Nimi

Yes, but what happens to the client authentication when it migrates between servers? Do I write a cookie to the client saying "authenticated as user X"? Encrypt the cookie? Sign the cookie? It sounds one would need to write cryptographic code to do that...

"""Conventional wisdom: Don't write cryptographic code!

Use SSL for transport""

Honest question here: suppose I have a webapp with multiple servers, being load-balanced through Amazon's ELB. This sounds about as standard as it can get. Question is: how does one handle client migration between servers, and client authentication, without writing cryptographic code or knowing anything about cryptography?

(apologies if this is trivial)

I wonder what will happen when the pool nears exhaustion globally, not just in Latin America and the Caribbean. A few scenarios come to mind, would love to hear more scenarios/insights:

1. The governments of the world push IPv6 legislation. Everyone invests the resources needed to migrate in a few years, overall everyone's pretty OK with this.

2. Carrier-grade NAT becomes much more widespread. People who need a public IP (mostly p2p users, I guess) pay more for that. Again, overall everyone's pretty happy.

3. Gradual, failover-friendly solutions are deployed. The network becomes fragmented, this plays out like IE6. After a few years, most of the people who matter get tired of this, pull support for IPv4.

A blogspam linking to this page also claimed the alleged "boy" was described as a Russian boy to whom English is a second language. The official report from University of Reading doesn't mention this, can anyone shed more light on this?

http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-first-computer-in-history-to-...

So if I understand correctly, the plan is eventually to become the "marketplace for food"? We have one here in the high-tech sector around Tel-Aviv (mainly for lunches), this is indeed very defensible. You might be interested to know they apparently built their customer base by saving the employers the hassle of accounting for the lunches for tax purposes - the employer is simply informed of a sum at the end of each month and that's it; they also have a way to limit the expenditure of employees to something reasonable each month.

BTW, this marketplace take wasn't the impression I got from the TC article.

One could argue that Yelp, AirBnB and Uber all fall into the "marketplace" category of defensibility rationale. At first glance, this doesn't seem (to me) to apply to delivery, as restaurants can always opt-out and build their own delivery operation. This is also a significant source of cost for them, so unlike Uber, where users might be willing to pay a few dollars more for a slick experience, they will likely try to skimp on costs.

Good luck!

Would you mind elaborating on that defensibility claim ("if you look at any of these local businesses, whether they’re Yelp, or Grubhub, or whatever… once they’re built, they’re defensible")?

Why wouldn't this be a race to the bottom where "courier as a service" companies will be lowering prices until competition has eroded profits completely?

(just to be sure, to clarify: I'm genuinely asking out of curiosity - I'm sure if you have both YC and Sequoia backing you, you have some excellent answers for this question)

Agreed. I have been looking now for a while for a rigorous treatment of how to deal with monopoly-related problems (hopefully this would be a summary of the current consensus among economists), are you by chance familiar with one?

"How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?"

Sounds like the U.S. already has such regulation - anti-trust regulation. As ChuckMcM noted above, the problem is that Comcast has a monopoly over the last mile. Effective and enforced anti-trust regulations would break up this monopoly into several different competing companies.

BTW, here in Israel, the government apparently has taken the position that services requiring significant infrastructure investment (Internet or cellular networks) are best handled by handing out a limited number of licenses using a bid. We then get an oligopoly where the companies are wildly profitable, until the government has decided we got the infrastructure we wanted, and removes the barrier to entry. Specifically for Internet, we have a duopoly over the last mile "going until the city exchange" to put it in ChuckMcM's terms, then a lot of ISPs taking it from there. IMO, not a bad way to go - we don't pay a lot and get decent Internet everywhere in the country.

AFAIK, there are several experimental results supporting low carb diets, but all are refutable, as in someone can always come up with a counter-argument. Robert Lustig and his "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" lecture (available on youtube) is probably currently the best-supported argument.

There's an initiative called the "Nutrition Science Initiative" (nusi.org) that apparently attempts to put an end to the debate with irrefutable research, which will finally convince everyone one way or the other. They seem to be still in the early stages.

Respectfully, I think the author got the reason wrong. In software, there are inherent problems, and non-inherent problems (as observed by No Silver Bullet). Scientists, when writing scientific code, can only encounter/create non-inherent problems: local (or relatively local) bugs in their code. Programmers, otoh, are employed in order to tackle (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) the inherent problems, which mostly distill to the problem of "scale". Note that most of the problems the author listed in those bullets may be described as "this doesn't scale".

