skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I certainly wasn't trying to claim that the letter was a well-written persuasive one. However, I was more shocked with the implication that engineering management can't be expected to read past the first line of a memo if it doesn't hook them.

In most organizations I've worked in (generally large ones), the rank-and-file engineers/scientists are below-average communicators (a stereotype, I know, but it's been true). They choose the wrong level of technical detail for their audience (or send it to such a large cross-section of people that there is no appropriate level for everyone). They certainly make grammatical mistakes. It's up to engineering management (who are generally better communicators) to pull the salient bits out of the communication and then pass that up the chain in a more clear manner. I certainly can't imagine a manager going "well, Darren's letter that warned me of a likely loss of human life used 'insure' instead of 'ensure', so I'm just going to assume that the rest of it is drivel and go on about my day".

Your way would certainly have been better. Related note, one of the best writing classes I ever took with regard to its effect on my current work was actually a journalism class. The notion not to bury the lede has been key as attention spans wane (apparently more than I'd realized).
There are already points of centralization at the domain registrar and DNS layers.

That was a major (really the major) basis of the fight against SOPA--it would have required ISPs to interfere with DNS resolution as a way of shutting down serial copyright infringers.

And the U.S. federal government can already seize domain names for some reasons.

So, the question is: does the value of pervasive over-the-wire encryption outweigh the risk additional centralization via CAs? Right now I think it does, but that is in part because I believe that the CA infrastructure itself will improve over time.
Feynman is well-known for his TV appearance where he dramatically demonstrated what happened with the O-rings, live...but in his memoir, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", he credits being inspired by General Kutyna, who had asked him to join the commission. Feynman describes that a random comment from Kutyna led him down the path of revelation:

> Then he says, “I was working on my carburetor this morning, and I was thinking: the shuttle took off when the temperature was 28 or 29 degrees. The coldest temperature previous to that was 53 degrees. You’re a professor; what, sir, is the effect of cold on the O-rings?” “Oh!” I said. “It makes them stiff. Yes, of course!” That’s all he had to tell me. It was a clue for which I got a lot of credit later, but it was his observation. A professor of theoretical physics always has to be told what to look for. He just uses his knowledge to explain the observations of the experimenters!

However, Feynman admits at the end of his multi-chapter account of serving on the commission that Kutyna had coyly played Feynman:

> Another thing I understand better now has to do with where the idea came from that cold affects the O-rings. It was General Kutyna who called me up and said, “I was working on my carburetor, and I was thinking: what is the effect of cold on the O-rings?” Well, it turns out that one of NASA’s own astronauts told him there was information, somewhere in the works of NASA, that the O-rings had no resilience whatever at low temperatures—and NASA wasn’t saying anything about it. But General Kutyna had the career of that astronaut to worry about, so the real question the General was thinking about while he was working on his carburetor was, “How can I get this information out without jeopardizing my astronaut friend?” His solution was to get the professor excited about it, and his plan worked perfectly.

If we take Feynman at his word, to me this is a great description of how science and bureaucracy and invention (and, sometimes, disaster) works: it's not always just random eurekas, or study-real-hard-and-you'll-figure-it-out...sometimes the information is already well-known, and obvious, but for various logistical/political/bureaucratic reasons, it isn't immediately disseminated or explored.

via: Feynman, Richard P. (2011-02-14). "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character (Kindle Locations 2923-2930). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Unlikely hospitals are; HIPAA compliance and enforcement is an actual thing.
You and I have different definitions of "understanding". I would not count them as understanding the dangers that a mischievous person could do.
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Male, age 39, with one completely "blown" disc in my back and another that is probably bulging.

I am completely asymptomatic, pain free, and perform extremely high stress and high flexibility athletics. Here's how I do it:

- hip raises on the ball[1] 20-30 reps.

- scorpion stretch[2] - 20-30 reps, back and forth.

- roman chair[3] - 40-50 reps, some with a weight across chest

- plain old straight leg deadlifts with dumbbells

- and of course, balance it all out with ab and trunk strengthening

But, BUT ... the real key is walking. Your body is a machine built for walking. You may scoff, but nothing nothing will tighten and straighten up your back, and all of its supporting muscles, and erase the imbalances and create the alignment you need more than walking.

Walking will heal you. The first week or so might make things worse - a LOT worse. Just keep it up. The walking will heal you.

[1] http://reach-yourpeak.com/tag/glute-strength/

[2] http://www.jsonline.com/multimedia/video/?bctid=64438317001

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_chair
I learn something new every day. Oh, the irony. :D
I worked in a company that made CNC machine tools at the time of the Challenger disaster. The actions of Roger Boisjoly gave me the courage to reject a demand from management that I add a "feature" to a control system I was working on to disable all safety lockouts from a single virtual switch.

