skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The deal with the climate change CO2 is that we've pumped out an enormous surplus of CO2 beyond what is tied up in that loop. Note, that all that CO2 came from oxygen that was once in the atmosphere, and we're still breathing fine.

If the CO2 that would be caught by these trees would otherwise be "breathed" by plants, there wouldn't be a problem. CO2 doesn't bother the climate as long as it's down here, it's in the stratosphere (I think. One of the -pheres) it becomes a greenhouse gas.
Even he admits that most great companies don't exhibit most of them.

The article says: And it is also true that great companies don't hit every single one of these traits. But they hit most of them. And some do hit all of them.

What's with the misquoting followed by bashing on this thread?
Of course, not everything is actually first-class in Python.

There's a whole bunch of statements — simple (assert, pass, del, break, continue, import, raise, …) and compound (if, while, for, with, try) — which definitely don't qualify
When you say "I think in pseudo-code", what are the semantics of this pseudo-code?

'cause it's actually a bit of a non-answer, when you think about it. Saying 'pseudo code' means that the language you think in has some informality in its syntax - but presumably you still have some fixed understanding of what it does?

If it has no fixed syntax and no fixed semantics, then is it actually helpful as a mental model? I would argue that it is not.

(Note: I'm not just being antagonistic here, I'm genuinely curious. I don't think in terms of "syntax", so this is all a bit alien to me).
I used to think in pseudocode, but once I learned Ruby, it turns out I had been thinking in Ruby all along. Ruby just matches up really well with the way my brain already solved programming problems, then I had to translate it to C or Java or whatever else.
You are right, it is never as black-and-white as we'd like to think.

But innocent civilians being killed are innocent civilians being killed. It doesn't matter who's killing or what color their skin or what religion they are. There are terrible killing and attrocities still going on in the world.

We should do something about it if we can. But if we don't or we can't. We shouldn't lie about it, and pretend we do while we have completely different motives for our foreign war "adventures"

I wouldn't mind if the government actually told everyone what its real motives are. Perhaps there will be less support for war, or perhaps there won't. At least we won't be lied to.
Galaxy's 'cannibalism' revealed
The vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by digesting stars from other galaxies, research has shown.
During and after the bombing of Serbia, there was a lot of publicity in certain conservative newspapers in America (particularly the Washington Times) about how the mass graves and such had turned out to be a myth, and about Serbia's historical reasons for wanting to hold sovereignty over Kosovo. The main rationale for this coverage was probably that it was a Democratic war, so a Republican newspaper had to oppose. Still, it exposed a lot of good points that weren't widely publicized elsewhere. (There were also the following arguments: that it's not the job of the US to protect Kosovo anyway, that Clinton was trying to distract people from his own problems, and that Clinton was doing a very bad job of prosecuting the war even if it were justified.)

Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether Serbia was in the right or in the wrong in Kosovo. It's just a bullshit argument to pretend Zoltan was doing something entirely separate from supporting the continued Serbian domination of Kosovo and its people. Either Serbia was in the right (in which case Zoltan would have been perfectly justified no matter what) or Serbia was in the wrong (in which case--since the bombing was an attempt to pressure Serbia to leave Kosovo--protecting Kosovo from bombing turned out to be indirectly supporting the domination of Kosovo.)
Why You Should Try Slackware
So I know this is frowned down upon on HN but fuck it. I've been waiting for this feature ever since the PG essay. I'm extremely excited. Thank you etherpad gods for finally giving me this damn feature! I've been into poetry and essay writing lately and something like this will add a ton of creative expressive value to my writing.
Japan's Moonshot? $21 Billion Invested in Space-Based Solar Power Project
I kinda skipped SICP (I had already been programming for a long time before it even occurred to me that there might be texts available that attempted to teach "computational thinking" rather than just individual languages), but having browsed it since, I always recommend it to anyone who wants to learn programming (or HtDP, which also seems to cover similar ground).
> I'm willing to bet no one read the book and said "Eureka! I've been hiring slimy weasels when I should have been hiring top performers. That is why we aren't a great company." ...

Not like that. But I once talked to a guy who's the CEO of a 2-100 employees in 8 years firm, and he would privately admit to being bothered by hiring sub-par people to keep up with the growth.
Cops, lawmakers send message: Dnt txt & drive
Missing: first-class syntax.
Meatcards
I take a slightly more abstract approach: I first think of the problem from the user's perspective (and their expectations), then I map out a work flow before diving into pseudo-code and wire-frames.

Overall, I agree with the parent because before you can dive into coding, you have to think of the problem and solution abstractly.

