skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you arguing that the thousands and millions of dead would not have died without warfare? Are they immortal apart from military conflict?

I am a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan and have been considerably closer to war than, arguably, 99% of the collective posting on Hacker News. My point was not a moral position and most of you seem incapable of grasping the nettle of the original discussion thread.

The gist was the sum total economic impact. Moral, ethical and sentimental values do not matter and, like in most economical discussion, they are to be discarded.

At no point have I stated I agree with war (I do in certain circumstances) - the original question was does war create more wealth than it destroys?

Your emotional appeal about dead children is nothing to do with the original question. Without war however, we would still live under Feudal yokes or Patriarchal societies. War was required in many cases to establish the liberal democracy most of us exist in.

When you talk about moving the beads from one side to the other you look only at beads such as money, dead bodies, widespread crime and the gory side of conflict.

How about those conflicts that resulted in freeing slaves, securing indepdendence and democracy? What about the civil wars fought to ensure that men and women are treated fairly under the law and not at the whim of a Royal Family? Do you make any allowance for the benefits (however callous) to the reduction of the human population?

I expect the storm of downvotes but I attribute them to HN respondents being unable to separate the rational academic question from the emotional impact of warfare.
>Also, most ML people are lazy

As someone who has written a fair amount of machine learning code, I could not agree more. It is an inelegant way to solve a problem by brute force.

Which, of course, is occasionally very useful! But it is often lazy.

Though it sounds really cool.
They can and will jack up their prices regardless of net neutrality.
Your wish is Sao Paulo's command. Removed adverts in 2006, seems to be still going in 2013. I wish London would do this...

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-...
Please excuse my outburst, but this bothers me to no end:

> See here for proof of calling out curve225519 vs scrypt http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=curve25519%2C%20scryp.... (when scrypt isn't even really an improvement upon bitcoin).

Comparing cryptographic primitives by a Google publicity count is completely nonsensical. They offer disjunct applications: curve25519 is a mathematical group for protocols like Diffie-Hellman etc. while scrypt is a guaranteed to be slow hash function.

> unproven (non peer-reviewed) curve25519 algorithm

curve25519 was published by the renowned cryptographer Dan Bernstein in "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" ( http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11745853_14 ) and according to Google Scholar it has 114 citations. On its
Wikipedia page you could have found out that it extensively used by Apple in iOS: https://www.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb1... . It's probably going to be one of the major groups used for ECDH (elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman - the stuff you need for fast perfect forward secrecy) in TLS 1.3 and some even argue to ditch all the NIST curves in its favor.

I'd appreciate if you would do a minimum amount of research before you dismiss widely accepted cryptographic primitives just because you haven't heard of them before.
I wonder if Eisenhower felt the same way about the United States War of Independence?

You seem incapable of discussing this issue in it's entirety.
Club Sandwitch Index
It's just to explain to the layperson how easy it is, on the software side, to intentionally remove the feature he considered necessary for NSA to keep working consistent with the laws and the constitution. It also explains the difference between his approach and the approach the organization took.

It also doesn't mean what you imply. They've certainly used revision control systems at that time and his example doesn't contradict that.
Yes - they put kerosene on it which suffocates them. Unfortunately it's quite toxic to anything which enters and exists the water plus there is some indication (after the whole BP Deepwater Horizon fuck up + Corexit that used deodorised kerosene) that it is toxic if absorbed.
Oh dear... I'm just sight-linting so this might be wrong, but I'm certain the function executable in src/clib-install.c [1] can be easily overflown by providing a maliciously long package name or version --neither of which are validated at all [2] despite coming straight from the wiki page, as you point out. The function allocates 256-byte buffers to store a url and file name, respectively, but blindly fills them up using sprintf with non-validated user-supplied data, and without checking the resulting number of characters written, eg:

char *url = malloc(256);
if(NULL == file) goto e1;
sprintf(file,"%s-%s.tar.gz",pkg->name,pkg->version);

C is unforgiving indeed.

Also what's up with all those (0 == count) yoda conditionals all over? Is that becoming a thing again?

[1] https://github.com/clibs/clib/blob/master/src/clib-install.c

[2] As far as I can tell, the package info from the wiki is dealt with by functions in deps/clib-package.c that, despite promising names like json_object_get_string_safe, do not ever validate the provided name or version string:

https://github.com/clibs/clib/blob/master/deps/clib-package/...
I hate ads so I'm going to block them. You can't just shove things in my face that I can so easily decline and except that to be a good business model. I fully encourage the death of the ad based business model for web content. If that means I would eventually have to pay for things I actually want then that makes way more sense to me. Honestly though a website shouldn't expect to make money for simply existing and getting views. They should have something people actually want and are willing to buy.
http://transportdirect.info has had gradient profiles in its cycle planner for years. I should know, I was involved in writing it (the gradient profiler). The gradients come from official OS data. It is somewhat slower than Google to calculate routes, but for my money has slightly clearer instructions and seems to make better use of cycle paths.
Soylent is a weird and interesting case.

