skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think your argument is clear - but I think you're also missing a point about another approach to evolving JS, and how development stacks such as Dart can fit into this.

Bignums - ok - you claim that bignums could have made it into ES6 if google had provided more support. I'll take your word for it, but you can probably understand my scepticism.

I'm not religious about language either. I don't care much about syntax. What I really care about is being productive.

IMHO the main things that help my productivity are:

* optional types

* completion

* doc popups

* development-time runtime type checking

* good debugger

* Few implicit conversions

* Consistent core library

Now you argue that google would have been better off building these language features and tooling on top of ECMAScript instead of creating the Dart stack. What would this alternative scenario actually look like - especially from the point of view of a developer?

* It could be a mode in V8, or a fork of V8 (I'll call it "V8FutureMode"). V8FutureMode would be incompatible with other vendors JS VMs. Just as Dart is.

* Each time ES standardises a new feature already in implemented in V8FutureMode, then all your existing code would need to be updated to match the ES spec. This regular churn is painful for developers.

Now let's consider another scenario where google develops Dart, and ES20 arrives in 2020 with optional typing.

* 2013-2020. Stable language no breaking changes.

* In 2020 I can port my code over to ES20 (trivial as near 1:1 semantics, 99% automated).

This scenario is better for me as a developer. It also insulates me from the risk that optional types don't make it into ES until 2030. I also think it gives a lot of real world usage data helpful for getting optional types into ES. (You seem to disagree here.)

From the Dart team's perspective the Dart scenario is better too:

* Can build a core library and tools on a stable language, rather than having to regularly deal with breaking changes.

* Able to experiment with VM optimisations which are difficult to do in JS due to legacy compat.

* Personal motivation - this is what the developers really want to work on. (Being told by your boss to drop your experimental project, and continue doing the same old thing isn't always a good management approach)

I'm optimistic that over time experiments such as "use strong" will mean that the same optimisations implemented in the Dart VM will be able to be used in other JS VM's. Perhaps if a developer guarantees that all JS code is "use strong ES20", then it would be possible for a browser to even use a different VM behind the scenes (in Chrome perhaps even using the original Dart VM codebase, but with the language front-end changed to compatible with ES20).

The future is uncertain and difficult to predict. There are multiple ways to evolve JS - you seem quite certain that incrementally fixing JS is the only approach. I think building a new programming stack, and simultaneously evolving JS in that direction with insights learnt from the new stack, is also a valid approach. I don't understand why you have been so hostile towards this.
1337% of Pi is 42.

Also, don't forget Tau Day on June 28th!
I love this project, I think it is wonderful. I'm not sure of the practical usage but I don't care, it just strikes me as smart, and looks very nice.
Because mail is one of the more anonymous physical ways to interact with someone. Try buying Bitcoin anonymously. Most suggestions have you walking into a bank (highly monitored), or meeting a stranger (easy to be monitored, perhaps even collect a DNA sample, plus could follow you around).

Whereas if you can buy stamps anonymously then discreetly drop a package of in an unmonitored mailbox, you're doing fairly well on the anonymity. (Assuming you're using untraceable cash, didn't leave fingerprints, hair, writing style, printer fingerprint, etc.) The best they get is a day + one point of physical presence.

Edit: Making it so severe is that the apparently preferred way to get stamps is the machines that print out uniquely marked stamps. Last time I tried all this, I had to go out of my way to find non-serialed stamps that I could pay for with cash.
Lain, the Whom of the Verb World
York HackSpace [1] created SpaceHack - a lovely "physical" game with similar gameplay [2]

[1] http://spacehack.york.hackspace.org.uk/
[2] http://york.hackspace.org.uk/
> The thing about typechecking, though, is that you're essentially specifying your program's behavior twice: Once very detailed in the actual code and once at usually some lesser detail in the types.

How so? The implementation is not the specification; but the type is the specification. Like people like to say, the type is a Theorem, and the implementation is is the Proof of the Theorem. (In a very real sense.) And don't you need both?

Hopefully there can be some type inference at a certain scope, to avoid cluttering the code with a lot of 'obvious' type declarations. I forget exactly how dependently typed languages work in that regard right now (there certainly can't be full type inference).

> All the compiler does is checking that these two specifications are consistent with each other.

"All". That's already better than informal mathematical proofs.

> Your types can have bugs too, in which case nothing will help you.

Yes, just like any other kind of alternative specification there is. Short of mind reading, there is no getting around actually describing what we want. But where there is a distinction to be made is in what kind of specification is easy and declarative enough to use as to give the least likelihood of introducing bugs in the spec itself.

> What frustrates me about detailed type systems is that as detail increases, difficulty of writing the types will increase and type bugs will become more common.

