zipfle

I've heard the idea that banks are keeping foreclosed houses off the market a few times. Do you know of a reference that describes the scale of that?

Well, as we're already dreaming, why not stipulate that the person who gets credit for the breakthrough should be the person who gathered the data, not the person who analyzed it.

In any case, neither of you have fooled me yet.

I wonder if there's an analog to "parallel construction" that uses intelligence contractors and competitive intelligence firms to move NSA data to the private sector.

It's interesting that this was a "failure" because it was supposed to be a customer acquisition strategy/business plan. I wonder how the math would shake out if you looked at it as a market research expense.

sorry to repost; mistyped url last time.

I've found that in many environments, particularly on the web, it's much harder to make sure you've accounted for all the quirks and interactions with related systems than it is to find the right basic algorithm. There have been few times I've really thought something like "If only I'd known about A*!", but comparatively many times I've thought something like, "If only I'd thought to test two-finger swiping on a touch device with both fingers inside the element created by that javascript."

EDIT: Also, maybe more importantly, I never feel more tempted to give up than when I know I've solved the basic problem but some environmental factor prevents the solution from being usable. The fun part is over, and if I want to make progress I have to dive into docs and other people's source code, and write good tests. I think there's more difference between someone who gives up at that stage and someone who doesn't than there is between someone who knows a particular algorithm and someone who doesn't.

Whenever I hear this, I find I don't recognize the world the poster lives in. Is it a thing to tell coworkers when you're looking for a new job? If not, how many jobs do you need to have and leave before you have a big enough network for this to be a viable strategy? How do you get those jobs?

I went from zero programming experience (English major) to a dev job in about a year and a half. There is a LOT of luck involved. In my case, I knew someone at the company where I got hired, and was hired for a sort of 'unspecified assistant / other' position, and took on every single 'hey we need a script to...' task I could find until they gave me bigger projects. You need a story besides "I am a developer" to get your foot in the door, and your business degree is probably the place to start. What insights could your programming experience give you that a person with a comparable background would never have? What kinds of product opportunities could you spot that a great developer might not notice? So my first piece of advice is about your objective. Try to find the specific combination of skills and interests that you have that few other people have, and then think about where all of them might be useful.

My second piece of advice is about your skill set. As someone who is mostly self-taught, it's going to be hard for you to get people to give your work serious consideration. Your reference projects should demonstrate a serious focus on readability, documentation, and testing. I advocate for those things in general, but people like you and me actually have something to prove, and we may not get many chances to show off. So when you learn a new framework or language, make sure you understand the preferred style for code and docs, the way projects are usually organized, and one popular testing framework. Those things will reassure employers that you are serious about doing a good job, not just copying the most-complete stackexchange answer and tweaking it until it works.

Good luck.

I sometimes make calls to collections.namedtuple and other class building functions at the same time as the rest of my definitions.

I always try to write code that my favorite English professors would approve of.

Interesting that their evidence --a stone arrowhead found in a whale-- is actually also described in Moby Dick itself:

---

It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into [a whale, not Moby Dick] with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered.

gutenberg.org full text:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm

Maybe this is a silly question, but if you haven't looked at them, how do you know the decision hasn't been made?

dear lawyers,

Isn't there a thing called 'slander of title?'

Would that thing apply in the case of representing someone else's work as your own for the purpose of issuing a DMCA?

I really like this idea. I'm planning on starting to freelance in a few months, and one of the things that really worried me was setting rates. I know how much runway I have to make it a success, and I'm confident I can get work pricing myself below market rates (anyone can sell $5 for $4 forever). But I've heard a lot of people say you shouldn't try to be the lowest-priced option, because then you end up with clients who don't respect your time. I was worried that I might have to choose between market rates and be outcompeted by people with better portfolios, and low rates and clients I didn't like. This seems like a great third way. Start out below market, and raise my hourly rate by $1 for every 100 hours. I'll have plenty of time for portfolio building, even if I have to hustle for people who aren't my ideal clients (which actually sounds like a necessary experience anyway). Then when my rate goes up, if those customers don't think my time is that valuable, we can just part ways.

