skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Studios want to make films that will bring in buckets of money. Audiences in the US are far more willing to go and watch patriotic films than those that question the actions of the military or government.

>A good example of this would be Iron Man 3, which had several minutes of additional footage added in for the Chinese market.

Yeah, doesn't seem like it worked too well for them[0]… if they really wanted to make 'buckets of money' in this case, why not add footage that would resonate with the audience (possibly non DoD supportive stances) instead of irrelevant shots of a local pop star? How can one go about hand-waving this situation that presented itself? They didn't feel like taking the time to understand the Chinese audience? Easier to employ Edward Bernays techniques of misdirection and diversion in order to try and associate good feelings with the movie?

[0]: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2013/0510/Chines...
I lived 10 minutes walk from there, in 1996 or so. It's now a park that's around 5 minute walk wide. I could never have imagined 50,000 people fitting in that park!

"A thorough government survey in 1987 gave a clearer picture: an estimated 33,000 people resided within the Walled City.[8] Based on this survey, the Walled City had a population density of approximately 1,255,000 inhabitants per square kilometre (3,250,000 /sq mi) in 1987. For comparison, Hong Kong as a whole (itself one of the most densely populated areas on Earth) had a population density of about 6,700 inhabitants per square kilometre (17,000 /sq mi) as of July 2009.[26]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
BART's fare formula cracked
What would you call more reckless than having no passcode at all?
The site also says "Maybe": http://istouchidhackedyet.com/
PPM - Netpbm color image format
Teen Punished for Stopping Bullies From Harassing a Special Needs Girl
"Why Lisp Machines? The standard platform for Lisp before Lisp machines was a timeshared PDP-10, but it was well known that one Lisp program could turn a timeshared KL-10 into unusable sludge for everyone else. It became technically feasible to build cheaper hardware that would run lisp better than on timeshared computers. The technological push was definitely from the top down; to run big, resource hungry lisp programs more cheaply. Lisp machines were not 'personal' out of some desire make life pleasant for programmers, but simply because lisp would use 100% of whatever resources it had available."

This explanation doesn't seem to make sense.

If you wanted to prevent a Lisp program from using up 100% of CPU on a timeshared machine, all you would have needed to do is impose CPU quotas on the users.

And a lot of the engineering on Lisp Machines did go toward making life pleasant for programmers. The windowed GUI environment on a Lisp Machine was a whole lot nicer than logging into a PDP-10 on a VT-100 terminal. If running Lisp more cheaply was really the goal, they wouldn't have given these machines high resolution bitmapped displays, which were very expensive at the time.
I'd like to propose a slightly refined version of this question. If you wanted to select the best-of-breed books on a wide range of technical topics, math, physics, practical skills, survival, etc. what would they be? Which ones would be good to go into a time capsule to preserve modern knowledge in an end-of-civilization setting?

The types of books I'm looking for would include the Feynman Lectures, SICP, Art of Computer Programming, etc. What would be a good book series (preferably a classic one that's stood the test of time) on math (Algebra, various Calculus topics, Statistics, etc)? Principia Mathematica should go in here, but it would be nice to have something that includes modern notation. For general on-your-own in a cabin in the woods setting, I've been impressed with the topics covered in the Foxfire books. So what else? I'd like a good world history book, that ties in how everything is related to everything else (i.e, not just cover each civilization in isolation). Also, something covering Western and Eastern philosophy.
Oil & Gas

I'm with a startup called PetroFeed and we're looking to tap into the huge potential in the industry[1]. Most startups in the O&G industry are concerned with building better drilling technologies, or finding new resource pockets; leaving lots of room for companies like ours. ;)

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_com...
Don't knock potatoes. I do all of my hardcore data analysis on my Very Large Potato Array.
SEO when changing CMS or page structure
It also doesn't work nearly as well if you are OCD about wiping your screen often, not that that makes the pattern lock any better but it isn't quite that trivial to defeat
even though it was almost expected to be bypassed easily, using fingerprints can still be handy if one wants to establish claim on a device. I believe the thinking was to provide a way to uniquely link the device to an entity - security was just a byproduct (but marketing trumpeted it)
Low-end disruption hasn't set in because of the carrier model. It doesn't matter than the iPhone costs twice as much as a Nexus 4 because most people will only pay $200 anyways. This works in Apple's favor. It's also why the iPhone 5C is going to be so big for them; they can sell last year's phone as though it were new and barely drop the price. The margins on that phone are going to be gigantic. It's a direct response to their stock troubles, by the way.

