skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not defending Erich in any way, but the "obeying orders" excuse has been used by US Soldiers in Iraq (among other stories regarding previous wars in history and involving other countries' soldiers). Do you think they should be executed? The Nazi's were one of the first instances of prosecution for soldiers who were following orders when committing war crimes (in the case of concentration camps the scale may be the marker) so it is an interesting question.

Seriously asking and not trying to be inflammatory. It is seriously just an interesting concern of where "following orders" stops being a valid excuse. For instance should drone operators controlling, attacks that kill a whole wedding convoy, be prosecuted for following orders? Weird world we live in.

Again not defending Erich Priebke just a jumping off point for interesting discussion.

Edit: Fix spelling
Ask HN: request for comments on realtime log analytics
How do you guys build your own realtime log analytics system?

I wrote up my setup on the prototype
https://appinno.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/building-realtime-log-analytics-system-by-leveraging-flumekafkastorm/

Looking forward to your comments
> It is always better to be given one bitcoin now than one bitcoin in the future.

A counter-example: Your pot dealer says you can have 4 bags of pot now, and you have 1 year to pay the 1 BTC you owe him. Being a man of better impulse control than you, and a prudent financial manager of his drug enterprise, he values 1 BTC in a year more than 1 BTC today.

That is, of course, assuming the expected value (after applying the deflation and factoring in risk of non-payment) is greater than the value he could build by investing the 1 BTC in his business today - an open question until we have some real deflation figures.

> (If 1 BTC is worth 4 bags of pot today and 5 next year, 1 BTC in a year is worthless to me if I want to smoke now.)

As I tried to illustrate above, finance is not something that's based on your personal preferences - it's a complex inter-dependent system.
I've switched to Anaconda recently: http://continuum.io/downloads

It has all the same libraries, Spyder, etc., and seems much more versatile, with easy package management and upgrades, and the ability to have different independent environments, e.g. one for Python 2.7 and one for Python 3: http://continuum.io/blog/anaconda-python-3

Plus it's cross-platform and works pretty much identically on Linux and Windows (and presumably Mac).
OP points out the gold standard has disappeared from all modern countries and that this is a good reason to eschew a similar system in Bitcoin.

But could it be that the reason why the gold standard disappeared was that it acted as a check on political power? That is, that leaving the gold standard behind has permitted politicians to consolidate their power to a level heretofore unseen in "democratic" countries?

Just because a system has been left behind doesn't mean it's a bad system. Sometimes good systems are abandoned if they challenge/limit the authority of a powerful actor.

And I'm no gold bug, but I'm not convinced that a monetary standard is an entirely bad thing. I think there are trade-offs in each direction.
Many startups can't do the "see if they fit in" thing, they have too rigid ideas about their hires.
Sadly, journalistic ethics have followed the path of documentaries.
Writing a full OS with apps in 10Kloc(VPRI steps project by alan kay) and enabling similar power to other programming needs.
Verizon Teams With Oracle To Tackle Amazon In The Cloud
If you can handle the strobing on the slides, this is an excellent introduction to how Rust helps you manage memory predictably and safely without GC. Well worth the watch.
http://www.math.kz/images/journal/2013-4/Otelbaev_N-S_21_12_...

It is in Russian
The problem with changing "amount" for "burden" like you do is that we stop talking about something objective and start thinking in subjective terms. And I really don't want governments to be subjective, especially when there is a better measure available and can be used.
> Do you think they should be executed?

Yes. Not "executed", and not every soldier in every war; but torturers who hide behind orders should absolutely be brought to justice.

Of course, if their country as a whole decides torture is suddenly ok, or even cool (see most recent TV shows), then that won't happen.

The fact that it won't happen in the case of the US doesn't excuse the Nazis... or anyone, really.
What I appreciate -- and I realize this is a bit more meta than about the game itself -- is that when it says "for Linux", it really means "for Linux" and not "for some specific versions of Ubuntu and maybe a 32-bit Red Hat thrown in for good measure".

The game is actually in the package manager for my distro, but just for fun I downloaded the binary off the site. I ran it. It worked.

That's an amazing technical achievement that many cross-platform games today (even the commercial ones) have not managed to attain.

Massive props.
> Status and cost mean nothing.

Saying status does not matter is of course an attempt to signal high status. No one's out of the status game.
The way you design web content is about to change
Your argument could also be used to claim open source software features should never be sponsored, and as such I believe it fails on grounds of proving too much.
I'll believe it when I see the prize get awarded. Until then, I'll file this beside that guy who writes a 'solution' to P=NP every month on arxiv.org.
Sounds like I need to give it a try, thanks for the feedback!
Natural Language Toolkit
Yes, but how long does this exist? My guess would be that it isn't really used (yet) in ffmpeg.
Wrecking Ball vs The Fox
Two Songs that sound surprisingly good when mixed together
Basing opinion on citation index is like saying if this person is not widely cited he is likely to be wrong. From what I know, it is common for researchers in US and EU to cite each other. However work from say China or other Asian/African nations is not cited as often.

