skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obvious Prediction: Apple fan boys will continue to claim that any feature on an Apple product is well designed and works and will, sight unseen, claim that any feature on a competing product is not well designed and doesn't work. :-)

Edit: I should have mentioned the other obvious prediction: Get downvoted to oblivion by Apple fan boys for daring to critique the cult of Apple. :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks - Committed by a Gulf War veteran.

This is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I remember several other incidents through the years in which a former soldier shot up a public place or killed innocent civilians here in the US.

I can't offer any statistics about the relative percentage when compared with postal workers, but it would be interesting to see, I think.
Great to see some figures on snopes. 7-8 million uniques per month, $3000 bandwidth bill, 2 staff.

With those sorts of numbers I'm sure they could optimise and monetize the site better than that. I bet if they had a paid email list ($5-10/yr)where you got the debunks/explanations 24-48 hours ahead of anyone else you'd get quite a few conversiosns. Maybe even enough revenue to change the horrid site design and clunky search.

Great site though.
ah your right I put in additional words. That is weird though since its only for the embedded bing search.
Trying to post the YouTube video to Facebook allowed for the link but none of the usual meta data or embedded video.
This whole thread is anecdotal, but they are still interesting anecdotes, so here goes. Here's my experience with these companies:

Microsoft: Interviewed with them for an Internship. Very organized, on campus recruiting followed by a fly up and an offer a couple months after the job fair where I submitted my resume.

Amazon: Interviewed for a full time job. I went through two rounds of interviews with one team in under two weeks from submitting my resume; they said my domain-knowledge wasn't a good fit for that team but another team was interested. About two months passed before any follow-up on that, but once that did happen I had three rounds of interviews with that team and an offer within three weeks.

Google: Interviewed with them for an internship. Gave my resume to them. Did not hear anything for about 2 months. Then I got a notification that they wanted to schedule the first round of an interview. Great. Another two months pass, no updates. I get another offer and let them know they have only a few weeks to decide.

Near the end of that few weeks, they call to schedule a phone interview for the following day. Based on one hour-long phonecall with a manager who asked pretty much just basic screener questions, they give me an offer later that day. At that point, for all they knew I could have been someone who could barely code! Granted, this was for an internship so the downside risk to Google was much lower: the internship would have essentially been an expensive three-month interview.

Interestingly, Google and Microsoft did not even consider my resume for full-time positions. The Microsoft recruiter even handed my resume back to me at a recruitment fair, which is the only time I've ever seen that happen! The reason was I did not have a Bachelors degree because I had left to do a startup. When my startup folded, I thought that the experience that had left me would allow me to find something at any of the major big companies (where I could save cash and get ready my next startup), and fortunately Amazon did see this as a positive while Google and MS were hung up on the degree.
GE (a massive player in the military industry) is a major stakeholder in MSNBC/NBC. They make a lot of the parts that go in the helicopters involved in this latest video.

I think this one can be filed squarely under "malice."

Edit: updated for accuracy.
And yet: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34149853/
You can release a new version all at once and avoid user gripes by launching the new version on a subdomain so users can get used to it. Digg did this with their last version and probably will with V4. Facebook and Zappos did as well.
An April Fools' joke. Was already posted as:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1235167
Also worth noting: I viewed the video on YouTube this morning (6 hours ago aprox.) and the View counter has not changes from 359 in all that time.

I see more comments so I do not believe this is a browser cache issue.

Or maybe YouTube doesn't update that value on the fly? Anyone know more?
No offense, but the fact that you can only think of two use cases for 3rd party app multitasking isn't really a very compelling reason not to include it in a smartphone os. It's the awesome use-cases that nobody has thought of yet that are being stifled by this limitation.
I know the author IRL and he's one of the nicest people I know. He's also incredibly whip-smart and, I suspect, the reason why it's so unnerving interviewing with him is that he can surgically hone in on your exact areas of weakness and gaps in your knowledge.

People who have survived all these years on pretty lines of bullshit and puffed up records will find the interview process harrowing. People who are smart, humble & enthusiastic should do fine.
I would bet that "wikileaks video" will not work soon, too.
Speed is important, but it takes a good part of a year for a new engineer to get up to speed. Compared to that, an extra week (which is what the HC introduces) for better selection is worth it.
Like I said, they have the excuse of being in a war. It's, however, unacceptable that their training resulted in such a lapse of judgement and less acceptable that the officers in charge opted to cover up the problem.

Even if they are not charged with "reckless shooting of civilians", the civilians killed in this incident deserve an inquiry and changes in the procedures and rules that allowed it to happen so that it doesn't happen again.

Because if it does, and, I would risk it did happen many times - they just did not kill Reuters employees, those civilians died in vain.

