blatherard

Regarding the need to do a GET when not connected: How would a native app solve this problem any better? Presumably, there's live data that sometimes needs to be fetched. If you're not connected you're not going to get that data whether you're in a browser or an app.

If you're interested in technology and/or entrepreneurship, go to one of the highly-rated schools you named. Stanford, CMU, MIT are all great choices if you're up to the rigor and competition. At the very least, it will get you out of your current backwater (I know the area, I grew up in Western PA and my mother lived in Buffalo for about a decade) and you'll make friends and connections that will last you for a long time.

You might be wrong about what precisely you want to do with your career, too. Maybe Javascript hacking is the most interesting thing you can do where you are, but will pale in comparison with the kinds of stuff you could do at a big research university.

The truth of the matter is if you go to a top tier school and major in cs or engineering, you will be fine money-wise. It's not engineers who are suffering after college. Grit your teeth and take out some loans, however scary that seems now.

Also, if you want to do startups there's a lot more access to capital when you go to the Stanford/MIT/CMUs of the world.

If you hate college after a year or two, then you can alway drop out and work. It's much harder to do it the other way around because the whole admissions system is built around receiving kids straight out of high school.

According to the update at the end of this ars technica article (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/window...) which indicates Microsoft involvement:

"Microsoft has given us a statement: Yesterday FTDI removed two driver versions from Windows Update. Our engineering team is engaging with FTDI to prevent these problems with their future driver updates via Windows Update."

Having lived through the transition from broadcast-only tv to widespread cable tv, that's not at all how it was sold. Cable was sold on the merits of primarily: better reception (no more antenna!) and many more available channels. The dollars that you spent on "cable" were for those features, primarily. The channels themselves were "free" and carried the advertising they always had. It was kind of like buying internet access, in that most people don't expect that all content accessed via the internet will be ad-free.

The unbundled CBS isn't really akin to paying for cable. You're already paying for your internet access yourself. If anything, CBS online will be like a "premium channel" in cable tv terms. Which, historically, have been generally ad-free. I assume the reason for that is the market figured out that people don't like to both pay for some particular channel and see ads.

There's plenty of details left out but it sounded like Mrs. B was paying the bills, but wasn't happy about it. There was a hint that Mrs. B was "sick" so perhaps she was under doctor's orders to remove the mold/animal feces/garbage/vermin/etc that may be present in her home. Alternatively, sometimes people are ordered by home inspectors to clear out their homes enough to bring them up to code or face condemnation.

The actual process is, by and large, taking everything to the dump. There do exist some hoarders who keep clean homes and for whom an estate sale could make sense, but many/most have homes that are pretty much garbage pits.

Source: a close relative of mine was a hoarder, and I've watched way too many hoarding shows.

Looks to me like nautil.us is aiming at a general readership that is interested in science. Many articles like this gloss over the numbers in favor of narrative and anecdotes, because that's what's interesting to general readership. The provides plenty of opportunity to delve deeper by seeking out the source material, as you have done.

There's many people, myself included who you could send the original paper and I'd give it a glance and probably leave it. Not because I'm stupid or uneducated, but because I don't even know if its a paper that says something new or relevant to the field or has something to offer me as a person. An article like this makes it much more likely that people will engage the research by giving me some initial sense.

It is an important part of US law. In conspiracy cases, individuals may be prosecuted in any district in which an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy occurs, by any of the conspirators. In this case, some of his alleged co-conspirators trafficked drugs in Kansas.

In weev's case, the court rejected New Jersey as venue because no overt act in commission of the crime occurred in New Jersey, since neither weev nor the AT&T servers were in the state. The prosecutors argued that NJ was proper since many of the victims (AT&T customers) were in New Jersey, an argument the court didn't buy.

It is an important principle, but doesn't seem to apply in this case:

* Distribution of cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana are explicitly forbidden by federal law, dating back at least to the mid-1900s.

* Conspiring to violate federal law has been explicitly illegal since 1867. [1]

The prosecution showed that Mr. Avaya knowingly participated in a conspiracy to violate laws related to drug trafficking. He wasn't prosecuted just for making "traps" in cars, but rather for knowingly making "traps" in cars for the specific purpose of transporting illegal drugs.

[1] http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41223.pdf

I posted this elsewhere in the comments already, but it seems relevant to the "obviousness" claim.

From the decision of Anaya's 2013 appeal [http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-10th-circuit/1642115.html], here's a synopsis of the evidence that swayed the jury to believe he knew what he was doing. Its not just the 800K.

