its interesting that this is in such an urban area. if it happened in some remote cave it is unlikely that we'd know much about his living conditions - beyond what the government chose to let us know.
since it is in a city environment such as this neighbors, post-mortems on the building and things like that will likely give us a much better idea about what was going on there.
I'm not sure your location is the correct one.
In the ground photos, you can see high-tension wires running near the compound; your don't appear to have any. And the compound is in the middle of a residential area (there's video from @ReallyVirtual on YouTube), with houses on all directions; yours is pretty isolated.
Google Maps has a slightly older picture. The whole neighbourhood has been under development in the last decade, with bin Laden's compound being built around 2005 and other houses coming up around it afterwards (you can notice the differences in the sequence of photos in the briefing, too). Considering the lay of the roads and the exact shape and orientation of the compound it can be said with virtual certainty that this is the correct location.
The revolution will not be televised. Live, inadvertant, real-time Tweeting on the other hand...
For all the discussion of business cases for technology like Twitter, let's spare a moment to reflect on how impressive it is in and of itself for this sort of event.
So the article about Osama Bin Laden being killed -- which has nearly 800 up-votes -- is being flagged off the front page, but the article about a guy who tweets about him being killed is having no problem staying #1.
Then again, so many people had their comments down-voted into light gray in the original Osama article that I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of flaggings came from people that wanted to stem their own decline in karma. That would make for an interesting dataset.
I think you're comparing apples to oranges. An article from the mainstream media about bin Laden's killing is nothing out of the ordinary.
This link, however, is likely the first time in history that something so covert and meticulously planned has been exposed in real-time by someone experiencing it himself. We get the opportunity to see it from his perspective without the media's filters - just raw data. This is incredibly fascinating to me.
Ptolemy saw the earth go around the sun every day his whole life. So what? This guy didn't "expose" anything because he didn't know what was going on himself. All he heard was helicopters and an explosion. All the rest -- starting with the fact that one of the helicopters was not Pakistani -- was just gossip he heard nth-hand from eyewitnesses. If Obama had not held a press conference, he still wouldn't know what happened. What's historic about that? It's just the standard excitement and local gossip when something dramatic happens. If he had credibly detailed a piece of information that wasn't officially released, or if he had reported something interesting before it was openly announced by the U.S. government, that would have meant something.
Sure, it's not really historical, but it is certainly indicative of the new age. If you look at the top articles right now, not one of them is particularly important in the grand scheme of things. I think this is surely more interesting that finding out that some data center management tool that perhaps a few dozen people on here will ever use has switched to a different open source license.
Have to back you up on point 1. It is disappointing to see this deeply significance, globally relevant event treated as somehow immaterial to the hacker community. Such a dogmatic interpretation of the guidance is certainly contrary to the intention and spirit.
That said, this stream is rather interesting, and it belongs here too.
imo what is worse is the lack of transparency around the flagging.
We don't know how many people flagged that article, whether it was manually pushed down by a moderator etc. All we can guess is that it is artificially moving down because other articles (with much lesser upvotes and same age) are ahead of it.
I flagged it because every comment I read on it was stupid. There was nothing intellectually curious about the topic-- just poking people's political identities.
Here, someone in close proximity to a reasonably significant historical event used social networks to broadcast his observation of said event. If this has happened before, it hasn't been very many times, and it's undoubtedly been only quite recently. We are witnessing a new historical phenomenon that will undoubtedly be worth a line in a history textbook.
Moreover, importantly, the comments on this article don't completely suck. There's some meta-noise like this, but much less complete political stupidity.
Yes, UBL's death is significant to just about everyone. But it's not really intellectually gratifying or interesting, nor was much of the commentary surrounding it in the previous thread. There was lots of unfocused complaining about fallout from 9/11 including the TSA, DHS, wars, and political changes, but very little of it was new or enlightening. Definitely worthy of a flag.
Here, I find it tremendously interesting to see a (distant) eyewitness account of a significant historical event, given in real time over social media and not filtered by any other entities after the fact. Much more of the commentary here is intellectually gratifying as well. This was worthy of an upvote.
The ranking algorithm might be influenced by the point-to-comment ratio, which PG has noted in the past to be a fairly good indicator of article value.
The article about Sony and PSN data stayed #1 for over a day if I recall correctly. I don't think that an article with 770 up-votes (that's an incredible number, for any article) would be #15 after 11 hours unless it had been repeatedly flagged. It's probably for the best though. Many of the comments for that article are inflammatory and that could also be the reason why it was flagged.
I suppose twitter's involvement in real-time news isn't really news at this point? But I find the roles that these services are playing in affecting the way information moves pretty interesting, and completely relevant to HN. I'm also in the "Let major news events get voted up, if that's what happens" camp.
If there's one thing that I find most useful about HN it's that articles here are constantly making me think about how our world is changing, and what new tools and solutions might enable compelling needs that arise from those changes. Major news events are relevant, and I'm more interested in what HN'ers have to say about them than most other communities I'm a part of.
