User variables, even though not part of standard SQL, are great objects in MySQL. They allow to keep some “state” for the life of a session: a session can execute a statement to compute a value, store that value in a user variable, and use it in all next  statements.…

via Planet MySQL
Row numbering, ranking: how to use LESS user variables in MySQL queries

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One thing that’s always bothered us about science fiction is how we see these enormous, futuristic constructions, and never see how they get built. Thanks to Isaac and Benjamin Botkin, here’s a look at how the ultimate power in the universe might have been assembled.

via The Awesomer
Building the Death Star

For the first time in years, raises could be in the cards for Columbus Dispatch employees. Reporters, editors and other staff members met with Dispatch President and Publisher Brad Harmon and Editor Alan Miller Wednesday morning, where they learned that merit-based pay raises could come next year. "Brad and I have been working toward providing merit raises in 2018, and I’m happy to say that we’re going to be able to make that happen," Miller said in an email sent to editorial employees Monday.…

via Columbus Business News – Local Columbus News | Business First of Columbus
Columbus Dispatch employees told to expect merit raises in 2018

via AppleInsider
Amazon Prime Video is already the most popular Apple TV app at launch

The response to The Last Jedi has been divisive to say the least. Some love it because it takes Star Wars in a bold new direction; some hate it for the same reason. While I enjoyed a great deal of the film, it profoundly depressed me, and here’s why: The Last Jedi killed my childhood, but not in the way you think.

I understand the issue here. “Killing my childhood” evokes the far more common “ruined my childhood,” a petty term that merely means someone hates a modern installment or version of something you loved as a kid. “So-and-so ruined my childhood!” cannot be said meaningfully; it can only be whined. The Last Jedi ruined neither my childhood nor the Star Wars franchise.

So when I say it “killed my childhood,” I mean it only personally.

I was born in 1977, and I grew up with Luke Skywalker. I was one of the multitude of kids who watched the films religiously. I can’t even imagine how many times I’ve seen A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. I loved a lot of movies and cartoons and toys, but it was always Star Wars first and foremost, and Luke Skywalker was my hero. It’s not that I necessarily considered him the best hero in pop culture, it’s that he was The Hero. The other good guys in my pop culture life were just that—other.

A regular part of the makeup of hero stories is that there’s a problem—a monster to defeat, an issue to solve, an institution to topple—that the older generation has either allowed to happen or is actively participating in. It requires a young hero, a new generation, to solve the problem that the older generation can’t, or won’t. Older characters can at best act as mentors to the heroes—but they must fail so that the heroes can succeed.

For a kid, it’s an intrinsic, powerful story. It makes up the bulk of Western mythology, from the stories of Greek heroes like Perseus, Theseus, Achilles, to the tale of Beowulf. It connects to kids fundamentally. That’s why people have been telling stories about heroes, just like this, for thousands of years. But with few—very few exceptions—these heroes don’t get old. We don’t want to see our heroes turn into mentors, because we don’t want them supplanted. There’s something inherently tragic about aging from a hero to a mentor (or even worse, the hero becoming part of the problem). The message is that no one stays a hero forever. It’s why this part of the story is usually left untold.

But this story is effectively told in the Star Wars sequels, just as it had to be told. Once we learned Luke Skywalker, Leia, and Han Solo would appear in the trilogy, we knew there would have to be a problem they couldn’t solve—a conflict beyond their powers that could only be won by Rey, Finn, and Poe. It couldn’t happen any other way. If it had, it sure as hell wouldn’t be Star Wars.

When The Force Awakens came out, a movie I loved, I bemoaned this fact. My childhood heroes had won their war against the Empire in the original trilogy, but TFA showed that they didn’t bring peace to the galaxy. The New Republic Leia fought so hard to establish was broken even before it was destroyed. Luke’s attempt to bring back the Jedi ended in such tragedy that he had been living in self-imposed exile for years. Han Solo not only failed to keep his son from the Dark Side, he was murdered because of it.

