skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To avoid downvotes, billyjobob should avoid making dismissive generalizations that are trivially shown to be untrue. This detracts from the conversation. What billyjobob should have said was, "In the UK, a PhD is..."
The interesting thing to me is how is this even enforceable? Most of my friends keep a tight lid on all their freelance work - how would they even know someone had broken this contract?
A friend was telling me that his kids' school (his kids are 5 and 7) has decided to give out extra homework for all students, a minimum of 4 hours per night, to help them get used to the workload as the progress through their education. I fail to see how this sort of practice helps create productive citizens. A lot of people I know were burnt out on anything that required reading, science or math before they even graduated/left high school. Education as we know it is no longer pushing society forward, it is holding us back in a very serious way.
Steve Ballmer predicting the iPhone to fail?
Engineers as Heroes
There is no need for the creepy camera - this can be done with Bluetooth 4 + geolocation (like Square does).
Or because you have no choice. Many consumer class laptops now are shipping Windows 8 already, and in a year, it might be impossible to get one with Windows 7. You can downgrade, but only if you have the Pro version, and that won't appear on consumer class laptop.
You're right, I think, in complaining that this is too verbose. Yudkowsky has some very good writings, but this isn't among them. The key point, I think, is here:

"'I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’."

I don't think the essay as a whole communicates much more than that point, but it's not a bad one.
When talking about VS and libraries/APIs you really need to be more specific.
VS lets you work with very different technologies from native C++ to .NET languages, including web stacks.

The user experience may vary but if we are talking about the .NET world I think it is a very strong package.

The only equivalent I can think of would be the Eclipse/Java combo.
This is from 2008 (should probably be mentioned in the title.)
Great if you're a retiree, not so great if you're a young person just starting out having to deal with continually falling salaries and the old people owning everything worth owning in the society.
We're employing more academics than ever. The problem is that we're producing even more grad students than we have academic positions, because academia's self-replication behaviors have metastasized.
This is actually several months old:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3369878/facebook-saves-you...

> The default privacy setting for searches is "Only Me," and cannot be changed unlike the privacy toggles of other Activity Log entries. But, you can delete any searches you want to hide from yourself. The idea is to provide added context and transparency to using Facebook, as well as provide you with complete control over every single thing you do on the site, like searches — which apparently we're doing a lot of.
good point. but tech progress is fast, and tech margins for the leader are gigantic. so you recoup your investment in 3 years before the next generation. then the next generation is 10x better, so that motivates building the following factory with high margins.

you can't build a new power plant that makes 10x better power than the last one. and yet prices are falling. so basically you have to wait a lot longer until the old plant is obsolescent, or only build a power plant when the power shortage gets really bad and margins so high that you would recoup quickly.

falling prices mean high real interest rates, fewer projects meet high hurdle rates, less investment, less growth and employment.
My End of the World Post
The problem with we all have slightly different or even evolving meaning behind words like "occupation", "life" and "time off".

I have had time off when I wished I was working on something awesome.

I have been working when I wished I had a life.

I have been in a place when I thought I had a life but I remained perpetually unsatisfied and even unhappy.

I have had an occupation when I saw it as my life and enjoyed it more than the traditional meaning of "time off".

All this is okay because by nature, we seem to be chasing different things at different times of time. I just think your post takes a bit too simplistic view of life.
A problem with this calculator is that it doesn't consider how your expenses could change if you quit your job and work on something on your own instead. I think the big differences are: how much more would you have to pay for health insurance (esp. if you aren't including it on the income side)? and what would you need to pay for office space (such as coworking)?

Also, your burn rate could increase a little more if you want to continue doing things that have annual limits (such as contributing the maximum amount to your Roth IRA each year).
What has he said about it?
A CLI is not graphical, but still a user interface - and a very opaque one, you can't use it at all without any prior knowledge. It's the complete opposite of the ideal interface in this context.
I've been evaluating Win8 on behalf of an old client I still sometimes help out.

It's nowhere near as bad as the press has been making out. It's certainly different but I can point out a larger volume of improvements than the measly 3 obvious regressions.
Of course there is C specific hardware!

X86 provided efficient call/return protocol instructions including display management, specifically targeting Pascal/Modula style languages. Microsoft Windows 3.1 even mandated this calling protocol. However old style C didn't use this API because it doesn't work with varargs and C doesn't have nested functions.

