skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, but perhaps for different reasons. The authoritarian-apologist doublespeak it's full of is even more damning than the original story.
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.

And now they do and you complain anyway. So - what's your preferred method of screening people?
> Can you get into more details about how this is used? If reddit needs to display a page that has 100 comments, do they query Cassandra on the voting status of the user on those 100 comments?

Sort of, yeah. There are two versions of this, the old way and the new way.

Old way: keep a cache of the last time they voted. Remove any comments from those 100 that are younger than the last vote (since they can't possibly have voted on them). Then look up the keys containing the remaining ones. Most of them hit the bloom filter, those that pass the bloom filter actually get looked up. In the worst case this is all 100 comments, which can hit up up to 1/RF of your Cassandra nodes. The worst case doesn't happen often.

The new way is a little different, you have one Cassandra row (so only one machine) containing all of the votes for the user (perhaps further limited to a given link ID or date). You hit that one node for all 100 comments. If you have per-row bloom filters, see Old Way for the rest.

> I thought Cassandra was pretty slow in reads (slower than postgres) so how does using Cassandra make it fast here?

"Fast" and "slow" as used here is very naive, performance is usually more complicated than simple statements like this. I guess if you had 1 postgres node with 1 key and one Cassandra node with 1 key, and only 1 client, you could answer simple generalisations like this. But reddit has thousands of concurrent hits spread over hundreds of servers with varying amounts of RAM, I/O performance, network bottlenecks, and usage profiles.

The single biggest win is that you can easily horizontally scale Cassandra. Just add more nodes until it's "fast". But even that's a gross simplification.

For another example, if you scale Postgres by adding a bunch of replicas and choose a random one to read from for a given key, then they all have the same data in RAM, so your block cache miss rate is very high (that is, your effective block cache is the amount of RAM in one machine). Additionally, your write performance is capped to the write performance of your one master. Your replication throughput is capped to his outbound network bandwidth.

So you want a subset of the data on all of them so that whichever machine you ask has a very high likelihood of having that data in block cache. So you shard it by some function. But then you want to add more postgres machines, you have to migrate the data somehow, without shutting down the site. You've now more or less written Cassandra.
They also took great care in collecting old magnetic tapes of historical netnews history that would have long been lost to bit rot history and restored gaps in DejaNews's archive. Google deserves a lot of credit for this.
So you want to be covered by TechCrunch?
No, there's a third option: You will be free to leave after some defined event occurs.
Insert Michael Jackson eating popcorn gif here
> And at the same time they use and praise Postgres a lot, so it cannot be about NoSQL.

We had a basic schema that basically made postgres into a K/V store. So we had both.
I imagine 100 years ago, before terrorism, before the TSA, before the NSA snooped on our phone calls or Hacker News posts, before all of this... I imagine there was a guy who wanted to do something, got stopped by police for a couple of questions, and got agitated by the hassle and it turned into something bigger.

Now 100 years ago, that guy couldn't write a blog post about it and get worldwide attention. But then again, it's just always been true that when dealing with the authorities, if you rub someone the wrong way, if you act belligerent, if you want to run the other way as soon as the police ask you a question, if you test positive multiple times for explosives... well, it's always been true that you're going to have a bad day that day.

Mr Mukerjee had a bad day. But then again, he tested positive for explosives multiple times!
Possibly the legalities are different when you're raising money for a cause, like a charity, or they're just concerned about 'fake' charities popping up?
If I were building a tiny number of auth servers relative to my frontend servers, I'd potentially just use an HSM and symmetric crypto vs. a computationally hard KDF. Less subject to resource consumption DoS, somewhat more flexible for even regular authentication, and allows you to do things like hold credentials for services which don't support oauth using the same system.
Definitely true, and one of the earliest and longest-standing optimisations. Even pre-Akamai, we had simple caching, both whole-page and per-object/query.
Totes. I was shocked that missing alimony payments can land you in jail. It should be a purely civil matter.

Marriage as it currently exists is a stupid arrangement. One size does not fit all. It's an opt-in to all sorts of contractual rights and obligations/responsibilities, which two consenting adults should review the same way they review any contract. Instead there should be a form with all the obligations that you could have as part of marriage and you checkmark those that box you and your spouse-to-be agree to.

