spkthed

Cool, but not really on-topic for this website.

While the restaurant is cool, this might be slightly off-topic for Hacker News.

It's really simple. Amazon may make things convenient, but, they're also holding you to their beck and whim with these devices. Hold out until you can can own drm-free software and products so you can actually own things. If you don't, you're leasing something from Amazon and stealing it if you break the DRM.

Support fair business practices. DRM isn't.

It's not partisan differences or the system holding things back, California has a Democrat majority with the votes (24 out of 40) to push things through. Voters there are polling at a 1/3 approval rating for raising taxes. The majority just doesn't want to be the ones responsible for cutting programs or raising taxes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Senate

In addition, their bond ratings are pretty low, they have the lowest rating of any state. The net result of that is that borrowing money becomes much more expensive and the cycle escalates.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/04/local/me-budget4

You can't run programs with deficits forever, eventually you have to raise taxes or cut funding. Neither are popular positions to have but they are necessary.

Taxes deprive the private sector of money. The net effect of not cutting programs when tax revenue is down is that you have to raise taxes even further to make up the gap increasing depression on the very area you are trying to help grow.

California is facing a 23 billion dollar budget deficit and their bond ratings are junk. It's going to be interesting to see what they do.

AdBlock Plus shouldn't have forced the issue by making it even more of an "island" war. They should have started with this kind of blog in the first place before escalating on the technical side.

Okay, so, you do realize that Adblock faces spammers that are constantly trying to tweak the system to get through blockers like Adblock, right? It's a constant fight. How is what Noscript is doing any other than other spammers?

Adblock is simply treating them as any other ad company that's trying to sneak ads in. Given that that is the reason people install Adblock, that's a perfectly appropriate response.

The NoScript developers not only overreacted, they also acted incredibly against the wishes of the users installing both programs.

I'm giving an example of a way to approach this problem. Installing Noscript could add a rule to an Adblock whitelist. What Noscript is doing by trying to sneak it in is wrong. If they wanted to overwrite a rule, let the user do it. As that article points out, and as Mozilla points out, making that the non-default option is very important.

One of the big points in that article mirrors your example. The correct response is to allow the user to decide.

"But targeting the other program in such a way is no different than someone installing two A/V softwares. Sure they may conflict in some areas"

"This software program conflicts with this software program. You can choose to run them both and accept the problems that occur accordingly or you can choose to cancel this installation or remove program X"

Do you want to cancel, remove program X, or cancel the installation?

Give users the option to opt-into using your software, don't force users to get into a proxy battle by automatically opting into things.

I don't think they did overreact. Noscripts function is to block scripts, Adblocks function is to block ads. They found a popular plugin that attacks their functionality and they took steps to combat it. I'm glad they did so.

The major point behind all of this is that extensions should be an island. You shouldn't be messing with the work of anyone else, especially for the reasons they had here.

The problem with your argument is huge. It requires you to basically have a whitelisted internet experience. Since most of the browsing we do is to new sites and new content, Adblockplus and Noscript have value in letting you evaluate the site first, then do whatever you want with it after.

It's a safety buffer and a very, very important one.

Unless you donate to the site/project or enable ads after that you are leeching content.

The responsibility for that goes both ways. If you depend on ad revenue for your entire revenue stream your business model is flawed. Let users do things like purchase the model outright to avoid annoyances or to donate. It's unfair to assume that a product won't be supported.

I really don't understand it. A good education is a good thing, but it's hardly necessary to succeed in today's workforce. There's also lots of alternatives to getting a college education. As the cost to get an education continues to increase and as the benefits from it continue to decrease there's going to be a point where the tide starts flowing the other way.

It's also increasingly likely that small/smaller businesses will be the companies of the future instead of the giant corporations we have now.

In spite of all of that, colleges continue to do business as usual. It's a really strange dynamic. It appears to me that colleges have lost their goals of teaching people necessary skills and have begun to exist simply for themselves.

Gentoo is based more for the tinkerer and full-time sysadmin. If you're prepared to spend time nursing the system, compiling everything, tweaking packages/the OS itself for every bit of performance possible, the Gentoo is a good solution. Until you're talking about really big scaling though, it's probably more time effective to use another distro.

As far as the rest goes, it would be better to use Debian before Ubuntu, but there's a lot of other distros as well. RHEL powers many of the webs servers as does SuSE and Debian and Gentoo. Once you get past that, it's mostly personal preference.

Also, big plugs for nginx. It's definitely a very impressive software package.

My company works directly with them. I've not been directly involved but I've heard about everything every step of the way. They are slow to change, resistant to doing anything new, and their decisions are chaotic.

Pretty much what you'd expect from a company that almost refuses to adapt to modern times.

Interesting article, but it doesn't seem to relate to the general area of this site.

This guy might be the best guy in the world but payday loans are predatory lending and regardless of the situation, puts people in a worse spot than they were before.

Depending on the situation, they can charge over 1,000% interest. If payday loans were to charge 30% interest they'd still be able to cover the people that wouldn't pay.

