skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Conquering parts of the flat lands could have been pretty easy but the Swiss strategy was retreat into the mountain area.

That isn't a strategy. That's how you lose. So they hide in the mountains and starve?

> And if you have ever looked at the modern american army in afganistan then you will know that you can't just show up with some people and resources and take everything over.

Last I checked, we conquered afghanistan. And there are many countries with mountains. And they were all conquered pretty much.

You could argue that the swiss population wouldn't have been "subdued". But it's absurd to claim switzerland is some impregnable military power. They are not.

> Effective defense is about causing more pain then it is worth conquering you.

I know. That's my point. It's switzerland's money laundering role that made conquering switzerland pointless. Not the silly notion of switzerland's military prowess.

> Generally its just not worth attacking small neutral countries.

No. It's not worth attacking small neutral countries that serve a purpose.

> Banking is just one of many aspects, its simply false to claim that it is the major reasons.

Banking is the ONLY aspect.

After all, "switzerland" had been conquered MANY times in history. From the romans, hapsburgs, etc. Did switzerland get their mountains in the last 150 years?

Switzerland is a joke when it comes to the military. Their saving grace is their role in money laundering and banking.
One small extension:

* L_0 -> mode

* L_1 -> median

* L_2 -> mean

* L_infinity -> midrange, I think

that is, (smallest observation + largest observation)/2

(BTW, the author is also a big contributor to the wonderful Julia language, I believe)
Also the complete guide is ironically only 70% complete.
I remember hearing this paper presented at USENIX 1998, in New Orleans.

IIRC, the most interesting part of the presentation was a slide titled "Is UNIX portable?" Miller said, of course it is, I ported it! But then he showed a chart with the number of lines of code in the distribution and the number he had to replace for the Interdata mini, and the proportion was quite large! His punch line was that yes, he had ported UNIX, but it wasn't quite so clear that you could call it portable.
There are ways of disrupting them without completely bricking them. I submitted this last year. Took a long time to publish!

https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSA-17-341-01
That it’s an interesting question?
I don't know, some of the things they were doing up there were just ridiculous and useless. Like putting a woman in a chemically induced coma for a year, and playing high volume affirmations though a headset she wore the whole time. The doctor who started all this up there was just Mengele with a Psych degree and some very stupid ideas.
a practical demonstration of N.Taleb's Antifragile principle, if you will :)
>On a more serious note, I can't believe any government can keep a tight enough lid on something like that. Someone, somewhere is bound to defect or to leak it is somehow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtmpaM0PqyI
FYI, this is just one of the known experiments out of MK-ULTRA. Victim testimonies describe being immovably bound to chairs for all of their waking existence and forced to listen to a short, recorded tape on loop while blindfolded for sensory deprivation.

One victim was unable to recount the message as they suffered PTSD flashbacks and dissociated if they even thought about it. IIRC official records show the tape was something like “I did not kill my mother”, however there were other inclinations that the actual played message was the opposite - “I killed my mother”.

At least hundreds of years of torture were carried out on unwitting Americans and Canadians; on a magnitude that is comparable to human experimentation astrocities of the worst regimes in history; just less in numbers.

More reading: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you-turn-a-...
Paying salaries according to a local index in a remote context is externalized discrimination.
Quaternions are a 4-parameter representation of a rotation + scaling operator, the analog of using a complex number to represent rotation + scaling in the plane.

You can convert a (4 parameter) quaternion to a (9 parameter) 3x3 matrix in a similar way that you can convert a (2 parameter) complex number to a (4 parameter) 2x2 matrix. In either case you aren't using the full parameter space of the matrices.

In general in programs quaternions are used for storing and manipulating rotation operators (e.g. composing them together, etc.) because it saves work and improves numerical stability, but then final application of the rotation to a gigantic list of vectors is done using a matrix, because matrix-vector multiplication is very efficient (only need 9 multiplications and 6 additions to multiply a 3x3 matrix by a 3-element vector).
You appear to be making some big leaps and also assuming several things about my beliefs and politics. I try not to do political discussions ($$).

But, if you're seriously and genuinely interested in my perspectives, let's talk more. I've been thinking of economics, currencies, labor, income, and wealth for probably 25 years. It's a huge hobby of mine. I've been enthusiastically monitoring crypto-currencies ever since Bitcoin emerged and have been thinking about them for even longer. I could probably write 100s of pages on my thoughts. But, HN is definitely not the place to start that type of in-depth discussion.

($$) Political debates (especially online) are rarely productive. A person's political views are built on so many low-level things that it's a very personal thing. I used to love political debates when I was younger - it just felt so good. But, I've learned that people's politics don't budge much. So, while interesting, it's ultimately not useful.
Let's agree to disagree. Clearly you enjoy living in a nanny state and think that's the only way to feel safe.

