skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They had airport security right back in 2000. All they need to do is go back to doing things that way and everybody will be a lot happier.

Back in 2000, Hijacking an airplane meant that you landed it someplace, demanded some stuff, let the passengers off, then got killed by the police. Passengers knew that all they needed to do was sit tight and things would work themselves out. That's the reason why a bunch of dudes could hijack a plane with silly little utility knives. In the passenger's mind, it sucked, but they figured they'd live through it.

Nowadays, if the TSA lets me keep my fingernail clippers and I attempt to take over the plane with them, I'll get 185 people jumping on me because they expect me to crash it into something.

That's the fundamental thing that changed after 9/11. The upside of it is that it's now next to impossible to hijack a commercial flight, even if you're armed. The natural conclusion then, from a security perspective, is not to start confiscating my bottled water, but rather to continue with the straightforward, effective security that was already working.
While I also prefer to be an optimist in such matters, I never quite get the "we are so resourceful" reaction. Yes, a couple of times in history we (I mean earth, humans, as I am not from the US) have been lucky, and some looming crisis was averted. A lot of other times things didn't go so well. History is full of civilizations collapsing, wars, famines and so on. There is not always some genius at hand who invents a wonderful rescue device (as apparently with the agricultural revolution last century).

Personally, I used to hate cars and everything oil related. So I am the first who would welcome it if the economy would run on sustainable alternative energy. But I think oil is ultimately simply this: free energy. It is as if somebody gave your country several trillions of dollars (without inflation). So if you take that away, you suddenly have several trillions of dollars less (or more, just picked a random number here). You can not simply replace them, they are missing from the equation completely. So overall, you will be that much poorer, with all the consequences. Sure, you can build other things, but it will take time.
What's the deal with Safeway Icecream? Never heard of it.
Approaches to Writing Film Essay
When watching a film you would never think about all the aspects that go into the making of it. However, when you are assigned to write the film essay, this will be something which you should concentrate on the most. Exploring every avenue open to you will enable you to find a good topic to write on.
"become economical far before petroleum is totally gone"

What does that even mean, though? If oil was gone today, dragging things by hand or with horses would become economical, too. That doesn't imply that it would afford us the same luxurious lifestyle we enjoy today (luxury == not having to drag stuff around by hand, among other things).
But binocular vision is only one of the many ways that our brain uses to create the perception of depth... and not even the main one at that.

We use the knowledge of what covers what, the size of objects/people, and the parallax effect. The first two can already be done with 2D and the latter cannot be done in 3D either (at least not with a lot of the cheap stuff out there). Which is why it doesn't seem that big of a deal when you look at something in 3D (though surely it helps a bit).
Kim Stanley Robinson still betting on utopia
So far my main complain looking at 3D films have been:

1- They are darker and therefore you lose some details, simply because polarised glasses cut half of the light

2- But most of all every time something is coming towards me in the film is impressive only until it reaches the edge of the screen... at which point I get one massive reminder that I am watching a film and not reality and it completely kills my suspension of disbelief. Maybe with time I'll get use to it, but so far I've been much more aware that I was in a cinema when watching 3D... ironically it was a lot less immersive. ;)

Where I do think it can have a positive effect is either where the film maker makes careful use not to go beyond the screen's size (for example "How to train a dragon" was quite nice in 3D because of all the dogfighting which was a lot clearer in 3D), or in sports where the director can be sure the ball and the players will stay within a certain area.
Are there competitors to deviantart? Because I have seen them reign supreme for many years now and cant recall anyone being as successful in this market.
The problem I see is the simple fact that one can't ever do an actual experiment that demonstrates the existence of multiple universes…

Here we have left empirical science and moved on to "anything can happen" speculative fiction, where authority counts as sufficient evidence, and the lack of observations maybe explained away.

Any hypotheses which does not differentiate between "ordering" and "organization" is not actually a science, it's a cargo cult.
Anyone get the feeling this game is going to sell like crazy. It's like an urban legend you can purchase. They should embrace the jokes and try to leverage it to build suspense and PR before the release. I was awaiting this game as an 8th grader for crying out loud, and now I'm 28!
A typo. Fixed. Thanks.
A Problem Course in Compilation: From Python to x86 Assembly [pdf]
There must be a floor ... or maybe the man is floating!
What if T >> 30 right from the start. Don't they all rise at once?
Does anyone know if any of the original developers are still working on the game? I'd like to believe that this is the story of a few intrepid programmers overcoming great odds to ship a release that everyone had given up on. But I suspect that all remnants of the old team are gone and a whole new team was put in place when the IP changed hands recently.
Ubuntu 10.10 beta arrives with new netbook UI
I do Agile Coaching and .NET architect/PM work. I'm currently in the market for some short-term work as a means to help fund my startup. I specialize in more difficult jobs. Anywhere in the US or Europe is fine. Clients include many big-name companies and mission-critical applications. Past work in both large and small environments across many industries. Lots of references and samples of work available on request.
>Yes it is an assistance animal[1]. It is kind of sad that the guy never figured it out.