But which language is used for writing out the solution? Whichever is the best tool for that particular problem.
Has Texting Replaced Talking?
I tend to think in terms of abstract flowchart of the process/algorithm/structure of what needs to happen.

And then I make it happen.
heh, reminds me of the nvidia prototype video device thing they demonstrated at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. It had a power cord and a tv cord attached and nothing else. It was kinda around the corner from where the nvidia employees were and there was nobody around. I stood opposite thinking how easy it would be to grab and run... :-P

Obviously I didn't, but it would have been interesting to own a prototype handheld video thingy. (they were using it to demonstrate their embedded gpu for smartphones, it was coool)
What Keeps Us Online Late at Night: Porn, Games, and Chat
The commentary makes it seem like ESPN meets a game show.

In Miami, people steal laptops and they just shrug it off, turn the alarms off, and go back to work. Saw two get stolen while waiting for a repair a few months ago. Eventually they called a guard to write it up.
I seem to recall seeing the computers, or at least iPods, attached via an alarm-headphone jack. That's fine for store hours but doesn't do any good at night.
Is X An Illusion?

Is "the word Illusion" an Illusion? Does it convey a sense of mystery and secret knowledge where there is none?

When people actually claim something is an illusion, do they actually have a clear idea in their head about what they mean, or are they playing semantic games with flipping back and forth between mistaking the word map for the reality territory and not?

Yes to that second one.

All "X is an Illusion" means is "that definition for X you thought you had? It's not right." Which is a much less, well, stupid way to put it. Of course, it doesn't have the same ability to confer Special Knowledge that the Plebes don't have.

Free will isn't an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. Time is not an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. Our sense of self is not an illusion; something is there, though what it is may not be clear and may not be at all what we thought it was, but no amount of word games will change what is actually there. And so on.

Stop it with this damn worthless "illusion" word. Maybe go study General Semantics instead, since all the word does is reify map/territory confusion and basically doom what could otherwise be an interesting debate from the very beginning, and General Semantics has some choice words on that topic.
'learn to READ' I want to point out, to help head off lots of needless argument.
If it Looks Corporate, Change It
I tend to think in terms of workflow.

1. How would user interaction occur?
2. What systems are necessary?
3. How can the problem(s) involved be solved? (what languages/tools/infrastructure)
4. Pseudo-code
5. Get crackin' on code

It's a pretty high level list, so I am probably missing some key points.

I tend to spend a fair amount of time just thinking and pondering the problem; once I reached some indeterminate threshold, I start typing up point-form notes. As I think more to gain more definition of the problem and potential solutions I add new, revise existing and remove obsolete notes.

And to actually answer the question "Which language do I think in?", it depends on my answers to #3.
I still don't think it adequately answers the question. Maybe the question should be rephrased as "What programming paradigm do you think in?"
Hacking independence: Protesters claim Taiwan part of US since World War II
I've been coding long enough that most problems don't need thinking about. I just 'know'.

However, I've been alive long enough that if I don't 'know' the solution I need a whiteboard. I can't think without a whiteboard.

Age brings wisdom and experience but it certainly has dulled my brain quite a bit :(
Background here (note that it may take some time to load):

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2009/08/13/2...
Microsoft SQL Server exposes passwords.
Regarding the colors and un-linkability... why is that? To discourage lengthy "Ask HN" posts?

While I appreciate the commenters who do it, I think it's kind of silly to have to comment a "clickable link" for HN submissions that need it. Why not just change that?
Zzz.

Atwood rewrote the blog post posted here earlier[1] without really adding anything. At least he referenced it.

Coding Horror has been feeling exceptionally desperate for new content. Lately it's been providing very little value and has been following the same schtick of saying something unimpressively generic and summarizing it in a sentence typeset in bold.

[1]http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/youre-a-little-company-now-a...
I focus on the semantics first: I try to capture the essence of what I really mean to "say". Then I try to imagine the most idealized language that would let me specify as exactly and easily as possible what I really mean, unambiguously.

If I have access to such a language, I use it. If I don't, but know how to implement it, I might do just that if I think it's worth it in terms of time and effort. Otherwise, I try to think of the next best language that could represent what I mean and that I can use or implement more easily. At some point I get to "really low-level" abstractions like Common Lisp objects, closures and macros...

It's a surprisingly high-quality and slow way to program. I figure at some point I'll have accreted so much language implementation knowledge and infrastructure that I'll be unstoppable because I'll almost always be able to make a good approximation of the best tool for the job quickly.
Now, supposing that our solar panel capacity increases by something reasonable every year, like 25%, how many decades would that take to cover square miles upon square miles upon square miles with collectors, and, given that power demands will rise in those decades, how much longer will it take to catch up to that again? How expensive will it be, in light of an effectively infinite demand during those periods where it hasn't been completed yet?

