skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They are just targeting one of an infinite number of threats

That's silly, there's a finite number of threats to airliners. Excluding external threats like missiles (which are themselves defended against by other agencies) you've got two basic avenues: bombs and hijackings.

Hijackings require weapons. The first hijackers used guns, so the TSA (and other similar agencies around the world but I'll use the TSA as an example) made it hard to get guns on board. So the next round used knives. So the TSA made it hard to get knives on board. With the damn near impossibility of getting knives on board plus the fact that passengers in a hijacking are now much more inclined to fight back, hijacking is pretty much fully defended against.

Bombings require bombs. The earliest bombers used suitcase bombs, which is ideal from their point of view because they can be very large. But security screening got better and suitcase bombs are too difficult nowadays. So they switched to shoe bombs. But now they're impossible. So they switched to underpants bombs. And with the latest (overly invasive) techniques that's more or less impossible too. The size of the largest bomb you can smuggle on board keeps decreasing, and the danger keeps getting smaller and smaller -- whatever you can stick up your butt it's never gonna blow a sizeable hole in the side of an airliner.

It's a finite space of threats, and they're actually doing a pretty good job at defending against them. That's why since 9/11 there have been N foiled attempts to attack airliners, and zero successful ones (I think there was a Russian exception).
The election's tuesday. It's topical.
This was a sale of near last resort.

This was not a "win" or an "exit" by any measure.
AND a wife. First (and most importantly) of all, you need to convince your partner it's the right option.

It's easy enough to talk about "geo-arbitrage" (or whatever Tim Ferris calls it) when you're single and unattached - it's another thing to uproot a family of five and move to another country.

If you can get to the point of both partners buying into the plan, then you need to consider things like schools, healthcare, appropriate housing for 5 people, etc. That's of course assuming you are eligible for a visa to live and work in the country you'd like to move to.

It's not impossible, but it's a lot harder when there are other people involved, some of whom depend on you for everything.

To be honest, for a family, simply moving a bit further away from the city to somewhere with a lower cost of living would probably deliver more utility for far less effort than changing countries.
I have a prosthetic leg, so I've been getting the secondary screening (i.e. pat-downs, bomb wipes, and wanding) for years. It's invasive, but the TSA agents don't grope your genitals. They don't even touch them. In fact, they're usually shy about touching "sensitive areas" (most of the inner thigh remains unexplored), and sometimes bordering on apologetic.

I get that every single time I fly, and even so, I would never opt for a backscatter machine. It's far more invasive. Having been through dozens of patdowns, I feel pretty sure that someone looking at a naked picture of me is a worse option.
If a guy is willing to blow up the plane he is flying on, do you really believe that living with a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass for his final 5 hours is going to be a deterrent?

Nope. But I do think that a butt bomb is significantly less of a threat than a suitcase bomb. The Lockerbie bomb ripped a 747 to pieces. I'm no explosives expert, but I imagine the worst thing an anus-sized bomb could do would be to punch a hole in the side, which would probably be survivable.
For me, it's all connected. The SF area is one of the most innovative places in the world because in it's also one of the most free places in the world.
I think most people would define it as the class of drugs that tend to turn people into addict shells of human beings and in the process inflict a bunch of damage on that person's family, friends and society at large: cocaine, heroin, meth and associated derivatives.

Now, criminalization may be counter-productive, and I'm inclined to think it is. But let's recognize what we're dealing with, here, it's not just freedom and rainbows.
I lost my uncle in much the same way. He dragged it out a few more months, but at a very poor quality of life.
Of course the unsaid is that the TSAI is really just trying to protect those expensive metal flying tubes, not the people who fly in them. If you look at it from perspective, their policies seem rational and consistent.
MATH E-102 Sets, Counting, and Probability
The idea that anyone has the right to regulate someone else's life based on morality is deeply puritanical. It may seem like a different problem when posed in the form of a highly addictive and often destructive behavior such as meth use but it's still the same fundamental issue.

How much harm does being homeless do to society? How much harm does having a bad credit score do to society? Smoking cigarettes? Listening to thrash metal? Rock climbing? Eating a cheeseburger? Being HIV positive? What's the proper response to these sorts of things?

History has shown us in no uncertain terms that it is impossible to protect people from themselves. And every attempt to do so will fail utterly. Will result in more harm to the individual and more harm to society than the problem attempted to be addressed. There are good ways and bad ways to deal with the problems that, say, meth addiction creates. The wrong way is to try to regulate what people can put into their own bodies, that road leads to addicts who can't seek help because of fear of jail, it leads to no-knock militarized police raids, it leads to a criminal justice system increasingly cut-off from the populace. It leads to corruption, to gang violence, and to tragedy of epic proportions. There are too many examples from history to pretend otherwise.

