skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before the decade is out they will just rename it to do an end-run around public relations. Nothing will change and it's never going away because there's major money being made from it's fake foolishness already.

You really think they are going to give up the "visual response teams" for searching people at bus and train stations (and even in traffic)? That's the gold topping of security theater.

ZERO terrorists caught for all that money and other than the box cutters the original 9/11 would have still made it on the planes for all the rights violated and money spent.

The should have just secured all airplane cockpit doors and called it a day but first rule of government, why spend just a million when you can potentially spend a billion and get lots of wartime powers.
I'll also continue being angry until they come up with a better response than a half-assed paragraph on a social network by some guy that doesn't even bother introducing himself or his function within Google.
So the argument is that DHS is ineffective and wasteful? I thought the article would talk about how DHS is dangerous because it systematically dismantles your freedom in exchange for omnipresent surveillance and faux security.

Then again, I'm only watching it from the outside.
You intuition is right, it's kinda creepy to native speakers of American english, too.

There was some discussion at the time, but not enough to modify the course of the barreling train in Washington DC that created the DHS.

Here's one example from 2002:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/kausfiles_sp...
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> TSA was created two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) [.pdf] to keep the millions of Americans who travel each day safe and secure across numerous modes of transportation.

The rise in death rates after 9/11 from people switching from safe air transport to dangerous road transport is well known by now.

So it's surprising to see TSA still saying they're spending money to keep transport safe. That is blatantly not true. One man tries to set fire to plastic explosive stored in his shoe - now everyone has to take off their shoes. Meanwhile, thousands die in road traffic every year.

I've travelled on California[1] roads. God almighty; for a nation obsessed with doing everything by car some parts of the US have an appalling road system. (I never knew why Americans were happy to drive cars with awful gas milage. Cheap gas doesn't quite answer that question. Cheap gas and bloody terrible road surfaces which need a big comfy car does.)

You can kind of forgive Joe Sixpack for being bad at risk assessment and management. But a government department, spending millions and billions of public money? It's a disgusting waste.
Regarding the construction of abstractions from day one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
You pay a doctor to give you advice. The doctor says take these pills on schedule for X days [1]. You ignore X. Why did you bother going to the doctor in the first place if you weren't going to follow her advice?

The only people who should be selectively following medical advice are people who have made an effort to understand the science behind the advice. The more serious the condition, the better your understanding of the treatment ought to be before you disregard advice.

If a patient has a working understanding of what bacteria are, and how antibiotics work [2], then the patent understands why taking antibiotics for W (where W<X) days might be bad. The reasoning, roughly, is that fewer resistant bacteria will be killed, making you more likely to infect others with resistant strains between when you stop taking it on day W and when you become non-infectious. That sort of patient can do whatever she wants for all I care. She's likely to make a decision that's at least as informed as the doctor's.

That type of patient would never ask why X matters.

[1] Determining X on a per-case basis would involve way too much testing, so the medical community reaches a consensus based on studies (which may or may not be any good), and prescribes drug X for time T based on that consensus. Even if you could afford to get fast test results every few hours to monitor your infection status and see how well the antibiotics were working, and even if you could see what percentage of your infectious colony is resistant, you probably wouldn't want to. Spending that much time in a hospital or clinic is way more risky -- MRSA loves hanging out in those places -- than spending an extra day or three taking antibiotics even if fast accurate tests might show that you don't need to.

[2] It's not binary. It's all about how different concentrations of antibiotics result in different rates of bacterial survival. In any colony of clinically significant size, there are going to be different rates of resistance.
Global would mean a bigger impact.
> Then you made a mistake and hopefully learned something.

Perhaps you learned that prematurely abstracting things is a waste of time?
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The first thing that jumped out at me was that the table has been taken, unattributed, from The Economist - very distinctive visual style.

Shame on you, Andrew Dumont.
An improved Command Line Interface for Web console lands in Firefox 12
Absolutely. I always referred to it as 'Homeland Security, Comrade'. But that's pretty much what they were after, a totalitarian fascist government with 'total information awareness', so it makes perfect sense.
Little wonder, people see companies like Zynga, Microsoft and Facebook copy with wild abandon and be rewarded richly.
Wauw, can you imagine if the framers had inserted:

'These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United States Government'.

