skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know the specifics about the NSA (or about any other agency), but the whole "don't care much about past, caring about trust and transparency" is pretty standard security model in western governmental agencies. Notice that CURRENT illegal activities can be a source of blackmail - if I'd work for the NSA and run over someone with my car I wouldn't expect a three letter agency to come and make the charges disappear (and that's a good thing of course, we don't want an above-the-law military class).

As I said, I don't know the specifics of the NSA (maybe they do or do not care about future light drug use) but I would expect them not wanting you to continue any illegal activities, to a reasonable degree (continue stealing the office toilet paper if it gives you kicks).

Unless you're some sort of a world-level genius they would probably also shy away from evident extreme sociopathic behavior. From a reasonable human resources angle, not just security. Most of us wouldn't want to work with someone who released a worm that specifically targets thesis drafts for example.

ANOTHER EDIT: I really think the #1 concern for applicable defcon recruits is "computer crimes", not drug use. Found/tested exploits? Use bittorrent? Cracked WinRAR (and hopefully something else that is more than simply changing a je to jne)? don't be afraid to send a CV and be honest. That is all.
Behind the Huge Facebook Loss at UBS
>How many people are killed per year with a rifle?

>How many people are killed per year with a handgun?

I don't think these are interesting questions in this context at all. Can a crazy shooter (ok, not you ;) kill more effectively with an assault rifle? Absolutely. That is the only important question, I think.

And if you want to ask these particular questions, it would be also interesting to know how many assault rifles are out there? How many handguns and knives? Perhaps there are fewer people killed by rifles because there are much less rifles?
Lenovo to Buy Nokia? Market Rumors Point Towards That
These are the kind of thoughts that keep me awake at night ;)

Then you probably don't want to read Thomas Ligotti's "The conspiracy against the human race". It's a philosophical and neuroscientific treatise on existentialism written by a lovecraftian horror writer...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Conspiracy-Against-Human-Race/dp/0...
Recently Google started people with Google accounts to update their birthdays, promising a surprise --> https://plus.google.com/u/0/116113014152499702246/posts/9SF8...
So I think a personal Google doodle is that surprise.
I have to say that confused me too. The 512MB limit I thought was serious. It may be the case that the Pi is using a large swap partition on the SD card?
Maybe. On the other hand, it seems like a fair amount of these opinions are "fuck this noise, I'm going to Reddit/etc."

Don't get me wrong - I would absolutely love to see the new Digg rocket into popularity again... but I'm just not certain that's going to be the case.
Projectbook for iPad tries to beat Evernote at its own game
So I assume that these will be the anti-virus of the PC+ era?
Craigslist Wants Postings Under ‘Exclusive’ Terms: Padmapper Fallout Continues
From the article:

> No curly braces, no parentheses, no semicolons. None.

That's not completely true. Strictly speaking, Python does have semicolons. But those are only used to allow for multiple commands in one line:

a = 1; b = 2; c = 3

However, most style guides discourage this programming style anyway. Also, in this example of mass-assignments usually the tuple style is preferred:

(a, b, c) = (1, 2, 3)

which can be shortened to:

a, b, c = 1, 2, 3

> Yes, strictly speaking, there is one delimiter [in Python]: the colon that opens a new indent block. But typing that feels natural, [...] Still, if Python were to upgrade its parser to eliminate the need for the colon, I wouldn't complain.

I think the main reason for the ":" delimiter in Python is to allow for one-liners where the block follows immediately on the same line, so you can write:

if True: print 'Hello'

instead of:

if True:
print 'Hello'

However, I don't think this was a good idea. Most style guides recommend the tow-line version anyway. Thus, I agree that Python could gain even more clarity by abandoning the ":" delimiter.
I would claim that Facebook is essentially the "end of point" of a friendship.

What would the Facebook of starting-points look like? :)
Why The Irish Times fancies itself as a startup incubator
What is this function useful for?
That's not what statistically insignificant means.
Jamie lives a hard life.
From HR to CSR: management lessons from Mexico’s drug lords
Am I the only one expecting a tighter and tighter Apple-Facebook integration[1], driving the stocks of both upwards? It's a great synergy against Android/G+

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=...
Save your company money with Remote Patch Management.
I'd add: whatever happened to microscopes? I loved getting one of those and a box of slides: bugs, plants, cells, all kinds of cross sections... And what happened to the 160 in one electronics kits from Radio Shack, ala http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1987/h104.html? (Actually, those last evolved into the rather clever SnapCircuits which are pretty fun, sold in Radio Shack and other fine stores).
Symantec Seeks Help Cracking Mystery of Password Used In Attacks
State of the tablet market: 85% to iPad
If you really want Apple to change, how about NOT developing for iOS? Articles like this aren't really going to make them change their policies.

