skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the comment in question was edited to say "major stake" instead of "owned by" after my correction. Thanks!
How does this sound to you as a former marine?

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/bmooi/wikileaks_video_j...

It seems plausible to me that these guys are seeing this situation all the time: they fire on a group of people, some are left wounded, and vans show up to collect weapons, but also grab wounded/bodies to try and look legit from the sky. Being used to tactics like these, I can understand how anxious they were to get clearance to fire on the van; who knows if they are going to fire on the helicopter or speed off. It wasn't clearly marked as a medical vehicle, and it sounds like everyone over there knows that you will be fired on if you do something like this.
Tin foil hats?

/?q=wikileak works, /?q=wikileaks returns an error. It's a politically sensitive topic involving the death of two press employees, possibly unethical conduct by the military, and the government has attempted to suppress its release. What more do you want?

It seems pretty obvious to me that their search dept is trying to stop people from finding the story. Either that or their search is broken in a truly bad way--given that those words should stem to the same query, it's suggestive to say the least.

[edit] Looks like their article search is working again.

[edit] You know what? I'm sorry, that was premature. It is suggestive, but there are other plausible (and, to my mind, preferable) explanations. "wikileak" returns web results, whereas "wikileaks" returns article results. MSNBC may have a local index for their stories and a fallback to Bing. Perhaps it's a failure for a newly-emerging search term that only applies to the local index, which does not stem queries. Or perhaps they're doing extra processing for stories which failed, for any number of reasons.
The intelligent don't have an obligation to create maximal value. But if you're making money without creating value for society, then what you're doing is rent seeking and "cheating" people who do create value. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

I definitely agree that finance is an exciting field where a lot of interesting topics converge. However, the examples you give are way exaggerated. The full complexity of the modern financial system isn't really needed to facilitate trade/provide insurance/provide financing/whatever else. Those things don't go away if fewer people are trading inside spreads.

Yes, liquidity is important for a market. But it's not an end in and of itself. There is no value in liquidity. There's only value in what liquidity enables. It's like what Paul Graham always talks about, you have to make something people want. Liquidity is kind of like ball bearings. No one really wants ball bearings, but they're useful because of what they enable. Liquidity is the same way.

Edit: I'm also not suggesting that there's no value in making ball bearings or intermediate products, just that they are not the ultimate goal.
There's a number of reasons why that video hasn't, and probably won't, appear on mainstream news (for what it is worth, I use to work for BBC News Website in a technical capacity):

Firstly, most mainstream news websites have rules and policies on showing videos coming from unknown and unvarifieable sources - especially war. The concern is that videos can be edited and doctored to make them appear to construe something else that doesn't represent the true facts.

I'm not saying this video is doctored/edited in this way, but it's a blanket policy most news orgs will keep to. Instead they will report that WikiLeaks have this video and link to them instead. Which is what is happening here.

There is a second, and somewhat sad issue here too. That video remains property and copyright of the US military, which means news organizations probably wouldn't want to redistribute it anyway as they don't have permission. News orgs have been known to republish photos and videos they don't own when there is extra-ordinary reasons but I don't know if this is enough to warrant that.

As an aside, I'm also concerned that it could get pulled from YouTube if the US military issue a DMCA notice or similar request due to national security.
You're advocating total war or no war at all. "In my opinion, we should only ever declare total war, and we should not allow ourselves the opinion that some wars are less gruesome than others." If that's not what you meant, then you need to seriously re-examine what you are saying, or else don't act offended when people read your words and not your mind.

Anyway, you are logically incorrect to the first degree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma . Some wars are less gruesome than others. By multiple orders of magnitude. You are wrong.

And the very notion that total war is even permissible angers and disgusts me.

Also, while you're at it, you might as well educate yourself as to what "ad hominem" means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
3rd possibility: malice, incompetently implemented...
In a way this is a good sign. You don't have a game changer unless you can take it far enough to get a Slashdot contributor to wonder what it's really useful for.

That said, it's a roll of the dice. It's just like the original Apple computer. It's a great device looking for its killer app. Steve pushed it so far, there is no known and tested current use case to fall back on.

Now it's up to those of us who see the potential to implement the future.
Believe it or not, Flash comes preinstalled on some systems.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't then, huh?
Not the cradle, the case. Combined with the Bluetooth keyboard, it's great for typing-intensive stuff.
Indeed. I think Python calling them "dictionaries" is pretty weird, but saying, "see, it's like a dictionary, you look up the key word and it has an associated value" is probably the right level of abstraction for someone new to programming.
A quote from iPad review by Jason Snell:

There’s just something about surfing the Web
using Safari on the iPad. It feels different,
somehow. Apple’s marketing pitch says “it’s
like holding the Internet in your hands,” and
while that’s a little bit cheesy, it’s not
far off. There’s just something different about
holding that Web page in your hands, rather
than seeing it on a desktop or laptop PC, or on
a tiny iPhone screen. Tapping on links doesn’t
feel the same as clicking on them with a mouse.
It’s a good feeling.

