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throwawayaway

345 karma · joined January 4, 2011

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throwawayaway··on Why I don't like smartphones
Hope springs eternal!
throwawayaway··on Why I don't like smartphones
The point people are making is that if it's the only thing on the shelf it's not easy to opt out.
throwawayaway··on Why I don't like smartphones
Vote Trump, get a despot - have Americans live with the consequencies of locked down technology, surveillance.
throwawayaway··on Who killed Nokia? Nokia did
Five year anniversary of the burning platform memo just passed, the world is a different place now.

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-...

throwawayaway··on People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads
Just like someone reading playboy for the articles, I typically read news aggregator sites for the comments.

Major news organisation provide a couple of paragraphs about the latest development and the interesting part is not the journalists opinion, but what the thousands of people reading the article have to say about it.

This holds for good sites, for e.g. youtube and some others - the comments are mostly worthless.

throwawayaway··on People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads
Addictions can be multiplied, cross addiction is common. Substance abuse and internet addiction can go hand in hand.
throwawayaway··on Douglas Rushkoff: I’m thinking it may be good to be off social media altogether
I have a hard time distinguishing someone's behaviour from their innate personality. Perhaps forgiveness is the key.
throwawayaway··on Unlocking my Lenovo laptop, part 3
In no uncertain terms I absolutely detest the x230 keyboard. I am none too happy about the location of Insert on the x220.

It is like using a cheap acer/toshiba laptop from Argos. A common question I have using them is 'where have the HW UX geniuses decided to put this button I want to use?'.

Cheap laptops are fine by me, but that's not what I want from a thinkpad.

The fact that there is a difference at all is the inherent superiority, a standard layout that stood the test of time and changed for the sake of saving a few pennies.

The fact that you would consider replacing it if it dies with an x220 keyboard (thanks for the info I didn't know that was possible) shows that you do mind it to a small extent.

The keyboard is a very common complaint: http://blog.the-compiler.org/?p=134 - also see the comments.

Also in addition to my prior whining about lenovo, their customer support and returns policy is nowhere near as good as IBM's was. A friend was sent the wrong laptop and after returning it & huge delays lenovo failed to source the correct laptop. He bought a dell.

Richard Sapper, the German industrial designer who orchestrated the look of the iconic laptop for IBM, died 83 years old. I'm blaming lenovo, he's probably spinning in his grave.

throwawayaway··on Unlocking my Lenovo laptop, part 3
The new lenovo thinkpads are nearly as bad. I'm an x series user, the last model with a good keyboard for programming was the x220.

From the x230 onwards they have stupid chicklet keys, no visual representation of caps lock or numlock, bad trackpads, and 'modal' function keys - (visually represesented with LEDs of course). Abandoning traditional insert/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn layout.

Superfish on thinkpads, this battery thing, this bios thing:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...

Very frustrating! Beyond a joke at this stage.

throwawayaway··on SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
Soundcloud & co require the content provider to upload the content too. If you want to share the content, provide the seed. If you don't want to share the content, don't upload to soundcloud, don't provide the seed.
throwawayaway··on SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
bandcamp and mixcloud
throwawayaway··on SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
Disagree, torrents are a great solution for the most obscure stuff and very cheap. You just have to be the seed.
throwawayaway··on Pull request acceptance of women versus men
Theorizing is fine, to say: 'Maybe because of barriers to entry, only the stronger programmers survive, from that follows the higher acceptance rate'.

It's just information but you are right in saying that they should not be making any claims or drawing conclusions!

Also I casually give the wrong gender on websites because on the internet nobody should care.

Look! Somebody wrote an essay about a similar phenomenon:

http://paulgraham.com/bias.html

throwawayaway··on Show HN: EZing – Mobile email client that looks like Messenger and uses PGP
> eZing is a messaging app that closes follows concepts of well-known messengers to achieve the same comfortable reading and writing of messages.

closely

throwawayaway··on Ubuntu for tablets
I'm not buying one unless it sends all my interactions to amazon

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-deskt...

throwawayaway··on Include-what-you-use: Clang tool to analyze includes in C and C++ source files
I guess this can be a problem for cross platform code, yes?
throwawayaway··on NSA Chief Stakes Out Pro-Encryption Position, in Contrast to FBI
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8623643&cid=5131565...

It's really pretty damn easy.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8623643&cid=5131356...

Win 7, 8 and 10 are done. OSX has spotlight upload to microsoft in plain sight. What else does OSX have under the hood? Phones are pretty much a foregone conclusion in my estimation, with the exception of cyanogen mod or something.

throwawayaway··on SuperMalloc: A Super Fast Multithreaded Malloc for 64-bit Machines
Wow! Want to do a full disclosure?

