skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be interesting to find the "basis vectors" of issues, if you will, underpinning this matrix.

They seem to be: Israel-Palestinians, Syria's Civil War, Egypt's Overthrow, and the new Iraqi state.

So, if the issues would be resolved in the most peaceful way, namely:

Egypt's current government continuing to exist

Israel and Palestinian Authority defeating Hamas and working towards a peace deal

Iraq getting stable borders (with Kurds using political struggle only)

Syria - probably the overthrow would maximize peace at this point, esp given the resolution above ousting Hamas

The big winners would be:
USA
Israel
Palestinian Authority
Egypt
Rebels in Syria
Iran (even though Assad lost)

And the big losers would be:
Hamas
ISIS
Hezbollah

Meanwhile:

Al Qaeda and USA will keep fighting

Turkey has recently had its own set of protests against Erdogan, and it's unclear where its future lies

With ISIS gone, Saudi Arabia and Qatar will continue to have stable states favoring Sunni Wahhabism

Iraq will probably become one of the fastest growing economies in the middle east

Iran will go from being polarized to roughly moderate in its connections, esp if a peace agreement is reached with Israel, the Assad regime is ousted, and Iraq is a stable and friendly state

Jordan would enjoy further peace and the Palestinian Authority's new confidence since the ouster of Hamas etc. may prove a strong factor for Jordan's relations with its Palestinian majority, which would take away focus from Israel-Palestinian conflict

The new Syrian government would aspire to join the Arab League but may consider giving Palestinian refugees citizenship, which will play a factor in Israel-PA deals
I was tempted to reply, because I think you've made some points I can understand, but object to. And some others I believe you simply misunderstood.

> Well yeah, your victims pay for it.

That's not what I meant. I meant that when a country starts a war, it's not politicians who pay for it. Citizens pay for wars with their taxes. Politicians simply sell them a war, while not investing any money of their own. In fact, what happens is, politicians make money, because there are companies who benefit from wars (oil, military equip and tech), so they lobby politicians. If politicians or companies had to pay for wars out of their own profits, there would be no wars.

> In theory Capitalism distributes the most to those who provide the most, which sounds great.

That's a misunderstanding. A rich person can only spend that much for himself (even then, by buying things, he actually creates jobs). He then has to invest into something he believes to be sustainable. Thus, I see businessmen as ultimate redistributors. They proved on the market they're good at handling money, thus they deserve to have more of them. Politicians only proved they can manipulate public opinion and you are entrusting them your own and someone else's tax money. I don't think it's a good idea at all.

> And you think a society that would pass such a vote would be any kinder in a free market

Yes, because in a free market the redheads would be able to legally invest money of their own to protect themselves from other people, who wish to kill them. With government, since it has the monopoly on protection and laws, no such thing would be possible. In other words, in a completely free market minorities are able to put a price tag on them being discriminated against, while when you have government, they would actually be paying for their own discrimination. Gay people have been paying taxes just like everyone else, yet until some point, it was even illegal to be gay, not even talking about marriage.

>No, my whole point is that access to services is a form of freedom

Very well. Even by your definition then, when government takes a portion of my money as tax for the services I don't use or disagree with (like wars) it takes away my freedom to use other services I consider good.

The crucial distinction is force. Government is force that is abused because it's so centralized. Government is telling other people what they can or cannot do, how they can or cannot spend their money and what services they can or cannot use. It doesn't matter what you consider freedom to be. With government some may indeed get a little more "freedom", but always at the expense of someone else and always with people in the government benefiting most from their position. I'm simply against this redistribution, because it is based on a system that is inherently unfair and broken. No, it cannot be fixed.
Just seems to be the BBC homepage. The rest of the site seems to be working just fine: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ for example is working - watching the BBC News Channel right now.
If you're using a resolver which supports DNSSEC, and you're using Firefox with the DNSSEC-Validator addon from https://www.dnssec-validator.cz/ (which supports DANE) and you visit https://grepular.com/, you will see a nice little green icon in the address bar to show you that DNSSEC was used, and another green icon to show you that the SSL cert was validated using DANE.
Sounds pretty clear to me: If you write an opinionated blog post on an article you are free to submit it just as much as the person who submits the article itself. But if your blog post is just a summary of the article it's probably going to get removed.
Simplification is a good thing. And the middle east desperately needs some. Sure, the foreign ministries of the world shouldn't use this chart, but that's not really the audience here.
A more recent story concerning the resignation of a famous climate scientist, Lennart Bengtsson, former director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, from a controversial lobby group due to what Crichton calls "consensus science":
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientists...
I think this question would have been better via email to the mods. There's a good chance they would have reverted for you based on what you've mentioned in this particular instance. For what it's worth, while they are only human, I think the mods do a great job with both titles and (more rarely) changing URL.

