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One interesting thing I learned from this is how highly correlated mortality from heart disease and cancer are. They're quite different types of disease, but perhaps what they have in common is that they're diseases of civilization in the sense of being caused by de facto "toxins" (I don't mean this literally) of industrialized life like processed foods, lack of exercise, cigarettes, etc.
Is there local data about possible causes of mortality? If so that might be a good thing to add.
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cancer and blood flow are very closely related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiogenesis
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The low-end Alienware box has specs that don't meet the minimum requirements for Batman Arkham Knight, one of the few AAA titles coming out this year that supports SteamOS. And it costs more than either the Xbox One or Playstation 4, both of which will run Arkham Knight fine. I think Steam Machines are a failure waiting to happen. PC enthusiasts can get a Steam Link for $50 for most of the benefits of this. And people who aren't PC enthusiasts have no reason to buy these over a console.
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Yeah, you basically are buying a PC-in-a-box in order to get AAA PC games. At which point...why not buy a PC and hook it up to the TV?
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This is effectively the software-only equivalent of a console launch.
Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform?
Valve certainly has a better chance than most at pulling this off (and likely enough user/market data to make this seem like a valid investment) I am still super skeptical that these publishers are going to spend the time porting their AAA releases to this platform.
A good chunk of the console games barely make it to PC/Windows as it is, let alone a PC/Linux platform... seems like a tough sell.
If the goal is an entertainment OS with streaming and DVR capabilities in addition to the few Linux compatible games on Steam, that's a bit different of a story but not a huge commercial win I don't think (unless they having some amazing partnerships planned with Netflix/Amazon/Vudu/Hulu for streaming that I am not thinking of).
If the goal is to make Steam into an entertainment platform (not just games) it is interesting to watch all these platforms converge on this "entertainment delivery pipeline" solution.
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I wrote a response to your comment but it became rather long so I decided to make it into a blog post instead.
http://mortdeus.blogspot.com/2013/09/linux-core-component-po...
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This article is both accurate and highly misleading. The author is correct that there is very little reliable evidence that links glutamic acid and/or glutamate to health problems. The backlash against MSG as a result of the "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" craze, was not rooted in scientific inquiry.
However, MSG is not just a source for glutamate like seaweed and tomatoes are. MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid and contains not just glutamate but also sodium ions. Having 2000mg of natural glutamate should be harmless. Having enough MSG to give you 2000mg of glutamate means you're getting a shit ton of sodium. That's not good for you, especially if you're one of the many people for whom excess sodium intake adversely affects your blood pressure. So while MSG is presumably no worse than NaCl (and is perhaps better in that the umami flavor means you don't have to use as much sodium to get an equally rich taste), to say that MSG is totally harmless without even mentioning sodium and hypertension is ridiculous. Even in terms of short term effects, I've had plenty of MSG-free hot and sour soups that made my head itch. Not from MSG but from thousands of mg of sodium found in their gratuitously added soy sauce and table salt.
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You hit the nail on the head. For most of us, it's not the MSG that causes the problem. It's what comes with it. For starters it's the sodium. For me it's the 1000 calories in a monster Doritos bag, or the 3000 calories when I eat three times what I should at a Chinese takeout.
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I doubt the lazy people who haven't moved to python3 will ever do a decent port of python 2. Python3 has been out for over six years now, with warning before that.
I'd much rather bet on the python developers who are shipping software. All major python libraries have been ported to python 3, many of them for years. There's 4799 packages registered on pypi as supporting python 3.
Python is becoming less popular? The author provided no evidence at all. Downloads of python3 from python.org are higher than python 2, and have been for a while now. Job websites show python having more postings than 2 years ago.
Not much has changed in python 3? What rubbish. You just have to look at the thousands of commits, and change lists. Python 3.4 has generic functions to do single dispatch matching on type. You can statically type check python now (see pysonar2, pylint, and pycharm for example). Not only as pypy made a major breakthrough with performant STM based concurrency(no threads), but threading has been improved in python 3 too. There is the new asyncio library for really elegant async, which go along with great generator improvements(yield from). We have CFFI for simpler FFI. Lambdas are kept simple for readability, as functions are preferred.
I'm just going to stop here... many of his statements are just insane. Like this one: "You might as well ask someone to port their entire codebase to Ruby". Um, yeah... porting a codebase to python 3 from python 2 would take more time than porting it to an entire other language. What complete nonsense!
Edit: the post isn't from Microsoft, so fixing it so it isn't misleading. There was a link to a Microsoft person on the top right of the page, which seemed to indicate he was the author. Instead it was just someone promoting the page. Oops/sorry!
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Reminds me of Ruby, IMHO the version jump from 1.8.7 to 1.9.* killed it. Different scoping rules made porting a non-trivial task, many packages have never been ported to 1.9 and one of the early 1.9.* major releases was extremely buggy...
Nowadays hardly anybody seems to use Ruby for new projects...
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Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either. I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons.)
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Right now I think you can't, unless you can get your hands on a cheap dual socket motherboard for the new Xeons. Even then, the PCIE SSD will get you over the limit.
I really like the new Mac Pro, even if it's not upgradeable...
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If you are just starting, you should have the simplest setup - everything on one server - and scale it only when it becomes necessary. Premature scalability adds complexity and slows down your iterations.
My setups usually consist of an nginx serving static content and proxying applications requests (doing gzip, etc). The data tier is initially collapsed into the application as described in http://www.underengineering.com/2014/05/22/DIY-NoSql/ This architecture allows very fast iterations while providing enough performance headroom; it can serve 10k simple (CRUD) http requests per second on a single core.
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How do you protect against single point of failure and total data loss? Do you do frequent offsite backups?
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I am a scientist, and I have seen a lot of terrible code. Most scientists have no formal training in computer science or coding. Many advisors don't place much value in having their grad students take such classes, though even a short language-specific introduction class would vastly improve their students' productivity.
I recently undertook a complete rewrite of our group's analysis software that was written by our previous postdoc. It was ~30k lines of code in 2 files (one header, one source file), with pretty much every bad coding practice you can image. It was so complicated that that postdoc was essentially the only one who could make changes and add features.
The rewritten framework is only ~6k lines of code to replicate the exact same functionality. It's easy enough to use that just by following some examples, the grad students have been able to do implement studies in a couple days that took weeks in the old framework. The holy grail is for it to be easy enough for the faculty to use, but that will probably take a dedicated tutorial.
My point is that following "best practices" may be overkill, but taking a thoughtful approach to the design of the software can vastly improve your productivity in the long run. Posts like the OP help scientists who write bad code defend poor practices. Any scientist worth his salt should support following good practices because it will always lead to better science.
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> "taking a thoughtful approach to the design of the software can vastly improve your productivity in the long run"
I think, taking a "thoughtful approach" is the key to a lot of different practices. "Best practice" as used by most people, in many different crafts and arts, is a method to avoid thinking on what it is you are trying to do.
The most effective kinds of "best practice" are the ones you mastered by making a lot of mistakes, not something you pulled out from a book or a class. It is naive to think you can substitute standards for personal mastery.
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The high end of the PC laptop spectrum has been neglected for years. I guess the market is just too small to care about. I have no idea where they're taking their profits if they're pushing down on the low-end prices too.
I've been looking for a new laptop for over 2 years, and nobody's been selling anything worthy of replacing what I'm already using, which was built in 2010. For a few brief months that year, HP made a wonderful MBP clone (magnesium alloy case, 1600x900 14" screen with edge-to-edge glass, SSD, etc). Soon after, that product line turned into the same plastic 1366x768 crap everyone else was selling, and that's been what's filled store shelves ever since. Meanwhile, my 2010 laptop is starting to fall apart, with dead pixels, an overheating GPU and lost battery capacity.
I am looking forward to buying an ASUS UX301 this November to replace it. That's the first and only Ultrabook-class laptop I've seen since 2010 that'll actually be an "upgrade" without buying some thick "gaming" monstrosity. It'll have a Haswell i7-4558U, which comes with the Intel HD 5100 graphics, the first Intel integrated graphics chip to outmatch the 3-year-old Radeon in my current laptop. Plus 8GB RAM, 512GB of RAID-0 SSD, an all metal and glass case and up to 9 hours of battery life. Assuming this PC in that configuration actually makes it to market.
What's amazing to me is that this many months after Haswell parts started showing up in stores, that one ASUS laptop is still the only announced product by any name-brand manufacturer with the i7-4558U/HD 5100 parts. Every other new/"refreshed" laptop that'll be in stores this holiday season will either have an integrated GPU incapable of playing games well on the higher resolution screens they ship with, or give up its thickness and battery life for a discrete GPU.
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I think Dell m3800 might be what you are looking for. Not sure how they will price it though. Specs seem pretty nice.
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/precision-m3800...
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Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game.
I feel like this sentiment is very common, but is implicitly stating that all of the other things, family, friends, personal health etc... are not games - when I don't see why that would be the case. Nothing distinguishes those things for me.
Creating new products, like software that gives people better productivity, or hardware that helps people achieve physical fitness goals, or systems that make getting clean water cheaper - those are life changing to a lot of people, sometimes even millions. The typical response to this is "yea but most people make junk" to which I say, telling junk from non-junk is an exercise in futility.
We wouldn't be quoting Paul Buchheit or talking about Dave Sandberg if they hadn't sacrificed some of those relationships, or health for the products and platforms that we know them for. And that's the real point - legacy. Someone's legacy is not the relationships they had personally, just look at the miserable relationship failures of Steve Jobs, but their impact on bringing their vision and impact on groups outside of their circle.
Winning in my opinion then, is having an (hopefully positive) impact on those outside of your inner circle, not within it. And the larger the impact, the bigger the win.
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You think Steve Jobs lived a meaningful life because he sold some fucking electronic toys to rich people? You really think that's what matters?
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The biggest issue I have with Chrome is how aggressive it's been about linking Google IDs with the browser. I've lost data twice by bugs related to not having a linked ID.
Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.
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Chromium does not include the Google bloat and works flawlessly. I don't know whether it will make you lose data, but personally never had any issues with it.
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This is complicated.
1. rapgenius is probably the least spammy lyrics site on the internet, and definitely so amongst those on the first page of search results. As a consumer, I would not have a problem with Google, et al giving rapgenius results a special algorithmic bump to move them up. I also know that this is an opinion - it may be a popular opinion, but it is still inherently subjective.
