skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> millions of independent APIs and callbacks implemented over the years without rhyme or reason, and a Windows exe can call any of them any time

Do you have a typical good example for this?

So, genuine question, are you suggesting that if Microsoft decided to do something about this, that would pretty much have to rewrite it from scratch?
I might be restricting it to government funding, so this might be true. Considering this in the context of the rest of my post, I'd think this kind of money is restricted to practical, applied fields, not quantum gravity. I do suppose once in a blue moon, a wealthy benefactor might want to support a grad student doing string theory. Still, the exceedingly small number of rich people willing to pay out for esoteric physics guarantees it will go to researchers working in those finger-enumerable universities as I said. For the larger pool of physicists across the country that mainly would be paid by NSF grants and the like? They lose out to the condensed matter physicists making leaps and bounds in material science.

On second reading of your post, you may be implying it isn't zero sum due to more money going to the applied physicists, leaving some for the stringy guys. It might be true, my impression is that it isn't enough[0], but I could be wrong.

[0] This is somewhat out of my ass, but it is tempered by colloquia at my university I've attended where this comes up from time to time.
I was a field organizer for Obama in 2008. Back then VAN was a run of the mill LAMP CRUD app. It felt pretty hacky and old-school, I'd be surprised if it had a thoughtful multi-tenant data model / architecture to isolate campaigns. So my interpretation of the "dropped firewall" is just a flaw in the permissions system that opened up cross campaign data through the web interface (which might include access to CSV dumps, etc).

VAN stands for Voter Activation Network. Indeed the data in VAN is the "meat and potatoes" of the campaign's field operations. Access to local data is available to low-level campaign volunteers through role-based permissions. So campaigns could easily spy on this local per-voter and operations data with double agent volunteers. If this story is really significant, it would have to mean that the flaw in the permissions leaked aggregate data, data across large regions, and other data that would only be available to trusted campaign staff (IE regional, state, and national field directors in increasing order of access; I suspect there is a facility in VAN for authorization of data scope functioning in a "need to know" / "up the chain" manner a la the military).

The workflow at my level was the field organizer (FO) gets instructions from the regional field director which geographies and demographics to focus on. The FO goes into VAN and "cuts turf" which means carves up the geography and extracts voters matching the desired characteristics, and delivers these lists to subordinate canvassers (mostly volunteers, some paid). The lists contain info on historical voting record and campaign contact events (contact attempts, dated answers to "who are you planning to vote for?" and "how much have you made up your mind?", etc) with the voters so that canvassers can craft their pitch accordingly. Then if they're making phone calls the canvasser sits in front of a computer and checks off their list voter-by-voter right in VAN and entering data with the result of the phone call. If they're going door to door, the canvassers carry clipboards with the list printed out, take notes on the list with the result of the canvass, and enters the data into VAN later. The campaign emphasizes careful and timely VAN data entry because the higher ups in the campaign depend on the up-to-date aggregate VAN data to coordinate field operations from the top down. An FO has access to some aggregate data for the region so they can better perform activities like yard sign distribution, planning events, identifying partner organizations, and much more. The canvassers have the abilities to search (somewhat powerfully) for voters statewide (and also get back campaign contact data) so they can respond to circumstances like one local voter mentioning that their cousin across the state is undecided, and the canvasser can just call the cousin up and try and persuade them.

I'm curious to hear the workflow for higher-level campaign staff.
I'm just about to start a course that uses OCaml for teaching. Any book or website recommendations?

The textbooks are "OCaml from the very beginning" and "More OCaml: Algorithms, Methods & Diversions"
How Remote Teams Save Money
But the real question is how many lines of HDL went into the design of the processor?
Disney is safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece
The overwhelming key is free/freemium. Word of mouth works much better when the product is easily accessible. And there are a zillion other advantages to a freemium approach.
Call me a starry-eyed idealist, but

> The iterative bloat during development can happen for so many reasons. (Numerous changes in requirements late in the project,

... and people not cleaning their mess up afterwards;

> many developers working on numerous modules,

... without proper coordination, or, without the drive to keep things clean (i.e. proper manners);

> design for flexibility and expansion that are never used,

... and never cleaned up, i.e. left there to rot by the people who put them there;

> going too far down a path that turns out to be more work than an alternative)

... and not cleaning up.

> Once a program has been in production for a while and its use cases are more well defined it becomes easier for a single person to swoop in and rewrite it in a far more conscice way.

I think it's always easier for the guy/gal who wrote something to clean it up than for the next guy/gal, who doesn't know the code or its history as well.

Really, this is all just people not cleaning up (or being allowed to clean up) after themselves.

