skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This worked about as well for me as it did for Firefox, when I implemented it a few years ago, after reading the YSlow presentations. I've said it three times on HN but I'll say it a fourth: watch one of the YSlow presentations, get their checklist, go down and tick off items on it. It is the easiest money you'll make in your life. Look at the improvements here: combining uncombined JS files and inlining CSS. These are tweaks that you can have coded, tested, and live in ten minutes or less.

As an aside: It is a little disturbing to me that I'm ahead of Mozilla on the Internet technology adoption curve.
Incidentally, how is HN for speed?
But, the vehicle was already transporting suspects.

That's like using a medical vehicle to transport combatants and then come back and pick up the wounded from the same vehicle.
You're welcome. In fact the main reason I mentioned it was because it seemed like there might be time for feedback to make a difference.
Agreed. The only reason I'm even considering the iPad at this point is for its battery life. 5 hours is a deal killer.
Probably because it says nothing but "I agree". It doesn't bring anything to the discussion, hence 0 karma (negative would be overkill, however).
Ask HN: Toolset to write an e-book
I have a good idea for an e-book and I have like 50% percent of it written. I'm currently writing it using textile markup in WriteRoom. I'm planning to render it to HTML and from there use "print as PDF", but I think that there have to be a better workflow.

I know some of you have written e-books and I would appreciate any advice on the matter.

Thank you!
have you used windows 7? also, this thing can run chrome, so close enough, maybe?

what about the ability to multi-task, install hulu desktop, etc?

also, if one needs more than 5 hours of battery life, it's probably a good sign that one should get a laptop or, dare I say, a netbook. why? because you're probably going to end up buying the docks anyway. no one can sit through 10 hrs of facing down and typing on a screen. i promise you that.
if you examine the frame between 2:40 and 2:41

I don't think people do that in combat. If you're ever in combat, or in a situation with armed people who think you may want to kill them, I highly recommend that you make it very obvious you're not armed. If they look at the footage of how you died and say "Oh! If we examine the frame, it looks like he wasn't going to kill us, after all!" I guess you'll be vindicated.
"If the US wanted to conquer Iraq, it seems like it would have been over already."

No it wouldn't. (As you say don't get emotional about this). Except genocide, which wouldn't be acceptable in this century, what exactly would the US do differently without having an even more aggressive insurgency?

The US has conquered Iraq, in the sense of defeating and disarming its armies, executing its leader and occupying territory. The problem it has is in getting sections of the conquered populace to go a long with its designs for them.
"9 years in and still at a stalemate, moving at a snail's pace" is in spite of everything the US Army could do.

So again I ask you what exactly would the US do differently than what it did if it were (in your opinion) a "real" conquest? I would say that troops of another nation occupying your country for many years, and planning to stay (albeit on a reduced scale) for many more and maintaining a monopoly on heavy weaponry (tanks, planes, artillery etc) while building up a local collaborating militia is the definition of "occupation" or "conquest".

This is exactly what the Soviets did in Afghanistan, for e.g. (Iran is doing what the US did then by providing arms, motivation and ideological support to people who fight the invasion, but on a comparitively reduced scale. Nothing like the Saudi/Pakistani/US tieup that formed to help the Afghans fight the Russians). If the Americans aren't ocupying Iraq, the Soviets didn't occupy Afghanistan either and that just doesn't seem to be a sensible conclusion.

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.

As a (by and large) supporter of the United States (I'd rather see the US win than some kind of deranged Islamic theocracy, the poor Iraqis don't have any good choices) I suggest the problem is not that the US didn't occupy Iraq, it is just that 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. It is very hard if not impossible for a democracy with a free media to fight a war for very dubious ends and maintain support "back home" over 8 years with steadily mounting casualties and huge expenditure of treasure during a recession.

Coming back to your post, how (in your opinion) would a "conquest" look different? How would the insurgency go away if the US adopted different tactics? Except for massive scale concentration camps/genocide/scorched earth tactics which wouldn't be acceptable in the US or Europe or anywhere else really these days, how would it not face any less of an Islamic insurgency and/or do better?

(There seem to be hyper patriot US readers here who downvote anything that suggests the US invasion of Iraq is an occupation and the Iraqis may be somewhat justified in fighting back.

Just think of what you would do if the USA were invaded. Co operate with the invaders? Or fight back any way you could?

Interesting how some people in the US think the US troops and mercenaries like BlackWater are anything but an occupying army in Iraq.)
The reality be damned. Hindsight is 20/20.

