chrismonsanto

Yes, you could.

If it's apart of my service, I want it on my servers.

> Could you elaborate on the scammers?

Here's an example. I remember there being a big storm, so big that the subways were shutting down temporarily, and if you didn't catch a ride soon you would be stuck for a bit. Of course this announcement was in Japanese, and I didn't understand the exact words, but I did figure it out from the rain + watching other folks scramble to buy tickets.

There was a guy there who would go up to the tourists and let them know there was a storm coming and that they needed to buy their tickets. He would say this very hurriedly, causing the tourists to become a bit panicked. Then it was "Where do you live?" "Ah, you should take this route" "Do you have enough for this? How much money do you have?" and at this point the tourists would instinctively pull their yen out of their pockets. Then the guy would clasp their hands over the tourists, lead their hands to the machine, and dump the coins in the machine. The machine would spit out a ticket, he would hand it to them, and then say "oh and I'll take this for helping you" and run off (revealing that he took some of your yen while he was guiding your hands to the machine).

He was actually pretty slick about it, and I imagine it worked on most people because they were accustomed to the locals being very polite. And by reinforcing that he was helping you, I think he avoided people reporting him. I ended up running into him again doing the same thing at a different subway station, so I assume he changed locations often.

I agree for the most part (my experience being in Tokyo). I remember having trouble finding my hotel, and two kids not only showed me where it was, they walked with me a few blocks to it, rode down the elevator with me, and personally introduced me to the staff. I was blown away at how polite the gesture was, and vowed to be more helpful to the legions of lost parents trying to find their way around Princeton.

On the other hand, there were scammers trying to take advantage of tourists who couldn't understand the subway system (less popular stations tend to be labeled exclusively in kanji). And the locals can have a very skewed idea of American culture; for example, our hotel breakfast was french fries and hot dogs.

(And yes, the toilets were great. Gotta get that stuff here in the US)

This made my day.

"Build on request" is a good idea. We do something similar in our stack: tup[0] as the (insanely fast) build system, and developer VMs run mitmproxy[1] on port 8080 which runs tup before every request.

I prefer this style of a setup to coupling them together a-la Harp. If the webserver doesn't work out, I can swap it out. Same with the build system. Tying them together makes me antsy. And for good reason I think: since 2004, we have switched from Apache -> Lighttpd -> Nginx, and have switched from custom shell scripts -> Make -> Tup (with some fabricate.py, and with calls out to other build systems like Leiningen)

[0] http://gittup.org/tup/

[1] http://mitmproxy.org/

Firebug is much better.

- Tools like YSlow and PageSpeed require Firebug.

- You can't disable the browser cache from FF devtools, which really sucks when you are trying to debug a broken redirect.

- When inspecting an element in FF devtools, :before and :after CSS properties will not be shown. I wasted many hours debugging a CSS refactor because of this (imagine going up the DOM, comparing computed CSS properties until you reach the root). Both Firebug and Chrome devtools will show :before and :after properties.

I think Firebug and the Chrome devtools are comparable in quality.

> But wait, I'm not your peer at all. I guess I forgot that...

I'm afraid I don't have anything else to add to this discussion. Good luck with your endeavors.

> Am I not entitled to an opinion? ...You could tell me _why_ you disagree.

Why I disagree with your disparaging remarks aimed at PL theorists is irrelevant.

The Urbit documentation should say what Urbit is, why it is important, and how to use it. Your disparaging remarks do not help to answer these questions. In fact, they do the opposite by antagonizing many readers and unfortunately giving you the appearance of a crank. Therefore, you should remove the remarks.

Knocking down PL theory does not boost Urbit up.

> We may mean different things by "practitioners." I mean programmers. Unfortunately, your vocabulary is not common to programmers and shows no signs of becoming so.

This is flamebait.

> I know it seems strange to introduce new designs in the 21st century - most people assume, rightly of course, that everything worthwhile got figured out in the 20th.

This is a strawman, and a particularly odd thing to say to someone who is also interested in advancing the state of the art.

> I don't think anyone would disagree that PL theory, as a body of work, has produced a set of languages whose penetration in the real world is oddly small both given (a) the investment in these technologies, and (b) the many real advantages of typed higher-order programming.

I'm a PL theorist, and I disagree.

Who cares about your opinion on PL theory, its practitioners, and its textbooks? Is internalizing your hate for TAPL necessary for understanding the semantics of Urbit and related technologies? Why don't you just state succinctly what your ideas are and let them stand on their own merits.

That being said, I have no idea what your ideas are. Your website is unintelligible. Ironically, one of the things PL theory provides is a common vocabulary amongst practioners, which helps us communicate. I shouldn't have to learn a new alphabet (or in your parlance, a set of runes?) to figure out what new ideas you bring to the table. That kind of stuff is just not interesting to me. It's like if you 'rejected' English and wrote the rest of your work in Esperanto.

magit (https://github.com/magit/magit) is unequivocally better than the Git CLI if you use Emacs.

Does this mean the FSF can cross off 'free flash player' from their high priority list? What will happen to Gnash?

The domains were impersonating pinterest. Perhaps the damages factored in lost traffic and damage to the brand.

What about giving away the first version of the application, and charging only for upgrades? This way the user has a chance to integrate the application into their life before you ask them for money. Nobody likes shareware--if you have an explicit time limit then people won't feel comfortable with making that app 'apart of them'.

