sethg

8 ms·

31.
by sethg 14y ago
The Romney campaign’s equivalent was apparently some system called “Orca”, which involved volunteers on the ground sending information to a central location about the conditions that they saw. It wasn’t as extensive, and now we know that i
32.
by sethg 14y ago
Speaking as a former Chicagoan: the way you swing an election is with the connivance of the people who administer it, e.g., by making sure that the ballot boxes from “unfriendly” precincts end up in the bottom of the Chicago River. Voter ID
33.
by sethg 14y ago
Obama took PA by five percentage points, which is consistent with his margin in the state-level polls that were taken throughout October. In absolute numbers rather than percentages, his margin is about 300,000 votes. Are you really tryin
34.
by sethg 14y ago
Well, if you employ yourself and you could collect unemployment insurance after laying yourself off, some would consider that gaming the system.
35.
by sethg 14y ago
Two years of unemployment benefits are considered “short-term”? Wow. In the US, benefits usually run out at 26 weeks. Congress took note of the Great Recession and extended that to 39 weeks, or 48 weeks in states with over-6-percent unemp
36.
by sethg 14y ago
A lot of the discussion in this thread seems to be along the lines of “if universal care is instituted in the US, then it will be ruinously expensive, because doctors will authorize every kind of treatment and the taxpayers will pick up the
37.
by sethg 14y ago
Depends on what you mean by “further to the right”. From WW2 to the early 1970s, there was a two-party consensus on government intervention in the economy, and that consensus moved “right” even before Reagan. (One of Carter’s legislative a
38.
by sethg 14y ago
Gloria Steinem once remarked that women in our culture are valued when they are young and pretty, while men in our culture are valued when they are old and rich: therefore, as they grow older, women become more radical and men become more c
39.
by sethg 14y ago
All countries—especially small and/or underdeveloped countries—need foreign trade in order to develop their economies, and it’s really really hard to engage in foreign trade without credit. And “if you stiff your current borrowers it may b
40.
by sethg 14y ago
For private borrowers who can’t make their payments and probably never will, there is bankruptcy law, which lays out a orderly procedure where the borrower asks for relief, the lenders make their claims, and a judge decides who ends up with
41.
by sethg 14y ago
There are two companies that have done the legwork to acquire a really really good database of mapping information: * TeleAtlas, which is in bed with Google * Navteq, which is owned by Nokia, which has a deal to provide maps to Bing So now
42.
by sethg 14y ago
I’ve been hip-deep in this kind of thing for years, and it really is hard. Suppose that data source A has a point for “Logan Airport” and data source B has a point (a few hundred feet away) for “General Edward Lawrence Logan International A
43.
by sethg 14y ago
Last I heard, Bing was contracting out to Nokia for their maps, as part of the whole Nokia-Microsoft strategic surrend^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpartnership. (And I know that for all its faults, Nokia is smart enough to apply human QA to their mapping s
44.
by sethg 14y ago
In my experience (six months at a job that does Scrum and, I think, does it very well), the thing that slows down iteration planning meetings is when the product manager hands down a one-sentence feature description, the engineers say “we c
45.
by sethg 14y ago
You can code, code well, and then discover that the feature you just implemented was something that the upper management actually didn’t consider to be very important, or that they wanted something completely different from what you thought
46.
by sethg 14y ago
The slapped puncher is not going to say that. He’s going to say something like “I was in a crowded bar and some crazy bitch hauled off and slapped me, and I don’t know about you, but when someone up and hits me, my first impulse is to hit
47.
by sethg 14y ago
Right, but that’s during childhood, not as an adult going to work and attending technical conferences. I can think of only one person I’ve met since turning 18 who was, umm, skeevy to me in a sexual way, and that person was male. (He didn’
48.
by sethg 14y ago
From a feminist perspective, it's not very empowering to a woman to have to resort to props and other crazy schemes to get unscrupulous men to fuck off. People who already have power do not need props and schemes, because, well, they ha
49.
by sethg 14y ago
Shouldn’t it be called “Burnr”?
50.
by sethg 14y ago
Really, if you’re going to commemorate it, cite a more authoritative source. http://www.theonion.com/articles/july-21-1969,10515/
51.
by sethg 14y ago
I have developed a theory about this: Suppose you were hired to do X, and after doing X for a few years, you have developed the skill to do Y instead. But that skill does not guarantee that your current employer will have an opening for
52.
by sethg 14y ago
What has a non-integral number of seconds? I just found out today about Calcutta time, which until 1948 was GMT+05:30:21, but I didn’t realize it could be even worse than that.
53.
by sethg 14y ago
Imagine a historical database of Russian birthdays, copied from historical archives by data-entry clerks who had no idea when Russia switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. (For extra fun, imagine that half of the clerks doing
54.
by sethg 14y ago
Sometimes legislators want the law to be ambiguous, because an ambiguous law can get 51% of the votes but a law that actually spells out all the details would only get 49% (or less). And I’m not sure it’s possible to have a completely una
55.
by sethg 14y ago
Differential pricing is a retail strategy that predates the Internet. If you want to be one of the first people to read a new book by an author you like, you have to spend to get it in hardcover; if you don’t like the hardcover price, wait
56.
by sethg 14y ago
I don’t have an open-source portfolio to show off, my blog is pretty moribund, and I spent approximately the second half of 2011 job-hunting. On the one hand, I did wish I had some code to show off, because a significant proportion of the c
57.
by sethg 14y ago
In general, if a company’s stock goes way down and that decline is attributable to bad management, then some entrepreneur can gather together a bunch of investors and say “I can run that company better than the yoinks that currently occupy
58.
by sethg 14y ago
By getting into a car and driving you assume a non zero risk of being injured or killed in a car accident. By getting into a car and driving you assume a non zero risk of being sued for damages caused by a car accident.
59.
by sethg 14y ago
Yeah, the monitor isn’t the reason; the monitor is a symptom. Best Buy is selling 27" monitors for about $300 and 30" monitors for about $1,500. As a percentage of a full-time developer’s salary, depreciated over three years, $600 is pocke
60.
by sethg 14y ago
Ah, yes, now I am recalling the AC Adapter Saga from my last employer. We all got free cell phones (with free data plans), but for some reason mine didn’t have an AC adapter in the box. No big deal; I could just recharge it over USB. But

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