thecoffman

Freedom is a terrifying thing to people who have a naturally authoritarian mindset.

I don't personally believe that Bitcoin is the road to some techno-utopia. Frankly, I expect that ultimately it will just be a blip on the radar; but there's no reason to get so angry about it unless its fundamentally a scary idea. Its a direct challenge to the authoritarian worldview and that's frightening.

Sigh... the same old political arguments rehashed for the nth time, but with links to Krugman blog posts and some class warfare for taste this time around!

> I’ve enjoyed the thought experiment of Bitcoin as much as the next nerd, but it’s time to dispense with the opportunism and adolescent fantasies of a crypto-powered stateless future and return to the work of building technology and social services that meaningfully and accountably improve our collective quality of life.

So... because you feel that this is what we should be expending resources on, the full coercive power of the state should be brought to bear in order to force others to do it. Neat!

While Miyazaki's contributions to animation are important and numerous, you're quite mistaken that he "defined" animated films. I would look very closely at early Disney films (Fantasia is a personal favorite). Most of those movies very literally involved inventing new techniques for animation.

Depending on how much time you're willing to put in, "The Story of Film: An Odyssey" [1] Is available on Netflix and fantastic. Its also 15 hours long. The narrator, Mark Cousins, who is also the author, is frankly pretty poor; but if you can get past that, the content itself is very good. It covers both American and International cinema in great depth. It is also available in print form, but I cannot personally vouch for whats in the book itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Film:_An_Odyssey

For one, you don't need to sign in with Twitter or Facebook... that's a huge advantage right away! Its also open source, which is a giant win.

IIRC they released two versions simultaneously - one was edited for "maximum impact" and the other was the complete, uncut footage.

I think the former is good in a TL;DR sort of way as long as the full material is made available for scrutiny by the public as well.

And how long after I take the time to import all of my loyalty cards into this system before Google decides to go a different direction and shuts this down?

Sigh...

Straight from Drew himeself:

   data's stored on s3, and encrypted before storage -- there'll be another 
   option to enter in an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing 
   in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer (kind of like 
   what mozy does.)

It is sad to me that this never came to pass. I guess the desire to offer a web interface overrode the idea of encrypting the files before they left your computer. Not that you can't use your own encryption, but having it built in would have been great.

This looks good!

Jekyll theming is an area that I wish would take off a little more. I've looked for custom themes on several occasions and it really seems like there are about a dozen total, and that's it.

I don't think you would do that at all.

Places like SF and NY are more expensive because there is more demand to live there and a limited supply of places to live. Presumably if you're on a basic income, you won't be able to afford to live in the "most desirable" areas in the entire country.

This would be akin to guaranteeing everyone a basic transportation and then having someone say "Well, actually, I wanted a BMW."

Ironically, I'm assuming I'm the one who inherited ben1040's ticket mentioned in the other comment thread.

I just wanted to say thanks to puredanger to putting this thing on each year. The quality of the talks exceedingly high, but honestly the buzz about St Louis is my favorite part. Its great to see people come in from the coasts (and all over the world) and watch the tweets as people discover restaurants, breweries, and all St Louis has to offer. Its nice, at least for a weekend, to see my city not reduced to "flyover country."

I hope that people take that enthusiasm back to their respective homes and keep it in mind next time St Louis comes up!

This is:

a.) pretty good evidence that DO did their due diligence and

b.) way more thorough investigation than I would have expected from a "value" vps provider.

Interesting - I found the lambda syntax of LINQ to be quite "Ruby like"

  someList.FindAll(i => i < 2)
    .Select(i => i * 2)
    .GroupBy(i => (i % 2) == 0 ? "even" : "odd")

Is about as close to Ruby's Enumerable as I've found in a mainstream/enterprise language (unless you include Scala).

I have a very similar background/opinion. Almost all of my professional work has been on the *nix stack and I generally like Ruby. During a brief stint in Microsoft-land I found myself super impressed with C#. First class functions, type inference, anonymous types/functions and LINQ make for a really nice general purpose language. Its really a shame its mired in the Microsoft toolchain.

I rather liked the Buckyball article personally, but I wanted to note that Ken, while probably the best author on Popehat, isn't the only one and the Buckyball article wasn't him; it was Clark. Clark's articles are often the explicitly libertarian ones.

