skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
| his harassment at the border began right after
| giving a keynote at HOPE 2010 in place of Julian
| Assange

| the only US citizen identified in the media as
| a member of the Wikileaks team.

I'm thinking that these two pieces of information are part of it.
Chrome was my weapon of choice but I am moved to a new house and this Error 324 issue started. Click reload and the very same page I was just looking at doesn't work anymore. It affects sites with CloudFlare as far as I could figure, but all other browsers are working fine.
Many PhD's I know didn't work on their research for the extra letters on their business cards, but out of a genuine devotion to further our knowledge on their research subjects.
The blog post in question states in the fourth paragraph he was inspired by the recent article about "placebos and nocebos", which is "the article" I'm referring to. That is, we're reading the product of someone's short-term random curiosity. Random curiosity is a great thing but IMHO the path from random curiosity to published findings needs to have some serious experience in the middle for it to be worth our time.
Man hunt for ex-soldier who shot police chief's daughter and killed policeman
IIRC, moxie said at some point that he was being harassed because he was a contact on Jake's phone which was confiscated by the US government at some point, so now he's associated with him.
What's missing for IE9/10 support?
Ok, pardon my ignorance, but I'm curious if anyone can comment on how this does or doesn't relate to the Curry-Howard correspondence ? The very limited amount of introductory type theory that I've read (mostly Benjamin Pierce's TAPL and Software Foundations) seems to treat Curry-Howard as a deep and fundamental cornerstone, but the only places I've seen the algebraic properties of types explored is in blog posts (http://blog.lab49.com/archives/3011).

Is there some connection I just haven't figured out yet due to mathematical immaturity? I'm struggling to see the relationship between types as sums, products and exponents, and types as conjunction, disjunction and implication.
Ah I see, I really like Go: interesting.
I already signed up for the beta, waiting for the email.
Why is it hard to port Haskell to Java?
I am surprised you are writing this about Apple (I rarely use Apple products and hence don't know much about their quality) but I wholeheartedly agree on that title of yours in general. I increasingly feel like all products I use are in beta.

I used to blame manufacturers for this, but recently I have come to the conclusion that consumers are to blame. Nobody cares about longevity and build quality of products any more. Read some product reviews on Amazon and you'll notice most of them are written within days of purchasing the product. Go to Techcrunch and most of the product reviews there seem to be written before they used the damn thing.

tl,dr: If we incentivize designers and manufacturers to neglect quality over specs, we get the crap we get these days.
Apple doesn't even have an open bug-tracker. That alone could improve a lot. discussions.apple.com is full of issue-discussing threads with thousands of replies, but nobody gives a damn.
New evidence suggests comet or asteroid impact was last straw for dinosaurs
I took the time to setup a small VPS from the lowendtalk[1] forums and then installed

* openvpn [2] (In ubuntu just apt-get install openvpn)
* webmin [3]
* webmin openvpn module [4]

Next, In installed tunnelbrick[5] on my mac.

The above looks like a lot of work, but it only took about 30 minutes. I've been using it for over a year now and it works well.

-------

[1] - http://lowendtalk.com

[2] - http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto...

[3] - http://webmin.com

[4] - http://www.openit.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=s...

[5] - http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/
You can preach to children the value of the process, the importance of learning, etc. But the second you give them an exam, you lose all credibility. That's the real problem with school. Even if teachers devote themselves to imbuing this "problem centric" approach in their students, the school system requires them to give examinations, which inherently encourage the "answer centric" approach.
Honestly, this is ridiculous. I have experienced none of these issues. I use Preview and Color Picker all the time. Both Chrome and Safari works always for me. My iPhone 4 did not have a home-button issue, so it is definitely not 100% bad. I don't need to restart iTunes all he time. I use Mail with 15 accounts and 50000 messages across multiple servers. No problems! None... Zero... It really just works for me.
Xcode sucks, but is becoming a lot less sucky with every new release.
As soon as I stopped building computers from off-the-shelf parts, stopped installing unpopular applications and plugins and stopped trying to use OSes like Linux with relatively few users the amount of my life I spent fixing weird computer problems fell from hours per week to almost zero.

