skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In individual battles, the U.S. almost never loses. The raw military capability the U.S. possesses is staggering. It's so vast that in actual wars, the Army doesn't even do the bulk of actual fighting anymore, and massive garrison forces in Europe and Asia barely see a dip in total manpower. Special Forces and Marines go in to clear the way for big Army to come in and sit and patrol like an overamped police force.

The opening invasion of the first Gulf War was over in what, 5 weeks? This was a military power that Iran fought to a virtual standstill for almost a decade. People forget about this part, because the rest of the occupation was such a debacle. But when the U.S. military gets pointed at an objective, it will generally get the job done. The military on military loss exchange ratios are astonishing, like 150:1. In most of history, 4:1 or 5:1 is considered overwhelming. In the Korean war, it was about 4:1 for example. Vietnam was about 1:1

The problem is that the world has changed and the U.S. has changed. Achieving occupation no longer counts as "winning" and the U.S. no longer has the will to simply carpet bomb and shell an enemy to the point of complete annihilation.

The U.S. fights wars for precision and to minimize non-combat casualties.

Genghis Khan would simply raze a city to the ground and murder every man woman and child if he faced resistance. The U.S. orders Marines to go in for a door-to-door clearing operation and try real hard not to shoot too many innocents. And if that didn't work they'd just go and do it again.[1][2]

War is supposed to be terrible, and there are no "winners". Victory has always been the last to give up or run out of people to throw at the enemy's swords. By sanitizing the terribleness out of war, the U.S. has managed to ensure that it never "wins" anything in particular. It's turned war into large-scale police actions, which means it's regularized it. The U.S. hasn't fought a real war in ages. Everything else has been policing.

The U.S. doesn't really have many big enemies, it has rabble rousers and riff-raff on the edge of it's sphere of influence it needs to deal with -- rogue and failed states, non-state actors, whatever. Most of the world is America's town and it sends in police/soldiers to deal with the bad parts of town and "keep the peace"

In a normal town, nobody cares if the police "win", just so long as things are relatively safe for the good parts of town. Police are part of the infrastructure of successful nations. The U.S. military strives to be the global police infrastructure of a successful world.

The commander-in-chief has just been turned into chief-of-police of the biggest baddest police force in the world.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Fallujah
This hits on honestly the only regret I have with the recent military history of the US. I don't mind that we spend $150 million on "warp speed death machines". I do mind that we spend some of that in the name of protecting countries which are perfectly capable of protecting themselves. Assisting allied forces with our own is fine; replacing them is not.
What a crazy world. Help my friends and I raise $500 million and we will build a cheap, modular and safe energy source that could end our oil addiction, poverty and drought in the third world and fuel a new wave of technological innovation based on nuclear engineering (transmutation).
Or we can send funny pictures to our friends.
I love these times.
> This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted

Can't speak for reddit but I think HN is quite much better than SO. Specifically it seems:

* somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO. This might be because HN attracts another audience though, I don't know for sure.

* maybe because redditism and stupidity is mostly downvoted swiftly?

* spam and politics is dealt with before it hits the front page

* but contrary to SO moderators the ones on HN don't seem to get a kick out of finding something, anything that can be banned with the correct reading of the guidelines

I sometimes see what I consider to be abuse of downvotes but 1.) it doesn't seem to be rings and 2.) downvote abuse is very often corrected by the rest of the members.
Thank you for the reply. Although my last sentence was probably unnecessarily combative, I hope that people reading this don't get hung up on that, how exact the math is, or how much nutrition a loaf of bread can truly provide. I mean I just looked at the cost of building the active fleet. Wikipedia estimates the total costs of the program as being roughly 4x that cost, so even taking into account the costs of a loaf of bread beyond wheat I bet that feeding the planet (with bread) for a year is still pretty close to the cost of the program.

You got what I was hoping people would take away, which is that we look at groups around the world being radicalized, turning to oppressive religion and wonder "why? what makes them do that?", and maybe one piece of the puzzle would be asking what sort of reaction these people would have if we gave everyone in their nation food for a year instead of taking a large portion of the world's total resources and expending it on war machines which we then use in their homeland.
That answers my question then - on the 1440x900 13" MBAir, the black lettering from Practical Typography is jarring, and unpleasant to read for long periods of time for me, but Medium flows very well - and I read tons of material on their site.