2. If I was in rapgenius' shoes, I imagine gaming SEO would be a strategy to be seriously considered - one doesn't get into the music lyrics market without being aware of the current state of affairs. Barry Bonds believed he was the best hitter of his era, and if McGwire and Sosa were going to get credit for breaking the home run record while taking steroids, then damnit he was going to take steroids and hit 70 bombs. IMO, this is not a morality play.
3. But I do not care for the public personae of the rapgenius founders. They come off as juvenile and occasionally offensive, and I think they are bad representatives for consumer internet start-ups. I'm pretty sure this is a common opinion on HN, but I am not sure how much it should color our judgment of their actions.
As they say, the game is the game.
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I can't tell if Hacker News hates African-American culture, or just white boys who take part in it. If they were annotating Opera Librettas and spoke in Victorian English, I'm sure HN would love them.
It's not like they are complete posers. They got investment from Nas.
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The comments thus far show exactly what is wrong with HN. HN has become an echo chamber where we all love certain people/companies/ideas and immediately dismiss any counter viewpoint.
Instead of immediately discrediting the linked article because they're "haters" or "threatened", try reading it and understanding their point of view. I love Khan's work and what he's doing, but at the same time the article raises some valid points. You learn a lot more by examining both sides of a story than being a fanboi.
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I hear you, but I think the headline really invites the strong counter-response. The use of the word "dangerous" is provocative to say the least.
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> I don't care about being as strong as I can be.
You should.
From the introduction to Rippetoe's Starting Strength:
“Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not. As humanity has developed throughout history, physical strength has become less critical to our daily existence, but no less important to our lives. Our strength, more than any other thing
we possess, still determines the quality and the quantity of our time here in these bodies. Whereas previously our physical strength determined how much food we ate and how warm and dry we stayed, it now merely determines how well we function in these new surroundings we have crafted for ourselves as our culture has accumulated. But we are still animals - our physical existence is, in the final analysis, the only one that actually matters. A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their
squat strength goes up.”
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let's face the obvious (actually insanelly obvious). Money is the most important thing in life. If you are strong and poor, you will live less.
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While civil forfeiture is scary, my (very very brief) stint doing criminal law as a public defender showed me that there's also a bigger side of this -- seizing the assets of individuals who are charged with a crime so that they cannot attain private counsel, make bail, or receive any creature comforts while incarcerated. What will generally happen is that after sitting in jail for 120+ days, they'll jump at any opportunity to be released; that includes a plea agreement that includes no more jail time, but, generally also includes more financial obligations (probation, fine, license reinstatement) against the defendant.
We've moved away from a society where the police were there to truly protect and serve the community (think 1950's/60's beat cop walking the blocks during his shift) to a totalitarian police state (constant erosion of the 4th amendment, nexus centers, sweeping overreaches of the third party doctrine, stingrays, and mass deployment of license plate scanners). Big Brother would be proud.
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Why is this? I mean, are the police forces so (money) broke that they've needed to make up the difference by becoming this way? Or are they truly corrupt (I find this unlikely)?
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More people really need to watch this video. http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
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Thanks for sharing! I really enjoyed the video, though I didn't understand everything (english is not my mothertongue).
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I can't stand these coffee capsules. The amount of waste they generate is absurd for a process which should really only produce negligible compostable waste (coffee grounds and perhaps coffee filters). Plus, I doubt the plastic capsules are recyclable, since they permanently contain the grounds once used (at least, the Tassimo brand that I've seen in action does this).
This is an "innovation" that saves little time (making a cup of coffee is not a time-consuming process), is substantially more expensive than the process it replaces, and generates an inordinate amount of waste.
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The companies themselves are usually the ones that provide the recycling.
For me, the problem is price (and dependence on a single vendor - which is connected :))
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We don't need an NSA or CIA or any other spy agency. I know I'm an extremist on government secrets, but I think there should be none. Nothing should be outside the reach of a FOIA request. In my ideal world all government officials' documents and emails would be made publicly accesible in real time, they're working for us. Any exception or loophole to transparency gets abused, every time. If that makes it harder to conduct wars or espionage, well too bad. If you remember from the game Civilization, democracy is not a good system for a warmongering state. And that's a good thing.
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There are probably things that still need to remain secret, just like corporations need secret to protect their business. However, to insure a minimum level of transparency, the government should clearly SAY what kind of things are going to be secret, so that the scope is clearly defined (for example: locations of nuclear weapons will be treated as classified for obvious reasons), as well as the constitutional limits of whatever secret operation can be carried. Likewise, there should be budget restrictions on secret operations to ensure nothing huge can go out of the radar without public scrutiny.
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"OS X Mountain Lion arrives this summer. With all-new features inspired by iPad, the Mac just keeps getting better and better."
Am I the only person that doesn't want an ipad on the desktop?
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I actually like the idea of it being both (and and ipad becoming a desktop) Launchpad for ipad like utility, the normal desktop for desktop things, have both on both systems. Lets be honest here, we are moving away from a central computing device model, to a model with many peripheral devices. I'd like it if they all acted the same, and were capable of displaying the same content, as well as providing the same ability to create.
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Slightly offtopic: I live in a city in Brazil whose heritage is basically german so I know a lot of people trying to learn german here. A particular friend of mine used to work for an IT german company and went to Germany a couple of times and he said every time he tried to speak their language they'd frown at him or feel like "conversation's not flowing" and switch to english. Other friends living in Germany (Stuttgart, Munich, Berlin) and also in Switzerland (Zurich) said the same happens to them with some frequency. I never heard about it happening with other languages or in other countries, so why is that? Any germans out there care to comment on this?
Edit: just to make it clear, this is purely out of linguistic curiosity
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Thanks to you folks who commented on this! I really appreciate it :-)
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Is anyone's choice of distro influenced by the type of servers they find themselves working on?
For example, I find myself doing alot of work on REHL systems in the cloud, and thusly run Fedora (so I don't have to figure out where config files, etc. are kept in other distros).
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Yes. CentOS minimal for servers, Fedora for desktop
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The real problem is the disconnect between math and "math".
"math" is the game of rote memorization that kids play in school where they try to memorize arcane rules that seemed to have been pulled from some greek dudes ass with no explanation.
Math is a legendary construct whispered about as a hypothetical possibility in high school classrooms. A problem solving exercise that has you think, with a logical progression from base rules and assumptions.
"Math" and Math both use the same language and the same symbols, with a lot of the same concepts. I've never seen Math, and only know of it's existence through hear say from mathematicians, but been through a lot of "Math". Imagine if we tried to teach English this way. It would look a lot like memorizing words out of the dictionary. And then playing ad-libs with out of context sentences.
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We do do that in English, that's why most people with Degrees in English can't write a convincing piece of prose to save their life.
But they can tell you all sorts of arbitrary rules about English, and probably something about iambic pentameter.
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Since there are so many Duoling fans here, I have to ask: am I the only one who finds the app almost unusable because there's no theory?
For German I used to try the exercises on my commute, but suddenly the app expected me to use "dem" instead of "der" without any explanation. I can't be the only one with this problem, right? Or is there a "new concepts" tab that I've never seen?
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I'm like you that I prefer to learn the theory before brute force memorizing. Just get a good grammar book and use it besides Duolingo, and you're golden.
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Pao had thousands of people calling her a ching-chong cunt. Why do you think your comment is relevant to this thread?
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Like other people display Obama as a non-american, Donald Trump as Hitler and so on. As a public character you should be able to handle that.
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Anyone using Perl for new projects and why?
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Yes. I'm too lazy to write code, so CPAN means I just pick the pieces I need and glue them together with Perl.
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Could be a MBP replacement for developers. The only thing is those of us running on OS X, how is Windows 10?
I love my command line and linux like commands and tools.
- Homebrew
- Bash scripts
- Docker (Windows 10 currently not supported)
- Vagrant
I just feel the tooling for MS isn't in the direction I am.
I still have a Windows 7 desktop and it's just not the same.
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You might be interested in the most recent episode of Shop Talk Show (http://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/186-dave-goes-windows/) and associated blog posts.
One notable thing from the blog side was significant issues with RoR, but otherwise I think there's a lot of good.
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I often read such articles from women, but never from men. After looking deeply at myself and how the world around me acts, I feel that it is really true: Women ARE evaluated mostly by their looks. Women who look good, wear good clothes, have a good makeup, will get what they want much more easily then others. To some degree that is also true for men. It is just how the world IS. So instead of teaching girls about the value of other things, don't we do them a favour, teaching them to care about good looks? Does caring about good looks exclude caring about smartness and education? Is my observation totally wrong?
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Let's put it another way - if you teach a girl that her good looks are super super important, and she's bombarded with adverts telling her ways to improve, and images of people on TV that are portrayed vastly superior to her physically, then she is being set up to feel that no matter what she does, she's never good enough. Whilst us boys can "hit the gym" or "hit the books" and our manliness and success can exude, a girl has to chase beauty products, botox, and boob jobs in order to progress with what she's been born with.
This is an awful, awful system.
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Secondary math education, for me in the UK, didn't deal with anything outside of elementary algebra, Euclidean geometry, some statistics, and relatively simple calculus. Nobody talked to us about imaginary or complex numbers, or bayes theorem, decision theory, or non-trivial mechanics problems until I was in college (age 16+). Nobody mentioned matrices, broader number theory or discrete transforms until I was in university. I studied EE not compsci. Things like algorithmic complexity I had to learn for myself and from Knuth. I'm trying to grok group theory right now to help with my understanding of crypto. Before this, it was never mentioned throughout my education, so I don't know what courses you would have had to take to learn that. The fact that I didn't even know group theory was important to crypto until after I had made the choice strikes me as a bad sign.
The common theme at every level is learning cherry-picked skills, before you're even told what the branches of mathematics even are. Everything seems disjointed because you're not taught to look past the trees for the forest. Most people infact, even technical folk, go through their entire lives without knowing the forest even exists. Any idiot can point to a random part of their anatomy and posit that there's a field of study dedicated to it. The same goes for mechanics or computer science. You just can't do that with mathematics as a student.
