcissistic allusions to "As you know from reading my prior body of work..."
Kal Me Maybe - a comparison of Kal to monads in Haskell
Here's a comment I also left at the website:

I read the original article, and Wang et al. measure fitness by (i) measuring photosynthesis in glasshouse-grown plants (ii) measuring seed germination on wet paper in petri dishes and (iii) growing plants in garden (grown 20 cm apart, fertilized, hand-weeding and insecticides applied).

We probably can assume that the extra copies of EPSP synthase genes increase the metabolic throughput (by boosting some of the protein synthesis pathways) of the plants, and when grown in abundant light (20 cm apart, no shadowing and competition from neighbouring plants), water and nitrogen (grown in garden conditions, fertilized), it is plausible that these individual grow faster and larger. This is all that Wang et al. did and all that their article claims.

The higher throughput capacity only comes into use if supplies of energy or raw materials are not bottlenecks.

But the Nature News conclusions "effects of such modification have the potential to extend beyond farms and into the wild" and "genetic diversity [of wild rice], which is really important to conserve, could be threatened because the genotype with the transgene would outcompete the normal species" are very much unsupported by the results of Wang et al.

In the wild, seeds may need to germinate in more challenging conditions that wet paper on a petri dish, there may not be abundant light, nitrogen or water.

So the EPSP synthase -boosted plants grow better in the garden. But maybe there is a good reason why the EPSP synthase levels are lower in the plants from the wild. Maybe something else is more valuable to them, something that helps in e.g. low-light photosynthesis, nutrient or water uptake in scarce conditions, or defence against insects. Maybe the wild EPSP levels are just optimal for growing in wild conditions and the plants with boosted EPSP synthase levels would have lower fitness in wild conditions. (I assume that the higher levels of the synthase don't come for free, but have a related metabolic cost that cannot then be used elsewhere).

As Wang et al. only measured fitness in garden, not in the wild, the Nature News conclusions are unwarranted.
That's what I was going to say! I'm sure for most of us, programming is FUN when you're doing it for the enjoyment, the puzzle-solving aspect, and working on a project you love, isn't it?

Once I'm wealthy and financially free, I might take some time off of work initially, but eventually I expect I'll do fewer of others' projects and more of the things bouncing around my head right now. I just love working on this kinda stuff!

That was the feeling I got from this article -- since Notch doesn't need the money, he works on something that interests him until it doesn't anymore, regardless of whether it's the best money-making option, don't you think?

I doubt my personality would let me just shelf a project when I'm in the middle of it, though... once I start something I can't help but see it through to completion!
They did, but there are many thousands of domains still out there.
NSA-Proof Your Email - Consider your Man Card Re-Issued (fiction)
Oculus Share Platform (for Oculus Rift)
I think you make an important point here. People should understand basic math and basic programming, if only to protect themselves from charlatans. If more people understood basic financial math we wouldn't have as severe a credit crisis as we had recently. People would have understood the risk in all those crazy loan offers (no income - no money down - no problem!) Congruently, when companies of the future say "trust our computers, they're artificially intelligent" people are going to have a little knowledge to base that trust on.
Most programming classes that do exist also aren't available until high school. This is a mistake. Elementary school kids are totally capable of learning the basics (I was using HyperCard when I was 6), and they have a key advantage: they don't feel much shame from making mistakes. Kids get frustrated and distracted, but not embarrassed.

This is a major problem for adults learning to use computers in general, and for programming in particular. If you're afraid of poking at a system and possibly breaking it, it's very difficult to learn how it works.
You're a fucking idiot. He found a serious error in your system and made a good faith effort to inform you of it despite his language barrier. Instead of showing any sort of gratitude for his discovery and integrity, you chose to dig in your heels and discourage the man and others like him from bringing this to your attention. As a result, you've brought even more damage to the reputation and integrity of Facebook. Way to be an asshole.
Thanks! Could you please tell more about the experience? What should be keep in mind to choose the right lawyer or to work with the lawyer?
this is a pretty good blog, but it's best to ask on mailing list or IRC if googling cant find something

http://notes.implicit.ly/
Journalists doing their jobs is quite a lot different to what the poster posted:

> They can make an oxygen-sucking scandal out of nothing. This could devour the rest of Obama's second term if it gets out of hand

This is not 'journalism'. This is blackmail.
Agreed.

