skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And it could be just as violent even if it's was a 1/10 of the current size.

While the number of people actively shooting other people is in relative terms small, to the extent it does happen, it happens because we have a large enough force to occupy other countries and make the absolute numbers pretty high. For example, almost half the active military from 2002-2005 was at one point deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan [1]. We just couldn't have had those wars without 1/10th the military without significantly changing how we wage war. At some level, it's possible that we could be equally violent with a tiny fraction of the military manpower and budget, and the same is true of, say, the Netherlands. But it would be wildly impractical, so in practice countries like the Netherlands don't do it. We're violent because our budget makes being violent easy for us.

> Most of the money goes toward hardware, which means engineers, construction, and the like

I need to be convinced of two things there. First, that it's actually true. The two largest categories (which together make up a solid majority) are "Operations and maintenance" and "Military personnel" [2]. I don't understand what's in that first category, but since there are separate categories for procurement, R&D, and construction, it's not those (education does presumably fall under "military personnel"). (In general, I've always found good numbers on exactly how the military spends its money hard to come by.)

And second, I'm very skeptical that as far as job programs go, the military is a very good one compared to other ways of spending that money. To begin with, the military doesn't create nearly as many useful things. Designing and building bombers might have ancillary positive effects in terms of R&D and employment, but the bombers themselves are only useful for bombing, and mostly just sit around and being ready to bomb things. But what if we made really fancy civilian aircraft instead? It would have those effects and we'd end up with all these really useful planes! Similarly, a lot of the infrastructure the military builds is in far-away countries, or is of transient or at least limited use. Soldiers are getting paid and engineers are building, but they're not really adding much value. Compare that to building bridges or researching solar panel technology.

Next, the primary reason for having make-work programs is that the people receiving all the money are also consumers, meaning the money is fed back into the economy and stimulating further economic activity. The military is terrible at that because a lot of the money is actually spent overseas developing other country's economies.

All of that is to say: assuming we want to spend a few billion dollars on construction, training, R&D, and personnel, why do we prefer to spend through the military instead through other stuff? My guess is that we do it that way because we've always done it that way, and not because it's optimal or even rational.

[1] http://usmilitary.about.com/od/terrorism/a/deploymentrates.h...
[2] http://medillonthehill.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/DOD-Bu...
PHP Is Not Dead
The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome
"bawbag" is a Scottish brand of designer shorts - it is also a term of endearment between strangers in Scotland, so when meeting someone new it is traditional to shout "Hey ye big bawbag!".
> I envy people who regularly get tired in the evening rather than waking up and wanting to do stuff when the rest of the world shuts down.

Here's some more from my personal experience (not saying it would work for any of you, and it appears you've already tried a few times):

fwiw, I rarely am tired in the evenings, I just decide that it's reasonable to go to bed now. Similar about food, I do it more to keep my machine working, not because I'm hungry. Sometimes I pull a late-nighter because I'm sucked into something, but getting up the next morning is harder (the "blerch" [1] is louder) so that sucks.

Every time my alarm goes off in the mornings (fun fact: the alarm sound is "Gonna Fly Now" from Rocky :-) there's a few minutes where my inner "blerch" tries to convince me to stay in bed. Every time. I force myself to walk the stairs and down a glass of tomato juice, and in almost an instant, am up and running.

I don't think that it being really easy is the point here. And part of me always wants to stay up long and nerd around. For me, taking control, getting over that hump is never easy and takes a good bit of discipline, for the lack of a better word. I did find that getting up in the mornings and stopping to code/paint/play games a bit earlier before getting tired gets easier with time.

[1] where I got that "blerch" word from: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/running
The compile times for things of similar complexity to the running example in this presentation are pretty much negligible. If you haven't given it a try recently you really should.
I want to also add that older guys can do a better job managing people, because they are normally less emotional and better communicators (something at which i really suck). So if any of these guys manage to grow out of coders' pants i will find him a suitable use, too.
On HN, it's an item of debate. HN is the only place I've ever had to explain that a quasi-military benevolent dictatorship is an incredibly wonderful idea and would be great for installing if only we could trust anyone who was actually part of it.

Which is why HN is a really bad place for political articles. HN attracts people who believe in momentous change, rather than incremental change: no matter how many times it's pounded in that startups aren't a get-rich-quick scheme, you still have people who think that their big idea is going to make them the CEO of the next Internet giant.
Thanks!
It's primarily intended as a quick, at a glance conversion tool, like for shopping abroad or to get a sense of what they mean when foreign units are used in films, books and recipies.

It also has a precision mode to get exact values, though google and other apps are quicker for just that.
If InkFilepicker is down again there is always a choice
Let’s explain the “why” instead of the “how
Paid Apps are a Ponzi Scheme
Fair reply. The discussion so far seems to have hit the usual HN extreme where any trace of impropriety (and thus, arguably, humanity) must be purged from job postings in favor of dry job requirements, lest someone feel ostracized.

