skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/409796087264714752 - I think this is what the poster is referring to?
> real-name based handles figure quite prominently

My ( controversial) idea is that people often upvote persons, not their opinions. Many of HN top have curated well known internet personas with separate blogs (either by their real names or nicknames). A familiar handle (either real or famous nick) is downvoted less frequently than an anonymous handle.
Parrot Discussion Platform
Tips for Parents: Developing Mathematical Talent
What kind of procrastinator are you?
While I understand that people enjoy playing with the various Elop conspiracy theories, they always seem to ignore inconvenient facts. In particular, Elop has now been a Nokia employee for longer than he was ever a Microsoft employee. Furthermore, he was hired into Microsoft as the head of MBD and that's the position he had when he left less than three years later -- so there was certainly no "racing up the ranks".
i wasnt being entirely serious, and i presume the parent didn't either (he doesnt even have a fullname handle)
I wanted to learn a functional language, because I was frustrated with C, and none of the OO languages I could use at the time (C++, Java or Python. These were the languages used at work, so I was restricted to these) filled me with confidence. So I went looking, found Haskell and the "Learn You a Haskell (for Great good)" book, skimmed through it, loved it, bought it, studied it for months. But I never did anything with Haskell, it's a great language, but I never found a task I could do with it, to experiment and deepen my knowledge.

At the same time, I've always been fond of Lisp (due to Emacs, Sawfish and partly GIMP-Fu I believe), and one day, reading HN, I came across Clojure. A functional Lisp on the JVM, with great interop, and strong support for concurrency. Hell yes! I toyed around with it too, but shelved it soon after, until I found a problem I could solve with it. And solve I did. The sheer beauty of the language still mesmerises me. It's insanely powerful, yet concise and easy to understand.

The thing that got me hooked into Clojure was that I could express myself a lot easier and a lot better with it, than in any other language I worked with before (and I worked with a lot of languages in the past). Everything else (core.logic, core.async, overtone, riemann, pedestal and ClojureScript) is just an added bonus.
Interesting factoid about the points and comments. I wonder if a resubmission of the same popular post a few months later will gather the same amount of points and comments?
I don't know about Hitler, but casual Russian nationalism and homophobia is not based on the sense of superiority; quite contrary, it's about fear that Russian language/culture/ethnicity/state disappears as others will outnumber us demographicaly or all our children become gays.
I don't think that's true at all. See this Quora thread, for instance, which discusses effective means of learning at length: http://www.quora.com/Learning/What-is-the-most-effective-way...

…oh, I see what you did there ;)
Can you expand on this? Any stories or observations?
Yeah, but the "trusting trust" rathole has no bottom. Why stop at the government CAs? Google certainly cooperated with NSA surveillance, if presented with a subpoena they could be forced to implement a MITM attack in chrome directly. Why trust any browser vendor or CAs that could conceivably be vulnerable to government pressure?

A more subtle solution to the CA mess is needed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/tea-party-racist_n_...

http://depts.washington.edu/uwiser/racepolitics.html

http://www.newsweek.com/are-tea-partiers-racist-70695

http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/13/liberals-on-twitter-one-id...

What happened to Web browsing ?
Movie Studios Target Leaked Copies of Wikileaks Films
The inept mind-control experiment that led to 20 years of CIA funding
The analysis of a Frank Zappa song
You could boot from a liveCD or some other read-only media. Your files could live on a server you trust, accessed only by encrypted means that you trust haven't been modified because your machine is read only.

You have to trust something.
I agree there is profoundly something wrong if Microsoft uses executive recruitment firm. This company has 100,000 employees with significant filtering in hiring and even more filters in climbing up the ladder. If no one from 100,000 people within Microsoft is deemed to be worthy of leading it then its yet another fail from Ballmer's part.
Taught myself to program BASIC on my TI-83 graphing calculator. Dad taught me VisualBasic, took high school classes in C++/JAVA, and taught myself Python, JavaScript, and Ruby while working terrible hourly jobs.

Now do full-stack Rails development for a startup.
Yes. Guthrie reports to Nadella, so that would be an overtake maneuver that seems unlikely.

But, given that Nadella has all these Scotts (Guthrie, Hanselmann) working (seemingly) happily for him, I'm hoping he will become the next Microsoft CEO. I saw Nadella present at the Build Conference, he comes across as a nice and intelligent manager, talking vision and doing demo's. The Azure/Developer division that he runs will be a very important part of future for Microsoft, whatever strategy they decide on regarding Windows, XBox, Bing and Devices. His group seems to understand the broader software development community, much more than any other part of Microsoft.
lots and lots of historic districts

there are crippling height restrictions all over the place, and you have to buy un-used "air rights" from your neighbors to build anything taller than what already exists in the neighborhood

environmental impact studies (weirdly) can be used against projects

local "community boards" have a lot of power

and the aforementioned centrally imposed limits on development -- the city's top-level boards may not like what you're doing to transportation
I think it's more that voluntary redundancies tend to foreshadow compulsory redundancies, and indicate that the company thinks workers in your area don't make as much in money as you cost in salary. Given that you'll end up unemployed anyway, you might as well get some cash out of it.