I refused the assignment. When they didn't fire me on the spot I followed the managers who made the request and when they would ask another engineer to do it, I would warn the engineer that they could be held personally responsible for any injuries or fatalities that could occur.

I fully expected to be fired but surprisingly, management just gave up on the idea. Perhaps my insistence that it was a bad idea convinced them.
For those interested, social scientists often refer to what happened with the Challenger as a "normal accident".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
A new open source cloud management tool… from Walmart
FWIW, this phenomenon is not a "US National Security Community" thing, it's a government thing (although quality control can vary).

I saw it in the Army -- enlisted Soliders get a certain number of "points" towards their promotions for completing coursework and obtaining a degree. So, they find the most expedient methods -- and for-profit schools that catered to this nonsense were all over. An entire platoon could literally pass around the same papers and get through an associate's degree together. "Criminal justice" was a popular one, for some reason.

I have lots of teachers in my family. They get a big pay bump for a Master's degree (had to be accredited, admittedly, so that's a little better). If the pay bump is the same no matter which school you go to, why not take the path of least resistance, especially when you're working full-time and raising a family? They all have online degrees from one of the local state colleges that caters to this market. I don't think they try to argue that they are better teachers for it. It's just a way to hustle for more money (and can you blame them?)

If you have to make a one-sized-fits-all rule about "this degree is worth this amount of money," you're going to run into these issues.
I don't know that off-hand, but the book I cited may provide enough of the raw data to suggest a magnitude. By memory, I venture to say that more than 10 percent of monozygotic twins of schizophrenia cases (probands) do not have a schizophrenia diagnosis of their own--but I'll revise this figure if someone can find a good reference. What's clear in general about the research is that schizophrenia is a polygenic condition (influenced by many genes) and multifactorial (also influenced by factors other than genes).
NDA and non-disparagement are radically different things; I have zero issues with NDA, I'd take umbrage at not being able to say a place I used to work at sucks.
{random advice from the internet}

The pitfall is to imagine beating the pros is likely both directly out of their money or indirectly by separating amateurs from their money.

That's not to say it isn't easy to make a small fortune. All it takes is starting with a large one.

Good luck.
As someone else mentioned, yes he does need to be able to access that data should a specific need arise.

That said, personal health records at an insurance provider are not the same thing as classified information within the DOD. The DOD classifies lots of operational details in order to protect its operations. Unit locations, security procedures, budgets, even the existence and personnel rosters of certain locations. Do you think Mark Bertolini could run Aetna without access to its complete budget, employee rolls, locations, and functional areas?
Mark Cuban Calls Paul Graham and YC Entitled and Arrogant
Don't have any background, but from what I've seen so far (a small handful of the tons of docs) it's collective bargaining agreements between various police unions and the cities they operate in. Haven't seen one more recent than 2012.
Most state laws don't allow police departments to keep the proceeds of forfeitures under state law, and the policies around local agencies doing federal-law forfeitures which do allow the agencies to keep proceeds have been narrowed recently because of concerns of inappropriate use.
This happened: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-roche-europe-idUSBRE85K1NH...
You are technically correct - the best kind of correct.

I agree, but my concern is not correctness, it is aesthetics.

Why? Reading a computer program is often harder than writing it from scratch, so I like when languages enforce (or at least encourage) a name convention - just to keep it easier to read. Does Nim have something like PEP-8?
Security is just an illusion.
The letter demonstrates foresight, not hindsight; a very long list of equally severe and plausible warnings is needed to make the point that one is unlikely to single out this one letter without the benefit of hindsight.
I downvoted because of both content and tone.

The web is the platform that works across all devices. Sure an app is great when you already use that site, but before they're invested, are people really gonna download an app?

Not to mention that you're heavily reliant on Apple and Google for your framework. With the web, you can use whatever you like, you can even roll your own if you want.

Sure there are a lot of JavaScript libraries, but how else will ideas evolve?
That's correct. A send call could call with a 1GB buffer and the IP layer would have to break it up into multiple datagram packets. That's the nature of TCP. Again sending large message is expanding the requirement beyond what is capable in UDP, while we were striking to emulate UDP in sending short unreliable message.
Sorry; editing mishap, yes. Here's the missing example:

class Holder { var x = 0 }
var n = 1
var h: Holder? = ...
h?.x = n++
n // 1 or 2?
The IETF has been working on distribution issues and, amongst other documents from the tzdist working group, produced this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tzdist-service
Simple example of GDB debugging: http://hookrace.net/blog/what-makes-nim-practical/#debugging...
There are many problems with the US education system, but it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English, not because of "failure to fully understand phonemes."

