skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Of five cars that I looked up, three cars turned up nothing, but I found data on the other two.

"One car had a single sighting: it was parked on Manhattan’s Upper West Side at 12:40 in the morning last December."

This squares with my use of databases sold to lawyers, doing look-ups on myself and close family members. The databases are much less impressive in their power than salesmen suggest. I'm not worried about this. I won't be worried about this, and eventually when most cars are self-driving and many cars are paid for by the use and ridden by many different passengers, license plate recognition will be less informative than ever.

To be sure, aggregating a whole lot of data can add up in its impact. MIT has developed a tool with which you can analyze all of your own Gmail metadata

https://immersion.media.mit.edu/

(I learned about this from a submission to HN from ColinWright, which alas received little discussion here), and I found out from that tool that my use of email is more business-related than I realized: all of the top seven "collaborators" (that program's term) that I have are actual work colleagues, as well as personal friends. A megabyte here, a megabyte there, and pretty soon all the data turn into information. But really the victims here often enough will be the chump clients who pay for license plate record searches and don't find out anything worthwhile.
Some of the products tested on Mythbusters were able to partially obscure the plates. The issue was that it was easy to find the full plate from a partial when you have the DMV database behind you (and a photo which gives you things like color, make and model). Seems like obscuring might be enough to make this a non-starter for private companies though.
It's probably a worthwhile recruiting venue, even if they just get one every year or two.
Ones that present data in order, like chronologically, and don't auto-scroll, leaving manual control to the user, work okay. Like "related products" on some websites, where the most relevant ones are first, but you might find something more interesting to you if you click a few pages in.
Literally, with like paintball guns or some other form of humiliation.
The idea of the chromebook is to move away from native apps that run on your computer to cloud apps where your computer serves as mainly a front end to google's datacenter.
There is nothing to mark them as feds, payments are in cash and everyone is in plain clothes. I think this will make very little difference to who attends.

It is also worth mentioning that Black Hat (the two days preceding DEF CON) has reportedly seen a drop in registrations due to lack of funding for federal employees to attend (I have no source for this other than industry rumor). There was a suggestion that some would still attend DEF CON and save on the registration cost for Black Hat, but many were planning to stay away anyway.

I feel that this is more public relations than anything else, the feds will still be there but DEF CON can present the image of being underground hackers fighting "the man". Some of the smartest people that I have met at these sort of events work for governments around the world, either directly or through private companies.

The reason the lines have blurred between the two groups over the past decade is as much to do with money as it is to do with diplomacy or a shared enemy. I think that this statement goes against one of the core values of DEF CON: that everyone is welcome, regardless of background or ability.
There is so much opportunity in medicine right now for automation and quality improvement through good software. You're in a great position!
Like the XML-based formats that MS Office has used as its default for saving documents since 2007?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
Google Glass: will they be a game changer for travelers?
Ziphius: The Aquatic Drone
"low ranking analysts whose job at the conferences are to assess the material presented and report back."

And maybe those people should go home and rethink their lives.
You're example is where a newbie gets matched with 9 other experienced players, this scenario is no fun in ANY 5v5 team game. Now imagine the scenario where the newbie gets to play with other newbies, the game is more fair and fun. The problem you're describing is the problem of matchmaking, and not a problem of game design.
You do realize that the lifting of the ban on general solicitation does not mean that startups and small businesses will simply be able to advertise at their leisure, right? These are still Reg D offerings, which require paperwork, and under the new rules, companies that are going to be advertising publicly will need to file their Form D with the SEC 15 days before the offering. Interested investors will also need to be vetted to ensure that they're qualified to participate.

You don't put together a Reg D offering without competent legal counsel, and competent legal counsel costs money. So before you and your buddies can even test the fundraising waters through general solicitation, you'll have to make an investment of your own and that could easily run into the five figures.
You may very well be right. The story certainly has the air of one of the fetishistic tales told about him following his death.
Zynga Dethroned As The King Of Facebook Games
To your last point, my gmail reflected the same thing, but I think the cause is that immersion seems to analyze the number of emails for each person.

To get something small done for work purposes requires 10 emails. For personal stuff, it seems to require just a few.
You're mistaken if you think I'm saying I am. I'm telling you what other people hear when you say 'theory'.

Feel free to think whatever you'd like, but this is what people will be thinking of when you say 'theory'.
Ask HN: Open gmail, see image blocked.... hey wait
Lastpass ticket confirmation, images blocked but they're not really... So how is this happening?

