aneth

The article says:

> According to statisticians, it is almost impossible to manipulate data in a way that a certain outcome is guaranteed and Benford’s Law is met at the same time. Hence, tax authorities in several countries are using Benford’s Law as a default testing device.

I'd be very interested in evidence to support this. This doesn't sound correct. "Almost impossible?"

Would the every podcast had a transcription. Listening is such a waste of time.

I'm curious what effect sleep, meditation, and rest would have on willpower.

Wouldn't this be to ensure that one degree of latitude is always approximately the same distance? (i.e. one mile)

We can inspect the skeletons and determine if there was cancer present. I have also read that it was largely non-existent in paleolithic cultures, indicating agricultural products and lifestyle, but I'd like to see further confirmation of this.

In my experience, Rails is much slower to start up than Java frameworks, even if the rvm itself loads faster. Also, Play does allow you to see changes instantly. Read the docs for more information.

As far as static typing goes, that's a larger debate. Many, myself included, believe static typing has many benefits for error prevention, debugging, tooling, etc.

It may be more lucrative to partner with deal sites and take a cut of revenue through ads and the like - without the expense. In some way, Facebook Deals is like Google getting into ecommerce - it's better just to be a middle man and sell ads.

More evidence that Google is tone deaf. They lack compassion and understanding for their users and community, and they abuse their power. This a precursor to grand evil - lack of compassion plus grand intentions. Slide? G+ names? What other examples?

Anyone worth $58M is doing it for more than the money. Jobs most certainly wouldn't have hand picked a successor who would choose retirement over running Apple.

'Steve, look. I don't give a fuck about Apple. Just make up your mind'

I need friends like that. Glad to know indecision has good company.

Assuming the anecdote is accurate, my guess is this was Steve's subtle way of nudging Vic to be more attentive to details. I don't think Steve would call anyone at anytime making a fuss over such a small thing - he would never get any work done.

Call someone who's work is starting to slip once on a Sunday to complain about some minutiae, and you are letting them know that you are watching - even if you aren't really watching all the time. I think this is a leadership technique, not the micro-management it appears to be.

This also is a way of Steve asserting control and dominance. Making someone scurry over a mis-tinted letter sets the tenor of the relationship.

I think it's important not to take the wrong lessons from all these anecdotes. Jobs knows how to get good work out of people by causing them to demand perfection of themselves and to fear producing imperfect products. No CEO has time to exact perfection end to end - their job is to set standards, expectation, and culture. Sometimes ridiculous demonstrations of micro-management are just what someone needs.

This is a huge improvement over their developer forums, which are a mess of unanswered duplicate questions, terrible search, and didn't even support Facebook login.

I like the "virtual jobs" concept mentioned here. I recently wrote a post addressing this issue as an urgent matter.

http://blog.stacktrace.com/2011/08/16/end-of-employment-eter...

Now the question is, how can De Beers extend their extorted monopoly to all flame?

I think you answered the question. You scale Rails by slowly replacing it. The problem with their architecture is that they hadn't done that yet. Node is handling their web scale traffic as-is.

I'm a 5 year + rails developer, and this doesn't actually surprise me. Ruby and Rails are just incredibly slow in my experience unless you cache everything, which can greatly increase complexity. Right now I'm struggling with the creation of 2000 active record objects taking 10 seconds, which is absolutely ridiculous. And that's down from 30 seconds - which was happening because require was being called for each of those object instantiations by a third party library. So a 20 second gain by removing 2000 calls to require - on Heroku - something is wrong there.

The JSON that's generated with all that data is converted to backbone objects instantaneously in a browser, and the few database calls are instantaneous - it's all Ruby. I will probably need to create custom lightweight objects just because ruby is so darn slow. Much of the time is spent in gsub resolving paths for paperclip attachments - work that would take most languages a few milliseconds can take 10 seconds in ruby. I know there are many ways to optimize this but I should not have to at this point.

I find with ruby I constantly run into performance bottlenecks and need to revert to optimization that I would not have to do on other platforms.

Yours is the typical answer from rails fans. But what could be wrong with his Rails implementation that could be that slow, assuming they are reasonably competent - a valid assumption I think given their successful port to node?

Could everyone make sure every Republican and Tea Partier they know reads this? Republican concerns are critical to this country, but the current incarnation is deeply harmful.

A reminder that we should be thankful for the academic orgins of the winning Internet standards. We could live in a world of fragmented protocols and pay walls at every turn. Instead we live in a world where the hacker standard prevails - that everything should be free unless it is truly a unique value add.

