skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That sounds like something people might say about socialism too.

We need only look at the Soviet Union to see how that turned out.
Of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchscan

But it will never be put into practice. Thanks in part to the huge amount of money thrown away on the Republican-biased Diebold and their insecure black boxes, people have been trained to repeat bumper-sticker criticisms like "hackers can break into anything" or "no electronic voting is completely secure." They form ridiculous conclusions like "the only fair vote is a paper vote."

To make matters worse, even if we someday do see a sea change and implement secure, verifiable electronic voting, it isn't going to make much of a difference unless we also adopt a better method of choosing a winner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
A new book has just been released on the history of Pakistan's nuclear program: Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb by Feroz Khan (http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=21098).

It bears pointing out that the decision to build a nuclear weapon is at least as much a political one as a technical one.
You're right, that is worrisome but I highly doubt it will reach that point. The US and Israel will never allow that to happen.

If only the Iranian government cared about its people and making the world a better and more innovative place...
Ask HN: Python 2.7 book, any recommendations?
Hi, I've just read trough the Python 2.7 tutorial and want to get in more deeply. I want a book targeted at beginners and it would be cool if it teaches programming too, not just the language.

Thanks.
> We now theorize that on Easter Island, the societies that presided there destroyed their island's environment to such an extent that they themselves were essentially destroyed.

Actually, it's a matter of dispute among anthropologists and archaeologists. A notable book came out on the topic last year that contradicts the "ecological collapse" view:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/201...
I think it's a joke based on the fact that was a relatively rich county in the 20th Century and had a poor record on self-defence. France was actually considered to have the strongest military in Europe in the late 1930's, but it didn't pan out for them (bad management).
I wrote an application a while ago which would connect to an SSL service and print out how many days until expiry. It works with network ranges and supports IPv6 also. It was designed with the aim of having something useful to stick in a cron job. So if you specify "--expires-within 14" for example, it will only output data for certificates that will expire within the next 14 days. For example:

mike@alfa:~$ sslScanner.pl contracts.comcast.com news.ycombinator.com smtp.gmail.com:465
IP Address Port Days Left Common Name
130.94.78.15 443 -172 contracts.comcast.com
174.132.225.106 443 934 news.ycombinator.com
173.194.78.108 465 222 smtp.gmail.com
173.194.78.109 465 222 smtp.gmail.com
2a00:1450:400c:c00:0:0:0:6d 465 222 smtp.gmail.com
mike@alfa:~$

You can get it from https://github.com/mikecardwell/sslScanner
I wonder how did they hire you when you had no prior experience? You're lucky. I also want such job.
Oohh, that's it - in the film The Right Stuff, there is a sequence of failed launches, with an announcer counting down to ten and pulling a funny face each time a rocket fails.

At the end of the montage a parachute comically deploys with a pop and the guy mugs it up considerably.

I always wondered why they doctored the footage to produce a comic effect. - but hey - it turns out it was genuine footage... From the four inch flight.

Stunning really
The pursuit of economic growth shapes government policy, and although government may not always station their guns and dogs outside your residence, their decisions impact pretty much everything you do in some way.
No doubt.

But looking at light through slits, firing atoms through foil, falling apples and making tiny sparks using dynamos made those all possible.

You'll also notice those were all government funded defense programs - and are hence a special case with the final one not being effective.
Lol. :)

Jokes aside, there are dichotomic interpretations of "studying geometry."

There is studying geometry for its own sake, otiose learning if you will, just like the ancient Greeks did.

And then there's studying it to pass an exam, the extreme version of it as portrayed and as you are no doubt first-hand familiar with in Japan, is 100% guaranteed to cripple whatever inner inclination one may have had towards geometry. Which is sad, because there's something wondrous about the nature of space, and whoever sees a glimmer whereof shouldn't have that inner eye pulverized.

It takes the likes of an Einstein adamantine to recover: "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."

In an age of abundance why wouldn't we rather have a million $REDACTED of $ETHNICITY origin bloom?
It depends which TV station you're watching. The BBC and Sky in the UK already have circuit trackers from the car's GPS, ability to choose from 10 or so different camera feeds (onboards, pits, etc.) and full feeds of all pit radio released by the FIA.

I wouldn't count on the established players leaving this to new disrupters, especially where there is adequate competition, i.e. in the UK.
Ipad3- 2sec per 1 sec
This already exists. If your boss is making more money, he will (theoretically) pay more corporate tax, and that goes to welfare for the unemployed.
If he has a job, just go to his job and pretend that he called you to give you back your ipad infront of every one."hi I just come to pick up my ipad, thank you for calling me"

I don't think he can negate it if you bring the bill and make use of the Tracking software. If he doen't comply then just tell his boss.
Looking at their long history I would say that the French have been as good as anyone, and better than most, at defending themselves.

