skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The military and war generally is "politics by other means". I don't think it is fair to say people who go into the military have a "need to shoot people", though I'm sure one could find those cases. I think a lot of people join the military just for the benefits - education opportunities, and so on. Broadly, from a public policy standpoint, for example with the Iraq war, that was not motivated by "violence per ce", though one could make the argument that everyone has a need for violence just from evolution.

Iraq is just an issue of economic control. Either Iraqi's can control Iraqi oil, or we can. In fact it has nothing at all to do with terrorism, that is just for the weak minded to buy into. What it has to do with his privatizing oil. American companies do not benefit from publicly owned oil in Iraq, but if multinational or American-owned corporations own Iraqi oil, then the American people benefit. Think about it: would you rather have the Iraqis own the Iraq oil, or would you rather have the benefit of American companies owning it instead? Personally, I have a slight moral gripe about taking away people's natural resources and giving it to multinational corporations, but hey, that's just politics. War is politics by other means. Always been that way, always will be that way.

Japan was right (from their point of view) to do Pearl Harbor, because it eliminated the threat caused by the American navy, and solidified their economic control of the Pacific rim. Similarly, the US was right (from our point of view) to do the Iraq war, because it got oil out of the hands of the indigenous peoples of that region and into our hands, benefiting us, not them, and eliminating the threat caused by Hussein at the same time. Please note I say "right" not as in morally right, but just right from the point of view of economic dominance.

Violence is incidental. It is just a necessary part of war. The real point is economic control. True with Japan. True with the United States. Is that "moral" or "just". I don't know. I would like to think not. But apparently the 50 million people who voted for President Bush would disagree with me.
Ignoring if what he did was right or wrong, you have to a admit it is a pretty good social hack.

But could it be an even better hack?

What if he started a business, leased all that land, after a while filed for bankruptcy because you know the business "earnestly" was going to raise funding for exploration but then that darn financial crisis...

Then the bankruptcy preceding drag on for a while and when the leases come up for auction again...
another small company...

Rinse and repeat.
"Most people avoid certain actions because they view changes as permanent. If you make a change, can you go back to doing it like you did before? You can always reclaim your current state in most cases. If I quit my job in industry x to test my artistic abilities in a different industry, worst case scenario, can I go back to my previous industry? Yes. Recognize that you can test-drive and micro-test things over brief periods of time. You can usually reclaim the workaholism that you might currently experience if you so decide to go back to it." -Timothy Ferriss

http://sivers.org/tim-ferriss
> Dr Wissner-Gross's study claims that two Google searches on a desktop computer produces 14g of CO2

.. it sounds a lot like NOT performing two Google searches on a desktop computer would produce between 13-14g of CO2.

I read in another article that some other study tried to factor wether or not you would need to start your computer up or not .. and how far around the world the data would have to travel.

I may just be cynical, but this sounds alot like an attempt to make ordinary people feel guilty about killing the planet, just by living -- in turn to make them turn to the whole buying indulgences for your climate sins (including Googling, apparently) trend.
But what if the "shell" company was earnestly going to raise funding for exploration but then that darn financial crisis struck?

Wouldn't you have to prove intent to defraud?
Constant refactoring makes it easier for me to add new features.

The first time I get something working, I often don't have the perspective to know how the best way to organize or abstract it. If I didn't go back and clean that up, it would be significantly harder for me to add on new features.
The doctor's report accounts for a) your computer viewing the page for X minutes, b) the overall searches per power used by google's datacenters, and c) some other random guessing I'm assuming.

Google's figure accounts for usage of power the google search actually utilizes.

Both of these are skewed figures, reflecting the agendas of the two. The doctor has a site he wants to promote, google has a "green" label they want to keep.
The carbon cost of Googling
In order to decide, we need quantitative estimates of how much prices will be reduced, and how much natural beauty will be harmed. It seems to me that even someone with your attitude will probably find the trade-off does not favor development in beautiful areas for the unmeasurably small change in prices we can expect.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/otheranalysis/ongr.html
> The psychology people seem to have is to believe that if
the government regulates it, then anything that falls under
the regulation requires no independent thought.