When I do encounter a problem, the answer is almost always available after 5 minutes on Google.

Following the herd leads to an easy life. Go figure.
I think they need to stop adding new stuff and fix what's already released. Snow Leopard was the best version of OS X because they did exactly that. Bug fixing. No new stuff.
TSA trying to sell off X-ray screening machines
"Mathematicians don't use square brackets for functions"

Not true at all:

1) Operators acting on a distribution: E[X], Var[X], Cov[X,Y]

2) Square brackets are used in nested parentheses to avoid confusion: [1(2 + 3) + 4]/5

3) Functionals: L[f] for lagrangian

The main reason why [] isn't used as frequently as () is because most domains interpret the square brackets to mean something special. For example:

1) [x] is often used to denote floor(x)

2) [i=j] is used to denote the kronecker delta
Thats a healthy dose of reality distortion. He lists specific flaws in specific applications.
Yeah, I've had to push code down from our C# layer to our C++ layer on more than one occasion because the GC wasn't freeing memory promptly enough. I guess I don't know the GC well enough to nudge it in the right direction - but now I don't trust it and I plan to keep all high performance stuff in the native layer. I'd like to hear from someone who figured out how to tame the GC in applications where lots of new data is created and destroyed quickly.
when all purchasable soybean seeds on the market
end up being composed of seeds that originated
from Monsanto's genetically modified stock

This is very unlikely to happen. People are careful to keep track of seed varieties. And as long as there are many people who don't want to grow GM soybeans then non-Monsanto seeds will even stay relatively cheap.
I love my chromebook so I'm fairly interested in doing this. I have two questions:
1) How does having a chroot environment affect battery life? Does access to the Ubuntu tools cost a ton of battery?
2) After I go into developer mode can I still get updates to Chrome OS?
I can assure you, I don't install anything I shouldn't, I just USE my hardware. Not just "sending emails, receiving email", but doing work on them all day, every day. And this is when the issues start to come up.

Only then you start noticing little things like how headers in those 'Group by' modes in Finder obscure the actual file names, that you can't sort files in the Open window, that every time you try to save the file with a new name it offers you to save to iCloud, etc..
It's a bug in the Chrome 25 Beta. Will be fixed on stable release.
wow... Who knew?
Anyways, viewing it as a package manager is not too bad is it?
Something ignored in this article (maybe it's covered elsewhere on the blog):

iTunes Match is by far the biggest Apple crud that I've used. It simply does not work.
Completely Bulls*&t article. I was going to write a long explanation why, but this made up whining doesn't deserve it.
Yup. I deliberately ignored ⊥ to simplify the presentation (and I make no apologies for doing so!)

There are a couple of posts by Dan Piponi where he explores how to count inhabitants of types when you properly account for ⊥:

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2008/02/how-many-functions-are-there-from-to.html

He does it by counting the number of functions () -> () (where () is of course inhabited by both () and ⊥), and concludes that the number of functions () -> () depends on the semantics of the language:

1 in a total language (like Agda) or in mathematics.
3 in a lazy language (like Haskell) when working completely lazily.
4 in Haskell, when using seq to enforce strictness.
3 in a strict language (like ML).

He then goes on to analyse the relationship between point-set topology and computability, showing that the set of computable functions is in a 1-1 correspondence to the set of continuous functions, under the appropriate topology:

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2008/01/what-does-topology-have-to-do-with.html
http://blog.sigfpe.com/2008/02/what-is-topology.html
http://blog.sigfpe.com/2008/03/what-does-topology-have-to-do-with.html

Fascinating stuff - but you can see why I decided not to talk about it!

