skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Treason" has a specific U.S. Constitutional meaning. "Aiding the enemy" is probably the nearest equivalent under U.S. military legal procedure. Either definition would fit the layman meaning of 'traitor'.

Your first paragraph is kind of worrisome though. You say that Manning meets the definition of a traitor "if you believe he intentionally leaked information which risked American security during a war". But from the military legal standpoint there is no such thing as "no harm, no foul", so really he would be a traitor "if you believe he intentionally leaked information [to an American enemy] during a war", and this is true whether or not one would go through even a neutral (or Allied!) third-party first.

Other military servicemembers have acted as actual whistleblowers, even for things far more embarrassing to the U.S. than leaked diplomatic cables (e.g. Pfc. Justin Watt, who revealed a heinous crime of rape, multiple murders, and arson committed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, or the unnamed(?) whistleblower who revealed the Abu Ghraib abuses).

The reason they ended up OK is because they were whistleblowers, and not just exfiltrating as much confidential material as they could (without even examining it all) before their security access was removed due to a previous Article 15 conviction from punching another soldier in the face.

I mention this only because I see all the time (even here on HN now) about how people think Pfc. Manning is a "whistleblower" who is being oppressed, but there's far more to that story.
I'm split on this myself. Devil's advocate, siding with the board he failed to make his goals during that time period and he also had opportunity to simply leave himself.

I think he was hedging that he would have been able to raise more VC to get through the snag, and when that didn't work It didn't appear there was a plan B.
They do this. When you click to donate you get this (in the top right):

Kickstarter does not investigate a creator's ability to complete their project. The claims and responsibilities of this project are solely its creator's.
That's my single most important take away from the last 12 months. Going slowly, doing small projects and growing as you go has helped me actually making something. The benefits were massive, reduced stress level and getting to know interesting people along the way. It's really just a small thing I'm releasing today, but it's something I take a little pride in.
How polished UI (icon) helped my iPad app's downloads (stats inside)
Indeed but they obviously seem to apply to CS as he has shown in his examples.
Thanks. Am now able to choose among the fonts supplied by the plan9port tarball.

Still would like to be able to choose a OS X system font, though.
Announcing Microsoft Roslyn September 2012 CTP
And coal plants are about the worst yield of various energy plants.

Anyway, the whole thing is moot. The article may as well say "High School Student crams stuff under hood of car, claims it will kick butt if he can get it to work". I predict we'll never know.
You think CloudFlare is infallible? I use their service but I doubt they are the first company in the history of commerce that is perfect.
But... the N... stands for Number!

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!

Potentially relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1108/
First computer powered by steam
So where do all the old ones end up?
Ok, when will it load and unload the dishes?
Yeah, I did see some glimpses of that in the video. Air formations and boat-jumping rallies, things like that. It's intriguing that somewhere inside the chaos people found a way to organize.
It's possible, but unlikely for the same sorts of reasons that the Bay Area is ever likely to be 'on par' with New York in terms of theatre. Bay Area culture accepts failed startups just as New York culture accepts failed plays. Likewise, the couch surfing ramen fueled lifestyle is fine for programmers in the Valley just like actors in New York.

Every city has a cluster of socially acceptable reasons for being broke. In New York, being an entrepreneur tends to be not among them.
Thanks for the stats share. And the nice app too, :)
The point is, most consumer buy without knowing any of that, or even trying the phone out.
The key word you used is "alpha". As the OP of this thread said, you're not buying a product, you're donating to someone (probably not a very large company with lots of resources) to develop and make something you're interested in, and in return you may get the 1.0 (or perhaps earlier) version of what you're donating for.

I don't believe it's Kickstarter's fault in any way if people view it otherwise.
Sounds great! Keep at it!
The part about "your existing switches still work" strikes me as impossible. The switches here are on/off switches ... there is no current getting to the bulbs when in off position, so there is no way of controlling the LED-bulb.

If they require to leave all switches turned on for the remote control to work, than I'd have to always turn the light off with the smartphone app. That sounds a little bit complicated ;-)
My wife has Virgin Mobile and is happy with it, and I am (or was?) planning to switch in a couple of months, once my AT&T contract runs out, so I really hope they fix this pronto.

I think it's especially important that Virgin Mobile resolves this, since the market share is basically theirs for the taking.

Their basic $35/mo. plan, which includes text and data, is great for my needs, so I called AT&T and told them I was thinking of switching, but because I'd been an AT&T customer for years, I was giving them a chance to match that kind of offer. Not only did the rep basically say, "Nope, we can't come close to matching that," but -- more surprisingly -- he had no script to say, "Here's why you shouldn't switch to Virgin." Which says to me that AT&T isn't taking Virgin seriously yet.

