skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the major problems that occupying forces have had in Afghanistan is that modern military strategy fundamentally isn't designed for taking and holding ground. Outside of the bases in Afghanistan, there is not one square meter of ground that is "owned" by the coalition.

The approach seems to be that transient patrols, haphazardly driving around and visiting villages in giant bomb proof robot trucks, is a substitute for thousands of years old strategies of taking, holding and controlling territory. There's no front lines in the kind of conflict because that's how the new strategy has defined the conflict. The last time a modern military in a major conflict actually took and held ground was probably the Korean War. After that it was endless insurgencies or hit-win-withdraw like in the first Iraq war.

This is opposed to the Taliban which can comfortably move into a village and live there 24/7, becoming "the villagers" as much as anybody who was there before. A robot truck driving up and asking "where are the non-villagers, where are the bad guys?" will get no answer because everybody is a villager, and the guy making bombs in the afternoons is a village elder the rest of the day. There are no bad guys.

Afghanistan isn't a failed state, it's an anti-state, its borders are a reflection of the borders of its neighbors -- extending only so far as they cared to and stopping when the terrain became too difficult to bother. Within this zone are several city-states and otherwise large stretches of lawless territory connected, but not held together, by a network of smugglers and local warlords. The coalition controls none of it save for perhaps the city-state of Kabul.

Of course the ability to take and control territory means lots and lots of manpower, which runs contrary to modern military thinking. This forces military leadership into a state of sustained denial that this or that alternate approach will be the one that opens up the opportunity for Afghanistan to develop into a real state. They're flummoxed that it isn't happening.

But there's sadly only one proven way to accomplish this goal, take, hold and control territory. Put in place a carefully controlled puppet dictator or similar for a couple decades, one who will build up strong institutions of government and industry. Then once these things are in place, kill him or his dynastic line off (or have a quiet democratic revolution) and have the people assume ownership of these institutions and industries. Sure if the timing of these things is off it fucks up and we end up with Iran. But if the timing is good we end up with South Korea.
Strangely compelling, even.

Something that almost seems as though it wouldn't be completely out of place in a production codebase (though you'd probably want to ensure that they were elided or at least renamed before shipping :P).
Do you not have favorite songs and movies? Also your post may sound like a rebuttal but it only reinforces my point. I want to own my software not have it hold me hostage later, but it may be more profitable to you to rent it to me with the added bonus that you can claim anything digital deserves no copyright.
...what a bodybuilder eats when he's bulking up. But bodybuilders eat 4 times this amount of protein (55 g).

A midget bodybuilder. The rule of thumb is 0.75-1g protein/lb bodyweight, 0.5g for maintenance.
How Email On Acid stole our work
I'm okay with most of the changes, but the treatment of of newlines would be pretty much a dealbreaker for anything beyond a comment or message.
The relation between Islam and society is actually a lot more complicated than that. Go to Pakistan and ask 10 Imams about honor killings[1]. Eight will hem and haw, one will say that it's against the Koran and needs to be stopped, and one will say it might be against the Koran but it's so important it needs to continue.

I do find the rules Muhammad laid down to have a lot of problems, but they were a big improvement over the existing traditions in the area and would be a big improvement over what people actually do in Afghanistan.
Map of Pangea supercontinent with current nation borders
Don Pako Sex Shop: 10 fantasías sexuales que todo hombre quiere cumplir
None of them. Their rep is that they're great for hiring low to mid level offshore devs for $10-20/h. If this describes you then great, get on all of them. But if you're charging $100+/h you do yourself a disservice by associating with them and are unlikely to find clients looking to pay that much. It may be an unfair stereotype but it's mostly true.

Network instead. Get yourself out there. Go to local events where you can meet potential clients. Get active on Twitter and interact with people in the industry. Put open source stuff up on github. Increase your exposure so when people come looking they find you.
> Graffiti is reported to cost Deutsche Bahn about 7.6m euros (£6.5m; $10m) a year.

or leave it alone and it will cost you close to zero and still look better. wholecars ara PITA for travellers so windows need to get cleaned, but I thought that vandal squad hysteria after the 90s graffiti boom has ended. I guess somebody needs to pump up their budget requirements.
Except for music, I personally prefer to rent media. There are very few movies I will watch more than once. Of course, music is a huge exception.
Actually it's very useful, it's just receiving 6 daily mail is a little bit too much.

The special notification on the other hand is very useful, it should be sent more.
Of course it is possible that they find holes, but I consider the odds that they will find holes like that early enough that countermeasures won't already be deployed in a situation where people have come to expect destructive actions from their software on a regular basis to be quite unlikely.

