skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to one of these with a decade of moderate meditation under my belt and just over a year of 'wanting to'.

I got extremely sick from a combination of rhinovirus and detox (I had been smoking regularly); and left on the 5th full day.

My experiences with meditation had been primarily pleasant. I learned accidentally following rote instructions at 18; and meditated regularly on and off (mostly off as years went by) until I heard about this course (which is free, including room and board), and it took just over a year until I sorted out the opportunity to go.

I honestly feel/felt scared/respectful of the whole endeavor. Meditation is what it would be like to learn to breathe underwater, if it were possible.

Our bodies know intrinsically we can't breathe water in; so when you are under water you don't breathe. When oxygen levels are high its not really a thought, but even with oxygen levels are low there is an inherent aversion to sucking/breathing in the water.

Meditation is like that, in the sense our commitment to sit for ~60 minus (or 10 hours a day) is akin to committing to keep our heads under water. The difference is with meditation, the only thing limiting how long you can sit is your will.

By sitting and not reacting to our thoughts we are eventually shown this "layer" where we are unconsciously "holding our breath" in the same way we do when we are under water with high levels of oxygen. Meditation effectively "reduces the oxygen" thereby increasing the signal on the "i need oxygen" circuit, so in the same way that being under water when oxygen is running low, what was previously so subtle as to not be noticed consciously there is now this new, apparent phenomena we can't help but be made aware of.

This is the mechanism, in my estimation, that meditation gives its benefit. Essentially the 'secret' learned while meditation is that "you can breathe underwater" and all this aversion you were feeling was a total waste of energy; energy you didn't even now you were expending.
Why wouldn't you be respected equally? The point of a degree is that it's a proxy for a statement about skills, not that the prestige of the degree itself is valuable.
IPhone 5 32GB Specifications
> Now take the equivalent function in Python

Those functions maybe similar but they are not equivalent.
Hmm?

The set of functions with the type \alpha -> \alpha is trivially infinite.

f(x) = x - 1 for \alpha = Z

is an obvious example that's not the identity function.

Or do you mean the function

f(x) = x

because obviously there is only one such function (and it's called the identity function).
Let's just go roughly backward from around the 1950s.

A grab-bag of events that brought us to the contemporary period:

US's role in post-WW2 reconstruction of West Germany & anti-soviet programs.
Taft-Hartley Act.
WW2 internment camps.
OSS.
US's complicity in doing nothing about the German work/death camps, despite knowing about them by 1942.
Banana republics.
The Gilded Age.
America's excessively and government-sponsored anti-labor business history.
The Pinkertons.
Jim Crow.
Plessy v. Ferguson.
Dred Scott v. Sanford.
Compromise of 1877.
Reconstruction.
The Civil War.
The Missouri Compromise.
Property clauses in the Constitution.
Pre-revolutionary colonial America.

A similar grab-bag of landmark cases one should understand if anyone is going to even speak about power of the private sector (because that power is a recent invention (in history, recent doesn't mean last decade)):

U.S. v. Martin Linen.

Buckley v. Valeo.

Ross v. Bernhard.

Wheeling Steel v. Glander.

Hague v. CIO.

Grosjean v. American Press Co

Ligget v. Lee.

Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon.

Dodge v. Ford Motor

Armour Packing v. US.

Hale v. Henkel.

Lochner v. New York.

Noble v. Union River Logging.

Minneapolis & St. Lous Railroad v. Beckwith.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad

Railroad Tax Cases.

Munn v. Illinois.

Slaughterhouse Cases.

Paul v. Virginia.

McCulloch v. Maryland.

Dartmouth College v. Woodward.

Fletcher v. Peck.

Marbury v. Madison.

The OP has an inaccurate and myopic view of how we arrived at our present state.

For example, his comments on the private sector--President Bush isn't a drop in the bucket on that. He's over a century after the damage was done (two, depending on when you start counting). Even Citizens United is but a great-grandchild of earlier 'power grabs' (see Buckley v. Valeo).

Case in point--After passing the 14th Amendment, would you care to guess at who brought the most cases to SCOTUS to have their legal rights as persons recognized under the Amendment? Corporations. At a ratio over 15:1. There were 19 cases that dealt with African Americans' legal rights as citizens. There were 288 cases brought by corporations asking to be recognized as persons intended by the language of the Amendment between 1890-1920. A 30-year program by American business to be recognized as having the rights of natural citizens using the most important Amendment in the fight against holding people as property at the cost of ~600K lives--all to pervert the national mind into holding property as people.

It's been a long and winding road.
>the fact that something is extremely unpopular like Windows 8 makes it unlikely to have much impact.

