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Great post. This is the kind of perspective you want to have. This reminds me of PG's high school essay:

"The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn." - PG

Before I quote the whole thing, the OP (and anyone in the same position) should read the whole essay: http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

If you want the real world to be (quoting from the other post) "lots of sucky boring shitty work, for a few profound moments of bliss," that's fine. But if you don't want to accept that, you don't have to. What Kirill said above is totally right; life works how you want it to.

It's normal for someone in high school to feel like the OP, especially someone who's a hacker at heart. School limits you in a lot of ways, but you don't have to let it stop you. You just have to realize that the boundaries are self imposed. You can do real things. So treat school like a day job, get it out of the way, and do what's interesting to you.

Well don't forget, there's a standard client that works fine. These exchanges were writing their own custom clients, but that's probably not something a one man shop would have to do. And if you have to modify the client, you should definitely be reading the wiki. And test it extensively when you're running million dollar exchanges.

Never knew, do you a have a source on this? Not that I don't believe you, I just want to read more about it. A Chrome extension that shows you if STARTTLS is being used would be really neat.

While Google, Amazon, etc. being centralized might be bad in some ways (and good in others), I'm less concerned with that kind of centralization (because there are alternatives). The most dangerous centralization is at the ISP level, because it's the first gateway to the internet. When I saw the article title I was hoping it would be about that. Unfortunately, wired internet connections make for a really good natural monopoly, so until we have super fast wireless internet everywhere, I don't expect a solution. If any wifi mesh net appears, it would be a good start, but I'm skeptical it would become widespread.

The other dangerous centralization of the internet is the DNS system. I know, technically it's decentralized because there even thousands of root name servers. But politically it's centralized under ICANN. Domains are controlled by registrars and governments. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but a truly distributed system would help guarantee a neutral internet. There are some good solutions for this already, namely Namecoin (http://dot-bit.org), which uses proof of work and a bitcoin-like blockchain as a P2P DNS. Namecoin uses the .bit TLD, but probably the largest barrier to adoption is that it's not accessible by default on devices because it's not ICANN sanctioned and therefore not in the root name servers. There are workarounds for this. ICANN could add Namecoin to the root servers but then it would still be under the control of ICANN. The true solution would be for ISPs to add it to their DNS. If the ISP decentralization is solved, this becomes trivial.

In my opinion, this is the only real way to guarantee net neutrality and prevent censorship.

The export limit is limited to 30 days only by the UI, if you do a request but change the timestamps you can get any range of dates. This will get you all your data as a KML from 1/1/2005 to 1/1/2015:

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/kml?startTime=11...

There are tons and tons of wiki and blog posts about bitcoin out there, but in my opinion the original paper is really good, if you have a technical background. I don't mean like crypto-expert, I think it's something the average programmer can read, maybe with a bit of googling. I usually wouldn't recommend a paper, but I found it really clear and straightforward. Maybe it's because I already understood bitcoin pretty well, but here it is if you want to take a look: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The bitcoin wiki is also pretty good: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Introduction

What this article doesn't mention is that this data isn't only for cops, anyone should be able to see license plate records. Milage may vary, but since this is government data, something along the lines of a FOIA request should get you huge files with license plates, coordinates, and times. Some police departments may be more stubborn, but under current laws this data should pretty much be public.

For example here's data from Minneapolis (with anonymized license plates): https://github.com/johnschrom/Minneapolis-ALPR-Data

Privacy concerns aside, there's definitely something really cool about so much data.

For most people, it's really not a problem. But here's a fun example I recently came across.

I'm looking for an apartment in SF, and I stumble across a few places that seem too good to be true. Pretty sure they're spam, but out of curiosity, I go ahead and email. (Plus the way to make life difficult for spammers is to give them a lot of false positives, playing along for as long as possible, wasting their time, but unfortunately yours too.) The response I get back is clearly a scam—the "pay $200 deposit to schedule a tour" kind of scam. I get a few more emails, pressing me to pay the "deposit." Out of curiosity, I check the email headers. The sender is using Yahoo, and the IP address is being leaked. I do a geo IP lookup, and it turns out the IP is from Ghana.

