skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How TweetDeck uses Google App Engine
I guess when they have direct gain, ie- people accessing facebook profiles through google searches, they are more than happy for this to occur.
I didn't write that particularly well. My apologies; I was trying to convey that the concept of constitution was somewhat different there (That the word "constitution" is somewhat of a misnomer).
After I saw the first video, I did some googling around and reading about the rules of engagement during an insurgency. Under the Geneva Convention, clearly identified medical personnel treating combatants removed from combat are protected. However, if an armed combatant is attempting to help another combatant get to cover, they're both fair game. There's a grey area when it's not clear if a person helping a combatant to cover is a civilian or a combatant.

That's the first part. The second part is that the Army and other forces have made it very clear that attempting to take any weapons from the battlefield counts as engagement, and they will fire at anyone attempting to do so. Apparently this was a big problem during the start of the war - if they took out insurgents, their guns would often be grabbed and ran away with, and presumably used again later. So that's a clear situation right now - attempting to remove weapons from a battlefield will get you fired upon.

It's unclear who was in the van, and if they were attempting to take weapons, though.
You could then claim that the lawsuit is against the wrong person or would they argue that the original scraper was in the right and the secondary person was in the wrong?
MongoSF: Mike Dirolf of 10gen on Developing for MongoDB in Python
A sidenote to yours: War prior to the 21st century was equally horrible, if not more so, in terms of scale.
This blog post (thankfully the economist hasn't published it as an article) is just another excuse to mention the word "iPad".
Nominate this year's Ruby Hero
Why mobile advertising banners suck...brand guidelines & MMA hindering progress
I nominated patio11.
Selection bias? I might not be the best example, but I haven't emigrated yet (to Canada, Australia, the US or the UK) because I am looking to work within the existing inmigration laws (and I'm not motivated - or resourceful, proving the point - enough I guess, but I'm definitely not moving illegally anywhere). For me, they're a powerful deterrent.
Also on a more practical note: take note of high-frequency data costs. FX is the only asset class you can study in detail without major financial backing because of the costs.

This seems to happen even in academia: research in CDS's seemed slim before the financial crisis, I imagine partly because the major U.S. data provider has enjoyed monopoly pricing.
Yeah, it's pretty clear to me that they didn't just decide to shoot people without cause.
Well, even not half-decent schools (the good ones) accept non-cs folks, but with the stipulation that it would serve you better if you came from a math background (engineering, etc.)

What the admissions folks want to know is whether you can handle the workload and can contribute something of significance in the form of a thesis or a project. As about workload, you will invariably encounter systems programming, operating systems, compiler construction and some theory class. Of course, this may not be true everywhere but is an indication of a good grad program's basic requirements. To succeed in those classes (and beyond), you would be advised to have a good grasp of at least C, Java or C++, data structures and algorithms.

Now, if you really want to go through with this, you can succeed if you spent some time studying. Start with MIT OpenCourseWare. Master the intro class with python as a gentle intro (checkout Google's Python class for great intro). Then write those some programs in Java. Then, write those same programs using Object Oriented Programming.

Then look into data structures (arrays, lists, hashes, trees) and the big algorithms (start with path finding - dijkstra, other shortest paths, sorting, and if you have time - strongly connected components, suffix tries, etc.) Another big concept you need to understand is Big O notation - something that tells you how complex a given program or algorithm is (it's nice to know sometimes to compare one algorithm to another on basically how fast it can run - e.g a big O of n^2 O(n^2) is worse than O(n))

Now, all of the above is just good preparation for the fun parts you will do in a Master's. You should spend some serious time hacking around with C (get this book - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_%28b...). The best way to play around with C is to mess around with Systems Programming in UNIX. Get Systems Programming book (http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-UNIX-Programming-Marc-Rochkin...)

Having said all of the above, do you know what you are interested in doing with a degree in C.S? There are some nice interdisciplinary programs where you may not have to do all the hardcore stuff I mentioned above but still dabble into as much detail as you'd like. Look into programs like Michigan's School of Information, for example.

Hope that helps.
There's clearly something fishy about the video if only because we're obviously coming in half way through whatever happened. But the real problem isn't the behavior of the soldiers as much as it's the military not making it's case before this video broke. The author here is raising some valid points but they're all speculation because the military hasn't released anything officially.

Military tribunals should be public record (like civilian trials) and the public that funds the military should be allowed to see what's going on over there and why certain things happened. ESPECIALLY when there were possible non-combatant casualties (I'm talking about the alleged camera men)

Clearly the names of the soldiers would have to be withheld to avoid retribution but there should be some public record when something like this happens
Ask your potential customers. Talk to publishers and advertisers.
No, I looked it up...98.5% of people voted for McCain or Obama.

