skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anecdotally, ~50% of the faculty in my department at a large American public university are foreigners. I've been told, but not verified, that if you count dual-citizens, that number gets closer to 65%.
Find a goal or even a yardstick that's more meaningful to you than to anyone else. Ideally, also find a path to it that's uniquely appealing to you.

It's way harder to think about what you want than to hop on to society's defaults (schools, work prestige, wealth, looks, ..). http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html touches on this ("if you admire two kinds of work equally, [choose the less prestigious]").

When no one else is trying to accomplish the same thing in the same way, only absolute measurements matter: how close did you get? How much did you enjoy the ride?
While I suspect you are correct that there is no 'shortcut' (or syllabus) to critical thinking I think one is able to perceive critical thinking ability in others. If critical thinking is seen to be useful by a potential student, that is likely enough to drive that student to improve that skill. So critical thinking doesn't necessarily need to be taught from a textbook, but could be taught by example. (Of course, this assumes that the teacher is able to do so, which is another can of worms). I propose that it would be possible to have a 'critical thinking' class in schools, where, for example, students are shown critical thinking applied to a range of different problems and are encouraged to apply their own. Yes, you are correct that it is a skill that should be practiced everywhere, but at the moment this is not even addressed.
Inspiring stories of great startups and the people behind them
Did you read the entire post? Functions were only the first example to introduce the reader to the basic idea of associativity and identity. The post then discusses the Kleisli category and the category of coroutine pipelines.
And there's the nanny state aspects. Hundreds of millions of people in China eat unregulated street food and they aren't amidst an epidemic of food safety deaths. I think Americans overreact and over regulate things that the market should naturally handle. If you don't like a restaurant because of cleanliness issues, don't eat there. This is a problem the free market can solve (and does well, ironically in China of all places.)

I am rather obsessed with food safety in my own kitchen but I don't see that obsession something that ought to make the cooked food business as highly regulated as it is. As with the sous vide example or the ridiculous import ban on certain French cheeses, the government overreach is stifling. For example, a chipped tile in a NYC kitchen could result in a health code violation. Does a chipped tile really pose that much of a food safety risk? Regulation seems to be a mild form of extortion, especially in NYC. You get a C rating but want an A? If you know the right people in NY, that 'problem' can be easily fixed -- irregardless of the actual violations in question! The shakedown aspects of local health departments is astounding.
I think you're reading more into spooningtamarin's posts than was actually there.
wordpress, and a t2.micro can handle >1 million pageviews?
I don't know who the Haskellers you refer to are, or who they're regarded highly by, but all of the core members of the Haskell community that I know do care about category theory, and do know some amount of it. It's too useful to ignore.

You absolutely do not need to know category theory to use Haskell effectively and productively. Once you've been using it for a while, though, you pretty much inevitably start learning (and caring about) the mathematics that underlies it.
Show HN: Native-feeling OS X dock links
What are some examples of good pedagogy in programming?

I would point to pretty much anything by Norvig, Knuth, Sedgewick, and maybe to Zed Shaw's agressive tutorials.
I think the time-frames of when this will happen are debatable, but not the general arc of events.

Machines and AI continue to get incrementally better. There is no reason to think that this incremental progress will magically stop at some threshold which leaves a large swath of employment for humans to perform.
According to NASA, Antarctica is actually gaining ice
with a cache sure. static content is easy to serve.
Offline API documentation browser
The Luddite Fallacy is itself it fallacy because it misses one very very important thing.

Technology and AI is able to solve higher and higher levels of abstract thinking which means it will be able to compete with humans more and more. It's not just about competing with our muscle but with our brains. And AI increasingly do so. Furthermore once a new skill is learned it's instantly re-learnable by all other machines. Humans takes years to develop.

And where human evolution relatively is at a standstill technology keeps growing exponentially.

AI doesn't have to be general purpose to put most out of a job it just have to be good enough to the kind of functions our jobs represents.

When people like Andreesen claims that 150 years of industrial evolution proves the "luddites" wrong, all I can really say is that million of years of evolution proves Andreesen wrong.

There are no systems that can't be replaced by others.
You were claiming, with extremely vague reasoning from a throwaway account, that any technology with a reputation of bad pedagogy—obviously referring to Haskell—"fundamentally sucks."

Ad hominem fallacy is when you use a character attack but pretend it is a logical argument. I don't claim to make a logical argument—there's nothing logical in your comment to respond to.

If you don't want to start debates on the internet, try not telling people that the technology of their choice "fundamentally sucks."
Capital/resources are accumulated. It seems unlikely (for now) that someone will be able to muster the same amount of knowledge and data as some of this revolutions frontrunners (Google, Amazon, etc.).
Why? (Serious)
The difficulty with revolution, at least since the advent of professional armies that could easily defeat any peasant force, is that of target selection; people who won't line up for the Maxim guns. You can't kill them all, because you need some of them, but at the same time they're hiding among the people you do need. What's the acceptable false positive rate?