I loath academic papers. Often I find I spend days or weeks deciphering mathematics in compsci papers only to find the underlying concept is intuitive and plain, but you're forced to learn it bottom up, constructing the authors original genius from the cryptic scrawlings they left in their paper... and you realise a couple of block diagrams and a few short paragraphs could have made the process a lot less frustrating.
So many ideas seem closed to mortals because of the nature of mathematics.
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> So many ideas seem closed to mortals because of the nature of mathematics.
Which is why everyone, but especially programmers, should learn a lot more math.
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Hacker News double standard:
* A company like Zynga who runs a completely legal business and employ thousands of people with good wages and benefits by copying game concepts is generally considered evil.
* A torrent tracker or file locker that makes a handful of employees rich by ripping off thousands of artists, musicians and filmmakers and serving spammy aggressive popup ads shut down and are considered martyrs.
Somebody care to explain?
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It's not a matter of good and evil, it's a matter of due process.
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That's a very good point and very observant.
I too am highly skeptical of ALL of these claims.
My main gripe with Soylent (ever since I first saw it here on HN a month ago) is that they are making cooking seem like a horrible chore that nobody wants to do.
Shopping is convenient because I go whenever I have time and only buy exactly what I need. At the same time, I also ensure I only buy the best ingredients I can at the moment (Assuming labeling is correct).
A lot of people I know and myself included, LOVE to cook. I love cutting a bell pepper and catching a whiff of its fresh smell in my nostrils. I love sometimes adding different sauces, spices or ingredients in my meals to give them a distinct and unique taste.
And cleaning up is also fun because I recognize I am a responsible adult, able to revert something back to the state I received it in. Just like my bed, or a rental car or my home.
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You aren't required to buy it or use it. Cooking and shopping is a horrible chore for lots of people. Those are the people this is marketed for. "I am not the target market for this product" is not a problem with the product.
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Took a job in Bellevue in April and moved from Philadelphia to Seattle. So far it's a been an interesting experience. I've encountered many people hostile to software engineers in general. A bunch of people immediately ask if I work for Amazon with a hint of disdain after I state my occupation. So it hasn't felt super welcoming so far.
I get it, even in some neighborhoods in Philadelphia the same thing is happening. Although to a much lesser extent, but there is tension between locals and newcomers. I was initially sympathetic to the locals, but now it just seems people will complain about the change no matter what.
But you have no right to complain about this gentrification when you are operating newly built apartment complexes, charging a premium to tech workers. And then go on to say you have Amazon prime. Screw you, Owen.
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I can't speak to every demographic, but I've lived and worked on the Eastside as a software dev for 15 some years now, and I've never had that reaction from anyone. Far from it, probably a third or better of the households I go to church with, or who my kids go to school with, have at least one engineer in the household, sometimes more.
That said, Woodinville and Bellevue are not Capitol Hill, which has a very different vibe. I'm as uncomfortable in that neighborhood as they would be in mine, I expect.
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And she said that one of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in competitive language. The language of competition not only doesn’t appeal to many women, it actually puts them off.
This doesn't make sense to me because easily the most competitive path I've ever seen is premed. Almost all of the premeds I know are competing for the best grades, the best resumes, and the best internships. Organic chem is like a giant free-for-all where everyone tries to beat the curve. And yet, at least 50% of biology and medical students are women. Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS (which I think is less common in my engineering classes where people often try to help other people and don't compete for the best grade), but not in medicine?
Aren't we just applying cultural influences to both genders in either case?
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> Why are women turned off by competitiveness in CS, but not in medicine?
From my experience, the primary thing driving those who aspire to work in the medical field is not so much salary as employment security. They compete early on (in college and in medical school) so they wouldn't have to compete later when they enter the workspace. I think that the promise of job security (guaranteed employment) has a particular appeal to women. I suspect that their thinking is that once they graduate, they can relax at the high-paying secure job and invest their time and resources into growing children. On the other hand, to me, as a young man looking to enter the startup field, ventures with ongoing high risk and high payoff appeal more than employment guarantees.
I dropped out of premed and started programming and studying art sometime in college partly because I was turned off by people whose primary career motivation was job security and who did not have any serious creative pursuits besides their career goals.
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I'm currently working at a school district in Lancaster, PA.
We have gone with Linux laptops for all of our students. Even more, we've given them root access.
We chose this because of exactly the points that many people are bringing up in these comments.
What does the iPad offer to the pedagogical process? Not really that much outside of the sanitary iOS enviroment.
Are they teaching kids about programming or computer skills? Probably not.
However, with a laptop (and root access), students are able to, and encouraged to play around and experiment.
Yes, we have some students that don't care about it at all, but there are others that have created some genuinely interesting projects. We've actually modified and used one of their projects to help support the linux laptop deployment.
More info:
http://www.pennmanor.net/techblog/?cat=69
My boss did an amazing TEDx talk regarding the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Co37GO2Fc
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This program was mentioned at POSSCON earlier this week as one of the ways open source is improving society.
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"But technology is not neutral – and neither is code nor numbers. There are human, subjective judgements lurking behind the apparent objectivity offered by algorithms and the “user-friendly” operating systems. These technologies perform almost magically, while at the same time enabling all sorts of organizations to easily collect information about us, something that makes it that bit easier to usher in new forms of surveillance and control."
This paragraph relates to a thought I've had lately:
What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. Obviously we're in a climate of rapid advancement and meta shifts currently but it seems as though that will inevitably end at some point. Proprietary software that can profitably leverage personal information is bound to hit the market first, but even if it takes 50+ years you have to imagine that equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available.
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The obvious low hanging fruit is helping humans avoid error. But you have to actually be prepared to admit error for this to happen. You have to be ... cognitively dissonant enough to treat error as just another information flow.
The "software end game" looks a lot like the show "How It's Made". Frankly, most of that is just PLCs, which are barely computers at all.
As to phone/desktop/laptop applications which do things for people, I think we're largely at satiety. That's always a dangerous prediction, but it's been at stasis now for quite some time.
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Sigh. I don't know whether I'm alone in being saddened that many of the excellent thinkers of our time, who once might have spent their lives probing the the very limits of our comprehension in their field, now end up comfortably turning their minds to the services of (in the long term) rather short sighted commercial ends.
I can imagine that this sentiment is probably against the prevailing HN mood, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how certain kinds of thought and investigation are only enabled and supported by certain structures. The point of a university used to be being the highest pinnacle of thought. A place where people could have everything not related to intellectual pursuit taken care of so they could devote themselves to the pursuit of greater knowledge. Now that seems to be replaced by a corporate campus.
It's a cliche, of course, but how many breakthroughs of meaning are we missing out on because the brightest and best of our generation are now no longer seeking after truth, but instead seeking after a way to make more people click on an ad? Ah well, it's late, and as ever I'm post-sober. Best of luck to him and his team - I've enjoyed his lectures and papers. I hope they may continue, but I sadly suspect not.
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What if you consider the application a trojan horse for doing interesting things which are useful well outside the supposed domain of application?
I think the trope of "the best minds working on ad clicks" is perhaps not giving people enough credit.
Hackers and academics always find a way to screw around and work on interesting things. The trick is to find interesting structure in mundane problems.
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Alright, let's do a group experiment. Choose one of the links below:
http://www.google.com/search?q=pressure+cooker+backpacks (insecure)
https://www.google.com/search?q=pressure+cooker+backpacks (secure)
and report back if you get a visit from a squadron of men dressed in green wearing helmets and holding guns. If any reporters clicked on the https link, it's PRISM because the leak is from inside Google, otherwise it's XKeyscore. If we get results from both we are really fucked.
Or were you too scared to search? I know I was...
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Sorry, didn't see this before I posted but this was exactly my though, yet done on a much larger scale with the assistance of bots.
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Looks like great fun!
I doubt it has close resemblance with medieval long sword fighting, though :-)
It must have been a lot slower fighting in leather, chainmail or plate armor than in this ultra light modern equipment.
And, I assume a medieval fighter would take far smaller chances than these modern hobbyists knowing a counter blow could be (almost surely would be) fatal.
Also, these guys fight one on one. But in a war you would have to guard yourself from blows and cuts not just from one enemy but from a crowd of enemy soldiers, left and right.
The guy you were fighting might be using a sword or he might have another weapon. Maybe he was using a shield and you didn't. And if he had a sword, he might not have read the memo that it should be max 4 feet long.
And fighting on some uneven, damp meadow he might be fighting uphill or downhill, and just keeping ones balance when striking or blocking would be hard compared to fighting indoor on a floor.
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I've seen a video of a big Polish swordfighting battle (you can probably find it on google), people in full armor and swords. What I could spot is that swords are completely ineffective against armor; swords glance off, are unable to penetrate armor, and just bend. I'd use a mace or club and beat people's head in. Which is probably why those weren't used in that one.
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The enthusiasm around React is infectious and I'm thinking about integrating it into one of my projects but I can't quite tell what exactly it's supposed to be used for. Is it only for SPAs or is it reasonable to consider react when you just want to add some interactions and dynamism to a page that was rendered server side?
React seems kind of like an all-or-nothing approach. It seems like overkill if you just want to provide a little more structure to jQuery spaghetti code.
Can React be a competitor to, say, Knockout? React seems more in the realm of angular or ember to me.
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It's an idea for organizing the components of user interfaces, regardless of the platform.
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Out of interest, how many people here actually use async methods? Excluding being forced to by a library.
They haven't revolutionized my code at all. I can't decide if I'm too stupid to realize when to use them, or if they're really just a bit useless for most normal code. I can see the point to it, it's just that most of the time I'd consider using it, it just isn't worth the extra effort. Usually seems to be a premature optimization.
Lambda expressions, now they revolutionized my code completely.
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The style is great if you have a main thread you need to keep fast and responsive.
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Dude... the small, light gray text... are you trying to ruin our eyesight?
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I'm guessing he changed it - looks fine here (text is #111)
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Somewhat tangentially, I feel Twitter sort of stopped innovating after they got big. If Google as a search engine can do Gmail, Glass and driverless cars, why has Twitter made tweeting the only business they do?
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Google didn't really go full on expansive product company until after their IPO.
Maybe twitter will do the same.
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Maybe I was raised by a bunch of rabid dogs...
