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Hasnain says:

"Then I asked if she could substantiate rumors that the position would eventually translate into tenure-track position. This answer was more troubling. “Universities aren’t really looking to make thirty-year commitments anymore,” says the beneficiary of such a sinecure. In the space of five minutes this Dean had summarized my plight: because I’ve never held a tenure-track position, my decade of productivity put me in no greater standing for a job than someone fresh out of grad school; and those tenure-track positions—the only means to vindicate that work—aren’t in the interests of higher-education administrators."

Posted on 2016-07-31T16:27:37+0000

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High frequency security bug hunting: 120 days, 120 bugs

1) Intro & Motivations 2) Findings 3) Analysis 4) Methodology 5) Advice 6) Notable bug I: Second order subdomain/page takeovers 7) Notable bug II: DOM Based XSS via subtitle tracks 1) Intro & Motivations At the start of of this year, I set myself a personal goal of finding

Click to view the original at shubs.io

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The chip card transition in the US has been a disaster

They're confusing to use, painstakingly slow, and aren't even the best solution for consumers. And banks had every chance to do it right.

Click to view the original at qz.com

Hasnain says:

"Critics have told me that banks opted for a signature versus a PIN code because it saves them large amounts of money by not having to store PIN codes for everyone. Banks, on the other hand, say they feared that their customers would have a difficult time remembering a four digit code. (This, despite millions of people already using check cards and other access cards with PIN codes.)"

Posted on 2016-07-31T16:17:46+0000

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Random notes on improving the Redis LRU algorithm - <antirez>

antirez 53 seconds ago. 8 views. Redis is often used for caching, in a setup where a fixed maximum memory to use is specified. When new data arrives, we need to make space by removing old data. The efficiency of Redis as a cache is related to how good decision it makes about what data to evict: dele...

Click to view the original at antirez.com

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The law depends on compute power

In 2011 Sony sued George Hotz and his friends for jailbreaking the Playstation 3. One of the main complaints was that Hotz published an…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

"The only real conclusion I can draw from this is the observation that the law necessarily depends on current computational power, but the law doesn’t make that explicit in any document or court opinion I’ve heard of."

Posted on 2016-07-31T16:01:30+0000

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We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

A few years ago, I became aware of serious problem in science: the irreproducibility crisis. A group of researchers at Amgen, an American…

Click to view the original at nautil.us

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Habits of highly mathematical people

The most common question students have about mathematics is “when will I ever use this?” Many math teachers would probably struggle to give…

Click to view the original at medium.com

Hasnain says:

"And while Devlin’s particular example is very specialized, a consultant for defense intelligence, his technique is universal. It’s one of the foundations of the wishy-washy term “critical thinking.” So now an average citizen who might discard the idea of mathematics is listening to the news and hears a politician say, “We have strong evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” If they had a good mathematics education they will ask, “What exactly do you mean by strong evidence and weapons of mass destruction?” And, the crucial follow-up question, does the definition provided justify the proposed response, starting a war? If you don’t understand the definition you can’t make an informed voting decision. (Of course, if you watch the news for entertainment and to be part of a political tribe, the truth is irrelevant)"

Posted on 2016-07-31T14:39:24+0000

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Is It Just Me, Or Is the World Going Crazy?

By nearly every objective measure, the world is a better place than it has ever been in modern history. So why doesn't it feel that way?

Click to view the original at markmanson.net

Hasnain says:

"But people have seemed to conveniently forget that freedom is earned through internal sacrifices as well. Freedom can only exist when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some of your desires for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way and that’s fine."

Posted on 2016-07-31T03:19:40+0000

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A Worry if Hillary Clinton Wins: What to Do With Bill

Clinton aides are addressing a potentially thorny problem: Historically, when Mr. Clinton has time on his hands, he can create dangerous distractions for his wife.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

I don't even know where to begin ...

"Mr. Clinton is not likely to shoulder many of the traditional duties of first ladies, advisers say, like selecting White House china and floral arrangements and presiding as the host in the national home and arranging state dinners. Some of that is expected to fall to the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea. Mr. Clinton also has not given thought to using the role of first gentleman to redefine images and ideas about American masculinity and patriarchy, nor has he decided if he might draw on his personal interests — like veganism — for a healthy-eating initiative the way Michelle Obama did, his advisers say."

Posted on 2016-07-27T00:19:18+0000

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Programmers imagine the most ridiculous ways to enter a phone number into a form

Programmers have been trying to make phone number entry forms that are as terrible and hilariously difficult to use as possible. And, so far, they've been succeeding.