Are you sure. Why could it not be a pet? The image in the OP doesn't appear to show a harness (as in the NYTimes article) as is usual for an assistance animal. In my country assistance animals usually wear some high-vis in public too.
Which is ironic as Mac OS X printing was terrible until they adopted CUPS and sprayed on some usability.
your email isn't visible in your profile
Every FPS before it was super serious. Then comes Duke, a trash talking, stripper payin, badass mofo who is all out of bubble gum. Also it has holo-duke which I contest is the best FPS feature ever created. Many a friend parished from my holo-duke + room lined with pipe bomb combo.
Video games can do this - Starcraft is a poor example of a video game with emotion, but they do exist. (Metal Gear Solid, for example)
This reminds me of the time I saw Steve Jobs in the Apple Store, Palo Alto. No one was looking at him, except me. Eventually, I walked up to him and said hello. Then, I showed him Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing, the iPad app I developed, on the new iPad I had just bought.

To modify part of the article to fit my experience...

I asked one of the Apple Store employees: "Do you realize Steve Jobs is behind you?"He sighs at me and says, "Yes, he’s in here all the time."
When we draw a circle it has no beginning and no end, but there is most certainly a creator of it.
I hear quite often that prostitution would be a wonderfully pleasant industry if it were only legal, which does not square with the experiences of countries where it is legal or tolerated.

You pretty much have to be running schoolgirls out of homeroom to get the Nagoya police to so much as glance in your direction, but Japanese prostitution is a very, very ugly place to be, and much of it is based on trafficking. I live two hundred feet from a "Korean aesthetic salon" which is open at three A.M. in the morning. One of the not-so-young ladies who works there has taken to sleeping on the bus bench across the street recently, in heat which has nearly sent me to the hospital twice. You may have heard that Japan has a storied relationship with its Korean immigrants. Those who do -- to use a nauseating euphemism -- the jobs Japanese girls won't do can expect neglect from polite society, because polite society knows that inquiring into her circumstances means they have to know what goes on in those walls, and they are very interested in keeping up the fiction that they do not know what goes on in those walls.

Or take the European experience. Amsterdam, city of lights, so much more sophisticated than the American puritans, perfectly legal thriving sex trade, right? It has been taken over by Russian mafia who are undercutting the locals via use of trafficked girls from Eastern Europe. You always have the option as a merchant of sex slaves to one-up what the "morally upright prostitutes" allow, safe in the knowledge that they will cover for you because an investigation into what you are doing harms their business interests. Society, meanwhile, has no great desire to actually police what happens inside of brothels, preferring to believe its sanity-saving fictions like "she wants to be there", "it is just sex between two consenting adults", and "no slaves live on my block."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/world/europe/24amsterdam.h...

Prostitution, legal or otherwise, is not pretty. It is based, root and branch, on exploitation. To the extent you think that legalizing it will end the exploitation, you believe something which is contrary to reality.
I agree that scientist are not above human mistakes and bias like everyone else. But there is a way to tackle that. The scientific method tries to minimise the errors cause by bias and human mistakes. That's why we can eventually decide that the tobacco industry's results were wrong: because they had to show all their procedure and some other scientist could explain where they went wrong.

But when you take statements from alternative medicine, which are: a) not based on any scientific theory, b) often only defended by anecdotal evidence, c) their speaker is charismatic and a proficient PR, then it gets really really hard.

You may point out to research showing that homeopathy doesn't work. To avoid being branded as hiding data or such, you say everything very carefully, explaining anything you know and you don't know, and the uncertainty in the results and so. The other then replies: "You can give me all the numbers you want, but I've _seen_ cases of people who got a lot better." and then show you a few photos of before and after: "Why---he concludes---do you not want the audience to have access to the most effective treatment?".

The former was boring, hard to understand, and objective/dry. The latter spoke straight to the heart, and show evidence.

And remember that a lot of problem arise because people _want_ to believe the charlatan. They want to believe that the incurable cancer that the doctor prescribed can be cured, or that they can keep their lifestyle without destroying the world, or that the religion the believed for for so long is correct an we humans are special.
As I understand it, he said that he needed a few seconds to get his email out. If you can't get some sort of business leeway, what's the point in flying first class? As I understand it he's not talking about carrying on all the way through the descent, nobody's died from having a laptop on during the descent, why go first class then?
In the spirit of Duke here is the best web comic ever:
http://www.pidjin.net/2010/01/25/iwish/
Trading two for one - A Monty Hall variant.
Suppose I have ten cards, one of which represents a prize of great value. I shuffle them, spread them out face down, and let you choose any two. You take them, but you don't look at them.