But after reading the cached page... I really don't understand what the creator did wrong?
He was a guy that I a lot of people can identify with, whom is publishing a book about his experiences?
Is seduction intrinsically bad?
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There's paragraphs to write on the subject, but in short, yes this was very bad. Details here: http://caseymalone.com/post/53339539674/this-is-not-fucking-...
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I don't really understand how they can have such a radical view... If the pirate bay were to be the only media distribution system left after all of the traditional "Hollywood" corporations went out of business (b/c of the pirate bay), there would be no more movies which the pirate bay could distribute. I don't know about you guys, but I do like my movies. EDIT: Please note this was just I thought an interesting topic to think about - I by no means think this is going to happen. TPB's statement gave me the feeling that they didn't want the traditional Hollywood to exist any longer, which is why I brought this up.
Call it what you want, but what a ton of people are doing in downloading movies off the pirate bay is taking something that they haven't paid for. Maybe one can say that isn't stealing, but I find it hard to call it anything else.
Maybe I'm missing something in their stance?
EDIT: I know we're talking about the middleman and not the producing companies, but the pirate bay is still facilitating the act of taking revenues away from producers, right?
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if you're a consequentialist then you only care about outcomes. Every economic analysis I've seen indicates piracy rate does not affect the returns to creators.
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I'd like to switch to !GoDaddy, and Namecheap seems popular. Are there any useful pro/cons I should know about Namecheap before switching?
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Tried to read their Terms of Service, long as hell
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But, but, but... they're not democratic! If only they'd put more power in the hands of the common man, they too could enjoy such luminous choices for statesmen as McCain vs. Obama, Bush II vs. Kerry, Bush II vs Gore, Dole vs. Clinton, Bush I vs. Clinton...
...we gotta keep saber rattling that our way is better than theirs. Boo China, boo.
Edit: To the downvoter - okay, I'm joking around. But which of these premises do you disagree with?
1. The United States has more electoral politics in choosing its leaders than China.
2. The last 20 years of leadership in China show a much more nuanced understanding of policy and statesmanship than American leadership, where charisma and mass appeal tends to be more important than "hard credentials."
3. There might be a cause-and-effect relationship between point 1 and point 2.
Disagree with any of those? Yeah I'm joking around, but it's worth thinking about, no? Or maybe it's upsetting to think about... that I sympathize with...
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Chomsky has a great quote about this: In the U.S. there is basically one party - The Business Party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations of the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies, as is most of the population.
I'm not against business, but it shouldn't be our singular goal as a society.
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$100k isn't successful, it's the bare minimum as a professional. If you're an engineer, all that's required to earn that much is show up on time and be good at your job.
The cold, hard truth is if you don't earn at least that much, you either suck at your job or suck at negotiating. Your bosses and many of your peers earn twice as much as that.
Edit: IF you work in the corporate world. Clearly if you're a lifestyle-biz/consultant working over wifi at the beach in Thailand this doesn't apply at all. In fact, congratulations, if you're this guy, you probably win the game.
If you asked a lawyer, a CPA or a banker if they'd take $100k to work their ass off for a corporate master, they'd laugh in your face.
Edit: It's quite typical of HN when this topic comes up for someone to be downvoted by people who make very little money when they come out with the cold, hard facts. This place is full of millionaires and super-successful entrepreneurs who mostly stay quiet in threads like these. Wake up and smell the coffee.
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My lifestyle-biz friends working over wifi at the beach in Thailand are making 1/4 - 1/2 million/year. Just like any other job, you just have to know what you're doing and do it well.
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We need a Butlerian Jihad against surveillance.
You know what will never stop this? Posts on hacker news. Letters to your congressman (LG can donate a fuqton more to his re-election campaign than you can). Voting with your dollar (people who know what a privacy policy is are few and far between).
You know what will? Taking these TVs into the street, smashing and burning them. Mobs storming Best Buy and smashing the surveillance cameras built into these telescreens. Bricks through the window of every mercenary selling your privacy, selling a live feed right to your living room, to the NSA/FBI/creepy internet hackers.
It's really hard to get people to commit to sustained, long-term action -- that's why boycotts are not effective and why this trend has continued. But people are actually angry about this and that anger can be fueled into displays of acute disapproval. Like burning a pile of spy TVs in the street and then flipping the cop car that comes to defend the surveillance state and burning that too.
Pretty sure this will get downvoted because anything outside the blandly acceptable boring-as-fuck politics always gets downvoted. But just keep in mind that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and the power structures of the world pretty much only respond to Arab Spring-esque events now. We need to make every digital dictator afraid of becoming the next Gaddafi.
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>You know what will never stop this? Posts on hacker news. Letters to your congressman (LG can donate a fuqton more to his re-election campaign than you can).
Plus it's not just LG that wants that kind of data. It's the government itself.
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We are in the process of mitigating a large scale DDoS attack against our global DNS platform. We expect service to return to normal very shortly. Stay tuned and let me know if you have any questions. ted@namecheap.com
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do you have ETA?
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No.
I believe in the concept of a natural monopoly for most utilities though - Building outside plant is horrendously expensive - it to me makes as much sense to have multiple cable providers as it does multiple sets of power/telephone/water/sewer infrastructure.
I'd even like to see a fewer wireless carriers (consider that each for carrier are spending billions of dollars to roll out what amount to essentially identical network infrastructure often even from the same vendors - how on earth does that even begin to make sense? We - the rate payer ends up paying for it in the end thru higher rates - economy of scale is a thing, and it works.
Having been in the industry for about 2 years now, looking at the spectrum, I believe that we have enough for two, possibly three really competitive national wireless carriers - as in a complete nation wide footprint. That means 20x20 LTE even in rural areas, plus whatever 2g (CDMA 1x or GSM) tech you need for circuit switch voice, and whatever legacy 3g you need too (EDGE and HSDPA or EV-DO), with the eventual goal of multiple 20x20 or 40x40 carriers once we can replace all the legacy stuff - but consider the current for a moment, that Sprint in Seattle on 1900 mhz only has 20 mhz duplex, and nothing on 800 at all - this is excluding the acres on 2.5, because of the obvious limitations of use with atmospheric issues.
That said - the only way natural monopolies do not become abusive natural monopolies is thru intense and careful regulation - mostly by setting a fixed rate of return for the infrastructure, and then building rates from that.
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> it to me makes as much sense to have multiple cable providers as it does multiple sets of power/telephone/water/sewer infrastructure.
That's how things work here in Brazil, some cities have 2 DSL providers or 2 cable providers. Big capitals may have both, and fiber. Also, there are a bunch o local radio providers.
It is way better for the consumer, as all of them suck and at least you can choose the least sucking one.
Telecom infrastructure is very different from electricity/gas/water/sewer infrastructure.
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This attitude that everyone should be a programmer bothers me. The designer's job is to design, and it's the programmer's job to integrate the designs.
Why don't you learn photoshop and how to do basic design? That way you don't need to ask the designer to do minor tweaks.
It doesn't work. If you've never used version control, "just learn git" can be a multi-week project. If you've never done design, "just learn photoshop" is the same.
Each person is on a team to do a specific job, let them do their jobs.
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I think that enra meant that git is a tool for people who are part of a team and modify files for the same project. Just like you know how to handle files and directories, you would know how this kind of tool works. But you are definitely right : the tool should be easy and quick to learn and understand.
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Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself.
In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalks had actually increased since the lights were installed. "Taken together, the data suggests that approximately eight additional crossing accidents per year occur at these locations," says the report.
There are lots of theories about why, but I think it boils down to one thing: when pedestrians can hit a button and light up these big signs which are supposed to make everyone stop, it makes them feel much safer, to the point that many people will hit the button and start walking almost immediately, without taking the time to make sure that all lanes of traffic are aware of their presence and stopping.
The prospect of automated cars scares me because, obviously, they cannot be perfect, and they will not be able to identify every dangerous driving scenario. Of course, there is a manual override, but I fear that the car being right 99% of the time will lead to such a complacency in "drivers" that, in the 1% of cases where the car is wrong and about to hit something, we will not be able to stop in time. The more accurate the car is, the more safe we feel, and the less likely we are to monitor it as closely and notice when it is wrong.
Anyway, I rather hope I'm wrong. I'd really like to drink my coffee and read during my commute as my car drives me to work.
[1] http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_14859190
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I walk a lot and the times where I've been nearly hit by a car have ALWAYS been at crosswalks and traffic lights (where the pedestrian light is green and cars should be stopping).
Crosswalks are a problem because you can't predict car behaviour: some will stop. Some will completely ignore them (for reasons unknown). If there were no crosswalk you know exactly what cars will do. That's much safer for both parties.
The "illusion of safety" is most dangerous at traffic lights. 2-3 times I've had cars just sail through, completely oblivious. Note: they're sailing through on RED lights. Not amber going red. It's not one of those borderline cases.
Once I had a cop have a chat to me about jaywalking but I've never been fined. I would be pissed if I ever was. In a fight between a car and a pedestrian the pedestrian loses (big time) so pedestrians have a higher vested interest in their own safety. I know what the light changes are at intersections I cross a lot. Where are these cops when cars sail through red lights or nearly run over pedestrians when turning when the pedestrians have right of way?
I get the distinct impression these skills will come in handy when I move to New York next month!
Anyway, back to the self-driving cars: this I believe will be a painful transition that will take many, many years. It's nice to see Google working on this.
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It seems odd that Buffett and the WSJ would call this price gouging. There are high prices brought about by low supply and high demand. Sounds like Econ 101 to me. Am I missing something?
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Successful businessmen only like supply-and-demand when it benefits them.
They squall like babies when it works against them, however.
And, this will only work until the hotel goes out of business. Then the AirBnB crowd will lift their rates, as well.
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A little while ago I would've agreed heartily with Peter. Now, as a "born" software engineer with a decent portfolio (now age 21) recently frustratated by a fruitless job search, turned down again and again (I believe rightfully so) because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ.
A good college degree (especially in STEM fields) provide the basic foundation upon which to innovate. Our industries have gone so deep, and we are standing on such giant shoulders, that anyone who is going to take it further must first absorb the century or so of knowledge created so far on the subject. Even in Computer Science, the next innovation is not yet another WhatsApp, it's more along the lines of Counsyl (a dna-sequencing app), where a person without the knowledge-foundation equivalent of a degree simply would never get started with the idea of making such software, leave alone actually building it.
