pingswept

I don't think that the pricing structure you describe is mentioned in the article. Maybe the books were the same retail price in both cases and the school chose Amazon because (for example) it made the accounting easier. Kind of weakens your argument, I think.

I'm not worried because my repos are filled with code.

I don't know that I would agree with you that morality is relative, but I strongly agree with your larger point that you shouldn't let other people build your moral code for you. I also would never[1] work for the NSA or a defense contractor.

[1] By "never," I mean that I cannot imagine a realistic scenario in which I would accept such a job. I can imagine an unrealistic scenario in which the head of the NSA has kidnapped my child and is holding New York hostage with a ticking time bomb in which I would accept such a job gladly.

Some Americans think working for the NSA is ethical. I'm an American engineer, and I would not work for them, given their recent history.

I would be surprised if you found an American working for the NSA who didn't do so willingly-- people in that position can easily find other jobs, so they do.

Your BS detector should be bleeping at full force. There is a long, long history of failed attempts to build ducted wind turbines. The fundamental question is whether, for the revenue you'll gain from the energy gains, it's more efficient to put the money into building a duct or extending your turbine blades a bit more. Unfortunately, building all the extra structure to support the duct is expensive.

The history is long and discouraging. Paul Gipe has some good photos of recent attempts: http://www.wind-works.org/cms/index.php?id=541

Think of it as "machine learning for humans."

(The author is a woman.)

This looks cool, but doesn't appear to be open hardware.

Does an open hardware phone exist? I'm not aware of one that I can actually buy today. The closest I know of is the OpenMoko GTA04, but it's not clear to me that the project is still living.

I was planning on doing this as well. If you do it, where might it appear on Github?

You can. I've done this using a different web editor based on CodeMirror: https://github.com/rascalmicro/red

I do suspect that Xylakant may be right elsewhere in this thread when she points out that it's not possible on Heroku, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, I would love to see Ghost use a pile of static Markdown files rather than a database for posts. Then, in a couple of years, when I want to use something else, I can take my pile of Markdown files and move along.

Agreed, but I think it's a pretty big multiplier.

The evidence in this article is:

  1. Jason Lahoz couldn't sign up.
  2. @Ginnyproffitt was frustrated.

I tried signing up a couple of days ago. The site loaded quickly and worked fine. The only quirk I noticed was that I received two registration confirmation emails instead of one.

We should not be so quick to jump on the government without evidence that there is a problem, especially when you can just go look at the site yourself and see if it works.

Just clicked the confirmation link that appeared in my email. Had to accept some terms and conditions. I can't actually get insurance this way because I already have insurance through my state's exchange (I pretended I lived in Maine for this test account, since my state doesn't use healthcare.gov). But my profile page loaded fine. This series of steps also took less than a minute.

Anyway, sorry it's not working for you, if you're really trying to get insurance.

Hmmm. I just created an account. The site loaded quickly. Took maybe 2 minutes to create an account. The password rules were weird, but I don't see what all the fuss is about. It seems to me that scaling a site from 0 users to millions in a couple of weeks is hard.

If it's working now, which is seems to be, what's the problem? (OK, I'll concede that $634M is totally and completely insane. But I'm not convinced by the rest of the "bad code" complaints.)

I strongly agree with you. It is not clear to me how a billionaire like Larry Page is being forced into anything. It is not conceivable that he personally would be jailed if Google were to defy the US government.

It would be interesting to see what would actually happen if one of the big American internet companies just said the truth. "We have received 35 NSL's and we gave them your data."

What would actually happen? Would their stock go up or down? Would they gain or lose customers? Would anyone be prosecuted and jailed?

Hey, that's where you bumped into me.

Yeah, the Cambridge/Somerville nexus is pretty amazing.

http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

Housing in Boston is substantially cheaper than Silicon Valley.

Anecdotally, when I moved from Silicon Valley to Boston, my rent stayed the same price and but I got to live in twice as big a house.

Non-anecdotally, look at these real estate price maps.

Boston (Middlesex County, north side of the city): http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Massachusetts/Middlesex_Co...

SF (San Mateo County, south of SF): http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/San_Mateo_Count...

You can buy a relatively large house within a few miles of downtown Boston for around $400k. I don't think that's possible in SF.

