mgalka

Awesome project! Nice work.

Agree w the programming analogy. It's easy to get caught up spending lots of time on design detail, only to trash the whole feature later on. Seems harder w writing for some reason. But worth trying. Thanks for the thought.

Really good suggestions. Thanks!

Hilarious. Since when does the FBI announce when it finds a new vulnerability to exploit?

It's up against the biggest companies in the world, the US public, and the international community. And now it's backing down with its tail btw its legs, and telling a silly story to save face.

I have problems with writer's block, but my problem seems quite different from what's described here.

Usually, I'm fine with the creative aspects -- I know what ideas I want to communicate. What troubles me is finding the words to say it. And the more time I spend thinking about it, the more difficult it becomes. Sometimes, I can spend an hour working at a paragraph, and still can't get comfortable with the wording.

Does anyone else have this problem?

I think the email goes further than poorly worded. It says pretty clearly that access will be cut off, gives no suggestion that there could be a negotiation.

Kudos for caring enough to come here and respond directly. But man, Twitter just seems to have no consideration at all for the people and businesses who build on the platform.

Every 6 months you guys make a new change that kills a bunch of websites who were silly enough to rely on your APIs. Then you give an explanation like the one above: something about needing to grow the platform, and pushing the responsibility for the problem back on the businesses.

When you killed the tweet count a few months ago, the story was exactly the same - something about depreciating it in order to build a more dependable platform, and people shouldn't have relied on it in the first place. It's clear you guys just wanted to take control of your data.

As a social network, I love Twitter. But I would never waste any time building on your platform. At every step you leave a trail of dead businesses in your wake.

Sounds like you are speaking specifically about the sitemap. Agree that they serve a good purpose, though you don't need robots.txt to have a sitemap.

Agree. It is the government's role to protect its citizens. Promoting an addictive and risky behavior for profit goes completely against that.

Surprised this got published. This theorem is literally day-1 number theory. And unless I'm missing something, this paper is just rephrasing it in a slightly different way.

http://wstein.org/ent/ent.pdf

Also seems like a pretty baseless claim to say that this proof has never been done before.

You should reread the comment. It doesn't say everyone needs to use Snapchat, just don't insist it's stupid merely because you don't understand it.

Cool data source. Thanks for sharing. In case anyone is curious about the early history of the income tax, or why it is so spotty prior to 1913:

The income tax was first imposed in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War. Prior to that, the government got most of its income from excise taxes and tariffs.

In 1895, the Supreme Court declared the income tax unconstitutional, since it was not apportioned fairly between states, which is why the government added the 16th amendment in 1913, which gave it the power to impose an unapportioned income tax.

Doesn't make sense to compare this to Ferguson.

Ferguson was not a standoff. It was a protest. And it was getting violent, which is why the National Guard was needed.

Oregon was originally a protest, but it is now an armed standoff. And if history is any guide, aggressive government action is the surest way to cause it to become violent.

Was referring to the website, not the submission.

I am old enough to have a yahoo.com email, which I suppose proves your point.

Good reference. My only gripe is calling it an "exhaustive" list.

Considering they just arrested someone rumored to be Satoshi, I thought this was going to be about why he was arrested.

Good post though, well explained.

This post was shared nearly half a million times in the U.K., but the story got hardly a mention in the U.S.

By my read, it is an exaggeration to say we had any involvement in "fuelling" ISIS. But it does show that when the government was calling it a JV team, they actually had pretty good intel that ISIS would be a problem.

This is the document referenced in the article: http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-...

Same here. It's actually a really good post!

Regarding his comment about hearing from amateurs who think they've solved the world, that is something I've heard from a lot of physics professors, that they get a lot of emails with crazy stuff like this: http://i.imgur.com/QTt6ZTq.gif

Why does that happen in physics and not chemistry, bio, econ, comsci or any other subject?

What I want to know is, how has Yahoo lasted so long?

Google has beaten them at search, maps, email, and news. And their homepages is still confusing web 1.0 jumbled mess.

What do people still use Yahoo for anyway?

Gave the post an upvote because it is interesting from a theoretical perspective, but I have a hard time imagining a real life scenario where averaging a 99 percentile will lead you to the wrong conclusion.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but whenever I'm looking at the tail of a distribution, it's usually just to understand the order of magnitude, not to reach a precise number.

The website is currently down. Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ekqXbg2...

Cool website, at least for the ones I know enough to understand.

I'm a fellow New Yorker, and have been familiar with Placemeter for a while. Really like the concept, seems like it could grow in a ton of different directions.

Maybe it's there on the site and I just missed it, but what is the one-liner overview of how the sensor works? Does it detect mobile devices?

Because most people have never experienced it, I don't think they realize how much of our legal system is at the discretion of judges and their own personal views / mood.

The chart in this post shows the relationship between court outcomes and time since the judge last ate (tho it is from Israel). http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...

Scary.

Won't disagree with you about Dawkins. But he has a point. Looking back at it, I feel sort of ashamed for jumping on the bandwagon so quickly.

Really, other than possibly connecting a few wires, the kid didn't build a clock. He took a clock, and put it in a bomb-looking suitcase.

It seems unlikely a kid would intentionally try to get in trouble for carrying a bomb. But it seems even more unlikely that he would put a clock in a bomb-looking suitcase and bring it to school as a science project.

Didn't say anything about it being narcissistic. I only meant to say that people use Instagram to see photos, which is something that appeals to everyone, myself included.

People use Twitter, on the other hand, to convey ideas, often highly academic or controversial -- doesn't have the same mass appeal.

One other guy who deserves some credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowski

The first one to reduce them to a single equation, in relativistic form.

At one time I was looking into starting a secure messaging business myself. Had I done so and then found myself in this situation, I would probably shut the business down. Ethically, that would probably be the wrong thing to do, since it's implicitly a vote in favor of NSA spying, which I am against. But the thought that I might be facilitating mass murder would be too much. Don't think I coukd sleep at night with that hanging over me.

There is actually very little difference in the functionality btw Twitter and Instagram. The real difference is in the "personalities" they have taken on by virtue of the people who use them.

People on instagram are looking for instant gratification (nothing wrong with that), so it will always win that battle. People on twitter are looking for news, controversy, protests, etc.

That's an important function for some people. But it does not have the same mass appeal, so can only scale to a certain degree. I don't see how they can solve that problem by adjusting the functionality.