skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
El Al Spends $100M securing 37 Aircraft. Scale that to the 8,225 Aircraft (http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_stat...) and you'd need a budget of $20 Billion+ without even taking into account that you have a heterogeneous population that doesn't lend itself to easy profiling (unlike israel).

The major vulnerability of the El Al security system is that anybody that isn't considered part of the "Risk Profile" (I.E. Muslim) - can walk right through the security system. The day a Jewish Terrorist decides to bomb El Al, is the end of the "Interview" system, and the adoption of shoe screening, liquid screening and full body scans.

To some degree it's easier just to selectively screen everyone and not even bother with the interview. Just pretend everyone fails it and eliminate that entire step.

And, I'll take exception to your statement "Current Methods Aren't working" - How many aircraft per day, or per month, heck _per year_ are being blown out of the American Aviation sky under the current regime?

Regarding security theater - Seems to be working for me.

"Relying on passengers to fix flaws" - Nobody is allowed to bring on guns, knives, or even large amounts of volatile liquids - the system is designed to allow passengers to subdue any hostiles on the plane. I think that's an excellent part of the current system.

"Airport Chaos" - I flew two days after the bombing incident out of YVR to SFO, before _anyone_ really knew what was about to happen next, after most of the restrictions had been put in place, but BEFORE Canada banned (most) Carry On Luggage for US bound flights. So, every single person was having their luggage checked AND being patted down - the net result of this "Chaos" - my normally 20 minute wait took 90 minutes.

But, the most important element to be aware of - the Israel Security systems works based on Racial Profiling - it's that simple. The United States has decided they don't want to go down that path, so, even if the El Al system would scale from 37 to 8,000+ Aircraft, it's not politically tenable.
Paul Buchheit: Tablet thoughts
Across multiple transactions, through multiple jurisdictions, in cases where not all of the entities involved are acting in good faith?

Not easily.
"I don't see why at least these precautions wouldn't be scalable"

I believe those policies were in place at Amsterdam airport already for US flights. At least, I have memories of being asked behavioral questions at the gate and of another screening of my carry-on luggage and walking through the metal detector. I can't say anything about the process in place last week.

If it was in place, and still didn't work, then what?
Ironically religious beliefs mean that Islamic extremists won't let people with a known mental illness become suicide bombers. So they have to filter for sane people then get them to act insane.
Thanks -- at the moment, there are only four:

Quite Modest, Rather Average, Self-Important, a Raging Ego
Http://www.habbo.com.br/client
How do you reconcile those being "musts" with the wild success of products that don't have them? Not even paper satisfies all of those supposed necessities.
My online cash winrate dropped to 1/3 of what it was in the "salad" days, and my variance increased substantially.

My understanding is that my winrates are still very good, but the rise of massive-multi-tablers and HUDs really ruined the game for me as even if you're turning a profit, it's just not as fun as it once was.

God bless real-life poker.
I think you reached a different conclusion than others reading the article which may explain the confusion. What I took away here is Gruber thinks it will be unlike other tablets that have been released due to Apple's strong focus on practical usability and their ability to tightly integrate their hardware & software platforms unlike other companies who have attempted tablet computers. As for the authors credentials -- he makes a living covering Apple. He has an excellent understanding of Apple's corporate culture and a good feel for how people are using technology in their everyday lives.
The argument is a relative one. "No one reads books" is like saying "everyone watches TV". Neither are true, but practically, they are close enough to the truth to draw reasonably accurate conclusions from.

For instance, you can conclude that Apple wouldn't release a dedicated reading device (as Amazon has) because the market is relatively small, being the union of "people who read", "people willing to read on an electronic device", and "people who can afford a dedicated reading electronic device", as opposed to (say) "people who use the web" and "people who listen to music or watch tv or watch movies". (I don't agree with the parent post, incidentally, as people who read the news as opposed to watching the news are a dying breed.)

As for libraries--they're quite obviously an argument against a reading device.
Again, the major banks are addressing this problem directly across all their customers. Some of them are doing it with hardware fobs, and some of them are doing it with "true-r" software multifactor auth. It's a top-of-mind problem in banking. It doesn't matter what segment of the banking customer base you're serving: you are up against extreme competition for banking security.

I'm not saying there's no opportunity with small business banking. I'm sure the banks themselves are painful enough to deal with that a Wesabe-a-like has a good shot at capturing the market.

(NB: banking security kind of in our wheelhouse at Matasano).
It's already the largest non-democratic economy, for what that's worth.
It seems to me that the right approach should always have a significant random element, not as a deterrent, but as a check on how well the non-random component is working. The random part will examine in depth to find anything that should have been found in the non-random part but wasn't (say, body searches to find large metal objects making it through the x-ray screen at the airport). Without that you would be blind to defects in the system.
Let's take it as granted that you and I can type faster than we can write for many kinds of inputs. Can Joe Six-Pack?
andres barreto + gmail + com
@andresbarreto
SICP and HtDP are good for starting out.

