skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There will be consequences" is not a prediction, it's a empty statement. Every possible course of actions has consequences. People usually claim more specific things, which is what the author is disagreeing with.
Scala encourages people to not use nulls everywhere, so adding syntactic sugar for a special case, which is not even idiomatic Scala doesn't sound like a good idea.

Option is not a "replacement" for null. Sometimes another type is more appropriate to replace a usage of a null in Java/C#, so making Option special would be counter-productive.
Good point.

That's where lots of terms with `co-' in front come in. Co-recursion can deal with certain infinite structures.
Parts of this story are not ringing true to me.

Do dealers really drive around with balloons in their mouths, prepared to swallow them if stopped? Do buyers really receive calls from dealers asking them whether they're satisified? Do buyers really announce their intention to quit using or switch dealers, and get free heroin?

I don't have a lot of experience with stuff like this, but it sounds so bogus.
Ask HN: What code analyzers do you use?
I would like to know what code analyzers (static/dynamic) you use. Do you run them locally, before pushing your code or remotely against pull requests? Thanks!
I mean - linguistically speaking, it's fascinating. I really want to read this paper.
Something of a tangent, but i really wish it was possible to whitelist specific apps to act as "stores". Right now if i want to use F-Droid or similar i have to either leave my device open for others to also be able to install, or constantly juggle the "unknown sources" option.
I definitely had problems with ADHD, and still do to some extent. I was listening to a book, The Sports Gene, and the touched on exercise and attention deficit. A proposed theory is that in the attention deficit brain you don't have enough dopamine. Exercise produces the dopamine you need to get to "normal". Therefore, exercise for some people is very rewarding and helps them out a lot. In other individuals who already have normal levels of dopamine it is a very "meh" experience for them, maybe even counter productive. They don't get the boost of dopamine as strongly since they already had "enough" to function well. And, since they had to endure, potentially higher, cognitive load to do the exercise its a net negative for them. Anyway, I don't know if this mechanism explains all of it, but anecdotally this matches extremely well with my experience.

Later in life I have come to rely on routine physical exercise as it keeps me on an even keel and productive. Caffeine and Ritalin both just made me go into the zone just the same way hard exercise does. I find that if I do not exercise hard and regular I have a hard time staying productive and I might seek towards other dopamine producing behaviors (Alcohol, junk foods). I have found a middle ground of moderate exercise, but it is never as fulfilling as being full tilt into a training cycle.

edit: Found a quote from the author of The Sports Gene:

"Here at Axon Sports, we talk a lot about the brain’s role in playing sports. From vision to perception to decision making to emotions, the brain plays a critical role in sports success. What have we learned about neurogenetics that can influence an athlete’s performance from a cognitive perspective?

DE: One of the most surprising things I learned in my reporting was that scientists know quite well that not only does the dopamine system in the brain—which is involved in the sense of pleasure and reward—respond to physical activity, but it can also drive physical activity.

One of the scientists I quote in the book suggests that this may be why very active children who take Ritalin, which alters dopamine levels, suddenly have less drive to move around. That’s precisely what he sees when he gives Ritalin to the rodents he breeds for high voluntary running, anyway. And it appears that different versions of genes involved in the dopamine system influence the drive to be active. (Interestingly, native populations that are nomadic and that migrate long distances tend to have a higher prevalence of a particular dopamine receptor gene; the same one that predisposes people to ADHD. I discuss in the book the possible link.) "
The problem with that is that having proof and getting overpowered by a superhuman AI might fall within a very short timeframe.

To be brutally honest, I don't actually see this as being necessarily a bad thing --- it's not like humans are doing such a great job of running the world. If a hypothetical AI is so much better at it than we are that it can replace us, then don't we deserve to be replaced?

Although I would make sure than anywhere halfway competent AI has the collected works of Iain M. Banks on its reading list.
Decisiveness is overrated. - Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz

Rocks that are next to each other in Massachusetts now were also next to each other 400 million years ago. - Geology, Amherst College

Rats will go to great lengths to earn a pellet of sugar, and even more so when on the right kinds of drugs. - Neuroscience, University of California, Los Angeles

Older favourites from lolmythesis, in my fortune clone @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
Open offices are an immense waste. Guess much work I get done when the five people near me have visitors resulting in three separate concurrent discussions? I already have Bose noise cancelling headphones. They are amazing, but cannot be expected to stop that level of interruption.

I have a strong work ethic. The productivity loss actually makes me sad. It's a waste of my employer's money, the customer's money, and everyone's time. Just let me be productive. Please.
Imagine an AI that's exactly as smart as Einstein, but thinks a thousand times faster. Now imagine a thousand of it. This fits easily within your speculations about limits to intelligence, since we know that Einstein-level intelligence can exist; even so it sounds pretty darn capable. I bet that Thousandfold Overclocked Albert could do some pretty impressive stuff.