For the record, I'd love to work in a company where beer, ping pong and pizza are perks as long as these were done well, instead of just being an obligation. Guess this makes me a "brogrammer" :)
1) I think the responsiveness of Microsoft Office is largely from using appropriate APIs. LibreOffice is ultimately based on StarOffice, and StarOffice was the worst office program I've ever tried. It dragged its own OS platform on top of whatever OS it was installed on, and it was slow and buggy. LibreOffice is heaps better now, and it's improving fast, but it still suffers from the legacy.

2) I don't see the need to slavishly follow Excel conventions, but I don't know of any evidence that Samsung would be a good lead developer of any software. Be that as it may, Samsung is free as anybody else to contribute to the LibreOffice project.
Rethinking JavaScript’s Try/Catch
Google Analytics in iOS applications
Beside Flurry analytics, Keen IO, App Annie and other existing solutions for tracking activities from your applications, Google Analytics probably will take top position in this competition. In this short tutorial i’ll show up steps for importing google analytics sdk, initializing tracker and logging custom events in application.
I like this - great design. Downloading it as we speak. Har du noen andre apper?
Yep, can confirm too. Those bright coloured Nokias are easy to spot and I saw a lot more of them over the summer.
MIT: A Google Glass App Knows What You're Looking At
Letter to a Young (Or New) Programmer
Oh, I agree with you on that; it's just that, when the program is closed source, it is already a big enough reason to dismiss it.

"It's open source, therefore trustworthy" is not valid, I agree. But "it is closed source, therefore untrustworthy" is valid, and that's what most people are saying.
and the supermarkets, and the retail malls
Web Application to convert Java code to Scala
Takk! Dette er første app.
Do you support SVN? If not, why not?
Multipath TCP: Siri's new toy isn't a game-changer
> sorry about "old man"

No worries. I didn't take it personally, but it was kind of a "what kind of argument is that?" moment.

I generally don't think of FUD as an "old man" argument (more like a "man keeping you down" kind of thing ;-), and not really very applicable to a venerable and pervasive language like JavaScript, though I guess Node is newish (and ironically the JavaScript environment I'm most familiar with).

> "Some kid" clearly was directed at me as a person.

I think if you look carefully at the thread, you'll see that the "old man gripes" comment unfortunately presented you as a petulant child and provoked an anti-ageism response from jbooth, which ultimately ended in the "some kid" comment.

I don't think jbooth was trying to make a technical argument at that point; it was indeed personal, and an empty ad hominem, but you unintentionally opened the door for that. Something to keep in mind when processing his comments.
For the ASMR there is also the curated site http://www.soothetube.com/

I also like to listen to rain/thunderstorms which I find relaxing. Hope that helps.
Nothing of the sort, all in all, Flex is indeed a great platform. The sad reality is that it only runs on a crappy, obsoleted runtime (Flash) so it is not useful for most web development, but otherwise everything he says is true.

For a web app (RIA) I would pick Flex or Silverlight any day over the whole HTML mess if they would only run properly in all browsers, desktop and mobile.
By the way, are vector files hardware accelerated on mobile devices, usually ?
I just realized something.

The complex PSF isn't important for camera applications because the complex field carries the transparency information. I don't want to see transparent things with my camera.
I share your sense of not replaying the negatives, I let those go long before she passed. What about the good memories? Those are the ones I want to re-live. I want to replay the highs, the wild times, the experiences we had with and of each other. She has the other half of all the memories we created together. If I forget something, she is not there to remind me, and if I no longer have anything else to remind me, that memory can potentially be lost forever. Her social media disappearing just made this effect worse...
The magazine Economist is part owned by the Rotschild banking family and it's reporters are attending Bilderberg meetings every year. Articles in the news paper are not signed so you do not know who wrote them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-03/full-list-2013s-bil...

Loan to deposit ratios, look at the furthest to the left.
Danskebank, SHB, Nordea, SEB are banks operating in Sweden.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-25/complete-and-very-d...

If you want to know more about how the FED was started
"The creature from Jekyll island"
http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm
This method tries to correct specific lens errors. To do this, you need very good intensity resolution. If you have poor intensity resolution, information is lost and the lens errors cannot be corrected anymore. In low light, the signal to noise ratio will lead to poor intensity resolution, and the lens errors become irreversible.

A better sensor will only get you so far; since light is quantized (a ray consists of individual photons), there are physical limits to the intensity resolution possible at low light.

Once information is lost, there is no way to recover it. And that's why you just can't make up for a crappy lens with sofware.
> or more commonly lack of interest in learning how the admin UI works.

