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Hasnain says:

We should just get public transit and/or self driving cars everywhere.

Driving sucks, and the amount of time/energy/effort people waste driving is outrageous. It would just be better if people could be productive, or just relax and not waste mental effort driving or being stuck in traffic.

Also, I think smartphone use contributes to people not wanting to drive as much...

Posted on 2015-03-31T21:03:58+0000

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China's Man-on-the-Side Attack on GitHub - NETRESEC Blog

On March 27 The following message was posted on the official GitHub blog: We are currently experiencing the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in github.com's history. The attack began around 2AM UTC on Thursday, March 26, and involves a wide combination of attack vectors. These inc…

Click to view the original at netresec.com

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How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT Mike Solomon OpenWRT is a powerful Linux distribution for embedded devices, such as my router, and this is the story of how I used it to double my bandwidth at no extra cost to myself. How? By doubling the number of Internet connections I have. My setup M…

Click to view the original at msol.io

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TPP leak: states give companies the right to repeal nations' laws

A new Wikileaks-published leak from the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty reveals a January 2015 draft "Investment Chapter" of the agreement, where the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are set out. They allow companies to repeal nations' environmental, health and la…

Click to view the original at boingboing.net

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The man who proved Stephen Hawking wrong

He grew up in grinding poverty and was forever in trouble at school. So how did Leonard Susskind become one of the world’s greatest physicists?

Click to view the original at telegraph.co.uk

Hasnain says:

:The day that Leonard Susskind decided he was not going to follow his father into the family plumbing business, his parents were appalled. “My father was a tough guy,” says Prof Susskind with a chuckle. “He said: ‘What do you want to be: a ballet dancer?’ I said: ‘No, I don’t want to be a ballet dancer, I want to be a physicist.’ He said: ‘You aint going to work in no drugstore.’ I said: ‘No, not a pharmacist, a physicist.’ He said: ‘What’s a physicist?’ I said: ‘Like Einstein.’ That shook him and from that moment he got it. My mother was crying and saying, ‘We’re going to be broke,’ and he just looked at her and said: ‘Shut up – he’s going to be Einstein.’”"

Posted on 2015-03-28T17:24:01+0000

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Super Mario 64 HD

Demonstration project for the Super Character Controller, a recreation of Super Mario 64's first level, Bob-Omb Battlefield. Everything is just as you remember, except some really minor stuff that ...

Click to view the original at roystanross.wordpress.com

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Ikea's flat-pack refugee shelter is entering production

Ikea's line of flat-pack refugee shelters are going into production, the Swedish furniture maker announced this week, after being tested among refugee families in Ethiopia, Iraq, and Lebanon. The...

Click to view the original at theverge.com

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Woman held in psychiatric ward after (correctly) saying Obama follows her on Twitter

A woman is suing a psychiatric ward after claiming she was diagnosed as being delusional because she told doctors Obama follows her on Twitter, according to a suit filed at Manhattan Federal court.

Click to view the original at independent.co.uk

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Errata Security: x86 is a high-level language

Inside the CPU, the results always appear as if the processor executed everything in-order, but outside the CPU, things happen in strange order. - shouldn't inside and outside be swapped in this sentence?

Click to view the original at blog.erratasec.com

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Google Sends Reporter a GIF Instead of a 'No Comment' | WIRED

The GIF was apparently the official answer Google sent to a reporter in response to his seeming scoop on a new YouTube livestreaming plan.

Click to view the original at www.wired.com

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Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft With Unlimited Cloud Drive Storage

Last year, Amazon gave a boost to its Prime members when it launched a free, unlimited photo storage for them on Cloud Drive. Today, the company is expanding..

Click to view the original at techcrunch.com

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Chris's Wiki :: blog/programming/ProgrammingViaSuperstition

[...] Failure to adhere to a standard while on the surface making use of it is a bug. It's not a SySV init bug, but a bug in the particular init script. Why write the information at all if it's not going to be used, and especially if it could cause unexpected behavior? [...]

Click to view the original at utcc.utoronto.ca

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Hasnain says:

" For now, though, politicians have mostly kept quiet about the prospect of a structural shortage of decently paid jobs."