I know many (well-established) professors who don't bother updating their webpage. In fact some of them wouldn't have eve bothered keeping a webpage had it not been for the courses.

That said I will take this news with a grain of salt because it is not an easy problem and definitely needs a through review.
At this rate they'll all be solved by mid-century. Weren't these supposed to last us like a millenium or something?
I wish people who submit links to HN would think before doing so.
French Senate wants ban on free book delivery
I wonder, if true, how it will change CFD. That is, will it change at all.
Well, expressions like these look to me very clearly like a pattern that can be implemented using SIMD instructions:

map (uncurry (+)) (zip [1,2,3] [4,5,6])

I guess because of these standard functions and the fact that everything in Haskell is immutable and side effect free it should be comparably easy to do SIMD optimizations. It's only a guess, though.
I have DDG as my default search engine both at home and work now.

As a command-line junkie, I like it that I can access everything in one place. Admittedly, maybe 1/3 of my DDG "searches" are actually commands (I can type an address and then !map to go directly to the map for that address, for example, or a term and then !img to go to an image search for that term). I think of DDG more as a command line than a search engine.

The search results are generally pretty adequate, too. If you search for a simple term, you get relevant Wikipedia or IMDB results for that term, which is often exactly what I want.

And if I feel like Google would be more relevant, I can just slap a !g on there. I realize "ease of access to a competitor's product" is not a fantastic selling point, but for me it's enough.

100% personal preference, obviously, but it works for me.
Link to CMI's Millennium Problems:

http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems

Relevant summary:

"Navier–Stokes Equation: This is the equation which governs the flow of fluids such as water and air. However, there is no proof for the most basic questions one can ask: do solutions exist, and are they unique? Why ask for a proof? Because a proof gives not only certitude, but also understanding."
According to this article, he claims to have found a strong solution. My prediction was/is that the types of solutions asked for by the millennium problem were not going to exist, so my first instinct is to not believe this, but clearly that is not a good reason. So, at the risk of being wrong, I will make the following not so bold prediction: there is a critical mistake somewhere in the paper and the approach will ultimately not pan out.
You're missing my point. While I allow that your statement has merits, mine is that even if it didn't, Google simply cannot assert the ability to secure users privacy.
This look great! Will give it a try. On Windows I've been using WinPython

http://winpython.sourceforge.net

which has the additional advantage of being a portable installation.
If i'm not mistaken, the same people are behind WinPython and PythonXY.
I'm sure they keep statistics on searches, in fact it would be pretty bad if they didn't as they'd have no data to improve search results.
"Weren't these supposed to last us like a millenium or something?"
Why would you think that?
The PDF (in Russian):

http://www.math.kz/images/journal/2013-4/Otelbaev_N-S_21_12_...

There is a small summary at the end in English, although it only seems to cover the problem:

http://i.imgur.com/fVqVBiE.png
I tend to agree. I really think there are two metrics. Genuine remorse and the ability to concede that the actions were wrong or misguided.

I find it dismaying that currently our culture (most of the world, not just US) seems to have gone backwards in terms of recognizing torture/misguided killing/execution as a serious issue. There really is no excuse for such behavior, although happens in times of conflict, it should be accounted for at some point.

The ability of a country or people to recognize the wrongs of their past and move forward, rather than denying that they were wrong, seems an important thing.
Interesting. Is this also the case for siblings or other family relationships that are not parent-child? In my own experience I've seen quite a few businesses run by, say, the youngest son who essentially hired his older brother. I have no idea about the statistics on this; I'm just wondering.
I was making a joke about the name...
Hopefully a Chrome-like "prevent this page affecting vibration" dialog.
This (lunch with referrer) happened to me when I was interviewing there and I agree that it is a smart move. It put me at ease. Presumably by the time you are there for an on-site, there aren't any questions of fit left.
There are already a large number of solutions to Navier-Stokes that are known. The millennium problem asks to prove existence or non-existence of smooth (infinitely differentiable) solutions that are valid for all time See pg 2, here: http://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/navierstokes.pdf
I didn't think it was open source though? According to wikipedia it's shareware, with further features opened up upon registration?

Regardless, it is a great game!
Why, why, would a central bank use the concept of "mining" in a cryptocurrency?

They're a central bank, and they want to be able to control the money supply. All they have to do is generate some suitably strong keys, and use regular PKI infrastructure to verify them and transactions with them.

