Ratufa

If he wanted to make a public statement and get publicity for his views, $440 to get on the BBC and various other news outlets seems like a good deal.

When you talk about "increase in beehives", are you referring to hives that are managed by a beekeeper, or hives created by wild bees, and not managed by a human? When you talk about "fewer live bees", are you referring to wild bees, or bees in a managed hive? In my previous post, I was only referring to managed hives.

Active hives have increased because beekeepers have reacted to the increase in bee die-offs by splitting hives and otherwise increasing the number of hives they have. This causes an increase in demand for queens, and companies that sell queens will have more hives in order to meet that demand. Also, simple economic growth is a possible contributor to the increase in number of hives.

I'd rather not "imagine" anything or speculate what a "sane judge" would think. What criminal law is being broken, given what we know? If you think it's obvious consider that sexual harassment in the workplace is usually considered a civil, not a criminal matter (though, in some circumstances it can be criminal).

As for the evidence, we don't really know what evidence exists in this particular case, but it seems premature to assume an e-mail trail or testimony other than the "he said/she said" variety.

For the people saying she should go to the police about this: what crime (meaning something that would be criminally prosecuted as opposed to something that might be the cause of a civil suit) do you believe has been committed in this case (I'm not a lawyer; I don't know)? There was no mention of physical assault in the blog post. Even if this incident broke some law, how would there possibly be enough evidence to prosecute?

Wrt the argument that these things happen because guys will be guys or because nerds have grudges against women: That may be a reason, but it's not an excuse for this sort of behavior. People should be expected to act professionally when in a professional context.

As for whether publicly naming names accomplishes anything: If a person's sense of professionalism (not to mention simple human decency) is low enough to engage in blatant sexual harassment, they clearly need some external incentive to not behave in this way. How does that incentive get provided if the people being harassed keep it to themselves?

Is there any good evidence that the main problem with our schools is bad teaching? In other words, if you're going to spend money on improving educational outcomes, should you spend it on "better" teachers or on something like early childhood interventions, as per arguments like this:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/james-heckman-educ...

(Ignoring for the moment that spending people's tax dollars on better teachers is politically more acceptable than spending it on targeted interventions.)

Yes. Beazley's essential reference is the way to go. The docs at the Python website are still essential for some things, though, since newer 2.X versions of Python often have minor changes/additions from previous versions, such as library changes and backports from Python 3.

That apple collects "non-personal" location data isn't a secret. Look at their privacy policy:

http://www.apple.com/privacy/

Some details as to what and why they collect data was provided by Apple to Congress last year:

http://markey.house.gov/docs/applemarkeybarton7-12-10.pdf

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/Apple-T...

Some additional information as to what's going on is at:

http://alexlevinson.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/3-new-thoughts-...

Note the emphasis in all of this on "non-personal". As somebody else pointed out, Steve Jobs is technically correct in the statement he (supposedly) made.

One of the things driving this is that e-publishing has lowered the entry barrier for people who write "genre fiction". It's easier to get published and put your work out where an audience can find it. By "genre fiction", I mean stuff like military science fiction or vampire romances, etc, that has emotional appeal to a fairly specific audience. In the days before e-publishing, John Norman's Gor books would pretty obvious example of that sort of niche-appeal content.

For this sort of fiction, "well-written" is less important than pushing the right buttons (the plots are usually fairly predictable). To use an analogy, the rise of e-publishing is similar to the rise of blogging, in that they both allow for the easy production and consumption of targeted content (and predictable button-pushing is the raison d'etre of many blogs, particularly those discussing politics).

Note, I'm not claiming all e-publishing is genre-fiction or poorly written, just like all blogs don't fall into the predictable button-pushing category.

Yes, there are multiple issues: one of which is whether or not the government should be paying for NPR and foreign aid at all. But, what I think the original poster was responding to, and what the main purpose of the "receipt" is, is that most (or at at least very many) people don't know how government spending is apportioned.

Good "dictionaries" for doing on-line brute-force attacks don't just contain words, they contain likely passwords. Guidelines for choosing good passwords should point this out. For example, something like "J4fS!2" is a much much more secure password in terms of protection from on-line attacks than "letmein" or "chang3m3" or "tryandguessthis" or "password123" or "root!@#" or "b4ckm3upsc077y". All of those passwords are actual passwords taken from the list used by an SSH brute-force password cracker.

