skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The previous and current nuclear strategy consists of a concept called TRIAD. Land, Sea and Air nuclear weapons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad

They all have their advantages and disadvantages and strategic uses. Taken together they are a complete package of nuclear strike capabilities. Nothing about it is obsolete as the author suggests.

Battleships also are hardly obsolete and also have advantages and disadvantages. For instance, when the Missouri class battleships were retired in the 90's, it was met with a great deal of opposition by the marines. No other weapon in the military arsenal could provide beach bombardment like the battleship; and certainly not for the low cost. The marines were promised a replacement - they are still waiting.
Here's a pretty good review of what these attacks looked like. Apparently this is part of how Google got tipped off... Spear phishing.

http://contagiodump.blogspot.com/2011/02/targeted-attacks-ag...
This is obviously a valid criticism.

But it would be far more valid to criticize any alternative valuation that fixed the problem you're addressing. For example, it would be conservative to value all of YC's startups in terms of their cash and receivables, plus the liquidation value of their furniture and servers. But then it would be trivial to say "Hey! AirBNB isn't an asset play. It's valued based on growth. The asset value is a worst-case scenario, but most of the other scenarios involve a lot of revenue growth and free cash flow."

Basically, is there any valuation method you have that would make you indifferent to a bet on the portfolio's valuation going up or down? (i.e. anything you think would produce a "fair" market price?)

Actually, more directly: how much of your net worth would you invest in shorting YC's portfolio at this inflated $4.7bn valuation?
The whole point of versioning, however, is to designate how big changes are between versions. There's a world of difference between 0.2.1 to 0.2.2 versus 0.2.1 and 0.3.0. That's what I'm mostly concerned about- patch versions should be a relatively low-stress change between versions. Changing that minor or major number to designate something large is coming is important.

I agree that it doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have to rework your local code, but particularly with projects like RubyGems (which are more end-user than code integration points), it's more important to know whether or not upgrading will break your entire process.
Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, etc. seem to be doing rather well, as far as higher education goes.

Not a good example. These schools increase their enrollment very slowly, while other schools have grown massively. As a percentage of total college grads, these schools are more exclusive than they used to be.

But the general idea is correct: the value of the YC brand is getting diluted, of course (imagine what it would mean if YC funded just one company per cycle!), but the total value of the brand keeps going up.
I'm glad I never upgraded to see these issues and that someone is taking care of them
The goal of a company is to make as much money as possible. If you want to get people to develop for your OS over another OS you have to give them an incentive to do so. Using a cross-platform API disincentives one to only develop for Windows as now the benefits to using platform specific technologies available only to Windows has been marginalized.

If they're going for lowest common denominator apis like HTML/JS, then you get subpar LCD applications that Apple can blow away via better support in native apps and Apple OS specific APIs for Objective-C/XCode. Windows devs will then feel like they can do better than HTML/JS and move over to Objective-C/XCode and Apple.

In fact I'm strongly considering moving to the Apple camp after being a long time staunch MS supporter for my entire career.
I don't understand the excuse-making ... if it is OK for 1 company to spam you, then surely it is OK for 1000 companies to spam you... Craigslist should be considering legal action at this point.
There's also 0AD, inspired by Age of Empires http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/
Internals of the LZW and LZ77 and GZIP file formats
Seal Teams Training under Water (PIC) | Current Affairs | I Think
So you are saying that when people see that Windows 8 is different to what they currently use, they won't buy it, and instead they'll purchase a whole new, even more different operating system (OSX Lion)? I'm not sure I agree with that train of thought.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beta.asp

"Beta" has two popular definitions. One is "market beta," i.e. the return you've gotten from the market you're in versus the particular trades you make in that market. I have only heard professional investors refer to this. The other kind is the one defined by investopedia. I only hear this mentioned by retail brokers.

If PG said he wanted high alpha, it wouldn't make sense to increase the probability of failure. All else being equal, higher alpha means a lower chance of failure (at any given volatility level, the higher-alpha portfolio has a lower chance of going to zero, since e.g. if beta is -99% and the lower-alpha portfolio generates -1% alpha, that takes it to zero. Right?
Move to Los Angeles, we got one.

http://twitter.com/grlldcheesetruk
What bitcoin needs is a killer app.

