skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As it turns out, placing nuclear weapons in space is disadvantageous, aside from the prohibitions of the OST. It significantly limits the targets, in space or on Earth, that weapons are capable of hitting.

As to whether ICBM arsenals are militarizing space, I think you would have a different opinion if we were to change contexts. Airplanes are air craft, boats are sea craft, and ICBMs are space craft. That all these vessels begin and end their travels on land, in port, or on the Earth doesn't change their fundamental natures. If the major powers of the world all had massive navies which they almost always kept in port except for occasional training missions we would not be pretending that the oceans were unmilitarized.
Exactly; extremely low.

But now your also scared of storms :)
For argument's sake, giving 15-25 hackers my business plan for their perusal is a risk in itself. There'd have to be some thought put into how much is revealed, and under what circumstances.

You could get around accredited investor rule by having the founder form a contract with each investor. "Whatever profit and earnings I make from startup A, you have xx% up until the year 20xx." In this way, there is no interference in the startup's balance sheet, although there should be some indication of a cash injection by the founder due to their relationship with the hackers.
A mandatory app store for OSX would be a slap in the face for Valve's Steam platform. I'm not so sure Apple would be ok with Valve being the major supplier of games on the OSX in the near future (which could very well happen).
whose motorcycle is this?
iPad/iPhone/iPod touch are mainly content consumption devices, that is why Apple locks them down. So even the most technologically ignorant person can use them worry free and not end up with all the issues like they've had with Windows and even sometimes OSX machines.

OSX machines are REAL computers that let you do whatever you want. And OSX is mature, you won't be seeing many changes to it besides those that trickle up from kernel optimizations that occur on the iPhoneOS platform (Apple has moved many devs over from OSX to iPhoneOS).

An app store may be in the cards for OSX, but app lock out (locking out anything except app store apps) is not going to happen. If Apple did something like this, it would kill a large portion of their creative, scientific and development market. It will just be an easy application distribution system for those who want to a more convenient way to buy software (and for developers who are willing to give Apple a cut for this convenience).
> I’m not sure the danger posed by space based weapons (such as laser systems) is any more significant than future earth bound weapons.

I know this is a glib response but: have you ever read "The Day of the Triffids" (if not - you should, great book).

I would hope that, this time, we would have learned lessons from the world war, cold war and other conflicts and just go about our progression into a Space Faring world peacefully.

However precedent is a worrying thing; I expect we will see some kind of war over it at some point.
I'd read (though I can't find the link now) that there's no FM antenna connected to the FM radio in the N1. I'm not sure if that's true, or not... would be a damn shame if so.
What would be really useful actually is DAB, since that seems to be where things are moving in the UK.
Well, evolution doesn't always mean improvement.

I think the personal computer will split into two branches, with power users keeping today's form factors, while average users who just want to surf the web or check their email will go for the appliances.
This is bad juju. Think about it, we're talking about a 35,000 km cable. Imagine the line losses on that. Not to mention, in order to provide any amount of power you would need a massively heavy wire, likely heavier than the beanstalk itself. This is almost certainly true even for superconducting wire (due to the cooling requirements) but may even be true for hypothetical room-temperature superconducting wire.

Secondly, and more importantly, the electrodynamics of a 35,000 km conductor piercing through the Earth's magnetosphere are daunting to consider. Or consider the geodynamics of a lightning rod that spanned the ground through the stratosphere and beyond, it would constantly be discharging electric potential from the atmosphere. More than likely the result would include one or both of the beanstalk being dragged out of orbit or intense arcing along the beanstalk resulting in its destruction.
Who would connect this to their HDTV, and then use it within the 6' distance of the VGA/HDMI cable? I did that once with my 42" LCD and it felt like my retinas were melting. Typically, one would connect a PC to an HDTV for couch computing. Therefore, nettop and a wireless keyboard/mouse makes much more sense.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# from selected block in vim: !scriptname.pl
while (defined(my $line = <STDIN>)) {
$line =~ m/^(.*)\{(.*)\}/;
my $element = $1;
my @list = split /;/, $2;
@list = join ';', sort { $a cmp $b } @list;
print STDOUT "$element" . "{@list}\n";
}
Building EJBs with Clojure using new Java annotation support
Right now the burden of establishing Earth-alien communication pretty much lies on the aliens, so it doesn't matter what we do. Our conscious attempts in contacting other world are so feeble in their scope and reach that it hardly matters if we do them or not.

