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Scott's Cheap Flights on Indie Hackers

Scott and Brian explain how they grew a small side project into a booming businesses with over 600,000 subscribers and $4 million in annual revenue.

Click to view the original at indiehackers.com

Hasnain says:

This is a story of how Scott's Cheap flights started just from one person doing what he liked to a pretty successful business.

I really like the product, and I'm happy (and somewhat surprised) to see it doing so well ($4 million annual revenue)

Posted on 2017-06-30T17:29:45+0000

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Defining Environment Language for Video Games

Level Designer Emilia Schatz outlined the core principles, which help to make your environments playable and understandable to the player.

Click to view the original at 80.lv

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Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS? | The Official SQLizer Blog

Facebook was has been around since 2004. In the years since, the company, now one of the five US tech giants, has moved from a single server running in a dor...

Click to view the original at blog.sqlizer.io

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How to Interview Engineers

We do a lot of interviewing at Triplebyte. Indeed, over the last 2 years, I've interviewed just over 900 engineers. Whether this was a good use of my time can be debated! (I sometimes wake up in a...

Click to view the original at blog.triplebyte.com

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Tea Tuesday: Meet The Chai Wallahs Of India

Resham Gellatly and Zach Marks spent eight months traveling through India, meeting with hundreds of India's chai wallahs — or tea vendors — who highlight the country's culture and diversity.

Click to view the original at npr.org

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Maritime Mystery: Why a U.S. Destroyer Failed to Dodge a Cargo Ship

Lookouts and radar operators on the destroyer Fitzgerald should have spotted the freighter it collided with, and the captain should have been wakened.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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A Cyberattack ‘the World Isn’t Ready For’

In May, a so-called ransomware attack hit computers in over 150 countries. But two weeks earlier, one security expert found something a lot worse.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Canadian elite special forces sniper sets record-breaking kill shot in Iraq

Sources say the sniper killed an Islamic State insurgent from a distance of 3,540 metres in a feat one a military insider says may ‘never be equalled’

Click to view the original at theglobeandmail.com

Hasnain says:

""It is at the distance where you have to account not just for the ballistics of the round, which change over time and distance, you have to adjust for wind, and the wind would be swirling," said a source with expertise in training Canadian special forces.

"You have to adjust for him firing from a higher location downward and as the round drops you have to account for that. And from that distance you actually have to account for the curvature of the Earth.""

Posted on 2017-06-22T06:34:51+0000

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Tesla hires deep learning expert Andrej Karpathy to lead Autopilot vision

Tesla has hired deep learning and computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy in a key Autopilot role. Karpathy most recently held a role as a researcher at..

Click to view the original at social.techcrunch.com

Hasnain says:

In other news, Chris Lattner is out within 6 months and the Tesla Press release sorta threw him under the bus.

I don't know this guy but to get to head such a role within 2 years of your PhD is impressive

Posted on 2017-06-21T05:45:54+0000

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Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

The company’s co-founder had been under increasing pressure, and several major investors demanded that he resign from the company immediately.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Internal Apple presentation on how to handle leaks gets leaked

The Outline recently obtained an hour-long audio recording from an internal briefing at Apple titled "Stopping Leakers - Keeping Confidential at Apple." The presentation, held for about 100 people,...

Click to view the original at theverge.com

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The worst volume control UI in the world – uxdesign.cc

A group of bored developers and designers has decided to start a thread on reddit to figure out who can came up with the worst volume…

Click to view the original at uxdesign.cc

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The RNC Files: Inside the Largest US Voter Data Leak

UpGuard has discovered an open database containing information on what appear to be approximately 198 million American voters left misconfigured by a GOP analytics firm.

Click to view the original at upguard.com

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DeepMind Open Source – Datasets | DeepMind

A large-scale, high-quality dataset of URL links to approximately 300,000 video clips that covers 400 human action classes, including human-object interactions such as playing instruments, as well as human-human interactions such as shaking hands and hugging. Each action class has at least 400 video...

Click to view the original at deepmind.com

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US Navy destroyer collides with merchant ship near Japan - BBC News

A number of injuries have been reported but the extent of the damage is still being determined.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

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Analysis | The surprising number of American adults who think chocolate milk comes from brown cows

Many people are agriculturally illiterate, researchers say. They blame the industrial food system.

