skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It wasn't just teachers, it was more or less any respectable profession. Rules that programmers were subject to:

"When I started at IBM there was a dress code, that was an informal oral code of white shirts. You couldn't wear anything but a white shirt, generally with a starched collar. I remember attending my first class, and a gentleman said to me as we were entering the building, are you an IBMer, and I said yes. He had a three piece suit on, vests were of the vogue, and he said could you just lift your pants leg please. I said what, and before I knew it he had lifted my pants leg and he said you're not wearing any garters. I said what?! He said your socks, they're not pulled tight to the top, you need garters. And sure enough I had to go get garters."

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html

It wasn't just the US, the UK was also very puritanical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_inde...

Claiming that these things were restricted to teachers, or have changed because of teachers unions is nothing but the post-hoc fallacy.
I've always found your attitude strange for someone working in security. Especially in military intelligence the name of the game is protect yourself or you only have yourself to blame. The main reason we are seeing this leak is because too many and/or the wrong people had access to the data, which is also why it's mostly "raw data".
I'm concerned about the visual pollution of all these bikes halfway up lampposts, blocking sight lines. If it becomes popular, it'll get banned.

Also if it doesn't go up all that high then it'll be at the right level that passing pedestrians have to duck under it.
No, the arbitrary firings for political reasons /is/ relevant, it's why we have teachers unions and tenure.
That diagram is showing something related, but not really directly applicable. The important extra feature the controller has is the ability to add energy to the pendulum - which is akin to being able to move between locations on the plot. However, the graph doesn't suggest anything about the results of any particular move by the controller, so (even using an extended version of the plot, dealing with upright target positions) this doesn't really a way to solve for the controller's actions.

What the plot shows is how complex the behaviour of a double pendulum is : small changes can result in wildly different outcomes, even though it's deterministic.
I think that when it comes to classified information like this, it is important to have an aim when releasing the information (The Nixon leaks showed Nixon's abuse of power, for example)

Thats were Wikileaks went astray in my mind.

What does this show us except how the metaphorical sausage of National Security and diplomacy is made?

What has the exposition of this information done, except make it harder for the American government to do its job?

Releasing classified information, just for the hell of it, strikes me as a bit silly. There's a reason that information is classified ... and if you disagree with the reasons, then the information you release should clearly show why the information should be public knowledge (covering up civilian casualties in the Iraq/Afghan wars for example).

Little if any of the information I've seen has passed that test.
I love wikileaks, but they screwed up on this one.
This is especially hilarious because Rep Peter King has a long history of supporting terrorists and associating with terrorist groups, as recognized by several different governments:

In the 1980s, King frequently traveled to Northern Ireland to meet with IRA members. In 1982, speaking at a pro-IRA rally in Nassau County, New York, King said: “We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialis­m in the streets of Belfast and Derry.” A Northern Irish judge ordered King ejected from the former's courtroom, describing him as “an obvious collaborat­or with the IRA”. He became involved with NORAID, an organizati­on that the British, Irish and US government­s accuse of financing IRA activities and providing them with weapons. He was banned from appearing on British TV for his pro IRA views and refusing to condemn IRA activity in the UK.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Northern_Ireland for more information.

One of the coolest things about being an Arab American living in the Boston metro area is the near certainty that anytime I'm in a busy public place, there are terrorists supporters and sympathizers with me, and they're all white Irish people.
Ecological economics and economic growth
That seems to be President Ahmadinejad's tack - he's calling the cables a massive fake pysops operation. He seems jolly upset that the cables appear to show the US behaving with remarkable restraint towards Iran, in the face of his Arab neighbours screaming for first strike.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-claims...

I'd say the US comes out looking rather good in some situations, and rather poor in others. If only we had access to all countries dirty laundry in such detail.

(also, this cable on Iranian diplomacy made fascinating reading for me: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/briton-us-diplom...)
Somehow I find it hard to blame wikileaks for that.
Cyber Monday 2010
Seth Priebatsch: Get a life
Absolutely. The diplomacy that goes on behind closed doors does so for a reason. Politics tends to shift the focus to the irrational side (just look at the current state of political discourse in the US). If we had access to other nation's documents like these, I think the US would look downright saintly (or at least no worse).
It's interesting to see how the application form has evolved.
WikiLeaks Diplomatic Bombshell Reveals Strange Tech Snooping Schemes
Can someone please explain what the graph is? I can't quite figure it out. I'm assuming that the green is total distance traveled... but I can't figure out what the black one means.
Nice to see Dan York here - I remember him from Linuxcare days...

