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The next generation of journalism students have no idea what they’re getting into

The consequences of reaching "peak content" in the digital age.

Click to view the original at qz.com

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Indian Women Seeking Jobs Confront Taboos and Threats

The Indian Constitution guarantees equality under the law. But for women facing a patriarchal social order, strict caste rules and centuries of traditions, that guarantee means little.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

This is such a depressing article.

"His younger brother was in full agreement: Female employment, he said, “has spread like wildfire” and was hurting the reputation of the village. A third elder, their cousin, observed that his own wife worked at a factory, adding 5,000 rupees a month to the 1,800 he earned in a wedding band, but that there was an important difference between these income flows. “My money,” he said, “is the money that is earned with respect.”"

"Roshan could not help preening a little. “See, in our community, a woman is a woman and a man is a man,” he said. “This is what it is here. Women have lower status and men have higher status.” If any more women propose to challenge that principle, he said, “we will quietly, politely tell them this is not a good thing.”

And that night, as the sun slipped down over the sugar cane, Roshan and the others laughed and laughed."

Posted on 2016-01-31T08:32:48+0000

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Why use www? – www. is not deprecated

Why use www? This page is intended for webmasters who are looking for information about whether or not to use www in their canonical web site URLs. First, a bit of terminology. The domain name without www is sometimes referred to as a naked domain, and I’ll refer to it as such here. Why should I use…

Click to view the original at www.yes-www.org

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Hasnain says:

"A friend and I were planning a trip together and wanted to mix a little learning in with our relaxation. We looked at a local university’s film collection, saw that they had one of his lectures on physics, and checked it out. We loved it so much that we ended up watching it twice. Feynman had this amazing knack for making physics clear and fun at the same time. I immediately went looking for more of his talks, and I’ve been a big fan ever since. Years later I bought the rights to those lectures and worked with Microsoft to get them posted online for free"

Posted on 2016-01-29T08:39:07+0000

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Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams To Block Audio, Records Show

KONKOL: Intentional destruction, hiding mics and the curious case of Jason Van Dyke's dashcam.

Click to view the original at dnainfo.com

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Why do people put on differing amounts of weight? - BBC News

Foods that make some of us put on weight can have little effect on others, according to research.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

Hasnain says:

This is an awesome study, love the methodology of actually doing detailed individual level tracking.

Also of note is the actual paper itself where the apply machine learning to diet.
(http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(15)01481-6.pdf)

"We devised a machine-learning algorithm that integrates blood parameters, dietary habits, anthropometrics, physical activity, and gut microbiota measured in this cohort and showed that it accurately predicts personalized postprandial glycemic response to real-life meals."

Posted on 2016-01-29T08:20:11+0000

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Why I work remotely ( hint: it has nothing to do with productivity). — Signal v. Noise

These are some of the things I can do because I’m fortunate to work for a company that lets me work from anywhere:

Click to view the original at m.signalvnoise.com

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This Is Why Understanding Space Is So Hard - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

Comstock/Getty ImagesIf all the matter in the universe suddenly disappeared, would space still exist? Isaac Newton thought so. Space,…

Click to view the original at nautil.us

Hasnain says:

Space is mind-bogglingly big.

"52! is the number of different ways you can arrange a single deck of cards. Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.

Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps.

After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. Continue until the ocean is empty.

When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean. Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun.

Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063 × 10⁶⁷ more seconds to go. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385 × 10⁶⁷ seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.

Well, the volume of the visible universe is 3.4 × 10⁸⁰ m³ and therefore another factor of 4.2 trillion larger than 52!. And then the entire universe is estimated to be at least another 150 or 250 times larger than the visible universe. In diameter, not volume."

Posted on 2016-01-29T08:10:25+0000

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Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer | Benji's Blog -

Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer Posted January 25, 2016 by benji & filed under XP. Follow @benjiweber There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” Productivity…

Click to view the original at benjiweber.co.uk

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If we can afford our current welfare system, we can afford basic income

Basic income (BI) is getting a lot of press these days. From Switzerland’s upcoming referendum to give each citizen 2,50…

Click to view the original at medium.com

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Doctors of Doom: What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community | VICE News

Since 9/11, the number of doctorates awarded to those in the US Intelligence Community has risen steadily — but many of those degrees are from online institutions and have nothing to do with science, engineering, or the social sciences.

