jongraehl

"literally" :)

and yes, agreed - analogous on so many levels - a publicly admitted places where secret government things happen, which can be invoked to give an aura of reality to conspiracy theories true and false alike.

I think it's fair to say "religion X causes honor killings" if and only if X's teachings encourage them (by explicitly saying there's no spiritual punishment for them, for example). It's also fair to say that "religion X doesn't cause honor killings" if there's no correlation between religion X and honor killings. I agree that correlation on its own is never enough.

So: do the teachings of those with a mantle of religion-X authority, on average, encourage or discourage honor killings? This is not a question we should avoid asking just because we want to be nice.

I don't see any evidence that Sam Harris has got this wrong.

Good point about being nice vs. reaching a permanent accommodation.

The way they're monetizing their role in the release of this widely-followed signal is morally equivalent to insider trading on their own.

That said, serious traders who object to this tax can predict the signal from more-primary sources.

It's hard to tell whether HGP was a waste of money (trying too early to do what would inevitably be cheaper years later) or whether it really got us to today, faster. Certainly many researchers were gainfully employed.

Obviously, we should expect that some portion of the funding actually had lasting value. But some of it was bridge to nowhere economic stimulus, scaling up old tech to cover an entire human genome (which obviously has some potential value as well - getting more people into the field, sooner).

"their crop cross-pollinates with yours, and now they own the seeds of your crop!"

It sounds like you picked up some inaccurate propaganda there. Might want to get that checked out.

Great writing - we really feel along with you ("and that's okay"). It's terrible to care and work with people who don't. Find a new team (in MS or out of it).

Nice design. I hope it's quiet (is the bottom air intake really sufficient?) Will it accommodate any standard parts (PCIe cards?) other than memory/drives?

Is the "one fan" concept patented?

Thanks for bringing that up. I'd have to agree that Glenn Greenwald is an intellectual rotten apple. You don't accuse intelligent atheists of "racist islamophobia" if you're a good actor.

That said, he might just have an irrational us vs. them "liberals vs. racists" complex and be able to speak sensibly on other matters.

Neither of the two sides here (CEO, usgov) can fairly expect the benefit of the doubt. I welcome any expert legal analysis of his alleged crimes, but otherwise can't be bothered except to say there's a good chance his claims of retaliation are true.

Let's keep in mind that congresspeople legally commit insider trading all the time, and surely many of their DC friends and allies do so illegally, but without punishment. Or, let's remember how successful former public servants are at earning a big salary on the basis of their connections+access (at best) or as reward for their corruption (at worst).

The author is full of stupid snark. Clearly Snowden is an exceptional individual; learning that he used to be a janitor, or whatever, shouldn't cause us to throw away all the evidence we have about him and double-take "they promoted a janitor?".

Perhaps the quality of his work matched his obviously high character, regardless of his initial lack of formal credential. This is IT we're talking about - classes are a joke.

why is it a barrier? there's already significant local setup implied in establishing trusted keys.

I was curious about this Iroquois influence on the form of U.S. government, so I read Wikipedia. It turns out to be a pleasing story of recent invention.[1]

Perhaps we can say that the prominence of the Iroquois confederacy (where, although the tribes themselves had hereditary leadership, the way the tribes were confederated was vaguely democratic[2]), was used as a persuasive anchor in favor of the colonists' confederation - Ben Franklin urging: "It would be a very strange thing, if six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union … and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies."

Some excerpts:

  Rakove writes, "The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois" and notes that there are ample European precedents to the democratic institutions of the United States.[57]

  Tooker concluded that the documents cited indicate that groups of Iroquois and white settlers realized the advantages of a confederation, but she thinks there is little evidence to support the idea that 18th century colonists were knowledgeable regarding the Iroquois system of governance.

  Tooker concludes, "...there is virtually no evidence that the framers borrowed from the Iroquois." She thinks the myth resulted from exaggerations and misunderstandings of a claim made by the Iroquois linguist and ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt after his death in 1937.[60]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois_Confederacy#Influence_...

[2] (from wikipedia) No Iroquois treaty was binding unless it was ratified by 75% of the male voters and 75% of the mothers of the nation.[46] In revising Council laws and customs, a consent of two-thirds of the mothers was required.[46] The need for a double supermajority to make major changes made the Confederacy a de facto consensus government.[47]

[57] http://hnn.us/articles/12974.html

[60] Tooker E (1990). "The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League"

Zuck likely saw the Page stmt before he+lawyers finished theirs, so it's not at all necessary to jump from "doesn't seem independently formulated" to "therefore govt handlers probably gave them a PR formula".

Anyway, what difference does the origin of the statement make? The companies are either trying to deceive us, or they aren't. What matters is what's being done to us. We're all powerless here except to let politicians know we're unhappy, will vote against, fund EFF, etc. "Gotcha" parsing of official statements is not an important tool in this fight.

Personally I find ridiculous the notion that proud public figures will feel less ashamed technically not lying than actually bald-faced lying. Either way, you've sacrificed public credibility. So the whole discussion of "is this really a denial?" is uninteresting to me.

