skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some findings from the European Minorities and Discrimination Survey:

(The results present the first EU-wide comparable data on selected ethnic minorities and immigrants’ experiences of discrimination and criminal victimisation, including experiences of policing)

• On average, every second Roma and 4 in 10 Sub Saharan African interviewees was discriminated against on the basis of their ethnicity at least once in the last 12 months.

• 82% of those who were discriminated against on the basis of their ethnicity/immigrant background in the last 12 months did not report their last experience of discrimination anywhere – either at the place where it occurred or to a complaints body.

• On average, 1 in 5 Sub-Saharan African and Roma respondents were victims of what they considered to be‘racially motivated’assault or threat, or serious harassment, at least once in the last 12 months.

• Depending on the groups surveyed,between 57%and 74% of incidents of assault or threat were not reported to the police.

• Of those who were stopped by the police in the last 12 months, on average 17% of North Africans and 14%of Roma considered that they were stopped specifically because of their ethnic or immigrant background.

Source:

http://fra.europa.eu/en/press-release/2010/first-ever-eu-wid...

http://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/664-eum... [ PDF ]

Edit: Formatting
There definitely is a tradeoff between civil liberties and security. Each action of the police, warranted or not, is an invasion of privacy (civil liberty) while still being aimed at solving a (planned or alleged) crime (security). A state monopoly on firearms is another example.

The problem with the argument that DIRNSA and similar circle make is that the current invasion of civil liberties brings negligible or no improvement of security. They're exaggerating the security gains and downplay the erosion of rights. That's the dishonesty in the current debate.

I think Damon is very well on the mark here - a decision to give up civil liberties for security should not be made by the government/powers to be but rather by a well informed public. There's a major problem with that approach though: How do we educate the public in such a way, that they can make well-informed choices. That's a pretty tough nut to crack.
Designing a single robot that can cook clean and drive sounds pointlessly complex. Much better (and no doubt cheaper) to design an automated car, an automated kitchen, and a self cleaning house as three separate projects. Sure watching a humanoid robot running around your house and doing all those tasks might be novel for a while, but at the end of the day it's the wrong tool for most jobs.
MIME blows
Thomas Schelling [0] has shown that even if your most preferred neighborhood is a perfect mix of races, it is a dynamically unstable equilibrium (assuming that if the balance tips one way or the other, you prefer it to tip towards your own race). That is, segregated neighborhoods are not necessarily a sign that people prefer segregation -- it is also a natural outcome when people want to live in a mixed neighborhood. There are many interesting simulations of the phenomenon. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_XtboyO8jc&noredirect=1
Yes I was. I was using the Tor browser bundle and checked the box in the settings. Good thing you mentioned that detail I've forgotten it.

But still though. If they make Tor a feature in Firefox what is stopping any user from checking that box?
If they have access to your database then they most likely can also get access to your source code.
>the actor who must know a thing or two about the covert world

and

>He is being asked what he thinks of Edward Snowden. Astonishingly for someone who has been Jason Bourne and knows the danger of such things, he is answering the question.

WTF. Actor who has been playing Jason Bourne and been in Good Will hunting now is now expert?
It's been pretty flawless for me. I'm running the 64 bit 0.11.0 static RC1. Like another post said though, it's really a pain to handle page breaks, page numbers, headers/footers etc. But for straight HTML page -> PDF it's really good.
> Firing 12,000 people would have been devastating for morale of the company

Yes, especially since that would mean firing every employee of the company:)

I can see that being a bad day for moral....

All joking aside, I think your point is pretty solid. Getting rid of a 1/3 of the work force was not going to send a positive message to the rest of the employee's.
You are right that in the presence of sufficient data, everything converges to the normal and we're fine.

However the difference between the t-test and the normal to which it is an approximation is that the t-test takes into account corrections the rate of convergence to the estimated normal. The details of that convergence is dependent upon the distribution of individual samples, and the t-test is predicated on the assumption that each and every sample is from a normal distribution.
I left. I live in Australia now.

