skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would you make the same argument for programming languages? Should anyone feel free to code in whatever "vernacular" style he please, because living up to a defined standard makes it "hard to express [one]self"?

No doubt someone will attempt the argument that there is a qualitative difference between a language in which one speaks to a computer, and that in which one speaks to other people, but in this case I contend it's a distinction without a difference. The very reason why coding standards exist, after all, is because what we write in programming languages must be understandable to other people, no less than to the computer, and supine permissiveness as regards writing style impairs the legibility of one's code for the other people who must also read it.

Granted, it takes more effort to live up to the coding style required by whatever project one happens to be working on, just as it takes more effort to express a thought in Wallace's "SWE" than in whatever corrupt vernacular happens to be one's native pidgin. In exchange for this additional effort, one produces a result which is both more generally legible and more likely to be taken seriously. (On that latter point in particular -- would you have read this far if I were writing, not in that acrolect Wallace and his latter-day imitator so deride, but rather in my native Southern American English? Don't seem any too likely to me.)
I second that. I was just about to email Nate to ask him how he would deal with this issue but struggling to articulate it. Thanks!
"So her message to girls is "Hey, you can create apps to use in emergencies to help people."

Or, you could end up optimizing ads, working in some badly ventilated open plan office. (This is what every developer in my city seems to be doing).
Newly-discovered 'hypervelocity stars' flee our galaxy
When he started to write about writing (military) simulations in a functional style, I really expected a reference to this paper http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/?post_type=publication&p=366 which is one of the rare examples of a real empirical experiment in software enginering. (And it is going to turn twenty this year, we are not learning very fast as a community).
Part of life extension is restoring neuroplasticity. If medical science advances to the point where we can cure cancer along with all the other diseases of aging, rejuvenating the brain ought to be doable too.
This really depends on why you're asking and what you want to use it for.

If you want to roll up your sleeves and learn a new discipline, but just as a hobby, you might get the best information density from a commercial outline, like Emanuel or Gilbert's.

http://www.amazon.com/Contracts-Emanuel-Law-Outline-Steven/d...

http://www.amazon.com/Gilbert-Law-Summaries-Contracts-14th/d...

Probably more info than you could ever want, but those usually contain abbreviated outlines in the beginning, and more detailed outlines in the back, so you can expand to the level detail desired. It could even serve as a general reference aid (with the caveat that textbook law is rarely good law, it's usually superseded by local regulations or more recent precedents - it might just get you in the ballpark).

You'd get a deeper understanding of some of the key debates in the development of these areas of the law by reading the case law referenced along the way.

There's some benefit from seeing how the law handles contracts differently from torts or criminal law, and trying to figure out why, so you could turn to those subjects once you've mastered contracts. That's essentially the law school approach.

If you just want to make yourself a more well rounded citizen or think deep and interesting thoughts about social order, then probably pick a major case in Supreme Court law every week or so to read through and ponder. Read the dissents as well, the dissents are really crucial to making it clear why these were nontrivial questions.

Here are 50 highly cited SCotUS cases (from a few years back, but not a terrible list to start with): http://heinonline.blogspot.com/2009/01/most-cited-us-supreme...

You could listen to the oral arguments for many of these over at the Oyez Project:
http://www.oyez.org/
But that's really of secondary interest to the actual opinions.

If you just want to be more savvy in commercial transactions and court cases, you probably need a tour through the Uniform Commercial Code, and to learn some Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Those are just seemingly endless lists of abstract rules though, not sure there's an easy way to make those more accessible. That's what keeps attorneys employed, I'd recommend avoiding unless you're considering law school.
Agreed. It doesn't take a conspiratorial mindset to suspect that something's amiss here. It suffices to apply Occam's razor.