Now we're talking about a situation in which everyone can be watched for suspicious behaviour by computers, every minute of every day. Where you need fewer and fewer people, so your acceptable rate for false positives is going up rapidly. And in which the military force that can be applied by per dollar is increasing very quickly.

At an extreme, if you can automate everything, you and your mates hold up in a bunker and just gas every other living thing in the country. Before that, you send your robots into the ghettos if the peasants start getting uppity and kill every second person or something like that - you don't have to worry too much about false positives there because the people you need are a bit richer and get nicer digs. Before that you drag those who defect up before the courts and there's no revolution, there are just criminals harming the wealth of society - the war on drugs writ large.

You don't get a civil war when the disparity between the rich and the poor is very great. The poor don't get to organise and arm. They just get arrested at the low end and slaughtered at the high end.

No-one's going to get into a field with you and have a fair old dust up. At least, not unless the dust up involves nerve agents and ghettos.
> Capitalism makes production incredibly efficient (a great thing)

I'm not so sure. If you think about it, capitalism along with the industrial age are only possible because of and have been subsidized by fossil fuels. By subsidized, I mean that this increase in productivity is a simple conversion of energy from fossil fuels to products and services many of which we don't really need. The industrial age is basically the usage of cheap and readily available fossil fuels. But that also has had a great cost to our environment and this is an implicit cost that has been ignored.

Furthermore, in this modern age most advances that we've made tend to be zero sum. For example the advances that we've made in health-care tend to be nullified by modern cronic diseases, like diabetes, obesity, heart diseases, allergies or cancer. And why do these happen? We live in really crowded and polluted cities of course. And many scientists have been warning us for example about the "western diet", a diet consisting of mostly corn, soy, animals raised from corn and mono-cultures raised with pesticides and transported thousands of miles before reaching consumers, which is basically what you get when industrializing our food chain. And we may have access to education or information, yet we are burdened by debt, we are none the wiser and we are probably not happier. The only real advances we've made as a species has been in the form of individuals rights, which have been eroded lately in the name of security.

So personally I'm having a hard time lately seeing what's great about it.

> Capitalists may not feel comfortable with workers owning the means of production, but they will have to make some concessions to society (example: single payer healthcare, free education, basic income, something else?) in order to maintain a healthy stability.

Capitalism only works if the means of production is not concentrated in few hands. Once that happens, then the whole system goes crumbling down because who is going to pay for those products and services? The people that are on a basic income and that are also paid by those with the means for production? No, that's not going to happen because it doesn't make sense.

More realistic would be to say that we'll end up with a handful of masters that have billions of slaves. Unless we change the economic system to face the new reality of course.
> Will "the rest of us" just give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"?

How many people run their own e-mail servers?

What about personal websites vs facebook?

The direction is quite clear.
>Millions of men, food, supplies, armaments, had to be shuffled back and forth from France, to Russia, and back to France again, in ways that had never been conceived before.

And not only that, but the bulk of it was still being done with horse and carriages.
The tipping model possibly allows the delivery person to capture more of the value than a flat service charge, depending on the shape of the demand curve.

That is 3 customers tip 10%, 15% and 20%, for an average 15%. But when you fix the service charge at 15%, the 10% tipper now orders less frequently. That might be made up for by the 20% tipper ordering more, but it depends on the shape of the demand curve.
What are the odds that those robots have perfect software security and every individual who ever worked on them will not leak source/specs/backdoors/admin passwords once they see them used oppressively?

Just like they aren't human and don't feel empathy, I don't feel empathy for shutting down a robocop or subverting his programming to ignore me or sending it on a suicide mission back to its makers.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. In which case, the numbers simply do not work out. Makes the article's argument seem even less thought out as the author didn't even do some basic calculations.

But this slightly different system I'm describing isn't the same as what we currently have. What I'm thinking is UBI (or whatever it might be called in this system) vs. wages. Pick one. This would automatically make the minimum wage > $30k, probably at least around $40-50k and wouldn't require paying every adult in the US, including ones who already have jobs. The key difference is that people would have a choice of going to this new Semi-UBI system anytime they wanted, no questions asked, with guaranteed income. I think that's one differentiator. Another differentiator would be removing the countless barriers that exist in today's systems. The many idiotic rules around welfare and Medicaid for example are so complicated and require so much time and paperwork, it's ridiculous. It would keep the state from trying to force people to look for jobs they don't want and waste time doing it. It would allow people to go to school full time while still receiving aid (not possible in many cases today). It'd be a real, living wage, albeit low, that could remove the stress and uncertainty of today's welfare systems. And finally, it would hopefully not carry the stigma it has today as artists and thinkers and all types of people might choose not to work at all, rather than have this be only a program for the poor.

