bimmer44

This is also a really good point - I was specifically thinking of PC's in my point above and you're right there is a lot more interest in old gaming systems. Maybe part of it is also the emotional connection and what does or doesn't have it, there are definitely a lot of old cars no one is collecting! Nassim Taleb's "graveyard of silent evidence" at play in my first comment.

I'm definitely not arguing there aren't people collecting these iconic old computers - just the mismatch between how many people have used computers daily for 20/30 years now and how few people seem to collect them. In my small-sized city in a small country there are maybe 25 car clubs I could be part of, specialist garages for just about every brand of car - even really niche shops that just do custom re-upholstery only for certain brands etc. Whereas for computers there's just a handful of people using the local auction and classified sites.

I think the reason you cite for the mismatch is the strongest one. If you're into collecting 80's BMWs you can still easily drive with a club including newer cars every weekend on the same roads, use the same petrol, easily get plugs, belts other parts etc. But an 80's PC is much more "stuck in time" and you need to be quite knowledgeable to maintain and enjoy in the same way.

Great article, thanks for posting. It makes me think about car detailers obsessing over paint matching for repairs on older vehicles. As a petrolhead I sometimes wonder to what extent there will be an equivalent collectors community of old PC hardware to the car community. Obviously there already is substantial interest in older PC's but if you compare the similarly widespread use of cars and computers I'd say that there are many more forums discussing old car maintenance, availability of very specialized detailing products for cars, marketplaces for collectible cars, concours for showing cars off etc. than there are for collecting/restoring PC's.

Maybe PC collecting, restoring etc. will be as big a deal but it's just early on the curve still. Or maybe the comparatively much higher steepness of the progress curve for PCs will prevent any sort of similar widespread enthusiasm for older stuff.

Thanks for this interesting link - I take back my criticism of the article! Based on your comment and that of t3hz0r it sounds like the martian colonists would be fine with this setup, as long as they mainly worked and lived in shielded habitats within the ETFE covered areas and also had underground shelters for emergency radiation protection.

I believe this post ignores the implications of increased surface level radiation (Mars does not have a protective magnetosphere). See the two articles I link below.

A structure like this might make sense for a shorter mission - but considering the thought experiment asks what structure would be suitable for a long term Musk-style settlement I don't think thin ETFE would be enough.

At least part of the radiation risk is temporary solar events, so perhaps you could use a slightly hardened version of ETFE as the author suggests but keep all human activity near regularly placed deep shelters to retreat to when radiation spikes are detected?

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...

https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html

After completing the course I can't recommend Startup School enough. For a free course the value I got out of it was amazing.

* Our group's mentor (James, co-Founder of Lista YC S09) was totally committed and freely giving of his time. We could set up individual office hours for 1-on-1 advice and he put a ton of effort into surveying us & adjusting his approach so we could get maximum value.

* Being part of a 25 startup cohort (the size of our group) was hugely motivating. Even when the conversation in our video chat office hours wasn't perfectly incisive it was still energizing to hear other founders pushing at the same things you're facing.

* The internal Startup School networking tools were decently effective and I don't think YC talked about them too much when inviting people to apply. Building a network of other founders when you're bootstrapping in Cape Town, South Africa can be a little tough. Now I've got around 30 different folks I'm emailing with - all of whom have resonating experiences due to the Tinder-style networking tool in the Startup School portal.

* I also got around $5000 in AWS, Azure and GCP credits. Apart from being able to spend this year's infrastructure money on other business things (awesome!) I can also experiment pretty freely with the different platforms and pick the most ideal setup for my app.

Finally a shameless plug for my startup: https://watchdog443.com

I'm building a tool for ongoing monitoring of your HTTPS state & configuration. Feel free to mail me (address in profile) to chat about it or Startup School!

It now looks like there were some technical issues with the demo day page and it's been taken down for now. The time limit for me to deleting my post has expired so maybe a mod who sees this can remove it?

After completing the course I can't recommend Startup School enough. For a free course the value I got out of it was amazing.