Click to view the original at washingtonpost.com

Hasnain says:

Reminds me of all those posts where people were complaining about (bay) leaves in their food from chipotle.

This is really sad though.

"Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.

If you do the math, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed, milk-drinking people. The equivalent of the population of Pennsylvania (and then some!) does not know that chocolate milk is milk, cocoa and sugar."

Posted on 2017-06-16T18:44:47+0000

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The Konami exodus - Nikkei Asian Review

TOKYO -- "You are unfairly discrediting the company." Those words were contained in a letter that Japanese gaming giant Konami sent last fall to Hideo

Click to view the original at asia.nikkei.com

Hasnain says:

"A staffing agency employee who asked not to be named said he notifies gaming companies if a prospective hire is an ex-Kon. He said that is because Konami files complaints to gaming companies who take on its former employees."

Damn

Posted on 2017-06-15T16:33:35+0000

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You and Your Research

At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W. Hamming, a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a retired Bell Labs scientist, gave a very interesting and stimulating talk, `You and Your Research' to an overflow audience of some 200...

Click to view the original at cs.virginia.edu

Hasnain says:

Rediscovered this again and re-read it, still incredibly amazing. Covers career growth in general and is very relevant to this day.

Posted on 2017-06-15T02:33:56+0000

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Hasnain says:

The other scary part is that the government apparently knew about this type of fire safety hazard for quite a while but sat on the report for reasons unknown

Posted on 2017-06-14T20:57:55+0000

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Paradoxes of Probability and Other Statistical Strangeness - Quillette

You don’t have to wait long to see a headline proclaiming that some food or behaviour is associated with either an increased or a decreased health risk, or often both. How can it be that seemingly rigorous scientific studies can produce opposite conclusions? Nowadays, researchers can access a wealth...

Click to view the original at quillette.com

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Hasnain says:

"I'm pretty convinced that the United States has a self-induced abortion crisis right now based on the volume of search inquiries. I was blown away by how frequently people are searching for ways to do abortions themselves now. These searches are concentrated in parts of the country where it's hard to get an abortion and they rose substantially when it became harder to get an abortion. They're also, I calculate, missing pregnancies in these states that aren't showing up in either abortion or birth rates."

Posted on 2017-06-14T05:57:26+0000

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How MutexGuard was Sync When It Should Not Have Been

A couple of weeks ago, our ongoing effort to formalize Rust’s type system lead to us actually discovering a bug in the Rust standard library: MutexGuard implemented Sync in cases where it s...

Click to view the original at ralfj.de

Hasnain says:

"So all’s well that ends well? Not really. Notice how the bug is not caused by an incorrect piece of code somewhere in the implementation of Mutex. One could go over that entire file, and prove every single line of it correct, and all proofs would go through. The bug is in a line of code that was not written. I don’t think it is very surprising that this was overlooked."

Posted on 2017-06-13T07:08:10+0000

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Lessons I've Learned from Three Million Downloads

In January 2011 I was on summer break, but instead of getting a day job, or socializing, I spent a lot of time holed up in my room writing the first version of an iOS app called

Click to view the original at jordansmith.io

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IRDC US 2015 - Brian Bucklew, Data-Driven Engines of Qud and Sproggiwood

"Brian will discuss some of the interesting design decisions he made during the development of both Caves of Qud and his latest game, Sproggiwood." ---------...

Click to view the original at youtube.com

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future reference.

A great video on entity component systems, data driven design, and why composition > inheritance.

Posted on 2017-06-13T03:21:51+0000

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The Design and Use of QuickCheck

QuickCheck is the grandfather of property-based testing libraries. Despite being imitated in over thirty languages, the original implementation remains pre-eminent due to the type system and consistent logic of the Haskell language in which it is written.

Click to view the original at begriffs.com

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Wordpress's owner is closing its San Francisco office because its employees never show up

The blogging platform's parent, a remote-working advocate, wound up listing the property.

Click to view the original at qz.com

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Hackers Are Hijacking Phone Numbers And Breaking Into Email, Bank Accounts: How To Protect Yourself

If you have a cell phone and use Gmail, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Facebook, Twitter, your bank's website and countless other web services, you could very easily be hacked.

Click to view the original at forbes.com

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Hasnain says:

"What’s more important than the document Winner leaked is that policymakers know there are people below them who will keep them accountable or at least expose them to the world.

