skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It's a reminder that social situations are complex and though we try, it's impossible to think of every edge case.

If they implement a tag to show someone has died what are they going to do about the zombie apocalypse/second coming?

Edge cases.
The technology isn't revolutionary but making it accessible to people is.
Declaring bikeshed should be like calling shotgun--whoever declares it should make the decision.
Wikileaks presented their "full" version as "uncut" but is actually missing 30 minutes -- Gawker covered this in some detail:

http://gawker.com/5513068/the-full-version-of-the-wikileaks-...

In addition, there is a lot of "context" in the edited out footage of even Wikileaks "full" version (timestamps):

0:26 The “Black van” dropping off possible insurgents.

0:46 “We got a target fifteen coming at you, it’s a guy with a weapon.”

1:05 “One of them has a weapon.”

1:27 Guy carrying AK-47, and other with RPG (no way it a tripod) that had previously fired on U.S. Troops. WikiLeak video distracts you with letter box about a camera Bag).

3:53 “Roger, be advised, there were some guys popping out with the AKs behind that dirt pile. Break.”

4:25 “Uh, location, I have about 12 to 15 dead bodies. Where else were you taking fire from?”

4:34 They had AK-47s and were to our East. So, where we were taking small arms fire, over.

4:59 “I also wanted to make sure you knew that we had a guy with an RPG crouching around the corner, Getting ready to fire on your location. That’s why we requested permission to engage.”

5:17 (IMPORTANT) “Six this is four, I got one individual looks like he’s got an RPG round laying underneath him. Break.” (Note: Four was at the scene of the shooting and found an RPG, of course wikileaks left that out).

5:43 “ I can hear small arms fire from your engagement area…”

6:10 “Right about where we engaged? Yeah, one of them with that RPG or whatever.”

6:19 “He’s got a weapon. Got an RP–, uh AK-47.”

6:34 “Roger, we have another individual with a weapon.”
I'd be interested to know what a lot of these projects are. That graph suggests that there are a good number of projects that have > 90 comment lines per 100 lines, which just seems absurd.

Do they count perl one-liners where there is a huge amount of functionality packed into a single line, with a big comment above it explaining what it does?
Yes, it is. That's what the CU Spaceflight people are doing with BallastHalo and there have been autonomous cross-Atlantic flights I believe.

The balloon manufacturers give lift information and then you simply fill the balloon and measure the lift.
Another option if you are planning to take the Mac into the exam room with you would be to install Apple's BootCamp, though again you will need to purchase a copy of Windows
How would people feel about the option to have your state ID number associated with your account (but kept private) so that Facebook could update with a file from the government of recently notified deaths?

Facebook could send a condolences message to the associated email to catch false positives (people that the gov think died but really didn't!) and then a week later or so put the account into "deceased" mode.

Thoughts?
Inside Anybots And The Rise of Human-Size Telepresence Robots
Your account is 3 hours old. Seems like you created this account just to sell your product.
Meaningful names are fine if you have enough servers that every single server can do one thing. But in smaller circumstances the 'web' server may need to do decidedly non-web tasks. And it's difficult to know this in advance, so trying to name things meaningfully will only cause confusion when someone discovers that the database server is running apache or the web server is hosting the local office nfs mounts.

I like the use of something like elements because it lets you use the character of the element as a sort of metaphor for the function of the server - but since it's a metaphor and not a clear name it's understood that you can't rely on the name to know what the server does, and you should keep it documented.
Why dig up this drama from over a year ago?
Actually, my brother gave up before even trying (at this age "passions" are sometimes a very passing phenomenon).

I'd recommend pygame over web development. Making a video game is much more fulfilling at that age in my opinion. Ask any 12 year old "do you want to make a video game or a website?"