And, of all regrettable incidents that day, this would be the least acceptable of them all.
People are missing that the helicopter was called in by ground forces who were getting fired upon. This is from the unedited video at 15:23:

"Bushmaster to all elements: Which element called in Crazyhorse to engage the eight man team on top of the route?"

"Bushmaster six, this is hotel-two-six, I believe that was me. They had AK-47s and were to our east, where we were taking small arms fire. Over."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik

Looks like the helicopter wasn't flying around and saw a group randomly - it was called into a combat region to support ground troops under fire. Still a bad situation, but a bit different than it's being made out.
After all, an iPod touch is an iPad nano. ;-)
It's a delicate balance, actually. If you price your apps too cheap, people with no real interest will buy them, run it once, uninstall it and give it one star.
Do you mind explaining how you get to your number of 9.5 bits? I'm just trying to understand this. It seems like you have to iterate through the variations one at a time - just because turning the dial quickly lets you iterate through them quickly doesn't mean you're not actually going through them one by one. I don't see how turning the dial and pressing a button are different in that regard other than you can iterate with a dial much faster than with a button.

I guess I mostly don't see how he defines turning a dial as being equal to 9.5 bits. I understand why he says it would take that many bits to store that decision, but not how a dial gets you there.
Definitely better... No question. I actually prefer it to the desktop because of the double tap to center and zoom your screen on a paragraph of text or a picture. Using the iPad for a while and then going back to the iPhone makes me feel like the phone is a toy. This device is actually letting me read some PDFs that I have been putting off for a while because reading PDFs on the computer screen is just so damn inconvenient. Reading it on the iPad is very sharp and overall a good user experience.

I do wish this thing had competing web browsers like chrome and opera but safari is ok for now.
The gun camera video doesn't seem to have been picked up by any mainstream US news outlets, at least, not that show up on Google News. It's on the BBC's front page. This seems odd to me.
That is incorrect. MSNBC is owned by NBC Universal which Comcast bought a 51% stake in the company to GE's 49%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_Universal
I left when I was 29. There were enough grad students/vet school students to keep me going until then.

Edit: also, Schlitz for $0.86.
Web Laureate Insight, "Zivity: a positive proclivity for exciting activity"
YouTube is always slow updating its view counter (certainly several hours if not a day behind). Completely normal, but certainly already started more than one conspiracy theory :)
That's interesting, but I'm not seeing the same thing...

I have two accounts, one that I signed up for my freshman year and another that I signed up for when I transferred schools. I haven't signed into the former in about 4 years but just did so and saw the story that I had posted this morning from my other account.

Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm getting different results.
I have, and unlike the previous poster, I appreciated how short it was. I'm so used to books packing in a lot of fluff to appear fatter and better value for money. This book is thin but it's dense with information.
Google's Android Gains The Most Mobile Share In February
"I personally think the lack of Flash is a feature, not a problem, considering I have flash block installed on all my browsers."

That's contradictory. If you think that the lack of Flash is a feature, then why do you have it installed at all on your computer? The mere fact that you use Flashblock means that while you don't always want to see Flash applets, there are cases in which you do want to see them.
I tried it just now and it worked so I'm guessing there was a mistake on your end.
Unless something has changed with the iPad from the iPhone I would wager that if you want to do the scrolling in a frame like he was talking about that he could do a two finger scroll which should break the focus from the main page to the captive frame.
When you talk about creating serious value, you're not talking about value in general, but the value derived from the money supply. Not that there's anything dirty about money. But value can come from other places.

For some people, it's hard to escape the soul-sucking nature of working in finance. The super-high salaries are a kind of anti-filter: they attract people who really don't "love what they do." And eventually money isn't enough to keep such people working. That's why i-banking has such a high burnout rate.

Speaking of Nietzsche, I know someone who quit i-banking to teach philosophy, of all things.
Are they fast and reliable enough? (My understanding was that part of the Urban Airship value proposition was helping to paper-over the unreliability of Apple's push notifications.)
Searching for "Wikileaks" on MSNBC yields this error: "We are unable to display search results at this time. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience and try your request again."

Searching for "Tiger Woods" yields the results you'd expect.
Glad to see Puppetlabs included.

If you are into devops and/or Ruby scripting, give them a call!

Here's their codebase: http://github.com/reductivelabs
Remove your tin foil hats, while MSNBC's search sucks they still have a mention of it that was linked from the front page.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/04/05/4117730-wik...

Also NYTimes has one:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/05/us/politics/AP-US...
Having a "major stake" doesn't necessarily imply that it owns the majority. You wouldn't call 49% a major stake in NBC?
Which is pretty much the way Android currently does it. http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html#...
Any ideas about a good ruleset for 3D Life?

