skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you can also say

$ < file executable
You have to look beyond the direct costs to the costs imposed on travellers and how their reaction impacts the airlines.

TSA's current model is expensive for the airlines because it is deterring people from flying.

It's expensive for airline travelers because it's adding significantly to the hassle of flying: I believe that many flyers would pay more for the Israeli model if it was at least equally effective because it saves time. I believe that they would pay even more if it was not only less hassle but more effective than the current "security theatre" approach.
Or they could send someone through multiple times, giving them a prepared briefcase each time, but only put a bomb in it the last time, but telling them that there was a bomb each time; eventually, even an idiot will get used to it, and stop triggering their screening. Hell, depending on what sort of records they keep, they might eventually interpret his nervousness to just be who he is (dislikes flying, say), and wave him through anyways.
Whoops F.C.C. Chairman Spams Facebook Friends
Chicago and New York. Other people's software: fold, spindle, mutilate. We beat up everything from web apps to firmware. We want you to code well, be into security, and want to spend serious time building things in order to break other things.

Contact info's in my profile.
"The TSA/United States can't get away with the same type of behavior that Israel can get away with. We have to treat everyone the same to avoid the taint of "Profiling"]"

The TSA operating procedure manual specifies that ALL citizens of 12 countries (almost exclusively Muslim-populated ones) are automatically selected for secondary screening.

Even my American citizen friends with Arabic names get "random screening" the majority of times they fly.
1. The incident didn't take place in an airport but in an overland border crossing, which hasn't much to do with El Al's security system and thus the article.

2. The official claim was that the laptop was left unattended and mistaken for a suspect object (this is the Taba crossing which extremely sensitive these days). I can't say who's right, but I do know I've never heard of a passenger's laptop getting shot at before, and I flew in & of TLV quite a bit.

3. Both Ms. Sussman and Zarathu obviously have a political axe to grind: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946037 ("The pro-Israel lobby in Britain") - there's always Reddit for this stuff.
What are the opportunities here? There is perhaps no area of technology more aggressively addressed by venture capital funded startups than electronic commerce security; not only that, but the market is moving slowly towards hardware solutions, which price out seed-stage first-attempt entrepreneurs.

I totally believe there's an angle for startups vs. sucky online banking (customer service, flexibility, etc), but I don't think security is it.
http://xkcd.com/378/

You asked :)
We're looking to fill the following positions:

1. Python, Django developer

2. C/C++ developer

3. Sales/marketing (including some outside sales)

We're based in Waterloo, Ontario. We're angel funded. Doing some pretty cool stuff.

Contact me at mike at tophatmonocle dot com
(We're in private beta, so you won't find any clues as to what we're working on at our website.)
For what it's worth, I don't think decorum is the problem with duplicating El Al for, say, UAL and AA. The problem is that we can't staff enough competent people to execute at El Al levels of sophistication against our passenger load. TSA screeners are close to the bottom of the law enforcement and homeland security food chain, and the people we need to do this job require more skills than the average metro police officer.
The Laurnence Olivier analogy is stupid, inaccurate, and irrelevant.
Yes, if you use PaJes-CommonJS.js you can use use namespace by using standard require() construct.

For example,

var pjs = require('PaJes-CommonJS');
pjs.DIV(pjs.forEach(...));

This requires CommonJS module system to be in place (that is, function require() being implemented to be specific).

Alternatively, it would be trivial to make non-CommonJS use namespace too by modifying PaJes.js. Do you need namespace in non-CommonJs setting?

Thanks for trying it out!
I am so worried about this visa.

I understand why so many people consider it a no brainer. Who wouldn't want to allow entrepreneurs who create massive wealth and jobs into the country. Anyone opposed must be a xenophobe, right?

The problem is, I've seen where this logic took the H1B visa, and my confidence in employer sponsored immigration programs has been shattered. I consider the H1B to be an utterly corrupt program, even if it has been used to bring some indisputably excellent people here.

I hate the idea that an investor would have the power to determine whether someone is allowed to live and work in the US. I hate it somewhat less than the idea that an employer would be allowed to do this, but I still hate it.

All people in the US need to be free. Free to work, free to quit, free to move, free to change careers, free to go to law school, you know, free, as in freedom. Any visa that allows you in here but with conditions, like "to be an engineer", or "to do a startup" is bad in the first place. Any one that allows an employer or investor to decide if you get to move (and stay) here is even worse. This power will be abused, count on it.

