skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the military investigation, it is revealed that the man crouching around the corner with the camera was taking a picture of US troops 100 meters away. The timestamped photo was found on the camera later.

So he's in an area where combat has occurred, crouching around a corner, pointing a long tube at US troops. No press is suspected to be in the area. Other men in his group are undeniably armed with weapons. He's a threat by any reasonable standard.

Two RPGs are, in fact, found at the site by ground forces, as is an automatic rifle. There were combatants in this group.
Ask HN: How much customer support time would 100,000 users take?
Let's say I can bootstrap a SaaS web app that would attract 100,000 active users. I have no problem with the technical part of managing that traffic, but what about the customer support part? How much time should I expect to spend in answering user emails? Obviously it depends on the nature of the web app, so let's say for the sake of discussion that a user would use the web app once a week, its complexity would be similar to meetup.com, and if the web app doesn't do its job the user is significantly inconvenienced.
My first reaction: How much time and money did this cost? How is this benefiting anything? Is this a test of some operating system that will be used on other, more useful things, or just a science project?
There are weapons visible at various points in the video and an RPG was found at the scene, these people were not all unarmed. That the journalists were killed is tragic and may very well be due to mistakes or incompetence or even malice, but none of that is clear from this video.

What is clear is that the journalist and his driver were in the presence of armed Iraqis carrying AK-47s and RPGs at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It was common practice for Iraqi stringers for news agencies like Reuters to embed themselves with insurgents in the hope of being extremely close to the story and getting pictures they would not otherwise have been able to obtain, but it was a very risky thing to do. If soldiers have already seen the people around you carrying guns and RPGs, they're a whole lot more likely to misinterpret your camera lens as an RPG when it peeks around a corner.

There were also two Apaches at the scene, but it's not entirely clear which crew is making each comment on the radio and what they can see as we only have one viewport into this event, which comes from the gunner's sight of only one of the Apaches. It is entirely plausible that the other Apache crew did clearly see weapons and that, outside the field of view of the camera we're looking at, they saw the black van picking up weapons. Further, each helicopter also has a separate sight for the pilot which can be slewed on its own axis and which we cannot see.

In short, the video lacks context and it's difficult to make a conclusive judgement without that context. We are given only one limited viewport into this event and expected to pronounce judgement on four guys who at once had a much broader and more detailed view of the situation but who also, unlike us, had to process that information in real-time, not from a video which could be rewound and played back. Whatever happened here, I'm not as ready to call it murder as WikiLeaks and some of the commenters here have been.
It depends how demanding the requests are. Just as one example, when I request the list of my own threads (to be sure to respond to replies I may have missed through regular browsing of the site), I OFTEN find that that times out. This is probably more likely to happen to a user with many subscribed threads than to one with few, but I see it happen a lot. I can hardly ever successfully request my list of submitted threads.

But perhaps that is just me. My use pattern here is at the extreme end of the distribution.
Let's not forget Apple gets more footprints into their little tent than HP's retail stores (oh wait, they don't have that kind of success on land).

As iTunes is to iPod, App Store is to iPad. Apple succeeds because of the combo punch, not because its consumers care whether HP has more Ghz or not.

Too bad Compaq didn't make better iPaq's (oh that's right, HP bought them :-p )
http://www.mcsquare.me
The comment history and user pages have been very slow lately. I guess it depends on how you define "bug," but at some point slow results cross the threshold, and I think we're there.

Not that I/we don't appreciate everything you do. I mean, this whole site is an act of charity so I guess I expect some bugs.
But as I understand it, by 2007 they were not permitted to take those guns out from their houses. This is why the US's rules of engagement pretty much stated that anybody in the street with a weapon who was not part of the Iraqi security services was fair game.

So the quoted comment may not have been entirely accurate with regards to Iraqis as a whole, but it was in fact accurate with regards to Iraqis carrying weapons in the street and the fact that there was no such thing as an armed Iraqi escort for journalists.
i think a mouse move with a "apple-esque" for lack of a better term of a pinch to zoom out or a reverse pinch to zoom in would be the way to do something like this. I know the learning curve would be kind of steep and would require a magic mouse sort of device, but it is becoming more and more intuitive.
iPhone game development on Windows with DragonFire - Touchpad Input
I watched both the short and long versions a couple of times, and there I see no justification for the claim that the truck or those in it were doing anything but trying to move the wounded man to safety. Considering (1) there were children in the front seat visible about as clearly as the weapons the men were supposedly carrying and (2) the dialogue on the radio, it seems clear that the gunman was a little too eager to engage without really considering the lethal gravity of his actions.