For instance on April 15 the US government shut down all of the online poker sites that were letting people play poker for money in the USA. If you look at the charges, they pretty much all have to do with wire fraud. (The operator of the site can also be charged, but analyses that I have seen suggest that that charge may be harder to make stick in the case of poker.) If someone is willing to not travel to the USA, and is willing to set up a poker site that does transactions in bitcoin, then all of those financial issues go away. (Or are subsumed in the inevitable ones that bitcoin will face, depending on your point of view.)

There are a lot of issues to getting a poker site to work well. (People will let you charge surprisingly high fees if in return you do a lot of policing to eliminate people running bots and who are engaged in various kinds of cheating.) However there are a lot of online poker players suffering serious withdrawal in the USA. The market is there. And the online poker market in the USA until a month and a half ago was well over an order of magnitude larger than the current bitcoin economy.

So there you have a realistic company which could be built, now, using bitcoin. You can generally count me as a bitcoin skeptic, but if someone can get traction with something like this, bitcoin may indeed have a nice future.
The Big Problems of Windows 8
Well, I said blackboard because we're talking about a potential math major and I'm pretty sure a majority of mathematicians prefer blackboard and chalk.
It's actually even more difficult than that. I participated in a UAV project in Idaho, and we had to secure airspace for the UAV, prove that if radio comms went down, the UAV would immediately go into a death spiral (to prevent it continuing on to a populated area), have a fully licensed pilot to guide it when not in automated mode, and who knows how many other requirements.

At this point, the FAA is _very_ serious about UAV safety, IMHO with good reason. Even with our extremely safe controls, we had one UAV crash due to launcher failure, and another get stuck up in the air a long distance away due to a sudden thunderstorm that rolled into our area.
Don't forget rake. The latest version of rake broke all versions of Rails (don't know if this got fixed yet).
Wow, somewhat offtopic but that page is very well done. I browse in Chrome with Javascript and Plug-Ins turned off (except for a few whitelisted sites), and I think this is the first site that has ever had a working video for me. Usually I have to open the page in another browser or something.

Lends a little credence to their claim of incorporating HTML 5 apps.
What does your small business owner do? I think that is the most important question.

Are they a commerce company? Adwords.
Are they a comedy club? Facebook.

I have experience with both ad platforms, and they are good for VERY different things.
Isn't that Chrome OS? Just enough OS to get your employees on to the websites that they use to do their job. (Only applicable for certain types of jobs, though)
I reckon this UI would lend nicely to being controlled by a Kinect
It's important as a communication tool. But you'd still be in a world of hurt because that logical distinction doesn't affect execution semantics. The problem is exacerbated once transitive dependencies enter the picture.

As a concrete example, the redis-rb gem went to 2.0 and completely broke API compatibility. They did everything right by the semantic versioning book. I used about 10 libraries built atop redis-rb, but never used redis-rb directly. About half the libs updated and required the use of redis-rb 2.0, the other half did not. Moreover, the gem dropped protocol support for the old redis-server, too, so it forced a redis-server upgrade.

This was an absolute mess to work out because updating 10 libs at once is basically insane. And the whole thing could have been avoided if modules were used to namespace, allowing activation of both sets of classes.

But, anyway, this isn't to say semantic versioning has no value. It's just not a solution to a library that keeps changing its public API either.
What is "meaningful innovation"? Is it dead?
I don't see the opportunity here.

It is very easy to transmit Bitcoins across the Internet.

It seems cumbersome to me, what with having to use client software, having to wait 10 minutes, etc. I guess Bitcoin is the easiest totally paranoid payment system, but that's not saying much.

There is no Bitcoin bank

Because the point of Bitcoin is that there is no bank. If you're going to trust a Bitcoin bank, you might as well trust Paypal instead.

So long as your business is solid, it will scale with the Bitcoin economy.

