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The FBI Faked an Entire Field of Forensic Science

For more stories like this, like Slate on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it w ...

Click to view the original at www.slate.com

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Atari co-founder: mobile games make me want to throw my phone

Video games pioneer Nolan Bushnell is planning to revive the ‘hardcore fundamental game design’ of arcades to make mobile titles worth playing

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

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Teen birth rate hits all-time low, led by 50 percent decline among Hispanics and blacks

The decline that has taken place over the past decade has been happening in all regions and among all races and ethnicities.

Click to view the original at www.washingtonpost.com

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Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

An exclusive look at data from the controversial web site Sci-Hub reveals that the whole world, both poor and rich, is reading pirated research papers.

Click to view the original at www.sciencemag.org

Hasnain says:

"For Elbakyan herself, the future is even more uncertain. Elsevier is not only charging her with copyright infringement but with illegal hacking under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. “There is the possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking,” Elbakyan admits. Others who ran afoul of this law have been extradited to the United States while traveling. And she is fully aware that another computer prodigy–turned-advocate, Aaron Swartz, was arrested on similar charges in 2011 after mass-downloading academic papers. Facing devastating financial penalties and jail time, Swartz hanged himself."

Posted on 2016-04-29T04:41:51+0000

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The American Scientist Magazine Understands Nothing about the Traveling Salesman Problem

I like to think there are some solid foundations to my life. I will be able to do the Monday New York Times crossword and I will not be able to do the Thursday version. My dental hygienist will not...

Click to view the original at mat.tepper.cmu.edu

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Mitsubishi: We've been cheating on fuel tests for 25 years

The embattled automaker admitted Tuesday that it has used improper methods to test fuel efficiency for the past quarter century, the latest revelation in a cheating scandal that has rocked the company.

Click to view the original at money.cnn.com

Hasnain says:

"The Japanese automaker admitted Tuesday that it had falsified fuel efficiency tests for the past quarter century, the latest revelation in a scandal that has rocked the company."

25 years?!

Posted on 2016-04-27T04:48:31+0000

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Have Software Developers Given Up?

Note: I’m a software developer. I create bugs. I once switched a production SQL database to Simple recovery mode and Truncated an important table causing a ton of work for my colleagues. The content of this post is aimed as much at me and the company I work for as the companies listed here. I think…

Click to view the original at blog.dantup.com

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It isn’t just Uber: Carnegie Mellon’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

Andrew Moore was a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University for a dozen years when Google hired him away in 2006 to lead..

Click to view the original at techcrunch.com

Hasnain says:

"I’m not making light of the issue. How to retain people who are worth tens of millions of dollars to other organizations is causing my few remaining hairs to fall out. But we’re also proud that because of their world-class stature, that they can do the entrepreneurial thing if they want."

Posted on 2016-04-27T04:40:40+0000

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Dark Patterns by the Boston Globe

After years of falling revenue, some newspapers have resorted to deception to boost their subscription numbers. These dishonest tactics are sometimes called “dark patterns” – user…

Click to view the original at rationalconspiracy.com

Hasnain says:

"In the short term, these dishonest tricks raise revenue for newspapers that use them. But in the longer term, they do even more damage, by giving the whole industry a reputation for bad business practices. Cable companies can get away with it because of government-granted monopolies; newspapers won’t be able to."

Posted on 2016-04-26T06:46:57+0000

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Hasnain says:

This is a really interesting short bio.

"It was around this time that Rockefeller learned the power of interest. “The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my servant and not make myself a slave to the money,” he said of this time. As a kid, Rockefeller was known for being particularly serious and rarely smiled."

Posted on 2016-04-26T06:38:36+0000

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The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing — Fluxx Studio Notes

I’ve been slightly obsessed about pricing since 2010. Before joining Fluxx, I was part of the team that changed the pric…

Click to view the original at medium.com

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Debugging memory corruption: who the hell writes “2” into my stack?! – Unity Blog

Hi, my name is Tautvydas and I’m a software developer at Unity working in the Windows team. I’d like...

