skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The TSA is a jobs program with a bit of "throw government contracts to your buddies" mixed in. Same with the military to an extent.

A TSA Screener job is about the closest we'll get to Basic Income: stand around in an airport occasionally groping people for $13-18/hr, plus awesome Federal benefits. Qualifications: essentially none.
> Airports should kick out the TSA

I'm not American and haven't been there for a long time so forgive my ignorance. TSA is an agency of DHS so I believed that its presence in airports was mandated by the government. Can airports really replace it with anybody they like? If this is the case, why they didn't do it before? Only because TSA is for free and airports have to pay private security companies?
I've had a tech who came to deal with a reported issue I was having tell me to test on a specific Time Warner Cable speed test. He then got upset/flustered when I used a different speed test to demonstrate that the issue was still present. I had to explain that I use the internet connection I was paying for to do things on domains that aren't owned and optimized by TWC.
All those problems you mention are real, but they're not the main problem. The real problem with the TSA is that it's explicitly unconstitutional, since the 4th amendment explicitly prohibits search and seizure without a warrant.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

This does not at all describe the operation of the TSA's search and seizure. Notably, the statute's language makes no allowance for implicit consent based on location or attempting to use some private transportation system. A sensible compromise is to privatize airline security, since the constitution does not prohibit Delta employees from searching and seizing without a warrant.
TSA is the number one reason why I don't fly and drive instead. From my POV most of the world's industries have progressed positively, but not air travel. I took a train a couple of years ago and it was a beautiful example of old merging with new. Walking through an antique of a train station, iPhone in hand, with my digital ticket ready to board; so easy and pleasant.

At that point I realized that air travel is by far the worst traveling experience money can pay for.

If an alternative airport wanted to do things a little different, such as "fly at your own risk" "no lifeguard on duty", aka no TSA b.s., I'd happily take the "at your own risk" option rather than the TSA controlled situation we're subjected to currently.
A definitive introduction to the field: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/cup.pdf
How to Create Simple Jenkins Pipelines to Amazon Web Services
This reads like an overly cynical view of early stage experimentation. Will there be a lot of data that has to be simplified and ignored? Of course. That is almost by definition why we look at Calories and other proxy measures.

This will not become a science when someone perfects the one experiment that can answer questions. It becomes a science when people ask questions that they can falsify in ways that other people can replicate. It continues to be a science as long as that is the case.

Edit: I should point out that I misread the headline. I thought it was "Is Gut Science Based?" Not "Biased." .... so, I definitely had a more slanted reading of the article as I was going.
Portugal runs for four days straight on renewable energy alone
Watching people fight on Facebook and Twitter, I frequently recall Stephenson's vision of the human race nearly destroying itself with flame wars.
Spot instances are about $13 - $19/hr, depending on zone. Not available in NorCal, Seoul, Sydney and a couple of other places.
Do you have references for that last claim?
Badii and Politi 1997 is fun and interesting reading. Try Lempel-Ziv complexity for some hilarious idiocy and statistical Grassberger complexity for some less idiotic thought. Logical depth. Symbolic dynamics.
> You write this, but then you go on to mention job interviews, which are becoming more and more algorithmic each passing year.

It's been the opposite experience for me in SF, actually. More startups are realizing that they want people who can build good products quickly, and with more people coming from non-CS backgrounds, they'd rather test for that than see if they can whiteboard a breadth-first search.

I took enough CS coursework to learn the stuff you mentioned, but I've worked with a number of developers who don't know any CS theory. Several of them are stronger engineers than me and have had very successful careers, and I'd rather work with someone who can communicate well and solve hard problems than someone who's read through CLRS.
Smallpox is a thing. Yes it is deadly and a bad thing, like nukes or taco-bell being open at 3am. But it is still a thing. It's evilness derives from the people who can use it as a thing, not itself. For instance, rabies is a very bad virus too, but is used all the time in research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies_virus#Application). There, rabies is used as a thing in the vein of a tool for research, not as a tool to hurt others. Having some back-ups somewhere like in an internationally governed vault in Greenland would be most prudent. We all have access, in theory, then to it and it is less likely to be used as a bad thing in the future that way.
Exactly my intent. Well-worded. I'm not sure quite how to describe it how average person would understand. So, insider trading is one option to approximate it. Pyramid Scheme seems like another one in the rip-off aspect but doesn't fix the specifics as well. The traits to categorize are it's rigged, parasitic on others, requires enormous investment, and requires physical proximity that's fairly exclusive.
Interesting. Even over multiple tests, I get almost exactly 1/3rd the download bandwidth speed to NetFlix that I do testing with speedtest.net.
Yet, who decides? A pro-IP court powered 'industry' in East Texas that keep entire towns afloat? It seems counter to their financial wellbeing to be critical of IP claims because then we'd all assume a loss in most cases and this stuff would never go to court (mediation would probably solve most issues).

