skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. The worst sort of situation for a country to be in in terms of nuclear deterrence is to have only one nuclear weapon, because even though the threat of using it has significant power it would leave them utterly defenceless if they were to ever use one. It would be a weapon they could never realistically use, because they would be unable to deter the inevitably-devastating counter-attack, and so the threat itself would become baseless.

Having two or three isn't that much better, since it still leaves them with a finite supply and no way to replace the weapons once they reach the end of their usable lives. There's also always the possibility that a foreign power would be able to divine the locations of such a small number of bombs and be able to destroy or steal them all.

With its own program, a country can avoid all of those disadvantages by producing enough weapons to distribute them and maintaining strategic ambiguity about their exact number and location while possessing the capability to renew and replace the bombs as they age.

Terrorist groups, on the other hand, would be perfectly happy with just one nuclear bomb. Unlike a state, they don't have to worry about deterrence or their ability to carry out a second strike. But that's why the US and other countries have put a lot of effort into securing Russia's nuclear stockpile and part of the reason why there continues to be huge effort to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Ask HN: Purchase small site as launchpad?
Hey HN,

I'm considering the purchase of a small community website (~150k pv/month, ~200 active users) in a sub-niche space. The site is established, but significantly smaller than the players in the main-niche.

My ultimate goal would be to broaden the site from the sub-niche to the main-niche, and bring a better experience to the users. Is this a bad idea?

To really offer users something good, I would eventually need to move the site away from the current software, and into a custom web app. Do you think this is: A) a bad idea? B) something that would tick off the users?

Thanks

(When thinking about this, consider the financial cost of the site to be nominal. I'm more concerned about my time/effort; also consider me to be a pretty good web developer)
Sweden's Pirate Political Party
Static scenes, no apparent occlusion handling, poor object localization.

If I had to guess I'd say all they have going on in the demo is straightforward background-subtraction with blob tracking.

Maybe they're working on something more interesting, but haven't got a compelling demo yet. That being said, they're trying to tackle a very hard unsolved problem, and quite frankly their chances are low (using HTM is a bad sign.)
I was proposing a thought experiment: create a program that bets the lowest frequency numbers and see if it is even capable of breaking even.

Right now the Ontario Pick 3 has a frequency deviation of 1/20th from norm, in that the number occurrences have been >5% off of a 1/10th share between the 10 numbers. Would betting the three most statistically likely to occur numbers change your lucky enough above random probability.

To put it even simpler: after 100 coin flips and 57H/43T would betting T give you greater odds than betting H, or are you equally as likely to win as if you flipped a coin yourself to decide your bet?
If some guy claiming to be a Russian general offers to sell you what looks like a surplus nuclear warhead, how do you know he isn't a CIA or FSB agent running a sting? How do you know that he hasn't ripped out the electronics that control the timing of the implosion and sold them to someone else? How do you know that the guy who assembled that particular warhead back in 1973 was sober and followed all the instructions? (If you have eighty nuclear warheads in your arsenal, you have a credible nuclear deterrent even if each warhead has a 75% chance of being a dud. If you have one, not so much.)
There is no single future for scientific journals
Tweet Miner, why I use it
You don't think the generous warranty service in the first two years and then an extension to 3 years for RROD and av plug issues was an attempt to court sympathy?
I don't think it's even a CAD model, unless we are willing to extend that D to meanings it was never supposed to take. I think this model never quite ventured out of the comfy environment of 3D Studio, an environment where you don't care about clearances, materials or thermal dissipation.
Ah.... true.

Just a second....

"arch" adj - deliberately or affectedly playful and teasing.

Upvoted for teaching me a new word usage. ;)
Enough with the stupid release names
Wouldn't startup be more stressful?
This doesn't seem to me to be very much about DRM. Palm is making use of Apple's USB identifier in an unauthorized way.

Nobody is stopping Palm from syncing their Pre with iTunes. They should write their own sync app and be done with it.
The iPhone is Not the Internet: A Product Management Essay from a Developer
There's a book called "The Bomb in My Garden", about the man responsible for Iraq's nuclear weapons program in the 90's, which get pretty in depth to the length he had to go to in order to get "not very close".

It gets into a lot more detail than this article, so if you're interested I'd recommend checking it out: http://www.amazon.com/Bomb-My-Garden-Secrets-Mastermind/dp/0...
http://www.helveticafilm.com/

About the film:
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.
Sure seemed there was no way this could go any other way for Palm. Their letter to USB seemed a PR stunt at best, and likely to backfire at worst. For the sake of OS stability, I'm glad it did.

Each vendor of devices and software for those devices should be able to have its drivers and apps listen to and interact with its own devices without worrying about interlopers.

