dribnet

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.

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.

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

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...

That one dates from 4/2013.

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

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

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.

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

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)

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/

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.

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...

"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-...

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

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-...

"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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm glad you are familiar with industrial farming as many people are not aware of how food gets to our supermarkets. However, even in the kindest of farm environments (which, incidentally I have visited first hand) I personally find milk production unethical. Force impregnating a cow and separating - and getting rid of - the calf at birth are not "practices" famers can opt out of, they are the biological and financial reality of producing milk.

I don't know if you can empathize with an animals plight at the discomfort of repeated pregnancies, births, and forced separations from their offspring - or the even grimmer likely outcome of the calf itself, but for me this is not justified by own fleeting enjoyment of a slice of cheese that is completely not necessary for my physical well being.

Is there anything wrong with force feeding a cow corn which makes them sick, injecting them with antibiotics so that doesn't kill them, impregnating them so that they produce milk, separating them from their calf at birth (who most likely will be used for veal) causing them distress, and making them livid a horrid life wading in cow shit their whole life until their hoofs are painfully literally rotting?

Yes, what is happening to the civets is appalling. But it's really no worse than what is standard CAFO treatment. It's not entirely your fault that you don't know this because the food industry tries very hard to keep this from you, including pushing for laws that make exposing these facts acts of terrorism.

> there's no way to grab the line number of a caller in JS

But this is easily fixed by converting the function call to a macro, right?

Oh wait - this isn't a ClojureScript library... so nevermind.

HN circa 1813: s/animals/slaves/g

This is not meant to defend cruel people, I just want to raise a few points about slave owners.

While I have only been to small plantations, I have definitely seen what some people would consider slave cruelty. But I think it's important to understand the mentality of people that work with these slaves.

Slaves on plantations are seen as property, not an employee in any way. Most owners and workers of slaves distance themselves from the slaves to keep themselves mentally healthy. When distance yourself from a a slave, you won't be treating it as nicely as you would your hired hand.

Plantation owners see slaves as money, so they won't do anything that could jeopardize being paid (won't damage the product).

When people are disconnected with the slaves they are working with, it is easier for some people not to be so nice to those slaves. This isn't to say that all people working with slaves will be abusive towards them, but it creates an opening for those people that aren't as nice to take their anger out on the slaves.

Or Ballblazer?

A great read by Hofstadter on Analogy as the Core of Cognition is here: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...

I'm a big fan of Hofstadter and his emphasis on analogy. George Lakoff has and others from cognative semantics provide strongly supporting views from linguistics.

And in Machine Learning, Deep Learning is now providing new support for these views on analogy. This isn't immediately obvious until realizing that analogy is not necessarily an active process more likely a passive result of how thoughts and memories are encoded and stored. I'm curious as to whether Hofstadter will address this in this book - I would imagine so as he was long ago excited by earlier similar ML approaches (Sparse Distributed Memory).

> Whoever wrote this script should be fired.

Not to mention the potential GPL violation for cut-n-pasting brainjar code.

http://www.brainjar.com/terms.asp

> I often have this feeling when I read Mike's code, particularly D3.

Agreed - there is tons to learn in the D3 src, but I don't feel that it is written in a way friendly to casual inspection. But D3 more than makes up for this with such clear and thorough documentation that this is rarely an issue.

Random example: wondering what a d3 selection.attr returns? Reading the docs [1] is a much quicker read than scanning the source [2] and working backwards from this nested return one-liner:

    return value == null
        ? (name.local ? attrNullNS : attrNull) : (typeof value === "function"
        ? (name.local ? attrFunctionNS : attrFunction)
        : (name.local ? attrConstantNS : attrConstant));

[1] https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Selections#wiki-attr

[2] https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/v3.1.4/src/selection/att...

> The devil's in the details of interoperability with other libraries, as other folks note in this thread.

Indeed. I should have also mentioned that editing angular.js to work is fairly straightforward (~5-10 LOC), and this is probably fairly typical. So if you are willing to patch this isn't necessarily a blocker, and done right could probably be submitted as a reasonable merge request.