Certainly convincing other people not to develop for iOS would have more of an impact than just swearing off it personally. More generally, I dislike the idea that we shouldn't write this sort of thing because "the market will sort it out anyway". This sort of post is the market sorting it out.

Apple reserves the right to accept or reject applications from the app store.

Sure, they're probably legally entitled to do almost anything. That doesn't mean they can't (or shouldn't) be criticised for it, though, and it doesn't mean that criticism of them can't have any impact on anyone's behaviour.
It's almost like it isn't a finished product.
This was a report from the House of Lords Communications Committee - not the Government itself.

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/...

Also, it apppears to be talking about terrestrial broadcast TV - not the satellite broadcasting used by Sky and others.

Edit: I love the comment from the report: "The Government's strategy lacks just that – strategy."
It's more like the guy who built your house and sold it to you reserving the right to decide who can come into it.
Apple designer describes company's 'kitchen table' in testimony
From what I've read, their turnaround was pretty fast, so I'm not surprised by this. I suppose this was a "hack it out, get it out, refactor later maybe" type of job.

Unfortunately, that ends up being a standard, with the "refactor later maybe" staying as a maybe.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you...
Want Your Startup to Succeed? Stay Home —Study
Look closer at the statistics. Just like most other countries it is mostly people killing people they know within their own communities. Typically relatives. Look at what they use to kill each other, how many people they kill per incident, the demographics of the people doing the killing and being killed, etc. A crazy high percentage is things like off-duty cops using their service pistols to kill their own families, for example. We're a messed up country for all sorts of other reasons that are obviously too long to go into here. But we don't have people regularly shooting up schools, malls and cinemas.

(And South Africa as an example made up maybe 10% of my comment.)
Oh, just an ICS dongle. Thought you were talking about a full, integrated Android TV O_O
I was more or less convinced by Paul Willmott´s arguments on this one.
$0.10 per IOPS-month? Is that per volume or does volume size enter into the equation? I.e. would two 10GB 100IOPS volumes cost twice as much as one 20GB 100IOPS volume?
Some of them are no doubt serious; I seem to remember a study showing that mathematicians are more likely to be theist than atheist.

In my experience, "Why did God pick X?" and the like is shorthand for, "Is there a classification/uniqueness theorem that says X is the only possible solution to the problem?", which is how it is used here.
Yes, becuse if you grant someone exclusive rights then you need to possess those exclusive rights in the first place. If the material is not protectable, then you don't have any rights to grant to others.
On iPhone, toys, the enterprise and of course, Windows 8
A Computer Infection that Can Never Be Cured: "Rakshasa" for your firmware
> © 2012 Bananastand Inc

That made my day.
After a few hours I've switched back to 1920x1200. I still love the huge native resolution, and will switch to it in certain circumstances, but for regular web-browsing, email, text writing, etc, it is more comfortable at 1920x1200.

When I'm developing in Xcode or for the web I will switch back to 2880x1800 to get maximum real-estate for many windows.
Frankly, I personally have absolutely no intention to answer your data. I don't have the expertise, nor the patience to gain it.

But I can still take issue with your manner. Not because it offends me (it doesn't), not because of some imaginary "popularity contest" -- but because your arrogant tone, and your visible scorn of those who disagree with you, is going to achieve nothing but damage the quality of debate. You can't complain about getting naught but emotive responses when your posts seem structured to provoke exactly that.

State your claims, show your data, that's great. If you want people to answer your case, stop there -- dressing it up in antagonism only gives respondents the option of answering your attitude instead of your argument. Don't give them that chance if you don't want them to take it.

If they get distracted by emotion anyway, then, well, at least you tried.
You're right, if it was a certainty that a particular company was never going to return any money to its owners in any shape or form, owning it would be pointless and its market value would go to near zero immediately.

But successful companies do return money to shareholders eventually. The question is when. If you owned Microsoft in 1986, would you have asked for a dividend instead of letting them use the money to build their Windows and Office franchise?

