skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think many of the points raise are very valid areas of improvement, for example: "Learn the Language"; Others are products of politician reality: "Fear of Casualties".

But I think the premise: "the World’s Biggest Military Keeps Losing Wars", is wrong.

1. Conventional forces have trouble wining asymmetrical conflicts unless they are allowed to wage total war (which is usually precluded by modern political/moral concerns). Nothing new here- the Romans had experience with this.

1.A Note the single "win" on the list of post-Korea conflicts was the first Gulf War, a conventional conflict.

1.B It is arguable that the U.S. is actually better than most other conventional militaries at asymmetrical warfare: http://www.warriorlodge.com/blogs/news/16298760-a-french-sol..., however that may just be a product of being better at conventional warfare improving overall fitness.

2. "Winning" define this? Winning means very different things in total war vs. occupation/garrison/nation building actions. While its fair to say the U.S. lost Vietnam, I think its fair to say the U.S. won in Iraq and Afghanistan as they are now governed by friendly democracies... Military action is just a way of attempting to physically impose political will- If a nation's military helps the leaders reach their goals, it won.
Gnumeric and Abiword have been pretty much abandonware for years now.
This isn't true. Shog, Jay, and many others were hired from the community precisely because they were avid long term users who had demonstrated deep insight into the culture and organization of Stack. I would easily rate them as equal to myself if not, frankly, better at helping the Stack community govern itself.

The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standards. This rubs some people the wrong way, but it is the ONLY way to achieve reliable, sustainable, long term quality.

If you have specific examples of where things went wrong in a question, take it to meta and discuss it so that the community can adapt and change. That is how community works, and Stack is a democracy in that sense -- anyone can provide evidence and push for change.

(warning, though, scroll down in the comments here to see an example that turned out to be an anti-example when examined closely. A lot of times people just complain when they don't like rules, and the rules don't favor their personal needs versus the needs of the community or the greater Internet)
> And not single word about what is actually wrong with US army (F35 and similar projects)

This is a silly mindset. Your preconceived notion about the worst problem shouldn't stop someone else from talking about a different one. If you looked you will notice that other than quoting complaints at the beginning, the vast majority of the article ignores costs. They speak only of effects.

It is easier to question military spending by first pointing out why throwing money at problems isn't working, since you can't easily quantify the benefit of the military you can't just apply cost benefit analysis and have a convincing argument.

> 75% of servants in army (support roles) is pretty stable number since Roman Legions times.

And that number works great in Roman style conflicts. When you have a force power huge logistic lines make a great target, refocusing your logistics is a way to minimize that weakness.

> Fighting street by street, block by block takes large number of men.

You assume that is the ideal method of fighting the conflict.

> Army should not do police work. There should be para-military units (gendarme) composed from locals, but from different regions. US did great job at Philippines with this strategy.

You didn't actually disagree with him here but frame it as if you did. He said they sucked at understanding local needs but acted on what information they had. You said that they shouldn't act on local things.

> I will take any US 'war hawk' over this guy anytime. BTW Russians captured Crimea with 2 casualties, so much about 'not enough deaths'.

Was the goal of Crimea to minimize casualties? Because it isn't the results he is criticizing but the mind set. "#1 don't let anyone die. #2 win" isn't the best strategy if you want to win.

> Americans lost because they could not go near Chinese border. Please read some facts about that conflicts.

You aren't actually disputing his point, but simply pointing to a different one. There are lots of things that cause Vietnam to go bad, their ability to sustain casualties certainly helped.
Flawed methodology and their results have since failed to be reproduced [1]. There's a run-down of the major issues with it in post #156 here [2] (all verifiable by reading the research paper).

There are also various studies which essentially show the opposite results ([3], [4]).

[1] http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12375

[2] http://www.head-fi.org/t/266217/from-cd-to-sacd-how-much-of-...

[3] http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14195

[4] http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=13185
> If the file chooser is powerful enough, couldn't it be?

Experience from OS X and WinRT is that they aren't powerful.

> I don't use VLC playlists at all, but I could e.g. grant read-only ~/music/.../*.mp3

What about mkv linked files or .mpc lossless complements? Or cue/bin complements?

What about m3u that have mp3, ogg and flac interleaved?

It's not that simple.
It's $498 if you pay upfront. The higher price is to get yours first.
First, flash player has been deprecated for a long time now; obsolence predates the deprecation imho. Having said that, second, shumway isn't feature-complete yet. Not only does shumway not currently run on all platforms, but it doesn't work generally (only in specific cases).

