bpchaps

18 ms·

151.
by bpchaps 8y ago
You should check out muckrock.com!
152.
by bpchaps 8y ago
I've put a LOT of thought into address cleaning! And yep - levenstein distance seems to be the way to go. My current stack is: 1. Send addresses to https://smartystreets.com/ - They gave me a year's worth of unlim
153.
by bpchaps 8y ago
You can often request that the FOIA officer waive the fee so long as the public's interest outweighs the burden to collect and redact the info. That's almost certainly what happened with my IL requests.
154.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Yep - I have two ways open now: A donation to my non-profit, Free Our Info, NFP - which is the company I'm submitting requests for DBs' info through (and many other requests): https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/we
155.
by bpchaps 8y ago
So many PDFs......
156.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Yep. Have a look at their hourly rates for systems support [1]. All of the entry level positions are above 80/hr. [1] https://imgur.com/a/ieJj5Po
157.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Kind of, but nothing super formal. I've contacted a few of the aldermen's offices, but never the aldermen themselves. Though, during last mayoral election, some of the mayoral candidates wanted to use parking tickets as part of t
158.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Funny enough, I submitted one of those to all of the biggest cities in each state for a list of their databases and the columns/tables within each. Pretty much universal rejection. The ones that didn't send me a rejection letter
159.
by bpchaps 8y ago
If you're interested in bike lane parking tickets, you might want to check out this article, which was done using the same dataset: https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/where-chicago-tickets-f...
160.
by bpchaps 8y ago
It was free. I've never had to pay for any information coming from an Illinois FOIA request.
161.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Hey! Thanks for posting this, and the kind words. Interesting note about getting data like this - Illinois FOIA allows a requester to submit a SQL as part of their request.. so long as they know the tables and columns within the database ;)
162.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Thanks! I thought so to until recently and was honestly kind of surprised they actually gave it to me. They rejected giving license plate info at first, but they've given it out in other, similar, FOIA requests. Specifically in FOIA&#x
163.
by bpchaps 8y ago
That's what I'm saying!
164.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Should be better now. Let me know if it persists!
165.
by bpchaps 8y ago
About two years ago, I spoke with Comcast's CISO over the phone about a leak of a sysadmin's home directory. It included private keys, log files, configs, licensed binaries, splunk(!), etc etc. A week before, her staff told me th
166.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Because it's interesting, dammit!
167.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Hah. You clearly haven't worked with any government agencies or their contractors. There will be mistakes, and it won't be just a few. The public will have very little action towards even validating whether they're configured
168.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Pretty soon we'll have a direct image of a black hole! https://eventhorizontelescope.org
169.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Almost certainly so. I'm really interested in knowing why you're so positive in saying it's not. There are significant signs that the reduction of lead emissions leads to a time-delayed reduction in crime when geographically
170.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Why is this downvoted?
171.
by bpchaps 8y ago
No idea, either. This whole thread is being bombarded with downvotes. Downvoters: Whatsup?
172.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Yep. It's pretty disheartening, frankly.
173.
by bpchaps 8y ago
I just renamed my microwave to "refrigerator", but all of my food caught on fire and started leaking operational debt! :(
174.
by bpchaps 8y ago
If your company's management doesn't even know what an SRE is, then you're stuck in the same exact place, where the SREs are the one being screamed at instead. Some companies just rename "devops" to "SRE".
175.
by bpchaps 8y ago
When reading these articles, never forget that your company is NOT Google! If your company doesn't have a management/infrastructure/communication/skill structure that Google has, then it will be very difficult to impleme
176.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Hah. I'm genuinely surprised this isn't more of a thing.
177.
by bpchaps 8y ago
How long have you been on call for and how many 3am wakeup calls have you had? I used to think these same. Protip: you won't always be on a good team.
178.
by bpchaps 8y ago
Heh. From the article: Does all of this hold for my papers, too? Of course. The most I can claim is that I am hyper-aware of my own epistemic frailty, and have a litany of self-imposed safeguards. But I totally understand why my critics
179.
by bpchaps 8y ago
You might be surprised. A lot of us early adopters had a lot of issues with getting RAM to run at its advertised clock speed. Buying expensive RAM didn't really have benefits over cheap RAM. It took something like 4-6 months for a BIOS
180.
by bpchaps 8y ago
I had an interview at a company, peak6, that allegedly disallowed any sort of out loud work conversations. From what I was told, they only allowed work conversations over IM. That, and tons of cameras strewn around their overpriced office.

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