skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Soviets had (and the Russians still maintain) the one anti-ballistic missile system allowed by treaty. It's emplaced all around Moscow. In addition, Soviet leadership had constructed a series of deep bunkers and transport systems under Moscow -- there is/was another subway system underneath the civilian Moscow system for Kremlin leadership to use.

So should a missile (of several targeted against Moscow) make it through the ABM system, it would still have to destroy a very hard target. And so you need a big bomb to ensure destruction.
Sounds like he might be doing damage. (Speaking as an ex-Microsoftie, actually).
Define "stable", there was an arbitrary code execution flaw in Wordpress just in the last version. A smaller, more efficiently designed codebase which isn't hampered by backwards compatibility might well have fewer bugs. Wordpress is kind of a sprawling mess at this point, and it's got bad practices baked into it.
Don't even bother with the user "newnewnew". Look through a few pages of his comment history. He makes condescending remarks about liberals & keeps trying to prove Africa(and African-americans) are the cause of their own problems. And if you read a couple of pages of his comment history, it's not clear if he sees women as equal to men and/or doesn't understand how strong gender-discrimination is.
But don't take my word for it. Seriously, look at his comment history. Here's just one, of many examples, of his mind set: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360762
I don't buy this argument. This is only valid if you want something exactly like WordPress that grew up like Wordpress and has all the benefits and the baggage that comes with its unique evolutionary path.

It's 2013, we have a much better understanding today of how people use the web, from how they consume to how they socialize. Many of these habits are the product of things invented between when WordPress was invented and today. With that in mind, an experienced engineer familiar with the architecture of WordPress, it's history and the web as it exists today, would be very well equipped to choose a whole host of different abstractions at lower levels, which would permit a permit said WordPress replacement to support better features more easily, where better means "fitness for use" from now into the future (5-10 years)
Pneumatic bed & desk
Straddling Checkerboard Encoding
A lot of stuff:

Asimov's Foundation (I only recommend the trilogy, though; Foundation's Edge is good but will make you want to read Foundation and Earth, which does severe damage to the universe. Haven't read the prequels.)

Asimov's short stories

Tolkien

Ben Hur

The Count of Monte Cristo (brilliant revenge story)

A lot of Brandon Sanderson's work (The Stormlight Archive is promising to be fascinating)

Too long a list of other stuff to put here.
"So Zambia is not failed. It is simply very, very poor. Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day"

And that is the key fact. Many of the comments in this thread are not specific to Zambia. There was a time when Zambia looked like a success story among African countries, as the first national leader after independence seemed more democratically minded and less corrupt than many leaders in Africa. The year Zambia became independent, I have read, it was wealthier than Taiwan--where my wife was living at the time. Zambia was neither unusually poor nor unusually badly governed among countries of the world when it gained independence.

So the key question in looking at international examples of national development is to slog through the process of John Stuart Mill's "method of agreement and difference"[1] and figure out what commonalities help countries develop and prosper, and what commonalities drag down the fortunes of the inhabitants of a country. "Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief." That jumps out at me as a huge difference between Zambia and many countries that have developed more successfully--clear land title that can be readily transferred for money. Taiwan makes better use of its land, and developed better, I hypothesis, in part because it is clear who owns what land and who has rights in land. (There was land reform for poor peasants, making them landowners, in Taiwan in the 1950s. Then the economic development began there.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill's_Methods#Joint_method_of...

AFTER EDIT: I posted hurriedly at first, having an appointment to get to. One other point, which generalizes to more parts of Africa and more parts of east Asia, is that for a given level of educational spending, many east Asian countries invested mostly in good-quality primary education for the masses, while many African countries set up a national university available only to an elite minority of the population. (And often enough, the national university graduates from African countries became part of the "brain drain" to other countries.) Raising the skill level of the masses diversifies the economy and makes even countries with very limited natural resources--of which Japan and Taiwan are noteworthy examples--able to develop through trade and transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy and then to a postindustrial economy. Few African countries have pursued a national education policy of broad primary education, those that have are among the African countries that are faring best.
I'm partial to my ergodox[1]. It does have blue switches, but if I decide I want to switch to clear I can do the swap myself.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/7245/ergodox-review-an-ergonom...
Bitcoin network just reached 1 PH/s
Ask HN: Inexpensive, small footprint Bluetooth 4.0 I/O?
What inexpensive and small Bluetooth 4.0 I/O boards do you recommend? Where to order from and what is their approx. shipping time?
> We're not going to nuke Tehran. Full stop.

It's not whether we are, it's whether they think we might.

