skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You claim to have 'studied lots of history' and then claim that the UK 'bailed out the appeasement nations'!? That Russia 'bailed out' the pacifist nations (whatever they were in Europe at the time)

The UK is known as the appeasement nation. 'I hold in my hand a piece of paper' are the immortal words. When someone says 'appeasement', Chamberlain is the guy who comes to mind.

Russia didn't get a choice to bail anyone out - they were invaded, and through dint of favourable geography and stubborn nationalism, they prevailed.

Russia and the UK were both hastily militarising at the end of the '30s in response to rising German militarisation. And in counter to your earlier idea that in order to be more 'military' a society, you have to have more upper-class people in the military: you claim that Russia was a militant nation at that time, despite the Great Purge removing a solid chunk of the officer corps, including most of the top brass.

Keep in mind that even Russia's allies at the start of WWII considered them a backwater military, unsuited for playing with the 'big boys'.

Honestly, your comments read more as if you're just finding ways to support your predetermined conclusions than incorporating things you should have learned from studying lots of history.

Out of curiousity, who do you frame as an 'appeasement/pacifist' nation in the WWII timeframe? Is it just a jab at the early French surrender, you know, the French who weren't pacifist, but were heavily investing in military defense, just the wrong way? Or is it a jab at (I'll give you these for free) Denmark and Norway, neither of which could stand up to the German military machine, even if they were highly militarised? Surely you're not thinking of Poland, which had a strong-but-outdated military? Certainly not Czechoslovakia - that country had been left to the wolves by the countries you claim 'bailed them out'? Sweden and Switzerland were both pacificst... but didn't need bailing out. Perhaps you mean Benelux... but again, you're talking about small countries being steamrollered by a powerful military using never-before-seen tactics (paratroopers and armored spearheads) which was subsequently able to bring a world power to its knees in only a couple of months?

And despite all this, the US was not highly militarised in the period before WWII, when isolationist politics had led to a reduction in the size of the military. All three nations you report had small or underdeveloped armies (two did have very large navies, but it wasn't the navy that defeated Nazi Germany) in the lead-up to WWII.

When you say you've 'studied lots of history', are you actually delving into the actual events and reading about them, or are you just pulling from 'an interest in the populist zeitgeist mythology'?

Yes, there are no easy answers, but that doesn't mean you should skip the reading requirements...
<Ctrl-C> works the same as <Esc> and does the same job of jumping back into normal mode.
I agree in principle, but I think there's scope for leeway (at least I hope there is in this case!).

Case-by-case can be painful/time-consuming - I know, it's baked into the ethos of the company I work for - but it has its rewards.

People have more time for a company that has more time for them.
That's a good point. My salary might be considered extremely high for my years (1) in the role I am in now. However, my years as an engineer (15) definitely boost my salary to a 'senior' level. Your form doesn't take that into account.

Also, I'm waiting for the link to a nice chart of your results - when?
I don't have much to add to the thread except for:

set undofile

which will allow for persistent undo, i.e. undoing changes even after closing a file.
No, really, what time is it?
Nothing wrong with open speculation at taxpayer's expense? This reminded me of an excellent essay by Michael Crichton on the rampant increase of pseudo science in our society.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122603134258207975.html

I particularly appreciate his debunking of the Drake equation as "science".
Reminded me a little of this quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray:

Lord Henry stroked his pointed brown beard and tapped the toe of his patent-leather boot with a tasselled ebony cane. "How English you are Basil! That is the second time you have made that observation. If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman -- always a rash thing to do -- he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself. Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. However, I don't propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. Tell me more about Mr. Dorian Gray. How often do you see him?"
Interestingly, Japan has spent loads of time on manufacturing robots and personal service robots of dubious utility (see Asimo, Toyotashi and others), while the U.S. has dumped military money at robots and ended up with drones, bomb disposal robots, exoskeletons, etc. etc.

While I agree that the level of technology and packaging in Japanese robots in generally higher than U.S. counterparts, to take a rather cheap shot, it was U.S. drones and robots that were first on the scene.

Due to the pedigree of mobile robotics, the U.S. needed systems that worked now and not the future...resulting in a variety of heavy duty
operable robots capable of working in difficult environments.

Here's arguably the most advanced robot in the world handling perfectly normal stairs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASoCJTYgYB0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASoCJTYgYB0

Conclusion? Make the robot more like a crappy old American robot.
http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2011/08/hondas-asimo-to-a...

It's critically important PR for the Japanese robotics industry to respond to Fukushima with something of utility. Otherwise these decades of work and millions of Yen in R&D haven't amounted to much more than an interesting series of public demonstrations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wwB43D0FG8
i think the root problem here is out-of-band -- expertly written OO models are fine. the problem is that i've never encountered an expertly written OO system, which is probably because OO allows you to get lazy, where functional patterns require thought and understanding. i'm gradually starting to suspect that an expertly written OO system actually kinda looks like a functional system, except with practical compromises with respect to functional purity.
Good post. Reminds me of that quote by Oscar Wilde: "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
Follow the guidelines?

