Hacker News Reader

jrogers65on The TSA wants to be everywhere in 2013 - here's why we shouldn't let it

By that metric, the police are terrorists for using tear gas and blocking roads.

jrogers65on The TSA wants to be everywhere in 2013 - here's why we shouldn't let it

A Ghandi-style peaceful protest would fare better than what the occupy movement did. I went to the one in London and saw that the protesters were following police orders to, for example, stay in one place. This is not the way to make your voice heard and it's not what Ghandi did.

You can have an active, non-violent protest. This entails disobeying any and all orders from the authorities (e.g. blocking major roads and refusing to move unless taken by force), blocking access to important buildings, blocking access to police and government vehicles, using smoke bombs - anything which causes chaos but does not physically hurt anyone. The point is to cause as much of a problem as possible without enacting bodily harm to another.

http://www.crvp.org/book/Series01/I-39/ch18.htm

> An avowed pacifist, he saw non-cooperation as a training in self-sacrifice. In Gandhi’s dictum, non-violent, non-cooperation was "a method of search for social truth."

> He cautioned that non-cooperation does not apply to service under private individuals. Its efficacy lay in voluntary withdrawal from the affairs of the State, an expression of popular discord, causing discomfort to government.

> "Satyagraha literally means insistence on truth."

jrogers65on What should you do every day to improve your life?

Spend less time on social news sites.

jrogers65on Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

The problem of replicating environments was already a solved issue for me. When I'm setting up an environment for the first time, I make note of all of the commands required to set it up and put them in a shell script. I guess it's nice to not have to tweak them when there's an OS upgrade.

The other side of solving this is writing tests to check that, for instance, a particular language extension is loaded. The application should be throwing a fit if something is missing in the environment.

jrogers65on Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

Easier way to get a good development environment and not have to deal with a crippled window manager: http://www.ubuntu.com/

On a more serious note, what is with the fad of running OSX and doing all of your work in a VM? OSX is terrible for anything serious and is enough of a pain in the ass that one must use a VM just to run their web application on their development machine. Why not just use Linux? Why not use Windows and run a VM in that? At least you'll get the benefit of being able to run more software.

I'm finding it very difficult to understand the justification for such setups and, from personal experience, I find that it's better to avoid shops which operate in such a way altogether.

jrogers65on How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic

I accidentally tried an atypical antipsychotic once. No person, sane or insane, would voluntarily consent to taking drugs with such terrible side effects. I do not blame them one bit for refusing the current generation of medication. I would even argue that it's a stretch to call it medicine since it just masks the symptoms and makes a person placid enough to deal with. By the same metric, heroin is medicine for depression.

jrogers65on How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic

ATOS are a horrible bunch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atos#Controversy_over_disabilit...

jrogers65on How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic

Shadow banning is a terrible way to moderate a forum. If the HN guys are reading this - make your process fair and transparent!

jrogers65on University wins $1.17 billion hard disk patent verdict against Marvell

http://www.researchoninnovation.org/WordPress/?cat=4

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100421/1451179133.shtml

http://readwrite.com/2009/07/02/study_says_patents_hinder_in...

http://archive.mises.org/10217/yet-another-study-finds-paten...

http://www.healio.com/orthotics-prosthetics/development-fina...

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:_DA2suNYWFoJ:...

Skip to the conclusion in the last paper.

jrogers65on Journalists’ Addresses Posted In Revenge For Posting Of Gun Permit Owners

Personally, I think that this has less to do with having a transparent than it does with personal privacy. I think that the latter trumps the former. Government is supposed to be open because everybody funds it through taxes. A private individual should have the freedom to remain private if they so choose.

jrogers65on University wins $1.17 billion hard disk patent verdict against Marvell

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...

Chapter nine.

jrogers65on University wins $1.17 billion hard disk patent verdict against Marvell

That the idea of a monopoly somehow facilitating innovation and competition is accepted by so many people is the mark of a political and economical system which is corrupt at it's very core. I'm not just talking about software or hardware patents - medical patents have caused regressions in innovation just the same (see chapter 9 in the link below). How something so fundamentally and obviously incorrect has seeped into common culture is something which needs to be investigated and taken seriously.

That this has happened in the software industry in particular, where since day one everybody rejected the idea, is a testament to the notion that there are social and political factors which are actively spreading misinformation. Naming names might be an effective way to shunt them out of the economy by refusing to do business with them.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...

jrogers65on Use two Dropbox accounts on one computer

> Still, running both instances from a non-default HOME seems like sound advice.

