skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your perception of a lack of transparency is not accurate. Under the honor code at Mudd, every case that comes before either of the two student boards must be made public. Student names are withheld, as are other identifying characteristics (building names, professor names, etc.). Both boards are required to follow these precedents, and anyone can look at them. If a precedent is abandoned, then the boards have to give a very good reason why. Also, students who feels that the board has ruled unfairly have a right to challenge the ruling (and before you ask, they often win these challenges).

As for the honor code not being up for debate or discussion, that is patently untrue. Not only are there regularly scheduled community discussions of the honor code and any changes that ought to be made to the code or how it is enforced, but there are also rules in place that require any major changes to the code to be approved by a student vote.

As to the student board "penaliz[ing] deviant behavior much more enthusiastic(sic.) precisely because the administration is hands-off," that is not supported by the evidence at Mudd. The most common penalty by far is a short, anonymous letter of apology to the community. More extreme punishments are rare, and can be easily challenged. I don't know of many administrations with explicit rules who would be that lenient.
Doesn't the new Air have a large (multi) touch pad? That might allow for a more transitional 'middle ground' to exist. Lion and it's feline ancestors will get more touchy over time, plus what Dave W is hinting at is more of a virtualization strategy rather than a sudden leap I think.

I too think that Apple cares deeply about UX, but you're probably discounting the enormous amount of money/users that could be made if this evolution could be made to fly?
EveryBlock partner API
If you've studied this matter extensively I'll concede the point but for what it's worth I hear people (mostly those unfamiliar with guns) refer to a cartridge as a bullet regularly.

> While nobody usually uses "cartridge"

The must be hyperbole. I have heard people use the word cartridge and I have used it before. Do you have any basis for that statement?
I'm pretty sure it's their job to ask people questions and put them off balance while doing so. Even to the extent of saying unreasonable things and raising their voices. It is irritating to be on the receiving end and I say that having only got the low-level treatment that I think everybody gets. But there you go.
The current Iridium looks like it has focused its marketing to the segments that actually make sense: maritime, explorers, and military.

But the infrastructure is up there and, sure, a bunch of people lost a lot of money, but it's THERE now. I could think of some products they could introduce that might be promising.

Here's an idea: a small piece of plugin hardware for iPhones, Droids, etc. This would be something you take with you (for example, on road trips or vacations to far-flung places). You would buy the unit for $149 and then prepay, say $30 for 10 minutes of service. The idea is that it's "there when you need it, wherever you are." It could even go in your first aid kit... it's there for emergencies.
Thats not true, customs agents, TSA and Air Marshalls are all definitely trained to look for anything suspicious and/or fits a rough potential terrorist profile. Coming back from the Pakistan/Afghanistan, having a live round you carried on a plane, Osama Bin Laden candy... You are pretty much asking to have a sit down chat when going through customs.
None of these are red flags. Al-Qaeda might be fundamentalist arseholes, but they're not stupid. Imagine you've been to a terrorist training camp. You're packing your bags to fly home to the US. Are you going to pack a bullet, a box of Bin Laden crackers and a Burqa? It's like arresting a kid in a Hamburglar outfit because he's got a mask, a striped shirt and a swag bag.

The obvious red flags aren't red flags because they're obvious. If someone isn't smart enough to realise that, they're not smart enough to pose any real threat. We're dealing with focused people who know that huge resources are going into finding them. What we're looking for is people trying to conceal their actions and obfuscate their movements. By jumping on a chair and screaming "Aaaagh, terrorist!" every time we see a piece of Islamica, we're just reinforcing the idea that people are suspicious for 'looking Muslim'.
Sony BMG rookit scandal: 5 years later
A couple Philly guys are doing the same thing as phillycowrimo - just to finish a usable code project in a month, no matter the state. Some are going to be webapps, some iPhone. Should be a fun experiment, and if it's successful we'll repeat it with a bit more organization (and cities?) next year.

http://phillycowrimo.wordpress.com
> Also, Heroku is missing here - I would use that before Azure or GAE.

Out of curiosity, why? I recently made that comparison and came to the opposite conclusion, but based primarily on price.

GAE's 5million page views/month + 500MB storage for free is an unequaled price point. Basically, it's free until you get real traction.

I am language-agnostic for that particular project.
I liked seeing the "Not interested in building with us? Tell us why" but then saw it was an email link rather than a feedback form.

FWIW having to use email for feedback is a disincentive for me (I guess partly because I have to copy & paste the address into a different browser that I use for email).

You might want to consider using a feedback form instead.

Oh, and as much as it seems obvious in hindsight, it didn't occur to me to "click on the image" to see the sample--I just assumed the image was all there was to see so I was left wondering "how does it work?" even after reading the FAQ.
The Potential of Google TV
Or 27 days to write any app, 3 days to write the novel: www.3daynovel.com

Go, go, go!
The Maclean's article adds some interesting points.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/11/01/umanitoba%E2%80%94phd-dip...

