skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This paper appears to be the description of the "World Model" which led to the "Limits to Growth" book series. The paper is by Jay Forrester, and another influential name in the field is Donella Meadows.

"Limits to Growth" made several forecasts for humanity that basically predicted mass negative changes, with best-case scenario being that it would settle out with humanity having an average quality of life equal to that of what eastern europe has (or perhaps had 10-20 years ago).

The forecast gets updated every ten years or so, and I've lost track of what the most recent updates said. They generally claim that the metrics are tracking what the model predicted in its worst-case scenario, which would lead to quite a lot of horrible worldwide societal changes in the 2020-2030 range.

The model has generally been ignored and criticized for being too pessimistic and not based on rigorous data.

When they talk about levers for change, one of the most powerful ones they recommend is changing the goal entirely, in this case removing the emphasis on "growth". It's interesting to think about changing the definition of GDP, since our entire definition of recession and depression is based off of that.

It sounds like some of their prescriptions to avoid the worst outcomes are pretty draconian, like limiting food production to help control population growth.
What about Redshift on Wayland :(?
Please respond to the entirety of my post instead of cherry-picking, thanks.
> His style is so rigorous that he is known for the Coase Theorem, an idea that he posited without a single word of mathematics but that is as fundamental as many things written in mathematics.

?

How can it be both a theorem, and not mathematics?

That seems like a contradiction to me.
Which medication and for how long?
I mentioned this in another thread, but another option is using (hair) conditioner. I can't personally speak to how well it works on faces seeing as how I have no facial hair, but it's my go-to at home for shaving my legs and things.

I've even tried body lotion in a pinch, at a hotel that didn't have conditioner unless you asked for it... not the worst. But way better than shaving cream from hotels still, especially when they give you those practically empty plastic packets.
You can compare completion rate for a free course and a paid course based solely on how many students enrolled and how many completed the class.

You will have to set some point in the course at which you begin to compare, say for example you will start to compare all students who have completed the first half or third of the class.
20 years of speedcubing (2001)
In some countries, voting serves the same purpose, doesn't it?
Which medication?
Sure, handhelds have bounded power. I don't know how depth sensing tech work but I expect it to be power hungry. Question is can it be LCD/WiFi demanding or would it kill the average battery after 10 shots.
4mg of Fluoxetine daily for a little over two years.

Additional: Occassionally I may forget to take it and I won't feel any different however those around me pick up on it straight away as I become reclused and start constantly sweating.
> TOR is openly audit-able, publicly vetted, and peer reviewed

Just like OpenSSL?
This is similar to my experience spending a lot of time in the desert areas of the south western US. Basically there were things you could do that would exponentially increase your likelihood of being bitten. Examples being sticking your hand under rocks or into holes.

Understanding that snakes moderate their body temperature by moving from shade to sun to shade again allows you to quickly see spots that a snake would find attractive. Usually a surface in the early morning or late evening sunlight, next to a place where a snake could be in the shade but have some awareness of its surroundings. Once you figure that out, you can easily spot places that snakes would like to hang out and either avoid them, or as I was prone to do in my youth, go find them.
This is one thing that Mac seems to have gotten perfect nowadays, I connect my retina laptop to non-retina monitors, and every seems to work fine, all the time.

Apple made one massive simplification -- apps only run at 1x size, or 2x size, and nothing else. This isn't theoretically "nice", but (for me) covers most use cases, and seems to have made the implementation much easier, as you can still design your interface pixel-wise, and just let the OS double scale everything.
"Performs well" has no concrete meaning. It almost always requires a second question for clarification, e.g. "What does good performance specifically mean here?" Or "performs well compared to what?"

Scientist, doctors, lawyers, and other engineering disciplines use precise words. Software engineers should too.

As more and more people use "performant" fewer and fewer people will understand what good performance actually means. I wouldn't be surprised if this encourages a culture of wasteful premature optimization.
On what basis do you say that meta-analysis is not credible? From my stats background, (but without any direct experience in meta-analysis) I would say that they could be problematic because the N is very small and so have a lot less to work with, and more temptation to use fancy statistical techniques with hidden assumptions. On the other hand, what do you do when you have 50 studies of varying quality, no one of which is has such a compelling methodology as to eclipse the others? In that case it seems like meta-analysis is the least bad option.
Intelligence Agencies Are Not Here to Defend Your Enterprise
Given how statistics seem to be an integral part of psychology research, I hope there is.
this is amazing, thank you. More hidden but incredibly useful features...
And like keerthiko, I am disturbed by the easy acceptance of this distinction.