Don't get me wrong, I love what shumway is doing and every inch closer to death Flash moves is worth celebration; but, this title isn't quite accurate.
We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.
I think this is the problem with a professional army. I bet Vietnam would have gone on for much longer if there had been only volunteers there. And the Iraq invasion would not have happened of there had been a draft.
I feel like this problem has been solved before, by small businesses. It's gotten even easier with some recent tech solutions but the premise hasn't changed much. I guess the main thing is that the customers are lazy and want a one-stop app?

Looking for a cleaner? Google "cleaning service <city>". Choose from the top 5 results.

Want to offer your cleaning services? Set up a simple website, read some SEO articles or get a friend to help with that. Maybe go in with a friend or a family member (like the sisters the article described) to share those costs. Get a square reader for taking credit cards, lose 2-3% instead of 15-20%. After each job ask for a review that you can put on your website.
Good example of how a successful, popular app can be shipped with shockingly bad practices. Nice work by the author in patching the bytecode.
The Domain-Driven Design book is awesome, but a bit heavy. InfoQ published a nice introductory book called "Domain Driven Design Quickly". A free PDF is available, too:

http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/domain-driven-design-quickly
When fighting monsters, one must take care not to become a monster.

Anyways, to answer you more fully:

The media has, depending on what sells, never shyed away from hawkishness. Consider the coverage from, say, Fox in the last decade--only reconsidering the war effort when it let them score political points against someone they disliked.

There is no compelling reason to "throw away the Geneva Conventions". You're a savage.

Also, since when is a people "tired, broken, and without refuge" anything you want to have around? The vast majority of the people conducting these acts of terror across the world are young men hailing from exactly that background--if they were members of proud, stable cultures, they wouldn't be engaging in such behavior.
To be honest, I don't participate in SO that much. The problems with close votes, and the HN community's dislike of the situation is well known. There is no easy fix for the situation, although I do agree something should be done.

The core of the issue, as was pointed out above, is the vtc-please culture in certain chat rooms. Culture is a very hard thing to change (impossible?), and whatever change you make to how closing works is unlikely to be effective unless cultural change is brought about too.
Do you mean closed or locked from vandalism by drive by users? A lot of popular stuff gets locked due to noise answers and bad edits.
I think technically the US is 'at war' with certain terrorist groups, allowing certain tools of war to be employed (esp. in the middle east).

Something along the lines of: "In times of war...

* the battlefield is wherever the enemy is (just about anywhere you can draw a link to terrorist activity);

* the battlefield may be 'prepared' (drone strikes, assassinations, covert ops, etc).
Indeed! It's not just about privacy either. The less the reliance on someone else's servers the less likely that a subsequent shutdown is going to impact you (whether by acquisition or otherwise).

FWIW I'd like to see approaches like this applied to personal servers so that the device doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting but the code still runs close to the user. The approach I'm taking is based on unikernels http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/
A female computer science major at Stanford: “Floored” by the sexism
> Why not used shared memory?

Because this is not normal shared memory, this is GPU shared memory. This is hard to port.
This has long battery life, the band looks soft, and it doesn't have a buckle.
Maybe the goal is not to win. Maybe the goal is simply perpetual war.
What do you diagram on the whiteboard/Visio? Class hierarchies?
Even the D.C. capital got captured and White House burned down in the 1812 war.
I can recommend "The Utility of Force" book for further understanding of modern warfare and it's evolution.
Tesora provides agent to provision Oracle Database in OpenStack
> For hardware decoders, maybe using dmabuff buffers shared between multiple processes would work?

This is not portable, but this is a possible solution for Linux.

But this is far from being ready, which is one of my main point :)
That is pretty stupid of them.
Football New Tab
Maybe the goal is not to win. Maybe the goal is perpetual war.
I'm lacking sleep a bit here, but wouldn't NaN == NaN do the same trick?
What is the point of having laws curbing the government if the government can change those laws when it pleases?
> I was afraid that this was the case. Might shared memory be a viable solution to buffer sharing?

It's GPU allocated memory, so not so sure.

> In any case, it makes me really happy to know that you've thought about this!

If you have ideas, we'd love to work on it, seriously.
The PonoPlayer sounds no better than the iPhone to an untrained listener using mediocre headphones. The writer misses some important quantitative differences, because he knows very little about audio engineering.

The most crucial and easily understandable difference IMO is the headphone amplifier. The iPhone has good quality digital-to-analog converters and generally sounds fine through easy to drive headphones, but it falters if you use large high-impedance headphones that need a lot of power. Hook up a pair of Sennheiser HD650s or AKG K701s to an iPhone and things go badly wrong - the bass disappears and transients start to distort, because the tiny headphone amp just doesn't have the power to cope.

