skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fault in your logic lies at "once this becomes obviously economically viable". If and when it becomes economically viable. And even if there is "asteroid mining" during his lifetime, what makes you think that it'll be a manned mission?

NASA's space program has nothing to do with profit, it has to do with knowledge. And that can never be replaced by private companies.
Those side effects are trivial. Everything has side effects or lets just call them effects, since drugs don't do what you want them to do.
stupid frat house bullshit

Why is this hatred and stereotyping in the comments of a front page Hacker News article?

Is it particularly uncommon for someone that both drinks and is passionate about programming to write code drunk? Someone incorporated an arduino breathalyzer into a source control tool with some jokey features.

What's so stupid or frathouse-ish about that? It's not super-duper strait laced and serious, but neither is life.
C++'s standard library has valarray, which is supposed to avoid aliasing effects, and is allowed to use expression templates and other tricks. Something like:

float dot(std::valarray<float> const& x)
{
return (x*x).sum();
// Alternative: inner_product(begin(x), end(x), begin(x), 0.0f);
}

should, in theory, achieve the same kind of performance as the C version (but none of this is guaranteed, sadly). A smart implementation would actually end up calling BLAS routines, which is what libraries like Eigen do.

Which reminds me: does Rust have infrastructure that would allow something like expression templates to exist?
I don't understand why commenters don't actually discuss Obama's argument. He has the following options:

- Do nothing

- Use drones

- Use conventional weapons which, he argues, would have more collateral damage

- Put troops on the ground and be perceived as an invader.

So either you should argue that these are not the options or you should argue that he did not pick the right one.
Unjustly? The front page is automated: it is not a human entity. It has no notion of fairness or justice.

Do you understand all of the technical reasons why posts are penalized off the front page? Do you have improvements to the ranking? Or is this merely a rant? Sometimes things get unfortunately demoted. Life goes on.
One software suggestion. Have an option to put in an orientation tracking factor so you can have the PID loops slowly track the aircraft if desired. In some cases you want a perfectly level flight, but in others you want to have the feeling of flying smoothly with banks and all. It would allow you to dampen out all the craziness of quad flight, but still see majestic turns and such.
It's very easy to not agree with the way the North Korean government handles many things, but you have to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not doing it for shits and giggles. After all, they have been at war for over 60 years now. It must be obvious to any patriotic Korean that the danger posed by American imperialists who still occupy the southern half of the country is ever-present and growing. Someone must guard those walls.
I've taken numerous (1 EPA, 2 FCC, 16 USCG) government administered tests and they are all have these poorly written, blatantly wrong answers. Fortunately, with larger question pools and more questions on a test it doesn't throw your final score off if you get one or two where the wrong answer. I wouldn't want to take a test with 100 question pool and only 10 questions.
Generating Behat tests when creating pageparts - Kunstmaan Bundles for Symfony2
Yes, but the purpose is not to 'escape' the infrastructure costs, but rather to 'optimize' them...by keeping them low. So, in a general sense, self-regulating features of an economy (eg, transparency) create a "remedy" for otherwise more expensive-to-monitor arrangements. By increasing the opporunity set of remedies, your system optimizes to a lower-cost-base. That is to say, a 'remediable' inefficiency is different than one which there is no better option. The idea is that credit cards are a net-postive addition vs cash, because they create benefits to the consumer. These benefits are also the reason why the merchants pay (rents) to the CC companies. The "lost business" would be greater than if they did not exist. But again, here you are seeing the level of CC payments is a function of value added and costs avoided. It is not the case that they are really a measurement of the governance costs of the network (ie, those are at once a subset--anti-fraud--and on the other mostly external and borne by others)
The WHO isn't just giving advice to mothers in America, they're giving advice to mothers in Bangladesh and other developing countries. Indeed, that's their primary audience. The short-term advantages of breastfeeding are extremely relevant to mothers in countries where the water may not be clean and where babies are constantly exposed to high levels of pathogens. Those considerations are far less relevant to babies born in the first world.

It's stupid to take WHO recommendations, or medical recommendations generally, at face value, because they generally are devoid of any cost-benefit analysis. Take this study of short-term benefits done in the U.K. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/119/4/e837.ful.... It found a 53% reduction in diarrhea hospitalizations from exclusive breastfeeding, and a 27% reduction in lower respiratory tract infections. This is a very strong result and justifies the "breast is best" recommendation. Yet, when subjected to cost-benefit analysis, the result isn't so clear. The incidence of these conditions in the sample of infants was only 1-3% to begin with. In other words, exclusive breastfeeding reduces the chance of a diarrhea hospitalization from 1.1% to 0.5%, and for a lower respiratory tract infection from 3.2% to 2.3%. And remember, both conditions are easily treatable.