The universal declaration of Human Rights truely is a joke.
Who's behind the Koobface botnet?
The parts that are outrageous about the DMCA are still outrageous. Like that you can get in jail for "circumventing" DRM mechanisms. There just happens to be one part about it that works out great for websites with user generated content.
What? The Constitution gives the government the right to legislate to promote the general welfare?

So they could compel people, with the treat of prison time, to exercise and eat healthy?
"At the end of the day, the code threw an exception, and our programmer failed to catch it. They put in a good game and tried their best. That's all you can ask for really."
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Ask HN: Visa troubles, now what?
I've been reading HN for a while, i decided I'd make an account to solicit advice from those wiser than me.

So I'm an Indian citizen but I've lived in the UAE my whole life; don't speak Hindi well. Went to a top 20 school for CS, graduated and got a nice offer from a start up in SF. Ran in to visa issues and the cap expired so I returned here. Now that my age > 21, I'm no longer a dependent of my parents so I'm not eligible to stay/work here either.

I've tried looking for jobs here, mostly jobs are reserved for UAE nationals and they are looking for 5+ years experience with J2EE stuff or VB.net.

I've tried applying for jobs in other english speaking countries like Australia,Canada but no bites yet.

Since i can only work in India I've started looking for jobs but the starting salaries are a little hard to digest, I'm not sure what they will think of my degree, and I will probably have problems fitting in.

So what should i do? Suck it up and find a job in India? Keep looking for jobs in English speaking countries? Grad school?
I almost assume that sites with very good graphic design will be buggy, seems to be the rule - Path being the exception of course.
I don't doubt that you regularly do not follow instructions. Everyone knows many instructions err on the side of caution and not literally following them doesn't add any risks.

Almost everyone crosses the street when the light is red, but there is not a car in sight (and the view is clear). Many people will use perishable products after their guaranteed 'fresh until' period.

However, this also happens for instructions you don't actually know the reason for. People will mentally substitute a convenient reason. Take the antibiotics for 3 weeks? "Yeah, probably because it sometimes takes 3 weeks for the infection to be gone. It probably doesn't hurt to stop after 2 weeks; I mean, what could it do?". People are not even aware of reasoning in such a way and saying "it doesn't have to be well explained" disregards that well known fact about human psychology.

If you want people to do something, explain why. In fact, that even works when your reason doesn't make any sense. "Can I please use the copy machine before you, because I have to make some copies of these documents" will get more compliance than "Can I please use the copy machine before you".
> "normals" have absolutely zero clue about what it is

I was surprised to hear my relatively non-technical father ask me back in December if SOPA was as bad as he had heard. Discussion of this legislation seems to be making it out into the mainstream press in bits and pieces. NPR has done several segments on it that I know of for instance.
Modern IP networking relies extensively on graph theory. The Spanning Tree Protocol is a prime example of this.
Wolf in Sheep's Clothing in the startup ecosystem
I would love to read those papers, but there is no way I can -- the language is simply too complex and they use too many 'old' words.

Do you know any good collection of them with footnotes and explanations?
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Big Spaceship : Chrome Extensions Are Good for You
Finally!. Isn't too late? Are OEM and carriers going to follow the same principles? Or they can build whatever skin/mess they want as they did so far?
The Samwer Brothers seemed to have made a fortune from "go away" money. I don't think they ever really have an intention of running these sites for a time.
Would you argue that a company should ever consider the fact that other companies might prefer them not to exist when they're thinking about what market to target and how to target it, though?

I'm fine with being negative on the approach of literally stealing the details of all that the incumbent does, but as a rule, I don't think that it's really a problem if an acquirer wishes the acquiree didn't exist at all, isn't that the reason for a large number of acquisitions?
That does not make sense to me. If they get a discount for Windows licenses they would have bought anyway, then they are not paying anything at all effectively.
I think the point was that the source code doesn't make the game better or worse.

A nightmare of hacks is fine as long as the product is great.

IMO writing such code is sometimes even better, especially for a solo developer. If you aim to write beautiful code, it might eventually outweigh everything else, while giving a false impression that you're doing the right thing. Your goal is the product, not code. I'd argue that you can't focus on both (it's called ‘focus’ for a reason).
World rings in 2012 and bids adieu to a tough year
I have to ask the question: does the points system at HN promote groupthink?
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RetroShare: secure communications with friends
I think this is a great idea. To work, it should be extremely simple.