> Even without nuclear arms, the Pentagon runs the largest and most lethal military force ever assembled in all of human existence

Well, not without nukes. I'd bet on Russia or China's nukes over the US conventional military any day.

> Also, how does having nuclear arms allow these countries to "dictate terms" to us our allies? What, sign this trade deal or we'll nuke you?

There's a quote about this from the 90's when we were trying to use our conventional military to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, something like "in the end, you care about Los Angeles a lot more than you care about Taipei". It means that the US can't just start a war with China or threaten them with nuclear attack because a state of MAD exists. And your solution is that we should empower China to threaten us? Because whether or not we have nuclear weapons, China still knows we care about Los Angeles more than Taipei.
Whoops, I used backticks instead of spaces to mark it as code.
But many engineers are choosing to do exactly that with their micro-startup idea vs work for that 0.05% equity slice. Start up recruiters have a hard time and have to compete against Google hours & compensation or engineers going into business for themselves.

On top of the equity slice can often disappear from a firing whim, since they often expire soon after you stop working for the company. On top of that many employees who leave startup's don't actually buy the options, as the founders of ESO fund found out.
Yes (ok) he talks about the concept of master/slave morality in Beyond Good and Evil but he talks about a lot of other stuff in that book. He also talks about it in Human, All Too Human and probably other places. I don't remember off the top of my head. But where he explores it at length is in On the Genealogy of Morals. The title's a bit of a giveaway. I've read Beyond Good and Evil a number of times, and I'm sure I'll read it many more times before my number is up, I don't need you to tell me that :-)

The only bit of Heidegger I'm going to read is his where he talks about technology. Other than that I'm going to give him a wide enough berth because I don't like his writing style. He can be as profound as he likes and he can destruct whatever ontologies he's into but after having flipped through a bit of Being and Time I have to say no thanks.

And in fairness destruktion is not de_construction_. You still haven't told me where to look it up though. Chapter and verse and all that, no?

edit: ok, so FreakLegion[1] hereabouts has some pointers and I used my Google-fu and got this[2] which looks helpful. But even that says that Derrida got inspiration but that the terms are not used in the same sense.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6390545

[2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/deconst/
Every time there's a discussion on estimation the Planning Fallacy is brought up as a kind of trump card.

But it's not. First, psychologists have done research on how to ameliorate it. See the "unpacking effect" paper I linked elsewhere. Kahneman and others have also pushed using "reference classes". In the estimation literature this is called "estimation by analogy" and it is a well-established technique.

Which reveals the next thing about the Planning Fallacy; it comes from the psychological literature. There are at least two other bodies of literature which need to be dealt with before we give up entirely. The first is ordinary project estimation literature; most of the advanced stuff is by people from the Operations Research field. The second is work done by Statisticians working on what they call forecasting which is essentially parametric estimation of timeseries data.

These 3 bodies of literature seem to have evolved largely in isolation. I haven't see OR papers talking about the psych research, I haven't seen the psychologists citing the International Journal of Forecasting and so on.
Why PHP and MySQL?

JavaScript, since it is the only thing that runs in the browser, is a much better choice since the barrier to building and maintaining a site isn't too far from the reach of a novice because only one Turing complete language is required.

With respect to MySQL. Given what WordPress does today and all the other options out there, is WordPress still the best tool for the job?

Why not Postgres or MariaDB? Or how about NoSQL options? Is there an option which would permit development to be just as easy, but that avoids the security complexity of a database exposed to code injections because it execute arbitrary code snippets?
I agree with you on the isolation point, though the original article is far from expressing that clearly. This isolation is perhaps part of the reason why so many literary scholars start to include more and more cultural studies, which is usually regarded as a route of the self-imposed solipsism of literary criticism. Cultural studies, then, allows for a more direct interaction (and questioning) of power structures, institutions, ontology, humanity and categories such as history.
That's only about $18/hour if you're working full time.
I keep a list of subjects for articles I want to write for the website.

One of them is "Why Research Is Almost Impossible To Estimate".
I'm perhaps unreasonably assuming a lack of a death wish.

Retaliatory attacks on the wrong nuclear power means you're now fighting a nuclear war against two nations. The first will likely still be striking you, and you'll likely get more cities slagged by the nation you've incorrectly gone to war with.

I also tend to assume D.C. is a highest priority target, so who knows what the political situation would be.
Microsoft wants to capture some of their dwindling browser share? This dumbass need to check the stats again...
"Most awkward"? Really? Its not nice and it definitely carries around some baggage that is a direct result of its evolutionary history, but there is always a way to get what you need. I won't defend its beauty. But i guess my questions to any WP vs. X questions would be - 1. Do you know what you need tomorrow? 2. Are you interested in getting it done or in the elegance of the solution.
So if you make money by teaching, is that commercial?