Also OS level virtualization is not the only protection worth using in a scenario like this. Sandboxing at the syscall level (restricting allowed syscalls and arguments substantially) is also highly useful, and if we start seeing a threat from apps that people are expected to intentionally install knowing that they pose a risk, we will see a lot more aggressive security work.
Both I and my wife work and while I may not have a high-flying career with million-dollar IPO's and jet-setting across the world with VC's (and write humblebrag blogs on how to start half a dozen startups and 'still' get to gasp have dinner with my children once a week), I can objectively say that I'm (compared to how it's described in the article - I have nothing to go on but that) much more involved with my children than this guy. Look, everybody is entitled to live his life the way he sees fit, but don't go around claiming you've found such a great work/life balance (and that you're such a great parent) and then have it turn out to be like described. On weekends, I go to the zoo with my children, I don't drag them across the world under the pretense of 'they get to experience so much' to leave them with complete stranger babysitters in hotels across the world, and pretend that waiting times in airport terminals with them is quality parenting time.
Whatever happened to "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants." ?

One of the things that worries me is the focus on cost as opposed to nutrition. As it stands, we have relatively poor ways of measuring the nutritive value of any particular meal vice measuring the cost. We've trained entire generations to shop for food on taste and cost rather than nutrition.

If you've ever watched those documentaries on morbidly obese people, you learn that even though these people are consuming tens of thousands of cheap calories per day, they're all malnourished.

My wife started a ketogenic diet and I've largely been following her meal plan. Since the only way to guarantee that we have nothing added to our food by an sneaky enterprising chef or food processor, we cook mostly at home.

As a result, we've saved something like $2K per month on restaurant bills. Keep in mind that we're not making any special effort to save money.

As a bonus, my wife has greatly reduced her bf% and has seen several markers of absolute health improve significantly. I've reduced bf% and improved my lifting program along with my sleep and mental clarity.
Well, the online display advertising market is getting harder for everybody, so Google is not having that easier either.

As RTB market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding) is growing in significance, then it is starting to make sense to diversify the networks that advertisers would use, so just using Adwords is not enough anymore, and in that sense it is time to start checking out OpenX, Appnexus, etc.
No there are few few pieces that would deserve to stay on. Most isn't more than ugly names (at least not tags). But what I hate most is when they cover the windows, seriously?
I hope you're referring to the "rap scene"..

Yeah that documentary was slightly exploitative: "oh look, let's send a cute young girl into the ghetto and film a bunch of knuckleheads trying to get in her pants!" Then again, nothing too different from the usual late night TV "documentaries" about the police/the ghettos/the jet-set..
tl;dr The ground truth is NOTHING like what you see in the MSM.
I fought in Iraq as a paratrooper mostly in Baghdad from '04 to '05. While there I was really surprised by the reporting I saw. We had CNN in our hooch (paid Hadji to hook it up). We had satellite Internet (again paid Hadji for it) and I read the NY Times. The reporting there could not have been further from reality. We used to scratch our heads at the reporting each morning on the day prior in Baghdad. It was like they were reporting from a different planet. You should not be surprised that the ground truth is wildly different from what is being reported. My first briefing when I got on the ground in 2004 was that we were past a simple insurgency and now in a small scale civil war that we were trying to stop from becoming a full scale humanitarian crisis. I recall a lot of reporting and very brainy discussion about the insurgency at that time but I don't recall the civil war entering that discussion until late 2005 when I got back to the states. Keep in mind that in Afghanistan most of reporters don't go out without ISAF patrols because that would not be very safe, it was the same in Iraq. This drastically alters the story you get. On the flip side, I'm pleasantly surprised by the courage displayed by some of the PBS Frontline reporters and the places they've gone. I love Frontline.
As they say, America isn't at war America is at the shopping mall. The US Army is at war.
An orbital is not a spherical shell.

Edit: These are probably higher energy states. e.g., the 6s orbital: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HydrogenOrbitalsN6L0M0.png

edit 2: Previous comment was still not correct. More plots of electron density for different energy states: http://cronodon.com/Atomic/AtomTech4.html
This is exactly what I was wondering. If your SaaS pitch fails because people are multiplying costs out as if they were fixed and are worried about existential risk/switching costs then either don't sell to them or sell up exactly (1-3).

I—for one—love this line when you can afford it: "we have n engineers full time on this project so you can't possibly have an internal product that grows as quickly".

Comparative advantage is an incredible force.
What's wrong with canola oil?
Not to mention the wood rotor blades. I would run away if I were in that crowd.
yeah, I just added the bit about wholecars. well, I don't believe graffiti is a bigger "problem" now than in the 90s when it spread as a subcultural phenomenon around Europe (just like in the 70s-80s in the US). I remember how I was amazed at how Berlin looked back in the day. Warsaw trains are also 'clean' now. I sincerely believe it's an excuse for some political experiments with drones, than fighting graffiti.
An interesting read, and I would still prefer spending an year with this diet than a week on Soylent.
And why avoid those?
Agreed, this was what I was pointing out. Government is a complex and multifaceted enterprise, but people often treat it as a monolith, especially in conspiracy theories.