I feel like 99 out of 100 times an identical product gets produced by a supplements company and no one notices. Somehow, this one seems to have really really interested (or really really pissed off) people.

One possible narrative is "blandness is a virtue". All the pictures are bland beige stuff in a plastic jug. The people drinking it look normal, not athletic or exceptionally pretty. Their expressions are neutral.

The 'water of food' is, I suppose, a compelling idea.
> We just need a killer game for the post-pc era

Famous last words.
Sorry to be slightly off-topic, but since you mention NoScript and are familiar with that, this (HTTPSB) and ABP, can I ask. Is HTTPSB more of a NoScript alternative or an ABP alternative?
Actually I am a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan - returning from Helmand Province most recently in 2012.

I never said I don't see detrimental effects of war. The original question was Does War destroy more wealth than it creates?

Also, I know of many situations where a sane person may stand in a bombed out building surrounded by corpses and find none if it detrimental. Standing inside the final bunker that housed the last vestiges of the Nazi's for instance.

It is also absolutely ludicrous to think that war is only characterised by munitions destroying buildings resulting in the death of the inhabitants.

For instance - here is the United States Navy USNS Comfort (T-AH-20).

In accordance with the Geneva Conventions, USNS Comfort and her crew do not carry any offensive weapons. Firing upon the Comfort would be considered a war crime as the ship only carries weapons for self-defense.

The Comfort has provided medical aid to literally millions of people around the globe regardless of colour, creed or caste however it remains firmly within the employ the US Navy and is funded by the same pot used for fighting conflicts.

Your understanding of war is childlike at best with no discernment.

Furthermore the question was centered purely on the issue of wealth creation - a purely economic question distinct from ethical or moral concerns.
Banksy says it best:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
This presentation is about using an automated program to convert the existing Plan 9-based Go compiler suite from C to Go, it's not a "rewriting infrastructure in Go" story.
High-Flying Turbine Produces More Power
> "... unless that's changed drastically in the past year or so ..."

Actually a lot has happened in the last year or so. If you're not aware of it, you could start by looking over the end-of-year post from OCaml Labs [1]. I'm aware that it's difficult to keep a central overview of all the progress but there is a lot of work being done, in many ways, to improve the ecosystem.

[1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/ocamllabs/news/#Dec%202013
The graphs in the article are really good and clear, matched scale across the different graphs, enough years for context. I hadn't realised that US cable really was declining on such a scale rather than cable cutting being something more talked about than really happening.
I'm sure the USA will respect this treaty right up until they decide not to.
Oh yeah, the Japanese invented prostitution.

Aren't they are weird?
Wasn't multicast designed for something like this?
PHP was hacked together quickly to help Rasmus Lerdorf write his website.
Back when I first heard about this, I wondered if it wouldn't be possible to simpy add an extra byte to the date. That would last us until the end of the universe.

I still don't know enough about OSs to know how feasible it is, but back then, the move towards 64 bit OSs seemed like a great opportunity to make this change. Maybe when we move to 128 bit systems we can finally do this? I'd like not to postpone this until the last minute like last time.
Regardless of technology who is going to build it? Techies? A large portion of the high speed internet we have today was done with private investment, the same goes for all that cell power out there.

The government hasn't spent nearly as much on infrastructure as private business yet far too many think that the same government who cannot maintain highways and bridges sufficiently would be best to handle the internet? Even city governments are scrambling to fix sewer and water systems they invested in ONCE and left to rot.

I still don't see the value in investing so much in broadband other than cellular. Wired solutions require far too much expense, meet more regulatory hurdles, and simply isn't quickly deployed. With all the small businesses available, let alone franchise businesses, there are millions of locations across this country to anchor transmitters. The big stumbling block is the cash to start it all.
Well, if you have an Oculus Rift, you can jack into the Matrix.
with the advances in rail guns being in orbit may not be a necessity.
Wikipedia says an early requirement asked for a delta-v of 3,100 m/s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37#Development

You can estimate engineering limits from the rocket equation, delta-v = effective exhaust velocity * ln(mass ratio). In orbit, it probably uses hypergolic propellants, likely N2O4 and one of the hydrazines. These have exhaust velocities of about 3,350 m/s in vacuum. So, with the orbiter weighing 4.99 tonnes loaded, you could guestimate figures from 2,300 m/s (50% fuel fraction, payload+orbiter = 2.50 tonnes) up to 7,600 m/s (90% fuel fraction, payload+orbiter = 500 kg, if that's possible or useful).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_rocket_propellants#Bipr...

