just_steve_h

Would now be a good time to remind savvy technical readers that it's crucial to have a solid grounding in ethics? It can be hard to draw a line when you work deep inside a system.

No informed scuttlebut on causes yet?

I miss her voice. She was a singular talent.

Toshi Reagon created a musical version of The Parable of the Sower that moved me to tears - highly recommended if you can find a video of the performance.

"… weirdos and designers buying type for their clients" – but, I repeat myself!

Folks - don't be obtuse. Police commanders know exactly what will happen when they escalate with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Pro-police forces WANT mayhem. It makes people watching on TV afraid of the protests, and it changes the subject away from the widespread peaceful opposition to racist police violence.

It certainly does make one wonder who else in the worlds of high technology (and journalism!) May be – wittingly or unwittingly – working for Uncle Sam.

I've seen some deep integrations that have made me despair of any organization being free from the overweening influence of the "security services." I'm talking about groups as large as multi-billion dollar public US technology infrastructure companies and as small as anarchist cells planning to attend a political convention.

Sometimes it seems that internal turf battles, budget disputes, careerism, and rank incompetence are our only protections against the machinations of the National Security State.

Do any of the folks writing these articles know anything about ARPA (now DARPA) and the US government's foundational role in funding the development of technologies like radar, transistors, microchips, the Internet...?

Honestly, the United States scolding China's state support for their domestic tech manufacturer is about as ridiculous as a nation founded upon human slavery lecturing the world about human rights!

...

What?

I can't believe no one has linked L. J. Hart-Smith's classic 2001 paper "Out-Sourced Profits" yet!

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2011/02/04/2014130646...

It offers a detailed look at Douglas Aircraft and their doomed attempt to boost profits via outsourcing.

Those familiar with the commercial aviation business know that Boeing's "purchase" of McDonnell-Douglas resulted in wholesale importation of Douglas's accounting wizardry to what had been a largely engineering- and safety-driven corporate culture.

Relevance to the MAX fiasco and the tardiness of Boeing's NMA designs is left as an exercise to the reader…

"Went from?" No. Has always been.

Fascinating that an article with so much detailed information doesn't include a discussion of waste and the costs associated with handling and storing it safely for [checks notes] 10,000 years.

This is a very old argument. I got my bachelor's degree in psychology at Harvard in 1993, and was told repeatedly that p-tests are abused, overused, and not terribly useful.

To my mind, the most hackable flaw is that the number of subjects in the study is a term in the denominator of the p-value calculation. Any study with a sufficiently large sample will find "significance" with p<.05, but it won't be meaningful.

We were taught that "effect size" measures were crucial to understanding and interpreting results. If you have p<.05 but a tiny effect size, you're likely not seeing a meaningful difference.

This gentleman suffered for the entire day in order to bring us this excellent summary from today's extraordinary session of Parliament. He is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/IanDunt

His most telling comment: "I never fucked up harder than when I forgot to buy some of those little G&T cans when I came into work today."

I'm grateful for walrus's comment. And yet I feel they are in the minority.

We are long past time for real professional ethics in our professions.

If we are so bold as to claim the title "engineer," where are our obligatory professional standards? Our licensure? Our - gasp - liability?

If a structural engineer designs a bridge in a way that ignores established best practices, and the bridge fails and causes injuries, the engineer is held responsible.

Why are our professions different?

"Dhalgren" and "Stars in My Pockdt Like Grains of Sand" are two of the most revelatory, liberating novels I've ever had the pleasure to encounter.

Neither is easy. Both reward re-reading.

The man is a treasure!

Thank you gregmac21 for doing some uncompensated labor :)

Does anyone know the address ranges that are affected?

Right. The argument "not that many bikes, why build bike lanes?" is a bit like "nobody crosses the river on a raft, so why build a bridge?"

The subject was the complaints of drivers about losing on-Street parking to a bike lane.

Not a straw man at all!

Actually the City of Cambridge installed a bike counter on one of the main thoroughfares toward one of the bridges over the Charles River into Boston. There are more than 1000 trips in each direction on a weekday.

Why do you find it worth asking why I mentioned his race?

There is certainly a strong relationship among perceived entitlement/privilege, apparent race and ethnicity, and apparent gender. I shouldn't need to explain this.

I also wonder what all our resident PRIVATE PROPERTY enthusiasts think about on-street parking: what other of my 250 sq.ft. objects may I store on public property for free?

I've lived in Cambridge or neighboring Somerville every year but one since 1989. The cycling infrastructure is much improved and still deadly.

Just yesterday, I approached an arterial Street from a side street at 6pm. Cars on the arterial were moving about 8 MPH. I dismounted my bike, and began walking across the arterial in the crosswalk. As I re-mounted on the other side and resumed riding, a white man in a mid-size SUV leaned out his window and said loudly to me, "I hope you get hit!"

This morning on my way to work, a driver popped out of a side street from my left side directly in front of me. As I was along side of him, he swerved hard to the right and into a parking lot (no signal of course).

I've been a daily bike commuter in Cambridge for 12 years. We desperately need infrastructure that forces drivers to respect cyclists as equal road users. There is hardly a day that I don't almost get hit by car while cycling.

Contents of the article aside, this for me was the hardest to parse headline I've read on HN in a long time!

Here's the design decision that puzzles me the most: MCAS commands nose-down trim. The pilot uses the trim button on the yoke to command nose-up trim. Why isn't that enough to disable MCAS and cause an audible alert?

Think of an analogy: when the autopilot commands a nose-down elevator input, and the pilot pulls back on the control column, that's enough to disengage the autopilot.

Or think of cruise control in a car: if the computer commands acceleration, and the driver steps on the brake, cruise control disengages.

The necessity of MCAS is to meet regulatory requirements for similarity in handling characteristics to achieve a common type rating. It's not strictly an engineering requirement, nor is it a safety-assisting technology. It's an attempt to mask the actual aerodynamic characteristics of the aircraft being flown. That is a conflicting mission if you will.

Fantastic article that sheds beautiful light on the core of modern digital computers.

"a glimpse at the wild life of America’s most polarizing tech superstar, underscoring the chaos of a year in which he savaged his enemies as idiots and pedophiles, smoked weed during a live interview and got sued by federal authorities accusing him of misleading investors"

makes popcorn

watches fanboys' heads explode

I'm so grateful to EFF and the iRepair folks and everyone else who is out there "fighting the good fight" on behalf of us regular end-users! Great news!

Obviously, expecting deals to protect voting machines is foolish! They should've hired walruses.

I sure am glad I live in a country (the U.S.) where my movements, purchases, and public movements aren't tracked!

Professor Chomsky has often had to respond to criticism that he singled out the U.S. for his criticisms. He rightly points out that, as a citizen of the U.S., he is obligated first to attempt to address the wrongs (as he sees them) of his own government first, since he (at least in theory) has some ability to influence his own government.