Hacker News Reader

cbryanon FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts

Pirate radio stations have been operating for a while and people are rarely charged with a crime. This guy from Corpus Christi handled it like hell. When he talked to the FCC agent he admitted that he was running the CB station. The agent never had to enter the house to prove it, this guy was free and clear until he said 'yup, that's mine alright'.

As far as I can tell the article is saying that this could turn sour. The FCC is reserving this right and it could have disastrous consequences. If the EFF is really worried about it I'm sure they'd be glad to defend someone and hopefully set a positive precedent. (If not the EFF, possibly the ACLU.)

In short: avoid talking to cops. When you do, don't say much.

cbryanon Ubuntu One : Store, Sync & Share

It does certainly look like that, but I think that this could turn into something alot cooler, something alot more than Dropbox.

I'd imagine that this will stay Ubuntu-exclusive and will start to act as a 'your-computer-in-the-cloud' sort of thing where you can plug your Ubuntu device into the network and have all of your apps and data instantly available.

Ubuntu-only-ness will let the dev team concentrate on making sure that the default Ubuntu apps will sync perfectly and it's open-source nature will let people write other clients that concentrate on other devices.

FWIW, this is all wild speculation. I think that Shuttleworth already knows what the market is like and I'm sure he's taken Dropbox/rsync-users into account.

cbryanon GitHub releases integrated issue tracking

Branching!

The way that git deals with branching is great. I'm a real fan of the way that it lets me context switch. This feature isn't a result of git's distributed nature, but I think it's worth switching VCS's for.

One of the advantages it certainly gave me is that there isn't any difference between the local and remote repositories. There aren't any daemons to start and no infrastructure to keep up; just initialize your repo and go!

cbryanon Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN?

I'm glad someone mentioned this. MeFi has done really well and certainly hasn't lost steam since requiring a paid account. If HN were to go in a paid direction I think the posts and comments should be available to anyone (a la MeFi).

cbryanon Google Reader API

Thanks for posting this. I know it's three-ish years old now, but I still hadn't heard of it.

cbryanon MBTA to roll out free wifi on all commuter rail lines (Boston)

This is awesome. I really enjoyed having Wifi on my rides into Boston from Worcester. Hopefully it gets a little more reliable; I had trouble with it a few times.

cbryanon Planet organic

I'm really disappointed with this article. It slams 'organic' farming and says that those methods lead to lower yields but it fails to explain why or cite any sources. Seems like journalistic troll.

Coversely, I hope we can have a good discussion as to how different types of farming effect our ability to produce food. These sites might be a good starting point:

http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/Concept.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_agriculture http://attra.ncat.org/

cbryanon Ask YC: Learning an Editor

I started using Emacs a few months back and I found that having a keybinding reference next to your computer is super handy. So long as you know what you're trying to do, you can just look it up and do it. After a while the commands will become second nature. Muscle memory baby!

I found this really nice visual cheat-sheet by Stephen Chan and it helped me a ton. There are a few text references out there but I think this is by far the best.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/264676/NotesheetEmacs

PS: Look around for information on modes, they're worth mastering.

cbryanon A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

Hmm... The software apparently didn't pass the Turkey Test.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001075.html

cbryanon Thoughts on Physical Social Networking (hello my name is E)

I think it could work, but I think it would have to marketed differently. Right now it seems aimed towards the twenty-something web developer who might be more casual. I think there's an equally large opening for a device like this marketed towards more traditional businessmen. Replace the Rolodex, make migrating to social networking apps easier, etc.

The device is certainly a limitation too. Maybe think about ways it could be implemented as a mobile phone app? The hardware infrastructure for mobile apps already exists, and people are already comfortable with it. Bluetooth would be nice, but I don't know how easy it is to leverage that sort of technology.

cbryanon How Cops Really Want to Police

This is great! The way the post is worded, I thought I would disagree, but I think that community policing is a great way to deal with problems. The court system seems okay at handling large problems, yet fails with petty crime.

An anarchistic community-based justice model might just work, especially if the police are already thinking this way.

cbryanon Silicon Valley Engineer Testifies on Need to Retain Talented High-Tech Students and Professionals

I don't think its about lowering labor costs. A highly-skilled foreign born worker can still command as much as his native born counterpart.

I do think that this is about retaining talented workers and bolstering our knowledge-centric economy. These people are motivated enough to come to the US and succeed, we should try to keep them.

cbryanon Hey Firefox - Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine

As much as choice is a good thing, I don't think that the default should change from being Google. Mozilla gets a huge amount of money from Google for directing searches there. The money they make by doing this lets this great open source browser keep making headway.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/23/google-continues-to-ban...

If you want a default search other than Google, you can certainly change it. Just a quick trip to about:config.

http://www.firefoxfacts.com/2008/01/13/change-default-search...

cbryanon Ask YC: Mac Text Editors

I use TextMate because it just goes. The defaults work great for me and it has builtin support for 90% of what I want to do. I was a big Aquamacs user, but when I stupidly lost my .emacs I just couldn't justify the time it would take to rebuild it.

I'll go back to Aquamacs someday, but for now I'm a TextMate guy.

cbryanon DHH: Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco?

I'm surprised that noone's really talking about money here. The Bay Area has one of the highest costs of living of any city in the country. That means its going to take that much more of your time to work, to make money, and to live. If you're spending your time working to live, that means you're not using that time to work on your projects.

Right now I'm taking a culture hit. Living in Worcester, MA certainly doesn't put me at the center of startup culture, but Boston and Providence are close enough. I can take the bus/train and find myself surrounded by technically oriented people. A low cost of living in this town is what allows me to work less and affords me the free time to work on my projects. To me, this time to work is alot more valuable.

(Oh, there is culture in Worcester. You just have to dig. :)

cbryanon Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Shriram Krishnamurthi (Free Book)

This book is great. It's by no means written in plain english; It's definitely an academic text, but Shriram does a wonderful job of explaining how programming languages can be implemented.

Certainly worth a page-through for any hacker.

cbryanon Valley Newbies: What Slowdown?

I'll admit, I'm a bit spooked that that all of my work is going to dry up suddenly because of the big bad recession. But I haven't noticed anything yet; I still have contract work and people pestering me for a resume.

How's everyone else doing?

cbryanon Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault

While keeping vast amounts of data in your head isn't worth it because of the internet, it is certainly still important to know this stuff off the top of your head.

The more that you keep in your head for later means that you have more information with which to provide a context for other information.

An example: I've been reading Noam Chomsky's book on the Balkans, and I remembered a few things he said. When I saw that Kosovo declared independence via the BBC I had a better understanding of how important that was. This type of stuff doesn't happen when you're sucking info from the internet on demand. When I see some news article, I don't lurk around Wikipedia for an hour researching it, I skip it.

FWIW, knowing is still important. The internet does not replace your brain. It replaces books (kinda).