altotrees

I was about to mention this. Interestingly enough, I found this out the hard way, as I was struck by a sudden urge to listen to Sign o' the Times late one night in college.

Upon signing into YouTube, I was surprised not only to not find any of his songs uploaded, but to also find several articles about his extreme distaste for digital music after Googling the topic. I ended up going to the record shop and buying a used copy.

And as far as the topic of whether this story should on HN, I tend to treat this news in a similar manner as the death of Bowie. Both artists were really creative, and were fiercely passionate and intelligent (at least from what I've seen and heard), not to mention they were masters at marketing themselves. These are attributes anyone who values innovative technology and startups might be interested in — at least in my opinion.

Regardless of whether it is on- or off-topic, the world lost a great musician who blended genres and broke rules, and that is a shame.

Another great installment. It is more mind-bending to me each week, the level of planning, the number of ties Le Roux has to so many different places and people with varied histories and interests. Even assuming conservatively that only 50 percent of what is written is fact, it is still crazy to think about.

It is quite a story, Le Roux going from a gangly teenager hunched over his computer to a man who is able to amass a small commando squad at a moments notice...it seems as though Hollywood would struggle to come up with such a plot.

It was not the first time I viewed it, but it seems to be now, apologies.

There is a non-paywall version available via Google. I tried to link to it here, but it throws the paywall up.

This is really good news, assuming the TOS are enforced strongly. I also appreciate the fact that they were open about concerns with these spammers competing directly with their Jobs service. That was the first thing I thought about.

I have found that the density of content certainly adds to or detracts from the ability to read at a rapid pace.

When I sit down with a Raymond Carver short story, the shorter sentences and clear descriptions allow me to absorb it more quickly and move on.

I tried to read at the same pace with authors like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace (and Hemingway) and found myself re-reading the same paragraph four times.

For me, it isn't nessecarilly that I want to speed read a novel, it is just that I have trained my brain in other ways to absorb the most crucial aspects of a text/problem quickly and jump ahead (at my own detriment). Thanks college!

>I think one of the biggest reasons people don't give themselves a work-life balance is peer pressure and the desire to please others first.

This is the root of the issue in my opinion. When I fail to achieve work/life balance, it is usually due to one of two things:

1. To please my direct co-workers, manager, CEO. 2. To please everyone else — that is, make enough to live the way I envision other people expect me to be living, and doing the things I imagine them expecting me to be doing.

Living for even the imagined expectations of others can take a heavy toll. It took time to unlearn that way of thinking.

>"He did it and nobody connected dots until piles of high risk crimes added up with benefit of easy tracing"

All really good points. I found myself having to re-read the part where he was actually brought in by the authorities, thinking to myself how hard it would have to be to actually trace Le Roux the man. I wasn't fully expecting him to be captured until the next installment, actually.

It just seems amazing for someone who had been security-minded to let arrogance and big risks, mainly the high risk crimes, bring him down. In a way, this part of the story reminds me of the recently deceased Howard Marks who went bigger and bigger until he went down.

Even so, stories like these make me wonder how many drugs/weapons smugglers, etc. do turn in for that "early retirement" as millionaires. Must be quite a few.

So excited to red this installment. So far, this series has been fantastic. I had no idea who Le Roux was three weeks ago, let alone his shadowy background and connection to tools I have used in the past.

Thank you for the great work.

The whole notion of a car being a "rite of passage" in America has always seemed odd to me, even as an American. In many cases, I have friends with loads of college debt taking on an equal amount of debt for a new car upon graduation.

It seems to me to be a throwback idea that has lived on. I don't think a new car can really be seen as a rite of passage in the current culture of tuition inflation/stagnating wages. It is more like a luxury you are lucky to be able to truly afford (I'm not talking a 72 month payment plan, no down payment afford here) a year or less out of college.

I grew up in Dayton, Ohio around a relatively major Air Force Base. The presence of contractors of every stripe (Northrop, Oracle, Booz Allen, General Dynamics), and the stories I would hear about the projects and funds they were approved for were mind-boggling.

