timsally

12 ms·

61.
by timsally 12y ago
There are no words for this; an incredible story. My thoughts and prayers are with Bertrand and others with NGLY1 deficiency. It seems that while Professor and Christina Might were making a herculean effort to discover and fight NGLY1 defic
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by timsally 12y ago
> The team comprises CEO, CFO, COO, and VP-BizDev…no engineers, at least in the leadership. Huh? The CEO has a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace engineering from Princeton and was a Principle Propulsion Engineer at SpaceX, Senior Systems E
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by timsally 12y ago
Shameless plug to follow... Much of the technology here was invented by Brendan and others at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which is where I work. We have been very lucky to have Brendan join us for a few summers while he was completing his PhD a
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by timsally 12y ago
Go Dan!!!!!!!
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by timsally 12y ago
My point is that you and I have no idea whether a mission to capture al-Awlaki is "what they do or not". To know whether such a mission is possible or realistic requires knowledge that few people in the world actually have. Wheth
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by timsally 12y ago
The argument that we should send special operations forces every time to go grab people is a common one, but it falls short in several respects. The first is that most people do not realize how long and difficult the modern training pipelin
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by timsally 12y ago
Anwar al-Awlaki could have had a trial anytime he wanted. He simply had to go to the American Embassy and turn himself in. As things stood when he was killed, it was impossible to bring him back for a trial without an unacceptably high risk
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by timsally 12y ago
> But I think there's something fundamentally different about someone saying or doing something in ignorance -- especially if they appear contrite once they realize how it's made others feel -- and someone doing it purposefully
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by timsally 13y ago
> There is absolutely nothing a human can do in space that a machine can't do better, except die. I can think of two things. The first is a bit morbid, but consider what happens if some country ever decides to weaponize space. Being
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by timsally 13y ago
You know a great way to get a good workout in a short period of time is? Running. You should run for 25 minutes 3 to 4 times a week. There are three types of workouts you should do within this time. Long Slow Distance (LSD), Continuous High
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by timsally 13y ago
> Everyone has already forgotten Pfc. Manning rotting away for 35 years. Please represent the facts accurately. Manning is eligible for release in 7-8 years. I'm willing to make a long bet ( http://longbets.org ) for $300.
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by timsally 13y ago
> First of all, fuck you. It is because of people like you that believe we should be permanently at war that we are permanently at war. Did you reply to the right comment? I don't believe in permanent war. Do you think I believe tha
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by timsally 13y ago
In the US "what we pay them to do" is vernacular for "it's their assigned job" or "it's what we asked them to do". I admit it's a bit of a weird phrase but its not actually referring to money. To
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by timsally 13y ago
I care deeply about what happens in the world and I also think countries having intelligence agencies is ok. This may seem contradictory to you but I don't think it is. I recognize that there are people who do not believe spying is ok,
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by timsally 13y ago
This article states the NSA developed an exploit for a product made by a Chinese networking and telecommunications firm. Honest question for HN readers inside the US: does anyone seriously have a problem with this? In my mind it falls squar
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by timsally 13y ago
> So now what Schneier says has me puzzled about whether or not there is any level of secure room between what he calls a "regular room" and a room that a United States citizen can only enter with a very high level of security
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by timsally 13y ago
You're completely off the rails here. You've devolved back into discussing the probability of dying from a terrorist attack instead of a whole system analysis. Some questions to answer your questions. Do you think the government k
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by timsally 13y ago
> Trying to apply that sort of economic analysis to a statistically nonexistent phenomenon like major terrorist attacks is utterly useless by comparison. It doesn't matter how accurate or inaccurate our assessment of the costs is, b
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by timsally 13y ago
Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed, but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use techno
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by timsally 13y ago
Loss of life from 9/11 was about 3,000, which using your numbers works out to be twenty million, but the total direct and indirect costs of 9/11 are in the trillions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effe
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by timsally 13y ago
That's exactly my point. It would have been better to spend large amounts of money preventing 9/11 from happening so we wouldn't have spent the 5 trillion we did on our reaction to it (never mind the cost it had to our nation
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by timsally 13y ago
It's not just about lives saved. This type of analysis is complicated because the costs are not always straightforward to analyze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606 .
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by timsally 13y ago
What specifically is your moral objection?
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by timsally 13y ago
Check out Ali Soufan's book ( http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Banners-Against-al-Qaeda/dp/... ). I'll loan you my copy if you're in the Boston area. He has had quite an interesting career. According t
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by timsally 13y ago
The overreaction to terrorism isn't a direct cost and its not part of the numbers I cited. Direct costs are insurance losses, medical care for victims, relief to widowers/widows, lost wages, etc. Those costs make up the numbers in
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by timsally 13y ago
Terrorists attacks cost more than lives. The direct costs of 9/11 were between $40 to $100 billion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t... ). The direct costs of another terrorist attack ta
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by timsally 13y ago
Language changes: https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/405148448107659264 . I took a bit of time to read some of your more recent comments and I'm going to level with you-- I cringed pretty hard. Labeling pe
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by timsally 13y ago
Great material, but it's been directly taken from the source material ( http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/19759/core-algor... ) with no added content. I imagine Vijay (the author of the source materia
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by timsally 13y ago
All the other companies I listed have had either successful exits, large fundraising rounds, or a successful IPO. David's company is much newer and doesn't meet that bar yet.
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by timsally 13y ago
Add Tom Leighton (Akamai), Frans Kaashoek (Mazu Networks), Dawson Engler (Coverity), and maybe David Brumley (ForAllSecure) to that list. Profitable startups are not uncommon among professors in top departments.

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