hackercomplex

Fast execution with very terse code, and also the code that is produced by a diciplined OCaml programmer can be easier to grok in many situations because it may read close to what the math formulas look like on paper relative to other languages.

To be honest this is the same argument people make for Haskell and I'm only assuming the argument applies to OCaml equally well.

I wonder if their recruiting tactics are as aggressive as some of the firms I've seen portreyed in film..

MARCY DAWSON: I admit we've been too aggressive. But all I ask is that you give me five minutes. As a token, accept this.

MAX: I don't want your money

MARCY DAWSON: The suitcase isn't filled with dollars, or gold, or diamonds. Just silicon. A Ming Mecca chip.

MAX: Ming Mecca? They're not even de-classified yet.

MARCY DAWSON: You're right, they're not. But Lancet-Percy has many friends. Beautiful, isn't it? Do you know how rare these are?

MAX: What do you...?

MARCY DAWSON: Mr Cohen?

MAX RUNS DOWN INTO A SUBWAY

(taken from π screenplay by Darren Aronofsky)

sorry for not paying attention. high five

one other thing since you're here: you could have a second button: whitelist the top 20 most popular private VPN services, and college dorm NAT environments.

I know that sounds annoying because it's not a simple task to compile and maintain such a list, but I suspect it's the kind of work that a single non-technical intern could have as a partial responsbility. If you left this control in the "allow" position by default then I bet these VPN providers would start policing their own networks as a means to win your blessing to stay onto the whitelist.

Then consumers would have a better idea about which VPN providers are respectable at least in terms of whether or not they nix the most obvious forms of breach attempts/scanning emanating from their nodes. That may sound far-fetched, but I just wanted to throw it out there.

I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/DonnchaC/cloudflare-tor-whitelister

with a simpe cron job like this ^ you can benefit from cloudflare without blocking TOR.

btw cloudflare if you see this. I suspect you could make all of this drama disappear in an instant by adding a convenient firewall control panel option called "whitelist TOR". Then all of the grumbling would be redirected towards the individual websites who neglected to apply this option.

this is why the language we use to describe the phenomena is so important: "remote work" is the correct way to describe it in my opinion because the phrase does not exclude the possability of working in a co-working office space.

With remote work it's entirely possible to work from a social business environment or "hacker space". The difference in this situation is that the individuals who you socialize with at work, aren't always working on the same project as you, or employed by the same company.

In other words remote work need not imply a life-style change or a work-style change, so to speak, but the people who blog about this stuff often ignore this and get it wrong. As an aside, in Manhattan there are nice co-working spaces which are not cheap and increasingly what you'll find there are individuals who are working remotely, but who prefer to do so while hanging out around other startup developers. I think this is the kind of thing we're going to see a lot more of rather than the idea of working in pajamas

That has been my experience. I've done meditation retreats and the like. I do find it slows down my mind, but can also surface things that frankly I'm perfectly happy to leave under the surface.

This is generally acknowledged by many meditation traditions especially ones which incorporate vipassana, but perhaps less so by the scientists who write papers about meditation. At some point in the practice all your "inner stuff" can come up: fear, confusion, uncertianty, memory of trauma, etc. Jung called it the "shadow", a popular spiritual teacher Eckart Tolle calls it the "pain-body", and in some Christian traditions they use them term "dark night of the soul". Psychologists may call it PTSD-like-symptoms.

Buddhists believe that one has to purge the mind-body of the three poisons as part of the process of awaking, and during this process it's normal for unsettling mental fabrications to arise.

Some practitioners in America feel like they did not sign up for a deep purge/cleanse of their dark inner content because the whole meditation affair was pitched to them as a form of gentle relaxation therapy. For many people however it can become almost a sort of all-encompassing, existential, ground shaking, transformative process which can sometimes feel like a burden when viewed from a lense where you only indicator of progress has to do with how socially well-adjusted you are in terms of finance, social signals, dating, etc.