Naturally, I enter the IP in my browser, and guess what shows up? An authentication dialog for the "EchoLife Home Gateway." Sure enough, entering "admin" for both username and password works fine (first try too), and here I am, connected to some scammer's router, halfway across the globe.

What's more, the router connects to the ISP using PPPoE, so the username for the account is visible in the PPPoE config. And the password is hidden under a password field, but it's being loaded by some sketchy javascript (you know how router software is). Pretty trivial to check out the DOM and find a plaintext password. Next time I'm in Ghana, I get free DSL! Did I mention that the username for the PPPoE account was clearly an actual name? A bit of google-fu and I know quite a bit about the guy who tried to scam me. Turns out it's no secret he's a scammer—in his early days it looked like he'd been using his actual name to run scams, so there were a ton of postings on scam reporting sites.

I stopped there because, as fun as it was, this was just an exercise of intellectual curiosity, I never had the intention of breaking stuff. As much as a scammer might deserve it, vigilantism isn't really the way to do it. I just reported the email to Yahoo/Google and moved on. I doubt there was much anyone could do to stop the guy from scamming anyway. But there's a lot you can do with an open router if you want to harm someone, and that's an understatement. All it would take is something as simple as setting up a VPN connection (I don't think the router I was dealing with actually supported VPN, but I'm sure you could do something malicious, like port forwarding to netbios)

The moral of this should be pretty clear; if you're a scammer don't leak your IP. Also don't use default passwords for routers. Clearly that was the bigger issue here, but how many average people do you think use default passwords? At least if their IP is hidden, there's an extra layer of obscurity. Not a great one, but better than nothing.

There are certain games that work better with controllers—the best example I can think of is Mirror's Edge. I would be upset if I couldn't use a controller, because sometimes you need joysticks.

I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but I thought quantum entanglement didn't allow for FTL communication? A lot of times the way quantum entanglement is explained makes it sound magical but here's a non-magical scenario with no fancy terms (like quantum superposition, qubits, or wave collapse):

Imagine you create two entangled particles, A and B. They have a number of properties, like momentum, position, and spin. Let's use spin for this example. You don't know these values yet, since they've never been measured—they could have clockwise or counterclockwise spin. However, you know the particles have opposite values. One is clockwise and the other must be counterclockwise. You then allow them to travel really far from each other, and you measure the spin of particle A—let's say it's clockwise. Because of that, you now know that particle B must have counterclockwise spin. You just learned something about a distant particle instantaneously. However, the data didn't really travel anywhere. If you interact with particle A, and change its spin to counterclockwise, particle B won't be affected. So you can't manipulate one particle to have effects on the other instantaneously (or faster than the speed of light).

This explanation seems pretty intuitive to me, but correct me if it's wrong.

EDIT: It almost seems stupid that there would be a whole theory based around this, since one would think we can just say particle A was clockwise and particle B was counterclockwise the whole time, but there is an important distinction to be made. We can't just assume they were in a certain state before we measured them. The whole premise of quantum superposition is that before being measured, the particles are a "superposition" of both states—for all we know they could both be either clockwise or counterclockwise. Just because we then measure them and determine what they are doesn't mean they had a single state before they were measured—that's an assumption. Removing the assumption creates so many consequences that we now have a whole subfield of science dedicated to understanding this stuff.

So back to the particles, if they're in both states before one of them is measured, and now they both have to resolve to one state, in some sense there is something traveling between them, letting the other one know what it has to be.

I would try making a FOIA request for the survey—on the school district's website, there's a link for requests: http://www.bps101.net/node/936

What these stats don't show is how many people will go out and buy a full $25 set or have already done so. The expansion isn't particularly useful without the main set, so even if everyone paid $0, it would still probably be a good promotional tool.

Plus the cards are awesome, I don't see how anyone could not want go out and buy the full set and the expansions after seeing this pack.

