skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You see this as a "failure of regulation"? I see it as a failure of deregulation. We passed laws and made interpretations which reduced the effect of structural safeguards in the financial system. We didn't pass laws which strengthened those safeguards or improved oversight.

As for "manageable chunks", vs. "artificial" chunks, I point you to this comment by Alan Greenspan, in http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Brookings-Papers-Ec..., that the current size is too large, and not manageable.

> For years the Federal Reserve was concerned about the ever-growing size of our largest financial institutions. Federal Reserve research had been unable to find economies of scale in banking beyond a modest size (Berger and Humphrey 1994, p. 7; see also Berger 1994). A decade ago, citing such evidence, I noted that "megabanks being formed by growth and consolidation are increasingly complex entities that create the potential for unusually large systemic risks in the national and international economy should they fail" (Greenspan 1999). Regrettably, we did little to address the problem.

> ... However, should contingent capital bonds prove insufficient, we should allow large institutions to fail and, if assessed by regulators as too interconnected to liquidate quickly, be taken into a special bankruptcy facility, whereupon the regulator would be granted access to taxpayer funds for "debtor-in-possession financing" of the failed institution. Its creditors (when equity is wholly wiped out) would be subject to statutorily defined principles of discounts from par ("haircuts"), and the institution would then be required to split up into separate units, none of which should be of a size that is too big to fail. The whole process would be administered by a panel of judges expert in finance.

This is based on issuing contingent capital bonds, which funds a "living will" "in which financial intermediaries are required to offer their own plans to wind themselves down in the event they fail."
There is no "saving for retirement." As a practical matter, all forms of financial savings for retirement are at their root getting the working generation to give part of their production to the non-working generation. The American system does this directly through a tax. The Australian system does it indirectly by mandating savings in private financial instruments that achieve the same essential transfer.
Anything that runs Android 4.1 and comes with Google's apps (Maps, GMail, Play Store, etc.) and has capacitive touch should be OK-ish.

You should be able to find a 7" tablet like that for the price you are looking for, but they will be from obscure third tier OEMs like "YuanDao N12 Deluxe 7 Inch Android 4.1," or "Teclast P76e 7 Inch Android 4.1," to give two examples I found. The screen resolution will be mediocre. Don't expect software updates.

If you can afford it, buy a Nexus 7 instead. For twice the money you will get a tablet that gets timely updates and that you will be happy with for at least twice as long as a craptablet.
Top computer science blogs of 2012
I used to work next to the guys from mySugr. They went through the process of having their app certified as a medical device by the European Commission, (the CE or Conformité Européenne mark). Not easy, but doable. I'm not sure whether it gives explicit recommendations, but it let's you identify patterns based on what you're eating and the activities you're doing.

https://mysugr.com/
Hm, it's interesting, would you care to elaborate: what do you mean by "too useful"? Too useful for whom?
Well, the lisp factor is obviously an issue, for people who aren't interested in learning another language, but that's knowledge friction.

It's not particularly difficult to learn Lisp, it needs a nice syntax highlighter to dim away all the parens, but really, it's a very simple language. I'm sure you could write some bad-ass shit if you gave it a little attention.

There are python -> emacslisp bindings available, but I can't speak to that, regarding completeness / stability etc. Frankly I wouldn't suggest anyone waste their time doing that.

But really with such a HUGE resource of functions / libraries, (and some of the cooler features of Lisp, I mean have you seen the loop macro!?) ... it's a bit of a waste to pass it up over its "(( big ears ))"
Any examples?

It just seems intuitive that there is a strong correlation between academic acclaim and occupational success in the sciences, and being classically and comprehensively educated in the sciences.
You're clearly more of an expert than I am on this (although your tone seems unnecessarily condescending), but I was hoping you could articulate in a clearer way:

What's the accepted explanation behind the vast racial divide in scores? Is it a proxy for poverty? Is it a cultural issue? My understanding is that white + asian Americans, on PISA tests at least, perform at a level that would put them in the top 5 countries in the world, were they alone. I'm not interested in race-based theories -- those seem obviously wrong to me -- but that fact does seem to stick out. Can you explain what the prevailing theory is? Or should I be ignoring that data?

Also, do you have data to support your "rare American who speaks or reads any language besides English" gibe, or was it just offhand snark? The famous Arne Duncan bit cited people who speak more than one language in their home, and the only other data I could find was a gallup poll (suspect already) about people "able to have a conversation in a second language" -- about 25% of Americans.

EDIT: I should stress that my natural bias is irritation at arguments that try to layer European policies over American populations. Forget race -- I don't think it's interesting -- but it seems a lot easier to to design an education system for a culturally homogenous society than a culturally diverse one. This is akin to when people were exclusively blaming the American health care system for a higher mortality rate rather than, say, the massive obesity rate in this country.
Instead, Apple put a $50 computer in peoples hands- the iPod shuffle. Sure, it might not be as full featured as a laptop, but you have to walk before you can run.

