feklar

I avoid MOOCs lately as they are often too slow paced, or lacking in specific and/or advanced material and instead find a university with a public accessible calendar and cherry pick what I'm interested from there. For example this excellent course from CMU on the internals of modern database management systems. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjbisIGOepfn...

Those cities are also destinations for migrant homeless. How would this SLC system cope if new homeless were showing everyday from out of city like they are in Seattle or SF, or where I live as the eastern street youth population migrates out here every winter to avoid the cold.

Seems like every city would have to try the SLC model instead of putting their homeless on a bus with a one way ticket.

Friend of mine runs a tiny and successful to-go cafe. His most unexpected problem was competitor restaurants around him constantly phoning city hall to "complain" about his business in hopes they regulate him off the street. The most common complaint at first was cooking smell, so the tiny cafe is forced to install expensive filtration exhaust.Then the complaints turned to signage. A city inspector showed up numerous times to measure his sign, how far his little sandwich board was placed in the sidewalk out front, the brightness of the lights on his sign, that the artwork on the sandwich board was offensive or violated one of the thousands of regulations regarding public advertising. Then the complaints turned to patio, there was too much noise, chairs were too far into the street, garbage was left too long on tables, ect.

Anybody with a restaurant/cafe startup idea should have some kind of contingency plan to deal with the inevitable use of city hall to try and close you down.

Nil interface/nil pointer in the interface errors also explained in this 'Go landmines' post https://gist.github.com/lavalamp/4bd23295a9f32706a48f

I remember reading an article about AirBnB breaking into Japan, where the local resistance wasn't the usual complaints of limiting the monthly rental supply therefore jacking up rental rates, but that AirBnB 'encouraged more foreigners to come here'. To get rid of foreigners, Japan puts up so many blocks and delays to permanent residency they hope you get the message and choose to leave.

According to 4/2chan posters from Japan it's all about money. Men are expected to have a career by age 30something and be set for a family, if they don't it's seen as shameful so they don't try to date. Too many low paying jobs, with fleeting job security, and no support for single women to raise a family.

I have a new habit of reading a Princeton University Press book a week, it's good to get a modern update from a professor on the status of Greek history research, and other subjects. For example this book was one of the best books I've read in years the explains why we learn elementary math the way we do currently and how it's changed through history, how it ties into more advanced concepts, how infinity complicates everything. A great read with little noise http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10697.html

This is how RMS has made a living for 2 decades. One advantage to attending these is being able to briefly talk to the speaker afterwards if they stick around, like asking RMS about his papers in the 1970s about propagation, dependencies and backtracking for building large-scale symbolic systems.

No real time, some months at a pretrial, some months at a state prison then transferred to BOP and deported.

BOP I was constantly transferred around, for unknown reasons. Sometimes after a week, three weeks, or a few days (same with my friends who did time in federal, who knows why). Everytime, somebody would try the "Do you know what that guy said about you?" trick. Later I find out they had a certain amount of days to fight somebody to squash some beef they had or be kicked off that unit by the other inmates, so tried to get me to fight for them instead, hoping the other guy gets adseg for fighting me. I got so used to this set up that whenever some guy approached me and said "Hey, let's walk together to chow" the morning after I arrived at a new unit and lined up for count, I immediately knew he was going to ask me to fight somebody for him.

Indeed, you don't have to win any fights in prison you just have to be willing to fight. This is usually instigated by The Punk Test, where somebody will try to incrementally take advantage of you, by either saying something and seeing if you let it slide, then later bumping into you, finally taking your stuff, ect. If you don't fight typically you will be kicked out of that unit and forced to go to another, where your reputation will of course travel with you and they will make your life hell there as well.

Article could have said something about how to avoid needless fights (prob in the book I assume). For example, being in the yard and some guy is looking to start a fight. "What are you looking at?" of course, the wrong answer is "Nothing" as the reply will be "So I'm nothing goof?". The right answer is "Sun in my eyes, no disrespect". You both walk away as respect is maintained and dude trying to bait you into a fight figures out you aren't an easy mark and goes to harass somebody else.

