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From the Canyon Edge: Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers

Dustin Kirkland is part of Canonical's Ubuntu Product and Strategy team, led by Mark Shuttleworth. Dustin leads the technical strategy, road map, and life cycle of the Ubuntu Cloud and IoT commercial offerings.

Click to view the original at blog.dustinkirkland.com

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Elimination of HIV-1 Genomes from Human T-lymphoid Cells by CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing

We employed an RNA-guided CRISPR/Cas9 DNA editing system to precisely remove the entire HIV-1 genome spanning between 5′ and 3′ LTRs of integrated HIV-1 proviral DNA copies from latently infected human CD4+ T-cells.

Click to view the original at www.nature.com

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Google BigQuery Public Datasets

A public dataset is any dataset that is stored in BigQuery and made available to the general public. This page lists a special group of public datasets that Google BigQuery hosts for you to access and integrate into your applications. Google pays for the storage of these data sets and provides publi…

Click to view the original at cloud.google.com

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Spotify raises $1 billion in debt with devilish terms to fight Apple Music

On-demand streaming music is inevitable, so Spotify is taking whatever fuel it can get to win the race against Apple. Whoever can sign up customers faster to..

Click to view the original at techcrunch.com

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Hasnain says:

I love it when reporters don't do any research at all

"The skepticism has been routed in the fact that headsets are still very clunky and overpriced. The Rift must be used with a pricey gaming console -- the best of which recommended by the company is called Asus and retails for about $1,500, Fowler says."

Posted on 2016-03-29T16:51:08+0000

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Hasnain says:

"Large firms no longer employ all that many people in America: the domestic employee base of the S&P 500 is only around a tenth of total American employment. New firms would invest more, employ more staff, and force incumbents to invest more in order to compete. If this sounds pie in the sky, consider the shale revolution over the past decade. Although the industry is now suffering from low oil prices, it is a rare example of entrepreneurial spirit taking on a stodgy industry to the benefit of all. A new commitment to competition could be the source of optimism that America is desperately searching for. After all, it is only a healthy dollop of greed and a belief in a better future that prompts people to start from scratch and try to cross the moat that has been dug around corporate America."

Posted on 2016-03-29T16:02:03+0000

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Texas woman arrested after responding to police Facebook post about meth tainted with Ebola

Central Texas police put out a fake news story claiming that supplies of methamphetamine and heroin had been tainted by the deadly Ebola virus. Guess what happened next.

Click to view the original at m.mysanantonio.com

Hasnain says:

1) poor woman
2) now if there's an actual legit issue with contaminated drugs, no one will come forward and we'll have unnecessary deaths

Posted on 2016-03-29T04:38:25+0000

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In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and train…

Click to view the original at www.latimes.com

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Hasnain says:

"Applicant United States of America, by and through its counsel of record, the United States Attorney for the Central District of California, hereby files this status report called for by the Court’s order issued on March 21, 2016. (CR 199.) The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple Inc. mandated by Court’s Order Compelling Apple Inc. to Assist Agents in Search dated February 16, 2016."

Posted on 2016-03-28T22:32:29+0000

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Hasnain says:

"Double.parseDouble in Java 7 is a synchronized method. So only one thread can parse doubles from strings at a time. Really? Really. They fixed it in Java 8 though so that's good."

Oh come on...

Posted on 2016-03-28T07:13:10+0000

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A List of Isaac Asimov's Books

Here's my list of Isaac Asimov's book titles. The numbering was provided by Asimov (except for a few marked with an asterisk). After that the titles appear in roughly the order they were written, although this is an educated guess. Note that there was often a delay between the completion and the pub…

Click to view the original at www.asimovonline.com

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Under the hood of lambdas and std::function | Shahar Mike's Web Spot

In this post we’ll explore how lambdas behave in different aspects. Then we’ll look into std::function and how it works.

Click to view the original at shaharmike.com

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Suicide blast kills at least 65 in Lahore park - The Express Tribune

Number of injured stands at more than 200 people, most of them are in critical condition, say hospital sources

Click to view the original at tribune.com.pk

Hasnain says:

I have no words for this senseless massacre, at a children's park, of all places.

"A Pakistan Taliban splinter group claimed responsibility for the deadly suicide attack.

“We claim responsibility for the attack on Christians as they were celebrating Easter,” spokesperson for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Jamaat ul Ahrar, Ehansullah Ehsan told The Express Tribune over telephone."