Posted on 2015-03-24T15:23:57+0000

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Free Non-Commercial RenderMan

RenderMan is now free for all non-commercial purposes, including evaluations, education, research, and personal projects. The non-commercial version of RenderMan is fully functional without watermark or limitation. For further details please refer to Pixar's Non-Commercial RenderMan FAQ.

Click to view the original at renderman.pixar.com

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Don’t let AT&T mislead you about its $29 “privacy fee”

This week AT&T got a lot of media attention for its expansion of its GigaPower service to Kansas City announced on Monday. The news wasn’t so much about the expansion, but about the ISP’s plans to to offer a $29 per month discount for customers who let Ma Bell scan their web searches in exchange…

Click to view the original at gigaom.com

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Hasnain says:

"Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material."

I can understand needing and having safe places, but if we all went to our safe places every single time, we would never solve the underlying problems

Posted on 2015-03-22T18:12:45+0000

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The Decline of Vancouver

Vancouver, once a city with its own unique spin on Canadian ideals and culture, is well on its way to becoming a vacation city for the world’s rich, its economy transforming into one predicated almost...

Click to view the original at sofard.tumblr.com

Hasnain says:

"We’ve reached an almost criminal point of misinformation and political correctness. Picture an elephant in the room. This elephant has a large bed sheet poorly covering half its body. Most in the room say “hey look it’s an elephant.” Property owners say “no, we can’t be sure it’s an elephant, there’s a bed sheet covering part of it”. Politicians say “we can’t be sure it’s an elephant, we need to study it more”. And developers say “we did a survey and concluded it’s a hamster.” "

Posted on 2015-03-22T18:06:35+0000

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David Graeber: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’

The books interview: The anarchist author, coiner of the phrase ‘We are the 99%’, talks to Stuart Jeffries about ‘bullshit jobs’, our rule-bound lives and the importance of play

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

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John Urschel, Ravens Offensive Lineman, Publishes Math Paper

"A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians" was published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. It's not Urschel's first paper.

Click to view the original at www.npr.org

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Google Just Fixed One of Wi-Fi's Biggest Annoyances | WIRED

With the new Android 5.1 update, which began rolling out yesterday in the U.S., your phone will remember which networks you attempt to connect with have crappy Wi-Fi.

Click to view the original at www.wired.com

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Silicon Valley’s Sex Workers Are Being Priced Out of the City By Their Own Clients

An FBI crackdown and skyrocketing rents in San Francisco are forcing them to take side jobs—like driving for Uber—or leave.

Click to view the original at www.thedailybeast.com

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Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Between 2006 and 2009, senior MIRI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote several hundred essays for the blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, collectively called “the Sequences.” With two days remaining until Yudkowsky concludes his other well-known rationality book, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rat…

Click to view the original at intelligence.org

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Optimizing performance on low end devices

One of the hardest parts of building for Android is making your app work well on all phones. While device fragmentation often brings forth concerns on design, the bigger struggle will be behind the...

Click to view the original at blog.echolocker.com

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Compare VPS from your country in a second

Compare worlds best Virtual Private Servers and choose the right one in a minute with your local currency, from your country.

Click to view the original at vpscomp.com

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Elon Musk Says Self-Driving Tesla Cars Will Be in the U.S. by Summer

The automaker’s chief says a software update will allow the Model S to navigate streets without the driver’s touching the wheel or pedals.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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We Buy Broken Gold

My Uncle Pat claims the Martin family fortune has its origins in a World War I gold scam. I won’t apologize for this because I never saw a nickel of the family money. It was squandered by my father on

Click to view the original at laphamsquarterly.org

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Warren Buffett Just Wrote His Best Annual Letter Ever

Bill Gates shares what he has learned from Warren Buffett’s look back at 50 years of Berkshire Hathaway’s history in his new annual letter.

