skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm also impressed by the lack of trust in the Pakistanis.

By far my favorite MSM reporting on the raid is the WSJ article by Siobhan Gorman and Julian Barnes, "Spy, Military Ties Aided bin Laden Raid". Google for the title and you can read the full version from Google's cache.

If the article is to be believed, Barack Obama's role in the planning is quite impressive. He choose the riskiest of the options offered to him; the military consensus was leaning toward heavy bombing that would have guaranteed civilian casualties, but would minimize exposure to U.S. personnel. Apparently, Somalia still looms large in the memories of military leadership.

Obama took the bombing option off the table completely, and told them to do it the Hard Way -- sending commandos 128 miles into Pakistan's interior. But the best part is that Obama explicitly equipped the SEALs to blast their way out if the raid went bad and Pakistanis showed up shooting. That as opposed to throwing up their hands and surrendering, and then letting the diplomats try to arrange their release in the ensuing months (or maybe years; it took us months to get back one single CIA contractor arrested earlier this year). From the article:

"Mr. Obama directed Adm. McRaven to develop a stronger U.S. escape plan. The team would be equipped to fight its way out and would have two helicopters on stand-by in case of an emergency."

Now that, my friends, is risky. The ways in which this thing could have gone bad are almost too ugly to contemplate. How could Obama & co. possibly not have crapped their pants watching the raid live from the white house?
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> I think it would be better if whoever used Rails and made changes to Active Record[...]

But doesn't it at this point boil down to an academic argument? Surely Rails benefits massively from being popular, and draconian (which I consider AGPL) licenses might hamper its popularity. I doubt that Rails misses out on significant contributions just because they are not required. Contributing to open source looks good on a CV/employer branding page.
"We don't know" is the answer he is looking for to his rhetorical question. It's a value judgement. The island nations that are losing land to rising oceans have a very different idea of what is acceptable to northern nations enjoying longer growing seasons and milder weather.
Are you suggesting having one production DB => multiple virtual machines with application code? If so, I suppose that might work for some read-only workloads.

If you need to bring up a "production scale" server for a developer to go along with their virtual machine with application code, then you have to do it no matter what environment the application code runs in. I imagine modifying data using experimental code on a production system is not really desirable no matter what the code is written in.
The whole app feels like an imitation of a Mac app. Most obviously on 10.7, the window chrome is wrong. Other small things like incorrect and wrongly sized fonts inside controls, or the whole menu bar disappearing when you use an extension in its own window. When you add everything together, it just feels wrong, like wearing clothes that don't fit.

The way they've been updating the UI so far has seen some improvements, for sure, but it's as if they've been patching it bit by bit. I just wondered whether this signalled a change of approach.
And this is how IE6 will slowly be deprecated across the industry. Sure it's easy for an intern to get up on his soapbox and proclaim, "We should stop supporting IE6 because that browser came out while I was still in elementary school." But when you look at the how many people still continue to use it, deprecating support is on a case-by-case basis, and it is irresponsible as web developers to just ignore that it even exists.

I would actually argue that Google Search is still supporting IE6, just as a degraded experience. Dropping support all-together means they just ignore it exists, which is far from the truth and likely won't happen for 5+ years.
Ask HN: How would you solve redistricting?
I caught part of a discussion on NPR this morning regarding California's newly drawn districts. There seem to be many complaints (most from different groups feeling like they were split, or combined unfairly).

While it's an improvement to have been done by an independent commission, the way these maps are drawn still seems archaic. Redrawing district lines, to me, seems like a problem that could pretty easily be solved algorithmically.

What do you think? What sort of inputs would you need? What factors would you take into account? Any good articles on this sort of thing? Any existing partitioning algorithms suitable for this? Would simply randomising districts be preferable?

Thoughts.
That's looking awesome!!

