My understanding is that the "testimony" would be in the text of the password: compelling someone to reveal the password could be self-incriminating if _the password itself_ led them to additional evidence (e.g. a password of "I hid the revolver in the Conservatory"). [1]
I can't think of a case involving a fingerprint where there's a similar risk since the fingerprint is arbitrary data.
The case law thus far has stated that compelling the decryption of a data storage device really hinges on this: What evidence is known by the prosecution to exist? In several cases, when the defendant makes known that incriminating evidence exists, or when the prosecution is independently aware of the existence of incriminating evidence (they saw the screen before you locked it, and testified that what they saw was evidence of a crime), the defendant was rightfully forced to decrypt the storage device.
However, when the prosecution has no specific knowledge that the evidence they seek exists, US courts have ruled that the defendant cannot be compelled to decrypt the storage device, since doing so would be forcing the defendant to reveal that incriminating evidence actually exists.
Applying your fingerprint to an iPhone is an act that, without argument, decrypts data on an encrypted storage media, as the act of applying your finger to the sensor instructs the device to retrieve the actual cryptographic information necessary (your passcode/passphrase, plus other hardware-specific data) to access the cleartext of the data.
The more and more I think about this, the more confidant I am that a fingerprint, while "something you have", forces you to disclose, by proxy, "something you know" to your phone.
I guess the question then is twofold: If you have a combination safe that may contain incriminatory evidence, and a safety deposit box that contains only the combination to your safe, can the courts compel you to give them the key to the safety deposit box? And if so, should they be able to?
I think it's interesting that we're 44 comments in and nobody has commented on how race fits into this.
She sees herself as someone working her way up into a freelance writing career. Her customers, her bosses and her family view her as the kind of person unlikely to do anything more than what her parents and grandparents did: bounce around through low-wage, low-prestige jobs like Instacart their entire working life.
When everyone around you assumes you won't make it higher, it's hard not to wonder if they're right. And society assumes African-Americans are much less likely to achieve career success. [1]
[1] See http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html for instance: "Race, the authors add, also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower quality resumes. But the positive impact of a better resume for those with African-American names was much smaller."
Nobody has commented on how race fits into this because race is entirely irrelevant to the theme of the article.
Her skin color is not relevant to her picking kale for a living. She's picking kale because she got two college degrees in non-marketable subjects, not because she's black.
Not every topic contains a hidden narrative of latent racist oppression just waiting for an overeducated postmodernist to come along and deconstruct it, even if it does involve people of a visibly different ethnic background than their employer.
"Our national history is rife with examples of black Americans facing exclusion from labor movements, as well as general workforce discrimination. It’s not hard to see how the effects of these policies have trickled down. I see my family’s work history, rendered briefly here, as a particular kind of ingenuity necessary for black Americans."
It's not at all, though she seems to think it is. It's about how indignant she is that she got two college degrees and still can't get a middle class job.
The headline is: "Two College Degrees Later, I Was Still Picking Kale For Rich People."
That happened because she studied creative writing, a largely non-marketable subject. Her being black is not relevant. If she had studied chemical engineering or dentistry or any of a large number of other in-demand subjects instead of creative writing, she'd easily have obtained a middle class job despite being black.
Just to be clear, this article is talking about ego depletion which is the theory that willpower is linked to glucose consumption implying exercising willpower in one area will deplete willpower for another area.
What Kahneman is talking about is a tendency for the brain to swap out expensive slower analytical thinking with cheaper and faster heuristic thinking. Both ideas are only tenuously related because they both discuss the role of the brain's glucose metabolism.
If he's the one who can't handle the breakup then shouldn't he be the one to leave? The knee-jerk assumption that _she_ should leave is an example of the implicit sexism that sucks about our industry.
In fact, I agree with you. He should definitely be gone, not her. She seems to enjoy Tinder the app/product/company, and were it not for him, she would still be there.
The reason that is not the case is because there is a systemic lack of HR or proper channel to report this behavior. But that's another discussion entirely. I'm simply saying it can be a bad idea to start/join a company with your significant other. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. But you should realize this is a risk.
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We guide every stage of a used book’s life. We help students save money, and bookstores become and stay relevant, competitive, and transparent.