Click to view the original at blogs.unity3d.com

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The web is Doom - mobiForge

In July 2015 I suggested that the average web page weight would equal that of the Doom install image in about 7 months time. In about 7 months average web page size will be same as Doom install image. Well done us! Onwards & upwards! pic.twitter.com/xtSAtZjPGl — ronan cremin (@xbs) July 30, 2015 Wel…

Click to view the original at mobiforge.com

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Hasnain says:

"Anticipating the government’s resistance to Boaty McBoatface back in March, the journalist Ross Clark observed, “Our leaders, of course, love democracy—until it comes up with an answer different to the one they were expecting.”"

Posted on 2016-04-22T14:55:49+0000

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Computer Science Reveals Exactly How To Organize Your Closet

Step aside, Martha Stewart: It's time to get your closet and piles of paper organized! Computer science can help.

Click to view the original at www.wired.com

Hasnain says:

Pretty good read on real world caching. Probably won't be able to get away with the pile of clothes though...

"In short, the mathematics of self-organizing lists suggests something radical: the big pile of papers on your desk, far from being a guilt-inducing fester of chaos, is actually one of the most well-designed and efficient structures available. What might appear to others to be an unorganized mess is, in fact, a self-organizing mess. Tossing things back on the top of the pile is the very best you can do, shy of knowing the future. You don’t need to organize that unsorted pile of paper.

You already have."

Posted on 2016-04-22T07:58:53+0000

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A Protocol for Dying - Hintjens.com

DomCode 2015, Nov 2015 (keynote)Coding Serbia, Oct 2015 (keynote)Euroscipy, Cambridge, Aug 2015 (keynote)PyGrunn, Groningen, May 2015Craft Conf, Budapest, Apr 2015QCon London, Mar 2015Code Mesh London, Nov 2014Build Stuff, Vilnius 2014Build Stuff, Vilnius, Nov 2014 (interview)Coding Serbia, Nov 2014…

Click to view the original at hintjens.com

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Implementers, Solvers, and Finders

I was talking to a former student when he brought up an article written by a well-seasoned programmer regretting his choice of career. This fellow had rejec...

Click to view the original at rkoutnik.com

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Inside Pascal: NVIDIA’s Newest Computing Platform

Today at the 2016 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the new NVIDIA Tesla P100, the most advanced accelerator ever built. Based on the new NVIDIA Pascal GP10…

Click to view the original at devblogs.nvidia.com

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inessential: Performance These Days

Mike Ash reports that objc_msgSend takes 2.6 nanoseconds on his Mac and 2.7 nanoseconds on his iPhone. This shouldn’t come as much surprise — we’ve known since Mike’s first report in 2007 that objc_msgSend is fast. (Though this function isn’t the only measure of Objective-C’s speed relative to other…

Click to view the original at inessential.com

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Hasnain says:

"It’s not surprising that skins gambling has avoided legal scrutiny. Obscured by several layers of abstraction, the wagering is tucked away in a subculture that most mainstream legal authorities don’t know exists. Gaming lawyers say Valve could be legally vulnerable; on the other hand, this is a rapidly changing area of the law with little established precedent."

Posted on 2016-04-22T05:16:01+0000

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I am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He is Wrong About Women in Tech

My name is Amilia St. John and I am the daughter of Alex St. John. Yes, that one. For those not following the horrific t…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

This is an amazing rebuttal.

I'm not sure if people saw the original material the guy wrote. I saw his recruiting deck,laughed as I thought it was satire, and was horrified when I learnt it was his true opinions. And coming from the guy who wrote DirectX.

Posted on 2016-04-22T04:05:56+0000

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Hasnain says:

"There were more too. I’ve won 2 bronze medals at IOI, 1 bronze at CEOI, 2 silvers at IZhO. Mari, Ani and I competed in HackerRank Women’s Cup as a team last year, and we ranked third place! Some companies that sponsored the event even sent us a letter after the contest, but I had to tell them that we’re too young right now to work for them."