You must think I'm wrong in some other way...please explain. Getting out of Iraq wasn't part of either candidate's platform. So, how was I blatantly wrong?
Hammers home the point that the integrity of any journalism is contingent on editing, and context.

Yet still I’m glad for the leak - for the first time in months I heard more discussion and awareness that a war we’re bankrolling is still raging instead of celebrity infididelity.
Wouldn't a person helping a combatant get to cover be by definition a combatant (although perhaps just for the duration of the action)?

Also, if we're talking about the Conventions, were these illegal combatants? (I haven't watched the video.)
Blame the victim. They shouldn't have been in Iraq. They shouldn't have been near someone bad. They should have marked the van.

You shouldn't have murdered them. Killing should be the last resort, even in the heat of battle.
My comment was more along the lines that a page that promotes your service should load reliably rapidly, because people who are kept waiting by page loading may not stay around to convert to a user of your product, even if it is free. The comparisons the Firefox team show with the webpages of Brand X products made me think "Ouch!" because I am a user of Firefox myself.
Agree. I did not expect to read this.

Great article, Alex.
Take a year off and learn programming on your own.
Then knock their socks off and get accepted.
I am usually the last to complain about "the state of hacker news" and such, but the fact that this article has managed to amass such a large number of points so quickly does indicate that there is a need for moderation.

this has nothing to do with hacker news, it is replying to conjecture with conjecture, even though the wikileaks story had a very relevant back story (power of the internet, freedom of press, etc) this ignores it all and just gives someones opinion on their interpretation of a highly controversial video.
> Wouldn't a person helping a combatant get to cover be by definition a combatant (although perhaps just for the duration of the action)?

I think the key part is armed combatants in combat - you can't just open fire on any civilians who are helping an unarmed combatant after he's removed from combat. I'm not an expert though - I spent a bit of time reading on Geneva about a year ago, and just refreshed my memory today.

> Also, if we're talking about the Conventions, were these illegal combatants? (I haven't watched the video.)

There's still some limited protections granted to people fighting in "non-international conflicts" under Protocol II, a 1977 Amendment to the Geneva Convention.

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

They do have much less protections than soldiers fighting between two sovereign nations.
Track.com - we're in the financial research space. You?
That's not entirely true. Up until version 7 of Flash Player, Adobe (Macromedia at the time) provided a Flash Player SDK which basically gave you full access to the Flash Player source code (if you checked out as a genuine hardware provider, like Nokia, Apple etc. and where willing to sign some sort of NDA). Some old link: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_sdk

I don't believe the SDK is available like it was back then. I think Adobe has rolled all of this into their Open Screen Project (http://www.openscreenproject.org). I believe the SDK is still available to all the open screen project partners. Apple of course is not an open screen partner. They haven't even tried...
Bacula or any real corporate backup software should also do the job quite nicely, if a bit painful to install initially.

It's also not enough to simply look at backup, you also have to look at recovery, how long it will take to recover from an incident, how frequently data needs to be be backed up, etc........
"Regardless, no one is allowed to be armed except for Iraqi police and Coalition forces. There is no such thing as an armed Iraqi escort for journalists"

Err.. no. Under Iraqi law, everyone was allowed to keep one gun at home. These guns were mostly AK-47s (because that was what was issued to the army). See http://johnrlott.tripod.com/armediraqis.html for example discussion of this.

I believe there was an attempt to change this law during 2007, but confiscation was not widely enforced and the law has since been changed back.
Great piece, check out this video snippet from Zeitghiest living in a society without money. Resource based economy vs what we have today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDJ18m6KUW4
ummmm no. The whole point of the heat of battle is death. What you mean I think is that getting into the heat of battle should be the last resort.
That's exactly how I learned to program.
I was mostly thinking of Adobe dragging their heels on keeping their software suite up to date with Apple's OS progress. But it sounds like you're saying that all Apple needs to do to get crash-free Flash performance is to fix Adobe's bugs for them. You may be right.
I watched this video from end to end. It is entirely possible that this was a team setting up an ambush and filming it.

The fact that a Reuters photojourno was involved only fortifies the plausibility of this theory, since wire photojournos are well-known for "embedding" with insurgents.

I'm not saying one way or the other (unlike many others). I'm proposing an alternative theory that I believe is just as likely as the "collateral murder" storyline.
Macs were never for hackers

Sure they are. Macs are full Unix workstations that can also run Office and Photoshop, with a much better UI than Linux. The meme that Apple's computers are deliberately unfriendly to hackers has never been true, until the iPhone and iPad.
Agreed.

There was just a front page story about the video with over 2 or 3 hundred votes. Everyone can't have their say in that story, so that we can move on?