> Metrics: 350 colleges and universities, serving 4.5 million students, tracking ~200k unique book titles, integrating with 7 vendors & 20 retailers, raising the “win rate” for bookstores to 80%, and dropping prices across the board. 17 employees, 3 part-time. 2 dogs. 5 cats. 3 children.
Profitable. Growing.
> Code: Ruby, Rails, JS (Coffeescript/Backbone), Clojure for Hadoop, MySQL on RDS, AWS w/ Chef. We love experiments and go with what works! We also love making a stable, solid product which is why we have a ton of metrics and a one-click build pipeline.
What’s in it for you: A great team and company culture, benefits (even for part time!), a laptop, unlimited books, BART pass, pool table, healthy (and un-) office snacks, great conversation during our yearly company work-cations, and hard, challenging, fulfilling, good (in the public sense) work.
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If this story piqued your interest in late Communist Poland, give Timothy Garton Ash a read.
His "The Polish Revolution" is a great in depth account of the 1980/81 Polish uprising, and "The Magic Lantern" is a romping retelling of the last few months of Communist rule.
I'm being audited right now (over a $2,500 student loan interest deduction, of all things) and it's totally automated. It seems like they have an internal process that goes "Taxpayer claimed deduction, IRS doesn't have paperwork matching payment activity, ergo send letter asking taxpayer to pony up".
If Coinbase is going to report earnings to the IRS, it's a good idea to match what they report or you might trigger the algorithm.
What you are describing is not an audit. The automated system is a separate process. An audit involves an actual IRS agent manually reviewing your entire tax history for the given year.
At least at the state level (MA), the automated system is considered an audit. I recently received notice that an "audit" (their word) of my state tax return detected a discrepancy with my federal return. When I called, I was told that it was caught automatically.
So I think the manual and automatic processes are considered to be two forms of the broader term "audit".
"An audit may be conducted by mail or through an in-person interview and review of the taxpayer's records."
"You will be provided with a written request for specific documents needed."
"An IRS audit is a review/examination of an organization's or individual's accounts and financial information to ensure information is being reported correctly, according to the tax laws, to verify the amount of tax reported is accurate."
Consquently by my interpretation (and actual experience over many years) your last sentence is not correct.
Could we just say that it's not what people usually think of when they say "IRS audit"? Getting a letter in the mail asking for some paperwork isn't really scary.
I think it's actually something that will raise your anxiety level even if you are "pretty honest".
Also there are some borderline issues with taxes (and/or self employment or small corp) that can give you problems.[1] (One for example is deducting for a home office, another might be charitable deductions, another might be writing off some auto usage).
Think in terms of what happens when you see the flashing lights of a police officer in back of you. Even if you haven't been speeding you don't automatically think "no problem I didn't do anything wrong" you get anxious thinking there might have been some mistake that you have made.
[1] See the typical business owner isn't Zuck and doesn't have an army of knowledgeable advisers to handle all the details. You are essentially on your own with your accountant.
I should have phrased that better. You're right, it is a bit frightening. But not on the same level as what we would think of as a real audit (I imagine, haven't had one).
But they should be scared. Why? Because it could be the tip of the iceberg. If you are able to sufficiently answer the inquiry they are generally done with you. Otoh, depending on the inquiry, if you are not you then possibly open yourself up to further scrutiny in the current year or future years.
What you are describing is a compliance audit. The parent either is responding to an automated quasi-audit request (which have different rules) or a traditional correspondence audit, which occurs through phone/mail and is generally confined to specific areas of a return.
It doesn't fix the "custom book" problem, but if you're an instructor you should encourage your institution/bookstore to mandate price comparison for textbooks.
We run white-labelled price comparison sites for about 350 campuses, and the stores at those campuses end up winning 80% of the sales. The need to look competitive against online retailers is a really powerful incentive for the local store to do everything possible to get lower-cost options on the shelves (and we do things like help them get more used/rental books, lower prices strategically, etc).
I love verbasoft! It's like a university-sponsored price comparison site. I believe the model is that instead of having a central university bookstore that sells the canon copy, students are directed to a site like http://davis.verbacompare.com/ that shows textbook prices on Amazon, Albris, Half.com, and a few others.