Really inspiring.

Posted on 2016-04-21T05:55:43+0000

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Mad scientist shrinks Arduino to size of an AA battery

The hardware tinkerers and prototype mavens out there will invariably have stumbled across the Arduino platform. Completely open source and always pushing the..

Click to view the original at social.techcrunch.com

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It’s Time to Wipe Mosquitoes Off the Face of the Earth

“The level of alarm is extremely high,” said the head of the World Health Organization on Thursday, describing the spread of Zika virus around the worl ...

Click to view the original at www.slate.com

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Hasnain says:

"One rant, reasonably mild, one time, by a teen against an adult in a position of authority. By this low standard, I’ve been “cyberbullied” over Twitter and email most days."

Posted on 2016-04-21T05:04:36+0000

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Hasnain says:

"Nicholas Ori, a teenage neighbor of mine, recently described a flight he took a couple of years ago to compete in a swim tournament among several international schools of West Africa. He and his teammates flew one of the regional airlines from Dakar to Lagos, Nigeria. On the return trip the pilot announced the plane needed to make an unplanned stop — to refuel.

The plane descended onto the runway in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and the passengers shuffled into the airport. The crew proceeded to take up a collection. That’s right: They hit up the Dakar Jaguars middle school swim team for gas money. Nicholas wasn’t sure who finally ponied up, but the flight eventually returned safely to Dakar."

This sounds a little made up though.

Posted on 2016-04-21T05:00:09+0000

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19 Tips For Everyday Git Use

If you are completely new to git, I suggest reading Git Cheat Sheet first. This article is aimed at somebody who has been using git for three months or more. Table of Contexts: Parameters for bette…

Click to view the original at alexkras.com

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Got a Hot Seller on Amazon? Prepare for E-Tailer to Make One Too

Rain Design has been selling an aluminum laptop stand on Amazon.com Inc. for more than a decade. A best-seller in its category, the $43 product has a 5-star rating and 2,460 customer reviews.

Click to view the original at bloomberg.com

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Wangle — an asynchronous C++ networking and RPC library

Wangle is a C++ library for building protocols, servers, and clients in an asynchronous, clean, composable, and scalable manner.

Click to view the original at code.facebook.com

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Why is there a screen that says “It is now safe to turn off your computer”? | The Old New Thing

Why is there a screen that says “It is now safe to turn off your computer”? ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★ April 19, 2016By Raymond Chen - MSFT11 0 0 0 I don’t know whose idea it was, but Windows 95 added a screen that appeared when you shut down Windows. It’s now safe to turn offyour computer. This message was ad…

Click to view the original at blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

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A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch - Eli Bendersky's website

A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch April 19, 2016 at 05:02 Tags C & C++ , Multiple dispatch This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first…

Click to view the original at eli.thegreenplace.net

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What convolutional neural networks look at when they see nudity – Clarifai Blog | Artificial...

Last week at Clarifai we formally announced our Not Safe for Work (NSFW) adult content recognition model. This week, one of our data scientists will walk you through a technical exploration of how he taught computers to see naked people. Warning & Disclaimer: This post contains visualizations of nud…

Click to view the original at blog.clarifai.com

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Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

Intel Corp. will eliminate 12,000 jobs, or 11 percent of its workforce, embarking on the deepest cutbacks in a decade to gird for a fifth year of declines in the personal-computer market.

Click to view the original at bloomberg.com

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Hasnain says:

An absolutely essential read on content moderation and how large companies are effectively playing the role of the gate keeper here. Too many quotes, it's hard to cherry pick a single one. Really long but every word is worth it.

"While public debates rage about government censorship and free speech on college campuses, customer content management constitutes the quiet transnational transfer of free-speech decisions to the private, corporately managed corners of the internet where people weigh competing values in hidden and proprietary ways. Moderation, explains Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford, is "a profoundly human decision-making process about what constitutes appropriate speech in the public domain.""