3. Sufficient Evidence of Knowledge

At trial, the Government presented evidence that Mr. Anaya

• built multiple hidden compartments in vehicles for the DTO that were insulated to mask the smell of drugs;

• witnessed $800,000 in one of his compartments in a DTO vehicle;

• used “kilos” as a unit of measurement for building compartments;

• communicated by phone with the DTO through a secret code to discuss compartment sizes; and

• warned Mr. Crow not to discuss the compartments or how they worked with anyone to avoid police detection.

I agree that the sentence is way too harsh. He's clearly being used as a warning to the rest of the hidden compartment makers. Also, this guy must have had particularly awful representation.

I guess I just don't think that disagreement with the sentence requires disagreement with the findings of fact or with his conviction.

The main reason I'm responding to a lot of comments is not to defend the drug war, but rather to combat an incorrect "slippery slope" argument that regularly comes up in HN discussions like this. Something like, "Person X was convicted of crime Y because of facts A, B, C, D, E and F." and then there's a number of comments that boil down to "They're saying that B is illegal! What's next?!?! I do B all the time! The government is out of control!"

Yes, there are laws against activities that are prohibited. These include laws against the distribution of heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana. The government established his knowing conspiracy to distribute these substances, and he was convicted! The system seems to have worked here.

Certainly, he wouldn't be spending 24 years in jail if he had played ball with the DEA. Instead, he decided that his criminal co-conspirators were dangerous enough that he shouldn't play ball and instead risk jail time.

ADDED: To elaborate, conspiring to commit a crime is itself a crime, and has been for a long time in the U.S. There's no need to worry about ex-post facto laws, as the parent claims. You can participate in the commission of a crime doing any number of normally legal activities, such as driving (e.g. driving a getaway car). Your intent to commit a crime is what matters. The prosecution established that Mr. Anaya knowingly assisted the drug smuggling operation in concealing its shipments, hence the conspiracy conviction.

In addition, the physical location of Mr. Anaya isn't relevant to his prosecution in Kansas. He was prosecuted in Kansas because the criminal conspiracy involved transporting drugs into the state, using his modded cars.

From the decision of Anaya's 2013 appeal [http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-10th-circuit/1642115.html], here's a synopsis of the evidence that swayed the jury to believe he knew what he was doing. Its not just the 800K.

3. Sufficient Evidence of Knowledge

At trial, the Government presented evidence that Mr. Anaya

• built multiple hidden compartments in vehicles for the DTO that were insulated to mask the smell of drugs;

• witnessed $800,000 in one of his compartments in a DTO vehicle;

• used “kilos” as a unit of measurement for building compartments;

• communicated by phone with the DTO through a secret code to discuss compartment sizes; and

• warned Mr. Crow not to discuss the compartments or how they worked with anyone to avoid police detection.

> He was prosecuted in a state he'd never set foot in

He was prosecuted for criminal conspiracy in an interstate crime. One end of that crime was Kansas. His physical location when he engaged in the conspiracy is immaterial.

> for doing something that wasn't against the law

criminal conspiracy is against the law. You can take almost any "legal" activity and make the doing of it an element of a crime. For example, saying "Yes" is not explicitly illegal. However, saying "yes" in answer to the question "Would you kill this guy for ten thousand dollars?" would be an element of the crime.

> as contracted by people whose plans he did not know

Except for the fact that he was selling them secret compartments, witnessed one stuffed full of almost a million dollars in cash, and continued doing business with them. Plus, "avoiding talk of illegality" indicates that he knew what service he was really providing.

> and he was convicted, and sentenced to twice the term of the actual lawbreakers

He engaged in a criminal conspiracy, so he was also an actual lawbreaker. His sentence was very harsh though, agreed, but he was knowingly engaging in a commercial enterprise that assisted criminals for a number of years.

> That's not how the rule of law works.

Yeah, actually it is. A judge and jury in this case looked at the overall pattern of facts and correctly determined that this guy was aiding people in breaking the law. That's how the law works.

Its unfortunate that a guy who clearly had developed some interesting skills and otherwise had a kind of messed-up life ended up where he got. But this is not the fault of the criminal justice system, or prosecutors gone wild. This is a guy who made some really stupid choices and got caught.