First off, sure, there are circumstances that make it difficult to seek alternative shelters, but the root poster in this thread said "the alternatives are not for everyone." If you have have kids, you're not gonna be couch surfing. The idea, however, is that for some people, alternative housing is definitely an option, and that point seems perfectly valid.

Secondly, there's no need to be negative in your reply. Some people might have different goals than you and it's not very kind to disparage them for that. There are people that don't continue their genetic lineage and have fulfilling lives. Perhaps you're just exaggerating to make a point, or the humor didn't quite convey over text and I'm just taking it too literally, but I don't see what you're trying to achieve with that harshness.

I'd be curious to see if "name your price as long as it's not $0" options are any more successful—maybe entering payment details is too annoying for users, so given the $0 option, they'll take the least time consuming path.

We all do a ton of projects in our spare time. And not just web stuff. tylermenezes installed a power outlet into his car. I built an XMPP chat bot that learns. vu0tran made a "search engine." And we're all okay with this because it really adds to the environment we're in. We all feel best when we're building a lot. It keeps us learning and thinking. It feels productive, and as long as everything gets done at work, why not?

Also, it's really entertaining watching each other try to make things. I can't wait to see what happens when Vu doesn't get his company-paid lunch this weekend, and he has no money.

Well, generations don't have to be rendered in realtime, so you could just grab some high cpu instances on AWS and compute really large sizes. For example, this guy made a turing machine, and it's pretty huge: http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm

And that was in 2000. I'm sure we could do extremely large boards now.

According to Charity Navigator, it seems the Free The Slaves is very accountable, transparent, and financially effective, with a maximum 4 star rating: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...

I'm not sure why the LLC owns the site though.

We're doing a huge feature build out right now, and there will definitely be an option to delete your video as soon as you're done streaming.

It's clear that there's a good number of people who really love your product, and PadMapper is clearly a better product than Craigslist—the only thing going against you is the network effect. I don't know the specifics, but maybe there's enough of a support base that PadLister could take off the same way as AirBnB did.

PadMapper gets content from more than just Craigslist. They have their own postings (padlister.com), sublet.com, apartments.com, apartmentfinder.com and a lot more. There's really not that much difference between them and a search engine.

Features can be added without alienating users with outdated tech. Just conditionally show the improved site only to users who can run it. It's a poor excuse, especially since Craigslist hasn't even tried to improve the layout of the site, which has no effect on load speed and compatibility.

Facebook's advantage over any competitor is that everyone is already on Facebook. I could see early adopters moving to what you're describing, but it would take ages to move the other 90% of the users over. So at least for the next few years, it's unlikely that people will transition en masse to a completely new service.

Perhaps, but for now, it's cheaper to make a data center out of traditional commodity hardware.

Let's say that a hard drive (or whatever storage device) has a failure rate of 1% over 1 year. With traditional hardware, for every 100 computers you have, you'll replace 1 hard drive. A new hard drive will cost a fraction of the machine's initial price, let's say 1/5. So maintenance costs for storage devices are 1/500 the initial costs per year, maybe a bit more if you factor in the cost of the labor.

Now if you make the same cluster of servers out of ARM hardware, let's say you'll need 4x the number of machines to get the same processing power. That's 400 machines. If the storage devices on these machines have the same failure rate, you'll need to replace 4 machines per year. However, since you're buying a new machine, you're don't get to pay for just the storage device. It costs you 4/400, or 1/100 the initial cost to maintain the storage devices for your ARM cluster per year.

A huge assumption here is that both types of hardware have similar initial costs. So the point here is that it'll always be cheaper to compartmentalize your losses, unless ARM devices are much cheaper than traditional commodity hardware. Intuitively, throwing away a whole machine when something breaks is going to be a lot more expensive than just replacing the broken part. I don't imagine that it's extremely difficult to make parts replaceable on ARM boards, and it would definitely save some money, so I don't see why it shouldn't be done.

