Asparagirl

6 ms·

1.
by Asparagirl 10mo ago
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-published to Kindle (for the lowest possible price setting, 99 cents
2.
by Asparagirl 11mo ago
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 fix it?
3.
by Asparagirl 2y ago
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.ancestry.com/search/collections/24
4.
by Asparagirl 2y ago
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-year lawsuit, and even won our attorneys fees too. If you had c
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
The veterans in the data set are all deceased, and I have not heard any complaints from them so far.
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 particular files (benefits claims files, or C-Files) are a di
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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” legal papers section. They also get a shoutout in our colophon f
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 not to the general public. Our taxpayer-funded data keeps e
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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.
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 years. They were almost completely inaccessible from this specif
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 FOIAed and posted online too. (It’s up on the site, next to t
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 in names like O’BRIEN, often written as O BRIEN, and/o
13.
Show HN: New search engine and free-FOIA-by-fax-via-web for US veteran records(birls.org)
118 points by Asparagirl 2y ago|72 comments
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
“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-Merola, a software engineer who is on the Tech Guild’s bargaini
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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-...
16.
by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 considering taking a job (or keeping an existing job) in the st
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 raped. They voted the bill down eighteen months ago. This is who
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 illegal in Arkansas.
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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. No woman in her right mind would ever move there, and this
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 sponsor. It's not a 501c3 but it is a 501c6. I use the p
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by Asparagirl 2y ago
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 (Wayne State University), Joshua Goodman (Harvard), Lucas Goo
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
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.
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
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 by virtue of being a US citizen but you usually get a cred
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
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 feeds? Or did you just try a huge list of domain names a
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
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 courtesy of its annual 10-K filing with the SEC. This esse
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
A US Congressman (from Texas, naturally) introduced a bill to grant letters of marque to be used against Russian oligarchs’ property early last year, just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alas, it did not pass. But letters of marque a
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
Newton was a member of the British elite, he had income from Cambridge University, and he was first the Warden and later the Master of the Royal Mint. He was also experienced in investments. Nevertheless, he also got sucked into the infamo
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
Important point — many of these employees were “paid” at least half of their salary in the company’s own scrip, a shitcoin, and with extra social pressure to not convert it to real money.
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
Some of the previous recordholders were at least 38 Ukrainian Jews, including three families (Stermer, Dodyk, and Wexler) and some very young children, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Ozerna caves ("Priest's Grotto&quo
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by Asparagirl 3y ago
This is important: FDIC insurance protects you if the bank goes bust, but it doesn’t protect you if the company/fintech/exchange you’re using goes bust, even if they use an FDIC-insured bank. This exact issue came up repeatedly

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