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brianlweineron She invited four people over for lunch. A week later, three were dead

parent comment roughly paraphrased the advice... the core advice is to never speak to police WITHOUT YOUR LAWYER present.

Certainly providing the menu that might exonerate you is probably fine -- but that's what a lawyer is for.

brianlweineron Flipper Zero – Portable Multi-Tool Device for Geeks

URL is blocked by my company VPN as being in the Russian federation

brianlweineron Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits

I don't even know if it's cargo culting as much as engineers using their day jobs as opportunities to learn marketable skills for job hopping.

Nearly ever new technology introduced at places I've worked was because someone was keen to get it onto their resume.

brianlweineron Plant-based meat deceleration signals niche future

https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...

70% of that is for livestock feed.

brianlweineron Baltimore Museum of Art will host an exhibition curated by the museum's guards

There's still lots of non Military / Fed stuff! And it's getting better.

https://www.sparkpost.com/ https://www.cloudtamer.io/ https://www.contrastsecurity.com/

A few off the top of my head. I'm currently working (remotely) for a BigCo that acquired my startup employer last year.

Technical.ly can be a good resource for local postings. I've worked as a SWE in Baltimore for 10 years and have never had employment issues. I don't quite make SV money, but I make solid 6 figures and can afford a very nice home on just my salary and send my kids to private school, etc.

brianlweineron U.S. Consumer Prices Rose Strongly Again in May

Two factors that I'm aware of:

-- Early in the pandemic, travel was way down. Rental car companies unloaded a lot of their fleet that were sitting idle. Now that demand is back up, they are back on the market for vehicles.

-- Semiconductor shortages: automobile manufacturers cut their orders in early 2020 anticipating a decline in demand. That decline never happened, so they're now now able to obtain sufficient chips for new vehicle manufacturing. Thus a decline in new car availability that might push some car-buyers onto the secondary market.

brianlweineron I don't care what Elon Musk thinks anymore

FYI you probably meant 'egregious'

brianlweineron The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

What's your model?

brianlweineron Portland approves 10% cap on fees that food delivery apps can charge restaurants

In at least some cases ... the prices you see on grubhub may be higher than the actual prices the restaurant is charging. E.g $17.99 vs $14.99

brianlweineron An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

Probably the ludicrous notion that somehow Hillary Clinton is to blame for electing Donald Trump rather than the millions of people who voted for him despite overwhelming evidence of his lack of fitness for the office.

brianlweineron How to sell to 20M software devs with amazing onboarding

Seems like it ... my experience with Algolia was fairly lukewarm -- it seemed expensive for the capabilities offered.

brianlweineron Okay, Maybe Proofs Aren't Dying After All

John was a professor of mine, so I'll defend him a bit here :). To be clear, he's certainly a contrarian, and has a fairly pessimistic take on modern scientific progress.

I pushed back in class quite a bit about his 'End of Science' claims, and we disagreed frequently - but his actual claims are usually not as strong as they're made out to be. He simply doesn't see the same sort of practical gains being made from scientific research that we were making in the 19th and early 20th century.

If we look at the research being produced by obviously impressive scientific endeavors like LHC - I think you can see his point. We're obviously gaining knowledge, and negative results are still valuable, but we're investing more and more to make incremental progress in many fields and the actual research is becoming less and less accessible to the average person.

Anyway, it's not my job to defend John's work (he's more than capable of responding to critics) but I always found him to be interesting, patient and encouraging to his students. His class was one of my favorites and even if I disagree with his claims overall I don't think they deserve to be dismissed so readily.

brianlweineron Vox Media to cut hundreds of freelance jobs ahead of California's AB5

Employers have significant tax advantages when offering health insurance that individuals do not have access to.

brianlweineron Baltimore Blew Off Ransomware Demand Only to Find Data Had Never Been Backed Up

I applied for the Baltimore City director of digital operations position. I interviewed with Frank Johnson and a variety of other city department heads.

I got the impression they were a group of people that broadly understood their problems and were finding it very difficult to steer the city towards good solutions.

Although Mr. Johnson was the City's Director of IT, realistically he had very nominal oversight over many of the city's actual IT departments - which were spread across a series of departments with their own employees, budgets, and resources. This was something he had been actively trying to improve but with limited progress.