Because people aren't random when they choose words to remember (e.g. "beavisandbuthead" is also on that list), a better set of password-choosing directions would provide instructions one how to add some additional (pseudo-)randomness to passwords that are being created. The classic "pick a phrase, take the first letters + punctuation" method is one way to do that ("pap,ttfl+p" is a somewhat strong password), and it's not hard to think of other password generation schemes that also create strong passwords.

I think that the overall causes of obesity are fairly complex --- there's not some simple cause one can point to that is "the problem". But, threads like this one and the recent HN thread about Western diets remind me of this set of photos on "what the world eats":

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_137366...

Which provides some evidence that how Americans get their carbs in 2011 is likely very different from how they got their carbs in 1914. For example:

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_137369...

and

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519_137374...

Maybe one reason to encourage comments in source code is not to waste the time of good programmers who write clear code, but to help everyone who has to deal with unclear code written by not-so-good programmers.

An opinion on those conclusions from someone who is not Steve Sailer:

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh122410.shtml#MINION

If you would like to verify his data, the source is here:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004.pdf

Both of these are good tools --- you won't go too far wrong no matter which one you choose.

In brief:

The strength of Mercurial is that it has a fairly simple set of basic commands. These commands are easy to use and the documentation for these commands is way less daunting than those for git commands. Using Mercurial out of the box, without enabling extensions, it is harder to screw things up in a way that destroys history. At the same time, it may be harder to manipulate the contents of a Mercurial repository in ways you want. However, there are extensions for Mercurial, some third-party, some that come with the system, that let you do many of the manipulations that git provides.

Git's command set and UI are more complicated than Mercurial's. But, you don't have to learn them all at once, so just getting to a point where you can get basic stuff done isn't difficult. The strength of git is that it has fairly straightforward conceptual underpinnings, and once you start thinking of commands in terms of how they manipulate the underlying structure of your repository (see, for example, http://www.slideshare.net/chacon/getting-git for details), it's a very empowering system (or, if you're a pessimist, you've been given enough rope).

A not uncommon pattern is for people to start out with Mercurial, perhaps because the learning curve isn't as steep or because it had clearly better Windows support at one time, and then switch to git as their usage pattern requires more complicated functionality than Mercurial easily provides. An example of this is: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2010/8/17/git-and-mercurial-branchin...

To a large extent, the focus on Social Security budget shortfalls in these pieces is like the punchline in the joke about why the drunk guy is looking under the lamp post for his keys when he lost them in the alley: "Because the light is better here." Rising Medicare/Medicaid costs are a much bigger long-term budget issue than Social Security, but coming up with realistic-sounding proposals to improve Social Security's fiscal status is relatively easy (and less politically radioactive) compared to controlling medical costs.

Still, I think that blog post really drops the ball by not even mentioning Medicare/Medicaid as budget problems.

Somehow, I'm not comforted by reassurances that an AGI is likely to have a human-like value system, given how humans have often treated other humans who are 1) Different from themselves in some way and 2) Technologically more primitive.

Your scenarios, while technically accurate, leave something out. Here's another version:

D) Your child spends his/her high-school years mowing lawns, doing part-time jobs, etc, in order to save some money to help pay their way through college. You encourage them to do so. The money earned is put in a jar. You take that money, replace it with an IOU, and use it to pay for household expenses along with more frivolous things. Now it's college time and you scramble to find the money to pay the IOUs.

The problem with tax evasion in a democracy is that, when combined with a government's ability to borrow money, it removes the one of the main reasons why voters should care about how much the government spends. If you don't pay taxes, government spending is free money, at least until the debt burden becomes obviously unsustainable and things start falling apart as a result.

One reason this is unlikely to pass is that Congress likes renewable tax breaks because 1) It gives Congress an "accomplishment" they can brag about. 2) Members of Congress like being lobbied for tax breaks for businesses because it allows them to extract campaign contributions and other favors. 3) They are a bunch of egotists who like being treated like VIPs by people asking them for things.

The public can do something about it --- people can make it clear that they support (additional) legislation to restrict what information companies can collect and what they can do with it. But, it's not clear that the public is willing to make this an issue that influences their vote enough to overcome resistance to such laws by companies that benefit from collecting and selling personal data.

