skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"he began punching numbers to calculate the probability of such a catastrophe (...)

Hellman estimated these numbers:

Rate of initiating events: six percent per year

Probability that an initiating event leads to a major crisis: 33 percent

Probability that a major crisis leads to the use of a nuclear weapon: 10 to 50 percent

The third probability is hardest to estimate because we have yet to drop a bomb on Russia (or vice versa)."

Very impressive calculations

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/384/
I've spent 3 months using Vim exclusively, and ~4 months with Emacs. They both have their strengths, but the multi cursor plugins for both are vastly inferior to Sublime.

Vim and Emacs both represent a significant investment of time. They have a lot of difficult to remember commands, and require a lot of configuration to get something usable. Sublime Text is drop-dead simple, and is very usable right out of the box. I've switched entirely to Emacs, and I'm happy with the change, but I spend 90% of my time writing code. The equation is going to be different for a front-end developer who spends most of their time in Photoshop, etc.
I had a quotation for a 500 GB HD recovery a few months back, it was 400 euros (France).
It was a flat rate, problem could be the controller or mechanical : same price.
But I guess it depends on the company, didn't try it anyway so I dont know if it was reliable or not (no BTC on this drive!).
There's lots of ways to damage the platters, at which point the data probably won't justify exotic recovery methods.

For a drive with bitcoin on it, just move the coins to new addresses before disposing of it.
I have also heard/read about a few people doing this.

If I remember correctly, you need a special tool to pick the platters up out of the drive without rotating them, but aside from that just a new controller/assy.
I like the bit in US elections where you don't vote for a president, but instead vote for people who promise to vote for the candidate you like, but do not actually have to. I have never been able to understand that.
I've always read the advice as advice for readability. It's just text -- even in ancient times the bandwidth savings were not huge -- text does compress rather well.

[edit: This entire discussion is now at roughly 7K, or 3351 bytes after gzip (this is copy pasted, not the html) -- that's 89 seconds at 300 baud if I do the math correctly.

By comparison, my original reply was 166 bytes and compressed to 146 -- so would download in a fraction of a second. But note how poor the compression ratio is. Still doubt this was born out of a quest to save bandwidth (as most(?) were batch up/downloading discussion-lists at the time. And 300 baud is roughly typing speed -- that's a long time ago.]
> Too bad this didn't happen before the elections happened. Not that I wanted Romney to win, but at the very least it would've forced the Democratic party to offer some candidates, too, and with any luck, actual changes to NSA spying would've arrived earlier, if it would've been a major issue during the campaign, when everyone is watching the debates.

As a non-American, I don't see why the Republicans wouldn't do their best to pretend mass surveillance wasn't a problem, considering that they started it in the first place.
So it's contenteditable, except with a twist! It now comes with Google Analytics tracking!
Thanks, I hadn't really heard about this. Although at current btc prices, it might actually just be cheaper for me to claim them as "lost" on my taxes than try and recover them
A lot of the time pair programming and code reviews could be simply automated, which I find infinitely more efficient. If it can't be automated that may be a sign of a bad architecture/tooling.
Open it, take the disc out and microwave it.
Well there's another funny one, pedant. Champagne is produced in a specific region of France, and in most parts of the world, when you buy it, it comes from there.

Except the US... where they've decided they can make their own Champagne despite none of the product having touched the ground in that region of France.
Android emulator SQLite database location
6 attempts a second on a high end i7 is as good as it gets. If you don't remember 90% of it then the coins are lost.
My New Year's Resolution: A Random Book per Week
With that if statement, does it first assign the value of db.getNextResult() and then check the elt.shouldProcess variable to see if it is true or false, or does it firstly check to see if elt.shouldProcess is true or false and then load the next result from the database?
The 10 Dumbest Crowdfunded Projects of 2013
Yeah, the price of tuna is a terrible measure of inflation. Those fishy stocks are finite and we're approaching the pointy end.
Awesome. I have a little regret that I wasn't brave enough to sell at $1000. But then I'd have to decide when to buy and I'd probably chicken out and already buy for something like 800$. And I'd be risking the scenario I'm most afraid of that I get stuck without bitcoins and I can buy much less of them because the prize never goes below for what I sold them.
Want 30 days of free agile coaching? Help me on my project and it`s yours.
Oh geez, have upworthy-style "this guy" headlines come to HN?
I would be shocked if Apple sockets the CPU, they haven't done that in their other Macs for years, why would this one be any different?
> limited to the Chinese market only

yeah, limited to $9 Trillion, 9% growth Chinese market and the economies that sell into it such as anyone in the entire world.
> And Netscape (Mozilla's grandaddy) tried it with Javascript.

