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I don't mean to distract with the examples of corn subsidies and malaria. I don't think it's terribly difficult to find a plethora of examples in which a state's concern for rather trivial internal affairs dwarfs its concern with globally momentous affairs that happen not to affect its citizens. The fact that the spread of malaria could be, but has not been, mitigated by relatively cheap counter-measures just goes to show.

I am not claiming that immigration is an unalloyed good, nor that there are no caveats to consider. I am claiming that freedom of travel is a human right, and that this freedom is largely compossible with the flourishing of the new states into which immigrants move. I just cannot locate any moral claim I have against people who want to move to the part of the world circumscribed by US borders, nor any moral obligation they would have to recognize one. Where is the argument? I can certainly understand that citizens in certain industries would prefer that immigrants with similar skill-sets not immigrate, but protection from competition is not a human right.

Thanks for your reply, if you can even read this.

While it's unclear to me whether it's ever off-topic to point out problematic slurs (would you think similarly if the OP had written "they got rid of a faggot..."?), I guess this exchange signals a mutual agreement between myself and the modal HN user about whether we want to interact.

The analogy holds precisely for the reason that San Jose does not consider itself beleaguered by the influx of immigrants who want to live there. The fact that you could entertain thought experiments in which the net consequences of immigration are negative (e.g., a giant flashmob of 50 million people immigrates simultaneously) does not suffice to show that San Jose's hospitals and roads are overwhelmed in the actual world.

In the actual world, San Jose is not in fact appealing to the federal government for assistance; it is reaping the benefits that attend a growing metropolitan population and tax base. On average, San Joseans are better off when more people become San Joseans, for all the same reasons that New York is a more desirable place to live (as measured by the demand for housing) than Wichita.

I've never claimed that there are no states who do not take their citizens' interests into account. I claimed that states often take little or no consideration of the interests of non-citizens. In absolute terms, for example, malaria is a much more pressing human affair than corn subsidies. But corn subsidies primarily affect people within the US whereas malaria primarily affects people outside the US, so corn subsidies dominate malaria in contest for the attention of the US government.

The fact that the OP is confusing a positive claim: "states often exhibit little or no regard for the people outside their boundaries" with a normative claim "states _ought_ to act that way" is plainly evident.

That counties and countries are two different things is also obvious, but you need to offer reasons to believe that they are morally distinguishable with respect to economic growth and immigration.

Where's the sexism in my comment? I'm not assuming that straight women are doing all the cock-sucking, nor am I neglecting the existence of gay men, lesbians, bisexual folks of all stripes, asexual people or other people who just plain don't suck cock. I'm just assuming, to a first approximation, that their contributions toward aggregate cock-sucking cancel out. If roughly half of the world has penises, then some half, and not necessarily the _other_ half, of the world is sucking them.

I'm not trying to be snide, I just suspect you're assuming a reading of my comment that I don't endorse. Plenty of people besides straight women suck cock, and the world is better for it.

I'm merely pointing out that the term "cocksucker", when used as a term of derogation, is actually pretty unsavory.

Half of the world sucks cock. What's your problem with it?

I fear you are confusing positive with normative claims, even if your highly doubtful positive claim is true. How do you make the citizens of a given state better off on average by preventing them from engaging in mutually voluntary associations with whomever they want?

When you read that San Jose is one of the fastest growing cities in the US, do you conclude that San Jose will soon be a desirable place to live and do business, or that undeserving foreigners from other states are "taking San Joseans' jobs?"

> [P]eople born in this country have more rights to the money being created here than foreigners. Asian countries feel the same way about foreigners. Asian countries are, typically, a lot less open to foreign worker immigrants than is the U.S.

I would like to know why being born in a given country should entitle you to more or less opportunity than anyone else who wants to do business in that country.

I would settle for an explanation of how bad immigration policies can be justified by pointing to states with worse ones.

> unfamiliar sounds

Kiswahili has implosive stops, which are pretty weird for English speakers, but it's certainly possible to make yourself understood if you treat implosive consonants like their closest English counterparts.

As a Bantu language, Kiswahili also has a very elegant (and reasonably regular) noun class system that makes grammatical agreement easier, IMHO, than in Latin or Greek. On the whole, I'd agree that it's among the best bets for an English speaker interested in learning a non-Indo-European language.

Even so, the rubric only shows that Michigan is willing to overlook academic shortcomings in their efforts to recruit athletic talent. Academic and athletic talent still might be correlated in the general population, while sampling bias from the university admissions process over-represents dumb jocks and under-represents dumb non-jocks.