Click to view the original at news.vice.com

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Scientists open the ‘black box’ of schizophrenia with dramatic genetic finding

Scientists have discovered a gene variant involved in synaptic pruning puts individuals at higher risk for developing schizophrenia.

Click to view the original at washingtonpost.com

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Basic Income

We’re going to try something new—our first Request For Research. We’d like to fund a study on basic income—i.e., giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I’ve been...

Click to view the original at blog.ycombinator.com

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Is it the Wealth Gap that’s bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

There’s a a really interesting discussion unfolding right now between Paul Graham and Tim O’Reilly on the Wealth Gap and whether economic equality is really a bad thing per se. I used to believe that...

Click to view the original at peternixey.com

Hasnain says:

"And yet eight years later I did basically exactly the same thing myself. I was back in San Francisco. This time though I was there as an advisor to the Entrepreneur First cohort. These were all 20-something, first-time, unfunded entrepreneurs. I’d organised for us all to go out to dinner in the Mission. We weren’t at a particularly expensive place but when the bill came, every single one of the fifteen people there wanted to split it item by item. I found it intensely annoying to end the meal in such a tedious way and dismissed it suggesting that we just divide by the number of people.

But then I remembered that each of them was only making about $3,000/month. They had to use that money to fund both both themselves and their companies. Meanwhile I was making $1,000/day contracting. So whether I was up or down on a $30 meal didn’t really matter to me. I wasn’t empathetic to them."

Posted on 2016-01-27T08:07:03+0000

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Adventures in debugging tail latency

Perf is probably the most widely used general purpose performance debugging tool on Linux. There are multiple contenders for the #2 spot, and, like …

Click to view the original at danluu.com

Hasnain says:

These tools look really awesome.

"After finding the cause, an engineer found that this was happening on 25% of disk servers at Google, for an average of half an hour a day, with periods of high latency as long as 23 hours. This had been happening for three years. Dick Sites says that fixing this bug paid for his salary for a decade. This is another bug where traditional sampling profilers would have had a hard time. The key insight was that the slowdowns were correlated and machine wide, which isn’t something you can see in a profile."

Posted on 2016-01-27T07:27:05+0000

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Hasnain says:

"So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats."

"One adjunct teacher, JJ, posting a comment online, calculated his/her pay as an adjunct as $65 per student per semester, adding up to the princely sum of $2,000, noting that “each student paid $45,000 in tuition and took about 4 classes a semester.… I think their parents would be rather upset to learn that only $65 of the $45,000 went to pay one professor for an entire semester.”"

Posted on 2016-01-27T07:12:50+0000

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Problems Found at Theranos Lab

U.S. health inspectors have found serious deficiencies at Theranos’s laboratory in Northern California, and failing to fix them could put the lab at risk of suspension from the Medicare program.

Click to view the original at wsj.com

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The Tennis Racket: Secret Files Expose Evidence Of Match Fixing

Betting worth billions. Elite players. Violent threats. Covert messages with Sicilian gamblers. And suspicious matches at Wimbledon. Leaked files expose match-fixing evidence that tennis authoritie...

Click to view the original at buzzfeed.com

Hasnain says:

Wow, this is pretty scary.

"Winners of singles and doubles titles at Grand Slam tournaments are among the core group of 16 players who have repeatedly been reported for losing games when highly suspicious bets have been placed against them."

