I could post a bitter complaint here how it has become impossible to post comments on boingboing.net since their latest move to Substack, how you keep running around in circles, how clicking on the "comment on Substack" link at the bottom of articles just leads you to an overview page with commenting functionality in sight, how clicking on any article in the overview tells you to send money to Nigeria, whatever. But I am confident I am not the only reader of HN who has experienced this and I thought we might want to discuss the topic:
Hi! I am about to launch a new community and I was wondering what are the best communities (no specific niche) built with Discourse? I would like to see more of the good ones so I will be able to implement on my own one.
Here are the best I know: https://meta.discourse.org www.growthtalk.co twittercommunity.com http://bbs.boingboing.net/
I saw an essay on Ask HN the other day by a full on sex offender looking for work, so I thought I'd follow up with my own plea for assistance.
I registered the handle "dontbenebby" on a variety of platforms intending to use it for the weekend in Las Vegas for Defcon, but the joke seems to have gotten a bit out of hand.
I thought I would get a job offer at Defcon, and abandon it after a weekend of jokingly tweeting like a Chapo, but instead folks took me into the room Steven Paddock would later shoot out of (or one very similar in the same set_) and told me they're not required to hire me, then made a show of making be try to do the OSCP as I had a string of breakins, cyber and physical.
I went back again, after that attack, and folks still weren't very helpful.
In parallel with the above, I was living with my parents, who abused the fact they were former state and federal officials to do things like slit my mail open", threaten me with firearms, and generally engage in the same abuses that I left out of my hit essay[1] in order to let them and others save face.
(Abuses like: having my septum deviated, my collarbone broken, and being forced to take speech therapy classes for my lisp after I was "too aggressive" about the homophobic comments staff and students made to a twice exceptional queer, autistic Appalachian son of a carpenter. )
On my end, I will admit I can be an unpleasant person, but one of the core sources of my anger is lack of reoccurring income, paired with a deep regret I spent over ten year acquiring skills that normally are off no use if no one opts into letting you use them. (Lockpicking, penetration testing, Tang Soo Do... you know, typical "IT stuff".)
I'm about to pay the bare minimum on my secured card through the credit union account I opened during my aborted PhD.
Should I stand up a website on the domain, blog about technical topics, and continue this charade of "looking for work"?
Or sell it and exit the United States, having accomplished my "stay behind mission"?
At one point, a nonprofit told me they'd help me avoid having my lease illegally ended and connect me with something called "ERAP" to pay my rent until the pandemic was over, when I could safely and leisurely look for a new apartment, having moved out of said abusive enviornment prior to COVID falling. When that payment didn't come, I had to sell out of my IRA -- and I used some of those coerced funds to verify I'm eligible for an Italian passport, so emigration, with zero intent to return to the USA is on the table.
When I was having insurrectionists stalk me, I took a look at some guns down at the Pittsburgh Waterfront's Dick's -- and very purposefully decided to get a medical marijuana card instead.
However, folks inside and outside the dispensary refused to follow the guidlines, which is a trigger for someone on the autistic spectrum -- it felt like I was back at the approved private school that I wrote about. (In fact, I ran into at least one of my old teachers at the dispensary, and another I saw on the TV running up on the capital on January 6th).
I'm sorry if this post comes across as entitled, but I worry sometimes that people are not registering that I feel trapped behind enemy lines. This is not a movie or TV show, and if it was it would not be The Perks of Being a Wallflower or Mr. Robot.
(It'd be more like a mix of "Pirates of Silicon Valley" and "The Americans", the latter of which I hadn't seen until quite recently.)
TL;DR: What should I do with dontbenebby.com, dontbenebby.org, and dontbenebby.net -- use them or sell it? I'm happy to go into more detail if needed or if the above was unclear. (I'm good at writing, not editing... you can only do so much by yourself.)
I was just in the elevator with a colleague at work. He told me that over Christmas break, he built custom 'Loft' beds for his kids, with desks positioned under the beds. I mentioned that my kids would like that, too, and we both agreed that bunk beds are fun.
5 minutes later, I'm on boingboing.net, which then presented me with an ad for "Bunk Bed with Desk -- Custom Built to Order" at the bottom of the page I was reading.
I had NOT searched or even typed anything about 'bunk beds' in any application.
I do have a Huawei Mate SE Android phone in my pocket.
Very strange...
FYI, my previous, similar post is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071459
Also, please don't take this as an accusation against Huawei -- I'm actually very happy with the phone.
Fight them smart, not just hard, right? After reading http://boingboing.net/2011/12/17/wtf-is-happening-with-sopa-now.html I agree that not playing the Washington game would be good for principles but bad for the imminent SOPA fight. Lobbyist work for whomever pays them, not just Hollywood. What does the HN community think of an online crowdsourcing project to raise capital for a anti-SOPA Lobbying innitiative? Is it too late for that? What online tools can be used(Sparked.com, JustGiving.com, KickStarter.com, )?
I was inspired and a little agitated by Bruce Sterling's speech here: http://boingboing.net/2013/04/29/bruce-sterling-on-startups-r.html
I asked myself, as a budding entrepreneur, what can I do to actually disrupt things, or at least make sure the world is a significantly better place as a result of what I'm building?
What if I obligated my company with a set of constraints, like a "B corp" but stronger, as a real "do no evil" ethical charter. If a socially beneficial company succeeds, however, the rich still get richer and that money can end up funding anything, even bad stuff. But what if I obligated investors to remain within a set of ethical standards for usage of the profits they make from me? What if we had a viral investor agreement: money made from this can only go into ethical endeavors. And what if those endeavors had to also subscribe to the same viral agreement, like a GPL for ethical investment?
Would this ever work? What could feasibly go into such an agreement with it still being palatable to at least a few like minded investors?
The article's points are fairly obvious when you think about it, but I haven't seen enough emphasis on the real social network you can develop online in the articles I've read. It is also helpful for me to realize web surfing isn't all necessarily wasted time and can actually be quite valuable.
Also, in the spirit of the article:
I found this at lifehacker.com. Besides the regular sites, such as proggit, hn, & /., I also semi-regularly check boingboing.net, makezine.com/blog, hackaday.com, aldaily.com, tcsdaily.com, and my old undergrad tutors' site: scriptoriumdaily.org.
boingboing, makezine, and hackaday all go together. They focus on hacks, makezine and hackaday on the tech side and boingboing more on the cultural side.
aldaily and tcsdaily also go together, aldaily represents the humanities side of academia and tcsdaily represents the business/tech side of academia; though both are written informally.
The last one is written from a Christian perspective, but I usually find the articles to be pretty insightful, and if you are an atheist and don't get all these religious wingnuts you might get a better idea of what makes the more reasonable ones tick.
I am moving to Toronto from Boston, so I have been researching Toronto Internet providers.
At the same time, I have been reading that independent Canadian ISPs are crippled by reselling bandwidth from a monopoly provider. (http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/13/canadian-isps-need-y.html)
Do you have experience with Toronto ISPs, and what do you think about your ISP? Would you recommend them, or recommend against them?
Why has BoingBoing.Net enshittified itself?