HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

throwaway1980

230 karma · joined April 18, 2013

submissionscomments
throwaway1980··on Rules of a Zen Programmer
I think these rules miss the point of Zen. The primary teaching isn't about achieving spiritual perfection by embodying absolute states of mind. It is about finding a middle road between two extremes. For example, although a gigantic ego makes it difficult to cooperate with others, it would not be possible to survive without an ego. The middle road is to find the connection between your ego and the egos of other people. If you think you are selfless and have no ego, the paradox is that you probably have a gigantic ego, because your identity is invested in being spiritually pure.

The stuff about "shut up", "stop crying", "there is nothing special about you", and "NEVER stay at a company which does take away the happiness in your life" is similarly unhelpful. Zen teaches us that working with emotions is often more effective than working with thoughts, so if you're crying, that's probably important. In terms of being special, a snowflake is both unique and highly similar to all the others at the same time. It's abusive to focus only on the similarity. And if a company is taking away your "happiness", there's a reasonably good chance that it's an opportunity for you to learn something about yourself before you run away from the situation.

throwaway1980··on This page is anonymous
Oh, I see. Yeah, I think you're right. Actually, the $10 cash prize matches Bruce Schneier's Security Snake Oil Warning Sign #9: Cracking contests.

https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9902.html

throwaway1980··on This page is anonymous
He'd probably even send $10 to SDF if they could find him. It would be somewhat more trivial for a Wordpress employee if the site was at voidnull.wordpress.com.

The difference seems to be that he doesn't want to have trust anybody, whereas you'd be happy trusting organizations such as Wordpress and the US legal system.

throwaway1980··on Illinois moves to legalise employer access to workers' social media accounts
Thanks for that. I think this is a good law. If I'm working for you, this means you don't get access to my personal accounts. If you're working for me, this means you can't lock me out of accounts that I'm paying you to use.

The only place this law causes friction is when employees are either using personal accounts for business purposes or business accounts for personal purposes. It's a good law because it encourages a separation of the personal and professional spheres of one's life.

throwaway1980··on Google releases some Glass source code
If you make me a written offer to provide source code and then I follow up and write to you asking for the source code, and then following that you ship me a CD with source code on it, for all intents and purposes you have released the source code to me. I'm pretty sure that the definition of "release" is the problem in this thread.
throwaway1980··on I dropped over 40 grand when I could have spent $100
> I'd love to learn how to better communicate in writing on-line

Replying to people instead of editing your post helps.

← PreviousPage 3 of 3