skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>That position is utterly untenable. It's so obviously wrong to imprison someone because some signals indicate they might commit a crime based on who they're friends with on Facebook! There's a difference between being buddies with a gaggle of career criminals and actually committing (or conspiring to commit) a crime!

I think you are trying to create a straw-man here. Imprisoning people even though they haven't committed a crime is obviously bad, and I completely agree with that. All I'm saying is if we were going to do it, then we might as well try to make the predictions as accurate as possible. If your predictions are more accurate fewer "innocent" people will end up in prison (innocent as in, wouldn't commit a crime if left out of prison.) In your example, less accurate predictions can literally ruin people's lives. Excluding data in that case would be much worse than just for loans.

>> If there was a 99% chance of you becoming addicted to them, then you probably shouldn't be given pain killers.

>If that person has a history of abusing painkillers, yes. If their friends do? C'mon, you can't possibly justify that position.

I don't see why it matters that the data came from who your friends were. It could just as easily come from blood tests or who your parents are, or all sorts of arbitrary things outside of your control. The point is 99% of people with that feature become addicted to the painkillers and it ruined their lives.

If there is a 99% chance of that happening to you, would you take the pain killers? Would you really care where the data came from Would you really ignore information if it was your own life at stake?

>I didn't argue for equal interest rates for all. It makes sense for interest rates are tied to risk, but it's only reasonable to make an assessment of risk based on an individual's performance and ability to pay, not their friends' or peers' performance.

But assessing risk at all puts some people at a disadvantage. It doesn't matter where the data came from, if the predictions aren't 100% accurate then some percent of people are going to wrongly have a higher interest rate, even if they pay back their loan on time.

I think you are thinking of this as an incentive system and not a predicting system. That is it's ok to select for features that people can control, like their past history, but not for things that are outside their control. But the point of interest isn't to reward or punish people for paying or not paying their previous loans back on time. It's just to make up for people that don't pay. The riskier you are, the more it costs to make up for all the other high risk people that didn't pay.

Ideally you just wouldn't give out loans to people who wouldn't pay them back, and would give loans with no interest to people who would. But usually it falls somewhere in between 0 and 100% probability. The goal isn't to reward or punish people, it's to predict as accurately as possible.
> I know many people want to believe in TSA and national security conspiracies. The idea of a government collective creating a single story to keep one person down is intriguing. People will believe what they want,

The fact that they need to build a straw man argument basically dismissing all those who might disagree as conspiracy nuts (a well known PR tactic) should make one scared and worried. This is a pretty good PR technique used by those that know what they are doing.

> Fish, is globe hopping professional photographer, airline emerging media consultant working with large global airlines and founder of The Travel Strategist.

"airline emerging media consultant" does it mean airlines are basically paying him to PR on their behalf? What does that soup of words even mean.
All those I've seen (mostly abroad where I've used wireless in restaurants, airports, etc) allow you to use fake details. I've never registered with true information to use public wireless.
There are some countries with essentially no taxation. Many more with essentially no taxation for non-resident citizens. The popular "five countries" strategy exploits this -- one country for citizenship, one country for business incorporation, one (or more) for holding assets, one for operating business, one physically living.
I believe they meant that the ad companies are promoting a product that blocks the same ads they sell. If the promotion is successful, the ad company gets a short term win ($$) but a long term loss in ad views.
I filed a FOIA request, as the author suggested:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/tsa...

Given that involves a lot of personal information, I also asked for more general information sans personal details:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/sec...

I'd be surprised if either are fulfilled with any actual information.
I suspect they just sent him the article prepared by DHS PR department interns along with a check.
It does not seem unreasonable to me to believe that someone (other than law enforcement) broke into his apartment and, finding it nearly empty, rifled through his suitcase, and took the picture simply out of anger.

None of us on here know exactly what happened but the above seems (to me) just as likely as law enforcement breaking into his apartment. I would think they would also visit the apartment/residence he was vacating.
I think due to evolving as a social animal we necessarily have a sense of justice and a notion that bad behaviour must be punished or corrected. The notion that all bad behaviour is logged by a mysterious being that will present you with whatever comeuppance you deserve after life is a beautiful fiction. It makes one feel much better to believe that over thinking the more powerful person who took your things by force is going to get away with it.