Of course, they lost to Nazi Germany, but unlike us Brits they didn't have a Channel to hide behind - after all it mainly took the huge sacrifice of the Soviets to eventually defeat the Nazis.
Nukes? The French have a lot of them.
This is impossible because it will stop the investment loop: investment cannot exist in the economy which is contracting and is supposed to contract indefinitely, because average return on investment will be negative. This is why such conditions will never happen.

As for environmental concerns, huge successes by the Germans seems to prove that transition to renewable energy is possible, even with current or slightly better level of technology. This may take some 30-40 years for most developed countries, and about as much after that for the rest, but we seem to have that time given successes in development of shale gas, coalbed methane, and most recently, shale oil.

Germans are good example because if they are outliers given the conditions they have, they are outliers in negative sense: they don't have much of either renewable or non-renewable resources, they are rich and need to consume a lot of the both, and cannot afford having energy too pricey because their economy is based on industrial exports so they need to stay competitive. If they can do it, everyone can do it. Others mostly don't care so far, soon they will have to.
Automatic Grading of Code Submissions Isn't Perfect Either
> such as over-reliance on fixed fortifications.

Which "fixed fortifications" would those be? If you're talking about the Allies' final attack on Germany of late 1944-early 1945, then I'd say by that time Hitler had already lost the war. The two most crucial moments I can think about are the battle of Stalingrad which did not allow the German Army to lay its hands on the Caucasus and its oil resources, and then the battle of Kursk, which had nothing to do with WW1 tactics.

And to copy-paste Clausewitz's name in here (the article makes a passing reference to him when it talks about "Franks fundamentally misunderstood generalship, which at its topmost levels must link military action to political results"), I'd say Hitler's final chances were political in nature, more exactly I'm talking about his tries to intervene between Churchill and the US on the one hand and the USSR on the other, trying to convince the first bunch about the perils of letting the Soviets be on the victorious side. The Tehran Conference put an end to that. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_Conference)
I don't think the difference is as qualitative as you might think.

"using the power of the web to reduce prices" -- If any company had 1/10 that influence here that Wal Mart has had, they would be doing well.
Wait what? The project you link to attempts to send a small robotic spacecraft to the moon, not a person.

The project seems quite interesting, though it has a bit too much of a nationalistic angle for my taste (Their headline is "Sending our flag to the moon"... is that really the most important thing people see in the ability to send a probe to the moon?)
That was pretty much why Britain was so keen to develop nuclear weapons - they are actually relatively inexpensive compared to the equivalent number of armoured divisions.
> In both countries, the main-stream left has long since realized that there is no alternative to reducing the deficit and bringing back growth.

Although behind the scenes this may be the case, the rhetoric remains.

In the UK we still have Labour bleating about the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition making spending cuts "too hard, too fast" when they are barely making a dent in the annual deficit.
婚活イベント栃木口コミランキング
I've never noticed. I guess I should press the red button?
Having nukes works well as a deterrent to being nuked, but using them (even defensively) could only ever be as a last resort.

It's not hard to see how a country with nukes defending itself from a country with nukes AND a conventional military could be forced to make a whole lot of concessions.
look harder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement
Looks like they might be using this timeline...

http://almende.github.com/chap-links-library/timeline.html
I wouldn't dismiss the final one so off-handedly. The Soviet economy may have been pretty unimpressive by the 70-80s, but earlier on it was making fast progress, not completely unlike the progress of the Chinese economy of the past 20 years.

Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.
I can't go along with "You win this round," as this isn't really a debate for points but rather a coöperative game where we're all seeking some sort of optimum experience for HN.

In that spirit, I will say, "Nice move!"
It does look similar.
> What you're really proposing is a tax on increasing efficiency, by a long shot the best and most easily understood kind of growth. Interestingly, with reference to the movement's goals, little frees up more resources for family, art and music than getting the same work done in half the time.

I think the real gripe with this is that, although automated production may be more efficient, it fosters greater wealth inequality.

As tools become more powerful, and come to replace rather than assist humans, those with existing wealth become yet more powerful. The evil factory owner can now produce their widgets five times faster, at half the cost, and they don't have an unruly workforce to rely on.
مباراة ريال مدريد وريال مايوركا بث مباشر 28/10/2012
I recommend Breaking Bad, there's some startup lessons there.

On S03E10, entire episode is Walter and Jesse trying to catching a fly. One small fly inside huge lab. Jesse wants to give up and continue cooking, but for Walter, this is absolutely critical issue. I thought this episode was quite boring, but then Walter explains himself and it finally hit me: It was like assertion code failure, something that should not ever happen under your assumptions. You don't just ignore assertion failures. Code could still work and you can still ship it, but that code is not what you think it is anymore. This small fly in lab is going to ruin your entire product. Drop everything and catch that fly first.

