venning

The original announcement from 2006: https://signalvnoise.com/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...

It's interesting to see how their expectations appear to have lined up well eleven years later.

I wouldn't normally leave a reply like this, but I would like to say that your comment took me by surprise. In my personal community, I'm used to knee-jerk responses to the military that feel both hostile and uninformed. Your reply was neither and I want to thank you for that.

I can get a bit defensive about this sort of thing, but that's not an excuse for implying that you were being "cavalier". I apologize for doing so. You seem to be thinking carefully about what you want to do and how to go about doing it.

I sincerely appreciate that you are approaching your work and your words with thoughtfulness. Good luck with your project.

> What happens if private company ABC Inc. Is using your software, and then they are contracted by the military to perform work

This would likely fall under normal contract negotiation due diligence. You don't accept a contract to use a piece of software that you aren't legally allowed to use on that contract. Violating that would be ABC Inc.'s problem (though it would obviously affect the contractee). Thus, the status of your various software licenses needs to be tracked.

I worked with a vendor that had issues like this. They would need to "firewall off" not only data but also employees who were working on or with data or software that could not legally be used on another contract. This extended to seating assignments in their cubicle farm, where some people could not sit near other people who were working on conflicting contracts. The onus of staying legally compliant was taken very seriously.

As a former DoD contractor and someone who has spent the majority of his life around the US military [1], I have three points:

1) The majority of the DoD struggles to get permission to use open source software. There are plenty of developers, DBAs, and IT technicians who would love to use some piece of software that they are not allowed to use specifically because it is open source. I once spent 11 months trying to get approval to use a single Google-produced library. I was unsuccessful.

2) Related to the above, agencies responsible for approving software for use are very concerned with licensing issues. After all, they are used to negotiating licensing terms for multi-million dollar contracts. The fact that OSS essentially guarantees that you have no one to call [2] when you have an issue (for the entire lifespan of the project) is a large part of why they will not approve OSS. Beyond that, compliance is a real concern. Popular opinion may be of heartless assholes, but these are real people working jobs. I would not be so cavalier in saying "they'll just use it anyway".

3) I am always disappointed, though never surprised, when people assume that the military works solely to execute war. I was specifically contracted to a (large) part of the military that works on exactly the kind of thing that prevents and reduces violence (sorry to be vague). The kind of domain that would probably translate improved computer vision into saving lives (domestic, foreign, combatant, and civilian). That is, if they could get approval.

[1] I have no idea how other countries' militaries operate.

[2] Literally call. On a phone.

Honest question: is there any evidence that refined sugar has a deleterious effect on brain function? I can find this: [1], but I'm not sure how to interpret it.

Yes, weed and sugar are both addictive, but it is my understanding that the reduction in performance is not due to the addiction itself.

[1] http://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/harvard-mahoney-neuroscience-in...

> see geology pre plate tectonics for an example of mainstream science being in short supply of doubt

Did you mean to say not in short supply of doubt? I thought this was something with little certainty. Or are you saying that little certainty translates to little doubt? Honest question.

Okay, I gotcha with the [1, 1].

I'm still curious about using it. The GitHub example [1] works as described, but I can't get a result from the 'he' example. Is it saying no match was found by returning an empty array?

EDIT: Okay, saw your edit. Might be nice to use an example that's not a stopword. ;) Nice work on the library and the blog post.

[1] https://github.com/KingPixil/wade#usage

I'm sorry, I'm still a bit confused. If it "refers to the index in the data", how is it referring to both "Hey" and "Hello"?

Running the following doesn't seem to work for me:

  var Wade = require('wade');
  var search = Wade(['Hey', 'Hello']);
  search('he'); // returns []

> In the end, we will be left with a results array like:

  [1, 1]

Is that supposed to be [0, 1]? If not, how does that correlate to ["Hey", "Hello"]?

