skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The military does not adhere to rigorous discipline because that is an effective way to accomplish general human endeavors. They do it because committing violence against other human beings is extremely difficult to get human beings to do. And when they do it, they are torn apart with post-traumatic stress disorders, depression, anxiety, and all sorts of negative effects. In order to be able to overcome the conscious brains prohibition on violence, soldiers must be trained so that their muscle memory can kill before their conscious mind can prevent them from doing it. And sticking to a simple routine with no allowance for individual diversity and the like makes it easiest to continue functioning in traumatic situations. These techniques don't work in any other human endeavor at all.

Star Trek takes place on ships and space stations, so let's consider the typical carrier battle group, which consists of at least one aircraft carrier, a deployed carrier air wing, and various support ships. In the course of its mission, the people of this carrier battle group will safely launch, control, pilot, land, and maintain high-performance jet aircraft from the deck of a ship; maintain and operate ship systems including computers, electricity, fresh and waste water, communications, and propulsion--which fairly often entails operating a nuclear reactor; feed, clothe, deliver mail to, provide comprehensive health care for, and maintain the fitness and morale of thousands of people at sea; and occasionally, sometimes, launch cruise missiles or carry out bombing attacks against land targets hundreds of miles away. Very few of the crew actually engage in anything close to combat, and those who do have distance and technological abstraction separating them from the effects of their actions. Tests have shown that naval aviators actually experience more stress landing on an aircraft carrier than in combat.

The purpose and applicability of naval tradition is not to desensitize people to killing; it's to coordinate many different people doing many different jobs to work together cohesively. And it is certainly directly applicable to a wide range of human endeavors. Of course, it doesn't entail "sticking to a simple routine with no allowance for individual diversity"--that kind of command-and-control structure was shown to be ineffective as recently as World War II, where the most effective militaries were the ones with the most disagreement, political infighting, and allowance for individual initiative.

You've got an internally consistent narrative, but it doesn't match reality, and while I could certainly get into a flamewar with you, it would make more sense for you to read some recent military history and modern military doctrine, get to know some veterans, and really educate yourself about this. There's kernels of truth in what you've written, but reality is always more nuanced than the simple, tendentious narrative you've constructed.
that would make too much sense
It is a business. I've got a business model that's ready to be implemented from the start so it does make sense to go with what I know.
He probably prefers Courier New. Browsers will fallback to the next in the list if it can't use the given font, he probably wants font-family: "Courier New", monospace;
With videos of the lectures.
They still think it's okay. It's the users' fault this is a problem. Read carefully:

- users brought to light an issue

- we now understand that the way we had designed... was wrong

- we are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable

Not sorry. Sorry if and only if you took it wrong.

- We want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.

You won't be in control, but we want you to "feel" you are.

Also:

- stored securely on our servers using industry standard firewall technology

Hmm. My firewall doesn't store data.

- We hope this update clears up any confusion

It's not us, it's you. Stop being confused.
Self-Sufficient & Manual Creation
Intresting thought. You could also use the number frequency of letters found in the rest of the journal passages that are not cryptic. That perhaps may be a better indicator for the symbols as it's the writers own tendencies.
After growing up in the sixties listening to this commercial for Radio Free Europe, which was meant as much to highlight the west's freedom of expression as it was to advertise RFE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LWSOKOqh2c

I am disappointed in the west's descent.
I agree to a point, but I'm not so sure about this.

> Benevolence will not come from a political system or from the top down.

Here, you seem to be implying that incentives and benevolence are exclusive. The political (and economic) system can be set up so that it rewards benevolence, or it can punish benevolence. To get more benevolence, I think we must also work on changing the rules to encourage it. (As well as voting with our wallets for benevolent companies/authors/etc.)
It already does that, and I don't discount that it could actually get worse instead of getting better. However, I am an optimist.

(Assuming you have a legitimate patent). Can you personally realistically sue Microsoft for patent infringement and win? No. Can a small company? No.

Why? Because the litigation would bankrupt anyone without Microsoft's coffers, and Microsoft can likely afford a better lawyer than you can anyway.

(I recall there was a movie a few years back about the guy who invented intermittent wipers and had them basically stolen by the Detroit auto-industry, it gives an interesting perspective on the matter. Basically, fighting the auto-companies ruined his life, ended his productivity as an inventor, and bankrupted him. By the time he was rewarded for his invention, he was old).

So, it is already a one way street in that regard, with the exception of patent trolls, who are large entities with lots of money which actually have the ability to sue the likes of Microsoft and Google and have a realistic chance of winning.