But according to your own line of thought, shouldn't people be fully responsible for their own conduct, regardless of the surrounding circumstances? If so, how is lack of governement regulation going to help people determine the correct speed to go at on icy roads?
I'm referring to the findings of the US Senate, widely reported in the media. I don't know what their sources were, but I think there is little doubt that beheadings and bombings of civilians in Baghdad started after the invasion.
If you don't mind being a bit seedy, sign up to Offerpal Media / Super Rewards and give users extra points from completing their offers.
As I browse HN every morning on my iPhone, I would say that's a pretty critical use case as far as I'm concerned! :-)
If the company is paying me 10x what it's paying them then it's probably more cost effective for me to brain dump (if it's clear) than it is to clean up for the reader. This is not about outsourcing the same thing happens with emails from senior management.
No one wants to install yet another unused technology (Silverlight) for an unknown new product.
I think the other key benefit is that it actually looks like a phone. Smart Phone companies are all aiming for the 18-34 bracket, however there's a lot more people with a lot more money in the 35-65 bracket. My wife's uncle laughed at the iPhone, because without a keyboard it's completely useless and as a 20 year old writer I whole heartedly agree.

There's also an amazing thing called "word of mouth" which beats any other form of advertising ten-fold. I saw the demo and said "I want one", I showed my wife and she said "I want one!" There's a handful of people that if I showed I'd say there's a good 80% chance they would say they want one, all of whom don't have an iPhone.

See the funny thing with the iPhone is that it plays off the iPod gimmick. I'm not sure how long that momentum will last, before all the people who are whipped into thinking apple are amazing begin to ask questions. Apple has too much momentum and it'll have to spend a lot of energy keeping it up to keep people distracted from flaws. Palm however has virtually no momentum, it has no large vocal user base that it has to fear, aside from a few techies (like us) most people probably haven't even heard of Palm so it's like being a brand new player. No one knows they failed in the past, no one cares and as long as the Pre is as good as it looks in that demo then I give Palm an amazing chance as lead underdog.

I also think the Pre sits in a nice niche between iPhone and Blackberry, which will either make it huge or kill it completely depending on if it can steal customers or if it acts as a gateway drug to the iCrack/crackberry.
Not something I'd consider a splurge. It's a sizable business expense.
Kitesurfari Kiteboarding & Kite Surfing
Kiteboarding & kite surfing equipment, lessons, and travel for Los Angeles and Orange Counry area in Southern California.
That does not mean that Zimbabwe does not have a very high literacy rate - it is well known that it does because of the government policy towards education.

Compared to the rest of Africa, the Mugabe government has been pretty good, and it was generally praised a lot till the land redistribution exercise started, after which the media portrayal suddenly swung the other way.

Many people who are aware of Zimbabwe only studied the country post 2001, and those that did have their information sources mostly from sensationalist U.S or U.K based papers. They do not attempt to balance their understanding by reading alternative points of views.
wow, really impressive application (I made an account)

I couldn't get "website" resources to work? when I load them it just fails, odd!

the app wasn't full screen for me by the way, merely full window :)

How did you find Silverlight to develop in? are you on twitter? you should be :)
"I can tell from your comment that you've never used OCR"
well I just did, so erm, yeah.
Umm, ok, a UI is a fiction made up for the user by the programmer...

And how exactly is a steering wheel not a fiction made up for the user by the engineer?

Just because the steering wheel is physically connected to the car's wheels doesn't make it any more "real". It's still an abstraction on a complicated piece of machinery (in that case, a differential and power steering system for turning the wheels of the car). A browser is no different - it's an abstraction on a complicated piece of software.
Related topic: who would you consider the Kay, Hillis, etc of today?

I don't know that I would place Hillis on the same level as Kay, given the conditions of today.

