skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an important and interesting discussion, and I appreciate your viewpoint from the "inside" as it were. Let me try to explain my civilian perspective.

As one of the (unwilling) funders of the Afghan war, I believe it's in my best interest to have as much truthful information available to me as possible, although of course there are a very few specific things that need to be kept secret, at least for a time. However, as the leaked documents showed, we as funders were being provided a very distorted picture of what was actual happening. As the LA Times said, commenting on the leaks, "no democracy can or should fight a war without the consent of its people, and that consent is only meaningful if it is predicated on real information."

With respect to the harmful effects of what was leaked:
"In October, the Pentagon concluded that the leak "did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods", and that furthermore 'there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak."

Manning's motives may not have been completely pure, but I still strongly believe that he did the right thing.
spammers can easily figure out they can just remove everything from the + sign, including the sign itself, and boom, they have my address without the specific alias.

Do they in fact do this?
The title made no sense, then I read this:

LISP: Locator/ID Separation Protocol (essentially a way to separate network location information from user identification information).

For a moment before I read that I thought the OpenFlow folks went overboard with adding intelligence to the network :)
This is visually very interesting. You can tell that there is a lot of care being put into the transitions and all. It's a pretty competitive market out there in terms of "to do lists". With a good UI, it gives you a fighting chance. Sure it might not be for everyone, but that's the point. Segment the market and fight for your share.

How did you find backbone and D3. Do they play well together in terms of overall code maintainability? What worked and what didn't?
He also hinted at a radical new product, some social Groupon 2.0 platform that never came to fruition. I'm more curious about that in retrospect and what happened. The real story at that moment in time was the flowering of hundreds of Groupon clones.

"This guy" ...Get off it. Ideas > events > people. Leave it to HN, tearing down the mainstream success stories of our clan in ever decreasingly creative ways.

BTW, he wasn't a happy guy. He described very clearly at that event he forgot what being happy felt like while building GRPN. Sorry to bust your editorial bubble, but when you make a bold + false assertion, your detractors will use it to debase your entire narrative.

I'm learning that for a certain segment of humans the presence of rich people bring out claws and fangs, like a full moon.
I've started blogging recently... Here's my latest
Andrew Mason's Github Account
Great list of resources for startup marketing
I am making no implications or analogies; I am simply asking a hypothetical question in response to the parent post. Why does volunteering to follow some code make it morally wrong to blow the whistle?
My opinion is that Daniel Ellsberg supports Manning for the simple reason that it aids his own activism, even if the facts are not 1:1 the same as his case was.

And that's kind of an important point: Ellsberg helped author the Pentagon Papers and knew full well the import of what he leaked (to an American paper, btw, not Soviet, N. Vietnamese, or neutral party). Despite having a Top Secret clearance Ellsberg didn't leak other classified information that he may have had access to, as it didn't pertain to the lies that the government was feeding the public at the time.
I'm a big fan of presentation-free markup and IMHO, SASS offers a good way to achieve it with mixins. Look at this article, it pretty much covers that topic.
http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2009/09/20/why-styleshe...

The idea is to get something like this :

@mixin three-column {
.container { @include container; }
.header,
.footer { @include column(24); }
.sidebar { @include column(6); }
article { @include column(10); }
.rightbar { @include column(8); }
}

body#article,
body#snippet,
body#blog-post { @include three-column; }

I describe the whole thing with examples here:
https://github.com/niclupien/compass-examples/wiki/Example-0...
I really do love all of these, but I hate knowing that few are viable, and few will ever be real products.
"Awesome ideas" are exactly why we built LaunchSky.com
-- a tool to quickly and effectively validate if an idea is truly viable (and needed).

If you go to LaunchSky.com now, we've locked off free invites, and have the submissions we'll be using for our launch -- but these are really good.

If the OP or any posters of the ideas on that medium page want a free credit to post it on LaunchSky.com -- email me: Vlad (at) DarwinApps.com and I'll hook it up with a free credit to LaunchSky for you.

Just screenshot the medium.com part of the post and send it from the email you'd like the free credit to go to.
Anyone that clueless couldn't possibly use whatever other solution to this problem.
Nobody's proposing a ban on sugar.
The fact that whistleblowing through official channels sometimes works does not prove that it always does. In the chat logs Lamo released, Manning cites one of his motivations as being how his superiors did not at all care about some of the corruption he found.

And I don't see why you see a distinction between what Manning did and what Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg doesn't see much of a difference: http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-19/us/wikileaks.ellsberg.man...
Manning had Gigabytes of secret documents and cables. He didn't know what was in them. Even if no one died, he sure as heck didn't know that when he gambled on releasing them. Therefore he was playing God.