Just as employers can’t rely on worker loyalty they haven’t earned, neither can the federal government. Young people were caught up in a post-9/11 nationalist surge, but it ebbed quickly. In 2016, Gallup found adults under 29 least likely to say they were “extremely proud” to be American, with just over a third agreeing. Every other group, including self-identified liberals, was more proud of America than millennials were. If managers in the national security industry think they can count on patriotism to dissuade potential young leakers, they are mistaken. The cycle self-perpetuates as each leak that reveals another government lie or secret makes the state look less trustworthy and leaking information more legitimate."

Posted on 2017-06-11T22:38:41+0000

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Prozac Nation Is Now the United States of Xanax

How we went from depressive flannel and fog to anxiously monitoring our heart rates, twirling fidget spinners and streaming into meditation studios.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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The Norwegian who knew his tortoises so well that he changed the course of history

This article has previously been published in Norwegian in Aftenposten Historie no. 6, 2015 and Biolog no, 1, 2014. Due to several reques...

Click to view the original at nypesuppe.blogspot.com

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Uber Board to Discuss CEO Absence, Policy Changes: Source

Uber Technologies Inc's [UBER.UL] board will discuss Chief Executive Travis Kalanick temporarily stepping away from the embattled ride-hailing firm and consider sweeping changes to the company's management practices at a meeting on Sunday, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Games from Within - Independent game development

I haven’t written purely about tech in a long time, but this is a particularly interesting intersection of tech and game design, so I thought I would share it with everybody. Be warned though: This is one of those posts that’s just about the thought process I went through for something and the solut...

Click to view the original at gamesfromwithin.com

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Houzz raising $400 million at $4 billion valuation

Home improvement platform Houzz continues to grow, and is in process of raising another huge round of funding. The company confirms that it is raising $400..

Click to view the original at social.techcrunch.com

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New Medium, New Rules: Video Advertising in the Mobile Age

Today, television is still a powerful medium where great creative work takes place. But now, it's in direct competition with mobile, a medium defined by the fact that beyond every household, every person has a screen, on their person, at all times.

Click to view the original at facebook.com

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Jeremy Corbyn has caused a sensation – he would make a fine prime minister | Owen Jones

This was not about Tory failure. If Labour had offered the same old stale, technocratic centrism it would have faced an absolute drubbing

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

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Rust Performance Pitfalls — Llogiq on stuff

Overall, Rust is pretty good for performance. Write the most simple stuff, and it will usually run within a factor of two from optimized C/C++ code. However, Rust makes some tradeoffs for different reasons than sheer speed, so here’s a handy list of some things that may bite you and how you can spee...

Click to view the original at llogiq.github.io

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Options vs. cash

I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t understand about this claim is, if the claim is true, why shouldn’t the startup go to an investor, sel...

Click to view the original at danluu.com

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A top Uber executive, who obtained the medical records of a customer who was a rape victim, has been fired

Sources say Eric Alexander carried around for a year confidential information about a woman who was assaulted during a ride in India in 2014.

Click to view the original at recode.net

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Reading Between the Lines of Comey’s Prepared Testimony

New York Times reporters analyze prepared remarks by James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, that were published Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Opinion | How to Keep Your College Admission Offer: Start With Digital Literacy

What students do and post online has real life consequences. It’s on us to teach them that.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

I saw the Crimson article the other day and was surprised at how those students thought it was ok to share those things with their real name. This article goes into the problem in a bit more detail

Posted on 2017-06-08T00:18:08+0000

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How air conditioning changed the world - BBC News

Initially invented for the printing industry, the technology has transformed the way we live and work.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

Hasnain says:

"A study in Phoenix, Arizona, found the hot air pumped out of air conditioning units increased the city's night-time temperature by 2C,"

Posted on 2017-06-07T04:40:54+0000

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Alex Honnold Scales El Capitan Without Ropes, And The Climbing World Reels

The climber scaled the granite wall in under four hours, in what Alpinist magazine says "is indisputably the greatest free solo of all time."

Click to view the original at npr.org

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At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard

At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now cost more than a year at Harvard

Click to view the original at latimes.com

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Hasnain says:

"The second is that when they print things out, they includes these invisible dots, so documents can be tracked.

Yes, this code the government forces into our printers is a violation of our 3rd Amendment rights."

