skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason for one-character names is the habit of these languages to sidestep naming problem. Naming things is one of the hardest problems in software. APL programs are ideally read as "variable X is ...", not "do this, then this, then this" - so appropriate names of variables could be something like "max of reduce by difference..." - hence the hardness of coming with good names.

Another reason is the same as in math. When you write equations on a whiteboard - the long-sought golden standard of expressiveness - you don't use long names - at best you encode names with subscripts, indexes etc. But names themselves are usually pretty short. APL languages use the same rationale.

Just like you need to read carefully every line of a math equation to understand what's going on, you have to read carefully each symbol of programs in APL family languages. It's unusual for programmers who got used to more help along the line - but the vocabulary of all such languages is quite short and doesn't extend that often. Another reason why APL could be used for teaching math.

I don't agree that this style of naming is not good for anything. Somehow majority of programmers in these languages agree with that. Regarding much more useful things -

"If you are interested in programming solutions to challenging data processing problems, then the time you invest in learning J will be well spent." (http://jsoftware.com/)
Cool game, love it.
I did that for a bit - you can observe that people's cursors don't warp to the beginning at that exit.
I got a "Lost connection to server" Anything went wrong?
And we were so far along, too :(
crosses fingers for persistent state
too much load
A simulated social experiment it is. This is pretty much how societies will need to be like. WIN - WIN - WIN!
Would hydroponics be efficient on a large scale like this?
I went AFK after reaching a particularly hard level, and came back to "Lost connection to server." Apparently it boots you if you're AFK for more than a minute or two.

A bit frustrating, considering how much "work" I put in to get to that point.

It's hands-down the best HTML 5 game experience I've ever had. I look forward to more.
I was staring at that one so intently that the walls started morphing.
When I got to that level a cursor was drawing an arrow to a false path. I couldn't figure out how to draw, so I assume a "fake cursor" was part of the level.
I have that message too now, I think the server simply went down, as I was not AFK at all.
Killer feature
--------------

Not having to write:

for(int i=0; i<n; i++) {
...
}

which generally obscures the fact that I'm trying to do a map or fold (e.g. - reduce) operation :).
Got to big maze and... "Connection Lost"
This issue is commonly considered to be far-off or irrelevant due to the difficulty of developing strong AI, but I think that the reasoning behind that judgement is faulty.

We are unlikely to develop strong AI any time soon, but it is far easier to create the convincing impression of sentience. Humans are naturally prone to pareidolia and the pathetic fallacy - we see faces in potato chips, we convince ourselves that a faulty photocopier hates us, we attribute personality traits to automobiles.

Looking back to the 1960s, many people experienced strong emotions when interacting with ELIZA, a program that is laughably simple by modern standards. Today, there are numerous accounts of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan holding funerals for bomb disposal robots and decorating them with honorary medals.

Machines don't need to be as intelligent as humans for us to begin forming deep attachments to them, they don't need to pass the Turing test, they don't even need to match the intelligence of a cat or dog - they only need to appear plausibly sentient, which I think is a far lower bar than most of us realise.

Personally, I think we're on the cusp of a profound change in how we interact with computers. We'll see it first in cases like these, people with limited capacity for reasoning - children, the learning disabled, elderly people suffering from cognitive decline. Machines that aren't smart enough to fool a skeptical observer, but that represent a perfectly satisfactory stand-in for Rex or Tiddles. The natural human tendency to see patterns and project ourselves onto the world will meet the machines in the middle, glossing over their deficiencies.

We'll dismiss it at first, framing it as the slightly pitiable self-delusions of the vulnerable and lonely. Change will come imperceptibly gradually, creeping in from the edges as the technology improves and filters out into the world. We won't really notice that society is being reshaped, just as there was no shocking moment of realisation that a whole generation had grown up with ubiquitous access to communication technology. We'll just have a vague "huh?" moment, like the first time you were sat on a train and realised that nearly everyone on board was staring at a small glowing rectangle. Huh, my elderly mother spends most of her time talking to a bot. Huh, my child's best friend is a bot. Huh, these students are passing around a petition for bot rights. Huh.
Firefox's cursor hiding breaks it, won't let you move the cursor, so don't enable it. Red circled cursor is your actual mouse position, grey circled one is the 'ingame' cursor that's blocked by walls. Move the red onto the grey to start.
Dev here, yep. Server was restarted.
Thanks to this game I finally decided to upgrade my ball mouse to LASER.

(and unfortunately I got "disconnected from server" about 15 levels in)
"Connection to server lost"

I had myself convinced for a few minutes it was just a clever way to end the game when you got to the last level.
As someone not in any way related to the medical industry, I want to ask what broke: if interns are overworked, and /or overqualified (I have a hard time seeing a justification for effectively secretaries having doctorates), then where is the pressure (more compensation, reduced barriers to entry, etc) for more of them if those already in the industry are incapable of being healthy with their workloads?

