CoffeeDregs

I think the rationale is: You don't want to be holding an asset who's value is predicated on a very low interest rate loan. If mortgage interest rates go up by a factor of two, housing affordability will come down by a factor of two (assuming an interest only loan). Better to sell now, pocket the money, then buy back in when prices are lower.

That's just in the US. Also, that sugar hasn't necessarily worked itself out of the bloodstream yet.

Those gigantic spikes represent plunges in earnings, not spikes in share prices... If you look right before the spikes, you'll see PE ratios in the mid- to high-twenties.

Yes, but you have to print it yourself. The point of my post was the hopefully you could get a lovely print for $10 from a government store.

Had the same thought. See my comment elsewhere in the thread. Turns out that the USGS sells posters.

Wow. USGS has a store with this poster: https://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/catalog/setCurrentItem/(isQu...

In case that brutal link doesn't work: go to https://store.usgs.gov/ and search for "Under the Golden Gate Bridge".

The poster is basically 1M^2 so is a decent size.

EDIT: Not 1M^3, but 1M^2. We'll have to wait for the 1M^3 version...

    The addiction industry is $35 billion...

Shouldn't they have included prescription painkillers? That's predicted to be about $40-$60 billion this year.

Finally, this technology is gaining acceptance. Leopard Logic and others tried this about 15 years ago but Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling were still going so CPU+FPGA didn't take hold. I'm not sure exactly how Intel is going to implement this but the predecessors had multiple configuration planes so that the FPGA could be switched from Config1 to Config2 in nanoseconds (e.g. TCP offload, then neural network calculation, then TCP offload, etc) and had some automatic compiler support.

Drive-by-upgrade... Happened to my wife's Windows 8 computer late last week with no warning. She was puzzled to wake up to a computer that had been upgraded without asking her. Then she couldn't use our home printer. So she went to work to print something. But then she couldn't use the work WiFi.

I know that her Windows 10 experience will be better than her terrible Windows 8 experience, but this seems clearly to be a maneuver to minimize the Software Support Reserve line on the Income Statement.

I'm all for upgrading users from a crappy Windows 8 to a nice Windows 10. That said, my wife is a reasonably sophisticated user and she didn't notice any significant notification before her computer was upgraded.

[... And, when I talked with her about the upgrade, she mentioned that she was now getting toolbar pop-ups asking her "How likely are you to recommend Windows to a friend?" WTF.]

Conversations about self-driving have focused on zero defect rate in-city self-driving vehicles, but a lot of these technologies are reaching Pareto-efficient levels of usefulness. I don't need my car to drive the first and last miles; I'd be perfectly happy if it just drove on the highway.

And why do humans drive long haul trucks for anything other than the first and last miles? Trucks should drive themselves between depots at the edges of metros and then humans can drive them into the city. https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/th... "Self steering"... How long before that moniker is replaced by "Self driving".

And why are humans delivering packages? They might not be for long: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-starship-delivery-robot-id...

It's going to shock our economy once industries begin constraining roles to the level at which robots can be "good enough". After figuring out how to manage them, we'll start to see robots deployed in force.

As parents, my wife and I are talking about this a lot as we think about how to raise our kids (and we are emphatically hands-off parents)...

Well that was probably as frustrating to write as it was to read... The author does a nice job of forensics but can't really pin down the meaning on any particular OS.

My preference would be to have a well-defined, even if of-limited-use, load rather than a poorly-defined, but maybe-more-useful?, load. From the article, it sounds as if kernel authors tried to implement the former, found it difficult to do as machines grew and then everyone headed off in different directions only to implement lots of the latter...

Thanks for putting in the effort to produce this. I'm excited to learn Rust and to port a few projects over to it, but I haven't gotten traction to get past the first few steps. Your packaging-up of the examples is a great way to start.

Very nice.

In case you're interested in something less nice, but 3D, see:

http://www.alsonkemp.com/geekery/webgl-fractals/

Or:

http://d1r5286bar8cf9.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/web-...

Another gotcha is that ELB appears to load balance based on the IP addresses of the requests... We had private VPC/IP workers talking hundreds of requests per second to a non-sticky-session, public ELB fronted service (... don't ask why ...) and experienced really strange performance problems. Latency. Errors. What? Deployed a second private ELB fronting the same service and pointed the workers at it. No more latency. No more errors.

The issue appeared to have been that the private IP workers all would transit the NAT box to get to the public service and the ELB seemed to act strangely when 99.99% of the traffic was coming from one IP address. The private ELB saw requests from each of the individual IP addresses of the workers and acted a lot better. Or something.

There are forms of SETI besides the listening-for-interesting-signals kind. Looking for large-scale artifacts also exists:

http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_s...

http://www.space.com/24269-how-to-search-for-alien-civilizat...

I find these fascinating: let's consider the branching tree of ways civilizations might grow and then look for evidence for leaves on that tree.

    Sounds more like a crappy setup than a problem with uWSGI itself.