Instead Intel observed real code and optimised their instruction set to speed it up, locking everyone into lame languages like C. Attempts by Intel to break from this, for example with x64, have failed (x64 has two stacks).

Similarly segmented architectures, which implement extension of the Harvard machine model, have been largely unsupported in favour of linear addressing von Neumann machines, primarily because that's what C and Unix use. Interesting to see Microsoft adapt their OS designs based on this trend.

To support more advanced features in a language often requires only a few very low level primitives. This is why Linux kernel doesn't need much assembler, to do things like stack swapping. Control exchange is one of those things completely missing from C.
I recently started using a Nexus 7. It's such an incredible little device. I think Apple and Microsoft should be worried about the potent mix of Android software and great hardware.
Economic models suggest greater economic activity around housing booms - it boosts capital flows, job creation, employment for blue-collar workers. That's why "housing starts" is an indicator watched by economists and investors. That's the macro-economic view, and is usually favored by governments, who can create economic waves by tweaking incentives in one industry.

From micro-economic perspective you're right, the cheaper the better, money you save on not paying your mortgage will be deployed somewhere else.
Not sure I understand the point still. This Mark character must be a clinical idiot if he does not understand how one thing can cause other to move. How he then wears his toga (or whatever those Rumans wear) and eats his breakfast in the morning? Is is kind of strange being explained that one even can cause other event - we observe this thousands of times daily. Why he needs to be explained that in such a complicated way? There must be some deeper point than this in it. What he actually tries to explain here?
At least in software, salaries are high enough and there's even enough competition on culture that this can't really be the case. Furthermore, it's not actually possible for one employee to do the work of two. There actually is a shortage of qualified people in the world.

The fact is, business has become increasingly more sophisticated and, consequently, difficult over the past several decades. Operations have become increasingly driven by increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques and modeling and much of the drone work has been replaced by computers. In the early days of digital electronics, actual engineers were paid to minimize logical expressions using Boolean algebra or Karnaugh maps. These days we use algorithms and engineers have to solve more difficult problems. If you had the chops to be a white-collar worker at Sears Roebuck corporate in 1960, you don't have nearly the chops required to be a white-collar worker at Amazon corporate in 2012, because there's been half a century of innovation in operations by dozens of firms trying to beat Sears Roebuck.

The end result is that more jobs require numeracy and specialized skills, but if anything there are fewer people with these skills because mathematics requirements were dumbed down to get more people into universities and out with degrees. The stereotypical unemployed Gen-Yner is a liberal arts graduate, and for good reason. The engineers are fine.
As eropple has already pointed out, the Nexus 4 is quite reasonably priced. More importantly, it's not that you're paying a premium, it's that you're paying the true cost. Most of the locked phones are locked because they are enforcing the fact that you are paying an extra $10 to $20 a month to defray the cost of the phone. If you don't replace your phone after two years, you'll end up paying an extra $120 to $240 extra for your phone. And if you do get a new subsidized phone, you'll be locked in for another two years.
"about a month", sigh. :(
In addition to tmhedberg's good reply, I'd observe that you are either A: excessively stuck on this particular Python implementation when people are trying to argue that monadic patterns are useful in general (and in fact this Python implementation isn't even correct), or B: tautologically arguing from a base of monadic patterns being difficult to conclude that monadic patterns are difficult.

They aren't. Really. They just historically had one of the single most disastrous PR departments in the history of programming concepts. (Which has gotten better, but the old PR is still floating around the nets, screwing up everyone it meets.) It's just an interface slightly more complicated than the standard Iterable interface that happens to have a lot of useful things that can conform to it, and then a lot of useful things that can be built on it (two statements equally true of Iterable itself). It's a great deal simpler to use them when appropriate than the horrifying complexity of trying to manually implement them over and over that you've just grown so used to you can't see any more.

I do my part by trying to ensure I use the term as an adjective instead of a noun, because "monad" is like "iterable" as a term. It is unfortunate that it inherited its status as a noun from the world of math, where that happens to make sense. It does not in programming.
It makes me seriously sad when people say that their occupation takes all their time, they have no time off and no time for what we call "life".