Is this just one of those cases where, if you made it through medical school for an obscene number of years, you "don't care about the money", and thus just take whatever you can get in industry?

From what I hear around here (again, not in the medical industry at all and never really interact with it besides as occasional chauffeur for relatives) it is just an over-regulated mess that makes market forces impossible to act on it. Is it any better in some of the single payer nations without as much bureaucracy? Or is there even more on that side of the circus?
Dev here. There's an editor at http://cursors.io?editor, but it can't submit the level to me yet. But you can type "generateCode();" and put it on pastebin and email it to me at me [at] m28.io and I'll put it in game if I like it.

My server is getting hammered pretty hard, that's the reason for the disconnects. The spike caused by hn: http://d.m28.io/ZCWdy0m1DHOG.png

I'm gonna sleep now but ask anything and I'll reply when I get up.

Edit: Sleeping is not an option anymore, the server is having some... troubles.
I'm an active gamer and this is the first time I've had fun playing something in years.

Thank you.
I can't imagine what kind of law you have in mind.
I was about to take issue with the term "supercomputer" as this is really just a cluster of standard boxes. But then I looked at the latest Top 500 list (http://www.top500.org/list/2014/06/?page=1) and found that 55000 cores and standard gigabit ethernet easily lands you in the top 100 (#73 is a close approximation). I clearly spend too much time thinking farms like this are no big deal and that "obviously" a supercomputer is more like BlueGene/L or Tianhe.
Interestingly, arsenic has long been suspected of being an essential nutrient in mammalian biology. There are wasting diseases that are nominally caused by extreme arsenic deficiency and adding arsenic to animal feed in certain regions of the world (presumably with extremely low environmental arsenic levels) has been practiced because it increases animal weight and fertility. And fact is, in some parts of the world (including some regions of the US), extremely high natural arsenic levels in the water and environment exist at several times the EPA maximum designated levels with no obvious adverse consequences. I do not think there is any rigorous scientific evidence for acquired tolerance but it is a possibility; at a minimum, populations living in naturally very high arsenic environments don't seem to accumulate notable pathologies as a result.

The old saying that "the dose makes the poison" probably applies here, and bioavailability of the arsenic forms probably plays a role. However, the line from poison to harmless is rarely straight and in many cases is bimodal i.e. too little is as bad as too much. Many common vitamins have a similar toxicity curve. Even alcohol consumption has a bimodal distribution in terms of its effects on mortality. Arsenic having a bimodal toxicity would not be surprising, even though it is presumed to be linear by the EPA. It would be somewhat surprising to learn that a high degree of tolerance can be developed but not unprecedented.

An alternative hypothesis is that arsenic bioavailability varies considerably. What may be interpreted as tolerance is actually a circumstantial lack of bioavailability. There is scientific evidence lending credence to the idea of incredibly low bioavailability of dietary arsenic in some cases such that it might be possible to consume large quantities without actually absorbing it. Some plants are known to be aggressive concentrators of environmental arsenic without being particularly toxic to critters that eat them. In some contexts most of the arsenic may go in one end and out the other.

Arsenic is quite interesting from a biochemistry perspective. It can be extremely toxic, which is well understood, but the variability and the effects in lower doses is not. Plenty of interesting research still to be done.
Nah, I lost connection to server even though I was actively playing. I'm pretty sure it's just high load.
Lost connection to server a couple times now. Gets old trying to get through the beginning levels.
A view can be thought of as a dependency expression. In version 3 of K there was a data driven GUI. The dependencies allowed one to to Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) quite easily.

Unlike SQL, views in k are not limited to queries as dependency expressions. The expressions can be arbitrary.
I started playing this while some code was compiling and ended up getting completely sucked in.

That giddy thrill of enabling a restless mass of fellow cursors to rush through a gate, or the temporary, unspoken bond between the lone cursor selflessly manning a button and the new arrival sidling up to them to see if they want to change shifts... there's a lot going on in this seemingly simple game. I'm glad I got to play while it's at critical mass.

(Developers, are you logging the cursor movements? This would be fascinating to analyze later.)
"Perplexing" was from the context of the comment you'd replied to.
Been using node in production at work for 6 months, and 2 years in general with zero immaturity issues. The only downside is userland modules which seem stable and active now days.
Reminds me of cursor*10[1]. I always wanted an actual multiplayer version of it -- awesome!

[1] http://nekogames.jp/g.html?gid=CURSOR10
Ebola Open Data Jam NYC Brainstorming Document
I think we need a save/load button or the auto-save feature
I am not logging anything at the moment. I started writing this a few days ago.
1- If this happens to be like all those websites with symptom matching and finding possible causes, i'll pass. Thanks.