I've evaluated the risks and feel that my family's safety is my responsibility. When seconds count the police is only minutes away - oh and they have no legal obligation to protect you in the USA.
Yes, obviously. Yet, I'd assume space/memory problems persist today to - games are always pushing the PC hardware envelope.
Scouting in The Netherlands includes this, Jong Nederland (Catholic Dutch Youth movement) as well [1]. Source: my anecdotal experience in 90s plus [1] (Dutch entry). Don't remember cellphone policies. It was the 90s...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jong_Nederland
> I'm disgressing but I'd argue in those European countries you probably won't see kids walking to school alone and for strong safety reasons.

I don't know for sure about Italy or France (though I'd be very surprised if they were not basically the same), but in Germany, I walked to school alone starting in first grade, and from fourth grade onwards I in fact had a 40min public transport commute to the neighbouring city that involved several interchanges; from what I can tell, this was normal at least from fifth grade onwards (since you choose secondary schools fairly carefully based on subject specialisation). Also, as far as I can tell, very little changed about this even in the face of recent paranoia about refugees.
Twenty years ago this was doable, but today most coveted jobs require a four year degree. You’ll hit a ceiling going this route.
It's true that a class with a set of methods defines a contract with its collaborators about what calls they can make (or what messages they can send, in Smalltalk terms), that is a lot like a type. Smalltalk calls this a "protocol". But they aren't enforced by the compiler; you can still send a message to an object that it won't be able to understand. What happens in that case is that a method called doesNotUnderstand gets called; a class can implement that to try to do something useful (you could implement a proxy this way, for example), but the default implementation throws an exception. I think that a genuine type would prevent the message being sent in the first place - the could would be rejected by the compiler, and would never get a chance to run.

Interestingly, it seems that this was planned for Smalltalk, but never implemented; a 1981 article about the design of Smalltalk [1] says:

"Also, message protocols have not been formalized. The organization provides for protocols, but it is currently only a matter of style for protocols to be consistent from one class to another. This can be remedied easily by providing proper protocol objects that can be consistently shared. This will then allow formal typing of variables by protocol without losing the advantages of polymorphism."

[1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk....
I _think_ the point of posting this article is to argue that bitcoin isn't a bubble? Not sure. I say that bc in every bubble/bitcoin thread people jump in and make this point.
Well one of the selling points of bitcoin is lack of government intervention. Seems like a prime use case.
Oh please.

This article is completely correct of course. But there is zero hope that it'll be taken seriously at all.

Just the other day, here on HN someone seriously proposed the idea that hate speech doesn't lead to violence against minorities[1]. I pointed at the Rwanda genocide, and got voted down (a lot), because the OP claimed that 10% of deaths didn't prove my point. Then I pointed out that was at least 60,000 deaths, and that was downvoted too.

Enough people clearly want to ignore things which disagree with their world view that there is zero chance that this destabilising behaviour will stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15936785
Way too often intuition (or trying to make things clear on an intuitive level) interferes with and/or severely impedes and slows down gaining the actually useful skills. Maybe not in applications to computer grahics, but in genreral there is so much to matrix analysis [1] that trying to translate everything into geometric images would make learning it at a practically useful level anything but impossible.

Rote learning, like the mindless memorizing of the multiplication table, is an extremely important component of education that is to reach any degree of sophistication or usefulness.

Also, being not (too firmly) attached to a particular interpretation of a formal system leaves open the door to potentially discovering new applications.

[1] See, for example, a book by Horn and Johnson.
If I'm not mistaken, if there is an even number of values, any value between (and including) the middle two values minimises the L1 norm. To choose the "central" (mean) of those two is just a convention.
Show HN: Fast-yet-simple golang router
Well when it comes to corporate interests you literally have the GOP party shut down Net Neutrality while the DNC has made preserving NN a party platform and plan on acting legislation when they gain back control.

Claiming that both sides favor corporations is to deny reality when it comes to voting records. Republicans have consistently passed legislation that hurt consumers and benefit corporations, another recent example was banning consumers ability to start class action lawsuits against banks.

You have the DNC legislature that was enabled to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a bureau that the GOP voted whole-hardheartedly against and continue to weaken now that they control Congress and the Senate. You have the GOP that put a pro-corporate Justice on SCOTUS that thinks employees should be punished when they aren't willing to risk their life in literal life and death circumstances in ransAm Trucking v. Administrative Review Board.