I often use Scheme when I teach compilers, and I've got a few Scheme-related blog posts designed for the curious student:

* Church encodings: http://matt.might.net/articles/church-encodings-demo-in-sche...

* Macro-generating macros: http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-scheme-vect...

* Programming with continuations: http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continuation...
My iPod touch is all smudgey from thumb and index finger use. Now you want me to pay 2x-4x for a multitouch device and rub my whole hand all over it?
/nonycjobs would be an efficient solution?
Point taken. I would say that satisfying point 3 relieves the need to satisfy point 2 (if I can replace it for less than $50 then I can handle the possibility of coffee getting poured on it). So paper works.
An interesting insight on this in Freakonomics is that things we do with our children don't affect their long-term development as strongly as things we are.

Take the effort to make yourself whatever kind of person you want your kids to grow up to be, and they are more likely to grow up into that person.

For example reading 50 books to your toddler is good for short-term amusement followed by teaching your kids that "books are for kids" leading to a belief that they've outgrown "silly books". By contrast letting your toddler see you read what you like teaches your toddler that "books are for grownups" and your kid will naturally model their behavior on yours.

My personal attitude is that I want my children to grow up curious, inquisitive and self-motivated. Supplying external structure can't supply those traits, I have to model them instead.
So how do you explain the iPhone? The smart phone market was well and truly catered for when Apple entered there. Apple's primary method of business is to price themselves in a tier above everyone else but to provide a (perceived or real) value proposition that makes people buy it anyway.
Nifty. What's the correlation of self-mentions and follower count?

It might also be interesting to qualify people: are they more or less narcissistic than those they follow (or are followed by). Or, rank those I follow by narcissism, and find local maxima in the follower-graph.
The tablet is going to be an iPhone and iPod Touch accessory. That's what will sell this thing, and that's what they will have in there. A tight integration with the tens of millions of mobile devices out there.
It was just to demonstrate a certain absurdity. No, that conversation might not happen, but the point was that the terrorist planners have objectives beyond "cause mayhem". And that increasing airline security costs probably don't even rank on their scale of worthy goals.

In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is bleeding the USA of billions of dollars every month. But the article suggests that merely inconveniencing air travellers -- to the tune of maybe a few hundred million a year, widely dispersed -- might rank as an acceptable second best to a terrorist.
Top-tier high frequency proprietary trading firm. Always looking for expert level C and C++, strong knowledge of network programming, real-time systems, distributed systems, multithreadeding, Linux (to the kernel level preferably), performance optimization, occasional scripting. Very meritocratic environment where you get to see the impact of your work every day.

Financial industry experience is not required but it's a plus. Must be able to work under extremely high pressure, deliver on promises, learn and work independently and aggressively, build reliable software, and work with all areas of the business to generate P&L.

narita . jal712 at gmail
McDonald's does not provide computers, though. People who patronize the library for internet access the most are those who don't own a computer at all. In other countries, this role is often filled by internet cafes, but they never really caught on in the U.S.
My company, ProjectDX (http://www.projectdx.com/), is looking for developers in Portland: http://projectdx.com/webappdev_job.pdf

Contact me at jd at projectdx dot com.
I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine
Ad Hominem Is More Important Than You Recognize
That's just it... the people who pulled off 9/11 were a bunch of amateurish mooks. A bunch of amateurish mooks with an 18 in the Luck department is still dangerous.

Just as in this case, there were any number of measures already in place that could have stopped 9/11, if they had only been followed. More rules are not the answer.
Now the internet won't be free if Oracle buys Sun?! Give me a f'ing break!
To me the list in the post is too broad. In building up entrepreneurial skills, besides regular good business books, I tried to put together a list that covered a) inspirational stories, b) reference tomes, and c) practical advice.

http://blog.aparicio.org/entrepreneur-books/
He's only been writing the piece since September: http://twitter.com/gruber/status/7250169522. Does most speculation about Apple's next move strike you as something that much care was put into?
Ask HN: How do I change my bar colour? And what is 'noprocrast' mean?
and happy new decade! -_-
parallelization is not only about scalability, but also performance. If a task takes 20min and can be parallelized 4X, it now takes 5 minutes. There's only a certain portion of each program that is inherently sequential. We're at 2-4 cores now, soon it will be 8-16. I'm not really in a position to comment on average joe computing... but my social circle runs PCs down to a halt regularly. If I had 8 cores and all of my apps were setup to exploit it, I'd be a very very happy man and I don't think I'm in a minority. There's analytics on large databases - every enterprise does this. There's gaming - imho not a fringe activity at all. Exactly what are these day to day applications? CRUD web apps with no analytics? word processing which certainly do parallel processing of spellchecking etc? firefox? photo editing? I honestly can't think of a program worth writing that couldn't stand to use multiple threads of execution - even gedit polls files for modification.
I figure it will be the other way around, with the phone and ipod accessories to the tablet.

