skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very well written story that takes what I already kinda of assumed to be true and made it feel very real. It's quite sad, really.

I don't want to trivialize the plight of the poor, but I'm also concerned with the impact on the world's intellectuals. A somewhat relevant rant follows....

We were down in the bay area meeting investors a few weeks ago, and I took some time to walk around Standford's campus. It's beautiful. It feels somewhat quiet and lonely, but that's simply because it is huge. However, I walked through a few random buildings and delighted in seeing people studying and working. While still quiet, there was an energy to the place. This was a place that brilliant people made magic happen.

It strikes me as odd that so much work these days is done out of coffee shops. I mean, I do it too, but it's really kind of weird. You walk in, all these people have headphones on, are sipping on a latte, and totally ignoring the outside world. People are crammed in like sardines and working like mad men, but it simply doesn't feel like magic is happening.

Neil Degrasse Tyson talks about how NASA is necessary to create the sense of wonder and enchantment to raise a new generation of scientists. He says the NASA budget is simply a great investment. He's right.

I feel the same way about public spaces.

I'd really like to see more energized, magical, beautiful public spaces. I'm not a Stanford student, so I couldn't use their wifi. I had to walk down to University Ave and work out of Paris Baguette. There's just not as much wonder and excitement when you're surrounded by pastries.
That is a good idea, though I favor chalk boards. But it would be great. In order to bring it about a lot of difficult management problems would have to be solved. For instance, people are going to be turning tricks in all those separated rooms pretty quickly.
What Happens After The VC Associate Cold Call?
You know where all the public money has gone for libraries? War.

The cost of medical benefits for all the soldiers who are mamed but now can survive for 50 years is staggering and will choke our culture to death. All those weapons, fuel, R&D, "homeland security theater", etc. all part of the massive war machine.

But war will always be funded because it's the ultimate high of money and power, to be able to send people to kill and be killed, heck it gives the politicians special "war powers", why would they not want it?

Doesn't matter if it's the left or right in charge, they do love their war and will never, ever stop.
@xenophanes - see philwelch's response below, which sums up why there's is a need for an agency to do things in the long term interests of society that individual or corporate entities probably (hah - definitely) wouldn't.
Installing Second Crack
My guide on how to install Marco Arment's Second Crack blogging platform, for Linux novice or ninja
Libraries are a private good, not a public good. Since so many people seem to be getting confused on this point, I'll just post these articles:

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

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

The fact that their customers are broke (but not so broke they can't afford cable TV) doesn't change this.
For every one hundred comments that say that ideas do not matter I will have to add one comments that say:

IDEAS is what matter. Please do not confuse idea with a confused unclear statement with no connection with the specific implementation. Ideas is the specific intellectual way to move forwards and towards your goals.
Yep, to be honest this is the exact same thing they did for java. Try to use java in Lion, blam pops up a window asking to install it.

Seems like they're just trimming the base OS install down to what is used by most users. I'll put this in the meh category.
If they can't afford to pay for them, they should provide more value to society and not, egoistically, expect to extract more than they put in.
No, he meant the swarm of micro-helicopters as part of the same project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8LkcgYRHdA
Sure. Wild switching of languages is infuriating to your partners.

Car analogy: it's like insisting you need to park all 7 of your vehicles — car, van, truck, harley, two bikes and a wheelchair — in the prime spots in front of the office. You'd be out of a job in an hour.

And knowing all the languages helps you. (If only to successfully talk your partner out of wildly slinging languages around.)

Ok, better example: to write a web app, you need a server-side language. Plus javascript. Plus CSS. Plus multiple browser interfaces and their toolsets.

I think the article totally misses the point: polyglot programming is a fact of life. Adapt or perish. We could debate the relative merits of _fully_ _equivalent_ languages, but I think it's linkbait to demonize "polyglot programming."
Logo oficial de Windows 8
You're probably referring to the case of a city fire department that offers service to its (tax-paying) residents, but charges an annual fee for residents outside the city limits. When one of those houses in unincorporated land is on fire but hasn't paid their fee, then - once they have ensured no lives are at risk - they choose to let it burn.

http://www.firehouse.com/news/10472820/tennessee-fire-depart...
It's great that you started early. If you really (and i mean really) like your idea and still feel that this is going to be great, then you seriously go with it.
Dijkstra to the rescue: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
Does it consumes more CPU than 1.12?
Rewriting server-side code in Javascript
IMHO programmer, coder and software developer are different words for the same thing. Do you write code, program a computer or develop software? Or are they actually the same thing?
As much as I'd like to see the cable co's die, not the TV industry entirely. The internet is not a truly viable alternative for now.

