skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, thats what distinguishes between good and bad IT departments. Companies which looked at IT as a cost center tended to have bad IT service, where as those who viewed it as a value-added service had good IT service.

I use to do IT consulting and bounced in and out of dozens of companies. Some had no IT support, others had us augment their IT team. The best IT department was at a company where there was about one IT worker for every three employees. A ratio typically unheard of, this company spent greatly on IT as everything had to run smoothly. IT was at an employees desk within a minute if any trouble arouse. They were very profitable of course.

The worst companies spent as little as they could on IT. One literally asked me if I could setup their Windows NT 4 box because their Windows 2000 Server was having issues. This was only a few years ago, and they didn't want to buy a new Win 2008 box. Eventually they did, but it was months of pain and plenty of downtime before it happened. Everything else in the company smelled of cheapness too, all in a bad way; Penny wise, dollar foolish.

Also, if the IT-to-employee ratio is really low, like 1 per 200 employees, and systems aren't locked-down super tight, IT HelpDesk can constantly be in a position of stress with more requests than it can handle. This is typically the reason for long delays.

It's like any service center, really. If you want good service, you have to pay for it. Call up Apple's tech support, and then call up Lenovo's. Both do the same thing. But one is really really good, and the other terrible. Guess who views their tech support as a cost center and who doesn't? (Hint: You can tell if you don't see a tech support phone number on the front of their tech support webpage.)
According to their twitter feed, if you increase your purchase to $10 then you can get FLACS. They also added torrents cause someone wanted that. Apparently they are just that awesome.
I've gone through periods of very high cannabis use, but recently i've massively reduced my intake. But i think its the frequency with which i smoke - everyday - that can be damaging in the way i described. It doesn't ruin my life: i won't lose my job, and i can still go about my normal duties perfectly fine. However my tendency is to do the minimal amount possible to get by, instead of excelling and doing anything above and beyond that.

100% agree with your assertion of heightened imagination and visualisation, it also changes your thought patterns in such a way that your train of thinking may lead to interesting perspectives that you would have never otherwise arrived at. It's what drew me to cannabis in the first place; intellectually i was intrigued by the creativity cannabis brought on. That said, a creative mind does not a productive person make! it's one thing to visualise etc. but it's the doing/execution part that seems so far out of reach when you're under the influence of cannabis. At least that's what i've come to realise.

As for habit-forming, I've always smoked cannabis with tobacco, but never smoked tobacco alone. This puts put me in quite a unique position in that after ten years i clearly have a nicotine addiction, meaning my use of nicotine is so entwined with my cannabis use that it's hard to mentally separate the two. Over time it occurred to me that i could never be sure whether i wanted to get stoned because i enjoyed the sensation, or whether it was purely for want of nicotine, with getting stoned being a proxy for that. Interestingly, i have recently quit smoking cannabis inasmuch that i now use a vaporiser to get high, which means i have also cut out tobacco completely. It's been around 5 weeks since i last smoked cannabis with tobacco, and i definitely have less of a want to get stoned, so i guess my suspicions were correct - nicotine was fueling my cannabis habit to some degree.

That link was intriguing, especially the inverse proportionality of benefits vs. dose size. It must be remembered however that the drug administered was a synthetic form of THC, not actual THC - presumably there were modifications to the molecular structure else they would have just used a THC extract straight from the plant. I'm sure it can still be taken as indicative of potential benefits of actual THC as a therapeutic drug though.

I think overall i'm just going through a transition period in my life, a slight epiphany; realising that i've been abusing cannabis and that my use has been detrimental to other areas of my life. My recreational use grew into habitual use, which brought with it a constant lack of boredom, leaving me unproductive and demotivated. I expect that i'll have all but given up cannabis within a year, if my current trend of usage continues. Maybe i'm just growing out of it, or that perhaps my desire to be productive is finally outweighing my desire to get high. Either way, i feel good about the changes.
A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review is very much intended to challenge a delete which already happened, and that page has guidelines and instructions for starting one. Actually somebody already did it two days ago, because they regard your new cites as more substantive than the junk that was offered last month: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review#Jessi...
I've noticed IT people will often try to bluff their way through problems with some technobabblely bs. (Probably because they're trying to maintain the image of the "know it all".) If you ever hear "I'm not sure, I'll have to look into it.", you probably have a good IT guy.
Group insurance should be abolished. Take the whole country as one big group. It doesn't make sense to have small groups negotiate their coverage.
There are a ton of things that could be said on this topic. But one basic issue is that most IT departments are built from the ground up on diametrically opposed goals. The first being to equip the company with the tools it needs to function. And the second being to avoid any change with undue risk or opportunity for abuse.

