skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There will never be a hot war between US and China for so long as nuclear weapons have no effective defense.

I beg to differ. First, see India v. Pakistan as a direct counter to your "impossible" statement.

Second, as the example shows, the line you draw regarding using nukes does not extend all the way down to the rifleman. It's entirely possible to start a conventional and/or localized war with the understanding that you intend to win and therefore do not have the need to use your nukes.

You're making the major mistake though of assuming your enemy is a rational actor, a la the cold war. Russia is a rational actor. So is China. Even India.

In Pakistan however, only a minority are rational actors. Should a change in government occur that is pro-Taliban, you now have a nation of irrational actors with nuclear weapons.

MAD falls apart at this point. The fear of death means little to the Muslim extremist, and a man that isn't scared does highly irrational things, like nuke a civilian target.

All it takes is one, and then all bets are off.
Ask HN: Doing due diligence on potential investors?
I was at a networking/seminar event for film producers and investors (I'm in the former group) and met a variety of interesting people, several of whom were early-stage technology investors. As a general point, if you're an engineer and have or are contemplating a startup, attend such an event if you can - I found it a very empowering and educational experience - empowering to actually meet people out there who are actively looking to invest (there's a yawning social divide between the creative and financial communities in film) and educational in terms of hearing from investors about their needs and challenges.

Anyway, one person I met there - let's call him Mr X - was speaking a lot about new media, social networking and digital distribution, and mentioned investing in Y combinator. I pegged him for a member of this community, and sat down with him for a chat during a break in the presentations. As soon as I mentioned YC he went off on a torrent of entrepeneurial excitement and investment possibilities - which I found a bit hard to keep up with, actually - but when I asked if he read HN it sailed right over his head. 'It's a discussion forum run by Paul Graham,' I added, which didn't seem to click with him either. So I assumed he was too busy and high-powered to deal with the hacking end of things.

But as time went on in the conversation, and in some other conversations I listened in on later, I began to wonder if he was for real - much talk of buzzwords and high multiples, and many interesting mentions, but after a while it sounded like a classic fast-talking hustle. I also noticed that the speakers who most impressed me with their insight, experience and businesslike demeanor all ended up backing themselves out of conversations with Mr X. After I got home I checked out Mr X's blog, which looked and read like he talked - lots of enthusiasm and connectivity to hot topics and projects, but little coherence.

I didn't dislike Mr X. He's a nice person who radiated enthusiasm, was full of ideas, and emphasized good karma and mutuality as a key part of successful business. He had insights and opinions on markets and companies that I know well, and which would find wide agreement here. But he also made me nervous, as if I were talking to someone on cocaine (which he wasn't, I hasten to add - he was just so fast and forceful in his conversation). One instinct was telling me 'you should have a meeting with this guy', but another was telling me 'you should never, ever, bring someone like this to a meeting - you might get a deal, or you might get ejected...by force'.

I'll probably keep this relationship purely social, since it benefits neither party to get into any kind of a relationship if one side has misgivings. But I'm also considering the possibility that being pushed out of one's comfort zone can be scary, but is sometimes necessary.

Has anyone else had an experience like this, and how do you evaluate potential business partners or relationships? Are there any litmus tests you've found useful as part of your networking process?
Reid's Motto
Biber Hapi Zayiflama
While I read past the "think of the kids" argument, I was disappointed analogy of the locksmith. The locksmith didn't unlock the doors while you were sleeping. To follow the analogy, there would have been something over the lock requiring you to either allow the locksmith to unlock the door or to keep the locking mechanism functioning as is.
Review of Bryan Ruby's Blog post re: Drupal Vs. Joomla
That seems like a much better comparison. However, what it leaves out is the network usage. Maybe there aren't as many people using one carrier's towers in those other places or maybe the usage isn't as heavy. So while we know that AT&T's network can't handle the load we don't know if it's because of an inferior network or because of higher usage. I would be interested in seeing those kind of statistics compared for well performing and poorly performing networks, but I don't know if that information will ever be available.
When I saw that there was only one comment, I knew it would say that...
Employment is not a valid criteria by which to validate a scientific paper. It's a red-herring, when the actual paper and data is available to validate. Employment has 0 bearing on it's validity. The point of the article and other like it is that papers and careers were being blacklisted not on the validity of the science conducted but on the personal opinions of a group more interested in their own ideas than in open discourse.
why the lucky stiff on Hackety Hack [video]
Haha sorry - I didn't want to editorialize the title too much, but I also wanted to point out that there really was a reason I was posting it here.
Why is this occurring now? If this type of behavior was going on then it sounds like there were a number of scientists that could have spoken out about this long ago? Especially when the "hockey stick" paper came out if it was questionable. Why did it take a mysterious "hacker" to reveal this bias? If all the scientists at the CRU are being unfairly treated why didn't Sallie Baliunas pull a Zed Shaw when she left science?

