skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What I really mean by this is, IMO, it would be a better result overall if the world were less productive, but the minimum living standard were higher.

Maybe, but I think it's a bit of a non-sequitor. There's no either/or choice there. Consistently, a place producing a lot equates with a high quality of life. The only places that do better for quality of life are relatively small, extremely homogeneous societies (Okinawa, Switzerland, etc). As a general, large scale strategy, produce more is pretty good. Attempts to produce less and streamline it to where the governor thinks it should go have all ended poorly thus far.

> Sure, but the incremental benefits of these items to people tends to get smaller. These could be sacrificed at least until everyone reaches a flatter part of this curve. This like medicines, sanitation, are not exactly in the same class as, say, an iPod.

Definitely - and this is a choice we already get to make as individuals. You can choose how much you want to consume, invest, and give charitably. It's an individual ethical judgment, and one we must all make and live with.

> In practice a decent plan, and perhaps even the only practical one given human nature and our political systems. But still not a goal in itself.

Well, I think "produce as much good stuff as we can" is a good goal in itself, but improving the baseline of the whole world is good too. Actually, I think they're complimentary goals, and not really in opposition with each other at all. Working to build as much good stuff as possible in the world makes it easier to make more good stuff cheaper - I don't think there's any natural antagonism or choice between producing more and improving the baseline for the rest of the world. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're complimentary goals.
They don't tell you why things get flagged, just that they were. So, it's not that transparent. And I would be willing to bet that if you spent some time trying to learn the system through brute force, they have a system to watch for that level of activity and ban your account for tampering.
This is the real story, and has been from the beginning.
All this discussion is very good, but it's disappointing more people don't care about censorship.
On that note...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
I find this outrage prissy. I don't know anything about war, but even I know that it's utterly naive to expect that soldiers wouldn't get off on killing people. It is completely to be expected. The fantasy that war would somehow be more acceptable or even possible without it is not serious; it's a head-in-the-sand refusal to consider the ugliness of the thing. Next up: they aren't faithful to their wives while on tour, either.

Edit: this comment comes across a little more harshly than I intended. The reason isn't you; it's that I just finished watching the Wikileaks founder in an interview, and his self-righteousness in making the same point really turned me off. The guy could barely contain his glee. I think this kind of outrage is all about stroking one's own moral delicacies. Expecting anything at all about killing people to be decent is foolish.

Mainly I'm angry at him for ruining my faith in Wikileaks and turning my world into one in which now no one plays that vital role. Guess I was the naive one. I had thought they were something like the Red Cross of information. Now they seem like ideologues who want to get on TV.

One more edit: now that I think of it, I should have figured this out from the way they were hyping the video before they released it.

Ok one more: there's clearly controversy about whether the soldiers followed the rules or not. That question is serious. But I highly doubt any rules of engagement have anything to say about how much fun killing is not supposed to be. This is part of the don't-ask-don't-tell contract (the real one) that society has with the military: here are the conditions under which you can be a serial killer; we will call you a hero for it; just don't tell us about it.
Back in 1985, I remember bugging my Mom to get me the Radio Shack Assembler for the Color Computer and a book on Assembly language programming and I wouldn't be surprised if she spent around $60 or so back then. Using this calculator ( http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ ) that works out to between $100 to $200 in 2009 dollars (depending upon which inflation scale is used).
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/02/the-tyranny-of-government-a...
> Yes, all true. But just like I can drive a car, I couldn't compete in F1.

You're missing the point. Let me quote something that you wrote previously.

>> In theory yes, but we hadn't managed to do that in a couple years since we were so focused on tech and not spending our time learning some of the more arcane businessy things

A successful F1 team isn't just a bunch of techs. Someone has to drive. Someone has to make sure that the suppliers are paid, and so on.

As I wrote previously, a tech biz is still a biz. You can't all do tech.

I'm glad that you found someone to take care of this stuff for you, but if you'd done so earlier, or done some biz things earlier, you'd have more runway.

By overconcentrating on tech, you put the tech at risk....

And no, it's not that complicated. 90% is just thinking that it's worth doing. It's not at all comparable to the difference between an ordinary driver and an F1 driver.
The reality is that it is fucking stupid to put young Americans and young Iraqis alike into that situation to start with. It was stupid in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and it is still fucking stupid in 2010, because we've shoveled mountains of money into Iraq and mountains of dead people of various nationalities out of it, and nobody can tell me exactly what we've gained.

This is because even though nobody wants to admit it, we've gained nothing, and we will continue to do so, because this was a publicity stunt from Day One and now it's a political third rail thanks to the morons who direct what passes for a national discourse in this pathetic shadow of a democracy.
Mixing Colors
How long is a piece of string? This is going to depend on how sophisticated your users are, how sophisticated your application is, what your users' expectation for handholding is, and how optimized your processes are for dealing with user issues before they get to your inbox.

