skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily a good idea. I could probably handle it now without a problem, but when I was 25 or 30 I would have quit first, and you should have your head examined if you would have put me in that position back then. Given how many high functioning autists tend toward techie type jobs, it may even block your hiring good tech talent (it may even be an ADA violation).
Automation vs. Customization
Nice post, had similar experiences few times when i blamed myself for too early delivery.

The problem with agile or iterative process(although i am a big fan of it) is that some clients (usually non techs) are just not ready for that! But its amazing how many Project managers still cant understand that most of clients just DONT NEED their product to be shown week earlier but without nice design it meant to have. They are so much inspired with books and articles about “release early and iterate” that they just assume that client will be also happy to be iterative. So they forget about more fundamental rule -keep your client happy all the time!
So keep that in mind before you decide to go agile make sure that client is fine with it, understand it and manage his expectations carefully!
I don't see anything here that you can't say to quite a lot of people. And I'm not surprised. After all, if you couldn't say it, you sure couldn't publish it for the world to see.

A genuine list of things you can't say has not been written and will probably not be written, because such a thing is nearly paradoxical. Even if someone is foolish or suicidal enough to write one, nobody who reads it will want to pass it along to anyone else as that would taint them as well, so it will remain obscure.
I find it interesting that the organisation most likely to have the information does not list Microsoft as a supplier in the categories "operating systems" and "office productivity...". See http://www.buyingsolutions.gov.uk/services/Misc/ITGoods/Soft...
Very curious what other folks personal desicion making process is when it comes to specialization versus automation.
Spring 2009.
I think you've hit on a weakness of the whole Machine Learning paradigm. I might get this wrong, but I believe every machine learning algorithm necessarily introduces some bias into selecting which possibilities to consider, and without some kind of bias, learning is impossible.

But once you've chosen how you will bias your model, you are only going to search for solutions in the space defined by that bias. So, figuring out the parameters of the ellipses describing the movement of heavenly bodies, but not questioning whether ellipses are a good choice to begin with. There is also feature selection, how you decide which aspects of reality (or measurements of reality, actually) are relevant to the learning problem. (There are feature selection techniques, but that presumes you already have a finite set of candidate features and then determine which ones have the most value.)

It seems that, perhaps, this kind of paradigm busting discovery is out of reach of current machine learning methods, and that the kinds of decisions about what to model and how to bias your model is where humans add value to the process.

This is all philosophical bullshit at this point, but I remain curious about the relationship between learning algorithms and scientific discovery. If anyone is still reading, are there any good books on this topic?
Here is my favorite monad tutorial: http://www.valuedlessons.com/2008/01/monads-in-python-with-n... . The reason I like it is because it uses Python rather than Haskell while pointing out that you can build monads in any language that supports objects or closures.

Actually, now that I think about it, it seems to me that pythonic monads should really be context managers, so they can be used like:

with SomeMonad:
do stuff
This topic reminds me of an ex-girlfriend who had a knack for saying what I deemed inappropriate things. I recall getting upset with her when said something like #4 (below) among others. For example driving through an apartment area I used to live at which had slipped down economically after the dot-com bubble burst she said "You know you are in a bad neighborhood when there are a lot of black people" ... talking about a newborn cousin "he has a big nose, like a black person" ... and some other non-racist sounding stuff that I can't remember. Even when stuff she said was statistically true or had some basis in fact she just stated it in the most matter of fact and cynical way possible that really upset me.

"4. There is no such thing as altruism. Everyone is ultimately only interested in their own pleasure. Even those who appear altruistic are doing so because it makes them feel good. No one actually cares about anyone else."
Thanks, this looks really interesting.
> Oh, blow me. Michael Jackson was an incredible musician.

Before you get your due remember all of Michael Jackson's best selling hits were produced by Quincy Jones who is very much a fan of those musical masters that came before. And, one of the great musicians of our time. Much of what was the early Michael Jackson sound was Quincy's creation.
It's a conceptual error with the problem, which means that it indeed WAS missed by unit tests. I wrote some of those and checked the "overlapping numbers" case; the difference was that I did so in a naive situation where the values were inserted once and never updated.

Now, it would have gone from a "mysterious" error to an obvious one had I done an academic-style step-by-step visualization applet of the entire structure's processes before integration, but I had confidence when the code was first written that because this structure was being used with extremely high frequency, the only thing I had to write an explicit test for off the bat was off-by-one ranges causing edge-case "near misses"; anything else would make itself known at runtime after integration.

