dsrguru

Or smash your window in far less time than it would take to pick that lock.

But if you pay by credit card, that applies to any key copying service, online or not.

That's in Watertown not Cambridge, so it sounds unrelated. All this stuff happening around Boston at the same time jeez

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

I think a much more likely explanation is that the creators wanted to develop a cryptographic currency that was sound enough to become wildly popular and, in doing so, to let early adopters (i.e. themselves) make a ridiculous amount of money. I say adopters in the plural because Wikipedia suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto is three people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Identity

From Wikipedia:

Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's. After textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto#Identity

> Seeing Americans in movies go "best country in the world!" sounds absurd to us

That sounds absurd to most Americans too. I've only heard that kind of rhetoric spoken by politicians, and it's definitely not a view most of us espouse.

There are a large number of Americans who believe the U.S. has the most powerful military in the world, and there are a sizeable number of Americans who believe that the U.S. provides the most opportunity for poor people to become rich through hard work (the "American dream"), but there are at least as many Americans who disagree with both, and I've never heard anyone in real life state that the U.S. is categorically "the best country in the world." Interestingly, I think it's safe to say that almost all Americans hold one view in common: no one likes the central government. That might be true in most democratic countries--I wouldn't know. But I don't think I've ever in my life heard an American state that they were satisfied with the government.

We can't propose effective solutions to the conference imbalance until we accurately identify the source. Your post assumes that the problem is with the function being used to evaluate speakers. That's far from certain. An arguably much likelier explanation is that, due to the huge gender imbalance in computing, the percentage of female applicants to speak at a conference is much lower than 20%. Therefore, the percentage of qualified applicants who are female is presumably much lower than 20%.

Let's assume for the sake of this line of reasoning that the function for evaluating a speaker's ability is accurate. If you are looking to invite ten speakers to your conference and there is only one woman among the top ten speakers, it would make perfect sense if you only invited one woman. That makes you good at your job, not sexist.

Now how do we go about changing this? Well, one approach is what you're suggesting--affirmative action. There are certainly pros and cons to introducing such a minimum quota, but I find the article's assessment that the cons seem to substantially outweigh the pros to be very persuasive. Inviting inferior speakers in an effort to increase the representation of a specific group at a conference is problematic for two main reasons: (1) it results in a conference that is expected to be worse quality and (2) it deprives women who actually are evaluated to be in the top ten speakers from knowing, and from having other people know, that their value to the conference came from their speaking ability rather than their second X chromosome. Additional ways in which the quota approach is problematic are that (3) it discriminates against the many other groups that are under-represented at tech conferences, as well as the oft-debated argument that (4) inviting a worse female speaker over a better male speaker is unfair for the man.

If we suppose the quota system does more harm than good, what alternatives do we have? That's the million dollar question! The only answer I've got is to focus our efforts on addressing the sources of women's under-representation in computing in general, such as encouraging female students to study computer science, getting schools to examine whether their classroom environment discourages female students from pursuing CS, and help software companies identify whether their workplace atmosphere discourages women and what steps they can take to address that. Forcing conferences to invite more women or businesses to hire more women is a highly problematic and very short-term hack. Identifying and fixing the structural barriers to women in computing is a highly difficult but very long-term solution.

While the linguist in me is appalled by the author's joking (hopefully!) prescriptivist notion that British English is equivalent to such a thing as "correct English" (the American in me is also perturbed by such a claim), I'd like to point out that the home page's phrase "amount of features" is considered by such prescriptivists to be incorrect English. :) They would insist on "number of features" :P

> If real markets could get 1 hour behind in transaction processing because of a spike in volume it would be the end of capitalism as we know it.

The Facebook IPO was pretty damn similar and didn't end capitalism as we know it :)

The parent is referring to people selling their bitcoins, then launching a DDOS attack on the exchange server to get the rest of the world to sell in panic, and then buying back bitcoins at the lower rate. I haven't been following the bitcoin news carefully, but presumably that's been going on recently.