Typically IT managers' self-interest calls for a focus on the second goal. So upper management must create incentives that reward a focus on the first goal and diminish the consequences to IT when something goes amok.

For situations where risk management is more critical, a separate department that can share its message and enforce policies across all departments can help reduce conflicts and allay suspicions of IT having unhelpful motives.
>But for many Californians, struggling through a bleak era that has led some people to wonder if the state’s golden days are behind it, this project goes to the heart of the state’s pioneering spirit, recalling grand public investments in universities, water systems, roads and parks that once defined California as the leading edge of the nation.

well, why don't we return the golden days and invest these billions in the universities, water systems, roads and parks ... And if there some money left - for healthcare and basic school education. That would definitely put CA back on the leading edge of the nation.
First off, any department is ONLY as good as it's management. Don't like IT, don't blame the worker, blame the manager. Second, most users have an IQ somewhere between a pet rock and a retarded monkey. Even a Special Ed teacher loses there patience after explaining the same thing over and over and over and over again. Third, IT is NOT your personal Slave - Learn how to operate your own damn computer. Forth, IT and Helpdesk are TWO different skill sets, don't hate IT because you have problems with the Helpdesk. Fifth, most places underfund IT, then bitch when things don't work out. Sixth if IT is so damn bad, fire the lot and see how long your company stays afloat - IT keeps everything except the stupid users working perfectly, but the one thing they don't control (i.e. the users) is the one thing that causes 90% of the problems

No, I'm not in IT (I'm a Scientist, not an Engineer), but I've observed plenty of people bitch about IT when most times the fault is strictly their own.
M-x speedbar

or Options > Show/Hide > Speedbar

More info: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SpeedBar
It would be awesome if it was just 4 yrs. The current EB3 wait-time for indian and chinese nationals is estimated to be around 70 years.
Oh snap :D
Sure its not a fixed solution, however to me it doesn't mean that the idea isn't worthy of discussion.

I'm not sure where you see this belittling coming from... maybe I'm missing something? I certainly didnt see any belittling of programmers here.
That catchphrase is stupid. This isn't reddit.
Would any of this help with producing a panorama? That's all I could think of.
Here's a link to the code that I found in the blog post (I'm assuming it has the jQuery code, but I'm not sure): https://github.com/bertrandom/unshred
I think this tendency to mythologize certain financial derivatives is weird. The concept of a macro is way more complex than the concept of a credit default swap. To demonstrate, here is (in my opinion) an explanation of credit default swaps that a person with no financial background should be able to understand.

A bond is a contract created and sold by an "issuer". The issuer can be a government or a company. Ownership of the bond entitles you to payments from the issuer. The specific number and size of payments varies from bond to bond. Once the issuer sells the bond to someone, that person can sell the bond to anyone else they want.

A credit default swap is a contract between two parties (neither of which is necessarily the aforementioned issuer) that are usually called the protection buyer and the protection seller. This contract is made in reference to someone called the reference entity. The protection buyer agrees to make a series of payments to the protection seller in exchange for the protection seller's promise that, in the case of a "credit event", they will give the protection buyer either some specified amount of money or some specified amount of bonds. The nature of the payments and the meaning of "credit event" vary from contract to contract, but generally a "credit event" is understood to have occurred if the reference entity (which is always an issuer) fails to make payments on some of the bonds it has sold. Either party in the contract is free to find someone else to take up their side of the trade at whatever price they can negotiate.

The only thing you needed to know to understand that was what a contract was, but if you want to understand macros, you really need to know what an interpreter is.
Glad someone did! It's a work in progress - there are other parts to it, just felt that excerpt was particularly apt :)

I agree that infrequent use is not worrisome, perhaps even beneficial - I always found when I was a less frequent user it made me more conscientious, more constructively critical of my actions/behvaiour and allowed me to see through life's issues with greater clarity (at least that was my perception!).

