skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Legitimate question:

Given the objective evidence that this is not reliable as an interrogation technique, why was it done?

I find it difficult to believe that US military brass are ignorant or stupid. These people spend their lives studying strategy, intelligence, etc. When educated and intelligent experts suggest or do incredibly irrational things, I often wonder if there isn't some other reason that is not being publicly stated or discussed. In other words, do these irrational things become rational when viewed from a different perspective?

A somewhat cynical answer I've encountered is: it was done to deliberately foment anti-American sentiment based on a "fight them over there, not here" and/or "shake the tree" theory of operation.

A significantly more cynical answer I've encountered: the US defense establishment is an enormous make-work program and requires a constant supply of enemies to justify its budgets. By this reasoning ISIS would be an example of a successful result of this program -- a long-term enemy against which we can fight a low-grade war for a decade or more.

Of course I suppose I may be wrong. My assumption here is that educated and intelligent experts will behave rationally. This assumption actually underlies quite a bit of so-called "conspiracy theory" -- the reasoning process goes "elite leaders of business and government act like idiots, but they're not idiots, so therefore there must be a big nefarious conspiracy or hidden agenda!"

But maybe they are idiots -- or at least are behaving very irrationally due to emotional or ideological drives or bad information. As the saying goes: conspiracy theory is actually optimistic. It assumes that human beings are rational, resourceful, organized, and in control of the situation. The other possibility is significantly more pessimistic: the world is run by delusional ideologues and "peter principle" apparatchiks who really are that foolish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
Buried in the language of most consumer software and services is a mandatory binding arbitration clause. A while back, a couple of rulings came down from the Supreme Court that declared mandatory binding arbitrations clauses to be perfectly kosher, and state laws declaring such clauses invalid to be -themselves- invalid.

So. Good luck with a class action suit. You've likely agreed to a contract in which you waived your right to file one. :(

Yes, this sucks. I wish Congress would fix up federal arbitration law.
It’s not an either-or question. The current system is a travesty; replacing it with another that rewards those with means and early adopters at the expense of others isn’t any better.
I didn't say they bypass reviews, I said they get post-reviews, they can push without being blocked by a review.
> curiosity is the thing that matters most

This. A million, billion times this.

I wish sales VPs, marketers, HR folks and managers asked more questions about product and technology than simply view software development as the Dark Arts. Don't settle for "it's software - it is complex" responses from the CTO or the technical founder. Dig deeper.
Hilarious. I recall saying to myself YouTube won over Google video because they supported comments early on. They really understand social. Laughing at myself...
Is that you Skynet?
No, there's a middle ground. We are also removing people of their liberty. The wholesale use of plea deals (which elsewhere in the world are not allowed, or massively limited) is driven by multiple, flawed priorities:

1) the re-election of DAs and / or prosecutors, and;

2) the desire to minimize the cost of prosecuting cases, with a lack of acknowledgement of the massive disparity in power and little to no concern for those steamrolled in the name of such efficiencies.

Many of today's problems with the justice system do indeed stem from funding issues, but rarely on the prosecutorial side. Instead you have overworked, underpaid public defenders who may many times only meet their clients just before opening statements, even on more complex trials.

Leaving aside the question of zealotry in things like The Innocence Project, many of these cases have issues related to defense ineptitude, not (just) prosecutorial misconduct or misguidance. And by ineptitude, I don't mean active or otherwise incompetence (though there are certainly instances of this), but instead, details and problems that slipped through the cracks because a defendants counsel was too unfamiliar, too overworked to be able to provide the best or necessary defense. Tales abound of missed submission dates, witnesses not interviewed or called, and the like.

If there's funding issues to be found, it's this, rather than 'how do we make the prosecution's life easier/better?'.
Wouldn't a low yield nuclear weapon detonated at a relatively low altitude generate a localized EMP?
>The surprising part is that humans are (at least for now) generally very accepting of and engaged with the robots/AI performing these tasks
Do you have a concrete example/case study for that?

I vividly remember a documentary about caring robot in Japan. They are there to talk with old people. In fact general health of the people interacting with those robots is better. But the people don't accept it and are sad that they have to talk to a robot.
A fraction of the same type of transaction for Bitcoin.
That's a bit of a stretch. I don't think that's the justification Google used nor do I think that's the problem that people had with it. The real issue was that Google was forcing the link between Google+ and YouTube along with the real name baggage. Most people had a pseudonymous name on YouTube and Google decided that everyone should suddenly attach their inane YouTube comments to their real names where potential employers and relatives and anyone else could easily associate the two.

