skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're missing the main point: it's about discrimination.

A law that would forbid wearing a burqa as a societal trade-off would apply to everyone equally hence it wouldn't be discrimination. Even though it would affect the most people of a certain religion, it would also apply to secular burqa wearers.

The main issue with a law that forbids gays to marry, and the reason it's discrimination, is that it denies them a right that everyone else has.

Whether polygamy is legal or not has nothing to do with it. The law forbids a specific behavior (polygamy) and it applies to everyone so is not discriminatory. Constitutionally, it's in the same league as a law that forbids smoking in public places or, for that matter, killing people.

So you're left with only one potential argument: that gay marriage causes specific, societal harm that is not caused by non-gay marriage. I would like to see a solid proof of that. "It may have" is not one.
Wave was a bit too sci-fi. A bit too ahead of its time maybe. Maybe it's best if the technology is split up and spoon-fed to the general population ... that way people can get a taste. I think change needs to be incremental.
Why don't we apply to the same logic to every potential decision? Many Republican tax cuts have been unprecedented, so (il)logically conservatives should have opposed them. The iPhone is a disruptive technology will have "unknown consequences", so clearly it should be banned.

The reason we don't apply this idea (except to things we already disagree with) is because it's completely illogical. Caution is one thing, but simply dismissing every idea that could have "unknown consequences" is a great way to make sure that literally nothing gets done. It is certainly not rational. It is, in a word, FUD.
I suspect that now that Google is trying to compete directly with Facebook, they looked at wave and saw that it wasn't going to be adapted by many non-corporate users, so they reallocated the resources to something that would be.
Wikileaks, like Wikipedia, is one of the healthiest things to come out of the internet. The service it provides to the United States and the rest of the world is invaluable. The only group I see threatened here is that great "military-industrial complex," and that's fine by me.
I work in cryptography. This field has taught me something rather applicable here:

It is far better to know your secrets are in the hands of your enemy than it is to not know when they are in the hands of your enemy.

If your secret stuff is released on Wikileaks, you know about it. You can take steps. e.g. Evacuate your informants before the Taliban whack 'em. If the Taliban get their hands on a list of CIA informants, without the CIA knowing, those guys would be screwed. As it stands they've got a fighting chance.

Wikileaks or sites like it are now a fact of life. If the CIA disappears Assange into some banana-republic torture-hole or simply assassinates him, his fate would most likely be leaked to Wikileaks successor. The cat is now out of the bag.

The U.S.'s only real option here, aside from investigating how that data was leaked in the first place, is to attempt to improve their ability to cope with leaks when they do happen. Time often makes all the difference, so they would be well served by developing a relationship with Assange. e.g. "You give us a 48-hour heads up when you leak something from us and we'll forgo atomizing your brains with precision guided explosives." It's not like Assange would have a choice if presented with such a deal. However embarrassing his assassination might be for the U.S., it will ensure that the next Wikileaks plays ball.
I hear China is nice this time of year...
Actually, I'm phenomenally impressed with how Posterous is responding personally to all of their customers. Their messages is pretty straight forward "DOS - hope to be back up within the Hour" - That's all I'd really need to know.

Ironically, I came to ycombinator first to see what the status was and didn't even have to click through to "new". :-)
Does it come with free lessons from Dolph Hauldhagen, The Instruc-TOR?
Gays are not denied marriage - there is nothing stopping gays from marrying opposite sex partners.

It's true that opposite sex marriage is given a privileged position, and this benefits people who want to engage in it. It's also true that purchasing a home is given a privileged position, and this benefits people who want to buy a home with a mortgage.

Thus, denying subsidies to renters (unless they go against their preferences) is discrimination against people who prefer to rent, just as denying marriage to gays (unless they go against their preferences) is discrimination against gays.
How about if we take it one step at a time?

First, remove the discrimination against one of, if not the most discriminated upon groups, gay people.

Second, remove subsidized marriage.

Since the second is a much larger hill to climb, let's be decent human beings and support the first in the interim.
Best Practices for Handling Android User Data
Read the article one intelligence officer and hundreds of Afghani informants have been revealed to the world including the folks who want them dead. Before the leak their potential killers didn't know who they were now they do. Assande has no intention of not revealing more information of the same sort in the future.
Six Psychological Reasons Consumer Culture is Unsatisfying
I don't think it's hyperbole at all. That the 99 Designs "logo" is as terrible as it is, proves nothing about the almost-as-terrible logo that is in use now.
Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse Unless you work in law enforcement
>Here's what I'm wondering: when did it become fashionable to stick up for the Taliban?