That is part of the reason I think this stance is so admirable and interesting. I do not think defense spending is inherently negative. But even for those who do believe that in a strong way, I think it would be hard to leave those opportunities on the table and walk away.

Really? I did not even realize this, and I spend time in the region. Do you know how much expansion they are planning on?

edit: aside from the Innovation Center/Lab.

"Sometimes though, when I really think about the inevitability of dying it's still hard to go to sleep."

I totally understand this sentiment. Thinking about death in life's quiet moments is almost like thinking about an absurdly complex problem set, for which there is no one right answer, and maybe one that needs no answer.

I have never tried psychedelics, but my idea of death was altered recently when a friend was diagnosed with stage IV throat cancer. He went from relatively healthy to "weeks to live" within a span of days. It shook me, obviously and shifted something in my perception.

This is why I steer clear of psychedelics...I fear that I could lose my ability to attempt to reason about such events. It is also why I don't drink. I feel like I need to be able to "control" such shifts. Sometimes though, I feel that this idea of control is a total illusion, or a coping mechanism.

So, perhaps a silly question...but if Ford is going to be competing for the best talent Silicon Valley has to offer, will they establish a stronger presence in the region?

I am not trying to knock Detroit or Dearborn, but it seems like they would need to do this. Maybe I missed it in the article. I think it would be kind of hard (even given the cost of living) to get top talent to migrate from, say Cupertino, to Dearborn en masse.

Couldn't agree more. Living in a college town a few years ago, visitors would always mention the sheer number of Chinese students around. Nevermind the fact that there were just as many students from India, European countries and other regions around every corner.

If they bring ambition, ideas and pay taxes, who cares? That is just my opinion, of course.

Hmmm, on Monday morning, under the "Interesting" listing, one of the planes flying:

SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY SHERIFFS DEPARTMENT - SAN BERNARDINO, CA

No location coordinates provided though. I wonder if this is anything related to an ongoing investigation, or just a coincidence?

I have so much internal confusion when it comes to Yahoo. I remember them as innovators, as the go-to search engine when I was a netscape-obsessed middle school student. I respected their site and work.

Now, I go to Yahoo and am just...disappointed. The front page has become a home for stale clickbait, and other areas of the site a home for hateful comments and obtuse advertising. I just think to myself "who the hell are they trying to appeal to, what am I looking at. Why don't I switch mail services already?"

I am used to their email, and still use it daily. I have been hoping to see Yahoo make some serious changes and be on the upswing for a number of years. If The Daily Mail touches Yahoo in any way, I would be finished with them, without hesitation, without question. That would be the death knell. And it doesn't appear I am alone in the sentiment.

Exactly... a "Software Engineer" in my experience can run the gamut from someone with a CS PhD to someone with an Associate Degree to someone who is self-taught. Sometimes pay is correlated with education, sometimes with experience, sometimes both and I have seen cases where neither is really a factor as a company is just looking for a warm body to fill a dev role.

Add to this the glut of contract positions in industry along with the wide range of pay there, and it becomes much harder to make an accurate assumption (at least for me in my head) of what software engineers should be making.

Googling "Software Engineer Payscale: brings up pages listing, 73, 78, 83, and 92 thousand per year. And I am leaving those roles with sub-titles like senior and principal off the list. That said, this is a cool idea and undertaking, especially the country comparisons.

This is exactly the same reason I value side projects. Coming up with an elegant, creative solution without being forced into time/system/professional constraints is pretty amazing.

I want to use the language, platform and philosophy of my choice when working on things for myself. It reminds me of why I got into this field in the first place.

The comments are so abrasive and tone deaf that it almost seems like this is certainly more of an instance of trolling than actual technical discussion.

As much as I wish the above statement was true, I have run into folks on Github and in my professional life who think something like this constitutes intelligent reasoning. This is what scares people away from open source...

