skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People don't make plans anymore, make fliers for their parties, etc. So if you decide that you don't want to participate in social networks online, it essentially means that you're opting out of society offline as well: you simply won't be included in those social plans.

In my experience, this simply isn't true (I'm not on FB). If your friends do not value your presence enough to contact you via some method other than Facebook, they're not worth having, and most public events also inform people via other methods (email, websites, twitter etc). I would draw a distinction between closed social networks (which require you to sign up and agree to a degree of data-mining just to view content), and open social networks, which act as a broadcast medium. I'm not in your obligatory network effect, and don't want to be; it really hasn't affected my life in the slightest, so yes we do have a choice, and it's really easy and pain-free to say no to FB.

Saying you must be on FB for your life to function is really a post-hoc rationalisation for a choice already made, and as FB becomes more user-hostile while catering to its advertisers, we'll see more people coming up with this excuse for continuing to participate, but the real reason most people are there is simply because it's what everyone they know is doing and through inertia, not because it is necessary in some fundamental way. I've been reading more and more people talking about giving it up recently though.

It's quite possible to have a happy and fulfilling social life without FB or other closed social networks, particularly as you get older and rely on your established network of friends. Email, texts, phones, blogs, websites etc. all existed before the FB ghetto, and will exist afterward. I'm not convinced there is a future for an exclusive social network like FB, which tries to force you to participate and be tracked (even unwillingly) as the cost of interacting with your 'friends' online - that's just too high a cost for people to pay in the long run for simple online interactions which can be done elsewhere on the open web. If FB was open and not intent on selling your data and your life, it would be more attractive, but as it is not, it's not worth joining IMHO.
The sentiment in France is that he was a scapegoat for his chain of command, who all knew what was going on. The CEO was "let go" in a very gentle way, but otherwise no one else was punished.

The lawsuits were just CYA and leverage to make him shut up, which he didn't, he spilled the beans on his managers, so they threw him under the bus.
You're conflating two things here:

1. A messed up culture of rewarded risk taking and management turning a blind eye, turning on their own people when things go wrong in this cut-throat environment; in this sense this guy didn't do anything special and could certainly be seen as a scapegoat

2. A guy who went far beyond these tacitly approved rules of engagement, while being well aware of the game [1]:

- he spent 5 years in compliance when he started his career, so he was not ignorant of ANY of this nor can he claim he was

- he exceeded his authority dramatically and his actions were purposely designed to conceal his behaviour (no doubt advantaged by his compliance experience); it took him 2 years to blow up after becoming a trader, the only reason he pushed so hard was greed

- "skeptics" say the bank's story doesn't make sense and bank management must have been complicit but the accused himself has not defended himself in this way other than to pretty much acknowledge everything

- everybody describes him as pretty much average, is it that hard to believe a greedy young man just plain screwed up?

This is kind of like saying Lance Armstrong should keep his titles, money and receive no fines because everybody else was cheating and he was just one of the guys that was caught. I don't agree with that logic.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel
Building graphical interfaces in C feels like carving a tree with a knife

Now, building them in C++ feels like carving a tree with a power drill. Better, but still not the right tool

And GTK makes C feel like C++, the bad parts I mean, without the good ones.

I think Android does it in a good way, browsers also made it easier to create nice interfaces, not sure how it works in IOS though.
I made (more) money with exactly that advice. It's not easy and "passive income" though.

It's just condensed knowledge to improve your freelancing after all. No magic. I do doubt that # seeds/replies correlates highly with actual value. Just have a look at the top ones.
"It exists to avoid a deadlock."

What do you mean? Tight popular votes at most require a runoff between the two most popular candidates. If anything, this [1] 2004 NYT article gives the traditional reason:

"The Electoral College's supporters argue that it plays an important role in balancing relations among the states, and protecting the interests of small states."

But it goes on to convincingly counter:

"A few years ago, this page was moved by these concerns to support the Electoral College. But we were wrong. The small states are already significantly overrepresented in the Senate, which more than looks out for their interests. And there is no interest higher than making every vote count."

For the record, I'm not American either, but if I were I'd feel much better and meaningful during presidential campaigns living in, say, Ohio or Florida, instead of New York or Texas.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/opinion/making-votes-count...
> If Haskell is so great why isn't it dominating?

I'm not sure whether Haskell is really that great since I've never got around to really learn it (though I'd love to once I have enough spare time) but I think the dominating languages will be C-likes for a long time. Haskell is too far off from what average Joe Programmer is used to. Most people don't care about a new approach or don't want to invest time learning since the tools they use already work great.