The timing just makes all of this very suspect. Had this occurred six months prior I might be less skeptical, but at this point I don't know who to believe.

Until someone figures this crap out I'll be in my hummer doing donuts in the parking lot.
Cycles of Doom in Batch Processing Workflows
Actually, this is relatively old news. What this article does that is new is clearly point out some of the shortcomings of RDS; we'll definitely be working on these weakpoints so that we can more clearly explain why we're better!

It's a weird experience competing with Amazon because we have such different philosophies - Amazon write their press releases before their technology, which is why their technology often has such glaring holes when you dig down into it. We write the technology before the press release (and sometimes the press release not at all), so our technology is better but we have a harder time communicating it. We know we need to work more on communicating our awesomeness :-)
Apparently that's the whole article. I'm surprised, actually.

(Is it just me, or is the phrase "read a video slideshow" doubly oxymoronic? It's not reading, it's watching. It's not a slideshow, it's a video.)
Google Video for Business
To quote my second favourite Winnipeg band:

"And yes, I recognize the irony that the very system I oppose affords me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds. But that’s exactly why priviledged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream- until everyone has everything they need."
Startup customer acquisition strategies and marketing tactics
Plaxo CTO Joseph Smarr joins Google as Social Web Evangelist
I was thinking about this precise issue this morning, because I was pondering that PastryKit post that was posted here recently and wondering if it would be in Apple's best interest to release that framework.

I think a lot of it comes down to competitors in the hardware space. If Android really takes off, and it starts supporting web apps that work really nicely - the way we are talking about, in ways that are similar to apps built in Obj-C or Java that are running natively on the phones - then if I were Apple, I'd ensure that web apps were just as slick on the iPhone as they are on any competitor's hardware.

Otherwise, for purely evil and competitive reasons, I'd probably ensure that web apps always had limitations compared to the native apps, unless I found a way to monetize the web apps too (for example, by creating an easy payment mechanism for use by web apps that ties in with iTunes, where I take a cut).

However, I think that Google is going to pile on the pressure to make web apps super slick (they are already doing so).
You should read the Wired article on James Cameron / Avatar, which goes into nice detail of how his idea for Avatar began, where there were delays, and a brief history of his other film career: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_cameron/
Makes sense, after all the goal of any bureaucracy is to perpetuate its own existence.
I guess I'm confused why it seems Facebook wants to compete with Twitter in this regard. I don't think fb users have asked for the option to publish their information more privately, so why is it a priority? It feels more to me like fb is moving more toward "make something we can sell" than "make something people want."
When I Heard the Learn'd Poet
Our Jihad on SiteAdvisor continues
you can always win by playing to people's egos, or fundamental reinforcers (food/sex/sleep/drinking)
Actually, the bit about the world not staying saved was a reference to the first little bit of The Incredibles. :) I think that fighting (metaphorical) entropy is worthwhile, though; I just prefer to find the most efficient means for the result, or at least a more efficient means than convincing folk to change their ways through rhetoric and example. I guess it's a bit ironic that I'm even writing this...
But there is no clear link between GDP and carbon emissions. For example, US's GDP is slightly less than the EU's but our CO2 emissions are double the EU.

The idea that investing in alternative energy and the like will cost jobs or even lives is total bunk. If we can create a market around things we don't need (like gourmet potato chips) then we can create a market around things we do need, like clean air and water.
It didn't take a mysterious "hacker" to reveal this bias. It has been known for a long time.

I heard about the "smoothing over" of the MWP and the weighted bias used to produce the hockey stick many months ago. A significant number of climatologists have been vocalizing these concerns in varying degrees for some time. No one would listen to them.

The only reason YOU are hearing about it now is that once light was shed on the CRU shennanigans, it lent legitimacy (whether or not it is deserved) to said climatologists, and the opportunity to voice their concerns to a larger listening audience.
wasn't it the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty? basicaly, after that, you could only detonate nukes during peacetime underground, right?

and orion would have been detonating them not-too-distant from earth when ramping up for interstellar voyages.
While that is bad, what is worse is that it destroys science and without science we may as well just shoot us.
Well, I have been using Outlook 2010 since June and it has threaded discussion features since then. I am sure as he was an Microsoft employee he had access to the early release and dog-food versions which he should have tried. So, threaded discussion shouldn't be a new feature for him. And if he was using Outlook I don't know why offline Gmail wows him so much.
Mag+: Future eMagazine concept
Crashed in 10 seconds.

I'm like a walking bug plague.
Perhaps because it isn't a coding issue, it is a design issue and the fact that advocates of any stripe tend to gloss over the problems with whatever they are advocating.
A lot of investors know YC but not HN, so you shouldn't read anything into that.