For example, suppose the academic ability of jocks is normally distributed about 105 with a std dev of 15, whereas non-jocks are normally distributed about 100 with the same std dev. If the cutoff for admission is 110, but athletic talent gives you a 20 point bonus, then you're your comparing mean aptitude in a sample of non-jocks, given that every observation is >= 110, to the mean aptitude in a sample of jocks, given that every observation is >= 90. Under those conditions, you'll find a 10 point difference in favor of your sample of non-jocks, even though the population mean for jocks is higher.

I think you alluded to this point in an earlier reply, but it's worth spelling out.

Could you say a little bit to justify your use of the term eigenvector in that sentence?

I care about scheme.

This fun article by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan shows that it's practically impossible to create a coin that will demonstrate a bias when flipped, unless the coin is allowed to bounce: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/dice...

Yes, says Daniel Davies: (http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/10/in-praise-of-budweiser-c...)

Budweiser has rice in it. So what? So do Asahi and Kirin of Japan, Bintang of Indonesia and Efes of Turkey, and nobody has such a hate on about them. Lots of the people who claim to hate Budweiser will out of the same mouth discourse long and pretentious about the merits of sake. Rice is a perfectly sensible bulk grain to make beer out of if you want a light lager, particularly in countries like America which grow a protein-rich strain of barley. Plenty of real ale types will maintain that Anheuser-Busch uses rice in its brewing in order to save money, which shows a worrying lack of curiosity, as anyone making this argument can’t possibly have looked at the price of rice and the price of barley. Adolphus Busch in 1876 was a German master brewer of exactly the sort that beer nuts go gooey over, he was trying to make a high quality beer (as proved by Budweiser’s use of expensive Saaz hops), and he decided that the best way to brew a lager was to use rice.

> You make it sound like Anwar al-Awlaki had a beer with al Qaeda so we decided to whack him.

Well, that's practically all that we know-- he was killed for propagandizing on behalf of some terrible ideas. But it isn't illegal to propagandize on behalf of terrible ideas, whereas it is illegal to execute US citizens because you find them loathsome and geo-strategically inconvenient.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn publicly what Anwar al-Awlaki actually did, and whether his actions were criminal? As far as I can tell, it's unclear whether anything al-Awlaki did would actually satisfy the "imminent lawless action" test in a civilian criminal court. I suspect the senior officials responsible for his assassination understand this too, which is why they would prefer to dispense with the niceties of extradition and trial.

So here's where we find ourselves: in a world in which the US government openly assassinates US citizens who have not been convicted of any crime, and no one bats an eyelash.

And then, if your assistant gets anywhere with the date, file a lawsuit to prevent them from ever mentioning it in public.

You're there in the lab to see them make these mistakes, but you can't tell them to man nano?

Perhaps a better example here is the work of the empirical psychologists Fechner, Weber, Helmholtz, Wundt &c., respectively influenced by and reacting to Mach and Kant.

  converse

Hey Tito, congrats on shipping! This is Patrick from Baltimore-- we talked for a bit at iGEM and the FBI DIY-BIO thing last year.

In the dry lab, I'm really more of a regular PCR consumer than a regular PCR user, but yeah, my attitude towards PCR is more or less my attitude towards snakes: try to keep a respectful distance :-)

  there are free web tools that can help you design unique primers.

I fully acknowledge that there are domains where C is the best/only tool for the job. I was specifically taking issue with the claim that C is lucid, and neither scary nor evil.

Well, QED.

I don't intend to argue so much as to offer a data point: I suspect that most folks on this site learned C or something C-like early on, and have internalized its modus operandi. I have been learning C recently from a background of functional programming, and I find it scary and evil.

FWIW, I enjoy programming very much, and have built some non-trivial stuff in several languages. Still, I found C extremely taxing. Not in the sense that I felt it was beyond me, but in that I was fighting or recoiling from the language at practically every turn. In what follows, I am acutely aware that I am nowhere near fully fluent in C yet, and am writing only to offer the first impressions of a student. Nevertheless, in that time I have been able to draw on the advice of several "experienced colleagues", as K&R urge. In that sense, if I misstate the facts, I will be repeating the misconceptions of people who have objectively spent an awful lot of time writing C. I would be glad to be corrected on any point, but I'd also find that kind of symptomatic of the issues I have with C.

Firstly, C is incredibly stateful. I would be glad to learn that I am just Doing It Wrong, but there seem to be no obvious way around stateful manipulations as a way of life. Take, for instance, the fact that arrays are essentially second-class citizens and must be stuffed into functions as (pointers to) extra parameters in order to capture the "function's" "output". I am breaking out the scare quotes here since it is an abuse of vocabulary to refer to a procedure that communicates with the world by modifying its inputs as a function. If you have not cut your teeth on it, it seems almost obscurantist. If I want to multiply A by x and store the result in b, I want to write

b = matrixProduct(A,x);

not

matrixProduct(b, A, x);

as I must in C. I go back and forth over whether this is a deliberate and worthwhile performance tradeoff or just myopic design[1], but I don't want to have to settle for this in code I read every day.

