skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're entirely correct on scale. If we take a look at passenger movements for the top 30 airports in the world, available at http://www.airports.org/cda/aci_common/display/main/aci_cont...

Ben Gurion airport isn't even listed. The US, Asian, and European airports handling this traffic could not possibly scale to handle this Israeli solution.

That said, it may (or may not) be beneficial to find components of the Israeli solution that would work best to handle the issues with manpower and volume.
Why not put close relatives of those who attempt terrorist acts on the "no fly" list?
Designing For Social Traction: Solving 3 Big problems of Social Software
Per - Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam. Oxford University Press

'The term "Jihad" used without any qualifiers is generally understood in the West to be referring to holy war on behalf of Islam.'

What I'm trying to state is that the number of individuals who have radicalized to the point at which they will blow themselves up AND are authorized to fly on the American Aviation system, are few and far between. Even the christmas underwear bomber had been reported to both the CIA and State Department. If they had simply taken the father at his word "My Son is radicalized islamist and has a Visa which permits him to fly into the USA" they would have put him onto a list of selective screening and a bit of an extra pat-down, if not revoked his Visa in the same manner as the UK.

You can be certain that the TIDE list is going to be aggressively reviewed, and the list of 14,000 or so people currently targeted for selective screening is going to grow dramatically in the next few months.
If you recall, at least one of the 9/11 hijackers almost missed his flight because he was late. Al-Qaeda is not sending its best men for these missions. Why would an organization send its best men if they are going to end up dead or in jail?

It doesn't make sense. You send the worst people possible that have a chance of pulling it off.
I almost agree, but it seems clear now that Apple is working intensely on just such a product. They've earned trust that they just simply don't introduce things of such large scale that are fatally flawed.
Airport security is indeed considered a good job in Israel, allowing El Al to pick and choose, but not because it is well paid - they probably don't make more than TSA workers.

The key is that the job allows employees to be assigned to a station out of the country after a year or so of working TLV. This attracts young people who want to study abroad - it's not uncommon that your El Al screener in JFK would be a grad student at NYU, for example. It also keeps them more motivated, since they see view it as a temporary job rather than a dead end McJob.

Of course, in Israel those young students also happen to have 2-3 years' military service behind them, but this isn't that big a deal. It's almost irrelevant for their job (unlike El Al's sky marshals, though, which are another key element)
For more detail as to what Polis is proposing, see:

- The full text o fthe Act (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-4259)

- His press release on it (http://polis.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=1...)

- A summary of the Act from his office (http://polis.house.gov/UploadedFiles/HR_4259_Employment_Bene...)

- Its GovTrack entry (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-4259)

Its current status, for the record, is that it's been introduced (with no co-sponsors) and referred to the Judiciary committee.

As for what's a "start up", it looks like the Act's requirements are $250K from a US-based VC or $100K from a non-family citizen/green-card Angel, as well as a business plan that will create 5+ jobs or be profitable and take in $1M in revenue.

Interestingly, if the Angel is well-established (5+ investments totaling $250K+ in the past three years), the Act would waive the requirement that they be in any way American.
The problem with this post is his answer to the question "What do we do when we detect a terrorist through random screening?" His answer is "shut down all commercial aviation until the the most rigorous screening possible can henceforth be applied universally, effectively creating the same kind of havoc that occurs after a successful attack", and his whole post rests on this point, but I think it's totally flawed.

- Shutting down commercial flight is better outcome (for the defender) than the the destruction of 9/11
- There are alternative responses, such as heightened screening, tighter in-flight security, or checking passenger lists for people with known connections to the terrorist caught.
Unless the tablet is big enough your hands will be covering up a big portion of the screen.

Also, unless is can partially fold, your head will either be facing down to look at the screen or if it's vertical your hands will be raised to type. Both of these things are terrible for long term use ergonomics.

I see the benefit for travelling or as a household device. But I don't think touch screen technology has shown potential for increase productivity with any full-time/professional use.

Besides, I use 10 fingers to control the UI on my macbook.
The Wisdom of Cameron
That quote should go on his headstone when he dies.
1. Homemaker != woman. Highly correlated, but don't assume.

2. Contractors can either work per hour or per job. And if both people agree on a job and a price, and each job is slightly different, and you don't know a priori how long it's going to take, how do you reprice the jobs?
Things you should know about USB 2.0 and 3.0
Goosh - the unofficial google shell
Are relatives of terrorists commonly terrorists themselves? I thought they are typically outcasts. For example, the Christmas Detroit bomber was such an outcast his own father reported that he may be dangerous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5orss3fAEU
Last I checked, it was profitable to replace mid sized bundles of copper wire with fiber and sell the copper. I don't think it works with a single strand, but it's less expensive to roll out above ground fiber than you might think.
Discipline in getting up, IsoCort three times daily (for Adrenal Fatigue), and Somatomax (active ingredient is GABA which stimulates HGH production and is a light sedative which helps with going to sleep when taken right before bedtime).

