skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Almost all of the wars and trouble in the region are a result of the current national borders having been imposed on the continent by colonialists who divided up the spoils, rather than being based on local tribal affiliations."

Yeah, that's what you're supposed to think. No shame in that. Most people barely have time to learn the official excuses, let alone dig around for the actual story.

Actually, Occam has a simpler explanation: all the wars and trouble in the region are the result of decolonialization, which is what we call the process by which the British, French and Belgian empires were confiscated by the US and transferred from colonial administration to post-colonial aidocracy.

This is sometimes called "independence," but by any objective indicator post-colonial Africa is more, not less, dependent on the outside world. "Third World" forms of government also owe much less to indigenous structures than the colonial regimes - for instance, the Indian Raj was much more similar to Moghul India than the postcolonial democratic welfare state. It also worked a lot better - surprise.

The writers you've been reading are institutional defenders of decolonialization. But try Occam's Razor on for size. Before decolonialization, not a peep is heard from the would-be aidocrats about how these countries are going to be completely screwed up once the Europeans leave. No, the "party line" is that the Europeans are at fault for not industrializing West Africa, etc, and instead retaining an agricultural and artisanal economy. And, of course, not employing enough Harvard-educated natives in government.

As soon as the transition in power is accomplished - not at all a spontaneous event, but driven by US diplomatic pressure - the Third World falls to crap. The steel mills in the jungle are all white elephants. The Harvard-educated natives are all "wa-Benzis." And the aidocrats responsible turn to... blaming the Europeans they confiscated Africa from.

Congo is a good example. You'll notice that your official Congo sources skate really lightly over the period of Belgian rule between the Congo Free State and "independence." There's a reason for that. Rescued from the memory hole, here's the first paragraph of a Time Magazine article about the Congo in 1955:

"In the Belgian Congo last week massed tom-tom drummers practiced a welcome tattoo. Prosperous Negro shopkeepers climbed up wooden ladders and draped the Congolese flag (a golden star on a blue field) from lampposts and triumphal arches set up along Boulevard Albert I, the spanking concrete highway that bisects the capital city of Leopoldville. In far-off mission churches, encircled by the rain forest that stretches through Belgian territory from the Atlantic to the Mountains of the Moon, choirs of Bantu children rehearsed the Te Deum. African regiments drilled, jazz bands blared in..."

The rest used to be online but now it's paywalled: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,866343,00.h...

(Much) longer discussion: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cr...
The author explained that:

I'm actually kind of embarassed I had so much trouble with this - I've been working on a commercial Java package for two years, but because it's GUI based I rarely have to deal with reading from the console. Real Java programmers will probably look down on me with a mixture of pity and disgust. Such is life.
There is no additional code in the script which is there to just support FF down to 3.6, the reason the script isn't supported on older FF versions is due to lack of key methods missing/or partial support (i.e. getBoundingClientRect, canvas etc.). Nor is there any functionality in the script that the support for FF 3.6 is holding back.
Am I reading this right... Wilmott's program is roughly $20K. Ouch, but I guess the salary expectation would also be considerably different too. Thanks.
Well, a "month", unqualified, is not really a unit of time. You have to know not only which month you're talking about, but in the case of February, what year it's in, to know exactly how long it is. The same goes for years, if you want them to consist of an integral number of days.

So I think as a matter of API design, Ruby has made a wrong choice by making these operations look like arithmetic on known values. It's too tempting to think that they'll obey the arithmetic identities, when they don't. If you want to have an API function "same date N months later", I have no problem with that at all; then it's much less tempting to think that it's just doing addition.
Announcing the {nanoproduct}
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Then again isn't there that study about mice given a functional pleasure button dying of thirst?
our bodies are very good at telling us when something is wrong with warning signs

No, not really. It does warn you, but in many cases way too late, and then you lose the opportunity of fixing the problem with a fast, cheap and safe procedure. If you want to save money, early diagnosing is key.
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Media Center is in your windows 7, do you use it on your workstation?

An OS is full of stuff you never use and, unlike a muffin filled with chunks of pickle, not using the stuff you don't want is often as easy as breathing air.
This is Hadoop MapReduce code written using the Crunch library, which is written on top of the Hadoop API with an intent to simplify it. On top of that, the gist author wrote this bit of code in Scala (thus, Scrunch), trying to emphasize how much easier it is to write functional code in Scala as opposed to Java.
I don't think I ever implied that it always breeds success.

I didn't even imply that effort directed in the opposite way breeds failure. There are no doubt (rare) examples of people with a strong self-sacrificing mindset becoming successful despite those - just no one I know or have observed personally... Most lottery winners presumably fall into this category.