How about this: allow in some excellent people, a lot but not an unlimited number,and let them do what they want, without asking the permission of their employer or their investor.
http://www.ntsb.gov/avdata/Access/ (get the avall)

http://www.ntsb.gov/

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_atla...
Design firms also operate with a similar mindset. While they can (and do) make money, they are driven more by the work they do.
Because then you have to get two suicide bombers on the plane at the same time.

By all indications, the 9/11 bombers were very high on the AQ food chain. The underpants bomber didn't get tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars wired to him before the op; he was a shmuck, in a strategy designed to weaponize schmucks.

If a TSA measure doubles the manpower required to carry off an AQ op, it is almost prima facie "effective". Is, I think, the logic you'd deploy against the "combine the 3oz bottles" argument.
Why do you think the PS3 sucks? It's priced similarly to the Xbox and has a powerful CPU and GPU, good game selection, nice controllers, and support for what's currently the most viable way to watch 1080p movies along with streaming capabilities for the future. The Xbox has better game selection, but since I'm not a serious gamer, I'd rather have Blu-ray capability.

I think the Wii is cool and it definitely broke into new markets. Party/casual games are a big thing and I like playing it at friends' places. Families I know get really into it, with parents playing as much as their kids.

I'm sure there's little incentive for Nintendo to do so, but I'd gladly pay another $100 for a more powerful version with HD graphics and more HTPC-like capabilities.

ETA: The only bad thing I've heard about PS3 is how difficult it is to program for from former game developers. Publishers seem to be pretty good at getting good results with it, plus you can install Linux and tinker with Cell programming if you're so inclined. MIT has some really good slides and notes from one of their courses online (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/ps3/).
No one reads books anymore.

Explain why libraries are still operational, please.
Well, for ghosting, they're so damn cheap that replacing them isn't a cost concern for anyone but those where ramen profitability is a lofty goal :)

But perhaps you could combine the two? Tileboard for a solid white back and this cellophane for a covering to protect against ghosting. Sounds like a winner.
I don't think the chip on the shoulder exists to the extent that it may once have, partly because those with reservations about US foreign policy have discovered that it is counterproductive to take it out on PFCs. There are undoubtedly a bunch of folks out there with PTSD, and reflexes learned in Baghdad may be honed a little keen for Kansas City.
Not to mention it was Mac only!
But they also recommended to show up three hours early for a reason.

US check-in times for int'l flights are 2h. I'd rather show up 3h early and feel safe than 2h and feel like security is a joke.

If you fit a profile they will drill you like you have Osama on speed dial. This was a puff piece for how awesome El Al is, but the reality is their method only works because of the small number of passengers (and their willingness to accept racism).

First, nobody is free of racial bias. This bias will leak into the decisions we all make, everyday. Take this test and let me know how it turns out:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Launch?study=/user/edu....

That said, the Israelis use behavioral profiling, not racial profiling. There's no need to dismiss a security system that the US can learn from and improve by dropping the "R" bomb.
Agreed. In my head, I call this the "blender" comparison that many technophiles seem to use.

Want to compare two meals? Put them in the blender and analyze the nutritional content of the resulting goop.

What? You don't compare food by spec sheets? (Calories, vitamins, carbs, proteins). What are these subjective "texture, taste, style, temperature, presentation" variables you care about? They offer little or no nutritional difference!
> In the US, "subjective" is merely a synonym for "pending lawsuit".

What a quote, Chapeaux!
Anyone know where to get a data set of all published video games?
Sorry, the metaphor was from R/B trees to flamboyantly unnecessary flip kicks - but R/B trees are quite necessary a lot of times, whereas showoff flip kicks exist purely for showing off. There's more than enough fluff used in software engineering with the sole purpose of being fancy ("enterprise software patterns" come to mind), but R/B trees are not part of it.
No worries. I am actually curious to your thoughts about DSLs. I love Python, but it is not really optimized for DSLs. You can obviously implement a DSL in Python, but embedding it is another story.
I am one. I play mid/high stakes poker, and pretty much every form of it.

I funded my first startup by playing nights and weekends. These days, it's solely an avocation, but one I rather enjoy.
We're still trying to grow YC within the US before we think about expanding to other countries. We're still learning.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 116 - Bye Bye 2009
How does your claim that any given comment was downvoted for disagreement backup your wider claim that downvoted comments were downvoted for disagreement? That's circular.

> 1) Spam should be flagged not downvoted.

Agree.

> 2) On/Offtopic is about as subjective as you can get

Roughly agree, except there are official guidelines from the HN HQ so it isn't completely subjective.

