skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't say "formal semantics", I said "fixed semantics", as in "something you understand and can apply consistently within a context". Within the context of a single code-fragment, the semantics are not changing. They might change from example to example, but that's perfectly reasonable.

My assertion is that when people say "I think in pseudo-code", they actually mean "an idealised version of language X", where language X is some paradigm or language they understand well.

I just wrote a blog post about this very subject, based on the flood of comments (shameless self-promotion follows):

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=802780
Or is every choice -- even the choice to prepare for future choices -- an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid?

Is water really wet, or is water really made of non-wet atoms of hydrogen and oxygen over which an illusory wetness is laid?

It's self-defeating to define free will in a way that inherently violates physics, but it's easy to define it in a way that doesn't, but still preserves what we mean intuitively by "free will": If it's possible to perfectly predict (absent actual errors in either mechanism) what a system will do without simulating it, the system doesn't have free will. If it's not possible without simulating the system (and the actions of the system aren't actually random), then it could be said to have free will.

This still leaves the possibility that it will turn out that humans don't have free will, of course, or only have it in certain conditions.
Use that to give yourself the gumption to fire him on the spot next time you see him. Don't be rude, of course, but it's all the more reason to be honest and up front and say, "Look - you haven't been able to deliver what we expected when we hired you. We were looking for ... but we've noticed that you're more... You might fit better at a larger corporation, but right now, we really need to let you go."
So this is nice, but is it super fast/efficient? It would seem to me that this sort of thing is where inline assembly, on a per processor basis, would really make a huge difference. Is this sort of thing well enough known that compilers already do it for us? Anyone know a lot about this sort of thing?
For example, if someone asked me to do the fizzbuzz test (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000781.html), I might think to myself in pseudocode:

Loop from 1-100:
if the current number is a multiple of 3, print "fizz"
if the current number is a multiple of 5, print "buzz"
otherwise, print the number
print newline

Then I might turn that into PHP:

<?php
for($i=1;$i<=100;$i++) {
if($i % 3 == 0) {echo("Fizz");}
if($i % 5 == 0) {echo("Buzz");}
if($i % 3 != 0 && $i % 5 != 0) {echo($i);}
echo("<br />");
}
?>
How do you know the solar system isn't like an atom in a drop of water?
ring him and tell him to come in to chat.
In a programming or problem-solving context, this is sounds close to how I work in the very early phases of thinking about a problem.
UI difference. That and when browsing code history, the focus is on commits rather than the order in which the keys were hit. When I'm checking code history, what was typed in between commits would be useless information 99% of the time.
Well, it's been available for quite some time as a MediaWiki (also dokuwiki etc.) plugin, so I don't doubt those numbers.
Then schedule a meeting. Tell him to be there early tomorrow because you need to talk, and then deliver the news face to face. Have a list of events in which he didn't perform as you expected him to, explain that while he had an acceptable performance, your company is too small to survive with less than absolutely stellar work, wish him best of luck, and say you are available if he needs references.
I think being nice and respectful is much more important than being informal. In fact, I think informality may give the impression that you don't care.
Hm, I distinctly recall reading:

Also, don’t shop a verbal offer.
I commit to version control very often. Further, with version control, you annotate the commits with meaningful messages, and you (presumably) commit at meaningful points in time. For example, you (usually) wouldn't commit in the middle of developing something (when it's obviously broken, even syntactically). Snapshooting at arbitrary points in time would not enjoy these benefits of intentional version control commission.
on thinking in code: after doing a rather intense data integration/normalization/clean up project for many hours ending around 5 am or so, i had to take a shower before catching a nap. upon turning on the shower, my tired mind took a minute to organize/process the physical actions required to put myself into the shower - suddenly it wasn't a shower at all, rather, it was an array of droplets i had to somehow JOIN but the query was already running! all of this data was going down the drain - corrupted with no audit trails - but what regex/match would help? there was none... luckily, i snapped out of it and regained the proper level of abstraction conducive to good hygiene. apparently, i only had to step under the water. rest would work itself out with little need for analytic involvement.

after that, with sleep & time to breathe i went back and checked my work from that night because i assumed that a mind so frazzled would be similarly error prone. alas, that mode of thought, while not suited for normal-person-tasks worked well for the project. no bugs (from that night at least) and that single all nighter put the whole thing way ahead of schedule.
Text files are small. Even if they saved every keystroke and you type 100 chars/second for 10 hours it's less than 3.5 megabytes.
Pinax 0.7rc1 released
Presumably, your supposition is that the genetic programming route might work because anyone with a "moral" aversion to learning about biological evolution may not have a problem with learning genetic programming.