Source: http://www.macworld.com/reviews/product/462192/review/apple_...
The people I talked to, from Symbolics, did not tell me the Stallman version. So at least I have a lot of doubt about the story that the article linked tells.

Especially since Stallman and the FSF surrounds a lot of propaganda. Essentially Stallman was working for a government lab paid for mostly by the military (DARPA). DARPA wanted to see their investments applied to military software and created the commercial structure to do that. Stallman was living in his dream world thinking that all that money was coming for free and for the best of mankind and he could play there forever, working on editors and other stuff - when in fact the military wanted all kinds of advanced software for their projects, which then lead to 'Strategic Computing Project (SCP)' and 'SDI'. DARPA paid the whole show and had the goals - intelligent software for weapons, battle management, pilot training, logistics, etc.
All government video/pictures etc are public domain.
Yeah, I just noticed that as well. CNN's World page has "He married a video game character," but not a mention of this. Things like this make it hard to feel bad about the looming death of Old Media.
How I got sued by Facebook
> This video is proof of murder, disresctpectful combat, imcompetent ranking officers and blind trigger happy pilots. Calling this video anything other than above is political bullshit.

Proof of murder, huh? I'd point out some things worth thinking about, but it sounds like you've completely made your mind up already. Would it be worth spending a few minutes trying to look at why it happened, and all the elements of the situation, and the thinking patterns of people involved - or would that just be "political bullshit"?

It's easy to apply black and white thinking to a battlefield after the fact, but it seems to miss a lot of the nuance of the situation - the helicopter had been radioed in by ground troops who were under small arms fire. The fight might or might not have still been going. It's not clear where the van came from, and what the positions of the engaged ground forces were relative to the van. Who knows if that style of van had been used recently for combat purposes by the insurgency. This was at the height of the surge - was there a curfew or some ban on vehicles in the area?

I don't know. I'd ask and think about things like that, but is that just "political bullshit"? Battlefields seem to rarely give way to black and white morality. It seems like after something like this comes out, you could get more answers by thinking and asking smart questions than you would by rushing to moral judgment.
neat idea. But your pitch is missing the other side of the equation. Who is going to be making such requests?

Journalists? Stay at home moms? bored people with money?
Provide some use cases.

It's too easy to say "If we build it, they will come."
Time to coin a new unit: the milliTaco. 1000th of the innovation necessary to flummox a Slashdot editor. Thought to be the quantity of innovation required to make a game changer.
Can the U.S. assert copyright? I thought all work product of the Federal Government was in the public domain (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the...)
Just think about it this way. How many people using msnbc will actually make the query that will match the regex "/^wikileaks$/i". If they were truly trying to prevent people from accessing information about it they would have done a better regex.

"It seems pretty obvious to me that their search dept is trying to stop people from finding the story. Either that or their search is broken in a truly bad way--given that those words should stem to the same query, it's suggestive to say the least."

It really doesn't. I'm going to take a big guess here and say that the good people over at MSNBC are not that inept.
Exactly. The US Military cannot hold copyright. They could classify it, but that's about it.
posted this to my social network, definitely looks like malice.
The whole "hung up about the degree" thing is one of my biggest complaints about Google's hiring philosophy. It is a widely shared complaint.
Nice. Puts the BMW iDrive to shame ;)
It's up to $1 at The Cellar.
Bringing flash would be only half of the solution. The usual use cases mentioned are video and games. Well, some video providers already are updating to include non-flash alternatives, but let's say this is valid point.
Then we have games, and I am wondering: what's the use of Flash games, which are designed either with keyboard or mouse in mind. How many would be playable with multitouch at all?
I've heard that engineers work on a starter project for the first few months. The starter project is often assigned a few days before the new hire arrives.
Really? I'm not trying to be facetious: Can anybody roll up to the military and ask for arbitrary gun camera footage?
I'd propose the theory that a plausible explanation is that when the domain becomes unreachable/times out the search engine removes it from search results.

Someone might have made a design decision that says that domains that cannot be reached are not shown to customers in their results.
Very nice concept. I think you need to spend some time working on the UX. The flow to get me to know what is going on could use some work (also to get me to wanting to sign up).

