skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What stops so many other countries from building nuclear weapons?

That's an interesting question, perhaps the best answer is simply affluence, the perception of geopolitical safety, and the perception of unwanted negative repercussions of obtaining nuclear weapons. Any developed country with a significant industrial base can build nuclear weapons. Trivially so for countries with significant local nuclear power industrial infrastructure such as fuel reprocessing or Uranium enrichment. Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, all these countries, and more, could build nuclear weapons quite rapidly and in great quantity just by deciding to do so.

For everyone else, well, one hopes that it is sufficiently difficult and costly that it's just not worth it for most countries, and difficult to hide as well, though mostly that's a lie we tell ourselves to make us feel safe. The hardest part is acquiring the fissile materials, which turns out to be slightly tricky. Plutonium requires production in reactors, but more so it requires a rather inefficient process to produce weapons grade Plutonium in reactors. Reactors are hard to hide, and if a reactor is under IAEA observation it's non-trivial to use the reactor to produce Plutonium. I say non-trivial but it is certainly far from impossible, as it's been done, but it makes it difficult to produce in large quantity while under the IAEA's eyes.

Uranium enrichment is a bit of a different story, and not a particularly heartening one either. It does require very sophisticated equipment and significant industrial resources to enrich Uranium, but it turns out that this equipment can be hidden fairly well and it actually takes much less of an investment to create enrichment facilities for making weapons versus for making reactor fuel (the enrichment level needs to be much higher, but the quantity needs to be vastly smaller). For example, to process natural Uranium into 5% enrichment takes about 75% of the work as to process it into 90% enrichment (weapons grade), and you only need perhaps 16kg or so of highly enriched Uranium to make a bomb. Getting back to observability, these facilities can be easily hidden and operate without notice since they blend in well with other industrial facilities externally. The world learned of Saddam's vast Calutron facilities only due to the first Gulf War. And the world learned of North Korea's centrifuge cascades only when that regime announced their existence.

In the last 50 years half a dozen countries have acquired nuclear weapons without sanction from existing nuclear powers and in most cases without the world being certain of the existence of those nuclear programs until they were announced (such as through weapons tests). That gives some perspective on the true difficulty of preventing nuclear weapons proliferation.

As a side note, if the entire worldwide civilian Uranium enrichment capacity was diverted from making reactor fuel to making nuclear bombs it could produce around 400 nuclear bomb cores per week.
>> My point is that someone seeing a reference to sym_equal may not realize that (1) it's identical (at the C level) to rb_obj_equal and that (2) that fact has important performance ramifications.

Exuberant ctags will find the #define that goes with sym_equal and make it quick to locate. Upon seeing that sym_equal is #define'd to rb_obj_equal, it will be clear that they're identical at the C level. It may not be obvious why it's a #define, but a cautious programmer would be on alert that changing it back to a separate function would likely have some kind of implications.

Perhaps the ideal solution would be a large refactor to make the whole system as self-explanatory and surprise-free as possible. While waiting for that, this #define looks like a reasonable and low-risk bug-fix.
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say - core.async has no type annotations, you cant even figure out what the protocols are supposed to do because there is no documentation and no types - you literally have to find places its used and reverse engineer protocol semantics. And the function I linked to is very hard to keep track of - a large part of that is inherent with synchronization/buffering logic being complex but the language does nothing to make the code simple or easy to read - I'd bet that function would be easier to understand in Java than in Clojure.