Now if we could all just be nice to each other and hold hands..
Educational research at universities often leads to patents. Universities like Standford own patents or have helped research performed at a University lead to patents. Government funding for research in the U.S at least has never been hostile to commercialization.
This site isn't for "today I learned"'s. There is a reasonable limit to the context of conversation and submissions that happen here.

And instead of being snarky, you could actually explain what is so novel about dynamic image generation on a server.
Isn't it more realistic to expect that Visual Studio will be made binary-available by Microsoft itself on Linux or even open sourced at some time given the latest Microsoft turnarounds?
As with everything to do with smart people it is all about incentives. If you create a system where accuracy of results don’t matter and where you must publish or die then don’t be surprised if what you get are lots of crap publications with dubious or false results. Hoping for a different outcome without changing the incentives is fantasy thinking.

The positive is there is lots we could do to change the incentives, but there are some powerful forces benefiting from the current structure.

Edit. I should actual say what we could do. We need to focus on the incentives rather than the problem. Fix the incentives and the problem goes away on its own, focus on the problem and you just end up shifting it to somewhere else - the "squeezing on the balloon" effect.

The best solution in my opinion is to move from our crude "most publications = funding" model to a hurdle + lottery model. With this you have to publish enough to prove that you are capable of doing good research (the hurdle) and once you have done this you go into a lottery from which we pull out grant winners until we have used up all the funding available.

The reason this idea is not popular is it would not work in favour of the current grant winners.
Very cool! I wonder how the game dynamic changes when people are not required to be in the same room as each other.
> This is probably not true. All kinds of money is being poured into physics research to create better batteries for example. It may be indirect, but there's a ton of money going into physics research.

This is not research (in particular not physics research) but engineering or development.
While online ads consume substantial resources (energy, etc.), traditional ads did as well. Consider the cost of printed pages, or even making your TV run for slightly longer than it otherwise would because your TV show lasts 30 minutes with ads even though it would last 22 minutes with no ads.

An interesting environmentalist argument would be, to ask everyone to pay more to producers of all kinds (online or otherwise), to prevent the "need" for extra resource consumption on any medium.

It "should" be an easy argument because people are clearly already paying for ads, they just don't see how. For instance, your electric bill would go down if you knew your TV would run for a half hour less every day.
Well, there is the case of Aristarchus who came up with the heliocentric model of the solar system about 1800 years or so before Copernicus. His model was rejected because of experimental evidence -- the theory predicted stellar parallax which observation at the time could not detect! (Of course, we can detect it now that telescopes have been invented -- the stars are just so much farther away than anyone could have possibly believed at the time.)
To get to Cantor's theories you have to accept his concept of a "completed infinity". This implies that infinity is a metaphysical concept, i.e. that infinity really exists in the universe. For example, do you believe that black holes are really infinite density or does an infinite property indicate a breakdown in the equations or theory, i.e. infinity is an epistemological concept. Modern physics is not consistent on this question but the error and question all derive from Kant.
And yet, its basic point -- that given how the NYT seems to have abstained from any serious investigation of Carlos Slim's empire, since he became a shareholder -- and the irony of its attempting to give kudos to the LV paper for investigating its ownership -- seems quite valid.
We have a bigger problem, nobody found electron source code yet.
Sleep better with two simple keyboard shortcuts
atlassian products are not a freemium product - you pay a subscription, or outright buy it and run it on your own server. There's a trial period, of course, but that's not considered freemium.
GTD IS for everyone. All GTD is, is acknowledging how our brains function at a very fundamental level, and then building a trustable system around that.

Why can't create tasks work in GTD? GTD methodology doesn't say that you HAVE TO break everything up into 2-minute chunks. It can be 2 hours set aside for creativity.

Saying "X doesn't work for everyone" sounds nice, as does "everything in moderation." But I get skeptical when someone uses "everything in moderation" to excuse their smoking habit, or "___ is NOT for everyone" . Hundreds of years ago I'm sure there were people arguing that "reading and writing is not for everyone." Eating vegetables is not for everyone, etc.
Better here than hosted on some volatile service that'll be gone again in 5 years.
Really, or are you just saying that? They "missed it" because either (a) they didn't bother to test at all, or (b) they actually thought November has 31 days and didn't bother to do the 4 seconds of research required to get both the implementation and the test correct (since, of course, the people writing this are almost certainly Chinese and know as much about the Gregorian calendar as they know about McDonald's hamburgers, Norman Rockwell's art, or the present value of the euro).