Edit: Aha, I just realized who you are, and that we've met before..!
A recent problem I ran into was sending Xmas cards to friends and family. We had over a hundred addresses to send to and I didn't want to send them all by hand. So, I wrote a script. Of course, most of the emails went straight into the spam folders because, I guess, doing this just made them look like spam to most filters.

Granted, the emails were all sent from a shared hosting account, the mail server of which I had no control over as far as certificates and reputation were concerned. But my feeling is that anything I could have done to improve my Xmas greetings' success rate would have been exactly what spammers also try to do.

Aggressive filters assume everyone is a bad actor until proven otherwise, and I think that's a problem. Our quality of life is degraded whenever we make this calculation.
How the Wikileaks founder alienated his allies
Raytheon's Riot program mines social networks
LLVM and Clang have nightly buildbots that check for regressions. They are quite fastidiously maintained. The project would really appreciate your help and you can do so by submitting a bug report with steps to reproduce and build artifacts. The bugfix will contain a test case, likely a minimal reduction of your repro, that will be run in the buildbots to make sure that you never see the same problem again.

And I do not believe that they have sacrificed anything to support both C and C++ (including partial support for their '11 variants). The codebase is abstracted away from the C/C++ differences where it makes sense. It is an impressively comprehensible compiler!

http://llvm.org/bugs/
A Language Without Conditionals
You can use simple cellular automata to create somewhat natural-looking cave formations: http://rcfox.ca/random-cave-map-generation/
That's funny, I could have sworn that the article described someone who followed the herd and had everything go to crap.
Yea, the blog shows us what Value Noise would produce, and says this is easily confused with Perlin Noise, but does not show us what Perlin Noise output looks like.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is the "seed software" as it existed before you is still free for all to use. The software license analogy would be BSD (any non-copyleft license).
It's unfortunate that this post about a young businessman's frustrations with school showed up when you weren't reading:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5194104

It would have been nice to read your thoughts on whether he should just get a GED (or perhaps no diploma) and find other ways of educating himself.

But perhaps they would have been similar to this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358559
China Passes U.S. to Become Biggest Trading Nation
"We need to find a better way to teach children, one that doesn’t kill their innate sense of curiosity and play."

But how do you objectively measure creativity and play? You can't. So it's not surprising that American public education is moving in exactly the opposite direction, drifting ever closer to a system where high stakes standardized tests determine your entire future. At the root of this is some deep seated hysteria about being overtaken by China or whatnot. It's madness, but I have no politically viable ideas for fixing the system.

Anyone out there tried home schooling?
It's this. If you look at the stats on the % of visitors to most web sites, 1280x1024 or 1024x768 (and the non-retina Macbook equivalent) remain the dominant approximate screen sizes, so developers optimize for them on the assumption that things will work ok for folks with bigger screens.

I can remember when we used to optimize for 800x600.
I am a web-developer and I guess it is different with Xcode, but I would like to have my colors in HEX, like I had them before Lion came out. Amazed with your iPhone 4 experience, but where I live almost everybody I see has a "accessibility controls" on the screen because home button doesn't work. Regarding iTunes, my library might be too big, but each morning I see it used 5Gb of ram and after force-quitting it I have to wait for like 7 minutes while it is checking the library.
Hey, this isn't just Apple. It's everywhere. Thinking of a doing a Kindle book? You poor frikkin naif. You just have no idea.
http://www.selfpublishingreview.com/blog/2013/02/why-amazon-...

And you can multiply that by just about every eBook app out there too.
Another "If education had been more customized to me, education would be better for everyone" lament. Know what, Nabeel? Few people are like you. Most people aren't tinkerers. Lots of people aren't curious, and many people respond to freeform environments with indecision and frustration that's self-defeating. That's not to say that Nabeel is a special flower and everyone else is a drone, it's to say that everyone is different--I mean, really different, in a way that any education system is going to struggle with.

