skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People seem to miss the part where Iran won't be able to build a thousand of these, supply them, fly them, train for them, maintain them, upgrade them, equip them with the appropriate technology, and build the next generation of them.

It'd be like saying: oh look I stole an Intel processor, and was able to figure out how it works. Now all I need is to build a fab and a global supply chain so I can churn out thirty million of them. Or hey, I know how PageRank works, Google better watch out.
I wrote a thing to synchronize ics files with caldav calendars: https://github.com/untitaker/vdirsyncer
yes good point, one stealth drone design does not an air force make.
I see your Obama and raise you Disraeli.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disraeli
That implies that the lack of ipv6 support on their website has nothing at all to do with their technology.
This Life a Long Disease
Lots of use use something that can export to latex :)
Yes, but unlike a gamma-ray burst, there is literally no hope of survival. With a gamma-ray burst one could, in theory, survive given an ultra-shielded structure with full life support (to offset the lack of atmosphere and any other life on the surface once the burst passed). If a region of lower vacuum energy were headed our way, it would completely change the very physics we know of down to the sub-subatomic level. Ain't nothin' standing in the way of that...
I think the author is learning the wrong thing.

Software isn't about automating things, and certainly not about automating things 100%. It's about building tools to leverage people's times (in this context).

If you can build software that makes those folks doing those manual processes 30% more productive, then do so.

He has this idea that you should never build tools by default because automating them 100% is too costly. Automating them 100% may be too costly, stop trying to do that.
We should put them to work finding bugs in code. Breed one to click buttons and fill in webforms...and it gets to replicate when it breaks things.
Reassembling a 5.25" floppy that has been cut to pieces with scissors [video]
Even if they were a possibility near here, they're so far beyond our capabilities that it doesn't matter. We'd never be able to do anything about it.

The strength to change what I can, and to accept what I can't...
It's of course hard to know "the actual facts". As another commenter here reminded us, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

It's not one person, it's an entire brutal regime that operated in Iraq. I remember reading some stories, but don't have links saved. But the stories are so numerous and so "over the top" that it's probably not just "a lot of professionally crafted lies". There's probably a lot of truth there.

So I did a quick search. The Guardian [1] (leftist rag recently giving us the Snowden revelations) had this to say about Uday, one of Saddam Hussein's sons, in the lead paragraph in a story in 2003:

Uday: career of rape, torture and murder

He was a monster even by the standards of
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a sadist with a taste
for cruelty so extreme that even his father
was forced to acknowledge that his first-born
son would not be a worthy heir.

Uday and Qusay pretty much got to do as they pleased in Iraq. At least until they suffered from a terminal case of acute lead poisoning.

I was never very enthusiastic about how jingoistic the US was vis a vis Iraq in the runup to the 2003 invasion. But ridding the gene pool of a few of these miscreants can't be such a bad thing.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/23/iraq.suzannegol...
You're going to ask the general counsel about fee shifting? The money question is how often litigation by plaintiffs in the position of your company goes sideways such that the proposed legislation would require you to pay the defendant's costs. General counsel is going to ask the trial lawyers.

And that's assuming outside litigation counsel wouldn't offer it as unsolicited advice, as they have every incentive to do, particularly as it became more apparent that the legislation could pass.
Actually, yes. Here's a recent article overviewing the subject: http://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5738756/you-can-kill-someone-in...

Scroll down to "an actual case". Mind you, AFAICT, they didn't travel to the 'zone of death' intentionally to commit a crime; but, having committed a crime there, they did attempt to use this defense.
IPhone (Metrognome remix)
For an example of famine, look up Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Ethiopia:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari...

For genocide, try looking up the 1954 Guatemala coup, in which case the CIA got involved directly at the behest of Coca-Cola and the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita).
This has been tried in various ways at various times. It has never worked, will never work, can never work. All that has ever happened is black markets get created, and local cops and politicians get bribed to look the other way, and crime skyrockets.
I really, really hope such a day doesn't come. @GsElevator put it well the other day, "If it weren't for America we'd all be eating Bratwurst for dinner"
Well, I know what I'm watching tonight.

Pretty much every Mill CPU talk in the series has blown my mind in one way or another (which is to say, taking things that sound wild, weird or impossible at first, and carefully demonstrating how they're all actually simple and straight-forward when you start from the right axioms), and I expect this will be just as good.
"hra" -- sounds like the perfect lapine font!

can change it to "hrair" when they get to version 5
Maru: Symbolic Expression Evaluator
Maybe, but you're not considering (a) the value of the target or (b) the effectiveness of drone defense. Even if defense is cheaper than offense, it will never be perfect. If all it takes is one drone to destroy the target and the target is sufficiently high-value, then the 10,000 drone strategy may be worth it.