And I say that as a self-taught software engineer. Yes I can probably build the next Snapchat on my own. But even then I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, especially low-level stuff like kernels, bits and bytes, and fundemental details of cryptography and security. Not to say anything about the "unknown unknowns" which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.
And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now, after spending years in industry and freelancing.
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You're talking about vastly different fields. If you want to be a scientist and study DNA, college seems like a great option. For computer science? Not so much.
You probably feel like you've missed out on something really important but once you actually get to college, you'll realise that it isn't as great as it is portrayed to be. A lot of stuff can be self taught in a much more efficient and less time-wasting manner. As well, you can focus on recent technology whilst the curriculum of a uni may be outdated.
Despite that, I don't think your definition of "self-taught" is where a lot of industries will end up. You can still have a great education experience online (there will be many services offering this as technology evolves), so you can still cover the same content but not have to enter a traditional physical university relationship.
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I wish people would stop calling this a hack. It's not a hack, it was a cyberwarfare. I know someone who was working on the team trying to recover from this attack, and Sony Pictures is basically fucked. Their IT infrastructure has been utterly destroyed, meaning they can't even pay their employees, pay their vendors or take orders from customers. They don't even want to use computers anymore, people call and text now to avoid any sort of central infrastructure that can be hacked. They had to switch to all-manual processes, and it will take months or likely years before their infrastructure is back within some sort of semblance.
But by then Sony Pictures as an entity may no longer exist. From all of the emails being released ridiculing their own talent, to their employees having their privacy destroyed and financial accounts hacked, who could work for this company again?
The thing this attack does is raise the bar as to what to expect. The worst we had heard until now was credit cards being stolen for quick gains, maybe some business secrets being stolen. But in my mind it started with lulzsec a couple of years ago where the attitude was for anarchy and cyberwar. But if the new trend is for companies to get destroyed, then cybersecurity will go to the next level where every company has to assume if they get hacked, they will get destroyed, so it becomes probably even more critical than other business processes.
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Yay, another confusing term without an agreed upon definition!
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You know what the problem here is? There is no material difference between a 10 person game studio and a 3000 person game studio. Zynga likes to pretend that their Z-Cloud gives them an advantage over their competitors. Maybe it does in terms of operations, but games isn't an operations business, it's a hits business. All of the optimization in the world doesn't help if you can't keep making wins and Zynga can't make wins because they're too cluttered with layers of middle management FUD.
520 employees is a lot of people out of work, but I have to think they saw it coming. My advice to people in similar positions all throughout tech is this: there are three signs that indicate an impending downsizing.
* Depressed Stock Value over long periods of time
* An Acceleration of secrecy and fiefdom claiming within the culture
* You look around and no one wants to come to work anymore
If you find yourself in this situation, leave. Find another job. Being caught in a downsizing sucks, but if you pay attention you can avoid them. It's important to make friends and to be able to tell the temperature of your local environment to avoid such devastation.
Edit: This can best be summarized as the well known phenomenon: "There's no such thing as a Free Lunch".
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What does "FUD" mean in this context?
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doesn't really work for me with Chrome on Windows 7 - an image flashes for a split-second, then it's back to "Finding pointer" (I'm not even touching my mouse)
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Doesn't work in Chrome but the 'right mouse click' hack works.
There are likely some good opportunities for this code however speed of response may be a problem? Runs a little slow on my PC.
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As a front end web developer, I am not really sure I understand any "advantages" to VIM or VI, or any command-line based edit for that matter. Sure, they might be great if you're doing scripting, messing around with the back end, or dong DB stuff. But for me, writing day-to-day JS, HTML, CSS code, VIM seems like a very huge burden. It's like trying to unscrew a screw with scissors when you have a screwdriver laying next to you. Why not just use a good, well-rounded editor like Sublime or Atom, or even Eclipse, for that matter..? I often see web developer, dabbling in front end code, doing their coding in VIM. Yuck. Someone explain?
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Your problem with vim is that you don't grok vi: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118/885262
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It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group.
I've spent many hours over the past several years trying to understand and mitigate such problems. I've come up with a bunch of tweaks that worked, and I have hopes I'll be able to come up with more.
The idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. Although snarky comments themselves are the most obvious symptom, I suspect that voting is on average dumber than commenting, because it requires so much less work. So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less.
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Good. Something needs to be done. Every time I click on a link about a start up or a new site, I see the negative feedback and I cringe at the thought of putting anything I do on here only to reach an inevitable fate that could permanently damage the reputation of the project during its launch phase.
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You know, I've been messing around with Java little lately. Nothing too fancy. It's actually not a bad language -- with a modern IDE it's actually pretty quick and breezy to work with.
If the standard library was cleaned up and the warts were all removed and filled in, even if it broke compatibility (call it Java X or the Latte language or something) I'd be okay with that. There's too much old 90's cruft hanging around making usage of different pieces non-standard and lots of over-objectizing everything so you end up having to assemble lots of things out of little pieces, boilerplate-like, that should just be a single import and instantiation.
The modern JVM is surprisingly quick and robust technology and I've been pretty happy with it in my limited tests. I ported some old Perl algorithms to it and got some really good speed out of it once I benchmarked some of the collections a little.
Some things should just be outright fixed, like a proper regex literal so I don\\'t have to \\e\\s\\ca\\\p\\\\e everything so much\\\\\//\/\\.
It's "got good bones" and a refurb of the entire thing to bring it focus could breath a lot of long-term life into it.
edit
I guess what I'm trying to say is it would be great if the language was informed a bit more with what's going on in the dynamic languages space like Go has been. I like how Python is about as clear as Java code is, but it's always seemed a little more quick and breezy to work with. This is something I think Go got right and it'd be great if Java sort of caught onto this.
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Lots of things in the library have multiple ways of doing things. Eg File, NIO.
Generally if you use the new class you're in for a nicer time.
I agree about the regex literals. JavaScript does it right.
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>This is overwhelming. Even when you always hear the claims about we knew this was going on, somehow it is still shocking when you see it all laid out infront of you with screenshots and the capabilities described.
It has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine recently to see self-aggrandizing comments from users around the net about how "we should have known" and "none of this is new."
I'm a practically addicted news junkie (especially tech news) and while I've been aware of a fair amount of what has been exposed in this latest leak, it seems that every day there are revelations new to me, and what is revealed absolutely shocks the conscience. And I'm an outlier. I'm more plugged in to reporting on this subject than 99% of the globe's population, and this subject tangles with the rights and treatment of a large portion of the population of said globe.
The staggering majority had no clue, has no clue, and no, they were never informed. For all intents and purposes, the global media has been asleep or complicit.
It's staggeringly important to keep telling this story at every level specifically because "we" don't know, and still don't.
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From the slides, apparently a node in
the system just connects at an ISP
or peering site and grabs all the
packets. Then they essentially 'parse'
the packets to TCP/IP sessions, logical
user sessions, e-mail messages, etc.
Then back at HQ, can send
the node what are essentially 'filters'
to return 'alerts' and the associated
content.
So, point: As a system, it's quite
obvious. As software, it's quite
routine.
And, from their description of working
with anomalies, they are being just
intuitive and elementary and not at
all advanced or powerful.
It would appear that a terrorist
Internet user
could
do fairly well beating that system
by using a proxy server also used by
many other Internet users and also
using a lot of strong encryption --
PGP used well might be strong enough.
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Satire works when you hold folly up to ridicule. Central banking is possibly the greatest human invention since sanitation. The U.S. central banking system ranks among the finest of its kind.
Bitcoin handles 7 transactions a second on a good day, has no reliable institutional actors, and I can neither pay taxes nor satisfy court judgments with it. It is an impressive proof-of-concept for decentralized trust in cryptosystems, but it is hardly a currency.
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Satire: "the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices".
What is being held up to ridicule are the various criticisms of bitcoin, not central banking. For example the article quotes an economist saying that paper money is evil, satirising Krugman's article about bitcoin. Quite entertaining!
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What I don't get is why it's necessary to have comedy to get people engaged? What is it that news requires the 'chaser' of comedy? I don't think we can attribute it to people being base/vulgar. Why can't a serious, well researched news program do well? Why does there have to be a chaser to make it successful?
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I would speculate that the audience for TV news these days might not be looking for well-researched news.
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If you pay a man by the hour, he'll work a lot of hours. If you pay him by the brick, he'll lay a lot of bricks.
These "games" are basically the equivalent of counting lines of code or checkins. We're measuring poor proxies instead of the things we're actually interested in. The solution isn't an arms race to build bigger and better proxies, the solution is to measure real things instead of artificial ones.
Here's just one example of what I mean by "measure real things". Electing representatives every X years to decide the laws of the land was once upon a time the fairest and best way to have the voices of the masses heard. Today it is feasible to directly poll everybody about every issue, so we no longer need the proxy. If you say everyone cannot be educated about every issue, fine, I can "follow" PG's votes on wall street reform and grellas's votes on IP tort reform and Schneier's votes on TSA etc just by copying their votes on those issues into my ballot, a permission which I can revoke at any time or on a vote-by-vote basis, as easy as unfollowing them on VoteTwitter. This is better than the proxy of professional politicians deciding every issue with fixed terms.
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I'm in favor of ending the cap on representatives in the House. The House was never meant to be capped at 435.
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No one likes surveillance but can anyone provide a better/cheaper option to prevent large scale crime like terrorist attack?
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Don't have a foreign policy so shitty that people are willing to kill themselves flying planes into buildings just to attack you?
Hell, I bet we'd save money.
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I "Google" less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for "big name" items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well.
These days, I'm fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page.
Whatever you are and aren't doing about it, Google, whenever I search for something detailed that's not in StackOverflow, your results are increasingly crap, once again. Pages and pages full of very spammy results.
Some time ago -- perhaps a few years ago or a bit more -- I became accustomed to fairly quickly paging several pages into the search results, where the heaviest, highly ranked spam would start to filter out and I could start to recognize more legitimate sources of information. These days... the spam results just go on and one. If there's quality somewhere in the search results, it's beyond the limit of my patience to continue paging forward and scanning.