Welcome to firmware, folks!
We don't, it's how the correctional personnel get their jollies :o
how are you defining innovation? Japan, for example, became the 2nd biggest economy (with 10% of China's population) by improving cars, electronics and shipping (among other things). is that innovation? rather than inventing new products, they perfected ideas created in the West (statistical process control invented by Deming, et al).
They likely work on trading desks at hedge funds.
Well, science cannot be "proven" to "accurately describe reality."
Zero lines of HDL, probably? [1]

[1] http://www.colorforth.com/vlsi.html
I'm not talking about what the author wrote, I'm talking about the 500 posts which entire take away was 'mongo is retarded'. Reread what I wrote.
The person responsible doesn't care in the slightest. They got paid, their product not only got sold but is still being sold, and so there's nothing to be bothered with. That's what firmware's about: toss it out the door and move on. Trust me, if the person who did this even knows about it, he surely does not care at all.
What sort of consulting?
GOLD+Faces+Risk+Of+More+Strength+On+Price+Rejection
Well, simply storing and hashed version of the pass would be ok. Even an MD5 or a SHA1 would be enough to guarantee at least a "Very Few plus Us" security.

Hiding that in the could would be much more difficult. And using PKs would make the attack even easier to spot.

And then you have to consider that a "Nobody but Us" backdoor exist only on paper, not in reality. If a key exists and someone knows it, well sooner or later it will be discovered (disgruntled employees, hackers etc). The only safe backdoor is the none backdoor. Now, consider this problem from an attacker that doesn't give a st of your security. He knows that as soon as the backdoor is known (because someone find it in the code, because someone leak the password, because whatever...) the backdoor will be useless most systems. What you do, you design a safe backdoor or you design a backdoor with as little footprint as possible?

Obviously, legally sanctioned backdoor have a different set or constraint and making them safe is a requirement. The fact that it is impossible to prove them safe unless some assumptions (that always prove to be wrong, but...) are made, it's a totally different problem.
which univ ?

#ocaml on irc.freenode.net might be of help for adequate suggestions.
The German word for entertaiment is "Unterhaltung", which is composed of "unten" and "halten" ("down" and "hold") - and that is what entertainment is: Holding the masses down (such that they don't ascend or revolt).

Guess who is thus interested in funding entertainment.
There are different kinds of "testable".

Some theories are so easy to test, a 4th grader in her science class can test it conclusively in half an hour. We don't even question these theories anymore, because they've been set in stone for centuries.

Some theories take millions of dollars and several years to test, but they're manageable by large research universities and governments. At the very edge of this range, we have things like the Large Hadron Collider testing the existence of the Higgs boson. That one actually cost a few billion dollars and several decades, but we could live with that.

Some theories will take trillions of dollars and several centuries to test. Perhaps it will be quadrillions of dollars and several millennia instead, or even several million years. Right now, we don't even know what kind of technology we will need to test string theory. Perhaps we'll need to evolve into something else before our brains can even imagine what it would take to test it. But eventually we'll get there, if we learn to accept that science is bigger than all of us and stop being so impatient.

The difference between these three kinds of "testable" are quantitative, not qualitative. It just looks qualitative because the quantities involved are so huge. But if someone cannot grasp the idea of a theory that takes aeons to develop and test, I don't think they're qualified to judge the merits of theoretical physics.
And then are better results achievable with SSRIs instead?
On the contrary, the comments are far too kind. This sort of error is simply unconscionable and the person responsible for it deserves far worse. It's unfortunate that the poor sod responsible for working around it can't do any more than write a scathing comment, because at an absolute minimum the responsible party should never work again (in any industry or role).
Only if you postulate that your drives won't be able to saturate their respective number of PCIe lanes. The total number of lanes in the system is fixed by the choice of CPU, and having drives with a total lane count in excess of that only helps when your drives can't fully use the lanes they're given or if you're trying to maximize capacity rather than performance.
Not their children's tuition, their next month's rent or grocery bill.
I find it to be a remarkably gentle response to an act of such gross incompetence.
Coming from a 10 year veteren in consulting for orgs ranging in size from 3 people to federal departments.

Most of the time there isn't any budget left after they have a functional app for cleaning things up. Despite impassioned hand wringing the client will place value on things they can see over things they can't. So any budget left over will almost invariably be directed toward additional features and not on proper engineering.

Sad but true.

Speaking to your points there's also the problem of not being able to see the forest through the trees for developers who have been with a project from the beginning. So large refactoring endeavors can be less obvious to them. They may also have fatigue and be less willing to rewrite everything. This combined with budget pressure is all it takes for the bloat to stick.
> Nobody can figure out a way to test string theory.

That's why some consider it physics inspired branch of math. For now.

> why should they be funded?

