skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Low hanging fruit is one great example of where independent research can shine. The incentives are different, so what is considered "low hanging fruit" is also different. An independent researcher can focus on projects where the timescale is longer or the project is unlikely to be funded. With independent research being rare, I can see a lot of low hanging fruit for independent researchers which traditional academics would not touch.

I could provide an example of research which is disincentivized in traditional academia but incentivized in independent research from my own PhD research if you're interested.

> Your other example according to Wikipedia is someone who got a PhD at MIT, and applied for grants and held faculty positions at a number of universities.

Kraichnan was an independent researcher from 1962 to 2003, the majority of his career. Yes, he was affiliated with a university at multiple points of his career, but he spent 4 decades as an independent researcher and produced some of his most important work during that time.
Professors have three full time jobs; administrator, researcher (well supervision of people actually doing the research, but this is very time consuming if done right), and teaching. Each job is more than 35 hours a week (the time I was nominally paid for).

I was deliberately terrible at the administration side and outright refused to do anything unless it meant more money for my department (the one good thing about tenure is you can be a pain in the backside and not get fired), but even spending less than 10 hours a week on admin, my work week was rarely less than 80 to 90 hours.

One of the major reasons why I quit academia and went back to my startup was to have more time to spend with my family.
I can't believe people don't pay attention. Facebook never removed any data generated, they just remove the index from the data. Deleted data is can be more valuable than data that is kept there.
I'd say that web programming architecture has been converging between most languages. What's shown here is:

- Setup a library tracking system (composer, the autoload stuff)

- Setup basic Dependency Injection (using code in this case, but the same could be done through config files or annotations)

- Parse requests into a request class

- Setup a middleware chain, including a router, and dispatch a request through it

How is this different from flask/django (python), rails (ruby), or gin (golang)? I'd say the basic concepts are pretty much the same, except maybe the library handling part. In other words, I don't think there's enough "meat" in this example to appreciate actual relevant language differences.

Also, you can write "java-like, enterprisey" code (Symfony) that values explicitness over magic, or go the other way around following the "convention over configuration" mantra, and end up at Laravel that is much more Rails-like.

Finally, PHP is still has several advantages over java for many people out there:

- Every request starts from scratch, meaning it is impossible to accidentally provoke side-effects on other requests

- The package system (composer) is just a package management system, and hence MUCH simpler to understand than ant/maven/ivy, that are entire build systems that also want to control testing, deployment, and everything

- Development is faster-paced thanks to the lack of compilation. You can even easily setup an environment with auto-reloading and just "save updated code" -> "see result in less than a second".

- You can deploy your app to any of a horde of (cheap) hosting providers and let others deal with the ops side. The service may exist in java-land, but it certainly isn't as ubiquitous.

- PHP programmers are cheap (yes, cheaper than java-programmers).
Does not look like it’s launched/final yet...
what os do my you need to run it?
> Oh, man, can’t move there. Too red. You don’t know if you could be surrounded by Trump voters. They share your fiscal views but don’t align with you on social issues. Austin is blue, but the rest of the state has the guns. Can’t deal. Move on.

Thought that was pretty funny.

More seriously, this kind of lazy dismissal of a place based on a notion of "oh ho ho, it has gasp Republicans, in rural areas!" is kinda exactly the problem we face--and you can bet your ass that red-tribe has no problem colonizing the pearl-clutching blue-tribe regions.

Can people that think like this articulate what it is that distresses them? Can they articulate why it is a valid concern? No, no they cannot.
In his circa 1985 book Body Electric, Robert O. Becker M.D. cites to several published research studies he conducted related to acceleration of mitosis by electromagnetic fields.
Facebook lost billions in days and is poised to lose more.

I imagine there are more pressing issues than the difficulty of implementing a schema.
So what about the cdns? They're all overselling too? Otherwise they'd obviously have to charge amazon prices?

From eg Hetzner and other less affordable hosts (and from second hand comments here on hn about bandwidth is where amazon has ridiculously high margins) - I'll venture that the "cloud" providers get away with it because on average "actual" bandwidth correlate with "actual" usage: and hence correlate with actual users that pay or are worth paying "for".

I get 30tb/month bw with my 50/month hetzner dedicated server (along with 1gps uplink). And I can actually use that.

I can't even see backing stuff up to a typical "cloud" provider, because testing restore of a single tb of data/month would be too expensive.
I'd play that racing game for a few minutes.
His son? I think it was his brother. His sister played the princess IIRC. He might have used a video camera from his father to capture the movements. Jordan Mechner was still quite young when creating POP.
Best I can tell, pretty much everything he describes is already part of Common Lisp. “Gradual Typing”, for example has a long history in Lisp, and is pretty much the default way to write programs.
It was his brother, David Mechner. http://www.gameanim.com/2014/01/07/prince-persia-rotoscopy/.
I first saw it on a monochrome XT, and it looked amazing in just two colors.

