I comment rarely, but had to chime in as the ACA was very important to me in terms of starting a company.
The ACA also allowed me to pursue founding a company. 6 months before the ACA kicked in, I left my job to start a robotics company. As I was only 29 years old, I did not think it would be a problem getting individual health insurance -- I had done it in the past when attempting my first venture.
What ended up happening was that every health insurance company rejected me for having the pre-existing condition of asthma! It made no sense as I was very healthy and my asthma under control as long as I took a control inhaler everyday. The cost of my medicine would be way less than the premiums I paid -- but some actuary somewhere decided I was too high risk!
For 6 months, I was scared of getting sick or injured -- to the point where I was considering giving up to get a job just for health insurance. That thought to me was just so ridiculous and heartbreaking that I couldn't do it --I just kept telling myself that I had to make it to Jan 1.
I was overjoyed the day I got my insurance card -- it was a huge sense of relief. What brought me even more joy was knowing all my fellow Americans whom also could not get or afford insurance could finally receive it.
Today I no longer need the ACA -- our company is doing great, we're well-capitalized, and provide excellent health insurance to all of our employees. Without the ACA, this dream would not have been possible. We were able to create wealth and jobs because of the ACA -- it makes no sense to repeal it.
Even before I needed the ACA -- I had enough empathy to know that every person has the right to health care and one of the biggest reasons I voted for President Obama. When it affected me personally, it obviously hit even harder. The GOP's lack of empathy as well as a real solution to the problem are just infuriating -- it is absolutely shameful and disgusting how they are attempting to repeal this law.
elon = grit, as an entrepreneur when i have dark times, i'll read about him to get amped. my favorite quote: "Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work." -- back in 2008 after the SpaceX Falcon rocket failed to make orbit 3 times. More context: http://dcurt.is/elon-musks-determination
Interesting to note that when he said that, in the third quarter of 2008, he was in the middle of a complete implosion across everything in his life. Adds a very dramatic quality to it.
That's a great question. Here's my take on it:
I switched from Windows to Linux over a decade ago...but as somebody that has to often write a lot of C/C++ code, man do I miss Visual C++. I've gone through all the IDEs (Eclipse, Code::Blocks, Anjuta, QtCreator, etc). QtCreator comes close for me, but I feel most comfortable with Sublime Text and a terminal for compiling/debugging/profiling.
Visual C++'s intellisense actually worked...not perfectly, but much better than what I've seen on Linux (QtCreator is close). Their debugger quality, source control integration, profiler integration, target code quality, compiler error messages/feedback, a call browser (a feature I still can't find on any other IDE, not the same as grep)...all wonderful. All of that stuff can be leveraged for writing cross platform code, including the Linux kernel. I know it sounds insane to use a Windows-specific IDE, but VC++ is that good of an IDE. Personally I would think it's way more trouble than it's worth, but apparently the OP felt otherwise :)
I don't have many good things to say about Microsoft's products, but for Visual Studio I only have praise. MS has always excelled with compilers, languages, development tools. People mock Steve Ballmer for his "developers, developers, developers!!!" rant, but IMO MS's dev toolchain is a big part of how they attracted developers and achieved market domination.
Look, I love OCaml and it's my favorite language syntax-wise, but the real big elephant in the room is not its JS-backend maturity. Rather it doesn't have kernel thread support...all threads are user-level just like Python due to a global lock for garbage collection. This means threads do not run concurrently across multiple cores. This is UNACCEPTABLE in 2014 - roughly 8 years since processors went multi-core. Intel is talking about having hundreds of cores on a single die by next decade and having programs that can't take advantage of that is extremely limiting.
Xavier Leroy (the creator of OCaml) and his team at INRIA didn't think this was a big deal because when they were writing this stuff, processors were single core and had been since the beginning. Sure there were multiprocessor machines (not the same as multicore as there are multiple die), but those were only meant for servers/workstations. OCaml seemed very promising around 2006, the peak and end of the single core era with the Intel Pentium 4. What made OCaml so impressive was not only was it this beautifully simple, high-level functional language, but that the native compiler produced very fast code that was comparable to C/C++ performance. However, as multicore processors were introduced (Intel Core, Core 2), not having this capability made writing new code in OCaml less appealing. There are solutions like MPI, but that's lame. The same excuses you hear in the Python world about having true multithreading you hear in the OCaml world. Microsoft was able to do it with F#, which is essentially a clone of Caml by targeting their .NET CLR. Haskell is able to do it with GHC.
