read_wharf

Listen to a house during a blackout. Nothing to hear.

Almost the same as r4vik:

Django, Python, nginx, Postgres, Ubuntu. Vim in a terminal, and ssh to my Linode.

Because their motivation is control and their major influence is moneyed lobbyists representing arbitrary interests.

Take an existing example Django demo app, and make it better. Change its look, add functionality, refactor it, change the back end, whatever "better" means to you at the moment.

Edit: added "demo."

The cool thing is, he could back into a programming job. Intern, QA, semi-technical gopher, job got through a friend, whatever. He seems to have some chops. If he's there for M months, and moves himself into a programming job for N months, he gets to say on his resume:

    JobCo
    M to N
    Role: Programmer, etc, etc

It's an option among options.

Everything you say is good, including the last line about freelancers. But I wonder if the alternative of a steady job might also be worth considering, just to remove the stress of finding the next gig for a couple of years.

"Each Xi3 device is made up of three separate modules: one for the processor, one for how the unit communicates on a network and a third for power. This means you can upgrade any of these components -- say, to swap out for a faster processor -- with little effort. Just unscrew the back panel, slide out the required part, put the hatch back on and you're done."

As long as Xi3 still exists. Once they die, you own a cool historical curiosity.

I have one. I know many people without one who have better careers than mine.

Except for possibly your very first job, I don't think having a CS degree or not matters for most jobs. Experience and ability are all that matters.

In fact, looking back, most of the good people that I can remember personally had math, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or nothing. The two with nothing are stellar.

That's actually not a bad idea, particularly if you generalize it. You could make a device, or you could do some cool text analysis that predicted whether you are drunk.

I have the Thunderbird Confirm-Address addon installed, to give me one last chance to check if I'm sending a message to someone who probably shouldn't receive it. Like the boss. Which happened.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/confirm-a...

I remember once I sent some email to some friends, after a very hard night of drinking. I knew I was drunk while I wrote, and I tried my damnedest to write coherently, with no errors. I was very proud when I checked it over and clicked Send. I was astounded the next morning when I read it over, at how obviously drunk the writer was.

Who was the second weakest? Third weakest?

    YpVr=
    
    Yank line, Paste below, Select line, Replace with ‘=’
    
    Yank the current line, paste it below, replace all characters with ‘=’. Or in other words make a Markdown heading. You can replace ‘=’ with any other character.

Hey, nifty, I didn't know that.

Hey, wait, I do that every day, exactly like that, and have been doing it that way for years. I just don't think of it as YpVr=, I think "make an underline" and it happens.

This is why I like Vim so much, it seeps into my brain and I forget "how" to use it, and just use it.

If I worked for him I'd be wondering if he thought of me as one of the many.

I look at Slashdot, and all I see is organization.

I look at HN, and all I see is information.

Ah, so all that was needed was for the school board to sit at the shoulder of the complaining parent, as the complaining parent voluntarily showed the school board the parent's Facebook, and the offending post that the parent saw via the parent's Facebook.

I don't believe the school board should have been involved in that either, but that would have been somewhat "better" than firing the teacher.

Better still, the school board should have said "It's Facebook, nothing to do with us."

Back my Django site, because it's one of the databases on Django's list and I hear better things about PostgeSQL than MySQL. I have not taken any of the other actions on your list (yet).

My non-expert impression from reading around is that Postgres has a better future than MySQL, and is just a better solution. Oracle's clouding of MySQL's future didn't help it when I made my decision.

The fact that two people have communicated is damaging enough, which is what this does. For the law under discussion in the UK, it seems that it's just formalizing practice.

In the US this is covered under the Pen Register Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register. Essentially the fact that two people have communicated is not protected under our Constitution; only the content of that communication is protected. In that context, Congress passed the Pen Register Act, which requires law enforcement to get a warrant to monitor who calls who; the bar for these particular types of warrant is particularly low.

The Patriot Act extends the concept of pen register and their required warrants to internet communication. The government specifically is required to get a warrant before it can ask an ISP, for example, to reveal who someone emails or what web sites they visit. For now, they need a warrant to know that you visited Amazon or your library's site, but they need a harder to get different warrant to know what books you've bought or checked out, or what you thought about those books when you emailed your friend.