I take the remaining eight cards and look at them. One by one, I show you six of them. I want to keep the tension high, so I definitely don't reveal the card of great value. After all, I might not have it.

After revealing those six of the cards, I have two, you have two, and I make you this offer:

You can choose and keep one
(but only one) of my cards,
if you give me both of yours.

Assuming this isn't a card trick, and that everything is as I've described - should you accept?
that is the greatest thing i have ever seen - literally laughing out loud.
But there are no children in the Apple Store, for the same reason you would not see a child in a jewelry store: things are small and fragile and expensive and shiny.

In my experience, there are usually quite a number of children in Apple Stores.
"Exchange 2010 adds some important changes for non-Internet Explorer browsers by officially and fully supporting both Firefox and Safari with its Premium version of the Outlook Web Access client."
Flex/Flash/HTML/CSS/JS developer, 3 month contract, London, UK. Potential to roll or permanent.

We're writing web workflow and project management systems inside of Pearson (the publishing company). It's a good gig with a lot of freedom and an excellent cafeteria. Did I mention how good the food was?

Competitive rates of pay. Likely to close on Monday. Monday is chicken day.

On-site only, no telecommute, sorry. And the food is great.
He seems to be doing fine, but he has definitely not taken over the world yet...
It's really surprising to see you describe Adeo as principled. I did the Founder Institute with him last year, and was insulted by him personally and professionally on a weekly basis. As were most people I spoke to. He clearly has good intentions (imho we all do), but treated us all poorly.
Razor Syntax in ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1
I'm saying that it's not "horrible abuse" because:

a) I've spent a reasonable amount of time around horses;

b) Can see nothing in that photo to suggest the horse has been mistreated or is distressed; and

c) Find this kind of trivialization of animal abuse by someone who has little experience with horses to be offensive nonsense.

There's real "horrible abuse" out there, and this is most emphatically not an example of it.
Seems to work on the iPad, except I can't figure out how to use the three sets of four buttons on the bottom right.
Ludicrously complicated syntax being required to refer to something simple, like a pointer to a member function.

Python:

sort(my_list, key=my_instance.sort)

C++/Boost:

sorry, I had only had 2 hours and couldn't work it out (it's 10 years since I did any real C++).
Here's the old thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586905
I'm a Django/Python dev with many years of experience and quite a few launched web apps under my belt. I'm looking for freelancing/consultancy work, so if anyone needs any Python or Django work done, my company's (holding) website is:

http://www.stochastictechnologies.com/
My resignation letter is in ANSI C++
We've got 9-10 production servers. My methodology is allow what you want and deny everything else. So with iptables specific ports are open for public access and all else is dropped. For complete access to the servers we use openvpn. OpenVPN is setup on one server in the production environment that acts as a gateway to the rest of the servers. Only those with vpn keys can gain access. Each developer is given a specific IP and access is restricted through iptables based on what their requirements are. Knockd a port knocking daemon is used as a way to open a hole in the firewall for 60 seconds to make the connection to openvpn. I have a backdoor incase openvpn or knockd go down. The great thing with openvpn is later on you can disable keys if need be. User accounts are created across the servers for users however ssh keys are only added to the specific servers they may need access to. No passwords, people use insecure passwords, they can be cracked. SSH keys with 2048 bits work nicely.
One thing I noticed was that when sport is being broadcast in 3d, they will use some completely useless camera angles which have lots of people at different distances. Although I don't watch a lot of sport, I've only noticed this in games where they are available in 3d.
I wouldn't say installing anything on windows - somethings are nice. http://germanysfinest.posterous.com/hooray-software-policypa...

Also, no-install / portable apps are ever such a pleasant trend - just copy the files and run them.
You need to earn points for access to those features - i.e. be a part of the Deviant Art community. Kind of a clever idea.
Using Google's AJAX APIs to Make Custom Site Search
The oldest I know of is with a relative of mine. He runs an accounting company, and they are using a 15 year old IBM minicomputer (a small mainframe - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer ) for the accounting.

I asked him once why he didn't switch to PCs, he couldn't see any reason to do so - the minicomputer was rock solid, still running strong and had the software he needed.

I imagine the oldest machines still in production would be with companies that regard computers the way a factory would regard expensive machinery - switching costs are high, and there is no sense in switching when the old one still works.

And I guess they would be mainframe class computers rather than PCs.
He did say beforehand that he'd need a second to finish the email so the flight attendant could have told him then in a polite way that there was no time.
And anyway, if they are so concerned about this, they can tell people to shut down their electrical devices 5 minutes before so that no one is late (and well anyway, there's no safety reason for this rule).
that PIN is just wrong.

in my app I am opening the auth page in a web view and then parse the html of that web view to get the pin.

an alternative is to register a custom url scheme like myapp:// but for that you have to email twitter's api team
Clustered Networks Spread Behavior Change Faster
As startups we are essentially creating things that will change people's behaviour. For example Amazon made people purchase books online instead of going to bookshops, and read ebooks on Kindle instead of paper books. How to spread the behaviour change should be something we think about constantly.

