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Choronzonon Bilingual people are twice as likely to recover from a stroke, study finds

"even after taking into account other factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and age" But not IQ and social status,bilingual people are more likely to score higher on both and this could be an aspect of healthier cognitive functions rather than how many languages you know.

Choronzonon Countries That Don't Exist

Libya and Iraq can effectively added to this list.

Choronzonon Ask Hackaday: How Did They Shoot Down a Stealth Aircraft?

Because ancient radars in the VHF frequency light up stealth aircraft. Hell even wikipedia mentions this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-18_radar

Increase the wavelength and triangulate with multiple P-18s and you have a very visible nice slow moving target.

Choronzonon iPhone 6 Sapphire Crystal Display

Way too bendy to be actual sapphire crystal.Unless its some sort of a composite.

Choronzonon Python 3 Features

Too little too late and not good enough,very little offered for splitting the user base. Python in the long run is badly positioned as

1. Moores law partytime is over. Performance matters again and the language has significant upper limits on speed.PyPy is not fast enough and further splits the user base.

2.As performance matters again concurrency matters more,concurrency in python in horribly implemented.

3.AsyncIo, What the hell am I even looking at? Gevent is vastly simpler than this.

It is a pity as it is one of the cleanest languages around and a joy to code in. But programmer productivity is more important than speed you say? We in many cases that is true but languages like go and Julia can offer both so why program in a slow language which you may have to replace later when its almost as easy to take another option and have everything?

Choronzonon In Venture Capital, Birds of a Feather Lose Money Together

A VC may win by maximising profit but a VC employee has to protect his reputation."We made a mistake but so did everyone else" is an unfortunately successful defence.

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” Keynes

Choronzonon Foursquare, Quora, Path: What Becomes Of The Underachievers?

For those of us outside California Quora seems little more than a silicon valley circle jerk.A better branded version of the old experts exchange,though its not hard to brand yourself better than the company with the second worst url in internet history(I wonder how mole station nursery is doing these days?). The very the people who have benefited from the internet revolution move to limit access to publicly provided information,information they themselves did not even create.Nice job kicking out the ladders from under you. If I ever get hit on the head and want to live life as some someone else's virtual pet ill be sure to check out foursquare as well(oh you went to the pub,who's a good boy?Have a virtual cookie). Stack Overflow does a lot wrong,half of my favourite answers are marked as closed for some arbitrary reason but at least it can provide open and accurate answers to questions in specific problem domains. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is truly king.

Choronzonon Real-time applications and will Django adapt?

The best way I found to do this for python is by using Tornado,you have an excellent websocket implementation baked in and a scheduler within the webserver itself so its simple to poll for changes and update only when necessary,or interleave with a call back if you want "true" real time. Plug in a front end with angular/knockout etc,pass around json objects and you are good.

As far as meteor/node goes,having the same language on the server client is great. Having javascript as that language is not so great. Web apps are generally a front end to something bigger and I never want to do any serious data wrangling in javascript if I can avoid it.

Choronzonon New study confirms that eating healthy does indeed cost more

Considering that in the US health insurance costs are potentially 12 dollars an hour!!Healthy eating looks like an excellent long term investment. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/05/do-...

Choronzonon I Got Fired Last Week. That’s a Good Thing. Here’s Why

People are way to literal here,actually believing what comes out of the mouth of people who fire one of the founding team 13 days before christmas out of the blue. This has nothing to do with generalist/specialist of any of the other assorted lying bullshit they mentioned.

I will propose two theories. The board required a more experienced hire, the directors bent over. They are growing and got greedy,this is an equity grab.

The attitude displayed by Alex is healthy for his own psyche however this is not in anyway a good thing. Effectively he was cheated out of his startup investment.

Choronzonon Former BP geologist: peak oil is here and it will 'break economies'

Forget production rates barrels left and the economic value of the oil. They are second order approximations .The way to measure peak oil is in joules. The energy from the oil - the energy to extract in the first place is what your economy is left with .We will never run out of oil but running out of energy efficient oil is probable

Choronzonon Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP

Im not a computer science major and got functional programming naturally but when I first encountered OOP i found it immensely confusing.I couldn't understand WHY you would want to do any of this, thinking about manipulating data was natural to me,but mapping classes onto so called 'real world ' ideas seemed like an immensely leaky abstraction. I eventually got a mental map that while functional programming resembled maths OOP resembled biology,considering an object as cell which can be a compartmentalised abstraction which could could change state and provide an interface.Probably not the most useful mental model for everybody but it helped me.

What i learnt was: Forget about all this dog inherits from Mammal bullshit(it doesn't work that way,its just wrong!). OOP is good for a few things. 1. Sharing state between a collection of functions(call them methods if you want to use two names for the same thing). 2. Code reuse (inheritance)

Im rather amused that test driven development forces you to simplify OOP as much as is humanly possible,thereby going against the advantages of a shared state,which is one of the reasons you would use an object in the first place.

Choronzonon How to bet against the bitcoin megabubble

Slow transaction speeds leave you with inventory for way too long (the bane of market makers ) and as you have no correlated instruments you can't even hedge the inventory you have.

Choronzonon How to bet against the bitcoin megabubble

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Option-Trading-Volatility-Strategies...

An excellent chapter about market making in here,however you would have to adjust it quite a bit for bitcoin.

