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That's presumably because most people who frequent this forum don't fall into the same tax bracket as I do.

Ever read Les Miserables?

When it's the difference between making the car insurance payment and shopping at Wal-Mart, or not making it, and shopping at, say, Publix, the choice is less about ethics and more about practicality.

For what it's worth I do grow a garden, albeit a limited one due to the law restricting my garden to my backyard. I hope to plant fruit trees this Spring to offset more of my food costs and enjoy fresher, healthier fare.

While I applaud your efforts to eat well, I'd posit that with some attention, you could measurably decrease the expense if you factor in certain foods and factor out others.

For example, I enjoy tacos as lunch a few times a week. I make them from scratch, and while this doesn't adhere to your recommendation of no starches, I doubt they cost me $1.00 per taco, and that's with avocado, beans, onions, and peppers (plus the tortillas, of course). If I added meat, that would almost double the cost, so I don't.

Other foods are like that too, stir fry with veggies and shrimp, instead of beef saves me another 20-30% on cost.

I also shop at Aldi, or at Wal-Mart as often as befits what foods I'm eating, which knocks another 30-40% off of my food budget.

Eating well doesn't have to cost a ton.

You're welcome!

After reading a few paragraphs I realized it was going to be largely anecdotal, so I figured paring it down would save some people ten or twenty minutes. I agree, however, that the flow made it more manageable to enjoy.

Pretty long article that I doubt most will read in its entirety, if at all.

It was, however, a good read about social engineering, and I've summarized the points made and the solutions proposed below:

>Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy.

>The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.

>Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts.

>The Russians appear to have invested heavily in weakening the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary by promoting emotionally charged content to supporters of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, as well as to likely Clinton supporters who might be discouraged from voting.

>We also have evidence now that Russia used its social media tactics to manipulate the Brexit vote.

>A team of researchers reported in November, for instance, that more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted pro-Leave messages in the run-up to the referendum.

>[B]ad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.

>Facebook and Google responded by reiterating their opposition to government regulation, insisting that it would kill innovation and hurt the country’s global competitiveness, and that self-regulation would produce better results.

>Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies.

Solutions proposed:

1) [I]t’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans

2) [T]he platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.

3) [T]he platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.

4) [T]he platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms.

5) [T]he platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users.

6) [W]e need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms.

7) [C]onsumers, not the platforms, should own their own data.

8) [F]inally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly.

The last sentence of the abstract does a good job of this:

>"Based on the present results, we propose that psilocybin with psychological support is a treatment approach that potentially revives emotional responsiveness in depression, enabling patients to reconnect with their emotions."

This hypothesis was borne out in the data produced by the experiment.

Essentially, they were able to increase empathy in their patients which enabled the patients to experience less isolation, thus relieving (some/most of) their depression.

As much of a pity that, 70 years later, we are still using transistor based computers originally derived from three wires stuck in a piece of rock[1] by some very innovative fellows at Bell Labs[2]?

[1]http://images.computerhistory.org/revonline/images/500004836... [2]http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/digital-logic/12/2...

Both of the instances you mention would almost certainly rely or result on, and from, what intelligence might be shared or derived from having that frantic phone call or backroom diplomacy.

It's not just who you know, but what intel you can share to strengthen an alliance that matters the most.

What troubles me about this article is the after effect on those who might be employed by nation states who seek to better understand our intelligence mechanism, and while I realize that every actor in the schema is a cog in a very complex machine, it stands to reason that if tons of people are leaving public service for the private sector, there is a vast amount of leaky intel out there for the having.

I don't think there is anything wrong with consolidation, necessarily, but we need to have stopgaps in place to quell the unwanted outflow of personnel from what is essentially a defense-centered brain trust because of how much we as a public have invested in their training and relied on them to help us stay out of harm's way. I'm especially worried about the younger set (not to foment discrimination, per se, but maturity does shape one's thinking) who may more easily be duped by some seemingly friendly industry that is a shell company for nefarious activity.

