reeses

I think the part where he said the poor kid "would be forced to sit on a spike," may have not been a serious proposal. Extrapolate from that what you will.

"I'd rather fly $500 return to Tokyo, because some rich guy upfront is paying $4000 for a flat bed"

NB: I'm 40 and didn't have these issues when I was younger/fitter/elasticker.

I pay $10k+ for a flat bed to Asia because I find that I can be off the plane and ready for a meeting the next business day, with no need to take an extra day or two on either end. Little seats that don't recline all the way are a recipe for back pain, neck pain, or just general low-grade misery, as if air travel isn't annoying enough. It's not really about "rich" (although I'm glad I have the option) but more about productivity and not losing time. The same thing happened with Saturday stay-overs on round trips (I don't know if they still do this) or one-way tickets being as or more expensive than round trips, because business customers often prefer to be home on weekends.

All that said, I generally book business and upgrade myself to first, so I'm not feeling the full $10-15k pressure myself. Also, I only book international first on vacations, when it's miles/points anyway, for which the spendy fares help out a lot.

Plus, I really don't want to fight with 500 people over two toilets. That gets more important when you get old. :-)

Yeah, it's onion routing applied to services. I never know how much detail to go into on HN these days.

I should have just said "TOR back ported to UUCP" and saved time. :)

Yet another weapon in Logitech's arsenal of ways to create a small amount of annoyance at every opportunity.

Annoying wireless and iffy non-Windows support join the pack.

We have options already, although we abandoned them once the Internet became ubiquitous. UUCP would allow encrypted envelopes that would only allow trusted nodes to decrypt enough to forward to the next destination or to the local user.

It would be ungainly, especially at first, and just as easy to scoop associations between users (although, not subject lines or other metadata) by tracing the limited paths. As a critical mass were achieved (yay network effects), along with peer-to-peer sharing, you could source route your messages to anyone.

Given this message:

  From: reeses
  To: hagbard
  Subject: fnord

  Please immanentize the eschaton at your earliest convenience.

I could route it through the equivalent of a bang path (foo!bar!baz!bob), each step of which is a trusted node whose private key(s) I have in my routing table. Instead of bang paths, however, the envelope could be something as simple as:

  Next: baz
  Data: 
  Ardhrcbeebdhvfdhnzrfgdhvqbyber
  zvcfhz,pbafrpgrghe,nqvcvfpviryvg

baz would receive the "Ardhrcbeebdhvfdhnzrfgdhvqbyberzvcfhzdhvnqbybefvgnzrg,pbafrpgrghe,nqvcvfpviryvg" blob and unwrap it, forwarding it to bob, who would have exchanged keys with reeses.

Multipath routing and multiple recipient support would be possible by having additional Next: headers and the encrypted blob would serve as a sufficient identifier, or input into an identifier generator, to deduplicate messages if a transmission fork were coalesced.

This is off the top of my head, so it's wrong in a bunch of ways, but it's a simple model that could easily be deployed among circles of people who need a degree of anonymity. As in the later days of UUCP, with comp.mail.maps and the like mapping a combination of FQDNs to named hosts, initial, intermediate, or terminal nodes could involve forwarding over (E)SMTP. (foo!{bar|baz}|quux|reeses@example.com) would route through a number of machines, and the message in my inbox would look like the following:

  From: POSTMASTER@quux.com
  To: reeses@example.com
  Subject: (none)

  -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
  Version: 2.6.2

  PnyyzrVfuznry.Fbzrlrnefntb-arirezvaqubjybat
  ...

Again, at the beginning, it would just be necessary to know about quux (or just the message fingerprint) and monitor its traffic to identify reeses@example.com as someone up to no good and watch for sidechannel communications to create a correlation between conversants. "Hmm, reeses received a message at 3:14pm from an unknown source. Ah, he received a phone call from 415-555-1212 at 2:58pm and called that number at 3:18pm." Multiple transmission sources, split messages (torrent file pointing to message, etc.), unconventional channels, and the like could wrap enough layers of encryption (and yes, STO) that the feasibility of a timely interception of content would be significantly reduced.