When there are two groups of killers involved in a conflict recognizing the killing of one group doesn't mean one is excusing the killing of the other group.

If you are familiar with the history of the Taliban you are likely aware of the role the US played in their rise to power (http://nyti.ms/ddOTcu). The Taliban would likely not exist without the support of the US. The US didn't nurture the Taliban for the good of the people nor are they attempting to control Afghanistan for the good of the people.
Yeah this is good, but the thing to keep in mind is that an OS release always drives these numbers way up. IE8 comes with Windows 7. Vista didn't do so well so the IE7 numbers reflect that.

IE9 Won't benefit from being part of an OS release (unfortunately).
Google Tech Talks: Expressive Languages for the JVM
Flogging people for having trouble scaling at Google's size is not nice.
This is a brutally honest narrative of being a cancer victim. (I choose not to say 'battling cancer' due to the article's content.) Anyone who has encountered this disease, en route to their own oblivion, will recognise its ferocious impact. I commend this article, whatever you think of Christopher and his views; I commend his naked honesty.
No, the police in the US cannot randomly search you in a train station. The only circumstance in which you can be searched without probable cause without consent in the US is by border security.
The Obama campaign intranet used game mechanics to show people what task they can perform.

http://www.empowerbase.com/index.php/organizational-change/o...

Some photo retouching tools show a grid the possible actions, so that users can select "brighter, more like this". etc.
Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Aren't these two sentences contradictory? 'Wave is a great product if you changed the interface, integration points and, really, if it was a different product'. I think there's a tendency to over-analyze the reasons Wave was not a success because it got a lot of coverage and came from Google - a company with a long track record of many successes. Whatever the merits of the over-arching idea of Wave, 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 - no amount of market targeting, faster approval of beta invites and a score of other remedies that don't address the basic deficiencies of the product (e.g. largely unusable) could have saved Wave. 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.
Cool, this is a pretty neat app! I listed my startup, feel free to follow up and I will let you know how it goes...
While that sounds great, according to
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(+microsoft+profit+)+/+...
it's actually 51 million/day. So it took them a full week to make the 250 million.
Or was yesterday special?
Wow. Thank you for sharing this. Now I'm going to insist that you post a link to your registry (or email me - alexis@breadpig.com)
I don't understand why it matters that the US helped bring the Taliban to power. Help me understand why our culpability in the rise of the Taliban doesn't make us more obligated to eradicate them.

Please understand, I think that this article we're all commenting on is all the way at the crazytown other end of the spectrum on this issue. The notion that the US should be allowed to kidnap people in friendly countries and haul them back to the US for military trials is also repellent.
Developing a website from the ground up
I am in the process of redesigning a small store website. The current version of the site offers users the ability to see a weekly flyer and read some details pertaining events at the store. As part of the redesign I would like to move away from the current cms (Joomla) and rebuild the entire site using a different infrastructure. I am proficient in Java and hence have been looking at GWT as the primary choice in creating a dynamic site. Do you have any other suggestions regarding frameworks and/or CMS systems?
If it's truly an honest question, the mapping for my analogy is { "white" : "straight married", "asian" : "gay", "black" : "single" }. Since I'm single, in the analogy I would be black.

(Admittedly, it's a confusing analogy if you are unfamiliar with US history.)
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If MVP fell out of the sky and wiggled on your face, would you know it?
Assange is a hero to democracy, the government dirty secrets must be uncovered!

Those informants aided the war, they aided civilian slaughter that many US troops did for fun, so I guess if they get killed, they had it coming.

The war is [supposably] over, why does the US need to have so many secrets? Are they embarrassed that their army is full of sadistic murderers?

These short sighted people that write articles like this eat propaganda.
Communications technology is to fundamental social institutions and mores as apples are to oranges.
'The latter' would be 'leadership brought to justice'. Read carefully.
Its open source, save it for yourself.
imho the government should step-in to prevent this prosecution, or this soldier should appeal on moral grounds. he was just exposing the wrongdoing of the military forces. the correct course of action would have been for the military personnel to release/punish the people that shot at the civilians (but that is not possible as the military writes these off as collateral damage). I am not too familiar with the us law system, but i hope i am making sense.
FYI, Iceland was some kind of anarchy between 930 and 1262. Which apparently lead to a lot of feuds.

I think it's important to what kind of information governments need to keep secret and what kind they keep secret. Judging by Wikileaks content this seems to be information about (a) wars of aggression (defensive wars apparently need less secrets) (b) providing unfair advantages to private companies (I think ACTA counts here) (c) things they shouldn't allow (such as misbehaving personnel) (d) censorship.

