skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually this started happening two years ago (of maybe bigger surprise is that Yahoo has actually been driving this)

http://odopod.basecamphq.com/W2436833

(full disclosure - my company built the CBS widget for the Yahoo platform)

There's actually a bunch of App platforms on TV now. Vudu has one (Lua based) and many of the manufacturers are doing their own. (Samsung and Panasonic both have their own)

What's a bit strange is that many CE manufacturers are doing are HTML/JS engines. Going to Android/Java is an interesting choice as opposed to chrome with CE-HTML
A small nitpick. It's "gunsight", "gun sight" or something like it.

I sincerely hope the whole chain of command goes to jail.
If you had any doubts as to the important of Wikileaks, give this video ten minutes. This is cold blooded murder. Those people were clearly unarmed, and the conversation that occurs over the radio is disgusting. It was like they were begging to just pull the trigger, no matter what they were aiming at.
AddThis - Help
A very insightful comment.

I like to say that if Greenspan had replaced his famous "irrational exuberance" comment with one citing "incredible short selling opportunities for insightful investors" things would have turned out much better.
That's not necessarily true. It depends on what expectations the soldier has for that area. If it's an active combat zone, then a solider has less than a second to make a shoot/no-shoot decision. Someone raising something long to their eyes will resemble raising a weapon.

With that said, I haven't watched the video, and I don't know if that was an active combat zone, or if it was considered "safe."
Yes, I would become a 'terrorist' if that means fighting with any means necessary. In Iraq that means IED's.

A childhood friend of mine just returned from Afghanistan missing an arm and leg from an IED. He understands why they use those tactics given the firepower mismatch.

I would also like to add to your point that there is no duality between supporting the troops and being against events like this. You can do both.
Apple Holding Special Event To Preview iPhone OS 4 This Thursday
I'm an iPhone user as well, and it also kills the iPhone. the point was that on iPhone, 3rd party apps are not given the opportunity to do this without the user being aware (because it's in the foreground.) i've had a runaway android app kill my phone after it screwed up and started devouring resources in the background while it was in my pocket.
A Nifty CSS Trick for Rollovers « Jolie O'Dell
Not so. A refcounting scheme cannot collect circular garbage, garbage collection can.

In any case the point is that an object's reference count is a piece of internal state that is externally manipulated.
As for the issue of reserves, I think if you make the argument you are making you have to state what you think the optimal reserve requirement is.

If the recent crisis had been a bit smaller, existing reserve levels would have been fine.

If the crisis had been a bit bigger, then it's not certain whether even the previous reserve requirements would have been sufficient.

The only way you get 100% security is to have a 100% reserve requirement. Anything less is gambling.

So if you critique the lowering of reserve rates you are obligated to state what sort of odds you think are more reasonable.
That's not playing the devil's advocate. It's bringing a sensible post to a forum filled with emo reactions.
Don't forget that that is what soldiers are trained to do. They are trained to feel scared of the enemy and shoot to solve problems. It is not surprising that incidents like this occur, or that some soldiers go crazy and go on shooting rampages later when they come back home.

War is a sign of a world culture that is mentally ill, and being a soldier that is willing and eager to kill is a form of mental illness.
I don't know that anyone is blaming the individuals here. The individual on the gun repeatedly got approval to engage and wikileaks posted the rules of engagement as well as the video.

I agree about the system put them into the situation and hid this video being disgusting.
I feel like we have a bunch of trigger-happy teenagers viewing the world through a video-game-like HUD with a joystick, just itching to light something up.

Your analysis strikes me as a bit glib.

There are two critical pieces to this issue and I think it is important we distinguish between the two. The first part (which is what you are trying to get at) is that the prospect of warfare being conducted through a video-game like interface is scary and feels wrong. I agree and I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach just thinking about it. Imagine soldiers driving to work in the morning from their homes in the suburbs, putting in a 9-5 day piloting a drone killing insurgents, and then going home to their families in time for dinner. Very scary.

However, the second part is what you miss. These military personnel are kids. Kids that we ask to conduct a large scale invasion and then engage in the near-impossible task of nation building. As Thomas Barnett says, the same 19 year old just can't do it all. These kids should have been out of Iraq after we captured Saddam. They aren't psychologically equipped to deal with a country post-invasion. This video is a perfect example of that. Notice how the kid mistakes a camera for a weapon and is extremely jumpy when he is trying to figure out whether he is being shot at. He's never been trained to deal with this kind of situation (urban warfare, enemies without uniforms, civilians intermixed with soldiers) and it's criminal we force teenagers make these kinds of decisions every day.