Click to view the original at qz.com

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Hasnain says:

"While many in the insurance industry expect the new technologies to improve and proliferate, “we are still operating in an era when car makers are recalling millions of vehicles for the simplest of technology failures: ignition switches, floor mats and air bags,” said Robert Hartwig, president of trade group Insurance Information Institute.

He said many prognosticators with speedy timetables for driverless-car adoption “have drunk too much of the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.”"

Posted on 2016-07-26T17:49:50+0000

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World of Warcraft: one simple line of code can cost you dearly

A few days ago, a new type of gold/item scam made the rounds. Usually scamming in MMORPGs is done using social engineering techniques, e.g. an attacker sells a fake item code for alleged in-game items like mounts to a potential victim for in-game currency. But this most recent kind of attack...

Click to view the original at blog.gdatasoftware.com

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Hasnain says:

A pretty good read on LSMs, why they're useful, and where they're needed. I still think it's unfortunate that I haven't seen them covered in databases classes

Posted on 2016-07-26T00:52:22+0000

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Hasnain says:

This was tough to read. A few snippets below.

"A single shot from a pellet gun sprays more than a hundred pellets. A pellet is a high-velocity projectile 2mm to 4mm around and with sharp edges. It doesn’t simply penetrate an eye; it ricochets inside it, tearing the retina and the optic nerves, scooping out flesh and bone."

"Omar Nazir, a reed-thin boy of 12, barely filled one corner of his bed. A thick swathe of bandages formed a cross across his chest and belly. He had black, adult-size glasses. “He’s lost both his eyes,” Dr. Shafi said. Doctors had yet to deliver the news to Nazir Ahmad, the boy’s father, a day laborer in Pulwama, a district in southern Kashmir, but he already seemed to know. Mr. Ahmad, tall and wiry, looked at the doctor, his eyes liquid with entreaty: “Dr. Sahib, we own one-fifth of an acre of land in the village. I will sell all my land, but please make him see.”"

"A few days later, the police raided the offices of Greater Kashmir, the daily that had run that story about Insha, as well as several other local newspapers, and shut down the printing presses. The authorities’ familiar silencing routine had begun again. Indian officials and thought leaders fell back on tired rituals of obfuscation and denial. But already one line of graffiti had appeared on every other wall throughout the entire valley: “Go India, Go Back!”

Posted on 2016-07-25T23:49:52+0000

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Nintendo shares plummet after investors realize it doesn't actually make Pokémon Go

Nintendo shares have skyrocketed since Pokémon Go's release and instant transformation into global cultural phenomenon, but they fell dramatically today after investors realized that Nintendo...

Click to view the original at theverge.com

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Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » My biology paper in Science (really)

Well, you can see the paper right here (“Synthetic recombinase-based state machines in living cells,” by Nathaniel Roquet, Ava P. Soleimany, Alyssa C. Ferris, Scott Aaronson, and Timothy K. Lu).  Unfortunately there’s a paywall, but I think we’ll be able to post our own version before long (will che...

Click to view the original at www.scottaaronson.com

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Japanese 'rent men' who are paid just to listen

From lonely pensioners to Japanese schoolgirls with shattered dreams, Takanobu Nishimoto and his crew of middle-aged men will lend an ear to clients who would never dream of spilling their guts to a therapist or worse, their families. "For me, the service is a hobby more than anything," says

Click to view the original at yahoo.com

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How we broke PHP, hacked Pornhub and earned 20.000$ | Bug Bounties - Evonide

We audited Pornhub, then PHP and broke both. In particular, we have gained remote code execution on pornhub.com and have earned a 20.000$ bug bounty.

Click to view the original at evonide.com

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Rich Countries Often Fail to Bolster Well-Being, Boston Consulting Says

Sub-Saharan Africa and Emerging Asia lead the pack over an 8-year term in improving its citizens lives, while Western Europe remains at the top of the current index

Click to view the original at bloomberg.com

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The man hired to have sex with children - BBC News

In some remote regions of Malawi, girls are made to have sex with a paid sex worker when they reach puberty - but the tradition has the potential to spread disease.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

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Bullet that struck caregiver was meant to protect him, police union prez says

The Miami-Dade police union president said the North Miami cop who shot Charles Kinsey, an unarmed healthcare worker, was aiming at the autistic man sitting next to him, who was playing with a toy truck in the street.