Time it would have taken for a visualization applet: ~3-6 hours?
Time it took to solve the bug: ~3 hours

It's placing a bet - and the bet is that the bugs are limited to a specific segment of code that can be narrowed down easily; if the problem were architectural in nature I'd be in far deeper shit because that would make the same class of bug appear all over, with any number of different symptoms.
Honestly, I could tell most of the things in that list to pretty much anyone I know without shocking them. Including my grandma.

"Communism would never work" ? Gee, I think there are actually more people in the western world who would actually be shocked if they were told otherwise!
They must something that teenagers can spot as true.

Indeed. Many of these are sophomoric "truths" that a teenager might believe, but someone with more understanding would spot as falsehoods.
Thanks Wallflower, yes I was hesitant about making that comment - I did research previous comments but not as far back as you did - I do think it's important to question authenticity of a comment esp. when it's a PRETAY big claim like above. If it's true - good luck to JimmeyL - if it's not he still seems to add a lot of value here with his comments.
I didn't think it was surprising as well, but I don't know if it's because I'm older and have seen more of the world and the sort of people in it, but I know I would have been surprised at some of them as a college student, such as public schools didn't exist to teach, but as a daycare center so parents can work.
Arsenal can beat Chelsea, says Fabregas
Where is the definition of Western culture? Also, civilization?
I think you missed the point of that one

"Communism would never work, because no one with power is ever willing to share it. However, the reason we were taught to hate it was because it was a threat to our masters."
There's nothing wrong with getting a referral fee for signing up people. It's when most of your income comes from signing up new people instead of the product you're supposed to be selling that it becomes fishy.

I don't get whitedotbox. Why would someone give up 50% of potential revenue when they can use adsense for search and keep 100% of the payout.
The given syntax for prename is very odd, and e.g. http://man.he.net/man1/prename has a much more sensible explanation of what the command does (i.e. remove _bak).

The script under "crash test dummy" is hackish and full of race conditions, but that's perhaps acceptable in that case.

Leaving webmin and X open to all local users (in the case of webmin, by choosing a bad password) is not a good idea.
Ouch, you are right. This is perhaps the only one that might shock one or two persons ;)
The author brings up a fundamental difference between traditional engineering and software engineering. In many fields, engineers sign on the dotted line and assume professional and financial liability for the correctness of their design. They have to think about things like warranty repairs, recalls, product liability lawsuits and dead citizens. They tend to design very conservatively.

How many software engineers are willing to make their careers dependent on the correctness of their code?

There probably are some that are. Unfortunately I've ever met them or had the privilege of hosting their applications.
There is no "we" here. These leaders work for their companies and are sitting precisely at local maximums. It makes sense to sit there for a while, wait for someone else to discover the new new maximum, and then move toward it and try to take it over.
I ordered 2 from them last night, right after I saw the OP and before there were any comments here. I figured at that price they were well worth experimenting with.
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Why Are Some Cities More Entrepreneurial Than Others?
Recursion and concurrency with Go.
I'm a frequent business traveler, but I don't see being able to expense flight change based on predictive analysis.

Is there anyone within the travel industry that can speak to the market demand for this? Does this cost the airlines $x/year, or booking services?
"the reason we were taught to hate it was because it was a threat to our masters."

That's sophomoric pseudo-wisdom, and a cliche to boot. Who hasn't heard that one?
Which ones are false? The only one I vaguely reacted to was about how women are less adept at symbol manipulation.

I think there might be other sides of the coins and exceptions in exceptional situations to some of these, but overall, I didn't think they were falsehoods. Perhaps I'm too easily agreeable.

But defn, I didn't find them surprising.
I was a bit reticent about posting this since economics articles tend to lead to flame wars, but it is interesting, and based on research, and doesn't have much in the way of policy/politics. Flag away if you don't think it should be here.
Do you really think that Michael Jackson will have the permanence of Shakespeare or Jefferson? Young people mostly don't care about [him] or for his music, and he is unlikely to make the history books.

I agree with the spirit of your comment though, in believing that the linked article was elitist beyond reason. Anyone who would describe western society as contemptible because the "intellectuals" don't watch PBS needs to pick up a book (just like the "intellectuals" have done). The information density is way too low for someone with real stuff to do, which is why television is relegated to relaxation time, where bandwidth is a non-issue.