Some people see these charts and see possibility. I see the sheer scale of the operation and boggle; it's absurd.
I've had decent luck using TinyMCE's with the Paste From Word plugin along with a pretty restrictive whitelist of allowable tags and attributes.

Interesting to hear that YUI does OK out of the box, I may have to give that a shot.
All I'm seeing is that we tend to follow our instinctual reactions. Which isn't really surprising, considering how close we are to when our survival depended almost entirely on making a snap judgment and executing.
Suppose the moon is in a circular orbit with radius R and angular velocity w. Then its position looks like R exp(iwt), so its acceleration is the second derivative of this = -Rw^2 exp(iwt), whose magnitude is -Rw^2. (That's a standard formula but I always have to derive it from scratch.) So GM = R^3w^2.

Now, what do we know? If we have a calendar that marks full moons, we know how often the occur and therefore we know w. What about the stuff involving GM? Well, now construct a pendulum. Standard formulae again but let's do it from scratch again. Length L, angular displacement a: vertical displacement is negligible to first order, so for small displacements the restoring force just comes from the tension in the string. To first order again, that equals the gravitational force on the mass, so the horizontal component of the acceleration is GM/r^2.La where r is the radius of the earth. So, measure the period of the pendulum (and of course its length); that tells us a and therefore GM/r^2. So provided we know r we now have GM and therefore R, and we're done.

So, one remaining question for RiderOfGiraffes: are you happy to look up r in a reference book for this exercise, or do you have a classroom-friendly way of getting that by simple observation and calculation too?
The same thing happens with real trees, though. They capture the carbon in themselves. Then when they die and decay, they release the carbon again, as methane (when they rot) and CO2 (when they burn).
Sure, all of us need a break from whatever we're doing, not matter how much we love it, once in a while.

But if you find yourself asking, "How do I stay motivated?" more than once or twice per year, then you're probably in the wrong line of work.

99% of the time, loving what you're doing should be enough motivation.
I think (hope?) the implication is that the sun is always shining on some of this world-wide network of panels - so we don't need huge batteries to store power for nights/cloudy-days.

Kind of like the old saying that "the sun never sets on the British Empire."
The Second World War - 70 Years Later
> Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it.

> All of the data of cognitive neuroscience are pushing us to replace the idea of mind-body duality…

This is ultimately an issue of definitions, but for me, those two quotes are the main takeaways. You have to decide whether there is such a thing as a self that exists apart from the couple pounds of organic material inside your skull. Science hasn't found hard evidence of such a thing.

If you give that credence (albeit while remembering that absence of evidence != evidence of absence), forget about whether you have free will — the bigger question becomes to what extent "you" exist in the first place. If you're comfortable reducing yourself to your brain (and science would probably suggest that you should be), then it's not a problem; you do have free will, as long as you're willing to define that as having a set of chemical reactions sitting inside your skull, doing their thing.

If you aren't comfortable reducing yourself to your brain, the search for free will and a self gets a lot more stressful.
On HTML 5 Drag and Drop
Right, so trying to balance this cycle by pumping it back underground doesn't seem to be the right solution (unless these synthetic trees can operate without being powered). Otherwise all we're doing is creating a second, closed loop of: Pull Carbon out of the ground (in the form of fossil fuels) -> burn, turn into CO2 -> capture out of atmosphere, put back in ground. Unless we the trees do it without using up more fossil fuels to do so, it doesn't seem entirely effective.

It just seems to me to be a bad idea to create a second CO2 loop rather than just strengthening the one that already exists. Yes, the synthetic trees may be more effective, but you get more than just CO2->O2 out of a tree.
I think in whatever language I'm writing unless I've just started it. Then I think about what I'd imagine they'd call it and google around for it.

Translation from one language to another is just another layer of indirection and makes you slower. It's easiest and best just to learn languages from scratch or near-scratch, IMHO. If you get used to learning in that way, it's easy to keep doing it.

Caveat: I think in C when I'm coding C++.
I'm glad he's okay. I had a good friend in college get trampled to death by an elephant, I believe in Tanzania. It was just part-way through her first year volunteering for the PeaceCorps. Really sad.
What you say here reminds me a bit of Hume. Hume attacked cause and effect by noting that all we ultimately have access to are our perceptions, and that we can never perceive "cause." We may see the hammer flying through the air, then the window shattering, but we don't see any "cause" here. Just event A followed by event B. For Hume, our mind naturally correlates these events, and we call it cause and effect.

