skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine they'd seed a few million profiles to start with, so probably a few people ("a few million" equates to "a few" in the Facebook ecosystem!) got converted over to hotstart things. Not surprising, really.

Allowing you to change back to your old profile at will wouldn't be a very feasible move, I'd imagine. You want to move your userbase over to the new code as soon as possible so you can start iterating on that for everyone, without worrying about maintaining two versions.
If that's the best "proof" you have, it's not even worth discussing. Amazon explicitly denied that they booted Wikileaks because of Lieberman. Lieberman isn't even saying that either. He's claiming that his staffers, were informed by Amazon, which probably is an exaggeration.
Routing traffic to wikileaks would have been a perfect demonstration of this new system. Instead they decided to show how much they respect freedom of speech.

And tptacek, yes we should speak about wikileaks when discussing Amazon, from now on. This isn't a fanboy site, this is a place to discuss the real ramifications of a company's actions.
Why are people so quick to blog about problems before trying to get them solved? The article clearly states that it was only after posting the original that the Moniker agent was contacted, isn't that the first port-of-call?

I had a similar situation recently where I cancelled my auto-renewal 6 months before the renewal date and my site was pulled (even though I'd paid for the year). I could've blogged about it and tried to encourage everyone not to use the provider, but I just contacted them direct and got a quick resolution. Maybe if I'd had no response I'd have tried to make it public but there was no need as it was a simple mistake.

It seems to me that these days people want to shout out their problems far too quickly rather than try and get them fixed. This is a strange way of getting things resolved.
What exactly is the danger of this information? It is obvious that fuel/power facilities are vital to any nation's economy that is attached to those facilities.

I think at least one good thing from this leak is that maybe people realise that their country relies on things coming from far far away and how that might be an unstable and insecure base for any economy.
I must say The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell

http://artofgamedesign.com/bio/

If you think this talk http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Bo...

is good you should really read the book. Great stuff.
I'm having a hard time reconciling people's viewpoints over here. Most people are intellectually inconsistent over Wikileaks.

If a leak fits with people's opinion on wars or something similar, it's supposedly alright to leak; if it doesn't fit with one's opinion, it's bad and irresponsible? I think this goes to show that most people just view leaks on certain topics as means to an end on that specific policy subject.

It's not like that. Only leaking "politically correct" material is not going to happen. Either you stick up for the unmitigated leaks or you don't.

If you think a middleman (newspaper, whatever) has to assess whether or not a leak is potentially damaging or "not worth" leaking, then I think you haven't come to terms with what leaking is also about: exposing the truth and not relying on whatever authority to establish what is alright for the general populace to see and what is not.

P.S.: If this is so important for the US government, why is it only SECRET/NOFORN? Also, according to Michael Chertoff, this list was/is used by US government agencies to prepare themselves for disruption.
"The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Take time to walk slowly and think deeply. Walk slow enough to forget that you're actually walking.
Do you think Amazon is habitually informing staffers of any particular Senator that they booted a client off their servers ?
Well, it does not happen like that accidentally. The whole point of terrorist attack is terrorizing the population to achieve one's political objectives. To terrorize population you hit where it hurts the people.

People are less emotional about shut down plants than they are about dead children.

> If I were on the Chinese politburo, though, this leak would read like a literal shopping list.

You bring a point here. This list makes sense (and is obvious) if you have a strategic bomber command in your disposal. Otherwise a few of those isolated attacks will fail to shatter the economy. Remember how many bombs were unleashed on German industry in WW2 before it started showing any effect.