"lf you were to invent a sport that was tailor-made for match fixing the sport that you would invent would be called tennis"

Posted on 2016-01-26T04:27:26+0000

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9 things every React.js beginner should know - Cam Jackson

9 things every React.js beginner should know24th January 2016I've been using React.js for about 6 months now. In the grand scheme of things that's not very long at all, but in the ever-churning world of JavaScript frameworks, that just about qualifies you as a bearded elder! I've helped out a few pe…

Click to view the original at camjackson.net

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Hasnain says:

The main thing I'm taking away from the whole CRISPR story is that science is now just copying politics while trying to claim the moral high ground

"But if I had my way, there would be no winner in either of these fights. The way prizes like the Nobel give disproportionate credit to a handful of individuals is an injustice to the way science really works. We should celebrate the long series of discoveries and inventions that brought CRISPR to the forefront of science, and all the people who participated in them, rather than trying to decide which three were the most important. And I do not believe either Berkeley or MIT should have patents on CRISPR, since I believe it is a disservice to science and the public for academic scientists to ever claim intellectual property in their work"

Posted on 2016-01-25T16:31:39+0000

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threadbase

We washed, dried, measured and weighed 800 of the most popular men's t-shirts available online. The shirts included a wide variety of price points ($5-$50), sizes (XXS up to 6XL) and fits ("slim", "tall", "relaxed", etc.). After compiling the data, we worked with beta testers in NYC to develop an al…

Click to view the original at threadbase.com

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Amy Cuddy’s “Power Pose” Research Is the Latest Example of Scientific Overreach

As practicing statisticians who work in social science, we have a dark secret to reveal: Some of the most glamorous, popular claims in the field are no ...

Click to view the original at slate.com

Hasnain says:

"And we are not really criticizing the New York Times or CBS News, either. We all have been conditioned to believe that scientific publications represent truth, and it is taking the journalistic profession awhile to unlearn this lesson."

Posted on 2016-01-24T20:19:27+0000

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Postgres Query Plan Visualization - tatiyants.com

Postgres Explain Visualizer (Pev) is a tool I wrote to make EXPLAIN output easier to grok. It creates a graphical representation of the query plan.

Click to view the original at tatiyants.com

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Hasnain says:

"This report takes a global view, since 85% of young people live in developing countries, and focuses on practical matters, such as education and jobs. And it will argue that the young are an oppressed minority, held back by their elders. They are unlike other oppressed minorities, of course. Their “oppressors” do not set out to harm them. On the contrary, they often love and nurture them. Many would gladly swap places with them, too."

Posted on 2016-01-24T08:35:29+0000

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Hasnain says:

This is an awesome read on Indian startups; chronicling the challenges and failures. Applies to Pakistan too in my opinion.

"The Indian consumer is value-driven, not convenience-driven. We have all the time in the world to research and find the best price. Most have time to find a competing offer. We hate paying for service. And loyalty—what is that?"

Posted on 2016-01-24T08:29:17+0000

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A Former Mexican Governor Is Arrested, but Not by His Own Country

The news that Humberto Moreira, who governed Coahuila, was being charged with corruption came with an asterisk: It was the Spanish police who succeeded in building a case against him.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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Counting Legal Positions in Go

L19 = 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935

Click to view the original at tromp.github.io

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Hasnain says:

An amazing read; I kept nodding throughout it.

Covers why the odds are inherently stacked against poor people in more ways than most people realize.

Posted on 2016-01-23T04:21:08+0000

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Pakistan’s Unnecessary Martyrs

We’re being told the students killed by the Taliban laid down their lives for the sake of our future. But weren’t they our future?

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

"Maybe they should try to ensure that when children go to school and university they don’t become martyrs. The Pakistani political and military elites are fond of reminding everyone at every opportunity that the country’s nuclear assets are safe. Could they one day make the same claim about our schoolchildren?"

Posted on 2016-01-23T04:13:36+0000

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Why I Quit my Dream Job at Ubisoft | Gingear Studio

The Reality of AAA Games Development or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Go Indie Back in 2005, I remember my boss asking me where I'd see myself in 10 years.

Click to view the original at gingearstudio.com

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Docker Acquires Unikernel Systems As It Looks Beyond Containers

Docker today announced the acquisition of Unikernel Systems, a Cambridge, UK-based startup that aims to bring unikernels to the masses (or at least the masses..

Click to view the original at social.techcrunch.com

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Why Do People Keep Coming to This Couple's Home Looking for Lost Phones?

Sometimes people are angry. Sometimes sad. Sometimes they have police officers with them. But all of them are convinced their phones are in this Atlanta house.

