skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
International law does cover treatment of civilians during conflicts, but I'm afraid you are wrong - international law doesn't automatically class any and all civilian deaths as war crimes. This is pretty basic stuff.
Cracker culture has been traditionally marginalized by the state and law enforcement. It's unlikely that it will grow a sudden fondness for those who work with the state. Lamo, in addition to selling out Manning after telling him he was a journalist, is also involved with Project Vigilant, an organization that claims to use ISP EULA loopholes to spy on private citizens: http://bit.ly/dsS60a.
Pretty much. And since anybody can sign up as a "developer", this is really a way for Google to keep selling the N1 to geeks without having to pretend to care about customer support. Which is probably the best way to go; those of us who want an unlocked and unrestricted Android phone can get one, and it won't annoy the carriers quite as much since it's not targeted at general consumers.
yes. next question?
Total cost > $500K

A site license is > 500 seats

Long, intensive sales cycles

Heavy support and uptime requirements

And I'm not against it or anything. It can be more work than small or med businesses but it's also significantly more money. In fact, the amount of money is probably inordinately more. So you can actually become more financially successful doing enterprise software.
Why should the priority go to the call? You don't know if the person is watching a Youtube video showing how to give someone CPR, and the person is busy dying. Would you prioritise a call from a telemarketer over that? Tele-medicine is just one example. Who decides?

I completely agree with roc that once you start thinking about it, there are just too many holes in the argument for prioritising on type. "Type" can just be a synonym for "provider". There will be nothing to prevent carriers to push new protocols to a non-priority "type", if they don't pay up.

If voip calls get priority, what prevents me from writing a torrent protocol over voip? That would just be a waste of bandwidth. Prioritising will set off a never-ending arms race.
Ask HN: What would you like to see in a new educational language?
Over the last few weeks I have been working on implementing a programming language to teach myself more about how they work.

The point has come where I need to decide on a direction for the project. Now that I know how it all works do I abandon the project? Work toward making it a production language? Or build it into an educational system for teaching people how to program and how programming languages work?

I like the last option personally, but I am curious about what others feel is needed in an educational language.

My thoughts are:

* Imperative
* Simple data-types (Int, Float, String, Array, Hash)
* First-class, anonymous, functions only
* Single-threaded
* Simple STDIO-only io
* Local variables only
* Unit testing baked-in
* REPL

Finally, my main requirement is that the language implementation itself be very accessible. The VM, parser and compiler are all already partially written in Ruby and are concise and clear. The goal is to make a language that you can crack open and understand in less than a week...

I would love to hear what everyone has to say about this...
It's really a problem to configure a keyboard to dvorak in the workplace these days? It only takes a few clicks to do it in windows, linux and mac. If a user doesn't have the privileges to do so (on windows, for instance) I'd assume it'd be easy to ask someone to configure it.

About people not being able to use my computer, I actually like that ;-) but if someone really needs to use my laptop, all it takes is to click on the keyboard layout switch in the gnome panel bar. One click.

About Ctrl-C,v,x, for me the key is to have Ctrl where capslock is.
I've also got a master/slave setup and am looking forward to replica sets.
It's great to see sharding is production ready. It's now there when I need it.
Sure, try this out:

http://keytweet.com/celebrity/categories/
Let's you see top tweets for other people. We've got one for "The top tweeters from hacker news"
Google Small Business Blog
Then the much more accurate stories should have been posted with the call for the NYTimes to apologize, and not the single tweet. It was the headline I took issue with. In general, even if what you're saying is true, that doesn't excuse holding up a flimsy argument and then demanding everyone change their mind based on that flimsy rationale.
During "Collateral Murder", an Apache gunship shot up, with no warning, a civilian van that exhibited no aggression. Would this be legal under international law?
That's a 'fix' if network capacity were infinite. You can rephrase your corollary as 'why should my VOIP calls drop just because I'm downloading StarCraft II'. There isn't anything inherently evil in the notion that you might want to prioritize, say, latency-dependent traffic over traffic that isn't.
I was also a lone waver for a long time. I think the same happened to many users, so the way in which it was launched should have been different. However, I don't think that the failure can be blamed entirely upon the launch strategy. Performance of wave was really poor, and as the conversations became longer the refresh rate really dragged.

I think a lesson here for Google is that when they initially launch a product to a small number of users, they should really try to encourage the early adopters and make sure that they don't end up stranded with no other users to talk to, because those early adopters will become evangelists if they're well treated. Perhaps they should have just kept Wave quiet and then launched it a year later to everyone.
Method and apparatus for automatically exercising a curious animal
Let's assume for a moment that his choice was neither right or wrong: A crowd of people attacking an informant without being placed in his shoes. This group mentality leads to ignorance leads to violence.