It wasn't a simple solution or an easy decision. They just rammed through millimeter-wave machines here, too. And you can't opt out.

http://travelsecure.infrastructure.gov.au/bodyscanners/faq.a...
The overriding trend in American cities is that whites will not live in predominantly black or hispanic neighborhoods.[1] But the reverse is generally not true. So you see much less segregation in predominantly white cities like Portland than in cities like Chicago that have an even mix of races, which have less segregation than predominantly black cities like Detroit or New Orleans.

As far as I can tell, most European cities are predominantly white, so I wouldn't expect as much segregation in those cities as you see in say Chicago or Detroit or Philadelphia. London is one of the more ethnically diverse (large) Western European cities, and is roughly 60% white. LA is the whitest large American city at 50%. New York is 45%, Chicago is 30%, etc. New Orleans is around 25% white, and Detroit is 8% white. At the other end of the scale, Portland is 75% white. If you look at the map, the ordering by level of segregation follows that pattern: Portland is the least segregated, Detroit is the most segregated, and LA, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans are between, in that order.

[1] You can argue about whether this is racism or classism. As a practical matter, in American cities the two are tightly linked. Middle class people of both races tend to move to the suburbs, and of the people that are left, whites skew wealthier and blacks and hispanics skew poorer, even more so than in the general population. E.g. The median income of a white Chicagoan in 2009 was $64k (substantially above the national average). The median income of a black Chicagoan in 2009 was $29k (substantially below the national average). http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-muckrakers/2011/02/second-....
Setting up tor as in using the Tor proxy is easy enough.

Setting it up so it's actually not leaking information that would identify you is hard-to-impossible. See the things the Tor Browser Bundle ends up doing (including changes to C++ Gecko code!).
Yep, will do when the work continues. It's on pause right now while I'm away.
The US has a much higher tolerance for what in Europe would be considered pretty blatant racism.

Please expand. Nowhere in Europe has anything resembling the 4/5ths rule or Griggs vs Duke Power, no European country has a visible minority community as large as Blacks in the US, and no European country has a policy of discriminating on the basis of race in university admissions, to the best of my knowledge.
NASA Engineer Says He Has Secret Warp Drive Technology. Physics Says He Doesn’t.
No, it has C++-level patches too.
Have you considered teaching your wife how to read?
Isn't this just a web service for CRON jobs?
If your rely on rules to maintain order, bad actors will figure out how to "game the system". If you rely on people to maintain order, bad actors will bribe and corrupt those in charge.

The US has traditionally relied more on rules, and you are correct in citing that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights still represent the most comprehensive set of rules in the world guarding personal freedom. In turn, you also have "enemy combatants", "extraordinary rendition", "enhanced interrogation techniques", "national security letters", and "corporate personhood" that all represent ways in which people have gamed the system. Rules, alone, are not enough. You also need people.

(Consequently, where I live now there has always been much greater reliance on people over rules, and as such corruption is a major problem... Striking the right balance can be difficult.)
Great point! So many comments on HN need to start off with one such sentence. I think this is called etiquette.
The embarrassment of premature VC-infatuation
One thing those analogies miss is that starcraft is an imperfect knowledge game. You don't know everything about your opponent as you would in chess and fencing. It is similar to poker in that regard.

This is probably my favorite part of the game -- watching pro level players react perfectly to even the slightest tell.
It's not that they got rid of the taskbar (it's still there on the Win8 desktop), it's that they took the button for the start menu off of it, and replaced it with a hot corner, and in Windows 8.1 they've put the button back.
> As far as I can tell, most European cities are predominantly white