Your papers were very valuable while doing my undergraduate study. Is Hoard neck and neck with jemalloc and lockless' allocator nowadays?

http://locklessinc.com/benchmarks_allocator.shtml

throwawayaway··on Fuck the Cloud (2009)
Safer on laptop vs. forgetting the password for facebook.

By making a technically inept strawman, it's reduced to an argument of which is more idiot proof.

The problem with idiot proof is that there's always a better idiot out there.

The argument here by the 'anti cloud' side is 'why not both?'. To argue for one side or the other exclusively is pointless.

throwawayaway··on Fuck the Cloud (2009)
Both statements are correct. Remember that it was a personal computing 'revolution'. It would be a great step backwards to accede power to cloud service providers.

Computing at the whim of others aka timesharing.

Smile and nod but your mother has seen a few cycles of the industry.

throwawayaway··on Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business
Am I wrong in thinking there's a fat chance that the US govt. is funneling money to tech startups? I doubt there are grants for this stuff in Silicon Valley.

Maybe some sort of trickle down effect from the money that goes into Amazon, intel, MS & IBM.

Not sure every home in the US is getting the claimed 10gig internet pipes neither.

throwawayaway··on Short-sightedness is reaching epidemic proportions
I'd love to do my computing outdoors.

My optician offered an explanation that the elastic material in my eye's lens has probably hardened from prolonged engagement in 'near work'. Hence myopia.

However, I don't see (ahem) how going outside and doing the exact same thing would improve matters. It would probably be better to have a change of focus target distance.

Therefore I wonder will they have to reconsider their conclusion if more data becomes available - e.g. pixel-qi type screens gain commercial success.

Also, matte screens have gone completely out of fashion which is a shame.

http://liliputing.com/2015/01/pixel-qi-dead-low-power-displa...

Do outdoor readers suffer the same myopia, as inert indoorsy readers? I would imagine so.

throwawayaway··on Tell HN: I spend so much time solving problems I feel like giving up
I'm with everyone else here that says you need to forget about the trendy junk and get the job done.

Think brutally effective rather than elegant or modern. The simplest most old fashioned method that will work is often good enough.

> The trouble is that you need to learn those tools and languages before you can get to do it the easy way.

this is never some weird tradeoff, this is simply people selling you bullshit and you buying in.

throwawayaway··on The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes [pdf]
No true stereotype, not relevant. Only stereotypes believed true and relevant are unbearably accurate.

A quick internet search reveals many think the stereotype is true to boot.

throwawayaway··on The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes [pdf]
The most innocuous stereotype I can think of, is the 'typical' French stereotype of a man in beret and a black and white striped jumper cycling around with a baguette, an onion garland necklace, smoking gauloisies. Some stereotypes bear no relation to the estimated mean.
throwawayaway··on Strategies for reclaiming our personal privacy online
Thanks for the feedback. I guess you misinterpret how successful I think the approach I laid out is. I was already aware of most of the points that you make, agreeing with all except 3 and 4.

Forgot to mention disabling referer where possible, which you can test with https://www.whatismyreferer.com

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendRefererHeader

throwawayaway··on Strategies for reclaiming our personal privacy online
Yeah I thought the exact same.

1. have a browser that doesn't store cookies, use that for casual browsing.

2. use an adblocker at all times. user agent faker too.

3. use pgp email with no subject lines with offline mail clients.

4. avoid social networks, centralised services. set up your own for other people you know.

5. keep informed. keep looking for how to give away less information. keep looking for which new information is retained. e.g. karma police revelation.

throwawayaway··on Superfish 2.0: Now Dell Is Breaking HTTPS
Not so sure that the KB text description in control panel will give enough info.

It's only after months of reading about it do I know enough to discern that diagtrack.dll == "telemetry".

The statement 'Which you can decline to install' makes it seem as if this is specifically flagged and you have the option of not installing it.

In reality you are describing the standard options: Automatically Update/Let Me Choose Which Updates/No Updates at all.

When users are advised to install this stuff for their own good for security purposes(Microsoft Recommended), and yet this is basically malware/a keylogger - it's pretty bad in my opinion.

throwawayaway··on Superfish 2.0: Now Dell Is Breaking HTTPS
Although you are trying to be helpful, you did not answer the question that I asked. Retroactively uninstall is not my definition of decline to install.

Also, it's not clear which KB snuck it onto my Win8.1.

throwawayaway··on Superfish 2.0: Now Dell Is Breaking HTTPS
I think an article from the eff is more notable than a reddit anecdote and should be treated as such.

This is now gone off the main page, which is a shame.

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