So yeah, it's not really UBI, but it could still be a lot better than current systems.
Because you need something paid for underneath it to stop spam.

This fantastic post from Mike Hearn, who was on the GMail spam
team and now makes P2P decentarlized stuff, explains it all:

https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....

Essentially, every large provider (e.g. Facebook, GMail) of network services
ultimately uses phone numbers now as a common thing that can't be infinitely
reproduced. They underpin all high quality antispam on large Internet systems.
I think a key difference is that you drive the car everyday. Even if you have no clue about the inner workings of the car, you have a direct, frequent, operating relationship with it. You understand its basic principles and functionality in a hands-on way (literally). If unseen defects are present in a car, they'd reveal themselves to you in short order.

The same cannot be said for houses. You live in a house everyday, but you don't have a true working or operating relationship with it unless you're very handy (which many home buyers these days are not). The car has a direct input/output operating cycle that you control; the house does not. It's harder to suss defects out because the house doesn't 'run' on them per se. You only learn about the defects when the house fails in one way or another. That may be two days into the inspection period, or it may be two years after closing.
We've seem the same problem at Yahoo:

https://github.com/yahoo/ygloo-ymagine/blob/master/src/com/y...

Here's another fun Android / PackageManager behavior - Android doesn't kill an app before upgrading it (unlike on iOS). You may think this is a feature, except that after the upgrade the PackageManager is now out-of-sync with the running code. So for example, say v1 of the code is still running after an upgrade to v2, and the code calls getPackageInfo() in order to find out say, its versionCode. The running code will erroneously think it's v2.
Complete Guide to Surface Book
If the Falklands had actually had any native inhabitants at the time it was "colonised", and the UK's military involvement hadn't been at the behest of the Falklands' contemporary native inhabitants to repel an invading foreign military dictatorship, they might have had more of a point...

"Other places" do not exist unless you name them. Even the Chagos Islands, the UK's most questionable overseas possession, have only been fought over in the courts.
Wow Peter, thanks for that. I like their analysis.

It reminded me of a great article I read years ago that dealt with the issue of self-referential paradox. In fact, at the time I tried applying the techniques therein towards the surprise examination, however I didn't get anywhere.

It's a paper by Noson Yanofsky entitled "A Universal Approach to Self-Referential Paradoxes, Incompleteness and Fixed Points" (http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0305282)

I think you'll enjoy reading it. I read the paper on a long train ride loved working out how given "Ann believes that Bob believes that Ann believes that Bob has a false belief about Ann" asking "does Ann believe that Bob has a false belief about Ann?" results in a paradox. This is supposedly called Brandenburger’s Epistemic Paradox.

Anyway, thanks again for your reference.
Spain has the most incompetent burocreacy of west world.
A Postal Treasure Trove: the Brienne archive of 17th century letters
Yet another article about the somethingization of money that doesn't mention decentralized currency, or even plain old digital. I get that people love hating Bitcoin, but isn't it fashionable at the very least to nod at the underlying technology?
Measuring Polymorphism in Python Programs
nginx + varnish + cdn + pagespeed + php-apc. Most definately possible and you will still have 400+mb memory to spare on a 1gb server, avg cpu usage is at 30-40%. Done it for few clients myself.
"There are no systems that can't be replaced by others."

Weak A.I eventually meets strong A.I and the cycle begins again. Every paradigm and those centered on it has its time.
In San Francisco, full time day care can run about $2k a month - here's a link to the costs for the day care for faculty and staff at UC Berkeley ($1600-$2125, depending on the age of the child). Let's go with $1700 for the calcs, to keep it conservative.

http://ece.berkeley.edu/facstaff

so, ($3,400 * 12) / .15 = $272,000 a year.

There may be cheaper options, but seriously, fifteen percent sounds very low even for two income well paid families. And of course, at such an ultra wealthy income bracket, tax breaks have phased out far lower in the income scale.

Another way to look at it is $3,400 * 12 = $40,800. Let's assume a 20% tax bracket (assuming one spouse makes a good income and intends to keep working), so it costs you $51,000 to go to work vs staying home. Even if you don't strictly lose money by working, that second income has to go way up before it's really worth it.

There is one other factor, of course, which is career continuity. It may make sense to work essentially for 20% of your pay if it means that in 5-6 years, when the kiddos are older, you can rejoin the workforce at a higher income level, rather than trying to break in after an extended absence. Also, my numbers are a worst case scenario, where you have two small children in daycare at the same time, though of course spacing it out comes with a different set of problems.

