ratsbane

Roof-mounted miniature helipad mailboxes, painted with QR codes. Really, why don't houses already have package receptacles for UPS and FedEx?

Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is, he (or she or they) must have been at least aware of Nick Szabo. I wonder if there's any coincidence to the initials: SN and NS? Of course, even if SN != NS it could be a tip of the hat or an intentional red herring.

I don't know if bitcoin is doomed to fail or not but, the thesis of this article isn't credible. There has never been anything like cryptocurrency in the history of the world and this statement may well not apply: "They will fail, because money that is not issued by governments is always doomed to failure. Money is inevitably a tool of the state."

Just guessing; maybe age distribution, income distribution, and climate?

Here's a table showing age distribution by state. This doesn't explain everything, but WV does have the highest percentage (16%) of 65-and-overs. That might explain their poor showing, but LA and MS are unremarkable there: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0016.p...

Has something changed with gmail imap recently? I use Apple Mail every few days mostly just to keep a backup of my several gmail accounts. After reading this I remembered I hadn't done this in a few days so I opened Apple Mail on my Macbook (not upgraded to Mavericks yet) and got password prompts for each account. None of the passwords I entered was accepted. I can log in through the web just fine.

I think I've had the same experiences and made the same observations as you. Also, +1 to this: "...you shouldn't write a single line of code if you can get away with it."

I got the modal subscribe/login window also, though I don't immediately see anything to click to make it go away (without messing around in Firebug).

The current browser I'm using is Firefox 23.0.1 on OS X. My UA string is Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0

Thanks for speaking up. That's one of the great things about HN - primary sources standing by!

I was ready to buy something there until I looked at the prices. £24 (about $36 US) for a pair of novelty shorts? Doesn't that seem a bit high? You could make a pair out of real bacon for that.

Or Devon. Dev for short.

Yes, I was thinking the same. Sort of the software engineer equivalent of flying the best fighter jets and recognizing that you're going to be using them to bomb people in mud huts instead of dogfighting equally-classed opponents.

A second-hand IBM X3650 in my basement. 16GB RAM, dual quad-core 3Ghz Xeons, dual power supplies, and hot-swap RAID 5 drives for less than $400 on eBay, connected through the Comcast connection I already have. The Comcast connection is the weak link. Google fiber would be so nice.

This is crazy.

"fixed interest charge of ten percent (10%) regardless of the time of repayment"

Does that mean, as it sounds, that the interest is $37,500 whether they pay it back in ten days or ten years? I realize it's due March 31, 2014, but if it's not paid by when it's due, no more interest accrues?

"palisade" seems like precisely the mot juste

It's true... I do carry subversive materials in the trunk of my car: books on Bayesian reasoning and risk management. If they found a chapter on prior and posterior probabilities they might well question their purpose in life.

What happens if you lock the trunk and glove box and then give them the valet key? Do they break the locks?

I go back and forth on this. Aptitude seems more reliable in general than cpan, at least in the sense that cpan installations fail more frequently than apt.

Also I assume that cpan packages reflected through apt will be updated with apt-get update, while cpan has no similar update-all mechanism (AFAIK).

One advantage of using cpan is that if you're developing on a Mac and deploying on a Debian distro you can use the same commands on both systems to pull in the packages you need.

For Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libtest-perl-critic-perl

Nice. I didn't know that. I wonder when they started that? https://www.bayareafastrak.org/vector/dynamic/signup/VTconfi...

There are very good reasons for some businesses to use ALPR technology. EasyPass and other automatic toll-collection schemes use RFID tags on cars to uniquely identify them. There are parking-lot control systems that use RFID tags to allow access to paid parking lots. ICS, the largest vendor of car wash management systems, sells an RFID subscription package. One of their tags is on my car's windshield: http://www.icscarwashsystems.com/index.php?product=17

ALPR has some technical and business advantages over RFID. The RFID car-identification solution has been around over ten years; ALPR wasn't as effective then. If it has been, we'd probably have ALPR toll-collection systems instead of RFID.

I hope this pushback against ALPR won't extend to private uses of it for reasonable and limited purposes.

I just noticed I don't have flag privileges either, at least for comments (I still have them for submissions.) I'm sure I used to. I can't remember ever having flagged anything. Is this based on karma levels or something else? Now I'm worried I've done something wrong.

The hellbanning/ghostbanning/whatever is one of a very few things that disturbs me about this community. I can see how it could prevent the problem of a banned user immediately creating new usernames, but it's also easy to imagine how it could be abused.

I keep "showdead" on and I have occasionally seen a user marked as dead whose comments didn't seem to me to warrant that. I support the resurrection vote idea.

That was my first thought too. And second, that if it's possible to rent a herd of goats I would like to do exactly that. I'll figure out a reason after the fact.

I wonder if the PRISM revelations might give defense attorneys a broad strategy to deal with inconvenient evidence: "the government was illegally intercepting my client's communications; they never would have found the {cocaine|bodies|plutonium} without these illegal intercepts, thus all evidence against my client flows from this tainted knowledge and he must go free."

I wonder if US laws would apply to foreign corporations entirely owned by US corporations? E.g., if Amazon set up an Irish corporation to own and manage a data center in Ireland, even though Amazon still exercised control, wouldn't that data center be outside the scope of US law?

$20 million to run the whole program? That doesn't make sense. That amount wouldn't buy the hard drives to hold a firehose feed from any one of those companies.

Yes, fair point, but I do think it's a red flag. On looking a bit further I see that yes, in fact, he is using a GET link to delete records: https://github.com/Paton/Saaave/blob/master/_views/browse.ph...

This is an actual, serious problem which I would note in a code review, as opposed to the int thing which cannot, as far as I can can tell, ever lead to an exploit or malfunction which would have been avoided by using a named escape function in this code. If anyone can think of a specific example to prove this wrong, please say so.

In any case the real problem with this line of code is not the int cast, it's that it's using a GET request to delete a record.

There is an opposing viewpoint, i.e. if you actually need an int, casting to int is one of the most reasonable ways of getting it.

Yes. Furthermore, if the people responsible for these rules really believe there is a need for them then surely they are being derelict in not requiring RF monitoring devices in the cabin.

I have over 20k photos in my iPhoto library. The problems he describes here are real. For me, it's more of a problem of retrieval. I want to search on more attributes than just date, location, face, and a flat tag structure.

Examples: show me... - all of the photos of people from my uncle Harold's side of the family (cousins, etc.) - all of the photos containing the blue car I used to own. - all of the photos containing both person1 and person 2.

This would require a significant expansion both in the complexity of metadata as well as automated tagging. I wish Apple would make it happen.