skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of the contractual obligation isn't to assume liability in case they aren't the same, though; it's to force Microsoft (or whoever else) to prove, incontrovertibly, that they are the same, and therefore give the companies no wiggle-room. Without that proof, no company is going to bother either way, no matter how much liability they're spared.
This is Not a Time Warp
This is the actual state of the Jeopardy tickets website...
I get the sense he thinks this a big political game. (after all, war is just the imposition of political policy via force).

Having spent some time with the folks he is pissing off, I don't think it's an understatement to say that he may just get himself killed.
I think Wave is a creative and full of effort generalization of a basic idea: adding something to GMail to promote online work coordination and cooperation. They went way too far and they realized it. I would, istread of throwing everything away, rework the concept and see what can come out.
re. PS #3: I don't think it'll take 10 years to show up in gmail - at least, I hope not. I think Wave's great, but it's utility was limited by keeping it completely separated from existing tools (email, buzz, chat etc.).
> Besides, there is nothing to suggest Wikileaks is an anarchist organisation.

"Leaking is inherently an anti-authoritarian act. It's inherently an anarchist act." - Julian Assange

- http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/22/2933892.htm

(note, I don't think this is a bad thing)
>Help me understand why our culpability in the rise of the Taliban doesn't make us more obligated to eradicate them.

If I could believe that eradicating the abuses of the Taliban is in some way part of the mission I might agree, but I fail to see any reason to believe that whatever regime the US installs post-Taliban will be any different.
Ask HN: What is a “Google Fellow”?
Today’s announcement of the discontinuation of Google Wave [1] was made by “Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow.”

Googling the phrase shows few results and no obvious answers.

[1]: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html
The Rockefeller foundation funded the argonomists behind the green revolution, which has hugely improved world nutrition and has been credited with saving more than a billion lives.

Philanthropy has worked in the past.
Couch.IO hiring
Slide was originally supposed to be a revolutionary way to organize and share photos. But they found monetization in the social network sphere and seemed to focus on that.
It clearly can be debated what is and isn't radical change.

However, "Allowing a tiny sliver of the population to enjoy the same privileges and responsibilities as the rest of us?" can be a radical change. For example, it's exactly what happened when we abolished slavery.

I'm not trying to equalize slavery with gay marriage, just to point out that something that fits your criteria can be considered a radical change.

As to gay marriage rights, given that a majority of US population is against it (as was proved in California, one of the most progressive states, with Prop 8), the fact that courts suppressed Prop 8 is pretty radical. It pushes the equality goalpost a little bit further.
The community message board support model doesn't work for google. My current peeve is this god-awful bug thread for adding an additional account to an Android phone:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=6981e6d970e2f29f&hl=en
"The story I've heard is that Wikileaks attempted to contact the White House, so the two parties could go through the documents and remove references to informants. The White House declined the offer. Has any evidence emerged to suggest this is untrue?"

Right, so like little children that aren't responsible, they released all of the names instead.

"See above."

see above
> I'll take a self-promoter over a murderer any day.

How is crap like this getting upvoted? New Guys, here at Hacker News we vote up and down based on intelligent, civil, primarily unemotional comments. Calling out "neocons" and randomly throwing "murderer" around is not what we vote up here. Please think, a lot of us are ex-Reddit and we don't want Hacker News to become Reddit, or else we'd be at Reddit.
Is that open-source anywhere? That's actually pretty slick.
"Godwin's law so soon in this thread? Not helpful."

Don't know your history? not helpful.
We also have amazing beaches, cheap beer and great (but hard-to-find) coders

I can vouch for that! My favorite beaches are in Boracay and Bohol. My favorite Philippine beer is San Mig Light (at less than $0.60 most places), and the best coders I've worked with outside of Belarus live in Cebu. I have an outsourcing company and my whole team is based in Cebu. They are 100% reliable, much cheaper than stateside developers, and they write English better than some Americans. I'm a year or two away from moving there permanently to keep living costs down.
I think there wouldn't have been a negative response to dropping Wave into GMail either. Wave was this cool new thing, and arguably an extension of mail, it would have made sense. COmpare that to Buzz where it was obvious they were just trying to compete against Twitter and leverage their existing user base.
People who recklessly fire on civilians are murderers and should be tried as such. Commanders who issue orders that make ignore forseeable events like that should be held criminally responsible.

Corruption should be eliminated.

Corrupt local replacements for the Taliban should be thwarted.

Incompetancy is bad and should be rectified.

Now, all those things being true, help me understand how it can be OK to arm the Taliban with lists of probable informants?
At many companies Fellow is the highest technical job title, reserved for people who have made major contributions to the company. It often carries a degree of autonomy from corporate strategy and sometimes a sort of tenure, akin to a full professorship.

