skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is pretty idiotic and yet another another attempt by new economists to try to excuse the terrible financial policies of the last 10 years under the silly and completely wrong slogan "nobody could have possibly predicted it would all turn out this way." This of course was the same excuse used for the housing crisis (even though most of the country actually predicted it) and for the Iraq debacle.

Take this quote "Nothing in mainstream “neoclassical” finance theory explains these persistent crises." That may be true but if so it merely reflects a weakness of neoclassical finance theory and not of our knowledge of economics as a whole.

In fact Keneyesian theory explains the boom and bust cycle as well as the periodic crises very well and has a pretty good solution for dealing with them. In fact we did deal with them pretty well during the postwar period of expansion and prosperity. Then of course we started progressively departing from Keneysian theory under the tutelage of the Chicago school and the crises, as if by clockwork, started intensifying and the crashes started getting worse.

So the answer is obvious, the theory is well known. The problem is that the new economists do not want to admit it because (i) they do not want to admit they are wrong and (ii) they sure as hell do not want the correct medicine that Keynesian theory prescribes.

So they go on with this ridiculous farce where they pretend that the economics crises are some unexplained phenomenon.
Well, on my two startups I got nothing, twice.
Fabulous, love the detailed advise he's given on gaining followers and his photo apps
Nanowire whip (a la _Johnny_Mnemonic_), anyone?
Facebucks: Economic impact study released
No. It is equivalent to buying the preferred shares at $X/share, which obtains voting control of the board, cutting the founders a check (not for shares), and zeroing out the common.

This is always possible with a company with a significant interest controlled by the preferred (which is another way of saying: a company funded by VCs.)
Since people are throwing out similar kinds of implementations, here's my pattern matching library (which is kind of the same thing as multimethods, but allowing more arbitrary matching than just based on type):

http://svn.colorstudy.com/home/ianb/recipes/patmatch.py
Right, but the original article was saying the education system is bad for those people, and my point is your original comment wasn't elitist, it was a valid response to the complaint in the original article.
10%? I think it is more in the lines of 3% as an early employee and it goes down from there.
Bill Gates, China talking about jointly developing nuclear reactor
sudo apt-get remove update-motd
Anatel aprova Apple TV
Facebook's evangelist for MySQL is a joke
OM had an article about why FB prefers MySQL and quotes FB's Mark Callaghan for his reasons.

Did anyone ever ask whether Callaghan's previous 8 years at Oracle had any impact of why he is an evangelist for mysql?

Furthermore, this Callaghan says "The implementations just aren’t as mature, he said, and there are no published cases of NoSQL databases operating at the scale of Facebook’s MySQL database". WHAT A JOKER!!!

He needs to get out into the real world and do his research! There have been successful NoSQL implementations for over 30 years! I'm going to dig up some stats for the number of queries and transactions so stay tuned...

Here's the full article:
http://bit.ly/t5fNY2
God, college was fantastic! Talk about the greatest 4.5 years of my life. Here's why:

I was in Engineering, where they drill math into your heads for the first 2 years, and you don't see a lick of a practical application for it, but looking back, that was incredibly useful.

I found more creative outlets then I could possibly imagine. I had friends in the fine arts who could teach me how to paint, and let me play around in the photography darkroom. I dabbled in getting a minor in philosophy (but found the meaning to life, and decided I didn't really need to go any further in it..) I planned practical jokes and embarked on poorly thought epic adventures with roommates. I wrote in my spare time (inspired to write out thoughts by my philosophy teacher) I met friends who played guitar as well, and we made wrote goofy songs that annoyed the neighbors, to blow of steam.

The social aspect was AMAZING. I participated on two club sports teams, joined philanthropic causes and met some of the most inspiring people from all walks of life, I threw the greatest parties and after-parties in the history of life, (I was somewhat shy in high school though, THAT changed) I now have more friends than I know what to do with, and an available couch to crash on in every major city in the Northeast (and several in the Midwest and CA)

I was free. It's not like most of real life, with serious financial responsibilities. No day was the same. If life sucked, in four months a new semester would be here, and it would be different.