For comparison, see ICBMs and missile defense.
I wish there had been a github when I was his age.
I remember writing a .ini file parser in Java. I showed it to my friends who couldn't care less and... that was the end of it.
Would you be willing to run Fastmail.is or Fastmail.com.au or something for some premium over general US fastmail?
> Once crypto assets which track USD, Euro, Yen, RMB pop up with turing complete scripting build in... man that's going to be a different world.

Do you mean assets that are pegged to real world currencies? Is that possible with a Bitcoin-based currency?
First Recorded Usage of "Hacker" (2008)
I think their copying is more propaganda for them than anything else. Just look at how they're displaying these models for show in a plastic tent. Really?
I would further refine this to, "Learning to code is like learning to write prose: Easy to learn, and easy to do, but not so easy to do well. Especially since 'well' is at least a little bit subjective." There are plenty of people who can write well, who are not commercially successful. And there are people who are commercially successful who do not write very well at all. Cough-DanBrown-Cough.
Great point. Glaciers on land are diffrent. There are also some ancient/long-lived ice formations in the south pole (also land/locked). I believe these are more like frozen freshwater lakes than glaciers (mobile, compacted snow etc).
The point of moving regulation to the states is to foment competition amongst said states - this should exert downward pressure on corruption, but how much we don't really know. Certainly we currently have some states which are more corrupt than others. Which would certainly be an improvement on the status quo.

Copyright is certainly a popular issue here on HN, and I'm sure K Street makes a lot of money on it, but again it's like the EPA - something which the government has to by definition regulate in some way.

In fact, moving Social Security and Obamacare subsidies to the states would probably put a larger dent in K Street than all of the other issues you've mentioned combined (military, EPA, copyright, antitrust). You're talking about trillions in handouts, issues which impact every single citizen, massive bureaucracies fighting for power.
"They don’t tell you that a lot of programming skill is about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code is best to copy-paste."

No, no, no! This always frustrates me. This is not 'coding' (maybe it is, and we should be doing less of it, and more programming). This is gluing together pre-coded snippets and trying to make it work. Continuing to do this is an impediment to getting better. Thinking that somehow this is what 'coding' is, is missing the point.

I will read a stack overflow page perhaps in a search for some direction, look at all the 'solutions' like surveying a landscape of others approaches to the problem. Then I'll throw them all away and code my own. Possibly it will share a lot with one of the answers, what I would consider a good approach. But a literal copy and paste just doesn't happen. I would consider a copy and paste a recipe for inviting trouble, because you haven't really reasoned through the problem yourself, and thus don't really understand the solution intimately.

Programming is a process of mental reasoning around your problem with an eye on the form of reasoning computers use, so you can express that reasoning to the computer in the language you're using. Because computers don't reason like humans 'reason' (ie. humans don't really 'reason'...), knowing how a computer reasons and behaves is alien and takes time to understand and learn and it takes time to become quicker at comprehending this. This is the path of becoming a better programmer. Gaining that experience so the process is less alien and you more easily can fathom how a computer will respond and behave with a certain approach of laying out of the logic you are trying to express.

Copy and paste doesn't help you at all with this. In some cases it may prevent you learning essential lessons and hinder your improvement.
> Why does it matter what he wanted to do growing up? Since when do we value the judgement of children?

People are children at age 18 now?

I find interesting the dichotomy between how we treat 17-year-old "children" and how we treat 19-year-old "adults". The 17-year-old gets told: work hard for your dreams, and never be ashamed. The 19-year-old gets told: shut the fuck up and get back to work if you want to make rent this month.

What separates them? Two years.
"Read about ETFs. They are the same as mutual funds without the fees."

ETFs do have expenses - nobody is going to manage them for free. They're just incorporated into the share price, so their long-term returns will be slightly less than those of the underlying basket of securities they hold. ETF's expense ratios are generally lower than those of traditional mutual funds.[1]

However, with many mutual funds, you can reinvest the dividends and distributions for free, but to do that with an ETF would require paying a brokerage commission each time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund#Costs
Domain specific expertise combined with non-zero programming skills is a potent combination. But it's easier said than done for many, since the ability to solve problems with computers is a particular skill many just can't grasp (difficult both for programmers and non-programmers alike). Depending on your frame of reference this is either unfortunate or a godsend.
What I think is cool about programming is that if you can understand a book, like the C Programming Language for example, then you can probably program. Although, being able to understand that book may take a little more work than just reading it (you might need some supplementary material). A lot of other pieces are soft skills for becoming a professional software engineer, such as time estimation, communication, version control, etc (soft skills in that they can likely be picked up on the job).
A challenger can't undercut an incumbent and drive them out of business. Who would finance such a move? And why wouldn't that financier back the incumbent instead? In reality, it's this opposite case that occurs. This practice is generally considered anti-competitive and illegal.
I'm teaching a relatively mathematically-minded friend programming and I've found http://repl.it/languages/Scheme to be an excellent resource. The simple syntax and semantics of Scheme and its easy accessibility allows them to quickly develop an understanding of the fundamentals, and from there it's not much work for them to download DrRacket and start on more practical applications.

