Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learned
'Teachers work hard, but I now think that conscientious students work harder. '
Alan Eustace Jumps From Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s World Record
A helium-filled balloon lifted Alan Eustace, a Google executive, to more than 25 miles above the earth. Fifteen minutes after he cut himself loose, he was on the ground.
Hasnain says:
"Mr. Eustace cut himself loose from the balloon with the aid of a small explosive device and plummeted toward the earth at speeds that peaked at 822 miles per hour, setting off a small sonic boom heard by observers on the ground."
That is one way to do it...
Posted on 2014-10-24T22:29:05+0000
Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich—Then Vegas Made Them Pay | WIRED
Michael Friberg John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak. On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of the machine flashed,…
Hasnain says:
"The defense attorneys pushed for dismissal of the computer hacking charge, on the grounds that anything the Game King allowed players to do through its interface was “authorized access” by definition: The whole point of playing slots is to beat the machine, and it's up to the computer to set and enforce limits. “All these guys did is simply push a sequence of buttons that they were legally entitled to push,” says Leavitt, Kane's attorney."
Posted on 2014-10-24T18:10:23+0000
The joy of text – the fall and rise of interactive fiction
The annual Interactive Fiction awards are taking place right now, showcasing the very best new works. By Leigh Alexander
Hasnain says:
"This degree of accessibility means that in many ways, text-based games lead among other kinds of computer games in terms of creative democracy, sophisticated subject matter, and even political themes – while plenty of the competition games are traditional or humorous, modern text games bring new perspectives to bear from creators who might have been restricted from access to the traditional, privileged computer-education background, whose tone still dominates mainstream gaming."
Posted on 2014-10-24T18:01:14+0000
The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed | WIRED
Inside the soul-crushing world of content moderation, where low-wage laborers soak up the worst of humanity, and keep it off your Facebook feed.
Hasnain says:
"Constant exposure to videos like this has turned some of Maria’s coworkers intensely paranoid. Every day they see proof of the infinite variety of human depravity. They begin to suspect the worst of people they meet in real life, wondering what secrets their hard drives might hold. Two of Maria’s female coworkers have become so suspicious that they no longer leave their children with babysitters. They sometimes miss work because they can’t find someone they trust to take care of their kids."
Posted on 2014-10-23T23:06:25+0000
Diary of a Corporate Sellout
The rise and fall and rise of Upcoming.org
Hasnain says:
"I kept my day job at the financial company until the day it was acquired. My resignation meeting with my boss was surreal:
“So… Yahoo bought my website.”
“I don’t think I can counteroffer that.”"
Inside San Francisco's housing crisis
'We are not just numbers. We're persons.'
Hasnain says:
A well written piece that describes the problematic housing situation in the area.
Posted on 2014-10-22T21:22:34+0000
Why #Gamergaters Piss Me The F*** Off
Chris Kluwe played in the NFL for eight years, but he’s been a gamer for 26 — and he’s tired of the misogyny in today’s …
U.N.C. Investigation Reveals ‘Shadow Curriculum’ to Help Athletes
A report finds that classes requiring no attendance and little work were common knowledge among academic counselors and football coaches.
Hasnain says:
Yay for academic fraud.
"In the meeting, two members of the football counseling staff explained to the assembled coaches that the classes “had played a large role in keeping underprepared and/or unmotivated players eligible to play.” To emphasize this point, they presented a PowerPoint demonstration in which one of the slides asked and then answered the question, “What was part of the solution in the past?”
“We put them in classes that met degree requirements in which … they didn’t go to class … they didn’t have to take notes, have to stay awake … they didn’t have to meet with professors … they didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material,” the slide said. “THESE NO LONGER EXIST!”
Indeed, the report said, “the fall 2009 semester — the first in over a decade without Ms. Crowder and her paper classes — resulted in the lowest football team G.P.A. in 10 years, 2.121.” Forty-eight players, it went on, earned semester G.P.A.'s of less than 2.0."
Posted on 2014-10-22T20:45:36+0000
The man with the golden blood | Mosaic
Meet the donors, patients, doctors and scientists involved in the complex global network of rare – and very rare – blood. By Penny Bailey.
Hasnain says:
"And Thomas’ different blood has given him the odd unexpected perk. When he was due for conscription, the doctor who first told him about his blood – Dr Marie-José Stelling – wrote to the army saying it was too dangerous for him to do military service, so he was exempted."
