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The world of game theory is currently on fire. In May, Freeman Dyson at Princeton University and William Press at the University of Texas announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner’s dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other. That’s a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more. ...

El pasado martes, Mercadona retiró 11 productos cosméticos después de una evaluación realizada por la Agencia Española de Medicamentos y Productos Sanitarios. Ayer, esa misma agencia publicó un comunicado explicando que el problema era de orden administrativo y no existía ningún peligro para la salud de los consumidores. Me parece un buen momento para que hablemos del verdadero problema de fondo. La industria cosmética se sostiene sobre una mentira: hacer creer a sus clientes que la eficacia de sus productos tiene una base científica. ...

Fellow Linuxers, This is just to announce the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release, which I’m calling the Debian Linux Release. This is a release that I have put together basically from scratch; in other words, I didn’t simply make some changes to SLS and call it a new release. I was inspired to put together this release after running SLS and generally being dissatisfied with much of it, and after much altering of SLS I decided that it would be easier to start from scratch. The base system is now virtually complete (though I’m still looking around to make sure that I grabbed the most recent sources for everything), and I’d like to get some feedback before I add the ”fancy” stuff. ...

I run FreeBSD on my computers. A lot of my friends run Linux, or at least one of the distributions of it. Naturally, then, we agree that a Unix-style operating system is the right choice, but we disagree on which to use. It’s been my impression that the BSD communit{y,ies}, in general, understand Linux far better than the Linux communit{y,ies} understand BSD. I have a few theories on why that is, but that’s not really relevant. I think a lot of Linux people get turned off BSD because they don’t really understand how and why it’s put together. Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb. ...

A compilation of classic arcade deaths, arranged to an 8-bit cover of ”Mad World”. The music is a cover of Mad World, by Tears for Fears. » Rob Beschizza | boingboing.net

Much of this data was entered by hand (obtained by contacting past conference organizers, retrieving cached conference websites, and searching CVs) so please email me if you notice any errors or omissions: bestpaper-AT-jeffhuang.com. I tried to collect best paper awards from the top-tier conferences in each area, but some conferences do not have such an award (e.g. SIGGRAPH, CAV). ”Distinguished paper award” and ”outstanding paper award” are included but not ”best student paper” (e.g. NIPS) or ”best 10-year old paper” (e.g. POPL) ...

When developers shift from PHP, Ruby or any other platform to Python, the very first road block they face (most often) is a lack of an overall understanding of the Python ecosystem. Developers often yearn for a tutorial or resource that explains how to accomplish most tasks in a more or less standard way. What follows is an extract from the internal wiki at my workplace, which documents the basics of the Python ecosystem for web application development for our interns, trainees and experienced developers who shift to Python from other platforms. ...

I just made a tool to transform any javascript code into an equivalent sequence of ()[]{}!+ characters. You can try it here, or grab it from github or npm. Keep on reading if you want to know how it works. What do you know about non-alphanumeric XSS? The other day one of my friends asked me that question on IRC, pointing me to some articles on sla.ckers.org where they tried to create some scripts like alert(1) with non-alphanumeric characters. ...

Twenty-four years ago today, I had a very bad day. On August 8, 1988, I was a senior in high school. I was working my after school and weekend job at Safeway as a cashier, when the store manager suddenly walked over and said I better stop ringing up customers and talk to my mother on the store phone right now. Mom told me to come home immediately because, well, there were police at the front door asking for me with some legal papers in hand. ...

You must have heard about The Internet map by now. If not, you can take a look at it here. Roughly speaking, the Internet Map displays websites’ location according to users’ behavior. Similar websites visited by the same people are situated close to one another; different websites not having mutual visitors are situated at a considerable distance from each other. The size of a website on the map is determined by its average click rating while the color is defined by belonging to a nationality. You can get a more detailed notion referring to the About section on the website of the Map. ...