As opposed to a normal startup that can scale with the Internet economy, which is much larger.

Bitcoin will probably succeed in some form or another... If it succeeds, it will probably be huge.

Obviously this is a matter of opinion, but given its selling point of paranoia, I see Bitcoin getting to the size of e-gold, maybe a little bigger. (If you haven't read about e-gold, I think it's instructive.) And if it gets that big, the US government will try to shut down all USD-BTC exchanges.
I'm not saying this was a good thing for AirBNB to do, but is violating the sanctity of the craigslist commercial checkbox the worst AirBNB has done? Sure, that's not a respectable way to do business, but we're not exactly talking about Enron or Bernie Madoff here.
How does this work exactly? I'm on Firefox 3.6 and I can't type anything into the box. Same goes for IE8.

I don't know who you're targeting, but I certainly don't expect interview candidates to be running the latest and greatest.

Finally, the URL is way too complicated to give out over the phone... oops?
I disagree that fingerprints are a secure form of authentication. As the Chaos Computer Club has shown, it is relatively simple to create duplicates of fingerprints that can fool sensors.

In essence, relying on your fingerprint for authentication amounts to leaving a copy of your password on everything you touch.
Ask HN: San Fran "Competitive Salary" for Devs
How much should one ask for for a San Fran "startup" developer position? Midwest salaries are much lower (due to cost of living and small tech scene) and the avg developer makes around $60k, so my reference point is low. Moving to the valley and possibly getting a job for an exploding startup, what is a reasonable starting point w/ 3 years of solid experience?
I'd love to see slimgems also make it easier to install and manage gems programmatically (without the CLI). Using the internal rubygems classes yourself is... frustrating.
Is it possible for the government to establish a separate secure network? A North American network for government communication and infrastructure control use which was entirely separated from the internet would be very useful.
Absolutely right. There are some really really crufty bits of Windows in there, and they don't ever fix them, or at least do little things to update the interface to current standards.

The first thing I try with any new Windows release is to add a font using their interface (not just dragging it into the fonts folder). The "Add font" dialog box is STILL circa Windows NT/3.1 era.
My point is they used tactics that most people in the industry have been using for years. People shouldn't be so outraged or shocked by it. Rogue agents is just a silly explanation.
If people are swtching because the UI alienates them then I understand them sticking to Windows 7 but why would anybody switch to Lion given that its even more alienating than Windows 7.

If you're being forced to basically adopt a new product, then you start to consider all the possibilities.
I'd wager PG is laughing all the way to the bank.
Rake 0.9.1 is out, but I haven't had a chance to test it. I can't even find where on earth it's being maintained now.
Emacs Pinky
People love to create meta-drama about the ruby drama, but really, let's not sugar-coat it. These are significant and serious breaking changes to the standard package manager, in a point release. Something is wrong.
First disclaimer: Before doing any of these see the appropriate legal rules around this as at least in the US dealing with 'alternative' currencies are not exactly looked positively on.

First ideas that just push bitcoins around:

0) Another exchange, but nicer than what we have today. The top exchange is pulling in ~30K+ a week.

1) bitcoin arbitrage bot. Connect to the various exchanges and make trades.

2) future trading. Miners who are buying 8 gpu's would be willing to buy future sales of bitcoin at todays prices so they can 100% be sure to pay back their gpu costs.

Actual bitcoin item:

1) Sell physical 'bitcoins' read-only usb sticks tied to 1 bitcoin that can be returned at any time for 1 bitcoin or some other form of physical bitcoins that be traded around.

2) A debit card backed by bitcoins. Like a UK debit card that can be use in the states, but converts on the fly this would deduct from deposited bitcoins.

Software/hardware:

1) Turn-key software mining solutions. Plop in this linux live cd into your gpu computer and it will generate you bitcoins!

1b) Turn-key mining solutions. We mail you a tricked out box

2) Linode for mining.... Rent a box and generate your own coin and slightly less than the current rate.

