skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are two problems:

1) You might very good with text communications, as all hackers are. But your clients, especially big corporate players from which you'll land a $$$ job, might not be. And they will not level with you since they can have someone that fill their requirements.

2) Theoretically you can open your laptop while snowboarding at the French Alps and write the Linux Kernel. But it's certainly much more comfortable to do so in front of a 27" iMac sitting at home, with your cup of tea on the side your ergonomic chair and keyboard etc.

There was one time that I thought it was cool to being able to do all my payments and everything via ebanking while I was on vacation. Then I found it that it sucks big time, having to do job while others having fun.

However that's just me, it's like it's an absolute truth or anything. I'd just prefer to hand a job over to someone who I know has an office. Give him more chances to have established a decent work flow.
This is true. I've had donations to Heifer delayed by credit cards before. I've heard is is pretty common.
Stories like this make me brood on quantum immortality.
URL synchronization API
Earliest for me in Boston, MA
The # sign
"with a host of middle eastern countries within grasp of nuclear technology"

Who?

Israel already has a significant nuclear arsenal and very capable delivery systems - and given their history who would grudge them this? [NB I say that as someone who theoretically lives within range of their weapons.]

Apart from Iran, who might soon be able to build fission bombs and who would have difficulty delivering them very far, who are to be included in this "host" of countries?
You realize HN

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22you+realize...
I can't wait for the whole rich-get-richer meme to go the way of the dodo.
Well he was trying to watch porn before his gf called him.

He saved the link and closed it when they started talking.
But not if it doesn't rise.

But saying that the longest day happened during the night may be technically true on the South Pole, but still sounds odd.
So please, enlighten us, what should we be telling poor nations in Africa or the Middle East to be striving towards, if not economic growth, democracy and respect for human rights?

It also may appear to some, that those people lacking a 5000 year old written history seem to be increasingly intolerant towards dictators...
The comparison to Godel is absolutely priceless.

Describing the incompleteness theorem as "a cheap trick to frighten mathematicians" is hilarious as well.
We definitely can "take back the internet," [1] but it will take time, concerted distributed efforts, and focus. I wrote a rant about how we've been caught with our collective pants down recently: http://matt.sh/introducing-dx

My approach is more "get funding so a few dozen smart people can live and focus 100% on fixing things" rather than letting people just play around on nights and weekends.

Ubuntu got people to pay a total of $12 million for a fantasy phone. A phone. People's lives are so empty they will pay for things that don't exist in the hopes it makes them happier at some unspecified date in the future.

Can we focus that faith and optimism into funding real problems and get a paltry five million to fix the entire world?

[1]: The world is a lot bigger than the Internet — there's much we need to set back on track in addition to Internet stewardship.
Who manages the foundation, and won't tinfoil hatters just assume the foundation is being corrupted? Especially if its primary benefactors are the large corporate entities that they're already extremely afraid of?
The content doesn't say what the headline does. No surprise -- the Telegraph is really bad on climate issues. Check out http://realclimate.org/ if you want to get a real view of what's happening.
"Americans have an anti-nationalist, universalist ideology"

Come on. You're just trolling.
>Hello captain hyperbole!

14 year old, life in prison. It IS medieval -- in the metaphorical sense of the word. What you did was a straight-up historical correction on the "medieval" thing, which was totally uncalled for.

That said, I wouldn't be so smug if I was in the States either. From what I've read 14 years old (or 15), even get the death penalty in some states.
you ask for cross-platform and you don't define "most secure". so it seems like the "right" answer is the one that is believed to be secure and is as cross-platform as possible. and i think that would be openssl.

it's famous for causing bugs/weaknesses from being used incorrectly, but afaik it's secure if used correctly. and it compiles on a wide range of hardware.
America's commitment to non-proliferation is debatable, especially in the middle east. We block requests for our client state to join existing nuclear treaties. America's belligerant aggressive posture/actions in the region make nuclear programs the most viable defensive strategy for nations attempting to protect themselves.
>One of the defining characteristics of a free market is perfect information.

'Perfect information' is an unrealistic assumption used in neoclassical models which treat knowledge as just another input, on a par with raw ore, pork bellies or gasoline. In the real world it just doesn't work like that.

The defining characteristic of the free market is that it is a creative process of discovery. It creates knowledge where none existed before. There can be no such thing in principle as 'perfect information'. Information tends to exist in the state of being inherently dispersed among the actors, often tacit to the point of being inexpressible. The market facilitates the use of such knowledge, and the the discovery of new knowledge.
A novel system for identifying Canadians on HN:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=sorry&start=0
Here's Apple's first design for a wearable device-from 1985
Do you still use Captchas or moved to something better?
I am wondering if there are any reliable less time-consuming activities that make Captchas look a thing of the past.

