skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is also a good summary of the leak in this Spiegel article -> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-72402... (in English).

It's quite revealing just how brutal the war in Iraq has been, with all parties willing to commit atrocities (al-Qaeda, Iraq police and U.S. army). It's definitely a much stronger image than media have been serving to us about the war.

Also, for those who feel some sympathy towards al-Qaeda, the reports about their decapitations practices are also quite enlightening. ("A document dated Nov. 3, 2007, for example, relates that an Iraqi woman approached US troops to tell them that Islamists had cut off her baby's head. The officers sent out a few soldiers to look into the matter. The report ends: "Confirms baby is decapitated."").
I'm surprised this got upvoted so high, since this has been discussed ad nauseum on HN. But I will say that I had the same question and I ultimately chose Ruby simply because it intrigued me more. Since they are THAT similar, if you just go with your instincts, you can't go wrong.
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Also consider how much he must optimize his attention compared to other people:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html

He simply has to think differently than most.
First of all, Somalia is not a great example of anarchy. All anarchists recognize that there needs to be significant social change before anarchism could happen; just toppling a government without changing the people leads to very, very bad things.[1]

Secondly, Somalia has done really well without government, depending on who you ask. There are studies that show [2] that it's only after the UN started screwing around and trying to impose a state that it stabilized into smaller, community-level governments. I'm no expert on Somalia, but you also have to recognize that when the institution of a state is recognized as the default condition, even a successful transition to anarchism would be talked about as 'failed.'

1: http://c4ss.org/content/2859

2: http://www.independent.org/publications/working_papers/artic...
That's one side of the story... the other side is that OpenOffice was stagnating, in terms of commits and added developers, the current developers were not happy with how the community was managed by Sun/Oracle, and eventually decided to take matters into their own hands.

Historical data: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008....
Because the address bar has become rapidly irrelevant. Domain name is almost as useless as ip address - its highly coded unrememberable nonsense, often unrelated to the product or company name.
While quiet obvious to some, I think it's worth mentioning that Adobe was never against HTML5, or implicitly worried about Flash because of it.

Adobe always tried to make a case for Flash based on a few points that some refuse to grasp. HTML5 just can't do- or not easily at least -some of the things Flash can (e.g. webcam interaction, RTMP, multi-threaded animation).

This isn't to say that Flash is amazing, just that developers must have some kind of platform to deliver engaging, rich experiences for many reasons. Not all of them are banner ads and movie sites.

While Flash may have had many years as a cheesy intro page engine, more recent development with Flash is often an impromptu petrie dish for future advances in standards and web-based UI.

The real issue is, could implementation of a standards-based Flash variant work? And if so, how?

Certainly Adobe has pondered whether Flash would survive such standardization since we barely see CSS3 and HTML5 specs materialized as necessary.
The New Yorker had an article about Gates' involvement in fighting malaria in Africa (synopsis: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/24/051024fa_fact_sp...).

That article paints Gates as extremely quick. For example, it recounts an episode (touched on in the synopsis) where Gates was given a reading list by somebody who was used to potential donors wanting to get involved. Unlike most of them, Gates came back having read and synthesized most if not everything on the list.

I don't remember much about that article anymore, but I remember coming away from it thinking a lot more highly of him, both in terms of his intelligence and his willingness to use his skills in the service of others.
Knowing that Jupiter is the 5th planet from the sun is practical knowledge for how many people?

edit: (HN wont let me reply again)

I understood your point. I think in the context of the article the only irony is you think the technical fact that astronomers label Earth as a "planet" is necessary knowledge for every field of engineering or anyone with an advanced education.

Yes, I learned about the solar system in elementary school too but I wouldn't judge someone who didn't. It's not much more useful than trivia to most people.

Discussion around another recent article on HN comparing C programming to a carpenter using a hammer demonstrated that even people with computer science degrees and years of experience writing software might no nothing about HTML or SQL.
No, but you do have to say things nicely.

What does this mean?

Good attempt at spelling and punctuation.
Don't curse too much, don't use excessive punctuation, proofread.
Reread your post objectively and ask yourself 'am I trolling'.
Attempt to make an argument supported by facts and intelligent reasoning.

Don't bother complaining about karma when someone down votes you for posting an unpopular opinion or being wrong. You posted an unpopular opinion or didn't check your facts thoroughly enough, what did you expect? With that 1 karma and a cup of coffee, you can sell the cup of coffee for a dollar.

Also, check your facts and post relevant links.

(So pretty much pretend like you are a hybrid of on a date, writing a term paper, and applying for a job, rather than posting on an internet forum.