Lastly, it opened doors. I have a career that pays well (thanks, valuable engineering degree) I have connections (be it social or business), and it was so damn tough (at least at times) it gave me the confidence that if I put enough effort into something, I can build it, and succeed. Priceless

edit: I didn't build anything awesome in college, or get a startup going, or discover the cure for cancer, but it gave me tools to do so, the rest is up to me.

edit #2: I spent a semester in Florence, Italy. I sat in museums and sketched, I took a history and culture of food class, I was exposed to so much diversity in thought/way of life/culture. I became exceedingly good at picking up non-verbal communication, which is VERY useful in real life (Took my first Italian class while there...). It was my first time living in a city, now I travel frequently, and move with comfort in a city. Sans travel expenses, it wasn't any more expensive than my public school tuition and room and board.
I personally felt that he

1. Identifies baddies and eeeevil plaaaans

2. Said plans go wrong because evil is dumb

3. Smugness.

Or something like that. Essentially his problem is mixing history with histrionics. He's not a documentarist, he's an entertainer. A music video director.
It sounds like he is claiming that if a major browser changed this behavior, websites would just reconfigure their response to give a 200 response error page because they would prefer if the browser showed something like this rather than a browser dependent error message. That would end up making 404 completely useless, even for actual tools like wget because it would be against webmasters interests to use them anymore.

Do you disagree with that claim?
It's a strange assumption that someone would be using Ubuntu just to complain about it. I'm fairly sure there are fewer Linux distros than there are Linux users so it's very unlikely that any user is going to find a distro perfectly suited to them.
same here im looking to move to the bay area come next year.
The rationale, then, is that the compiler should catch mistakes that lead to security holes. On that basis, then, we'll be adding GC memory management, so we never access freed memory, also strongly defined types - e.g. bounded integers, and bounded arrays too. Writing the OS an ADA would satisfy this chap?

"catching security holes" is the compiler version of "think of the children".
AdBlock, NoScript, Ghostery, Flashblock.
Vaguely related: Autopagination (fixes multi-page sites), and Remove It Permanently.

It's my browser, my computer, and my network connection. Damned straight I'm going to exert my preferences over them.

Your crappy business model is your problem.
SSDs choked by crummy disk interfaces
We're not talking differences in IQ points. We're talking about the difference between an ant and a human, only humans are the new ants.
Well free stacks aren't really free either but we could argue that point until we're blue in the face.

The issue with Microsoft right now is they seem to want to throw away everything they've created over the last decade and embrace the web in a desperate attempt to bring new developers in.

For example, if you watch the Build sessions you see a lot of focus on C++ where as Microsoft used to treat C# like it's preferred language. That's got a lot of people thinking Microsoft's looking to sideline C# in the same way they did VB 10 years ago.

Visual Basic was obviously more popular that C# at that time (being C# hadn't existed before that). So the Tiobe index doesn't mean much (and honestly I'm always dubious of Tiobe in that I don't think PHP is more popular than Ruby and Python combined in modern development)

3 years ago Microsoft was telling developers to use ASP.NET Web Forms, WPF, and Silverlight. Today all that is essentially looked on as bad practice. So yes, there are people in the MS Developer community who are nervous.
Agreed. This has little to do with what their repl can do and is mostly a bunch of functions with their output.
Why Everyone is in Sales
You really think there's even a chance that java will be 'largely irrelevant' in 1 year? Maybe you should try assessing your prognostication skills by writing down your predictions for 1, 5, 10 years out and see how close you were. I have a feeling you're just as liable to make mistakes trying to guess what will happen in 3-7 years as you are using the best tools at hand today. Whatever you think of java, for example, google 'java is dead' and see how well people have predicted the future. It's still going strong in the enterprise, and even a lot of startups probably do some java in the form of Android apps. Flex has some great things going for it. It's only easy now in hindsight to say that four years ago you took the wrong path.
The Horrifying Post-Date Rant Allegedly Sent by an Investment Manager
Science Getaways
Rendezvous with Rama!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This gives me some insite on the matter:

From: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

"9. Accepting Warranty or Additional Liability. While redistributing the Work or Derivative Works thereof, You may choose to offer, and charge a fee for, acceptance of support, warranty, indemnity, or other liability obligations and/or rights consistent with this License. However, in accepting such obligations, You may act only on Your own behalf and on Your sole responsibility, not on behalf of any other Contributor, and only if You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold each Contributor harmless for any liability incurred by, or claims asserted against, such Contributor by reason of your accepting any such warranty or additional liability."

So someone please help explain how this is possible:

From Reuters Nov 9, 2011:

"Google Inc will continue to offer support to firms using its Android system that are involved in legal disputes, its executive chairman Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday, as the Internet giant looks to cement alliances in the face of toughening competition."

The way I am reading the Apache license says that Google should not be giving support to OEMs? Am I reading this part wrong? "However, in accepting such obligations, You may act only on Your own behalf and on Your sole responsibility, not on behalf of any other Contributor" I'm not the best at reading law, so I would love some insight.