Everyone who wants to have a say, can have a say there. Let's not fill the stream with all wikileaks. It reminds me of the ipad mania.
price, battery life and brand name are three most selling points. If I need to buy tablet why exactly will I buy HP tablet :-/
Get Your $ 2500 Fast Cash Personal Loan Now, without a credit check
I've been using Firefox since ... well, since Mozilla 1.2. [1] It makes me sad and nostalgic, but I have to admit that Chrome kicks ass at sheer page-rendering speed. I still use Firefox for testing and troubleshooting (Firebug is amazing), but I'm increasingly using Chrome for straight browsing.

[1] http://www-archive.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.2/
> Why not make money the way Larry & Sergey or Jobs & Woz did, by creating wealth?

Why not make money the way David Shaw or Jim Simon or Paul Wilmott did, by adding liquidity to global markets that have modernized economies and provided stable living conditions for communities that came from nothing.

Or you could make fun tech toys for the most privileged 1% of the world.

Of course neither side is that simple, but please don't mistake PG's preaching for the truth.
Finally! It looks like someone actually did some simple math to determine if their results were statistically meaningful. I wish more people would include a section like this when they talk about conversion rates.
The author like many other posters is making the mistake of thinking that some of us put fault on the individual soldiers. In their own shoes I would've done the same thing, with the things hanging on the shoulders I couldn't tell if it was an AK-47 or a camera so I would've opened fire.

What most people is complaining about is the military secrecy and handling of this business, not the "mass murder of civilians" (like some of WL editors try to make it look) but the lack of reaction and respect by the army. If they had released the same video explaining the circumstances instead of hiding the details the situation would be different now.

Short: The blame's on the high command, not on the individual soldiers.
You are dead on there - it's hard to believe.

And forget a/b testing - Google's Optimizer provides full multivariate testing, FREE.

We paid $10k a month to license a hosted multivariate test engine just 3 years from Optimost that was a piece of junk in comparison to that free tool . . .
Thanks for the thorough advice. I really appreciate it. I think my main goal is just to get a credible degree for the web development job market. It will be a complete career switch for me. My thought process is that going back and getting another BA is too time consuming. I am motivated right now and I have a lot of free time, so I'm wondering if it is possible to teach myself most of the basics taught in undergrad and get into a grad program, which would be worth much more in the job market anyways.
Re: your second point, here's a good example of what you mean:
http://i.imgur.com/NVih0.jpg

(via @chrisloos)
Wow, the apologists are springing into action. Watch the video again. At the exact moment the correspondent is in the crosshairs of the camera and you see that he is carrying a small black bag you hear the crew saying "Yeah that's a weapon." and "Fucking prick". For God's sake, it's a guy sauntering down the middle of the road carrying a little bag and the crew is making out that they're tracking a dangerous insurgent. Then they start talking about another guy with a weapon and I would swear that the person they're looking at in the crosshairs is actually hobbing along with a crutch. Then the FireDogLake guy makes out that because the black van appears twice it is somehow ominous. He defends firing on the van because one crew member says that the person is the van is picking up weapons. Listen to the video. What he actually said is that there's a van in the area "possibly picking up weapons". Yeah, possibly doing anything. I agree that a video doesn't tell the whole story but so far the people defending the actions of the crew haven't come up with much.
Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it
The "All-Stars" list looks a lot like my "you are following" on Twitter.
Everyone picking up the bodies and from the van was clearly UNARMED. Unarmed non-combatants were picking up the body of an unarmed non-combatant who never held a weapon.
"Expertise needs schooling, maturation, taste, and quite a lot of attitude."

Maturation, taste and attitude comes with experience. Experience comes from doing. When the tool in question, limits the doing, then where does the expertise come from? A bunch of people sitting behind a company fence telling you that they're the only experts? Doesn't sound right does it?
The following comment was posted by Deviltry on Reddit.

"That's the problem with the war in Iraq... It's insurgency based. They use vans to come up and pick up the bodies, but truth be told they don't care about the bodies, they come to get the weapons/rpg's.

I know it's popular to hate America and our military action on reddit, but this particular engagement is necessary. Anyone who's ever spent time on the ground in country will tell you the same. If you are going to fight an insurgency war, you have to engage these individuals. We have made it VERY well known throughout the country that they cannot even make it look like they are going for weapons. The problem with this situation is one i've seen personally on multiple occasions... The Van pulls up, takes the bodies of the men, leaves any children/women, and takes all the weapons. Then they take pictures, and blast them across the airwaves saying Americans murdered unarmed women/children.

Queue the downvotes, but i speak from experience. If you sent us over there to operate under the absolute "good guy" mantra that you all expect, we'd end up with 100x more losses than we already have... And the insurgents would know they could get away with doing virtually anything. Honestly, the only way to end this is to get the government to get us out of that country."