All of that said, clearly bad decisions were made in this video. I'm not disputing that. But there are two crimes in this video.
On of the men clearly did have an RPG. The cameras were mistaken for AK-47's. One the left as they point out the 2nd cameraman note the long tube that one of the 'innocent civilians' is carrying and leaning on the ground. It also looks to me like this is the same guy peeking out from behind the wall, the tube is too long to be a camera.

I expect that the source video for this is much cleaner than a youtube conversion, and seeing it in real life, by an experienced pilot and gunner, would make it clearer that these were not simply locals gathering to talk to a reporter.
Microsoft is announcing a mystery product on April 12th
While this isn't on the same scale, we spent several weeks in high school studying My Lai[1] as a lesson in personal responsibility and morality. It seems we've learned nothing, not even to be honest when these things happen, but, then again, perhaps the lesson is that war changes people in horrible ways?

Wikileaks' continued existence is essential to our democracy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
Please read the forum guidelines on civility: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This discussion will be killed if it devolves into name calling.
The Worst Mistake People Make in Political Arguments
The strategy discussed involved lots of creating new objects that were the same as an old object but with one more piece of data. If you're using a reference counting implementation then every one of those methods needs to know about, and adjust, all of the reference counts that the object points to. This kind of busy accounting work is error-prone, and does a lot to undo the simplicity that you're trying to achieve with this methodology.
Juicy Ideas
"This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use."

The internet laughs at your attempt to suggest that no one wants to use it.
I don't know that anyone is blaming the individuals here.

Yes fortunately there isn't too much of that in this particular thread. But if you look at other online discussions going on right now, you'll see plenty of hateful comments of all sorts.
It is quite obvious from watching this video that the boys pulling the trigger have no idea what they just did. So, calling it "murder" is a bit misleading. We got to see the photos of the reporters with their cameras before watching the video. So we obviously know, going in to it, that those are not AK-47's and RPGs. But that fact that they have no idea what they just did, is damning in itself.

One could easily presume from watching this video, that we have inculcated a sense of utter callousness for the taking of life, and an inability to distinguish peaceful from threatening activities. The judgement is made in an instant that there are guys with guns, despite the fact that there is no suspicious activity going on. It looks like a lawful public assembly. The presumption is: Iraqi men, milling about an area, some with something slung over their shoulders. Must be insurgents. Kill em. Good job, soldier.

Is anyone in doubt that the guys who drove up in the van were unarmed? Did they LOOK like they were trying to shoot back at the helicopter. No. They kept looking at it, wondering if they were next. They were risking their lives trying to save an innocent. And they were killed for it.

The most chilling line, after announcing that two children were wounded: "It serves them right for bringing kids into a battle." Serves them right? Setting aside the fact that nobody who got shot on that day knew that they were in a battle until the bullets starting raining down, do they truly deserve to have their children shot because they bring them into a battle?

I have no doubt that these boys will be haunted by what they did the rest of their lives. I utterly abhor what happened and I was literally shaking watching this video. At the same time, I cannot help but sympathize with the young men that we have placed into a situation that, quite literally, cuts off their common and moral sense and requires them to be trigger-happy in order to gain the accolades of their commanders. My God, what are we doing?
I'm not convinced that I'm more secure because of them.

The argument could be made that in some respects you are in more danger. Not only do incidents such as these promote hate of the US by other countries and terrorism, but many of these soldiers end up badly mentally damaged because of the post traumatic stress disorder from the things they took part in over there. There have been multiple incidents where former soldiers snap and go on killing rampages.

War just trades one kind of danger for another. At best it just keeps the majority of the danger in another country.
Ask HN: Would you use a cord bank?
We are expecting our first child in August and have seen a lot of adverts for cord blood banking - the idea is that the blood in your baby's umbilical cord contains stem cells that might be useful for curing diseases later in life and so you should bank the blood as a form of insurance. The ads and marketing literature are very compelling, but of course that's what they're designed for! We've done a little basic research, and it looks like not everyone agrees that banking cord blood is desirable (e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_blood_bank). However, as my wife pointed out, while the organizations in that wikipedia article who
recommend against banking are the kinds of people who should know what's best for mothers and babies, they don't necessarily seem like the best people to judge the potential effectiveness of stem cell therapies.

I'm posting this in the hope that there are some biotech folks reading Hacker News who can cut through the marketing spin and give us a straight answer - would you do this yourself, for your own children?
If they can't actually identify a gun as a gun, why are they engaging?
Delicious is a pretty good place to look for bookmarked data sets.

http://delicious.com/sidmitra/datasets
Who ever thinks that these atrocities won't occur in war? The mindsets of the people who commit these actions are not a far leap from the mindset that a soldier has to maintain in order to kill enemy combatants day in and day out.