Do you know of any?
Syria was developing a nuclear program before they had their facilities bombed by the Israelis. Saudi Arabia has shown interest though they don't want to rock the geopolitical boat, but if Iran developed the bomb then it would likely set off a local arms race. Egypt has the industrial capacity, wealth, and local nuclear technology to develop nuclear weapons if they desired and their government is in so much flux that the chances of a future Egyptian regime deciding to develop the technology (especially if Iran were to acquire it) can't be ruled out.
> There wasn't that much pre-existing structure to destroy.

That is a myth that the colonizers were very happy to bolster, for obvious reasons.
The Sokal affair is a lot less shocking when you realize Social Text was not peer-reviewed at the time and the article was for a special science issue of the journal.

If you've ever had misfortune of having to review submission for non-major CS conferences you would know that there is an amazing amount of bullshit even in technical fields.

The only thing I've found shocking about the Sokal affair, or this article (and the many others like it) is the obsession with 'proving' the humanities to be bullshit. It is an incredible and intellectually lazy pursuit of the idea that: If I don't know it, it's not worth knowing.
>>Yes, they should be. Then, you should uninstall the custom trackpad driver that does that, because that's not a built-in gesture.

How many people are going to be able to: 1)diagnose the problem(the driver) 2) figure out they need a new driver 3) find a driver for the bundled hardware that will work the way they want(assuming it exists) 4) uninstall the bundled driver 5) install the new one

If something isn't easily fixable for 99% of computer users its broken because they don't even know where to start.

The same thing is wrong with the backup solutions microsoft has. They are all either 1) are too heavy weight and brittle or 2) do nothing useful. People aren't going to take the time to go install third party full system backup software when it isn't clear it will even work for them and they don't know how it will work when they need to recover something. It is just another thing they have to manage on their computer.

Compare that to Time Machine. It usually just works, and when it doesn't it is better than nothing. Plus people understand exactly how it works. Lost something? Go Star Wars! Simple and effective.
Shrug. The article is mostly a tale of two, uh, causes of excitement. It doesn't make a sweeping claim about getting rid of anything.

"continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation."

I'm amused. Its easy to promote other people not having weapons :). Its worth noting that the US is still the world's largest nuclear power. The RRW program would have featured replacing every existing weapon, probably the US resuming tests, and it was pretty expenvise - are you really surprised it got cancelled?
Google Shopping API closes next week: do you have an alternative?
Not sure, but I heard that the book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond addresses this question.
Wat.

I don't know what you're trying to say, but "Derrida was a guy who existed" is not, in reality, an "impossible contradiction". It's just true. Your first statement, on the other hand, sounds either meaningless or false.

I think I agree with you, though, that the Wikipedia page on Deconstruction is "the quintessential case of original research".
I majored in philosophy, and consider "deconstruction" as a philosophical tool for analyzing empirical philosophy.

The problem with anyone who majored in philosophy is that they will switch between big-D and little-D while expecting everyone around them to code switch at the same pace.

This is also true for any given smartass who never gave a flying fuck about Derrida.
Any evidence for your statement?

This seems to be the opposite of the book's spirit. What's interesting is the authors they leave alone...
don't travel in a car. exercise, but don't do dangerous sports. eat sensibly. live with a partner or pet dog.
Note that Chip Morningstar, the author of this essay, was a key person behind the first graphical MMO -- in 1986! The "graphical MUD" in question was called Habitat and ran on Commodore 64 computers. Access to it was provided as a pay-per-minute service by Quantum Link, which later became AOL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_%28video_game%29

Be sure also to read his and F. Randall Farmer's paper on the subject [1] and related collections of anecdotes [2][3] if you're at all interested in the history of virtual worlds.

[1] http://www.crockford.com/ec/lessons.html

[2] http://www.crockford.com/ec/anecdotes.html

[3] http://www.crockford.com/ec/layza.html
this could be even more accurate
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=eh&start=0
Ah yes, the most condescending phrase in HN's lexicon
Previous discussion (when this essay was published in The Guardian): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336373
i haven't had problems, but do it annually (i can't remember how, but i would guess it's credit card). i am in chile.
But wasn't that the result of the transition _from_ colonialism rather than _of_ colonialism?
Culture is fractal. For the first division, Northern Africa and subsaharan Africa are very different entities with very different histories. Northern Africa has been part of the great Roman and Muslim empires and has long traditions of law, trade, and government on a large scale. This does not mean it is necessarily western or compatible with westernism. But the first step to wisdom is to recognize the quality of the clay we work with (perhaps the second step is to leave the goddamn clay alone).