I think pricing like this could work well for open source applications too. I see people now putting up donation suggestions with the download (see elementaryos for an example[0]). The problem is I am not going to pay for something that I have never used before. However, if I like the application, payment is easy, and the pricing is reasonable, the warm and fuzzy feeling of helping a community project that is apart of my workflow would probably be worth the money.

[0] http://elementaryos.org/

Justification for new logos seem to be given by placing the logo on a grid and using straight lines to show the relationship between the elements. We see it in this blog post, and we saw it for the Yahoo logo.

Serious question: what are these grids and lines supposed to show me? One would assume there would be intrinsic motivation for the lines chosen (such as a relationship to a simple mathematical object/idea). But to me the lines always look chosen to fit the design, instead of the design fitting the lines.

For example: http://www.bing.com/blogs/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserve...

How was this angle chosen for the lines? Why three of them? The lines are parallel, but are they meant to be slightly different distances from each other? If you drew a line in the opposite direction, but aligned it to the slant of the graphic, is that 'correct'?

For those of us without smartphones, they increase the profit margin by tricking users into buying things. All of the software on my gophone is trial only, and it is extremely easy to extend the trial by accident. Why on earth would anyone want to spend $3.99 to have an extra 10 days to 'evaluate' the shitty software on the phone? And WHY would this purchase be recurring?

And no, you can't remove the trials.

I'd love to be proved wrong, but I don't think there are any (at least that aren't just research prototypes)

- The GP did not say anything about the richest of the rich only having children, nor did they say that they were libertarian.

- Calling the GP an asshole and implying that they aren't "terribly intelligent" can only serve to detract from your argument.

EDIT: At least you took out the asshole comment

So what happens when this site gets popular and the owner decides to 'punk' all of the other sites by turning it into a content farm?

edit: or if they get hacked and the same happens

My litmus test for a 'hacker friendly' tool:

Does it have a CLI interface?

I use two monitors with an nVidia card, and it just works. You can configure stuff through nVidia's GUI application, if you want to.

Yes -- see https://github.com/hraberg/shen.clj/blob/master/shen/src/pro...

Upper case symbols are variables, as in Prolog. The others are literal matches.

Mapping caps lock->ctrl destroyed my pinkies on Emacs, just saying... thumb modifier keys is the way to go IMO

I have the foot pedals. I never use them, because it is so convenient and comfortable to hit Ctrl/Alt with my thumbs. Maybe there are better keys to assign to my foot pedals, but I haven't really thought about it much.

I really can't think of anything good to say about this keyboard. I've used keyboards like this, and I've damaged my body with them. You know what matters a lot more than a backlight? Ergonomic design. Get a Kinesis Advantage instead.

I agree on principle, but there are some activities for which Tor isn't an option (for example, sending large files). An offshore VPN that doesn't store logs (or even tunneling through several VPN providers/countries) can provide good enough anonymity for the task at hand.

A lot of people have asked me for pointers to write-ups, but there don't appear to be any comprehensive ones on the Internet. When I setup all of this, I had to learn from piecing together information from various tutorials and reading manuals and what not.

I have been meaning for a while now to make a mini distribution of Linux that works well for VPN usage out of the box. If people are interested in this sort of thing, maybe I could try to make time for it.

If you are using a VM like I suggested, you can do this inside the VM instead of messing around with Windows. See this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6285837

Unfortunately I don't use Windows, so I don't know how to firewall from it.

On Linux, I use a shell script like this:

   servers=( ip1 ip2 ip3 ... )
   
   # Can fwd over internal network
   iptables -A OUTPUT -s 192.168.0.0/16 -d 192.168.0.0/16 -j ACCEPT

   # Can fwd over loopback
   iptables -A OUTPUT -o lo -j ACCEPT

   # Can fwd over the tunnel
   iptables -A OUTPUT -o tun0 -j ACCEPT

   # Can send packets to VPN
   for server in "${servers[@]}"; do
      echo "Installing rules for $server"
      iptables -A OUTPUT -d $server -j ACCEPT
   done

   # Otherwise drop
   iptables -A OUTPUT -j DROP

Use it with a package like iptables-persistent so you don't have to run this every time at boot.

On Debian 6, the default behavior is to do this. I remember searching high and low at the time to change the behavior, and couldn't figure out how.

If you Google around, a lot of other people seem to have trouble with this as well--there are a lot of tutorials for how to setup iptables to block OpenVPN fallback on dd-wrt and Tomato, for example.

I'd love to be proved wrong though!

I use a VPN for much of my private traffic. Here is where I differ from the article's recommendations, and why:

- I don't recommend rolling your own on EC2: pick a VPN with a good reputation and a policy of not retaining logs. See: http://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-that-take-your-anonymit... (you don't have to use torrents to need a VPN, btw!!)

- I recommend using a Debian VM w/ OpenVPN for your private traffic. That way, 'am I using my VM?' is a quick test for whether your traffic is private or public.

- I can't stress this enough: _be sure to firewall your VM from any traffic not to your VPN provider_. If OpenVPN drops its connection, it will fallback to sending packets normally! At least if you firewall, your connection will just die, instead of potentially sending private traffic in the clear. The article doesn't mention this, and it should.

- Be sure not to log in to your usual services on your VPN, or there is a possibility that someone can connect your real traffic and your VPN traffic. I use LastPass with random passwords to manage all of my accounts, so I solve this problem by simply not installing LastPass on my VM, which makes logging in a very deliberate action on my VM.