Your solution depends on third parties checking the script or going based on some knowledge of "trusted sources." That has nothing to do with this hack, which exploits those who are "verifying" the script themselves before executing it.
The simple solution here is not to use curl/execute with a pipe. Just wget to save the file and check it locally (rather than through a browser) before executing.
Tangential, but this is the same reason mandatory health insurance makes sense. We go around living in our bodies, and they break down sometimes. It's the law in this country that emergency rooms can't turn people away without evaluating and stabilizing them, so you're always one accident away from creating huge costs for someone else if you don't plan for these costs with health insurance.
In the case of car insurance, the injured party is the driver you run into, or the property you damage. In the case of health insurance, the injured party is the hospital/doctors.
I always thought it was strange that so many states were totally on board with mandatory car insurance, but not mandatory health insurance.
I had a manager that loved Java. He wanted to add a new helper service onto an existing service that was written in Python, but the new service would be Java (because Java is the best, obviously).
This new helper was responsible for transforming, combining, and synthesizing large API responses with somewhat variable and highly nested data structures into other large API responses with somewhat variable and highly nested data structures. It certainly was not Java I was proud of, but it would have been trivial (and FAR more readable) in Python. Ugh.
> they've picked the right abstraction for the problem
I hate to agree with you, but "picking the right abstraction for the problem" elegantly expresses what I've been trying to tell people for the last few years now, but far less succinctly (I usually ramble on about "underlying data models" and "what this actually is in the real world, not just how we view it in our application")
The reason I hate to agree with you is that I just became very disappointed that this is a difficult skill to master. "Just use the right model and the code is easy, duh. Why aren't you doing this?" Well. Now I just feel like a jerk. I thought they just gave me the "senior" title because I was old.
It's unfortunate that one of the most important skills in the industry is so intangible and difficult to quantify. Even more difficult to teach.
"If unforeseen complications arose during or after the procedure, the Surgery Center would cover those costs. Villa wouldn't see another bill."
So there is a sort of built-in insurance to this system. Those who don't have any complications are paying more to cover patients who do. They're simply passing the first line of medical costs (known, anticipated, where a price estimate can be created) on to consumers while letting insurance handle un-estimatable medical emergency type situations.
Amen. I rented in Boston, Somerville, and Medford after college, and it's amazing the number of landlords who are just random people who happen to have an extra property, or bought a house with an extra unit, and decide to rent it out. They print a template lease, we sign, and they hand over the keys.
Two landlords in particular didn't know about things like escrow account and interest laws for security deposits, contact information posting for vacant landlords, who's responsible for things like snow removal and smoke detector maintenance. I left those units in good condition (thankfully for them!) but nearly sued twice and, in one case, received triple damages on my security deposit.
One landlord said "To keep costs low, tenants generally organize snow shoveling" I said "Oh, sorry, I didn't realize we were breaking the law here."
There are some states with very few tenant rights where landlords can get away with a lot. California and Massachusetts are not those states. It's a very serious part time job that requires a lot more than just owning a property.
I think it's incredible that her health insurance didn't cover electronic prosthetics.
The hook prosthetic is just a simple open/close grabber tool. Imagine trying to navigate through life with two grabbers. The modern myoelectric prosthetics offer way more functionality and freedom. You can use a computer, dress yourself, drive a car, and feed yourself (of course the author can't do all these yet, it does take time to learn). You can't do this at all with hooks.
I fractured/dislocated multiple wrist bones two years ago and it wasn't life threatening but I would have had diminished functionality without surgery -- insurance covered it no problem. My hand is great.
How the hell does it make sense to fix a wrist in order to allow someone to do the activities of daily living but it doesn't make sense to give them a common commercial prosthetic in order to do the same thing?
"Sleeping with a guy is a built in option women have to better their lives, that men don't have."
This is a complicated issue, and there's a lot to unpack here.
That technique may be used for women (and, heck, men too -- I'm the female 'breadwinner' of my household, although I didn't meet my husband at a sex party...) to better their lives, but those gains may be sporadic, and they depend on the continued cooperation of the man they're sleeping with.
I was in a "trophy girlfriend" relationship when I was young and my entire life revolved around "keeping" this guy. After a while, he broke up with me, I had to ask my parents for rent money (I had taken a first class trip to Europe the month before, but what was I going to do, ask him to put the money into my emergency savings account instead?), my entire life sort of fell apart. I went to parties with his friends, lived in his apartment, had a credit card on his account. Making sure he was happy was a job, but the skills weren't entirely transferable and there was no security. Not a situation I wanted to be in again, and I didn't.
Having a job, skills are easily transferable between employers, resources in my own name, and a relationship built on mutual respect and kindness, gives me far more freedom and security than sleeping with guys for the lifestyle perks. Even with alimony and child support in the picture (in which case you need to "get him" to marry you and/or have children) there is no facet of your life or lifestyle that is insulated from the whims of a single person. No, you may not starve after a divorce, but, especially if there's a pre-nup involved, the "betterment" in your life will always be temporary gain during the length of the relationship while his will be a permanent one.