Derivatives are formulaic. Integrals, like proofs, require thinking backwards, i.e. creativity and/or luck. For the vast majority of people, cultivating that intuition is a lot harder than plugging numbers into formulas...

I've found it's the exact opposite. If you're fine with a low-level coding job and are a competent coder, you'll have no problem getting a job in any major city in the US. The demand way exceeds the supply. However, despite there being far fewer good coders (let's say the top 1% of coders), good coders all want to work for the same thirty or so late-stage startups in the Bay Area (or Google). Those companies want exceptional coders (let's say the top 0.1% of coders), so good coders tend to have trouble finding jobs.

That wasn't true for me. Working through vimtutor for vim and the `C-h t' tutorial for emacs, followed by some spaced repetition over the next few weeks, got the basic motion commands of both editors fully ingrained in my muscle memory. It took longer for my fingers to internalize using operators on text objects in vim, but you can definitely master the basics in a few days. Even though I use vim as my daily editor and haven't really used emacs (at least with emacs-style keybindings) since working through the interactive tutorial years ago, it only takes me a few seconds to get comfortable navigating an emacs buffer without having to think.

Granted, emacs keybindings deliberately don't constitute a language (the whole point of emacs is to remap them for different functionality in different contexts), but I don't think it took me much longer to "become an expert" at vim's language of editing.

There's a lot more that the language of Vim can do than what's in this article. You should check out this screencast on vi/vim's command/text equivalence (analogous to LISP's code/data equivalence): http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/11/screencast-custom-vim-re...

Also, this thread's article doesn't go into keys like ftFT;,#* or the incredibly useful Vim-specific feature called text objects. This gives a good introduction to a lot of that: http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

This wasn't about card counting (which is an integral part of blackjack strategy and certainly should be legal in any jurisdiction that allows casinos to operate). Counting takes place in your mind. Breaking into the casino's surveillance feed to learn extra information is outright cheating (and therefore, theft). I'm curious to know what information the player obtained. I can't imagine there are cameras low enough to glimpse the dealer's hole card before it is set down. Perhaps multiple accomplices each watched a table, keeping count and waiting for the count to be high (meaning the chance of drawing a ten-value card or an ace was very high), and then told the player to move to that table?

You might want to add Shin Dong-hyuk's first-hand account of life in a North Korean prison camp. Slavery, starvation, torture, rape, and murder are the norm, and given that it's illegal to be related to someone in prison, a ridiculous percentage of the country's population is enslaved in these prisons. The DPRK's human rights violations go well beyond the oft-cited starvation of the populace.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57556662/north-korean-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5216332

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091962

It's also interesting to note that the worm's author went on to cofound YC.

As someone who hasn't spent much time in SF but plans to move there very soon and doesn't want to live off of ramen, I genuinely want to know: where does one get those free meals?

Edit: namank and iamwill beat me to it.

> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard.

Not according to http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013. Clojure alone is in 10th place for code submitted to codeeval.com in 2013.

Edit: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... appears less focused on web development and startups (it puts VB ahead of Ruby and leaves Clojure and Scala out completely) and even this ranking puts Lisp (presumably CL) at #13 overall.

That a New York Times journalist would fabricate data in an automobile review in order to wage war on the electric car industry seems beyond belief as well. We really don't have enough info to resolve these discrepancies, but Occam's Razor suggests to me that John Broder legitimately believes his claims and Elon Musk believes Broder to be a liar. One or both of them has incorrect data. It seems unlikely that either is deliberately lying.

How to install (at least on Linux):

1. Install the Vundle plugin manager for Vim.

2. Add the line "Bundle 'Valloric/YouCompleteMe'" (without the double quotes) to your ~/.vimrc file.

3. Open Vim and run ":BundleInstall" without the quotes.

4. Install cmake if it's not already installed. In a temporary directory, run "cmake -G 'Unix Makefiles' . ~/.vim/bundle/YouCompleteMe/cpp" (without the quotes) to generate a Makefile and then run "make ycm_core" to build.

5. Open a file in Vim and start typing.

Pascal would agree with you, but the problem is that the clay has no way of knowing who its potter is, if any.