I've tried core.typed, it's amazing in theory but in practice it's unusable (at least for me) and nobody annotates their code anyway. If core.typed becomes more widespread in Clojure community I might actually give it a second chance, in the mean time I'm just going to use Kotlin for JVM, it has transparent Java interop and reduces the Java noise, and the tools (IDEA) is infinitely better than anything I've seen in Clojure land.
if something seems too good to be true....it probably is

Feel sorry for those who lost money, but, I can't imagine transferring money to someone making such promises
Oh, don't be a party-pooper.
Not sure, I think it is greed related. People assume that money creates more money just like that. One person in the article didn't trust banks post crisis. I guess people do assume that the financial services business makes vast amounts of money out of money, rather than largely just taking proportions of said money away.
'Deprecated' is now 'deprecated'
Well I am trying my best to use my knowledge in the best possible way and not keeping it to myself only.
Let me introduce the "business presentation" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkBjbnvnrBk
Hi, I'm the author. I've added a small description at the top of the post explaining what this is about (nonlinear dimension reduction).
As canterburry says above, good communication can go a long way towards improving customer experience and avoiding problems.

If you can provide clients with ample warning about any upcoming changes, and preferably provide them with a staging/dev instance they can test their code against, it might help avoid similar problems in future.

In my experience, clients get frustrated when their business-critical processes suddenly break with no warning and they have to engage in fire-fighting. From their perspective, they had something working one day, then you "made a change" and "all their stuff broke". That might not be a fair assessment, and it might well be due to shoddy practices on their end, but the end result is the same: the client is frustrated and has a bad experience of using your product.
You mean ICQ is now discovered again?
I believe this has already been done in Yemen, as part of the programme of murdering foreign nationals in countries the US is not at war with.
SatNOGS (DIY Satellite Ground Station) Wins the 2014 Hackaday Prize
Thrust is a parallel algorithms library like STL for CUDA, TBB, and OpenMP
To a shady bank in Latvia, no less. This goes to show that if you dress something up the right way you can sell it to anyone.

In Spanish we say "even though the monkey dresses up in silk, it's still a monkey." But people are blinded by their own greed and can't see through the sham.
> My instinct is that people at MS are freaking out right now about Docker specifically.

All, right, why would you say "freaking out" specifically? MS has a habit of adopting good ideas from elsewhere, and I don't think containerisation is any exception. Maybe they see not supporting it as a strategic weakness, but shoring up strategic weaknesses is business as usual for any large company, not "freaking out". Throwing chairs is freaking out.

We know that .Net is rolling out containerisation features in 2015, including but not limited to docker integration. Going all in on any tech is an odd way to "freak out about it".
Show HN: A beautiful Reddit/producthunt clone
Impossible to find faster file-sharing than this?
> The continuing leadership also seems committed to geographically-centralizing the team for improved collaboration.

Centralizing a dispersed team for improved collaboration would put them somewhere in Nebraska, maybe Colorado. Just say that the investors want them close by.
Mobile Growth: Strategies, Tools and Tactics
The Nasdaq Hack
I'm going to avoid using FTDIs at any cost in my future designs. An Atmega16U2 or Atmega8U2 replacement should suffice in most cases.
surely knew how percentages work

Not even close. A 1% daily return is science-fiction.
The greater fool theory of investing
New Video Series: Personal Config Data
Node.js production release ships with no longer supported version of V8
In all fairness, a known range of TOR IP's is blocked by most websites such as google.com . And a login from any such anonymous sources may be used to perform malicious activity on your behalf.
How optimum the solution is is related to how important and conserved the system is. The visual system is very old, and it has unquestionably been subject to intense selective pressure.
I agree with that, but just to be clear, Stash is independent of Jira (though they do integrate) and has a simple pull request model. It's actually very nice to use (pretty much just like BitBucket).
The format that git stores it's data in is great, the tool most commonly used to access that data is a bit of a mess.
So there's no reason not to use git with a different UI and there are a lot of UIs for git.
> To a shady bank in Latvia, no less.

I kind of understand what you mean, but this is a little unfair to Latvia. It's a member of the EU and the eurozone, its banks are (don't laugh please) supervised, and the bank itself was very likely not shady at all. Rather, the bank's customer, which opened an account with the bank, was a shady fraudulent business.

The issue with transferring money like that is that it makes investigations harder and slower, as there are more jurisdictions in play. But I think the bank that processed the transactions was basically quite all right, unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.
Ask HN: Any startup charging with direct debits?
Notice I'm not asking about startups offering direct debits platforms (ie. GoCardless), but startups that are using direct debits as their main method to charge their clients.

