I'm an Afghan combat veteran in Los Angeles who has recent first hand knowledge of how to navigate the homeless-to-housing pipeline through the West LA VA, along with a great resource list of other things: transitional housing, transport, getting into the VA system, psychiatric care, benefits claims, VSOs (veteran service organizations) and so on.
Also, if Ray wants to speak to a good counselor, a Vietnam combat vet and outstanding man, I can't speak any more highly than my own counselor. I credit with him with me still being around.
Happy to assist in any way whatsoever. My email is username at gmail.
There will always be power and profit in being able to monitor and control what people are going to do. This is a scary fact of life in the human arena. And though this is not the first time that technology has advanced so far so fast, some pretty scary basic concerns about governance and fundamental rights have been raised in recent years.
Eventually, in the midst of the well-wishers there will come those souls who are not good actors, and they do seem to seem to spoil the bunch sometimes - don't they?
Given enough power, anything is worthy of unusual inspection. Similarly, the current success of Uber is no different. Regardless of whether the social, political and market narratives about Uber are currently accurate, fair or not, it is the sudden nature of company power and the driving essential questions around the nature of new economies that compel articles like these. Uber and AirBnB are challenging fundamental labor and property rights shibboleths, and demanding real consideration from people across the philosophical, commercial, and political realms.
Similarly, the 20th century spread of dictatorial socialism was incredible. No matter how much I try to sympathize with the promises of various ideologies, I always return to the premise that in all circumstances, it is the CONCENTRATION OF POWER that is the problem. It is even more disturbing for pragmatists and empiricists when they see something moving fast that is denying anyone the chance to scrutinize, test and debate the merits of the method, the motives, the means.
As a good friend says though - it is easy to make these conceptions "heuristics" and see someone's intent as globally bad. Some people's intentions can be good and means and methodology sound. Yet with data as with literacy at large, the medium by which the person't intent is made manifest is the very means by which the power will be exercised and the rules challenged. In this case, massive volumes of data are being generated that have multi-dimensional consequences for all humankind. This IS a concentration of power. Even though a witch hunt is far from a beautiful thing, the world citizen has very real reason to be concerned, and truly should be immediately concerned, about the very topics that are daily discussion here on HN. Matters of technology, privacy, rights, commerce and liberty are not weak, and neither are musings on the mating habits of whales.. from time to time.
HN is a fount of a certain kind of literacy. How does that literacy get expanded to all, and seen as a human right?
Interesting! I didn't follow the Tiny Doo story too closely but read more after you posted.
Except I am not sure what you mean. Are you saying that people SHOULD be mad that we're prosecuting Brandon Duncan because of his published work? I'm assuming that's what you mean, and if so, I suppose I agree.
Often I see good critiques and discussion of Mozilla software endeavors here on HN. I rarely see much discussion about the Mozilla community at large. There was a discussion during the Eich appointment scandal, but I didn't see as much as I had expected.
Mozilla is an extraordinary organization. I would love to see more discussion and critique of the Foundation's non-software community work.
I'll echo what is said further down; it is good to see a reasonable look into homelessness here on HN.
I literally just came bsck from a vigil for a man who died in a self-lit fire in an abandoned moving truck parked in my hometown. The vigil was attended by homeless advocates of all political stripes, had a local police officer singing at the beginning and end, and a gubernatorial candidate was around as well. The "issue of homelessness" is definitely complicated, and amongst the crowd tonight, all holding candles, were those who take stands for rental vouchers, more conservative "housing first" policies, expanded mental health care, and a few other approaches. There were plenty of compassionate Christian conservatives there who I appreciate for their emphasis on pragmatism and on human dignity, even though the solutions run against their deeply held political beliefs.
As someone who has always felt just a day a way from slipping into homelessness myself, including struggling with alcoholism - the one thing I can say for certain is that the only way to address this is by continuing to address the issue honestly, trying the best we can with evidence of what works. I wish I could say I trust my faculties, but week to week its obvious I have a problem, even back when I was 9 years into sobriety..