Posted on 2016-03-27T19:02:47+0000

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Compiler Bugs Found When Porting Chromium to VC++ 2015

Moving a big software project to a new compiler can be a lot of work, and few projects are bigger than Chromium. In addition to the main Chromium repository, which includes all of WebKit, there are…

Click to view the original at randomascii.wordpress.com

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Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill

In Bruce Levine's career he as spoken with hundreds of people diagnosed with ODD & ADHD. An astonishing number of these people are also anti-authoritarians.

Click to view the original at www.madinamerica.com

Hasnain says:

"Americans have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society."

Posted on 2016-03-25T15:39:24+0000

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HTTP/HTTPS not working inside your VM? Wait for it.

Have you ever run into a problem, done some troubleshooting, but decided it only affected yourself, and shelved it for a while? I did that a couple of a months ago with a particular problem which forced its way back into my life this morning.

Click to view the original at rachelbythebay.com

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Hasnain says:

"A new report is highlighting that risk, showing that almost half of all the revenue generated in mobile gaming comes from just 0.19 percent of users."

Posted on 2016-03-25T02:47:58+0000

Hasnain says:

This is just so amazing. Don't need to worry about that one line of code for left padding as a dependency, you can just call this API now

Posted on 2016-03-25T02:46:25+0000

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Privacy — Seamless & Secure Online Card Payments

Checkout securely online by creating unique virtual card numbers for every purchase. Avoid data breaches, unwanted charges, and stolen credit card numbers.

Click to view the original at privacy.com

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Reset your Android One to factory settings - Android One Help

You can remove all data from your Android One device by resetting it to factory settings, or doing a "force reset." You can do so by either using the Settings menu to erase all your data or by using t

Click to view the original at support.google.com

Hasnain says:

"If your device is running Android 5.1 or higher, your device is protected to prevent other people from using it if it's been reset to factory settings. To ensure that it's really you doing the reset, you'll need to enter a Google username and password associated with the device after factory reset. If you don't have this information, you won't be able to finish the setup process and use the device at all after factory reset."

What the heck is the point of a factory reset then?

Posted on 2016-03-24T05:24:13+0000

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NPM & left-pad: Have We Forgotten How To Program? | Haney Codes .NET

NPM & left-pad: Have We Forgotten How To Program? Leave a reply Okay developers, time to have a serious talk. As you are probably already aware, this week React, Babel, and a bunch of other high-profile packages on NPM broke. The reason they broke is, to me, hilarious: A simple NPM package called le…

Click to view the original at www.haneycodes.net

Hasnain says:

Why does an is-positive package exist, and even worse, why did it have 3 dependencies?

Looking at the source code is depressing

Posted on 2016-03-24T04:23:04+0000

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$250K Per Year Salary Could Qualify For Subsidized Housing Under New Palo Alto Plan

The sky-rocketing housing prices in Palo Alto have left some in limbo, with teachers, firefighters and other government workers making too much to qualify for low income housing, but not enough to afford cost of living.

Click to view the original at sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com

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That awkward moment when Apple mocked good hardware and poor people

Today’s Apple press event played out pretty much exactly like they always do. A few new products, a few promotional videos, and a lot of talk about changing the world.

Click to view the original at www.techinasia.com

Hasnain says:

"But of course, Apple isn’t really targeting those people. That was mostly just a cheap shot, a jibe at all of us poor fools who haven’t yet seen the light. That’s why the audience laughed knowingly, and even applauded. Using the same machine for five years? How barbaric! Thank god we live in civilized society, where everyone throws their gadgets out and buys new ones every two years."

Posted on 2016-03-23T15:16:30+0000

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I’ve Just Liberated My Modules

A few weeks ago a patent lawyer sent me an e-mail to ask me to unpublish “kik” module from NPM. My answer was “no” and h…

Click to view the original at medium.com

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U.S. Says It May Not Need Apple’s Help to Unlock iPhone

The Justice Department moved to cancel a Tuesday court hearing in its bid to gain access to phone data in the San Bernardino mass shooting inquiry.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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How sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll are creating the next big tech companies

Fifty years ago, when someone heard the word ‘vice,’ they may have thought about the seven deadly sins: envy, wrath, lust, pride, sloth, pride and..