Right now, Apple is making a killing by selling machines whose user interface is a descendant of Kay's work, whose programming environment is a descendant of Kay's work, and whose form factor is a descendant of Kay's dynabook concept. Kay, in effect, blueprinted today yesterday.

Hillis, on the other hand, made his impact in parallel computing. Whereas Kay's work dealt with today (yesterday), the stuff Hillis did yesterday deals with tomorrow. In the next decade or two, we might watch Hillis' work come to fruition as Kay's already has.
It's crashing both IE8 and FF3 when I attempt to type the first character in the email address field on the login page.

Silverlight version 2.0.31005.0.
the price hasn't gone down in two years, but the resources have more than tripled. . .
Well to start, rethink the EC2 web serving, you're spending more money than you need to. Consider linode or slicehost as bandwidth is way cheaper than amazon.

Second, why silverlight? The whole idea of online collaboration is allowing as many disparate people come together regardless of device. So you've thrown up roadblocks to two platforms that can no longer be considered marginal (OS X and Linux) for what is an arbitrary technology choice. At least with Flex you'll hit 98% of it and you can't sell me that silverlight has any advantage over Flex that is worth that.

I'd love to give you more feedback because I'm very interested in online collaboration, but I can't because I'm on Linux and won't install SilverLight on my mac.
Tables as independent objects on the page does sound like what I'm getting at. Of course I'd need to see it to see if they're doing it the way I want ^__^
Page not found on Microsoft site - for downloading Windows 7 key.
Ask HN: Has Anyone Used SCORE
Has anyone gone and talked to guys at SCORE for business advice on planning, resource management, establishment, financial issues, etc? I was just wondering if they were a help and how to best use their services as a start up.
It looks fun but lacks practicality.
I think silverlight could be an issue, but plenty of companys get by on windows only tools.

Why can't you install Silverlight on OS X? I had to quit my browsers then run the installer. It failed if they were open.
New Year's Resolutions for IT Pros in a Down Economy
Just type it in.
Sprint customers have been stuck with terrible phones for so long, most of them are no longer Sprint customers.

And those that are will look at the Pre and say, "What? No PTT!?"
There are still a lot of unknowns until they have a shipping product. But assuming they deliver I have a feeling that someone will buy Palm. HP? Nokia? Google?

People are making a fuss about a perceived lack of rich application development. My bet is Adobe Flash will pull it out of the bag.

The big issue in North America/Korea is that only RIM, Microsoft, and now Palm support CDMA properly. Advantage Pre.

Finally - lets see if they can get decent deals in Japan or China. Two of the largest markets - where iphone has had limited success.
You prefer doing that? I just have a bookmark on my toolbar. I never code without an internet connection, so it's easier to look at it online than store it locally.
Ruby on Rails on track for major upgrades
I've got an open support call into Microsoft about this one, not to shift the blame but it seems to be a bug with the Silverlight plugin rather than something we are specifically doing.

Thanks for the feedback!
Everyone is a Social Media Consultant
Apple IQ Test
I think the mortgage rights for 22,000 acres of oil rich land is far more than 1.8 million.
Hi! I live near NYC and would like to join the meetup.Anything I need to do to join your group or I just walk in? And you guys have any agenda?
This really makes me want to learn Rails. I wish AppEngine were closer to Heroku, so I can have my python and eat it too.
Yes. Setting comment Threshold to 4 will fetch best comments from /.

http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
* It's way too shiny. Like by a factor of a billion.
* I can't find somewhere to just click "Free - go - try it"
* And I have to install silverlight??? You've just reduced your potential market to a very small niche.
Last Moments of A Dying Mother and Her Child....in Gaza‏ [Pics]
Startup Tip: Don’t Pick A Name With "ebay" In It.
I took the decision to develop using Silverlight becuase I've got a strong background in using the Microsoft stack for development, wanted to get in on the ground floor with a new technology and follow it as it matures and becuase I wanted to (try!) to produce a richer user experience within the browser.