Click to view the original at fusion.net

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Hasnain says:

Silicon Valley is indeed quite a bubble where only a few privileged people are allowed in even though they like to be all high and mighty about meritocracy.

Posted on 2016-01-21T16:41:07+0000

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A Linear-Time Sorting Algorithm for FPGAs

Sorting. It's a classic problem that's been studied for decades, and it's a great first step towards "thinking algorithmically." Over the years, a handful of sorting algorithms have emerged, each cha...

Click to view the original at hackaday.com

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A free shipping mystery

If you've ever purchased a physical good on the internet, you know that shipping is a big deal. And all online shop owners know that providing competitive shipping is a key part of their success. It is indeed one of Amazon's greatest strengths and they are famous for offering free shipping to their…

Click to view the original at romain.goyet.com

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Ninth Planet May Exist Beyond Pluto, Scientists Report

Two professors at the California Institute of Technology laid out an argument for the existence of a planet perhaps 4,500 times the mass of Pluto.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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Lamb chop weight enforcers want warrantless access to Australians’ metadata

National Measurement Institute one of 61 agencies seeking to be classed as a ‘criminal law-enforcement agency’ in order to gain access to phone and web data

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

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Scrapy Tips from the Pros: Part 1

Scrapy is at the heart of Scrapinghub. We use this framework extensively and have accumulated a wide range of shortcuts to get around common problems. We’re launching a series to share these Scrapy...

Click to view the original at blog.scrapinghub.com

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Edhi volunteer claims 15 killed in terror attack on Bacha Khan University Charsadda

Eight to 10 terrorists are still inside the school; security forces engaged in operation to clear university.

Click to view the original at www.dawn.com

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35 million people didn’t notice a thing… - BBC R&D

35 million people didn’t notice a thing… Posted by BBC Research and Development on 19 Jan 2016, last updated 20 Jan 2016 My name is Justin Mitchell. I’m a principal engineer at BBC R&D and I’m going to tell you about the NICAM Codec replacement project. The BBC national radio services are carried fr…

Click to view the original at www.bbc.co.uk

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“Subject: Urgent Warning” | daniel.haxx.se

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Technology “Subject: Urgent Warning” January 19, 2016 Daniel Stenberg Leave a comment Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for he…

Click to view the original at daniel.haxx.se

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Hasnain says:

This is a really depressing article.

"The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame. They should have gotten more education. They should have been more prepared. On this score, too, the U.S. deviates from other wealthy nations. America’s frontier spirit of rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by race and education level, too. White Americans, for instance, are more likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate degree."

Posted on 2016-01-20T07:57:34+0000

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The Monad Challenges

The guys who wrote the matasano crypto challenges realized that you cannot get a working knowledge of crypto without investing blood, sweat, and tears into playing with and attempting to break crypto. They even say, “But more people ‘know how’ to break it than can actually break it.” Their crypto ch…

Click to view the original at mightybyte.github.io

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Is it still possible to get away with a heist?

The Hatton Garden raid was meticulous in its planning, dazzling in its complexity – yet still the perpetrators were caught. In this interconnected age, has the Hollywood-style heist become a thing of the past?

Click to view the original at s.telegraph.co.uk

Hasnain says:

This is really engrossing and quite interesting

"“Hands-on heists are a dying art, because those who have a background in it are literally dying off.”"

Posted on 2016-01-20T07:32:06+0000

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Hasnain says:

"It is crucial for artificial intelligence research to have good testbeds. Games are excellent AI testbeds because they pose a wide variety of challenges, similarly to robotics, and are highly engaging. But they are also simpler, cheaper and faster, permitting a lot of research that is not practically possible with robotics"

Posted on 2016-01-19T01:03:27+0000

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Contents of “Development and Deployment of Massively Multiplayer Games: from social games to...

Table of Contents of the upcoming book on various aspects of game development and deployment, from business requirements to bot fighting

Click to view the original at ithare.com

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Hasnain says:

"TWO of our most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far. We’re hitting the targets, but missing the point."

Posted on 2016-01-18T03:35:05+0000

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ArcadeRS 1.0: The project

2015-07-04: Original article.2015-07-25: Changed library to rust-sdl2 0.6, no change to rust code.2015-10-17: Changed library to rust-sdl2 0.9; increased the...

