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cmars232

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[dead] 15 years ago

My worst on-call pager duty IT lackey job still beat the hell out of convenience store clerk and buffet-steakhouse dishwasher.

As a BBQ loving Texan, I find this fascinating. On the one hand, it does seem kind of creepy, on the other, this could be some cool resilient community-building technology to create a real alternative to the current food economy.

I don't think this will ever be a complete replacement for real meat. There are such subtleties to how an animal lives and what it eats that affect its taste. Wild hogs and domestic pigs are the same animal but taste entirely different (I prefer the wild variety).

Still, I'd prefer higher quality lab-grown meat created under safe and open conditions with some free range/hunted organic on the side to the factory farmed meat we're stuck with today. I drive 35 miles out of my way for groceries every week to avoid that stuff.

False dichotomy. You can't "pay $20/mo to stream as many as you want". The available selection from services like Netflix and Hulu is extremely limited.

Many in the "15-25 set" pay about $20/mo to download through an offshore VPS, private trackers and servers. This money would go to the content holders if they didn't cripple their "precious content" with bundling packages, intrusive advertisements, DRM and region restrictions.

Punk Rock Languages 15 years ago

A nice kick in the ass to remember my C & C++ roots. I've been too hung up on "perfect" languages and "beautiful" frameworks. Thanks for this.

I would not have a hard time saying no to this at all. There are limits which you can assert without being rude or coming across as paranoid. What's next, access to all your private emails?

Some private content like facebook could add to their liability for discriminatory hiring practices. Imagine if they figure out your sexual preference, or veteran status. Seriously, recruiters would be foolish to pry like this into the personal lives of recruits.

As one who has dabbled with Haskell a bit here and there, "programmable semicolon" is the most apt metaphor I've seen.

Every time I have to break up a chain of method calls in Java with several lines of ternary null checks, I think about the Maybe monad.

There is no hacker news problem if you realize that all sites up to this point in internet history are either heavily curated for quality and limited in scope or self-moderated with a one-dimensional, imperfect karma game, and thus chaotic and ephemeral.

Such is the nature of suchness until someone figures out a better game that more properly engages human nature.

Crying over the demise of HN is like crying over a naive hill-climbing algorithm when it gets stuck.

Don't Make Me Steal 15 years ago

Yeah, but I would download a loaf of organic bread if I could. And I'd copy that loaf whenever I needed more for a sandwich, and I'd upload that bread pattern to all my friends, and give away free slices to any hungry people I came across.

Post-scarcity is funny that way.

Reject here. Pretty discouraging at the time, but in retrospect, best thing that could have happened to me. A year later, I landed a great job at a local startup, and the Google branch closed up shop.

All in all, it was decent self-learning experience. I say apply anyway. Even if you don't get it, it might sharpen you up enough for somewhere else.

I use them, but I don't trust them. They've got my email and feedreader (for now), but not much of my search.

I hate instant search, and I don't want to authenticate myself to them just to turn it off. My browser is forgetful of cookies, and I shut it down regularly to get shit done.

DuckDuckGo is a refreshing alternative and Google now gets but a meager fraction of my search, where they used to be almost exclusive. I'll check DDG first, then elsewhere if I'm disappointed. Subjectively, DDG result relevance seems to be improving lately.

I also block Google's Javascript analytics and ads, as I do all other third parties. As a user how can I trust let alone know what all these ad networks and doohickies in a page really are? If you want to advertise or analyze on your site, fine, back it up by serving it out of your own domain if it matters that much to your bottom line.

More importantly, why? If governments are doing their jobs and serving whom they are meant to serve, people as a collective group are well cared for and have no reason to do such harm to themselves. The few who would threaten it are the odd pathogen, quickly and easily dealt with.

OTOH I can see people as a collective group deciding they don't need large corporations like Bayer killing their bees, Monsanto poisoning their food, Visa and MC ripping them off and suppressing speech of those they don't like, etc. But are any of those essential and vital? Perhaps these are more like a cancer that should be removed from the body politic.

TL;DR Anonymous doesn't shit where Anonymous eats.

Wikijerks 16 years ago

Why should a nation involve physical borders anymore? Perhaps there is no territory that captures how some of us are feeling? What then?

Back in '95 when my wife and I were dating, we didn't have a lol. Most of the campus was vt220s hooked up to a VAX, local chat was done with a DCL command called 'phone'. To simulate laughter we would mash random characters from the home keys. The longer the string, and the farther out from the home keys, the harder the laugh.

I don't know, I still think it's a more expressive way to laugh in a terminal.

I don't think it's paranoia at all. It doesn't even take bad motives, just a lapse of judgment or faulty assumption to ruin privacy -- like Google Buzz integration into GMail.

I think the solution requires more than feel-good policy statements and trust building. And God forbid someone mention legislation.

Ultimately the users need full localized control (hosting, or decrypting) over their private identities, content and social connections. Private groups should be darknets. And it should be as easy as automatic to set up and use. Zooko's Triangle be damned.

Maybe I'm going to the wrong theaters. Maybe I'm just that much closer to grumpy old man. Lately my theater experience is crying babies (not just at kid's movies), mouth-breathers incessantly pawing at the bottom of their feed buckets, fiddling noisy wrappers and cellphones opening.

It's about on par with an R5 that has shitty audio. It would be nice if theaters focused more on experience and novelty.

Thanks to OP for announcing the release :)

Interesting. In my case they seem to latch on to dead accounts or accounts with fake info.

If you're worried about services like Rapleaf, mix fake info into your public profiles. Most sites have no business knowing your birthdate, city of residence let alone your mailing address. Regularly forget your passwords and whimsically start over with new accounts.

Make it hard for automated scripts to harvest your real identity. Be "damaged goods" that can't be easily sold.

Ebooks may be more useful, but they are also much more ephemeral and fragile than a physical copy. They are subject to accidental deletion, file corruption and future obsolescence due to closed formats, DRM and technological innovation over time.

Those bits you paid for, they are rotting. The flash memory that stores them is leaking electrons and decaying. 5-10 years from now, your purchase may well evaporate into entropy unless you take great pains to move it from media to media. That is, if this is even allowed by your locked-down hardware.

How is something so ephemeral actually worth more than a physical artifact?