If Virgin Mobile can get its account security act together, I think it can make pretty good in-roads against the bigger carriers.
I absolutely agree that instead of investing, it's really a pre-order system with zero liability. If I pre-order a product from a vendor and it doesn't get delivered, I can get my money back or contest the charges but here, because you're donating to a project, it's not really on commercial terms so there's nothing you can do but give negative feedback on the project.
I'm going to ignore your condescension. I'm also going to assume you didn't read the rest of my post, because you presented no arguments to counter my points.

I'd like to point out that the wikipedia article on the Alcubierre drive writes at length to show how this warping process does not violate causality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive. I know you feel strongly about people not understanding special relativity and I actually agree with you on that point, but you're not addressing any of the valid counterpoints that people are making. You're simply closing your ears and exclaiming "special relativity" which only applies locally (if you want an appeal to authority, I talked about this with a former physicist who worked with Stephen Hawking).

1) The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. In other words, galaxies are moving away from us faster than c (evidenced by the growing redshift of light emitted by galaxies when they were NOT traveling away from us faster than c). That does not violate causality (as I mentioned in my post) because the topology of space itself is changing. Locally, everything still obeys special relativity.

2) Virtual particles, EPR Paradox (I know it's not actually a paradox). (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_partic...) My point with these phenomena is that locality and the speed of light are not very intuitive concepts. You can still have "spooky action at a distance" without violating causality.
Pebble's good {code}
Why do you want to maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people? That might the more important question.

Networking is only somewhat related to the point of Dunbar's number.
Did The Universe Just Happen? [April 1988]
Scam implies some sort of intent. There's actually a huge difference. When burned, you might call someone a dipshit. But to actually BE a dipshit, their intent matters.
Very glad to hear this. These people aren't criminals, they're researchers publishing their findings and proposed hypotheses.
Microsoft Urges Internet Explorer Users to Protect Against Targeted Attacks
your cookie database is the cookies of your website visitors

What do your future customers call it? If there's one thing I remember from patio11's podcast that was posted here yesterday, it's that you must use your customers' language --- their terms, their jargon. Not yours.
Yes, because summarily removing all of that spending would certainly have no drastic follow-on effects to the national economy.
One of the first thing I do in Hacker News or Reddit when seeing sensational headlines (cancer can be cured!) is checking the posts to find out what's wrong with the claim. In most cases it's the highest voted comment. I think Kickstarter would profit from a similar moderation system. Posts where users can add flags like "will work" "won't work" and some voting system so you can easily see the highest voted comment(s) with one of those flags. Or alternatively a normal forum to allow real discussions about projects would also be a major improvement. Although there needs to be a careful decision then who can cleanup spam as you wouldn't want project moderators to allow removing all critics without any consequences.

The currently used comment system there is just horribly insufficient - it's basically impossible to have any real discussion there.
Kickstarter supports the arts. Many, many people support artistic endeavors solely for the tshirt and the satisfaction. Its the larger part of their base.
This seems better to me https://gist.github.com/2843375
Getting started with Grails Hackathon
Isn't it possible to love someone because they are the kind of person who is considered economically valuable by society? Such a person is romantically desirable because they offer more resources and their offspring are more likely to survive to adulthood.

(sort of an evolutionary biology / Ayn Rand-ian concept, of course, but I see this kind of reverence for 'the best' coming from some people)
It's Ruby code
Pragmatic Software Development Tips
Right, and for a bonus "hand" wash things that don't fit in the dishwasher.
I guess everyone has their own mental picture of what spaghetti code is. Mine refers specifically to the old days of the early web when html and code where so heavily intertwined that is was impossible to determine what was code and what was markup. Flashbacks of enormous pages of string concatenation with with tons of escaping where the layout of the html page dictated the flow of the code. Fun times.
Oh, in that case, I am in absolute agreement.
I thought Moissanite* had a place in the jewellery industry nowadays?

*I knew that some people tried to pass them off as diamonds, but after a quick wiki I guess Moissanite always had distinct features from a diamond.
This is so sweet! I gotta try this soon! Thanks for the links!
Of course it may happen that becoming more visible in the universe would provoke impossible to defeat enemies against us. But the argument for this is purely hypothetical and one could similarly make an argument that sitting around on our rock and not expanding could end in us being wiped out (cf.: Every primitive culture on Earth ever wiped out by explorers/settlers).

It seems impossible to decide which way is safer with our current information, so I'm for expanding/exploring till we know more.
I've been curious lately about how robotic arms are designed and built. Do you have any beginner resources you could point me to?
Twitter announces profile page changes
I think religion plays second fiddle to every other factor out there. It's more often justification than motivation.

The thing is that I can't think of any religion or non-religion that hasn't had extremely violent organizations use their ideology as a basis for this sort of thing.