It's not necessarily mutually exclusive. All the grad students I've known tend to find plenty of time to socialize, if they want to. They just think about schedules in different terms than most people with jobs. A grad student will have some sort of deadline (a paper to submit, a conference to prepare for, etc) and won't hesitate to spend an entire holiday working on it. But then when it's done, they'll throw a party or go camping or whatever, and they'll still take out time here or there for dinner/movie/exercise/etc. along the way.
Ask HN: Why is it difficult for Apple to create more than 1 tolerable ring-tone?
I've been thinking about this for a while... I find it interesting that everyone w/ an iPhone uses the Marimba ring-tone. This makes me wonder why it's so difficult for a company like Apple to create more than one popular ring tone. I wish Apple would come up with another tolerable ring tone so I am not always reaching for my phone when it's someone else's phone is ringing Marimba.
As I said earlier, there are also helpful investors who are willing to buy stock at high valuations. Which means those who aren't have a lower ratio of value to cost.

And lowering one's valuation is not an automatic way to make a round close faster. I've watched literally hundreds of startups both succeed and fail at raising money, and as a rule, if investors don't want to invest at a valuation of x, they don't want to invest at x/2 either.

All that's really going on here is that Chris is mistakenly generalizing from a single data point.
You mean like Square Wallet? It seems to be doing fine.
Ugh, this made more sense than anything else I've ever read about monads. This, together with the Wikipedia sentence that monads are "programmable semicolons", helped me finally understand what they actually are.

Like the other commenters said, I don't understand why someone would use Haskell syntax to explain monads. If you know Haskell, you already know what monads are!

Thanks for this great example.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_386SLC

Very interesting. Thank you.
This book provides a great introduction to game theory. What I like best about it is the way that it introduces simple examples in the first chapter, and then expands upon these examples in the following chapters, adding new complications each time.
How to Write your own Minesweeper AI
how is this on the front of hn?
the primary function of a programming department is to crank out code

OP didn't say the primary function of the legal department was to crank out legal language. He does say their job is to crank out advice that "prevents legally actionable mistakes".

Similarly, I think most developers at core are expected to output code that fulfill some communicated requirement.
Interestingly, with all the economy references, the lead Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen was apparently on the VRML standard committee. I wonder if those two have had a chat yet.

Single page: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron...
The corollary would mean that the people who can explain well can't understand monads, which means that some people just can't understand them. We're doomed!
Is hiring a development firm the best option?
Lots of theories, but it's only a month 'till MSFT Q4 results on Jan 24. Will be interesting what the numbers look like and how Microsoft explains them.
Some context on this: I found myself really loving movies that were able to tastefully dramatize engineers and the work they do. There are precious few movies that do this. Let me know if I missed any good ones.

Hopefully it will be some inspirational fuel going into the New Year.
Here's more useful version of FU calculator. Just don't omit % sign when you fill in your own values.

http://blog.makezine.com/2007/08/05/investment-spreadsheet-2...

Click FU Money Template google doc link below.
I believe it's a matter of technology. Right now touch screens have so many advantages that they make up for the lack of tactile feedback, but as soon as technology allows it will be back.
Not every public web site enforces its business logic in client-side JavaScript and just accepts as valid the data that's submitted to a server. Every game that wants to submit a score to a central scoreboard has this problem, and it's a little absurd to debate the exact protocol by which an insecure-by-design architecture gets exploited.
I normally would not make a comment that adds nothing to the conversation, but I feel I need to in this case. If you are one of those who reads the comments before the links, a warning:

This does not have much of a point. It goes on forever. It's really not that great, and doesn't give much of a take-away for its length. Even if you just want to satisfy your curiosity, you will probably walk away disappointed. The foreword contains the only real content.

Yes, there is somewhat of a point to the metaphor, but I think more horses died than sheep.
This argument in support of "lives saved by guns" is not a classic case of Bastiat's "that which is not seen". This is a classic case of intellectual onanism.

There is a high statistical correlation between gun ownership as a percentage of population and gun deaths as a percentage of population. Unknowable figures such as "lives saved by firearms" are already taken into account. Regardless of how many lives have been saved by potential criminals not committing a crime due to fear of consequences, there were far more deaths actually caused by firearms.