For an older kid (~16), web development with APIs such as Facebook can be interesting too, because (s)he'll want to brag about it to his/her friends.
There are benefits to the business from good customer service, beyond word of mouth: I mostly buy things from newegg, amazon, zappos, and jcrew when given a choice, and don't even bother to comparison shop, because my time has value and it's not worth dealing with crap customer service unless I'm going to save at least 20%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Traversal_Utilities_for...

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Connectivity_Establ...
A free option to try would be darwine (http://darwine.sourceforge.net/index.php), but it can be difficult to get some things working on it. If you have access to the program you need to use before hand, try this out, but otherwise you're probably safer with an option like bootcamp.
It is very relevant. This how one economy gets classified as service or industrial.
Even if we take different approach, overall industrial output of USA per capita, it still less than Germany's.
Precisely. It's one of those things where the longer you put it off the more expensive it gets to fix and the harder it is to deal with. My vote is to just adjust to doing it on day one.
What about distillation. I have read a few science articles claiming the price of distillation is coming down and a viable alternative than pumping water great distances.

I can't find the one from Popular Science, but I did a quick google search and found this article. Though, I don't know its accuracy.

from http://www.freedrinkingwater.com/water_quality/quality1/1-ma...

Here's a few reasons why...Seawater provides an unlimited, reliable water supply for coastal populations worldwide; brackish water is a plentiful, relatively drought-proof water resource for inland populations and reduces dependency on imported water. And, of all the Earth's water, 97 percent is salt water, only 1 percent is fresh water available for humans to drink, and 2 percent is frozen. Of the more than 7,500 desalination plants in operation worldwide, 60% are located in the Middle East. The world's largest plant in Saudi Arabia produces 128 MGD of desalted water. In contrast, 12% of the world's capacity is produced in the Americas, with most of the plants located in the Caribbean and Florida.

To date, only a limited number of desalination plants have been built along the California coast, primarily because the cost of desalination is generally higher than the costs of other water supply alternatives available in California (e.g., water transfers and groundwater pumping). However, as drought conditions occur and concern over water availability increases, desalination projects are being proposed at numerous locations in the state. Desalination costs are decreasing as technology improves and more plants are built. Today there are more than 15,000 desalination plants in 120 countries. The desalination market is forecast to grow more than $70 billion in the next 20 years. About half of the world's desalted water is produced with heat to distill fresh water from seawater.
"If A Man Watches Three Football Games In A Row, He Should Be Declared Dead."
VMWare, VirtualBox and Parallels.

VirtualBox is free and works great.
Have you ever Googled "anagram"?
"people" use skype all the time. I'm not sure video calling from mobiles will really take off. It's been available on other phones for quite a while now if you look for them. I really only want to video-call when I'm at home. For which skype works just fine.

I can't really imagine wanting to video-call anyone while I'm out or without laptop/netbook.
You would love CA then, where the state seizes local taxes to pay state bills and the republicans rant on about lowering taxes. The cities are feeling the pinch and have to cut local services.
Curious.

I don't read "out loud, but silently" (if you see what I mean). I don't hear the words in my head as I read. I trained myself at age 8 or 9 to read very, very fast by not "sounding out" things in my head. Net result is that I get confused quickly by misspellings. Then I need to backtrack and read things "out loud" while trying not to see what's there.

Which is tricky.
Paul the Octopus did it again
Google I/O 2010 - Making Freemium work
But only if you make it accessible to people with iPhone 4 on both sides of the conversation, and only while in range of an accessible WiFi access point?
Complements Chris Brogan: http://twitter.com/chrisbrogan/status/18303586355.

Another one: Googling for Recursion: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8....

Anyone else have any?
Interesting...I originally had a more complicated interface on http://buyersvote.com/ where people could add/remove items on a list which would pop out a new text field for each item.

I eventually just made it one big text area and let them do "one per line".

There is a still a sparate field for the title. I don't have any hard data on whether this change improved engagement or not. But I think as a general rule, the simpler you can make the UI the more engagement you'll get from first time users.
I feel sure I've read this before and yet it's dated July 11...
CUDA.NET 3.0.0 Released
Iknowthatgirl: Real Amateur Porn & Ex Girlfriend Sex Videos
"...because the mainstream media have a tough time taking him seriously."

