skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It occurs to me that you may be looking at this sideways.

We homeschooled our younger two kids. Specifically, we "unschooled" them. This meant that instead of a curriculum, they found things they enjoyed, created projects from them, then executed. As part of executing, they naturally learned stuff. Worked great.

On the other hand I went to a traditional school. That meant I thought of topics in little silos. Want to learn math? Well gee, that could be a full lifetime of study. Everything I look at appears to be infinitely deep.

Find projects that you can commit to that involve learning your topics to the depth you would like. Then, instead of the topics, execute on the projects. Doesn't matter if anybody likes your projects or even if you use them -- by getting your head out of the vertical silo and starting to think horizontally, you'll probably learn in a much more natural fashion.

My two cents.
The OP has responded to the problem of "push[ing] the five most marginal percent [..] into homelessness". Your blowing his modest proposal out of proportion when talking about rebalancing wealth. He only suggested to design the policy in a way that prevents the poorest to become homeless.
Is the prevailing opinion then that OS X really just isn't a good development environment? Seems like most of the suggestions so far are "install one or more Linux VMs". As someone who develops on a MacBook Pro everyday, I know I definitely fall in the Linux VM camp.
This is one of those "Certainly feels like work, but does not actually advance the business forward, so why bother doing it?" sort of tasks.
Technically, this is impossible because their build system and shared libraries [0]

Commercially, this is exactly the right thing to do! Then you can only blame customers for not buying shares of the spin-off!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899467
SEO+Indexer+AutoBot+Poster+Automated+Marketing+Software+-+FREE+TRIAL
"How to get what you want" by Raymond Hull, 1969. Check out the Amazon reviews. It is a classic and starts with your question.
[Edit: Story changed based on feedback below.]

Here's my analogy:

"Developer, how long will it take to acquire a vehicle that can travel a mile?"

"That depends. Will the vehicle drive over a highway, through the sky, or dig through a mountain?"

"That's only an implementation detail, right? Give me a ballpark estimate."

"I can call a taxi here in 15 minutes and $50. Chartering an airplane will require two days and $2000. A granite-boring drill will take 6 months to design, 2 years to build, and several million dollars, possibly several times that if --"

"Geeze, no wonder no one trusts developer estimates. I'll double it and tell them half an hour and $100, just to be safe."
revoke access: https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions?hl...
Needs some work, but you're basically proposing an Edx/Udemy/(etc)/Wikipedia/PersonalBrain mashup? Sounds interesting...
The heartbleed "issue" in Rust involved code that passed the same array to two functions, making it apparent that the array was never getting destroyed. Since they used a custom memory allocator, secure destructors won't help you since your array might not even get destroyed. Lessons: Don't use custom allocators.
it has turned into a publishing platform which is what they have done right compared to their competition (Xing, Viadeo). useful or not they manage to keep people engaged and coming back.
That's a good point which reflects the prosperous times we live in. Looking back at history these times seem to be the exception rather than the rule. In the end I fear that we cannot hope that "science will solve all of our problems", because science by its very nature is "hard". There are no guarantees that things will work out and we could very well land again in a period of time where science hits only dead-ends for many years. In that case we'd either live without any progress or we invest effort into using the solutions we already have.
The Long Now date format isn't really a new date format thou, its just a symbolic extra digit to encourage thinking long term, it really is the same format in essence.
Before the whole thing collapsed, I was using BeOS for my desktop at home and had a skunkworks project going on at work trying to demonstrate BeOS as platform for our diagnostic devices.

We were transitioning from a 2-line, 32-char LCD display to QVGA colour touch screen and the experience was become painful. I really thought I had found a much better alternative than the RTEMS, VxWorks, and Windows based options we were looking at.

And then it seemed like everything fell apart. I don't actually remember if it was Be Inc, or what I was working on and then where I was working that folded first but for me it was like a very long line of falling dominoes resulting in a lot of interesting and promising tech being abandoned.

Worse, after all the dust settled in my professional career, all that was replaced with stuff with a lot more familiar names but that was more difficult to get right. It pains me to even say it but I worked on four projects over six or seven years that never made it out of R&D.
Move Mario without any JS
It is a good dev environment, but you shouldn't just install server stuff on your mac, that's what the VMs are for (so that all developers would have identical server setup).
Agreed, it is a bit like saying: We do not need a standard http protocol. If you want to use Firefox use Firefox, otherwise use Chrome. No need that they display the same web pages.
I'm not sure a minivan is going to capture their target audience.
Nitpick:

> The idea is to use zero-width and space characters of UTF-8 such as U+200B, U+200C, U+200D

That must be Unicode, not UTF-8.
>neo-monarchists, redpillers, neo-objectivists, and their loosely related ideological ilk have spread far and wide

Those are widely different viewpoints who have more in common with mainstream viewpoints than with each other - it is dishonest to label them together, please don't do so.
I'm not so sure, I've seen these precise accusations made against systemd, so he is certainly responding to genuinely perceived flaws.
Stop complaining or improve yourself
Anyone have a suggestion of how this would be used in practice for uniquely identifying something?

