skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most objections to surveillance are not to all forms of government surveillance, instead people are objecting to extra-legal, and arguably illegal, mass surveillance. Those opposing mass surveillance tend to argue along some subset of following lines:

1. it is ineffective compared with other techniques,

2. it is government graft to favored contractors,

3. mass surveillance databases and collection points provide an excellent target for foreign intelligence agencies and others,

4. it is harmful to privacy and liberty,

5. it is rife for government abuse and blackmail,

6. it undermines the rule of law.

I have yet to see anyone argue against lawful and warranted targeted surveillance of known terrorists. I claim that none of the above objections hold in the targeted surveillance case.
In the UK, the NHS (National Health Service) website has an excellent section called Behind the headlines that "provides an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that make the news".

Their articles are well-written and thorough, but unfortunately much less widely-read than the misleading newspaper reports they often debunk.

http://www.nhs.uk/News/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx
Yes we offer various different downloadable datasets. Reach out to ben@ipinfo.io or use our contact form if you'd like more details.
Most Americans would name large northern cities like Chicago, NYC and Philadelphia as hotbeds of police corruption. San Fransisco's police force is pretty bad, though. They were just filmed shooting a slowly-walking man a couple months ago, and it wasn't too surprising an incident.

Southern states have corrupt police but tend to be known for using drug trade suspicion to confiscate cash and vehicles from immigrants. This is especially the case in Texas.

Generally, the view of police in any state is dim, though. Only the very smallest/low-density states seem to have few issues that make the news.
Great post, I really enjoyed it. Norvig has a knack for modeling these domains in simple, powerful ways.
Others might have another thought though when I read your comment I rolled my eyes and groaned.

You basically 'well actually'ed the quote. Further, it was to point out something rather obvious, trivial and trite. Lastly, you killed the joke.

When someone 'well actuallys' or 'technically it's ...' Something it tends to end poorly for the person using those terms. Why? Because it has a way of coming across incredibly poorly to the receiving party or parties. There are better ways to engage.

fwiw, i suspect a very common reaction to people reading your post would be something along the lines of 'well, yeah. Of course.' Meaning everyone already understands this, the joke is simply phrased that way to land with people. So, you likely aren't pointing anything out to people they don't already know, you just come across in any number of unflattering ways.
What percentage of students used it?
In some cases, the available space for queueing is quite limited. If too many people are queuing, so this mass extends to the platforms, it might not be safe to let a train depart.

Anecdote: During rush hour, I was almost at the bottom of an escalator at Oxford Circus station, when a women a little ahead of me fell over, and the man in front of me fell over her. I pressed the emergency stop button, and blocked the way for people coming down until someone had helped the woman stand.

Less than a minute later, a London Underground employee finds me on the platform and thanks me for acting quickly¹. He says the crowding at the top of the escalator — in a minute! — means the station has been partially closed "exit and interchange only". (Probably only for five minutes.)
I think that is already happening. Will Postmates service deliveries to ISIS controlled territory?

The questions here are:

1) If Postmates knows that someone will, or may, be at risk due to following their instructions, should they still give those instructions to that person?

2) What liabilities does Postmates have when a person is injured after following their instructions?
Nietzsche's sister was a real bitch. Didn't know that.

As for the rest, I found the article concerning. Maybe it's more about the humanities than the hard sciences, but it seems clear to me that academia is doing a good job pushing the boundaries of what is known. As for 'culture', no I don't think academia ever really had the ability or intention to define it - it seeks, perhaps, to describe it. It's true that modern philosophers have little effect on real culture, and that's perhaps for the best.
Interesting that the study was done in India.
Annotated Books Online: A digital archive of early modern annotated books
Everything that's needed to make an OS is documented, either directly or (like USB) in the Linux kernel's source code. Even the GPU is much easier to support than on a PC because the OpenGL ES driver is running on the GPU itself. You just talk to it through a mailbox interface.
I also regularly hit that bug where it starts inserting what I type "in parallel" in different places in the file. It's... upsetting.
> Using the escalator this way adds capacity, but it makes journey times longer.

In the article they mention that on these long escalators, the majority of people would only stand anyway, so their time on the escalator is the same. For the minority that do walk up, even though their time on the escalator is slightly longer, because the bottleneck was significantly reduced they're not waiting before the escalator for as long which makes up for it.

If you're increasing throughput, it means you're getting more people out of the station in the same amount of time, so their journey is quicker.

> If the escalators are at capacity then the right thing is to build more.

But in the article they demonstrate with diagrams that they're not at capacity because everyone is leaving the right sigh free for people to walk, but no one actually does.

> But that costs money, so instead we get "cheats" like this.

