skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are not your government, and neither are the Iraqis.

If we're talking about collateral damage _in Iraq_ though, it's reasonable to assume firstly that the American (civilian or otherwise) consciously chose to be there, which means they certainly accepted an elevated level of risks and secondly it is reasonably probable that they actively supported and are actively profiting from the war. Choosing a job with an oil company in Basra implies a much greater acceptance of the risks and ethical implications of being there than simply not choosing to overthrow the government.
All you can tell about an Iraqi in Iraq is that they haven't managed to get out yet.

The hawk would no doubt approach with a different line; it is less probable that the American is actively or passively supporting hostile combatants attempting to prolong the war not to mention more likely the American happens to be their old buddy from school.

Either way both are making ostensibly reasonable value judgements.
I agree: http://www.google.com/trends?q=justin.tv%2C+ustream

Their problem is branding. When you think "realtime video streaming online" does the word "justin" even enter your mind?

http://www.google.com/search?q=stream+online - nowhere to be found;
http://www.google.com/search?q=video+stream - over halfway down the page

It's quite sad. justin.tv's infrastructure is better than their more popular competitors, but performance doesn't always win the mindshare war.
The spin-off Pure64 looks very interesting. It looks like they have factored out the code for getting up and running with your own project:

"The loader gets the computer into a full 64-bit state with no legacy compatibility layers and also enables all available CPU Cores in the computer."

"Two very simple kernels are included to get you started with your new 64-bit OS (One written in Assembly, the other in C)."
Why management cannot cope with social media marketing
Social networking for energy conservation [video]
Windows Phone 7 Developers Tools Are Final
It's based on SMS [0], the standard that allows telephones to receive text messages. The message size in SMS is limited to 1120 bits, which works out to 140 8-bit characters (or 160 7-bit characters.) One of twitter's design goals was to be usable from the broadest set of mobile devices possible.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS
The individual subcultures do, but taken altogether they could be quite large. Good point though, we'll see, hopefully that's not Diaspora's fate.
We try to be very clear about licensing: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Licensing. Please let us know if there is something on that page that needs clarification.

I would like to make it clear that users of MongoDB don't need to opensource their product, only their changes (if any) to the MongoDB server itself. The commercial license is mostly for companies that have strict (if misguided) "no AGPL" policies. Most users do not need it.
From Apple's perspective, yes. But he's talking from Best Buy's perspective.
My company runs a contextual advertising network that could be plugged in with your widget on your publishers pages.

(Can also do non-obtrusive text links which should be more acceptable to your publisher base than banners)

We could really help with the entire monetize using advertising strategy but our service is currently not public.

Contact me offline for details (see profile). (Sorry can't reveal corporate info at this point, apropos of not being public)
Well, there are different App stores for different countries ?

Users with US app store accounts will not be able to see apps in other countries app stores (of course, they can just create a new account set to a different country, but your average user is unlikely to do that)
SMS/text message length, minus the site identifier; lets people use the service via cellphone. As for why text messages are restricted to that length, word is that the guy who developed the first system felt 160 characters was plenty for most communication needs, based on the average length of a random sample of sentences and considering the tedium of having to enter the message via the 12 buttons of a then-typical telephone keypad.

So ultimately, it's arbitrary but practical.
Not a bad idea. Of course, corporate phones require significant support and build-out of infrastructure, whereas a consumer device just works, but RIM made a similar move with their buy-one-get-one-free offer in Spring 2009 for Blackberries, and it apparently helped to boost their (consumer) market share by 15%:

http://news.cnet.com/blackberry-curve-outsells-the-iphone-3g...
How Reddit Kicked Digg's Ass
We need a system to push emergency alerts directly to mobile phones based
on their location without the need for the person to opt-in.

I don't understand why this can't be opt-in. Granted, emergency alerts are something I would want to receive, but I think it's something that should be provided as an opt-in service, either by downloading an app or signing up with your cell carrier. My fear is that with a helpless, captive audience, the scope of "emergency" would slowly creep outward until you're spammed multiple times a day about the great deals at the Costco in your area. Also, if the service weren't opt-in, it would prevent competition because users would not be able to choose which emergency notification service they want to use.
"We don't have a free market of authors and readers. Readers don't currently pay authors, this is what needs to change."

OK. But 1) readers are free to reward authors IF they want to, and 2) authors can potentially make money from their readership by selling ads and t-shirts, getting speaking gigs and job offers and holding conferences, etc. So there's freedom, and there's a market. If people don't value something enough to pay for it, you can't force them to value it. They have a right to their own opinions.