So when the author is called to solve a problem created by a colleague, he either gets a very local bug in some scientific code, which is apparently easy to debug (I'm surprised about the concurrency stuff also being easy, but if that's the case - great for him), or a problem with a large code base, badly architected, which we all know is very hard to solve.

The author seems to imply that if software engineers would ditch this extravagance and start writing simple code instead, we would be better off - I highly doubt this. I mean, the code would certainly be easier to understand, but how much duplication would there be? How much more code would we have to understand?

Pardon if this is slightly off-topic, but you mentioned a slightly different version of HN - this is the first time I hear about this. Could you please provide more details? 10x

Google appears to have gotten into the CA game with their Certificate Transparency initiative:

http://www.certificate-transparency.org/

As most of these Google initiatives go, this is open source, and they're encouraging other entities to adopt the technology.

Here in Israel, we have a growing phenomenon of high school students studying for a B.Sc degree, especially in CS, during their last few years of high-school. Not only do they save a couple of years of their career trajectory, they also get a shot at significantly better placement during their army service. Israel's a small place, so most places have a pretty good university one or two bus rides away.

One could argue that high school is a bit unnecessary, and a good move would be to simply skip it.

I wonder about these workshops (even asked Uncle Bob Martin about them in a recent thread). I can't shake the feeling they are the exact opposite of agility (obviously, he is better qualified than me to judge that). Their limited time schedules, which is essentially a bound over the amount of contact between the client and the supplier, seems analogous to the infamous "requirements document". Also, there doesn't appear to be a "shippable" product at the end - the developers apparently don't end up practicing TDD.

I used to be an instructor for a living, and I kind-of equated lectures to waterfall and exercises to XP. There is even a semantically analogous term in teaching research, problem-based learning (each word corresponds to the respective word in test-driven development - cool, right?). Is there anyone else who sees these analogues, or am I completely crazy here?

Thank you for the thoughtful response. To be honest, up till now I haven't heard of a suicide problem at MIT, Technion or TAU, but I wasn't exactly at the right circles anyway.

I wonder why doesn't the student body (here or at your place) rebel against this. At times I really want to grab one of the student representatives and suggest they do, but I know this will be the quick death of my academic career (not that chances are good as it is :-)

Yes, sounds like a serious dilemma - try to get help, and you risk being committed. I have a feeling that private psychiatrists know they face a repeat game with a patient they shipped to such horrendous treatment at a ward, and thus have their finger resting much easier on the trigger. But as you said, nothing here is foolproof.

I read your comment as a joke, but it hints at a serious matter. I'm a TA at TAU EE, and my students really don't have enough time to sleep. Every deadline is a mix of mails begging for an extra day, and submissions at 5 AM. Talking with my students, it appears this is a faculty-wide problem - the coursework is simply too much (and this isn't simply students whining - in 4 years in CS/math I didn't hear of a single person cramming through the night for a deadline, something here is very different). I hear Technion is the same, for CS too.

Now, you take young people, pressurize them to excel or it will have lasting effects on their career, and deprive them of sleep. No wonder people have mental difficulties - it's actually a wonder this doesn't appear to happen here. Maybe it's a bit more maturity coming from the army service.

Yep, wanted to make sure it's not just me missing something here. Left the OP a message in the comments that she might want to look into this, maybe she'll see it.

Hmm... so what's the deal with the, for lack of better terms, ex-parte hearing Yale put her through?

If the hospital is an unrelated medical institution, how did her medical history get released to the school? Is this even legal?

Also, IIUC, the psychiatrist who told her "we can't have you here" was employed at the hospital, not the university?

In short, there seems to be some type of relationship between the hospital and the university.

Interesting point. I've recently read about a case in my university where the student, who was disaffected with the university's response to a sexual harassment complaint, filed a complaint with the police, then was told the police can't do anything while the university hasn't issued a final ruling.

That is opposite to what the law here says, but if the law simply said that criminal offenses are police matters, period, the police's response would likely have been very different.

Thank you for the response. Your comment and other ones indeed explain the matter - some colleges are basically their own cities, located near a small town.

