jlev

I am an American, and most of the other folks on the project were as well. I did go through an interview with Customs officers when I returned to the US, but it didn't affect my ability to use GlobalEntry. I don't have clearance, but it might cause questions if I did apply for that in the future.

I've also been to Syria as a tourist several times, and at one point had to maintain a second passport for visiting Israel or the West Bank. You can't travel to most of the Arab world if you have Israeli stamps, but you can get another book from the US to keep them separate.

Sorry for your friend. Borders are bullshit.

This change https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/baea52df7ac9c4b53857556f... was a huge pain in my ass in 2013.

I was working in Libya on voter registration tools with the UN and the High National Election Commission. The government decided to not implement a planned TZ change, and didn't inform the public until the day of. Not the hardest thing we dealt with, that was a full country internet shutoff by a mob outside our data centre (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-25481794). Sometimes the politics of a project are more complicated than the technology...

We did implement an all-SMS voter registration system, which was pretty cool. Hasn't been used much since, but it's all open source. https://github.com/hnec-vr

Thank you, I’m never letting the domain go.

I did something similar for my wedding website back in 2013. We used a mail-in service that produced a decent TTF, and then I converted it to a WOFF. Still online at https://ruthandjosh.net/story/ (warning, millennial cringe ahead)

A modest proposal to turn Alameda's former naval station into an AI and robotics hub.

"All it would take" is

- Exercising the Endangered Species Act 7(j) exemption to reactivate this plot of land, a former US Naval base that closed in 1997

- Invoking the National Emergencies Act to maximally accelerate federal permitting across all domains, and

- Transferring ownership of the land from the VA to the Department of Defense.

Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit and inventor of RSS and Markdown, was hounded to death by an overzealous prosecutor for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the intent to learn from them. He was charged with over a million dollars in fines and could have faced 35 years in prison.

He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their technology actually reproduces and distributes copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped the entire internet.

https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

I used to work at a company that used Sentinel-2 data and a large scale AI model to detect changes in land use and land cover anywhere in the world. They provide free global data at 10m resolution on an annual basis, or paid versions at 3m resolution over a custom timeframe.

https://www.impactobservatory.com/

This seems like it goes against most standard development practices.

Phrenology 2.0!

You can tell that this author knows their shit because the blog post is entirely illustrated with furry memes.

I did a project at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media on building a hyper-local radio platform, and we'd always use Car Talk as an example of the kind of interactions we wanted to enable. Like, what if you were a vet in rural Uganda, and you wanted to have a show for farmers to describe their problems and get expert help. Call it Goat Talk, and we'd descend into bleats and baahs.

This was an informal thing for a long time, but I didn't know that there's now an actual certificate. I may have to go back and request mine retroactively.

    Believe it or not, George isn't at home
    Please leave a message, at the beep
    I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone
    Where could I be?
    Believe it or not, I'm not home!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrkKvk2Lrjw

I had a niche in voter registration, and wrote frontend code and server processes that helped tens of millions of people register to vote in the US.

Worked on tools for Rock the Vote, vote.org, HelloVote (the first sms voter reg chatbot), and VoteAmerica. It’s a surprisingly tricky problem on the backend, with state specific rules and lots of smaller jurisdictions (most election officials are at the county level). Developed methods to extract a user signature from a photo and include in the generated pdf, so people wouldn’t have to print, sign, and mail the document, and we could do everything digitally.

In 2014 went to Libya to help there after the revolution (but before the civil war), and worked on a team that was helping build tools for that new democracy. They haven’t had another national election since, which goes to show that sometimes politics are more complicated than technology…

I think this is a very cool usage of the internet for good, and using massive audiences to reach people that traditional activism often misses.

Looks like they take crypto. Any of you doge-millionaires want to throw down?

I rented a Tesla on Turo a few years ago, it was a blast to drive.

It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend renting one.

When are people going to stop rebuilding high tech phrenology?