I've learned a few things too, among them, that the majority usually isn't as right as you'd think. Especially in crafts like programming there are habits involved and habits are hard to change. Me, personally, I really like Haskell from what I know about it, simply because it's different.

However, I think there is no "one true paradigm". OOP goes horribly wrong for some things, just as Procedural gets horribly complicated for others and I'm pretty sure Function has a few drawbacks as well. Our real problem is the "use this, not that" mentality. Use what is appropriate for the problem you're trying to solve. That's why I like multi-paradigm languages like Python.
Yeah that's not really true either. Haskell is functional.

All that means, and all that ever meant, was that the entire language worked around pushing static data into static functions and giving static returns.

I can do that in C, C++, Python, Java and Javascript. The only difference is that it is really the only way I can use Haskell - whereas the other languages are highly flexible, adaptable and actually help me ship product. Most of my APIs work essentially like Haskell - static pre-determined data in, static data out - and the back-end implementation is irrelevant for consumers.
There are problems with FTPT, but all voting systems are simply compromises between certain mutually exclusive criteria, all of which are generally desirable. You can't have all the desirable characteristics at the same time, as demonstrated by Arrow's impossiblity theorem and the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem. Sure, FTPT has some disadvantages, but trading it for something like instant run-off voting introduces some new disadvantages. It's insufficient to argue that FTPT is strictly inferior. You really just have to argue for which criteria you think are more important. The third link is a great comparison of many different voting systems and criteria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_t...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_runoff_vo...
Couldn't you get the results for all the different simulations and add up how often each combination arises and get probabilities that way?
I can feel what you say suhastech. But I don't think that is particular to developing countries. I am from Ecuador, and when I was maybe 9 or 10, was given my first Commodore 64. My dad taught me some BASIC and there I was making my first crappy programs. Of course they cared a lot about grades, like any parent.
Being born in a developing country screwed you up because technology took ages to get to you. Man, they still have 128K connections there...
Congrats to the OP by the way!
This is Ben Goertzel...

AGI is mainstream science, these days. The keynote of the 2012 AAAI conference (the major mainstream AI research conference each year), by the President of AAAI, was largely about how the time has come for the AI field to refocus on human-level AI. He didn't use the term "AGI" but that was the crux of it.

The "AI winter" is over. Maybe another will come, but I doubt it.

What's different from 20 years ago? Hardware is way better. The Internet is way richer in data, and faster. Software libraries are way better. Our understanding of cognitive and neural science is way stronger. These factors conspire to make now a much better time to approach the AGI problem.

As for my own AGI research lacking anything new, IMO you think this because you are looking for the wrong sort of new thing. You're looking for some funky new algorithm or knowledge structure or something like that. But what's most novel in OpenCog is the mode of organization and interaction of the components, and the emergent structures associated with them. I realize it's a stretch for most folks to realize that the novel ingredients needed to make AGI lie in the domain of systemic organizational principles and emergent networks rather than novel algorithms, data structures or circuits -- but so it goes. It wouldn't be the first time that the mass of people were looking for the wrong kind of innovation, hmm?

Regarding tachyons in videos of AGI conferences, could you provide a reference? AGI conference talks are all based on refereed papers published by major scientific publishers. Some papers are stronger than others, but there's no quackery there.... (There have been "Future of AGI" workshops associated with the AGI conferences, which have had some freer-ranging speculative discussions in them; could you be referring to a comment an audience participant made in a discussion there?)
Integrating Google Analytics SDK (V2) with Android
From the article you quoted: The assumptions include a majoritarian election system in which political views are along a one-dimensional spectrum.

Political views are not along a one-dimensional spectrum. As soon as you add another dimension, FPTP elections favor extremism according to the visualizations I linked to elsewhere in the thread (http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/).
This is brilliant. Thank you!
Hike.. SMS solution
Actually I'd rather stick with what we have. Worse is better and all that. I find Haskell to be like reading a cross between perl and the dictations of a crazy person chanting in tongues.

The underlying principles however are damn good, but they are not enough to salvage it.
>In plain English, arbitrage just means taking advantage of discrepancies when things should have the same price, but don't. The idea is to buy the cheaper one, sell the more expensive one, and then wait for them to converge. The beauty is it doesn't matter whether markets go up or down -- you're both long and short -- just that the prices actually converge.

I'm familiar with arbitrage (or "arbing") in other contexts (mainly gambling). However, I really didn't follow this explanation.