I'm not familiar with the geography of London's stations but I would imagine building more escslators is hard. Lack of space and added disruption while they build them.

This is a great optimisation. I would imagine the cost-to-benefit ration would be heavily in favour of utilising the existing escalators capacity more efficiently, rather than building new ones.
> It is amazing how much more people care about their hair and skin in comparison to, say, their blood vessels when it comes to aging.

I'm thinking that the state of your blood vessels isn't something that has been highly visible to others in the past, whereas your hair and skin have been visible, if imperfect, indications of your health and youth. Signalling health and youth to others has been a good strategy for your genes to use, to get additional copies of themselves into circulation.

Thoughts?
Makes a lot of sense. The scrawny kid with low self esteem who has a bad family life so he lashes out from time to time, is entirely ostracized by all the popular kids until he agrees to turn in his red ruder bb gun.
Seems to be ungoogleable. Maybe it's unique :D
The writing and thought in this piece is pretty facile. @rbrogan's comment below sums it up well. Let's remember that Nietzsche received a very rigorous education before his precocious career as a professor.

Sure, there are pressures on the university that push its members away from independent and critical thought. But independent and critical thought has threatened institutions with volatility for a long time. I don't think the wilderness of pop culture is the best place to go looking for it.
"The future will repeat the recent past until some catastrophe changes our current way of implementing republican government, and Americans may not like what that change will bring." - Major General (Rtd) Mike Symanski
This is probably my favorite thing pg has ever written. He's right in so many ways, but my favorite is just his reminder of "don't wait."
I was searching for a usable/scalable way to develop cross platform native mobile app, but found limitations of current solutions.
Mr Graham, I respect you and you've accomplished more that I will in my life, but I sincerely hope that this essay against "bullshit" and "arguing online" isn't you declaring that you'll be "bubbling" yourself after your last essay was met with wide disagreement.

It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from.

Anyway good luck!
The sad thing is Iran used to be reasonably liberal in the 1960's. Based on pictures from that time period, but politics got really ugly.

IMO, it's a classic case of nut-jobs on both sides of a boarder causing pain for a wide range of people.
Ad Blocking: A Primer
> The person that refuses to go into debt, saves until they have the money to spend on whatever it is they want to buy

That's me!

> Another useful addition would be someone with a mortgage that they actually pay off on, their net worth would likely dwarf the net worth of the beggar

And they're so old their body has given up and they spend their days sitting in front of the TV, thinking about all the things they wish they did in their life.
demo on a live webpage ---> https://jsbin.com/lecelimequ/2/edit?html,output
Interesting. Lethal weapons are banned in much of the world, but based on my reading of it, the UK seems to be pretty radical when it comes to non-lethal tools, compared to most of Europe. Looks like pepper spray, stun guns, or really anything else is not legal to carry.

Legal self-defense tools apparently include bright flashlights / strobes (I kid you not) and personal alarms.

It's actually a pretty extreme doctrine, no? The UK does not enjoy a particularly low rate of assault or rape, compared to most other western countries. If unarmed self-defense is the only thing you can try, this would seem to put smaller-framed women, the elderly, and less physically fit people at a distinct disadvantage. Weird.
> The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life...

I'm glad he pointed out this seemingly small detail. This took me a very long time to understand.

EDIT: It reminds me of another great post by Paul Buccheit. It's so important to have the 'heroes' of startup culture explicitly spell out these values:

> I worry that perhaps I'm communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we "win", but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing.

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.fr/2012/03/eight-years-today.ht...
so you're saying mass surveillance is victimless as long as nobody learns that they specifically have been spied upon?
> I accumulated a total of over 500 registered users (out of about 800 9th-12th graders)
"With the constant (and unsustainable) attention of staff, and three weeks of practice, they eventually became a little more docile [...] It’s like child psychology [...] So if you can’t tell them what to do every two minutes, how on earth do you get them to comply? [...] The handrail and tread of the escalator will be a different colour, and firmly planted pairs of feet will decorate the left of the steps."

I wonder if they have tried to simply explain to commuters why it makes sense to stand on both sides. Treating people like intelligent and responsible adults often works much better than treating them like intellectually disabled children.
Crude oil is expected to fall another $2-$3 on Monday after this news. Curious what that will do to the rest of the market.
I think this is pretty similar to the rest of the western world, and certainly to the legal frameworks in much of the US. The interpretation is probably very different, though. So is the legality of carrying weapons in anticipation of an assault...
Holborn station is 100 years old, although it was significantly altered in 1933 when the original lifts were replaced with escalators.

Looking at the 3D diagram of the station [1] it seems the original lift shafts didn't go to platform level anyway, and are now used as emergency stairs and a ventilation shaft.