Posted on 2016-04-19T06:10:44+0000

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Quit my full time corporate job. Built an iOS game. It became #1 in the App Store. Here are...

## TL;DR Made a little over $700k selling a premium mobile game with no IAP or Ads as a one man shop. It _is_ possible to create sustainable...

Click to view the original at reddit.com

Hasnain says:

A great post from the guy who made A Dark Room and other games on making money and the nitty gritty of writing indie games for a living

Posted on 2016-04-19T05:38:22+0000

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Shrink your Go binaries with this one weird trick

Ok, I lied, there's no weird trick. However, you can easily reduce a Go binary size by more than 6 times with some flags and common tools. Note: I don't actually believe a 30MB static binary is a problem in this day and age, and I would not trade (build

Click to view the original at blog.filippo.io

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For Female Astronomers, Sexual Harassment Is a Constant Nightmare | Broadly

Earlier this year, famous Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy was found to have sexually harassed his students over a period of a decade.

Click to view the original at broadly.vice.com

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College Student Is Removed From Flight After Speaking Arabic on Plane

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, was taken off a flight after he called an uncle in Baghdad and a passenger overheard him.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Smoking dead scorpions is KP's latest dangerous addiction

Experts say scorpion venom is more harmful than any drug— addicts start living in a constant state of delusion.

Click to view the original at www.dawn.com

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In Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to Build, Baby, Build

An activist who calls her group BARF is pushing for more housing, pitting cranky homeowners and the political establishment against newcomers who want the region to make room for them, too.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

"“There’s that book, ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR, an urban policy research organization. “What’s the matter with San Francisco? Why is it that in a city that’s two-thirds renters we have adopted a housing policy that is horrible for renters?”"

Love that they're called BARF

Posted on 2016-04-16T16:49:39+0000

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VR is the opposite of cinema « Ken’s Blog

I was on a panel this evening about the future evolution of VR. At one point I made the argument that people who try to “make their film in VR” are getting it very wrong. In fact, I argued, VR is essentially the very opposite of cinema.

Click to view the original at blog.kenperlin.com

Hasnain says:

A gem from the HN comments: "For a long time, game developers struggled with how to tell a story while not locking the player into a track ride. A movie is a story. A good game today is a place you visit. VR track rides are somewhere in between."

Posted on 2016-04-16T05:51:24+0000

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Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services

[This is a guest post by Vitaly Shmatikov, professor at Cornell Tech and once upon a time my adviser at the University of Texas at Austin. — Arvind Narayanan.]

Click to view the original at freedom-to-tinker.com

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Keeping secrecy the exception, not the rule: An issue for both consumers and businesses -...

This morning we filed a new lawsuit in federal court against the United States government to stand up for what we believe are our customers’ constitutional and fundamental rights – rights that help protect privacy and promote free expression. This is not a decision we made lightly, and hence we want…

Click to view the original at blogs.microsoft.com

Hasnain says:

"This morning we filed a new lawsuit in federal court against the United States government to stand up for what we believe are our customers’ constitutional and fundamental rights – rights that help protect privacy and promote free expression. This is not a decision we made lightly, and hence we wanted to share information on this step and why we are taking it."

Woo! MSFT suing the us government

Posted on 2016-04-16T05:40:30+0000

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Hasnain says:

Interesting read and point of view.

"America faces a two-part problem. It’s no secret that the country has fallen behind on infrastructure spending. But it’s not just a matter of how much is spent on catching up, but how and where it is spent. Advanced economies in Western Europe and Asia are reorienting themselves around robust urban clusters of advanced industry. Unfortunately, American policy making remains wedded to an antiquated political structure of 50 distinct states."

Posted on 2016-04-16T05:35:04+0000

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What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life? That’s What We’re About to Test.

Over the last decade, interest has grown in an ostensibly unorthodox approach for helping people who don’t have much money: just give them more of it, ...

Click to view the original at www.slate.com

Hasnain says:

"But fundamentally, the question should be an empirical one: What are the impacts of a universal basic income? And how do they compare with other forms of assistance?