(Also, I realize that the Beaglebone uses SD cards, which are cheap and replaceable. But imagine that instead of storage devices, I'd used memory for the example)

Cool for a personal server, but there's one large downside—everything's soldered on. Upgrading a server like this isn't really possible. And what if something breaks? Unlike commodity hardware of the past, you can't just take the server out, fix the broken component, and stick it back. Before ARM servers take off, manufacturers will have to make components replaceable.

Great breakdown. I took a quick look at the HTML, and this is what I got from the div ids, listed spatially:

Mixer Section:

  "mastervol"             "moog-volume2"

                          "moog-volume1"

                          "moog-volume3"

Oscillators Section:

  "moog-osc2-rg"          "moog-osc2-pb"          "moog-osc2-wf"

  "moog-osc1-rg"                                  "moog-osc1-wf"

  "moog-osc3-rg"          "moog-osc3-pb"          "moog-osc3-wf"

Filter Section:

  "cutoff"                 "attacktime"

  "moog-glide"             "decaytime"

  "contouramount"          "sustainlevel"

Envelope Section:

  "moog-loudness-attack"

  "moog-loudness-decay"

  "moog-loudness-sustain"

It looks like that confirms pretty much everything you described. For the filters, it looks like the filters section of the Minimoog panel, but rearranged a bit in order to form an "O."

I've read portions of the manifesto, like the one you mentioned, and I'm not claiming that I have a full understanding of all of Kaczynski's arguments, but I don't think I deserve such a vacuous and condescending response. I'd like to hear what you think is wrong with what I said.

I do know that he specifically focuses on how technologies gradually advance so that we're forced to use them. He refers to this as "control" and describes how technologies don't seem harmful independently, but as each technology forces itself upon us, the combination becomes more and more controlling, until we're completely controlled by the whole. It's as if technology is slowly chipping away at the foundation of freedom through compromise, or something like that.

Now, what I said was that he focuses on the controlling aspect of what were at first seemingly innocent technologies that were absolutely beneficial, but he doesn't see the increase in freedom that the same technologies provide over the long term. Yes, there are stop lights, roads, licenses, and jobs are further away from home, forcing us to own cars—but at the same time, you can go anywhere you want within hours instead of days. Is it controlled? Yes. But even with the control, the total amount of freedom the individual has is now increased, because one is no longer confined to a small area.

Kaczynski uses the neighbor scenario—there are two neighbors, and one is more powerful than the other. This more powerful neighbor asks the other to give him land, to which the weak one says "no." So the powerful one offers a compromise where he only gets half of the land he had asked for. The weak neighbor can't refuse. This goes on and on until the powerful neighbor has all the land. My argument here is that while the powerful neighbor might be taking away land, the big picture is that the powerful neighbor is also offering the weak neighbor lots more land somewhere else. Yes, technology takes our traditional freedom (the already established plots of land), but simultaneously extends our freedom in new directions (new plots of land). Kaczynski only views freedom as something that can be subtracted but not added to.

Perhaps I understand his arguments incorrectly, but this is what I've gotten out of what I've read. If you don't agree, go ahead and explain what's wrong, but don't just make an empty claim like that.

Kaczynski's view seems a bit narrow—he takes a small portion of freedom and complains about how technology eliminates this freedom. But there's more to freedom than just the freedom of not adapting. Sure, it's becoming hard to get by without a computer, so in a way, we're being forced to use computers. But at the same time, computers give us a lot of freedom we didn't have before. Ironically enough, Kaczynski could've probably used this freedom to self-publish his work on the Internet. What Kaczynski fails to realize is that technology creates an increase in net freedom. More tech means more overall freedom, which is what really matters.

Exactly. Being frugal is can be great, but I think it's important to remember that it can sometimes cost more to be frugal. For example, walking for his trip to Michigan—if he had spent $100 on a bus, he could've shortened his trip by hours, during which he could've made money by working. I'm not saying it was a bad choice—maybe he wasn't going to be working during that time anyway. But there's always an opportunity cost, and it isn't all about getting the lowest price tag. It's better to aim for efficiency rather than frugality.