Posted on 2017-06-06T04:47:18+0000

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Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read? | Hacker News

* The Dataflow book has some great coverage of fixpoint algorithms. It's really helpful to recognize when some problems are best solved by fixpoint analysis.

Click to view the original at news.ycombinator.com

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WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Results

After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal’s subscription business soared, with a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers. But there was a trade-off: Traffic from Google plummeted 44 percent.

Click to view the original at bloomberg.com

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Climate Science Meets a Stubborn Obstacle: Students

A new teacher’s efforts to educate teenagers in Ohio coal country ran up against a cultural resistance to evidence of the human role in global warming.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

Really engrossing human interest story.

"On a field trip to a biology laboratory there, many of his students took their first ride on an escalator. To illustrate why some scientists in the 1970s believed the world was cooling rather than warming (“So why should we believe them now?” students sometimes asked), he brought in a 1968 push-button phone and a 1980s Nintendo game cartridge."

Posted on 2017-06-05T19:46:10+0000

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London Bridge attacker was a known extremist who was filmed unfurling an ISIS flag in Channel 4 documentary

He had been thrown out of his local mosque because of his views and had a reputation for aggressive behaviour.

Click to view the original at businessinsider.com

Hasnain says:

I don't see how more surveillance would help given that they're already not following up on so many cases which are already flagged.

Posted on 2017-06-05T18:57:27+0000

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America Is Getting a Raise, and Goldman Sachs Is Freaking Out About It

In a private newsletter to wealthy investors, Goldman Sachs analysts warn that “rising wages are a threat to corporate profit margins.”

Click to view the original at civicskunk.works

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Oculus Founder Plots a Comeback With a Virtual Border Wall

After facing political criticism and leaving Facebook, Palmer Luckey is working on another start-up. Its military interest will go nicely with his helicopters and abandoned missile silos.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Theresa May wants to ban crypto: here's what that would cost, and here's why it won't work anyway

Aaron Swartz once said, “It’s no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works.”

Click to view the original at boingboing.net

Hasnain says:

"In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartz’s words: “It’s not OK not to understand the internet anymore.” That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in “golden keys” that only let the right sort of people break your encryption."

Posted on 2017-06-04T22:17:04+0000

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Theresa May says the internet must now be regulated following London Bridge terror attack

New international agreements should be introduced to regulate the internet in the light of the London Bridge terror attack, Theresa May has said. The Prime Minister said introducing new rules for cyberspace would “deprive the extremists of their safe spaces online” and that technology firms were not...

Click to view the original at independent.co.uk

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My Improbable Graduation: From A Tiny Village In Ghana To Johns Hopkins

George Mwinnyaa didn't get high enough scores for admission in his homeland. So he put his dreams on hold. Here's how he came to earn his diploma at Johns Hopkins University.

Click to view the original at npr.org

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Artificial Intelligence and Games – A Springer Textbook | By Georgios N. Yannakakis and Julian Togelius

Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence and Games book. This book aims to be the first comprehensive textbook on the application and use of artificial intelligence (AI) in, and for, games. Our hope is that the book will be used by educators and students of graduate or advanced undergraduate courses o...

Click to view the original at gameaibook.org

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Dissecting Marissa Mayer’s $900,000-a-Week Yahoo Paycheck

Yahoo’s chief executive presided over the decline and sale of the company. But she delivered big rewards to investors.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job, and was told to leave, on top of this i was told by the CTO that they need to get legal involved, how screwed am i? • r/cscareerquestions

Today was my first day on the job as a Junior Software Developer and was my first non-internship position after university. Unfortunately i...

Click to view the original at reddit.com

Hasnain says:

Junior dev destroys production database by following onboarding document, gets fired on first day.

Sad because they should have been promoted for flagging just how bad the company's practices are. The blame lies solely on the senior people there for a bad process and no backups.

Posted on 2017-06-03T18:50:59+0000

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Researchers Use Ridesharing Cars to Sniff Out a Secret Spying Tool

University of Washington researchers put sensors in 15 ridesharing cars, and uncovered new evidence of how stingrays are being used and how to detect them.