Want to revolutionize education? Figure out a way to 1) reliably detect the optimum education environment for each student, and 2) give it to them. Some kids really do want, and thrive in, extremely structured, rote learning environments. Some kids really do want, and succeed best in, environments geared for professional advancement. And others want self-directed learning.

The education system failing one student doesn't mean its failing all students.
My Android devices 'just work'. I also advice novice users to buy Windows for their laptops, even though I, personally, prefer Linux. Windows gets a lot of crap from more advanced users, but it's amazing how everything 'just works' on that platform considering the huge amount of software and hardware that is supported. My mom bought herself an iPhone earlier this year and has been very happy with its usability, but I would never, ever, let her install anything but Windows on her laptop.
> Google's OTR and OTR XMPP spec are different

> The specs are not different. They are completely different things.

Do you not have any reading comprehension? That's literally what I said. I haven't said anything against OTR at all. I fully support the use of XMPP and OTR for communications. You can attack me all you'd like, it doesn't change anything I said.
To the contrary, I know many examples of young people who rock on exams precisely because they learn to pursue curiosity rather than to fulfill minimal school requirements. How useful an examination is depends on how it is designed and administered. How influential examinations are in an overall educational system depends on what incentives are attached to exams and what rewards and opportunities are available to learners irrespective of exams.

Albert Einstein had an interesting account of his school experiences in his longest autobiographical writing, the introductory section of a book I grew up having in my home library (because my dad bought the book when he was a student of the philosophy of science).

http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html

The examination system that Einstein encountered as a student in Switzerland actually allowed him to spend minimal time getting ready for examinations and most of his time independently pursuing his interest in physics. As Einstein wrote, "There were altogether only two examinations; aside from these, one could just about do as one pleased." If his school grades had been based more on daily homework assignments (as in the United States), then he probably would have seen his "holy curiosity of inquiry" entirely strangled by the school system, to use his words.
Convex vs. concave. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/the-end-of-ma...

The old-style, industrial-era education was based on limiting mistakes and reducing variance. Produce 100 widgets, by deadline X, with low variation. Reliable, low-variance work is still important, but machines do it a lot better than we do.

We've handed the concave world over to machines. They do that stuff far better than we can. Now the only marketable human labor is the convex stuff where the variance-reducing approach that has characterized 200+ years of industrial capitalism fails (because when the input-output curve is convex, you want variance).

The way we do things in the U.S. is ideal for the concave world and utterly incapable of preparing people for convex work, in which autonomy is no longer a rare reward but a prerequisite for producing quality work.

It's not just education that has become outmoded. Our attitudes have as well. We understand natively that both talent (to be judged at best) and character (to be judged at worst) are important in assessing other people (building teams, choosing leaders) but we also conflate superficial reliability with character, to disastrous results. It turns out that the people who most easily maximize superficial reliability ("team players") are often the people of the worst character (psychopaths).

The educational process is designed to (a) inculcate reliability appropriate to a concave world, and (b) prime the smartest people for a world in which superficial reliability will be the main criterion for advancement.
If he had stopped at "Hmmm, there may be some cause or causes of lung cancer we're not paying enough attention to." that would have been fine.
That's one reason I liked my non-science/math courses in school better than the science/math ones, despite otherwise being inclined in the other direction. It varied based on the course, but on average I felt that courses where you wrote a paper or essay took the problem-centric approach more seriously, and graded me based on whether my analysis was interesting, coherent, supported properly, took into account obvious objections, etc., rather than by whether it was the "right" analysis matching some pre-determined answer the teacher was looking for.

