skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if you know that IO and monads are different, why your first statement was conflating the purpose of IO with the purpose of the monad interface?

Just for brevity. Everyone knew what I was talking about. I'm sorry. I don't like that I was imprecise and confounded monads with the IO type any more than you do.

Considering that monads in Haskell were discovered as a solution to the unweildy problem of performing I/O in a pure functional language, and that all of the early tutorials approach them from that direction, don't you think it's a teeny bit disingenuous to suddenly act like they are completely unrelated and orthogonal concepts?

Maybe I should take another crack at Haskell. But I'd just started Erlang and Riak...
Well, when you say it that way, I guess I must be wrong to want things that simplify my life as a developer.
No such thing as a neutral news source. The closet thing is a news aggregator which will expose you to a variety of different viewpoints.

For US political news realclearpolitics.com is pretty good. They also aggregate news on other topics but I haven't explored those personally.
This blog post "The power of ignoring mainstream news" by Joel Gascoigne is also worth a read. http://joel.is/post/31582795753/the-power-of-ignoring-mainst...
Think It’s Safe To Use A Cellphone? You Might Want To See This
It just seems like a particularly parochial wish, is all. And in life we rarely get what we want because potential ends are limitless and means limited.
Seems an odd thing for someone who was involved with RSS to write, considering that it lets you keep up with (selected) 'news' more effectively (sure, it might be the longer form stuff he says is more useful, but ultimately it lets you skim more individual articles which is the root of the problem).

I agree that most mass media news is a waste of time since you have no control over the stories or the level of detail. I think news via feed is a lot better; you have more power to investigate the things that actually matter to you.
The real irony comes from the author's claims:

> Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which
> require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities
> of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for
> the mind.

...and the manner of publication:

> This is an edited extract from an essay first published
> at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better
> Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published
> by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at
> guardianbookshop.co.uk

But there's a good case to be made for knowing your
audience. In that sense, this version is actually much
more likely to reach those who might be influenced by it.
I've had pretty easy success moving my bottlenecks into Cython. With the development of Numba, https://github.com/numba/numba, this is going to become even easier(I work for the company that produces Numba, but I do not work on Numba). I think one thing the scientific community does right, is that we keep our data in NumPy arrays. This makes it really easy to write extensions in other langauges because NumPy arrays are very transparent and easy to access in other languages (they're just chunks of memory with dtypes, and a shape)
I heard about this Facebook thing the other day. They seem to be doing all right for themselves.
I think you are right, but it feels like a matter of definitions. A movie without cinematography is essentially a novel (not exactly the same, screenplays differ from novels), and they both fall under the "story" umbrella.

I feel that "game" is most closely related to "story", and what Crytek are talking about are "visual games", where there are also things like "text based games".
I may be opening myself up to some flak here but I think it is generally accepted that the BBC is one of, if not the, least biased news source (Excepting climate change.)

Some of my friends swear by Al-Jazeera for non Middle-East news
in america each election is similar to an exam in school. you need to study to pass an exam. your textbook is the news outlets of your choice. hopefully you've been keeping up on your studies so you can vote for the right candidate and pass the exam. you can determine for yourself if you've passed by...reading the news.
In "NES Open", you earned money depending on how you placed. So, given long enough jumps back in time, there is a way to track an increasing score.

Either way though, I think the results would be sub-par.
The Minifesto
Scary indeed. Those robots might be very good at ... Thermonuclear War.
Hmm, I'd have to disagree with you on that. It is true that JSON processing could reduce raw scalalability in the sense that a query that uses JSON may be slower than one without. However, having JSON processing in the database simplifies quite a bit. For instance, imagine an app that processes and emits JSON and also uses a normalized database. This functionality now makes it possible to move some of the JSON processing closer to the database. In some cases, this may not be the best idea, and in others, it's a win. As with many things, having the choice is not the problem; it's how one chooses, given the choice. I can see the benefits of XML in the database, but I can also see how it could be misused. The key, as always, is to apply judicious thought to the problem.
There's also a certain arbitrariness to what the media establishment chooses to cover and how they choose to cover it. It often seems as if the "news" is nothing more than what entrenched political and/or private interests want people to be thinking that day.