Posted on 2014-10-22T18:37:26+0000
44 engineering management lessons
I am a cofounder of RethinkDB — an open-source distributed database designed to help developers and operations teams work with unstructured data to build real-time applications. We're hiring.
Hasnain says:
"Don’t judge too quickly; you’re right less often than you think. Even if you’re sure you’re right in any given case, wait until everyone’s opinion is heard."
"If you find yourself blaming someone, you’re probably wrong. Nobody wakes up and tries to do a bad job. 95% of the time you can resolve your feelings by just talking to people."
"Most conflict happens because people don’t feel heard. Sit down with each person and ask them how they feel. Listen carefully. Then ask again. And again. Then summarize what they said back to them. Most of the time that will solve the problem."
Posted on 2014-10-21T23:44:00+0000
My Day Interviewing For The Service Economy Startup From Hell
I interviewed at Handybook in July 2013. My temp job had just ended and I was desperate for a steady job, and was relieved and excited when I got an email from Handy scheduling me for a phone interview.
Hasnain says:
How do companies like this even manage to get funding?
sigh.
Posted on 2014-10-21T21:09:30+0000
ers35/luakernel
Contribute to luakernel development by creating an account on GitHub.
Hasnain says:
"This is Lua + SQLite + musl running on bare metal x86."
wgb
Posted on 2014-10-21T18:37:40+0000
Firebase is Joining Google! - Firebase
Firebase is a realtime backend as a service that allows you to create incredible apps. Save, Store and Update Data in realtime directly from the browser or mobile client using only javascript or native iOS or Android code.
Man walks again after transplant
A paralysed man becomes the first in the world to walk again following a pioneering therapy which involved transplanting cells from his nose into his severed spinal cord.
Hasnain says:
This is really really exciting and promising research.
Posted on 2014-10-21T17:52:43+0000
SimCity That I Used to Know
On the game’s 25th birthday, a devotee talks with creator Will Wright
GM’s hit and run: How a lawyer, mechanic, and engineer blew the lid off the worst auto scandal...
As the sun was setting on a stormy Georgia day, Brooke Melton was 30 miles outside of Atlanta in her Chevy Cobalt. It was March 10, 2010, her birthday, and the 29-year-old pediatric nurse was on he...
Hasnain says:
"Brooke Melton needn’t have died that night. She was killed by a corporation’s callous disregard for the safety of its customers, made worse by a regulatory agency reluctant to regulate. At least 26 others perished, and scores more were injured, and these numbers will almost certainly grow. Reuters, after sifting through government accident data, estimated that 74 people have died in crashes that reflect “key similarities.” Thus far, General Motor’s victim fund has received 1,330 filings seeking compensation, including 165 from families of people killed in GM cars."
Posted on 2014-10-20T01:30:45+0000
How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F.
A mother discovers that her autistic son, Gus, has become inseparable from the voice emanating from her iPhone.
ffs ssl -- wingolog
I just set up SSLTLS on my web site. Everything can be had via https://wingolog.org/, and things appear to work. However the process of transitioning even a simple web site to SSL is so clownshoes bad that it's amazing anyone ever does it. So here's an incomplete list of things that can go wrong whe…
Backstabbr
The web's most modern interface for playing Diplomacy online, compatible with all modern smart phones and tablets.
On Error Handling in Rust | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Rust is improving quite a lot lately and it makes it very exciting to play with the language and see how good API design could look like. There are areas in it however that are a bit frustrating still. For me one area is error handling. But some improvements might be coming up which I find quite exc…
Hasnain says:
Why I need to learn Rust pt 2. Really loving the ? operator idea.
Posted on 2014-10-17T04:35:32+0000
How Text Messages Change from Dating to Marriage
Way back in October 2008, my now husband and I went on our first date. On our one year anniversary, his gift to me was a Word doc of all of our text messages since our first date (what he likes to ...
Hasnain says:
This is some really cool data. And, from the top HN comment:
"> more recently I seem to have decided to no longer greet my husband
This is the most interesting part. When you're dating someone, there are defined parts of the day where you start-and-then-stop interacting with them, so there are greetings exchanged, etc. When you're married (or in a very steady relationship), it's more like one continuous conversation; since it never ends, it never has to begin again."
Posted on 2014-10-17T04:34:16+0000
Dirty medicine
The epic inside story of long-term criminal fraud at Ranbaxy, the Indian drug company that makes generic Lipitor for millions of Americans.
Hasnain says:
How the hell are these guys still in business and printing money instead of being in jail?
"Thakur knew the drugs weren’t good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world’s poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who had almost no medical infrastructure and no recourse for complaints. The injustice made him livid.