We’re planning to find out. To do so, we’re planning to provide at least 6,000 Kenyans with a basic income for 10 to 15 years. These recipients are some of the most vulnerable people in the world, living on the U.S. equivalent of less than a dollar. "

Posted on 2016-04-15T15:52:22+0000

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Over 1,000 Leaders Worldwide Call for End to "Disastrous" Drug War, Ahead of UN Special Session...

Former Presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Nigeria, Cape Verde, Switzerland & Poland; Former Prime Ministers of Greece, Hungary & The Netherlands Join With Distinguished Scholars, Celebrities, Clergy, Business Leaders, Elected Officials, and Others in Calling for Alternatives to Prohibiti…

Click to view the original at www.drugpolicy.org

Hasnain says:

"Governments devoted disproportionate resources to repression at the expense of efforts to better the human condition. Tens of millions of people, mostly poor and racial and ethnic minorities, were incarcerated, mostly for low-level and non-violent drug law violations, with little if any benefit to public security. Problematic drug use and HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and other infectious diseases spread rapidly as prohibitionist laws, agencies and attitudes impeded harm reduction and other effective health policies."

Posted on 2016-04-15T07:34:10+0000

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Inky the Octopus Escapes From a New Zealand Aquarium

Tracks suggest he slipped through a small gap at the top of his tank, scampered across the floor, slid down a 164-foot-long drainpipe and reached the ocean.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Every shot Kobe Bryant ever took. All 30,699 of them

Kobe Bryant's 30,699th and final field goal came from 19 feet with 31 seconds left against the Utah Jazz. During his 20 years with the Lakers, he fired up more than 30,000 shots, including the regular season and playoffs. Take a tour of key shots over his 20-year career, or explore the makes and mis…

Click to view the original at graphics.latimes.com

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Hasnain says:

"The Rio wiretaps were a revelation, a treasure trove of leads and evidence, a chance to finally hear from the man himself. Here was Le Roux, living with his girlfriend and another mistress abroad, urging Lilian Cheung Yuen Pui to stop buying real estate. As Jody recalled it, Le Roux warned her that property was too easy to seize if he was arrested. When his wife seemed to discount that possibility, he reminded her that “I’m not running a fucking McDonald’s.” "

Engrossing story.

Posted on 2016-04-15T05:51:21+0000

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Hasnain says:

"If you want to buy soap at the Walgreens on Market Street in San Francisco, you’ll need to find a store employee to unlock the display case for you.

Fifty dollar earbuds and $100 bottles of Claritin simply sit on the shelves where customers can pick them up and go. But baby formula, shampoo, and soap are all protected by locked display cases. "

Posted on 2016-04-15T05:30:56+0000

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This study 40 years ago could have reshaped the American diet. But it was never fully published.

A fuller accounting of the results of a massive government-funded experiment on fatty foods challenges the conventional advice about what is healthy, and what is not.

Click to view the original at washingtonpost.com

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Man accidentally deletes his entire company with one line of bad code

A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers.

Click to view the original at independent.co.uk

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Google Cloud Status

This page provides status information on the services that are part of the Google Cloud Platform. Check back here to view the current status of the services listed below. For additional information on these services, please visit cloud.google.com.

Click to view the original at status.cloud.google.com

Hasnain says:

It's always an edge case interacting with another edge case

"We take all outages seriously, but we are particularly concerned with outages which affect multiple zones simultaneously because it is difficult for our customers to mitigate the effect of such outages. This incident report is both longer and more detailed than usual precisely because we consider the April 11th event so important, and we want you to understand why it happened and what we are doing about it. It is our hope that, by being transparent and providing considerable detail, we both help you to build more reliable services, and we demonstrate our ongoing commitment to offering you a reliable Google Cloud platform."

Posted on 2016-04-14T05:16:09+0000

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Oculus demos VR selfie sticks and 360 photo spheres and

Oculus wants to let you go anywhere in the world instantly and even take a photo while you're there, and today it demoed how at F8. Facebook's CTO Mike..

