skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a wiretap, they'd definitely need a warrant. And I think there was a recent court decision that says that police need a warrant to put a GPS tracker on someone's car. What they did here was to install malware on thousands of machines, without any probable cause to believe that any specific machine owner was involved with child porn. If I understand the law correctly, they would need to obtain a specific warrant for each machine they wanted to search.

Let's say that there was a store in a neighborhood that was known to sell child porn. No judge would sign a warrant that gave police permission to put a GPS device on every car in that neighborhood to track whether they ever visited that store (and they may have visited but bought only legal merchandise). So why is it different if you do it on the internet?
What do you tell business owners to do when accessing their online banking?
DwarfCorp's Kickstarter Postmortem
Unrelated, but interesting:

> That is to say there isn’t pain in the conventional sense; as CO2 goes up past critical levels, in the absence of fear or panic, the body will try breathing harder or faster and, eventually, you’ll pass out.

This is why most people drown. They panic and aspire water, long before they reach critical O2 levels and pass out.

It's possible to train and control the instinct to breath though. It's a great self-control exercise, and it's safe to try it outside the water. Try this:

Fill your lungs and hold your breath for as much as you can. You'll notice an irresistible urge to let go and breath (this is when most people panic, even though O2 levels are not anywhere critical yet). If you ignore your brain and keep holding, you'll notice involuntary movements in your diaphragm, forcing you to breath (this is when people drown). If you still keep holding, you'll notice the diaphragm movements get more intense, up to a point when it's impossible to keep holding your breath, but it takes a while still.

With enough practice, you learn to stay relaxed and post-pone those reactions as much as possible. After a while, you start being capable to hold the breath many times longer than expected. If you couple this technique with exercises for increased lung capacity and cardio (for lowering your base BPM), you'll be free-diving like a champion.
Having suffered from this before I can say this: sleep paralysis is absolutely terrifying. Whenever this occurs there is a small, rational part of your brain that tells you that nothing is wrong but this is drowned out by the absolute certainty that something or someone is just about get to you and you can't even move to defend yourself. It's a very primal fear unlike any other I've experienced and I find interesting is that it's a common theme across people who've also suffered from sleep paralysis.

I've experienced lucid dreaming as well and I can assuredly say that it is nothing like sleep paralysis. The physiological effects might be similar but there's a very big difference between consciously deciding to do something and waking up to a nightmare.
Sure they do. But do they have a right to use the fact that they have kids to sponge off the rest of us?
At least the Port Mann Bridge in Vancouver, which uses the same license plate camera only style billing, has a database which they use to send a bill to your insurance.
I agree, women should have to expect to be victims of violence and harassment and should stop complaining about it and just steel themselves for it instead. And it is totally only the women who can't look in the mirror and be confident in what they see that are harassed on the street. This isn't a problem strong, confident women face.
I'm okay with waiting, but the lack of entropy worries me a tad. Would that be super common with keys of that length? Thanks for the reply!
the creation of an ombudsperson is a well-intentioned idea, but the words of the mayor are still troubling: "from this point forward, no District residents whose property has been sold at a tax-lien sale will be at risk of losing their homes through this process if they have extraordinary circumstances that warrant a re-examination of their cases."

So, now we have to trust the city to be able to decide if your situation is "extraordinary"?? Isn't this backwards, this process should not be the default, it should be the extraordinary. There's also very little admission that there's anything questionable with the way they were doing things, and that everything is (for the most part) going to continue, move on along, nothing to see here.

Even if you were to concede that there is nothing wrong with the idea of taking someone's home for tax truancy, the question remains, why weren't the homeowners at least compensated for the value of their place less the value of the lien?

Radio static on the other end.
That may be true, but we're not talking about the average household.
Enkhmunkh, the principal, was also the main driver behind bringing the OLPC project to a few of the schools in Mongolia. He also pretty much singlehandedly did the localization for the largest project on it, eToys. He's definitely contributed heavily to bringing higher IT education to Mongolia.
Well, yes, it does, or we'll lurch from one imaginary crisis to the next.
Just returned from Mongolia a few days ago...
In most rural areas in Mongolia 3MB downstream is not existent too. Actually I would say it is only available in the capital Ulaan Baatar. 3G and Wimax is available with a little luck in the populated areas of the country, but the connections are not very reliable. I experienced outages on a daily basis.
Personally I would say that educational resources in different forms are available to those who are willing to search for it AND know the english language (which is only the case for a very small fraction of the Mongolian population).
I'm not so sure if the (extremely corrupt) Mongolian government is investing wisely in modern infrastructures (streets in Mongolia are usually dangerously terrible)... it's more that the population is very interested in shiny smartphones and having a working network is a prerequisite to make them work. In such a huge country, a wireless network is probably the fastest way, to get people connected. But if the outcome of this is that a few brilliant people are taking their chances to get into higher education, then the government probably made correct decisions by accident.
Illicit drugs are not immune to the placebo effect, either. When people are bombarded with messages that illicit drugs are irresistibly pleasurable, they are primed to overrate the effects when they try them. Reality is always complicated.
I don't see any evidence "laws then screw over the poor". Exactly what are you talking about?
This is a rewrite of the #1 story on the front page all day.
Use a machine that is used for absolutely nothing else.
I've gotten sleep paralysis a few times before and this is why I always start sleeping on my side. I only get it if I lay on my back facing the ceiling.

