stegosaurus

I currently use it and it's very nice. It makes me long for a better handheld though (my 4" Moto G screen is difficult to type on, even with Hacker's Keyboard).

I can have tmux sessions running on servers with say, an irc client running, mosh in, chat away for a bit, turn it off, the irc client continues running. Perfect. Same for e-mail using mutt, notes that are backed up on the server automatically using vim, etc etc. Really nice workflow.

Give me a handheld device with ssh/mosh support and I'm happy. :)

[0] https://termux.com https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.termux

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates might have won the game. Someone with $5M might have.

But your average 'privileged white male'? Even if we restrict it to the middle class, there's not that much to give up, you know? It's not as if we're all paid up on the mortgage with the retirement fund sorted and now we're just drilling away for more hookers and blow.

I have real issues with the rhetoric that seems to be cropping up as of late as it seems to push the focus away from the capitalist elite that own everything, and on to those who are in the same order of magnitude of wealth, battling away to keep their lives together.

We are friends, not enemies.

WhatsApp has some weird thing whereby I need a smartphone and a telephone number and shit.

Facebook - let's not even go there.

My ideal communication feels like call > e-mail. SMS possibly as an ephemeral 'i'm outside the museum, i can see you from here' type thing.

Basically anything else I just don't really get (for one on one). IM is so distracting that unless I'm doing something mindless like playing a video game, I'd be better off in a call.

Basically, is the whole article just nonsense? :)

I want my relatives, my spouse, my friends to use e-mail.

I'm not quite sure how to convince them, though. It generally feels like they'd rather use Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever's in fashion at the moment.

Any tips? Do I just have to sign up to all of the different chat apps and write bots to forward them to me or something?

Not having ever wanted to buy a machine for that amount of cash, I'd expect to do better with multi-socket systems.

Anyone care to chime in? I struggled to spend over 1K GBP with my latest machine. (I think 'Extreme Edition' is basically like buying the S version of a car, mind). i7-5820K, 64GB ram.

One thing that does stick out is an odd monitor comparison. There's an expensive color repro "low" (in comparison) res monitor for the PC, against the standard iMac retina. Aren't there cheaper 4K monitors/TV's about?

How is salary negotiated? What happens over time - do you just become discrete employees? What about internal promotion - does it just not happen?

I would find it incredibly difficult to get together with friends and decide 'right, i guess we're all worth X each then, let's go for that'.

I try to live in that way, and I try to encourage those around me to live in that way (refusing imbalanced employment conditions). I think if enough people did, we could start to help each other, rather than relying on capital and private property so much.

Basic income is one sort of stepping stone towards that. Ultimately I think the ideal is people actually having real choices, not the huge bias we have towards salaried employment at the moment.

If life were an MMO, then salaried employment would be the cookie cutter build, hourly work would be the odd hybrid, and otherwise you've decided to not bother with your talent tree, and you're just gimping yourself. Can we tweak the rules of the game a bit, or are they just emergent?

People love cheap clothing stores, cheap items off Amazon, quick delivery, etc. That's the impact on them.

How it happens is immaterial. You can do it via magic 3d-printing device, 8-year old slaves, minimum wage workers, hamsters running on a wheel with a dog as foreman, none of that matters to the customer.

What matters is firstly the actual experience, and secondly your presentation - because most customers won't research it, and if you get to Uber size, whether you're lying is immaterial unless the authorities become interested in you.

I don't think this is limited to capitalism. It's just realpolitik. Consider that many of my comments on Hacker News have some up votes. That can be considered rewarding my comments. The utility to others has been in reading them. Funny, informative, whatever.

Maybe I've employed an army of unpaid interns to produce my comments whilst whipping them twice weekly. It doesn't matter (to my up vote count), because no-one cared enough to research it, and even if they did, most people viewing the comments wouldn't know, and even if they did, of that group even fewer would care enough to prioritise an alternative.

The ultimate hope here is that the benefit to the customers outweighs the negative to the workers. Which in the case of Uber, is probably true, at least in the short term.

Whether it's beneficial longer term for larger portions of the economy to tend towards lower incomes for more work remains to be seen. But can we even do anything about it anyway? Not sure. such world.

A restaurant is a place where speaking more loudly than a certain amount will earn you ire from others. You're surrounded by other groups that aren't your group. There's a prescribed format. It's a ritual, you know? There's a sandbox out there, and the format is 'let's go and do X, for X hours, and that's it'.

