skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
College is not beneficial to all people but to many it is critical. At least in America the state of elementary, middle and high school is simple failure. Students are graduating with skills 8th graders had 30+ years ago. Students are graduating with only ever have taken watered down math and science courses.

I was one of those students who went to a public school which the standard of education was pretty darn low. When I got to college I was hit hard with just how behind I was. Many students were far above me all around.

When I graduated HS around 98% of students went off to colleges of some kind. Now when I look at facebook at least of the people I knew only a handful actually has a real job and of those people they are the ones who finished college. The rest don't have careers.

For me and the few others college fixed us. It forced us to do the work and work our way up to what most people are capable of.

So when you hear about the all star developer who never went to college and is doing great. Be sure of one thing, that person got a great education and good problem solving skills were learned. For the rest of us who never got this, you need to make up for it somehow. College is your shot.
Dear DoD, if you are missing the Start Button, please consider installing Classic Shell - http://classicshell.sourceforge.net :)
The ride was terrible. And I loved every minute of it.
He makes some great music as well.

Try Streetlight Manifesto as your soundtrack for the evening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2yeNzL7rTU
There are no magic pathways for gene "transfer". Theres chromosomal crossover and there are random mutations. These are very very blunt instruments and the only reason they work to create complex organisms is through sheer number of different organisms and natural selection.

Nature is messing with nature all the time through pure randomness, the penultimate chaos monkey. Nothing has collapsed.
My huge problem with iOS (and Apple in general) is the obsession with constantly making you enter passwords. Sometimes it gets so overwhelming that I am convinced the codebase mainly consists of password entering routines interspersed with small bits of other functionality. iOS's inability to share between apps also means usernames and passwords have to be constantly re-entered there too (eg every app that supports Dropbox requires entering a username and password in each app).

This Apple disease spreads elsewhere. I had to enter my username and password on their developer site, and some web developer at Apple had gone to great lengths to prevent you from pasting your password into the password field. (I don't know that password - it is stored in a password management program.)

I can't for the life of me understand why the Apple faithful put up with this nonsense.
The Secret History Of Lead (2000)
because movies are a great way to make policy decisions.
You saw it on reddit, a while ago.
Ah, Death Note, one of my favorite manga. I read it in the original Japanese and it was very thrilling. Unfortunately, the anime adaptation was rather poorly done. The second half, IIRC, really went off the rails.

Edit: the author of the linked post also has an analysis of Death Note Endings[0], which talks about some of the reasons for the manga and anime endings and the incentives for why they ended the ways they did.

0: http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20Ending
I get the strong feeling I've read this article before, but I can't find a strong indicator this is an old article. Did someone else write about the leaked script?
Very well said, and I'm heartened to see your comment at the top of the page.

I think it's worth emphasizing that GMOs aren't a category, from a safety point of view. There can't be any evidence that all GMOs that will ever be produced will be safe, any more than there could be evidence that all drugs that will ever be synthesized will be safe. We have to look at them individually. I don't think the public has digested this point yet.

EDITED to add: It's also worth keeping in mind that in some cases, the primary danger may not be from the plant itself, but from pesticides to which it has been engineered to be resistant. I'm speaking, of course, of glyphosate, which I understand is being applied in growing quantities as the weeds it is intended to kill evolve their own resistance.
My specific recollection is this:

On Ubuntu at home, I used Chrome for most things. But I specifically installed Firefox to be able to use the "better" version of OWA. OWA would still work on Chrome, but it would automatically downgrade to the less-capable version.

Presumably, Chrome and Firefox were similar enough that the same code should have worked with both.
Yeah, would have been fun to see NSA to operate under Windows. ;-)
Show HN: A Chrome extension that helps you read articles with minimal scrolling
Whenever I'm reading a long news article on my desktop/laptop, I always wonder why I have to scroll so much when there's so much unused space on the sides. So I decided to make a Chrome extension that uses the CSS3 multi-column layout to make good use of all the screen space available on a desktop/laptop monitor.

https://github.com/chaowentan/Purify

The article parser that I've implemented is not as robust as other well-known apps such as Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, etc. But I hope this will make people more aware of the usefulness of the multi-column layout in large screens such as desktop monitors.
We tend to crave the things we need. If you need magnesium, you likely also need calcium and then there are a couple of other things you need to absorb calcium properly (I believe vitamins K and D). You could do a little googling, give it a whirl, see if self treating for a presumed chronic magnesium deficiency helps with your capd-like symptoms.