Still, nowadays it's less terrifying and more of an annoyance after I discovered I could force myself awake by sheer will.
I hate when this happens and I have a stuffed up nose. The only thing I can control is my breathing and rolling, I can't even moan. So I breath in a noisy pattern to wake up my wife (I've told her that shaking me would 'wake up' my body), or roll onto the floor (ouch!) to regain muscle control.
Teachers' unions are preventing test-score linked pay and firing. Several of my union teachers did flipped classrooms on a regular basis. How is the teachers' union the villain here?

> There is an 'unlimited demand' for programmers skills because of demand ran out, there would be no work left (we'd have a singularity/post scarcity) - programmers automate work.

Someone has to pay programmers to live. If everyone is a qualified programmer, then there's always a programmer willing to work for less (barring a powerful labor union) - until you've driven the wage back down to basic survival (at least for many of the 90% of people who are by definition not in the top 10% as far as skill level), and we're back in the same cycle of poverty we were trying to fix.
The F5 Key Is Not a Build Process ('07)
Hmm, good point, with keys, 30 is a bit long these days.
Show him how to make his favorite game, it's probably just Angry Birds or w/e with lots of tutorials available in lots of languages for you to get up to speed and reduce to digestible simplicity, and then discuss the things he would and can now change about it.

If that doesn't get him interested he's probably never going to get interested.
A carbon tax is a technocratic solution that requires far too much coordination.

One solution that works at a lower political level if densifying cities and making them walkable. See e.g. grist.org/carbon-zero/
Wow! This is a sea change for the Seattle Times, too. The Times is a newspaper. This is the first time I've seen anything approaching this quality in video form from them. Strong work.
Yet, here we are, without a system in place where that data can be queried in seconds in a programatic way, stored perpetually.

As it should be.
Neither you, nor I, have any idea as to the ultimate fate of the cores that have melted, the other (spent or not) fuel rods, any other radioactive materials on site.

We do know, that they are not contained as of today.

We also know that some unknown amount of radioactive material of unknown composition (Iodine-131, Strontium-90, Cesium-137 - but in what ratio?) enters the atmosphere or the Pacific.

TEPCO does not know the numbers or the amount; and in fact, they hope but do not know for certain that the melted core is still on top of the 7 meter thick concrete slab which is under the pressure vessel that used to hold the core, but which was breached.

Really, your response is arrogant.
> I agree, women should have to expect to be victims of violence and harassment and should stop complaining about it.

Straw man. Didn't say that.

> And it is totally only the women who can't look in the mirror and be confident in what they see that are harassed on the street. This isn't a problem strong, confident women face.

That's over-simplifying things slightly, but let's play ball.

I'd put it like this:

Self-confidence and social graces are both 'soft' things. These are things you - and only you - can improve (classes, therapy, introspection, psychedelics, whatever floats your boat).

I reject that an iPhone app has any capacity to do that.

So, if the problem is 'street harassment' (to the non-tragic degree I've described it in my OP) is painful due to the effects it has on your self-esteem, you should fortify your self-esteem.

No, I don't think strong, confident women face this problem. It's probably an annoyance, like any undesirable social interaction is for anyone, but I don't think it has long-lasting impact, after the interaction.

We, as a society, should encourage self-empowerment. Identify the things that are causing problems for you, and work on them. Self-esteem and physical security can be greatly improved with focused work. Picking up an iPhone is not the right solution.
Seemed reasonable enough to me...
Fortunately they've never been correct in the history of recorded civilization.
I've got a controversial point of view on this topic.

Premise 1. Sexual harassment, as a term, is a relatively modern one. The dominant position of males in most societies has been so for thousands of years, though the extent to what we would identify as abuse now varied(s) from society to society.

Premise 2. In modern Western society, and increasingly in other societies influenced by the West, sexual harassment is a sociological behavior that is now considered negative for the most part.

Based on these two premises, I argue several positions. First, the behavior identified as sexual harassment stems from some part of genetic influences on cultural behavior. Second, we are not mere genetic automatons and our culture has a huge influence over the expression of behavior in individuals. Third, changes in culture, over long periods of time (centuries) will cause sexual selection preferences that result in mild but significant modifications of genetic predispositions to certain behaviors in the members of a human society.