I guess if we assume that we have collapsed/unified the type and term(/value) level, we can use any old Good Software Engineering Practice when it comes to keeping the types tidy. Like using type functions to encapsulate some of the detail: maybe have a `sorted(list)` function instead of having to write it out each time we need it.

This is just a guess though; I don't know how the dependent programmers do it. Well most of what I'm writing here is guessing, on some level.

(And judging by the pride that some people show when they proclaim that "half of our code base consists of just tests", well... I certainly think that types can be more succinct than that!)

> Now, assuming the bugs in your code and types are statistically independent that would still save you a lot of bugs, but I suspect they are not.

I guess if we go with the previous assumptions of a unified value/term level, then the statistical chances are the same in that types are just ordinary values, instead of the types belonging to its own language. ;) Then we just have to make sure that the amount of types is substantially smaller than the amount of "regular ol' code".

Typer er fremtiden. Håper jeg (kanskje).
You're working in the wrong place.
Facebook chat stopped being Erlang quite some time ago.
I think the Desktop needs innovation more than ever. But right now everything IMO just gets worse. I'm using a reactionary and dead simple XFCE. But I don't want this to be the future.
the author is retarded person
Read your comment wondering if Spreedly was worth the pricing, hit your Edit, realized its totally worth it for a few hundred dollars a month.
Thank you for the information.

This raises a couple more questions for me.

First, when searching I was able to find Martin Fenner's very interesting blog posts about ideas for a "Scholarly Markdown" and, as those issues and the first link on the scholarlymarkdown.com site reference, he appears to be associated with a separate "scholmd" project, also called "Scholarly Markdown," which is apparently a related project that itself is a fork of the Python markdown science project:

scholmd:

http://scholmd.org/

https://github.com/scholmd

Markdown Science:

https://github.com/karthik/markdown_science

However, it's unclear what all of the relationships are between all of these projects and forks.

Secondly, since some (or all?) of the changes are being discussed in the Pandoc issue tracker, are these changes intended to be submitted to Pandoc in pull requests? I don't currently see any.
The idea that Brasília was designed to stop a popular revolution is a myth, just that. I lived there for close to a decade, and my mother was working in the government during its construction. At one point I tried to find any reference to this somewhat popular idea (amongst leftists, mostly), and I couldn't find anything. I talked to people involved in the architectural planning, and everyone pretty much laughed at the idea.
Just because a place has good sniper spots doesn't mean it was the builders' objective.
Also, many want impeachment, but many also are protesting against corruption and not impeachment, at least not yet. The people who want a military coup is a minority.

Also, the
Lua is often used for that purpose. It is not a Lisp but it fulfills this role well enough.
This information is interesting. does anyone have information similar to this for the JavaScript V-8 engine. I know that function calls are cheap due to in-lining but never knew that there were other things going on behind the scene.
We evaluated various possibilities and even started building our own scripting language (because TS compiler APIs weren't ready back then) before going with TypeScript. Many reasons:

We want Superpowers to be as "Web native" as possible. TypeScript is just JavaScript + types, they're working to align with ES6 and maybe even merge with ES7+, they have a lot of mindshare, their compiler services are awesome (having intellisense-like in the editor is a big deal) and the whole compiler can be run in the browser, which means it'll work everywhere just like the Web we're building on.

(I've talked in more details about it in our devlog - http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=46317.0)
If you get no luck from this post, have you thought of trying to get a microfinance loan?
Class anxiety, brought to you by Apple
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuja

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astana

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamabad

I think it is more common than you think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community
> One nibble for the foreground colour, one for background.

No, 3 bits for foreground, 3 bits for background, 1 bit for extra brightness and 1 bit for blink (swaps bg/fg every second).
Then they threw sanity out the window with the registry.
I agree with everything on this list, but in case someone takes things too literally, I would change this:

Fight for what you believe, but gracefully accept defeat.

to this:

Advocate for what you believe, but gracefully accept defeat.

Sometimes "fighting" for what you believe can turn in to just fighting.
Why a Mortgage Is Not Actually an Inflation Hedge
It's neat, but Microsoft has not reinvented the keyboard.

There's much prior art: https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=off&client=safari&hl=en...

I wonder how much MS paid Time.com for that article?
Oh? How is Godus?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/13/peter-molyneux-in...
The Author's Notes recently:
"I decided long ago that once HPMOR was fully written and published, I would try to get in touch with J. K. Rowling to see if HPMOR could be published in book form, maybe as HJPEV and the Methods of Rationality, with all profits accruing to a UK charity. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to try rather than automatically giving up and assuming something can’t be done. If any reader thinks they can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling, or for that matter Daniel Radcliffe, regarding this matter, I do hereby ask them to contact me at yudkowsky@gmail.com."
I think that this assertion is not quite unlike correct.
YouTube now supports 360-degree videos
You are certainly right in a sense, because both FPGA and silicon is usually described using some VHDL or Verilog. So once they have a working FPGA, it's not too difficult to get it into some silicon.