Not that I'm using Yahoo, in preference. That part... all I can think of is measuring by byte counts, and buttloads of banner ads. Probably not the right explanation, but...
--
P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. Being able to tell the query engine that I definitely don't want to see results that don't include term x frequently proved quite useful. Now... the damned thing shows me "whatever it feels like", whether I quote terms, beg,.... any other suggestions?
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> I "Google" less and less for search results
Google is absolutely unusable for some search terms that are not part of the primary association of the term. Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan). If I don't mention the word "buy" or "holiday" I would not expect to see either.
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IMHO, this list contains only BS books. Tim Ferriss? Seth Godin? Malcolm Gladwell? Please. This is a list for those who need self-help and "motivation" books. Only exception is Livingston's F@W. The rest is pretty much junk.
Please allow me to write down my personal list for those who love to learn:
- The Art of Computer Programming
- Algorithms (by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani)
- Algorithm Design (by Kleinberg and Tardos)
- Feynman Lectures on Physics
- Landau & Lifschitz's series
- Vladimir Arnold's books on ODEs and Classical Mechanics
- Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays (by Berlekamp et al.)
- Elements of Information Theory (by Cover & Thomas)
- Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (by MacKay)
- Network Optimization (by Bertsekas)
- Convex Optimization (by Boyd & Vandenberghe)
- Nonlinear Control Systems (by Isidori)
- Visual Complex Analysis (by Needham)
- Lasers (by Siegman)
- Game Theory (by Fudenberg & Tirole)
- Trading and Exchanges (by Harris)
Plus a bunch of books on Classical Mechanics, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Differential Geometry, Real Analysis, Algebra, Theoretical CS, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Cellular Biology, Evolution, Game Theory, Mechanism Design, Auction Theory, Economics, Finance, etc. That would be a reading list worth considering! It would also take a lifetime to read all the books...
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That's interesting, because I liked a bunch on the original list but I'd probably consider most of the books you listed to be junk. To me this looks like the kind of list you'd put together if you wanted to look intelligent, but weren't actually intellectually curious. The only common thread among the books you've listed is that they're all hard to understand, but the questions most of them answer are rather banal.
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I've been hellbanned here on HN on at least three different IP addresses and accounts...that I am aware of. Probably more.
In each case nothing I'd ever said would be considered trolling by any rational observer. Here on HN, however, as with most communities where you start to recognize the regulars (tptacek, raganwald, etc), "trolling" is redefined to simply mean "going against the grain".
There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN (whatever the mechanism -- is this the verdict of a bored PG, or has he anointed some particularly under-employed members to apply it? -- it is horribly broken).
Troll is, more often than not, a term used to circle the wagons.
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The fact that you consider the observation obvious, is a sign that you were possibly trolling. You were probably being intellectually too lazy to make your point without resorting using tactics like calling your own opinions seemingly obvious.
It is not obvious that increased competition leads to declining margins. Often increased competition validates the market, and increases consumer demand far more than the effect on pricing. I have seen it in my own industry, where our sales increase when a competitor launches a big ad campaign.
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We're assuming these are fake, and that someone just got hold of their Facebook and Twitter passwords.
On the other hand, I notice the same statement has appeared on their blog. So maybe it's real. Or maybe their blog was compromised too.
The really suspicious thing is that they don't seem to have confirmed it to a reporter yet, which presumably they'd be willing to do if they were so eager to spread the news that they tweeted about it.
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Is there a systematic process to follow before being allowed to kill a submission?
The feeling of censorship is real, although unintended.
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Websites are growing in their nuisance of DOM-level UI breaking. I'm increasingly using the Inspector dev tool just to delete entire chunks of elements on websites.
"Oh, you need me to click LIKE on your page? ... Deleted!"
"Oh, your news article is 25% of the width of the page and the other 75% is navigation, ads, and other unrelated articles? Deleted!"
"Oh, you have the annoying chat box that hovers in the bottom corner and hides things I actually wanted to see? Baleted!"
I keep telling myself that eventually I'll add a deletion option to the right-click context menu but I never actually bother with it.
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Extensions like Readability and Clearly let you read just the main content on the page. It would be nice if they had an option to automatically load pages like in that mode. Besides avoiding all the clutter websites put, the pages would also load faster that way.
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In the time since that comment was written (just under 5 years), Linux replaced most graphics drivers with ones based on in-kernel modesetting and the DRI2 interface. This was done without breaking applications. So, the assertion that changing the video driver model would be disruptive is kind of disproven by reality. I guess Linux has a liberal bias.
That's not to say that NT doesn't have benefits. Linux is still catching up with implementing some features that Windows has had for some time (and multiple GPU support is actually a great example of that), but so far there's no real evidence that these disparities are because of architectural differences.
Really, a worthwhile comparative analysis requires someone who has a deep understanding of the kernels they're comparing. I'm pretty familiar with Linux but know almost nothing about NT, so I'm a bad choice. But "Take the recent Linux arguments about the HardLocks code that is giving Linux trouble with multi-processor granularity"? That's not someone who knows Linux, otherwise they'd be using words that I recognise. "You call BSD a kernel, it technically is a set of APIs"? That's not someone who knows BSD either. This isn't an in-depth analysis of benefits that one kernel has over another. It's a handwavy justification of some NT design decisions without any reasoned comparison to Linux design decisions in the same area.
I'd love to read an in-depth comparison of the benefits of NT over Linux. This isn't it. Is there one?
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> "This isn't it. Is there one?"
I don't think there can be one. Even if one existed, its value would be questionable since the rest of us are unable to prove or disprove the claims therein, seen as we don't have access to the nt kernel code. We're stuck with uninformed rants by microsoft's evangelists, unfortunately.
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Honestly, I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to create a camera chip not susceptible to any software hack. The camera sensor needs electrical current to work. Simply place the LED inline or in parallel to the camera and you are done. Any time current is sent to the camera sensor, the LED cant help it but light up. My knowledge of electronics is limited, but I know for a fact that this can be achieved without the use of any reprogrammable microchips, with the use of a simple electrical circuit.
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One of the best ways is to have a dedicated "Chip Enable" pin on the camera module. You then connect an LED to the state of this pin and when the Chip Enable pin is "Hight" the LED is turned on. However, there needs to be additional circuitry (an extra pin) and some work to ensure proper voltage levels are met for both the pin and the LED (extra cost).
Another option is to enable the LED when power is turned onto the module.
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I can't help but feel like these brothers are also victims here. Of course, their victimhood is nothing like what they inflicted on the people of Boston and the marathoners, but they're victims nonetheless. Humans are glorified chemical reaction vessels; somehow, they ended up going down a path that led them here. Was there any alternative? Was it the education system? Social circumstances? I'm sure the magnitude of what he's done must be setting in on Dzhozkar now. Provided that this case is how it appears, his life is over; he's committed terrible crimes. But provided that he's not a biologically-determined sociopath, somewhere down the road he become subject to forces that ended up with him hiding from FBI HRT in someone's backyard after a prolonged shootout-chase with his brother dead. Even if this is justice, it seems tragic.
EDIT: I'm not denying agency or free will, I'm just expressing the belief that you are the product of your environment. I like the saying that an individual will tend towards being the average of their friends. If all of your friends are into running, you'll probably end up being into running. If all of your friends are into music, you'll probably end up interested in music. Certain books, movies, or other cultural experiences can affect individuals in differing, significant ways. All of these forces act on people to create who they are tomorrow.
There's no statement about free will, in a strong sense, in there. It's all about social and cultural context, and brownian motion. He's still responsible for his actions. I would reserve the term "human monster" for measurable psychopaths. Those do exist, and are a different matter entirely.
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Denying people agency for their actions is just as dangerous and dehumanizing as vilifying them as inhuman monsters. They are human monsters who are responsible for their own actions.
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If this merger goes thru, (and the AnitTrust people would have to be really asleep at the wheel for that) two things are certain:
1) Americans can expect some of the worst Cable price gouging they have ever seen
2) NetFlix, Amazon Prime et al will become really popular as a result of all the customers saying "FU ComcastWarner"
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Show me how Comcast and Time Warner Compete? They have 100% non-overlapping service areas.
If anything, I'd expect prices to stay the same, because they have far greater leverage over the other media companies.
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What's amazing to me is the cognitive dissonance required to make the leap from Adria publicly outing someone (questionable, but not egregious given you know, the public venue) making an off-color joke to 'she got these people fired'.
Their boss finding out what they said got them fired. Because what they said wasn't appropriate in the opinion of their employer. Period. Full stop.
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The person being fired is a direct consequence of her tweet and/or blog post. She has thousands of followers. It isn't likely she thought nothing would come of it.
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Wow, what a complete shitbag (DPR = Dread Pirate Roberts):
DPR sent a message to "redandwhite" stating that "FriendlyChemist"
is "Causing me problems" and adding: "I would like to put a bounty on
his head if it's not too much trouble for you. What would be an
adequate amount to motivate you to find him?"
And then
Later that same day, redandwhite sent DPR a message quoting him a
price of $150,000 or $300,000 "depending on how you want it done" -
"clean" or "non-clean"
DPR responded: "Don't want to be a pain here, but the price seems high.
Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you
quoted the best you can do? I would like this done ASAP as he is
talking about releasing the info on Monday.
DPR and redandwhite agreed upon a price of 1,670 Bitcoins - approximately
$150k - for the job. In DPR's message confirming the deal, DPR included
a transacation record reflecting the transfer of 1,670 Bitcoins to a
certain Bitcoin address.
Made $80mm in commissions running a drug trafficking network, paying hundreds of thousands to have people executed, mail fraud, money laundering, conspiracy.... He's looking at cartel level prison time.
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"the unsocial network" .. this movie is going to be big.
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I can't really treat this article seriously when his second graph illustrating "real" growth of startups requires that we are able to breach time-space continuum and go back in time.
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I read a little way into the article to see whether he'd explain the lack of axis labels or just how the graph maps to anything real. Nope.
The article is reasonable but the loops just annoyed me too much.
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Only crazy people put sugar in cornbread:
10" round (iron) skillet
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/4 cup cooking oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder (not baking soda)
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 cup unbleached white flour (or 1/2 whole wheat + 1/2 white)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees:
In a large bowl, beat together the eggs,
milk, oil and salt until well blended. Sift
in the baking powder and whisk until foamy.