Best of luck.
Out of curiosity, how would you describe it? As a American I can't get enough distance to tell.
Breakout of Facebook's 470m mobile app users
As much as I truly, truly loathe criminals of any sort, lionizing vigilantism, especially when the self-appointed avenger threatens violence, is misguided at best and dangerous (read: deadly) at worst.

Please, if your phone is stolen, don't chase down the thief yourself. It just isn't worth it.
That sounds incredibly expensive. I think these companies just price software that way because they don't get a lot of contracts through out the year, if they make only custom software for governments, and they need to make every license very expensive to survive. Then the government pays up, because what the hell - it's not really their money.

So I don't think the prices these companies are asking from governments is in any way related to development time of the software, or even with maintenance time. I think it's mostly based on how much the government is willing to pay.

And I disagree with your last remark, too. By that logic the government can just spend it on anything and as much as they want. They need to be efficient with the money, to be able to make or sustain multiple projects at once. Otherwise they'll have to raise taxes, fire people from other programs, or they wouldn't start new needed projects.
I'd be interested in seeing software patents come with source code and unit tests. The tests, in particular, would help delimit the breadth of the claims which seems to be what the USPTO feels it needs help with. Once they have executable unit tests, it seems like it would be possible to automate the search for prior art.
> I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty.

You can argue about many benefits, but genetic engineered crops is hardly a solution to poverty and malnutrition.
This particular post is a new version of an older article, not a completely new article, so it seems mostly likely that you read the old version already.
This was actually the 80s, I believe.
The dates on the sidebar indicate it was first published in 2009 (and last revised today). Most of gwern's site is an indefinite "work in progress".
Ah ok that makes sense then :)
I won't say that you can't approximate what you get from a liberal arts education without actually going, but it will be far more difficult than working at a few companies and traveling, it will require an incredible amount of determination, and you won't be able to do it alone.

For several years you spend the bulk of your time reading, writing, and perhaps most importantly: having very smart people critique your writing. All of this follows a program designed and honed over time to make you a capable and well balanced person. Where else are you going to find this?
A Death Note fan would write an analysis this detailed.
I enjoyed the original Japanese films more than the manga. Despite the mediocre acting, the movie was much better than the anime.
It's a bit hard to find, but in the left sidebar there's a date string "2 Nov 2009". This would match up to the article's timeline; script appears on the Internet in May, add a few months for the author to discover it and perform extensive research. Inspecting the HTML verifies that that date is probably when the article was first published:

<meta name="dc.date.issued" content="2 Nov 2009"/>
And this, after Biden said that he wants to cut $20B from the DoD spending... Really wouldn't be cheaper with something else? Maybe I'm missing something, but a Windows OS by itself takes probably couple to dozen GB, and if this is installed on a tablet device, or even on SSD laptop - this takes significant amount of space (probably to solve SxS issues (dll side-by side versions) which also grows quite big with newer updates).

And then you would have to instruct your personnel to learn two interfaces - Metro, or who knows how it's called, and the old one.

And for that all monitors better be touch-capable, otherwise - what's the point of Windows 8?

I simply don't get it... Me & My wife are both using OSX, and we are happy, and while I understand that this is probably more expensive (or maybe... not) - there is completely free OS alternatives - not one, but at least couple decent.

If a big portion of the internet is built behind free OS, I don't see why DoD can't go with that option too.
"there are no vtable passed around nor attached to "objects" in Haskell"

Err... what the fuck? That's exactly how they work.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/OOP_vs_type_classes#Type_...

Read about the 'dictionary' passed around.

If you don't know how Haskell is implemented, why post a comment about how Haskell is implemented?
College is a great place to make friends, bond with other intelligent people and learn of course.
Even though when you reach some point, you have to do all the learning by yourself with books and articles anyway...
If you were Canadian / French/ German / Finish, studies would be very affordable. Maybe you could go over there to study? My sister is in Finland right now and she tells me that school is free for everyone, even foreigners. Go burst that bubble !

The other option is to stay home, be discipled and learn everything from books and online courses. Then you impress the hell out of interviewers and you get the job anyway because some companies care more about skills than diplomas.
it seems like uber swapped the icons for driver/consumer in their recent update. catching multiple versions of the same icon is something on the todo as well.

thanks for bringing that to our attention, peter.
Too true. Gwern's whole site is an awesome example of applied critical thinking.
I think its a good idea, except there is some ass-backwards rules to stop this; OMB Circular A-130. The Senate also added to the NDAA 2013 to ensure a "less expensive" commercial software is used.

