skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the only estimate I've ever seen that says that the damage the Soviets could have inflicted on the US was anything like as severe as what the US has planned for the Soviets. Of course, the US could have faced a lot of damage, but nothing like the complete annihilation that would have been visited on the Soviets and other socialist countries.

The US consistently over-estimated the strategic threat the Soviets posed to the US for most of the Cold War - particularly the infamous "Bomber Gap" and the "Missile Gap":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
It's the bigger dick foreign policy at work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CghWWWXSUUU
Good essay. The dynamic scoping / mutable global state issue, especially with respect to rounding modes, is a total nightmare. We've been trying our hardest to provide great support for rounding modes in Julia and it just doesn't work well. The trouble is that there are functions that need normal rounding regardless of the current rounding mode while other operations can safely respect the current rounding mode. There are still other functions for which neither is appropriate. A software-implemented sin function, for example, may completely break if used with an unexpected rounding mode, so you don't want that. But you also don't want to just completely ignore the rounding mode either. What you really want is a sin function that returns a correct result, rounded according to the rounding mode. But that means you really need five variants of the sin function and you need to dynamically dispatch between them based on the current rounding mode – i.e. global mutable state – which is, of course, quite bad for performance, not to mention the explosion of complexity. I've come to believe that the rounding mode concept as designed in IEEE 754 was only ever feasible to use when you were writing your own assembly code.

The essay is not quite right about the motivation for rounding modes – they are not intended to support interval arithmetic. When we got the chance to ask him about it, Kahan was quite negative about interval arithmetic, noting that intervals tend to grow exponentially large as your computation progresses. Instead, the motivation he suggested was that you could run a computation in all the rounding modes, and if the results in all of them were reasonably close, you could be fairly certain that the result was accurate. Of course, at the higher level the essay is exactly right: the fact that this motivation isn't explained in the IEEE 754 spec is precisely what allowed this misunderstanding about the motivation to occur at all.
I also thought it a ridiculous statement fwiw. "The existence of a specialised thing means that attempts at building a general purpose thing is not viable" Apply that logic to anything specialised to see it. I'm really not trying to be rude or belittle you, I'm just trying to get a stark example that shows the thinking in the spirit of sensible discourse. You may read it differently and explain why and I'll learn something. So...

The existence of nascar shows that attempts to build a family saloon has failed, if it had succeeded you could race your family saloon competitively on a banked oval track.

A general purpose thing involves a trade off such that it can do most things but can't do any one thing as well as something that is designed to do that and nothing else. Yes stupid car analogies to describe computing indeed. Totally. I'm sorry.
Because it's incredibly fun to work on? It's a brilliant VM once you wrap your brain around it, and the hackers behind it got to really try something new?
> Every visitor to the U.S. needs to inform the authorities where s/he will reside for the duration. With the exact address, not something vague like state or city.

You're talking about foreign visitors. That's very common in other countries as well. Obviously not a shining example of a freedom country. Still, I was talking about residents. In your own country.

> Have you heard about neighborhood watch? They even have menacing signs all over the area that they patrol, reporting any suspicious activity, calling the cops on you if you linger and look around.

I've never lived in one so I can't tell how it works in reality, but apparently as of early 1980s 12% of population was involved in a neighborhood watch:
http://www.ncpc.org/topics/home-and-neighborhood-safety/neig...

Still, that's no where near as prevalent as what I described. Not even close. Also I figure neighborhood watch resonates well with Americans and their take-matter-into-my-own-hands, government-distrust mentality.

To be fair, I only experienced the last few year of the Cold War. I was young, my family didn't suffer from any hardship, and I still love the place and go back whenever I can.
I know. What is funny is that they made OS X free despite that.
How bad is Roku?
He was, but has since moved to Dropbox.
That logic is like

X < Y => "oh, so X is always zero, huh?"
I Miss the Old Google Chrome
This is why I'm happy for living in the EU.

While developing a smart-TV-controller appliance, I ended up researching CE and other requirements which have to be met... and some of these actually set maximum allowed standby power consumption!

I bet that the US market doesn't have anything remotely similar (and that TTIP and friends will allow US companies to sell their shit in EU without adhering to our rules!)
Rage Profiteers: How Bloggers Harness Our Anger for Their Own Gain
To this day Turkey has the largest standing army after the US of NATO members, it's not been a pushover for some decades now. Its also got a rather large number of armored units with few rivaling NATO members with the US as exception. It lacks Nuclear weapons (although it has the capacity to build and deliver, and participates in Nuclear sharing treaties, a bit like the Netherlands) and it's not better funded than say the UK, but it's pretty massive. Together with the reasons you mentioned (proximity) it makes a pretty decent case.
Whoa. That does make it intuitive. :)
"Comedy writer" isn't quite how I'd describe it, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Urbit is run by the guy who writes/wrote under Mencius Moldbug, who is perhaps one of the more controversial people to achieve internet fandom. If you read through all the archives on his site and have no opinion (probably somewhere in the "I hate him" or "I find this reasonably convincing" statistical clusters), then your sense of outrage has been diminished, I would say.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/

Note: I myself am unconvinced by his writings, and find him to be just another ironic instance of the ironic nature of American culture, eager to avoid the appearance of naivete by abandoning all hopes that are fragile. Do with that what you will.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6438320

I've been watching this since it's started. It has some magical atmosphere around it and you never now whether it's serious or not; whether it's a real technical project or some kind of artistic performance.

