bpchaps

What sort of useful information would that even provide? It would just show that the system crashed because of a text. You'd still have to send some sort of contextual information about the text, which itself would carry non-metadata information about the text (ie, components of the text's contents).

That's kinda small compared to Banqiao Dam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, approximately 26,000 people died in the province from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people. The death toll of this disaster was declassified in 2005.

Heh. And yet case.law has a 500 case download limit except those who have been approved by research agreements that are mandatory by lexis nexis. I've been waiting since release night to get a research license approved. Granted, it's been less than a week.

What do you think would happen if somebody with a research agreement downloaded everything and released it all to the public? You'd probably then find that the two situations are very similar.

No kidding. After looking at this project for a bit longer, I'm much less optimistic about this project. Frankly, it really depresses me that they require research agreements to download all information.

Developers of this project: Please make the information freely available in a way that doesn't require agreements with a giant for-profit company.

For now, I'm convinced that this project is nothing more than a veiled advertisement for lexis nexis.

Gotcha! I've been looking for something like this for a while now. Thanks for making it!

If the creators are listening in - do you have any plans to include the text of the court docs as well?

Pot kettle black, I guess.

Ah! Thanks!

My phone was dead at the time, so I was using my desktop with google hangouts for the call. I was not booted from the call. My internet died. End of story.

I work from home, so my internet going down is a big deal for my livelihood and all that. I'm not saying that something suspicious happened, but I figured it was an interesting thing to happen. You're frankly thinking into it too much.

Who knows. It was strange for me, too.

Er, why the doubt? My internet completely died. My room mates were also affected.. Not sure how I can give proof.

Fair. Though, in my defense, the last time I tried to report a similarly large leak (completely different circumstances), it wasn't until I was very explicit in what I found that the report was taken seriously and sent to the appropriate place. Otherwise, I think reports like this are just added to a pile of other complaints.

In this case, it took about a week for them to take it seriously. Like last time, it wasn't until I was explicit that they took it seriously.

I probably only spent 30 minutes looking at it and used a few regular expressions to look for anything interesting. The point there was to understand the extent of the leak so that I could raise it in the intent of being taken seriously.

A search for "(Fuck|Shit|Bitch)" can go a long way.

For what it's worth, I used to work at an investment bank spending 30hr/week diving through logs with unix tools, so finding interesting information quickly is something I've learned to do quickly.

Probably both. Or maybe just a story about a thing that happened.

Woah there, calm down. I never said that you shouldn't or can't socialize or put on a pile of TV shows, etc. That'd be ridiculous and unhealthy. Hell, before writing this post, I was playing XCOM 2 :). I'm merely suggesting that techies like us have a much better financial situation than a vast majority of the public, so we have financial flexibility to spare.

Some things you could do:

  -Go to a local weekly meetup. Four hours a week.
  -Move your career towards non-profits. It's now your profession.
  -Teach programming to small classes. Eight hours a week.
  -Find a local advocacy group and make small contributions. Couple hours a week.

If you can't do that sort of volunteer work, then that's on you. No need to be so sour and uncharitable to those of us who try.

Heh. You'd be surprised, so long as you're willing to apply your skills outside of employment and with the knowledge that you might not get paid for it. There are SO MANY fields of applied programming that are currently completely starved for resources.

Think of it in terms of open source projects, where the projects that you might be interested have only a few people working on them - but in the context of issues that affect folk completely outside of tech who don't have disposable income like those you'd see on HN or similar.

I seriously recommend that you check out a local "open data civics" group, or something similar in your area. You'll find that they're generally filled with junior programmers - but what they need are senior level programmers who can take charge of problems that junior programmers otherwise can't take charge of. Be that person.

FWIW, personally everything that I learn is entirely aimed towards helping the general public (at a distance), at the expense of my own salary. The work has been very rewarding. That said, it would be great if others would take the plunge that I have.

Unrelated to the article: the 'x' on the newsletter popup doesn't work on mobile. Makes the article very difficult to read. If the author is reading this, you should fix that!

Yep :)

The sad part is... yeah, you're right. It's the best ticketing tool I've used, too.

I'm not sure what the solution is. My naive thought has always been that good management can mitigate most of the need for JIRA - even at large companies. Management like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer), perhaps.

How long has your company been using JIRA for?

JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. New ticket types are created with custom fields that aren't ever kept up to date. Everyone starts to choose random entries because they have no choice, and no way to add new ones. Once that starts, things fall into chaos because nobody knows the "right" way to file tickets. Tickets soon become immeasurably immeasurable. Projects become categorized incorrectly on a constant basis. The only people who know how to use JIRA effectively are the ones who know how to ignore all the noise. Once those people leave, you're left with pure, unadulterated chaos.

And then you get people who try to fix it by adding a new ticket type or project group, etc. Rinse, repeat.

If you haven't already, then you should check out JIRA's query language and its API. The query language is... special (and doesn't support wildcards, last I checked). Its API, instead of displaying field names as you see it in their interface, shows "fieldname_21234". No joke. You have to run another api request for all of the field names and associate them yourself. It's painful

To your point - sure, JIRA can be used effectively. Though, any bad tool can be used well if enforced. But that's not what most of us have seen in the wild. JIRA eventually just becomes a behemoth of a tool.

It's because many of us have worked at companies that use JIRA extensively. It's a tool that marks the sign that a company cares more about the management of staff as units, instead of caring about employees as breathing and creative forces.

It makes management's job easier, but it does nothing for the managed, except lead to frustration and hundreds of emails that have to be waded through for that 5% chance of relevancy.

Their integration seems particularly targeted to JIRA, when they've lapsed on many other useful features and improved UX implementations. It reflects GH's priorities as a company.

It's a sign that github is catering to management over the programmer. Contrast that to gitlab, whose implementations are designed to make the programmer's job easier.

From that repo: http://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html

A really neat project (written in haskell) for turning a postgres database into a restful API:

https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest

My naive (and likely wrong) understanding is that cosmological inflation was caused by a "false vacuum" of the higgs field. Think of it as if the energy pressure of a system is higher than a vacuum, but has similar pressure properties of a vacuum. That had the effect of gravitational pressure pushing matter outwardly, instead of pulling it inwardly like we have it today (to answer your question). That caused enormously fast expansion of the universe. Very shortly afterwards, the false vacuum "decayed", and gravity started behaving as you know it.

Check out Alan Guth's inflationary universe - a surprisingly accessible book on a deeply complex subject.

Someone please correct me where I'm wrong!

Yeah, probably. My career started in a job that could have easily been automated, but never was (intentionally). So in a lot of ways, I feel indebted to it and the idea of entry level tech jobs, because it allowed me to build a career without a degree. From that experience, it feels kind of sad that certain automation can displace potential careers.

You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions there.

In the end you're probably right for a population of people. I'm not talking about that, though - I'm talking about very specific people with families to feed.

One thought that keeps me awake at night is that my past automation work has cost others their jobs. I understand that that's "how the world works", but it still deeply affects me that people have lost their livelihoods because of my actions.

Er.. your imagination must be weak if you can't imagine that. Every state has different landlord laws with different thresholds....

Sorry - should have been more clear. I'm mostly talking about local policy, which is where most of my experience with government comes from, through many FOIA requests. Federal is much more calculated (read: slow) in comparison to local government. I've found local government to be very "we've checked the box, let's move on", which doesn't leave room for analysis, let alone the acknowledgement that analysis is even possible.

Sorry - edited. Still didn't answer the question, though :p

Systemic, not systematic.