> ... favors your more extroverted engineers. My experience has been the engineers I really want to keep, the ones who solve the really hard problems, are much less likely to be in that group.

I, too, read "group" as "extroverted engineers," and I don't really see alternative readings.

Informative article, but slightly inaccurate. General American is not "considered generally confined to a small section of the Midwest." This is a myth that I've heard a lot of Midwesterners propagate. Prior to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, the most identifiable broadcaster accent was probably the Inland North dialect, which is spoken mostly in western New York, northern Ohio, Michigan, northern Illinois, and Wisconsin. That's presumably the source of the myth. But today, that accent sounds very different from most other dialects of American English (for example, their short 'o' as in "block" sounds almost like most American's short 'a' in "black" and their short 'a' sounds like the non-rhotic diphthong that speakers of RP use for "air"). I've heard Iowans claim that their accent is the most standard, but that couldn't be further from the truth, as most Iowans have backed 'o's and 'u's a la Minnesota, in addition to subscribing to the cot/caught merger, etc. The reality is that there are seven or so dialect regions in the U.S. with lots of variation from place to place within those regions. Some metropolitan areas have their own distinct accents. In my experience, broadcasters tend to use features from their native accent as long as they aren't from the South or a region heavily affected by the aforementioned Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

One other inaccuracy is the article's claim that the British elite had much less influence in manufacturing hubs in the Mid Atlantic where Scots-Irish immigrants and nothern English speakers of rhotic dialects predominated. One specific example they give is New York. In reality, New York English was non-rhotic up until recently, and even now, a sizeable number of speakers either have a non-rhotic accent or drop their 'r's in certain environments. I don't know the history of the New York dialect or whether it become non-rhotic at the same time the Boston dialect did, but I'm assuming New York English was influenced more by Dutch, Italian, and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants than by Scots-Irish and northern English immigrants, which would explain why it didn't follow the rhotic trend of the other Mid Atlantic cities that the article talks about.

Well, there's also the size nuance here -- that you need to spend far less than you'll end up earning. For the non-Chinese speakers out there, it literally means "Spend [a] small [amount of] money, make big money," with the same implication found in the techie epigram "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning."

I'm glad Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and Moonwalking with Einstein made that list. Lucid dreaming and "photographic" memories are two of the most amazing near-superpower skills that anyone can and probably should learn.

> No, compilers that accept "void main" do not necessarily produce executables that produce an exit status of 0. I just tried it with gcc on Ubuntu, and the exit status was 1.

Interesting. I wonder why gcc does it that way.

> And the validity of "void main" doesn't depend on whether the system uses exit statuses. An implementation may accept forms of main other than the ones defined by the language, including "void main()" -- but if it doesn't, the behavior of such a program is undefined.

I don't think we're disagreeing. I'm saying that "void main" is never preferable to "int main", and the only time it's equal to "int main" is if you're writing code specific to an implementation for which "void main" is not undefined and which lacks exit statuses, making any return statement in "int main" equivalent to returning from "void main".

> But for hosted implementations, there's no advantage at all in using "void main" vs. the correct "int main(void)".

Agreed. That's why it makes no sense for textbooks to teach void main.

How so? The argument as I understand it is that all C89 standard-compliant compilers work with "int main" (and work correctly), regardless of whether or not the target OS has exit statuses. Not all compilers work with "void main", and those that do will yield executables that always produce an exit status of zero. While there are times you might write C code that doesn't need to be portable (in which case "int main" and "void main" are effectively the same if your system doesn't use exit statuses), there is no good reason for a C textbook to teach the non-standard approach that only works in certain non-portable cases. If a textbook does so, that's likely a sign that the authors made other poor decisions.

Thanks! CTRL -> zoom out here on Linux (and presumably Windows)

The thing is, most apologies contain the word "sorry." By contrast, this one acknowledges that "[l]egal documents are easy to misinterpret" and that they don't blame us for interpreting "you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your ... photos ... without any compensation to you" as what it sounds like.