Click to view the original at jadpole.github.io

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Iran Complies With Nuclear Deal; Sanctions Are Lifted

Iran has shipped most of its nuclear fuel out of the country, destroyed the innards of a plutonium-producing reactor and mothballed more than 12,000 centrifuges.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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The tube at a standstill: why TfL stopped people walking up the escalators

It’s British lore: on escalators, you stand on the right. So why did TfL ask people to stop walking on the left? And could it help solve a looming congestion crisis?

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

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Hasnain says:

"However, a career as a software developer or engineer comes with no guarantee of job satisfaction. A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms, by TINYPulse, a specialist in monitoring employee satisfaction, found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated. Only 19% of tech employees said they were happy in their jobs and only 17% said they felt valued in their work. In many areas they were even more discontented than non-tech workers: 36% of techies felt they had a clear career path compared with 50% of workers in areas such as marketing and finance; 28% of techies said they understand their companies’ vision compared with 43% of non-techies; and 47% of techies said they had good relations with their work colleagues compared with 56% of non-techies."

Ouch.

Posted on 2016-01-16T07:51:43+0000

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Hasnain says:

"If there is middle ground between Graham and this body of research, it's the idea that policymakers shouldn't go after inequality with blunt instruments, like big tax hikes just for the sake of soaking the rich. Perhaps, instead, they should target rent-seeking, which economists agree is bad for everyone who isn't a rent seeker."

Posted on 2016-01-16T07:14:02+0000

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Finland's basic income plan could change everything

Finland to test a basic income for adults FINLAND looks set to challenge the global economic orthodoxy in a way that could usher in the biggest step change in economic thought since the Industrial Revolution – it could signify the end of the link between hourly work and income, signalling the

Click to view the original at businessforscotland.co.uk

Hasnain says:

"An answer to end poverty, to bring respect and dignity, hope, and a feeling of being valued, rather than pitied, by society, to our poorest communities. A solution that prepares us for the coming unemployment crises of the new automation wave, increases tax revenues, addresses inequality, raises wages and addresses growing health crises and their associated costs. Right now critics will say we can’t afford it, and yes, it needs a lot of work, but in ten years we may realise we can’t afford not to. Finland is going to test it, and it might change everything."

Posted on 2016-01-16T07:13:43+0000

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You Can't Destroy the Village to Save It: W3C vs DRM, Round Two

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the nonprofit body that maintains the Web's core standards, made a terrible mistake in 2013: they decided to add DRM—the digital locks that train your computer to say "I can't let you do that, Dave"; rather than "Yes, boss"—to the Web's standards. At the time, we…

Click to view the original at eff.org

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6 Hospitalized, One of Them Brain-Dead, After Drug Trial in France

The drug was being tested on healthy volunteers in a licensed private institution specializing in clinical trials, the health minister said.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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When to join a startup

Something has changed in the last few years which has made an increasing number of people want to join startups. It seemed to start around the time the Social Network movie came out - perhaps it’s...

Click to view the original at tomblomfield.com

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Tadepalli v. Uber Technologies, Inc.

This website contains information regarding a class action settlement that has been approved by the Court, Vamsi Tadepalli v. Uber Technologies Inc., United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Case No. 3:15-cv-04348-MEJ.

Click to view the original at eclaim.kccllc.net

Hasnain says:

Looks like Uber finally got called out for charging customers "airport fees" and not paying the airports.

Wondering how many dollars I'll get back... (as credit, which kinda defeats the point)

Posted on 2016-01-15T06:38:20+0000

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Yahoo Releases the Largest-ever Machine Learning Dataset for Researchers

By Suju Rajan Data is the lifeblood of research in machine learning. However, access to truly large-scale datasets is a privilege that has been traditionally reserved for machine learning researchers and data scientists working at large companies – and out of reach for most academic researchers. Res…

Click to view the original at yahoolabs.tumblr.com

Hasnain says:

Awesome, but sad that they limit it to .edu's.