I'm curious to know more about their background, if they started charging with credit card, etc.
0h h1 is now available on Github. Clone away :)

https://github.com/Q42/0hh1
Brillant. What's not to like?
Even the CEO looks 3d rendered.
Having migrated projects from GitHub to/from Bitbucket and internal git servers - which is a 10 minute job at most - I'm not terribly worried about this.
Daly City's actually pretty convenient if you live near 280 or, to a lesser extent, 101. Most of it is only a few minutes away from the highway. If they found an office that was within walking distance of BART and had dedicated parking, I could see it being an interesting compromise solution.
Yup. https://github.com/Q42/0hh1
Nigerian Army Recaptured Mubi from Boko Haram
Right. But I think any description would have to be vague given what little we actually know. If it sounded too precise, it would be giving the impression that we know more than we do.
And this will never get fixed so long as people keep denying there's a problem. Even when people want to fix stuff like this it's hard to transition well from where you are to where you want to be, but at the moment people seem to be able to use this poorly evolved interface daily without noticing these ridiculous and uneccesary inconsistancies.
It would be interesting to see this article today with the iPhone 6/6+'s improved camera: http://petapixel.com/2014/09/24/side-side-comparison-8-iphon...
Bitcoin: The Most Important Innovation in the History of Money
The merge history is the true one, it's what you want when browsing backwards to see how particular things changed. Rebase creates fake commits corresponding to a tree that never actually existed anywhere. Your history viewer should be able to linearize the tree for you if you want, but the canonical history in the repository should be the true one.
I do agree with you, we'd better have one ID name to make sure safe. from os-store
"By the end of 2015".

How about do it by the end of next quarter, seriously!?
It's just MUCH more memroy efficient to run containers and also VMs typically have worse I/O throughput.
CPU scores are fine though.

As an example i am running around 20 containerized servers on my Laptop in a 4GB VM which would typically be run on 20 distinct VMs on one or more hypervisors. It's not very fast but the density of servers you can put on your hardware is MUCH bigger.
Actually, a lot of medical doctors and "professionals" do not really know how probabilities work. For more on this, refer to Gerd Gigerenzer's Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/risk-savvy-gerd-gigerenzer/1...
TL;DR: "[T]he iPhone 5S currently sits 8-9 years behind the DLSRs in bright light, while the Nokia [Lumia 1020] trails by less than 6 years — probably nearer to 3."

"Step into candlelight, [...] the iPhone trails the DSLRs by about 10 years, and the Nokia about 8. "
I dont think so - the docs suggest you get a full Linux that your code runs on, not just a limited sandbox, one of the blogs mentioned running binary code. So I don't think it is being sandboxed at the language level. Especially as they talked about adding more languages soon.
So the CEO resigns over a vague disagreement about the office's location, as if that made any sense whatsoever, and some elite lawyer waltzes in to replace him. Sure.

This is like Condoleezza Rice joining the board of some company I can't remember now. The Powers That Be just made their involvement overt, for whatever reason.

Reddit's front page is like half-full of "liberal" (etc) propaganda at any given time anyway, and there are paid sophists shillng for Monsanto and the like, working full-time. In other words, Reddit is a part of the mainstream media now, and it has to be kept under control.
Despite major hardware drawbacks such as much smaller sensors and cheap lenses, I think computational photography will play a big role in shrinking the gap with current gen DSLR's too, over the next decade. We are slowly managing to put bigger and bigger sensor sizes in phones, too, without any compromises in design, as Sony has shown with its 1/2.3" sensors in the Xperia Z series [1].

Maybe in 2-3 years a 2/3" sensor will fit just as well, too. Again, I'm talking about no compromises in design. I know there are already 1" sensors in some smartphones such as the Panasonic Lumix DMC-CM1 [2], but despite myself being fine with buying such a phone, I assume most OEMs or smartphone customers have no interest in those.