BONUS: Click "Search Nearby" and enter "PMA Kakul" -- you will see that the Pakistan Military Academy was just a short trip up the road from his house!
Was that in the news before the tweets were found?
And even if they really destroyed it themselves at the end, that also speaks a lot about the circumstances there. Pakistan government is supposed to support U.S. but the helicopter has to be destroyed, obviously to keep it from failing in the hands of Al Quaeda. It's more than interesting.
Not letting military hardware get into other nations' hands is standard practice. Really, "not trusting the Pakistanis that much" is a sufficient explanation.
are you suggesting that the US military thought 'some guy on twitter mentioned the helicopter we lost, so we should address that in our press statement' ?
the carcass of the helicopter is sitting out in a field all blown up. it is on pakistani tv. i doubt they would have even thought about trying to cover that up
Oh, come on. It's pretty obvious at this point that Bin Laden was in an ISI safe house. We're not talking remote Pakistan tribal lands here. This is next door to the capital.
Mr. Urbahn quickly added, “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is.” He was credited by many on the Web with breaking the news, though he did not have first-hand confirmation.
Within minutes, anonymous sources at the Pentagon and the White House started to tell reporters the same information. ABC, CBS and NBC interrupted programming across the country at almost the same minute, 10:45 p.m., with the news. “We’re hearing absolute jubilation throughout government,” the ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz reported.
Seems like the leak was planned, or at least, unpreventable.
The press corps went to great pains to stress how unusual it was that a speech was announced with one hour warning and they had no idea what it was about. Chuck Todd said he got an email from the WH that literally said, "Get back here now. I can't tell you what's going on, but it's a BFD"
He speculated, as did most of the media. Its one of those "well, what else could it be?".
"Hey, this special President speech tonight... this mood, is it Osama?"
silence
The media guys then call up every old defence contact they have, old generals, the like, who probably got the news a little earlier. They get something, and run with it.
Things don't need to 'leak', sometimes the gravity and mood just tells the story.
I'm probably going to be downvoted for this but... Increasing the speed at which our news is delivered is not even necessarily a good thing. Please wake me when someone invents something that makes it more accurate and unbiased.
I think decentralizing the story so that it comes from a bunch of noninstitutional observers is a pretty good way to get rid of bias. I think it also helps make news more accurate, in the sense that, in the very short term, the accuracy of a story is inversely proportional to the time since it occurred, because people need time to piece information together, and Twitter and such make distributing all of the relevant facts happen that much faster.
Piecing information is what people do, whether they're reporters or not. Many reporters do great work, but we all need to develop the skills of detecting misinformation, rather than depending on a professional class to do it for us.
He's a friend of mine and he's also into CS. Sometime back he tried startup stuff but now he is into consultanct.
I've been doing a startup for years and I never made it to front page of HackerNews, TechCrunch, NY Observer and many other hot places at the same time.
I've advised him to launch a product ASAP. Its gonna be hot and I'm definitely gonna invest :P
A lot of outlets are calling this Twitter's CNN moment. It'll be interesting to see if Twitter has the legs to maintain this crowd sourced news momentum that it has been building.
I was telling my brother earlier today how I have a nagging feeling twitter will end up as the myspace of short-message sharing. From the outside, it seems like a confused org with too many changes at the top much too often. Add to that the main founder cashing out 100M and it sounds a lot different than a founder cashing out to buy a decent house etc. Instead it sounds like a founder who isn't sure twitter's value will increase a whole lot more.
To contrast all this, we have Zuck at facebook providing smooth stable leadership that can clearly be seen in how fb as a product has scaled and evolved. Twitter meanwhile may be scaling and sue that can require significant effort - but as a product in year five, it's a relative fail for the hype and valuation.
I feel like MySpace never quite penetrated the mainstream the way twitter has. It was always something people were largely aware of, but outside of the segments it did really well in, people rarely engaged with it.
Twitter seems to be a bit different in that regard.
IMO user engagement is one of twitter's biggest issues.
As it stands right now, twitter is a great tool for journalist research and other niche research. That's been true for a few years now. The problem is twitter has done little to break beyond it OR to completely own that space. It's similar to if facebook never really broke out of its college roots or had high account abandonment rates for non-college crowd. Both of those were proven wrong for fb; fb long ago made critical product decisions to break beyond college(such as complete removing course listings) and working country by country to ensure penetration and engagement.
Back then the internet hadn't penetrated the mainstream like it has now where we're always connected. Relative to that I think they're not incomparable.
Live coverage is only valuable if it is live. For most, this only came in the clear in the aftermath.
Twitter is more akin to a real time, universal log + interactions, but it doesn't come with a central studio that sifts through the materials and gives you the good stuff. If you don't know where to look, for most it will always be a hindsight experience.