PT is just very unwelcoming for me to read - both the diamonds all over the place (which reminds me of the PCL printout when you didn't have the correct font installed), and the assault on my eyes. Perhaps on a higher-resolution retina display it works out better (and perhaps Medium suffers somewhat in comparison)
Can an $11,111 coffee pot turn out a better cup of joe? (2012)
cloud-init

https://cloudinit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
A lot of non-Free software also disallows redistribution, so it's not permissible to put it in the binary repository. It's possible that free but not Free (e.g., zero-cost binary-only software) software could be included in the repository.

pkg metadata does include license information -- see https://github.com/freebsd/pkg/issues/20, but I am not sure of plans to provide user-facing control over acceptable licenses at the moment. It's a good idea though and I'll see if we can make it happen.
You mean like Facebook?

EDIT: Facebook 2004 to 2009 for a $10B valuation, Snapchat 2011 to 2014 for the same valuation.
I've experienced this too - I seem to get a few people joining my gameserver from that ISP and I notice the DNS appeared as 'localhost'. Not ideal and I imagine it could break certain things. I always assumed it was a misconfigured internet cafe or something. 'Nice' to know it's a wider issue
Good point. My stupid mistake.
What are you talking about? The file format is most certainly not the "main selling point" of Office.
OpChapelHill: Hackers Deface Military Boarding School Website
And if you use University of Phoenix diplomas to wipe your ass, they are owned by Apollo Education Group, Inc, which has a market cap of 2.83B.
Really they don't even need to downvote at all, it'll get downvoted (as it probably did) by others. Asshats are going to exist regardless.
A 90 minute video overview of ECMAScript 6
Catastrophizing at the Scale of Big Data
False dichotomy. If you could actually deliver on that, you would have no problem getting 500 million.
EDIT: Nevermind- it's in the app. Really dislike that web page, but since it's an app, who cares?

I'm certain that this is a stupid question- but is it snapchat.com? I went to that site and I see all black- probably flash or auto-start video or something.

Is there a deep link where there is a menu or something? I didn't see anything called discover on the front page.
The E in P/E is earnings (profit), not revenue. Your valuation is probably an order of magnitude high. Also your first link uses the vague "sales" which could mean end retail sales, in which case revenue to P&G would be even lower.

There's no way Charmin is worth $60B.
If Apple would do this, they'd have even more incentive to promote the highest grossing apps in their app store.

Look at the 30% fee as a marketing cost. Surely you want the owner of your only marketing channel to be well compensated?
A good starting place is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
Well, sure, if you never do anything serious it's fine.
The risk of loosing the users to another app in the future is not taken into account in this valuation. What if all the teens grow up and move on to another app and the new teens do not use Snapchat and use another app that goes viral?
I wonder how difference between TV show productions affects this. Broadcoast TV shows in America are expected to run 22 episodes a year. In the Thick of It has made about that many episodes over 7.5 years. I don't think you can get people to watch that much biting satire in such a small time period.

But I think in the end, American audiences want to see the good in people, especially the main characters. If not good, at least some humanity.
This is an interesting talk, thanks for sharing!

For those not already familiar with K-S tests, I'll save you from a google query: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov%E2%80%93Smirnov_test
I was using Google Docs in my business for several years until one day I one day I embarrassed myself point out paragraph numbers were wrong in a contract I was trying to sign. If it can't get them right, what else is it doing wrong.

I had to go buy Office for Mac that day.
A SaaS could use it to distort content, and remove the distortion for paid accounts.
Show HN: MacBook Pro Port Guide (download and Print)
This is why we can't have nice things. And by nice things, I mean identification of people via cryptography rather than rectangular pieces of plastic.
> Personality/Character evolves, often quite a bit, as people age but still exists.

If it evolves, why is it preferable to circumstance when explaining things? To my mind, the benefit of character traits vs circumstance was that distinction.

Also: do you believe that character primarily evolves based on circumstance?

> I considered it for quite a while. Did OP not notice he had a prosthetic arm? Did he have severe nerve damage from an old motorcycle accident? ... nothing we can reasonably assume here.

Hmm, I find reasonable examples very easy to come up with: he might have been jostled by another bar patron, been surprised by OP rotating, been surprised by how slender OP was, or simply failed a dexterity check. In these hypotheticals he either didn't notice (he was distracted by having been jostled for example), or did notice but was too embarrassed to apologize / allowed OP to quickly change the subject.

> I an now having a really hard time not making the fundamental attribution error in evaluating what type of person you are. But I assume if you thought about what you just said you would realize the mistake.

Your position, if I'm understanding you here, is that there exists no reasonable set of circumstances on the part of the investor where he genuinely believes he didn't try to proposition OP. Based on you including OP not noticing the touch of a prosthetic arm as your most likely alternatives, I'm guessing you think he's 99% likely to be guilty.

