whitegrape

Have an immutable filesystem, where "deletes" are recoverable by going back in time. At least until you do a scheduled "actual delete" that will reclaim disk space.

Another option (though last time I tried it, it didn't work..) is something like libtrash: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/libtrash/ Deletes become moves and you can really delete when you like.

Practically speaking, if you're quick an 'rm' isn't totally destructive even without backups. There's a good chance your data is still there on the disk, it's just not associated with anything so it could be overridden at any point. Best to mount the disk read only and crawl through the raw bits to find your lost data (I recovered a week's worth of code this way several years ago).

For me it was college.

This explains it pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_burnout

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party These people were not evil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Naked probably is evil but at least he's trying to repent.

If we're going to try to come up with a system, mine is simply (borrowed[1]): I like beef and broccoli, mind your business. I readily admit this doesn't cover every corner case, but I don't think there can be a satisfactory system that does. Many things have to be determined by context and taste, and usually aren't even worth thinking about if you're not in a position of power and responsibility over the lives of others.

[1] http://genius.com/Immortal-technique-beef-and-broccoli-lyric...

What's so bad about prefacing the meeting with "Sorry guys I'm expecting a call at some point today so if my phone goes off I'll need to leave to answer it"? Some people must surely be expecting calls from someone of an unknown number every day individually, but I would be surprised if it was a large number of people.

30-something.

It's The Guardian, what do you expect? Lots of HN users like reading trash it seems.

Education on the individual level just doesn't work. People are too dumb. (I had the pleasure of rereading this recently: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-real...) Those that aren't too dumb lack personal responsibility, which is a separate problem I fully agree is pretty big, so more education might fix that, but that's sort of something you can't learn from a book, and arguably the game of chicken at teaching responsibility by making it illegal to discharge student loans in bankruptcy has just made things worse.

The solutions I think have the best shot are those that involve authoritarian decrees one way or another (that is, going full free-market or going full nationalized colleges), but that requires a government with an actual interest in governing.

OT/pro-tip: the trick to reply when the reply button is gone is to click the timestamp and reply on the item's page instead.

Or if students had the option to discharge their debt in bankruptcy at all, how many would do it. I suspect enough that we'd have something resembling the last debt crisis on our hands, but depending on how that gets handled it might encourage lenders to be a bit more careful with who they lend to and how much they're willing to lend in the first place which may then encourage schools to lower costs.

I went to college for a number of reasons despite already being skeptical of the "party line" everyone was telling me about how important it was to go to college, but ultimately I was able to swallow the estimated $100k price tag at the place I wanted to go the most (which was small, private, and out of state) because I made the calculations that let me be confident that if I made it to the end it shouldn't be too difficult to get even an entry level job in some field of tech I already had experience in (my degree was computer engineering) at $60k/yr which wouldn't be too bad for paying off that debt. Things more or less worked out, I too don't use any of my degree knowledge on the job and the thing that gets me the most recruiter spam is my broad experience working for peanuts on/off at a local startup while I was still in school. Certainly the degree would have been cheaper by going to the state university, or a community college first, but even those figures are starting to rise and when you can't get any job $30k of interest-accumulating debt probably feels about as back-breaking as $100k. I don't know if I would go back and take the safer, cheaper path. I think I did alright given my information at the time, so I don't put all the blame on the system -- too many college students just don't do the steps of calculating the full program cost (including any loans for housing), the desirability of employees with this particular degree over a degree in general, and then figuring out a plan to actually pay back what they borrow for the degree.

It's a lot easier for people to see this argument with basic income than with minimum wage, but the signaling on property owners ends up being the same whether you know for certain all your tenants now have an extra $x in funds or just some of them might now be getting a raise to the new minimum wage. From the property manager perspective, suddenly they're getting more demand on units than they were previously, so they balance that by increasing rents. An increased minimum wage can play a part in that rise in demand even if no single person can afford an apartment on their own at minimum wage. For instance perhaps there's a group of 4 people cramped in one apartment, but now with all of them getting more money, they can afford to split off into two groups of 2. Until the landlord raises rents, anyway, because they aren't enough units for everyone to do that and building new units takes time.

King County property taxes have been steadily going up, that's a bigger factor than minimum wage. Even in the sprawl around Seattle, prices have gone up, but I hope they'll see a regression since the commuting situation is if anything worse than it was even just a few years ago especially on the Eastside with the 405 toll lanes.

Google's done a lot of crappy and questionable stuff over the years, but intentionally bricking devices is unquestionably evil.

If it actually happened, that's both pretty hilarious and sad for all parties involved. The unintentional fallout has been much more amusing to witness than the actual gimmick of putting a Minion in everyone's email.

I can't get on board the tear train of "victimized by technology, technology maker should make amends!" when the impact of victimization is so small, even the "lost my job because technology maker and especially my boss are retarded" is pretty low-impact. I generally have the attitude of "Sucks, but get on with life" to a lot of things, though.