[Edited]
Tell me again why we're listening to this guy?
Ask HN: What's the best browser-based IDE?
I know I've seen several of these in the past but it's been awhile and I'm wondering what's the current "cream of the crop". I'm looking for IDE's/development environments that run completely in the browser and are capable of building stand-alone apps and publishing them directly to the internet. Something that can be used to develop an application with no reliance on local resources other than a web browser.
IPhone Developers Aren't Stupid, PPK
#27. There will always be people who think they are Right and anyone who disagrees with them is Wrong. These people will espouse their views through Religion, Politics, Lists of "What you can't say", etc...
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The list has the air of, 'you're an idiot if you disagree.' I suspect the punishment that the author perceives from society has more to do with over confidence of the delivery than the content itself.

Not to say I agree with all (or even most) of those statements. All of them are highly debatable. Even the ones I agree with are not clear cut. I think that's why I do find myself upset on reading the list. I find it particularly infuriating when very complicated matters are cut down into terse one liners as though no more thought is needed.
I say (and believe) things from that list every day. I find it funny to provoke people and test how much they can accept.

You can guess how popular I am with friends and at parties.

Consequently, my list of things we can't say would be very different. I guess each of us has his own limits and his own taboos.
Interesting question. I was just thinking about this yesterday, so I'm glad you brought it up...

Business software, in particular, is often financially-critical (failure of the software leads to loss of money) rather than life-critical.

This may have been true at one time, but not any more. As a business programmer, I've worked on quite a few things where there is much more at stake than just money. Just a few of them:

- distribution of mission critical airline parts with linked certifications
- scheduling & routing of ambulances and firetrucks
- scheduling & routing of trucks carrying time-sensitive medical supplies
- clean-room quality control of medical devices
- distribution of pharmeceutical formularies
- medical claims processing & adjudication
- formulas & recipes for large batch food processing
- medical demographic databases of allergies
- certification of automotive safety devices, including airbags
- building contractor specifications, including electrical & plumbing
- clinic scheduling

Just because something won't hurt you immediately doesn't mean that it can't hurt you eventually. You can see from my examples that so much we program does affect the welfare of many, even if indirectly.

We really have reached the point where software QA is just as important as engineering QA. We programmers aren't the only link in the chain, but we are an important one.

I have looked at horrendous enterprise code that supported critical health and safety issues and thought, "Do you really want to get on that plane?" or "Are you sure you want to take that pill?" (Hopefully QA catches most of the potential culprits.)

Thanks for getting us to think about it a little more. This sort of thing should always be on any good developer's mind.
Tell me again why we shouldn't?
Maybe not outright falshoods - but possibly a product of over zealous cynicism.

For example:

"Fathers being suspicious of their young daughters' boyfriends and dates is really just sexual jealousy"

Could just as easily be attributed (nowadays) to social pressure: e.g. it is a well known in pop culture that fathers are suspicious of their daughters boyfriends and so some of them are. :)

(and yeh I realise it is somewhat ironic to be disagreeing with a list of "things that cant be said" :))
Do you really think that Michael Jackson will have the permanence of Shakespeare or Jefferson? Young people mostly don't care about or for his music

I have no real comment on MJ as a musician, but I just wanted to point out that young people don't care about or for Shakespeare either, and haven't for a long time. They overwhelmingly tend to feel that it is something forced upon them that has little relevance to their lives. Obviously there are exceptions, but they aren't exactly the common case.
Maybe stuff you can't say (and definitly should be able to say, no doubt about that), but not stuff that is (obviously) true.

I have a hard time believing that there is empirical verification for all of the things on the list. (Considering the ability of the social sciences, I would claim that - at least today - finding out whether much of what is on the list is true, is pretty much impossible. Not forever or even in principle impossible, just as things stand today impossible.)
Because most of the content is insultingly inane. I don't need some single guy with no kids telling me about how

Love is not eternal. It is a simple state of endorphin chemistry. It serves a single evolutionary purpose. It lasts about three years.

Fathers being suspicious of their young daughters' boyfriends and dates is really just sexual jealousy.

Parents care less about their children than they do about their careers, their socioeconomic status, and what the Joneses think. That's why we have public schools instead of home education by one parent who doesn't have a "career".
We are not (hopefully). But I would support the making of such lists in general, if only to encourage discussion.
If this is true that it is simply an Artificial Neural Network, then it really is a scam. I was under the assumption that it was part of the IBM Blue Brain project, but it is obviously not. For some real ground-breaking research, take a look at Blue Brain: http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
> we will be releasing AdWhirl as an open source mediation solution

From a newsletter I received this morning.
Top Ten Publications

5. DEMBSKI, W.A., 2006. No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence. books.google.com. [Cited by 80] (33.07/year)

Creationism!?! THAT really helps their credibility.
1. writing a business plan.
> How many software engineers are willing to make their careers dependent on the correctness of their code?