For example seeing the people in Egypt now (VICE documentary), both camps, whether the secular camp/army or Muslim Brotherhood were blaming Obama for the current situation.

On a similar note, hats off to Russia, that, even though is supporting the Assad regime in Syria and beyond, never gets such a strong backlash or blowback as you say. Or maybe the fights in Caucasus are underreported.
Why Hiring Contractors instead of Employees is Better
Thanks for the heads up, what brand is the firewall? I know the site had some links injected a couple years ago, and I've been watching to see lingering effects.
I remember trying that when I was in middle school and discovering that the local library did not exactly have a great selection, and I didn't know anyone who could recommend good resources. Searching the web kept bringing up the same few overly shallow tutorials which didn't even explain how to actually run a program. It's less of an issue today, but finding good resources to learn from matters.
I think you're interpreting "math professor" as "school teacher", while others are talking about the tenured kind of professors. "Students" here are researchers, who do work potentially ostensibly for society, not just homework for their own education.
The V8 team's anti-documentation culture is kind of problematic. As a compiler author targeting JS, it's been consistently difficult to figure out what kind of patterns V8 optimizes for, what patterns cause problems, and what the hell is going on inside their runtime. The rapid pace of changes to V8 - both new feature additions and system overhauls - means that if you're maintaining a complex project that interacts with V8, you're going to have a really hard time.

They barely document their engine internals or debugging tools, things change randomly making the existing documentation incorrect, and they frequently break the user-facing development tools like Chrome's JS debugger.

The only good things I can really say are that when V8 works, it works marvelously, and that if you can somehow track down a V8 developer they're usually incredibly helpful. Regardless, having to head over to the Google campus and buy a dev coffee isn't a scalable solution to these kinds of problems.

I've basically given up on delivering good performance in V8 as a result. The cost is too high. If I see obvious bottlenecks in their profiler (when it works at all), I tune them, but that's about it. I wasted a handful of weeks digging around in debug builds looking at bailout log entries and trying to decipher their IR using the broken log viewer they recommend, and the net result was that my code ended up faster for a few weeks until V8 changed again. Not worth it.

P.S. When I say 'anti-documentation culture', I mean it. V8 devs have personally told me they dislike documenting certain aspects of V8 and its internals because they fear that end-users and developers will rely on those internals. They lean towards occasional blog posts and Google IO presentation videos to pick up the slack.
This has been a significant issue on the windows 8 machines I've handled. It's mitigated somewhat by creating your own scheduled task to more frequently do ntp updates.

I like this guide:

http://www.pretentiousname.com/timesync/
Hey Volscio thanks for that. I agree that problem solving is great skill to have. Philosophy long filled that role but has fallen a little out of favor. I studied it (minor) at University and many of the lecturers pointed out (mostly in a hope to keep us engaged and motivated) that some of the world's best philosophers make a small fortune on the side with paid engagements for large corporations. Corporations literally give them problems that they cannot solve in terms of the market and philosophers solve them. While somewhat skeptical at first I was ultimately very impressed with how philosophy taught a disciplined approach to problem solving
I think a simpler explanation is that people enjoy being productive. Otherwise, why would people have a problem with meaningless jobs?
Yes, I think buying land "outright" is impossible. Perhaps in some unincorporated area or whatever?

Property taxes are relatively high where I live(about $350/month, though I pay quarterly.)
If you admit that "you should have pushed back asking for more details" than you should also admit that because of that, you are partly liable for the fact that he did go beyond the explicit rules. Now, are those rules also in Arabic? Also, how are you to encourage users to work with you in a quick, efficient manner, if these kinds of things are bogged down with red tape? It's only $500. Perhaps, you should change your rules to make the system for bug reporting easier, efficient, and a bit more egalitarian. Best,
LJ
Is it the End of Jordan as Silicon Valley of the Arab World?
I don't understand the alternative world that is being proposed. If all these bullshit jobs could be magically eliminated, then most people would sit around doing...what, exactly?