Ranbaxy executives didn’t care, says Kathy Spreen, and made little effort to conceal it. In a conference call with a dozen company executives, one brushed aside her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. “Who cares?” he said, according to Spreen. “It’s just blacks dying.”"
Posted on 2014-10-17T04:25:49+0000
When Women Become Men At Wellesley College
Can women’s colleges survive the transgender movement?
Hasnain says:
Really long, really engrossing read.
"“It’s this very bizarre reversal of what happens in the real world,” Kaden said. “In the real world, it’s women who get fetishized, catcalled, sexually harassed, grabbed. At Wellesley, it’s trans men who do. If I were to go up to someone I just met and touch her body, I’d get grief from the entire Wellesley community, because they’d say it’s assault — and it is. But for some reason, when it’s done to trans men here, it doesn’t get read the same way. It’s like a free pass, that suddenly it’s O.K. to talk about or touch someone’s body as long as they’re not a woman.”"
Posted on 2014-10-16T21:36:34+0000
Copywrong
Why have copyright protections grown and grown? Louis Menand on what the intellectual-property battles really mean.
Hasnain says:
"Cultural consumers are not organized at all. They can speak only through their elected representatives, but most of those people will be listening to the money—to the lobbyists for the content industries, new and old, as those industries search for more reliable ways to squeeze profits from the awesome stuff that human beings have created."
Posted on 2014-10-16T21:29:44+0000
Why Inequality Matters
Bill Gates reviews Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”
Hasnain says:
This is a great analysis.
"The debate over wealth and inequality has generated a lot of partisan heat. I don’t have a magic solution for that. But I do know that, even with its flaws, Piketty’s work contributes at least as much light as heat. And now I’m eager to see research that brings more light to this important topic."
Posted on 2014-10-16T17:15:44+0000
At the Far Ends of a New Universal Law | Quanta Magazine
A potent theory has emerged explaining a mysterious statistical law that arises throughout physics and mathematics.
Hasnain says:
This is really really interesting; a new distribution that seems to be appearing everywhere.
Posted on 2014-10-16T16:43:37+0000
From 60 Frames per Second to 500 in Haskell | Keera Studios
Haskell is fast, easy to parallelize and to optimize. In this post we explain how we increased a game's speed by 700% and reduced memory consumption to 3MB.
Hasnain says:
Kinda disappointing that it's just a breakout clone, but it's impressive that they managed to get it working and performant in Haskell.
Posted on 2014-10-16T16:43:07+0000
Chinatown’s Kitchen Network
Lauren Hilgers on employment agencies that can get Chinese immigrants kitchen jobs across the country in a few hours.
Hasnain says:
Rain’s cousin had worked in restaurants when he arrived in the U.S., but he got out of the business as soon as he could. “It’s too hard!” he said, pantomiming a cook’s frantic routine: shaking a wok, grabbing things off shelves, tossing them in. “All day, for twelve hours, you’re like this!” Rain sat at the table, grinning. He sympathized with his cousin’s restaurant fatigue. “Americans, when they want to rest and enjoy themselves, they rest and they enjoy themselves,” he told me. “Chinese people—it all depends on your boss.”
Posted on 2014-10-14T20:56:39+0000
Disney’s new Production Renderer ‘Hyperion’ – Yes, Disney!
With Disney as the owner of Pixar & thus RenderMan, it may surprise some to know that Disney Animation has developed a completely new production renderer: Hyperion - with some very cool tech & clocking a million render hours a day on Big Hero 6.
Hasnain says:
This is a really cool article on state of the art rendering.
Posted on 2014-10-14T04:48:16+0000
No Smoke, No Mirrors: The Dutch Pension Plan
In the Netherlands, a system rests on the idea that each generation should pay its own costs — and that those costs must be measured accurately.
Hasnain says:
"But something else happened: Dutch young people found their voice. No matter their employment sector, they could see that their pension money was commingled with retirees’ money, then invested that way by the outside asset management firms. In the wake of the financial crisis, they realized that they and the retirees had fundamentally opposing interests. The young people were eager to keep taking investment risk, to take advantage of their long time horizon. But the retirees now wanted absolute safety, which meant investing in risk-free, cashlike assets. If all the money remained pooled, young people said, the aggressive investment returns they wanted would be diluted by the pittance that cashlike assets pay."