Which you know, they've done - that's the modern credit card system (though I am open to the idea we could create something at a government level that was lower fee.
Wikipedia's entire ruleset ("neutrality", no paid editing, no original research) winds up excluding anybody from the editing process who actually has knowledge about the subject of the article.
Well the Kazakh press (inform.kz) seems to take it as fact that a Kazakh mathematician has solved the problem, so there's that.
Check out Charleson, South Carolina. Amazing quality of life and a heck of a tech scene. Search for Charleston Digital Corridor.
And in my surroundings, I'd argue that adulthood (vague as that concept might be) often has not fully emerged even at thirty.
It doesn't have a nice prominent GitHub link, but source is available:

https://www.teeworlds.com/?page=docs&wiki=CompilingEverythin...
That's amazing. At least intrusive security measures give us great fart videos!
There was a researcher from HP that did the same for "NP Hard" some years ago, that finished in the same place. He took a new angle, but ultimately, the proof didn't hold up. While it was disappointing in the end, the attempts are laudable. Here's hoping he got it, and if he didn't, that he at least manages to contribute a novel approach.
....that's called a loan.
3D Display Lets Video Chatters Interact With Remote Objects (includes video)
"...women and _other_ minorities..."

Wait what?
Anaconda is certainly portable on Linux (all in one folder - set the bin path and everything just works), and I think elsewhere too.
Does Wheat Cause Coronary Heart Disease?
Amongst other things, their approach to increasing women's participation in tech seems to involve actively trying to exclude women like Violet Blue whom they don't feel are acting in an appropriately feminine manner.
Great points. What I think would be interesting is if the Treasury did something like create a variety of your "Bit-dolla" crypto-currencies and let the markets/users decide which ones to use for which purposes. Each would have fixed rate of inflation.

$BD0: 0% annual inflation

$BD1: 1% annual inflation

$BD2: 2% annual inflation

$BD3: 3% annual inflation

etc., maybe up to 15%

That way market expectations of inflation and demand for price stability (and maybe actual laws) would dictate the overall usage patterns of the currencies, without the typical psychological risk associate with central banking systems.

Prices of goods would always be expressible be in terms of each currency, and conversion between them at any point in time would be easy and automatic. Prices of things like flash memory would go down in BD0 but would appear stable in BD4.

Just as businesses/industries settle on accounting practices (FIFO, LIFO, etc.) they could choose which currency to pay employees in, which to store cash in, and which to use to track the value of inventory.

The nice thing about this kind of system would be that we'd actually have much more price transparency, since inflation hides information (such as decreasing real wages).

Laws could be made to require pension funds to use BD2, for example, or to require all taxes to be paid in BD4, or student loans to be issued in BD10.

Treasury bills could be sold against each BD type which would add discipline and certainty to that market as well.

I know this is a sort of silly idea but it's fun to think about.
Your counterexample makes no sense. If I pay him 1 bitcoin today and he puts the bitcoin under his mattress, he has 1 bitcoin in 1 year with 0 probability of non-payment.

1 x 1 > 1 x P(payment)

He also has the option to invest in his business or anything else, which has value.

Your claim amounts to the idea that giving someone a loan at 0% interest can be profitable. It can't.
Well, the good news is that there will probably never be a "bitcoin standard". The gold standard consisted in Nations basically enforcing the convertibility of currencies into gold (or indirectly into dollars, which were convertible into gold). So it was an authoritative enforcement of what money was supposed to be.

Bitcoin is a free currency. You're free to use it, or not. You're free to fork it, to create an other one with different monetary rules. And people do. Bitcoin is thus not exactly a "standard" as gold was. If you worry about the fixed aggregate idea, just don't. If there is no more bitcoins to create, and if the economy needs additional monetary units, then they will appear in the exchange market, as the price of other cryptocurrencies will rise, or others being created.
>It is a crime to deny it in many countries.

This somewhat pisses on my battery. It makes me generally less sympathetic. Imagine if it was a "crime" to deny evolution. Even though I don't get the fundamentalist nut jobs and their creationist bullshit, it's absolutely unnecessary to make debate on a subject a "crime". It coveys a sense of weakness and bigotry.
It is interesting that Apple seems to have been focusing lately on mobility at the expense of more 'sexy' improvements. When talking to people around me, the battery life of devices rarely comes up, and yet in my own experience the most important improvements that I notice in day to day use of laptop, and tablet, has the battery life.

I'm not saying that it's exclusively Apple that focuses on this. That's beside the point. Rather, I find it interesting that so often the wrong trade-offs are made for so long and by everyone.
PHP Concatenation – Comma (,) vs Dot (.)
A long time ago, I started working on an approach that never panned out, attempting to prove that such solutions could not exist. I will briefly mention it here in case anyone would like to comment or continue the strategy.