It should also not be discounted that patent trolls exist on the same time-scale as megacorps (potentially immortal), where as humans are extremely feeble and limited in their life-spans (last time I checked).

I'm getting very devil's advocatey here, as I really think software patents are a bad idea, in general. Copyright is already enough protection for software, patents just give entrenched entities a big bunker to hurl grenades from.
If the builders were using security as a major selling point when marketing the houses, it wouldn't be unreasonable.
The MIT 2005 Introduction to Algorithms course is available.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
Risking an entire team of special operatives, or spending a few hundred million in "bail", or going to war with Iran isn't much to ask?

I mean, I'm not saying necessarily leave the guy to rot, but we paid something like a million dollars a head for the hikers- and they weren't even employed by the DoD!
Windows really must be getting better.

I used to comment on how I had to reboot my computer the other month. Windows users would be like "yeah, that sucks, I hope you had everything backed up ... wait, did you say reload or reboot?"
"It is virtually impossible to deduce the original input from a hash if a strong hashing algorithm is used."

That's just not true when the "original input" is constrained enough, like, for example, a phone number.

It really makes no difference what algorithm you use - if it's fast enough for you to hash all the phone numbers in my contact list on my phone, I can have a set of rainbow tables for every possible phone number. There's just not enough entropy in 10 digit numbers for that to be an effective solution.
Nodemap – First product of my Nodejs playground
Anonymous? o.0 I've always seen them as being "script kiddies" but they are always able to do more than I thought. Who knew they could free one of them from a drug cartel?
Iraq's army was a cakewalk. The fighting was over in hours, and it took less than 2 weeks to mop up the military and police forces in the country. Iran might be a little harder, but their military won't pose a serious challenge to US forces. The fact that they are centralized means it probably won't degenerate into the morass we're facing with Iraq.
In case anyone is interested, the program to which I referred is "OFF System". Its home page is supposed to be http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/, but unfortunately it's down now and the project seems dead. The paper was on the site, but I can't find any link to it now.

EDIT: I think I found it at http://www.findthatfile.com/search-31270472-hPDF/download-do... . The name of the file is "CopyNumbCJ.pdf".
Software patents are already not valid in India. So no patent on implementing one-click buying. On the other hand, no protection for mpeg family of protocols either.
The robots in Asimov's stories don't much resemble computers as we know them--they're more like characters. His computers tend to be massive centralized things, as computers were in his day. Compare to the pocket computers in The Mote in God's Eye, which are eerily similar to today's smartphones. Niven apparently thought the idea was one of the most fantastical aspects of the book.
Coach Briefcase Op Art Black
Treason is punishable by death in the US too.
(This will be an unpopular opinion)

The community response to this is ridiculous. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other company that has responded to community criticism within a day or two with a policy reversal, a software change, and a deletion of offending data.

Guys and gals, stop picking on Path. They are AWESOME. They deleted your data and changed their app so it would never happen again. Try that with Facebook.

As a nerd, on some level I too lament that they didn't fix this with a cryptographic hash and a bloom filter, but come on, as businesses go, this is top notch.
Not sure why people are down-voting this, but how about offering a counterargument if you disagree instead of just clicking an arrow like a Rhesus Monkey?

Facts are stubborn things.
isn't it the same problem as monetizing any web site? NaCl is just embedded in the page, after all.
Yup! I love feedback!
You owe me an icecream
Nike Air Max 90 Hyperfuse Premium Shoes For Sale
So if I do something bad and then when someone finds out I reverse it, am I instantly forgiven and innocent? And anyone with half a brain can figure out that people would get pissed about this, which means they took the risk to do this secretly. They did not do this accidentally.
This may be a calculated risk. Hopefully they did more due diligence, but a quick search shows a Dec 2011 case [1] where an estate business was prosecuted for collecting info, but was fined a small amount (< £1,000). The extenuating circumstances were that they had already complied with the law by the time the case was heard by the court.
[1]: http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/latest_news/2011/estate-agent-pro...
This depends on the implementation. There are implementations that always unmamp freed memory to catch use after free errors (I think there is a BSD that uses this by default)
Phong lighting/shading inventor died young
Just wanted to ask...are you saying we should do something for him...or that we should not?

Because I stand by my post, risking ANY of those things is, to my mind, too much to ask of the Government. Especially when individual Americans KNOW the risks of going to Iran.
Yes, it is one of the only countries left in the Western world that still has capital punishment on the books. But death is not mandated as the minimum punishment: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
Do you have an estimate as to when the print edition will be published?
Erik Demaine has some of the nicest algorithms lectures, and I would compare him to Gilbert Strang teaching linear algebra.

