seltzered

For those wondering who runs this site / if it's endorsed at all by snowden himself (can't find anything stating such a thing outright yet) - from the bottom of the faq (https://edwardsnowden.com/frequently-asked-questions/):

### Who runs this website?

The site is commissioned by the trustees of Courage to provide information on the threats Edward Snowden faces, how he is being protected, and what you can do to support him.

### What is The Courage Foundation (formerly the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund) and who runs it?

Courage is a trust, audited by accountants Derek Rothera & Company in the UK, for the purpose of providing legal defence and campaign aid to journalistic sources. It is overseen by an unrenumerated committee of trustees. Edward Snowden is its first recipient. The terms of the fund and its trustees can be obtained from Derek Rothera & Company.

They'll be sold to someone (stalking horse bidder is Flextronics) within 60 days. See http://blog.wink.com/wink-blog/2015/9/22/wink-corporate-upda...

I've done the pacific starlight from SF to Portland/Seattle a couple times over the years, and while I love the scenic-ness of the train, I felt like the author painted a bit too rosy of a picture of the amtrak.

Here's my anecdotal list of downsides of amtrak train riding:

- People will talk on their cell phones in the cabin despite the rules. You wouldn't think this a big annoyance, but it gets annoying after several hours.

- Amtrak cars can have issues - I spent 12 hours in one with a door that kept opening and closing making a huge 'clunk' noise every 30 seconds. A passenger finally figured out a way to make it stuck open.

- Watch your stuff, Things can and will get stolen - particularly in areas where there's multiple close stops (e.g. the stops near seattle) - last time the person in the seat in front had their smartphone stolen while they took a brief break in the snack car.

- The co2 savings compared to flying depends on the actual route and timing - I have to point this out because amtrak does market themselves a bit on co2 savings - I calculated this once between flying and taking the train from seattle to spokane, and after factoring in the need to stay at a hotel an extra night for the train along with it's non-direct route, the co2 difference was negligible. Here's my math for those curious: https://i.imgur.com/zTHfSB8.png

- Certain trains are historically, tragically slow - amtrak has a website logging the timeliness of trains, typically 70% on time for a long train is on the good side.

This said, I do want trains to be more of a thing here - I've had great experiences with the ones in europe, wish the pioneer train ( http://pioneertrain.org ) and ski train ( http://www.skitrain.com/ ) make a comeback, and prefer taking the business class amtrak trains for shorter trips over flying or driving. Plus you can pack a folding bike like a brompton on amtrak just by tossing it into the overhead compartment.

More: here's a blog of someone traveling the us by railpass: http://railpass.tumblr.com/

Oddly, I learned about Gary Kildall a few days ago after reading a wired article about the "Halt and Catch Fire" tv series ( http://www.wired.com/2014/05/halt-and-catch-fire/ )

"Easter eggs: Gordon and Donna Clarks’ first initials and back story echo those of Gary and Dorothy Kildall"

another option is just keep the assets as SVG's and use a library to do the conversion (ios/osx specifically, I personally use SVGKit - https://github.com/SVGKit/SVGKit )

As referenced at the end of the article, there's a This American Life podcast from a few years ago about the whole thing: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/m...

Really worth the listen.

Are any of the hp Sprout folks from the MS Research 'illumishare' team from a couple years ago? the video reminds me of this demo of kids playing games over skype with a similar system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODx5t53j66M

also, an even older demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnL34XwTgag

I'm actually a bit surprised they didn't stress the collaboration features more, guess there's an initial fear of how many people will own the same device.

I looked into this a bit, and if I'm guessing correctly, the alloy isn't different than the alloy 'ethergraf' tips that have been in the market since 2010, and saw them as cheap as ~25 bucks. These are the sites I bookmarked when looking into it:

http://www.axelweinbrecht.de/en/Produkte/Schreiben_mit_Metal...

http://www.napkin4ever.com/it/

http://www.vat19.com/item/the-inkless-metal-pen

Basically it's not 'everlasting', but lasts for maybe a few years, and you may have to sand the tip down occasionally to make it a finer point again. Note that it does use a bit of lead, and so isn't recommended for use by children. I don't plan on buying any one myself, since it just doesn't seem like the writing give fine-enough of a point for my needs (search on youtube, there's a review or two of these things.)

Read iTulip.com / the book "The post-castastrophy economy"

I'd argue it was the rise of the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economy that grew very rapidly over the past 30 years. The FIRE economy is opposite to the classical producer - consumer economy.

There's plenty of times I sometimes wish I just made money like my friends doing trading/finance/etc. instead of studying electrical engineering. I'd get to work downtown instead of in a far away suburb too.

pinboard, usenet, and occasionally small community forums. soon picasa web albums, rhapsody, and a vpn provider.

I'll pay for anything that saves me a lot time, has a great interface, and/or replaces something I already use.

I'd consider paying for a very usable todo-list app that synced over dropbox instead of charging me a monthly fee (i.e. remember the milk), and had an amazing user interface over the free google task apps.

I'd also love to pay for mint if it similarly just worked over something more secure/local, and had an open backend (I had accounts that didn't sync at all correctly on mint). Maybe wesabe should be revisited.

not counting vps'es or anything as that's more of a hobby/entrepreneurship thing.

that's a rough and very large social circle (for me at least). I'd still expect circles or whatever "next-gen" social network to make setting up groups of friends and information control a very easy and pervasive process, enough to make me pry myself away from using email for group communication.

