skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are ways to get the best of both worlds. XKCD is free and ad-free (and a useless amusement, as are most things people want to pay money for).
Yes, but his comment was about an OS needing to be pragmatic and designed with performance in mind (which Scala was), not about it not being immutable.
There are so many problems with ads that I cannot in good conscience offer any other advice than "block 'em all."

• Ad networks can be, and are, used as a malware distribution vector. No one is vetting all the ads. Not the publishers, not the networks.

• They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it.

• Ads are cognitive pollution. It's possible that mass marketing largely doesn't work, but I'm wary of assuming that "ads don't work on me." What if they do? As a matter of hygiene, it's better to avoid them. No, I don't avert my eyes away from billboards (ironic next gen Google Glass application) but I do skip TV commercials.

• Even if they don't work, they're at least distracting from stuff viewers actually care about.
Is bi-directional replication going to be included in 9.4?
But is he going to find one that follows his "all has to be immutable" approach? I somewhat doubt it. Do you know of any existing OS that works like what the author describes?
Don't some of the Adblock whitelists available with the plugin actually do this (Block known bad publishers but leave non-intrusive ads available)?

I'm not certain but I think there is even a checkbox for this in the options? I know I still see some of the Google search contextual ads and I use adblock.
Yeah, dolls or an onion appear to be the best analogies.
Humans may be one of the last life forms to inhabit the universe
I'm not a native speaker, but still have a pet peeve for that one. It's "line-of-sight" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-of-sight).

Light travels in a straight line over (human-scale) long distances, so you need a straight line free from obstruction to see between two points. I'm sure you know this and just made a typo, of course.

Thanks for the additional information about this interesting solution.
The system would complain loudly in an error message with a line number.

The problem with accidental key typos is that at their worst they are completely silent, and if the value you intend to replace was another valid value, finding the bug might not be easy.
I admit that I've had useful ads related to databases and hosting. But most of the time, the ads have been too obscene.

I almost feel like puking when I use a public computer. Google has made it better with textual ads, but they still serve those flash ones the literally flash and try to entice the same kinds of things mobile games often cater to.

There's also the past where the computers that had kids that would click on these ads would end up infested. Overall, the web ad industry has made some really dumb mistakes in the past.
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive
No, there's a big assumption that those of us who use ad blockers would miss things that are now delivered "free with ads". That may be true for a lot of people, but it isn't for every one of us.
This isn't a "move" - it's how dogecoin worked from the start. The devs just didn't understand the code they wrote.
Irony - this developer, who seems to have a good understanding of ethics and web best practices, on a post about advert blocking, has a link at the bottom of their sidebar:

"Essay shark - paper writing service!"

This is labelled in the source as an ad. Comparing DNS and IP records suggest it is very unlikely they are related services. Chris also actively lists what they work on,which does not include Essayshark.

Essayshark do, however, appear to have an affiliate scheme. This raises interesting questions given the topic of the article.
The maleware distribution crap is definitely one of the biggest reasons for it. In the past, arbitrary JS could just be executed.
Optional. Not necessary for the main game.
It is not my responsibility to save your business model.

It may well be that many sites will shut down without ads. That does not obligate me to look at the ads; it only obligates me not to whine when a site I liked shuts down from lack of ad revenue.
> They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it.

Understandable, but um, if you didn't have those ads, you wouldn't have YouTube. Oh pay for it? Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody.

Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.
The Act of Creation
Pure functions would let many of your functions become immutable :)

EDIT: Well... not really I guess. But idempotence has similar properties I think.
"uniquely distinguish"? Know your history. This is the founding principle of Freicoin:

http://freico.in/
That's fair. At least in our discussion we have shown that the situation is more nuanced than it appears at first glance because of many of the underlying facets involved.

In the end, it comes down to actions by individuals or groups of individuals to make things as they are and how they will be.

Myself, being aware of what more or less has been going on prior the Snowden leaks from previous wistleblowers and from previous events in history that set a precedent of the actions individuals/corporations/governments are willing to take with whatever capabilities available under such perceived or actual circumstances, I have decided on what role I want to take (and get hate mail for every day because I guess it's easier to send feedback to a company on what they're doing as opposed to criticizing one's government for doing the same thing in the shadows).
>Why do companies chase this market? They're very fickle, and rarely appreciate any sort of gameplay mechanics.