Click to view the original at techcrunch.com

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We only hire the trendiest

An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn’t know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume arou…

Click to view the original at danluu.com

Hasnain says:

This is a great read on hiring bias in tech

"When I started programming, I heard a lot about how programmers are down to earth, not like those elitist folks who have uniforms involving suits and ties. You can even wear t-shirts to work! But if you think programmers aren’t elitist, try wearing a suit and tie to an interview sometime. You’ll have to go above and beyond to prove that you’re not a bad cultural fit. We like to think that we’re different from all those industries that judge people based on appearance, but we do the same thing, only instead of saying that people are a bad fit because they don’t wear ties, we say they’re a bad fit because they do, and instead of saying people aren’t smart enough because they don’t have the right pedigree… wait, that’s exactly the same."

Posted on 2016-03-21T15:18:05+0000

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FIFA admits to World Cup hosting bribes, asks U.S. for return of money

While acknowledging for the first time that votes were bought in past World Cup hosting contests, FIFA is seeking to claim "tens of millions of dollars" in bribe money seized by U.S. federal prosecutors.

Click to view the original at www.usatoday.com

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Hasnain says:

"Look: Microsoft still has some old-fashioned hardcore talented developers who can code circles around brogrammers down in the valley. These people have a keen appreciation of the complexities of operating system development and an eye for good, clean design. The NT kernel is still much better than Linux in some ways --- you guys be trippin' with your overcommit-by-default MM nonsense --- but our good people keep retiring or moving to other large technology companies, and there are few new people achieving the level of technical virtuosity needed to replace the people who leave. We fill headcount with nine-to-five-with-kids types, desperate-to-please H1Bs, and Google rejects. We occasionally get good people anyway, as if by mistake, but not enough. Is it any wonder we're falling behind? The rot has already set in."

Ouch. Big rant about MSFT from 2013

Posted on 2016-03-21T06:33:06+0000

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Yes, the American Economy Is in a Funk — But Not for the Reasons You Think - Freakonomics

As sexy as the digital revolution may be, it can’t compare to the Second Industrial Revolution (electricity! the gas engine! antibiotics!), which created the biggest standard-of-living boost in U.S. history. The only problem, argues the economist Robert Gordon, is that the Second Industrial Revoluti…

Click to view the original at freakonomics.com

Hasnain says:

"And it may be that once so many of these external, concrete needs have been met, what’s left is the really hard stuff: the internal needs. Things like psychological and cognitive gains. Learning to find true happiness. Or, perhaps better yet, to be satisfied with what we have. If you could achieve that, then yes, it might make even electricity and clean water and antibiotics seem like pretty basic stuff."

Posted on 2016-03-21T04:07:04+0000

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San Francisco’s transit system stopped being polite and got real about complaints on Twitter

What an honest response to mass transit delays looks like.

Click to view the original at vox.com

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Crowdsourced research: Many hands make tight work

Crowdsourcing research can balance discussions, validate findings and better inform policy, say Raphael Silberzahn and Eric L. Uhlmann.

Click to view the original at www.nature.com

Hasnain says:

"Most researchers would find this broad range of effect sizes disturbing. It means that taking any single analysis too seriously could be a mistake, yet this is encouraged by our current system of scientific publishing and media coverage."

Posted on 2016-03-16T01:23:53+0000

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Hasnain says:

"We shot some crowd footage at Disrupt," the real TechCrunch conference that fictional Pied Piper competes in, he said. "I have a friend in tech who called me, and she said, 'Those crowd shots are absurd, you didn't put any women in there at all.' I had to tell her—those were real shots. The world we're depicting is fucked up. Do we have a responsibility to make the genders on our show more balanced, when this is the world we're depicting?"

Posted on 2016-03-15T07:44:06+0000

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Microsoft Wants PS4 and Xbox One to Connect Online

Rocket League announced as first game to support Xbox Live's new Cross-Platform functionality; Microsoft extends invite to "other platforms"

Click to view the original at www.gamespot.com

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Hasnain says:

""Because caffeine is socially acceptable in most cultures, and because it is the most widely consumed drug in the world, it is easy to forget that it is a psychoactive stimulant," Meredith says. "There are several clinically meaningful disorders related to caffeine use. However, the widespread availability and acceptability of caffeine can make it difficult to recognize or diagnose these disorders when they occur."

Posted on 2016-03-15T06:31:22+0000

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Why Enrollment Is Surging in Machine Learning Classes

Machine learning is sweeping through industries, transforming scientific research and already changing aspects of everyday life, making the impossible possible. No wonder university students are flocking to it. Enrollment in machine learning classes is soaring, and universities are scrambling to add…

Click to view the original at blogs.nvidia.com

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The Epic Story of Dropbox’s Exodus From the Amazon Cloud Empire

Half-a-billion people stored files on Dropbox. Well, sort of. Really, the files were in Amazon’s cloud. Until Dropbox built its own. And threw the switch.