See http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/awards_fellows.shtml for example.
Bing Maps Adds OpenStreetMap
I find it bizarre that so many people suddenly care so much about the lives of a couple hundred civilians in Afghanistan. Between the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed, and nary a tear was shed by a reporter anywhere, but suddenly God knows how many people are out for this fellow's blood.

The world's a funny place.
Interesting analysis, but I disagree on three points:

1. This analysis implies that a business would agree to work with Groupon if their sole goal were to maximize today's profits. That's unrealistic.

2. Many Groupons are service oriented. This analysis seems more suited to the production and sale of a physical good. Service oriented businesses have constraints as to how many customers they can serve at a given time (i.e. they generally don't scale, and if they do the quality degrades).

3. On a given transaction, there won't be increased profits for the merchant. Despite the increase in demand, Groupon is taking a 50% cut and I don't think that the demand increase can compensate for the commissions exacted by Groupon.

Those are my "dummies" points. I don't have the econ. background to talk specifically about the supply/demand graphs :(
Either this:
http://www.google.com/policyfellowship/faq.html

or this:
http://research.google.com/university/relations/phd_fellowsh...
The power of small data"points" in aggregate - good metaphor.
"I think you are misreading what the "writing on the wall" is..."

iOS is still the winning team at the moment, not Android, in terms of total devices out in the wild and more importantly to developers, app sales. I wonder how much more money the App Store has made since, say, January 1st, 2010 than the Android Marketplace...

"I would not at all debate that the overall app ecosystem on the iPhone is superior to Android, largely owing to its early lead, yet the gap is rapidly narrowing. Very rapidly."

Is it? The gap in total number of apps might be narrowing, but I don't see the quality gap getting any closer.

As to "Dropzone" (I assume you mean Dropbox?) allowing local saving, yes, it does. But it saves the files to the SD card, and opening the same file in Dropbox isn't any faster than downloading it for the first time. On the iPhone, after the initial download, the file opens noticeably faster.

You can call the Android Twitter client whatever you'd like, but the UI is not (in my opinion) nearly on the same level as Twitter or Twitterrific or numerous other iOS twitter apps, and scrolling is still janky as ever (much like scrolling in the rest of Android).

RealCalc is fine, and spinner or not is a personal preference. But show me an app for Android that has the kind of attention to detail as described here: http://tapbots.com/blog/design/designing-convertbot

Mail in Android 2.2 is not superb, and not as responsive as Mail for iOS. Plus, the UI for Mail in Android makes my eyes burn. Gmail for Android is wonderful, but I find Mail for iOS just as good for use with Gmail.

Yes, there are hundreds of note taking apps for Android, but most are ugly and don't sync. Plus I'm not a big fan of the apps that do sync (AK Notepad and 3Banana), as I don't like the style of note taking encouraged by snaptic.com.

The calendar app for Android is alright, but it misses the little things. In Calendar for iOS, when I move to say February 2011 and go to create a new event, it intelligently knows that the date of the new event is likely in February 2011. Try this in Android's calendar app...

2.2 is nice, but it's very telling that most people immediately go and download LauncherPro to replace the jerky scrolling found in the default launcher. And 2.2 still doesn't reach the level of responsiveness found in iOS4 while using the iPhone 4. And yes, games on Android are pathetic, nothing more to say on that front. It may sound like I hate Android, but I actually think it's pretty decent. I did enjoy my time with the Nexus One. But it reminds me heavily of the differences between Windows and OS X; Windows is functional but not enjoyable, OS X is both.
toad from microsoft?

Google Me? (its not named yet)

you make it sounds like your an insider and know these guys personally (if so correct me) but it just seems inappropriate.
There's a US law about invading an international court to free US citizens.

There are a bunch of reasons why the US is hated by quite a few people, most of which boil down to: (a) many US presidents are war criminals (b) the US is a very big "western" nation that likes to start wars (c) the US doesn't play nice with international standards and organizations.
> This does not excuse laziness and a crappy work ethic.

If it won't make any difference, then… why?
Firefox 3.6, Linux, 4 gigs of RAM, 1.86 ghz CPU, 10 mbit connection.

9 second load time. And the scrollbar is uselessly broken. (Nonstandard behavior, arrow keys don't work, etc)
You have to juggle three parameters when taking photos: aperture (How much light does the lens let through?), shutter speed (How long will the lens be kept open?) and film speed (How sensitive is the film to light?).

Slow film speeds inevitably lead to larger apertures or slower shutter speeds or both. The brightness of lenses is limited which means that the shutter speed (which you can take up to years with pinhole cameras if you really want to) has to do all the heavy lifting and exposure times can quickly get out of hand.