Because of how the federal system operates, its difficult for the defendant to force a change of venue here. These pro-IP jurisdictions give companies like Oracle the wins they want and all the fees and fines and lawyer hourlies add up. Its a win-win for everything but justice.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/east-texas-courts...
> angular has adopted ember-cli into angular-cli – any plans by the react community to do this?

First, you would need to define what a React framework looks like, which libraries it needs and which conventions it should use while wiring them together, then build tools around that.

Version 3 of React Boilerplate takes steps towards that by deciding on a set of tools, libraries and conventions and providing code generators for adding to them in a compatible way, but the initial wiring is still done as boilerplate (like it says on the tin).

react-project [1] was heading towards something more like managing this wiring behind the scenes as a dependency rather than a boilerplate, but it's not being actively developed any more at the time of writing.

---

I think React and view libraries like it also necessitate a slightly different approach in that there's no overarching thing to hook into behind the scenes - you just write a bunch of JavaScript and what it returns (plus side effects) is exactly what you get.

For example, to use Font Awesome icons with Ember via ember-cli, you install ember-font-awesome and the next time you run ember-cli it does... something... such that an fa-icon component is now magically available in your templates. [2]

In React, you install react-fa, import it into module scope where you need it and use it as part of what a render() function returns - your build tools handle it the same as any other JavaScript and CSS you've imported. [3]

[1] https://github.com/ryanflorence/react-project

[2] https://github.com/wycats/github-issues-demo/commit/a3358026...

[3] https://github.com/insin/react-nwb-github-issues/commit/cad3...
Agreed! I had tons of fun building my own CMS on top of RethinkDB (as well as a logging/journal app for personal use). The only reason I ended up with a wordpress/MySQL solution for the CMS was that building the CMS interface is a bitch and migrating from SQL to SQL was a bit easier.

But man was I sad to leave RethinkDB for that!
Getting an information ahead of the rest of the crowd sort of fits under this specific meaning.
This is great. I don't have anything insightful to say, but this makes me so happy.
Remember Ello? You Abandoned It, but Artists Didn’t
Ask HN: Best First Steps for a Startup?
I'm almost done with a prototype I believe has potential but I'm not sure of the best way to proceed with my idea/product?

Anyone have experience they care to share?
If it works the way I expect it to, I think all it would do is push the whole group of tandem bots down. The cheesing wouldn't make them score better against other user's bots.
You might want to look at https://github.com/dmathieu/sabayon
There's still an option for airports to hire private companies which are overseen in some respects by TSA. I think only two or three airports are doing it; notably at SFO the screening is performed by Covenant Aviation Security (CAS), not TSA.
I'd be interested to see how they got the 95% failure rate. If the TSA was sneaking in actual bombs that could bring down airplanes, that is a horrific. But if they were testing someone bringing in a nail clipper with a 1 inch blade tucked into it, a plastic gun, a disassembled "bomb" with no explosive residue, etc, then it's not that bad.

The fact that there have been attempts to blow up airplanes, and they all involved using explosives designed to get around TSA procedure suggests it works or terrorists think it works. The shoe bomber had to put a tiny bomb into his shoe without electronics. The underwear bomber had to build a crude bomb on board the plane.

If there was no security, they'd walk on with a prebuilt bomb and take out a flight.

In the 60's and 70's there was a goldenage of hijacking airplanes. If you could just walk onto a plane with a gun, people would do it again.

Maybe you think that risk is low enough per flight to not matter. Objectively it's still less risky than driving to the airport. But like you allude to, the people aren't going to buy that argument. "Just accept that al Qaeda or Isis will bring down a 747 or two each year, it's still safer than a roadtrip" will get you punted out of office in record time.
When I used to be a Netflix customer it was more the variability of my connection that was an issue and not its "speed" at a given optimal time.

Usually I could begin a stream without problems. But often while streaming (often enough for me to realize streaming was a bad experience) the bitrate dynamically dropped way down to a terrible quality in response to what I imagine were poor network conditions. Netflix no doubt sees this dynamic quality adjustment as a feature, and preferable to buffering, but I chose an HD stream and I'd rather even see an SD quality video that I could be sure would stay that quality than switching between HD and very low bitrate, fuzzy, artifacty video.