This article would be a lot more interesting if it were actually Erlang interacting with an SMS sending device and handling clients via the web or something like that. The code is really just an HTTP request with some json, which in the grand scheme of things is not terribly interesting.
Mary Meeker Joins Kleiner Perkins as Partner
I don't know if this is true generally, but in Minnesota this is not the case, and as a parent of three, I would say it does lead to improvement in some schools. The challenge, however, is what to do about the schools which aren't as good, and this seems to be where the the parallels to free-market competition break down a bit. If you buy crummy goods or services from a crummy business, which then goes out of business, that's a feature. If your kid goes to a crummy school and gets a crummy education, and the school eventually gets closed, that's a bug - at least for your kid (although the net utility for society may be maximized).
Startup Lessons From Foursquare's Dennis Crowley
Reduction in CO2
Abhitech Energycon Ltd - Reduction in CO2, Reduction In bagasse consumption, reduction in coal consumption, reduction in emissions.
Do we really need government to be this transparent? It makes sense to me that war and diplomacy are not things that 100% need to be in the public eye.

Are some things unnecessarily secret? Of course. I'd love to see papers exposing the motivation behind the Iraq war or about who knew what when about torture or what is going on at Gitmo.

Do we really need to know a lot of this mundane stuff?

I think if you gave me a choice between a country in which a lot of things are classified but the populace actually read and understood what the competiting parties platforms were, and one in which classified documents are leaked all the time but no one even reads the public documents to begin with, I'd prefer to live in the former. Unforunately currently the US is the latter.
I dunno. And then you fight disinformation with information. And in all likelyhood, someone working there decided that the State Department was going to get some egg on their face anyways, and attempting to cover it up with disinformation would just add some bacon and mushrooms and turn it into an omelet of bad PR. This is the least 'dumb looking' way to attempt to suppress the information.

Or it's entirely possible that they really believe (or know) that the information will cause harm and risk, and are doing their best to prevent it. My understanding is that the State Department is usually staffed with people who want to do the right thing. In fact, most of the US government is.

Seriously, based on how often people cry foul whenever it appears that some government is trying to spin/manipulate information, it's probably a better idea that they didn't try that.

And the fact that you advise that points out to something. Your advice is probably the correct course of action for any body out to maximize it's self interest. But people generally don't like that in their governments. Hell, they don't even like when their governments are cold, calculating and cynical.
Very cool as a V1, with a user experience that's loads better than existing alternatives. Couple feature suggestions (that are probably already on your roadmap):

-User and/or editor reviews are a must. Tab quality tends to range from completely wrong to almost right, and without any kind of community input it can be difficult for newbies to tell the difference.

-I don't know how feasible it is, but a web based version of PowerTab (or comparable solutions) would be great. Old-school tabs are nice, but when you can listen to a MIDI-fied version of a portion of a tab, it helps a lot.
Sadly his server seems to be turned off.
> She adds: “The US position on freedom of information and the press should not be questioned"

Heh. I know she (likely) didn't mean it the way I'm reading it, but that's amusing phrasing given the context.
I learned it because of the general -i; the -p was the only portion of -i that I really use with "git add". The -i is what makes "git rebase" more than just a patch pusher.
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Personally I still can not believe it, I’ve downloaded a huge file include this incredible collection or resources from the best bloggers and marketer out there, I actually don’t need to mention that as all of them are well known!
Innovation Agents: Brandon Kessler, Founder ChallengePost
Don't Optimize For Your Lowest Common Tech Denominator
If it behaves differently in FireFox and Chrome and it's inconsistent, it's usually an issue with the speed of JavaScript execution and the order of the JavaScript operations.

If it works in FireFox but not Chrome, it usually indicates a problem with the JavaScript executing too quickly. E.g. computing the width of one element and setting it based on the width of another element on the page, before the content of that other element has been fully rendered.

If it works in Chrome but not FireFox, it usually indicates a problem with the JavaScript executing too slowly. E.g. firing off an intensive process, like manipulating 100 elements on the page at once, and then firing off another action that depends on the previous process being completed. If the JavaScript execution is slow, it's possible to fire off the next event while the other is still being processed.

In this case you'll want to either have the previous function fire off an event when it's completed, and bind the next function to that event, or brute force it with a setTimeout.

