mjs

There's a nice list of checklists at

http://www.projectcheck.org/checklists.html

including a "checklist for checklists" (!)

http://www.projectcheck.org/checklist-for-checklists.html

Great article on the use of checklists in hospitals, by Atul Gawande:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...

Well ... I think it's actually pretty good bug reporting habit. Was it text/plain or unstyled text/html? Was the body an error message but a styled header and footer present? You might want to copy and paste the text as well, to aid future copy and paste efforts, but it's surprisingly frequently useful to have a screenshot.

3/31/2013 is the backup they're reverting to, not when they got hacked though, right? (The email refers to "downtime over the last week", so I guess the hack happened around 6th April or later.

Yes please! I'd like to subscribe.

Interesting, this is the first technology blog-like site I've seen that does not have an RSS feed...

These three things require wildly different levels of ability: incorrectly using a t-test (e.g. using it in the wrong circumstances), correctly using a t-test, inventing the t-test.

I think Wilson is saying that whilst scientists need to be able to use mathematical tools effectively, they don't need to be able to come up with them.

(Though statistics is probably much easier to use in this way than, say, calculus. Mathematica is very good at differentiation, but I think in many situations where you need to know how to differentiate, rather than just the result?)

There's an intriguing exercise in Paul Heyne's "The Economic Way of Thinking" that asks, as a thought experiment, what would happen if a helicopter simply dropped cash on groups of people that needed it--the thinking being that if people have money, someone will figure out some way to get them the goods and services they need.

(There's obvious security and fairness problems with this method of distributing aid, but if these could be solved somehow, this approach "fixes" some of the problems that afflict traditional approaches, such as the way in which they disrupt existing businesses, and make it difficult for new businesses to sustain themselves.)

Are they really shutting down the CalDAV interface to Google Calendar? (I'm not sure what the "API" bit means, or the "whitelisted".)

As of now, CalDAV is Google's recommended way for syncing with iOS devices http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...

Seems like the Chrome App can access:

* Your data on all websites * Your tabs and browsing activity

I'm not very comfortable with that. It also seems very unnecessary for an RSS reader.

What is real and what is simulated in war games such as this? It apparently cost US$250m, so you'd think some of it would be real but for example were real motorcycle messengers used to transmit messages to real front-line troops? Were ships actually moved? Were cruise missiles actually fired?

Thanks. Is there any significant performance difference? (I'm wondering if it makes sense to roll my own "proxy" converting read()s to emit()s.)

So a readable stream is an EventEmitter, but it's not recommended that you actually listen for 'data' events? (Instead you're supposed to call read()?) That seems ... counterintuitive.

Anyone know what you're supposed to do if you have code with multiple listeners for 'data' events?

But you basically can't do anything with a credit card number anyway--there doesn't seem to be much point breaking a long number into 10+ shorter numbers with different security requirements if you need all of the numbers all the time to do anything anyway. It's not like I can make purchases under $5 with just a CC number, but for larger purchases I have to provide more information.

Even if the different fields have different security requirements, that doesn't seem to be a good reason to require them to be entered separately.

I don't really care if someone mandates that digits 1-4 can be sent via email, digits 5-10 can be stored unencrypted, digits 11-16 must be encrypted, and digits 17-20 can never be stored at all. They're still just digits/bits of information, and I have to provide all of them almost all the time anyway.

The one exception is when a retailer has saved my credit card number, in which case they might ask me for the CVV only. But I'd rather that they didn't save the card number at all! I have to look up the CVV and copy and paste it into their form every time anyway--so they may as well require the whole thing every time.

I don't understand why, instead of adding extra fields to collect more information, the banks and credit card companies instead just added more digits to the original fields. So instead of a separate field for the security code, why not just append the security code (and the postcode, and the XXX, etc.) to the credit card number field? I always have to enter a bunch of information anyway, so why not let me enter it all in one go? (Better for copy and paste.)

The way they're doing things at the moment is driving people to pay via PayPal, because PayPal requires--hey look!--a single string which they call a "password".

The description on the UK Apple Store says that it "mirrors exactly what you see on your device", so that needs adjustment, at least.

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MD826ZM/A/lightning-digita...

All that setup and no "very very frightening" joke?!

Huh, I wonder what the crouton developer was talking about then. No encrypted disk? (I don't have Chrome OS, I was just guessing what the crouton README might mean.)

To run crouton you need to put your machine into developer mode though, which could mean that all bets are off. (e.g. if you power it off, it comes back up without requiring a password, since this is annoying/unnecessary if you're actually developing for Chrome OS.)

Looks like this is crouton:

https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

"Anyone who wants to run straight Linux on their Chromium OS device, and doesn't care about physical security. You're also better off having some knowledge of Linux tools and the command line in case things go funny, but it's not strictly necessary."

The bit about physical security seems to refer to the fact that for some reason you can't even password protect your machine.

This is very superficial of me but ... are there any screenshots of Textadept anywhere?

I actually have no idea why the hal people aren't writing hal specifications for existing services right now--it's not quite as nice as "native" support, but the format supports it, and it would be useful to see what a hal version of the Twitter API looked like, for example.

Ugh, it's being edited constantly too! Someone just removed the "Hello" from the first line, which was part of what made it great...

What version are you using? HHVM (with JIT) is the successor to HPHPc (the version that has the C++ intermediate stage), and is faster. See http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150415177928920

This is an argument that there's no discrimination in tech? Or less discrimination than in other industries?

I agree with you that they're not logical, but unfortunately I think it's too late to fix now. All the documentation, stackoverflow questions and answers, and so forth assume you're using standard git commands and terminology.

At least (in trying to match what the GitHub applications do) it's not trying to invent a completely new system. But I don't see this getting much traction unless GitHub adopts it and pushes it as their "official" command line client.

Oh, and apparently there's an update to the poster in the form of an iPad app, and she's the only woman there, too. http://techpinions.com/men-of-modern-mathematics-lives/6332

Emmy Noether is the only (?) woman on IBM's famous "Men of Modern Mathematics" poster (1966). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica:_A_World_of_Numbers...

That's pretty awesome! Although I think the elements of the "poor" example that draw attention to some potentially pertinent information shouldn't have been removed. (For example, the fact that the applicant is not mission-essential during a training cycle, and that given he has not previous cold-weather injuries, he may be less susceptible to them.)

Interesting. Do you know what the tool support is like? What compilers implement it, if debuggers support it, etc.