Good for USB-IF.
when is "lumbering lummox" due?
When I think of "comet" I think of "something that gives my apps the ability 'push' to browsers [even if it's really long polling under the hood]." Did I miss the browser integration story here, or are we calling all asynchronous apis "comet" now?
AFAIK there are 2 reasons to acquire a company:

a) when there's an operational deficiency (and you have the wherewithal to solve it), and

b) when there's a management deficiency (and you have the wherewithal to solve it)

I imagine that's every bit as true on the web as it is offline. So from where you're standing, do you see an opportunity the current owner is missing? Do you have the skill and resources to install that value? If after a good hard consult with your gut you can answer Yes to both questions it may be a good idea to move forward.
Though the names are long, I don't think the naming style is all that bad. The real problem with this code is its non-orthogonal logic. It has duplication and crossed wires all over the place.
Cast is Set for "The Social Network," a Drama about the Founding of Facebook
They will start using Unicode characters. Since this will be totally unpronounceable, they will change their slogan from "Linux for human beings" to "Linux for our robot overloards."
Yeah, we didn't get a chance to change that headline before the project leaked out there. The next two phases of the project will get higher-level and build out our "real" goal: a bitchin' comet framework.

But you're right, it doesn't have much to do with comet at this point.
Because it's $170 million!

Enough said, really.
(Disclosure: I'm the author of the post in question)

So why did I use the "Read on" tactic?

Answer: To circumvent an objection. I felt that an objection would be raised after that story. So I added that sentence so people would read further stories without being turned off.

Why do others use it?

Couple of reasons:

1. It builds anticipation. And its a form of subtle encouragement.
2. It shows that the piece is incomplete. Which improves the % of people who end up reading the entire article.

Similar tactics people use... good copywriters always end the page in the middle of a sentence - so people have to turn the page to know how the sentence ends. Magazines mention the page number right besides the headline on the cover itself.

The purpose of all these tactics: prevent people to drop off in the middle of an article and get them to finish reading the entire piece!
In 2006, I wanted to see if it was possible, so I wrote (in C++) a virtual CPU with 2 registers (A and Program Counter) and input (In/Out ports) and the basic idea was it'd log everything (per cycle) in a reversable form.

Unfortunately I was too lazy to finish it, but I think it would have worked. It was just a proof of concept.
On the bright side, "Zesty Zephyr" is going to be AWESOME.
I did read the thread, thanks.

The "contrast" is being highlighted, but I can't see anyone in there seriously advancing the idea that all of the things I've described aren't "theoretical CS" - they just suggest that there aren't many people in the US doing them. One commenter rightly notes that there are plenty of people doing the kind of "theoretical CS" I'm talking about at CMU, for example (and I can think of a handful of other places doing similar work in the US).

So I stand by my original assertion: the definition of TCS as being exactly complexity and algorithmic analysis is a particularly narrow definition that is inconsistent with the way in which most people use and understand "theoretical computer science".
Personally I felt that the article had too many exclamation points. Reading it was like having the author shout at me for a couple minutes. I don't know why it made it to the main page of HN.

Dennis Rodman: Before & After. Black boring hair hid him in the pack. Red exciting hair made him rich and famous!

Sounds like a TV hair dye commercial. lol

I guess the article has useful advice on how to make yourself or your startup business stand out from the pack. But all things considered I don't think this article is particularly profound.
> There is got to be plenty of counties who would be prepared to pay a lot of money for such a device, since it guarantees that they will never be attacked by the US.

Not really. You need a device and a delivery mechanism. If either fail you are basically ending your country as an independent entity for the next couple of decades or so and you personally are unlikely to survive long after the failure.

If you have one device and declare it the general public will not believe it (some will, those "in the know" probably will if they can confirm it, but most will think it is tin-hat BS) so you need two devices: one to "test" openly and one to hold in reserve. If you bought a device rather than built it yourself the game enters a cat-and-mouse phase where a large fraction of US resources will be devoted to finding your device and blowing it up, if they succeed then you die shortly after.

If you get the device and just tell the US secretly that you have it then the cat-and-mouse game starts without the need for public posturing on either side and you (and most of the senior leadership of your country) are likely to find yourself on the unpleasant end of soft-power attempts at regime change and not-so-soft attempts that come from a busboy with a silencer.