That's one of the reasons I'm really enjoying the new Vice show on HBO -- they're covering topics nobody else is touching, they don't censor or clean up the horrific aspects of the human behavior they're covering, and their presentation doesn't try to pretend that their reporters are anything other than human beings who possess their own viewpoints (rather than "objective" beings capable of transcending their own subjective perceptions and beliefs, like poor CNN still claims).
CA law says that what you do on your own time with your own materials is yours.
Try buddhism or stoicism (I read Seneca) and you'll be happy my friend, even with less :-)

You'll even be happier to see everyone in the human race is getting more.

It even beats being dumb with a full stomach, because how good is happiness if it is based on ignorance?
How does this compare to dtrace?
Just what I wanted. Hopefully this project will get swallowed up by ember core.
When it comes to mass media (and increasingly the web, too, thanks marketers), skimming content is not the problem, the sheer deluge of useless, distracting up to outright BS content is. Hence skipping that, and being selective about what you subscribe to RSS-wise :P
My favorite part was how the program finds glitches and uses them ruthlessly.
I guess I was being too dry, but I was suggesting that such massive deployments in multiple regions costs far more in ongoing fees and engineering effort than an equivalently performing environment that is managed by the end user (campaign). And yet with all that expense you still end up with less reliability and transient issues that you end up compensating for by even more over provisioning and rearchitecture.

AWS is good for organizations that need to minimize upfront costs, orgs too small to support suitable ops staff, overflow traffic, people who hope they're about to hockeystick growth or have no idea if they'll even be around in a year. Also it's good for people busy wasting limited partner's money.

It is, however, a pretty bad choice for a campaign with huge coffers, a large staff, certainty about the length of time they'll be in operation, and a very predictable seasonal use pattern. And of course they do it all with money from small contributors.

I'm not saying that aws or especially cloud models aren't a wonderful tool in a lot of cases. But we're training a whole generation of web jockies who are reflexively going to AWS because they think ops and infrastructure is scary.
Really jazzed by CloudOpt, which I didn't know about. I had a multi-region architecture supporting AWS offshore development teams and HA between US-East & US-West, and this would have been a godsend. We had Windows Servers as dev workstations in Singapore and devs were based in India and Canada -- latency was actually fine to the desktop, and we used Amazon's internet connection to haul data back to US-East before hitting our data centre. This was satisfactory for most connectivity (throughput was fine) but occasionally the encapsulated routing would cause packet retry pains that traditional WAN acceleration may have helped with a bunch.

But, overall, this is great work, and shows what's possible to those in the enterprise that think that Amazon is still a bookseller, and clouds are basically things in the sky you don't want on your golf days. This will only help further the progression to way less wasted cost & time in IT. (Unless you're a republican, I suppose. Or maybe especially if you're a republican, you should be studying this for 2016 and considering an alternative to hiring Very Serious IT Consultants.)
GCC calls for Iran nuclear plant inspection
slowclap.gif
It looks like the author of the article wants to promote his book (see the end of the article) and The Guardian will profit since it provides a link to the book in their own "book shop". And they figure that nobody will actually give up their news addiction after having read the article, so there's no risk to the newspaper's business.

For those who like the article, the complete version from which this article is excerpted can be found here, in PDF form:

http://www.theartofthinkingclearly.com/no-news-2?lang=en
This article irks me. Although most "news" has regressed into banal link bait just plain yellow journalism, and the notion of the "news organization" has undergone an inexorable transition towards the likes of Buzzfeed the the Huffington Post, it's absurd to assert that all news is worthless.

First, his point that no news can be of value to one's personal situation or decision-making is false. News has impacted my life thoroughly throughout the past year. Off the top of my head, some stories that have provoked meaningful consideration and or action from me include: Aaron Swartz, the election, several Supreme Court cases, the Bitcoin bubble (which inspired me to start my first true weekend project this week, http://twitter.com/Bitcoin_Ticker)... There are still valuable and significant things happening in the world every day.

Moreover, there is something incredibly presumptuous in his assertion that "we are not rational enough to be exposed to the press." The fact that many people are not particularly analytical and prefer to consume simple, superficial stories does not mean that every person is necessarily incapable of thinking critically about events and about how we ought to consider the dangers in society. Even if we can't help instinctive, irrational fear or bias, most people can acknowledge the irrational nature of their opinions and still intellectually acknowledge the true nature of the news. It's simply perverse to state that everyone is too stupid and or manipulable to rationally understand the news.