Click to view the original at www.wired.com

Hasnain says:

This is a great read on both hardware and software.

Also surprised to hear they're using Rust in production.

"Measuring only one-and-half-feet by three-and-half-feet by six inches, each Diskotech box holds as much as a petabyte of data, or a million gigabytes. Just 50 of these machines could store everything human beings have ever written."

Posted on 2016-03-15T06:10:36+0000

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How Badoo saved one million dollars switching to PHP7

We did it! Hundreds of our application servers are now running on PHP7 and doing just fine. By all accounts, ours is only the second project of this scale (after Etsy) to switch to PHP7.

Click to view the original at techblog.badoo.com

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Hasnain says:

"The North and South Koreans might be one nation, but after a few generations living completely apart, they have less and less in common. Not only are the North Koreans shorter on average because of malnutrition (Christopher Hitchens called them a nation of racist dwarfs) [4], it also makes one in four of young men too mentally retarded for military service [5] - too slow to even follow orders..."

Posted on 2016-03-15T05:37:14+0000

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Stop Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time is an archaic practice, but it isn’t just irrelevant in 2016 — it’s dangerous. A rise in fatal traffic accidents and increased energy costs are just two of the many ways DST impacts us today. Join us, and let’s put a stop to changing the clocks once and for all.

Click to view the original at stopdst.com

Hasnain says:

"Between 1986 and 1995, fatal traffic accidents rose 17% the Monday following the switch to Daylight Saving Time."

OK, I'll be extra careful on Monday...

Posted on 2016-03-13T09:10:21+0000

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AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol - Game 4 (LIVE STREAM)

This is the live stream of Michael Redmond and Chris Garlock's commentary of the third game between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo. Join us to discuss the game as it happens.

Click to view the original at gogameguru.com

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Facebook's new front-end server design delivers on performance without sucking up power

The new design packs more than twice the compute capacity into each rack while maintaining the rack power budget.

Click to view the original at code.facebook.com

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San Jose Is The Most Forgettable Major American City

What’s that California city again? Starts with “San,” has a million people, near the coast? Almost everyone can think of San Francisco or San Diego. But San Jose, the nation’s 10t…

Click to view the original at fivethirtyeight.com

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How the internet flips elections and alters our thoughts — Robert Epstein — Aeon Essays

The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do

Click to view the original at aeon.co

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Cannot clone Spec repo · Issue #4989 · CocoaPods/CocoaPods

What did you do? Run pod setup What did you expected to happen? Clone Spec repo master What happened instead? It only downloads a few bytes and then throws error: fatal: unable to access 'ht...

Click to view the original at github.com

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How to pass a programming interview

This post started as the preparation material we send to our candidates, but we decided to post it publicly. Being a good programmer has a surprisingly small role in passing programming...

Click to view the original at blog.triplebyte.com

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Homework is wrecking our kids: The research is clear, let’s ban elementary homework

Homework does have an impact on young students — but it’s not a good one

Click to view the original at salon.com

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One of the FBI’s Major Claims in the iPhone Case is Fraudulent

“We have enormous computing power in the US government, but we need to be able to bring it to bear without the phone killing itself.”                                  - FBI Director James Comey, March 1, 2016.

Click to view the original at www.aclu.org

Hasnain says:

"In short, they're asking the public to grant them significant new powers that could put all of our communications infrastructure at risk, and to trust them to not misuse these powers. But they're deliberately misleading the public (and the judiciary) to try to gain these powers. This is not how a trustworthy agency operates. We should not be fooled."

Posted on 2016-03-09T02:26:57+0000

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Announcing SQL Server on Linux - The Official Microsoft Blog

It’s been an incredible year for the data business at Microsoft and an incredible year for data across the industry. This Thursday at our Data Driven event in New York, we will kick off a wave of launch activities for SQL Server 2016 with general availability later this year. This is the most signif…

Click to view the original at blogs.microsoft.com

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How this language learning app got 110 million users without spending a dollar on marketing

The biggest challenge for learning apps is users dropping off after a while. Duolingo founder and Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn shares some secrets on overcoming that.