Edit to add Reuters link: http://us.mobile.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE7...
There are a number of reasons this could have happened:

1. You left before any of your stock vested. Assuming a standard four year vesting schedule and a one year cliff, this makes complete sense. (Although you are saying that you paid for your options, so this likely isn't the case here).

2. The company got shut down, its assets liquidated, and the founders and a select group of employees went to work for Google. This is perfectly sensible from a legal/operational standpoint, but is really unethical if the founders didn't take care of existing stock holders.

3. The founders had liquidation preferences that employees didn't have. This seems really unethical to me, but it's also something you could have seen when joining the company by doing the legal diligence.

Bottom line here is do the diligence, understand the mechanics so there is no confusion as to what they are later, and, most importantly, make sure company founders are decent people who'll pick the high road if/when presented with a choice. I don't think I could live with myself if I had to look in my fancy, gold-plated mirror every morning knowing that I screwed people that trusted me to lead them out of what's rightfully theirs. Make sure you get a good vibe from the people you work for - nothing can substitute chemistry, character judgement, and basic human decency.
Have such reactors been build before?
Windows 8 - The Decision Between Innovation and Practicality
A key difference is that Haskell functions can only have one type signature, so you need to explicitly make "Bunny" and "Lion" data constructors for "Species". Multimethods operate on multiple types. You can fake multimethods in Haskell with multi-parameter type classes (with the language extensions to allow undecidable and overlapping instances).
You are an accomplished ballroom dancer, though.
Learn more about AMD
I agree with that in general, but it feels like a single point of failure. 10 different servers that all have an X% chance of being hacked are much more secure to me than 1 server that even has X/10% chance of being hacked.

That said, I like the idea of mint in general. It's depressing that banks can't (won't) figure out read-only credentials for use cases like this.
I do.

EDIT: And now I don't.
Android: A visual history
Also, I don't think the christ-figure of apple corp is in the same bracket as the discoverer of penicillin and the author of wealth of nations, but I don't imagine arguing about that is going to get us anywhere. Just wanted to register my dissent.
The pragma wouldn't really work. It'd have to work in all old versions of Python to make any sense, and it doesn't. For unicode literals in particular, it should just be true in Python 3.3+ that u'' = '' out of the box.
It's disruptive in the same way me shouting at you while you're trying to get work done is disruptive.

[ For that matter, 9/11 was pretty disruptive, but I don't think that terrorism is a good start-up idea. Please refrain from knee-jerk reactions (i.e. "I can apply the word 'disruptive' here, therefore it's good"). ]
But he could be cheating. He could literally be telling these people "I'll give you a thousand dollars if you let me out and keep the conversation a secret."
I think this is more accurate. Gruber has generally been complimentary of Windows Phone compared to Android, but he doesn't believe it measures up to iOS.
HN is heavily biased toward hackers and tweakers, in the sense of those who prefer to hack at and tweak their environments.

Many, many, many moons ago I ran across a page which reported on user display resolution setting as reported via javascript. At a time when low-end equipment generally supported at least 800x600 and likely 1024x768 display, over 50% of users showed 480x640. Which was the Windows default at the time.

Changing your display resolution takes 2-3 clicks: right click on Desktop, display settings, resolution. And "OK". And this was too much for people.

The lesson was: people don't change defaults. So, oh you devs: choose really sane defaults.

As for me? I've hacked my environment a lot over the several decades I've been using it, and I hack it a little bit more every day. Why? Because I become more productive in it, and it becomes more useful to me.
I do this now in Cambridge, MA.

I really can't imagine myself living in a place where I'm required by circumstance to drive everywhere. Walking, public transport, taxis and Zipcar cover all the bases.

http://www.walkscore.com/score/Central-Sq.-Cambridge-MA
Maybe I'm confused but on my Debian system this works _exactly_ as expected. Yes /etc/motd is a symlink to /var/run/motd and removing said symlink, or replacing it with something causes either the new message to show or there to be no motd. Is the author just confusing Debian and Ubuntu or am I missing something? Why do people keep doing this? Just because Ubuntu behaves in a specific way does not mean that Debian behaves the same.
Cannon have been rifled since at least the time of the civil war, so that would make some sense.
Google's Android Market earn just 7% of what Apple's App Store makes despite larger market share.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/21/piper-jaffray-android...
I think Eliezer's specific objection to this (but I may be misremebering) is that any AI making such bargains is an AI in need of destroying and starting from scratch.
Mislabeled: should say "an ad for ron paul"
EDIT: OK, I misunderstood. That paragraph is there even in the original blog post, but the author didn't pick up how to get their desired behaviour until they read the code. Also, there's the "boot time regen" vs "login time regen" change between Debian & Ubuntu.