His other problematic assertion, that "learned helplessness" is detrimental, is questionable. Regardless of knowledge, the world will still be filled with misery, poverty, death, bigotry, and fear. Is it better to be knowingly miserable or ignorantly blissful? I tend towards the former. John Mill's famous line, "it is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied," comes to mind. This is a question that philosophers have puzzled over forever, and I won't get into it, but the fact that he dismisses such a philosophically significant and contentious argument so quickly is worrisome. Maybe it is better to know what the world is like, regardless of our ability to change it.
Well by that logic, we shouldn't work for startups that have the potential to fail... because you could be creating negative value!
Bitcoins are not environmentally friendly
I've been using jQuery to handle JSON API requests in my Ember app. This looks like a promising alternative. Ember-data has been in too much flux to use.
Al Jazeera and BBC are both solidly on the left. I'm not disputing the quality of their reporting or the value of exposing oneself to their reporting, but you're fooling yourself if you think they're neutral.
Short answer: all of the above.

The most important factor here is your preference category when applying for a green card. There are 3 buckets, EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3, in decreasing order of desirability. Which bucket you fall into is a combination of your degree(s) and your relevant work experience.

Each bucket has a longer wait than the previous.

The second factor is your country of origin - the system is quota'ed based on it, so the more applicants coming from your country of origin the longer the line is. For the most part this is a minor factor except if you're from China or India, in which case you're pretty fucked.

I believe (though I'm not sure) there are also other ways to expedite processing for $$$, but this mostly surrounds various form filings that can otherwise take months to process. The actual line itself cannot be shortened.
Thanks! I think embedded video, when implemented correctly, can make for a very compelling web experience.

One great example of this is kickstarter's team page - http://kickstarter.com/team

In terms of users, my hope is that one day, all web developers look to this site as the easiest way to embed videos on their sites.

Ideal use case - A web developer wants to incorporate a video on their site. He or she wants to have the freedom to customize the video experience, but doesn't want to worry about video hosting. Instead of using youtube or setting up their own video hosting platform, they go to this site to have their video embedded within their site in minutes!
It is a small wish, and you are trolling.
But we never managed to make a significant dent in the market. And we grew convinced that nobody could take on Google head on.

Depressing. Mozilla can and should take them on, Google Search is biased given that their real customers are the advertisers and extremely ad heavy. Amazon could make a dent too but they'd be biased as well.

Maybe Apple...
I have the equivalent of this already: my bank sends an SMS on every transaction.
Indeed. The article seemed quite hypocritical. For someone who decries the public knowing about how miserable the world is and emphatically preaches ignorance, he seems quite keen on informing the world about how much news sucks. (And undoubtedly selling books in the process.)
apt-get -s install ruby1.9.1-full. A simulation-only dry run that will show you exactly what is being installed.
There's a ton of useful news out there. I get it filtered through serious people, or people interested in important things like labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, local politics, urban development, civil liberties, and hacker news :). These are things that will affect me, and I can affect (in groups of course).
I do like the concept of information obesity, and the importance of budgeting one's attention. The article seemed to borrow it from The Information Diet:

http://www.amazon.com/Information-Diet-Case-Conscious-Consum...
Totally useless non-invention.

We receive emails, SMS and mobile app alerts already. And those we can see even after the fact, unlike some BS wallet vibration while we were, say, driving.
"Gulf Co-operation Council raises concerns of possible radiation leaks after earthquake near Bushehr nuclear plant."

in case like me, you wondered what a compiler had to do with Iranian nuclear policy.
Little Big Co. started working on a Rails app a couple weeks ago: https://github.com/Little-Big-Co/The-Challenge
"Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months,
name one that – because you consumed it - allowed you to make a better decision
about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business.
The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you."

I agree, yet I find my main use for news is to make me feel connected with other humans... If I cut myself off from it, I feel disconnected and lonely. I feel like I'm missing relevant context.

Is that an unfounded fear, and I should find ways to get rid of it?

Or is it a valid concern, but are there better ways to feel connected?

I work from home so I don't interact with a lot of people regularly.
Not to mention, as GP mentioned, the bulk of immigration in the US is family reunification. While other developed nations are using immigration policy as an economic driver, importing the best and brightest from elsewhere, the US's immigration policy does not support its own economic goals.

The argument being made by tech lobbyist groups, among other immigration reform groups, is that the US needs to start wielding its immigration policy as a strategic economic tool rather than the somewhat directionless policy which exists today where small allowances are made for the importation of talent but which does not appear to be part of any cohesive overarching policy.
"Exhibited at Ars Electronica 2009".