There is also a kind of bureaucratic spirit in much C code, resulting from the fact that one must attend so closely to the how of computation rather than the what. In some contexts, like when you're doing distributed simulations that may run for days and performance is at an absolute premium, this emphasis may be appropriate. In most contexts, however, one finds oneself implementing and reimplementing standard operations by hand. Why should it take four lines to sum an array?

One of the most alarming symptoms of this style can be witnessed by watching an experienced C programmer read code. Old hands don't read lines, they scan an entire section of a page at a time. I was awed by this ability until I realized that it is possible only because each line of C does so little. I recall someone (probably in an HN comment) describing the "rhythm" of reading C code. That, to me, is not an encouraging sign.

Then there is, of course, the penance of debugging segfaults and space leaks. What happens when you declare 10 pointers and allocate 9 of them? No one knows, because C doesn't know either. It's up to the compiler. Towers of Hanoi, nasal demons, &c. Even with the help of with smart and experienced people, I've never spent so much time diagnosing such trivial, silent runtime errors. Yes, I know it's that way for a reason, but that reason is not legibility or ease of understanding.

At end, C has performance and a relatively (but not exceptionally) compact semantics. The importance of cycle-squeezing is becoming less of a consideration daily, for reasons well-rehearsed on this site and elsewhere. As for C's semantics, I'd much rather spend my time thinking about the transformations I want to map over my data than orchestrating von Neumann machines to carry those transformations out. If your model of computation is something other than register machines, it's not quite cricket to describe the implementation as magic.

-----------------------------

[1]I'd like to qualify that remark in two ways. Firstly, I certainly recognize the brilliance of K&R for working C from the raw conceptual materials of the time. Secondly language designers in 1969 did not have the benefit of the last 40 years' of object lessons in readability. There are many potential languages--points in language space, if you will--that are semantically identical or near-identical but much more readable than the ansi standard. For an example given by Kernighan himself, postfixing the dereference operator would have done miracles for legibility. Ultimately, a lot of more or less arbitrary choices were made early on and now it's too late to correct them.

I'm not sure, really. In Saeed Dehnadi's article "The camel has two humps", it's mentioned that there are three great filters in programming pedagogy:

* assignment/sequence

* recursion

* concurrency.

Most students never master the first, and most of those never master the second, and so on. In that spirit, I would recommend that the OP firmly grasp the first two with both hands before reaching for the third. Of the languages the OP could study that treat concurrency or parallelism as a kind of conceptual primitive (e.g. Scala or Erlang), none are likely to appear as working languages in an HPC milieu. Almost always, the libraries are bolted on as an afterthought to traditionally popular languages for scientific computing.

I think this is a regrettable pattern, but a pattern which will shape the OP's daily work if they wish to begin (and remain in) a program in computational chemistry.

All I meant to suggest is that when the OP begins to learn parallel computing, they want to be thinking about parallel algorithms, not segfaults or pointer purgatory or the finer points of scp or vi. The sooner the former can be mentally sublimed, the better the OP will feel about HPC.

Hi. Most of the advice in the comments already posted is sound, but none of them seemed to address HPC. Working on a cluster invites an entirely different bundle of conceptual and practical hurdles (e.g. parallelism, working remotely, industrial-strength shell scripting &c.) Even though I had been programming since I was a kid, I found my crash-course in HPC to be quite challenging; confronted with a new programming model in a new low-level language, it was the first time that I really appreciated what it must be like not to know how to program at all.

So: code as much as possible. As soon as you can possibly stand it, look into MPI4py and start parallelizing your code. Chances are you won't be working with python in HPC contexts, but learning parallel programming at the same time as C or fortran would be needlessly difficult. I would also try to get time on a cluster as soon as you're in a position to use it respectably. Most universities with HPC facilities have an online application for an account, and some sysadmin might take pity on you :) Otherwise, maybe Amazon has some kind of deal?

In the interim, become _very_ comfortable with bash and general command line fu, and a serious text editor. Good luck!

Thanks.

"Daddy issues" is a sexualized pop-Freudian phrase applied only to women. Lots of men, myself included, had rocky relationships with their fathers that caused some emotional harm and affected their later relationships, but you'll never hear immature or irresponsible men described as suffering from "daddy issues".

Moreover, the original request was a completely reasonable one: "I don't know how to turn this feature off: I've tried this and this, but it didn't work. What should I do?" When you ask a technical question and receive irrelevant, sexualized and emotionally condescending comments in response, I think that's prima facie evidence of sexism.

