Is it strange that I'm getting more constructive advice from the Devrant community than the co-workers around me?

No lie, I discovered gistboxapp, vue.js, hacker noon and a bunch of other cool stuff through here.

Unplugging the monitor. We in the hacker community call it the Schroedinger defense...

So, in my very first rant in this astounding community, I unwittingly decided I’d settled for Ubuntu not knowing the massive sea of distros out there 😊 …... boy was I ignorant!

After testing a number of these distros out there I was comfortable enough to truly settle for Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (Xenial Xerus)

I wanted something stable, something that I won’t have to tinker much with, something that has a relatively long-time community support. So, I based my decision vastly on the below points since I think they encompass your everyday Joe distro requirements.

1. Package Manager
2. Desktop environment
3. Community support
4. Stability

Any whom, thanks @Totchinuko for sharing your experience about Linux Mint, also @calmyourtities for the Zorin suggestion. I must say I still like Zorin’s look and feel desktop environment. Also @hacker, @Cyanide for your suggestions and to the guys shared their view and comments on the rant 😊 😉

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

By far one of the most non toxic communities has to be that of perl monks. The community is amazingly welcoming of new people and the shit that these dudes talk about is so fucking interesting. That one is definitely one of the last remaining "hacker" communities still going around the net. Really wish there was Perl around where I live. One would be lucky to find a programming job, let alone one in such language.

My image of dream career through different times of my life:
- frontend specs prodigy, css enlightenment, a member of w3c or a similar committee
- indie hacker and entrepreneur, leader of a startup community
- architecture prodigy, expert in scalability
- transsexual evangelist, popular article writer and a rockstar
- hardware engineer: Linux, C, chip and dale’s Gadget-like girlfriends, xkcd, latex, assembly, buying a radio station and a telescope
- scientist like NickyBones, papers, data, more data
- art expert

Though achieving one of this would take the entire life, I had a chance to grasp all of this. WHY does they feel so incompatible? Why do I have to choose?

Why do I feel so sad? Why do I feel like I haven’t achieved anything even though I objectively achieved what I dreamed of like five years ago?

Is it true that it’s in my nature to always seek an environment to feel like a junior in? Is feeling like a junior only pleasant to me because it reminds me of old times when I wasn’t actually this mentally ill and was still happy?

Why do I feel like that arduino and C shit is the equivalent of a red corvette?

All the crypto bots and hire a hacker adverts make no sense. After all, they still need to either go through the API or make a selenium script. Will still take them 1 to 2 hours at least to build it. For what?

To advertise to a dying platform that has a dwindling community, which is on top of it well-versed in programming and technically affine, so that the probability of profiting of it is tiny...

My conjecture: A devrant member is pulling a long running prank.

I bet it's someone like theRealJase. Or someone like that.

These days i like to think of our data privacy as that of an amazon package delivery between person A to B

- Person A wants a packet of condoms and guns, but don't want society to know about it
- person B wants to send guns and condoms to B
- Amazon is willing to provide transportation with a pinky promise that it won't tell anyone about the delivery.
- Thus B gives the condoms and guns to Amazon wrapped up in hard box hoping that Amazon or anybody else won't open it. Similarly A receives the packet hoping that nobody else got to know about it.

But the problem is a LOT of people could possibly know of the contents, even if A or B aren't willing to share details
- Amazon can look into it.
- government can stop the amazon car transporting the packet and force them to look into it.
- some 3rd person(aka hacker) could fool the delivery truck and get access to packet contents.

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and this morning, my neighbour, A very radical hindu supporter, frustrated by the recent tablighi jamaat fuck-up , gave a very strange statement "you know in future, the government would pass a law which will allow them to hear these ppl's calls /whatsapp messages. This will allow government to detect and take actions on every of these anti-national scums"

I wanted to say WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU HOPING FOR, BOOMER? THAT'S CENSORSHIP!! but i couldn't say because his illiterate vision is no longer a hope, i can see it becoming reality.

Personally i am equally angry with that whole incident and how that community handled it. But how can anyone ask for censorship, just because a few elements misused it? The problem lies with thise elements and people who support their thoughts not the whole community or the communication medium.

From what i have heard in the recent US and indian law news, they are essentially trying to peek into the data we send to each other legally.

So going by the package delivery analogy, its like government now wants to have every amazon delivery happen in transparent boxes in a transparent truck, just because a few people ordered illegal items via amazon delivery.

This world is going crazy and stupid.

Has anyone attended a Defcon Conference? If so, how was the experience?

I can't decide who has more pompous assholes in their community. Reddit or Hacker News....?