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My understanding based on reading the Geek Feminism Wiki [1] is that the author misrepresented trigger warnings as a signal that something might be offensive when rather they are actually meant to give people a warning that content may re-open deep psychological wounds (such as a PTSD flashback from abuse, urges to self-harm, etc).

[1] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning

If the comment quality has eroded, is that because the standards are too lax (in which adding a new rule will theoretically fix it), or is it because of an Eternal September-type issue? If it's an Eternal September issue, then you have an enforcement problem: the upvote/downvote system is democratic, so the community would be unable to police itself against the new rule. The obvious solution would be to have people "more equal" than others, but then there's a possibility of groupthink forming and/or resentment against perceived "censorship." These are classic problems of Internet forum governance.

With all due respect to pg, one data point against the idea that it's just the standards being too lax is that this article was posted on Hacker News in the first place. The Hacker News guidelines state that most stories about politics are off-topic unless they are evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. I've never read tech news sites where the H1-B debate wasn't going on (I've been reading since 2001 or so), and based on the mountains of H1-B rhetoric I've read online, the arguments raised in the article are not new.

Even worse, "Madam Secretary" is now spreading torture apologist rhetoric by framing the character that worked for the CIA and approved torture as a successful but war-worn, down-to-earth realist that acknowledges that "life is more complicated than you think," while the character that vehemently opposed torture is framed as an overly-idealistic young adult that dropped out of college in protest and has to work menial jobs in retail to "learn how the world works."

Themartorana never said that the left was good and the right was evil, and never said anything about George Soros. Even worse, you are engaging in a tu quoque fallacy to defend this perceived partisanship.

The Koch brothers spent $31 million in 2012 to lobby for their coal power interests [1], which is linked to higher rates of lung cancer for miners, people who live near mines [2], and people who live near coal power plants [3]. I consider their cancer research donations restitution.

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/07/oil-lobby-coal-...

[2]: http://www.scopemed.org/?mno=20068

[3]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19187950

In your blog post, you argue that since the two terms result in (mostly) the same output/outcome, the two terms are synonymous. However, according to FSF's open-source/free-software overlap diagram [1], tivoized programs are open source but nonfree, meaning that there is a difference between the outcome of the two terms.

More importantly, that difference is actually a big reflection of the underlying philosophy between the two terms. Free software is about maintaining the Four Freedoms (making tivoization a damaging loophole in the GPL), while open source is about arguing that the bazaar model is superior technically in order to sell it to business (and therefore tivoization is actually a plus to them). I believe this difference in intent should be noteworthy to the IRS in terms of evaluating whether a company is creating a nonprofit for tax-free software development as a form of corporate welfare.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-open-overlap.html

The IRS BOLO lists [1] are scanned bitmap PDFs, which make them extremely hard to search. Does anyone know if they also BOLOed Free Software, or was it just Open Source?

The reason I ask is that the term "open source" was designed to be more palatable to businesses. In Revolution OS, Eric S. Raymond said in regard to saying open source over free software: "If you walk in to an executive's office and say 'Free Software', OK, If you're lucky, the response you'll get is something like, 'hmm, hmm, Free Software, must be cheap, shoddy, worthless.' If you're not lucky, it has associations with the Free Software Foundation's wholesale attack on intellectual property rights, which regardless of what you think about the ethics of that, it's lousy marketing, it's not something that businesses want to hear" [2].

I don't know how savvy the IRS was about the nuances between open source and free software (probably not very), but if they were, they might be making a somewhat-reasonable distinction that "open source" was designed specifically to please the business sector rather than free software's focus on ethics and freedom.

[1]: http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/press-release/new-ir... [2]: http://www.cswap.com/2001/Revolution_OS/cap/en/25fps/a/00_54

I believe the Founding Fathers were aware of this loophole, since Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it" [1]. Having a just government requires constant vigilance.

[1]: http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Benjamin.Franklin.Q...

As ridiculous as that pitch might sound, it makes the implied security-money tradeoff directly visible to management and causes them to make a formal decision.

I know it's taboo to bring up the Holocaust in Internet discussions, but this coaster and the verbiage that the Wikipedia article uses ("unloading of corpses" in particular) creeps me out at a level similar to the industrial processes the Nazis invented to perform mass murder. The coaster would probably be horrifying to watch, too -- people would scream for the first drop and the first few inversions, and then you would hear an eerie silence.

The impression I got from "don't roll your own crypto" (especially after the Debian key bug thing) was that crypto code was so nuanced and complicated that even if you thought something was a bug, you were likely to be horribly wrong for really complex reasons outside the realm of understanding of anyone who wasn't an expert, and everyone would laugh at you for even bringing it up.

After an entire webpage was created to ridicule the Debian developers for how stupid they were when they changed something in OpenSSL's code in their distro's version (complete with references to Dilbert strips about faulty random number generators), I just assumed that I shouldn't even bother trying to look at OpenSSL's code (and especially not try to send patches or ask questions on their mailing list) unless I was willing to make a lifestyle out of it, lest I get ridiculed in the same way (but probably not at Debian's magnitude). I wasn't willing to make a lifestyle out of it.

I got the same vibe from the chorus of "never roll your own crypto" rhetoric I heard on the Internet -- that I shouldn't even bother looking into OpenSSL's code unless I went to the Shaolin Temple of Crypto and trained under Master Schneier for 10 years. Just because the intent of the message was one thing doesn't mean that it won't be interpreted in a completely different way by the intended audience.

What are the "unmistakable signs of supreme genius?"