Click to view the original at social.techcrunch.com

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Introducing Facebook's new terrestrial connectivity systems — Terragraph and Project ARIES

Connectivity Lab's two new terrestrial systems are focused on improving the speed, efficiency, and quality of internet connectivity around the world.

Click to view the original at code.facebook.com

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What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population • Jupyter Notebook

In this notebook we'll compare the median annual income of software engineers to the average annual income (GDP per Capita) in 50 countries.

Click to view the original at ramiro.org

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For life expectancy, money matters

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that income is closely correlated with life expectancy, with the richest Americans living as much as 15 years longer than the poorest — and even the poor living longer in wealthy areas.

Click to view the original at news.harvard.edu

Hasnain says:

"“The increase has been approximately three years at the high end, versus zero for the lowest incomes,” Cutler said. “This is important, because it has major implications for Social Security policy. People say, ‘Americans are living longer, so we ought to delay the age of retirement,’ but … it’s a little bit unfair to say to low-income people that they’re going to get Social Security and Medicare for fewer years because investment bankers are living longer.”"

Posted on 2016-04-13T07:11:13+0000

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“I had so many advantages, and I barely made it”: Pinterest engineer on Silicon Valley sexism

Like many a woman before me, I ran smack into the confidence gap.

Click to view the original at qz.com

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Hasnain says:

"But Congress has said it doesn't want to spend any new money on Zika until the federal government uses up excess funds from elsewhere. The administration says it's scraped up nearly $600 million as a stopgap." :(

Posted on 2016-04-12T15:22:07+0000

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Write opinionated workarounds

And some people did. Unfortunately, despite the promise of open source, many users were unable to make such fixes themselves, and for a rather large number of operating systems the principle of standards compliance seems to be more aspirational than actual. Given the limits which would otherwise be…

Click to view the original at www.daemonology.net

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Google Cloud Status

This page provides status information on the services that are part of the Google Cloud Platform. Check back here to view the current status of the services listed below. For additional information on these services, please visit cloud.google.com.

Click to view the original at status.cloud.google.com

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The 1% hide their money offshore – then use it to corrupt our democracy | Aditya Chakrabortty

From US billionaires to City barons, the super-rich are buying political influence as never before. Our politicians now work for them, not for us

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

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Evicted by Matthew Desmond – what if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

‘There is an enormous amount of pain and poverty in this rich land,’ argues American sociologist Desmond in this brilliant book about housing and the lives of eight families in Milwaukee

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

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Climate-Related Death of Coral Around World Alarms Scientists

Researchers believe that bleaching, which they attribute to heat stress compounded by climate change, is threatening more than a third of the planet’s reefs.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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Millennial Employees Confound Big Banks

Investment banks are trying to stop an exodus of junior bankers by adjusting their advancement models to better suit the expectations of the millennial generation.

Click to view the original at www.wsj.com

Hasnain says:

"Some bankers are baffled by the attitude of their more junior colleagues. There is a pain point among midlevel bankers who “can sometimes get frustrated if the younger analyst isn’t as available as they want them to be,” says Mr. Waldron, Goldman’s investment banking co-head.

Nevertheless, he says, “just because other people worked 80 to 100 hours [each week] in their life history doesn’t mean these people should.”"

Posted on 2016-04-10T03:19:19+0000

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Exploding offers are bullshit · Erik Bernhardsson

Exploding offers are bullshit 2016-03-16 I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career. Although many companies do, I never put a deadline on any of them. Unfortunately, I’ve often ended up competing with other companies who do, and I feel really bad that this usually tricks y…

Click to view the original at erikbern.com

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Hasnain says:

"People pulling 16-hour days on a regular basis are exhausted. They’re just too tired to notice that their work has suffered because of it."

