skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article seems particularly bad (I stopped reading halfway through), but a lot of articles published in The New Yorker seems to do this kind of meandering. The other day I was reading a story about Jake Leg[0], and if you compare it to the corresponding Wikipedia article[1] the difference is really striking---the Wikipedia article tells you straight away what caused the contamination, while the New Yorker story somehow tries to keep you in suspense.

I guess I just don't see what these authors are trying to do. If someone started reading an article about "no, yes", probably they want to know about "no, yes". Why intersperse a bunch of unrelated fluff?

[0] http://www.danbaum.com/Nine_Lives/Articles_files/Jake%20Leg,...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_ginger
One technical aspect you didn't consider:

The work you wish you'd done sooner (1 to 6 years ago), would have been done with that year's tech. Starting an app 6 years ago, whatever idea, would have been harder to do. Early versions of mature frameworks we enjoy now weren't as easy to deal with. In the last few years things have gotten much faster.

It's easy to see how easy work is to do today and look back and say, "If only I had those lost years!" but that's not the case, that work would have been different by it's nature, due to the tech.

If only you'd started your app 15 years ago! You could have gone through the fresh hell of flash, php, hand writing deployment and basically being a sysadmin!
I have had a similar kind of issue my whole life as well. Being ambitious at the core but actions not being representative of how I think. And though I haven't figured it all out, I have improved massively from earlier. What helped was an understanding of how subtle anxiety affects me. Initially, at the age of 26 (30 now), if someone told me it was anxiety I would have told them no, but over time (with lot's of mediation) I began to realize that it is a very subtle, subconscious anxiety that makes is significantly harder to do anything that has a result riding on it.

To test if this is your problem, look back at things that are difficult but didn't have a expectation or result riding on them. Say you created a small app or read up on a complex topic and understood it well. If you are able to do difficult things that don't have expectations but are not able to similarly difficult (or even easy things) that do have an expectation it is probably an issue of anxiety.

If this is your problem, I would recommend the book The Now Habit. Also, start mindfulness meditation if you can.

Hope this helps.
Weird, I remember when I was in NZ a few years back "yeah nah..." meant "yes" which confused me. I think Australia had it too, but I'm not sure.

Another semi-related but confusing thing was while I've been living in Czech Republic I visited South Korea. I ended up getting twisted up trying to answer yes\no in Korean because...

English: Yes | No

Czech[1]: No | Ne

Korean: Ye\Ne | Anio

Each language has one that's annoyingly similar to the opposite in at least one different language. Trying to get this right after a few beers is hard.

[1] = "No" is a common contraction of "Ano" but even then that conflicts with Korean "Anio".
seq has the -s flag which voids the need of the paste for that command:

$ seq -s + 10 20
10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20

But I agree that the paste is very useful.

# a few random samples for an IN SQL statement
$ shuf -i 1-500000 -n 5 | paste -s -d ,
371492,250061,266669,455846,295852

# we can even get PI
$ ( seq -s + -f '4/%g' 1 4 100000 && seq -s - -f '4/%g' 3 4 100000 ) | paste -s -d - | bc -l
3.14157265358979523735
Thanks for the mooc. It sounds like exactly the level I'm looking for
This. Happy to talk in private about my experience with anxiety and procrastination. "Find a therapist you like" is great advice: it may take a couple tries. Good luck!
In the USA yes, I don't know why you all seem to hate each other so much.
Zero rating is a pox upon the Internet and should be killed with fire, regardless of any perceived short term benefit to some end users. In the long term zero rating is always toxic.

There are over 800 telcos in the world. Even if zero rating was free to the app/service provider, just negotiating with each and every telco would be a huge burden.

Zero rating is, however, neither free nor available to all app/service providers. Thus zero rating creates both a toll booth and a gatekeeper who gets to discriminate against app/service providers and pick winners and loosers.
I'm a bit of a strange case: I'm a runner in the north east US and its been very cold until recently. So I've had my watch on the outside of my thermal sleeve, where it obviously can't read my heart rate, but I'm mostly using it for stop watch + it can monitor how much total time I'm spending running vs walking. So not much data from me about sweating + heart rate.

You can store music on the watch, but the sync is so slow and the data cap is 2 GB that unless I want to listen to the same playlist on infinite repeat its not viable. You'd also need bluetooth headphones, which is a purchase I don't feel I actually need... generally when running I'd rather be alert of surroundings less I get hit by a truck while jamming to a favorite track.

My use of music controls on the watch has been this: phone is sitting around office or home and connects to sound bar, I can leave phone charging somewhere while reading / studying / drawing and if I want to change tracks or volume its a flick on the wrist. Otherwise while in the subway + listening via headphones on a crowded train, can change music while keeping a grip on subway poles.
I think he is right about that for books you want to read through. It would certainly be worth paying more for a cross library subscription that would allow you to quickly look up things in a lot of different books - but that only works for non-fiction.
> And the other options are...?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
Minimalist Java Applications
If most planets are larger than we are

Do you have a source for that assertion?