Yes, the audiophile world is full of bullshit, but that doesn't mean that all quality audio products are bullshit. Professional audio engineers with degrees in physics or engineering are not fools, and they do not do critical listening through $130 headphones and whatever converter and amp happens to be on their device. They use $2000 converters, $4000 monitors and $600 headphones because they are measurably better in all sorts of ways to cheaper equipment.

If you're listening to music for pleasure, use whatever equipment you like. If you don't hear the difference that better equipment makes, then don't pay the extra. The only thing that matters is your enjoyment of the music. Conversely, just because you can't hear a difference, don't assume that it isn't there. Really understanding audio and being able to critically assess recordings and audio equipment takes a great deal of training and practice.
On OS X the [NeoOffice](http://www.neooffice.org) native port has had better integration than the original for years.
> An interesting startup idea would be shaking up existing translation services. It would be difficult and non-trivial. Ideal startup field!

I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Many tech-oriented small companies and startups have already come and gone in the translation field. It is indeed difficult and non-trivial.
I think there's more to it than that, particularly legal interpretation of 'where is the battlefield' and 'preparing the battlefield'.
Took me a minute to realize what you were talking about as I have mod powers and could see the post just fine (finally clicked everything was red).

They outgrew the initial laissez-faire model and needed to grow beyond it. However I heartily agree they didn't do the best at making that transition.
Moreover the technology developed to "hunt terrorists" can be turned against the population much more easily than the rockets, nuclear weapons and computer systems of the past.

You've hit on it in a nutshell, I think.

The entire War on Terror is predicated upon the idea that a) we must ferret out and neutralize threats before they manifest and b) we must occupy regions which may generate threats.

Those two policies directly manifest in the development of advanced surveillance and techniques of oppression. Even more sickeningly, there is no way of proving it wrong: if something bad happens, the answer is to increase efforts; and if nothing bad happens, the answer is not to cutback the defenses that presumably prevented that nothing.

We're doomed.
"I don't think that Vietnam was a mistake; I think it was a success. [...]

To determine whether it was a failure you have to first look at what the goals were. In the case of Indo-china, the US is a very free country; we have an incomparably rich documentary record of internal planning, much richer than any other country that I know of. So we can discover what the goals were. In fact it is clear by around 1970, certainly by the time the Pentagon Papers came out, the primary concern was the one that shows up in virtually all intervention: Guatemala, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, just about everywhere you look at. The concern is independent nationalism which is unacceptable in itself because it extricates some part of the world that the US wants to dominate. And it has an extra danger if it is likely to be successful in terms that are likely to be meaningful to others who are suffering from the same conditions. " -- Noam Chomsky
Plumin is a light wrapper around paper.js [1] and my opentype.js library[2], which can parse and write OpenType fonts in pure JavaScript.

Plumin is nice to build fonts from scratch. If you're interested in taking an existing font and manipulating its shape or metrics, consider using opentype.js directly.

[1] http://paperjs.org/

[2] https://github.com/nodebox/opentype.js
Pie charts? Why not a histogram for each bacterial phylum plotted for men and women?
Probably, yes. Upthread, someone looked at the code and suggested that it fell back on a linear congruential generator as an RNG. If that is true, I'd expect the Dieharder tests to fail it.
The economy means different things to different people. The black economy is part of the economy but I would not want to funnel trillions of dollars into it. Similarly the arms trade is part of the economy but I wouldn't want to funnel a trillion dollars into it every year.

For my money the century of mechanised was has been about taking money out of the economy and into the arms-trade. This shows up as GDP and is therefore a good thing but it is at the expense of things like schools and hospitals. Government borrowing has been at record levels during the 'terror' years, government spending on weapons has been at an all time high. The money gets borrowed from the banks that the politicians know so well. It is a virtuous cycle for them but not us even if that is what they say.
No it has not. 0-copy shared buffer don't exist yet for most video usecases.
I’m Joining TpT
Thanks for checking it out. Yes I totally agree on all fronts. This is indeed WIP, my hope in posting to HN is to get some assistance with said work - but you're right I should make that more clear.
The author's bit about how we forget about the problems and solutions of our forefathers - that resonates with me.

We do seem to keep re-inventing the wheel, and while part of that is out of joy of creation, I think a lot of that is that we're not writing down the problems, and we're not teaching the problems. We're only paying attention to solutions, and that's limiting.

Code is a solution to a problem, but it's not always apparent what that problem /was/ when you just look at it. So NodeJS (according to the authoer) is doing something that was thought of as a good idea at first, and then people learned why it wasn't, and /nobody wrote that down/. Or, at least, when they wrote it down, nobody taught it.

Solutions are /answers/, problems are /questions/. Here's a beautiful illustration of this dichotomy: http://dead-logic.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-collection-of-quest...

