skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's flagged because it's a misleading attempt to relitigate only one of many causes of the war in Iraq.

Among other causes were Saddam's attempts at genocide against the Kurds,[0] his attacks on US and British forces patrolling the no fly zone,[1] his defiance of UN regulations,[2] his redirection and delay of distributing aid to hurt his own people while blaming the international community,[3] his army of fascist goons running the country--to include his serial rapist sons,[4] the training and financing of international terrorist groups,[5] and his attacks on and threats to destroy Israel.[6]

The ideal of providing a democratic model for other authoritarian regimes, proximity to Iran, a need for strategic air bases to support anticipated regional conflicts, and oil politics all may have played some role as well.

Moreover, information declassified in 2015 showed that Iraq had stockpiles of missiles armed with sarin, and internal plans to halt production during sanctions while retaining the capital and facilities to resume production as soon as sanctions were lifted.

The US had a policy of regime change in Iraq as early as 1998, and the conflict should really be seen as one from 1991-2003. In the 2000 Presidential debates, even Al Gore said Saddam should have been removed earlier, and that he wanted to arm rebels to topple Saddam.[7]

It was flagged because Saddam promising an interrogator he wouldn't use chemical weapons to start WWIII doesn't change any of that, and is barely relevant to anything.

Granted, it's an extremely unpopular war. It's extremely unpopular because it was one of the most poorly prosecuted wars in history, partly due to de-bathification deteriorating civil government and partly due to it becoming a magnet for rising violent jihadism.

It's not an unpopular war because Saddam was some noble innocent, some scapegoat who wandered into the crosshairs of geopolitical forces outside of his control.

[0] https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFALINT.htm

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/081399iraq-conf...

[2] https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/iraq/dec...

[3] http://www.usip.org/events/iraq-sanctions-what-have-we-learn...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/23/iraq.suzannego...

[5] http://www.cfr.org/iraq/terrorism-havens-iraq/p9513

[6] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/956084.stm

[7] http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-11-2000-debate...
Ask HN: Did any book(s) change your life in 2016?
If so, I'd appreciate the details (title, author) and a few words about why.

Sunday curiosity, no ulterior motive.

Thanks very much in advance.
The only issue I've ever had with MSSQL is that the Express version comes configured out-of-the-box with a set of defaults that make it nearly useless. TCP/IP connections are turned off, and you have to go through and set all the protocols to use the normal SQL port.
Yes. StudiVZ is listed with 17 Mio registrations but it is virtually dead. People used it for the first 1 or 2 years when it was popular and then everybody moved to Facebook.
The author could spend some time discussing the genesis of the current, objectionable approach and what benefits it may have. It probably has some. Similarly, they might ask themselves:

* What are negatives or risks others might see in their approach?

* What are ways to mitigate these dangers?
Russian hacker Rasputin allegedly stole logins from the US election agency EAC
Please, a significant portion of my job involves understanding criminals and their interactions with everyday people. For every criminal, there is a never ending line of good hearted people who are willing to have faith in their fellow humans.

Of all of my short-comings, understanding this is not one of them.
I remember reading about this in Reader's Digest back in the 80s, or possibly early 90s.

One of the passengers mentioned that during the last-minute sideslip manoeuvre, he could almost tell what clubs the golfers on the course below them were using. :)
I think the real question got snowed under the brevity of the last few answers, but I'll admit that my answer was worded clumsily and only makes sense in the context of the original question "I'd worry about recording someone who simply bought a "used" phone on ebay - and the legal ramifications of such a move."

An unwitting buyer in good faith becomes owner of that phone, because the transfer of the good is, briefly put, valid (articles 3:84 and 3:86 sub 1 of the Dutch civil code). Now it's true that the original owner can revindicate (that is, 'claim back') the phone from the buyer (within 3 years and within some other small boundary conditions). This follows from the exception to 3:86 sub 1 in 3:86 sub 3.

I'm saying however that this right to revindication is irrelevant here. My point was (but again I'll freely admit upon rereading it that my wording didn't actually make this point), that the phone at the time of the spying was the fully, legal property of the buyer; and as such, that they have the full legal protection any owner has or would have. So you can't make a legal claim 'oh but that guy who bought it wasn't the owner so we could do with the phone as we pleased'. (Which is what I read as the worries about recording someone who bought a phone off ebay - the worry that the guy who did this could be legally committing the same 'thing' anyone else would be doing when abusing someone else's phone to spy on them).

(While I'm not technically a lawyer, I do have a Dutch law degree, although of course that doesn't make me all-knowing and I've often been wrong before)
> finally I got hourly job at $35/h ... It is 1.5 years since I'm on UpWork and I earned around $200K so far.