The main point of the article is a proposal of a new way to evaluate teachers. It says, "let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers (it’s tempting to use student outcomes instead)."

To me that seems like a reasonable part of a good method of evaluation.
Same results on Chrome. I am not on a corporate network - I am at home.

Are there tools I can use to work my way through this?
Maybe I'm wrong - and I kind of hope I am, as there's a noble motive behind this movement - but I always feel that people are focusing too much on IT and the stories of a guy who became a full-blown IT professional learning by himself, Google and open courseware.

I think this kind of approach to learning works for IT, because a) the logistics to learn it are easier to handle; but mostly because b) most IT jobs actually don't require a degree - or "degree-deserving" knowlege; most programming is "trade-school"-like knowledge.
Funny; DST is exactly what made me doubt the rule of storing everything in UTC.

We've had a lot of problems with a platform that stores recurring events as UTC date + time delta (eg. 1 week). What the users want is an event that happens every week on a certain weekday and time, in their timezone - they don't care if that falls on various times in UTC throughout the year.

Of course, that's specific for recurring events/schedules.
It's good to know that the teachers/professors who still care are aware of how bad things have gotten.

Do you, as a former/current educator, see things changing in the future?
I've look at react, angular, mithril, and lately elm. It seems elm is here to stay.
After General Magic filed for bankruptcy, their patents and other assets were auctioned off. (To Intellectual Ventures via Paul Allen). IV then sold or rented it out to the patent troll. (IV protests their hands are clean but won't say why or how their patents end up with trolls).
Josh, do you know if is there anywhere that confirms the 204s ISP number for the superdraco thrusters? And what the fuel mass is for that?

EDIT: yes its a typo, I mean 240s
> I know several people who were committed against their will after as little as a cursory 5 minute conversation.

Not to call you a liar, but quite simply I don't believe that. Having dealt with wanting to get someone committed against their will, I found it was all but impossible unless they're actively and obviously dangerous to themselves or others.

> Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists weld a frightening amount of power

They really don't. They can't just commit people because they talked to them and decided hey lock that guy up.
>Does anyone have a file listing for this? Is it just a PGDATA dump, or are there more interesting things?

I see a lot of text files (docx, doc, rtf, txt), and two DB dumps.

Not sure how/where to start looking. Opening files at random yields things like collective bargaining agreements and legal briefs. Any suggestions for munging through all of this?
Cash is eroded away by inflation. If your currency hits high inflation for years continuously, like we had in Iceland (yes, I'm from there), going up to 25%, your cash isn't worth shit in 5 years time.

I've experienced that. My parents experienced that. They had no "investments", kept their money in low-interest savings accounts, yet somehow their life savings was no longer enough to buy a used Toyota.

Want to get more strange? What about war? How much is your money worth in case WW3 breaks out?
Hardly likely? sure. Is it possible? absolutely.

The point is, nothing is "safe", just different levels of risky.
Timezone problems (cf The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile on youtube or postgres doc on why not to use TZ) are not solvable.

TZ are politics and politic is very bad at making stuff engineerable. Politics are inconsistent, unstable and lack of rigor in propagating the information to the coders.

The TZ definitions are handled by clerks that writes an XML files manually that are embedded in your libs and that no one cares to update.

TZ are not versioned. So if you want to know what was the local time 12years ago in any place of the world : good luck.

But international exchange are bound to delays workhours and SLA requiring delays to be measurable ... With arbitrary changes (EST shit).

Timezones are broken by design and all our applications too.

The only way to solve the problem is to forbid politics to come anywhere near science, history and standardization of measurement. Corporation don't do any better. I abide by International System (metric) and the idea that there should be a monotonic non disrupted absolute time whose origin IS NOT the birth of Christ but since when we are able to have continuous "rigorous" measurement of time.

Which is exactly the opposite of what people calls for.

The begining of the year should be the aphelia (3~4 jan) and not some religious bat shit conventions. Noon should be when the sun is at its top. And 13 month of 28 days (+intercalar days) would make our lives easier.

