Disqus - Latest Comments for konklone

Re: Tutorial: Securing your GitLab Pages with TLS and Let's Encrypt

Eric Mill — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 20:00:39 -0000

Yeah, this is not recommended. Strongly recommend updating the post so as not to encourage more unnecessary potential HTTP connections.

Re: Encrypting Our Congress API and Protecting Your Location

Eric Mill — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 10:59:57 -0000

We're not planning to update the deprecated Congress API to use HTTPS. Instead, I'd port your work over to the new API. We have a migration guide here: http://sunlightlabs.github....

Re: Government APIs Aren't A Backup Plan - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Eric Mill — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 12:01:08 -0000

If backups were the *only* advantage to bulk data, I'd be more sympathetic to your point. The article I linked "APIs are optional" to...

http://sunlightfoundation.c...

...makes a lot of other points. APIs are optimized for some kinds of uses, bulk data for others. But you can always make an API out of bulk data -- you can't always easily reconstruct bulk data from an API. Bulk data is a necessary foundation.

Re: The Library of Congress Really Really Does Not Want To Give You Your Data

Eric Mill — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 16:11:15 -0000

That would be the Senate Rules Committee!
http://www.rules.senate.gov...

Chaired by Chuck Schumer, with ranking member Pat Roberts.

You can definitely expect more recommendations on Senate action from us in the near future.

Re: Troy Hunt: The complete guide to loading a free SSL certificate into an Azure website

Eric Mill — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 17:45:50 -0000

The more the merrier! This is great for Windows and Azure folks, too. Mine is aimed more at *nix and nginx folks. Troy, I've added a link to your post inside mine.

Re: A Modern Approach to Open Data - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Eric Mill — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 15:49:59 -0000

You might be interested in some of the work our Open States team has done. They have a contributor's guide (http://openstates.org/contr... and their work takes place on Github (https://github.com/sunlight....

There's also a lot of work going on at the municipal level, all over the place. One hub of activity that Sunlight's participating in is the Open Civic Data project (https://github.com/opencivi....

Re: Obama Promises Disappear from Web - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Eric Mill — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 09:14:16 -0000

d4rkpl: exactly. Freeze it into static files if you must, set up 301 redirects from the old dynamic URLs to the static ones, whatever - this is not a new problem, and there are solutions.

Re: Obama Promises Disappear from Web - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Eric Mill — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 00:38:58 -0000

" no website or electronic resource operated by a public entity should ever go offline when it's job is complete"

Yes. I basically agree with that. There are exceptions, but that is one of the fundamental promises of the web, and why they're called "permalinks".

Re: Obama Promises Disappear from Web - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Eric Mill — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 00:18:35 -0000

This is a simple discovery, but an important one. Change.gov was the President's official transition website, and included a vision for his presidency. It's a central piece of the historical record of the US, and they yanked it from the Internet.

It doesn't matter whether or not the Administration was trying to remove something specific: taking down the content at Change.gov is un-American and un-Internet.

Re: Mr. T-Bill

Eric Mill — Sun, 07 Jul 2013 23:02:35 -0000

So it's clear - this was a collaboration between Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, and Tom Morgan-Jones. http://distractionware.com/... I don't think any of them consider themselves the primary author.

Re: How does NSA hack into e-mails?

Eric Mill — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 12:29:44 -0000

Hi Marc - I'm glad you acknowledge the possibility of the NSA messing with the Certificate Authorities, but I think the post downplays this too much (and my quoted tweet unfortunately reinforces it).

I've written a response on my blog putting my quote in context, and going into more detail on the problems of the CA system:

http://konklone.com/post/ce...

Re: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Moustache

Eric Mill — Sun, 12 May 2013 23:48:49 -0000

Yeah, this is how it feels to me - MMM's ideas are naturally resonant with my own, but delivered by someone who's actualized it already. It's taking the currents of motivation that have been swimming around in my brain's crust and finally working them down into the mantle. No self-loathing required! All of my emotions here are positive ones, and that's really what gives me the energy: taking what has been directionless anger and turning it into something constructive.

Re: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Moustache

Eric Mill — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:08:45 -0000

You certainly can! I have no desire to retire early, if at all, ever. And I agree that he allows his rhetoric to wander outside what's strictly necessary (there's a place to criticize excess TV consumption, but it doesn't make much of a difference to financial excess beyond one's cable bill), but I do consider "Learn to mock convenience." a completely reasonable and non-cruel piece of advice. How far you follow it is up to you.

