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kaffee

255 karma · joined April 4, 2014

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kaffee··on Why Substack?
Essential context: Seymour Hersh is a big deal.

"Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh

kaffee··on Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
For anyone scratching their head, I suspect "Brooks" == Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick Brooks Jr.
kaffee··on Ask HN: Why is everything a SaaS product?
Ben Thompson nails it, as usual:

"The brilliance of paying on a subscription basis is that a company can buy exactly what it needs, when it needs it, and no more."

From https://stratechery.com/2019/microsoft-slack-zoom-and-the-sa...

He's written about this in other posts too.

kaffee··on As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
>> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.

> My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing.

I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...

kaffee··on Ask HN: Why aren't there any real alternatives to Electron?
Not having access to the js libraries seems like a feature rather than a bug. With rare exceptions, third party code written in javascript distributed via npm is a liability.
kaffee··on I was wrong, we need crypto
The most recent episode (#118) of Law Bytes with Michael Geist (a respected Canadian law professor) goes into the legal nitty gritty about the use of the Emergency Measures Act.

Here's the link: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/Law-Bytes-A-...

Having just listened to it, I will say the restrictions on Canadians using the banking system to donate to the truckers sound sweeping.

kaffee··on The Pirate Bay Token
Can you see in the history how they are setting the price? Are they dripping this into the market somehow?

What's the standard strategy for fundraising this way?

kaffee··on Running a Law Firm on Linux
What's the current best tool for generating redlines from two PDF/Word documents?

Makes sense that this would be important (e.g., when comparing contract versions).

kaffee··on FEC Asks Congress to Ban Prechecked Recurring Donation Boxes
It's not well known that the (US) CAN-SPAM act does not apply to political and religious organizations. They can spam as much as they want.

First amendment law is full of surprises.

kaffee··on A warning about Glassdoor
Thanks. This makes some sense.

Honestly, I'm sympathetic to Yelp. The money has to come from somewhere. And there's at least superficial evidence that you cannot operate a honest review platform at a reasonable profit rate (e.g., glassdoor, consumer reports).

kaffee··on A warning about Glassdoor
Anyone spot an official response from Glassdoor to this?
kaffee··on A warning about Glassdoor
Is this true? I thought Yelp still did a decent job of moderating reviews.
kaffee··on I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
I thought this was mostly unenforced or unenforceable in cases like this -- where it would be really hard to prove that someone took a payment. I'll keep digging. Thanks!

One more thing -- this isn't an explicit endorsement. It's content marketing. I rather thought that made even the FTC rules hard to apply.

Also: "The Guides are not regulations, and so there are no civil penalties associated with them. But if advertisers don’t follow the guides, the FTC may decide to investigate whether the practices are unfair or deceptive under the FTC Act." https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert...

edit: more details

kaffee··on I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
Does anyone know about the legality of this? My suspicion is that this black-hat content marketing is perfectly legal under US law. It's only potentially a violation of individual platforms' TOS (or publishing agreements). Is this approximately correct?
kaffee··on Tailscale has reached general availability
Seems like it requires a Google or Microsoft account (or corporate SAML). No thanks!
kaffee··on The Risks of Distributing Risk
> "... would probably be a few cycles of students ..."

This sort of delay would be priced in by the person buying the ISAs from Lambda.

I agree with the grand-parent post. Lambda school definitely has skin in the game. If they want to continue operating (i.e., sell the next batch of ISAs onward to investors) then they need to have students who get high paying jobs.

kaffee··on 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
This blog is excellent. But there's no RSS feed.

What do other people who rely on feed readers do in these scenarios? Is there a good service (which will not disappear) which will either convert the thing into rss or alert you when there's a new post?

edit: It has an RSS feed, just no link to it in the index.html. https://danluu.com/atom.xml

kaffee··on If Wealth Is Justified, So Is a Wealth Tax
I'd like to understand this better. My understanding is that the Netherlands has had a wealth tax on assets which are not financial assets for some time. And income from financial assets is taxed at 25%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Netherlands#We...

kaffee··on Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
Is WIP https://wip.chat/ ? First I have heard of it. Are there other well-known communities doing this sort of thing?
kaffee··on Mozilla will reportedly launch a paid version of Firefox this fall
I would pay about $250 a year for software with these features. I don't think I'm alone.
kaffee··on The War to Free Science
So you can't censor sci-hub.now.sh (at least in the US, where linking is typically protected speech). So that's one thing.

Also, the actual DNS system doesn't have a way of redirecting you to another site when the record has been censored, so it's not very resilient in the first place.

Relevant similar site: https://dark.fail

kaffee··on Switch from Chrome to Firefox
I really enjoy the Containers. The only problem is that you can only have a single container tied to an individual site. I'd rather like it to be tied to a subpath or url "root" so I could use it with GitHub.
kaffee··on [dead]
Where does it say that they record your visit to other websites?
kaffee··on Ask HN: Amazon delisted me – what do I do?
I think this is right. It is possible to sell on your own site. Luxury goods do it right now. For example, if you want to buy perfume directly from Chanel, you cannot do it through Amazon. My sense is that Chanel wouldn't give Amazon product even if they asked for it.

That said, I think this approach is best combined with voting for and supporting candidates and social movements which will break up big tech and/or socialize their assets.

kaffee··on Ask HN: Amazon delisted me – what do I do?
Which "Traction" book is this? There seem to be a few with this title.
kaffee··on A JavaScript-Free Front End
This is cool. But it needs to be updated for ES6. The "Code Examples" could look even better now.
kaffee··on Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number
Something like this happened to me. It certainly prompted me to look for alternatives (e.g., Mastodon).

You can start small: sign into Twitter every other month. IIRC, this will decrease the number of active users they report to investors.

kaffee··on A JavaScript-Free Front End
I like the slogan "JavaScript-free"! Finally something to rally around.

I don't mind projects which use a tiny bit of hand-coded, vanilla ES6. Would be nice if there were a slogan that included these.

Looks like it actually does use JavaScript for the "select2" case. This is exactly the case I'd be happy to special case.

edit: added paragraph

kaffee··on White Words
Aaron Bady is one of the best writers on the Internet right now.
kaffee··on Show HN: I made a site that lets you stream any torrent
I had not heard of Simafri. Looks good actually.

It's true that you need a hosting provider in addition to a domain name. It's good to discuss privacy-enhancing domain name registrars and privacy-enhancing VPS providers in the same breath.

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