7,861 karma · joined December 28, 2008
http://blog.knowtheory.net @knowtheory
Running the ATProto Community Fund. Previously I ran DocumentCloud. I like data big and small.
He styles himself as a truth teller to some sort of "techno-elite", but he's really just a troll with nothing interesting to say.
I agree that I would much rather work with Linus than Wikipedians, but I'd also prefer working with people who I trust to give me their honest opinion without a needless verbal shelacking.
You could also ask me if i'd prefer to have my hand or my foot cut off (foot for the record), but personally my preference is to find a way to keep all of my limbs intact.
The point over which I absolutely support Sarah Sharp is that what Linus is doing is essentially hazing. He's trying to enforce societal norms by handing out verbal beatings, and trying to encourage others to enforce his norms via his methods.
That is a problem. Tart replies regarding criticism of code, or how code is managed is one thing. Trying to encourage a culture of verbal abuse is entirely another.
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Sidebar: There are organizations that do work these sorts of verbal dressing downs as a systematic tactic. The Marines are famous for it. The objective is to provide shared hardship to encourage bonding amongst a group of trainees. They're also famous for fucking it up (so much so that we've got films like Full Metal Jacket to memorialize the experience).
But FOSS and Kernel contribution is not like the Marines. There is no inherent unit of social support to fall into. If you're lucky enough to be part of a group, or to have someone say "oh yeah, that's how Linus is" then maybe you get over it and inure yourself to the abuse. Or maybe you just stop contributing to the Kernel.
This is what the FOIA Machine guys said specifically about that in their application for a Knight News Challenge Grant (scroll down to the competition section): https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submissio...
So, when you're deciding between food and rent, that is a different kind of difficulty than whether you have to decide between private and public school for your kids, and all together a different thing compared to whether you have to spend your time flying coach or business class.
As a sidebar, I think it's reprehensible that we (Americans) conflate having sufficient capital to guarantee one's basic needs with having sufficient access to capital to do interesting things (say create a startup) and also with having sufficient personal wealth to slake one's desires/whims.
In the post-war period the US spent a decent chunk of money via mechanisms like state sponsorship of universities and the GI-bill to ensure that university education was accessible to most Americans.
All of that spending took a downward turn somewhere in the 80s & 90s. As a consequence students must bear the vast majority of the cost of their university education starting somewhere in the 00s.
Universities began looking elsewhere for other sources of funding (since you can't actually run a university solely on the backs of students), and began reaching out for grants from the US government (NIH and NSF being two major funders). Now that gridlock in the Congress has forced the sequester on all of our federal institutions, we're seeing research dollars take a dive now too.
Private schools are part of the problem, but the real problem is that American politics has abdicated its responsibility to educate its people.
Maybe you meant something other than difficult, maybe you meant "easy" instead.
Having enough money to survive on for the rest of your life doesn't mean a life devoid of challenges, but to claim that such a life is difficult is probably a misunderstanding of what difficulty actually is for the vast majority of humans living on the planet.
For a lazy analysis also see: Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
That said, lets do a quick analysis of the subject for GP. It doesn't matter to Snowden what the AP or WaPo thinks of his asylum documents. All he cares about is whether a) his passport will get him through the intermediary countries, and b) whether Ecuador will recognize his asylum document.
He already believes a) or he wouldn't be flying through Europe (although that may have changed if the US has gotten its INTERPOL red notice right finally.
If b) is in question, it would explain why he's still hanging out in the Moscow airport, and not headed on a more direct route for South America.
There are of course many other reasons why Snowden would dally in Moscow, but whether the WaPo or AP thinks of his immigration status in Ecuador doesn't seem like one of them to me.
> "reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer"
That's clearly factually incorrect. Snowden wasn't a career man, and also wasn't an officer. He was an IT infrastructure analyst. He's a support guy.
Reading posts like this make the distinction (even w/in the intel world) very clear: http://qz.com/92509/edward-snowdens-lesson-to-both-businesse...
DIRECT ACCESS ZOMG :P
It doesn't seem unrealistic that someone could take valid creditcard details and put them onto a physical card to swipe.
National media is more or less fine. Local and state reporting has all but disappeared.
If Github were to explode forever tomorrow, active projects would just take their locally cloned repositories, and put them online somewhere else and carry on committing (albeit sans github's awesome social tools). That's the real power git offers us.
It's just a fact of reality that most projects centrally organize through a few bottlenecks. It's easier for people to remember where to go, if there's only one place to go to. But if you're really concerned about it, i suppose you could build a tool to automatically sync a github repo w/ another 3rd party host if you wanted (or visaversa).
Backbone's three major components, Models/Collections, Views and Events do take some planning to coordinate effectively, but that's part of laying out your application.
Also, using bare JS objects is not an anti-pattern in Backbone. Use Models/Collections when you need to manage data, Views when you need to monitor parts of the DOM, and Events to manage messages between your components. Apply as necessary.
P.S. Model.get is literally a single line of bare JS object property access: http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html#section-38 but if you have a lot of events, or validations conditioned to fire on attribute changes, that may effect how long it takes your setters to run (http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html#section-41 )
You can run SQL queries on individual JSON files... but you have to have PostgreSQL installed already.
And you can't run it against multiple JSON files, only one, with a single JSON object at the root.
Especially since you did it without any citation/reference (and since FDL notes that they did the legwork on this).
Edit: I'm going to give the OpenWatch guys the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they never saw the FireDogLake post, and that they were linked directly to the PDF of the letter that is hosted on DocumentCloud's S3 account.
It would be nice if they acknowledged the original source of the letter.
Also, she actually is substantially autistic, despite all of her work and achievements.
Irrespective of who's right on that point, there is a cultural issue here. People who have not lived with/around fire arms, and who do not hunt, have essentially no reason to ever encounter a fire arm. It is, save for violent crime, just not relevant to their lives.
Expecting them to be informed about firearms kind of isn't reasonable is it? So even if the information is out there, they've had no cause, nor frame of reference for figuring out how guns work.
So, when an explainer like this pops up on how easy it is to put together a gun, it's worthwhile to point out that turning some sheets of metal into a gun is really freaking easy, and banning all guns (even if it were legal) would be from a practical standpoint really really hard.
> As has been noted elsewhere in these comments, we do not have a problem with rifle violence in the US. [...] Let's fucking talk about that.
Dude, I could not agree with you more. But despite that, having even the most basic explainer on firearms is still a good thing.
So, anyway, how do we stop handgun deaths, deliberate or accidental? :P
How many of them do you think understand what a receiver is, or what the difference is between an automatic and semi-automatic?
If you genuinely think this is information that more people should not know then say so explicitly.
There is a debate about guns going on in the US, whether you like it or not. The question is whether you want people to make informed decisions or not.
How would you have preferred to see this reported?
Is it just that Mother Jones published it? Is it something he said? Is it the fact that he destroyed the gun afterwards?
Here is Mother Jones publishing an article which gets to the heart of how difficult gun control is as a practical matter, and what is your reply?
Oh they're a "known Liberal magazine" (as if it mattered).
And you're "shocked at how uninformed gun control advocates are".
Here are your avowed Liberal gun control advocates, making the case that gun control is difficult and impractical, and what are you doing? You're chastising them. No attempt to assuage their concerns, no attempt to highlight the points that make gun control challenging. Nothing except a cultural appeal to people who already agree with you.
Way to move the discussion forward.