I think I have a destroyer somewhere.
Partial function application for humans
> You know it's not the only question, and not even the most relevant one (which is whether the structure, sequence, and organization part of an API is the copyrightable part, or whether the literal implementation only is protected).

To me, an "API" is just the "structure, sequence, and organization part," distinct from the implementation. I.e. you can't take a C header file and delete the parameter names, and replace all the types with typedef'ed names and get a different API. So the question is whether that (whatever you call it) is copyrightable. And under 17 USC 102, how you answer that question is to look at whether that is original and creative.

> 1. API's are not expressions of anything. They are literally interfaces. An outline of a story in abstract terms is not copyrightable. The actual story is. Such should it be with API's. API's are not copyrightable, their implementations are.
2. The fact that it is hard work and requires careful thought is 100% irrelevant in united states copyright law, since we have no sweat of the brow doctrine.

Of course, but something being hard work and requiring a lot of thought is indicative of whether it requires originality or creativity. Take, for example, the POSIX file API's. That specific combination of orthogonal function calls, the concept of passing around file descriptors as small integers, etc, is definitely a creative expression, distinct from the underlying functionality. And it's a distinct creative expression from, e.g., the Win32 file API's, which express similar functionality in a very different way.
Oh the author's blog[0], he states that all his code is in the public domain.

[0] http://moronlab.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/moron-lab-goals-princ...
>* But in that case, why are instruction booklets copyrightable, but not software APIs?* //

The instructions themselves are not copyrightable only a specific presentation of those instructions.

So if I create a new recipe for a dish. You can include that recipe in your book but you can not include the specific presentation - so you should rewrite in your own words, not duplicate my layout, not copy my picture without permission, but you are free to recreate the recipe as it's a method of preparation rather than a form of presentation. Now arguably my layout of the dish could be copyright too so you may have to plate it differently.
Which monitor are you using?
How important is it to implement floating point arithmetic exactly as the standard specifies it? What if the same set of features is generally available, but not quite in the required way?
I'm not sure it's equivalent. What you're saying is that whoever wrote the stack that SR used should be prosecuted for facilitating the site's creation.

This is simply a project in the same way BitTorrent is a project - it can be used for many things, illegality being just one, and even if that is the main usage pattern (which isn't clear at this point), that's no reason for the creator to be punished.
As stated, I'm not going to engage on the politics of the situation. It was a point about language.

If you ask one of those "far left" people why they favor those policies, you're going to get an answer along the lines of "fairness" or "safety net", etc... That is, they want that stuff because it seems like a good idea. But if you don't want that stuff and want to argue against it, yet have at best a subtle or abstract reason, you end up being on the side of "unfairness and danger" in the argument.

So you make up a term like "paternalism" (or better: "nanny state") to describe the same policies that evokes a negative connotation. Problem solved!

Politicians do this all the time, and it's just something we live with. But the danger to the thinking person is that you end up internalizing this kind of language to such a degree that it pops out in a completely non-political discussion about Japanese corporate culture.

Don't do that. Leave the spin to the talk shows. If you feel competent to have an opinion about someone else's ideas, you should be capable of discussing it in a neutral manner without resorting to Orwellian newspeak.

Again: "bemoaning the lack of paternalism" ... WTF?
Are you suggesting the Rust compiler didn't catch that?
This reminds me of a very short-lived wave in Windows application development. Application bloat was deemed to be endemic, and frameworks like Microsoft's MFC certainly didn't help. So alternatives were sought. For some, just using bare W32 in C/C++ or with some minimal wrappers (Microsoft did have an STL=ish ones, IIRC) was enough. But a surprisingly large community started developing apps in assembly!

Not sure how much of that is still available. But due to and early Palm devices, assembly had a short-lived renaissance and (small) size was important.

Nowadays? Well, what's the average size of an iOS/Android app?
Interesting that you used the example of eBay.

I remember reading about the alleged reason eBay acquired Skype.

Skype is a peer to peer network. The guys behind it were the guys behind Kazaa, an earlier peer to peer network.

In Skype's case, the network is used to send audio and video.