Imagine you're there, in the arena, adrenaline practically oozing out of your pores. You're 500 feet above the one of the most dangerous cities in the world [1], a warzone that's claimed the lives of thousands of young men, just like you, and you've just taken out the armed enemy. That was the enemy. And that guy laying there still is the enemy. And so is anyone helping him. And now a van has pulled up, unidentified. You don't know who or what is in that van and whether it is armed or not. You know the reality,the statistics, and they're not in your favor. So you do as anyone in that situation would do, with limited information and a hell of a lot of empirical data. You neutralize the threat. You destroy them and live to see another day.

[1] 2007 was the bloodiest year to date in Iraq - http://icasualties.org/
It is an amazing community to watch. Design leaves a lot on the cutting room floor, and in dribbble you see both final products and bits of glory that may have never been appreciated or reviewed.

I hope they open up some parts of the site for others to see. Some very fresh work going on by some of the best designers in the world, sharing openly, participating freely and having a damn good time doing so.
That happens when you have a problem where I/O somewhere, so lots of processes wind up blocked on I/O and are counted to load even though they aren't counting for CPU. The fact that normal queries take 5 minutes is confirmation of this.

As you've figured out this can happen because of a full storage device (causing writes to fragment as it squeezes data into small empty spaces, which causes what could have been one write to be many, which adds lots of seek time) or overloaded I/O causing the pre-fetch/caching tricks to stop working, causing everything to slow down.

The best solution is to never get into this situation in the first place. The second best solution is to find a way to halt I/O to the afflicted device until the system gets sorted out, figure out what was wrong, then add load and get back to a running state. The worst solution is to let things limp along until diminished load hopefully lets the disk get through its backlog and go back to normal.
There is a standard library forming, largely as part of the HTML5 process, however JS-in-a-browser's 'standard' requirements are different to those of a server or desktop application. Whats missing is simple things eg a broad range of collection types would be nice, filling some particular niches:

Real dictionaries (ie, non-string (complex) keys)
Sets
Sorted Lists, Dictionaries, Sets

Bonus points for immutable variations of all of the above (particularly if they were allowed as arguments to web workers) and for real iteration support and functional processing methods.
people are focusing on the wrong area of this story...yes killing that first group of people was a dick move, but it might get justified by ROE....killing the people in the van who tried to help was also a dick move...but it can still be justified by calling it a gray area.

The actual story here is that the army decided to cover up this whole issue in the first place(i.e. them saying they had no idea how the kids got wounded)
"Very freaking fast."

The front page loads with 10 HTTP requests on an empty cache, and doesn't have any user-perceptible blockage while waiting on elements. (Pulled this straight out of YSlow.)

Improvement is overkill, but if you wanted to:

1) Creates images{1,2}.ycombinator.com and split y18.gif, s.gif, and grayarrow.gif, and your JS and CSS files across the three domains. This will cause older browsers to load them all in parallel. (The HTTP spec suggests having no more than 2 requests to any one domain open at a time, so you end up with stairstep loading graphs on browsers which are spec-compliant, such as IE6. Browsers which have a more pragmatic view towards compliance with published specifications, such as Firefox 3, will do 8 ~ 10 requests in parallel.)

Note the balancing act in that every domain you add is another DNS query that needs to get resolved once. Ideally you want to keep it to about 4 domains or less.

2) Put far future expires headers on your static assets. You can bust caches by using the Rails-y filename.js?timestampOfLastModificationOfCode method.

But, again, this site is probably the fastest one I use on a regular basis, even from braindead clients like my Kindle. I wouldn't guess the marginal improvement is worth the expensive engineer time.
Some of us are still using Firefox out of pure loyalty. I'm painfully loyal (That's why I'm still watching 24 and Heroes) but I'm thinking seriously in Chrome.
For a few short moments while watching this video, I forgot how much I hate cars.
Wow only 256MB RAM? Anyone else surprised?
One of the best programmers I know (became VP of Engineering at a major company at one point) was an English Lit major with no formal CS training.

He started off consulting and worked his way up through a lot of hard work. Point is, I actually think it would be faster to do this (assuming you're willing put in the effort) than to aim for a master's program with the hope the end result is a better opportunity. After your first programming job, experience and recommendations matter much more than a degree.
Yelp Increasing Transparency and Eliminating 'Favorite Review'
The vehicle was not transporting suspects! According to the Huffington Post it was a good semeritan taking his children to tutoring classes.

There is no indication it was the same black vehicle at the start of the video. No one on the ground or air claimed it was. Furthermore, even if it was, no one claimed the black vehicle at the start was a target or contained suspects! The air merely stated it passed under their targetting crosshair.

The suspect as reported by the ground was ONE MAN, who had appeared in front of their Bradley.
I just want to point out that the robot's operating system is open-source and runs on heaps of different robot platforms:

http://www.ros.org/

The software is primary developed by Willow Garage, a start-up created by an ex-Googler that also has Larry Page on its board:

http://www.willowgarage.com/

You can actually simulate this specific robot and even write algorithms (in Python and C++ AFIAK) without having one:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/pr2_simulator

As you can probably tell, I really love how they're lowering the entry barrier for robotics programming!
Well, in that case, in the next year learn by doing what you want to do i.e. web development. You still would benefit going through the exercises. At the very least, go through Google's Python tutorial and get some decent coding skills from the MIT intro class (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...)