I think games are a great place to start; simple, humorous text-based adventures, for instance, are both really fun to write and teach a lot of the basics.
I've been thinking about switching to fastmail from gmail for a while now, even going so far as to ask for people's opinions about it on reddit. Seeing this really convinces me I need to go ahead and make the switch, and I would assume I'm not alone in slowly becoming disenfranchised with gmail, hence the many posts you're seeing.

My issues with gmail have nothing to do with the email scanning, etc, and everything to do with the interface getting more complicated over time. I just want an email web interface that's simple, and common.
M2M, IOT, Device Managment: COAP/LWM2M to rule them all?
copy and paste helps to get the job done
I want to buy one so badly.
I've found the hardest thing for beginner programmers is being in a state where they can actually run their code. That's why I think NodeJS and Javascript are so awesome. The code just runs, better yet, Javascript (perhaps not NodeJS) can run in the browser (there's the developer console, even JSFiddle)!
The Renaissance of connected things
My reply to Mahesh Murthy
This seems like a disgrace. Someone should teach them Git.
But that doesn't mean that they give or sell your data to other companies. In fact, that would be incredibly stupid, each bit of data you can sell only once, while as space, you can sell every day.
"That's why there's excitement about opening of the northwest passage - shipping and oil drilling in the arctic that wasn't previously possible."

That's a glass is half full way of looking at it!
Yes, it is critical constraint - if you find it easy to remember.

What's the size of random password space there?
It does.

You can append your current 2FA TOTP code right after the password when your email client requests the password.
If you don't know what a thing does and you don't have the time to learn it, sure. A few years ago when I was making my first applications I "used" regex's off of stack overflow long before I was able to take the time to learn the syntax myself. At the time it was much more important for me to learn design and compilation than it was to go off and learn regex.
shorter time controls: yes.
no more adjournments: yes.

but also increasing popularity of things like
'Sofia rules'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_by_agreement#Only_theoreti...

which has a big impact
I can't find it. My understanding is he posed the birds to show how how much garbage would be found in them.

I'm not saying birds don't have plastic in their stomach though, just not that much.

I can believe microplastics would kill tiny animals, but not larger ones. It doesn't belong in water either way.
That would be great! I'd be happy to pay 1.5 times the current price if my accounts were guaranteed to be hosted in Iceland.
You shouldn't have any "knowledge" that there is no god.

The issue isn't that there is a small probability of god existing, but rather there is a vanishingly small probability of your particular brand of god being true versus all the other particular brands of god or gods being true.

The pudding in a Bayesian discussing is as so often in the normalizing factor...
bind, ??, more than, fmap, ??, monoid, f $ x f(x), f . g . x == f(g(x)), x !! 1 == x[1], seq, ??... and \ is lambda.
Thomas Harriot
Did you train the spam filter with the minimum number of e-mails that is required to activate your personal bayes classifier?

Once your personal database has seen more than 200 spam and 200 non-spam emails, we automatically start using it to classify your incoming mail. Because it's been trained by the exact type of messages you receive, it is normally significantly more accurate at classifying spam than our general database. However, it can only do so once it's been properly trained, which is why we have to wait until it has seen 200 of each type of message before it is activated.

Source: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/stopspam.html
By continuations I believe Jules means Continuation-passing style, a popular optimization/intermediate format in compilers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style
And diamonds are nothing like true love.

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b...
"Thirty years ago, programming was an R&D job. Programmers had a lot of autonomy: the kind of autonomy that it takes if one is going to invent C or Unix or the Internet or a new neural network architecture. Programmers controlled how they worked and what they worked on, and either answered to other programmers or to well-read scientists, rather than anti-intellectual businessmen who regard them as cost centers."

Thirty years ago (1984), most programmers were employed by big corporations doing whatever IT was called back then ("data processing"? "MIS"?). They were very much a cost center. The average programmer had to program in whatever language was installed on the company's mainframe or minicomputer (PCs were just beginning to enter the business world), coding primarily database transactions and reports for executives.

R&D? Autonomy? Working for scientists? Inventing C or the internet? That was for a small minority of programmers, as it still is today. The only difference is that CRUD web apps have replaced CRUD batch jobs as the average programmer's work.

(By the way, working for scientists can be just as crappy as working for businessmen, since they both consider mere programmers to be lower life-forms.)
The webmail is fantastic, they're not scanning my email to show me ads, [...] and I can use it with my own domain rather than gmail.com.

