ibarrac's comments

That is not true. The US does not block Cuba from getting to the internet in general (https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/912206/download?inline), although it blocks most commerce in general under its embargo. Your linked webpage is a Github policy restricting the availability of Github Enterprise Server and Github Copilot in Cuba, not the internet.

Your characterization of the Mariel boatlift is misleading and wrong. Cubans were mostly not allowed by their government to leave Cuba. During the 1980 Mariel boatlift, Castro suddenly temporarily abolished this policy due to preceding events where thousands had rushed into the Peru embassy in Havana hoping to leave. He announced that foreign relatives of any Cubans who wished to leave could come pick them up in boats in the Mariel harbor. Those wishing to leave where subject to abusive acts of denunciation and beatings by mobs organized by the government. In a cruel twist, Castro then demanded that in addition to their relatives, the boats had to be filled with common prisoners from jails and mental patients, who were given the choice of staying in prison or trying their luck emigrating on those boats. Castro wanted to provoke a crime wave in the US to tarnish the reputations of those Cubans living there. (source: I was one of those Cuban Marielitos that arrived in 1980 in one of those boats).

I've been using this for the last 3 weeks and it works really well. It has blocked 21 spam calls up to now. After the free week they charge $30 yearly or $4 monthly.

You can set the spam calls to be answered with selected funny time-wasting recordings, but since that would be embarrassing if I get a call from a professional contact, I set them to be answered with a plain fax tone.

Now I am back to being able to pick up all calls that ring.

Beautiful! Great job.

Lander used to be the first game I would program when I got a new computer as a kid. I remember writing it for the TI-99/4A, Commodore 64, and the Amiga 500 (in Modula 2). Your game brings fond memories of those simpler times.

Amazing what you can do these days with the tremendous speed of computation available on modern hardware, even with the js13k constraints.

No, the tool works like a brainwallet. The seed phrase determines the ethereum public and private keys. That way there is nothing else to save, no file backup is necessary. Knowledge of the seed phrase is sufficient. That's a feature, not a bug.

It is not like gpg where the private key is independent, stored on disk and encrypted by the passphrase.

The user messed up in that he didn't understand that he needed to use a strong passphrase or it was possible for anyone in the world to guess it.

In the video the researcher claims that they can build a significantly smaller/cheaper tokamak with HTS (high temperature superconductor) materials technology that has only became available in the last 5 years. Even if ITER is built not using HTS, can HTS be later retrofitted into it and therefore improve its performance down the line?

This happens today in Cuba, where many of the same techniques of repression were copied from East Germany.

As a young Pioneer I was told to inform on my parents if I heard any talk disparaging the government or Communism at home. There are neighborhood organizations called CDR (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) that know what everyone is doing and will report any hint of dissent or any suspicious meetings. Snitching is encouraged as the patriotic duty of every citizen.

The 80% poor may have had their standard of living raised by the revolution in 1959 but the rich and middle class had it lowered. In the 55 years since, the standard of living of the middle class and opportunities for the young in other similar countries has advanced past Cuba's while Cuba has stagnated and remained a 1970s soviet-like low-tech state.

I'm 46. I do agree that I felt smartest around 22-25, I was able to recall stuff quickly and think faster than now and absorb new information faster, but that's just raw calculating ability and short term memory. I have noticed over the years a slow decline, and now I feel about 10% less smart in that sense.

However, over the years I have gained a large array of mental tools, techniques and knowledge that have vastly expanded my abilities. I am a more competent programmer now, as well as a more rounded person. We will see if that holds up for another 10 years.

Needs a volume button.

I disagree. There is a larger need for skilled workers: that's why they command much higher wages.

I think dmk23 is right. Since Obama got elected there seems to be a higher rate of denials for H1B applications and renewals, without clear guidelines why. Looks like pressure from above. See http://www.indianexpress.com/news/obama-warned-over-h1b-visa...

It does seem like Obama favors unskilled immigration (amnesty for illegals and the like) over skilled immigration, which I think frankly, is stupid and short-sighted, pandering to his increasingly powerful latino (mostly Mexican-American) voters.

One thing that I have not seen expressed very much is how people in other countries, especially in intolerant or oppressive ones, are not aware of the level of freedom of speech guaranteed to all citizens in the US. In turn, Americans are not aware of their lack of awareness. This causes no end of misunderstanding.

I remember seeing an interview where Chrisiane Amanpour is told by an Iranian member of parliament, "I don't think there is a place in the world where freedom means that people can say whatever they want, where they can lie or make whatever accusation they choose. For example, in the United States, can someone say or write something against their country's national interest and security?" Ms. Amanmpour replies, "Yes. Yes, they can".

Here is the clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCkHzljMtB4&feature=playe...

What I find really ridiculous about this article is that the author is worried about just a single possible use of a world-changing technology. He is concerned that creating real artificial intelligence will allow for the possibility of someone building androids with nuclear bombs inside masquerading as humans, a very specific and frankly ridiculous idea, taken straight out of the movie Impostor or from Philip K Dick's story of the same name.

In reality, the effects of building truly intelligent machines would be so vast, so utterly unpredictable, that worrying about one single possible use of the technology is absurd. Nothing has prepared us to deal with another fundamentally different intelligence on this planet, especially one that would soon outstrip our own. We don't know if we can keep the AIs as our slaves, or whether we would become their slaves, or merge with them, or we would become extinct like the dinosaurs and they would represent a new phase in human evolution.

For more about the risks related to the rise of true AI read this: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/ai-risk

Teradata is meant for data warehousing and analysis with lots of reads and few writes, not for OLTP that has a lot of writes.

Any DML that modifies a row in Teradata either locks the whole table if it doesn't know immediately where the row is, or locks the row hash if it does (if you give it the primary index value). Locking the whole table involves sending a command to all of the nodes and waiting for a response. That's why most writes are typically done as large batch loads at infrequent times.

So, does it work on Windows, or is there a version for Windows?

Yep, that paragraph is crafted for internal consumption.

The average American reads this and thinks "that's not quite right, I don't have most of these restrictions."

The average Chinese reads this and thinks "yeah, every country censors, why is Google singling us out?"

I think that free speech is a basic human right, not an American cultural value.

The Chinese government is trying to evoke feelings of xenophobia and fear of cultural imperialism to justify its control of information and muzzling of criticism. In this case, it is a total feint to redirect attention away from a core issue: that an uncensored Google lets you find anything, including "objectionable" information. That's not an American idea. The ability to search for information is a core human right.

Yes, online gabling is mostly illegal, thus my "minor exceptions".

But all types of porn except child porn are allowed as far as I know. Definitely all types of anti-government websites are allowed. The first amendment confers very strong protection on free speech.

This Chinese news release is trying to mislead. I think the average Chinese citizen would be shocked to learn the level of freedom of expression and access to information in the US.

They say:

In fact, no country allows unrestricted flow on the Internet of pornographic, violent, gambling or superstitious content, or content on government subversion, ethnic separatism, religious extremism, racialism, terrorism and anti-foreign feelings.

Not true, the US allows all this, with very minor exceptions.

If you know Python and Teradata, please send me your resume anyway to [email protected] and I will keep it on file for any future position. It's very hard to find people with both Python and Teradata skills.

The contract starts out at 2 months because that is all my client will commit to at the moment, but I consider it likely to get extended if you are any good.

I don't mind missing out on applicants that are searching for the usual "ETL developer with Informatica or DataStage experience". I am looking for people with strong SQL, not a particular ETL tool. Thanks for the suggestion.

We are looking for someone with Python and strong Teradata SQL knowledge for a contract position in Orlando, FL.

Dice.com posting: http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302...