Most discovered planets to date are larger than Earth and closer to the star, but that's probably because it's easier to discover those planets given our current technology...

Interesting to think that the size of planets would limit exploration though (from the article):

If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.
HP Comes to Terms with the Cloud
A Prehistoric Giant Is Revived, If Only in Name
>Unchecked population growth is not sustainable. How do we check that growth?

By making people rich enough that they stop having so many damned babies because they can soundly expect the first one or two to survive infancy, and because they don't need seven children for farm labor.
True... and barring fictional "investigations" could be challenged in court. The problem is, we're rapidly reaching a point close to 1984 in terms of privacy (or lack of).
Happy to discuss your concerns. PCP 3.10 should be available on Ubuntu's official repo pretty soon too.
I am quite excited about upgrading my watch experience and the next generation of connected devices, however, the biggest surprise for me is that Apple doesn't offer more gesture recognition.

I always imagined the primary interface for shortcuts would be gestures such as waving away your arm to dismiss a message or flicking the wrist multiple times (if you try it right now, you can easily flick your wrist 3-4 times per second). It would make interaction that much easier and wrist flicking could even become a thing. One flick for health, two for time, etc. depending on the context.

Another thing that could be mildly annoying for a lot of people is that it can only ever be operated by engaging both hands. Phone by contrast can easily be operated with one hand using the thumb.

EDIT: If the watch has enough sensors, I am sure it could detect users not only flicking the wrist via rotation but also bending your hand down/up (which tends to pull/push the tendons on your wrist) though the watch would need to be worn snugly.
The really hard part about encrypting communications is key distribution and validation (eg: validating that the public key for number 555-1234 actually belongs to Alice).

How did you guys attack this problem?
1. Chrome is the most visible app that breaks.

2. Sublime Text works okay if youre running Gnome since it uses the gtk text scaling factor. But if you use something like dwm it will not work correctly.

3. Gtk apps as such work well.

4. XFCE is the window manager that works best because it has a simple no nonsense knob to set the dpi exposed via the control panel.

5. Oddly enough dwm works fantastically well since I can control all the font sizes manually via things like .emacs / .Xresources
Unfortunately, the way sentences are constructed in English this is a common way to phrase a question.

"Is it true you don't like cigars?" is a completely different question from "Do you like cigars?". The first question implies the asker has been given prior knowledge that they are looking to confirm. In some cases, the asker might already know with certainty that they don't like cigars, but they're looking to bring up the subject of cigars and that's their icebreaker. There's a lot of hidden information in that one short sentence.

It's a poorly constructed question yes, but the straightforward alternative isn't always a good alternative because that poorly constructed question isn't actually a question, It's a statement dressed up like a question for the sake of subtlety. So in actuality, the responder shouldn't answer yes or no. That's not the correct response to a statement. If the subtlety is lost on the responder even momentarily, they may answer yes or no, in the same manner that when someone says "happy birthday", I might mistakenly answer the same thing back to them as if they had wished me a good afternoon.

If someone says "Is it true you don't like cigars", the correct response is not "no", it's "that's correct".
If only every bug report that I received had been processed by a geostatistician... Usually I get a "hey, I can't get X to work". One of three responses from me usually fixes it: "Is your computer on?", "are you online?", and "try hitting refresh".

I am actually surprised the sysadmin in this scenario thought it was a bad thing that the statistics department did their research and presented a well documented error.
You'd have rated them poorly in this situation.
And they get new rides faster, so they don't care as much where they go.
We used a real PC obviously (my machine), and a capture device plugged into the NTSC composite output of the CGA card.
Great article Danny!
I can't reply to your replier, so replying here.

Population growth is already taken care of in any modernized country. We're only getting to replacement level by immigration.
I don't think the point is that you can't be a good programmer unless you understand NP-hard problems (at least I hope so, otherwise I'm in trouble). I think the point is that you can use this matrix as a guide towards improving your knowledge and skills.
Its seems you are suffering from Agoraphobia. I myself suffer from it (Even when I have an IQ above 135) I kept struggling most part of my life. It wasn't until I knew I suffered from this condition I could understand the problem and face it.

Go to a psychiatrist and get yourself evaluated. It would help you a lot. My 2 cents.
Hi. I won't be able to read this for a while. I am not familiar with federated byzantine. Can you quickly comment on the difference between this and purely distributed consensus? How is fault tolerance maintained? Do we presume that top tiers are free of byzantine nodes?

