skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We need to make sure we're not being manipulated. Here the Guardian is just serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion. I'm not sure how this is different to much of the chest beating I'd see on Fox News. I'm not here to argue for or against the drones. Just that if we pride ourselves on being educated and critical thinkers that we apply that to all sources of data we read.

We all know war is hell. We know using weapons to attack people creates horrific, real human harm. So starting off listing the effects of weaponry on humans tells us nothing about drones. It just tells us about the horrors of war. Given this is an article about drones it should be very drone specific. Do drones increase or decrease the inevitable horrors of war? I suspect they decrease it with smaller more targeted bombs vs prior more traditional larger bombs. Today if we make a mistake we bomb the wrong home and kill everyone. 25 years ago we bombed the entire village. Maybe they increase it because we're carrying out a lot more sorties than we did prior when a jet and a pilot were needed/at risk. However, I'm not sure and this article goes nowhere close to helping with the discussion.

"The view is so pixelated it makes decisions tough" Can you imagine military people who fight/fought on the ground in real combat and order in strikes reading that? Surrounded by smoke and fire and deafening noise and hoping (or maybe not caring) that the strike they call in hits the right target/s vs all the nearby civilians also hiding and cowering in a village?

The military is aware of the impact on these operators. From a February 20013 article sighting a Defense Department study: “Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Lastly, imagine how you'd feel reading a similar opinion piece on Fox News from a gun ho former operator talking about all the American lives he saved by observing and taking out "the bad guys". What's even better with drones we're not losing American solider lives and dramatically reducing the number of innocent civilians killed vs how we would have approached the same problem just 25 years ago.

War is hell. The issues are complex. Trusted new sources add to the debate. Biased ones feed their viewership what they know they'll eat up and do little, maybe even damage, the search for truth.
Somehow I doubt Al Qaeda is using Juniper, but our allies (read: economic adversaries) are.

I hope the companies listed -- Dell, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, et al -- are happy with themselves. The government's mantra has historically been similar to that of Microsoft's: embrace, extend, extinguish. The US Government is no different and they'll happily throw every company under the bus for the smallest advantage over their adversaries.

America's rivalry with China is continually climbing higher and higher, and we're getting dragged along whether we like it or not. The unshakable intertwining of private and public industries, the scorched-earth economic policies where private industry is consumed for the benefit of the public, the unlimited spying powers -- all to stay ahead of China.

The real kicker is that this kind of spying power compounds on itself -- as soon as we get Juniper gear exploited then we can move onto infiltrating Seagate's intranets, and then we can use Seagate exploits to more easily dig into hard-drives accessible by us/in custody by us. We may never be able to make a distinction between which tech companies have been exploited and which are wilfully/maliciously passing vulnerability information to the US Government.
You do realise the Taliban are specifically opposed to Western education, especially the education of women. You have groups like Boko Haram (literally "Western education is sinful").

Dropping books on villages when the security situation hasn't been established is akin to dropping landmines - anyone who picks one up and takes it home risks being killed.

There is a very good reason the Afghan campaign was about providing security in an area first then building schools, providing power, healthcare etc.

The problem is that Helmand province (especially) is so close the Pakistani border, and thus limitless reinforcements, providing the security there to do anything else is nigh on impossible.
What bugged me most about the OP was the attitude of "we're done, shut up with this other stuff."

The OP didn't say that at all, but instead observed (in a manner that you have quite overwhelmingly failed to refute at all, instead relying upon emotives and non sequiturs, betraying a bizarre and completely unsupported defensiveness that seems to be some variation "but it's new, man! It's new!") that everything old is new again over and over again.

People have been trying these things for literally decades, and many of the current products that lead categories have some elements of those designs. If someone is pitching a very old idea as (r)evolutionary, it is worthy of discussion, whether that offends your sensibilities or not.

And it's odd that you mentioned MySQL, given that yes, it did face to "criticisms" because it made the same old mistakes that so many products before made. FUD? Do you think since then Oracle became more like MySQL, or the opposite? I'll answer that for you -- MySQL abandoned all of the supposed "advantages" that were birthed largely in ignorance and adopted the designs of the products that came before.
It's kinda scary how many microprocessor and different firmwares are needed/used in nowadays computer/hardware, and how each one of them add a new point of failure.

I was reading just today a similar article, but involving HDDs instead of Microsd cards (and even with a PoC): http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack
Regarding your last bit, I'd guess his notion of "successful currency" is observational. There have been a lot of currencies, so it's pretty easy to look at the ones that have lasted versus the ones that haven't.