That's a good question, but probably impossible to answer due to the US's peculiarity. From Wikipedia's list [1], it appears that the US is one of only a handful of countries with employer contribution. All of the others countries I could see are noted as using employer contribution as secondary, where a very large percentage of US coverage has employer contribution as primary or only.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_systems_by_country

It may also minimize the impact all of that moving air has on everything else in the station. Without gravity, fans blowing your things around could get annoying.

Not sure about the movement-momentum question.

Thinking about it, the bicycle would only rotate about the center unless it had something to react against, as was pointed out by others.

You're right. I was thinking about that, but I really don't know. This is pretty far out of my expertise. averagewall made a good point [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14796338

Imagine holding up a bicycle in the air from the midpoint. Now spin both wheels in opposite directions. No movement. Now apply one brake. Now you have movement. Now do that in three dimensions with precision and you have this thing.

Conservation of momentum applies when there are "no external forces", which wouldn't be the case here when you apply the brake.

EDIT: Yeah, my apologies. I didn't mean to write "momentum".

From a related video: the reaction wheels spin up while keeping total angular momentum at zero, then apply a rapid (magnetic) brake to transfer the momentum to the body (from the wheels). I'm assuming if you do that precisely enough (and in three dimensions), you can generate linear movement.

EDIT: I'm probably very wrong about the movement.

EDIT: The video: https://youtu.be/n_6p-1J551Y

Don't know if you check these 5 days later, but you never reverted this change.

Doesn't help you on mobile.

Another way of interpreting the results:

- 76.87% of subjects accepted a 25% tax rate intended for redistribution.

- 44.80% of subjects accepted a 50% tax rate intended for redistribution.

It's hard to infer much beyond that.

Perhaps they need to test for a larger number or more fine-grained tax levels between 25% and 50% and see if there is indeed a step change (or other sharp decline) in acceptability when it "reverses social order". Or if there is a smooth distribution curve based on tax rate, not relative position.

---

Even if you take the results as intended, that subjects were considering social order and not tax rate, you still have to concede that this could be about "fairness" and not "rank". It shouldn't be surprising that a majority of people dislike redistributing more than is necessary to achieve equality. That helps explain the results with the children. Ages 6-10 is about where they start to understand "fairness" from the perspective of both parties [1].

Additionally, taking the tax perspective into account, "Person B" appears to be subject to a lower tax rate than "Person A" despite ending up with more money, which subjects would likely see as unfair.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/how-fair...

See "Step 3": https://debug.com/how/

I'm assuming that Symantec makes money off of selling SSL certs which, again I'm assuming, they will make less of as Let's Encrypt begins to gain "conquest" domains over "greenfield" domains (those that did not and would not have held a cert without ACME and without being free). Of course, that assumes that a substantial number of paid-for SSL users switch to Let's Encrypt. Unless I'm misunderstanding, this may solve two problems for Symantec.

EDIT: I have no idea if LE's impact is of a "rising tide raises all boats" kind or a purely disruptive kind.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians

> an important distinction

That it is a distinction is important to me. Having difficult discussions is made more difficult if we obscure facts or conflate terms.

> more acceptable

I applied no normative judgement.

Just so no one is misled: "original inhabitants" does not mean "indigenous peoples" with respect to the BIOT. The islands were not populated prior to late-18th Century European colonization. The depopulation was of post-colonial people.

(Not affiliated with Pinboard or even a user.) If your problems occurred 1.5 months ago, the "huge impending work" was likely Pinboard buying Delicious [1] and subsequently being inundated with Delicious users attempting to onboard. Not an excuse, just context.

[1] https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...

The submission URL should probably be changed to https://keychest.net/content/letsencrypt_numbers_to_know

The current link is just a poor summary of the data on that page.

Two things about this incident have always struck me: How incredibly calmly New York City handled what movies tell me should be a riot-worthy moment; and how I have never met someone who wasn't living in the Northeast at the time who is aware that this occurred (I mention it off-and-on).

The cheapest per request is $0. There is a free tier where, presumably, the long tail lives.

The Westermarck effect attempts to explain why that is not a simple mental adjustment. It's a theory, but it states "people who live in close domestic proximity during the first few years of their lives become desensitized to sexual attraction." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect

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