Suppose for a moment, some korean spy was bragging about all the US documents they were funneling back to their government. These documents consisted of building names, employee's names, and a few other misc trails. Do we worry that the spy might obtain even more sensitive information and release it or ignore the spy completely and continue on with our daily lives?

What if there was a man working at your mom's bakery leaking all of your mom's baking secrets/employee information and boasting about it on his facebook page. Would you let your mom know that this employee is letting everyone in the world know her address and she makes an excellent strawberry muffin?

Hacker, civilian, crackhead, secretary, garbage man; whatever title, if you believe a person might be endangering your government, people, or rights(or baking secrets)... is it so wrong to alert an authority of the situation before it gets out of hand? Could he have stumbled upon some new nuclear weapon schematics that wiped out an entire continent and went "OH LOOK WHAT THE US IS DOING, MUST SHARE THIS?!"

(BTW: I don't really understand why we push democracy on other countries. The best way to spread democracy is by example and let other countries adapt on their own, in their own way... rebellion, civil war, or civil disobedience or whatever new method springs up. Democracies don't just spring up over night, the US just got extremely lucky in forming its republic. Many lives were lost, rights were nonexistent, and somehow we still ended up at this point.)

(Also, that soldier knew the risk of leaking documents in a time of 'war,' so, I feel no pity for his capture.)

(I should also note that I know nothing of Lamo or bradass other than what I saw on the daily show. This video is just group stupidity.)
Yes, because no good knowledge could possibly come from reading a business book. Startups are not just about work, they're about work, learning, and growing a business. All of which can be improved by insights from some of the fantastic business books out there.
How Many Irons Can You Have in the Fire?
I suspect we agree more than we disagree. The remaining differences are about whether there are only three options- "passive" == "do nothing but wait for the next attack" and "active" == full fledged war wasting trillions of dollars and lasting decades or "c" improving the life of th average Mohammed which in practice devolves to full fledged war and subsequent "nation building". Your analogies all suffer from being set up to have only binary alternatives and so are flawed - a ultra "passive" and sissy option and an "active" or chest thumping all out aggressive one..

In real life, I suspect there are a lot of options between those extremes (and a few beyond them). You could have just bombed/droned or even better captured the top leadership of AQ (at Tora Bora for example) and hung them from lamp posts wrapped in pigskin and never said a word or claiming credit. The message would have been delivered loud and clear, with you still free to hunt down the Saudi and Pakistani financiers. You could probably still grab the lot from Quetta and Riyadh with a few strategically placed billions in the right Pakistani and Saudi pockets or a private ( and believable) threat to cut off all aid to Pakistan and impositions of weapon and other embargos unless OBL and co are trussed up and delivered to you. The generals will all fall over themselves to obey.

I still disagree with you on civilians not being able to say "enough" to their governments without putting a complete military and strategic plan in place. No government would ever get criticized or elected out by this logic.

And as for comparisons of wars, there will always be differences in any two wars. But there are also similarities and lessons to be learned.

Sure the Vietnamese didn't have a Caliphate (but communism also had an impossible goal) , but the United States getting into a battle with high moral aims impossible to fulfill militarily ("Make you and me safe from communists" - Make you and me safe from Islamists") and no clear victory definitions or path, relying on technical superiority, staying and bumbling around long enough for initially friendly host population to turn hostile, rogue units killing innocents and the resulting back lash, leaks of "classified material", presidents campaigning to stop the war and then escalating once in office, loss of prestige worldwide,deep divisions in American society people foolish enough to trust the United States left twisting in the wind and generally getting sucked into a quagmire certainly sounds familiar.

And all this has nothing to do with why Assange should necessarily take the US side in a dirty war when the USA administration doesn't care to vet the material before publication. The witch hunt in the name of "saving innocent informants" is the height of hypocrisy.

That said this thread is overly long so I'll stop contributing. Politics and HN don't mix well. Cheers and have a nice day|!
One of the Great Things to come out of the US Patent system.

Figure 2 is, by far, the most ghetto patent drawing I have ever EVER seen.
Just got permission from The Powers That Be, looking forward to it!
Whistleblower? Leaking the single video was arguably whistleblowing. Dumping documents en masse without knowledge of their contents is not, by any stretch of the word, whistleblowing.

Regardless, whether you agree with the leaking, in whole or in part, Adrian Lamo was going to end up in an interrogation room sooner or later if he didn't come forward. Manning put him in that situation quite carelessly. This is not about politics/policy -- this is about someone instantly making another person a potential co-conspirator.

