tgarma1234

It's clickbait to generate youtube views. Seriously how many times have we seen this trick?

We can make burglary illegal without any additional explanation of why burglary is "wrong". This is because it is part of understanding the concept of burglary to know that it is wrong. It's the same sort of logic that applies to Nazi propaganda: it is wrong simply because it is Nazi propaganda. We understand what it is and what they are saying, so we do not need to go to additional lengths to explain why it is wrong. It should be silenced for no other reason than that it is Nazi propaganda. To promote Nazi propaganda is to undermine the social contract itself about what constitutes free speech. It is a mistake of Enlightenment political philosophy to say that every decision we make about what constitutes right and wrong must derive ultimately from basic principles by logical reasoning. In many cases merely understanding a concept suffices to directly condemn an activity and Nazi propaganda is almost the best example of how we can, without further conversation, simply say "NO"... we are not going to help you promote this and we are not going to politely explain to you why we do not agree with your views. All this talk about free speech and Nazis is nonsense. I support Cloudflare's decision.

I would like to see a side project finance checklist.

I mean seriously. These ponzi schemes all involve american buys propping up the money and it is an absolute miracle that the US government is willing to invest time and money in creating a system of justice that at the very minimum punishes clear breaches of trust in this system. The only alternative is that any money invested in this technology at all is wasted on Russian fraudsters. I mean honestly is everything just pure bullshit in this world or what?

Sorry I know that post quality is important and everyone should strive to make important points that move the conversation forward but at the same time I have to say "let's get ready for the aliens" really made me happy. Funny.

The Tim Ferris book "4 Hour Body" will introduce you to a whole world of reliable ideas. Also, Joe Rogan talking to Dr. Julie Kedzie, which you can find by googling his podcast.

That there is a huge amount of marketing hype that comes out of silicon valley for languages, projects, etc. and for the most part you are wasting your time to get too deeply immersed in any one thing.

Reading this thread I can answer the question because I have worked in this industry and given/sold data to Intellius specifically.

There are three main sources of ALL of the data:

1. Acxiom http://www.acxiom.com/ 2. Experian http://www.experian.com/ 3. Neustar https://www.neustar.biz/

Acxiom got it's big start by developing a way to copy phone books in the 90s and they won a court case that sided with them saying the name and address information was basically public info. Acxiom aggregates something like 800 different attributes for each named person at each address using third party vendors and then resells the entire consumer database to list brokers who often times will add additional detail for smaller subsets of the data. You can opt out of Acxiom by going here

http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/privacy/consumer-data-inf...

2. Experian. Same as above but they have a lot more specific data about you because you probably fill out forms related to credit and loan applications correctly. Thus they know all of you previous addresses and they sell that to companies like Intellius.

3. neustar: ditto.

The main thing to keep in mind is that each of those three companies have slightly different channels through which they aggregate consumer data so your info comes out a little differently in each database.

Almost any list broker or mailing house or telemarketer that you encounter is getting their data ultimately from one of those three companies (and in many cases they would buy data from all three sources).

Finally, a company like http://www.criteo.com/ uses a process they call "database cookie-ization" to match your online browsing history (hence interests and business) to those three databases via your email addresses. So they know what you look at online, where you live, everything you have ever requested credit for, etc etc.

There are hundreds of smaller companies like these (below) feeding data into those databases too:

https://www.hgdata.com/ https://www.fullcontact.com/ http://zetaglobal.com/ https://www.lotame.com/

Well, as someone over 40 let me suggest a perhaps controversial take on this type of post: by the time you reach a certain age you should have found a place in life that doesn't involve "looking for a job" or "getting hired". The biggest problem with people at that age isn't that they aren't curious, creative, willing to work long hours, etc but rather that life hasn't worked out for them somehow and they need to apply for jobs. It's basically the same problem as trying to find a date to the prom when you are a teenager. Most people do it naturally and easily so if you are the last person in that game of musical chairs looking for a date, you should ponder seriously why nobody asked YOU yet. Likewise with jobs. If you have 20 years of perl programming experience and 10 certifications in various databases and suchlike, then why exactly aren't you an equity stakeholder in some successful business by now? Short answer: you aren't very good at the game we are all playing. Hence, I am passing on this hire.