Kant then followed by saying that this account was incomplete and that cause and effect are more like a type of lens through which we organize our perceptions, without which, we couldn't make sense of the world.

*Vastly oversimplifying huge swaths of 18th century philosophy here, so don't take this very seriously.
I agree. I think the article has its vocabulary backwards. I like the philosophy that: "if we feel it, then it's real". It's just that "free will" nothing like we originally expected it to be (that is, it's non-magical). We can learn new things about the nature of free will by studying the brain, because that's where such things are created. To say that free will doesn't exist because of this finding isn't too different from saying that desks don't exist because they're really just collections of a bunch of molecules, arranged just so. There is no magical essence called "desk", it's made up of stuff, and we experience that arrangement of stuff accordingly.

See Dennett, (2003): "Freedom Evolves" for a more lucid account. He says the same as is said in the article, but instead re-defines "free will" to fit the reality of these conclusions - a more intellectually satisfying approach, even though it's just a smart readjustment of semantics.
basically, like groupon.com. I recently bought sky diving tickets $100 lower than the retail price since there were more than X number of people also buying. The first time I read what the site was about, I thought it was a brilliant idea.
The NYT Magazine also had an article last month http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16beatles-t.html
I think in English about programming stuff too. I think in either Italian or English depending on the context, but mostly English as that's my native language. Italian is more for things or events that happened in Italy or with Italian speakers (so... actually I do think in it a fair bit, because I live in Italy).

This can make it weird working on programming stuff with Italians, as English really is where my brain wants to be for programming. It's not about knowing the terminology (I do), it's just that English is really what I want to use to reason about programming.

Incidentally, trying to think in another language about what's going on is a great way of practicing it if you're learning it.
i think in diagrams.
When I first read the question I almost fell off my chair. The answer is YES. I have used source safe, star team (briefly), cvs, svn and now mercurial. I haven't used Git but I understand that it is conceptually similar to mercurial. I keep most everything in mercurial repositories, not just my projects.

I much prefer the distributed stuff. Just make a repository anywhere now it is an awesome concept. Soooo much easier than fiddling with an svn server for example. (I am talking about the set up of the server.)

I personally think it is completely worth it to get your head wrapped around the idea of distributed revision control. Aka mercurial or git.

Rolling eyes and shaking head at all of the other folks on this post who recommended avoiding learning revision control as soon as possible. That would be a mistake.
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You are young so it is a good time to make mistakes. Even if it all goes down the pan you should have something interesting to say at your interview when they ask you what you did after graduation.

Just one niggle, serendipity doesn't make house calls so you should not make plans based on it. make things happen. Once you get going however you might be able to give talks about your journey at tech meets, which should bring up more leads.

I think that your case studies would need to be days rather than just an hour, they would also be more valuable that way. Watching what people do will tell you a very different story than asking them what they are doing. Very few people are willing to admit that their success is down to plain luck, they will tell you all about vision and skill and all that other rock star bullshit. Dumb luck plays a bigger part than people are willing to admit and you will only see that if you spend much more time with people otherwise you could end up just acting as unpaid PR for these people.

Also people lie, which is something that is hard to detect in a one hour interview.

You know, with hard work and a bit of luck ('cause we all need some) this could be a lot of fun
If there is no free will then our will is determined by our DNA. Since our DNA is subject to continuous change via random events, then do we have 'random will' and does that make it 'free will?'
As someone who hasn't raised funds, but might be interested in doing so in the future, my interest in these sheets isn't so much saving money. I've followed these threads because it gives startups a baseline for what terms "should" be like. This jump starts the whole process. It would make you dive in a bit more when terms begin to deviate from these outlines.

I realize you get a crash course in these subjects when fundraising but how many companies out there go into the process with no idea of what half of these terms mean?
If the problem requires science, I think in English because most of my relevant university education and R&D was/is in English and thus most of the terminology I know. If it's business-related, I think most the time in German. I draw causal diagrams and sketch in Haskellesque pseudo code.
That's a rather large philosophical debate to be skimming over so glibly... and the world is not completely mechanistic (quantum mechanics).

Quantum mechanics accounts for unpredictability. It doesn't account for free will. Just because you can't predict something accurately doesn't mean it has a choice; think, for instance, of the weather.
At least it introduced me to the "headset hotties" blog, lol. Maybe that's something I should have come across before, but its hilarious
Thanks in advance for reporting back here whether it lives up to these promises once you've tried it :P
Why I (Still) Code