skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was done in Australia and they were caught. 90% of drug seizures are a result of intelligence gathering rather than search.

I listened to a talk from the former head of a customs agency who admitted that search alone is useless in stopping the flow of contraband. He described it as searching for a needle in a haystack in a haystack.

The intelligence turns out to be a good method. It is difficult to import multiple kilograms of a drug into a major city and not make noise about it. First you have the concern of anybody in the lower end of the pyramid being caught, and second there is the competition who are usually more than happy to rat you out to get rid of you.

I'm willing to bet that even the case of the professor in OP was a result of intelligence. There are two common ways couriers are caught in South America:

* the first is that they are turned in by the organization that has sent them. As part of police corruption and keeping locals out of prisons they setup foreigners.

* the second is signature detection. It turns out that a lot of organizations use the same types of suitcases. I bet it was the type of suitcase he was carrying that prompted them to search.
No Google Glasses allowed, declares Seattle dive bar
And what if they turned the whole thing into a request queue and workers get the "messages" as they become available? To ensure there are no timeouts, they could define a max time a request may stay in the queue, and then take it out and handle it with emergency workers or kill it?
Javascript interpreters are also written in C. Flash is written in C. HTML parsers are written in C.

All of these are exposed directly to untrusted code from the Internet, and none of them break at anything like the rate that Java seems to have done recently, nor get as much bad press as Java does. The closest analogy I can think of is MSIE in the post-Netscape, pre-Firefox era (c. 2001-2005).

Maybe the conclusion is, security holes don't get fixed if a technology is closed-source, is developed by a single large company, and there are no alternative implementations.
Many credit companies would not let you to contest transactions beyond certain limits (90 days? don't remember) so with old games that probably won't work. Not sure if any of them provide warranties for digital goods... Worst case one may try one's luck in small claims court, though what would be the result is anyone's guess - there's certainly language in EULA saying you're not getting any money back but that may or may not be legally true.
For me, first, because it's cheaper, and two, because I won't be near people. I certainly enjoy the convenience of living in a city and being in an apartment, but I strongly dislike having so many people near me. I look forward to buying 5 or 10 acres and building a nice 2000sqft home where I can enjoy the outdoors and the lack of people.
Why are you guys so upset? Serious question. EA screws up, admits it and gives a nice compensation. What more do you expect?
This comes down to having freedom and experiencing life on 'a ranch and 20 acres'. If you've never experienced life in such a way, it is almost impossible to understand why people live this way.

I for one love having my own washroom and bedroom where I can rest, relax and find silence.

Do you think a family of 4 would find comfort in an apartment?

I'm fairly sure if money were no object and transportation was near instant, myself and most people I know would choose the ranch and 20 acres.
How to improve site navigation
Stripping a website to its barest form, ignoring for a moment, content which is only text and images, all a browsing experience is, is navigation. It’s clicking links that take you to other pages with more links. The main navigation of your site is such a crucial part of this as it represents the persistent doorway to the most important pages of your content.
You can sign up for Cryptography courses at Coursera.org. You learn about basic tenets of crypto like attacker games, cryptogaphic advantage, cracking some exploits (AES-CBC). If you do the problem sets and programming assignments and pass the course without help, you are off to a very good start I would say.
Do you have children? Or a dog? It is usually a good idea to have one extra room per each member of the family. This way if you want to be alone for a while you can. Or if you want to listen to the music that others don't appreciate you can (headphones can be tiresome to wear).
As humans, we tend to aspire to more than absolute necessity. Go too far and it turns into indulgence. Personally, I'd like to continue living in a place that allows for movement beyond 180 degrees of rotation.
The gist of it is, is that you don't lose your rights when your get together in a group.
The supremes are not known for being tech savvy.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/04/19/our-tech-savvy-supreme-c...
If they aren't committed to memory, performance is far worse, as fetching from disk is 10-1000x slower.
Mark Shuttleworth is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The square peg being Steve Jobs' style, the round hole being open source/free software.
There weren't many patterns presented, so here are a few of those and some more:

Some evil UX patterns are:

* Opt-in: Prepopulating option with more expensive or recurring payment. (example was a donation, but Amazon does this when not defaulting to free 5-7 day ground shipping after promising free shipping prior to putting it in cart! which is much worse since they are bait and switching)

* Opt-in, part 2: Making changes subtle changes can be evil. By switching around buttons, etc. after having it work a certain way a long time and not changing the interface enough, you trigger muscle memory to do the wrong thing. Amazon has exploited this as well with the (not) free shipping option.

* Difficult to quit/cancel: also mentioned in the OP's linked presentation. In addition to more steps or having to email, etc. they don't even give you a documented option, e.g. you have to email them so they will delete your account and they say that nowhere in the site.

