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I Am Fully Capable of Entertaining Myself in Prison for Decades If Need Be
- q-base 10y agoAm I the only one surprised to find Peter Thiel's name in that article? Anyone who has anymore on that?
- roh0sun 10y ago> The chairman and co-founder of Palantir is Peter Thiel — the same man who more recently funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, a media outlet that had angered him, and who served as the final speaker at the Republican National Convention. His firm continues to work closely with the U.S. intelligence community.
- pmoriarty 10y agoAnd who recently made headlines by donating $1.25M in support of Donald Trump: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716825
- tzakrajs 10y agoWow, gross.
- SixSigma 10y agoThere are people in this world that have different opinions to yours. He his opposing a party that co-ordinates violet protests at political rallies as well as many, many other crimes.
- totalZero 10y agoHow dare he support a political candidate!
- tzakrajs 10y agoTo be clear, I think supporting political candidates is a fine thing for anyone to do. I am not disagreeing with Thiel's choice to support a candidate, but rather his choice to support an ignorant, totalitarian bigot under any circumstances.
- throwaway7312 10y agoBetter the candidate agitating for nuclear war with Russia, right? [1][2][3] We might all turn to glass, but at least we'd still have our safe spaces. [1] http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/26/clintons-syria-strategy-would-require-war-with-russia-congress-hears/ http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/26/clintons-syria-strategy-wo... [2] http://www.inquisitr.com/3598001/russian-trump-hillary-clinton-will-start-world-war-3-be-the-last-u-s-president-ever/ http://www.inquisitr.com/3598001/russian-trump-hillary-clint... [3] http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/07/the-kremlin-really-believes-that-hillary-clinton-will-start-a-war-with-russia-donald-trump-vladimir-putin/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/07/the-kremlin-really-belie...
- tzakrajs 10y agoWe are post nuclear war. Cyber is the new nuclear. This nuclear saber rattling is a way for leaders to show their mettle to people in a way that they understand well.
- pmoriarty 10y agoI strongly disagree. There are still thousands of nuclear weapons pointing from the US to Russia and vice-versa, along with many others in hot spots like India and Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. A lot of the weapons and warning systems in Russia are antiquated, and could result in false alarms. False alarms have drawn the world close to nuclear war before. Now that either Hillary or Trump will get elected, the US is very likely to get in to another war, and it's quite possible that it will turn nuclear if one of the other nuclear powers get involved in a big way. The nuclear threat is just not considered much any more, except in the case of North Korea, because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but this is a false sense of security. The proverbial Doomsday Clock might not be quite as close to midnight as it was at the hight of the Cold War, but it's still way too close for comfort.
- krige 10y agoDestroying Gawker is a real community service.
- dsr_ 10y agoThe price of freedom is dissent. When you shut down the voices of people you disagree with, you reduce freedom.
- krige 10y agoGawker's case has absolutely nothing to do with freedom of speech, as much as they were styling themselves, instead it has a lot to do with ruining people's lives, breaking the law and paying the consequences of such behaviour.
- aetherson 10y agoJust to be clear, "ruining people's lives" by reporting true things, at least in the case of Thiel and Hogan. I mean, reasonable people can disagree about the bounds of journalism. It is not crazy to say that outing someone or publishing a sex tape is scummy. But it is not true that this had "nothing to do with freedom of speech," and your rhetoric seems awfully overblown. Is Thiel's life ruined? Hogan's?
- JanezStupar 10y agoI would just like to note, that the gist of the problem with Hogan is that Gawker has been ordered to remove the said tape by a court and they refused to comply. That is the real reason why they got obliterated in the end.
- aetherson 10y agoThat may be true. But my parent poster said that it was because they ruined people's lives. I don't think that refusing to comply with a court order, however dumb that may have been, was ruining anyone's life.
- rmc 10y agoThiel is also a YC partner.
- diyorgasms 10y agoIn a thread yesterday, sama qualified his status as a "part-time partner" but nonetheless he is involved with YC.
- SixSigma 10y agoThat is what we call "spin". Gawker destroyed itself.