The example I mentioned was not a migrant worker doing "rounds". It was under an H-2A agricultural visa to work for a single company in North Carolina. Is that specific Mexican, Rodolfo Benito Coy Garcia, an ex-pat? It sounds like your answer is "no, because he isn't in the right social circles."

I say, if someone's on a 5-year rotation in London, call them a guest worker. That's what they are. Why do you think we should maintain the class distinction in calling people from the more economically advantaged social circles to be "expats", while those from others are "guest workers" or "migrant workers" or other less socially accepted terms?

I'll again point out that your definition excludes all the other people who call themselves "expats", who live more or less permanently in another country, and are self-employed or retired. But who just happen to be from a rich country, and seemingly don't want to be called an "immigrant".
Joe Duffy's Presentation “Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET”
Oops, looks like they went out of business. They had some pretty interesting LIDAR technology for mapping cities. Not sure what happened.
Several of the crosswalk graffiti examples pictured in the article are sociopolitical commentary on our illusions of control.

"Naturally, a number of street art projects have popped up around the humorous futility of pedestrians pressing placebo buttons:"

I think the depths of the satire on these is lost on the author.
Those example words have precise meaning, "performant" does not. Engineers should communicate using precise language, like other technical disciplines.
There are many Americans and British in Sweden who have settled and married Swedish people and call themselves expats. Really seems like keerthiko has a good point about the word expat just being a fancier word for immigrant.
> I'd love to have comments in JSON. It's not so important for machine generated files but when you hand-craft an example it's nice to annotate it.

Luckily, Douglas Crockford has an explanation and an almost prophetic solution[1] for your use-case:
I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability. I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn't.

Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser.

1. https://plus.google.com/+DouglasCrockfordEsq/posts/RK8qyGVaG...
Fabulous book.

I saw it as a metaphor for those things in our cities we choose not to see, e.g. poverty and homelessness.
‘Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’
> the middle class drive over the border and get major surgery done

AFAICT it's pretty rare, and usually done to receive a 'experimental' treatment not approved in Canada.

> The waiting lines are pretty long for most major surgeries and many older people die before they actually get it

Source?

AFAICT the wait times are bad for things like hip replacements and cataract surgery. Not so for things like cancer.
This doesn't feel consistent with my experience. Significantly restructuring a large and complex piece of infrastructure is never going to be easy, but I don't think a strong static type system makes it any harder. If anything, it makes it significantly easier, just like a strong battery of unit tests would.

A sufficiently expressive type system will guide you and hold your hand over the course of the refactoring. It will determine for you the precise cascading effect of any code changes you make. And if you forgot to write a unit test to handle some edge case, the chances are pretty decent that the type system will detect it for you anyway.

In terms of writing a new piece of software whose design you haven't fleshed out yet, my approach in a language like Haskell is in fact very experimental, but quite different from something like Python. Rather than writing lots of little tests and trying to get bare-bones functionality implemented passing those tests, I often completely ignore tests and let the type system guide me. I try to flesh out the types that my program will need at a high level and just go from there. I call it "type-driven development", and it's extremely useful for early-stage exploratory programming, because it lets you play around with the structure of the program without worrying about any details. This is only possible in a language those type system is powerful enough to actually encode nontrivial aspects of a program's high-level structure.

I make sure at every point that I have a codebase that passes the type checker. It may not be interesting to actually run it at an early stage, but in many ways that actually makes exploratory problem solving even easier.

In many cases, this approach will reveal architectural issues early on that you may not have realized existed until you'd already written thousands of lines of code in something like Python. The real point is that either way you will have to face those issues if you want to end up with a working piece of software. But it's a lot easier to face them early on, when little code depends on them, rather than later on.
> a generic name for a street view service

What is "a street view service" other than Google Street View?

Bing has a similar service called Streetside. I can't find any usage of the phrase to mean anything other than Google's service.

Mapillary uses the phrase "street level photos"

It is a registered trademark as well: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4805:dq9...

I think in a dispute, Google would very likely win.
Intel Corporation’s Kaby Lake-X Gaming Chip Promises to Be a Beast
For Redshift, I rely on actual red glasses. You can find these on Amazon etc., search for "UV protection glasses". The advantage is that these work with any screen, even with paper books. The disadvantage is that you have to remember to put them on. :)
It's interesting that you say America has done a good job of assimilating immigrants in light of the popularity of Trump. It seems to me the opposite is true. To me, America is a collection of states that is fairly cohesive, but is quickly ripped apart when politics comes up. Americans can have pleasent conversations over sports, entertainment, and food, but anything beyond that and the debates can get pretty hairy...
Intro to Apache Kafka as a Metaphor
Behavior may be very different during low-traffic periods. During busy periods, it's important to keep synchronization with nearby intersections. During off-peak periods, many traffic lights go to an on-demand mode, skipping directions where no traffic or pedestrians are waiting.

