skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I realize that Jason Kester believes the customs officials are offended when he gloats about his globetrotting, but you know, they probably aren't. The likelihood is that they hear stuff like this dozens of times a day from happy, excited people who have just come home from extended travels. "Oh, yeah," they think, "that's nice."

They're probably a little annoyed that Mr Kester has negligently not bothered to retain the first half of his ticket, failed to deep track of when he left or what countries he visited, and was too stupid to fill out the paperwork properly. They may even roll their eyes thinking he's a bit of a smelly pig not to have changed his shirt in over a month and wonder why he couldn't afford to have more than one.

I'm pretty sure they don't give a crap about his software company, or have any use for his product, either. They're probably pretty content in knowing they have the federally mandated power to just just glance over at the big guy off to the side and within three minutes, Mr Kester will be bent over a table in another room with a couple of rubberized fingers up his ass.

If Mr Kester thinks he's making customs officials feel small and unimportant because he has such an "exciting life", or that he's in some way "evening the score" by bragging about having been in the Far East for over a year, I must say that "this sort of treatment" is rather too subtle for thick-skinned customs staffers. They really couldn't care less where he's been or where he's going, as long as he isn't carrying any contraband.

If he really wanted to make them feel that they're so much worse off than he is, he'd have to add, "... unlike you, with your shitty, dead-end job, sitting in a little cube," or some similar direct comparison. But that would probably get him taken into the other room.

Finally, I'm willing to bet that the agents aren't regular readers of Hacker News, so they haven't seen Mr Kester's post. In this case, ignorance is bliss.
He didn't want to let his laptop out of his sight. I'd behave the same way given how important my work/data is to me.
Yes.

In general, I think it sucks. Sous vide salmon taste like canned salmon mixed with sushi salmon. Sous vide eggs are interesting, thus I have no problem with the technique of partially denaturing proteins.

Wood plank cooked salmon is very good. You get a nice smokey taste, but with soft skin. I agree, that it is not all about the crispy skin. Of course, a plank cooked salmon could be improved with a torch.
The article makes it very clear what "detained" vs. "not detained" means, in this context.

Mukerjee wasn't being detained, or kept, beyond the basic protocol of "unscreened passengers have to be escorted out of the terminal."

Mukerjee was free to leave, he simple had to leave the building entirely. He could not just leave and then step back into line, as was his intention, for numerous utterly sane reasons.
> However, this man set off a bomb detector. He set of the machine that detects bombs, repeatedly.

It detects a lot more than bombs. Over the machine's lifetime it will detect hundreds of thousands of things but almost certainly not any bombs.
Be very careful when cooking with plastics, there are dangers in the sous vide technique if the wrong kind of bag is used.

http://www.yourdoctorsorders.com/2012/12/sous-vide-and-plast...
I don't know Mr. Mukerjee personally but I've attended a few meetups where he gave a technical talk and he's always been very mild mannered and approachable. I just can't take this article seriously.

Sounds like the TSA/DHS is just trying to cover their asses. Shameful, no apology, no accountability.
But that's like saying, every time you are going through security in any airport, you are detained, because - you could not - if you so wanted, simply go back through security again. But you sort of opt-in for this when you fly; you know you are going to go through security and they won't let you leave unless you are cleared.

Edit: etchalon said it better.
Flying is not even remotely a right.

Any airline, any airpot, any business period can refuse to provide you service for any non-protected reason (race, gender, etc.).
Right at the end of the section you quoted states he would have been able to leave in such a case. He would have been allowed to leave the airport if he was willing to "be escorted out of the secure area (and usually the terminal)." The problem is that Mukerjee wanted to leave the interrogation area and immediately reenter the security line. Don't you think it would have been a little pointless for the TSA (ok, more pointless than the TSA usually is) to allow people who were stopped in security to simply restart the process again in hopes they wouldn't be stopped a second time?
Yes, clearly it's impossible for the actual event to have transpired differently than what the person said. No one ever exaggerates things or misrepresents them on the internet.
In their case, I would want to talk to some of the Arabs who deal with their security methods while traveling before declaring victory.
Just as good at teaching teaching as you are at teaching. Really enjoyed the read.
Bringing personal computing to the masses is pretty important.
Really cool giveaways (say a Tesla) seem to work for mass appeal on the other end of the double-end of this. And the press lap it up = free marketing. :)
"Free to leave" and "free to roam about the airport" are two vastly different things.