On the other side of the scale, exclusive breastfeeding guarantees that the mother will be saddled with the primary role of feeding the infant for six months to a year and cannot easily delegate the task to the father (even with pumping, the father remains wholly dependent on the mother). Does a statistically significant, but small, reduction in an unlikely outcomes really justify blanket recommendations to exclusively breastfeed? Do you apply that same sort of extreme caution to every parenting choice? Given that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death in children at every age from 2-14, shouldn't the WHO recommend that everyone move out of the suburbs into cities where they don't have to drive?
Begs the question, so what exactly does the Google UK office actually do again?!

Google "operates" in the UK, the second biggest market for advertising revenue yet manages to book their profits in Ireland because that's where their sales are "signed". Yet even that Dublin office has no profit as they have expenses to pay to the tune of billions in IP to a patent-holding Google subsidiary in Bermuda.

This must me a wake up call to quite a lot of people. It used to be that it was only poor countries that got shafted by foreign corporations (e.g. Dow Chemical, Bhopal disaster in India). Now, it's -gasp- happening to us too!
The Brazilian Semco company has a similar structure, IIRC:

http://www.schneede.se/assets/files/Ricardo_Semler.pdf
I believe that folks are actually starting to look into this. http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/TECHNOLOGY/OVERVIEW/dpcc.htm...
Let me guess, you think there's a cure for cancer but the doctors are withholding it and Exxon Mobil bought the patent for a combustion engine that would achieve 100+ mpg.

Any industry that is built on addressing problems that people naturally have is going to generate lots of revenue.
It has been proven that people naturally fight with each other. People fight over race, religion, sports, politics, and territory. Nations do the same thing.

If you think it would end terrorism by killing all current terrorists and if you think it would even be possible, I think you're misguided.
Whoa, that's deep bro.

Would get one if it wasn't expensive - just a sanded and painted block of wood? The methodology is cool, but it seems like a marketing strategy - could make your own and have the same impact.
Essentially I'm saying nothing more than I can change a function A -> (B, C) to a function (A, X) -> B. Typeclasses provide a way to represent a more general space of those functions. Existential types are the explicit way of writing the kind of subtyping I'm talking about—so if you need it to be an explicit hierarchy then, yes, you need extensions to Haskell98.

The best example of doing this without existential types (though it violates Haskell98 in its own way) the lens library. It absolutely provides a natural subtyping hierarchy without using existential types, though all of the coercions are implicit.

I'm very confident in my understanding of the Haskell behavior, but I'm happy to concede that my use of subtyping terminology is off. I cannot see how the behavior you see in lens doesn't provide a stellar example of LSP, though.
Working in a Sustainable Pace
What exactly determine's the press's release schedule? Ratings? Milking? Ad conversation stats?

No idea why everything hasn't been released yet. It also isn't bulk data like the wikileaks fiasco. Looks like NSA program specs. Redaction can't be taking this long.

Funny how Snowden is now caught between a dictator in Russia and the Western for-profit press. Probably not a good place to be. I imagine he's smart enough to have an "insurance" file which means we'll never see the real dirt on the NSA.
Gates and Clinton on the NSA, Safe Sex, and American Exceptionalism
This is simply not true, the US has both signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention [1], though it still has to destroy some of their stockpile [2].

[1] http://www.opcw.org/about-opcw/member-states/

[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/11/us/u-s-chemical-weapons/
I don't understand how Bitcoin is considered a currency in the slightest. Currencies are generally a mere representation of production, not the output of production itself. Let me explain:

If a worker on an assembly line in South Carolina makes a window motor for a car, he is paid in USD. But the USD he is paid is not the output of his labor; the output of his labor is a window motor that is eventually put into a car, that some software engineer may drive on his way to work creating other productive (albeit non-physical) things. It's the economic web.

Bitcoin is an economic dead-end. It takes CPU cycles to make a Bitcoin, and those cycles aren't used for anything else. It is an output of production that has no intrinsic value. Well, that's not ENTIRELY true: Bitcoin has had some fleeting value as a loophole that allows the economy to reclaim some dead weight loss from government regulation, but as those loopholes close, the economic value of Bitcoin diminishes.

Bitcoin is different from other stores of value that behave like currencies (such as gold) because it has no use other than as a store of value. Gold has industrial uses due to its physical and chemical properties, and it is desired in the consumer space as a material to make jewelry out of. But Bitcoin is not an input to production: its sole purpose and use is as a store of value. The price of Bitcoin will never stabilize for this reason: even if people decide to stop using gold as a store of value, it will continue to have a price floor based on its industrial and consumer use.