This is the type of out-of-touch-with-reality comment that tech nerds make that make people laugh at us.
That's the title, but in the text he says "an order of magnitude better". There's also a primary filter that the founder believes it has commercial potential.
i do think a resource providing is more suite.

8k dollar is not a large number for those programmer

if you could provide a large amazone ec2 or other needed resource for us, that would be more cool than just the money
and could reduce the cost more
Some suggestions:

Help build better tools for researchers.
* Julia (julialang.org) is very promising and could use talented developers to help build the ecosystem.
* Numba (http://numba.pydata.org/) looks amazing and should build on the existing strength of SciPy.

Contribute to open-source projects related to medical research; a few favorites in the imaging space:
* PLUS (https://www.assembla.com/spaces/plus/wiki)
* OpenIGTLink (http://openigtlink.org)
* XTK (http://goxtk.org)
* NiPy (http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nipy/)

Contributing to an open-source project would give exposure to the problem space while leveraging existing skills and not taking a huge initial risk (school or paycut). If you wanted to make this a full-time pursuit, such contribution could be leveraged: many labs would love to hire a talented programmer. However, expect a ~30-50% haircut (in hospital or university labs you will have a hard time cracking $50k to start and $70k on the high end).

I am familiar with open-source projects in a number of other medically-relevant research areas. If you are interested in some specific area, shoot me an email and I'll see what I can think of.
That's an interesting idea.

Whatever anyone thinks of the periodic surfacing of the feeling that Raganwald was expressing, the fact that it does come up with a degree of regularity indicates there's an unfulfilled need here.

What can be done to help people fill it?

It seems one thing that factors in is that people feel helpless to get started on the path to working on "big problems". What can be done to make it not feel so overwhelming? What can help us all find our way to approaching these questions and actively searching for solutions?
Control f'd "vulgar" and "profanity" - only one hit. Really proud of HN for not making this about the use of the word "Fuck", which was used exquisitely and in its most potent form (which is "to add emphasis").
The under $100 category has improved a lot in a year. You can get Android 4.1 and Google apps for that price now. Even cheap tablets have capacitive touch now. Screen resolution will still suck at that price.
Since we're talking about medical industry here, we're talking about insane regulations because human lives are at stake. I personally believe that software professionals working in this field must be professional engineers. Much like every other engineering discipline where you are obligated to take the blame for your actions. Unfortunately, given the current state of our industry, I would have to say from experience that more than 50% of devs are either self-taught or certified without any formal education. Not to say that all of them are terrible devs, but it sure as hell doesn't look good for us. I don't want people "hacking" medical industry like it's some kind of mind-numbing picture-sharing app. I want people building better medical experience.
Yes, a compiler can do that for you. One example:

http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/10/18/a-type-based-sol...

(That was written over six years ago. Today, there are even better solutions that don't just apply static types to strings but to the language fragments within them.)
Just one thing to add: I think that driverless cars could be a huge force for good. At the top of the list IMO is obsoleting DUIs completely.

Sure people can get taxis but there's much more of a logistical impediment. You have to call a cab (which will arrive in an unpredictable amount of time, especially on busy nights when you want it most). And you have to leave your car at the party and find some way back to it the next day. If your own car could drive you home it's an absolute no-brainer.
Well, "geography" apparently answers the question as to how to get more ad clicks. Not sure it had much to with the original question though, aside from the fact that we choose a job because it's there, for some relative value of there.
Since you asked earlier, you probably got downvoted for concatenating a reply to the bottom of your post about a totally different part of the thread with no transition in between.

It took me a minute to figure out why you were talking about hypocrisy.
I recently read Douglas Coupland's biography of Marshall McLuhan: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1935633163/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

After having read some of McLuhan's work, which provides theories that explain much of the effect information technology continues to have on our society, this helped me understand much better where he is coming from and what his opinion was on what he saw in his time (which he omits in his work).
Do you speak like this in real life? I went ahead and read your other comments on other threads and I can't understand what you're writing until I've read the words at least three times.
while quite a bit more complex than this (2200 lines rather than 50), dwm[1] is a fairly complete tiling window manager, with extremely readable code.

[1]: http://git.suckless.org/dwm/tree/dwm.c
Nice!

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There's something about those old school 70's books with Helvetica covers.
Expecting NFS (or any other remote filesystem) to behave as if it were local is a fundamental error.