- AvenueIngres 10y ago>media outlet >Gawker Never mind. This isn't the issue. But this is amusing to see Gawker - a garbage tabloid with a pseudo-progressive agenda and highly questionable ethics - be referred using a very neutral term ("media outlet"). And to see any attempts at neutrality vanish next sentence when it comes to describing Peter Thiel. As if Thiel was not famous for Paypal, Facebook, Palantir or 0->1 but rather for being the guy who "destroyed" Gawker (an innocent media outlet that is.). Or I guess for being the guy who helped Hulk Hogan get justice, but that's if you are not a rancid journalist. A few thoughts anyway: 1/ Interestingly, it is a few months after Thiel publicly endorsed DT that Palantir faces an obviously bogus lawsuit from a US agency that is directly supervised by the Executive branch. 2/ The article fails to mention that if Thiel was "angered at Gawker", it is because he was outed as a homosexual without his consent by those very people pretending to be progressives. 3/ Thiel funded the Hogan lawsuit. The tone the article takes make it seem like he fabricated evidence or used his power to take away the jobs of those honest and hard-working investigative journalists. That is not the case. He helped someone (Hulk Hogan) get reparations for the harm Gawker and their greed had caused him, ruining part of his life. 4/ There is a trend here. An ever increasing amount of vicious attacks towards Thiel since he started to create some harsh cognitive dissonance between media/liberal narratives ("Trump supporters are ignorant idiots, rednecks who don't know any better") and reality ("There is a broad spectrum of people who support Trump, each for different reasons. You can be a V legend, a successful tech entrepreneur and Stanford-educated lawyer and think Trump is the best choice all things considered").
- bobsgame 10y agoI always imagined I could just program something on pen and paper and that would keep me busy, and when I got out I would have a masterpiece to sell.
- matthewking 10y agoWhen I was first learning programming at a young age, probably 14-15, I was so engrossed by my new skill that I carried on with pen and paper when I was dragged away from my computer to go on a family holiday. I guess there's worse priorities to have as a teen!
- awestroke 10y agoGood luck prototyping and iterating with pen and paper. Waterfall model?
- nibnib 10y agoHas anyone ever done this? There have been successful books written in prison but not many, and that translates much better to pen and paper than software does. It sounds like something of a fantasy to be honest.
- ChoHag 10y agoIf you can't code on paper, you can't code.
- pvdebbe 10y agoAgreed, although I don't personally mandate paper-coding to pass any syntax / compiler checks, but the code should resemble the language and the algorithms be made sound without any googling or whatever.
- Houshalter 10y agoI don't know about complex pieces of software. But many algorithms were invented on paper first (or whiteboards.) Conway's game of life became popular before computers were programmed to do it, and people executed the moves with pencil on graph paper. Turing had a chess playing algorithm which he executed by hand on paper. I've written short sections of code on a notebook before implementing it into a computer. It's slower, but it's possible, and I don't think paper is that inferior to a text editor. It will definitely require a lot more debugging when you finally implement it on a computer. So maybe write lots of test cases.
- mhd 10y agoFormer "nerds" having grown up, finding mentions of D&D is no longer really rare, but I'm always surprised where you find GURPS. I do wonder whether prisoners might find the increased realism interesting, as there's a higher likelihood that they might actually know a bit about losing "hit points". (If it's white collar crime, the point-based accounting might be a bigger incentive)
- pmoriarty 10y agoGURPS is not particularly obscure, so I'm not surprised to hear mention of it. Though it definitely is more obscure than D&D, which is sadly the only RPG that a lot of gamers have ever played.
- Rapzid 10y agoThe cliché-ridden passages created by the gamemaster aren't the only ones you'll find in this article..
- fsloth 10y agoIs there any other backstory available? What are the actual charges? Are there any?
- stplsd 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Brown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Brown
- emilga 10y agoInteresting story. Reminds me of this story from Flow: > Tollas Tibor, a poet who spent several years in solitary confinement during the most repressive phases of the Hungarian communist regime, says that in the Visegrád jail, where hundreds of intellectuals were imprisoned, the inmates kept themselves occupied for more than a year by devising a poetry translation contest. First, they had to decide on the poem to translate. It took months to pass the nominations around from cell to cell, and several more months of ingenious secret messages before the votes were tallied. Finally it was agreed that Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! was to be the poem to translate into Hungarian, partly because it was the one that most of the prisoners could recall from memory in the original English. Now began the serious work: everyone sat down to make his own version of the poem. Since no paper or writing tool was available, Tollas spread a film of soap on the soles of his shoe, and carved the letters into it with a toothpick. When a line was learned by heart, he covered his shoe with a new coating of soap. As the various stanzas were written, they were memorized by the translator and passed on to the next cell. After a while, a dozen versions of the poem were circulating in the jail, and each was evaluated and voted on by all the inmates. After the Whitman translation was adjudicated, the prisoners went on to tackle a poem by Schiller.