Basically this checkbox form could basically be made up of all the items on this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of_...
Israel has been doing behavior profiling beginning at the moment you get out of your car at the airport, and run one of the most secure airports in the world. Even though the word profiling has a bad connotation in the USA, it works.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
Absolutely. Conspiracy is unnecessary. I hear nothing about the TSA that can't be explained through bureaucracy, politics, and the Stanford prison experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Yes, nobody was interviewed or anything to put this together. They just cobbled together some (mostly very old!) articles
As an intermediate haskeller (I use it for my business every day) his criticisms largely mirror mine. I found the quake codebase to be great in the 90s. I have also found him more than most other developers to admit when thing didn't work out, specifically that doom 3 was c++ in name only and he didn't fully understand it. A scheme based language would have been better for most modders than quakeC.
I can highly recommend reading the Relaxation Response for a scientific treatment of meditation.

Much like exercise, if it came in pill form, everybody would take it.
That's an extraordinarily shitty excuse.
Nobody really wanted their entire social network to be public; Facebook kind of removed the option. Even those who think they have nothing to hide don't want this.
No. Some are postgres, some are cassandra, some are web servers (haproxy), some are app servers (the reddit app running inside of pylons), etc
Huh? It was just some constructive criticism, I wasn't being racist like you made it look like. Am South Asian and my country has so much shit going on that I won't even bother to criticise it.

I just think that this violence crap should be censored instead of breasts or nudity. If you show that being a criminal is so cool and bad ass then don't expect anyone to not commit crimes. Many people would try to replicate what they see on TV.
And this is how reddit does it, reddit doesn't use hstore.
Good catch, I've added a description that links to the Khan Academy CS landing page. Thanks!
This story is told from a perspective that rather than being a right, flying and travel is a privilege awarded to those who satisfy the TSA

Who cares what the Behavior Detection Officer thought, he was wrong

Who cares what the screening machine thought he was carrying, it was wrong

Who cares what behavior the TSA officers and supervisors 'noted', they were also wrong

If a person cannot simply get up and leave the TSA area if they haven't been arrested, then the law is wrong.

If the TSA can't do their job without threatening the rights and freedom of movement of a large part of the population then they shouldn't be doing it at all. All this inconvenience for an organization that in its 12 years has yet to even catch a real terrorist.
If you're in an airport security section, you're not free to go wherever you like. He wanted to go to the back of the line. They said he could leave the airport. But his bag still needed to be searched. He was free to leave, but he didn't want to leave. He wanted to go catch his flight.
One could argue the fact there's been so many coup d'etats by the military shows the military continues to hold the power.
> Static methods are actually facades as pointed out and are key in having proper testable applications.

Thanks, I had a look about a year ago at the facades document and it seemed a justification for using static methods, rather than a reason.

I'm pushing hard on this as I really want to understand it. I am surrounded by PHP programmers chanting "Every time you use a Singletons a kitten dies" and "No static methods". Yet when I used (and contributed to PEAR) they were positively encouraged. Is the change another fad, or fact-based?

> * Forms? It has support for forms in more way than one. Read the docs! :-)

I have :) I see helpers to generate form fields and a validation library. I see no way to create form entities, to extend forms (to create variations on a base form), or to abstract the field definitions from the view (while the visible value of select box options could be in the remit of the designer, modifying the value shouldn't be accessible to anyone other than the programmer, and neither IMO should choosing the field type (drop down or multiple radio buttons? Multiple select or checkboxes?)

Also no support for 0..N repeating fields baked in (with conditional validation), or 1..N fields - stuff I use in almost every form. Every form library I've discovered falls short in these requirements though!
Did you read the original article? If so re-read the very end of it to acquaint yourself with the evidence that his apartment was searched without a warrant.

Edit: P.S. note that I said evidence not proof.

P.P.S. I find it somewhat weird how people are so eager to jump to the defense of law enforcement with shouts of "that evidence proves nothing!" while at the same time supporting the idea that a now known to be false positive explosives test is more than sufficient to justify someone's ill-treatment for hours at the hands of law enforcement.

I'm not saying that Mukerjee's story of missing and tampered items in his apartment is sufficient to convict any law enforcement agent of wrong doing but maybe it's enough to justify an investigation (which could easily be rolled into the investigation into LEO behavior around the entire incident).
Any advice on stripping wiki markup to obtain plain text from the wikipedia dump? A friend is doing linguistic research and could benefit from large bodies of text in different languages. Ideally this would be a C# library, but a simple command line tool in any other language would do as well - accept .xml.bz2, strip the wiki markup, return something that's easily processable by further tools in a single file. Thanks in advance.
That's a really general statement, people write C code all of the time. You just have to be more careful. That is, you have to actually be a C programmer instead of a Python programmer cobbling together some C.