When a URL is changed, it is a way of saying, 'Look, we think this other URL is better for the discussion', while keeping the discussion. Daniel does a great job of mentioning these changes in a comment - hardly ever to a complaint. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang for some of Daniel's comments.

Title changes are also generally good ones. Often they happen in response to a complaint.

If you don't like it, email the mods with why!

They do a fantastic job. I approve of changing the titles (even silently) or URL's, especially with a comment. If you have a complaint do feel free to email the mods about it.

And here's a thanks to the great work the mods do and to hoping they will keep it up.

You're only reading Hacker News thanks to their tireless work.
Ars Technica also did a good write-up on that subject:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/gears-...
"Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research to determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research in other policy areas as well."

Okay - let's build another earth on the other side of the Sun, we can carry on burning fossil fuels and they can say use solar and molten salt batteries! Michael Crichton is a well known science fiction author; you can take his disbelief in global warming with a grain of salt.
The rules around titles are to always use the title from the article. If people could make up their own titles we could end up with a tonne of click-bait. There are clearly situations like the one you mention where the title doesn't do the article justice but I'd rather miss the occasional article that see a tonne of click-bait and waste my time viewing dozens of shitty articles.
Really nice article with lots of nifty technical stuff about optics, lasers, etc.

But this thread also has a lot of thoughtful comments that
question the actual bottom line financial potential of this nifty technical stuff.

Here's much of the rest between the nifty technology and the financial bottom line: The art, entertainment, content, etc.

E.g., I've never paid much attention to ballet. Since early on I liked music and classical music, I have some CDs of the music to a few of the famous ballets, right, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Coppélia.

But, right, via YouTube, it was easy, e.g., to watch some of Coppélia, so I did. It's fun! It's a light comedy, with a cute story by Hoffmann (right, as in Tales of Hoffmann), and a LOT of really pretty girls (right, I'm a human male!) acting really cute!

Movies and the OP? I'm coming back to that with Coppélia
as an example!

The YouTube performance I watched was from The
Australian Ballet. Well, too soon that performance
was taken down on YouTube. Bummer! But, if The
Australian Ballet had used YouTube just as a
free sample, then it worked because I bought the DVD.

Now the DVD of Coppélia
on my computer is really nice, nicer to watch
than via YouTube. No matter how the work
goes on a day, a little Coppélia
will make the day a lot better.

Why? Lasers? Nope! Instead of lasers,
what's good is just the
art, entertainment, content, and these
come across quite nicely via the DVD.
The music is terrific; the
story is cute; the girls are
really pretty. Drive 50 miles to a 3D, 4K laser
movie version at big bucks? Likely
not.

Why? There's an old point: Once long
ago a guy asked a child which he
liked better, radio dramas or TV
dramas. The boy said radio.
For why, he said, "The pictures
are much better on radio.". Yup.

Sorry laser guys: Some of the best
pictures are what the
viewer forms in their head
from just hints from the
content itself.

Sit down, laser guys: I have a DVD
of the original 1933 King Kong. It's
just black and white, but it's still fun!
The nicest part is the interplay with
the Fay Wary character, the poor, pretty,
sweet, naive girl, the older, powerful,
assertive, rich movie producer, the
hard boiled crew of the ship, etc., the
beauty and beast theme -- all that comes
across very nicely with just that old
1933 black and white version.

My wife understood drama: So, once she
took us to a summer stock play, only
a few actors, a small stage, a small audience,
and afterward pointed out to me how
there is some magic to the theater,
that the audience can really get into
the story and experience with just the
hints of such meager production values.
Not nearly new since such drama
goes way back in English literature
and the ancient Greek theater.

Net, the main issue is the content, not
the technology.
That's referring to an immutability helper, not like angular at all
I don't know anything about global warming research to comment about the conclusion of the text, but I can say something about what is certainly a religious belief infecting those who respect science, and are then led to respect "science": nutrition. The truth is that we know very little about human nutrition, especially in healthy individuals. When John Ioannidis demonstrated that most published medical research is false (wholly or partially), he singled out nutrition and gene-association as two especially problematic fields. Yet, the reason many believe that reading some papers and changing their diets to include more or less protein -- or more or less fiber, or more or less fat -- has an effect on their health is pure religion and magical thinking. This magical thinking stems from a possibly innate (and certainly ingrained) belief that "our body is a temple", or that "we are what we eat", which is a particular manifestation of the more general psychological desire in what Jonathan Haidt calls "purity". This psychological need is combined with the false[1] seemingly-scientific belief that our bodies accumulate damage over time.

