Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
A couple of decades ago tax code transparency and making it easier and cheaper to file your taxes would have been a very Republican policy. Point taken that the current administration is particularly destructive, but I wouldn't expect Democrats to be very staunch in support this either. The tax/accountant lobby would influence both parties.
Comment · 1 year ago
I was expecting command line financial software...oh well, maybe next time.
Comment · 1 year ago
You'll never be able to run both scenarios side-by-side to compare - obviously. But for the people who say that the solution is to just spend more money, we've been doing that for quite awhile and nothing has seemed to improve.

A more interesting study would be to see how many of those dollars actually reach the student, or the teachers - as opposed to administrators or other positions that have less direct influence over the quality of education.

Comment · 2 years ago
Where are you getting 1.41x? What you'd really like to increase is the SNR. As you open up the bandwidth, the amount of energy you can collect in your band increases, but there's no way to collect the energy from only the signal and not collect the energy from noise. So as you increase your bandwidth, your SNR stays the same.

Not all noise is gaussian. And the fact that the noise is random while the signal is not, is useful when you can average and drop your noise floor. But you need multiple measurements to do that.

Comment · 2 years ago
I don't put a huge emphasis on credentials. If someone is capable and talented, a degree doesn't change that. However, if they were able to complete an engineering degree (or insert analogous degree from any other area) then they have demonstrated an aptitude and capability that others have not.

The people who couldn't create their keypairs may have had the raw material, but they were trying perform at a level they weren't yet capable of - they couldn't google a simple task and follow instructions. They needed to go back to square zero and learn basics when they were in a graduate program. And because the graduate program was dumbed down, they weren't going to learn the basics in the program.

Comment · 2 years ago
It's notoriously difficult for the government to fire an employee. It can also be difficult to fire an employee in a defense contractor. From what I know of Anduril, part of their business model is that they've found a way to handle government procurement differently where they are not as constrained? They may well be able to fire people more easily, but I think they might also do a better job of hiring and retaining talent.

The government outsources things to contractors because they have no idea how to manage those projects. Do you want your mayor as the foreman for the crew paving your roads?

As with most businesses, the government has the money but not the know-how so they need to outsource or contract.

Comment · 2 years ago
I almost graduated (switched programs) from a graduate school cybersecurity program. They tried making the program "interdisciplinary" which essentially meant that they dumbed down the technical classes so that non-technical undergraduate degrees could pass them.

I tried to put together a team of students to compete in one of MITRE's cybersecurity competitions, but struggled to get other students to create SSH keys so that they could get access to the competition server. Not hack into the server, just follow instructions that I gave them to create keys and give me the public ones so that they could log in and participate.

The industry has a similar problem that the military does: It's very difficult to take non-technical people and train them to be cybersecurity professionals, much less hackers.

You need to start with an engineering background, and it almost has to be electrical or computer engineering, or at least computer science. Of those people with that background, hacking in particular is a type of thinking, problem solving, and mentality that not everyone has.

If you want to defend, attack, or manipulate cyber infrastructure you need an understanding of how that infrastructure is designed and operates. An engineering background will at least give you the building blocks for that.

Comment · 2 years ago
This is a great line, though it might not have aged well. Younger generations might just think "Oh, the sky was black"
Comment · 2 years ago
Is this some kind of test?
Comment · 2 years ago
If I met someone who said that any book was their favorite book, and then didn't remember anything about the book or had any value for the ideas that it advocated for, then I'd have to consider that person a bit of a manipulator.

Being disingenuous is just a bad first and only data point to give someone about yourself.

Comment · 2 years ago
Ah got it, there was a 'Constellation' option to find the GPS sats.
Comment · 2 years ago
A user interface suggestion: I tried using the 'Find Satellite' option and manually scrolling through all the options in the drop down menu was a little tedious. Maybe allow a filter by typing the first couple of letters?

Also, what are the US GPS satellites listed under? I saw Beidou, GLONASS, and Galileo but I couldn't find the GPS satellites.

Comment · 2 years ago
If you have no experience in writing software, physics, or applying higher level math, jumping into a master's program without an engineering background will probably wreck you.

Lots of universities will let you sign up for graduate level classes as a continuing education student or certificate program. Sign up for one and see if you can keep your head above water. Even taking a Python class at a community college would help a lot.

Comment · 2 years ago
That Chevron Deference decision might change the authority that the FTC has in interpreting that.
Comment · 2 years ago
Definitely need to add a womp womp on a compile error

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