Thanks!
somewhat unrelated but if you email a private URL to a Microsoft email address, they will also crawl it, about once a month (I get an email anytime someone access it and MS bot is the only one accessing it). Not sure if Google also does that...
And people said no-one wants a larger version of the iPhone that can't make calls
My heart goes out to you, because these are issues I've dealt with my whole life, and I can now, with age, see how pointless it was to get wrapped up in them so tightly. If I could say one thing to you it would be to try and develop a little compassion and love for yourself. Really, make a conscious effort at it, maybe even check out meditation, "Metta meditation" in particular.

First, this sounds like typical ADHD behavior to me. Have you considered the possibility that you may have ADHD? If not, they research it a bit. (Right now -- Go ahead, I'll wait ;-)

Also, you seem to have a constant feeling of insecurity, of being "less than". Even though you have obviously accomplished a lot, you are still in a panic over not accomplishing enough. This is just a guess, but I'd bet it has affected your life in a a lot of ways far beyond your programming career. That's OK, you are certainly not alone, but just something else to mull over in your mind, and why I think mindfulness and metta meditation might be especially useful for you. Check out "Pragmatic Buddhism", as well as Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, Shinzen Young, and simiplar teachers.

I'm stressing meditation because I've found it to be the most effective way to deal with similar issues in my life. It's not fast, or easy, but it seems to be the most effective thing so far.
As someone at the very other end of the 20s spectrum:

1. My own responsibility towards myself and my life weighs a lot more heavily on me at 29 than it did at 22. At 22 I had faith that it would work out, somehow. I think that's a feeling to be taken advantage of while you still have it.

2. Conversely, I also realize now that I won't be successful at something that I don't like, and that doing something I like is worth more than money. Obviously this only works to a certain extent, I still need to live. But it seems more and more that as long as you are pursuing you believe in and enjoy, you aren't poor in spirit.

My point being: maybe don't worry so much for the feasibility of your dreams at this moment in your life.
My laptop (a Toshiba Satellite) has an annoying level of coil whine. If it's from power saving, it's GPU power-saving state related, not CPU. It's not noticeably affected by turning off CPU power saving modes, at the very least.

It's most noticeable when scrolling image-heavy webpages, or with pretty much anything that ends up with framerates in audio frequencies. Older versions of Dwarf Fortress on the menu screen, for instance.
> The requirements for employees make it so you need lots of money to even manage HR (hiring and firing is a court case).

Yet, the best feature about universal income is that it's simple and has low overhead. If you are successfull you'll get taxed -> taxes go to the people, equaly distributed. No extra administration staff, no means investigation, no extra court cases.

> However, I know so many people that went on unemployment and had no motivation to even be bothered to look for a job.

How much of this was because those people had a living income, and how much is because they'd lose money if they got a job?
This might get 14 to 20 years in India even if we consider him as murderer. I am not sure what makes people think that lifetime prison helping. Atleast in India i would expect the guy to comeback after 14 years as clean person most probably more useful to society if he had taken the punishement seriously. What is the use of putting some one for the rest of the life in jail? if the jail was not for correction but to revenge then you may execute him right away and may be save prison cost.
Someone explain to me why the same argument does not apply internally within the US. The imbalance of trade between Germany and other Eurozone partners does indeed create winners and looser. How different is this from states within the US. Since when did the US care about similar imbalances created between Alabama and say California? I'm sure there are arguments against this comparison. I'd be interested to hear them.

That aside, I "feel" (based on living in Germany) that Bernanke is correct with his suggestions of where Germany could move. I don't think it will have much impact on the trade deficit but it will help Germany avoid more drastic emergencies in the future. The pay for workers is out of balance. The investment in infrastructure is not required now but important for its future. Currently it's infrastructure is far better off than other EU zone countries of similar size (and many times better than the US). But if it wants to retain it's significance 20 years from now it will need to innovate in infrastructure or be satisfied with being that country known for making old-world things at good quality. Germany definitely needs policies that encourage investment. Ideally though I'd prefer that not be in housing as stable housing is probably one of the primary social benefits in Germany. But as it stands with its undervalued assets it's becoming a place to be bought by others. Politically this creates interdependence which is NOT a bad thing but ultimately as the undervaluing continues Germans are just throwing away that value as value lost. In a globalized economy if they do not capitalize on it someone else will. Still, none of this will do much for the trade deficit. Because while it may take 20 years for Germany to push some of these changes, change within other EU countries to take advantage of it will take significantly longer. Then again, I'm not an economist so what do I know.
Also Conversations doesnt allow for customer server IP address so it's unusable for me. Yaxim does which is why I will have to stay with it. Custom IP server addresses are important if you have DNS/NAT complications within your internal network compared to outside.
Thanks for the link. I already have a pretty decent setup, but I'm always looking to improve it. Trying it out now.
Back in the day, people had hobbies. Collecting butterflies, studying physics, cataloging all the fungi on earth etc. Maybe today it would be more like visiting all the places Survivor filmed, or collecting a model of every sword in any Conan movie.
FWIW, GNU Guile lets you use "native" call/cc in its (broken?) JavaScript implementation.

http://wingolog.org/archives/2009/02/25/callcc-and-ecmascrip...
Awesome, very helpful Article. Keep it up man.
New Visual Studio 2015 Product Range
My current laptop has 8GB of ram, and I have to agree.

