drinian
A Ramble Through Firefox
Re:Ask HN: How do you deal with information and internet addiction?
on Friday February 10, 2023 @07:37AM (#34738870)
I wrote about the tools I use to help with this a while back:
https://auspicacious.org/posts/2020/10/03/rehumanize-yoursel...
For HN specifically, I don't browse the site but rather subscribe to the once-weekly Hacker Newsletter; there's already more than enough commenters and voters here. This is the first comment I have made here in many years; usually I'm many days late.
Re:Vizio reboots the PC: a quiet American success story
on Friday June 22, 2012 @11:16PM (#4149921)
Or at least a no-OS version, quietly offered through a few tech-friendly resellers.
Re:Ask HN: Zero-cost startups for ordinary Americans?
on Wednesday February 15, 2012 @10:10PM (#3597190)
I would not be so ambitious -- but I have to believe that any entrepreneurial activity is better on a resume than nothing at all. It can't lose money.
Ask HN: Zero-cost startups for ordinary Americans?
Something of a different challenge for HNers. I have a friend ("from the Internet," so to speak) who is in a difficult situation. She's highly literate and intelligent, although advanced math is out of the question for her. Lives in upstate New York with her mother, who is also unemployed, and somewhat physically disabled; they're both short on income. She has a two-year degree that doesn't...
Re:Canonical will no longer fund Kubuntu
on Sunday February 12, 2012 @08:49PM (#3583814)
I haven't tried this in a few years, but I recall that Kubuntu and Ubuntu desktops used to have serious issues co-existing on the same box for some reason.
Don't really care, now, as I'm on Lubuntu.
Re:30 to 40 Percent of VHS Films Will Never See Another Format
on Sunday February 05, 2012 @07:59PM (#3555795)
Remarkably, I know of at least one early-1990s film -- Rockula -- that was never released on DVD, but is available on Netflix Instant streaming.
Re:Kim Jong-il tweet: South Korean Park Jeonggeun held
on Sunday February 05, 2012 @07:48PM (#3555776)
This is not "starting to become" for South Korea. The fact of the matter is that South Korea is far more democratic now than it was during the Cold War. These laws restricting the dissemination of North Korean propaganda have been in place for decades, and were often used with the tacit approval of the US in years past to suppress dissent.(In fact, until about ten years ago, it was technically illegal to import Japanese pop music into South Korea!)
The only difference now is that their use is becoming increasingly controversial. This, at least, is a good thing.
Re:Public speaking for normal people
on Sunday January 22, 2012 @04:45PM (#3497803)
Probably a bit late for most readers here, but I highly recommend taking advantage of whatever opportunities for public speaking and performance your high school offers -- whether that's just walking on stage as an extra in a school theater production, or joining the debate club. Even a little can go a long way in relieving anxiety for the rest of your life.
Re:Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street in One Brief Tale
on Monday January 16, 2012 @08:16PM (#3473356)
Libel laws place more burden of proof on the accuser there? I understand that's the way it is in the UK.
Re:Government won't disclose why 12 girls suddenly developed tourettes...
on Saturday January 14, 2012 @07:34PM (#3465842)
Sensationalist headline, interesting article.
Re:JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles
on Saturday January 14, 2012 @05:12PM (#3465475)
Thanks for clearing that up. They are a very different sort of organization than the one behind my old summer job.
That being said, I don't really care what their Web interface looks like, but the wording used in this press release is not related to reality, and that bothers me.
Re:The White House's Response to SOPA
on Saturday January 14, 2012 @01:58PM (#3464940)
Everything that China blocks with their national firewall is considered "illegal" in China. That is, in fact, the exact same justification, even the same wording, that was used to build the Great Firewall of China.
It's true, in many ways US law is much more just than Chinese law. But that doesn't mean that walling off US citizens from the rest of the Internet in any way is a good idea.
Re:JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles
on Saturday January 14, 2012 @01:52PM (#3464918)
What on earth does "read-online access" mean? Are they making people use some kind of Flash application to read them (so you'll have to screencap important stuff), or are they just blocking access to the PDFs?
I would continue by asking who on Earth let people with such poor technical knowledge run a major academic publisher, but I have a funny story about an internship several years ago at another academic publisher.
Circa 2005, IIRC, I sat in on a sales meeting where I was told that the company was seriously considering requiring institutions to buy microfilm copies of journals in order to get online access, as their margins were higher on microfilm. Or something like that.
Re:The White House's Response to SOPA
on Saturday January 14, 2012 @10:07AM (#3464353)
new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity.
In short, reserving the right to build a Great Firewall around the US.
