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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?
Re:Marvin Minsky Reflects on a Life in AI [video] on Saturday October 31, 2015 @05:04PM (#10484208)
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.
Re:Chinese University Tops MIT in Engineering Rankings on Friday October 09, 2015 @06:08AM (#10359103)
hahaha Have you ever lived there to have any sort of clue what you're talking about? Jeeze, I love the Internet sometimes.
Re:The KGB’s success identifying CIA agents in the field on Monday September 28, 2015 @12:53PM (#10291429)
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.
Re:Blackphone 2 Review on Monday September 28, 2015 @07:55AM (#10289936)
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.
Re:The anatomy of a door-to-door Taobao delivery on Friday September 26, 2014 @02:27AM (#8371584)
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
Re:The anatomy of a door-to-door Taobao delivery on Thursday September 25, 2014 @11:30PM (#8371193)
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.
Re:Should I use a carousel? on Wednesday July 10, 2013 @08:12AM (#6018938)
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?

Re:Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility on Wednesday June 12, 2013 @08:05PM (#5871542)
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?
Re:Why 3 MIT Grads Want to Send You an Empty Box on Friday May 31, 2013 @09:28PM (#5802211)
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.

Re:The Sex Degrees of Separation - The Hollywood STD Network on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @02:28PM (#5451139)
"so I hear..." I just corrected it.

The Sex Degrees of Separation - The Hollywood STD Network

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OZr4dgwojjjdw1yeIJlZIvaXSunpc4A4JW_7OEogXBI/edit

In short:We found 15 celebrities with confirmed herpes and the dates of their diseases. Starting with these nodes, we calculate the probability of the rest of the network having herpes and when those nodes were expected to be infected. We keep in mind that transmission only affects relationships that occur after the confirmed date of disease. Appendix B lists all 7000 nodes that have a chance...

( Read More... | 2 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Ask HN: Emergency, where can I find building footprints for Kent County, MI?

Hey HN,We paid a county for some GIS data, thinking it would be great, but it's complete garbage. Now we have 11 days to deliver our product to a utility in Michigan but we don't even know where to find the data we need.We need building footprints for Kent County, MI along with their street addresses. Primarily we're looking for Grand Rapids and some of Wisconsin, MI, but if someone had access...

( Read More... | 4 comments | 9 points | on HN )

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