This is intentionally done by one political party that does not care about democracy. They push policies that restrict individual voting rights, gerrymander districts for minority rule, and expand the influence of money over people. This has been their plan for decades, as they see the younger and more diverse America as a threat to their ideology. We have got to vote them out at every level.

"By using fax and email APIs, VoteAmerica is building out a system that allows voters to request a vote-by-mail application just by taking a photo of their signature. VoteAmerica’s tool then uses code to put the signature in the right spot on the form and then programmatically faxes it to the relevant local election official."

This uses some very slick computer vision techniques to do the signature extraction in variable lighting, and runs on AWS lambda for easy scalability. We'll be sending text messages to 300k Georgia voters on Monday (the first state where this is live), and will extend to 14 more states over the next month.

Check it out at https://VoteAmerica.com, or the backend code at https://github.com/vote/turnout

- disclaimer, I'm product director at VoteAmerica.com

Thanks for the review, Kristo. We are the real deal, and we'll have all our code on GitHub in a week or two. Just deciding on licenses now.

Turnout2020 - https://www.turnout2020.us | Senior Software Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE

Turnout2020 is a nonprofit organization founded by a small team of elections and technology experts (including the founders of Vote.org (YC S16) and Vote.gov), who have come together to combat the chaos of the 2020 election cycle by helping to to drive record-shattering voter turnout. We will accomplish this via hyper-aggressive and targeted outreach to the millions of low and no-propensity voters who are generally neglected by partisan groups. This isn’t just empty rhetoric: collectively we’ve registered about 20 million voters and run GOTV to tens of millions more in our past roles. Now we’re scaling up.

You can join us to take a leading role in the development of Get Out The Vote web applications, primarily by architecting, developing, and deploying high-quality Python code to AWS.

Our code is open source, we pay pretty well for a non-profit, and you get to help to save democracy.

https://jobs.lever.co/turnout2020/2357f5fb-917b-459f-a6f6-d0...

The Internet challenged MrBeast to plant 20m trees for his 20m subscribers. Let's do it!

Location: Oakland, CA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python (Flask/Django), JS (React/Vue), DevOps (Docker/AWS), Nice APIs (Twilio/Lob)

Résumé/CV: https://levinger.net/josh/files/resume-technical.pdf, https://spacedog.xyz

Email: josh@spacedog.xyz

I've been a freelancer for the last six years, working on projects to scale collective action via online organizing. Before that I led a small team at a non-profit tech accelerator. MIT degrees in aero/astro engineering and media lab. Looking to join a team of do-ers who are actually trying to change the world.

I'm currently on the job market, and have done a few of these types of take-home tests over the last two months. If they're well structured, as it appears here, they can be fun and hopefully build enthusiasm about the company. If they're not, it's a huge red flag. A company that doesn't value my time as a candidate is unlikely to do so as an employee, and isn't one I want to work with.

If you do this, make sure to treat candidates with respect and humanity. Give them some feedback at the end of the process, so they know their efforts aren't wasted.

The problem in 2016 wasn't that anyone "hacked" our election, it's that they hacked our electorate. Turns out that people's opinions are much easier to change than cast ballots.

And we only have a decade left to save the planet. Time to stop extracting fossil fuels and emitting ancient carbon into the atmosphere.

These are also Pokemon Go stops, because Niantic ingested some global POI database without considering local contexts. It’s sort of funny, but also pretty offensive.

https://twitter.com/jlev/status/1026068175966928896?s=21

Hey Graham, I'm in Oakland in a six story building downtown. Currently have DSL with Sonic, but am getting impatient with their fiber rollout in the East Bay. Any chance of getting service from Common outside of Alameda?

If anything, $60/month seems too cheap.

really good visualization of this from the forest service airfire tool https://tools.airfire.org/websky/v1/run/standard/CANSAC-2km/...

via stamen design https://twitter.com/stamen/status/918210924615426049