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Comment Re: It's an algorithm (Score 1) 352

White people are easier to photograph, particularly with digital cameras. These are positive media, so the more photons that strike the sensor, the cleaner the image will be (within the range of sensitivity). White skin reflects more light than dark skin. Regardless of what the algorithm is trained on, if you take the real-world photos people are actually making on their phone cameras, the pictures of white people will be better exposed and cleaner than those of black people. Better data in...better results out.

Comment Re:Project Management or Business Analyst (Score 3, Interesting) 250

+1

Not to be sexist, but most women prefer jobs that include more interaction with people and less time spent in solo problem solving, so it's not terribly surprising that she does't love coding. This isn't to say there aren't women who really like coding, or even introverted women who find working with people all day to be unpleasant. There are all kinds... but on average my observation is that women prefer more human interaction.

So, assuming that your wife falls into that category, there are lots of roles in and around software development that are more people-focused. Project management requires an additional set of skills, both people skills and management skills, but it's eminently learnable, and having a technical background is very valuable -- as long as it doesn't cause her to second-guess what the developers are telling her (always a risk with PMs, and even more with those whose technical background is shallower than they think it is. There's a tendency to assume that everything they don't know how to do is easy.)

Business Analyst is another good one. It, again, requires some additional skills she probably doesn't have but can learn. Industry knowledge tends to be important, but most companies are okay with analysts learning that context on the job. She also needs to learn how to gather and document requirements. A technical background is useful there because good requirements need quite a bit more precision than most non-technical people are used to. There's also a risk; formerly-technical BAs have a tendency to overspecify. An important skill for this role which isn't so easy to learn is writing. Good BAs are excellent writers, able to concisely and accurately boil complex issues down to simple statements.

Another option that might be excellent if she can swing it is Systems or Application Architect. Companies generally want experienced, senior developers to move into these roles, but smart but less-experienced people can do it as well. Architects take the business requirements and convert them into high-level technical plans/architectures. Architects tend to spend less time interacting with people than PMs or BAs, but still quite a bit since they provide the primary interface between the technical and business teams. Architects need to have good technical skills and good "taste", meaning a good feel for what sorts of structures are easy to build, easy to maintain and flexible, and for how to intelligently trade those issues off. They also need to be good at translating technical issues into language the business people can understand. Honestly I expect that your wife probably doesn't have the depth of experience needed to make a good architect, but I thought I'd throw it out.

Another that might be good if she's a good writer and enjoys writing is technical writing. Good tech writers have greater need for writing skill than they do technical skill, but the latter is very valuable because it enables them to more quickly and accurately understand the information that needs to be documented.

In smaller companies a lot of these roles get mixed and combined with other business roles, so another good option is to look for a position that isn't necessarily directly related to software development, but could benefit from having a deeply IT-literate person.

Finally, the option that I've long thought I'd take if I ever got tired of writing code is the law. It's a lot of additional training, but I think there is a deep and growing need for attorneys who understand technology. This is especially true in the areas of patent and copyright law, but I think it applies in many areas. Of course, the law may not have any attraction whatsoever for your wife.

Whatever, I'd really encourage her to take the time to figure out what she wants to do, and do that, rather than settling for something she doesn't really like. We so much of our lives working that it's really a waste to spend it doing something we don't like.

Comment Re:Drone It (Score 1) 843

How about we stop trying to make one plane do everything? Build something small, fast, and minimal for dogfights. Build something with more range and capacity for when that's needed. Don't cripple the pilot's ability to use the tool, either.

Comment Re:The founding documents present a path... (Score 1) 161

The electorate fully agrees with him.

This is completely untrue. The electorate is pretty divided, and whether you can find a majority depends which poll you look at, and which week. The fact is that there is a significant part of the electorate that thinks bulk surveillance is fine because they have nothing to hide and it keeps us safe. That they're wrong on both counts doesn't change their opinion, or their votes

Congress mostly agrees with him.

And yet they passed the USA Freedom Act which, although better than the PATRIOT Act, still authorizes way too much surveillance. And in the process they failed to do anything to curtail article 702 of the FISA, which is the basis for the FISA court's ruling -- as was completely predictable before passage of USA Freedom. The argument is that while article 702 authorizes only surveillance of foreign people, the court considers it perfectly reasonable for the NSA to hoover up ALL the data and then figure out later what they can and cannot look at. This all comes back to the NSA's choice to define "collect" as "look at", since the law hadn't defined the term.