It's not at the point where it's constantly an issue, but it does become an issue relatively commonly. Especially if I have, say, Eclipse and Pale Moon (FireFox fork) open at the same time.
My use case is the exact same. Take the 360 off at night, I don't want to sleep in a watch anyhow. On the occasions I do, it survives a night (but complains of low battery in the morning) in case I need to use it for a silent alarm in the early hours.

I agree that the toxic NIH syndrome at Apple harms their users - why not use Qi? Because then they can't charge $30 ($50?) for a replacement / secondary charging cable.
> Neither can tablets or computers normally send SMS messages

TextSecure is android-only, so I fail to see how this is an issue.
Also, (please, correct me if I'm wrong), they also require that you have an SMS-capable line to use it, so I fail to see how that limitation would matter.
A slight tangent, are there public XMPP servers?

Are there open source projects that use XMPP for their public channels?

I'm a little dismayed by how many Slack accounts I'm acquiring.
In 1st-world economies (the only ones suggesting a basic income) its checking itself. Germany, Japan, France, the USA have negative population 'growth'
Complete Guide to Increasing Open Rates for MailChimp Newsletters
This baby belongs to them cloners. What you got here is a Kamino Saberdart.
People need a purpose. Work gives people that purpose.
The libraries have a license for a particular number of copies of each title that can be checked out at one time. They pay for this license, at high rates for popular books (more than hardcovers).
The charts look like they were built with nvd3. Can anyone confirm/deny?
Why We Melt at Puppy Pictures
Water being common doesn't mean life is common. We have the intuition to be aware that the exact atomic configuration of a boeing 747 getting replicated by pure chance on a planet 500 light years away is impossibly low. So impossibly low that I'm willing to bet my life that it won't ever happen, not just on a planet 500 light years away, but on every planet in the universe. What are the chances of life being on a planet 500 light years away? Unfortunately the definition of life is vague and the chemical processes required by life aren't even completely understood.

Without knowing the processes/materials necessary to ignite the self replicating processes required for life we don't possess the information necessary to know whether life is probable or improbable. Even in a universe with plentiful water and plentiful habitable planets, without context on what started it all we can't make any meaningful prediction. Is life like the boeing 747 or is it not?

I always find it ludicrous when someone says the universe is just so vast that life has to exist somewhere else. We just don't have enough understanding/context to know.
It can last days if you turn everything off and use it as a dumb phone, but who wants to do that.
For me the UI and its interactions is part of the service. UIs are really dominant when it comes to experience of a service.
I like the idea of the digital crown, because the screen's too small to swipe to scroll without obscuring almost everything.
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
--Rob Malda, on the iPod at its release in 2001
Only if you just want people to tackle easy, meaningless problems.
> So you can't just drop them off at the park and go to the pub.

Why not? I used to play in a park with other friends all the effing time after around 2nd grade or so.

I guess though, that the US has a far lower "implicit layer of support" though -- if anyone in our community saw kids going somewhere they weren't supposed to, they wouldn't bat an eyelid at hauling us up and taking us back to our homes. In th US if it's someone's else's kid, you automatically go into "NOT MY PROBLEM" mode :)
The French phrase is "n'est-ce pas?".
Would You Rather: MSP Edition
Best of SXSW Interactive 2015
You're still paying for the phone when it's "free".
I bought a used X230, upgraded to 16GB of RAM, added an SSD, and it's been an awesome machine so far. But you're right, the X250 will offer a better display. At least Lenovo seems to have eased up on the hardware blacklist where this model and the T450 are concerned http://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/31rnsv/t450_and_x2...

Also, here's a link related to the 16GB SO-DIMM modules that you mentioned https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/16GB-...
For the conversation so far, "Communism" only refers to the system that decides and maintains how resources are allocated. (Just like how I've been using capitalism).

As I understand it, communism decides an allocation of resources to maximise a utility function which isn't driven by individual demands but by some objective ranking of value.

From my side I am curious what you mean by economic democracy.
I think you must mean 1998, not 2008?

This is a good story. I'd be curious to hear about things you learned that are related to unusual aspects of what Be was doing.
Here's a fun fact: You can do productive things even if nobody threatens to take away your livelihood if you don't!

Maybe you need someone looking over your shoulder to tell you what to do all the time. Many of us don't. I'm sure we can get a robot to periodically check in on you and yell at you if you aren't doing something productive.