I did have a few project-based science courses, based more on having to propose something and justify your proposal, rather than giving a pre-determined answer. But I wasn't able to find more than a handful of those, and they tended to only be senior-level elective seminars, with a small number of students. I would guess the trend towards large, lecture-based courses (whether in-person, or MOOCs) will make them even more rare.
I can't get Chrome to work reliably on OS-X or iOS. The overwhelming majority of "Spinning Beach Balls of Death" I got on my old MacMini and on my new MacBookPro were from Chrome. On iOS it just randomly crashes, and would occasionally munge up my bookmarks. (On top of that, Google's logic for checking if DNS is working correctly caused my ISP's DNS servers to treat me as an attacker and start ignoring me, so I would lose their DNS for some time after I started using Chrome. I eventually switched to another DNS server at router-level, but it took a while to find the cause.)

But I agree with you on the rest - these are not issues the majority of users face, and I've seen none of them. [Edit: Few of them. I'm somewhat sympathetic to stance that Apple's software is lacking in some polish. And Preview after Lion has been /less than helpful/ for reviewing batches of images.]
> 1. Getting punished for being smarter than some teachers. It doesn't have to happen often to really really sour things.

I have witnessed teachers putting down bright kids hundreds of times.

They often cloak it in concern.

A lot of people interpret a smarter person than themselves as a cognitive insult, and will automatically try to bring the person they feel is smarter than them down a peg or two.

This crab mentality is so prevalent, and gifted children feel things so acutely that I would encourage any gifted adolescent to drop out as soon as possible, get a GED and get on with their lives.

They will be 7-8 years ahead of their peers at 23.

A gifted child we be smarter than most of their teachers at all but the best institutions. Their time would be better spent reading books and learning from the eminent experts in their fields than some hack with a teaching certificate.

Living in a place like NYC can replace the social aspect of the college experience just fine.

There is no excuse for tormenting a gifted child with the ordinary school system. It is designed to produce the mid-level workers capitalism needs for it's factories and offices, it is not designed to imbue the best education possible on young minds.
I've found the "Arch Linux Installer" available in the Play store to be quite nice for having a full distro available under Android on my Nexus 10...
If you goto someone else for help and they ridicule you, that person is wasting your time, and you should ignore them. If the person won't help, or at least give you constructive criticism, then ignore them.

It doesn't matter if you didn't fully consider the problem, it matters if the other person will help you. And sometimes, if the other person doesn't know either, he can at least make himself feel good by making you feel bad. Don't let him.
Yet OP couldn't use more popular software (Chrome, Flash, iOS, iTunes).

Personally, the difference I see since I switched to Debian (six years ago) was that I had less problems than on Windows, and more importantly, that I could actually fix those problems instead of having to get used to them.

My Windows 7 desktop, which I barely use compared to my Debian laptop & VPS, still wastes much more of my time with maintenance and random bugs.
The New York Disrupt Pitch-Off/Meetup Is On Tuesday
The clang static analyzer is the best you can find in the FOSS world and is constantly improving. LLVM itself is multi-target with a single compiler binary (llc), always handy for embedded developers. LLVM can target GPUs, and the resulting binaries wouldn't care if the host OS was Linux or Hurd. Clangs diagnostics are often better than GCC's but the GCC project is catching up fast in that area. Finally, LLVM offers a JIT that projects can use as a library. GCC offers compatibility, large target support, lots of compiler extensions, and great code generation.
"Oh well, so after I got the iPhone 4 finally I could use the phone for a whole day, but the Home button... It's not working, and everybody who had an iPhone 4 had or having this problem. So basically speaking 100% of the iPhone 4 yield was defective."

Too true. I bought a Nexus 4 because I had this problem, and the alternative was paying £100+ for Apple to fix my button. Surely the sole button on a device should work for the lifetime of the device?
Great article. Unfortunately the vast majority of the so-called education to which people around the world are exposed is not education, it's merely schooling. For those interested in the difference I suggest reading John Taylor Gatto's books. Also most important is to reflect on your own experiences of education vs. schooling. I myself have found that the two are absolutely antithetical.

"The Underground History of American Education" available free online:
http://mhkeehn.tripod.com/ughoae.pdf

Radio piece w/ JTG on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKci3_cmlqI