Wondering how long it'll take to show up on a torrent and how soon someone will deanonymize it.

Posted on 2016-01-15T06:30:12+0000

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Goldman Sachs Will Pay $5 Billion To Settle Financial-Crisis Claims

The firm is under investigation for its marketing and sale of mortgage-backed securities. If finalized, the agreement will reduce company earnings for the last three months of 2013 by $1.5 billion.

Click to view the original at npr.org

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Hasnain says:

This is pretty addictive. I'm closing the tab this morning so I can actually get some work done.

You're all welcome for the loss of productivity.

Posted on 2016-01-14T18:22:33+0000

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two weeks of rust ~ numerodix blog

Disclaimer: I'm digging Rust. I lost my hunger for programming from doing too many sad commercial projects. And now it's back. You rock, Rust!

Click to view the original at matusiak.eu

Hasnain says:

"No segfaults, no uninitialized memory, no coercion bugs, no data races, no null pointers, no header files, no makefiles, no autoconf, no cmake, no gdb. What if all the problems of c/c++ were fixed with one swing of a magic wand? The future is here, people."

Posted on 2016-01-14T06:14:35+0000

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The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems — The Development Set

“If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving prob…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

This is an awesome read on social/economic development and the attraction everyone has for "social entrepreneurship" that is often (but not always) misguided or playing on people's "feel-good" thoughts without actually solving a problem.

The article's intro (quoted below) is mind opening and so relatable.

"Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week.
You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30."

Posted on 2016-01-14T05:53:46+0000

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ChakraCore GitHub repository is now open

In a December 2015 talk at JSConf US, we announced that we would be open-sourcing the key components of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge. Today, we are excited to share with …

Click to view the original at blogs.windows.com

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Cryptography II - Stanford University | Coursera

Cryptography II from Stanford University. Learn about the inner workings of cryptographic primitives and protocols and how to apply this knowledge in real-world applications. Take free online classes from 120+ top universities and educational organizations. We partner with schools like Stanford, Yal…

Click to view the original at coursera.org

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Hasnain says:

This is a really really touching and sad story

"I started being unable to control when I cried. Tears would stream from my eyes if I stayed up too late, or if I was feeling especially socially anxious or rejected. At DEFCON in 2014 I distinctly remember being ‘bored to tears’ at multiple parties as I watched people scan the crowd for more important conversational partners when I’d try to strike up conversation. Important enough to have around, not interesting enough to talk to or to even attempt to learn who I was. I felt like garbage."

Posted on 2016-01-13T05:22:16+0000

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If too many users are wrong, it's probably your fault

A few recent comments on stories at reddit and Hacker News about user support stories have again shown that some technical types just don't understand other people. There are countless examples and stories of times when someone calls in because they can't get something to work, and the support perso…

Click to view the original at rachelbythebay.com

Hasnain says:

"If a bunch of people trip over the same thing, maybe it's not them. Maybe it's your product, or maybe it's just you. You can try to take some kind of high and mighty approach to this stuff and claim to be technically correct and yet totally fail in terms of having your users succeed at performing tasks."

Posted on 2016-01-13T05:19:12+0000

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Hasnain says:

Very well thought out piece that most people should read.

"Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider alternative views. It signals that we’d much rather show our friends that we’re like them, than try to understand those who are not."

Posted on 2016-01-12T17:39:56+0000

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Hasnain says:

"The solution might be found in a form of constraint: more standardization of the time for work and the time for life."

Posted on 2016-01-11T06:15:38+0000

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The Lark-Owl Scale: When Couples’ Sleep Patterns Diverge

Do you collapse with the kids, or stay up past midnight? This is what happens when bedmates have mismatched sleep habits: They hardly see each other.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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John Ioannidis has dedicated his life to quantifying how science is broken

An interview with the author of the groundbreaking paper "Why Most Published Research Findings are False."