Where can we find your blue wallpaper from the back of those mockups / screenshots ?
I've been running the nightly, and there was a brief period where the tabs were moved into the title bar. Not sure why they backed it out, but I didn't really like it anyway. (I kind of like knowing the title of the page I'm on -- for instance, with this particular link it conveyed semantic information that was missing from the page itself.)
Yes, that's what I usually end up doing: having a DB dump that I can load back in at the beginning of the test, then drop it at the end. I can see how a purely stored procedure test harness would have a hard time with this. However, if you just wrap your unit tests in a shell script, you should be able to do this.
"What makes you think they shot some fat guy, and not some skinny guy?"

I do think they shot a skinny guy, which would show that the video from 2001 was almost certainly fake.
Why? I'm confused, isn't this investigative journalism at its best?
ObjC's main "frying" factor is that it uses a different (and to my mind, superior) set of object-oriented patterns as primary abstractions. For example, subclassing is much less common in ObjC than in Java, preferring to use the less complex delegation pattern as opposed to subclass-and-implement patterns for behavior extensions.

Another problem some people have is that ObjC brings to the table all the pain of C. You've got memory management and bounds checking and unsafe casts all dumped into your lap. It can be pretty painful if you're not experienced in C, C++, or ASM programming.
Emacs keys binding not working in some place (e.g. Ctrl+N, Ctrl+P not working on Awesome Bar). Missing contextual services menu when you right click on some text. Missing text services (e.g. Cmd+Shift+D popup dictionary), etc. etc.
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Imo its worth working at any big shop for a year to see how things work at scale, and understand the problems bigger companies face. Consider it part of your training.

Dont hand over a significant chunk of your productive career. Just use them to sharpen your own saw.
All of the Cocoa UI controls are reimplemented in XUL. They look and behave close to, but not 100% the same as the native Cocoa ones.
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"Man, these guys went to a lot of effort to get a fake body, then."

You're missing what I'm saying. Assuming the body the recovered was actually OBL, then any high-res photographs and videos released could have potentially proven that the evidence used as a pretext for the large-scale invasion of Afghanistan was fake.

Before that video, there were less than 1,000 Americans in Afghanistan. Today there are 90,000. Is it really that difficult to see why this matters?
Are they going to fully integrate firebug into firefox rather than having it as an extension?
Depends -- with that attitude we would still have assembler.
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It is fine to have an opinion. It's even productive in some cases (if you toolchain up scala to the android, for example).

What's unproductive is to decide to avoid the biggest-by-number-of-units mobile platform because of Java.
I hope there's an option to put the forward button back in. I use it a lot.
This was a phenomenal post. My biggest take away was to not ask people whether they liked the idea, but to ask what was wrong with it, why wouldn't it work, etc. That concept just blew my mind.
I had to do a double take and check the posting date when I saw the 'can be version controlled' part, complete with a _CVS_ screenshot. Wow.

My take: Stored procedures are a valid tool that belongs in everyone's toolset. I dislike them for one reason only: I'd rather define as much as possible in _one_ language. Having a codebase that is mixed between languages can be worth the tradeoff, but I'd like to avoid it where possible.
If Firefox adds a single bar for search and URLs, I'd consider switching back, especially if they do a better job of history search than Chrome. (Chrome's history search sucks pretty bad in my experience.)
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I think the parent is invoking occam's razor against the idea that our government is capable of organizing a conspiracy of this complexity. For my part, it's not so much that I trust what the government says; it is rather that I trust their inability to keep secrets of this magnitude.
Just start the emulator op in the morning. There is no reason to shot it down when you go back to coding.
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Governments are (rightly) generally held to higher standards than private citizens due to the immense power at their disposal.
Even so, having the backup option didn't negate the political option; while, not having the backup
(in hindsight) would have guaranteed a political
showdown.
Keep repeating cliches without thinking about them. Especially ones so obviously false. Let's consider two hypothetical options:

1) A steady, decent income job. Let's say you're making $120k/yr. After taxes, that's about $7.5k/month. If your expenses are $3k/month, you can save or splurge to the tune of $54k/year. Not bad!

2) A higher paying job, say $500k/yr. After taxes, that's $25k a month. Let's say that you need to spend $4k a month instead of $3 to deal with the extra stress. Now you're saving $252k/year.

