mcphilip

It's looking like it might be a Brexit moment for the USA. The filter bubble echo chamber of social media and 24/7 coverage of celebrities stumping for Clinton is going to leave a lot of people shocked tomorrow when/if it's officially given to Trump.

I rarely listen to music while programming, but when I do, it's usually Megadeth for trivial work or Ashkenazy playing Chopin - Bercuse for complex work. Possibly swapping Sigur Ros () for Chopin.

I search on YouTube for a URL and throw it in YouTube repeater.

You are incorrect. From Bloomberg:

>A day before the March 6 debate sponsored by CNN in Flint, Brazile allegedly wrote Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, that a woman from the town “has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint.” During the town hall, Lee-Anne Walters, who had a son who had stopped growing and a daughter who lost her hair, asked Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, her primary rival, whether they would “make a personal promise” to make the removal of lead a requirement for public waters in their first 100 days in office, according to transcripts of the debate provided by CNN. Both did.

That MusiCares speech is a great read if you have 30 minutes to spare. A few favorite bits:

On Dylan's immersion in classic folk:

>If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me – "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand." If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.

On what's often missing from rock & roll:

>The other half of rock & roll has got to be hillbilly. And that's a derogatory term, but it ought not to be. That's a term that includes the Delmore Bros., Stanley Bros., Roscoe Holcomb, Git Tanner and the Skillet Lickers... groups like that. Moonshine gone berserk. Fast cars on dirt roads. That's the kind of combination that makes up rock & roll, and it can't be cooked up in a science laboratory or a studio.

Additional background info from last year:

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31594856

1. Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support

--https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8006869

The admin of an automated twitter feed alerting followers of rockets launched between Gaza and Israel appeals to HN for help getting in contact with someone at twitter who can relax rate limits on the account to prevent it from being suspended during a sharp escalation of conflict.

2. Einstein and the Great Fed Robbery

--https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417511

Research from nanex using the speed of light to prove that results from a Federal Reserve meeting were leaked early. Ultimately led to policy changes at the Fed.

Agreed.

My suspicion is that they are way ahead of competitors in terms of data from testing self driving cars and realize there are still so many unsolved problems that true autonomous vehicles aren't going to happen nearly as soon as competitors claim.

For instance, I see self-driving Google cars on a daily basis here in central Austin. There are a ton of zero visibility turns where you have to slowly edge out and hope no one is coming because visibility is blocked by a hedge.

How can self-driving cars handle that scenario without delegating to manual intervention?

Google Drive's REST API documentation is a good place to start:

https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/#Children

New blog post on dao hub. Seems pretty grim:

https://blog.daohub.org/the-dao-is-under-attack-8d18ca45011b...

Question: are frequency, consistency, and productivity important metrics for bubbling up users that get noticed as really good candidates?

I poke around every now and then on stockfighter but am definitely not looking for a job change in the near term. Is this use case something y'all support?

Thanks!

Sam's take on bubble talk from his Hard Tech is Back post said it best:

>Leave the Medium thought pieces about when the stock market is going to crash and the effect it’s going to have on the fundraising environment to other people—it’s boring, and history will forget those people anyway. There has never been a better time to take a long-term view and use technology to solve major problems, and we’ve never needed the solutions more than we do right now

Back to work!

[1]http://blog.samaltman.com/hard-tech-is-back

Re: Hard Tech is Back

>So, if you’re thinking about starting one, we’d like to talk. And we think we can help

What's the preferred method of contact? I have connections to a "hard tech" startup in Austin and pointed the founders at your blog post.

>I think "made redundant" has been the British term for laid off for quite a while; though this is, IME, far less common in American usage.

A big part of the plot in the British Office tv show was watching Ricky Gervais fumble his department through a merger that ultimately made him redundant. He kept assuring the employees there would be no redundancies.

Zenefits using the term redundancies may just be colloquial British phrasing. They've got much greater PR problems now that make the semantics of layoffs vs redundancies seem a minor concern.

The Onion Talks series parodying TED talks has some real gems. My favorite: What is the Biggest Rock?

http://youtu.be/aO0TUI9r-So

Discussing the merits of HFT is similar to discussing the merits of different approaches to cryptography. Because there's such a vast amount of prerequisite knowledge required for analysis, one either has to slog through the learning curve or look for expert opinions.

So who are these experts in HFT that should be referenced? Certainly not me or Michael Lewis.

One source I like to follow is Eric Hunsader. One of his claims to fame is catching a leak in FOMC data that led to a policy change by the Federal Reserve [1].

My own take on the HFT debate: HFT is here to stay; the method of trading is not the problem, the danger is that no regulator can monitor the massive stream of quotes and trades and accurately sift out bad actors. What's the solution -- I have no clue, but arbitrarily slowing down trades is not useful.

[1]http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4473.html

Edit:

Apparently no true Scotsman would follow Nanex as a source. Duly noted. :) I'd be interested to hear of other sources that at least attempt in depth analysis like Nanex.

I seem to have less nervous tics associated with stressful situations, but anxiety related racing thoughts don't seem to have changed. E.G. Propanelol doesn't seem to impact problems like laying in bed worrying about the upcoming day

I've been using extended release propanelol daily for the past couple years as part of the treatment for chronic mixed tension migraines. I'd been struggling with migraines leaving half of my body feeling extreme muscular tension 2-3 times a week. I can't comment on beta blockers effectiveness in treating anxiety, but it does seem to have a powerful effect on soothing the nervous system without the damaging side effects of addiction and impaired memory when I was taking Xanax or Valium.

