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enginnron On Being Smart (2009) [pdf]

I remember the painful feeling in college of solving problems in reverse. That is to say; when presented with a problem, there are no intrinsic reasons propelling me to solve it with any meaningful gusto. Only extrinsic motivators like getting a paper in on time, or adding another small jigsaw piece to the body of knowledge I must somehow cache in my head until exam time.

An utter waste of time and not relevant to the real world. That is why I dropped out.

enginnron Gmail, We Need to Talk

Schema has the same problems as Microformats where adoption only takes off if the market demands it, or it gains enough momentum that people can't imagine webapps without them.

There are countless other standards this article overlooks which have been implemented very well in recent years in Gmail, so why does it lambast the lack of Schema?

enginnron What is Ethereum? – A high level intro to the problems Ethereum can fix

SO many problems are being solved on the same plane they were created with. What I love about Ethereum is the direct action approach where rather than simply request that those in power get their act together in any meaningful way, we just create the damn thing ourselves and proceed as normal...

enginnron Ask HN: Is Skype safe to use?

Well one way to test is to put honey links into an IM session and see which ones are pinged. Invariably they will be pinged from a co-lo situated in a remote U.S data center.

enginnron Ask HN: Do you stalk Facebook profiles?

Similar to: http://bioischanged.com/privacy but for Facebook :)

Slightly tangential, but what's to stop me flipping one bit in a JPEG and uploading it again. JPEGs are renowned for being fault tolerant to even the most aggressive mangling of the file structure, as long as the header is intact it will preserve some integrity

enginnron Cuckoo hashing

Aside from addressing potential collisions, what other use cases does this strategy have?

enginnron Ask HN: How do I stop comparing myself to others?

I would liken the whole process of 'success' as nothing more than the acquisition of accolades. If you peek beyond the veil of most institutions (financial or otherwise), there is the fabled trophy you must acquire at the end. This trophy can be anything, and the institutions are always careful to suppose "It's not about the trophy", but secretly it is.

Money is a trophy. Marriage is a trophy. Dissolve the trophy and focus on what you need instead of what you want. Most of what a person needs is fairly rudimentary and easy to attain. Be careful with validation (a basic need) because it's usually sought in the most egregious places

enginnron Twitter Sees 6% Increase in “Like” Activity After First Week of Hearts

I've yet to see heart/fave/star/like buttons being context aware. I've heard anything from people using these mechanisms to read articles later, to using them as attention grabbing devices used to steal eyeball hours from distracted phone users, and everything in between. "Like" activity is a misleading metric and could mean anything because it's stripped and devoid of context.

enginnron The Problem with GitHub Pages

> I understand Pages has nothing to do with source control

Slightly disagree. What I always loved about pages is every commit is on record and auditable by the public. This makes coders accountable for their actions if they introduce malicious code to their users. Take for example:

`something.js` being served from RawGit (https://rawgit.com/). In all likelihood the asset can be trusted because we can inspect the repo where the asset resides and audit it.

The same cannot be said for private GH accounts, because it's impossible to view the source. People actually pay Github money to conceal their source code. Gasp

enginnron An open letter on side projects

Side projects start to bit rot if the creator stops caring for them with a full heart. Like anything, if you're not committed to something, it becomes a second class citizen, and in the worst case simply becomes abandoned.

The only person who can sustain a side project long into the future is the creator. Not the people who support it via donations, or buy an item...You and only you are responsible for its shelf-life.

enginnron Million Dollar Shack

For those who are not clicking, this site just houses a YT video located here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBjXUBMkkE8

> Our family has been priced out! Has the Bay Area gone crazy? Real estate prices have doubled in the last few years, a tent in the backyard can rent for $900/month, foreign investors are driving up prices, evictions and rent hikes are everywhere, people are commuting longer than ever, the middle class is disappearing, empty investment homes are everywhere, and locals are leaving in record numbers.

enginnron Ask HN: What project are you most proud of?

Of course it's worth mentioning :) Even small projects are worth posting, like this recent one by Holman: https://github.com/tholman/github-corners

enginnron Ask HN: What project are you most proud of?