That said, reddit uses a mix of straight-C and Cython-ised Python, which is a bit like the best of both worlds.
Agreed. I'm upvoting because everyone is calling out the author on his bias and BS.

Funny how if a stranger on the street infringes on your rights, you're allowed to get agitated and aggressive, but if the government does it, you're supposed to be submissive and cooperative.
And even calling it Pylons is a bit of a stretch. It's an ancient version of Pylons, of which most of the innards have been replaced over time.
>Until these agencies stop externalizing their damages to the public, they have no reason to lower their false positive rate.

Completely agree. This seems like a completely reasonable course of action (compensation for lost time) but instead they just aggressively search and detain people and the only punishment they get is if someone gets "uppity" and asserts their rights, at which point some low-level nobody will be suspended with pay. Wonderful.
"Query planner are what make SQL database engines so amazingly useful and powerful. (This is true of all SQL database engines, not just SQLite.)"

No it isn't. I have been using SQL databases which got absolutely horrible query optimizer totally ruining any performance exceptations. I have blogged about that, and I was very frustrated and disappointed with results.

Which is faster if id>100 or simply walking database by using series of selects select ... id=101 ... select ... id=102 ... Turns out that the later method is a much faster. Engineers also then suggested that I could optimize the query by using structure select ... id=101 UNION select ... id=102. That's simply insane. How ever the query was written, query otpimizer / planner should make sure that all these queries are delivered using similar background process. Of course that walk is impossbile to optimizer, because it's series of individual queries. But it's just crazy that select id>100 is slower than that!

Yes, you might have guessed that the SQL database I'm referring to isn't SQLite.

And finally, I love SQLite and use it for most of my (work & hobby) projects as local database.
Creating chilling effects on speech is a feature, not a bug
Looking at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Tables I see that the column width needs to be specified to avoid text overflow. HTML does much better job, automatically fitting a table to desired width.
Varied depending on the type of explosive and contamination.
I don't have it open anymore, but it's in there
Right, because ARM cores exhibit completely predictable behavior with, say, assignments to IP or instruction predicate bits?

All architectures are insane. MIPS, probably the epitome of a minimal/clean architecture, still has a vestigial 1980's pipeline stage (the branch delay slot) baked right into the ISA such that it can never be removed.

Is the x86 ISA a big mess? Yeah. But ARM is hardly better (anyone remember Jazelle?) Basically, if you don't want to look at the assembly stick to your compiler. That's what it's there for. But don't pretend that this stuff isn't present everywhere -- real engineering involves tradeoffs.
Relevant (from his own bio):

Steven Frischling, aka: Fish, is globe hopping professional
photographer, airline emerging media consultant working with large
global airlines and founder of The Travel Strategist.
This book is starting to show it's age, lots of the examples are broken.
I read the article. "Something missing" is not evidence of a search without a warrant.
"Apps and services like Cluster, Albumatic, Keepsy, Swirl, Flock, Kicksend, Kaptur, and dozens of others are destined for the dustbin of Internet history."

I suspect most of these were headed there anyway, no offense to anyone working on them.
I can only agree. I started learning to code, because I wanted to acomplish one special thing (downloading and parsing xml from a weather-source to look at historical wether data for five places).

I started with python, learned a little bit sqlite on the way, learned about parsing files (good for understanding our devs at work better) and so on. Now I've gone on, got a little sandbox-server at work (I'm an editor) and atomated some really bad jobs at work with python. And did some funny things to make life better for our editorial team.

Yes, I am probably still writing spaghetti code, and there are a lot of things left I really like to learn, but with time comes understanding and I get better week by week.

When I look at code from 3 month ago, I get the urge to refactor it. But it works, it runs as it should and today I am more inclined to learn new things and get new things done first.

So yes. Keep coding and have fun!
Does this "defined event" actually have any legal status? How long can it take until the defined event occurs? It's possible that this is an intentionally murky area of the law (i.e., a judge can decide that preventing a person from leaving for an hour in case X is okay but 1 minute in case Y is not). Even so, it seems like if there's a person in front of you with legal authority to let you out of a secured area and you are asking them to let you out, then either they have to let you out or you are being detained.
So that non-programmers can use Bootstrap.
"Passenger was acting aggressively" sounds like something the TSA would say to justify holding him for three hours.
A suicide bomber with nothing to lose.
Who cares? I thought his blog post was written as a realistic fiction short story (he had way too many exact quotes and precise descriptions for it to be believed as some accurate retelling). Can we just appreciate it on a literary level? He's a great writer.
When I was learning to speak French, I struggled until my sister said "speak in a French accent".