No. As I detailed, it was a deficiency with uWSGI itself. Complicating the setup as you suggest is a crappy workaround for a uWSGI deficiency. We simplified the setup by switching to gunicorn. I would still use uWSGI, but, as with all software/tools, I would be aware that it has a deficiency.

uWSGI docs on production usage of HTTP functionality don't mention this issue so I wanted to let others know. https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/HTTP.html?highl...

    I have a drawing of my favorite infrastructure

Wish I had the luxury. We're running 20-30 projects/applications (~3000 tasks) across our clusters. Some are Django fronted by gunicorn, some are directly fronted by flask, but 80% are non-HTTP services.

    And nobody should be using gunicorn, it's way
    less performant than uWSGI

uWSGI may be different now, but 4 years ago I built a browser toolbar C&C API server that peaked at about 2k requests per second. We used uWSGI to front our Django application with SoftLayer HTTP load balancers in front of uWSGI. uWSGI was speaking HTTP and translating to WSGI, but did so only in one thread/process. So while 8-16 Django threads were tootling along, the single uWSGI HTTP->WSGI thread was pegged. We switched to gunicorn and had dramatically better performance.

Agreed. I heard a guest on NPR address this and he made two points: there's likely already been plenty of material transferred between the two planets; and human arrival will guarantee the transfer of biological material.

Another take @ http://www.marssociety.org/home/about/faq/

Q: What are the risks of contaminating Mars with Earth life forms, or vice versa?

A: Actually, it is arguable that this has already been happening for billions of years. During his study of known Martian meteorite ALH84001, Cal Tech's Joseph Kirschvink showed that large parts of the rock were never heated above 40C (104F), proving the theory of University of Arizona researcher Jay Melosh that it is possible for rocks to be ejected from one planet's surface and land on another's surface without being excessively heated. More importantly, this discovery showed that not all rocks ejected from either Mars or Earth are sterilized -- a fact that, when combined with the known ability of microorganisms to remain alive in a dormant state for millions of years, means that Earth life has probably already traveled to Mars, and if life ever existed on Mars, it has already traveled to Earth.

I'm excited about the release of any functional-ish language, but I'm unclear as to how F* is different from F# or OCaml. I did read some of the docs, but any pointers?

I should have read more:

    We aim for a language that spans the capabilities of interactive proof
    assistants like Coq and Agda, general-purpose programming
    languages like OCaml and Haskell, and SMT-backed semiautomated
    program verification tools like Dafny and WhyML. This language
    would provide the nearly arbitrary expressive power of a logic
    like Coq’s, but with a richer, effectful dynamic semantics.
    It would provide the flexibility to mix SMT-based automation
    with interactive proofs when the SMT solver times out (not uncommonly
    when working with rich theories and quantifiers). And it would
    support idiomatic higher-order, effectful programming with the
    predictable, call-by-value cost model of OCaml, but with the
    encapsulation of effects provided by Haskell.

That sounds pretty exciting. Especially considering you can use the full .NET stack (which I'm not currently using (Linux) but definitely respect).

EDIT: formatting

Hadn't heard of that. Props!

I must admit that I've researched this on-and-off for years. Surprisingly, it's reasonably expensive (ie. not inexpensive). That said, the reviews I've read have been nearly universally positive: as the article notes, the crews love interesting company (they spend months on the boat painting from stem-to-stern and you're naturally inclined to discuss the outside world and not-painting-bulkheads).

Boredom: if you step onto a container ship as a guest without at least a month of "work" to do, you're to blame. I admit, I'm uncertain of bandwidth and such; but there is some. Download sources before boarding! And I ain't much of a writer, but I might take a whack at writing the Great American [short story] during the journey so that I wasn't bored. Point is: riding a largely automated ship for 2-14 days without a plan is nearly the definition of boredom; plan against boredom!

Having taught myself Ruby on Rails while cruising in Alaska 8 years ago, learning without the internet can be pretty blissful. Just make sure you download the sources first! [Yes, Ruby doesn't need that. I'm looking to learn Rust...]

EDIT: I have no affiliate relationship, but this (http://www.freightercruises.com/) seems pretty solid (e.g. http://www.freightercruises.com/seaworthy_news_1310.php).

Nancy Kress wrote Beggars in Spain to explore nearly this exact topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain In the book, the upperclass controls all capital and productivity and, literally and directly, buys the votes necessary to stay in office.

    That, the quote above, is the left wing's preferred 
    approach to amassing votes everywhere in the world.

I happen to agree with much of what you say, but it's not just the left wing. See Medicare Part D (http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/01/medicare-part-b-tea-party-o...)...

    Imagine if every Airbnb host had the option of having 5-10% 
    of their earning withheld and used to purchase equity.

Imagine if the rankings of your listing reflected your selection of equity preference... [This is a Thing, not a dystopian speculation.]

    Crowdfunding with equity can't come soon enough.

