skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> but history tells us that the most likely trigger for it happening would've been human or machine error, not some attempt at empire expansion

I think you're falling victim to the post hoc fallacy to some degree. Remember that the Cold War ended up only lasting about 4 decades or so, which limited the amount of time for incidents to occur that could have led to WWIII. Also remember that the process of succession of the leadership of the USSR was a very convoluted one. Most Soviet leaders remained in office until they died, which meant that a succession could occur at any moment, possibly even during a period where unusual things were happening with the party which might get sorted out quickly but could result in someone seizing power who might otherwise not had the chance. Also remember that dirty politics and coups were rampant in the communist sphere of influence and there is little reason to assume those tactics would not be used at home (as indeed they were). Especially considering the unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev. Given these things it's safe to say that there was absolutely no significant guarantee that the leader of the Soviet Union could be expected to be reasonable in any way. As indeed the example of Stalin plainly shows.

It's immanently possible both that the Cold War could have extended several years if not decades longer and an aggressive political figure akin to Stalin could have taken control of the Soviet Union almost at any point during its history.

Given these facts the idea that a pre-emptive nuclear strike from the Soviets could have occurred at any time during the Cold War was not as far fetched as we in the present, having avoided such a calamity, should assume. All it would have taken was the death of the General Secretary at an inopportune time and some sort of fight for supremacy within the party married with some sort of geopolitical state of high tension and a firebrand Soviet leader who ends up in control of a sufficient part of the armed forces (or perhaps all of them).
I love this idea. A few questions about implementation:

- What is the central source of truth for names/identities?

- I assume the primary consuming client will be a web browser. Will content be decrypted client-side in the browser, or is one's server node implied to be trusted? The latter could be a security risk.

- Are there any constraints on message sizes, and can files be attached? If messages are limited in the blogchain, can they be "stitched together" for longer posts?
Now add to this the fact that NSA shares information with DEA and IRS (at least, that is what is known, who knows what else exists), and both are trained to lie about where the information comes from as a matter of routine, and that information, as any other, once shared can not be unshared - and you have a nice unregulated channel here.

NSA analyst makes a "typo" and finds information on John Doe that, say, IRS wants. He then "mistakenly overshares" this information. Once it is detected, NSA instructs IRS to immediately forget the information, which they happily agree to do, though miraculously it turns out they've got exactly the same information by other, confidential, channel. Thus, no abuse of NSA facility ever happened, and IRS can continue with the investigation using this information - and no warrants or probably causes ever required.
It's the title of the linked post, so I don't think so.

From the guidelines:
Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
Unlike the others, Englebart didn't directly accomplish very much. Most of his work was a long way removed from anything that was commercially viable. Seeming prophetic is nice, but actually getting stuff done is better. The relevant Jobs quote is "Real artists ship" - Englebart was not good at that part. Which is what got him kicked out of SRI.

Some of what was shown in The Mother of All Demos had been done elsewhere better - his group suffered from Not Invented Here Syndrome. He was enamored with the idea of one big software program that did everything (badly) rather than a lot of component parts that do specific things well - sort of the polar opposite of Dennis Ritchie's approach to problem solving. So his team had a program that did email and text editing and videoconferencing and drawing but didn't do any of those things as well as a system that focused specifically on any one of those things.

On the plus side, he had lots of severe personal setbacks (including at one point his house burning down) that could be played up for melodrama. And the end was poignant. And he did patent the mouse. And some of his most oddball ideas seem even more prophetic today (life-blogging) while others are weird enough to be entertaining on their own (chorded one-hand keyboards).
On a Galaxy S3 in tablet mode the new design of the main site is awful. Horizontal scrolling and all. The article view is great though.

I look forward to the wp knock off :)
How many times do I have to say this. Generator/Yields and equivalent constructs don't actually solve the callback problem, they exacerbate it. That is, because you only get to direct one call-level down, but, that's now how you'd code. You'd have some perfectly synchronous code until it hits some infrastructure I/O part some N call layers down, and then now what? You're gonna convert everything to yields? Got any idea how messy that is?

Javascript needs proper co-routines. Nothing short of co-routines will solve the issue. Please lookup microthreads, greenlets, fibres, etc.
Reply to Zooko
I suspect it must have something to do with my set up. My first suspicion was my nvidia drivers (304xx) but I recall not even being able to boot in console mode. I'll give it another shot later but for the moment vagrant's doing a fine job putting it all together.
> It is difficult to imagine what sort of evidence will convince you.

What are you talking about? There is no evidence for the assumption, and the only reliable evidence stands against it, like the WSJ Dartboard Contest.