Lukacs wasn't on the board when this student was exempted from the exam requirement or had his course upgraded. Another professor resigned in protest and Lukacs took his place.

He had never met the student until he served the student with papers for the lawsuit.

The University says it has suspended Lukacs without pay for violating the student's privacy by naming the student and discussing the student's medical conditions in the lawsuit. UofM claims this is a violation of academic privacy and a violation of the law concerning medical privacy.

Lukacs claims he is acting so that his good name is not sullied by being associated with a degree mill. Interesting, to say the least. I see many laudatory comments here. Are other universities as interested in having Lukacs on board as posters here would suggest? If so, why not go to a place with the standards he admires, instead of trying to carry UofM on his shoulders?
I'm disturbed that you aren't outraged both by the inappropriateness of the behavior described as well as the utter ineffectiveness of their methods at finding and stoping someone who truly did intend a terrorist act.
"You'll start receiving your daily lessons tomorrow?"

That's a bit condescending to my ears? Might want to work on that tone. You don't want to imply that you're giving something to people that they should be grateful for.

I guess you'd better work on the actual application as well.

What technology and framework are you using?
Coming home from Pakistan with a bullet in your pocket does point to the possibility that while in Pakistan you were dealing with weaponry. The guy doesn't give enough context to understand how the journal entry actually looked.

From your last sentence, I can see you are no stranger to making snap judgements without all the details. ;)
My just launched startup - videolla.com is looking for remote sales/marketing/blogger/biz dev/everything. Basically its a small gig, but if this idea proves itself might turn into full-time something. Might be great for intern/student/part-time. Small salary + commission + bonuses. Email vlad /a/ videolla.com

Extra bonus ifyou can code on Rails
Again, it might work very well, I just think that some sort of tree-based approach might be faster and more efficient.

While this is true in general, sometimes the nice thing about genetic methods is that pretty much all you have to do is write the fitness function, cross your fingers that the problem is a good fit for the method and go do some real work on another computer for a while.

Oftentimes other methods require more in the way of setup or planning, not the least of which is actually picking an appropriate method and mapping its implementation onto the problem space.

Some of the nastiest problems I've ever worked on have gotten that way because I went with a domain specific approach that was "optimized for the problem"; while the end results are usually very good (and, to be fair, run on the computer from zero-to-solved in no time flat), in a couple cases I've gone back and tried the "brute force" genetic programming approach, and though it took quite a bit more computer time, the programming effort was substantially smaller to end up with similarly good results.

The real problem, though, is that many of the problems people apply GA/GP to aren't well suited to the genetic approach, usually because the problem itself doesn't lend itself to incrementally improving solutions (problems like function regression can be tricky, because getting close to the correct functional form symbolically usually leaves you very far away from the correct form numerically, and sometimes the correct result is actually surrounded by a "wall" of completely and utterly unfit solutions that's very hard to break through). Genetic methods work well when the fitness landscape has lots of solutions that work fairly well, and quite a few that work great, not when there's literally one needle in some super-multi-dimensional haystack.

To be fair, the Starcraft optimization problem is probably somewhere in the middle, there are probably many good solutions to the problem, and many of these will be minor variations on other good solutions, so it's pretty likely that a GA will get to some good ones. But the search space is small enough that you're probably right, a heuristic-guided direct search would be more likely to pick out the best solutions faster.
So, on the one hand we don't like security theater. On the other hand when real security is implemented, we don't like that either.

So what should we do?

And please don't tell me that real security does not involve what was described in the article, because the reality is that until we invent mind reading machines, that's pretty much the only way to do it.
Now use Hotmail's web interface features for any POP3 email address
I cannot view the article. I'm getting "Error establishing a database connection". Is there a mirror somewhere?
Edit: oh I didn't see this[1] comment mostly down the page with a link to the google cache page[2]. Thanks.

[1][http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857943]

[2][http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SECcYsQ...]
And they have a tough job. What if the story played out that customs/border patrol found ammunition falling out of a guys pocket and just confiscated it with no further questioning. Then a week later that guy blew up a building? It is their job to determine if someone entering the country is here to do harm. There are plenty of problems with whole airport security thing right now, but questioning this guy further probably isn't one of them.
Nice to know that if they don't have any legal way of stopping you or coercing information out of you, they'll only resort to harassment and intimidation for a little while before letting you go.

Of course, the Customs Officer ignored the other four books and while holding up the book of quotes from the Prophet, proceeded to repeatedly scream “Do you believe in the words of the Prophet Mohammed?” over and over again while standing one foot away from my face.

Every time I tried to mention the other books, and the one time I tried to ask why that question was even relevant, I was immediately cut off and told to be quiet. So in the end, the only reply I gave to his question was, “What?”

