tuxidomasx

I'd like to make a case for modern hair pieces / hair prosthesis (colloquially known in the black community as man-weaves), which have seen huge improvements in function and aesthetics over the past couple of decades. Combined with a skilled stylist, the results are jaw-dropping.

I'll leave these 2 videos here to demonstrate what I'm talking about:

before/afters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIRuZFLDHP0

stylists perspective and more information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Ik8eah5Vw

This reminded me of a steganography blog post I wrote back when I was doing computer security.

It should be possible to binarily concatenate compressed (RAR'd or ZIP'd) text data directly to a JPG.

Then you can save it as an image on the client, or uncompress it in the client browser and read the data.

The differences are 1) the saved image won't look like random pixels-- it'll look like whatever base image you choose and 2) you don't have to worry about writing the encoding/decoding data as bitmap stuff.

Southern Virginia here. Stinkbugs are EVERYWHERE right now (and have been for the past few years around the end of the summer and into fall).

As I read the headline for this post I saw one slowly meandering up my wall. I also began to think about the possibility of this being done intentionally...

You see, the brown marmorated stinkbugs we have are native to asia. They have no natural predators except for a tiny small wasp that parasticies their eggs (also native to asia).

When I was researching them, I thought "What if China intentionally introduced them to the USA as some sort of ecological attack?" That would be some next-level warfare. Or just a really mean prank.

And then this impending laternfly invasion re-piqued my interest in this theory. It turns out that a similar type of parasitic wasp is the natural predator for laternflys too...

Could this really be a coincidence? Could it be a response to the new tariffs? What if they offer to sell us some bio-engineered wasps (a la Monsanto ) to help control our infestations? But the wasps die after a generation, so we have to constantly buy then...

Of course it could still all be coincidence, but it's fun to think about.

Well, that escalated (and got resolved) quickly.

Personally, the 'free tiers' offered by the big PAAS and cloud providers are good enough for small projects and MVPs-- can't beat free. If and when extra resources are needed, it's usually easier to just start paying at that point rather than to switch platforms entirely.

Free tiers are are extremely effective (albeit crafty) in a "the-first-one-is-on-the-house" kinda way.

I often hear or read about how there is a developer/software engineer shortage. And the rising salaries seem to reflect that-- supply and demand and all that...

Yet it seems that there are hundreds of applicants vying for each position.

How is this possible? Are there really that many lesser-skilled people trying to finagle their way in as software developers? Is the shortage one of _skilled_ engineers, while the deluge of applicants is a result of posers and imposters trying to get a slice of the pie?

I made it 3/4 of the way through the video, then clicked around the website in frustration looking for the download button.

The fact that China's government moves so decisively in areas of technological advancement may have to do with the fact that many of their government officials have degrees in engineering, science, math, etc.

With so many of the Chinese officials having technical degrees, I can't help but wonder if the United States government could benefit from technocrats in Washington.

Bonus points for landing government contracts if you can fit into one of the underrepresented/minority/disadvantaged group or small business categories.

There's basically a quota that some percentage of contracts must be awarded to those groups.

Amazon Web Services free tier, elastic beanstalk running node.js, S3 for static files and stuff or basic web page hosting

or

Google Cloud free tier, Google App Engine running node.js, google cloud storage for static files and stuff or basic web page hosting

both are git-compatible and deployments are as easy as : "eb deploy" or "gcloud app deploy"

for front end stuff, if its just a prototype i just copy a bootstrap 'live preview' design that i like, and jquery stuff together.

There are also vision exercises on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/VisualExercises

It is totally possible to improve your ability to focus visually using these. Just doing them on occasion, or once a day for a few minutes can be enough to counter the negative effects of staring at a screen all day.

"Although some of these problems may not result in symptoms under less visually demanding conditions, the high demands of computer work cause them to become manifest. "

THIS. After about 7 years of staring at a screen all day at work, then coming home and staring at a screen all night (gaming, programing, etc), plus marijuana = dry squinty eyes-- the cumulative effect was that my eyes began to always focus slowly and unevenly, especially on things far away.

I got glasses and they helped, but it felt like more of a bandaid than a solution.

I have since reduced my close-up computer screen usage dramatically. I also do the occasional eye exercises (youtube has a lot of these and they really help).

I stopped wearing glasses and spend more time outside and away from the screen so my eyes actually have more things to do than look at bright pixels 3 feet away.

