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bikeshack

874 karma · joined November 25, 2013

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bikeshack··on Things I did to reboot my life
So it's back to the concept of a recipe where the ingredients change, but the recipe sort of stays intact. Change too many ingredients and we have an entirely different dish. I like this analogy because it's less formal and more forgiving. Just make sure to stick to it in an informal manner and not abuse the leniency provided, and you shall be fine. Technically every substance is mood altering (sugar for example), but there are some that have a marked increase on judgement and mood that it is safe to treat them as suspect. When I refer to "recipe" I mean a loose guide to run with in times of crisis.
bikeshack··on Things I did to reboot my life
Seconded. There is a lot of noise on what diet is superior and which one works best. Intuitively a person knows when they've over indulged just as when we pull back when putting our hand in a flame. We just don't do it anymore, and design our lives around not ever having it happen again.

My only problem with this is the victim-hood that happens when this high carb crap clamours for our attention in ADs and the media. Invariably you will get victim-hood and people gorging and gulping their way to negate such imagery. I know I don't look at a McBigMac the same way when I've had one.

bikeshack··on Things I did to reboot my life
The problem with itemizing specific things to avoid or cut down, is they are too specific and end up becoming habits. Instead it is more suitable to form an over-arching doctrine. So instead of "Drink less beer", it should become "Avoid mood changing substances".

The reason for a more general approach is because the moment things are calcified like this, they are very difficult to uproot and change. Think of this as a recipe where the ingredients can be swapped out. The recipe doesn't change, but the ingredients do, and not so drastically that the recipe is destroyed.

bikeshack··on Write like you talk
Just ran Paul's article through Anonymouth https://github.com/psal/anonymouth Considerably changed and mangled beyond all recognition. It even sounds less persuasive in tone.
bikeshack··on Complexity budgets
I solve this with the Cynefin Framework:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8

What I love about Dave's work is that it's very Zen and self similar to nature. The more I observe complex systems, the more I realize they are just like self-organized nature. Complexity begets complexity. Novelty begets novelty. These ideas are not new.

bikeshack··on Whitemark: Steganographic encoding of a watermark in the whitespace of text
Reminds me of this talk from Defcon 2008: https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-16/dc16-presentations/d...

Tool called Whitespace used to encrypt messages

bikeshack··on Write like you talk
So I should talk in Legal English all day? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_English which is the reverse of writing as one talks, because the Rule of Law surrounds us always, except for the criminals who flout it repeatedly throughout their day.

When I write, I self censor all the time, and it is no different when I talk. We forgive and forget. We silo only certain words to certain areas of the world. "What happens in Vegas" etc. Language only becomes a problem when it is committed permanently to the footnotes of the web. You can't overlook the law aspect. You also can't so easily withdraw a statement said online.

bikeshack··on The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)
Did this article overlook the recent findings that Alcohol is similar in effects to low doses of Oxytocin and thus influences a 'trust decision'?
bikeshack··on Do you know how much your computer can do in a second?
Some of the work of Distributed.net ( http://www.distributed.net/Main_Page ) is wonderful. Does anyone know if this idea could be more than it is currently, where computers (more than ever) are sitting idly and not contributing their cycles in any meaningful way? Even 5 minutes of raw CPU 100% usage per device could do some serious computation. Theoretically superseding modern supercomputers.
bikeshack··on Why Tech Entrepreneurs Love Burning Man
Yes it has turned into The Hacienda at this stage. It has its roots in Temporary Autonomous Zones / Pirate Utopias, but has since seen the attention of the gentrifiers.

The Hacienda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ha%C3%A7ienda

Gentrification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

bikeshack··on Netflix Is Dumping Anti-Virus, Presages Death of an Industry
I like tools that rather than scan for signatures (which can be polymorphic in nature and bypass AV), they can look for out-of-place behaviour on the OS. The Sysinternals Suite is great for malware hunting: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062

And things like Reason Core are brilliant for nuking any rootkits that somehow get on to a system https://www.reasoncoresecurity.com/

Malware has grown up and is now residing in hardware and can survive entire OS re-installs. I feel sorry for Windows users these days because malware has grown up and it is not as obvious you have malware. In the past there were obvious signs you were infected and the malware made itself known (sort of stupid when you're an attacker really).

Also some of the 'second opinion' tools are interesting too:

http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro

bikeshack··on Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea
Ideas are not stolen, they are merely moved to where they can fully blossom
bikeshack··on Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance
Except for the part when they will care eventually. Secrecy loves silence
bikeshack··on Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea
Seconded
bikeshack··on Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea
It is not a rare case that some startup will have more seed capital than you and a lot more drive. They will probably have an entire team of hungry interns too working for free to push out product revisions. I say let them steal my ideas all they want, because frankly if my idea gains some weight, my job is done and I can go home. No I will not smoke a cigar in a Hawaiian beach house because of it, but that is not the point. If egoism and money gets in the way of idea dissemination we have a real problem.
bikeshack··on RedditStorage
Also in 2010 there was a file storage system based on Bitly: https://nealpoole.com/blog/2010/12/bit-ly-file-storage-cleve... Super clever idea, except for the part where Bitly now sprinkles links with affiliate codes to make $$$
bikeshack··on RedditStorage
Wikipedia is full of hidden messages. A common pattern I have observed is the first letter of a sentence being used to string together a message. You can read more about this tactic here https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Subliminal_Messages
bikeshack··on Twitter needs to offer a better explanation for why it killed off Politwoops
Part of the reason ties into centralization. If Twitter was plumbing, i.e it formed the backbone of apps (which it does not, as their API is forever shifting and not 'open' in the truest sense), then sites like this could be tolerated. It would be perfectly okay to have an ecosystem of non-siloed data which originally resided on Twitter's servers, but Twitter exercise ownership for that data, and are using sites like this to make an example of people. A bit sad really
bikeshack··on US hit by 'massive data breach'
A great talk by Jake Appelbaum that one should watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kilAPZ-vGA A very in depth and revealing talk about the current state of the union of 'identity' on the web and the apparent digital doppelgängers we carry around with us. Frankly the notion of a digital doppelgänger is hillarious and identity is not a hard problem when people are effectively schizoid when they surf and flitter between multiple idens all the time.
bikeshack··on 6 Brilliant Ideas for Repurposing Content to Increase Traffic
Would hate to be caught in that game
bikeshack··on Are Emoji ruining the English language?
I would not get in a moral panic about Emoji ruining English. After all: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fred/emoji-dick