My own conclusions from this appalling story are:

1. If you're at a U.S. university and are experiencing mental difficulties - just pay the 25$ copay and see someone outside the university. Had the OP done that, Yale would have probably had no clue what was going on. Maybe someone would notice she's missing classes, maybe not even that.

2. Don't get committed. If you need to, see a therapist on your time and on your own dime. They likely won't order you to take off your underwear, spread your legs, then hop up and down to make sure nothing was hidden “up there".

Non-US resident here. I found the treatment of the OP appalling, but I have to ask: what's the deal with schools doing this stuff? I'm a PhD student at Tel-Aviv University, the medical services we have on campus are limited to a couple of nurses and maybe a doctor or two, for urgent cases or when you just need a band-aid. Last time I went to the medical "facility" (which is really a couple of rooms), I was told to schedule an appointment with a doctor outside the university, and that was it. So no one at the university even knows about any health issues I may have, and certainly not treats them or evaluates their severity.

Sexual harassment is indeed a problem, here as well, but again I wonder why not go to the police? At least here, it's a criminal offense. Not that students go to the police, but why don't they?

In their defense, this is EE, not CS. The main thing that matters to them is to get the future engineers proficient in C. When I push for SICP, I claim it will achieve this better than the proposed alternatives, which are all-C and Python-then-C.

Our CS department did use SICP for many years, including when I was a student. Unfortunately they just dumped it, I don't know why. The fact they dumped it makes life even more difficult for me with this...

Wow, the Brian Harvey essay you linked to is exactly what I was hoping to find. A down-to-earth explanation of the benefits, as opposed to Dijkstra's formalism and its potential to alienate non-programmers (in fairness, I only read the first half of it, getting late here). Thanks!

Your explanation is of course along the same lines, and rings true, but I need a "source of authority" (if I can even get someone to listen). Sadly, pre-reading and "honors" are not options at my school, certainly not when a lowly TA pitches them. But this Harvey essay, this might actually work... :-)

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll see if I can gather a few supporters before I request their help.

Thanks, would love to. But I don't have a fighting chance with that. Pushing SICP through would be an unbelievable feat.

I'm trying to get my faculty to switch to SICP as the intro to programming course, instead of a planned migration to Python (I'm at the EE department, which is completely separate from CS). Can anyone think of good arguments in favor, which may convince the professors?

So far, my main "ammunition" is Dijkstra's argument that "it provides an environment that discourages operational reasoning":

http://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java

Curiously, I found some of these negative to be true for "managed" companies as well, certainly when the company is large enough:

1.Lots of chaos - yep. "It’s not entirely clear what’s happening, but there is a lot of activity and eventually large structures/tunnels get built. I know for a fact that we have Projects that were started and eventually abandoned because another Project was conflicting or duplicating their work". All this seems to hold true for the last company I worked for (MegaCorp, you'd easily recognize the name).

2. Coordination is very hard - yep. "it’s up to individuals to take time to communicate what’s happening on their Project and how it affects others" - absolutely.

3. Starting Projects can be slow - well, I hear a lot of MegaCorps have entirely abandoned the notion of starting projects, and simply rely on acquisitions, either consciously or in practice.

4. I can’t make people do things - boy oh boy, please ask your friends working at MegaCorps about people who are "the only ones who know how this works". Delightfully funny stories, really.

5. It takes longer to understand what’s going on - I simply got the impression no one really understood what's going on. When high-level managers spoke to me about the status of my project/component, they were routinely misinformed, although it was clear they cared and have spent time trying to get informed.

6. Harder to hire people - OK, maybe this is true :-)

BTW, apparently there are citation-like watermarks when copy-pasting from the blog post - this isn't a big deal, but I don't see any particular benefit to anyone from this... Ryan, if you're reading, may I humbly suggest you reconsider this?

Thanks for replying.

So why are you still of the opinion that losing weight is just a matter of energy balance? Are you familiar with other studies which have shown this claim to be correct?

As you can probably tell, I'm a low carber myself, but I'm genuinely curious to understand how did the "energy balance" consensus opinion form. It seems that currently, both opinions aren't rooted in scientific studies. BTW, there's an initiative called nusi.org that attempts to solve this once and for all (by proving low carb diets are right and everyone else is wrong, of course :-)