Quickly mix in the cornmeal and flour.
Beat until the batter is smooth. Pour into
an oiled 10" round cast iron skillet. Bake for
20-25 minutes, or until a knife inserted in
the center comes out clean.
(Okay to freeze the leftovers.)
Once cooled, crumble into bowl, add milk for a breakfast-type cereal.
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Southerners are never averse to sugar.
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I actually support "vicious" speedbumps. People regularly drive 40 mph on my road which has official speed limit of 25 mph.
Instead of spending money policing main streets, I support draconian camera-driven enforcement on side streets.
Make unmarked google-maps-like cars with high quality cameras and software. Park it on streets and watch for traffic. Send tickets remotely to speeders (equivalent to running a red light). Split revenue with the city.
Hmm, maybe I should run this by my city council. :)
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I take it that you don't live in a place that has winter (speed bumps == ice humps) or have back pain.
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I am very surprised the article doesn't mention the american "shoot-to-kill" policy, despite the fact it gives the perfect example of how this policy is overkill (pun intended). If a knife-yielding attacker runs toward you, police in other countries (say western Europe) will shoot at the legs to NOT kill the attacker but sufficiently harm him so that he is not a threat anymore.
But in America the shoot-to-kill policy is so deeply ingrained in every officer's training that they only see 2 choices --when should I kill or not kill-- as depicted by that officer's simple question at the beginning of the article ("How close can somebody get to me before I’m justified in using deadly force?").
I have done research in the past on why the shoot-to-kill policy became prevalent in the US but not in other countries, and I have never found an answer. This puzzles me more than it should.
Edit: to the replies saying "if you don't intend to kill, don't shoot", you are wrong. This is precisely why tasers and non-lethal weapons were invented: there are many situations were harming or incapacitating an assailant is needed without necessarily killing him. On this note I agree a taser would be a safer weapon than trying to cause harm with a firearm. But my general comment is meant to apply to scenarios where a police officer cannot make the choice of firing with a taser[1]: in this case shooting to harm is better than shooting to kill.
[1] For whatever reason: he has no taser, or a firearm is the weapon he has in his hands during the split second where he has to decide to shoot, etc.
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I saw someone asked about this (sorry, can't remember who) in an interview after one of the many recent shootings and he said that in a scenario where deadly force is not required, the gun should not be used at all.
It makes a lot of sense and I can only imagine the lawsuits and riots we'd have here if police were allowed to say "I was just trying to shoot his foot".
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I violated Responsible Reading Of The Internet Rule #1 and accidentally looked at the comments. I am having a hard time reconciling the vehement anti-net-neutrality anti-government hair-on-fire screaming there with the reasoned discussion and general attitude here---I would have thought the majority of readers of Wired would be of similar mind to HN readers.
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You thought Wired readers were as naive and as communist as you and you're disappointed they are smarter and more cynical. Boo. Hoo.
There's no reasoned discussion in HN as discussions get downvoted. There's only a huge circle back-patting which your comment is a part of.
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I still can't justify anything better than my $10 Casio Bin Laden watch.
There is literally nothing that has an advantage over it for me. Status and cost mean nothing.
I think the smart watch is purely an example of conspicuous consumption, nothing more.
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> Status and cost mean nothing.
Saying status does not matter is of course an attempt to signal high status. No one's out of the status game.
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I'm all aboard with being pleasant and respectful of others, but find some aspects of this distasteful. Specifically, the portions of the author's "politeness" that involve performance, or adhering to a script I find off-putting. For example:
"Just ask the other person what they do, and right after they tell you, say: 'Wow. That sounds hard.' "
While it seems that many aspects of "politeness" are intended to trigger pleasant feelings in the other person (which seems harmless enough), I find it hard to be in favor of something so disingenuous. Even when it comes to small talk, I think one can be both respectful and charming without having to fall back on a script and cheapen the interaction.
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> I think one can be both respectful and charming without having to fall back on a script and cheapen the interaction.
Sure, one can be. But what about with people you find incredibly boring or distasteful? Usually we'd just choose not to interact with those people, but that's not being charming.
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Regardless of your ideological background, you cannot possibly assert the U.S economy is healthy.
0% interest rate for several years is not healthy.
QE is not healthy.
100+ % debt:GDP ration is not healthy.
Inflating assets is not healthy.
A vanishing middle-class is not healthy.
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Cherry picking much?
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I'm glad that my LBG friends can now marry anywhere. But damn, Scalia's counter opinion (and Roberts' opinion) strike me as well-considered and well-argued in the 2nd half of http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf . In brief, their view was that resolving this issue in the courts erodes the democratic process.
Can anybody counter Scalia, and say why the issue of gay marriage couldn't wait to be resolved by the states? Why is this class of license inequity different than other classes, where the states' right to license something is not resolved by SCOTUS?
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Should the courts have waited for the state legislatures in the deep south to desegregate schools? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education#/m...
Should the courts have waited for the state legislatures in the deep south to legalize interracial marriage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage#/media/Fi...
The court needs the power to overrule legislatures because democratic majorities have consistently failed to protect the rights of minorities.
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I'm glad that my LBG friends can now marry anywhere. But damn, Scalia's counter opinion (and Roberts' opinion) strike me as well-considered and well-argued in the 2nd half of http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf . In brief, their view was that resolving this issue in the courts erodes the democratic process.
Can anybody counter Scalia, and say why the issue of gay marriage couldn't wait to be resolved by the states? Why is this class of license inequity different than other classes, where the states' right to license something is not resolved by SCOTUS?
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> In brief, their view was that resolving this issue in the courts erodes the democratic process.
That the issue made it to the supreme court shows that it is following the democratic process laid out in the constitution. If it has to be decided on by SCOTUS, the issue has already been through a number of other checks and balances. SCOTUS decisions are part of the American democratic process, and it's incredibly disingenuous of Scalia to complain about it.
Basically the "this is not democratic process!" is a standard dog-whistle cry put forward when conservatives lose a vote. Progressives have their own cries, of course, but "this isn't democratic, and the proof is that I didn't win" is a standard losing conservative trope.
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Over the last decade, the distributed system nature of modern server hardware internals has become painfully evident in how software architectures scale on a single machine. The traditional approaches -- multithreading, locking, lock-free structures, etc -- are all forms of coordination and agreement in a distributed system, with the attendant scalability problems if not used very carefully.
At some point several years ago, a few people noticed that if you attack the problem of scalable distribution within a single server the same way you would in large distributed systems (e.g. shared nothing architectures) that you could realize huge performance increases on a single machine. The caveat is that the software architectures look unorthodox.
The general model looks like this:
- one process per core, each locked to a single core
- use locked local RAM only (effectively limiting NUMA)
- direct dedicated network queue (bypass kernel)
- direct storage I/O (bypass kernel)
If you do it right, you minimize the amount of silicon that is shared between processes which has surprisingly large performance benefits. Linux has facilities that make this relatively straightforward too.
As a consequence, adjacent cores on the same CPU have only marginally more interaction with each other than cores on different machines entirely. Treating a single server as a distributed cluster of 1-core machines, and writing the software in such a way that the operating system behavior reflects that model to the extent possible, is a great architecture for extreme performance but you rarely see it outside of closed source software.
As a corollary, garbage-collected languages do not work for this at all.
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> one process per core, each locked to a single core; use locked local RAM only (effectively limiting NUMA); direct dedicated network queue (bypass kernel); direct storage I/O (bypass kernel)
I have no idea how to do any of these things. What are the system/api calls to lock a process to a kernel? How do you bypass kernel IO?
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Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store.
So I built Gumroad. I coded/designed from 12PM -> 11PM on Saturday and 8AM -> 11PM on Sunday. There are still tons of features missing (I'm working on AJAX file uploading next!) but I think it's reached that - buzzword alert! - MVP stage where I want to see if anyone's actually going to use the darn thing (I'm thinking about taking a 30% cut).
Here's an example Gumroad link: http://www.gumroad.com/l/hjbaod - I use Stripe for payments. Here are some screenshots I took while making it: http://letscrate.com/gumroad/gumroad-progress - I didn't use Photoshop so no crazy time-lapses!
I think it has some potential. What do you guys think?
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I've tried it and purchased on my own link.
1) How soon until the money reaches PayPal?
2) There are no assurances that the CC data is safe. It looks to be sent over HTTPS, but you're assumed to be trusted.
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I know this is just anecdotal coincidence (and not really that interesting to most people other than myself) but today when I weighed myself I had my ideal body weight for the first time in my life. This is after following a low carb diet for six months and losing 50 pounds... so throw another vote in the "yes, low carb seems to be effective" bucket. The findings in this article are certainly music to my ears.
(Here is the version I followed http://fourhourworkweek.com/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs-of...)
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The slow carb thing is fine (better than atkins, keto, high fat, etc) but still probably overly restrictive. I think what remains easier and possibly better for almost everyone is 1) eat in moderation, 2) avoid processed foods and 3) be minimally active (ie, 10 miles of walking per week).
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Not trying to be a problem here, but what problem does this solve? Why does someone undertake to make a new desktop environment? Is XFce/Kde/gnome/cinammon/what-have-you not enough?
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I don't like Gnome3 or KDE. I just need a bottom panel. I'm already used with configuring Openbox, LXDE is just a layer on top of that.
If LXDE wouldn't exist, I would just use XFCE.
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HN'ers asking why this isn't a cell phone app take note - this exemplifies why we (geeks) don't make good use cases for consumer tech and we should always be careful looking to our own habits and values when in a Product Development role.
We're rarely the target customer and rarely behave like "average Joe". We're naturally resistant to superfluous redundancy ("My phone can already snap a barcode, I don't need a separate device") when consumers don't even see the duplication let alone the issue. They don't separate devices (or even apps) has having layers of similarity and just see things for their end functionality.
My mother would see a phone and apps as completely separate functionality to a physical device like this. She probably would have the Amazon Fresh scanner, the (theoretical) Google Shopping Express scanner and the (also theoretical) Whole Foods scanner and wouldn't even consider the duplication, let alone be frustrated by it. She doesn't care about the potential for an "open standard"/"common standard".