Click to view the original at techinasia.com

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Segfaulting Python with afl-fuzz | Tom's corner of the internet

Image source: Image source: Image source: Der Berg Hua Shan, Provinz Shaanxi, Volksrepublik China (© Tao Ming/REX Shutterstock)

Click to view the original at tomforb.es

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Hasnain says:

"It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design."

Posted on 2016-03-08T04:43:18+0000

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The secret life of a games programmer: I’ve lived my dream and it came up short | Anonymous

‘Passion’ meant working six days a week –16-hour days. I still play games, but having seen the inside of the sausage factory they’ll never be the same again

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

Hasnain says:

If someone says "I now work fewer hours, have a better family life, and have an employer who cares about my welfare." about the FINANCE industry; you know their old industry must have been tough.

"If you like games and you’re a programmer, go work for a firm that will pay."

Posted on 2016-03-08T04:39:58+0000

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Hasnain says:

"Working on Marvin’s case, I thought of myself as a maker of mosaics. My role was to create Marvin's portrait from the shards. I wanted to show that Marvin was not just a killer. When Marvin was a child, we — our society — abandoned him to a life of poverty, violence and chaos. If Marvin had had a different life, his victims would not be dead. Marvin was a human being, and not a monster."

This is a depressing story.

Posted on 2016-03-08T04:34:56+0000

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Hasnain says:

"Rather than suggesting that people should strive harder to conform to an artificial ideal of normality, Daniels’ analysis led him to a counterintuitive conclusion that serves as the cornerstone of this book: any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail."

A really great read on averages and how no human really conforms to any notion of average

Posted on 2016-03-05T20:19:42+0000

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Hasnain says:

"This issue brief argues that a labor market where the deck is stacked in favor of employers at the expense of employees is a primary cause of this poor median compensation growth. Millennials have spent almost their entire working lives in a labor market that is loose—with too many job seekers and too few jobs—and where private-sector labor unions are almost entirely absent. Certainly, monetary policy that promotes employment while making it easier for workers to form unions would help Millennials make up lost ground."

Posted on 2016-03-05T05:10:19+0000

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Cheap oil is taking shipping routes back to the 1800s

Plummeting oil prices have had many effects – one of which is that it may be cheaper for ships to travel right around Africa than go through the Suez Canal.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

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MAME Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator

After 19 years, MAME is now OSI-compliant! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!

Click to view the original at mamedev.org

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Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

The new PM1633a SSD comes in a 2.5-in. form factor, and is targeted for enterprise storage use; compared to 3.5-in. drives, twice as many of the Samsung drives fit in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack.

Click to view the original at computerworld.com

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How would you explain the difference between war and terrorism to a space alien?

Author and former CIA officer Barry Eisler spoke at the Association of Former Intelligence Officers opposite ex-CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden on Monday. In front of about a hundred former CIA…

Click to view the original at boingboing.net

Hasnain says:

This is an awesome read. Need to get the book

"Martian: I confess I am more perplexed now than when we started. I do not understand how the nation that commits the most violence and causes the most terror can claim other nations are the most terroristic. We Martians will have to study this question more closely."

Posted on 2016-03-03T07:43:39+0000

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'World's longest filibuster' ends in South Korea - BBC News

South Korean opposition lawmakers end a parliamentary filibuster that lasted 192 hours - believed to be a new world record.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

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Hasnain says:

This is an amazing read. I haven't read "The Party Decides", though, so I defer to anyone with more polisci experience.
"
This is a big problem for the parties as described in The Party Decides. Remember, in Noel and company’s description party actors care more about their policy preferences than they do voter preferences, but in an aggregated world it is voters aka users who decide which issues get traction and which don’t. And, by extension, the most successful politicians in an aggregated world are not those who serve the party but rather those who tell voters what they most want to hear."

Posted on 2016-03-03T06:53:36+0000

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Nanex ~ 1-Mar-2016 ~ Vindicated!

On July 21, 2010, Congress signed into law, as part of Dodd-Frank, a new Whistle-blower program, which Hunsader wouldn't learn about for several more years. That same afternoon, Hunsader was comparing the quote time-stamps in General Electric (GE) common stock between the SIP and NYSE's direct feed…

Click to view the original at nanex.net

Hasnain says:

"On July 21, 2010, Congress signed into law, as part of Dodd-Frank, a new Whistle-blower program, which Hunsader wouldn't learn about for several more years. That same afternoon, Hunsader was comparing the quote time-stamps in General Electric (GE) common stock between the SIP and NYSE's direct feed (Open Book). What Hunsader discovered over the next few hours would become crucial evidence that led to the historic $5 Million fine against the NYSE on September 14, 2012. It was the first time the SEC had ever fined a Stock Exchange.