Honestly, I can't think of anyone with less moral authority than the (bulk of the) mainstream media. If WikiLeaks could simply bypass the MSM, we'd all be better off.

I don't know if Assange helps the movement more than he hinders it, but at least he has done more for the cause of monitoring centers of power than the MSM in the last 40 years, since Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers. If he's using the donations to live the good life, I really don't care. Donations are voluntary, unlike the taxes that fund the Iraq War.
I'm dubious. I don't use reddit, but I just skimmed the site. You're totally right, reddit has done a shit job allowing people to advertise. That being said, I have some experience with monetization, and forum traffic, dominated as it is by page refreshes, monetizes like shit. For starters, pv per user is way higher than almost any other type of site. All display advertisers cut individual users off pretty quickly -- IME often under 3 pv per day -- after which you're purely displaying remnant inventory at $.1 to $.3 ecpm.

That said, they should immediately experiment w/ adsense, pubcenter, ideas ala stack overflow of embedding amazon referrals onto all books (not at all obnoxious IME), and some of the better display advertisers. Most of these are free and come with basically no commitment so why not. Also, they should embed quantcast's tracking pixel to get some idea about their demographics in a much cheaper fashion than comscore (NB: this could be misconstrued as an advertisement but I think it's good advice.)
I understand avoidance, but what do you mean by "neurosis"?
"This may be the world's greatest tricycle" [pdf]
No SciPy is amazing and I wish ruby had something like it. Its also got a lot of C so its pretty fast though you interface with it in Python.

http://www.scipy.org/
Residential users use about 10% of the water, last time I looked. Larger users are alpha, hay, and rice. So if we ban growing rice in the desert, we will have plenty for the people. CA rice is probably for export, because it is the shor grain variety, not the long grain that most of us eat.
That's very cool. I particularly like the waves of scroll bars (http://www.the389.com/works/scrollbars/) and using checkboxes as pixels (http://www.the389.com/works/drops/).
I was just looking at the file that defines these, but I don't think I'll spoil them for all the non-cheaters. ;-)
Yet it is pretty silly to say that USA is an agricultural country.
That means there is a lot creativity going in the agriculture to keep it so efficient.

Even if there is innovation going on in the jet engine, there is still a lot of space for innovation in less hi-tech industry.
To send a first-class priority (same-day) message from New York to Los Angeles now costs $25, plus 88 cents a word.

Does anyone know of a valid reason to pay 88 cents a word in 2010? It made sense in the old days where they used Morse code, but you would think that the telegrams are sent electronically now.
Google is incorporated in Delaware. Apple (through Braeburn Capital since the mid-2000s) manages most of its assets in Nevada. They're not paying state corporate income taxes to anyone, let alone California. Perhaps they're not using any of the services that California state taxes provide. But it's sort of a complicated argument.

The state has a long history. Perhaps this article is a good way to break the deadlock. But realistically, corporations are already acting as if this were a city state (funding their nearby cities much more than the state, etc.).

So I don't know. If anything, I think they should move the capital to San Francisco, so that there is better dialogue and involvement with businesses. Similarly, I don't quite understand what the point of Springfield, Illinois, or Albany, New York are. Maybe there's a reason though...
Honestly, I can't think of anyone with less moral authority than the (bulk of the) mainstream media.

Sadly that is how you contact most people. Besides - one of the main issues with modern media is bias and vitriol, shouldn't Wikileaks rise above that?

If he's using the donations to live the good life, I really don't care. Donations are voluntary, unlike the taxes that fund the Iraq War.