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/6353/wqo.png
Nadezhda Popova, one of the “Night Witches” bomber pilots, has died aged 91
My sites are gone too! WTF?
Why Twitter Finally Killed The “Auto Follow” For Good
hey derek, Leo here -- I'm CTO at kivo. So, although the PowerPoint COM API is super old and buggy, the OpenXML standard which has been around since Office 2007 is actually pretty advanced. This means that you can realistically diff two versions of a file and extract and analyze the changes. The C# wrapper for this is also good (the hard bit is actually serializing the slide from COM -> OpenXML in memory). We would never expect our users to read the XML!
Can you show this to be the case, or should I just take your word for it that bad investments don't have any negative impact on society?
Are we supposed to start rewarding these institutions for being capable of "uncovering" million dollar technology projects that are wasteful and pointless? The fact it happened in the first place is bad enough.
Yes, but you can plug monitors, a keyboard and mouse into a laptop just as well.
I think that with the new consoles we'll see a new push in graphics performance over the next few years which will drive upgrades in PC gamers. The optimisation tricks which can be achieved on console mean that spec-for-spec, a much more powerful PC will be required to run current gen console games in the next few years (just like this generation). The money is going to be in the gamers, and I would expect to see Intel make a push there (AMD is already in the market with their ATI purchase).

But I agree, for every other computer user, a PC they bough 5 years ago is most likely still completely fine, unlike those from the 90s and early 2000s, where after 3 years they frequently became near-unusable. A great development as a result of the slowdown of the spec race is the push for smaller/lighter/better battery life which is occurring - new laptops have near hassle-free portability while still being fully functional PCs.
Because the RIAA isn't as crazy as the MPAA
also, is this common? I haven't seen this until now.
It is a human condition to have endless wants. The genius of the American experiment was that the Founders understood this, and created institutional checks on the size and power of government-- after all, governments are made up of people. The problem is that these institutional checks are crumbling under the twin weight of the military industrial complex and the entitlement state.
I think that a "PC" is a sort of weird limbo between a focused device like a kindle or iphone and a truly general device.

The way that I use my PC is mainly as a host for virtual machines, be they JVM or vagrant instances etc. I don't really want to have an "operating system" so much as I want a hypervisor and a windowing environment to tie everything together.

It would be great to have a system where I can just slot in arbitrary stuff, for example: If I want to develop mobile applications I'd like to be able to just pop an ARM system into my case via a PCI card or something and just have certain software execute on that.

Maybe if I want to edit video, I'd like to be able to rent a bunch of high end CPUs for a weekend and just slide them in there and then take them out and return when I'm done.

This is sort of what I hoped the new Mac Pro would be, but they seemed to go in the opposite direction.
Yes. The largest war machine the world has ever seen should definitely be made more efficient. </sarcasm>
Google Brings Rich Chrome Notifications to Windows, OS X
hey ludoo - cheers for the reply; my name is Leo and I'm CTO @ kivo. Re for a version for writers, would this entail MS Word? We are planning to ship our Word version in the near future and it would be great to get your feedback on what you would like this to look like (leo@kivo.com). All Office files post-2007 actually do have the open format of OpenXML behind them, so we can totally see this being a reality.
It's definitely plausible. Slashed travel and conference budgets have been a major result of the sequester.
The real reason generating lift with large wings is better is that it's much more efficient to generate a force by accelerating a large volume of fluid a small amount, than vice versa as with a turbine engine. This is why helicopters exist at all, because of the efficiency of large rotors (wings). Ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VTOL_DiscLoad-LiftEfficien... (note log scale).
Are they attachments?
That is why you have Smite! ( www.smitegame.com )

It's a third person, heavily skill shot based MOBA. So no you don't have to be pro to learn how to play. The skills rollover from other games (especially WoW), so you don't really have to relearn basic mechanics. And new players are matched with all new players (so besides from smurfs), you should have a relatively easy time.
About $400 Is The Price Of Your Co-Workers' Love ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community
So I assume Dark Tangent won't attend his own con? Jeff Moss sits on the Homeland Security Advisory Board and is the CSO of ICANN.[1] If that's not "the man", I don't know what is.

[1] http://www.dhs.gov/homeland-security-advisory-council-member...
That's astronomical compared to a typical cyber-security salary, even at the higher levels.
This seems less malicious than, say, installing Ask toolbars.
That's the question, isn't it? LE uses facial recognition to scan crowds. Now cars are tracked, not using GPS, an observing officer, or a member of the public (who may need to report a crime), but by snarfing video of all the license plates with a geolocated camera, timestamping and OCRing them, and storing the resulting information.

The next thing that pops into my head is the fingerprint. Not because it's "easy" to get, but you also have no reasonable expectation of privacy with them.

Imagine the embarrassment when "no two fingerprints are alike" is finally disproven as some poor bastard is arrested and charged with a crime committed by another person solely on the basis of his thumbprint.
Inline if so, I have no option to download or retrieve.
Nope, bullshit. http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/samsung.asp
"But there has never been any expectation of privacy when in public."

There's been an assumption about "just another face in the crowd" pseudo-privacy though.