P.S. http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3582329113/
Bloomberg Game Changers: Sergey Brin & Larry Page
Diaspora's October Update
Anybody comment on what the situation is in Amsterdam, where pot is legal, at least, in small quantities?
Then the whole purpose of the porno machine is moot. You'll have porno without the machine.
Actually, I'm 38...bit of a late starter :) Thanks for the reply and link. Modeling and simulation is my area of interest (I work in civil and environmental engineering), so it will be interesting to see what patterns will work best.
After A Five Month Stay, AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui Leaves Google
How so? Both are more than enough to down the plane.
Once some of the stored files leaks onto the internet... Then this whole thing would just be over.
Does anyone know the deal price?
Then don't write any code, because clearly you don't have enough belief that you (or I or whoever) can weigh the various tradeoffs to make the right decision.
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati... is the relevant post, I think. It looks like I was wrong about it varying by age. (Maybe that was another post, though.)

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exact... may be relevant to your interests as well.
Touchpads are not 1 to 1 though, like wacom tablets or touch screens, you still have to "move" the mouse, you can't just touch where you want it to go.
Ask HN: Looking for beta testers for diff viewer
Sometimes looking at diff output (usually from version control) can be a pain. I wrote this little app that you can pipe unified diff output to, and it displays the diff in a window, nice and easy to read with colors and line numbers.

I have limited testing resources and would love your help testing this on your machines. Right now there is only a Mac and Windows version. I will work on a Linux one too provided there is demand for it.

http://readablediff.com
hi everyone - use the code HACKERNEWS on adafruit.com and you'll get 10% all our arduino products and our kits. this expires on sunday so buy quickly, we usually do not discount arduinos :)
Ghar, distributed homedir management
Generally, the pros and cons list should be isolated down to a given implementation. While you can vaguely state that NoSQL data stores are fast, and that horizontal scaling is generally easier on NoSQL, that isn't always the case, and doesn't apply to anywhere close to every situation.

MongoDB offers some REALLY cool features that enhance development speed. Inserting into a table that doesn't exist? It creates the table on the fly. Querying from a table that doesn't exist just returns an empty result set (instead of an error, or exception).

If I had to speak in specifics though, I think it's pretty easy to say that NoSQL stores allow for querying very large datasets faster than you could on a relational store on similar hardware.
I always wondered how Drop.io made money. I use it all the time for one time file sharing drops, but they never had anything to sell me.
The Vegas Strip
It's never been decriminalized in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis#United_Kin...

Under Labour they reclassified it as class C for a while but then put it back to class B in 2009.
So... you were in grad school... but you couldn't learn independently?

I said that a good instructor can speed up your learning by a factor of 3 to 5, compared to self-teaching (which is what you're reduced to when you have a bad instructor). How could I know that if I hadn't done both? It sounds like you're deliberately ignoring what I wrote so you can get in an ad hominem.
Microsoft also has a habit of constantly changing the names and market positioning of everything, which can make it seem more mercurial than it is. (Not that they haven't had their share of truly ephemeral Next Big Things as well.)
Never used drop.io but maybe airdropper.com could be a sort of hacky solution?
Well, it's the only literally totalitarian sector of America. Dartmouth is particularly notorious for this.
jbail was referring to my comment which was posted a few minutes earlier than his.

However, my question was a bit more pointed and I think you haven't addressed it.

The justifications used in your post are equally applicable to cocaine and to other drugs. If different drugs have different answers, why didn't you (or why don't you) explain why your argument is limited to marijuana.

OTH if you strongly believe in the philosophy outlined in your post, what is stopping you from endorsing similar initiatives for cocaine and why would cocaine potentially need a different answer ?

[edit] I see a lot of good responses, but all of them special-case marijuana (e.g. marijuana is less addictive than heroin). This is fine, but Paul's post has flowery language about freedom and all of that language is applicable to heroin as well. Paul's post doesn't make the case for special-casing marijuana. On the contrary, if he denied the principles of "freedom" for cocaine, it would undermine his post which is all about "freedom" and nothing about marijuana being less dangerous than cocaine etc.
United Airlines Flight 93.
It's topical to people in California, who care about drugs. Not really hackery is it.
You know, you are an adult know - you are the person who should stand up to them (I won't, I don't care to fly)
It's 'funnier' in the UK - they ruled the scanners aren't a problem for kids, scanning them isn't obscene.

But images taken by the machines may be obscene - so possession of the pictures gets you prison + lifetime on the sex-offenders register.

This came up after they were going to use them in schools.
I wish I could +1000 this comment.
Actually, by convention, Congressman or Congresswoman refers to the Representatives only.
I find conversations about the black market in general to be an interesting topic on the desires of society versus the realities of society and how we attempt to reign in human behavior.