> You know, the then proprietary to their browser technology that we now use as a standard. What "works best in X" can eventually be an adopted standard given time.

While true, everyone agrees that was the wrong way to go and suggesting that we repeat that mistake is... a mistake.
What is computing really good for?
Sure it has made life more convenient, but has it made us more content.

Or was the great intent for us to simply do more and more?

I really don't know anymore. You?
The above is true because it is defined to be true. The meaning of the material conditional (i.e. "->") might itself produce some surprising results for anyone attempting to intuitively equate it with the English word "implies". Interestingly, there is still a lot of debate about how the material conditional should be used to model certain aspects of reality (or at least our statement about said reality).

So for example, if we're attempting to model a causal chain, we might apply the modus ponens inference rule to deduce the truthfulness of your above proposed statement. But the inference rule is itself an axiom and there's no reason why we can't define a system of logic where it does not hold.

Would that system of logic be useful in modeling reality? It very well may be for modelling some aspects of reality.

Is it possible to definitively say that there is a "Logic" that exists apart from logical systems. I'm not sure how you could define the former without the latter. As a result, this sounds somewhat akin to the classical Greek belief that the universe fundamentally consists of numbers and is probably more of a philosophical statement than anything else.
This is a fantastic book!
The market rose from $500 to $540, so that means I've earned back $474! And since my last edit was an hour ago, that must mean I'm earning $474/hr writing HN comments in my pajamas!

Your sense of humor is worth its weight in gold. I've just bookmarked your comment as a reminder of "survivorship bias," how people can look back at any arbitrarily chosen period of their lives as evidence of their successful reasoning and planning.

Yeah, being a bit older than most participants here and remembering earlier gold booms and busts, and earlier technology stock booms and busts, and so on, means that I'm a bit less excited at each new Best New Hack Ever™ that comes along. Hot-blooded younger people will continue to ignore me, but that too has happened often enough in the past that I don't let it get to me. Good luck in building your product. I'll be glad to buy new products built by young people as they gain wisdom.

To all our friends here: "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent"[1] is still good investment advice.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes#Attributed
That's interesting; I wonder how they pulled that off?

Producers from other regions of France produce wines that are almost identical to true champagne, but they cannot call it that.

They used to print on their bottles that their wines were made according to the "champagne process" (méthode champenoise) but were eventually barred from saying even that (which is crazy, since it's all but true).

They now say they use the "traditional process" (méthode traditionnelle) and I think everyone knows what it means.

It could be fun to import US-made champagne in France and continue to call it champagne. But as a rule, foreign-grown wines are hard to find in France.
>> The truth is that real privacy will in fact get more people killed, in the short run, because yes it makes operations easier for the Bad Guys. I'm okay with that, because I'm more worried about a tyrannical government, and We are bigger than the Bad Guys. But I'm not sure the electorate sees it my way.

Yep. It's no different than regular crime. We could prevent all crime if the state handcuffed every single citizen. Done! Yay! Whoops, except we destroyed what we meant to protect: life and liberty.

That's what surveillance is doing now. It destroys freedom of speech, freedom to gather peacefully, freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances (how can you investigate government wrongdoing if they're tapping your phone?), all to (possibly) mitigate the already-small risk of being blown up by loonies.
> I've tried pair programming myself and it was completely inefficient when we tried it

Or: I've tried Vim and my writing/editing speed halved. Or: I tried APL but it took me half a day to write one line of code. Or: I tried playing guitar and it sounded horrible.

I get the feeling that maybe the outcome would be different if you'd try doing it for a while longer. No guarantees, though.
Drive a few nails through the case, it's fun and destructive! When drives were much larger, we used to take them apart, use the platter for mirrors/silly decorations and the magnets to magnetize tools around the office.
This feels like moving the problem from one bucket to another.

Instead of crappy specs you end up with crappy tests.

the issue is always the inability of the business to define the process - in particular the edge cases but even then sometimes the focus is on the edge cases and the mainstream improperly defined as a consequence.

Gotta keep looking for solutions though...
"(NSA) The US govt. does have a cyber intelligence agency which is capable of infiltrating hostile nations computer systems and figuring out where exactly missiles are being kept."

I wonder to which extent this is true.
> The system runs at around 350 degrees Celsius (662 degrees Fahrenheit) at a pressure of around 3,000 PSI, combining processes known as hydrothermal liquefaction and catalytic hydrothermal gasification.

I wonder what it the energy ROI of the whole process. It is not mentioned in the article, so it is not sure it is positive.
Wait for a year. Two years. Three years.
Ask HN: What stake should I have in a company when I'm developing for free?
I've been working on a website for some guys I know based on an idea they had. The premise was that I do it for free and I get to own part of the business when it goes live.

Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing? What % of ownership should I have?