However, to get it into fast and power-efficient silicon is still a ridiculous amount of work. FPGA technology is vastly different from directly designing VLSI circuits. For one thing, they'll most likely have to use different pipeline designs to squeeze the cycle times low enough.

I worry that the Mill people are vastly overconfident. There are very interesting ideas there, but I suspect that they are trying to improve so many aspects of a CPU at once that they will be unable to execute any of them well. The end result is likely that sub-par execution leads to inefficiencies that accumulate to the point where any of the theoretical advantages of their design gets overwhelmed - especially since many of their ideas can be integrated by competitors as well. That said, I'd love to be proven wrong here.
This is so sad, but true. I've talked with a lot of architects about how virtual reality can revolutionize the way they design and a lot of them always end up telling me that the visual portion is often overruled by the numbers. Especially when dealing with real estate developers its all about the bottom line.

My hope is virtual reality will bring the human element back into architecture.
Code-used Time-used Shapes
The most efficient protein-producing machine is certainly not a cow. Chickens and especially insects are way more efficient. Some species of insects are over 90% efficient in turning raw food into protein, with way less water used to boot.
Voat – Some Reddit clone
This is the dumbest thing any news agency could ever do. What the camera was put there for was to gather evidence of people tampering or trying to steal mail.

Now if who ever was doing this saw the news they will stop and go un punished.

This happened at my local post office. Someone would drive up to the mail boxes with a vacuum cleaner and suck the mail out.

Eventually they caught the guy red handed with a cameras just like this.

Shame on the journalists for blowing this sting operation.
If they want to do more than their fair share of the necessary work, they are either just dumb or altruistic and should feel free to go for it. If they want to do less than their fair share of the necessary work, they are either just lazy or actively trying to exploit the others and should be punished by them. Everything other than fairly sharing necessary work seems suboptimal to me, either for individuals or for the society as a whole.
First: I'm not sure of the exact origins of things. The way I see it, academic markdown is more of an ecosystem of tools with a lot of overlap. There is no one single markdown workflow right now when you want to do do academic writing. I think this is because no one is sure what the final spec should look like and people are trying things out and seeing what sticks. I feel that there has been some convergence in the last 2/3 years though.

Second: The PR for image attributes is here: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/pull/1806

There isn't a PR for internal referencing yet because the implementation hasn't been worked out yet and it isn't a simple change (should there be a native representation, should it be a filter, which syntax should we use, what about the existing citation syntax...).
You must have worked on that system a LONG time ago.
Just to point out a bit of an overly binary comparison: There is a middle ground here — consider a powered-off, pre-paid phone. No constant texting and so on, but also there for emergencies (in which instance, you turn it on exactly when you actually want to be tracked — by emergency personnel).
Every time I see your nickname all I can think of is that time you got drunk and puked on the floor.

I'm joking of course, but that and your comment are equally smart ways of evaluating other people's deeds and ideas.
I'm in fundamental disagreement with the principle behind CommonMark. They prioritize standardization over practical usability, and for that reason people will keep splintering markdown.

For example, they do not plan to add syntax highlighting blocks (the ```some code``` on GitHub) to their implementation, because they believe that it is outside the scope of markdown. Then, because a lot of people actually need this feature, they still have to patch or extend or plug-in the functionality into any implementation of CommonMark, leading to fragmentation again. And frankly, the reason that I start writing more markdown is precisely because of the syntax highlighting ability. Oh, and to write scientific articles, math formulas are a deal-breaker.

They want to have a standard, unambiguous syntax specification, a suite of comprehensive tests and a cleanly implemented parser. They want to unify the community of markdown users and developers. All of those are commendable goals. But at the end of the day, it doesn't satisfy my needs, so I'd rather use a messy, poorly specified markdown flavor or even just render the markdown with GitHub's service.
The question is - does it have some kind of magnet that keep it folded, or it will open in your bag/backpack freely and get all messy?
Theoretically, everything can. And there's a FUSE implementation: https://github.com/philipl/pifs
Not a novel idea :) Had one of these for a Sony Clie back in 2003-2004. Boy do I miss that thing.
Thanks, this was interesting:

"The changes in the Earth’s orbital tilt and precession (or the wobbling motion) occur because of gravitational forces emanating from other bodies in the solar system. To understand exactly what happens, picture a spinning top when it is slightly disturbed. Just like a top, the Earth too wobbles slightly about its rotational axis. This tilt changes between roughly 22 and 25 degrees about every 41,000 years, while the precession varies on about a 26,000-year period. These cycles have been determined by astronomers and validated by geologists studying ocean sediment records. "

Are there any recommended references on this 26,000 year cycle?
That doesn't invalidate the scientific method

You're right, but neither I nor Kuhn ever said that it did. In fact, he echoes your thoughts about how models replace one another:

First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem solving activity that has accrued to science through its predecessors.