At a high level, the recognition of sexual harassment as a point of contention in modern society is important. It is a sociological phenomenon. If the idea has enough influence to influence the mating behaviors of enough people over a long enough period of time, we will the changes genetically towards individuals who are more biased towards being less aggressive towards women.

In the meantime, if this is something we want to see happen more permanently in our species, we must keep up the fight against this crap for a long time. Right now, we have to choose intellectually that its bad to discriminate and harass. And if that's a good evolutionary fit for our survival, then our future generations of offspring will be much kinder and gentler souls by default.
Same here. When I realize it's happening, I just have to concentrate and force my legs or my arms to move which will in turn wake me up. I too noticed it happened more frequently when I slept in a certain position (on my stomach in this case) so now I always sleep on my back or side.
But that isn't a special case because of law. It is only special because only a microscopic portion of the population is that popular with the rest of the population. People don't do this to me because no one is buying those pictures and putting them in magazines... not because some laws give me extra privacy.

You asked what would happen. The answer is the same for me as it is for Jay-Z or Tom Hanks: Nothing.
Speaking as another insensitive east coaster[1], I kind of disagree. As a guy, I still remember specific times in my youth when I realized that women simply aren't allowed access to many places, situations, or neighborhoods that I can walk through without problems. They face harassment, if not real, physical threats to safety in many situations which routinely seem mundane to me, and I catch myself taking for granted all the time. Coming to terms with this is already a bit of a head-trip as a guy, but now that I have a baby daughter it is all the more relevant. So, if someone wants to write an app, I'm not going to knock them.

[1] In fairness maybe I've gone soft for living out west in the last 5 years, though I continue to have my share of cultural clashes with people who can't take a joke or just take the whole world too seriously.
We are building both solar and wind extremely fast, and prices keep coming down as a result.

Historic: http://io9.com/solar-powers-epic-price-drop-visualized-51044...
Recent: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/13/2455121/solar-ge...

Financing has helped with the capital costs. Many people can now get solar panels installed with no money down.
Is the iPhone 5s 64-bit processes a secret "game changer"?
Wireless is Not Dead, FCC to Schedule First Auction in 5 Years
For what it's worth Moxie Marlinspike gave a talk a few years back about some of the major issues with SSL as it is and had an anecdote about how bad Verisign's security is including the fact that they had a major breach in which several certs were taken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA
Perpetual overuse of the word 'genius' is enough to make one vomit.
People want to talk about, you'll have to deal.
Dell CEO Says Dell Needs to Run Away from the Mobile Phone Business
I don't want to seem dismissive, but this strikes me as the sort of thing Lovecraft would have absolutely freaked out over. I wonder if he experienced something similar or engaged with people who suffered this affliction.
Well. Be a little careful. If you're an unincorporated sole proprietor of a single-person company, many large companies will try to withhold taxes when they pay you; it's a problem several friends of mine have run into in trying to start consultancies and small product companies.
The rockstar coder is a myth. It's based on a study from the punchcard era where a cohort of a whopping 24 programmers were compared in terms of punch card output.
I've only had sleep paralysis a couple times and I agree that it is AWFUL. I felt like someone was standing in the room with me and was (irrationally) terrified.

I lucid dream far more often, probably once a week. I agree that it's nowhere near as frightening but I find it to be unpleasant as well. It's not very fun to stay dreaming when I know I'm awake.

It's funny but the movie Inception really helped me with my lucid dreams. Falling (in my dreams) will wake me up. I double-check that I'm actually dreaming by flying first (aw yeah, I can fly in my dreams - kind of like swimming in the air). So I'll often wake up by flying high into the sky and then falling to the ground.
Palringo
Http://2tag.nl/
You know, I actually tried. I wanted to help get that $500 into some kind of charity, so I spent a bunch of time enumerating all of the article's arguments and tried to craft some supporting rhetoric.

But there's not a single concern that holds water. They're probably valid questions -- newcomers to Watsi probably think them up on their own as they try to decide whether they want to donate -- but a legitimate concern? An actual, bona-fide "Watsi needs to address X or their trajectory will be at risk" concern? Or "we should be worried, because Watsi's success would have negative consequences for X other group" concern?

Nope. There simply aren't any. So either I'm just not clever enough, or there aren't any arguments that can be made against Watsi which don't simultaneously make the inquisitor sound like a complete douchenozzle.

As far as I can tell, Watsi is the perfect example of (a) technology uplifting quality of life, (b) Silicon Valley making it possible (would Watsi have been possible without SV?), and (c) that it's possible to live life without being forced to be motivated by greed or glory (the Watsi founders just want to help people).

