Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24825183

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Absolutely do the math, but keep in mind that fees are not the only fees when doing FX: few banks will use the spot FX rate for wire transfers, they'll typically add a spread of about 3%.

On one or two occasions (flying to a short stay at an outstation, and catching the same crew on the return), the attendant clearly recognised me, and made a point of saying hello, welcome back (not by name though, that would have been creepy). That's rare, and not really to be expected, though.

I am making no attempt to quantify this, I simply have no data, but it seems the argument is that today it is relatively more fashionable to write a book about black women doing something that is traditionally thought of as something white men would do, regardless of the "classic" qualities of the work. If it is the case (and I have no data to argue either way) that such a fashion means that a mediocre book about black women doing something (not saying the particular book is good or bad, I don't know it) gets published instead of a really good book about white men doing something, that could certainly be considered "diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West".

But there has always been literature pandering to political fashions, and fashionable literature has always enjoyed an edge over unfashionable literature. Some of it is good and has stood the test of time, and some (most, probably, this is a power law domain) of it pretty bad, and totally forgotten. It's easy to look at the literature that survived from 20 years ago and compare with whatever flash-in-a-pan is being hawked by publishers right this minute and see all kinds of diminished products.

You already had to do the physical trust thing. These devices are a new challenge because they could be remotely compromised.

But, of course, the author is perfectly within his rights to just not pursue this, and I have no idea what processes he'd been told to expect for this -- it's just strange that he would emphasise something he doesn't care about in the post.

As an aside, as I understand it, refactoring was popularised as a response basically to this conundrum - it's a technique for reorganising code without changing its functionality. So you can gradually "rewrite" your two page function without losing the accumulated knowledge.

As for "fishy", I find it very strange that someone writes an article emphasising twice that they're out three weeks of pay, but then couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. There's breach of contract, this isn't a long and arduous appeals process, it's open and shut, and if it isn't you have a lawyer deal with it, and recoup expenses, too. And if the guy just doesn't care about it, then why does he mention it twice?

And for the purposes of this, and the other sub-thread that is incredulous about this, this is not an American thing: If you're a contractor in Europe, and you don't get paid, and you then don't do anything about that, then you don't get paid. There's no process that automatically fixes things when the aggrieved party doesn't ask for them to be fixed (and yes, even in Europe, there's a bit of annoying process and paperwork to deal with).

Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being supportive. Or get the agency to do it for him, and bill them for the trouble. Or whatever. Something smells a bit fishy about that part of the story.

https://siestaspirits.com/products/jim-beam-kentucky-straigh...

That's not a good idea, an encrypted filesystem is only as secure as the computer you decrypt it on. Yes, of course, if you're carrying a USB drive around with you, it's strictly better that it's encrypted than not (protection against theft and loss), but it's not exactly difficult to imagine that a public computer should have malware installed.

For the leaker/whistle-blower scenario, disk encryption is your absolute last line of defence. When the MiB comes knocking, you absolutely want all your drives fully encrypted, but the vast majority of your security efforts should be spent on not getting identified in the first place. But what you don't want is for the MiB to find out that you're using the computers in a certain library, go there and install keyloggers and only come to your house once they have your passphrase.

But that doesn't answer the question: does Cheddar cheese made in the village of Cheddar have some intrinsic, inimitable quality that can't be achieved outside of that village?

(And industrial producers do indeed plop down large factories in certain geographies so they can churn out large quantities of bland product, yet slap a geographical origin label on it, so it doesn't even protect against that).