Everyone posts a clunker once in a while, but try not to get too worked up about it.
After all, this is entertainment, not serious business.
Maybe Halliburton or Bechtel or Blackwater, they have the biggest weapons
I have 10.10 installed on my MacBook Pro, and I can confirm the 1-5 are no longer an issue :) (resuming from sleep takes at least 2-3 times longer for me than on OS X though). I don't know enough to confirm 6, but if that is also covered then 7 should be as well.
I did a very similar blog post back in August and took the other side, here - http://www.melonakos.com/2010/08/02/wikileaks/
Way to totally miss my point. I guess I wasn't being obvious enough.

This highly educated Engineering graduate student didn't know that they lived on a planet. Its ironic.
VirtualBox in PHP-AJAX
You "win." I'll be contacting you... now. :)

EDIT: I can't find an email address on your profile, could you email me (in prof.)? Thanks!
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Minarchism
VC = Venture, Vapor, Vulture & Vampire Capital
I actually wish window managers would use overlays for the toolbars and menus - if the hardware was up to it.

Then my web browser would just be a bare chrome. Touch screens, could sense my fingers coming close to the screen and bring up icons or something. Text based menus could also be brought up for power users. Something like that...
So a bunch of non-important people quit? Big deal.
for me simplex (george-dantzig) is very very cool.
Also, note that static and dynamic typing are not mutually exclusive (dynamic typing with optional static annotations is one very practical point in the continuum; inferred (i.e., few to no annotations) static typing is another), and static/dynamic typing are distinct from strong & weak typing. C is semi-weakly typed, because you can fake out the type system easily with casts.

Basically, static vs dynamic is about how early types can be decided, strong vs. weak is about how strictly they're enforced. People have been mixing the terms up for a while though, even in type system papers, which adds lots of confusion.

For a really good tour of language design issues, check out CTM (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html) or EoPL (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/eip/eopl.htm). I've also heard good things about PLP (http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~scott/pragmatics/), but haven't read it yet.
Couldn't agree with you more. A few months back when my previous macbook had an unfortunate meeting with some stray beer, I was in the market for a new laptop, and I couldn't even bring myself to consider anything else - it just felt painful to even think about it. There are some very nice PC laptops out there - the Dell Adamo series, the HP Envy, and the IdeaPad immediately come to mind - but they're all more expensive than a comparable Apple laptop - and they don't run my OS of choice! Sure, you can try that shady hackintosh noise, but for the most part, that puts you right back in the endless tinkering camp with the Linux on laptops crowd. Apple makes great laptops that just work, they deserve the praise they get for them.

(1) Couldn't agree more here. This "manufacturers need to make open drivers" is just a bunch of whiny noise. Grownups who have things to do don't have time to worry about that crap.
If there was no government, there would be no corporations. A corporation's power is dependent on the social framework a government creates. To give an example of what I mean, modern currencies are fiat, that is, they have value because various governments have declared them to have value. With the collapse of government, one of the chief sources of power for corporations, their immense liquid wealth, would become meaningless.

That's not to say that corporate entities wouldn't be able to adapt and fill the power vacuum, but they wouldn't resemble corporations as we know them today, and they likely wouldn't resemble some of the silly concoctions that you sometimes see in SF (_Venus Incorporated_, etc.)
Co-op hits out at CRC tax
Looks cool, I love the idea of getting recommendations from my social network
I agree. I don't expect people to become experts in cars or computers or anything else they use in their daily life that their job or safety may depend on, but I do have more respect for people that make an effort to learn the basics or try to understand what they're dealing with.

I don't assume someone is stupid for being clueless about technology. I might assume they're at least a little lazy.

When I started using computers in the 1980's I sat down with a 20 minute tutorial and learned the basics about the mouse, keyboard, interface elements, command line and components of the computer. I've met people that have spent years asking others for help with things I took less than half an hour to learn up front.
Also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833774

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1831271

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1830232

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1829211 <- This one has comments
The fighting and tinkering is your problem. You are fighting the wrong enemy.

Virtual machines have their own ideas about graphic hardware, and by default they show generic VESA to guest.

In the VMWare world, there is a "VMWare Guest Daemon", that combined with vmware driver adjusts the guest resolution according to VMWare settings (fit to window, etc).

In VirtualBox world, there should be something similar. Quick googling shows, that VBoxLinuxAdditions provides custom display driver.

Also note, that if a) you install guest tools without package manager and b) these guest tools do not support dkms (though VirtualBox should support it), then you will have rebuild kernel modules after each kernel upgrade! This may be your "integration broke for some reason, I need to re-install". Just use dkms and let the operating system worry about reinstalling drivers.

Regarding VirtualPC, it is broken in it's own, special ways. Sometimes I wonder that it works at all. Microsoft does not support other guest systems than Windows.
Wasn't Unix written to play Space Travel (http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~lib215/reference/history...)?
What specifically is wrong with that sentence?