* Glossing over legal: Small text or less readable font to hide details is evil.

* Hiding legal: putting legal disclaimers in an area of the site that is hard to get to is evil.

* Unnecessary login: making the user login because they might want to retain info about something, when really the site owner is getting more benefit (selling email address or lead info, mining it themselves, etc.).

* Asking for more than is needed for user to accomplish what they want: asking the user for more info than they need to provide in order to get lead info when they are not aware you will contact them is evil.

* Unintended use of data: Worked for a telecom that had page to get phone# to look up service availability and then they would use that for lead info.

* Easy to determine security questions: this is just stupid. Many are easy to find out and they do little more than make the uninformed user feel more secure. Examples: birthday, street you grew up on, etc. that can be learned even without social engineering.

* Passwords: one of the most archaic and stupid constructs ever. Passwords encourage people to use the same password across sites, so if one is compromised, they all are. An autogenerated passkey and a more secure way to reset it with a new one if your passkey was lost or stolen would beat passwords anyday. SSO only compounds this idiotic UX we can't get rid of. (And we put abusable/hackable cameras in every laptop instead of adding retinal scanners or thumbprint readers in every laptop, which could be viable alternatives.)
The hedge fund deploys Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm:

"The private key itself is AES-256 encrypted. After exporting Bitcoin private keys from wallet.dat file, data is stored in a TrueCrypt container on three separate flash drives. Using Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm, the container password is then split into three parts utilizing a 2-of-3 secret sharing model. Incorporating physical security with electronic security, each flash drive from various manufacturers is duplicated several times and, together with a CD-ROM, those items are vaulted in a bank safety deposit box in three different legal jurisdictions. To leverage geographic distribution as well, each bank stores only part of a key, so if a single deposit box is compromised, no funds are lost."
The source of these images, http://www.soco.org.hk/cagehome/, is an intriguing (if somewhat poorly executed) advocacy-cum-exhibition site.

For those who don't want to click through, the site first present you with a fake Firefox popup, with the only a close button. Each time you close one of them, new ones will appear in greater numbers. Do this three times, and your screen will be filled with popup and a message that translate roughly to:

> Ignoring the housing problem will only make it worse, help us change the status quo!

> Our city may be beautiful on the surface, but underneath all that 10 000 hardworking low income workers are unable to share the fruit of our success. Families are forced to live in apartments with an average area of 40 square feet. They need your help to improve their lives; forward this email, help promote social justice!
> He doesn't have enough notability to warrant a dedicated article

You say this as if it were just so. I don't happen to agree.
What's depressing about that?
Wow! Looks neat. Will get around trying it over the weekend :)
Am I the only one who has no problem with always-online DRM? In what situations don't you have internet nowadays?
First of all, what is this monolithic "community" you're talking about? Secondly, the question is not if more people will pirate without DRM, but if the company can increase their revenues - in the long term - by making that move.
> But I imagine you can find solace in just having only the things you need.

No. You, maybe, but not me, and certainly not everyone.

And that's not even fully addressing the unstated assumption that everything you 'need' would even fit in an apartment, let alone a micro apartment.

Getting rid of things isn't always a good thing to do. Having the ability to be fully packed and ready to move in an hour is a tactic, not a life philosophy.
Hear hear. He has our support:
http://jmonkeyengine.org/2013/03/java-for-games/
There's two very different kinds of APIs.

One is a service, the "aS" in PaaS, SaaS, and many others, where what you are getting is programmatic access to the thing people want to sell you anyways. A service might be very valuable, but it's probably replaceable. If someone is geolocating IPs for you, hosting images for you, handling blog comments for you, this is all stuff someone else could do for you if your first-choice API turns into yet another /dev/null.

The other kind of API is access to specific content and/or networks. This is a whole different ball of wax, and I would be wary of doing anything significant with an API that is only valuable because of the value of the data that is coming over it. You have to ask yourself very carefully why they are giving you access. Most likely it is because they think you will drive growth to them. Once that motivation is gone because they have reached scale, they will stop treating you as valuable, and start to see all the value you generate as value that is not being sent their way: they will start rent-seeking.

Basically, ask yourself: if some API that you use were to close up shop, would your company no longer have an existential purpose? If you want to give people directions to a brick-and-mortar store, and Google Maps closed itself off tomorrow, would your company cease to exist? Hopefully the answer is no, you would just have to spend some resources and switch to someone else or build it yourself.
Well what exactly does the question mean? I can't think of an answer to how that would satisfy you. They simply agree on the terms.
Most citizens of most countries, yes, but in this case he seems to have been a US citizen. While there are many wonderful things about the US, mercy for drug smugglers is not among them, particularly compared to Argentina or Ecuador.
10.04 was definitely when it peaked, as far as I'm concerned.
If Comcast is not directly a customer of he.net or cogent, then it is likely that each has multiple routes available that they could use to send traffic to Comcast. Have you explored whether getting them to pick a different one would improve things?