Time as a political and religious construct is shit.
A bit of background for context: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/07/08/massiveteachi...
The Android malware monster will never die
Every year a huge leak. 2015 it was HackingTeam, 2016 it seems to be the FOP.
People born after the 1970s may not be aware of the Teton Dam collapse, but it was another case of total disregard for many, many expert warnings of disaster in the rush to build something big and impressive. Here's kind of a cheesy documentary clip describing the incident [1], but the book Cadillac Desert [2] goes into some detail if you're curious.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdOGPBnfoKE

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-...
Ask HN: In what areas is Go better than Python?
I know Python quite well and I plan to learn Go. But before that, I want to know whether is it worth or not.
I believe everything that Go does can be done in Python. Are there any areas where Go is significantly better ?
Please enlighten me.
I'm helping http://www.myire.com which is about to publicly launch this quarter and is working on this exact problem. It's everything from ideation to publication allowing for collaboration. Truly reproducible research.

If you want to chat about it email me hn at strapr dot com and let's talk.
Maybe it's time to disband police, in general? Just put up a few more cameras (total public coverage), make the footage available to anyone for up to a year, and allow persons to press charges for crimes committed (with hefty penalties for demonstrable false statements with mal intent). There would need to be some kind of force in place to investigate crimes committed in private areas, but we wouldn't need nearly as much shoe leather on the street. Yeah, there would be minuses too.
Yup, that was accidentally cut out when posting from the original writing. We've added it back in. Thanks for pointing it out!
One would assume the key was simply pilfered as well vs the crypto being cracked, but that's just a gut reaction. Human opsec is almost universally worse than any crypto, even ones that have already been broken.
While I agree with you about the difference between "insure" and "ensure," that's not a universally accepted grammar rule. I think the may even be in the minority; The New York Times, for example, uses "insure" for all instances.
They do on extremely rare occasions, but it is clear that the level of misconduct is far higher than is ever prosecuted.

On the subject of camera compliance - if an officer deliberately evades camera compliance, as a huge proportion do, we have clear evidence that that officer believes they do not have to follow policies and procedures in general. That is corruption.
A one year sabbatical to start a new university, where her long-term commitment depends on its progress after just one year.

Doesn't inspire much trust to prospective students...
In its most basic form, yes, but because of Rust's safety guarantees it's not quite that simple. C functions can only be called from unsafe blocks and there is a lot to be desired when you have to pass strings back and forth (I don't know how well Nim handles this). It's also a bit harder to debug an FFI wrapper in Rust when you tell the compiler your code is safe but then make a mistake in how you use the unsafe C api.

I strongly prefer Rust's safety but it's not quite the same as a blind FFI like Nim.
Do the security p&p thing.

One other thing that I haven't hear yet is that you could do is introduce "identifying easter eggs" into the data if you can. Sorry, not sure what the right word is, but it's a proven technique in certain high level negotiations. You make it easy for this employee to obtain an ever so slightly modified recent version of the data. The modifications are minimal, but allow to identify him as the source of the leak.

Document the easter eggs in a registered letter to yourself. Wait until fairly sure the "custom" version of the data is on employee's machine. Then sue if he leaks.
The wide destruction of the cities is indisputable, I just don't have the impression that the comparable long-term effects outside of the area known as the ancient Greece existed. The more centuries of "dark ages" (effective illiteracy) that ensued seem to be characteristic only to that ancient Greece area?

For example, Phoenicia had a high point exactly at the time of Greek "dark ages":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia#High_point:_1200.E2....

Re Mesopotamia there were already the links.
Apple and google settled [1].

Microsoft, IBM, ebay, a bunch of other companies participated in the collusion scandal. Microsoft's case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations. [2]

Again, I don't think he's a villain, good for him for getting rich. I don't believe those billions are an accurate reckoning of the value he personally has created in the world.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goog...

[2] http://www.workplaceclassaction.com/2015/12/microsoft-defeat...
Correct! The fact that this breaks Ranked-Choice Voting is another reason why this is an interesting example. If the each camp in the population were to sit down and think what they'd prefer, the outcome would be in favor of Jones. So, even if they were using Ranked-Choice voting, Camp 2 would strategically vote, putting their favorite at the bottom, so that they end up better off overall.

Actually, Jones is what is known as the Condorcet winner in this election. :)
Wow, that actually makes me very frustrated, because it means not only did they ignore that flag (not read the documentation?), they actually did more work to implement a tzdata database and check against the current date to change it.

Of course, IIRC it also only had 4 timezone settings, so I guess if you lived in Hawaii, Alaska, the Atlantic time zone, or Newfoundland, you were out of luck. And if you lived in Arizona or Saskatchewan or any other place that didn't observe DST, you were also out of luck. (Well, you could at least manually adjust the time, which I think turned off the auto-DST stuff).
I can't thank you enough for this. Anyway, thank you very much for the detailed information.