I find it very plausible that there are limits on intelligence, but those limits are high enough that this should not be very comforting.
Lots of excellent advice on this thread (What I read of it).

Take breaks at work and move around. Spend as much time as you can outside. The time away will recharge you and you'll be more effective when you return.

Concentrate on your meals when you're eating, instead of eating in front of the computer or reading, for instance. You'll be more aware of how the food is affecting you and how much of it you need. If you start to notice that something adversely effects you cut it out of your diet.
Hmm, not sure I could answer that question, as in this case, DARPA is supporting our open source projects, not our commercial projects. Or is that what you are asking?

That said, FastCompany covered the story of how we got involved with DARPA here:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3040363/the-future-of-search-brou...
It does seem pretty daunting. A tall sundial would not have enough mechanical stability to be accurate, especially due to wind loading. AFAIK at least one of the people who measured the circumference of the earth, did so by observing a shadow at the bottom of a deep well. Still, a shadow would be pretty washed out over the span of, say, 15 meters, unless some sort of focusing optic were involved.
I've never worked in anything other than open plan offices. Some are definitely better than others. The worst are offices without breakaway spaces, which cause impromptu meetings to happen at desks, which can be immensely distracting.

On the other hand, I have found that open plan offices can be a boon when working in small teams. One arrangement I remember quite fondly had groups of 4 desks in an X configuration with L shaped desks. We were working 4 to a team and it was a friendly and cooperative environment. The L shaped desks were also significantly roomier than I've encountered elsewhere.

I should note that my experience is in London, where I suspect there's a greater premium on floorspace than in many other places.
We wouldn't wish for the end of humanity, but if it implies the end of inhumanity, it would be a net gain.
if our computing systems continue to get significantly more powerful, won't a brute-force system obviate feature engineering? in other words, can't kaggle eventually be outcompeted by an algo-of-algos that iterates through all known approaches and then settles on the ideal candidate?
Previous discussion, 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815065
Probably what's more important than the open office plan is the underlying idea : collaboration. Collaboration between various siloed parts of the organization. You can achieve that without creating open offices . When you force an open office where u actually were trying to encourage collaboration it may not always have the effect you were going for
It's embarrassing for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police that they haven't cracked this case yet. They're one of the biggest police departments in the world and have extensive resources. Yes, their in-house computer crime department is new, but they could draw on expertise at the national level or from outside Japan.
Just because $15/hr is more than many police or firefighters make doesn't mean that it's too much to ask for. Perhaps we should consider that police and firefighters (and also the accountants et al who are mentioned in the article) are also underpaid. Maybe the decreasing real value of minimum wage is also depressing wages and salaries for more skilled and higher paid workers.
This is a little off topic but maybe someone who knows more about this than I do can chime in and give me some links to studies on this:

What is the possibility of creating a biological computational device and are there currently efforts to do so? To me it seems like rather than physically building computers out of processed materials, growing computers in labs might be much more efficient and more powerful. The human brain is an example of this (not lab grown, biological).

Are there any studies that look into harnessing the power of biological computers? I mean, actually tapping into neurological pathways, giving input and receiving output?
Thank you for these posts. We need to keep awareness of the issue as high as possible as it will become easier and easier for both the forces and liquidators to dilute the funds left for payout down to nothing over time.
Except that rewriting Make to handle LaTeX wouldn't work, because "keep re-running LaTeX until the labels stop changing" is turing-complete.
Just as an example of what you're saying: a few posts up the index, there was an article on intelligence and language in dolphins.

Dolphins are practically our cousins --- they're social mammals living in much the same world we do, and a lot of their behaviour maps directly onto ours. But they're so alien to us that we're still arguing about whether they are intelligent, low alone how much.

If we can't even communicate effectively with them, what chance have we with a machine intelligence with which we have nothing whatsoever in common, not even time and space?
We've ensured that the entire region is a war zone for the last 30 years. These things happen in war zones. The U.S. Military business and the Muslim extremists need each other, and owe each other much of their strength. By playing along with their game of racism and war, you strengthen them. Weakminded citizens such as yourself and your Muslim counterparts are easily manipulated by manufactured hatred to enrich the sociopaths.
Those efforts also need humility. In San Jose, Rod Diridon and the VTA thought the city would radically reshape itself around the light rail, which didn't really happen: http://www.mercurynews.com/traffic-old/ci_22264605/25-years-...

