skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"No one can really use them without the threat of massive reprisal"

You can, of course, use them if your opponent is not capable of a massive reprisal - which the Soviets weren't until the late 1960s (at least against the United States). That's why Curtis LeMay, and later Thomas Powers, were so keen to land a "Sunday punch" on the Soviets - fortunately the political leaders of the US (notably JFK during the Cuban crisis) would have nothing to do with such a plan - to their eternal credit.

A fairly interesting novel describing a world where LeMay had got his way is Resurrection Day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_Day
>>Whenever I've set up in a new place, my productivity suffers severely for a week or two.

The language you are using here - specifically the word "suffer" - is indicative of a certain type of (generally Western) mindset where productivity plays a big role in a person's happiness and satisfaction.

I went on a two week vacation to my home country of Turkey back in July. For the first few days, it felt really odd to not work. I would wake up in the morning, have breakfast, fire up my laptop on the patio of my parents' house, and then... stare at the screen. After screwing around on HN and other sites, I would realize that it was 2pm and that I had "wasted" half my day. And I would feel bad about that.

After a few days though I realized how absolutely ridiculous that mindset was. I was on vacation and I was not supposed to be producing anything. I was supposed to be relaxing. It was like flipping a switch - I made a paradigm shift and spent the rest of my vacation "doing nothing." It felt great!

If I ever find myself in the author's situation where I have sufficient savings and am sitting on a beach in Thailand, instead of trying to continue working and getting stuff done, I'll just check out mentally and enjoy life.
It's worth noting that there are excellent Python bindings to Z3. http://rise4fun.com/z3py/tutorial
"Inferior" is probably really bad wording. Let's say "more advanced". If you know C++ you will have no problem accommodating with C if it better fits your need. If you know Scala you can still program in Java if your stuck with it for whatever reason.
I don't see what this would show us

You have an interesting lack of intellectual curiousity. Last time I checked, 37 college presidents were being paid over $1MM/year in salary. Where is that money coming from? Not the endowments? Your right. Its coming from students, who are basically laundering the government loans, into tuition to support operating costs of the colleges. Money is fungible, in that regards.
I realize that, but I don't think you have a valid counter argument, since it doesn't contradict what was claimed.
Larry Summers Withdraws from Fed Consideration [pdf]
It's the Prisoners' Dilemma writ large. We'd all be better off if we all cooperated, but we're individually better off if we defect.

Incidentally, a lot of game theory was developed during the Cold War to analyze nuclear war.
Gosh this article is really sexist. If the authors were writing about people instead, they would never write so objectively about gender. Considering how orangutang's are our close genetic cousins, if the authors replaced each instance of 'orangutang' with 'human', their conclusions would still be largely correct yet there would be much more public backlash.
It's always a good time for a revision of privacy/security tools.
These "experiments" are normally companies that no other fund on the planet would finance, as they are extraordinarily risky. In those cases, KV does expect greater equity (due to risk and the fact that nobody else will support the company) than a standard seed or Series A. Would you prefer we just decline to fund them like every fund?
I made a simple wrapper at https://github.com/yol/wit_ros

Are there any test cases I can use, which utilize the full power of the API?
Wikipedia is overrated as a resource. It is, like many crowd-sourced things, a social determination of importance and not an actual assessment.

However, as you'd expect, it's great for pop culture.
Climate Change (rebranded Global Warming) is such a heated and controversial topic, including in academia, that turns decent people into crazed maniacs (think of Apple or sport team fans). I suggest to stay away from it until something conclusive emerges from the study.
There are a host of languages > 20% as fast as C (Common Lisp, Haskell, Java). I would have preferred Common Lisp but would have settled for Java. Once you're within a factor of 2-3 of C, speed rapidly becomes less important than other things except in limited circumstances. I wouldn't write an h264 decoder in Lisp, but short of that...
It started promisingly. Then it said at the end of the first paragraph,

> But with Derrida, we know now, the foundation is not a unified self but a divisible limit between myself and myself as an other (auto-affection as hetero-affection: “origin-heterogeneous”).

That's bullshit intended to baffle.
A good way to make another person seem stupid or crazy is to just repeatedly declaim how you can't understand them. Because it's not your fault you can't understand them, it's theirs.
that "solution" is, basically, ridiculous and not adopted for good reason.