I think your impression is flawed. Many European cities are racially diverse and quite a few are segregated. Paris comes to mind as a particularly good example of both.
It is like you installed software to mute your TV each time the commercials start.
Asynchronous Testing with Django and PyVows
Time to short manufacturers of midrange jets, like Embraer.
I have a few questions for you: What if there is a more advanced Google-glass which has enough juice to detect real-life ads and ability to remove them from our display? If I read a magazine with it, would it be stealing? What if I just cut the ads before bringing the newspaper to my grandma, because she finds them distracting or just throw away the bundled magazine full of discount coupons and ads? What about tv recorders which automatically skip ads? When I take a coffee break instead of watching the ads, would I still be breaking the law? Can I put a paper on my display, where the ads on my favorite website appear? Should I just avoid those web-sites with ads when I'm using a text-only browser?
I don't mind them putting the Start button back, but I wish there was an option to remove it again. I much prefer a vertical taskbar, which puts my Start button in a different corner than the Start hot corner (which is just confusing and annoying).
This is untrue, see D79 and D89 of Unicode 6.2: an ill-formed UTF-16 string is one containing lone surrogates.
Maybe it's just the time of day (9AM EST), but the feed seems to be dominated by Asian (Japanese and Korean, in particular) users. Is there a cycle to this sort of thing or is it only picking up photos from that part of the world?
Reuters swaps story about NSA hacking the UN for NSA fluff piece.
The article in question is here: U.S. Spy agency edges into the light after Snowden revalations

http://www.reuters.com/article/comments/idUSBRE97O08120130825

The original article is here (Uk Site): U.S. spy agency bugged U.N. headquarters - Germany's Spiegel

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/25/uk-usa-security-nsa-idUKBRE97O08B20130825

The story was linked to on Reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1l22ie/us_spy_agency_bugged_un_headquarters_reuters_the/

Read the comments in the US version of the article, and there's a handful of comments on Reddit about it, but no one on Reuters seems to be acknowledging that the article has been swapped.
Is segregation really the appropriate word here? Separation of the races is coded into our genes and happens naturally without any malicious intent too. It's not much different from the fact that all of us prefer to surround ourselves with people who are similar to ourselves, usually in terms of thinking, hobbies, and interests. Physical attributes influence us as well, whether it's bikers and leather jackets or punks and black spiked clothes. In evolutionary biology this is referred to as "kinship".

Not to say that racism isn't worth fighting against, but the more free our societies become the more people on average will follow their natural instincts. A non-racial example of this is Norway, which is likely the most gender equal country in the world, but has also extremely skewed gender distributions in professions such as engineering and nursing; with almost only men in engineering, and women in nursing, despite massive attempts to balance the situation. This could be easily misinterpreted and claimed as evidence that Norway does not respect gender equality, but in fact it's more likely evidence of the opposite! People in Norway are more free to pursue what makes them happy.

When we use terms like "segregation" for cases where it might actually be just "separation", we risk causing unnecessary hatred and overblown illusions of racism - misleading us from what actually matters: freedom and equality.
> Oregon looks like a nice place to live </sarcasm>

Not sure why you applied a sarcasm tag. I can't speak for all of Oregon, but Portland is quite nice.
It's working for me ... this was a godsend! Thanks a lot!
Shit will really hit the fan when we have a President or some authority figure who will use all this massive surveillance power to run McCarthyistic campaigns against people. Heck, already NSA employees are spying on their former lovers. The author is correct, this is how freedom and rights are lost, slowly and bit by bit.
They're not metal detectors -- they're RFID scanners that sound an alarm if someone tries to steal something. A lot of products have an RFID chip attached that must be deactivated at the checkout. It's for reducing shoplifting, not for public safety.
>as opposed to the more concise C family way of doing it

The "C family way of doing it" is problematic, and gets crazy complicated with more involved declarations (e.g involving function pointers and such).

Nimrods/Go/etc way is much better.
I don't like them either, but why are they invasive?
> They stopped a few years ago (2006) when the PC media found out that africans and arabs were way, way over-represented in all crime categories.

I would love to see a reference verifying the causality that you are implying when it comes to the decision to drop ethnicity from the statistics.