Second, if you search through this entire comment thread you will find links to NYTimes articles about them actual damage caused.
He did a full dump of information regardless of whether or not the information was related to his cause.

...to a journalist, to vet and release as appropriate. It's not like he just uploaded it to The Pirate Bay or something.
It doesn't belong on HN. But I read it, and... well... I just could not help upvoting it. Sometimes a judge can abuse her powers, and we hear those stories from time to time. This time a judge used her powers to transform the world in a wonderful way.
I covered this. To repeat, we probably won't ever get proof of any particular death from the leaks, but we knew the leaks included information on groups of people that we know bad guys were actively seeking out for jailing, torturing, and killing, and so the odds are high that some are or will be killed from the leaks.

It's similar to the way we can conclude that smoking has killed people via lung cancer, even though it is impossible or nearly so to pin any particular lung cancer death on smoking. People get lung cancer who do not smoke and do not spend time with smokers, and so any particular death might be due to one of those instances of lung cancer.

There's also common sense. The Taliban is known to target people who they discover are committing certain acts that they consider to be offenses (which is why US forces were keeping an eye on those people, and thus why those people turned up in US reports). It seems unlikely that they would consider, say, educating girls, to no longer be an offense if they first learn about it through a leaked US report.
For context, check out the video of the presentation where I made this point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiPe7DPmEgE.

TL;DR: to build efficient applications in the browser, you do need to understand how the browser works. Just like understanding how an operating system works will help you design good applications for the OS (especially when it comes to performance).
No, there are not. FoxIt and similar 3rd party readers are not any more secure.
tl; dr Email that abstracts away device distinctions between mobile and desktop, letting them share what email's open so that when you sit down the email you were looking at on your phone is on your desktop

Critique: weighing of -> weighting of
Playing with ECMAScript Harmony Modules using Traceur
That's all true, but how does it make what Manning did a bad thing? What I think it comes down too is whether or not you think the U.S is a force for good in the world or not.
I've lived/worked in both the USA and France, and this guy's comments are so transparently uninformed. To simplify things greatly: In France, there is more time off, but people are more sérieux while at work. In France, time off is taken outside of work, while in the US, time off is taken at work -- at the coffee machine, on reddit, chatting about banal stuff with coworkers, complaining about stuff (that's usually related to working too much)...

On a different note, I've noticed numerous CEOs lately bringing up politics in reference to their work. The most common example is, "my company isn't doing as well as expected, and it's a certain politician's fault, not mine." Gotta love the personal responsibility, there.
There should be a specialization: some people are specialized in coding, others - in something else. A group of specialists together is better than a group of those who can do several things just not too bad.
I got the email earlier this morning. I'm not quite sure exactly how it works, but I have a shiny new REST API which could use some load testing before we unleash it on the public.
Well you don't get to complain about official channels when you don't make any attempt to use them. I mentioned how Pfc. Watt didn't trust his superiors on purpose to show that you could still blow the whistle with a non-sympathetic chain-of-command.

For Ellsberg I'll just paste my comment from below:

My opinion is that Daniel Ellsberg supports Manning for the simple reason that it aids his own activism, even if the facts are not 1:1 the same as his case was.

And that's kind of an important point: Ellsberg helped author the Pentagon Papers and knew full well the import of what he leaked (to an American paper, btw, not Soviet, N. Vietnamese, or neutral party). Despite having a Top Secret clearance Ellsberg didn't leak other classified information that he may have had access to, as it didn't pertain to the lies that the government was feeding the public at the time.
Amazon customer service for their buyers is pretty great, in my experience. I broke my Kindle (stepped on it) and they sent me a brand new one, no questions asked. I've heard stories that their customer service for seller is terrible, however.
Why is Dropbox letting volunteer moderators represent them so poorly? Dropbox is a grown up company now, train and pay a couple people to moderate, or at least make it more clear they're volunteers not employees of the company.
now if you want to use the zerigo dns addon, you have to add the site via heroku's website or cli before you can set records for it.

if you're on basic/free they forbid this.
"In the US, time off is taken at work."

I never thought of it that way, but that is spot on. As an entrepreneur I used to wonder how people work 8 hour days behind a computer for $10 an hour. After a while I realized they don't.
But we know the human brain doesn't work like that anyway. My life is, in almost all aspects, better than the vast majority of the people in the world, but that doesn't stop my brain from making me feel completely awful when something bad (relatively) happens. Your brain doesn't say 'well, you've been fired from the company you worked for for 5 years, but hey, at least you have fresh drinking water'.
A quick summary of the difference between this and existing implementations of deflate such as gzip or zlib:

Deflate combines two compression techniques: Huffman coding to replace each value with a string of bits whose length depends on the frequency of that value, and backreferences of the form "go back N bytes and repeat M bytes from there". (Glossing over a pile of fun interactions between those two, such as Huffman-coding both literals and backreferences, and Huffman-coding the Huffman tables. Not to mention the ability to have M > N, repeating the earlier parts of the thing you backreferenced. See RFC1951, https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951 , for the full details.)