After going through that exercise, you should be able to build some non-trivial apps.

For web side, you can benefit from learning at least one web framework (yes, HN folks will flame throw you with framework do's and don't, but for learning sake, just pick one and stick with it). Ruby on Rails is a pretty popular framework and some Ycombinator startups have built extremely impressive sites (scribd, justin.tv, Loopt to name a few).

So, assuming you put in work on the python tutorial or even if you didn't, I highly recommend this online ruby tutorial in 15 minutes. http://tryruby.org/

I'd recommend this Ruby on Rails online tutorial - http://www.railstutorial.org/book#top. It is very new-comer friendly and dips into industry-relevant points that other tutorials don't necessary cover; by that, I mean this tutorial touches base on version control (a program to keep track of what you added or changed in your code) and unit testing (you need this when your code gets ridiculously huge).

And, even though this may sound too early (it's not), look at job boards of places where you may want to work for (this would and should change as your learning progresses). In those places, look at skills required and the tools they use. You'd be surprised how often some jobs care about what you have built and how smart you are rather than your impressive educational credentials (though that can help).
Neither the US nor Iraq have ratified Protocol II.
RIP digital me: Saying good-bye to Facebook
Sundolier Robot Pumps Sunlight Indoors for Powerful Daylighting
Is Digital Media Worse for the Environment Than Print?
This may not be directly relevant, but it doesn't hurt to use version control to keep track of changes or for just giggles to see what the heck you were thinking through the writing process.
Songbird drops Linux Support
The response was directed to the blogger and his writing, who was not the same person as apache pilot to my knowledge, and therefore had the luxury of examining the video.
Without the labels and WikiLeaks cuts, could you have looked at these pictures and determined what the guys on the ground were holding? Honest to god, I could not.

Rules of engagement are good. They should be followed. Unfortunately, the government sets them, and I think even a YCombinator startup would get its butt kicked coming up with better rules.

Example: the Van, that is very gray. Is it a weapons collection unit or a medical assistance device? Its both. Its war. Its moving...

As I read through these comments, some gave a back story that the Apaches were called in by ground troops that had taken fire earlier in the day. If that's the case and you are on that trigger, in that moment, I doubt many of us would be as judicious in our decision making.
Hmm, can you tell me where in the video that it's pretty clear anyone from the van was picking up weapons?

I can understand some fog-of-war "I thought the camera was a gun." excuses, but just because they say on the radio that they were "possibly" picking up weapon doesn't mean that they actually saw them do any such thing.

I've watched it twice and it looks to me exactly like they shot up a van that was trying to help a wounded man.
Well, it's your use of the data, not so much the scraping itself. But way more importantly, the search engine has money and you don't.
The backend software (custom written by pg) can be buggy and slow at times, but the actual HTML interface is fine for performance.
Websites you read?
I check techcrunch, gigaom, mashable and here daily. Are there any I am missing out on?

edit: I check out quicksprout every few weeks or so too. I just need to find some meaningful distractions to divert me from wasting time on reddit :)

Thank you in advance.
They weren't there though. According to the analysis on other sites, the helicopter was about a mile away. (Based on the time between when the rounds were fired and when they hit.)
It's not that buggy, is it? Requests occasionally time out, but I don't know of much that actually breaks.
Though just to clarify something, this footage was taken in 2007 at the height of the Iraq War. It's not recent and the war is not still raging, at least not at anything close to the 2007 level.

But I agree with your main point. Context is everything, Wikileaks could have handled this better.
There was an article a while back by the person who writes those "Dive into" series (Mark ??). Iirc, he stopped using markups and began writing directly in HTML. That way he could see exactly what he was getting and not waste time fighting a markup. See if you can google him. (dive into mark - iirc).

I used to have a lot of problems with textile some years back. One never knew when it would just ignore a markup. Same often happens with markdown.
Lessons for Clear Thinking Teams
Thanks for posting. I needed this!
The way I like to think about this is, imagine a hypothetical company, let's call them ROCK. They have a wild business idea of mining asteroids in space. You spend all your money on this stock during their initial public offering and end up owning 1% of it. 40 years in the future, ROCK has had hundreds of successful mining missions and tremendous wealth was derived from the metals they have salvaged.