My personal stance is that governments need to admit that the black market is a fundamental condition of humanity, and trying to stamp it out is impossible. However it is the governments responsibility to monitor the black market and prevent it from becoming too large, and the only way of doing that is to legalize the most popular activities found within the black market.

If America legalized prostitution, marijuana and cocaine today, i would guess that the black market would be put on life support here in the states.
… as I understand it there are two main problems with the status quo. One is that under the old tolerance regime there’s still no way for a coffee shop to legally obtain the supply of marijuana you need to operate on the scale of a business. Consequently, de facto legalization hasn’t actually eliminated the black market and associated criminality. Secondarily, the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug tourists from abroad. That reduces the Dutch political constituency for keeping them open. And the two factors interact together to create a situation where there’s a strong case to be made that legal coffee shops (by bringing drug tourists from the UK and the US into shops that need to tap an illegal wholesale market to gain their supplies) increase the scale of organized crime in the Netherlands.

– http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/coffee-shop-crackd...
In praise of software delays.
Yup, brilliant (although unsurprising) move on Apple's part. By bringing iOS and OS X together (from a developer standpoint), they're able to seed iOS with Mac developers and Mac OS with iOS developers, and attract more folks overall to both platforms.
EPIC is fighting the machines in court and online.

They have an incident report page:

http://epic.org/bodyscanner/incident_report/
I've slowly come to the same opinion over the past few years. I'm just going to leave this here for posterity:

http://www.dbdebunk.com/
See, this is where you've blown your cover and have shown yourself as a troll. What you're saying is that hijackers can only be passengers and therefore these security measures are good and getting better. There are so many loopholes as yet unclosed that further molesting passengers, and this now can be qualified as molestation, is a diminishing returns.

Someone else here said and I agree, this is really starting to feel like more overt discouragement from air travel. It's almost as if the TSA has decided that the best way to stop hijacking and bombing of passenger planes is to eliminate passenger planes altogether. I sure as hell will not want to travel to the US by air anymore.
That is a horribly disrespectful thing to say in front of someone who is doing their job.

Good, maybe if we are lucky he will kill himself over it.

If that happens I will urge everybody to go piss on his grave, because he is not a human, but a criminal mindless drone.

JUST DOING YOUR JOB WAS WHAT THE NAZIS WHERE HUNG FOR - IT IS NO EXCUSE.
Are you sure you're remembering this right? In "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" there is a story he tells about an ongoing challenge he had with the mathematicians. They would come to him with a theorem about topology, and he would tell them if it was true or false. That is much different from solving the theorems.
Is there hard data on what percentage of people who try these drugs become addicted? I think we need to start there. In school we were told of the many supposedly devastating effects marijuana use had but I see now that was clearly a misinformation campaign designed only to scare us from trying it. We never got anything else and I am guessing most people are basing their opinions on similar misinformation or anecdotes.
Occured, a 404 error has ...
Presumably someone (Coast Guard/border patrol/TSA/etc.) would have the authority to inspect the ferries and passengers headed to these offshore airports even if they didn't have jurisdiction over the airport itself.
Nice, I read this a long time ago before learning C++. It's interesting (and reassuring) that some of the stuff we are learning is considered bad practice by Google.
I'm kind of curious... really what were the MS technologies that you spent more than 15 minutes on(reading a Dr.Dobbs article) learning that went poof?

I've learned over the years:
Win32
Visual C/C++
COM
.NET
C#
WPF
T-SQL
JScript
ASP.NET
Direct3D
Visual Studio (the IDE)
Windows Services

I literally can't point to a book on my bookshelf that is related to MS technology and say, "that was a waste".
Agreed, a six-minute charge is a delightfully vague term. It's like saying a car only requires a 12v battery to start, it doesn't give any relevant information. I tell you it's delivering it at between 20-40 amps (for the starter motor) and has over 100 Ah it's very different than the 1100mAh of a cheap battery.

It's like saying I can fill a pool in 6 minutes, it provides no relevance. Am I using a 6" pipe from a water truck, or am I using a garden hose?
1. drop.io is going away

2. Sam Lessin is leaving New York City

Sounds like great news to me :-)
Or better yet - yell loudly "no I will not suck you" during the pat down.

Hopefully the TSA guys will make life hard for the sucker, perhaps enough to make him quit.
> You'll note that none of these plots worked. Why? Because they were increasingly shitty bombs.

At the risk of the FBI stashing a tracking beacon in my car (ha! I don't even have a car!) I'm going to take your bait.

Richard Reid's bomb didn't fail because he had to hide it in his shoe, rather than doing the ol' Ramzi Yousef "hide it in the life jacket routine." Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn't fail because he had explosives shoved down his shorts.

They failed because they were untrained. These guys displayed a Carlos the Jackal level of buffoonery in their conduct. The July 21nd attackers didn't fail because of the crack police work that went on to murder Jean Charles de Menezes. They failed because they were too stupid to build bombs. (Who would want to target Hackney anyway? It's just a bunch of tyre shops and fish & chips.)