Thus my position that Bitcoin is not truly a currency, and the way it's being traded today is much more akin to something like a junk bond. It is an asset because it is limited by the factors of production: it is the exclusive output of production. Currency is different than an asset specifically because there is a central authority that can issue new currency without increasing production. This is necessary because they issue new currency as a reaction to increased production; not the other way around. Currencies like the USD and EUR are stable because the central banks control the conversion rate of those currencies by manipulating the supply of currency.
Feel free to refute my minimum wage example for starters. Here's another:

1) you want to help the poor
2) you confiscate wealth from other people, and give it to the poor
3) you have just removed money from the economy
and caused it to get used much less efficiently
than it would have, and demotivated lots of people
from doing business and producing value
to the world at large.
... because this has happened how many times?
It's very easy to put it in terms of "Yeah, some civilian deaths are a necessary evil which we burden our conscience with. But we do it because we have to protect our civilians", but I think it's intellectually lazy.

Because the next question that should inevitably spring up is ok, ok, but why the fuck would someone in Yemen want to kill US citizens?

Once you start answering that question, the question of morality in drone strikes becomes a lot more difficult to answer.
You're right maybe it was a misunderstanding and maybe its misinformation but I couldve recalled Bush saying something along these lines about Iraq. I also believe some of my grade school teachers may have put these ideas in our head. I dont not fault them for it they were just trying to paint a rosy picture of America abroad.

Just so you anyone knows, not all americans feel the same as our govt. does.
> At the time, I had friends deployed and in my head, I thought that it's better we have UAVs than my friends coming home in bodybags...

But that's the thing: in my mind more human soldiers means less potential for outright slaughtering of civilians. So more drones might end up raising the body count. in the long run; not for US soldiers, but for people you'd miss just as much if you'd happen to be born as their friends.
St Petersburg was built as a European imperial city, and architecturally it is still very much that. (Outskirts are different, just like in Paris.) Religion (Orthodox Christianity) and script (Cyrillic) are different from the Western and Central Europe, true, but culturally it's a vibrant mix of different European and different Asian (especially Central Asian) influences. The isolation you mentioned did happen but it was not total, and I would say in some respects (especially scientific) there was less isolation then than, say, before the XIX century.
As mentioned in other comments in this thread:

From a political point of view, drones are much more attractive than traditional methods. You won't see the corpses of dead Americans being dragged through Mogadishu with drones. You won't see captured pilots being paraded in front of a camera with drones.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AO0Y120131125?irpc...

Also just because the NSA gives snowden amnesty doesn't mean UK won't extradite him for espionage. I'm sure they will play that game to jail him some how for life
You can bet that someone in that group is already making plans for revenge, 10 years from now, when everyone has completely forgotten this incident ever happened.
>Just because society is supposed to do something, does not mean that government is supposed to do that thing.

Why not? Government is the set of people we, society, put in place to do some work for us in an organized fashion.

So if there's something society at large has to do and that is not about individual action, then the government better see to it pronto. That's what people pay taxes for -- so we can have things like roads, bridges, clean water, schools, armies and action to aid the more unfortunate.

>Likely the problem you are so quick to put government in charge of, wouldn't be a problem in the first place if we had a free economy.

Yes, but also if we had free ponies. I don't deal in "what if" scenarios alluding to some perfect state of being that nobody has seen. This is the kind of economy we have, it might get more or less free, but nobody has seen a "free economy" anywhere, and I don't see such a thing coming in any conceivable time frame.
I think this is the point. Because we're not putting our own lives at risk, we're actually getting more callous about it. This seems paradoxical, but I believe it's true.
Building Debian packages using Linux namespaces
Don't Bloom filters provide just an illusion of privacy when talking about phone numbers because its easy to iterate through every possible number?
I wouldn't count on it. The US govt has enough media lapdogs who would shout down any calls to ground the fleet. I predict we won't have much longer to wait before the hypothesis is tested.
TC yes.

R# no. On a large solution it becomes a hindrance.
Sounds much like the system of property.
The front page is far more than automated my dear friend. While automation indeed plays a key role, PG and a select number of YC alum handle moderation of the site.

As with most sizable sites that handle comment/post moderation, I'm under the assumption the system automation flags certain posts and perhaps auto manages others. The key being that certain tasks require human intervention as machine learning only gets you so far. The automation aspect likely makes some very well educated guesses, but there's always the aspect of confidence intervals not being met and probabilistically performing incorrect actions.
Ask HN: Is it possible to get a tech job without a degree?
Serious question. If you have a story, success or cautionary, please share.
Don't Believe a Word of Last Night's 60 Minutes NSA Interview
Amazon has already made a decision to move some logistics to cheaper countries in Eastern Europe, so next year they'll have a nice excuse to fire all 'troublemakers' in Germany.
Let me guess, you said something similar to all the people that said the NSA were tracking everyone.
I was cast into doubt by the same comment. The United States military does not make use of even things like pepper spray as a non-lethal weapon specifically because of being a signatory of treaties against use of any chemical warfare.
> If they were a US only operation then fair enough - it would seem silly to sue them here in the UK.

