jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
It's not that distorted. Antietam had a wounded:killed ratio of 4:1, Meuse-Argonne was 4:1, Vietnam had 6:1, Iraq had 8:1. Bulge was a particularly deadly sample at 2.5:1 (If you include all allied forces and not just US military, Iraq drops back down to ~5:1). Basically you could convert 4500 US casualties in Iraq into deaths as a pseudocontrol for 'ye olde medicine' to bring the ratio back into line, and it wouldn't particularly change the numbers above.

I also think that total casualties needs to be taken with more care than total deaths, as a casualty is anything from a nicked ear that takes you out for only a day, right on up to an amputation. Death is unambiguous. Casualties are far more mutable - witness the presidential candidate who had a successful smear campaign run against him because he supposedly 'wasn't wounded enough' to merit a Purple Heart...

How many people returning from these modern wars will need full-time medical care for the rest of their lives?

Probably much less as a proportion than previous wars, though it's really anyone's guess. 'Full-time' medical care is a big thing; it basically means hospitalisation for the rest of your life. Remember also that while some soldiers would survive who previously wouldn't, treatment overall is superior - someone who previously would have been left with a lifelong crippling disability may have a much reduced effect in the modern day. It's not like modern medicine improves the lot of only those patients who are at death's door.
I have been seeing quite often that the webpages makes it to first place on Hacker News are getting unresponsive, slow or even down just like this one.

Is there anybody knows about the load statistics when a story on Hacker News gets on the first place?

What i mean is; how many requests are made to a web page, what is the req/seq and etc?

I guess this would be useful for me and other people to get ready for possible load on our site to be sure if we can handle this load.
(tongue in cheek) There's no if __name__ == '__main__'. This doesn't seem pychecker / GSG compliant - importing a module shouldn't run anything. And how do they unit test an entire module?
There is a point of exaggeration. I don't think smart as they are, MIT engineers need an adaptation program like the marines to the real world. That's what comes with smartness, flexibility to think and adapt. You cannot say the same for a marine with physically extreme skills.
There is surprisingly a lot of innovation going on in the field - "magic" is a broad field though - could be anything from stage to mentalism on the street.

Yigal Mesika has done a lot in the field recently, check out his website www.yigalmesika.com

Very cool stuff to play with.
There are lots of links like this one on HN:

<a href="...">Facebook is using a trick to make people use faceb...</a>

Changing it to include the complete, uncropped post title would be a nice addition:

<a href="..." title="Facebook is using a trick to make people use facebook">Facebook is using a trick to make people use faceb...</a>

Then you could see the complete post name on hovering the link.
I use "Cheers" too. "regards" is too formal. I quite like "All the best" as well.
Chrome 5.0.375.55 and it works for me.
But it is not as snappy as google docs are.
> Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and don't have ad block built-in as shipped. Huge difference there.

What difference? Safari 5 has a plugin architecture and doesn't have ad block built-in as shipped.
I'm getting a "Complex Document: Optimise editing in Word" type message, suggesting they might not be completely confident in 100% of the offline features yet?
This is what a physicist friend sent to me a while ago:

"there is really little point in trying to graphically represent anything beyond spacetime. Possibly 3D space with a time vector is useful (i.e. an object representing 3D space moving along a vector) because it is still helpful to explain the concepts. Beyond that just stick with the numbers or you risk confusing yourself on what is being talked about"
You do if you want to get past SmartScreen instantly.
> It's like demanding that music authors just send you MP3s for free without paying for it at all.

That's exactly what should happen. Creators need to figure out how to get paid before the work is created. They need to get paid for the work of creating, not for the end result which should be public domain.

They should also publish a lossless FLAC instead of an MP3.

> I personally hope that more companies allow me to pay for their services instead of being plagued by behavioural ad tracking.

You are still being tracked. Also, the service isn't likely to remain free of ads. Cable TV was once ad-free but the opportunity to milk even more money out the audience was just too irresistible to pass up:

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
Related, but I used to use a Bypass Quora extension in Firefox (which just tacked on something like ?share=1, so quora nag screen doesn't hit you), but switched to another extension. It gets me past the vast majority of paywalls and nag screens: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox
Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but nowhere near the team that builds the iOS app.

My experience as a user of the Amazon iOS app is that the developers deeply care about these kinds of quality issues. I have seen the looping behavior before in other contexts; I reported it, and it was eventually fixed.

In the app there is a customer service link in the hamburger menu, with a “contact us” option if you’re willing to spend a couple of minutes telling them about your problem.
>The US is an extreme example of a system that optimizes totally for choice...and it achieves that aim.