Click to view the original at miamiherald.com

Hasnain says:

After watching the video and then reading this, I don't even know where to begin, from the fact that they say they tried to shoot an autistic person, to leaving their "accidental" gunshot victim handcuffed and bleeding, to the fact that they never went close enough to de-escalate, or to the SWAT officer's skills for hitting the wrong person at 50 yards (and missing two shots too)

Posted on 2016-07-22T06:45:48+0000

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What if There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around?

A new study examines earnings data to link declining job mobility to lower overall demand for workers, suggesting the focus on supply-side factors such as occupational licensing is misguided.

Click to view the original at blogs.wsj.com

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Outage Postmortem - July 20, 2016

Overview On July 20, 2016 we experienced a 34 minute outage starting at 14:44 UTC. It took 10 minutes to identify the cause, 14 minutes to write the code to fix it, and 10 minutes to roll out the fix...

Click to view the original at stackstatus.net

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Braid Code Cleanup (part 1)

I am still puzzling through the right way to think about some ideas in compression, so let’s take a break from that and talk about generally cleaning up the ...

Click to view the original at number-none.com

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Is Sushi ‘Healthy’? What About Granola? Where Americans and Nutritionists Disagree

We surveyed Americans and a panel of nutrition experts about which foods they thought were good or bad for you.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Millennials 'set to earn less than Generation X' - BBC News

Millennials could become the first generation to earn less than their predecessors, wiping out generational pay progress, new research concludes.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

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How I Could Steal Money from Instagram, Google and Microsoft – Arne Swinnen's Security Blog

1 How I Could Steal Money from Instagram, Google and Microsoft Posted on July 15, 2016 by Arne TL;DR: Instagram ($2000), Google ($0) and Microsoft ($500) were vulnerable to direct money theft via premium phone number calls. They all offer services to supply users with a token via a computer-voiced p...

Click to view the original at www.arneswinnen.net

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I Teach Seniors How to Use Technology — Code Like A Girl

I have always loved tech. I even code with it. But, I decided it was time to expand technology’s target audience to include seniors.

Click to view the original at medium.com

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Hasnain says:

"In the early going, sellers sent the EPA spreadsheets listing RINs sold, strictly for record keeping. Skeptics wondered whether this system would work in the real world. Michael Hubbard, a former EPA special agent for criminal enforcement in Boston, says, “Folks like me would sit in the room with senior leadership, and they’d be saying people are going to self-report, and we would be rolling our eyes.”"

Posted on 2016-07-18T05:51:30+0000

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Hasnain says:

Interesting data, albeit with a click bait headline.

"In medical-marijuana states, the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication.

But most strikingly, the typical physician in a medical-marijuana state prescribed 1,826 fewer doses of painkillers in a given year."

Posted on 2016-07-16T17:13:41+0000

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Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem — BestTech.io

For as long as I can remember there have been two Microsofts: Microsoft Sales and everyone else. It’s a split that exists in most tech…

Click to view the original at besttech.io

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Hasnain says:

"Consider the cases of steak frites and carne asada. They both involve cooking a fairly high-quality cut of meat over high heat, and they’re both dishes whose origins are foreign to America. But they’re often listed on American menus at vastly different prices. Why?"

Posted on 2016-07-16T05:26:02+0000

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Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer

My mother has been working for one of the largest banks in the EU since before I was born and I’ve always been fascinated by her line of…

Click to view the original at medium.com

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So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors

There is such a surplus of Ph.D.s that in the most popular fields, like biomedicine, fewer than one in six reach their goal in academia.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

"Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is an admission of failure."

Posted on 2016-07-14T21:37:17+0000

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About Prof. A. Z. Al Hafi | Sir Aurangzeb International

About Prof. A. Z. Al Hafi A Brief Citation for the Arch-Researcher Prof. A.Z. Al-Hafi: Over the itinerary-course of the new century rising years, the ‘epitome watchword’ Prof. Al Hafi has iconically emerged as a colossal-authority figure, in multi-disciplinary, as well as inter-disciplinary spheres…

Click to view the original at siraurangzeb.org

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The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development

The Frontside is an Ember software consultancy based in Austin, TX. We use Ember.js to build dynamic, rich web applications that make people happy.

Click to view the original at frontside.io

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Google, LinkedIn announce massive land swap

Google and LinkedIn officials on Tuesday announced a surprise deal for a massive property swap that would trade real estate and development rights, consolidating Google's presence in Mountain View and effectively sending LinkedIn out of North Bayshore and over to the Sunnyvale border.