I think the answer is: "only if you're sneaky and don't tell them that that's what it is". I'm pretty convinced that anyone who's thought about evolution and "doesn't understand it" doesn't understand it because they want not to. If they don't think their identity as a creationist is being challenged, then presumably they would indeed be more receptive to the concept and "get it" very quickly.
It would be useful to have a simple editor like TinyMCE but with image browsing/uploading plugin that doesn't just provide you with a file system interface. Instead it would be more useful, IMO, to have a database backend powered images table that you can search through via autocomplete/tags that you can give to each image when uploading it. It would also be useful to have a module in that plugin to search flickr and other services images for CC friendly images that you can transfer to your site easily - retaining all the authors info (to be displayed next to an image).

Actually I have this in my TODO list somewhere down the road.
Is your product an Ice Cream Glove or a Snuggie?
I don't think there's a rule, written or not... it's just the mob mentality towards self promotion can be pretty brutal sometimes, and people on HN generally don't like that. Get some traction on your blog post, and hope someone else posts it around HN.
I can see it being a big plus for working on longer-form documents. I write screenplays and when you've got 100 pages going back to look at old autosaves becomes a real pain.
the program model of a system like subversion pretty much == the user model for source control for someone who is new to source control.

I'm pretty sure you just made that up.

Which is about as hard as understanding the difference between "your wallet" and "the bank."

Once you've grokked it, yes, it's simple, but if you're managing your own system on your laptop, for instance, it is a bit of a leap to wonder why you have to install the server in one place and work in another, etc. It's not that it's hard, it's that it's harder than git.

I like how you chopped off the "and even then, the only 'savings' is you don't have to stage first" part of my statement about working with only one branch.
unrestricted first-class anonymous functions.

Python already has first-class anonymous functions (`lambda`), but highly restricted ones.
Sounds like Vim's :later and :earlier commands.
I find myself wondering about trees: what happens if you "slide" back in time, then create a "new timeline" from that point in the history? Does it get appended to the current timeline?

Is it all strictly online? If it also works offline on the client, how does it deal with synchronizing multiple "timelines" created by copying the saved file?
Here I get my twitter feed via rss.

Do people that write articles like that understands the things they write about?
The Windows iPhone
There's a difference between verbally shopping a written offer and verbally shopping a verbal offer.
Thank god they changed the name. This is truly a great editor and I've seen it used many times, but I always felt uneasy saying it out loud or even typing it to someone who had never heard of it. It's just awkward. The new name has no (blatant) bad connotations.
This has been on HN already yesterday and it's logic is flawed as I explained last time. You don't need to cover extra space with solar panels as they are situated on roofs etc.

See:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800264
Yes, perhaps the original question is too open-ended, but without a proper context, all answers will be leaning towards the abstract.

While I may express the solution in Objective-C, PHP or Python, I always think of the solution in terms of logic.

Also, if you have experience in multiple languages (and environments), then you're less likely to be constrained by a single mindset.
This effect is very noticeable in the HTML 5 process. <video> is an attack on Adobe; offline storage is Google's attempt to make Gears a browser built-in so GMail works better everywhere, etc.

But is this really so bad? With luck, you get a compromise that works reasonably well for everyone. If you just leave the standards body to get on with it by themselves, they produce theoretically elegant but totally impractical standards like XHTML 2.0 (or, even earlier, HTML 3.0).
My project: Parselets.com -- a pastebin/wiki/editor for web scrapers
I imagine it would help quite a bit to not work alone...
That's an understatement
In general, this will probably get you close to maximum performance. Most CPUs implement shift, rotate, AND, OR, XOR, and NOT instructions, and usually not much else in the way of bit manipulation (besides maybe a few very specialized intrinsics for popular encryption algorithms/hash functions (see SSE)). DSPs and more domain-specific microcontrollers generally have more bit-banging instructions, and you might be able to make better use of them with assembly or intrinsics.

A smart compiler could theoretically transform your crappy implementation of "is the Nth bit set?" into something more intelligent, but it is rarely profitable enough to do so, as programmers who write code in which bit-banging is the bottleneck typically know how to do this themselves; in fact, most of the macros linked are what I consider to be the most parsimonious implementation.

