hoggle

"I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work."

Bertrand Russell - "In Praise of Idleness" - http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

"Leisure: The Basis Of Culture" by Josef Pieper also seems on topic, I'm planning to read it myself - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/767958.Leisure

References are from comments on here yesterday - "How did we get so busy?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7769610

I don't know if the OP is still contracting but if he is, something like Brennan Dunn's "Double Your Freelancing Rate" could help with working less on more interesting / higher paid projects - http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com

Thanks, very much appreciated!

That was exactly what I needed at the moment, thanks for sharing "In Praise of Idleness". Brainwashed as I am I keep thinking that I need to shake the slave mentality and focus my life on leisure time to ultimately become more productive of course.

"It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English (up to fifty words used in correct context) [even higher since Sagan died] no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese."

~ Carl Sagan

"Creeping normality" also known as "death by a thousand cuts" or in the context of the "boiling frog" story - the war of attrition, lobbyists generally excel at this.

Most of us are too busy to notice and/or are underestimating the negative impact of a large sum of little policies.

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

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

TL;DR Be mindful of reflections when taking a picture.

"Conclusion

Clear and simple: the reflected images in pictures might disclose information that you wouldn’t be willing to share, such as your location or other personal details."

"Finally, do not forget that a reflection could be your enemy."

On a tangent - I didn't realize that the google maps 3D rendering has gotten so good over the last couple of years. I wonder how hard it would be to scrape the point data and satellite textures to source a GTA map, I'd love to cruise through actual Vice City with the GTA V engine.

If you haven't checked it out yourselves - breath-taking WebGL view of Miami (Chrome, OSX):

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Miami,+FL/@25.7747883,-80....

I really liked the part about there actually being low intersection between developers who know embedded systems and web technology.

The new web administration interface will still be written in Lua but they will push all the markup handling to the browser. Embedded systems are probably the best example where having a slim json api together with a rich client side html5 app is the most beneficial.

I'm somewhat intrigued to look into how I could possibly contribute, seems like they need web developers.

http://luci.subsignal.org/trac/wiki/Documentation/JsonRpcHow...

It's good that the lab you worked in had good standards in place but can you be sure this is the case for most labs?

I'm very much interested in this as well.

"There are huge political, monetary and bureaucratic reasons, too."

As a standard web / mobile developer how could I help at least in those areas?

Sorry, the sentence really is a bit off.

The point I was trying to make was essentially that it seems logical to me that a higher crime rate can be connected to substantial inequalities in terms of opportunities / wealth.

Sorry, I'm actually from Austria I don't really know anything about that, interesting though.

It probably has to do more with being open to immigration and innovation than being ruthlessly capitalistic that the US has been able to maintain its competitive edge.

Immigrating to the US has become harder over the years and "regulators" are against potentially disruptive technologies like Bitcoin while countries like Denmark are trying to embrace those kinds of technologies.

It remains to be seen if the USA can maintain its position going forward. In any case it's tough times ahead for many highly privileged economies. I'm from Austria and the disconnect between what used to be and the current realities is often huge. I guess the most important thing is to not get blinded by your own success, then you survive and possibly even thrive.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23og0b/danish_polit...

To me it ultimately boils down to fairness and having a sense of "being in this together". A very good example to me is the firefighter mentioned in the article, he probably does a much more productive job (saving lives) than someone like myself who might get lucky in playing the entrepreneurial / technologist bootstrapping game by striking it rich with some cost-reducing / profit-boosting tool-building. Alas, it's problematic to make these kind of comparisons though (you could argue some tool saves even more lifes, etc).

The "smells" of extreme ideology..

In any case I still believe it's fair to try to spread the wealth more evenly as you and I couldn't even build stuff without the solid framework of society.

I answered your question somewhat in another comment in this article's thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7628811

When I visited San Francisco some years ago I was appalled by the many comments on all the people living on the streets as being "homeless by choice". It also seems to me as if having to switch to the other side of the street or by having to circumvent a dangerous block as some form of coercion resulting from a very inconsiderate and self-serving illusion that everybody starts life with a similarly equivalent set of cards.