Man, I can't wait for the Watsi API to roll out.
Congratulations, you just reinvented the "stream cipher".
35% in Fed taxes + 10% in state taxes is pretty close to half, buddy.
To add to my experiences, I've noted that it usually happens to me with these circumstances:
1) Sleeping on my back (it always happens this way, has never happened on my side or stomach)
2) poor bedding, where you've worn a divit/canoe into too soft bedding.
3) After having foods with lots of salt/msg (chemical imbalance? dehydration?)
4) On stuffy nights with stagnant, humid air or a stuffy nose
5) Sleeping on my back with arms above my head. I'm not sure why this is, but it's almost repeatable.
My top qualifiers:

a) the ability to deep dive into abstract concepts and come out with a simple yet complete solution;
b) the ability to pull others up the skill tree with them;
c) the ability to listen, irrespective of the speaker;
d) the ability to verbalize ideas and concepts to non-technical types and have them actually get it;
e) the willingness to embrace new paradigms, even if they didn't originate with that person;
That is a render from DeviantArt, produced by a person who does not represent Microsoft.
"Today only 16 types of fish are considered safe to catch here, compared with 150 types they caught before the disaster. " (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57599433/japanese-fish...)

South Korea has banned importation of all Japanese fish from 8 prefectures in the areas near Fukushima.
No professional or academic cryptographer in the world does this. Consider asking yourself why. It isn't because they haven't heard of a one-time pad.

When Schneier wrote about one-time pads in Applied Cryptography, he wasn't doing it to establish the high water mark for best possible crypto; he was doing it to illustrate some of the theory that underpins modern ciphers. Unfortunately, a whole generation of amateur cryptographers took a different message away: "forget about modern block ciphers, let's just use one-time pads".

Encrypt your content with AES-128 with a random (from /dev/random) key; write the key down as 32 hexadecimal digits. Nobody is going to break it, ever.
I agree that disabling password auth--or even just using something like fail2ban to blacklist attackers--is just as effective (and significantly easier) than setting up port knocking.

The substantive difference, though, is that port knocking can be used to hide the service entirely, rendering you safe (mostly) from 0day attacks, DoS against a specific service, etc. It can also be use to make things that shouldn't be on the Internet (say, an RDP route to the CEO's computer) a little safer. Still, though, it's not like VPNs are very difficult to use...
Oh I totally agree - the article was effective. But I think there is a distinction between objectively high-quality journalism and convincing writing.

Most writing intended to be convincing (see marketing copy, political rhetoric etc) steers well clear of the facts or twists them so as to be unreliable. That doesn't make it any less convincing.

It is easy to notice when you disagree with the writer's point, but I don't think having a noble purpose automatically makes a piece of writing a "masterpiece".
Lexus Creates a Physical Racing Video Game in an Airplane Hangar
>> In this case you typically are forced to keep a drivers log for this vehicle for the future.

Really?? You're found not-guilty, but you are still punished?
I lived in Mongolia for two years as a missionary and taught ESL at schools every day. The schools systems there are what you would expect from a 3rd world country but it never ceased to amaze me how many bright, gifted Mongolians that had innate desire to learn and improve their situation, even with very troubling situations at home.
Looks good. Just noticed rubygems.org support is disabled. Any chance it can work with ruby-toolbox for example?
> As you remove this need, even dumb people will want to avoid having kids, because it's less work.

Yes, that explains why people who lived in the early agricultural societies, who had easy lives, also had a lot of children. It explains why, today, those with the highest birthrate end up becoming the majority, consistent with the principles of natural selection.

You need to realize something about natural selection -- the future population belongs to those with the highest birth rate, whoever and wherever they are. You should know this, but you clearly do not.

In Israel, arabs are outbreeding Jews and will eventually become an absolute majority:

Title: "High Arab birth rate in Israel raises concerns about country’s Jewish identity":

http://www.ibtimes.com/high-arab-birth-rate-israel-raises-co...

In the U.S., groups other than White descendants of Europeans are outbreeding them and will soon become an absolute majority, as they already are in California:

Title: "California: Whites are no longer the majority"

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/01/california-whites-are-no-long...

I'm not complaining about the ethnic makeup of the future, I'm only making the point that natural selection blindly chooses those with the highest birthrate, and it is that group that becomes the future population of the world.

> Don't just write massive posts, also ask "why?" a LOT more.

It is you who needs to educate yourself on this issue. You posted opinions, I posted facts. You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation

Quote: "As of September 10, 2013 the world's human population is estimated to be 7.11 billion by the United States Census Bureau, and over 7 billion by the United Nations. Most contemporary estimates for the carrying capacity of the Earth under existing conditions are between 4 billion and 16 billion. Depending on which estimate is used, human overpopulation may or may not have already occurred. Nevertheless, the rapid recent increase in human population is causing some concern. The population is expected to reach between 8 and 10.5 billion between the year 2040 and 2050. In May 2011, the United Nations increased the medium variant projections to 9.3 billion for 2050 and 10.1 billion for 2100."