This isn't really an issue of friends, because most of the people you'd be concerned about finding your random YouTube comments are not friends. It's also not an issue of Google failing to understand this. Google understood the issue, but they denied and ignored it, choosing to force this on people regardless because they felt it was strategically useful to do so.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been approach by random people asking for feedback on their killer app idea whilst at http://www.workshopcafe.com/
I always thought of this as an excellent satire of anthropology rather than a criticism of culture.
Review of Nestle water permit neglected for decades
I'm struggling to take seriously any article from the NYT that is supposed to invoke outrage since I got duped by that recent nail salon article.
The guy asleep in bed is a 'bad guy', as those police saw the situation. Yes, they were wrong and stupid. But that was their interpretation of the situation.
Very nice site. Slight typo under the CBN explanation tab -- you have "oxides", which is a noun; I believe you'd want "oxidizes" there.
The problem is defining "this product". A package that contains 3 snickers bars isn't the product, each snickers bar is.
Maybe a small percentage of the time it generates useful information. You'd have to chase a lot of false leads but maybe they figured it was worth it.
Proper pwnage would erase the MMS as soon as the exploit was complete. The only record of receipt would be on you itemized carrier bill.
> these very profitable opportunities (Uber, airbnb, instacart, even private MOOC to replace education) are all responses to public infrastructure failures as our voting population becomes more and more self-centered and focused on individualist (i.e. extremist capitalist/Libertarian) economics

Not exactly. Yes, we do have a problem with voters playing identity politics and voting tribally -- to promote one constituency over another. Overwhelmingly, these are not libertarians or fans of capitalism. Elected representatives bring home boondoggle infrastructure projects with the primary intent of "creating jobs" and "getting reelected".

The problem is our representative voting model, which has been largely unsuccessful in the last 50 years at maintaining or building out new infrastructure. This model is very good at rewarding the in-group and punishing the out-group, often by a winner-take-all tyranny of the majority, but it's ineffective and inefficient at actually getting things done or satisfying the voting public overall.
I don't know if that was meant to be flip... but Africa has made a lot of progress since my first introduction to it. There are tour groups snow boarding in the Kalahari today. This would not have been imaginable in an era of famine, Apartheid, and genocides where a million could be killed with no one really raising an alarm about it.
UC Study Finds Most Americans Can Be Fed Entirely by Local Farms
It sounds like you are reasonably well informed in this field, whereas I can barely parse the abstract for the linked paper. I was hoping you could give me an educated opinion about negative effects of cannabis use in non-adolescents. It seems like papers are mostly finding negative effects for adolescents only.

Also, the particular paper you mention seems to be studying adolescents with "Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD)". Is this just a roundabout way of saying they are a pot smoker, or is there a difference between cannabis use and "cannabis use disorder"?

For example, consider a non-adolescent who uses cannabis sporadically but does not have a "disorder" (i.e. no addictive tendencies). Do you have an opinion about cannabis use for that individual?
I, too was confused by that setting. It turns out that media attached to an MMS message is not decoded until you actually open the attachment. See: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/3817
check the audit LeastAuthority did on them: https://github.com/LeastAuthority/ethereum-analyses
I agree, it's the best I've seen on the internet. Still, I wonder if it would do any good if the site admins would post some kind of civility reminder every month or so, to remind people what good conduct looks like - with examples.
That's absolutist, too. If we define a goal of 'zero jailed innocent people', even accepting it as a goal we can likely only ever asymptotically approach, then it shows an impedance mismatch between how to attain this, and the motivations of prosecutors which are not the same, but rather typically, 'show a high and increasing rate of convictions to show a toughness of crime'.

This is not to say that all prosecutors are railroading sociopaths, of course not. But there is a valid question in the sense of "should a prosecutors role be to a) see the guilty punished, or b) to see the most convictions?".
It turns out that media attached to an MMS message is not decoded until you actually open the attachment. See: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/3817
Spinal cords, marrow, organs (especially brains) tend to be very nutrious in fact. When given a choice, most wild animals will preffer what we call the waste.
Client referral
Hey everyone, what is your experience with getting clients to spread the word about your business? What are some of the strategies you tried that worked or not?
I've heard some good snarky comments about the way police interact with black people that brought race and humor into dangerous proximity. I wouldn't say that there are topics I would never joke about, but there are implications I would never make. I'd joke about NASCAR being a boy's club but not about women drivers. The old "Punching Up / Punching Down" distinction.

And nobody gets to "decide" what everyone else should feel. What I have a problem with is the idea that it's not the meaning of your utterance that makes it offensive, but merely the topic. The idea that tome expressed in the parent comment that there was literally no circumstance under which you could joke about women being treated unfairly (even if it was to call attention to the problem).