* Our group's mentor (James, co-Founder of Lista YC S09) was totally committed and freely giving of his time. We could set up individual office hours for 1-on-1 advice and he put a ton of effort into surveying us & adjusting his approach so we could get maximum value.

* Being part of a 25 startup cohort (the size of our group) was hugely motivating. Even when the conversation in our video chat office hours wasn't perfectly incisive it was still energizing to hear other founders pushing at the same things you're facing.

* The internal Startup School networking tools were decently effective and I don't think YC talked about them too much when inviting people to apply. Building a network of other founders when you're bootstrapping in Cape Town, South Africa can be a little tough. Now I've got around 30 different folks I'm emailing with - all of whom have resonating experiences due to the Tinder-style networking tool in the Startup School portal.

* I also got around $5000 in AWS, Azure and GCP credits. Apart from being able to spend this year's infrastructure money on other business things (awesome!) I can also experiment pretty freely with the different platforms and pick the most ideal setup for my app.

Finally a shameless plug for my startup: https://watchdog443.com

I'm building a tool for ongoing monitoring of your HTTPS state & configuration. Feel free to mail me (address in profile) to chat about it or Startup School!

This article is very detailed and includes examples of setting sshd to only use more secure options: https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.ht...

There was also a lot of HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8843994

I've actually been building a tool that does just this during the current YC Startup School program.

You can get on the launch list here: https://watchdog443.com

My main focus is ongoing alerting of changes to HTTPS configs rather than just a one off check. So you can be confident that everything is up to your spec or know as soon as something isn't.

Because we'll know your setup we can also alert you to things you specifically should be aware of - for instance a browser policy change that would affect user experience due to your certificates not meeting the browser policy etc.

Feel free to mail me if you'd like more info! (email in profile.)

(PS. YC Startup School's virtual demo day is tomorrow if you're interested! All the startups that completed the course are posting a short demo video.)

This is a useful resource - thanks for compiling it.

I'd suggest allowing users to submit short reviews of each ebook. I'd imagine it would be useful to have some insight as to which book would be most helpful for different circumstances - especially once you start to get some more submissions and there are more books per category.

Web of Trust is a browser extension that claims 140 million installs. The marketing language on the home page [1] is all about how the extension will help users decide which websites to trust.

Their privacy statement [2] includes a section that describes "Browsing usage, including visited web pages, clickstream data or web address accessed;" as one of the categories of "non-personal information" that they may disclose or share with 3rd parties.

I'd imagine most users installing an extension to make their browsing safer would not be happy to know they were also making their entire browsing history available to 3rd party data brokers at the same time.

Unscrupulous business practices are definitely made easier when no one actually reads Privacy Policies...

[1] https://www.mywot.com/

[2] https://www.mywot.com/en/privacy/privacy_policy

In the article you posted the WOT spokesperson appears to say that they'll be making sure that data is better anonymized in future - not that they will stop selling it. I don't think this type of response is going to work out well for them...

"When there are cases where information has not been anonymized and protected, we will, of course, review this and, if necessary, take steps to ensure adequate protection for our users."

I also found "The Power of Habit" a fascinating read. It's one of the books I recommend most often. Understanding your habits & learning new ones is such a fundamental/essential part of living. I almost wish "Habit Management" had been a discrete subject in my school curriculum.

My understanding of the 3 second exercise from the article is that it's the simple steps of experiencing a pleasant moment (trigger), noticing & reflecting on the simple pleasure (routine) and then the boost in happiness felt after this awareness (reward).

People often think this sort of expiry is due to some shocking technical deficit - but it's actually more often due to things like organisational change (people not handing over responsibilities correctly) or important information (e.g. on parts of the CDN infrastructure) not making across a migration to a new internal wiki.

My app [1] actually has users who use Let's Encrypt - which has totally reliable email reminders before expiry - but still like the idea of having a long list of backup contacts and a company that will follow up on them to prevent an expiry in production.