You're averaging roughly double that $35/h, consistently for a full working week, every week, solely via UpWork?!
The problem is high start up cost and high real estate cost. Batteries are small and you can purchase and deploy them in small quantities.
Yes, and what does that have to do with this article? If you come to a discussion about thing x to complain about thing y, no matter how valid your complaint you are out of order.

To quote The Dude: "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole."
This is such an incredibly weird story. "Who would ever think that we would use chemical weapons on the world"? You might start by asking the Iranians, or the Kurds of Halabja.
Or perhaps even better use conditional imports and do progressive fallback.
into the rabbit hole..
Throwaway email mechanism. libre free software principles?
What throwaway disposable email mechanism fits libre free software principles?
So it turns out that passenger jets do not carry backup batteries. This poses problems when all engines fail, as many functions are fly-by-wire, and require power.

Th RAT comes to the rescue in such situations. Its a Ram Air Turbine which pops out of the body when called upon. The turbine spins and generates just enough electricity to power the crucial instruments and controls.

I was touring a Hamilton Sundstrand factory a long time ago that manufactured these RATs. They had a tally board up that listed situations where the RAT was deployed and the number of people that survived the incident.

Talk about being motivated to do a good job!
Indeed. Start by reading the opuses of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Levinas and then maybe you can begin to talk about postmodernism and not be laughed out of the parlor.

Till then, stfu and start reading.
Citation needed (2013)
Cereal Epic Fail #Hardstyle Cringe
Ooooohhhhh now I see it. You're right there is an uncanny resemblance.
It's really sad if you don't strive to excel at your craft. Though
I understand that most of the craftsmen don't care about their work, they care
about bringing home a good living.
they should rename the flag button to #FakeNews
There are quite a few products that require a Linux host for the main app server and a MSSQL or Oracle DB.

Are there?
I'm genuinely curious about what these products, are that run on Linux and use SQL Server.
The vast majority of BLAS and LAPACK are written in Fortran (at least, the ones provided by netlib.org). Github also reports that OpenBLAS is around 50% Fortran, so there's quite a bit there too [1]. Usually when you call BLAS functions from C you're really calling a cBLAS wrapper to some Fortran function. This is generally why you see -lgfortran -lf77blas when you compile programs that require numerical tools.

[1] https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS
I'm running Windows 10. If I could pay to go back to Windows 7, I would in a heartbeat.
Ascii Art in GPG key signatures
> there's also a lot more bikers in the Netherlands, so it's easier to justify spending money on rebuilding roads instead of retrofitting there.

And a reason for that could be that the infrastructure for riding bikes is so excellent?
That's very reasonable; thank you for clarifying. I don't mean to imply that the CIA or anyone should be taken at their word, but it's a little concerning that some are more willing to trust the Russian state than the CIA. There isn't a conclusive case either way yet.
Spammers and similar people who want to abuse HN to artificially promote something.
The tutorial makes it seem more complicated than it actually is. JSONDog and the constructor example has no place there.
I can't stand it either. Makes it even worse on aluminum keyboards/laptops.
>It will take many many years before time estimation will die, but it will happen.

I'm not so sure. Typically the business isn't really asking for time estimates. They are asking for quarterly or yearly spend estimates. Since the primary cost driver is IT timesheets, they converge. At least at non-tech companies, that's never going to disappear.

How much revenue will this project create, and how much investment/expense will it need (within specific time boundary x)?
Sep Kamvar (MIT Media Lab) has similar thoughts on what he calls self limiting technology. Instead of technology being useful initially, but then embedding itself and changing the way we live, technology could just solve the problem it sets out to solve and then just recede away.

He gave online dating as an example.
Over the Shoulder 1 – Text Preprocessing in Forth
I suppose after watching this show, I now understand it better. But I now realize that pilot error is never just pilot error. Without some other failure or extraordinary circumstance, pilots have a damn hard time crashing a plane on their own.
Ask HN: What type of service/SaaS would you pay for if someone was to create it?
I see where you are coming from, but I liked it purely for the Malaysian School anecdote.
Like you observe, the compilers matter.

Historically, C compilers just couldn't do such a good job at optimising, because C is pretty complex and has loads of undefined behaviour. Also, Fortran compilers have always been optimised for numerical computation.

Recently * , a lot of effort has gone into making C compilers produce very optimised code. In general, this is a good idea because humans are bad at optimising and also remembering every damned Intel vectorisation instruction.

So historically, Fortran was much faster, recently * with compiler advances in e.g. reordering and AMD64, it's possible C compilers beat Fortran compilers.

* edit: adjust your definition of recently to encompass the entire timeframe of Fortran's existance
Rebuttal on paragraphs:

1) SSDI is determined by a medical doctor. The patient has the decision to apply, but after that it's a judgement call by "professionals". I used quotes because the system is severely flawed. Getting a dissability lawyer involved early is prudent planning. It shouldn't be this way, but the system is severely flawed.

2) Just rambling?