Links:

http://www.modernherbalist.com/products/isocort.html

http://www.amazon.com/MuscleMaster-hitech30-Hi-Tech-Somatoma...

Somatomax can be researched more if you need, I am not a reseller or anything - just a very happy user. It has had no adverse side effects. I can only take a quarter of a cup of it though (I sleep deeply and have abundant energy all day); the full suggested serving size makes me feel too sedated in the morning.

Good luck!
> I am absolutely afraid to post what I think

Why? What have you to fear from being down voted?
Top 5 Books for Entrepreneurs from 2009
I don't think america has a shortage of "trained" security people, there is a fairly large pool of former enlisted military personnel who can be transitioned into airport security.

From what I understand, the criminal/terrorist probably would draw suspicion even if approached by relatively untrained airport staff "greeter", and draw further attention to themselves.

Remember that the Abdulmutallab came from Yemen, Paid Cash, and had a one-way ticket. Those factors alone, should have warranted further attention during screening, that others would not have recieved because of a benign profile.
my point was that if you have more airports you may also be simply a bigger country, with more resources.
For some, it's the exact opposite: buying a copy of something you've already read, in order to lend it out or display it on your bookshelf. http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/08/08/the_book_st...
Most of the people around here have underground power and phone lines with the land that their homes are on being from 4 to 20 acres.
If techniques and machinery alone were enough the TSA wouldn't have had any problem. Israel relies on information, design and training specific to Ben-Gurion airport and would have to repeat some of these steps if it ever needed to cover another one.
That only works when you have a tiny number of flights at a handful of locations are willing to spend through the roof. It would never scale. Their largest international airport is tiny by US size--it wouldn't even make the top 20. And that's just the US.

Not to mention that the US public would never put up with it.

Update: this puts it into perspective--El Al (the largest and most well known Israeli airline) operates only 37 planes which would make it the size of a small regional airline in the states. Allegiant Air is unheard of to much of the US and operates 49 jets. Delta has a cool 449 and flies to more countries than El Al has flights per day. Ben Gurion International Airport, the airport mentioned and the largest in Israel, is roughly the size of Kansas City International Airport. There's simply not a valid comparison.
Net Banking fails Small Enterprises: many opportunities here.
This book about sleep has pretty good reviews: http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Sleep-Medicine-Connection-Happ..., I'm going to buy it.
Apple has a long history of releasing products that look like losers when one compares a bullet list of features with the competition. I bought a Sansa with twice the storage of the current ipod and grew to hate the device, despite the fact that it won on paper. Apple's products have design and usability features that the competition has never even considered. (one example - the dozens of times that the magsafe connector on my MacBook has saved the day).
Self-doubt tarnishes Brand America
You're straining to take offense, and so imagining slights against these people that weren't present or intended.

Really, many of the people doing online piecework, like Cha-Cha answers or MTurk tasks, aren't even looking for a real clock-in job. They're just engaged in a diversion, and happy to be making a little on the side. If they weren't doing the piecework, they would be Facebooking, IM'ing, TV-watching, gaming -- something else they can do in dribs and drabs at home. In fact, they may be doing all those things simultaneously!

If your preferred crackdown was enacted -- abolishing their current arrangement -- many wouldn't even look for one of your "fair" regulated minimum-wage jobs, clocking in at some office or fast-food-joint.

I respect them to make their own decisions. You "color these people" as if they were helpless victims "who let themselves be taken advantage of" and "aren't using the same judgement and resources to make their decisions as those who know better". That's more denigratory to voluntary at-home pieceworkers than anything I've said.
A decade is a period of 10 years. The period of ten years whose numbers begin with 200X is ending, and since that's how we refer to decades (as in 'the 90s'), we say the decade is ending.
If someone is considering a terrorist act, he/she would need to consider the effect of it on his/her close relatives.

And close relatives would have a greater incentive to report him/her if they suspect something.

Of course, you could consider a different sort of penalty such as fines that would bankrupt his/her close relatives.
To paraphrase you, just putting books in hands doesn't automatically educate them, either. There have been, and always will be, challenges in education. But for those who are willing and able to make good use of the resources available to them, computers and the Internet are two very powerful resources.
That's a wrong thing to do for two reasons.

1. It's collective punishment. Unethical unless absolutely necessary.
2. It would be ineffective. In most cases in the west the relatives of people who ended up blowing themselves up didn't know about their involvement in terrorist organizations and didn't condone their actions.
Can Ghana beat the curse of black gold?
Studies of human social networks go high-tech
That's a bet I won't take. I guess I meant a physically exposed bus with a connector I can use.