- Houshalter 10y agoFor those who didn't read the whole thing, the part referred to by the title is at the very end. This guy constructed an insanely elaborate RPG world, which it sounds like he plays by himself: >I oversee some 70 fully realized characters as they pursue their blood-soaked vendettas against one another in accordance with the several handwritten pages of primitive, dice-based behavioral heuristics I have devised for them. Their entire world is limited to a map I’ve drawn on graph paper and taped to my wall, their stage confined to my cell’s steel wall-mounted desk on which I have created an elaborate city consisting of dozens and dozens of buildings, vehicles, vending machines, trees, dogs, rats, surveillance drones, and dwarves — a small world, yes, but one of extraordinary depth and intrigue. I make the pieces out of cardboard tea boxes, drawing and then coloring them with very sharp pencils, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve become very good at making itty-bitty tea box people over the last year or so. Otherwise a very sad story that this guy got locked up and it didn't even accomplish any change. From the discussion on the reddit, many prisons ban D&D, probably because of fear D&D sessions could turn into gangs and...: >D&D can "foster an inmate's obsession with escaping from the real life, correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior," which in turn "can compromise not only the inmate's rehabilitation and effects of positive programming but also endanger the public and jeopardize the safety and security of the institution." https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/57uz74/i_am_fully_capable_of_entertaining_myself_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/57uz74/i_am_fully_capa... Also the author says he couldn't do this at his previous prison because they kept taking away his books and papers.
- faraggi 10y ago> because they kept taking away his books and papers This is very worrying. There is a (light?) documentary[1] which compares nordic and american prisons which tries to compare both systems. Both have totally different operational philosophies ergo, results. Very interesting watch but probably even better if coupled with more insightful reading. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfEsz812Q1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfEsz812Q1I
- Fjolsvith 10y agoFederal prisons (min to medium security) cannot take away role-playing books. They can limit you to 10 books total, though. And, as long as your papers do not have any prison layouts or escape plans, they cannot take them either. There are legal courses of action an inmate can take to force the facility to comply with policy with regards to these things. Allowed subject matter is set by BOP system-wide. It would have had to be a state prison or perhaps a pre-trial facility
- anondon 10y agoNot directly about the article, but the Quote of the day, which is below the article. > “Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats. … Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?” — Richard Nixon, 1971 I don't know the context of the quote, but hatred towards Jews is something that I never really understood fully. I tried reading up a little on the history of Jews, and a few reasons seems to be (I know I am missing a lot): -first Abrahamic religion, difficult to acknowledge for Christians and Muslims -Palestine-Israel conflict creates hatred among Muslims -super successful and influential for such a small community. Without becoming a flamewar, can someone provide an objective TL;DR about hatred towards Jews?
- fnord123 10y agoYou're looking for a logical framework supporting hatred. Even if someone gives you a complete answer, you will surely remain disappointed.
- fnord123 10y agoEDIT: I've been proven wrong by some of the excellent replies.
- Freak_NL 10y agoYour question is valid and deserves a proper answer, but it won't do this topic any good. It is an extremely political topic, and discussing it in full would hijack this HN submission.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sfrechtling 10y agoI think an objective summary is going to be hard to come by. The only thing I can add is that this view is common throughout history - think Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. The stereotype of Jewish people as being involved in the processes of finances and money lending may have been one seed for this.
- mcv 10y agoPart of me is actually a bit jealous that he gets to design an intricate campaign full-time. The bigger part of me is outraged that an innocent guy got locked up for uncovering a criminal conspiracy.
- intended 10y agoI really can't wait for the future, the kind of childish maliciousness we have today will be replaced with increasing technological sophistication and innovation. People working on this are probably on HN, and I can only doff my hat to them. Being employed by palantir et al is far better than being on the receiving end.
- jstanley 10y agoThe kind of childish maliciousness we have today will be replaced with increasingly effective and omniscient childish maliciousness.
- hellofunk 10y agoFor some reason, this is something I have very often thought about. Not because I think I'll ever to go prison, but because I've often wondered what I'd do if I didn't have access to things that please me, like a musical instrument, or a computer. I've often thought that I would also be capable of keeping my mind excited without anything, and for me the one item that always stands out is that I'd commit myself fully to number theory and just think about integers and prime numbers all day and all night, for years, trying to work out the most basic puzzles in existence. That would probably never happen, I'd more likely end up a depressed opiate addict, but the thought that it could happen, even in the face of incarceration, gives me a bit of strange solace.
- restalis 10y agoContrary to what we like to imagine from outside, in prison you don't get the most favorable conditions for meditation. It's still an effort to get your mind serene and ready for heavy lifting like math. It's way more productive to focus on things that both have a lesser mental demand and touch your interest on a deeper, personal level.