Existing deflate implementations use various heuristics to guess when they should encode the next bit of data as a literal symbol or a backreference, such as a hash table of possible strings to backreference; the compression level (-1 through -9) tunes those heuristics to take more or less time, most notably by changing the lengths of strings stored and searched for for in the hash table.

Zopfil says it uses "more exhaustive compression techniques" based on "iterating entropy modeling and a shortest path search algorithm to find a low bit cost path through the graph of all possible deflate representations." The entropy modeling allows Zopfil to estimate the effectiveness of a given approach to deflate. The path-search algorithm effectively treats the space of all possible deflate representations as a single-player game, with "moves" that change the representation in some incremental way, and then uses standard search algorithms to find a near-optimal representation.

(Without reading the source in detail, I don't know whether the search space includes the choice of Huffman tables, the set of possible backreferences, or both. I can see how either one could map onto a search space, though.)
What should everyone do instead? And who will then write code if no one learns?
The Clouds Next Killer Apps
Your post has a few small inaccuracies... The media weren't helpful for what should have been the story of the decade. The info was filtered at least once before publicizing it.

However there is also a bias in tone of your post. Reminds me of those I have heard before regarding whistle-blower Police officers. Fellow officers are highly motivated to dig up any dirt and paint a picture that the person is nuts and didn't belong, or had a vendetta, etc, etc. Rather than the scenario where an honest person decided they had enough.

Each case is different of course, so pardon the bluntness, but your post is exactly what I'd like to hear if I were a fellow soldier.
Could not disagree more.

Just because you will not become a computer scientist or full time engineer does not mean you won't have value in your life by understanding more about how software and computing works.

All businessmen are not accountants, but you still take a basic financial accounting class when you major in business. It teaches you the basics of how things are organized and why certain things are measured the way they are. Learning the basics of programming could serve the same purpose. Kids would learn how to break problems in to algorithms and what sorts of things are even possible with software, helping them gain an appreciation for why software works the way it does. And unlike accounting and its relationship to business, pretty much everyone in a first world country uses software throughout their life often for several hours a day.
Let's start with everyone learning some math, first. Particularly probability & statistics.
We were also hit by the iContact breach.

We lost a lot of trust with customers since we had a kind of low-rent image to start with (discount software bundles). The worst part was they never really owned up to it - the blog post just said they were "investigating it". They never followed up, then they redesigned their site and the blog post mysteriously disappeared. Assholes.
I support the 'Learn to Code' trend, insofar that programming has the ability to empower people. e.g. Being able to automate a tedious boring or building your own blog is an amazing feeling that I do believe today's youth/generation ought to experience.

Overall, I think that the minority of programmers who are afraid of the wave of poor-programmers seeping into the field shouldn't hinder the coding movement.
seamless, grubhub, eat24. There are lots of such services.
It fascinates me how desperate folks are to excuse Dropbox. I wonder why - is it because they're a startup?
If you give a man a match, he may start a fire, cook food, and feed the hungry, or he may burn down every house in a five mile radius. Everyone will point the finger at what might happen. So as cool as this is, I bet it could lead to some serious legal issues.
Ask HN: How can I direct my experience towards renewable energy?
I'm a computer engineer with 15 years experience on a variety of platforms, architectures, programming languages and so on.

I'm currently looking for a bit more. Although it's a huge field, I feel like I've done my time learning and doing things around 'computers'. I see a big future in renewable energy, not just as a new industry, but because I'm as passionate about it as I was 15 years ago when I discovered programming.

I'd be interested to see any thoughts or ideas from people involved in or passionate about the field.
wat.

That's like saying no one should learn to draw because they might draw better than a "real" artist. Or no one should learn woodworking because they saw a nice table once but they'll never fully understand it and they'll build shitty things. I don't get the point of this article at all.

Coding is a craft! A really powerful, accessible, incredibly-sharable craft.
have you ever worked on a real project?

In some places specialists are quite nice, but in most situations, there is nothing worse than a person who says "oh, I won't touch that, I only deal with X".
It’s a Worldwide Dance Craze, but It’s Not the Real ‘Harlem Shake’
Great..so they've fixed that one problem. What about all the rest of the bugs? For example, I was just bitching at them earlier today [0] about the 13-month old bug [1] which prevents uninstalling virtualenv packages on the cedar stack. Seriously, check out the workarounds listed in the stackoverflow link, they are pretty desperate.. the situation is ridiculous.