In Kazaa's case the network was used to send "files".

If I recall correctly the article said eBay planned to use the Skype network to allow buyers and sellers to communicate with each other, directly.

It's also interesting you mentioned SMTP. I do not think I have ever seen anyone mention it online but SMTP works well over a peer to peer network.

Peer to peer SMTP obviates the need for intermediary SMTP servers and third party "email providers". With peer to peer networking there is no necessity for users' data to be stored and forwarded by third parties.

Not to suggest anyone would be interested in that.
Actually, the BBC did one documentary that was in some ways even scarier than Threads: Q.E.D. - A Guide To Armageddon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJttnC8PoA

It goes through the details of what would happen if a 1MT bomb exploded the center London - which is, of course, completely catastrophic. Then it calmly mentions that London would have probably been hit by at least 30 bombs...
This isn't really a great solution though, since it pushes the problem of ensuring FIFO ordering outside of the queue and onto the user; but being FIFO is entirely the point of the queue data structure. If your queue doesn't provide ordering across multiple threads, it can't meaningfully be called a multi-threaded queue, so it's not very fair to compare it to genuine multi-threaded queues. Unless I've misread the documentation, this is just a collection of SPMC queues, together with a read operation that checks all the queues for an item to dequeue, right? But there is no synchronization that occurs to tie any of these SPMC queues together. Even if you wrapped every single access to this data structure in a lock, for instance, you would not be able to ensure FIFO ordering of elements inserted into it.

I think the estimation that having inter-thread ordering requirements is uncommon is incorrect. Probably the most common use of MPMC queues is as a concurrency primitive in systems using a CSP-like abstraction, where such requirements are extremely common. But you can't implement, say, Go's channels in terms of this data structure.
Semantic Gateway as a Service Architecture for IoT Interoperability
I remember when CMOS was new and static really did damage just about every part you handled if you weren't careful. Little conductive wrist band connected to steel desk, carbon coated conductive foam to work on and so on. But for the life of me I can't remember when a part failed due to static in the last decade or even longer. If anything broke it was either a cable or a soldered connection to a board.

Sure, I've had RAM break, but that was factory installed RAM that was several years old. This is definitely anecdata but it would be interesting to know how much damage static really does these days. If you're going out of your way to pet your cat prior to installing your RAM chips on a glass floor or something like that then you're probably asking for it. But regular precautions (place RAM container on the case before opening package, hold the case while inserting the RAM) seem to be more than enough. On chip ESD protection has come a long way since the 80's.

http://www.amazon.com/On-Chip-Protection-Integrated-Circuits...
Indeed. And somehow, I'm able to build full web applications from database to CSS, by myself, without once using "Machine Learning"...

This whole article is ridiculous.
An API for free open source scientific protocols
Dell UP2414Q
Well its kind of part of the article -- it's a promoted comment (and the only one).
Many web fonts render poorly on some combinations of OS/browser. Old windows + internet explorer and there is a big chance for the cool typekit font you picked to look like crap.

I use and like web fonts, but from a technical point of view I would rather use a generic "font-family: sans-serif" and let the browser do its thing.
Kind of fascinating that the Slate podcast about a podcast is now ranked #8 in iTunes Top Podcasts list.
Well, Jesuit way to treat thing is very different even from "canonic Catholic" (yeah, sounds a little weird after we have Jesuit pope), not to say about Orthodox Church and it is not unusual for them to conclude that "black and white are essentially one and the same thing after all", so I probably wouldn't relate contents of that class to discussion about some Orthodox saint too much. AFAIK Olga isn't treated as saint in Catholic Church, is she?
Or as I sometimes say: "on the bottom it's a new kind of math, on the top it's a new kind of social network." This is kind of shameless hype but not as much as you might think.

Sounds like a 10-year research project, right? Actually I started working on Urbit in 2002, as a sort of "unsupervised PhD thesis." I figured it'd be done by 2008 or so.

We seeded a startup last fall and are busy turning a prototype into a product. You can now write a pretty decent web app in Urbit, but it's still too raw to stand the light of day. For instance, the network works, but we often run global flag days when we shut the whole planet down and change the protocol.

One of the main problems with Urbit is that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If you're going to ship something this crazy, it has to work extremely well right out of the box. We had a sort of abortive non-launch last year when the project kind of got accidentally leaked, and decided we had to "unlaunch" and go back into quiet mode. I hate selling things I can't quite deliver.
I can't decide if it's a science fiction novel written in code form, a programming environment, a game, a radical creative take on computing and networking ... Whatever it is, it's genius.
For Facebook, ping "static.ak.fbcdn.net"; it's their Akamai CDN, and it's probably much better than the main hostname.
That depends on what you want. Some people don't care at all, but others have legitimate needs for a lot of the features described in the spec. So if you can at all, it's best to follow the spec, imo. That way languages don't do a lot of annoyingly different, similar things. And, as this essay points out, the spec is wildly successful – it is arguably the most successful spec of all time – so second-guessing it is usually a mistake. Kahan at al. have forgotten more about numerical analysis than most of us will ever know.
I like how we live in a world where you can say "open source" and put a bunch of compiled binaries in a bin directory. Leaving aside the trail of GPL violations, it's ... certainly something ... that the phrase "open source" doesn't make people think about whether source should be _present_, open or otherwise.