Plus, rubber hose.

You might be forgetting the other thing you left behind that was causing even more pain than, say, a car. :-)

Is that because you're so ascetic that you haven't cut your hair or fingernails in 20 years and they are literally attached to your central heating? :-)

That wonderful temperature between 21-22ºC is truly excellent. Paris in the springtime.

Now the question is, if a meteor vaporized the moving truck, and you did not receive a check for the loss, would you be satisfied?

Symptoms.

People lack, for want of a better word, meaning in life. They're looking for it in various places, whether that be via the frisson from buying that glass hummingbird at Gump's or getting a new job selling advertising space on the web.

That this is a 'first world' problem is a sign of affluence. You're bouncing against the ceiling of Maslow's 'esteem' and failing to break into 'self-actualization'.

When you look at these people wondering at the angst they feel because they can't believe they made poor choices in buying not just twice the amount of stuff they need, but three, four, or ten times as much, it's because they live in a society that has (more or less) solved hunger, personal safety, social interaction, etc.

There's this middle ground where they can see that they're unhappy. They can't see what would make them happy, only things that would make them unhappy. They look at people who don't have the current source of unhappiness and they see that those people do not seem less happy for their lack of possessions. "Oh, it must be my attachment to tchotchkes that causes my unhappiness. If I get rid of everything, I will be happy."

In many cases, this "meaning" was provided by religion or by an extended family. Some "higher purpose", whether it was preparing the next generation for the future, or their souls for a post-physical existence. In many cases, it's a "legacy" that is a third way to immortality.

People have to reach a point of deciding if "happiness" is the optimization they need or want. A friend uses the phase "Budweiser and NASCAR" for the condescending view of the basest American pursuit of short-term happiness or amusement. This is just another form of that, just of a different social class.

Looking at the 99% or the developing (or failed) countries is still an externality. It can help frame the scope of your unhappiness, but it is irrelevant how happy you are related to a child soldier in Somalia. You can be grateful for your fortune and privilege, and that can be a good thing, but you're not interchangeable.

Unfortunately, there's no royal road to enlightenment. It is, and should be, hard work. Knowing yourself and discerning what is truly important takes a lot of honesty and reflection. You'll have to redefine superficial and deep, as well as a lot of other labels. You'll have to figure out your worldview, your true values and principles, and how far you are from becoming the person you want or need to be.

And it wasn't what we would consider a "nice house" in the present day. It's not on a cul de sac and it's no McMansion, just a house that a guy used to living in boardinghouses, bedsits, and apartments for fifty years would be proud of.

Water view, but it's of the harbor, which is mainly shipping. Kind of like the difference of a bay view from Oakland, CA and the SF Peninsula, Tacoma/West Seattle and Magnolia, or Newark and Manhattan.

Time for bed. "Un-ionized? What is this person trying to say?"

(I kind of took the 'ten years' thing and ran it back to when I was young, in the 80s and 90s, sorry. :-))

I don't think I ever have to change the oil in my car over the duration of my lease. Synthetic lubricants, tighter tolerances, and better seals are amazing.

Plus, at what other time could you get a 400+ hp car that can get 26+ mpg? The safety features are insane. The wipers and lights come on automatically and the car buzzes (or so I am told) if I drowse off behind the wheel. I can listen to punk rock in the middle of Wyoming, but I won't have to because my car will plot a route around it.

Clothing has gotten much better for less, but that's largely global supply chain. I checked into a hotel in China and my room had a pair of throwaway trainers for walking in the city.

I can safely fly between any points in Europe with the change left over from a beer.

I can walk into an optometrist and get a box of contact lenses for my astigmatic eyes and wear a clean, new pair every day, all for less than hard lenses cost decades ago and for which I would have to wait weeks with multiple fittings. And they still sucked, especially in a windstorm.

