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peterhost

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*nix admin, perl geek, somehow totally hating OOP and so glad we've been given haskell, clojure and javascript to play with. Free software, free speech, free anything-that-can

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I'm Leaving Mojang 12 years ago

Yes.

Its such a lame end for "the story of Mojang". Let's see how long it takes for the word "mojang" to be forgotten. Lego is still called Lego, and Pixar still hasn't yielded its name to Disney (they sortof managed to coexist) to take just two examples.

The sad thing about Mojang is people are inspired by "vision". Money ? sure, we all want to earn as much as we can... But when did money give anybody any inspiration.

We need more user friendly tools regarding online privacy. In this regard (not talking about devs who fully understand and use GPG on a daily basis),... Email is broken.

Most people don't even realize their gmail/whatever account is like them standing naked (literally more naked than any psychanalist would ever dream to see you naked) in [google/whatever]land.

Stasibook is quite good in that regard too. To sortof paraphrase [obfuscated]berg, <<Privacy for the masses is sooo 2008>>.

As long as you keep true to your users, don't store any users metadata except the bare minimum to make the service work, try and be what spideroak is to dropbox, or wickr is to imessage, you have my (worthless but sincere) blessings.

Way to go.

+1. Totally agree on the "not a good backup solution". But we both (obviously) know the difference between redundancy and backup. My poor mum does not. So in the end, that's a problem, and i'm not bashing dropbox either (paid account and all, use it all the time) : their position as it stands, is a bit like the "nobody can presumably be ignorant of the law" article in french civil code (which was suppressed a few years ago), a position no commercial service whose customers are volatile should take for granted.

Thoughts ? Well, ...We (supposedly) live in a free country.

Analogy: When one fucks his/her neighbor's wife/husband (no, just kidding, nobody ever does that IRL), one at least draws the curtains, or goes rent a motel room 500 miles from home. It can lead to legal problems, big loss of money, and shattering a whole family (hurting real people for real), but no jurisdiction in north america or western Europe would sent someone to jail for that.

So... Signing into your new shiny service with a dupe email ? You bet i will. All the more if it's free. And that's just the beginning. It's time people realize their "profile" is as private as their "privates". Don't let anyone profile you for free. Your profile is worth more than that, right ?

That answers your question ?

(Btw nothing personal, as for the "illegal" stuff hapening on your service, it's mostly your problem, alas:( and that's not the easiest part. As long as you wish to profile users, you cannot securely (as in security by design) offer them privacy, and hence will run into the kind of troubles you allude to)

Very interesting project. Since I watched the "what happened to the cryptodream" video, I have finally begun to understand that we need more tools like yours or say Wickr (closest to secure IM on ios...), tools which my mother who know shit about aes but know her history and what an enigma machine was, can use.

The fact that your code will (?) be opensourced, is a big +1 The fact that it's secure by design is a big +1

Count me in, and go defeat gmail, icloud, and all those monstrosities,... one user at a time !

I share your feeling. We are at a loss what to do as a society, and what's more, we're most likely more at a loss than people were in very structured societies of the past (not that I wish to live back then).

My first guess (being diagnosed, not self, with some weird neurotransmitter problem and very lucky to have found a cure which makes my life normal again) is that the medical/pharma world is not giving a shit at the moment. It's like financing research for rare diseases : no money to be made here.

Second guess is that (oh yeah, you'll like that) most psychologists are charlatans (the biggest of all being Freud, then Lacan imo) and they got traction after WWII, for obvious reasons : western societies at large were scared shitless of the Reich's positions as to all problems having only to do with genetics (jews, mentally ill people,...). So we got 60 years of this "be nice, try to understand" bullshit.

Third, what we learned with Aspergers is that something as radical as autism can be a continuum. This is quite a revolutionary discovery, and does not seem to have sunk in yet. We all know as programmers the difference between discrete and continuous, we live in a world built upon bits after all. There might be thousands, hell maybe quintillions of such continuums which chained together lead to a unique pathology each and every time : it's also called personality.

Roughly speaking, we are still apes (alas not) trying (hard enough) to further our scientific knowledge of psychic disorders.

My feeling is that until the human being, the individual, is placed at the center of all the fabric of our societies, the fact that each case in unique and requires a specific attention, we will get nowhere. Money has no personality, money is the key to almost anything as comes to survival in this world. This is the thing that has to change... Someday. Because money likes not diversity.

Ok, you're my target cause this comment is so obviously being uttered by someone who hasn't studied history in his/her whole life... Jeez ! (whom i don't believe in btw)

Hacker new indeed....

Has anyone's been following dunno, wikileaks or Appelbaum or... Hacker news that are not on hackernews (which usurpates its name because what it really is is startup news) ? Eagle, the Athen Affair (http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair/...), or more generally this : http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html ?

It's our liberty that's slipping out of the (gaping a..)hole of democracies, which is not democracies fault because they are by definition are "representative governements", based on election. Tocqueville knew that back in the XIXth, so did all theoreticians of "governance", and not a single one called a "representative government" a "democracy".