Wow, that was way longer than I meant it to be. Oh well, hope it helps.
And - in a large organization, where you need to communicate patient information to a potentially significant number of doctors, for example - what prevents one unscrupulous doctor from posting the information in plain text when it gets decrypted?

Encryption works fine for trusted communication, but it's not a solution when the people posting the information are also potential valid recipients.
Braid Hairstyles
Mostly, long hair is perfect for braid hairstyle. Braid hairstyle is simple and formal hairstyle.
That's no different to a sufficiently secure bike lock, though.
After years of blogging, occasionally on programming-related topics, and years of managing an outsourcing operation, my guiding star for all code samples is "this will be used without modification by the least competent member of the cheapest team identified by a non-programmer working in the procurement department of the company which handles my mother's medical insurance."

If you have a blog where you routinely discuss topics that might come up in trivial back office code, you can probably think of a comment or email or hundred from the type of developer I'm thinking of.
ChromeSheep - FireSheep for Chrome (uses Node.js server for packet capture)
I've come to the conclusion that the only real nationwide problem in American education is one of expectation.

Simply: we don't demand the best from our kids anymore.

Studies have shown that good schools and good educators do matter, but what they all highlight, bold and underscore, is that parents and culture matter so, so much more. 'Good homes' and 'good parents' absolutely dwarf the effect that 'good schools' and 'good teachers' have.

And we're just running out of 'good homes' and 'good parents' that care about the results. We've retained a ritual of schooling, but increasingly we just don't give a shit about the outcome. And we're just reaping what we've sown.
Pencil balancer in 2D, using very fast silicon retina cameras:

http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~conradt/Projects/PencilBalancer/

(The cameras: http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch )
Original video: http://vimeo.com/2952236
I suspect that some aspect of Groupon is a Ponzi scheme

In what way?

Groupon has a clever model but their valuation is precarious because it's easily copied. If anything I would say it is already past its peak.

Not only are there the restaurant/teeth whitening/facial generalist competitors (many of them backed by newspapers that already have sales teams and business relationships), I've been seeing a lot of niche competitors appear as well, which really makes sense. The web is naturally distributed so there's no added barrier participating in multiple sites, especially if they're using a shared or common login platform like OpenId/OpenAuth.
Google Code Blog: Random Hacks of Kindness #2 - Come hack for humanity
In 2006 my AP government teacher was the subject of about a half dozen articles in the local paper and a school board meeting where about 500 angry parents came and tried to get him fired for being too liberal. It is definitely relevant.
Exactly... that's where I was getting at. In the mid 1800's, they were bad ass in chemical production and science in general - really many areas. Seemingly, WWII made them a more risk adverse society. Beforehand, the small/mid size businesses were actually very entrepreneurial.
Your domain is already on a non-US registrar, so all you need to do is move from EC2 to a non-US host like abdicar.com, PRQ, admin.2x4.ru, or any "bullet-proof" host. They will ignore DMCA requests and their ilk.
"Do we really need to know a lot of this mundane stuff?"

I guess this is opinion but I didn't think that the released information was mundane.

"and one in which classified documents are leaked all the time but no one even reads the public documents to begin with, I'd prefer to live in the former. Unforunately currently the US is the latter."

Actually imo the US is a country where "a lot of things are classified, but where most of the populace is too disinterested to read public documents or stay current on news." However, that doesn't mean that there isn't any value for educated, interested parties in having access to public documents.

Wikileaks is a recent phenomenom and not an age old one.
Why? The purpose of public sector employees is to benefit the public. The government should endeavor to provide as little benefit to it's employees as possible - just enough to retain the necessary workforce. Anything else is a waste of our money.

A regulation of the nature you describe would potentially harm the public - an employee might be harming the public under conditions D, but would be unable to be fired.
I really like playing with Racket. It's very powerful and simple. Mathematical. I concede that. But it's not "natural". I can guarantee you that Lisp showed to a novice isn't "natural".

C++ is different. It's not unnatural. There's no "natural" programming language.

C++ is explicit. You need to manage your memory. You need to tell how the return value will be handled. You need to work with the compiler, the linker.

You have more control. More power. It gets in the way for some tasks, but it is mandatory for others.

I find the lack of STL to be frustrating, because I'm used to it. To me it feels "natural".

There's no problem with not being proficient with C++ or the STL. It's just not your thing!
I'm the one who posted the comment you're referring to. I remember seeing the primary document with the complete list of rules for schoolteachers in my history of education class, but I have no idea how I'd even find it right now.