When you and your co-workers are being offered voluntary redundancy and sites other than yours are being closed is also a good time to make sure you have redundancy insurance on any loans you have; to check your CV is up to date; and to make sure your friends at other companies still remember who you are.
Which is why they're likely to be crowd-pleasers rather than original contributors. The various karma systems only exacerbate this behavior.
I mean the guy won't show up in Russia himself. It does not mean that German athletes won't compete. I think you maybe misunderstanding this situation.
"Somewhat negative" in the sense that it suggests that they haven't made much of an impact on the world, or that they don't have much to say. They are much more of an unknown quantity.

Quiet isn't "bad" per se, but I'd rather hire someone who is confident enough in what they have to say, to say some stuff publicly.
http://couchbangs.wordpress.com/
While I am sympathetic to the woman in the article, consider this: I am bipolar type one (the wilder type), ultra rapid cyclicity with psychotic features. I have had countless manic episodes complete with week-long total sleeplessness, hallucinations (visual and auditory) and delusions ranging from believing I was a CIA agent to thinking the CIA is out to get me. And I've done some really crazy, stupid things of.. questionable judgment, including sending very crazy faxes to the White House. Been hospitalized against my will more than once.

But now I take several drugs and am very well-treated, extremely "high-functioning" in the clinical sense. I've been married happily and nicely employed for years. While being manic is a lot of fun, I have no inclination to fall off the treatment wagon. I'm a success story basically.

But suppose I wanted a government job requiring security clearance to privileged information, should I be trusted given that I've been mentally healthy for several years, without incident?

I think the answer is no. Obviously.

Manic depressives are, relative to everybody else, prone to poor judgment, psychosis, run-ins with the law, suicide, not taking their medicines, unemployment, broken relationships and vices in general. Call me a self-hating nut but if I had a daughter (and parenthetically I do intend to have a kid, even though the kid has a fifty fifty chance of having the disease), would I want a bipolar boy to date my daughter, however well-treated he might be? Absolutely not.

So regarding my people, those with mood disorders (not just bipolar), while I appreciate the anti-discriminatory progressive stuff to make things easier for my people, between you and me, do yourself a favor, whether you are an employer, a money lender, an army recruiter, an immigration policy maker or a dad - or even a bipolar person yourself who's on the dating market, keep your distance from us manic depressives as too often we are bad news.

... Though we are more creative.
(Conventional) Solid state devices are very hard to fail - exception: flash memory

Apart from electron migration issues and failures by excess (voltage/temperature), they're pretty long lasting

Much easier to have a failure because of something else: capacitors failing, oxidation or mechanical failure (for example, because of thermal expansion/contraction)

I've seen people complaining about a dead CPU but I can't find it right now
Did you see this a few weeks ago? http://patshaughnessy.net/2013/10/24/visualizing-garbage-col...
Probably because it leverages the security built into bluetooth.
I can say that the Z80 if my ZX Spectrum keep working since 1984... Or some old K6-2 300 was working this last year...
The 1968 fist raise probably contributed to the cause of civil rights in the U.S., so I wouldn't argue these are useless gestures.
You can fake whole system reliability by incorporating redundant internal systems.
The best language for micro-controller programming, for one.
> The day the news broke that Edward Snowden had left Hong Kong, I was out of town at a soccer tournament with my daughter. The parents of her teammates, mostly younger than I am, heard me announce that news, and when one parent asked, what Snowden's destination was, another said, "Gitmo?" with a smile that indicated that he thought Snowden belongs there. I find that reaction quite commonplace among Americans I know.

Then you know a lot of shitty Americans.
So is the hotel industry paying bloggers to write these hit pieces?
Do you think hundreds of millions of malnourished children would suddenly have food in their mouths?

Yes.Because part of the problem is that the distribution system is broken.It is broken because the system is inefficient.It is inefficient 'cause it is corrupt.If you reduce to a level where it is not an acceptable thing for the society,it would be far easier to deal with all other problems you talked about.

Don't confuse the effects of corruption and incompetence

No.There are states like kerala where all of the above problems have been solved in past.(ie Malnutrition,food security,education etc) They pretty much have the same education system and political system like rest of India,just that society is less tolerant to mass corruption and mismanagement.So issue number one is corruption and the value system that tolerates it.
Someone has to implement those garbage-collected languages. If you ever want to be one of those someones, you need to learn manual memory management and raw-memory manipulation.
That makes me wonder... Linus refers to this as well, but how much of the 36+ years can be attributed to the components actually being turned off?