My only comment is to applaud an absolutely fantastic effort. Well done, and thank you for such a comprehensive yet accessible set of steps to become more well versed in deep learning.

Thank you for clarifying that for me.

I recall reading some article about how, when mining for bitcoin (for example), what was really being mined are progressively larger prime numbers, or scientific data, or some such data requiring lots of computation.

Isn't there something of real value being mined? If not, what is being done when people _mine_ bitcoins?

> Indeed, the P100 is twice as fast and the K80, but due to the huge cost premium, it’s not cost effective for this simple task.

Am I reading the graph wrong, or is this statement not true?

Looks like the P100 is running the code in around half the time as the K80 and the cost is only 150% that of the K80.

.5::1.5 == 1::3 > 1::1

Thank you for the explanation.

What I find interesting, in addition to your description of the price elasticity being at issue, is precisely _what_ a bitcoin represents.

In fact, what _all_ cryptocurrency represent, to my knowledge...and that is, some increasingly unbreakable cryptographical mechanism by which information may be passed at ever more secret rates.

The question I have is: precisely who is in the market for such things, and are they not, in fact, what is holding these currencies together?

It also begs the question: if the person who can afford to 'buy' the cryptographical information is the one "funding" the market, are we not at the beck and call of the deepest pockets in terms of securing what may ultimately be state-secret level data?

Not that this necessarily applies to your situation, but for those who might otherwise be dissuaded, it is very doable to install solar panels on the ground to accommodate what requirements exist regarding the incident angle of solar radiation/absorbtion.

I actually find it surprising that your utility finds that to be a deal breaker as it would only limit your ability to generate electricity by a few percent per skewed degree.

Thanks for making my point for me.

Every one of your statements is in some way a defense of the current mass media structure. Even your counterexamples of public news sources maintain a sufficiently small enough market share as would be counted as noise in a t-test.

Without sounding pedantic, I think it's fair to say that the mass media put out a LOT of material into the public domain merely to acquire the largest market share of attention.

It is very rare that I read a story in a newspaper or hear one on television that isn't some form of salacious gossip or eye catching spectacle.

Though I haven't read most of it, Chris Hedges' book: Empire of Illusion, speaks to this with much greater acuity than I can.

I wish we could all just take a breath of fresh air (whoops, there is an allusion to another, though admittedly fairly neutral, piece of media) and remember that we are often much better off without the media dictating what we think should be important. I fear that the fractionism that George Washington cautioned us against in his farewell address is driving most of what we consume from the mass media.

I hesitate even to post this for fear of sounding too alarmist, and for the possible repercussions on myself from the powers that be in their never ending fight to be 'right', but I do think that this is a subject that is important enough to stand up and say "enough is enough". I know I sound paranoid, but as we become ever more connected, it is not as far fetched as it might seem that such things transpire. It is imperative that the power remain in the purview of the public and not those with access to what information money can buy, or cookies can acquire.

Fair point, I didn't realize that the Philippines were predominantly Christian.

I really didn't want to go about defending Christianity necessarily, though I realize that is how the beginning of my comment turned out, but rather point to how we shouldn't generalize the problem into a certain religion being responsible for problem.

Thanks for helping me understand the punitive issue in more detail.

Not sure why you have to point at the members of the Christian religion as the culprit, when there are people of similarly zealous ilk in each and every religion besides Christianity. Certainly, Christianity has the majority stake of religion in the Western world, but this question is a global one, and I don't remember the last time a person was summarily executed for dealing drugs in a Christian country like one might find in Singapore, or their head cut off like one might find in certain Middle Eastern countries, or (again) killed, in certain African countries.

Pointing a finger at a single group is unproductive when the desired outcome is a more comprehensively understanding, less punitive, and essentially more humanitarian solution for what is at issue.