If you buy an asset at a cheaper price and sell it at a more expensive price, why do you then need to "wait for them to converge"? In what way are you "both long and short"? Aren't you just buying assets from one agent and selling them to another?
I will talk about my own experience, and it only engage myself. I am not sure we can generalize my experience here with callbacks: But for me callback resulted in a big mess. :-)

I've worked in two investment banks, working on their "order passing servers" legacy code. It's c++ code for unix platform. And of course select() driven implementation leads to extensive use of callbacks. The kind of code structure was the same every where I worked: I receive something on a socket, I decode it, what is the event type? Huh ok, I call then the corresponding callback... Huh I need to load the associated context too. And usually the spaghetti appears just right here. When writing the callback for a processing deep into the "sequence diagram" people tend to be overflowed by information. They don't have a clear view of the invariants in their mind. Which leads to over-complicated code in order to deal with the myriad of possible states of your context. And it leads to a lot of bugs.

The context being global, a callback function is forced to behave with side effects. I guess (and only guess since I've never had the occasion to work in FRP style yet) that writing a callback in a synchronous style would would favor a more Functional-programming style, avoiding a lot of buggy side effects, while I guess also it would not be possible to avoid them all... :-/ It must be verified in a real world project that FRP does lead to a cleaner code. Does someone have examples please?

It would be great to have a c++ framework implementing FRP. Or implementing the async/await keywords as in c#. (just tell me if I am not clear enough cause I am not a natural English speaker... :-) )
When ubuntu moved to Unity i started using XFCE, but since 12.04 i'm surprised how much Unity has grown on me, i use it every day.

KDE seems over complicated, i have never got on well with it.
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Some people need to know that their decisions are followed by famous people, otherwise they feel insecure.
Although I don't use it day to day, I was rather impressed by Cinnamon (on Mint). It's got the GNOME 3 visual wizziness, without all the usability problems that GNOME 3 suffers from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_%28user_interface%29
I don't know why more people don't just use tiling window managers. It's a bit confusing at first but now I couldn't be happier. I used LXDE for a long time then realised - why don't I just use dwm to open stuff, and actually get a window manager that arranges my windows to maximise screen space usage?
Indeed. I've tried all desktop environments on Linux.

I have finally settled on a Windows 7 machine with PuTTY and Firefox. That appears to be the best desktop environment for Linux.
Top signs your business is not VC fundable
> In other words, standardized tests are capable of reflecting and encouraging progressive teaching ideals OR regressive fact-regurgitation models of learning.

You are putting the cart before the horse. Standardized tests in America circa 2004 allowed for that flexibility. You had an education system that allowed for progressive thought precisely because you weren't forced to standardize.

as I have argued before. Your standardized test earlier, and your teaching system, was NOT comparable in ANY way to what Korea/Japan/India have.

You are now recreating those systems with Standardized COMPULSORY tests. Your comparisons are superficial and invalid.

> . If you assume competent, progressive teachers and incompetent, benighted test-writers, it's easy to conclude that tests will drag down educational standards. That isn't fair, though. There's no reason to assume that the test designers are any less enlightened and competent than the teachers manning the classrooms.

You are painting a far too rosy picture of test taking limits. And part of that reason is because you aren't straying into the details.

Tests can be only varied on a few axes - if you are testing about the revolt of 1857 or the various ways to calculate capacitance there is only a small subset of problems that you can come up with.

Don't forget - These are STANDARDIZED tests - they have to be graded either through an answer key, or through grader judgement - if you allow too much on grader judgement then results aren't standardized. SO it ALWAYS skews to answer keys.

This results in all tests becoming predictable. You do not have that many degrees of freedom when standardizing.

> I have to disagree with you there. That NEVER happens in the real world.

Studying/testing is never about real life. IT can't be. No one knows what sort of life a student is going to lead, so you can only hope to give everyone a similar base of information which should help them find their own paths eventually.

As a result, data has to be produced in long form story format, and tested to see that key pieces of information were retained.

Real life doesn't come into it.
I will vouch for your comment. I recently tried to knock up a simple GTK+ UI for something and it was utterly painful.
The Linksys iPhone came out in 1998 too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_iphone). I doubt they were copying the iMac naming, which was just released around the same time. Putting 'i' in front of your product names, when the Internet starts to become a commodity and you want to connect your product to it, isn't exactly far-fetched.
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Independencia de Panama - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/03/independencia-de-panama/
Independencia de Panama - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/03/independencia-de-panama/
Independencia de Panama - http://www.psdmate.com/2012/11/03/independencia-de-panama/
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>because calloc zeros the memory and therefore writes to each page.