Plus statistically speaking some percentage of the people who have their untamed mental processes come up are likely to be ensnared by these creepers in some way and perhaps spiral out of control or go off the deep end. However the meditation dharma-sword is an approprate instrument to hack your way through the mental jungle, and come out the other end which opens up to reveal a mountain. Whether you climb to the summit of your mountain, or just make a cave dwelling within is up to you, but at least you have an elevated perspective relative to the jungle of untamed body consciousness below.

There is a vast "spiritual marketplace" in the western culture which incorporates everything from yoga, to self-help movements, life-coaches, new-age, pop psychology, and more.

I recommend you pick a Wisdom tradition with roots in the very ancient past of which there are several, and make a study of it's roots and branches and resist the urge to tightly couple yourself to one teacher until you've read more about the practice and heritage. Buddhism is an example of one such Wisdom tradition.

Since you ask for a jump start here is an introductory book on Zen buddhism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFt1r7eubbc

Why not SQLite ?

well I certainly didn't mean to imply that you were full of hot air. :) and although I agree with you about nicotine but I'm personally more interested in the idea of consuming medicinal plant oils this way as a form of relaxation therapy because it would seem that cannabis prohibition is rapidly evapourating in the United States. I suspect it'll be a lot more difficult for scientists to find any medical evidence that this form of vaping is harmful, that is once they're finally able to conduct research into it.

One problem with conducting this kind of science however is that different varieties of cannabis have different profiles of cannabnoids and turpentines, so what science would really need first is a way to determine what genetics are what. This is why I'm so excited about the work that is being done to track the genetics.. here is a fascinating interview with a leading scientist about this if you're interested:

https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/episode-73-distributed...

When it comes to aesthetics though I think we're on the same page about those portable smoke monstrosities.

Heck even if you breath water vapor all day it won't be good for you, there is no way in hell that breathing in "hot" vapor can be good

Is the vapor really any warmer than body temp when it goes into your lungs though ? I just conducted an experiment where I took a puff of a vaporizer but kept the vapour in my mouth, then I probed with my index finger and honestly the air temp felt about the same as it does without the vapour.

Also I wonder if vaping a pack a day while living in the a prestine wilderness setting would be more safe than breathing regular air all day in a large metro with auto air pollution. I suppose it probably depends what flavors are in your liquid, and which city.

Then there's the question of whether or not it's safe to be nicoteen in the first place. The way I look at it sugar and coffee are probably equally bad if not worse for the body, but I haven't looked at it in depth

http://fuckcombustion.com/threads/steam-distilled-essential-...

According to what I've been reading vaporists in Colorado are experimenting in this area attempting to isolate the best "turps".

"Terpenoids and cannabinoids are both secreted inside the Cannabis plants glandular trichomes and they have a parent compound in common (geranyl pyrophosphate). More than 100 terpenoids have been identified in Cannabis. The most common and most studied include limonene, myrcene, alpha-pinene, linalool, beta-caryophyllene, caryophyllene oxide, nerolidol and phytol. Anecdotal evidence suggests that alpha-pinene is alerting, limonene is sunshine-y, and beta-myrcene is sedating.

    Limonene (also found in lemon)
    Alpha-pinene (also found in pine needles)
    Beta-myrcene (also found in hops and mango)
    Linalool (also found in lavender)
    Beta-Caryophyllene (also found in pepper and Echinacea)
    Caryophyllene Oxide (also found in lemon balm)
    Nerolidol (also found in orange)
    Phytol (found in green tea)"

It sounds to me like this new product category (vaping) needs time to discover the safest compounds to use for flavoring. In other words I suspect that the researchers in this study don't think it's actually the nicoteen which is causing this effect.