A little example: Say you are shooting with ASA 25 film and your light-meter tells you that, given your aperture, you need a shutter speed of 15 seconds. (You would get values in this range at dusk or inside at night with a normal lightbulb illuminating the room.) To bring that down to a more manageable quarter second (you will still need a tripod but capturing smiles might be quite a bit easier) you would need crazy fast ASA 1600 film (only to give you a sense of perspective on that: you could buy the first ASA 1000 color film only in 1982).

This is actually one area where digital photography handily beats film. A fancy and expensive digital camera like the Nikon D3S will let you shoot photos up to ISO 102400 (for the purpose of this comment let ISO = ASA) which will bring your shutter speed down from a quarter second to 1/256 of a second. Well, those ISO 102400 photos will look like crap, but you will get usable results up to ISO 12800 [+] (that would be 1/32 of a second, you could even pull that one off handheld if you really tried). Unthinkable with film. That’s the reason why digital point and shoots can get away with fairly insensitive minuscule sensors.

Long story short: You mom is absolutely correct when she says that shutter speeds were slow. The reason for that were slow films which cause slow shutter speeds (given a fixed aperture).

[+] http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond3s/page17.asp
Automated Flash/Flex Testing w/ Selenium now available via Sauce Labs
You don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide, eh?
Star via Twitter
No, those aren't what we're talking about.
Is it just me or is the source not easily discoverable? I found the wave protocol sources, but i can't really find the individual components. If anyone could point me to the right repo it would be much appreciated!
> That's not the point. The point is that if information was given to the Germans, it would have resulted in many deaths. Occupation has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Stop to think about what the scenario entails. If X occupies Y, the Xes kill the Ys in great number. Releasing information that kills Xes, and thus moves the occupation closer to an end, prevents the killing of more Ys. Every soldier kills some to prevent the death of many—it's all about the numbers.
at the time I went it had 300+ people in the wave and over 170 threads; above what I suspect was the average user case; try loading a regular wave.. with less than 20 people and its good to go. (use chrome if you can also; its faster.)
Whatever the merits of the over-arching idea, the actual implementation and the thing you got to use, frankly, blew. An interesting technology demo, maybe but as an actual product it was a horrendous, inscrutable, clunky mess. [] This remains true despite the fact that there exist a few merry bands of hyper-intelligent and/or masochistic mutants who have managed to get some use out of it.

I think you've just described >50% of all software.
I don't have an ipad and it sounds to me like everyone uses it like I use my cell phone. Is it just the screen that makes it better?
When you know the identity of your informants was compromised, you should remove them from the field immediately. If you don't, it's at least 50% your fault when they get killed.

Keep in mind the US government knew what documents would be leaked before the Taleban could get access to them.
I do think the announcement to kill it off was a bit early :(

- I use wave daily and have for a while for basic 'group meetings' with people who work remote.

I am also surprised that Google didn't keep it alive for internal use (where Gmail came from) ~ perhaps they have something entirely new in the pipe.
"What they're doing is precisely journalism."

Journalists have a responsibility. If a couple of people have leaked information, the likelihood of anybody actually seeing the information is close to zero. Wikileaks has a huge audience that now includes most major media outlets in the US. This is the difference.
I suppose you could track how many times a person has poured over time and cut them off at some point.
CNAME anyone?
I found this remarkably encouraging as I've been trying to deal with some "difficult" personal decisions lately. This brings me to a place where I can see how little some things matter, how much more some others do matter, and finally that life should be lived NOW. Many thanks to the author for writing it.
> If he gave information about locations of jews to the Nazis, would we say it was freedom of information?

While we've got a time machine handy: If he gave information about the location and plans of Vichy officials to the French resistance, would we say it was an act of espionage/treason/terrorism and/or murder?
> Governments can't function without secrets -- even your local small town has to have secret meetings to discuss personnel issues and such.

That's just proof that governments can't function without immediate secrets. Nothing needs to stay a secret after its immediate usefulness has expired. As soon as you've fired the personnel you were having issues with, publish the minutes of the meeting where it was decided.
>That's not the point. The point is that if information was given to the Germans, it would have resulted in many deaths. Occupation has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Occupation doesn't generally happen without bloodshed. Involving oneself in occupation is an investment in bloodshed. The jews who died during the Nazi regime didn't make a choice to involve themselves in bloodshed.

>Can I have your social security number, address, phone number, mother's maiden name, and when you are going to be away from your home? We have no secrets around here

If I were involved in attempting to use force to extort land or resources, I would assume the risk that my identity would be exposed. This is one reason I don't involve myself in these things.

