skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there's one great read that discribes the fundamental flaws of defense procurement pretty well (http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/full-labyrinth-text-w-cove...).

Mainly geared towards the US, but the basics works for Germany, too. As far as the procurment of the NH90 and Tiger is concerned, there are more flaws in the specification, design and program that fit in a book. Everybody aims at a silver bullet solution only to end up with a one made of lead for the price of a golden one.

One point that dtruck me most when I was still part of the "system" was the shere amount of spec and design changes that happened AFTER development was finished. the solution is called Retrofit. That and the important difference of a design to be able to perform a certain task and a design being allowed to perform it by the german army.

One example is the NH90 not able to transport troops with combat gear (German army view pint) and the NH90 being suvvessfully used to airlift troop over half of Finland.
Another one would be the Eurofighter being unable to perform ground support operations in the german air force and the very same plane doing just that for the british.

And the A400M would be apretty good plane hadn't politians insisted on a new prop engine built by a paneuropean consortium that did that for the very first time. That other planes would be just as good, agree. Even i would have rather opted for the Antonov An70 :-)

What really sad about the NH90 is the wasted potential. Considering the age of the Blackhawks, the potential market is HUGE. The situation being what it is, this ain't gone happen. But that's a point the NH90 has in common with the F-35, doesn't it?
I'll let someone else elaborate why.
Indeed, this is an "I'm shocked, shocked to find that politics is going on in here!"

I disagree with you on the "no honesty in politics", successful politicians tend to have a degree of honesty that, when it successfully translates into policy and results, helps to make them successful.

See my comments on Reagan and the economy and government financial situation, and ending the Evil Empire.

See G. H. W. Bush repudiating his "Read my lips, no new taxes" and getting booted from office.

See Clinton promising sane economic policies and delivering (ADDED: and after the demonstrable failures of LBJ and Carter). I think in general he was an awful president and no one denies he lies a whole lot, but when the financial guys pointed out what the bond market was saying, he accepted reality. I can't find the good quote from him on that, but here's the great one from James Carville: "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

ADDED: but that wouldn't seem to explain Obama's successful reelection. There's a more focused explanation which which still hinges on honesty: when there are two candidates, one is running on values, one isn't, the former wins. Obama has been honestly running on (hard Left) values, and beat two opponents who weren't. I think that'll also explain 2004, and it's been noted that if the Republican base voted like it did for W in 2004, McCain would have won; don't know about 2012, but "Hairpiece Q. Mother$*%&^$" as one former resident of Massachusetts conservative friend refers to him is widely thought to be the least principled, "value" free national politician in a long time.
>Who cares how Michelangelo held his brush

I can't swear to chisels but brushwork is extremely important to paintings; you really haven't seen a painting until you've gotten up close and been able to see the texture made by the strokes, and while maybe in theory you can achieve everything with a ham-fisted caveman grip on a brush it seems unlikely.

Which is to say, actually many people care about how artists hold their brushes.

This has been another entry in the billion part series: Why Analogies Are The Weakest Arguments.
Ahh, 2013 Hacker News, where the difference between "being charged with a federal crime" and "not being charged with a federal crime" is "semantic hysterics".
Is WebRTC Secure...Enough?
According to this paper: http://vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p1724_tilmannrabl_vldb2012.pdf VoltDB does not scale anywhere near even MySQL, let alone Cassandra.

Also, full ACID is overrated. Banks do well without it for years.
> If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here.

Well, Obama got that right.
Clarke's 1st law comes to mind :

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The other two :

2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible
is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
While I disagree with you on all of the specifics, I have to ask, if we accept that, what exactly does it have to do with his Administration and the press?
When I talk about history, I don't mean about 50-60 years back. If 20-30(or more) years from now a new kind of government emerges and thinks for some reason, that Nixon being a hero serves its purpose, then he will become a hero.

This is being done for thousands of years. Actually it's one
of the first things you learn in history class.
How is the latency and quality? Any skips?
HN Must Read: Atlas Shrugged
Given what's going on in our country this is probably a good time to read it if you haven't.

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

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123146363567166677.html

Wake up.
From the guidelines:

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
Are they sophomoric or do you just dislike being reminded of the fact? He linked statistics (although I'm almost certain it's >0 for DPRK) that are worth being reminded of, that's it. YOU made a judgement. Twice.
Will you post this on your github profile soon?
Would love to see how you approached this.