[1] https://www.httpsmonitor.com

Having these billionaires willing to throw money at competitive space flight is pretty great - I'm sure positive effects on commercial space exploration and global internet access will inevitably follow.

I'm intrigued that they plan to go from New Shepard straight to a rocket that's bigger than Falcon 9 (3.85m pounds thrust for New Shepard vs. latest Full Thrust version of Falcon 9 at 1.71m pounds). I was under the impression that New Shepard wasn't as serious as Falcon 1 (.e.g not capable of reaching orbit) and that SpaceX spent quite a number of years moving from pre-Falcon 1 to the regular launch successes of Falcon 9.

Maybe someone who knows more about this can explain - are the technical challenges involved less associated with pure size and more to do with design/fabrication processes etc.?

This makes sense - I think the Reuters article was quite misleading. I posted another comment [1] with a link to a Guardian article that supports what you wrote.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463745

I agree the posted article isn't particularly clear - found this one [1] on the Guardian that's better.

The understanding I get from it is that MasterCard could be liable under UK law now that the EU court has decisively shown the fees charged to have been anti-competitive. What's required for the UK claimants is to show that harm was caused to them by these anti-competitive practices and that redress is due.

The Reuters article makes it seem like "the fees were just too high" is the reason for this suit. A court-of-law decision that anti-competitive practices took place makes a lot more sense as a pretext for a claim like this.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/sep/08/mastercard-sue...

I'm intrigued by this type of case - this article doesn't mention any specific legislative requirement that fees should have been less during the period concerned. It's a strange precedent that a company can be retrospectively liable for charging "too much".

This is similar to the case of Apple and their tax dues in Ireland.

Maybe someone with a better grasp of legal matters can explain a mechanism that gives this case a chance. Otherwise I can't see this claim succeeding without causing a great deal of business uncertainty.

I agree it's definitely easier to do - and obviously already happening in this context. Also billboards that use Kinect CV to record emotional response. [1]

I was just intrigued by the perceptions around this - people often have an instinctive strongly negative response to the idea of pervasive face recognition but I'm not sure they would feel as unnerved by the presence of a wifi network with this sort of "surveillance" traffic running through it. Maybe they would.

[1] http://theconversation.com/now-advertising-billboards-can-re...

Some business ideas from the 2.4GHz dystopia:

* Using wifi in a movie theatre to build a Google Analytics equivalent for movie studios. Total heartbeat and respiration data for every individual "user session" across all screenings. Devices like Roku could do this too and sell the data to Netflix.

* Amazon Echo could notice your heartrate is becoming elevated due to the start of flu - Amazon stages your go-to remedies in the nearest DC and pushes appropriate ads on the site.

* In store movement tracking. Why bother with phone beacons and hassle-some devices randomising their MAC addresses when you could just power up a wifi blanket and track bodies with precision.

I guess the lab setting of the above research wouldn't apply to these situations - but I imagine with more research and some specialised equipment a movie theatre could be made conducive to this kind of tracking? Would there be legal implications? Wifi is everywhere already...

I'd guess that this sort of bulk wind power is going to increasingly find favour with the big utilities over time. They don't like thoughts about homeowners buying in to a future with Tesla powerwalls + roof solar at plunging costs (e.g. the situation in Hawaii [1]). Big offshore projects let the utilities supply clean electricity without decentralisation of the grid.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/hawaii-solar-indust...

As a satisfied Tarsnap customer - thanks to cperciva for this explanative post-mortem & making the refund automatic rather than based on who emails support and complains...

I'd recommend Pass [1].

It stores your data locally, is suprisingly easy to use and relies on battle tested GPG.

From the website: "The community has even produced a cross-platform GUI client, an Android app, an iOS app, a Firefox plugin, a Windows client, a pretty Python QML app, a nice Go GUI app, an interactive console UI, Alfred integration (1) (2) (3), a dmenu script, OS X integration, git credential integration, and even an emacs package."

[1] https://www.passwordstore.org/