If a particular institution does better than the averages, the most likely explanation is chance, and no other explanation has anything resembling scientific evidence. And the Dartboard Contest demonstrates that, when called on to put up or shut up, the professionals weren't able to put up.

> The stock market rose by about 8 or 9% annually during that time. Dismissing his 227 positive months requires absurd contortions ...

No, it requires acknowledging that the market rose by 8 or 9% per annum, as you just pointed out. His performance needs to be compared to the market averages, not to a hypothetical flat market. I can see you're not getting this -- someone says, "I must be a stock genius, because I never saw zero or negative growth in my portfolio." Someone then deflatingly points out, "Neither did the average market, the holdings of retired, risk-averse investors in Ohio."

> ... to even come close to supporting your hypothesis.

It is not my hypothesis, it is the default assumption of people with scientific training -- if there is no evidence, there is no effect. And there is no evidence.

In a pool of ten million investors, a handful will show spectacular performance by chance alone -- this is a mathematical fact -- and those individuals would have to be saints to avoid assuming and claiming they're stock picking geniuses.

Occam's razor is a precept that says the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. The simplest explanation is that some investors come out ahead because of chance. This means the burden of evidence rests with those who would like to claim that stock market performances arise from "secrets of the winners".

That would be you.
This is hilarious because it's right out of the ponzi playbook - financial scammers love to make their schemes invite-only since it gives clients the feeling that they're part of an exclusive club and makes them less likely to question the investment.

I doubt that FundersClub is a ponzi or even a scam in the legal sense, but it's entirely possible you'd have to be a sucker to invest and there there will be shadier imitators that are outright scams looking to pick up the people who can't get into FundersClub, especially if the JOBS Act is implemented and they can seek money from the general public.
> I fear for Wyden's safety.

Even if this was an issue - There is no point in living an oppressed life.

Maybe it's time we start making sacrifices now so the future will be better and we don't leave our kids in an even bigger mess.

Keep in mind, we've already shown that we're OK with messing up the planet for future generations: We haven't taken any serious measures against

- climate change,

- overpopulation (this is 1 "meta" problem which reinforces most others),

- wealth inequality (poverty is now "the new normal"),

- pollution,

- etc.
NodeJs File Uploader Application
Ask HN: What are your favorite email newsletters?
Either free or paid newsletters, I'm curious which newsletters people find valuable.
>...women.

Would it be more tolerable to you if he were kicking a man?
AFAIK it's fairly popular, though I'm sure many are happy enough writing markdown files. If you don't use emacs, you're probably not using org– though I believe Github and some others support it in their editors. Literate programming with org[1] seems to be a thing now which, if you haven't seen it yet, might be fun to try out. Searching Github may yield some files like that, but you'll have to wade through all the READMEs written with org.[2]

[1] http://justinlilly.com/emacs/literate_programming.html

[2] https://github.com/search?q=extension%3Aorg&type=Code&ref=ad...
> You assume any such 'secret' is infinitely scaleable.

First, I never said or assumed that. Second, Human greed is, in fact, infinitely scaleable. But this is a silly debate -- obviously the most likely explanation for a spectacular market performance is chance.

> Insider trading is an advantage that exists but doesn't fall into your #1. Has it 'drained the market' or stopped businesses from using the stock market?

In a word, yes -- in a number of cases, companies try to buy themselves out of the stock market, for that and other reasons (like the tyranny of quarterly earnings reports and shortsighted boards of directors).

We're off on a tangent now. We've left the original topic. And the original topic was resolved by noting the WSJ Dartboard Contest, where managers had every incentive to show what they could accomplish, but instead they failed, spectacularly, in public, for years.
I ran a website similar to TorrentButler, made a quick million from advertising revenue and affiliate revenue.

I've been trying to do it again for a few years, but it's not as easy to build an internet business when you stay clear of what I call "the easy 3" sex, drugs, and pirating. I've been driven to make it happen again, except in a legitimate industry. It would have been extremely hard to stay motivated all of these years without having tasted success early on.
How big did you estimate / project the market / potential revenue for your company to be?
I don't think naming your functions has to make the code "significantly longer". Perhaps 2 lines per callback.

And yes it can be hard to name functions, and I think the OP has not created very good example, but a good name that accurately describes what the function does means I don't have to read it if I don't want to.

A better example would have been some node.js code that has 5 levels of nesting, each with a some significant code within.

You've just got to name them.
To quote Charlie:

I'm not American

All this talk of "the Constitution" as though it is some kind of 100% correct holy document handed down from on high to our superior ancestors is pretty irrelevant in the rest of the world.
I think you have it wrong, generators would solve the problem. If you have asynchronous code N call layers down, then everything above it would be asynchronous as well. So you would only need to yield the first call.