The scientific truth is that (other than obviously pathological cases of eating poison, or living on just fries for a year) we simply don't know what food is good for us, and certainly not in what quantity. It's actually worse: we don't even know if diet (again, non pathological) has any effect on health. It is absolutely possible (and even likely), that our bodies are certainly capable of retaining good and disposing of bad nutrients, as long as our diet is somewhere within a very large "normal" range.

But nutrition is another of these scientific religions of our times, which infects actual scientists, too, and affects their research (like various papers linking diet to disease through a correlation with cholesterol -- an unproven pathogen).

[1]: http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-w...
I would agree, if reality had matched up with this theory. I've watched many insightful blog posts be replaced with the original article over the last year. Usually as a result of a few people just linking to the original article (despite some dozen plus other threads continuing the conversation started by the blog).

Sadly, no, I don't have links (and it's not something you can search for), so you'll have to take me at my word, and choose an appropriate amount of salt to go with it.
That's a beautiful thing, I was thinking about building a system like that, but without the cryptocurrency thing, it's genial.

Reading the whitepaper one thing isn't clear: will the pieces of data be encrypted before sending them to the network?
Sites that don't redirect to PayPal could charge you $200 more than what they display too -- even easier!
The annoying thing is that other governments are pressured by the USA to keep criminalizing drugs, while the USA itself is decriminalizing it state by state.
you can take any belief in a specific future with large barrels of salt, even when those beliefs are promulgated by people with whom you are in agreement.
I was also surprised. I guess you can only really look at one monitor at a time, and switching workspaces with keyboard shortcuts can be about as fast as turning your head.
"Certainly the increased use of computer models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make the models from those who verify them. [...] an independent research institute [...] must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it."

Yes, we should take his opinion with a grain of salt, not because he is a science fiction author, but generally. I like to remind HN of the Royal Society's motto: Nullius in verba.
Considering that there is a lot of users using their own identity, changing the title - or worse - the actual source of a submission, could result in misunderstandings.
Can you cut some expenses in a way that doesn't lower your self-perceived standard of living too much? see www.mrmoneymustache.com for inspiration.

You seem to have a lot of resilience, so using more of your income to buy more time should be an easy feat for you. Especially with the life perspective I am sure you gained from going through all that.

Whatever you do, good luck.
Aaron Swartz offered an interesting insight into this on The Setup [1]

I don't have any extra displays. When I was little, I'd read Adam Engst talk about how great a second monitor was and lust after one, but never could bring myself to buy one. When I went to work for Condé Nast they gave us all nice big external Dell monitors and I found that I just couldn't get in the habit of using two screens. Everyone talks about how great it is to have more screen real estate, but apparently for what I do it doesn't really matter. I spend nearly all of my time on the computer staring at a block of text of one sort or another (emails, web pages, code) and no matter how big my screen is, I can't read more than a couple words at a time. Everything else on the screen is mostly a distraction. But maybe I'd feel differently if I wasn't so nearsighted.

I've found working on just my 15" laptop leads to much less procrastination (sometimes).

[1] http://aaron.swartz.usesthis.com/
I asked a very similar question of dang [1] about two months ago when he decided to change an article's URL to one I added to the comments [2].

His response to me (w/ irrelevant stuff redacted):

The short answer is that HN's goal is quality, so that's
what we optimize for. Optimizing means trading other things
away. One thing we're willing to trade away–if it's a clear
win for quality–is fidelity to the original submission. HN's
focus should always be on the content, and the details of the
original submission are of little interest compared to the
subject at hand.

HN isn't a purist's kind of place. Our goal to make the
front page and the threads as interesting and substantive
as possible. We change a lot of things to serve that
principle. If we knew how to serve it better, we'd happily
break more crockery to do so.

Someone (perhaps a purist!) will object that terms like
"quality", "interesting", and "substantive" have no precise
definitions and are in the eye of the beholder. True, but (a)
they're not arbitrary either, (b) the alternatives suck, and
(c) someone has to make the calls. We don't get them all right,
but we do try hard to correct mistakes, and I'll defend the
principle any day.

1: dang = Daniel Gackle, HN's moderator. http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hack...

2: Original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747401
So what? The whole point of that confirmation screen should be to let me confirm the amount with Paypak which authorizes the funds' release.
DNSSEC still relays on CAs. They were just renamed to "Trust Anchors". The trust anchor for .com is Verisign.
What Great Scientists Did When They Weren't Doing Science
NSA for example. Any topic with "NSA" gets a very large hit.
Usually dang post a comment when he changes the title or url. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=author%3Adand+changed#!/comment/so... Most of the times the change is sensible.