And that, I think, says it all. My principles are not so easily bent (I'm not convinced he is misappropriating funds btw). I gave them a donation to fund the support of whistleblowers - not to fund a lavish lifestyle. If he is doing that then I am very pissed off :)
Actually, a lot of contemporary philosophy -- at least as it is practiced in the English-speaking world -- strives for exactly the "plain, clear, specific definitions" and "verifiable logic" you're looking for. I think the overgeneralizations and nebulous explanations you refer to are more typical of "Continental" philosophy and related disciplines like "critical theory."

The former style of philosophy does produce work that is clearer and easier to read, but it has its own limitations: in the worst cases, philosophers get so hung up on being clear that they shy away from discussing the difficult problems that bring people to philosophy in the first place, and instead spend their careers arguing over minutiae or practicing pseudo-science. Clear definitions aren't going to provide you with the final word on how to treat others, how to organize society, what really exists, or how we know about it.

Then again, the latter style of philosophy doesn't necessarily do much better on addressing these "big questions." Sometimes it is better at keeping these questions in view, but (as you point out) it is often extremely esoteric.

The best philosophers, I think, understand that clear definitions are a starting place, a model that needs to be developed. They see that model as a tool for addressing the thorny, complicated, and tangled questions that philosophers are asked to answer, not as a truth that must be defended in its own right. The goal is to find real philosophical truths. Where a rigorous, methodical approach helps us attain that goal, it should be welcomed; but where that approach becomes a hindrance, it should be left behind.
I don't know if it has a name (it seems to simply be referred to as "an efficient sparse set representation"), but I think I initially remember seeing it introduced in "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" in an exercise at some point in the past.

A good description of it is here: http://research.swtch.com/2008/03/using-uninitialized-memory...
Yes, but if you look at amount of industrial output per capita, you'll see that it is smaller than Germany's.
All important points to raise.

But.

Not an awful lot to do with that specific video; which is our whole point about pushing the agenda. It was twisted from an important video about the killing of civilians into a statement about the legitimacy of the war.

That is exactly what Fox or one of the other big networks do to stories ;)
Absolutely agree. Excessive patriotism and pride is not serving the country.
The important point is to understand what the person is and is not aware of, when they make the pitch. If someone pitches an idea, but clearly has no idea what makes them better, and has just as clearly never even thought about it, it tells you a lot.
> Anyone else have any?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googles_hoaxes#Easter_eggs
"ascii art"
This is a great list. +1 on the Philosophical Investigations.

As an introductory book, I would recommend Russell's Problems of Philosophy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googles_hoaxes
Couldn't disagree more about the idea that product knowledge makes a good salesperson. Ari Gold can't act, and a top salesperson might barely know how to use the product. From what I've seen, effective salespeople:

* Are persistant and laser-focused on getting deals to close.

* Can turn off every part of their brain that would prevent or delay them from asking for the sale.

* Have a nose for the org chart and for figuring out who needs to be sold to how.

* Can accurately gauge where they are in the sales process for any prospect, engagement, or eval --- this rarely has anything to do with technology and usually has everything to do with budgeting, MBO's, and getting bakeoffs started.

* Take meetings and make visits relentlessly.

* Appear confident, like the guy-in-the-rated-R-movie.

Most of this isn't helped by product knowledge, and some of it is actively hindered by in-depth knowledge (for instance, by creating doubts about whether now's the right time to ask to close a deal with someone considering or evaluating).

I always sound like I know exactly what I'm talking about, and often I don't, so don't hesitate to tell me I'm wrong; I'll learn from it. My sense of it is that it's very hard for a tech person to be a good salesperson. Not impossible, but not statistically favored.
Being on stage is worth it. There are two main conferences that target new startups: TechCrunch Disrupt and DEMO. DEMO has something happening in September, with application deadline mid-July (pretty much right now).