Because they spend money.
Or because they have ASICs and a vault full of gold bars...
https://ochronus.com/git-bisect-debug-with-git/
The best thing about BizSpark is free software. If you want low priced servers go to Digital Ocean.
Registration doesn't work here in Argentina. :-(
The problem with modern day ad blockers is it is just an all out block every ad. Now if they were blacklist by default instead of whitelist, it'd be better. Nobody ever changes the default settings, so people who serve non-intrusive ads don't ever get a chance to display their ads.
Bubble Cursor
I would find it hard to believe that USN submarines do not have equivalent "standing orders" on what to do if after an attack the command hierarchy is unavailable.

Whether these are in the form of sealed handwritten letters from the President, I don't know.
>Macs are hardly the recipients of Windows installations.

Um, duh.

> I fail to see your point. Does your local Best Buy store have a non-Mac area? I think you'll have a hard time finding a late generation laptop there that doesn't include touch..

The point is that you're conflating supply of Windows-based touch desktops and laptops for actual demand for those systems.

> I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...

And as somebody that deals with end users, I've yet to talk to anyone that didn't ultimately find touch in a laptop/desktop either pointless or outright counterproductive.

It's one of those things that people think is a cool idea until they actually use one for an extended period of time.
Why we love Mozilla Persona. And why you should, too.
Are there other examples of website using mozilla persona??
While this is true, AFAIK pretty much all new (and replacement) systems will be ridiculously better than the old legacy systems. Storage is cheaper, sensors are better (pixels, sensitivity), optics are better and cheaper... You'd have to make a pretty big effort to be able to find a new sub-720p video systems these days.
http://supergenpass.com/
Here is the thing, I don't mind ads - but I do mind pages loading 10+ files of javascript when I am attempting to read an article.

I browse with noscript enabled, and for the most part the web is a much faster and a much, much safer place (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Haum9UpIQzU).

I am still amazed when I try to read a simple blog article and am greeted with a blank white page, it turns me right off the site and I go spend my time elsewhere.

I will happily shell out money for content that I like.
How about the anti-portfolio of some of the most prestigious VCs, say union square venture?

I always thought USV missed few to-be-facebook startups. Anybody care to give us some names?
I agree. Math seems to be a one man or two man show, so you need to be absolutely focused on what you are doing.

Businessmen can delegate and use the system set up in their young adult years to continue their trajectory. Franchising is an example that comes to mind.

I have always admired Paul Erdős, a really interesting life doing something he loved.
So many comments on this thread parrot the notion that people will just pay for the things that they love, but the math there rarely, if ever, ads up. The fact of the matter is that outside a few exceptions advertising makes more money than charging to use a product or relying on donations. And revenue is necessary not only for servers, but for man hours and ability of the creators to concentrate. No one can pretend that Google would make as much money through any other means of monetization. And people don't often work for free.

There's also value in lowering the barriers to entry, and allowing all people to use or access a program. Say, for example, Google cost $20/month. Would I pay for it? Absolutely. But a lot of my friends wouldn't. My grandma would use yahoo or bing instead. And some of the value that is gained in Google's ubiquity (which is actually quite a lot) goes away. Google would make less money. We might not have gmail, or google docs/drive. Or a self-driving car. Or Google Fiber. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm reminded of the notion of App.net. Sometimes critical mass is inherently valuable, if not part of the core functionality of the product. App.net was originally a pay-to-use Twitter, that a lot of smart people started to use. But it wasn't enough for me to ever find value in it. Twitter was better and free. I'll let them throw ads at me every now and then - it's a great utility and platform. There's no way I would consciously pay enough to use everything that I use online.

It's also easy to say that "No one clicks on ads" or "I never click on ads." Even "I'd be happy to pay for the sites I use." But not everyone using those sites feels that way, so your price would likely be astronomical, or the site would collapse under its own weight. A "pay to not see ads" model might work, but a "pay to use the site" likely wouldn't.

One look at Revenue numbers of Facebook, Twitter, Google, or the recipes site my little sister built (it makes her $150/day) says differently. I admittedly click on ads at tims, especially retargeted ads. Even if you don't, someone does. And they drive sales, otherwise people wouldn't use them.

So consider yourself opted out if you like, but don't pretend like they don't make sense.
Youtube ads have gotten more and more obnoxious and intrusive as time has gone on. I remember even before adblock was a thing using Youtube and not having to wait 30+ seconds to decide if I want to watch the video or not.

This is not necessarily a reason to block all ads. But if they would make the ads less obnoxious I'd be much more likely to not worry about blocking them.
> Remember, the alternative I'm comparing it to is restoring the land to a forested state (specifically one with much higher food production).

I'm puzzled. If the land is forested, it's no longer usable for crops in the sense that land occupied by trees cannot simultaneously be occupied with something else. So, even if you interspersed crops among the trees somehow, you're not going to have higher food production than fields that consist of nothing but food crops.