Other:

1) Auction site that takes bitcoin
2) Really any service that would take local currency, but use bitcoin. The real kicker would be to find a service that is used all over the world where having one currency would be good. Games and app-stores (android porn based app store?) come to mind.
I was pretty sure they fixed that with Windows 7.
My biggest problem with recruiters comes to my SharePoint skills. I get a ton of calls, but they don't seem to understand, "No, I don't want a SharePoint job. I dislike it intensely."
RubyGems doesn't follow SemVer, it follows Ruby's versioning system. :(

(offtopic) Also, I too got bit by the redis-rb changes. They also broke apis from 2.1 => 2.2 as well. SemVer isn't hard, I don't understand why people can't follow it.
Wow you can create your own challenges? That's awesome. I've seen some sites like this before, but they usually have a predetermined amount of algorithms.

I always wanted to make my own challenges that would have to be automatically solved by potential candidates, and here it is! Glad someone else did this already.

Edit: I see codio.com does this as well
The only reason anyone posts anything on Craigslist is to get emails for commercial interests. That's what classified ads are for. Because everyone posting apartments for rent is by definition looking to rent their apartment, I think it's well targeted enough that AirBnB would get a pass on cold emailing people if they were doing it in an ethical and upstanding way. It sounds like they weren't, but if they were then the 'one bite at the apple' law would be the governing ethical principle. (Of course the design of Craigslist makes following this rule impossible, but that's a separate issue.)
Except the first letter of a post on HN is automatically capitalized for you.
Now updated to increase the total number of apps with malware to 34.
14-year-old creates iPhone app that is downloaded 7 million times [video]
Yes, this strikes me as an important step toward the beginning of the end of having to design for archaic browsers. The ball just needs a nudge and it'll get rolling, the momentum of it just-being-the-way-it-ought-to-be behind it.
don't list it. i stopped listing stuff i don't want to do.
Challenge for Cigarettes
Associated Touch reported of which newports cigarettes enthusiasts are fighting for this they were being allowed to help smoke around enclosed spots, explaining in which cigars are generally fundamentally not the same as cigarettes and tend not to cause these harm. Increasingly more U. VERTS. states connect with their demands. At on this occasion, 13 expresses, including Manhattan, have manufactured an different for stogie bars.
im looking to shake things up in africa, lets chat
Hm. I'd have to say "somewhat well versed". org-mode was actually the catalyst that made me switch to using emacs, and the learning curve is on the steeper side. The time to overcome the learning curve may not be worth it only for org-mode, but if you were interested in checking out emacs in its own right, org-mode is a darn good reason to! :-)
I don't think experience matters that much. If you're awesome, you should be paid $100K or more. If you're awesome, btw, I'd like to make you such a job offer.
Where a thousand units won't move the market?
Location - Preferably San Fran, Tampa, Miami, Austin, Boston but other areas OK

Need - we need one Android and one iPhone programmer

Company - we're C Monster Solutions, developers of the mobile app called Ship Mate. The app has roughly 50,000 uses per day and can be found in the App Store's Top 20 Travel Apps with Zagat, Disney, Tripit, etc. Our business is in the vacation travel industry (specifically cruises). At times, employment may require coding from a hammock on the back of a cruise ship with rum.

Android Programmer Needed - Ship Mate for the Android has about 20% of the features of Ship Mate for the iPhone. We need someone to bring it up to par asap. Once we have those in place, we'll need to tie the app into the back end we're currently building.

iPhone Programmer Needed - we have some smaller projects as well as some huge, lofty goals for a prospective iPhone programmer, depending on the skill level.

Compensation - negotiable - we can structure it in a traditional manner or we can get creative if that's your flavor.

Ideal Candidate - bored with their current employment and wanting to be involved in something that's exciting and entrepreneurial and in a sweet industry.

shipmateapp.com
New Zealand Tech Companies On The Rise
Shoe String Marketing: How To Play The Marketing Game with The Big Guys
Public companies have their financial records available. I wonder if it'd be possible to work out how much they pay in transaction, chargeback and credit card fees.

