Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
"Kafkaesque" suggests people standing in very long queues. It doesn't seem unreasonable as a name for very long queue software.
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
I get out of sorts when other cyclists break the law. How can we cyclists ask drivers to obey the law, to protect us, if we won't even do it ourselves?
Comment · 4 years ago
I'm right handed but I use my left hand to mouse for RSI reasons.
Comment · 4 years ago
I learned to knit. It helps keep me from getting distracted during video meetings. (I apparently need to fiddle with my hands a lot, and a fidget spinner or doodling doesn't cut it.) I got a lot of help from my wife, but learning it was pretty straightforward.
Comment · 6 years ago
If you do the take-home problem, do you get to skip the interview? My understanding was that it might, at most, replace a 1-hour whiteboarding interview. The one time I did a take-home problem for an interview, I spent a whole weekend day on it (which felt hard, given that I was making my wife watch our child all day), and then I still had to spend a whole day on in-person interviews.

And then they didn't even ask me any questions about my take-home solution--it was just ignored. It felt like a pure waste. I'd much rather do whiteboarding.

Comment · 6 years ago
This reminds me so much of Vernor Vinge's story "Fast Times at Fairmont High". It's set in the near future, and one plot point is that high school tests cover this skill--to read through the manuals quickly and get things done with new tools. I recommend it, and the related book "Rainbows End".
Comment · 8 years ago
I think they can easily hedge prices (via futures), but hedging production is much harder (because your weather & production might be different from others around, and with insurance the incentives can get bad; see moral hazard).

I worked for a company that tried to insure farmers so they'd be profitable even in bad years, but the reduction in profit on good years (i.e. cost of insurance) was too much to sell well.

Comment · 8 years ago
When I read it, I see that the "The data subject shall have the right to ... erasure of personal data ... where one of the following grounds applies: ... the data subject withdraws consent...."

I imagine that HTTP logs associating URLs and IPs are personal data because they associate users with activity, so they would have to be removed.

It's pretty hard to destroy individual log lines (they're often aggregated in zipped files, for instance), and logs show up in lots of places: your load balancer may log, your web server may log, your application may log, those logs may be backed up to tape, you might have debug logs captured for analysis from any of these systems, and those debug logs might be present on developer machines, not on servers or long-term storage.

That basically means that if any user asks to have their data erased, you have to figure out whether they owned that IP address at that time (so they can't ask for others' information to be removed), then delete all those logs, potentially rewriting your whole tape archive(!), potentially having developers destroy the debugging info they were using to track down a memory leak or whatever (on laptops, or in the ticketing system, or in heap dumps, or wherever it might be).

It's pretty easy to say "don't keep logs of IP addresses", but that's one of the major ways people detect malicious traffic, e.g. spam, denial-of-service attacks, and break-in attempts. It's hard to live without that.

Am I reading something wrong? Is there something I missed in that section that makes it easier?

Is "so we can look for malicious traffic" enough of a legal ground for processing to keep personal information around indefinitely even if the user asked for it to be removed? I can't imagine that's so, as that would be a pretty big loophole.

Comment · 9 years ago
No. I have fast cellular internet but pay $10/GB, and I consider that a pretty good deal (total for me + wife is $45/mo, including cellular and data; in Portland, OR). Your 4G internet is cheaper than most people's wired internet here in the US.
Comment · 9 years ago
If you play the classical guitar, you may receive different advice. Long nails can have practical uses.
Comment · 9 years ago
I also let my spouse unlock my phone. It's not so much "being an open book" as it is "I trust her not to snoop, and sometimes it's convenient that she can open a map on my phone." That meets your definition of trust: not having to know what she does because I know she'll do the right thing.
Comment · 9 years ago
I posted a comment! Hooray for participation in government.
Comment · 9 years ago
I think one thing that causes conflict here is that there are a lot of things that aren't blatantly racist, but rather subtly racist. For instance, casually assuming that a minority student is less capable than a white student is the sort of thing someone might do without thinking of themselves as racist, but it is still actually racist and harmful. Subtle racism like this still needs to be identified and opposed, and I'm interested in how that can be done without making people feel so uncomfortable and judged.
Comment · 9 years ago
I agree that rational debate is good, but in this case the rational debate has to include judgment because the one side of the debate is arguing that the other side (say, racism), is evil. That prevents it from being a perfectly calm, rational debate because the other side ends up (accurately) feeling judged and condemned. That's exactly the thing the author dislikes here--that the people supporting the non-mainstream views on these issues feel that it's not socially acceptable to have those views, so they feel they can't speak up.

So, how can people argue that bigotry is unacceptable and wrong without making it harder for bigots to speak up?

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