skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a white natural born citizen not carrying more than $100 on a domestic flight from SEA to SFO, still suspected.

The weird part of it was after opting out the TSA thug asked if I wanted to go somewhere private for my government-blessed groping. They must have had the cattle prods and waterboards ready.

In all seriousness, if we want the TSA to remain in any way accountable we need to opt-out, and to do it in public with other fellow travelers watching, since there is no telling what happens when they pull you aside in a room for an "enhanced pat down".

There is a perverse irony to the whole thing though, if a man decides to sit alone in a park, say to get some coding done outside in the sun this automatically means that you are a pedo and the soccer moms will not hesitate to call the police on you. On the other hand you have actual TSA agents groping kids all the time at the airport (http://articles.philly.com/2011-04-23/news/29466700_1_tsa-sp...). They get to wear a uniform and stick their hands down people's pants every goddamn day. Is this what freedom looks like?
Mozilla’s Firefox OS Gives The Open Web Top Billing On Mobile
>Was there prior research to suggest this, or were they just taking a bit of artistic license to add some mysticism?

Research on brainwave entrainment and biofeedback.

They've done similar things with EEG machines, binaural beats, electric stimulation, etc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment
I think you mean Azure competes with AWS.
Maybe, but here's the thing. Splitting them like that might help the already rich ones (Windows and Office), while it would hurt the struggling ones (Xbox, Bing, Surface).

I actually don't know how Xbox is doing financially on its own these days, but I doubt it's extremely profitable and has a lot of cash on its own. The consoles usually make the money back over certain period of time from games. Could Xbox survive on its own in that scenario?

As for Bing - it's still losing billions of dollars a year last I checked. So are the Surface tablets, and Skype - well Microsoft paid over $8 billion for Skype, and they're not going to get that money back anytime soon. Hotmail, despite many registered accounts, was pretty dead, and I think only some transitioned to Outlook.com.
Can it really be repealed by the Spanish government if they're required to enact such a law as a result of an EU Directive? They could take the UK's approach of turning a blind eye, but I tend to feel it's wrong for a country to pick and choose which laws to enforce.
I integrated Atmosphere into a Dropwizard-based project (not on GitHub yet, hoping to get it out there in a week or two -- look for Cyranix/mi5 if interested). Although I did get it to work, it wasn't a smooth experience. There seem to be many ways of accomplishing the same thing which are just different enough to trip you up in subtle ways (at least if you're only a moderately experienced dev like myself), and the documentation is a bit of a mess (scattered, not well translated from French, etc. -- not entirely, but enough to be a pain). Any JavaScript devs interested in this sort of tech could make a much-appreciated contribution to the project by making a client-side script that doesn't depend on jQuery.
* a name that makes it impossible to have an intelligent conversation around

why? Is the word orgasm so scary to you?
I was wandering the same and came to conclusion that these security measures are not for our safety but the safety of our ruling elite. How often can you see a prime minister in a subway? But they often take commercial flights. And they never face such humiliating checks as we do.
P.S Is there anybody who can explain me why 5x100ml bottles are safer than one 0.5l?
The Product Manager Handbook
We've had a long time to prove the disaster that is users controlling updates. The majority of people are far and away better off having automatic updates. It's also one of the big selling points of the devices though so I don't think it should catch anyone by surprise. You're free to install another OS on your device though (which is a good sign the device is yours).
A Fizz Buzz implementation.
Comments like yours make my blood boil.

> flying is a privilege, not a right

Is taking a train a privilege, not a right? Driving? A bus? Would you be okay with TSA-like screening procedures before any such sort of transportation? What makes flying so special? People have bombed trains, cars, busses, etc before too.

> "The terrorists have won" because you had to go through a machine? I think it's time for the OP to step back, take a hard look at their life and wonder if they have their priorities straight.

Maybe because our government has taught the citizenry that it's okay to be pre-emptively searched on planes, or stopped and frisked (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_stop-and-frisk_pr...), or other such things. Meanwhile, the rent-a-cops operating these machines are basically given free reign to do whatever power tripping they want, because one wrong move can have you finding yourself detained for a while.
Your paper is interesting. Can you share a link to a video of your simulator in action? Better, is the code still live? It appears that you allowed the user to switch modes between global commands and "attract/repulse". What modes did the users prefer?

The term "assistive swarming" is intriguing. In future work, we'd like to simulate interacting with an intelligent swarm, perhaps a group of Boids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids). Our current work is inspired by micro/nano setups by colleagues here at Rice, and RPI, Drexel, and Harvard -- see the videos page for an overview: http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com/videos
There's no clinical trial you could possibly do to show that these machines are "safe" in the medical sense (i.e., that the benefits to human subjects outweigh the harm). You could expose animals to the same doses of radiation and see what happens. This has been done for the general types of radiation (with X-rays animals contract cancers and die at sufficiently high power, with millimeter waves there's substantially less evidence for damage), but AFAIK not with the machines themselves.