Bicycles that would be insanely futuristic when I was a kid, with disc brakes, aluminum frames, and more gears than I need, cost the same as my hunk-of-steel Schwinn.

Bread! Coffee! They are so good now!

Best of all, my toilet cleans me.

I like this because Bukowski's first purchases when he "made it" was a BMW and a house in a nice neighborhood.

I'd write more but, as you say, we only get one chance at this and we're living in the best time ever.

Those cookies can be a real pain if you make a typo.

Those vocal exercises singers do seem silly until you run into a problem such as this. They've been working on getting more mileage out of their larynxes for hundreds of years and have some pragmatic practices that can help.

Lots of water, avoiding nastiness in the air, learning the bare minimum volume of air you can push through your throat and still get results, and taking breaks when your body (either by feel or sound) tells you that it's tired.

In this specific case, adding leverage with short macros such as "laip" and "slap" is essential. There's no way you could work a full day spelling everything that wasn't in the recognizer's dictionary.

s/coffee/tea/g

Uninflected language is a pain. Ditransitive terms (substitute, comprise, etc.) are easily misunderstood at the best of times.

#3 is often the equivalent of taking a walk or a shower, or walking in the shower. It's enough of a context shift that your brain will forget the inessential and you'll notice the pattern you were hoping to extract.

I think it's one of the great things about working with extensible tools and having a tool-building mindset. You can maintain momentum while relaxing your brain from working on a seemingly intractable problem.

But, you should be using emacs. :P

Econ is great, but you may want to take a minor in the humanities. I'd recommend music, but art, literature, etc. are all good.

Think of your ideal "interesting person" and supplement your CS with something else you'll enjoy. If nothing else, you'll be a better writer and conversationalist.

It's good to shop around, especially here in California, one of the states where graduates from non-accredited law schools can join the bar. :-)

I can't see a reasonable way of establishing bona fides other than creating a strong implication/inference of "national security".

(My wife is a federal attorney, and it is disappointing how warped "the government's" perspectives are on rights and what is reasonable.)

What people say and what people pay are not strongly correlated. :-)

Coupons can give a 100-10,000% lift very easily, enabling web merchants to be less dependent on black Friday/cyber Monday/etc. They can shift demand earlier in the year to even out fulfillment stress and reduce the uncertainty in sales projections.

In the face of realized revenue vs. some perception of unhappiness, sales and marketing will take the buck eleven times out of ten.

I agree that source codes, affiliate ids, landing pages, and the like are necessary to track and reconcile sources from campaigns and third parties.

There are a lot of ways to skin the cat, and the most realistic is to use a single field that can take gift cards or promotional coupons. It's easy to bin GCs and look up coupons and the use of a single field (with {apply} and {add} buttons) also reduces the complexity of the payments page.

It's well known that the web has enabled a whole segment of customer often referred to as "the extreme price shopper," who is a person who only buys the promotional item and generally has a negative lifetime value once margins and acquisition costs are factored into their RFM.

Companies do not like ESPs. Abandoned cart processing, which any viable ecommerce system supports, will be able to salvage a number of those transactions as well as indicate where the user exited.

The other option is using third party cookies for sourcing and attribution, which is sloppy, unreliable, and generally creates more affiliate unhappiness (although, honestly, affiliates are generally more trouble than they're worth).

The OS X "version" is a nightmare. It's guaranteed to break with every major OS release. Nuance takes months to release working versions. When it does work, it's hostile to any other apps that use the accessibility hooks, such as Text Expander, Alfred, etc., which would be awesome with speech input.

The history of the Mac version (acquisition of a company that licensed the Dragon engine) means that it and the Windows versions are very likely permanently divergent. Given the relative market sizes, the Windows version has the best development, the best recognition, and the least schizophrenic product support.

I am glad that dictation (apparently powered by Nuance's engine anyway) is to be included in Mavericks, including a disconnected (i.e., non-Siri) mode. Maintaining an application with a skeleton crew and relying on system services that change at a fundamental level every couple years is not a path to customer satisfaction.

That page was a tough read so I laughed out loud when I got to this point.

