skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
111 TBq [1] and it seems like they carried it for more than half a kilometer after they removed the material from the shielding [2].

[1] http://iaea.org/newscenter/news/2013/mexicoradsource.html

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-25224304
It doesn't have to be a 1:1 mapping; there are certainly valid scenarios where it might not make sense (or it might be prohibitively difficult) to provide a particular representation of a particular resource, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use consistent URLs where possible. This is what HTTP 406[1] is for.

1. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10...
i should make clear, i absolutely think 23andMe are in the wrong. very very far into the wrong.

the fact that the FDA are effectively impotent in many areas they are not is largely irrelevant, but I enjoyed seeing it brought up since it is very true and also a real world problem with a measurable impact on the economy and quality of life.
Keep in mind that DirectX and OpenGL are first and foremost abstraction layer on top of the GPU. Consoles have a fixed hardware, so you can skip a large part of these and write code directly for the GPU.

I don't know how much still holds for the XBox One, but for instance the XBox 360 version of DirectX is very different from the PC version: it's much closer to the metal and exposes pretty much all the GPU functionalities.

Here is a thread talking about XBox 360 dev: http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=62049
...I agree? It seems like you're saying that compromising your email account right now won't allow anyone access to all the sites you've signed up with it, which is pretty much incorrect.
"Code Transparency

In addition, Microsoft said it would enhance the transparency of its software code, helping to convince customers its products do not contain back doors. The company said it would go as far as opening a network of “transparency centers” designed to provide customers with greater ability to assure themselves of the integrity of Microsoft’s products. The centers will be opened across Europe, the Americas and Asia, Microsoft said."

Transparency centers, eh? Is that like a Microsoftian Ministry of Truth where inquisitors go to be reeducated?
Why does that have to be the case though? The universe/galaxy are already very old. I can't imagine there's anything preventing alien beings from having gone through an entire life-cycle already, since humans began to walk the earth.
Not that it does - just that it can. FWIW, I'm no war hawk, I generally consider myself an anti-war veteran.
I have to agree with this sentiment. I'm in nyc. I've hired several cleaners for my apartment through different services, and each cleaner I got was very different than the one before them, even through the same cleaning service.
After I found a cleaner I liked and trusted, I just contacted them directly (via text) to book a time to clean.

I don't see how you would prevent this from happening? Its cheaper for me, and the cleaner gets paid directly with no commissions taken out.

I see this as a different situation from airbnb because this is a repeat service (weekly, biweekly, monthly) and this relationship will last longer than an airbnb relationship which is usually a one time deal.
Was it a full microprocessor or just an ALU? In my Digital Design class we created a 4-bit ALU with about 8-9 opcodes and one register.
North Korea is - for the wrong reasons - a beautiful country.

It's not as crowded, filled with cars, smog and litter as "developed countries". It's not as dirty, crowded and poor as India. It's filled with trees, quiet, clean. Buildings look okay from afar. Almost an eco-utopia.
I'm curious, why does pride come into the equation?
When in Doubt, Raise Your Prices
The distinction you (and the site you link) propose between "morals" and "ethics" is far from universally used, even in the domain of philosophy which concerns morals/ethics.

Notably, its not even consistent with the definitions given in the "references" provided on the linked site, which seems to adopt the principle that if you assert something boldly and provided references to "support" it, it doesn't matter if the references actually support it, people will just assume your description is authoritative because you gave references.
and black american people make excellent athletes - and that has nothing to do with selective breeding in the slave trade?

evolution is maybe not the answer, but my experience tells me that survival skills lack in my surrounds.
That bit in the article made me furious.

Edit: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's contact page is here: http://www.dccc.org/page/s/contact

I tried calling them on the phone about this, but their "Comment line" voice mail box was full and bounced me back to the receptionist, Matt. (On the bright side, Matt was very helpful and offered to transcribe my comments into their web comment form for me. I opted to just type them up myself.)
What sort of insurance? My wife booked an apartment in London several months ago. Got there in November and it wasn't anywhere near what was shown on the site - same location, but size, amenities, etc were all not as advertised.
What Microsoft needs to do, is abandon its secrets and OS property

You provide no support for this statement, so we're left to ask what you mean by it. What is your meaning? Before you answer, please look at this:

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

That shows that Windows is about 91% of the desktop operating system market. On what do you base them as needing to prove "it kicks ass and is still relevant in the 21st century"?

In fact, the one operating system on that chart that supports an "open-OS" ethos takes up less than 2% of desktop operating system market. I would think that operating system would be the one that needs to prove its relevance as we are almost 14 years into the 21st century.
I think the spokeswoman for the DCCC missed the part where this was presented to the House Science Committee, not the committee in charge of immigration or minimum wage...
Sure, as with all things human, there is the occasional gray area where there are no good answers, but yes I probably wouldn't work in a criminal enterprise in a democratic nation, whether it is about medical marijuana or not.