So, we need to ask: does our perfect, imaginary, peaceful state need to keep anything secret from its own citizens? I think no.
The ridiculously confusing interface to the Wave loaded on this page, plus the fact that it takes 30 seconds to load and then runs like a dog, is the perfect explanation of why Wave is being shut down. It's almost like that's what they were trying to demonstrate.
Schengen only requires a transit visum for citizens of a small number of states.

Schengen requires a transit visa for citizens of 140 countries. There's only about 40 countries that don't need transit visas. The USA has visa waiver programs with more than 36 countries, and other similar arrangements with Canada, Mexico and states in the Caribbean.
Your statement is correct, but doesn't tell the whole story. The issue is that Apple's relationship with its customers is simple: we make stuff, you give us money for it. Google's model is more complex: we make stuff, you get it free, but you give us your data. I would much rather exchange money for a product than my personal data. Everything Google does requires me to turn over my data to them so it can be monetized somehow. That's much more Orwellian than anything from MS or Apple.
Only a subset of mormons (fundamentalist LDS). Also, I doubt they'd want to legally marry their wives: single mothers collect more benefits.
> The practical purpose of marriage is to give protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing.

Got a cite for that? If protection of childbearing women were such a great concern, wouldn't we expect societies to have historically provided much more protection to children born by non-married women, too? Yet historically when the Lord diddled the maid, neither the maid nor her bastard received any protection at all. Why single out married women to receive protection?

It seems far more likely to me that marriage was to provide a stable framework upon which to build a predictable system of inheritance of land. When the Lord dies, you really want to have a clear transfer of ownership, for the good of the estate and the commoners who depend on it.
The problem with just one idea is that the success of that idea is also subject to external factors beyond your control (ie competition).

Thus diversifying with multiple ideas, similar to in a stock portfolio, allows these externalities to cancel themselves other out.
I get the sense that the launch strategy wasn't flawed as much as no one really understood the real use cases. Without that, no one knew how to properly communicate benefits and target the right users. (I would also guess that they never thought they'd get the level of publicity they got.)

And by the time Wave had had enough testing, they had lost all the early momentum. At some point you've got to choose where you put your effort!
> a poor economy is certainly no
> excuse for apathy.

You are encouraging people to live in denial of reality. If the economy is bad, then a wise investor will take into account the fact that the economy is bad. And, when it comes to our careers, we are all investors. In the face of a bad economy, many investors will go to cash. Cash is a rational option in the face of a bad economy. When we are speaking of individuals, the equivalent of "going to cash" is to focus less on one's career and more on the other parts of one's life.
None of this money will go towards empowering people. It will be used to reinforce the status quo. A lot of people will get suckered by the publicity, and they will buy into how this kind of movement can change the world. Meanwhile, they will continue to be rice pickers serving their billionaire overlords.

I don't buy any of this. What charities are going to handle this kind of money without the majority of it being misappropriated? This sounds more like a set up for a giant scam and huge distraction than anything that might actually be useful to other human beings.
What browser are you using? Loads in less than a second for me. The interface doesn't seem any more complicated than a hackernews comment thread.
Due to their preferences, gays find heterosexual marriage undesirable. Many straight people also find heterosexual marriage undesirable.

I fail to see what the difference is, apart perhaps from the magnitude of the desires. In either case, one must go against one's preferences to get a subsidy.
"I hate to put people on the spot with "well, what would YOU do." But Daniel's post implies that there is some wise oversight that can expose just the right secrets, without exposing the dangerous ones. I don't think that's realistic, unless he has some particular scheme in mind. I think the choice is between total control and some degree of anarchy, and I would take as much anarchy as I could get on that spectrum."

How about not including names? They obviously knew it was an issue because they attempted to contact the government to have some of the names removed. Instead of doing the right thing and removing all names, they released them all with this "any deaths are worth the information" attitude.
Phone to Chrome with Android2Cloud
> When you call those prosecuting the US/NATO side of the conflict in Afghanistan "murderers", you run the risk of implicitly taking the side of US/NATO's adversaries, who in this case are the Taliban.

Nice strawman. Calling the folks who recklessly fire on civilians murderers may be a bit exaggerated. Human error happens and human error when the human is on the trigger of a 30 mm cannon is usually disastrous, but automatically siding those who propose a less reckless fight with the Taleban is a flaw of logic.

When you are in position of using lethal force, you must use it responsibly, with great care.