Non-commercial is a terrible term, because it's simply too vague. You can simply say "well, MS will use a bit of discretion, and not sue someone for a marginal infringement". But it does feel a little dodgy.
You can develop apps on the iphone?

Well, look at craigslist, freelancer websites and hustle hustle husetle.

You can sell your ability to those with an idea who are posting.

However, you will only be studying/schooling/working/looking for work. No GF/BF, not much social time.

Be a freelancer, and the future is in your hands.
> But how long does it take to climb a never-climbed mountain?

This estimate could be derived in a number of ways. By analogy to other mountains, by creating a statistical model of climbing time based on parameters like gradient and climber skill, or by aggregating expert judgements of the mountain's likely climbing time.

A better example of a difficult-to-estimate task was the Manhattan Project. How long would it take to build the first atomic weapon? That was a truly novel problem, insofar as it would require fundamental physics research to solve.

But almost none of our work is of that nature. To be sure, there are unexpected requirements and complexities, but we are almost never performing fundamental research to achieve our ends.
In fact people in many different walks of life are often incentivized to have herd behavior. I witnessed the same thing in medical research quite a bit.
Is the average criminal really twittering information about their crimes?

I submit this into evidence of rampant human stupidity: https://twitter.com/NeedADebitCard

Never underestimate what people will do to try and feel special in their tiny social spheres.
I'm a little amused by how you guys in the 'community' are so agitated because, as I see it, Fox is the only tv outlet that has given a damn to profile those of us who do what we do. props to the newscaster for at least trying. And the fact that we're all talking about it? proof that they've made an impact.
I'm curious how many folks have issues with WordPress from a pure user / author perspective so outside of how the code is written or a site is installed Also what are your thoughts on how responsive Automattic are to user feedback for publishers?
Norad is protected against a 30 megaton nuclear explosion. What level of protection do you need to be protected from the greatest conceivable explosion today? Do any facilities in the world meet the criteria for protection from a direct detonation of this magnitude? If not, what is the most fortified installation in the world and how close does it get to being protected from any conceivable attack today?
Do a lot of people continue to surf during the winter there, in wetsuits?
Yep, what a bunch of a-holes we look like for nit-picking here. I saw the video and actually thought she was kinda hot for making the effort.
What utter nonsense. "Hipster culture" is a myth, and a poorly defined one at that. The author does not seem to know to what he is objecting. Clearly it's not anything so-called hipsters do or wear, since that is apparently everything. And it's not the people themselves, since that apparently includes everyone, including himself. The word "hipster" needs a break so that it can come back some day and have real meaning again. In the meantime, we'll have pointless complaints like this one setting this phantom category up as a cultural bogeyman capable of "co-opting" literally anything.
>For what I lack in low-level understanding, I more than make up for it on a higher level. Ask me to build something as a whole, don't ask me to solve mathematics questions and other unrealistic junk questions.

Without the math, how do you know that your solutions are any good? How do you know that the algorithm you sketched out on the whiteboard will work on the 1,000,000 records that we have in production in addition to the 5 record toy example that you worked out?

I mean, sure, I agree that brainteasers are in appropriate. Knowing why manhole covers are round or how M&Ms get their candy shell tells me nothing about your programming ability. But basic math and algorithms? They're a lot more important than you think. Knowing Big-O notation, various kinds of basic algorithms and a good assortment of data structures lets me know that you can evaluate a solution and find potential flaws and bugs.

How is putting someone on the spot to build something and build it perfect a good test of their capabilities and skills?

There's a difference between perfect and working. I've never had an interviewer ask me for perfect code. Not at Amazon. Not at Google. Not at Facebook. I have, however, been asked for working code. The code doesn't need to be 100% bug free, but it should be syntactically correct and should solve the problem in a reasonable fashion (e.g. without using inordinate time or space).

Frankly, I like technical interviews a lot more than the alternative, which increasingly boils down to, "Make me a webapp and we'll evaluate your code." I'm sorry, but if I wanted to make a webapp for you on my own time, I also want to get paid for it. Even now, when I'm single and living alone, I have a hard time motivating myself to do homework problems. I can't imagine having to do something like that when I'm married and have children.
It's remarkably similar to how you get a job without a philosophy degree.
Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights
Check my http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com for starters.

Google "frugal living" etc too.
Russell Brand and the GQ awards: 'It's amazing how absurd it seems'
This is really important because as the world falls apart around you, you don't know if your OTC derivatives happen to be based indirectly and at least in part on some other failing financial institution.

This is simply incorrect. The cash flows involved in an OTC derivative are explicitly stated in the contract itself.