My position is that, given the evidence at hand, the chance the investor is guilty is less than 50%. This is also the view taken by US civil court -- if this was an employer/employee situation, OPs statement on its own wouldn't satisfy the preponderance of evidence requirement for a harassment claim (aka greater than 51% chance of guilt).
For me, I don't think that the longer titles are any better than the shorter ones, at least for the examples that you give above. Looking at the articles themselves, they have completely different titles to the ones that you picked (both the short and longer versions). This goes against the Hacker News Guidelines [0] which state: "...Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." Indeed, a general rule on Hacker News is not to editorialize headlines (ie make up headlines that look good in order to attract people to click on the link).

This does of course raise the question of whether the Hacker News Guidelines are a good idea or not and I am torn on this one. On the one hand, I suppose there are occasions where a headline can be made clearer and more useful by rewriting it. On the other hand, I see the current guidelines as a backlash against the state of linkbait headlines on Reddit when Hacker News was first created all those years ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Good point. Edited my comment to reflect it was bad math.
Snapchat did it in 4 years compared to FB and FB was a site/app/platform back then where you logged into a site using Facebook. This is not the same. It is just an app.
Cashing people at at higher multiples.
DuoLingo is great, but very easy to fall out of the process.

I think gaining fluency in another language is a very practical and even romantic notion. There'd be millions of people willing to pay $x00 to gain fluency if it was low effort or smartly accelerated - I'd be one of them.

But the consistent time and effort required for now is evidently too much. Hopefully someone thinks outside of the box and breaks open the game. Maybe AR where you're paired with a native speaker or even an avatar of one.

Or an app that reads you word/phrase reminders throughout the day via headphones, so you are semi-immersed for 12 hours rather than dedicated for 30 minutes.
twitter? pre-cesspool twitter had a lot of potential
Remember that this will almost certainly be Preferred stock, not Common stock.

That means that even if Snapchat sells for $1B tomorrow, everyone who invests at the $19B valuation still comes out positive.
It's frankly still not as good, the savings are not so big from a company's perspective, the amount of time spent doing the switchover would easily outweigh the license savings, and most big companies do not have people who want to stake their reputations on a hot new alternative to an established product that is nearly universal.
I'd love for someone who knows more to chime in but its my understanding that gradient descent does not perform well on non-differentiable functions and only finds local optima.

Wikipedia seems to confirm this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent#Limitations
If that is what it takes to get the deletionists away then feel free to add any valid reference I say.

I have given up though.
Sean De Clercq, CEO of Kickfurther here if you have any questions!
A file chooser outside the application is safer if the sandbox enforces that only selected files are opened. Of course I want the app to be able to read files I told it to open, but it shouldn't be able to access files I haven't selected.
I don't know. Never got a job with this :\
Ask HN: How to buy/sell stocks?
Premise: I have zero knowledge about stock market and trading and I want to learn how to buy/sell stocks.

What books and courses would HN suggest? What is the essential bookshelf of any self-taught trader?

Please remember this is all new to me, so answer as if you are talking to a simpleminded 12-year-old. Thank you in advance.
I'm not sure what you say is true. On it's face, it doesn't make any sense, if you have completely MiTM's the network connection, and can pass along traffic from each part to the other, I don't see how client key auth would prevent MiTM.

Even the thing you link to actually says:

> The algorithm itself does not protect against active MITM attack, but it makes it impossible for MITM attacker to influence the choice of the shared key (and by extension the session ID) by the victims.

Does not protect against active MITM attack. It _does_ keep an attacker from influencing choice of shared key, but an active MITM attack is still in the middle and doesn't need to influence choice of shared key to mount many many kinds of attacks.
An alternative to typical configuration management (puppet, ansible, etc) is making your own OS installer. I've adapted the Ubuntu installer to turn a blank machine into a running instance of our app in just a couple of days. The client just has to pop-in the CD or flash drive, answer a couple of questions, and go grab a cup of tea while it installs.
Yay! I'm so excited to use the `async` methods in production with MySQL. The biggest bottleneck for our PHP apps can now have a workaround in some cases, that's brilliant.

> Integration of LLVM as a further optimization step to make the hottest code run even faster on HHVM.

These multistage JITs are absolutely fascinating, I believe Safari is doing something similar with Javascript. Intuitively I would've assumed the overhead of firing up yet another JIT and VM to run it on would make it not worth it, but I guess the instructions currently generated are so far off optimal that it is worth doing.