This post does nothing to address the biggest reason people might have Javascript disabled: security. If I'm browsing through Tor (or whatever), I'm not going to turn on Javascript to use your site. If your site doesn't work without it, you've lost a customer.

Granted, people who disable javascript are obviously vastly outnumbered, but just saying "fuck you" to security conscious (and most likely tech-savvy) users seems like a mistake.

I generally program on the Linux platform and use Ruby, Java, a bit of Perl and occasionally C++. In one previous job however, I did Windows development in C#. Whenever I tell people that C# is a seriously awesome language they look at me like I'm crazy; but its true. In many ways Java is still years and years behind C# for a general purpose OO language. It is really a shame that (outside of Mono), C# is trapped over in Windows land.

LINQ is incredibly awesome, expressive, and powerful. I generally prefer the lambda syntax to the more verbal syntax the author has used here, but both are really great and miles ahead of what's available in other, similar languages.

I will second pretty much everything you just said. I have renter's and auto insurance, checking, savings and a credit card all through USAA and they are fantastic. Many banks are just beginning to catch up with their technology and none can match their customer service.

Masters of Doom is a fantastic read, I had the kindle edition and had to track down a hardback copy after reading it. I wanted it on my shelf.

The author has a new novel out titled Jacked which I believe tells the story of Rockstar games but I haven't read it yet. Has anyone else? Is it good?

I feel like it would be lacking some of the nostalgia and lure of Masters of Doom. The celebrity and talent of Carmack is legendary in our industry and Romero's arc makes him a compelling foil later in the story. Additionally, id software's games are the games that I grew up playing as opposed to Rockstar's games which I have only seen in passing.

I'm assuming he means South Korea.

57 isn't a prime number. 3 * 19 = 57

For all of the people in this thread saying "some of these aren't that bad" you seriously need to get some perspective. Come visit what's disparagingly called "flyover country." I live in the St Louis area and pay $450/month for my apartment. ~1100 square feet with a yard and a parking spot in a nice, safe neighborhood.

I fully realize that I may not have all of the opportunities available here as I would in NYC or San Francisco, but I've never struggled to find interesting, well paying jobs and there is more than enough going on in the St Louis area to keep a person entertained.

Far be it from me to judge other peoples' choices. You should do whatever makes you happy in life but, when you find yourself saying that a room the size of my closet "isn't so bad" of a living space, you might want to take a step back and reassess some things.

I think you would find that there are a subset of people, myself included, that don't find that notion so insane. If you accept the idea that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to allow the citizenry to overthrow their government then having the government restrict what citizens can and cannot purchase is somewhat nonsensical.

Historically speaking, government restriction on firearm ownership is a relatively new thing. "Weapons of war" like ships and artillery were privately owned in this country as recently as the civil war.

Believe it or not, the country didn't degrade into people waging private wars against each other, mass murder, etc...

It is sad that the sort of bigoted opinions you're espousing here are what us firearms enthusiasts have to endure. It has nothing to do with machismo, nothing to do with Obama, and nothing to do with birther garbage.

The right to bear arms is a right of last resort. Its the right that protects all others and, as such, it is the _most_ essential right.

As for naming incidents in the last 100 years where armed resistance to the United States government would have been productive or useful, I recommend you look up the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2. I also recommend that you read about the Black Panthers standing up to corrupt Oakland police and marching on government buildings, loaded guns in hand.

You don't have to be a crazy conspiracy theorist or a right-winger to realize the thought that "something like that couldn't happen in America" is naive at best.

edit: I omitted an "n"

Very cool! Its great to see this progressing at such a fast rate, and I'm glad I got the chance to be a part of the Kickstarter. Are there any plans for Ruby support? I know Python was first as it was the stretch goal, but Ruby has been mentioned in passing a couple of times.

+1 For forklift. The tabs and multipane remotes are killer features. It also feels lighter weight than a complete finder replacement like TotalFinder.

What you've described is the internal policy at the company I work for, and its a total nightmare. You don't get new versions of software until you upgrade your entire OS, a non-zero amount of developer time is spent re-packaging things that have already been packaged (and their dependencies!) and if you want to run multiple versions concurrently, you have to resort to horrible hackery as aptitude doesn't support that.

Sorry, no thanks.

I can confidently say that I would not want to live in this man's world. Making things illegal because they are harmful? Ridiculous on its face.

Looks like they tack on shipping when you check out. It was very reasonable for me though < $4.00

pg himself posted the link. I'd say that counts.