It's a dumb saying but "don't be evil" springs to mind. Taking money off of the backs of the people that can least afford it isn't capitalism, it's greed.

That's why getting a good soundsystem (read, one with a very nice range) is important. It's also why having an EQ is very handy.

It's a script that comes with most distros, but, not with Leopard by default at least. You probably could add it, but, it's a simple command either way and not everyone can add scripts like that.

osx/Linux ssh-copy-id replacement:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh 'ip/port/options' "cat >> 'home directory'/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Sure? It's like anything else, don't trust a single solution. In addition to local backups S3 is good, in addition to S3, Mosso. There will always be accidents, data loss, corruption, etc. The only way to mitigate that risk is simply to cover your bases and avoid relying on a single thing.

You can easily get dual (possibly quad?)-cpu AMD mobo's and add to the power. It's the server line you'd use but same basic technology. $500 USD would get you a single Phenom 940 with 8GB of ECC ram, computers are cheap these days.

Apple has done a good job of keeping software relatively uniform, instead of having random menus, keystrokes, UI's they've managed to keep the look and feel of most programs relatively similar.

But, key bindings are hardly OS dependent, rendering the general point of this post irrelevant. It would be really interesting to see this transformed into a rant against a lack of uniform standards for standard functions.

Most OS's give you the ability to remap keys as you see fit. in addition, most modern Linux distros allow you to hook up an Apple keyboard. Combine the two and this entire post is unnecessary.

All of that being said, there's no difference between using the Apple key for commands vs. other key combos (ctrl-alt-shift, etc) it's simply user preference.

If you take this argument down to it's base level, it's a frustration at having to learn the UI of a new program, the equivalent of Vim vs Emacs. All of that is fine, but burying that sentiment in a general "only Mac software can do this" post which isn't the case.

All of this being said, it's looking more and more like Textmate development is dead, perhaps it's time to look at one of the alternatives?

You're assuming several things:

1. That he has money to pay. 2. That he will pay the money he's ordered to pay. 3. That he will pay that money in a timely fashion.

Bottom-line, this person is not going to give you a product that you're happy with and definitely not on the timeframe you need. Go ahead and file a small-claims case against the person but count the money gone.

There's lots of good advice on here about what to do, raise the cash again, hire a good programmer using the advice given above and below this and move on. Don't waste any more time pleading, threatening, or talking to this guy. Sue him and put it in the past, count the money gone. If you ever get any of it back, apply it to something different, server costs, etc.

Honestly? $2,500 is a very, very cheap price to pay for everything you've learned here. Learn from it and how to avoid this situation in the future (plan out all contingencies ON PAPER with the person ahead of time.)

It would seem that the slow creep of the Digg/Reddit effect is beginning to surface. It may simply be me but the articles on here are beginning to lose some of the technical/interesting nature and starting to turn into broader, general interest pieces.

That's exactly what interest-only loans are, heh.

If you invest and get 7% interest, after taxes you may get 1-2%. If you have to get 12%+ things look a lot different. Also, investing is risky, debt anchors you and keeps you from trying new things. At that point, you're gambling your house away. That behaviour is exactly what caused the Great Depression.

Government bonds are a terrible investment strategy. You may barely hold out against inflation (the next 5 years I vey much doubt that will happen) but there's better vehicles. The stock market, for all that it's fallen, historically speaking has never had any 10 year windows that it's shrunk. It will rebound.

If you're going to get a mortgage, it should be a 15yr, fixed-rate.

This is outstanding advice. Interest you gain is taxed while interest you owe is not. There's also risk involved. Debt at 8% costs you far more than investments at 15%.

Debt first, a nicely funded Roth IRA, 401k, 6 months or so of living expenses in a money-market account then park the rest in a mix of stock market funds with a nice 10+ year track history. This is THE time to buy stocks and real-estate.

This guy does it right: http://www.daveramsey.com/etc/cms/baby_steps_2867.htmlc

If you look at the amount of interest you pay vs. the amount you can actually deduct and the total taxes you pay, it's far, far more expensive to have the mortgage with the tax credit than to simply own outright.

If you get $2,500 in reduced taxes and pay $10,000 in interest... :)

Ditto and I agree, it is awful.

I overcame the extremely poor, rural part and I can raise you being homeschooled, and, in an information-society on-paper at least, relatively uneducated. That's a bigger barrier than being Black to being part of societies norms.

I was exposed to less of society than most people and in a culture much, much further than societies norms than black culture is.

I'm also dark enough to experience prejudices, if any indeed existed. One thing that life has taught me, you're treated the way you expect to be treated and the way you act accordingly. Perception is reality. You hold the key to how people perceive you.

Everything I have in life I earned by myself, I haven't finished college yet but have a decent job. I taught myself enough *nix and networking experience to move through jobs to where I'm making the mean salary for a single person in my city.

The only barrier that has ever held me back is myself. I've also experience big setbacks in life. If you feel sorry for yourself and stop moving, sure, life sucks you in. If you pick yourself and keep on striving, you can do almost anything you desire to.