I hate restaurants, and cinemas, and cafes, and stuff. Just give me a roof and we'll make the fun. But the roof doesn't exist, because as a society, we decided that capitalism and the building of private castles is how it's going to work. Railing against that as an individual is terribly hard.

The problem with it, is that if we decide as a society that these paid, gated experiences are how we're going to socialise, then everyone who doesn't work hard enough is excluded. That's how we get things like socio-economic groups. If you socialise in restaurants, then your friend circle reduces to the people who can afford to socialise in restaurants.

If it's non-deliberate, then it's sad. If it is deliberate, then it's the 'ego thing' that I tried to speak of in the first post - it's about us not realising that we are humanity, we don't need to battle each other and assert dominance, we can just be, you know? Individual, yes, but one, too.

We need public spaces and gatherings because otherwise the ultimate endgame is that people retreat into ever-smaller niche groups until we just sit on our own.

I don't agree that it's about people 'drifting apart', or 'finding different interests'.

In some sense those are being taken as tautologies, when I don't think they are. Why can't people with different interests hang out?

There's loads to talk about. Our interests are a tiny microscopic portion of the human experience.

In the UK people go out and get stone drunk and then anything becomes a fun topic of discussion. We call it disinhibition. But why are we 'inhibited' to begin with?

This is why I call it 'ego'. I don't think I'm using the term accurately. It's just this idea of pleasing one's self, efficiently, rather than trying to be part of some whole, or just swimming, letting life happen.

I went out and bought a random webcam model from a local store for 7GBP as a proof of concept so that I could start hacking on the code. 640x480, but that doesn't matter too much for testing. It is completely unusable in most lighting conditions. I wanted to point it out of the window to track wildlife. Sunlight just overloads the sensor and you get white, low light and it's fully black.

Is this something that requires higher cost equipment? I can't see how it could be useful as an ipcam if outdoor lighting destroys it.

Very rough numbers here:

Generic person might be able to earn $50K working 40 hour weeks in their most optimal career (one that uses their skills).

Same person might also be able to earn $25K working 20 hour weeks doing a similar thing.

They could also earn minimum wage with a rota that isn't really under their control much.

But the real 'work-life balance' option, the one in which the tables are turned and someone decides to 'schedule' work for 8pm on a Saturday or whatever because it's free in the diary?

As far as I can tell this just sort of doesn't exist. I mean you could do piecemeal bits and bobs for neighbours, maybe. But a sustainable source of money sufficient to eat and heat, pay for a roof?

An example would be a 24 hour supermarket. The employees could bid to fill slots and the rate they'd charge to cover periods. But it's not set up that way because the capital owners hold all the cards and it'd be less optimal for them. What you get instead, is 'come to work 6pm thursday or you are fired, kthx'.

One thing I would take issue with is conflating an app with societal change, though. The latter is much much harder. I think that in developed countries we have lost our way a bit.

Work-life balance, to me, would mean that I work hard, and play hard, but that fundamentally work would fit around life. At the moment, life fits around work, for me, and for everyone I know, including those that are really quite well off. And I don't think we are individually choosing this state. Some higher power is, Moloch, I guess.

In my opinion, it makes a lot of sense to do that anyway, at least viewed from outer space.

Stepping away from 'the economy', London's public transport system is used because it's the only option. The roads are at capacity. I say this having driven basically every possible route in rush hour. They are full. I'm often surprised that we don't literally end up having gridlock and just all getting stuck forever.

A metro system in my small northern hometown would be pointless because there's hardly any road traffic so everyone just jumps in their car and has their nice personal space.

I find this quite interesting. Public transport has to be a better option for a critical mass to use it. This can happen either by it being much better (quicker), or by the alternatives simply ceasing to work.

The photograph in the linked article explains it quite well to me - regardless of how 'real' it is, there's a picture of a shiny gathering with the dresses and the shiny clothes and the fancy food, and so on.

And there's nothing wrong with that. I love me some good dress-up and the food there looks super yum. But the simple gatherings seem to have disappeared. Outside of family, do people visit just for the sake of visiting anymore?

I think it was the unified purpose, the school catchment area, maybe. That proximity. Everyone is everywhere now. My park is not your park, my pub is not your pub, etc.