Being a store of value is a goal if you want people to hold a currency. For example, when I was an exchange student in Ecuador long ago, the Ecuadorian sucre was not seen as a good store of value. Better-off people would, as much as possible, not hold sucres; they'd buy dollars. Poorer or less connected people couldn't do that as easily, so they just got screwed. Eventually, the currency collapsed entirely and now they just use the dollar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_sucre

I don't think BitCoin can survive purely as a medium of exchange. There's the obvious reason: why pay two sets of transaction costs when you can pay just one? But I think the bigger problem is that there's a period when someone is holding BitCoins. If those are a stable store of value, then you're ok with that. But if not, you're in the land of currency risk, and the only people who like currency risk are currency traders; everybody else hates it.
Just curious, you said you worked on building some of these systems, so how did you personally square your morals/ethics with the fact that your employment was probably helping to bring about this "seriously scary new world"?

I took a similar job once, sold on the awesome technical challenge (aeronautical mapping, gyro/sensor input, camera control, etc). But over the time I worked there, I became more and more ethically conflicted about some of the potential applications of the technology I was developing. Was it wrong to continue working on this, given the potential for it to be abused? Personally, I believe developers are a lot like doctors in that we have a power that most lay-people consider to amount to magic, and with that power comes an obligation to do no harm. On one hand, if I wasn't working on this technology, they'd just hire someone else to do it, so leaving would not stop the program. On the other hand, while one person can't have an effect, if we all made the ethical choice, it might ultimately become difficult for these types of programs to exist.

In the end I decided I wanted to be in the group that avoided such ethically questionable projects, lucked into a great opportunity to move into mobile development, and the rest is history.
Well, I have worked in a few companys with big SQL databases. You say the only care about the current state, but inreally EVER big database I have seen actually impnents some kind of backup thingy. Mostly handcrafted stuff.

The diffrence between Datomic and just storing your transaction log is that datomic gives you first class access to your hole history, you can work with it as easly as with the current data. I have at least not seen that in any other database.

So for me at least it seams a database who just stores everything and gives access to it is what most people should use for most problems. For me at least Datomic is the new standard and only if I have a special use case I would go to something else.
That's the idea -- it's OK to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into offensive operations, but defensive operations? Nope, we can't be too quick to put up the walls otherwise our enemies will learn of our 'defensive' techniques and do the same.

Furthermore it's an inevitability that our adversaries learn of these offensive techniques, so attempting to keep them a secret is simply a race against time -- and I don't think that's a race we can win. At this point we're arrogantly exercising recklessness and negligence on the hope that we can stay ahead of the wave.
Leaving the work laptop at work is great advice!

For those whom this isn't practical (like me) I have found that having two computers - one "work" and one "fun" - can serve much of the same purpose.

(Obviously, the "fun" computer could also be a netbook, tablet, whatever)

Same idea, really -- the idea for me is to create a computer that I strongly associate with work, so that sitting down at that computer means, "Hey brain... it's work time, dammit."
Maintaining self-discipline while being self-employed is related to but not quite the same as maintaining self-discipline while working from home. My advice would be to achieve clarity on which of those two is really the issue, and if it's the latter, then do one of two things:

1. Find a co-working space and go there to work.

2. Failing that, mark the start and end of your work day in some semi-formal way. When I was managing a team of people working from home I instituted the following policy, which seemed to work really well: when you decide it's time to "show up" for work, send an email to the team saying, "I'm in", and a one or two sentence description of what you're working on that day. When you're done for the day, send another email saying, "I'm out" and another one or two sentence description of what you actually managed to get done. Just that little bit of structure made a huge difference. If you don't have a team, then collect a group of other self-employed-working-from-home people to be mutually accountable to. Even just sending such an email to yourself might help. The act of actually writing things down activates different neural pathways than just thinking about things and so makes a difference in your mindset.
Americans should be more concerned about the NSA spying on US citizens than on foreigners. Here's why:

When the US government decides a US citizen's communication patterns makes him a terrorist, the US government is free to knock down their door in the middle of the night and whisk them off to Guantanamo, and NO ONE except the US government can do anything to stop them.

When the US government decides a foreigner is a terrorist, they have to ASK your government to cooperate, and if they don't, the US has to be ready to go to war to kill/capture him.

The difference between the NSA spying on an American and a foreigner is that only the foreigner has a government that can protect them from the US government.
That is blatantly and purposely inaccurate, did you even bother to read it?! they are not "backdooring equipment"; they maintain vulnerability databases which also include firmware bugs. Also non-US companies are also mentioned but just like the Reddit submission they are omitted to make the impression that there was some foul play on the part of these companies.

