gwillen

It would be good if -- in addition to emailing customers BEFORE you archive their backups -- you specify in the email what counts as 'connected'. I already responded to this HN post by digging an ancient machine out of the closet and booting it, so that it can connect to CrashPlan, make a null backup, and thus rescue my old backups of it from impending deletion. If merely performing a single-file restore (or merely checking some box on the website) was enough to indicate that the backup is still 'live', that would be nice to know.

As other people have said above, "What even is X?" is a sort of odd phrasing being used for emphasis, similarly to other odd dubiously-grammatical constructions that the Internet likes.

A more typical usage of "even" in a similar role would be the sentence "What are you even doing?" which is just an intensified version of "What are you doing?". Even this reads to me as colloquial, but it doesn't sound especially marked and I can imagine hearing it on the street. "What even is X?" seems like a further evolution of it.

You can bypass essentially all paywalls using DNS tunnelling. The connection you get has _terrible_ bandwidth and latency characteristics, which is why nobody does it.

Google does follow every link, and those people do notice, because their forums get deleted. Very few people do it this wrong for very long.

(Or they get fed up and patch the problem without understanding it, by using robots.txt to block all crawlers from their site.)

Can you explain, or point me to an explanation of, _in detail_, exactly what GTalk broke in terms of federation?

I find that in practice I can _sometimes_ communicate with _some_ users from _some_ clients, but it seems like it's flaky and there's not a clear pattern to it. Do you have any deeper insight?

You'll probably get a chuckle out of the first five-or-so paragraphs of:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

The referenced paper can be found here: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm

I'm curious why this article seems to have gotten flag-bombed off the front page:

http://hnrankings.info/9266769/

Is there something particularly un-newsworthy about this change?

> I think SF has already ceased to be an attractive place to live.

Or as Yogi Berra allegedly once said: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

You can also get around it, at least in Chrome, by going to the console and entering:

  $('div#storytextp.storytextp').css('-webkit-user-select', 'inherit');

If that doesn't work, I would also try:

  $('div.nocopy').removeClass('nocopy');

I have no idea what the 'nocopy' class actually does (in Chrome it seems to do nothing), but it seems like something to try.

I have a theory: Doctors don't feel that someone with ALS can have an acceptable quality of life, and so do not provide the strongest possible lifesaving care.

Since Hawking is a celebrity, he gets a significantly higher level of care than would otherwise be available.

(Note for clarity that I am not, in general, in favor of forcing live-prolonging care on people who do not want it due to quality of life issues. But doctors have the same prejudices as everyone else, and people who look physically different or disabled tend to be silently judged as having mental problems, even when that's not remotely true.)

Can you give more details about the broken integration? I'd be interested to see the error message / the code in question.

Great, so now we don't even make email clients anymore; now we make Gmail clients. The open Internet sure is alive and well in the age of Google.

I was assuming 'cheating'.

As usual for wild-eyed headlines like this, it's not quite what it sounds like. This is condensed-matter physics: These aren't "particles" in the usual sense, and they don't exist by themselves in free space. They are more like "particle analogs", which exist as excitations of some underlying matter.

These are "particles" in the same way that we talk about "holes" in semiconductors like they're particles. I.e. "sort of, and for all practical purposes within the relevant domain, but not exactly."

I would be interested to know (1) what the legal and regulatory implications of such a deal would be, and (2) what the implications would be with respect to the deals the founder would have signed with regard to the equity they were holding.

My suspicion is this couldn't be done without causing problems in one or both domains, but I don't base that on anything solid.

General anesthesia really does knock you out, so you were very probably out like a light for the removal of your wisdom teeth. But when people talk about a lighter kind of anesthesia called "twilight sedation" or "conscious sedation", they actually do mean "we'll make you a little woozy, but keep you awake -- and also inhibit memory formation so you'll feel like you slept through it." The lack of disclosure to patients of exactly what this means -- "yes, you'll be awake, but you won't remember" -- gives me bad feelings about medical ethics.

I know (at levels varying from 'friend' to 'acquaintance', so the field is more like 100-200 than your 25; but these are all people I have at least conversed with multiple times) two trans men and at least seven trans women (off the top of my head.) These are all people who are, at a minimum, currently taking prescribed hormones corresponding to their self-identified gender.

But I understand that there may be a self-selection effect where a lot of trans women end up in technical fields, so my sample may well be biased.

What those programs are likely actually doing is not deliberately resetting the attributes, but saving a file by (1) writing to a new file, and (2) moving the new file over the old file (thus destroying anything about the old file that they aren't aware of in the process.)

Not sure if this helps figure out a way around it.

Because if you don't want them to take a mile, you'd better watch out when they start taking an inch.

I feel like people vote only partly on whether they think something is good or bad; they also (or maybe mostly) vote based on whether they think something has a higher or lower score than they think it deserves. So as a post or comment's score rises, people will stop upvoting when they feel it's got enough.

sanderjd: Your comment (sibling of this one) appears to have been moderated. I suspect it's because of your use of is.gd.

This story is from 2011, and the title should be changed to reflect that; it's missing VAST changes that have happened since then.

As a followup, someone finally did find a full-blown 'execute whatever you like' exploit for the patched version of bash.

http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2014/10/bash-bug-how-we-finally-...

You are being downvoted because the 5-year survival rate of pancreatic cancer is 5%. In all probability Jobs was going to die no matter what he did.

Don't think "how can an attacker get me by prepending '>' or '<' to a commandline?" (You did realize that '<' is also possible, right? Did you check what else is possible?)

Think "the buggy bash parser is still exposed to an attacker, and nobody really knows what it can be made to do."

The last I heard about this 'hack' was a fast food employee claiming that it's stupid, because (1) the fries turn over so fast that they're basically just as fresh anyway, (2) you're stalling the line and creating headaches for everyone, and (3) the salt doesn't stick properly if you apply it yourself after the fries have cooled, so your fries will taste bad.

I don't think Burning Man will ever have a true September. There's no amount of money that can make it perfectly safe and comfortable, and it takes rather a large amount to make it even modestly so, at least by the standards of the wealthy.

Driving in is slow and boring. Flying in is fairly dangerous. Even if the event itself can be made perfectly comfortable with enough money -- and it really can't -- at least the journey will always suck a little, one way or another.

Eh, I think that's a little premature. Plus I don't think you actually tried applying it; it doesn't look like he scores that high.

The worst thing I think I can say about this guy with my undergrad-level physics knowledge is that he's a self-promoter, to a degree that's kind of distasteful in pure science. But the idea is at least cute.

I don't immediately get how it's proposed that the two universes couple, though -- from the reference to dark energy and repulsion, I figured that it was a sort of gravitational repulsion, but then there are references to eliminating the need for dark matter, which provides a missing _attractive_ force. So I'd like to know a bit more.

In the United States, Professor is a correct formal title for a university professor with a PhD.

To be clear: I think it's _great_ that we went out of our way to get those doctors back to the US for treatment. If it would be resource-prohibitive to help everyone, I think it's important to help the helpers first, and we owe that to them.

But the issue with experimental drugs is not one of resource constraint. We _could_ give them to anybody who asks. It's not that we gave them to the doctors because they are more deserving, but rather because they are insiders to the system and thus can get strings pulled and rules bent.