"The bill indicates that Accumulo may violate OMB Circular A-130, a government policy that bars agencies from building software if it’s less expensive to use commercial software that’s already available. And according to one congressional staffer who worked on the bill, this is indeed the case. He asked that his name not be used in this story, as he’s not authorized to speak with the press."
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/nsa-accumulo-go...
Although it went a bit off the rails, I wouldn't say it was poorly done. As an anime compared to others it stands amongst the best in my opinion.

I agree though it is always a pity when something has the potential to be perfect, and some directorial decision is made to make a big dent in it (see almost every book to movie adaption).
If your project isn't properly encapsulated, incremental recompilation will often come close to a full recompile, or at least recompilation of a big chunk of code.

For example, if you delete AbstractFooBase.unusedMethod, sbt will recompile every file everywhere that references a concrete Foo instance.

(In principle it should only need to recompile files which reference unusedMethod, but it's not that smart yet.)
Can you explain why you think there's no such thing as true referential transparency? I'd disagree with that statement, so I'm interested as to what you mean, and what your arguments are.

Thanks.
I agree with your point about Metro.
$617m probably includes a support contract, Windows Server, and MS SharePoint Enterprise licenses.
I enjoyed the mechanics of traversing this slide show with my mouse wheel.
Um, you might want to check out that National Geographic video on the NSA... You'll see a few Linux screenshots, but most of the screens are Windows. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quq67h8j_OY

Now as to their backend systems, who knows.
Probably.

Most people like college, and many people try to re-create aspects of the college experience at later points in their lives, usually without success. Even those who don't learn much seem to get a fair amount out of college. A lot of the learning takes place between the lines, and between classes.

I've seen college from the position of an undergrad, a law student (I quit) and now an ABD in a Phd program. I've written a lot about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/?s=college . Take a look at those posts to get a better sense of the issues.

You can also look at a college degree as a kind of insurance: you may or may not need one, but if you do need it when you're 35, you REALLY need it.

Finally, look at the successful people you know or have read about. The vast majority went to college. Even the famous dropouts didn't, for the most part, dropout because they thought getting a degree was useless—they did so because they had a better opportunity to pursue. Unless you do, go.

Don't spent every hour programming. Go to parties, join a club, hit the gym. You'll still have lots of time with your hands on the keyboard. For many people, college is the easiest environment for sex they'll ever encounter. Take advantage of that.
Plant breeding has always been tinkering with the genome, why aren't people scared of it? Read the Wikipedia page on the various ways plants are bombarded with radiation, mutagenic chemicals, have nuclei fuzed with electricity, et al in "non-GMO 'organic'" plant breeding.

Why is the more error prone process, in which we are ignorant of the mechanism, presumed safer?

If we invented a machine which randomly bred plants, sampled their DNA, and tested for the modification of a single gene, or infected plants with naturally occuring bacteria or virii and waited for an inter-species transfer, would you find this less scary than a process which uses a petri dish and a pipette?

There's a continuous gradient between the way people bred, modified, and selected plants thousands of years ago up until today. Our precision and our knowledge has gotten a lot better.

The only reason at all to trust maize, or other human domestic modifications, is simply because they've been around for a long long time and so you can infer safer because if there was something dangerous, it would have shown up already.

Or, are we simply ignoring dangers that have already existed but become desensitized to them, like gluten issues, or lactose intolerance. Our diet has changed radically since the invention of agriculture, and in a way, much of man's early experiments at domestication of plants, our first "GMO" so to speak, may have had unforseen circumstances.

But we brush it all off, yet people are hypersensitive to any minute theoretical issue that could happen with GMO, real or imagined.

This boils down a lot I think to human emotion, and our notions of disgust with respect to food. We like what is common and fear the unknown.
Interesting- I only watched the anime back in high school (darn, has it been that long?!), and absolutely loved it.

I just ordered the manga box set on Amazon :)
One of the largest advantages in getting a degree is working abroad. A lot of countries wont give you work Visas unless you have some sort of degree.

While this advice isn't perhaps directly answering your question, the fact is simple, having a degree will open some extra doors for you.
I've never seen the live action films, I'll have to check it out. I see that Toda Erika, one of my favorite Japanese actresses, stars as Amane Misa. Apparently it was her debut film, so it'll be interesting to see how her acting back then compares to now (I just started watching the spring 2012 dorama Kagi no Kakatta Heya yesterday, in which she isn't all that bad).
Generally there's no reason not to take the AA on the way, incidentally.
Except there is merit to running without swap in some circumstances, and I wouldn't be surprised if projects like compcache bear some resemblance to some "compress your RAM" product out there.
Quitting Facebook Is The New 'I Quit TV'
Uh... what implications would those be? Sterile hybrids of plants where the offspring of hybrids are generally undesirable anyway?