I hated learning that their hard-won accomplishments in the original trilogy were for naught, that after the end credits of Return of the Jedi their futures would be filled with disappointment and pain. But when The Force Awakens ended, despite Han Solo’s death, there was still hope. The Resistance survived. The battle against the First Order had just begun. Luke Skywalker had been found.

I knew The Last Jedi would be a darker, more tragic movie; second acts invariably are (which is why the rumors that TLJ would be the Empire Strikes Back of the new trilogy were so useless). But The Last Jedi does more than leave the story at a low point. It ends with the galaxy nearly consumed with evil, yet a small hope remains—a flickering candle in overwhelming darkness, to use TLJ’s constant metaphor, that could bring light… someday. In the future. Presumably Episode IX.

The reason this small light isn’t extinguished is because Luke Skywalker makes the ultimate sacrifice to keep it burning. He projects himself across the stars to confront Kylo Ren, buying enough time for the tiny remnant of the Resistance to slip away. It’s a noble act. And Luke is successful at keeping that, well, new hope alive. But Luke dies tragically.

When he becomes one with the Force, things are infinitely worse at the end of The Last Jedi than they are before A New Hope begins, before Luke starts his journey. Evil rules the galaxy. There are no more than a dozen members left living in the neo-Rebellion—not even enough to fill the Millennium Falcon. His adventures, his sacrifices, his victories in the three movies that dominated my childhood accomplished nothing, meant nothing.

I turned 40 this year. I’ve had a mild, rather traditional midlife crisis at the realization that I’m likely at the midway point of my life, but my love of the entertainment of my youth—buoyed both by the immensely popular and profitable nostalgia entertainment industry, as well as the fact that my professional career keeps one foot stuck firmly in my childhood—has kept me at least partially in a state of arrested development as I approached middle age. I recognized this, but I saw no downside to remaining young at heart. I still don’t.

Watching Luke die, not to achieve something as much as to prevent an unfathomable defeat being total, made me ache with sadness. I hated that he died, essentially, a failure. I hate that the movies I lived and breathed as a kid (and for decades after) meant nothing to the Star Wars galaxy. This past weekend I happened to glance at the original trilogy DVD set on my shelf, and had to look away because I didn’t want to think about Luke Skywalker’s fate. The Last Jedi has made me so upset I don’t want to think about Star Wars at all.

I would suspect that those people of my generation who were as obsessed with A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi as I was feel the same—like the Star Wars franchise has been wrested away from them, by taking the focus off the original heroes, by killing Luke off, and by essentially negating the movies I loved so damn much. Those who grew up with the prequels, or who enjoy Star Wars but don’t feel a proprietary ownership over it, probably think I sound like a self-entitled asshole.

This is because I am being a self-entitled asshole. Because despite my feelings, The Last Jedi is the best thing that could have possibly happened to the Star Wars franchise.

The Last Jedi is a direct, not-even-slightly subtle message to hardcore, original trilogy-obsessed fans like myself that Star Wars is more than those three movies (or the three prequels that served as one long, terrible prologue to them). It completely resets the battle between good and evil, putting good in more dire straits than we’ve ever seen in these films. It introduces several brand new Force powers. It expands the universe in ways no one expected (or in ways purists like me wanted). And it removes the old heroes to fully make way for the new.

It proclaims boldly it’s time for a truly new Star Wars saga, for a new generation of kids to fall in love with, just like I did. That Star Wars can be more, should be more, than the original trilogy and its prologues and epilogues. That the franchise belongs to more than just those born in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. That it’s time for me, like Rey, to let go of the past. It has been that time for awhile now.

This is all exactly how it’s supposed to be. The franchise needs to do more than just ape the original trilogy in order to evolve, if not outright continue. I shouldn’t be holding Star Wars hostage. Lucasfilm and Disney shouldn’t be making these movies just for me. They can’t if they expect to continue for the next decade. And god knows I’ll get to experience plenty more of the adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han for decades to come. As long as I and my ilk keep spending money on them, someone will keep churning out ancillary Star Wars products targeted to our nostalgia.