The standard modes are called "pre-timed", "partially actuated", and "fully actuated".[1] In pre-timed mode, the pedestrian buttons don't do anything, but there's a WALK period somewhere in the cycle. In "fully actuated", you never get a WALK without pushing the button.

[1] http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop06006/chapter_7....
As mentioned, KMS uses encryption contexts (a set of key-value pairs) to namespace your secrets. KMS won't decrypt the data key if you aren't in the key policy or your IAM policies don't allow access to that particular encryption context.

You're doing it at the S3 object level (presumably with a single KMS key?). Credstash does it at the KMS access level. Both are roughly equivalent, but Dynamo accesses are a lot cheaper in my neck of the woods than S3 accesses.
Important tips to overcoming poverty
I did not save it, and search engines are not really great on finding specific news articles based on queries like "what women and men want". Too much noise.

I did find people who has done a similar study, like http://www.sverigesingenjorer.se/Global/Dokumentbibliotek/Ra... page 18.

As for software development, there has been quite a few movies so far about CEO's of large software companies. I don't think there is that many other professions that get hero worshiping like that, except for doctors.
The Challenges of Wearable Computing: Part 1 [pdf]
Gabor Filters
I live in the Triangle, and driven to such far-flung locales in NC as Advance, Roxboro, and Eden. The people I've interacted with (however limited) are ardently political in the conservative direction for reasons other than fiscal.

Many are hunters, or serve(d) or have family in the armed forces, or just grew up around guns. They remember, before the big-box stores came along, when the town hardware and general stores sold shotguns, rifles, and ammo. They see the liberals in SF Chicago and NYC wanting to stop their multi-generationally deep and rich tradition in hunting and defending and baring arms. If there is one rail that should never be touched, one single-issue that will move that type of voter, it is preserving the 2nd amendment. I mean, sure, you don't have to worship it and Hillary won't have to sit there holding an AKM-74 with 100-round drum mag to pander for votes, but just don't go after it with such vigor and I can bet dollars to donuts that you can win over at least 40% of the voters 1 hour outside the Triangle.

They vote republican not for their non-existent tax breaks or wait in bated breath for their drip of the trickle-down. They're savvy enough that that junk has been tried all over the country and has mostly failed (in the case of Kansas, utterly and miserably with negative job growth). They just don't want you to mess with their traditions.

I mean, these folks don't even care to fight over marriage equality, either. You don't see much gay-bashing in these areas. They simply don't care. Ditto abortion. Sure, there are ardent bible-thumpers, but on the whole, they are nuanced enough to know that we don't want a nation filled with unwanted children.

So, really, don't mess with THEIR rights (guns), and they won't vote against their own interests. I can't get why a lot of democrats (both politicians and voters) can't see that. I _know_ that democrats and liberals are about as far from single-issue voters as you can get, so they'll be kinda-sorta bummed that guns aren't the big focus for legislation, but it would certainly NOT be the end of the world.
> Feeling you have control over your world is a desirable state

I wonder when exactly in business the "experience" of something became more important than the actual thing - but this pattern seems to become increasingly more common:

It's more important that customers feel valued than that they are actually valued; it's more important that food looks fresh and tastes nutritious than that it actually is; it's more important that a device has a high-quality exterior than that it has high-quality specs; etc, etc.

I feel this kind of thinking is the source of many frustrations and even health problems. I find it sad if it's now apparently so widespread that papers take the assumption for granted.
This is going to sound overdramatic, but looking at that Dell logo staring back at me for 10+ hours per day would be unbearable. I would give surprisingly more consideration to the machine if they removed branding on the inside (like Apple does).
I guess I just don't understand this kind of attitude. If it was done with public funds, it should be made available to the public. We have the means and capability to do so now.

The point of research is to be useful, even if it doesn't immediately have an application in the present, it could form the basis of something new in the future. Not having easy access to this institutional knowledge decreases the value to the public, or putting it behind a paywall and restricting access could prevent a non-standard performer or individual contributor from obtaining access and thereby benefiting.

I think the motivations in the academic world is very flawed. If I were an academic my goal would be to provide my work to the largest audience I possibly could, so there likelihood of someone benefiting from it would be the highest. This is especially true for research that has no present application. It should be highly accessible and available to anyone if the public has paid for the academic to live, eat, and generally do the work.
But ultimately most application developers wouldn't be using $15K workstations anyway.
they "aim" for monopoly.

They lock you in at every step they can. In hopes to archive monopoly, or quasi monopoly market cornering.

ever since the walkman, sony tries to have a monopoly on media production. from betamax to memory stick cards to mini cd to blueray. oh, wait, they got it. what is the alternative to blueray when dvd goes away?

