selfishgene

Also think Thunderbird should implement JMAP (Fastmail standard) and/or Google RESTful gmail API because these are open standards worth supporting.

Another feature that I would like to see more fully supported in Thunderbird (through better synchronization with mail provider server back-end) is editing emails, to include most importantly the ability to remove bulky attachments without losing email text or touching important meta-data. Unfortunately gmail treats each email as an immutable object, and the hacks that have been suggested to date to work around this limitation have all been clunky at best.

At MIT, a few years after the arrest of Aaron Swartz, a prominent researcher from Mass General Hospital was threatened one afternoon with arrest by an MIT police officer for the alleged "crime" of using one of the library computer terminals for "longer than an hour."

It's worth remembering then that there are some out there who are using SciHub now because they don't want to go to jail for trying to access the same content through more "legally legit" channels.

Has anyone proposed naming an "information making free" service after him yet?

Surprised not to see Andrew Lo's name associated this "groundbreaking research." It would be totally within his "working style" to trot out some fancy-sounding mathematics that pretends to solve some impossibly messy financial problem, and brag about it in some journal that real scientists (who sometimes collaborate with him in hopes of landing a job on Wall Street after their academic career starts to flounder) do not take all that seriously.

On a more serious note, the former deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management (Gabriel Bitran) is currently serving time in a federal penitentiary with his son for a similar sort of chicanery (fancy mathematical pricing formulas that were complete bullshit according to SEC indictment) in order to screw his investors out of millions of dollars.

This was not long after Bitran narrowly escaped charges for sexually assaulting one of his secretaries at the same institution. In which case, I guess there may be some truth after all to the old saying about a man not "getting lucky" twice :)

No further comment here on the nurture vs. nature debate, except to mention for those interested in learning more about recent research into volition and agency (i.e. what is commonly referred to as "free will"), Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind is a good place to start.

Remember though that this book covers recent experimental work in psychology, so the usual disclaimers apply.

I had just finished reading the hacker news item on Scott Aaronson's controversial blog post -- that's all.

Fix the housing crisis in highly inflated markets by creating more supply (i.e. rescinding exclusionary zoning bylaws) and job candidates will be able to afford the more "ethical" choices.

We need to shift more in the direction of a direct democracy, using the blockchain perhaps as a next generation digital ballot box. Not holding my breath though that this will happen within the lifetime of any one reading hacker news right now. There's just too much at stake for our corporate overlords.

Fixing the housing supply problem appears to be critical here. Without increasing supply, folks might find ways to work around the "mandate" out of sheer necessity.

Also I think the OP should broaden the question to read "lifelong contributors." The learning is a very important component of this, but broadly construed, that learning should include the practical experience gained from contributing to all sorts endeavors that produce social value. One of the critical problems with today's workforce is that so much of the work revolves around what social anthropologist David Graeber calls "Bullshit Jobs."

There's often very little to learn in these environments except how to play office politics more astutely ... the next time around.

"The rent is too damn high."

3-day work weeks will quickly follow.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/asia-pacific/japan-s-c...

When these same "private companies" are allowed to commission their own police forces, it can get a lot uglier pretty darn quick, given the close relationship that most police departments have with local prosecutors.

Just recall what MIT police did to Aaron Swartz after he "overused" his library privileges by downloading too many papers from JSTOR, most of which were already in the public domain anyway.

"No Parking Fees EVER!"

Know someone that got a master's degree from the comfort of his own living room for under $10K and is now earning a decent six-digit salary.

Isn't there a more important question to ask here, namely how the US compares to other countries in bringing "traditionally marginalized peoples" into the R&D workforce.

After all, when one factors in the impact on social justice, there's a big difference between a discovery being made by the oppressor, e.g. the "douche-bro entitled STEMlord" that Scott Aaronson talks about in this recent blog post:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4522

versus one made by the objects of their oppression, e.g. all of the women who are being denied "free and conveniently located childcare that makes a colossal difference to women's choices of whether or not to stay in STEM."

So let's stop fretting about "global leadership" (that's kind of a testosterone-driven thing anyway) and focus our attention instead on making sure that lactation stations are installed in all laboratories that receive government funding. The requested childcare centers should quickly follow though.

Lloyd should resign from MIT immediately. There is simply no excuse for soliciting money from a child trafficking racketeer like Jeffrey Epstein.

If your research is worth pursuing, compete honestly for federal research grants like everyone else.

A group of judges met behind closed doors to discuss the incident involving Judge Patricia Curtin and concluded that she "intended eventually to give it back."

This is apparently part of a much larger pattern of "unequal protection under the law" in Massachusetts:

https://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/secret-courts/

If we saw that this number was appreciably higher than 2%, then we could immediately draw the conclusion that the justice system in this country is biased against Jews, right?

(This would be just like we do in the case of blacks when it comes to "more dangerous" crimes like assault, armed robbery, rape, and murder.)

And who would measure it?

Assuming that additional government bureaucracy would be created for this (noble) purpose, what guarantee would we have that their decisions would be any more "rational" or "efficient" than the so-called "free market" system that currently exists in the US for determining salaries?

This is not a criticism of the author's underlying arguments, just a question about how he would implement the proposed remedy.

If so, bring them on!

Really? After the missile defense fraud cover-up at MIT Lincoln Laboratory that was exposed by Prof. Ted Postol or the deliberate "anonymization" of donations from convicted child rapist Jeffrey Epstein (both at the direction of President Rafael Reif) ... or how about the former deputy dean of the Sloan School of Management, Gabriel Bitran, who ran a $500 million hedge fund scam for which he's just finishing up his prison time in a federal penitentiary down in Philadelphia (after narrowly escaping charges that he sexually assaulted one of his secretaries a decade earlier). The Sloan School is the same MIT institution that bestowed a prestigious entrepreneurship prize on Brandon Wade, who has recently spoke on campus about what it's like to start one of the largest and most successful online prostitution businesses in the world, on which some MIT girls apparently advertise their services (supposedly to help cover the sky-high tuition that funds the bloated MIT administration).

Trust MIT? Really?

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pent...

were covered up by the same man (MIT President Rafael Reif) that deliberately concealed the source of millions of dollars in gifts to MIT from convicted child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, why should anyone care what Lincoln Laboratory endorses?

So just remember to look before you leap.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

... for all of the folks out there who don't have a university picking up the tab for the articles that they want to read.

It's important to remember that paywalls disproportionately impact those who are not "working" in an academic setting.

http://www.texmacs.org

TeXmacs is based on Guile and there is apparently already a Guile-based implementation of Emacs that is near feature complete.

Perhaps a Guile-based Emacs could somehow be embedded as an elisp-compatible interpreter "back-end" inside TeXmacs, much like how Mathematica is separated into a kernel (for computation) and a front-end (for input and rendering) that communicate with each other over a protocol called MathLink.

There is also DomTerm from Per Bothner, who perhaps coincidentally has also worked hard to produce his own Scheme-based version of Emacs (by way of the JVM).

https://domterm.org

One of the downsides of TeXmacs is the significant keystroke input latency caused by the extensive amount of page redrawing that is often required when editing "rich text." It's one of the main reasons that many still prefer latex-preview mode inside Emacs instead. Maybe latency would be less of an issue inside a graphics-aware terminal emulator like DomTerm.