Hacker News Books

It features something roughly like Google Glass, plus Reddit Karma acting like BitCoins and like XP in World of Warcraft.

I am not a React Native developer, but I am a React Web developer (not by choice). The author summed up my feelings about React and JS in general so eloquently. The Swamp Castle and Freedom from Digging bits were so on point.

I am betting that my comment will get buried in the bottom of the comment avalanche, but if the author is reading, thank you for making my day!

Say what you will about Stallman, but I've never heard anyone accuse him of not living by his principles.

My least favorite was The Google Story - I couldn't stomach more than a chapter or two of it. It read like the sort of ass-kissing "He's a hero" crap that I encounter from living in an oil dictatorship.

* SWAT 4: How cool is a multiplayer shooter where you actually have to breach a room from multiple sides to pressure the enemy into _not shooting_? And hold your guns until you saw any indication they would? We played that game for nights in one room for better communication.

* System Shock 2: Deeply flawed in some regards, but also the first game that creeped me out in a _perfectly well lit and bright environment_. Shodan, as always, was a great enemy.

* Freedom Force Series: A comic strategy game. It wasn't that hard (it wasn't easy, either), but had "comic" written all over the place. The description if you hovered the cursor over a mere building was "A proud participant of the Patriot City skyline." Someone put an ironic joke on the patriotic theme of the game in the description of a boring apartment block... How fun is that?

BioShock was a culmination of all that. Would you kindly pay them your respect?

If you want privacy, you must first have security, and no system is secure.

I mean, just for starters, there are a constant stream of zero day exploits in OSes and Browsers that would allow me to install a keylogger on your computer, completely undetected.

So why are you so anti-cynical?

The situation is dire.

I highly recommend "Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel Suarez, who was a Security Consultant.

Privacy is literally life and death for people. I think trying to minimize the dangers is reckless.

Cheers.

- 6 weeks of (paid) vacation

- Private office, with a door

- Ability to partially work from home

- No on-call

These are probably less about the offer and more about working environment:

- Freedom to choose my tools (incl. laptop, development OS)

- No Agile

- No team, or very small team with smart colleagues

To summarize, the above are about satisfying two needs: for authonomy, and to not be worked to the bone.

I tought I wouldn't see that in my lifetime, that it was a thing of the past. Reading of totalitarian societies I always wondered how it could happen, and now we see it develop right before our eyes. It is fascinating & terrifying.

Old Man's War - John Scalzi - My first Scalzi book and won't be the last. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51964.Old_Man_s_War

Red Rising / Golden Son - Pierce Brown - I'm a sucker for these YA SF series. Lots of fun. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15839976-red-rising

What is within control?

What is outside it?

What are the risks of both non-action and action.

Sean Gallagher's "Threaty McThreatface" model is actually among the better high-level approaches I've seen:

• Who am I, and what am I doing here?

• Who or what might try to mess with me, and how?

• How much can I stand to do about it?

• Rinse and repeat.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/how-i...

See also EFF:

https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/introduction-threat-modeling

As you pursue the basic questions, you'll find yourself looking at specific threats, and the means (mechanisms, technologies, techniques) of addressing them.

Bruce Schneier and Freedom to Tinker are other good starting points -- ports of entry, not your be-all, end-all.

More broadly, this "start from a broad question, follow the implications" approach to research is a useful one in general.