At the same time, the Earth is releasing enough signals (think lights and satellite TV) and artificial objects (satellites) to be noticed by anyone bothered looking.
It's part of a series:

http://www.nowpublishers.com/product.aspx?product=DBS
تباريح فــارس خـضر | موقع قصيدة النثر
To me this seems like unethical behavior of a very profound nature when you consider the human consequences.
Every new article I see about this story appears to have more and more pointers towards a child porn investigation. I hope someone sensible thinks very seriously before deciding to do that...
It's not all that far fetched in one form or another. If we started to see a significant amount of malware for OSX I bet Apple would strongly consider it. I look at the issue with Mcaffee last week, and the Microsoft BSOD inducing update on infected machines earlier this year, as an untenable situation. Computers can't just stop working randomly or become exploited this easily. I would hope we could find a better solution but if open platforms continue to be plagued by these problems it's almost inevitable we'll see a shift towards locked down platforms in the future. We've already seen Microsoft move in this direction carefully with WHQL certified drivers. Who knows? In 5-10 years Linux might be the only open platform left. It's only going to take one major catastrophe to put the pressure on Microsoft, Apple, etc to lock down. Add in some government saber rattling and fear over "cyber warfare" and it's a done deal.
And/or relationships.
I wonder how many of the people that are upset here, own an iPhone. My guess would be, a lot.
Why do people think it's ok on the iPhone (which i assume they think, because they bought it in the first place), but are upset when such things would come to OS X?

I think, this blog entry is not based on real information, but i think it would be in the spirit of Steve Jobs. So, i'd not be as surprised as most people, i guess.

All hail to more censorship, closed systems and external control!
There's a simple solution to this: acquire ManageTwitter, and then find a clever way to integrate this to the core service (with controls that Twitter approves of).
I'd actually like to see desktop app stores become popular. We've had them in the Linux world for years, though there's no mechanism for payment. Ninite gets us partway there on Windows, but it's still crude compared to apt.

I can't imagine any desktop OS vendor locking down the system though.
Apple Crunch Recipe
Thanks for your comments.

memcached is a competitor, as is Oracle Coherence and Gigaspaces.

memcached is a decent open source product, which appeals to a certain type of customers.

We realize that there is a competition, but we think there is room for improvement.

- no benchmark for now, we think it's too early, we'll do that during the beta. Our preliminary tests show we're at least twice faster and up to ten times faster.

- we tested our cache's performance on a 12 cores machine, so we can only say "it scales up to 12 cores"

- we offer out of the box a C language binding, PHP, Java, Ruby and Python

- wrpme has been designed from the ground up with security in mind, the default install is secure, you need to manually activate the remote and administration features (if you need them)
This is Liberace playing a Liszt concerto:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl6vCZSD70U

Liberace was a professional concert pianist -- that is, he actually played as solist with professional orchestras. I'd say that fits my definition of "seriously good pianist", though he was probably not good enough to be at the top so he chose to be more an entertainer than a pianist.

But then, Lang Lang is not too far from that (he played a fake piano at the Beijing Olympics ceremony).
How does the PC communicate with the IIe? Serial?
Yes, tech specs do not matter if all you are doing is looking at the device as a consumable.

For techies i suspect it will continue to matter.
As long as they don't lock things just like the iPhone, and I'm sure it's quite impossible. Because we can run official developer tools on the Mac.