"Should there be some change in the law now forbidding collecting licence plate data because it is easier to do en-masse?"

Yeah, I think there should. There's a fundamental difference between law enforcement (or even commercial businesses) being able to target specific people or locations to do time-limited licence plate collection - and this new "record everything and archive it all forever" surveillance capability.

I don't claim to "know for sure that everybody considers it wrong", but I do claim that so far nobody has asked if I think it's OK. There are examples of industries that have tight regulation over the privacy-relevant data they collect and store (medical, financial, childcare are a few I've bumped into) - we should at least have the discussion about whether people involved in widespread collection of vehicle location/time data should have HIPPA/PCI type regulation of that practice, and some well known (and enforced) repercussions for mis-using that data.
CSS3 special effect for your images, look ma, no javascipt
iamtherockstar you are hellbanned. Your comment appears as dead. I tell you because you made an informative comment. Looks like it happened about a month ago.
It may affect their ability to recruit.
If the thousands of hours came from time that could otherwise be billable. If you're the sort of person that's never going to sell your Saturday, maybe not.
> Modern, latest-generation fighter aircraft have a TWR somewhere between 0.75 and 1.15. If you pointed them upwards, they will barely be able to lift off the ground (if their TWR is above 1.0 at all), much less gain enough speed to generate lift with their wings.

Taking off horizontally allows you to get lift "for free" with the wings.

Well, more specifically, you are using the atmosphere as reaction mass. Wings direct air down. It's not free lift, it's free reaction mass.

I'm not saying that you should eliminate catapult launches. But a ship large enough to have catapults can still be a whole lot smaller than a modern US Navy aircraft carrier. Any aircraft that can land vertically will also be able to take off vertically. (Though with less efficiency when fully loaded, if at all.)

There's a huge amount to be gained by being able to stage aircraft from much smaller ships. How about building submarines a bit larger than the old Soviet Typhoons, and having aircraft on those? Short of that, how about the ability to build squadrons of multiple redundant cruiser-sized carriers?

Perhaps such schemes would be more valuable potential opponents of the US, than they would be to the US.

Yes, on the whole, the system will be less fuel efficient than horizontal take off and landing.
This is so cool. Good idea, I am sure people will like it!

<rant>I wished NeoCitites mentions to ignore W3Schools, mention W3Fools and the WebPlatform.org project as the starting point.</rant>
It's not about being offended. It's about theft and corruption. All these agencies are taking away our income and squandering it through incompetence, cronyism, and worthless spy programs and military adventurism. If the "computer hackers" were stealing 30% our collective income and wasting it I'd be very angry about them too.
...or they will pass it only so they can look both fabulous and honest but a signing statement or a secret executive order from the executive branch will declare that it won't be enforced.
They are politely discouraged from attending. I imagine that a person who says "I'm a fed" while buying a badge would not be issued one, but Defcon has no way to avoid issuing badges to feds who don't disclose their status.
> The reason you don't use tail sitters is because they have much less payload capacity.

I wasn't thinking of abandoning horizontal flight entirely. Being able to land a drone aircraft after it has spent its munitions and fuel should be handy.
I'd find stories about this interesting too.

I took a couple of weeks to camp by a lake and attempt to learn kitesurfing, while working in the evenings. In the test run with my solar panel at home, everything worked well - charge batteries during the day, work at night with a dim screen.

In the wild I soon found that mobile internet power usage goes up dramatically if you're a long way away from the mobile tower, it's hard to work without a decent seat (I took my motorcycle, so didn't have a car to sit in), and the light was just too bright in the days/evenings.

Next time I'm going to try with a van =D.

Also, to answer a couple of the other questions:

- Sand wasn't generally a problem for me, except I blew up my fancy 240/12V laptop power adaptor when some wet grit got into the connectors.
- Sunlight was only really a problem in regards to battery power; screen brightness is a big contribution to power usage, so there's a trade off.
The mainstream news reported on this: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-li...
We do the same thing, almost word for word. And yes, it has worked very well for us too.
A curious aspect is that the person who wrote this message (Jeff Moss) is actually a fed himself. Does he plan to exclude himself from the conference?
Ostracized by who? People in the media or regular working class folk who pay plenty but get little?

My parents both work and make money and the only real benefits that they have gotten as a result of trillions spent on war is that they'll continue to pay taxes for the rehabilitation of the soldiers whose bodies and lives have been destroyed.

They MIGHT collect on social security, etc but given that they're still at least 10 years from retirement, it's certainly nothing they can count on.
Meet Pitchfork's Ambitious New Film Site 'The Dissolve'
Run n times, compare results. The idea of the same bit flipping twice is fairly ludicrous. These n times could be on the same machine, or distributed and compared with paxos. Then back everything up a billion times. Safety is extremely hard to guarantee, so the closest approximations will be expensive.
I've seen it before, had the same question.
I believe because:

1. Lyrics are user generated content, UGC + DMCA Safe Harbor makes it easy for a site to keep operating, even if they have to keep taking some content down.