I think it's more a desire to see justice than a desire for something omni-present. People that believe in neither religion nor good government will sometimes make claims like, "yeah one day I'm going to be that guy's boss," which is just saying, "I feel bad now but he'll get his comeuppance later and balance will be restored."
Hadoop 2.x beta Announced
How about you search the suspicious guy thoroughly, and then once it's clear he doesn't have any weapons you let him on the plane?
Ask HN: Do we have to do everything by ourselves?
Every time you created a new company, you worked on every aspect of starting a company. You and your team would code, design, copy-write, create marketing strategies and try to promote it by writing blog posts.

You would start each project with, as it seems at the moment, infinite amounts of energy. You would listen to customers to find out their problems, create well-designed products and receive great early feedback. But the thing is, you just can't get the ball rolling. You hit a wall. Getting the amount of customers you expected seems impossible.

You stop and try to start something new. You and your team fool yourselves thinking that in the next strategy or product everything's going to be all right and you are not going to fail again dealing with the same problem.

This story is my story and I can imagine lots of you have been through this.

We are a SaaS company. We are a team of 5 co-founders and we hired zero employees, zero PR agencies & zero social media managers.

We've received an angel investment from an incubator in Latin America and we have salaries below the market, so we burn our money slowly. I always thought -and still think - that one was one of our biggest strengths but recently I've been thinking that we are going nowhere slowly.

Marketing and promotion is not one of our strengths. It is very difficult for us to keep any strategy going on for more than two weeks. Maybe is our anxiety for quick results, maybe we are not doing things right or maybe we just don't have the necessary energy.

I really need you to help me understand what should we do. Should we keep trying to do everything on our own and keep learning or hire agencies or freelancers that could help us filling those gaps with their experience?
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a computer scientist

I'm a self-taught programmer which means that I don't feel qualified to answer the cs questions, nevertheless, I think I can answer your question.

First, thinking that "the new stuff" is the same as the exciting stuff is wrong. The exciting stuff is the stuff that excites you and not necessarily the new stuff. For example, the principles behind the modern web apps aren't exactly new (client/server, CRUD), and yet, you had a love affair with rails :)

Second, there are two kinds of "the new stuff". The first kind is the stuff that's a new development in cs, the second kind is the stuff that's new to you. If you focus on the second kind you'll see that there's a whole new world out there waiting to be explored and conquered. Scratch that, there are worlds upon worlds of potentially exciting stuff waiting for your attention.

My advice is to keep looking.
As someone who has spent the Summer living on the same floor as Mr. Mukerjee and interacting with him often, I find it very hard to believe that he was overly aggressive at the security gate. This account seems wildly exaggerated.
What is the threshold for acting "aggressive".
That there is no record of his home being searched doesn't prove anything anymore.

"Transportation Security Officers, a Supervisory Transportation Security Officer, a Transportation Security Manager, a Transportation Security Specialist – Explosives, an Assistant Federal Security Director for Law Enforcement, a Lead Transportation Security Officer, Port Authority Police Officers, a Department of Homeland Security Special Agent, two agents assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force and a representative from JetBlue Corporate Security."
-that's alot of various people from various agencies.
Since I am using the MediaWiki extracts API, I never had to find/write my own Wikitext parser. However, I did run into a couple in my research that seemed relatively popular:

- https://github.com/dcramer/py-wikimarkup (coverts wikitext to HTML using Python, would need to extract text with BeautifulSoup or something

- http://wiki.eclipse.org/Mylyn/Incubator/WikiText (also to HTML, but in Java)

- https://github.com/earwig/mwparserfromhell

I'm sure if you did a bit more digging you could find a C# library that does this, or you could roll your own pretty easily using the others as a model.
This is exactly why Docker containers are becoming popular.
"Mr. Mukerjee contends he asked to leave the screening area and return to the pre-security section of the terminal, with the intention of simply stepping back in line and going through screening again, but was not allowed. This is absolutely correct, at this time he was in limbo, he was not being detained, but he could not leave. A person cannot simply leave the security area of any airport once they are on the airside but have not satisfactorily completed screening. Once a person has passed through security, but is not cleared to fly and then chooses to leave, such as Mr. Mukerjee, s/he must be escorted out of the secure area (and usually the terminal)."

----------------

Deciding if I am detained: a rule of thumb.