A quote from Michael O'Church I quite like:

Let's say that you have 20 tasks. Each involves rolling a 10-sided die.
If it's a 1 through 8, wait that number of minutes. If it's a 9, wait 15
minutes. If it's a 10, wait an hour.
How long is this string of tasks going to take? Summing the median time
expectancy, we get a sum 110 minutes, because the median time for a task is
5.5 minutes. The actual expected time to completion is 222 minutes, with 5+
hours not being unreasonable if one rolls a lot of 9's and 10's.
This is an obvious example where summing the median expected time for the
tasks is ridiculous, but it's exactly what people do when they compute time
estimates, even though the reality on the field is that the time-cost
distribution has a lot more weight on the right. (That is, it's more common
for a 6-month project to take 8 months than 4. In statistics-wonk terms, the
distribution is log-normal.)
Software estimates are generally computed (implicitly) by summing the
good-case (25th to 50th percentile) times-to-completion, assuming perfect
parallelism with no communication overhead, and with a tendency for
unexpected tasks, undocumented responsibilities, and bugs to be overlooked
outright.
[1]

The point is, you are unable to know the worst possible outcome. Since it will have huge input into your average, your average is therefore useless. Perhaps the project isn't specced fully enough and, during implementation, a dev discovers an ugly or impossible feature interaction. You now have to either cut features or rearchitect another feature, ie the dice come up 10 in Michael's analogy.

An example from my background: I work on ml code. A learning algorithm was written in parallel with a particular loss function (essentially, this tells you if your estimates are good or bad). The person writing the spec assumed that a different loss function could be dropped in later. Indeed, this is how the math works on paper. But loss function number 2 required a different data layout between the machines. The vision was writing a new loss function should be one or two lines of code dropped into the middle of a hot loop; the reality was it took almost a month of work.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3522910
>There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case and considerable evidence that the exact opposite is true.

What kind of evidence? I've heard of no credible claims for future evolution of Earths economy... with perhaps the exception of R. Hansons rather informal blog posts.
Review of Scott Berkun's book on Wordpress.com
To me there is an inherent contradiction between the concept o a hackathon and any actual effective effort produced during one. The idea is that you only work on your project during that day. However in the current era just about any worthwhile programming effort will draw heavily upon years if not decades of previous work. I would even guess that the most interesting efforts at hackathons are the ones most directly related to an individuals current area of expertise.

Many good programmers today are quite adept at modularization or other related efforts like framework building. By utilizing existing frameworks and modules one can leverage an enormous amount of existing code. I think though that many of the most worthy efforts at hackathons actually leverage existing modules or frameworks that were actually built or co ntributed to by the particular hackathon participant who is using them.

I think because of this contradiction and because it is difficult to distinguish between a completely new project and one that is a continuation of existing work that we need to alter the concept somewhat.

Getting together to hack on existing projects and describe them is probably a more honest and generally applicable idea. If you really want to limit people to work done on that day you are going to need to be very specific about what types of existing modules and frameworks can be used and whether the individuals participating may have created those. I'm not sure I really see a great point to that sort of exercise though unless it is just for developers to demonstrate how many interesting techniques and algorithms they can carry with them in their mind. That seems kind of a primitive thing to test for when we have so many great ways of reusing code.
Cagliari, on the southern coast of Sardinia, a southern big island in Italy, is the perfect place: startups, astonishing sea, tens of beaches, hot summers, max 2 winter days at near zero (Celsius).

I live there, I know how it is ;)
Avoid HP, they suck unless you buy their Premium models which again might have driver problems with Linux
Free Nintendo Wii Points
Why? Did the author make an argument based on a claim of subject matter expertise?
It's not checked into git... because they use CVS.
As far as I know, there is no good way to fortify a submarine base against a nuclear weapon (which is one of the reasons why Object 825 GTS is a museum - some of the other ones being that it's on Ukrainian soil and that it's easy to trap submarines in the Black Sea, restricting their utility - Russia operates nuclear submarines only out of the Arctic and the Pacific).
Can you setup Hackintosh with working wifi and gpu on it? If yes, I'm sold
I was very pleased to find out that at least UK politician admitted that, even if our country had been nuked by the Soviets, he wouldn't have retaliated - of course he couldn't admit that while he was in power!

"You had to make people think you would use [the bomb] even when you wouldn't."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-h...
Completely agree. However one thing that I think is missing in most books with a lot of math is the opportunity to use programming to help teach and communicate the math in question.

A great example of a book that communicates abstract mathematical concepts via algorithms is the Little Schemer. Ironically, it doesn't even set out to communicate the math, but actually just uses the math to communicate other programming ideas like recursion. That, however, doesn't diminish the fact that it demonstrates ways to teach math through programming and algorithms.

Another book which also does a good job at using programming to demonstrate more concrete math is Allen Downey's "Think Stats" book. All through the book, you learn the mathematical concepts of statistics through hands on programming activities.