> …from which it evaporates, leaving the salt. Not a great plan.

I see you're cherry picking my comments without full context. Although I can't remember specifically why I mentioned drainage basins. I suspect it was because of run-off storage. See below.

Anyway, the point of solar desalinization (or rather, any desalinization) is to, well, evaporate or separate the water to separate salt and other unwanted things in solution, so unless you're willing to accept that desalinization is going to yield dissolved salts, then there's no point in doing it, is there? The salt doesn't magically disappear.

I also suspect that you may not live in a climate like I do, which is largely classified as a high desert, mountainous region. You don't have to design for run-off. Run-off is a given. An inch or less of rain leads to heavy flooding of lower areas simply because the soil isn't conducive to drainage or absorption of precipitation, and the steep canyons upstream serve to collect and concentrate rainfall. So, you wind up with low-lying areas that fill up with brine collected upstream from various salts and minerals, and eventually settle in subterranean aquifers that are entirely non-potable without desalinization. The drainage basins already exist. Oftentimes, salt lakes appear and persist for weeks following a rain because the atmospheric humidity is too high to allow for quick evaporation. The upshot is that if you were using a solar greenhouse, you wouldn't have to pump the water particularly far. Or you could pump it out of the ground.

> The Ogallala aquifer is currently pumped 6x faster than it's being recharged,

I wasn't talking about potable water. I was humoring the "seawater greenhouse" as a method of treating non-potable water, pumped from underground briny aquifers. I think you have this idea in mind that all subterranean water deposits are fresh water. They're not.
A python based Google Search crawler
The insight here, which the writer doesn’t get to, is the incredible economic inefficiency all of this implies.

Ineffective ads outnumber good ads by at least an order of magnitude, conservatively. By good I mean “delivering economic value”, which might take the form of clickthroughs or general brand awareness.

If we consider clicked ads, or those that eventually result in a purchase, to be good ones, then the rest are a waste.

That waste should be understood as a degradation of the publisher’s product. We go to great lengths to get the typography and design just so – and then allow an economically worthless ad to degrade it.

The opportunity is to improve ads by an order of magnitude. This isn’t a question of eking out slightly better targeting. It means not showing an ad at all, most of the time.

Though the evidence to date is not in my favor, I have to believe that the current state of web advertising is waiting for the bottom to fall out, like print media in the last decade.
This article assumes that there's nothing affecting or constraining people's career choices besides interest in a particular field. It's not that women choose careers that pay less - it's that careers dominated by women are frequently perceived to be less valuable to society and are therefore paid at a lower rate. Careers in which men historically dominated, but which later become "female professions", pay less when done by women. "Women make less remunerative life choices" seems like a fairly ignorant way to explain wage disparity.
In my view, the position "get a lot more cautious about source vs. derived data" sort of is a mystery .. and I can only see one thing: temporality. Time-value.

If the CPU has 'now' to consider, and now is Time value [t] and if [t]'s are all there is between states, then 'think about [t1 .. t2]' should be a standard op.

And isn't this the point about immutability, that it has to have had a Time value, to be of any value at all, anyway, to the user?
That's a neat approach! Thanks
Oh, yeah. I realize I'm freeloading here and it may not be sustainable.

Although, maybe if it wasn't for centralized video repos, we could host them in some p2p fashion? Torrent has certainly become less popular since the advent of streaming. As an added benefit, such networks would be more resistant to censorship.
Imagine I want to send a letter to someone, but I am worried that it may be intercepted (by the government, for the sake of argument). So instead of sending it directly to my recepient, I make arrangements with some reliable friends so that if they receive a letter from one of us, they take it out of the envelope and put it in different one, addressed to another friend. To make sure the letter doesn't travel forever we add dots at the end; once there are more than three (four, five...), we send the letter to the original intended recepient. Nobody knows for sure who is the person who sent the letter originally (as I can put different number of dots at the end of the letter). We can also make it so that none of the intermediate parties know what the message says (possibly even who is the final recipient?) by encoding the message at every step and using extra envelopes. At the outset I write my letter, add some dots at the end and send it to one to my friends, picked randomly, together with an extra envelope addressed to the intended recepient.