Or is the problem in the direction of Comcast to you, which is harder for you to control?
Ubuntu 10.04 is infinitely better than 12.x and Unity. It blows my mind that anyone could think otherwise.

>I sincerely feel someone should take the 10.04 and spin it off into a new better OS, polish it and give it back to the community - If it's good enough, I won't even mind paying for it!!

Yes, 100 times yes. If I could get that OS with the 12.x patches and updates, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Can you have an intentional oversight? Seems inconsistent...
Oops, looks like my tweet (the "open-source GitHub") got a bit more famous than I thought. I feel I must write a big disclaimer here:

I was just joking and would never actually exploit someone that would do so much damage. I was merely commenting on the irony of leaking GitHub on GitHub. Don't fucking do this. It's not fun.
Ruby 101: Classes
I wonder. In a previous post here on HN, somebody said in a comment, that the Sim City infrastructure runs in Amazon's infrastructure.

Isn't one of the big advantages of cloud computing the ability to scale your hardware with demand? Why only scale up by 130% when there's still people having problems? Why not scale until everybody has a good experience?

I don't even think it's going to cost all that much: after the initial onrush, the number of concurrent sessions is likely going to drop rapidly, at which point, they can easily scale down the infrastructure (maybe forcing regions to be consolidated, but as a player I'd rather suddenly have a new neighbor city than a ghost town because my neighbor stopped playing).

If you can scale up by 130% in one week, you can also scale up by 500%. Or however much it takes.

Them not doing this, leads to twoconclusions: 1) they don't care about the current ire among gamers. If the game is good, the rocky start will be forgiven when in two weeks time load normalizes and it will be forgotten within a month. And 2) having overloaded servers due to "unanticipated demand" is in the long run good news to give, increasing the perceived value and quality of the game.
Good site, I use it all the time. Poster child for why Netflix doesn't like APIs very much, though: there's a giant Hulu banner ad front and center!
It gets worse. The photos are not the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Hong Kong real estate. Those who are in the worst poverty are the ones who live in cages. It's literally a bunk bed with sides enclosed with cage wiring. They have no walls, minimal possessions and live day to day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4jjdRzy3w

Hong Kong is an intriguing city that I highly recommend to go spend some time in.
Trying some technical analysis of the (SimCity) server situation
Go look at the bestsellers on these websites, they'll give you an idea of the problems people want solved, then write a better solution to each problem you discover.

You can even give your best one free here on HN, to get attention for your paid offers.

Also, what sells well on codecanyon, will sell outside codecanyon so you can build your own online storefront and build an audience around it, or find other marketplaces and try to bring the bestsellers from one marketplace to another. I used to do this a lot for physical products and it worked for me with varying degrees of success.

Good Luck
Apple finally turns HTTPS on for the App Store, fixing a lot of vulnerabilities
Your password rant falls on it's ass immediately considering that we don't have any way to link your thumbprint to your identity for the remote peer.

Using a service like twitter as online identity helps to some degree with having fewer passwords except that then cracking a twitter account gives you access to everything.
This explains very little that would actually be of interest coming from hacker news.

I expected a technical analysis and got PR bullshit.
The iPhone's Biggest Flaw
> Selling a game with online features should not have to be a commitment to provide those features forever, so finding decent middle ground is the only solution.

I bought the damned thing. I didn't buy it "for X years".

The only "middle ground" that works is that if you take down the servers, you must provide the ability for end users to run their own. But that'll never happen, because then they can't sell you New SimCity as easily.
From your comments, its not hard to see that you are religious, so it is understandable that you would see "god" as the underlying force in everything.

I think you are confusing agnosticism with atheism: agnostics basically question the existence of "god" or deities because of a lack of evidence.
It would be hard to argue that we don't know who invented various religions as the stories of various prophets getting messages or missions from "god" are widely known, as well as the groups of people who practiced early versions of what we call each religion today. And the point you make saying "we were told about it" is evidence enough to question the validity of religion and god- we are relying on words and stories passed on and reformulated throughout history.