Applying is free. If you pass the selection process, you can make your decision then. If you are not selected (2 years ago, TC40 had about 1,000 applications for 40 slots), then you don't need to think about anything.
The wikipedia article gives the story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

The quotation I like comes from this page:

http://www.airdisaster.com/special/special-ua232.shtml

where they say:

Subsequent simulator tests showed that other DC-10
crews were unable to repeat the effort of the crew
of 232. Investigators concluded that, in its damaged
condition, it was not possible to land the aircraft
on a runway. As a result, the crew was given much
praise for managing to put the aircraft down just
off the runway centerline and saving as many lives
as they did.

I've heard that the simulator was run repeatedly with the scenario, and no crews hit the airport, let alone the runway, let alone landed the plane.

Outstanding flying by the original crew.
If you're in a room full of people making phone calls, be aware that you're might be hearing "inside salespeople" --- ie, highly-compensated telemarketers --- and that inside salespeople are usually used to queue up engagements for account managers who actually do the real selling.
It is separated. I use 3 as my telco, never used AT&T
I'm looking forward to "positioning against the competition". I think this is something a lot of startups will find useful. Many people have good ideas, but when it comes right down to it, it's a dog-eat-dog world, and the cash flows from the customer/users opinion of your offering weighed against the competition. You can iterate all day long, but to take home the money you need to be more attractive than the others out there. That takes a well thought out plan.
here is the question...off the top of your head can you remember one other leak besides the collateral murder one that wikileaks leaked?
Linux Market Share At A Record High
This makes me feel stupid. Just like Final Crisis, when everybody was saying that Grant Morrison was awesome and I couldn't understand a panel of it.
I'd somewhat disagree, and say that a kid given books, versus a kid living in a house without books, has potentially a big advantage.

I remember two main books I used to read pre-10 years old, which were "Great Men of Science" and "Encyclopedia of Wildlife". The second book especially was huge and I'm sure I'd still learn something at every page, even today, 30 years later. Reading about dinosaurs, or mammals, or birds was always a great escape from a somewhat crappy at times childhood.

Kids have a huge amount of energy, but it seems that it's far too often directed towards collecting every single McDonalds Happy Meal toy, or getting further into the latest video game.

Kids love collecting stuff, including facts, and should at least be given the opportunity to read.
Don't write off Wikileaks just yet. The art of being a trusted leak distribution entity is a new one, and I expect the finesse and execution to improve as time goes on.

That said I'm glad the leak happened even if there was some hoopla associated with it.
It's kind of silly California, 'we', Bay Area, are the best and greatest of all, you need us, bow before us. This sounds too one-sided and most likely, it's not that simple.

Anyway, except this reasoning, I'm very keen on the idea of city states, I'd like to try something like that, the city I live in is most likely the first thing I try to identify with, and it is perhaps the authority that affects my life the most (and I even can't vote in the city where I live now…).
What's scary is that people have spent decades putting momentum behind the idea that technology is an educational force, and now we have to wonder how far in the opposite direction that might have been wrong.

If it's not wrong, we can at least see now that computers are like cars and take people where they're going faster, whether they're going straight ahead or into the gutter.

Directions of hope:

1) Maybe the spread of these technologies is in fact spreading skills that will enrich lives and economies. If so, can we identify what those are and stop wasting time with other things? (I don't get the impression at all that modeling and programming are propagating as fast as games and websurfing)

2) Maybe this is indeed the end of faithfully hoping technology will have a net educational benefit. If so, what is the next thing to try?
Update: Wikileaks editor Jullian Assange told CNN yesterday that the 39 minute video is "everything we have. It is a continuous take except for one 20 minute interval." So, ___Wikileaks did not edit the video themselves—their source did___.

Although, the article goes on to argue whether they still can call it the "full video", but that's just a debate of semantics then. I am at the moment unsure whether the timestamped captions were a part of the original source video or not. It would be disappointing if it were, just as disappointing was WikiLeaks' decision to go by the 'collateral damage' domain, still however -- they are doing what they need to be doing: leaking material.
Of course a bay area city state would vote to spend no money on the military industrial complex, and then an orange county city state would invade and conquer them.
Crisis Awaits World’s Banks as Trillions Come Due