That should do as far as Tor goes, but the more general problem of explaining why is such a thing needed by your mom is much harder. (Unless she lives in North Korea or some such place).
I also like MINUX's message passing style of interprocess communication.
So has the general medical profession.
Agreed. The potion/QISH implementation of the two-finger cheney loop is extremely efficient even without register values (volatile), typically 3ms pause time on a mid-sized heap. Compare that to typical java or ruby pause times, starting from 25ms to typically 150-250ms. You need more memory though, as in most lisps it's using copying, i.e. compacting, not just simple mark&sweep. Incremental is doable, but you need to add GC state then, which is a bit tricky in threads. Actually libgc is pretty good.
Well, that's the thing: if it was an obvious success from day one, others would have done it too.
Dance Talent of The Week
Blue Apron (New York, NY): Software Engineer

Blue Apron (http://www.blueapron.com) is an NYC-based startup delivering original recipes and premium, seasonal ingredients needed to prepare them, in exactly the right proportions. We've raised $8M from First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners, among others. Forbes recently named us one of the hottest startups of 2013 [1].

Since launching in late 2012, we're now delivering over 350,000 meals each month nationwide. Our product is growing quickly, and we want to work with talented, passionate individuals that will help us enhance the experience of cooking at home.

Our engineers solve problems for both customers and members of the Blue Apron team. We evaluate, design, and implement new features to provide more enjoyable experiences for our users. We collaborate to understand and overcome unique supply-chain, scheduling, and logistics challenges. We listen to the needs of our internal teams and build tools that bring harmony to complex operational workflows.

Our stack: Ruby on Rails, RSpec, PostgreSQL, HAML, Bootstrap, SASS, JQuery, AJAX, Git, Heroku

About you:

- You've taken features or products from concept to completion and have experience working with production web applications.

- You communicate your ideas clearly, and are capable of designing and implementing complex, scalable solutions.

- You want to build software that has impact on the lives of customers and coworkers alike.

- You are always learning and are excited at the prospect of mastering new technologies and techniques.

- You write tests to improve the quality and reliability of your code.

- You help teammates improve when reviewing their work and appreciate feedback when they reciprocate.

This role comes with health insurance, a flexible vacation policy, and competitive salary and equity. To apply, please submit a short email outlining your experience and why you are interested along with your resume to jobs@blueapron.com.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/pictures/emjl45himd/blue-apron-4/
I don't know much about Clojure, but I understood that it is a lisp and default immutable... so wouldn't that work?
I don't consider trackers "well behaved". My reasons for adblock:
1. Security. I don't mind static image ads because the security implications are minor. But running third party code without accountability is scary. (1)
2. Performance. Loading images from a dozen different domains means many dns resolutions.
3. Privacy. This is just creepy, networks watching every page I go to.

There is nothing in advertising that requires all of that. I'm perfectly fine with static locally hosted ads. But the whole industry is based around something else. I continue to use adblock plus despite their "Acceptable Ads" program because I consider it reasonable in requirements.(2) I think there's a lot more room for compromise in allowing ads but no extension makes it easy to address my concerns.

Citations:
1. https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN22569.html?impressions=true
2. https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
See also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxdSgLmez5Q&t=33m31s
Soylent Officially Has a Nutrition Label
> That would be great to have UPSERTS

Indeed. Postgres has some amazing features, and yet something so basic has been missing for years. I can't wait for a simple UPSERT, especially that most workarounds work correctly only with 1-row inserts.
He's not designing a language; he's designing an operating system.
Indeed. I was rather shocked to hear a friend had be subpoenaed for a DNA swab based on phone tracking data, along with a handful of other men, in connection with a rape case that happened early in the morning (so few phones in the area). The idea was two-fold a) rule out suspects, and b) (presumably) get in touch with potential witnesses. While everyone wants the guilty party to get caught, I'm unsure what options one would have about refusing such a swab. In theory that swab wouldn't be held on file (but who can know if there is a secret backup of such data -- we don't have adequate oversight in Norway either).
I agree with that, this requires certain mindset and skill, however I have seen some dismissing attitude from HR "specialists" and alike while real world seems to be quite different
I don't think your definition of Godwin's Law matches its stated definition. However, I want your definition to get forked into its own law because it is an incredibly astute observation.
Thanks! :D

1. Affiliate links. Each time someone buys a book through my site, I make ~5% from the retailer.

2. You know, not very well, but I think its a cool perk to give to customers you interact with ("glad I fixed your issue - want some free stickers?"). My biggest ROI to date is from google adwords, but they're outrageously expensive, so I'm going to be focusing on natural SEO for this next semester.
I believe the article followed Hardy's quote, and I followed the article lead. I realized after posting that it might be seen as male oriented but I believe the same is true for female mathematicians.

There are quite a few female mathematicians who made important contributions. My wife wrote a top 10 of sort on my blog a few years ago: http://math-blog.com/2008/09/28/10-remarkable-female-mathema...