[1] - http://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/phones/xperia-z...

[2] - http://www.panasonic.com/de/consumer/foto-video/lumix-kompak...
Grothendieck has been a point of interest in me since I read many years ago about his work about generalization of theories, his genius, his hermit life and that he chose to be stateless. Just last Sunday I saw an issue of a scientific magazine about him in a friend's house, and said I loved this guy, it is so strange and sad to learn about his death a few days after.
Yep.

My personal view from my interactions with HR (as a manager looking at redundancy, poor performance, sickness) is that they're best viewed as the Employment Law team.
I'm not sure why you say I make assumptions as to what libraries you use. In fact, I thought I made it apparent that I made no such assumptions, given that I stated both possibilities: 1) You use libraries that are powered by meta-programming (making it good for you, ergo good that it is part of the language). 2) You don't use libraries powered by meta-programming (doesn't matter, a huge c++ user base do, ergo good that it is part of the language).

If you belong to either of 1) or 2), it doesn't matter whether or not this feature is possible, you can choose not to use the libraries, and you can choose not to use meta-programming features.

Could you share an argument as to why you feel a language shouldn't have features that you don't have to use?

If you don't use STL, boost, QT, or pretty much any C++ library I can think of... do you write everything from scratch?

As for when C++ is "best" or "second-best", these kind of questions tend to lead to opinion-based arguing, rather than constructive discussion. I'm definitely not interest in the former, so I'll just give you the general objective consensus of the programming world: C and C++ are used when performance matters. C++ allows more abstraction without a real runtime cost.

A good read:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/29109/is-ther...
Dear god... somebody threw 60k at them after seeing that?
So governments are to be rejected while profile-building credit card companies are something to aspire to?

While CC companies have no means to jail you, locking down your credit card access in a mostly cash-less world can be a real pain - and unlike governments, they have no (somewhat) independent appeals process.
ZeroVM lets you run code on Swift, Openstack's S3 clone. Although it is not evented, and they mainly support Python, so it is a way off at present.
The problem with email encryption (part 2)
Last time I used a language without generics I had to cast web form values (we used a library with a general-purpose representation of "form control backed by object"). Sometimes these were incorrect, and had to be debugged. More than that, when working on the form code I had to constantly keep track of the types of things in my head, because there was no way to have the computer do it for me (we did try Hungarian notation for a bit but that was a disaster). Is it the end of the world? No. Does it slow development? Absolutely.
You forgot to add: "In my humble opinion."
Ask HN: How do VCs hedge their risk?
I'm wondering if there is some kind of hedging mechanism for private equity that I've never heard of.

If you looked at a VC's portfolio, would it be truly 100% long? Or are they figuring out a way to take a short position in private companies? (Either literally or through something akin to Credit Default Swaps, etc)?

Any insight, or precedent would be appreciated.
There's two things I care about in a digital camera: low light performance, and dynamic range. I don't care about how much megapixels you can cram in there - if your lens is pixel-perfect, 6 is enough for most purposes anyway. The only reason I might want to upgrade from my Canon 40D is a drastically improved dynamic range, a compacter size and the ability to shoot movies. So far it's all not quite there yet to be worth it, from my point of view.

Plus, I'm having more fun developing my pictures taken with my Nikon FM2 anyway.

Ironically, recenty the Nokia approach with supersampling seems to have paid off most regarding low-light and dynamic range performance of phone cameras (especially dynamic range, which this article didn't address). I hope the others will catch up.
I don't suppose anyone here has a Pacer account and could look it up?
Goldman Sachs Recasts Its Reputation to Woo Tech Talent
Twitter's debt assigned 'junk' status by S&P
Are you kidding me? Not "interesting" ideas?

> Even the nanoparticles are mundane and not much more of an extension of the work that's been going on since the 90s on bio-chips for detection.