There definitely is a chicken and egg problem in areas like machine learning because unlike the above resources which have only one layer of abstraction to cross, machine learning presents two layers of programming<->math abstractions to cross for most people who decide to learn it. To really understand and apply machine learning you need to understand the math and models behind it. However the math and models are presented in pure form that makes it difficult to grok unless you arrived at the resource with a classically-trained mathematical background. I would hope that given that the target market for such learning resources it not mathematicians but programmers, that such learning resources would present content to help you arrive at the math from a programmer's point of view.
This Guy Has an Invisible Headphone Implanted In His Ear
"Is that a question?"

Let's take a look at the original quote from you I was responding to:

"Is it the poor who have power to change things, or the rich?"

Yeah, that was the question.
Exactly. The conversation frequently goes something like this:

Boss: Give me an estimate on how long it will take to do Project X.

Developer: Six months.

Boss: That's not acceptable! We promised it to the customer in one month.

Developer: OK, one month.
See my response to Dylan16807 [1], as he had a similar question.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6388337
>This is basically all the social sciences, from econ to psych to anthro

This is all too typical of the anti-scientific, anti-intellectual nonsense that holier-than-thou techies exhibit towards fields which they have very little knowledge of, and barely understand.

All of these fields are intensely focused on empirical evidence, statistical testing, and sturdy experimental design. Yes, sometimes poor studies are published (especially in economics and sociology; psychology and anthropology tend to be far more rigorous), but there are poor published studies in all fields, and generally authors comment on and make note of the flaws in their studies, and present them at face value. To decry the validity of thousands of scientists is not only arrogant, it is stupid.
Another project targeting Java on iOS is XMLVM[1].

It has several frontends, including JVM bytecode, and several backends, including Objective-C (and vanilla C, these days).

1. http://xmlvm.org/overview/
Load testing: an unexpected journey
Apple Market Share: Facts and Psychology
That fits my interviewing experience for computer vision. Tons of people that work in MATLAB or OpenCV, throwing it over the wall to 'production'. That's not terribly appealing when you are already limiting what you can do because your CPU/GPU is running at 100%. Not too many that can actually engineer a working, performant solution.
This is probably good as we do not need someone that is overly connected with the street, if you know what I mean.
Most of the comments here focus on poverty but the author is talking about a broader subject, he is talking about scarcity. Being poor is but one of the forms to experience scarcity. And this is a brilliant idea.

What intrigues me is that poverty is essential to the dynamics of capitalism. Some are rich because some are poor. Modern capitalism operates on a very abstract layer and my basic comprehension of economics is not enough to understand how this relationship between rich and poor translates to modern times but I have I feeling it still holds true.

That said, and here's an inconvenient idea, what if some are lonely because others have too many friends? In the same way the richness of some breeds the poverty of others, what if the abundance of some breeds the scarcity of others? I hope you understand this doesn't imply guilty on any side. It just hints at a somewhat cruel dynamics underlying the commodification of life. Doesn't it?
This is very much a grey area. Most hackathons I've attended restrict previously written code to open-source projects, with the idea that it's fair game if all participants have access to it. I think it's hard to police because projects aren't usually audited, and if someone utilizes private, frequently-used code snippets like you mention, that's even harder to catch.
Patriotism is a force that opposes fragmentation. A wise governor carefully considers his people's self-identity. Self-identity can be managed. Do they view themselves as Americans first, and Irish second? That is good. It is a recipe for stability. The opposite is not.

The balance of these forces is tricky to get right. I believe the Western democratic model may turn out to be the creed of a short-lived, highly chaotic period of history.
Half-life of The Half-life of Knowledge
Get a good start with mob programming
This is complete garbage. A bitcoin account in no way represents the wealth of a person. If you look at the graph, you will see that bitcoin accounts typically change in their "wealth" by orders of magnitude over the period of a month.

So if this is some way represented the real economy, it would be saying that in a given month, some people get 1000 times richer, some get 1000 times poorer, but in some average sense, the rich tend to get slightly richer.

The whole article has the feel of researchers taking the data that exists and is easy to analyze, doing some simple computations that are completely meaningless, and then pretending these computations have some implications for society.