Certain aspects of Heroku, and especially some of the people who work there, are excellent. However, it seems like there are chronic systemic problems with how the organization monitors/checks quality.

[0] https://twitter.com/jtaylor/status/307261409262202880

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/15087542/293064

edit: added a missing comma
I don't at all disagree with ensuring that the public has all of the information available to them that can possibly be provided; that's already how it's supposed to work.

I'm not on the inside of the Army but I'll say that much of what was leaked (as described by the Guardian, et al) was not that surprising, but that's because I was paying attention to existing public-source news, blogs, etc.

But if Manning managed to only leak material that was already kind of out there, that was only by sheer luck (the first nuclear bomb killed no one after all; it was detonated in the middle of nowhere).

> With respect to the harmful effects of what was leaked

This is what we call "no harm; no foul". It's not something I believe in with regard to classified information (at least when you can't be bothered to actually read through the classified information).

The reasoning is simple: Let's say for example that I tie you down and move to shoot you and realize I'm out of ammo. So I duck out of the hut to get more, and when I return you've been freed by a passing bystander.

No harmful effects came to you, right? So I should just be free to go, right? No harm, no foul, after all.
Book shelves - garage door design idea
Basic accounting class is equal to the basic computer class. You'll learn just very general things like "this is computer and here's what it does"
Almost 10% of Afghans speak English. Pretty sure the Taliban can read the doc dump.
Brain-to-Brain. Via Internet.
I've always thought the main reason to "learn to code" is not immediately practical, but rather the same as learning math or literature: it introduces a new sort of thinking and expands your mind. Programming is essentially an accessible form of logic, something missing from most people's educations (including their math classes!).

Learning the mindset and the perspective is the most important thing. The practical benefits are just a bonus. They do not have to be particularly extensive.
No, that is not "basically" what is patented here. You have to read the whole claim. And if a claim refers back to an earlier claim as a dependent ("the apparatus of claim x, further comprising...") then it also incorporates all of the limitations of that earlier claim.
How else will you compare a 2300 calorie diet of healthy foods with a 2300 calorie diet of unhealthy foods?
Not everyone should be a software developer by trade.

However, learning to code, even a little bit, can make everyone just a bit more effective. Even if that coding is in Excel and VBA. Especially if that coding is in Excel and VBA.
Founder of Dropbox is a YC alum, and HN is likely visited by a lot of the employees
The claims define what a patent covers. You're not quoting from the claims.
I fully agree.

I also find the duration and character of his pre trial detention to be unconscionable. I believe it is reasonable to suspect him of crimes which, if guilty, would warrant decades or life in prison.

Yet, it may be that he should be released to punish the government for his detention and prevent them from doing the same in the future.
Show HN: Spoiler free e-sports (youtube/twitch skin)
I've put together a web app for watching spoiler free starcraft2 and also keep track of team livestreams! Let me know what you think!

keep in mind it's just version one at www.spoilerfreecasts.com

The site 1.) hides how many games are left in a "best of" series and 2.) hides the time remaining in a game. 3.) Intelligently loads comments, so as to not spoil the result. Honest feedback is requested
Well I stand corrected then. Continue on with your heart string party.
I'm not a professional but wanted to look into bootstrap for a while. Your Jetstrap finally made me get on the bandwagon and I was able to look at the potential in a single day no less!. Thanks.

I think it would be even better if you were to showcase some example websites on your landing page. I'd wish to see what others are building with Jetstrap.
Agreed. It is very weird how english illiteracy is not tolerated where as mathematical illiteracy is the norm.
In my point of view a man with a deep understanding of its time is congratulating another one for successfully hacking a vicious system.
Don't let the 20th century marxists (or the cold war propaganda) ruins your perception of Marx's genius. Lincoln's importance is more obvious. Both men changed the world for better (IMO Marx is not to be blamed for any dictatorship atrocities). A Nelson Mandela quote resume pretty much for me both of their ideoligical legacies: "Money won't create success, the freedom to make it, will."

That said, I think its counterproducent for people who love to claim that are trying to change the world, underestimate the significance of history. And this letter is, at least for me, a unique, yet not well known, piece for understanding history.
P.S. I'm trying to figure out what learning-to-code resources adults who don't yet code would be in to, or where you'd tell your non-programmer friends to start if they expressed an interest.

Fill out this survey! http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RCP98L5 Or write it out in the comments!
Care to share any of your experiences in building a startup using .NET? It's refreshing to see something outside node, go, haskell, RoR, etc.
SocialBusinessFramework
I am a big fan of the "Learn to Code" movement, and I agree that Statistics should be even HIGHER priority than coding - data-based reasoning & communication are almost an absolute necessity for <b>any</b> field.

Also the job prospects are probably just as strong for data analytics folks, even if the median salaries don't match software folk