My brain knows all this, but my heart is still broken. When the Skywalker saga came to a close, so did, in a very real way, that last remnant of my childhood. Star Wars is so representative of my inner child, of my nerdiness, that when Luke faded away into the Force I truly felt like I had lost someone close to me, and the loss was profound. The fact that The Last Jedi’s incredibly tragic end makes it so uniquely, horrifyingly perfect for 2017 makes it even more powerfully depressing to me.

The Last Jedi was made with other fans in mind—especially the new ones. This isn’t only a good thing, it’s the right thing. If you grew up with the prequels, or your first Star Wars experience was The Force Awakens or TLJ, you almost certainly wouldn’t have latched onto the original trilogy heroes in the way that my generation did. How could you? Why would you? If you were born in 2007, why would you be any more sad about Luke dying than we were when Obi-Wan sacrificed himself in A New Hope? Rey, Finn, and Poe are the heroes now. And whenever Episode X rolls around, maybe in 2021 or so, another new generation of heroes will emerge, for a new generation of kids to be inspired by.

The Last Jedi is a good Star Wars movie. It just wasn’t made for me, or the legion of other fans my age. After 40 years of having Star Wars basically tailor-made for us, it was well past time.

But Luke Skywalker is still dead. And with him, part of my childhood died, too. I mourn them both.

via Gizmodo
The Last Jedi Killed My Childhood, and That’s Exactly Why It’s Great

Price: $60  | Buy | Link

ThinkGeek’s new four-port USB 3.0 hub is a nice gift for fans of action or sci-fi flicks. It has two toggle switches, a keyhole and of course a red button. When you toggle the controls in the right order, the hub will play an explosion sound effect.

via The Awesomer
Self-Destruct USB 3.0 Hub

A startup is a journey of questions with as yet unidentified answers. Most startups fail because they never find true enough answers to succeed. Startups succeed when the founders are focused on finding the truest answers to their most important problems.

What is the best way to engineer a product that will delight customers? What is the most efficient channel to get that product into your customer’s’ hands? What is the most effective way to scale up that model to maximize the impact and commercial success of the business? Who are the right leaders to help achieve these goals? Even small questions seek “truth” – What color button on a website is most likely to convert the customer?

While there isn’t a single “truth” that is the correct answer to any of these questions – each fork in the road has more and less true answers. The job of the founder and leadership team is to find the truest path to success. Unlike large companies operating at scale, at a startup the unknowns are overwhelming, and data cannot by itself resolve most of these decisions.

Most team leaders will agree on the majority of decisions that need to be made and good startup teams seem telepathic at times, but there are inevitably going to be profound disagreements. It’s critical that entrepreneurs embrace these conflicts because solving them properly is often the difference between success and failure.

If the decisions were easy, someone would have made them already. The conflict exists because the answers aren’t obvious. It’s in the conflict that the right answers emerge. You have to lean into the conflict to win.

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images

Conflict Failure Modes

Avoiding the Conflict

I believe the most common conflict failure mode at a startup is when the leadership disagrees on what should happen, but no one speaks up because it’s uncomfortable to do so. The team is in full denial that there is even disagreement on the hard choices that need to be made. As a result, these choices aren’t made at all and the leadership of the company makes the wrong decisions while pretending that everything is okay. Inevitably, after the company fails, leadership team members lament that they knew that the company was going in the wrong direction and should have spoken up sooner. Yes, they should have.

Ego

Ego makes conflict painful because we try to avoid hurting others’ feelings, while protecting our own. But for many, winning the argument becomes more important than the company making the right decision. Therefore, when we engage conflict, we become emotional and want to win for ourselves, confusing this emotion with our desire to win collectively. While each of us struggles with this tension, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that everyone in the debate naturally is subjective on the superior value of their perspective. This tendency can often lead to anger, insecurity, and unnecessary emotion that makes conflict painful, relationship threatening and unproductive. Unfortunately, ego frightens many team members to shift into conflict avoidance.