Congress had a perfect opportunity to define "collect" as "collect", and chose not to.

Yeah, we have a problem here. And the "democratically elected government" ain't it.

The problem is fundamentally the electorate, which isn't sufficiently convinced that bulk data collection is a bad thing. If 80% of the voters wanted it shut down, enough to make it a major election issue, it would be shut down. But as is Congress knows that with a slim majority (at best) concerned about data collection, if they shut it down and then Something Bad happened the voters would turn on them like a rabid dog.

The system isn't perfect, but it is basically working as intended. We just need to convince more of our fellow Americans that surveillance is bad.

Comment Re:Apples and oranges (Score 2) 107

... it's just a little more than 1% the size of OpenSSL...Notably, s2n does not provide all the additional cryptographic functions that OpenSSL provides in libcrypto, it only provides the SSL/TLS functions....

So then, aren't size comparisons between OpenSSL and s2n at best useless, and at worst intentionally misleading?

No, but this particular comparison is. Besides all of the stuff s2n doesn't provide, s2n actually uses OpenSSL's libcrypto to provide the implementations of all of its crypto algorithm. A useful comparison could be made between OpenSSL's TLS layer and s2n, with some caveats listing the TLS features s2n doesn't provide.

Note that none of this means that s2n doesn't have value. If you don't need the other OpenSSL features, it's a lot less code to audit.

Comment Re:And if they see a NEW surge, it's because... (Score 1) 112

[goes to check]

Looks like IXQuick/Startpage has reverted to the old layout (that was quick) which would explain why today it again works fine without javascript. The 'upgraded' page quite definitely did not. Plus it was hard on aging eyes. Fucking pastels everyone has suddenly gotten into...

DDG used to require JS to work, but doesn't now.

Comment Re: How is this news for nerds? (Score 1) 1083

The restriction to look at now is whether the marital status of each spouse in the marriage at hand is single. Today it has to be. But there's not a good reason for it. (As already mentioned, administrative convenience is not a good reason). So why can't Alice, who is married to Bob, now also marry Carol? Bob isn't marrying Carol; the A-C marriage would be between two people only. You're treating Alice differently merely because she is already married.

So what happens to Alice's stuff when she dies? How are property rights naturally divided? I can tell you there would be different interpretations of what happens and that's a problem. You need new law or legal precedent to establish how that works.

Sure, it's not intractable, it's also not even something I'd be against. Equal protection, however, is based on "protected classes" and the state of "being married" is not one of those. Why should it be? Someone who is married is denied the joys of ... being married? That doesn't compute.

Comment Re:Bandwagon (Score 1) 818

I was okay with the government flying it in SC, because 1) it was the battle flag, for soldiers, not the political flag of the Confederate States of America and 2) it was flying at the memorial for South Carolinian soldiers who died in the Civil War. It's a sign of respect for the men who died fighting for their home and neighbors. Most of them were poor people who didn't own slaves themselves, and were, like every other damn soldier ever, fighting a rich man's war for the rich man's interests, but died believing he was fighting for home and honor. I don't believe they should be dishonored.

I can understand, though, Wal-Mart and pals not wanting to sell flags. That's fine. They can sell or not sell whatever they want (within the law). But Apple is just fucking stupid, pulling it from video games set in the Civil War. Might as well replace the soldiers' guns with walkie-talkies, too.

Comment Re:Soooo... (Score 5, Informative) 44

Like most of the up-voted posters here, I think you're missing the point. This new service isn't a Google Code replacement or a Github competitor. It's an add-on for cloud-based hosting, so people who are hosting systems on Google App Engine or Compute Engine can keep their source there as well, with nice tools for working with the code online, managing releases and even live debugging... if there's a problem with your running app you can debug it instantly. The system snapshots the live system so it's not interrupted and then gives you an online debugger so you can examine the state, step through the code, etc.

It's a value-added feature on a paid cloud hosting service, not a place to host your latest open source project. That's what Github is for.

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