EDIT: Anyone know of any papers regarding multi-stage JITs that I can check out?
Who says we can't?
It's a risk game, you wouldn't know as soon as with SnapChat. Hence the low amount of investment in "real" ventures.
Yes it's definitely difficult to get a foot-hold on the site, now isn't it. Maybe they need a real sort of wiki, or some sort of discussion community built around them. Seems like they started doing that, then killed it.

The problem with discussion boards is that it is absolutely painful to dig through a post until you stumble on a solution, and even then, you're in no way sure it's a good solution.

They need to harness that opinion/discussion/off-topic-subject energy in a way that doesn't work against their strategy. I think they are losing a lot of opportunity along the way.
Why does the fact she used this word matter if the rest of the article is relevant. And if the poster has a problem with the rest of the article, why focus on this word choice rather than make a counter argument?

And I believe my post wasn't ad-hominem because his point isn't valid.
Is the Google APIs console down for anyone else?
The error occurs when I try to authenticate. I get a 404 response code and "30" in the body of the page.
> still I don't understand why there aren't authentic "Taquerias" (taco shops) in the US,

In most of California and the parts of the Southwest I've been to, taquerias are very common.

> The closest I ever tried was at a Taco Truck in LA, but that was just one food truck.

If you were in L.A. and you couldn't find taquerias, you weren't looking very hard (or you had a bad guide.)
And Snapchat's very design (no history) makes the app not very sticky. There is practically no switching cost.
Not all load balancers support this (I recall some very expensive alteons that didnt) but worse is when the LB does support it but it isn't configured to check. Out of the box most LB's will do a TCP bind and if that works, then fire away.

The reverse of this issue can also cause problems where you get a bad node that accepts the request but never returns (or takes 2-3 mins to respond). As a rule the timeouts will cause queuing, thread pool starvation and general not working all the way back up your request chain to whatever is facing the internet where your site will either hang or give back a 503 page.
This looks like something straight out of Command & Conquer: Red Alert
No company really has the resources to design custom applications for every Excel monstrosity that arises.
I'm guessing the logic is "if one can raise at 2x last year's insane value, why not." Perhaps the founders cashed out some too.
in VMware, you use Customization Specifications to do the equivalent to sysprep for Linux (and sysprep on Windows VMs)
Spark is pretty fantastic from our perspective. People just think about it in terms of a faster Hadoop MR but it is so much more. The APIs and integration with external systems are so much easier and more intuitive to use.

It really is Hadoop 2.0.
Yes i was strictly speaking in terms of specs. You are right in this regards, rasberry pi has much better eco system.
"We don't know how to do this"

In truth, no one does.
Through history it seems that rights and representation have typically only manifested after long periods of peaceable post-conquest oppression.
I still find this VERY hard to believe. I could be wrong (and very well might be), but Snapchat still seems far more of a Groupon type of company than a Facebook.

We'll have to see how well they can deliver/scale Discover, but I remain unsure they can ever find a way to exit and become worth this amount with the types of users they have (very young, very unloyal to services, very difficult to monetize because of youth -- look at the ridiculous Snapcash product for instance -- requires a debit card/user to be 18, when 80% of Snapchat's audience is 13-17 and thus unable to use the feature).

I just don't know.
>in just a couple of days

Days?! That is a crazy-long deploy time.
Never seen this in years of using VMs
Seriously ./spark-shell is a godsend for development.

And I love the fact you can press Tab and get autocompletion of methods.
Certainly I wouldn't use it for blogging (as I said, the default HTML output is pretty spartan), for that I have Frog, which I mostly just tweaked a little bit with a custom Bootstrap template.

The bulk of my writing though has traditionally long-form (I'm not great at maintaining a single-interest blog, and social networks are better for personal musings most times), and for that I don't think I'd use anything else but LyX, especially if I were self-publishing (which I generally have been).
> A broken RNG in such circumstances is much, much weaker than kernel RCE.

How do you reach this conclusion? If nobody runs -current, then the damage associated with a -current RCE must also be scaled down by a similar factor, no?

On the other hand, a -current test system which later gets upgraded to the next release for production will still have busted keys on it, but would have had the RCE fixed.
Re: "owning the market", people forget the difference between market share and profit share. Profits are what keep your ecosystem alive and thriving. Raw usage numbers, by themselves, don't. (Sure, usage can lead to profits... so just measure profits!)

Yes, Android sells more devices. Apple has 93% of the profits in industry, Samsung has 9%, and everyone else is fighting for that tiny slice and losing money.

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/02/09/apple-mobile-profits-q4-...

The more profitable ecosystem is where developers want to play. Apple doesn't need to change their royalty rates, everyone is clamoring to be in that arena.
was vba too hard for you to learn?