Another interesting thing is, you can understand what it means to "know your metrics". They have pureness metric to scientifically measure their product quality. Pureness is what makes their product best in the market and they never compromise on it. It is interesting that how they keep an eye on it and why it matters.
Back in the days when our manned launch vehicles were re-purposed ICBMs (Restone, Atlas, Titan).
Respectable CAs will email you a warning about a month before it expires.

Disreputable CAs will email you 3-4 months before it expires, emphasising that you need to "ACT NOW" (GoDaddy is guilty of this).
Well, a bank account is almost required for life in most Western countries now (unless you can receive all your income/benefits and pay all your bills in cash - not even an option for my salary or utility bills), and banks are only willing to give every Joe Public a current account on the assumption that they'll be able to make a profit on most of the money on the stock market before Joe wants it back, and the assumption that you can almost always make that profit is based on growth being an almost inevitable fixture of the universe...

...so yes, I think growth has forced its way into our day-to-day lives even if you are successfully ignoring any suggestions to buy the latest consumer gadgetry.
We just need this combined with a game, our own car/tag, micro-machine-esque controls and we're sorted :)
Author of blog piece seems to be very confused about how staged rockets work, and appears to think that a two stage rocket is somehow inherently more efficient than a three stage rocket! Which is just plain wrong.

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

What he might be getting is that, if Iran had stuck a third stage on top of a pre-existing two stage IRBM in order to put a tiny wee satellite into orbit, then it would imply that the rocket in question was borderline-capable and not really amenable to being upgraded further. But the Safir-2 is apparently a 2-stage rocket with the ability to reach orbital velocity, implying that by adding boosters or a third stage to it a much larger payload could be launched.
That really doesn't sound like the Soviet Union at all - which was obsessed with growth through centrally controlled 5 year plans.

One of the many reasons the Soviets failed is that they channeled a huge proportion of their national wealth into their military (fearing as they did an attach from NATO) and away from improving the living standards of their citizens.
True. I haven't played with Go, but the reason I like Scala (slow compiler and somewhat lacklustre tooling aside) is precisely because I have a lot of time and brainpower invested in JVM-based stuff. If and when I need a wicked fast systems programming language, I think Go might be on the agenda.
Of course it doesn't talk about how to solve the social aspects of problems. That would require criticizing the current sociopolitical status quo.
.NET (Monogame) running on Raspberry Pi
Howdy sir! Yeah, making it through yesterday took a really thick skin. The Internet - gotta take the bad with the good.
Ah good point, it will still make Israel the 3rd country to land on the moon though, even if it's not a human.
Jorge - thanks! Based on the sounds in the video, you're using a Touch Cover. I wonder if it's related to me using the Type Cover instead?
People love the strong emotions of the Apple vs Android debate. The emotions are the POINT of the socializing. The strong feelings are the PAY OFF, and if you don't let people have their feelings, you'll just have a tumbleweed town.

Don't people enjoy expressing strong emotions about online freedom, startup life, the ethics of various companies, and many other subjects on the front page as well? Could we not have strong emotions about tablets and phones without calling each other names?
> Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.

That's why they were making fast progress - any idiot who doesn't work will increase performance 100% by getting a job.

Just because you take hundreds of millions of people that aren't working and starving to death to working and still starving to death - doesn't mean you did anything particularly useful.

It just means you really fucked things up. China's real growth began with capitalist reform. So did Russias.
I'm amazed there is no young 'Michael Dell' out there selling things like this out of his trunk at tech shows.
> - There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do in Go that you can not do via libraries in Java.

Anonymous functions, type inference
Many unmanned launch vehicles still are descended from re-purposes ICBMs. Atlas-V and Titan-IV are probably best viewed as "trademark compatible" -- they're so far evolved from the originals that they bear little resemblance to them -- but others such as the Soyuz launcher (descended from the SS-7 ICBM), Dnepr (formerly SS-18 "Satan" ICBM) and Shtil' (formerly R-29RM SLBM -- still launched from nuclear submarines!) all carry civilian payloads into orbit to this day.

The Russians seem to be particularly hot on recycling Soviet era ICBMs for commercial purposes. And Soyuz is indeed a man-rated launcher and currently the only crew carrying vehicle ferrying personnel to the ISS! Atop a core stage and boosters descended directly from the USSR's first monster ICBM of the 1950s.
The Soviets had a similar disaster in 1960 that killed a lot of people (probably well over a hundred) including the head of their Strategic Rocket Forces:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe
> Sure you can. Spawn a child process ...

This is exactly what I was talking about. You can't even admit facts like that Java has dynamic loading and a security model and that Google Go does not. You're simply delusional in this respect.
'The Hacker News' Celebrating 2nd Birthday
Get off your high horse - the market dictates usefulness within the bounds of negative externality regulation and human rights.