I still think OCaml is a wonderful language -- not having true multithreading doesn't make it useless. However, to me it has become more like a statically-typed Python which I can use for scripting. Having to use hacks like MPI to do multicore processing is a huge turn off in a multicore world. This is again nothing against the language, but the standard implementation needs a concurrent garbage collector and kernel threads. Otherwise I think OCaml may be doomed to irrelevance in the long run, which would be truly sad.
That being said you can still use multiple cores by using multiple processes, and that doesn't necesarelly imply MPI.
OCamlNet (and probably some other libraries) provide a way to communicate between multiple OCaml processes.
Good to see work is being done on it, but until it's in the main implementation for at least a year...I wouldn't trust it on anything that matters.
The advantage of kernel threads is that they have way less overhead than a process (both in context size as well as more efficient memory caching at processor and OS level)...though more than a user-level thread. If there isn't any sort of message passing between two processes, the only mechanism I can think of of sharing data is shared memory (i.e and mmap) which is just as efficient as threads sharing the same process heap...but awkward (yes there are sockets, file IO, signals, queues, etc, but not as efficient). Even if OCaml provides a way to abstract that to be more palatable + safe -- my argument is that in a multicore world, kernel threads must be a first class citizen and the programmer shouldn't have to resort to tricks to harness it -- otherwise it's a major flaw that is going to prevent future adaptation. Also, as the number of cores increase, this is going to matter more and more...so hopefully this stuff gets out in the wild soon.
The multithreading situation in Haskell is pretty exciting. Simon Marlow's Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell is the best new programming book I've picked up in a long time. And there are new developments since he wrote it (http://www.haskellcast.com/episode/004-simon-marlow-on-paral...). It would be a shame to give all that up.
What's interesting about Haskell in this regard is due to the pure functional nature, the Church-Rosser theorem applies...every function call could be executed in its own thread without protecting any resources with locks/mutexes/etc! I haven't studied the compiler design of Haskell, do you know if the compiler can delegate function calls to a thread pool automatically?
I don't think multicore will be touted as a reason to choose OCaml over Haskell, but it will remove one of the reasons to avoid OCaml. Subtle but important difference :)
It won't though. Because it'll still be a decade behind haskell. People want more than just "ok, you can use multiple OS threads now". They want a concurrent IO manager, painless and seemless multiplexing of low cost green threads over OS threads, and high level concurrency and parallelism constructs. It is going to take a long time for ocaml to catch up to haskell in this department, and who knows what haskell is going to be offering by then.
Yeah, I should've addressed this in my post. Right now multicore doesn't mean squat to me as I'm using it for JavaScript support. I did investigate this, but forgot to add the links (others have already replied with) about work that is progressing nicely.
I'll update the post once this traffic calms down a bit :)
As somebody who spent a few years in Saudi Arabia (as well as visiting some of its fellow oil rich neighbors)...I can confirm this problem which is endemic to all rich Middle Eastern countries. As an American of Indian ethnicity (I can speak Hindi), I was able to see how people from these countries treat folks from the Indian subcontinent.
They're all basically nouveau-riche. They bring in what is slave labor/indentured servitude from poorer countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, etc. They clean the toilets, they serve the food at McDonalds, they build every house and skyscraper, the work the oil fields...in other words all the dirty jobs. Likewise people from western countries are brought into do the white collar work -- doctors, engineers, architects, etc....though they're having a blast.
I would say the situation is analogous to illegal immigrants from Mexico in the US -- but believe it or not we're way way way way way nicer to our illegal immigrants than these countries are to their legal immigrants! They live in terrible and barbaric conditions very similar to those described in the article. What makes it all so horrid is the disparity in wealth between the way they live and the way the elites live. If you're in Dubai, you can go snowboarding on a ski slope inside a shopping mall -- built by some guy who's in the outskirts of the city, sleeping in a hot tin can with 12 other guys, a broken AC, completely sore body, and sun burnt skin. You'll sometimes see Arab guys screaming at/assaulting these people at stores, shops, or taxis as if they're feudal lords talking to their peasants.
My father calls these immigrants heroes. They take shit (physically, verbally, mentally) you and I could not imagine just to send back the equivalent of $100-$200 a month to their families back home. That small amount of money enables them to educate their kids, feed their family, build homes, businesses, etc. They dream of the day they get to return home and finally see their families again.