The great thing about words like "active user" is that they mean whatever you want them to mean. For certain definitions of active user such as "Has downloaded the trial version of my software recently", I have a hundred thousand of them. (For very strict definitions of active user, ~2,000 or so.)

My support burden averages out to well under an hour a week.

On a very bad day, it is four emails, three of which will be about transactional issues ("I paid but didn't get my software!" "Begging your pardon, ma'am, but the payment processor doesn't tell me about it if you don't hit the confirm button on your confirmation page." "Oh thx!"), forgotten passwords, and lost Registration Keys, and that will take twenty minutes. An average day sees checks stats 1.2 emails. Many days have no emails at all.

It has not been my experience that support scales linearly with user count. It is closer to logarithmic but with major decreases when you take affirmative steps to resolve the 20% of the issues that take 80% of your time.
It is sad such rhetoric gets up voted.

How many of the Iraqi causalities were Iraqi or foreign insurgents killing Iraqi civilians?

Nobody seems to care less about those numbers. The biggest threat to an Iraqi citizens life (back then) were insurgents and criminals. That is who the gunner thought he was firing on.

"Killing ten Iraqis to save an American soldier is not justifiable, any which way you look at it."

No, but surely any solider in the world would kill 100 enemy combatants to save his friend.

This incident and this war do not make any other tragedy, such as Tiananmen, any more or less terrible.
The second-to-last photograph [1] taken by Namir Noor-Eldeen shows an American Humvee and the radio calls make it clear that there is a ground force in the vicinity which was reporting a contact with the individuals on the ground, was able to see the individuals at various points in the action and was close enough that it took only 8 minutes for them to mount up and arrive on the scene. This group (apparently "Bushmaster element") appears to be the one which radios "Yeah, we had a guy shooting. And now he's behind the building" at 04:22.

Your assertion that there were no Iraqi or coalition ground forces in the area is not supported by the video.

[1] http://duckbar.mirror.waffleimages.com/files/c7/c76f1e685afe...
Reminds me of Richard Hamming's saying: "What important problems are you working on?"

Very good read - "You and your research" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
On making decisions
As pilots and CO were not punished I've learned it is clear that assisting the wounded ( no weapons were picked up ) will get you full of DU bullets. Carrying anything in your hands may be the excuse for a gunship a mile away to open fire.

Given these GI Joe tactics the average Iraqi might as well be carrying an RPG, and might as well shoot down that Apache helicopter. 7+ years of murderous Yankee mayhem is enough already.
> Assholes are kiss up, kick down people.

I agree. No matter how 'nice' someone else claims this guy to be, if he was trying to make someone cry because they didn't know something during the interview, makes him a prick.

That is is plain and simple bullying -- no better than a physically stronger kid beating all the weaker ones on the playground. The playground here is the interview process and he is the bully.
India is the largest regional threat to China, and the two countries have squared off before (and are likely to in the future) over small, disputed patches of land. In many area's India is China's biggest threat, especially economically, both countries are competing for the same type of foreign business.
i'd say find a way to weigh and rate the most common queries(human intervention i know it sucks) then eliminate those through tooltips or faqs

You really need to sit your Mom, Dad, wife, golfing buddy, whoever else is close to your target market and get them to interact with your app to find the inherent flaws.
Yes, there was.

I've been at a small startup in Bangalore for some time now, and the rents I've had to pay for an office have seen huge differences over the last couple of years.
> I don't give campaign promises much weight in this discussion.

Huh? 03 wasn't campaign season. And Mccain wasn't running for re-election every time he went after Fannie and Freddie.

I'm not claiming that Repubs, notably Bush and McCain, did a lot - I'm pointing out that they did do what you claimed that they didn't do. And, that they weren't pushing the other way, as Dems were.

As I've written before - manslaughter vs murder.

> You can try to argue that Bush -- the guy who had control of both houses of congress and was able to sell an unpopular war -- was politically powerless do do anything, but that's just not persuasive.

I'm not claiming that he was powerless. I'm claiming that he didn't care that much.

However, there's a huge difference between that and throwing gas on the fire.

> To use an analogy, maybe it was a Democrat who lit the cigarette and fell asleep

Except that that's not what happened. Dems insisted on pouring gas on the fire and fought anyone who tried to intervene.

Bush didn't fight back much. That's wrong, but it's not nearly as wrong as actively pushing bad policy.

> He decided not to make it a major issue

true

> and he benefited tremendously from that decision

false.

He didn't take a hit for trying to deal with it, but that's not the same as benefitting. And, Dems did benefit from it.
Chrome OS has these wonderful little things called "tabs". They do a bangup job of multi-tasking.

(Sorry, your comment just really struck a nerve)
Image a twitter for composers.
> Until very recently in human history the Europeans brutally conquered half the world and effectively turned the "savage people" that were unlucky enough to survive the raping and the pillaging into slaves.