So there are a certain number of non-width space characters. As far as I can find in the links in the OP, U+FEFF, U+180E, U+200B, U+200C, U+200D would make 5.

So we have at least 5 values to work with, which would make... 120 combinations if they're ordered differently? Surely we would need more if we want to uniquely identify something such as a referral, or are there more non-width spaces?

I'm kind of dumb and bad at probability, also. You're encouraged to correct my thoughts on this and show me the errors of my thinking.
Sure, Musk is so limited. Let's see: Rockets, Cars, Payment systems.
Thats still a kind of industrial example IMO, the issue with post-industrial is different.

Its fairly easy to estimate how long it's going to travel a mile once you undstand how you have to travel it. You can rarely go faster than you have estimated.

No the actual problem is that in the post-industrial world you haven't even build the car to travel by the highway or the tools to go through the mountain.
Having said that, the alternative of "estimating is a waste of time" is also ridiculous.

"Developer, will I be able to catch the next train if I walk, or do I need to get a taxi?"

"Estimating is a complete waste of time"

"But I just want to know if I need to spend money on a taxi. It's two miles away and I don't have any bags, and the train leaves in one hour"

"Start thinking post-industrially"

"FFS, I just want to know how long it'll take me to get to the station!"

So what's new here? That estimating an unknown task is silly? Well of course it is! But saying estimates are useless is also daft since there are plenty of times we know a fair amount about the problem, and knowing how long things are likely to take is very helpful in deciding what to do next.

If someone asks me how long it'll take to add a bit more information onto a page that we already have in the database, I can give them a fairly good answer since it's a problem that we've done plenty of times and therefore have a good idea about how long it's likely to take. If they want me to find new data sources and integrate them then I can tell them we've never spent less than X weeks doing that so we have to assume it'll take at least that long. If X weeks doesn't seem like a worthwhile investment of time, then even this level of estimation has been useful.
I'm not sure whether you intended your comment to be both pedantic and faecitious, but it unfortunately comes across as unconstructive.
wanting to do everything is not a virtue. want less do more.
To significantly halt climate change using today's technology would cause misery on a scale unprecedented in human history.

To switch from fossil fuels to current solar energy would require a massive amount of land use. A huge portion of the world would have to be covered with solar cells to match the output from fossil fuelds. Do you know what that would do to real estate prices? Buildings that are horizontal would have to become vertical, and that money has to come from somewhere. Rents would double. Companies would have to offset the costs and some people would get fired, and most would have their wages or benefits frozen.

The trucks, ships and planes that pollute by shipping goods would have to be converted to today's electric engines. That would increase the cost of everything that everyone buys by 15-20%. From a book on amazon to a pair of jeans from the now 10 story shopping mall. Everyone would have to get their personal vehicles refitted or buy new ones, incurring even more costs. Every business would see its margins shrink further, driving wages down even more.

Producing and transporting meat is one of the largest contributors to climate change. The price of a hamburger at McDonalds would have to go from $2 to $20. Children need protein while in their developmental years, but it would become almost impossible for most families to afford. An entire generation raised on soy paste.

Globally, everyone would feel extreme financial pressure as the businesses they worked for AND their customers all make less money while paying more for everything they consume. There would be riots and revolutions as people took to the streets to feed their starving families. Endless foreign and civil wars, immeasurable suffering and loss of life. And for what? For what? Something that might or might not happen 100 years from now?

As adults, it's our job to keep this horrible future from unfolding. The responsible thing to do is invest in education and infrastructure, slowly and carefully, to keep those kids writing essays from growing up in a terrible world. That's why we're the adults, because we understand the difference between fantasy and reality, what's possible and what's practical.

If history has taught one lesson, it's "Never underestimate the pace of technological change." There have been Malthusian predictions before and there will be again. They never come true because technology solves problems in ways that we can't anticipate. It's our job to keep the world running while we wait patiently for a technological solution to climate change to present itself. We can't imagine what it will be today, but it will happen sooner than we think. Progress will take us to other star systems, too. Eventually.
Vagrant has been a much bigger time sink for me than benefit. The ssh-agent never works while provisioning for nix servers, only during ssh (which I can do using the -- -A regardless). It often gets confused and the machines need to be destroyed and re-created after 1-2 provisioning attempts. Packers (The tool used to create vagrant boxes) lack of support for winrm on windows systems has also been a bone of contention. It requires a number of workarounds (like installing open-ssh) on the windows VM that in no way would be viable on a production windows server. And that divergence allows for the "It works on my machine" bugs which is really the whole point of using Vagrant. I use chef for provisioning, and Vagrant also downloads the chef provisioner every single provision, I suspect it does this with puppet as well, so if you're developing on the go and need to re-provision, you're either out of luck or require an unlimited data plan.