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not really sure, but it seems like an Erlang execution model (except for single-assigment, to which everything can be, and frequently is, automatically boiled down anyway)
What kind of cult is this?
They will need genomic, health research that target their populations anyway. That's enough to occupy them for a while. What I don't seen in these discussion is the fact that I feel soon, Asia will want things for itself and that's a huge amount of people to serve. They will be busy making goods for them and that should drive up labor costs and help make the US labor look cheaper for US companies.
It's true that fear, insecurity, etc can provide us with drive, but they are not the only or best sources of drive.
Or bind Caps Lock to <Esc>:

$ xmodmap -e "clear lock"; xmodmap -e "keycode 0x42 = Escape"
> Funding isn't a problem,

That's a pretty big assumption but lets say that's true. I don't doubt that they coudl raise some money, I'm just not sure that a WebOS company could raise enough to fund a complete hardware and software product through to finish.

The biggest reason I think this wouldn't happen is that I can't see HP wanting to assign any patents to this company as patents have significant value, as we've seen of late.

Who would support a company that doesn't own any sort of patent portfolio to defend itself?
Reminds me of a lecture given on Beginner's Mind that emphasizes the pitfalls of intellectualism:

'Can we look at our lives in such a way? Can we look at all of the aspects of our lives with this mind, just open to see what there is to see? I don't know about you, but I have a hard time doing that. I have a lot of habits of mind—I think most of us do. Children begin to lose that innocent quality after a while, and soon they want to be "the one who knows." We all want to be the one who knows. But if we decide we "know" something, we are not open to other possibilities anymore. And that's a shame. We lose something very vital in our life when it's more important to us to be "one who knows" than it is to be awake to what's happening. We get disappointed because we expect one thing, and it doesn't happen quite like that. Or we think something ought to be like this, and it turns out different. Instead of saying, "Oh, isn't that interesting," we say, "Yuck, not what I thought it would be." Pity. The very nature of beginner's mind is not knowing in a certain way, not being an expert. As Suzuki Roshi said in the prologue to Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few." As an expert, you've already got it figured out, so you don't need to pay attention to what's happening. Pity.'
Human-form robots : robots :: Space Shuttle: ICBMs. It's just a media-friendly way of demonstrating that you have the capability to produce something of use. Most robots look nothing like a human. The overwhelming majority are in industry.

Interesting you mentioned exoskeletons. The US is 5 to 10 years away of getting them on a battlefield. They're commercially available in Japan for medical use. (I'm not making a value judgement on that, except to the extent that "You could actually buy this" is superior to not being able to buy it.)
As an aside, I found it interesting reading through te comments here how little bio-industries are mentioned as a possible way out. I got my degree in biotechnology and I must admit, there are far fewer "jobs" it leads to than being handy with, say, Photoshop or Ruby.. I wonder I it's something which will change..
The video is definitely more engaging than text would have been. And I think it's a reasonable topic on HN. I knew some of it but certainly not all.
Be a Part of the Summer of Smart Hackathon in San Francisco
Ask HN: How would you market this site?
I made a site that allows you to find out if a crush is mutual without having to embarrass yourself. Something I perceived to be a useful service (which may or may not be true). How should I market this site? How can I validate that the site actually has value for people? (I created a test Facebook ad campaign - we'll see how that goes)
http://www.luckychat.biz
RideCombine
Hi everyone,

I am looking for customer validation/feedback on a startup idea that I have called RideCombine. I posted a topic a while back on a kiteboarding forum about sharing rides to kiteboarding spots and got an overwhelming response from people looking to share gas money, rent cars together, etc to get to kiting spots that aren't easily accessible by public transit.

So I came up with the idea for RideCombine - basically it would be a website that lets you find a ride or give a ride - the AirBnB of ridesharing. You would be able to enter where you are leaving from, where you are going, and the timing. Then you could browse ride matches by their radius from you, listed price, and reviews of the driver or passenger. Passengers would pay for the ride on the site, and the site would retain a certain % of the price (e.g. 10%).

There are a bunch of competitors trying to play in this space (like Zimride and Pickuppal), but most of them are focused on long distance, city to city travel - whereas this would drill down further to the 'neighborhood to neighborhood' level. It would also connect users' Linkedin profiles to establish trust/legitimacy among early users of the site. Initially I would test it with kiteboarders and skiers (people looking to travel to off the beaten track locations), but then I would expand it further.

I would love to hear any thoughts you might have and any advice. Would you use it? If so you can sign up for early access at http://www.ridecombine.com. I come from a business background so my next step after this is to find a technical person to work with.