Mac is the only device left that we could tinker without paying contracts, etc.
Just used typed lambda calculus if you want to avoid that.
Don't forget that it included an IP sharing agreement, which was no doubt worth more than $600 mil given what Apple had to share.
What cons exactly would there be to wiping out a comparatively stone-age world?

"oh no we lost a chance to perform sociological research."
Dear Millennials: Your parents lied to you
Reminds me of a 'Rich dad - Poor dad' seminar I attended on my trip to Philippines.

In my case, I would have saved just a few hundred dollars, I got free AppleCare with my MacBook in 2008 and Apple has already replaced too many things, from my battery to fan to what not.
I did it ages ago. Worked for me.
We (techies) tend to ignore that the vast majority of the web users today are not techies.
Fatih Aki karmen Örgü Modelleri 2010 örgü ve elişi çeşitleri çok güzel gerçekten eline sağlık.
I think people don't notice it until it's all presented back to them in some manner like this.

People might also have an unreasonable expectation that there's some law against misusing their data. Partly, it's because that is true in some areas, e.g. the phone company can't run speech-to-text on all your conversations and sell histograms of your word usage, so people might assume Facebook can't either.
I had the opportunity to discuss that with a pilot who uses to land in Russia in different airports and explained us NDB landings in Russia. The pilot made only one landing attempt that failed, the other ones are the standard procedure in Russia where ATC take you down step by step in the traffic pattern - make you flight 3 or 4 circuits round over the runway. Also the captain didn't have much hours of flights compared to his years of experience - a common pattern in the east countries who don't have much money for military aircrafts expenses. It looks like a flying error at the end, he maybe have turned over the trees (probably because the NDB wasn't on the runway centerline), and was too low too early... Investigation will tell more hopefully.
I'm confounded. How can interest be below inflation? Don't people want money now? I though there was a premium on saving money, because people were short-sighted and greedy. I though that saving your money let it get put to work, creating productive stuff, and you would get rewarded for your short-term austerity.

Funny old world.
Chrome ~200fps i7 2.6GHz
Monopoly, is it a problem?
What about Komodo Edit? http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/
Ask HN: What is ridddlr.com?
It timed out the first time, then loaded fast the next time.
I think you should bite the bullet and recommend a few text editors on Windows, Mac and Linux. Or one cross platform one. Some poor bastard is going to end up wondering why test.py.doc isn't running - and I don't think it's fair to cast them off as too stupid to program for that.
Can he make a mean, dirty, nasty version? Like the former blog.
I miss the angry in your face Zed Shaw.
Because they might be the ones in the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Not bothering with the tech specs is nothing new, game console market's been like that for years. People (normal people, not geeks salivating over specs) don't care how fast the CPU in their console is - they only care which games can be played with it.

They can still compare the quality of the consoles (newer, bigger, nicer, games will run on newer consoles, but not on older - or, one can complain about lack of DVD playback on Wii, without going into tech details).

(Feature) phone market used to be like this, too, at least from what I remember in the past 13-14 years in europe. Only with the rise of the smartphone (when people started looking at the more like computers) and phone cameras (the unavoidable megapixel comparisons) did tech specs started get into everyday conversation about phones.
I see, so it's not the JVM loading time, so much as library loading time. Interesting. I would have thought that would hit python even harder.
Brazil and the New Economic Miracle. The US Has a Lot to Learn
You really ought not to use the formula for anything other than calculation. You should characterise the determinant as the highest order form in the Exterior Algebra[1] and then use the fact that it's a group homomorphism so det(UAU^{-1}) = det(A)

That's not to say that I agree with the GP. There's a lot to be said for testing the ability to perform abstract calculations with no practial use. A dimension 6 determinant seems completely unreasonable though.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exterior_algebra#Functoriality
Surely this could be done using something like Contiki?
Makes me wish I had the capacity to downvote frontpage posts.
I didn't. Deleted my account a few months ago, and have not looked back. My reasons were probably 40% privacy issues (I felt at the time that facebook was going the wrong direction) and 60% just to avoid the massive time sink.
Seems somewhat backwards. This relies on a how-did-it-get-there argument: is a monopoly the result of illicit activity, or did it get there by "winning" in its market segment? For example, this passage, from the article:

If such status is gained by competition in the free-market then the
"monopoly" -- the successful business -- is good. If such status is gained
by using the government, or Mafia, to force one's competition out of
business, then the monopoly is evil.

