peterhost | 11 years ago | on: I'm Leaving Mojang
peterhost's comments
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
Holly Ass, Twitter, by essence is an assholy thing. What can you expect from someone who has "3500 friends" or "50 000 followers" ? Follow the Holy Shoe of Jerusalem :)
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Parley.co Project Outline: Encrypted Email and IM for Everyone
Most people don't even realize their gmail/whatever account is like them standing naked (literally more naked than any psychanalist would ever dream to see you naked) in [google/whatever]land.
Stasibook is quite good in that regard too. To sortof paraphrase [obfuscated]berg, <<Privacy for the masses is sooo 2008>>.
As long as you keep true to your users, don't store any users metadata except the bare minimum to make the service work, try and be what spideroak is to dropbox, or wickr is to imessage, you have my (worthless but sincere) blessings.
Way to go.
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Randi Zuckerberg Also Confused About Facebook Privacy
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Receiveee.com - disposable email address
Analogy: When one fucks his/her neighbor's wife/husband (no, just kidding, nobody ever does that IRL), one at least draws the curtains, or goes rent a motel room 500 miles from home. It can lead to legal problems, big loss of money, and shattering a whole family (hurting real people for real), but no jurisdiction in north america or western Europe would sent someone to jail for that.
So... Signing into your new shiny service with a dupe email ? You bet i will. All the more if it's free. And that's just the beginning. It's time people realize their "profile" is as private as their "privates". Don't let anyone profile you for free. Your profile is worth more than that, right ?
That answers your question ?
(Btw nothing personal, as for the "illegal" stuff hapening on your service, it's mostly your problem, alas:( and that's not the easiest part. As long as you wish to profile users, you cannot securely (as in security by design) offer them privacy, and hence will run into the kind of troubles you allude to)
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email
The fact that your code will (?) be opensourced, is a big +1 The fact that it's secure by design is a big +1
Count me in, and go defeat gmail, icloud, and all those monstrosities,... one user at a time !
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Thinking the unthinkable
My first guess (being diagnosed, not self, with some weird neurotransmitter problem and very lucky to have found a cure which makes my life normal again) is that the medical/pharma world is not giving a shit at the moment. It's like financing research for rare diseases : no money to be made here.
Second guess is that (oh yeah, you'll like that) most psychologists are charlatans (the biggest of all being Freud, then Lacan imo) and they got traction after WWII, for obvious reasons : western societies at large were scared shitless of the Reich's positions as to all problems having only to do with genetics (jews, mentally ill people,...). So we got 60 years of this "be nice, try to understand" bullshit.
Third, what we learned with Aspergers is that something as radical as autism can be a continuum. This is quite a revolutionary discovery, and does not seem to have sunk in yet. We all know as programmers the difference between discrete and continuous, we live in a world built upon bits after all. There might be thousands, hell maybe quintillions of such continuums which chained together lead to a unique pathology each and every time : it's also called personality.
Roughly speaking, we are still apes (alas not) trying (hard enough) to further our scientific knowledge of psychic disorders.
My feeling is that until the human being, the individual, is placed at the center of all the fabric of our societies, the fact that each case in unique and requires a specific attention, we will get nowhere. Money has no personality, money is the key to almost anything as comes to survival in this world. This is the thing that has to change... Someday. Because money likes not diversity.
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal
To further your/my/our point(s), you can read Bruce Schneier's latest "Crypto-Gram Newsletter" (https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1212.html). He rephrases the problem with a feudal/serf paradygm, which is quite appropriate imo.
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal
Hacker new indeed....
Has anyone's been following dunno, wikileaks or Appelbaum or... Hacker news that are not on hackernews (which usurpates its name because what it really is is startup news) ? Eagle, the Athen Affair (http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair/...), or more generally this : http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html ?
It's our liberty that's slipping out of the (gaping a..)hole of democracies, which is not democracies fault because they are by definition are "representative governements", based on election. Tocqueville knew that back in the XIXth, so did all theoreticians of "governance", and not a single one called a "representative government" a "democracy".