I wonder at what point does the carrier model break. If a high end phone only costs $300 - $350, when that becomes the norm I mean, do people still agree to 2 year contracts in order to trim that down a hundred dollars?
So rather than addressing the point, you attack him on something completely different. Presumably because there are actually no examples where he's been wrong about TouchID.
Artificial Wombs

Artificial/in vitro food
It's known as soft power. Another example is the BBC World Service, which is currently funded by the British government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
"Orbiter OK-2.01...was dismantled and sat gathering dust at the Tushina factory near Moscow for years until 2011 when it was reportedly moved to an aviation museum in Germany for restoration"

I just walked through this Buran model a few months ago at the Technikmuseum in Speyer, Germany. It's really there.

http://speyer.technik-museum.de/en
It takes more than 5 seconds to form an opinion
LLVM Python
Read Asimov. It's all there. It comes down to space travel.

Presumably, the ultimate propulsion will be nuclear-boiled water ejected out of a nozzle as steam. I suppose you could do something similar with other low molecular weight (stable bonds), low atomic weight (plentiful in post-stellar debris) fluids, but water's on a sweet spot in terms of caloric density. Hydrocarbons would probably be good, so I suppose you could mine the atmospheres of the gas giants for those. Interstellar travel will involve strapping a reactor to a large iceberg lassoed from the Ort belt and accelerating for one half of the trip, then decelerating for the other half.

Space travel will require space mining (uranium, water, gold, titanium, lithium, etc)

Think of all the things involved: mining equipment, (robots) depots, transport, refueling stations, distribution. SpaceX has already shown vast industries are going to be largely robotic. But people will go to the same places as the mining, because something will always go wrong with something, and those will be the well-developed trade routes.

Those people will have all the same issues they have here. Governance, gambling, hepatitis, surgery. But there will be new issues as well. There will likely be founder effect: segments of humanity will venture off to planets many light years away. It will take decades to get there. How do you maintain the concept of "humanity" if they land on a planet with slightly more gravity, slightly colder, slightly less oxygen, so everyone becomes what we would consider a furry dwarf with an IQ of 170?

Synthetic genomics will be big in all sorts of ways, some related to the founder effects of space travel.

We will not travel faster than the speed of light and hibernation is a fiction. Our bodies just aren't made for that. I think this is a thing people haven't started really planning for very well. Interstellar travel is going to involve very large vessels.

but once we do Mars and the asteroid belt, there's not much left in this system.
But you have to consider potential damage from the successful attack.
It doesn't matter if 99% of low damage attacks are unsuccessful but 1% high damage attacks will go through.
The solution is fine by itself but millions of people will use it and not understand the real level of protection.
no no no no no.

This is not being done by lifting an existing print from the existing device. They're taking a photo of the authorised FINGER and using that to create their fake finger...

I don't see how this could be considered a significant issue unless you are going to steal someones phone AND somehow get a still 2400 dpi photo of the surface of their finger
Actually it hasn't been demonstrated at all. They dusted a carefully made high quality fingerprint to defeat TouchID, not an opportunistic one taken from something an unwitting victim left behind.

Until they do that, this doesn't really indicate much about how weak TouchID is in the real world.
Very nice! I worked on a similar steganographic system (not for tweets though) that you can find here: https://github.com/hmoraldo/markovTextStego There you'll find both the source code and a link to a paper explaining how it works and how it differs from other approaches.
Right. Yesterday, people clamored for a browser API to allow for that stuff to login, now that it is broken it has magically morphed into a mere 'convenience feature', a sidenote, a little fix.

(Of course, this post ends with Apple has succeeded. Sigh.)
NSA: Possibly breaking US laws, but still bound by computational complexity
Nobody has been able to use those low quality fingerprints to defeat TouchID.
> I also need to be able to navigate the code quickly but that might be part if your "tools to help me understand" remark.

It often takes me 20-30 minutes to edit a single line of code. Understanding why I need to change the program, what the effects of making that change are, determining which line of the code to edit, figuring out whether I need to edit or refactor, spending time in a REPL to test the proposed changes...

I just use the mouse.
LuaJIT isn't a perfect drop-in, however, as it has various limitations that base Lua doesn't (in addition to the obvious ones if you're using Lua 5.2 features, which LuaJIT doesn't support).

In my case it's because of LuaJIT has address-space limitations that standard Lua does not, due to its use of NaN-encoding for pointers. There are some inputs where LuaJIT simply runs out of memory (or rather, address-space), which work fine when run using standard Lua.

[For my app the speedup from LuaJIT isn't so great anyway, so it's just a minor annoyance.]
Ah, thanks! I do appreciate the insight here...
Avatar was quite negative. Syriana, Rendition, and Jarhead were as well. Your general point definitely stands, post 9/11 at least, but those are notable exceptions.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html
I login with empty password. Just click login button.
No he doesn't.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html

“Commercial”

Please don't use “commercial” as a synonym for “nonfree.” That confuses two entirely different issues.