Time, and speed of light, ultimately matter. If you need assurance, find a way of getting reliability in your system through redundancy and locality. Distinguish between "task has been delegated" and "task has been confirmed completed". Down any other path runs pain, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

You're going to have to compromise: whole systems (or clusters) going titsup because your NFS heads had a fart, or lost commits. Neither is very attractive when shit's on the line.

Your database relying on NFS is a fundamental error you'll have to design around.
I work at Stripe and we are working hard on rolling out our products internationally. I am sorry you cannot use it yet and that you can't recommend us to your friends yet.

It takes time to do right--it's a schlep--as we want to make sure that the experience is as dead-simple everywhere. "Fixing payments", as PG put it in the Schlep blindness essay, involves working with new banking partners and new back-end infrastructures to make it as easy in every country.
Well, that's certainly not what everyone of consequence is doing, just the risk-averse and as-yet-unrescued.

A lot of us work hard to rescue them :P
Thank you for posting learning resources
Just want to thank everyone out there who posts their learning experiences, and links to learning resources. I am learning to code, and now I know that things will eventually get easier. Others have walked this path before me.
So what I've never been able to understand is how it works in areas which don't have cold winters.

For example, when I lived in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), where the temperature never really goes below 65 F, I was surprised that everyone would tell me that people get colds/the flu not in the winter, but in the summer -- supposedly because the constant shifts between hot summer air and cold A/C indoor air made you more susceptible.

But it seems to be common "scientific" knowledge that flu is a wintertime thing. Is that not always the case, though? Are there places where it actually is a summertime thing? Or in places without much change in the seasons, is there no yearly variation?
This is tough to comment on because it feels a bit loaded. I think this is an important post in its own right, something we should all be talking about, but at the same time I think its somewhat tangentially related to what raganwald was ranting about. (I'll try to comment evenly with my personal experience to tie them together, sorry about the horn-toot in the process.)

I totally agree that the importance of geography is only occasionally touched upon, usually when working-from-home topics arise.

But it's crucial.

I know a lot about canvas. I'm the top answer-er on StackOverflow for Canvas and HTML5 tags. By far. I love it, I love helping people. Because of this I get emails weekly from people with various issues and I try to reply to them as best I can. Job offers come in too, from uh, one corner of the globe (a little place called California). I reject all of them out of hand[1] because they reject me out of hand, because I won't move.

It might sound like I'd work somewhere special or prestigious (do they still say that about companies?), but I don't.

I'm a person before I'm a programmer. And I always will be. And I have a family and friends and a home in New Hampshire and I want to stay here, even if that means staying with my teeny tiny less-than-ten-person company. And I probably get paid a pittance of what I might get paid out in CA (chuckles were had when I last mentioned my salary on the phone).

But I walk seven minutes to work every day. And lunches are paid, and I feel relaxed and at home, and at noon I can go home (paid lunches, no clock) and cook eggs and swing by the cafe to find fresh coffee and see the faces Jed and Emily and Sam and Alyssa and all the others that I know and love. Just seeing some of the same people every day, people I've known for years, brings me immense joy.

I'm not curing cancer, but at the end of the day I do feel accomplished and refreshed and loved by coworkers and friends in my tiny little world.

Well. I think I've sort of lost the point I was getting at in my own head. Anyway, suggesting people merely uproot their lives seems like the height of insanity, and while many a brave soul do it, I don't think I ever could, not even for cancer-curin'.

[1] One company to date has said that not-relocating my entire life is OK with them.
If we call for BitCoin as the solution, The Federal Reserve will fight us, using our money, to make it the villan in the narrative. If we call the division of banks as the solution, the federal reserve will support it, because gigantic entities have clout in resisting the parasitic nature of the Federal Reserve, where minor banks would have to suffer what they must.

Whatever we do, the parasites who can print and dilute our currency through systematic inflation must be appeased and satisfied, or else they will inject poison into the entire system as a retaliation for trying to remove the blood sucking parasite. The bitcoin angle won't work.
"the smartest guys" didn't want to work on health problems, ok, however

Google Search is pretty much crap lately, AdWords/Facebook ads campaigns are expensive and ineffective

maybe it's not that bad after all
bth, the set of topics seems like an amalgamation of buzzwords and TLAs. I seriously doubt they can go into any sort of depth if they are all covered.
Honestly, how is a story from the China Times calling the next iPhone the "iPhone Math" considered a credible story?
For what it's worth it plays just fine on the first gen ipad
I'll tell you "Why the fuck"
Historically, you're correct that our prognosis is poor. Then again, we cannot compare numbers with the generation before us because they were, more than likely, cruising around with sugars consistently in the 200-400mg/dL range.

I realize that what works for me won't necessarily work for others, but I have a really hard time complaining in light of the fact that I regularly achieve A1Cs of less than 6.3 with nothing more than a glucose meter, syringes and some Humalog. Maybe I'm lucky, but testing sugars 4-8 times a day and injecting before every meal isn't hard work.