If the Western powers wanted to make a difference in many of these countries, they could try to broker deals to decentralize the governments and give ethnic regions large amounts of autonomy, much like the Americans have done for the Kurds in Iraq. Afghanistan should be at least two states, not one, and Americans might have to recognize that the Taliban is the popular representative of the national will of the Pashtun people in the south. The problem with SS Africa vs. the Middle East is that the African countries, having no history of large-scale states before the Europeans came, have so many national divisions that it becomes impractical. So I don't have answers to everything. Perhaps city-states?

I would note that the popular revolutions in North Africa don't appear to be doing so good by the welfare of the people. I enjoyed this article in the Telegraph - "The Arab Spring has failed because constitutional democracy needs nation-states"[1]

> "what should we be telling poor nations in Africa or the Middle East to be striving towards, if not economic growth, democracy and respect for human rights?"

Yes you are a good American that believes in the American ideals. So much destruction is done trying to impose them on others, though. At some point we need to make peace with the fact that not every country can become an America within a decade. And what happens when the people we are trying to bring to the American way of life don't want to be American?

[1] http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100232225/her...
Spent a winter here once, not easy, but quiet, and the waves keep coming despite the brrrrrrrr, cold water.

I tend to come here in the autumn and spring now, weather is beautiful and the living is nice.
This system to identify Australians has way less false positives:
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=crikey&start=0
Except that the quality of HN comments varies widely: not all commenters on HN are experts in the subjects they're writing about (and the people voting up a comment aren't necessarily experts either). A general reader following a link here from Wikipedia is not likely to be able to tell the difference between an expert and a non-expert. Thus, HN would make a much worse secondary source than something like an industry publication that has an editor and fact checkers (rare as these seem to be in our field today).
Semantics 3 seems to be the only good solution out there.
I can recommend this book that describes the history of the Rocky Flats plant just outside Denver and the various accidents that happened there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_a_Real_Killing:_Rocky_Fl...
I would just like to see 'FreeBSD' appear as a "mainstream" option when choosing the OS for a new EC2 instance.

That is now fixed in the AWS Marketplace -- although the only AMIs in the marketplace running FreeBSD are my FreeBSD image and Citrix's NetScaler and CloudBridge products.

Will the licensing issue for the smaller AMIs go away once the PVHVM drivers are fully implemented?

No, PVHVM is still a variety of HVM, and on the old instance types that's only available with a "Windows" label attached.
We're using a modified Perceus tied into cfengine.
Every time an engineer writes a screed against the humanities, I feel like I'm going to break out in hives.

Engineering and the sciences have, to a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of crass commercial necessity.

Unsubstantiated bullshit. Most theoretical backbones of math and science were discovered/formalized for anything but commercial reasons.

It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge from the jungle on their own. I think that the task of outreach is left to those of us who retain some connection, however tenuous, to what we laughingly call reality.

You could start with your own field(s), which are full of mediocre paper-pushers milling around other people's theory, publishing uninteresting observations which, as long as they are "logical" and "correct", are shit into a godawful paper that no one will ever care about or read. "A Novel Method for Applying a Trivial Modification of an Already-Known Algorithm to Some Type of Specific Data" could be the title of about 35% of the CS papers in existence.
To make things crystal clear here: the US has vastly reduced its deployed nuclear warheads and stockpiles over time. The US currently has less than 1/10th as many warheads deployed as during the peak of the Cold War, and that number is continuing to drop.

Also note that in fact Russia has more deployed warheads than the US currently.
I don't understand why an accidental detonation of a warhead would produce "lethal" fallout. Yet there's comparatively little concern (and rightfully so) over the 2000+ intentional test detonations done around the world so far?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
Web apps or Chrome packaged apps?
I couldn't help but think about Shawshank as I read this. Once you are in prison for that long, it's hard to know anything different. 2-5 years is one thing. 30 years is something completely different. He was in prison twice as long as he's been out of prison, not to mention he was just a teenager when he went in. Of course he doesn't know how to react to life on the outside. Hopefully he is able to adjust eventually without going back to crime.
Now you can cite this conversation when editing it.
Your answers raises the question that how does a country with people from different ethnic background become a nation ?

So, can the Afghan issue be resolved by splitting the country ? And if yes, do the people of Afghanistan want that.
Looking at "similar scandals" on the same page, science/engineering does not come out unscratched either.

Also I always found Sokal affair a bit stacked against the offending the journal. The issue was "Science Wars", that is confronting scientific vs. postmodernist view. If they were to edit what were presumably contributions from the side of science, it would defeat the purpose somewhat.
What shines through is that you believe in segregating ethnicities because they just can't live peacefully together.

