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b-manon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2016)

SEEKING WORK - REMOTE (UTC-3)

I can help you craft non trivial systems using precise language and focused listening.

My focus is on achieving the correct balance between quality and speed in my work, in the sense of maximizing your cost/benefit ration. I do this by front loading the analysis and quality guarantees as much as possible.

I have experience in building complex internet facing applications, computer vision software, complex database views, among others.

CV: [https://github.com/ebellani/Curriculum-Vitae/raw/master/cv.p...]

Linkedin: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-bellani-0116b450]

Github: [https://github.com/ebellani]

b-manon Ask HN : What do you do when you feel like a loser?

Have more compassion for yourself.

Read this book to understand more what I'm talking about:

http://www.amazon.com/Compassion-Self-Hate-Alternative-Despa...

b-manon Oracle knew about critical Java flaws since April

No so easy mate. Brazil has one of the largest bank concentration in the world, orchestraded of course by the central bank. We have the choice of 6 major banks, in this order of size -> Banco do Brasil, Itaú, Bradesco, BNDES, Caixa Econômica Federal, Santander

They are all highly regulated and with very little incentive to innovate. So they can screw around and do pretty much nothing at all. The fascist/socialist banking system that exists across the globe is even more pronounced here.

For those of you that can read portuguese, I recommend this article: http://www.mises.org.br/Article.aspx?id=1387

b-manon Bitcoinica MtGox account compromised

The competitors of a bank practicing fractional reserve and cargo-cult security would have a major incentive in pointing that out, in order to gain market share.

The free market does not lead people to nothing. What 'it' does is to reward lucrative (i.e. economical and profitable) behavior and to punish stupid ones. It is a form of social organization with an embedded stabilizing mechanism.

The same could be said of centralized banking, or centralized anything, as could be more easily seen on the more socialist economies of the soviet block.

Given that, let the people invest their money as they see fit, and punish fraud (including fractional reserve banking) as the crime it is. Simple solution.

b-manon Bitcoinica MtGox account compromised

I disagree strongly.

The reason that bank runs and failures are so destructive is because of the state build cartel, driven by central banking. That was built in order to prevent competition and to let fractional reserve(which is in essence fraud) to run wild.

The only reliable way to ensure stability in banking is to separate it from the state and let the free market do what it does in every industry known to man, weed out stupidity and fraud.

b-manon Judge Posner: U.S. patent system out of sync

About patent in drugs, I found these couple of articles really pertinent:

http://archive.mises.org/14949/patents-kill-compulsory-licen...

http://archive.mises.org/15365/update-patents-kill-compulsor...

b-manon Duke Nukem Forever finally available for pre-order on Amazon

Xanadu

b-manon [dead]

It was sarcasm man. I'm not defending using suicide attacks to invoke the process of reunification. Personally I would let the Korea peninsula future alone, where koreans would take care of themselves.

But again, what do I know? I'm a westerner programmer with limited sociopolitical knowledge.

b-manon [dead]

Yes, "liberate" the people with bombs and assassination.

History appears to like iteration.

b-manon Ex-Minuteman missile officer: I could have faked a global missile launch order

I was thinking more in these terms:

... the entire "madman theory" of coercion was flawed in its essence, depending as it did on twisted logic that assumed an adversary would respond to a calculated show of irrationality with something other than irrationality of its own. [1]

[1] http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0614-20.htm

In that article you can see what kind of danger unchecked assumptions and arrogance can lead people into, specially when these traits are carried by people with access to WMD.

b-manon Ex-Minuteman missile officer: I could have faked a global missile launch order

Being crazy gets you leverage on the negotiation table. Seeming measured and rational and restrained oftentimes gets you into trouble. See Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, for instance. There's no way that'd happen under a more aggressive President, like FDR or Nixon or GW. [citation needed]

b-manon Deprecating XML

How about SXML?

http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html

b-manon Calculus distilled into hours

Try looking at the constructionist articles, specially Papert's works, as there are a lot of them online[1].

Basically, the idea is that you can introduce deep mathematical concepts very early by adopting a more intuitive media. Also, take a look at McLuhan[2] to understand how the media shapes the message if you really want to go deep into it.