Re:B&N refuses to release source code of Nook Tablet, censors user req...
on Monday January 09, 2012 @10:07PM (#3445446)
It's not an attack, I'm just pointing out that it's unprofessional and makes the author look like he pays no attention to detail.
When dealing with legal issues, detail is of course paramount.
Re:B&N refuses to release source code of Nook Tablet, censors user req...
on Monday January 09, 2012 @08:27PM (#3445198)
I applaud his efforts, but he's aggressively misspelling Barnes and Noble's name in that post, and that lack of attention to detail makes him much harder to take seriously.
Re:Steve Jobs to Obama: “You’re headed for a one-term presidency”
on Sunday October 23, 2011 @01:49PM (#3146738)
A lot of people in this thread seem to think that being in school until 5 or 6 PM would mean being in the classroom for ten hours a day or more.
That additional time would be fantastic if used for athletics, self-study, club activities (with a lot of personal freedom for the students), and so on.
Re:The Styrofoam Cube In This Letter Serves A Bureaucratic Purpose
on Thursday October 20, 2011 @08:52PM (#3137812)
Registered mail is supposed to be held to a different standard for proof of delivery than delivery confirmation as well.
Re:What it costs to live in Japan
on Monday October 03, 2011 @10:52PM (#3069145)
By the way, you can get a prepaid Softbank mobile on a 90-day entry permit if you look in the right places. I had luck at the Don Quixote in Roppongi (no surprise there). It probably didn't hurt that I had my Japanese address written out in kanji and folded in a piece of paper inside my passport.
Data service, though, is still unavailable prepaid, I think.
Re:The Great Cul-De-Sac Problem And How To Alleviate It.
on Saturday October 01, 2011 @08:41PM (#3061649)
Hey, if you're willing to shoulder the true costs of that style of living -- environmentally, that's at least air pollution, and runoff from increased paving and lawns replacing woods and fields; then there's the cost of building out utilities, which you'll share with far fewer people in the exurbs -- then I guess you can. I suspect that far fewer people can truly afford suburban density than our current setup has allowed.
Re:How the FRA is Regulating Passenger Rail Out of Existence
on Saturday October 01, 2011 @04:12PM (#3060985)
Effective, good-quality regulation is a form of subsidy.
This article is right to look at the costs of not updating regulation to meet reality.
Re:How the FRA is Regulating Passenger Rail Out of Existence
on Saturday October 01, 2011 @12:52PM (#3060398)
I don't buy that. Every other country with high-speed rail has rail regulations as well.
Re:Google Fiber: 151Mbps down / 92Mbps up
on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @08:20PM (#2923222)
To be honest, I have their business service at home to avoid trouble when I'm running VPN servers, etc. and the occasional Web service from home -- not to mention the usage cap issue.
And it's nice to know that they're up to 35 mbits upload (much faster than what I have), but their hardware is capable of much more (assuming it's on par with Google Fiber's).
Re:Google Fiber: 151Mbps down / 92Mbps up
on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @08:21PM (#2918918)
How about just convincing Verizon to sell the higher speeds to those who want them, at a higher price? The hardware's there, but their most expensive FiOS business connections are far short of Google's numbers.
Re:Why Arabic is Terrific
on Sunday August 21, 2011 @09:14PM (#2910860)
Going back in history about five hundred years, I wonder if you could compare the Arabic dialects vs. classical Arabic to Romance languages vs. Latin.
Re:90 Percent of People Don't Know How to Use CTRL+F (or CMD + F)
on Friday August 19, 2011 @09:17PM (#2905462)
The really interesting point is that people don't seem to put any thought into what should be possible with a computer.
Intuitively, people with a decent mental model of how text is processed by computers would expect that the computer could search through that text, and look for a command in the program to do that. But many people's mental model is that they are looking through a sheet of paper displayed on the screen.
How to change this is going to be difficult.
Re:Finally, USPS.com got nice look'n'feel
on Monday July 25, 2011 @09:13PM (#2805517)
When you're mailing something that needs more than one stamp, you still have to know the current value of that Forever Stamp.
That being said, the reason you can't just print postage online for anything but Priority/Express seems to be a really bad deal the USPS made with PitneyBowes.
Re:NASA's Successful Quantifying of Comedy Timing (By Penn Jillette an...
on Friday July 22, 2011 @09:06PM (#2795792)
I think government needs to use tax money for “police, courts, and defense” and that’s it. If I were king of the world, there wouldn’t be a king of the world and NASA would be private. But who cares what I think? We have NASA and they do the coolest things. It can’t be justified with Tang and Crazy Glue. Exploration of space is worth it because humans need to explore.
Cognitive dissonance much?