He was free to leave the airport, if escorted, as the article states quite clearly.
It's not a question of "going back through security", re-entrance has nothing to do with it. Going to a concert where they don't stamp your hand when you go through the door doesn't make you "detained".
>Making any decision with the potential to damae society and perpetuate class divisions

Nothing about this damages society or perpetuates class divisions and I haven't the slightest idea where you got that from. We aren't talking about arbitrarily discriminating against a group of people, but charging them slightly more because they cost slightly more. Or less. And for the most part, other factors like past history and the like will vastly outweigh that information, unless you actually believe it makes a difference. In which case why shouldn't it be used?

>Because human lives are more important than maximizing profit.

This is the stupidest expression going around the internet. Obviously human lives are more important than maximizing profit (well not so obviously, as almost everyone risks their own lives and often the lives of others for money and convenience. Driving cars for example.) This adds nothing to the conversation except to make it seem like the other side is against human lives which obviously aren't. No one has ever said "maximizing profit is more important than human lives."
Ah.. the old 218 characters in your path problem! Because of course!
> The most logical conclusion that I can come to is that a law enforcement agent searched Mukerjee's apartment and probably took the photo so that it could be scanned or for some other reason but accidentally forgot to put it back.

Have you ever considered that his landlord could have come into the apartment to make sure it had been cleaned up properly by the outgoing tenants (remember, he had moved in the night before his trip). If the landlord had found a poster that had fallen off the wall, he may have thought it was trash left by the other tenants and thrown it away. His landlord would not have had to break in.

I don't think it's impossible that law enforcement searched his apartment; but if they had, wouldn't his bags have been unpacked, rather than just one of them a little out of place?

But really, why doesn't he just ask his landlord or super? If the police came, they probably would have asked the landlord to let them in. I mentioned the landlord idea on the previous thread, but he never responded.
There's probably room for a startup, but not a very big one. Otherwise it will have to compress the images...
I second that frankacter. I use CloudFlare and even at its lowest option is a godsend. For those that are unaware it is a CDN with a number of great benefits:

1. It cuts your server bandwidth usage in half or better for flat content

2. It accelerates content delivery around the world

3. Provides protection

Disclosure: I am a VERY happy customer of their services
And all the other places they have jurisdiction over...It turns out there are more "ports" than just airports.
That sounds precisely like 'detention'. For instance, people are detained pending trial. In fact, imprisonment is also being free to leave after some defined event occurs - namely the completion of sentence. This third option is exactly the first option.
Is Benford's Law Summation Test Easier to Comprehend?
If you are particularly fidgety and have trouble concentrating, here is a thought experiment that might help:

Sit in a room with minutes to spare and task yourself this: to get to the market and back from your house. Maybe you shop for some fruits or something.

Step into your mental realm imagining every step you have to do in this task. Changing your clothes, tying your shoe lace, locking your door...everything. Not in frames but in a continuous motion as in a movie. It could be boring and I have felt the strong need to snap out of it. It still is difficult to power through, imagining every step and "looking" at the trees and shrubs along the way, picking up and inspecting an apple and putting it in the basket, paying for the goods, etc.

The whole thing is much more difficult than it sounds if you are the kind of person who gets restless easily. With practice, it gets better. Hopefully this helps you get in the productive zone. Good luck!
The US version of behavior detection isn't even in the same league. The Israelis have guys on the other side of cameras who monitor people from the point before they get out of their cars. Their system is so comprehensive that it would be cost-infeasible to implement here. It also sucks to end up on the wrong end of, over the years there have been a few reports by people who have had that unpleasant experience too.

The TSA version is a guy walking around the terminal engaging people in conversation and looking for things like "micro-expressions." (which are themselves a farce)
Applying Ockham's Razor here, surely the most probable option is that nothing actually happened, and for whatever reason he's simply misremembering it? Maybe he was going to put the poster up but didn't, maybe it fell off but he forgot about it, etc.

And if this seems implausible, consider -- how many times have you found yourself saying things like "I could have sworn I left the keys right there", and then finding them somewhere else? Is it more likely that you misremembered, or that they were moved by ninja-like FBI agents?
The descriptions are generally accurate, although very broad. The reticular formation is part of the brain stem, responsible for supporting breathing, cardiac function, and other somatic functions. The most relevant function is it's control of alertness and circadian rhythms.

The thalamus does function as a 'gatekeeper', although that's a bad term, the level to which the thalamus processes sensory input isn't fully understood / agreed upon. It's more like a transit hub connecting all the various parts of the brain and sensory tracts. It receives a lot of sensory fibers from the eyes, nose, ears, tongue.

For the parietal lobe, 'orienting you in time and space' just means that the parietal lobe creates a 3D grid system that helps in coordinating muscle movements. This system is supported by sensory input (auditory and visual). The parietal lobe will receive input from other lobes as well as the thalamus.

The frontal lobe is fairly well described, it basically handles higher level thinking, moral decisions, etc. It receives input from other lobes, the thalamus, and the brain stem.