I remember that story and it might have been during the first Clinton campaign in the 90s or anyway one of those "Welfare Queen" stories meant to make public assistance seem like a shorthand for "laziness". There are asset tests for assistance and you can see them broken down state by state here: http://scorecard.assetsandopportunity.org/latest/measure/ass...

I can't remember where I read a longer explanation of this but a quick google search got me to this blog entry http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2059 where the topic comes up. I think that for the most part what we civilians know as cryptography is often either a red-herring, a trick, or woefully out of date from the point of view of what the professional state actors know how to do. Anyway you get that impression from declassified documents. Crypto works well enough for commercial and civilian purposes but has no impact on militarized hacking I think. Please correct me if I am wrong but I think this is all by design, even going so far as the NSA putting backdoors in CPUs and suchlike. If they send a company a national security letter that insists on compliance, the company not only has to comply but also can't legally disclose to the public that they complied, so we can't really know the truth here.

If you have never seen the movie Before Night Falls I recommend it. While I agree that 20th century politics in Latin America was complicated, it's also true that the Castro regime committed a lot of human rights violations in ways that now seem really unjustified. I am not saying the United States was innocent. I am saying that a lot of people suffered under the regime needlessly and that should be acknowledged honestly.

The cartoons make it look like marketing copy aimed at non-programming parents who want to buy lessons for their kids.

I think that logo is really childish and weird looking. It puts me off. And Larry Wall talking about perl gets old really fast.

In my opinion perl will slowly die because it has no social capital. A good sign of this is when you are around other programmers working on a real problem if you say "Hey let's solve this problem in perl!" it will almost always be the case that everyone can do it that way and knows exactly what perl to script (if they are of a certain age) but almost no one would even bother. Who cares about the why. It's just the fact. You get no extra points for knowing perl and for the most part if you are the guy on the team that is assigned to work on some old perl script it's probably a bad sign for you career-wise. Other languages, on the other hand, do have social capital.

Ultimately for me it's a lot like asking why everyone still uses the QWERTY keyboard when there are other keyboard layouts out there that are so much better. Perl might be better at some things, but like alternatives to the QWERTY keyboard, it's just weird to use it and the payoff isn't big enough to justify the change.

As a referral source for new business in your marketing budget it would be a very good investment even if it only generated $150000 a month in new business. And I have no doubt they are getting a heck of a lot more from it than that.

I liked the article and the overall concept. The main issue in my opinion is that the sort of people who would be attracted to such a place would also have had already a great many opportunities to connect with others throughout their life and they likely failed in all of those attempts to form positive, valuable relationships. So the likelihood that they will succeed in this venue is very small. In other words, the reason they are there is that they could not do what this place is asking them to do in any other setting that normal people find plenty of social opportunity to successfully make friends and build a support network. Such spaces would likely be undermined in the United States by the fact that it would end up being a magnet for homeless mentally ill people. If you live in Chicago, as I do, and you want to talk to such people then you can just go to the library downtown, which has ended up being basically a day program for the marginalized, who sit there all day using the free computers and taking bird baths in the bathroom sinks. They don't talk to each other a whole heck of a lot though.

But yeah the modern world is super alienating for most people. The loneliness problem is, in my opinion, sort of like the 21st century version of slums. In the past the existence of slums was a sign that economic progress was not working to include everyone. In our times the isolation and loneliness of vast swaths of our population signals that the system is not creating the opportunity to form effective personal relationships. I doubt there is much we can do about that. Nobody is a stakeholder in the success of the lonely other than the lonely person themselves, and they wouldn't be lonely if the knew how to build relationships. So it's a catch 22 that only gets worse over time.