Imagine if Linux or BSD had been positioned such that they won the consumer OS war. Now imagine if AOL won the war for consumer Internet standards. Some may argue, but I believe this could have happened had TCP/IP and HTML not landed full force with as such an open, powerful, and stable alternative - largely due to years of academic and scientific influence.

AOL failed to adopt the way Microsoft did, and the open Internet was already compelling as a consumer experience, so they would have had a more difficult time competing - but it might have happened.

Had the same occurred for consumer OS, we could live in a different world of open desktop standards. We appear to be headed that way 30 years later through the browser, but it's going to take at least another 5 or 10 years to supplant proprietary desktop OSes.

We do have a similar battle going on for the mobile platform. I'm an avid Apple user and fan, but I'm rooting ultimately for HTML5 as the standard for developing apps. Let's just hope it's good enough to compete.

You are correct that Windows was responsible for the commoditization of computing. You are also correct that many hacks occurred through means other than unpatched Windows machines. Neither of those truths changes the fact that Windows XP has been and continues to be a serious issue for national and corporate security.

Almost every computer in China runs a pirated version of XP that can not be patched and is vulnerable and likely infected with some sort of botnet software. Many corporations and agencies in the US have been compromised in this way as well.

The millions of hijacked Windows XP machines ready to a botnet's bidding might beg to differ.

Let us never forget that Microsoft Windows is responsible for, among much else, the transfer of critical trade secrets, diplomatic communications, and weapons technologies to our competitors and enemies. If China wins World War 3 in 50 years, Windows, albeit indirectly, will be significantly responsible.

Windows 7 may be more secure, but XP is still a major drain on society.

I'm not sure that's the case here. It's not an anonymous recipient, it's Jonathan's stored value card and therefore Jonathan. Jonathan authorized anyone to use his card to buy coffee. He did not authorize anyone to steal his money.

Another way to look at it is as a common fund dedicated to the purpose of buying coffee. Using it for anything else seems like embezzlement.

This seems like an unauthorized use of the card and could be criminal theft. If I give you my stored value card to buy coffee and you instead steal all the money, it doesn't matter whether you're donating to charity or disagree with my cause - it's stealing.

Regardless, it's certainly a shitty thing to do.

Personally, I find working in an open office environment terribly distracting. It feels like a constant meeting and people always feel now is a good time for a question or a chat.

Without patents, secrecy would be the norm. Instead of revealing drug formulas, companies would lock them up forever and sue people who stole them. Patents serve a purpose, even if they are terribly broken right now.

SCSS and Compass support is important to me. I avoid plain CSS whenever possible, and CSSEdit is pretty useless (certainly not worth paying for) without SCSS support.

The battery life is 40% longer on the 13", which to me is enough to swing the balance. The size is only about an inch different in two dimensions and 1/2 pound.

I have a previous generation 13" and I find I use the SD port often, which is missing on the 11".

I particularly like their much simpler approach to null-safety. Null is a ghost that haunts every imperative language, and it's great to see a good solution. Scala's is also nice, but wordy and difficult for newbies.

Simply being able to call a method chain without null checks or pattern matching is really nice. In Kotlin, you can either declare the variables non-nullable or use a safe call chain, e.g.

kennel?.mommies?.puppies()

http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Null-safety

I did not cheat in school. I wanted to prove things to myself and to learn. However the basic premise of opposition to cheating here is incorrect:

"habitual plagiarism ... can have very serious consequences in their professional life"

This is something academics believe because it justifies their policies, but it isn't true, at least in entrepreneurship. Those who can "cheat" without violating the trust of those who matter or facing legal consequences are those who succeed. Those who play by all the rules bitch on HN about "stolen ideas" and cutthroat business practices instead of synthesizing ideas and looking for unfair advantages.

Cheat if it suits you, learn what you want to learn, get the credentials you need, cover your ass, and build the life you want. Life is not a your grade, but neither is it the opinion of a professor over what you should be doing with your time - copying or writing.

It's not illegal to use dominance in one market to enter another. That's called good business.

Antitrust requires monopoly, which google does not have. There are many competitive and successful ad networks and search engines, and there is no lock in to the search product.

I submitted a question, but there was no confirmation screen, just a screen asking for a new question. Hopefully it got submitted because it's important:

"Like many, I spend my days logged in to a G Apps for Domains account and all my primary emails are there. How can I use Google+ and how can people share things with me?"