I think it may just depend on what it is you're trying to accomplish with your career. Take Atlanta since you bring it up. Atlanta already is the number one place to be globally for a career in Information Security which is a significant chunk of the tech community even though it's not nearly as flashy as social-web. Atlanta is also becomming a nexus for email-related startups (it's really not just Mailchimp there are several major ones here when you look at volume of email sent). Turner is headquartered in Atlanta, as is Coca Cola, Home Depot, CNN, and more.

Atlanta has become a really excellent city for graphic artists and design firms because companies such as Cartoon Network pull artists in from the global market, and then these artists stick around and end up engaging with the local startup community. In other words Atlanta is becoming a designer hub (and the city's close-enough proximity to Disney helps boost this effect)

In addition it's also a nexus for medical startups probably due to the fact that the CDC is here.

You have to be a psychologist.

Not really, you just have to learn to avoid them at an early age and to not answer any of their questions except through an attorney.

I have an idea. What if some startups began incorporating hiking and/or climbing (easy/moderate skill level) into their process ? You can find trailheads that have wifi at various waypoints. The team could plan challenges and expeditions that span multiple days, but instead of hiking all day like the pros they set a less grueling pace and hack more. The company could purchase gear, and could rent private wifi-shelters along the way that are stocked with modern amenities, tiki torches, rest rooms, ready-to-go-bonfire pit, gormet catered cuisine, and more. This way there really is a comfy environment to spend time resting and working (perhaps for more than one day) at each major waypoint. There could be pre-planned short nature hikes around the waypoint, and the team could engage a nature conservationist or an expert on the local geography.

I imagine that this kind of expedition planning could even be provisioned somehow as a service, so there might be a startup idea in there somewhere :)

I'm imagining a good way to ease into it might be first climbing the flatirons in Boulder or Stone Mountain in Atlanta.

I'm not being judged on how well I do, or even that I solved the problem at all, I know I can put down the game whenever and no one cares. This is why I don't think gamifying work is too useful in the long run, because deep down we know we're expected to solve those problems and get results.

Well in World of Warcraft a lot of these players care deeply about their earned reputation, and the gameplay represents a huge chunk of their social life. I suspect that while these players are collaborating to clear a dungeon they are (emotionally) taking the gold and loot drops pretty seriously almost as if it were a real life salary on the line, but yet they're having fun.

I have a theory about this stuff. Some programmers who need to "blow off" a day here or there spend it by lounging around on the sofa playing video games. I don't mean to rag on gamers because I'm one myself, but the point is I'm fascinated by the fact that many video games are also "mental challenges" that are similar in several ways to computer programming and use similar parts of the brain. What factor(s) then make the game-play enjoyable while the heavy-lifting dev-work feels sometimes more tedious ? Maybe there is a way to adjust our methodology to feel more game-like, relaxing, and fun.

I think I've actually stumbled upon a way to do this, allow me to explain: If you start to read about the statistics around social dynamics in MMORPG games then certain things fall out of the data, and game makers have picked up on these ideas and used them to make their games more fun and addictive, and I think these same insights can be applied to organize software development.

Lets start with World of Warcarft. The statistics prove that World of Warcraft is a highly addictive game for many diverse people, but almost everyone agrees that if you were to join an empty server you would find that it's not an addictive game in one player mode. If you take this a bit further and say.. "ok, now you're on a server with other people, but you're not allowed to join a group, but you are allowed to conference with several players, exchange weapons and loot, and message individual players. Well I think in this scenario people would agree that the game does indeed become more fun, beacause now it's social, but yet it's not as much fun as regular WOW.

I'll just cut straight to the point: Pair-programming is more fun even when it's done remotely, because it's like real-time grouping in World of Warcraft. The problem is, just like in World of Warcraft not every group that you join will be fun! The enjoyability of a particular group will depend on both the obvious factors such as the weapons, experience, and spells that the other members bring to the table, but also certain social factors which are perhaps more philsophical in nature and therefor difficult to talk about briefly.