For students at universities that haven't yet partnered with verbasoft, I made a textbook search engine in college that does essentially the same thing: http://textbooksplease.com
I've mentioned this a couple times before but we hire Rails engineers for 24-40 hours a week + health insurance (in fact we're majority part-time at this point).
It's not for everyone, but it works well for us. We're all fresh and relaxed at work, and the free time is great for learning, side projects, exercising, travel.
Anyway, we're actually hiring right now: if you're in the Bay Area and looking shoot me an email.
This post boils down to one statement: "every 100 days we have a 20-day-long crunch time". I'm all for getting things done, but scheduling arbitrary crunch times is a great way to wear the team down until people quit.
This system works for us, but may not work for others. Either way, I don't think it produces burnout. Empirically, this hasn't been the case. We're 2 years in and I've never had burnout been an issue. For a few reasons:
The people on our team like work to have an ebb and flow. There are times when we're pushing 100% and times we're reflecting. The 100 day horizon is actually quite long so there's time to refactor, vacation, and reflect.
We do our goal planning bottoms up. Almost every one of our goals has originated from the engineering team. 100 Day planning sessions are an opportunity for individuals to lobby for their project. It feels great to push your own project and it feels great to pitch in on someone else's.
We do unlimited vacations (which everyone says) but our team actually takes advantage. We don't have a culture of martyrdom, so people don't feel bad. I've found more people take time off in the beginning of 100 day segments than the end.
Agreed. This sort of advice is great if you're the founder/owner, because you're the one standing to get rich when somebody comes in with a buyout offer.
If you're an employee at such a shop, though, this is a sucker's bet. Most likely your hard work is paid off with a bunch of feel-good bullshit about how you're changing the world, and the expectations that you'll do it all again in three months.
Having a crunch time (especially scheduled) is a tacit admission that you are not, in fact, reducing scope properly.
Startups are machines for learning. This isn't limited to learning the market and finding business fit and reproducibility, it also applies to all the participants, whether they are founders or employees. No corporate job is going to let you become a DBA and a Frontend Developer and a Backend Developer and a Product Manager all at once, in a production environment, with no safety net. There is no other place where you can learn at that depth, and there is no other place you can learn at that rate.
There is also something to be said for the experience of personally identifying with a goal, no matter what that goal is. The other people at your startup will quickly become your best friends (sure, maybe that's because you are spending all your time with them at the expense of your other friends). You work together, eat together, play together. The level of camaraderie and sense of membership that develops can only be compared to military service (I've done both, and it is very similar).
If you are lazy, or you don't want to sacrifice in exchange for an amazing experience where you will learn and grow more than you ever could anywhere else, then you shouldn't be working for a startup. There are plenty of big companies that will pay you a decent salary and let you stagnate, work 10-4, never expect or require of you any growth, and let you phone it in until you eventually die. Good luck whichever way you decide to go!
All I can say is, good luck with that attitude when you get married and have a family. Your perspective on what is important in life will completely change.
Believe it or not, you can be serious about your career without sacrificing your personal life.
You both seem to be guilty of universalising your own work values and denigrating the choices of others as either "lazy and don't want to learn and grow" or "too immaturely self-oriented!"
Take it from the Bard: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
> No corporate job is going to let you become a DBA and a Frontend Developer and a Backend Developer and a Product Manager all at once, in a production environment, with no safety net. There is no other place where you can learn at that depth, and there is no other place you can learn at that rate.
You mean breadth, not depth.
> Good luck whichever way you decide to go!
Wow that was disingenuous. There are non-startup jobs that do not suck, and at any rate, the goal of a startup is to become a big company. You just have a personal preference for working at early-stage, high-growth companies, which is fine.
Specifically, the definition is: "pervasive pattern of negativistic attitudes and passive resistance to demands for adequate performance in social and occupational situations"
Example: Letting the air out of someone's tires. This is an aggressive act. It's not passive aggressive, because it's not passive. It is sneaky and cowardly, which has nothing to do with being passive.
Example: Your manager is on the hook to have feature X ready on Monday. He has annoyed you by buying the wrong brand of coffee, so you read HN all day on Friday and avoid working on the feature. On Monday your manager looks bad for not delivering the feature on time. This is passive aggressive, because it was via withholding of sufficient effort that you managed to harm someone.