Click to view the original at www.vox.com

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Heinous CPU bugs of 2015 and their implications for the future

2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every time. They continue to be the only game in town …

Click to view the original at danluu.com

Hasnain says:

CPU bugs! Really interesting to see how FFTs can crash Skylake processors

"In part, that’s because “unpredictable system behavior” have moved from being an annoying class of bugs that forces you to restart your computation to an attack vector that lets anyone with an AWS account attack your cloud-hosted services, but it’s mostly because CPUs are now complex enough that they’ve become too complicated to test effectively. "

Posted on 2016-01-11T04:54:38+0000

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The Scope of Unsafe

I’d like to talk about an important aspect of dealing with unsafe code, that still regularly seems to catch people on the wrong foot: When checking unsafe code, it is not enough to just...

Click to view the original at www.ralfj.de

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Writing high-performance servers in modern C++.

Firstly, thanks for all the feedback from my first post — Starting a tech startup with C++. Also a big shout-out to the …

Click to view the original at medium.com

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How Nvidia breaks Chrome Incognito

When I launched Diablo III, I didn't expect the pornography I had been looking at hours previously to be splashed on the screen. But that's exactly what replaced the black loading screen. Like a sc...

Click to view the original at charliehorse55.wordpress.com

Hasnain says:

"Google marked the bug as won’t fix because google chrome incognito mode is apparently not designed to protect you against other users on the same computer (despite nearly everyone using it for that exact purpose)."

Posted on 2016-01-10T00:35:57+0000

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I made $1,000 an hour as an SAT tutor. My students did better without me.

Many parents believe their child is a "bad tester." The real problem is that the whole idea of a "bad tester" is bullshit.

Click to view the original at www.vox.com

Hasnain says:

"American students have become far too reliant on everyone and everything but themselves. When our children don't excel, we sign them up for classes, hire tutors, and, if all that fails, administer them amphetamines like M&Ms. Plummeting SAT scores stand as a blaring testament to the fact that this approach isn't working."

Posted on 2016-01-09T07:37:01+0000

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How to C (as of 2016)

How to C (as of 2016) How to C in 2016 This is a draft I wrote in early 2015 and never got around to publishing. Here's the mostly unpolished version because it wasn't doing anybody any good sitting in my drafts folder. The simplest change was updating year 2015 to 2016 at publication time. Feel fre…

Click to view the original at matt.sh

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You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition

Photographs by Anna Maria Barry-Jester As the new year begins, millions of people are vowing to shape up their eating habits. This usually involves dividing foods into moralistic categories: good/b…

Click to view the original at fivethirtyeight.com

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The man who studies the spread of ignorance

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

Hasnain says:

"While some smart people will profit from all the information now just a click away, many will be misled into a false sense of expertise. My worry is not that we are losing the ability to make up our own minds, but that it’s becoming too easy to do so. We should consult with others much more than we imagine. Other people may be imperfect as well, but often their opinions go a long way toward correcting our own imperfections, as our own imperfect expertise helps to correct their errors,” warns Dunning."

Posted on 2016-01-08T08:52:59+0000

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Why I love Snapchat • Justin Kan

When I first heard about Snapchat, it sounded like a toy. That should have been the first warning. Exploding photos, good for sexting. I tried it, mostly for industry research purposes, found the UI confusing, saw I had very few friends active,... | Justin Kan | YC Partner and I started some compani…

Click to view the original at justinkan.com

Hasnain says:

Love the top HN comment:

"I don't know what to say. I think OP did a good job of explaining what makes Snapchat so great, but their initial confusion and the confusion from the commenters within this thread boggles me. Recently I was in a room with a well-known VC who wouldn't believe a college student who said that they enjoy using Snapchat, as if they couldn't comprehend how anyone would like it.
Virtually all the comments are about how Snapchat confuses them and that there must be something seriously wrong with it. And yet the app is immensely popular. If you're one of those people, then Snapchat is not really made for you.
You might be able to understand why Snapchat is a beloved app by reading a report about what the millennials are up to these days but I encourage anyone dealing with this confusion to make an effort to talk to people outside of your normal social circles once in a while. This kind of empathy with others will make you much more effective when you're creating for people who are not like you."

Posted on 2016-01-08T08:25:40+0000

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The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare

Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain

Every time Disney’s beloved mouse is about to enter the public domain, U.S. copyright law magically changes. Does he deserve special protection, or should he be relinquished to society?