Chance can work both ways, but if you rely only on chance, the chance itself says you probably won't "succeed" for any given definition of success. Success is rare. Even if you fight tooth and nail you may not succeed, but you can perhaps change a 0.001% probability into a 10% probability, or a 0.01% probability into a 90% probability. That's worth fighting for.

Simple counter-example of your "chance rules all" idea: if your goal is to become a famous writer, there's nothing you can do to make success certain - but if you never write anything, you can guarantee failure.
I am convinced that what most people call luck or bad luck is partly due to their own decisions (previous or current). You can't change others, but you can change yourself and most of your actions and, more importantly, your reactions. Your actions and reactions change your surroundings, and they can bring you into positions where there is more low-hanging fruit.

If people just sit there, like you said, they are not optimizing for success at all. They are just doing nothing, missing chances, waiting for something to fall into their lap. That can work, but probability of success is lower.

Life is what you make it - your opinion and view of the world definitely falls into the category "can change".
I wholeheartedly agree. I've seen a few talks created with that tool and the "flying around the screen" gets old pretty fast.
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Oh yes, you're right -- the only difference is the swap between semicolon and enter. Good for Ruby, bad for C.

The only problem with your layout that I see is the right shift key -- you lose a key because it's covered by two fingers. I'm definitely going to give it a try.
I agree that Dyson is the Apple of vacuums, but it's funny because I come to a different conclusion. Sure, they're over hyped, but they also make top-tier products. I hated buying vacuum bags and have been happy with the performance of my Dyson. Whether I'll buy another Dyson, or a different brand: I don't know, but I'm definitely going bagless.
First Language's Don't Matter
edit:
I also want to point out that a murder-happy pill is a straw man argument. It will never happen for two reasons: 1-we have evolved to find murder repugnant, so the rewards wouldn't seem appealing to us 2-there are real life repercussions to murdering someone, so the joys would be limited in their duration.

We already have happy medicines that are legal. Valium, alcohol, WoW... I would bet that most people who are reading this have self-medicated on at least one of those before. And those are rather weak medications. They pale in comparison to what the robot was able to do by short circuiting the pleasure center in his brain.
I'm not sure I could write that code right without Eclipse, or at least not without quite a few runs through the compiler and looks to the docs.. I'm not a Java guru, but I have used it quite a lot.

It's not hard in itself, but it is overly long, with a lot of things to remember.
I want a pause button. For my life.
A lot of our behaviours and responses are driven by subconscious habits and thoughts. I may know that I have a bias towards doing X, but that doesn't mean that I consistently avoid doing X - in fact, quite the opposite. It takes years of re-training your subconscious to get away from behaviours which have become habitual. Knowing the way and walking the way are two different things, as they say.

I know I'm slowly getting there because I can observe the direct correlation between how I've shifted my thought patterns, and how the situation around me has shifted. One could posit coincidence as an explanation, and that may be true, but the areas of my life where I don't apply this "growth" mindset are the ones that haven't grown. Try it for yourself and see if it does anything for you.
I like your blog. Good job!
Lately, when people ask me "how do I get started learning to program?" I tell them the exact opposite of the OP.

I say, as I've been saying for years, that they should just think of something they want to build, and try to figure it out. And then I add this:

It doesn't matter if you succeed or fail. Programming is constant failure. You try something and it doesn't work. You try again and it doesn't work. You might try 50 different things before you find the one that works.

And while success might matter when you're on the job, it doesn't matter when you're learning. Because you learn exactly as much from your failures as your successes. When you figure out that Rails won't work for your streaming media server because it can't hold enough connections open, after investing weeks of investment.... great! You learned a thousand important lessons.

If you had succeeded, because you randomly chose Node.js at the start, you would've actually only learned 999 important lessons.

Which isn't to say that I disagree with the OP... often success does compound. But learning to program, at the very least, is an area where it's just Attempt--not Success or Failure-- that compounds.
That isn't a touch screen. They are using a projector as is evidenced by the objects being displayed on the "screen" are from time to time superimposed on the persons fingers.
Excellent. The sooner we get the laws into place, the sooner autonomous cars become a reality. Does anyone know if California's laws are modeled after Nevada's?
And it's not much more of a financial leap to get to 16gb in a MacBook. 16.
Yes. I looked through the comments on the article and the comments here waiting for someone to point out what the article should have addressed. That correlation isn't causation is so basic I'm still not sure I didn't maybe miss something in the main text.
Google could run Flash in a VM. Or they could re-implement it (as Mozilla is doing). [...] Or they could pay Adobe to write a version that uses the sandbox.