As for the government vs private company distinction: It seems pretty likely to me that most information that a company collects about a person will, eventually, become available to the government (Gruber touched on this). It may take a warrant, national security letter, or additional legislation for the government to be able to obtain it, but the usefulness of this data for various government functions (e.g. anti-terrorism, tracking fugitives, mining the data for tax cheats, etc) is too high.

I have similar issues at times. One cause (for me, at least) might be anxiety -- if you are very worried about a failure or have had negative experiences with evaluation of your work, it can carry over into small tasks. Our brains can be pretty clever about avoiding stressors. Bringing your work with you at all times (e.g. always thinking about some problem) doesn't help.

Some suggestions that sometimes work for me:

Get enough sleep (though, sometimes I find that lack of sleep, to a point, can help with focus, especially if paired with loud music).

Cut down on the caffeine.

Segment your time. Specifically allocate blocks of time to do something totally unrelated to work (see a movie, read some mindless fiction, whatever you like to do for fun). Make an effort not to think about your work projects during those periods.

Exercise and/or meditate.

Train yourself to be mindful of what you are doing, so that you catch yourself when you switch from work to some distracter.

When you sit down to work, use a timer to set how long (at a minimum) you will stay on task. When you feel yourself starting to drift during that time, close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing for a minute or so, then back to work.

If all else fails, you can try psychotherapy, but shop around for a therapist who specializes in this sort of disorder (adult ADHD would be one way to classify it). The person you visit will probably try to prescribe some drug as treatment. From my experience (long ago), Ritalin really really worked as a focus-enhancer -- perhaps too well, in some ways -- though the side-effects were unpleasant enough not to want to use it for very long periods.

This sounds like the same idea as:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1463751

My initial reactions:

1. Yeah, it's true that there are some people who have addiction "issues" with porn to that point that it negatively affects their lives. Some people have obsessive/addictive reactions to lots of other things as well: alcohol and other drugs, gambling, food (I'm referring to eating disorders, not our need to eat to stay alive), WoW, etc.

2. For most addictive things, there develops an "industry" around them that thrives on sensationalizing and over-stating the problems caused. As one example, this article tries to create a link by association between declining birth rates and porn.

3. The rise of anti-<whatever> groups usually leads to calls for legislation, and such legislation quite often has nasty unintended consequences (cf Prohibition, the war on marijuana use, etc). Even if that article is partially accurate about the effect of porn on some people, the correct actions to take, if any, are probably not the obvious ones.

My prediction: as soon as "DYI Bio" begins to have any real-world impact (or gets enough publicity), it will be banned/heavily regulated, at least within the US. It is too easy to come up with alarming scenarios if an accident happens or if the technology gets misused (which fits in very well with the current anti-terrorism rhetoric). Also, many corporations will not welcome the lack of control over some of the technology that a successful DYI Bio movement would bring, so they will lobby for "protection".

Whether or not you are correct, your post would be greatly improved if it gave reasons why many of the comments are ignorant, or at least provided a specific critique of one of the more representative ones.

This sounds very much like some of the theories that one hears when talking about the causes of procrastination when faced with an overwhelming task. For example, the quoted section here:

http://lifehacker.com/5508417/the-overwhelming-wave-that-mak...

One difference between the two cases is that the situation with many of the poor may be such that the problem they are facing may be unsolvable (i.e. it's not just a matter of 'getting to work') or at least unsolvable given the current framing of the problem. This means that the rational solutions that people suggest for procrastination problems, such as breaking the current task into small chunks, are not rational solutions to the problems the poor face. Hence the bee sting theory.

Bookwise, some places to start for general overviews of economics are:

"New Ideas from Dead Economists" by Todd Buchholtz

"Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan

Blogwise:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ is entertaining and filled with good insights from a libertarian point of view.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/ has more centrist/liberal views on a variety of economic issues and has a good set of links to daily economic-related blog posts from various points of view.

The above blogs have enough links to other blogs to get you started, and they will give you different points of view on current topics.

That isn't a "misconception", at least not wrt the US. As others have pointed out, a VAT is being suggested by some people as a way for the government to raise additional revenue. A typical argument (this from a libertarian-oriented economist) might be something like:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/02...

Since, as the blogger put it, "The former communists running Russia apparently understand tax policy better than the buffoons in charge of U.S. tax policy.", he must be in favor of the US having a VAT, like Russia does.