I imagine that the complicitness of the rating agencies in the whole thing never would have even gotten so egregious if most institutions had vanilla instruments on their books that were straight forward to value. OTC derivatives made it very easy to hide finagling...

You imagine incorrectly. Pricing most of these contracts is 8'th grade math given a specific scenario - fancy math comes into play only in estimating the probabilities of each scenario. In principle, the pricing formula is this:

price = P(housing goes down) x BIG LOSS + P(housing goes up) x MODERATE GAIN

That's the price, regardless of whether it's a straightforward vanilla mortgage or a fancy synthetic CDO.
The ratings agencies, banks and government all assigned a very low value to P(housing goes down). Using vanilla instruments doesn't change this basic calculation.
> I usually estimate that writing the code is anywhere from 10-20% of completing the project.

McConnell's book has a really excellent table of items that are left out of estimates. Nuts-and-bolts things like "API documentation", "deployment scripts", "status emails" and so on.

> This still leaves a lot of bugs.

Right. The classical software engineering theory is to build multiple quality gates and to study them for defects yielded. I recall that inspection stomps everything else; automatic testing came second.

The problem of time-to-fix is subtly different from time-to-release, though. Software with known defects is regularly in use.
This sounds pretty neat; a handful of modest little adjustments that could prevent a lot of headaches. Being able to instantly take Colemak with me to any computer would be amazing (although carrying a keyboard around everywhere I use a computer sounds iffy).

Now I've said some positive things, so I'm going to nitpick. This is HN, after all.

The first thing that stands out to me is that it doesn't seem like a lot of attention has been paid to ergonomic details. The lowest hanging fruit here, which I've never seen in any keyboard, is to put feet on the side toward the user. In almost all cases, the way I've seen people's desks set up is such that there is no way for them to have a neutral wrist position (wrists not bending up). Worse yet, keyboards invariably have those little feet on the back, and people assume they should use them, which causes them to bend their wrists up even more. Ideally, a keyboard would let you fine tune its slope so that you can set it up exactly to your needs, although I have no idea how you would build that conveniently.

The second nitpick is with something Atwood says on the linked page:

> Nothing lets you get your thoughts out of your brain and into words faster and more efficiently than a well made keyboard.

Technically that is true, in the sense that a stenotype is technically a keyboard. But the reason I'm picking this nit is that as someone who has made it a side quest to find something better than a standard computer keyboard, this is a bit of a sore spot for me. The minimum you have to be able manage on a stenotype to be a court reporter is 225 wpm for live testimony. That's a $50k/year job where a requirement is typing faster than the all time world record for a typewriter-style keyboard.

That's a phonetic system, and it's not immediately obvious how to untangle all of the issues with making it work with programming. On the other hand, there's Veyboard, which is non-phonetic and more flexible, and seems like it could be used for programming in its current state. It's slower than stenotype, but far faster than a traditional keyboard.

My point is that it irks me that we have so many people typing so much and getting injured, and not much focus seems to be going into adopting a better, radically different approach. We have a handful of very expensive hardware options intended for specialized markets, and we have Plover[1] (nothing similar exists that I know of for emulating a Veyboard), and that's about it. And on the mass market side, we have less expensive, specially designed ergonomic traditional keyboards based mostly on shakily researched principles.

Would it necessarily help with RSI just to increase typing speed? That needs to be tested. But it seems likely that if you reduce the amount of time spent typing, you'll reduce the amount of damage.

[1]http://plover.stenoknight.com/
People would be better off if they consumed less news and more ideas
In OTC trading by definition you know who your counter party is since you called them on the phone or they called you. What you are really trying to say is that you had no idea whether they had an off setting contract or if they were taking the other side of your position directly. I am not sure the exchange system we have for derivatives now has made things any better.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/xhroot/world.html

Happy?
>I'd be interested in some supporting documentation for your claim.

No offense, but it starts with having an understanding of what a derivative is and how they are used. There is nothing sinister about them in any fashion, nor were they the "cause" of anything. The mainstream, as usual, has it wrong.

At the base level, excessive risk was the problem, and because derivatives employ leverage, that risk is amplified.
Does that really matter? At least it's something.
AirBnB Releases First Television Ad
Anecdote: the Wake Forest University career-services department was not of very much use finding a job programming computers in 2007. A job ad from the (now-defunct) "Hidden Network" on the side of http://thedailywtf.com, though, was incredibly useful. Your mileage may vary. :P
What are the reasons? They'd want to be pretty good ones :-)
Uber Partners with SF Tamale Lady to Offer Free Delivery on Hot Tamales
Betting Against Tesla? Be Prepared to Lose