Actually, the Twitter stream was the first news I'd read about OBL. I woke up a short while ago, checked HN, thought "Huh, 'Osama'... I wonder if they're referring to Bin Laden?" and read the Twitter stream. (I had the good fortune of not seeing "Osama Bin Laden Is Dead" at #6.)
For me personally, that was far more satisfying than hearing about it via "traditional" sources. (Including Reddit.)
The benefit to CNN is that almost every household had/has access to CNN. It's some channel on basic cable, even if you didn't regularly watch it, it was easy to find and was pushing the same news out to everyone.
Twitter on the other hand is not as simple to just start using. You need to sign up, and then find the right people to follow (granted, Twitter does try to make this easier), but for any given event it's hard to find in real time a tweetstream that is going to be better than just watching CNN or other major news outlet. On top of that, Twitter is filled with parody accounts, people making stuff up, and lots of other noise.
CNN is not included with Comcast Limited Basic cable. That's the cheapest TV option, which you get automatically if you sign up for cable Internet service and nothing else.
That's a pretty narrow view of global access to things. Yes, probably most households in the US have access to CNN - but I'd bet a much larger slice of the planet has Internet access and therefore can reach Twitter.
And how would they functionally leverage an SMS-only Twitter feed to get breaking info to something like this?
Yes, conceptually a lot of people have access to Twitter. However, from a practicality standpoint my personal opinion is that it's not very effective tool for a scenario like this.
Are we sure that this is genuinely the Osama raid? I've read reports that Osama was in fact killed days ago. If he was in fact killed yesterday, have they really already buried his body at sea?
The White House transcript "Press Briefing by Senior Administration Officials on the Killing of Osama bin Laden" mentions that the raid happened 'earlier this afternoon'
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thank you. Earlier this afternoon, a small U.S. team conducted a helicopter raid on the compound.
No, and I admit that it might very well be wrong. I read this on Slashdot and reddit (I can find some specific comments if you'd like), which obviously are not very reliable sources. But the articles I've read haven't mentioned when he died at all (unless I've somehow missed it), which obviously generates rumours.
Edit: According to harshpotatoes I am wrong, so please disregard this.
For what it's worth, last night -- before and after the presidential address -- on the bottom of a bunch of TV channels (ESPN for one) the reports were that the operation was carried out last week, not yesterday afternoon. You may have been wrong, but you certainly aren't crazy. :)
I would've guessed the same thing, but it looks like he hasn't been dead for long. I'm almost alarmed that we got the announcement without DNA testing having been completed (as appears to be the case), and no photos or videos have been forthcoming as of yet. This can only fuel conspiracy-minded chatter, even if temporarily.
Assuming this is even true, it was faked before the news came out and was thus an inside job. What possible reason would they have for doing this? How do these tweets improve the position of the US?
I was under the understanding from the briefings that he was killed via action on the ground by US soldiers, with intelligence from drones. This does not corroralate with that account, it makes it seem like there was an airstrike from a drone. How do these fit together in the timeline of the raid?
I fail to see how this is newsworthy. Why bunch of mainstream media broadcasted this story, why is it on HN?
There is just no news in this story, guy saw a helicopter and tweeted, that's it.
the irony is that he has been buried without any autopsy/DNA test in sea.and moreover, there is no sea around Abbottabad and in Afghanistan either maybe they took him to Karachi or somewhere and As a pakistani and Muslim i want to clear that we have no tradition to bury a body in sea.
One thing that isn't particularly clear, is the timestamps on tweet library. Based on the top entry, I presume those are UTC. So if the action kicked off at 1 AM PST (UTC+5 according to wiki), then it would have been 4 PM EDT (UTC-4) in Washington. 3:50 PM doesn't jive with this (unless Pakistan is on DST).
Another article said that the burial at sea was completed by 2 AM EDT (so they presumably were done by 3 PM in Pakistan, about 14 hours after the first tweet).
Yeah, times didn't hold up in the yesterday's reports, the attack was around 12-1AM in Pakistan as witnesses' reports state so it must have been around 3-4PM in Washington.
Today's news are more accurate on that matter:
"At 2:05 p.m., Mr. Panetta sketched out the operation to the group for a final time. Within an hour, the C.I.A. director began his narration, via video from Langley. “They’ve crossed into Pakistan,” he said."
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html?pa...]
What does losing a helicopter have to do with it being a covert operation? Special forces use helicopters all the time. The official story is they brought two helis, had a mechanical failure with one, destroyed it and then left in the remaining unit.
It was covert enough that no one knew who the target was until well after the event. The neighbors knew something happened, but had absolutely no idea what.
There are aerial photos of the compound in the briefing obtained by ABC news:
http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/Graphics%20for%20backg...
Based on these photos and looking around the area, I've found the actual location of the compound, which exactly matches the photos from the briefing:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...
It's still in the area, but a bit further from the Pakistan Military Academy and in the SW direction from it (not NW, as the Telegraph map claims).