Perhaps our demise will be miserable but for now I'm grateful for my current quality of life. It could be so much worse.
A few more suggestions:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089663
Well, we can agree that Java is not in any way expressive; as result, there are few intermediary steps that would slow down the compilation process.

Which is interesting, there are actually 3 issues at play:
1) Dynamic languages: slow runtime cost, but expressive and fun to work with
2) Static (simple) languages: fast compilation, but soul draining
3) Static (complex) languages: slow compilation, but expressive and fun to work with.

Here are examples of 1,2,3:
Ruby
Java
Scala

I'm in the latter camp, thus the hurry up and compile! ;-)
i understand why social security is like this. why are retirement vehicles like 401ks and IRAs like this? for the young but well paid worker, do you suggest not saving for retirement?
99 Designs for Musicians, Open Market 101
http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/10/18/a-type-based-sol... is a very good read on the subject. basically, the compiler can have different types of strings, depending on where they come from, and how they are created. it can then make sure that different types of strings are never mixed without an explicit conversion operation. it is up to the programmer, of course, to see to it that that conversion operation involves sanitising, but the compiler will make sure you don't do

string a = get_input_from_user();
string b = sql_lookup(database, a);
insert_into_output_html(b);

requiring instead

UserInputString a = get_input_from_user();
SQLResultString b = sql_lookup(database, ConvertUserInputToSQLQueryInput(a))
insert_into_output_html(ConvertSQLResultToHtml(b));
Maybe I'm an outlier, but as someone from Alabama, I'm more inclined to click on job postings from sunny California.

Just clicking on Careers 2.0 shows me one job near Tuscaloosa AL for something that doesn't sound remotely interesting (obviously that's subjective). If that showed me stuff near Huntington Beach, San Francisco, or LA - I might be inclined to click on it. In fact, and this may be an unpopular opinion or maybe you're already doing this because I don't have an account on StackOverflow, but have you thought about matching jobs to most-common programming languages searched for info? I constantly search for Objective-C information but the only listings I see on my cursory click are for C#/ASP, HTML5/CSS3, Visual C++, PHP, Systems Software Dev Lead, and jQuery Master. This does come down to privacy but we gladly give Google that info, and I trust StackOverflow if all this would be for is getting me a better job in a field I'm actively seeking information in.

For me, I would take your algorithmic approach a step further. For known tech hubs / top 100 cities (at least in the US) your approach probably works wonders. For others, I would recommend feeding in geographic locations on the coasts out of the top 100 cities, radiating inward. Also I would add the programming language filter in as well.

Again, most of this is probably terrible from a privacy standpoint and you're probably already doing it by some means. But on cursory glance, these are the things that actually matter to me when job searching.

And I know this is only tangentially related to the point of your blog post haha.
I use a bookmarklet for that purpose – Zap Colors from https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html. It resets colors to the browser default while keeping the page layout the same.
You're ignoring the cost of actually running the applications in question. The benefits of reduced development costs can quickly be negated if performance starts to suffer.

We see this a lot with Ruby on Rails web apps, for instance. Perhaps they're quicker to develop in many cases, and maybe they're slightly less vulnerable to certain problems than C or C++ apps are, but they are much less efficient at runtime.

This inefficiency becomes visible when more hardware, or more powerful hardware, is needed to run such web apps. This inefficiency further becomes evident when users (it's worse when they're highly-paid employees) have to literally sit and wait for the web app to do its work. Over time, these costs can add up significantly.

It can be even worse for applications that are running on millions of systems. Even slight performance decreases can sum together to be very costly at such a scale.

C and C++ are still unmatched when it comes to producing efficient applications, both in terms of CPU usage and memory usage. Languages like Go and Rust may get close, but that'll be far in the future, if ever. I think it's safe to say that scripting languages like Perl, Ruby and Python will, in general, never be as efficient as C or C++.

Maybe you see C and C++ as a "waste of time and money", but they bring significant cost reductions for many of their users. That's why they're still being used today, and while they'll be used for a long time to come.
> [Fixing the bug] was simply not possible and there were applications that relied on this behavior [so now that it's technically possible to fix it, it would break compatibility so much we actually can't fix it anyway.]

I'm beginning to wonder if it's possible to design a platform complex enough to be usable without running into this problem.
Wikileaks Says Aaron Swartz Was a Possible Source
Making the "strong/weak" versus "static/dynamic" distinction is much more common in dynamic typing circles than static typing circles. And it makes total sense. Static typing people think of types as being syntactic. "Dynamic" typing seems like a misnomer--either the syntactic terms have strong types or they don't.