I think that there is real hard evidence that this strategy works, and because of this it's actually the gold standard for the world's leading web-dev consultancies, at least in the Rails space which is my center of gravity.

examples (in no particular order): http://pivotal.io/labs/process https://thoughtbot.com/ https://hashrocket.com/ https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/effective-navigat...

I'll tell you an open secret: Focusing very intently on difficult maths for an extended period of time can make almost anyone begin to experience aspects of mental illness.

The physics community has dealt with this, DOD code breakers deal with it, the manhattan project, etc. It's a well studied phenomena because of how it related to the war effort and much of the research documentation is declassified, in the public domain, and is a matter of the historical record.

My point is software development is just another domain where this research applies. This information is generally recognized by the pop culture as evidenced by the fact that there are several blockbuster movies about it, for example the film 'Pi' by Darren Aronofsky and 'A beautiful mind'. However this phenomena is generally not accepted by the startup community. I assume that the reason for this is because recognizing it could theoretically lead to a rise in insurance cases by engineers who developed serious mental illness over time due to prolonged exposure to what were known to be unsafe working conditions. In my opinion it should be thought of as a high risk job akin to scuba instructor, or roofer.

So the whole thing is swept under the rug. Never the less I will give my recommendations as a developer who works all the time and has wrestled with this phenomena in the past:

- Force yourself to hike/walk/bike outdoors for at least an hour per day. I'm convinced that merely jogging on a tread mill or gym excercise does not have the same benefit. Think of the outdoors (and the sun) as a relief valve for the "cabin fever" effect.

- A daily Zazen practice (15 minutes+) This is the kind of meditation from Japanese buddhism where you're not trying to accomplish or "do" anything, you just sit, in a good posture. I think of this as putting your overclocked CPU in hibernate mode long enough for the heat sync to do it's thing. I think this can provide a similar effect to having had a couple extra good hours of sleep, and all it costs is a few minutes of your day. The more you practice it, the better it works.

- healthy diet and exercise

- yoga (or just plain stretching)

- Do not under-estimate prolonged caffeine consumption as a likely co-factor for many symptoms. Always eliminate this as a possibility whenever you can

- As a relaxation excercise take a break during your day and spend a few minutes in a quiet place directing your attention to any area of your back, neck, shoulders, or even your face whereever you expereince a sensation of pressure or weight. Sometimes just stopping to pay attention that these muscle groups are becoming tense is enough to help them relax some.

- super mellow music at a low volume even if it's not what you prefer generally can help when writing software. Classical music, downtempo, ambient, chill-out, atomospheric drum and bass, even unusual stuff like gregorian chant. It can be slow and boring, after all it's less about entertainment and more about the cumulative effect it has on your brain when used as background music.

example of downtempo genre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYdebVcZDPw

soma.fm/groovesalad plays a good mix imho. There's good studies on this on mice. A good rule of thumb is asking yourself this question "could this song be characterized as 'intense' in any way ?" if so then save it for some other activity

At what point do you have to consider yourself an irresponsible parent if you leave your kid in public school while being able to afford homeschooling ? Are we rapidly approaching the point as a society where our public education feels more like daycare ? If that's not the case how do we measure it and where do we draw the line.

Facebook is keeping a tight lid on their core metrics around how effective their mobile advertising platform is. IMHO nobody really knows yet how effective mobile advertising is in the large, we're still in the early days. It'll all come out in the wash over the next decade or two.

1. Hemp oil does not have to become cheaper than petrol in order to become widely used globally because consumer behavior is likely to change to accomodate it. What I mean is educated consumers are willing to pay more for the "green alternative" of their disposable plastic product because they recognize they will see that the extra value is created when the product does not create a destructive externality.

2. Wheat is not an ideal primary food crop in terms of nutrition for an advanced civilization that has the technology to scale distributed food production of much more nutritious plants. Instead we could scale out verical farming, aquaponics technology, permaculture, etc. Still I don't believe industrial hemp would effect large scale wheat production. I think that's a misnomer based on calculations centered around the idea of what it would take to replace petrol completely.

