written by Sandhya Ramesh. added 5 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
For a civilian to obtain a firearm, a gun license is mandatory. Minimum age for applying for one is 21. The application form asks details about past criminal behavior. The process to get one can take months, even years.
written by Geoff Greer. added 5 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
vim neovim editors open-source
Neovim’s development community is excellent. They respond to issues. They merge pull requests. They give quality feedback. And most importantly, they’re nice to newbies. In fact, they’re nice to everyone. The main dev team holds no enmity toward Bram Moolenaar. They recognize Vim’s failings, but they don’t feel the need to criticize it.
written by John Cheever. added 5 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
christmas poverty family gifts
A beatific light came into her face when she realized that she could give, that she could bring cheer, that she could put a healing finger on a case needier than hers, and—like Mrs. DePaul and Mrs. Weston, like Charlie himself and like Mrs. Deckker, when Mrs. Deckker was to think, subsequently, of the poor Shannons—first love, then charity, and then a sense of power drove her. “Now, you kids help me get all this stuff together. Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over. She was tired, but she couldn’t rest, she couldn’t rest
written by Dexter Filkins. added 6 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
For the R.S.S., the initiative in Ayodhya paid off spectacularly. Membership soared, and by 1996 the B.J.P. had become the largest party in parliament. During the dispute over Babri Masjid, Ashis Nandy, a prominent Indian intellectual, began a series of interviews with R.S.S. members. A trained psychologist, he wanted to study the mentality of the rising Hindu nationalists. One of those he met was Narendra Modi, who was then a little-known B.J.P. functionary. Nandy interviewed Modi for several hours, and came away shaken. His subject, Nandy told me, exhibited all the traits of an authoritarian personality: puritanical rigidity, a constricted emotional life, fear of his own passions, and an enormous ego that protected a gnawing insecurity. During the interview, Modi elaborated a fantastical theory of how India was the target of a global conspiracy, in which every Muslim in the country was likely complicit. “Modi was a fascist in every sense,” Nandy said. “I don’t mean this as a term of abuse. It’s a diagnostic category.”
written by Dexter Filkins. added 6 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
india bjp politics modi rss UP
In northern India, Hindu nationalists have whipped up panic around the idea that Muslim men are engaging in a secret campaign to seduce Hindu women into marriage and prostitution. As with the hysteria over cow killings, the furor takes form mostly on social media and platforms like WhatsApp, where rumors spread indiscriminately. The idea—known as “love jihad”—is rooted in an image of the oversexed Muslim male, fortified by beef and preying on desirable Hindu women. In many areas, any Muslim man seen with a Hindu woman risks being attacked. Two years ago, Yogi Adityanath, the B.J.P. Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, set up “anti-Romeo squads,” which harassed Muslim men believed to be trying to seduce Hindu women. The squads were abandoned after the gangs mistakenly beat up several Hindu men.
written by Dexter Filkins. added 6 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
Muslim-Hindu harmony was central to the vision of India’s founders, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular state. India is home to all the world’s major religions; Muslims constitute about fourteen per cent of the population. As the British Empire prepared to withdraw, in 1947, Muslims were so fearful of Hindu domination that they clamored for a separate state, which became Pakistan. The division of the subcontinent, known as Partition, inspired the largest migration in history, with tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims crossing the new borders. In the accompanying violence, as many as two million people died. Afterward, both Pakistanis and Indians harbored enduring grievances over the killings and the loss of ancestral land. Kashmir, on the border, became the site of a long-running proxy war.
written by Gershom Bazerman. added 6 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
Knowledge is not imposing. Knowledge is fun. Anyone, given time and inclination, can acquire it. Don’t only lecture, but continue to learn, because there is always much more than you know. (And if there wasn’t, wow, that would be depressing, because what would there be to learn next?) Learn to value all opinions, because they all come from experiences, and all those experiences have something to teach us. Dynamic typing advocates have brought us great leaps in JIT techniques. If you’re interested in certain numerical optimizations, you need to turn to work pioneered in C++ or Fortran.
written by Anonymous. added 6 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
snapchat silicon-valley software-engineering work culture
When I got there I found John, the rest of this other manager’s team (which made sense, given that it was their team’s sprint planning meeting), and the other engineer working on the project with me. He briefly explained, before they got started, that John had decided to pull us into this meeting so we could plan the work on our project at the same time this other team he was involved with planned theirs, even though there was no overlap between the two groups.
written by James Whittaker. added 7 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
microsoft bill-gates culture history
Truth is, Gates and Ballmer are creatures of an era that few, most especially their successor, want to see return. Both were consummate know-it-alls, convinced that no subject, no matter how subtle, was a match for their intellect. No expert’s analysis was ever more prescient than their own. No competitor could possibly match the insights of their superior strategic minds. They specialized in snap decisions and dominating their subordinates. But chalking up the shouting, on-the-spot firings, and alleged chair-throwing as simply “leader’s passion” misses a greater point: They perpetuated their toxic behavior by surrounding themselves almost exclusively with leaders who emulated that behavior.