Strong Personalities vs. Wall Flowers

Often in ego-driven conflict, stronger personalities will win despite having no greater insight on the truth. It is crucial for a company to make sure that conflict is not resolved simply by the strength of personality. Otherwise, the company will have a scenario where personal victory – “I need to be right” – comes before company victory – “we need to be right.” The wallflowers have no less claim on the truth of their market, operation, or product. They often just have less eagerness to fight.

Softening The Edges

In polite conversation with friends and relatives, we are all taught to soften the edges of our conflict. In other words, we pretend that we mostly agree, even when we don’t. This adaptive approach to conflict at least arguably makes sense in a social setting. We can politely agree to disagree largely because in social settings we don’t have to collaborate to make critical decisions. At startups, softening the edges can be catastrophic. It causes leaders to work in opposite directions or procrastinate making the hard decisions.

Revert to Mean

Empathy is often misapplied in a startup context. It’s great to embrace the idea that everyone’s opinion counts, but critical to understand that these opinions do not yield equally correct outcomes. The inability to decisively move forward, and instead find a middle ground on each topic, leads to Frankenstein solutions that rarely yield the correct answer. In this way, the startup prioritizes compromise over finding truth. If there is always a more true answer and team members are in conflict on what that answer is, there is little probability that the compromise answer is the right one. While everyone might feel good that their point of view was persuasive to a consensus outcome, they will feel much worse when they realize that compromise and truth have little in common at a startup.

AP Photo/Isaac Brekken

How to Embrace Conflict

It’s easy to say that a company should embrace conflict and far harder to do so successfully. Ultimately, engaging conflict is among the most significant cultural challenges for startups, but also among the most important.

Reframe Conflict As The Search for Truth

Most people don’t think about a startup as a search for truth. It’s important to frame the quest of the startup this way and make sure that everyone understands that the purpose of a startup is experiment constantly  in the service of finding the best answer to pressing problems. Everyone has the right to question the assumptions and no one has a monopoly on being correct – yet in aggregate the company making the right decisions will make or break its success.

Call out Objectivity and Subjectivity

Companies need to build a culture where it is okay to question whether a colleague is being fully objective. By acknowledging the natural human tendency toward ego, it should become okay to check with colleagues whether their judgment is being clouded by their own need to win the argument, versus their desire to find the right answer. By being willing to engage in this type of self-reflection and giving others the license to question you, egos can be moderated.

Be Hard on Problems, Not People

Remind everyone that it is the problem, not the people, that should be the focus of the conflict. When team members start to attribute negative intentions and motives to their colleagues, it becomes very difficult to put ego aside and focus on finding the right answer. By being soft on people and hard on problems, the company can build trust as the basis for the exercise of doing the hard work of making decisions collectively, rather than playing the ego game.

While maintaining empathy for individuals, the culture shouldn’t have empathy for ideas. The best ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, from the CEO to the most junior team members, and everyone should be speaking truth to power at a startup. Having said that, everyone must accept that not all ideas are equal. Being respectful of everyone’s contributions is often confused with valuing all ideas as equally likely to be truth. Every single idea has a relative truth value to all others and must face that crucible.

Debate, Don’t Fight

Ego turns conflict into a fight. The goal is to avoid the fight, but engage the debate. Try to be objective and curious about others’ points of view. Listen to each other and work toward finding the truth. Keep debating until you find it and work hard to parse differences in assumptions and beliefs. The challenge is to build a culture where team members work as hard as possible to defuse the fight by showing enthusiasm for the debate.

Hard decisions take time and deserve intense debate, but when debate becomes a fight, it’s time to take a break and calm the negative energy. When taking a break, always address when the debate will continue, or breaks can often slip into conflict avoidance.