After all a tablet can pack just a bit more punch than either a phone or an mp3 player. Use it as a speakerphone or with a headset and you could lose the phone entirely if you're taking the tablet with you.

Same interface, bigger screen.

Think iphone on steroids.
I recommend reading the full speech: http://thevarsity.ca/articles/23855
And Firewire, which most computers didn't have.
You just described the MacBook Air.
Would China even allow a YC?
“The Tablet” and gadget portability theory
That's funny, if that is true then that is really proof positive they lost their way.

If you are thinking in terms of making products at a loss just for the heck of it then you are no longer competitive, you're already on the way down, it's just that the ground is still a long way off.

I doubt that's their real perspective. But the eagerness with which a 6 billion loss and a 7 year losing streak gets polished away with 'in a few years we'll be in the black' is quite amazing. I wouldn't be too proud of that.

The way these things get spun we'll probably never know the truth though. Nobody seems to like to admit to failure, even when it is blatantly obvious to the rest of the world. Zune anyone ?
It will be a way to get your pics off your iphone. Play your music loud. Transfer files to iPhone. You drop it on your desk, 'dock' your phone by dropping it on it and there you go.
In the 2010 season it looks like some new teams will be having a lot more of the startup dynamic, take Lotus, Campos, US F1 or Virgin Racing, because they're up against teams with big budgets like McLaren and Ferrari and they will have to find ways to win that are different. For example, US F1 does not have a wind tunnel, they've chosen to skip it and use CFD techniques instead.

Regarding the book list, nah...
Popular Immune Boosting Manufacturing Trends
IE vs Firefox is Microsoft vs Open source in a nutshell.

If not for Office they'd be a lot hotter water right now. Lock in is really nice when you've got it, even if your customers hate it.

Open Office still has a lot of rough edges, even after all those years, it's one of the few things that buys microsoft more time. If open office were to be ported to C, trimmed of it's bloat and made more compatible (ok, that would add some bloat back in) Ballmer would sleep a lot less good.
Paul's ideas for what could be possible with this device are very interesting. But I can't help but wonder if Apple's new tablet could turn out to be the Google Wave of consumer devices: a super-hyped disappointment.

Apple has a very good track record, but sooner or later, they are going to release a device that will fall short - maybe even well short - of the fever pitch of hype that precedes it. Could this be that time? I doubt it...but you never know.
+1, sir!
The TSA is run by idiots who didn't ask Israel in the first place.
The infinitely profitable program
You don't have enough karma for changing the menu bar color yet. Have patience, and make quality contributions.

Noprocrast is a utility to force you to stop procrastinating by reading HN and get back to work.
He did mention cost.

You can't get a comparably performing system for the same amount of $ on a different platform. That's a simple fact.

It's nothing to do with niches, every niche except for the smallest machines (and that's where ARM really shines) has an intel chip or a compatible just about tailor made for that niche, at a very competitive pricepoint.
In the past teams spent a varied amount of money but each did have an allocated budget.

For the 2010 season there is a budget cap in place at ~$65MM.
Entering a space by charging competitive prices is different from offering things for free. Maybe the goal was not to crush competition, but it has the same effect.
al-Qaeda wants 'The West' to fear them. People get scared of air travel every time there is an incident, even if that incident is a terrorism attempt that was caught before it ever got off the ground. If al-Qaeda doesn't have some sort of media presence, then people will start to think that they are a non-issue. Maybe al-Qaeda doesn't really think of things in these terms, but I have a hard time believing that they are all religious fundamental crazies. For them to be so organized, some of them have to be thinking on a more practical level.
Even granting that the bombers are gullible and unstable, and that "AQHQ" will oversell them on the chances of success, they can see the actual track record, and the mere act of training them sensitizes them to all the ways things can go wrong.

There's also a tradeoff between their naivete and effectiveness: a bumpkin who's never traveled internationally might believe whatever his handlers tell him, but is also more likely to draw suspicion or otherwise foul the mission.
... and how about the success of the iPhone? It barely passes #1...
Sure, but I think the most likely way it will happen is that one of the universities (probably Tsinghua) starts an incubator and the Chinese government owns shares in all of the incubated companies, per socialism with Chinese characteristics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_characte...
Much like when my Dad bought a Dell jukebox despite me insisting he get an iPod. It didn't take him long to really regret the decision. More companies could stand to learn from Apple's ability to look at the whole story of the product.
Well, pretty much all Macs did at the time, so that wasn't too relevant.
http://www.datamob.org/
Theoretically, yes. But why hasn't AQ gotten better at this "flood 'em with attempts" strategy so far?