"While Emily was visiting family I had started to develop some pain in my groin. I attributed it to over-use while she was away, but we were pretty concerned nonetheless."

Strength to you, your family, and your soon-to-be in-laws.

How many samples? All you need to do is wait until they tell you who they are by associating that MAC addr with a hotspot.

Share "anonymous" data with vendors who provide wifi access, and suddenly Sephora knows where you live and where you work and can remind you that you're almost out of La Prairie Crème Cellulaire Platine Rare when you bin your cup of coffee outside the office.

Liability is a nightmare in bars already. I can only see most bar managers buying these if forced by an outside agency.

I hadn't considered the extra-high heat used in bar-grade dishwashers. I was thinking about how great a solvent alcohol is.

If these were single-use plastic glasses, I think that would be a best case scenario, but then you're pretty much limited to ballgames.

I would not be surprised if a factor was mixed in for the "most rapes go unreported, especially date rapes," estimates.[1] Given these figures, either the 3% conviction rate or the 46% reporting rate, a person could take numbers that may or may not already include these adjustments and apply the most helpful. 10,000 x 33 = 330,000, might as well round up to 400k.[2]

I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but abuse of confidence intervals is an common problem, even among those with good intentions and little idea that what they're doing is misleading.

[1] http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-ra...

[2] This guy says 400k, but we know that less than half are ever reported, so it's probably closer to a million. And so on.

There's an old saying I don't hear much these days: never give a software engineer a soldering iron and never give a hardware engineer a compiler.

I'd recommend that commenters simmer down on the emotional intensity and put away the torches and pitchforks.

This is relevant to any startup. Yes, brain cancer is an extreme case, but just as it's important to select the right cofounder, having something unexpected or unplanned happen to your cofounder is a situation that has to be handled.

It could be something as awful as brain cancer[1], as joyous as a new baby or as horrifying as discovering that the new baby has a hole in his heart, or something that is both positive and negative, such as falling in love with someone who wants or needs to move away from your business location.

Key man insurance can help, but notes on experiences such as this are helpful as well. It's easy to pile onto the author as an insensitive schmuck because you are not in that position. We can't directly relate to his situation, so we can judge all we like without fear of hypocrisy.

However, at some point, if you are lucky enough to grow a company and you are responsible for the livelihood of your employees, a key member of the team will have an 'availability-limiting event' that will force you to make tough decisions.

Having articles such as this help. Not all the advice is immediately useful ("hire a bunch of interns") but dropping meetings and intensifying focus is good. Keeping in mind,"How should I handle this so that I don't leave this in a mess for X?" is good as well, because it assumes that X will be back.

If this happens to you, know that you have google/duckduck/bing fodder to look for help in your moment of panic. Know that while it's one thing to think,"I have cancer and I have to figure out what to do with my startup," for which you can find a number of bits of advice, it's another to be affected as a partner. Know also that you should make sure that you cross-train enough with your cofounder so that neither of you is trying to do a brain dump to the other in the back of an ambulance while your loved ones are terrified.

Finally, I would find it hard to believe that the author posted this without his partner's consent. It sounds as if they've gotten through the immediate crisis with the tumor and he is probably at least partially re-involved with the company.[2]

Take posts such as this at face value. Have compassion.

[1] Fuck cancer.

[2] Chemo is a bastard; see: [1]

I'd say that this is usually the case for many languages, but Lisp IDEs have been refined, unrefined, GMOd, and subjected to all kinds of prodding that you generally want to pick one of the approved environments (Emacs, LispWorks Emacsish, Allegro I-wanna-be-Genera-Emacs).

The main reason for this is that so many of the tutorials will assume emacs for your repl management beyond the basic "(car '(foo bar baz))" and any emacs will have a well-defined "manage the indentation and parens"-mode.

Getting help from other people will often involve Emacs-specific instructions as well. "C-c C-e at the end of the sexpr and eval the result..." which may or may not be the binding in Eclipse or whatever IDE the person is using.