>This tells me you haven't read any of the documents released.

That makes two of us, evidently.
Use a client side RIA framework like jQuery or Dojo. Abandon anything Struts, tiles, JSP, or JSF related. Implement all of your services with JAX-RS and call those services from your UI with XHR request from the client app. Put all of your none dynamic HTML into a CMS that can export static files to a webserver. You do not want yet another run-time dependency (Alfresco can do this). Separating the concerns makes for a far more agile process and allows you to use a greater variety and configuration of tools and technologies.
The industrial process for refining gold ores uses cyanide in one of the processing steps. Good thing he didn't try that process for a DIY project. He's already insane enough for using concentrated sulfuric acid without a fume hood, emergency shower/eyewash station, and full face shield.
Informant > Civilian. To those people at least.
I wonder which clean, efficient war we should compare it to.
I was talking about the same thing the parent was talking about. The page linked in this submission. Why are you talking in the past tense?
It is a legally binding ceremony so presumably you don't want that to be performed by just anybody. The idea that it's performed by someone who is licensed with the state and therefore officially accepts obligations that come with the right to marry other people seems reasonable to me.

As to unfairness, maybe it would be unfair if it would be a trouble to find an officiant that is not a religious representative. The way I see it is that allowing religious representatives to perform a wedding ceremony as accepting societal reality that many people are religious and are more comfortable when wedding is performed by a religious representative but in no way it constitutes harm to non-religious people.
It's about as similar to social institutions as marriage is to divorce, which you tried to equate. Probably more similar, actually, since marriage and divorce are opposites while communication is a keystone of society that's intimately involved in most of its institutions.

At any rate, saying America's current implementation of marriage is a social institution going back through all of history and geography is just plain weird. Even in the modern age, marriage means very different things to different cultures, and that's ignoring all the "marriage" constructs that have existed in the past. Outlawing polygamy was a greater offense to the history of marriage than allowing gays to marry.
Not that this is really a defense of the product, but you should try it in chrome. You'll have a better experience.
OK. It's 50% the US's fault if people get killed. What's your point? Note well: people are likely to be killed who aren't actually informants. Death squads don't do due process.
Dealing With Employees Who Are Social Media Celebrities
“a new type of sports media company that is focused on technology and automation instead of paying people to research and report news like is the norm with traditional sports media."

seems like he is making the Demand Media of sports; perhaps a good idea :) What could you be the Demand Media of? Also what if Google starts dis-liking auto-generated content?
How “The Most Advanced iPhone Exploit In The World” Hacks Your Handset
If the American government is indifferent to the fate of the informants (which refusing to work on removing the names of informants would suggest), then why should Wikileaks be held to a higher standard? At the very least, Wikileaks doesn't have any guns or military and is directly responsible for no deaths whatsoever, a fact which is rather less true of both the Taliban and the Americans.
Well either you are comparing the abolition of slavery to gay marriage or you aren't. The abolition of slavery was a radical change by any measure. The adoption of gay marriage has had no discernible impact in any country or jurisdiction where it has been tried. Except that a tiny vulnerable minority of the population is a whole lot happier and more secure. The rest of us haven't noticed a thing. It's just not that big a deal, except for the people who need and deserve it.
We'll probably have to wait for him to leak more memos for specific examples. All we know for now is Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid says they are using the data to punish informants. If we want to be really cynical we could assume Mujahid is a CIA creation for delivering US propaganda. It makes sense though. The Taliban holds villages hostage to get this type of information. Why wouldn't they just look at the memos?
> If a couple of people have leaked information, the likelihood of anybody actually seeing the information is close to zero.

In the Internet age, I find the concept of that laughable. If you want to show something to a great number of people, just post it on a social news/bookmarking site. Sending your info to Wikileaks is a hundred times as responsible an act as just letting the information spread virally would be.
Simple Living
The use of "murderer" could be argued, but I fail to see what's in any way controversial about calling a member of the AEI a neocon. According to Wikipedia "AEI is the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute
did you present your startup to Ycombinator? If so how was that?
You probably can, at least in principle. The SAT is effectively an IQ test (it correlates as well with IQ tests as they correlate with each other) and you can definitely study for that. The difference is that there aren't Stanford-Binet prep classes (at least I don't think so.)
Unless you can prove that the military is unnecessary and their absence would not prevent more bloodshed than they cause then I would say my equivocation is right on the money.

I disagree. Rather, I would suggest that the burden of proof should rest on those who claim the right to kill others, rather than those who wish to deny others that right. Which is to say, unless you can prove that the military is necessary and its non-existence would result in more deaths than its existence, it should not exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law

It's directly applicable.