Again this is not Reddit, don't embilish titles for karma.
petabyte datasets are downright cheap to deal with these days

Are you from the future? In no universe is a petabyte database remotely close to being cheap, even for large organizations. At this point I am seriously questioning your industry knowledge.
The Decline of IE and Firefox
Isn't that an aspect of air strikes in general, manned or unmanned, not something specific to drones?
Ask HN: What is the best functional programming language for data science?
I'm currently exploring Haskell, OCaml, and Clojure with respect to not only the core language features themselves, but also with respect to their communities and third-party frameworks for math and machine learning.

I'm mostly interested in the best "general purpose functional programming language for data science" but would also be curious which functional languages have a particularly strong hand within specific domains (e.g. medical, finance, etc.)
"the most basic rules of human life, that have been taught us since we rose from this Earth"

That is just fundamentally untrue. The notion that all life is sacred and killing for a living is wrong is a very, very modern notion.

Members of the military kill because it needs to happen. They would rather be members of a professional, trained force that means the number of total dead is minimised to the greatest extent possible. Modern wars by professional soldiers kill very few, both soldiers and non combatants, compared to the wars of conscripts and untrained masses.
The dedicated work-only office was my most important productivity enhancement. It helped me prevent burnout (where I'd just work every single hour), and it also helped my spouse understand when I was "at work" and should be treated thusly.

As an added bonus in the US, a dedicated work-only workspace can be eligible for a Home Office tax deduction.
This sorts news makes me shake my head.
The scammers are trying to get in, the NSA is in, and now every other state security organisation will feel if they don't try to get in they will be falling behind.

All I want is to do is keep clients safe and out of all this cross-fire.
> It's oftentimes good students who are mostly oblivious to why their skills are being exploited.

I'm not sure I agree with that, but if that's what you think it doesn't make sense to try and keep the "good" students away from military contractors. If they're going to build weapons (that use/require code) I'd rather they have the best developers available. Hiring bad programmers certainly isn't going to decrease civilian casualties.
7000000000
300000000
I never got passed pre-algebra, but i am having a hard time getting to 4%. I fully acknowledge i am shit at maths, but i would love an explanation (completely serious; i have heard this "4%" malarkey a few times now). I know these numbers are estimations at best, but they seem accepted so:
>China: 1.3-1.5 billions
>India: 1.3-1.4 billions
>EU: 400 millions
>US: 400 millions
>sum total, all nations: 7.1 billions [1]

I know this may seem like semantic silliness, but here of all places i expect accuracy within region. to the larger point, at this time, american minds are more valuable in terms of conviction, as it is our country that is so reckless in regards to others, be it in the realms of security, supply lines, manufacturing, etc. This is no an inherent value; the most important dude at the party is always the person with the weed. It is not because she is better than her peers, it is because of her relationship to here peers in the context of what they want and what she has. Before you charge up your righteous indignation cannons, this "importance" along with all the times i must sit through a harangue about why i need to be more respectful/appreciative of the greatest nation on earth drives me, and many other americans, completely nuts. i fucking hate it, but when i travel, my brothers and sisters from overseas will only let me be a shitty american. some of us over here are paying attention, you know.

pass the tea, mate. this whole coffee thing needs to end as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Seeking OSS Python devs to join team in Charlottesville, VA
Develop exclusively free, open source software in the name of open science.

The Center for Open Science (http://centerforopenscience.org) is a funded non-profit startup looking for OSS developers who are passionate about modern web and API practices (and, ideally, science) with expertise across the web development stack. Open source has changed how software development works, and we want to apply the same principles to the sciences. Everything we develop is exclusively free and open source (http://github.com/CenterForOpenScience).

See our full posting here: http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/centerforopenscience
Target: PIN data "protected by triple DES encryption, the most secure standard"
I came up with a general O(n^2) algorithm that yields 30 rectangles, which is one off from the optimal answer according to you. Actually, it's only O(n^2) because I'm exhaustively searching an array instead of indexing by xy coordinates in nested hashes, which would yield O(n).

Basically, it just fills the spaces with rectangles, expanding horizontally. Then I look for "stacks" of vertical adjacent rectangles and combine them.

(EDIT: Goes to show that you can get pretty good though non-optimal results by taking the low hanging fruit and optimizing a bit.)
A mobile version of the concept (Minneapolis): http://sisterscamelot.org/
"...we need an organization that makes peace, for the state, far more."

What does such an organization look like, and how does it work?