Proving program correctness is a very involved, expensive, and rigorous process. That, being said, comprehensive unit tests are a good investment in proving that code works as it should. Software cannot be engineered like a bridge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
I find most of these things true by default. But I also find them things that we are obligated to strive to overcome.

And I can't find a way to express this idea of overcoming human frailty and human nature, without referencing something very much like a soul, or a spiritual reality.

If we are just meat machines, we are just going to do what we are going to do, and the rest is just philosophizing. I find myself unable to accept that, and I guess that's why I'm religious.

To be specific, Jesus talked about most of these things as being the default human condition, and said there was absolutely no way to overcome them from within the human condition. The ability to transcend default human behavior is necessarily spiritual, almost by definition.

So, I find myself mostly in agreement with this list, but my disagreement with the first item puts the rest in a different context. Human nature is immutable, unless we consider something outside the system, which I and many others refer to as "spiritual."
Too many people? No, too many Malthusians
Regarding a similar problem with benchmarks in the scientific sphere:

http://www.bannedbygaussian.org/
These have been fixed for quite a while now - the iPhone web app I put together supports rotation and touch events in application mode.
I think you are taking "can't" too literally.

I think the original sense of "can't" from pg's essay meant "things you can't say and remain in good social standing with the broader society." You are choosing to reduce your social standing on purpose by uttering these remarks.
Shows like "Civilisation" are based on a notion of high culture - to uphold some things above others; the rationale for something being "high" tends to be flimsy. It's a cultural meme - not necessarily bad or good, but highly opinionated and in a way that embeds itself deep into our psyche. Recognition of this kind of notion was the entire point of pg's "What You Can't Say."
So, do you believe that proving the structural integrity of an engineer's work is less expensive or difficult?

No, they are simply built according to several, well-established, well-studied principles. Which software engineers not only lack, but are not interested in pursuing.
1. Just because a mental state like love has a known chemical or evolutionary basis doesn't make it any less real.

2. I say the father is concerned about his daughter's mate selection because she carries his genes. She is a proxy for his reproductive success. He wants her to choose a good mate (e.g. someone who's more likely to stick around to care for the children) so his genes are more likely to survive.

3. No comment here, but I think it underestimates the effects of social proof in a parent's decision.
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Depending on your motives, a fun alternative to the popular Arduino for getting into microcontrollers is just ordering the naked parts and wire them yourself on a breadboard, following Sparkfun's excellent tutorials ("Beginning Embedded Electronics" on http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php). They start out very basic with building a 5V circuit, connecting an AVR, programming it, adding a crystal and a RS232 level shifter to talk to your serial port, etc, all well explained for beginners. As a software person eager to learn the electronics behind it I've had a lot of fun that way. Great company!
I think Web App is a viable option if:

1. It's possible to write your app within the constraints of a Web App
2. You have hosting that can handle the potential load (how many million potential users?)
3. You plan on doing something that is likely to get rejected by Apple
4. You plan to give the app away for free

I think allot of people overlook #2. For me one of the nicest things about writing native apps is the fact that I can focus on coding and not infrastructure, and avoid the risk of having too much (wasting money) or too little (can't service customer spikes) bandwidth, etc.
I think the list's only purpose is to attack that way of dismissive, unconstructive thinking.
In order to discuss whether these are things that are not socially acceptable to even utter, regardless of their empirical merits. I think the point is not whether these things are true or false necessarily, but whether even discussing them are socially permissible.

At least, that's what I took to be the intent behind the title of the submission.
On of my favourite ex-girlfriends once said the following to me:

I have great difficulty with this whole idea of the soul. I mean it seems to simply be a way for individuals to secure themselves a much larger place in the universe than we deserve. When you think of the grand scale of things we are less consequential than a single atom is compared to the entire earth. Seeing as we cant even truly visualize that analogy the whole truth scares the crap out of us; hence the idea of a soul.

(I post that w/o wanting to derail into an argument/discussion. It always struck me as an insightful analysis of the possibilities - hence worth sharing)
Add to that:

"No one actually cares about anyone else."

Seriously?
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The point of such lists is not to be accurate. We accept that society is 90% right, so 90% of such lists will be either wrong or not even wrong. The point is to be aware that of the 10% we can miss if we stick to the conventional wisdom.

As for your examples, the first may be inane, but the second is at least taboo and the third actually has some truth in it, and is also more or less taboo.
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