Startup: "Dear Amazon (or any Fortune 500 company,) you pay $xx in transaction fees annually, install our system to cater to the $xx-sized bitcoin economy, and save about $xx in fees."

Even Square: "2.75%. [But] if you enter credit card numbers manually, Square costs 3.5% + 15¢ per transaction." https://squareup.com/pricing

Can that be beaten with say an android client: https://github.com/bitcoin-labs/bitcoin-mobile-android and a printed qr code?

Philosophizing more, in the larger scheme of things, perhaps Bitcoin can remove the notion of socialized losses from society which has devastated the economy.
grant to Apache Software Foundation usually means a grant of any patents covering the code, so that is a reason to be happy they went Apache.
Some things OpenLayers Shouldn’t Do
The cost structure of computing product manufacturers is changing, there is no longer a dire need for manufacturers to sacrifice margin to Wintel. Windows/office lock-In is dissolving. Any network-effect of being a Windows user is dissipating. As software capability moves to the cloud, and open-standards are adopted there simply isn't room for a bloated/expensive OS.

Decades ago I would not have bet against Windows, but today you can sense a perfect storm of competition approaching their gates.

If in 5 years Windows is still a dominant piece of software I will be surprised. However, I won't be surprised if Microsoft is still a main technology player in 5 years.
Is Twitter A Waste Of Time?
اخبار مصر اليوم 2/6/2011 | اخبار الصحافة المصرية اليوم الخميس 2/6/2011
> Suppose the buyer of a bass boat dies while it is stored in a rented garage. No crime has been committed, but it will take a court order and a deputy with a bolt cutter for the repo man to get his hands on it

Sure, but again in that case isn't there a record of the person dying, the storage rental agreement, a will or lien or something saying "The boat is now property of X?".

What I'm getting at is in the case of theft, there's no evidence that the property wasn't just given to the other person. How do you make a complaint to the court without that? If I can do that, I'd like to try next time someone steals something, which unfortunately happens regularly in the town I live.

I'm not a lawyer, but as a musician I've had some experience with getting stolen property back, and my experiences always involved filing a police report for the stolen stuff, and then it's recovered as part of the investigation of that. I mean, for example when my friend's guitar turned up in a pawn shop, he went to the police...told him about how his guitar was stolen and they looked up the report, etc...then the police in charge of that went to the pawn shop and got his guitar back. When my friend's bike was stolen, he got it back when the police arrested the person who stole it (he was caught shortly after stealing another bike).
Think Python is a fantastic intro-programming text. After mucking about with bits of code for a couple of years, I picked up Downey's previous version of the book, and that's when I became a programmer.

I highly recommend it to the handful of HN readers who are in need of an intro text.
I don't understand the downvotes I'm getting. I really did enjoy the headline. It tells an awesome story in a tiny amount of space, and it makes me smile every time I read it.

It's even got a main character, an interesting plot, and a twist ending!
Before you make a decision for or against SlimGems, please be sure to check out my series on RubyGems, in particular note the following things that happened in the last week:

* RubyGems now promises to stay API compatible with whatever version of gems ships with the latest point release of Ruby 1.9. That means if RubyGems 1.8 ships with Ruby 1.9.3, the RubyGems 1.8 API will be preserved at a minimum until Ruby 1.9.4 comes out, which will be no sooner than 6-18 months from now.

* RubyGems has removed two deprecation warnings in 1.8.4 and 1.8.5 that account for virtually all deprecation warnings that were frustrating users.

* Bundler works out of the box on RubyGems 1.8, as does Rails 3. The next point release of Rails 2.3 will also support RubyGems 1.8. Evan Phoenix is a maintainer of both RubyGems and Bundler, and is taking the responsibility of cutting stable releases of RubyGems for the time being, which nearly guarantees there will be no further Bundler issues.

* Frequent point releases of RubyGems should hopefully be a thing of the past, because starting with RubyGems 1.9, there will be beta and release candidates running for a month long cycle before they get shipped as stable releases that get installed by gem update --system

You can find additional information here: http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/tag/rubygems
Singing code