It's rather easy to comment from the sidelines and urge someone else to ignore the potential consequences they face.
Love the relevance so far! keep it up!
It's good to see people treating YC as a business transaction instead of pouring their self worth into the prospects of getting in:
"The value is incredible — it’s a very strong brand. it helps when trying to recruit and talking to press. It helps with getting upvotes on Hacker News. It helps on raising money."
From my experience, which may vary from others, I don't think so. It's like saying that you'll lose weight when you continually hang out at the warehouse candy store that gives free samples from time to time, since it's cheaper and easier to get candy than from the fancy pricey candy store.

I still say it's a actually a disadvantage for your start up. I'm not even counting the creativity and focus you inadvertently use for it, or even what you need for your wardrobe.
I am a long time user of Xfce and I am glad that there are more and more "native" Xfce applications being built and included in Xubuntu. Definitely a nice alternative to the more bloated Gnome.
Different school, but this has been discussed before - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231286

I still think it is just a marketing tool which Apple has been very successful in using. You don't see engineering schools "giving" every student a graphing calculator, which to me would actually make more sense.
Probably one of their mistakes was not to have interoperability between Wave and Gmail at an early stage. I think they ruled out doing that early on.
Ask HN: retraining for "computational science" and modeling?
For the past 10 years I have been building what I call "infrastructure" software. A mixture of systems level software, web software, sysadmin scripts. If I were to get a job at Google, my title would likely be "SRE." I would like to stop doing this.

I have a math degree, and I would like to move into a more analytical role, where I use programming to find the answers to complicated questions. What books and online resources (iTunes courses, web sites, etc) are most useful for learning more about how to do this? Right now I'm looking at "the nature of mathematical modeling" by Neil Gershenfeld, and Numerical Recipes in C. Any other advice?
Your example doesn't make any sense. For purely technical reasons there would be no reason to send a VoIP call along with the "sideband feature" over the same connection.

Even if your VoIP application offers a feature like streaming file transfer, you wouldn't actually implement that by sending that data over the VoIP connection, because the VoIP data requires real-time performance (the call starts breaking up if packets are delayed) but your streaming file transfer does not. It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call.

If you simply opened a second, non-VoIP connection for the file transfer, everything would work fine.

Would Verizon have an incentive to cheat by favoring its own services? Maybe, but that seems to be what these Google talks are all about in the first place. I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply.
Which particular international law are you referring to? The Geneva Conventions?
Sign the National Entrepreneurs' Day petition to Pres. Obama
I have problems with doctors using these devices with the lack of a replaceable battery.

The current plan is you trade them in for a refurb one with a new battery when your old one dies.
Yes, this may not be true. All I can report is what I've read.
Not to say that learning is bad, just saying of the thousands of people reading Hacker News every day, I'd guess the majority of readers need to stop reading and start doing.
Dude that's rude.
Wow your strawman is made of many little strawmen. My mom's baking recipe being leaked or not will not result in someone's death, nor will snitching on the leaker.

Nuclear secrets likewise are a completely different story than outdated opsec.

On the other side, not all instances of Authority are the same. Some should never be notified, others more often.

Of course, you are basing all of this on the assumption that someone leaking X must necessarily possess NO ability to reason and choose wisely about what to leak next (if anything) -- an assumption that is in no circumstances warranted.
Can you be more specific?

I'm really quite a layman in this area, but I've heard the overselling argument quite a lot, and I'd be interested in hearing why it might not be a valid one.
Rather than just believe in an unproven hypothesis why don't you test it out?

Find the interesting-code projects you actually use or have heard about (maybe Apache, Cassandra, Google's Bigtable, etc), find out who did the majority of the coding and then try to find their blog.

How many people work on Apache? How many of them have blogs? Do you even care that they blog? Wouldn't you hire any of them anyway?

Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik were the guys that wrote Cassandra when it was still an internal Facebook project. I can't find blogs for either of them. (Though they did write one blog post on the Facebook Engineering blog.)

Doug Cutting wrote a lot of great code for Hadoop. He has a blog here: http://cutting.wordpress.com/ but hasn't touched it in nearly a year.

Jeff Dean has done some amazing work at Google ( http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html Now THAT is one hell of a resume) and I can't find a blog for him either.

To me, it seems mostly random whether the person has a blog or not. It would be an interesting project to catalog and analyze how many do and don't. Then you'd have a real answer rather than a wild guess you believe religiously rather than scientifically.
How Asimov’s Robot Laws Ended Up on Last.fm’s Web Server
Woohoo 410meters after 5 plays (probably not much).

The instructions should say HOLD enter key, not PRESS.
99 Designs is not the place to go

you know, if I am at that point, I just go buy a template and am done with it. at least a good portion of the templates, on reputable sites, have clean code underneath them. I saw some work from a 99 gig and it was the most atrocious thrown together, to save time, job I have ever seen.