So, no, it's not a ponzi scheme. You're buying future dividends. In the case of Microsoft, every dollar you invested in Microsoft's IPO earns you two dollars in dividends today.

At any moment in time, you have ask: Can the company invest my money better than I can, adjusted for risk? If the answer yes, then any dividend payout is a net loss for you.
When Yudkowsky says configuration space in that sequence, he doesn't mean a separable Hilbert space, because he doesn't believe (for philosophical reasons) that that's the correct setting for QM.
(I have string opinions on gun law, but have tried to keep this post only based upon reasoning, without conclusions.)

"Should <killer item> be banned" should be calculated against benefit of item, not only the lives ended.

Even fewer people are killed with nuclear weapons, but they're not 'legal'. The issue of knifes vs handguns vs assault rifles also considers other uses and whether banning them encroaches on personal liberties (of the murderer).

A knife has many other purposes e.g. carving a roast chicken. In many countries it's not legal to carry round a blade most of the time - in the UK you need a good reason, such as being a chef going to a new restaurant, and you can carry a non-locking folding blade of three inches or less in length.

A gun is only used for shooting. It limits my freedoms less to say "You can't hunt game or take a handgun to a shooting range" than it does to say "You cannot buy knives to eat your dinner with".

It's true that a lot of people in the USA own handguns for "self-protection" in the home. Perhaps the best questions are not "How many people are killed per year with a rifle?" etc, but "How many people are killed per rifle?", in which case I think knives would be vastly lower than firearms.

It also raises the point that even though there are fewer assault rifle deaths, maybe it is more often a murder weapon among its owners - there are perhaps many more people who own handguns who have never hurt anyone with them. Why? One reason is that an assault rifle is a greater upgrade over a handgun when you're on a shooting spree than when you are trying to repel an intruder from your house. After all, one intruder only need a few bullets to repel, whereas in a shooting spree even an assault rifle could often do with more bullets in a magazine (from the attacker's perspective).
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When he said Android sucks he presumably evaluated a number of attributes of both iOS and Android and concluded that iOS outperforms Android in those he cares about.

He's now finding out the hard way that "openness" may have been an attribute the importance of which he underestimated.

And just like the tens of other iOS developers that came to whine here when the same happened to them: you knew what you were getting into and chose to ignore it at your own peril.
I agree wholeheartedly with you. However, there is no shortage of articles detailing Apple's arbitrary App store approval process. Yet, the number of applications on the App store keeps on increasing and increasing.

What is striking is none (or I haven't come across one) of these articles end with the developer washing their hands off the App store and vowing never to develop another iOS app. Instead, most of them seem to be aiming to generate publicity so that Apple takes notice and hopefully approves the app.
Actually, looking at comparative sales figures, it looks like Samsung is killing HTC by gobbling up its customers. The Apple lawsuits have a minuscule impact in comparison.
"The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership..."

I'm really worried about what Twitter is becoming.
>If there was a cause X that randomly killed 5 people in the US every year, and there was countermeasure Y that prevented those deaths, you wouldn't implement Y because X isn't a meaningful threat to any single person?

Well that's a hard question to answer, we still don't know how to evaluate the value of a human life. So in the general case I would say no I would, if it wasn't prohibitively expensive. (Relative to the number of actual damages caused.)

> I think the answer should be: it depends.

Okay. I didn't cover the kinds of issues you talk about in the following paragraph because in context everyone reading should know about them by this point. I could go on about the civil costs of gun control, the material costs, weighed alternative options like better mental health treatment, or not naming the shooter on national TV; etc.

But all that stuff could fit into a form letter. [0]

[0]: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

EDIT: I accidentally said "yes" when I meant "no" in the first response paragraph. That is, in the general case; no I would implement countermeasure Y to prevent 5 annual deaths.
Then if you zoom in on bottom of the background (http://www.nsa.gov/careers/dc20/images/Back.jpg)
in the light blue swoosh there is a message:
"GNXR N PYBFRE YBBX NG ANGVBANY FRPHEVGL NG AFN"

Which is ROT13 for "TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT NATIONAL SECURITY AT NSA"
This is not an EULA.
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They may not sue posters, but what if they sue the sites to where the poster voluntarily submitted copies of his post?
I think you miss the point of 'revolutionising'. It's not about making a couple of trips a year a bit cheaper. It's revolutionary if taxis become cheap enough that lots of people stop owning their own car. Or even if two car families become one car families.
Man banned from using Facebook for his sex ratings page
Impressive, who would have thought a government agency could have signs of imagination and even <gasp> fun!
It's almost like they don't care about all factors that matter when doing a major relaunch of a site; It reminds me of the lack of care that came to be with the big initial design revamp that caused the exodus of Digg users, including myself.