Gauge Magnitude of Beliefs

Some people just like to argue for the intellectual value, even if they don’t feel strongly about a particular outcome. Others are stubborn and don’t like to lose arguments, on principle. Both of these instincts must be subordinated. However, there is often truth in the magnitude an individual feels about an issue. Those who are effective at subverting their egos, but feel very strongly on a hypothesis, often have strong insights powering the magnitude of their belief. It’s important to listen to those who feel most strongly – particularly when they are not the strongest personalities at the table.

Consider Hierarchy & Roles

On teams where debate becomes unproductive, drawing lines around areas of responsibility can help. Deference to greater experience, domain knowledge, or responsibility for the outcome are all reasonable solutions for many debates. Let anyone add to the debate, but in many cases it is best to leave the decision to the responsible party. Note that this approach can be risky—if an individual pulls rank too often and he’ll find himself without a partner or team, and will often lose credibility in the next debate.

At Some Point, The Debate Must End

Truly convincing or being convinced of the best decision for the company is the optimal path to resolve a conflict, but it is not the only way. Sometimes a team has sincerely delved into the differences as much as possible and is running out of time to make a decision. In those cases, the company must find a way to pick a direction and move forward as one. Constant dissent on the decision, once made, can be as problematic as not engaging the conflict in the first place. After the decision has been made, the company needs the benefit of a single team moving forward together.

Get Out Of The Way

When a decision is made, everyone must lock arms and move forward or simply get out of the way. We’ve seen many circumstances where talented team members needed to part ways after a high-quality debate, because they simply couldn’t agree on how to move forward. Sometimes startup leaders must accept that if they aren’t part of the solution, they are part of the problem.

You’re Paid For Your Opinion

I had a boss who frequently repeated the statement, “you’re paid for your opinion.” He was encouraging energetic debate by trying to draw out the wallflowers and build a culture where the stronger personalities learned to listen. Crafting this type of culture is the key to a successful team. Studies have shown the difference between good marriages and bad ones isn’t the lack of fights, but learning how to fight productively. This is also true for startup teams.

A CEO who believes he is always right, and rams decision making through an organization, will create a culture of people who feel frustrated, suppressed, and will regularly make poor decisions. A CEO who integrates dissent and healthy debate into the company will be primed for success and likely find the truth she is seeking.

via TechCrunch
Learning to embrace conflict as a part of startup culture

via The Truth About Guns
Tips for Women Buying Their First Handgun

It was a long time ago so I won’t write about the conference (it was good as always), but at least I share the slides of my talk here.

via Planet MySQL
Percona live Dublin – Migratin and living on RDS/Aurora

If cops have the ability and opportunity to record a traffic stop, should it be held against them when they don’t? Arguments have been made to that effect for a few years now. Dashcams have been in wide use for at least a couple of decades. Law enforcement agencies all over the US are issuing body cameras to officers. But it seems whenever something questionable happens, footage is nowhere to be found, or what there is of it is almost useless.

Unfortunately, years of discussion by (mainly) defense lawyers hasn’t resulted in policy changes. Worse, it hasn’t budged the judicial needle much. In rare cases, the absence of footage is used against officers, but in those cases, it mainly seems to be because efforts were made to destroy footage already captured.

In this case [PDF] reviewed by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court, no effort was made post facto to destroy footage. Instead, an officer proactively prevented footage from being created by disabling the dashcam recording the traffic stop. (via FourthAmendment.com)

The defendant made a few different arguments for suppression of evidence obtained via a search of his vehicle. Citing Rodriguez, he claimed the wait for the K9 unit unnecessarily prolonged the traffic stop. The appeals court disagreed, saying its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision gives officers about 20 minutes to freely violate citizens’ rights.