Click to view the original at priceonomics.com

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Social media mocks DC Comics for note saying Pakistan language is 'Pakistanian'

The US publisher’s latest Annual features an editor’s note describing text ‘translated from Pakistanian’, setting social media alight with derision

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

Hasnain says:

So they could google and search for a remote village but couldn't spend 2 seconds searching for the name of the language

Posted on 2016-01-06T19:28:00+0000

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Netflix Is Now Available Around the World

06 January 2016 See Media Contacts Netflix Is Now Available Around the World World’s Leading Internet TV Service Now Live in More than 190 Countries Las Vegas, January 6, 2016 -- Netflix launched its service globally, simultaneously bringing its Internet TV network to more than 130 new countries aro…

Click to view the original at media.netflix.com

Hasnain says:

OK, this is pretty huge.

Also, who releases a press release saying it's now available in 190 countries, with a link to a list of countries that's not updated and has clearly less than 190 countries?

Posted on 2016-01-06T18:27:18+0000

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How to legally submit an app to Apple’s App Store when it uses encryption (or how to obtain an ERN)

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.  Last week we published a blog post describing how if your app does anything with encryption, even a single https request, then you need…

Click to view the original at carouselapps.com

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Hasnain says:

"But even Dr. Slavin seemed unprepared for the results of testing he did in cooperation with Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif., a once-working-class city that is increasingly in Silicon Valley’s orbit. He had anonymously surveyed two-thirds of Irvington’s 2,100 students last spring, using two standard measures, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results were stunning: 54 percent of students showed moderate to severe symptoms of depression. More alarming, 80 percent suffered moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety."

Posted on 2016-01-03T23:11:54+0000

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Hasnain says:

"The real billion dollar question is, how long can the traditional TV industry survive while Netflix and Amazon et. al continue to plunder and pillage every genre of TV and film?

How many shows or films that could have been successful but were squashed by TV and film execs will now see the light of day on Netflix?

How long before the Streaming Industry completely replaces TV?"

Posted on 2016-01-03T19:14:05+0000

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Hasnain says:

This makes me feel old, it's like the teens are in a wholly different generation

"During the recent focus group at Science, one girl said she showed Instagram ideas to at least three people before posting. Another said she deleted any post that did not garner enough likes. “I post and I just delete, because I don’t want to have, like, never mind,” she said, too ashamed to announce the precise number of likes out loud."

Posted on 2016-01-03T18:37:28+0000

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"Reverse Engineering for Beginners" free book

Topics touched: Oracle RDBMS, Itanium, copy-protection dongles, LD_PRELOAD, stack overflow, ELF, win32 PE file format, x86-64, critical sections, syscalls, TLS, position-independent code (PIC), profile-guided optimization, C++ STL, OpenMP, win32 SEH.

Click to view the original at beginners.re

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Why Age of Empires 2 is still growing | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Scant few games stand the test of time and retain a large active player base sixteen years after release. But not only has Age of Empires II endured, it has

Click to view the original at rockpapershotgun.com

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Hasnain says:

PG seems to be on a roll with great essays.

"Notice how novel it feels to think about that. The public conversation so far has been exclusively about the need to decrease economic inequality. We've barely given a thought to how to live with it.

I'm hopeful we'll be able to. Brandeis was a product of the Gilded Age, and things have changed since then. It's harder to hide wrongdoing now. And to get rich now you don't have to buy politicians the way railroad or oil magnates did. [6] The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy."

Posted on 2016-01-02T18:51:46+0000

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Hasnain says:

Pretty spot on, and pretty scary read on how inequality and fragmentation will keep growing, in society as well as the economy.

"I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its consequences."

Posted on 2016-01-02T18:48:14+0000

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Hasnain says:

This guy gives amazing talk after amazing talk

"For this to happen, it's vital that the web stay participatory. That means not just making sites small enough so the whole world can visit them, but small enough so that people can learn to build their own, by example.

I don't care about bloat because it's inefficient. I care about it because it makes the web inaccessible.

Keeping the Web simple keeps it awesome."

Posted on 2016-01-01T04:26:04+0000