There is a somewhat fuzzy critical mass of devices and reliable delivery mechanisms that are required before you are a threat with enough credibility to use your nukes as a shield. NK probably has a few nukes, but their artillery along the DMZ and the proximity of same to Soeul is really the only thing keeping Kim Jong Il alive; your hypothetical country has almost no hope of hitting the US and if it is not close to a US ally that its people actually care about then all bets are off. If Sudan suddenly declared that it had bought a nuke then you could probably measure Bashir's future lifespan in weeks...
Not if you implement your own integers ;)
What's to fear? The nature of free software is robust to commercial interference (by design), and didn't Red Hat prove that the relationship is generally mutually beneficial? Don't we want free software in the data center?
There aren't a lot of hardware startups in Vancouver. I would argue that there are many less hardware startups in general.

TechShop has actually come up to Vancouver and given a presentation to the VanTec angels. Working on expanding an existing business might be a lot easier.

The Bootup Entrepreneurial Society (http://bootup.ca) of which I am on the board, would likely be interested in supporting this. If your dad wants to buy us a building, we'll run it :P
"Would betting the three most statistically likely to occur numbers change your lucky enough above random probability."

No. It would not. The drawings are statistically independent events. Same thing for your coin flip example. If after 100 flips of a coin you have 99H/1T, the probability of the next flip being H or T is still 0.5 (assuming your coin is fair).
have a sense of humor about the naming, folks. "rabid raccoon lts" will be awesome, as will "egregious egret" afterwards.
Realistic headline:
New study attempts to refute old study whose results were interpreted by some to disprove free will; succeeds according to some but not to others

Readers attracted by realistic headline:
0
>At a briefing session organized by Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, a Texas Democrat and chairman of the House education committee's higher-education subcommittee, three mathematics and science professors advocated institutional programs that had succeeded in attracting and retaining black, Hispanic, and American-Indian students.

What would happen if our government attempted to specifically attract and retain white Americans in math, physics, and engineering? Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea, since that is the group who historically excelled in those fields and probably have the most interest in that area, while affirmative action type programs seem to hinder the careers of minority students who end up not being able to handle the rigor of engineering, maths, law school, etc.

>UCLA professor Richard H. Sander published an article in the November 2004 issue of the Stanford Law Review that questioned the effectiveness of affirmative action in law schools. The article presents a study that, among other things, shows that half of all black law students rank near the bottom of their class after the first year of law school, and that black law students are more likely to drop out of law school and to fail the bar exam. The article offers a tentative estimate that the production of new black lawyers in the United States would grow by eight percent if affirmative action programs at all law schools were ended, as less qualified black students would instead attend less prestigious schools where they would be more closely matched with their classmates, and thus perform better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_Unite...

>Does affirmative action hurt minorities? Racial preferences may be setting up many black and Latino law students for failure.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-sand...
Machines could ultimately match human intelligence, says Intel CTO
(not directly related to this article) The more I read about the brain, the less I believe in "free will". We have a nice illusion though...
Upvoted, now that I can finally see it. ;)

It would be nice if we could move this submission back up the page. It deserves a read.
LIFE Magazine (1936-1972) now on Google Books
That's an obvious straw man, and it's an ad hominem too (you're suggesting that because the author hasn't done something about the problem, her argument must be wrong). What nonsense.

The author is a journalist, not a VC. What's she supposed to do? Fund female entrepreneurs herself? And the fact that she hasn't -- that she wrote this article "instead" -- that's supposed to indicate that she's wrong? And for that matter...how do you know that she hasn't started such a project? You don't.

In case you're unclear, you're suggesting that the first of the two logical fallacies I presented is correct. Rephrasing it doesn't make it more correct.
Time for computer science to grow up
>But is that a fair bucket to build?

Well, to some extent, it is. A mouse or keyboard is one thing, a console or tablet is another.
Yet Another E-Reader — With a Stylus This Time
Those groups tend to score way below average on standardized math tests. So it doesn't seem like a stretch to suggest this project could end up just pumping up the number of "scientists and mathematicians" by watering down the talent level of the whole field (and doing nothing to increase the number of Ed Wittens, Andrew Wiles, Terry Taos, etc, whom I suspect are a lot more important than 1000 mediocre scientists who scraped by on affirmative action).
Ocaml's debugger has a similar time travelling feature.
The problem with financial models: the past doesn't predict the future
What you are asking is similar to Google FriendConnect features, which is what I believe Google will try to do.

Instead of waiting for websites to add FriendConnect widgets, a browser addon enables Google to provide those features on every website.

Similarly, even if AdSense is not going to be added on those websites, relevant ads can still be shown on the sidewiki. So, Google now gets to show AdSense on Microsoft/Apple's website.
All of which avoids the original question: "Does anyone know of reputable research and blind tests that back up the common designer sentiment against Arial?"
I can't help but wonder if some savvy designer/entrepreneur couldn't find a better ending for those seats.
Americans watch far more television than the rest of world
Intel Hints at Its Own Smartphone Operating System
DNS Redirection and how it will break things
> Spector thinks such a time frame is still reasonable enough for the United States to dissuade Iran from continuing down that path.