If I receive word about an urgent emergency, such as my wife being hit by a bus or about to give birth, can I immediately go to the hospital? If yes, I am free. If not, I am detained.

This rule breaks down a bit on amusement park rides, but one would assume the ride operators would immediately let you off if you could communicate with them and, in any case, you're only going to be stuck there for a couple of minutes at the most.

Mukerjee was not in "limbo". He was detained. When someone chooses to redefine words White-House-style I tend to view whatever else they say as though they are serving an agenda.
Putting aside drowning the majority of everything on Earth, what is just about destroying entire cities, sparing no one?
> Every time people complain about the TSA and are asked how they should do security people say they should evaluate the person - look for signs of nervousness and things like that.

Putting aside the obvious falsehood ("every time") there's obviously a little critical analysis required to differentiate between people who are nervous because they don't like getting airplanes, people who are nervous because they're about to miss their flight, people who are just generally anxious, and people who are nervous because they're about to blow up an airplane.
Bored minimum wage guy waving people through a metal detector and running bags through an x-ray machine without looking at the results? That worked fine for a few decades and did no worse than the gigantic TSA rigmarole.
Not just a site compromise; a path compromise (malicious exit node, shady ISP, or fake WiFi access point) can inject Javascript in an unencrypted page. CA-signed SSL with cert pinning prevents MITM injection.
High Suger Fruit
Holy crap! There is even a blog where somebody disgruntled chronicles all his alleged misdeeds: http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/

Some articles that caught my eye:
http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/p/about-fishfraud.html
http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/2010/11/projectweddingcom-revi...
http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/2010/11/warning-to-national-me...
http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/2010/11/steven-frischling-in-c...
http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/2010/11/yelpcom-reviews-in-all...

I've checked the news articles, and it seems like the guy was indeed arrested for forgery and fraud, and ended up in a pre-trial diversion program for first-time offenders.

I had just assumed that this guy was just writing down what officials told him, but if 1/10th of the allegations on the blog are true, then maybe he just made up all of his supposed statements.
> And, naturally, he doesn't bother to follow up with the author of the blog post he responded to.

FTA (the first paragraph, actually):

I was initially approached by his supporters, and put in touch with him, to help spread his story … however … once I began researching the story, his detailed blog post began to unravel.

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.
There are some relevant considerations in that document but I found it to be very dismissive. SSL for example is not hard to implement, and going ssl-always is now quite common.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't want to advocate slapping some crypto lib onto a site with a bunch of marketing script. A project from scratch with these considerations might some day get it done.
It's more of an issue for something like wifi, where you can trivially change MAC (and do host-level stuff to change the fingerprint of the rest of the stack).
Ah true. I guess I'm just really used to the 1-3 day turnaround that it seems norma. ;)
How would you suggest doing that?
Side note -- in case you're curious about the origin of the RSS logo: http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/2004/09/26/2004-09-26-... (5th item down).
Hi YanceyKSR, a question for you:

Kickstarter's FAQ clearly states that you need to be a US, UK (or now Canadian) citizen/business and you should prove it (SSN/government-issued IDs, address etc..) in order to launch a project.

So, can I ask you how this project has been published (and funded)
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1054394377/idae-the-book...
given the fact that the company is Italian, the team members seems to be all Italian judging from their names, the location indicated was "Milan, Italy" and the product was going to be made in / shipped from Italy?

Maybe it's just "ok" to have somebody in the US/UK/CAN that acts as a middleman for the project?

N.B. the above project is just an example, I'm Italian and I've searched from something that seemed to be founded from Italy
That's the same feeling I was getting from this article. It was completely disingenuous (or better put, an outright lie) to say that he was not detained. The police were keeping him against his will to determine if he was guilty of a crime. That pretty well fits the definition of detainment.
Very often, on social networking sites, we hear the pieces of contradictory advice "don't talk to the police", "be polite and considerate to the police", and "assert your rights". These are pair-wise contradictory:

1. Don't talk to the police: You are being impolite, and you will be unable to assert your rights.

2. Be polite: Obviously violates "don't talk..." but also if you say, even politely, that you refuse certain police requests which you have a right to, then "they're just trying to help you out" and you're rude to refuse.