Even being inherently relative, you still need to determine the underlying values with some metric (like implicit type conversions, or max deadlift). If you tell me someone's max deadlift is twice their bodyweight, that tells me they're strong, even if it doesn't tell me their relative strength compared to say Sigmarsson. If someone says "Language X generally forces you to be explicit with your type conversions" that tells me it's strongly typed. Is it more strongly typed than language Y? That depends on explicitness exceptions -- e.g. Java does implicit autoboxing and toString()ing when you're doing string concatenation, Go effectively type aliases primitives so that e.g. net.IP can implicitly convert to []byte, Python complains when you don't explicitly call str() on things but converts numbers pretty freely (like auto-converting to a bignum, whereas other languages might throw an exception or automatically and silently wrap-around to a much smaller number than expected).

Seems odd to lump Python (which is pretty strongly typed) with Ruby and JavaScript (JS especially not being strong). Edit: Actually this whole thread makes it seem like we all have our own different definitions on what makes something "strongly typed" (or just confusion with strong and static). For myself, a language's type system's relative strength is all about how it handles (or doesn't handle) implicit type conversions.

It should be implied by generics. But it looks like Swift has some special sugar for it, neat.

The simple theory I use for explaining Perl preference is that it correlates to your preference and tolerance of postmodernism in general. http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html is a good elaboration on the postmodernism of Perl, I think.

Yes, but that doesn't mean you can't benchmark them anyway. And I think you could probably find some meaningful comparison. Certainly it would be more useful than the Druid whitepaper's benchmarks against MySQL. (I used to work on a DB project, we too had a benchmark against MySQL even though our DB was OLAP-focused.)

Has anyone done a meaningful private benchmark comparison with http://www.scylladb.com/ ? I didn't find one online.

Wow 1997, but thanks for the link, it was a fun read. It'd be fun to hear from people in the industry what their experience has been on larger multi-people projects -- e.g. how long would it take to create an ASIC like http://www.jandecaluwe.com/hdldesign/digmac.html ?

China doesn't need anyone in the US to give it excuses, it can stand on its own logic.

It would be surprising. Snowden's confirmations pissed off a lot of people in tech and either effected or hastened plans to build more secure systems in tech companies. (See for instance https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131106/00235225143/pisse...)

I thought of disputing the "scientists and astronomers" bit in the parent (what do botanists generally know of orbital dynamics that make them any more qualified to comment than anyone else who took a few physics courses in high school / college?), it should really be restricted to domain-relevant experts which would then make it easier to take the claim that they're all more or less equally qualified. You're right there are lots of incentives in play that don't always make finding the truth the best course of action for either an expert or a so-called expert. As a layman on the subject I don't have much to contribute on the topic and would rather study other things. Though when I see the occasional chart (as the paper you linked above has) and notice that, while not "wildly incorrect", predictions have generally been "incorrect" over the last 15 years, or when I notice a shift or new emphasis in narrative, I end up feeling justified in my suspicions on the epistemic virtues (let alone the actual claims argued for being true or false) of the relevant experts. It's like, seeing all the issues with replication and so on in Psychology, how can you not help but feel like the entire field would be better off starting from scratch with rigorous methods?

For something as (relatively) easy to predict as asteroid trajectories, I would be very curious why the 1% disagree, or whether it really is 99% given that exact phrasing with no qualifications. It invites scrutiny, but also invites not being certain either way (though I would err on the side of that large a majority even if I'm not certain). I posted this quote by Bertrand Russell almost a month ago, it's worth a repost: "(1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment."

At least it's better than Verilog. But there's Python to the rescue! http://www.myhdl.org/

Still a lot of tooling left but my FPGA tinkering became much more enjoyable when I stumbled across MyHDL.

I don't know what a true polished, seamless desktop experience on any OS would look like. Windows 10 may be better (I'm still on 7 for work/gaming) but I still notice it BSODs and is apparently heavily resistant towards custom configurations like improving your privacy and control over the machine you own. I don't understand the Mac's UI and popularity among power users or casual users so I can't comment on it much. In the end I agree with Linus, the real issue is user inertia, but I also think it's not really an issue. Linux won everywhere but the Desktop, and it's not like that fact stops me from having the best desktop experience I can get using Linux.

Did you ever pay to support the various commercial endeavors for a Desktop Linux that Dell et al. have tried? I haven't, for one simple reason, though a second builds on it: their hardware is always subpar (laptop or desktop) -- which I can't even blame them for if they're trying to get sales from the much larger market of non-power users, but then the price isn't that competitive either. Second I'm going to reinstall the distro to one I prefer anyways, or even if the same distro at least one that I'm sure is free of any bundled crapware that is supposed to make the experience more polished and seamless, so I'm going to do it on better hardware. The only time hardware has been an issue for me was, I don't know, 15 years ago with a laptop's built-in wifi? Linux runs on a lot of things, some of those things include laptops and desktops.

More like anything with a guided search algorithm will be said to be like AlphaGo. In general I think the field may be warming up to the idea that "whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought."[1] MCTS does exceptionally well at Go all by itself. When coupled with something (in this case trained neural nets) that can give it better-than-random guidance in exploring the state space, it's no surprise it does even better.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/vq/the_weighted_majority_algorithm/

It'd be nice to remember original meanings. The "eu" of eugenics means "good" (and how this good is accomplished "positively" or "negatively" doesn't matter), humans have been practicing it for ages though on a much less sophisticated scale (and not as much on our own selves) than things like CRISPR allows for. The thing we should be worried about is dysgenics, "dys" meaning "bad".