As I said, I understand that this is going to be a limiting factor in some regards, but I couldn't have built what I did in any other technology (that's not to say that someone else couldn't have, just for my particular circumstances).

I'm hopeful that as Silverlight adoption increases this will become less of a problem, I'm also hopeful that colaab may act as a showcase for my Silverlight abilities and lead to further contract work, which in turn can help to fund product development.

Thanks for the feedback!
Same here. I wonder what's player disposition in the USA? I've played mostly 1 - 3 - 3 - 4 and a little 1 - 3 - 4 - 3.
Interestingly, I have silverlight installed on my macbook (Until later today probably when I uninstall it).

The reason being, earlier this month I bought an xbox360 (There is no choice, be stupid and spend a ton on a ps3 with its ridiculous bluray, or be stupid and spend less on an xbo360).... I bought the lips game, and went to lips.com to see what songs you can buy. It requires silverlight... for a list of songs. I installed it reluctantly, and in the most hideously badly rendered font you can imagine, it said "Song list coming soon".
I usually read the comments because I'm slashdot-hooked. One /. meme is to not RTFA. :p
Can Authors Help Enrich Content By Tagging It?
It takes a few startups to jump in and push Silverlight into popularity. IMHO, it is a better and more open RIA technology than Flash, so I'm happy to see it used! (Although, you don't have to use it everywhere. The signup form didn't need it, for example).
Rob, have much of an ego there buddy?
Living with free music for a year
DataHub: a framework for processing large datasets
hah, you're scrolling the button, not click-dragging it.

Glad you like it though. Try using trailfocus for automatic transparency, it's much easier.
Hopefully this inspires some environmentalists with real money to do the same. Gas right now in Ontario is hovering around $0.75 a litre, but last summer it was at $1.49 (I believe was the highest I personally saw it at). I think the more restrictions are placed on oil and the higher the price stays then the less people are going to use. I mean the carpooling lanes actually have cars in now, even with the price of gas being low.

Ironically, the more people who carpool the less money all the 'pay $5 to park' lots will get, which will actually mean some new buildings can be built and probably save the economy sooner.
Thanks, really glad you liked it!

I'll take a look into your issue with the website screen grabs and get it sorted.

Yes, full window is indeed the correct term I should be using.

To be honest I found Silverlight a joy to develop in. In the past I've tried AJAX and Flash / Flex when trying to develop this kind of RIA application.

Personally I don't enjoy writing code in Javascript, and found it difficult to bring my ideas of how I wanted the user experience to come together into reality.

With Flash / Flex I could get the richer experience I was looking for but was then developing in a different application / language when working on the UI component as opposed to the back end and this was less productive.

Thanks,

Bob

p.s My twitter username is "movingforwards".
The physical keyboard note is laughable. Most iPhone users have no problems with it. I switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone and after a week of heavy keyboard use, I am now just as fast / error free.

I'm not sure exactly how the iPhone is playing off the "iPod gimmick" or what exactly the "iPod gimmick" is. The iPod is an established brand name and a very easy to use portable media player. The iPhone offers the same easy-to-use interface. Think back two years ago, and see what other smart phones were doing with media players...Blackerry's was an absolute joke, and not one of them had a halfway decent web browser.

In comes Apple and they fix most of the key issues. They made the mobile web useful and actually integrated phone and iPod into a single device. You can call that a gimmick all you want, but they were the first to do it properly. The App Store also addressed a major concern in mobile apps distribution. Since then, everyone is just copying what Apple has done and try to innovate in between. What we end up with is a poor attempt by RIM (Storm), a OS that falls behind the iPhone from Google (not to mention running on inferior hardware) and whatever trash is running on Windows Mobile.

I'm not saying that there isn't a market for the Pre, but it's market isn't going to be current iPhone users. I just don't see the Pre being a game changer at all for Apple. If they ever break exclusivity from AT&T, it's just going to get worse for the competition. There is too much momentum and not enough room for innovation.