2. They have done a seemingly good job of getting major label rappers on board with the service, so maybe the labels actually get this this could be helping them make money.
I haven't bought a desktop in many years now, but I refreshed my laptop this past month after four years of service. The story is a little bit different but also points to a change in what drives the market.

The old one was a lower end machine of its era (Lenovo model 4446, Intel T4200, 2Gb stock) and clearly becoming too slow for some applications; higher-end video could not play at full speed, and streaming apps like Google Hangout were essentially non-functional. Add to it the fact that the battery was shot, the keyboard was dead, the fans were dying, and the CCFL backlighting occasionally flickered to half-brightness; there was a pretty good case for me to make the move before it stopped booting altogether.

While the new one(Lenovo model 20182, AMD A10, 6Gb stock) is definitely fast enough to do everything, including the majority of games, this aspect feels more like "pain relief" than "improvement" - the positive differences in upgrading are most visible in physical aspects of the package - screen brightness, build and weight, average heat output, keyboard and touchpad feel. Mostly better, although I dislike the touchpad - the multitouch is not as accurate as the older ones, even after disabling all the features.

And this is not a top-end laptop - it's a <$600 machine from late last year, purchased at $100 off as a refurb. The biggest bottleneck in its performance profile is the use of spinning disk storage(which, I should add, is more than I'm ever likely to use as long as I have it). And, I should reiterate - the performance problems of the previous one only came into play with some newer apps, mostly those that relied on GPU acceleration for video or 3D. To a lesser extent it had problems on CPU-hungry stuff(music production) as the fans gave out, but it was a very gradual degradation.

I think the most intriguing part of the new environment is in how it is informing how we write programs - a huge "style gap" has emerged between applications that can never get enough power, and those that can be unfathomably wasteful of power. For a lot of things, we can really say, "Given unlimited computational resources, how do we best solve this problem?" And the benefits of that thought process turn out to uncover new optimizations at the same time that they improve the code quality.
Interesting. I wonder what happened to Dennis Hwang, who started the whole doodle thing....
> There's a huge amount to be gained by being able to stage aircraft from much smaller ships.

These are called amphibious assault ships like the America and Tarawa classes. They can serve helicopters and V/STOL fixed-wing aircraft. No catapults.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America-class_amphibious_assaul...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Saipan_LHA-2_amphibiou...
Explanation of the Asiana SF crash by a former UAL captain
Glad to have you! While real-life might keep me away from my precious DotA this evening, hopefully I'll catch you soon! Feel free to add me on steam, name is the same as HN username.
A good number of the Feds seem to enjoy self-identifying. Many will still attend, but the chemistry will definitely be different.
4-app business starting course on the Kindle
God help the poor schmucks left to run that booth this year.

(I've never been; I presume it is like most other conferences and you've got a slough of bored recruiters staffing info booths?)
Since binary protocols are easier to write tools for -- and difficult to us without them -- the tools get written.

Slowing down everyone forever just to ease telnet debugging is a misdirected optimization.
It's like when Egypt killed herds of pigs to mitigate the "swine flu"
I'm skeptical. For the past few years that I've been attending, defcon felt at some times like an instrument for fed recruiting while paying lip service to its original "underground" feel. DT's message almost felt like posturing to underline the latter rather than a sincere statement to curtail the former. I won't pretend that I'm a long time attendee (my first was DC16), so I would love to hear from some more seasoned attendees if my impression is correct.

Edit: the reason for that impression is that there is no declaration of a policy in his message (e.g. "feds are prohibited from soliciting employees at DC21"), rather a soft "time-out". With all due respect to DT, neither we nor the feds are in the third grade. Contrast this with their strict journalist policy and recall how that undercover reporter was outed and kicked out/chased away a few years ago.
Feds barred from DEF CON 21
First, no one has proven that Amazon was ever playing a true loss-leader strategy in ebooks, as opposed to losing money on bestsellers and making it up on the backlist.

Second, the existing DoJ settlement specifically allows publishers to police this. One of the terms the settling publishers are allowed to insist on is "no losing money on my catalog overall". That's more than enough to prevent truly anti-competitive discounting.

Third, yes, startups will have a hard time. But they had a hard time with the agency model too - which restricted their maneuvering room in significant ways. For instance, with a publisher-specified price you weren't just forbidden from charging "too little", you couldn't charge "too much" either. That means models where startups charged a premium for ebooks in order to support other services their target readers wanted were no longer possible.
Your move, Skynet.
Hmm... forgive my ignorance, but do they have the right to not issue a badge to anyone based on occupation? Sounds like discrimination. Hope they don't sue. ;)