I'd be happy to get to that stage where my use is recreational and infrequent, which i think i will eventually, it's my next milestone
"If what you are saying is wrong we'll find you and kick you out like dogs" - An actual dialogue blurted out by the immigration "officer" at the port of entry.
Chat room for the Hacker News community
Someone should make an anonymous chat room for the Hacker News and start-up community. I'd totally use it. :)
A lot of my problems with IT departments would be solved if the IT folks recognized that people with degrees in computer engineering and computer science tend to be able to take care of their own machines.

Also, if they would quit telling me that I can't run VLC because it's not secure, when they have 3 year old versions of the Java Runtime Environment installed on everyone's PC.
Invest in roads - presumably for cars powered by oil to drive on?

Now that's a long term vision of the future!
I think GitHub should treat them differently. Maybe you and I are browsing projects that see completely opposite patterns of creation, forking, and upkeep. I said somewhere here before that the original is usually the best, most reliable, and useful to more people than most others. When I see a list of forks I do browse a few but always end up at the master and the master is usually the best one for me.

If I had to pick one day to do things I'd keep them as is. But having some sort of filtering mechanism where we can sort by hierarchy, activity, most recent commit, and others would be absolution that makes everyone happy. I wonder how feasible that is.

And again, I have to defend you against this rambling attack... This was a blog post, not a book submitted for publishing, not a thesis paper, not scientific research - it was a personal blog and you've got your own writing style like all of us do. You stated a position, gave examples, supported your arguments and I'd say that maybe you could have gotten to certain points sooner or maybe not. It doesn't matter. If some people can't be bothered to read a little bit then they can just move on to another post and not bother to go around insulting people who are just sharing a thought. Don't take shit from people, man.
Am I the only person who doesn't see this as Instagram's unshredding project as much as a DARPA one?

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/darpa-wants...
If money were to follow the student free from map restrictions, then how can education be contained by state governance?
That some of the 9/11 attackers entered the US through Canada is a thoroughly debunked myth. Plus, all the attackers entered the US legally, with valid visas. The startling persistence of the myth attests to its power to support a particular side of the debate about 'illegals' or 'weak borders'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumors_about_the_September_11_a...

Misinformation: rumors later shown to be false:

[...]

Claims that terrorists entered the United States through Canada
On September 12, 2001, Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counter-intelligence told the press that five of the terrorists had entered Maine from Canada via a ferry from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and/or a remote border point in Saint-Théophile, Quebec near Jackman, Maine.[1] The myth was revived again in April 2009 when Janet Napolitano, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, informed a Canadian television interviewer that some of the terrorist-hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks entered the United States from Canada. In the same month, senator John McCain also told Fox News that some of the 9/11 hijackers did come through Canada.[2]
"Within six years Cai was able to leverage his money and know-how into building a factory of his own, which now employs more than 100 people."

That is why wages rise. When workers can compete with their employers, workers have to be paid more.
Between refreshes, the number of signatures needed jumped from 3 to 16. I wonder what happened.
Of course you will need Euros for day to day expenses. The idea would be to move your savings onto USD or GBP before the exchange rates spike and convert them back into $local_currency after things in europe settle down.

...can you short a currency somehow?

If you have the right brokerage account you can trade currency futures and options but be careful. Such trading is generally very leveraged and the possibility of losing all of your principle is very real(1) so be sure you understand the risks.

(1) this does not apply to buying options.
In cases where you've moved on and someone else is taking over as a fork, can't you just delete your repo and have the entire hierarchy just shift? I'm honestly asking because I've deleted a ton of repos but none that have been forked so I'm curious.
I wonder if some of these barriers could be dropped fairly easily. For example, a few startups could get together and open source their legal boilerplate.
1. A peg is not a common currency/currency union. Critically, you readily come on and off a peg.

2. Various types of gold standards have failed many times in history, including pegs to gold. The reason is almost always the same: countries will overspend no matter what currency they use - wars/militarism are often the excuse. Notable failures include:

- helping worsen, if not cause, the US Great Depression (US Fed decided to defend the peg to gold);

- helping cause the Weimar German hyperinflation (due to the victors taking almost all the German gold reserves for WWI reparations).