I'm considering stopping my day job to work as a contractor. My goal isn't to avoid stupid grunt work--I just hope that being entirely responsible for my upkeep and well-being will make the stupid grunt work seem more urgent and important. When I see posts like this (especially when, as in this case, the author claims to like his situation), something about them seems a bit condescending. It sounds like he's saying that if you don't like having a boss you're not cut out for running a business. When I look at successful small business people, though, they all seem like the ones who don't like being bossed around. They work crazy hard for their clients, yes, they make big sacrifices, yes, but they're not motivated by the kind of petty dread that the pointy-haired boss types engender.

The original report is remarkably well-written. It's nice when you get someone with the domain knowledge to understand an issue and also the language skill to explain it clearly.

And nearly in the same breath he starts pouting that they never 'splurged' on the large bags.

Interesting story though.

Misleading title. Suggest: People On Internet Say They Will Do Something That Will Totally Stick It To The Man, Just You Wait.

The design of this blog is so good that I almost didn't notice how good it is.

I closed my fb account two or three years ago, at a point when I was really virulently anti-fb. I still haven't re-opened it, but I've mellowed a bit--not that I approve of it, really--it's a disgusting panopticon at best--but it's at least sufficiently obvious that it's hard for me to feel like anyone hangs out there without understanding what the basic dynamic is.

Now, articles like this don't make me feel bad for the kids who 'have to' use facebook (not that they don't; it sucks being ostracized, we all know). Really, they make me remember this talk by Steve Yegge[1] about how stupid it is that so many smart people spend their time working on cat pictures.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

lmakeppleave is saying that the amount that used to be stolen was "income" the employees were making (albeit illegitimately). like, I as a waiter make $100 per shift and steal $20 per shift; my net is $120 per shift.

When they put in cameras and I start upselling instead of stealing, I need to upsell 20 / .15 (15%, the traditional tip amount) to have my net remain at $120. That means I need to increase the restaurant's gross by $133 to maintain my extra $20 of income. lmakeppleave is arguing that it's easier to steal $20 than to increase the restaurant's gross by the amount needed to make $20 legitimately.

I'm a python-native programmer who just recently picked up SICP. I've been trying to use some more functional tools; I told a friend at work one day that I was going to try to do everything with just map and filter.

But I also just had an experience I haven't had much since I was extremely new: the experience of going back to something I wrote last week and not being able to decipher it. I'm going to keep it up, partly because I like it and also because I have some hope (unjustified?) that map will give me better performance than looping. I wish there was a way to enable tail recursion though--seriously, I promise I'll ask for clear stack traces when I need them.

The hygiene hypothesis "is used to explain the increase in allergic diseases that has been seen since industrialization, and the higher incidence of allergic diseases in more developed countries."

This is to say that it's a relatively recent problem; one that has not applied selective pressure over the millions of years of evolution you're talking about, but rather the past ~200 years or so. My non-biologist understanding is that you can expect evolution to a relatively good job of adapting to slowly changing conditions over a long period by selecting for the vanishingly small number of mutations that happen to be beneficial.

My citizen understanding of government is that we should expect more of it than that, or it will continue to suck.

without transmitting suspicious data except:

1) ars technica post with encoded public key 2) ars technica post with shared secret of some kind 3) ars technica post with hidden url 4) flickr photos of size (visible_resolution + resolution_of_hidden_images + any_salt)--way larger than they should be

This is without mentioning that in order to use this system, he has to have either already contacted wl to set it up (just moving that risk to some other time) or wl has to have indicated that messages of those kinds will be read (ensuring that the nsa knows too, and is paying attention).

import this

If the user is placing their trust in the UX's ability to validate that PGP/GPG is working correctly and has not been tampered with, that sounds exactly like something that could get someone killed.

Holy copyediting fail, Wired.

It seems like the more draconian and restrictive the rules for TLA employees get, the more TLA work ends up getting done by outside contractors whose chief qualification to do it is that they aren't bound by stifling TLA restrictions.

If future potential sources google the article author's name, they're going to find a vindictive-sounding article in which he fails to adequately protect the anonymity of sources to whom he explicitly promised it. Too bad there's no way to get something removed from google.