Posted on 2014-10-13T22:39:31+0000
Hungry Planet: What The World Eats
Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio traveled the world documenting that most basic of human behaviors -- what we eat. Their project, "Hungry Planet," depicts everything…
Rise and Shine
What do kids around the world eat for breakfast? It’s as likely to be coffee or kimchi as it is a sugary cereal.
Rust Means Never Having to Close a Socket
07 Oct 2014 Rust Means Never Having to Close a Socket One of the coolest features of Rust is how it automatically manages resources for you, while still guaranteeing both safety (no segfaults) and high performance. Because Rust is a different kind of programming language, it might be difficult to un…
Cox–Zucker machine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Cox–Zucker machine is an algorithm created by David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. This algorithm determines if a given set of sections provides a basis (up to torsion) for the Mordell–Weil group of an elliptic surface E → S where S is isomorphic to the projective line.
Hasnain says:
I'm not sure why these two people decided to work together...
Posted on 2014-10-13T00:27:47+0000
Microsoft’s Strange Quest for the Topological Qubit | MIT Technology Review
Can an aging corporation’s adventures in fundamental physics research open a new era of unimaginably powerful computers?
A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow
Researchers found that oral capsules containing human feces may be an effective and safer alternative to fecal transplants for patients with Clostridium difficile infections.
Giant leap against diabetes
Harvard stem cell researchers announced a giant leap forward in the quest to find a truly effective treatment for type 1 diabetes, a disease that affects an estimated 3 million Americans.
Hasnain says:
This is a massive breakthrough in the fight against diabetes.
Posted on 2014-10-12T21:38:00+0000
Home — Leandro Pereira
06 October 2014 Life of a HTTP request, as seen by my toy web server When learning a new programming language, I tend to write two things with it: a language interpreter (usually a FORTH-like language or Brainfuck if I’m feeling lazy), and a HTTP server. Sometimes, just as a challenge or a way to qu…
Aboard Amtrak
For some months, Amtrak was my home. It began simply somewhat unintentionally. A friend was getting married in Spokane, Washington, I was in New York, and the 45 day Amtrak pass was cheaper than rent. And so, I was on a train stopped in Washington DC. The station there is really magnificent, marbled…
Hasnain says:
Hands down one of the best pieces I've read in a really long time. It has a little bit of everything and is quite interesting.
(Apparently I had a facebook tab open with this text a week ago, but forgot to post)
Posted on 2014-10-12T19:06:42+0000
Move Fast and Break Nothing
Writings, screencasts, and talks by Zach Holman. Zach works at GitHub and enjoys consuming cherry pies.
Hasnain says:
This is a great talk on software development practices.
Posted on 2014-10-12T19:02:21+0000
Reverse Engineering Star Wars: Yoda Stories
Zach Barth zach@zachtronics.com October 5th, 2014 Background I don't know why, but I've always gotten a kick out of reverse engineering data files for computer games. Although decompiling a game's code is a challenging task, data files are often much easier to figure out (as they contain lots of hig…
Hasnain says:
This is a really cool read on reverse engineering data formats.
Posted on 2014-10-12T19:00:42+0000
The Man Who Smuggles Traders Joe’s into Canada
Imagine -- maybe you don’t have to -- you’re Canadian. You’re at a dinner party, and the host has put out a bowl of the best snack you’ve ever had. Love at first bite, and it’s going fast. Soon enough, your fingers graze the bottom of the bowl and you realize that the end is nigh. You master your pa…
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2014-10-04T00:02:34+0000
How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math - Issue 17: Big Bangs - Nautilus
I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague.…
The NSA and Me - The Intercept
James Bamford literally wrote the book on the National Security Agency, spending 30 years obsessively documenting the secretive agency in print. Today, for the first time, he tells the story of his brief turn as an NSA whistleblower.
Hasnain says:
"Despite the threats, I refused to alter my manuscript or return the documents. Instead, we argued that according to Executive Order 12065, “classification may not be restored to documents already declassified and released to the public” under the Freedom of Information Act. That prompted the drama to move all the way up to the White House. On April 2, 1982, President Reagan signed a new executive order on secrecy that overturned the earlier one and granted him the authority to “reclassify information previously declassified and disclosed.”"
Posted on 2014-10-02T22:49:50+0000
Best Papers vs. Top Cited Papers
Search and perform data mining operations against academic publications, using social network analysis to identify connections between researchers, conferences, and publications.
Hasnain says:
I find it interesting how a lot of the best paper award winning papers end up becoming false positives, and the really great papers are not recognized immediately.
Posted on 2014-10-01T23:21:24+0000