If you look back through the primary documents relating to education though it's pretty crazy how much of a role religion plays. For example, the first compulsory education law in the United States was the Ye Old Deluder Satan Act, the first half of which I'll paste below:

"It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so that at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with love and false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and to the end that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors. It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general, by way of supply, as the major part of those that order the prudentials of the town shall appoint; provided those that send their children be not oppressed by paying much more than they can have them taught for in other towns."

Essentially the reason why it started becoming compulsory for town to build schools is that the government thought that children, if left to their own devices, would be corrupted by satan. And these same beliefs are also the basis of how we treat not only our children, but also our school teachers right up to this day. Hardly a week goes by in the US where there isn't a story about a teacher being fired for having a picture of themselves drinking on Facebook, breaking up an assault on a gay student, assigning a book that mentions sex, etc. Of course this mostly happens in small towns in the south; the more 'enlightened' areas of the country have already mostly switched to having their teachers teach f om entirely pre-made curricula geared toward passing standardized tests, a system which was implemented partly to prevent these 'problems' from occurring.

Also, if I remember correctly even pg once commented that the reason he wasn't allowed to give his high school graduation speech is that the principal wouldn't have been able to get him fired if the parents complained.
The result of an evening hack, so not very robust or feature-complete. Only has support for hijacking hacker news sessions so far.
This is absolutely true, which is why I'm categorically against long lived record keeping in centralized databases when it comes to stuff like this.

Eventually it will hit the street and eventually it will be abused, you can pretty much count on it.

That's also the reason why I have yet to get a new passport because I don't think the government should have my fingerprints on file, given their history with respect to data loss and internal abuse cases.
The Most Resounding Types of Folders
The very first most resounding type of product is typically known as pocket folder which can be significantly used for securing your documents for long time. Bear in mind that it does have unique, colorful and versatile pockets inside it which more often than not appear in die cut shapes. The most beautiful aspect about this product is its elegant and graceful design, catching your eyes on the dot.
Thankfully we don't conscript in the US anymore. We've been at war for the last 10 years and we've drafted exactly 0 people.
Google's automation of customer facing services is exactly how they kill businesses. Google Checkout is horrendous and is going nowhere, and their customer-facing efforts with the Nexus One, while a model of efficiency, were a dismal failure.

There are some things you can't automate. Putting a personalized, humorous face on offers is a major value of Groupon, and Google can't automate that.
I was telling team YC during interview week that I miss the "animal" question, partially because I really love our answer (the "we're a freaking zoo" line is pure Huffman).
I think a lot can be rewritten with boost::lambda or boost::proto without being too obscure.
When I was more naive than I am now, I signed the yeah-all-your-IP-belongs-to-us employment agreement as a condition of employment. This was many years ago and I am still at the same company.

To counteract this, I only do contract work and work on fairly large team collaborations. My thinking is if I don't own it but the client does (since they are paying me to work on it after hours) - the day job company won't have much to go on because I didn't own the code in the first place. For the second - since I don't have full ownership/sole contributor - maybe that will make them less likely to go after me than a clean cut single owner situation.

All of these projects are done on non-company time, network, and hardware. I don't usually bring my MacBook in but when I have a client deadline, I will work on my train commute and not even charge the MacBook using (company) power - I tote around a second battery.
Hover over "last.fm". Next to Last.fm I support Like.fm and Libre.fm, and regular tab search :)
In the US, police and firefighters are usually unionized. There are limits on their ability to strike. I believe that those limits might be in place for teachers as well.

The military has incredibly strict rules for advancement and compensation that are very union-like. They have defined ways to make a grievance. They get pretty good benefits and pension. I'm not sure that they'd choose to unionize or what exactly it would get them.

There is, of course, the job itself, which they have zero control over, and would probably not be able to negotiate even if they had a union.
Anonymous Takes Down Record Industry Websites
As far as I know, this won't work if the user came from https:// - the referrer will be empty, won't it?
This is a "might makes right" argument and it's garbage.

I'm not close to the scariest person breaking systems. And I'm appalled on a biweekly basis by what I can manage to get software to cough up. One person's "basic precaution" is another's "failure so spectacular it demands an example be made of its author".

You aren't OK with a world governed by the ethic you just alluded to. You're only OK with invoking it to make a haphazard argument.

I absolutely do place blame on the people charged with protecting the information that got leaked. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with WL's culpability.
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Your safest and cheapest bet is to get a seedbox in France. http://dediseedbox.com
TSA revenge screening