While on one hand, it may very well be that troops are more effective (by some simple measure) when they fire first and ask questions later, on the other, if those apache gunmen were in the shoes of the marines on the ground who have to carry wounded kids out of the rubble, or worry about those same orphans throwing grenades into their humvee windows a week later, maybe they'd be as careful looking for children as they are for RPG's.
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I don't know if this talk was ever made public but I heard at Google that under some circumstances cutting a few hundred milliseconds of latency can double click-through, conversions, etc., or even more. I do occasionally see Google people encouraging web developers to make their pages faster at conferences and such. Personally I would be very concerned about the money I was losing if I had a web site where the 95th worst percentile of my paying customers had to wait more than two seconds (from the client's perspective) for a pageload. I'd buy a bigger database machine, spread my servers to more geographical regions, whatever it took to try to bring that latency down.
Ironically, Arrington's review of iPad seemed to have a tone of "haha, I am glad we are not with the sinking ship of a JooJoo," not that there's anything wrong with it, given the drama...

I honestly was excited about the CrunchPad because of the rumored price of $199 back in the day. Oh well, maybe that is where the JooJoo needs to be...
In Syria, a Prologue for Cities
"The team found that the eye movements could be used to predict the size of the next number before it was spoken."

Subject pictures a range of numbers -> before choosing a number to announce, subject "looks" at that number's position on the range they have pictured.

Am I the only one that finds it aggravating that so much money and human energy is expended proving things that are so intuitively obvious? There's a connection between what we imagine in our brains, and what we do with our bodies. There's a connection between what we do with our bodies, and how we think and feel. Anyone who has played an instrument, drawn a picture, or danced - anyone with any bit of soul - knows this.
This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait.

This is the key reason it works for Google. I really like Google's products and hope that y'all continue doing the kind of work that has made this true. If you falter, this will stop working.
Another use case: BuddyPoke

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/1/22/how-buddypoke-scal...
I believe its because the wafers are actually sliced of a single large crystal of silicon, which grows in a circular cross-section.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer_(electronics)
If I was running an insurgency in Iraq, I would keep a guy in the back of an unmarked van with an RPG and I would drive around pretending to pick up bodies. I think I'd probably get a lot of kills that way. I don't think it's fair to say the van was clearly unarmed, especially when you consider the fact that the van could have been called in to make a pickup by a group of people confirmed to have at least one RPG and at least one AK-47.

In the moment of the firefight it was unclear whether the van was armed or not. Was was clear to the soldiers was that the van responded very quickly to a group of wounded people who had several confirmed weapons among them. Also, as others have mentioned, the soldiers knew the insurgency has used similar tactics in the past to salvage weapons and ammo.
Well, there's some small quirks, such as incorrect HTTP status codes: http://news.ycombinator.com/oiqjweofjoqwej

Also, I thought I remember a problem with reverse proxies and the hacker news server? Can't remember the specifics though.
> they get annoyed when people with manuals are content to idle along in second which keeps the same average speed but periodically opens up large holes in front.

I do this (I have a game I play in highway traffic called Avoid Using the Brake), but I don't find that other motorists get annoyed. In fact I rarely even find that people cut into the big gaps - and if they do, it's usually just passing through en route to another lane.
Pretty cool!

* A URL that you can take notes on through your iPhone

* You can e-mail that URL to yourself, and edit that same list.

This is great because, as the author says, there aren't any easy ways to sync notes between your mobile device and computer.

I'm personally unlikely to use it because I just barf stuff into the notes app on the iPhone, but I think this will be of use to many people.
I hate to sound cold, but without context that video says absolutely nothing.

All that video, in its present form, with the present information available says is: investigate further.
The iPhone and iPad are not the machines that ship with an SDK, though. That lies entirely on the Mac. And yeah, the Mac is definitely part of the hacker's Golden Age.
I am not American; though I usually side with democratic countries as much as I can.

However, if you made a really big mistake and went to war with a country which posed no credible threat to you (at least in hindsight when this shooting took place) I'd imagine people would err on the side of caution when shooting somebody's family and loved ones.

At least in this part of the world, what is coming across is that your army does not care much about killing people - if they are not American or Western.