This is why the number of deaths got larger: there were more people dead from firearms than people still alive from firearms.
Interacting and exploring APIs is either the newest fad or a gold rush for new business, but one of the biggest things stopping me from using them is integration into my existing stable tools. webshell.io is another service which is hosting your code on an external service, leaving you vulnerable to fluctuations in their uptime or stability as a company. There may be new opportunities in turning this into a desktop application.
At what point do we realize that these people are simply trying to extract rent from our electronic communications, and we should circumvent them at any opportunity, and punish the politicians who are bought off to give them power?
Exactly. Mackie is now making a little audio console that works with your iPad. Plug in your microphones and amps, slide in your iPad, and run it from there. The problem? There's no haptic feedback at all, nor any memorable locations! If a horrible noise starts being emitted, you can't just reach at a known area and slam down a master, you need to make sure you're on the right page on the right mix and then find it, and hope your touch latched.
This is great. I think that in general home construction should be more modular.

The really hard part though is buying the land.

Are there any municipalities in the world where the space above the ground and below the ground are subdivided for private property? I.E., two people may own land in the same area but at different elevations, or maybe one person underground and other above ground.
>The Confucian influence on East Asian culture has resulted in a much higher degree of filial piety (孝) than in the West, which makes it possible for people to live in old age without social welfare.

Kind of an aside, but filial piety tends to break down when there are no children around. With the birthrate in Japan and China this system will break down. It has begun breaking down in Japan (and Taiwan to some extant). For example, all age groups but the one above seniority show declining crime statistics; the older age group shows an increase in crime, mostly petty crime such as food theft, bikes, etc. There is a school of thought which blames elder alienation from society (i.e. no descendants who care for them --or in some cases live just too far)[1]

>the wealthy parents will simply pull their children out of public schools and send them to private schools instead

This is also the case in Japan. On the other hand, in Taiwan, public schools are the better schools. I'm at a loss for the divergence, but would be interested in some insight into that.

>While most people don't mind if their children associate with middle class black and Hispanic children, they certainly don't want them associating with minority children from the ghetto.

Agree with the general statement. That's also evident in Japan and Taiwan, from what I know. It's all socio-economic than racial, in TW and JP, as there are negligible a mounts of "other" in both countries. The Zainichi problems not withstanding.

[1[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/3213349...
I think a turning point will be a combination of great Windows 8 apps and nice hardware.

Concerning the hardware I am surprised to see very attractive stuffs here in Japan. The Fujitsu Arrows tab here is an example:
http://www.fmworld.net/arrows/tab_wifi/qh/

It is featuring an Atom CPU so it's running the full Windows 8 (not the RT version) so it means you can really use whatever Windows software you've been using before on this machine.

I believe the idea of having a single device replacing the desktop and the tablet is still attractive to many users. It will take some time for PC-makers to propose compelling offers but 2013 may be that time
"In water chilled to 50 degrees F, an Olympic swimmer was able to hold his breath for only 10 seconds. Another Olympian, this one a silver medalist, was able to breast stroke for about 7 minutes before she lost all muscle control and devolved into a slowly undulating tangle of limbs. Message received."

Can anyone find a source for this? I've swam in some seriously cold water (partially iced over lake water, I don't know how cold it was) and it is really stunningly bad, but that seems rather off. The best I can find (some USCG powerpoint about surviving airplane crashes in water) has lack of muscle control beginning at around 10-15 minutes, which seems more in line with what I have experienced.
I don't think that's the main draw for most people, though...most people care about iPads, iPhones, and iPods, which you can get at most major retailers now. Perhaps the service stations at the Apple Stores make it more appealing to go there, but exclusivity doesn't seem to be a main reason to go.

I think why Apple has traffic and Microsoft doesn't is because Apple has thoroughly owned the entertainment and luxury image. Microsoft dominated the office, but I think the side effect of that domination is that when you go shopping for PCs, I think it's hard to escape the mentality of "these boxes are similar to those I do my spreadsheets on, 40 hours a week, in that dreary cubicle".

Shopping at Apple store feels like a luxury escape: I go frequently even for accessories that are cheaper on Amazon. Shopping at a Microsoft store will unfortunately have some of the same appeal as shopping for ink cartridges at Staples.
I would use it.
Three people cared enough to argue the point right here on HN.

Your claim is trivially falsified.
Many of us on the mainland ("us" being the type of people who would read HN) have switched to SSH proxies over port 443. Sshuttle [1] is highly recommended.

1. https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle
SpaceX's Latest re-usable rocket (Grasshopper) test launch (12 stories)
The cheap device that rocks at web, email & facebook is a solid solution.

I really do think that Microsoft miscalculated by going for the high-end tablet market rather than the budget device market.
It's great. I wanted this literally two days ago.