I'm sorry but there is clearly one party that cares about people and it ain't the fucking GOP.
All You Need to Know About Parcel
Some interesting notes in the summary: 1) wolves are one of beneficiaries of political instability (see the section on Balkan states). 2) in case of need, rescue from the Russian population is possible (section 7).
And also that the popular retelling exaggerates its actual significance to the Dutch economy.
There might be some branching, but mostly it'd be a straight line from "you are here" to "now you know enough". The back-and-forth shouldn't be with the person asking the questions, because then that's called teaching, not self-taught.

What they're asking for is a syllabus.
> Another story I love: when he was 12, my son and his friends found bottle of vodka in the schoolyard. Being 12 year old boys they did the obvious: filled on of the kids' sneakers with the vodka and set fire to it in the schoolyard. Apparently the math teacher walked by and called out "Boys! Class is in 5 minutes!"

I thought the obvious would be that they drank it :D
Fortunately, the original Bitcoin Classic kept a 1MB transaction size limit, making the worst case scenario 2n instead of n^2.
The use of blood-type tattoos during the Cold War
Final Tax Bill Targets the Free Food at Your Office
this is great, the docs/tutorial are pretty clear as well. shameless plug: I made a js library [0] for creating and playing board games a while ago. It allows you to focus on gameplay and logic without worrying about the user interface so much. It allows you to create games like chess [1] and simulations like game of life [2] pretty easily.

[0] https://github.com/danielborowski/jsboard

[1] https://danielborowski.github.io/site/jsboard/demo/demo8/

[2] https://danielborowski.github.io/site/jsboard/demo/demo9/
Everybody by now should realise that Bitcoin is a bubble and it is going to crash. Don't buy Bitcoin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
Hasn't the North Korea been doing this for a while now?
Uber allegedly hacked trade secrets, bribed foreign officials – Viral Docks
Then I hope the mods change the title to something like "Much of what you hear about Tulip Fever is exaggerated".
Wouldn't that give infinity or zero depending on whether the range of your values is larger or smaller than 2?
The article points to that oft parroted comparison:

"But before you even attempt to apply what happened in the Netherlands to more recent bubbles—the South Sea Bubble in 1700s England, the 19th-century railway bubble, the dot-com bubble and bitcoin are just a few comparisons Goldgar has seen—you have to understand Dutch society at the turn of the 17th century."
This is clearly targeting tech companies, who are the majority of companies that give this benefit.
That was a fun rabbit hole. I was amused to learn that bluetooth is named for a Danish king, and the bluetooth icon comes from runes.
Google Shutdowns Project Tango, Shifting Focus to ARCore – Viral Docks
This is really cool. I'm working on a mobile app [1] that lets you play social games with your friends over video chat. We built it in React Native and I was envisioning creating something like this to build our games.

We havn't gotten there but are exploring other services for the backend like Nakama [2] and Colyseus [3]. Right now we are just using Firebase for the multiplayer sync and building raw RN components with no library essentially and that's been working pretty good.

I'm gonna look into this library some more, looks promising :)

[1]: http://gameroom.co/
[2]: https://heroiclabs.com/
[3]: https://github.com/gamestdio/colyseus
Fun fact: St. Pierre and Miquelon was the site of the only use of the guillotine in North America.
Isn't the hamming distance simply L_1?
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=$140k+salary+...

For anyone else that was confused
I think the point is that sufficiently-advanced economies manifest bizarre micro-economies, but that these aren't necessarily earth-shattering. Like, Etherium Cats might be the 21st century Dutch tulips, but perhaps nations don't rise and fall on the values of "delicacies."
Nice catch that it's supported.

I encourage you to get a hold of the game. It's a nice puzzle gem that incorporates the humor of Douglas Adams.
One of the main parts is language, talking to the staff, actually typing, and communicating with them.
Sounds like a fun project. However, I doubt if word vectors buy you anything more than, say, old good Nilsimsa from 2001 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilsimsa_Hash).
Side note: py-nilsimsa should iterate over Unicode points instead of UTF-8 bytes. As it stands now, the similarity of any texts in the same language using a non-Latin script is ~80 rather than ~0.
Amazon in talks to buy NSA-linked security startup Sqrrl
Much like the dot com bubble. I never met anyone that invested in incubation funds or high profile dot coms. I was working in the middle of the craziness at the time so it wasn't due to small sample size.

With bitcoin I know quite a few bitcoin bores, so fun times ahead.
QX Quantum Computer Simulator
> ”Let's agree to disagree. Clearly you enjoy living in a nanny state and think that's the only way to feel safe.”

Regardless of how wrong you might think someone is, please don’t follow up “agree to disagree” with an insult. Even if you don’t think your parent deserves better, the HN community as a whole does.
Anyone brave enough to bet which ones are going to turn out big ?

Swift has a big potential in the sense that it's backed by Apple, and looks like Objective C reimagined for Apple's purposes.