You can certainly grow hemp on flat terrain that is not optimal for food crops, but how much can be realistically harvested on truly rough terrain is debateable. It helps to remember that since you don't need insect repellent or petro-fertilizers it's signficantly easier to grow. I estimate that it could at least double the amount of land that can be used for productive farming in the US, and another thing is that hemp actually helps add nitrogen back into the soil.. in other words it's an excellent "cover crop". In addition it only needs to be rotated once every 70 years.

Globally a very large percentage of construction materials, vehicle parts, and plastics are currently produced from petrolium sources because of rules and regulations which restrict our civilization from utilizing the sun optimally via nature's most highly optimized solar fiber/oil generation system also known as industrial hemp.

Although it's possible to obtain hemp fiber and oil now it's price is artifically high because hemp farming is restricted on most of the surface area of earth. This artifically high price pevents this plant from being used in building construction and consumer plastics which keeps us locked into a petrol economy.

In addition there is a vast amount of rough terrain in US and elsewhere which is suitable for hemp production but not for agricultural crops. This land currently sits unused which it could be absorbing co2 at a high rate while contributing to the global economy. Also a reduction in the price of hemp would cause it be used more as the world's primary source of cellulose which would help neturalize the wholesale destruction of biodiversity in both the rainforests and marine environments.

It looks like a move in that direction for sure and I think that's great. I personally don't believe that blockchain is the "only way" to make this idea happen of course. I think that there is an opportunity now for companies to "preempt" the wide adoption of blockchain tech on the web by offering a service that provides the same flexibility as blockchain tipping, but with a more frictionless user experience. I personally believe the key to doing this effectively will be

1. support for micro transaction amounts (The PPC business already think in terms of clicks that are worth a few cents on the dollar, and I think ultimately the consumer will think like this as well). In other words I think tipping needs to feel non-material to the consumer, but a dollar.. that's almost enough to buy a domestic draft beer.

2. support for truly global payment (tipping) and global remittance with reliable, flexible, always on time payouts.

It would need to embrace blockchain as a payout method because this is the only way to offer truely global remittance capability right now. In other words there's no way to get around blockchain completely so it's better to support it.

One way this could work would be for the platform to issue it's own alt-coin which rides on the back of the platform's reputation. Bloggers in diverse foreign locales where it's difficult or time consuming to receive bank wires could exchange these alt-coins to whatever they need to arrive at local currency. The consumer in priveldged markets would be sheilded, so to speak from thinking in terms of blockchain units because the platform would make it easy for them to tip and be paid in dollar amounts using the standard payment methodologies such as bank wires, ACH, and debit/credit cards. This reduces the amount of friction experienced by the average consumer in the most developed markets while at the same time enabling participation by people in the under-developed markets. In this way the platform could be thought to support a form of "graceful degradation" from a frictionless mobile/web consumer experience at one end to the complexies of blockchain / currency exchange at the other end.

3. Privacy protection

4. Fairness. The fact that you have your brand reputation tied to the platform why it's worth hosting not because of direct revenue. In other words No Squeeze.

5. A no-hassle embeddable tipping badge that any webmaster can easily leverage

6. No demanding of identity documents or tax id numbers while witholding payout. It should be the responsibility of the webmaster who is being tipped to comply with his local laws and tax regulations.

I think that if the ball is dropped in any of these areas then some variation of blockchain will ultimately win.

But at what cost ? What about the mdworker slowdown effect which can quite arbitrarily bring your workflow to a standstill ? On your hardware does mdworker increase the probability of experiencing a "beachball of doom" depending on what else you have running ?

The model I would like to see involves micro-payments. I would be willing to "tip" say $0.10 or $0.15 here and there to instantly unlock certain articles. I think if this were easy to do then wired and other websites like it would make a lot more money over all from it's content.