An important take away is that these are really non-specific anatomical regions, the thalamus has ~30 distinct regions all handling different things. The frontal lobe has numerous gyri (regions) with different functions ranging from executive to motor skills.

What he's saying is pretty bs too. The logical conclusion is not that meditation specifically reduces brain activity, it's more that any lack of sensory stimulation will cause brain activity to slow down because less neurons are firing, this can be achieved with other techniques as well, simply staring at a wall will do the same thing.

I can post sources if you'd like but this information (about the compartments of the brain) is very well accepted by those in the medical sciences.
Getting Real http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ is a must read (it is also free)
> Unless you mean that he should have shared with Aditya Mukerjee his article/accusations/assumptions/whatever and allowed him to respond to or rebut it prior to publishing it.

That's typically how journalists try to do things, and it's a reasonable thing to do - that's why you almost always see "We attempted to reach X but received no response" or "X was contacted, but had no comment".

The standard is relaxed somewhat for blog posts, I suppose, but at the very least the thing to do would be to send the original author a link to the post as soon as it was posted, asking for comment, and include a note to that effect in the post.
Just starting using Montserrat, which is a free font that google supports. It's very similar to proxima-nova, which costs money and is used in a number of up and coming sites.
I'm glad to see this posted, if only to provide another perspective.

What's most interesting to me is this line:
"However on any given day, the TSA and Port Authority Police at JFK interact with passengers departing on non-stop flights to and from Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Lagos, Istanbul, Jeddah, Riyadh, Casablanca, Amman, Riga and Tashkent."

Mukerjee’s entire account, and virality, is predicated upon implied racism. And yet, the numbers stack against him pretty heavily. He was not the only "muslim-looking" person to go through the airport that day. Not even close.

He was not singled out just because he was Muslim-looking. He was singled out because, if for no other reason, the dude tested positive for explosives, and, according to both accounts, was clearly agitated about it.

Now, yes, there's a completely logical reason for that. Yes, he has every right to be agitated when falsely accused. But no, it is not unreasonable for any security personal anywhere to throw up massive red flags about a guy who TESTED POSITIVE FOR EXPLOSIVES and was acted incredibly suspicious. Mukerjee is literally case example of what agents are trained to look for.

Everyone is up in arms about this, not because Mukerjee is even remotely worth being up in arms about, but because people just like bashing the TSA, regardless of the facts.
Punjab govt official bribed by Microsoft for Rs1 bn deal: WSJ
Ah, yes, the downvote.

For pointing out the actual, you know, law.
There is ample evidence that local, county, and state law enforcement will trigger false positives to provide justification for searches. This behaviour by law enforcements makes me believe it plausible that the TSA and other "Agents" And "Officers" (I thought TSA were still neither) orchestrated all this to incite behavior they could use to justify further investigation.
Visual Studio (at least 2010 and 2012) also has this problem, actually. If the path (including filename) to your solution file is more than 218 characters, it refuses to work with it.

Welcome to 1995!
I have a hard time taking this article seriously. All the references to anonymous sources with important-sounding titles just smacks of an argument based on an appeal to authority.
It's MAX_PATH in Windows (== 260. There's a 32K Unicode-equivalent limit[1]). In Linux it's PATH_MAX, which is (very likely) 4096. That's a bigger number than 260, sure; but it's still a discrete one; instead of, say, ∞.

---

[1] 'To specify an extended-length path, use the "\\?\" prefix. For example, "\\?\D:\very long path".' http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...
That's basically exactly what Yuri Milner did. He decided that YCombinator did a great job picking startups and mentoring them, and so he would invest $150K into each one that went through the program, effectively freeriding off PG et al's mentorship & decision-making processes while contributing additional capital.

It unfortunately seems not to scale, as making $150K available to otherwise equivalent founders made for worse outcomes, and so the program's been scaled down to $80K or so.
So they have their procedures. But that raises the question - what is the point?

Let's assume the threat is real, someone with nefarious intent is not-detained, escorted to outside the building and left to his own devices. What is to stop him from simply turning around, re-entering the building and going through a different screening station?

I'm pretty sure the answer is "security theater."
Hear hear! This is a chemical detector, not a bomb detector.

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/225047/estimate-conf...
Oh come on.

> These events include Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag.

> However,multiple statements by TSA personnel reference Mr. Mukerjee repeatedly grabbing for his bag after he was told not to touch it.

> While false positives are not unusual for ETD, it is unusual a person and their items could fail so many times using different testing equipment.

What would you have done in a situation like this, when people's lives are at stake and it's your fault if something goes wrong and someone gets hurt?
Getting Started, The Path to Starting a Startup
Yes you can and I do.
It's complete doublespeak horseshit.