The point is, I'll work on things as per my ethics, not some random person's ethics or a hypothetical "engineers code of conduct" or whatever as the article seems to advocate.

I gave plenty of examples of software that some people would consider unethical (say drone targeting, or NSA crawling etc that TFA is about) that I would have no problem working on. My ethics are mostly in harmony with the legal systems of democratic nations. I'm sorry if that doesn't accord with your notions of what "should be".
CIA's Tech Head: 'We Try To Collect Everything And Hang On To It Forever'
AFAIK it's not absorbed through skin, so that's not usually a problem as long as you don't aerosolize it. If you drop the droplet onto the floor, that's when the fun begins.
The metaphysical implications would be worth it alone.
Hard problems in secure communication(with solutions)
You definitely pay for gmail. Paraphrasing Heinlein, you pay for it other than with money.
I'll bet all those NSA tools are all running on Linux. Linux is a tool. Is Linus ethical?
I like the circle of concern versus circle of control metaphor from the 7 Habits book. However, it must be applied with some subtlety. Being aware of your competition is not the same as stressing over your competition. As the author mentions, you must separate the portions of this knowledge that you can act on, and the ones you cannot. Nine times out of ten, it comes back to doing a better job at your company. If your competition consistently does a better job than you, then you're likely to lose, but stressing over it won't change the outcome.
It's probably the same as with learning about your cognitive biases: First you start noticing your bias right after you did it, then you start catching yourself in the act, and eventually you're able to stop yourself before even doing it.
I'm okay with that. It hasn't cost me anything I valued.
Why Unity is so popular for videogame development?
Geo-locating the knowledge transfer in StackOverflow
it was an example... and a good one.

i strongly disagree with the sentiment that we can't use races, sexes etc. to discriminate (we shouldn't use it to privilege or under-privilege people for sure, and thats the real issue with racism, sexism etc.) - there is real measurable data there.

p.s. i am an arab. i can understand why arabs in particular would be inclined towards becoming anti-US terrorists too... its not very complicated or deep, and certainly not racist.
In the technology world, 18 months is still a very long time.

It's actually even worse now since the US switched to first-to-file. Suppose you invent something and show it to your buddy, Fred. Fred can then turn around and patent your invention, and then sue you for using it. And unless you took the precaution of patenting it yourself or formally publishing it to establish prior art, Fred will win. The fact that you actually invented it doesn't matter.
Was there an edit? I don't see any mention of baby-killing
What is your definition of a hacker?
I'm wondering how mbox format is going to work for 20+ gigabytes of email. Am I seriously going to be presented with a multi-gigabyte-sized text file?
Wouldn't that require knowing how much Cobalt-60 there was? Or is it always shipped in standard sized units?
He didn't mention any sensationalist baby-killing in his post, but one common side effect of war, and by extension soldiers, is the killing of other humans right?
Good points. I must have another look at Android on tablets. Mine (Nexus 7) fell out of use because very few apps made good use of the extra screen space compared with my quite big Android phone....
Moral behavior is not a 'game theory' concept. It is what you do even when you don't 'win'. At its heart, moral behavior is NOT doing whatever it takes to benefit yourself, which is the sum of game theory.

So yes, if your project has only harmful application then you shouldn't work on it. Even if someone else most assuredly will (I'm guessing that could be you). Because its wrong, hypocritical.
I get a weird tingling when a startup/company's domain name is worth more than the company itself minus the value of the domain name.
> we could find a dead moon ... nearby (to avoid contamination) and set up a station or artifact

hey, I saw that movie too
The article explains it. Moving things off the UI thread (and other responsiveness related fixes) is what has been done so far as part of Snappy. This project is about putting web content in a different process than the Firefox UI.
Typically the expansion markets have worse economics or other operational problems. That's why they wer not the 'model' or tier 1 market to begin with. It does seem a stretch to put a huge valuation on a business with so much value 'on the come'. The exception (that perhaps proves the rule) seems to be Amazon.
This is a good move - it increases overall security from illegal and quasilegal actors. "A rising tide lifts all boats". While it might prevent certain kinds of switcharoo ("let's exchange data on each other's citizens since we can't legally spy on our own citizens" maneuvers might be hampered), it still doesn't deal with an overly broad court order (c.f. Third Party doctrine). This does nothing against a duly authorized order from a legal entity. Those are threats that are very hard to deal with, in general. In order to ensure that privacy is maintained against overly broad and unreasonable legal searches, a non-technical (that is, political/legal) solution must be implemented.