Isn't the nacl+pepper flash rewrite effectively the result of doing a bit of all three?
I don't think it's as easy as you make it sound. The hypothetical driver would need to map everythink produced for "standard" trichromatic vision "down" to dichromatic vision in a meaningful way, maintaining contrast where it is relevant, but how should the driver know? (Maybe I am overestimating the technical challenge, so please correct me if I am wrong)

I think the solution can only be to make sure semantically relevant differences in color (e.g. different positions in a chart) can be identified by people with dichromatic vision, e.g. by not using the popular disticton of light red vs. light green. Quickly viewing a design through one of those filter programs is no big tasks and should be part of basic accessibility checks.

This doesn't mean you can't use all kinds of colors when they are not relevant to understanding, [edit: removed direct reference to deleted parent content]
GDC 2012, Day 2
Big discussion. Why do they program in C++?
I'm keenly aware of the complications. My point is that every other professional programmer should be too.

I stand by my statement: this was a stunningly stupid, n00b mistake. If I had made it, I would say exactly the same thing.
I think this is a good thread to recommend Andy Kessler's book "How We Got Here" which can be downloaded from here (http://akessler.blogs.com/andy_kessler/2005/04/hwgh.html). It's a parallel history between economy and technology evolution up from the steam engine genesis.
I'm matching $10K worth of DonorsChoose.org donations (code: breadpig)
I was on CNN here from SXSW to announce joining the advisory council of DonorsChoose.org but also to celebrate it with a $10K donation that will match anyone who uses the 'breadpig' code at checkout. I've been so impressed by their fight to make the world suck less one classroom at a time -- after all, I (selfishly) need more startup founders to invest in and technical talent to hire.

Visit www.donorschoose.org/AlexisOnCNN or make a donation to any classroom project on DonorsChoose.org (preferably one in Math & Science, but it's up to you - find something that inspires you!).
Cheers man! Much appreciated.
Udacity CS212: The Design of Computer Programs w/Peter Norvig Promo Video
Ecstatic Capitalism’s Brave New Work Ethic
Final attempt. Won't do this again. Promise.
Plotting 911 Police Responses in R
The Killer App: Wired Magazine, Voice of the Corporate Revolution (1995)
Great thinking - but I think the dichotomy of self-sacrifice vs growth is not the most useful conceptual model. I found the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in 'The two paths to success' to be more relatable when it comes to optimizing for growth.

Focus on self-sacrifice could be described as an intrinsically motivated activity to optimize for personal growth in realizing the ideal of benefitting others. For me, these intrinsic cycles have been self-benefitting - a focus on a particular product, or a focus on growth of engineering skills. In both cases, relationships suffer, bank accounts dip - but at the end of the cycle I have a more evolved product or a much stronger set of engineering skills.

Extrinsic motivation will optimize for a different set of success criteria. Maybe growing skills not as important at this phase, but perhaps growth in relationships, self-promotion and financial gains are the better opportunity to grow.

Yes, growth is the basis of success, but interest is only part of the magic - perhaps more important is arbitraging the value created as you switch between these 2 contexts of motivation.
How To Change Metro UI Color In Windows 8
> I will trust this system of humans counting any day over a sum function in a database implemented by a private company with their own agenda

How about over an open source one? I have occationally thought of starting a kickstarter for an open-source voting system. It would be completely open- even down to choosing an open-source processor, and completely and transparently audited.
Powered by sincerity.
Hey, Paul. Nicely put. Thanks for sharing it.
Actually, my impression is that the php-is-bad dogma has eased up a bit recently. And good at that - programmung language religion gets boring very fast.
Well that's possible, but then you'd expect some of them to self-report great happiness.

Once we go far enough down the "who's to say" route that we ignore self-reports for happiness, I'd say the term loses meaning.
I would never call her a bad human, and I mentioned that I like her - she's a good friend, and she won't do harm to anyone (except herself). She's just no good human to herself.

She is clearly not the master of her life if she decides to put off pregnancy so some pupils don't feel disappointed. She wants at least 3 children (very badly!) and she's already over 30 years old - so, she has to hurry up anyway. At least that's not mastery according to my definition.
I know these types of people (I used to be one to a lesser degree) and I don't think it's fair to say that she knows what she's doing. As a highly intelligent person, if this is pointed out to her she'll no doubt rationalise it all somehow, but that doesn't mean it's a conscious choice.

I've lived with an anti-money mindset for most of my life (it's changing, slowly), and it wasn't a conscious choice. I never sat down and thought "ok, I don't want money, so I'm going to steer away from opportunities to make money, spend money that arrives to me as quickly as possible, and basically generally push it away". Once it was pointed out to me repeatedly that I did this, I started working on changing this subconscious choice. It's still an ongoing process, and far from over.

It takes some pretty strong-headed, tireless friends to keep pointing out to you that you're being stupid and it's hurting your life. It takes a number of obvious, unignorable examples of people less talented than you doing much better.

Without those constant nudges over a period of years, most people will rationalise things just as you do, about themselves or about others. I wish on this woman that her friends will figure out how to get it through to her that she could have a much better life, and that her own subconscious choices and thought patterns are holding her back, rather than any external circumstances.