The best way to judge an investor (like people in many other fields) is simply to ask people who've worked with him.
The intersection of people with something worth saying and the people who write books is far from total.
No, you should not. Also keep in mind the author edited the World Climate Report funded by the non-profit "Greening Earth Society", which in turn was funded by the Western Fuels Association (a non-profit cooperative for "coal and transportation services"). On further reflection this might be a bit of stretch...
are you taking advantage of the commit that implements pre-forking?

http://github.com/facebook/tornado/commit/6fb90ae694190fcedc...
How do I delete my account?
I would like to delete my account entirely. How do I arrange that?
Also add a link to "Archives" (http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/)
But you are also speaking in broad strokes. For example, "DOM Traversal" is something that IE can do. How critical are the specific features of DOM Traversal that the ACID 3 test is testing?

I don't want to spend much time doing bug triage for IE, I'm just saying it's not hard to imagine that their priorities don't include bugs which were obscure only a year ago.
Twitter app store oneforty gets more funding
What we are seeing is the politicization of science. Free and open debate in the scientific community has been choked off by the true believers.

Data not showing what you want, then change it. Allegiance to the cause trumps the search for the truth and we are all losers in this debate.
Well it worked for me. The only reason I'm a member of the ACM is to get access to their full-text articles.
Thinking about it now ;).
To put a bow around this one, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), not exactly a bastion of radicalism, concluded after comparing Facebook's new privacy settings with the privacy settings that they replaced:

This sentence is strange. The EFF exists to promote online civil liberties, including online privacy. That they would come down on the side of more privacy is not surprising.

Note I have no problems with their conclusions; my problem is with how the author tried to frame them.
Why Using ShopSavvy Might Not Be So Savvy
My thoughts exactly. What wasn't properly communicated by the tool, even to someone who was paying attention, was that my profile picture and my name are now public. AND that I cannot change that.

Not explaining this clearly, especially to people like me who had their profile pic privacy set to "Friends only" before, is what I would consider a breach of trust.
A programmer's personal story about finding a job in this economy
I like it. Not sure if I'll use it regularly, but it's cool.
The problem with using only books to try and understand what people who are disagree with you think is that they aren't interactive. While reading something you disagree with, you will probably find yourself thinking "Well, what about X", and if the book doesn't explicitly address that issue you will never know what they would respond. Even worse, people tend to assume that those who disagree with them don't have an answer to their objections, rather than that the book simply doesn't address them. If you are instead talking to a (reasonably knowledgeable) person, they will be able to at least give some sort of answer to your objections.
"Google Qualified" Developer Directory
Memoize with cache reset in Python
No. Kennedy was shown a design for an Orion well before that, and was freaked out by the possibility of one hovering over an enemy city, per Ted Taylor, the project leader. The test ban treaty signing might have actually been partially a result of Orion, rather than an unrelated activity that shut it down.
SuperMemo looks dated (both the app and the web site) but it is very strong in the fundamental algorithms for learning and retention. The guy has been doing this for over 25 years! You'd do well to partner with him to produce a more modern offering based on his research than going alone. If I was serious about learning something I would live with his old school software because I'm really buying into the significant experience he has in the domain in question...
non-blocking Event I/O, server-side + client-side JS.

Cf. node.js for infrastructural style (but with Scala in Etherpad's case)
Or you can just write your performance sensitive stuff in Ocaml or Common Lisp or Forth, or if it really has to be super-fast, in Assembler.
I think this is so important for CS. If I hadn't been exposed to the fun stuff in CS before going to school (to me, that meant graphical applications with pretty pictures), I don't think I'd be drawn to it.

There are so many sides to CS and software development. Just because you can't wrap your head around algorithmic analysis doesn't mean you wouldn't be great at designing UI's and dealing with HCI, for example.
Ultra-Fast Flickr Badge with YQL
Death of OS X VLC Exaggerated
I hacked up something for LaTeX collaboration: http://etherpad.com/latexmk
Given that facebook reset my application blocklist, application privacy settings, and some other settings after I told it not to, I find the locksmith analogy to be accurate. In fact it would be as if the locksmith offered to unlock all my doors and windows and unlocked them after I told him not to.
Pretty interesting story, and it's cool that he was able to bounce back. In some areas, programmers seem to have lots of opportunities, even while there are few jobs in other fields.
Trident Gum Turns Fan Tweets into Full-Page USA Today Ad
Your real neighbors are all on the internet, too busy to talk to you anyway.
I'm really glad to see that they're building a new UI from scratch - this has a lot of potential. I wish that there was a chance in hell that this would light a fire under Apple's QuickTime team, but they seem to be stuck moving at a snail's pace.