But most antitrust theory isn't based on any sort of historical-deservingness argument; rather, it's based on the fact that a monopolist does not operate in a market, but is the market. Monopoly power is market-distorting, and prevents the normal free-market mechanisms from working to allocate supply and demand efficiently--- even if the monopolist did nothing "wrong" in getting to be a monopoly. The main argument for anti-trust laws is that society is better off when the "invisible hand" can work its magic, and use of monopoly power, especially to influence other markets (e.g. Microsoft demanding that Dell not ship any non-Windows computers), prevents the market from operating efficiently.

Some more modern, mathematically-heavy theory phrases this as more or less an issue of feedback behavior: in a properly functioning market, the market is determined by something outside the market mechanisms themselves (idealized as "real" supply and demand), but in a malfunctioning market, the market mechanisms themselves feed back into the market, so it's mostly determined, self-referentially, by itself.
This is not my field, but don't you have to store card card numbers in order to do things like issue refunds?
There are 24 million North Koreans and they earn per capita about 6% of what the 38 million South Koreans earn. In 1990 there were about 16 million East Germans and 63 million West Germans who earned only about twice as much. Twenty years on, East Germany is still behind.

Given the economic and ideological differences, I think the Koreans are more likely to drift apart than to ever become one country again.
If I hadn't bought that iPod zillion years ago, I would not read the question today^^
All kudos go to iPad buyers, all money to Apple designers.
German appeals court upholds Microsoft patent related to FAT
Please do explain: what's your hack to block just FB frames?
Overview of statistical analysis of baseball defense
"You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is." (Glengarry, Glen Ross)
It is always better to eavesdrop on the other unknown civilization before they eavesdrop on you. It gives you the chance to make a decisive move: invade, cloak, whatever. Hawking is dead right.We should be expanding in a way that is as invisible as possible to the rest of the galaxy. When we do find the aliens, we should pursue a normal intelligence gathering approach, collecting lots of information about them while misrepresenting ourselves as being more primitive and harmless than we are. Self preservation dictates this sort of stuff. It could explain the Fermi Paradox.
I like that it gives me this reassurance:

> You need to be logged into Facebook to see

> your friends activity

...so that I know I've remembered to stay logged OUT.

Now if only sites iFraming me to FB would post an reminder like:

"Thanks for staying logged in to FB (and providing info about all your activity to our advertisers)."
World hottest news: Foreign Office apologises for Pope 'condom' memo
comment failed, wrong number of arguments.

no, seriously,whats wrong with gpl?
Bleh, this started off sounding like an interesting piece - but it devolves into stating that the only "evil" monopolies are governments.

Which might not be a completely incorrect conclusion, it just reads like a political piece more than anything.
> Linux comes to mind, but then I would still have to move away from the slick hardware

Linux works pretty well on most Macs, so you could have both. ;-) The main problem is that most Linux GUIs aren't designed for a one-button mouse. You can avoid that somewhat if you map some sort of keystroke to right-click (for some reason, f12 is common), or use a more text-heavy environment.

Yeah, I realize it'd be weird to buy a MacBook just to run xmonad on it, but they really are nice physical machines, as far as laptops go.
He could have just kept all his notes on the back of those stock certificates. Easy.
I agree. Thanks for explaining :-).
As long as there is no coercion involved, I'm okay with monopolies. All a monopoly is a cornering of the market for a particular thing and you could even see entertainers as having a monopoly on their own unique offerings.

Most of the things people consider monopolies actually have competition. Its just not quite exactly the same, as cheap or as good.