- pmoriarty 10y agoI am reminded of something that I heard on the Alcatraz audio tour (which I strongly recommend if you ever tour Alactraz, which is awesome), where a former prisoner said he made up a game to help pass the time in his months of solitary confinement: He'd take a button off of his shirt and throw the button down on to the floor of his cell, in the pitch darkness. Then he'd crawl on his hands and knees to find it. Then he'd repeat the process again.
- feborges 10y agoYou can also see this game in the Brazilian prison movie "Carandiru" (available with english subtitles). Highly recommended.
- eric_h 10y agoI'd also recommend getting locked in the solitary confinement cell for a few minutes at Alcatraz, it's quite an experience (though it certainly takes a bit of trust to get over the fear that they won't let you out).
- guelo 10y agoOne of our political prisoners.
- scandox 10y agoIt's interesting that he references GURPS given that it was created by Steve Jackson Games, who were also raided by a Federal Agency and had their computers taken away without cause (Secret Service, I think). It is covered in Bruce Sterling's excellent The Hacker Crackdown http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
- evgen 10y agoYes, it was by the Secret Service and yes they were overly excessive in what they grabbed (e.g. everything plugged into an electrical socket that was not involved in food production), but even Loyd would probably admit by now that it was not entirely without cause...
- scandox 10y agoYes perhaps it is better to use a term like "heavy handed". Current situation seems so much more adversarial and frightening than what Sterling describes.
- pmoriarty 10y agoYeah, these days you're lucky if you don't have an armored vehicle crash through the wall of your house and you or your family don't get "accidentally" shot during a police raid.
- mcv 10y agoThere was of course a reason why the Secret Service raided them, but that doesn't mean it was a good reason. At the time, everybody was shocked and the courts sided with Steve Jackson, but with the past 15 years, I can imagine people are now more used to this kind of invasive, ill-justified raids by law enforcement organizations, and more willing to accept this as normal behaviour.
- evgen 10y agoIt was a good reason even if they were incorrect regarding their suspicions, and they did not have either the proper paperwork to enter the premises or the legal authority to remove what they did. As someone personally involved in the whole affair I can assure you that it was considered excessive and the Secret Service rightly deserved losing that case.
- pmoriarty 10y agoI always thought prison would be a great place to practice meditation. Even at home, where there are lots of distractions, I can easily spend hours meditating. In prison, with much more time to waste and a lot fewer distractions, I'd probably be able to focus for much longer and get really good at it, as the more you practice, the better you get, and the better you get the easier it is for you to meditate and the longer you can meditate. Another reason meditation could be great for prison is that it could be a fantastic antidote to boredom. After a few weeks of regular meditation, I found I actually started to look forward to "boring" chores like brushing my teeth and waiting in line, which provided great opportunities for meditating (which consisted of just focusing on my breath).. and those boring times just seemed to fly by as I meditated and no longer seemed boring. Yet another reason that meditation could help in prison is because it could be used to help one "detach", in the Buddhist or Stoic sense -- not to cling to things one desires, to be content with one's circumstances and surroundings, to help with pain, anger and other emotional issues, and just to achieve peace of mind. Meditation need not rely on any physical items that can be taken away from you. If you use the technique of focusing on your breath -- your breath being something that will always be with you as long as you live -- it can always serve as an object of meditation. Meditation seems tailor-made for prison (not to mention ordinary life, where it can also help).
- buovjaga 10y agoCheck out "Doing Time Doing Vipassana" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxSyv5R1sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxSyv5R1sg
- jkaptur 10y agoHave you ever been to prison? I think you may have a romantic view. For example: > “Plaintiff is being tortured on a daily basis in Attica Correctional Facility Special Housing Unit,” he wrote. “Plaintiff is subjected to having to listen to loud banging all day and night” and to “screaming and yelling” and to “feces being thrown in plaintiff’s cell” by “mentally disturbed prisoners” who were housed near him. From http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/derrick-hamilton-jailhouse-lawyer http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/derrick-hamilto.... Or (from an article about how prisons are putting two people in a solitary confinement cell): > The two started arguing immediately. Each had to prove that he would not be messed with, because if something happened — if one attacked the other — there was no escape. The only way to alert a guard was to bang on the door and hope the sound could be heard above the din. From https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/03/24/the-deadly-consequences-of-solitary-with-a-cellmate https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/03/24/the-deadly-con...
- eternalban 10y agoThis exact url was posted earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12719095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12719095
- greggh 10y agoBarrett is one of my best friends. He gets out soon and I can't wait for a time when he can put out articles like this every week again. It takes a lot longer to get through the process while in prison.
- eddie_catflap 10y agoI really like Barrett's writing, both the style and content. I look forward to seeing much more from him on his release. How he has maintained his wit throughout this episode is beyond me - especially after receiving such a harsh sentence.