Apple tried to do that with custom ports and data formats and now found the sweet spot with apps and media. Adobe also tried that with formats a while ago but is giving up.
1. Yes. You don't know if your kid will be the one who solves or ameliorates climate change.

2. Human life is its own good.

3. Bryan Caplan discusses this and many other interesting topics in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046....
Relevant user name is relevant!

"Workers not meeting productivity metrics are at risk of automation." - The Mgt.
Last Vesper Update, Sync Shutting Down
Thanks zrail, I will definitely have a look at those and your book :)
That post's numbers are entirely based a giant multi-gigabyte long-lived array: the classic worst case for a generational GC. That is not representative of most memory allocations. The generational hypothesis, which has been empirically verified in real world code again and again, is that most allocations are short-lived and small.
I use ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab. Works out of the box in Safari (and customizable for apps where it doesn't).
That was really fun to watch. I love old tech videos...thanks!
Political Polarization in the American Public
Oh my god, this changes everything! CMD-tab focus to the wrong window has driven me nuts for ten years and this fixes it. I've just binded it to cmd-e since the ´´´ shortcut doesn't work on non-us keyboards
This is exactly why I avoid apps/companies that insist on their own custom sync solution.

If I can't use it with iCloud or with a *nix server I control, it's pretty unlikely I'll use your sync-enabled app.
> I think in a dispute, Google would very likely win.

In the US. But OSM doesn’t have to care about that – the worst that could happen would be them being banned from doing business in the US, or their profits being seized.

Which is no risk to them.
Regarding the crosswalk buttons: The article mentions that in NYC the purpose of the buttons were obsoleted by "careful automation". That leaves me a bit stumped. Whatever sophisticated machine learning algorithm you have running behind the scenes, wouldn't you want at least some input on the state of pedestrians to tune it?

That is, unless the "careful automation" is actually just a fixed sequence of traffic light changes or a rigorous "cars first" policy.
It seems like it's doing exactly what it was engineered to do, extract the maximum amount of dollars from the fed for defense contractors.
How Accurate Are These Smartphone Sound Measurement Apps?
Its a common trope expressed by bitter people. In general this happens when you don't keep up with technology trends, you just don't understand why somebody prefers one thing over another when both, peripherally, yield the same product. Its also obviously not true.
In New Zealand most of the pedestrian crossings don't show any lights until someone pushes the button. Occasionally someone will stand at the lights staring at a completely unilluminated crossing light until someone else pushes the button.

Handily it means if the light is on it will change.
>> keeping modules composable,

> To my mind, this is a corollary of DRY: if you are not repeating yourself, then you are reusing code, which, by definition will have made it composable.

You don't get composability from DRY, as merely extracting common snippet of
code into a function doesn't make magically the function easy to put somewhere
else. Just "reusing code" doesn't make it composable. You can reuse body of
a car for something different, but it doesn't make it composable, so there's
no "by definition".

DRY is just a different thing than composability.

>> not mixing things of different abstraction level in the same block of code

> Never heard this one, frankly. I happily mix addition (arithmetic, machine-level operation) and, say, Dice Coefficient in the same line of code.

It's a practical thing. You don't put opening TCP connection to a database
service in the same chunk of code as building SQL query to be sent through the
connection.

>> avoiding circular dependencies

> Probably a good principle, but not fundamental

Oh yes it is. If code doesn't adhere to it, it ends up being a tangled,
monolitic mess of brittleness. As with every rule, there are cases when it
makes sense not to apply it, but this doesn't make it less fundamental than
DRY.
No local government in America is required to provide anything more than K12 education. Many rural areas toy have to pay for fire or police.
WW3 RUSSIS USA TURKEY +THE 3RD SECRET OF FATIMA
For 2,3 the better approach is probably certificates of some form. Ssh supports certificates as well as plain keys (a key with optional meta-data about validity, principals (users,servers etc).

And/or you could use some form of Web of trust model (one could say that a CA system is just a very small, highly trusted wot - typically one key with ultimate trust, that signs all valid certs - as opposed to wot that typically scores a key based on signatures by other (semi-)trusted/known keys).

Unfortunately Ca/wot/certs doesn't solve the problem - but it reduces "verify all the keys" and "rotate all the keys" to verify/rotate the key (eg: the key that signs your user cert - if you have a cert, you have a xhain of trust). It does however bring with it "maintain a CA" - which really is less work than "synchronise all the various public keys" but frequently ends up being hard to decentralise.

The latter is probably solved by realising better is better and having a few people/principals with signing powers (many priest, not just one bishop) and an audit trail, roll-call/revoke - can be a lot safer than ad-hoc trust-on-first-use.