philsalesses

They use existing IED locations and layers of GIS data to determine where terrorists would be likely to place them. For instance, they use events as training data and then measure distance to light posts, distance from school, distance from whatever to create heat maps of high risk IED areas. The problem is the terrorists algorithm changes as we get better at stopping them. Cat and mouse.

Because they're cheap and management is inefficient?

When trying to bring about a big change, his point seems to be that sometimes new simple thinking is more important than old complicated thinking. That's very much in line with the MIT Media Lab and their way of looking at the world.

hahaha Have you ever lived there to have any sort of clue what you're talking about? Jeeze, I love the Internet sometimes.

I wonder if this pattern could still be applied.

For a NOC they'll setup a shell corporation called "Southern Electronics Corporation, LLC" or some other discrete sounding name and have a real website, office address and phone number actually manned, but surely they register the corporations, domains, phone numbers at the same place, staff the phones with the same voices...

Makes me wonder if they fixed the problem or if it's just hidden one level deeper.

I'd be down to meet my doppelgänger., but if you want to meet at Window, we are not the same person. haha. How do I get ahold of you after my trip to the states?

Aren't you snarky... Read carefully. I have a fourth. And that wouldn't fix it anyway. They detect it on the protocol level. They posison your DNS.

I have 4 (ExpressVPN, VyprVPN, StrongVPN, and a fourth I'll never tell anyone where it is). They do not reliably connect, are prone to attacks from the government and even when they do connect, you'll be throttled into oblivion. Before I discovered Shadowsocks (Chinese went to clouds house and made him remove it from github), my VPN would, within 3-5 minutes, be throttled to about 128k average speed. I would be elated if I could get a 1 MBps connection out. And for those wondering, I pay for 200MBps and I do get that in within the Chinese intranet.

Not yet. Planning to write a small series of posts when I move back, but I do need some time out of this environment before I can judge things with less a biased mentality. Distance is great for that. Will post to HN when I do.

Your comment is off base. You don't know me or what I optimize for in life.

...and xkcd doesn't suck. Randall does something he's passionate about and out its out into the world for millions to see. Good for him.

Do you mind if Inask what you do or have done?

In terms of policy, probably nothing. They have however become more competent, meaning the firewall isn't easy to hop anymore and I went to MIT. I don't know how non-technical foreigners can do anything here.

Essentially this. There have been entire weeks where I can't get a connection out I the country and as someone who can't speak Chinese that's a problem. I've learned the language a bit, but there's no way I can achieve business fluency in the time period necessary to be successful.

I can not be the only one whose faith in secure digital has been fundamentally and irrevocably altered in light of the past few years. In my estimation, anything that has been said or typed in the proximity of a connected digital device is compromised. There are just too many attack vectors.

I imagine if you had enough realtime keystroke data, you could even identify a user using nothing more than how they type on a keyboard. That's some scary stuff.

Privacy advocates would better serve the public if they instead educated people on how to communicate securely instead of producing yet another black box that users can blindly put their trust in. I suppose this is better than nothing when dealing with less capable actors, but for those who plan their future years ahead, doing something on this phone, only to have it bulk collected and stuck in a database for decryption and analysis later when it serves the political will of those in power is counter productive.

As an American who up and moved to China on a whim and more recently started a tech company split between Boston and Shanghai, I can only greet this news with jubilation. Life here over the last two years has become simply impossible. Good luck to you China.

Thanks for the offer, though I actually prefer to only ask for help when I need it. Otherwise, my apartment will fill up with cheap Chinese goods, like the Shanzhai iPhone 6 I bought 2 months ago for absolutely no good reason. :P

As someone who lives in Shanghai, this is an interesting look at how it works. However, as an expat who can't speak Chinese yet, this website is one of the larger sources of my frustration.

Need something simple and don't know where to get it? If you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "TaoBao."

The issue is the way their page is coded, it's immune to machine translation. Images have critical text that isn't translated and often the page loads elements after translation has finished, leaving just enough Chinese to prevent a foreigner from using the page. I've set aside an hour before to make an account but I could not complete the task.

I wonder how much effort it would be to keep their site the way it is, but smooth out the experience just enough to allow machine translation.

It's not difficult language and I think what you really want to ask, without asking, is does anyone have a TLDR? At least that's what I'm asking because the PDF on my iPhone is on the fritz.

I often find myself having to display a wildly unpredictable number of images on a page. The image size ratio is about 3 height x 1 width and I can have anywhere from 1-40 images.

Carousel's do suck, but what other options do I have?

Story from: http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/what-the-n-s-...

Cesar was my advisor and I was his first student. I've never been happier to see someone make a splash.

You can't confirm that Palantir's Prism is not the NSA's Prism unless you have complete access to both systems. Palantir could be correct in saying that their Prism was not designed for the NSA, but is it outside possibility to believe the NSA is using software outside the knowledge of a corporation?

I tried to post an iPhone but got stuck when I didn't post enough description. They emailed once reminding me but then that mail got buried and I forgot. They have an opportunity to fix that problem creatively, by maybe using different interfaces for different products, where each post screen is uniquely tailored to posting that specific product optimally.

They're definitely in the right path, but I think like any startup, they have some wrinkles to iron out. Luckily they have an amazing team and I think they'll do just fine in time.

"so I hear..." I just corrected it.

Essess - Boston, MA

Here's a posting we sent out last week to a few MIT mailing lists:

Looking for a startup job? Want to make a difference? I, along with another MIT Media Lab grad, work at Essess and we're hiring.

We looking for coders, building scientists, and computer vision experts.

About our company: Forbes called us the "Google Street View of energy efficiency". We use thermal cameras to map energy leaks at city scales to help our customers make smart decisions about their energy use.

Our first product, launching in the next month, is a home energy report that will allow home owners to literally see the heat leaking from their homes, allowing them make informed decisions about possible improvements.

Here's our big idea: In the coming years, we want to create a nationwide energy market to allow us to identify properties that would benefit the most from an energy efficiency upgrade.

We would offer free home improvements to homeowners. In return, the homeowner agrees to a fixed energy bill for some period of time. The homeowner, instead of paying the utilities directly, would pay us and in return would receive a lower, predictable monthly energy bill.

Our mission is to build and drive this market. We're excited about using technology to help the environment and help people live more comfortable, less-impactful lives.

That's our idea… but we need your help make it a reality.

Come talk to us! Email phil@essess.com for more details.

And, for those interested, here's an example image: http://imgur.com/tmWRh5Y

I feel, personally, that the author is using a thesaurus too heavily.

So this is this like the onion, only true? Manually curated by you or do you have some magic code to do it?

There is a great paper written by Geoffrey West called "Life's Universal Scaling Laws" http://biology.unm.edu/jhbrown/Documents/Publications/West&#...

I was under the impression he was one of the first to touch on this topic, so I find it weird he wasn't listed.

He also applied this to city growth. Which is much more interesting, considering cities aren't biological, strictly speaking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.ht...

Now what would be really cool is if the owner designs and builds a contraption for the parrot to fly... oh wait....

I know the Form team. Good people. I hope this works out in their favor in the end.

Is there a serious demand for stereo street view? I wrote this code 3 years ago while working for the Army, then Google released their version of it. But now it's pulled. The code is released to the public so if there is interest in this, I'll see if I can clean it up and release it.