I'm not sure this is true, or at least, I don't understand what pre-requisites for this to be true the U.S. posseses. Insurance is not allowed to trade across state lines, the private marketplace has a small selection of plans, most people get their insurance from their jobs meaning they only know the details of their medical plans AFTER a non-trivial time down payment (in other words, the transaction costs are high)

I think the criticism that the U.S. system doesn't really have that many positives is a fair enough assessment.
This isn't just "someone's whim", but the Air Force chief of staff, the guy entrusted with the authority to make such recommendations.

See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

> Towards this aim, LeMay delivered the first SAC Emergency War Plan in March 1949 which called for dropping 133 atomic bombs on 70 cities in the USSR within 30 days. [...] Air power strategists called this type of pre-emptive strike "killing a nation". However, the Harmon committee released their unanimous report two months later stating such an attack would not end a war with the Soviets and their industry would quickly recover. This committee had been specifically created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to study the effects of a massive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, within weeks, an ad hoc Joint Chiefs committee recommended tripling America's nuclear arsenal, and Chief of Staff Vandenberg called for enough bombs to attack 220 targets, up from the previous 70.

Note that March 1949 was 5 months before the USSR's first atomic bomb test.

It's not a leap to suggest that if the USSR didn't obtain nuclear weapons in 1949, the US would have shown much less restraint than they did. And "restraint" is already not the first word that comes to mind to describe American foreign policy in the 20th century. (As for France and the UK, I don't think the US president would have worried about the UK nuking Washington in retaliation for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR).
I briefly worked for google this year, and “don’t be evil” doesn’t appear in any of their on-boarding materials (anymore at least).
if the app didn't constantly pop up modal dialogs trying to trick me into signing up for the trial I might have considered it

however I refuse to reward that sort of dark pattern, and yesterday created a new google account for youtube and installed youtube vanced on my phone
Tampermonkey extension to blacklist domains from search:

http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
Possibly Paul Davis, now lead author of http://ardour.org. I believe he claims to have been one of Amazon's very first employees.

Edit: Yes it was, apparently.
how can I use this when coding mutually recursive functions?
I can't stomach the level of discourse on /r/worldnews or /r/politics. I'm too young for my blood pressure to spike like that.
This disappearing does not happen as much anymore and they now have a lot of different tools which make recovery much faster. After awhile, you find that some of the things you need to do to protect yourself against such failures is good practice in general and using Amazon probably makes your site more reliable overall. In comparison, when I used SoftLayer, a hardware failure took down a site I had for 4+ hours while an engineer went to the machine, found out what was wrong, fixed it, etc. On Amazon, the same thing would take minutes to recover from.
Why do I get the feeling this is going to go on for quite some time?

On the other hand, I'm sure this is doing wonders for both Salon and Wired's visitor numbers.
I got Visual Basic at 12ish, but didn't stick with it for much more than a few months. Then at 13-14 I picked up TI-BASIC for my calculator. And a 16 I started down the road of "real programming" with PHP.
That solves the YouTube part of the problem, but not the AdSense part.

Google has for all purposes a monopoly on mass-market web advertising
Started with Basic around 10yo on a simple 2mhz machine with 32kb of RAM. Fun times.
This whole DMCA reporting business is pretty interesting

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...

This husband wife team is racking up some huge censorship numbers.
Every case is different (as the article says, generalizing these things is not easy) but the basic approach always involves two things:

1) Build a model of the expected time series. There is no way of avoiding this. To find an anomaly you must define "that which is expected", either in terms of the actual data, differences, or moments.

2) Measure the distribution around the expected values based on past data.

3) Apply some test that answers some version of the question, "What is plausibility of the belief that the new data are drawn from the combination of model plus distribution?" The trick here is that you aren't interested in all anomalies, just "significant" ones, which may have different temporal behaviour, etc.

The important thing is to test relative to the distribution you actually have, which is never going to be particularly normal, especially in the wings, which you are going to really care about when attempting to be maximally sensitive to real anomalies. Normal distributions almost always underestimate the tails, which makes them prone to false triggers, which another poster here has pointed out: you really do not want.

Robustness against "unknown unknowns" in the anomaly distribution is one thing you want to be particularly careful about. Weird things happen all the time in real data, and you are generally looking for anomalies of a particular kind, with particular characteristics. The ideal anomaly detector will catch those without going off on every odd thing that happens.
Looking at common keywords among the URL's, it appears as though they are merely taking a movie database, googling titles, and submitting complaints for anything containing said title/keyword in the URL (e.g. Pushover, Knockout, Wicked, etc.).

Shady, manipulative, and particularly troubling when the DMCA protocol is "shoot-first" and there is absolutely no oversight or review.