A suggestion is to be able to search for playlists to.
What's wrong with Windows then?
Although I like some aspects of the trial project idea, I agree that having something shipped to production after one week of work on a completely new project is in most cases unreasonable.
It's more like risk vs gain. There was a lot of testing and previous experience leading up to the 777 launch ETOPS rating. A better example is the 787 battery system. Likewise, you want to be very certain that the new electrical motor system won't interfere with normal braking, so something that sounds simple becomes very complex and difficult once you put it on an airlplane.
I think whats always been hard for me is dealing with the problem I'm trying to solve and all the anxiety happening at the same time. I feel totally comfortable writing code, but when 80% of brain is dedicated to flight-or-fight response it makes it extremely hard to answer technical questions and pass the interview.

My favorite interview that I took part in and got hired was when I was given 2 hours to pair program a project with the interviewer. So I really like the concepts in this post. Anything to get the developer to calm down and feel at home.
> there are a large number of syntactical ambiguities, so writing a parser for it should be completely impossible

Keep in mind that while your protest does sound intuitive - e.g. that Ruby can be syntactically ambiguous, ergo it is unparseable, it turns out that that doesn't stop us from writing a parser. We can parse most things even if we can't parse the "general case." When we DO encounter something unparseable, the compiler can a) guess or b) fail, hopefully with a message that will help us investigate and rectify the failure.

You point out that Perl's syntax may be worse than Ruby's, and I assume that implies that it is more syntactically ambiguous, ergo, writing a parser should also be impossible for Perl. It turns out that Perl is provably unparseable in the general case - in fact, it's been done rather rigorously: http://www.jeffreykegler.com/Home/perl-and-undecidability

Regardless of Perl's general unparseability, we have compilers for Perl and even large projects manage to compile to what appear to be functional executables. The same is true for Ruby.

I wrote this comment mostly a reminder that while something may appear to be insoluble, we may be able to solve for sufficient cases that we don't care about the rest, particularly if we have an oracle to fix the number of cases that we can't solve. (In this case, the oracle is the developer.)
This trial period is just a way of pushing the risk of a bad hiring decision back onto the candidate and allowing the manager to avoid the discomfort of actually firing someone (although telling the candidate that the project didn't work out is functionally the same thing).

It is tough firing people. But that doesn't mean it can be avoided.

And this is a good time to remind everyone: Firing an employee doesn't mean the employee failed. It means that everyone (including the company and everyone else involved) also failed. Such a failure in an organization should be a time of reflection for everyone; to think about and talk about what worked, what didn't, and what everyone can do better next time.
I don't say this lightly, but this is fucking awesome!!

Wondering how hard it would be to implement a function that would search for all the variations of a particular song. Lets say I want to see all the remix versions of Lykke Li - Little Bit, as an example...
How to run your own NSA spy program
Kickstop: how a sleazebag slipped through Kickstarter's cracks
But, yeah, people need to be out protesting

Even if it's "just" so they come together. I think that helps a great deal with the whole organizing, but also, and not unimportantly, s single person or a small group can motivate themselves through all snags only for so long.

So I think petitions are nice, but petition signing parties are nicer :) "came for the frustration, stayed for the resilience and creativity of the human spirit", that sort of thing.
While I have no personal insight into Barack Obama, I have dealt personally with several politicians; and while there are many earnest politicians dedicated to public service, there are also those who conflate public service with their own personal interest.

I do not mean they are cynical; that they are lying or have abandoned their principles, but that their principles are directed solely to getting themselves elected. Any form of lie-detection or telepathy would reveal they truly believe they are doing the best, most moral thing by getting themselves in a position of power. I find this attitude hard to describe; imagine “I am a good person”, “anything that is good for me is good for everyone”, “I should be leader”, “anything that makes me leader is good”, “anything that restricts my leadership is bad for everyone” all merged together into one single thought. Perhaps “I am the state” is the best summary.

This is how you get civil libertarians restricting others’ civil liberties, homosexuals getting elected on anti-homosexual legislation, and drug-users campaigning for harsh penalties for drug use. These people do not see any contradiction between their words and their actions; it is as if words and actions are the same thing to them. If I campaign for civil rights, then I am a civil rights leader, my actions are irrelevant. They do not seem to understand that other people can be good, that they themselves can be evil; or how restricting their own power could possibly be good. They do not seem to understand that arrests, investigations, or invasions, whether of privacy or of nations, which do not harm themselves could harm other people.
Lying to Congress is still a crime. He could have legally declined to comment, but not lied.
Thanks ! Good idea for the lyrics :) ! If I want to comply with the YouTube's API terms of use I can't turn off video. Sorry :(
This post makes some interesting points about the additional complexities the Instagram team will face as they integrate video uploading, editing, and consuming into their users' activity streams.