I'll say this as someone who lives last mile (half or even a quarter if you want to be technical). Television provides higher quality(lower latency) and more stable transmissions. Unfortunately, we're situated just outside of the cable co's reach, so have to deal with a satellite provider for TV and a Telecomm for phone/internet.

We spend $80 a month on a 756kb/s ADSL line and phone service. At one point, we had 4 rooms with televisions, this isn't something that could be handled with internet speeds such as that. When the digital transition happened we went from 7 basic channels down to 2 OTA; up until that point we had no need for an outside provider. If we could access the cable co's infrastructure, the bills would be much lower, 60-70%, and the internet access would be much better.

We need to fight against the communications industry for adequate infrastrucure before dismantling them under the assumption people already have adequate access.

Edit: I'm not the author of the post, I just shared it.
What do you believe the difference between the two to be? In US English I am unaware of a difference between the two in either denotation or connotation.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
If you're arguing my list of Government specialties was incomplete, I agree, and contagious disease control is a great example.
Ok, so first thing it did upon starting a movie in OSX was decide to rebuild the font cache.

Wasn't this a problem on windows that was fixed?
About a quarter of the way in, I realized exactly where this was going. I wrote a similar post under the more obvious title, "SOPA for Non-Techies" [1]. This is an excellent narrative, whereas mine is in the format of a collection of two short essays.

Without context for this post though, it seems only the tech community would understand the parallels being drawn (even I feel I may be overreaching in my assumptions as to his actual purpose). The problem is, we're generally not the ones who need convincing. Definitely a great article, though.

[1] http://jangosteve.com/post/16074674406/sopa-for-non-techies
Anyone else having issues with the delay in volume control? I'm used to the volume changing instantly whenever I change it with the mouse wheel, but in 2.00 there seems to be an annoying delay of about a second for each change, at least on my PC.
Ha! I agree! And what a coincidence, I was listening to Rime of the Ancient Mariner when I saw your post...
If you are 53 you have had plenty of time over the last ten years to learn to use computers.

As for what I would do if I was operating firefox for the first time? Try. Or ask somebody next to me (or one of those standing in line).
> There will just no longer be an "official" Apple version.

Even that's overstating it -- there will still be an "official" Apple version, written by Apple employees and automatically installed when it's needed; it just won't be on most users' machines.
People aren't asked to voluntarily pay for the police force, however people in the middle class and above do pay for security services which approximates a part of what the police do.

People also pay for detective services when the police fail, are unwilling, or are not tasked to inquire into a particular crime. Also people pay investigative services for breech of contract civil offenses that the police generally do not aid with.

People additionally form themselves into neighborhood watches, and voluntarily take up the general duty of a beat cop.

All these services that people are providing for themselves with their own sweat, money, and private organization are good wholesome things. Should they also become the sole providence of the government as well to perform in a beaurocratic and mayhaps inefficient manner?

Answer yea or nay, but think about it.... that's the crux of libertarian thought: thinking about everything in that manner and not just taking for granted that if something has been a government service for generations, then it should continue to be one in the future.
3) for things that provide value but don't (necessarily) make money. And no, persuading people to voluntarily pay for these is not generally sustainable.
The more efficient it is, but as an economist, I'd say those are two different things.

Your efficiency per unit resource may increase, but your total resources are still finite. Therefore, unless your efficiency increases asymptotically fast enough that the integral diverges (ie, infinite area), your total end product will still be finite. And I have a hard time believing that efficiency would increase that quickly.

Okay, I'll stop being pedantic now.
So far the following courses have announced that they are going to be delayed - CS 101, Machine Learning, Design and Analysis of Algorithms I, Natural Language Processing, and Probabilistic Graphical Models
And you know they can afford cable tv how, exactly?

There are apparently 1.5 million homeless children in the US. Are they watching cable tv?

But it's ok - you can link to the correct definition of public vs private good.

I'm actually disgusted by your attitude.
Fan-fricking-tastic. Thank you for writing this. This should be syndicated in the Times, WSJ, and every local newspaper in the country -- maybe then people would get it. Great piece.
Wireless drug-delivery microchips, more consistent than injections
> To believe that we can build our society with informed voters in democracies is extremely naive.

To believe we can do anything else is the road back to Dachau.