EDIT: I was mis-reading that graph, but the point remains that bitcoin accounts are no a meaningful quantity (if we are interested in the wealth of individuals). In particular that figure (and their observations that the rate of growth is higher for higher balances) only applies to the subset of accounts whose balance increases. When you look at the accounts whose balance decreases, almost all of the time the balance goes to zero.
Good Will Hunting's graph problem
There's also a tremendous Haskell binding, SBV (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sbv) though it's specialized to bitvector theory.
Nice, I didn't know a new version had come out. This game was written in Delphi, and open sourced a few years back. It has an API for writing computer controlled players, and a tournament mode for seeing which one comes out on top. That was where I learned function pointers, good times!
Some calculus and linear algebra. The majority is linear algebra.
I used to always use a 17" macbook pro and it was always very very comfortable moving from it to a 27" display. However, I found that since going from the 17" to a 13", that my level of productivity has increased greatly because I'm now forced to tackle problems that require greater automation and finesse with keyboard only navigation. Given OS X's horrible support for X-windows and the truly useful window managers like XMonad, dwii, dwm, awesome, etc, it's simply not that convenient moving between a 13" and 27" screen. There is too much setup and change to your workflow to make that switch regularly for any programming activity that involves user interfaces (e.g. HTML/CSS) beyond a terminal or ncurses.
Well you can probably look at most of the two U.S. bases right on Google Maps. It's certainly defended against conceivable land attack but as mentioned in the other comment, there's not a lot you can do to make it invulnerable to nuclear strikes.
I have heard claims that if you start people with the "functional style" they are less confused by these tracks. My scepticism goes back to just how many imperative "mutable" instructions people will have learned outside of programming. (That is to say, I'm curious how much research is into this question. Most of the people claiming one way or the other seem to have something to sell.)

Even the example you give, graphics, is somewhat interesting to me. It goes back to my thought where the "metaphor" of what you are doing is more math based already. In those cases, I fully expect a more rigorous "functional" approach to make sense.

And yeah, I actually thought this was sort of like the "with" syntax as I wrote my example. Couldn't remember the actual drawbacks of the with syntax right off. Similarly, I've seen a few times where you can use an import in scala to similar effect. Looks like:

def foo(x:Bar) {
import x._
...
}

I thought this could make reading some code a little less cluttered. Haven't seen it in wide use, though. (And... I would expect it should be used with care.)

I can't help but lingering on the thought that this is dynamic typing where the "type" of a variable encodes the state. Seems if the compiler could track the state and provide indications to whether or not the desired state could be achieved, then the code could be clearer.

Consider the directions for driving cross country. The required "actor" of the system is a vehicle with enough gas. If at any time the vehicle does not have enough gas, the system performs the steps to return the vehicle back to the state of having enough gas, then continues the trip.

That make sense?
This is a copy-and-paste from a previous comment I made on the subject of school student social media monitoring, but I think it's relevant here too:

---

Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want to know what is being said about them or their field.

Even though no company providing these services can have perfect coverage (not even a perfect coverage of public internet communications), or perfect accuracy (generally it boils down to what you can express with search facets and boolean expressions), they can very aggressively sell the capability to people and organizations, because the 'idea' makes sense, and the fear/need is genuine - maybe there are relevant good/bad things happening out there that we need to know about.

I think this may be the real story here: there are private companies incentivized to sell surveillance of public communications, regardless of end-result quality for the customer, and education is just one of many places where that is relevant.

I don't think this is going to change - we now take for granted that search engines can see what is on the public web, and the same will become true of public social media -- although these tools are (generally) not yet as well known to the public as Google web search.

I'd personally really like to see distributed and private social communications technology to take off, so that this kind of legitimized spying becomes near-irrelevant, and I think there are big opportunities there - but we're not there yet and there'll be some interesting ground to navigate in the meantime.

---

It's interesting that this group is using the full Twitter firehose - and when you realize that this is just one of many other companies providing the same type of services (either in public or behind closed doors), it becomes clear that an entire industry now has incentives to encourage people to capture and publish more of their life - with additional geolocation/contextual information where possible as well.
"The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership."

That was the cornerstone of Cold War propaganda. The leaders who'd do this weren't our own, they were the Soviet's. And as Godless Communists, they weren't even proper human beings to begin with, which made them even more dangerous. The only way to keep these monsters in check was to let them know that killing every one of us (which was surely their deepest desire) would also be the end of them.

In reality, this was just not the case. As the animated map of nuclear tests shows, the most threatening country on Earth was US, by a wide margin. We took an early, unchallenged lead in developing nuclear arms, and maintained it relentlessly for decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo

Watching this, it's hard to maintain the fiction that we were the good guys reluctantly responding to the looming Soviet threat. Put simply, there was no nuclear threat when we started arming ourselves heavily. In anything, you wonder why the Soviets took so long responding to the growing threat posed - without serious provocation - by the Americans.
Making a Reddit + Twitter bot
Doorman keeps your secret things
>I must confess to finding this answer pretty insulting

Oh come on... anyone who finds a simple human/monkey analogy insulting is way too sensitive.
Eric Schlosser: If We Don't Slash Our Nukes, Major City is Going to be Destroyed