It wasn't just the Europeans. This is the story of conquerors.
iPhone game development on Windows with DragonFire - Text Rendering
"I don't think it's fair to say the van was clearly unarmed, especially when you consider the fact that the van could have been called in to make a pickup by a group."

Or my theory: The van COULD have been driven by aliens from Orion 3. Or the van COULD have been driven by the guy from the future who wanted to stop the LHC again by fighting in Iraq. COULD be, you must admit!
> Some of the "too big to fail" issues we saw was definitely because companies got into multiple lines of business that Glass-Steagall would have prevented.

Those "other lines of biz" provided some diversification that gave them some chance of survival. It also made it possible for banks to save some of the trading firms.

You clearly disagree, so let's have names.
Presumably he meant "armed [in public]". Keeping a gun at home and being able to walk around in groups with them are entirely different things.
> Everyone within a couple of miles must have heard the 30mm High Explosive shells detonating.

The shooting has stopped by then. There was a long pause after the shooting and before the van arrived. Their fatal "mistake" was to assume Americans wouldn't shoot at a van that picked up an injured journalist to be taken to the hospital.

> would guess that what made the van suspect was that it drove into the middle of a battle.

Just to clarify things. Americans here are the invaders that _created_ the battle (both on a micro and macro scale). The children in the van were just going to school and their father wanted to save a man's life. Shells exploding around them is just business as usual. That is their country, their backyard. They didn't want it, they didn't drive "into" it. It came _to them_ on their way to school.
The Half Hooker Economy
FWIW that Dark Horse job pops up on Craigslist about once a year.
ok, I'll bite.

Well, the counter argument is that by this logic nobody can talk about human rights...
All I was saying was that when you don't practice what you preach, your credibility suffers.

This is rhetoric, and isn't an interesting statement about what happened in this video...
Isn't this exactly what is happening on the ground, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? Do you read any local news (easily available on the internet) from those countries?

I don't think many people understand the magnitude of suffering in those countries. Do the math, Iraq is a tenth of the size of the US. Work out the per-capita "suffering".
Find ways to help your customer find ways around common stumbling blocks - "FAQ"s. A subtle tour may not be too bad (think new YouTube).

As about customer support scaling at that volume, it is a good problem to have when you do hit that milestone :-) Having said that, do reverse customer support, i.e. preempt their questions by educating your customers. Better yet, get your users to write some of your FAQ's for you and delegate support to your nicer members via some sort of forum.
Non-standard hardware, that's all there is to say.
I don't know anyone who upgrades, repairs or hacks macs.
Any hackers I know that use macs don't really care about the unique mac features, usually they just want an oem *nix machine with approved hardware. This is a decent option for a second computer, or portable, when price isn't that much of a concern.
They need to drive 8 minutes to get to the scene, when they are "near"? Even when halving the time for mounting and going by 20kmh they were 1km around 1.5km away. Near? What does "in the area mean"? Bagdad?
Summary of C++0x Feature Availability in gcc and MSVC
Contact bloggers...
what is the most effective way to contact bloggers...

I am building a blog aggregator and wanted ask HackerNews about this. any good suggestions?? Thanks
A brain the size of a planet and all you people have me doing is folding towels. - MtPA
> Is this a test of some operating system that will be used on other, more useful things, or just a science project?

You say that like science projects don't lead to anything useful....

or

Everything is a science project until it ships.
Killing ten Iraqis to save an American soldier is not justifiable, any which way you look at it.

As messed up as it may sound to you, I'd rather my friends make it home. As far as I'm concerned, the blood is on the hands of the people who started and continued the war; not the ones who have to actually fight it.
Happiness Button (A Parable)
PHẦN MỀM - TIỆN ÍCH
Was only available for paid developers and under NDA.
It's not RAM in the form of SIMMs or DIMMs, though, it's RAM embedded into the chip (like everything else; the A4 is a System-on-a-Chip), meaning that it's basically an L3 cache: it suffers from heat dissipation and placement issues just like the L1 and L2 caches do.

The real question is whether Apple has designed the A4 with an external memory bus that's currently not being put to use, and which would allow for future expansion in the "iPad 4G·S" or somesuch equivalent. It would actually be a very clever game-theoretic strategy to constrain the memory at first.

If Apple had instead released this first iPad without multitasking but with 2GB of RAM (or even more; it could certainly all fit in the case, and RAM doesn't really impact battery life) developers would be sloppy and use as much of it as they wanted, disallowing their apps from ever being multitasked in the future.

However, constraining memory to 256MB at first forces developers to write apps that only use that much. Later, Apple can release the 2GB model, and it would suddenly be possible to multitask 8 or more of the 256MB-model apps at once. (Of course, also making provisions for new "fat" 2GB apps.)
The comments both here and on reddit contain many vivid examples of how people react to a marketing message.