edit: Microsoft has been one of the voices calling for legal reform. I respect that. It might be a PR move, but still... I'll take it. :-)
For anyone looking to an alternative method, there is a great open source Python script called Bagoma that incrementally backs up your Gmail account: http://bagoma.sourceforge.net/ . Each email is stored as an individual text file rather than the mbox format. I have backed up my account with it every few days for a couple of years and it works great. It will even restore your account to Gmail if you need to switch accounts or accidentally delete messages.
I'm aware of the speculative bubble. The point (which I think you understand) is that bitcoins actually provide real-world utility that is not transient or ephemeral (tulips blooming).
Oh well that's something different - you'll work on what you find to be personally ethical. That's absolutely fine, ethics after all are ultimately personal. Like I'd not work for Monsanto, since I find them unethical, but certainly most hackers disagree with me on that. I'm not happy about the NSA situation though I see it more as an issue of bounds being overstepped, the engineers working there don't strike me as empirically unethical.
Agreed but it takes time, effort and money to make sure that you can take your stuff with you.
The reason it was so surprising is that even 6 months ago Homejoy's numbers were already well above the threshold for raising a series A.

Investors are always influenced a lot by the founders. Which they should be. The mistake they make is to care about slightly the wrong things.
Announcing Zeno - Netflix’s In-Memory Data Distribution Framework
tl;dr: how to be a good robot.
If you don't mind me asking...

how are average people in China buying bitcoins without the use of a bank??? How do they get the cash to the seller of the bitcoin I guess is my question?

Do they walk into a brick and mortar "bitcoin store" and make a deposit (with cash)... and then they can trade from that "bitcoin store"? (Provided they accept all the risk).

Is there some other user friendly way this happens that doesn't require the use of cards that flow through financial institutions?

Or is the trade really complex currently and relegated to just "people in the know" so to speak?

Just trying to get an idea of how these new rules would affect the average Chinese.
Every see those vertical yellow gateways at border crossings and interstate weigh stations? Those are radiation scanners. Partially to keep terrorists at bay, but also to keep stuff like this at bay. In the 3rd world, this is sadly a frequent occurrence that these materials are used as scrap.

Example detector:
http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/jpodocs/repts_te/14400_files/5_13.jpg
Every other day I hit the problem that a tab consumes so much CPU that it stutters. After closing that tab and reopening the same web site the issue is gone. That's using Chrome stable both on Linux and Android.
This isn't to say you won't possibly need more than just DirectX. But this is to say you quite possibly need at least DirectX.
I'm reminded of H.P. Lovecraft: that we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. There's a lot not to like about Lovecraft but I think he pegged humanity's role in the cosmic order pretty well (we wouldn't have one.)

Any species capable of reaching our planet from another galaxy will be more than advanced enough to wipe us out without effort. If there's any sort of competition for resources or territory between aggressive civilizations operating at that scale and we find ourselves in the middle, we just lose. Our "fighting" them would be akin to termites "fighting" a steamroller flattening their mound.
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I respect you and are grateful that you risked your life during your service for us. However, making false blaming statements isn't going to help your cause. Datsundere didn't say you killed babies. He said that soldiers kill people, which is a true statement. It's part of being a soldier, but it isn't necessarily the right thing to do moving forward for humanity.

You personally aren't on the hook for this. You signed up for the military, took oaths to defend us (for which I am very grateful) and took orders from decision makers who may or may not have been influenced in their decisions to do the right thing. The rest of us have a right to voice those concerns and ask hard questions about the opportunity cost of warfare. That doesn't mean we're questioning the concept of chain of command.

I hope our sons and daughters end up living in a world where risk is still ever present, but it is used for exploration and the furtherment of humanity, instead of fighting and killing each other over what will later be considered less important matters.

Edit for fellow HNers: Voting down a soldier for expressing some emotion isn't cool. You don't have to apply (misweighted) negative karma to someone who is sharing an important experience of their life to make an impact in the conversation. +1 on the parent - listen to your fellow man, no matter what he is saying.
Well, first of all, you'd run into the chicken and egg problem. How do you fill a competitor with data without blatantly copying Wikipedia's data? How do you fill in data without editors? How do you get editors without data? It's not unsolvable, but a very tricky problem.

Second, you'd have to overcome Wikipedia's massive marketing efforts, particularly with the word "wiki". People often use the term "wiki" as a verb in the same way they use "google" as a verb. How do you get people to think "I'll look that up on Clonopedia" instead of "I'll look that up on Wikipedia"? It's not insurmountable, but potentially a very, very expensive proposition.

Third, despite Wikipedia's flaws, it is really one of the best collections of knowledge on the internet. It's so vast that the editing has slowed down because everything goes on there. This is like winning an architecture competition where they submit the Taj Mahal and you submit a sandcastle. It's not impossible, but... well... good luck.