EDIT: and closer to here, cpercival talking about cryptography and security, or tptacek when he's not grumpy and actually writes an informative, detailed comment.
Ask HN: I'm designing a board game. What resources would you recommend?
I have an idea and early prototype for a board game I'm working on, but this is the first time I work in this medium. The game is designed to have elements of strategy and luck, but also to be educational so that players learn over time and improve their skill.

I want to make sure I use good design practices so it is fun and playable with different numbers of people across different skill levels etc. What resources would you recommend to someone trying to learn and follow best practices in board game design?
I have to say, I find the concept of intent a little difficult to grasp when it comes to this stuff.

As an, albeit somewhat contrived, example:

Let's say I have a music player on my computer that, when fed the works of Shakespeare, it plays the Gaga's latest hit and when fed with the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it plays Jingle Bells.

My actual intent is to read Shakespeare and to listen to Jingle Bells, but that is going to be a pretty difficult case to prove in a real court of law. The assumption will be made that I had the player and copy of Shakespeare so that I could listen to Gaga.

Theoretically, unless Shakespeare has been interpreted by said program, I have not committed any crime. But precedence disagrees. Just having the right sequence of bits on your computer is enough to prove intent, whether your actual intention was to use it to violate copyright or not. That is where I get lost.
Fortunately for many people, the US is not the only country.

Millions of companies survive and thrive without doing business in the US. At this time in history, we are used to thinking of the US as being a favorable business climate; relatively free of corruption with clear rules and low cost of business formation. It is clear that unless current trends are reversed that this will not remain the case.

If the governments of the countries of Northern Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Morocco) were to form a regional economic initiative that created those conditions from the Suez Canal to the Atlantic Coast and created a clean Intellectual Property regime with automatic licensing they would attract a decent share of global technology investment if they could make it stick.

Automatic licensing in this context being the rule that no one can deny another the use of an invention, but proven priority and disclosure grants an automatic share of the license collected out of the VAT or other tax on finished goods.
They didn't allow it from day one. GPS apps, for example, couldn't navigate to contact addresses. VOIP couldn't use your numbers.

It was relaxed later. I don't recall exactly when, but I'm thinking around 3.2 or so. Before whatever update, you had to have silos of contacts. After it, all apps could use your address book.
Reminds me of the Confederacy from the prequels.

Oh yeah, those are forbidden.

Regardless, the Republic and Confederacy were both toys of the Emperor, so I guess Google and Firefox...

Ok I'll just leave.

Star Wars should be public domain though (the original 3 movies). Fuck infinite copyright.
FoxConn Introduces Summer Camp
I don't think that anyone who has seriously thought about / read up on the issue considers long copyrights to be of net benefit to society.

This indicates a deeper issue. However, which deeper issue it indicates is a subject of much controversy.
Scorpions may have lessons to teach aircraft designers
High heeled wedge sandal
There is a large world of mixed type of high heeled shoes, counting pumps, platform, flip-flops, wedge heels and high heels boots for women. There is too the rising tendency for men to now be dressed in heels, this indicate just how a lot of style today shoe style embrace. A couple of heels will improve the look of extended skirts on a shorter human being but obtain note of the tallness of the heel as the clothing or skirt must not come into sight too long or too small.
Something I have noticed about good managers:
They hire projects not people. They don't give a shit if you went to Harvard or not. They just want to know you can code. Build something awesome with their API over the course of two months and you will have a much better chance at getting the job than some random guy from a prestigious school. (Note: the prestigious school guy will build something cool too, so he still has a better chance than you. But, the point still stands. Build stuff, show it off, and you will be employed.)
You're totally right, but like any old, "high" art, Shakespeare's popularity partially includes people who actually get it and enjoy them and partially includes people who are self-congratulatory about how "cultured" they are. In Shakespeare's time, it was basically popular entertainment with lots of violence and dirty jokes, but there's centuries of difference in language and cultural context that provides a barrier to entry for contemporary audiences, and likewise there's an air of artistic prestige to it that's grown in the intervening centuries, so the way someone in Elizabethan England would watch a Shakespeare play for fun is extremely different from the cultural practice of Shakespeare productions today.

Music's another good example--from any objective standpoint, there's music being produced today that matches or exceeds the artistic merit of any of the old composers; likewise, tons of the old composers were popular musicians in their own day. But there's an awkward separation between high culture and popular culture, mostly based on how old something is.

