iamgilesbowkett

As a busy person who finds your ideas interesting but has no time for riddles, I would really appreciate it if you could at least drop some hints here.

Y Combinator is right to be mad, but wrong about the target.

Smith also attempted to expand the DMCA in 2006, again pushing for new wiretapping privileges for police. It's a question whether this guy is trying harder to destroy the Internet or the Fourth Amendment, but imagine how awesome it would be if that was just an academic question about a guy who didn't have a career in politics any more.

The bad news is he's been in office since 1987 and has won his most recent elections with crushing victories. The good news is he's a Republican, and SOPA is wildly anti-business; the other bad news is it may be tough to make that stick, because it's only obvious to the technologically literate. Fortunately, he also he has motivated, successful enemies on his home turf; his district includes parts of staunchly Democratic Austin, and that's because the Supreme Court ordered his Congressional district redrawn after the League of United Latin American Citizens won a gerrymandering lawsuit against then-governor Rick Perry. This probably also means he's extremely corrupt, but it's hard to imagine SOPA coming from anybody who wasn't extremely corrupt in the first place.

Let's all form a political action committee called the Coalition To Defend The Internet From Ignorant, Corrupt Assholes and get contributions from every millionaire in Silicon Valley so we can deep-six this guy so completely "Lamar Smith" becomes a synonym for "no career in politics ever again."

We can use a two-pronged attack; fund his Republican competitors, and find ways that they can show how pro-Hollywood and anti-business SOPA was (Republicans hate Hollywood), while at the same time also funding his liberal opponents. A Democratic victory in Smith's district is very unlikely, but his Democratic opponents probably hate him enough to make some noise, and I think it's extremely likely that Texas is full of younger Republicans who would love to take his place. There's got to be at least one who understands the Internet.

If you want context, I also posted nearly exactly this same thing on my blog, plus a bunch of links (mostly to Wikipedia) providing factual backdrop:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2012/01/lets-end-lamar-smit...

I'll add my voice to the "take a break" chorus. On the marketing problem -- people seeing you as a code monkey -- you could look for product development or project management jobs, and say "oh yes btw also I can code," but you're better off filing that away for future reference and travelling for a while. It's good to have a life!

it's legal because PayPal is technically not a bank.

The value of deliberate practice applies everywhere. I wouldn't want to do this particular exercise because I did a little bit of this in 2005, and the shipping part of it was kind of tiresome and exhausting, but you can do the same thing with World of Warcraft -- practice the key skill of buying low and selling high over and over again.

I actually did that with WoW, but I skipped the whole buy low/sell high thing after discovering a cunning hack which made me ridiculously wealthy until I got to around level 50 and had to start buying low and selling high like everybody else. The big lesson I got from that: finding a smarter profit-making system than average will give you wildly above-average earnings. I suppose the little lesson is that hacks are context-sensitive.

Anyway, the point is not which WoW method makes the most gold, or whether eBay profit margins do or do not offer opportunities, the point is to use deliberate practice to sharpen your money-making skills the same way you would use it to learn scales on an instrument. I did this in 2010, with a goal to launch a new mini-business every month. Didn't hit the goal, but learned a lot, and some of the little businesses I did launch worked out quite well.

I definitely recommend following this advice. Making money is a skill like any other. There's substantial research on how to attain high levels of skill. Leverage that research to develop the skills you want. Could not be more sensible.

I disagree, but I'm not going to dis anybody for being too generous, too trusting, or too fair, and I appreciate your attempt to smooth the waters.

Additionally, my most persuasive evidence is not my header graphic, it's just an extremely specific example. My most persuasive evidence is that every single aspect of his app is a direct copy of mine.

The app is not at all dead, and I use it on the iPad far more often than on my computers. If you're curious enough to search my site for Hacker Newspaper, you must have also noticed the numerous minor tweaks and updates to Hacker Newspaper I've made since that post where I briefly considered dropping it over six months ago.

If this is the case, why did you not use a gothic, New York Times-y font for your header graphic, such as is much, much more typical for newspapers than the font you did use? Why does your header graphic appear to be nearly identical to mine? Why is your functionality nearly identical to mine? It's just a massive coincidence?

Newspaper grid layout, downloads the text of the stories, he even used a very similar font in his header graphic to the font in my header graphic -- and the font in my header graphic was a whimsical indulgence because it doesn't really look like a newspaper header font at all. The New York Times and many, many other papers use heavy gothic fonts for their names, and I think that if he got the design from there, he would have done the same.

It's got the same name, dude, and the same feature set.

A) is http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com in there?

B) I used to curate a pretty large list of Hacker News mashups that you might get some mileage out of: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/11/hacker-news-mashups...

This is a blatant copy of my web app Hacker Newspaper.

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2011/11/imitation-is-sincer...