[1] http://www.papert.org/works.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

b-manon Entrepreneur Wins $625 Million Payout From Apple

Not exactly patented, but the concepts behind tablets, smartphones, and the PC itself can be traced directly to -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

b-manon What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

Yup, marked the pdf in the wrong place. Too late to edit it though.

b-manon FBI drives for encryption backdoors

The same argument could be made for the reverse side and against your proposal. For instance, Canada and Switzerland have a liberal gun policy, and Brazil has a somewhat restricting policy. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics

b-manon James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety. Then I would check the performance bottlenecks and rewrite them in C if needed.

Then I would use a more programmer friendly language on top of that. Something like Scheme, Ruby, Python and the like.

Stratified design, basically.

b-manon How to keep someone with you forever

I have posted this before in here, but it seems fitting to do it again in here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200226

b-manon Protein that destroys HIV discovered

because perhaps I should say if you had such understanding then you would have the liberty to suggest a better system.

Ask, and Ye Shall Receive

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/534

b-manon Human-shaped pylons carry electricity across Iceland

The thing about references is that they should demonstrate or negate the connection or affirmation that was presented.

I fail to see that in these links. I think a more appropriate set of citations would be:

basic research

http://www.religioustolerance.org/spanking_menu.htm

against corporal punishment as an educative method

http://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/policy/corporal- punishment.aspx

http://www.nospank.net/vcb.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/spankin4.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/spankin29.htm

for corporal punishment as an educative method

http://www.corpun.com/ukju9803.htm

http://www.corpun.com/10archive/ukd01001.htm#21929

I personally find a lack of serious psychological research that finds correlation between corporal punishment and increase of quality of life in the society where it is practiced. That observation makes me believe that this practice should be abolished, or severely restricted at least.

b-manon Human-shaped pylons carry electricity across Iceland

I can take a bet that if most countries had corporal punishment and applied it readily and liberally to vandalism cases, both vandalism and other offenses would be stopped. [citation needed]

b-manon Wikileaks Must Be Stopped

I would like to see how this guy would react if it was an American citizen leaking information about random_enemy_country. Should the federal authorities of said country have the right to violate foreign soil?

b-manon Too many laws, too many prisoners

If anyone is interested in digging further in the subject, I highly recommend this documentary[1].

[1] War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex) -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=864268000924014458&#...

b-manon Ask HN: What techniques do you use for gradually learning some topic?

* Don't force anything, have a list of different subjects that you want to learn (Ex: guitar, emacs, emotional intelligence, judo). Study what you feel like in this list.

* While reading, tag you book in interesting parts, but don't break you flow. Have the tags at hand.

* Use something like anki or mnemosyne to dump all your tags.

* Enjoy what you are doing. This is connected to the first suggestion.

* Sleep well, exercise at least 5 times at week, eat healthy, and socialize.

b-manon S-Expression based markup language

You could also use SXML[1].

[1] http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html

b-manon As Facebook Takes a Beating, a Brutal Movie Is Set to Make Things Much Worse

I really don't think you can say that Gates or MS made any breakthroughs in making computing ubiquitous. They were in business for a BASIC interpreter[1], created an empire based on monopoly and questionable ethics and frankly could not care less about the philosophy that paved the way for ubiquitous computing(that still is far from existing.)

If you want to give credit, give it to people who did the deeds to deserve it. People like Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Seymour Papert[2].

[1] http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/bill-gates-1986/

[2] http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html

b-manon China drops Dropbox

Tor[1].

[1] http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en

b-manon The Nature of Lisp (2006)

How about cusp[1] then? It is an eclipse plugin. Never tried myself, but it could be a starting point.

[1] http://sergeykolos.com/cusp/intro/

b-manon The Nature of Lisp (2006)

Did you ever tried Drscheme?

b-manon Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?

Not really related to the article, but do you have any data on forced prostitution?

It is a common argument, and I don't deny the existence of it, but I never saw any real research on the fact, besides watching this documentary[1], which did not presented much research on the subject in a global basis.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/slaves/