I don't know what the best solution is - their hiring process is flawed and it's difficult to remove or replace problem employees. The budget is about 60% of what it probably needs to be and there's no path towards improving it.

brianlweineron I Dream of Canteens

This is one of the few things Baltimore does well! We have many food 'markets' that are essentially small stalls run by independent businesses with common seating areas, tray returns, limited bussing, and open seating.

https://r.housebaltimore.com/ has become extremely popular, and several markets are being renovated with a similar approach. The prices vary somewhat depending on the type of stall, but in general they are within a fast-food price-range, not a restaurant.

brianlweineron Amazon's Alexa talks murder, sex in AI experiment

The email introducing the feature (May 2017) described it as follows:

`Get an inside peek at the Amazon-sponsored university competition to advance AI. The Alexa Prize "socialbots" are in early development and understandably rough around the edges. Help students develop more engaging AI by striking up a conversation and providing feedback. To get started, just ask: Alexa what's a socialbot? Alexa let's chat`

The only interactions students would have access to was interactions that occurred via the chatbot

brianlweineron The Insect Apocalypse Is Here

Is it not possible to breed insects to try and replace some portion of the natural base population? Obviously other changes causing the population loss would also have to occur (e.g more responsible use of insecticides, less reliance on monoculture agriculture) - but insects are pretty good at reproducing so I'd think this is at least something we could try and ameliorate.

brianlweineron Show HN: Recursive Recipes – directions to make food from scratch

Making a chicken from scratch -- hilarious. Where do you source those 'recipes' ?

brianlweineron Are We Experimenting on Our Children with Soy Formula?

Only 13% of mothers are able to provide breast milk for 100% of their child's needs for the first 6 months, according to NPR.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/09/23/22534912...

brianlweineron Google Home: An Insight Into a 4-Year-Old’s Mind

Don't most households own multiple smartphones? What makes them fundamentally different?

brianlweineron 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV

Literally posting one of the first google results so I cannot guarantee accuracy.

"The gasoline-powered generators produce at best 6.13 kilowatt-hours per gallon of fuel, at worst 4.42, and a median of 5.7." [1]

So it sounds like it's ~5x as efficient as a gas generator. [1]https://settysoutham.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/portable-gener...

brianlweineron Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

While it's clearly true that more privileged kids have opportunities to recover from mistakes, there is also a worrying trend where even those kids seem to think they can't possibly make a mistake (get a C, do poorly on a standardized test)

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sili...

brianlweineron Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

Parent was making a size comparison to the moon.

brianlweineron Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

Between 1960 and 2007, the share of disposable personal income spent on total food by Americans, on average, fell from 17.5 to 9.6 percent

http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/detail.a...

brianlweineron Self-driving trucks threaten one of America's top blue-collar jobs

Or they are in response to internal rising costs; e.g outsource 20 IT positions because health insurance costs for your other 200 employees are increasing 16%.

brianlweineron Poverty and social background remain huge barriers in scientific careers

"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry Mathematicks and Philosophy." - John Adams

*he struck through painting and poetry.

brianlweineron The Invisible American

Colorado tends to rank in the top 10 as far as ease-of-starting I believe. I think these kinds of regulations are often overlooked when states dream of starting their own tech hubs.

brianlweineron Louisiana Judges Issue Harsher Sentences When the LSU Football Team Loses

Indeed other research has indicated that lots of factors can affect a judge's decisions.

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full

A panel of judges would be one approach. Perhaps judges could be made aware of what the average penalty is for similar cases and that would give them an easier anchor for their decision.

brianlweineron WikiLeaks offers $20,000 for information on former DNC staffer's murder

Were establishment Democrats particularly pro-wikileaks during the Manning releases? I don't recall that - in general both parties have been pretty much anti-whistleblower and pro-secrecy.

If anything the Republicans (particularly pro-Trump factions) have been awfully hypocritical on this stance since they've previously called for various leakers (Snowden in particular) to return home and face the death penalty. They definitely previously referred to Assange as a criminal and a threat to national security, but I guess as long as he's anti-Hillary he's a hero?

brianlweineron Venezuela Refuses to Default, and Few People Seem to Understand Why

But Venezuela has already seized and nationalized foreign-owned assets. Surely that burnt plenty of bridges?

I'm more likely to believe that influential Venezuelans are exposed to the current bond market and are seeking to delay the reckoning.