I find the idea of someone declaring what's "not okay" for everyone else to be as upsetting as a boor telling a mean-spirited joke and insisting that nobody should be offended because it's just a joke.
Handling CSV Views in Ruby on Rails
Sorry, but the problem is how to use a pen to draw machine readable shapes. Machines find reading QR codes and OP's triangles easier than reading letters.
I don't think that explains the gusto behind this program, or the degree to which it was propagandized or maintained in the face of public unpopularity. If it's not that useful, why try so hard to protect and advance it as a policy?
Man banned from Starbucks for Life
This seems like a good overview: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper
There is an effort to make this process a bit easier using OpenStreetMap & Field Papers (http://fieldpapers.org/).
Using colors rather than digits, chars, biometrics, for authentication
A URL shortener that requires a proprietary app instead of a web browser.
Show HN: CSS Visual Test – Test your front end components visually
> Wouldn't a low yield nuclear weapon detonated at a relatively low altitude generate a localized EMP?

Probably, though Soviet strategic bomber formations probably wouldn't be operating at particularly low altitude and, IIRC, the idea was to intercept before they were over target (but not far enough away that it wouldn't be problematic!) anyway, and, finally, localized EMP and flash from a kiloton-range airburst is better for people on the ground than the effects of a megaton-range ground burst.

If the Nike missiles around SF had ever been fired in anger, it would have been an effort to turn what would otherwise be total disaster into merely major disaster.
I've been following the subreddit for over a year and I still haven't figured it out...
There is a continuum between pre-commit and push to production. You can push to integration, push to QA, push to nightly build, and so on.

I'm highly skeptical of code reviews as the way to find bugs. I think code reviews have other values, just not that one so much. Getting multiple eyes on code and the results of that code, getting it into the hands of QA, dog fooding it, all play a role. That all sounds way more ad-hoc than I mean it. I used to write life critical software, and you have well defined ways to handling source control and reviews. I advocate figuring out what your project needs, adopting that, and then continually adapting as the project changes, as any project will.
This is the part that I don't understand,

>Even if each round of review takes 2 days and there are 2-3 such iterations, it is easy for the author to stay blocked for good part of a week leading to wasted time.

How can the author of the code be blocked while waiting for a code review? Can't they use that time to review someone else's code or to work on something else in a separate branch or, heaven forbid, learn or train themselves?

I mean we never seem to find time to train developers but the time between writing code and having it pass review could be used for education not just sitting around and waiting.

>For code reviews to work well, each change should be reviewed by the people who have enough context on that change. It's even better if these code reviewers are responsible for “maintaining” the code they are reviewing so that they are incentivized to make the right long-term trade-offs

This makes sense at first but don't you also want more people looking at the code who don't have complete context so that the context must be explained to them and then they can learn more about the code base? Isn't reducing the bus factor also a priority?
Congratulations on the First and thanks for the polished package - this is quite impressive.

I finally cracked open the iCE40 HX datasheet, but was stunned to see the memory block: "Note the sysMEM Embedded Block RAM Memory address 0 cannot be initialized." That's extremely awkward.
And you missed my point that you can still appeal to authorities.

As I said in another comment... you have the option to call in the Feds. I'm talking about people in situations where they have NO option to call in ANYONE. And not only them. Anyone who wanted to help them... maybe just because they witnessed it and they wanted to put an end to it... that would-be good Samaritan has no recourse either.

No Feds. Central governments could be weak, corrupt or both back then. (They still can come to think of it.)

No police. Many places HAD nonexistent police forces. Things have changed in some parts of Africa... but I don't know about everywhere.

No nothing. And it might not only be Africa. This may happen in parts of Asia or the MidEast region as well. I only WITNESSED it in Africa. There are a lot of people living some horrible lives out there. And they don't have police, or Feds or journalists to write about them.
I love English :) Thanks for clarifying this.
The FAA and NORAD did indeed have protocols to deal with hijackings in US airspace requiring a military response. Those protocols broke down somewhat on 9/11. A lack of communication between the FAA and the military slowed down the military response to the hijackings.

The 9/11 Commission Report is well worth a read.
>I meant that bitcoin didn't, and probably won't, for reasons attributable to the limitations of the implementation, supplant fiat currency and become a basis for deprecating the federal reserve, which I agree is a laudable goal.

That expectation is not described anywhere in the system's proposal[0]. I'm not sure that was ever a real expectation except among the biggest believers.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Entire Internet ECommerce Usage January-July 2015
The University of Waterloo uses Marmoset, and it works well: http://marmoset.cs.umd.edu/index.shtml
Lovely beginning, but the narrative suddenly goes dark 3 paragraphs from the end, with the line: "Whilst I'm no longer at the company ..."