Anyway. What it boils down to is : if you're not strictly speaking living in a democracy (which i'm sorry, the US, UK, France,... Aren't by historical, philosophical, and semantic definition), the only thing that matters is keeping power at bay. Try and elect representatives who truly understand that too much power in to few hands always leads to disaster. Only. There are none. There haven't been for decades. The latest in france was General de Gaulle (though his ego was high, he was the sort able to step down from power after a people's vote) , and I guess, on the US side, Kennedy.

I wouldn't trust my shoes to the state. And to facebook ? (non existing) Jeez again ! This is so scary to realize nobody - at large - realizes...

WWII is far away, the days of the cold war too, and people become lazy. Even (so called) hackers.

Just for the record, French laws about "droits d'auteurs" and quotations allow you to quote any text under "droits d'auteur" as long as it remains a quotation (the definition of which is vague, and varies from one case of "jurisprudence" to another, but 300 words is generally considered reasonable)

This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you, there's "quote" and there's "quote".

I love you, dad 14 years ago

Haven't seen it mentionned a lot in comments, but it also happens that drugs are not the culprit. Your brain might be, or more largely your DNA. Drugs and alcohol are just ways (self destructive) to try and cope with the fact of simply being alive.

I had such an alcohool problem when i was 26 or so (some serious, drink alone thing). Only 10 years afterwards was i diagnosed with a problem in neuro-trnamitters, which another drug (medecine) just made disappear. I've been living 6 years in a world without fear and mental pain, since, something i've never experienced before. My brain was the main culprit.

I just wish we could advance our understanding of the brain so as not to serve people anymore of "god hate you" / "it's your fault" bullshit.

I'm gonna kick some creeper's asses tonight in memory of all the suffering ones (yeah, creeper's are good scapegoats, i know it's not their fault either;). Thx all of you for sharing, i've spent an interesting evenig reading the whole thing.

The Web We Lost 14 years ago

"You can't loose what you don't have"

Like privacy, like knowing you're being a product, like helping facebook, google and pals map you, your friends, your friend's dog,...

Seriously...

A smartphone is a tracking device that can make calls. An app is a tracking sotftware that can display pictures.

That's what you lose. Maybe people don't care, but i guess that if they had a chance to understand what's really at stake, they would care and reconsider.

Nothing is free. At least in the earlier days of the web people understood that, because everyone payed some sort of bill. And bills without hidden costs, sortof help people think what it is they are (or are not) paying for.

This is an amazing set of icons. I'll make sure I use them and credit you.

Your giving this for free reminds me of the biggest problem Freelance artists/developers have : if one's a dev at heart, it's creating that fuels one's achievements. It's the fact that people are using the results. Problem is : how do I keep creating if I can't make a living out of it ?

And it's a hard one. I read so many headlines on HN which revolve around "launch a startup!", but never really do more than read them because of one single fact : i'm bloody not, and never will be interested by selling anything, be it cakes, code or my secondhand ipad.

I totally suck at marketing cause I totally hate practicing this art (of which i do not doubt the usefulness).

It's taken me 40 years to realize that : 1) i'm not interested in sales/marketing 2) doing it takes me down a path of depression every single time i try and i'm better of doing other things like building my own house (took me 3 years) or working in mechanics (repairing engines) 3) most important : there's no shame in not caring about marketing/sales and (therefore) sucking at it.

I had the opportunity to team with a guy who excels at marketing, and am able to code for a living full time while still living in a small village on a secluded island with a good internet connection. I truly hope you'll meet one of these ! Cause your work is insanely good.

And this is the top ranking comment ? Proof that hacker new is seriously loosing its shit. (Mayb we should call it startup news ?)

Come one, go learn some history. At least the article's writer did know some (a lot)

What really bothers me on this project, is that all accounts of it i've read sofar (i don't have an insider's view, which might make me think different) is that it sounds like "let's experiment with the savages and see if they can come up with something". It's like in the good old days of colonial empires. Do the little savages have brains ? How do savages's brains work ?? Are they really so different than ours ??? Does the size of the skull or caudal appendice explain it ?

Drawing a caricature here, but principles don't change that much.

Only thing it seems to prove is that kids are all naturally born hackers. It's what society does to them later on that takes that ability away (like using apps or loving Steve)

When you think of it, those two stories are the consequence of one huge problem. Globalization, and financial empires don't give a fuck about human beings. This poor mother in China is dying because a whole chain of power/money holders don't give a dman about what could be an insect for all they care. Same for Zinga : no respect for the human beings whose income depends on what decisions the leaders make. Only, yes, i agree with you, nobody died at Zinga yet. That chinese mother did die.

Same here.

Bitbucket for opensource things Stash for our firm's repos behind the firewall.

And i have been using github for years, paid account, like others. Paid github vs Atlassian Stash ? Stash wins.

Cmon! All the High Education thing is about making Students work for their university for the time they're enroled, in exchange for knowledge, and insider's tips (yeah, i can introduce you to xxxx at ibm,...). I personnally don't know of a single PHD who didn't work (hard) for free for his director... Untill he got his phd. And even after that, sometimes, if he wants to get into research himself.