It might come off as silly to actually portray this in science fiction, but it's interesting to wonder how people a century or two from now will approach the art we're producing today. Will there be cover bands performing Metallica's "Master of Puppets" who are treated with the same reverence as contemporary orchestras performing Wagner operas? Will people wear formal clothing and sit quietly, not realizing that it was meant to be music for sweaty teenagers to run around and body-slam each other to?
Sorry, but this post is based on a false notion that intellectual property is a beneficial crutch propping up only corporations and piggybacks on the idea that destruction of entrenched interests is always regenerative. That second point is likely so - but the battle isn't about finding new corporate captains to pay creative individuals - it's about how not to pay creative individuals.

I find the irony very sad that we are supposed to move from an industrial to a post-industrial knowledge-based economy - one presumably underpinned by the ability and right of individuals to monetize their knowledge . . . but people have had their free lunch and prefer it instead, perhaps as some salve.

I've said it 1000 times - if you don't like how corporations conduct their business, set something up yourself and if you have a better solution, you'll eventually find yourself a real market. The willy-nilly urge to destroy intellectual property rights for individuals and corporations alike is nothing more than a selfish catharsis - without any sense - neither common-sense, nor business-sense, nor a sense of history. When you take power away, it hurts the weakest first and the strongest last - all the while preserving the existing power structure. That's not a smart solution for anything.
The entire point is to make it difficult to become a lawyer so that wages stay high.
Occam's razor disagrees with you. It is perfectly plausible that some engineer with little interest in cryptography/privacy implemented the most obvious solution.

Also, yes, I typically forgive people when they reverse their actions and ask for forgiveness. It makes for good relationships.
If companies truly care more about what a person has built, why don't more of them say so? When I look at job advertisements most of them say they want x degree minimum with a high GPA, x years of professional experience minimum, and so on.
Another victim of the HN echo chamber. Here's the scoop: no one outside of these forums cares what framework you use. Your users won't, investors won't..it's about getting things done and bringing a product to market.

The fact that your framework choice is so agonizing shows that you might have become way more interested in gaining cred with the cool kids at HN than you have being an effective entrepreneur.
Announcing Wolfram Alpha Pro
Help What should I do in this situation?
Hi,

I'm stuck in a bit of a freelance-payment type of mess, and I was wondering how to tackle the situation.

So, I started (about 4 weeks ago) on a project which involved moving a fairly large website from a certain platform to a newer version of that platform for $1800.

I was on Skype with that guy constantly, and he seemed like a very nice person at the time, and was quite helpful and understanding.

So, in about two weeks, I was finished with the project, and we tested it together on a test server he had set up, and it seemed to be working perfectly.

So, I pushed in the code to Github, and he said he would be testing it "in a few days", and he would pay me $200 of the $1800 to keep trust, and I agreed.

After a day, he told me he had to talk with the investors in order to get the $200, and he delivered that money.

Then (this is where matters complicate), in about 3 days after that, he told me he had some urgent work he needed done for the website, and he needed my help urgently.

And, he payed me in advance for this project ($400), and I agreed to do it.

Now, I finished it in about a week, however, he, apparently has still not gotten around to finalizing the first project to release my payment (and said he would not for another month).

He has not responded to me over the last few skype messages or the last email I have sent him.

Now, this strikes me as two things:

1) He's not going to pay me.
2) He made some commits during the time that I made the Cake 2.0 port, and he's trying to merge them in there, which is taking time.

What's going on, and how would I tackle this situation?

The last time I asked him "when he would test", he said he didn't know why this kept coming up, and he had more important things to do at the moment, and it would take another month.
It has a small deterrent effect on first time offenders. However, the study also notes that it does not significantly affect repeat offenders, there's little difference in how "dangerous" (likely to reoffend) registered offenders are vs ones who forget/refuse to be registered, putting the list online had little effect. It also notes that in terms of community safety, it may be harmful because it encourages offenders to plea to non-sexual charges and the courts to allow them to due to the scarlet letter nature of the registry.

Systems like we are discussing can and do exist, I just don't see them as a necessary or particularly effective solution...especially when compared with the necessary trade-offs.

Look at AOL, which during it's hey-day was basically this sort of walled garden. You needed a phone #, name, address, payment combination to register. Many chatrooms were patrolled by moderators...there were even investigations and "stings" of trouble-makers. If you got TOS'd too many times you were permanently banned.

However trolling, illegal activity, pornography, etc thrived pretty well regardless. It was easy to evade the bans and there was a steady flow of new trolls.

I think the best solution in terms of respect for privacy and effectiveness is a combination of crowd-sourced moderation and intelligent detection of likely "trolling" and problem posters by software.
If you use your own w/o the location permission, you don't get EXIF data, just the bitmap.

FlickStacker supports batch select, as do many other up loaders or photo vaults.