At the end of five years of option 1, you've got over $250k in savings. You can probably buy a pretty nice place to live in your chosen location, but you have exactly one option going forward: keep working for the rest of your life.

At the end of five years of option 2, you have over $1.25 MILLION. This amount of money makes available to you the option of never working again in your life, if you so choose. You just bought an astronomical amount of time -- the rest of your life -- to do with as you please. Not only does this destroy your notion that money can't be exchanged for time, I think the exchange has been shown to be a pretty fucking good deal, to boot.
Except that chrome's version obscures the navigation links in a lot of websites, which means you have to be quick to point and click in order to be able to navigate before the popup info tooltip blocks your click.
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Wonder what happens if you compare this in terms of salaries.
Eclipse is big, but it is really, really good to.

And he is not kidding about the write your code for you, it really feels that way.
Just about everything is on AWS. I use EC2 for the servers, S3 for storage, CloudFront for streaming, Route53 for DNS, SQS for messaging, and CloudWatch for monitoring. So, there are no real interesting solutions for the storage or streaming of video unless you consider S3 and CloudFront interesting.
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I use it for the standard things like hovering over URL's and watching page load progress. And I also agree that the pop-up in Chrome works reasonably well for this too... however...

FF went and added an 'Add-Ons Bar' to replace the bottom real-estate that plugins wanted to sit in lost by the status bar removal. So now, if I use the Add-on bar, AND allow the Chrome style status pop-up, I loose even more space since the URL is now outside the bottom bar, and I'm left with a ton of unused space on the Add-on bar. FF should have just made the Status label a movable element and allowed it to go back in the bottom bar if desired. Since the bar is going to be there anyhow for some people with plugins then their effort to save UI space just cost me 2x the UI space. It frustrates me that what could have been a simple and flexible change (optional, draggable status label) has turned into a hodge podge of work-arounds.
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When my likeness is used in conjunction with a random product, there is an implicit assumption that I somehow support it. And other people may see it and distance themselves from me, refuse to do business, or refuse to hire me.

As an extreme example, how would you like it if an unscrupulous porn site featured your face on an advertisement? Even worse, suppose a prospective client or employer saw your face on an advertisement for some banned substance. In most cases, its irreparable damage.
I'm pretty sure that's correct. I know they take stuff like JailbreakMe seriously — remote code execution exploits and sandbox evasions might cause real issues — but I don't think they care all that much about your normal USB-based jailbreak.
Yes, but it's the same thing when the FBI checks Facebook trivially. People still seem to have a problem with them doing any sort of searching via social networking.
I created a customer service app years ago and decided to put most of the database logic into stored procedures. The front end was Cold Fusion and I figured they would get rid of Cold Fusion way before Oracle (which they had recently adopted company-wide).
It's simple, really.
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As I understand it (it's still somewhat in the planning stages, and things are evolving), Firefox will ship with a set of developer tools which will cover the major use cases (inspector, console, etc). Firebug will be an extension, and will add more advanced functionality. It's being rewritten in JavaScript, and could potentially work on any browser (Firebug and Firebug Lite are going to merge).

This is how I understood it when I talked to the Firebug team a few months ago. Mozilla has since hired a ton of people for their Dev Tools team and John J Barton has left Firebug due to lack of funding from IBM -- so I have no clue if things have since changed.
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This is true. If the assumption is that it's a private branch, then other people shouldn't care if you push -f because no one else should be using it.

Sometimes there are cases where people want to pull a private branch because they are working on something that is in the same code path but will be deployed after the private branch is integrated and deployed. They want to work off the newest code and avoid a larger merge to their private branch later. Would rebasing that private branch make their life harder? If so, one could always stage changes in a feature branch at stable points for them. Thoughts?

Basically, my understanding is that push -f can be a hassle for others to pull if they made commits to the same branch already. You're totally right that if it's truly a private branch, though, this should be irrelevant.
A new kind of intersection eliminates dangerous, time-wasting left turns.
First this: "advertising is, ultimately, a form of discovery, a way of connecting people who want or need something with those that supply it."

Then this: "How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?"

And this: "How anyone can have a moral objection to that baffles me."

