neilk

96 ms·

841.
by neilk 14y ago
The benefits of a gift card program (to the retailer) are more than just info. The two big wins are float and unredeemed value. Float: while money is in the system, Facebook can use it for their own purposes or on Wall Street. Unredeemed va
842.
by neilk 14y ago
Maybe overblown, but it echoes complaints I've heard from other bioinformatics people. Surely this means there's a goldmine waiting there for someone to produce a non-broken toolchain for bioinformatics? Or is it even possible to produce st
843.
by neilk 14y ago
weev is not being charged with blackmail. As far as I know, he didn't do anything to accomplish that goal. He talked a little bit about it on IRC. Instead he went to a journalist, perhaps to increase his infamy. It's become part of the tria
844.
by neilk 14y ago
Agreed. In software there are costs to using niche tools, so typically everybody tries to use the most popular choices available that fit their problem space. This is true of all software, closed or open. FOSS is always going to be more 'mo
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by neilk 14y ago
Trolling is not illegal. Embarrassing a company is not illegal. Talking or joking about blackmailing a company on IRC is not illegal. Taking a security exploit first to a journalist, rather than the parties involved, is not illegal. I am no
846.
by neilk 14y ago
I grew up in Montreal, which is definitely more east coast but is so unlike other North American cities it's probably a poor comparison.
847.
by neilk 14y ago
Is it just because you have to have different size copies of graphics, and other such adjustments?
848.
by neilk 14y ago
He might, or he might also have been saying to go easier on him since he's just starting out. I dunno, are we so used to everybody hyping and hustling we see it everywhere now?
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by neilk 14y ago
Nope - San Francisco is not much bigger. San Francisco has 800K people. Vancouver has 600K. (It is true that there are much more people in Bay Area versus the greater Vancouver area.) I've lived in both cities. Vancouver is basically the Sa
850.
by neilk 14y ago
If you judge Chomsky by his fans, it is easy to dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist. That's not what he's doing. He's presenting another view of the world where, even in a free and democratic society, the media has institutional, structura
851.
by neilk 14y ago
I think danah boyd has the best take on this. Can we say that prosecution caused Aaron's suicide, in the same sense as one billiard ball sets another in motion? Of course not. But what should disturb us is that the business and government e
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by neilk 14y ago
No problem. You go on being not heated about this.
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by neilk 14y ago
Actually that's not the most amazing part. They didn't want to let him onto the RDF working group, so Aaron hacked the W3C process at the age of 14. > The rules said that while they could reject any requests to join from an individual,
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Aaron Swartz on illness and depression(aaronsw.com)
212 points by neilk 14y ago|22 comments
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by neilk 14y ago
It's called activism. Sometimes bad laws must be resisted, by breaking them deliberately. The best among us do it in public, under their own names, daring the state to make good on their threats. The law is not a unitary piece. Were Aaron's
856.
by neilk 14y ago
Groupon was not founded on the idea that propelled them to success (assuming Groupon still counts as a success). The site grew out of ThePoint.com, a group fundraising site. They took the expertise they had building that platform - for yea
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by neilk 14y ago
It's a good point, but you should also put it in context with Chuck Close's monastic dedication. Unlike a lot of artists, he seeks out constraints. Often times he starts out by closing off options, and then seeing what scope for creativity
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by neilk 14y ago
"college also teaches the life skills needed to succeed" Whoa. Is this subtle irony? I can't believe anyone who isn't actually a college admissions person wrote this. College can teach you some practical techniques, it can be broadening, an
859.
by neilk 14y ago
"Nibbles" are when you extend an agreement with further small concessions. Works best when the other side is under more pressure than you - they were happy to get to your yes, and the pain of losing your agreement is something they will avo
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by neilk 14y ago
Seconding this. Tannen's framework is very useful for understanding miscommunication across genders.
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by neilk 14y ago
I don't know what's wrong with OP's life or who he envies (I asked, which nobody else has done so far...) but I can answer for myself. You presuppose that there are certain things in life which are "mine" and that significance means that I
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by neilk 14y ago
Nope. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
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by neilk 14y ago
Why do you feel like a loser? That implies you're falling behind somebody else -- who, and in what way?
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by neilk 14y ago
I think you're projecting your own problems here. OP did not complain about cosmic futility or worry about being remembered a generation hence, just a feeling they hadn't done much in life yet.
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by neilk 14y ago
African Men vs. Hollywood Stereotypes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSElmEmEjb4
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by neilk 14y ago
I dislike "this new thing is just that old thing" analogies. Someone on HN once tried to argue with me that the old unix talk utility was no different from Twitter. Just because it's a computerized container for human communication doesn't
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by neilk 14y ago
> Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small. Except, once you start a regime of easy and ubiquitous surveillance, you cannot guarantee that those risks will remain
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by neilk 14y ago
As with all things Google, it's an order of magnitude beyond what hipmunk does. If you keep the window open long enough you will actually see flights disappear if they fill up. I still think the hipmunk interface is more humane.
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by neilk 14y ago
You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If... you assume that your attention is so important that strangers will pay money to send you mail. http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html#e-postag...
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by neilk 14y ago
I guessed it was a newspaper shop before he got to the bit about the Oregonian. All the marks are in blue pencil, which was a common tool in graphic arts until the digital era. And because it's a big basement in an old building in the cente

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