ims

OCaml is used to some extent. Most notable industry user of an ML (in the form of OCaml) is probably Jane Street Capital.

F# is an ML descendent.

That's weird:

    $ lsb_release -a
    No LSB modules are available.
    Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
    Description:	Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
    Release:	14.04
    Codename:	trusty
    $ ls -l /bin/sh
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Feb 19  2014 /bin/sh -> dash

> I've been told for example that in the US it would be completely impossible for a president to be elected if he didn't had a solid marriage and family.

That may be true now, but there have indeed been unmarried Presidents. Just saying.

On a related note, Poul-Henning Kamp's 1999 "bikeshed" e-mail to the FreeBSD list (with his take on Parkinson's Law) is still a good read: http://bikeshed.com/

After Google Reader shut down, I briefly switched to feedly but found the UI basically unusable.

Newsblur is a great alternative. The web client and Android clients are both nice to use -- no experience with iOS but I'm sure it's comparable -- and are open source, written and maintained by Samuel Clay (conesus on HN).

I pay for the service but there's a free tier as well.

> the incompetency of many in government finally reaching and affecting the American public

There may be more, less, or the same amount of incompetence in government employees as there is in every other human endeavor. I can't speculate.

But let's be clear: the shutdown has nothing to do with that. It is a political move orchestrated by a relatively small number of power brokers in the Congress. No more, no less.

> You'd think it would be all over the media.

Don't get me wrong -- I care about this issue, but I'm curious why would you expect people outside the tech industry to care much?

> If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death

That's doubtful. http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/stevens.asp

Original HN thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319667

He doesn't do consulting any more: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/07/17/kalzumeus-podcast-5-quit...

There's a difference between chemicals and genetically modified foods.

We know that human health can be damaged by all sorts of different chemicals. That being established, the task at hand is identifying which are harmful (or usually in what quantities do they become harmful).

Meanwhile there is no persuasive evidence that any foods become harmful simple because they have been genetically modified. Completely different.

> if they weren't knowingly poisoning us, why exactly would corporations be so very afraid of properly labeling foods?

Perhaps precisely because of this hysteria surrounding GMO?

So?

I've been to this conference center. It's in a very decent, touristy part of town with plenty of hotels, cafes, and restaurants. In fact there are two hotels right across the street, one of which has a Starbucks in the lobby.

The real issue here was conference organizers being officious and failing to use common sense, which the OP had a legitimate reason to be annoyed about given he was a speaker and apparently went to some trouble and expense. No need to be over the top, it was bad enough without the hyperbole.

I think the consensus on why this happens boils down to regression to the mean, selective experimentation (exciting things over boring things like attempting to duplicate results), and selective publishing (e.g. positive results are much more interesting to journals than hypotheses being rejected).

Did I miss any reasons?

The average is misleading here. Where do you think those 1 in 20 kids mostly live?

Goodyear and Hood blimps occasionally lurk over Boston.

> Coast Guard does search and rescue work nearly every day

Over 100 cases every day.

Re: Bradley Manning -- skim through the UCMJ and the Manual for Courts Martial some time. You may be surprised what you find.

Wish there was a cool reason to tell you, but it was just because somebody happened to be extolling the virtues of i3 in a similar HN discussion a few months back, so I gave it a whirl. I'm sure Awesome and Xmonad are great too, but all my needs are met so haven't really had a reason to shop around.

Looking back on all the hours I used to spend tweaking and fiddling with configs for things that I no longer use has made me sort of a setup minimalist -- anything that's not broken for me usually stays pretty close to stock these days.

Just came here to say: i3 is really nice. It's too bad he didn't mention it, it's one of the more lightweight WMs in his bar chart.

If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. Was always intrigued by tiling WMs but resisted for far too long because of a vague resistance to learning yet another set of keyboard shortcuts. Seriously though, it's not bad at all.

http://i3wm.org/

In no way did I imply that. I am responding to the central "story" of this article, which is about denied FOIA requests. My point was that FOIA is expressly not the right tool to attempt to get the USG to give you their signals intelligence due to a specific exemption (which is logical, or at least logically consistent) for classified information.

Perhaps a lawsuit would be able to accomplish what you suggest. I have no idea.

The history of human civilization in general has been one of force and savagery, gradually (and not monotonically) becoming more civilized.

It's an interesting idea that a country (that is, the people living in a certain country) should have some kind of "original sin" for things that happened before they were born. Ask a German how they feel about that idea. Even so, there is nothing special about the United States in the respects that you mentioned. Learning about history is the antidote to that belief.

One of the basic exceptions to FOIA is classified material. If that weren't the case, there would be no point in having classified material.

To my knowledge, every government in the world has some sort of state secrets program. If you are against this, then that is at least consistent. But it makes no sense to say that the NSA should be releasing classified information under FOIA.

That could be it. Or the United States could be applying the typical measures of pressure in the diplomatic toolbox, consisting largely of economic incentives, concessions that meet other countries' policy goals, and appeals to mutual interest. You know, the standard tools of statecraft that have barely changed since the Congress of Vienna.

You decide which seems more plausible.

> Some are speculating

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

Google Glass, it looks like.

Uh, here you go: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ56/pdf/PLAW-107publ...

Gray Hat Python is not bad: http://www.amazon.com/Gray-Hat-Python-Programming-Engineers/...

> Should they be keeping track of all newly-passed (and rescinded) laws, as well?

Largely, no, because it would be a spectacular waste of their time. Why? Because the regulations are usually microscopically focused on class of actors that (a) know they exist, and (b) have a vested interest in staying current.

Moxie Marlinspike's example of the undersized lobster rule is especially telling in how it goes against the very point he was attempting to make. On the enforcement side, this particular regulation likely affects fewer than 10,000 people in the entire country -- that is, people fishing commercially for lobsters. The public interest it serves is that fisheries are subject to the tragedy of the commons[1], and must be regulated to preserve these public goods. It's basically the equivalent of that little tag on your mattress that says "ILLEGAL TO RESELL" -- people joke about getting arrested for this. No, it's targeted at the vanishingly small number of people that sell mattresses commercially.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

EDIT: Also, just a note -- laws are passed by Congress. Regulations are promulgated by agencies that have been delegated some task or authority from Congress ("we don't have time to draft/debate/vote on every little piece of trivia regarding airplane part advisories or what plants are on the invasive species list or what next year's technical specifications for automobile safety are -- FAA, USDA, NTSB, you guys have the experts and scientists, so here's your authority, now go and figure out the details and make it happen")

> Federal laws are so numerous and complicated that even the federal government cannot NUMBER them. they literally can't even count them all.

This is just a meaningless thing to say. The reason for the difficulty in answering is because the question ("how many laws are there") is flawed because it implies a static number. Some rules are temporary (e.g.: a safety zone around a small area for X hours while underwater explosives are used for dredging from June Y-Z). They receive temporary CFR citations that start with T and they expire when they are no longer in effect.

The number changes, it's not "uncountable" -- this meme needs to die.

Oh by the way, these are also by and large submitted to the Federal Register for people to have a chance to read and submit comments and request public meetings.