Homebrew Cask also has no oversight for breaking changes, so use this only as a convenience, not a tool to be relied upon. It frequently looses track of applications, and I can't even find where it decides to put some error logs if they're created at all.

Some of these problems could be my lack of experience in operations, but the documentation for these is far from complete. A VM with snapshots and a good backup strategy will serve you better in the short term. This changes if you're attempting to support multiple dev, but if you're a lone guy, then snapshots are far far less buggy.
> I'm at the start of a 4-5 month stretch where I absolutely need to cover 4 highly technical subjects, on my own and unguided, to continue my studies.

Get yourself a mentor/supervisor who will (a) help you come up with a plan that prioritises those four subjects, (b) have regular interaction with you to track your progress, and (c) chew you out if you don't stick to the plan.

This seems to be a common issue for young, intelligent, technically-minded people. In my opinion, the solution is self-discipline and prioritisation (and, implicitly, having the judgement to know what should be prioritised).
That hardly addresses the point.
Fall Out Boy “Centuries” Violin Tribute
I don't get it. Why is everyone (including Snowden) talking about personal moments, privacy, intimacy etc when the problem is clearly about tyranny, dictatorship and misuse of power? We have very specific and numerous evidence that in the past the state used its powers to spy, threaten and discredit ideological opponents and activists, from M. L. King to all anti-war movements since Vietnam. Since the dawn of history the "state" was always the biggest threat to the safety of it's "citizens", not external aggression. We need to stay safe from our own state, that is why we must not give up our privacy, not because of some silly naked pictures on your phone.
Let me put on my Project Management hat for a moment. I think you first need to enumerate, at the highest level what you want to achieve, should be one sentence or less. Maybe its "Become a world class python oriented Data Scientist". Under that you can break that down into four-ish domains you need to learn, in this case, Statistics, Python, Data Science, Data Visualization. From there break it down into subjects under those domains, each one being maybe 20-200 hours of work. Continue to break it down until you get to something you can accomplish in one sitting. One sitting is different for all people, for me it's about 50 minutes. Then when you sit down you don't have the cognitive overhead of trying to figure out what to do, it's already been done for you. From there, just knock out tasks one after another. Every few months re-examine to make sure you are on course. As far as tools, I use Trello to do this personnally, but there are others out there.
This[1] bug from 2012 is the reason I switched; 30 months (still incrementing) to fix a massive usability break seems slow to me.

1. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619
Even if you're deploying to mac, you should use a mac vm. If you manage to get a buggy or corrupt package, it's much easier to revert to a snapshot or reprovision a vm than to reprovision your machine.
The imposter syndrome and how to fight it – Birdman the movie
> I feel like AI would outperform the heck out of us in that situation, because solving it correctly involves a) high situational awareness, which we suck at because we get distracted, and b) making split-second calculations, which we suck at because we panic and our reflexes aren't that fast.

My understanding is that current self-driving technology works great at short range, but is pretty incapable of dealing with obstacles at a distance. If there are things far away that are potentially dangerous — kids, a car behaving erratically, a landslide — I can slow down in case something happens. A self-driving car might have more trouble until the obstacle gets in range, by which point it might be too late.

> Are you more worried about endangering the thing before you or the thing behind you? If it's an animal, hit the animal.

What if it's somebody's pet? Sometimes putting a dent in someone's car is worth saving a beloved animal's life. What if you're about to hit someone and there's a bicyclist behind you? There will be times when the car will have to make decisions regarding which life to save, including the driver's.

> This one is actually probably most easily solved by just putting markers on all roads.

This isn't possible on all roads. Markers can be covered by snow, mud, etc. Yes, you can have RFID markers or whatever, but that would be incredibly expensive. Who's going to pay the bill? The taxpayers? Why?

Also, I was just reminded of parking: how the heck will self-driving cars deal with the current parking rules? It takes all my intelligence just to figure those out sometimes!

> There'll still be high-speed situations where the AI will fuck and kill someone, but I do think people would come to accept self-driving AI even if it occasionally fucks up and kills people, because it'll be world-changingly convenient.