What's interesting is that the poster above simply keeps asserting, over and over, that it was "because of the mold, ya know" as if the surprise incineration was an obvious, necessary result of the situation. Clearly it wasn't.
Bitcoin Price Touches $1,000 Again as Overstock Sales Hit $130,000
As far as I know, wireless data usage in Indonesia is "unlimited" (with double quotes...). The usage and billing are different if you compare it with the USA Bell/AT&T money-sucking operation.

In Indonesia, $15/month == check e-mail, surf facebook, whatsapp/line/kakaotalk all-you-can-eat buffet.

You don't need to shell $25M to make Path exclusive on your network. Even if you do, the Math just doesn't add up.

Speaking of Bakrie group, financially, they're not doing well lately: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/11/09/bakrie-telecom...

Having said that, I do root the deal and really hope both sides can pull it off because I want to see (other) creative ideas to make things like this work in SE Asia.
Thanks, that definitely help with confirming.

It probably be more would one algorithm problem and then other questions about frameworks.

Yeah good chance a lot of questions on technical ideation and architecturing maybe a very open question, answered whichever tech language I prefer, or in plain english if it has to be cited in a language I am not familiar with.

-- From there, how I do you think I can prepare?
"but sometimes I think you sw guys live in the dark ages."

Well those using gdb are, yes. (ducks)
Not only did it not support secure connections (which on its own is kind of shitty, but not laughing-stock material IMO), but it also failed to fail elegantly when you attempted to make a secure connection.
Not if [1,2,3] and [4,5,6] are actually lists, or aren't aligned properly, or aren't the correct bitwidth, or the expression can't saturate/wrap, etc.

The compiler needs to be able to see that the data conforms to all those restrictions (possibly more), and that's not a trivial thing to do.
The talk "Deconstructing Functional Programming" by Gilad Brach should really be a must-watch if you're thinking about having any meaningful debate about functional programming.

tl;dr Almost everything we call 'Functional Programming' being equally applicable to 'Object Oriented Programming' if it's done in a sufficiently flexible language.
Likewise and likewise. I never downvote for content; I do, on the other hand, quite freely downvote in cases, such as this, where there is no content of which to form an opinion.
Was Benjamin Franklin a Serial Killer?
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Not everyone writes with you in mind as their ideal reader. Some people write for themselves and publish to keep themselves honest, though I don't presume to know what OP's motives and goals are in this case.
Those facts you read there were just the tip of the iceberg.
Why does everything have to be evaluated in terms of encouraging one gender to do X or encouraging one race to do Y? Why not just generally encourage humans to be open to learn things they may find interesting or useful?
In that case it's often (yea I know, not always) better to put that block in a separate function, like readConfigurationFile() instead of "// This block reads the configuration file.". I almost always treat the act of writing comments as a signal that my code is a mess...although they're sort of a necessary evil when you're down to crunch time.
You can't switch between .at() and [] between two builds. There is a lot to be said about MSVC's checked iterators, but it sure does catch a lot of mistakes during debug builds. Any sane STL implementation should have something similar.
We aren't?
What are the elements of success for an oddball like Minecraft?
Not quite; there seems an implicit claim that oppressiveness exists along a gradient which, I can hardly resist observing, correlates closely with the average skin tone of those who employ a given dialect. On one end of this gradient, Wallace's "Standard White English" oppresses basically everyone on the planet save its few most fluent speakers; on the other, I've never seen anyone even try to make a claim of oppressiveness on behalf of, for example, AAVE.
I only started doing this recently. It occurred to me that I had some conception in my subconscious that natural language punctuation wasn't required in formal language code files. I think it may have simply been a cognitive spill-over from the fact that variable names start with lower-case characters.

Looking back, it's totally ridiculous that I would, in a professional setting, put my name next to unpunctuated writing. Aside from being ugly and hard to read, it's straight-up unprofessional.
Do 2 first, then 1. A lawyer will help you a lot more and cost you a lot less if you are organized. Also, balance the value of what you're owed against the stress of extricating yourself from this bad deal; conflict is very exciting, but not always in a healthy way, and it's easy to fall victim to a sunk cost fallacy, where you end up putting good money/energy after bad because you get fixated on the value of the loss.

