ispolin

One way to answer that might be to look inside ourselves.

Take me for example. I indulge myself with books, songs, apps, etc. Granted, it's on a completely different financial scale than Hermes bags, but I own more things than I can realistically consume. So let's call whatever I buy but can't consume "excess".

Whatever instinct causes me to buy stuff in excess instead of using that excess to help the poor more than I currently do is likely the same instinct that causes the rich to buy 4000 shoes and 100 Hermes bags instead of helping the poor more.

I don't introspect enough to know what that instinct is, but most of us here probably have similar very minor excesses in our lives and can get some clues by thinking about those.

Did anybody test the mice for physiological changes, and specifically reduced testosterone levels? In Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen", he mentions research about how low testosterone levels in both males and females cause this type of behavior.

Maybe there's an evolutionary adaptation that lowers testosterone production during times of high population, and in the artificial conditions of the experiment that adaptation exhibited itself too strongly?

That would also explain why mice taken out of the experimental environment didn't rehabilitate. There are other studies cited in "The Red Queen" that suggest that levels of testosterone are largely determined by the mother's environment and stress levels during gestation.

There are ways around that: http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

Sounds very similar to the "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat"[1] film shown at the dawn of cinema. Some of the audience supposedly jumped from their seats in terror as the life-size train seemingly came straight at them from the movie screen.

I wonder if this kind of thing happens for any mediums you aren't familiar with from childhood.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Arriv%C3%A9e_d'un_train_en_ga...

So does this mean that people can increase their happiness by using plugins that hide negative posts from their social media?

Having a virtual desktop manager helps a lot, along with keyboard shortcuts to switch between desktops comfortably. For Linux/Mac virtual desktops are built in and for Windows there's VirtaWin.

An even more charitable interpretation might be: We can gain insight on how to manage fully autonomous rule-based systems (AI) by looking at existing semi-autonomous rule-based systems (Corporations, Governments).

Good point. I suppose that the trade off is that you loose the "marker posts" from other languages that say to the programmer "Magic happens here, go read the docs" but you gain the power (together with macros) to add features to your language seamlessly.

In fact I think that only 13 "functions" are "magic" in clojure (as in written in java), and the whole rest of the language is written using those 13 functions[1]. That would be like, for example, adding golang's channels to ruby syntax by writing ruby code, without having to drop down to C, which i think is pretty cool.

I also found it very useful in real-life, mostly through having clojure libraries that can do things more seamlessly than similar libraries in other languages. For my last project, I needed to use maybe monad functionality quite often, and having it be as easy to use as the core language in my code was a huge win for my sanity.

[1]: I think some of the data structures are written in java as well, but only for performance reasons.

The thing that helped me most when I started learning clojure is to mentally move the parenthesis over to the other side, so

    (println (max 34 64 15))

    println(max(34,64,15));

Another thing that helped is realizing that almost all things that require special syntax in other languages look like function calls in clojure. So, for example, to create a new function, you call the defn "function" and pass it parameters for the name of your new function, the expected arguments, and the body of the function.

The last thing is remembering that in clojure, the last statement in the body of the function is automatically the return value of the function, so I just imagined that the last statement had a "return" call in front of it.

With these 3 rules I could mentally translate 95% of clojure* to c-style code and back.

*The other 5% is mostly about macros, which are what give clojure (and other lisps) the power to add new features to the language via libraries, among other cool things. They they're powerful and used sparingly though, so you won't bump into them too much, and when you do, most will be documented as to how to use them properly.

So a discussion in 4 parts then:

1. What attributes constitute a condition we call a "Police State"? (a list of which you already provided)

2. Does America (or some part of it) have those attributes?

3. Assuming the above is "Yes", what can we do to make it not have those attributes? (e.g. call currently elected representatives, elect representatives based on their historical opposition to those attributes, avoid certain companies or products, etc...)

4. How do we track if these actions are being performed and how effective they are?

Actually, we probably don't need to do categorize negative attributes so much. We can probably just focus on reversing the attributes we think are making our country worse.

Also, enacting political change is a skill as old as civilization I'm sure. There is probably lots of material around on how to do it effectively. We can start by reading and trying some of that stuff in place of arguing in circles about what is and isn't a police state.

(edit: formatting)

If he doesn't like the conversation, let's encourage him to stay and provide evidence for his point so that HN doesn't become an echo chamber. I find this model very helpful: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I suspect that you are right about this being innocuous. What I think makes this a "hot" story is not the intentionality, but that it reminds us how divorced campaign promises are from the actions a president takes in office.

gets on soap-box

Maybe the candidates aren't even lying outright. Maybe it's like when I'm estimating programming effort: I can really really believe in the estimate I give, but unless I look at how long similar projects took me or others in the past, the planning fallacy[1] gets me every. single. time. A similar thing for candidates would probably be to look at how much actual change previous presidents were able to bring about and assume that those presidents were just as smart and trying just as hard.

Of course even with a realistic estimate, there is another problem I constantly run into, and I imagine candidates do as well: Once you have a realistic estimate of what you can do, how do you compete with someone who over-promises?

One thing I found with programming is that clients who were previously burned by over-promising are somewhat inoculated against it. This doesn't seem to be the case for elections though. Does anybody have any other ideas?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy

From the point of view of the sender, I find read receipts psychologically calming, oddly enough. I noticed I used to attach a lot more emotion to some facebook messages and compulsively check facebook before read receipts. With read receipts, my mind seems to be satisfied with knowing my message was read and now it's up to the other person to answer when they get a chance, or not; emotionally, I seem to be fine with either outcome.