Defendant next argues that the search violated the Fourth Amendment because the officers extended the stop beyond the time required to investigate the traffic violation in order to conduct a canine sniff. The district court determined that the delay was not excessive, relying upon United States v. Collazo, 818 F.3d 247, 257-58 (6th Cir. 2016), in which we countenanced a traffic stop that exceeded twenty-one minutes based on the totality of the circumstances. Here, the district court observed that the canine unit appeared within ten minutes of the stop, the car’s paperwork, which was a rental, did not include any of the passengers as authorized drivers, and the GPS information indicated that defendant had been out-of-state, which was prohibited by the terms of his parole. While these factors might individually have an innocent explanation, the court found that “from a law enforcement perspective all that adds up . . . to a reasonable suspicion for an extension, which . . . wasn’t very long anyway.”

This completely ignores Supreme Court precedent, which made it clear it wasn’t the length of the rights violation, but rather the violation itself. Once the purpose of the traffic stop has been achieved, any fishing expeditions by law enforcement past that point are Constitutional violations, whether it’s five minutes, ten minutes, or a half hour. A holding like this makes it that much easier for officers to slow roll traffic stops so they can run a drug dog around a car they stopped for a lane change violation. That’s what appears to have happened here and both courts (district, appellate) said this is fine.

Trooper Boven returned to his cruiser after collecting everyone’s identification and ran the information through two law enforcement databases to check for outstanding warrants and to confirm that Mercedes Hunt was a valid driver. Defendant contends that Trooper Boven entered the information slowly in order to prolong the traffic stop until the canine unit arrived, which it did shortly after he finished processing the licenses.

In this case, there was plenty to be reasonably suspicious about, hence the call for the K9 unit. But once the K9 unit arrived something strange happened. The officer turned off his dashcam, ostensibly to "protect" the confidentiality of an informant.

Once Deputy Osbun arrived, Trooper Boven explained the situation to him to “keep him in the loop” and for officer safety. He also turned off the dashboard camera. According to his testimony, he did so to prevent information about the confidential informant from coming to light in case the stop revealed no drugs. After speaking with Deputy Osbun, however, Trooper Boven apparently forgot to restart the dashboard camera and, as a result, there is no footage of the search of the car. In total, twenty minutes elapsed before the camera was restarted.

The defendant challenged this, stating the missing footage prevented him from directly challenging the supposed probable cause generated by the dog’s nose. And there were sufficient reasons on record to warrant doing so.

Defendant contends that the lack of a visual record of the search undermines his ability to challenge the legitimacy of the canine alert to narcotics. First, there are no records maintained of the dog’s prior performance in the field. Second, Deputy Osbun recalled up to six false alerts at the suppression hearing, which defendant contends is a significant number given that dogs are deployed only when the presence of drugs is suspected. Third, the lack of dashboard camera footage makes it nearly impossible for defendant to challenge whether Deputy Osbun’s interaction with the dog may have influenced its subsequent alert. Finally, defendant characterizes the missing video footage as “spoliation” for which the government must be held responsible.

The district court, however, didn’t view this as spoliation of evidence. For the most part, the legal argument is sound. You can’t ruin evidence that doesn’t exist. The problem is that if you can prevent such evidence from ever existing, you can probably get your questionable actions excused by the courts.

The Appeals Court affirms the lower court’s decision. While the totality of the circumstances makes this a less-than-ideal test case, the fact remains too much slack is being cut by the courts. The camera could have been left on. Any concerns the trooper had about his informant’s confidentiality could have been addressed by the department. They could have been presented to the court prior to turning over the footage in case redactions were warranted. But shutting off a camera during a stop — especially a pretextual stop where an officer deliberately slowed down his ticket-writing duties to bring a drug dog to the scene — should be treated as a failure to preserve evidence by law enforcement.

In this case, the Sixth Circuit does double damage: it ignores the issues raised by cops disabling cameras during traffic stops, and gives officers in its jurisdiction 20 minutes in which to violate rights (and the Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision) without fear of reprisal.

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via Techdirt
Cop Shuts Off Dashcam During Drug Dog Sniff. Appeals Court: This Is Fine.