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jff

5,646 karma · joined January 31, 2009

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jff··on Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5
Yeah, my phone died recently and I'm really considering replacing it with this. I can hold out on an old spare iPhone until then, I think.
jff··on Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise
Yeah, it's pretty fucked up when an internet lynch mob gets you fired because you said "dongle" or something similarly bad.
jff··on Mt. Gox Bankruptcy Wasn't Really a Bust
Simply observing cryptocurrency users and exchanges in action does enough to delegitimize them, I'd think.
jff··on Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir
I found that line quite interesting. The wording seems to imply that someone is going to read this tablet to Ea-nasir, and possibly that someone wrote the tablet on behalf of Nanni. In an age before near-universal literacy (i.e. most of human history), that makes sense: Ea-nasir would have summoned someone to read out the tablet. Given Ea-nasir's position as a presumably well-off trader, he may have simply had a scribe on-staff to handle his correspondence--an early instance of the modern PR hack?
jff··on The Magic of Harry Potter Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You
The Pokemon game was itself just a slightly modified version of Ingress!
jff··on Social Media Has Failed Its Self-Driving Test
I typically only watch Cartoon Network when I'm traveling for work and I only wish it was King of the Hill. They use Family Guy as a firewall and it's fucking interminable, I keep flipping back hoping it's come around to Robot Chicken or whatever but it's always more goddamn Family Guy.
jff··on Social Media Has Failed Its Self-Driving Test
Check your local over-the-air stations; PBS has a separate digital channel for children's programming here, so it's always available.
jff··on Does anyone remember websites?
> let's download his file list to see what kind of porn they like.

this was the experience at my college, anyway

jff··on Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s Arizona experiment in urban planning
It's funny they pejoratively described the housing developments as beige, when all the pictures of Arcosanti are... beige concrete.
jff··on Amazon and Ebay Opened Pandora's Box of Chinese Counterfeits
> The worst part is that this kind of stuff is ammunition for the Trump supporter view that Amazon is doing harm to the American economy by promoting goods manufactured by cheap labor abroad.

So you're saying the worst part isn't that people are getting ripped off with fire-hazard chargers and lead-paint baby toys, but that a Trump supporter might be able to make a point because of it?

jff··on Amazon and Ebay Opened Pandora's Box of Chinese Counterfeits
I think you'd be surprised how easily Grandma cottons to the idea of cheap knock-off crap, and that by typing a code from her multivitamin bottle into product-validation.gov, she can verify it's not full of heavy metals.
jff··on The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)
Well that's embarrassing, I've been reading his name online for years and always read it as Gerrard. I'll just blame small fonts, that's it.
jff··on The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)
Andrew Gerrard worked on both and apparently didn't think Camlistore was the right basis for what they wanted in Upspin. But I'm sure you, who I'm not sure has used either project, know better than Andrew and Brad and Rob.
jff··on The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)
Brad Fritzpatrick's response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700968
jff··on American Nazis at Madison Square Garden, 1939
> Apparently the Nation of Islam was in favor of racial separation, and had a highly-placed anti-semite

I'd be pretty surprised if the Nation of Islam had only one highly-placed anti-semite.

jff··on Roman Empire per capita GDP shows the Romans were poorer than any 2015 country
> You have no more need to use a mobile phone today than the Romans did.

Don't tell that to the 'digital divide' people

jff··on Jewelbots – A Friendship Bracelet You Can Code
Yeah, with a different 'face', I think boys would think this was cool too. I know 9 year old me though 'secret codes' were very cool, so I'd have probably been into it.
jff··on Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says
If you think it's just western civilization, you haven't spent much time looking at non-western civilizations.
jff··on Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says
When I was in school (90s and early 2000s), it would have been considered extremely embarrassing to have your mom drop you off and pick you up every day. I think it was about the time I graduated that things began to shift. When I was in elementary school, the was nowhere for parents to pull up curb-side and get the kids. By the time I finished high school, the elementary school had blocked off half the curb-side into a separate loop for parents to pick up/drop off kids.
jff··on Microsoft acquires AltspaceVR
Nope! My Internet connection is less than perfect but better than the national average.

The local sandbox is still laggy crap on a recently-built i7 desktop with a 1-year-old NVidia card, though.

jff··on Microsoft acquires AltspaceVR
I've played with High Fidelity. It constantly disconnects, and it can take over a minute for an area to load enough to provide basics like 'a floor to walk on' or 'the shapes of buildings'. Second Life ran a hell of a lot better on my crappy old computer on a crappy Internet connection; the graphical improvements of High Fidelity are scarcely better and certainly don't justify the poor performance.

Oh, and it's already full of furries, so you might as well torch it and start again.

jff··on Gun Deaths in America (Data Visualization)
Well, it's been flagged. Didn't match what everyone on HN already knows to be true, so it's gotta go.
jff··on Musk revises Mars ambitions
They presumably call it the Big Fucking Rocket at SpaceX.

But if Musk says "Big Fucking Rocket" on stage, TV news can't quote him. That's counterproductive to his goals, but using a heavy implication both allows him a broader audience and lets every adult know they've got the 'cheeky' name for it.

jff··on King County rolls out Miranda rights tailored for young people
> Ummm....WA actually, as in Seattle.

Give it a few more years...

jff··on Breach at Sonic Drive-In May Have Impacted Millions of Credit, Debit Cards
You're getting downvoted because everyone hates when Bitcoin idiots force it into every damn conversation.
jff··on Jim Rogers: The worst crash of our lifetime is coming
Better get a real estate license while you're at it, since that's where the extracted money ends up.
jff··on Jim Rogers: The worst crash of our lifetime is coming
Given that the current practice for anyone with money in China is to get that money out of China and converted to foreign currency as quickly as possible... I'd counsel against it.
jff··on When Citi Bikes Are Faster Than Taxis in New York City
> Just because you can do it, doesn't mean it has anywhere the same likelihood of happening. Not even sure what argument you're trying to make.

Ok, go stand in the street and I'll hit you with a bicycle. I can come to the emergency room later and you can tell me how it didn't hurt that much.

> This is why concealed guns are banned in most states

False, by the way. They just require a license... like a car.

jff··on Show HN: MMOsteroids: JS, Go, and Webrtc
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPilot

I'll give it a shot when I get home from work!

jff··on Go: Ten years and climbing
We actually do this at work; our repository is a full GOPATH layout with subdirectories for src/, test/, doc/, etc. We vendor our dependencies. To build, we have scripts at the top-level that compile all of our components (we ship a whole suite of tools in a single repo), run go vet, run tests, etc. The user never needs to set GOPATH. It's not a perfect system, but we've been using it for 3+ years without too much trouble.
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