Through their efforts there are now thriving mining colonies living permanently in space, and a whole industry was created around their operations. Without the initial funds they received from their IPO, none of this would have been possible. As the years pass, they expand further and further into space, with no limits in sight. Another 10 years later you decide to cash in your 1% share and find yourself the proud owner of your own small moon.
http://www.aldaily.com/
That's pretty frickin' awesome... ideal for algorithm experimenting, and it could even help create a better-designed 'bot because you can experiment with different placements of tools.

Many thanks for the links! I'm definitely keeping those around...
What is the video in question? There's a video on the front page of wikileaks, but it's not a "39 minute video".
Uh, wtf. The helo is just circling about casually and they're taking their time fixing the targets before firing. How is that combat and an adrenaline rush moment? And that RPG...clearly a telephoto lens. Those supposed AKs look nothing like actual AKs.

I expect a well-trained pilot or soldier to be able to take a second to make sure they're firing on an actual target. If you look at the length of the damned video, you see that the helo pilots had enough time to examine the targets carefully (meaning at least a 10sec glance).
Wikileaks co-founder speaks about the "Collateral Murder" video
Apple A4 Chip Teardown at Reverse Engineer facility
"So you do as anyone in that situation would do, with limited information and a hell of a lot of empirical data. You neutralize the threat. You destroy them and live to see another day."

What exactly was the "threat" here? The helicopter was a mile away and in no danger of not "live to see another day" ?

(err why the downvotes? That was a straightforward question. The parent seemed to imply that the shooters were doing it in order to "live to see another day". Was anyone threatening the helicopter in any credible fashion?)
Not knowing who someone is is not an excuse to shoot them.

It is NOT true that 'anyone helping him' is also an enemy. That is just a recipe for war crimes.
Writing is one of my hobbies/passions outside of coding, and using svn/hg/git/etc is so great, since it's all text (or should be, screw word and other word processors that save in binary formats). Being able to track changes and easily get back stuff if you change your mind is wonderful, just like it is in coding.
Regarding deforestation, it seems less digital media's direct blame, and more a national and state-level issue of how we run our power grids. Coal's a nasty piece of work anyhow - the radiation they emit, along with the pollutants they generate, are enough to make even an ex-nuclear submariner acquaintance of mine shudder, and the guy's outright blase about anything short of actually being in a reactor without a suit. We should really, really be making effort to moving away from that technology anyhow.

However, e-waste? That's legitimate. The EU's e-waste regulations goes some way in at least limiting the environmental damage, but it's a far cry from enough. DARPA's callout for more energy-efficient computing devices helps, but pretty much the only argument in favor of electronics, in terms of how "green" they are, is that while they're more energy-intensive to make per unit, they make up for it in terms of information density and reusability by the order of quite a few magnitudes.
From the comments:

"Consider This:

* It takes 12 trees to produce a ton of printing paper—24 trees for higher grade writing paper.*

* A mature tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year.

* Only 5% of the paper used in the book industry is recycled.

* Up to 35% of books printed for consumers (down from nearly 60% several years ago) are never read. They are returned to the publisher and end up in landfills.

* 71% of the world's paper supply comes from natural forests, rather than tree farms

* Paper mills dump gallons of chemical bleaches and solvents into local watersheds every hour of every day.

* Conservatree—Trees Into Paper

World Business Council for Sustainable Development

You want to beat up on coal, go ahead. We need desperately to switch to less polluting power sources. But suggesting that paper is more environmentally friendly than digital media is laughable."
Tim Bray on the iPad: Memory Matters
Yes, digital media uses natural resources. Print media uses natural resources.

Until environmental impact is part of the economic equation (as argued by Natural Capitalism: http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Capitalism-Creating-Industrial... ) it will always be one evil vs. another.
It's a good theory. Unfortunately no other weapons (apart from a single AK-47 - which was commonly carried in 2007 Baghdad) or bombs were found, so I can just as easily say that they might have been aliens from Xenu.

I do think that there are more extenuating circumstances than some may think (it was 2007 in Baghdad - people forget how bad things were there). But claims that those people were anything other than a random group of people will require some evidence.
It's a strange world where this is the case, but Windows 7 is a lot more open than either ChromeOS or the iPad.7. hromeOS is similar to the iPad in that you're limited in your ability to install the software of your choice - does it even have native programs that you can install?. Isn't that like the complaint so many of us have about the iPad, that it doesn't have a full featured OS?
Do you think the gunner had a chance to "watch it again" when he was making his decision?

Hacker News is becoming reddit, except reddit has a hide button.
/me watches video

So, one of their advertising points on UI is that Cover Flow stutters like Porky Pig? Cover Flow in particular is smooth as silk on almost any laptop I've tried it on, and I'll guarantee that the iPad will handle however many thousands of covers you may have without the slightest pause.

And I find it kind of strange that it could handle 1080p without a problem, but be slow with scrolling images.
Why are wafers round? Is there a part of the process that requires spinning the wafer?