Hacker News Reader

> In general, I'd prefer not to interfere in private contracts...

One could argue that such cookie-cutter contracts are no longer "private" if they're presented to the employee as the industry's standard operating procedure. I don't know if such an argument would hold legal weight, but there's something wrong with an agreement where it's expected that only one side gets to decide what's being agreed to.

dmoneyon Letter From A Psychopath

Think of it this way: You use your favorite social site, interact with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or family members through it, and to a large extent it determines what interactions happen between you. Somebody saw how people previously interacted and how (or where) they wanted them to interact, came up with this system, and promoted it until it became popular. Things we've taken for granted at various points in history--moral systems, religions, monarchy, democracy, the nuclear family--were invented in the same way, by people who saw the system as an object to be manipulated, rather than reality itself.

dmoneyon Letter From A Psychopath

"Psychopath" could just be the degenerate form of the personality type that evolved to lead those groups. In other words, a leader is a psychopath with better impulse control.

dmoneyon There’s a 1,200-year-old Phone in the Smithsonian Collections

Quipus are interesting: using knots in string to encode columns of decimal numbers. They also had a device (made of beans and slots) for doing calculation (similar to how an abacus works I guess). The Incas had spreadsheets.

dmoneyon How to guarantee continued operation for an SaaS startup

I applaud your intent. But to play devil's advocate, what's to stop an acquiring company from shutting the service down the day after the expiration?

dmoneyon ZeroMQ is just sockets

> What do I search for when I remember "empty set MQ"?

https://www.google.com/search?q=0mq

dmoneyon Row over US mobile phone 'cockroach backpack' app

> how would a human attached to one of these perceive the foreign control?

"I have to turn left because it's my job."

dmoneyon Try Hy

To quote Dark Helmet, "What the hell am I looking at?"

dmoneyon Why I'm Planning to Kill W3Schools

> I own http://www.w3fool.com/, the one with missing 's' and you don't want know where it redirects to.

I did want to know where it redirects to. I was happy that my curiosity didn't lead me to goatse or the like.

dmoneyon What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? (2011)

  // Maybe these two lines will crush everything.

Whatever it referred to was no longer there.

dmoneyon An Office Made of Software

> In distributed shops request must flow through a gatekeeper, such as project manager,

Why not a web forum or a chatroom? Some chat software even allows screen sharing.

dmoneyon The Bay Bridge is gradually disappearing from Google Maps

This was Google's optimism test. You passed!

dmoneyon Learning how to think

Care to elaborate?

dmoneyon What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate

> max rio

Do you mean ROI?

dmoneyon [dead]

Maybe they had to take them down temporarily to install new PRISM boxes.

dmoneyon [dead]

It looks like it's up to me. Are you sure you're not just banned?

dmoneyon Tumblr responds to complaints about censorship

From a friend: "They seem to have rescinded a lot of it, albeit with a shitty nonapology blaming users: <link to this post>. Some of the tags in question could never [have] brought up porn, like 'depression'. I call at least partial bullshit."

dmoneyon “What Is That Box?” – When The NSA Shows Up At Your Internet Company

Then you're charged with obstruction of justice or something.

dmoneyon Do Things that Don't Scale

It's long, but at least PG gets to the point. So many articles have a title like "Why x is y", and then start like "The cool evening air smelled of honeysuckle in <place that, initially, would seem to have nothing to do with x or y>", and are multiple pages long even though having a web page be more than one page long makes no sense.

dmoneyon Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice

> Isn't it also plausible that after the first programmer hire (by non-programmer), any subsequent hiring will at least involve this first programmer?

Definitely. You'll generally have to convince a programmer of your competence. Once you've passed that test, you may also have to negotiate with a non-programmer for your salary. At that second stage is when you want to be able to convince someone of your ability to multiply dollars.

dmoneyon The interspecies internet? An idea in progress [video]

This more about non-human intelligence than about IPv6. I was hoping Cerf would go into why IPv6 is better for the "internet of things" or "interspecies Internet" than IPv4. Also, maybe an explanation in layman's terms why IPv4 won't scale further, even with the workarounds that are currently in use.

dmoneyon Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

I can't seem to find DuckDuckGo's intro to Perl.

dmoneyon Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

It was an interview on a Perl blog, so the target audience is people already enthusiastic about Perl.

Here's why I think learning Perl is worth it: a lot of programmers write stuff in it. It won't make you know other languages any less.

dmoneyon Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice

So the business wouldn't make sense (but just be less profitable) if you had to pay the list price?

dmoneyon Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice

It's like entropy: the emotional bullshit in a closed system only increases. Until one person leaves, or you bleed off the pressure outside it.

With negotiation, my understanding is that the real negotiation starts weeks beforehand, because the game is about getting an information advantage, enough to make the other side's shady tactics irrelevant. All the nonverbal skills are just used to hide the math layer of the exchange. Assuming you can't dump the shady opponent for one who thinks win-win, but even then having more information can't hurt.

dmoneyon Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice

I've recently found myself in a leadership role as well, and I don't think it has to do with whether people are business types or not. Humility is necessary to fit in with peers and to get along with superiors. Confidence is necessary to influence people (be they peers, superiors, or subordinates), and you can't manage without influence.

A piece of advice I've seen in a couple places is to focus on service, whether that's service to your organization or to the team you manage, or the customer. The idea is that it takes your focus off you and your communication skills, and lets you argue from what the company or team needs.

dmoneyon Python-Based Tools for the Space Science Community

It's more likely that enough people who happened to be scientists enjoyed programming in python enough to implement scientific tools in it. (IMHO as a non-scientist)

dmoneyon A list of front end development resources

I think lists of back-end development resources in specific languages could still be useful (and probably already exist in myriad forms).

dmoneyon U.S. asks Hong Kong to extradite Snowden

"A senior administration official also not authorized to speak publicly told USA TODAY that the United States is asking Hong Kong to act quickly on the request or risk complicating relations between the two for failing to hand Snowden over as required by international law. "

So it's OK for senior administration officials to leak information without authorization, about trying to prosecute someone for leaking information without authorization...