I have found out that I, along with my wife and my cat most likely had cancer whenever I looked some symptoms up.
Anyone want to benchmark to see if these short sequences are faster?
"Apocryphal means it didn't happen."

I've never understood it to be a strong claim that something didn't happen, merely that the particular events described are not well established. It doesn't seem inappropriate for something given as a second-hand report in a web forum, and it's certainly no claim that similar stuff doesn't happen.
Thank you. That means a lot :)
Broken in Safari -

[Error] TypeError: undefined is not a function (evaluating 'w.requestPointerLock()')
ma (client_out.js, line 1)

(As the error suggests, checking the 'no pointer lock' button fixes it, but it shouldn't be silently failing.)

Edit: Ouch, I was disconnected from the server after getting several levels in.
The real story is in their rendering suite. Hyperion, for multi-bounce raytracing, seems like the star of the show.
Not to sound snobby, but it's easy on a good trackpad :)
I don't fully understand the purpose of this
I think the opposite :) - marketing of R is light years ahead. Language is very obscure, but so good that from time to time you're going to hear wonderful stories from new enlightened.

And with the rise of parallel programming we're going to actually switch more to more vector way of describing and solving problems. Just like Lisp ideas are spreading everywhere in modern languages, APL ideas are also fruitful.
I love to learn about details of how cluster rendering works? How you break down the task? There is too much dependency between components(light, physics and material) compared to web server world
The author himself states that they are slow. I reckon that at that these instructions are translated into a whole slew of micro-ops. Rarely used instructions like this often are not well optimized.
Thanks for the bug report, should be fixed now.
That's certainly good - we should learn languages which are different enough to justify learning.

Your code in whatever language you work will benefit from that rethinking.
Thanks man. I totally agree. Sometimes I still get frustrated while speaking with clients and it takes huge amount of efforts to convince myself to look at things from the client's perspective.
Egg Freezing: A Sign Your Workplace Is a Dystopian HellHole
Although I had only brief look I would confirm of it being awesome so you should't be disappointed
> How you break down the task?

Per frame.
Playing this was a mistake on my part considering I have plenty of networking HW due tomorrow, but then again looking at HN was the first mistake. Great job! It's a simple game that ended up being significantly more fun than I thought it would be.
Almost everyone parallelizes on frames.
I imagine there's a lot of independence between frames.
This is all false for APL. First, APL is right there in the history with Fortran and Lisp - and its "every ten years" became irrelevant already when it was used to analyze IBM 360 hardware and found some bugs which were fixed in time for shipping. Second, these languages are truly for very wide ranges of problems - it's the industry curse that APL isn't used more widely; I guess the reason is it's harder to learn. But you can do can use it for really everything. Who'd thing JavaScript would be the language to write Linux emulator? So it's less wonder that k is used for OS writing.
Indeed! You're definitely getting into one aspect of things. The most important thing to know about music is that it is a super-stimulus. Great music activates all sorts of otherwise unrelated parts of the brain all at once! So we can spend infinite amount of time on any one of the cultural references, the language-like aspects, the rhythmic structures, the play with prediction and surprise, the psychoacoustic properties, etc. And on top of all that, lots of music happens in live performance with visual and social elements.

Regarding the language relationship, many people have discussed the ways that music, especially harmonized singing, is like a super-voice, it's triggers our emotional reactions to expressive language but at a higher order of magnitude.

The real interest comes when we realize that all the valid elements of the notation-jargon-style theory actually can be themselves described psychologically. So, the books I've mentioned, don't deny the classical ideas of tonality and chords and voice-leading and all. They just explain these phenomena in ways that are actually more meaningful and more universally applicable than just recognizing the notation patterns.
Light does not interact with itself under normal circumstances, so you can render each pixel completely separately once you have the environment.

In raytracing you render in reverse starting from the "eye", not forward from the lights, so each pixel of each frame can be parallelized. (With perhaps a small amount of mixing at the end to handle aliasing/quantization errors.)
Partially addressing 1 and 2: As someone who has had Lyme and writes software I can't imagine how we would even get 10% of the way there on #1, and #2 just sounds like a recipe for disaster. Imagine if Reddit took on patient diagnosis.

For lyme specifically, the blood tests are generally inconclusive, symptoms vary from person to person and are inconsistent, and even doctors who specialize in lyme seem to disagree on core details of the diseases' effects.

If consensus can't be reached even at that level, and if that level of complexity is present in many other ailments (which I assume it is), how would be able to build a beneficial piece of software around that information?
I would've thought it's by splitting the frame in tiles.
According to http://www.keypicking.com/viewtopic.php?p=81902&sid=69cf8ad0... This lock can be picked, but not easily:

"If you want to open one of these, I made a diamond pick out of thick plastic from an engine oil bottle. It was flexible enough to bend at the curved keyway, but if you were careful, they were still strong enough to manipulate the pins. The shank of the plastic pick will need to be wide enough to give some strength to the pick.