For comparison, the far larger (~100 tonne) space shuttle orbiter can do 300 m/s of delta-v, carrying about 20 tonnes of monomethylhydrazine + N2O4. (Note that's a factor of two lower than what the rocket equation allows; I don't know why that is).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Orbital_Maneuver...
Thats one of the most common argument against the concept of copyright. They say: How does a copy take away any of the authors rights? The original work is still there regardless how many copies are made by p2p file sharing.

Which has been stated before in this comment thread. If we abolish copyright, GPL is not needed. If we keep copyright (and thus accept the concept of derivative copies effecting the author), then GPL request freedom.

Please pick one. We should not cherry pick the arguments depending if one is talking about copyright or GPL. The same argument can't be false and true at the same time in the same mind.
Disrupting the ecosystem is precisely what we're trying to do here, so I hope it would :)
You are right, one should consider preparation time per serving. In your example something like 2 to 3' per serving which is more than reasonable.

When our life became busier (young kids + work), we started to cook 2 hours or so every week end, several recipes at a time. We order vegetables from a local producer (no fancy app, just a excel sheet) on thursday, get them early on saturday, and then cook stews, soups, meals that will feed us for the rest of the week. This requires some planification and organization but makes the whole cooking time argument irrelevant.

The other thing that bothers me with soylent enthusiasts is that they seem to disregard how the ingredients are sourced and their environnemental costs. The website's FAQ "From what is it made" links to the nutrition facts.
Power Up Kansai in Osaka, Friday May 23rd
As a thought experiment: what would be the main downside of hiding karma completely?
Wait, I have to do more?
Jupiter and Her Galilean moons – Stargazing Live Footage, Stargazer Nation
Oh gods of efficiency, tell us how to calculate the value of a post, so that we can smite the ones lesser than a threshold.
Oh, my hearing is definitely not excellent after many years of gigs/clubs without earplugs. It's not bad - I can hear a ticking clock from many rooms away if I'm trying to sleep - I just think it's been confused and now doesn't really cope with extracting human speech frequencies from the melange of a noisy environment.

If that makes sense.
Earlier today, and for the first time I recall, Firefox presented me with a slow startup notification. I had some very demanding programs running at the time and knew to dismiss the message without a moments thought. Some users might have responded to the notification.

I didn't click through to the help information at the time, but checking the source it looks like it takes you to https://support.mozilla.org/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most... which suggests a reset. Some users might have gone down that path without recognizing that it would leave them without security related extensions and/or preference changes they had made. Not to mention other less important modifications. Most people don't even keep a log of their changes, making it difficult to get back to what they wanted.

Being informed of conditions that might need your attentions is desirable. However, that doesn't eliminate the need to understand why the conditions arose and what the consequences of different actions would be.
Dunno, all that separates today's Detroit from Robocop's Detroit are the robotic police units, well until they arm the drones. You have the yuppie Detroit and the rest. Doesn't look very different that some Mexican cities recently in the news, wealth on one side of the fence and the poor excluded. oh sure, they get subsidies and such, carefully factored to insure their incentive to take from those on other side of the fence doesn't occur.

Until all that urban blight is settled Detroit isn't back. This is just a game to get the bonds people and such back in the game after bankruptcy goes through.
If you are going to use the music to entertain your customers, pay for it like you're supposed to.
Ah, thanks for the Snopes link. I didn't think to check there, my apologies.
This site demonstrates how the blink and marquee tag look in 2014
Ok, I'll bite. Next time you invest in a startup, or if you ever were to, you agree to forego equity. Instead take a cut of the sales tax, a job, and the opportunity to purchase the product. Fair deal?
> when youtube doesn't remember my preferred video resolution

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-cente...
"There were giants in the Earth in those days..."

I don't mean to suggest credibility for the antediluvian weirdness in Genesis, or Greek stories about titans for that matter, but this kind of stuff certainly makes you think.
To enforce contract you do not always need identity. Identity is needed when enforcement is through violence. But you can use economic incentives to make people prefer following the contract.

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/71410377996/real-crypto-anarch...

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-without-...
I find the "soylent is cheap and $10 a day" message very weird too.