Cool name too. I'd even recommend calling it Dribbbbbbbbble, so I have to bookmark it.
That is the first result I get.
Why do companies do that?

It has something to do with some weird accounting requirements/rules.
Will The Tablet Cure Newspapers' Ills? (Media Watch)
It is worth noting that NBC was until a few months ago wholly owned by General Electric, who are of course a major supplier of hardware and services to the US military.

GE don't put much info about their military work on their corporate front page, but if you search their subsidary sites you'll see that they supply everything from fighter aircraft engines through to IT systems (um, perhaps even video encoding and encryptions systems).

http://www.ge-ip.com/industries/mil-aero

Comcast bought a controlling stake in the company last year, but GE remains a significant shareholder. (See http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/03/news/companies/comcast_nbc/i...)
Except that they're blocking searches for "wikileaks", not results for "wikileaks.org".
"In order to qualify for the EB1-EA, the applicant must have won a Nobel Prize [...]"

I remember when, during my years in the US, I looked up my options to apply for some merit-based residence permit. When I found this I literally laughed out loud. I thought, "OK guys, if I were a Nobel Prize laureate you would be looking me up, not the other way around."
I hate this sort of rebuttal.

A: If you drive your car backwards you get better mileage.

B: Well, I tried that, but my field of view is pretty crappy in the mirror, and the controls are non intuitive.

A: Well, your shitty car design isn't my problem.

Look, whenever you're trying to change someone's behavior, you are engage in marketing. This is an important skill in the startup world.

If you told your customer "our solution is better" and he responds "your solution sets my house on fire", you DO NOT WIN POINTS by telling him that he should get a better house.

You just lost the sale.

Not only that, you made yourself look like an ass.

If you want to sell closures, and the fact that pretty much all debuggers don't make using closures easy, this is not the rest of the world's problem - it is a legitimate reason for folks NOT TO USE CLOSURES. You either have to solve it, work around it, or realize that you're not going to sell the "use closures" meme.
You're wrong about liquidity. By providing liquidity to a market you are providing immediacy to someone else. Market participants seeking immediacy place a specific value on it and are willing to pay someone for the privilege. As a market participant, if you want to buy or sell at the market, you're directly benefiting from the liquidity being provided by other participants.
The main Bing search works, if what your saying is correct then since MSNBC's search is just a modified version of Bing, Bing would also need to have the problem for there to be no fault on MSNBC's end.
I think the confusion may come from Lua the language being designed for / promoted as scaling downward to a simple scripting or data-description language. You can learn it in several passes, doing useful stuff with it without advanced stuff (coroutines, metatables, tail calls, the C API, etc.) getting in the way of the basics.

_The Awk Programming Language_ is another slim and lucid language book. I don't use awk for much beyond one-liners (usually at that point I switch to Lua), but it has some real gems.
If they get it, it's not protected by copyright. That's it.
False dichotomy.

You clearly have the ability to receive phonecalls at all times, so the phone is running so you have multiple concurrent tasks so there's no argument.

Except there is an argument, so that isn't what's really being discussed even if the discussion is framed by that term.
Justin.tv and Mainstream Event Broadcasting - a Suggestion
My guess is they're not doing regexes. Someone in charge probably said "Stop people from searching for wikileaks" and they added that term to a hacked-together blocklist ASAP. Either that or they added it to a special list of queries that get extra processing (topic summary for the top of results, perhaps) which was crashing, and deployed without checking the results. Either way, it looks like their search is working now although the error persists, which suggests things over at MSNBC are much in flux. :)
Though oddly enough, it still returns the story despite the error message.
I consider good to be positive while moral is closer to justified- not necessarily positive, yet always fair.
The search is working again, and MSNBC has an official article available.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36182383/ns/world_news-mideastn_...
You're right. "wikileaks video" now returns an error.
The above is interesting, but I never felt it was a driver of any significance for RMS, especially since the AI Lab was so very far removed from the sharp end of the spear.

A much better explanation someone told me was that one day RMS realized he no longer had anyone who'd go out to lunch or dinner with him (since they'd almost all gone to work at Symbolics and [you can fill in the rest]).

Now, there were people working on that sort of thing, e.g. I did some customer support for an LMI CADR that was sold to MITRE in Virginia (as I recall) where they were trying to do what you might call "battlespace SIGINT with memory", i.e. help get around the switching your transmitter on and off and hopping frequencies fun. Very interesting problem, but it was very early level research, I think more a proof of concept than anything else. I.e. unclassified research, at least at the level I've described it (I certainly didn't have a clearance).