Computational biology. I had studied math and philosophy as an undergrad (after I finally got my stuff together) and had become interested in mathematical approaches to biological problems.

Hi. I'd like to see if I can offer you some personal insight about the plausibility of extrapolating evidence from the scenarios you describe into broader policy judgments.

Currently I'm in a Ph.D. program in a field I find extremely interesting, and am quite happy with my position relative to my goals and background. A few years ago, however, I was living in a one room apartment above an auto body shop, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with several tenants in various stages of socioeconomic distress (viz. social service dependence, street-level prostitution, drug addiction, &c.). My life was generally unpleasant. I was working as a day labourer in construction and drove my four hour daily commute in perpetual terror of being pulled over while driving on a suspended license (for failing to pay an old ticket that was sent to the wrong address). My "roommates" repeatedly stole my food and occasionally broke into my room to steal loose cash. I had no health insurance. When I bit the bullet and drove myself to the ER after receiving an inguinal hernia on the job (while carrying literal tons of demo debris down three flights of stairs in a Baltimore rowhouse in July), I was stuck with an 800 dollar medical bill that plagues my credit to this day. When my parked car was struck in a drug-related accident (remember I didn't live in the best part of town), the city ran my plates and booted my car, soon after which it was towed and I had to find another job. My life was brimming with problems, the solution to any which required money that I didn't have. Moreover, the concurrence of all of these problems seemed to frustrate action on any one of them: how do I work if I don't have a car? How do I recover and fix my car if I don't have any money? How do I find work if I can't lift heavy objects without aggravating the hernia? How do I treat the hernia without health insurance, which I don't have even if I had a job? I am not relating all of this in order to garner sympathy, but rather to explain the kinds of problems I encountered, and their apparent magnitude relative to my means then.

One aspect of poverty which is probably less salient to those not acquainted with it is that it alters parts of your personality that you previously considered stable. While I had always considered myself a relatively even and temperate guy, friends who saw me then would tell me that I seemed constantly angry and brooding. Things that I could have taken in stride before were usually occasions for despair.

Even my tastes changed. Whereas I had previously considered soda and individually wrapped danishes disgusting, I found I could hardly help myself in 7-11s on my way home from construction sites. I used to enjoy cooking, but could barely manage to throw a can of beans a 25 cent box of mac and artificial cheese when I got home. (I shopped at a discount off-brand grocery store full of security cameras, screaming children and expired fruit.)

There is a famous quote from Orwell's _Road to Wigan Pier_ which I had never understood until that point in my life:

"The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.… When you are unemployed … you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit "tasty." There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."

This is just about one of the most accurate and robust observations you can make about the psychology of poverty.

So that's why I'm no longer terribly impressed about the exhortations of the rich to "knuckle down and work really hard" in order to bootstrap oneself into economic security and material comfort. My situation wasn't nearly as destitute as that of a lot of people in this country alone, and when I came home from work I wanted--very badly--to blow money I didn't have on cheap comforts and postpone thoughts of tomorrow.

Secondly, it's important to acknowledge that even while living with junkies and hauling debris for $10/hr, I was much better off than many in my situation, for reasons that make me much less impressed with riches to rags to riches stories such as you describe. Let me explain.

When I first began applying for construction jobs, I was objectively under-qualified in comparison to almost any other applicant, of which there were many since construction jobs were becoming scarce around 2008. I remember one interview where I flatly failed the ``technical portion" and had over-estimated my competence to boot, demonstrating that I didn't even know what I didn't know. I was nevertheless hired because I "talked educated" (verbatim quote, I swear to god), which I assume meant either that I was white, or didn't come from the working class backgrounds of south Baltimore of the other applicants. About three months after my first day labor gig (which I only found because I had internet access and at-the-time reliable private transportation), I was running a crew under my boss. I was offered this not because I was an objectively knowledgeable and competent carpenter, but because 1) I had learned serviceable Spanish in an enrichment program as a kid, and 2) the college-educated owner felt that I was "more like him" than the Salvadoran guys who actually knew what they were doing.

I was also able to pull in some lucrative (to me) side gigs tutoring math and Latin in-home (again, internet and car), which ultimately allowed me to get out of construction and start teaching rich kids full time. That obviously would not ever have happened if I were a day labourer from west Baltimore, rather than a middle-class kid from the county who happened to be very down on his luck.

The differences that separated me from the people I met during that period were vast. If I had found myself in those circumstances without the advantages of white skin, middle-class education and secret-handshakes, and freedom from further complications like care-giving responsibilities (as you somehow manage to mention and dismiss the significance of), I'm not sure that things would have turned out the same way. Really, I'm not so sure that things were guaranteed to turn out the way they did for me at all.