These are my babies currently:

http://www.jque.re/

https://www.unicod.es/

I could keep making these, but it's do or die with side projects. You either commit to them with a full heart, or they begin to bit rot.

Currently I just maintain the projects and promote them the only way I know how (Hackernews and Twitter). There are other outlets for promoting your projects, but they tend to be very niched and specific.

You can see the Twitter accounts here:

https://twitter.com/unicodetools

https://twitter.com/jQueryRepo

enginnron Ask HN: Is 30 too old to be a digital native?

Those who ran BBS systems wax nostalgic about being early adopters of new communication methods and systems. It's the same with the digi-native set; waxing nostalgic about Geocities and Angelfire homepages when they could be building something to replace them (Like what the Neocities and Snapchat crowd are doing). It's the wrong question. 'Too' in a question puts the onus to answer with an extreme viewpoint

enginnron Ask HN: How do you browse Twitter?

If you don't like lists, then put in the necessary hard work to curate them, and you only need to do this once to enjoy Twitter

There are so many ways to do it, and there is no 'one way' to browse Twitter, apart from deliberately being serendipitous.

Here's some lists I made:

https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/true-hackers

https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/twitter-dna

https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/diamonds-in-the-rough

https://twitter.com/enginnr/lists/availability

enginnron Universal DNSSEC: Secure DNS for Every Domain

DNS is often the weakest link in the chain and well worth hardening if you're doing proactive sec. Combined with DNSCrypt it can be a pretty robust setup. My only problem with DNS hardening is zero-knowledge problems. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof It is possible to encrypt DNS queries, but tricky for end points to deny knowledge of having requested it, and so we have zero-knowledge proof issues.

enginnron Is Dublin Airport tracking passenger phones without their permission?

This sounds like a judgement on those who carry phones and don't think too hard about this but then call out those who go phoneless because they (the phone-equipped) don't understand the hardware. This is not a judgement. It's simply challenging the false narratives and assumptions citizens have when they carry a phone around: DO you feel empowered or enfeebled (weakened) by a phone?

enginnron Is Dublin Airport tracking passenger phones without their permission?

Funny that this article comes out just as I wrote this:

http://blog.higg.so/2015/11/03/look-at-my-invention/

> I just want to bust open the false narratives surrounding phone culture and speak about the long term implications of having a computer in your pocket at all times that talks to the public Internet.

It's as if the article was designed for the likes of what I wrote in my article. The Big Brother narrative is a false narrative.

> Big Brother gets the brunt of the blame, and not the citizen. In the worst case, the citizen identifies with the aggressor and feeds the narrative: "I am not in control, Big Brother is. I willingly submit my data to third parties". But, you are in control, and you should never forget that. Perhaps you need to work hard at being in control, or challenge more assumptions about that, but in a free and democratic society, we are in control (and empowered) more than we have ever been.

enginnron Amazon Should Implement 2-Factor Authentication for It's Non-AWS Customers

They are a bit late to the game on this one, and are leaving millions of customers at risk. Thankfully they use TLS for their checkout, but their store is quite well known for being cleartexted. See: http://smerity.com/articles/2015/amazon_information_leakage....

enginnron Encryption ransomware threatens Linux users

"Once launched with administrator privileges" which is very difficult unless the soft goes out of its way to ask, and most open source software doesn't ask

enginnron Fermented foods probably deserve their healthful reputation

I'm still amazed at how the marketers are only starting to realize the health benefits of fermentation. 'Actimel' for example is a yogurt drink they sell in my parts, and the ADs for it always overplay the importance of it, as if probiotics are some life giving elixir.

What they overlook is that probiotics are indeed that: 'pro' in that they prevent rather than treat. Do I eat yogurt because I like it? Probably not, but I feel wonderful 2-3 hours after eating it, and can almost feel the PH in my gut getting more balanced.

enginnron Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

One click encryption is one click too many

enginnron Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client

A lot of baseline configs can be implemented to setup opportunistic crypto, for what Ben Brookes calls 'starbucks hacker bob' https://brooksreview.net/2013/06/encrypting-stuff-against-st...