We'll see what happens once it's released. I know one thing though...Apps are going to be the lifeblood of mobile devices in the future. If I'm an App developer and I only have one platform to release on, it's going to be the iPhone. Where will the Pre sit on this chain? I don't think it's going to be near the front.
Passwordbird generates 'quick, easy and relevant passwords'
Aha, yes. I got a bit carried away there. Currently redeveloping in ASP.NET MVC as a more standard web form!
Just show up. No agenda, but if you have some interesting project to talk about that's always a plus.
I am starting to think that Dan Lyons must have some real skeletons in his closet, to be so negative all the time.
What about having it actually correlated to progress?
It looks very cool, I just created an account. Not sure if its usefull for me, but it is at least interesting to see a nice silverlight app. Did you build it with Blend or just Visual Studio? Personally I would pick Flex due the market share it got. But silverlight is much more enjoyable to develop with. Mainly because the adobe builder is not as good as Visual Studio and Blend.
Watch Full Episodes of 24 Online
Wow; this is a very cool idea.

A few months ago, when the "financial crisis" was really spiraling out of control, I purchased the domain name transparentaccounting.org -- not entirely sure why, but thinking that one of the trends of the coming decade will indeed be transparency in accounting standards and government.

So this would be a great way to make use of that domain. I imagine that a project of this scope would require collaboration of some savvy business people & some savvy programmers. So if you're interested, please send me an email -- address found on my profile.
Thanks! It was built using a combination of Visual Studio and Blend. Tend to use blend to do a first pass at UI elements then hand crank things in VS from then on.
Very impressive. I tried a word doc and a web page...nice UI.

I'm curious about the architecture. Did you use Model View ViewModel?

How are you converting the word docs? Do you convert every type of resource to an image?
> Don't bother improving your product unless it results in visible changes the user can see, find, and hopefully appreciate.

That's ridiculous and blatantly incorrect. Users may not notice it but that doesn't mean the development team won't find it easier to understand or the support staff won't find it better to troubleshoot. It is possible to write the most convoluted code for any product that functions in the exactly the same way as the the cleanest, most-easy to understand code. The user will not notice the difference but which one would you rather want to be involved in?

Also, there are a lot of code improvements you can do that maybe nobody notices today but will certainly avoid catastrophes in the future. For example, hardening security. Most users won't notice or care about your security policies when you just release your app but once your product starts to gain traction, you should spend time making sure you improve security on a constant basis. Users do not care if you still use MD5 for hashes but you might as well go ahead and rewrite your code to use better hashing algorithm already.

There's also the financial aspect. As the business needs change, maybe you can adapt your code to perform better on cheaper hardware while giving up some potential features that you had planned on. I ran a moderately popular website that could handle 1-2m visitors/day on some beefy hardware but seeing as how most of our traffic came from embeds, I was able to switch hosts and platform and satisfy the critical load using very cheap yet stable hosting. The users did not see any performance or feature change but I saved $700/month.

So yeah, I would definitely improve code if it has more substantial, long-lasting benefits than immediately obvious to end-users.
Whats the topic
whats the topic?
Please email me to martin@domainweb.info
Where do you live? I'll hire you ;)
Longjmp - FOR SPEED
Zimbabwe does [...] have a very high literacy rate - it is well known that it does because of the government policy towards education.

Government policy does not corellate at unity with outcome. There are other factors.

Would you agree that there is probably a siginificant brain drain occurring right now in Zimbabwe?

http://news.google.com/news?q=zimbabwe+%22brain+drain%22

Would a brain drain likely affect the literacy level of a nation?
Most Dangerous Programming Errors
This is my default mode when reading HN.
cool, I proded the european amazon web services dude to check out your site - nice publicity :) (he's @simon on twitter, I'm @plc)

Maybe, MAYBE, a little too many refelctions on the site. Just my 2 cents.

Can you turn this web app into a desktop app easily with silverlight?