Plus, VLCKit could be a really great tool for Cocoa programs, since Apple's API migration roadmap to QTX just flat out doesn't exist publicly.
Tell HN: The joojoo guy [was] live on mixergy
Because how are you going to refer to foo (and not the result of foo) otherwise?

Haskell has it right. And Scheme and Forth of course.
FWIW, I'm not a big twitter user, I don't use a single twitter "app", but hey this is pretty cool and its extremely digestable. I'd imagine a lot of people would want that cute tree on their page, just depends on how easy it is to get it running. The concept is good though imo, good job!

Also the main text on the page is kind of hard to understand. It makes sense now that I saw your example page, but "dynamic twitter theme" didn't really do anything for me immediately. Personally I would put something like: "Finally! Custom twitter backgrounds!" That sounds kind of myspace-y which is a good thing imo because any idiot can use (and understand) myspace. "pimp your twittaaaahh" - ok just kidding about that last one.

So overall, your app lends itself to the "show, don't tell" mantra more easily than most.
Tailcall anyone
I'm almost positive he was not. While not completely in agreement with him, I can definitely sympathize with him.
Not nearly as close as we are to colonizing the oceans: http://seasteading.org/
> And the old privacy settings are still available

Not quite. I previously relied on one particular setting which seems to no longer exist. I had a "Limited Profile" list of friends who had my full list of friends hidden from them. (One of my friends is the type who might contact/annoy any other female on my friends list who she's unfamiliar with to find out who they are.)

From what I've read, you have no choice but to share your list of friends with all of them. There also used to be an option to hide it from everyone but yourself.
Consensus != truth
> ...it is the same language, but it is not the same environment.

It is for me. I'm building a framework and enterprise app that just targets V8 (Node server, Chrome client). It's very liberating, to say the least. I still use Firefox (Firebug) for experimental stuff though, as Chrome's dev tools aren't up to par yet.
Twitter App Store oneforty Raises $1.6 Million, With More On The Way
Breakdown of Great Web App Homepage Design
Joojoo Web Tablet Pre-Sales Violate PayPal Rules
If I were Apple, I would make Javascript APIs to iTunes payment system.
But as cited in the article Mr. Mann tried to put Climate Research "out of business" as it's put after a 2002 paper didn't agree with him. If YOU heard about the smoothing over of MWP data only months ago doesn't make it very current. The paper was from 1999. It's not like this stuff just happened within the last year.

If these small enclave of scientist felt CRU was being railroaded why did it take 10 years for them to get a larger audience? They couldn't come up with some way to expose this problem? He's sending these emails around. I'm sure plenty of them were CC'ed on one or two of them. "as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." Those emails could have been sent along to any paper and they would have been published. There are plenty of journals that could have published this research, and would have been happy to do so if they were compelling.

Why did someone choose to expose this through the shady hacker route?

At least Patrick Michaels went to WSJ when he wrote his article.
How about putting more resources into bribery. It seemed to work quite well in Iraq, and took out opposing forces cheaper than weapons. And with less blood shed, of course.
I was really hoping he'd resurfaced.
There are a lot of words in the dictionary you shouldn't use. They're obscure, don't have a meaning that isn't expressed equally well by another word (or limited number of other words) and/or don't actually mean that much. They exist on the fringe of a language and as such should be documented in a dictionary, but if your aim is to communicate clearly through writing, you shouldn't use them.
Looks like a Bespin IDE ..... fantastic!!
To an extent, this is the hard part about any programming language. As soon as you're writing programs that don't completely fit into the given system and language libraries, you will have to start writing those layers.

C just starts requiring these layers at a slightly earlier point in the abstraction continuum. On the other hand, the low-level abstractions are the easy ones: my experiences verify that in a medium-size project and up, with C you will have quickly built your own vocabulary and primitives and you get to the meat only a bit later than with some higher-level language.

I don't mean that C is all you need but that it's not the big problem in practice. I've seen so many large C projects where most of the code is about the problem domain itself and only a minor part is dedicated to overcome the C's lack of features and primitives.

I somehow recognize it as a good thing in C, forcing the programmer to build these layers early. You'll have to do that eventually and if you're so used to doing it already, you'll have more brain left for the actual problem itself.
Your first argument would be more interesting, if you could compare it with a situation where the money remains in civilian hands.

(E.g. during the Second World War a lot of new technology came out of the military, too. But that was only to expect, since all resources went into the military.)
In Surgery, a Tangled Tumor Meets Its Match
This is not a video, it's a slideshow (insofar as it's a self-contained sequence of card-sized pages), each of whose slides is a video clip.
Opsource Cloud: Adopts Mezeo Platform, Adds Windows 2008 Support
Louis CK - "Everything is amazing, and no one is happy."
A DNS takeover could compromise Twitter passwords
You know that there were more hot wars during the cold war than we have now?