Also, I'd imagine that space craft components are of an entirely different category of components that the off the shelf computing variety.
Did I read this right: "Collin Price is available permanently". Or should it be "Collin Price has been available forever"?
Not with their definition of 'voluntary.'
We know the mass of each of millions of galaxies? I doubt the galaxies involved have even been counted. But never mind, because ideas aren't proven invalid when they aren't applied in some way you desired.
I went from C++ and Java in school, to C for work, then C# for work, and now I'm back full circle to C++ and Java.

I don't really care about the language I use as long as it's the right tool for the job. I think C is the most frustrating because of its verbosity and how explicit I need to be, but I understand that there are circumstances where the low overhead is useful.
Spacecraft are not built out of the same grade of components as consumer and commercial hardware.
He's talking about desktop/server CPUs where people care about performance. If you don't care so much about performance, you can increase the transistor sizes, reduce the clock speed, and achieve totally insane MTBF... as space-rated hardware tends to do. Kind of like how server CPUs are underclocked to increase MTBF, but more so.
Airbnb Confessions
I warmly recommend trying out Simon Marlow's book "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell"
http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929

I've a number of friends for whom haskell didn't "click" until they read Simon's book.

even ignoring the haskell bits, its also a great walk through of different paradigms of concurrent and parallel programming with working code.
Kraken (bitcoin) app for Windows Phone 8
Notre Dame set to play in 2013 Pinstripe Bowl
The Mess We've Made
Still rooting for Forstall. The ultimate revenge, and the once in a lifetime opportunity for Microsoft to change its ways, cut waste, bureaucracy, and ship new product on a regular basis.

If Microsoft wants to operate like Apple does, there's no better person to do it than the man who learned and worked for Jobs! You can't do this kind of thing with a run-of-the-mill CEO. You need someone that's going to micromanage and rebuild the company over the course of a few years, in addition to being somewhat polarizing and making unilateral decisions.

Scott Forstall is this person, and Bill Gates would be foolish to completely discount him.
Is your book on safaribooksonline.com?... and... are you happy?
I'm pretty sure Microsoft would rather set fire to all their buildings and engineers than extend the valley's reach of google-based incestuous "leadership" higher up the left coast.
> I do not say anything online that I wouldn't in real life

But do you say things in real life that you wouldn't online?
I would humbly disagree with your second assessment on two fronts:

1. It's not that hard to get people using immutable data structures. You just have to remind them during code reviews. It's not that "var" doesn't have its place (within function calls but not escaping them.) It's that it'll take someone a week or two to really get comfortable with immutability.

2. Akka, can come after they learn about Futures and how to use them in for-comprehensions. Once they make that mental leap and have adopted #1, other things fall into place with much more ease.

Granted, neither #1 or #2 comes without someone who has done some Scala lending a guiding hand. If it's purely Java devs showing other Java devs, then they will be doing what C programmers did when switching to C++ (writing Java in Scala.)
YouTube of audio:
Howard Stern Show : Sir Paul McCartney Interview 10/08/13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd80ZB5YxsM
You are flat out wrong about Tucker. That essay you cite is about how the only thing shared between anarchists and socialists is the labor theory if value...

I have read many (but not all) of the people you cited. I'm also not a Marxist, though I play one often. Since you're French, I'll name drop Deleuze here...
At one level, translation is literally "impossible." Books are written for people who speak a common language, and have a common cultural context. No matter how "accurately" the individual words (or broader meanings, which is different) are translated, there just isn't a 1:1 mapping to another culture, place, and time.
Interesting the mention of payment processors like PayPal or Dwolla but little mention of payments. If banks became the primary interface for making payments, that would change everything for businesses and allow the kind of data usage they're talking about here.

That's what I'm working on, nice to see someone pointing out some of the things we've been talking about internally!
Yes, even caught me off guard for a second. This is a rare case when sensationalist title is indeed factual :)
The title should probably read "Control power outlets via Bluetooth Low Energy"

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

It's BlueTooth Low energy, a fairly recent standard, the technology used in iBeacons. It's range is about perfect for a room. Several of the comments seem to be considering the older bluetooth standards.
If this kind of stuff outrages you, please ask your Rep to investigate: http://www.house.gov/htbin/findrep

Since we are talking about taxpayer money, this seems like a great opportunity for a Congressional hearing on the matter.
I am not sure balloons are viable. For short term disaster sure, but long term is too much maintenance. Besides worsening hurricane/wind trend is likely to continue. I think they might just deploy network of cube sats, and figure out low power satellite uplink if they are really shooting for global connectivity.
It's hard to suggest sensible names, even from a distance. Microsoft is such a diverse company in terms of Enterprise and Consumer focus that there are very few candidates who would make sense.