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/bmooi/wikileaks_video_j...
From reading the sworn statements of the helicopter crew (http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%2...) it sounds like that van had been active dropping off and picking up insurgents earlier in the day, so they're not necessarily non-combatants. True, they wouldn't have been able to do much to an Apache, but there were other units who it could've fired on.

Not that it makes the situation any more right, but it does make things a lot less clear cut...
Most of the Indian hackers (and they are few) prefer to work for the multinationals like Google, Yahoo etc. So only mediocre guys are working as security experts for Indian Defence. No wonder, every tom, dick and harry is able to hack into the NSA at will and get confidential information out.
After viewing the video, it clearly is an unprovoked massacre.

LINK:This is clear considering they approached the hot zone at the beginning of the video with intel, either from ground troops, or from the another Apache, that there were armed combatants in the area.

The video indicates there was ONE combatant, and that the group of people was NOT him.
@2:49: air: “we had a guy shooting, now he’s behind the building”
@2:52: ground: “Uh, negative, he was uh, right in front of the Brad. Uh, ’bout there one ‘o clock. Haven’t seen anything since then”

LINK:As for the possible observation of an RPG, which some suggest could be a tripod,

The “RPG” @2:32 was clearly a telephoto lens pointed at the ground. I’ve never heard anyone claim it was a tripod, it is clearly a photo camera with a telephoto lens. I don’t see how you can refute this if you examine the frame between 2:40 and 2:41, it is CLEARLY the camera with a telephoto lens that he is holding completely in front of him pointed at the ground.

When the van comes to pickup the target, NO ONE IS ARMED. The CO should never have given them permission to engage unarmed people “for picking up the bodies”, PERIOD. According to the Huffingon Post the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session.
a pretty goofy definition of "crippled"

Yes, which is why I wrote it that way. If Apple released a ChromeOS-alike, I would bet money that the response, from all corners of the tech world, would be to denounce it as unnecessarily "crippled", invoking theories of Steve Jobs' pathological need to prevent anyone from ever learning how to write native applications ever again.

And that response would be about as stupid and misinformed as the attitudes consistently displayed toward Apple for, e.g., the iPhone/iPad.
Video of 2D BOY’s Ron Carmel creating Suck Goo with WarioWare: D.I.Y.
That was an interesting interview. I starting reading the Clojure related material on the Freiheit blog a while back - very interesting approach to doing business. Their 'The Deadline'is also pretty cool. It sounds like they use a production baed expert system to trigger agent advice on your to-do list items.
Reading the investigation you linked to (the one labelled "1st" I was surprised to see that they describe as perfectly correct the shooting of the van, despite also describing the van as clearly just picking up wounded.

War is very ugly, always, and this is just one of the many aspects of its reality.

Some comments have said this sort of stuff wouldn't happen if the crews involved had high quality optics. The van scene clearly would still happen.

Also very late in the video, when preparing to fire a missile straight into a building, there is very obviously an unarmed man walking along the sidewalk in front of the building, totally relaxed. The excited gunner is so impatient to blow up the building that he simply fires with his crosshairs practically on top of this person.

Again, something that would happen regardless of optics improvements, and a sad message about the level of desensitization soldiers are forced to.
The reality is that there were kids in the van and they were trying to help a wounded journalist.
Things like this always make me worry about the patience levels of some people.
In my opinion the Commodore/Amiga and later the PC computers created a lot more programmers than the Nintendo Entertainment System did. The North European game industry (DICE, Starbreeze, Remedy, etc.) was more or less based on the demoscene i.e. hacking for fun, not math education. Sure, the NES inspired a lot of people. But the real questions is: What if the NES would have been hackable?
Syncing Text Notes
fairly telling how the slide sells the device in the fashion of a traditional pc and not a personal appliance.
1080p LED HDTV : LG 22LE5300 22-Inch 1080p 60Hz LED LCD HDTV
This is the second dumbest thing I've ever seen. Anybody can learn anything if they want to, whether its an MBA who wants to program software or a programmer who wants to run a business.
IPad Problems Begin to Surface
Mind over matter? How your body does your thinking
HN discourages job postings.
The military has now released the records on their investigations:

http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%2...

I suppose that this information wouldn't have been released, at least for a long time, without their hand being forced by wikileaks. However it is also not reasonable to expect everything to be immediately public; there is going to be a ton of sensitive information, and it's not practical to redact and release everything by default. Obviously, it's in the US interest for this kind of thing not to be front page news, but that doesn't mean that by not publicizing it there is a coverup or something illegal going on either. Everybody, including Wikileaks, has an agenda.
Why I am short First Solar