Viewing profile — Asparagirl

It’s not common, but it does happen. Andy Weir, author of “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary”, originally gave his work away for free online on his website. He only self-publishe…

The US federal government is in yet another shutdown right now, so how would some sub-agency even know if there were an unplanned outage, who would report it, and who would try to …

Ancestry has a somewhat smaller copy of the BIRLS database online, covering just the years 1850-2010 [1], and it seems to have been published on their website in 2011: https://www.…

Actually, “op and crew” were the Plaintiffs (well, really the Petitioners, to be pedantic) who already sued the VA for this database in federal court (SDNY), and won that multi-yea…

The veterans in the data set are all deceased, and I have not heard any complaints from them so far.

Yes, a terrible fire, although there are efforts ongoing to restore some of those files, even reading the data from charred papers and edges with newer technology. However, these p…

We love MuckRock! And we made the original FOIA request to the VA for this dataset via MuckRock’s platform. You can see the actual screenshot in the “Reclaiming These Records” lega…

Indeed. This is ABSOLUTELY not the first time we’ve dealt with a government agency (at the local, state, or federal levels) providing a copy of a public dataset to Ancestry.com and…

Yes, that’s on purpose. SSNs of * deceased* people are public, not private. They are never reused. They are available under FOIA from other sources as well, such as the SSDMF.

The processes for getting these very particular records (C-Files, as opposed to something like an OMPF or other better known military records) has been horrendously broken for year…

The VA worked to confirm that everyone in this dataset is deceased, in order to satisfy the judge’s order, and produced an internal document about how they did it — which we then F…

Thanks. The original data set, as provided by the VA, has all sorts of data errors and oddities in it. The major ones involving surnames include the inconsistent use of apostrophes…

Hi HN. I'm the president and founder of a small non-profit called Reclaim The Records that identifies historical and genealogical materials and data sets held by government agencie…

“The second issue is return-to-office policies. Though Times management has told the bargaining unit that it has no plans to change the current hybrid-work model, Goran Svorcan-Mer…

Or their daughter. Or when it's them . There's a reason this twenty-four-year-old article is a classic: https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-...

Have they turned those squishy-sounding different views into horrifically inhumane absolute laws that affect every female person in the state, passing through the state, or conside…

And yet the elected leaders of Arkansas purposely rejected a bill that would have allowed these children -- excuse me, these edge cases -- to be allowed abortions if they were rape…

Words mean things, and the four-week fetus of a raped eleven-year-old is not a “baby”. Medical care to terminate that pregnancy and that fetus is literally medical care — and is il…

Arkansas currently has a 100% total abortion ban. They do not even allow abortion at any week if you’re raped, if you’re a child who has been raped, or if you’re a victim of incest…

There's an established organization called Open Collective that can let you support various open source software projects, with the organization acting as a legal and fiscal sponso…

See also the noted 2014 economics paper that studied the phenomenon of co-authorship of economics papers… “A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors” by Allen C. Goodman (…

It’s still no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Not sure about the first part, but generally the way it works is that first you pay taxes to the country where you are a resident, and then you still must also pay taxes to the US …

Cool! But how did you get the initial dataset of 643,000+ Shopify stores (data as per your “About” page) in the first place, to then scrape the products from their /products.json f…

Arguably, Starbucks is a mid-sized bank that also sells coffee. “Here's the shocking part -- Starbucks has about $1.6 billion in outstanding gift card balances. That info comes cou…