skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny thing: the word "school" is actually the ancient Greek word for leisure. The idea was, if you had the means to live a life of leisure, then of course you'd spend it learning and talking about cool stuff with other similarly well-off people.

Somewhere along the way, they turned school into just another form of work. Unlike regular work, it doesn't produce anything. It has all the stress and unpleasantness of regular work (more, even), except you can't use the most efficient method to get it done (that would be delegating the work to someone who likes it), and it consumes time and other resources without yielding benefits. The theory is that learning happens as a side-effect, but the reality is, it doesn't. Seriously, if you wanted to set up a business to help people learn subjects to a high level of mastery, you wouldn't do it anything like a (modern) college.

I wonder, though, if professors live (or at least can live) the kind of life we want: they are basically paid to indulge their curiosity, and their only measurable obligation is that they have to teach some classes. If you're a cool professor, you might even find a way to make the classes worthwhile.

This is the route I've just started on. I'm now in my first semester of grad school. I'm hoping to treat the experience as "school" in the ancient sense of the word. In six or seven years, I plan to get a tenure-track job, indulging my curiosity. I figure since that's play-time for me, I should be great at it and enjoy it.

Results so far: terrible. Taking three grad-level classes at once (and teaching one class) chewed up so much time, I had almost no time to think or learn or sleep. Complicating factor: I had a headache that lasted six weeks, and I started the semester exhausted. Mid-semester, I was so exhausted, I took a three-week break from homework. I got my ability to think back, but I spent the rest of the semester hustling to catch up.

Plan for next semester: Get a lot of rest over the break, and put all the creativity I can into finishing each day's "work" by 5:30 p.m. so I can follow my whims in the evening.

If that doesn't work, then I'll quit. Or maybe not. I just can't see getting a regular software job again. I've done that cycle of working hard and enjoying it the first several months or a year, and then getting sick of it and barely showing up. I think I am completely burnt out on just getting coding done. I am particularly sick of debugging. Oh, damn, that reminds me, I have to debug some Scheme code for one of those classes.
Some musicians make noise too! Seriously, music teachers etc. also wonder about how to teach, how to determine which studets has potential and so on. But they usually dont do it on HN, so it is probably a case of confirmation bias if you think programmers make more noise or talk and think more about their profession than people in other walks of life.
Not necessarily. If you are a competent developer (ie. dont use copy-paste too often) SLOC is a pretty good metric for how complex you code is. Especially the change over time in SLOC in the same project.

Now if you believe that high and increasing SLOC is always a good thing (rather than perhaps a warning signal), then your hair is getting pointy.
The Brits skip the lunch, gets in the way of drinking.
It contributes that this is trash and I have flagged it because it doesn't belong on HN. It has nothing to do with hackers, we've really had enough bailout-spam lately, and this is one of the least well thought through (although very reddit- and digg-friendly because oh-my-god-look-it's-a-nice-picture), and I hope never to have to rest my weary eyes on this stupid headline again.
Technology gets fossil to reveal its secrets
It is not a ship problem. I'm talking about me being conscious of being alive. If a resurrected body does not contain my consciousness, as my thought experiment shows, then cryonics is pointless since it does not keep me conscious of being alive. If you still think it maps to the ship problem, see if you can exactly demonstrate the mapping.

It's weird that people don't seem capable of distinguishing between their own consciousness and someone else's consciousness.

The practical grounds point is made by others.
That's a bad reason to assume the opposite. If Eliezer's assumptions are valid, then the scenario I outline is just as valid. You can't have one without the other.
it's not cheaper than america... and it requires a prescription, as well
great read, thanks.
Well, that's just a matter of psychology then, not any kind of logical should. I think about death too, but it doesn't seem to bother me like it does others since I don't see a logical reason behind the dread. Sure, the psychological side still gets to me when I stare death in the face, but otherwise not so much.

A logical should would be something like if I were to die I would spend an eternity in ceaseless boredom. That would be a reason to avoid death. Otherwise it is just a false anticipation, like jumping off a high rock when you know it is perfectly safe. I try to eliminate that from my life if I can, which is the rational course of action. I think this is the psychological basis of thrill seeking.