The problem though is that with today's credit card infrastructure the processing fees make this sort of thing unrealistic, and the emerging alternative (blockchain tech) is not yet widely enough accepted by consumers to be useful in this regard.

I think we'll get there eventually, and a new "culture of tipping" on the web may flourish in a way that is very healthy for the journalistic community as a whole. It could also mean that for instance a poor person in a remote part of the world could record a youtube video of some traditional folk art or dance and then upload it to multiple social platforms and receive material amounts of money from random visitors within the first few hours without first needing to "strike a deal with youtube" or anything like that.

This might reorient village life in some areas away from making trinkets to sell to western tourists and instead towards making traditional creative art to share with a global audience. This could in theory help counteract the "westernization effect" that global cultures have been experiencing.

Why compare it to windows ? Compare it to Ubuntu or Chrome OS. You have Aptana, textmate, emacs, and web based IDEs. Ubuntu's "one button search" works better, it's called /usr/bin/locate.

If you're buying hardware devices that linux can't support well then you're doing it wrong. Support open standards and eschew manfacturers that don't support open source.

Thank you for this. I suppose I should have included the caveot that my rant applies mostly to early stage shops which are aren't ready to build out and ship a shiny new dev machine for every employee. Another problem for smaller startups is that if you're not careful almost everybody ends up being "blessed". And simply being a senior sysadmin type doesn't mean that you're automatically immune from all forms of social engineering attacks. I suppose your point is that even very early companies should opt for standardized hardware, I think you're right.

I <3 Duo Security.

Choosing to only bind SSH to a VPN interface is another option. If you can utilize a VPN that incorporates 2FA then that's even better. Projects such as zerotier are going a long way towards making this kind of thing easier to setup.

I think that "APT" is just a fancy new word that describes a very old methodology that has been commonplace since the earliest days of computer crime. If you read about Kevin Mitnick for example he was doing this stuff in his early teens.

I think that you may have a dangerous attitude about it because in modern times it's not a question of whether or not you're a big enterprise or a startup it's a question of whether or not the dataset at the nucleus of your system would be valuable on the black market or not. If an attacker or group of attackers thinks that your dataset could be saleable one day in the future as your company continues to grow then instead of trying to buy your equity on the secondary markets they may invest in trying to "own" your infrastructure now before you become big enough to put your employees thru white-hat training around social engineering.

I suppose my point here is that it does make sense for startups to put their team through proper white-hat training but it doesn't have to be expensive because you can roll your own. What I suspect is that in 10 years or so this kind of anti-social engineering training will be a standard for any IT knowledge workers not just programmers and will likely be part of the job interview process.

We are aruging over something moot though, since we both agree.. take it seriously.

I think that unfortunately you're mistaken. If all you do is sit and look at log files all day you can come off with this impression because you see so many scans go by, but that creates a bias in your thinking which doesn't line up with the facts.

A motivated attacker will always tend to try the "low tech" approaches first to rule them out as a first step because it it doesn't require as much sophisticated technical attention and in addition it's a well known fact that human beings are more often than not the weakest link in the chain of security.

It goes something like this:

1. enumerate the employees.. in other words build a list of all their work emails and try to obtain their personal emails and those of their spouses and children.

2. investigate the background of executives so that a compelling phishing email message can be crafted which looks like it originated from high up within the organization.

3. Send targeted phishing emails designed to bait people within the organization to visit webpages that exploit Adobe Flash attack vectors or other browser based vulnerabilities, or perhaps even lure them into installing a trojan directly.

4. after someone in the organization falls victim to the client-side attack, read their emails to learn more about the organization's structure so that your next phising attack can be more refined, specific, and compelling and can possibly utilize a real corporate email address.

5. Rinse and repeat until you eventually gain access to a developer laptop where you can grab production environment SSH keys. Now you own the network without even having to scan a single server and without leaving a trace in the log files.