In general, his approach is to be loud, provocative, and to not pull punches about what he sees as self-sabotaging, entrapping behavior. It's harsh, and it's not my personal style, but it's getting through to a lot of people, myself included, in a way that a firm inner monologue never did.

To bring it back to TV - most sage or stern financial advice, not to mention actually facing my money itself, has the same effect on me as The Wire: sobering, even gripping, but ultimately representing an expenditure of energy. I need to recover afterwards. Mr. Money Mustache's articles, especially ones like http://www.mrmoneymustache...., are more like Breaking Bad: I internalize terrible truths, but they are delivered with such potent force by people living so far outside of what is considered normal that the world's possibilities seem vastly larger than before. I don't know if this is most people's reaction to Breaking Bad, but it's why it's the only TV show I've ever binged on in the last 10 years - I leave every one with twice the energy I went in with. I can accept some rough edges for that effect.

Re: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Moustache

Eric Mill — Sun, 12 May 2013 13:59:09 -0000

Well...I had a different reaction. :) There's an ideal to aspire to here, not a laundry list of ways to stoically suffer. Over the last few years, well before I found MMM a couple weeks ago, I have been coming to a steady and angering awareness of a few basic truths:

* From when I entered the private tech sector workforce in 2005, to 2010, I maintained a constant supply of ~$3-5K in savings. (You can see the $4,000 frozen in stone in late 2010, when I shut down http://ohnomymoney.com.)

* I make more than 2x as much as I made in 2006, and feel 1x as pampered and comfortable. The sentence that first perked me up on MMM is the "Exploding Volcano of Wastefulness". This is what I am living (and I knew this well before MMM articulated it).

* In the most challenging time I've ever undergone, from Nov 2008 to Mar 2009, I entered joblessness with $3,000 in savings, went down to 0, freelanced back up to $3,000 before landing my job at Sunlight, and then my savings didn't budge for *years*.

So what I have realized is that I am just not good at saving money, and that it is largely all mental. Sure, I've had sharper constraints on me in the past, and I am saving more now, but that I still only manage to save 20% of my income despite having all the advantages in the world (well paying job and no family chief among them), and haven't managed to budge that despite 3 years of feeling really angry about it, is deeply frustrating.

How I'm channeling MMM is simply to give me the emotional impetus I need to make a few reasonable behavior changes. Such as: actually cooking, ever. Bringing lunches instead of buying them. Reducing my impulse purchasing. Taking car2gos a little less frivolously. Basic stuff, that really just requires an emotional foundation of really wanting to do it. That foundation's been very difficult for me to construct, and I'm welcoming it being shored up.

And I really just don't read his personality the same way; he actually sounds like an awesome, level headed guy who is noting how many people there are like me around and what kind of patterns they fall into based on the subtle cues and norms that we all have. It couples well with my own long-held sense that we keep ourselves in both collective and individual dysfunction by not talking about it - we can't even properly recognize our groupthink and patterns, because it's all underneath the surface. Thus ohnomymoney, and thus why I find MMM a kindred spirit in empowering people to live a little more deliberately and honestly with themselves when it comes to their money.

Re: Optimism, Fear, and the Knight News Challenge

Eric Mill — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:40:54 -0000

I'm really confused by the criticism of Democracy Map here. Cicero provides a commercial dataset - their pricing page is extensive, and there's a "Free Trial" button at the top of every page. They may produce open source software, but they do not provide open data. Neither are their data gathering systems open source.

Democracy Map's plan is specifically to provide a comprehensive and free open data source where none exists. Its proposed model for sustainability is nothing like Cicero's. Specifically, Democracy Map's proposal says they would only charge for live API access by extremely high volume users. It expressly rejects the model of metered services like VoteSmart. Democracy Map's raw bulk data would always be free, and all of its code (including its data gathering systems) would be open source. So you'll always be able to get the data for free if you want it.

This is the model of a community resource, not a business model. There is a world of difference between what Cicero is, and what Democracy Map aims to be. If Democracy Map were funded, and that put the squeeze on Cicero, all that would reveal is that Cicero's business model is predicated upon access to public information, rather than a high quality service. While it's not inherently wrong to build a business on that model, simply gating the fundamental data that describes our democracy is not a model worth receiving special protection from a publicly funded effort with a public return.