Until we have room temperature superconductors they are note done.
How can we know that it is the only backdoor? Wouldn't be safer to just stop using Juniper's products altogether?
Case sensitivity i'm assuming you mean the automatic semi-colon insertion due to a line break after a return statement? I have a hard time seeing this as being a reason to dislike an entire language.

Most languages have features to avoid, JavaScript is no different. Many JavaScript developers use linters to avoid the poor `==` feature. I'm unfamiliar with the argument of the `Map` datastructure implementation being broken. Do you have a reference to that claim?
Thank you for the detailed response. In my circles that judge books, I'd actually expect more sympathy for Rand than Marx (or Piketty), so I think mileage varies.

To me, it seems that what you describe as the 'key idea' of Atlas Shrugged is actually two separate ideas; 'individual is more important than the state', and 'sacrifice of a few innocents for the many is not morally valid'. Leaving the individual aside for the moment, for the second idea, how do you reconcile the reasonable notion of not sacrificing innocents for the many with cases where the many will suffer unfairly (e.g. the Trolley Problem [1]) when it is in your power to act?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
In addition to backend compilation for managed code, Phoenix could continue to be used to compile C/C++ code. One of the things the team did was continue to compile the Windows codebase to compare Phoenix and UTC (for both functional and performance reasons, IIRC).

Disclaimer: I was on the Midori team for a few years but did not work on Phoenix itself.
Here's an argument that runs completely parallel:

jwmerrill's razor: points in the plane should be considered to be close to the origin unless there is evidence otherwise.

Is this a reasonable law? As reasonable as Occam's razor? I think probably not, but I don't have a strong opinion. One interesting thing to note is that the law doesn't say where the origin is (similarly, Occam's razor is vague about what exactly is meant by "simple" and "complex").

Finite asymptotic form: for any finite point set, there is a distance D such that no point in the set is further from the origin than D.

Continuous asymptotic form: given any function from points in the plane to non-negative numbers which has a finite integral, there is a distance D such that the integral of the function over the region that is further from the origin than D is less than any epsilon_1, and such that the function is everywhere less than any epsilon_2 on this region except perhaps on a set of measure 0.

The asymptotic forms are provable mathematical statements, but I think it would be a mistake to say that either of them is a very compelling argument for the original statement of "jwmerrill's razor."

Without intending to call you out in particular (I don't know what opinions you hold), I think people sometimes accept some odd logic in probability theory that they would be less likely to accept in other contexts. Bayesian probability theory provides practical solutions to a lot of interesting problems, and I personally wish people would emphasize those cases more, and make fewer sweeping statements about it being a consistent theory of all of the scientific method.
The Death of Expertise
> BTW, is astrology actually falsifiable? I'm under impression that astrologists deliberately strive for unfalsifiability exactly to avoid falsification which could cast doubt on their wisdom.

It is. Just do the following experiment:

Find, say, ten persons and an (or many) astrologists and let them create a horoscope (say, either a prognosis for the future or description of character traits) for these 10 persons, where only the exact time and location of birth is given to the astrologists.

After that give all ten horoscopes to all ten persons and let them rank. Now just formulate some sensible statistical model and voila - falsified.
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
- Goodhart's Law

Awarding scientists for publishing works -- whether or not they've passed rigor -- is the mistake.

The monetary system for awarding grants is completely broken. Nobody wants to admit they have their hand in the cookie jar for fear of having the lid slammed down on their hand. Universities take a cut of the grant money to subsidize their staff payroll. Professors gain notoriety and a significant increase in income when their published work leads to being awarded a grant. Industry/NGOs have their own financial incentives to 'influence' scientific reporting that favors their own bias'. Nobody calls attention to the corruption because... Woohoo! Free money!

I find it very difficult to trust any of the scientific reporting related to current affairs and/or politics. The incentives for 'bad actors' who commit intellectual dishonesty are too high.
The problem is not the publication model, it is the incentive structure that encourages scientists to rush out publications without checking their data in enough detail, or in putting them under so much pressure to generate “exciting” results that they falsify the results.

I will share an anecdote about a paper I was involved in. The work was done in collaboration with another lab within my school. One of the results suggested that one of the instrument was out of alignment and possibly giving false results. I raised this with the head of the other lab and after speaking with his post doc he said that everything was fine. I asked to see the calibration data (there was none), but I was assured that everything was fine and they were going to submit it as it was. At that point I went thermonuclear and said if this paper was submitted without the dubious values being checked I would write to the journal asking for it to be withdrawn. This caused a huge ruckus within the school including visits from the head of school and the dean telling me I was being “unreasonable”. I stood my ground and the post doc eventually ran the calibration experiments which showed the instrument was out of alignment and the results were wrong.

Of course this burned a lot of bridges for me and it would have been better for me to just shut up and let the paper go out wrong.