Setting HOME to a new value means that ~/ will always be resolved to that value. I think that the far more likely result is that this will work as expected.

jrogers65on Randi Zuckerberg Also Confused About Facebook Privacy

One thing I detest about HN is the amount of shameless social media advertising that people spam. It dilutes word of mouth and makes social media a less interesting platform to learn about new products and services. If you want to advertise then pay for it like everyone else.

jrogers65on Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922)

Supply and demand. The nice person is always available so they are cheap.

jrogers65on Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong

This is the only piece of advice I would listen to out of all of these replies. Copy the great, not the average.

jrogers65on Laws of Physics Can’t Trump the Bonds of Love

To phrase it another way, the bonds between people are more important than the fruit of peoples' labour. Without collaboration, we wouldn't have all of this technology or knowledge in the first place.

jrogers65on “a dribbling selfish jerk” – an analysis of getting on the front page of HN

It appears to be a hardware limit - humans can only consider a given number of other humans as individuals. Everyone else composes "the others" and are treated less favorably.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

jrogers65on What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

I can't comprehend how this individual is considered to be influencial when, looking at his achievements, he has not really contributed anything of substance. I don't mean to be a killjoy, I just honestly don't see why he is considered to be an authority on, well, anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier#Works

He wrote a couple of books and gave a few speeches? Perhaps I'm missing the point - if anyone would care to enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.

jrogers65on The Great Bank Robbery

It's not a hypothetical scenario. Plenty of banks work under Sharia Law and prohibit usury. Hell, the majority of the world's population was emphatically against usury for a long time.

> Are overdraft fees annoying? Yes. We've all had to pay them. But under the current system, we all have a choice as to whether or not we pay them. The simple choice is: balance your checking account. Punishing the banks for an individual not taking responsibility for his or her own money is shortsighted at best, and unsustainable at worst.

This argument is rooted in a logical fallacy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

jrogers65on Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

Page loaded, saw the article text briefly. Then the JS loaded and all that remained was the header. Fancy web effects are all well and good but not so much when they prevent you from viewing the content.

jrogers65on The Placebo Phenomenon

In case you missed it, endocannabinoids (CB1 agonism, in particular) appear to account for the other half of placebo analgesia:

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v17/n10/full/nm.2435.html

jrogers65on The Placebo Phenomenon

> From the article: "Kaptchuk . . . doesn’t argue that you can simply 'think yourself better.' 'Sham treatment won’t shrink tumors

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22287549

> process by which stress may potentiate carcinogenesis and how reducing body stress may prevent cancer growth and progression. The opioid peptide β-endorphin plays a critical role in bringing the stress axis to a state of homeostasis

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20050725232410data_trunc_sy...

> A study from the University of Michigan (U-M) has provided the first direct evidence that endorphins - the brain's own pain-fighting chemicals - do play a role in the phenomenon known as the placebo effect

Sure throws a spanner in the works.

jrogers65on E17 is out

It's trivially easy to change those with xset:

> xset m <ACCELERATION> <THRESHOLD>

and:

> xset r rate <delay in milliseconds before auto repeat starts> <repeat rate per second>

I'm of the opinion that it's not a window manager's job to deal with mouse acceleration or keyboard repeat rates in the first place.

jrogers65on Bootstrap 3.0 Upcoming changes

>Why will they choose hyphenated variables instead of camelCase?

Presumably because hyphentation is the standard in CSS.

jrogers65on Twitter Suspends Anonymous’ Most Popular Account, @YourAnonNews

There is a correlation between being very religious and being a criminal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlates_of_crime#Religion

Not that it implies causation but food for thought.

jrogers65on Moonbase: A plug and play engine for making web animations

I couldn't find a way to delete an element after placing it in the workspace.

I also wanted to play with the initial setup but completing the tutorial made a video pop up and there was no way to get back - just an option to start a new workspace.

jrogers65on The economic return of Iceland has proved that the joke was on Ireland

There has been a silent revolution in the last few decades which has resulted in a new branch of mathematics called Chaos Theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

It happens to be quite capable of making a science out of traditionally difficult to understand subjects such as economics, psychology and sociology.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:naTCJqLey4QJ:...

The comparison would have been absurd last century, not so much today.

jrogers65on How far has Microsoft fallen?

Plenty of those articles link to mainstream sources.

First one I looked at linked to this, for example: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/03/136920664/gates-foundation-sho...

Which contains the same kind of information they are talking about:

> They're influencing governments in lots of different ways — and corporations, and really everybody else in society, and it's not just about writing checks

So clearly this isn't just a philanthropic effort - it's a political machine with real influence.

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2012751169_gatesmonsa...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson/post_1315_b_788...

jrogers65on Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

People are very predictable if you know enough about them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlates_of_crime Criminality is essentially a combination of low dopamine, low serotonin and low adrenaline levels. Stress chemicals such as cortisol can rapidly deplete neurotransmitter levels. There is also an inverse correlation between socioeconomic status and criminality. Being poor means more stress and lower levels of those neurotransmitters.

The impulsivity caused by dopamine deficiency also causes more unwanted pregnancies - another risk factor for criminality.

Poor people are also more likely to be religious - http://www.gallup.com/poll/116449/religion-provides-emotiona... and being religious is correlated with criminality.

So there is clearly a strong correlation between the effects of being poor or in poverty and criminality. Since the law is specifically designed to 'deal' with criminality, it is a mechanism which is quite biased against the poor. Hence, the law is there to protect the rich from the poor.