Spyke

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PDFs

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Not just this, most (?all?) browsers now support viewing standard PDF documents… So, they shouldn’t even need to installing anything as long as they aren’t using IE…

news

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Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People’s Medicaid Benefits

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Honestly executives and board members who receive performance bonuses and golden parachutes should carry extra liability, such that these perks can be denied or even clawed back (and used to help the damages) when their decisions have these sort of outcomes. Nothing wrong with making more when things go well, but if you're going to take a larger piece of the pie, then you need to be prepared to take a smaller piece when things go wrong (aka, cut executive pay before layoffs, etc.).

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Role models

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This is so true, heck I've even 'baked' some custom PCB boards in the oven to do some cheap reflow... Every man belongs in the kitchen, that's where all the big boy tools are

usa

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Every American's Social Security number, address may have been stolen in hack

Honestly, we need to replace social security numbers if we insist on using them as a form of identification (they never were designed for this); they follow a pattern (which is publicly available) and can be partially predicted without knowing too much about the individual. They were originally for Social Security only (hence their name), but then the IRS decided to use them for ID and then others followed suit, and we got to where we are now

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Southwest Airlines to assign seats, breaking 50-year tradition

I never received this survey and I fly Southwest specifically because I found their boarding process to be less of a hassle (for a single traveler who doesn't care where they sit). The only way I could see this being beneficial is if they board people in order of assigned seat in such a way as to optimize time to seat, not the BS boarding that other airlines do to try and maximize price of fair, otherwise they will have lost the whole reason I like(d) to fly them... Their simplier, no bs, boarding process.

P.S. I really don't get people liking to pidgen hole themselves to a specific spot for any of these things, just makes it easier to inflate the prices later

rust

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My frustrations with Rust. Why is this the most loved language?

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Enter embedded programming, believe it or not there is a ton of low level C code being written; also, try adding a new protocol for networking, there are many cases where bitstructure matters, I recently wrote a small bit of code for a project that used bit packing so that we could fit inside of a single Ethernet frame so that we didn't have to deal with fragmentation and the networking overhead it caused.

For context, what is your past programming background and what are you trying to do? While rust is a great language, it may not be the right tool for what you're trying to do if these are things that you view as unnecessary

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Question from an educator

what software are you using and how is the class structured? It sounds like this might be a rotating group of students all using the same ipads? Does the school have access to some sort of storage medium that requires unique (per student) login credentials that the students could save their files to?

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Has ethernet become illegitimate? A librarian flipped out after spotting me using ethernet

This sounds odd to me, unless you connected to an Ethernet port behind a desk or somehow forced open a network closet… They also might not like it if you disconnected one of the public computers to use its cable/port; otherwise if this was an open and public port, you used it as designed and the librarian probably has watched too many Hollywood hacking movies. I have to admit, I never thought of this as a way to bypass the captive portal (sorta just assumed everyone going through the public network would have to hit it, kinda of the equivalent to having everyone sign a liability waiver).

With that said, I can see some institutions not liking connections that aren’t part of the more traditional/commercial networking (but it doesn’t sound like the library took issue with your traffic, just the librarian didn’t like the PHY link you chose to use). For the SMS thing (I haven’t seen that used in a while, you might be able to use some sort of burner number app if they don’t filter them).