If this is even possible, the admin UI is not usable enough. "Man, I wouldn't have to use this ridiculous XML configuration system, if only I had the patience to slog through this UI. Alas..."
This is consistent with product launches... Blackberry released the Z10 smartphone in May 2013. The Statcounter data tracks usage, which would plausibly go up quite a bit with new users on a phone with more fully-featured internet access.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Z10
Word2vec in Python, Part Two: Optimizing
> provide out-of-date information that otherwise appears to be authoritative

That's a good point. USDA data influences the financial markets in a big way all around the globe.

It's completely reasonable for them to not want to run such a critical site without anyone minding the store.
Your corporate network is compromised: are your internal apps ready for attack?
Dutchman here. Most designers use MacOsX here. Developers go with Windows. Design-savy or iOS developers use both.
One sad aspect of this is that it won't have any effect on the income of the involved politicians.
Ask HN: SELinux, opinions?
SELinux was developed primarily by NSA and I remember back in the day I had a distaste for using it just because of that fact. It was a huge code-base with hooks all over the place for various modules, just didnt sit right with security - minimize LOC and exposure. Instead I chose grsecurity and RBAC.

What is the opinion today, is SELinux preferred over alternatives such as Tomoyo?
>Because of the way co-pays and deductibles work, you have to be in the top 10% or maybe 15% of health care spenders before you even break even with what you've paid in on a Bronze plan (by far the most popular self-purchased plan).

The nature of catastrophic events are that they are rare... and catastrophic. If buying insurance protects me from an event that would have otherwise pushed me into bankruptcy 10 or 15% of the time, that sounds like a pretty okay deal, I mean, depending on how much that insurance costs. But if an event that could bankrupt me did have something like a 1 in 10 chance of happening, and I could insure against it? Yeah, I think I'd look into that.

(Add to this the perception that you get different treatment when you show up to the hospital without insurance.)

Now, I don't know that's how the numbers work out... it sounds like you pulled 10-15% out of total healthcare costs, and I didn't see any reference for that number. just saying, the point of catastrophic injury insurance isn't to 'break even' - the point of that insurance is to not be bankrupt when that catastrophic event happens.

Further, we're talking about entrepreneurs here; a special case of folks who often don't have insurance even when they have income that would normally come with insurance, so the fact that most people are going to go for the super high deductible plan isn't all that relevant to the discussion. My understanding is that the affordable care act would enable me to purchase a full freight health plan, assuming I could pay, without worrying about pre-existing conditions (which have prevented me from doing that in the past.)

I mean, I think contractors, really, more than Entreprenuers are the big winners here. At this point, I've got employees and a group plan, so I'm in okay shape. But, this would have saved me from spending as much time in W2 jobs as I did when I was contracting; Generally, I'd go a year or two as a contractor, then spend a year or so as a W2 to top up my cobra.
No, they can't keep the whole 20 billion as profit. They still have to pay for administration, marketing, etc.
As someone who has worked on Open Source in France I think this is big for another reason. It might lead to a nice push of Linux in Africa (specifically through the African Union). Many of the French speaking countries look at France for "tech trends" etc.

Microsoft is following an interesting strategy in Africa. basically the MS-whatever certificates are cheap and widespread (and nonauthorized copies of Windows are tolerated) which leads to IT guys wanting Windows. I always thought that was strange and Linux should be much stronger in Africa :)
Code Keyboard Hands On
Are the health care reforms really that scary to those who lobby the Republicans?
Your App is also mentioned a lot in the world of InDesign users looking to create interactive e-books. The HTML5 import of InDesign works well Hype. Hype was mentioned just last week at the Adobe User Event I helped set up. These people are designers, not programmers and your App can really help them. #eyeopener
NASA is almost completely shutting down. They are all essential. Essential and non-essential are simply legal terms that define who gets a paycheck during such fiascoes. We have huge datacenters that are mostly (there's going to be one guy who runs through checking for any emergencies such as water leaks etc) unmanned now and there is no climate science being done. They are essential but are being furloughed anyway.

'Essential', in many cases, mainly means emergency personnel who keep the facilities safe. Important work has stopped.
The Wikipedia article explains it well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdown
Sounds typical that society is figuring this out right about at the end of the era of desktop computers.
I did some testing of my graphic card using WebGL on Chrome (windows 8 and ubuntu 12.04 13.10 and Fedora 19 (64bits) ) and what i can tell you is that performance on Windows is better for at least 30% than on any linux distro (i'm sure its more but lets say its 30%). I've used amd propriety drivers on each linux distro (latest beta) and latest catalyst drivers for windows.

My laptop is HP 4720s with i5 CPU and Radeon Mobility 6300 series with 1gb dedicated memory.

Another thing is that most of major open source web developer tools used on Linux got their windows versions (plenty of WAMP packages, eclipse, vim etc)

I might be one of the few people here that likes Windows 8 new interface. Its fast and running apps is just blazing fast. You press Win key and start typing apps name (almost identical like on gnome or unity).