Maybe a 2D Life using the 3rd dimension for time would look cool - generations scrolling top to bottom.
If I remember correctly the deal is still being reviewed before it actually happens (but it will be soon). The wikipedia article also says the current owners are Vivendi and GE still.
http://huffingtonpost.com has it in bold red letters on their front page. That's the most mainstream place I've seen it.
ComScore: Android Market Share Continues To Gain On The iPhone
Sounds a lot like how background workers are handled in Android. http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals.html#...
Can't see any comments. I'd like to see them, and know if I can contact them about job4dev.

I put a couple of listings there, one for ENTP (http://job4dev.com/company/entp) and another @Dark Horse (http://job4dev.com/company/dark-horse)
New York Times has it, though CNN doesn't. There is another more recent military abuse scandal breaking today that is overshadowing this one at least as far as I can tell.
It hasn't worked surprisingly well for me. I've been told by several people that Google's hiring department is a black hole.
That occasionally breaks. I've had problems with it today on an innocuous site.
Are you saying they are supposed to leave the baby attached to the placenta while the afterbirth is delivered? I would imagine that remaining attached to the afterbirth as it is delivered is an infection and antigen exposure risk for both the baby and the mother.
I wonder how things would be if we did not comment at all
So what are Americans doing from stopping their Army? (I'm not saying it's Americans fault, just govt administration, as everywhere)

For me this video it's just a tool for journalists to play with, and the media to make some money with. Nothing more.

Has the army retired from war? No. The administration could be punished only once it finishes its goal.
However, if you look at taxes per person, the US is right in the middle of the pack. (Lower fraction of GDP cancels out higher GDP.)

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/03/taxes-per-person.html
see also
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=4626

In other words, the US govt gets enough money to provide the services of "high tax" countries but doesn't manage to do so.

Example - the US govt's health care spending per resident is about equal to that of countries with single payer yet the US govt doesn't even try to cover everyone. Instead, most of those residents pay for their own healthcare....
"Boogers were already semi-standardized. User interfaces should follow the principle of "least surprise" — if people are used to a certain metaphor, icon, or behavior, you should honor that so people understand your product immediately. No one else had a mini-viewer."

It's amazing how many people misinterpret and/or completely make up their own definitions for the principle of least surprise.

"6. The mini-viewer doesn't convey more information than boogers do."

This is wrong, and seems to be the key point of what the 'mini-viewer' has over 'boogers' -- the miniviewer shows the shape of the text where the text has been changed. If you're familiar with the text, you have a decent chance of being able to look at the shape of the text in the mini-viewer and possibly know what that text says, vaguely if not precisely. The boogers just show the vertical position of the changes in the document. Thus, the mini-viewer does convey more information than the boogers.

The fact that it is a miniature representation of the document is also a plus -- the boogers are an abstraction where as the mini-viewer is a representation.

The main thing I get is that this guy is thinking about UI optimization in terms of how can the UI be optimized for the guy implementing it, rather than how the UI can be optimized for the person using it, which is exactly the wrong way to think about optimization.
The first thing that came to my mind was Sivers' blog post the other day about others being a lot like us.
I see no complaining or bitching going on in the parent comment. Would you point it out, please?
This just came out, so it may have been that the mainstream media didn't want to report until the authenticity of the video was confirmed by an independent source. http://twitter.com/BreakingNews/status/11660278998 See if the news stories start showing up in a few hours before calling conspiracy.
Ask HN: Please suggest me a PHP book
I'm not very smart & quite a slow learner. After coding static HTML based sites for 3 years now i am pretty confident with my CSS abilities & would like to move ahead learning PHP MySQL.

But seems like i can't never move beyond the variables chapter in online php tutorials, a real book might help me.

Would you recommend anything from here - http://search.oreilly.com/?q=php

I'm thinking may be the Head First one has easier language for me to understand. Books from Wrox seem difficult.
The Finger Tree
Sounds good, what are you working on?
Scheme hits the App Store again
Im guessing by non-lethal he may have meant a warning shot (though possibly not).

Im surprised there was no warning shot; I vaguely know an apache gunner in the UK army and he has talked about how a warning shot is the usual approach in many situations.
I'm a fan of the WTFPL http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
I have a number of fake accounts for work; just checked and they seem to be appearing for all of them ok.
Side note: You don't need another account to do that. You can go to your privacy settings and click "Preview Profile". For example, this link will let your see your profile as me:

http://www.facebook.com/USERNAME?viewas=100000686899395

You can type a friend's name into that box there. Also somewhere in the privacy options is the ability to see your profile as someone who isn't logged in, etc.
In other words, in a war, my life means more to me than a civilian's who has a 50/50 chance of being a combatant.