A program is commercial if it is developed as a business activity. A commercial program can be free or nonfree, depending on its manner of distribution. Likewise, a program developed by a school or an individual can be free or nonfree, depending on its manner of distribution. The two questions—what sort of entity developed the program and what freedom its users have—are independent.

In the first decade of the free software movement, free software packages were almost always noncommercial; the components of the GNU/Linux operating system were developed by individuals or by nonprofit organizations such as the FSF and universities. Later, in the 1990s, free commercial software started to appear.

Free commercial software is a contribution to our community, so we should encourage it. But people who think that “commercial” means “nonfree” will tend to think that the “free commercial” combination is self-contradictory, and dismiss the possibility. Let's be careful not to use the word “commercial” in that way.
No, each failure increases the time between tries until you brick the phone.
The last film to mock the U.S. military was Dr. Strangelove? You're kidding, right? Even if you only count Kubrick movies, there's Full Metal Jacket.
Those techniques still haven't been shown to work in practice because CCC was only ago to unlock the device using a carefully made high quality print, not one lifted in an ecologically valid situation.

What matters is the rate at which copies of real prints are rejected, not the fact that one carefully made print can be made to work.
This is a pretty cool concept, but it still needs a bit of work. While I agree with black borders around the text, I think it seems to meme-like. Maybe work on getting a shadow around the text when it is over multiple colours (e.g. the third picture near the concentration of lights). Other than that, it's a great concept, and I'd love to use it.
The coolest thing is how the first (and only) voyage, including the landing, was completely automated.

Its one thing to drop an unmanned capsule into the ocean, quite another to land it on a runway. Of course, drones do it all the time these days. But this was 27 years ago.
Even worse:
Other manufacturers will jump ship and this sort of device becomes omnipresent on smartphones.

Probably, apps will get access to capture raw prints themselves at some time. Someone will start to store real and unhashed fp's in their database. As happening frequently with databases containing CC numbers (and even CC pins), that DB will eventually get copied and accessible on the net.

Buying one's fp data will become possible at some point.
The USSR should be commended on not throwing as much good money after bad as the US did w/ the Space-Shuttle Program, which was built on even worse faulty assumptions re: cost, reuse, safety, launch frequency, etc.

> When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost of the Space Shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch, or $60,000/kg (approximately $27,000 per pound) to LEO. This should be contrasted with the originally envisioned costs of $118 per kilogram (approximately $53 per pound) of payload in 1972 dollars ($1,400/kg, [approximately $630 per pound] adjusting for inflation to 2011)

> The launch rate was significantly lower than initially expected. While not reducing absolute operating costs, more launches per year gives a lower cost per launch. Some early hypothetical studies examined 55 launches per year (see above), but the maximum possible launch rate was limited to 24 per year based on manufacturing capacity of the Michoud facility that constructs the external tank. Early in shuttle development, the expected launch rate was about 12 per year. Launch rates reached a peak of 9 per year in 1985 but averaged fewer thereafter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_...
True enough, there is other "noise" on the phone, in the form of point-like finger prints, and even other trails. But you're imagining a blank phone, where you have to try and discern one trail from another. Now turn the phone on, and the unlock background appears. Which trails intersect all of the dots of the unlock background?

It's much easier that you imagine. I've been using my phone as I normally do throughout the day, and I can see the unlock pattern clearly on the phone.
We have already been doing that. This is potentially a long discussion, but basically there are a few factors.

Heat. It gets really hot the deeper you go. There are a lot of mines already where it's very difficult for humans to exist for very long.

Also, availability. There's a lot of stuff in the earth. But after 4 billion years gravity happened. All elements have different densities. Turns out a lot of the metals that are really, really useful also turn out to be pretty dense. Think uranium and platinum as examples. Most of these elements have sank into the deep mantle and the core over time. The bits we find left over aren't even a taste of how much is collectively in the earth but can't get to. On a side note, it's been theorized that the massive amounts of uranium that sank to the core has been powering the earth for billions of years. Basically, the earth is a giant fission reactor.

The third point is that there's a lot more stuff up there than down here. If you had to pick a direction to mine, in the long term it's going to be easier and more profitable to mine the stuff in space than to dig deeper into the ground.
http://nigelparry.com/news/guardian-david-leigh-cablegate.sh...

This is the full account.
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Surface 2: Everything that's wrong with Microsoft's model
A Quick Primer on Writing Readable Python Code for New Developers
Lessons learned from Startup Life and Crossfit
This describes me to a T.