Even if it's possible to add lifts, and even if the expense isn't astronomical, it would still only make sense if it could be done for many stations on the line — but most of them are this old, and handling far more passengers than ever anticipated.

[1] http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2015/07/12/3d-maps-of-every-...
Life is very long - TS Eliot
It's really not clear to some people that replies to a deleted message are not replies to the message above the deleted message.

This thread contains an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9458661
Pinhooker – R package with thoroughbred bloodstock sales data
I I see a bottleneck at an escalator, I like to take the stairs and then watch where I would be in the bottlekneck to estimate how long it would have taken me to take the escalator to validate my choice of taking the stairs.
That's true to some extent but only in urban areas. Rural areas where Khomeni drew his huge support from were in dreadful conditions and as reactionary and conservative as they get.
Hopefully it will drive more people to use Linux which doesn't have such ridiculous problems.
Is a Creative Commons license for research only or can it be used for commercial purposes if you attribute the original author?
Cleartext in the butt sounds exquisite.
Please don't walk against the flow, it inconveniences so many people. :(
In some cases it can half the throughput for a coridoor as people walking in the right direction have to slow down and merge into another line just so you can go past.
If companies did boycott some areas for police violence, where could they send employees?
There was a general global religious reactionary backlash in the 70s and 80s. Over here we got the moral majority and such.
I would third what you have heard here. A person that never served time for a felony that was not financially focused (e.g. wasn't a crime of dishonesty) would not be excluded from participating in a round of friends and family. Especially with no voting or board seat.

If you are exceptionally concerned have the individual invest via a LLC or separate company, but I doubt any future investors will care either way as they will only be focused on your ability to deliver and as long as that isn't compromised you are good.

There are some restrictions on a felony conviction in the SEC rules but I do not believe you would trigger them by taking funds from the person. IANAL but I believe they only become a factor if the person has a material interest or has a voting/board position in the company.
No it’s not. We second guess every plane crash trying to figure out exactly what happened and how we can prevent another crash in the future. Lessons learned are then passed on to other pilots. The NTSB and other safety boards are huge second guessers and it’s how aviation has become as safe as it is today. Certainly you want to appreciate the stressors the pilot was under, but that’s no excuse for not evaluating the actions he or she took leading up to the crash.
It's still faster for the person running up the escalator but for that luxury, we are sacrificing half the capacity of the escalator.

Having another row of people on the left means the overall capacity increases and everyone moves faster but I always walk up the stairs and this won't benefit me one bit. Everyone else wins.

Standing when I'm in a rush can never be faster than walking up the escalator.
Seems like a difficult thing to do in such a small trial. Because it's just one escalator (out of 7) in one station, their only point of contact is someone at the bottom of the escalator to shout "stand still".

They hinted at in the article about if they were to expand the trial, they would be able to sell the public on the benefits of it, presumably through a larger campaign.
I'm a more productive engineer now that I have small kids than I ever was before. I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. I don't waste time building some over-architected nonsense on a side project, I ship the MVP. When I do take time away from my kids I maximize it by learning three or four new technologies, patterns, or libraries at once.

When you realize how short time really is you ruthlessly cut bullshit.
Maybe overthrowing their democratic government and replacing it with a brutal dictatorship wasn't the most intelligent thing the American government did.
One very welcome change is reconnection of SWIFT network to Iran. You can't believe how hard it is right now to send money to Iran. This hit me when I had to transfer money to my family in their extremely hard times, when my brother had an accident and needed cash for treatments.

I hope this trend continues and Iran comes back to the international scene. It's good for everyone. Iran is very similar to Israel. Most of people are normal but there is a small percentage of extremist who have a lot of voice. Lucky for Israel they have a better constitution and governance model.
I didn't read it as him suggesting that he'd stop writing, just that he'd make a conscious effort to stop defending himself from online attacks. I agree that it would be terrible if he quit writing his essays.
This is terrific news!

As with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, opening up countries to the world's economy and ideas is the first step towards democracy.

The implications of this are tremendous (not in order of importance):

1) Oil prices will continue to fall as Iran is able to supply the global markets. Many oil states rely on money from natural resources to preserve monarchies. Money for freedom only works so long as the money keeps flowing.

2) Our (US) reliance on Saudi Arabia will diminish as there are now two powers in the region to work with. Having strong relations with both Shiite and Sunni powers in the Middle East will likely reduce sectarian violence. We're light years from being out of the woods, but this is big step in the right direction.

3) The Iranian people will gain access to the world economy. From a human rights perspective, they are the biggest winners here. As with Sunni/Shiite relations, no doubt a long way to go (the Ayatollah is a tyrant,) but you gotta celebrate the wins when you can.