They love yelling, and it isn't because they want you answer or comply. Apparently yelling serves some purpose in itself. Whenever someone shows me a police video, I take careful note of when they stop yelling variations on "Get down on the ground!" I saw one recently where the police fatally shot a guy (completely justified; he actually attacked a cop who was holding a gun on him, and another cop shot him) and one cop yelled "Get down!" or "Get down on the ground" at him three times after he had already fallen on the pavement.... I saw nothing inappropriate in the shooting, but I got a morbid chuckle out of the cop screaming at the dude to comply when the dude was already flat on the ground motionless and bleeding. It's also pretty shocking to watch the video of the guy being shot in the BART station in Oakland and try to figure out in what way he was resisting the two cops who were holding him face down on the ground while he was handcuffed. The cop who shot him kept yelling at him to stop resisting and then just popped him. He was -- what, shifting his weight? Trying to raise his head to answer their questions? Who knows. No level of compliance would have saved him, just like the guy who wrote this article didn't actually have to answer the questions. They just wanted to yell at him; they didn't want answers.
Are you sure you are timing it correctly, using it on the right map, and microing ok? It should decimate most Protoss players unless they scout, discover, forge up, delay possible cannons until last min, dual exp, and quick air or go all in sentries.
You are right.

My (Extremely badly put :() point was, why does it matter so much to make new hires productive as a race to zero countdown? If a employee going to work at an average for 2 years, to me, it feels OK to give them sometime to get accustomed to new environment.
En yeni oyunlar
http://quickbrownfrog.appspot.com

Quick Brown Frog: a 100% in-browser, non-Flash, non-Java typing tutor.
If you're going to round my exact change down, then don't complain if I'm a couple cents short.
The problem is that they are indeed just doing terrorism related things. They are not actually preventing terrorism. How ignorant do you have to be to think that bringing back Osama Bin Laden candy is suspicious?
Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Interns? (November 2010)
A lot of interested (and I'll guess capable) student hackers hang around Hacker News.
Mark Suster: Scaling Sales: Arming & Aiming – A’s, B’s & C’s
"Patent pending"? Gross.

Also, if it's not ready to download until tomorrow, why not just announce it tomorrow? I would try it right now, but I know I'll have forgotten about it by tomorrow.
The most troublesome part of this entire story is that the guy flew internationally with a live round in is pant pocket and the first person to notice was a customs agent in a secondary screening room.
Al-Qaeda might be fundamentalist arseholes, but they're not stupid.

You're over-generalising; I reckon there are plenty of idiots in Al-Quaeda.
MetaOptimize is hiring contractors for exciting project work building real-world NLP + machine learning systems. I have a lot of who cool project work for people who are good hackers, and can deliver fast and correct code and are self-starters.

This is for remote, short-term gigs. You can set your hours. The only requirement is that you kick ass and add value from day one.

Email your resume and/or github URL to joseph at metaoptimize dot com

We are looking for generalists and specialists:

* Hardcore programmers who learn new technologies and APIs quickly.
* People with backgrounds in machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, and/or search. Medium experience is fine, you don't have to have a PhD.

* Visualization programmers

Did I miss you? Send me an email anyway, and explain how you kick ass and are a self-starter.

Example things you might work on:

* Take this Python/Java program that operates in batch over textfiles, and convert it into a webservice (REST+JSON or XML-RPC or whatever) that operates real-time online (one document at a time).

* I have a NLP tool but the output is dirty. Build these simple text processing components to clean it up, e.g. by discarding low freq terms.

* Exploratory statistical analysis over data sets, to see if there are any interesting patterns. (More open ended)

* Take this code for a neural network, and write scripts that batch invoke the NN with different hyperparameters to do model selection.
The bottleneck is mainly in rendering. Plus I actually took a lot of 'blur n zoom' effects out already (which is where the silverlight version really excels I think). I'll put them back in and retry (it's a kind of blend like anim)

I'll check out the 2d canvas - thanks for that. Ironically the IE 9 works very well too, although that group of users always seem to have Silverlight already :)

With traffic non-existent to the site it might just be too early, or perhaps some best suited as a native iOS app instead.
These are relatively tiny nukes coming in one at a time - the sort of thing we might see if attacked by North Korea or Iran in 10 years. The fusion weapons used by the USSR were fifty to five thousand times as powerful.
that does not explain why the terrorist would then try to introduce the burqa to the US, so the whole theory is rather pointless. seeing where he travelled to, it would be quite logical to assume the burqa is just a case of a tourist bringing home a souvenir.
The Whiskey Robber talks
The "man's" propaganda got to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0zgIzqgxFU
The main advantage is that optical aberations increase quickly with sensor size (upto diameter^4). That's why your cell phone is able to take pictures with such a crappy lens.

