happimess

I think that you misunderstand what the article means by "evolved twice." Neurons certainly did not appear out of whole cloth in one generation, and the process involved many false starts and dead ends.

The question is, do all currently living creatures with neurons trace back to a common ancestor who also had neurons, or are there several neuron-having lineages alive today, each of which traces back to a different earliest-neuron-having ancestor. In the latter case, each of those neuron-having ancestors would have shared a common ancestor, but one that did not have neurons.

The lineage of all life on earth certainly creates a more complicated graph than a tree, but at the time scale needed to create a novel feature like neurons, it certainly looks like a tree. To say otherwise, you'd have to point to a case where genetic information passed laterally between species, rather than vertically from parent to child. This probably has happened [1], but is not so common as to make all tree-shaped charts misleading.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis

To my ear, it seems that the emphasis comes from the FBI agent. The reporter keeps a fairly neutral voice, but the paragraph quoted, combined with the ones immediately before and after, paint the FBI agent as uninformed and credulous.

It is worth remembering that part of the case against Mr. Aleynikov involves his use of "subversion" software, which sounds, well, subversive.

From the Vanity Fair article[1]:

"The Web site Serge had used (which has the word 'subversion' in its name) as well as the location of its server (Germany) McSwain clearly found highly suspicious."

[1]http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

I think this is exactly the kind of situation that GP had in mind. A computer would be undoubtedly faster and more accurate concentrating fire on the weakest stalker, but a human is better at deciding whether to attack now or move into position.

So instead of 'attack this unit,' the player could command his units to 'attack the weakest stalker in range.' Or even, 'stutter step along this path, concentrating fire on the weakest anti-air unit.'

To be fair, I think a lot of sighted people would agree with you on both points.

Surely you're joking--Notch gave away the POC for free, and started charging for the beta somewhere before 2011 (when I started playing). Since then, new features and bug fixes have been essentially non-stop.

I picked it up after a long hiatus and found new terrain types, new monsters, new neutral creatures, an enchanting system, a brewing system, an entirely new dimension ("The End"), and several types of abandoned structures.

Does anyone have any insight as to how painful it is to relocate to Paris from outside of France, or even from outside of the Schengen zone?

This is a great list for my "while integration tests run" bookmark folder. Thanks!

Quick feature request: It would be great to see the number of comments on the HN page.

I'm with you--I have a beer with dinner almost every night, but it is very rare for me to have three drinks in a night.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Vol 2 [1] has a great chapter on ghc, which includes a good look at the ghc runtime (section 5.5).

[1] http://aosabook.org/en/ghc.html

I've just peeked at this book again, and I noticed that they do start with ghci. They're very up-front about its peculiarities, though.

> Also checking out the other people's suggested Learn you a Haskell.

Just to get the minority opinion out there, I found the style of Learn You a Haskell to be insufferable. Real World Haskell is available free online[1] and has a straightforward tone of voice.

[1] http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

Hey, you're right. Maybe clearer messaging is the answer. I had no idea that that was the norm.

One more UI request: Given two points, there are two possible third points on an equilateral triangle, and no clear way to choose between them.

Great game, though. I'm on level 5 and having a lot of fun.

The entry on Warp in "The Performance of Open Source Applications" was similarly fascinating.

http://aosabook.org/en/posa/warp.html

Parts 2, 3, and 4 are here:

http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/1405/index....

http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/1405/index....

http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/1405/index....

I would alter your list to say that a competent software engineer working together with a scientist > a scientist taking a thoughtful approach > a sloppy scientist > someone who is neither a competent software engineer nor a thoughtful scientist.

From the article and your comment above, it sounds to me like you have had to work with a terrible programmer who ranted about best practices to cover for his incompetence. We've all worked with someone like that, even in software shops. Don't tar us all with that brush.

My strategy is to do sun salutations until my body fully warms up, and then do a handful of (usually standing) poses that seem like they'd feel good. It may take me 10 or 15 minutes.

More is great, of course, but even a brief session does wonders.

Wear shoes and clothes you can move in. It really is one of the coolest indoor spaces I've ever seen.

The headline is over the top, but the article was pretty levelheaded. From the penultimate paragraph:

"[...] Freitas points out that if someone is monitoring your internet traffic — or mass monitoring internet users — they’d still be able to find your IP address (Freitas suggests those looking for additional protection consider the Tor Project‘s anonmity software)."

Based on this account, I imagine that being a psychopath confers some advantage for just about our entire history as creatures that can form and execute plans.

Being a sincere participant in social groups has probably provided an advantage for just as long, if not longer.

I'm sure that there are entities who have $150m in cash lying around. Drug cartels come to mind.

For anyone wondering about the acronyms above, ECB is Electronic Codebook, CBC is Cipher-block Chaining, and IV is an Initialization Vector used in CBC. IND-CPA is Indistinguishability under chosen-plaintext, a method of attack.

These are explained at [1] and [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext_indistinguishability

That was very informative, thanks.

Forgive my ignorance, but I inherited a wad of xslt fairly recently, and it seems frustrating and verbose to me.

What do you like about it? Can you point me to some examples of good code?

The tone of the first paragraph was jarring. "Most professionals" are classist, judgmental pieces of shit? What?

No, for two reasons.

First, Humble Bundle scales. They can pull together a handful of artists to offer some MP3s, and sell it to the whole world. Groupon has to negotiate with small businesses in every market that they want to have a presence.

Secondly, the nature of the goods on offer is different, in that a restaurant or cafe has considerable marginal costs associated with each sale, whereas a comedian selling MP3s has no marginal costs, and even the Humble Bundle team has almost no marginal costs. The Humble Bundle team spends a few cents on bandwidth for each sale, and the artist only loses hypothetical future sales at a higher price.

(edit: pluralized "business")

I believe Spooky meant "trivially avoided" rather than "resulting in trivial damage."

> better concentration, and better impulse control.

I have not done a 10 day sit as described in TFA, but I've had a passably regular Vipassana-style meditation practice for a few years now, and concentration and impulse control have been two major benefits in my life.

One thing that comes with impulse control, but I find valuable enough to merit mentioning on its own, is that I am now much better at letting go of thoughts. I used to have difficulty with intrusive thoughts--fantasies of violence or humiliation that would play on loop in my mind. Now, they appear, drift once through my mind, and are gone. This also applies to getting songs stuck in my head.

For context, I grew up in the Christian church, identify as atheist, and have only a mild intellectual interest in the spiritual trappings of the tradition from which meditation comes to me.

> If you can have a 32 character password it is more likely to be forgotten.

I disagree. There are many long passwords that are easier to remember than a short password. Just to make up an example, I might use "WakeGrindTampInfusePourSip" as a password--it's the sequence of actions that lead to my morning caffeine fix. Compare that to a password that must be between 6 and 12 characters, with one lowercase letter, one capital letter, one numeral, and no special characters. Nothing in my life maps readily onto that schema except for my AOL password from 1996, so I'm going to make something up on the spot, forget it immediately, and rely on the password reset functionality every time I want to log in.