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Hasnain says:

"Now, however, mathematicians have solved the cap set problem using an entirely different method — and in only a few pages of fairly elementary mathematics. “One of the delightful aspects of the whole story to me is that I could just sit down, and in half an hour I had understood the proof,” Gowers said."

Posted on 2016-05-31T22:41:44+0000

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Moving Forward on Basic Income

We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project: Our Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes is joining Basic Income Project as our Research Director. She recently...

Click to view the original at blog.ycombinator.com

Hasnain says:

"We think everyone should have enough money to meet their basic needs—no matter what, especially if there are enough resources to make it possible. We don’t yet know how it should look or how to pay for it, but basic income seems a promising way to do this.

One reason we think it may work is that technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources. Although basic income seems fiscally challenging today, in a world where technology replaces existing jobs and basic income becomes necessary, technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources and the cost of living should fall dramatically."

Posted on 2016-05-31T17:15:15+0000

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The New Napster: How Sci-Hub is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry - The Art of Ass-Kicking

There has been an explosive new development in how scientific research is read and distributed. It’s name is Sci-Hub. Founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan (who was, at the time, a 22 year-old graduate student based in Kazakhstan), the site has seen a major uptick in the last year. In February 2016,...

Click to view the original at www.jasonshen.com

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The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development

About MeI’ve been working in software development for twenty-eight years. My current position is Senior Development Director at a software consulting compa…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

An engrossing read on managing software developers.

"Even worse is when bug fixes are included in completed work item counts when those bugs are fixed by the software developers that caused them in the first place. For example consider a project that developer #1 is likely to complete in ten days with a low or nonexistent bug count vs. developer #2 who is likely to complete it in five days but the feature ends up with four bugs eventually being discovered, each of which take two days to patch. Not to mention the extra support costs and negative customer experience that will result from those bugs.
In this scenario developer #1 only completed one work item in ten days and developer #2 completed five work items in thirteen days. Which developer is more productive? Your own completed work item metrics are probably lying to you. Don’t trust them and absolutely don’t publicize them."

Posted on 2016-05-30T19:22:40+0000

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Poverty: What Does It Mean To Be Poor? - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Poverty is measured on the basis of income, but that is often too one-dimensional for such a complex phenomenon. Researchers have developed better ways of defining who falls below the poverty line, but do those concepts stand up to the test?

Click to view the original at m.spiegel.de

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We need to challenge the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators

In this article Andrew Sayer revives some concepts – ‘unearned income’, ‘rentiers’, ‘functionless investors’, and ‘improperty’ – to explain why the very rich are unjust and dysfunctiona…

Click to view the original at blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Backreaction: The Holy Grail of Crackpot Filtering: How the arXiv decides what’s science – and...

Where do we draw the boundary between science and pseudoscience? It’s is a question philosophers have debated for as long as there’s been science – and last time I looked they hadn’t made much progress. When you ask a sociologist their answer is normally a variant of: Science is what scientists do.…

Click to view the original at backreaction.blogspot.com

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I’m a black man. Here’s what happened when I booked an Airbnb. — Stay Woke

This is a story of an AIRBNB experience I recently went through. I met this awesome lady Crissie in my Facebook Group. Super nice lady…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

"So I had a white friend book for my same dates and all of a sudden her plans changed back hahaha. Approved immediately! LOL"

Ouch

Posted on 2016-05-28T04:54:37+0000