forkandwait

Seems like this is a golden opportunity for a consortium of microbreweries to run youtube ad campaigns:

"At Hood River | Deschutes | Ninkasi | Whatever (haha), we care about our community, starting here in 19XX, investing yyyy in local infrastructure, employing zzz, supporting aaa at schools, etc. This is our home, NOT a whatever place for us, and we think you care your about home too. So support microbrews, the NOT whatever beer."

(EDIT: "youtube")

When I worked in construction and restaurants, I saw people agree to work off the books (at the restaurants) and the construction companies would "bank" the overtime hours so they didn't have to pay time and a half, even though they were union companies. Scumbags both, plain and simple...

Forgive my flip dismissal, bad use of caps, and general un-hacker newslike tone just this once, but:

NO MORE FAD DIET BULLSHIT, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!!!

It's just like we have known since the Ancient Greeks and probably earlier -- eat fewer rich foods, more light foods, a big variety of foods, and get lots of moderate activity.

Want to lose weight? Eat fewer calories than you burn. Want to gain muscle mass and tone? Work out regularly. Etc.

Jesus christ, the next time I hear the words "Gluten Free" I am going to scream, jumping up and down, Remember The South Beach Diet!?? Remember the no-fat diet????!!! Don't you people ever learn!?!?!?!

Sorry. I promise to write more grown up posts in the future.

Socialized some of the costs.

Some systems in the US, especially Kaiser, are basically a socialized system supported by premiums, and seem to work pretty well.

Downvoted, here is why:

I find your statements to be over general to an almost crazy degree -- "the actual experience"? Everywhere? "In general we don't have an honest effective government" -- really? Got data? Etc, etc.

Also, I would be interested in specific metrics of worse and better -- you make the claim it is worse because of regulation, which you imply is basically the same as socialized funding (which it isn't). So where is the data?

No offense, but this sounds like canned right wing bullshit rhetoric straight off Fox News. Granted, there is plenty of canned rhetoric on all "sides" to go around, but that doesn't make this any better.

"rs" for "reshape array". Found only on FreeBSD systems (yes, we are better... smile)

For example, transpose a text file:

~/ (j=0,r=1)$ cat foo.txt a b c d e f ~/ (j=0,r=0)$ cat foo.txt | rs -T a d b e c f

Honestly I have never used in production, but I still think it is way cool.

Also, being forced to work in a non-Unix environment, I am always reminded how much I wish everything were either text files, zipped text files, or a SQL database. I know for really big data (bigger than our typical 10^7 row dataset, like imagery or genetics), you have to expand into things like HDF5, but part of my first data cleaning sequence is often to take something out of Excel or whatever and make a text file from it and apply unix tools.

There is a command on freebsd for transposing text table rows to columns and vice versa, but I can't remember or find it now. It is in core, fwiw.

I think that is a pretty big overgeneralization, to be generous.

I believe any "universal ontology" like this is theoretically impossible in the same way that finding an isomorphism between integers and reals is impossible. I am also struck by how appealing everyone finds such classifications.

But then i am something of an existentialist and doubt the transcendent reality of logic and reason.

I think you are arguing "a priori" - you have a set of given principles and then you derive conclusions. While very powerful when done by smart people, a priori reasoning is often wrong, and should always be trumped by real data. I think one of the points of the article is that the data point to a flaw in the way we intuitively reason about the situation.

I agree with the court in dropping tenure laws, but arguments in favor of have cited protecting freedom of teachers' conscience and preventing politically motivated hiring. I personally think tenure had its day, but its day is long past....

This kind of relentless simplicity should be the aesthetic of all engineers. Personally, i think if we had gone to war with the USSR, they would have won just by surviving the dust and breaks in logistic chains. (Assuming, for the sake of rhetoric, that the human race wasn't exterminated by radiation.)

Most census geographies aim for equal-ish population, so they vary widely in size. Blocks are a little different, though, and are designed to be a more or less nicely boundaried thing as well -- surrounded by streets with no crossings, etc.