Didn't Apple have the first music store? Doesn't apple let you rent movies or TV shows? Didn't Apple create one of the first popular MP3 Players?
I'd personally like to see some more examples. If you already have some content, it would be nice to have a link to a sample gallery (or top pictures, or something) on the front page. The examples of what not to send are good, but what are some examples of what you want?
Yes, ClojureCLR. It is supposed to work on Mono as well.
C is one of the few languages in which data structures are really fun and challenging. Even C++ has STL where everything is ready for you...
Photo-editing machine? For low end photo editing it's probably fine. For high end - why would you be doing that on a laptop?

Gaming? Why would you be doing that on a laptop?

Development machine? What are you developing? I think it could handle the average web developer's work load just fine. If you're writing something intensive enough that hardware is a real issue - why are you doing that on a laptop?
Macports is horrible. Homebrew, however, is incredible.
Yeah, that's sort of my point :-)
If you're talking kids and toys :

Oracle is the new kid who is sitting in the corner writing his name in marker all over 'his toys'.

The Libre kids just want to share toys, and think the new kid is a bully.

Maybe one day they'll all play together. But it'll probably take the new kid realizing that the kids that share each get to play with shiny new toys.
Am I alone in thinking that the right solution to the OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice mess (by which I mean the software itself) is to start all over again?
>The modern anarchist movement hasn't been able to connect their message to anything that's relevant

What is the message? I usually just hear unfocused discontent. Saying "Grrr evil government" makes for a fun sense of solidarity and good conversation as you try to screw that cute girl from your collective. It doesn't, however, lead many people to thinking up scalable alternatives to government.

It seems to me that "Anarchism is something that's hard to have an actual discussion on" because most anarchists are either focused on (1) a perpetual oppositional stance to government (fun for them, but what's there to discuss?) or (2) creating or helping a small community. The second category is laudible but still offers almost nothing in the way of big-picture political solutions.
Steve Jobs' Business Card from 1979
The answer is yes. The U.S. just isn't as ready as it should be for this sort of thing. On top of that, we're not just talking governments at war anymore. Anyone can start the war, but who will stop it?
whats your point? browsing social networking sites is how most people spend their day and spare time
also the fact that you can use multiple hash functions to reduce the error rate even further is pretty nice. this is of course without incurring the overhead of extra storage space...
White iPhone 4 Finally Hits Apple Store
How MIT Made Me Who I Am Today
also job postings
Because, if you're like me, you can only afford one machine? And you don't want to be chained to one desk when using it?

EDIT: sorry, you didn't downvote me.
> Why is this different on the web?

Let's go through what happens when I visit a web site. I type a URL in my bar, and hit enter. My web browser makes a request via http to a server, and the server inspects the request, determines if I should see the content or not, and returns either a 200 if I am allowed, and a 403 if I'm not. So, by viewing their pages, I'm literally asking permission, and being allowed.

It sounds to me like a misconfiguration of their server; it's not doing what they want it to.
Yes I've looked at them. I use them every day.
The example you posted its difficult to parse because it deals with multidimensional arrays and also populating one in the inner query. The simple, and much more common case of one dimension arrays is very straightforward. Can you show me the equivalent in MongoDB?

About the performance/scalability warning; I don't deal with very large arrays, a couple hundred items max, and when using a GIN index over the array field, search queries are screamingly fast.
try brew... much more reliable than ports, and puts stuff where you want it, although not quite the coverage yet.
Have you checked out the legal implications for unpublished manuscripts ? - often publishers have specific clause saying that no-part of the manuscript may have previously made available to the public. Given you're only showing one page, it probably won't matter too much, but it might be worth investigating.
I was a classmate of Gates (he was a year behind me). We took some CS classes in common, and had a passing acquaintance.

Let me assure you he's smarter than your average really-smart-person. He's also more determined. ;-)
Nicelios - What is your email?
Well, try installing Mac OSX in VirtualBox and you will see, what a nightmare really is.
Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovasz:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenstra%E2%80%93Lenstra%E2%80%9...

High dimensional work is bloody hard, and this algorithm works amazingly well. I've spoken with Lenstra (one of them) and he's amazingly insightful on these things. He helped to crystalise my understanding of why high-dimensional spheres should be thought of as "spikey," rather than "round."
Clickable: http://stockyoo.com
Blog hyperlinks to news stories as copyright infringement? (Righthaven)
The chipset is just one variable when choosing a laptop. If a laptop has a great chipset for Linux but looks like a pile of ass and weighs five pounds, who cares what the chipset is? What about usability? For the average (non Linux zealot) user, they'll pick their laptop on the basis of portability and yes, to some degree, aesthetics. If Linux doesn't work on that laptop - and quite often, it won't - then as far as they're concerned, it doesn't work well on laptops, and they're right.