This is then part of why the TDD movement is in the right direction - you write down the problem you're going to solve, and later, someone can come read it. And maybe teach it.

(Not saying TDD has gotten "there", but it's in the right direction)
Man 22 and woman 52 busted for their action in stranger HOT tub, woman
Can you not use dma-buf and EXT_image_dma_buf_import?
A Behind-The-Scenes Tour of YouTube's Free Production Facility in NYC
Non-spammy version: http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for-losers...
Mollusk biology could hold the key to lithium-ion battery efficiency
Wood burning stoves, helpful hints
What's the current general stance on that these days I wonder? What's the prevailing wind?
Friendly note: I think you mean "razing."
This was a comment I pulled off my Twitter timeline. Hence the apparently.
>Humans are pretty significant threats to other humans, so "we can manipulate it like we do other humans" doesn't seem to justify the claim that it would be no threat to us. If it did, other humans would be no threat to us, either.

Humans compete for the same resources for survival. An AI only needs electricity, which it can easily generate with renewables without any need for competition with humans, just like we produce food without having to compete with natural predators even though we COULD outcompete them.

When resources are plentiful, humans are of very little threat to other humans. This is evidenced by the decline in worldwide crime rates in the last several decades.

Why would an intelligence greater than our own have any reason to deal with us at all? we certainly havent brought about the extinction of gorillas or chimps even though they can be quite aggressive and we could actually gain something from their extinction (less competition for resources/land)

What does an AI gain by attacking even a single human let alone the entirety of the human race? Would it proceed to eliminate all life on earth?

I guess in the end, i can see that there is a technical possibility of this type of sufficiently advanced AI, i just find it an extraordinary reach to go from [possess an unimaginable amount of knowledge/understanding/intelligence]->[brutal destruction of entire human race for reasons unknown and unknowable]
And yet they had no problems selling those pocket tone dialer you could mod into a pay phone red box and make free phone calls.
Yep, you can configure the number of failed requests to make it unhealthy, and number of successful ones to mark it healthy, also the timeout, and the polling time (e.g. every 30 seconds).

But as others also pointed out, you can still get some "captured" servers until the LB realizes the machine is not super fast but simply superbad.

Also your health check URL might return 200 and the rest of your app 404 / 500, which makes me think

Perhaps the LB should be aware that if it gets back way more 404 and 500 than average for known URLs, then this should be considered as a bad server... I assume advanced LBs support that?
Who do we blame when a robot threatens to kill people?
Sure, but my job isn't affected by voting rings on HN, nor does YCombinator justify a totalitarian moderation policy by claiming to be the best google-able SEO-optimized source for whatever it is I'm questioning.
You need to boil the water for optimal black tea flavor, which results in heating the mug/glass to the point it's too hot to hold, and causes a portion of the water to splash out of the mug in the microwave once it bubbles over.
Usually, I would say that we just have to wait for some sort of wake up call, something the US government fucks up so incredibly that anything involving surveillance of an innocent populace is a poison pill.

But we've already had the Snowden leaks, and if that wasn't a wake up call, I don't know what else could be.
This is a sad excuse for a review. Most of it is downloading it, installing it and showing a couple of screenshots wile raving madly about how great it is. This doesn't even try to use the suite seriously.
That is a slander piece. If you are going to come up with a source then at a mimimum I expect the author to know the http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa... and be able to tell me with a straight face that that is what those who (like me) believe fathers should have better custody rights.

Oh and how PUAs and MRA are part of the same moment when PUAs look down on MRAs, how PUAs want a class of alphas with more social responsibility like the NR.

To me your argument only works if you adopt a you are either with us or against humanity attitude for political correctness and associated belief with _is_ inline with what many SJW think.

I will give you this much: about the only thing these people you have grouped together do agree on is that feminism and modern leftism has gone a little too far: but since they do not agree on how much (wiz MRA wanting more custody rights to NR wanting James of Stuart as king) nor what to do about it they in fact have more in-group and out-group variance.

Of course the fact that they disagree at all is enough for some (such as the author of that hit piece) to wrap them all together, we should be above such simple mindedness here on hacker news.

Edit: removed unecessary and counterproductive anger, added call to unity.
I would say you were incredibly patient in that thread, not just 'little'. Everyone seemed to try to help though.
Service Discovery with Docker and Synapse at Clay.io
Fallujah was razed. Phosphorous incendiaries were used as in Dresden. Casualties were much lower though as most of the population had fled by that point.
I found a citation that I think even you will accept:

https://community.nest.com/message/36003
> Most of those conflicts are a pretense to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy

It's funneling trillions of dollars into military contractors.
more sdk's to follow
It says it would affect openssl, which Bitcoin Core used up until the last update. IDK about other wallets.