These are the stakes: http://www.archive.org/details/nazi_concentration_camps
Yeah, but explaining why "But computers are a luxury, we shouldn't subsidize those lazy (epithet) people, they should get a job" is a problem, is an interesting exercise. For some reason, people refuse to accept that if you want someone to get a job, but deny them the means to do so, you are being hypocritical and exposing severe cognitive dissonance (seriously more than once I've had someone straight faced tell me "if they want to be able to get computer to apply for jobs, they should get a job"). Yet a large portion of the people don't seem to be able to follow simple causality chains unfortunately. It is both infuriating and saddening.
> if voluntary charity worked, no one would have invented public services to begin with

Not to judge this particular use of tax money but of course they would -- it's in the direct interest of the reigning bureaucracy, or any bureaucracy, to expand its scope whether it's necessary or beneficial to the society. It's the same with departments fighting over budget and new hirees.
Their site seems to be taking a hammering. Any mirrors?
Ok. But here, basic cable is still analog -- as my nice but rather old Panasonic 27" can attest.

My parents had extended basic. My father's understanding was that Comcast's mandate that they switch to a free, deck-of-cards sized set top box, and/or rent a Comcast DVR, meant in part that the digital signals being delivered are switched. Perhaps that's switched for smaller viewer share, and multicast for those channels with heavy viewership -- that's what I understand you to be saying.

This week's been my week to repeatedly reveal myself for the fool I am. So, I might as well make a thorough job of it in this thread.

P.S. As I recall, his thinking was in part that to keep the "deck of cards" transceiver small, power efficient, and cost effective enough, it must be receiving a single switched signal rather than trying to handle multiple signals. But perhaps it is picking amongst multiple signals, but only handling one of then at a time. (So, e.g. not producing multiple outputs that would enable a old Tivo to keep working.)

Sorry if this subthread is going on too long.

P.S. Thanks again for the explanations/clarifications.
We don't need an educated populace; we just need soldiers.

How many people become soldiers because they are patriots who want to give their lives for their country, and how many become soldiers because the alternative is poverty?
Fundamentally they don't make money because they don't charge, and also don't sit around trying to think of ways to make money (while still remaining true to their core values and purpose). I don't think we should assume it's an insoluble problem. Once one has an audience and does something useful, monetizing can often be tricky, but is often possible.

Just as one example, what if libraries had some ads somewhere? Then they could be provided for free to poor people but also gain some revenue. (And you offer premium membership with no adds for a yearly fee.)

If that would work (I don't know), then the question would become: should we charge people taxes so that poor people don't have to deal with ads at libraries? And I think the answer to that would be "no" -- if you want to help poor people see fewer ads you could pay money for that yourself without the tax system (e.g. the libraries could directly accept money and the more they get paid the fewer ads they show according to a formula).
This is exactly the position of Ayn Rand, especially the part about not really caring if poor people get to have things like libraries or housing or food. To Ayn Rand, a "rational" homeless person would rather stave to death on the streets than accept the first crumb of unearned bread or a single night's sleep under an unearned roof. The only reason there's no conflict for Rand is because Rand doesn't recognize a legitimate interest in public goods, but only private goods gained through mutually beneficial transactions. To Rand, there's no rational interest in having a public library, so there is no rational conflict between the wealthy taxpayer and the impoverished library patron. Randroidism is one of the most brutal and shameful forms of libertarianism.
Ancient Rome had a fire brigade, run by Marcus Licinius Crassus, who you might remember as the villain from the 1960s Spartacus film. He and his crew would arrive at the scene of a fire to save your home from going up in flames...if you sold it to him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassus
Right now there is a divide among programmers. One one side you have people like the author who crave the power of code-as-data more than they care about nice syntax and therefore love Lisp. On the other side you have people who like more conventional syntax more than they care about code-as-data and therefore don't love Lisp.

Neither side can understand the other: one side says "why do you resist ultimate power?" and the other side says "how can you possibly think that your code is readable?"

My belief (and what I am starting to consider my life's work) is that the gap can be bridged. Lisp's power comes from treating code as data. But all code becomes data eventually; turning code into data is exactly what parsers do, and every language has a parser. The author says "it's about read," but "read" (in his example) is just a parser.

The author asks "How would you do that in Python?" The answer is that it would be something like this:

import ast

class MyTransformer(ast.NodeTransformer):
pass # Implement transformation logic here.

node = MyTransformer().visit(ast.parse("x = 1"))
print ast.dump(node)

This works alright, but what I'm after is a more universal solution. With syntax trees there's a lot of support functionality you frequently want: a way to specify the schema of the tree, convenient serialization/deserialization, and ideally a solution that is not specific to any one programming language.

My answer to this question might surprise some people, but after spending a lot of time thinking about this problem, I'm quite convinced of it. The answer is Protocol Buffers.

