More welfare or more weekend? On a Universal Basic Income, full employment and avoiding libertarian traps It's the summer of 1986. Top Gun and Glasnost and the depths of a renewed Cold War—a war the Eastern Bloc is losing. Reagan is in the middle of his second term. Thatcher is set to win her third in just under a year. Socialist French President François Mitterand has long since abandoned the radical programme he was elected on in the face of capital flight, rising inflation and economic sabotage. It is beginning to be more than clear to some on the left that the rightward turn that began in the late seventies across much of the West is no temporary set-back or routine swinging of the political pendulum that would very soon be corrected with a revival of working class militancy.
Amid the spreading demoralization, a paper appears in an academic journal that embraces the despair and yet simultaneously aims to provide new hope. “Prospects for the Left look bleak indeed. It’s a worker’s paradise. As economists C.M.A. How Art Became Irrelevant - Commentary Magazine. ‘Not a Math Person’: How to Remove Obstacles to Learning Math. Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler spends a lot of time worrying about how math education in the United States traumatizes kids. Recently, a colleague’s 7-year-old came home from school and announced he didn’t like math anymore. His mom asked why and he said, “math is too much answering and not enough learning.”
This story demonstrates how clearly kids understand that unlike their other courses, math is a performative subject, where their job is to come up with answers quickly. Boaler says that if this approach doesn’t change, the U.S. will always have weak math education. “There’s a widespread myth that some people are math people and some people are not,” Boaler told a group of parents and educators gathered at the 2015 Innovative Learning Conference. “But it turns out there’s no such thing as a math brain.” “We live in a society with lots of kids who don’t believe they are good at math,” Boaler said at an Education Writers Association conference.
Little Man Computer - CPU simulator. The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps. The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps By Tiago Forte of Forte Labs At the end of 2014 I received an email informing me that I had read over a million words in the ‘read it later’ app Pocket over the course of the year. This number by itself isn’t impressive, considering our daily intake of information is equivalent to 34 gigabytes, 100,000 words, or 174 newspapers, depending on who you ask. What makes this number significant (in my view) is that it represents 22 books’-worth of long-form reading that would not have happened without a system in place. We’ve made a habit of filling those hundred random spaces in our day with glances at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. But those glances have slowly become stares, and those stares have grown to encompass a major portion of our waking hours. The end result is the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram (the global average) complains that she has “no time” for reading.
I’m not talking about basic literacy. Read It. 1. 2. 3. 4. A Good Vimrc. Posted January 21th, 2014 How To Vimrc There is just one rule you must follow when crafting your own .vimrc. Don't put any lines in your vimrc that you don't understand. There are tons of tutorials such as this one on the internet that contain all kinds of awesome hacks to make your Vim better, but the absolute worst way to make your environment better is to just copy it wholesale from others.
Spending the time to actually learn what's going into the construction of your editor is invaluable. With that said, the rest of this article will be me explaining each and every line in my current vimrc in its entirety with the hope that you will find some tricks you haven't seen before. I will break it up into logical sections. This article will almost certainly fall out of date with my vimrc in the very near future.
Colors colorscheme badwolf " awesome colorscheme Colors! Moving on: syntax enable " enable syntax processing The comment should be enough to describe this one. Spaces & Tabs UI Config Folding. The Power of a Dollar. The new issue of Jacobin, centering on development and the Global South, is out now. To celebrate its release, new subscriptions start at only $14.95. Thirty years ago the international development community was ecstatic. It had found the perfect market-affirming solution to poverty in developing countries: microcredit. The popularizer of this new strategy — which consisted of providing small loans to the poor so they could launch self-employment ventures — was the US-trained Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, who portrayed microcredit as a panacea that would rapidly create an unlimited number of jobs and eradicate endemic poverty.
Yunus’s project of “bringing capitalism down to the poor” quickly turned him into the go-to-guy for advice on how best to address global poverty. The microcredit movement was born. By the mid-2000s, the model was being described as the most effective anti-poverty and “bottom-up” development intervention of all time. Heightening Immiseration. Understanding Infrastructure as Code. Feyerabend on empiricism and sola scriptura. In his essay “Classical Empiricism,” available in Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend compares the empiricism of the early moderns to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.
He suggests that there are important parallels between them; in particular, he finds them both incoherent, and for the same reasons. (No, Feyerabend is not doing Catholic apologetics. He’s critiquing empiricism.) To understand Feyerabend’s comparison, we need to be clear on what “empiricism” is. But they are decidedly not the sorts of thing empiricism as it developed from Locke to the logical positivists regards as immediately knowable via experience.