What Olympus did was exactly the opposite of the article - they gave themselves the ability to make lenses that were much smaller and cheaper, or much more ambitious in performance for the same size/cost - by gambling that semiconductor progress would make smaller sensors just as efficient as large ones.
Not in this case. Would you block access to entries about murder? robbery? guns? knives? Halloween (the work of the devil to some people)? Santa Claus (who might be discovered not to exist)? or any of the myriad of topics where some might feel information informs action.
U.S. Fiscal Hawks Turning French
>Of course, the Customs Officer ignored the other four books and while holding up the book of quotes from the Prophet, proceeded to repeatedly scream “Do you believe in the words of the Prophet Mohammed?” over and over again while standing one foot away from my face.

No, certainly, that doesn't sound unreasonable at all.
I just launched videolla.com. Now have a goal to add feature/day, polish it, get some traction and make early users fall in love with it. :)

Videolla is basically video publishing and monetization platform. Best in this galaxy.
I hope it exceeds just beating OpenOffice. Even under Sun, I feel OpenOffice didn't really have what it takes to be a successor to Microsoft Office, even though it was certainly a capable piece of software. Hopefully freed from the shackles of all bureaucracy we can see a capable Office suite emerge. For these reasons I'm glad Oracle was a catalyst to their departure.
Need Django help, entry level OK, part time (~10hrs/wk) contracting.
What The Hell Does Your Company Do?
Part of the solution will be the inevitable shift away from cash entirely. Paying electronically it doesn't matter if the price is $0.42 or $13.37. Just ceasing production of coins and bills would probably save a tidy sum. The problem of course is universal infrastructure.

The half penny was eliminated too when physical money was the only option. It's just a tough bandage to pull.
The Christmas Day Bomber was an 18-24 unaccompanied male without baggage who purchased a ticket, in cash, to Detroit, without wearing any kind of winter clothing. I don't know how many more "obvious red flags" you can raise, and yet he still managed to get onto a plane with explosives. You can't discount any obvious signals on the presumption that the real threats are too smart to send them.
It seems to be about right--the predicted damage to Hiroshima from Little Boy matches up pretty well with observed damage (see http://www.atomicarchive.com/Maps/HiroshimaMap.shtml)

I think it's just a very different geographic scale of the cities involved. We learn that Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb; we don't often hear that Hiroshima is tiny in comparison to e.g. LA (which would require something on the scale of Tsar Bomba, or multiple strikes, to destroy it to a similar degree).
If anyone goes to this, let me know. I unfortunately can't make it, but would love to read a tl;dw summary of the event.
Just what I hear, people usually say something like this: "I just bought 300 rounds of 9mm for really good price at Walmart".
VHS standard, eBay, Microsoft Office probably merits its own entry. x86 in terms of desktop hardware.
What does it mean to give someone a discount after they've already paid? Are you paying them money?
APIs are becoming the glue of cloud computing
Just a reminder for people wanting to try Dvorak. If you have some spare money on the side, trying Dvorak with a Typematrix keyboard is really worth it. I did the switch, it was painful for 2 months, but now (one year later I think) it is so natural that I wonder how I was able to type on a qwerty standard keyboard before. I will buy another 2030 as spare part, just in case of Typematrix is going broke.
I looked for the issues discussing the first airplanes.
I'm not sure what you mean.

I just turned javascript off and loaded the site -- and it's a big list of books where you can read the descriptions and click for more information. The book detail page suggests other books and provides you with a consensus and a list of formats available. Is this what you see as well? Were you expecting something else?
This is the type of non-obvious optimization that genetic algorithms excel at.

This is not true. GA search is a hill climbing algorithm which is prone to finding local maxima. The less obvious a strategy is, the more likely it is that GA will miss it.
This is good because it's spatial. The last really spatial typing method is the traditional number pad. And it's reaaaally good despite the necessity of having to press each button several times most of the time.

A spatial method can be applied without seeing the screen. The speed and ease of spatial methods comes from the deterministic and predictable behaviour: you learn physical finger patterns instead of reading the screen and adjusting yourself all the time. So, in other words, it's one-way input instead of two-way interactive typing.

If the screen surface had a tiny little dot embossed to the center, blind writing would be even easier. The 8pen looks a bit weird though, so people might have a hard time figuring it out first. If the quadrants were aligned to 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees it might be easier to grasp. Also, I hope the center isn't mandatory: you could just start from quadrant n and move over to quadrant n+1, lift your finger, and start over.
مسلسل وادي الذئاب 5 الحلقة 13
Using Redis (or Memcached) as a buffer for SQL resulting in near-realtime stats
the way its implemented, thumb is only convenient to type using the keyboard.. and if you're right handed, its extremely difficult to master it with left thumb..

Its like learning to write with both hands if you want to switch thumb!
Gotta love that bluecoat blocks it as "adult content". That looks good on the monthly report.