The January 15, 2016 SEC press release "SEC Awards Whistleblower More Than $700,000 for Detailed Analysis" had this to say about Hunsader's analysis:

“The voluntary submission of high-quality analysis by industry experts can be every bit as valuable as first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing by company insiders"
When the SEC called Hunsader in June 2015 to tell him about the award, he said to them:
"I would have accepted $1 if you simply acknowledged me at the time.""

Posted on 2016-03-03T05:51:02+0000

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Preregistration of clinical trials causes medicines to stop working! - Chris Blattman

Something must be done to combat this public health hazard. In 2000, the National Heart Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) began requiring that researchers publicly register their research analysis plan before starting their clinical trials. From a new PLOS paper: … Continue reading →

Click to view the original at chrisblattman.com

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Uber Launches in Pakistan, Will Cost Rs. 13.7 per KM

Exactly like we told you earlier, the largest taxi dispatch companies in the world -- Uber -- has officially launched its services in Lahore, Pakistan. Lau

Click to view the original at propakistani.pk

Hasnain says:

Based on the numbers, it'll cost just a bit more than a rickshaw ride for a 30 minute ride, which is amazing, but I'm not sure how sustainable it is.

Posted on 2016-03-02T21:49:10+0000

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Why my Mother's maiden name is nonsense and yours should be too

Last week, I spoke to one of our service providers on the phone and had to clear security prior to actually having a conversation with the rep at the other end of the line. This wouldn't usually be a cause for comment, but the conversation left me thinking about why we still use such archaic se

Click to view the original at technicalchops.com

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Ghost in the Shell, over two decades old, remains our most challenging film about technology

The first questions about the loss of human identity in a tech-filled world were raised in Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 hit film.

Click to view the original at newstatesman.com

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Dan Grossman | Mandrill’s Betrayal

Mandrill, MailChimp’s SMTP-as-a-service offering with 800,000 customers and a $12MM ARR is essentially shutting down. They’re merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service’s raison d’être: sending bulk mail programma…

Click to view the original at dangrossman.info

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How We Built Uber Engineering’s Highest Query per Second Service Using Go

How the Go programming language helped Uber Engineering build and scale our highest queries per second microservice, for geofence lookups.

Click to view the original at eng.uber.com

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DROWN Attack

DROWN is a serious vulnerability that affects HTTPS and other services that rely on SSL and TLS, some of the essential cryptographic protocols for Internet security. These protocols allow everyone on the Internet to browse the web, use email, shop online, and send instant messages without third-part…

Click to view the original at drownattack.com

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The collective insanity of the publishing industry - Gene Doucette

Unless you’re a writer, I imagine you haven’t been paying quite as close attention to the publishing industry and all its weirdness as I have, and that’s a shame, because it’s been really entertaining. Actually, entertaining isn’t the right word. It’s been insane, but the kind of insane that’s unre…

Click to view the original at genedoucette.me

Hasnain says:

"Soon after that contract was signed, the other Big 5 contracts came due, and they all asked for the same Agency Model arrangement. Thus, the finest minds in publishing—or one might assume—negotiated themselves out of an arrangement whereby they sold more units at a lower cost without suffering the financial impact that comes with a lower unit cost.

On purpose."

"I mean it. One article after another, from the New York Times on down came news pieces declaring that print was making a comeback at long last, and the long national nightmare was over.

All it took was the biggest publishing companies in the world deliberately murdering their own share of the market. And it wasn’t even true."

"The only problem is this: the largest seller of print books right now happens to be Amazon. Guess who saw an uptick in print sales in 2015?"

Can I please have some of whatever they are smoking

Posted on 2016-03-02T06:21:38+0000

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The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit

Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range of forme…

Click to view the original at quillette.com

Hasnain says:

"As the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” This is the unbearable asymmetry of bullshit I mentioned in my title, and it poses a serious problem for research integrity. Developing a strategy for overcoming it, I suggest, should be a top priority for publication ethics."

Posted on 2016-03-01T09:08:56+0000

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Google says self-driving car hits municipal bus in minor crash

Alphabet Inc's Googleself-driving car struck a municipal bus in a minor crash - inwhat may be the first case of one of its autonomous cars hittinganother vehicle.

Click to view the original at mobile.reuters.com