Re: Open Public Access to Court Records, For Aaron #FreePACER

Eric Mill — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 14:02:38 -0000

The Federal Register is freely available to all at federalregister.gov, both in well presented web pages, and in fully machine readable data. All agencies are required to publish in the Federal Register, even independent ones.

The GPO archive of court opinions is great, and they actually just announced an expansion of their pilot program to all federal courts. It will require those individual federal courts to participate, so I'm hopeful that this will be expanded; it's only a handful of courts right now. It's still a long way from providing the breadth of information that PACER already has.

Right now, PACER is largely used by professionals with a substantial budget, but this is self-fulfilling because of the cost involved. We can't gauge what future use would be like by looking at present use.

I don't have a substantial budget, but I make active use of free services like CourtListener (http://courtlistener.com) to track issues relevant to my work. It doesn't compare to what you'll get from West or Lexis, but at least I can experiment with different searches without paying money for every attempt.

This service is only possible because of a massive and complicated scraping effort over court websites. It's subject to error, highly incomplete, and requires lots of ongoing maintenance work by volunteers. Sunlight undertook a similar effort to gain state legislative information (http://openstates.org), and it was 3 years of paid, ongoing labor by multiple employees until we could remove the beta label.

Until we have the data that PACER has, freely available to all, these kinds of datasets and tools are what the community of researchers, activists, advocacy groups, and developers without big budgets has available to them. It shouldn't be this way, and doesn't have to be.

Re: Open Public Access to Court Records, For Aaron #FreePACER

Eric Mill — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 13:14:19 -0000

The executive branch already provides its own records, via the Federal Register, freely and digitally. I don't believe the Federal Register ceases publication or operation during a government shutdown.

If the fundamental records of the judicial branch were treated the same way that we treat legislation and regulation, as they should be, it seems unlikely their publication would ever be paused.

Re: Report: Booker Canceled Interview When Criticisms Were Broached

Eric Mill — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 22:17:29 -0000

I think this was originally a Politico story that the Star-Ledger is running?

http://www.politico.com/sto...

I guess it could be the other way around, but the reporter sure seems to have awful specific information on how Booker's interacted with Politico.

Re: Open Public Access to Court Records, For Aaron #FreePACER

Eric Mill — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:56:23 -0000

Yet we wouldn't say this about legislation, which, yes, also costs the government money to host and distribute. The point is that it's fundamental information, that the public needs access to.

Some questions can only be answered, and some services can only be built, when you have all the information at once. At that point, you're talking about many thousands (millions?) of pages, and the fees for that are whopping indeed.

Re: Trine 2 continues to be worth your time.

Eric Mill — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 01:07:25 -0000

Becoming convinced...

Re: girl eat machine

Eric Mill — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 17:05:33 -0000

-_-

Re: elasticsearch - blog - 0.20.2 Released

Eric Mill — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:35:52 -0000

I know it's just a quick info post, but - two typos in the first sentence: " upgradges to Lucene (from 3.6.1 to 3.6.2), and other interal libraries."

Re: Making our Data and APIs Bigger, Better and More Accessible

Eric Mill — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 14:34:35 -0000

Some of us here use Github issue tracking quite extensively. For example, I'm managing a lot of our Congress API refactoring through Github right now:
https://github.com/sunlight...

In this case, the refactor of the API code itself is in way too rapid flux to be seeking out code contributions, though there are lots of ways to contribute code: you can write a client library for our API, or you can contribute to some of the scrapers and datasets we make use of:
https://github.com/unitedst...
https://github.com/unitedst...

Re: 2Day in #OpenGov 11/29/12

Eric Mill — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 10:52:09 -0000

Stephen - there are lots of services out there that turn RSS feeds into email alerts.

The most prominent one is IFTTT - I just set up a recipe you can use to quickly get this:
https://ifttt.com/recipes/6...

Also, we have a less well-advertised feature of our government alerts tool, Scout, that lets you get email alerts for any RSS you want:
https://scout.sunlightfound...

Re: On Starting a Startup | Luigi Montanez

Eric Mill — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 03:11:57 -0000

Oh, and -- thanks for the mention about Sinatra - I'm glad Padrino is working out so well. After you linked me to it a while back, I remember scoping it out and being turned off primarily by the directory structure that seemed nearly as heavy as Rails.

Scout is a Sinatra app, and not only did I use the padrino-helpers library for form helpers, near the end I finally realized I needed to move my models, controllers, and views into an "app" folder to stay sane - and now my project doesn't bear much difference to a Padrino app. If I was doing it over again, I might choose Padrino from the start.