These are not equivalent scenarios. They are all one-shot deals and, significantly, there isn't an obvious connection between the sale and the law-breaking. They could probably be altered to match a little more. Here's my take on the third:

You sell special hunting rifles that are designed to kill elephants. Sometimes people need them for self defense, you say when people ask. You insist that purchasers not mention that they will use them to hunt protected species, especially elephants. One of your clients asks you to come out to the field to repair his gun. While there, you see a stack of elephant tusks in the back of his truck. You tell him to get them out of there. Then you sell him and his friends more guns over the next year. They are caught and convicted of poaching, and then you are too.

Alfred Anaya is yet another example of magical thinking about how the law works. Just avoiding certain words doesn't prevent rational people (in this case, a judge) from concluding that he did, in fact, know what he was doing when he built hidden compartments for drug dealers.

This isn't a guy who built one thing for the wrong person, but many over the course of multiple years. It blew up in his face, but that is the risk of working with very dangerous people at the edge of the law.

Each week I get an email reminder with this quote in it and the subject "Things Are Hard":

"When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard."

which is part of a pg comment on an HN thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512096

Google doesn't have moderators posting messages like "uh-oh your illegal content is being taken down. Here's a list of other places to post it." Meanwhile, Reddit has precisely that. Warning: link to NSFW board, though this post isn't itself NSFW.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheFappening/comments/2fa2a1/meta_ef...

In which the mods write: "On another note: please use other hosting sites besides imgur.com. We have a large list of whitelisted domains listed here that you should be uploading to besides imgur. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket."

This reminds me of more than one job interview I've had. One included a puzzler that was "fix this horribly convoluted javascript code by adding exactly four characters." I'd consider myself a pretty good bug finder-and-fixer. As in, I've read multiple books on debugging methods and even given some talks on effective debugging. Nevertheless, these kinds of stumpers make me freeze up.

I dunno exactly what puzzles like these demonstrate. That you spend a lot of time working in poorly written code?

John Lewis, the subject of the article, is an employee-owned company [1] that operates multiple business lines. I don't know the internal dealings of the company, but I'd attribute their slow upgrade path more to the costs and difficulties associated with a large-scale rollout rather than managerial indifference. I also wouldn't delight at the cost of the upgrade, which will directly affect the profitability of the company and therefore reduce the profit-sharing that all employee-partners participate in.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership#Organisa...

Mine too! https://mvexel.github.io/thenandnow/#13/40.7858/-73.9732

Should probably add (2007) to the title.

Four months later the previous record holder, Harry Hong, took back the title with a 4,988-line run (about 5x Lori's run), which remains the record to this day.

For example, into a crowded market plaza? Into a playground?

In the specific example of a child at a tunnel entrance, you've got a good point. However, I think there are plenty of scenarios which you can make up that function similarly without providing a culpable victim.

For example, the self-driving car you're in is driving by an elementary school at the end of the day, so there are a number of children on the sidewalk. Suddenly, a truck appears coming at your car going in the wrong direction. Should your car take an evasive maneuver onto the sidewalk, with a high likelihood of striking a child?

Because they are children and children do stupid things.

One problem is that they look a lot like silver dragees, little silver sugar balls sometimes used to decorate baked goods. See e.g. http://www.fancyflours.com/category/silver-dragees for what they look like.

They refer to themselves as "Employment Lawyers." Don't know where you are, but googling "Employment Lawyer NYC" gives me back a gajillion results. If you're in NYC, I can give you a recommendation (my email address is in my profile)

People will often use cabs to go somewhere when they have something to carry, even if its a short walk. Also, if the weather is bad.

A lot depends on your situation:

- Do you live in an area with many opportunities?

- Are you willing to relocate?

- How well-regarded is your school / department?

- How have you applied to the jobs you've applied to?

- What kind of work are you particularly interested in and prepared for?

- Does your school provide any placement help?

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7969112

The means of blocking is the car that they have sitting in the spot, which presumably they won't move until the payee shows up. Its also not paying for prior knowledge but payment for vacating, as the Monkey Parking website clearly states: "Get notified about drivers willing to pay you for leaving your parking spot"

A few shy/introverted friends of mine like to go to board game playing events. One nice thing about these kinds of events is that there's a lot of structured interaction through the games, and there's an obvious thing to talk about. In my experience, this takes a lot of conversational pressure off and you can be yourself a bit more. And go easy on yourself! Try to enjoy the company of other people without pressuring yourself to "make friends", whatever that means exactly.

Looking on meetup, here's a couple over your way (I'm in NYC, so I can't vouch for these)

http://www.meetup.com/silicon-valley-tabletop-games/

http://www.meetup.com/Peninsula-Board-Games-and-Drinks-20s-a...