techtalsky

That sure doesn't stop them from doing it though. I've threatened to report them before and although you can threaten them it sucks to have to do it. I'd rather just let them roll and wait for another cab in all but the most dire circumstances.

Seems like you could make more than .60 a day doing Mechanical Turk jobs. It'd be a little less mind numbing than watching commercials every day.

Kind of recently, a close friend of mine took a picture of him and his wife explaining something to their dog: http://i.imgur.com/bfpOGYK.jpg

They're the sweetest, coolest, most open-minded people and I adore them. They're not trying to act like they're better or more stylish than anyone else, but the level of "hipster hate" they got in the thread was just intense.

I'll always love all the comments that came to light when a significant hunk of Win2k source code was leaked, especially:

* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

The book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is an astoundingly good illustration of this. He follows characters as they use work, tennis, video entertainment, and even addiction recovery itself as addictions. I feel as if my understanding of addiction and its depths was deepened a great deal. The older I get the more healing from addiction seems like an actual real miracle.

Sounds like another way for apps to drain my precious battery life.

I guess I'm in the minority, but I genuinely enjoy Facebook. Sure, it has its annoyances, and ads are a much more prominent part of the experience. However, it lets me connect with my friends back in Seattle (I live in Brooklyn now) and gives me an outlet for cool photos of my life here in Brooklyn and fun stuff I'd like to share with my friends. I've built a reasonably fun little discussion group around my content and the content of my friends, and we all seem to have a fairly good time with it. I tried Twitter, G+, and everything else, but nothing gets as much "interesting discussion per post" except FB.

The best coffee I've been able to make at home is with a red plastic #4 cone filter holder and a large mason jar, slowly pouring boiled water over the grounds until the jar is full. Now they have those fancy looking chemex ones for $60 and I'm sure they make good coffee as well. I was seduced by the inferior coffee of a coffe maker because, well, it can have coffee ready for me when I wake up.

That's true... but I haven't had to do real work on a system that didn't already have Python installed on it in a long time.

The problem with encryption in this case when it comes to US companies is that the US can compel US companies to install custom backdoors while pretending they are still secure and not notify their customers that this happened.

He RISKED his whole life. He was fortunate and his plans turned out OK, and for the moment he remains beyond the reach of US power. He could have very easily ended up in US custody.

I'm probably a little late to the party, but I think it's worth mentioning that some of the "XML" looks like this:

<tr style=" -uslm-lc:II22; "><td style=" text-align:left; vertical-align:top; border-right:1px solid black; padding-right:2pt;"><p style=" text-align:left; text-indent: -1em; padding-left:1em;">

Wow. I wonder what -uslm-lc does.

I wonder how he managed to be "financially secure for life" without any merchandising. Just from book sales and syndication money? That seems amazing.

That is true. I was recreating there two days ago, and New York's public interactive art festival, Figment NYC is held there.

I absolutely agree with you but I think keeping it important here is a part of keeping it in the consciousness of people here who have the power to take action. This is an absolutely red alert level problem where even the insane powers provided by the USA PATRIOT ACT are being superceded. A million conspiracy theorists were 100% correct about domestic spying and people who didn't want to believe that the 4th amendment could be so sidestepped were wrong.

At the very least people can join and support the EFF, ACLU, and other orgs making real movement. The US government is hoping this will die down quickly. I'm just saying it shouldn't.

Thanks for writing this post so I didn't have to. The readers of HN for the most part belong to a sort of protected class and do, in fact, have some political power. It's the time to beat this drum as hard as we can. I think it's time for this issue to stay at the very top of our consciousnesses.

Obama's twitter account is blithely tweeting about climate change (also important) when the blatant end run around the bill of rights should be one of the most important issues of our lives. If this kind of practice becomes the norm, then the 4th amendment is a hollowed out shell that once meant something, and future generations will never even know what it was like to be protected from unwarranted search and seizure.

My opinion about it is that it's ONE way for them to take the temperature of the people. Of course 100,000 signatures alone isn't going to create meaningful action but it does allow for a certain amount of visibility into what's bubbling up to the surface. Thus, it's valuable... just not as valuable as some hope it will be.

I've actually suspected this for years and my simple and polite response is, "No, thanks." or "I don't give it out."

This is a very small comfort when the government gets to have "classified" interpretations of the law.

I'm feeling extremely impotent at this point to cause any meaningful change on this issue. It seems like the deck is stacked. We have the ACLU and the EFF but it increasingly seems like a war that can't be won. We're being slowly inured to total surveillance and it doesn't seem like there's any way to turn back the clock. It seems like the furor will die down over this particular issue even though it seems obvious to me that there's almost certainly more odious levels of data collection than what the government was currently caught doing. Is there ANY solution or is this the new reality?

To call it "dated" would be kind.

Just make a quick, loose, all-text-fields schema and dump your data as a CSV: http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=ImportingFiles Then you can run SQL queries against it using the SQLite commandline tool: http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite.html

Great story. I suspect there are about a million single user applications out there running oracle and paying huge license fees for db's under a million rows that would have been orders of magnitude easier to set up and faster using SQLite.

I think WordPress just tries to cut complexity by using MySQL only so it doesn't have to deal with support for arbitrary RDBMS's.

I like to take every possible opportunity to sing the praises of SQLite, which is one of the most widely deployed RDBMS's in the world. Not only is it open source, but it's public domain, and it's an incredibly stably developed and well-tested piece of software.

Please note that it's not for every application. It is not a client/server architecture. It simply a tightly optimized piece of C code that interacts with a file (or RAM) to create a lightning fast approximation of a SQL server that is ACID compliant.

One thing I've used it for the most, is for small, ad-hoc internal web applications. With the webserver as its "single user", it is incredibly speedy and reliable and holds a shockingly large amount of data (still works pretty well when data gets up into the Terabytes).

D. Richard Hipp, the inventor and primary developer of SQLite considers the rock-solid reliability of SQLite of primary importance, which is one of the reasons everything from iOS to Skype uses it. (The fact that it has a public domain license doesn't hurt.) He lists the potential pitfalls of using this method on the page: http://www.sqlite.org/mmap.html and leaves it to users to determine if those risks are acceptable to them. I'm sure he's been thinking about this method for a while.

Agreed, that was not a fantastic pitch.

Although many people hate to see Monsanto win, it seems clear that this case was well considered, and that the license was violated here. No one should be surprised that Monsanto won this one.

However, the passage of the Farmer Assurance Provision aka. "The Monsanto Protection Act" is a much more horrific legislative end-run around the will of the people.

MAME is a project to emulate Arcade games. This is a project to emulate Sega Genesis/Megadrive games. Although many already exist, they use a lot of different tricks to help performance. Some of these hacks can cause game-breaking timing problems in some games. A cycle-accurate emulator takes a lot more processing power, but allows for the most accurate emulation of the games.

I don't see that as very mystifying. He was escaping in the middle of a death-defying gun battle and staying alive was literally the only thing on his mind. He panicked, and possibly thought his brother was already dead.