This is not my idea, but I've spent 100's of hours developing their site for them while I've been on break from study.
It's neat, but their snow looks more like old heavy snow than recent powder.
Heh. Welcome to Canada, UK, and Australia.
Extremely cool images! I found myself looking for the BT Tower in London... it took me a minute or so to get my bearings and realise that that's where the pictures must have been taken from!
Show HN: Spark - 37Signals Campfire client now available in Windows Store
Because you cannot treat a humanitarian issue without considering the humane aspects of it. As you said, your 'model' needs to consider the humane aspects of the problem at hand. We're dealing with humans, so it sort of by definition of the term requires a humane approach. That humane approach is about understanding how the system as a whole affects all parties involved in it and their motives for their actions.

The de facto situation in a worryingly large portion of people involved in debate about these topics is that it's not humanised to them, because it's at arm's length and they don't see it happen or feel any effect from it. It's no different to why seeing video footage of some atrocity is far more shocking than reading about it in a paper. That's why stuff like the OP and the link I posted is important - it's the next closest thing to shoving someone there themselves.

Think of the OP as a laywer dogfooding the judicial system he helps operate.

As an aside, there was a series on TV here a while ago called "Go Back to Where You Came From" [1]. It took a bunch of people, including some prominent anti-asylum political commentators and actually took them over to Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Congo, etc. and showed them first-hand what life is like for the people fleeing these places. Unsurprisingly, their reaction to it in person was markedly different to their reaction to it when they're sitting in an office at home reading about it in a paper.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Back_To_Where_You_Came_From
Right, it was my understanding anyway that it was pretty simple to turn any kind of biological into oil, but the issues were energy efficiency, and scaling the process up.
Cool site. I would love see an animation of number 30! :)
I'm creator of Spark app (http://codefather.io/spark/) - 37Signals Campfire chat client for Windows (8.1)

IMHO it's one of the best Campfire clients out there (iOS, and Android included). I've put a lot effort into creating it and really hope users will enjoy it as I do.

Feedback welcomed.
Tadek
Also helps wearing your joints.
You must have grown up with snow. My thoughts exactly. It fell into the uncanny valley for me... Sort of close, but then off in unnerving ways.

Great work for where they got to, but it's not quite right yet.
Please spare us the lecture on what an investor should and should not do. What someone does with their money is their choice and the consequences of what happens with that money is their consequence.
That's actually the new security model that Metro apps use. They are sandboxed by default with a declarative privileges model. I think its called AppContainer?

Here's a blog post:
http://recxltd.blogspot.com/2012/03/windows-8-app-container-...
The Logging Olympics: A Race Between Today’s Top 5 Logging Frameworks
The "journal" Medical Hypotheses in that period was a complete piece of crap, with no effective peer review.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/is-there-a-rol...

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100318/full/news.2010.132.ht...

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/05/medical-hy...

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/05/medical-hy...

See also

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1465503

a comment by another Hacker News participant with strong understanding of human physiology.
The problem being that "more possible futures" doesn't actually learn any specific function or direct actions towards a specific goal.
>remembering earlier gold booms and busts, and earlier technology stock booms and busts

A favourite pass-time of mine is reading old business and financial newspapers. I remember vividly the bubbling joy and aching pain I felt as the EU and European Monetary Union came together, as in the shining future The Economist saw for the citizens of 1920.

That juxtaposition of exuberant optimism and the knowledge of cold reality has been a good template for walking through possible outcomes as if they are known eventualities. The process tends to leave one considerably soberer than at the start.
> Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it?

Do they now? As far as I've managed to figure out, gmail has a broken conversation view that only works half the time, and then there's sup -- any other email clients that do a good enough job of threading quoted conversations?

I agree in principle -- fix the software -- but that implies fixing the protocol first -- and we haven't done that yet. XMPP does a little something to help (for conversations) -- but isn't a suitable solution for email-like functionality.

I'd love to be wrong -- but I've yet to use any email client that has decent "smart" threading of conversations (I don't use sup -- as of yet anyway).
I would say split it with all of them IF you're in it together and they start to work with the site now (marketing and so on).
Nobody find it strange when most countries elect prime ministers that way.
[Competition] Win 1 of 3 copies of iOS 7 Programming Cookbook
I just went through exactly this train of thought, except I caught myself before posting :)

Honestly, I have no idea why this is on HN.
While I certainly agree with the author that this isn't good treatment at the hands of an airline, let alone a flag carrier, I'm confused as to why this has been a) submitted to Hacker News and b) seems to have received 7 votes.
Someone explain how this is different to pyCon's well received feminist lounges?