And then there was the company that had Lispm's driving bulldozers (for maximum efficiency), but I was only told that 2nd or 3rd hand.
Somewhat off-topic but this is the first time I've heard the phrase "Silicon Forest" and it's quite catchy! Silicon Florist is even better. Kudos from someone who appreciates a quality name but sucks at coming up with them.
I wish the case worked with the cradle :\
I think it would be reasonable to add a filter for sites that are known to submit false info to HN.
I doubt it, as he only just submitted his preference ordering of what to work on (backend, search/ads, UI, etc.).
Any CEO with a bit of technical competence should know this.
Improving download behaviors in web browsers
How about the syntactical difference between "insert into <x> ..." and "update <x> set...". I've always wondered why no vendor has an "insertorupdate" function. This issue, from an application development perspective, is another reason I love ORM's. The idea that, in the year 2010, I have to write at least two stored proc's for each table in my database, just for persisting data, aggravates me.
It's only partially working at this time. It seems to return "articles" but nothing else.
He's a creative guy but I thought he was supposed to have reasonable tech chops!
I'm sorry but there isn't a false dichotomy between multi- vs. single-tasking, or did you mean to imply something else? I know the operating system is a multitasking environment, but that aspect of it is not exposed in any kind of useful way outside of Apple's pre-chosen features.
Mobile Internet Statistics – Search, Usage & Browsers
To the address in my profile :)
I've taken flames for saying so in the past, but it bears repeating: Having a publicly funded news source in your country that is required by its very charter not to pander to political or corporate interests is utterly invaluable, despite its inevitable shortcomings.
It's more murkey than that. As I understand it, all video that is released by the govenment and army is public domain -- but it is not clear exactly how this video was obtained.

In the website they say that they made a freedom of information request but later say they had to decrypt the video.

That seems to suggest that the video was not released to them under the freedom of information request and instead an encrypted original was obtained by other means not explained.

I doubt any video of recent active combat is going to be declassified and thus available under a FOIR, and if you obtain something illegally/unofficially that doesn't suddenly make it public domain.

(to be clear, I'm glad this video is out there - it is an important story being told. But IMHO the distribution status of the video is a reasonable discussion topic none the less)
Houston, we have a real problem
Positive in what sense? Positive in the sense of greatest good of the greatest number? That sounds awfully like utilitarianism, where the definition of moral and your definition of good would roughly coincide.

It seems like you're unable to decide between utilitarianism and some notion of "fair"ness (reason perhaps?) as your central moral philosophy. Note that utilitarians generally define fair as "greatest good of the greatest number".
I'm not sure that "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours" is the greatest example of a language tutorial that isn't steeped in programming-language-theory-geekery-for-its-own-sake. :)
The higher average prices (relative to the iphone) are simply a reflection of the more limited population of apps released on day one. Once independent developers get their hands on physical devices, and more applications are released, we'll see average app prices drop.
Do you have a source for this piece of information? I'm led to believe it is the other way around, anything obtained illegally doesn't automatically become public domain - but I don't have an internet based source to link to at the moment.
That seems reasonable, though if MSNBC did tracking of people clicking through and their success rate it could still be true. I have no idea if that is common practice or not though.

When I try out wikileaks I get the message "We are unable to display search results at this time. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience and try your request again." It doesn't describe what effect the error has though. It seems to just display results inside MSNBC and not results on the web at large.
sar gets its info from /proc/loadavg (on Linux OSs), just like top and uptime do, which is produced using the same code the article shows.
Earlier this afternoon, MSNBC aired a 10 minute segment on the video. It seems unlikely this was intentionally censored.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31510813/#36182090
"Nobody can really believe the US wants to CONQUER Iraq in the sense that they want to stay there indefinitely for control."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_the_United_States_in...

"A new embassy, which has been described as the largest and most expensive embassy in the world at 0.44 square kilometers—the size of Vatican City[1]—was opened in January 2009 ..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

Iraq is the 39th most populous country in the world, behind, for example, China, India, Russia, Japan and Mexico. Why do we need such a large operation, and personnel, for the 39th largest country in the world? We didn't build to this size with the idea that embassy personnel would shrink in the foreseeable future.

I believe the US did and does indeed want to conquer Iraq, because it gives us a presence and force projection that, unlike an aircraft carrier, can stay on station indefinitely.

Otherwise why invade a country that (differing opinions acknowledged) posed no threat to the US?

I imagine we're still anxiously searching for the real weapons of mass destruction.
Neat. Could you talk more about Scheme. In retrospect how did it work out? If you could do it over again would you use Scheme or just jump into Objective-C? What were the pros and cons of using Scheme.