3) agree

4) not totally free. Agree "lots of providers won't let you in the door."

5) I belive you get Medicare after two years on SSDI? The people I knew who were on dissability were all relied on state medical benefits. In California, they relied on Medi-Cal. Most doctors won't accept medi-cal. Sure, they got free hospital visits. Depending on where you live, a hospital might be your only recourse. Yes it's free, but it minimal quality of help. Many drugs are not on an approved Formuliary. They purposely make getting benefits very difficult. Going to a hospital should be the last resort? The system forces some people into going to the emergency room. Still not fixed, even after Obamacare?

I don't know. Let me ask you something? Why would you pay a hospital bill you have absolutely no control over? I see some noble people trying to pay off their padded hospital bills, and I don't get it. I would understand it if their wasn't collective bargaining, and some standard way of computing hospital costs. Right now they can charge you whatever. My father was given a gift basket by the hospital staff. Months later he looked at the bill. That gift basket was $300.00. He refused to pay even his 10% of the adjusted bill. (Had great Union insurance.)

If someone qualifies for free medical care; why do you care? Our medical system is not a free market entity. We like to think it is, but it's a closed system.

My congrats to any collective barging entity(like Medicare, and many private party insurance companies) that keeps prices down for its members. Actually, they just refuse to pay the bill on many cases because they can.

Obamacare gave us a few rights. They look like they will be history though?
May I ask why? As a year round bike commuter without a metro card I can not find any good reasons to chose bus/metro over riding a bike. The bike is almost always faster and gives me superior flexibility.
System loads web pages 34 percent faster by fetching files more effectively
Yes, solely via UpWork. I got a bit better hourly rate since then, and I usually work around 60h per week.
If you view them as just a seed stage VC then is 7% for $120,000 reasonable? Seems that if someone thinks $120,000 is a lot of money (cuz 7% is a hefty percentage) they're desperate. If they think the YC Rolodex will make them, they're desperate. I'm not getting the value.

Yes, YC has a brand and they can command this and their actions are indeed pretty consistent and logical. But it doesn't make sense from the other side of the transaction at least to me.
I'm sorry if I've violated some set of community standards. I personally find this article rather distasteful and lacking in details. The cultural signaling strewn throughout it come off as an attempts to raise an angry internet mob against a company based on what is very clearly a bias representation of the situation. This sort of manipulation and axe-grinding is not something I see as being in particularly good faith, so my distaste for it colored my comments.

I tried to make sure I wasn't attacking anyone, but rather the ideas presented. I'll keep your guidance in mind if I find myself making such comments again.
Relevant paper: "Polaris: Faster Page Loads Using Fine-grained Dependency Tracking", http://web.mit.edu/ravinet/www/polaris_nsdi16.pdf
The RAT is backup power for the hydrolics. Do you have a citation that there's no backup battery for the electronics, because I don't believe it. Even for the crappy 25 year old not-approved-for-IFR GPS I had in my Cessna needed the engine/alternator to fail plus two separate batteries to drain before it would turn off. I can't believe the electronics on a fly-by-wire airliner are less redundant.
I run HelloBox

https://www.hellobox.co

It was started as "Create your own HackerNews clone" tool. It lets you create a HN-type community. Please check it out.
> But only by understanding why things are the way they are, and who else is connected to each part of your work, will you start to see that there are damn good reasons, even if the result feels inefficient or frustrating at your desk.

I would go a bit further, there isn't necessarily damn good reasons, sometimes there is just politics, and if you would like to keep your job, do not try to fix something (unless you have been given orders to do so) if there is any sort of politics involved, unless you've been there long enough to know with absolute certainty that it is not a politics driven organization. And of course, every organization thinks they are free of politics, or doing things wrong, or dishonest employees, etc. Politics trumps everything, even economics.
How are you using Ruby for physics?
In fairness, Cloudflare's CTO did engage with the Tor folks for quite some time. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361
So it's a crazy powerful (and presumably crazy expensive) supercar in the form factor of a four-door sedan?
It's a war for control. I don't think the article goes too far.

I used to run a small business that sold Bitcoin for cash and it was practically impossible to keep it afloat – every major bank refuses to work with cash businesses that aren't retail because of MSB regulations.

If you read up on the history of money service regulations, they make it practically impossible for a business to transact with customers anonymously under the guise of preventing money laundering and terrorism. Every transaction needs to be available to the government.
I'm curious whether the basic income studies being done by Sam Altman and others will also cover what happens when subsidies are withdrawn?

Ideally, UBI would be guaranteed and never withdrawn, but it would be a pretty good argument for basic income if you can say that people continue to have a better outcome for years after payments stop versus people who never were enrolled in the first place. On the other hand, if most people become dependent on the payments and do worse than the control group when payments stop, that would be a strong argument against UBI.