3. Free floating, market-traded fiat currencies solved the core problem of a physical fixed currency like gold. But like gold, they do not, nor can they, prevent governments continuing to overspend. However, they do allow a mechanism to punish them for doing so, i.e. the capital markets!

Unfortunately, the capital markets are unable to enforce their own brand of spanking and consolation in this case because there are no individual currencies per government in the Eurozone. So, it has to whip them using the main stick it has left which are the separate sovereign debts, but cannot console them with lower currencies.

After leaving these individual sovereign debt markets in droves and therefore causing government borrowing costs for EZ countries to soar to unsustainable levels, everyone in the markets is finally starting to realise there is no upside in being involved in a common currency which is killing its members.

Locked in a sub-optimal currency area, unable to raise affordable funds, unable to devalue currency, forced to reduce debt levels by austerity, no ability to import inflation (which would reduce real level of debts) because the world economy is entering a downturn, no fiscal union therefore no fiscal transfers, uncompetitive industries and low productivity due to decades of binge spending, therefore low or negative growth outlook...

This is a painful way for any sovereign to live and at some point something has to give!
>Invest in roads - presumably for cars to drive on powered by oil. Now that's a long term vision of the future!

roads are presumably for wheeled vehicles. Until you can show a good prospects for flying cars, we need roads.

Edit: Despite the lobby and being favored by the political system, the use of fossil fuels in cars is going away. Even today, the 30KW batteries weighting 500kg will get you 150mi range at the price $10-20K - about the price and weight of ICE engine + transmission. The avalanche is starting ... The argument that there is no infrastructure to fill-up the electric cars is BS - the electricity is everywhere, including existing gas stations. Some upgrades may be necessary though - this is exactly minor (compare to the rail system) investment that would provide huge return.
This would be beat with a very high success rate if it were a captcha.
But if you believe that the exchange rate is going to move in favor of the dollar, the sensible thing to do is still to switch almost all of your euros into dollars and convert back gradually as you need to actually use them to buy things.
I don't know about other fields, but math papers have an abstract, then a section called "Introduction" which has some background and motivation and ends with an overview of the rest of the paper, and then the remainder has the details.
I took a try at a theory of this: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-do-engineers-...
Short summary: it's due to the historical intermediate and uncertain class status of engineering as a profession.
> photography 101 course

I did not follow any 101 course but if they are anything like French education, then I disagree with you.

A course about photography would be made by someone having this topics as its main focus in life since 10 years or more, it would start with some history, some physic, some chemistry, maybe some mathematics grounds and gather them all in a comprehensive photography topic, etc. Even a short course summary on three pages would reflect this comprehensiveness.

While Peter Norvig's article is a simple exploration path. One start from one simple easy to understand problem (here it is taking good pics of his daughter dancing, in another paper it was solving all sudoku puzzles) and go to its resolution in a few steps. The sequence of steps he chose is interesting in itself, and maybe it is what feels the most "scientific" here: all of them are necessary to attain the goal. But while Norvig guide us on this path, he also and "by-the-way" shows some interesting landscapes in the far. It is not a "I'll explain you all about x", it is more "I walked this path and some other might be interested", and that what's make his article interesting to me.
Yeah, I did. Sorry, I took that wrong. That used to be a working domain when I first had it in the profile. I just pointed the name servers to another hosting account but I'm not quite ready to do anything with it which is why it was dead. Thanks for reminding me it was in my profile though. I did forget that.
To be pulled by horses or mexican immigrants ?

Edit: well you might get the range if you want to drive tiny little Honda golf carts at 30mph. But what about real men that want to drive a 5000hp electric train at 300mph
In societies that are not yet rich enough to allow them not to, children work.
#startups channel
freenode irc server

have fun
Finding Purpose After Living With Delusion
Quantum computing and light switches
C-x dired is your friend.
Well that's fine, as long as you're willing to accept the blame when things go wrong. But most companies simply don't work that way.
That's interesting - can you summarise his objections here briefly? I haven't read this book (yet) but I find it hard to see how anyone could make a coherent argument against flow for programmers. In fact, there's all sorts of literature showing that concentration is incredibly important (c.f. Peopleware).
The wingspan required for something like a manned spacecraft would put the Spruce Goose to shame. You need something huge to be able to slow you to a reasonable speed.