> 3) Downvoting is being used more and more and more for uncommented disagreement.

Maybe, but even if so I don't see it being a problem. HN isn't turning into an echo chamber because of it, HN has always been a self selected echo chamber, as are all self selected groups of people who choose to belong to a group focused on some area(s) of interest.

> Don't believe me?

Don't understand you.
"What’s the courseware and curriculum?"

And if you don't ask this question first, your well-intended project to 'gift the poor' becomes 'abetting the criminals'. Examples: FM. Television. Someone will fill the vacuum.

I maintain that there's a huge, untapped market for ed. software. Wikipedia is a powerful clue ... and, now, a free resource. But education's a lot more than shoveling data.
Sorry for the meta-comment but why does this article has so many votes?

I read the whole thing and it's nothing more than pure speculation and "analisys." What I took from it is that The Apple Tablet will be a full working device like the many tablets we've seen since the beginning of the decade.

Is the author someone famous in the Valley or something?
"no one else can match their cost to performance ratio"

This is untrue. No processor can run as many threads per socket as an UltraSPARC T2. No general-purpose CPU can match the Cell at floating-point performance (the Cell BE in the PS3 can do single-precision FP, but IBM has other models that handle double-precision). No processor can match ARM in performance per watt.

The sad truth is those processors are pretty much niche in that they cater to people who don't need Windows.

Once you make a server Windows-compatible, you can sell it to a much bigger public, just because it runs Windows and it runs Unix, if not at the most performance per dollar over a 5 year period, they run it well enough.
Free wi-fi/internet access?
This is the time of year when people really like speculations and predictions, especially when they sound plausible and/or reasonable.
I assumed it was an ad for ibusinessmagazine.
"We're not entirely sure who ended up with the funds."

How is that possible? Can't electronic money be fully traced?
Fun. What are the different levels you can reach?
Travian irx
The author's analysis is top-notch because he actually understands what the newest incarnation of Apple is about, unlike most of the people who write about Apple.
Tiger Woods: Risk taking control freak
Thoreau on Goethe (_A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_, Thursday):

"He was even too _well-bred_ to be thoroughly bred. He says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his towns-boys. The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure."

But one should not minimize the level of surveillance that was there for the boomers. A lot of mothers did not work, and though playtime was not micromanaged, it was not that easy to get away with serious mischief.
It's probably going to be more than 5-7 years this time around. Neither Sony nor Microsoft want to go through another round of big losses any time soon. I have no inside knowledge of our next console plans, but I can tell you that it certainly feels like Natal is that next "console" for us as far as investments go. Sony has publicly said that they intend the PS3 to last a full decade or more.

Furthermore, graphical capabilities have just gotten to a point where the game developers are begging the hardware producers to stop for a while. They simply can't afford the art costs to do anything higher definition than they already are. Sure, the devs would like some extra CPU cycles. And the designers would love a faster medium to remove loading restrictions. And the list of wants and asks will never be satisfied. But making AAA games cost boatloads of money. Every new console is a new burden on developers and they have spoken, loudly.
Made me laugh, but McDonald's has that plus food.
I presume that most applications that most people use most of the time do not need to scale. Most websites don't need to scale, most business apps don't need to scale, and most userland applications don't need to scale. Single-core sequential programs do just fine on comparatively resource constrained hardware for "everyday" applications. with the exception of maintaining a separate thread for UI, the examples you gave are edge cases.

I am into game dev, music dsp and highly concurrent web application development... but I recognize that these are all fringe activities.
They haven't been able to generate web logs for almost a year, maybe more now, eta is still several months off -- for log files.
You're right it's a puff peace (the guy interviewed sells security services..) and that some passengers get grilled, but wrong about the race angle: People I know that got the longer question & search treatment include a French Indian woman, a Korean guy and an Irish American from San Francisco. The only thing they all had in common a certain profile - in their 20s, traveling alone, little luggage, staying for a short period.

I got profiled a few times in other airports - a random search in Pittsburgh, a less random one at Auckland, NZ, a few more I'm probably forgetting - all in all, I prefer that to the process that subjects everyone to a full on search as they do in FRA and sometimes in LHR and US airports. That said, I suppose if I was consistently getting profiled I'd probably be less game.

As for "3 hours early", you'll find almost every airline has this in their website, to cover themselves. Except for very infrequent fliers, no one really shows up 3 hours early. It's a small airport and usually pretty quick to get through.
There's a better reason why Apple won't build an e-reader. Kindle already owns the high end - it's the ipod of ebooks - and Apple has no interest in playing in a market where all the pressure is to simplify and undercut.
Do you have evidence that they are?