Is this study valid? Is it possible to build "clustered network" instead of "random network" initially? Please comment.
I also think that this is a fad - and only industry fad if I may add. I don't believe that people will start throwing out their 2D HD sets just because of 3D.

It's unpractical - this is the worst. I can't imagine sitting in my living room watching the stupid TV with stupid 3D glasses.

But I kinda like the emergence of 3D sets - because it will probably bring down prices on 2D sets, which is good. And I guess that people might start buying 3D sets - if they phase out 2D sets and not increase the price too much. But people buying and using stuff - that's completely different on the other side - I divine that entertainment industry will try to charge even more for 3D movies than what they charge for already overpriced 2D movies - and that certainly WILL kill 3D.

And also it is interesting to see corporate drones all droning to the same failed hype.

Call me when the holo-TV is ready. kthxbye
Interesting, I certainly do get some of the effect but don't find it very pleasant to watch. Like when they float the subtitles right in format of you, it almost hurts my eyes.
"Just look at the water. Beautiful."

Made me laugh.
The medium is great, but the current implementations are v0.1 alphas. Unfortunately, marketing will buff and shine, or attempt to, until reality bites.

As they say in the music business, "You can't polish a turd".

Now, v2.0 should be interesting, when the goggles and the crappy picture have been axed, and the content isn't focused on the "gee whiz".
I love Hawking, but I have to play apologist here (and I am not a religious person)

I've spent many, many hours on this God thing, and at the end of the day you can't prove nor disprove there is a God. Sure, you can assume all sorts of attributes about a God that don't make sense or are silly -- big old guy with beard in the sky. But the idea that there is some greater intelligence out there with some sort of interest in mankind? It's just impossible to know, one way or another.

Now some will tell you that because it is impossible to know, there must be a god. I.e, that we can put whatever thing we like under the category "god" -- one story is as good as another. Actually, this "creative story-telling for stuff we don't know" is a critical part of being a human, even being a scientist. As long as the stories don't contradict observable reality. So that's okay, up to a point.

Some will tell you that because we don't know, there must not be a God. If you can't prove it, it doesn't exist. Or put better: why add terms to an equation where no extra terms are needed? You see this in Hawking's essay -- once we figured out the theory, didn't need a God anymore.

The problem here is that this smacks of the caveman, when told about airplanes, said that the other person was either a fantastical liar or crazy. In his mind he is being uber-rational. From our point of view he's being childish and silly. Certainly things exist that we have not experienced. We do not know everything, and many things we think we know we are mistaken about. This is the way it has always been. It is part of being our species at this point in time.

So we're left not-knowing. And that bugs folks. I had a good friend that was an atheist tell me last week that sure, he didn't know, but he felt like he had to take sides. He felt like certain Christians he knew were somehow harming rationality, and it was up to him to sort of balance the scales. Many other people are profoundly disturbed by not-knowing and go the other way.

As for me? I've decided that while I cannot accept your story about an angry guy in the sky, the idea of not-knowing -- and the greater idea of our relationship to not-knowing, our relationship to the unknown, is a critical part of being alive. I choose to call that Great Unknown God, simply because, well, that's the traditional name for powers that are outside of our scope of knowledge. This allows me to enjoy both the work of the scientist and the priest.
Would unionisation or regulatory organisations help?

[edit: another thought - I can imagination a few decades ago someone arguing similarly against US casinos. They were generally run by crooks. Now they're run by corporations. Not that I think that makes casinos any more ethical than they were before, but they are crime-free.]
I Kissed a Girl Lyrics
Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On Ubuntu 10.04 (Initiator And Target)
There is a well-known corollary here with happiness. People think that if they are million- or billionaires, or have a super-fit girlfriend, or drive a ridiculous car or live in a massive house or whatever they'll be happy, or at least happier. However all studies have shown that rich people are not happier than poor(er) people. And more interesting is people that have suffered catastrophic accidents or contracted disabling diseases: on average these people are no less happy than anyone else.
Word? There are still things that were a piece of cake to accomplish in WordPerfect (5.1 for DOS; I never used WPWin) or AmiPro[1] (3+ for Windows) that are impossible, or extremely difficult, in Word.

[1] I say this despite having once written a piece (c. 1993) based on a Dr. Suess book that featured the lines "I could not merge 'grneggs' with 'ham'. I do not like you star dot sam."
Damnit. I wish I lived in the area now.
The audio recording of that speech is available: http://garykemble.posterous.com/audio-kim-stanley-robinson-g...
What Hawking said is not that god does not exist, but that god is not required for the universe to exist. Subtle but important.
Blind prejudice