At the same time, your life in a gunship as the operator of a 30mm cannon is also rather more secure than that of of wounded individual reduced to crawling on the ground, or of unwounded people who choose to assist the wounded individual rather than first trying to secure the area (eg taking a shot at the helicopter). Of course it is difficult to weigh such subjective factors in an objectively dangerous situation but that is part of the training for a professional rather than conscripted military force, IMO.

Did not vote on your comment - don't agree with your perspective but it seems like a sincere effort to further rather than stifle debate.
I was sort of there (in the larger social circle, worked at LMI, was a roommate of RMS after that, etc. etc.).

If you'd spend a little time with both in that period you'd have absolutely no doubt who's more credible.

As for the specific claims:

I can't speak to how he did it and if he looked at Symbolics source code, but I do know that RMS only created a fraction of the software artifacts that the Symbolics team did on top of the existing code base (RMS is/was back then good, but only so good ... and very possibly below the average for the core AI Lab Lisp Machine team (note that average was very high indeed)).

His effort concentrated on covering the very most important new core stuff ... the last thing I remember talking with him that he was doing before I exited the Lispm community was something like an exception system, but it's been way too long to remember any details.

As for who "invented" TECO EMACS, everyone I talked to at the time said it was primarily Guy Steele, who then turned it over to others after a very short period. At the time, the effort was mostly to get the community to agree on a common set of key bindings, macros, etc. There were something like three popular sets which meant it could be very difficult to sit down at someone else's console to help them. I can well believe David Moon lent a significant hand there, he was one of the very top wizards (e.g. KL-10 (for ITS) and Lispm microcode) but one of the most quiet ones.
No. That is not evidence of a conspiracy.
First of all, I disagree with the entire premise of the question. Why does the intelligent have an obligation to dedicate his or her life to the creation of maximal value for society? Sounds like Nietzsche's slave morality to me. Why does the attractive/tall/healthy not have a similar special moral obligation?

I might be projecting, but having hung out with Carter (the author) a few times while he spent this past summer out here in Palo Alto, I can probably assure you that it's just an un-stated assumption that's causing you guys to differ. The reason he's asking that question of "what value do you add?" is because it leads to personal fulfillment. Some people are personally fulfilled by shaving basis points. Hell, I could be one of them if not for the the lost forests of entry-level finance work.

Carter is talking to people that want to have huge impact on society. They dream to be Rockefellers, Jobs's, Brins, and so on. In those cases, it's always worth stepping back and thinking about what overall impact you're having. If all you're doing is shaving basis points you're probably not changing the nature of society.

And no, this doesn't rule out finance; J.P. Morgan diverted the vast holdings of Europe into the burgeoning economy of these United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan#Treasury_gold) during a crisis.
How To Actually Change Your Mind
Im not surprised it's on the BBC to be honest; they are usually quite good at picking up on news like this.

In actual fact their article seems either rushed or ass covering. There are many "they say" and "appears" in the article.
Does it have a dvorak layout?
How many CEO can make the difference
Getting similar reports from others. I blew away the cache to see if that solves the issue.
Thankfully not happening with my iPad. I was worried when I had problems with it at a hotel, but it looks like it was just a problem with the hotel. Bad news for Apple, though.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/109063/screenshots/us_civil_forces_m...

This is the front page of MSNBC. You can't possibly justify their search function not presenting results when the blurb provides marginal insight into how severe this video is.
It's a good project. I find the way Snopes disables highlighting and copying very irritating though. I always have to disable javascript when I'm there.
Redditors/Wikileaks is making a big stink about it, but it really isn't about being righteous. Its about making a big stink.

Every army fighting a war against an insurgency makes mistakes like this. If you are saying that the rules of engagement are flawed it might be eye-opening to realize the reduction of military casualties by having a more aggressive set of rules. The only solution in my mind is to not go to war from the beginning and to end it as soon as possible with the best means possible.
Here's something published just today that shows both the value of well-funded commercial journalism and the folly of trusting major news organizations to bother with real journalism:

http://www.salon.com/news/afghanistan/index.html?story=/opin...

In this case, most of the major news sources simply parroted the Pentagon, but some bothered to investigate. Eventually the Pentagon was forced to change its story, at which point CNN and the NYT were able to report that U.S. and Afghan government forces accidentally raided a peaceful party and blamed the deaths of three women they killed on honor killings.

Gotta love this quote from some American Rear Admiral acting as Nato's "director of communications" in Kabul: "You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back." He's either from the "What Would George Bush Say?" school of communication, or he's incompetent, or, if he was choosing his words as carefully as you would expect in such a delicate situation, he decided to send a damned chilling message, not something I want a representative of my government saying to people we're supposed to be educating about freedom and liberal government.

Source for the quote: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/arti...