The "contributing" page is pretty awesome, along the same lines: it describes a list of things you need to do in order to ask the maintainer to implement the feature you want.
I could see a clunky old Tivo style DVR consuming that much.
Me too. Add fires to energy consumption among the perverse results skeptics will harp on for the arbitrary constraints imposed by bitcoin.
A power supply rated for 500 watts doesn't mean the device draws 500 watts all the time. Most electronics don't draw anywhere near their rated input during normal use.
Err... No, the network didn't even notice. There's so much noise in the hash rate that any signal is lost. See https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate and try to find the "disruption".
pretty sure the margins for the hardware is significantly higher than the margin for their OS, so it's much more valuable that Apple makes it as easy as possible for people to buy into their ecosystem.
>they never seriously tried to kill her.

Yeah they are not as bad as Russia. They could still aim higher though. Transparency International has the US at 73/100 on it's corruption index, ranking no 17. Denmark and New Zealand are the leaders at 91/100. Come on USA, you can improve!

http://files.transparency.org/content/download/700/3007/file...
I sure hope they had an offsite backup or address for their mined coins.
If it's desktop CPUs you are looking for, as opposed to power saving mobile models in desktop shells, I did get the HD-Plex S1 when it came out and I've been happy with it. No moving parts to break down or cause noise.
actually we have the EPA's Energy Star certification system, which a lot of products do try for.
Roku's power input is rated 12V and 1A [https://www.roku.com/products/roku-3]. This is maximum draw of 12W at any given time.
TOHKBD – The Other Half Keyboard for Your Jolla
Ask HN: Founders whose startups have failed, where did life take you afterwards?
Interesting but a bit silly, thus landing it in credibility buster territory for anyone who puts a moment of thought into it. Take Boise as an example. Within the five mile radius is downtown Boise. On any given day guess how many planes fly at a low altitude over the downtown corridor? That's right, zero. They all stick to a southerly route over mostly dessert.
I was hoping for a bit more with regards to significant pronunciation differences. Not just spelling differences.
I think it's just my retrospective naive optimism!
Wow, you're right. That's a terrible monitor with TN panel to match. From a reputable(?) brand no less. Anyway, I think my original point still stands. Apple is no Dell.
That's the question, isn't it. I can't define it very well right now. We have a board we designed in house that uses a large FPGA for a range of basic real time image processing on 1920 x 1080 video. It's about ten years old. It'd be nice to be able to replace it with a software based platform and Python.

Also, it seems this has the same issue as other similar boards: No HDMI input.
I inspired this article creation - it fell into the "exploding animals" category, mainly because I originally wrote the exploding whale article on Wikipedia.
It depends on the patch. If they introduce a patch to fix something say bluetooth or wifi, that patch could very well break it. If it breaks, you might have to hack it again to resolve the issues. Having a hackintosh myself, I think it's easier to just buy a mac and not worry about it. If you love tinkering / you have the time to deal with it, then by all means.
>* the concept of passing around file descriptors as small integers, etc, is definitely a creative expression, distinct from the underlying functionality* //

If you pass the file descriptors because that looks pretty, because of the beauty of the form and not for any functional effect. And, if the same functional effect (if there is one) can be achieved in other obvious and equally functional ways, so the only reason to do it this way is aesthetic, then yes - the essential elements are creative.

Just because you can achieve the same technical outcome in a different way doesn't make this way specifically creative however.

If an obvious way to create a specific technical effect creates a specific art-like outcome too then it's probably not copyrightable. Tyre treads, say: if your tread is created to appear different and there's no other reason to make it that way then you're covered by copyright; but if they have a technical benefit and you don't have other IP protection (patent or design patent) then others are free to duplicate that design because they are allowed to generate that technical outcome and the visual "artistry" is subordinate to that it's emergent rather than being directed.
But can you please explain why you couldn't use existing math (language and compiler) on the bottom layers (1 and 2) before replacing them by your own? That would help me understand the level of your ambition :)
I think in both depending on the situation.
I like the concept, but altitude matters. Airport control areas are like an inverted layer cake:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Airspace_...

It would be nice to add a feature to drone navigation software to prevent accidental entry into an exclusion zone.