Click to view the original at www.gatesnotes.com

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YouTube just put the final nail in the Loudness War’s coffin

  This is HUGE. It may not look like much, but if you're involved in music production, recording, mixing or mastering, this image could be the most

Click to view the original at productionadvice.co.uk

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BitTorrent-Style Updates Revealed in Leaked Windows 10 | TorrentFreak

A leaked build of Windows 10 has revealed that Microsoft may be about to utilize BitTorrent-style tech to deliver updates to its new OS. Deep in the settings is an option to receive updates from multiple sources including Microsoft, local computers and those "on the Internet." Could this be BitTorre…

Click to view the original at torrentfreak.com

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I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name

We can’t ignore the composition of the Unicode Consortium’s members, directors, and officers -- the people who define the everyday writing systems of all languages across the globe.

Click to view the original at modelviewculture.com

Hasnain says:

"The evolution of emoji is impressive and fascinating, but it makes for an uncomfortable contrast when other pictorial writing systems – the most commonly-used writing systems on the planet – are on the chopping block. We have an unambiguous, cross-platform way to represent “PILE OF POO” (💩), while we’re still debating which of the 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers deserve to spell their own names correctly."

Posted on 2015-03-18T00:24:15+0000

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Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty - The New Yorker

The GNU Manifesto is characteristic of its author, Richard Stallman—deceptively simple, lucid, explicitly left-leaning, and entirely uncompromising.

Click to view the original at www.newyorker.com

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Makani – Google

Makani is working to accelerate the shift to clean, renewable energy by developing energy kites, a new type of wind turbine that uses lightweight electronics, advanced materials, and smart software to generate more energy with less materials—all at lower cost.

Click to view the original at www.google.com

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How the FBI Created a Terrorist - The Intercept

In 2012, Sami Osmakac was 25 years old, broke and struggling with mental illness. His family wanted to get him help. The FBI wanted him to carry out a terrorist attack.

Click to view the original at firstlook.org

Hasnain says:

" In these cases, the FBI says paid informants and undercover agents are foiling attacks before they occur. But the evidence suggests — and a recent Human Rights Watch report on the subject illustrates — that the FBI isn’t always nabbing would-be terrorists so much as setting up mentally ill or economically desperate people to commit crimes they could never have accomplished on their own."

Posted on 2015-03-16T16:17:14+0000

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How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else | WIRED

Google Code was supposed to spread the open source religion. But then GitHub came along. And GitHub, it turns out, was a much better preacher.

Click to view the original at www.wired.com

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Hasnain says:

Interesting read on torrents versus tube sites and ethics.

SFW link, but none of the other links on the site are really SFW.

Posted on 2015-03-12T16:46:26+0000

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Bidding farewell to Google Code

When we started the Google Code project hosting service in 2006, the world of project hosting was limited. We were worried about reliability and stagnation, so we took action by giving the open source community another option to choose from. Since then, we’ve seen a wide variety of better project ho…

Click to view the original at google-opensource.blogspot.com

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Drones and the rise of the high-tech assassins

How twenty-three innocent Afghani civilians were wiped out by self-deceiving drone operators seven and a half thousand miles away.

Click to view the original at boingboing.net

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Early Retirement in the N.F.L. and at Google, and the Paradox of Success

What a retiring chief financial officer and three football players — Patrick Willis, Jason Worilds and Jake Locker — have in common.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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There is No Now - ACM Queue

The time elapsed between when I wrote that word and when you read it was at least a couple of weeks. That kind of delay is one that we take for granted and don't even think about in written media.

Click to view the original at queue.acm.org

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Fear of Failure and Lack of Speed In a Large Corporation

I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a cu...

Click to view the original at steveblank.com

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The crazy, true-life adventures of Norway’s most radical billionaire

Fred Olsen is both the owner of Timex and its most successful watch designer. He’s also a world-class sailor and an oil industry pioneer, and was rumored to have inspired a Simpsons character. Now he’s leading a revolution in offshore wind.

Click to view the original at fortune.com

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Using Named Pipes and Process Substitution in Bioinformatics

It’s hard not to fall in love with Unix as a bioinformatician. In a past post I mentioned how Unix pipes are an extremely elegant way to interface bioinformatics programs (and do inter-process communication in general). In exploring other ways of interfacing programs in Unix, I’ve discovered two gre…

Click to view the original at vincebuffalo.com

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Bill Watterson talks: This is why you must read the new ‘Exploring Calvin and Hobbes’ book

Coming out tomorrow, the bound catalog for OSU's Bill Watterson retrospective offers a rarity of a revealing, in-depth interview.