For example, they presuppose memory of recent events in light of which what you are experiencing now is best described in terms of a gunman or an apple. Notoriously, attempts to reconstruct everyday knowledge and scientific knowledge from such purportedly more basic statements all fail. Blog : Network Container. TL;DR: If you’re going to put the network in user space, then put the network in user space. For the past six months we’ve been heads-down at ZeroTier, completely buried in code. We’ve been working on several things: Android and iOS versions of the ZeroTier One network endpoint service (Android is out, iOS coming soon), a new web UI that is now live for ZeroTier hosted networks and will soon be available for on-site enterprise use as well, and a piece of somewhat more radical technology we call Network Containers. We’ve been at Hashiconf in Portland this week.
Network Containers isn’t quite ready for a true release yet, but all the talk of multi-everything agile deployment around here motivated us to put together an announcement and a preview so users can get a taste of what’s in store. Background We’ve watched the Docker networking ecosystem evolve for the past two or more years. Cattle Should Live in Pens A popular phrase among container-happy devops folks today is “cattle, not pets.” I tried three apps that claim to make you more likable—and am now addicted to one of them. I have a confession to make: I might have cheated to get this job. Last spring, when I was applying to Fusion, I heard about a new start-up called Crystal that promised to, among other things, help you write the perfect email. Crystal scrapes the web for public data on a person, from sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn, and then feeds it into an algorithm to figure out their personality and the best way to talk to them.
Think of it like a data-driven cheat sheet for what to say and how to say it. Before emailing Alexis Madrigal, Fusion’s Editor-in-Chief, I navigated over to Crystal and entered his name into the search bar. It spat out this: Per Crystal’s instructions, I included an exclamation point in my email to Alexis so that even my brief note confirming when and where to meet sounded “emotionally expressive.” My pre-interview online stalking seemed to pay off: the interview went great. Obviously, I looked her up on Crystal, too. I got the job. Htty.github.io. S s .uef^" :8 :8 .. :d88E .88 .88 @L `888E :888ooo :888ooo 9888i .dL 888E .z8k -*8888888 -*8888888 `Y888k:*888. 888E~?
888L 8888 8888 888E 888I 888E 888E 8888 8888 888E 888I 888E 888E 8888 8888 888E 888I 888E 888E .8888Lu= .8888Lu= 888E 888I 888E 888E ^%888* ^%888* x888N><888' m888N= 888> 'Y" 'Y" "88" 888 `Y" 888 __ .__ 88F J88" _/ |_| |__ ____ 98" @% \ __\ | \_/ __ \ . /" :" | | | Y \ ___/ ~` |__| |___| /\___ > __________\/_____\/____________________ / | \__ ___/\__ ___/\______ \ / ~ \| | | | | ___/ \ Y /| | | | | | \___|_ / |____| |____| |____| ______\/___________________.___. \__ ___/\__ ___/\__ | | | | | | / | | | | | | \____ | |____| |____| / ______| \/ htty is a console application for interacting with web servers.
It’s a fun way to explore web APIs and to learn the ins and outs of HTTP. See what’s changed lately by reading the project history. It couldn’t be much easier. $ gem install htty You’ll need Ruby and RubyGems. The things you can do with htty are: Querying a web service. Reconstructing and deconstructing the self: cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice: Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Mobile TCP optimization - lessons learned in production.
Jepsen. In the previous Jepsen analysis of RethinkDB, we tested single-document reads, writes, and conditional writes, under network partitions and process pauses. RethinkDB did not exhibit any nonlinearizable histories in those tests. However, testing with more aggressive failure modes, on both 2.1.5 and 2.2.3, has uncovered a subtle error in Rethink’s cluster membership system. This error can lead to stale reads, dirty reads, lost updates, node crashes, and table unavailability requiring an unsafe emergency repair. Versions 2.2.4 and 2.1.6, released last week, address this issue. Until now, Jepsen tests have used a stable cluster membership throughout the test. We typically run the system being tested on five nodes, and although the network topology between the nodes may change, processes may crash and restart, and the system may elect new nodes as leaders, we do not introduce or remove nodes from the system while it is running.
Lessons learned from reading postmortems. Lessons learned from reading postmortems I love reading postmortems. They’re educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven’t done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but there are a handful of postmortem patterns that I keep seeing over and over again. Error Handling Proper error handling code is hard.
