twostoned

I agree with this. Mobile to me seems boring but I grew up in an age, and with a cohort, who was much more into messing about with computers and seeing what we could do with them.

Mobile seems so restricted and I'm always amazed by how effectively distracted by phones people generally are. The games and apps to me seem utterly boring in comparison to hacking about on some open source project, making games, or working on something. Computers are fun, and were always fun because you could do so many things. iOS seems like a bunch of lame apps and a web browser with a camera somehow wedged in there.

I'm friends with a Computer Engineer who just finished his undergrad and he doesn't have the hacker spirit at all. I doubt he even knows who Stallman is and considers some of the most basic config a huge hassle. I don't think this is necessarily a reflection of Engineers in general but I always wonder why he studied computers at all. He doesn't seem to enjoy them.

I remember when what.cd was taken down someone on reddit saying, perhaps hyperbolically (perhaps not) something like, "this has ruined the internet for me; it's no longer for fun. only work" or something along those lines. I always think of that comment and don't really disagree with it: as this technology ages and matures the things that made it fun or interesting in the first place to me seem to be slowly getting destroyed. All these little battles keep getting lost and as time progresses it's just kind of "meh..". Instead of wondering what we can do with computers maybe we're finding out?

Proverbs for Paranoids #3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. --Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

I don't disagree in principle, "Be the change you want to see in the world" and all that, but climate change from an individual level to me seems silly, or perhaps overwhelming. I have stopped really worrying about it in the Dr. Strangelove sense because it's out of control. We're supposed to sort our plastics and papers and yet all of our options available for purchase have been shipped, at least in part, from across the Pacific Ocean? There's airplanes littering the skies yet I'm supposed to worry about putting my banana peels into a compost bin? I actually don't understand. I feel like a lot of business decisions are made that we, as peons, have no say in that affect the overall biosphere a lot and then we're made to feel bad about it. "Ride your bike!" "Recycle!" "Don't forget to turn your lights off when you're not in the room!" Meanwhile: Fracking. ookay...

On topic: I have little doubt there's a strong link between climate change in general and the production and consumption of livestock.

I've actually noticed this and was totally blown out of the water by it. I understand you can use getwd() and setwd() but I thought you could simply do relative paths (similar to other languages) but it doesn't always work and I haven't figured it out.

For example, if you are loading a data.frame from a csv, my.df <- as.data.frame(read.csv("file.csv")) seems to work if the R script is in the same directory as the .csv. This is what I tend to do in .Rmd code chunks (which is my primary R workflow). It also tends to work across platforms which is handy as who knows what box I'm going to be hacking away on. However, R's preference for absolute paths in general I find very strange as I'm always on different machines with, of course, different directory structures. Isn't everyone?

Regardless, R is funky but I think I like it in a sort of awkward 'first date not sure yet' kind of vibe. I'm a noob and novice programmer otherwise though so who knows.

This makes multilingualism seems incredibly important (which I think it is)

This might have been asked already but would you mind linking me to said TED talk?

I honestly love reading stuff like this, especially on a tech board like HN. Sometimes these days I feel like I'm not allowed to be disconnected. It is beautifully refreshing to hear about others who think that it's okay. Let's find ways to use tech to our advantage and not have it control our lives.

I have been reading the comments wondering if this was a specific GMail webmail thing. I'm guessing that using IMAP or POP3 through an email client will make this harder? I'm by no means without risk but I rarely use the GMail web-client so wasn't sure exactly what the scam was

As a musician, this post turned me on a bit.

I am baffled by this also. It doesn't even make sense that industry is STILL trying to stop file sharing. I literally forgot about this argument until recently; It's hard to imagine something less important to worry about. Yes, I would download a car.

I sort of understand what you mean. I've been in music production, more of a hobbyist, for the last decade and need to upgrade my hardware. Seirra doesn't seem like a great upgrade and Apple hardware seems like garbage. I'm shocked. My 2009 MBP is obsolete but then there's nothing for me to migrate to. I'd go 100% Linux if it wasn't for Logic and Photoshop + Illustrator.

So are Apple Pigs or Dogs then? Surely we're the sheep.