Add in the sky high cost of housing, and you can see how hard it is to raise a family in the bay area now. The best bet is actually to have one very high earning spouse (medical or nursing specialist, higher echelons of law or finance, some upper tech or managerial positions). $200k+ a year is a very different picture if it is all earned by a single spouse. Alternatively, for two very high earners (again in that 200k+ range), the percentage spent on childcare and basic housing starts to diminish to acceptable ranges.

This is also why, ahem, I don't take claims of a labor shortage in SF seriously at "six figure" salaries if the salaries are barely above 100k.
Aside from freedom of speech, movement, association, and thought, people need three things: energy, data, and means of production. (Housing is a special case)

Need a doctor? Are you sure? Or do you need access to the appropriate medical information for the symptoms you have (data), plus production of consumables that will make you better? (production)

I know folks want to go immediately to a redistribution of wealth discussion, but I'm not so sure. As everybody wants to point out, with robots, production is becoming generalized. If the tools are becoming more generic, doesn't it make sense to start talking about generic solutions?

If I had unlimited energy, unlimited data and data processing capabilities, and a dozen or so robots that were my own? Seems like I'd have pretty much anything else in life I needed. You could even make trades: I'll send a couple of my robots to work on the nearby building construction project in return for X dollars a week. My neighbor is loaning me a few robots for the weekend for a big party. In return I'm loaning him some of mine next weekend for a house remodeling project he has.

Will robots replace us? Or will robots make us all some kind of weird version of digital slave owners?
Oh so it's another run. Thank you for the clarification.
>Also add in that wordpress.com's free hosting platform... well... surpasses any other blog solution by far.

Are you sure? To me, it's by far the slowest one of them all.
Such scams only raise the price if the fools hold Bitcoin instead of what they most likely do: sell it for local currency. The scam's popularity does boost transaction volume, critical to the emergence of a fee market.
Best of luck with what? I'm merely stating an idea here.
I'm talking about creating a job for yourself, i.e. becoming self-employed/starting a business with a friend, not competing with Tesla.

You're a noob in your freshman year at the latest. Not after three or four years of class projects, study, summer internships!

And albeit your value added isn't going to be as high as seasoned practitioners', are your prospects as dismal that you couldn't create a job for yourself that would pay your living expenses + some pocket money, and have a prospect of getting you on a good career path?
We have clients running multisite with 150MM+ page views per month but on dedicated hardware and Varnish running in front of it. The latter is a must in a setup like this. You save on MRC for server rentals, which is a huge value proposition.
Fox eclipses dog/cat by many orders of magnitude. You can smell it from quite a distance.
Operating the Lisp Machine (1981) [pdf]
Who's Al?
Adblock Filter List Monitor/Notification
how would you even measure that without the causal effects of "we only hired people from these schools" not being an interfering factor?

my own personal experience (from > 20 years in professional workforce) is that there's generally very little correlation between work performance and academic pedigree. For entry level positions, I've seen a bit, but after, say, 5-8 years, people are generally either really good at what they're doing, and are getting better, or they're struggling. I've not seen any correlation between the strugglers/non-strugglers and where they went to school, or indeed, to some extent, what they studied.
What’s new with iOS 9.2 beta 2
I find it strange that I hear a lot more reference to the "means of production" concept in marxism these days. I always thought it's a concept from the weakest parts of marxism. But besides that, it's an increasingly ethereal concept.

In Marx' day, you could think of "means of production" as land, factories & tools mostly. At least, thinking of it in these few concrete terms related very closely to most of the economic activity around you. In a communist society, workers own the factory and farmers own the land, fairly concrete. Marx then suggests (as I said, I always though it was very weak) that a proletariate state would just own all means of production and workers in general would own it. So, he breaks from the simple and concrete concept pretty quickly. Still, at least you can picture what you're thinking of.

But in today's world, what is Google's "means of production?" What's Apple's? HSBC's? Disney's? Uber's? Uber is more fiction-made-matter than a bunch of "capital."

I find it surprising. I mean Marxism/Communism/Socialism has other concepts that I think are more relevant and less contrived that I'm surprised we don't hear more about. The idea of historical progression seems appropriate given the rate of change we see today. The Marxist revolutionary concept that when the majority don't have a stake in the status quo, revolutions happen... that seems relevant given the trends in inequality. Global solidarity.

At least "labour power" isn't making its back way into general political vernacular.
Works fine for me in South Korea.
Sorry I can't offer help, but I feel the exact same way.

I used to love coding and so on, but my current company is pretty terrible at everything it does, but for personal reasons I can't realistically leave for a while.

The only thing that helps me is to take some time off now and then and focus on my hobbies, and remember that my work funds those hobbies.
Free.mp3