Thanks!
"An exception is Apple [AAPL], which “has been able to preserve a first-rate design capability in the States so far by remaining deeply involved in the selection of components, in industrial design, in software development, and in the articulation of the concept of its products and how they address users’ needs.”"

This guy is very confused. Other US-based companies selling hardware operate in this same way. To boot, he never shows that anything listed here for Apple WASN'T done in the US for the Kindle. The same laundry list of components he describes for the Kindle goes for every Apple product, every Motorola product, every Xbox 360, etc. Yet the design and software is usually done in the same way Apple does.
It may make the problem less prominent, but it can not make the problem disappear.

It would look quite weird and most other programmers would think you were crazy for having done it, I think it's possible to write a C++ program that provably doesn't leak. You could define a custom operator new for every type which ensures that it gets allocated with some smart pointer or GC heap.

You could probably still use most of the C++ standard library that returns something needing manual de-allocation (except perhaps new and the old C malloc itself, which can be banned in various ways).
That's a different discussion. You're talking about how they should have dumped their inventory, the grandparent was talking about how they should have priced the product from the start.

My take is that they set the price so low as to clear inventory quickly. I'm sure the deals they had with retailers made a prolonged sell-off at incrementally decreasing prices undesirable.
I prefer not having to press Ctrl. I also map jj to Esc.
Pictures of JUSTIN BIEBER HOT SINGER
Corruption in India
If anybody is still looking to order, try ordering from the HP Small Business site using Opera as your browser. You might have to hit refresh at every step (since the website is unstable right now and errors out) but my order went through. In fact, I did it twice so I have 2 orders in the system. The confirmation page said that a customer service agent will be contacting me to confirm the order.
No, that's not what I was saying. I'm saying that the future of drugs should include positive side effects, benefits. Right now anything positive in a drug is considered recreational and avoided completely. Hence the perfect drug in this day and age eliminates disease but is otherwise completely neutral.
Ah. okay, got it. That was just to give an idea of how compile & test, etc. looked, didn't think it would have an impact on the site, my bad. Would put up a proper sample test. Thanks so much for your feedback.
That site sucks
What's the point of hiding referrers when Twitter uses hash-bang URLs, which break referrers already?
Inspirational read. Our own insecurities mean nothing in the end. Enabling others to erase theirs means so much more.
It's a measure of the ability of automation to replace human labor.

Let's say that, as a middle-class American, I consume enough to employ ten manual laborers full-time. If we have ten robots for every person, then everyone can live like me and no one has to do the physical labor.
I don't think you are 100% wrong, but I can't let this one slide:

How about cleaning up after old people when they mess themselves?

You know, some people actually appreciate what their parents have done and take pride (or at least sympathy) paying back that debt when the time comes.

I'm not sure that you grasp the working conditions in some parts of Asia (i live in Hong Kong). People would be willing to take the job, but they'd ask for benefits that wouldn't even compare. I don't think there are, as you say, plenty of people willing to take on these types of jobs in their present state. In fact, there are already sectors in the US that are having a hard time finding people because people have generally become too prideful. Just look at the skilled trade problem, which is way better work than what patio11 is talking about.
I can relate. I too am trying to abandon my self and my "brand" because it's spiritually suffocating. I don't want to care what - oh, someone just voted up my last comment!

It's on the todo list anyway.
Hi Mtogo, got it! We're in the process of launching real-world problems just like the reddit jobs page [http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/fjgit/reddit_is_doubli...] which is not only more than math problems, but more than algorithm challenges itself.

We're adding twitter auth / Fb connect as well. Is there a particular reason, why you don't like Google auth?
dfranke@ancalagon:~$ ls ~/.vimrc
ls: cannot access /home/dfranke/.vimrc: No such file or directory
I think part of it might have to do with the fact that a majority of people joined it for the novelty, realized what it was for, and didn't want to put the effort in to contribute anything meaningful. A good number of people in my circles seem to have just joined and said "Yay google+" and not posted a single interesting thing.
I am a husband. I am a father. I am a child of God.

There is a fine line between putting yourself in a box that you (or others) create for you and knowing who you are. The classifications that Paul lists in his post are of the first kind. The second kind, you can't really change.
This sounds more like a marketing stunt than a customer service story.
The Independent Case For Ron Paul
For what .... the only 'benefit' is you can downvote comments.
I don't have one, I have a .nexrc
Job Creation 101
I'll bite.

For the 1st question, you are drawing only from families with boys (excludes families with 2 girls). Only a 1/3rd of picked families would have two boys, so 2/3rds have the girl as the other child.

For the 2nd question, if you are asking about whether Joseph's sibling is a girl, I think more information is needed.

How is the child named Joseph picked? If we assume that a random boy (regardless of family) is chosen to be named Joseph, 1/2 of boys have male siblings and 1/2 have female siblings (the boy-boy situation is double-counted if choosing a random boy), so it would be 1/2.