If you look at your own decision making process, you'll see that this procedure is how you also shape your psychological reactions. Say you really dreaded a certain event, such as moving out of your parents house. Then, when the time came, you found you could handle yourself alright. With that knowledge in the back of your mind, you no longer dread similar situations as much. I'm just making this process explicit in how I think about life.
I find the introduction of a hybrid polling/interrupt driven network interface really interesting. Mainly because we did the same work in 2003 on NetBSD for a wireless router that never made it to market. We were at the opposite end of the spectrum. Basically, we were running on a 100 MHz 486 and spent too much time on interrupts with all the network traffic. It's funny that it is the same situation for them on the latest systems out there (of course for some of the same, but some different reasons as well).
Has anyone read the section in Beautiful Code where one of haskell's designers talks about STM in haskell? I thought the code looked pretty neat. It is a very smooth serial semantic for parallel programming, and really fits the beautiful criteria.

Unfortunately, I've recently read that STM is turning out to have too much overhead in practical applications. Hope they figure it out.
I'm doing this currently in a # of ways, e.g. the related topics on the top right and messing with the Yahoo BOSS results (under the human powered results) using information from the Wikipedia topic. I'm of course very interested in ideas for how to do more.
Doc Searls: A World of Producers
Let's hear it for low tech. I like it when people are able to chain existing, simple tools; instead of engineering a new kludge.
I think you are correct, in fact this is common, at least to historians. It doesn't take many generations for knowledge to be lost. Look at how much is reinvented and rediscovered every so many years in computer programming :)

http://www.ams.org/mathmedia/archive/03-2007-media.html

There is also thought to be connections between ancient Taoist texts and physics.
My only gripe with DuckDuckgo is their use of highlighting. The results do not need to be highlighted on hover. I know this is the current trend in webdesign, but to me that kind of highlighting just becomes a distraction.
To address entrepreneurship in Europe misses the point. What Mike Arrington fails to realize is he's only talking about France. When it comes to work ethic, different European countries are world's apart. You can't take countries like France, Germany, the UK and Ireland and blithely treat them as one entity. Behaviors and attitudes to work and to start-ups differ vastly from one country to another.
Yes, there's always ordinary preemptive multi threading. My idea is more of a "proof by example." Even if somehow conventional tools are not enough, there are still ways that Apple can guarantee totally paranoid control, but still give developers background processes.

Also, my scheme is precisely about user applications not getting all the CPU they need. They'll be absolutely guaranteed to only get the miserly little bit we give them. This will come in the form of a single user background process that runs in totally predictable time slices and -- from the POV of the OS -- never throws an exception. (User background code will throw an exception, but it would be virtual.) Thus, we are guaranteed to never get exception handling overhead from the background apps. Likewise, we are saving context switching overhead by using "green processes". One would be able to achieve a completely paranoid level of sandboxing this way.

The purpose of my post is not to do engineering for Apple. It's to show there's no reason for Apple to not give us background processes!
I suppose most businesses face the same problem, at least if they are in a "winner takes all" market? You invest to outperform the competition, and if they win, you basically lose your investments.
I know about aleph, and I understand cardinalities.

There's no way that you value your life infinitely, while you value, say, your opposition to holocausts uncountably infinitely. Do you or ericb truly believe that this is the case, or are you putting me on?

Just because I know there are cardinalities of infinities doesn't mean that it makes sense to claim that the people use these values in their life calculations.

It's very simple, for example, to use arguments from the amount of money a person will accept for a more dangerous job, as byrneseyeview pointed out, to show that people value their lives as a finite number. If people valued their lives infinitely, they would accept no additional money for any increased risk of anything, ever.

Unless of course, people value money infinitely too, and they're doing some sort transfinite math in their heads. Which I think you'll agree is a bit surreal and total nonsense.
A bit more explanation why it doesn't map:

Given another living body constructed exactly the same as mine and in the same state, it still does not have my consciousness. However, physically speaking, both the replicant and my own body are identical, since particles do not have individuality, as Eliezer points out. The ship problem is a question of whether identity obtains, whereas identity is not a question in my thought experiment. Thus, the two do not map.
I've nevertheless just tried to engage as much as possible.
Interesting. I did this for two reasons. 1) To give a much bigger clickable area bc some people really have a difficult time clicking on things, and over time it should shave off time for anyone once discovered you can click anywhere. 2) For keyboard shortcuts, so you know where you are. Of course, there are alternatives for #2, but I didn't find anything as good.
My coworker has a symbolics.com email address. He has a (sometimes) working Lisp machine in his living room.
Scientists find 2,000-year-old brain in Britain
War is all about making the other person stop fighting. War has been around as long as there have been people with different opinions and the will to use force to settle them.

These are super-ethical issues: ie, they exist regardless of your opinion of them. I hope there is no disagreement on them.