I started out college wanting to be a professor. That was fleeting, once I saw what my most respected professors and advisors were up against, grinding out papers, looking exhausted and subtly hinting that I should pursue anything but my initial goal.

When I started college, for some reason, I also thought the most interesting work was being done in academia, without exception. Now, a few years out, it is clear that the most interesting work is done at a crossroads - between top CS and engineering universities and industry. I do think it is getting harder to resist the lure of industry (based on the experience of my friends with PhDs), mainly because of comparable pay and far fewer peripheral responsibilities like managing labs, advising students, etc.

This exactly. My eye was drawn to the orange button last night as I went to send an email to my professor. I nearly clicked it, not remembering the date. Luckily, I just thought it might be some new weird voice feature I must not understand...that was close.

Not sure being an emotional wreck and being a horrible person are necessarily equivalent...

The one thing to avoid is too much caffeine, or any other stimulant. First thing in the morning, I have found that they make me feel like the most brilliant, innovative writer and developer ever. So I have some more, and a bit more, and a touch more...

Later on in the day, I cannot even understand some of my earlier thoughts, I get shaky and generally burnt out. Watch out for too much of a good thing.

I have also found that sleep, a brisk walk in the afternoons, and exercise after work help tremendously. Taking care of yourself will improve your work life greatly. Sure, you can grow more proficient and versatile sometimes by locking yourself in a room in front of a screen coding, but do it too much and the impact will be more negative than positive. YMMV.

Yeah, 94% seems very high, and although I guess it could be possible, I can't imagine it is quite that high. Cloudflare is zeroed-in on Tor users, but am I crazy for thinking that there are several other ways bad actors could create issues not using Tor?

It seems like they are trying to come up with an amicable solution, but for the moment, legitimate Tor and VPN service users suffer. If Cloudflare really refuses to acknowledge that their view may be a tad skewed, I don't see how this is readily or easily remedied.

Your comment is pretty much the argument I offer when discussing Go with friends and colleagues who are skeptical of it.

I tell them to think of it as a tool in your arsenal, rather than the toolbox that carries everything you need. You will write far less boilerplate than Java, silly fast for certain network usages,and Goroutines have saved me quite a few headaches.

With that said, it is still pretty new. But it is a great tool to have.

Sure, Go may still be surrounded by some hype, but I wouldn't call it a hipster language. I started reading about it and messing around with it about a year ago. It is really fun to use for certain things (usually Network servers for me).

That is not to say it's a perfect language, but I have friends dedicated to python who love using Go and friends who use C and Java that love building personal projects with it. I really had no idea it was gaining adoption in industry and some areas of academia until recently though.

My uncle is an engineer in Toronto, and often speaks positively of the startup scene in parts of Canada. I know Waterloo loses quite a few grads to the Bay Area and other major U.S. cities, but haven't some companies actually relocated to be closer to the scene there? I am thinking Pivotal Labs and Google off the top of my head.

I am genuinely curious on your take, since you seem to have direct knowledge. I have seen many people say things in the same vein, but also hear positive things from people in Canada and outsiders as well.

Have I made pithy comments or tiny modifications occasionally to keep a streak alive? Maybe...

but that was pretty much limited to my earlier days of using Github. Now, I think one or two days of quality commits a week (on personal projects) is far superior to straining to make tiny changes for the sake of a streak.

That was my first thought too. Comments can sometimes be seen as an afterthought, something that you feel obligated to leave for future programmers or managers craving documentation. In cases like this, comments become an active part of the program, documenting and teaching parts of the code to anyone who wants or needs to understand.

It inspires me to leave more thorough, detailed comments, not for my own benefit, but for that of others. This almost reads like a really well-done technical paper in parts. Very neat.

I always did love the angles and sharpness of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. I always felt like going into a building she designed was like walking into a real-life geometry problem set.

Granted, I am only marginally aware of the work of many architects, but I actively sought hers out whenever possible. I was never disappointmented. This is sad news, indeed.