$10 per person per day (in multi-month bulk, it $12.15 per day for a weekly supply) is on the expensive side for grocery shopping. If your goal is nutritious thriftiness, $2-5 per day is a very achievable goal. If you want cheap on a global "nutrition-crisis" level, $0.30-$2 is the goal. I've hear soylent mentioned in that context too.

It's only "cheap" when compared to eating out which seems like a very disingenuous comparison.

I'm not dismissing soylent. I'd be interested in trying it. But, calling it cheap is crazy.
HN takes away all the enjoyment and the little bits of direct social interaction still present in our lives and replaces them with text-only messages, which lacks the fundamental attributes of physical presence, and I'll never give that up, so I guess HN isn't for me.

Best of luck to those that are going down the route of online discussions, meanwhile I'll spend some time with real people and not just bits.
One of the big reasons we have funneled money to the banks was to get them to lend. When they start, it will be welcomed with open arms.
I truly believe that we are getting stupider at the hands of dictionary authors - and those who would dissuade children from reading and using a dictionary in the first place. There is so much knowledge to be gained in just understanding the derivations of words - yet hardly anyone ever even bothers to try to understand the reference to words from other languages/cultures. Maybe one way we can fight the prejudice in the world today is to encourage competent wordsmithing with the dictionary as a tool .. would love to see the whole world of software dictionaries, and lexicological tools in general, improve immensely.
Yep. I run Privoxy and a DNS resolver configured to be authoritative for the worst 5000 or so ad farms. Zips along nicely, and works for every machine on the LAN or via remote VPN.

Fuck ads. Find a different business model.
I once trolled a tech support scammer pretty hard through his own incompetence. He kept on trying to run a .NET based registry cleaner in my VM without the .net framework installed, and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work. (I managed to grab the files out of the VM before he deleted them, and it was actually a registry cleaner, some rebrand of a commercial product that I forgot the name of now)
Hot code reloading is the most sought after feature for me :) Many other technologies are borrowing this idea, namely the unreal engine 4, which comes with a hot code reloading C++.
The move to a 64-bit is sufficient, or at least a 64-bit time_t suffices for the very foreseeable future. Adding just one byte doesn't gain you much because neither CPUs, nor most programming languages deal well with a 36-bit type – you'd end up with a 64-bit type anyway in most cases which is nicer to handle.

The question probably is why a 32-bit type was deemed sufficient back then, but as others have noted, it is very hard to anticipate the lifetime of software and it was a pragmatic tradeoff between anticipated OS lifetime and necessary storage space. There are other problems as well, though. time_t is a type designed for keeping track of the current time of a computer system, therefore an arbitrary cutoff point in the past is sufficient. But then it got used for all kinds of other things – storing people's birthdays, using it as internal representation for a DateTime type, etc. Those have been problematic ever since because a possible date range of 1901–2038 is not necessarily sufficient for those use cases.

Fact is, though, that for keeping time in a computer a simple scalar that counts units since a reference date is the easiest and most efficient solution. Over time there have been plenty of such reference dates (epochs) [½], the most notable these days probably Unix (1970-01-01), popular spreadsheets (around 1900-01-01) or Windows (1601-01-01).

[½] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(reference_date)#Notable_...
Principles of Data Integration book
The best thing I could be doing is spending at least 8h per week less in front of the computer, not optimising the rest of my time so I can be on it even more!

Because Soylent precludes using your time for anything besides being in front of the computer?
I could have sworn he was stuck on Minmus, trapped in an upside-down pod with the solar panels on the top (so no way of righting it). Oh, Jebediah.
I've got a fountain in which the pool is NEVER still ... once the chlorination has bubbled out of the water, it still gets mosquitoes.
Have you thought this through? Approaching a 1:1 tenure-track-PhD ratio is not desirable. Universities can't just raise the number of faculty without a big increase in permanent funding. The other option would be to drastically lower the number of PhD positions, and then you can watch how your country slowly fades into irrelevance compared to the research that other countries are doing.
That analogy really does not hold water.

HN allows you to interact with hundreds of people from all over the globe, something that you could not do in real life, it would be a physical impossibility.

On top of that it does not replace you normal day-to-day interaction with others, nor does it aim to do so, it simply complements it.

Soylent does not do anything regular food does not already do except (probably) save some time, replaces enjoyment of food (taste, smell) and good company with slurping sludge and aims to replace.

Nice try though.
Why is there no viable alternative to Windows and OS/X?
> "Even in antiquity, with Iron Age medical care, men commonly lived to 100 years,"

But that's not remotely comparable to someone growing 3.5 meters tall. Nowadays there are also plenty of people who live more than 100 years, and not all of them need extensive medical care.

Growing to 3.5 m is more comparable to finding someone who lived to 200 years.