Also made a back-up key from a milk jug that lasted for one opening, and another from the oil bottle that lasted for four openings. The picks an plastic keys wear out quickly."
That's actually unlikely here. With a show like they they likely only make a few frames per day, and they want to render them immediately.

Parallelize per frame and you can only have a few computers. They actually parallelize per pixel (see my other reply).
This is going to be H U G E.

Stats about one's own selflessness etc would be really cool. Or even aggregated stuff. X% is selfish, Deciles of goodness etc.
When I started to write the article this is exactly what I was trying to convey. But over time I realized that even when you are working as a full stack developer, you need to understand a software product's other aspects apart from coding to build a great product. Otherwise you are just building in vacuum which I think is the wrong way to build anything.
In my hasty reply I wrote Plato but meant Socrates. In fact Plato was most definitely literate. In fairness this was also only unsubstantiated rumor. Socrates upbringing was supposedly poor so it's possible he could have been. However my overall point was that this isn't important in light of his larger contributions.
Really? I don't know much about it, but I always thought splitting per frame tiles (of frame lines) seems more efficient way to go.

What if a frame, or several frames or small sequence of seconds is requested to be previewed?

Possibly it's more dynamic, and not just set up one way.
Ah, I see he did. Oh well.
Schematics makes it easy to specify an API interface. It will let you bind / coerce json to your types, and then validate that the provided json bound exactly (no extra fields, no missing required fields, custom validators). We also extended it to provide a polymorphic type that will bind to a class based on a discriminator value in the json (based on an old gist from one of the schematics contributors). The roles definition also allows you to provide different serialized views of a model (though whether the model should be aware of that concern is questionable, but a nice shortcut).

We use schematics to back the data on our domain models. It provides models that are separate from persistence models that live in the data / client layer (database or external service bound), and gives you a few nice things for free (like validation) and you can attach behavior to them.

The only things I would like to see added are:

- A native polymorphic type (we're going to try and submit a pull request with our implementation within the next month)

- Roles (lists of fields that are output) optionally separated from the models.

- Support for redefining a model (currently it is difficult to add a self referencing field and have schematics pick it up for you, or add fields through mixins).
50 USD is too expensive for me, Even the kindle edition is 1k INR. Sorry too poor :-(
JDK 9 Early Access Now Available
I read about this new benefit over the weekend, and my reaction was extremely negative. It seems like a great way for companies to force young women to work harder and put their family plans on hold, in favor of the company. I can easily imagine a situation in which this benefit will be used to force women to choose between advancing their careers ("why not freeze your eggs, and have children later?") and starting or expanding a family.

Part of the problem here would seem to be that the US still lags behind the rest of the world in maternity leave. If the government were to mandate that companies let women take off from work, and then return to their jobs without penalty, it would result in a level playing field, and a sense (among women) that they don't have to choose.

Actually, that's not entirely true: In Israel, where I live, there is government-mandated maternity leave with decent benefits, and women still find it hard to compete. It's not unusual for potential employers to (illegally) ask women how old they are, when they plan to have children, or how many children they plan to have. So even with such a benefit in place, things are still tough for women in the workplace.

I should add that I'm male and the owner of a small (currently 3-person) company. I have hired women before, and see having children as something to be encouraged and integrated into the business lifecycle, rather than ignored.
I'm glad they've upgraded the render farm since Big Hero 1 through 5 were so visually unimpressive they failed to make much of an impact with critics or audiences.
This really brings back memories. 25 years ago I used (what was then) the undocumented variation in the itoa() routine for the Borland C run-time library. The purpose was to eliminate the need for a 16-byte table to generate hex codes when base-16 output was desired. itoa() was a part of the printf() library so this table became embedded in virtually every executable. Knocking that out was a meaningful size optimization in those days.
customer service is often overlooked and underestimated in a business. A lot of small businesses don't seem to understand enough how great customer support leads to happy customers and happy customers in turn lead to revenue.

I wish less and less companies go with the defacto 'Your support question will be handled in the next 48 hours', or 'Your ticket number is #10388737125', or many of the robotic, templatized responses that is lazily copied from somewhere. A 'Reply above this line' also gets on my nerve.

Customer support should be more personal. Unfortunately, that seems to be missing in a lot of companies' support goals. It also helps if the CS person has a sense of humor, at the right times of course.

While in interviews I do try and get a sense of how a company, product and team values their customers, asking about how they do customer support never crossed my mind. I'd be surprised if there are many people who ask that. That being said, I'll keep in mind to query whenever my next interview comes up =)