I think there are some interesting reasons why Instagram needed to do this that are worth noting. Instagram's high level of user engagement is in my experience predicated on the way it captures (1) beautiful experiences that are (2) relevant to me (3) without the clutter of posts that are of any other category. Facebook and Twitter are both fantastic and I use them all the time, but Instagram is the first and last app I use every day because it is a purely positive experience to consume.

I think there is a certain saturation point where there is a maximum number of social apps that a person can afford to be engaged with at any point. While the idea of Vine was appealing to me, I have resisted it because I just don't have room to add another app into my consumption patterns. Same thing goes for Path.

So the reason I think Instagram did the right thing in adding video, and in fact had to, is that an app like Vine is really an extension of the same concept that Instagram did with photos. If I want to have that kind of experience, I would prefer to do it all in one place, and so I think there was always going to be a gravitational pull for one app to win in both of those categories.

Vine is great, and I have no doubt they will continue to see success in the myriad of other ways people use it that are dissimilar from Instagram. But I think Instagram did the right and necessary thing in taking on this added complexity.
Loons aren't eavesdroppers. They only operate on very specific spectra in order to ensure high bandwidth.
Unfortunately, the site refuses to scroll in an Android browser.
Accurate Recording: What makes European DVRs so much better than American DVRs
"Obama promised"

After all that has happened, it amazes me that anyone would put any value on a promise made by President Obama.
I hear the point. Seriously I do. But the Constitution the US is bound by is not an agreement between the US government and citizens of the world. It's an agreement between the US government and the citizens for whom it claims jurisdiction. It's scope and application is not only limited, but intentionally and wisely limited. Were it not, we would be imperial Britain and we all know how that worked out.
Wrong solution to wrong problem. The emergency gear extension works in a vast majority of cases. 99% of gear emergencies are minor, and either false warnings, or easily fixed on the ground, with minor or no damage to the jet.

Newer jets have wheel well fire "bottles" or extinguishers and sensors to detect problems so the crew can respond appropriately. Aircraft tires are filled with nitrogen for safety. The DC-8 ground crew topped up with air, and not nitrogen, and also flew with under-inflated tires. "Hot brakes" is a relatively common cause of aircraft incidents, and responded to by airport fire services, to avoid major disasters.

In the Swissair 111 crash, the entertainment system didn't have the proper isolating breaker installed, and wasn't fully shutdown once it malfunctioned. Placing the racks in a critical cockpit location near pilot oxygen supply lines, was a major flaw in the system design.

PS. Running out of fuel waiting for "ground landing gears" would be significantly more likely, as commented below.
Working on implementing a new feature for my web app. I'm currently at the Hacker Dojo!
Cool service. I'll have to use this instead of Youtube's auto-generated playlists.

I'm not sure if it's a bug but...I was streaming a local radio station and searched for the artist I was listening to. Blynde search autosuggested the song to which I was already listening (it's a very popular song). In the playlist, this same song is showing up every 2-3 songs -- not even remixes of the same tune, but the same original mix of the song.

I'm on the 2nd time around of this song, and I'll hear it again in ~3 minutes, ~9 minutes, ~12 minutes, and ~18 minutes.

Edit: re-searching (searching again) seems to have cleared this up.
I like my DVR better: its called Netflix.
It's worth mentioning for context how long this outage lasted. It started at around midnight eastern and only came back at around 8am today.

Furthermore, before the outage, people were able to view other people's account details without doing anything. It definitely seems like it was a caching issue in that regard - nobody attempted to do anything other than use the site and they saw other people's data.
This shows you've never built a banking site.

All financial institutions will greatly benefit by sending less to the browser, not more. CAPTCHAs as we know are not foolproof, and should be limited. Instead, things like session/ip based hashing of field names, generating anti-csrf tokens and the like are trivial for the backend.

The vast majority of complexity in most projects is needlessly self-inflicted. DRY is dead, less-is-more is dead.

Let's Include All The Things is how Amazon became as pathetic as it is for a major commercial website.
Income tax might not be so high, but taxes for products are very high. Electricity: about 45%, gasoline: about 50%. Import tax/PIS/Confins/ICMS are calculated one after the other, so you pay tax over tax.
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side.

-- George Orwell ( http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat )
Second life: dashcam videos of people narrowly escaping death on the road
You mean "suspected" of espionage.
> Every time you see a dot, do NOT think attribute access. Think message sending a la Smalltalk.