There is also a saying "Do your own time not somebody elses". This means somebody approaches you and says "Hey, do you know what <insert name> said about you?". This guy is trying to get you to fight somebody for him. Your answer can only be "Let him say that to my face" and leave it at that. In general you never talk about other inmates when they are not around, part of the whole mind your own business mantra of prison.

Never go to the TV area if one exists. Fights always happen here over who gets to watch what, and often set ups happen where one group of inmates will be attacked by a rival group and you don't want to be caught in the middle while it all kicks off.

Finally, do not complain about the food or anything else out loud, or ever tell anybody when you are getting released. Guys who brag how they only have a few months left or are getting out the next week will have some guy who's doing decades or life immediately smash them because they don't want to be reminded of how much time they have. There will also be guys who simply want to mess with your release date and try to cause trouble because they can.

If you want to impress your fellow inmates, screw the system as much as possible like demanding a Kosher meal (often it's better quality food), orchestrating transfers, finding ways to weasel out of bad work detail. Anything you can figure out that gets one over on the system is respected.

tl;dr generally prison is not hollywood unless you're in a gang or owe money to drug dealers. For the most part you will just be doing time and bored stiff so get somebody to mail you TAOCP to do by hand, I wish I had that instead of the dismal prison library. Keep eyes forward, look at people's hands who are approaching you not their eyes.

Some state prisons still allow weight stacks, they post their weight lifting competitions on youtube all the time (illegally, not sure how prisoners get phones).

Here's some guy in a no weight stack prison, with a contraband phone showing off his exercise routine (and pics of the homemade water weights) https://youtu.be/WLmDkcb6JQE

There are "Prison Consultants" that exist for this. Besides survival their main avenue of expertise is how to influence the decision on where you will be sent and/or transfer to your prison of choice.

Madoff hired a consultant which is why he's teaching economics classes at a minimum security trustee camp right now instead of letting the system just send him anywhere.

Another annoying trend is only offering remote workers half vacation as the other half is 'a paid company retreat with the team!'. I do not want to ride bikes or go sailing with my coworkers and boss in Thailand for 2 weeks I want time off to see my family.

Would tuition also follow by being more affordable? The government guarantees loans for everybody so institutions jack up their fees accordingly it seems.

They don't have to fear for their life on a 24/7 basis while doing hard time http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3338209&post...

I understand the position that why should criminals get anything since they have nothing coming to them, but some sort of plan has to exist to stop the revolving recidivism door or even promote prison order. There's state prisons that now allow you to order (with your meagre work wages) takeout pizza and other food from restaurants close to the prison if you have good time credit. Apparently that is the best discipline motivator since nobody wants to risk losing their pizza and takeout privs.

The media report wasn't very clear. First Manning is in solitary because of the suicide attempt, which every prison does when an inmate tries to kill themselves. You get put in a room under 24/7 surveillance with only a blanket usually for 3 weeks evaluation and sometimes extended if you keep making suicide threats.

The prison disallows any deviation from military grooming regulations. Manning was in genpop, and repeatedly violated this regulation growing out hair/wearing makeup ect so the prison kept pulling her privileges, plus getting Manning thrown back in adseg as punishment. This is what all prisons do when you get written up for minor violations of dress code, after there's nothing left to restrict they just put you in solitary.

tl;dr Manning has won the right to transition to female while being incarcerated through a lawsuit but the military doesn't know how to accomodate this. I'm guessing Manning will get moved to one of the empty wings at Leavenworth, and effectively be in solitary confinement with an entire wing to herself. That will be the prison's concession, we have complied with the lawsuit so here's your new prison to yourself as punishment because there exists no political directives from Washington DC and the military can only follow it's own rulebook.

BOP (feds) is the worst of all the systems when it comes to having any kind of blog/fb/twitter or speaking to the media. A friend of mine once posted his prison band, and apparently they weren't supposed to have access to instruments so everybody in that picture was given 2 months adseg and my friend they moved around prison to prison repeatedly to keep him away from any mail. https://www.thekindland.com/your-prison-blog-is-legal-but-it...