4) De-escalation of our conflict with Iran. We saw it with Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea. Invasion + nation building is sexy, but highly ineffective. Having one less nuclear power that calls for our destruction is certainly a nice to have.

5) Shows Americans that diplomacy can work. Iranians don't hate Americans, they hate what America represents. To them, we represent a superpower that gives little to no thought of anyone else's sovereignty. We assassinated their democratically elected leader and backed the Shah, which got us into this mess. Diplomacy is far less sexy and easily criticized, but that's a huge part of getting this deal done.

Note: Many of these are over-simplified. Nonetheless, this is a pretty big deal and a cause for celebration.
why does × mean "close" when it's in the upper-right corner of a screen

But even ignoring the counterpoint to the idea that a UI element must be contextual within some category to be understandable, the idea that the hamburger menu isn't a standard OS abstraction is also just silly. Hamburger menus are for mobile devices, and in your points you're comparing them with navigation used on operating systems meant for desktops. On Android — the most-used mobile operating system in the world — the hamburger menu icon is part of the standard toolkit, is built directly into their SDK, and is called out explicitly in their specs for Material Design.
> Iran will use the roughly $100 billion in frozen assets it will receive to support terrorism and other misadventures.

> Iran’s support for terrorism, its imprisonment of dissidents and even some Americans, its meddling in Iraq and Syria and its arms trade.

Funny that Saudi Arabia is guilty of all the above if not 10X worse but not a single word from those republicans. This speaks volumes of the power of the Saudi lobby in the US political system and how their wealth could influence decisions and policies in the US.
have been tinkering with this idea also something like

*echo -n 'my unique passphrase' |sha512sum*

only issue is this shows up in your memory and on disk (e.g. .bash_history)
It was social liberalism masking a particularly virulent and corrupt regime under the Shah. The greatest mistake the West made in dealing with modern Iran was to support the coup against Mossadeqh; it ushered in a period of political oppression that even CIA admitted was unsustainable, and which led inexorably to the Bazaari-Clericalist revolution. (Khomeini's supporters weren't the only anti-establishment revolutionaries, but they seized the reins of power first and then began systematically reducing the liberal and Marxist opposition.)
Can you refuse to show your ID to the cops?

Probably no (in practice), if you're black or Latino or lower class white. Or anybody, in a drug-dealing neighborhood.
I'm no expert if CPU internals (only the general architecture) and I'm puzzled. Maybe somebody can help to understand this issue.

Assuming that the instruction set is backward compatible as always has been, how's possible that an older Windows doesn't work with those new CPUs? Timing issues, assumptions on behaviors of the CPU that won't be true anymore, other?

Other popular OSes running on those CPUs (OSX, Linux) will stop running properly and need a special build or CPU detection and per CPU paths?
Sure. I'm in Australia, and those are problems sometimes.

My general point was that I imagine most banking systems are legacy and archaic, and if they ever wanted to improve them Bitcoin could be s potential implementation detail for a modern system.
just because it's all javascript, doesn't mean you can "just" make a web client. electron, the shell atom is built on, has a lot of functions that are tied directly to the operating system and atom relies heavily on them. it also has a module system that allows you to do require() in front end javascript without needing to bundle anything. it would definitely be an interesting project, though.
This is my least favorite. I respect his advice on startups, but little else. This sounds like the stuff Oprah used to say.
> The sad thing is Iran used to be reasonably liberal in the 1960's. Based on pictures from that time period, but politics got really ugly.

It still is, compared to it's neighbors.
As opposed to the present, when there are no tax loopholes.
> With SETI, we explicitly make the assumption that any prospective aliens are using communications technology that can be intercepted by us.

And they probably are not. :-)
>And for every outlandish hypothesis that turned out to be true there have been a hundred for which a much more mundane explanation has sufficed.

A 1% probability of aliens seems pretty significant to me. Obviously it's more likely that it's not aliens, and no one disagrees with that. But the fact that it's even a possibility is very interesting and makes it worthy of investigation.

Anyway there isn't anything inherently unlikely about aliens. You make it like it's incredibly unlikely that aliens exist, so any hypothesis that includes them must be incredibly unlikely. A lot of people have higher prior probabilities on the existence of aliens.
That depends on how liberal you believe a coup d'état is...

Iran's prime minister was overthrown by the UK and the USA because Iran wanted to nationalise its oil companies. The UK & USA weren't having any of that and put their own choice of government in charge.

Naturally, this had a large influence on the eventual Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the country's swing away from the west.
I had no idea jellyfish had eyes.