Hacker News: jff

New comment by jff in "Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5"

jff — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 20:46:33 +0000

Yeah, my phone died recently and I'm really considering replacing it with this. I can hold out on an old spare iPhone until then, I think.

New comment by jff in "Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise"

jff — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 18:12:50 +0000

Yeah, it's pretty fucked up when an internet lynch mob gets you fired because you said "dongle" or something similarly bad.

New comment by jff in "Mt. Gox Bankruptcy Wasn't Really a Bust"

jff — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 20:33:31 +0000

Simply observing cryptocurrency users and exchanges in action does enough to delegitimize them, I'd think.

New comment by jff in "Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir"

jff — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 17:09:49 +0000

I found that line quite interesting. The wording seems to imply that someone is going to read this tablet to Ea-nasir, and possibly that someone wrote the tablet on behalf of Nanni. In an age before near-universal literacy (i.e. most of human history), that makes sense: Ea-nasir would have summoned someone to read out the tablet. Given Ea-nasir's position as a presumably well-off trader, he may have simply had a scribe on-staff to handle his correspondence--an early instance of the modern PR hack?

New comment by jff in "The Magic of Harry Potter Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You"

jff — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 01:16:14 +0000

The Pokemon game was itself just a slightly modified version of Ingress!

New comment by jff in "Social Media Has Failed Its Self-Driving Test"

jff — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 20:02:43 +0000

I typically only watch Cartoon Network when I'm traveling for work and I only wish it was King of the Hill. They use Family Guy as a firewall and it's fucking interminable, I keep flipping back hoping it's come around to Robot Chicken or whatever but it's always more goddamn Family Guy.

New comment by jff in "Social Media Has Failed Its Self-Driving Test"

jff — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 19:59:55 +0000

Check your local over-the-air stations; PBS has a separate digital channel for children's programming here, so it's always available.

New comment by jff in "Does anyone remember websites?"

jff — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 18:15:26 +0000

> let's download his file list to see what kind of porn they like.

this was the experience at my college, anyway

New comment by jff in "Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s Arizona experiment in urban planning"

jff — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 20:13:30 +0000

It's funny they pejoratively described the housing developments as beige, when all the pictures of Arcosanti are... beige concrete.

New comment by jff in "Amazon and Ebay Opened Pandora's Box of Chinese Counterfeits"

jff — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 20:04:07 +0000

> The worst part is that this kind of stuff is ammunition for the Trump supporter view that Amazon is doing harm to the American economy by promoting goods manufactured by cheap labor abroad.

So you're saying the worst part isn't that people are getting ripped off with fire-hazard chargers and lead-paint baby toys, but that a Trump supporter might be able to make a point because of it?

New comment by jff in "Amazon and Ebay Opened Pandora's Box of Chinese Counterfeits"

jff — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 20:02:35 +0000

I think you'd be surprised how easily Grandma cottons to the idea of cheap knock-off crap, and that by typing a code from her multivitamin bottle into product-validation.gov, she can verify it's not full of heavy metals.

New comment by jff in "The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)"

jff — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 15:45:18 +0000

Well that's embarrassing, I've been reading his name online for years and always read it as Gerrard. I'll just blame small fonts, that's it.

New comment by jff in "The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)"

jff — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 21:35:59 +0000

Andrew Gerrard worked on both and apparently didn't think Camlistore was the right basis for what they wanted in Upspin. But I'm sure you, who I'm not sure has used either project, know better than Andrew and Brad and Rob.

New comment by jff in "The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)"

jff — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 21:31:08 +0000

Brad Fritzpatrick's response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700968

New comment by jff in "American Nazis at Madison Square Garden, 1939"

jff — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 16:02:33 +0000

> Apparently the Nation of Islam was in favor of racial separation, and had a highly-placed anti-semite

I'd be pretty surprised if the Nation of Islam had only one highly-placed anti-semite.

New comment by jff in "Roman Empire per capita GDP shows the Romans were poorer than any 2015 country"

jff — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 22:59:49 +0000

> You have no more need to use a mobile phone today than the Romans did.

Don't tell that to the 'digital divide' people

New comment by jff in "Jewelbots – A Friendship Bracelet You Can Code"

jff — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 21:29:57 +0000

Yeah, with a different 'face', I think boys would think this was cool too. I know 9 year old me though 'secret codes' were very cool, so I'd have probably been into it.

New comment by jff in "Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says"

jff — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 21:09:03 +0000

If you think it's just western civilization, you haven't spent much time looking at non-western civilizations.

New comment by jff in "Productive on six hours of sleep? You’re deluding yourself, expert says"

jff — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 21:07:34 +0000

When I was in school (90s and early 2000s), it would have been considered extremely embarrassing to have your mom drop you off and pick you up every day. I think it was about the time I graduated that things began to shift. When I was in elementary school, the was nowhere for parents to pull up curb-side and get the kids. By the time I finished high school, the elementary school had blocked off half the curb-side into a separate loop for parents to pick up/drop off kids.

New comment by jff in "Microsoft acquires AltspaceVR"

jff — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 21:53:09 +0000

Nope! My Internet connection is less than perfect but better than the national average.

The local sandbox is still laggy crap on a recently-built i7 desktop with a 1-year-old NVidia card, though.