Not necessarily. When Metro came out the design was definitely talked and made an impact. The market unpopularity, after that, doesn't effect the initial impact.
Congrats! Those are some worthy achievements.
Largest galaxy, 5 times size of Milky Way, uncovered
I think he meant the type ∀α. α → α. At least in Haskell, there is only one non-⊥ function of this type: id.

Moreover, there is no non-⊥ value of the type ∀α. α.

There is a tool called Djinn which can actually provide functions of such sufficiently constrained types. Another example would be the type ∀α.∀β. (α, β) → α, which only contains fst.

Even types that contain an infinite number of functions can have interesting constraints from polymorphism like this. For example, the type ∀α. [α] → [α] contains a whole bunch (for sufficiently infinite values of "whole bunch" :P) of different functions. However, you are guaranteed that the functions can only affect the structure of the list: the function cannot create or modify values of type α in the list. So the function reverse would have this type, but a function which added 1 to each element of the list could not. Moreover, a function of this type would always have to map [] to [].
When I opened the homepage, at the bottom I could see some options and on the top of them it was written, you are using "Helishopter Lite", to enable full version click here... something like that, I clicked but nothing happened, then I refreshed the page, and the bottom part was not visible anymore, I think the issue was both mobile and web version got loaded at once.

The transitions on this page http://helishopter.com/s/*/fashion where the options to save it buy it and send it appears are not so smooth.
> f(x) = x - 1 for \alpha = Z

What? The whole point of what you're replying to is that \alpha remains undefined. Once you specify \alpha, of course you can specify more interesting functions.

IOW, write a function that works even if \alpha is a composite datatype the details of which I refuse to disclose.
This also assumes no one will fork or fetch from your fork of the OSS repo before you rebase.
Oh wow, funny to see this on here as I just an hour ago applied to attend a session. Thanks for sharing your experiences everyone!
How application compatibility works, step by step
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~cs30x/rt_lt.rule.html
First suggestion: show the 2nd level in your Table of Contents.
That's helpful for customers like me who would buy the book if they knew a bit more details about what's inside (I don't want to buy something and then find out I know most of the contents already).

Another suggestion that would get me to buy the book: does the book addressed particular issues that I know I need to figure out (and will save me from having to do my own research).
In particular, would be useful if the marketing of the book told me that it would discuss specific tasks/decisions. Some examples of tasks:

-how to code my django app so it works in both python 2.7 and python 3? What's the best way to do that? Django six? How do I setup virtualenv to support my dual configuration? I think this is what the django core team is doing nowadays so I can also adopt the same strategy, right?

-what's the best way to replace django templates with jinja2?

-for python 3, what is the alternative to PIL?

-as mentioned elsewhere, how do I do database migration when the models change. Especially, what are the different alternatives for doing the migration (django south seems too complicated -- can I just make sure the manage.py db schema and the actual db schema are the same as the docs suggest?)

-should I use store much of my model data in a json field so I don't have to deal with db migration? Any software packages or coding tips about this?

-how do I use SQL Alchemy with django? Issues with doing this (besides not getting a lot of django goodies).

-how do I configure django-social-auth ( https://github.com/omab/django-social-auth ) beyond the default setting (ie: the pipeline)

-what is a good web host for django. Answer: webfaction. How do I set up virtualenv on webfaction?
Keep in mind that there are (infinitely) many ways to implement the identity function. One such example (in Haskell) is:

foo = head . (:[])

This is the composition of putting an element into a list with removing it from the list. You can do this with any functor.
Sweden rather than US tells me it's an administration error. Not all episodes of this show have aired yet, so it may be that someone added it before the rights licensing process was complete, or it's also possible that it was planned for one episode but they decided not to use it in the end (which happens a lot in film and TV production).
> The implication, it seems clear, is that we should not focus on this one case, but on broader problems in our legal system. This seems to be a straw man. I see no one saying "let’s only be angry about Aaron Swartz."

I have noticed several of comments with this "focus on the larger picture" style of criticism here, and frankly I think at this point it amounts to concern trolling. I think this article does a good job of rebutting that sentiment.
I'm guessing that you disagree with this. I certainly do.

Sometimes that is our only choice to right a wrong. Case in point: the civil rights movement.
I agree with everything you have said, but it is worth pointing out that the best online players are assisted by bots. The top players use software that can immediately show your last 10 bets and the outcomes as soon as you raise.

My point is that if you play low stakes, you get crushed by patient bots. If you play high stakes, you get crushed by cyborgs.
I'm not at all arguing that shutting up will make everything be fine.

I'm arguing that mentioning the most logical trigger as a sure main/only cause for the suicide, besides being fallacious, can potentially cause more harm than good.