It's hard to say in retrospect how obvious that clause is, but there's no reason the original author couldn't have raised a bug with Debian saying they didn't understand the man page, and can Debian please add another sentence saying "To have a static motd, delete the /etc/motd symlink and replace it with a plain text file." Ranting won't make it better, but a polite suggestion might.

Ditto raising a suggestion with Ubuntu about replacing "boot time" with "login time" in their manpage.

---

Except from the motd man page on Ubuntu oneiric:

On Debian GNU/Linux this file is a symbolic link pointing to /var/run.
The contents of this file are regenerated upon every system boot based on the contents of /etc/motd.tail.

I can see the original author's frustration, but I got to the end of the post and thought "why didn't he submit a bug report mentioning the motd man page needed updating?"

Yes, this was a mistake in Ubuntu. Nevertheless, it didn't seem like one that the Ubuntu developers would be unwilling or incapable of fixing. In fact, lo and behold, it has been fixed!

I can see there's a broader point here in general, regarding the philosophy of "change vs not-change." However, that point doesn't seem to necessitate quite so much nerdrage.
In addition to what mikeash said, using a credit card and paying it in full improves your credit score whereas a debit card doesn't, which will make it easier to get loans later.
I might agree with you, but we'd need more information to really know for sure.

A minute of Googling turns up TechCrunch speculating YC and other investors got paid back in this deal, in which case I'd say this is pretty sleazy.
Apple’s Hiring To Improve Siri, Possibly Readying API For Third Parties
no, i just couldn't think of a relevant use for it, aside from making it easier to talk about hex. not to mention, it's even less of a standard for measuring things than -bi prefixes.
Of course wrapping the other software was deliberate! Someone at c|net designed, built, and deployed the wrapping feature; that is as deliberate as you can get.

However, at least they have re-enabled the direct download link for non-registered users so that those people who understand the difference can avoid the wrapper. I still think it's distasteful to pray on the ignorance of users, as all these wrappers and toolbars do, but that is how they get paid.
Yeah, something like OAuth for banks would be very, very handy.
It just didn't have to happen, though.

Without debating the (IMO very questionable) utility of changing motd behavior, or the (IMO too sloppy) change management of Ubuntu...

A three-line update to man motd would have solved the problem, and the motd maintainer didn't do that, and whoever accepted the patch didn't do that, and now anyone who wants to figure what the Penguin is going on is going to have to google for it and, hopefully, find the answer before they hit the "download source" rabbit hole.

All because of a few sentences.

Yeah, at home I don't use Ubuntu directly anymore. =)
Welcome to linux. Actually, welcome to the world of software.

This attitude is not helpful and please don't "blame" it on Linux.
What's the correlation between his 8 years at Oracle and MySQL?
This started out interesting - I find these kinds of l10n problems quite fascinating. But the last part of the article kind of baffles me. It's presented as a hard engineering problem and they solve it with a nasty hack. Why not just cache the various ways of rendering a name, based on different cultural customs?
"Heads roll" was an overly vindictive metaphor, because what actually happens is Skippy pays the poison victim some money, which rectifies the mistake, to some extent. So why would we ever spare them? By doing so, we're effectively shifting the burden to the victim. In delivering justice, consequences can't be eliminated, only redistributed.

And if the risk is really so small, then Skippy should have no problem assuming it. It's either them or little Timmy.
A couple points:

1) Every distro out there has its weaknesses (everyone likes to tout Arch, but it was only recently that pacman got support for crypto-signing, for example).

2) If every user that ever found a problem with any Linux distribution just hopped to another Linux distribution then: 1) they would run out of distros real fast and 2) nothing would improve inside of said distros because there was no one complaining (or challenging the status quo).
I am not sure I follow you. By that you mean that CNET installer is a malware because its installing toolbar without disclosing it to the user? Surely StartNow toolbar should not be marked because somebody decides to bundle it. If I take your software and bundle it does it make it malware? I am arguing that all those toolbars do same things, and they should be marked as PUP not as malware as they are not in the same category as viruses.
I think a education system could be designed for those people, it just may not be a system for all people. That is a huge problem that we have now days, equality has ballooned into this one size fits all, everyone is a winner mentality. Equal rights and opportunities does not mean equal capabilities, abilities, or experiences.

We do need to design systems around groups of people that are alike, but what we don't need is the systems we have now, that are designed around the medium, because it creates medium value at maximum.
...and https://github.com/fsharp (the compiler, core lib extensions, IDE bindings, etc)

Also, MS contributions toward libuv (part of node.js project)