So what happened!?!? I'd love to believe that anyone with such a clever hack could get some mileage out of whatever came next. Alas, it sounds as if this is the classic Cinderella story with only mice and pumpkins at the end. Darn! A follow-up post with the rest of the story would be very welcome.
This seems to be a problem with all social networks.

Why is Google being singled out here?
CVE-2015-5154
Raising money is "just the beginning" for a company but for many people, including most founders and early employees who raise the funding, it's really the beginning of the end.

With funding comes outside pressure from investors that seeps into and permeates the entire venture. The pressure to show rapid growth, alone, changes what kind of people get hired, how their responsibilities are structured, and how they interact with the pre-funding team. Founders will be pushed out or replaced by career executives from the industry, early employees will be managed out or grow bored with the monotony of an established business, and anyone involved in raising the initial rounds will likely be way out of their depth by the time growth stage funding rolls around.

Let's face it, we monkeys like shiny trophies for well quantified metrics to put on our wall and taking credit for a bunch of zeroes on a check is a lot more practical than for the sum of all of the work and value added by a company that survives for years or decades after you leave it.
Seems like a more durable solution would be making an encoding of the alphabet that's easier for machines to read.
Again, for many Americans, using grams is introducing additional units of measurement. Obviously, the US should've moved to metric forever ago, but we didn't. When addressing a public health crisis, it's good to put things in a way the majority of the public understand.
But it's a small step from that to something that can kill humans. Weaponizers would easily reuse the technology you create.
"> The Abacus clients whose aborted closing sparked Ken Yu’s termination lost their deposit on the property when the loan fell through. They went to the police and filed a complaint, mentioning that Yu had falsified their mortgage application. The police referred the matter to the DA."

See, this is one of those facts that is more disputed than you seem to describe.

Sung noticed discrepancies, multiple checks to be written out, which were incongruous with common practice, called Yu to explain what was going on. She then noticed him outside the branch talking animatedly to the borrowers, and realized something wasn't right, and stopped the finalization of the loan.

"She begun investigating, and found trails of several fraudulent loans. By the following Monday, Yu was fired."

So less than a week from the incident to his dismissal.

Yet to listen to the DA, the bank only acted after the prosecutors began asking questions. Do you see the Manhattan Police and DA turning that (a fraud complaint) around into a criminal investigation into a bank in four business days or less? Or is the bank's story, that yes, this was happening, was discovered and the employee "immediately" terminated (because even for a small bank that's still a quick turn around in investigating financial fraud and falsified business records) actually accurate?

"> its loans wouldn’t have met Fannie Mae’s income requirements, and the bank depended on Fannie’s money for a significant chunk of its profit."

Yet the article states that the bank only received $120K in servicing fees across all Fannie Mae loans in several years. I'm not sure even a small bank sees $30K/year divided amongst however many mortgages (only a small fraction of which were determined to be fraudulent) as a "significant chunk of profit".

"If this were HSBC instead of a small bank people on HN would be furious if the prosecutor didn't go after the bank with the kind of evidence he had."

Perhaps if HSBC did as this bank did and fire all employees found to be in on this, rather than awarding them bonuses and promotions, people would be a lot less furious?
It doesn't enforce quality at all. All it does is file a cleanup task at most, while the jankey thing that never should have been committed stays in production.

This is a bad idea.
Symfony Framework has this built in and it's a real treat to use. http://symfony.com/doc/2.0/book/security.html#impersonating-...
Hard to say because the Bush Administration did not give details on information they got from torture that prevented terrorist attacks and didn't list any inaccurate information they got that was false because the person being tortured gave any info to make the torture stop.

We know that terrorist attacks on US soil stopped, but it might not be due to torture getting information, it may be due to the fact that terrorists use social networks and our military was able to obtain the info in the Middle-East when raiding terrorist buildings and recovering computer equipment. They could have just data mined social network accounts used by terrorists and gotten the data off hard drives with lists of bank accounts and people who are being paid to do terrorist attacks.

I think when the Obama administration killed Osama bin Laden they raided his hard drives from his servers and computers and got a lot of information off of them. More than one could get from torture. So there are other methods of getting information that are more effective than torture.

We also have the NSA Metadata program and Prism system of collecting information. While many consider it a violation of rights and privacy, it might have collected a lot of information used to prevent terrorist attacks.

Still these methods are unpopular with the people, torture, domestic spying, etc.
If someone installed malware on that computer already, all bets are off. It might as well be a radio transmitter that's broadcasting every keystroke. The title is sensationalistic, because the hard part was installing malware. The "simple cellphone" part is meaningless.
When I grew up, my grandmother would sometimes cook brain schnitzel - it was considered a delicacy.