"we don't - our contractors do"

"we don't - our interception devices do"

:(

thanks; thought it might be that, but it wasn't updating immediately for me. pref for page-through without reading to bottom = read?

also, i can't figure out how to add a new or existing feed to a folder. the tags i had from google reader are still there.

It's doing a fine job replacing Google Reader for me (I was otherwise going to use Feedly, who require me to learn a different UI).

Are you already using your own backend? It seems so, since it's showing me different articles and not sync read status from Google Reader (which seems to show new content sooner).

What's the meaning of the orange circle empty/filled?

What's your avg hours asleep per day in the past month? 1-4 sustained (let's call it 3.7 avg) over years is like no anecdote I've read and believed (though certainly medically possible).

Have you measured your performance at various levels of sleep? Supposedly feeling "rested" isn't even sufficient to guarantee full performance.

And if your son is able to understand your reasons (which seem compelling), it needn't be traumatic or rebellion-provoking that he's made play well.

This does sound like hyperbole, but Moxie said they start at a disadvantage, and is talking about highschool dropouts eligible for an interview, not highschool dropouts in general.

pretty nifty. thinks "humble" is a negative word:

http://ireadless.com/PUMA-Men-s-V5-11-I-FG-Soccer-Cleat/?act...

If Twitter is a menace to your society, then it's time to start looking for a new society.

GirlInCS: the guy who tried to retaliate against the offense he took should indeed get some strongly worded advice from someone in authority over him: he needs to deal people he doesn't like with more decorum (talking trash to his peers is just making people uncomfortable and making him look bad), and further, he should contemplate the understandable girls-in-CS tensions he probably wants to avoid aggravating in order to be liked in the community.

Ultimately it's really up to him if he wants to like you and to be fair to women in CS. You're probably right that he has a "bossy-"woman chip on his shoulder. But it doesn't seem proportional to address this as "what should I do as a leader of a WICS organization" (as you allude to with the case of Adria Richards, that's unproductive business). I know it's uncomfortable, but what I'd like to see happen is: when someone is insulted in front of a group of people, the offender is reprimanded appropriately in front of those people.

Let's assume that you face more bristling than a man would when you directly exercise authority (safe bet). Let's even say that it's even worse in CS than society in general (I think the contrary, actually). Then it would be great to tell the guy that while it's understandable that he felt disrespected (be charitable!) that when you hear stuff like this, and you hear it more often than a man would in the same situation, the effect is worse than he realizes, that you don't want gender to be an issue, etc. etc.

I don't think the use of the word "bitch" should make much of a difference, although I know it triggers associations of other sexism. It's just too commonplace to read any specific intent other than "I don't like this person".

I don't think the authority figure you escalated to is anything other than a selfish conflict-avoider, like we all are sometimes.

The visualizations and explanations are fantastic. The mouseover highlighting of code as you mouse over the hexes in the 'Neighbors' section remind me of Bret Victor's work[1]

Also, I was amused to see that the author used a language called "Haxe"[2] which can generate (compiles into) javascript, flash, C++, java, C# etc. I guess it's good for making web games where you have a flash fallback (or vice versa)?

[1] http://worrydream.com/

[2] http://haxe.org/

I use Trello and Google Calendar for smartphone support. But I do use emacs whenever I'm at a computer. Should I try org-mode? Can it interface with those?

re: the social value of emacs-lisp parsers/code-completion etc, perhaps someone could supply an API where other programs can query a headless emacs runtime. I defer to the author's experience when he says that emacs is a poor runtime for simultaneous editing + compute, but perhaps it's acceptable for compute-only (and this separate-process approach could in theory improve interactivity for the emacs editor as well).

My emacs at times can't keep up with my typing. But I love what it does for me. The lack of threading is a huge headache for elisp developers - they have to resort to manual cooperative-task-slicing hacks.

"Weighted average of the volatility" is an odd baseline. It presumes that the assets are perfectly correlated. But assuming 0 correlation isn't defensible either. If you didn't have information about the pairwise correlations, what default value would you use for investment volatility?

Yes. He started some great stuff. I don't see what a list of what amounts to MyFace "likes" adds to that. What matters is the great stuff.

We don't need to mock vegans, so why should we mock Stallmans? Just live your life and ignore the meaningless fact that they think you're doing wrong according to their personal morality (after you explore the origin/reason for their lifestyle to the extent of your curiosity).

1 GBP : 1.5 USD

(I assume people answered poll in GBP?)

I love visually distinct/suggestive operators so long as they're easy to type on a standard layout. So for that reason alone I agree that a ! b is better than a <- b

With many punctuation infix operators (see Scala for an extreme case) people who don't use the language won't understand the code, and you'll have to use an appropriate search engine or emacs mode to look up docs, but it's worth it for what you get in exchange.

It would be nice for the community to standardize on unicode glyphs for enhanced visual representation of ascii-art operators like |> <- etc. (so that online syntax highlighters / code review / diff interfaces show the same as your editor). Pretty glyphs instead of mere ASCII could really help readers (the source code should still be ASCII).