Click to view the original at mv-voice.com

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Armin Ronacher on Twitter

“The axle count of trains in Switzerland must not be a multiple of 2^8 of the system does not detect a train. https://t.co/f5wKS55don”

Click to view the original at twitter.com

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Hasnain says:

"School mathematics is presented as a collection of immutable truths. Problems are binary: there is a right answer and you’re damned if you can’t find it. Curriculum standards do not reflect the rich, exploratory forms of problem solving that underpin mathematical thinking."

Posted on 2016-07-11T03:54:21+0000

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How Uber secretly investigated its legal foes — and got caught

When a young labor lawyer named Andrew Schmidt first filed suit against Uber in December of last year, he couldn’t have predicted it would make him a target. Schmidt’s suit was a legal longshot,...

Click to view the original at www.theverge.com

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Amazon's counterfeit problem is getting worse and sellers are enraged

Amazon sellers have long dealt with counterfeiters, but with Chinese goods flooding the marketplace the problem is exploding.

Click to view the original at www.cnbc.com

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A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline

The leading killers — cancer, heart disease and stroke – are coming later in life in wealthy countries as people in general live longer in good health.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing

What Dallas authorities did on Thursday raises concerns about due process and the use of remotely triggered lethal force by law enforcement.

Click to view the original at motherboard.vice.com

Hasnain says:

"The ability for police to remotely kill suspects raises due process concerns. If a shooter is holed up and alone, can they be qualified as an imminent threat to life? Are there clear protocols about when a robot can be used to engage a suspect versus when a human needs to engage him or her? When can the use of lethal force be administered remotely?"

Posted on 2016-07-10T18:04:20+0000

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Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong?

It's possible that string theory or the multiverse may find strong links with data, but a recent book provides a view of what a truly different philosophical approach would look like, says Adam Frank.

Click to view the original at www.npr.org

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Hasnain says:

This is an amazing piece of writing, clearly a must read. So difficult to pick out any one single quote.

"But here is the irony, here’s the thing that all the angry Black people know, and no calmly debating White people want to admit: The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.

Ask any Black person and they'll tell you the same thing. The reality of thousands of innocent people raped, shot, imprisoned, and systematically disenfranchised are less important than the suggestion that a single White person might be complicit in a racist system.

This is the country we live in. Millions of Black lives are valued less than a single White person’s hurt feelings."

Posted on 2016-07-09T02:44:59+0000

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Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy

A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation? Nancy Jo Sales investigates.

Click to view the original at www.vanityfair.com

Hasnain says:

Super engrossing human interest story

"The most surprising thing about Miranda’s story is how unsurprising it is to many of her peers. “Almost all of my friends do some sort of sex work,” says Katie, 23, a visual artist in New York. “It’s super-common. It’s almost trendy to say you do it—or that you would.”

“It’s become like a thing people say when they can’t make their rent,” says Jenna, 22, a New York video-game designer. “ ‘Well, I could always just get a sugar daddy,’ ‘I guess I could just start camming,’ ” or doing sexual performances in front of a Webcam for money on sites like Chaturbate. “And it’s kind of a joke, but it’s also not because you actually could. It’s not like you need a pimp anymore. You just need a computer.”"

Posted on 2016-07-08T20:59:04+0000

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Celebrated humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi passes away in Karachi

Edhi created a charitable empire out of nothing, masterminding Pakistan’s largest welfare organisation.

Click to view the original at www.dawn.com

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African wildlife officials appalled as EU opposes a total ban on ivory trade

European commissions’ opposition to a continued global ban will spell the beginning of a mass extinction of African elephants, warn officials from 29 African states

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

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Venezuela Refuses to Default. Few People Seem to Understand Why.

It’s been almost two years now since the renowned Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann caused a stir in his native Venezuela by posing an uncomfortable question.

Click to view the original at www.bloomberg.com

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NASA Images Show Toxic Air Challenge Choking Indian Subcontinent

The mega-city of New Delhi has tried everything from banning diesel guzzling SUVs to taking about half the city’s cars off the streets in a fight against air pollution. Officials may yet have to do much, much more, based on National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite research.

Click to view the original at www.bloomberg.com

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Go’s march to low-latency GC — Twitch Blog

We use Go at Twitch for many of our busiest systems. Its simplicity, safety, performance, and readability make it a good tool for the…

Click to view the original at blog.twitch.tv

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Hasnain says:

""To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.""