One does not imply the other. Internally what the kernel can do is link the page address it gives you to the zero page and mark it as copy on write. Only when you actually write to it will it allocate an actual page to back it. Only if your libc implements calloc as malloc+memset would this be a problem. Does glibc do that?

In fact the copy on write is probably also done on malloc as well. Even though the manpage implies different behavior (malloc doesn't guarantee setting the memory to 0, while calloc does) I don't think any sane kernel will give you someone else's free()'d memory. It would be a security leak.
I'd say it's not warranted and it's not needed. After meddling about for a bit, I did a reset and I did it using "emacs starter kit" by technomancy (of leiningen fame):

https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

On top of this I've added some tweaked versions of yank-indent and indent.el from the emacs-wiki:

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoIndentation

On top of that, I've just added whatever tweaks and hacks necessary to get screen & emacs behaving properly in a FreeBSD shell, since currently my best and most powerful internet-facing host is a FreeBSD machine.

So as you can see, most of it is repo'd already :)
In the context they're referring to, the idea is to enter two positions simultaneously (not to enter and exit one position - in that case you'd have to predict which direction the market is going)

1. You buy and sell at the opportunity price (two positions, not one).

2. Prices converge.

3. You close out your positions in #1 and make a profit regardless of which direction the market went.
Nice one Maneesh! Way to make me feel inadequate.

First, I started programming at 15.

Second, the beard you had at 16! Back then, I would have killed for one of those.
Can you follow a recipe? Like for making a simple dinner? Turn that around, could you explain to somebody how to do something that you are good at, say making a great cup of coffee using an espresso machine.

Programming is like that. The bits and processes are different but the overall concept is similar. As petercooper suggested, hire a tutor or attend some introductory course. A competent teacher should be able to identify where your stumbling block is and present the material in terms that fit with your cognition processes.
Always good to have your sshd on auto-respawn in case OOM makes a bad choice ;) Learned this in a similar scenario.
Don't waste time writing a business plan. Find out first if your idea can result in a value proposition which is accepted by the market. Build a mimimum viable product and start testing.
Or you use Visual Studio Express C# which is free.
Visual Studio (payed) combines all tools, all languages together and works with git, sourcesafe and many, many things more.

Or if you're a startup, you can receive all Windows stuff for free ;) (so you don't have to pay)
I wasn't sure why that would be the case. To me, the naïve answer would be that they wouldn't behave the same, as calloc is required to return cleared memory, meaning memset or similar. Saving time on allocation but clearing it on access would seem to require kernel-level access below that of the C library. So I took a look.

Interestingly, in glibc-2.15, the code for calloc (well, public_cALLOc) is longer than that for malloc. Most of that actually seems just to be doing magic to figure out when it actually needs to clear it. So in any cases where calloc is touching reused memory, it clears that itself. Otherwise, things end up at either mmapping MAP_ANONYMOUS or sbrking, which simply allocates pages that all get cleared on access (well, on write) anyway for security reasons.

Honestly I was surprised how much indirection and optimization there was. I knew that there were some clever things being done and they try to take advantage of processor features. But this stuff really does everything possible to avoid even a single unnecessary cycle. I'm impressed.

So in the general case, calloc might do some extra work. But where you're just callocing heaps and heaps (tee hee) it's not likely to. Strange, I could have sworn I just stumbled upon a case where someone claimed doing that was noticeably slower, but now I can't find it... was going to be very curious how that was the case. But after this romp I'm tired.
I agree with others. Age is an excuse. Start simple. Java is great (use netbeans). Go is another option. JavaScript/C/C++ are definitely not for the beginners. Java probably is the best. But please accompany it with a good book on algorithms.

there are also many free material on the internet. Start with this first and the use java in parallel with a second reading. Just buy a cheap black and white laserjet.

Good luck, success is imminent.
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> Only if your libc implements calloc as malloc+memset would this be a problem. Does glibc do that?

I just checked (see my reply to the parent) and it doesn't.

> In fact the copy on write is probably also done on malloc as well. [...] I don't think any sane kernel will give you someone else's free()'d memory

You won't get someone else's freed memory but you're quite likely to get your own back and in that case it won't necessarily be zeroed.
You know what, someone steals $1000 bucks from you, I can understand you not knowing... but $6.3 billion? Haha, you must be kidding me that bankers didn't miss $6.3 billion, the whole euro crisis with Greece is only $80 billion.
> please do not try to change history. All newspapers agreed that Gore won Florida.

That's the funniest comment in this thread. I love the idea of history or truth as something established by consensus between newspapers. I don't mean to say that your conclusion is wrong but your method is somewhat lacking.