Throughout history all of the techniques you mention have been used to advance society in order to put you in a position of modern life being able to make your opinion to quit fighting under certain circumstances. Since you are alive right now, and must find some value to your life, it follows that after all of these conflicts in which your rules were not followed, there was still something left that was worth fighting for. At least at the level of civilization. So it follows that you at least value the results of other people with fewer qualms than you. Otherwise you should be living in a cave by firelight -- but fire was probably stolen by force involving torture, mass killings, etc. as well, so put the torch out.

That's at a civilization level. At a personal level, many folks throughout history have had moral issues with various parts of war. In the United States, many many times the rest of the populace fought wars the Quakers refused to participate in. In this case, either 1) you die, 2) you submit, or 3) somebody else with fewer moral qualms fights the war for you.

Morals are a key part of your personal life. I just wouldn't substitute my personal morals for my greater responsibility to mankind. My personal morals might be wrong, and if morals mean anything they mean the ability to introspect and change. I'm fully prepared to be wrong and face the personal consequences to me if my morals tell me to do or not to do something. It becomes selfish and grossly immoral, in my opinion, to inflict consequences on others under the banner of my own self-righteousness. War is a nasty, ugly business and it should be avoided at all costs mainly because of this equation: it strips us all to the primal need to dominate or die.

That's just my opinion. I would not mean to judge. I've found self-righteousness on both sides of the "just war" discussion, and it seems to hide the greater issue of how mankind as a race reacts and suffers.
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All that work for a yourmom.com joke.
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"What are the odds of them all dying?"

"You'll get the last one standing!"
I've been using a homegrown solution for years. I've learned more than I ever wanted to about spam filters, having IPs greylisted, throttling delivery speeds etc. I've decided it's not worth our time anymore to keep up with all the latest requirements at hotmail,yahoo,gmail,comcast etc. So we're in the final stages of switching to http://cakemail.com as our "back end." Their api has worked flawlessly and lets us control everything. So far we're happy with them. Another good solution (but expensive unless you get to really high volumes) is strongmail.
Www.galottery.com-Business-Open Directory
The solution I know of is to use Flash as a proxy to copy to the clipboard. I don't think there is a standard way of doing this without going through Flash.
Please see counterpoint to Pascal's Wager. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager
>> "eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them? Is the future such a utopia that not only have we solved overpopulation, but we're desperately looking to bring back long frozen bodies with severe medical problems?"

What if I am a cobol programmer, and they need me to fix the Year9999 bug?
Iphone app turns phone into credit card terminal
Yes, we're asuming different meanings for "hacker", and I was hoping for the one I take is the more accepted one for this site (Hacker News), those who are "trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression" (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html)

In any case, point taken as I probably got a bit carried away on my comment above, the talk referenced is more about the collaborative benefits new technologies bring to us.
Well, I'm British, yet I sometimes find myself using US spellings when posting in an online place with lots of Americans.
Bookmark to instapaper. Come back and read later
You're implying that we would not be able to enjoy all the benefits of modern life (or even our own existence) if it wasn't for the atrocities of the past. I don't agree with that. The things I find valuable in the present might still be here, and more on top of it, if history had taken a differnt course.

But I never denied that some wars are justified. I'm just saying that winning them is not worth throwing out of the window all the things that we want to achieve by winning them.

Your logic is that by accepting defeat (in some extreme cases) instead of using torture and mass murder I also accept that these very things do in fact take hold. That's not a necessary conclusion though. Even lost wars have sometimes had the exact opposite effect of what the winner had expected. And vice versa you could win a war but lose the argument so thoroughly that the principles of your enemy prevail for generations.

Put differently, it is important how wars are won, not just that they are won, because wars are not the end of the world and we have to live with the consequences of how things were done in past wars.
Dave Packard's 11 simple rules
The fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.

Just because Steve Jobs said it doesn't mean it's a fact, you know.
I'm betting there are some industries that are doing bumper business, and usually see a peak in a recession.

For some industries/products, the recession is great news I'm sure.
Not sure if you'll like this answer, but although you may be comfortable with a low income now what about the following future life expenses?

* Marriage/Honeymoon
* Kids/College
* Retirement
* Mortgage/House
* Taking care of parents

I see your plan being tenable in a "no-dependents" scenario, but not so much if you need to provide for others.

My personal opinion is that any job you have will have at least 20% of BS you have to do in any role you have. Its the cost of working with people and organizations. Aim to reach that 20% level an if you can find a job with less BS stick with it.
so it's a solution for 70%+ who don't use safari, stop being an elitest
Sometimes it's hard to believe that the oldest domain is still less than 25 years old.
You already know with high probability when you're gonna die. If anything, living indefinitely (or giving yourself a chance thereof) takes you farther from knowing when you're gonna die.
It's still a finite number, and unless the marginal utility of life goes up over time, it should be less than eight times the original number. So let's say $5 to $50 million. Still not infinite.
Escher's Droste Effect
Most interesting thing is probably the quality of the discussion on HN compared to TC ...