There's a great line in "What Chinese Hackers Get Wrong About Washington:"

This is the most pervasive of of all Washington legends: that politicians in Washington are ceaselessly, ruthlessly, effectively scheming. That everything that happens fits into somebody’s plan. It doesn’t. Maybe it started out with a scheme, but soon enough everyone is, at best, reacting, and at worst, failing to react, and always, always they’re doing it with less information than they need.

That’s been a key lesson I’ve learned working as a reporter and political observer in Washington: No one can carry out complicated plans. All parties and groups are fractious and bumbling. But everyone always thinks everyone else is efficiently and ruthlessly implementing long-term schemes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/25/w...
I'm an awesome Ruby dev and I'm on oDesk, I live in a city with basically no market for rubyists but I've stuck with it out of passion(I'd have to find something else to do with my life if I had to keep with Java and government/bureaucracy software), I've got perfect english and I'm 1 hour away from EST, I've got no doubt I'd be making nice figures if I lived in any hot startup/private sector spot. oDesk allows me to work and get paid doing what I'm good at.
OP: "to complete a relatively simple job"

I'm guessing the average HN freelancer will be overkill for the stuff he has in mind. Some tasks are incompressible, however good you may be, so there's no point hiring Michaelangelo to repaint your bathroom ceiling.

EDIT: after making this comment I can no longer "reply". Is this a ban?
I got scared when it said node.js, then I saw it was only using node.js for the customization part, not the hosting part and I got relieved.
I really think they should emphasize that you can use your own web-server, using node.js to host a static site just doesn't make sense.
DB could supply free masking tape and plastic sheeting to cover the windows while the artists work.

Why not go further and put up the train carriage specs/dimensions in an easy to use template online, so you can lay out your design in advance to take account of the windows.

Going any further like sponsoring chosen designs might backfire because then it all gets viewed as too commercial, and we'll get people defacing the corporate graffiti.
We don't. That's just more crazy rhetoric. It's almost as if he doesn't actually have anything compelling to say and has to try to misrepresent what everyone else is saying.

It goes to show who we're talking to, and the level of discussion we can have with those who wish to control us.
Rackspace interview with Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding, co-creators of Erlang
Most software projects are capital expenditure ("capex"). Often the capex budget is set annually, and the investments are depreciated over subsequent years. Recurring monthly fees seem more like an expense than a capital investment. Hence, SaaS may not work with the budget allocated.
I had to Google Canola oil as I'd never heard of it, but it seems to be a product name for rapeseed oil. If so what have you got against rapeseed oil. It's a great oil and every bit as 'valid' as olive oil and I use both when cooking all the time.

Sure you can buy shit rapeseed oil, but you can also buy equally shit olive oil, and I fail to see why you would think one better than the other. Or is it just that the Canola brand produces bad rapeseed oil.
Absolutely nothing. It's really strange that HN is filled with people who think they're experts on nutrition, even though their beliefs are often directly contradicted by scientific research.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fats-and-cholest...
This might change your mind http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gLrwaXfeLg.

While the problem is definitely less nowadays, the difficult to reach places where graffiti appears around German stations sometimes makes you appreciate how much motivation and effort the artists(?) must have.
It's not down to the OS or OS vendor. Most rootkits are exploiting bugs, not intentional backdoors, and many of them are exploiting bugs that are not in the OS but in third party applications.

E.g. a common approach is to look for common third party applications that require admin/root privileges for some part of their functionality, and look for ways of tricking them into executing your code (via e.g. buffer overflows, or by finding ways of modifying the configuration with lower privileges).

So unless you never install third party software, you are potentially vulnerable even if the OS is flawless (and it isn't - no matter which OS you pick).
It's titled as a "static site generator", which I think is clear enough.
One of my favourite modern regex libraries for C++ is Boost.Xpressive, which allows for parsing context-free grammars using recursively nested rules. After fighting with Boost.Spirit (a more formal parser framework) for some time, I achieved what I wanted with Xpressive in a fraction of the time.

From the manual:

The theoretical computer scientists out there will correctly point out that a self-referential regular expression is not "regular", so in the strict sense, xpressive isn't really a regular expression engine at all. But as Larry Wall once said, "the term [regular expression] has grown with the capabilities of our pattern matching engines, so I'm not going to try to fight linguistic necessity here."
> Why not go further and put up the train carriage specs/dimensions in an easy to use template online, so you can lay out your design in advance to take account of the windows.

such stuff has been available in graffiti shops for decades :) but a little hint: nobody cares about windows :)

> Going any further like sponsoring chosen designs might backfire because then it all gets viewed as too commercial, and we'll get people defacing the corporate graffiti.

yes. google for 'adisux', an Adidas' Warsaw fiasco when they covered part of the horse racing track wall (longest graffiti gallery in Europe) for an ad and got trashed to the point the scandal got to tv, their pr firm got into panic mode for a week and in general, how to say it, their marketing campaign didn't work out.
Ask HN: Why do startup company websites look better than corporate sites?
Whenever I travel in Germany (indeed usually by train), I marvel at how much prettier most graffiti is than it is over here in NL (basically, more & larger colourful "pieces", rather than ugly "tags").