I am defiantly getting screwed

I hope this isn't a Freudian slip ;)

Good luck whichever course of action you pursue.
Stop forgetting your password...
See also:
http://www.steve-yegge.blogspot.ru/2008/08/business-requirem...

and "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"
And this is why I'm not taking anybody serious using that meme. Using it is saying "look at me, I am retarded".
From the [FAQ]:

4.I’m a straight white male and my life isn’t easy! My life sucks! Your “lowest difficulty setting” doesn’t account for that!

That’s actually fully accounted for in the entry. Go back and read it again.

This one’s a stand-in for all the complaints about the entry that come primarily either from not reading the entry, or not reading what was actually written in the entry in preference to a version of the entry that exists solely in that one person’s head, and which is not the entry I wrote. Please, gentlemen, read what is there, not what you think is there, or what you believe must be there because you know you already disagree with what I have to say, no matter what it is I am saying.

[FAQ]: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/lowest-difficulty-sett...
"Turning your code inside out" is a great piece of advice, as it often opens up abstractions and refactorings that you didn't realize where there to begin with. The same idea is behind several common object-oriented design patterns (Command, Mediator, Strategy, Visitor) but it's baked into to many functional programming languages.

For example, say we want to write a function to compute square roots. A common approach to computing sqrt(n) is to start with a guess of x = 1.0, and keep replacing x with (0.5 * (x + n/x) until the relative difference between subsequent guesses is small enough.

sqrt n = loop x0 x1
where
loop x y = if converged x y
then y
else loop y (0.5 * (y + n/y))
converged x y = abs (x/y - 1) < 1e-10
x0 = 1.0;
x1 = 0.5 * (1.0 + 1.0/n)

That's good, but it has the test for convergence all mixed up with the logic for generating the guesses. What if we could factor out the code that generates an infinite sequence of guesses?

sqrtGuesses n = go 1.0
where
go x = x : go (0.5 * (x + n/x))

Note that this works in Haskell because of laziness, but it's simple in any language that has a mechanism for delaying computations. Now we've decoupled the method for generating a sequence of guesses, we can write a function that checks for relative convergence

converge (x:y:rest) = if abs (x/y - 1) < 1e-10
then y
else converge (y:rest)

and define the square root function in terms of these

sqrt n = converge (sqrtGuesses n)

The logic of the program is now much cleaner, and we've got a useful function 'converge' which can be re-used in other parts of the program.

This kind of 'turning inside out' is often possible in functional languages, often leads to more compact and more compositional code, and is one of the reasons that I enjoy programming functionally so much.
You can put a lot of stuff in the other 2/3. Stuff that readers will enjoy. I keep a top post widget on my own blog. People seem to like it, and I know I like having easy access to more stuff from a writer whose words I didn't mind reading. The aversion to criticism you've shown in this thread makes me think I won't want to see anything else from you, so maybe it's for the better in your case.
I meant to say readily available. Apologies.
If it helps, the English IPA for "doge" would be /doʊʒ/; if you need a key, Wikipedia has a good one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English
I enjoyed Brach's talk; criticism like that needs to be heard. Of course FP isn't the solution to all problems. Still I felt he employed a number of strawmen. The HN discussion it provoked was excellent, however https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6941137
Riak CS may be a simple answer for that. It even has S3-compatible API.
Setting up SSL/TLS on a single server in a virtual environment that you don't even have to manage is a different story than getting major changes tested and deployed on a huge multi-billion dollar, multi-tenant distributed system spanning not just the globe but multiple teams, languages, people and requirements.
"People don't watch television to watch commercials."