There are some very big differences between europe and the US:

1) Funding - it's trivial to get funding in the valley compared to europe, more former founders, more vc

2) Market Size - the US market is just bigger, of course the combined EU market is even bigger but you need 20 marketing teams to try to work with it

3) Culture - Yes there is no start up culture comparable to the US, but that's not that bad. The work/life balance thing is true in general, but i've never met a european startup founder who doesn't work the weekends.

4) Failing - Failing is not that acceptable, and that's a big obstacle, especially since you have to get more parts of your funding from banks.

5) Cluster
There are only very few technology clusters and none comparable to the valley

6) ...
Famous Awk One-Liners Explained, Part II
Drawing a custom window on Mac OS X
Seth's Blog: When you notice it, it's news
Structure Synth, an application for creating 3D structures
Well, there's two aspects to that. One is that they tell you exactly how it works. The other is the marketing, where they all but promise you cheap goods.

Is it a scam? Is an advertisement for a beer a scam when it promises you women will throw themselves at you if you drink their product? You can play the internet "difference minimization through copious verbiage" game all you like, but I still think there's a qualitative difference.
Chef: a programming language in which programs look like recipes
Esoteric Programming Languages (Piet, Chef, Ook, and more)
Internet Wins Over Sex | TechJaws
Oh! So that's why Google is developing a speedy JS interpreter... they want to be able to see JS-based pages! They can load a page into a browser-with-no-graphics, and give the JS a certain amount of time to run before freezing the page and then reading off the DOM nodes instead of reading HTML. If they don't like the results, they can just use the HTML like they used to.

(Reading off the DOM nodes also gives them a fresh crack at some more semantic analysis that used to be really hard, since it involved emulating a browser... did you use <span class="some_header"> instead of <h1>? They can make a better heuristic guess at that if they are "inside" a browser and thus capable of seeing that the size is twenty points higher than the surrounding text, no matter how you implemented that.)

To really pull this off, you need a browser engine that enough people are using that site designers need to account for it, and it needs to be designed with the goal of running just the engine as quickly as possible on the backend, with the ability to cut it off after a certain amount of time.

So... has anybody dug deeply enough into Chrome to have an opinion on the feasibility of running the browser without a UI?
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FCC delays plan for porn-free Internet
I've been waiting for a Haskell response to that STM article, because the STM article didn't pay any attention to Haskell at all. One criticism of the article fails in Haskell entirely (in Haskell, you don't get the problem of IO repeating if the transaction repeats, because you can't have IO in transactions (barring cheating)). I'd like to hear how their performance compares, and if it does have a lot of overhead, whether they think it'll ever come out.

The fact that there wasn't one leads me to believe that they are susceptible to the same problems and have no hope of getting around it in the future, though; I suspect if that wasn't true, dons would have been all over the comments on proggit, and he was silent. It's thin logic, admittedly, but...
absolutely. i was a programmer at yahoo for almost thirteen years and was laid off. i'm not worried about finding work again, but since i have a nestegg i think i will sit things out for a year or so since job reqs will likely be featuring lower salaries. this makes sense, if i was a hiring employer in a valley of perpetually overextended, consumption obsessed workers, i wouldn't offer top dollar either. people will be taking what they can get to pay their bills.
There's always exceptions. Some law firms essentially specialize in suing companies during a recession. Short sellers and proprietary trading firms are also doing well especially if they longed volatility. The other 99% of the states (world?) is struggling.
I understand why some people want sequential semantics in parallel programs: it's very easy to reason about, especially for those who are used to sequential reasoning (like most imperative programmers). Certainly, if your goal is to use parallelism to speed up your existing software (and this is, indeed, Cilk's goal) then it makes lots of sense.

But most software programs can accept a little nondeterminism. Object-oriented design (at least, GOOD design) is built around the fact that your object's methods might be called at any time; you're just providing an interface. So (this was a programming language idea I was working on for a while) why don't we make it work that way? Make all method calls asynchronous, make methods transactions upon objects, and just schedule as many method calls in parallel as you can get your hands on. Good for server design, potentially good for parallelizing existing code (you'd still have to go through it and make sure it made sense -- no reaching into other people's objects and tweaking their internal state, etc.)

I guess my point is that while serial equivalence is a strong property, it's not necessary for many programs, and it completely prevents the existence of some, especially server-type programs.