Check how Q.nfcall works.
You should be added "Infinite Bang Bang" somewhere to the title, such that readers of that first article know that yours is a follow-up on the topic.
I'd love to see the kickstarter for this :)
> I can't ask my computer to make me a cup of coffee, and it responds.

Question: what exactly would you like your computer--that beige box under your desk--to do, if you ask (or rather, command) it do do that? This sounds more like an embodied intelligence/robotics problem than a problem with constraint-solving goal-directed AI, per se.

Unless you want it to use Mechanical Turk to fire off a task to have a human make you a coffee. I could see that working, but it's probably not what you'd expect to happen.
The examples are 40% and 20% longer. That is significant.

The trouble with small examples is that their problems don't seem like a big deal because their entire codebase isn't a big deal. You have to apply them many times over to get any sense of their compounding effect, which is what really matters. But by definition, that's out of scope of a discussion whose examples are small. The only way out of this paradox is to pay close attention to apparently small effects.
In my browser at half width (840px) the new layout forces horizontal scroll. I'm used to shrinking text when this occurs, but for a blog it's annoying because the content itself isn't that wide. The vertical bar on the left is unnecessary, and the other stories bar on the right could easily become narrower. The old Svbtle layout fits perfectly at this width and is very readable.
Further analysis by Robin Houston:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6227115

Newly registered OEIS sequence:

https://oeis.org/A228162
Ever since Bitcoin and PRISM became 'mainstream' so to speak, I feel as if the renaissance period of P2P/decentralized communications has been kicked off. This last couple of months I have seen so many projects for decentralized and secure communications, but they all are individual in their own little communities, and it's sad to see such a fragmented space.

Now, to comment on the actual project. It seems here that we have another person attempting another decentralized project with a vision but no planning. It can be done, as somewhat shown by Tox [1] which was started off a /g/ thread on 4chan, but I'm not liking it so far. Generally you either start with some innovative ideas and get people to help you develop them, or you develop something and get people to help test it. Nonetheless, I wish the author the best, as we have similar goals.

On this note I'd like to end with a plug for my project [2], which is somewhat similar to Trsst but uses a P2P publish-subscribe overlay for distributing messages (it's more of an experiment than a product).

[1] - http://tox.im

[2] - http://bitweav.org
Here's two times we came close. They're both stories of Russians deciding not to pull the trigger based on faulty data, but I would not be surprised if there's a couple stories floating around of Americans making the same decision. It didn't need aggressive heads of state to happen at all.

http://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/07/15/the-men-who-saved-t...
Why Mobile Gaming Startups are Risky
Asking anyone who knows: Is there a way to "backport" Ubuntu-targeted DEBs to Debian? There seems to be a recent movement in what I might call "indie" OSS software (e.g. Docker) where the pre-1.0 versions are only targeted at/built for/tested on Ubuntu, because:

- A. nearly every developer uses Ubuntu on their own workstations, and

- B. Ubuntu has all the other shiny new pre-1.0 stuff to pull in as deps (it's a network effect, in other words.)

So, would, say, slapping Ubuntu's apt repo-set into Debian work to satisfy an Ubuntu-targeted DEB's prerequisites, or would there be tons and tons of conflicts?
Clever until the scanner part breaks but the shredder keeps shredding.
Layoffs Taboo, Japan Workers Are Sent to the Boredom Room
That.
Also, this:
http://this-plt-life.tumblr.com/post/55420560033/when-somebo...
Off the top of my head, C# can't type infer: Fields, properties, parameters, return types, lambdas, generic type declarations, type constraints.

I did a pretty fair line-by-line translation of a C# app to F#, and the F# version needed 1/20th the number of type annotations.
So you "doubt" that FundersClub is a ponzi scheme or scam (a very very serious accusation), yet you accuse them of employing the same tactics?

By definition, a scam intends to mislead .. it pretends to be what it is not. So if FC does not intend to mislead, it's an honest business and you have no reason to tar it's reputation with the words you've used.

Regardless of what you think of the JOBS Act (which in many reasonable interpretations is a boon to those who would not otherwise be exposed to the opportunities now exclusive to the so called "1%"), it is wrong to tarnish FundersClub with the labels you've used, sans some sort of evidence .. which you don't have because FC is not a scam.
> Maybe this sounds out here

It does. Please name the last time the US government assassinated a federal-level elected official. (And "Kennedy" doesn't count as an answer).
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Probably not. It's a sad fact that women are on average disinclined towards risk-taking, and investment is a classical risk-taking activity. This effect must have been even more pronounced in the 70s.
> So what's the catch?

The catch is that testing people for an unexplained adeptness at making money in equities is essentially certain to produce a handful of "successes" that arise from chance, not talent.