The fundamental problem with pen registers and the internet equivalents is that it brings people under government scrutiny that otherwise would have escaped notice. If person A is a person of interest, and the government is pen registering his communication, then that makes everyone on person A's communication list a person of interest. Now the government gets a warrant to pen register person B, someone who person A communicates with. That means that everyone that person B communicates with is now known to and watched by the government, even though they are not specifically the target of any investigation or warrant.

Person A may be a drug dealer, person B may buy from person A, and I, person XYZ, may be a friend of person B, don't buy or use drugs, and don't know a thing about the relationship between person A and B. But now the Eye of the government has swung its gaze over to me. I could become collateral damage in, for example, a plea bargain negotiation. My house might be violently raided by law enforcement, merely because Person B visits me a lot; my child might have a gun pointed at his head, and my dog might be routinely killed merely for getting in the face of one of the law enforcement home invaders.

This (the pen register) is a violation of my desire to not be scrutinized by the government, whether I've done nothing wrong or not, whether I have anything to hide or not. I in fact have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide, and I still do not want the scrutiny of the government to fall on me. The government is in theory my servant, not my master. That relationship naturally gives me the right to expect the government to leave me alone.

I find the best way to create an entry on Blogger is to email it with your secret email code. Now your editor is as good as your email client's editor.

I won't touch Blogger's editor unless forced. I haven't seen it for months.

No code in these two, but lots of problem solving:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34_%28novel%29

I recently read Rule 34 by HNer Charles Stross. I liked it a lot.

Thanks Charles.

If you want to go old school, Rendezvous With Rama is great.

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

Simple exercises? http://projecteuler.net/ and similar.

In depth learning? Your own pet project.

And they can allow or disallow anyone they want. It's their business.

And I'm saying that the algorithm is imperfect by design, and accepted as such, because perfection would cost too much in computing and human resources.

You cannot fail a cabbage.

It's a private, voluntary, non-essential service. They can do what they want, short of protected class discrimination.

They haven't failed. They have a huge body of identified individuals that they can sell to advertisers, efficiently and economically harvested.

Oh, they failed at individual user service? What farmer is concerned about an individual cabbage? It would cost way to much to get down off the truck and carefully retrieve the few units that rolled off the truck.

There is absolutely no failure here. None.

It is spin, but if you step away from it, I don't think it's unwarranted.

This episode is an excellent demonstration that this sort of casual use is part of the essence of the web. It's so fundamental that even a major corporation does it incidentally. And if you hammer this sort of thing down, you essentially kill the web.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next,” Schmidt said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that sparked criticism from privacy advocates."

At least they're (sort of) upfront about it. That is advertising's exact task, to tell you what to do. What thing to buy. What destination to buy. What service to buy. And that does seem to be what people want, because most of us sit on the couch every night watching a box tell us what to do and what to buy.

Think of all the things Google might be telling you to do. Virtually all of them will involve cash changing hands. Google will never tell you to go for a walk or play with your kid.

I never saw the survey. I guess I'm part of the silent majority, and therefore not reachable by ubuntu.

Distro drama is beginning to nudge my awareness.

I don't like Unity (and it's more than fine if you do), which is partly why I went to Lubuntu. Windows and a panel, and all I have to think about is what I'm thinking about.

I thank Ubuntu greatly for what they've done, but I believe within a year or two I'll go upstream to Debian and LXDE. I'll probably miss the repositories, until I don't.

I'd rather they spend time on this instead of substantive issues, because they don't seem to be doing all that well on substance.

Give 'em something to play with, and maybe they'll stop bothering us.

"In a perfect world, every search would result in a page with a single item: exactly the thing you were looking for."

That's just the opposite extreme of thousands of paginations.

I, personally, don't search that way. I generally look for a few good results, and then draw my conclusions based on the total of what I read. Rarely do I look for the page that has the answer. Maybe because I'm not looking for answers.

Agreed.

Further, how much would that $20 purchase net you over an invested lifetime, at whatever reasonable rate of return you care to estimate with?

Further, if you buy it with a credit card that you never pay off (so common), how much more are you really paying with essentially a lifetime of credit card interest? And how much would that net you over an invested lifetime?