One thing where an intrinsic will definitely beat a C-level implementation is population count (how many bits are set in this int/long?) Many recent x86 parts and many DSPs implement a POPCOUNT/BC instruction which will outperform even a smart LUT-based implementation (without the memory capacity/bandwidth requirement too). There's an interesting anecdote about that instruction here (http://www.moyogo.com/blog/2005/09/secret-opcodes.html ), no idea if it's true.
I'm incredibly curious as to implementation too. Any of the HN boffins want to breakdown how something like this works?
I usually think in math or visually about a programming problem. When thinking about a person I usually think in the language that person speaks.
Thanks for this article Andrew. It's absolutely timely as I launch my membership website at this time. I successfully built a free community site with decent traffic but I spent years of answering hundreds of emails and phone calls about digital filmmaking and self-publishing, often to overbearing people who did not respect my time. Now, I'm focused on the best content and customer service for those willing to pay me for this access. I just signed up my first paying member. So this quote stands out "The absolute minimum number of blog readers or email newsletter subscribers you need to start a membership site is... One!"
Oh for writing of course! (I wrote another comment about that here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802642)

But for source code control... I was thinking nuh-uh... but it might actually be helpful at least until check-in. Shucks. I dunno.
The Snuggie is actually a great product if you often laptop in a cold house. It keeps you warm but still lets you use your arms. Although I much prefer the slightly more expensive Slanket. This review of all the products on the market probably started as a joke (they include a review of a robe warn backward), but the info turns out to be good:
http://community.cbs47.tv/blogs/techtracker/archive/2009/03/...
I built this with tectonic! He did (among other things) the super-sweet realtime-crawling Javascript JSON/Parselet editor. You have to log in to edit tho :/

It's based on this open source project we did:

http://github.com/iterationlabs/jsoneditor/tree/master
Is Apple going to kill Pure Digital?
I used to work at an Apple Store and although while I was an employee I was absolutely forbidden to discuss this (apple PR wanted to pretend it didn't happen), I can at least somewhat anonymously divulge somewhat the information now: My apple store was robbed during Christmas when the power went out.

The store was literally packed to the point where it was a fire hazard, the power went out for 10 to 15 seconds, and when it came back on, we were missing nearly every demo iPod and iPhone.

They never found the culprits.

I was impressed.
Not to mention bzip or gzip compresses text like its cotton candy.
According to the dictionary "Illusion is something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality".

The question here is who produces the decision, for us the "reality" is that we (as persons) take a decision, according to the article the one producing the decision is the subconcious not us (of course we can argue if the subconcious are us or not, but I think that's more a metaphysical/psychological discussion).

So the brain deceives us to think that we are taking the decision which produce a false reality (or impression) and not the brain itself.

So for me the word is used properly. Altough I agree with you, illusion is often not properly used word.
I'm reminded of Clifford Stoll's TED talk where he dicusses (among other things) how he teaches high schoolers to calculate the speed of sound.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everyth...
Eric Sink, author of a competing non-distributed version control system?
I think that's a deliberate spoof of Apple's marketing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940
Technology Review: Making Gasoline from Carbon Dioxide
That's hilarious! Now, to jive with the rest of Apple's marketing, it'd have to conclude with "The heist was pulled off 2.8X faster!"
Work it out?  Or look it up ...
Over on this item about measuring the distance to the moon ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802304

someone wrote:

REALLY smart school kids would go to
wolfram alpha to get the distance to
the Moon, and let the suckers analyze
echo's from old NASA clips.

I was going to dismiss this out of hand, when I remembered an old story.

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

A class of engineering students were given the following question on an exam: How long should a three pound beef roast stay in a 325 degree oven for the center to reach a temperature of 150 degrees?

One student, described as a "Big Project man," didn't come up with an answer but did offer a plan for a series of precise experiments that would yield an accurate answer in six to nine months.

Another student, an advocate of the practical approach, went out and bought a roast, an oven thermometer, and a watch. He wrote his report while munching medium-rare roast beef sandwiches.

A third student used logic. Reasoning that animal tissue is mostly water and therefore should have about the same specific heat and conductivity, he applied heat transfer theory to produce his answer (it proved, incidentally, to be quite close to that of the second student).

The quickest answer, however, came from a student who called his mother on the phone and got the answer from her.

Which of these men promises to be the most effective engineer?

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

Which would you rather have on your start-up team? Which would you prefer your child to be? Which ones make the money? Which ones will be happiest in life?

Which would you rather be?
One thing that the article misses is that there is a way to tell the difference: do you find your product useful?

Clearly there are major limitations to this heuristic; you might be strange or exceptional in some way that makes the inference fail, and a sample size of one (or even two, three, four etc.) will not give you the same certainty as a large userbase. It is, however, better than nothing.

Note that this is not an "exercise at the whiteboard"—you have to actually build the thing. Given this caveat, their claim holds, but there's a clearly identifiable step (actually, there are several, but this distinction is not necessary for the argument at hand) between scribbling on a whiteboard and releasing a product for public use.
Excellent comparison. I too thought the snuggie was a joke, but a clever part of their strategy was that they launched in late summer/fall...people laughed about it, but by the time it got cold, (and the product became useful) they were already aware of it.