It's not necessary to qualify comments like this. :)

Sounds like we all need to move to Seattle. Maybe not too many of us though. :P

I find myself thinking that there's an economic side to all of this. It might just be that my small hometown was less competitive. London feels like it has some sort of illness by comparison. A place to work, not a place to live.

>> Choose the brands from below a) Papa Johns b) Dominos c) Pizzahut

I don't know! Which one's cheapest? By how much? Is it appreciably worse, should I go for the other one?

It's like a description of post-scarcity bot. I'd just cat /dev/pizza, or something.

But in the real world if I ever found myself in a position to make decisions like that without regard to cost I'm either paraletic or I have a human assistant. :)

(Semi-serious bit: Here in the UK, I'd go for local pizza chain. Dominos without a money off voucher costs more than a three course meal. I have no idea how they stay in business).

Choice bits:

>> RDRAND is available in Ivy Bridge processors

Theodore Ts'o:

>> Relying solely on the hardware random number generator which is using an implementation sealed inside a chip which is impossible to audit is a BAD idea.

It doesn't seem too outrageous to me that the use case of 'have been in a neighbourhood for a while and already have enemies' is just outside of the scope of the program, though. It has far more utility for people who have just moved to a new town and have no contacts at all.

Axiomatically, socially the sum of two humans is greater than the two humans apart.

And large cities, with metros, many villages that melt into one, employment opportunity, talks, bars, etc, are the embodiment of what it means to be social (with some exceptions - community feel being an important one).

In the UK this is at the forefront of politics - it is obvious to anyone that the country is governed as 'London plus appendages'. The rail and road networks are basically built around the capital. Most public transport subsidies go to the capital. The important (in a status sense, not in an absolute sense) businesses are headquartered there.

I think we'd have a great time. No vi vs emacs, mind.

I've found that as time goes on, people are far more concerned with doing things by the book, projecting an image, etc. rather than just 'being', enjoying life in the moment, doing things just because.

I've certainly been guilty of this to some extent because it seems impossible to avoid.

Personal anecdote: At age 16 it was fun to hang around at a bus stop or street corner or whatever and just chat bollocks. Move forward a bit and in college we'd hang out in someone's dorm room or flat or equivalent.

Now everyone is off at work, spaced out all over the place. You might be able to get one or two people to do something, but it'll probably mean some sort of sanitized commercial experience (go and get pizza at a restaurant, pay to commute there, pay to commute back, etc).

And it's all because we've sort of decided that working all the time is more important than being social.

I think that's sad. I often wonder if it's how we end up with such warped political environments. No-one just relaxes, any more, it's all 40 hour weeks and 'scheduling appointments' months into the future.

You grow up, and what were 20 kids, become a banker, a lawyer, a janitor, a policeman, a nurse, a dropout, a homeless guy, and so on. And it just doesn't work, because of all these rules we've made up, status games, location, whatever. Why can't we just go to the park again?

And no, this isn't just about childhood friends moving away. It's the same story up and down the scale, in my experience. Everyone is busy, everyone is pushing.

The community takes a back seat to economic needs, it seems. Something like that. I'm not sure. I know we still got stuff done back then, I have a bit of paper with a hologram on it that proves it. But it wasn't all consuming, somehow.

Could you create a platform without that?

I can't say I've noticed issues on cat photo subreddits, or /r/unixporn, or whatever else.

There seems to be this slow and inevitable descent into discussing politics at every available opportunity, and not in a humourous sense.

If you create a subreddit about some social issue, then the social issue will be discussed there.

Talking about appearance (which covers race, gender, basically stereotyping in general) - a human might look at another human, see that they have certain attributes (I dunno, wonky teeth, not well shaven, particular gait, whatever) and decide to box them.

The idea of gender identity seems to be a way of trying to break out of that box of judgement. So yeah, I look like I have a penis, sexually I can interact with those with vaginas and produce children, but that's where it ends, I figure.

What I personally don't understand, at the moment, is what makes it different from anything else - identifying as working/middle/upper class, as a nationality, as whatever, really. They all seem like patterns of the same thing to me. If you're working class and you waltz about in a suit with links, providing you can even afford such a thing, you're not going to be treated well by your peers. And that sucks! But what does the identity help? Being able to find others who want to do the same things?

Is it just that we're doomed to try to simplify our models about society by creating these groups, so gender identity is about trying to move the groups a bit to limit damage? Or what?