The biggest danger may not come from chronic exposure, but from an acute failure of the machine or mistake made by the operator, the probability of which could not be determined in a study anyway. (Therac-25 delivered overdoses of radiation to several patients due to a software bug; Cedars-Sinai recently reported that they had accidentally delivered dozens of CT patients doses several times higher than normal; patients get killed by oxygen tanks and other objects sucked into the magnetic fields of MRIs with startling frequency.)

In any case, I think the danger posed by millimeter wave systems is significantly less than that of backscatter machines. There are plenty of studies to show that microwaves don't cause cancer, and it's hard to imagine a malfunctioning machine delivering something harmful.
He can be belligerent and totally unsympathetic to most people in any sort of customer or human facing role. He's a better tipper now than he used to be, but can still be rude to harried waitstaff (i.e., when it's clear they have a lot of customers to handle he would get annoyed at having to wait for a refill). He dislikes companies/businesses charging him more than he thinks things are worth, while simultaneously being one of the strongest free-market capitalist supporters in my social circle. And he'll let their employees know he's upset. The irony is apparently lost on him.

With the TSA he likes to derail the process (unless he's short on time). Not just asking for a pat down rather than the scanner (if I gave myself more time at the airport I'd likely do the same), but to the point of abusing the worker rather than making the system itself slow down. Also, he has little regard for those behind him in line, and doesn't mind delaying them a few minutes so he can feel better about himself.

As I haven't spent much time with him (physically parted ways after college) the past few years I can't really recall any more specific incidents, but it was a reason that, in college, it took us about 6 months to become friends. I thought he was a jerk, and I was right, he just happens to be a good friend as well.
Thus proving the point.
There's a big difference between being compelled by the laws of nature and being forced by the bidding of another man.
Educating people like you!

If I can knock some sense into people like you, you might be more productive and create something that I might benefit from.
Yes, that's an ill-formed string. As I wrote, there's a long ways to go from a "sequence of valid code units" to "a valid string."

But what I wrote is nevertheless correct, and matters. See for example the special requirements on UTF-8 processing in D93:

If the converter encounters an ill-formed UTF-8
code unit sequence...it must not consume the
successor bytes as part of the ill-formed
subsequence whenever those successor bytes
themselves constitute part of a well-formed UTF-8
code unit subsequence....For a UTF-8 conversion
process to consume valid successor bytes is not
only non-conformant, but also leaves the converter
open to security exploits."

"Ill-formed code unit sequence" is not possible with UTF-16. That's an advantage. Also note the last line: the existence of ill-formed code units has security implications that are not present with UTF-16.

To be fair, UTF-16 has its own unique issues too, like endianness.
>The right answer to all of your questions is, "it depends". For example, a society where everyone is completely free but dies at the age of 5 is not really worth living in, nor is a society where everyone lives to 100 as a slave. Thus there is no one answer to "Is life more important than liberty?"

I think you're missing the point.

The followup question to "It depends" is "On what?" The answer to that question is where commonality begins to form. We might not agree on the exchange rate between freedom and life expectancy, but we will likely agree that there is one.

It reminds me of an old joke:

A man asks a woman if she'd sleep with him for a million dollars. She looks him up and down, smiles, and says "sure." He then asks her if she'd do it for a dollar. She slaps him, asking what sort of girl he thinks she is. He replies she already told him what sort of girl she is and now they're just haggling.
The original Galaxy S had the same resolution as S2 - 800x480. It was available in June 2010.

But it was also not the first. The Nexus One/HTC Desire had also 800x480 resolution - 6 months before iPhone 4. Also, the original Motorola Droid - available since November 2009 - had 854x480 resolution.
> Used the Pylons (Django was too slow), a Python based framework, from the start

This isn't quite right. It was web.py at the beginning. They have started using Pylons after Conde Nast acquisition.
Wadhwa mostly fails to address that Microsoft (prior to a couple of weeks ago) was already "broken" up and organized by business groups (or customer segments) in much the same way he is proposing (Xbox = IEB, Online Services = Bing, Windows = Windows, Office = Office, etc).

I realize he is proposing an entire break-up, but I would have liked it if he had approached the problem providing the context of the difference between his proposed plan and the business unit separation. Afterall, Microsoft is famous for teams fighting each other for power and resources and meanwhile still requiring cooperation.
I think you've got the right idea. The 'facts' of what-counters-what don't matter too much; it's the feedback mechanism that matters. When you see Player 2 do X, you use that info to play the best Y. Good scouting decreases this feedback timing, and the player that iterates better will, given enough time, come out on top.

