Readit NewsI see how ex-CIA guys would expect to get a profile on everyone and know what color toothbrush they use.
I am lucky that I can refer to media publications citing my name in a professional context. But it's a creepy world where the employers' expectation is that all your personal information is public.
I can't find it right now. Maybe I should try Bing search
wiseacre means "one who feigns knowledge or cleverness; one who is wisecracking; an insolent upstart." If you made a joke somebody might say "oh, a real wiseacre, eh?"
seeing Weizsäcker's name I was struck by the similarity so I thought I'd look it up, and turns out the two words have the same etymology: soothsayer, wise man
wiktionary From Middle Dutch wijssegger (“soothsayer”), from Old High German wīzzago, wīzago (“wise man, prophet, soothsayer”), from Proto-West Germanic *wītagō (“wise one; prophet”). Cognate with Old English wītga (“wise man, prophet”). See also German Weissager (“soothsayer, seer”).
Weizen - wheat Sack - bag
LINQ, however, attempts to solve a much bigger problem: Use consistent code to process data and don't worry whether it is in a remote database or in a local array.
If you manage to do it in a way that
- integrates seamlessly with e.g. Python IDE and I don't have to pass and parse strings
- allows me to access graph, document and relational data
- allows me to pull and process the data from REST APIs, [O/J]DBC and straight from my RAM
- and maybe even includes deductive (PROLOG/DATALOG) features
I will be your most loyal client
The examples arbitrarily make SQL look more verbose:
SELECT
id,
first_name,
age
FROM
employees
ORDER BY
age
LIMIT
10
from employees
select {id, first_name, age}
sort age
take 10
select id, first_name, age
from employees
order by age
limit 10
It's insane to me that the vast majority of inter-island travel in Hawaii (an archipelago where generally each island is visible from the next) is via jet aircraft. You have to spend hours (especially if you're checking bags) getting to the airport early, going through security, waiting at the gate, taxiing, etc ... for a 20 minute flight.
There used to be a ferry between Oahu and Maui but it got killed due to real and perceived environmental impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Superferry
A light electric ferry service like this, directly between say, Ala Wai and Lahaina harbors, skipping airport/TSA nonsense, could be a very successful premium product. I just hope from there it could be scaled up so that it wouldn't remain just a niche offering for the rich.
An electric wing-in-ground-effect aircraft still looks like an airplane and might still fall under the same regulations as any other airplane.
In any case TSA objectively does not add much security[1] and does cause issues e.g. for people who have names with similar spellings to those on a no-fly-list [2].
But that aside, the technology is great for short distance travel. Climbing to 2-5 thousand foot to travel some 50 miles is clearly insane.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives
Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website their playground, though[0]. If you get rid of the superminority, the website literally couldn't function. The inner workings of Wikipedia are actually a fascinating rabbit hole to fall into, but the takeaway is that this behaviour seems to be ingrained into human nature. Basically, the majority consume, a minority produces, and a minority of the minority produces a lot. You can see this in any participatory system as well, not just Wikipedia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_...
It's more like the minority of the minority does a lot of spellchecking and editing, but it seems, much more plausibly, that a group much larger than a minority does the bulk of writing.
Any discussion of Wikipidia on HN is incomplete without a reference to Aaron Swartz's analysis of how Wikipedia is written:
"[He] concluded that the bulk of its content came from tens of thousands of occasional contributors, or "outsiders," each of whom made few other contributions to the site, while a core group of 500 to 1,000 regular editors tended to correct spelling and other formatting errors.He said: "The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around." [1]
That might very well be the case for a big company that receives a ton of applications but the numbers game works both ways: as the person looking to hire somebody, I find it well worth the time to weed out people based on poor spelling, grammar, etc. It only takes a few seconds to spot the bad ones, and it ensures I don't have to waste my time with somebody who has poor communication skills to begin with.