danohuiginn

obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1235/

probably because you missed a zero. 169 out of 100,000

Large institutions can be surprisingly good about this. Government jobs in the UK, for instance, tend to be pretty open to job-shares. Look for companies supportive of working mothers -- if they have systems in place for parents to work part-time, they may well be prepared to accommodate you on similar terms.

Superstitions about drafts are bizarrely common. Bosnians, for example, tend to be terrified of "propuh", or cross drafts. If you leave windows open on either side of a building, you risk any malady up to and including paralysis.

I find it hard to understand how such beliefs get started, or manage to remain so prevalent.

I can't find a decent link ATM, but I've also seen smoking claimed as a major cause of death among the military.

Soldiers and veterans tend to smoke much more than civilians, which doesn't do wonders for their life expectancy.

The most generous approach to audiophiles is to allow for a placebo effect. i.e. they get greater enjoyment from listening to what they believe is a perfect sound system, regardless of whether the gold-plated cables actually do anything.

SEEKING WORK -- Python, data, research. Berlin, Germany. Remote OK

I like to combine code, data and real-world analysis to make sense of things. I've lately done a lot of work with investigative journalists...exposing weapons sales, tracking organized crime through banking records, making tax havens more transparent than they want to be.

I'd love to apply similar approaches in other domains -- using all the tools available to help you answer some question. Could mean writing a web scraper, running a Hadoop job, or picking up the phone and calling the right expert.

I know my way around big data, though I find smaller datasets equally valuable. I've worked on a multi-terabyte mapreduce system, and the associated web service to handle 1000+ requests/second.

I'm also happy with web-dev (python, js, PHP where needed). Things I've (co-)done lately:

http://investigativedashboard.org -- site used by investigative journalist in 30+ countries for research collaboration

http://yanukovychleaks.org/en -- making public the documents of the former president of Ukraine

Remote is fine, or I can travel for up to a couple of months.

http://ohuiginn.net, email daniel@[that domain].

CV: http://ohuiginn.net/docs/cvdanohuiginn.pdf

That's 3 of the 8-member Technical Committee, which is the group that's ultimately responsible for all technical decisions in Debian.

Good for her, but the commuting process sounds hellish. And from the comments here, several others have been in the same situation. Does YC have any plans to better support founders in that situation?

I don't think anybody is proposing to move away from emacs lisp as the usual scripting language. Rather, you'd initially move to Guile's implementation of emacs lisp, and potentially later allow use of other languages supported by Guile.

Coincidentally, I've just been reading about Esperanto. It seems slightly nutty in today's climate of English dominance. But when you needed to learn several natural languages to communicate internationally, it made far more sense to pine for a simple, neutral common tongue.

What is the advantage of releasing a high-end phone?

They've made a sensible strategic choice to target a low-end market -- probably the place where firefox-os has the best chance of competing with Android. Trying to have a high-end flagship would dilute their branding and divert their dev efforts.

I'm nitpicking, but it's bizarre to see Karl Popper being described as an "economist".

In many areas, yes. But from Europe at least, the US healthcare system seems so obviously broken that it's relatively rarely used for comparisons. Sweden is more common, I'd say.

Now if we're talking about innovation, technology, culture -- THEN there will be wistful comparisons to the US

picking up on a tangent in that article:

<i>Two other perfect examples of "obvious-in-retrospect" theories are evolution and special relativity. Admittedly, I don't know if the ancient Greeks, sitting around in their togas, could have figured out that these theories were true. But certainly -- certainly! -- they could've figured out that they were possibly true: that they're powerful principles that would've at least been on God's whiteboard when She was brainstorming the world.</i>

To me, evolution is a perfect example of the need for practical knowledge. Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution are both absolutely reasonable theories; it's just that only one of them matches the world we live in.

The idea is that postgres would be a storage engine for mongodb, like innodb is a storage engine for mysql

yeah, mongodb has flipped from hype to hatred without much in between.

The reason, I think, is that few people using it had a good sense of where the pain points would be. Many of us somehow imagined that because we didn't know where mongodb's limitations were, we wouldn't run into them. Cue frustration when you're bitten by some issue you didn't think about.

I do believe there are good uses for it. But they are pretty specialised, and I'd rather use a relational db for most things.

Or you could just get their annual accounts from the business registry, and see what they've reported there.

[won't be up-to-the-minute accurate, of course, and won't work for all jurisdictions. But it's a data source that far too few people use, IME]

careful, you might just be seeing a regression to the mean.

i.e. the first time you buy something, you are comparison-shopping, and likely to choose an item that is particularly cheap at that moment.

When you go back a year later, you aren't comparison shopping -- you're looking to replace what you bought last time. And you may well find that whatever made it cheap in the past (promotion, overproduction, market conditions) no longer applies.

the phrase in German is "Der Islam gehört zu Deutschland" -- which means something like Islam has a place in Germany.

fair enough. I'm mainly thinking of a European context -- tenants rights in the US being much weaker, the same pattern may not apply there.

'"To my surprise," Freeman says, "it seemed to suggest that people in neighborhoods classified as gentrifying were moving less frequently."'

Well, duh. With rents rising, your only chance to stay in the neighbourhood is to cling on to your existing contract. Look at a fully-gentrified neighbourhood; the only low-income residents will be those who have been living in the same home for decades, with a rental contract that protected them from rent increases.

For Ubuntu 14.10, Debian imports will be frozen in a couple of weeks. So probably it won't make that release, but will be available in 15.04. That's being available in universe. Somebody might put it into 14.10 backports, as well, but that would only affect people technical enough to get ffmpeg anyway. Being used by default would be at least another release on from that, if ever.

That's assuming normal release practices. It could change a bit if Canonical decided to push it, or if a showstopper bug turned up in libav.

The book he means is Mindhacker -- Hack 17 in there is Lion Kimbro's description of his simplified note-taking system.

Available here: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/personal-development/97...

you don't eliminate #1, it just has less consequences for the hosting provider.

Bitcoins can still be stolen (albeit perhaps not as easily as credit cards). But since there's no chargeback system, the victims don't have much recourse.

Here's a classic piece of data journalism on the topic:

'This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted... “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”'

http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-...

greggman's usage is pretty common.

e.g. wikipedia: "In common usage, the term is often used in the context of professionals or skilled workers sent abroad by their companies,[1] rather than for all 'immigrants' or 'migrant workers'."

Wow, that is one of the craziest lists I have ever seen.

Several of the places there would be interesting to live (I have a soft spot for Georgia, for instance), but I wouldn't recommend them to somebody coming from the US and looking to settle in easily.

It's the first link under Sources

May 2, 2014 English Wikipedia Archive http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20140502/enwiki-20140502-p...

Start with freebase.

But you're going to have a serious problem with missing data. Date of parent's death will only be there (in structured form) if the parent is themselves notable enough to have a wikipedia article. Otherwise, it'll only be in the text.

So I think you'll only get a meaningful result if you manually clean the data. Choose a 'neutral' source of notable people (e.g. Who's Who). Hire somebody via odesk or mechanical turk to find and record age of father's death. Compare with averages across the entire population.

Basic manual research is now cheap; take advantage of it!