galeforcewinds

Quite interesting is the bit about hiring the "former lead of GNU Radio" who had experienced pain in getting closed/proprietary hardware things to be useful. I wonder if this will lead to more open platforms. If for no other reason, that bit makes the article worth reading.

On Mac: vi

On Windows: Ubuntu environment and vi

On Linux and BSD: vi

On phones and tablets: email client

Alternate for all platforms: email client

William Gibson's Neuromancer continues to hold up well both for adults and teens. Worth a read or re-read.

Travel books can be a good fit for the summer, and Keri Smith's Wander Society is a fun pick.

I also like to make a random pick or two that I'd never normally choose for myself. My next random pick may be off this thread...

Z

This video of "Inside the RFID Stickers from a Chinese Cashier-less Store" (around 9:20 and again at 12:20) was a real eye-opener to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QKrHi-G9WQ

The courts exist to provide relief to the people and regardless of whether a solution like this were applied, the courts could continue to provide relief. It would be interesting to see a solution which is more self-organizing at a grassroots level and which might mitigate the whole "from on high" decision-making. So long as a small group of driven individuals is making decisions like this, we will continue to have risks from material non-public knowledge used to game the system, and risks to the successful foothold by minority (of any sort) populations except those large enough to warrant party support. It's not an issue that the courts have had to step in -- without the courts the people would be left without relief.

Have you also given yourself a mobile equivalent for those times when you are traveling, or when your primary environment is unsuitable and you must work at a place with public WiFi?

Though your job may be one thing, the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) community provides endless opportunity to do meaningful work on another thing.

Working remote causes you to trust people based on results not on spec. This can impact your interactions when you expect things like followthrough, consistency, demonstration of commitment, attentiveness to your communications, being on-task, and work quality where these things work a bit differently IRL and you are more prone to be exposed to intermediate work products rather than incremental or final.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, What Color is Your Parachute are both absent. Also, science fiction.

The lack of vehicles for SF delivery have at times impeded literary acceptance and broader adoption -- take H.P. Lovecraft for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Literary

Format adaptations have catapulted some great SF into the pop culture stardom:

The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, and though looked upon favorably, it is rarely mentioned today without also mentioning the 1938 radio broadcast.

The Wizard of Oz (Baum 1900) is more famous for its 1939 film.

In more modern times, Johnny Mnemonic (1995 film from "Burning Chrome", Gibson 1986), Snowpiercer (2013 film from "Le Transperceneige", Lob and Rochette 1982), and The Martian (2015 film from "The Martian", Weir 2011) have all increased SF visibility through film adaptations.

Without format shift, would general SF readers have pursued these works independent from the film? Probably. Would these works have entered pop culture and have been sought by the everyman, even the ones who don't routinely buy books or enjoy reading? Less likely.

I have understood some drop in fiction book sales to be caused by the wind-up of the Harry Potter series in 2007. A 2011 article from The Guardian (Datablog section, author uncredited) linked to this spreadsheet of Harry Potter book sales numbers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C6QriM1aMBd5Ab6Tn7hn...

Is Rowling's Potter part of Literary Fiction? The report states "We therefore leave the definition of what literary fiction is, open. [...] What it definitely is not, for our purposes, is poetry or plays. We are looking at fiction." Which causes me to believe it does fall within their definition.

Having technical knowledge and entering a room of less technical policy-makers, it can be particularly important to leverage existing industry messaging rather than winging-it.

I would focus on the CIA triad + Accountability + Assurance. It's helpful to use standard terminology that is understood by existing privacy practitioners.

Personal information should be Confidential from unwanted disclosure.

Personal information should have Integrity with the creation, modification, and deletion of personal information only as authorized and intended.

Personal information should be accessible readily by authorized parties.

Personal information should have Accountability, with traceable ownership to a party responsible for Confidentiality, Integrity and Access.

Personal information should have Assurance, with appropriate audit of Confidentiality, Integrity, Access and Accountability; including the right to inspect.

Just as the Amendments to the Constitution form a latticework of protection for each other -- e.g. that freedom of press helps ensure other rights are not eroded -- the elements of CIA+A+A do the same.

Recommendations can then be framed for direct implementation:

* Confidentiality: Requirements for timely breach notice

* Access: The right of the consumer to be aware of and to have access to access data about them

* Integrity: The right of the consumer to repudiate data about them and demand removal

* Accountability: Direct ownership and legal teeth (fines, jail, and barring of eligibility from data or business management roles, etc.) to compel the presence and adherence of an appropriate privacy management program

* Assurance: Standardized audit reporting, guaranteed consumer right to inspect, etc.