Attacking population on the other hand is accessible and effective, that's the whole idea behind the terror. So a proper, realistic list should be "dense urban areas of the United States". Of course it's not what the embassies were assigned to find out, so they really did an honest, if mostly useless, job.
I feel the opposite way. This strikes me like having hearings about steroids in baseball --- blatant pandering for votes instead of dealing with real issues with real consequences. I have no problem with individual networks or stations deciding that they want to better serve their audiences, but can this possibly be the best use of time for our nation's highest governing bodies? Going further, what's the positive national interest in encouraging Americans to watch yet more broadcast television?
Sorry, but until you show me more proof than the verbal statements of one of the most corrupt US Senators, I'm not convinced it actually even happened.
What happened to this tool?
Should it make us feel safer to know that the US Government was relying upon security by obscurity for vital interests?
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You make a point, but anyone doing 5 minutes of research would find this exact same spots. Besides, being "industrial cities" they are actually hard to hit. It's like saying NYC, Chicago and DC are critical..
Correct, but you definitely can "increase the backlash further than a declaration of war."
Electronic Pickpocketing
That's a good point. Thanks, I'll do that.
Pivotal definitely does all pair programming
Pivotal labs does this by offering everyone free catered breakfast at the start of the day. As I understand it, the motivation was to synchronize everyone's lunch hunger so half of a pair-programming team wasn't hungry earlier because they hadn't eaten lunch but their pair had. It also served to mitigate mid-afternoon food-coma somewhat.
Same in France, IP as the first result.
Is this related?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970016
There is no (Paul) Graham's Lemma, but there is Graham's Number.
Superb point. It would be trivial to create attacks sufficient to grind public transit to a halt in a major city for weeks and result in a crackdown on civil liberties,... among other things.

That nobody has done this stuff underscores just how much of a non-threat terrorism is.
What’s Wrong With Mainstream Media Companies And Their Mobile News Apps
This is the first working result in the States too
In Local, Google And Groupon Are Now Competing For The Same Dollars
Anyone who scuba dives want to chip in? When I checked last (about 10 yrs ago), it wasn't recommended for scuba divers.
Only #3 for me (UK).

It does rather depend on lots of people getting the word out though. I'm not sure it would work for a less prominent website.
Before that:

wikileaks.org

cablegate.wikileaks.org

and when you click you get the usual "Oops!"
Have you read Peter Hamilton? Specifically, the Commonwealth Saga.

Banks is good, but I find his universes are to be sketchy and sometimes fairly shallow and not well-thought through (e.g. the one in the Algebraist). Hamilton is as creative as Banks, when it comes to the concepts, but he really delivers on the depth and complexity of the story lines and the actual execution. If you haven't read him, do it. If you have, I'd be curious to hear how you compare him to Banks.
I wonder what he was playing in PSP/DS before replacing them with the iPhone.
The cable states that they are vital to US economic interests in Qatar, not that they are vital to Qatar's national security.

I can think of lots of other things that are vital to US economic interests. I don't think they're particularly hard to find.

Of course, thinking that terrorists want to target these things is a mistake; terrorists are not an existential threat to any state, not unless they have the sympathy of the general public and are fighting an unpopular government. As such, military targets are some ways down the priority list. Terrorists want targets that generate a disproportionate reactionary effect on the population. A pipeline in the middle of nowhere may affect energy prices indirectly, but lacks the immediacy that makes the public demand an overreaction.

Al Qaeda and the likes are more interested in regime change in Saudi Arabia than anything else. Making the US out to be the Great Satan plays into that dialog, and therefore making the US overreact, vilify Muslims, and polarize the population is their goal.
Oh jeeze, I have to choose?

Nonfiction: QED, by Feynman. It made a large portion of quantum physics "click" for me intuitively and dispelled a bunch of popular notions about quantum physics that are just wrong.

Fiction: Probably the celebrated Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, for reasons others have stated over and again, or else Ass Goblins of Auschwitz for letting me explore an author's deliciously disturbing mind.
I read through the Canadian "Critical Foreign Dependencies" List, and what struck me, is how difficult it would be to really damage any of the elements on the list, unless you were a state power.

Canada James Bay Power Project, Hydro Quebec, Part of the St. Lawrence Power Project, between Barnhart Island, New York, and Cornwall, Ontario Seven Mile Dam, Canada Chalk River Nuclear Facility - big industrial targets that would require a lot of effort to really do damage to. Also, there were a lot of obvious targets that are already well known "Border Crossing", "Atlantic Cable Landing".

Pretty much every one of the Canadian items (and many, many, many more) are discussed fairly openly in Canadian Newspapers in terms of how attractive they might be to terrorists, so nothing particularly interesting there. If anything, I was disappointed, significantly, at how _little_ is considered a Critical Foreign dependency.

The Alberta Tar Sands aren't considered a Critical Foreign Dependency?
> I'm finding a hard time seeing how this leak is a positive thing.

Some possible ways it could be useful are

- Stop the reliance on 'security by obscurity'

- Motivate cooperation on how to secure these facilities or decentralize their function where possible.

- Inform public discussion on these issues which may possibly lead to new ideas / solutions

I'm not saying that it will necessarily be a net benefit but it certainly is possible.
> I don't think a simple facepalm expresses my feeling that this is about the best our government can do over the past few years when it comes to making the lives of its citizens better.