If we named Joseph by choosing a family with at least one boy and naming one of their boys "Joseph" randomly, you get the same 2/3rds as the 1st problem.
Ctrl-[, too. But for some reason it's not as smooth for me. This idea of mapping semicolon came from a command layout rethink experiment I originally did on emacs. Always been meaning to reconstruct that more fully some day. Vim doesn't make it possible to define new first-class modes, so it will probably have to be a from-scratch editor (if I ever get around to it).
Edge Magazine tends to be keen on these at-first-glance-misleading pun headlines.
I'm hooked on Caps Lock being an additional Ctrl. That helps for emacs-style bindings too (like bash).
Mature? It's artificially stymied and partially stagnated by the external imposition of ignorantly granted government monopolies.
Why would it look quite weird, and why would anyone think you were crazy? It's standard practice and quite easy in C++. Smart pointers and RAII are your friends.
You must have a keener eye than me: where were these errors?
> Why is it that an honest-to-God investor in productive enterprises like Warren Buffet can call for higher taxes on the super-rich

Careful. Buffet advocates govt policy that puts money in his pocket. (He makes a lot of money off estate taxes, which his estate will never pay.)

> But the thing to watch is how same cable of rent-seeking corporations that suck-up a good portion of what you aptly-label bad government spending also whips-up the "anti-government" mob when threatened (or simply greedy).

Some actual examples would be nice. For example, GE is one of the more successful rent-seekers. Care to provide any examples of it whipping up an anti-govt mob?

Some argue that defense contractors and/or banks are very successful rent-seekers. How about some examples of them whipping up anti-govt mobs?

And no, the Koch brothers have not whipped-up mobs.

BTW - what crimes[1], other than disagreeing with you and having more money, have the Koch's committed? (Yes, I've googled them and read what I found. It's nothing but accusations by political opponents.)

[1] I don't consider violating campaign finance laws as a crime because I believe that the first amendment applies to political speech. And, they're not doing anything wrt politics that Soros didn't do before them so unless you regard him as a criminal....
Really? I just assumed that the way everyone talked about php, that my choice of language was the cause of the low salary.
> It is easily the worst legal job I've heard of in a first-world nation.

I've had worse, and I've had it pretty good.
An oversimplification

suffering = your self image vs perception of reality self

The argument goes that man is a prisoner of his self image. This self image is a mixture of his desires, wants, tastes, hopes, fears.... This can be seen as a self image that arises out of conditioning by the society and self. You are like a frog in the well and imagine the well to be the universe. You are limited and shaped by the well. How can one know of what the possibilities are unless they ascend from their own intellectual/egotistical/scoietal wells or the well of self image?

On the other hand, I have noticed that rejection of natural tendencies leads to suffering as well. No matter how hard we try the self will never be a blank tape. When you reject the self image your self image becomes "Im he/she who rejects self image imposed on me". So now you are straight back where you started with a brand new self image, only this time you are more observant of your flaws(tendencies of self). So there is still suffering here.

Let me oversimplify again
the frog = Neo in the matrix,
Ignorance is bliss = Cipher in the matrix
Glasgow may have a self-deprecating culture similar to that here in New Zealand. We've had to learn the hard way to be -- by our local standards -- incredibly pushy. Hopefully my business partner won't mind me quoting an article he wrote for Ars Technica [1]:

Then come the cultural differences (or perhaps they're just personality differences.) Whether it’s a New Zealand-wide trait or not, we tend to talk ourselves, and our products, down. To boast about how great you think you are seems arrogant and obnoxious, but when you’re trying to get people excited about your games, underselling it (and yourself) can backfire horribly.

I’ve seen the same confused facial expression from many overseas visitors when I modestly described my game as “alright." If the creator doesn’t think his game is totally super awesome, they seem to be thinking, then why on earth should I check it out? We've had to learn to talk our games up. Even if it makes you cringe inside, developers have to show others why they're spending their life making these things!

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/sell-in-america-live-i...
Don't karma points place my links higher?
I made a little convention of marking 's' and 'd' as the top and bottom of a range of lines. Then I define several handy utilities like:

"	Shift-Alt-Z #-comment range 's,'d
inoremap <S-A-z> <Esc>:'s,'ds/^/#/g<CR>:noh<CR>
inoremap ^[Z <Esc>:'s,'ds/^/#/g<CR>:noh<CR>
noremap <S-A-z> :'s,'ds/^/#/g<CR>:noh<CR>
noremap ^[Z :'s,'ds/^/#/g <CR>:noh<CR>
onoremap <S-A-z> <C-c>:'s,'ds/^/#/g<CR>:noh<CR>
onoremap ^[Z <C-c>:'s,'ds/^/#/g<CR>:noh<CR>
anyone has the talk or video download?

sometimes you just can't get enough from slides...