Also, I sincerely doubt that those of African and Arab ethnicity are over-represented in all crime categories. Violence, petty theft, sure, possibly. This is generally the category which the low-income portion of the population tends to dominate. But I think you will be hard pressed to find a document showing that the ethnics groups you are referencing are more prevalent when it comes to tax fraud.
Where are you having these problems?

International travellers tend to arrive by plane or train (as Derbasti says), you can buy something from there. Or from a restaurant.

The only problem you would have is with supermarkets away from the train station or airport.
I'm not sure if this makes sense from a scaling perspective looking at the ratio of perimeter to area as size scales up, we are now far more likely to only casually meet members of our own "tribe" than ever before in history.

Think of multiple tribes "sharing" a watering hole or a hunting ground or simply plain old common borders.

I think we're pretty well prepared for it, as long as we're not at war we seem to have a pretty good ability to be casual, ignore them, yet unconsciously keep an eye on them and if they start acting weird (about to stab us in the back).
Stupid complaint is stupid.

Nothing to see here people, move on.
We can speak english in europe. In scandinavia by the age of 10 most kids speak english fluently.
What if your primary refers you do doctor X for condition Y?
Huh? source? :/
Reading the title of this reminded me of a scene from a movie about Howard Hughes. He was telling his staff that he could not sleep because he kept "hearing his heartbeat all night long". Strange ... don't think I'll try this.
Ehm.. tens of millions of realtime events but no "www." alias?:

404 Not Found

Code: NoSuchWebsiteConfiguration

Message: The specified bucket does not have a website configuration

BucketName: www.moot.it

RequestId: xxxx

HostId: xxxxx

I didn't know what "Moot" was so I tried www.moot.it
I think it would be reasonable to have strlen, strchr and the other str*() functions as processor instructions by now. With no 16 byte restrictions.
1984 by George Orwell - audiobook (archive.org)
I've actually been a little grateful to them for closing down. When they did, I went all over trying out the alternatives. If they hadn't shut down I never would have noticed that there were better choices out there.

Now I'm on Newsblur (a lot of good things to say about other alternatives, but this is the one I settled on). With Google out of the way, there is now a chance for small success like them (and Feedly and Old Reader, etc) to get some market share and pull in some revenue.

It has not only turned out to be painless but beneficial. And it's given me a healthier outlook on relying on Google. That is, I don't.
i'd say i'm a fairly high-volume consumer and tend to spend a lot of time searching for, acquiring, managing, and enjoying my music.

i'm fairly old-school in that i like to download everything and have built and maintain a large collection of digital files. i view it very-much-so as one would a record collection and spend a lot of time ensuring quality (audio fidelity, proper tagging, rich cover art, ...).

discovery: genre-specific blogs (mainly for hip-hop), soundcloud, digitally imported, 8tracks, live shows/concerts, word of mouth

acquisition: direct downloads (you'd be surprised by how much great free, legal, content is put-out on a daily basis, especially in the hip-hop world), beatport, bandcamp, xbox music, amazon mp3, torrents

management: pretty much focused around proper tagging and maintaining a consistent file structure. mp3tag [1] is great little windows utility for batch tagging

consumption: mobile phone via bluetooth audio (in-car, headphones, portable speakers), laptop connected to sound system, xbox connected to home theater system

i've toyed around with various streaming services and never been satisfied with the selection or the overall experience. i've also tried using a number of cloud music solutions but have yet to find anything that can effectively manage my library in an efficient and convenient manner. would love to hear any others' thoughts on these.

[1] http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
20 Fonts to Avoid to Maintain Your Readers’ Sanity
The Geography of Cancer Varies by Gender
I can't find the research hsivonen (probably best known for validator.nu and Gecko's HTML parser) did into this a while ago, but he concluded that for the top 100 (IIRC) CJK sites, they were smaller as gzip'd UTF-8 than gzip'd UTF-16, because they all contained a sufficient quantity of HTML/CSS/JS that the gain from the shorter representation of them outweighed that of the text itself.
My take away here is that we need to educate people in such a way they view ones' ability to change their position given new evidence as a positive. Like scientists do.