Eating pizza and playing videogames, maybe? But who's going to make the pizza and video games?
I have more or less the same viewpoint. There are big gains if everyone understood how much time code loops can save, and if they started to see the areas of their lives where a manual task could be cast into an automatic task without much work.

But this suggests a different way of teaching intro programming, one that is more tool-based than concept-based, a way that's about searching for the existence of a tool and then finding and reading its documentation or examples so that one can use it in a simple, encapsulating control program. If you don't know about the existence of imagemagick, are you going to think you can loop through all the images in a folder and resize them, or extract a subimage from them, or something else, without having to write a ton of code? Maybe not, but you might search for a command line program to do the hard part and discover the tool, or it might have been part of an intro programming course focused on "look at all the neat things general computers can do to save you time if you have this problem". Same thing with Python's csv module, which someone who has used Python for over a year in a CS class may not have even known was there all along. There are lots of powerful one-liners and small code chunks that deserve a lot of respect since they can save so much time.
Launched Airbnb for flight lessons. Thoughts?
>I was taught long division as a child. Didn't like it; who does? Nor do I use it.

Really? I mean, I guess I don't like long division; nor do I dislike it. But I like being able to get its results, and I do it all the time in my head. What do you use instead?
Promises are a completely sufficient solution to handle asynchronous code in my opinion and there are already several great libraries for this in JavaScript. I don't get it why would I want to switch to a new language just because of that one feature.
3 New AngularJS Job Opportunities
The best example of this are spreadsheets. There are plenty of people who don't think they can program and don't think they have any need to program, but will write some really insane things in Excel. They just don't realize what they are doing is programming, poorly. The great advantage of computers isn't "better TVs", it is that they are "compute-ers", and anybody who has an office job has a real use for one.
Snarky! But I'll bite. Perhaps the main factor in my own unlikely perspective is that although I was lucky enough to be originally western born and educated (in Australia), I have been fortunate to live over half of my life in 'developing' countries. My worldview is thus shaped by a multitude of experiences across different societies, not one culture's education/media environment. I have also lived for reasonable lengths of time in the US and UK, and was accidentally in Tunisia for the revolution. I am Australian/German/Kiwi by citizenship, and write from Spain, where youth unemployment is reportedly ~40% and perhaps communicate more frequently in Mandarin than in English or Spanish. (I only arrived yesterday) I am not a believer in nationalism, and see no issues discussing the nation's many and varied problems while admiring its natural beauty, admirable facets of its history, and the friendliness of its people. Oh, and sarcasm is the lowest form of wit...
My instinct is that node probably doesn't interface as tightly with v8, or have as much of a surface area on those interfaces, as something like v8-juice.

Given Stephan's claim that the new version of v8 is incompatible with all applications, though, I suspect some energy will be expended to make node compatible. Node at least has a huge pool of users and developers to draw from when tackling a change like this.
Well, that's not necessarily true (at least, in my case). I can't walk down to the local bank and be approved for a small amount of capital without providing equal collateral. Even with a strong business plan. I have to show quite a bit of history of revenue and cash flow for a minimal credit line.

On the other hand, it's relatively easy for me to ask a bunch of my friends to each lend me $10,000. And, that is more because of the cumulative result of decades and decades of productivity increases in addition to a society that values electronics and computers and the internet. Those factors give these software engineer friends the extra discretionary money to lend to me. It's not because of the magic of the financial system.

The author is saying that there's a huge excess of capital and productivity that could theoretically 'pay' for other types of work. But, instead, we as a society, decide to funnel most of our excess to people who push around accounts ledgers, ruminate on legal logic, generate sales ads, and do other sorts of 'educated' busy work.