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PythonicAlpha

1,352 karma · joined November 1, 2013

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PythonicAlpha··on Net neutrality in the EU is only a few amendments away
As much I know, you are right.

But you also must see, that when something (so profitable) is allowed, than it will be used. Such a loophole was long time awaited by the internet providers. They want a legal loophole, so they can better sell their services.

I guess, they are already in the starting blocks to sell "better services" to the highest paying bidder. How this will end and if the nightmares will come true, nobody can say.

PythonicAlpha··on Net neutrality in the EU is only a few amendments away
Maybe. I just can speak from those politicians, I saw going there. There are some very incompetent instances in between. I can not see, how they (which I know) could be dangerous -- in spite being dangerous for the whole EU because of their decisions in Brussels.

It also seems, that many politicians just see the EU as a way to get much money very fast. The best idea is, just to cater the interests of the lobbyists.

But maybe the real problem is, that we only have incompetent politicians left. When I see, how the Germans stick to the "most competent women-leader" we have ... it is a disgrace.

Today, leadership in politics in reality seems to mean: Don't do anything at all and wait, until "the market" will do it right. How anybody could trust such leaders, that never solve a problem, but just shift things into the future (ultimately making the troubles worse) is just beyond me.

PythonicAlpha··on Net neutrality in the EU is only a few amendments away
The whole regulation was undermined from the beginning by financial interests of big corporations and internet providers.

No wonder, when you see, which politicians are in charge.

The EU -- I must regretful say -- is just a dumping place for those politicians, that did already prove in their own country that they are incompetent.

The whole EU is just an invitation for lobbyists to get more pleasant regulations.

In our country, the politicians always say: "Oh, we don't like that regulation, but we have to put it in action, because it comes from the EU" -- of course they say that even, when their own party or even when they themselves have pressured the EU to bring this regulation on it's way. The EU is just a big black box, where any stupid and unwanted (from the voters side) regulation can be brought threw, without putting votes at risk. A perfect system for politicians like we have in Germany, that give themselves a pretty looks, but in reality they just give a sh*t for their own voters. No wonder, we only have such puppets left in Berlin. But maybe, every nation just gets the politicians, it deserves.

PythonicAlpha··on C++: Using Variadic Templates Cleanly
As a former C++ programmer, I appreciate everybody that tries to make programming in this language more logical.

I just think, that C++ and particularly the whole template system is just to complicated.

I have enough work to do, finding solutions for the real world problems that must be implemented -- I don't want to have more work fiddling around with language specifics and even more trickery, just to have my programs running maybe 1% faster.

C++, particularly the template system and the new standard library that is based on the STL, disappointed me long time ago, when a whole group of programmers where trying to find out what the compiler errors where about deep inside the STL. The whole error handling inside the templates where so muddled, that it was nearly impossible to find out what the trouble was, without reading big parts of the STL source.

I trust, that today's compilers generate better error messages for templates, but still I am not sure that the whole thing -- and particularly the STL -- is worthwhile for most real-life problems.

PythonicAlpha··on Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.
The problem IMHO is, that even the finance experts do not understand our finance system completely and partly it is more like a believe system instead of real science.
PythonicAlpha··on Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.
> Globalization because of technology before first world war was actually increasing and was only stopped by the two wars.

I have a slightly different view. The US had some very good presidents. Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of them. He did some serious reforms in the US and countered some of the capitalistic outgrowths. As much I understood, he really did fight for a more human society.

In my view, that was one of the main brakes against capital aggregation. An other of course where the two world wars. These factors where important for the rapid growth of social systems and wealth in many western nations.

The reversal came later with presidents like Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK.

---

In my opinion, yes, technology can bring capital aggregation and thus become a problem for democracy itself -- but good and brave statesmen can counter this trend. I see the few decades after the 2nd WW, which brought wealth to many people (not only the few), as example that technology needs not to be a money accumulating force.

Human decisions are also important -- but where to take brave politicians, when there are none? The problem is, that we are all already corrupted by money and easy living (and brainwashed by the tv).

PythonicAlpha··on Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.
The global trend is, that the wealth (in money, shareholder-value, ...) of the world is mostly owned by <<10% of the people.