Just to spitball a bit:

"The transmission of any data owned by one person to another shall not be infringed by the government of the United States."

Something like this is what we should have had in 1995. Instead, all the corporate players are now in the place -- it'll be a long, hard fight. Whoever puts something like this forward should be prepared to be ignored, at least until they can't ignore you any longer. Then they had better be prepared to be slimed. There will be all kinds of over-the-top attacks: child pornography, terrorists, etc. Supporters had better have a strong argument (and supporting sob stories) in place for when that day arrives.
I'd agree this is terrible but also say I've seen Silicon Valley startups look at a hot web property in Asia or Europe and clone it, raise a lot of money and take credit for it a number of times.
IP could bot be a fundamental right, but unrestricted communication is.
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Oh, absolutely, they can be.

I'm lucky in that mine provides decent flexi-time. I can start any time between 7:30 and 10:00, take lunch from 11:45 to 2:30 and leave between 3:30 and 6:00.

So if I want a 65 minute lunch break I can have it - so long as my times add up in the long run. I'm in charge of being responsible for my timekeeping, which is how it should be.
Twylah: Twitter Brand Pages
I used to think that about email services, too. Then one after another they changed their terms when I wasn't looking, and deleted data I thought was safely stored.

What ever happened to 'your own hard drive'? Is there some reason people can't use that for storage? I have a VPS that I use as a file intermediary. I'm highly confident that, and my backups, will be there in 5 years.
Firefox To Get Chrome-Like In-Content Preferences
I don't see any Flash. It seems to be implemented in javascript.
I was reading along, nodding my head, then I got to this:

Hard to argue with most of that, although abolishing the TSA isn't a good idea. Airport security should be rolled back to pre-9/11 levels, but someone is going to have to be in charge of it. Putting the airlines in charge of it doesn't make sense; their incentives are going to be passenger service rather than security.

What? How many passengers can you service if the airport is unsafe? Is the author unaware of the hundreds of different types of businesses that operate in hostile environments yet manage to keep their customers safe as part of their service? Has he never walked into a fast-food restaurant on a weekend night and seen the security guards? Hell, that's McDonalds, for chirstsakes, they sell you 2-dollar burgers. Don't you think the airlines would do a bit better?

The TSA is the one department we should abolish. They have too broad of a mandate -- they think they are responsible for controlling, er, protecting _all_ transportation, not just airline travel. They have too many powers -- the ability to virtually strip-search passengers, prevent innocent people from traveling, and interfere with international commerce. And, worst of all, they've combined the military-industrial complex with a paramilitary quasi-police force. This is like an endless cold war where the people themselves are the enemy.

The TSA is a terrible mess. That's the one thing we have to get rid of. The facts are that we went 70 years without the TSA just fine. The threat has not increased so much to warrant this kind of intervention. So we have tens of thousands of "officers" harassing normal business travelers daily as part of this ongoing shoddy security theater. It's a witch hunt without any witches, but with lots of government dollars, security contractors, and union jobs. They'll just keep tightening the screws until they do find something alarming. Then they'll congratulate themselves and ask for more money (and authority.) You don't need to be a genius to see where all of this is heading.

The TSA is a monster and a menace to freedom. I doubt we'll ever get rid of it, but that's no reason to give up. Speaking out against it at every opportunity, to me, is a civic duty. I freely admit to being over-the-top in my language here, but you have to remember that the entire idea of the type of security state we now live in was the wildest fantasy just thirty years ago. I'm just trying to write something that will still be relevant in another 20 years or so. Using that standard, I'm not sure I've been over the top enough.
That's what I tell my kids, Credit Cards are modern day slavery one purchase at at time.
Scientists gear up to take a picture of a black hole
Hollywood must be paying handsomely
I've have many ideas, Ranging from new Operating System designs to Clean Energy to world changing web applications (they are ideas, So, probably many of them may fail ). I don't have a technical education.

When I started getting these ideas, I was very confused about what to do with all of them. But, Now I have great clarity. I'm starting from the easiest to approach.

I started doing web design for hire before 2 years. Meanwhile I taught myself, Ruby, Rails and Jquery. Now, I'm building two of the web apps, I wanted to build.