Given a pool of ten million investors, all playing the market, and all making random picks, it is certain that a handful will succeed spectacularly because of chance. I know because I have modeled this sort of thing with computer programs, each of which produce "winners" simply by making random picks.

With a large enough population, some will "succeed" spectacularly, through chance. Those successes will find it hard to accept that their success arose from chance rather than genius, just as happens in real life.

> Why can't I just go and study this book and make a lot money if I think I'm smart, now that I've read this article?

If there really was a book that contained secrets to beat the market, secrets that worked, that were reliable, that anyone could put into practice, businesses would abandon equities as a way to raise operating capital. After all, why should they line the pockets of a bunch of non-productive speculators? What possible incentive would they have?

The only reason the equities market works is because investors get a fair return on their investment, consistent with the risks they take, and businesses get operating capital at a reasonable rate as well. Both parties to the transaction get a fair deal. All this talk about making a killing in stocks using "secrets of the winners" overlooks the fact that, if it were possible, if someone could really make a fortune by something other than blind luck, reliably, deterministically, the market would collapse.

And for the life of me, I can't understand why people find this so hard to understand.
Wait...what happens if there's a paper jam halfway through scanshredding?
Hi api. I'm interested in your view about reasoning from first principles. Is there more behind that suggestion? And do you have evodence of it?
This has a very "functional programming paradigm" feel around it.
.. or 3 ways of saying the same thing, really :)
That is also the explanation they gave in the video. When they say "wrong or misleading", are referring to the fact that this is not always obvious when this projection is used, so it can make people think they can actually compare areas with it.
The more interesting question is how is it going to grab last pages from the table. "My printer was out of paper and dropped from the table again!"
The mobile view is horrible. Why would you make us do horizontal scrolling on a smartphone?!
Oh, so what you are saying is that they have been wrong and misleading for the past 500 years?

Yeah, projections are always wrong and misleading in some ways and it’s certainly important to point that out – but the Mercator projection has certain properties that are desirable for navigation but also properties that are completely undesirable for how many maps are typically used today. All that navigational stuff? Completely irrelevant for all typical use cases nowadays. Distortions of sizes? Quite relevant for typical use cases.

Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good.
I figured the author would be judging Torvalds wealth by something other than money, but really, are we so limited in how we can measure wealth that the ability to tell people off is the best we or Torvalds can do.

Is saying 'FU' a measurement for wealth? A homeless person can say it to anybody they please with no reprecussions, so is a homeless person equally as wealthy as Torvalds?

I'm a bit disappointed in myself for even responding to this and feeding the troll.
I agree - an MBA is not engineering, and many in my class would have been unable at that stage to finishing 3rd year engineering mathematics. A few of us had engineering backgrounds though, and some very deep at that.
However there is (usually) a deliberate effort to overload students with volumes of work, so that they can figure out how the real world works and work in teams.
Also in my MBA course students had a minimum of quantitative work they had to do, and if they wanted they could dive deeply into the more serious mathematics in certain courses. It was part of the expectations that people who were more technical or more experienced in one area would help out those who had less experience, and vice versa.

Engineering mathematics is not for everyone, and indeed not required for every MBA graduate, but it certainly helps for the more quantitative courses. And finance at one school can differ wildly from finance at other schools. Look for the professors. Look at the courses people take.
But also look at the culture. Some universities are focussed on the money, others, like Yale, on much wider impact in business and public service.
The most popular headphone among hackers (and other hardware used by them)
But there is a very significant difference between the two. The strong form leads you to believe that it is impossible to expect to do better than the average even with a Herculean effort. The weak form allows that it is possible to beat the market, even by a lot, if you have insight or capabilities that most of the market lacks.

This leads to wholely different conclusions. In (1), a cheap index fund is the only investment option that isn't equivalent to gambling. This is comforting to believe, because you could feel completely comfortable in not spending any effort on researching your investments. In (2), it is okay to buy a modest position in Google in 2004 because your knowledge of the untapped potential of the Internet hints that Google could be much more important than the (median) skeptic believes.

Perhaps most importantly, if you are in camp (2) you will consistently have your investment choices denounced by those in camp (1), which gets very annoying.
I've never been to San Francisco and I wish I could eventually live there, but...

Saying that San Fracisco transportation are top notch compared to South America is not going to help make SF look good. How much you pay in taxes and for a Muni or BART ticket there? What are the expectations regarding transportation for some living and working in SF?

And I'll may be too used to Europe, but some place that it's three hours from my home is not "close". Hell, I drive 30 minutes each day to work and no everybody tells me I live too far away from the office...

In any case, SF looks like an amazing city to me.