This article is taking one facet of science- the microscopic world- and showing how more discoveries lead to skepticism when people in the past thought of religion as the answer to everything. It is essentially pointing to the fact that as more scientific discoveries are made, more religious theories are put to question. You are right, there is A LOT we STILL don't know about, but every time more discoveries are made, we find that more past assumptions (religious principles in this case) are proven false.
Could this apply to non-IT related companies? "Java" is a name of a region in Indonesia to begin with, what about companies dealing with tourism or local products such as coffee or fabrics from that region?
Here in Argentina, Falklands/Malvinas are the first thing people associate with Britain. A British friend of mine was trying to persuade her (Argentine) landlord to fix the roof in her apartment, and he started yelling at her about the Malvinas. The dominant stereotype of Englishpeople is not that they have terrible food or that they drink a lot of tea but that they are pirates who want to steal offshore oil that legitimately belongs to Argentina and who keep invading Argentina over and over. There is actually a suburb of Buenos Aires whose actual name is "Malvinas Argentinas".

If you're talking about public perception in England, I'm sure you're right. But the case was here in Argentina.
Top Tools for Productive Blogging | The Brightpod blog
How happy was the Brightpod team last month?
"Why do you need a ranch size home and 20 acres?"

Why do you need to eat three square meals a day?

Why do you need a $1000+ PC?

Why do you need $50+ jeans?

Why do you need....
By misrepresents you mean that the end users didn't exactly understand how underlying architecture worked, didn't like the performance, but kept using the service anyway. If every customer I dealt with while working on the EC2 platform could sue because they didn't understand how every technical detail of AWS worked and they couldn't optimize for it...well there would be more lawyers employed by Jeff Bezos than engineers.

This lawsuit will go nowhere and it is sad that such a supposedly tech savvy crowd wants to bring out the pitchforks so fast. But I guess since Heroku has a lot of cash they are now the enemy since they've made it and they should be taken down.
See also "100x100," a collection of 10 ft by 10 ft Hong Kong apartments photographed by Michael Wolf. The use of space in some of these is just amazing.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.404783143152.173014...
He's in a highly competitive market. He needs differentiation. Other than the impression he can make upon people who have ALREADY tasted his food, the words on his website are one of his key chances at differentiation.
"you'll get a free crappy game"

Well, yay for DRM all the way.
Three-Body Gallery
Things don't scale that easily. I'm guessing you're not a programmer.

Question: If it takes 1 server to handle 1,000 clients, how many servers does it take to handle 1,000,000 clients?

Answer: Between 1 and infinity. It might not even be physically possible to serve 1,000,000 clients, depending on the application.
Multi still isn't better than D2, one year later. I don't think expectations were that high. I think they actually sold less than planned and went into low-activity maintenance mode after a few month. Not buying again from them. Game may sucks or not, but empty promises, I can't give money for that.
Really surprising to see such photos after watching some ancient footage (early 1990s) of the Kowloon Walled City recently. I'd thought that there were no more tiny living spaces.
I'm willing to guess that the JVM source is an order of magnitude larger than any JS interpreter or Flash interpreter (I'd be interested in being corrected if wrong). The number of security holes is proportional to the trusted code size.

I thought that Java had a pretty good record until recently. As I wrote in a previous comment, what may have happened is that Windows and Flash and other ubiquitous client software really cleaned up their act in the last few years. So hackers started going for the JVM and Adobe Reader as vectors. The JVM wasn't under as much scrutiny when Windows was wide open, although that was quite a few years ago.

I wouldn't rule out other possible reasons either, e.g. the fact that there may have been a huge brain drain in JVM talent after the Oracle acquisition. Or a failure of software engineering processes after a re-org.

I agree that closed source software doesn't have a great security track record... but I think there are some other factors at play here, some of which I'm speculating on.
I would just like to point out that, in the wake of the Flat UI DMCA fiasco, talking about things like this publicly was the recommended course of action, as opposed to some sort of pathetic legal action. So that's what Patrick did. He didn't himself seem to make that big a deal of it. So what are you complaining about (those of you who are complaining)?
...unless you define 'competent' correctly.
Well said. I would up vote multiple times if I could.

The world needs more business leaders with that kind of humble, thoughtful, and down-to-earth attitude and approach.

Compare PayPal's typically corporate cult of ego statement: "Under David's leadership..."
I completely agree. Some interesting factoids:

1. Arch already has Wayland in its official repositories.

2. KDE already has preliminary support

3. Intel is driving Wayland development, so integrated cards will likely work without a hitch

4. Systemd was another large change with lots of FUD, and it's already default in high-profile distros (OpenSUSE, Fedora and soon RHEL 7). Even Canonical's on board.

This article is mostly FUD. I think we'll see a relatively stable KDE on Wayland this year. I doubt the Wayland team is that optimistic, but it's moving at an incredible pace.
5 reasons to reject the WebKit monoculture