As I always used to tell my students, your degree is just a piece of paper that helps you get your foot in the door. Its worth is equivalent to the effort and energy you put into it. Those that work hard and are passionate about their major, whether it be computer science or whether it be philosophy -- they'll end up doing well in their chosen fields -- or at the very least grow as people. If you're really into what you study, spend a lot of your extracurricular activities in related areas (e.g. being in debate club if you're a political science major), and are excited about working in a field pertaining to your major, you will do well. If you came just to party, socialize, and not major in something that you didn't care about or find challenging...you'll likely not get your return on the investment. I majored with plenty of people in computer science, some were even able to cheat their way to decent grades. However, we all know how well that works when you have to sit down for an interview at Google or wherever and you have a blank stare when you can't tell the difference between a binary tree and an apple tree. Your computer science degree in that case is almost worthless.
So it's worth it if you know what you're getting yourself into. Some people think it's just a rubber stamp to a job that pays a minimum of $50K a year somewhere in the city where they can continue partying. Not true unfortunately. I knew since I was a child what I wanted to study...for most the answer is not that easy. I always suggest that if you don't know what you want to do, don't go into debt by going to college without a plan. Do something else -- join peace corps, volunteer, get an apprenticeship...maybe join a community college first. Getting a college education is one of the most fantastic and redefining experiences a person can have -- you may only have one shot and should feel blessed you have that opportunity. Don't squander it.
I think this is a fantastic concept with lots of potential! I especially loved the tongue-in-cheek humor -- "Eternal moral vigilance is no laughing matter."
In my opinion, deleting code is fine...however you should 1) be warned that it will happen in the near future if you do nothing about it and 2) it should be tied to some version control system (e.g. GitHub) where it pushes the deletes (maybe even creating a branch and remerging it so the changes are clear) so that code can be recovered if need be.
Vigil can maybe even have some logic built in if you revert deleted code it gets "angrier" and starts more aggressively purging code in the future :P
What's most interesting and beautiful about the concept of free, open education is that people that would not have access to a college education can now have it. I'm talking about people that are the poorest of the poor who would never see a university let alone be able to attend one. A lot of folks on here are talking about certification...certification doesn't matter, rather creating wealth matters! We're on YC Hacker News right now, I'm sure everybody has read Paul Graham's "How To Create Wealth" essay (http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html). A person with a college degree or higher is useless to society if they can't produce something with it. However, somebody with little or zero formal education that can create something world changing IS valuable! Just giving people access to information allows them to change their world and create wealth. Some of you may have heard of William Kamkwamba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba) who created a windmill that could generate electricity just after seeing a picture of a windmill on the cover of a book written in a language he couldn't read. I saw an interview with him on "The Daily Show" where he joked that when he had the opportunity to access the Internet for the first time, he typed "windmill" into Google and was like "where was this when I was trying to build that damn windmill?!". People like him can do so much just with a picture -- imagine if he had access to science and math lectures from an amazing university like Stanford.
We have finally reached that point (or are at least damn close to it) where virtually every person on the planet, no matter how poor, will have access to a computer and the Internet. That is all a person needs to access these resources. I'm sure everybody has been following the Raspberry Pi, a full-fledged computer with video output for $25 - and it's only going to get cheaper. People like Thruun and Khan are dead-on. The only way to get people out of poverty is by empowering them with knowledge and education. In my opinion, the work these folks are doing are the seeds of a coming worldwide renaissance where poverty and ignorance will be eliminated.
The ACA also allowed me to pursue founding a company. 6 months before the ACA kicked in, I left my job to start a robotics company. As I was only 29 years old, I did not think it would be a problem getting individual health insurance -- I had done it in the past when attempting my first venture.
What ended up happening was that every health insurance company rejected me for having the pre-existing condition of asthma! It made no sense as I was very healthy and my asthma under control as long as I took a control inhaler everyday. The cost of my medicine would be way less than the premiums I paid -- but some actuary somewhere decided I was too high risk!
For 6 months, I was scared of getting sick or injured -- to the point where I was considering giving up to get a job just for health insurance. That thought to me was just so ridiculous and heartbreaking that I couldn't do it --I just kept telling myself that I had to make it to Jan 1.
I was overjoyed the day I got my insurance card -- it was a huge sense of relief. What brought me even more joy was knowing all my fellow Americans whom also could not get or afford insurance could finally receive it.
Today I no longer need the ACA -- our company is doing great, we're well-capitalized, and provide excellent health insurance to all of our employees. Without the ACA, this dream would not have been possible. We were able to create wealth and jobs because of the ACA -- it makes no sense to repeal it.
Even before I needed the ACA -- I had enough empathy to know that every person has the right to health care and one of the biggest reasons I voted for President Obama. When it affected me personally, it obviously hit even harder. The GOP's lack of empathy as well as a real solution to the problem are just infuriating -- it is absolutely shameful and disgusting how they are attempting to repeal this law.