I don't blame Netflix for the quality of my connection, but streaming is just not as reliable as cable and it's not one of those Moore's Law type things where throwing more processing power or memory fixes the network issues.
Airports can replace the TSA with private contracts. SFO farmed security out to a company called Covenant. They still have to follow TSA policies and aren't necessarily an improvement from a passenger standpoint. I.e., you're still getting yelled at by otherwise-unemployable nitwits on a power trip.
This may be a description of what Oracle is trying to claim, but it has no bearing on the reality of the situation. The OpenJDK code was copied in order to contribute to OpenJDK. It's utterly shocking that Oracle would misrepresent this as theft rather than a gift from Google.
I'll second deepanchor. It might seem like such a minor detail, but at least for some people, including myself, it does matter. It signifies something.
> 2. Notwithstanding #1, there have been zero successful terrorist attack on aircraft in the U.S. since 9-11.

How much is due to the TSA, as opposed to civilian and military intelligence work at home and abroad and simple measures such as having air marshals and preventing any access to the cockpit during flight?
I wonder why so many people immediately jump to thinking about a car as an alternative to short distance air travel. Would people in the US never even consider a fast train system as a good option between Philadelphia and Chicago? (If it were built, of course. But self-driving cars need to be built too. But I guess they're easier; I'm just dreaming)
I saw in a different thread some back of the napkin math that he number of people-hours wasted by the TSA adds up to something like 500 lifetimes each year.

Terrorists would seriously have to step up their game to kill more than 500 people each year in the US, especially with passengers no longer operating under the "hijack just means a free trip to Cuba" assumption and actually fighting back.
Also once you have fully autonomous with no human oversight vehicles there is no reason they even have to look like a car internally any more, it could be a single bed next to a sit up chair and a table, you could sleep properly while you drive along or sit and work, that would sound pretty pleasant, work for a few hours while it drives, pull over for something to eat then get your head down and wake up at your destination.
Foreign agents apparently snooping on Presidential campaigns
Could you post it here when it's up? I'd like to see it.
Sure, but smartcards have traditionally fulfilled a narrow purpose - creating a notion of non-cloneable identity for some centralized top-down entity. The technology of a hardened mini computer could be applied to many other things, but the closed philosophy of the industry really hinders that. I'd love to get some samples of ST23 and create a board with an appropriate hardware UI for end-user signing, but alas this industry has not seen the light of Kerckhoff's principle.

My problem with PINs is twofold. First, the reader required to use them in a transparent manner does not fit with the form factor of a laptop. Second, they're obviously less secure than a passphrase - relying completely on hardened hardware. If I'm willing to enter a passphrase for every session, why should I be carrying around the key in the clear?
$9.6K/mo without a reservation, but a hefty 70% off with a 3-year reserved instance purchase. It's actually good value, it's 8x the RAM of the nearest memory optimized instance (R3.8XLarge) at just 5x the price.

If you have a whole bunch of memory optimized instances, this can allow you to simplify and consolidate and still save you money. Still, don't put all your eggs in one virtual basket.
A void function that does nothing but throw exceptions. Scala engineers everywhere cringe at the thought of converting this kind of code to native Scala.
In the end, it always boils down to network reliability, latency, and loss of power/control, which is where you pay for the convenience you get from thin terminals.

The control issue in particular will come back, it's human nature. Centralised environments are locked down to a level that someone eventually finds intolerable, so they start using unsupervised local hardware. It's the natural anarchy of the human spirit... or a reaction to the stupidity of people in power :)
> The TSA is a jobs program with a bit of "throw government contracts to your buddies" mixed in.

The TSA is not a jobs program, especially for screening, etc.; those jobs directly replaced private sector jobs. The function was nationalized to move potential liability from the airlines (who contracted with the organizations operating airports, who contracted with private security firms) when they complained about the potential liability for security failure in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
I'd love to see someone benchmark how fast you can get ~2TB of data into that instance from S3, process it, get the results back into S3, and power down.

Big data version of Cannonball Run.
A pragmatic attitude of mine is: do not use anything that is less than a year old.

Applies to frameworks, tools, programming languages, operating systems etc.

You can break this rule if you really know what you're doing, and it's only one thing in the chain. But basing your whole product on a whole stack of work-in-progress stuff is madness, unless you like pain.