3. Assert your rights: "May I search your vehicle?" "No, officer." "Listen, man, there's no reason to be suspicious, I'm just trying to make sure there's no trouble. We're here to protect you. Why not just do it?" "I'm asserting my right to refuse a search, officer." That last line is perceived as rude by hundreds of people on social networking sites and is likely to be perceived as 'suspicious', 'rude', or 'aggressive' by the officers themselves.

The thing is, no matter what you do, if you catch a police officer on a bad day you will be in trouble. This is because you are always violating the law in America. For instance, I've noticed that driving the speed limit is something no one does and doing so in some places will lead to your being honked at at best and being cut off rudely to "teach you a lesson" at worst. This means the authorities can always catch you on something because it is socially unacceptable to follow the law.

Personally, I have the feeling that Aditya Mukherjee was just doing exactly what any of us would have done if we had opted out and been treated as disgracefully as that.
If every textbook case got the worst treatment then the problems would be so obvious that they would have been fixed a long time ago. It is like "driving while black" - if cops pulled over black drivers every single time they were on the road the practice would have been stamped out long ago.

If tomorrow you got the same treatment as Mukergee did, then all of the tolerable experiences you've had up to that point wouldn't console you all that much.
It's certainly far from proof, but it is very disconcerting.

Let's go through the lines of evidence here.

First off, there were apparently no visible signs that anyone had broken into his apartment. If the FBI or the police had picked the lock or if they had gotten the super to let them in and told him or her to remain silent about it then that would explain such an absence. A thief could also pick the lock but why would they bother if it is so easy to simply break through the door?

Second, this seems like exceptionally odd timing for a random act of thievery.

Third, why would anyone except law enforcement bother to put everything back almost exactly where it was before?

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. It's certainly not a very high degree of proof that such a thing happened but I think it's the most likely possibility, though it's mostly just a side-show compared to the other more troubling issues in this case.
I know this is asking a lot, but would anybody like to weigh in with some explanation/evidence for the descriptions of those four parts of the brain?
I disagree because I knew the laws of the country before I came over in 2007. I am not a citizen and so cannot try to lobby for a change in laws. Actually, that might be illegal.
The baseline is what counts.

You can avoid buffer overflows in C by using a library that's got safe strings.

Does that make C safe? Nope.

The Windows NT architecture has an enormously rich security mechanism that can allow arbitrarily granular security statements to be made about almost everything. But the default policy until Windows 7 was "pretend you're Windows 95".

Did that make Windows more secure than Unix? Nope.

The baseline is what counts.
Coke, KFC and Twinkies and Their Business of Secret Recipes
Maybe we should just tell the CalPERS pensioners, sorry, we gave it to the home owners.
I forgot to mention (now added), I am not a US citizen or resident. I was pretty aware of the situation in the US before I consciously decided to come here for university and then remain for a job.

The main point of my post was that I think the original poster could have cooperated a little better with the TSA. But, I take that view because I know I am a 'guest' in this country. I guess being an American would give you different expectations. The US border agent can refuse entry to me. But not to you under any circumstance. In that case, I think it is worth asserting your rights, like Mukherjee.
love it, but looks terrible in #f29eba
I read the original article. I don't see any particularly good evidence his apartment was searched without a warrant. He says a picture on his wall was missing, and some luggage was moved. Now, his apartment being searched is one possible excuse; but the landlord of the apartment he just moved into, or some maintenance staff, coming in to fix something or check on something, and finding a poster that had fallen off the wall and thrown it out in the assumption that it was the previous tenant's, is a lot more likely to me than the government searching his house without a warrant.

It sounds like the TSA's actions were excessive and heavy handed. It sounds like perhaps he got a little argumentative, due to being hungry (as he said, he hadn't eaten; I know I get cranky when I go too long without food), thirsty, and upset about missing his trip.

The TSA, and whatever other officers interviewed him, should probably be trained better in dealing with this kind of situation. In particular, using behavioral excuses to detain someone who's been singled out for extra screening is silly. Many people get upset about that kind of thing. And given that none of these TSA agents have ever actually interacted with a terrorist, and most likely never been trained with anyone who has, it's hard to believe that their training is any good at actually distinguishing a terrorist from someone who's just mad that they haven't had food or water in many hours. Heck, if you were a terrorist, you would prefer to blend in and act calm to singling yourself out for more screening by acting angry.

I feel like his article was a bit of an overreaction, but likewise the TSAs screening policies are much bigger, costlier, more painful overreaction.