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achingtooth

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My point was never that journalism is not unbiased, I was pointing out that Mozilla has a leftist bias.

"Water is wet, and pointing that out brings absolutely nothing of value to the discussion." That's most of the comments on HN, the only reason I browse this place is because the rest of the internet is even worse.

I'm not in college, I live as a digital nomad in Eastern Europe. My parents wanted me to go down the traditional path so they made me talk to various companies/agencies to make sure I didn't want to get a normal job and go to school before I left. Your post made me even more glad I didn't go down the traditional path though.

People in this thread are talking about how they wouldn't trust the NSA at all. I went to a presentation and talked with people from the NSA before and at face value they seemed like a silicon valley tech company. In their presentation they talked about how they were interested in open source, diversity, big data, artificial intelligence, and all the other buzzwords. They all seemed like they genuinely thought what they were doing was helping people. I know what they've done (and continue to do) but it's strange being able to attach a face to an action. You're more likely to believe them and buy what they are saying. I suppose the best thing to do is check over their code and accept it if everything looks good. They probably are being genuine.

As a an extra piece of information that I found interesting, they were pushing the diversity stuff hard. Everyone that gave the presentation were women (and they weren't low level people), they had an African-American person that worked there talk about how inclusive it was, they talked about how they're super accepting of LGBTQ+ people, and on and on. The tech stuff was for like 5 minutes, then the rest was on diversity (at a tech presentation, looking for recruits). I'm not exaggerating.

It might be because Slack has support, a great UI, lots of users, and 'just works'. A company I worked with tried to setup Riot and Matrix and they were having all sorts of problems. Even when they tried to use the Riot.im website there were bugs and features from Slack they needed that were missing. What Matrix and Riot.im is doing is still good though, I hope it takes off.

"But Jonathan," I hear you say, "by providing a gateway aren't you just making Cloudflare a centralizing institution?"

The problem is the market share of these institutions. Google could argue that they aren't the sole gatekeeper to search since services like DuckDuckGo exist. This isn't really valid when you control a huge amount of the market share. I'm worried about how the internet is becoming super homogeneous, it really hurts startups. I'm not saying what Cloudflare is doing is bad, but the amount of control Cloudflare has is increasingly worrying based of all the services they are launching. Look at what it did to The Daily Stormer (I think they are disgusting and have zero support for them), it's clear that they aren't unbiased. If Cloudflare blocks your service on their VPN, DNS, DDoS protection, IPFS site, Ethereum, etc you are majorly screwed. Most people aren't willing to change their setup just to visit your one service. I still think what Cloudflare does is awesome, not trying to be too negative, just a little worried.

That wasn't really my point, my point was that we take on enormous debt and we spend it on things that aren't the best. Why don't we spend more on infrastructure, research, investing in clean energy, etc? I understand that we need a military to protect our position in the world, but I'm not sure $750 billion dollars per year is needed. Sure some of that is spent on research, but I think there are more efficient ways to spend the money.

I've been having a hard time getting people to sign up for my service, I found that it's easiest to get to know a person then shill them your product. I guess that's the equivalent of what Jeff Johnson was doing. It's a lot of work for little return, especially for a social media site. A shoe has a lot bigger profit margin compared to a website (per user). I'm still learning though, the site has a lot of other useful examples

I don't doubt that it's far easier to abuse traditional captcha systems, but I wonder how wide spread that is. A while ago I did a test with securimage and tensorflow/python/opencv/keras after I read a Medium post. While it could solve captchas with a little distortion when I added squiggles, dots, and more distortion it was unable to solve the captchas. I'm sure you could spend more time and create a system that can solve these captchas, I wonder how much effort some random spammer will put in to attack your blog. Yandex uses traditional captchas, and they don't seem to have any issues.

I don't take trips back home, I don't have a phone, I don't have health insurance, I have one pair of clothes and gym clothes. I have an 10 year old x200 ThinkPad that cost $90. It's very fast, I use Arch Linux+Libreboot+Vim. I've live in Ukraine, Moldova, Macedonia, Romania and Serbia. Normally I stay in Ukraine or Moldova though. My expenses are between $150-250 for housing (I live in youth hostels or Airbnb, I travel with my brother and a friend so we split the cost), $165 for food, and ~$20 for the gym.

If you're serious about it, there is another option. You can move to Europe or Asia and live cheap while working on your business. I make ~$1,000 a month doing freelance work 30 hours a month. The rest of the time I spend working on my project ideas. My living expenses are ~$400 and I spend another $100-200 on project ideas.

I don't think the gimmicky travel to Alaska, take a gap year, or having "a way to talk about one’s higher purpose in the world" is important at all. What is important is having cheap tuition and solid courses. As much as people bash on college, it's still important. I don't have a college degree and it's been impossible for me to find a 'real job', though some of that may be due to my age. This is despite having a decent amount of programming and freelance experience. Overall college is important if you want to go down the traditional job path smoothly, I think these people are focusing on the wrong thing.