Sure, 99% of authors make zip. But I bet a larger percentage of the population makes money creating stuff on the web than they did when you had to have a publishing deal to publish anything.

My point with "how would they be funded" was this: either it's voluntary or it's not. If you want to create a voluntary system, great - try to market some kind of micropayments thing or whatever. But if a committee is making the decisions about what's good, and I have no input, the only way I can see for them to get my money to put into the prize pot is to tax me. And I'm opposed to that, both because it's my money and because I distrust this hypothetical committee. What enlightened people do you imagine should be officially blessing The Best Of The Web? I bet my list is different from yours.

Oh! I know! Let's have lots of committees! In fact, let's all be our own committee! Freedom of thought and whatnot!

You see where I end back up?

"I don't think it works fine at all, judging by the fact that all of our biggest problems are marketing problems."

If you define 'people mistreat their neighbors for personal gain' as a marketing problem, maybe. I think it's a lot deeper than that. I'd call it a spiritual problem.

"In any given area of society the science is between 25 and 100 years ahead of the status quo."

Not sure what you mean by this, but science is a tool, not a solution. Psychology, for example, can help you understand what motivates people and how to influence them, but it can't tell you what SHOULD motivate people and how they SHOULD behave. It can as easily be used for evil as for good. Casinos use plenty of science to drain their victims of every last nickel.
I know it's not exactly the intended use, but does this allow one to effectively run a headless browser with JS from a server with Node installed? (Right now I'm generating server-side snapshots of Raphael.JS drawings with wkhtmltoimage, but I'd much rather get the actual SVG and run it through Inkscape.)
Why a Big Mac Costs Less Than A Salad
Can someone explain why Redis? Would one run a Redis server just for ACLs (separate from your existing db, say MySQL), or does this really only make sense if you're already using Redis?

Edit: Looks to me like the store is programmable (http://github.com/nu7hatch/aclatraz/blob/master/lib/aclatraz...) -- I suppose one could build one for MySQL, or for Riak, or whatever. So, back to my original question... is Redis superior for this sort of thing?
True it's not the easiest to do manually but there are plenty of preference panes that can open up this feature if you are motivated enough to fix it.
This is an interesting read. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of learning new and unfamiliar languages (note that "new" rarely means "unfamiliar" since most languages just rehash old concepts). When you have a completely different toolkit to express problems, it forces you to think more, and this makes you into a more flexible programmer. To pursue the game analogy, it's as if learning Go would make you a better chess player. That may be too much of a stretch, but I know of many chess players who have learned Shogi (Japanese chess) to improve their mental flexibility (and also because it's fun; Shogi is an awesome game, better than chess IMO). Back to programming: if you can think about a problem in several different ways (imperative, OO, functional, logic programming) you will have absorbed a lot of "tactics" without realizing it, since every paradigm has its own design patterns. The stuff about good naming conventions etc. is easy. Larger-scale design notions like loose coupling are harder, but when you work in a language like e.g. Haskell where there is no mutable state (except in specially-wrapped subworlds like the IO and ST monads) you get loose coupling forced on you.

I think this is one reason why a book like SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp) is so helpful; you have to learn a new language (Scheme) and then learn unfamiliar design patterns applied to larger and larger-scale problems, and along the way you pick up a lot of generally-applicable software engineering knowledge that transcends Scheme.

Another really useful trick is to have to maintain/fix someone else's badly-written code. Nothing teaches good design better than having to fix bad design.

Note, though, that some of what the author calls "tactics" (like loose coupling) actually span the range between tactics and "strategy". Writing pure (referentially-transparent) functions that can't do anything other than transform their inputs deterministically into their outputs is loose coupling on a small scale (tactics). Writing classes which are not highly dependent on specific other classes for their functionality is loose coupling on a large scale (strategy).
Actual Lesser Known Traits of Successful Founders:
1. Private high school
2. Supportive parents/mentors/friends (most likely parents, if on the younger side)
3. Sleep deprived, yet energetic
4. Addiction-prone
5. Nothing to lose

Just a few trends I have noticed over the past year.
Ask HN: Are there any premium Rails template providers?
There are quite a few people / companies that sell premium Wordpress templates. From what I understand, some of them do quite well.

I was hoping to find something similar for Ruby on Rails templates. I know that there wouldn't be the same kind of drop-in ease of use, but for us developers who are somewhat design challenged, it would be really nice to just start with something that we can modify.

Unfortunately, I am not finding any place to buy such a thing.