I've seen USB adapted 3.5 drives, but I don't think I've seen one in the 5.25 format. If I did, it might be priced at a significant percentage of the cost of your netbook!

I suppose someone still sells internal adapter cards, or there's eBay and the junk store. I keep forgetting about eBay; I guess I've no immediate worries about acquiring some piece of equipment if needed. But I still have a couple of relics laying around that should do.

BTW, I still miss that Kaypro's keyboard -- not half bad. Less so, "hacking" up Wordstar documents with control sequences to backspace the Okidata to make do-it-yourself Umlauts and Eszett.

But now I guess I'm drifting over to hardware, whose preservation is a separate group.
The Bloody Battle to Save Broadcast Television
btw, where do you put an ebook for sale when it's ready? I mean, what's the best place to sell it in terms of getting as much readers as you possibly can?
What about the isolation of the suspected luggage in a bomb-proof area or container? All that would seem to require is investment in the containers and/or blast-proof shell. Why instead is the 'best idea' to try and evacuate a bustling airport terminal with 100's or 1000's of people?
Funny how people with the biggest dreams end up taking the most flack.

OLPC was a big ambition and, like most new initiatives, was probably bound to fail initially. However, he had an idea and he did it! The great success is that future initiatives will have the opportunity to learn and improve upon it.

Are there other things that need fixing around the world? Yes, but the argument that we cannot do anything grand until every single primitive human need is solved is bunk. Innovation does not need to wait for a utopia.
It would be nice if excess XP was preserved. I had maybe 3 pixels of empty space in the meter, then fought a huge battle, but the meter was empty after leveling up.
I think that there are some patents by Apple which describe cameras behind the screen. Say thay use multiple Nano 5th Gen cameras and some magic to scale/whatever.
Functionality depends on what tasks people are using netbooks for. It's hard to generalize but it seems most people are just browsing the Internet, watching videos, and listening to music. A tablet might be more functional for them.
The article hinges on the proposition that a failed attack still serves the terrorist network's purposes. Seriously, can you imagine a terrorist being briefed like this?

"Well, if you succeed, you may shock the world and rally the Muslim nations to our cause, while drawing the Great Satan into an unwinnable war costing over a trillion dollars. If you fail... well, you're going to cause a lot of air travellers to be a little annoyed for five minutes."

There is this idea that terrorists are like devils, delighting in causing misfortune of any kind. I don't think that's the case. Al-Qaeda has concrete goals, like advancing Wahabbi ideology or ejecting the USA from the holy places. Failed missions don't support that, do they?
We're talking about audio files, ebooks, and software--it's all bits. The difference is just on whose drive the bits reside.

"Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to try to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management)

The current best way to control access to software is to run some key components on the server side in the SaaS model. From a business perspective, it accomplishes the goals of DRM beautifully--because the DRM naturally flows from its purpose and structure.
DandyID: Universally Portable Social Identity
> there is a fairly large pool of former enlisted military personnel who can be transitioned into airport security.

The problem here could be that -- at least in the US -- a lot of military personnel come out of the military with some sort of chip on their shoulder towards the rest of society. Though I could just be exaggerating the issue.

If the new security personnel act like 'bullies with a badge' rather than trained professionals, it still might leave air travel as an unpleasant experience.
The part that wouldn't scale and that we would never put up with is the personal interrogations, highly armed guards covering entry points and all the searches.

Go ahead and put some blast containers in place, but it would likely be a waste since there are so few evacuations.
Oh, definitely, I only used "woman" to tie together my previous sentence a/b the beginnings of minimum wage.

In a perfect world Chacha should have to readjust their per search payment until their average hourly wage was minimum wage. Several hundreds or thousands of people doing contract work online from home shouldn't escape the kinds of regulations other businesses have to meet.
I was unaware that you could rotate things.
I don't have the numbers but I'm pretty sure as it is Israel is spending an order of magnitude more per passenger than the TSA does. The fact that the TSA drill is inefficient (and ineffective) doesn't mean that it's expensive.
That would never fly in America as it's wholly unconstitutional. I can't be held accountable for a relative's crime if I had nothing at all to do with it. I'm OK with the parents of John Walker Lindh not being bankrupted and being able to fly--anything else would be a trampling of rights.
Still though, the shitty thing with Steam (or why Valve is so evil) is the fact that the customer can not act as a reseller if he/she is either unsatisfied with the game or is just tired of playing it.