Which is bullshit, looking at almost any country that is not currently embroiled in a civil war. Many of them combine tons of ethnicities... USA, Canada, Australia, India, even countries like Germany just aren't that "ethnically pure" as they are sometimes stylized...
I lived in Zambia for a year around 2005, and my impression was that this 'nation-building' is one thing that Kaunda did really quite well. There is a strong sense of identity of being Zambian in parallel to the tribal identity. One way of achieving this was stationing secondary school students(almost all secondary schools are boarding schools) and young public employees (and in 70s quasi-socialist Zambia almost everyone with a job was a public employee) in regions other that their original tribal region. As a result, very many people married into different tribes, and very many people now have several tribal identites, which as a result aren't very strong.

Also they are indoctrinated that 'tribalism' is a bad thing, and they learn a lot about Bismarck in school. There is also a bantu language that isn't really associated with one of the major tribes but is a kind of lingua franca beside english in the urban centres.
You want to back up your personal files, not your OS. How can an OS make backup user hostile? Write your files to several external disks that you keep in different places, and maybe some online service, and that's it.
Get an nsa.org email today
There are some slight inaccuracies in the article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane

The wikipedia article is unclear on the exact number, but mentions two dozen or so survivors in total, rather than a single one.
so why were they wrong? (or is the post incorrect?)
Are native app forms any better in this regard?
Several random points (from a dev with a background in philosophy and linguistics).

First, from the standpoint of intellectual history, it's probably most useful to cast conversations like this in terms of the split between analytic and continental philosophy (esp. postwar developments). The fact that he doesn't really mention the split and only talks of literary criticism is a very odd omission.

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

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

Second, I applaud the author for taking the tradition that he's poking fun at as seriously as he does. There are scads of philosophy professors who simply sneer at those from the opposing tradition. This is a shame.

Third, and related to the point above, it's a breath of fresh air to read someone who can genuinely straddle the two traditions. Richard Rorty is probably the best known philosopher that this can be said for.

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

Fourth, anyone interested in the ideas that underpin deconstruction should take a look at Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics". It's an utterly fascinating read that forms the basis for a huge amount of work in both contemporary linguistics and postwar French Continental philosophy.

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

Fifth, anyone who dismisses the techniques one of the world's greatest mathematician/logicians as a "cheap trick" without so much as a winking emoticon is immediately suspect in my book. ;)
Thanks. That disclaimer at the end though ;)
> That was followed by Soviet occupation and communism it entailed.

It could be a matter of degree. It might sound radical but what if I told you that Soviet occupation wasn't as brutal as British occupation. Soviets didn't tolerate political dissent. But they did give everyone an apartment, free (including higher) education, healthcare.

Did the British empire have those programs. Free healthcare, education, and minimum living space? I kind of doubt it.
The only reason to keep nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert is if you're worried you might have to use them or lose them in a first strike. Now that we have almost impossible-to-target (in quantity alone) nuclear submarines with missiles capable of serving whatever strategic purpose you'd need, there's no reason to be spreading the risk around to land- and air-based systems as well.
Why the Media Has Been Mostly Wrong About YouTube
Even if you're publishing nothing really new, you can publish something that looks at something in a slightly different way and it can be useful to some people. I agree that a lot of these papers are poorly written, but there's nothing wrong with being unoriginal, not everything has to be groundbreaking. I recommend watching Simon Peyton Jones' talk on how to write a great research paper: http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1464870
It was a trade-off but those kingdoms weren't the ones making the choice. It was made for them by the occupiers.

They had perhaps some authority structures, some nation and ethnicity based borders, perhaps less civil war type conflicts. At least that was taken away. Whether it would have been better for British and others to stay away is hard to say.
"The two propellants were extremely efficient"

This is not particularly true. Hypergolic fuel mixes are less efficient than LOX/LH2 (which is nontoxic (exhaust is water vapor) though still hazardous of course) and LOX/RP-1 (more or less nontoxic again. RP-1 is just fancy kerosene). The only real reasons to use them in first stages^ is that you can store them in the rocket (problematic with cryogenic fuels/oxidizers like LH2 and LOX since they will boil off over a short period of time) and the ignition system is simpler (not really a big deal).

LOX/RP-1 was actually used with earlier ICBMs like the Soviet R-7, the American Atlas. Storable hypergolic fuel mixes followed these, though now modern ICBMs are solid fuel rockets (storable, and safe for people on the ground).

Hypergolic fuel mixes have caused issues for non-military rockets too. During Apollo-Soyuz there was a leak of N2O2 into the Apollo capsule. Not a very good situation at all, but for that application they are really the best tool for the job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo-Soyuz_Test_Project#Re-en...

^ Hypergolic fuels are also useful in engines that you need to start/stop multiple times, and in upper stages that need to store their fuel for a while.