Also one more thing, Microsoft with windows so far is the only one succeeded to create same interface for PCs, tablets and phones (canonical is trying with Unity but i'm not sure it will do anything usable any time soon).

So why all this hate for Windows ?? Price ? I'm not buying it that price of windows is main problem,
most people spend more money on games (much more money).

Linux is open source ? Like Ace Ventura like to say Rheaaallllyyy? So what? How many of you give a fuck about that ? How many of you write software and sell it ? (most of you I'm sure, be it web service or mac apps or iPhone apps or android apps, so you say you care about open source ?)

Security could be, but i don't trust to anything that is connected on internet, anything that is man made can be broken and cracked its just lack of the will to do so :) and popularity of OS itself. If Linux was popular like windows you really think that viruses and other crap would not float around internet?

There is so many advantages of windows over Linux that's just insane. I'm not saying that there is no Linux advantages over Windows but i think more things from windows miss on Linux than other way around.

I am not in any way involved with Microsoft and this is my personal opinion!

Thank you for reading :)

Bye
There needs to be more anything actually, as there seems to be nothing except an image of (an app on an) iphone and a link to download something from the app store.
Apple Smartwatch to Have Flexible Screen
It's just my laymans explanation of how you won't, personally, see a benefit. I've never had a company send me a check except as a refund. Usually the reductions are rolled into the next cycle. But if they are mailing checks that is even better.
I don't understand. I am self-employed and I have insurance....I just go buy it online.
> I don't think I ever caught myself writing code for my employer and thinking "hey, I really enjoy this"

If you've never really enjoyed your job I can't fathom how it's taken you so long to realise this isn't for you.
Please, dear future Hacker News submitters, edit those dumbed-down public press release titles and add some actual information. The "household plastic ingredient" they found is (mono)propylene, which is quite interesting!
Elegant WebSockets for your Flask apps
That is not the grand-daddy of the genre.

This is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
Is there a writeup of your 'failed LibreOffice roll-out' anywhere? I love reading the details of that kind of thing and I'm sure others do too.
And an awesome example of unintended consequences. Now the only way to increase your profit as a insurance company is to spend more - so there is no incentive for them to bring the costs they pay down.

Writing laws that mess with markets without just making everything worse is _hard_.
is it free?
How To Make Money With The Blog Beast Mobile App
Well you have the same problem if the company that supplies the proprietary software goes out of business except that you are usually just flat out screwed. Granted it's unlikely that someone like Microsoft will go out of business anytime soon (but then again I'd say it's also fairly unlikely that Ubuntu disappears anytime soon and even that would leave you with a fallback option of other, similar Linux distros).

If say Windows XP just gets phased out on you that's not exactly cause for celebration either. And of course there's also the advantage that you can at least theoretically check most of the source code of Linux which is probably somewhat relevant in a government setting (a potential NSA cooperation of Microsoft says hi)
What am I missing? Is this Google Answers under a new name?
An answer to the question "What is Google Baraza?":

http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=3084c339e2379cf8
Better Than Kittens
This is exactly how I describe my sleep pattern. I just don't feel like my body has a 24 hour cycle. I'd probably be awake 20 hours and sleep 7 hours, and would end up shifting my schedule by 3 hours a day if there were no external factors (sun, work, etc).
They have also liberalized the insurer market, so instead of 1-3 insurers per state you can choose one from CA, NY, or TN. If you get insurance through work it is up to HR to find the best rate. If you go alone you can use the exchanges.
"What is Google Baraza?"

"I am a member of the Google Baraza team. One of Google’s goals in Africa is to make the internet more locally relevant and bring more people online. One of the challenges of the internet in Africa is that there is a lack of local content online. At Google, we find that users search for information about local businesses, entertainment, health, etc but often don’t find it because the information is not yet available online. In order to help bring more local content online, Google engineers have created Baraza to allow people in countries across Africa to ask questions and post answers to questions from others.

Here are some quick tasks to try out

- Answer a question on your favorite topic - Find a question by browsing labels (e.g.,"Programming & Design") or Search (e.g., "Economics")

- Ask a question that you have been wondering about
[...]"
http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=3084c339e2379cf8
"One of Google’s goals in Africa is to make the internet more locally relevant and bring more people online. One of the challenges of the internet in Africa is that there is a lack of local content online. At Google, we find that users search for information about local businesses, entertainment, health, etc but often don’t find it because the information is not yet available online. In order to help bring more local content online, Google engineers have created Baraza to allow people in countries across Africa to ask questions and post answers to questions from others."

http://www.google.com/baraza/en/thread?tid=3084c339e2379cf8
I'm just learning Scala (and don't know Java), but seeing as Scala is built on top of Java, what is the value of this tool?

That may be valuable to say on the page Shekhar.