He doesn't deny that there is such a thing as scientific progress, he only means to model scientific progress as an episodic cycle in which existing paradigms present with insoluble problems, and that these problems are only resolved when the old paradigm is replaced.

It wasn't so long ago that Einstein declared that God doesn't play dice with the universe. Kuhn doesn't deny the existence of scientific facts or the utility of the scientific method -- he only hopes to illustrate that the notion of scientific truth is contingent on certain assumptions and that these assumptions often get in the way of future progress.

It's also important to remember that Kuhn wrote "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" back in 1962. At that time, he was largely responding to the logical positivists. While I think a lot of the contemporary rationalist movement is caught up in old logical positivist modes of thought, your own willingness to invalidate models based on evidence wasn't fully developed before Kuhn and Popper brought such thinking into the mainstream.
Reinvented is pretty strong language here, this idea is far from new. I think this new keyboard looks convenient enough for those needing extreme portability, but also probably a pretty mediocre typing experience.

In any case, this time.com post is just blogspam. Here’s Microsoft’s page that all the content comes from:
http://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2015/03/02/get-more-done...

And here’s another third party page with some more pictures:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/132994-microsoft-universal-f...

Here’s discussion at geekhack, a keyboard enthusiast forum:
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=69498

For a keyboard attacking the same ultraportable market, the upcoming TextBlade keyboard seems like a much more interesting sort of new idea:
https://waytools.com/products/textblade/1/trailer
"It allows you to focus on your content (one feature of Markdown) while still being able to write mathematics."

That's what LaTeX does too. Its markup, generally, is semantic.
1600 commits by one dude? 700 commits in January? An average of 23 commits a day? 12,000 lines written and 7,000 removed just that month. An average of 640 commits per month.

I may be naive. Am I missing something or this guy is an incredible code machine?
I think a good implementation of this would encrypt the traffic between the proxy server and the client.
I didn't read enough of the paper to see how bivector multiplication is defined. I'm assuming everything is in the exterior algebra and thus made my comment with that assumption.
Yes. How? I canceled my home internet service.
I thought this too at first, but then I realize that an image would do the job just as well.
We have no way to know if homulilly got drunk and puked on the floor in public, but we do know that Yudkowsky and assorted Lesswrong visitors had a reaction to the Roko's basilisk concept that most relatively "normal" people would judge as embarrassing or humorous.
Join in on research of the Swifties
The semantic approach seems to work quite well for gnome 3 with tracker.
No kidding. Reinvented? "Microsoft made yet another folding keyboard."

Here I was half-excited, half-terrified about seeing something with no buttons; or one without the standard letter keys.

Still, if it's comfortable for typing, and if the battery really lasts that long, that'd be kinda neat. But I doubt either will be true.
I think this is a very naive refutation of what the point was about Kuhn.

First off, the notion that engineering "validates" science. What do you mean by validate? Do you mean successful engineering informed by a set of scientific principles, somehow, in a scientifically rigorous way, renders those principles true? As in, end of story true?

Because most of mechanical engineering is done on the assumption that force equals mass times acceleration. The industrial revolution yielded countless engineering marvels on the back of Newton--cars, trains, breathtaking buildings and bridges. But the theory isn't "true," because Albert Einstein did some thinking and realized that all of the physics change as you go really fast--something "engineering" missed, despite the fact that the stuff "worked."

But somehow it feels wrong to say that Newton was wrong, right? Because in his world, with the kind of thinking and set of scientific instruments available to him, and the battled hardened inverse square phenomena [1] that could be painstakingly measured and applied in engineering, it was infallible. It was true. But only in historical context.

1) Actually not quite so. The strange orbit of Mercury was out of line with Newton's equations, so much so that the planet Vulcan, placed out of Earth's visible observation, was invented to explain it. And so the theory was saved, until General Relativity explained it away, too. So much for "truth."
You know, if this was a foldable ergonomic keyboard, and also supported OSX/GNU Linux I'd be down. A standard keyboard though, well I can get a nice smallish mechanical switch one for a hundred bucks.
Microsoft once made an awesome trackball and then discontinued it, leaving the remaining supply to be auctioned at high prices on eBay. If you're lucky, you can now find one of these extinct $50 MSRP rarities for the low price of $550 on Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-D68-00007-Trackball-Explorer...

Why they won't bring this trackball back to the market is a mystery.