(I imagine the outcome might also be very different between study participants that know their payments are going to stop at a certain time, participants who have their payments withdrawn suddenly without warning, and participants who are told in advance that their payments might be withdrawn at any time.)
Like how less people drove cars and went back to horses because when seat-belts became mandatory?
It may not be the posters desire to excel...just the reality of what's possible in their current job.

I suppose their are job choices you can make the open up more possibilities, but that brings other factors into play, not all of which are easy choices (salary, where to live, career stability, etc).
I agree with you. I was mainly playing devils advocate with the if you can't read some very large amount of news, it's better to read none.

Even then, the sources you pick have to be varied as you say. Reading solely MSNBC or FoxNews for 12 hours a day is not the same as multiple sources.
As a non-logged in lurker, I always get "prove you're legit" when using TBB. I usually hit the "new tor circuit for this site" button a few times until it goes away.

It is really annoying how to even read HN you need to jump through hoops. I can possibly understand commenting and posting being restricted, but there's not reason to block simple views, it's not like anyone is going to use tor for ddos.
A web directory that doesn't suck
IMO (and I dislike JS) it doesn't really matter. If the kid is really interested, they will go out of their way to learn new languages eventually.
No, not this one. The one I'm talking about had people talking about the product and how you could use it. The part with the song I'm talking about was a food restaurant setting (as opposed to a bar setting)

Edit: The one I have in mind was more like this one in terms of setting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRU3NemA95k
This is all historical revisionism. You need to look at the reasons that were given at the time, not the reasons people made up to justify and obfuscate what they did decades later.
> How is an executive supposed to decide what I should work on next if I don't provide estimates of the things that I could work on?

I dunno.

Maybe ask an executive at one of the many companies that have scientists or mathematicians on staff how they do it.
Year around bike commuter in Stockholm here... Thanks for that roundabout video, it was a freaking joy to watch. The bikes can cruise at a good speed while being separated from the cars and the pedestrians too.
> Mythbusters, I rarely come out of watching that show feeling like I really learned something

The earliest episodes were more scientific and educational. They spent quite a bit of time explaining how they were going to construct something and then showing how they actually built it. It became pure entertainment--devoted especially to blowing things up--once the show achieved success.

Another example of a show descending to the lowest common denominator: The first years of "Biography" on the A&E Network had stories about explorers, scientists, and world leaders--Michelangelo, Henry Ford, Julius Caesar, Marconi, Marco Polo--but now it's nothing but celebrities.
I wrote Dirac DevTools[1] to address some of the points you raised:
[1] https://github.com/binaryage/dirac
While I think this particular sketch isn't going anywhere without a lot more work on concrete implementation details, I do believe it is well worth spending time on what a working formalism of development would look like built atop the first principle of "there are no estimates".

No existing methodology in practice works like this.

If you asked developers why this is the case, they would point out that at the high level, business deals are made in the shape of pay X for Y by time Z, while at the low level managers carry out the same internal deals of deliver Y at cost X by time Z, whether day by day or project by project.

Nonetheless, I agree with the basic idea that estimates in software development cannot be given with any reliability at all. The corollary there is that the client never receives what they asked for in anything but the high level sense. Every single deal is basically a polite fiction that is renegotiated at length all along the way.

Given that this is already the case, and people kludge their way through to make a business of it, whether kludging at the large scale with waterfall or kludging at the low level with agile, one has to imagine that there is a distinct, different way to actually surface and incorporate the absence of estimates top to bottom in the process of business and development, and thereby reduce friction and waste.
I remember seeing an entertainingly bad TV movie of a very similar incident. I think it was this one, not the Gimli incident.

But we learnt about the Gimli Glider in my university computer risks course. It was a masterful piece of flying (and you'll note that most people who've tried to reproduce it in simulators fail).

Sobering reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_flights_that_r...

There's a lot of flights there with casualties (including one in 2005 where a pressurisation failure caused the crew to pass out; the autopilot flew the plane to Greece where it entered a holding pattern until it ran out of fuel; interceptors spotted a flight attendant trying to land the plane with portable air equipment, but he didn't make it. No survivors). Airliners don't really glide well.
Show HN: Libtmux – A tmux workspace manager in Python
The ndarray library indexes via tuples, i.e. [(1,2,5)], which should be just as efficient as a built in syntax (if perhaps a bit uglier).
Apparently also for electronics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_air_turbine
>I think it does not matter when your UpWork profile is empty

I would be tempted to find a local client and offer to do something small, but real, for free...provided I fronted them the fee to pay me via UpWork. Just to bootstrap the reputation/experience on the platform.
I don't get the usual cloudflare captcha when I visit HN via Tor. Maybe the problem is something else?

You can disable CloudFlare's tor-blocking [1] - I do on my static blog, as I don't see much value in putting a captcha in front of static content.

[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/203306930-D...