Folks noting "accountability" often mean the entire CIA Triad + A + A, not the technical term "Accountability". This is likely the gap to bridge -- turning a sentiment that businesses are not operating appropriate privacy management programs in to an actionable path to compel existence, adherence, reporting and audit of such programs.

I've always understood abstract thinking to be of broad nature, generalities, non-specific, a vastness.

The idea that abstract thinking is devoid of specifics has never struck me as a prohibition that you can't get to abstract thinking by starting with examples and metrics. Looking for patterns, mind mapping, and tabletop exercises all seem like ways to take concrete thinking elements and bridge them to the abstract.

In doing so, I think there are some specific areas to watch for, namely the influence of cognitive bias. I'm a big fan of the Cognitive bias cheat sheet which has been covered on HN in the past, https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a...

I also believe that the concept of multidisciplinary approaches can be one of abstract thinking -- when you begin your exploration of a topic from the viewpoint of a discipline you have not mastered, your mind is more likely to be able to explore concepts and solutions which are not bound by fact -- you simply don't know the facts and principles of these foreign disciplines intimately.

And just as disciplinary viewpoint can provide interesting triggers in abstract thinking, so can applying empathy and imagination. The best books on things like this are often written for children. Try "The Book of Think: Or how to solve a problem twice your size" (Burns, 1976).

Season 30, Episode 7 (and repeated as Season 37, Episode 1) is "Who wrote the book of Sloyd?"

Available at http://www.pbs.org/video/the-woodwrights-shop-who-wrote-the-...

Also worth noting Season 30, Episode 10 may be of interest as it covers manual training in England. "The Tiny Tool Kit" is tied to Christopher Schwarz's reprint and update of "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker".

Many database platforms support column-level privileges or permissions which could be used to prevent that sort of backfill, by preventing UPDATE on the column that holds the creation timestamp.

I've also dealt with databases without column-level privileges. Where not handled by a column-level privilege system, it may still be possible to block this sort of UPDATE using a TRIGGER designed to fail.

Privilege grant (or drop of the trigger) could be used when the system is in an offline maintenance mode should you require the ability to correct that protected data, reinstituting the control when the maintenance is complete.

The criticality of the data and the level of automation in use would probably be the factors I would use to decide whether this overhead was warranted. Hopefully you had backups available.

Two big pitfalls seem to hit almost all of these "low-level optimization of how the database handles..." type posts: the importance in optimizing the system, and the use of other technologies.

Write activity impacts database query caches. Many applications do not require realtime-accurate results from the database and generate a substantial number of the same paginated queries. For these cases, it is very important to consider higher-level caches within the system -- CDN, page-level caches, page block-level caches, etc. as caching your 99% traffic pattern will provide DB platform headroom to support your 1% traffic pattern.

Where the results you are paginating are based on any sort of matching (SQL WHERE), most read applications see a sizable benefit in integrating a search platform. Data selection for display is handled in the search layer, and underlying data retrieval for display happens either from the search layer or via the backing database using inexpensive lookups via primary key.

One of the key considerations not covered in the article is the need for result consistency when paginating, e.g. if the underlying data changes. It is the need for this consistency, not the desire for performance, that I see as the primary reason to include primary key identifiers or timestamp values in your pagination strategy.

In my experience, the data points most accurate in Glassdoor are those related to tone from the top and the CEO or owner. I've not seen one that didn't match my experience either as an employee or as a customer.

But it's important to remember that these are static data points in time, so there are certainly factors you should weigh based on other available data. For public companies, it can be important to assess changes in organization structure including and around the CEO. For private companies, sale of company is worth considering, though that top leader may still be in place post-sale.

Depending on the role you intend to enter, a negative tone may be what you're looking for -- lots of managers enter roles to help turn around a company. That the problems have been called out directly provides an important starting point in understanding whether you will actually be in a position to fix the problem. And public disclosure of the problems also provides a clear target for response through subsequent Marketing/PR and corporate improvements.

While the concept of peer review of intellectual property work products may be relatively new, there is long history of craft guilds applying peer quality controls on physical work products in part to protect the reputation of that class of products within the market.

When no other action has driven change, financial factors seem to often spur movement. Autopsies in NH are paid for by the state, so a surge will surely trigger a deeper awareness in the legislature. There have also been a number of stories recently about workforce capacity losses and hiring challenges; this places the problem more squarely in the domain of businesses which may have deeper pockets than the government. It is my prediction that before long we'll see lawmakers announcing new public-private initiatives sponsored by large companies to combat the opioid crisis at a community level. I think we're on the leading side of this trend, as government initiatives on the health industry level are just getting rolling, https://www.nih.gov/opioid-crisis

Similar detail, itemized, and with hardware specs appears to be at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-a...