Somerville (bordering Boston and Cambridge) is home to one of the world's largest makerspaces: http://artisansasylum.com and a big cleantech incubator: http://greentownlabs.com/

Ah, I get it. Instead of relying on one guy, I can see that lots of different people who don't trust each other all agree that the binary hash should be X. Lots of people unknown to each other are unable to conspire to backdoor a binary.

Cool. Thanks for the explanation.

My first thought is that the next attack will be analogous to fake Amazon reviews. "This binary with the hash e99a12d388afa2fa5fdde8ed3bcbe055 gets five stars! After using 51fc8eff10b2fccec9890fe5d1b0cfd9 for years, I've realized that e99a12 is far superior in speed and robustness. I recommend you upgrade today!"

Is the idea behind deterministic builds that you build the software on your own trusted system and then compare a hash of the binary with the hash the original builders got for their build? Thus you know that the binary you have must not contain any backdoors (or both binaries do)?

I'm just trying to understand how it would work.

How are deterministic builds better than distributing binaries with hashes for verification? Just because I don't have to trust the original author's compiler?

The Crying of Lot 49 is also good to start with because it's only 150 pages or so.

His collection of short stories, Slow Learner, has some gems in it. I really liked the second story, Low-lands, the last time I read it.

Around 20 years ago, when I was in college, I collected as much of his non-book stuff as I could and put it on a web page. Oddly, it seems it has survived: http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/index.html

My favorite piece there is the article for Aerospace Safety, from when Pynchon worked at Boeing: http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/together.html

This has been my experience as well. Roberto kicks ass.

The jump to 3 was made arbitrarily after 2.6.39. Here's the announcement last summer from Linus: https://lwn.net/Articles/452531/

I actually noticed your Labradoc comment earlier and took a look. It's more or less what I'm looking for, without the weirdness of being embedded in Github. There are 2 reasons I'm not switching to it right now:

1. My system already works fine.

2. The default styling of Labradoc doesn't suit me. The blue/purple links and left-aligned text have a 2005ish look to me. Those would presumably be pretty easy to fix with a CSS overlay of some sort, but that would require a little tweaking.

But still, Labradoc looks like pretty much the same solution that I came up with, so I like it!

One suggestion: make the example have a link or screenshots to something that shows the Markdown side of things. Is there an editor? What does it look like? Even a screenshot tour would help lure people in.

Yeah, if my vim infection weren't so advanced, I would investigate org-mode more closely.

I've been keeping a project journal in a series of notebooks for a few years. As I've filled more and more notebooks, I miss the searchability of computerized journals. For a while, kept a text file open all the time and tried using it as a journal, but that's lousy for any kind of sketching.

My most recent attempt has been a pile of Markdown files in a Github repository. I edit them directly in Github's editor and they are automatically rendered by Github, so I get nice syntax highlighting and working links. It has the added advantage that I can send people links to whatever I'm struggling with, like "Here's the error message I'm getting: <link>."

Here's my log: https://github.com/pingswept/dev-log (Obviously, this only works because most of what I do these days is open source, but it could work just as well on an intranet.)

I've been creating a new file for each day's log, but I think that might not be quite the right approach. It makes searching a little more difficult (though still much easier than notebooks), but makes editing easier because I don't have to scroll to the bottom of a huge file to start typing.

If anyone has suggestions of better ways to do this, I'm definitely interested.

(Hmmm. Maybe there's a keyboard shortcut for skip-to-bottom-of-file in the Github editor. Edit: hey, there is! Command-down-arrow.)

For reference, oil is at $113 per barrel today (August 9, 2012).

Distasteful, or maybe imprudent, sure, but I don't think it's unethical. When I signed up for Gmail, ads weren't part of the bargain.

"Gmail is built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun. After all, Gmail has: Lots of space. Over 7538.321890 megabytes (and counting) of free storage."

If just using the service obliges me to view the ads, doesn't it also oblige me to click on the ads? If I don't, I'm lowering the efficiency of their ad network, and thus the value of their advertising product. Maybe I'm even obliged to buy some of the stuff advertised?

That seems crazy to me. They didn't mention the ads when I signed up, so I just don't care. I don't owe them my attention any more than they owe me customer support.

> We (NoScript users) have our reasons to keep it disabled by default.

Out of curiosity, what are those reasons? Related to privacy? Annoyed by animation?