In [1] I learned that it is known that certain differential equations associated with embedding manifolds in R^n possess no smooth solutions. And in [2] I asked if it was possible that the Navier-Stokes equations were of this nature, since if this was the case it would create a clear path towards a negative solution. There was no definitive answer given, but the community (of mathSE) did seem to agree that it would turn it this is not the case.

[1] http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/8586/what-is-an-exam...
(See Willie Wong's answer)

[2] http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/9085/manifold-interp...
Does his proof involve Hilbert & Fourier spaces? How about Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators?
Google lunch interviewers are instructed to give no feedback whatsoever, and in fact the internal tools provide no opportunity. The only exception is if they do something terrible, like punch somebody (it has happened!) or say something really racist. Then, an email is sent directly to the recruiter.
Yeah, thats my problem. I want to live somewhere boring and cheap, because all I need is a place to live within walking distance of a grocery and a good internet connection. My wife on the other hand is concerned about things like weather, and fun things to do.
Right, it's not like we were ever on track to pay it off at the beginning of the 21st century or any such nonsense...
I don't understand why a blockchain completely mined by one entity would be any good. wouldn't a relational database be much better suited for this application, since decentralization is no longer an objective?
> I'm more impressed by the critical thinking in the physics department than the philosophy department, but departments like philosophy and law are way ahead of the pure activist studies departments, because they tend to genuinely reason about issues from multiple perspectives, not just proselytize the approved one.

Eh? I'm not sure what your college experience is based on, but I don't even know what you mean by "activist studies" departments. Most humanities classes don't even touch contemporary politics, and I couldn't even guess the political leanings of (for example) my literature professor.

I'd probably agree with your criticism when it comes to, say, gender studies. But the majority of liberal arts classes don't involve the "teacher's political agenda." In my experience, it's extremely possible to do well while completely disagreeing with the professor as long as your argument is well-reasoned and articulate.
> Being a man of better impulse control than you, and a prudent financial manager of his drug enterprise, he values 1 BTC in a year more than 1 BTC today. [...] expected value (after applying the deflation and factoring in risk of non-payment)

I think the status of that example as an alleged counterexample results from a subtle misuse of words. If the pot dealer's choice were between 1 BTC now and 1 BTC a year from now, the former is still of greater or equal value. If you are able to factor in "risk of non-payment", then you are talking about a decision between "attempting to get you to pay 1 BTC now" and "attempting to get you to pay 1 BTC during the succeeding year", which is by stipulation a materially different choice than "1 BTC now" vs "1 BTC a year from now".

As for the deflation--if the pot dealer believes that the increase in value from deflation is greater than what he could get by investing in his business (or in anything else), then he always has the option of sitting on the BTC for a year. The only reasons I can think of for this not to be the case are (a) if the pot dealer lacks impulse control and would spend it and regret it, or (b) if the pot dealer may be robbed of all his worth during the intervening year [so getting the BTC a year later is essentially a substitute for a safe money-storage service]. Both of these possibilities are generally assumed out of existence in this context, hypothesizing a hardheaded economic actor and a market with well-defended property rights.
How in the world is this "fighting back"?

Did I just skim over a paragraph somewhere on the site? All I see are banners, social media buttons, and a mask to put over your profile picture.

Raising awareness is fine and good, but thanks to Ed Snowden (who fought back in a much more effective way than by changing his gravatar), we already know that the NSA are spying on everyone, everywhere.

They stuck a Ben Franklin quote on there. It's a good quote. But where are the public officials running on a pro-surveillance platform? Whose door should we beat down while carrying our torches and pitchforks? That battle is lost several times a second when we voluntarily step into the body scanner at the airport that both the TSA and the terrorists know doesn't catch everything.

I'm not ready to start a revolution. And I just don't feel like anything less than a revolution will do, at this point. The only thing I can do is leave -- and hope that my new home isn't doing the same thing or worse without having been caught yet.

But this sucks. I hate feeling powerless. So I guess I'm off to post some witty anti-NSA propaganda to my Facebook page!
I remember listening De Sautoy podcast on BBC, that Euler was not able to solve/find the equation that governs fountains and that it was unsolved.

Is this relevant to the topic?

ps. Never mind, I guess this[1] answers the question.

[1] http://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/navierstokes.pdf
The prize is awarded either way. You have to prove that a solution exists or doesn't exist. http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/rules-millennium... In the case of the P versus NP problem and the Navier-Stokes problem, the SAB will consider the award of the Millennium Prize for deciding the question in either direction.
I'd like to thank Wired for the buy signal on Twitter. :)
Looks extremely fake - surely the fart would be white since it's quite warm (warmer than the environment at least)? And who really farts in that kind of amount?!
I don't see "Marketing through Hacker News" listed. That's a great documentary.