written by Raymond Zhong. added 7 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
china cryptocurrency finance money privacy
“As long as you aren’t committing any crimes and you want to make purchases that you don’t want others to know about, we still want to protect this kind of privacy,” Mr. Mu, the deputy director of the central bank’s payments department, said in another recent online lecture on China’s cryptocurrency plans.
written by Motoko Rich. added 8 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
In Japan, some audience members said the movie revealed information unavailable in their history textbooks. Tsubasa Hirose, a freelance copywriter, wrote on her movie-reviewing blog that she had always thought comfort women “treated people at the hospital, like nurses.” “I didn’t know anything,” she wrote, “and I wasn’t given any opportunity to.”
written by Alexis Petridis. added 8 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
music rock singers elliot-smith
The cover of his second, eponymous solo album, released in 1995, features a grainy image of bodies falling from a high building. Another, 1996's Either/Or, was named after a book by Kierkegaard, in which the philosopher posited that the aesthete would eventually find himself in a state of despair. As one tribute article wryly noted, you couldn't say that Smith didn't warn you.
written by Paul Tough. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
education college admissions usa money
The rise of predictive analytics in admissions and financial aid has had the effect of automating and turbocharging the pressures that enrollment managers have always felt. Colleges’ predictive models and the specific nature of their inputs may differ somewhat from one institution to another, but the output is always the same: Admit more rich kids. That’s the message that almost every enrollment manager hears each spring, either obliquely or explicitly, and it was certainly the pressure that Pérez felt each time he opened up the latest PDF from Hardwick Day.
written by Alexia Campbell. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
silicon-valley uber technology government employees laws
As employees, gig workers would have a safety net for the first time ever. The changes from the law will also reportedly benefit the state of California, which estimates that it loses $7 billion in tax revenue each year from companies that misclassify employees. California has the largest state economy in the country and is home to the Silicon Valley tech industry — which means its lawmakers have outsize influence in national politics. The law could lead other states to take similar action.
written by Vindu Goel. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
“Sometimes with all the discounts, it’s cheaper for the customer to order online than cook at home,” said Anurag Katriar, who runs a group of European-style restaurants under the Indigo brand and heads the Mumbai chapter of the restaurant association. “For the aggregators, it’s the number of users and clicks that builds their value.”
written by Helene Cooper. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
In short, the Navy has carried out the order of its commander in chief to counter Iran in the Middle East, but in the least provocative way. Just where to station the Lincoln — one of the country’s 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers — is a decision made by the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which has its headquarters in Bahrain. The fear is that sending an aircraft carrier through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, right when Mr. Trump has turned up the heat on Tehran, could provoke exactly the kind of conflict the Pentagon wants to avoid. “Anytime a carrier moves close to shore, and especially into confined waters, the danger to the ship goes up significantly,”
written by Mike Isaac. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
uber silicon-valley investing money
But there’s growth, there’s growth at all costs, and then there’s Uber’s version of growth at all costs. By 2015, some company insiders believed Mr. Kalanick had an obsession with global expansion that crossed a line. He had tapped Ed Baker, a former Facebook executive, to increase South American ridership. In Brazil, Mr. Baker encouraged city managers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to amass as many riders and drivers as possible. To limit “friction,” Uber allowed riders to sign up without requiring them to provide identity beyond an email — easily faked — or a phone number. Most Brazilians used cash far more frequently than credit cards, which meant that after a long shift, a driver could be expected to be carrying a lot of money. Thieves and angry taxi cartels struck.
written by Brian Chen. added 9 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
All that Mr. Tezisci, the researcher, had to do was plug my number into White Pages Premium, an online database that charges $5 a month for access to public records. He then did a thorough web search and followed a data trail — linking my name and address to information in other online background-checking tools and public records — to track down more details.
written by Angela Chen. added 10 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
free-speech Internet cloudfare censorship
This may mark a shift comparable to the one that has affected social-media platforms like Facebook. There was a time when they insisted that they were neutral platforms and could not be responsible for policing hate speech in any way. That time is long gone; Facebook now employs 30,000 content moderators. But up until now there was a general agreement that hosting companies like CloudFlare, which did not publish content themselves, could remain neutral. Now that, too, can no longer be taken for granted.
written by Somini Sengupta. added 10 months ago by @icyflame ARCHIVES
Forsake the washing machine, and hand wash everything with two carefully rationed buckets of water. To avoid a fight, fill only four pots when the water tanker arrives. Only once everyone has had their share should you consider going back for more.
Cutouts is an open source application. Code licensed under the MIT license. Copyright 2018 Siddharth Kannan