I assume you mean free cloud services. If you're a paying customer with a contract, it's harder to pull that stunt.

Microsoft apparently made a deal with DEC after some Digital employees notified their senior management of how similar NT and VMS was. Microsoft paid them 65-100 million dollars (src: http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re... ).

As Steve Yegge says in "Done and Gets Things Smart," Cutler and Carmack are the types of engineers that companies file lawsuits over when they are hired away. This is because they generate a lot of extremely visible value -- most programmers are not perceived by legal departments to be worth suing over like that.

I think that falls in a "it's not illegal if you don't get caught" scenario -- that is, unless you make an incomplete Faraday cage, the FCC would have no real means to catch you doing that. Also, since you wouldn't be jamming anyone else's signals, nobody would report you.

You'll find out real quick if you screwed up your Faraday cage design, though.

I agree that he's probably overestimating Atari's impact on an entire generation's psyche, but I like that a) he's indirectly reminding artists to stay conscious of the emotions their artwork provokes in people and b) that's he humble and introspective enough to accept and admit the possible negative by-products of his work.

At the end of every episode in "Once Upon Atari," Rob Fulop (author or co-author of Demon Attack, Night Driver, Space Invaders, and Missile Command for the 2600) talks about how many children in the 80s played thousands of hours of Atari 2600 games and the effect that it had in their psychological development. Specifically, he believed it produced a nihilistic generation due to the overarching message that "you always lose" in the end. He contrasts it to the early television he watched as a child where the overarching message was "it will all work out" in the end. He says that he thinks about this a lot, and that him and everyone at Atari is responsible for that.

The paper ( http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/12/1059 ) is a meta-analysis of papers addressing this correlation. In the section "Limitations of the evidence base," the author notes the deficiency you pointed out in most papers (only two had a control group), among other deficiencies. The conclusion is a rallying cry for larger and more rigorous studies on the matter since the current (ragtag) evidence shows a noticeable correlation.

Parts 2, 3, and 4 explain the practical ramifications of his sliding-window design (which differs from indirect addressing) much more thoroughly. In Part 3, he actually mentions that HackADay accidentally credited him with PC-relative jump due to a similar misunderstanding.

Other (7 hours old) HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7626072

I've been thinking recently about Heartbleed, and I was wondering if by writing C code to implement various network and cryptographic protocols, we're acting as human compilers for something that might be better represented in a more abstract format. I know there's some research on this already (the Austin Protocol Compiler), but does anyone here know of any other serious efforts to take the human out of the equation in terms of implementing protocols in C?

I'd recommend that anyone interested in startups download a capitalization table (Google "cap table download" without the quotes for a variety of choices), and just play with different scenarios. Plug in rounds from companies on Crunchbase (not just super-successful ones) and see what kind of money the founders are slated to get. See what happens if you don't meet expectations and go through a down round. It's better to see these possibilities before you're financially and emotionally invested in a company going through one of them.

If you still believe your startup idea is a slam-dunk after seeing how horrible things can get if there's any hiccup in the process, then you're ready to take an investor's time to give a proposal.

He declined having a picture taken for public display when asked and gave a reason implying that he wanted to stay anonymous. Even if there's no general social expectation, I would argue that there was a specific expectation with this transaction.

I didn't know that -- that's very interesting! Thank you for showing me that.

I learned about Kalman filters in a mobile robotics course that made explicit Gaussian assumptions early on for the primary topic (SqrtSAM), and they brought up Kalman filters in its own lecture as kind of a "this is how they used to do SLAM" lecture. Considering the large amount of overlap in the methods, such as the use of linear covariance projections, I guess I made the assumption that Kalman filters had the same Gaussian assumption.

That may be a part of it. The problem was only described in vague terms, so there's probably a reason why a Kalman filter makes sense, but as it was described in the interview it seemed more like a regression problem to me.

A Kalman filter assumes that measurement noise follows a Gaussian distribution, and it continuously updates its estimate of the covariance based on previous observations. Therefore, if you gave it a bunch of very similar observations (like differing by 0.1) for a long time, the covariance would get very narrow. Once the activity spikes appeared, they would not have much influence on the state estimate because the probability distribution would imply they were extremely unlikely events. This would look very similar to a low-pass filter.

Although the Kalman filter retains some aggregate data about past states in its iterated covariance estimate, it is still primarily a recurrence relation where the future state depends on the immediate present, much like a discretized low-pass filter. This is part of why I'm intrigued by the parent article's use of a Kalman filter for this application.

Typically, a Kalman filter is only as accurate as your mathematical model of the underlying phenomena (for example, your flight dynamics on an airplane), and the filter is mainly useful to mitigate the noise from your real-world sensor observations. Is there more public information available about the mathematical model being used within their state transition matrix? Depending on that information, this could be really clever or a glorified low-pass filter.

It also shows what happens in an environment without insurance. If Mt.Gox was insured, this catastrophe would have been avoided for the customer by either the insurance company paying out or by Mt.Gox never getting hacked due to the security controls that the insurance company would have demanded.

This, of course, raises the questions of "who insures the Bitcoin insurance company" and "how do the insurance companies protect their Bitcoin now that they are a target?"

Similar to "bath salts," that legal trickery may work for a while, but the law will eventually catch up if a government is motivated to stop something.

Another thing to consider is that GrabCut is patent-encumbered for commercial use -- it relies on the mechanism described in Zabih, Boykov, and Veksler's "Fast Approximate Energy Minimization via Graph Cuts," which is patented in the US since 2004 (Patent No. 6,744,923).