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nacker

329 karma · joined April 11, 2012

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nacker··on The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
"I was shocked to come back online after a couple of hours and find this at the top of the front page"

Well mindcrime, Stoicism has been on my mind for well over 20 years, and I'm simply agreeing with your "shock" that a simple link to the Meditations is on the front page.

Let me assure you, this level of recognition of the very word is new. It may be only the Tim Ferriss PR machine, but I think it's more than that.

Geek/hackers that I've come across over the last 30 years have much more in tune with such awful hackneyed dungeons and dragons/Tolkien crap than anything so sophisticated.

nacker··on The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Buddhism and Stoicism have a lot in common, particularly Zen Buddhism. As a complement to the skull on your desk, I recommend Basho:

http://www.poemhunter.com/matsuo-basho/poems/

nacker··on The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
This is so strange - I feel a disturbance in the Force!

Hackers are getting into Stoicism now? The world really is coming around to points of view that I thought were my individual peculiarities. Fantastic!

Couple of links to contribute something other than my amazement:

https://sites.google.com/site/thestoiclife/the-course

http://www.ibiblio.org/stoicism/

nacker··on Is Scientific Truth Always Beautiful?
Great stuff, as usual, lutusp. The paradigmatic example is Kepler, who labored for years on models of the solar system based on the Platonic solids and "perfect" circular orbits.

The reason he is remembered as one of the founders of modern science is that he abandoned the aesthetic criterion in favor of the messier, uglier, facts.

nacker··on Why did men stop wearing high heels?
"They didn't catch on over in Europe at all."

Totally wrong. I was born in 1960, and at my British school if you didn't wear platforms you were laughed at. They were practically compulsory!

nacker··on Tomorrow’s world: A guide to the next 150 years
Orwell learned about Big Brother when he worked at the BBC, that's where the phrase "Big Brother" came from.

http://www.corbettreport.com/episode-253-the-bbc-exposed/

nacker··on Reflections on Cannabis, Ayahuasca and the mystery of plant teachers
Say what you want about the "Green Bitch", she's never killed anyone, unlike the "White Bitch".

http://jacquesmattheij.com/this-white-powder-will-kill-me-on...

nacker··on Darpa shows off 1.8-gigapixel drone, can spot a person from 20K feet
Brilliant! I don't know whether to laugh or cry....
nacker··on Darpa shows off 1.8-gigapixel drone, can spot a person from 20K feet
That's what the frickin' lasers are for.
nacker··on Language Learning is Broken
After I read this article, I decided Chinese was far beyond me. Not for the faint of heart, to say the least!

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

nacker··on Why You Should Use Rule-Based Passwords
The idea must be in the ether! I just spent the last two days obsessed with this, having decided to make another stab at Bitcoin.

I now have a neat method worked out that I can do on the fly in my head, and a little Python script to check it.

Sorry I don't feel like sharing any actual tricks/code, but here are a few examples. Whatever the site address, it spits out a password from 13 to 20 characters in length. If anyone can explain my algorythm, I might even send you a Bitcoin!

https://news.ycombinator.com -> 0$$onew$vwqitt&10

http://slashdot.org -> 4$$guola$fwqivt&13

http://arstechnica.com -> 25$bars$jwdibt&15

http://www.theverge.com -> 4$$gthe$twggt&11

http://www.ibm.com -> 49$tibm$jwcint&17

http://www.wired.com -> 81$fwir$swfid&18

nacker··on How To Make Trillions Of Dollars
> it's relatively easily changed. Find those people, usurp their levers of power.

If it's so easy, could you please do us all a favor and usurp the levers of power of the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, and Goldman-Sachs to start with? Waiting patiently, thanks!

nacker··on Ray Kurzweil Says He’ll Get ‘Unlimited Resources’ to Work on AI at Google
As far as I'm aware, neither Yudkowsky nor Muehlhauser have built anything, and were primarily bloggers before getting involved with the Singularity Institute. How about Ben Goertzel, if you really want an AGI?
nacker··on Write Gambling Software, Go to Prison
When are people going to realize that Alex Jones is not crazy, and was shouting about all of this 15 years ago? It is sheer snobbery that has prevented a lot of people from understanding him.
nacker··on Write Gambling Software, Go to Prison
"Under plea agreement discussions that were never finalized by a judge, and that occurred in February 2011 before Stuart was charged with any crime, Stuart says New York authorities pressed him to install a backdoor in his software and distribute it to clients so the data of gamblers and bookmakers could be retrieved."

I hope the Bitcoin community is paying attention to this.

nacker··on I’m not ever touching Swedish money again
> Swedes have a national genius for public trust in their government

Is it a coincidence that "Borg" is a Swedish name?

nacker··on Eric Schmidt heading on mystery mission to North Korea
> If reunification were to happen today it would probably destroy South Korea's economy

Hmm... well, personally, I have always thought that the whole "Don't be evil" thing was a case of protesting too much, on Google's part.

Have you heard of In-Q-Tel?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/07/16/156839...

http://www.corbettreport.com/meet-in-q-tel-the-cias-venture-...