Yes Werner Herzog mentions the collective insanity of humanity in conjunction with text messaging in one of his documentaries. Games and text messages and social media have captured peoples brains. People are drawn into their devices mentally and emotionally in a way that barely makes them present in the actual world, even when they are walking to work or dining with friends or driving. There is something so magnetic about these devices that draws in almost every person who encounters them in a way that is not healthy.

Because it's all happening in real time to humanity as a whole it's hard to see the bigger picture of how we are changing. I think of it as probably being like how people responded to the invention of fire. It just made perfect sense and took over the world and happened to everyone together. Being present in the midst of this historical change is an opportunity to know something very deep about human beings, who we are.

The biggest thing about these changes from my perspective is that people are devolving into something that looks like a collective autism. Like they are obsessed with the fact that something is happening somewhere else at all times and the device has opened a window to seeing it. And yet when you look out that window into the collective digital consciousness of pictures and texts and advertising you see that there is actually nothing happening at all that isn't exactly what you would expect. People doing things. But always somewhere else.

The main thing I don't like is when I am walking downtown and people are literally just wandering mindlessly as a herd texting on their phones not even looking up at traffic as they cross the street. They navigate by being aware of other people's direction and path but oblivious to their own. For example, I will be crossing the street and another person who is texting will walk just a few steps behind me texting, looking at their phone, never looking up at traffic and trusting that if they follow my path they will end up on the other side of the street. I don't even know really how to describe that experience but I am sure everyone else has it too. It's like people have been reduced to herd animals walking collectively while immersed deeply in their devices... because there isn't possibly anything at all happening in this present moment that is worth paying attention to. And I am not talking about one or two people walking around in this way. It's practically everyone.

Honestly, am I the only person who notices this? I wonder.

I felt the same way ultimately despite my original enthusiasm. To be honest now that I have some experience with the eco-system as a whole, I mean Linux, it's really unreasonable to expect a few developers, even very good ones, to produce a desktop operating system that rivals OS X or Windows or even Fedora because they are competing against very large and well funded teams at huge corporations that by now have at least three decades of experience building desktop operating systems. In short, Elementary OS is a nice idea but it's a somewhat Quixotic endeavor.

Unless you pay for a larger instance where the cost turns out to more like 50 bucks a month you get very limited bandwidth out of AWS, which is why I stopped using it. I suppose if you are running a corporate blog and cost isn't an issue then AWS probably works fine but for smaller sites and individual users there are vastly cheaper very good hosting options out there. I don't want to seem like a shill so I won't mention them by name. It was the super crappy bandwidth on AWS where basically my site would die regularly with just one or two visitors that made me abandon the platform.

And that seems to me like the main incentive they would have to force developers into that user model. On the one hand it makes sense to charge $2500 for a laptop but then if the quality is so great now that the machine can be expected to work well for almost every user for nearly 10 years then that price point is actually almost a Pyrrhic victory. It would be better to sell smaller cheaper machines that justify upgrades more frequently and then charge power users for time in the cloud. I think that's pretty much the inevitable endgame here in an industry that is all but fully commoditized.

In that case it seems like using "big" desktop computers on Azure or AWS is right around the corner, especially if you factor in better internet speeds to make the remote desktop experience more seemless, so that the client computer doesn't need all that much power. It just doesn't seem like there is a future in developing computers with massive specs as personal machines anymore. If there was a market in it that was profitable, then the analysts at all of the major companies would know it. They seem to see that there isn't a market worth investing in.