In America, we definitely err on the side of personal liberty and responsibility, and though I agree with that in some abstract sense, it is obvious to me that moralizing the issue as one of choice, or as one of laziness vs. hard work and determination, is a failure. We can do better, and we will, but in the process we're going to have to accept responsibility for each other in a costly and politically inconvenient way.
The fact that people came out tonight in my hometown to celebrate our common humanity, despite another tragic loss, is admirable. It is what defines us as a human family. Although the circumstances anger me personally, all these people tonight, and the people here on HN, prove there is a solution, even if it is a hard process and not a clear destination.
I also spent a few months deployed in Helmand and Farah provinces in 2008. My platoon didn't go to Kajaki Dam in particular.. we saw a few little signs of what this article talks about everywhere. The guys in the line company that served in Lashkar Gah and Kajaki remarked about how bizarre the history was. I'm blown away.
The whole concept of "Technocracy" interests me to no end. Eisenhower warned not just of the Military Industrial Complex in his famous speech at the end of his presidency - he also warned of the repercussions of state-sponsored research and of those who were conducting it, and for what purposes (check out page 10): http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents...
"..there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."
Eisenhower knew that we were learning so, so much about the world. Our ability to reason was, and is, unlocking so many secrets to the nature of nature itself, that there was a never-ending pressure for top-down, ambitious projects - especially just following the dropping of the bomb and the ending of WWII.
How much of a "market" was there in XCMDs? As in, were they commonly exchanged or reused in any sort of open-source way, or were they written in-house? I know we're talking about Myst specifically, but I wonder if there's any community parallel to what we see with libraries & APIs now.
Although I'm just flipping over rocks looking for similarities, it's a blast to see when and how certain structures have been tried-out.
Holy Smokes.. the more I read about Hypercard, the more I realize that Myst was quite a huge hack!
The XCMD part is clutch. I'm curious what that community looked like, and how that code was exchanged. Beyond disks, did anyone ever host anything that looked like a repo on the early Net?
Add that to the fact that Tim Berners-Lee was also inspired by Hypercard, I feel like the web that we have now really is a big, beefed-up, networked remanufacture of Hypercard.
Whenever I see a Myst screengrab I always think "Look, the Web!" Again, as a non-programmer, this is probably just some useless observation, but its inspirational and evocative to me nonetheless. It gets me musing that there are some uses for what we've got now that we're not seeing, and some folks should be exploring. For me, its storytelling, and I bet we could all do some pretty damn cool storytelling with the toolkit we're sitting on.
Perhaps Myst doesn't actually demonstrate a hidden value, but I always point to Hypercard and its friendliness & useability when smarter-than-me people tell me Javascript is crap. People I know from that era that were technically inquisitive tend to point to Hypercard and go: "Yeah! Hypercard was the shit!" or some variation of that.
I'm proud of all of you who have had some hand in pushing back. Basic transparency measures are the right place to begin, and with them, a rudimentary accounting by the public can commence.
There's no reason why everyone here who's at the helm of a tech company or investment firm, large or small, doesn't sign onto these initiatives/letters and demand accountability for these electronic surveillance programs. I'm aware many of you have boards. Bring this up with them, and make it an imperative!
God bless this next generation. My girlfriend is black (I'm white) and my parents are fairly fundamentalist, conservative evangelical Christians. My stepfather, as much as I love him, still comments when he can on how disgusting white people dating black people are (he doesn't know I'm dating a black woman.)
We are going places as a society. This current batch of human beings is the greatest generation to have ever lived. Though we'll make _nearly_ all the same mistakes, we won't make ALL of them. We should be all proud that we're moving-on-up.
Also, if Ray wants to speak to a good counselor, a Vietnam combat vet and outstanding man, I can't speak any more highly than my own counselor. I credit with him with me still being around.
Happy to assist in any way whatsoever. My email is username at gmail.