We sure must not accept what is regularly being done in prosecutions, but not because someone died, rather because it's a policy of terror instead of application of justice.
Downvoted for the last sentence: Gruber explicitly writes that the "whole default iOS look [...] is optimized for non-retina displays", as in: Apple is doing this all wrong. If anything, his insane statement makes him a shill for third-party Apple developers.

(And I would agree that he overestimates the universal love for Letterpress, but basically all of the blogosphere was fawning over it. How much $$$ has it raked in compared to Carcassonne, which is almost a parody of skeuomorphism?)
This book really helped me in my transition from windows to linux
Do you care to elaborate? History, to me, suggests quite the opposite; you might argue that it's quite common for people to actually practice the application of a generalized set of pre-packaged criteria to all situations, but the actual patterns of events we can observe indicate that we might all be better off with fewer and fewer people doing so, and more and more developing the native intelligence necessary to evaluate every unique conjunction of circumstance on its own particular merits.
Sure, type systems are very practical. I wouldn't want to program without a good one any more.

But that's not really why I find them interesting. Mostly, I just find most type theory simple and beautiful. It's fun and gives me a new perspective on how to think about computation (as transformations between types).

Also, while a type system restricts the set of possible programs, it can actually make a language more expressive. Haskell's typeclasses make a whole bunch of things much nicer: custom numeric types, overloaded string literals, monads, QuickCheck... All this is far uglier in a language without typeclasses.

Coincidentally, I'm very excited that Rust is promising to bring much of the typeclassy goodness to low-level programming. It really does make life much nicer, and promises to bring some progress to the otherwise seemingly stagnant field of systems languages. I think that's the sort of innovation we really need rather than Go, but I'm obviously very biased :).
Decent letter, I'm glad someone from the Senate stepped up.
I would add this :

Seventh, really? 35 years for a kid who learned his lesson and didn't do something horrible in the first place? Some decency and common sense people.
Kind of OT, but am I the only one for whom Brushed Metal was an affordance? A brushed metal frame meant "I have a super large drag area, drag me from any edge you want to". Apps like iSync could be dragged basically from any pixel that was not on a button.
Epping Forest Walks « UK Walking
By default, this is true. However, you can set <Host unpackWARs="false"> so that it runs applications directly from the WAR file without extracting it.
And if you do this you are a wally anyway...
Thanks, we're really happy with how the launch went. We couldn't have asked for more.
The Insight Meditation Center, a long-time buddhist group, recently acquired and opened a new retreat center in Scotts Valley. See http://www.insightretreatcenter.org/

The meditation methods used there would be the same as the above.
And a few lines below he says that the default look of iOS does it wrong (in the context of the article). He can only be referring to third party apps.
Building Mega: Ars’ pre-launch interview with Kim Dotcom
Moral imperative to decrease negative emotions
So, perhaps I'm spoiled: I was born and raised in Las Vegas. and CES is just another expo. Heck, this year I made it down to the actual show floor once for a few hours max. Yet I also feel the pain of spending a ton of effort in trying to get a startup to pitch at a show; my first startup was in a niche industry that held its largest major convention in a major US city nowhere near where I was bootstrapping at the time. Just like OP, I also convinced myself that it was absolutely necessary to attend said conference and be on the show floor with a booth when in reality in most cases it's a waste of resources better allocated elsewhere.

I won't claim to understand the difficulties of the immigration system, nor the intricacies of running a hardware startup in India. But I do know what's going on at CES, and it's not a massive hack to get in and have your wares displayed on the floor. As the article points out, business is often built on hustle, networking, relationships and the like. Heck, my friend socially conditioned (hustled?) his way into a badge in about 30 seconds at registration desk.

Yet this same hustle and networking focus means that the deals at CES are often setup months before, usually between buyers and sellers who have worked together or in the industry for years. Tough sales are worked over dinner at a strip restaurant or at that industry heavyweight party at some great club. Execs take a look at products in their hotel penthouse suite. None of this world really fits the bill for a lean startup attempting to truly validate that their product makes sense for their customers.

Best of luck to OP, as it seems he really wanted to focus on being at CES and overcame some obstacles when that wasn't able to take place. But I'd warn away other startups considering whether big industry expos are worth it: It kinda becomes clear once you're there that it's not.
There's certainly historically been a great deal of UI experimentation out there, but in the past, it's been limited in context: entirely new UI paradigms, as I remember, we're often tested out in entirely new products designed around the UI concept - which often succeeded or failed in the market due to the UI's influence - or we're gradually fleshed out as R&D projects over long periods of time. But anything more than incremental UI paradigms used to have to prove themselves before they ended up as the default UI of well-established software products' shipping releases.