Choronzonon How to bet against the bitcoin megabubble

Classical Market making is probably the safest way to profit from bitcoin as the spread is so damn high. Good luck finding a hedging instrument though.

Choronzonon Started a stupid company. Failed.

Do Quit! At least for awhile,these experiences are emotionally and financially shattering and you will want to get a grip on both before you start attempt anything else or your will burn yourself out. Take some boring well paid contact for 6 months,then have another fresh look at things.You deserve some downtime dont be shy to give yourself and your family some.

Choronzonon Ask HN: funniest amazon review ever...

This one. http://www.amazon.com/review/R2X2TB3S4O5I60

Choronzonon A culture of beer and overtime

Better things to out given the security practices Out the company

to quote.. """, it allowed the transactions of users to be skewed, allowing malicious users to cause other users to essentially lose money, or worse yet, put them in a potential dispute, and ultimately, cause our product to lose customers."""

report to the regional financial services authority. Create anonymous story about how company x is causing massive user vulnerabilities etc.Send this information to the companies clients.You could cause massive damage and come out looking like the good guy if you spun it right.

Choronzonon Amazon’s First Employee Disses MacKenzie Bezos' Review

Spectacular own goal by Mackenzie Bezos,Brad could not pay for publicity like this. Amazon is interesting as it is the best pure "business" of all the internet giants,nothing truly revolutionary but incredible scale and logistics.Im curious of the human cost accumulated on the way to this.

Choronzonon Ask HN: What's your approach to System & Design Documentations?

My favourite approach to them tends to be scotch.

More seriously consider something like http://sphinx-doc.org/ Code is not static,your documentation should not be either.

Choronzonon Super Mario Bros. is easy with lexicographic orderings and time travel

I dont know why this isn't upvoted more.Its actually a beautiful visual illustration of the problems and challenges of machine learning. And i dont even like platform games.

Choronzonon How to Get a Job at a High Frequency Trading Firm

On the topic of the utility of HFT my personal opinion of is it reduces spread costs but adds systemic fragility. I actually doubt stock markets are socially utile,let alone HFT but that is an argument for another day.

The real trading problem when we look at access and information asymmetry is not HFT but dark pools.HFTs typically all compete for the same pie anyway.

Choronzonon How to Get a Job at a High Frequency Trading Firm

Keep the following in mind..

HFT is not very profitable anymore.There are a fair number of companies in the field now.

HFT tends to be algorithmically simplistic.This is not because stupid people are working there but its very difficult to have algorithmic complexity and speed,and speed is more important.

It is very much a winner takes all game,profits are not evenly distributed,being fast is VERY important.

However good you are you are not a trader.You are a codemonkey. You will never be rewarded or compensated as a trader in most of these firms(some firms like Rentech are an exception to this,but rentech is not typical high frequency).

Your hourly rate will probably not be worth it. When you factor in variable compensation(ie bonus) which is not guaranteed and horrible working hours you would in most cases be better off with some boring bank java contract for compensation.

Choronzonon Pple's iWork upgrade screwup has Microsoft laughing all the way to the bank

Poor article. Unifying ios/osx productivity suites to position for workable content creation on a tablet is not a screwup or a dumb move.This could be a serious shift in the utility of tables for many users,especially if paired with a keyboard.This is strategic repositioning for the tablet market. Internet bitching over changes is a uniform constant and if you never trim features you end up with something resembling well..office. It may well be a wrong move,but time will tell on this one.

Choronzonon Ask HN: My father is so obese he'll likely die from a heart attack this year

If he wont listen to you effectively nothing. I know this is not the answer you want to hear but you can only help people who help themselves. He sounds like he is in nowhere near the shape required for any kind of sport but an hour or two walking a day would be excellent workout. If the diet is failing then quality of food is probably an issue,high quality vegetables and meat/fish cooked simply (no sauces ),no vegetable oils,minimal milk and bread products.The more boring and tasteless the better.

You can consider a low carb diet as well(provided its clean),humans are normally perfectly adapted to eat carbohydrates but he might find it easier if he has problems with insulin regulation. And he should stop working already,time for health related retirement.

Choronzonon Life is all about killing the magic

If understanding computers kills the magic then someone has completely missed the point. Computers are a tool to be used,not a mystery to be solved,and there is plenty of magic using them to explore to build and to solve actual mysteries.

If you understand a hammer and chisel fully it does not make you Michelangelo.

Choronzonon Bitcoin heading towards $200, new bubble forming

"bitcoin is a medium of exchange but not a unit of account." Very true,however from an economic point of view it is a terrible medium of exchange,you have large spread costs,a difficulty sourcing and transferring product,issues of divisibility and and a massive level of price instability relative to the currency being exchanged.

Your example of buyer and seller also makes that point indirectly unless the bit coins are instantly convertible to dollars someone is going to loose out in any price move.

The cheapest way to pay someone in dollars is to actually pay them in dollars.

Choronzonon Bitcoin heading towards $200, new bubble forming

Its actually generally a lot easier to profit buying a bubble than shorting it.There are a lot more points of increase than points of collapse. Paulson made a fortune shorting the housing market,plenty of people predicted the collapse but Paulson picked the peak correctly. The interesting thing is given his shocking trading performance since then he appears to have been lucky rather than smart.

Didier Sornette has some interesting theories(and dubious models) about bubbles,well worth a read.