bpchaps

95 ms·

421.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Find a problem to solve in your local community and do what it takes to fix it, no matter how small. You'll learn, do good and get involved with your community more. I recently took six months off to try and solve some local problems.
422.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Man... when I contacted journalists about writing an article about my lawsuit against Chicago for the mayor's phone records, they all told me "tell us when you're done." and wouldn't touch it with ten foot pole. Ver
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by bpchaps 10y ago
I agree that I'm an example of a particular survivorship, but that's not really my point. I'm kind of trying to get out of the usual tech force right now with a focus on investigative journalism. Going that route is an acknow
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Absolutely. Most of those my age who didn't go into tech and got 'regular' jobs are absolutely filled to the brim with debt with zero way out. Those here in Chicago who have tech jobs aren't able to find jobs that match
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by bpchaps 10y ago
This is almost exactly my experience! I don't think HN talks about it much, but cannabis is a great way to approach intuitive depth on subjects. For me it was ego, math, music, civics and information theory concepts. When I started, it
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Posted this in the other thread about this. I think it's important enough to paste here: If anybody wants to do something about this with me and others, start sending Foia requests for similar information to your local and state govern
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by bpchaps 10y ago
hm. I'll fix that. dischiordic@gmail.com
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by bpchaps 10y ago
(unorganized list) Kinda, but most of it has been through trial and error with a few read-throughs of Illinois FOIA. I have a pro bono lawyer who can help out every now and then, but he tends to be very busy so it's not the best source
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by bpchaps 10y ago
I completely agree and fought pretty hard towards that, but the court eventually agreed with the state/city. Excerpt from the court docs of my suit: Additionally, the Illinois Attorney General's Office Public Access Counselor (&q
430.
by bpchaps 10y ago
If anybody wants to do something about this with me and others, start sending Foia requests for similar information to your local and state governments. You'll find that there is a huge amount of aversion towards releasing things like
431.
by bpchaps 10y ago
Pretty close! The bigger problem is actually vetting the data for privacy concerns. The original foia request included some code to run a whois on each domain. Not a privacy concern since it's "just" metadata ;) They also cla
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Eh, column A and column B. I'm convinced that the only reason this happens is because of bad wording in FOIA requests, combined with a lack of pushback after rejections or missing/redacted information. A great way to get around th
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by bpchaps 10y ago
My method for "earning to give" was to push my career and learning as quickly as possible so that I always have a way to fallback if things go south. It worked pretty well, and I got to take the past six months off to work on some
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Thanks for being a good person. The small things like this matter. :)
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by bpchaps 10y ago
I have significant social anxiety and see a doctor about it. Yet, buying condoms is up there in the top ten most uncomfortable things I know of. Your thoughts on this are way, WAY too simplistic. It's incredibly aggravating to see y
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Kick butt! Shoot me an email at the address on my user page if you ever need any help or just want to share experiences as you go along. :)
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Because it makes a very hostile environment for independent journalists.
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Great example why discussion of these meta topics is important.
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Holy false dichotomy, batman. Everyone should get paid for their work - why in the hell do you think I think otherwise?! Agh!
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by bpchaps 10y ago
I'm doing what many consider "high quality journalism" without any expectation of getting paid. I'm not the only one who does this (dozens!). Some of us just want to do good journalism because we're passionate about
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by bpchaps 10y ago
You've detached threads before, why not this one? :|
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Surely as a site, there's something you guys can do. At least help dampen the negative effects these articles push. These things are incredibly bad for private journalists without connections to wsj (or similar) who still have quality
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Why is this getting downvoted...
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Or, I can speak with my words.
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by bpchaps 10y ago
I have experience with private investigative journalism and can personally speak on how bad it is. This is awful obfuscation of news. There's little quality news because it's about what's interesting and what will make the mo
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by bpchaps 10y ago
Or, alternatively, the "Web" button should be the default for sites like this. Quality and original reporting is very nice, but the continuation of paywalls still pushes reporting towards profiting over news.
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by bpchaps 10y ago
What blows my mind is that every time I need to write anything in markdown (once a month or so), I can never ever figure out how to use it without doing tons of googling. Why can't sites add some easily accessible documentation? Hac
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by bpchaps 10y ago
I'm kind of trying to gauge how much interest this gets. Been sitting on this for a while but never posted anything about it because of the time it takes to organize everything by myself. That, and my web design skills stink. :) If any
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Chicago parking tickets, visualized(dischordic.tumblr.com)
1 points by bpchaps 10y ago|1 comments
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by bpchaps 10y ago
It's funny, I got the Chicago mayor's office phone records after a year of fighting for them. When my follow-up request asked for all calls to a particular hourly hotel in 2014, based on the results of my initial win, they claimed

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