orpheline
orpheline on Hacker News
To state that some relief agencies are - I'd say success-driven rather than profit-driven - is not an attack on the people in direct contact with, and assisting, victims. There is an unavoidable gap between volunteers at the forefront of relief efforts, and the people running the agency.
Like any other organization, relief agencies need funding, they need support from local government, they need positive publicity if they're to continue. The people doing those jobs are focused on those results, not the work those in the field are doing.
You asked for an example. About 20 years ago, my colleagues' three-year-old daughter was kidnapped from in front of her apartment house. She was a sweet, blue-eyed, blonde-haired child, and her search became a huge media frenzy: non-stop reporting as police followed lead after lead.
She started working with a local branch of a national missing children's organization. At her first meeting, the director told her that her daughter' disappearance was "the best thing that has happened to them" because the publicity pulled in so many donations.
He wasn't a bad person, or incident to get daughter; but his role was making the agency successful, and he evaluated things from that standpoint. I don't think that's at all unusual for these agencies.
He's not bringing the whole layout, but the skyscrapers are pretty big; having a dedicated room for the models plus tools (including glue and paint, both of which are fragrant) would make it a lot easier.
Yep! I like that the mouse is always in exactly the same place on my desk (s), so muscle memory always lands on it (especially useful in my home office, because the keyboard tray doesn't have much room to move a traditional mouse.
My mice have thumb trackballs: my fingers stay on the mouse buttons while I use my thumb to scroll, so I don't need to lift them to move the mouse pointer.
Reading the article wasn't disturbing?
FWIW I assumed from the title that he hadn't killed himself; if he had, the title certainly would have stated it.
> Ok, you drilled open a smart lock. Is the drill able to be positioned in such a manner when the lock is installed on a door?
He drilled it from the front; the face is off in the picture where he's opening the latch with the screwdriver to better show where the mechanism is.
I use a MBP at work and an XPS 13 at home and much prefer the latter - Ubuntu with a Plasma desktop makes for a crazy configurable UI.
Interesting. I use a MBP for work, and hate that Finder intermixes directories and files. I much prefer having directories sorted separately: it makes it easier to drill down through a hierarchy of all the directories are grouped together...
I'm both surprised and skeptical. It makes me wonder whether there's a larger story, now lost... Perhaps the archetypal occurrence was someone famously humorless, and their outburst was forever burned into the minds of those present. Or perhaps the first instance was on the estate of a noble who thought it funny and insisted everyone else find it funny, too...
I know the rest of these, but Buddies is a new one; to whom does it refer?
Tangential question I don't think anyone here can answer: what did the Times mean by 'put her intelligence background to work'?
Does that mean her training suggested a possible thing she should check? Or does it mean she somehow used her position or contacts within the intelligence community to get information which would not otherwise be provided?
I've never asked my bank for this type of information; I've no idea whether or not a bank would provide it (although it seems a reasonable request)... But if she used her official position to get information she would not otherwise be provided, that's a pretty clear ethics violation.
I'm not throwing stones here;I just wish the Times quote was clearer.
Punic refers to the people. Carthage was the name of their city, so they're also referred to as Carthaginians (see also: New Yorkers, Londoners, Dubliners, Parisians, etc.).
Seconded. Even before I knew dang was a moderator I'd been impressed by dang's ability to pour oil on troubled water... Thanks to both of you for a job thoughtfully done, and done well.
The demo was a modified cable, but the article said Hak5 was interested in manufacturing them.
I blame Disney for an unrealistic princess fantasy.
I was just having a similar thought, alright the logistics of making that happen are helacious.
Not least of which: how does one make a platform with global dominance into a national public utility? How does one split it or manage it when it had to comply with so many local laws?
An implicit acceptance and endorsement for the messages of hate and violence?
I personally doubt violent video games turn people into murderers; I suspect they do desensitize people to violence, and normalize violence. That's the problem with 8chan: violence, hated, bigotry, etc are normalized
My concern: the person expressing 'calming, positive comments' gets doxed and/or SWAT'ed for their efforts.
I agree in principle with what your suggesting, but at this point those boards are echo chambers, not spaces for discussion.
It's not Internet service that's essential: it's phone service - the ability to make emergency phone calls.
I don't find it so. I do both Perl and Python at work: the Perl code is almost always clearer to read IMHO. I know some people find curly brackets and sigils distracting, but to me they make code less ambiguous.
Medieval Christian cemeteries often overfilled, especially if the cemetery was thought especially holy. Demand was so high in some places graves were regularly reused: the bones were exhumed and stacked wherever they would fit.
For a spectacular answer to the "What do we do with all these bones?" question, check out the ossuary at Sedlec in the Czech republic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary?wprov=sfla1
I saw it too - amazing to see a steam locomotive that size moving under its'own power!
For anyone interested, the Union Pacific produced a high-quality for about the Big Boy's called 'Last of the Giants'.
There are several cuts and copies of this on YouTube: the link below is an edit from the 1990's includint interviews with former UP workers.
https://youtu.be/KWNJ63C_0ts
More like, going again - the Big Boys were taken out of service in the late 1950's, early 1960's.
This one was sitting in a train museum in California for 50 years before the Union Pacific got it back; they them spent several years restoring it to running condition.
The UP has a some information about this train on their website: https://www.up.com/heritage/steam/4014/index.htm
Thanks - you made my night
That's basically what we did. The problem here was that processing was split into eight or so steps across ~25 streams of work between the backup steps and was far enough along the output files were generated, revving their generation number. Those files fed something like thirty follow-on jobs, so all the file generations had to be backed out before processing could run.
It all seemed horribly complicated and brittle to me at the time. Not sorry I don't work with it any more.
My first gig out of college was maintaining Cobol at a bank for two years. Some of the programs were 20+ years old, and we made changes monthly - it always seemed like a fantastic rate of churn.
If something went wrong during a deployment, heaven help you. One time a pair of transposed digits got through testing and code reviews and into deployment. My colleague spotted it and called the management center to hold jobs... Thirty seconds too late.
It took four days to back everything out.