It just seems like there's a tendency for new versions of existing products to have in their release notes something along the lines of "added: entirely new grounds-up UI design, based on experimental concepts, that bears little resemblance to previous UI". E.g. Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, Windows 8; ironically, Apple currently offers the most conservative and predictable desktop UI among currently-shipping OSes.

This doesn't really relate to the state-vs.-action question directly, except that I thing both may be related to a current tendency to emphasize visual aesthetics over functional consistency.
Ad Targeting No Place for Serendipity
Ad targeting is amazing. Online behaviour is tracked and only relevant 'ads' are shown. I once visited a big A/B testing site and am hounded with their banner ads where ever I go on Internet.

There is no place for serendipity in the cutting edge world of ad targeting tech. Will we stop discovering amazing things by just stumbling upon?
...how is this different for complaining that "SQL is unsafe because of injection possibilities"?

...do real world Spring web apps really use unsanitized user input with "expression language" queries? (or am I totally missing the point? - not a Spring guy, I admit, but it all reads weird to me)
DISCLAIMER: This post focuses more on the Goenka courses than Vipassana meditation per se.

I'm quite surprised that no dissenting opinion has yet surfaced on the topic of Goenka's courses. Most of the commentor's opinions here seem over-enthusiastic, describing the Goenka retreat as 'the best thing in [their] lives'. To me, this is a serious warning sign.

I have attended a 10-day retreat, which ended prematurely (on the evening of the 8th day) because of my refusal to watch the evening lectures. While I must agree with the commentors' positive opinions on the meditative experience, I feel compelled to inform any potential attendees that despite claims of 'scientific rationality', the Goenka group is a regular religious sect.

When the course begins, the Vipassana technique is presented as an objective tool to achieve insight into the workings of one's own mind and emotions. Mr. Goenka presents himself as someone who merely happened to learn of the technique and is now passing it on.

As the days progress, the scarce sleep and food schedule begins to take its toll on the participants' bullshit detectors, and subtle religious notions are slipped into the agenda. These include:

* The primacy of Vipassana over other religions
* The unreasonableness of other religions
* The unquestioned truth of reincarnation
* The fact that our bodies are made up of some kind of vibrations

I remember finally 'snapping out of it' when Goenka started talking about bubble chambers( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_chamber ) and the depressed scientist who made them. My bullshit detector went on overdrive and I thought about all the things that had been said up to that point during Goenka's video lectures and his taped talks. I realized that I had been subtly manipulated into accepting certain ontological truths, such as the above. These were not things I would have readily accepted coming to the retreat.

I also realized I had been planning to continue with Vipassana practice and make it part of my life. Maybe help organize retreats in my home country. Become part of this 'wonderful' movement headed by Mr. Goenka. This was definitely not something I had in mind when I signed up for the course.

I know I will not convince anyone who is already engaged with the Goenka group to rethink how they got involved, but I would like to sincerely warn anyone who is considering attending:

You will not be alone with your thoughts and emotions during these ten days. You will be accompanied by THE RECORDED VOICE OF GOENKA, for 2-3 hours of each and every day. Every meditation will start with his talks and chants, every meditation will end with his talks and chants. From what I understand, but have obviously not experienced firsthand, the grueling 9-day course ends with a Love-bomb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_bombing). I believe these 'free' courses are set up to lure susceptible people into the organization.

Please look into some critical views on any religious group before engaging with one. On the internet, smears abound, but you may also find some grounded critique that may shine light on the structure and purpose of the organization.
I'm a lawyer and I completely agree with you.

In general, I think Prof. Kerr is just a lot more pro law enforcement than I am. I find that he is often very dismissive of the defendant's case. For example, he seems to take for granted that Aaron violated the CFAA. With that being said, I still think he is Volokh's best contributor.
I've been hoping for a while that cloud storage providers like Dropbox, Google, Microsoft and all the others would have one-click encryption, to get most people to use it.

Mega will probably not make any easier to mass-share files on the web, but it will make private sharing a lot safer from prying eyes of both the providers themselves and governments, and I hope this catches on.

Dropbox should figure out how to do it, too, instead of finding flaws from the sideline, one day before Mega's launch, which also happens to give 25x more storage than Dropbox. I smell a little desperation with this article.
Why the Moon Landings Weren’t Faked
I'd say the over/under for a clone of Voxer from FB is 6 months. I'm taking the under
It's nice that you say it works in all major browsers, but the mobile support is poor. No chrome.

Short-sighted... Mobile is growing at a crazy rate in ecommerce.