In SC2, there's a spectrum of usefulness to information. Finding a proxy pylon is hard, but screams intention. Scouting early double gas is easy, perhaps, but is more clouded. In chess, all the positions of the pieces are obvious (no concept of scouting), but all the information is clouded beneath layers of moves-after-moves. A very powerful attack can be hidden in plain sight.

In this more general context of iterative gathering & analyzing of information in pursuit of a victory condition, I can see how it applies. The fact that the general mechanism (however it works, exactly) can be exercised through a specific game is still intriguing.
It was intentionally silly and exaggerated, because every "if you're established you can no longer take risks" claim is predicated on the idea that the only outcome of that risky venture is full success, or complete failure that leads to broken families and a drunken ex-developer living under a bridge.

Yet often people just...get a job again (such as in this story). Exactly as the non-established person does. It really isn't that much of a difference. Life goes on.
If you're making a point about how low a number is, you need to base it on an upper bound. 90 is certainly high, especially to assume you'll maintain your current typing speed, but you have to shoot high if you're saying "You only have this much left to type".
I'm impressed by how well received it was, right off the bat. The first couple responses include actual offers of help! Maybe it's just because there are so many new projects posted here regularly but it seems rare to see that mix of humbleness and enthusiasm present in the thread.
You're right. This is an important consideration.

A policy that covers your exact occupation is the best. It's easier to get when it's an occupation underwriters really understand. For instance a surgeon can easily get an occupation-specific policy because it would be easy to determine that damage to her hands would cause her to lose her income producing work.

It's harder to get a similar policy for say, an entrepreneur. What part of our body allows us to do what we do?

Thus, most startups that get a policy have to get the 2nd type--if you can work elsewhere after an injury, you don't qualify. There's one addendum, however, that is still crucial. You can get a policy that requires the new job have a similar income level. Thus, if you were only able to do work at a 70% decrease in salary, the policy would be triggered and you'd receive your benefit.
Long Shadows: Tutorial, Resources, Examples and Videos
But "compare to completely unrelated thing" is also a logical fallacy.
This software has not really been discussed on HN. It's an interesting lightweight compromise between threading and an event-based approach to high concurrency servers.
Nokia tablet (Sirius) preview
#knockers
On the other hand, the big banks are creating a market opportunity for retail banking services that do not profit from fees. I chose to work at Simple [1] in part because I believe competition in this space will improve the industry as a whole.

The best weapon against predatory banking is giving customers the tools to understand their own finances. Because fees comprise an ever-growing portion of profits, it is not in the big banks' interest to provide these tools, thus they will always be a poorer experience than the services that do.

[1] https://simple.com
There is a lot to learn about editorial independence in newspapers. While they aren't obliged to announce that kind of influence, I would imagine that a lot of Washington Post writers/editors would speak out if Bezos dictated the content of this post.

The Washington Post is not PandoDaily.
I think there's some value in the goal of having a common interface and set of features across desktop, mobile, xbox, server. People would like that. Microsoft haven't achieved that there yet but it's still a worthy goal. I think slimming down and refocusing might be more effective than a massive break-up.
Maybe have a common pool of resources from which they draw from. That would force the "weaker" companies to compete more or pivot to create better products.
5 Key Ingredient On How To Become A Better Blogger | Onenaija Blog
StoryApp Launches in App Store
I feel like I've just seen the bigbang ...
It baffles me how few people have disability insurance. What would you do if injured your hands and could never type again? What would your family do? Everyone should have disability insurance -- it should be a fundamental part of your financial life.
Citing violent crime statistics as proof of a "cultural problem" without any regressors is not particularly helpful. What are the relevant demography-adjusted statistics? There are certainly some (edit: sub-)cultural aspects, but every culture has some aspects of the negative traits you cite (e.g. most people tend to disdain out-group achievement). These traits are often drastically accentuated by poverty. In the case of black Americans, doubly so by the compounding effects of high urbanization levels.
I just left an employer who had 100% salary continuance insurance in place.

Maybe mine is the minority view, but I found it a horrendous waste. When I left the employer it offered to have my portion of the policy transferred to me personally so that I could "continue to enjoy the benefits". I didn't even bother responding (despite leaving on otherwise very good terms).

While I work, I expect to be remunerated. But I don't allow myself the hubris to expect that remuneration should continue in perpetuity. If I decide not to work, or am unable to work, I would prefer to adjust my circumstances to accommodate that fact, rather than continue to pretend otherwise.
Try keyhero.com.
Yes that was me. I hope Coursera has not blocked it somehow...I think the dgorissen implementation is based on the other one, so not surprising the other one doesn't work either.
Argggggh! Damn You!