I'm not very familiar with the MS internal candidates. I'd note that it would be pretty unlikely that the board would appoint an internal candidate who wasn't on the "Senior Leadership Team"[1]. That would mean none of the "Scotts" are candidates, but Satya Nadella[2] is. Nadella has done a pretty good job the MS's enterprise cloud strategy: Azure is a decent platform. However he has no consumer background...

Exceptions to the "must be on the Senior Leadership Team" might be made for people from semi-autonomous divisions. Stephen Elop is one such candidate (who has consumer experience) and Tony Bates is another. Bates has a very well rounded resume: self taught programmer, ex-CISCO (so knows enterprise), ex-Youtube board (so knows media), ex-Skype (so knows consumer).

Outside the company.. hmm. Vic Gundotra or Sundar Pichai from Google? I looked through the Oracle & IBM leadership teams and no one jumped out at me (except for Mark Hurd, but I don't think that will happen..)

The person they really need is a cross between Andy Groves[3], Phil Knight[4] and Jack Welch[5]. We've had a Groves/Welch cross[6] and a Groves/Knight cross[7], but getting all three at once looks hard.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/slt.aspx

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/nadella/default.asp...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Knight

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V._Gerstner,_Jr.

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
The lack of "academic" translations such as Lionel Giles's or Victor Mair's is odd for that site...
> The file ends in `.c`, but the return type of `malloc` is cast to different pointer types

I was taught this way, and lint used to complain if I didn't. Just because it's legal not to cast doesn't also mean it's bad to cast.
Boycotts and scandals is what Putin probably actually want from Sochi Olympics to raise tension with the West and lead us to the new Iron Curtain.
The registration form is terrible: each time it doesn't like some input all the fields are reset and you have to start from scratch.
Then the website URL validation is broken: for instance, I can't use a domain with a hyphen for it, but I can in the e-mail field.
Also, the twitter field could be optional, and in any case tolerate getting the handle with the @ symbol prefixed.
Anyway, the really bad part is the first point because it promotes the others from annoyances into pain.

The site looks good, though. It might end up working very well with some refinements as others noted.
Super impressive disassembly of Exile from the wikipedia page:

http://www.level7.org.uk/miscellany/exile-disassembly.txt
Also, I'm curious what it's like to be a Microsoft insider. Is there a perpetual whisper along the lines of "Why can Apple execute, but we can't?".

I'm not denigrating Microsoft and it's employees. But I'm really curious what morale is like over there, before and after Bill Gates left.

edit: Start with Forstall, bring Ray Ozzie back, and you have a very solid leadership base.
This is hardly surprising, and it's unfair to try to turn it into a problem with "entitlement programs". There are many examples of this kind of thing -- and private insurers aren't pushing back on the costs, either.

Take the anti-viral drugs acyclovir and valacyclovir. They're both anti-virals used to treat diseases caused by the herpes simplex virus (e.g. shingles, chicken pox, cold sores, herpes, etc.), and are both commonly prescribed to patients of all ages. The only difference between them is that valacyclovir is a pro-drug -- it metabolizes to acyclovir -- and has slightly higher bioavailability, which means that patients can take three doses a day, instead of five. Otherwise, they're equivalently effective medications.

Granted, three doses a day is easier on patients than five doses a day, but that convenience comes at a cost: valacyclovir costs about five times as much as acyclovir. Your doctor won't tell you this -- she'll just prescribe the valacyclovir, in nearly all cases -- and your private insurance company won't do anything to encourage you to take one drug over the other. About the only way you'd know is if you tried to buy the drug without insurance, and your pharmacist told you that you could use this other, cheaper medication to save a lot of money.

Not only are "entitlement programs" not the problem here, they could actually be the solution: a single-payer health system would have an economic incentive to push back on providers, and encourage them to use more cost-effective drugs. Our current, private insurance system is almost totally blind to cost effectiveness, because nobody in the chain has any incentive to care. The final costs of the system get passed back to employers in the form of annual rate increases, when it's too late to do anything about them.
"I don't kill people because I'd get caught" is probably true for most people.

If you lived in a society where killing didn't tend to be punished, you'd probably kill. Because if you didn't you'd be dead. Don't underestimate people's tendency to adapt to their environments.

I get what you are saying, but I think if you look at it in the big picture, sites which require real names (and sites that otherwise reward you for gaining a positive reputation over the long term) tend not to degenerate into cesspools of ugliness. It may be partly because the non-civil go elsewhere, but I think it also is because it encourages civility from those who are there.
How do you define what the "return" is? Perhaps it's not an immediate causal relationship, but a much more complicated, interrelated set of returns -- like a more cohesive, inclusive, better functioning society.

Paying more for welfare to others might pay off in being able to walk the streets at night without being mugged, for example.