I know, it seems trite. But the point is: think of someone who speaks your native language. Copy their thick accent into the language you are learning.

So when I began to use ze outrrrageous Franch acc-sont, my actual French-speaking improved.
As a testament to maybe how we've come already I find myself believing Mr. Mukerjee story and that the TSA, PA, and various officials are just covering their collective aXXes.

I'm not known to be a conspiracy terrorist, and I do not believe there is one here. Just a bunch officers doing their (IMHO) misguided and useless jobs.

As a rational person I am not afraid of terrorist - the chances to be victim of an attack are minuscule compared to the risk of dying in car accident.
I am afraid of getting into gear of law enforcement - for example by not simply behaving right in the eyes of the BDO, as in this story.

Lastly what is this "limbo" state the article refers to? Either I am being detained or I am free to go.
There is nothing in between, if you are not allowed to leave you're not "free to go" and thus you're being detained.

Edit: Spelling.
Some predictors must be sacred because relying on them reinforces divisions in society, leading to greater long-term unrest.
You think the simplicity of LESS is what's wrong with it?
Not sure why you're getting down voted--I remember seeing at least 2 articles go by in the last few years about the Israeli airport security.

Both times it was portrayed as super amazing (low hassle plus high security) precisely because they used behavioral detection techniques.
I think history will probably say the US became potentially powerful due to geography (resources and relative safety in the 1800s), as well as technological innovation and relative stability and freedom for a couple hundred years. But then, that WW2 and the Cold War led to becoming an empire, and that once the empire lost a (fairly real, if pointless) external enemy, it started casting about for enemies, and found two: external "terrorists" and any kind of uncertainty or decentralization (i.e. domestic freedom).

I'd prefer an American empire to a global caliphate, but that's not really the a likely decision. What is likely is a hegemonic US empire vs. some kind of decentralized system with autonomy and freedom at different levels (individuals retaining a lot, local governments and companies having some, provinces some, nation-states other, regions other, and global some). That would be a pretty clear choice, and I don't think you can say opposing a US empire is opposing the US overall.
The police force is holding you against your will for the purpose of determining if you are guilty of a crime. But no, you're not being detained.

If there is one line that discredits this entire article, that is it. I mean, why not just call it what it is? He was being detained, and given that there was some evidence (explosive readings) against him, then there was some probable cause to do so. I'm not saying the TSA is justified in that regard... only that the article is completely disingenuous by implying that he wasn't held against his will at the hands of law enforcement.
I actually was going to point out that less saturated colors get... well, maybe not more dramatic, but in-my-opinion-"better" themes. For example, with this one, any but 'complementary' are almost usable http://rriepe.github.io/1pxdeep/#e9ede4

Also, anybody that's using this should be sure to add a rule like

input { outline: none}

or it completely ruins the whole 1pxdeep theme with OS-defined outlines on clicked buttons. On the demo, this may not work for the main "Scheme now" button, but

#change_color { outline: none }

will.
> Replacement value of laptop plus several hundred dollars for setting it up

+ lost opportunity + swap out all existing passwords + missed deadlines => $5,000 +/- $500
Plastic Surgeons in South Korea Defend 'Smile Surgery' - Scene Asia - WSJ
With respect, I think you're accepting an unreasonably low standard of conduct on behalf of the TSA. Why should you just accept "random" searches because of dark skin or arabic sounding name? (Even if 90% of terrorists are arabs, which isn't true, but even if it were, that still means that only 0.0001% of arabs are terrorists, which makes the whole racial profiling strategy not only bad morals, but also but operations). More importantly, what would happen if you asserted your rights, even to the smallest degree? What if you asked for an explanation of procedures before they're being performed, would the agents then qualify you as "aggressive"? What if you refused some procedures and asked to leave? What if you asked to call your lawyer?

I also have an arabic-sounding last name (though I'm white as a snowflake, and ironically jewish), and I also have to go through "random" searches on occasion (I had four incidents like this in the airport in Israel). Yes, the agents are polite to me, but I don't do very much to assert my rights, mostly because I feel like it would be picking the wrong battle. However, I don't have the confidence that they'd remain polite and professional if I did assert my rights, and many, many people have the same trepidations when they go through border security.

When a U.S. citizen has to feel trepidation upon entering his country when he's done absolutely nothing wrong, there's something very wrong with our system. (At the very least, I'd expect them to post procedures for public scrutiny and allow going through the regular court system when something goes wrong; as of now the whole thing of "being in limbo" just seems completely backwards)