Anybody know of a FreeBSD comparison?

Sort of related, though freakishly religious, are the hutterites:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite

The colonies are very successful, so much so local farmers have often lobbied successfully to make made them illegal.

As a data guy, that post was worth it for "rs".

Awesome comment. I think of this as the difference between Jesus and Buddha, which I have riffed about in other HN comments. Jesus says: You stand alone judged before God. Buddha says: Your supposed self is an illusion, the collectivity is all.

EDIT: I had an Alan Watts phase growing up, started by cool Episcopalian seminary students who lent me his books; Watts got ordained, then (I think) subsequently defrocked for his carousing.

Can julia yet do the equivalent of the following Octave code:

proportion_value = x ./ sum(x)

The blocker for me with julia is translating my vectorized way of thinking into loops. I know the loops are optimized, but yuck.

It is trying to act as a value add, but it failing consistently and pointlessly. The data, I think, are in. It is a waste of time and limits the number of possible good teachers.

Academic institutions used to have most of their teaching done by tenured faculty, now they don't, and there is such an oversupply of PhD's (myself included) that they don't have to have to offer shit to get someone to take a class.

I think it is time for tenure to go -- give teachers and professors a three year contract, good pay, and the same basic working protections as everybody else. Fire the losers, promote the achievers, and (probably) eliminate a bunch of the imbalance.

Many PhD's would probably teach high school, except for the ridiculous credentialing programs / teacher licensing requirements. Basically you have to get a 1.5 year education degree to "qualify" to teach a subject; yes, you can have a PhD in math from Princeton and be unqualified to teach 9th grade math in Trenton. Makes me want to vomit.

Tcl is the scripting language i hate the least. The string / macro / lispy syntax paradigm works great for driving sql and simple guis. You trade macro hassles like quoting for anti-macro hassles like inheritance or complex parameter specs, but engineering = tradeoffs...

And if you need something compex, do it C for chrissakes.

EDIT: And event loops are beautiful!

Not just cleaner (which might be debatable), but having a separate ON clause allows you put criteria for selecting rows after the join has occurred in the WHERE clause, which are different than criteria for making the join in the first place. Or so I prefer, but whatever.

Could you recommend agood, cheap book on this part of CE? A dover book or an older edition would be best for us dilletantes...

tl;dr -- Happy days are here again!

Not very much content, except that solar panels and natural gas continue to get cheaper. Don't get me wrong -- I love to hear the US is about to return to being a world class manufacturing nation, and it might even be true, but this seemed like a pretty content-free article.

I think it is growing slowly, partly as a spinoff from SF. If you want a lifestyle, it is a great place, but if you want a career I would suggest paying the rents and going to Seattle/ SF/ wherever.

Definitely not. One can tell a naive, non-Unix programmer by the fact that they write code that pollutes the output of a command line utility with informational/ error garbage. (And it almost goes without saying that much real work still happens on the command line.)

Regarding the OP comment about not being able to tell correspondence between a given output and an error: That is an interesting point, but generally in the Unix command line idiom, one stops the program on the first error, so it is easy to tell. However, if you have process that can't stop (like a server), then one has to be more careful and should probably use a more general logging system.

I tried to get into Julia, but I was put off when it seemed that the language doesn't support vectorization the way that Matlab does, but rather encourages writing your loops explicitly (which is fast due to the LLVM JITC). Yuck.

I am an Octave / Matlab fan myself, and think that Julia/ Python/ R/ etc don't quite hit the sweet spot for matrix driven algorithms and 100-1000 line programs that Matlab does. Call me old fashioned....

I think also that a society like Brave New World will outcompete a society like 1984. You can get agricultural labor to perform at the point of a gun, but you can't really develop engineering talent the same way. Though maybe if one stratifies society the right way, it is possible somehow.

A lot of modern Foucault-ish social theory is around how we manufacture/ enculturate the desires of a populace and they basically oppressive themselves with little or no maintenance....