It's true that Protocol Buffers were originally designed for network messaging, but they turn out to be an incredibly solid foundation on which to build general-purpose solutions for specifying and manipulating trees of strongly-typed data without being tied to any one programing language. Just look at a system like http://scottmcpeak.com/elkhound/sources/ast/index.html that was specifically designed to store AST's and look how similar it is to .proto files.

(As an aside, programmers have spent the last 15 years or so attempting to use XML in this role of "generic language-independent tree structured serialization format," but it wasn't the right fit because most data is not markup. Protocol Buffers can deliver on everything people wanted XML to be).

Why should manipulating syntax trees require us to write in syntax trees? The answer is that it shouldn't, but this is non-obvious because of how inconvenient parsers currently are to use. One of my life's goals is to help change that. If you find this intriguing, please feel free to follow:

https://github.com/haberman/upb/wiki
https://github.com/haberman/gazelle
I knowingly, intentionally disagree with the public good argument. See:

http://fallibleideas.com/public-goods
Ironic, no?
In the US if you quit your job you can buy the same health insurance plan you had, for up to 18 months ("COBRA"). It's not going to be the cheapest thing in the world, but if you're talking about taking a year off, you're probably not on the verge of going broke. (It looks like it'd be far less than what I pay for rent, for example.)

Another option could be to take a part-time job. A fair number of stores seem to offer health insurance for any employee working 20 hours a week. Of course, that may or may not be compatible with one's idea of a "break".
Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology
Salvia Divinorum and Brain Damage - Ronnie Day Warns
Even though I consider myself basically libertarian I'm often annoyed by the programs that seem to be first in line for budget cuts - libraries, parks, school music programs, and other basic things that don't actually cost very much.

This is by design, not by necessity - cuts to programs that people enjoy or support are more like to encourage voters to accept bond measures, tax increases, etc in order to avoid those cuts.

California spent $10 BILLION on prisons in 2011-2012. The country spent over $80B fighting drugs.

Funding libraries is a rounding error compared to the actual activities voters choose to allow their governments to engage in. If you want well funded libraries - stop voting for politicians whose only solutions involve more jails, more arrests, more wars, and more handouts.
What "massive positive externalities" are created by a library?

The sole benefit you describe, namely the ability to borrow books, is a private benefit. I borrow a book, read it and enjoy it. What benefit does this create for anyone besides me?

Since I am the sole beneficiary, the library can charge me for it, and prevent me from consuming it if I don't pay. Why should you be forced to pay for me to receive these benefits? Should you also be forced to pay for my netflix subscription?
> I think sometimes using the less optimal tool for the job carries overall benefits.

In that case, it's the best tool for the job!

Balance between the theoretical and practical uses of technology is the crux of the issue.

My day job is an unashamed Python shop, so even though other languages might be "better" for a task we're almost certainly going to use Python wherever we can simply because it makes our entire service offering more maintainable.

That said, knowledge of alternate languages/technologies does allow you to vary the status quo where the benefits outweigh the costs. The real benefit of being a polyglot programmer (or neophile technologist) is that you have the perspective to see where exciting new things might be employed successfully in more routine environments.
Link now works.
Arbitraging Blockbuster Video. At one location they were selling DVDs due to bankruptcy. At another location they were buying DVDs for more money. No limit on size.

What does that say about Blockbuster management?
I've taken several 6 month - 1 year breaks, but probably not for what you have in mind when you wrote this question.

Still, I think it was very much worth it.

Initially, I would spend my entire years off travelling, pausing from time to time at a spot with good rock climbing. Eventually, I started adding a bit of freelance development work into the mix, and spent a few years turning that into a consulting business that meant I didn't ever need to come home.

Nowadays, when I'm on the road, you'll often find me working on my own products, which incidentally are a much nicer form of income than consulting. A lot of the things I do during these periods might in fact fit your description of self study, since there's a lot of non-programming knowledge that you need to take a SaaS business from "pile of code" to "product that pays your rent".

Overall though, I'd consider all my years of travel to be about learning. Self study, studying the world. As I said above, I'd highly recommend finding a way to do it.
Abroreal - The Flashbulb (a lot of his stuff is good)

benn's pale blue dot is a great ambient album to work to.

http://bennjordan.bandcamp.com/album/pale-blue-dot
That might explain the growth of an existing bureaucracy, but not the creation of a new one. There's no existing bureaucracy that expanded its way into social welfare or public libraries, those were created democratically when people voted for candidates who promised to create those services.
Going to LLVM and dropping GCC is the best single Dev Tools related choice Apple has done since acquiring NeXT.
And you know they can afford cable tv how, exactly?

Because the US government did a survey measured this. I link to the raw data in a separate post on this thread, currently downmodded for reasons unknown.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3607475