ryanfreeborn

Yup, vertical mouse solves most of my right-side issues. It can't be one of those cool-looking vertical mouses either (e.g. Anker, Evoluent). While those do help, it's not enough for me. I get the most relief from an actual joystick vertical mouse.

Good to know.

And ya, a security question to bypass a phone 2SV is a joke. Almost entirely defeats the purpose.

Is 17 days an acceptable TAT here? I know investigation and fixes can be a challenge, but with the severity of this exploit+PayPal being a serious financial service, I kind of would hope for a faster fix. Maybe I'm off base...I really don't know; curious what others think.

How much time would've had to pass (without PayPal doing anything) before the author is ethically obligated to post to HN/media/etc about the hack? I believe publicizing an (unpatched) exploit like this crosses into criminality, but it would be essential to demonstrate some kind of proof, for credence and gravity. I'm guessing the community has some standardized guidelines for this sort of thing, but I'm not aware of them.

I started reading the physical copy and switched to kindle after a few hundred pages. I know it's not the "pure" way to read it but it improved my experience considerably. Not only does it make the book very mobile, but flipping back and forth between the footnotes is way easier.

I can't imagine the incessant legal and legislative battles they are fighting are coming cheap. That means hiring legal and policy people, paying a ton of money to outside counsel, lobbying expenses, the hidden costs of building influence.

And it's at a huge, because most of this isn't happening at the federal level (yet)—it's all state and city—which means they don't have the luxury of concentrating on the familiar, well-tread (and very insular) game of DC politics. Instead Uber has to have boots on the ground in a ton of places, and they have to have people knowledgable on the nuances of regional politics and culture. Things like the dynamics of a state's house vs senate, country executives, the port authority, taxi unions, legal systems, initiative systems, local elections, Chambers of Commerce. The list really does go on and on. It's a huge and complex footprint to manage.

That's not really the case. The courts have decided otherwise:

http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Theofel_v._Farey-Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Warshak

Oh interesting. I didn't know it was still moving along. It had a lot of momentum a few years back, but hasn't been making nearly as much noise since. Not sure if the founder's suicide actually correlated with the dropoff in media attention.

You mean Diaspora? (or maybe there's another clone I missed out on). The founder of Diaspora committed suicide. I think the project mostly died with him.

Neither really. If I do either it's very rare (and if I'm searching I'm probably using Google). Most of the time the information I need can be found quickly through the sidebar.

Subreddit communities. Particularly the small to mid-size ones. I honestly think knowing how to use subreddits as a resource is essential to being a functional user of the Internet. It's a crowd-curated feed of all things relevant to any particular topic, presented in a way that is consistent and meaningful.

For example, I'm debating between Android and iPhone for my next upgrade. I really only want to use iOS if it's jailbroken. So what's the latest jailbreak news? There are probably some forums or tech blog primers that could give me the answers I need, but the easiest way to get that info, is to go to r/jailbreak. Chances are, the sidebar will have everything I need.

You want to get your dad a nice shaving kit for father's day? r/wicked_edge. Interested in owning a noisy keyboard? r/mechanicalkeyboards. Why doesn't the guy next to you wash his jeans? r/rawdenim. Just experience your first panic attack? r/anxiety. What are the essential hip-hop albums I should listen to? r/hiphopheads. Classical? r/classicalmusic. Jazz? You guessed it, r/jazz.

There are thousands of medium-sized subreddits that cater specifically to one thing, and the content of those subreddits has all been curated, critiqued, and discussed by an organic, self-motivated user base. I may only be interested in the subject-matter for a short time and narrow purpose, but the community of that subreddit is interested in that subject-matter all the time, and they've done all the leg-work for me. I know the information I get will have undergone more review and rigor than almost any other source on the Internet. As a bonus, the organization of that information is always presented in the same familiar way, so I don't have to learn a new UI or workflow.

And that's just for using subreddits as one-time information repositories. You've also got the power of reddit as a newsfeed. Again, I can follow a subreddit for daily updates on whatever topic I want. This is so incredibly advantageous to those following sports, TV shows, or news events. ESPN is fine if I want general sports news, but what if I only want news about my local NFL team (the Seahawks)? I could follow a Seahawks blog, but then that's just a few people generating content. Instead, I can go to r/seahawks. There I've got all the content distilled, updated, and sorted for me: blogs, Twitter posts, articles from beat journalists, plus all the user discussion in response to this content.

Yup. Couldn't agree more with this response.

There is this growing contrarian sentiment—particularly in the HN and Reddit communities—that "college isn't for everyone". The college industrial complex aside, I cannot see how further education—particularly through programs like this one—could ever be a bad thing. After all, education is the silver bullet.

shame about that near-eastern medical attache in Boston...

...citation?

Back when my friends and I played Catan a lot, we developed a simple way to avoid the spoiler effect: running point totals. Games are still played in regular fashion, but your victory points for each session are added up over time. Winning a game gave you an extra VP in the running totals. You can set the constraints to whatever you want: a year's time, 6 months, 10 games, whatever it may be...at the end of the time frame, whoever has the most victory points wins. Put some money down at the beginning, and you've got great sustained competition.

Obviously it only works if you play with the same people regularly, but in my experience that's actually the norm.

He's talking about the 39 inch, which is $500. When you go to Amazon, it defaults to displaying the 50 inch. Click 39 inch button to the right of the product image and you'll get the $500.

I think you're reading into the $5 wrench a bit too literally. It's not about perpetuating the idea (false or not) that torture is an effective means of procuring intelligence. The point of the comic—at least to me—is about tunnel vision w/r/t security. Someone might invest a great amount of time and effort on encryption, but then look past the fact that the encryption is only as strong as the password that protects it...or that the password is only as secure as the place it is stored (lastpass, 1password, or even your brain).

There are many creative ways to circumvent encryption, and one of those ways could be something sinister like a wrench-torture, but it could also be through social engineering or psychological craft. The wrench is just an extreme example, maybe even a metaphor.