But self-driving cars won't be world-changingly convenient. I don't drive. I don't have to: trains, buses, and occasionally planes take care of my transportation needs for me. I can already snooze on my way to work, get home when I'm drunk, etc. Who will these cars change the world for? Silicon Valley types who want to commute and go on vacation without bumping into anyone else? Because the poor certainly won't be able to afford them, country folks won't be able to use them, and Europeans will probably have no need for them. (Heck, they're still mostly on manual transmissions. And have you looked at the gas prices over there?!)

When we went from horses to trains (and eventually cars and planes), it made it possible for humans to travel across the entire world in a matter of hours. Self-driving cars won't be that kind of leap.

I think it would be much healthier for our cities to focus on developing public transit infrastructure. The best places I've ever lived have been threaded by a city-wide metro system, with commuter trains connecting to further regions. Pedestrians benefit. Suburbanites benefit. The city feels more compact and walkable. You can even get rid of some of the roads!
Surely you could put as many of them in there as you wanted? So you have an alphabet of 5 characters to make an infinite number of words from.
Theoretical Applied Science (1994)
I think Apple heard the widespread grumbling about that. Preferences > Advanced > Show full website address
You really need to read this article:

"Screw motivation, what you need is discipline" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976451
I sometimes use the equivalent of a weighted decision matrix to prioritise between projects / things to learn about. I've written about this here:
http://noisytyping.com/quantify-your-personal-values/

Even if you follow this or another strategy to cut down your options, you'll need to build the discipline to stop second-guessing yourself while you work on your chosen plan.
I recognize your way of working in how my girlfriend works. She is very successful working this way. Within a couple of days in a new job people see her working hard and delivering results. She earns a lot of trust from colleagues, clients and managers by working this way. What she does, she does it very well. It looks easy enough, but it is not. Working this way is actually difficult.
> So what's new here? That estimating an unknown task is silly? Well of course it is! But saying estimates are useless is also daft since there are plenty of times we know a fair amount about the problem, and knowing how long things are likely to take is very helpful in deciding what to do next.

What's more, if we don't know enough about the problem to come up with a reasonably-confident estimate, that indicates that we need to define or scope out the problem better.
Because it resonates with everyone. Personal moments, privacy, intimacy ... these are things everyone understands, everyone can see how it might impact them.

Talk about "misuse of power" and you lose the attention of the very people you are trying to convince. It might just be the trivialities (and peoples desire to protect themselves from them) that create more fury and action that talking about the real issues.

I think it is smart of Snowden to take the tact that will resonate with the most people. It might be a sideshow, but it is a useful sideshow that might move the ball forward on the big issues.
you may find this video of use
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIgn...

"It's not what you read, it's what you ignore"

I think everyone suffers from this to a certain extent. There is an overwhelming amount of info out there waiting to be consumed. We just need to get smarter about how to consume it
> And for many of the situations that you list, there is a simple solution: the car should have two modes, self-driving and human-driving. Self-driving will only work when conditions are normal. Incompatible weather conditions? Broken sensor? The car parks itself, and you need to drive yourself or wait for assistance.

That would be a good solution, but many people who talk about self-driving cars don't want that. They want to sleep in the car. They want to "drive" home drunk. In both cases, a manual override would be disastrous and probably illegal. (We can already get a DUI just for getting into a car while drunk!) They also want to be able to "fetch" their cars without a driver, which wouldn't work.
There's a more generic term for what you're experiencing, which is "lack of motivation." On some level you don't care much about what you're doing; if you did, I guarantee you wouldn't be paralyzed. When you're motivated, things tend to fall into place.

That's not an indictment of you. Contrary to popular belief, motivation doesn't much come from within. For almost everybody, long-term motivation is about other people: your friends, your community, and the world at large. You'll be motivated to do something when these groups of people push you to.

And the mechanism for that push is almost always the same: status. In the long term, human beings find it very easy to do things that increase their status, and very difficult to do anything else (except for things that are inherently more pleasurable than difficult — but that generally doesn't include studying CS theory).

This is really hard on college students, because even though good grades will increase your status after college, they rarely do much for your status in college. If you're good, professors might care, but the collective student body won't.

The solution is to find people who really care about your performance in your field of study — maybe a professor's lab, maybe a group of high achievers, maybe (ideally) a club with an external goal (e.g. autonomous vehicle club) — and make those people central to your life by spending a lot of time with them. If you do, it'll become natural for you to work hard at your field. Although still, you'll only be driven to do things that directly increase your status in your group.

And of course, this solution can be hard to implement; spending lots of time with a new group of people takes its own motivation. It gets a lot easier after college, though. After college you get a job, and wherever you work, everybody will care about how you perform.
I regularly have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on both Windows and Linux and I haven't experienced the unusably fast (slow?) behaviour you're talking about. That said, Chrome seems much more unstable than Firefox for me lately.