The real disconnect is that the people in power are not held to the same standard as those being sentenced. When was the last time you heard of a prosecuting attorney being drug tested before they could argue in court? What about a judge, or probation/parole/police officer? If there was some transparency in how ubiquitous drug use actually is, one might have some real leverage when seeking to implement more equitable (and therefore less punitive) legislation that provides fairer sentencing guidelines.

Thanks for the praise, and for the insight per your experience. Sounds like a great gig!

I looked you up, and see that you are likely working exclusively in Haskell, but thought you might derive some value from Carl Cook's presentation on optimizing HFT code at the most recent cpp convention. I recognize the languages are distinctly different, but he provides some interesting theoretical points along the way that might be advantageous to you.

Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM&feature=youtu.be

Also, I can sympathize with your plight to run scalable sims. I've done some work in bioinformatics, and am building a small cluster at home so that I can learn to write code that'll scale to more massively parallel systems that are de rigueur in that domain.

Cheers!

I think it helps to understand that the financial sector provides capital that serves to energize virtually every other sector in every industry.

Without finance, there is no biomedical research (private especially). Without finance, there is no aerospace advancement. Without finance, there is no alternative energy. Being able to facilitate a more liquid, more transparent financial sector is, in my opinion, a calling worthy of any programmer who seeks to make the world a better place.

Your assignment of people as 'questionable' is likely an artifact of the 2007 recession, and that kind of thing is a personal choice. I can guarantee you that there are 'questionable' people in every sector and in virtually every company. Sometimes people are great, and sometimes they aren't. Their field of employment has very little to do with what makes them that way, and I think that it's a little ignorant to be so casual (and I say this because you are certainly not alone in your judgment) with how you view people.

Remember how, as children, we are taught to not judge books by their covers? Why do the same with a programmer who works in finance? Sure, some of the work may be a little pedantic, like squeezing an extra millisecond out of an algorithm, but hey, that's computer science in general, and I liken that to an F1 racing team spending hour upon hour sculpting the perfect frame for their car.

Sorry for the rant, I've spent a decent amount of time working on financial algorithms, and what you said touched a nerve.

Have a great day!

They (Google) have a feature built-in to the search engine so that if you put all the terms you want to absolutely see in quotes, for example: "tomato seeds grow", it won't return results without any of those terms.

Note that it will only return results with pages that have those terms in that order.

> A local newspaper and a news channel picked up the story. The throng turned into a flood of visitors taking selfies with the plane. India's aviation minister came visiting, as did senior officials and a bevy of businessmen.

> Mr Yadav says he's now ready to commercially build India's first indigenous planes. Investors have shown interest. The local BJP-led government has promised him 157 acres of land to set up a factory to make 19-seater aeroplanes.

While your point is understood, he does seem to be being taken somewhat seriously.

You're both right.

Extensive practice is essential to getting one's self to the point where creativity can take over, where the muscle memory can 'meld' with one's expression of whatever emotions are being communicated via music.

There are certainly counter-examples, musicians who compose from day one, and don't really focus on melodic theory, running scales, and all of the other pieces of the neuro-muscular puzzle that go into making one technically 'good', and some of them do well.

There are those that allot all of their time to becoming technically proficient, pianists who spend endless hours working up Rachmaninoff's 2nd concerto, only to get so lost in the technicality of their discipline that they become cold and mechanistic, but, again, are so proficient that they find work their entire lives.

But true greatness needs both. You have to, as one artist put it, be able to 'forget' all that you have learned and compose and/or perform from the heart, letting all of that training do what it will naturally do, resulting in a transcendent expression of artistic grace.

That's what makes Campbell so accessible. He speaks and writes as though he is talking about the weather to his best friend, but his erudition provides such a solid foundation in the topics he expounds upon that one hardly notices that one is being educated.

Humans would not be identically conscious on a different planet because our consciousness is dependent on the environment in which it exists.

Even a cursory definition of consciousness must include the sum total of all of our sensory perception, and without the biome to augment that perception, it is impossible that our consciousness would not shift to accommodate the inclusion and exclusion of whatever difference in our sensory input would give to our experience of being alive.