A UI that looks good doesn't mean it functions well.
the "ebay meets dating" impression is not correct. Craigslist is closer to an "Online Classified Ads" which is popular for posting jobs, apartment rentals, cars, sporting equipment, musical instruments, and pretty much everything else you might post in a classified ad.

I'm told it is one of the 100 most popular sites on the internet (and one of the 50 most popular in the US).

One of the reasons people feel strongly about it the platform nature. If you don't like the Craigslist interface for finding apartments, you don't have much choice. That is where everyone lists their apartments. Similarly, it is the first place everyone lists apartments because it is widely known that this is where users check.

For that reason, it's been hard for competitors to get any traction... even when the competitor has better technology.
"In some cases, we may require you to change your password. (For example, if it’s commonly used or hasn’t been changed in a long time)"

Commonly used? What do they mean by that? Aren't they supposed not to know my password?
Chartered Swedish plane drops teddy bears for freedom in Belarus
This article is heavily slanted and calling the sound judgment of Zamudio in the events described nothing more than "sheer luck" is patently insulting at best and fear mongering at worst.

Also, your second paragraph is somewhat ambiguous, I'm not sure if you mean to imply that the incident described is the only incidence of a confrontation with a deranged shooter. That is most definitely not the case. There are many examples of this happening:

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_20457445/2-die-sho...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_School_of_Law_shoot...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Colorado_YWAM_and_New_Life...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-01-01/local/me-1021_1_publi...
Nothing there, I'm afraid.

That is, unless they're intercepting Google searches for the decoded phrase, in which case, hello! Feel free to check out my resume, which you can find in my Documents folder, and I look forward to hearing from you shortly.
I don't have all the answers and can't really spend the time digging into this (have to work). But here are a few thoughts.

My argument here is isolated from data from other countries. Each country/culture has its own issues.

The data from our own Department of Justice and FBI shows that the so-called "assault rifle" is responsible for --depending on the year-- maybe 1/10 of the murders caused by knives. This, to me, means that if we are talking about the reality in the USA, knives are far more dangerous than rifles. That's a fact backed by real crime data from the FBI. Handguns are a different story. They are responsible for the bulk of homicides.

With that understood the next task is to try to understand why this is so. The data points that, by far, most of the homicides take place in the inner city and affect hispanic and black youngsters. I am not passing judgement here, just mirroring what the data shows. I don't know why it is so. I can only speculate.

As far as your comparison with South Africa, here are some thoughts, again, backed-up by data:

US Population: 300+ million (http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&#...)

South Africa: 50 million (http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...)

6x more people in the US could mean more total murders (by any means) than in S.A.

Homicide rate:

US, about 5 per 100K population

SA, about 32 per 100K population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

So, with 1/6 the population of the USA and very restrictive gun ownership laws SA manages to have SIX TIMES the homicide rate of the US. Isn't this further support for the idea that guns are not necessarily the root cause, but rather that people and other factors might be?

As far as solutions. Look, I'm an engineer. I have some thoughts on these issues but I have never claimed to have THE solution. I would like to think that it is a combination of education, illegal drug control, economic opportunity and other factors.

So, that's the data, please tell me what you think it means.
This experiment probably means this - most of the AD designs are Awful, with a big letter "A". They are so bad that they actually decrease CTR of AD campaign even compared to the blank rectangle image.
>What do you need an assault rifle for?

Very few people actually own assault rifles (you need a tax stamp and it has to have been registered before 1986). The weapon the shooter in Colorado used wasn't an assault rifle because it was semi-automatic.

Whether you agree with it our not our constitution gives us the right to bear arms as a check against government oppression.

The second amendment clearly wasn't written to protect hunter's rights.

That being said an AR-15 can be used for hunting, target shooting, or home defense. Its not fundamentally different from any semi-automatic hunting rifle.

Previous "Assault Weapons" restrictions in the US targeted guns based on how "scary" they looked (guns with barrel shrouds, collapsible stocks etc...). Since statically these kinds of guns are almost never used in crimes, regulating them would have almost no impact on overall death rate.
I tend to think of him as Zed Shaw's grandfather.
Block the FB script. Then you can see the page.