That said, I would enjoy some serious competition for Wikipedia and similarly placed entities (Google, etc).
Needs cool demos of practical applications.
Premature reporting by aljazeera. There was an even bigger dive a few days ago but it shot back up after hitting 840.
Firebug is known to not work (and cause stability problems) at the moment (for reasons mentioned by cpeterso). We're working with addon developers to improve this situation.
"Every algorithm known to man has both good and bad uses. Not developing algorithms because they might be harmful is insane."

Yep, that missile guiding system someone built for Boeing totally has primarily good uses in mind.

"Work is just work, a means to exchange your talents for money. Keep it legal, do good work. Go home and play with the kids."

Dude, seriously? Everyone should have some sense of morals and question authority. Come on, if we don't question our current way of life, how does anything get better? Why should we be okay with people dying just so we can have a nice, cozy life with our kids?
Once you have a multi-process setup in place, running in a single process is relatively simple, IPC just routes messages internally instead of across processes. Having a single-process setup and going to a multi-process one is a way, way, way larger effort.
I can't agree more. Legal isn't the same as moral, and conflating the two is pretty disingenuous.

My professional goal (hell, my life goal) is to work on things that make a positive difference in the world. Laws don't necessarily come into it (and sometimes are in direct opposition to this). I believe (or naively hope) that other people in my profession feel the same way, otherwise the future is going to get... interesting.
In the U.S., I use:

https://localbitcoins.com/

I imagine they use that or something similar.
It's really easy to put a sticker on it that says "This thing is radioactive and will kill you if you open it!" or so goes the $5 wrench theory.
Why bother? This kind pic ads is just an indicator of poor content.
The Pitcairners aren't exactly a country. The UN calls them a non-self governing territory under jurisdiction of the UK.

I think Bhutan is the most isolated real country. NK is second. You'd much rather be a Bhutanese, though; by extreme contrast to NK, Bhutan is considered by many the happiest nation on Earth.
If there's one thing we learned in the last few months is how volatile BTC is. Reports of such "crashes" are really non-news.
"Do you regret building the internet because of surveillance?" is the new "Do you regret discovering fission because of the bomb?"

Now, as a technologist I'd never directly contribute to a project whose intent was to kill or surveil people. (I turned down that cushy DoD contract job straight out of college.)

But this whole "as engineers we need to consider the ethical implications" argument is deeply flawed. First, it assumes we can predict how the technology we build will be used. Second, even if we could predict all the uses, should we refrain from building something that has some good uses, just because it has some bad ones? Third...what about the people actually using the thing for evil?

We might as well drop the "as engineers" part and just have a discussion about not doing evil things in general.
Maybe they meant applications?
Somewhat sobering to remember that Linus released the first Linux kernel before the first beta of Windows NT (1992).
And it bounced right back.
Except if, for example, our discovery of the nature of the universe accelerates a change for us that isn't stereotypical of "Aliens from another planet". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity for context.
> as well as MS platforms (perfectly/badly is another question)

Not all of them unless you count using an OpenGL-to-DirectX wrapper library. "Cross platform" sometimes means writing all the platform specific code yourself.
Unrelated, but if you're weird like me and was enchanted by the fontface of the site, it's Lora: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lora
> The potential hack to defeat the FDA here is to simply split the company in 2 parts.

The easier "hack" is to just stop making unwarranted health claims. Or, if the claims are not unwarranted, to provide the support for them.

> Again, as I said in other posts, the FDA doesn't regulate supplements

Yes, it does, but the scope of its regulatory authority set by Congress over supplements is different than the scope it has over food, drugs, and medical devices.

> doesn't regulate Dianetics/Scientology

Dianetics/Scientology is neither a food, drug, supplement, medical device, nor anything else vaguely related to the FDA's scope of regulatory authority.

> didn't stop "The Secret" from killing people with heat-stroke therapy.

As with Dianetics/Scientology, this is not within the scope of FDA's regulatory authority.

> It's enormously offensive to me that the government spends so much time going after stuff like this, pot smokers, et al, instead of massively beefing up enforcement over the hundreds or thousands of hucksters selling harmful bullshit health products on radio and late night TV ads.

I don't think the government is actually spending all that much time on the things you are complaining about (I think you are confusing the amount of time that people spend on the internet talking abou thte government doing something with the amount of time/effort the government spends doing it), but if you want to advocate that Congress should expand the FDA's regulatory authority so that the things you complain that they aren't doing are actually within their scope fo regulatory authority, feel free.

I still don't see that as an argument that the FDA shouldn't act thoroughly within the domain they are charged with regulating now.
"Dude, seriously? Everyone should have some sense of morals and question authority"

Yes seriously. My "sense of morals" is very different from yours (in that I'd gladly work on defence tech say.). So what?
Huh. I didn't know that the UNIX timestamp essentially gets recalculated at UTC midnight every day to ensure that midnight now = midnight yesterday + 86400. I take back my previous argument.
Open Source is eating the world