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mozboz

163 karma · joined January 9, 2013

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mozboz··on Java call stack – from HTTP upto JDBC as a picture (2006)
OT, but anyone have similar stack traces that show call stacks or abstractions in other layers, down to transistors, up to user?
mozboz··on Letter to Amazon Board from Fired Ad Exec
TL;DR: 'I was surprised to learn how online advertising works, my manager in a big corp made me sad.'
mozboz··on Letter to Amazon Board from Fired Ad Exec
independent of the facts, shall we not start doxing individuals here? this isn't 4chan.
mozboz··on How Rebounds Work
Clicked expecting relationship advice. Stayed to learn about basketball.
mozboz··on Ask HN: Is it possible to have forum type community running without a database?
Yes.

People (including me) are thinking about and working on personally owned and hosted data. Your forum posts live in _your_ cloud, and in a way that the features as brickcap describes are achievable.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8049890

mozboz··on Own your own data
Can you provide a reference to, or a better description of the 'ideas coming out of UK local government' please?
mozboz··on Own your own data
Perhaps I don't have enough karma to message directly, but can't see a way to send messages inside HN. Can you provide a way to contact you?
mozboz··on How the Gut's "Second Brain" Influences Mood and Well-Being (2010)
Page is down, cached copy here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OTr-CgU...

mozboz··on Poll: How many Bitcoins do you own?
At time of writing 2/7ths of respondents own > 0 bitcoin. Are there many other new technologies you'd expect 2/7ths of all respondents to use/own? Especially one that doesn't really have a direct use to most consumers yet and high risk for people investing.

2/7th's is huge.

mozboz··on New UNIX implementation (1983)
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA
:(
mozboz··on From Idea to 10 Paying Customers in Less Than a Week
omg u r teh next steven job?

What really is the point of this article? Can someone wake me up when we are ready to let go of this passive income bullshit, worshipping the 'entrepreneur' as someone who can pull money out of their ass crack by finding and statistically needling their way into some exploitative niche and start focussing on things which have real social purpose and meaning and value to their creators and users?

mozboz··on KickStarting a Revolution
Can someone enlighten me as to how this achieves anything, other than a count of people who abstained?

If you want to reform something, it seems like the required action is to reform it. Saying on record 'i want reform', or 'i don't like the old system' does not achieve anything, and in fact wastes everyones' time. The hard part: working out reform and enactioning it, still needs to be done.

Am I missing something?

mozboz··on Ask HN: I'm a chronic procrastinator – how do I break it?
There is no such thing as procrastination or avoidance.

To 'avoid' something you need to have something to avoid and a motivation to avoid it, avoidance does not exist in and of itself.

My message still applies to whatever these new 'things you really enjoy' are. If you are procrastinating over them, you are avoiding _something_ because of _a reason_, and you'll need to do very hard work to find out what's going on and the real context in which it's happening (option 1), or drop out, clean the slate, and let yourself reinvent you (option 2).

mozboz··on Ask HN: I'm a chronic procrastinator – how do I break it?
Absolutely agree with this. You're exhibiting the behaviour of someone in a deep conflict because you're not doing what you really want to do, but cultural and societal norms are forcing you to play out this role, and you're getting enough rewards from it (monetary and psychological) to keep you in this stasis of inaction.

There is no quick solution, as you can see from your father who has probably battled with the same thing all his life too and millions of people who do jobs they don't like.

You will not beat it because this situation is deeply and invisibly ingrained in today's society, and you have none of the skills required to make the deep psychological changes required.

If you want to give yourself a chance, you need to take drastic action. There are two real choices:

1) Stay inside the system: Therapy. Understand yourself, understand the real social and psychological landscape in which you're living and learn how to make real changes.

2) Get outside the system: Drop out, reinvent yourself from the ground up. Make a break, go meditate in India for a year, find out what it is you really want and give yourself the space to do it.

mozboz··on Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
I'd suggest that this effect is a somewhat superficial expression of the deeply rooted problem of people in urban situations broadly losing their personal connections with their own expressions of creativity and art, primarily through doing work that they are not engaged with in a deep, meaningful sense.

Perhaps:

- People in certain modern, urban situations crave certain types of creative expression that seem to be very hard to find in these environments.

- Social patterns place a high value on being seen to have had an experience, that provide a reward similar to being the artist.

- People capable of producing these artistic experiences are initially perhaps not so interested in managing the people who are the recipients of their creativity - they are more interested in creation.

- Once money and/or fame becomes involved, the artists are unlikely to widely share the skills that lead to the creativity arising, are motivated to protect methods of production, fetishize the product and create strong brands.

These factors together create this 'hipster' effect where small points of creativity are heavily focussed on and take a long time to replicate.