I was attending a Christian church in Jakarta once (no I am not really a Christian, and partly because of this), and the preacher recommended trying to convert Buddhist children as practice for converting Muslims. The thing is though that this wasn't well received by the Congregation even though it fit in perfectly well with their worldview. They chose to do something different with their religion and not be one minority victimizing another. People choose what to do with their religion. Blame people, not what books they read.
I'm sure there's a lot of following the herd.

I like to think that I got an iPhone after carefully considering all the alternatives and making an informed technical analysis because I am a unique individual and I would never follow the herd or copy other peoples' actions. (At least that's what I tell myself.)
Intent is difficult to measure.

Money on the other hand, is very easy to measure. So are your legal obligation as a merchant.

If you sell something online, and the person on the other side never receives it, that's mail fraud. No matter what your intensions were.

caveat: As a merchant you also have legal protections in this case, which is where refunds, reshipping, etc. come in.
FireHost Lands Another $10 Million to Grow Its Secure Cloud Hosting Business
Coal plants may be the least efficient, but they're the most common source of electricity in the US. To be fair, I picked the most optimistic efficiency I could find for a coal plant. I was trying to present a best-case scenario.

It looks like the best case with natural gas is 60%, or 35% total system efficiency. Yes, that's a significant gain over 26%, but it's a best-case scenario. The real-world efficiency of the most efficient internal combustion cars is fairly similar to that of electric cars.
Twitter Blog: Because you have more to show
On what grounds? Can you provide more detail? Would rather not have the site be blocked if I can help it..
I just got my elevation dock last week. I've left it in the box until I figure out the iPhone 5 situation. Might just keep it as a paperweight. But I agree with you, it was ridiculously delayed
> We also generally agree, in 2012, that goto is flat-out inappropriate for source code in most modern programs. Exceptions to this policy exist, but they’re extremely rare.

No, we don't agree. In C, goto is very often the best way to deal with error paths. It is used in the Linux kernel and in many other important (open source or not) applications.
I doubt those qualify as rare.
I don't agree `goto` is all bad. Whilst the OP said there are exceptions, they didn't list them. An ideal use (in C) is to ensure that in an error state, resources are cleaned up properly by jumping to error handling code (within the same function).
New Twitter for iPad
The Longevity of Rankings
They could've OEM'd the lamp, for example, from Phillips. And a tiny-factor WiFi gadgets is hardly a rocket science, products like EyeFi has been around for several years. There's really nothing in the project that screams what you say it does.

[0] http://www.eye.fi
The argument for not introducing a 'var' keyword equivalent seems to be "Javascript's implementation sucks", completely glossing over the fact that really it's the lack of block scoping and the presence of undefined that leads to variable 'hoisting' and related issues.

CoffeeScript removes the latter, and the former is a lot easier to introduce once you have explicit variable declaration.

Seems kinda a circular argument to me.
Oo I agree, see my comment at the same time!
Security by obscurity is NOT security. If this kind of transparency results in an increased number of successful attacks, then they will be forced to implement more adequate security. This is a Good Thing.
Dice Holdings Pays $20M Cash For Slashdot, SourceForge And Freecode From Geeknet
Salesforce.com quietly bought an Israeli startup called BlueTail in July
That is not the worst case
Then that example can be applied to the Surface tablet* and any manufacturer's laptop -- no (TM) there.

But even then, what makes a hardware product different from an advertisement or a software? As far as I know, there's no legal text on the bottom of these hardware products either.

*I don't think there's a (tm) symbol there
Try this one here: http://www.yunicon.net/
It's a medium size company in Berlin with awesome customer service.
He was 16 when he started the build and was using an AMG Mercedes ($100k car) to pick up parts.

I'm going to assume he comes from a fairly well off family.
I believe the full data set is available here:

http://data.gov.uk/dataset/cloudstore_catalogue_version
Business apps integration platform
A way to integrate your business apps is using a service such as CloudWork which provides tasks automation between different applications. Now in beta, soon the platform will be available in the full version.
How to develop Android Applications in Java
Should Google and Microsoft pay OEMs to use their OSs?
The author forgot to attach his sources.
In the video, the guy literally says "For $69 dollars, you are essentially pre-ordering a LIFX smartbulb." (4:11) That's one of the major misconceptions people have about Kickstarter and these guys are playing right into it.
Immediately, the opening paragraph states that this service would be useful to "college students." However, Bitbucket offers their full unlimited package to college students with a .edu account, and this account lasts for a lifetime, even after graduation. Perhaps you could offer this deal to college students as well.
Resizing images before upload using html5 canvas
no link at all to the story that precedes this one? :/
75% of Windows 8 developers do it in XAML/C#, 20% use HTML/JS
Most US banks are that way. Almost all, in fact. I thought it was a law until I joined a credit union which lets me change my PIN at their ATMs.
> So my feeling is that both Kickstarter and the tech blogosphere should start being a lot more skeptical about the claims made in Kickstarter videos, where anybody can say pretty much anything.