Thanks for writing this. I recently started an etherpad server at work, and while it's still going to take some time to gain traction, I figure it's way easier than sharing files on the network or teaching managers to use subversion.

I love this post. The problem is that many people (including myself) are not working for (and possibly won't find) managers with this view towards hiring.

Many managers hire people as a sudden reactionary event ("we have an open rec, we've got to hire before the rec closes!"), leading to rushed hiring decisions, and then negotiation issues a year later where you ended up hiring someone (and they took the offer) out of immediacy / desperation, and the employee ends up leaving or accepts the lack of interest and doesn't work to his/her full potential.

very cool, thanks! I was using wunderlist until I switched to android, I still feel a need to build a native desktop app for some reason, but this works.

last i checked, you couldn't talk to custom hardware with it. you could do a html5/webkit/nacl installer-based app with appcelerator titanium and then modify things to talk to hardware.

I think that's the way forward, but for stuff that pays money I have to ship so I'm still kinda going with qt/swing/wx for cross-platform or wpf.

Wish i could find it, but there's an HN'er who bootstrapped a business and during the same timeframe met someone and got married, and wrote a nice blog post about it recently. He seemed to pull it off just fine.

"Gtk+ isn't as fun as Qt, but being forced to use C++ is plain out painful."

just curious, have you considered qt jambi (now open source) or qt4dotnet?

I still can't grasp where the market is to buy a tablet on a data plan contract.

The problem seems that these hardware-only vendors are trying to extract profit from only their hardware investment instead of either charging a higher price for quality hardware or investing in and charging for a quality app store / user experience.

It would be nice if google set an "experience" tier, where if hardware vendors followed a high standard of hardware quality / display specs they could share some of google's advertising/android market profits.

What would stop them from supporting android apps within meego? There's rumors that the RIM playbook is going this route.

Good to know. I know some other companies (e.g. Facebook) use IRC as another way to keep folks communicating.

I've been in a position where I've practically been a one-man software team for half a decade, but my boss has basically told me I can't work remotely even though a couple other senior folks do. I've tried helping ease the fear of me not being there by creating canned responses for other coworkers to follow, and getting a support system in place. New plan now though is to bleed a little, find a new job, and opt to not work remotely ONLY if I'm going to gain a good mentoring/apprenticeship experience from the people I work with.

Derek, you've been a huge inspiration for me, but I remember hearing you say at a conference that your employees started to hate you a while after working remotely -- to the point that you shutoff the website for a few hours to realize you needed to sell the company.

Do you have any thoughts on what can be done to keep rappore up amongst employees in the office while still working remotely?

NOTE: sorry I don't remember where you said it, might've been towards the end of your lessconf presentation http://b.lesseverything.com/2010/2/3/derek-sivers-speaks-at-...

Is it just me, or did anyone else not see anything that makes it stand out from the rest of the android tablets coming out.

this reminded me of an article back in 2004, where an engineer discovered sake can be used to make wood pliable enough to form it into speaker cones: - http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/06/sake-marinade-soften.ht...

I'm in austin, but I keep wishing that I lived in Silicon Valley or PNW - namely due to:

* greater ability to commute by bicycle/train/public transit. Austin's bicycle scene is growing, but it's still fairly impractical due to the lack of public transit infrastructure.

* potential for more outdoor trips - hiking around austin is fun when there's water around, but we easily have drought years too which aren't as fun. Plus, I'd think planning a ski or surfing trip is much easier out west than here. Many of my valley friends afford to share a house in tahoe during the winter.

I agree. My problem is that I'm unfairly hellbent on any notes/task management stuff being cross-platform, or having an open format. I wanted to make onenote a central place for notes, drawings, etc. But I stopped once office 2011 arrived for mac WITHOUT onenote support.

This is usually where one suggests evernote as a viable alternative, but I feel like they butchered much of the UI in the latest version, namely the fact that tagging is way less intuitive in the latest versions.

I'm currently trying to setup mobileorg + dropbox to sync with my windows machines and my iphone, and I've never used emacs (although I can grok vim). I'll try to post a writeup when I finish it.

I'm coming to try mobileorg after not liking things/omnifocus being too mac-oriented, hating onenote for being too windows-oriented (yes, I attempted to use it for todo), and not liking remember the milk for charging the same price as flickr. Google tasks isn't bad, but I disliked it's webapp-style popup in gmail, nor the widget-style apps it has. The canvas thing looks interesting though.

For basic todo list stuff I realized need something that can be easily made to support a different OS/platform, and work natively (i.e. no webapps).

I've experimented with tabs on the side for a while (tree-tabs in FF, and vertical tabs in chrome). While side tabs work nice when your browser consumes the whole screen, I usually work by having two browser instances (one on the left, one on the right) instead. At that point, horizontal screen real estate becomes more crucial.

I figured aza's tab candy (panorama) is really the nice compromise in letting you organize tabs (a la treetabs). It just needs to be refined to where it can be set as the home page so you get used to that workflow.

Do you have any preference towards countries in terms of health care available?

I always feel like the lack of a universal healthcare system in the US discourages lots of people from pursuing a startup full-time.