If I could give any advice to my younger self it would be to minimize long stretches of staring at the screen. Take plenty of breaks to give your eyes a break.

The altcoin crowd insists that people with a lot of bitcoins can and do "diversify" their cryptocurrency holdings by exchanging them for altcoins, thus making bitcoin somewhat of a "reserve" cryptocurrency.

This would also give those mining altcoins a nice market to convert their coins to btc and subsequently cash out.

I guess the question is, if bitcoin drops, will everything drop? Or will spreading your stake around the altcoin minefiled be enough to protect against huge losses?

The new Black Mirror season had an episode about this very concept called Arkangel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkangel_(Black_Mirror)

This episode explores some of the risks that monitoring and censoring children can have on their development and also the effect it can have on the parents themselves.

No. My dad still calls them "bitcorns." He heard about them on NPR.

It's anecdotal, but cryptocurrencies practically don't exist in my non tech-related social circles.

Very cool study on the loss of magic. There has always been anecdotal advice floating around about how to regain the 'magic', but it's good to have some empirical evidence on what actually works.

One of the odd factors that I've heard of but didn't see listed was the "someone new" factor. It maybe somewhat related to the "close friend" factor. Basically, some people claim to regain some magic if you do it with someone you just recently met or reconnected with who has a low tolerance (as opposed to doing it with someone you're already familiar with). Maybe its the empathy combined with the pleasure of making a new friend...

I've heard it makes a difference... but nothing beats supplements and tolerance breaks IMO. lol

We definitely need more studies like this-- there's still so much we don't know about MDMA.

As a counterexample, I regularly lose cash money...

Sometimes money literally falls out my pocket when I fumble out a wad of cash while i'm inebriated.

Other times I carelessly leave my wallet somewhere stupid and the money "walks off."

Over the past 2 years, I've probably lost over $1000 this way.

Research into the neurotoxicity would be very extremely beneficial. The usual advice goes: "You need to protect your serotonin receptors from damage. Antioxidants like Alpha Lipoic Acid are great for this, but in a pinch, a dose of Vitamin C does the trick as well. Hence the advice to drink OJ with your molly."

However, if there was a way to completely prevent damage to the brain and eliminate tolerance, I think many many people would do MDMA every day.

Yup, there can be many mixed results from powder/crystal MDMA sold as "molly" that I can see why people go for pill presses much more since they are a bit more standardized in terms of reviews and experiences (e.g. pillreports).

Much easier to have a consistent result when your presses come from a popular and widely-known batch.

Unless you have a reagent test kit and want to do all that, it's best to have a trusted source or go for the presses IMO.

That being said, my first experience was with MDMA in crystal form, and it was the greatest thing ever.

To be honest, the idea of universal income appeals to me because it sounds like free money.

So one could simply decide not to work at all and use that UBI money for housing, food, and habits and everybody would be fine with that.

I can see how that would have appealed to my 20-something year old self; and it's not much different than how it appeals to my 30-something year old self.

The purpose of an MVP isn't to create a final product or even a polished user experience. The 'M' in MVP stands for "minimum" which could apply to features, UI, UX, and even developer effort.

The goal of an MVP is to quickly determine whether the bare necessities of an idea solves the problem.

Your use of the word "lazy" has a negative connotation; an MVP is more positively described as "sufficiently efficient."

I've found Cordova/PhoneGap extremely useful for developing mobile app MVPs. Using it on my most recent project has saved a lot of development time (which my client appreciates), while allowing us to iterate and add new features very quickly. Of course, part of that could just be my well-honed development skills; as my girlfriend often reminds me, "it's not what you do, it's how you do it."

Once we find our groove and get to a stable point in terms of features, there will probably be a refactor to another hybrid framework (flutter looks cool right now). But until then, Cordova definitely gets the job done, and I'm glad to see the platform is maturing even further instead of stagnating.

When I interviewed with Toptal, once I made it through the preliminary screenings, the final test was to build a simple web application over the course of 2-3 days in a language of my choice, and commit the code to their git repository, and demo it live.

I finished it in a day and a half; decided to use Meteor since I never used it before and figured it'd be a good time to dabble in it.

It was by far the most enjoyable part of the application process. And I think its the best indication of a developer's ability. Real-word application of the knowledge that you will probably be using 90% of the time (as opposed to theory and logic puzzles).