Rust has Mozilla backing, and it's already popular around here, so I won't elaborate.

Extra points for naming languages which will succeed despite not being initially corporation-backed.
Going into Bitcoin instead?
I believe you are probably correct, and it is a tendency I really do not understand. People seem to be so profoundly invested emotionally in the specific success of bitcoin (as opposed to the broader technology of blockchain cryptocurrency) that they're out on the prowl to shout down anybody who threatens to pop their perceptive bubble. It's as if they're making a concerted effort to exclude any dissident opinion in the implicit belief that removing the dissenters will somehow ensure the success of the whole enterprise. I myself am hoping (as a macroeconomist and as somebody that preserves his objectivity by having no long or short position whatsoever in any cryptocurrency) that bitcoin will soon fail not because I have anything against those who designed it or who adopted it early but because as a fixed-quantity asset it is inherently noxious as a currency (which is why the world moved off the gold standard and bimetallism and representative currency progressively to begin with) and that it will be revealed to be what it is: an effective implementation of a new idea (blockchain) that solves a major computer science problem (the Byzantine Generals Problem) but was macroeconomically naive. Successors will be more pliant for the criteria of modern money.
Still a Sourceforge project AFAIK: https://sourceforge.net/p/vassalengine/svn/HEAD/tree/
The best approach of all would be to get people to volunteer and consume all the information you want before they even commit a crime. You could entice them with hard-to-resist benefits like cheaper groceries or a more active dating life.
No. Yours was.
What was the Triangle massacre? I can't find much about it.
Males are more likely to commit crimes, yes; but not necessarily as much as conviction statistics would suggest. There is systematic under-reporting and under-prosecution of crimes committed by females, which seems to be driven largely by a perception that women are "harmless".
You can opt out, in the third menue, down a flight of stairs, behind the door with "Living Tiger" sign on it.

You will be reopted in, on the next update. Sorry, we cant save your privacy and security settings.
I suspect that a lot of people aren’t buying bitcoin. I think the price is largely driven by one insolvent exchange counterfeiting dollars so they can stay afloat, and bots arbitraging in and out of that exchange to make quick profits. They’re up to printing a 100 million worthless tokens a week now to keep the price afloat and aren’t going to be able to keep the charade up for much longer.
"When finishing a level, the game would reboot the console and restart itself with a command-line argument(the name of the level to start) ... into the next level. Voila, the perfect(?) way to clear all memory between levels."

Well, that's basically how most websites work, lol
So you've watched Manhunt: Unabom I presume ;)
The reason why there are homeless in SF and other US cities is because of rent-seeking: a market failure which creates artificial scarcity in housing through zoning density restrictions, overuse of historic landmark status, and overregulation.

It is emotionally convenient (esp. for main-stream media) to blame President Trump for everything, but it is typically local city councils, usually Democratic and not Republican, that is responsible for the rent-seeking. The results are housing scarcity, the high costs of housing, renters paying much more they would in an efficient market, and landlords getting far more money than they would get in an efficient market.

Japan fixed this problem by having federal laws that overrode local laws that supported rent-seeking to disallow zoning density restrictions. The results: in 2014, 140,000 housing units built in Tokyo vs 20,000 in NYC and less than 90,000 in all of California.

The lesson: don't blame President Trump. Seek out and destroy rent-seeking market inefficiencies. Let the market do its thing and you'll see far more affordable housing. Japan has already demonstrated this fact.
The bug is closed and it was only open sourced after it was already installed in people's browsers.

Firefox is not fully open source.
Somewhat related: a friend and I created a service that sends your friends pictures of tulips when the crypto markets crash.

It started off as a joke over dinner, but now it's a fully functional product. More info here:
sendcryotopeopletulips.com
> This is yet another way Netflix differs from traditional media offerings: we don’t have one product but over a 100 million different products with one for each of our members with personalized recommendations and personalized visuals.

What? If I go over to a friend's house, I don't think of myself as using a different product. I don't want to use a different product. This advice seems to go against everything I've heard about brands and recognition.
construction companies often offer free drinks to discourage dehydration.
Can't overstate how great his stuff is.
Linear algebra is not offered in most US highschools.
That probably depends on how much space it needs at the end and whether or not you allow things like coffee shops (after all, we are talking full legalisation).

If they just need a counter, I'm guessing Vinmonopolet will do just fine even though their stores tend to be small with well-used space. If they allow for coffee shops/bars, it might be split much like alcohol: Weaker or set strength pre-rolled joints available at grocery stores much like cigarettes and beer and unrolled pot/hash at the liquor stores.
Same. I've deployed some dumb stuff in my time, and when it hits the fan, that sinking feeling is just the worst.