For example, one such belief is the idea that money is evil, the cause of problems. That's a load of crap. Money is a token of value that can be exchanged for whatever the hell you want. It's a resource that can be used to do great good or great evil - but that entirely depends on the person doing things. Money is a lever that you can use to multiply your impact on the world - but as long as you keep pushing money away from you, you don't get to use that lever effectively. If you understand this idea, that goes a long way towards starting to resolve manmal's friend's money issues...
Care to comment on downvote?
Oops i deleted the comment hastily. I don't see the reason why it's impossible to calibrate a mapping according to the specific user's color blindness. That should be enough to cover most cases, apart from the cases where you are actually asked things like "punch the red monkey"
In the spirit of this post, I'm a little wary of posting this yet (it's incomplete and not very robust), but I made a little toy 3D chat program recently using webgl,socket.io,express,node. Code can be found here: https://github.com/nkassis/EntangledGL

Hope it's of interest to someone.

P.S. ignore the color ;p I picked something at random.
Or, our society has learned how to take advantage of the energy and enthusiasm of youth before those people get wise enough to figure it out.
>We don't need computers in voting.

We don't "need" computers for preparing office documents either, but they sure come in handy. The system you are describing is not perfect and it's misguided to reject suggested improvements out of hand, just because they involve computers. An open, well-designed electronic system can offer mathematical certainty that votes are well formed and well counted (no uncertain marks on the ballot, no miscommunication and mistakes among tired workers at the end of a long day), while vastly reducing costs and human effort.
"Wired’s distinctive maimed typography and its fluorescent hues may be interesting, but the magazine’s truly marvelous feature is its corporate-cultural mission. Wired is technology’s hip face, an aggressive apologist for the new information capitalism that speaks to the world in the postmodern executive’s favored tones of chaotic cool and pseudo-revolution."

"Wired ’s vision of the good life is impressively consistent: money, power, and a Game Boy sewn into the palm of your hand. Equally consistent is the absence of any serious consideration of the problems that come with business control of information technology. In order to reconcile its standard pro-business politics with its rebel image, the magazine makes a great display of embracing a certain strain of extreme information antinomianism."

"Another Wired cause célèbre is the outlaw hacker. In almost every issue, it seems, the editors find a new way to stir readers’ outrage over the fate of one Phiber Optik, a jailed hacker described as having a “colorful urban style and a near suicidal willingness to demonstrate his prowess at picking the locks on telephone company systems.”2 While Wired’s ongoing loyalty to the troubled young man is admirable, its frequent stories do little more than use him to reaffirm the myth of the rebel entrepreneur so celebrated in contemporary management literature."
I didn't downvote you, but my guess is you're striking a chord that sounds a bit like "the secret" - whose author took that argument down to its natural conclusion and ended up declaring that the 100'000 victims of the boxing day tsunami somehow brought it on themselves...

There's a fine line between saying that you can make a difference in what happens to you, and saying that everything happens to you because of you. The latter is blatantly false, and leads to some perverted philosophies...

Anyway, that's just my guess as to why you're being downvoted...
It all depends on the problem one is trying to solve. Since you are addressing the user experience, then indeed, the protocol is not in your way. It is, for the problem I'm trying to solve. Note that the barrier of network effect can be reduced by providing a gateway between the two communication domains (i.e. Facebook). I've subscribed to www.post.fm so I should be informed of your progress.
A replacement for email should be a lot smarter and I think what pg hints at is pretty much the same as you're saying here, but broader.
If I receive an invitation to something, it should end up in my calendar and whatever gadget I have on me should notify me and ask me if i wanted to participate.

If i receive a receipt it should be stored and analysed. For example if the item had a 30 day guarantee it should ask me before that if I am satisfied with it.

If i receive a shipment notice it should automatically tell me on the day it arrives and alert me when I'm in proximity of the post office that I need to pick it up.

Actually I would want almost all of my emails to be read solely by a computer so that all of these emails I didn't even see. I don't need to see that I've bought something — I know that! I need to be told when its in my post box though, or if its a license key I need my computer to pop up a question if I should apply that license.

So a good startup idea here would be something that took your email, filtered it and just removed all of the receipts/etc messages from your view, while keeping it neatly organized somewhere else for the future.
What I mean is that most of the time people tend to fire heavy duty classes or libraries to implement these patterns when you can implement just what you need with very little overhead using the built-in language constructs.

I use both Python and PHP extensively and I find interesting that Python developers try to go to the minimum that work while PHP developers try to go the nice conceptually "right" way. I wonder if this is because the PHP developers kind of need to prove that they can do rigorous OO programming with their language or something like that where the Python developers do not care and just do it the simple intuitive way.