I first created an account on reddit about 6 years ago, and I think I had been a lurker for a while before that. When I joined, reddit was a place of learning. There was (to me, at least) a sense of community around sharing great philosophical articles, important news stories, and all kinds of learning resources. In essence, it felt like Hacker News before Hacker News. This probably isn’t a coincidence , as Paul Graham had a huge influence on reddit (which wasn’t even the idea Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman originally pitched for YCombinator). And over time, it lost that high quality aspect. I suspect that most people reading this post have heard this argument somewhere before .
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If you’re like at least a quarter of the people who read my original article, " Am I evil, or is killing patents just plain fun? " a few days ago, you probably read the title of this post as “Killing parents part 2” or “Killing patients part 2.” I have to wonder how many people originally clicked it simply for that reason.
This is but one of the many responses I got, however. Overwhelmingly, people who responded to the article were in favor of at least reforming software patents, and many favored getting rid of software patents altogether. I expected at least a few responses to my challenge, but so far the only patent posted is one that hasn’t yet been granted, and I suspect won’t be.
The other day I re-discovered this post by Joel Spolsky on Hacker News, entitled " Victory Lap for Ask Patents ." I saw it when he originally posted it a while back, but it didn’t resonate with me at the time.
But re-reading it today, I realized how great an opportunity we, as software developers, have to force patent reform by actively contributing to this project. Ask Patents , if you haven’t heard of it, is a StackExchange site where you can ask questions about patents, or, in my case, respond to requests for prior art that invalidate an overly-broad patent. In my case, I focus on software patents.
Checking out Hacker News for a refreshing end to my work day, I was instead greeted with the worst of all tech-related bad news: Heartbleed , an exploit in popular versions of OpenSSL allowing attackers anonymous (read: no way to figure out how widely it’s been exploited up to this point) access to 64kb of memory of an affected client or server .
How bad is it? Tor had this to offer in its blog post on the subject :
In the spirit of April Fool’s, but also because I think it might actually make me more productive, I’ve made a Google Chrome extension to slow down Facebook’s timeline feature.
Long for the days of 56k? All this high-speed gigaboot Internets nonsense got you frazzled? Just install Slowpoke in
Chrome by going to chrome://extensions/ and dragging the .crx file onto the page. Instantly, your Facebook addiction
will be both sated and abated.
“A man’s true wealth is the good he does in the world.”
— Mohammad
When you think of free market economics, undeniably the most championed principle is deregulation. By removing the obstacles that prevent us from economic exchanges, we become wealthier. Letting individuals be in total control of their financial decisions is the path to prosperity, as the thinking goes. Getting the state out of the way increases the number of transactions that will take place.
As some of you may know, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein from California has introduced a bill called the Fisa Improvements Act that she is portraying as a reasonable reform of mass government surveillance. I’ve been skeptical from the beginning, reading headlines like " Stop the NSA ‘Fake Fix’ Bill " from EFF and others. I’ve read through some of the bill, but here’s a list of reasons why this bill should be dumped that don’t even require reading it.
You might want to grab a cup of coffee #
My last article about the importance of getting started on your programming education is my most-read article on Medium so far. Like anything in my life, my writing is an experiment. When I see as many people getting excited about programming as I have because of this, it excites me too, and tells me I’ve hit a nerve.
Welcome to my blog! I’ll be posting random musings about technology, privacy, entrepreneurship, politics, college, and everything else here. I’m always looking for interesting people with interesting ideas, so get in touch with me if you think you’d make a good fit as a contributor.