Sometimes you need cheap and fast, I am of the opinion that when you do, it is better to adapt to a purchased template than to try to fix slop code from 99.
Fun game and great proof of concept, though the aerodynamics aren't very realistic and whenever I've flown a helicopter through a cavern it's never never seemed that quite that blocky.

Neat easter egg at the end though.
This limitation has been gone for at least 6 months, even on the previous phone. At least for HTC ION, (it's the only phone I had with this limitation).
Using BlobReader, wildcard subdomains and webapp2 on Google AppEngine
I used to paint all the rich with the same brush. When reading the Forbe's list and the astronomical numbers I would be at first amazed, then jealous and then think of them as thief's and cheats.

Although I still think that the wealthy have a vastly disproportionate influence over government and at times to the expense of the greater public and that many of the super rich would short the public to increase their bottom line, reading the letters written on http://givingpledge.org has entirely reformulated my perception. I am now much more likely to give any rich person the benefit of the doubt and even perhaps view them slightly favourably rather than default to their status being illegitimate.

I have been inspired and it is absolutely amazing to see what the captains of industry are doing with their wealth. There were many of them committing 90%, 99% of their wealth, even to die broke. Not only so but committing their time and experience too. Some of the most experienced and I would think of intelligence individuals dedicating themselves to such great causes as Socratic methods of teaching, many scholarships, medical research, clean water, libraries, homeless, social programmes for the young... I think is very inspiring and motivating to become rich.

What is inspiring also is reading things such as Greek immigrant, orphanage, all our worth at the back of a Ford's car, an average American.

There is much that can be improved with the working of democracy, but with people like these I have faith in that country and trust much to be good.

I can now once more view them as role models. They are great people doing great things and I am inspired to become as great if not more.
This is ironic. In the same way that Apple is closed system and hence hardware is normally more expensive than PC's standardized hardware, laptops are integrated systems and the fragmentation means only a handful of parts are generically substitutable. Apple wins by having proportionally less fragmentation.

Most laptop keyboards are little replaceable trays connected to the motherboard with a ribbon cable. If the keyboards were easily available to purchase independently, you could probably do it yourself; but they're not.
Yay! Great news, just in time for my startup launch. Kudos to MongoDB.
Not just highly likely, likely to specified probability. Typically 95% or 99%. If you want to be more certain (and have the quantity of data) you can look for 99.9% or greater. I'm not sure how you could see that as statistics "lying" :)

EDIT: I just noticed your username and I realise that you probably already understand this :p I still think it's a bit of an odd way of putting it though.
Mongo looks like its emerging as the preferred NoSQL platform on Rails at least.

As an admittedly rough measure, check out the number of "watchers" on github for each project's leading plugin:

1106 - MongoMapper
http://github.com/jnunemaker/mongomapper

536 - CouchREST
http://github.com/jchris/couchrest

312 - Cassandra
http://github.com/fauna/cassandra

I've only built one rails app with nosql in it, but at first glance at least Mongo seemed the most fully baked of the group.
Tracking down Five Minutes with Ubiqi Health
Article 5 of the 4th Geneva Convention states (in part): Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.

So your question comes down to whether the crew of that gunship suspected the van of containing persons who threatened the security of the Afghan state. I don't know the answer to that. Do you?
Smart technology scouting - Part 1
Here’s What Everybody Made From The Slide Sale
Max actually did quite well.
Cache on Delivery (Mining random people's memcached)
I don't understand why the ACM is so perturbed by Python. Why did the SEC choose Python to begin with? I'm sure that they weren't concerned with the few milliseconds you might lose on Monte Carlo simulations vs a compiled language implementation. While all valid points in one way or another, their criticisms of Python appear to lack context. Did the SEC choose Python for its speed and security?
_The Princeton Companion to Mathematics_ is the closest thing to what you're looking for that I know of.

I have a copy, and it's wonderful for looking up common topics in mathematics. The problem is that math is so enormous as a field that you'd essentially have to print and bind every journal article ever written to truly encompass all of the current mathematical knowledge.
Ideally if you have a designer friend in your circle, you should go to them for a discounted/better rate.. but there's no question that you need somebody with an eye for great design coupled with skills and experience who can design rather than "put together" a template.

I personally think your first step in having a great design and web experience for your application is to approach it from an Interaction Designers perspective.

Get on the white-board and start putting together all the necessary elements you need for every process of your app flow.

Once you have a clear picture of what you need and don't need, and how the user interacts with your application, then you can easily communicate those needs to a creative talent or a design shop. This way every design decision is made with a purpose, not just because it looks nice.
Learn about Boomerang.js from Philip Tellis 8/11 in SF