Emoji is a bit of fun, and the argument that it has poisoned young people's ability to learn true English is weak, because English is not going away any time soon.

bikeshack··on Pinterest's Buy it
I am sure they would much prefer purchases go through their site instead of a (third party) affiliate code then eh?
bikeshack··on Emot.es – All your favorite emoticons in one place
╯‵Д′)╯彡┻━┻
bikeshack··on Mark Zuckerberg's Year of Books: The Full List
"Orwell's Revenge", by Peter Huber was a bit unexpected:

http://amazon.decenturl.com/1984

What it says about Mark Zuckerberg: Is he preparing for a dystopian world? Quite likely, yes.

bikeshack··on Facebook Confirms It Will Officially Support GIFs
Looping MP4s are not GIFs
bikeshack··on Ask HN: Good business or technology book recommendations?
A few favourites of mine I read recently. Rushkoff's book is my favourite and there is lots of insight in Rushkoff's book. The others are mandatory reading for technologists IMHO

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, by Ray Kurzweil

http://amazon.decenturl.com/make-a-mind

Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, by Douglas Rushkoff

http://amazon.decenturl.com/ten-commands

Cool Tools, by Kevin Kelly

http://amazon.decenturl.com/cool-tools

(Yes, those are affiliate links)

bikeshack··on MobaXterm free Xserver and tabbed SSH client for Windows
Where is it storing the keys? The amount of clients I have tested that store keys in plaintext locally on the hard drive. It is mostly trivial to hoover these up if you are so inclined. Most malware checks for the default paths to keys on your system. Of course, if the value you enter is checked against a hash we are fine, but most people do not take that step of entering the pass each time. In other words, if I can fire up the application and suddenly I'm in an SSH session, so can anybody else. A common technique I have seen in some clients is using the machine GUID as a salt to login, but even that can be hoovered up by malware and replayed on another system.
bikeshack··on Ask HN: Do you feel like you're missing out?
What if OP genuinely is missing out on something? I have followed this discussion, and a vast many people are equating 'Fear of Missing Out' with a 'Freedom of Missing Out'. The argument that the internet has made spatial disadvantage obsolete because (apparently) we can now call anybody, any-time, from anywhere is a myth. The thoughts of cold calling influential people in Silicon Valley to discuss a new coding project frankly terrifies me. I would much rather afford to bump into them casually and spark up a conversation the natural way. i.e: Over coffee, or by way of bumping into them randomly on the street. So many great things start that way, and I dare suggest the Googles and the Amazons were born naturally like that as they are insiders clubs.

There are many countries where the Internet is disagreeable and molasses slow compared to Silicon Valley, and also a vast many people who can not even afford a keyboard to type on, never mind having several Herman Miller chairs in the office with exposed brick walls with fixies hanging on them. I know a few friends who are making their office like that just to replicate Silicon Valley, but that is like wearing an olympic medal for a few minutes just to see what it is like winning the race, but without having to run it. Maybe OP wants that, if not for the part where spatial disadvantage disallows it, or for the part where simply not having access to capital disallows it. Fair enough, research suggests we are not in another bubble, but those studies did not factor in how cheap it is to start things now, and how much leverage we have. Product Hunt is a perfect example of how far we have come in terms of leverage. It is basically free now to 'start something' or commit to a cause.

I think OP is referring to the amount of shoestring businesses / bootstrappers that are sprouting from the woodwork because of pure opportunism and nothing else. Perhaps they do believe in their idea and are causing parties to happen. Perhaps they are stuck in a hype machine. The internet is, after all, the perfect hype machine. Social media (especially Twitter) has allowed ideas to become a dime a dozen but with no real traction behind them. Ideas are allowed to sprout but quickly become ephemera. Ideas usually stick around much longer when they are on Apache servers however; but that doesn't qualify those ideas any further - it just appears that way, and seems like the webmaster is on to something because money was thrown at the idea, but the webmaster is not following up on the idea. You still see sites that were setup 10 years ago that are only online because they are monetized by Adsense. It seems 'Founders' have become the new 1998 webmasters.

bikeshack··on Famous Engine – JavaScript library for animations and interfaces
Why is it called famous?
bikeshack··on Your data is your lifeblood
There is also the issue of Google Analytics / Segment.io hoarding massive amounts of BizIntel. I prefer Piwik:

https://piwik.org/

The EFF.org site uses Piwik and for good reason.

And where possible, I like to move data around when I can and make it portable:

http://dataportability.org/

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