For those not familiar with the VTA, I'll just say that it's the kind of light rail system that passes by the airport, but the closest stop to the terminal is more than a mile's walk away.
I think the reason it's not discussed is that if there is a bound, it's far outside of human-scale intelligence. Even from my limited human vantage point I can see virtually limitless ways to improve my own intelligence. Perception improvements, speed improvements, rationality, strategy, physical skills, etc. A being with all the improvements I can specifically think of would be a demigod. Presumably that demigod could build a god, but even if not, a demigod would be a formidable superintelligence.
Bobbi Brown Tells Crowd That Bobbi Kristina Is Awake
MillionDollarHomepage variation attempts to raise $1M for charity
It is based on a similar concept as MillionDollarHomepage where pixels were 1 Million sold to advertisers. Will this new attempt raise $1 Million for charity?

http://pyramidscheme.link
If they are doing it by choice, and also mooching off of the system at the same time then I think the word "bum" applies.
> long after the introduction of viable free alternatives

Maybe Ubuntu (or mint?) has learned UX design and found a way to sand down all its' rough edges in the 3 years since I switched to OSX, but I doubt it. Running linux requires the time and patience of a knowledge person. Linux is far too expensive for most people.
Personally, I find cubicles to be the worst of both worlds: too spread out for much collaboration with neighbors, but open enough go have nearly all the noise and distraction of an open office.
The Computer “Scientist” as a Toolsmith [pdf]
"I've even seen rare glimmers of people criticizing EFF for trying to make a cause celebre of him."

Perhaps it's entirely possible that the EFF is just like any other organization that needs to find ways to justify their existence. The same with security researchers cloaking many of the things that they do in some quest for the greater good (the "if it wasn't for us" argument).

You know locksmith tools are available for purchase over the internet. But that's not enough! We should teach lock picking in schools so that people develop new and better ways to prevent their own locks from being picked and invest in more security against people that have been trained to pick locks. Because disclosure and transparency makes everything better and nobody thinks there is any value at all in obscurity or making things a bit more difficult by not being so out in the open.

Pretending that finding some security flaw is not about capturing the flag and all about saving humanity really bothers me to no end.
The cost is still too high, so the electric companies have little to worry about in the short run as long as they can find ways to improve their own margins. Of course lobbying for regulatory fees and reduced buy-back rates is one way to do that, but the utilities best be careful there. That could cause a blow back reaction.

In the long run though it is all downhill. Battery tech is getting better at around 8% per year. Solar efficiency isn't far behind. What cost $20,000 now to add solar or $40,000 to get off-grid completely, will cost half that in about 10 to 15 years. If the trend lines continue then in 20 to 30 years years its a done deal. No house will ever be built again without it's own power generation system.
You are arguing against a very insulting straw man, and I would ordinarily not consider you not worth addressing except that a lot of people apparently think along the same ridiculous lines.

Panhandlers in major cities are at low risk of not having food available to them. The idea of the 'starving homeless' is another counterfactual myth, just as much as the 'deserving homeless'--but if it really concerns you, there are far more directly expedient ways of helping them than giving away money. Services and shelters for the homeless are pretty terrible, but I've never heard anyone credible say that these services are worse than the shortsighted, feel-good solution of giving people money they are fundamentally incapable of spending correctly.

By contrast, it is common for the homeless to die of exposure--not because they had no shelter available, but because they are mentally ill and fell into a pattern of denying it to themselves, even on the coldest days.
Most net metering programs take solar from a home when the grid is facing its highest demand and energy is most expensive for the power company. They then provide a credit to your bill in watts. With a solar installation, you're drawing energy at night, when the grid basically wants to give away power to keep things balanced.

So you contribute a dollar worth of power, and you take out the same power at a later point in time, and the power company basically gives you a 5 cent credit.

The power companies make fistfulls of cash on the arbitrage.

They still hate it though, because distributed power generation threatens the model of power monopolies that get to fix prices while steadily reducing service.

Hawaii in particular has faced historically terrible load balancing, so some of the distributed generation is a response to the poor existing services and constant outages. HECO basically created all the incentives for the public to hate and want to work around them.

You couldn't just give them an out on whether they wanted to buy the power or not, since they despise distributed solar generation. They'd just build a messy and expensive quick spin up generator, buy expensive power from that during midday, and claim they don't "need" the solar, to deter investment in the technology, even though it'd be better for everyone if they bought the solar.

You can't ask a kid how much he needs foul tasting medicine. Sometimes you just have to deliver it.
I'm a big proponent of ~3 people offices as opposed to an open floor plan. There are many ways to "opt-in" to interactions:

- lunch/dinner is done in a dining area

- I invite people out for a coffee break

- I can go hangout in a common area

- I can just walk in to someone's office just like I would walk to someone's desk in an open floor plan

- I bump into people while walking down the hall, grabbing a snack from the kitchen, etc.

