bpchaps

36 ms·

331.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Invisible Institute is an incredible group. They are one of the few journalist groups who are interested in solving complex problems rather than simply reporting on them. If anyone is interested in doing similar work, it's surprisingly
332.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Fair enough - I can definitely see how auditing on a non-technical level would "do the trick". I'll definitely take you up on that beer ;). hubblefisher at gee mayl.
333.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Yep - I was actually hoping to see your talk on Starfighter last week, but work kept me in a different state. :) My experience has been in finance for the past ten years at an ops/sysad level and can frankly say that security at these
334.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Big respect for you usually, but I think you're completely wrong here. See my comment a bit upstream - having that sort of access to mortgage/credit card systems would a great way to steal money, or at the very least fudge things
335.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Hell no they don't. I worked at a larger bank that used rot13 to encrypt the RW passwords for the internal databases it connected to. Since risk management in this case included mortgage and credit card systems, it would have disastrou
336.
by bpchaps 10y ago
I'd be very interested! This is a field that I recently became extremely interested in and even met up with my lawyer earlier today to discuss a bulk FOIA research project. I left a comment on your blog with contact info if you're
337.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Fwiw, I actually agree with much of what you're saying. The contention others seem to be having might just be from perceived absolutism. Funny, since you're actually arguing for the opposite.
338.
by bpchaps 10y ago
How does it lead to authoritarianism? You're making some pretty sweeping statements there..
339.
by bpchaps 10y ago
That's not really what I'm asking about, though. It just feels like those who truly need to use something like Signal are shooting themselves in the foot by requiring others to have a smart phone. This has affected my ability to c
340.
by bpchaps 10y ago
No - simply something that doesn't require specific hardware or a specific browser to run. Note that I'm not commenting on the lack of alternatives - just the current culture. It all feels very backwards.
341.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Parent poster is probably talking about the fact that I willfully use a dumb phone. Though, I'm honestly not sure how a perception of being 'weird' is really relevant.
342.
by bpchaps 10y ago
I dunno, it just feels that the crypto community is shooting itself in the foot by largely catering to those with smart phones. A huge chunk of population, (poor, elderly, etc) are in a similar boat as I am and it doesn't make much sen
343.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Crypto community question - why is everybody so adamant about using Signal? Outside of work, I don't own a smart phone and refuse to, so signal is not an option. It's to the point where it's actually gotten in the way with ge
344.
by bpchaps 10y ago
They said that they were going to work on swapping things out. When I talked to the PR rep about it last, he didn't have much of a clue whether they did or didn't swap anything out. They also mentioned a bug bounty, but that didn&
345.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Funny. I reported something similar to comcast after finding several of their engineers' home directories on github. Ssh keys, usernames, passwords, scripts, logs, and even code for a DVR machine (no idea). Thankfully comcast got the G
346.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Maybe I'm unique to this, but that sort of default would drive me batshit insane. Not all of us are programmers by trade who use git. It's just another gotcha to keep track of. I'd seriously recommend removing that as a defau
347.
by bpchaps 10y ago
I should clarify - it absolutely is visual. Just less so than pure maths.
348.
by bpchaps 10y ago
I'm the same way and came to a similar conclusion a while back. For me, understanding math has been an incredibly visual process more than anything. It's a very useful heuristic. Programming is similar, but its discreteness seems
349.
by bpchaps 10y ago
I highly recommend that many others use FOIA to gather communication records of their elected officials. About a month ago I received this pdf [1] (1700+ pages of email records) of Chicago's office of the mayor after about three months
350.
by bpchaps 10y ago
My complaint with DRY - sometimes it's just significantly easier to learn a codebase or learn the problems that led to its structure/abstraction by just writing many of the underlying components yourself. Whether that code goes in
351.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Yes, but think about those in between the outliers. Troubled situations and many cases where loans aren't feasible or possible. I'll pass on a world where policy and education only deals with the common case.
352.
by bpchaps 10y ago
This is great! My weekend is officially opened up. ;)
353.
by bpchaps 10y ago
I love it. Spell checking was pretty relevant to some of my work recently and I needed to correct heavily typo'd address text from Chicago parking ticket data. It used difflib to recursively find similarly typo'd address until it
354.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Agreed. I'm working on a project with FOIA to build paths towards bulk communication records in Chicago. It's gone much better than I'd have hoped in comparison to the state it started in. If others would like to help out, I&
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Such as Ramanujan. ;)
356.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Sometimes the issue isn't time - it's money and access to schooling. Just because you've had the access, doesn't mean others do - and there are many, many who don't.
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Thanks for telling your stories. It's very clear that you care for them. It's personally comforting to know that there are those out there who don't simply dismiss these sorts of issues. Help as much as you can, and continue
358.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Why doesn't parallelized gzip get more attention? For larger files, it can be quite a pain to see a multicore machine sit mostly idle. Something like this works pretty well, but I've never seen it done outside of my own stuffs: sp
359.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Yep - it's actually been pretty invaluable in getting this project to where it is now. :) It definitely has its own flaws, but those are easy to work around. Edit - looks like they have a similar problem from dealing with hand typed da
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by bpchaps 10y ago
That's what using difflib does. Plaza vs pl vs place is just one example of many, though. There are about 1k different street names in chicago and about 18k different street names in the data. Many are missing street type and there are

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