We would all _be_ conscious (presuming relative health), but if we were all on Pluto, for example, the lack of light would change our consciousness, and for each individual this change would happen at a rate determined by their experience.

Perhaps this change would happen gradually enough for some that it might be considered an artifact of evolving, but certainly the change would begin the instant we left Earth's influence, and what might be considered our 'normal' state.

I realize it's a little (though I detest this term) 'hand wavy' because it's a thought experiment based on zero examples, but we do know that our consciousness is dependent on what we perceive and don't perceive. Hence the question posed by Nagel [1] "what is it like to be a bat?", as bats are cognitively very close to humans (relative to the entire biome), but without eyesight, it is fairly clear that the consciousness of a bat would be different than that of a human.

I recognize that this point is not necessarily the one central to your comment, but I do think it's interesting to remember that if we were not here, we would not be as we are.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

Most of what your brain does is statistical reasoning.

Much of the rest is logical inference.

You choose words in the order you choose them because as a child, your mind learned that, statistically speaking, certain words had certain meaning, and when used would engender certain results. All intelligent decisions follow that pattern. Training, comparison to expectations, memorize the difference, adjust behavior, rinse and repeat. Sound familiar?

Most of the intelligent mechanisms within the mind are employed through similar statistical inference, and when it's not done statistically (say, when you are inspired by some flash of 'insight' or when you dream things that have little obvious statistical grounding) there is still some reasoning within the mind that is allowing room for stochasticity to infer intelligence that is statistically calculated to be beneficial, when all other reasoning has failed. Tangentially, it might even be true that the irrational mind is simply one that uses stochastic reasoning more often than is deemed sane by our social norms.

Don't overstate intelligence like it's some amazing technology that we can't understand. Consciousness is more difficult to parlay into a black box model, but intelligence, reasoning, and 'wise' decision making is very much rooted in making statistically beneficial choices and deriving logic from the order we recognize via inductive and deductive reasoning.

If it sounds like I am oversimplifying, please understand that I hold the brain and the amazing parallel processing power it wields in high regard, and it's no mean feat for someone like Einstein, to use an obvious example of great intelligence, to intuit relativistic frameworks using only thought experiments, but his understanding (and everyone else's, for that matter) were built on many, many layers of statistical reasoning.

The fun size bags have one serving, but even so I doubt that doritos, en masse, are to blame for obesity. It's the accompanying sedentary lifestyle that is the real culprit.

If we want a food source to blame, look at high sugar content foods like soda or the slew of 'Little Debbie' type snacks (I'm preferential to Nutter Butters) that can be consumed in one or two sittings if you aren't calorie conscious.

But, just to reiterate what's important, if we all just got a solid hour of exercise each day the rate of cancer and heart disease would drop appreciably.

Not be too persnickety, but your math doesn't add up.

67+17 = 84

45+34 = 79

There is a lot to be said for not wanting to piss off the people who control the money that flows to you. I am not as certain that people would choose to keep things the way that they are if they also weren't keenly aware (as say, someone might especially be in China) that the State might be monitoring their answers.

It's also very important to remember that most people who manage wealth well, on the other hand, do so in a way that benefits those who do not, and as such retain their responsibilities as money managers because they are one half of a financially symbiotic system of exchange.

There are also a lot of social factors to consider that didn't necessarily (and understandably so) make it into the studies dependent or independent variable sets. The attractiveness of each party needs to be controlled for, as there is a definite bias to give money to those we find attractive. The age of someone is another control variable that needs to be accounted for, as the elderly are generally (and correctly, generally speaking) more adept at managing money, for how else would they have survived so long?

All in all, I think mostly what this tells us is that we are cautiously optimistic about the belief that those who have less in our social hierarchy are capable enough to have more, but that it's important to preserve and honor the way in which wealth flows because it flows in a way that has kept us progressing for millenia.

I would be much more interested in reading about how much wealth they believed should be distributed rather than simply if it should. That would give us more than a binary response from which to extrapolate data.