Huh. You just rekindled my interest in learning Ruby. Learning Smalltalk was pretty mind-expanding.
"Voted for Obama twice but he's just as much of a liar as any other politician."

Then why did you vote for him? You had a lot of other options:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_third_party_and_...
Let's just mention some bottom line things:

Due to pervasive malnutrition, North Koreans are on average a foot shorter than South Koreans, and significantly less intelligent (IQ/g), which is one very good reason the latter don't want reunification.

They are by far the largest of the last unrepentant Communist counties, so all the inevitable evils that come with that are in their greatest effect there (although China is just so big it's GULAG very possibly has more inmates).

How about their still being in a state of war with, well, everyone else in "the West", and regularly reminding us of that with overt lethal attacks?
It sounds risky to operate with only 2 engines, and in 1953 twin engine planes were only allowed to be within 60 minutes of a diversion airport, mostly because of the unreliability of piston engines. It was a fairly long journey to allow twin engine planes to fly the kinds of routes they are allowed today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS

As jet engines turned out be much more reliable than their piston counterparts, the restrictions were loosened over time, starting with waiving the 60 minute rule for tri-jets in 1964. The original concept for the 777 was actually a tri-jet design. However the 767 turned out to be very reliable as a twin-engine plane and in 1985 it became the first twin engine plane to be allowed to fly 120 minutes away from a diversion airport (ETOPS-120) and in 1989 it was allowed to fly 180 minutes away from a diversion airport (but planes had to first complete 1 year with 120 minutes before they could be certified for ETOPS-180). Since twin engine designes were suddenly much more capable than anticipated Boeing dropped the tri-jet design of the 777, and eventually came back with a twin-engine design. By 1995 there was enough experience with operating twin engine planes with the 180 minute rule in place and Boeing was able to get the 777 certified to 180 minutes from the start.

So it basically took from 1953 to 1995 to allow a brand new twin-engine plane to fly most transoceanic routes (with a 180 minute rule in place), based on increasing evidence that the jet engines themselves are fairly safe, and learning more about additional safety mechanisms and procedures required to safely operate twin engine planes at extended distances from diversion airports.
Lists are useful because sometimes you don't know what to google, especially if you hadn't really noticed a problem enough to think that someone else might have already solved it for you.
Web development newbie here: I seriously used to think that such a thing would already exist, a thing like Visual Studio that included all the guts out of the box, and including back end in addition to the front end.
It's definitely quite high quality, just some lag due to satellite communication.
Agree pretty much completely with this.

I don't think I saw this mentioned but another technique that companies use it to subject you to formal tests. Usually produced by some 3rd party. I have huge experience with Excel and spreadsheets since Lotus 123 and have worked on and produced some enormously complicated, but successful spreadsheet/VBA solutions. I am almost invariably seen as the resident Excel expert in all the organizations I have been employed, yet have failed a test to prove my Excel "competence" because somehow the Dictionary Object was considered all important by this 3rd party test and yet in 15 years of spreadsheet is never something I touched.

I don't doubt that the Dictionary object is very useful in some use-cases but to fail an Excel competence test because some test producer decided to get cute is hardly an indication of real world knowledge and experience with a product.

That is just Excel, I shudder to think what a test in C++ would do to even a highly experienced C++ programmer if it decided to explore all the edge cases and obscure gotcha's that exist in C++.

This is not to say that some tests cannot be useful - just be very careful of what you are actually testing for and how you are doing it.
Predicting # of Likes on a Facebook Status With Statistical Keyword Analysis
maan wtf, they are destroying everything there xD
I think your definition of meta-data is too narrow. It's not just keywords.

Excuse me if I state the obvious, but with something like a web page access, the meta data will be in part: your internet address, what time you accessed it, the referring url etc. A phone call's meta data could include the length of the call, which phone the call was made on, which mast was used etc.

Meta data is additional data about the data isn't it?

One assumes that you could then make telling deductions from that meta data. Like a persons movements (acquired from phone, financial and internet records). You can also draw a lot about their character: their interests, their political views, their cicles etc.

The meta data is very revealing in itself.
The videos are lying too? Those bastards...
> I don't understand why everyone thinks it's terrible if a government surveils its own citizens but it's totally a-ok if it does foreigners.

I think a lot of people are in the "right is might" way of thinking. Consider this quote from the Peloponnisian War.

"...since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

--The Athenians to the Melosians