Some kind of punitive penalty for false complaints and a few precedents are needed to put these copyright trolls in their place...
Without arrangement and bias, journalism would have no value. Searching for a random word on Google will give you a pile of facts but it's not interesting. People want to read something interesting to them. So it must be biased in a way they'll be interested in. Whether that's "dodgy company gets its comeuppance", "my favourite party does something good" or "person dies in an accident".
besides Prince of Persia, anybody knows of source code release for any of these games?
As I was scrolling through the list, that was my thought too... "Hey, check out all these porn sites I didn't know about!"

Then I realized their master plan: they're protecting their business model by (1) making it harder for us to do our work since it's harder for us to find the software libraries/tools we need, and (2) by providing us with a list of porn sites they fill up the time we would've otherwise spent coding.
+1 for the ERLite; it's a MIPS62r2 Cavium Octeon with 512MB RAM[1]. With the latest firmware, it's running Debian Wheezy, and I've had no trouble with adding the normal Debian repos and adding things like Privoxy to it (though I suspect these would be overwritten in a FW update). With Privoxy loaded and being used as an HTTP proxy for my local net with the EasyList rules, it doesn't break about 5%CPU with 100mbit/sec of inbound traffic and some web browsing going through it (I'm running NAT as well).

Being honest, it's a bit hacky for consumers...you'd be good to know Vyatta (what it uses under the hood) to get the most out of it, since there are still some things the web UI can't do (L2TP VPN being one, or PPTP without a Radius server for auth). However, it's a heck of a lot cheaper, smaller, and more power efficient than my previous P4 box running pfSense with Intel Pro/1000GTs, so I'm pretty happy with it.

I do think it'd be super awesome if Ubiquiti released a pfSense or m0n0wall-based EdgeRouter with the same hardware acceleration...I'd gladly pay $200 or so for that, but the ERLite is damn hard to beat for $100.

1. http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3
If it really ends up in browser and allows free-form code changes in one page, then there's a huge opportunity for education. I'd do this with my classes.
If memory serves, adobe announced the end of support for Type 1 fonts just last year. (This was mentioned in a conference talk, but apparently it's official: https://creativepro.com/adobe-is-ending-support-for-type-1-f...)

In any case I've coincidentally spent the week spelunking in the truetype spec; there are tons of old representations and font features that a robust font parser is still expected to support, and some of it is wonderfully arcane.
I had a disastrous experience with this.

Three years ago I joined a startup to help with infrastructure setup. They wanted to use Kubernetes to install their monolithic django/celery AI/web single app using the same script both for their cloud environment and customers servers with single node installation. I didn't last more than a month.

Since then, and for every company I worked with, no single time Kubernetes was proposed as a solution for the problem it really solves. It was always though of as the magical solution for whatever problem we had (or didn't even have).
Expensive vacuums are usually more quiet and, what is more important, are way better at filtering the output air, whereas cheaper ones - sure, they work, but they let a ton of dust out.

For people with allergies this is a big selling point.
If you haven't read the literature just say so. This is an actual topic of debate between real anthropologists and has been for decades. I think everyone sort of got tired of hashing it out with all the recent tree-rewriting going on, but it's still unresolved.

Here's an example: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2014.04.004
The money market accounts most Americans have access to as part of their baking account is simply a higher interest rate savings account with slightly different restrictions. It's not investing by any stretch of the imagination.

I think the real difference is in the US is the feeling that our portfolio (i.e., our retirement account) is the only thing that will support us when we can't work anymore. Thus many Americans regardless of how much financial savvy are likely to talk about their retirement and how much it's been hit by the recession, the stock crash, whatever.
I middle clicked the link and it didn't open in a new tab. How can I open links in a new tab with Flash?
I wonder how many more decades before we get high-speed rail in the US... I've been on the trains in France and Japan and it's a great way to travel.
Can you allow currency and default to local currency?

(from UK)
When I was at uni I had a calling card, you could type the number in instead of swiping it (most payphones then didn't have card readers). You'd dial the company free-phone number, the card number, the pin and then the number to call. When I called my gf from turkey I remember taking an age to enter the number - about 42 digits, the longest number sequence I've had memorised I think.
looks like adobe astroturf
Wow, I devoured every word of that article with baited breath. One of the most amazing stories of fiction intertwined with actual events I've ever read.

I wonder how much years will have to pass before it would be acceptable to make this fictional rescue mission into a movie..?

The obvious issue would be everyone walking out of the theater saying "Jeezz, NASA should have obviously done that, idiots. They killed those astronauts because they didn't do that."
It tends to be that for features people mostly don't care about, the automated tests started failing years ago, and nobody will prioritize fixing them.

At some point there was automated tests, but their failures are now ignored or have been turned off.
Non-paywall article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/24/business/skymall-parent-xh...
For more on the
perils of taxing
reader patience, see
WHY DOES
TYPOGRAPHY
MATTER.