I guess I always felt people didn't value this trait but I needed to have it spelled out for me in this article. Why in the world would any person value themselves more having been right all along. Why wouldn't they care about educating themselves every day.
Agreed on #2. Traffic analysis is possible even with encryption. Tor is a hack to resist, but at least some of the longer-lived exit nodes are either run by attackers or targeted for analysis.

#3 - the 'unaltered' property - is something we can add with signatures where appropriate and doesn't need to be a forced layer on every communication as its overheads may often be undesirable.
I'd like to replace your bear with a pendulum. History has shown that public sentiment towards authoritarianism is cyclical. Certainly Nazi Germany represented an authoritarian regime that was more repressive than the current US government (history will tell how long this remains true...), but that played out. Now Germany has a wonderful framework of laws and regulations to guard personal privacy.

What leaving does is control how far the pendulum swings. Imagine if Fermi hadn't left Italy? Or consider Lise Meitner who didn't leave Germany when everyone else did (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner). In her words, "It was not only stupid but also very wrong that I did not leave at once."
"Hey, can we stop at that Starbucks?"
...
"I really don't think we have time for a hand-job right now!"

- Idiocracy
Interesting project. Would be keen to hear about technical details.

How real-time is the data? I noticed a lot of repeating images so I'm assuming the data is collected and batch processed? Or are the images being fetched directly using the twitpic API?

Any reason for using canvas element instead of images or CSS backgrounds? My gut would suggest that loading an image and then painting to the canvas would incur a greater overhead than simply setting an img src attribute.

The page is generating a ton of traffic. A sustained 80-90kb/s for me. Within a few minutes the count was up to 50mb+ of image data!! Are the images all hotlinked from twitpic or are you doing your own storage and using a CDN?

Would be nice to be able to slow down the stream a bit.
I think as a developer, the easiest thing to screw up is the understanding of what a business is and how long it takes to build (and how much it costs to run).

Say you are making $50,000 a year. The owner is probably paying more like $75,000-100,000 when you include insurance, rent, taxes, equipment, etc.

Now, imagine you are on a small team of five - an artist, game designer, 2 devs, and a qa person. That is an outlay of about $500,000 a year. So, shipping a smallish game in 6 months is about $250,000.

The author seemed to think that building the whole thing from scratch was "saving money", but it was costing him a tremendous amount of time, which was in fact costing him A LOT of money.

So, if you are trying to start a business, understand that it costs some combination of money and time, and if you are short on one, you probably need to substitute the other.

If you are short on both, you're screwed.
I actually thought it'd be helpful to OP to point out that the text is hard to read. It's called constructive criticism - nothing wrong with that.
I watched once a lecture on Coursera about Schelling's model of segregation, which I found extremely insightful.

If you see maps like that with strong segregation, one of the first attempts to explain it is "racism". However, if you divide your neighborhood in 9 blocks such that you are in the center, you have 8 neighbors.

Schelling's model now shows that even in cities where most people say:"I'd like to live next to only 35-40% of people who are similar to me (whatever that means exactly, could be ethnical background, skin color, income, ...) and I'd accept 60% of neighbors who are different from me", you would still get a segregation of 80-90% in the city.

So, the reason for strong segregation is not necessarily that people are racists. People can be very tolerant, but if you try to fulfill the minimum requirement (40% like me), you end up with strong segregation patterns just because there's no other way to fulfill the minimum requirement for most people.

Note: Numbers aren't exact, but pretty close.

Edit: Link to lecture: https://class.coursera.org/modelthinking-003/lecture/16
I would be nervous to do that. I trust my dentist, I know he does a good job, and is sensitive to my comfort, that's why I go there. I've been to a few terrible dentists before, and I've had to get dental work redone because it didn't last. Dentists seem to be so hit and miss. Doctors can be the same way, price isn't the only consideration.