The Super Bowl is a notable exception.
This is sort of a corollary of avoiding being too naive when accepting product feedback. People often don't know how to express what they want, often they don't even know what they want. For every "shut up and take my money" moment there are many "I didn't even know I needed/wanted that" moments. So much of being an effective inventor is being able to have one foot in consumer land and one foot in product land and be able to translate between them.
Am I dreaming, or is this an example straight from SICP? (I remember something like this...)

EDIT: Ok, so obviously not "straight" from SICP. But pretty close.

Chapter 1: "Example: Square Roots by Newton's Method" http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-10.html...
Why does Self-Hosted File Sharing, Sync solution makes sense for Business?
In 2013-14, Stanford is a $4.8 billion enterprise

Expenditures for FY 2013-14

59%	salaries & benefits

31%	operating expenses

4%	SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

6%	financial aid

_________

=~$1.5 B on opex. Which is basically garnderers, housekeepers, lawn-mowers, and janitors. That, plus security, heat electric, etc. golf courses, gyms, etc.
I like detailed comments myself, but this argument is hurt by taking them out of their context - it would have been more instructive to examine different styles of commenting to document a complex function or how they can help or hinder structural understanding.
Engineering Marvel Comics Arc Reactor
I also find it to be the exact other way around.

A lot of mathematical transformations, on the inside, break down neatly into sequential mutations, and you really do need to express them imperatively for maximum performance. Fortunately, you can look at the math and verify they compose appropriately, and use testing to verify you've implemented each step correctly.

But if I'm doing anything involving state, particularly interdependent state like a simulation, functional algorithms make a lot of sense as a way to ensure that I always have a valid object handle (because I'm always returning a new, valid object as a result of a computation) and give you a somewhat easier route to refactor while maintaining the same semantics (because there are no rogue mutations or global state updates I need to conform to), as well as parallelizing updates to the object graph for performance.

Clojure's semi-famous "ants" demo is a good example of this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGVqrGmwOAw

https://gist.github.com/spacemanaki/1093917
Finally, I guess it makes sense.
Hacking Together An Electroluminescent Wire Suit
The Woman Who Could Write, But Couldn't Read
It's the "Children of Men" solution to the automation/jobs crisis.
I think another exception (in addition to the already mentioned help with an otherwise difficult syntax) is when comments are used to visually represent logical segments of the code. Some style guides suggest to write these in all caps. Eg:

# CONFIG
...
# LOCALS
...
# EDGE CASES
...
# REFORMAT INPUT
...
# MAIN ALGORITHM
...

Etc.
Years ago a good friend and I wrote a zombie outbreak simulator, and ran into a similar problem.

Our solution was to have "move" and "think" phases for all entities (usually run think->move->think because a movement could result in a collision with somebody else who had wanted to move), and to use a messaging system to have entities announce their intentions ("attack entity X", "open door", etc.). The messaging system also let us filter messages and do other clever things--a later evolution of this same architecture became a double-buffered entity simulation framework with green threads for handling updates.

It's a hell of a lot simpler to write a simulation with objects who can understand certain types of messages--the code is simpler, the mental model is tons simpler, and in general it seems to be just easier.
When you have a discretized timestep the functional approach falls into place quite easily. I think the worst case for functional programming is where you have an incoming stream of events (e.g. user requests) and need to update (your internal model of) the world based on those.
Some people have been offered that, and others have not.

http://www.quora.com/Salaries/I-was-offered-15000-RSUs-as-pa...
Well, it can't be straight out of SICP because SICP uses Scheme and this code is in Haskell. And, in fact, if you did a straightforward translation of the Haskell code back into Scheme it wouldn't work. Figuring out why it doesn't work in Scheme but it does in Haskell is left as an exercise.
Google confirms it will shut down goal sharing service Schemer on February 7
True. However, how useful literate programming is depends on a number of factors, time often being the main limiting factor.
On top of that, direct java interop is not bad at all.

Here is a talk on it: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Clojure-Java-Interop

I confess I haven't watched that talk yet and only remembered hearing about it as I wrote this. But I imagine it is a good Launchpad.
>lots of research indicates that the creative peak happens from 20-40 or so

Is that a social or physiological phenomenon?