She also has an AppleTV and a ChromeCast connected to the same smart-TV that also has native apps within it (she mostly uses the native apps). Again, she sees no issue with that and might even buy an Amazon FireTV if she felt it was more compelling for one use.
Ultimately we shouldn't assume consumers value convergence, especially when it creates ever increasing complexity in user experience (eg opening an app to snap a barcode vs pressing a single button on an Amazon Fresh scanner)
ADDED: If you don't have parents that also work in tech, go visit them and just watch them use technology without prompting. Ask them about their experiences, their frustrations, their decisions behind purchasing specific equipment and downloading particular apps. It's very insightful.
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To some extent, though. When I'm home, my mother gets extremely frustrated (still!) that there isn't one remote that does everything.
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>Companies that support remote workers and do it well seem to have a huge leg up on the competition.
I'm a remote worker and I'm definitely spoiled by not having to deal with open office plans and disruptions.
That said, I see no evidence that the article's statement is true. (I want it to be true, but that doesn't change the fact that so far, I see zero evidence that it is true.)
You can't convince people with just rhetoric.
Instead, show compelling examples of how Company-A-with-mostly-remote-workers is beating the pants off of the Company-B-with-onsite-workers.
Show that RemoteWorkerCompany is 10x more innovative, delivers 10x faster, has 10x profits, etc etc.
I suspect finding comparisons that control for other variables are hard to come up with. Nevertheless, that's what it's going to take to convince managers. A bunch of programmers writing a thousand essays on the "advantages" of remote workers is just preaching to people like me who happen to like working from home.
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I don't really see it being true yet but I think it's coming.
Right now if you're based in SV you can hire the best talent in the world, pay them a fortune and build something great. Investors are reluctant to touch anyone outside of that bubble.
With lack of housing (and no more construction virtually) alongside better tools for working remote, and more managers experienced in working remote, I can see remote teams leading the charge towards the end of this decade.
It takes time.
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I'm a tad frustrated. I love Apple and the Mac OS, but sometimes it really gets to be that the Mac space is a one supplier game. Apple has decided for me that I like glossy screens. I was pretty sure I hated them, but I guess Apple must be right. I also hate real buttons I guess. I'm looking forward to when Apple replaces my keyboard with a pretty glass piece as well.
I really need a new laptop (PowerBook is ready to kick the bucket), but at a certain point Apple needs to understand that some of its users are decently traditional and just really, really like the Mac OS. I feel like if Apple had to compete with other Mac OS players, I'd get a better deal and better products. Apple is making great things right now, but they're also trying to force you into a corner by saying "if you want the good Mac OS stuff, you have to put up with everything else we want to push on you".
Maybe I'm the only one who feels like Apple is getting arrogant with their marketshare. Maybe this isn't parallel to how Apple previously got arrogant and lost nearly all its marketshare. Maybe I don't want to go back to the dark days when I was openly mocked for my Mac choice.
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Why don't you buy the last generation of Macbook Pro which was the best machine until yesterday and it will have all the features you want(matte screen, real button, firewire) and you'll save a ton of cash if you go refurb.
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore....
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I don't get it— do these people hit more often than they miss? Why do we still listen to them?
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They see traffic again on a list published back in 2006. Thats the target. Not to publish accurate stories.
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Great idea; shame about the name.
Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly): the problem is not with what you[0] are thinking when you read the word "bro", but with what other people, especially newcomers, are thinking. The locker-room atmosphere that stuff like this creates is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people, women especially, who infer that on top of all the technically difficult stuff that everyone has to learn to be CS types, they'll also have to deal with a constant barrage of "you're not our kind" flung at them by the in-group. You personally may not be intending that as your message, but I assure you that your personal intent does not matter when you are using language that has been associated with exclusion and discrimination.[1]
The problem here, if this program is actually intended to be used, is that just typing in the command would be a constant reminder of an entire subculture that is widely seen as[2] putting up walls and doors that say "NO GIЯLS ALOUD" around the programming profession, an attempt to preserve privilege. Those of you suggesting an alias are either being disingenuous or missing the point entirely.
[0] Meaning individuals, of whatever gender/race/class/whatever, that are likely to be reading HN.
[1] If you don't believe me, ponder for a moment sentences like, "But I like Negroes just fine!" Language matters.
[2] Again, you might not mean to reference that when you use words like "brogrammer". But it's how an awful lot of us read it.
EDIT: Rereading other posts on this page, I should add that I almost certainly got the phrase "shame about the name" stuck in my head from reading dewitt's post. Four words, such a concise summary of my attitude! :)
EDIT 2: "they'll have" -> "that everyone has" to clarify argument. Thx vezzy-fnord.
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I'd have named them "spartan" pages.
The name is a LOT more sexist, but few people would realise (spartans famously didn't think highly of wom¹), but it also has the metaphorical meaning of being b¹-bones, which is what these pages are. But that name is seven whole letters and that's harder to type than m¹, so I'd abbreviate it to sprn, which also stands for sy¹ pn¹, both of which are way, way more sexist than b¹.
¹ censored for your protection - ED
The only way to fight moralfags is to make your product so outrageously sexist, no-one can tell it's actually sexist. Kind of like how Matt Stone and Trey Parker got the jokes in the South Park movie past the censors - each time a joke would be rejected, they'd censor/change it in a way that made it even dirtier. No-one caught onto the fact that "bigger, longer and uncut" is a dick joke.
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Great idea; shame about the name.
Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly): the problem is not with what you[0] are thinking when you read the word "bro", but with what other people, especially newcomers, are thinking. The locker-room atmosphere that stuff like this creates is a huge barrier to entry for a lot of people, women especially, who infer that on top of all the technically difficult stuff that everyone has to learn to be CS types, they'll also have to deal with a constant barrage of "you're not our kind" flung at them by the in-group. You personally may not be intending that as your message, but I assure you that your personal intent does not matter when you are using language that has been associated with exclusion and discrimination.[1]
The problem here, if this program is actually intended to be used, is that just typing in the command would be a constant reminder of an entire subculture that is widely seen as[2] putting up walls and doors that say "NO GIЯLS ALOUD" around the programming profession, an attempt to preserve privilege. Those of you suggesting an alias are either being disingenuous or missing the point entirely.
[0] Meaning individuals, of whatever gender/race/class/whatever, that are likely to be reading HN.
[1] If you don't believe me, ponder for a moment sentences like, "But I like Negroes just fine!" Language matters.
[2] Again, you might not mean to reference that when you use words like "brogrammer". But it's how an awful lot of us read it.
EDIT: Rereading other posts on this page, I should add that I almost certainly got the phrase "shame about the name" stuck in my head from reading dewitt's post. Four words, such a concise summary of my attitude! :)
EDIT 2: "they'll have" -> "that everyone has" to clarify argument. Thx vezzy-fnord.
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So if we name them girlpages will that have the affect of attracting more women into tech?
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If you thought I was insufferable before...
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Congrats, Thomas. I'm glad to you have you around.
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Copied from the other thread, because it bears repeating:
I think it's important to keep in mind that the 12 vote margin is comfortable for Amash and supporters of new NSA restrictions and uncomfortable for its defenders.
Here's why: opponents of Amash wielded an argument that "split the vote". Representatives who voted against Amash could have done so for one of two reasons:
(1) They actively support providing the NSA with unchecked access to cell phone metadata under the "business records" provision of PATRIOT, or
(2) They don't support that access, but can't support a broad amendment that potentially de-funds whole NSA programs, and instead need something finer grained to correct NSA with.
Meanwhile, everyone who supported Amash believes strongly --- so strongly that they're willing to do something disruptive to NSA --- that new checks on NSA are needed.
(I think Amash was a good amendment, if only because it would force the House to do its actual job and carefully regulate intelligence collection; if it caused a temporary shitstorm, so much the better --- it'd be a well-deserved comeuppance for a legislature that has been derelict in its duty to oversee these programs. But you should be aware that opponents of Amash had a persuasive-sounding argument for voting it down even if you believed new regulations were needed.)
I think this was a pretty hopeful vote.
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Agreed. This is the closest vote on anything related to the Patriot Act in a long time; and the bipartisan support is very encouraging.
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> Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency.
Completely disagree. Tesla is, I think, unquestionably the most impactful company in the game, including GE and Nissan. For two reasons.
First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.
Second, Tesla's critical product isn't their cars. Their critical product is their battery technology. It is second to none, in a business where the battery is everything. This is the reason that both Daimler and Toyota have invested in the company. I think you are seriously underestimating how important this is.
As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away. This might be an issue, perhaps a burp that Tesla has to get fixed pronto. But it's hardly, to use the breathless headline, devastating.
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Their critical product is their battery technology. It is second to none, in a business where the battery is everything.
vs
As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away.
So, on the one hand you say that their battery technology is in advance of everyone else... and on the other hand, you say that these fine engineering minds... haven't been able to come up with a 'pretty simple' solution yet.
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One thing I always think about brain emulation/mind uploading/strong AI research is we need an legal/ethical framework in place before we get there.
I still think it's far off, but not everyone does.
If you believe consciousness is a property of running a brain or sufficiently advanced brain model, at what point are you allowed to stop running your model and it's not murder of a sentient? At one point can a model claim rights?
Especially as their goal is to use it for drug tests.
Also, can you simulate a brain without a body or is say hormones/blood sugar/nervous system not easily separable?
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You raise a great point. Definitely agree on the fact that legal / ethical frameworks are required.
However, it might be very hard to do without knowing what the emulated "being" looks like. Its hard to imagine placing legalities and ethics on something whose powers (and possibly, limitations) are absolutely unknown. Consequently, the law might be misplaced, restrictive, or downright abusive depending on what it turns out to be.
Having said that, I agree with your broad point - having that advanced technology without the social aspects to deal with it might be a nightmare!
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My wife has been failing to lose weight for several months, she is literally weighing everything she eats and recording calories (~1200/day), plus doing a several hours of quite intense exercise (stairs, etc) per week yet has hit a plateau for well over a month - any advice, things to read? (Note: she "can't" do low carb, which I personally recommend.)
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Bullshit. This is 100% bullshit. If she is on ~1200/day she would be losing weight. That is how physics works. My advice is stop lying or tell your wife to stop lying.
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