> "All the really dangerous actions that Iran can do, haven’t been done," he said. "They do not appear to be manufacturing parts or developing designs for an advanced nuclear weapon. So if the U.S. can strike a deal with them where both sides can find some satisfaction, it may be enough to end the crisis."

This seems hopelessly naive to me. The "crisis" is that we don't trust Iran with nukes. What magic negotiation or concession can we offer in the next 18 months that will get them to stop pursuing nukes that we haven't tried before? They may halt facilities, only to move them underground or fire them up later when it is to their advantage.

It's like the NK situation all over again.
>There is got to be plenty of counties who would be prepared to pay a lot of money for such a device, since it guarantees that they will never be attacked by the US.

Or it guarantees that if they are attacked by the US, it will be with a massive and overwhelming nuclear attack.
Was the code commented in enough detail? At work, we comment heavily and tend to use short variable names (especially local variables) so I'd like to know of outside experiences with similar code.
IPhone Duvar Kağıtları Resimleri | iYiblogcu
I thought they had been doing 15 for a while. I wish all news articles about quantum computing progress would report this metric.
Mathematicians form hypotheses (guessed theorems, guessed properties, etc) then perform experiments to test their hypothesis (trying to construct a proof).

There's certainly an abstract similarity, but etymologically, constructing a proof is very different from running an experiment. A proof declares a statement as True. An experiment (at best) shows that reality behaves as your model hypothesized it would. Experiments can provide evidence of something, not prove it as True. As Alan Kay says (following former link):

When we guess in science we are guessing about approximations and mappings to languages, we are not guessing about "the truth" (and we are not in a good state of mind for doing science if we think we are guessing "the truth" or "finding the truth"). This is not at all well understood outside of science, and there are unfortunately a few people with degrees in science who don't seem to understand it either.
Just for the record, eventlet and concurrence are not dead, I even used the latter in production.

They both have a fairly small audience but when you look at their mailing lists you'll see activity.
From idea to a giant machine that spits out houses
A 6 episode (sixth episode to come in November) deconstruction of how two entrepreneurs have taken their idea for "Geometric Construction Systems" from business plan through the funding stage to manufacturing and operations.
Well, you can tell the developer of that was Indian.
Nokia To Acquire Dopplr
Ah, so that's scala seems so obtuse...
I thought I read somewhere that Prozac or other SSRI's were ending up in our water supply from treated waste. I'm not sure the logistics of that, or where I read it but it could be a factor?
For an employee (not a founder), a funded (series A or above) start-up might not be. Much less management, much more flexibility in terms of schedule and work description.
Uh, if a language makes some common, reasonable things hard, it's hard not to judge is harshly.
It appears to me that it's synchronizing inventory change records between a store front and the physical warehouse. I could be wrong, but I imagine it's something pretty similar to that. And, as much as I do shudder at this code, the names did give me a pretty good idea of the intent.
>"But a major problem with uranium bombs, Kristensen said, is the fact that the material happens to be the world’s heaviest naturally occurring element (twice as heavy as lead). According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear bomb needs about 33 pounds (15 kilograms) of uranium to be operational, a requirement that hinders how far a missile can travel. The bulkiness of uranium also makes it harder to mount the technology to existing missile systems."

This is rubbish. 15 kgs is hardly what keeps a missile from travelling around athe world, it's the tamper, explosives and other assorted hardware (weighing around 1000 kgs for a crude device).

>"Unlike uranium bombs, plutonium bombs are detonated using an 'implosion' method"

More rubbish, uranium bombs can also be implosion designs, indeed most modern ones (primaries in thermonuclear bombs) are.
Quite right. Just because group X is underrepresented in Y does not imply that group X is a readily available source of Y's.

It's distinctly possible that the cheapest and most effective way to increase the number of scientists would be to recruit more white/asian american men. Without looking carefully at the numbers it is impossible to say.
from what I've read, it seems that they are doing something to distribute a specially designed (tree structure) deep belief network across their clusters. Maybe the details more complicated (combining more properties of neuron?), and the results looks like that they just trained a "background-subtraction + blob-tracking" system.
http://www.thoughtoffice.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05...

Direct link to an image of an open OLPC XO 2. Now we know where Microsoft stole the design from. ;)
I think we're supposed to be used to it by now, that & the brown.
Why will only "douchebags" have a need for these techniques?
We don't seem to have even a deterministic universe, thanks to quantum indeterminacy. Yet quantum indeterminacy doesn't seem to be enough to rescue freedom.

The real philosophy doesn't get done until you dive into how ill-defined the concept of free will is. That way lies compatibilism.