A friend of my brother's played through it on the Amiga, right to the end. He did it while I was watching, although I never managed to finish it. I'm not sure if the Amiga version was any easier than the other versions. Still fun, though.
> Jan Zelenys Mashinky on Steam

Proprietary, payware, only on Steam, with empty installation instruction[0]... No, thanks.

I prefer OpenTTD as already avaliable for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, Symbian, etc. Fully free & opensource.

[0] https://mashinky.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installation
Not feeling too bad about my back of the napkin guess being off by one server at 53 vs 54. :)
This reminds me of those many YouTube vidoes showing extremely old machinery such as cars being started after many decades of inactivity. There's a certain indescribable feeling when something like this happens.
So..8tb vs 4tb? If paying for bw.. Seems reasonable?
I think what I'm taking issue with isn't anything about comparing them to self driving cars, it's that you characterize them as "trivial to build". They are not. They coordinate a significant number of life-critical systems, react to minute perturbations in the air stream with microsecond precision, and do so with such a high level of precision that human pilots are often forbidden from overriding them outside of specific situations. I don't know what gave you the impression that these systems were basic or trivial, but they have been at the cutting edge of systems automation for decades.
Review from 2017:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h4t33tOG60
I heavily question the assumption that learning philosophy or ethics courses will make one more ethical. I think being required to do something makes it less likely to take it heart in my experience.
They should be careful not to obstruct justice. ;-)
It's not that requires are hard to follow, it's just that you most likely don't want to mess around with requiring files manually instead of easily doing it by using autoloaders.

You can do it, but it's most likely a bad idea to mess around with it considering namespaces and such.
> Thats just how the internet work. Content must be paid for somehow.

Not true. Some (most?) of the best content on the internet is there completely for free, because people believe in it and put it out there out of their own pocket.

The internet is worse, because of the content that is paid for by the methods you describe, than the internet of the 90s when content was there by the methods I just described.

I do think there's some value in paying artists and writers for their work, with, you know, money, because those people have to eat too. But I refuse to buy into this narrative where "I pay you for content and you give me content" (a consensual transaction) is the same as "I request content from you and you pretend to give it to me for free while secretly violating my privacy, stealing my attention, and otherwise screwing me without my consent". These are not the same thing.

This is not "just how the internet works", it's how a few people have decided they want the internet to work because it's profitable to them, and we don't have to put up with it.
I'd be inclined to agree with #11, in that domination is always motivated by resources, and aliens visiting earth would likely already have all the resources they need. I'd hope they are motivated by curiosity more than trying to get hydrocarbons or whatever.
So, if you are ever in Miami, you can take a 45 minute drive down to their old facility at the edge of the Everglades in Homestead. Bring/rent a mountain bike because the last 2 miles are closed road. Great place to run.

Even cooler, there is still a test missile in a silo in one of the remaining structures. There is all sorts of interesting rusting hulks out there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerojet#Florida_facility_and_c...

[2] http://www.abandonedfl.com/aerojet-dade/
I am in general deeply skeptical of gradual typing, partially from my own underwhelming experiences with MyPy, and partially because 99% of the time when I hear someone advocating for them, they (1) take as given that dynamic typing makes for more productivity (which does not reflect my own experience), and therefore don't try to justify the claim at all, and (2) they say what gradually types give you is not having to annotate things up front. Types have not required manual annotations since at least 1978 (the original hindley-milner type system which, I will note, while not new, is still more recent than prolog).

TFA does all of the above, plus a parenthetical saying "inference is addressed in the next section" -- and then does not actually address inference later in the post.

I'd much rather have type inference than optional typing.
You're here way too soon. You need to make it work super easily so that signup is as easy as venmo.
And yet my phone can't last three full years.
Are they actually reaction-based or do they work like carnival / fair games where they're actually completely rigged and only pretend to involve reaction timing as a lure?
The tree would take what you burned and bring it back down because it's working in the dilute context already. Ethanol, or other biofuels, are nominally a closed cycle because you burn what you captured then capture it again. Now it's true corn ethanol is problematic for a variety of reasons (not least of which is use of fertilizer), but the concept of carbon neutrality in biofuels is mostly sound. The tricky part is to do it at scale, and reliably.
The ones I know tend to be b2b technology, or some kind of backend thing. I vaguely know that there are people doing consumer stuff but I don't care about consumer so I forget the details.

Here's one of the more prominent folks I know. http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?TRID=381

https://github.com/kazuho
Yup, come back when you can target an ATtiny.
Many good comments here pointing out the reasons for this. One overarching problem I see is that academia (just like many/most institutions) is a bubble. People who are immersed in it are only able to see the way things work from the limited perspective of that academic bubble. There are few senior members of the bubble (in this case professors) who can really teach you to think in terms of the bigger picture of life and society as a whole. And even if they exist, there isn't a class for that.