Click to view the original at www.washingtonpost.com

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Raytracing a Black Hole

It's now clear I'm on a Black Hole binge (I can stop when I want, by the way). They're endlessly fascinating. My recent interest was in particular focused on simulating visualizations of the Schwarzschild geometry. I was preoccupied by the problem of generating a decent accurate representation of ho…

Click to view the original at rantonels.github.io

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Announcing Starfighter

Thomas Ptacek, Erin Ptacek, and I are pleased to announce Starfighter, a company that will publish CTFs (games) that are designed to develop, improve, and assess rare, extremely valuable programmin...

Click to view the original at www.kalzumeus.com

Hasnain says:

This is awesome! A great approach to hiring, from some really well known people. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out

Posted on 2015-03-10T01:15:01+0000

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Lint For Math

Can we remove simple errors from math proofs? simple-talk interview source Stephen Johnson is one of the world's top programmers. Top programmers are inherently lazy: they prefer to build tools rat...

Click to view the original at rjlipton.wordpress.com

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Five minutes with Mariana Mazzucato: "We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised...

The public sector is often seen as sclerotic and conservative in contrast with a dynamic and innovative private sector. This assumption lies at the basis of much of the outsourcing of public servic...

Click to view the original at blogs.lse.ac.uk

Hasnain says:

" When Google received funding for its algorithm from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is it right that after it earned billions nothing went back to the NSF (which is today starved of funds), or that some of Apple’s profits go into a national innovation fund to fund the next wave of Apples?"

Posted on 2015-03-09T16:16:08+0000

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The Hiring Post

The Hiring Post 06 March 2015 1 The software developer job interview doesn’t work. Companies should stop relying on them. The savviest teams will outcompete their peers by devising alternative hiring schemes. Years from now, we’ll look back at the 2015 developer interview as an anachronism, akin to…

Click to view the original at sockpuppet.org

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people.torproject.org

On March 4th, 2015, we found a tracking device inside of the wheel well of a car belonging to an attendee of the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain. This was reported in the local media.

Click to view the original at people.torproject.org

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The dangers of intermediate targets: IQ, cholesterol, and 99%-ile latency

Most real-world problems are big enough that you can’t just head for the end goal, you have to break them down into smaller parts and set up …

Click to view the original at danluu.com

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The man who posted himself to Australia

In 1964 Australian athlete Reg Spiers sent himself from London to Australia in a wooden box - he was transported as freight in the cargo hold of a plane.

Click to view the original at m.bbc.com

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MySpace – what went wrong: ‘The site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess’

Sean Percival on corporate interference, Punch The Monkey, and a failed attempt to buy Spotify: ‘They sure as hell were not selling to us...’

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

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Silicon Valley gets a taste for food

A PLANT-BASED hamburger patty that bleeds. Meatless chicken strips with the same fleshy and fibrous texture as cooked poultry. Mayonnaise made without eggs that is...

Click to view the original at www.economist.com

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Hasnain says:

Kind of old but it's on the top of HN again. A pretty cool initiative that just has people pay directly for sites instead of being bombarded by ads

Posted on 2015-03-06T02:13:22+0000

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How we upgrade a live data center - Server Fault Blog

A few weeks ago we upgraded a lot of the core infrastructure in our New York (okay, it’s really in New Jersey now – but don’t tell anyone) data center. We love being open with everything we do (including infrastructure), and really consider it one of the best job perks we have. So here’s how and why…

Click to view the original at blog.serverfault.com

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Hasnain says:

An interesting read on the Adria Richards story. I'm kind of conflicted about this.

Not 100% sure I agree with some of the statements going on here

Posted on 2015-03-05T17:19:07+0000

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Introducing Airpal - Airbnb Engineering

Airbnb is pleased to announce the launch of Airpal, a web-based query execution tool that leverages Facebook’s PrestoDB to facilitate data analysis. People who spend time using SQL for exploration and investigation know that the workflow is not always smooth. Remembering how a query was written, cop…

Click to view the original at nerds.airbnb.com

Hasnain says:

Some cool data tools. I like how they use Presto and react, though I'm having a hard time figuring out why airbnb has / needs 1.5 peta bytes of data

Posted on 2015-03-05T17:10:32+0000

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Hasnain says:

" India’s parliamentary affairs minister M Venkaiah Naidu declared: “We can ban the film in India. But this is an international conspiracy to defame India. We will see how the film can be stopped abroad too.”"

