jrcii

Why would I pay hundreds of dollars to work in a noisy public environment when I could do that for free at a coffee shop? Presumably you're paying for the social aspect of like minds or something. As a freelance IT consultant in NYC the value proposition felt very weak. If someone had a $400/mo private micro office with a desk and a window I'd be on that like white on rice.

Drive to a state you don't live in, boot Tails from CD-ROM, connect to a hacked VPN account through someone else's wifi, then run everything through Tor. Then make sure you're using default browser configuration and resolution as not to be foiled a la panopticlick. Even then I wouldn't be so sure you're anonymous.

> nobody ever has to go to the bathroom

My favorite movie of all time is called Stranger Than Paradise by a director named Jim Jarmusch, in part because of its original treatment of these issues. The film is peppered with subtle little moments where, for example, a kitchen cabinet doesn't close correctly, or someone doesn't hear the person they're talking to correctly and asks them to repeat themselves.

To second this, I've had three or four conversations with Amazon warehouse employees and all told me it was a terrible experience. One worked at a major distribution point in Pennsylvania and explained that in addition to being compelled to essentially run back and forth constantly to pick items, they refused to provide air conditioning in the middle of summer.

I was watching this talk on Google's SRE and the speaker explains in depth why the answer at Google is indeed no https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4vMcD7zKM0 She explains the emphasis is more on learning from the problem and post-mortem than pointing fingers.

For me it was that I wanted full-screen Terminal without a scrollbar. Yet I like having a scrollbar in my browser (which indicates page length for instance) and the scroll visibility is a systemwide setting in OS X. (Actually there is a plist-app-specific version of the setting which Terminal.app erroneously ignores and Apple refuses to fix it). With iTerm2 I get a scrollbar in my browser, and a clean black full screen background in my terminal.

Hi Alan, sorry if this is a little off topic, but since we have you here I was wondering if you have any thoughts or opinions on the recently popular discussion surrounding object-oriented versus functional programming paradigms?

Every time I see the word grok I grok in my mouth a little.

Great! NetBSD fixed this "logo" http://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg Now all we need is for R to get rid of this monstrosity http://www.jeveuxetredatascientist.fr/wp-content/uploads/201... and we'll be on a roll.

Any time in the last 10 years I setup an independent email server it had horrible deliverability rates. I wonder how they worked around that. Getting your server whitelisted with all the major providers is a major hassle.

I worry that maybe there's a bubble in Silicon Valley created by all these startups being large customers of each other so it's just a bunch of VC money going around in circles.

This looks fantastic! Great work. I have some feedback too: Right now it groups all of my CLI programs into iTerm2. I would be very interested in tracking the actual programs. vim time means I'm coding, irssi (IRC), newsbeauter, cmus (music), or sl probably means I'm goofing off.

There's a Mac app called Dash that's good for this purpose as well.

A variation on what you're describing was actually my very first experience with computers. The programs that came with my Apple IIc when I was about 8 years old weren't very interesting to me so I started poking around and playing with BASIC code.

It's kind of funny to think that at the time the sole purpose of my computer was to help me write and run programs I wrote myself.

On iOS I use an app called Weblock. Installs through the App Store (no jailbreak). It does require some trust because it proxies your DNS.

You should consider installing an ad blocker like uBlock Origin. I haven't seen ads on Google Search for years.

> The rationale is a good read.

Hickey's design choices consistently appear to be exceptionally well reasoned.

>Google's provisioning and management systems are so far the best

So far my experience with that is trying to get an Active Directory server to sync with Google Apps for Education, for which they provide this tool:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/6027781?hl=en

It's beyond buggy, it's plain broken. It clearly hasn't been touched in years. I'm going to have to write the glue code myself.

Yep true story.

I was on a flight to Goma which had in years past experienced some dangerous rebel activity. I studied the region intensely before going there and understood that the situation was currently safe, but sitting next to a local on the plane decided to ask him. He didn't understand my pronunciation of the rebel leader and group names (for example, Ntaganda) so I wrote them in my notebook, upon seeing them in writing he immediately understood and assured me they were not active.

Later in the conversation we were discussing Hawaii, which he didn't know by name. I drew a small map of it in my notebook to see if he understood by the look of the islands since they're pretty distinctive.