Posted on 2016-07-06T07:55:38+0000

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Illinois Man Charged With Desecrating American Flag After Posting Photos On Facebook

A 22-year-old Illinois man has been charged with desecrating the American flag after he posted photos on Facebook along with messages decrying the state of violence and race in the U.S. This is the first time the Urbana Police Department has seen the flag desecration statute used in 27 years. Bryton...

Click to view the original at forbes.com

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Adnan Syed, of ‘Serial’ Podcast, Gets a Retrial in Murder Case

The decision came after lawyers for the defendant, who is serving a life sentence, presented new evidence in the 1999 murder.

Click to view the original at mobile.nytimes.com

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Hasnain says:

"A month later, I met with a woman notorious for having won more than $20 million from casinos in less than five years. Her name was Cheung Yin Sun. Elite Western gamblers and rattled casino bosses know her as Kelly, a fast-talking, sunglasses-wearing advantage player in her 40s. Her father, now deceased, was a wealthy factory owner based in Hong Kong. She says she lost $20 million of his money playing baccarat and slot machines. She claims to be unbothered by having blown a fortune in gambling dens around the world. In fact, she all but brags about her losses."

Posted on 2016-07-05T06:24:58+0000

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Hasnain says:

"I’ve seen lots of cases where someone goes to their manager to protest a decision — on the direction of a project, resource allocations among teams, or something similar — on the basis that the decision was driven by politics or some other personal factor. More often than not in cases like these, the leadership team and the team’s managers simply haven’t done a good enough job of explaining the decision in the context of the company’s broader priorities. When we dig in and provide that additional context, the notion that the decision was politically driven is dispelled."

Posted on 2016-07-05T05:50:45+0000

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Hasnain says:

"The problem with list prices or, as they are sometimes called, manufacturers’ suggested retail prices, is that they are regularly more of a marketing concept than what anyone is actually charging. When Amazon was saying the list price of the Breville Infuser was $800, Breville itself was selling the machine for $500 — about the same as Amazon. Other retailers sell it for $500, too. Breville confirmed the price was $500."

"The shift away from list prices is taking some merchants on Amazon by surprise. A seller named Travis complained in an Amazon forum that the list price on his product — which he did not identify — had disappeared from the site. “I’m well aware that it is bogus but it is a common marketing tactic that works very well at boosting sales,” he wrote."

Posted on 2016-07-05T01:36:02+0000

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No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

Pupils choose their own subjects and motivate themselves, an approach some say should be rolled out across Germany

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

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Home Computers Connected to the Internet Aren't Private, Court Rules

A judge in Virginia rules that people should have no expectation of privacy on their home PCs because no connected computer "is immune from invasion."

Click to view the original at eweek.com

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Employee 1: Yahoo · The Macro

A conversation with Tim Brady, Yahoo's first employee and current YC partner. Employee 1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies. Tim was the first employee at Yahoo, its Chief Product Officer for eight years, and is now a partner at...

Click to view the original at themacro.com

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The Universe of Discourse : Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to

This is a story about a very interesting bug that I tracked down yesterday. It was causing a bad effect very far from where the bug actually was.

Click to view the original at blog.plover.com

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The Day I Got My Green Card

A London-born writer never felt he truly belonged in the places he and his family were from: India, Pakistan, Britain. In America, finally, he feels free—and at home.

Click to view the original at www.wsj.com

Hasnain says:

Interesting story about intolerance, nationalism, tolerance, and immigration, by Aatish Taseer.

Though I don't get why anyone would put their green card up on the internet (with the id blurred, which can be reversed)

Posted on 2016-07-03T18:12:08+0000

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Hasnain says:

“She was between life and death,” Sanaa says, stroking her daughter’s hair. “I asked her, ‘My daughter, why did you drink the poison?’ She said, ‘Mama, there are seven of us and you work and work to feed us, but you can’t keep up. Without me, there will be one less person to feed.’ When she said that, I couldn’t stop crying.”

Posted on 2016-07-02T07:25:56+0000

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Mexican woman dies at age 117 just hours after receiving birth certificate

Trinidad Alvarez Lira had been waiting for years to obtain proof that she had been born in 1898 so she could claim government old age benefits

Click to view the original at www.theguardian.com

Hasnain says:

She died without getting a single check from the government because she couldn't prove she was old enough.

Now why anyone didn't just look at her and agree that she's over 60 is beyond me...

Posted on 2016-07-01T11:27:10+0000