For the most part, people who want to do us harm aren't particularly smart. Bright people tend to have more opportunities in life and are less to see that all go up in a puff of smoke. Of the 9/11 hijackers, only one had a girlfriend. Atta was a trained architect, but for the most part they were a bunch of college dropouts. We aren't faced with some "evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds," we're faced with a bunch of bumbling fools with nothing better to do than kill themselves.

Look at the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack. They had a deadly neurotoxin that they saw fit to unleash with pointy umbrellas and newspaper rolls. Good job team, way to unleash your crazy new age apocalypse.

It isn't a matter of loopholes getting closed. Attackers are simply dumb. Really dumb.
They just started running ads this week. For issues like this you don't want to start too soon and give the opposition a chance to raise money, produce ads, etc.
Drinking doesn't force others to consume the drink.

Smoking is something that you're forcing those around you to partake in with you. It's antisocial.
I never said I required, or tried to implement transactions. In fact I can tell you know I'm pretty sure a CMS and push based communications app are running quite fine without transactions. What I do have is:

* One language which handles both app logic and relationships, as mentioned above.

* A fidelity of types between storage and application (I'm using Mongo, so documents are stored as documents, not fields and rows)

* Apparently, some speed benefits should I need it in future, at the expense of losing the aforementioned features I don't need.

Please don't put words into my mouth:

* It's not nice.

* It's against the HN guidelines

* If your argument was of substance you wouldn't need to do it.

It saddens me this kind of nastiness gets upvotes.
I was thinking the same thing. This would have made a lot bigger impact if he'd donated the money 3 months ago. Now the most it can be used for is some last-minute TV ads.
Please notice the words “most” and “probably”.
Why not - terrorists are stupid people, they will get caught like the rest, but it can't be used to increase the security theater.
A lot of people do not know that before Australia was used as a penal colony, it was America.
Resort Watchers and Flockall welcome Rentul.com
You really want think creating a drug based startup is a good idea? Who would buy it? No one would advertise on it. No users would pay for it. And it would be morally questionable. But if that's what floats your boat...
Marijuana is not a big piece of the puzzle. Research from RAND indicates otherwise

Key findings include: 1) Mexican DTOs' gross revenues from illegally exporting marijuana to wholesalers in the United States is likely less than $2 billion; 2) The claim that 60 percent of Mexican DTO gross drug export revenues come from marijuana should not be taken seriously; 3) If legalization only affects revenues from supplying marijuana to California, DTO drug export revenue losses would be very small, perhaps 2–4 percent; 4) The only way legalizing marijuana in California would significantly influence DTO revenues and the related violence is if California-produced marijuana is smuggled to other states at prices that outcompete current Mexican supplies. The extent of such smuggling will depend on a number of factors, including the response of the U.S. federal government. 5) If marijuana is smuggled from California to other states, it could undercut sales of Mexican marijuana in much of the U.S., cutting DTOs' marijuana export revenues by more than 65 percent and probably by 85 percent or more. In this scenario, the DTOs would lose approximately 20% of their total drug export revenues.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP325/
1/ Yes. But I'd prefer you make it easy to integrate with my existing systems. As a stop gap, a web form would be fine; I can probably post to it from my system for volume transactions, or just fill it out for occasional correspondence. I am willing to pay in advance for credits or whatever to do this.

2/ Unless I am misunderstanding something, there's no way I filling out that three-stage form for every note. Is there not an account feature? (To me, that is MVP.)

3/ I would totally use this but very likely not at the volume you're looking for. If I'm going to do this, I would like the option to ship you at my expense a supply of my own branded notecards to use. If you're using my stock instead of yours, I do not want you to charge me more to use it - you're saving on your own paper costs.

4/ International postage?

5/ Your definition of neat writing is different than mine, just as an FYI.
This is exactly what happens. I often work from home, and I see them do this all the time.

You would think that with the explosion of personal shipping in the last fifteen years caused by the Internet, that these companies would have figured out residential deliveries by now but, if anything, it's become worse.
Nobody is trying to protect people from themselves- they are trying to protect themselves, those close to them, and those unable to protect themselves. You may try to argue drugs are a purely personal experience, but anyone who had an alcoholic for a parent will tell you otherwise.
At jaiku I'm sure you had a lot of input in the direction of the product and control over the technology. Moving into google I assume you had to give up a lot of that. Was it worth it? Is there anything you miss from the jaiku days?
Write cache is useful of course but it doesn't make random reads any faster. If your dataset is too big to cache, disk latency becomes your limiting factor. The question then becomes how to most effectively deploy as many spindles as possible in your solution - SANs are one way, sharding/distribution across multiple nodes another.