And to add some rhetoric, what gives America the moral right to talk about human rights when the Iraqi death toll exceeds well over one hundred thousand? -- What happened in Tiananmen is a mere _hundredth_ of what is happening in Iraq.

Killing ten Iraqis to save an American soldier is not justifiable, any which way you look at it.
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"Finally, there’s the issue of the App Store. I’m on the fence about it. My hunch is that Apple should follow Palm’s lead and allow users to install applications from the web, albeit after prompting for the user’s consent and warning against whatever security issues might arise despite the platform’s sandboxing... However, I don’t feel strongly enough about these positions to make them part of my “platform” above."

I don't get how one would feel less strongly about this point than the others. To me, the notion that smart kids would stop tinkering with things never seemed like a real threat. It's more fun to tinker with things when it's against the rules, anyway. My concern has always been the long term implications of embracing this closed app distribution platform.

I've read plenty of arguments for and against it. Inevitably, I am left with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Yes, I understand that this gatekeeper system could help keep users from hurting themselves. But Apple has also shown that it is not just looking out for its users — it's also being anti-competitive, namely with its decision to block new Google apps.

I've seen people try to argue that Apple is in fact very open because it includes Safari, which is HTML5 compliant. But I've yet to experience many HTML5 apps that are as snappy or easy to use as their native counterparts, and it seems like 'native' will continue to evolve faster than 'web' for quite a while.

I bought an iPad. I really like it, and was thrilled by how quickly my parents learned to use it. But I can't shake this feeling that the App Store's entirely closed ecosystem is a bad thing.
I can't even begin to follow some of the moral reasoning on this page.

The soldiers have to be there to keep the peace, as part of their humanitarian mission towards the Iraqi people. Because the soldiers are there, they have to protect themselves against the violent insurgents among the Iraqi people, by killing anyone who presents any kind of threat. Don't you see, they had to kill the Iraqis in order to save them.

If we didn't massacre Iraqis, we wouldn't be able to safely patrol their cities, and then where would that leave the Iraqis? Completely unprotected.
I would love to know how they intend on filtering reviews successfully while exposing the process behind the filter. It would seem any transparent filter system would invite people to find reliable ways of bypassing and subverting the things that get you flagged.

There's a reason Google won't give you a full look at a page's spamminess rating, and a reason reddit is open source except for the spam filtering bits. With any blacklist filtering routine, transparency puts you at an inherent disadvantage. Instead of a million trials to see what passes and what doesn't, the answers are already there.

...or they aren't really, and this is just a PR scheme by Yelp to claim more transparency with the illusion of fairness for review visibility. To me this is the only real possibility here.
3D will enjoy success in the living room for sure, what with even an iPad app (X elements) supporting 3D http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-a-visual-explora...
IBWire: Policy for Enhancement of... - Yu Hwang Wu
Absolutely. I tried teaching Python to teenagers. It turns out that significant whitespace is a hurdle. I would use QBasic if I had to do it again.
"he military has now released the records on their investigations: [url]

The site seems to be down.

"Unknown Error

Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services. "

SharePoint? :-P
It's amazing to me that this guy doesn't realize what terrible damage he's doing to Wikileaks' credibility by editorializing this so aggressively. In one swoop they've gone in my mind from neutral champion of transparency to just another advocacy group. It doesn't help if one happens to agree with the advocacy, either; what is destructive is that the ideological agenda is so obvious. (So, it seemed to me watching this, is his smug self-satisfaction.)

What a shame.
In a similar spirit to the article's question I've recently switched the emphasis of my economic thinking from, "How can I make money?" to "Are there any real-world problems I encounter frequently, or know that others are experiencing, that I think I can solve, and make money while doing it?"
100k active users might mean its time to hire customer support so you don't stretch yourself to do it.
"There are weapons visible at various points in the video and an RPG was found at the scene, these people were not all unarmed."

The official military statement about the incident was as follows:

"The Apache crew fired because militants 'were endangering the stability of Iraq' and because they had positive identification that the militants 'had weapons and were using them against coalition and Iraqi security forces.'"