Do any exist? If not, why? Seems like a hole in the market to me.
http://themeforest.net/user/goThemeTeam/portfolio
Sometimes the domains will be listed for sale on sedo.com, otherwise you can use a service (also on sedo.com) to try and contact the owner on your behalf.
OTOH I want to buy or assemble a powerful desktop. I need speed.
There's a flaw in the entire data set. I would "kill whitey" or the "blackman" to save the "victim group" but I would know that it was morally wrong. It doesn't test morality, it tests your response to the situation.

Thus my moral code is absolute, and I willing act immorally for a utilitarian outcome.
Released Too Soon
I wish they would release an intelligent dock that had some storage or USB connectors for a printer and external hard drive. That would be a neat for iPad syncing. Adding an HDMI so you could park the dock next to a TV and control it with and iPad would really be nice.

Alternately, syncing with a Time Capsule would be good too.
http://github.com/avsm/mirage
I agree. When I read something like this, my first thought is always 'Just go. We won't miss you.'

And his article reads like 'Enough about me, let's talk about ME!' He's even more narcissistic than he thinks he is, which is quite a feat.
Maybe the code wasn't the best, but I feel like Libre.fm was and continues to be successful.

* Because of Libre.fm, many applications now support configuration of the destination for their listening habits.

* Because of Libre.fm, Last.fm added export functionality, allowing users to programmatically export their data, for portability.

* Because of Libre.fm, new records have been made and a greater understanding of the debate for freely licensed music has progressed a little further.

The next version of Libre.fm will be based on GNU social codebase. GNU social is much better in terms of design and programming than Libre.fm, which has been in a perpetual alpha stage since April 2009.

We don't all profess to be hot-shot developers, we're a bunch of artists, hackers and kids willing to have a go and do something we wanted. All this, on no money, and in the spare time of the individuals involved.

Oh, and some numbers:

* 27319059 listens.

* 4621654 unique tracks.

* 34451 users.

That's not insignificant for a free software project, in my mind.
An alternate that I like is magicprefs for the middle mouse button click and coupled with jitouch for the tap and swipe gestures. I LOVE IT!
The doctor has already used up a lot of his potential.

But the baby has almost no potential. Well, that's not entirely clear...

Let me be more specific: the baby has some potential, but since it's too young, we don't know where on the Bell curve of potential it lies. Our change in expected value by throwing the baby overboard and making a brand new one is zero (at least once we casually discard the mother's grief, and the general distaste for throwing babies to sharks :) ).

We have to evaluate this against throwing the doctor overboard and starting with a fresh baby - the doctor has already proven that he's somewhere near the top of the Bell curve, so in order to figure out the utility of that trade, we need to consider how much he's likely to accomplish over the rest of his life as compared to what an average baby will accomplish during theirs.

Perhaps making the doctor 50 years old was a bit much, as it does raise questions about how much life he actually has left, and whether the (say) 20 years that he'll actually be practicing can be considered as useful as the 80 years the newborn has in front of it. I think there's still an argument to be made that 20 years of work from a highly qualified researcher is worth "more" than an average lifetime lived by an average person, but it's not crystal clear.

Suppose I'd made the doctor a brilliant 25 year old making great strides in cancer research - would that make a difference to you?
My theory is that "killing = bad" is a default canned answer that society says is "correct" and people don't really think about what-if-I-am-faced-with-a-tricky-life-or-death-situation scenarios since these scenarios are not realistic to begin with.

I'm not very convinced that the assumption that people have a fixed moral system is correct. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense (evolutionarily speaking) to optimize for some abstract ideal consistency rather than fitting into a group. As far as living in a society goes, telling your social circle that you shun all forms of human killing is one thing, actually making a life-or-death decision when there are tricky caveats is completely different.
Yeah, I was trying to figure out what to replace my 17" MacBook Pro with when I get to that point. I am starting to think a desktop and an iPad would be better than buying another portable.
From the video, it appears to run a standard browser and pretend to be a person, and creates a video from it. Or something. Seems kind of odd.
MongoHQ and other companies providing commercial hosting of MongoDB only need a commercial license if they modify the server and don't contribute back. We want to encourage hosting providers which is why we don't require buying a special license.
When I'm not cycling I have a Subaru WRX, and yet on the road I'm held up by all these people in SUVs,minivans and pickup trucks that can't do 0-60 in <5secs like I can.

Same on sidewalks - I'm jogging along and the sidewalk is crowded with old people that can't maintain a 50min 10K time, they should get out of my way.
There are some nice looking themes at themeforest.com.