Disclaimer: I am a big fan of FreeBSD - if you think linux is bad on laptops.....
Also, compression. Wikipedia got real good about error detection and correction and compression algorithms past few years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Error_detection_and_co...
PCPs are true magic. I once learned how to construct a PCP-proof with verification using just 7 bits, but it still feels like magic to me. The 3-bit variants are just crazy.
Is that somehow more your own fault than when, after months of ignoring the strange popups that appear when windows starts up, your virus-ridden computer finally grinds to a halt and fails to boot?
Stat of the Week: 91% think their boss respects them
By shooting the messenger, Ballmer gets rid of the bad news.

Two years ago, before shedding my managerish responsibilities here, I had to remind my team that I didn't care if they wait until the next briefing to tell me the good news, but that I want to know of bad news as soon as they learn them, even if that means waking me up in the middle of the night.
Ask YC: How to write a database
Most algorithm and data structure texts deal with in-memory algorithms and I'm having difficulty making the leap to secondary-storage equivalents. I know that one should think twice before writing one's own database, but I want to learn how they work. What books and/or source code would you recommend I read?
I installed 10.04 netbook edition on an old Dell inspiron, and it didn't grumble. Didn't do any subtle animation effects either, but that wasn't a biggie. Was a little slow flipping between the global menu and other apps which was a bit annoying for a 1.5ghz laptop with 512MB of ram! I was alarmed to see the omission of virtual desktops, and menu integration was a little odd. The person who received their updated laptop appears quite chuffed, given the choice again I would have used bog standard Ubuntu, but I was hoping the netbook edition might have some sensible power saving features.
Yeah, PHP's docs are one of the truly phenomenal bits about the language. I've yet to see another language get this as right as PHP does.
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/June_Maxam

Yes, that was a link to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Yes, they actually have more info than you would ever need to know about the operator of the site in question.
It seems to be a bit disingenuous to contend that a small amount of research before making a 1400-1500$ investment is too much to think about.

I had a problem with sound with Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop (It came with Vista which was slowing it down). When 8.04 came out, the problem vanished. I haven't had any hardware issues since then. Ubuntu has also worked flawlessly on the 3 or 4 machines I've installed it on since then.

I can come up with 3 or 4 reasons why Ubuntu is irritating to use, but "headache with drivers" really comes near the bottom of the pile nowadays. Certainly, the ability to install it on any piece of hardware and put in nearly any peripherals and see it work is a huge bonus.

Your second point (about building software on Mac) seems to be from an entirely Ruby-based perspective. I work with a mac server at work, and it was an insane adventure to get Django functional for a web project; as opposed to the 5 minutes (apt-get + config apache) it took to get it functioning on Ubuntu.

(The problem was mostly around installing python-mysql on a Mac Server; the solution was on Apple's site and involved downloading an additional set of header files, in case you ever run into that)

I'm glad that you enjoy the Mac platform; but I don't think the cost-benefit ratio is quite there for me. (It won't be until I'm making 3 or 4 times my current salary.)
At OhLife (YC S10), daily e-mails motivate a new wave of online diarists
As opposed to what, rotating particle accelerator dumps through N-space to correlate them against standard model predictions?

What, exactly, do you think people use laptops for? If you're doing something remarkably intensive like encoding video or writing massively scalable ETL code, and you're doing it on a laptop, you have failed at computers.
I was excited to see Adobe using jQuery, but then was brought down thinking about how they got here. Adobe was so stuck on making the swf a de facto standard that they completely missed the boat defining the direction of the web. While Apple was moving CSS in a way that suited them, Adobe could have been working on bringing Actionscript straight into the browser so that Flash could have exported to HTML. Instead they're showing off what essentially is a UI for a javascript library made by a reddit.com/r/sex moderator(1). It's sad.

(1) No disrespect to John Resig, he's one of my heroes. The image was too good to pass up.
What, it doesn't say "I'm CEO, Bitch" ?
Does Linux still consumes more battery power than MacOSX?

I had this issue in the past on my MacBook. It was very notable: on Linux the total battery time was about 60-70% of what I had with MacOSX.

I did some debugging and while the kernel itself also consumed slightly more than MacOSX, the biggest problem where the applications, esp. the window manager (tested both Gnome and KDE). They do a lot of stuff and mostly prevent the CPU from going into low-power mode or wake it up all the time.
The Drawbacks of Outsourcing
Full size to me means separate cursor block, numpad and a key travel of more than a few mm. I am probably more partial to the keyboard I'm using than to any other aspect of my computer.
My first blog post ever, so be nice! Heh :-)
You've already made the point that I'm about to make. That book is from the 30's, it hasn't made the best seller lists in decades; nor am I aware if it's required reading for most classes.

People need a modern reminder like Wikileaks.
Compare and contrast:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1812068