How will the police patrol roads when all these cars are self-driving?

Police forces will either need less patrol officers or they'll need to re-assign them somewhere other than roads. Or maybe surveillance inside vehicles to prevent any crimes being committed whilst in-transit.

What happens when someone decides to drive a non-autonomous car on the road? If they are banned someone is going to need to pull them over. If there are less police officers patrolling the roads, who will be doing all this enforcing of self-driving cars?

I like futuristic projections in that we really don't know how things will settle after a shake-up.

I've always been kind of bummed out that Hyper-V is disabled on the OS layer for basic Windows versions, even if the hardware supports it.

Co-sign on Google Music. I've started adding all new music I find this way, from albums (one-click torrent download), to singles (youtube/soundcloud-to-mp3 sites).

The Google Music Manager can be set to monitor your download directories and uploads any new music to Google Music automatically (even if they are ZIPed).

The mobile app is pretty slick too: syncs automatically, and has a 'store music locally' option for when you don't have a good connection.

This is only marginally related, but I have a story about how I "hacked" Ebay way back in 200x.

At the time they provided a free VIN report whenever you listed a vehicle for sale. VIN reports provide details of the history of your car (liens, accidents, maintenance, title transfers, etc). And the leading VIN services charge about $10 per report.

I wrote a PHP script that, when given a VIN number, would create a listing on Ebay for a car with that VIN number. The script then kicked off a website scraper which would monitor the listing page for the VIN report data to be populated (sometimes took a few seconds). Once the data was captured, the script would unlist the item (so I wouldn't be stuck selling a car that didnt exist). Bam! Free VIN reports.

So I took it a step further and registered and designed a website for it. It looked very semi-professional and web 2.0-ish as I have some decent design skills. There were sample reports and calls-to-action and everything.

A user would provide a VIN, pay with paypal checkout, and get the VIN report emailed to them within minutes. The report was stripped of all data pointing to the original source, and reformatted & rebranded with my site's name. All automated of course, since I had already wrote the scripts to do the heavy lifting.

I then set up an Adwords campaign, researched price points and settled on $7.99 per report. My ad campaign used targeted keywords that displayed my ads whenever people searched for "carfax" and "vin report", with my price displayed prominently in the ad block. The more money I allotted for ads, the more money the hack made.

For about 3 weeks I just sat back and watched the money roll in. In the interest of not drawing too much attention, I would disable the entire site and ad campaign during the day, only running it at night. I was thinking 'slow and steady wins the race.' But the whole time I was working on it, I felt a rush: part paranoia about getting caught, part excitement at crafting such a sneaky, sophisticated hack with so many moving parts.

In the end, ebay noticed an anomaly in their api usage data caused by me creating and deleting so many car listings, and sent me a nastygram.

I decided to shut up shop before they realized what I was really up to. Greed will get you 'got' quicker than not.

In the end, I learned a lot -- it was my first experience working with ad campaigns, writing parses/scrapers, and working with ebays api.

Nootropic supplements should be mentioned here as a way to boost brain performance in general, which could assist in learning new things both for children and adults.

The scientific consensus on the effects of nootropics is kinda all over the place (there are a bunch of different types out there, and different studies for the different types), but there's enough information to make an informed decision.

I had a daily nootropic "stack" that included choline and piracetam, and noticed an improvement in recall and focus. Whether it was placebo or not, I certainly felt like I was more capable of learning than baseline.

During my foray into the nootropic world, I also came across discussions about Hericium erinaceus, or lion's mane mushrooms. Studies have shown it to increase the 'nerve growth factor' which is a key measurement when it comes to growing new neurons. And since growing new neurons and making new connections between them is correlated to learning new things, and if this factor of 'neuroplasticity' decreases with age, my guess is that lion's mane can come in handy if you are an adult and want to learn to do other stuff good too.

However, I'm no expert; maybe someone with more direct experience or knowledge can weigh in.

I was also banned from AdSense a few years ago. They kept $30k that I had earned and I got no response. Still banned to this day.

It seems to me that the hardest part about fasting is tolerating the cravings for food.

Do people who fast resort to cheating the hunger urge (prescription pills, foods with no nutritional content, etc)? I know there is a well known and highly-available recreational drug that works extremely well for suppressing the urge to eat.