dribnet

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

sorry - s.trokes.org was just a clone of bl.ocks.org with syntax highlight support for clojure. I've updated the links to blocks and the examples are working again.

dribnet

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I don't think you read the article - the metals were the direct result of fertilizer which would not be allowed in organic farming. The catch is that the fertilizer (coal ash) was used to grow corn and soybean animal feed (which cows can't even digest properly, but that's another story...) and then the manure of those cows went to organic farms - so the purported vector of attack was indirect.

I'm no cheerleader of organics and think it's foolish that GMOs are by definition non-organic. However, I buy them when I can primarily because of my concerns with pesticide and fertilizer overuse.

dribnet

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

If you've ever wondered why newlines are sometimes CR and other times CR+LF, I think Gary is part of that answer.

dribnet

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Around 2012 there was an edit but the first two lines were accidently removed - both the <HTML> and <HEAD> tags are now missing but later closed.

This can be confirmed with internet archive. [1] vs [2]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20111220220928/http://ericschmidt...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20131030012224/http://ericschmidt...

dribnet

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

That one dates from 4/2013.

This one found via a recent merge-request is current to 9/2014.

https://github.com/Sydcul/WhatsAPI/

dribnet

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Certainly you've heard a government official frame an issue he didn't like as "bad for the economy"? In the US, it's basically the first page in the playbook for both sides of the aisle because very few issues are as sacred as a healthy economy. But if hurting the economy just means bringing down the GDP, then there are countless reasons why the underlying issue might still be beneficial to the welfare of its citizens.

Want to boost your country's GDP? Here's some tips. Become terminally ill. Get involved in a costly divorce. Try gambling or drinking habitually. Take a job where you commute long hours wasting gas in traffic. Hell, open a strip mine - every resource extracted is a net positive on the national ledger. Bonus points if you can coerce your fellow citizens into compulsory spending - a nasty coal plant triggering asthma in the local population is a great example.

Even worse, a focus on GDP directly contributes to income inequality because as a measure it is blind to the distribution. If the top 1% gain more than every one else loses in a year, GDP still rises. For this reason Rowe calls GDP a "statistical laundry operation that hides the suffering at the bottom".

Measuring and tracking GDP is a splendid idea, but using it as even a proxy for national welfare is insanity. I encourage anyone interested to read the linked article, which is as true today as when Rowe testified before the US senate 8 years ago. Also at the end he takes a first pass at laying out principles around new metrics to fix the situation.

dribnet

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

GDP is like measuring calories burned without any other context. Expenditure is a means, not an end.

As engineers I think we are aware of the danger of optimizing around the wrong fitness function. The GDP is used as shorthand for "the economy" in federal policymaking, so now there are many ways to "stimulate" the economy by creating various forms of inefficiencies and misery. [1]

[1] http://jonathanrowe.org/the-gross-domestic-product

dribnet

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Article fails to mention: the eyes of the squid and octopus are very similar to ours in overall structure, but are not "wired backwards". So it seems that any explanation of why backwards is actually "vision-enhancing" is incomplete unless it also explains why it would not be enhancing for the squid. (though perhaps a justification could exist based on different wavelengths and lighting conditions underwater)

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Some context for this code can be found here [1] in Lammers' great book.

Gates specifically says that "not a line of code went out that I didn't look over" for the BASIC 6502 product. At the time (1986) he said he considered BASIC for the 8080 his "greatest achievement ever in programming" and admitted that he no longer programs himself but does was still looking at code and discussing algorithms with his 160 Microsoft engineers.

[1] https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/bill-gates-1986/

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

It's my understanding that - because of obscure constants in the git codebase - it's a bad idea to use dates before Sat, 03 Mar 1973 09:46:40 GMT because the usable git epoch is 1970 + 100000000s. More details available here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=625480

FWIW: I routinely start my git repos with an empty commit to allow history rewrites and use Jan 1st, 1974 as my own epoch.

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Note that in the US, protections are broad and being funny doesn't matter. Legal precedent clearly states that "First Amendment protections do not apply only to those who speak clearly, whose jokes are funny, and whose parodies succeed" [1]

We have 2 Live Crew to thank for firmly establishing this majority opinion in US Supreme Court 20 years ago.

[1] http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/campbell.h...

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

"There would be few fossil traces of these lost siblings of the Earth."

Our moon is a pretty obvious reminder of Earth's lost sibling Theia.

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2014/06/new-isotopic-evidence-...

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Interesting editorial decision by Jeremy to submit this today and "The Fallacy of Tiny Modules" a few weeks ago. I recommend reading both.

http://hueniverse.com/2014/05/30/the-fallacy-of-tiny-modules...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822383

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Yes, this was on the radar then as Y2k was still fresh in everyone's memory.

[1] "S1B coming" http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/04/17/1915221/the-quickly-...

[2] "Any Billennium Bugs?" http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/09/10/0353238/billenniums-...

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

"Elsewhere in northern California, a major earthquake along the subduction zone between Cape Mendocino and Vancouver Island—a region known to geologists and seismologists as Cascadia and which the Working Group gave a 10% chance of rupturing in the next 30 years—will almost certainly be followed within decades, perhaps even within hours, by a major earthquake along the northern segment of the San Andreas."

Notable that Sunday evening there was a 6.9 quake in that region which was the California's largest in the past 7 years. I believe a deformation (not a rupture) - but it was just south of Cascadia near where it meets with the San Andreas fault close to the Mendocino triple junction. [1]

[1] http://www.decodedscience.com/m6-9-california-earthquake-lar...

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Nice idea, but for me this 5 line mac-specific shell script had two errors. Did anyone actually try this?

Here's a version that worked for me

   #!/bin/sh
   cd ~
   curl -L --insecure https://www.atom.io/api/updates/download -A "Atom/0.1 CFNetwork/1.5" > Atom.zip
   unzip Atom.zip
   mv Atom.app /Applications/
   rm -rf Atom.zip

dribnet

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

tl;dr:

  jobs: let's not hire each other's employees anymore, m-kay?
  colligan (Palm CEO): thanks steve, but no thanks.
  jobs: have you seen our patents and pile of cash, ed?
        you're entering a world of pain.

dribnet

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

I find the factor theory much more plausible for 4000 years ago than the finger tip theory. Why are there 24 beers in a case? Because 2 * 3 * 4 and the geometry of efficient packing. This would have been as true then as now.

dribnet

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

This was an interesting talk. My own interpretation was that PHP's strengths were claimed to be:

1) State => because endpoints have no persistent state

2) Concurrency => because there is no concurrency model

3) Transparency => (1) + (2) + fast reload = easy to understand

These combined give the language nice programmer "ergonomics" (Keith's terminology). It also limits the collateral damage any particular change to the codebase can have which allows Facebook to more confidently deploy multiple times a week.

dribnet

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Pleased to see Rich Hickey also supporting this. http://www.indiegogo.com/individuals/222990/activities

Submissions

NYC Mayor to require computer science in city schools

Google patents word2vec

Why Are Eight Bits Enough for Deep Neural Networks?

A Recurrent Neural Network Based Alternative to Convolutional Networks

Why I'm disappointed in React Native

Hardcore cascalog: dynamic queries

comments