News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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Re:I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality on Thursday November 23, 2017 @12:39AM (#15763061)
I don't think that many people actually do hold this belief. That's why someone had to make a bot to create the illusion.
Re:New in PostgreSQL 10 on Friday September 22, 2017 @01:25AM (#15309601)
I recently started using PostgreSQL for a project and have been pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion. I also have been hearing more and more people speak highly of it, especially for its security.
Re:Build-a-Coin Cryptocurrency Creator on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @11:22PM (#15078283)
Pay attention to this project and volunteer if you wish - https://voice.mozilla.org/ - it may be a big thing for Mozilla
I found uMatrix to be an adequate substitute once figured out (http://adamantine.me/index.php/2015/11/18/umatrix-desperatel...)
Re:Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy? on Sunday August 06, 2017 @01:52AM (#14939963)
Well that rules out Boltmann brains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @11:43PM (#14853534)
I'm pretty good at not falling victim to this. I don't check facebook. I don't watch TV or the news. I don't listen to the radio. I have a suite of ad-blocking technology. My attention is entirely mine to direct.

Instead I read, listen to podcasts (which are sponsored oftentimes, but it's more relevant and less intrusive), watch recordings of episodes/streams without commercials.

I believe I feel better because of this, and have more knowledge and skills. But I also sometimes feel like I live under a rock when I miss facebook reminders of birthdays, and "haven't heard" about current events that are blaring across all channels.

Re:At The Dawn Of Recorded Sound, No One Cared on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @09:58PM (#14407072)
Since I studied how humans sometimes have poor judgments for a briefly, I had the opposite reaction: I immediately imagined some young person from the 1800's saying "Well gee why would you want to record sounds when you go can go hear them live!"
It may come across as a simplistic answer but here it goes: just get comfortable making mistakes and being wrong. When I first entered this sphere, one thing that immediately struck me was the worshiping of brilliant ideas/code and the perfectionism that comes with it. In my opinion, less is gained when there is a culture that causes the majority of people to first doubt and second guess themselves while the people who have established a reputation raise their hand and continue to dominate the discussion. I like to believe the we live in a meritocracy, and that the best ideas inevitably make their way to the top, but that is stifled when our western obsession with flawless individualism gives pause to our intuitive and creative thoughts.

If you have good intentions and find yourself in good company, you should have nothing to fear. It really is a matter of "just do it". Thought without the possibility of action is imprisonment.

I've been listening to Python podcasts recently and this is certainly the impression I'm getting. Plus, there are always backports for those who cling to 2.7.
Re:The Invisible War for the Open Internet on Sunday April 30, 2017 @12:20AM (#14230144)
The article got me thinking what might happen in a dystopian future where all networks are under tight control and surveillance. Well, there's already the dark web... But what about the physical "backbone" to support a world wide web? Could you do it without laying thousands of miles of fiber optic cable? And without flooding the radio spectrum?
Re:The Invisible War for the Open Internet on Saturday April 29, 2017 @11:28PM (#14230034)
“Those are some lovely data packets you’ve got there. It sure would be a shame if they got lost on their way to your users.”

There were a lot of good quotes from the article, but this one struck me as particularly apt. I saw something on tumblr today about how "net neutrality" just doesn't resonate with people - and it's true - I tried striking up conversation about this and some people didn't even know what I was talking about.

Re:Anagram Scoring on Saturday April 29, 2017 @05:54PM (#14228982)
That is very cool. I am the type of person who enjoys anagrams, and started toying around in Python (http://adamantine.me/index.php/2016/09/02/python-anagram-tut...), but I never thought of rating the anagrams... My next step was to generate a list of names that are anagrams of other names, or take the corpus of The Dark Tower series and see if you can discover any interesting anagrams (as it is a motif in the series).
Re:Explain Shell on Thursday March 30, 2017 @12:40AM (#13992950)
I thought this was pretty cool but missing something. Until I realized that uMatrix was blocking Cloudflare. Once I loaded the rest of the site... Awesomeness. Great work, whoever made this.
Re:How to Learn New Things as an Adult on Monday March 20, 2017 @12:13AM (#13911636)
I agree, but I'm finding it's hard to follow through with the extra hour in the morning, before the commute and everything. Maybe an audio book could still work.
I thought of a pulley for some reason, and on the off chance it wasn't a completely ridiculous idea googled it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_space_elevator#Cross-Sec...
Re:Plex Media Server on Cloud on Friday March 10, 2017 @12:01AM (#13836509)
I've been running Plex in a FreeBSD jail (nas4free): http://adamantine.me/index.php/2016/11/20/how-to-install-ple...
Re:What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012) on Sunday February 05, 2017 @12:06PM (#13573262)
How common is this in Linux development? Is it better to have two competing solutions and "may the best one win"? Or would it be more effective for those two teams to work together on one project?
So you came from Arch, and thought FreeBSD had quite a learning curve? Hmm maybe I should rethink FreeBSD and stick with Mint.
I think you're on to something.
Re:Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well” on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @10:50PM (#13488549)
Agreed. Improving my writing from countless essays and writing heavy classes has been a tremendous help in my life.
Re:Wine 2.0 released on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @11:38PM (#13478573)
Though I've made the switch from Windows to Linux, I have not used Wine. Maybe it's time? What main things work and don't work?
Re:What science says about naming in programming on Sunday January 08, 2017 @01:32AM (#13348614)
hn hug of death. I tend to use shorter names, but maybe because most of my code isn't very complex. Sometimes I just change the spelling if I want a similar but new variable.
Re:The science of Westworld on Saturday January 07, 2017 @04:29PM (#13346754)
I was waiting for the author of the article to mention Asimov, but he never did :( It's too bad because Asimovs Three Laws of Robotics

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

do answer many of OP's points about goal oriented behaviour.

I think that if the show spent time covering how the tech came to be, it would just dilute the philosophical concentration of the series, which in my opinion, was extremely stimulating and appropriately delivered for television's standards. No I do not believe that Mr. Ford developed sentient beings with the help of just one other person, but who's to say he didn't just fork some open source framework (in his backstory, of course) and spend some ridiculous amount of an inherited wealth to make it all come true?

I had my share of disappointment as the show progressed, but it definitely added something to the mix that I was not expecting.

Re:Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot on Wednesday January 04, 2017 @12:45AM (#13315956)
I think a symptom checker bot has much to offer (though the devil is in the details). How is information extracted from a curated knowledgebase? In any case, a system with such probabilistic machinery could add a lot to our healthcare system since it would not make human errors such as base rate neglect. Furthermore, would existing doctors approve of machine responses?
Visual basic
Interesting development of the narrative - how the author began to feel guilty once he noticed the thief had to buy extra call credits since the spyware was depleting his data faster than normal. I kind of felt bad watching as well. Here is a man who is driven to steal, sleeps in homeless shelters, gets ditched by friends when he's unable to pay for a bus. . . And he prays to God every hour on Fridays, so that all his prayers will be answered.
Interesting point, I had not considered that.

Either way, I'm curious to see more adoption of UBI - even if it is a small, homogeneous population. Maybe working class beneficiaries of UBI could dedicate a larger portion of their time to volunteering, or re-training.

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