After landing I'm checking in and the customs guy asks for some baloney authorization papers that no one at the embassy or capital ever mentioned. When I said I didn't have them he said, "Give me $200." I said no, he said it again. I explained I was on a strict budget and even if I did have the money I wouldn't give it to him. He told his goons to search all my bags.

One of his guys opens my notebook full of the names of all the rebel generals and groups in Congo accompanied by map sketches. Mind you these people have no concept of Wikipedia. I was transferred around after being detained. The first question was, "What is your relationship with General Nkunda?" (an infamous war criminal). Of course the more innocent I made myself appear, the more honed my spycraft appeared to be.

After the initial interrogation I was forced into the back of an SUV with giant people on both sides of me and they refused to say where we were going. I was sure I was going to be shot and put in a ditch or a prison. After asking 100x they said we were going to the airport. We came to a fork in the road, the airport was right, they turned left. That was one of the scariest moments in my life.

Fortunately we were going to the airport, but to my hotel first to get my things, I was deported back to the capital for a second round of interrogation. After that I got a professional translator who was probably one of a dozen people who spoke English well enough in the country to understand what happened. The Minister of the Interior apologized and offered to give me armed escorts to off-limit areas in apology, which I refused and can only imagine was another attempt to see if I was a spy.

TL;DR I'm owed a favor by Democratic Republic of Congo's Minister of the Interior. And now I remember the whole incident was 20 hours, not 12.

I was detained and interrogated for 12 hours in Congo, accused of being a spy for the CIA. The whole thing was very scary.

I really object to the language of "dark" to describe privacy or anonymity, which are thereby painted with a sinister connotation.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988... "Around 150 Chinese workers at Foxconn, the world's largest electronics manufacturer, threatened to commit suicide by leaping from their factory roof in protest at their working conditions." I'll let the weakness of the argument, "That's normal" speak for itself.

I'm sorry, because their horrible working conditions faded from the headlines, when Foxconn gets mentioned we're not allowed to criticize them now? To me the most notable detail about any deal with Foxconn is the working conditions implicit in carrying it out. Please tell me more about what to think, I wouldn't want to break step with the Hacker News hive mind.

1. The evolutionary advantage of cooperative problem solving is what gives rise to the human tendency to self-identify with mutually exclusive groups of every scope including political territories, religions, sports teams, etc. and in turn some of the largest aspects of human culture. 2. Our concept of knowledge, which is based on prediction from past observations, is rooted in the design of our nervous system. Intuition is the product of micro-observations and predictions calculated with this system. 3. Organic life responds to its environment using a closed-loop feedback system that can be modeled as a series of steps (Sense, Organize, Analyze, Decide, Execute) where the Execute step changes the input in the Sense step.

"Nick reminds me of writers like Jared Diamond, people who develop a grand theory that explains a lot about the world. He is one of those original thinkers who makes you say: More people should know about this guy’s work."

I have original ideas that explain a lot about the world but no one cares because Bill Gates didn't tell everyone to listen to me.

* Can anyone remind me why we care what Bill Gates thinks about biology? If this was a post about the software business that would be one thing. It's so ubiquitous I don't necessarily expect anyone to understand my point, but this strikes me as a form of worshiping money. Because he has money we care what he thinks about anything and everything. It's a more covert form of the absurdity in reading and caring about what some celebrity likes to eat for breakfast.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini... "In July 2007, the Times Union of Albany, New York reported that TSA screeners at Albany International Airport failed multiple covert security tests conducted by the TSA. Among them was a failure to detect a fake bomb."

A different animal (no pun intended) but this project also provides the ability to render a web-based shell if that's your primary use for this http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.4/

There's also this https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox and this http://www.web-console.org/

I had a bug with a Bank of America payment system which wouldn't accept registrations with upper-case Zs in the company name. I went into super sleuth mode and somehow found the company they hired to make it and got a number for their development department. After explaining the problem to the guy who answered his only response was, "How did you get this number??"

Unfortunately it's an almost weekly occurrence that a site I'm visiting clearly was only tested in Chrome and something critical doesn't work in Firefox. For those instances I use this extension to open the current page in Chrome https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-in-chrom...