This is what I get on Firefox and Chome
> 5) Only works in one currency and in one country (without paying massive fees)

There are a lot of cards which charge nothing for foreign transactions. To name a specific example the Capital One QuickSilver card. If you look around the market there are several more which offer a variety of other things in addition to that (depending on your needs and credit).

I've also got a zero foreign transaction CC in the UK from Halifax.
Most people don't start learning Word by understanding the data structures used to store the text and modifications either.

For 95% of developers, git is a tool that is incidental to their primary task (developing software). Having to have a deep understanding of the underlying data structures in order to use it effectively is the antithesis of how most "utility" software is designed.

When I am in the flow of coding some part of my project, my head is full of the data structures, object models, databases, algorithms, requirements, etc. that are immediately relevant to that task. If I have to do a context switch and pull the git data model front and center into my thinking to know what to do to get my work into the repository, that is a serious break in flow and has always been a problem for me whenever I've had to use git.
Once again, these limitations are not with Windows itself (see all the C++ Unicode file functions / file longpaths). In general Node supports long paths just fine (you can watch `npm` write past the 260 [wtf?] char limit). The limitation is in other programs trying to respect MAXPATH even when they should be moving to Unicode functions for compatibility reasons / lack of knowledge. It should be noted that compatibility breaks not just from long paths causing errors, but automatic file expansion does not occur on long paths. So we get into even more special snowflake situations where sometimes files with expansions work with older functions but not with newer ones.

But the fact that Unicode functions don't expand adds an interesting problem for us; the MAXPATH respecting (and outdated) _A filesystem functions can cause a collision for non-expanded paths we get to fun things where you can have different FILE objects if you use old _A functions vs _W functions. The inverse is also true where you can collide by moving from _W to _A.

So! If we do start using old _A functions we actually can cause problems by directing to new files that would cause expansion because of file expansion being turned on.

* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms813802.aspx

PS. Don't get me started on FS permissions...
I am not a tax lawyer, but here's what I imagine are the benefits to the IA over increasing salary.

By owning property, a foundation benefits by having an asset that increases over time, as well as collecting rent (below-market, but enough to cover expenses).

- Paying more to employees sends your money elsewhere.

- Buying property and renting it to your employees sends your money back to yourself, covers the expenses associated with that asset, all while enjoying the increase in value of that asset
True of course, but having a placebo effect is not the same as being a placebo. Non-placebos have other effects too.
> I bring it up apropos this thread because any time someone says, "If I had invested in X, Y years ago, I would have Z dollars now!!!", that's the beginning of the road to madness.

I did say, “I think investing in LEGO is a stupid idea”.
On the Mac, could you assign a "spaces" virtual desktop to be shared with coscreen? Then you can just 3 finger swipe between a private screen and the shared one.
This is one of the things I like about Mac OS: text fields, by default, have the readline keybindings. In the box where I'm typing this comment in Firefox, I can use control-{a,e,n,p,f,b,d,h,k} just like I can in the shell. This is one of the reasons I haven't tried harder to use a Linux desktop.
No i'm not a fan either. I'd much prefer a site the loads in <50ms.
Was getting in compliance too burdensome for them?

For every well-behaved pirate, there’d be many ill-mannered pirates if you didn’t seize their operations.
There's going to be an argument about "derivative works". If I feed all 7 books of Harry Potter into an AI, and only that, and then it spits out something - That's clearly a derivative work. If I feed all of the New York Times Bestsellers for the past 50 years into an AI and it spits out something, there's much less of an argument that it's derivative of any one work.

I've seen stuff like https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/ - It's both impressive and not. Sure, it's "new" and "Unique" every time, but if you were to take a trained eye to it, you'd see that a bunch of what it's done are very simple derivatives of an already derivative artform. Do I know which image it's stolen the basic shape from and which it's stolen the color palette? No, but if I spent a few hours looking through the training dataset I'd probably find another image that looked almost exactly like the one I'm looking at. These things are impressive because they can fool a cursory glance, and quite frankly, that's often enough.
To nitpick: it's accurate to say that there is zero chance that the effect of psychedelics is just a placebo effect.

This does not mean that there is zero placebo effect involved with taking psychedelics. The latter statement would mean your experience is identical between actively taking a psychedelic and someone slipping some in your drink. I'd say this is unlikely, no?

We know for lots of other drugs, both therapeutic and recreational, that there is always a placebo component as well as a "real" one.

This is why people do placebo-controlled trials. You take 100 people and give them ibuprofen against joint pain, then you give another 100 people sugar pills against joint pain. Then you record their pain reduction on some scale, and the placebo scores 2 +/- 1 points, and the ibuprofen scores 7 +/- 1 points. So you say ibuprofen has a significantly better effect than placebo, but (probably) 2/7th of the ibuprofen effect is due to placebo.