The biggest challenges I faced were that, there were no immediate technical network for me, to go to. Since, I haven't worked anywhere, nor do I have technical education. So, For every problem, I face, I had to google my way around it, or go in IRCs, or forums. Its not all minus in a way, this self-service style of education, has helped me in some ways.

Here in India, I don't even know where to start, to get funding. But, I think I won't need it, Since, I value freedom for setting my own pace and control over the products more than anything.

In short, Haven't launched a product yet. But, will launch one or two within this month. I'm very happy looking forward for that day. (I'm also procrastinating bcoz, of fear of being ridiculed). But, will take a deep breath and hit enter on "cap deploy" soon.

PS: HN for the past 6 months played a very important role in shaping my thoughts on products, validation, launch etc.
Thankfully, here in Brazil things seems to be moving towards that:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111004/04402516196/brazil...
You wonder if some lawyer would take this up and make Microsoft pay back the royalties paid in addition to any damages. Would be a hefty chunck of change.
That's interesting, can you give any examples?
I'll start using it more, just for you. "Eleemosyne" is Greek for "charity", by the way.
I think it'd be useful to separate the fundamental idea of copyright, and what it means in reality: I certainly believe that the author of an idea ought to be recognized for it (be it that there're surely other people involved in some manner); the question is only what it entitles one to.

In a non-capitalist society, recognition would be enough since needs are cared for otherwise, but here and now it's still necessary to allow the authors to profit from their ideas.

Still, given that most other people have to work continuously rather than benefit from past work for years to come, it might make sense to limit actual copyright of a work intended for sale to, say, 5 years (private works like personal photographs would retain theirs). Subsequent to this, the author's right to be recognized would naturally still remain, but the work itself would enter public domain.
Remain Diligent: SOPA and PIPA Must Be Squashed, Not Changed
OK, now this is just exploring an idea about WHY this might have been done.

Rough details:

Google doesn't develop business web sites, but the callers were offering that service.

Obtaining their business contact database, and misrepresenting themselves, in a very un-Google way.

Since early November 2011. And the call operation switched to India when spotted.

The businesses being called were all in Kenya. KENYA - now why does that ring a bell?

Google admits it happened, but is vague about who did it. "a team of people working on a Google project"

Hmmm... You'd think if there was a clear relationship that Google could admit to, they would have. I smell something a bit more intense than mere bad business choices.

How about this:

Suppose you were a current US President, who (for whatever reason) very very strongly desired to eliminate (or 'modify') a specific piece of paper held at the Coast Province General Hospital, Kenya. A birth certificate, from 1961.
This one: http://everist.org/pics/Obama_bc/lucas_Obama_bc.jpg

Someone comes up with the bright idea to offer a document digitizing and cloud archiving service to the hospital. Just to get hands-on for that one piece of paper.

But as cover... you'd need something much more general. Like offering web hosting to all businesses in Kenya. Comes with document scanning at low low prices!
You can trust us, we’re GOOGLE! And we are associates of your widely liked Mocality.

So why now? Because finally a lawsuit about Obama's eligibility established legal standing and made it to the supreme court. Document discovery begins. Stuff's about to hit the ventilators...

20120113 VERY QUIETLY OBAMA’S CITIZENSHIP CASE REACHES THE SUPREME COURT
http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/01/09/very-quietly-obamas-...

That and other cases have been working their way through slowly. Takes months, and someone maybe saw a need and activated some emergency contingency plans.

Just a thought. There’s always a reason, and it's often not the most obvious one.

Why would any actual Google team, even rogue, offer web services Google simply does not do?
Indeed. And you could go even further to say hashtables and trees too, are not necessary in most apps.
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Can you point to resources/books where I can read more about design as is taught in CS degrees? I'm curious on their problem solving strategies compared to mine.
This is not a win and it's not backpedaling.

They don't want to vote on it and have it fail entirely.

They just want to rewrite it a little or slip it past later.

It's not if but when a version of this will pass that will be abused exactly like DMCA on youtube.
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Why do the originals buy them, though? I think at least for ebay it was a complete fail (exaggerated user counts), not sure about the others.
Absolutely. Most of the code being produced around me is of the "When button X is clicked, send an XML message to service Y letting it know the contents of textbox Z."

I'm sure this can be modelled mathematically, but I'm not convinced this would help.
Fees, Lies and Advertising
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