Fundamentally I'm not sure I even understand what it means to 'identify' as an X. What if I think that all of the groups are nonsense? That I don't feel working class, or middle class, or male, or female, or whatever? I sort of am one of them, by birth and inheritance, I guess, but my feelings about it seem kind of immaterial?

edit: Turns out that reading the whole article properly, rather than skimming it, means that my comment is almost entirely superfluous. :)

I think we have a real issue at the moment with people funneling their efforts into ways of dealing with issues at the micro level, rather than the macro level. Local optima. Something like that.

It makes me happy to see the sort of political revolutions that the Internet can bring about, but sad to see that we're still thinking so small. e.g. "Get x into tech" rather than "Make it so that you don't need to be in tech to live a decent life". That sort of thing.

I suggest that at the moment, we have basically two camps of website, with rough, fuzzy boundaries.

1. A place where someone sticks up an insight, or posts a wiki page, or whatever, to share some thought to others (if anyone actually cares). The blogs of many users of HN. Hacker News itself. Wikipedia. The Arch Linux Wiki. lwn.net. Etc. The sites are very roughly concerned with 'this is what I care about, if you do, great, this is useful to you'.

2. Commercial web sites that employ sophisticated means to try and enlarge market share and retain users. AB testing. 'Seamless' experiences which are aimed at getting more views, with user experience as an afterthought (a sort of evolutionary pressure, but not the only one).

Complaining that camp #2 exists is strange. It's a bit like lamenting the fact that chocolate bars aren't just chocolate bars, they have flashy wrappers, clever ingredients, optimized sugar ratio, crunchy bit and non crunchy bit, etc.

It works! A snickers bar is a global blockbuster, and 'Tesco chocolate bar' is the functional chocolate bar that just does the job, but will never attain that level of commercial success, it serves a different role.

-----

My personal view:

Fundamentally what I want when we click a link from an aggregator, is an 'article.txt' with perhaps a relevant image or two. Something like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ maybe.

But if a site actually does that, a website like The Guardian, I'd fire up wget, strip all the advertising, strip the fact it's even The Guardian, and read it like a book. If everyone does it then no-one makes any money, site dies.

So what we actually have is this constant DRM-style race to try and fight for our brains to get us to look at adverts. It's not about jQuery, it's about advertising, branding, 'self vs other' (the integrity of a company as a coherent thing), etc.

I don't know what the answer is here. I think this is why I find concepts like UBI so appealing - I find it kind of alarming that we seem doomed to infect more and more of the commons with commercialization because we haven't found a solution to keep each other alive otherwise.

Not sure I can provide a source on this (it's a matter of inner workings of Government).

>> inflation [...] was actually absorbed by the financial market

In the UK the CPI is made up mostly of operational costs. I deliberately use the term 'operational' here as distinct from 'consumer goods' or something because I am philosophically opposed to partitioning humans into 'consumers' and 'producers'. A naive idealist. :)

I would like to produce a 'teardown' of the specification at some point, but haven't motivated myself yet. I actually have a comment somewhere here on HN that has gotten lost - that's a bit of a kick up the arse for me to produce something a bit more structured like a blog.

Mortage payments, both interest and capital, and rent are dealt with very badly by CPI. As I recall, they're basically not even included. I think legal fees on home purchase, maintenance, and some other related expenses are in there.

At the moment, for at least the median household and probably a large percentage of them, some combination of rent, mortgage payments, or imputed interest is the highest annual expense by a large margin.

In that context the CPI becomes a sort of analysis of 'inflation of items purchased by discretionary income', because it fails to account for well over half of the economy.

On the ground I think this is sort of obvious, which is why I've been reluctant to produce write-ups with proper citations, because it feels a bit like preaching to the converted.

(This is taking as axiomatic that housing costs are 'the financial market'. I'm considering it 'obvious', because housing is essentially the only valuable asset that the median, or even 75th percentile person owns. It functions as capital.)

I think it's dishonest to not just simply post that 'if you're afraid of the cloud, you are not our target market, go away'. I guess it's a capitalism thing. Wouldn't look good to investors, or whatever.

I am sad because I have a beefy machine, and I want to use this, but I can't. I'd pay for it, you know? But I don't 'do' SaaS, the reasons are too long to list here.

More concretely, 32GB RAM is trivial, and preselecting my languages is... I've already pre-selected them! It takes months, years to learn a language :P

Kite looks really super cool.