There aren't any coalition or Iraqi security forces in the area, and none are ever mentioned in the video. So while it's possible that an RPG was found at the scene, it's just as possible that the military was lying about both.
Insurgents might do all those things, but the people in van made no moves to go for any weapons. Considering they are happy to watch the injured guy to see if he goes for a weapon, there is no reason they couldn't have waited to see if the van people went for weapons. They misreported the situation on the radio, making it seem like the people in van were picking up bodies and weapons - but they are just surmising that's what the people in van's intentions were. I think that ought to incur some kind of disciplinary response.
if you don't like an article, flag it. if enough people flag it, it'll go away.
Yeah, I got that. I disagree though. If Apple released a ChromeOS-alike and Apple's provided Apps did not have a advantage, due to direct hardware access or via secret APIs, because Apple made them, then I don't think we'd see people crying "crippled". I don't think Apple could keep themselves from giving themselves and advantage, though, so this ends up just being a academic discussion. ;)
I would guess that what made the van suspect was that it drove into the middle of a battle. Everyone within a couple of miles must have heard the 30mm High Explosive shells detonating.
:(. A lot of people seem to be completely missing the point of this video. It isn't that some journalists were killed, it's that they were killed in sport. The people speaking while they're shooting them are acting as though they want them dead, not as though they're taking their lives in an effort to protect themselves.

Did you see the part where the dying journalist is bleeding out on the curb and trying to crawl for cover? The helicopter gunner is saying something to the effect of "just pick up a weapon just pick up a weapon"; he's looking for an excuse to pull the trigger. Howabout the part before they shoot of the van that was trying to help people get out of the area? The gunner kept changing the subject back to whether or not he could open fire on it. Again, he wanted to kill the people inside, wanted to see a big explosion.

Yes, there are bad things that happen in war, this video is meant to illuminate the manner in which some of these bad things are happening.

Again, it isn't that people were killed, it was how they were killed and why they were killed.
Once you've murdered journalists in the field, the rules of engagement stop being as important in the war for public opinion. Modern war is as much about information as territory. You simply can't do this, regardless of if you can explain it away til next Tuesday.
Does anyone know why apple only included 256MB memory?

The lack of ram means that in-memory cache for the browser is limited (to zero?), which limits performance.

The cost of ram seems so small (a few dollars per GB in bulk) to a software developer - is the cost energy consumption or ???
If a spammer wanted to see what a site took down, all they'd have to do would be to keep track
of all the comments (including ones not by their accounts). Then they'd have some idea how the filter worked.

If you make the list open then honest people can see too.

The only reason you'd keep the list of what's spam private would be to maintain (perceived) infallibility. Every filter makes mistakes, only some filters let you see them.
what gives America the moral right to talk about human rights when the Iraqi death toll exceeds well over one hundred thousand?

Well, the counter argument is that by this logic nobody can talk about human rights. Until very recently in human history the Europeans brutally conquered half the world and effectively turned the "savage people" that were unlucky enough to survive the raping and the pillaging into slaves. Listening to anyone who points out legitimate human rights violations is better than listening to no one who points out legitimate human rights violations. It's just more constructive this way.

Killing ten Iraqis to save an American soldier is not justifiable, any which way you look at it.

This is rhetoric, and isn't an interesting statement about what happened in this video, how it was handled by the military, or how it was marketed and leaked by wikileaks. What possible constructive purpose could this statement serve?
To me, it didn't seem like the other guys were moving with purpose, just out wandering around. One seems to gesture to a street that the photographer should look at.

The chopper guys talk about 5-6 guys having AK-47s but there are only two who appear to be carrying anything at all. The rest don't have bags or anything.
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> Do you have a different definition of "conquest" or "occupation"? To the rest of the world, what the US does/did in Iraq and Afghanistan does look like occupation.

Yes, and perhaps that's why we disagree. Conquest and occupation in my mind are not the same. We are certainly occupying Iraq. 'Conquest' in my mind usually only involves simply seizing a country, which we don't seem to have done; easy examples would be Japan's attacks on China and Germany's sweep of Poland in WWII (and in Japan's case, somewhat before WWII as well), or Genghis Khan, or the Romans.

Looking up the word, it seems it means much closer to simply 'winning', but I usually use it in the sense of invading, taking and controlling. The US has largely avoided the 'taking' part, at least that I'm aware of, so it doesn't seem like conquest in my head. We are also occupying, but certainly not starting farms and such, actually moving in to live there. I may be way off in some of this, but that's how I saw it. I won't attempt to refute your points; they are mostly good, and through your lens they make sense.

> the US is way in over its head wrt the *post invasion" bit of the operation. The invasion went smoothly. The post invasion occupation is where the US struggles.

I absolutely agree with you there. We don't seem to have worked the second step out yet.