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tylerkahnon Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football

The condescending tone of this article makes it almost unreadable.

Play FF because you enjoy it.

Watch football because you enjoy it.

Don't secretly deride your coworkers for enjoying something you don't. That makes you a shitty person to be around. And chances are you enjoy doing something that is equally irrational (like playing video games or solving Rubik's cubes or playing Settlers of Catan).

tylerkahnon Announcing The Dark Mail Alliance – Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit

If you were interested in seeing any details whatsoever about the protocol there are none either in the article or on the official website.

tylerkahnon The End of Hypocrisy

Yeah, I don't know why they don't just use Khamenei's quote when trying to establish the Iranian government's antagonistic standpoint with regards to Israel. Especially considering that the Ayatollah is the real power in Iran and the cancer analogy is much more visceral.

Still don't see how this is evidence of propaganda in light of the myriad legitimate quotes are out there that are equal in meaning. Poor journalism, perhaps.

tylerkahnon The End of Hypocrisy

That quote appeared as a translation on an Iranian news site. Given that the Iranian government controls the media in Iran, it was reasonable to take the translation at face value.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070927213903/http://www.iribnew...

Furthermore, Ahmidinajad has made other antagonistic remarks towards Israel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel

Israel is a "cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut". - Ayatollah Khamenei

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/90...

Clearly not a propaganda conspiracy. But maybe it makes you feel better thinking that it is?

tylerkahnon FizzBuzz solved using only bit twiddling

    fizz = cycle ["","","Fizz"]
    buzz = cycle ["","","","","Buzz"]
    fizzbuzz = zipWith (++) fizz buzz
    fb = zipWith (\n cs -> if cs == "" then show n else cs) [1..] fizzbuzz
    mapM_ putStrLn fb

tylerkahnon Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

You say that unix is confusing. Unix isn't confusing. It's just unfamiliar to you as it was to me at one point. The way you get better is that you push through the unfamiliarity and keep going until you solve the problem you're facing. Sometimes it's painfully slow to acquire the knowledge you need, but that's just part of the process.

All that knowledge accumulates over time and you build skills about how to learn new things.

That's what allows people to pick up new technologies easily. Hard work, previous experience with similar technologies, and some intelligence (which you obviously have already).

I would recommend that you install Ubuntu in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is a good choice) and see if you can get some Python programs running. That process alone will teach you a lot.

For what it's worth, RoR and the Heroku stack are not basic and you shouldn't feel bad for not picking the up quickly. There's so much context that you need to have to understand what's going on and to use those technologies effectively. I bet if you polled your classmates the majority of them haven't even heard of Heroku.

tylerkahnon Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

He said he went to a small liberal arts school.

We definitely do C programming at my program (shell, malloc implementation, thread pool, web server, MIPS assembler/interpreter etc.). I go to Virginia Tech, a public university.

tylerkahnon Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

I mean this as a genuine question:

http://sixarm.com/

This is your company, correct? (I stalked your Github profile)

Seems like the types of problems you're solving are exactly those which require far more domain experience with Ruby/HTML5/Javascript/whatever than the ability to see the value of various graph-searching techniques.

Would you hire this guy even though he's said quite plainly that he lacks the experience with these technologies (and has difficulty picking up new ones owing to that lack of experience)?

tylerkahnon Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence

Fair enough. I see your point. North Dakota is a geographical region. Either you reside or have resided in that area or you haven't. It's not an ideological movement or organization.

I'm interested to hear your response to the other part of my argument. That is, what, effectively, is the difference between a monolithic organization and a heterogenous group of organizations with a shared ideology?

tylerkahnon Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence

I don't see how you've proven the illegitimacy of my analogy.

It's really the same argument you're making. Perhaps there are Al Qaida affiliated cells that are only Al Qaida affiliated in name and ideology but do not receive funding or orders from anyone else.

In any case there are people that identify as being members of Al Qaida (Al Qaida proper or affiliated groups).

I don't see what, effectively, is the difference between a monolithic organizations and a heterogeneous group of organization that have a shared ideology.

I think this is what you're saying that Al Qaida is but I don't see how this distinction is significant for any intent or purpose.

tylerkahnon Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence

So is your contention that no one identifies as a member of Al Qaida or that no groups of people identify themselves as belonging to an Al Qaida affiliated cell?

If that is your contention then I may assume that you dismiss the plethora of government and media reports which state that this is the case on the basis that such reports are untrustworthy.

Ok.

But then why do you trust the government issued ID that indicates that someone is from North Dakota? And how do you know that these people that claim to be from North Dakota are not in fact government stooges that are meant to deceive you?

tylerkahnon Qaeda Plot Leak Has Undermined U.S. Intelligence

Is there any way to be sure that North Dakota exists?

tylerkahnon My time with the Steam Controller

I think it actually is considering that both games he played were platformers (SMB and Spelunky).

The 360 controller is pretty much the ideal controller for that genre so if the Steam controller can reach parity that's a big deal.

The real test is how it performs with twitch FPSs and games like DOTA.

tylerkahnon WikiLeaks Leaks 'Fifth Estate' Screenplay

One of the problem with your logic is that getting support from the US military would lessen the appeal of the film to the reddit demographic.

Another one that comes to mind is the fact that redditers believe it is their God given right to pirate movies.

tylerkahnon WikiLeaks Leaks 'Fifth Estate' Screenplay

Both of those sites that you cited are terrible, filled with conspiracy theories and shrill rhetoric. Unfortunately more and more people on HN seem to be citing them.

Anyway:

> Do you recall any big American movie in the last decade (or even more) that painted America's military in a non-positive light?

The Bourne series. Though that was about the CIA.

Safe House, also CIA.

Avatar, as someone else mentioned, analogously painted the US military in a bad light.

Full Metal Jacket certainly shows some of the more brutish and shameful sides of the US military.

> I do remember The Hurt Locker, and a whole list of other movies, Iron Man and Captain America

So are you upset that these movies didn't pause to lecture the audience about the horrors of American imperialism? Are you upset that they don't serve your particular political agenda?

> To me, truly the most amazing thing about this is that pretty much no-one knows about this!

The people who don't know don't care. This information is readily available. And even some of the people who do know don't care (like me).

tylerkahnon Don't trust me: I might be a spook

I don't see what the NSA revelations have to do with this line of reasoning.

How do we know you're not (and have not been) selling tarsnap data to a corporation or non-US intelligence agency? This has always been a possibility and it has roughly equal probability to you being an NSA agent even after the Snowden leaks.

tylerkahnon "Forensics for Prosecutors" mentions backdoor in TrueCrypt (page 15) [pdf]

Incessantly cynical distrust of the government is the new blind patriotism.

tylerkahnon "Forensics for Prosecutors" mentions backdoor in TrueCrypt (page 15) [pdf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack

There's your backdoor.

tylerkahnon Chromecast update breaks AllCast

Yes you can do that. The problem is that currently tab projection is limited to 720p.

If anyone knows how to get around this, please reply to this with the solution. Googling for anything Chromecast related gets mostly pop-tech articles.

tylerkahnon Chromecast update breaks AllCast

https://developers.google.com/cast/release-notes

> Warning: The current Google Cast SDK is a preview SDK intended for development and testing purposes only, not for production apps. Google may change this SDK significantly prior to the official release of the Google Cast SDK. We strongly recommend that you do not publicly distribute any application using this preview SDK, as this preview SDK will no longer be supported after the official SDK is released (which will cause applications based only on the preview SDK to break).