When a starry-eyed high school graduate with little knowledge of how the world works, but with a strong interest in and ability to do science, goes to a top research university, he gets a lot of that academic bubble viewpoint. He's not taught to think independently or to identify and question the fundamental assumptions of that bubble. So he just takes it all in and does "the right thing" to go on to get a PhD, without necessarily thinking about all the implications for how it determines the rest of his life.

Doubly so if he comes from a cultural background that puts academic achievement and degrees on a pedestal. A lot of Asian cultures, for instance.

I don't know if there's a top-down solution for this. Any institution will be blind to the fact that it isn't able to look at the big picture of reality with minimal bias. It is really up to those of us who are aware of these issues to talk about this on the internet, and hope that as more people use the internet, curious individuals can learn enough to make a good decision.

BTW, the above description is based on myself. I am Asian American, had a sheltered suburban upbringing, really excelled at math and science, got almost full scores on college entrance exams, went to college at a top research university, etc. This university was really geared toward pushing people into scientific research. Fortunately I wasn't good at research but was great at building things, and realized early enough that I should go into industry. I've learned so much more about the world since then through my experiences outside of academia.
Sorry to disappoint by not making it declarative style (css file) but injected as needed using JavaScript; maybe it's not true "CSS3" that way.
There's nothing there which clarifies that "delete" isn't a euphemism for "flag it to no longer be displayed to users" like it is everywhere else where companies collect data on users, so you'll excuse my skepticism.
>Secretly from whom?

The vast majority of users.
No, this is probably serious; this is The New PHP.

Seems we finally broke the fever of infectious imperative spaghetti and are coming around to OOP and patterns by following the trail left by JVM ecosystem and eating its droppings and clothing ourselves in its shed skin.
Off the top of my head:

* type inference

* message passing concurrency
> "...Code Igniter or Zend (basically the only two frameworks back then)..."

wat?!

i coded php in the early/mid 2000's and had at least a half dozen frameworks available to choose from even then. for example, i used fusebox after starting to create my own framework and finding that it already (mostly) did what i had wanted to do.
Snapchat claims to. And after the trouble they once got into for not deleting media after it was viewed, I believe them.

https://www.snap.com/en-GB/privacy/privacy-policy/
I've worked on PHP pretty much non-stop since PHP/FI
and while this is a good try, it goes off the rails telling people they need a DI library, container and how routes SHOULD work, which is pure hubris. I won't be pointing to this as a good example.
This captures my feelings exactly. Even on this forum where I used to feel people would look at scenarios through a neutral lens, I see the dumbest, most outrageous conspiracy theories being upvoted to the top purely because they paint FB in a negative light. If I worked at FB I would definitely be keeping a low profile, lest some tinfoil hat nutjob got a hold of my comments, snipped a few words, and presented them in a negative light to the public completely out of context.
Sorry, that's probably the wrong word for it. I meant the vibe of "Patrick really wanted me to change this, so I did, but not quite how he had envisioned".
The PlayStation store, where literally the point is to pay for content, puts a reCaptcha on log in, and (for me) it quite often triggers the "Please flag all images containing cars/signs/shop fronts" version.

Edit: fixed typo/missing word
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=647FIQMR6jg

This is where I heard it. I'd make the suggestion to open your mind very wide however, it is very easy to dismiss what he says because of the way he says it.
DOJ asks Supreme Court to moot Microsoft email case, citing new law
The gzip version is actually the larger of the two.
I considered this a feature. It's interesting to compare true convo vs what's left after people have backtracked and deleted messages. Especially when the convo was daring so to speak. ;)
Not just billions but tens of billions. Somewhere around $50B.
Just because what you say is historically true doesn’t mean it will always be true. One would have thought the #metoo movement should have happened decades ago with women’s lib movement but here it is 2018.

Information is massively more knowable now and bad behavior isnt hiding very well anymore. I’m putting my money on a-holes not winning like they use to.
Facebook Plans Crackdown on Ad Targeting by Email Without Consent
I thought it was quite good. It shows a Facebook-like company that goes to the extreme of getting people to make their lives completely public, and I don't want to give it away, but then shows the dangers of that.
I get downvoted when I say anything remotely negative about PHP, in threads devoted to PHP, but perhaps my thoughts will make sense if I emphasize that I used to love PHP. It was my first real language, and I built my first business around it. That was in the year 2000. That was in the era before modern package managers, when PHP's huge standard library was a tremendous benefit, because the alternative meant using something like Perl, where you had to download every module from CPAN and cobble it together yourself. PHP was a dream compared to that.