Either he did something illegal, at which point they would love to arrest him.

Or else what he did was legal, and they're spouting shite.

This is like when the media says "The suspect refused to cooperate with the law enforcement officer." Translation: The suspect asserted his rights.
Humans aren't purely rational utility optimizers, so markets can remain irrational for long periods.
hope you have read the article
http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/59021412512/dont-fly-...

TSA Officer “You can leave, but I’m keeping your bag.”

Aditha was speechless. My bag had both my work computer and my personal computer in it. The only way for me to get it back from him would be to snatch it back, at which point he could simply claim that I had assaulted him. I was trapped."

the issue faced by Adithya was not too different from what Miranda faced at UK airport last week

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23750289
You'll note that the government is inserted here, that Jetblue's determination that he couldn't fly was the result of government action. The government has a lot more rules about what it can't do to people than private business does.
I don't think you were downvoted because you were wrong. I like to think the HN community isn't that shallow.

Reasons for downvoting is usually due to posts containing no new information, excessive snark, flippant attitude etc... Users and moderators are extra touchy about avoiding the Reddit ambiance here. Basically if it doesn't contribute to the discussion, then it may be downvoted. That said, I didn't downvote you because what you said allowed me to add to the discussion.

I try to follow this when I vote : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084
You mention that marketing and promotion is not one of your strengths. I.presume none of the 5 cofounders is a marketing guy. Maybe getting a marketing guy on board can bring clarity to the process of bringing customers to your website. Having said that, its not necessary to having a marketing specialist. Make a list of all potential traffic sources - eg googladwords, facebook ads, stumble upon, ads on forums and test them all out to find which works for you.

If you can mention what your business is maybe others here can help you with a marketing strategy
Ask HN: what to do before find a co-founder?
I'm in the early stages of a start-up and while it would be great to have a co-founder, no one good in my immediate network was available/interested. I'm wondering how to best prioritize my time given that. My current thinking is to go full steam ahead with the normal start-up playbook...prototype as fast as possible, find customers to test with, iterate...and just use creative avenues to find leverage, like outsourced work. If I can get some traction, I figure the co-founder search may be much easier than it is now. But maybe i'm entirely misguided and should be spending more time looking now. Thoughts?
Microsoft discloses details on Xbox One and Kinect chips
I definitely felt a lot ennui about the state of things when I was about 4-5 years out of college (although to be fair I jumped out to join the dotcom boom).

I'm actually pretty stoked about the state of things right now though. Ubiquitous compute power through virtualization, big data (map reduce!), open cv, machine learning, SAT solvers, you name it. Now that we have cheap, plentiful and fast computational power all that stuff they dreamed about back in the 60s and 70s is now a reality.

CS as a discipline is nowhere near tapped out. Sure, we're probably not going to find too many more core algorithms in many of the various disciplines, but come on.. we don't even have true general purpose AI at this point!
A Strategy For Making Money with Niche websites
Quoting your comment, to which I was replying:

"Be careful about what you have on your laptop and memory card in your camera. They could search everything. The pictures of your kids taking a bath maybe interpreted in a different way by immigration officers. The same goes for buying fake goods or pirated DVDs while on holiday in Thailand. Many people have said that in America and Europe these items have been confiscated and they were given a big fine. It’s not worth it so don’t buy any fake goods while on holiday in Thailand. And don’t copy any pirated movies onto your laptop. And certainly don’t buy any porno DVDs here in Thailand to take home. You have been warned. Don’t take this lightly."

If your intent was to bait-and-switch from "trying to bring pirated DVDs from Thailand gets you in trouble" (obvious) into this, perhaps you should have been less obvious about it.
Which is completely reasonable.

But the fact their guidelines require his bag to be cleared before he could have it back does not mean he was "detained".

There are some pretty goddamn good reasons why the bag of a dude who tests positive for explosives has to be cleared before he's given it and allowed to run around an airport full of people.
I don't think that is the case. I think it is more likely that because of the banking crisis, people lost faith in their political institutions because the moneyed interests controlled everything and that even the army knew they could not really stand up to them. In other words, I think it is more likely that the army never had power than that they always had it.
Are you talking about online marketing or more traditional offline marketing ? People often talks about "Crossing the Chasm" and "The Long Tail", here are few more such books http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/top-10-marketing-books-of-... though these are not your Marketing 101 books.

IMO this list looks to have good How to marketing type of books http://www.amazon.com/Top-Marketing-Books-All-Time/lm/3JOLQU...
Sir Bobby Robson spent a good deal of his management career at Sporting Lisbon, Porto, and Barca without speaking Portuguese or Spanish. You might have heard of his translator--Jose Mourinho.