State prisons vary where some don't care at all so long as you don't specifically call out guards by name, you're free to keep a blog and even criticize the warden but BOP, this is a big no.

There's some outliers to that article, many state prisons allow for min wage now such as Arizona where female inmates can work at a polling/telemarketing company and be paid the state minimum wage. The great thing about this is those inmates walk out with $10,000 or so saved up and have a chance to land on their feet instead of say, TDCJ who denies state prisoners any kind of income whatsoever.

Can script all that yourself if you properly document it so somebody else can come along a figure out exactly what is going on should you disappear/quit/call in sick/hit by bus.

Elastic Search 'beats' ( https://www.elastic.co/products/beats ) can do all the monitoring/stats, deploying snapshots to multiple servers can also be automated in Go or drop a Go binary on the server for some kind of Command&Control architecture for continuous remote maint, starting/stopping containers ect (assuming all security precautions have been considered).

This worked for a deployment of ~75 docker containers ymmv

Many had this feature (and Paypal for a while) but dropped it for some reason. My guess is they want to encourage subscription/repeat billing or some kind of fraud was rampant generating temporary numbers.

There's always Antergos which is essentially Arch + magic (installer + scripted updates). It just works with little configuration. Problem with Arch or any rolling release is you will download a gigantic amount of updates every day it felt like I was rolling dice with my system stability everytime.

ID-Kick-Fucking-Ass, ID-Delta-Quit-Delta was a made up frat of college dropouts

The tax only really affects landed immigrants who live and work in BC, and foreign capital investments in new developments as the Chinese speculators with billions who want to park money in Vancouver have already found ways around it because they can deposit millions to set up national corporations and have it do all the land holding/flipping. For example my sister who has lived here 30yrs with American citizenship will have to move to another province or back to the US if she sells her house since she will be eligible for the 15% tax buying a new place, on top of all the other existing taxes so is looking at +20% tax when her family outgrows their home.

0.8% vacancy rate, good luck renting also landlords all use fix term year leases now where you agree to move after it expires in order to bypass the provincial rent increase cap and raise your rent +30% https://www.biv.com/article/2016/6/tight-rental-market-bc-la...

I used https://bitcoin.co.th/ to pay out to an ATM w/code, not sure if they still offer it.

Since there's not one technical detail on their marketing site I'm going to assume this is reskinned Firefox with SQLCipher dropped in.

I was also under the impression that kids who plan out STEM majors typically bypass single variable (Calc I) and other freshman intro programs through advanced placement. https://www.cmu.edu/mcs/prospective/ap.html as an example

Found the original post that explains the algorithm better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665250

It is hard if the book has an incomplete index or poorly named chapters forcing you to skim around.

There are also plenty of incompetent dealers like the one here who mixed up his crack and fentanyl stash causing 39 ODs http://vancouversun.com/news/crime/36-drug-overdoses-in-one-...

If I remember correctly this method was advised in the comments of an HN article about Concrete Mathematics by Knuth et all. I used this for undergraduate texts, mainly in math that I had collected over the years and never got around to reading, like Calculus (Apostol), Algebra: Chapter 0 (Aluffi), Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (Bryant/O'Halloran), a 1000+ page book I flew through as I found I knew some of the material already and used the exercises to test what I had forgotten so I could re-read that material. I also discovered by doing this, subjects I thought I knew and would've skipped, I didn't actually remember correctly and other subjects I thought I didn't know, I could solve without having to read the chapter as previous exercises were helpful enough to understand the problem or I had picked up the information somewhere else.

Aluffi's book also helpfully tells you which exercises require solving previous exercises.

Somebody here once recommended when doing any kind of text with exercises to open to a random chapter and attempt the first exercise. If you can't do it research through the index/book where the information to help you solve it is likely to be found and repeat for all exercises. I've been doing this ever since, finished my library of unread books I had collected over the years but never had the time to read.