But 18 years have passed. Every language now has very good package managers. There is an abundance of dynamic languages, most of whom are more consistent than PHP.

I'm not going to waste your time with a long PHP rant. I just hope that everyone is aware that the huge benefits that PHP offered in 2000 are no longer valid. If you are programming in PHP, you owe it to yourself to explore some of the many options that are out there. There has been incredible innovation among software languages since 2000, but PHP has mostly tended to follow a conservative path, mostly imitating Java.

For anyone who won't be bored by another PHP rant, I wrote my thoughts on this subject back in 2014:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/why-php-is-obsolete
Though it's not like you don't need experience with those same packages if you go the laravel way.

A developer shouldn't have an issue working with either. It's all PHP and all sane PHP frameworks are mostly based on the same concepts, with some tradeoffs here and there...
The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures
In Front of Your Nose – The Orwell Prize
The 'Roomba of toilets' exists only to clean your skid marks
I think there is strong sense of “we’re not the old PHP anymore, we cut our hairs and wear suits with ties now” in the community.

In a lot of fronts it means mimicking Java, but I think it still is more flexible (and less reliable as the other side of the coin).
It’s still very easy to drop down to “quick and dirty” code anywhere it’s needed, and it still benefits from a very low bootstrap cost to deal with single command/requests.
my impression (and I've been using grubhub more often that uber eats) is that the uber eats pooling is more like the 'uber x' pooling, in that the driver is completing another delivery before it picks you (or your food) up. My impression is that the driver, once they pick up your food, heads straight to you. I could be wrong, as the last few months I've been using doordash.

Is this important? I'm not sure. I mean, it's certainly possible for kitchens to do things (heat lamps, not combining ingredients) to store cooked food longer, things that aren't done in cars, so it is possible that time spent waiting at the kitchen matters less than travel time.
GraphQL Didn't Kill REST
I think a lot of it is context. For example when I lived in Russia, I didn't know kids could be nice to each other. It was a doggy-dog world where I grew up. When I came to Canada, it took me 4-5 years to stop mad-dogging people and relax.

Had I stayed there, being on alert your whole life and dropping dead at 55 would've been very normal indeed.

This is why people who get someplace and then lose it, are the ones who tend to kill themselves, or folks who have a hard time fitting in from the get-go. For most people, they don't know things could be different, so they're fine with what is.
I wonder if things are just as brutal when you take industry into account as a place to wind up post-PhD. There are research labs in industry that are interested in hiring PhDs. But maybe this is just the rose coloured glasses we have in CS.
Facebook doesn’t maliciously expose private user data in order to inflict harm on people.
> The internet is worse, because of the content that is paid for by the methods you describe, than the internet of the 90s...

Yeah, when people comment that online content must be subsidized, I always find it a little ironic. They're contributing information and analysis to a discussion. Who's paying the subscription fee?

How could such a lifestyle, where they give away their mental energy for free, possibly be sustainable?

The frequent rebuttal of "but my comments are low quality and barely worth anyone's time!" is fun too.
Great link!
> Anything submitted to Facebook is the property of Facebook.

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion.

Are we to accept that this is how it works simply because Facebook says this is how it works?
What I also notice in Australia is when that music plays the volume slowly tends to zero. I worry that I've lost reception, but when they pick up its fine. I also notice the phone seems to "know" its on hold as there is an audible cue, so perhaps the carrier is deprioritising on hold audio.
A good idea if only because the natural world contains technology far beyond what humans are capable of engineering today. I use the word technology loosely here. Plants and animals are self-sustaining, self-replicating, intelligent, et cetera. We depend on this natural technology to survive.

However, it's a tough political sell for many people (and many powerful people). The more of us who put up money, the closer to the goal we are.

Charities such as the Nature Conservancy finance nature preserves... I'm curious about other organizations and philanthropists who do too.
Block Facebook scripts, widgets, buttons in Safari (iOS) with Quiet
Do we have to pick exactly one bad guy?
I think they are made more difficult by when Google observes "bot-like" activity coming from you. When they started the "I'm not a robot" checkbox, I used to be able to just check the box and it would let me through, every time. Then, one day I had to download several dozen files, and each download had one of these checkboxes. The first 10 or so files, it let me through like it always did. Then it started giving me one CAPCHA screen for the next 10 files. Then 2 screens. Then 3, and so on. That was several years ago, and ever since then it always gives me a long series of difficult CAPCHAs every single time. I guess Google still thinks I'm a bot even after several years of solving these things pretty consistently (I'd say I have about 90% success rate).

For the record, I do tag boxes containing only sign posts, or only tiny slivers of signs.
One reason is it's a lot easier to demo in person because you just need a browser. I wouldn't design any serious API with query params but I can understand the appeal.