I always assumed the great thinkers became less prolific as they voluntarily moved into other stages of life, like finding a mate and starting a family, and hence had less time to commit to intellectual pursuits.
RSA conference site sends an ajax request per keystroke when entering password
Crashes Safari on iPad 2. Latest iOS.
extremely impressive portfolio I wish I had that level of output but I simply don't, as I have tendency to work on one hard problem for years.

Half the stuff they ask in interview is did you work this open source software and that, did you know this framework has X feature, can you tell me what it is...I'm like all of this I can google and tell you there's simply no difference, it's a matter when I googled it, but the other view is that they want someone with 5 years of angularjs and mongodb experience in the hopes of finding a multi-year veteran and expert in the myriad of brand new frameworks and technologies that are barely mature.
Interesting, I heard it pronounced /dogɛ/ several times.
What was the roughly $300,000 in consulting fees for? How do the typically help startups? And did you find them yourselves or were they recommended by the VCs? Is it business/process consulting? Do you feel not having a non-programming founder was beneficial or a hindrance? This is awesome that you guys did this btw. Really eye opening. Thanks.
SICP has something to do with square roots in the first chapter, although I don't think they do this particular refactoring. I first saw it (or something like it) in John Hughes' Why Functional Programming Matters.

Which, by the way, is an excellent paper and totally worth reading.

http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pd...
CSWE is hard to express yourself in

This claim baffles and infuriates me.
The SafeSearch setting isn't saved on https. Did they even test this thing before pushing it out?
I think if you just look at the shear number of followers mainstream (i.e. CNN) and alt (Vice) news accounts have or the same for financial news accounts, it becomes pretty obvious that a huge number of Twitter users rely on it for REALLY important information. I don't look at customized Feedly or Flipboard type aggregators anymore, and why would I? The information I get from who I follow on Twitter is available sooner, is summarized and usually has the option to dive deeper. While we can see that celebrities have huge follower counts, because their accounts are often water down by third parties, it seems logical that people follow them as a way to just say they 'like' them and not as a source of important information.
The intentional breaking of form takes more mental effort than just writing normally.

Good slam on the mentally handicapped, though. Good for you.
Here's some old numbers: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/03/07/path-3-0-inspired-by-a...

Summary: low (if in USD, high if in local currency).
Storage infra problems to share?
Gathering problems companies have when setting up / scaling own storage infrastructure. Anyone to share some experience?
very hate, little understand, when love?
I think it starts far earlier than that. I know the reason why I and many others are in programming. Legos and video games. Your interests are shaped from the toys you play with and the activities you do from infancy. Stop giving girls dolls to play with and give them a toy that requires them to think more.
> Resource consumption is a problem with our current technological base

Overpopulation destroys quality of life. You can't fix that by throwing more technology at the problem. Technology isn't going to make more nice beachfront property accessible and affordable for middle class family vacations. Technology isn't going to make more high grade wild tuna, or quiet walks in empty woods.
New ideas are hardly limited to Japan so if there population is +/- 100 million it's not going to make much difference to technology growth. However, for people living in Japan having +/- 100 million people having fewer people may be a net win relative to their current population. Just look at all those family's living in 500sf apartments that still have long commutes. Population density is good up to a point, but Japan is pushing the limit in some of it's more populaed areas. Granted, there is still plenty of open spaces in japan, but most people want to live near jobs and infrastructure.
Interesting paper.

When I look at the outputs, I think "this looks like a very simple homework assignment". If they had provided sample input, as well as sample output, I'd be able to test my belief. I imagine I can produce functionally-equivalent Python code in a few hours (note: Python was not a reasonable option in 1993).

In any case, this is a test in prototyping, with guidance of "5 person-days of effort"), so you would certainly expect languages like C++ and Ada to fail spectacularly.