Using antibodies and tailored cancer treatment is still a reactive treatment. As the article states, the Google X Labs is aiming for "constant monitoring" of your body with these nanoparticles - hence creating a "proactive" ability to constantly monitor your body of potential issues. If achievable, that's pretty remarkable.

> In comparison, Elon Musk seems like the true visionary.

Both Page and Musk are visionaries. The logic you use to criticize Page's "mundane" ideas can be equally applied to Musk - serious attempts at modern electric cars have been around since the 90s [1][2], and space travel has been around since the 60s. Your logic would dictate that Musk is merely extending the work in those fields.

Your criticism of Page's "moon shot" ideas not being world-changing/interesting greatly misses the point.

Page and Musk have different areas of strengths, but I don't think you can call one of them a "true visionary" compared to the other. They've already both proven to be incredibly prescient on more than occasion.

As for self-aware AI, we're a long ways away from that. Neither Page nor Musk nor anyone else is remotely close to self-aware AI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_Propulsion_tzero

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
His "reckoning with risk" is an excellent book. As an example: http://imgur.com/zO4zkl4

Edit: and a review http://plus.maths.org/content/reckoning-risk
It appears that the FDA also has a data problem, as it refuses to respond to FOIA requests for data that is obviously in the public interest to be disclosed, and taxpayers end up paying $1.3 billion to stockpile a medicine that is probably not as effective as advertised.

How does this practice keep us safer?
I doubt super-sampling beats Google's HDR+ [1] in either range or speed (the 1020 takes about 4 seconds per "normal" picture). The 1020 does have much better details and such, but that's most likely due to a 4x bigger sensor and higher quality lens.

[1] - http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and...
The french wikipedia says he cared a lot about the spelling "Alexander", but signed his french work as "Alexadre".
Either the next SoMa or the next pets.com
I guess the premise is that, given that multiple 3D objects could correspond to what we are seeing, we consistently choose the wrong one. Perhaps to borrow your analogy, it would be sort of like if, upon seeing a multiplication problem equal to twenty, we automatically assumed 2x10, and we perceived an illusion whenever the problem was actually 4x5.
On the other hand, when speaking about US/EU differences, I don't think many EU countries have laws to grant enormous $$$ in punitive damages.

Germany certainly hasn't - when you win, you typically get your legal fees and damages (as in: what the court decided you _actually_ lost). So there isn't _that_ much of a liability - the main concern for companies is probably that they'll have to stop mistreating their other employees, too.

OTOH, there's a separate branch of jurisdiction especially for employment related issues which is generally employee friendly and for the employee a lawsuit is free and doesn't require legal representation on the lowest level.
So if I steal only one dollar in your wallet, it's not really stealing ?
Twitter debt rated as junk
20 Free Data Visualization Tools – Code Geekz
It's actually the opposite of payday loans. For example, if someone were to take a 1 month loan for $200, at 15% monthly interest, then they would pay $230 at the end of the month.

In the UK at least, loans must quote an Annualised Percentage Rate (APR), which is the IRR (Internal Rate of Return) over a year. So, any adverts or contracts for this 1 month loan would have to show prominently '435% APR'.

The loan is framed as '435% APR', when in fact you're paying $30 for a $200 1-month loan.
I recently listened to an advanced statistics lecture. As an illustration the Professor said, medical science (still) uses 2 sigma statistics, jet engine builders use 6 sigma. That's why jet engines never (sic) fail.

Yes, and then there is the influence of the drug makers too.
Listening to Your Body Clock Can Make You Productive and Improve Your Well-Being
A bit OT, but probably the biggest roadblock for me switching over to Go is the wonky syntax. Are there any plans to make Go more accessible to someone coming from more traditional languages? (i.e. like "do" notation in Haskell) I've done the Go tutorial about 5 times last I checked (seriously), and I just can't stomach the syntax. I may be tainted by my years of C, though.
Great news! This is going to help java be gpu accelerated! Using Graal/Sumatra to speed up java8 stream based computations.
Can the high voltage line be used as the primary of an air cored transformer?