That makes me kind of ambivalent about this undertaking :) But I also understand that for the Deutsche Bahn this means substantial damage and costs. On the other hand, more effective enforcement is probably mostly going to result in a larger ratio of quick-n-dirty tags, making the overall appearance messier, uglier and more vandalised.

Now I don't think that people should just be able to paint their murals on whatever property they don't own. That's not right. I just think it won't really change the appearance for the better.

I also don't like drones, btw. Flying surveillance robots? Brrr. At least ED-209 couldn't climb stairs ...
I've updated my mini-review of static-site generators to include it:

https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators

Early testing looks good, but like so many existing tools it mishandles symbolic links.
That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with six minute workout watchapp. Then you're in trouble, huh?
This is a common scenario for me. My contract generally includes the following provision.

"Client shall have a perpetual, irrevocable, nontransferable license to use and copy the materials and deliverables created, discovered, invented, developed or prepared in the course of this agreement (“Deliverables”) and prepare derivative works based on the Deliverables for its internal use. All other rights in the Deliverables remain in and/or are assigned to Consultant."
We are relatively new but I think I'll have to plug in our new effort of curating good developers and designers for clients/customers willing to pay a premium for quality work.

"My Startup, LxiDD[1], is a curated network of the best indie designers, developers, and creatives on the web, with exclusive access to top shelf clients looking for the best talent."

http://lxidd.com/
Yes, the numeral representation of the number is exactly what I mean, you clarified my comment perfectly. Numbers are independent from any base.
My guess is that those are the only wounds that are visible on the bone. On most of the rest of the body the bones are protected by soft tissue.
I don't think so. Say you have a relatively simple website that you would like to have implemented. Would you like to hire an unskilled $10/h web worker, or would you rather pay a $100/h dev to do it in a fraction of the time, and do it right? The OP was complaining about quality, wasn't he? And why wouldn't someone advertising their services in the HN Freelance thread not do a small project?
It's a UK government health recommendation: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx
Complexity isn't better design. Apple had widgets back in OS X 10.4. Not having widgets is a design decision, not being "behind".
I'm sort of desperately looking for a gig, and I consider myself hacker (unfortunately not a marketing guy).
http://linkedin.com/in/jparicka
jparicka@gmail.com
How can I be of an assistance?
Cars degraded over time, software does not. Get in a 10 year old car and it isnt as good as it was 10 years ago. Its loose and worn. Fire up 10 year old software and its as good as the day you bought it. Yeas the market would have changed around both, but if I have both a car and a piece of software in my hand, as it were, I can see the difference. There for leasing something the clearly degrades makes sense. Leasing something that does not degrade, does not.
Corporate sites are a huge mess of distributed code and it takes months and months to get approvals, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of inter-departmental white dollars to make anything happen.

Startups just do it. And are able to use whatever tools/people necessary to make it happen.
Another aspect of this is Google's inflationary tactics that continue to rack up rates. I had written a post on this: http://www.vinaysahni.com/how-google-inflates-adwords-bids

Their inflationary game has still not ended. This week I got a coupon in the mail for $200 AdWords credit if I spend $50.
I like the analogy but that is expensive toilet roll you have there.

I think part of the issue is data migration after the SaaS contract is cancelled. To pursue your analogy further, if you decided to go 'natural' and use leaves you would still be able to defecate...
Zoomdata brings big data visualizations to the tablet
The event will be starting in 15 minutes. Live feed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMlJgsvYlys&feature=youtu...
The fact that it's static should mean you can host it on any platform that hosts static files. The technology only kicks in when you are writing blogposts and (re)generating your static files before you sync/upload them to your host.
This is completely off-topic. Where in the entire IP Commission report did they mention anything about the entertainment industry?

http://ipcommission.org/report/IP_Commission_Report_052213.p...
> One of the things that worries me is the focus on cost as opposed to nutrition.

Well, this is just an experiment to see if a nutritionally adequate diet can be made for £1 per day.

I hope no-one is going to actually eat it.

I think it could actually be useful if the author increased the amount of money available - say £2 per day. Or if the author did plans for 2 people.
Well you can always ignore it? There are something things you might like to earn with the credits, for example the phone number for the head of support, a chat with me over skype with a cup of tea, or a t-shirt? It's not like you have to do anything extra.