Now, I'm not saying women shouldn't go to these parties or sleep with these men if they want to, or that considering a man's private jet ownership when debating about whether or not you want to sleep with him is an immoral choice. But saying "This is a built-in option for women that men don't have... the rest of us poor schmuck dudes actually have to go to work everyday" is an incredible simplification that makes the two choices sound like equivalent things, when they're absolutely not.
On a side note: The presence of these particular sex parties, and the fact that they're so closely intertwined with business in Silicon Valley, I think is an problem. As the article paints it, there's sort of a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" issue that they're introducing for women working in certain companies or who are seeking VC funding.
I think it depends on the amount of business that you want. I do freelance as a side job and only have a few clients a year that give me an extra ~10-20k of income. I mostly do web scraping, data science, data management, and teaching (workshops, taught a couple university classes, adult education)
Networking events and word of mouth from other clients have been about half of my work, and the rest just sort of email me out of the blue based on either my LinkedIn profile or a book I wrote.
I don't blog, I don't have much of a professional website. The book I wrote is fairly popular, but I find that the people who email generally haven't read the book (although they might have bought it... to see that it's real, I guess) but they find me through that.
Will agree that cold outreach doesn't work at all unless you're doing it on a massive scale (and then you're just a professional salesperson...). I've done it, but it's literally never worked for me.
In a computer security class I had at Harvard, the professor made the comment: "Your mother's maiden name is considered a 'secret.' Which is funny, given the building we're in."
We were in the Maxwell Dworkin building, named after the surnames of Bill Gates' and Paul Allens' mothers. Their mothers' maiden names were literally carved in a huge stone sign outside the building.
Individuals who have androgen insensitivity syndrome (XY chromosomes, but that don't respond to testosterone and are, for most intents and purposes, sterile females) will have large hips/pelvic bones.
So, yes, hip size takes a few modified base pairs (although probably all within one gene, or pretty close together on the same chromosome), but evolution only needs to "decide" (heavy emphasis on the quotes there) that this physiological change is hormonally triggered. Many skeletal changes are hormonally triggered, so this may have even been the easiest/most likely path.
I made a post about this, above, but I would argue that urine isn't always possible to completely clean in some situations. We lived in a place with a carpet and a thick pad under the carpet. Combined with a cat that spontaneously decided to habitually urinate in that one spot (no history of it). We tried EVERYTHING -- it was a massive project for over a year to get her to stop and spent hundreds of dollars on cleaning. Every enzyme product and shampoo, hours of elbow grease, soaking, drying, re-soaking, re-drying. We caught it as soon as it happened, gave LOTS of care and attention, but no dice.
Even the most responsible owners with the best pets can have problems that can't be fixed without just replacing the entire carpet. It happens.
My husband and I replaced a carpet in our last apartment ourselves before move out (hired a professional, got it matched exactly with the rest of the carpets, replaced carpet pad as well, cleaned concrete subfloor) because our cat decided that one corner of the living room was an appropriate place to urinate.
She's usually a well-behaved cat, never did anything like this before, and we tried everything we could think of to get her to stop. We spent over a year and hundreds of dollars trying to repeatedly clean the spot, shampooing, steaming, enzymes, but nothing worked.
Our deposit was only $500, but we spent about $1600 replacing the carpet (it was the right thing to do and, like you said, they can sue us). There was NOTHING you could do to get that out besides just replacing it. And that was just one room. Multiply by 5 or 6 for replacing carpets all over the house, and that's more than a landlord can even reasonably hold as a security deposit. And what if we had had a wood subfloor instead of concrete? That would quickly get into the 5 figures.
It seemed like an ideal pet situation -- good cat, no history of urinating outside the litter box, responsible pet owners, regular vet checkups, doing everything we could to try and clean and get her to stop, cared very much about the cleanliness of our living space, but we STILL had to replace the carpet.
Honestly, especially after that experience, I don't blame landlords at all. I own a house now and don't think I'd ever want to, say, rent a room to a stranger with a cat. And I have a cat!
I've been at my current company (satellite of a larger company) for a year and a half, we have 8 people in the office, max, every day. There are a couple people who usually work from home, some days it's only one or two people in the office. Our office is 4,200 sq ft and it's an "open office." We're not growing, we didn't just shrink from a massive size -- the company just picked an office and that was that.
I get paid well above market rate, I own a home just outside Boston, my macbook pro had an issue a few months ago and the company just issued me a new one without blinking. The company just doesn't give a crap. Open offices are cool and just what programmers do these days, right?
My last company was very similar. 5 people, > 2,000 sq ft, great salaries, open office. The CEO talked about how awesome it was all the time, and actually said he wanted MORE talking in the office. Annoying as hell.
I don't think it's a money issue. I really think it's a culture issue. The only company I ever worked at that had cubicles was my first job out of college and they were actually relatively strapped for cash. The difference is the founder was in his 60's and they were in business consulting, not software specifically.
There are really a few problems here that I think the article is getting a little mixed together, and I wanted to lay them out.
