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FTC to Crack Down on Paid Celebrity Posts That Aren’t Clear Ads

The agency says brands and the social media stars who promote their products need to be more transparent about sponsored content

Click to view the original at bloomberg.com

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Notes on concurrency bugs

Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature ec...

Click to view the original at danluu.com

Hasnain says:

"For example, the idea inside clang’s TSan, using “happens-before” to find data races, goes back ages. There’s a 2003 paper that discusses “combining two previously known race detection techniques – lockset-based detection and happens-before-based detection – to obtain fewer false positives than lockset-based detection alone”. That’s actually what TSan v1 did, but with TSan v2 they realized the tool would be more impactful if they only used happens-before because that avoids false positives, which means that people will actually use the tool. That’s not something that’s likely to turn into a paper that gets cited zillions of times, though. For anyone who’s looked at how afl works, this story should sound familiar. AFL is emintently practical and has had a very large impact in the real world, mostly by eschewing fancy techniques from the recent literature."

Posted on 2016-08-07T05:53:37+0000

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Hasnain says:

Pretty good essay on burnout

"“You know”, he said to me one day, “it’s not like I want to be this pathetic loser. I want to get up tomorrow, get back in the gym, find a new job, see people again. But it’s like even as I say I’m gonna do all this, some voice in me says, ‘no I’m not, no way am I doing that.’ And then I can’t work out if I feel depressed or relieved, and the confusion sends me crazy.”"

Posted on 2016-08-07T05:39:28+0000

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Chicago's 'Skullcap Crew': band of police accused of brutality evade discipline

Dogged by allegations of abuse, members of the group have been named in more than 20 federal lawsuits – yet have won repeated praise from department

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

Hasnain says:

"The members of this crew – Edwin Utreras, Robert Stegmiller, Christ Savickas, Andrew Schoeff and Joe Seinitz – have together faced at least 128 known official allegations from more than 60 citizen-filed complaints over almost a decade and a half. They have also been named in more than 20 federal lawsuits."

...

"Citizens have repeatedly accused these men of acts of brutality, intimidation and harassment – costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements. Yet over the course of their careers, these officers have received little discipline – a two-day suspension, a five-day suspension, a reprimand – according to city data. Instead, they have won praise from the department, accruing more than 180 commendations."

Posted on 2016-08-06T01:01:13+0000

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She Swam to Escape Syria. Now She’ll Swim in Rio.

Yusra Mardini, a swimmer who fled Syria, has become the face of a new team of refugees who will compete in Rio under the Olympic flag.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

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Missouri's Governor Wouldn't Fund Public Defenders—So He's Been Ordered to Serve as One Himself

The state's top public defender invoked a seldom-used provision to compel his political foe to come to the aid of an indigent defendant.

Click to view the original at theatlantic.com

Hasnain says:

Sickest burn in quite a while, in response to Gov. Nixon slashing the public defender budgets.

"Therefore, pursuant to Section 600.042.5 and as Director of the Missouri State Public Defender System tasked with carrying out the State’s obligation to ensure that poor people who face incarceration are afforded competent counsel in their defense, I hereby appoint you, Jeremiah W. (Jay) Nixon, Bar No. 29603, to enter your appearance as counsel of record in the attached case."

Posted on 2016-08-04T15:37:47+0000

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Illegal in Massachusetts: Asking Your Salary in a Job Interview

A law taking effect in 2018 requires employers to offer a compensation figure upfront in an effort to end the wage gap between men and women.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com