I thought us Pakistanis had the monopoly on claiming any bad press was a foreign conspiracy

Posted on 2015-03-05T16:14:42+0000

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One Twin Exercises, the Other Doesn't

Identical twins who shared the same sports and other physical activities as youngsters but different exercise habits as adults soon developed quite different bodies and brains, a new study from Finland found.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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EA Shuts Down ‘SimCity’ & ‘The Sims’ Developer Maxis

Maxis Emeryville, the studio responsible for huge PC hits including 'The Sims' and 'SimCity', has been closed by EA after nearly thirty years of operation.

Click to view the original at gamerant.com

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SpaceX Profitable as Musk Pulls In NASA Contracts, Google Cash

Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world.

Click to view the original at www.bloomberg.com

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Decision in ‘free-range’ case does not end debate about parenting and safety

CPS investigation leads to finding that Md. parents are responsible for “unsubstantiated” child neglect.

Click to view the original at washingtonpost.com

Hasnain says:

"“The go-to narrative in the last 20 or 30 years for parents was, ‘Take your eyes off your kid for even a second and he’ll be snatched.’ What the Meitiv case did was pivot the story to: ‘Give your kid one second of freedom and the government will arrest you.’ ”"

Posted on 2015-03-04T17:50:26+0000

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Why Unreal, Unity, and Source are Going Free

In the last three days, three major game engine developers have announced they are giving their technology away. Why would they do that? What do they hope to achieve?

Click to view the original at jeffwofford.com

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The Night My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was | VICE | United Kingdom

Because of her dissociative identity disorder, I was a stranger in the eyes of the woman I loved.

Click to view the original at vice.com

Hasnain says:

"She listened for a little while longer and then passed the phone to me. "He wants to talk to you." I spoke to George for a couple of minutes. I've never been so relieved to hear the voice of a girlfriend's ex."

Posted on 2015-03-04T17:43:42+0000

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The Overprotected Kid

A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution.

Click to view the original at www.theatlantic.com

Hasnain says:

Oh man. This is really long but I loved every bit of it. It shows how society has become so risk averse, especially with children.

" If a mother is afraid that her child might be abducted, her ironclad rule should not be Don’t talk to strangers. It should be Don’t talk to your father."

Posted on 2015-03-04T17:12:31+0000

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A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: Attack of the week: FREAK (or 'factoring the NSA...

If you don't know what these are, in year 1999 the US government raised the limit to 56-bit encryption and 1024-bit RSA. They were described in https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-56-bit-ciphersuites-01

Click to view the original at blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Unity 5

We’re still geared to delivering even better workflows, more optimizations and the features that give you creative freedom to drive your game development to new heights.

Click to view the original at unity3d.com

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Mozilla not accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015 - Florian Quèze

As you may have already seen, Mozilla is not in the list of organizations accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015.People who have observed the list carefully may have noticed that

Click to view the original at blog.queze.net

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Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory

There's a story I read on one of the Stack Overflow type sites a couple of years ago about a "duck". It was an answer about terms people have invented in the world of programming, and it went like this.

Click to view the original at rachelbythebay.com

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Corona SDK is now Free + Mac/Win Desktop Apps + GDC | Corona Labs

This week, to coincide with GDC, we’re making some very exciting announcements! Corona SDK is completely FREE First, Corona SDK is now completely free! Starting today, anyone who registers on our site will get the full power of Corona SDK (existing users can just logout and then re-login to the Coro…

Click to view the original at coronalabs.com

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Stephen King's "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes"

"I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn."

Click to view the original at www.aerogrammestudio.com

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Bill Gates tops Forbes rich list

Bill Gates is declared the richest man in the world for the second year running by Forbes magazine's annual ranking of global billionaires.

Click to view the original at m.bbc.com