I find internal auditing, under strict surveillance to be a very good idea indeed. This could even lead to some healthy form of competition between universities, not only base on who teaches that Lisp class, or what professor/university's name is.

Sure, only when it's your boss being racist, you don't have many other options than shut up or get fired. French white man here, apalled by 70% (yah, i did the math) of that whole thread. I don't care being called a colonialist because that's true, my country was a colonial empire, so was the UK, and so is the US now, with 200 years of history to catch up (irak anybody?). Laws against racism might be enforces, one day, in the US, who knows. It even happenned in moste European countries.

This guy did the right thing : stand up and talk. Obviously he cares more about telling "the world" than being patted on the shoulder. In other words, he somewhat did it the "black panthers" way, and as much as I like Martin Luther King and gandi, i don't believe you gain rights without fighting. For real.

Why that reaction of mine ? Cause it remembers me an episode of my youth, when i xas living with my Commando father (yeah, like your marines) in africa, and was the only white guy who stood up for a Malgache girl who was being bashed by a bunch of white guys, everyday on our way to school. I got beaten in front of the whole bus for about 15 minutes by the bunch of white racists guys. The driver, a black guy from Cameroon came to me the next day, and told me that he was glad i had to loose some teeth, because otherwise he would have lost his job.

So : racists are punks, a nuisance. I don't care about educating them. There are laws for them. I will fight them if i can, and yes, i hate them all :) (but i do like heavy metal, perl and javascript, yeas i do)

As a matter of fact, doing both, i think you can.

But in my opinion, the question is more : does every single people on earth like programming enough to get into it, instead of getting into something they enjoy more ?

Reading is easy, using an Iphone is easy. Bladesmithing, or repairing engines all day long is difficult, as is programming, as is writing for a living, or any other activity you don't enjoy doing on a daily basis for about 40 years.

It all boils down to (minimum) enjoyment of one's job.

Yes that exactly,

And also for Newton re-inventing the laws of diffraction back in 1672 when humans before that were just staring at rainbows like dumb elephants

And also for Thales re-inventing triangles just before the the 58th Olympiad (548–545 BC) while peasants back in the day thought they we just fancy things children used to draw with sticks in the dirt.

And also for Uguuk Buguuk (not sure about this one's name) for inventing something called the iWheel that enabled objects to be transported in batches, more easily. And he was dumbfounded when he saw how fast it leaked, the iWheel thing.

Come on, now... Serves them right (and WTF with apple anyway, Steve is dead). Nice thing the Whole world is not yet under US (patent) legislations domination.

PHP Addiction 14 years ago

Keep homebrew for standalone tools (recode, sntop, whatever). Then use rpm for ruby, perlbrew for perl, pythonbrew for ... And setup the defaut macosX apache (which has php5.3 and pear and whatever already here) work for your user account. See : http://echodittolabs.org/blog/2011/09/os-x-107-lion-developm...

Same on any nix system I use : sandboxing is the way.

- Want to use hg-git for mercurial, dont, homebrew that !! Build it in your ~/bin/ or in your $HOME sandbox, give all PATHS in your $HOME precedence, and rejoice.

- need mysql, postgre,... Don't homebrew that !! Either build it, or use the Macos dedicated installer with propper service installation, on dedicated port.

- etc,...

All in all, Homebrew, Fink and Macports are great for one thing : showing you how to patch the default tgz, saving the user hours of work for his custom, sandboxed install of any software (which as itself has been a life saver, for myself, on many an occasion).

Macos still is, as far as i'm concerned the best laptop platform for someone who has to use licenced software (external job/office constraint) but also needs a nix (bsd) environment. Otherwise, what can't you do with the default Ubuntu 12 LTS (i guess you agree) ? Macos, sure, is's on its way to become worthless as The Lion slowly sandboxes the user out of the OS, but tat's another story.

EDIT : and let it be said that OF COURSE, I agree with you that aptitude, yum and the like have no decent equivalent on the Apple/Microsoft closed platforms.

Why I'm a Pirate 15 years ago

Come on ! That's exactly what happens everyday. When you pitch some creative work, you know you're throwing it to the winds and hope the pitched guy will see more benefit in hiring you than in copying it. You cannot protect art in general.

I've worked for very decent folks (google in Dublin to name one) and very undecent ones. When you are not a mainstream artist, when you are part of the profesional artists crowd (people who live from it but don't make millions) which is the overwhelming majority of artists, you don't give a damn about all this bullshit on piracy. But you do pay attention on the fact that anything that further strenghtens big corporations will in turn make your situation more fragile.

Why I'm a Pirate 15 years ago

And say, with your wife and children ? Would you share it with them or make them pay too ? And when you listen to the music, streaming, with friends at a party you throw, do they all have to pay ?

Attention to detail is the basis of all art forms / crafts. In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". Perfection takes time, which takes money, which you might not have in infinite quantities...

On the other hand, many a good idea is a refined hack. What one thinks is lipstick might be the beginning of a new genuinely good idea. As a matter of fact, I believe that many a brilliant idea in human history was a side effect of digging a shaft in the wrong direction.