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nopal

913 karma · joined February 26, 2008

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nopal··on US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles
Geopolitical Implications of a Successful SETI Program

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.15125

nopal··on Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Map Coordinates
And if you run into problems dealing with coordinate systems, check out https://ihatecoordinatesystems.com/
nopal··on Marc Benioff of Salesforce: ‘Are We Not All Connected?’
http://www.salesforce.org/pledge-1/
nopal··on A Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code
Ah!
nopal··on A Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code
144th
nopal··on Google's 'Advanced Protection' Locks Down Accounts Like Never Before
How do the Google iOS apps handle authentication, since NFC security keys aren’t supported by Apple?
nopal··on How to Generate Millions of HTTP Requests (2012)
Here's one to spin up some temporary EC2 instances: https://github.com/newsapps/beeswithmachineguns
nopal··on Know How To Roll Your SSL Certificates
Here's a Python script I used when I ran a SSL monitoring site: https://gist.github.com/bretwalker/5420652. It'd be easy enough to get this running as in cron job.
nopal··on Thank HN: You guys helped me land my dream job.
Jerad's a great dev and a great person. You guys did well!
nopal··on Algorithmic tagging of Hacker News or any other site
Has anyone seen Open Calais [1]? It does tagging and categorization. It's been around for years and seems pretty powerful. It's a bit lower-level than Algorithmia (not href aware), but it seems more powerful, and a system like Algorithmia could be built on it.

[1] http://www.opencalais.com/about

nopal··on Ask HN: ISPs with alternative business models
That's a great answer, and it's encouraging.

Yes, I'm talking about the US. Louisville, Ky., to be specific.

I haven't been blown away by what I've read in the RFI responses, but, then again, they're pretty high-level. http://www.louisvilleky.gov/economicdevelopment/OfficeofInno...

The city does seem to be doing what it can to encourage and help providers, but I don't think they are willing to invest capital. Not sure whether or not that is a dealbreaker.

nopal··on As Hospital Prices Soar, a Single Stitch Tops $500
Are there any sites crowdsourcing provider charges?

There have been some data sets released by CMS, but they're far from comprehensive.

nopal··on Interviews are Broken
I'm not sure that same == fair.

If a worker is going to work remotely, is it a better evaluation of her skill to have her do her coding test remotely or have her do it in the office? Likewise, is it fair to ask a potential remote worker to take on an endeavor that's much more cumbersome than it would be for an in-office worker.

The other part of the argument is that the hiring company may be affecting its ability to evaluate a candidate by subjecting him to a situation that's pretty different from the job's reality. Ostensibly, the point of having someone work out of the office is to see how well he'll do if he gets the job, but in the case of a remote worker, this may not be a good indicator.

I think all of this is highly debatable, and there's probably no right answer, but there is lots of food for thought!

nopal··on Interviews are Broken
I think your twisting his words about C-level executives. The point of that section was the value of time, and was using his experience with executives to illustrate that point, not to insinuate that he deserves to bypass lower-level employees.
nopal··on iPhone 5s Teardown
I'm not sure they "lied."

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/20/a7-processor-manufacture...

nopal··on Django Security Release - 1.5.4
I think that method was just added in response to this vulnerability:

https://github.com/django/django/commit/aae5a96d5754ad34e48b...

nopal··on To my daughter's high school programming teacher
I really wish the mother would have contacted the teacher, even if her daughter had decided "to plow through."

I'd like to give the teacher the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn't knowingly let a student endure a semester of harassment. He probably didn't see or recognize the issue.

Open communication from the mother could have helped the teacher recognize the problem and deal with it.

nopal··on Ask HN: How does Google measure programmer productivity?
I'm genuinely curious. Core premise of the article is that Google is abandoning 20% time because they have these metrics in place and management places so much value in them. If the articles correct, the measurement they're using is having a huge financial and technological impact on one of the most successful software companies around.
nopal··on Why Ruby rocks
I'm sure it does, but I can write the same class in C# just as easily:

    class Person
    {
        public int Sanity { get; set; }
    
        public Person()
        {
            Sanity = 50;
        }
    }
And to call it:

    var programmer = new Person();
    programmer.Sanity += 1000000;
    Console.WriteLine(programmer.Sanity);
I don't see much difference between Person.new and new Person();.

What are the real ways in which it will knock my socks off? I'm honestly asking. Even though I program C# at work, I'm very interested in the advantages of other languages.

nopal··on Healthcare.gov: Code by the People, for the People, Released Back to the People
Of course. And if they do implement such a JavaScript-dependant approach, it will be entirely different from any other government site. As I said, I look forward to seeing how they progress.
nopal··on Healthcare.gov: Code by the People, for the People, Released Back to the People
I'm very eager to see how they handle the actual exchange code.

Jekyll and static HTML make a lot of sense for a marketing/informational site (which this appears to be right now), but at some point, they're going to need a dynamic backend (right?). These exchanges will need to aggregate plan info from lots of different insurance carriers and display plans to people based on various bits of user-specific info. Perhaps they can generate static info pages for all of the plans and redirect people to these pages via JavaScript and then pass the actual enrollment off to the insurance companies.

If they have to support enrollment and dynamic content, it will be interesting to see how they do so while adhering to their principles of simplicity.

If they don't, it will be an interesting example of how to embrace simple solutions where possible while preventing scope creep.

Either way, I'm glad to see this type of innovative development happening.

nopal··on Django 1.6 beta 1 released
http://storify.com/bretwalker/django-1-6-beta-fixes
nopal··on Show HN: Test your website's responsiveness
http://www.louiewatch.com looks different on my iPhone 5 and your site (accessing site using Safari 6.0.5 on OS X 10.8.4).
nopal··on The New uberX: Better, Faster, and Cheaper than a Taxi
For those that don't know, uberX uses hybrid cars instead of luxury sedans [1].

[1] http://blog.uber.com/2012/07/03/sf-vehicle-choice/

nopal··on Introducing the Square Stand
So does that mean it's PCI compliant?
nopal··on Web Framework Benchmarks Round 4
Any reason you didn't test ASP.NET MVC or ASP Web Forms?
nopal··on Rethinking J-school
To the author: since you're at Northwestern, don't forget about Rich Gordon [1]. He's the guy who started the scholarship program to bring working programmers to Medill to learn journalism [2].

To hackers: check out [2]. You can get a scholarship to learn journalism at one of the best schools in the nation.

[1] http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/faculty/journalismfulltim... [2] http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/page.aspx?id=5...

nopal··on Bing doesn't support SSL
I think $5 for 5 sites, $10 for 15 and $20 for 50.
nopal··on Bing doesn't support SSL
Yes, IMAP and POP were supported: https://gist.github.com/bretwalker/5420652
nopal··on Bing doesn't support SSL
Very useful. It's not a super hard problem to solve, but I did think it provided enough value that companies would be willing to pay for it. SSL is used on the most important pieces of a business' infrastructure, I thought it'd be a simple sell.

I also can't tell if certalert.me checks for hostname mismatches. That was another part of my service, because a misconfiguration is just as fatal as an expired certificate.

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