Every war there's big civilian massacres and other major moral abridgments no matter what the combatants' PR department spews out. We should be realistic about that.

It's not an excuse for those that committed or knew about this, but it shouldn't be unexpected.
Ask HN: Anybody else see an iPad Sales Bump this Weekend?
I have a few apps live in the AppStore - they tend to trend a little stronger on weekends but all saw their best sales since Christmas over the weekend - anybody else?
Yeah we had much better sales also. I attribute this more to the easter weekend and not to the iPad.
Why is everyone calling these soldiers kids?

There's a good chance the pilots at least are older than most of the people reading this forum.
1. Java was cool.
2. Then Java was cool and useful.
3. Then Java was just useful.

Lamenting the fact that #3 has happened is what's irrelevant because most languages never even make it to #2.
> Isn't a closure a function that carries around state?

Well, that's the question, isn't it?

In our present context, to me "state" suggests something persistent and independent, something that could be read and possibly written by multiple paths.

Do you view creating a closure as customising an existing function with specific data, or as defining a whole new function? I think of it as the latter, and it just happens to be at run-time. The resulting function is still pure, and any customisation based on particular data is an integral part of it that isn't externally visible, which doesn't feel "stateful".
Well, PARC has a history of not patenting perfectly patentable ideas. Like Ethernet.
What's faster: Mongo, Ruby or Postgres?
I'm not sure exactly how much funding is necessary; but it's not a big number on the scale of internet startups.

Please send me an email. :-)
Apple to preview iPhone OS 4 this Thursday at Apple HQ
You win. :)
Well? Does it? (Youtube is blocked at work)
It blends.
Please send me an email anyway -- whether people can provide funding is one measure of community interest, but definitely not the only one.
Business Law Stack Overflow Q&A
Get your questions answered on business law for your startup
One of the products they specifically listed was software. <Insert irony here.>
If you have read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell there is a detailed analysis of an incident in which police officers on the ground, less then twenty feet from a man, fired on him and killed him because they thought the wallet he was holding was a gun.

When you have a deadly weapon in your hand, and you are scared and trained to see weapons, not cameras, then what you see is an enemy target with a weapon.
Yep. He had to smash it in half first to make it fit in the blender.
You better believe it!
It can happen that new hires don't have a team, but most hires come in knowing where they will start.
Ask HN: How do I tether original iPhone (Edge)
I've been told it cannot and has not been done.

I've seen official and jailbreaked apps to tether (over wifi) and use the iPhone 3G's connection, but not the original iPhone with just EDGE.

Can it be done?
Those online versions require an entirely different computing experience: sitting in front of a computer with a monitor, most likely isolated.

The iPad/iPhone combo creates a potentially more social, electronic hybrid of the table-top experience. That's partly why this is more compelling than all those others.
Or it's just, you know, a joke.
Please next time use: http://m.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/18/50-css-and-javascri...

As it's faster to load and without their annoying ads.
Security Panel to IT: 'Expect a Breach'
Yes, see this post for details http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/web-des...
A lot of the people Google goes after are people who are not actively on the job market. Being slow does not hurt as much with that group.

We do try to expedite the process if we think someone is actively looking, but it is a cumbersome process and can only be expedited so much. :-(
I'm not sure where you deriving that fear from especially after the initial fire from the helicopter. All I was hearing was the gunner being excited he got to shoot something.

I realize Americans grow up late but there's also a big difference between being in your (mid?) twenties and being a kid, let alone a young one. How old do you need to be before you are responsible for your own actions and mistakes? I would hope it's before they put you in a helicopter armed to the teeth.

Theres plenty of blame to go around but some of it surely lies on the people lighting up a van recovering wounded people which was of no apparent treat. You can even hear him get stressed as the body they are carrying is getting closer to being loaded into the van, because hes about to miss his opportunity to shoot.
Remember though, you're watching after knowing that innocent people were killed. In fact, I watched it in 480res, full screen, on a 23" monitor and I too thought it was an RPG. What do you suppose the heli gunner was watching on?
Watching the video, it's fairly obvious to me that the people holding supposed rocket launchers were in fact holding cameras with telephoto lenses. However, this is obvious to me after having read comments about the video, as well as with all the captions in the video explaining what it is we're seeing. This is a lot information gathered after the incident, when the people on the ground actually got to go in and see that there were no RPG launchers and so on. So even though I clearly see a telephoto lens, I can't say that the guys in the helicopters could see that. I have a hard time saying that this is clearly murder.

