Hacker News Reader

drewwon Growl 1.3.1 is out, no longer free

since you're being deliberately obtuse, i'll spell it out for you on his behalf.

WILL USERS STILL LIKE IT, WHICH IS WHAT GETS DEVELOPER SUPPORT, NOW THAT IT COSTS MONEY?

drewwon Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

ask any woman how often she considers her personal safety navigating the world. consider how often you do it.

drewwon Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

keep telling women what to do because you know better, i'm sure that will end the sexism really fast

drewwon Dave Winer: Why I stand up for Stallman

i guess the advanced high school was so advanced they still had recess...

drewwon Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

your faith in the police to protect women is almost charmingly naive.

drewwon Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

the daily life of most women is filled with navigating a hostile space that may break out into sexual violence at any time.

having an obsessed troll on the internet following you around, or threatening you before you show up to a conference, goes way beyond what you're talking about here.

your whole point comes from a place of the privilege of relative security. imagine that is not the case.

drewwon Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment

empathy will fix it.

you are illustrative of the problem because you are a) ignorant of what harassment is really like b) apparently unwilling to imagine it and c) BLAMING THE HARASSED

drewwon Show HN: A storebuilder contained in a single text area

TBH i think the email method mentioned up-thread is more awesome, but wtf do i know. you could do that more quickly, it would seem to me.

drewwon Brin on Yegge's post: "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages"

Here you go, Sergey: "You're being a dick."

drewwon Ask HN: Please review my site "Smoke Signal"

i like the site. i would prefer a more passive indicator, that indicates my status in a less strident tone.

drewwon Why your new programming language won't work

i read it as making fun of knee jerk anti-new-language types, as in, all their arguments are pat and repetitive.

maybe that's just my perceptual bias, but perhaps also the greater context of hacker news that you point to in your comment. i tend to believe that things are posted here in support of experimentation.

drewwon The Bitcoin Crypto-Currency Mystery Reopened

http://news.ycombinator.com

apparently.

drewwon The Bitcoin Crypto-Currency Mystery Reopened

"For one, it begs credulity that someone who has filed patent applications dealing with cryptography had never heard of Bitcoin until I asked about it. That would be like a journalist claiming he never heard of Twitter."

this is a baseless assertion and essentially the crux of his argument. maybe real cryptographers don't spend any time thinking about bitcoin because it has the same relationship as twitter and real journalism.

drewwon 0day vulnerability full disclosure: American Express

(IANAL)

more than likely, yes. see US vs. auernheimer for a recent example. the complaint is here: http://i.cdn.turner.com/dr/teg/tsg/release/sites/default/fil...

The complaint indicates that AT&T's publicly accessible endpoint is a protected computer under Title 18, United States Code, Section 1030(e)(2). a protected computer is basically any computer used for interstate or foreign commerce in the US, or outside the US if it affects the commerce thereof.

the issue hinges on intent - if you know that you're exceeding authorized access to obtain something of value. 18 USC 1030 was created in 1986 by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and is often panned for being incredibly broad.

See this wikipedia page for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

(IANAL)

drewwon Anonymous Twitter Alternative Created For Protesters & Revolutionaries

so... you give it your location? from your cellphone? sounds pretty anonymous.

drewwon I was once a Facebook fool

don't you ever question the strange phenomenon of these giant inhuman corporations manipulating us to the point where we choose one as a team, adopting our allegiance to them as an salient feature of our identity?

they don't give a fuck about us, at all - by definition, they are incapable of doing so.

drewwon Salesforce buys Assistly for $50M in cash

such a good service - hope the project continues to receive the kind of stewardship it has gotten thus far.

if you haven't tried it, you're missing out.

drewwon Salesforce buys Assistly for $50M in cash

have you used either one? because you'd understand why acquiring assistly is more attractive.

drewwon OnStar Begins Spying On Customers’ GPS Location For Profit

It's true that OnStar's TOS is awful, but the author leaps to several inflammatory conclusions that, to me, seem unjustified.

The most obvious one is when he mentions the boilerplate about a part of OnStar being sold, and then theorizes that they are actually planning to sell, perhaps even to one of those great boogeymen, Apple or Google.

drewwon All His Life Has He Looked Away, to the Future...

they're both smug - what's confusing to me is why anyone who is not a major shareholder of these enormous corporations has feelings about these relatively boring narratives.

drewwon The dark side of an MIT brain

MIT - not a school known for its English or Journalism programs.

drewwon Why must you laugh at my back end?

this stack is... interesting. but the real problem, i think, with what he's saying, is that it is basically "i refuse to learn anything new that is not tightly bound to what i already know".

it's true that the laughter is unnecessary, and the trends and hype can be obnoxious, but it is somewhat about the excitement of always learning new things and new ways to think.

drewwon The Fall of Groupon: Is the Daily-Deals Site Running Out of Cash?

if groupon is losing money on every customer, adding more customers actually exacerbates the cash flow problem, and every time those customers buy a deal, groupon goes farther in the hole. they use the cash to pay their oldest debts but eventually there will be a reckoning.

it's unfathomable to me that it would be an attractive investment.

drewwon Pair Programming at a Startup: time sink or saviour?

Remember "Dabblers and Blowhards" http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

drewwon The Fall of Groupon: Is the Daily-Deals Site Running Out of Cash?

it's increasingly clear that groupon is essentially a ponzi scheme with some graphic design. can't wait for the post mortem documentary a la "the smartest guys in the room".

drewwon Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

thanks for your response - do you have a link to any data that shows the outcome of holding the basket of goods fixed? i will try to find some as well, just thought you might have some data handy.

drewwon Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

i don't think you can really make an argument that the GDP graph given in the google link is applicable to what i said. but if you can, i'd be interested to hear it.

drewwon Warren Buffett: Stop coddling the super rich

living standards have improved despite the rich getting richer.

Citation needed. Please explain how the living standard in the US can have improved if real wages have fallen. Oh wait, the answer is an incredible increase in consumer debt. That seems to be working out.

Keep calm and carry on.

drewwon AWS Post-Mortem

check out item no 3. on this list, which is AWS lessons-learned: http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-u...

and: http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html for the other simian themed services they've developed for care and feeding of their AWS stuff.

drewwon Detroit in Ruins

it was obvious from that comment alone, and then became overwhelmingly obvious that that is why he was uncomfortable based on his other responses in the thread.