Virtually nobody changed their mind (many simply got more strident in their position when confronted with opposing interpretations.) Many commenters overemphasized the portions of the video that agree with their existing beliefs, while downplaying or arguing portions that were not in line with those beliefs.

It makes me wonder if perhaps precision is overrated when it comes to writing. Perhaps an imprecise record of one's beliefs would be more popular, as it would allow room for this sort of selective interpretation.
If you are fighting insurgents inside cities where enemy is in close proximity of children and women you can not damn reality and shoot to death whoever you suspect to be an enemy. That will always get you more enemies and endless war regardless of the noble cause that you may be pursuing.

What the soldiers are doing is mostly shielding their butts while they maintain their presence. They are not helping the invaded civilians if they are also killing scores of them every now and then while being unable to stop the insurgents who are doing the same thing.
You are drawing a false conclusion. Even if 98.5% voted for McCain or Obama, this does not mean 98.5% support the war. It just means that 98.5% voted for a candidate that supports the war. I do not support the war, yet I voted for Obama. That fact alone spoils your conclusion.
Whats the best way to automatic geotagging feeds
here are the options that I have found:

ttp://www.geonames.org/rss-to-georss-converter.html to be lacking accuracy ..and are looking into Drupal + Geoparsed (Andrew Larcombe http://geoparser.andrewl.net) also http://superfeedr.com offers a cloud based feed aggregation service that can add a location based on a place names and other data and convert feeds to pubsubhub-realtime.

I think Simple Geo and MetaCarta also have this technology but charge per document processed

if you have any suggestions please let me know...

Thank you for your time
"A4 with an external memory bus"

I'm really completely out of my depth here, but if that were the case, I wonder if you could mostly eliminate the Flash memory, except for the OS. Would there be cost or performance advantages in doing so? I mean, it would suck to lose 64GB worth of stuff if the battery ever died, but the battery's locked in there, and you could put in some kind of backup button-battery... maybe that added complexity would negate any cost or performance advantages.
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> the blood is on the hands of the people who started and continued the war

> not the ones who have to actually fight it.

The nazis probably said the same.
This illustrates an important way of staying competitive globally:

You don't want to be the country where people fold towels.

You want to be the country that designs & builds robots that fold towels.
It's not extortion, they didn't settle for anything other than him deleting all copies of the data that he had access to. Hyperbolic statements are unnecessary.
Besides being cheaper, flash memory is significantly more compact.
> I think you should refrain from making judgements when you were not part of the particular social interaction.

Why shouldn't I? You described the situation on HN and others will naturally comment on it. If you see that comments are off, then correct the description or clear up the misunderstanding.

> it doesn't need the acceptance of that gesture in a culture to tell you it's offensive.

You obviously do. Showing someone your foot is not offensive in American culture to the extent that giving them the finger is. In India it is. In India you'd get fired for putting your feet on the table towards your boss. In US you would get fired if you flicked off your boss.

It looks like you are just as guilty of being close minded as you claim your professor is.

> As for your unsubstantiated guess that I might have been rude -- I would put the odds very much against it as I was looking for a research assistantship at the time.

Well but then what reason would a professor have to insult you based on that? In other words, you seem to have no plausable reason to behave rudely but neither does he.

> And if you've been in grad school as a foreign student without funding, you know how desperately in need of it you are.

Yes, I have been there. I sympathize with you on that. I ended up doing data entry for a university lab for $7/hour.
armchair generals and politicians make the worst conversations ever.
There are several communities online: go there and post your invitation.
Twitter Lists, Alexa etc. can also provide you details about pro bloggers
If my friend went to Iraq, I'd rather him coming back in one piece too.

Good thing that none of my friends went, your friends do not have to go either.
Incidentally, the people who started the war have a think tank. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Ce... Bill Kristol periodically goes on the Daily Show and has smug exchanges with Jon Stewart instead of facing charges before the Hague.
I think you might have trouble really maintaining squeaky cleanliness.

The 'average user' still might want or need Google Voice, Opera, or something she needs for work. She sees it on someone else's phone, she asks how you get it. The tell her: Go to preferences, untick 'allow only app store apps', click OK after scary warning, download app to your PC, follow installation instructions... The iphone just got a bit more difficult. People outside of the top 5% users will be exposed to this stuff, on their phones or on other people if it is available and semi-sanctioned.

Precisely because Apple is heavily censoring and annoying developers in the app store, average users are likely to want non-app-store-apps. Maybe even more on the iPad.

This power user who is a programmer vs average user who log in to facebook via readwriteweb is not really a useful description of the world. Most iPhones are in in between hands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law

I think it's laughable to try to draw a comparison between soldiers messing[0] up and causing collateral damage and the Holocaust.

[0] edit: unnecessarily foul language