Hacker News Reader

hugboxon Silk Road Founder Says Bitcoin Booms And Busts Won't Kill His Black Market

"the fact remains that you would probably be finanically better of by investing that money rather than trading it for drugs..."

No shit?

Truly you are one of the great minds of our times.

hugboxon Digg banned from Google?

And nothing of value was lost.

hugboxon Getting into the tech scene when you have no skills

No skills? No problem.

If you flunk the interview, try challenging the interviewer to a dance-off. If you win, the job is yours!

hugboxon This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

You want to talk disruptive? Let's talk about the other end of the digestive tract. Some people spend inordinate amounts of time pooping. I claim that they are flushing away their valuable productivity. In our culture, eating at your desk is considered acceptable, but due to social biases, pooping at your desk is not yet accepted. Let's hope that Google tackles this problem soon. Until then, the only advice I can give you is to avoid beans and dairy products.

hugboxon The morality of sperm donation

So you mean that I could acheive Genghis Khan-like levels of genetic patrimony just by becoming a sperm donor?

It's tempting. I'm not sure I could endure the social stigma of being a sperm donor, though.

hugboxon Terms of Service; Didn't Read

Judges typically strike down EULAs with provisions like that, at least in the states. So really, if they try that, it just makes it easier to ignore the EULA.

hugboxon Decoding the Deadpool: How to Tell When a Startup Has Failed

I went further still, and imagined a pitcher full of beer and a dozen topless cheerleaders.

I didn't read the article, though.

hugboxon Pros and cons of releasing Perl 5.20.0 as Perl 7.0.0

Careful there. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, is a born-again Christian who believes that Jesus will return to Earth. This event will be called the "second coming," or "parousia."

Presumably Perl 6 will be ready by that point. If you get "left behind," you can always while away the time writing Perl 6 programs, whilst waiting for the Seven Angels of the Bowl to pour out their plagues upon the Earth.

P.S. The name of the Perl language is a biblical reference to the "pearl of great price" from Matthew 13:46. Srsly.

hugboxon C++11 and The Long-Term Viability Of GCC Questioned

Well, your post definitely was "fierce, yet wrong." So mission accomplished, I guess!

hugboxon What we discovered about InstallMonetizer

The Windows app culture has really deteriorated. Even Oracle has started distributing malware with their Java installer. Applications that phone home, reboot the computer at random times, and modify system settings are not only tolerated, but expected.

It's hard to imagine a real-world parallel to this kind of behavior. It would be like if rape was a socially acceptable form of greeting.

In the future, I think all of this will give Microsoft a perfect excuse to shut down the independent application developers and force everything through their app store. Companies that develop for Windows better start thinking hard about their relationship with Microsoft.

hugboxon JSTOR torrent

JSTOR may be a non-profit, but they earn a lot of money and they're not shy about spending it.

http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your...

Of course earning money by itself isn't an evil thing. The bigger problem is that JSTOR is part of a system which many people have come to feel is unjust-- a system whereby the public finances research which is then put behind paywalls.

It isn't just wild-eyed hackers who feel this way. Even Donalth Knuth has commented about how little value the academic journals really provide, and how much they charge.

It is the public who pays for this system. We pay because our taxes and tuition money subsidize the research that we're not allowed to see. The government should require publicly funded research to be made available on a site like arxiv.org. It is those guys who are really in favor of open access, not JSTOR. Throwing us a bone-- some 80-year old manuscripts which are in the public domain anyway-- shouldn't obscure that.

hugboxon Japan's ninjas heading for extinction

On the plus side, pirates are still going strong.