A few problems with this statement:

- Many people probably feel you are discounting some of the work the government has done over the past few years. The stimulus and healthcare (depending on who you ask) both significantly improved the lives of large sections of the citizenry. And there are probably countless minor laws that fixed various problems that weren't quite as important to you.

- I don't like the assumption that the government's primary role is to make the lives of the people better in ways it is not already doing. This leads to government expansion and often fiscal irresponsibility and economic inefficiency. To put it concretely: a lot of the things you probably believe would "make the lives of [the country's] citizens better" cost money. That is, other people's money, people who might not value these things as much as you do. The government could I'm sure give every citizen a pair of roller skates, and that would "better" the lives of the citizens, but it also has a cost.
> Allowing you to change back to your old profile at will wouldn't be a very feasible move, I'd imagine.

I agree. It would be a real headache. That's why I would have been really impressed if they did it. Or rather, I would have been really impressed if they found a way to do it that wasn't a headache. :)
It's a shame LG adds a lot of "LG Apps" on Android phones...
Mine has been free even though I have no slices running.
Your second and third paragraphs have nothing to do with pair programming. They indicate crappy management (shoving people around like animals) and a crappy team (nitpicky argumentation) respectively.

Your first paragraph is more interesting. How does the fact that someone else also contributed diminish pride in craftsmanship? Presumably it's the program you're proud of, so if the program comes out better, isn't that reason to be prouder? (If the program comes out worse, that's a problem.) Personally, it would drive me crazy to work with people who were constantly worrying about who contributed what. Software development is hard enough as it is. We can't afford to waste valuable cycles on that kind of thing.

My experience has been that the solitary-genius fantasy is the calling card of an immature programmer and is purely something to get over. (Just so it's clear, I'm not drawing this conclusion about you, nor about the OP.)

It may be true that co-programming makes crappy teams worse, but it also makes great teams better. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing better than a small team of smart people hammering on a hard problem together. But there's no question that it forces team dynamics into the open.
It's a list of the three highest priority industrial facilities in the country directly across the gulf from one of your primary warzones, it also gives the name of the controlling company, and the name of the bureaucrat directly in charge of the controlling company.

More to the point, it is a concrete priority list according to the US' own economic research, it's like paying a research team to discern your weak spots and then handing that information directly to your enemies.

Frankly, the extent to which this information is dangerous is obvious enough that I actually feel somewhat uncomfortable discussing it in this public forum. But since somebody else clearly has already gone public with similar information in a much more obvious way...
IQ + EQ = great anything except a drone. But that's either impossible or very, very hard to find.

There's a reason people with very high IQs tend to be social outcasts; the way they perceive and model the world deviates considerably from the norm. And unless they succeed socially (typically by making a lot of money) the world will generally be quite happy to leave them be.
>>if Iran is telling the truth

is there anything at all supporting the Iranian version?

We know that USA and lots of other countries don't believe Iran, are really worried and put lots of resources into stopping the program. We also know that Iran has had suspicious behavior and actively supports terrorism. And so on.

The alternative would be an US conspiracy, which they obviously would have failed to keep quit about... :-)
I think the leading edge of startups is finally paying real equity to the first 5-10 (i.e. pre series A, taking a very low salary) people.

It used to be you'd get 0.1-0.5% as an individual contributor engineer; it is going up to 1-5%+. Much more on par with what founders get. Obviously this varies a lot with the size of any seed raise, where the company is, who is being hired, etc., but it's a whole lot better than it was in the past.
> Blatant pandering for votes instead of dealing with real issues with real consequences.

I think this is probably one of the things the government can do that is unambiguously good and will touch the lives of many, many Americans. It's also an example of a market failure where there is no market for the product or service demanded. It's a textbook example of the tragedy of the commons where the gain on the TV signal is owned by no one and thus not protected. It seems like a perfect thing for the governing bodies of the country to spend time on if that's what it takes to get it done.

I do not buy your theory that this is pandering for votes. I doubt very many people will chose their elected representatives based on this issue. Instead, I think that is just a convenient rhetorical device by which you are discounting the value of this measure.

> Going further, what's the positive national interest in encouraging Americans to watch yet more broadcast television?