Also, removing the Taleban from power in Afghanistan was necessary, but empowering corrupt local powers is, most definitely, not the best way to employ the resources consumed in this invasion. People die in wars and we owe them to make wars short, clean and effective, so that no more people need to die other than absolutely necessary.

This whole situation is appalling. It reeks incompetency and corruption from top to bottom. It's unworthy of the high ideals that are, or, at the very least, should be, the core philosophy of the groups we authorize to use lethal force against our fellow humans.
They should give the money to Louis C.K.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95fNgx8aCS8
A lot of these pieces are by Dale Chihuly, who does gorgeous work: http://www.chihuly.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chihuly
>> Specific examples would be great.

We don't even need 1 person to die from stupid non-sense like this. I understand that we need transparency, but you are not playing a game right now. The probability of a death related to 'leaks' just magnified. There is no denying that. Considering I served in this war, what doesn't absolutely need to be said shouldn't be said at this time. It's like we're playing russian roulette here.
Naming it "Wikileaks" was excellent for PR. People's first associations will be with efforts like Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, which have a significant amount of goodwill.
The public beta was only made available in May or June this year (as I recall).
> IE9 is an amazing step-up from IE8 so far and I think we should all be patting them on the back.

A boss once told me "you don't get rewarded for doing your job - you get paid." :)
I think you're being disingenuous, or just trying to get a rise out of people. There's little debate on these points, it was slow and the UI was unnecessarily complex. Whether or not it should be killed remains a valid topic of discussion.
1) I don't think this is a good thing overall, but I am happy people are angry. When the Afghan intelligence services kill Assange, we'll know how far you can push folks. That'll heat some up more -- maybe enough for things to change.

2)I believe the question you are asking me is "Do you think that some random schmuck on the internet should have the power to decide what remains secret and what doesn't?" For which I have to say no. As much as I love movies with the underdog and the little guy beating the giant opponent, as much as I love movies where somebody fights the system and wins, I can't support these decisions being made by some guy I never met. To think otherwise seems insane to me -- as I understand it the basic argument would be that things are so bad now that any type of release of docs is good. I'm not ready to go that far. Yet.

3) See above

Abuse as viewed by whom? Assange? The average 15-year-old internet reader? Oliver Stone? Call me an idiot, but wouldn't you want some kind of orderly process for releasing docs, even if you were for releasing all of them? What kind of half-assed system is this?

4) Sure it makes sense. All you have to do is start delegating and telling folks to keep no written records. Presto-chango, your "secrets" disappear. No docs, nothing to leak.

I think there are a lot of options -- a constitutional amendment comes to mind first. Make it a crime to keep any secrets longer than a certain period of time. All sorts of options there.

I feel uncomfortable because the arguers seem to want to push towards either supporting all sorts of crazy secrecy or supporting some system whereby random people email secret information to some asshole overseas who posts it on his website. Surely there has to be some middle ground here. I'd like to get rid of 99.9% of the currently classified documents. I'd like to streamline the intelligence agencies and programs. I'd like to impose criminal penalties on intelligence agencies which abuse their trust by over-classifying information.

But fuck-all if I want Assange playing peek-a-boo with national security items -- even if it's .1% of the total. It's wrong on so many levels that it'd take another post to list them all. I am perfectly capable of realizing how bad the problem is without having to cling to Assange as some kind of life-preserver -- the only way to safety. That's not happening.
How to blacklist domains from Google search results
There are no specifics mentioned and the article the AEI member links to doesn't have much in the way of specifics either. If the US military is concerned about those involved in the death trade having their identities revealed they would do well to make Wikileak's public role redundant and tell the truth about their actions.
Nice work. What libraries did you use for the iPhone to Arduino serial connection?
"The jews weren't attempting to occupy Germany at the time so probably not the most fitting comparison."

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.

"Absolutely. The truth can be politically damaging."

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

"Specific examples would be great."

This tells me you haven't read any of the documents released.
As a small startup team, they may be putting most of their efforts into getting it fixed quicker, with the intention of dealing with the PR after.
A great way to get started is by offering to port and package something to a different platform, or add an api/wrapper for another language. Most single developer/small group projects would be happy to have the help.
Many of the problems wave aimed to remedy still stand. It's my hope that google will bow out gracefully, leaving behind the work they have done and allow other to pick up where they left off. This seems to be the plan, although they haven't open sourced the entirety of the effort.
Yeah, the idea that the U.S. should blow apart its international alliances to apprehend someone whose activities are protected under American law is slightly insane. Then again, the author has a history of such things.
Personally I still use Etherpad more than Wave through the open source implementation.