That's only the DSM-IV definition. Psychology is a lot bigger than that, and the English language is bigger still. The difference between passive aggression and aggression boils down to whether the anger is being expressed directly or indirectly. It isn't solely determined by inaction, and there's a spectrum in-between the extremes. Letting air out of someone's tires is passive aggressive because it avoids confrontation while causing harm, whereas going up to the driver and punching them in the face is aggressive and does not avoid confrontation.
Faking niceness is similarly passive aggressive because it avoids confrontation while causing harm. Adding sarcasm into the mix, admittedly, makes it more aggressive, but it's still more passive aggressive than being straightforwardly aggressive in the first place.
Regardless of whether or not I'm right, regardless of whether your comment was disingenuous, passive aggressive, aggressive, or sarcastic, I'm unhappy that you're openly and unapologetically being uncivil on Hacker News, it's against the guidelines, and I'd like it to stop.
So you are upset because I am breaking the rules, and not because we are arguing in this thread?
Now who is being disingenuous?
As for your "definition", passive means a lack of action. No amount of arguing will make you right.
The convincing argument you might have given, except you are clearly not able to admit even slightly you were ever not perfectly correct about something:
Language is defined by usage, not definitions in books. People can't use a phrase wrongly, it means what they meant it to mean, the only question is whether it is an effective way to communicate when other people will interpret it differently. In this case, the dictionary definition is never meant, what people really mean when they say passive aggressive is "weak, not physically aggressive hostility".
Incivility is against the guidelines. Civil arguments and debate are fine. Normally I'd be happy to discuss the nuances of aggression and passive aggression, but the tone of this conversation has become overly hostile and I don't want to participate any more.
I disagree with you as to what passive aggression means, in that you have a narrow view and I have a broad view, but there's likely many mental health professionals who actively rely on the DSM in their work that would agree with you. I will certainly keep that in mind when I use the term in the future, so thanks for pointing it out.
I have decided to follow your lead and take a 'broad view' of what 'incivility' means, which is to say the real definition and it's direct opposite.
Good luck on taking the high road, or whatever it is your posturing is meant to convey!
Oh, and if you are going to pretend my definition is just the dsm 4 super narrow version (as if you had any idea of that before you looked it up on Wikipedia to try to debunk what I said), try googling 'passive aggressive definition'.
Not true at all. I work for a 107 year old family owned printing company. I get to be the DBA, Frontend Developer, Backend Developer, and Product Manager (our LOB applications). And it all leads from test to production. So you are just plain wrong. And there are LOTS of companies out there that have people doing what I'm doing. Lots of manufacturing businesses in the $50-$400 million dollar a year range have small in house programming staffs that have to be jacks of all trades. Doesn't always work out so well when people expand knowledge begrudgingly, but those who really have a passion for learning can have a long interesting career solving all kinds of problems that truly make a difference to the company bottom line.
There are also companies that give you room to learn and to grow, help you advance your career in the direction you want, and also let you work reasonable hours.
What? I'm doing it wrong because I work 40 hours a week at a job I love, then go home in time to go for a walk in the park, read a book and watch the sunset, play a sport, and see friends?
I'm glad whatever you're doing works for you, but don't assume everyone else has similar needs.
This is startup management 101. As a startup, you don't have a large HR team, so you need to engage in practices with strong selection bias.
In other words, "we run 100 day dev cycles with 20 days of an intense crunch" will cause people who thrive in a fast paced, results-oriented startup environment to self select.
It'll also eliminate people who don't like this environment.
The practice of 100 day cycles with 20 day crunches is tangible, real, and allows people to make a good decision about whether or not this company is a good fit.
It's much more effective that asking, "do you work hard", "do you work long hours", "do you enjoy a fast paced environment"...
"wear the team down until people quit" should be refined to: wear down people who should not be a part of our team until they quit, thus opening a spot for a someone who's a better fit for our fast, paced, result-oriented, win-at-all-cost environment.
I'm sure the length of the crunch varies. And in a startup situation having a crunch every 100 days doesn't seem totally unreasonable to me. Also, people's versions of "crunch" differ... one person might picture 60-hour weeks and another might picture JWZ taking catnaps under his desk every 48 hours.
I can't think of a case involving a fingerprint where there's a similar risk since the fingerprint is arbitrary data.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Hubbell#Summa...