Click to view the original at wired.com

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On the Myth of the 10X Engineer and the Reality of the Distinguished Engineer

One of the greatest myths perpetuated in the software industry, particularly by recruiters, over the last number of years has been the idea of the 10X engineer. The idea that

Click to view the original at redmonk.com

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Network Protocols – Programmer's Compendium

The network stack does several seemingly-impossible things. It does reliable transmission over our unreliable networks, usually without any detectable hiccups. It adapts smoothly to network congestion. It provides addressing to billions of active nodes. It routes packets around damaged network infra...

Click to view the original at destroyallsoftware.com

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Building a better web for everyone

We believe online ads should be better. The Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers. Here's how we plan to support it.

Click to view the original at blog.google

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India, Once a Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green

As the United States drops out of the Paris climate pact, New Delhi is canceling coal-fired power plants and investing heavily in renewable energy sources.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

"This is hopeful news for the world, said Mr. Tongia, because the only way for the world not to grow too warm is for “developing countries, especially India, to do more, to come in lower than budget, to do their unfair share.”

And, Mr. Tongia said, “the good news” is that India has decided that it is in its interest to do its “unfair share.”"

Posted on 2017-06-03T04:39:24+0000

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Pinboard Blog

If you’re a Delicious user, you will have to find another place to save your bookmarks. The site will stay online. but on June 15, I will put Delicious into read-only mode. You won't be able to save new bookmarks after that date, or use the API.

Click to view the original at blog.pinboard.in

Hasnain says:

Pinboard acquires del.icio.us for $35k. How the mighty have fallen (Yahoo bought it for $15-30M)

"Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard to keep Delicious down. I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web."

Posted on 2017-06-02T05:24:06+0000

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Google Will Help Publishers Prepare for a Chrome Ad Blocker Coming Next Year

Google has told publishers it will give them at least six months to prepare for a new ad-blocking tool the company is planning to introduce in its Chrome web browser next year, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

Click to view the original at wsj.com

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Crafting Interpreters

This book contains everything you need to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You’ll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will g...

Click to view the original at craftinginterpreters.com

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Hasnain says:

"Their research leads to two conclusions. First, tax evasion is extremely concentrated (see chart). The average Scandinavian household paid around 3% too little in taxes in 2006; the richest 1% of households, with net assets of at least $2m, underpaid by around 10%. The truly rich, though, behave truly differently. The top 0.01% of households, with net assets of over $40m, short-changed the taxman by a whopping 30%."

Posted on 2017-06-02T02:48:05+0000

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Hasnain says:

Haven't seen the show, but the reasons for cancelling it make no sense.

"News of the decision also comes a day after Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings told CNBC at the Code Conference that he thinks the content platform hasn't canceled enough shows. "Our hit ratio is way too high right now," he said. "I'm always pushing the content team; we have to take more risk, you have to try more crazy things, because we should have a higher cancel rate overall.""

Posted on 2017-06-02T01:45:29+0000

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Netflix is stepping back from the fight for net neutrality

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings isn’t going to fight the rollback of the rules governing an open internet and believes change is coming no matter what.

Click to view the original at cnet.com

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Career Monogamy: The Awkward Tech Sin of Longevity – Nemhouse

The Slack message was genuine and brief, “congrats on 20 years!” My name had apparently been listed on a slide during the quarterly all…

Click to view the original at nemhouse.com

Hasnain says:

A great read on tech, career growth and companies in general.

"That experience opened my eyes to how the sausage gets made. All my naive conceptions of how executives always knew what to do were shattered. What I saw were incredibly smart people spending most of their time trying to do what they believed was right for the company, and the rest of their time engaged in political jousting with other executives who were fighting for investment and visibility."

Posted on 2017-06-01T06:51:11+0000

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Ohio Sues 5 Major Drug Companies For 'Fueling Opioid Epidemic'

The state's attorney general filed the lawsuit Wednesday, alleging fraudulent marketing. "They knew they were wrong," Mike DeWine says, "but they did it anyway — and they continue to do it."

Click to view the original at npr.org

Hasnain says:

"As All Things Considered notes, the state of Ohio estimates some 200,000 people within its borders are addicted to opioids — a number roughly the same as Akron's entire population"

Posted on 2017-06-01T06:34:52+0000

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An Amazon engineer is letting thousands of Twitch users play the stock market with $50,000 of his own money

Meet StockStream, an experiment in letting total internet strangers bet on $50,000 of this Amazon's engineer's money.

Click to view the original at businessinsider.com