How do you think Samsung feels about Agent Schmidt's visit?

nacker··on The TSA wants to be everywhere in 2013 - here's why we shouldn't let it
Mother, should I trust the government?

http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=45633

nacker··on Dark Ecology
Also, here's a great discussion with Erik Davis of Expanding Mind with the author of Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, Bron Taylor.

http://expandingmind.podbean.com/mf/web/9kvav7/ExpandingMind...

nacker··on The netbook isn’t dead — it’s just resting
The best use of a netbook is as a bedbook - it's the laziest way of surfing the web, just balance it on a thin pillow on your chest, attach a trackball mouse, and you can burn almost no calories for hours on end!
nacker··on Let's Give Up On The Constitution
Sounds interesting, but I have doubts about utilitarian arguments too. Why not check out Rothbard's "For a New Liberty"? It's in audio form for free here:

https://mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=87

Chapter 12. The Public Sector, III: Police, Law, and the Courts is particularly impressive.

EDIT: Here is Rothbard's amusing argument against utilitarianism:

"Let us consider a stark example: Suppose a society which fervently considers all redheads to be agents of the Devil and therefore to be executed whenever found. Let us further assume that only a small number of redheads exist in any generation—so few as to be statistically insignificant. The utilitarian-libertarian might well reason: “While the murder of isolated redheads is deplorable, the executions are small in number; the vast majority of the public, as non-redheads,achieves enormous psychic satisfaction from the public execution of redheads. The social cost is negligible, the social, psychic benefit to the rest of society is great; therefore, it is right and proper for society to execute the redheads.” The natural-rights libertarian, overwhelmingly concerned as he is for the justice of the act, will react in horror and staunchly and unequivocally oppose the executions as totally unjustified murder and aggression upon non-aggressive persons. The consequence of stopping the murders — depriving the bulk of society of great psychic pleasure — would not influence such a libertarian, the “absolutist” libertarian, in the slightest. Dedicated to justice and to logical consistency, the natural-rights libertarian cheerfully admits to being “doctrinaire,” to being, in short, an unabashed follower of his own doctrines."

nacker··on The year GNOMES, Ubuntu sufferers forked off to Mint Linux
Oh please! You may dismiss Distrowatch, but then you have to provide some better alternative metric. There isn't one. It is plain to anyone who checks the site regularly that although Ubuntu has more installations, Mint surpassed it in mindshare last year, closely followed by (gasp) Mageia! And I'm happy to see Puppy continuing to do well. It must be so boring to be a WinAppleSerf.
nacker··on The year GNOMES, Ubuntu sufferers forked off to Mint Linux
I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, and this year I forked off to Linux Mint Debian Edition with Mate, for all the reasons cited in the article, plus I'm just fed up with reinstalling every year or so, and spending far too long tweaking everything to my satisfaction each time.

LMDE is a compromise between that and a rolling distribution that is constantly updating the system - it's "semi-rolling" based on a scheme that Mint has come up with of Update Packs that come out every few months.

Mate is very smooth and works perfectly on my netbook.

I've been using exclusively Linux on the desktop with many distros since the late '90s and I've never been happier with it.

The lucky thing for Linux is that this was also the year that MS shot themselves in the foot with Win8. With the much-criticized distro ecosystem though, it is much easier for Linux to recover from mistakes like the Gnome3 and Unity fiasco. The bazaar really is better than the cathedral.

nacker··on Ask HN: Best podcasts in 2012?
http://sixgun.org/linuxoutlaws/

http://anarchast.com/

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/

http://www.corbettreport.com/podcasts/

http://prn.fm/shows/lifestyle-shows/the-expat-files/#axzz29V...

nacker··on Is Getting Rich Worth It?
Try Googling "unhappy lotto winner". The question is, can you handle being rich?
nacker··on Watch Out: India’s Aadhar And The Consumer Credit Tsunami
If you can't think of any way to create a small business other than by using a credit card, you probably shouldn't be starting a business.

Making a "big education investment" on a credit card is insanity. The student loan debt crisis may well be the next domino to fall in the the US economic meltdown - it was half the motivation for the participants in Occupy:

http://business.time.com/2012/11/29/is-the-student-loan-debt...

Rates on credit cards are generally less than reasonable, and their policies are frequently abusive. And this is in America, not the "wild East".

http://www.mybudget360.com/endgame-credit-card-nation-40-yea...

Watch, or listen to this, if you are concerned about India's future exploitation:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/23/robert_manning_credit_...

nacker··on Watch Out: India’s Aadhar And The Consumer Credit Tsunami
I didn't claim it was the only factor. Read this:

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/428250-michael-clark/60563...

nacker··on Ask HN: what code text editor do you enjoy the most?
Kate. Simple and beautiful.

http://kate-editor.org/about-kate/

http://lifehacker.com/5911460/the-best-programming-text-edit...

nacker··on Craig Venter: The Biological-Digital Converter
And here is an opposing view, by the brilliant, if slightly insane, techno-pundit George Gilder:

Evolution and Me - The Darwinian theory has become an all-purpose obstacle to thought rather than an enabler of scientific advance http://www.discovery.org/a/3631

nacker··on Watch Out: India’s Aadhar And The Consumer Credit Tsunami
The disturbing thing about this piece is that it seems to imply that a tsunami of credit cards will be a positive thing for India.

How anyone can think this in view of the global debt crisis is puzzling. The smarter fraction of the population in the first world now tends to regard credit cards as akin to crack, opium, or junk food. Things the moderate use of which calls for unusual levels of self-discipline.

I'm sure the prospect of millions of new credit card slaves in India has its Shylocks salivating, but let's hope something has been learned about the consequences of failing to keep them under close scrutiny.

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