Anyway. What it boils down to is : if you're not strictly speaking living in a democracy (which i'm sorry, the US, UK, France,... Aren't by historical, philosophical, and semantic definition), the only thing that matters is keeping power at bay. Try and elect representatives who truly understand that too much power in to few hands always leads to disaster. Only. There are none. There haven't been for decades. The latest in france was General de Gaulle (though his ego was high, he was the sort able to step down from power after a people's vote) , and I guess, on the US side, Kennedy.
I wouldn't trust my shoes to the state. And to facebook ? (non existing) Jeez again ! This is so scary to realize nobody - at large - realizes...
WWII is far away, the days of the cold war too, and people become lazy. Even (so called) hackers.
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Something really scary is going on in Germany
This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you, there's "quote" and there's "quote".
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: I love you, dad
I had such an alcohool problem when i was 26 or so (some serious, drink alone thing). Only 10 years afterwards was i diagnosed with a problem in neuro-trnamitters, which another drug (medecine) just made disappear. I've been living 6 years in a world without fear and mental pain, since, something i've never experienced before. My brain was the main culprit.
I just wish we could advance our understanding of the brain so as not to serve people anymore of "god hate you" / "it's your fault" bullshit.
I'm gonna kick some creeper's asses tonight in memory of all the suffering ones (yeah, creeper's are good scapegoats, i know it's not their fault either;). Thx all of you for sharing, i've spent an interesting evenig reading the whole thing.
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: The Web We Lost
Like privacy, like knowing you're being a product, like helping facebook, google and pals map you, your friends, your friend's dog,...
Seriously...
A smartphone is a tracking device that can make calls. An app is a tracking sotftware that can display pictures.
That's what you lose. Maybe people don't care, but i guess that if they had a chance to understand what's really at stake, they would care and reconsider.
Nothing is free. At least in the earlier days of the web people understood that, because everyone payed some sort of bill. And bills without hidden costs, sortof help people think what it is they are (or are not) paying for.
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Suite of 300 icons for web and user interface design
Your giving this for free reminds me of the biggest problem Freelance artists/developers have : if one's a dev at heart, it's creating that fuels one's achievements. It's the fact that people are using the results. Problem is : how do I keep creating if I can't make a living out of it ?
And it's a hard one. I read so many headlines on HN which revolve around "launch a startup!", but never really do more than read them because of one single fact : i'm bloody not, and never will be interested by selling anything, be it cakes, code or my secondhand ipad.
I totally suck at marketing cause I totally hate practicing this art (of which i do not doubt the usefulness).
It's taken me 40 years to realize that : 1) i'm not interested in sales/marketing 2) doing it takes me down a path of depression every single time i try and i'm better of doing other things like building my own house (took me 3 years) or working in mechanics (repairing engines) 3) most important : there's no shame in not caring about marketing/sales and (therefore) sucking at it.
I had the opportunity to team with a guy who excels at marketing, and am able to code for a living full time while still living in a small village on a secluded island with a good internet connection. I truly hope you'll meet one of these ! Cause your work is insanely good.
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)
Come one, go learn some history. At least the article's writer did know some (a lot)
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves
Drawing a caricature here, but principles don't change that much.
Only thing it seems to prove is that kids are all naturally born hackers. It's what society does to them later on that takes that ability away (like using apps or loving Steve)
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Zynga stock plummets below value of its cash and real estate
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Programmer Competency Matrix
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Introducing the Redesigned Bitbucket
Bitbucket for opensource things Stash for our firm's repos behind the firewall.
And i have been using github for years, paid account, like others. Paid github vs Atlassian Stash ? Stash wins.
peterhost | 13 years ago | on: Hackers Breach 53 Universities and Dump Thousands of Personal Records Online
I find internal auditing, under strict surveillance to be a very good idea indeed. This could even lead to some healthy form of competition between universities, not only base on who teaches that Lisp class, or what professor/university's name is.
Its such a lame end for "the story of Mojang". Let's see how long it takes for the word "mojang" to be forgotten. Lego is still called Lego, and Pixar still hasn't yielded its name to Disney (they sortof managed to coexist) to take just two examples.
The sad thing about Mojang is people are inspired by "vision". Money ? sure, we all want to earn as much as we can... But when did money give anybody any inspiration.