Ok, React et al. are more than one year old, but still the whole ecosystems is not the best one to just start your webdev career from, due to complexity, lots of moving parts, breaking changes, etc.
Going to comment out the deallocation bits in all my code now.
-- mad mad props.
Good point. I'd love if we had high speed rails in the US. I'd take it over a car everyday.
Meeting with officials of a hostile government in unofficial settings is the general shape of espionage.
I know, but the React community almost forces you to use all these, if you're following any tutorial or guide, or even just asking help on some specific issue.
Correct: all Piriform products do this... unless chrome is already installed/detected.
> Of course symmetric cryptography can be resilient against quantum attacks (as far as we know today) if this keys are sufficiently long, but the problem is to securely exchange those keys, and this is were quantum cryptography has its place (again, in my opinion). I would love to hear why this idea is flawed though

Because security-wise, according to djb claims in the original article (and Schneier too (2)), everything that the "quantum network" does can as well be implemented with the normal insecure internet and the symmetric ciphers, with the same security limitations (the secure channel, as per djb, initially is needed in both cases: "Quantum cryptography, like locked-briefcase cryptography, also relies on a preexisting secure channel (to authenticate choices of "bases" by Alice and Bob)" See also (1) ). So from the security standpoint it's a typical "snake oil" not improving anything but costing more, being much more complicated to maintain and therefore much less secure from the get-go.

"The Manifesto says that it is "endorsed by a broad community of industries, research institutes and scientists in Europe" and is accompanied by an online list of thousands of signatories; but the list looks more like a rather narrow community of people who are hoping that the Manifesto makes money for them, such as quantum physicists and their students. Security review, like environmental review, requires experts who are skeptical."

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_key_distribution

"These proofs are unconditionally secure in the sense that no conditions are imposed on the resources available to the eavesdropper, however there are other conditions required:

- Eve cannot physically access Alice and Bob's encoding and decoding devices.

- The random number generators used by Alice and Bob must be trusted and truly random (for example a Quantum random number generator).

- The classical communication channel must be authenticated using an unconditionally secure authentication scheme.

- The message must be encrypted using one-time pad like scheme."

2) "Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless" https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/10/quantum_cry...
This is already happening for me when I travel between SF and LA. There's a bunch of bus routes that offer WiFi and operate through the night.

Why would I fly when I could get on a bus at midnight and then wake up in LA at 7AM? When flying, sometimes my time spent in security is literally longer than my time in air. And that's not even taking cost into account, you can do $40-50 round trip on Greyhound vs. ~$140 for a flight.
More of an issue of needing to throw ISP execs into a pit so that the infrastructure can move into this century.
I have to agree with this. It has been a real pleasure to use. I have managed about 50 workspaces... but there has been some annoying things:

- inability to modify workspace t-shirt size
- workspace features using AWS services but mostly hidden
- lack of ability to re-brand the client (i did rewrap the installer with custom artwork but breaks on upgrades).
- Linux client... still waiting. (but can run under wine)
- not easy to use 2fa support
- not easy to set default printer.. they are non-static
- reboots are slow
- no ability to declare exit IP location... UK people don't want to appear in Ireland (bad for google.com and credit card payments).. have to spin up a standalone proxy using a different provider (thanks digital ocean).
- BYOL is great.. but inbuilt support for office365 would be better.
- No Amazon Elastic File System yet in Ireland.. so have to run a separate fileserver for network drive.
- Not been able to get vnc as a service working.. and can't use the windows UAC without it.
- No ability to use custom templates on user provisioning emails.
- Can't use human interaction device, such as dictate pedals for secretaries.
- .. and some more.. these are the top of my head.
praise RNGesus!
Most everything here is subjective, inaccurate, or outdated by C99, save Fortran's multi-dimensional array handling which is legitimately superior to C despite partial reconciliation by VLAs.
I'd add nature to that 'list'. There's so much we can - and have - learned from what sometimes appear to be dumb or primitive processes.
If you paid hourly (instead of using a reserved instance) it costs $116840.88 per year (13.338 per hour * 24 * 365). A 1 year reservation + hourly charges for a year is $67197.96 (all up front).
Airlines are already marginal for shorter-distances. SJ to LA is (imo) right at the cusp of being worth it. ~5 hours to drive, maybe SLIGHTLY less door-to-door on an airline. Any aircraft delay throws the whole thing off. Add parking at the airport + last mile travel on arrival and financially it only makes sense if the company pays.
Yes, but only if you pay for three years up front. Spelling out all the options:

* $117K / year on-demand
* 81K / year for one-year commitment, nothing up front
* 69K / year for one-year commitment, $34,285 up front
* 67K / year for one-year commitment, $67,199 up front
* 35K / year for three-year commitment, $52,166 up front
* 33K / year for three-year commitment, $98,072 up front

All these prices are total, e.g. for the last option, you pay $98,072 up front and then nothing more, which divides out to about $33K / year over the three years.

Plus, eventually, the spot market, and of course you can run save money with on-demand if you only need the instance occasionally.
Or you could just use BigQuery =).
Do startups have a drinking problem?
Unlikely, but the reseller gets new drives, uses them (selling cloud storage) while they sit as unsold inventory, then sells them as new.