Posted on 2016-04-09T07:23:45+0000

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The Panama Papers prove it: America can afford a universal basic income | Colin Holtz

If the super-rich actually paid what they owe in taxes, the US would have loads more money available for public services

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

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How Celebs Make Big Bucks for Doing . . . Nothing

How rappers, Real Housewives, and lesser Kardashians get paid just for showing up at the club

Click to view the original at gq.com

Hasnain says:

"And yet the club-appearance gig is a giant knot in Disick's life that seems to only tangle and tighten like a noose. He began booking these appearances a few years back, presumably so he could gain some agency beyond the grip of Kris Jenner and have something to call his “job.” For a while, this was working out nicely for him. He was gaining enough notoriety thanks to Keeping Up with the Kardashians that his appearance fee rose to impressive numbers: He could pull $70,000 or $80,000 a night in the U.S. At one high point, he scored a $250,000 deal for a series of appearances in the UK."

Posted on 2016-04-07T05:32:28+0000

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More Than 40% of Student Borrowers Aren’t Making Payments

More than 40% of Americans who borrowed from the government’s main student-loan program aren’t making payments or are behind on more than $200 billion owed, raising worries that millions of them may never repay.

Click to view the original at wsj.com

Hasnain says:

"Carlo Salerno, an economist who studies higher education and has consulted for the private student-lending industry, noted that the government imposes virtually no credit checks on borrowers, requires no cosigners and doesn’t screen people for their preparedness for college-level course work. “On what planet does a financing vehicle with those kinds of terms and those kinds of performance metrics make sense,” he said.

Some borrowers aren’t repaying even when they can. Research from Navient shows that borrowers prioritize other bills—such as car loans, mortgages and heating bills—over student debt. A borrower who fails to pay down an auto loan might have her car repossessed; with student loans, there is no such threat."

Posted on 2016-04-07T03:06:16+0000

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Hasnain says:

Matt King is awesome. I got to interact with him for a short while at an internal session and I was blown away when I heard his story and what he was working on

Posted on 2016-04-06T04:59:28+0000

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9-year-old reporter breaks crime news, posts videos, fires back at critics

The daughter of a reporter loves pursuing real news, and scooped the local newspaper Saturday with her reporting on a tragic homicide.

Click to view the original at www.washingtonpost.com

Hasnain says:

"But her reporting did not impress some of the good people of Selinsgrove, and they let Hilde have it on Facebook Saturday night. “I think this is appalling that u would do a story like this when all the facts are not in yet,” wrote one commenter. Her parents were attacked too: “does no one realize that this is a 9 year old reporting this type of graphic information!” wrote a Facebook poster. “I mean, what parents are encouraging this type of behavior!”

Hilde was unfazed. Sunday morning, she gathered many of the comments she’d received online, summoned her older sister and her video camera, and read the comments aloud. Then she took on her critics directly: “If you want me to stop covering news, then you get off your computers and do something about the news. There, is that cute enough for you?” "

Posted on 2016-04-06T03:54:52+0000

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Forget Apple vs. the FBI: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

This morning, at a small office in Mountain View, California, WhatsApp made the scope of the Apple-FBI encryption battle look kinda small.

Click to view the original at wired.com

Hasnain says:

This is really huge.

"But the app’s two founders, for all their success, have remained in the shadows. They almost never speak with the media. Koum, in particular, is largely uninterested in press or publicity or, for that matter, any human interaction he deems extraneous. “Clearly, you can’t believe everything you read in the press,” he tells me, a reporter. Although the company runs one of the world’s largest online services—and is owned by the world’s biggest social network—it continues to operate almost entirely on its own in an unmarked building in Mountain View that’s fronted by unusually diligent security. And because the app is far more popular overseas than in the US, the typically fervent Silicon Valley tech press has largely left them alone. As a result, the American public hasn’t quite grasped the enormous scope of the company’s encryption project or the motivations behind it."

Posted on 2016-04-05T16:35:04+0000

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Iceland PM Resigns Following Protests Over Offshore Investments

The Panama bank secrecy leak claimed its first scalp after Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned following revelations about his personal finances.