I'd hypothesize that this situation would go away if people were broadly connecting with meaningful, personal creative pursuits. Or, if the artists flipped their model once they smelled success and were motivated to share everything they were doing, allowing the experience to be rapidly replicated.

mozboz··on Don't build an app, build a business
DNR

Don't build a business, create something good.

mozboz··on Ask HN: Why don't companies open-source the source code of their old products?
Why would they? There's plenty of downside and not much upside?
mozboz··on Why Awk for AI? (1997)
Did some of my most enjoyable and productive work in awk and BBC Basic.

Minimise resistance of expressing a translation of a hypothesis from thought into a computing language at all costs: get onto the highway as fast as possible.

mozboz··on I Knew a Programmer Who Went Completely Insane
> Is there a such thing as a corruption-repellent, paychopath-kryptonite system, and if so, what is it?

Yes. Make the goal of your organisation a social good, and not making money.

mozboz··on Want to Help People? Just Give Them Money
> is directly in the hands of the people who have the most interest in using it well

That has no relation to whether or not they know how to use it well.

Improving someone's well being involves improving their well being through hands-on, interactive problem solving.

Throwing a fist full of dollar bills at someone does not directly improve their well being.

If you have, by some measure, 'low well being', there is a reason for that that is likely to be outside your direct control, otherwise you would change it. If it is inside your control, you need help to discover how - application of cash is useless without direction. If it is outside your control the help needs to be applied at a higher level, community, town, borough.. country.

It is demonstrably not the case that cash solves problems unless it is applied in meaningful, sustainable ways, which are not known or understood by many people in difficult situations, unless you are talking about people who are about to starve to death and who will buy food.

mozboz··on Want to Help People? Just Give Them Money
Reframing required: give people money only when that is the most efficient option for helping them, given the risks of a no-strings cash donation.

Otherwise, help them in a way that directly affects their wellbeing, causing a direct, measurable change in circumstance with decreased risk.

mozboz··on Online Dispute Becomes Internet-Snarling Attack
Interstitial ad != paywall
mozboz··on My Journey Starts Here
"I’m not sold anymore on the idea of starting the next big thing that will revolutionize the world."

Gah. Failed already. Get yourself connected with whatever you're actually passionate about - something that you can connect to significant meaning and value in. That _can be_ your big thing.

If you're not connected to something you're strongly passionate about, why not just go back to being employed?

mozboz··on Bitcoin blockchain issue - Mt Gox Bitcoin deposits temporarily suspended
The ability for clients to erroneously or maliciously fork the chain can't be designed out whilst keeping the system open and decentralised. The blockchain is a distributed copy of a shared truth which takes time to propagate and has to be agreed upon by all participants. If the network is open, then me, or me and 500,000 friends, can join the network and attempt to propagate a different truth.

If you compare the way the Bitcoin community responded to this with the response you might have expected from even a very well run company, I think the Bitcoin community comes out ahead.

It would be useful and or interesting to compare the Bitcoin community response with a specific failure and response of a for-profit closed-technology company, but I'm not sure what case to use for comparison.

Maybe the recent cloudflare outage?

mozboz··on Why American Eggs Would Be Illegal In A British Supermarket, And Vice Versa
To summarise the numbers: the American laws result in 0.045% of the population being affect by salmonella related disease, whereas the British laws result in 0.00093%, that's 50 times more illness in the US per capita.
mozboz··on What Coke Contains
You're absolutely right, and it's important to keep raising this point and engaging with the part of your awareness that recognises that there is nothing good about coke and many other products and businesses.

Businesses and the people that work for them need to engage with their consciences, and stop doing work that causes harm, such as producing or marketing a food product with catastrophic effects to human health.

In response to some other comments: 'because I need to earn money' is not a reason to do work that causes harm to other people, 'because i am well off' is not a reason to not challenge what you perceive as harmful.

mozboz··on A simple solution to credit card fraud, and why you won't see it any time soon
Feels like over-reactive writing. Of course big business works to protect its interests and offload costs of business to customers. Big business is also terrified and highly resistant to change to systems that are generating profit that may reduce profit, regardless of any social value.

Why is this so shocking to the author?

mozboz··on Iceland May Ban Online Porn
There's no source cited in the linked article other than The Daily Mail. For the unfamiliar, they're a British 'news outlet' who are notorious for writing articles that grossly misinterpret source data, to forward their own agenda.
mozboz··on It could happen to you too
Bitcoin.

I don't underestimate the difficulty of Bitcoin becoming a viable tool to transact daily life, but this is something that could not happen with Bitcoin. If nothing else, the fact that Bitcoin provides a fundamentally different way to transfer value, independent from state or corporate interference shows that there are potential alternatives.

mozboz··on The dirty world of Facebook EdgeRank Optimization
Not sure why this particular activity is noteworthy. The 'dirty world' described here is much, much larger. 'Affiliate Marketing' is a very broad activity that involves doing the least possible work to generate a lead or sale for an affiliate for which you will get paid, and this is just an example of that.
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