thejefflarson

Every Blender tutorial starts with "hit a, hit x to delete the default objects." I don't think this is a valid point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Michiko Kakutani didn't work for the Book Review. She was the chief book critic of the arts section. The Book Review is a separate organization within the NYT, with an entirely separate editing staff. Sure sometimes critics like Kakutani and A.O. Scott would review things there, but it was always an assignment, not representative of the NYTBR. Generally, editors in the NYTBR strive to pick folks who are "interesting" to review the book rather than not, which leads to spicy reviews because they want to sell the Sunday section.

This article is confused from the get go.

See page two of the document: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

Seems pretty clear that they could decrypt the traffic they were interested in, they also talk about 5 years of retention of all traffic that they can decrypt at anytime. Sound familiar?

Looks like they used a squid feature: https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump

And that turned out really well. I’m unclear what your point is.

Sure my point here was it quickly? Or routine?

I live right by where these birds takeoff, we heard them, and I can tell you this is a normal day of the week. Not sure "scrambled" is correct here.

So as a married man, I use partner: it fits with my understanding of marriage, we’re partners, we both have a hand in managing a household. It feels good to say.

I’m almost finished with a RISCV core in verilog targeting FPGAs:

https://github.com/thejefflarson/little-cpu

I’m four instructions away from implementing the compressed extensions, and probably next week I’ll tackle the control and status registers. It uses an open source tool chain and is formally verified using riscv-formal. My hope is to eventually be able to compile some rust and get an fpga to blink an led :)

I wrote a small program do exactly this on OSX and Linux (Gnome):

https://github.com/thejefflarson/getpasswd

It accesses the OS keychain to get the right password. I don't use offlineimap -- I use mbsync instead which has a PassCmd option where you can pass in a shell command (e.g. getpasswd <imap-server> <imap-user>). And another tool to add passwords to the GNOME Keychain:

https://github.com/thejefflarson/setpasswd

Adding passwords to the OSX keychain is easy enough, but I found it fiddly in Gnome's GUI. YMMV.

Thanks for posting this. I encourage this crowd to to take a look at the methodology too: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compa...

Information sharing greatly increased post 9/11. See my reply to the sibling comment.

I don't think it is in anyway limited:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/facilitating-an-enhanced-...

As to the point about selectors, if a selector has an even remotely domestic terrorism related component, and is authorized by the FISA court, the FBI can and does see that information.

Edit: added qualifier about terrorism

The FBI most definitely has access to intelligence databases and information:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/25/us/25stellarwi...

A key part of the FBI's mission is "to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats" after all:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/faqs

That depends. At ProPublica we've done a bunch of visualizations with canvas and SVG in the past, and they are powerful tools. However, as part of our investigation into Hurricane Sandy flooding we knew we wanted to make a 3D visualization of NYC of show the storm surge:

http://projects.propublica.org/nyc-flood/

If your data is inherently 3 dimensional I'd say it is worth the effort to dive in, but the majority of visualizations that we do are charts and plots which don't really need to be 3D.

I'd love to chat with you. jeff.larson@propublica.org, PGP Key: https://s3.amazonaws.com/thejefflarson/pubkey.asc

The Chicago Tribune has a good series about how Big Tobacco and chemical companies have pushed for more flame retardants in everything despite health concerns:

http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html

You can download the data behind the interface here:

ftp://ftp2.census.gov/

My point being that the census data is independent of factfinder.

Are you serious? "Generate some copy?" Copy doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Someone wrote that, and meant to write that, you're kidding yourself if you think they didn't.

I went to UCSB as an undergrad for 2 years. I can guarantee if you ask -- and really listen! -- to women at UCSB, every single one would find this unwelcoming. Sexism isn't a 'culture' it is disgusting. Way to go 'bro'.

Not really, though I'd say it's smaller than Mapnik. TileMill (backed by Mapnik) is an amazing GUI for styling maps, and TileStache is an awesome caching server. But, really at it's heart all SimpleTiles does is convert spatial data into an image, and does that by relying on GDAL and Cairo as much as possible.

Code is here:

https://github.com/propublica/simple-tiles

Documentation here:

http://propublica.github.com/simple-tiles/

I've seen terrible assembly but I've seen much worse C. Most programmers have relatively no sense of organization, and when unleashed with C create things far more nasty than their assembly counterparts.

nasty: https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/blob/master/gcc/c-family/c-co...

nasty: https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/blob/master/gcc/c-family/c-le...

But you get the idea. I'm merely pointing out that compilers are tricky and complicated beasts. And especially in the rewriter CS has to jump through hoops to disambiguate.

I think we have 2 posts in the hopper about it, keep an eye on the nerd blog:

http://www.propublica.org/nerds

Yeah, non-profit, mostly foundation grants.

I didn't grab the flash content, but if I remember correctly, it was a flash movie that wrapped a PDF that Dan then OCRed and cleaned up with Refine. The coolest part was that the pdf was in grid form, so Dan wrote an ImageMagick script that split it into individual cells and then OCRed each cell (for better results).

EDIT: We haven't had any contact with Wolfram|Alpha but maybe we should reach out.

You can grab data from a web api, for example, geocoding:

http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/wiki/Geocoding

So I'm on ProPublica's web team -- the organization mentioned in the first video -- and we deal with the types of messy data Refine is made for on a day to day basis.

We've been using it pretty much daily for about 5 months now and cleaning messy government data used to be time consuming and destructive, with google Refine it's so easy and fast to join, cleanup and do rudimentary analysis on said data.

It especially shines when you have to merge many disparate data sets into one. My colleague, Dan Nguyen, did just that for our Dollars for Doctors app:

http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/

and he scraped the data from reports like this:

http://www.pfizer.com/responsibility/working_with_hcp/paymen...

(one company even put the disclosures up as a flash movie).

Of course we could write scripts, use grep/awk/sed or import it into a database, but Refine is really it. I encourage you to give it a try if you have questionable data you'll need to clean.

Thanks, I'll see if I can fix that.

There's a blog post on how we did it here:

http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/the-rainbow-connection-...