Isn't the problem more along the lines of "amateur investors making amateur investments"? Is it Kickstarter's fault if people believe the "pretty much anything" that can be said in a video?
Excellent! I'd love to see more companies follow suit. I have a bunch of 'logowear' and it annoys me greatly when a company puts TM or R after its logo on shirts, hats, jackets, etc. It seems absurd to me to need to protect their mark so vigorously on clothing when it's a tech company -- I don't mind seeing TM/R in advertisements, on their website, etc. but don't place it on clothing!
I find a discrete model of spacetime very attractive, for much the same reason given here; the real continuum is intuitively too big for space to run on it. I took an interest in the causal sets approach to quantum gravity for this reason.

However, unfortunately, there's simply no evidence for it. There's an argument that discrete spacetime would lead gases to heat up over time, but this hasn't been observed to happen, so either the discrete structure of the universe is pretty small, or it really is continuous.
I seriously doubt they just up and decided to take all your money. What policy or agreement did you violate?
Yes, it is totally irrational. Yes, it is manipulated by marketing. Yes, it is what it is. If you go mental at every irrational (as far as the purchase goes) act caused by marketing controlling social norms, well, you'll go insane. Human nature is obsessed with status symbols - always has and always will - these impulses are there for marketers to interpret and direct.

+1 ... HN is full of engineers who like to think that we are superior because we are not susceptible (ha!) to this irrationality. But of course we live in the human, social world, and it's good to understand these things, even if we seek to push back against them.
Sorry for the imprecision. It's the same thing to Python, in terms of significant whitespace. Language features that use whitespace for structure are not considered to be expressions, and can't be used as part of a larger computation. In CoffeeScript, they are, and can.
The Linley Group - Apple Designed Own CPU For A6
Well, C isn't a particularly modern language.
The original article is here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/what-is-spagh...

(yes, this is actually a michaelochurch article for some reason syndicated on jelastic?)
It should be trivial for anyone who understands HTTP and a for loop to reimplement.
I reread their product description and I still stand by my opinion

And even the article says (and they agree it's an OEM lamp):

"The Lifx is priced at $49 per bulb, which means that you’re basically buying a basic WeMo switch and getting the LED bulb — and all the technology merging the two into one bulb-sized piece of hardware — for free. It just doesn’t seem likely."

They can prove me wrong, sure, by shipping the product.
Wow, sounds cool! I could use something like that that to make these bingo cards I need.
I can think of a language that forces the programmer to create spaghetti, but it is much more ubiquitous than Ruby.
If it makes you happy then it's rational.
Most large service providers disallow ICMP (which prevents these types of ping attacks), unfortunately that also messes with path MTU discovery. One potential way of dealing with these bot nets forging source IPs is to perform an analysis on the IP TTLs -- if a single source is sending you a large amount of traffic, I wouldn't expect to see widely varying IP TTLs as the majority of packets should take the same number of hops to reach you. If a bot net army, distributed around the globe, is spoofing the source IP, I'd expect to see a wide variance in the IP TTLs and thus know that something was up (and thus blackhole traffic claiming to be from that source IP).
I sent your article to my partner this morning and she tried to access it on her phone on the Virgin Mobile UK network.

She couldn't access the article or your homepage. I just asked her to try again and it's being caught in their adult content filters or something. False positive? Maybe there is some adult content on the site?

Maybe another Virgin Mobile UK user can try it. They presumably would still have to have their content filters active.
I'm a Virgin Media customer in the UK. My home internet connection stopped working recently and (long story short) in dealing with trying to fix it, it turns out my main login password for their service can be accessed by support staff. This means the password is being stored in plaintext.

I was contacted to ask about how customer services dealt with me and I stated how unbelievably insecure their (my!) data must be. This was the straw that finally broke my password insecurity camel's back - I now use KeePass to generate all my passwords.

I wonder if any big telcos actually treat customer data appropriately?
Yes, but a lot of software is written in C and continues to be written in C. There isn't really a replacement.
In the United States, you can deny it all you want. It will make you a certified dick, but you can do it.
The get-out, of course, is that neither the projects nor Kickstarter are actually selling anything.
This is such awesome advice. Find and hire one good lawyer, who the deals with all your other lawyers.

It might not apply if your investors have their own legal muscle that they can introduce. But, if you are <10 employees, it is insanely expensive (manpower-wise) to deal with finding, retaining, and managing decent legal counsel (to say nothing of replacing them due to a sudden conflict of interest, when you unexpectedly find yourself facing a huge firm like Apple/J&J/Halliburton/etc, who seemingly contract 99% of all law firms).
The reverse sensor programming reminds me of cg animation auto-keyframing.