Click to view the original at www.bloomberg.com

Hasnain says:

Just a day after he said he wouldn't and that he doubted people would show up to a protest. About 8% of the country showed up

Posted on 2016-04-05T16:14:08+0000

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On Virgin America

My first airline was started out of frustration. As a young record executive, I travelled the world flying by other airlines, but found the experience dreadful. So in 1984 I chartered one second-hand Boeing 747 and offered flights between London and New York. People thought we were mad and bound to…

Click to view the original at www.virgin.com

Hasnain says:

"Because I'm not American, the US Department of Transportation stipulated I take some of my shares in Virgin America as non-voting shares, reducing my influence over any takeover. So there was sadly nothing I could do to stop it."
- Sir Richard Branson, Virgin founder.

Posted on 2016-04-05T06:56:22+0000

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How I Went From Leading the Egyptian Revolution to Making Minimum Wage in San Francisco

In 2011, Ahmed Salah was a leading Egyptian revolutionary who met with ambassadors and Secretaries of State. Now he is nearly homeless in San Francisco.

Click to view the original at priceonomics.com

Hasnain says:

Really sad, really moving, and incredibly well written. Also shines a light on how western journalists go for the easier reporting avenues instead of ground truths, something I see about Pakistan as well.

"I understand why outsiders attributed the revolution to people like Ghonim. Facebook posts are more visible than secret meetings, and Egyptians who spoke English and appeared on CNN had smartphones."

Posted on 2016-04-05T06:46:59+0000

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Hello World

The following is a short essay about my journey into the field of computer science – why I made the switch from a previous career path, my hopes, dreams, and heart-breaks, and where I hope to…

Click to view the original at rewritingthecode.com

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Side Projects – AVC

Side Projects Back when we started USV in 2003/2004, we used to see a lot of side projects that had taken off and were turning into companies. We funded at least one such side project, Delicious, which ended up getting sold to Yahoo! a few years later. But I remember that we would see one or two of…

Click to view the original at avc.com

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Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak - Craig Murray

Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak3 Apr, 2016  in Uncategorized by craig Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all in…

Click to view the original at www.craigmurray.org.uk

Hasnain says:

"Unfortunately the leaker has made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results. In consequence the first major story, published today by the Guardian, is all about Vladimir Putin and a cellist on the fiddle. As it happens I believe the story and have no doubt Putin is bent."

Posted on 2016-04-04T04:57:00+0000

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Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management — The Year of the Looking Glass

I first started managing people seven years ago, three years after I graduated and got my first design job. At the time,…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

This is a great read

"Unfortunately at many places, you’re roadblocked in advancing your career unless you become a manager. This sadly incentivizes the wrong outcomes, in which people who don’t love dealing with people become bad managers, and both they and their team suffers. "

Posted on 2016-04-03T16:56:48+0000

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AP Style alert: Don’t capitalize internet and web anymore

Associated Press editors announced a new stylebook change Saturday ahead of a session at the annual American Copy Editors Society’s conference — the 2016 stylebook will lowercase the words &#…

Click to view the original at www.poynter.org

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We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source || kuro5hin.org

The timestamps on the files generally say 25 July 2000. The source is contained in a Zip file of size 213,748,207 bytes, named windows_2000_source_code.zip, which has been widely circulated on P2P networks. Some dummy files of similar size, containing just strings of zeroes, have also circulated.

Click to view the original at www.kuro5hin.org

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Clang vs. GCC - code coverage checking

Recently, I've been compiling some of the codebases I work on under Clang 3.8 instead of GCC 4.8, to take advantage of better compiler warnings and faster compilation speed (I've seen a 33% speedup, though I haven't tested this rigorously). Today, I got to grips ...

Click to view the original at rkd.me.uk

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The Invisible Catastrophe

Over the course of 4 months, 97,100 metric tons of methane quietly leaked out of a single well into California’s sky. Scientists and residents are still trying to figure out just how much damage was done.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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