Personally I don't think it's in the national interest for the government to decide for its citizens what they ought to be doing with their time. Instead, it should observe what the citizens wish to do and, where appropriate and efficient, facilitate those activities.
"There are a number of reasons: I get to work at a museum where I can go and look at amazing fish, lizards, and butterflies every day"

This gave me goosebumps. If there was a way I could work this into my current office environment, I'd be in heaven. I love looking at fish, reptiles, insects etc...

I guess I could always buy a fish tank and plonk it down beside me.
Via this earlier thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973732

Good way to objectively measure the obnoxiousness of your stream. Pretty accurate – the top ten included all the noisy people who I've considered unfollowing in the past.
http://www.eastagile.com does 100% pair programming too

Disclaimer: I work there as a consultant every now and then
Also try http://www.officesnapshots.com
Thank you so much for sharing that.
If you visit the page you can see the "Musings Online" where previous Christmas Tree Lectures are available.
When both democrats and republicans agree on something, you can almost guarantee it's been requested for decades by the population they supposedly represent.

Still. Better late than never, I guess.
Surviving Project Management
I did this as one of my first things when I was learning ASP.NET. Now I absolutely hate it and intend to move to something else, something pre-built, something which I don't have to maintain.

That said: I don't regret building it as it taught me tons and tons of things which was useful when building real world applications. One of the most important things: What is marketing fluff, what can be applied in the real world and what is "easy now, hard later" vs "hard now, easy later".

So yeah. Building your own blog can be useful, but it depends on your motivation. If you have enough things to keep you occupied and you are past the need to learn the platform you are working on, I think it's more worthwhile to get something mature and spend your time on something else.
SpringSocial connect to Facebook & update Facebook status - what dya think?
It is to every established power's advantage to make leaking government information seem dangerous and wrong because states in general do bad things and would prefer to not be held accountable for their actions.

Yeah, good and bad things get leaked. That's what happens when governments use their secrecy to cover up some pretty dirty stuff that's happened. I feel accountability is more important than safety from some shadow threat that will always exist.

Also, those terrorists that are (supposedly) going to use this intelligence to do bad things, they probably wouldn't exist if states weren't busy terrorizing civilians.
"Financier" by T.Dreiser and "Martin Eden" by J.London.
Some of the best books you'll ever read about character development. Definitely read the latter one if you're in your early 20-ies.
Born in 1985, my reference point for the world got calibrated at around 1992 and only started moving along sometime in late high school/early college - the 2000s.

Increasingly I'm noticing the differences just in that period from the mid-80s. I do feel like "the future is now" applies to our time.

I look at all the occupations of our society and think to myself... "Within in my lifetime, technology is probably going to change this." Retail districts seem unbelievably shiny and glossy these days, with a tendency to put flatscreens and bright LEDs and reflective surfaces everywhere. I haven't gotten a driver's license yet and wonder whether it will ever be necessary; the Internet is already a huge enabler for setting up carpools, and automated driving is quickly coming up on the horizon.

I'd like to think I'm on the ball and know where things are going, but unexpected things seem to keep happening all the time. Some months ago I decided that I might as well just give up on the futurism game and just focus on what's relevant to what I'm doing(games), cause everything else is moving so fast I'd never keep up anyway. Yet even within THAT, it's still hard.
My gut reaction to this was positive because I really hate loud commercials, but after giving it some thought I don't understand the rationale for government intervention here. Watching TV is a voluntary exchange; the viewers put up with commercials, and the networks produce TV shows for a lower cost than if there were no commercials. Asking the government to use the threat of violence to interfere with this exchange doesn't change the underlying economic reality; making TV costs money and the viewer needs to pay for it one way or the other. Now we have the additional cost of more government regulations born by taxpayers and the networks, so this seems to be a net loss for everybody.
I second this and have a fun little story to add.

In 2008 I was on vacation in Costa Rica with my girlfriend and was actually reading this book. Two days before we went back to New York we checked in at a nice hotel in San José.

The first evening we met a really nice older Texan couple and had a few drinks with them.

The man was an engineer and had built a nice business around drilling for oil with some special explosives. Apparently no other companies did this and he was selling this technology to the rest of the world.

Then the day we were leaving I was in the airport reading the book and waiting for the plane. And lo and behold in the book Ducker referenced a company in Texas who had found a niche in the oil market.

I never found out if that was in fact the same guy since I never got his contact details. But I assume it was him.

Had I only read those pages a few days before!