What do you think IPOs were? Putting aside the craziness of the dotcom boom, this is basically what the public markets were doing 15 years ago. Sarbox fixed some of the dotcom issues and, basically, blew up the sub $1B equity market. As you note, the markets can manage this process provided they receive information, return and risk which are correlated with stage. We don't need a special term for this. We just need the regulatory burdens to be consistent with the levels of societal harm and to prevent faddish uni-portfolios.

Totally agreed. I know that I shouldn't believe announcements about future technology... But the early announcements from HP were so confident and "no, it's really going to be here in 18 months" that I bought in... I was rooting for a big disruptive result... Still am, but with less enthusiasm.

Fantastic article. I've been hearing about Watson and food on NPR or on HN for the last few months, but this article did a great job of detailing the experience. My wife had signed me up to make dinner tonight. We're going to my parents' place to hang out with them and with my brother's family. I think I'll plop my laptop on the kitchen counter and have us play with Watson until we find a fun and AI-ishly-weird recipe!

Perhaps OT: I often swing by Java web/services frameworks every year or so and I never see a good DB migration/evolution story. I'm fairly certain that it's because I don't know where to look or that I'm thinking about it incorrectly, but I've yet to see a Java web/services framework that supports the easy database migration/evolution schemes of Django/South or of Rails. Are these migration schemes not supported for a reason? Or am I missing the docs?

    The homeless industrial complex.

Not sure I really like the phrase (or, rather I do, but it feels unsavory), but agreed. Seems as though every 6 months or so I hear a rehashing of the situation on KQED's Forum; invariably, the discussion swirls around San Francisco's situation is so complicated and needs so much more money to fix. Then I read these articles and the situation doesn't seem so complicated. As you allude, parties with conflicts of interest have stepped in to complicate it...

Reading this reminded me of an article in San Francisco Magazine from a couple of years ago:

http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/arise-tender...

Quoting:

[...]

But the event that truly created the Tenderloin of today took place in 1980, when developers proposed three luxury high-rise hotels in the neighborhood. Residents and nonprofit advocacy groups organized to keep the big hotels out. The high rises were built, but in the aftermath of the fight, the city passed two crucial laws. First, the city made it illegal for owners to convert SROs into tourist hotels unless they also replaced the low-income units or paid into a fund for affordable housing. Second, it passed a zoning law lowering the height maximum in the Tenderloin from 30 stories to between 8 and 13.

These laws made it virtually impossible for developers to “Manhattanize” the Tenderloin. Meanwhile, the nonprofits, which had lobbied for the laws and led the fight to keep out the big hotels, themselves began to buy or lease buildings. These nonprofits, which include the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC), the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC), and Mercy Housing, now own or lease more than 5,000 housing units in the Tenderloin. The city plays a critical role too: It has loaned the nonprofits money to acquire or rehab about 50 properties with 4,000 affordable units, and it holds or finances master leases on dozens of other such buildings. “The Tenderloin is the only place where the nonprofits own the housing,” says Field. “This protects the poor people in the neighborhood from changes in demographics.” It also gives the nonprofits a vested interest in keeping their clients from being dispersed.

[...]

Combine that with rent control, resistance to new, higher density development and an influx of high paying tech jobs, and San Francisco's current situation makes a lot of sense...*

* To be fair, policies from the '80s that closed asylums and dumped mentally ill people onto the street contributed, but SF certainly seems to have worked to maximize the effect.

If you spend a few moments on LiveLeak looking for IS videos, I suspect you'll come to agree that "IS" (or "ISIS") is a thing distinct from "terrorism". As not an apparent, imminent threat to the US, I'm not sure whether they deserve more or less attention [from our population's eyeballs and thereby our military's bombs] than does "terrorism", but it's hard to agree with the cynical interpretation that "IS" is merely a rebranding of the terrorism bogeyman.

...and I would advise you against spending those few moments on LiveLeak looking for IS videos...

    Does the US not have regulations about UAVs automatically firing of weaponry?

Even if we do have such regulations, I doubt they'll last long. We'll have to respond in kind once China, Russia, Iran, etc start developing fully automated weapons systems. When Russia can send 1,000 aircraft into a theater because they only require 10% the personnel and we can only send 100 aircraft because we require human operators, the pressure is going to be pretty intense be fully automated. And, even if automation doesn't increase capacity, automation will reduce reaction times, thereby providing other benefits.

    Allowing robots to automatically fire ordnance seems something congress would
    legislate against -- or at least I hope so.

Victory in [symmetric] warfare is already largely dependent on economic advantage, but future war will be entirely determined by economic strength: assuming similar levels of technology, my coalition wins, for example, if we can field 10,000 automated aircraft and your coalition can only field 8,000. I would expect Congress to legislate against this; when China develops fully automated systems and starts deploying them, I would expect Congress to gut those regulations or to let the DoD proceed quietly with developing a to-be-held-in-reserve software update for full automation.

I agree this is not a good outcome, but I'm not sure how the world can avoid it.