I realize that most other people have a different feeling about it so I thought I'd mention it as an interesting data point.

That's true, it's a problem when you depend on having the repository at a specific location or depend on something that's not in the repo, like wiki or issue tracking, as mentioned in the other comments.

I just wanted to express my appreciation that github being down is not as big an issue for most people as it would be if github was cvshub or svnhub. :-)

Good thing about decentralized version control systems is that they're decentralized.

I hope github can deal with today's issue without too much trouble, but it's not a major inconvenience to me and the rest of my company's devs. We can just push and pull changes to some convenient in-house server via ssh to sync up our work.

I don't want to sound apologetic for the actions of NSA as a whole, and those who surely pressured them into those actions, and those that were aware of them but did not object, but I did take heart in the first sentence, "The Fourth of July reminds us as Americans of the freedoms and rights all citizens of our country are guaranteed by our Constitution."

I hope this is a sign that at least some people in the NSA recognize that what happened was an egregious breach of the spirit of our constitution, and the principle of government by public consent. It would be nice if it meant that some of NSA's members welcome, for their organization, public accountability, clear limits on power afforded to them, and recourse for pressure from other parts of the government to violate these things.

Regardless of whether this is just wistful thinking or not, we should continue to bring awareness to this issue, and take action.

I hope the form of this action will be public awareness, peaceful protests, crowd-funding representatives, and holding those elected representatives legally accountable for their campaign promises (because I do not see how we can have a representative democracy if the words of the representatives before they are elected are so divorced from their actions after).

I hope the result will be legal safeguards and public oversight to make sure that no federal agency can violate the constitution, and act against public consent, no mater how secret their mission.

(edited to include the bit about public awareness)

I use it (and like it) to monitor a middleware we wrote. The developer, Kyle Kingsbury, has a pretty good talk about it here: http://vimeo.com/45807716

Yeah, look at the JavaScript LOC! Who wrote the rosetta code for those, Brendan Eich?!

This hints at another way to optimize for this metric; make the language as expressive as possible. Less characters should translate into less typos. Paul Graham strikes again! (http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html)

As to your point about redundancy, I think the researchers are in agreement with you on that one if you consider unit tests to be a sort of redundancy, expressing the same concept in two different ways. They bring this up repeatedly in their report.

Obligatory Perl jab: It surprised me that any of the Perl solutions used more than one line. :-P

Using my complete lack of statistical knowledge, I multiplied the wrong output rate % by the total lines of code in the examples from original paper here http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/conf/2012-PLATEAU-Fuzzer/pub/ht... to get a very bad approximation of fat fingering adjusted for program length. You'd expect more typos in a longer program; the original experiment always introduced 1 typo per run regardless of program length.

You guys enjoy while I prepare for the lynch mob of Statisticians :-)

    Lang    Err %   LOC    LOC adjusted Err %
    Ruby    0.17    159   27.03
    Python  0.15    161   24.15
    Perl    0.22    156   34.32
    PHP     0.36    224   80.64
    JS      0.18    102   18.36
    Java    0.1     331   33.1
    Haskell 0.15    114   17.1
    C#      0.095   389   36.955
    C++     0.08    461   36.88
    C       0.1     458   45.8

Not exactly. "Simulated Instrument Flight Conditions" usually means that your instructor has you put on a view limiting device [1] so that you can only see your instruments and not outside the aircraft.

One of the reasons it's done this way is to teach you to ignore inter ear cues and trust your instruments. Your inter ear senses acceleration, not absolute motion. Couple that with the centrifugal force during a turn changing your perception of which way "down" is, and your body responses become one of the main reasons you get into trouble.

It's similar to banked turns on car racetracks. When you're in a banked turn, "Down" for you is no longer towards the center of the earth, it's at an angle, perpendicular to the speedway. You also loose the sensation of turning once you're in that banked turn long enough (specifically once the fluid in your ear settles down and stops moving). If you were driving with a blindfold, you wouldn't be able to feel how steep your turn was.

[1] http://sportys.com/pilotshop/category/864 "View Limiting Devices"

Neither. In US, your plane has to have the 6 basic instruments to be certified as airworthy by FAA. The reasons pilots die in non-visual flight conditions are twofold.

As the original article pointed out, the first reason is that the sensations are so compelling that doing what the instruments tell you will feel VERY unnatural and you will keep thinking that your instruments are broken or stuck (hence you HAVE to trust your instruments). And even if you remember not to trust your instincts, you will still often unconsciously apply slight pressure to the controls.

The second reason is that for every change in the plane's orientation and speed, several instruments will start moving at once. Without training it is very hard to integrate what the 6 instruments are telling you into a complete mental picture of what's going on with your airplane.

Here is the fatal scenario: http://www.aerosafe.net/page6.html

As a VFR pilot, you've received basic instrument training. Remember that training, trust your instruments, and you'll make it though.

Try this book: "59 seconds" - http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/59-seconds-think-a-littl... It presents practical advice based on research papers in the field.

A good book on brain hacks like the aforementioned spaced repetition is "Mind Performance Hacks": http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Performance-Hacks-Tools-Overclock...

And another good read is "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning": http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learni...

You can also try this site: http://lesswrong.com This is a good section to start from: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Science_of_Winning_at_Lif... Be warned, though. The writing on this site is heavily influenced by AI research so it tends to be somewhat... Vulcan, which can can be good or bad depending on your preferences.