The internet has produced more value over the preceding 10 years than essentially any other industry. "Purists" irritate me for the very reason that they don't work in the real messy world.

People like McDonalds. People like watching TV. Just because you don't like it doesn't matter.

Crass consumerism is the saving grace of the United States - it's what allows companies to thrive and grow and build wealth.

"Important" things are overrated by those who don't do.

Google's Ads and YouTube's cat videos have done more for the web than Wikipedia.
10 X=1
20 D=1
30 FOR Y=1 TO X
40 PRINT " ";
50 NEXT Y
60 PRINT "HELLO"
70 IF X=0 OR X=34 THEN D=D*-1
80 X=X+D
90 GOTO 30
Dive Into Python is a good start, you can find it at:

- http://www.diveintopython.net/toc/index.html

Of course you can also just buy the book.

If you're a bit more familiar to programming, try Zed Shaw's Learn Python The Hard Way:

- http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

Though 'The Hard Way' is obviously not for the novice completely new to programming it does teach a bit more than just the language, things that make you into a better coder.

You'll also find a comprehensive list at:

- http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers
I think all F1 live streams are same as they are prepared by the on-site directors.
Streetview + gamepad = real life GP simulator?
And the funny thing is how much he changes to the later seasons when a dirty place is "perfect".
Finland has just started building its own overcapacity.

Apparently the usual pattern is: garbage dump is full -> incinerator easiest way out -> must build a huge one to make the economics look reasonable.
Goggles - thanks for taking the time to explain your thoughts, and I can totally see how it would see like I'm a raving fanboi intent on destroying Microsoft. Most of the time when I read gadget reviews, that's how they sound, and it frustrates me too.

You asked, "Why would you return a device after 24 hours of owning it?" Because I was frustrated with it. I know this is going to sound corny, but I want my gadgets to surprise and delight me. This one didn't.

You said, "The camera angle is off only if you put it way too close to yourself or are extraordinarily tall". I'm 6'3", which I wouldn't call extraordinarily tall - for example, my business partner Jeremiah is taller than me. I put the Surface as far back as I could and still comfortably touch the keyboard and display.

You said, "Your complaint about the word slowness WAS somewhat valid (has been fixed and updated now)". Thanks, I appreciate the honesty. Unfortunately, the way to get the update is to go through a search, pick a non-default option, and refresh it. That's something we can't expect end users to do. I did the updates through the Metro Windows UI - repeatedly - and it wouldn't have even occurred to me that there were three different ways to get updates. Two I can kinda sorta get (OS and apps) but three, no.

You asked, "First off - how often do you reboot a tablet?" I travel a lot (5 flights in the next 2 weeks) so I have to do it pretty frequently.

You said, "It is clear that either you did a factory restore of the device. (WinRT apps are very slow to open the first time." No, that happened every time I tried to open Mail, but I bet this isn't happening to you because maybe mail only has to be configured once. Every time I opened it, it still wasn't configured. It probably has to go through some kind of long start to set things up, which it didn't do since it couldn't figure out where my email was.

You said, "The most embarrassing part FOR YOU must have been" - no, actually, the most embarrassing part has been having to spell things out for the fanboys. My brento@brentozar.com account is indeed a Live account. It's how I access all Microsoft services - MSDN, TechNet, Outlook.com, Messenger, etc.
Note the "Suborbital" in their name - they aren't trying to go into orbit, but send someone straight up and pretty much straight down again - so similar to Virgin Galactic.
You may also need the Sky dedicated F1 channel (Which you get with the sports package).
They will need to be quick, China announced they are going to land a probe on the moon next year:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jp07qg62e...
Nice, but is there a way to view the big picture (with all the bricks for 2000-2011) in a size where you can actually which books are on it?
The best part of the article is the irony of Facebook's statement: "Facebook is vigilant about protecting our users from those who would try to expose any form of user information. In this case, it appears someone has attempted to scrape information from our site,".

I read this as "We don't want anyone to potentially profit from the data we're profiting from ... let's squash the competition!"
9gag was doing a billion pageviews/month before they joined YC.

You should think of joining an incubator in terms of: if we joined this incubator would they increase the value of our business by substantially more than 6% that they'll take (or whatever stake). And if so you should consider joining one.

Vancouver does have significant conferences, for example the GROW conference in August had a pretty high-profile list of speakers and attendees. There have been at least a dozen or so companies in Vancouver who've raised VC rounds this year.

Almost all successful startups and tech companies will have connections to VCs (regardless if they were venture funded or not), so one good route would be to network with the founders of the successful startups in Vancouver and get introductions to VCs from them.
I wouldn't go near it yet, but it's very promising.

There are too many big bugs listed here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-nexus7/+bugs

RSS to subscribe to that is http://feeds.launchpad.net/ubuntu-nexus7/latest-bugs.atom