That seems a bit odd in a legal way. If a user breaks into Google servers, we don't care where the server is located. Why should the location of the server matter if its the server operators that do the crime? Shouldn't the same laws rule everyone equally?
yeah in 44/45 a b29 raid vs what ever the Japanese air force could cobble together is really equivalent.
I blogged about our Hack Day.
The FAA doesn't fly airplanes, either. NASA's role will change once commercial manned space access is part of the environment.
Do you understand the difference between a digital code and a computer program? I know information theory and coding theory can be used for studying DNA, when you make the models account for the physical and chemical complications that arise in biology, but the models used are way more complex than the ones used in traditional CS, so it doesn't make sloppy metaphors like the ones from the OP worthwhile for people who only know CS and no biology. Specific techniques from CS of course might be useful in understanding biology, but not metaphors of the kind OP uses, like calling introns comments. Also, while people do base computations on DNA, it doesn't work vice versa, e.g. none of the computational approaches to studying biology views DNA as a description of any sort of computation, as far as I know, it only treats it as a (often quite complicated) digital code or as a discrete stochastic process, as in the case of using hidden markov models for modelling DNA.
Everybody, lets LOL on that.
This gets round to the comment I wanted to make about the whole topic: Anarchism is a word that closes people's minds and should not be used to try to promote some better system of organization or community.

Can you imagine people trying to encourage community and a family unit by trying to bring back Skinhead culture? Try as you might to explain its positive, non-racial origins, people just associate it with neo-naziism. And though I acknowledge Anarchism can be a productive form of collective organizing, if I see somebody with a torn jacket with a circled A patch on it, I think that person's a jackass.
With great power comes great responsibility. I'm glad Snowden saw it that way, too. Same goes for William Binney who was a higher-up in NSA, and also in charge of creating some of its most important/dangerous surveillance software, before he decided to become a whistleblower.
"The Amazon system is characterized by low wages, permanent performance pressure and short-term contracts" - one of the union board members

For me, this sentence captured the entire article. Of course the wages are low-- the jobs require no skills and have been largely automated by Kiva et al.

It's hard to argue that performance pressure is a bad thing -- logistics is an industry where performance matters. And again, the competition is robots.

Complaining that contracts are short term does have some legitimacy. That said, it's clearly a seasonal business; do the unions honestly expect them to hire people year round when they just aren't needed?

I really want to be on the side of the people, but I'm afraid that asking for more money/longer contracts/etc. is just a way to make the automation even more compelling.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18535330
How does this operation make money?
They successfully transmogrified it into state capitalism.
In that case, though, the "Betsy Ross" flag was not the United States flag, since they were not states.

Anyway, when the number of stripes was set at 13, it could very well be because of the 13 original states. After all, it was replacing a flag with 15 stripes. (When Vermont and Kentucky became states, both stars and stripes were added, so the flag -- of "Star Spangled Banner" fame --had 15 stripes.)
Different countries have different definitions of what constitutes a war crime, depending on what international treaties they are parties to. Bombing wedding parties would come under what is often referred to as the Principle of Proportionality, as laid out in Article 51 of Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions and Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The United States is not a party to either treaty.
Gifs from the 19th century: The Richard Balzer Collection
Gödel believed there could be a complete and consistent set of axioms for government? :)
You make do nothing sound like it's a bad thing.

Is it really so terrible not to bomb wedding parties?
As I understand it, anarcho-socialism is against private (and especially corporate) "property" enforced by a state government in favor of personal "property". What "property" means in anarcho-socialism is still muddy to me.

Anarco-capitalism is for "property" if you can defend it, even if it is more than say what a typical person needs for a normal life. Anarco-capitalism would also be for "property" owned by distributed-autonomous-corporations.

The only thing that can be ascribed to Anarchism, is the dethronement of a central "state". What you described is Anarcho-socialism.
Id actually be interested if something like this happens in the US as well in this form ?
Amazon Germany defends itself by saying they already pay above average (for the logistics sector) salaries but ive heard the average is pretty miserable.

Overall i think the logistics workers cant win this, as the work they do is pretty expendable, its just a matter of quantity and they will probably find enough people to work for less.

As a german i have always had the feeling that these unions are way to aggressive and often times prefer short term goals (more money yay people are happy) over long term goals (successful business, stable jobs).
I strongly agree with this article, but is this the kind of article that belongs on HN? Is this political article really part of some new trend or otherwise noteworthy, or is it just an editorial that most of us agree with?