I don't really know what sort of model (subscription?) Steam has implemented here, but it appears very monopolistic and evil given the PC gaming market.

http://www.digitalruin.net/node/55
Ask HN: How was 2009?
Even if it's a minor accomplishment, I'm glowing today. My managed hosting company, which I've co-owned for 6 years now hit 55% growth in '09 over '08, and for the first time crossed 7 figures in gross revenue. Even though it's only 5% of my time anymore, it's the first time I've looked at quickbooks and felt "Hey, this is real!".

So how did everyone do this year? Was it a growth year?
If these airports handle so much traffic that these methods won't scale than how in the world is "evacuate the entire airport" even seriously considered as a solution to any problem?
Collective punishment with close relatives is better than racial profiling, massive inconvenience for everyone, etc.

And it would encourage people to be more alert about suspicious terrorist activity within their family.
While I think touch UI has markedly changed our interactions with computers, I still maintain that change in data entry is the missing piece of the puzzle for a true revolution. When data entry is changed from its current manifestation (physical QWERTY keyboards or some similar variant) we will have a true revolution in the way computers work themselves into our lives.
Of course, there are "personal interrogations" in US airports today. They're just "random", but they most assuredly exist.
Celebrate The New Year With A New Job
The new year is here and what better way to celebrate it than with a new job. Post any openings you have or know of below.

I'll start. My company Pedal Brain (http://en.pedalbrain.com/company) is looking for a web/print designer and a developer (Embedded C, Obj C Ruby, Clojure).
The trouble is that you have hundreds more processors. So even if the memory is twice as fast, and each processor twice as slow, memory access is still the dominating factor in efficiency.

You can work round that by being vary careful, arranging things so that processors access memory in sequence, which lets reads be coallesced (you're streaming data from continguous addresses, avoiding the "seek time" of random access). But that only works if all the processors are focussed on the same job.

Now you can say I'm just describing the standard problems with GPU, and I'd agree, but my point is that even in Fermi (which is a huge step forwards in many ways) these will still dominate. And it's hard to see how most software fits into such an approach. Hence my warning that they are not becoming general purpose.
CmdrTaco, is that you?

Try to consider the tablet as a modern version of the Newton MP2100. No built-in keyboard, no protection, no way to stand it up for a good viewing angle, pretty much the same complaints you give here. My newt's leather carrying case had a little fold-out bit that propped the newt up at an adjustable angle and held the keyboard in place so that I could unzip it on a tabletop, adjust the prop, and have my "laptop" ready to go. When I wanted to be more portable I could disconnect the keyboard, slide the newt out of the case, and walk away.

It is more portable than a netbook because it can do away with the keyboard. Any keyboard worth using cannot fit into a netbook. Period. By eliminating the keyboard you have more design freedom than the netbook form-factor allows.
Laptops will get phased out, in favor of inexpensive, lightweight input/display clamshells.

This is a pipe dream until we either get a better input device than the keyboard (speech?) or we no longer need to move text from our brains to our computers. Until then, people need keyboards, which means that tablets won't overtake laptops. Just my .02. Hope Apple has something revolutionary enough up their sleeve to prove me wrong.
Yeah, Pixel Qi is fabless, so any production is done by someone else.
It's much more work to have half hour interviews with every passenger than it is to evacuate a terminal every couple years.
ok, but that's point 1, which i suspect is getting me voted down. you're replying to me replying to someone questioning point 2.
This seems like a relevant comment, why is it downmodded?

Clearly if Israeli security forces are putting bullet holes through laptops as part of standard procedure, that's not exactly the hassle-free friendly security process the article implies.
My company, Causata, is looking for people in London: http://causata.com/
That depends on what you want to learn and what your goals are. Some of the most fascinating aspects of mathematics and computer science only exist in books and papers. That being said, I think it's perfectly valid to focus strictly on the practical side.
Yes, he made a personal attack, but he also made a legitimate critique of your original post. How does eliminating low wages help anyone?
That is really sad and disturbing. Somehow I think most people nowadays would side with the person that did the reporting. I wish people watched less TV hype and instead used their heads to critically assess risks and dangers.
I'm pretty sure they do make more than their TSA equivalents. At the very least, an Israeli student working airport security will be making more than her peers who do regular students jobs.

Another factor is the prestige that comes with passing the tight selection process and working in the security sector, which is considered possibly the most important aspect of the modern incarnation of Zionism, the national ideological school in Israel. Working in airport security is good on your resume, it will impress your friends and family, it will allow you to think good thing about yourself. I'm almost certain that's not the case for working for the TSA.
This is why the focus on One True Model (book ownership or license rights) strikes me as a red herring.
I'm not a huge fan of new year resolutions. If you feel something isn't right with your life, don't wait, change it now. Have a happy new year HN.
I emailed them asking for the raw spread sheet to look at differences across people familiar with, say, Ruby vs Java. If I get a response I'll put up a google spreadsheet for everyone. Bookmark this page if you are interested.