If you had a monopoly on the automobile, there would still be the bicycle, the train, the horse and buggy, and of course, walking. These all compete with people just moving closer to work. Or living near a navigable body of water or getting a helicopter.

And lets not forget that the government is handing monopolies in exchange for sharing ideas (also known as patents). When such a deal makes sense for society, the monopoly is a good deal. When it isn't, we shouldn't be granting them.
Useless, but published anyway.
I agree. Numeric methods have taught me far more than learning simple programmable analytic tricks.

Specially solving reccurrences and summations, which mathematica can do very well, and I will almost always make a silly mistake when trying to do it by hand.
I understand where the confusion lies now: you're using the word hypocrisy to mean something else. Hypocrisy concerns the relation between statement and action, not motives.

What you're pointing to here would be hypocrisy if (for example) Apple were claiming to support these open standards but in fact made no effort to support them at all. The closed nature of their native platform is irrelevant in determining hypocrisy unless they were claiming to support openness there, which they aren't.

Your "translation" indicates you're more concerned about motives, but having a "bad" motive for acting in accordance with what you profess does not make you hypocritical any more than having a "good" motive for not acting in accordance with what you profess makes you not hypocritical.

You may find it disagreeable--and again, it sounds like you must feel the same way about most tech companies--but it's not hypocrisy.
These broad demographic generalizations get really tiresome after a while.

I sure as hell don't remember being showered with praise or getting athletic trophies just for turning up.
i'm curious - which proxy software does that?
The Nanotech Way of Getting to the Stars:

In reference to several commentators WRT to the energy you need to command to get to another star system, as I recall Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation posited this approach:

Use lasers pumped by your sun to accelerate a solar sail probe to a good fraction of c. Once that's done, the probe reassembles itself into a linear accelerator. As it flashes through the target system, the accelerator deaccelerates tiny probes, which make their way to planets. Those probes of course have nanotech which they use to assemble ... stuff (maybe even copies of the aliens).

Any one of a number of science fiction stories continue the plot from there.

Note that this approach will result in a signature the target system can see, as described in Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye.
Weirdly, as someone born in 1981, it starts sounding eerily familiar around #4. It's very hazy, but I remember using Apple Writer II (word-processing software) along with an ImageWriter II sometime in the late 1980s to do my elementary-school homework, which sounds vaguely like that description.

I think my parents were pretty pleased that I had managed to find a productive use for the home computer they bought, in an era when my dad was still using pen-and-pencil and the occasional mainframe terminal for his day job with a big engineering firm.
Bay Area firms' profits soar, but shares slump
No, "avoid boilerplate" really has a different meaning here. In ML, most of what would be considered boilerplate in Java is either inferred automatically or completely unnecessary. If you're writing boilerplate, you're adding code that will get in the way of what you're trying to express with your code, and doing so in a way where you'll have to change it manually as your design changes.

The most interesting one, IMHO, is "Make illegal states unrepresentable" - many, many things can be structured as type constraints, and then the compiler can exhaustively test them. A fairly cliche example of this is using a type of "str TaintedString" for unchecked user input, and requiring it to be checked and unpacked before passing it to the internals. (While it can be done in Java or C++, it typically necessitates rewriting a lot of stuff all over the codebase as code changes, so it's often too much trouble. In ML, it takes very little effort.)

This strikes me as somewhat parallel to O'Keefe's advice in _The Craft of Prolog_: rather than writing manual runtime checks, let unification itself do the work. To check if a list is 4 cells long, rather than checking "length(L, X), X = 4", just check "L = [_, _, _, _]".
It's a hardware limitation. The touchscreen used in the N1 is a Synaptics ClearPad 2000 (http://www.synaptics.com/solutions/products/clearpad) which is capable of dual-touch at best (can't really differentiate the two fingers).

Still a great phone, though.
For regular users tech specs haven't mattered in years.

Although I suppose if you're writing for a website called ipadwatcher.com you feel obliged to relate everything to the iPad.