It also resists opening when your account is low, and inflates or deflates depending on how much you have in your account. It's more an art project I think...
Sadly, no such thing exists. One thing that I've found useful is to use wikipedia as a news source. It seems odd, but for big, complex events wikipedia often has the best overall coverage. Most news stories are just little bites which assume you're caught up contextually, or just don't care about context. Whereas wikipedia will usually do a much better job of providing all the information together. For example, take a look at this roundup of the current crisis over North Korea and compare it to contemporary news coverage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_North_Korean_crisis
>Rob Pike explains how Google designed Go to address major development issues they encounter while using other languages: long build times, poor dependency management, lack of robustness, etc.

So not exactly "Go at Google" (which is meant to give the impression this is all about how Google uses Go), but more like "How Go was initially thought out and built by a team at Google as a side project" or "How the team that built Go hopes to 'sell it' to Google".
I think Taleb was among the first to hit this tune.

" To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers. "

" The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him. "

" There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved. "

" Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner. "

source : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
37signals is using rbenv in production, and I know of several other big companies that does as well, and I am feeling quite comfortable using it.
The day has come, "AI rage quits, passes Turing test."
The wallets actually do a lot more than that. Besides vibrating when your bank account makes a transaction, they will make it harder to open when money is tight, expand and shrink when you have more or less money respectively.

It's about being intuitive and using metaphors to create "Proverbial wallets that allow it's user to experience a financial sixth sense".
i agree that it is an interesting result, however having access to everything is weird from an AI point of view and really muddies any conclusions to be drawn; the headline seems to make it sound like this is a breakthrough in AI, when it is using a cheat that won't apply to any sort of real situation.

notice that in your example of solitaire, knowing the values of hidden cards really changes the nature of the game and makes playing the game much less strategic
This looks similar to the genetic algorithm technique I used for the AI Programmer project http://www.primaryobjects.com/CMS/Article149.aspx

Genetic algorithms (and variants) can pick up some very interesting patterns for achieving the target fitness. I don't think this is necessarily anything new, and GAs have their limitations, but applying them to multiple NES games is impressive. I'm convinced that GAs will be an important part of future computing.
I think trying to understand what is going on in a game by looking at the screen would be more challenging than trying to understand by looking at the game's memory if you want to write a bot that can play any generic game.

The examples you gave are each specific to particular domains.

This whole topic reminds me of how it is much easier to develop natural language processing for use in a particular domain compared to generically.
I was just surprised you'd admit it in public, and thinking about what could happen if the school found your ASIC and knew what it was. Of course, you could make a counter-argument that you were entitled to use the school's electricity in partial exchange for your tuition fees :)
How do you ensure which versions of the packages that you receive?

It is nice to rely on system-packages, but if you depend on certain versions of certain packages you might see problems with that approach.
Haha I didn't see that! It absolutely is more of a thought experiment than a real product.
There is a small chance you attend the same university I do. If you do, message me (FB, twitter, email... I don't care). I'd be happy to grab a coffee or something.
> In a dysfunctional society, people acquire wealth via corruption, rent seeking, and theft.

I believe these three are one and the same.
But the AI isn't making strategic decisions. It's making brain-dead ones. It analyses a play-through looking to find sections of RAM that increase as time increases. It them locks in on these sections of RAM and says "increasing the values in these sections of RAM is how I determine success." It them brute-forces a play-through with the ability to rewind time (to try a different set of inputs).

This is why he mentions that Karate Kid didn't work well, because one of the factors of a successful play-through was that your opponents health is decreasing, which is something that this AI doesn't look for.

The ability to rewind time wouldn't make for a very interesting play-through of Battleship, but depending on how game state is stored, it might not even be able to accurately deduce a good game state from a bad one.
In the article (written in 2006), Aaron Swartz wrote:

"This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government being more subtle about committing crimes (well, for the sake of argument, at least) — but you notice how it never involves me?"

Ironically, he did unfortunately end up as a news story in which the government did something bad and he was personally involved.
Sometimes you can do the cold approach. As a 20 year-old college student, I really just wanted some career guidance to be able to eventually do what I wanted, work in the mobile-sphere. All I did was ask in IRC, and a few phone calls later I had myself an internship.

I realize this method is probably a lot more suited for the younger, college crowd, and it certainly won't work at every startup, but it worked for me!
The next generation will see SMS and mobile phone push notifications like horse and buggies. Not to say I think this experiment has any real world market as a product.