Looking for Dark Forces custom levels was my gateway drug to the QMODEM, BBS, and news groups back in 1995. Similar to Doom's wad files, dark forces had gobs. Eventually a dos base editor, DFUSE, was released, but I remember one level creator (dons3d, I think) that came out with a level created without any gui based tools. He plotted out all the X, Y, Z coordinates for the vertices, calculated texture stitching offets, enemy locations, etc by hand. It was amazing. Just the act of adding a door that slid open involved a special scripting language, coordinate geometries, texture lining, etc.

That man was my hero. I learned so many technical and spacial skills by trying and failing to make a good custom dark forces level.

Good times.

It's fairly common to take profits on half one's stake in stocks when you want to realize some profit but still think the stock could go up further.

Reminds me of the "In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas" NYT op-ed [1] that lists a lot of similar scenarios to the one at Yale.

I have no problem with an NA group asking participants to respectfully focus on recovery and minimize talking about all the crazy shit you did as an addict -- participation is voluntary, after all. Imposing a similar "safe space" in the real world is obviously impossible. Attempts to ostracize those who dare suggest that a university campus should model the real world instead of a safe space is really insidious.

[1]http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-s...

This first person account of social anxiety hits closer to home, for me at least:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/03/25/a-day...

Logically, if the U.S. feels justified in targeted drone strikes against legitimate threats to national security, what's to stop China or Russia from doing the same? Arent there some legitimate scenarios where U.S. and Chinese national security interests are in opposition?

Who has the "moral high ground", if such a thing exists, in such cases?

Pulling up that link in Safari on mobile really demonstrates how bad the UI/UX is. There is no obvious way to see anything other than the first tweet in the series:

http://m.imgur.com/7JSETBc

Apart from the clickbait title, the article is mostly common sense. No ideas should be held as beyond questioning/testing/proving etc. Labeling this approach as atheism just confuses the matter.

Reminds me of Nietzsche's thoughts on Eternal Recurrence. Instead of living each day like it's your last, you live each day like it will be repeated indefinitely in exactly the same way:

>The greatest weight. -- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine"? If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. (GS 341)

http://myweb.lmu.edu/tshanahan/Nietzsche-Eternal_Recurrence....

Have you tried Mother Earth Mother Board?

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

It's a ~40,000 word article from 1996 he did for Wired about the laying of undersea fiber-optic cables. I'd say it ranks as one of his best writings, just behind the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon

I think the question is if Snowden recklessly (i.e. without careful consideration of consequences) endangered the lives of <insert arbitrary people group here>.

Information is power. Snowden leaked damaging information about corruption in one of the most powerful and important surveillance groups. The public <replace with Russian, Chinese, child pornographers for emotional poignancy> has access to said damaging information.

The OP and the Times article are evaluating whether certain groups have 'privileged' access to the Snowden archive and that considerable harm has been done to British intelligence operations.

I think it's more damaging to not critically evaluate claims made by the Sunday Times article than to dismiss the HN discussion because of reverb in the echo chamber.

>Additional features like documents and deep indexes are nice of course but can be (and often are) implemented using relational databases as well, so in the end there really isn't such a large advantage to be gained from using a graph database, especially when taking into account the immaturity of many solutions in that space.

I've worked with graph data stored in rdbms in the medical informatics space. As you say, there are ways to correctly handle complex graph data in rdbms.

I've also used neo4j as the backend for a wall street analytics app that's in production. Could it have been done in rdms? Sure, but the ad hoc queries that needed to be run against the data were much easier to express as graph traversals than SQL.

There are some obvious downsides with using a graph database, mainly that it's practically impossible to find programmers with non trivial production experience, but it's been a great fit at the two startups I used it at since I got to implement it from the ground up and didn't need a large team.

That being said, database pragmatism is the main lesson to be learned here. Use the right tool(s) for the right jobs.

The first celebrity death that hit me hard. I've read all fourty Discworld novels, some of them 4 or 5 times. His books taught me to approach the world with a twinkle in my eye and a smile quick to come out -- a good change from the cynicism of my teens.

So many memories... he wrote amazing characters.

Dorfl, a Golem who figured out how to program himself (via writing his own scrolls to feed into his head). His fireproof nature made him a great firefighter and a constant nuisance on the street of small gods since he'd engage in rational debates and was not deterred by the prospect of hell -- the first fireproof athiest.

Death quipping to his grandaughter, Susan, when asked why people taught kids to believe in lies like the tooth fairy: SO THEY'LL BELIEVE IN THE BIGGER LIES AS ADULTS, LIKE JUSTICE AND EQUALITY.

I could go on forever, but I'll leave with one last quote from Death:

THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS JUST US

Just a side note to add about scanning the wristband for a ride's fastpass line or entry into a park: it's a two step process where you put a finger on a finger print scanner and then move on to scanning the wristband. If both are successful, you're let in.

Oddly enough, the fidelity of the fingerprint scans wasn't high enough to read 2 of our party's members, so it was an slightly annoying process having to wait for a supervisor to come over and officially clear them.

The process was seemless for the rest of the party (i.e. 10 people).