For more on this, Ding Yuan et al. have a great paper and talk: Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems. The full paper has a lot of gems that that I mostly won’t describe here. Configuration Configuration bugs, not code bugs, are the most common cause I’ve seen of really bad outages. I don’t mean to pick on large cloud companies, either. Hardware Basically every part of a machine can fail. Failover from bad components can also fail. Humans. Experiments in refactored perception A Children’s Picture-book Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of ideas in graduate-level theoretical physics.
But I’ll try to make this introduction in the gentlest and most palatable way I can think of: with simple-minded pictures and essentially no math. To set the stage for this first lesson in quantum field theory, let’s imagine, for a moment, that you are a five-year-old child. You, the child, are talking to an adult, who is giving you one of your first lessons in science.
Science, says the adult, is mostly a process of figuring out what things are made of. Everything in the world is made from smaller pieces, and it can be exciting to find out what those pieces are and how they work. A car, for example, is made from metal pieces that fit together in specially-designed ways. This is an intoxicating idea: everything is made from something. What are people made of? Biologist%20fix%20radio. Digital Reality. Digital is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. In computing there's a notion of a sign bit error, where you calculate something and you get one bit wrong, so the sign is the opposite of what it should be, which means everything you calculate is the opposite of what it's supposed to be. There's a sense in which that's happening right now in maybe three different areas. Claude Shannon wrote the best master's thesis ever when he was at MIT, inventing digital.
He went on to Bell Labs and did two core things. The one that's most interesting for me is he proved the first threshold theorem. What he showed is you can communicate reliably even though the communication medium is unreliable; that's what digital means. The sobering lesson from Bob Lucky is the resolution of the battle was death. Around that time, computers were analog. We have digital communication; we have digital computation.
Digital fabrication, in that sense, dates back to 1952. That's the revolution. What is work? Codage obligatoire pour tous : quel intérêt? (image piquée sur cyberzone.biz) L’excellent @berewt porte à ma connaissance un projet de loi (n° 2022 du 11 juin 2014), « visant à rendre obligatoire l’enseignement du code informatique à l’école », projet qui me semble instinctivement aussi sot que grenu. En tant que professionnel de l’informatique, habitué à me pencher sur des problématiques de management des systèmes d’information d’une entreprise, les quelques réflexions au sujet de cette proposition de loi (PPL) devraient présenter quelque intérêt. Enseigner le code informatique à l’école primaire : l’idée de la PPL me prend de court. Je la croyais cantonnée à quelques éditocrates américains qui, poussés par la montée irrésistible de la « consumérisation », cherchaient à se préparer au jour où il serait tant facile de développer une app sur smartphone que tout le monde le ferait.
Revenons en France. Le contexte est celui du développement logiciel dans une entreprise. Alors essayons de voir si l’on peut conclure. Bconway/resflash. How to Read in College | Easily Distracted. Staying Afloat: Some Scattered Suggestions on Reading in College The first thing you should know about reading in college is that it bears little or no resemblance to the sort of reading you do for pleasure, or for your own edification. Professors assign more than you can possibly read in any normal fashion. We know it, at least most of us do.You have to make strategic decisions about what to read and how to read it. You’re reading for particular reasons: to get background on important issues, to illuminate some of the central issues in a single session of one course, to raise questions for discussion. That calls for a certain kind of smash-and-grab approach to reading.You can’t afford to dilly-dally and stop to smell the lilies.
So okay, if you’re not going to read everything with intense precision and in gory detail, then how are yougoing to read it? The first rule, in some ways the only rule, is skim, skim, skim. Let me take you through a skim of this book, bit by bit. 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. University students are afraid of everything | Paul Minda's Blog. NaSC. A Year of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom - Less Wrong Discussion. A 4 Leveraging Openflow to create a Large Scale and Cost Effective Packet Capture Network.
Google postmaster tool. Depression’s Upside. Online MBSR (free) Cognitive distortion. Introducing Kale. Fossdroid: Free and open source Android apps. Explained Visually. The Xen Project - Next Generation Cloud: The Rise of the Unikernel (UPDATED APRIL 2015) The ribosome as a missing link in the evolution of life. More scientists doubt salt is as bad for you as the government says. Flockport Labs - Extending layer 2 across container hosts. Hard Drive SMART Stats | Backblaze Blog | The Life of a Cloud Backup Company. A Survival Guide for the Small Mail Server. Mes élèves, un drame et des mots.
Tänzer: Documentation. Emscripten #tweet. Why Stoicism is one of the best mind-hacks ever – Lary Wallace. Cyrus IMAP and SASL — Cyrus IMAP and SASL documentation.