Perhaps even most fanatics and angry unstable people prefer to shoot at soldiers than take a 99-in-100 chance of winding up in infidel custody, famous only in failure.
Apple has released poorly received products before. Perhaps you recall the PowerMac G4 Cube, the Newton, the mighty mouse, iMovie '09...
One of the problems with Wave was that it was Google doing the hyping. They did a terrible job managing expectations. With the Tablet, Apple hasn't said word one about it even existing, let alone what we could expect from it. Anything pundits have claimed it could / should / would do is, for the most part, moot.

I like Paul's "sharing" concept. I'd love to be at a family gathering with my brothers-in-law, and all sit on the couch and toss MP3s at each others' Tablet disk images, creating a shared library of files.
What I find interesting about this is how China is predicted to have almost double the US's GDP by 2050, but GDP per capita tells a different story: US GDP/capita will be double China's in 2050. Then some good debate on whether an authoritarian mixed economy can allocate its GDP more effectively than the US's democratic mixed economy. Which will define the next 40 years? Aggregate or per capita GDP?
I always thought Apple TV was that mythical "failed Apple product."

I admit to being a big Apple fan, so certainly I am biased. But Apple has a knack for shaking things up and a great track record of doing it. I will admit I've held off on buying a netbook because I want to see Apple's response to them first. I don't mean I will necessarily buy their response, but I am confident their response will change the scenery a lot.
Linux thrives. If the GPL fork of a mediocre database were to fail, sorry, that means nobody thought it was very important. Certainly not "part of the Internet".

And soliciting unpaid volunteers to pressure the legal system into stealing back the same rights you got rich by selling? Still appalling.
There's something missing from this: SoSerious made ad hominem attacks on DCurtis because that was the point - he was pointing out DCurtis' lack of tact and how his presumptuous tone in the end helped nobody (and got someone fired). The point to be made was to question DCurtis' character, ad hominem attacks are entirely expected.

What most people have against ad hominem attacks is where the character of the speaker is called into question in order to discredit a point that has no relation to it. I don't think I'm the only one who opposes this.

Some people need to have their character and human flaws called out - but not when it has no relations to the argument being made.
I would apply to yc china if it existed. I would also be extremely interested in helping set up yc china if given the opportunity.
Apple has been in talks with all the major newspaper and magazine publishers to sell subscriptions via iTunes. Your iSlate will download the latest edition while you sleep via WiFi or the cellphone network - ready to read when you wake up every morning. Apple is building a huge data center to deal with all this data.

Apple will try to do for print media what it did for music.
There is a world of difference between the ad hominem fallacy and an insult. The ad hominem fallacy is bad reasoning. But insults are the spice of life and cathartic for the soul.

Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee!

Winston Churchill: And if I were your husband I would drink it!
Dead duck? I'll bet you $50 that's not only will Apple make boatloads of money from the iSlate, they'll also make boatloads of money selling newspaper and magazine subscriptions for it on iTunes.
as i write this, your comment already has three other replies, two of which i think are pretty good. but i can't help but put my own two cents in.

do you remember the industry's response to the iphone when it was first announced? most observers thought it was the dumbest thing they'd ever seen. the general reaction was that apple was suffering from hubris of monstrous proportions to think they could enter into this market, with no history or reputation, and succeed. i didn't know whether it would be successful or not, but i knew i wanted one, real bad. it turns out that there were a lot of us.

apple succeeded with the iphone far beyond anyone's wildest expectations. probably moreso than jobs himself thought possible. they didn't just make a successful product, they completely upended the mobile phone business. it will never be the same again.

with any luck, we are now entering another period exactly like that one. apple is about to release a product that most people think couldn't possibly be successful. no one is willing to come out and say it will be a huge flop this time, because apple is now on a decade-long winning streak. betting against them is foolish.

apple's tablet has the potential to shake up the computer business in the same way that the iphone shook up the mobile phone business. if it does, this could be the beginning of a very exciting time indeed.
I think your list is great if you are just getting started with entrepreneurship or as a solid foundation.

The purpose of my list was to expose lesser known books that I read this year which I think can make even a bigger impact for entrepreneurs.
I brought him up as an example that there are certainly people out there that don't agree with macro evolution and can reason well beyond that of a "grade schooler." I was not trying to allege that he himself has done any research directly refuting origin evolution. Perhaps if origin evolution could come up with scientific theories that are falsifiable, we'd see more refuting research.