As a privileged individual (middle class, white, male, above average IQ) I've always found the liberal point of view naturally alluring but ultimately it seems to be dishonest and unethical no matter how many ideological writings on anarcho-capitalist theory I keep reading. So again, while I like the ideas of extreme freedom (voluntaryism, etc) in the end it seems like it's just extreme ideology disconnected from reality and actually resulting in less freedom.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Liberty

I urge people to check out Sweden once in their lives, it's such an open and fair place in comparison to most countries in the world. Even though I'm reading a lot of anarcho-capitalist theory recently (yes, because I like Bitcoin) I still believe all of the liberals miss (or subconsciously omit?) some fundamental social truths which the Swedes seem to recognize pretty consciously.

I always felt like there unfortunately was no proper alternative to libopenssl (might be unfair but it seemed like a somewhat smelly library) but thanks to this event I've now been made aware of all the alternatives.

How much more fun/comfortable is NSS/GnuTLS to use in a typical C project in comparison to OpenSSL?

Great potential to learn for developers and users alike this heartbleed.

YEAH to staying forever young and being white, male and without kids! No, honestly we don't have enough context. Maybe there simply wasn't anybody around willing to do the job before and if somebody would need it like in your example then maybe startup guy would "get fired"? Who knows? Context.

Another interesting article on that topic:

"Enter The Blockchain: How Bitcoin Can Turn The Cloud Inside Out"

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/22/enter-the-blockchain-how-bi...

What I'm interested in the most would be a new way to do Email. P2P and secure. I can't believe that most of us are still sending Email unencrypted but then again can you really blame us? PGP has failed not only in its main use case (trust in people, really?) but most of all in terms of usablity.

That's a difficult but worthwhile topic to discuss as we need to be mindful of those kinds of disconnects as privileged tech workers. Would it still be un-ethical if there'd be no one willing to do it? Can we ever know?

Maybe if there was some kind of token connected with paying the services the originator would be able to stash a lot of them very cheaply at the very beginning of the network's lifecycle - think Bitcoin/Namecoin again.

Namecoin, Ethereum and Open Transactions come to mind.

Maybe the future is much more evenly distributed and we all make a living by offering energy and computing power to those services? Why did PGP never take off? I would love to set up my own "miner" for it to play its part in a truly decentralized and secure Email service. Open source as the "business model" is key in that scenario.

I don't have enough energy nor am I smart enough to actually create those kinds of services but I do feel stuff like that is the way out of this mess.

Interesting articles on topic:

"Enter The Blockchain: How Bitcoin Can Turn The Cloud Inside Out"

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/22/enter-the-blockchain-how-bi...

"Can Namecoin Obsolete ICANN (and More)?"

http://theumlaut.com/2014/02/05/namecoin-icann/

A great way to push policies and technologies towards a more regulated Internet.

I might have my tinfoil hat on here but without any doubt we need to make away with all the centralization because that's what is the problem, really.

Aggressive push towards distributed services - think bittorrent/sync and bitcoin/blockchain technology as the solution to distributed network attacks.

Challenge accepted?

That's the real elephant in the room, it's about minority vs majority - Captain James T. Kirk would vigorously defend Dorian Nakamoto's rights for privacy.

Look at the man and how distressing all of this must be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrrtA6IoR_E

The trick is to love yourself.

"If you get rich, you have an apartment with an extra bedroom - and then you die."

"I've accumulated no money but I accumulate a lot of happiness."

-Arunachalam Muruganantham

I would think the decentralised approach would always be able to compete when we factor in transportation costs which usually make up a pretty significant percentage of the actual sales price with centralised mass production. Much more of the money stays in the local economies too.

http://www.mapsofindia.com/top-ten/india-crops/cotton.html

Even if this particular business model would "only" work in India it'd be a success.

I'm still in total awe, Mr. Muruganantham is a true hacker.

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1

I hope Sergey Brin's artificial meat project will take off soon, there is this constantly increasing demand for cheap meat which has been one of the main reasons behind the increase of factory farms over the years:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2013/aug/05/google-...

Also for node programmers there is https://github.com/mranney/node_pcap I remember doing some pcap C programming some years ago but node with its streaming nature and powerful js derived abstractions is just so much more satisfying to me, simply less boilerplate and tons of fun - don't fall too far down the well.. then again it's Saturday tomorrow! ;)

I guess it boils down to respect - for both sides, young and old. Thanks for the compiler error ;)