There's just so many ways I interact with people at the office, that making sure I'm surrounded by people I can't look away from or mute all the time is completely unnecessary.

And I don't want to have to blast music into my ears all day and wear horse blinkers just to get some continuous hours of distraction-free creative thinking done.
Now if we can get Kindle to support dyslexic friendly fonts.
Exercising, especially at your limits, drains mental energy from the same bucket as hard thought about say, math problems. In addition you are burning energy. Your bucket of cognitive energy is only so big. I think if you have already normal levels of dopamine and endorphins the rush of them after exercise doesn't do very much for you.

For the ADHD brain, which lacks a normal level of dopamine the exercise intensity is offset by the production of dopamine. For me, hard exercise, a proper recovery period of about an hour (nutrition, relaxing) and I enter a period of high productivity for about 4-5 hours. I can intensely focus in this time. After that I have to move around some more (it's also later in the afternoon then when many people are getting a little tired anyway). I can usually settle in to deal with lower cognitive load tasks after that (easier coding, email, report writing, et.) for a few hours.
Introducing dispatch.vim
A tall cliff? A building with a spire on top? An obelisk? Guess now I'm going to have to go and find a tall building with a spire and check how recognizable the shadow of that spire is!
If the purpose of open-plan offices is to intimidate people into working, they backfire. I fuck around way more in an open-plan office than when I have privacy.

There are many reasons for it. The first is that I have a fixed amount of "goofing off" (which is just giving my mind some rest) that I'll do per day. In a private office, it might take 20 minutes and I'm done and back to work. In an open-plan office where I have to intersperse it with the appearance of working and it takes longer (and the goofing off is less mentally restful, so I do more). The second is that, contrary to what a lot of people say, I find that 15- to 30-minute slivers of time (between other engagements) can be very productive, but not in an open-plan office. So the meeting multiplier is more severe. If lunch is 12:00 then a meeting from 10 to 11 kills the rest of the morning, whereas with private offices you'd still have 45-55 minutes of useful time. The third is that I've always felt like if getting work done efficiently were important, I'd have a legitimate working environment to get it done in. Being visible from behind suggests low status, which suggests that the work isn't that important. So if I'm intellectually engaged or the work is helping my career, I'll do it very well... but if neither is true, the surrounding physical environment supports me in not caring. Fourth, of course, is the anxiety caused by the aggravating and unreliable work environment. It would be bad to deal with a constantly noisy environment, but that would at least be predictable. Open-offices add to the evil by failing you at unpredictable times. Someone might tap you on the shoulder. Broken. Someone might pair with the person sitting next to you. Broken. The person behind you might get a phone call. Broken.
An easy solution is to avoid bank transfers for Bitcoin transactions, and instead to deal in cash.

Since Bitcoin is another form of cash, it becomes an exchange of one form of cash for another. There is no future risk of the transaction being reversed due to fraud.
The Real Reason Open Source Startups Fail
I was big promoter ofs smaller offices, but it is also wrong. Way forward is location independence and remote teams.
Ask HN: Moore’s Law: what will happen in the next 5 years?
What do you think Moore’s Law and other feasible short-term technology advancements will enable in the next 5 years?
http://www.higherorderlogic.com/2010/07/bad-code-isnt-techni...
There is a something-like-realist movement in biology to encourage the valuation of forests economically, at least in southwest China where a German biologist began to explain the economic value in terms of tourism and extractable natural forest resources to local government in a bid to protect remnant forest cover. I knew the guy before he died, and have met his wife and some of the German students sent over to work on his programs. The biggest cash pile put up was apparently by one of the big French perfume conglomerates, who wanted to use rare but naturally occurring orchids for some kind of luxury product. A goddamn obtuse way to try to protect a local natural resource in the face of the onslaught of rubber farming which is destroying the local forest (read: borrow money, clear fell, plant, dehydrate, nominally reap large medium term profits. What's actually happening now is too many rubber plants in ground equals tiny fraction of projected returns equals zero forest, zero income, zero traditional sustainable source of food/medicine/fuel/building materials, and the kicker... bank owns everything). We need alternate economic systems at this point: there's nothing else for it. Politics and the international meta-system of fiat-based capitalism 'as it stands' simply can't solve this stuff in time: our children will grow up with almost no real, accessible forests or tropical reefs, and only a fraction of current biodiversity.

For a more articulate explanation, search for 'growing commercialism' in http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/06/robert_bu... -- recently posted.
This is a nice way to feature and popularize open source software. It would be nice to have a way to integrate the repo with each individual app. May the play store should have a section like this.
Top 4 freelancing sites explained