It's still a problem because some of the comments refer to the old version.
"The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science"

Our science is very very limited, if you didn't figure out this until now you don't really understand what science is, there are some answers that you will never find if you reduce it to take it to the lab for tests and repeat it until you are sure it's true.

Some things are just educated guesses, drake equation is just statistics, that is the closest thing we have regarding the probability of life in the universe, the scientific answer to the question is only a limited robot sent to a near planet and some water discoveries on europa hoping that one day a robot will also find life in that water.

And all that crap only to get to the point to say that climate change is fake, earth climate is complex and with the same analogy strict science is too limited to get a true/false answer, all we have is an educated guess and that doesn't look good.

So what do you want to do, wait for science to reach the level that understands earth climate completely and can model it on a supercomputer and get a true/false answer? maybe that will happen in a 100 years but what if the educated guess is right, what then? keep burning fossil oil, pollute the oceans, alter the biosphere in ways we don't fully understand because we don't have a clear answer that these changes make a significant impact on the climate/biosphere?

Even if we don't have a true/false answer to climate change I think is obvious that our way of getting energy and dumping waste is very dirty and damaging and given enough time we will be able to see some visible changes before science will be able to provide that definitive answer but probably will be too late.
Duplicate Code Detection Literature
Thought I could contribute my 5c here.
I have been working in retail for around 4 years now, and dealt with PoS systems extensively: searched for the right software (protip: there is none), developed a master DB for synchronizing the product catalog across several locations, gathered reports and maintained the infrastructure.
After all, I find the lack of good PoS software frustrating (at least here in Norway). The more or less affordable solutions are decades old, running VB macros on top of MS Access databases, they are often incompatible with versions of Windows above XP. Everything seems stitched together over the course of many years by various WYSIWYG Studio dilettantes. Extending such software with new functionality is often hard or even impossible, which their developers admitted on several occasions. For instance, I've once got an estimate of $5000 for integrating an old DIGI scale, with a condition that I'd manage to find a datasheet for that protocol. I ended up writing a small COM port emulator and used it as a proxy between PoS and the real port.

Fun thing about PoS is the huge assortment of various hardware, and all of it could be abstracted in business logic. Almost every country has it's own ways of collecting taxes, own currency, own central company registers and different ways of reporting -- all of it should be considered when designing, a dream of every architecture astronaut. In addition come these necessary things like stock control, handheld scanners, BI, printing, Unicode (never seen it supported by any PoS; imagine running an international foods store with ISO Latin-1) and last, but not the least, user-friendliness.

I guess the PoS software market is much larger in the States, but what about the average software quality? PoS systems are not going anywhere soon, and I feel that a startup dealing with these issues could definitely see success. If anyone else feels like doing it, I'd be more than glad to contribute.
Morphy Buttons
I agree. I used to see going to the cinema as a social meeting. But now I invite people to my home to watch movies from a DLP projector.

This projector will be cheaper over time, and more and more people will be able to do that.

About the "3D thing", good for them if they want to raise tickets with it, but it is not for me.

It is not real 3D, just for those that have stereopsis their main way of understanding space. But neither my family or me do.
Bounce.JS: Create Complex CSS Animations Fast
It would make you the greatest (at least for me personally) if you'd support bulk playlist downloads.
> I've developed a set of tricks over the years and they are all quite simple.

Actually, so is Earley parsing. The more I study this little piece of CS, the more I see how simple this really is. This is why it feels so much like math to me: hard at the beginning, then something "clicks" and everything becomes simpler.

Your "set of tricks" are probably similar. Knowing nothing about them, I'd bet their simplicity is rooted in some deep, abstract, yet simple math, just waiting to be formalized:

> what I do is not very well understood, so there is no good theory for it yet and a lot of open questions to investigate.

And how do you plan to further your understanding, or finding good theories? It can't be just psychology and cognitive science. I'm sure there will be some math involved, including proofs.
Scientists Begin to Demystify Hole Found in Siberian Permafrost
Don’t Blame Malaysia Airlines
Shocking habit changing wearable
Can Writing Change You?
lol! ISIS has no friends at all
Get a ham radio license and you'll have access to lots of spectrum and the ability to use higher power levels, for non-commercial use.
Children most easily adopt languages before the 12th year of age. Between the ages of 12 and 14 language acquisition becomes more difficult, with the majority failing to obtain native(accentless)fluency after the age of 16.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis

Children and adults have been shown to retain this ability for the acquisition of a third language until the age of 50, if they have obtained accentless fluency in a second language before the age of 16.