That problem comes up with collective action all the time. Workers rights in developing countries for example... if all of the workers banded together to resist their employer's unfair treatment then... blah blah blah.. but in reality average people are awful at joining together to create a change that results in a greater good. When people are isolated and feel the impact of some injustice, they tend to give up fairly quickly without any thought given to what would be best for the greater good. That's my experience of life anyway. Rationality doesn't work very well in abstracted problems that involve reasoning about how you should suffer in this moment for the greater good of everyone suffering such moments. So the scammers are smart to make the cost of cooperating fairly low in a lot of cases. It's definitely easier to pay up than to try to make a federal case out of it. And honestly your inconvenience is not going to cause the wheels of law enforcement to spin fast to figure out which international gang is targeting you. If you don't pay you probably won't ever get anything back and law enforcement won't do anything about it. So really what's the point of personal heroics here other than rational arguments about what the right move would be from a game theoretic point of view? Just pay and move on.

I can't wait to find out what the revolution that was possible in our time but that we failed to see is. We have computers. We have spaceships. We have fish farms. We have sequenced DNA and cloned sheep. Seems sort of like you should be able to put all of that together to make... SOMETHING. Oh well, I guess 1000 years from now we are going to look sort of primitive by comparison. I would like to officially note, for the historians among us, that I am not culturally opposed to any technological innovations in the production of Computerized Spaceship Fishfarm Clones. Not sure what's stopping me from innovating here.

Yes, talking about the industrial revolution happening in Rome or China in the distance past is sort of like that in my opinion.

List of Iowa Writers Workshop people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iowa_Writers%27_Worksh...

And that is just one school. If you throw in all the other top programs you are looking at thousands of writers who are pretty much all top earners in their field. Sure, you might be the next Ernest Hemingway or Hunter S Thompson but I think in both cases what you are looking at are writers who filled a certain ideological void in Cold War america that perpetuated certain myths about creativity that were politically fashionable and the market for presenting yourself that way in a now highly professionalized writing world (after the student loan boom) is very very small. People just aren't looking for another Hunter S Thompson to wander around drunk spouting scandalous opinions and having counter cultural experiences. Same with Hemingway: we get it... Men struggle to grasp the duties of masculinity in a world that is fraught with danger. Yawn. There just isn't any material left to write about in those areas and you have to go to school to learn how to get out beyond those bare bones topics by studying past writers and meeting good current writers. Same with "Art" in my opinion. I mean sure you MIGHT be another Basquiat or Banksy but it's been done.

I have a MacBook air 13", the basic one with 4GB of ram and a small SSD. It works fine. I can't really see why it would need to get a whole lot better honestly. If I need a "big" computer then I use my desktop, and if I just want to read then I use my tablet or my phone. I would buy another apple laptop sure but not because of the specs really. They are just good computers in a world where there are lots and lots of good computers. I think apple is right to just keep on keeping on with these machines anyway because there isn't much innovation in terms of parts happening now. Touchscreens are a gimmick to me and newer cpus are only a little better and not worth the price of the upgrade. New computer specs are basically about as exciting as reading about innovations in Refrigerators or other durable goods.

I feel like a system like IBM Watson is going to end up writing the code in the near future. The real action, therefore, is in explaining the business logic and requirements in a structured way so that the AI can write the code.

Well I can't see that suggestion resulting in a gallery show for anyone who follows that advice. If you are an outsider, how would you ever get into legitimate galleries to show your work? Never happens because your school background is extremely important there, much like how it is true that anyone on earth can write a Novel but it is extremely unlikely you will find a publisher without being in a top writing school.

Because there are a thousand other things you can do that are worthwhile and there is no anxiety to be perceived as "smart" in the way that math requires. Just party on and network and land yourself in a start up. You can pay someone else to do the math because the real money is in MAKING DECISIONS.

Well one of the points they bring up is that this type of scam works on a particular demographic because of their attitudes towards sex in general. So, I think Samir is really a victim and like all such victims he didn't see that people were using something very personal to exploit him.

It took decades to construct the images of "success". I know that whenever I am associated with one of these awesome brands in a super sterile corporate location I feel like I have made it.

Even though I hate admitting that.