Safe(r) space + discussion of issues.
What's not to like.
If you're considering tossing the drive, please consider mailing it to my address instead so that I can try my hand at recovering the bitcoins. I can cover shipping costs. I'll email you in case you're interested.
The algae->oil part of the process necessarily loses energy, so it all comes down to the process of turning sun into algae. Which is not itself very efficient, but may be cheaply scalable.

I think if you just care about renweable EROI and not about storage in convenient petrol form then wind and solar are still the winners.
you make a good point.

i lean heavily towards code being explicit - i think of black boxes and third party libraries as things to grudgingly use because i don't have superhuman productivity for instance, and i prefer if i can debug their internals... i know this is not entirely common.
This is cool, now I just have to move to Chicago.
Bazaart’s new iOS app is ‘Photoshop meets Instagram’ for mobile
Other than leaks via Wikileaks etc. i don't have access to a lot of information that the president of the USA had 30 years ago. Most public information on the internet today was also available pre-internet. The main difference is the time needed to access information. Instead of searching for hours or even days it's now minutes. Time effiency increased a lot with the internet.

Because it is now so much faster to get information the question has become: is the info that i want really relevant to me? Otherwise it is still a time waster even though it only takes a minute to look up. Like many people here i tend to be intellectually curious and knowing things gives satisfaction. But increasingly i have come to realize that much is not truely relevant to me. I think that's where the focus should be for future technologies, helping people get small amounts of highly relevant information while respecting their privacy.
Just keep the HDD in storage until btc prices reach 10-20k then send the drive in.
"This guy" has been here for years. :) https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22thi...
I feel for you. As it happens I am sitting in a Holiday Inn in Queens where Air India put us after yesterday's Dec. 17 flight 102 from JFK to Delhi (i.e. the return trip of your route, maybe even the same plane?) returned to JFK after unspecified mechanical difficulties about an hour into the flight.

No one at Air India is picking up the phone except for an international call center that thinks the plane is still in the air. No one has given us any information about when or if we'll get to Delhi or on what flight.

At least we got to deplane. Air India then sent my wife and me to the wrong hotel, which was not ready for us and could not transport us to the correct hotel. (Kudos to the Radisson though for calling Air India and figuring out where we were supposed to be.) We ended up waiting in the subfreezing cold for the Holiday Inn shuttle that never came (despite repeated assurances from the hotel that the van was arriving "momentarily") for almost an hour before giving up and taking a cab.
Hook it up to firebase, make it a live collaborative document.

then you've got something interesting.
So "downloading it to have a look" is now "shady shit"?
Even better, that's what they were trying to simulate.
I often do both.

I thank them in advance, to make clear that they'd be doing me a great favor if they reply. Afterwards, I thank them for having taken that time.
It's an interesting point. That said, forensics on VPS's / cloud providers is already a big thing. Until now it's mostly been databases, secrets, SSH keys etc. Well-known providers zero their storage... lesser known, not so much.
Assuming you get the energy for the process to make it from renewable sources, how 'green' would the useful energy in terms of fuel be at the end?
A big pain in the arse yes, but pretty common in the world of air travel.
Man. I feel you. I am sorry :( hope the nightmare ends soon. Never again Air India. Never again. And to top it all, they are being accepted into Star Alliance to rub shoulders with Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines and the rest :(
This is pretty cool, can you add a instantedit.github.io/blank.html so that I don't have to delete everything when I come back?
I guess the best way would be to agree on a chunk of biz before taking on any work.
I think that depends on your entry point. Perhaps if you got in at $1000 you may be trying to convince yourself, or others, that holding long term makes sense. However if you got in at <$3 and have been holding bitcoin for a period of over 18 months then actually it is not an incoherent belief that it will be worth over $1000 again, it is a projected outcome based on the historic performance of the technology as a currency.
it is not sure it is positive.

It's certainly very negative. The advantage is you can use things like solar, hydro or geothermal energy to heat the system. Even turning 1000MW of geothermal energy into only 100MW of crude oil can be worthwhile since you can't run an internal combustion engine on geothermal energy.
This is the kind of genius I come to this site for. Thank you.
Why We Should Rethink Starting In Ohio
This is just the lastest article but it sums the story of SomoLend up pretty well.
You Asked When To Buy Bitcoin...Well Now's Your Chance
You experienced a minor inconvenience. You're not entitled to an apology or explanation.
Grails? You just uninstall the GORM/Hibernate plugin. Controllers have to be written in Groovy, but everything else can be Java.
-Automatically closing windows when the last tab is dragged out

This is so minor, and yet so great.

EDIT: I copied and pasted the wrong one.
This is only funny when torn out of context.

Note that this is about the Unix command "talk" (a primitive chat shown directly the recipient's shell). This is not about aktually talking to people.

The phrase "never talk to strangers" is just a mnemonic.