Really you should be able to take any theme, even wordpress themes, and quickly convert them to erb/haml/etc templates. I would guess you are just looking for a nice layout. A Wordpress themes would give you the structure of the page, plus the css. You'd just have to fill in that structure from your rails code instead of wordpress.
I have a few domains I like but haven't gotten around to using yet, but that's a far cry from having thousands I'm just trying to flip and extract rent from.
I am both a gamer and a CAD user. I love my magicmouse though as I spend a lot of time using the internet and scrolling on the magicmouse is amazing. I have jitouch + magicprefs to enable tap/swipe gestures and middle mouse button. if I need to do some hard core gaming I will just use a different mouse. Gaming with the mm is actually good enough for government work most of the time.
There is an old saying in my home country that basically says, "getting your hair wet.". The idea is that as you are washing your hair, you will slowly come to a point when you have shampoo on your head. That's when you know you are fully committed and there is only one acceptable outcome, otherwise you look silly no matter how much you try to explain your predicament. In my experience as an entrepreneur, the hard part is getting to that point of no return and the even harder part is to get out. Most people who wants to be entrepreneur but never do is because they are too rational to put themselves in that predicament. But as Yoda would say, "you do or you don't, but you must get wet first." I love this article. Good luck everyone.
* If the shark eats the baby it will still be hungry(or get hungry again sooner) old crusty scientist guy is a much larger meal.*

We'll assume for the purposes of this thought experiment that the shark just wants a nibble - he'll be satisfied for sure with either one.

Also an older scientist might be past his prime and have lower expected utility for the rest of his career while still expecting high pay.

Yes, I realized this after it was too late to edit (well, I still could edit, but people have already replied, so it wouldn't be fair) - I probably should have made the doctor younger.

But in any case, it brings up the question: how young is "young enough" to prefer throwing a baby overboard to throwing a highly promising child/teenager/adult? Is there a "young enough" age for you, or would you always toss the older person, no matter how likely they were to be exceptional for the rest of their life?
This is an innovative project which aims to help people reduce their energy consumption by giving them tools to monitor and compare their usage with that of their friends.

It's currently in contention for the GE ecomagination prize which seeks to find the projects with the most potential to make the world more energy efficient.

If you this like this project your vote will be appreciated.
In order to do you you'll be required to signup to the GE ecomagination site at http://challenge.ecomagination.com/ct/ct_a_view_idea.bix?c=i...
Would that be confusing to use that terminology since groups was recently a staple of facebook with a very different meaning?
I guess it's too much to ask that Google give up Eclipse and start supporting the Oracle owned Netbeans instead.
on facebook

;)
If that's what you want, you could have the best of both worlds if printers ran CUPS. Then you could have backwards and forwards compatibility.
You are not your government, and neither are the Iraqis.

I would say that our nation is us, and the same is true of the Iraqis. The bad things that my nation does (including the entity that it allows to govern) is my responsibility, especially because its acts are enabled because of my production (i.e., taxes, technology I develop, etc.).

The very same thing is true of Iraqis. They allowed their government to continue to run things the way they are.

You might argue that we live in a democracy, and thus change is easier for us. I would reply that (a) the form of government doesn't matter, in the final accounting a government cannot survive without the acquiescence of its people; and (b) fundamental changes in the USA might actually be more difficult, because its government is stable, entrenched, and incredibly strong.
I think it's better to have the spec be the code, as much as possible.
That sounds a good reason. Thank you!
As a domain owner and frequent recipient of such requests, here are a few tips:

First of all, don't assume the domains are unused. You have no way of knowing this. I have domains that are critical to my infrastructure but don't necessarily have a web site (or even public DNS records). I'll never sell them. I have others that are look-alike domains that aren't activated in order to prevent conflict with my other domains. I'm unlikely to sell these, either.

Secondly, and this is really important, make your offer as professional and informative as possible. I never reply to offers from freemail addresses that amount to something like, "Hey, I'm interested in buying a domain that you don't appear to be using for an awesome project I'm working on. Please reply ASAP. George". You don't have to divulge your business model, but at least include the name of the domain you're interested in, your FULL name, a phone number, and preferably a company name and/or related URL. Consider including your offer in the email, since it's more likely to get a response if it's at all worth considering. Serious offers are much more likely to get a reply, even if it's to say, "Sorry, not interested."

If you call and leave a message, include the same information. But keep in mind that I probably won't return a long distance call, so consider saying that you'll call back at a certain time, and do it. This will help to show that you're seriously interested.

Whatever you do, don't file a complaint with the registrar or try to initiate an unauthorized transfer. This will only annoy the domain owner and could destroy your credibility.

Finally, understand that the domain owner has no obligation to respond to your offer in any way. If you really want a response, follow up a couple of weeks later, and be prepared to make a serious offer. If you don't want to be considered a pest, stop after 3 attempts and give it a reasonable long rest before trying again (6 months to a year).