This is misleading. There may be people who object to advertising in principle, but even if you don't, if you are seriously trying to think about "moral objections", you need to at least consider what is being advertised and how it is being advertised. Instead, your comment is an example of how advertising advertises itself.

Edit: clarified for coherence
I like that wallpaper. Does anybody have a link to that?
You assume apple overly cares about jailbreaking. I feel they wish it were impossible, but knowing that it isn't, just want to make it difficult enough 'normal people' don't do it and start breaking things on the phone and not understand their jailbreaking is what broke things.

Hell, their AT&T contract was probably the only reason they got super up in arms about it anyhow.

The reason Apple closes the security loopholes is that they are security loopholes. It's not some sort of arms race. It's securing their platform.

Notice they have a pretty effective iBooks test for Jailbroken devices, but they don't deploy it widely, etc. I think they're at peace with the JB community as sort of a free research lab for them (hell, on device 3rd party apps came from the JB community first!) and use them to fix security holes in their platform as they are revealed.
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This has nothing to do with 'higher standard' if the media is the one responsible for publishing your name, publicizing it, and most importantly making money off of it.
What I don't like about these Chrome UI's is that they don't respect my OS settings. I am on Windows 7 with the classic NT skin. iTunes and Chrome are one of the few programs that don't respect this skin.

While in this case it is simple user preference, in other cases it could mean an accessibility concern, or even give room to malicious attacks: With all these custom browser skins, pop-ups over the HTML body (link destination on hover) and no clear divide between window and application, users won't clearly know the difference between interaction with the browser, and interaction with a smart malicious website.

With smart design one could make the bottom browser toolbar appear to be higher, and control the top half with your website. Fake plug-in install modal windows etc.
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SOJs was a really interesting phenomenon and probably taught me more about economics more than anything else.

SOJs, "stone of Jordan" was a unique ring in diablo2.

Gold in diablo2 became worthless, even though they tried to soak it up with improving vendor items, and even implementing gambling.

Eventually SOJs became the currency for trading. You'd see postings like "2 socket archon 4 2 SOJ".

What was so interesting is that SOJ's are very similar to gold in the real world. They were easy to trade, easy to store (only taking up 1 square), very rare (or supposed to be), and had great intrinsic value because the sorcerer class was always running out of mana and they gave a 25% increase to mana.

Using SOJs as currency just developed naturally, probably just like gold did in the real world.
Actually, you can still email Knuth, and his secretary will print the email out. See http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html

I can understand why he wants to be on the bottom of things, but I don't get why encouraging people to use postal mail rather than email is supposed to help. Email is just a medium, and it's a much more sensible way to move information around. The widespread habit of checking email every 5 seconds is by no means compulsory. I wonder why Knuth says that the batch mode communication he wants to do cannot be done properly with email.
If you think about it, the forward button is disabled about 80% of the time -- so it doesn't really need to always be there. The forward button isn't being removed completely; it'll just be hidden when it's not clickable. It will slide out when there's a "forward" URL available.
Sure. And maybe we will see another story about alternative appstores some time later. ;)
I launched a small side project Follow Trial (http://www.followtrial.com) as a way to manage my following list on Twitter.

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nate has a point. Why do we all believe thousands of military and civilians can keep a secret like this for decades when an oral sex act in the White House can be made public within a year?
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Firefox's UI has always been the most customizable of any of the major browsers. You will be able to add it back in if it is taken out by default in the future. (Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on the UX team.)
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> And the whole "protecting civilians" argument doesn't hold water anyway, the ratio of civilian-military casualties keeps going up in the modern era.

This is horridly disingenuous. WWII saw firebombings of major cities, nukes, etc. The ratio of civilian-military casualties is going up because troops are becoming damned near invulnerable to a lot of things they used to die from. The number of civilian casualties has dropped hugely from past conflicts.
They transparently do. Which makes total sense; the diminishing returns on jailbreak prevention are steep. Once you've made it enough of a hassle that 95% of your user base is confined to your ecosystem, how much is it really worth to you to get that last 5%, who would probably just switch to Android anyway?