It's very easy to say that we should just stop killing people and instead make peace. It's extremely difficult to put forth a realistic plan that accomplishes that.
> The problem with remote-control war is that there's no political cost

Oversimplification. Domestically, the US is still paying the cost of using, eg, Agent Orange in Asia, today (children of service members born deformed).
That's a great book! It also inspired "Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good" too.

Both are available online for free!

http://learnyouahaskell.com

http://learnyousomeerlang.com
> audio software/hardware manufacturers tend to ignore Windows

Really? Apogee is the only manufacturer in this market I can think of, out of many, that supports Apple products but not Windows. All latency-fearing Windows audio software and hardware uses ASIO, for which there is broad industry support.

> Audio hardware manufacturers want to release products for platforms that people are actually using, so they target OS X.

I think you perceive their motivations correctly, but most people would reach a different conclusion than you have. Anecdotal evidence suggests that said manufacturers have as well.

> The really weird thing is that I get better latency when recording through my iPad then I do when recording through my beefy gaming rig.

The latency of a digital audio system is determined by the amount of buffering in the signal path, but your computer must be able to keep those buffers reliably full. Your iPad, being a more controlled system with fewer background processes, should be able to do a much better job of this than your desktop box, where anything goes.
Ask HN: Why is the spelling poor on HN?
I'm over 50 and wondering: is spelling less a part of education these days?

On any post with a lot of comments, I see obvious misspellings, not just loose for lose, but things spellcheckers catch easily, such as descretely for discretely, etc.

This surprises me because commenters here likely have higher IQs than most other public internet forums.
Why is namecoin even useful?
Educating new generations is vital to the effort to replace these heinous groups with sane, functioning societies. Just because 'its hard to educate' doesn't justify the continued killing of innocents.
We as humans try to find the patterns and discover the causes. My question to you was nothing more than the attempt to get the direct information regarding your insistence to the unusual approach (repeating the claims that it's unimportant, ignoring the explicit examples of the uses of the compromised mechanism) to the topic we comment to. My question reflects my (maybe false) belief that there must be a reason for that. I believed it's better asking you directly than trying to devise some theories like some other users already did.
It is pretty ridiculous that the press is somewhat exempt from providing sources for their statements.

Wikileaks would have been much better.
Mark Shuttleworth: Ubuntu 15.04 Will Achieve Full Convergence Before Windows
Your comment really had two separate points one around training practices and another around hiring standards and occasional cargo culting. It was only the latter that I was objecting to.

It's interesting to think about the first point though. Why are training practices different in software? I can think of a couple of hypotheses:

A) Programming is one of few fields where it's possible to self train.
B) Programming is a relatively young field that hasn't matured enough to develop rigorous training practices.
C) Software companies aren't profitable enough to support expensive training programs.
D) Training of programmers is a relatively futile endeavor as most programming success will come from innate talent that is either present or not in any given individual.

Just off the top of my head I put the most weight on A and C (especially for startups) though I'm fairly uncertain. There might also be other reasons I haven't thought of.
What kind of people still get excited over a language's ability to do this?

* Category functions in Objective-C

* .NET extension methods
Code is a great book but it's rather a fictional story explaining how computers work than a history book. It does contain a lot of interesting historical elements though. Definitely a recommended read but I'm not sure it's really what the OP if after here.
I'm just talking about reporting it validly as spam.

This poisons the IP blocks they use to send SPAM from as the IP addresses get recognized as consistent sources of SPAM.

Certain mass-email marketing firms like MailChimp tout their "respectable email server IP addresses" as a feature.

Yep, IP-blocks have reps, good and bad.
It's almost as if there are different proponents with different reasons for supporting of Bitcoin...
This forms opens up when you select existing customers. Upon clicking not existing customers, it asks only email and phone.
To be fair, Microsoft's reference material is pretty good - it's standardized, comprehensive and available for every version. You just need to know what to google to find the right page..
Me to having worked for a registry ICANS requirements for up time and availability are "challenging"

Would be very interesting to see how they setup PostgreSQL to support HA
You'll want Burke's Connections:

http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0743299558
If you're running a successful startup and looking for some kind of charity outlet for some of those profits, I highly recommend Kiva loans. Find some entrepreneurs trying to start tough businesses in tough environments, like a tailor in Liberia or a corner shop in Congo, and loan them solid chunks of money (e.g. $500 at a time).

If they repay the loan (which the ones I loaned to have so far), then:

1) you've helped start a business in a deprived part of the world, possibly changed someone's life

2) you've got the money back to help another business

And in either case:

3) you've done something very tangible to help another entrepreneur who is dealing with business risks you are lucky to never need to consider in your entire entrepreneurial career.