Hacker News Reader

anthonyrubinon Peter Thiel on the future of Libertarianism, politics, and technology

I think the optimal solution would be a world where there are many smaller countries with different forms of government to choose from and moving from one country to another is much simpler than it is now. A United States with less centralized power would achieve many of the same benefits.

anthonyrubinon Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

Programming is hardly the most important activity in life.

anthonyrubinon Custom compiler for Linux kernel? It could happen

http://wiki.freebsd.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang

anthonyrubinon A Modest Proposal for the Copy and Paste School of Code Reuse

That is what Jeff does. I really don't understand how every one of his inane posts makes the front page of HN.

anthonyrubinon Spam 'produces 17m tons of CO2'

What about physical junk mail?

anthonyrubinon YouPorn is hiring. Apparently it's powered by Perl/Catalyst

In what way is it desperate? Most of us aren't working on very noble projects.

anthonyrubinon Congressman: there should be a law against Internet caps

So the solution to these supposed monopolies created by government intervention is a monopoly created by the government?

anthonyrubinon Congressman: there should be a law against Internet caps

Ridiculous. Should providers be able to advertise unlimited access and then limit access? No. Should limited access be illegal? No.

anthonyrubinon Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

Without proper historical context I believe the Bible would be somewhat confusing.

anthonyrubinon Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

I would start with world history -- first a book that covers the last few millennia, then specific books on significant events. Next would be a few of Karen Armstrong's books on religion; books such as the New Testament might prove difficult to understand without proper background.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics would probably be a good starting point for math. I'm not aware of any great texts that provide the same level of broad introduction to science.

anthonyrubinon Better

Does Merlin take his own message very seriously? Take a look at his personal blog:

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/

anthonyrubinon The Defeat of the Schools (1939)

A follow up article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95dec/chilearn/muref.htm

anthonyrubinon The Defeat of the Schools (1939)

I find this article to be incredibly insightful, even at 70 years old. It also contains many choice quotes.

"If we wanted to give our convenient inquiring friend, the Man from Mars, an idea of the best in human culture, we would hardly hand him a set of school texts and syllabi. Why should we do it with Johnnie and Susie?"

anthonyrubinon PawPawMail - Email for the Elderly

One of these projects might help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site-specific_browser#Software

anthonyrubinon Steve Yegge: Have you ever legalized marijuana?

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal/

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080

anthonyrubinon Stephen Wolfram Speaks About His New Question Answering Engine

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=549398

anthonyrubinon Engine Yard Hiring to help build the cloud

Have things suddenly turned around?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/07/engine-yard-cuts-15-of-...

anthonyrubinon [dead]

Only one of his examples of dead programmers is actually dead.

anthonyrubinon Fire the AIG management

"This shows a worrisome lack of basic business knowledge."

"The manager of your local McDonald’s is smarter than the AIG executives."

These types of remarks seem common when discussing this and similar situations related to the current economic situation. Perhaps the intentions of these executives was not to save the company, but to take care of themselves. I don't see this as stupidity. Greedy and unethical? Most definitely. These people are not stupid.

anthonyrubinon An open letter to Steve Jobs about approving the amber alert application

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#Controversy_about_s...

anthonyrubinon Sharpening the Saw

For some reason his articles are always voted up no matter how ignorant and devoid of insightful observations they are.

anthonyrubinon Reddit's Discussion about HN

I don't see any reason to discuss Jeff's ignorant article yet again.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948

anthonyrubinon Why Mahalo employed a felon hacker

Have you dealt with many recruiters? I seriously doubt that most recruiters would have done a better job in this situation.

anthonyrubinon Using Resource Obfuscation to Reduce Risk of Mass SQL Injection

I believe this to be part of a larger problem: many developers and organizations seem unaware of best practices (and when to disregard them) that have existed for decades.

anthonyrubinon Efarm. Indian Farm-to-House supply chain. (Needs a US copycat).

CSAs are one alternative in the US.

http://www.localharvest.org/csa.jsp

The above site provides a search feature to find local CSAs as well.

anthonyrubinon Where In The World Is Innovation?

Original source:

http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/innovation/building-a...

anthonyrubinon The Value of the Y Combinator Experience

The classic has to be the ArsDigita story. It seems that Philip Greenspun has removed the story from his site, but I found it elsewhere.

http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

anthonyrubinon Counting hours doesn't make sense

This type of experiment was done by the Peopleware authors. They are the source of many of the productivity numbers you see quoted for software developers.

anthonyrubinon Leonardo da Vinci was a hopeless procrastinator.

Because labeling Leonardo a procrastinator makes all of us procrastinators feel better about ourselves.