In all fairness, if you use Google Apps for Business ($50 per year), you can also use e-mail with your domain and they are not scanning your e-mail to show you ads.
> 1. Apple and MS have historically sued competitors with their own patents, which typically they practice themselves.

So you can't be a patent troll if you weren't one three years ago?

> 2. The only conceivable "proxy" may be Rockstar, and they claim to operate independently. If they didn't, well, the DOJ and FTC would be mighty interested [1].

In much the same way as a toy soldier can "claim to operate independently" after you release it having wound it up and pointed it in the direction you want it to go.

> Heck, even IV don't fit that bill, because they apparently ask for pretty large licensing fees.

Compared to cost of trial and appeals + impact on customer opinion of company + impact on shareholder confidence + risk of pro-plaintiff East Texas court or pro-plaintiff Federal Circuit judges reaching an incorrect decision and product being taken off the market during further appeals? What are they asking, hundred million dollars + first born child?

> Outside of cherrypicked media reports, there is insufficient empirical evidence that trolls target startups.

Of course there isn't. For a startup fighting is equivalent to bankruptcy and the settlement comes with an NDA. Suppressing all the evidence you can and then claiming there isn't sufficient evidence is not a very strong argument.
The whole overloading of "full stack" really bugs me. I lean towards definition (3) above. Software can run front end to back (or some portion there of), but most "full stack developer" gigs kinda stop at above the hardware level.

For me, knowing the right choice of software components best suited to the platform (vms, direct hardware, etc) and how to tweak the platform is as critical as any other layer above it.
actually, a draw has a certain value. There is a rating system (ELO) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system.

This means the weaker player has a benefit from a draw, while the stronger player drops rating points when drawing a weaker one.
IDLE opens a TCP connection for every folder the client is IDLE-ing on. It surely drains the battery. I haven't used it, but NuevaSync provides Exchange ActiveSync for IMAP accounts.
Here's a fairly recent link about using Benford's law to detect fraud.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2014/05/14/theorums_1_ben...
You should be using your own domains regardless of who is your email provider. That way switching email provider is only one MX record change away if the need ever arises.
Is there really such a major difference between you giving your data to your email provider who then sells it to other companies or you giving data to your email provider who then uses it very much the same way these other companies would do?
> A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process

If they get a court warrant, you should either give in or fight against it. I think most reasonable people would find that reasonable as opposed to secret surveillance (e.g. NSA).

I think it is necessary to realize that email communication is at least bi-direction. So if one side is vulnerable to attack, there is no privacy or security. The best we could do is of course encrypt the message.
"Now zeppelins, on the other hand ..."

wouldn't zeppelins be disadvantage by the thin air as well?
Don't rely on Gmail for push: they discontinued Exchange-support recently, though they grandfathered in old users. What's irritating to me is that when I set up my new phone I lost it, and am now back to using fetch-only Gmail unless I want to use one of Google's proprietary apps (unless they've changed this recently).

Google Apps for Business does have Exchange ActiveSync:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/135937?hl=en
I'm assuming space x would provide the launch services? Does Nasa even do rockets to outer space anymore?
I'm sure solutions exist for push notifications. Has anyone had success with any of them?

I played a little with PushOver, which seems to work fine. PushOver provides a user-specific (difficult to guess) e-mail address. E-mails sent there become push notifications. This can be combined with Fastmail's option to forward summarized e-mails.

One of the nice things about Fastmail is that you can use Sieve, so you can e.g. set up filtering such that only e-mails that arrive in the inbox are forwarded for push notifications.

It's not my default setup yet (I am mostly playing with Fastmail, while still using GMail as my primary e-mail provider), but it looked promising.
Why the Internet is getting bland
I don't think so. A program is an infinite stream of jobs and is never quite 'done'. The less time you spend on keeping things nice and clean, the more frequent the jobs will be. After all, it still needs to be maintained.

Unless you are using a library, it's gonna be better long-term going for complete understanding. Even then, it's usually a great idea to understand what a lib does under the hood.
I read that as tongue-in-cheek.
Fastmail also has PFS:

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...
I copy and paste code all the time. I'm in the business of getting shit done, not learning everything ever, I don't need to learn the ins and outs of some obscure algorithm I'm only going to use once. I also don't need to memorize Apis and boilerplate for technologies I rarely use. Of course once i'm settled into a domain I don't need google anymore. But it's invaluable for quickly diving into new stuff.
You might be interested in Stephen Greenblatt's essay "Invisible Bullets", especially the first part of it, where he discusses Harriot quite a bit.

Here is a brief summary of what he has to say about Harriot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_and_containment#The...
Could you elaborate and give pointers to what "Oulipo rules" and others are?