I had this same internal conversation with myself last night. I'm currently entrenched in a myriad of unrelated hobbies and pursuits, and last night as I sat at my computer and researched what knowledge I needed to build a violin, it hit me: I'm actually not mastering any of these pursuits. Golfing, Motorcycle Rebuilding, Objective C, Angular JS, Guitar, and the list goes on.

I decided last night to do what the article says: Choose one. Just one. and focus on it, serially, not in parallel. So, I've chosen one, and it will be my pursuit for the next 6 months, or until I feel I have mastered it. Then, onto the next one.
I don't think so. I think there's nothing unique about this thing called the "American dream". I've lived in a couple of countries outside the US and have travelled extensively. I can't think of many people who don't strive to improve their lives, provide for their families, own a home, perhaps own a business and, generally speaking, have a good life without worries, health or financial problems. This is not an idea rooted in the US at all.

How do you achieve these things? Well, should these things be handed to you by a government? Well, that's not going to happen anywhere in the world. You have to work for these things. That doesn't mean hard labor. That means that you have to focus on what it is you want and lay out a course through which you can reach those goals. No matter where you put your finger on the globe this requires determination, lots of work and focus. It might mean going to a vocational school, college or university to learn something in preparation. It could mean saving money for years in order to open a small business. It could mean learning how to find people who will invest in your vision. It could mean dedicating every free moment you have to slowly inch towards your goals. It could mean a million different things. None of which are unique to Americans or the United States.

A lot of Americans have this myopic ego-centric view of the universe. I don't know of anyone who's been exposed to a variety of cultures and ideas who things this way. There are brilliant and exceptional individuals all over the world. Not one of them succeeds without a solid dedication to a vision. Not one of them succeeds because the State drives them to succeed. Not one of them advances in life because they waste their lives away watching TV, playing video games and hanging out on Facebook all day. Those who do succeed work hard. With "hard" not necessarily being defined as "hard physical work" but rather an intense and sustained focus and dedication to what it is they want out of life despite their current circumstances and station in life.
Apparently a lot of people are much smarter than the people who built the technology. Kinda like everyone is better at cryptography than actual cryptographers. Nothing anyone says here is going to surprise the folks who designed it.
I thought they used restriction digests with gel electrophoresis, I'm pretty sure full genomic sequencing would be too expensive.
Good point. I also don't know enough about India to comment on that. What I was pointing out in my post was a subtle bias towards overemphasizing China's multi-ethnic nature. China is not especially multi-ethnic, and many of the countries in that list have ethnic minorities of similar size to China. E.g. Afghanistan, Israel, Poland, Russia and South Africa (Khoisan vs Bantu).
Jan's a great guy. Brian's a great guy. The way whatsapp (the company) works is a great counter-example to the conventional wisdom on how to run a consumer technology company in the valley.

Hey Jan/Brian, just one request - can you please open up the whatsapp messaging platform as an API with a simple charge-the-user with no-stored-user-info model that nobody in the valley believes could work for a social network. I'd become an even bigger fan of the company :-)
Soviet technological development was a very weird universe. They had a lot of very talented scientists and engineers and were certainly capable of coming up with many novel innovations on their own. However, within the communist soviet system politics ruled everything. Whether or not a project would receive support was utterly dependent on political factors, which could be affected by prior success of course, but not always. Soviet leadership put a heavy emphasis on espionage in guiding technological development, sometimes without much critical thinking. This goes back to the days of WWII spying on the Manhattan project and copying of captured B-29's into the nearly identical Tu-4. But you see many other projects in the same vein, such as the Tu-144 (Concordski) and of course Buran.

The fascinating thing about Buran is that the Shuttle was built with a really very bizarre set of functional requirements that imposed steep demands on the design of the vehicle but which turned out to be mostly useless in a practical sense and were not actually meaningfully used during the lifetime of the vehicle. For example, the large wings on the Shuttle give it a very high cross-range flight capability during re-entry, but that was only a requirement because it was thought that the Shuttle would perform a particular kind of military mission. A polar launch which would deploy a satellite, or perform other activities, in one orbit and return to the launch site. Such missions never materialized, and such missions were unlikely to be valuable to the Soviets at all. And yet that requirement dictated the size of the wings which forced the frame to be larger and heavier, which reduced the payload, and which created a larger area that needed thermal protection (an issue which contributed to the loss of Columbia, for example), and so forth. A clean sheet design without such a requirement should have had much smaller wings and thus be a more capable and more reliable design, but Buran copied the Shuttle too closely and ended up with all of the faults of the Shuttle design without a good reason for them.
The carrier model doesn't exist equally in all places.
Wag the Dog.
A further argument against biometrics, for those in the United States, is that your "right to silence" (under the 5th amendment) doesn't protect you against the government compelling you to use your fingerprint to unlock something (however it does protect you against revealing a PIN code)...