I agree that the number of data points needed for study and the number of variables involved are both key factors. The one area that comes to mind where a approach might be easiest is closed platforms like the hardware Kindle reader -- for example, measuring read times by a large population of the same text, with varying fonts, on the same hardware. Improved typography might reduce read times some modest percentage over baseline due to improved readability.

In my experience, factors include whether there are planned hiring freezes or organization structure changes, the critical experience of the developer for critical projects, and the level of understanding of the manager.

In many cases, if the business is advancing toward a downsizing, they might choose not to make a counteroffer and instead use the departure to fill a planned staffing reduction. This can pose serious issues for the manager when a business chooses such a course when their manpower was not originally slated for downsizing.

I've seen lower appetite for counteroffers in the "middle range" of maturity. When a team has begun to reject cowboy culture and tribal knowledge, embracing high levels of testing, documentation and automation there may be reduced interest in keeping someone for skill and knowledge. I've seen this behavior diminish when organizations reach a higher maturity level and are making a more sizable investment in long-term growth of their employees through things like training.

When serving as a manager, there are many cases where one might step in to ask the business not to make a counteroffer, such as: if the employee is relocating due to their spouse, if the employee determines remote work is not a good fit for themselves, or if the employee is seen to be making positive career steps forward which could not be matched in their current work environment. Many managers are big enough people not to try to hold their employees back.

There are of course many places I've not worked, and many possible cases I've not seen, but the above is my experience.

Bob Pease once said, "my favorite programming language is solder." That this OS runs on closed, proprietary hardware means we either need a third-party solution, for purchasers to vote with their feet, or for the vendor to be brought to their senses. Perhaps this is a regulatory matter for the FCC to evaluate (now or later).

Measuring the world around you can be fun and humorous, especially when you are measuring with a peculiar reference object like a kid's shoe.

I find games of math with kids are most interesting when the adult is on a level playing field and doesn't "hold back" effort. In addition to measurement, games of sorting, spacial analysis, numismatics, and cultivating a favorite number can be fun.

In the 1970's, Hasbro made a game called "Something Fishy" which involved solving a spacial problem of fitting plastic sardines in to a tin can.

Many kids love to count money and learn about the different types of money, and calculate value. Be careful, as they may also be crafty enough to keep the money at the end of the game. The best ending is going to the store and letting them pay.

"The Book of Think: Or How to Solve a Problem Twice Your Size" may be a source of inspiration, as may "Brown Paper School book: Math for Smarty Pants".

Do you have a favorite number? Do you have a favorite shape? Did you know 7 is the scariest number?

I believe an early love of math often stems from a love of numbers, the thought that numbers are your friends. One great game to cultivate this friendliness is to simply go out in to the world and look for a complete set of numbers from 1..20 or so together. Numbers are all around.

I'm a fan of the Apricorn Aegis encrypted USB drives (FIPS 140-2). In assessing the risks around critical offline storage, my primary concerns are that the data has an adequate backup, that no one vendor is entrusted solely with data protection, and low barrier of accessibility as that the solution will actually get used.

The 8GB Aegis drives are around $80. Unlock is performed via PIN entry. The drives are small and have a sliding case to protect the PIN pad, making them pocketable. The hardware is capable of wipe upon failed unlock attempts. Pairing these drives with a software-encrypted filesystem reduces the likelihood that a single-vendor fault could allow bypass and data access. This is a strong option for primary always-on-hand instances of offline data, which could be paired with some other secondary backup option from another vendor (like paper in a safe, HSM or additional encrypted USB keys).

IMO, the board of a public company is responsible for overseeing risk, audit and internal controls, and the CEO is the one person most responsible for ensuring the company acts in accordance with those directives on a day-to-day basis. That an error could be made by a worker is human, though an automated system could also suffer a fault. Audit would have caught a gap, risk management would have caught a vulnerability, and internal controls would have detected incomplete work were these practices properly designed and deployed. Good CEOs look at governance, process, oversight and don't fling muck at employees.

Mr. Bruce Sterling authored "Holy Fire" in 1996, a novel which deals with the topic of radical life extension through a protagonist who is an elderly woman. Contemplative, and a fun read.

Were he alive, Jules Verne would have been an excellent choice. Verne's tomb has a statue dedicated to immortality and eternal youth, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne#/media/File:Verne_...