Happy Birthday :)
I really enjoyed and appreciated this article. So many harsh comments! Yes, what he did was foolish, but thank god for foolishness. And these things are easier to see from outside and after the fact than when you're following a dream.

I've had a lifelong dream of building my own game, and I'll be sad if I die without trying. I'm way less prepared than the author. I've done web dev for 15 years. My last game was an ASCII roguelike in GW BASIC. I'm almost done reading Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory, and building my own engine sounds like a blast---but also like a 20 year project. Fortunately my dream game is more like an old 2-D Zelda 1 or 3. Still, it's tempting to build even that with 3-D techniques. . . .

The big lesson I'd apply to myself is to build something modest. That seems even more true given my lack of experience, although I'm not sure I'll listen.

I guess the difference between the author and myself is that I fortunately don't have the expertise to think of game making as anything other than a creative hobby.
When using slaves, anything is possible.
OP here. I'm not an expert, but $10 per month sounds too low. Check the policy and make sure it covers your employees against disabilities that still allow them to work minimum-wage jobs.

Usually the income-parity clause costs extra.
A comment from a Peruvian friend of mine, who I passed the article onto:

"This is incredibly misleading. There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners. The vast majority of people were a form of slave and trapped in basically a completely rigorous caste system. They were a mix of India and NK, ruled by a Mao "god" Inca who had total control of everything. The article gets right that people had to pay tax as labor but in some cases also as a percentage of the food they gathered, and a non-trivial percentage was stored in "tambos" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure)) to support the military and state-controlled trading routes.

OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people and creating basically what amounts of royal satraps in the new world from which to extract cheap/free labor and tons of gold and other wealth.

That said, the Incas were also primitive--no real written language and barely a minimum system for tracking amounts and numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu).

I took 12 years of Peruvian history and it wasn't until recently that I realized how utterly terrible the Incas were. They were proto Marxists."
The situation with the Incas was that, without the force coordination necessary to conduct agriculture in the mountains, everyone would die. Where does that fall on the nature versus man spectrum?
You asked a question. I gave you an answer. If you have a problem with that, try breathing into a paper bag for a while and see if that helps you calm down.

This technology could be plausibly misused for security purposes, and then perverted for political purposes, just like previous security technologies/bureaucracies have.
That shouldn't make you upset at the people pointing it out. Instead, direct your outrage at the portions of government that have previously done exactly this sort of thing.
> You don't appear to know very much about either science as practiced, or the current state of psychological research.

False, I am very familiar with the current state of psychological research, and it would be more productive for you to address the topic.

> Just the idea that there is no room in science for making, repeating and reporting observations is wrong.

Yes, and therefore it's a good thing that I never said this anywhere, only you did. What I do say is that observations can only be a preliminary to science. Science requires us to propose a theory about those observations, a theory that can be empirically tested and potentially falsified, a theory that can produce consensus between different workers in the field.

If we instead limit ourselves to observations and never try to craft a theory, we can accept any correlation as significant and call it science -- for example, I can shake a dried gourd over a cold sufferer and the cold will eventually go away. Have I cured the cold? Is that science?

Much of modern psychological research is on a par with shaking a dried gourd over a cold sufferer and calling the outcome significant. For example, recent meta-analyses show that talk therapies are indistinguishable from each other and from the placebo effect. Based on current studies, no one can say that talk therapy is an example of the placebo effect, only that it's indistinguishable from it.

Here is the conclusion of a recent psychology scandal:

http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...

Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."

> Also, have you read the paper in question ...

Of course. No theory, no science. Are you prepared to judge astrology to be a pseudoscience without reading every paper that's been published on the topic?
Done a lot of research on backdoored hardware?
"Fat" in which way? Traffic?
Same to you, my friend. Although hpaavola above is stealing some of our joy :)
> This is exactly my point: lots of code also treats utf-8 as if it were ASCII.

Two things to this:

- In many cases this is an entirely non-destructive mistake to make. This is an advantage of utf-8, that intermediaries that only care about ascii characters (even in the presence of extended characters) can work with it.

- It will become readily apparent that you've got a problem on the first attempt to port your app to any language with a non-ascii script. With UTF-16 it only becomes apparent when you go beyond the BMP.
I do like the concept, and it makes an important point, but...

Please change the text or background colors for higher contrast. I'm young, with semi-decent eyes, and white-on-light-blue and brown-on-tan are difficult to read.
The Decline of E-Empires (Paul Krugman)