The whole situation seems like a no-win to me. If they (US Military) don't release the video, they cover their ass in the short run, but when the video gets leaked it makes them look more guilty than perhaps they really were. But if they had released the video then, you'd still get tons of people proclaiming how horrible this is.

Don't get me wrong, this is horrible, but it doesn't seem more horrible than a lot of the stuff that happens over there. It's horrible that we're even in this situation.
Why It Is Easier Run A Pro Sports Franchise Than A Software Company
The perception that copyright allows the copyright holder to dictate everything you do with a device or piece of content is spurious

In a reasonable world, this would be true. But sadly Apple is most likely correct as a matter of law. The DMCA prohibits "circumvention" of copyright protection measures, regardless of whether you're doing so for the purpose of copyright infringement. It's a backdoor method of eliminating fair use, and like many other companies Apple has figured out how to take advantage of it to deny our property rights.
you must be new to writing with English in the Internet
3-5 days for shipping went by really quickly ;)
They troll LinkedIn a fair bit -- Google recruiters ask after me a couple of times a year.
> Think about how bad they must feel knowing that they killed innocent people when they thought they were killing the enemy

They felt like this for quite some time now.

You always have the choice to disobey illegal and or immoral orders. It may limit your career options, but, then, who would really like a career that involves covering up what could be, at the very best, considered manslaughter.

> You can't seriously expect them to notice the kids or the difference between a camera and a weapon

I always was under the impression military pilot training went beyond manoeuvring your chopper or firing its gun.

While all of them have the excuse of being in the middle of a war and having received orders they are trained to obey, there are lines you don't cross.
There's a good chance the pilots at least are older than most of the people reading this forum.

Do you have a basis for your opinion, or are you just making things up?

Actually, I already know the answer to that question. The average age of all active duty military is 28. 37% of the Marine Corps is between the ages of 17 and 21 [1]. And when you remove all the higher ranking officers (who are not very likely to be gunning for an Apache), the average age gets even lower.

Based on this poll [2], it appears the average age of HN is between 21 and 35. The data from the HN survey appears to have been taken down; that would give a much better answer. Regardless, your wrong in saying the average reader of this forum is probably younger than the military personal flying the helicopter. At best you can say it's unclear.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/pastinson/us-military-active-duty-...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=800158

EDIT: For the record, the parent post contains 100% factually incorrect information and this post contains a refutation with cited facts. Currently the voting split is 9/-1. This is an emotional issue, but let's try and not be so reactionary.

EDIT2: The parent is factually correct because waterlesscloud is referring to the age of the pilot, whereas I thought we were talking about the gunner (the person whose actions are in question). I also assumed the marines were involved, which is also incorrect. Sorry for the false accusation.
> And the revoking of Glass-Steagall under Clinton?

Irrelevant because it didn't have any effect on the crisis.

In fact, it allowed some transactions that had some hope of slowing things down.

Note that the non-regulated institutions did better, as did the non-regulated arms of regulated institutions.

AIG was regulated up the wazoo.
try stylizer (10 times better than firebug, but only for CSS) and you'll never care about order
I'm quite surprised that after properly bending it you could still see the virtual keyboard on the screen, so it was still running! Not sure any laptop would survive that.
Yes, you are probably true. But I have seen users permanently implementing a variation on the slightest hint of improvement, so it is better to take a strict stance because they are going to ignore it anyway.
I wonder how likely you would be to think that if it the video games that simulate this exact kind of thing didn't exist -- do we think they're playing a video game because of the video games they've played, or do we think they're playing video games because of the video games we've played?
Writing Technical Articles
Whether or not it is expected is irrelevant to the discussion of hiding the fact it happens. It also is irrelevant to the reprimand/punishment of those who do cross the line.
Will It Blend? - iPad
Finally, iPad-related media worth investigating.
Content creation != typing!

I will agree that the lack of cursor buttons is a pain for certain operations. (Like quoting HN posts with asterisks.) But I think this device is meant for it's chief input method to be something other than typing. That's a part of the revolution this thing is a part of. That's also what may make this device too early for the world.

Incidentally, it seems that I can type at full speed on this thing. (Posted from an iPad)
You suggest that there exists some "moral code" which justifies killing each other in certain circumstances. Combat is never respectful, nor is it ever moral. To make honorable rules of engagement is to obscure the horrific violation of humanity that war is.

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 we aren't willing to carpet bomb a school, we should not be willing to destroy the family that depends on it.

And yes, the video is horrific.