It's also a good lesson in the importance of branding - it has a good name instead of a descriptor, and not a web-2.0-meaningless-name either. Surprisingly, these kind of products been on the market for 10 years. But 'slanket' sounds like some kind of endangered fish that nobody cares about (edit: as below, it may be a better product, but I still say that a bad name = bad sales) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeved_blanket

Every time I get the urge to mock the snuggie, I just think about the fact they've sold >4 million of them.
LZMA is like gzip, but with a much larger window. It's a bit slower to compress, but much better performance.
I'm pretty sure you just made that up.

Sorry, I'm going to go with Eric Sink's opinion on this over yours (nothing personal). It seems pretty obvious to me that subversion's program model is way closer to the naive user model than git's is. And yes, that is an advantage, since the user has explicitly stated that he is an absolute beginner to source control.

Once you've grokked it, yes, it's simple, but if you're managing your own system on your laptop, for instance, it is a bit of a leap to wonder why you have to install the server in one place and work in another, etc.

He doesn't need to do that at all - for example, if he's running a windows machine, he can just install TortoiseSVN and set up repositories on his local machine. Dead simple.

It's not that it's hard, it's that it's harder than git.

I'm pretty sure you just made that up.

I like how you chopped off the "and even then, the only 'savings' is you don't have to stage first" part of my statement about working with only one branch.

Because it's false - the "only savings" an absolute beginning user gets is that it is much easier to grok than git if you're new to source control.

Sorry, but this will have to end here - this is getting pretty inane. If you feel that git is obviously much easier than SVN for an absolute beginner, fire of an email to Eric Sink and argue with him.
He is a lisp user.
6) Great companies are led by entrepreneurs who own a meaningful piece of the business. As such, they make decisions based on long term business needs and objectives not short term goals.

The second sentence in this argument does not follow from the first. Founders often have the exact opposite incentive.
Ask HN: Do You Watch Shark Tank or Dragons Den?
Ask HN: Do You Watch Shark Tank or Dragons Den?

Just curious to know your opinions about these shows. Seems to me like shark tank is 100% ridic but dragons den is a little better. Either way, thoughts?
I must have missed that part, but personally I think it's best in that kind of situation (firing someone or breaking up with a significant other--they're fairly similar) to write the person a letter (so you can deliberate over what exactly you want to communicate and how) and deliver it to them in person. Then you get the planning and precision of the written word along with the face time necessary.
Twtapps is up for sale
This is a wonderful resource. I especially like the lighthearted tone that goes easy on the jargon. With a great bibliography to boot:

Elliotte Rusty Harold: Effective XML. Addison-Wesley, 2004, 0321150406.
This book explains which of XML's many features should be used when: Item 12 tells you to store metadata in attributes, and then spends six pages explaining why, while Item 24 analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of various schema languages, and Item 38 covers character set encodings. It's more than most developers will ever want to know, but when you need it, you really need it.

I couldn't have described Harold's tome on XML better myself.
They are but the security stuff is more to warn that something is getting stolen than to stop you from stealing it. It's not much more than a sensor stuck to the machines that sets off an alarm.

It won't really stop you from removing it from the table but it will stop you from just slipping it in a backpack.

Obviously, once you broker the front door, you're good to go.
GWT for the Enterprise Developer
Bicoastal Brain Scramble? Company Culture in 1 Word: Boston CEOs vs Seattle CEOs
Sony Walkman Outsells IPod in Japan for First Time in 4 Years
"Getting fired isn't (generally) a funny thing"

Totally off-topic, but one time I did a crap summer job doing phone surveys. It turns out that I'm not very qualified for jobs that require being civil to people who are cussing me out. Getting fired wasn't funny, but the circumstances that led up to it certainly are.
This deserves a separate discussion.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802856
I was happy to do it when she started. She quit her (good) job to start the biz and had no money. Her lifestyle hasn't changed and I figured she was trudging along in the "valley of death". It seems she's doing ok now, but my guess is that this server will be a major strain on her profits and she made an impulse buy. The "company" was recommended to her by someone she looks up to. I actually feel sorry for her because she is getting ripped off.

The experience made me seriously rethink everything I'm currently doing.
Just being able to scroll back and forth between the history or different commits or whatever seems like a plus. It's the UI widget that impresses me, rather than the version control (which, as noted, is not new).
Eric Sink, author of a competing non-distributed version control system?

yeah he's only interested in promoting Vault. Except he didn't mention Vault at all during that exchange on DVCS - he only mentioned Subversion as an alternative non-distributed version control system, and he said that DVCS systems were definitely going to be the norm in the future. So, uh, no. :)
Often I let my brain work out the problem, and simply wait until it's finished.

For example, last night I awoke about 5 times, every single time with a new solution to a current problem.

But before that, I always try to really relax in the evening, for some hour, preferably in nature (and nothing beats the sea).