DRM for computers is bad because the only way for it to work is to ban computers as we know them and replace them with something fundamentally broken. There really isn't a plant equivalent.
I have two out of the air guesses on how brain damage might cause crime. First, part of your brain responsible for empathy might not work right. Second, if you're dumb you have a harder time holding down a job, so might be more likely to resort to crime. I throw these out only to play with ideas, not to imply I have any evidence they are correct, or that brain-damage even does cause crime increase.
I don't understand why people distrust GMOs. GMOs make food production more efficient; what's bad about that?
Edit Room | HTML5 content editor
Since you're smart enough to ask the question, then the answer is yes, you do. At 19, if all you've ever done is "IT" — maintaining servers and databases — then you need to broaden your perception of the world. A good college will help make you a well-rounded, much smarter person with a way better awareness of the world. That's what it did for me.

Go to a good college. Don't cheap out. Don't play with computers too much. Study computer science if you want (it's good for your programming skills), but don't get hung up on it. Step out of your academic comfort zone and take classes in subjects way outside of your experience: philosophy, anthropology, women's studies, linguistics, comparative literature, art. College gives you a place where you can experiment with knowledge freely. Maybe you'll find something you'll like more than computers. If you're really lucky, you'll find something you can put together with your knowledge of CS and do something really important (or at least really profitable!). Don't worry about jobs afterwards, since you clearly have all the skills you need to earn a paycheck.
The government leaves Google alone—what it means for users
Well, if a population of several thousand humans had been eating it for 50 years without evident ill effect, I suppose that would be more or less good enough.

In any discussion of risk it is important to remember the value to be obtained. I might take a drug with known dangerous side effects on the chance it would cure a disease from which I suffered. But to me, the only possible benefit of eating a GMO food is that it would be somewhat cheaper than something else I could eat. For some people, that might be a good enough reason. For me, it's not.
Perhaps running their existing applications is a consideration? Or retraining costs? There are plenty of reasons that the total cost of ownership might be lower with Windows.
I don't think going to college is worth it if you're just going to get a degree. If the education will get you a foundation that will almost certainly benefit you, go for it. For example, if you want to be a doctor you have to finish college before you get go to medical school, but I'm not sure a C.S. degree makes you a better sys admin.

Let's pretend you start your own startup and you look for an entry level dev + ops kind of person. All other things being equal, would you rather hire a CS grad with no work experience or the person who didn't go to college with 1 year of startup experience working as a dev and being a sys admin? Either way, you should probably hire the person who demonstrates the best ability to do the job.

There is definitely some value in having a college degree. HR drones may opt to interview college grads first. You'll certainly learn things in college you may not learn other places. But college is pretty damn expensive these days, you've already got a career that pays you something, and it's hard for me to imagine you could learn something in college that you couldn't just teach yourself by building interesting things on your own.

Basically if you have to ask if college makes sense, spending a lot of money to go to college to find out if college makes sense may be doing things the hard way.

Here's a post from my old blog questioning whether or not it was a good investment to have gone to grad school -- http://captainrecruiter.blogspot.com/2011/05/value-propositi....
Hollywood, please don't ever try to make live-action remakes of anime. Why can't they just show the anime itself? It was already good.

I highly recommend watching Death Note in its original anime form (preferably in Japanese with English subtitles). It's excellent. A little culture never hurt anyone. Every story doesn't have to take place in the U.S.
Educational value aside, a degree makes it easier to work abroad. As a Canadian I may want to work in Silicon Valley and I might get hired based on experience alone, but the US government is less willing to issue visas to those without a degree. That itself may make it worthwhile to you. Additionally, there are some government grants for startups (in Canada, but presumably elsewhere) that require one of the founders to be a STEM grad. Prior to enrolling in university I was unaware of these hidden benefits, but they're numerous.
" the studios initially wanted to give the main character Light Yagami a new background story to explain his downward spiral as a villain. The new background would have had a friend of Light murdered when he was young. When Light obtains the Death Note - a notebook with which he can put people to death by writing their names - he uses it to seek vengeance"

This really makes me cringe. This is precisely the sort of thinking that gave us so many mediocre/bad movies. Only someone who has no idea of what the story is about could suggest such a crude alteration of the story. And for what? Do they really think the movie would be better because of it? Or at least draw more audience?

Anyway it's great that the director managed to hold off these changes, I saw Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and it was absolutely great so I'm anxious to see what he'll make of it :)