I suspect that libraries are filling important niches today that are extremely hard to replace with technology, but their use for some purposes such as repositories for reference information is all but obsolete.

We use our local library intensely - but only to borrow about 20 books a week for our 2 year old. Otherwise I would not have gone there in 10 years.
It must be noted that not all soldiers are in Iraq or Afghanistan, the majority are still based in 'peaceful' areas. Perhaps the soldiers from Baghdad might be tightly wound for airport security, but there's still a large pool of highly trained soldiers who have never stepped into an active war zone.

However, from what I was aware the FBI, CIA and several federal agencies in the US tend to get 'first pick' when it came to the ex-military talent. So I wouldn't know if this pool of soldiers is already being tapped to the max.
Justin.tv startup idea
But once you achieve a critical mass - today, you could run most of the web on anything from MIPS to SPARC T2, as most of the source for pretty much everything is portable and available - you should get an avalanche effect.

Economies of scale will dictate prices, but this software availability will make processors tailored to specific roles viable. You will see ARM-based low-power servers and more designs like Tilera's in cloud-computing applications.
I am. I was so in to it I actually worked for an online poker provider for a year up in Canada. In the "salad" days when it was gaining attention, I was actually making money, because, well, it was easy with a lot of inexperienced players coming in. In general, the quality of players has risen significantly since then and I'm not good or persistent enough to win as much, so I can still play ahead, but with a much lower margin than, say six years ago.
XML Sucks
s/someone/google
Monty says: Help keep the Internet free
I think the tablet has plenty of uses, but it's the flaws that hold it back. We actually have a tablet at home and it was very useful on the couch and in various other roles. However there are a couple of features that are a must for such a device that I can't see being able to be provided easily:

1. I must be able to drop it from 6ft onto a hard surface and do zero damage

2. I must be able to pour a whole cup of coffee on it with zero ill effect

3. It must be able to be stolen with a cost to me of less than $50

These are the killer problems for me that make it an unsuitable thing for 'casual' use. If I have to treat it with kid gloves, watch it like a hawk whenever I put it down in public, assume a posture of paranoia about food and drink while I'm around it .... then it's just a failure at its main purpose.
You're right about the capital intensive nature of this market; and about how competitive it is. But it's also a very broad market and there are many niches that are not well served. The linked article points out that organizations and people whose liquid assets are in the range of $100,000 to $5,000,000 are particularly vulnerable if they don't keep on top of their network security; but most businesses in that range don't have full-time staff in that specialty and don't know enough to effectively deploy packaged solutions.

The larger problem is that innovation in the banking sector is really hampered on multiple levels. It's highly regulated, consumers are relatively conservative; and on some level any offering in that market is asking customers to place their trust in entities they cannot possibly verify to handle their money responsibly.

Note: did anybody catch the sidebar that referred to the "secure Ubuntu brower loaded from a USB Stick"?
Microsoft's innovative ideas of the past decade have a negative value. The writer has Microsoft in much higher regard than the facts would allow him.
I would assume it means to short sell the security.

No clever modeling is going to generate 3000% quarterly returns in mostly efficient markets without taking significant risk. I do this kind of stuff for a living. Either the model is excessively curve-fit or they didn't account for real-world concerns like slippage, latency, market impact, the bid-offer spread, and transaction costs. A typical user of their signal services won't be able to reproduce those results.

Statistical techniques have some interesting uses in quantitative finance, but it's important to find an underlying economic reason to explain why your model works. Stat arb <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_arbitrage>; is a common strategy, but there are sensible reasons why it (sometimes) works. If two securities are in the same industry, they'll tend to move in tandem since they're affected by similar factors. Thorp's articles (linked in the Wikipedia page) are worth a read if it's something that interests you.

Also, the difficult thing about modeling financial markets vs. other phenomena is that there's a huge incentive for market participants to avoid leaking information. Most inefficiencies are arbitraged away quickly or players who "show their hands" wise up; the market is a harsh mistress. Maybe years ago a big execution in a particular stock was indicative of its direction, but buy-side traders are smarter now and use algorithmic strategies that split orders temporally and physically across exchanges or trade in dark pools to avoid information leakage. There's not nearly as much incentive for you to hide your Google searches or ad clicks, so there's more opportunity for useful (and profitable) modeling using these techniques.