First, that the image corpuses used for machine learning have a strong gender bias, perhaps more than exists in the "real world." More images of men than women, more images of men working on computers, more images of women in kitchens, etc.
These images are sourced from http://imsitu.org/ which is sourced from http://image-net.org/, which (after some digging) looks like it gets most of its images from Flickr, stock photography sites, and random corporate sites. Are these representations of the "real world"? I would argue not. Professional photography, stock photography, and photos taken for the purpose of being used in an unknown future context, and/or to appeal to the most people, tends to err on the side of being "universally applicable" and emphasizing the "common idea of a thing" rather than how the thing actually is, with all its variations. An image of a man in a kitchen be perceived as more controversial and may be less universally usable than an image of a woman in a kitchen. So if you want to take a photo with as many possible uses as possible, you'd tend to fall back on established social norms MORE often than they might actually occur.
Second, machine learning tends to emphasize small differences when it has nothing else to go on, or is improperly trained. If you have a dataset featuring people in kitchens where 75% of the time the person in a photo is a woman, you could get an algorithm that is 75% accurate simply by saying "the person in the photo is a woman" every single time. While the dataset reflects 75% women, the algorithm reflects 100% women. It emphasizes small differences in order to gain accuracy.
This isn't just hypothetical. Many times, I've worked on a categorization/labeling dataset that turns out to have no actual underlying pattern, but I wind up, after many hours, getting a best fit algorithm that, say, predicts the dataset correctly 85.166667% of the time... only to realize that my dataset is spectacularly unbalanced and exactly (EXACTLY) 85.166667% of the dataset is in a single category. It's amazing how it just sort of snaps to that when you start layering the machine learning algorithms and you realize that the real problem is that there's no real pattern in the data (something data scientists don't often like to admit).
Third, sometimes the algorithms just get it wrong in ways that seem minor and rare from a data science perspective, but have large social consequences. Like improperly labeling a black couple as gorillas. It might actually be the case that the algorithm was improperly trained because it lacked photos of black people and photos of gorillas and didn't have much to go on (an example of the first issue) but I don't know enough about the situation to say for sure.
And fourth, of course, is that these patterns DO exist to some degree in the "real world," and this is a point that's been hammered on over and over again on Hacker News. The problem is that machine learning is a sort of big leveler that finds these patterns wherever it can and applies them universally (and often while emphasizing the differences for the reasons stated above). I mean, that's the point of it, after all! But knowing this fact, I think it makes sense to be careful where and how it's used.
Completely agree, and I was about to comment on the same thing that the author was drawing some dangerous conclusions from the anecdote about her kids, the same sort of conclusions I see a lot of other parents with young children making as well.
I'm female. When I was 7/8 years old I literally cried about having to do multiplication and addition flash cards. I was failing math. My dad said "Listen, you're not going to be a mathematician, but you have to learn multiplication!" Hated hated hated it.
Things started to turn around in middle school. My teachers kept pushing me, I kept taking math, I started to enjoy it. By 16 I was cross-registering at a local community college to take calculus and was in differential equations my senior year. I have a bachelor's in engineering and a master's in software engineering.
The preferences of seven year olds are almost meaningless, and their career aspirations are definitely meaningless. When I was seven I wanted to be either a baker or a manicurist or president of the United States. I haven't been interested in the culinary arts, cosmetology, or politics since. My sister was an avid artist, now she's an actuary who doesn't even do art as a hobby.
Almost every parent (especially parents of mixed-gendered children) I have this discussion with ends up saying something along the lines of "Just wait until you have kids -- boys and girls are super different and my son likes trucks and machines and my daughter likes dolls!" Yeah, but what does that have to do with which classes they enjoy in middle school or high school? I don't know. Maybe I will change my mind, but this extrapolation of early childhood preferences into adulthood career paths bugs the heck out of me.
I've had great experiences with Amazon the few times something went wrong.
- Had a fire extinguisher shipped to me but the pin apparently got knocked out in the box and it discharged during shipping. They sent out a new fire extinguisher immediately, I got to keep the old one and got it recharged for $10.
- A water filter was held by USPS and I wasn't able to pick it up in time. They sent out a new water filter (different shipping so it got to my door) even before the first one was sent back for non-pickup.
- Ordered through Amazon Fresh and some bread got crushed by a 2L soda. Sent a one-line message to them "Bread was crushed by 2L soda" Bam -- refund for bread.
- Called, questioning a $10 charge I had on my credit card, even though I hadn't ordered anything. They tracked it down to a Prime Video subscription I had made that had ended its "free trial period." I just said "Oh! I was going to cancel that!" and they removed the charge and cancelled it for me right then and there without me even asking. I've never heard of any company doing something like that that easily. In my experience "free trial periods" are just traps trying to get people to forget and let the subscription run, so I didn't even bother asking, but they went ahead and removed it.
In addition, the package (listed on the USPS documentation) didn't have the correct weight, which should have been further proof that something was wrong. The package was 8oz, the lens itself, even without packaging, weighs 3.2 pounds.
The simple solution here is not to use curl/execute with a pipe. Just wget to save the file and check it locally (rather than through a browser) before executing.