Of course, when you put together all the money of the middle class and also the better of lower class, you get a huge stack of money ... but this part of the worlds wealth is distributed much more than the money of the 1% richest persons.

I am not sure, how the pension funds fit into this ... but ask yourself, who controls all the money. In most cases, the money of smaller owners is controlled by the money of the big owners.

Of course, it is absolutely conforming with the system, that the small owners also become shareholder threw own investments or funds. But the system is always that way, that money is inherently not democratic, but those with the (singular) hugest stack of money controls the rest. Also those with the most money can draw the biggest benefits from it -- and finally, the money will concentrate more and more in few hands.

Might be, that corporations are owned to a large part by the public ... as long as the most benefits go to the wealthiest people (normal people seldom have funds so huge, that they and their children's children don't need to work to have a good live ... billionaires have) and are controlled by the wealthiest people, the extra money from public funds are just a welcome benefit for the system.

PythonicAlpha··on Devd: a small, self-contained web daemon for developers
This seems to be exactly what I needed for some of my projects. A simple application that can be used on my dev-system to be used as reverse-proxy for different servers.

Of course, I could use nginx, but fiddling with configuration files on dev-systems is not so cool. Also even nginx is not lightweight enough to me.

This looks really very neat! I will try it soon.

Thank you!

PythonicAlpha··on Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.
Of course, everything is interconnected. But I wanted to point out, which financial, social, business and political trend is following and in the same time behind many developments.

That technology drives changes and also drives capital accumulation increase is something we see for more than 100 years. But in the time between the first and second world war (and short after) we also saw a limiting trend that limited capital power. But since the Reagan / Thatcher areas and somehow now accelerated threw the fall of the so called communist block, dominance of capital over labor power and also over social achievements (look in the sweat-shop countries and look in western countries, that drop social standards to be more "competitive") is rising globally in a rate never seen before.

Never did we have that many possibilities to speculate or to invest, in things that are more and more artificial. One of the reasons of the finance disaster of 2008 where artificial "financial products" that where derived of derivations of real things (housing loans) -- so the investors could not know, what they where investing in. But the possibilities to speculate are growing and growing. Now I read here, that there are people speculating on lawsuits ...

There are so many ways to earn money -- without ever taking up a tool or move a muscle. Just by letting the the computers do the job. But in the end, somebody will have to farm the crops that are used to bake the bread you buy from the speculated money -- or somebody will loose the land, where you build your bungalow on.

It just seems that "capital" has taken over everything: Morals, social standards, individual believes, even religion.

PythonicAlpha··on Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.
The trend is going on for decades now. The rise of the finance sector is IMHO the main reason.

In the finance sector, multitudes more money is flowing today, than in the real economy with products and services. Big money is going, where the most interest is been made ... but the interest must come from somewhere. To think, that it just appears somehow and everybody is getting richer, is just wishful thinking. Finally, some day, somebody will have to work for it or somebody will loose something (e.g. land that is sold to investors, that use it to generate even more money).

So, more and more interest is made by investments, money lending or even speculations. Who are the losers? The working people, that just have not enough money to invest and use their working power or their brains to get the money for living.

Globalization is helping this trend. Money can just go where it is cheapest, instead fighting fights with worker organizations. In many countries, people are so desperate, that they sell their work for a prize, they merely can survive on.

Trend is going on. Money seeks better places to invest, more land to grab, more patents, more, more, more -- and for those that have not got money already, the possibilities to earn money or to get better of are vanishing, since more and more land is owned, more "intellectual property", more lobbyist, which say, how the laws shall be that shape our future. Also more trade treaties, like TPP, TTIP and the others, which create better conditions to invest and to make profits for corporations ... which are owned by big money.

PythonicAlpha··on Deploying a Django App with No Downtime
Really nice, but when you have bigger DB-changes, this might run into trouble, when the old code runs on changed tables or the new code runs on unchanged tables ...

At least such cases should IMHO be considered before doing such upgrades.

PythonicAlpha··on Rocket Internet: Waiting for lift-off
Interesting. I just thought, that Rocket was in a business, that seldom any other startup is ... As much I know, Rocket is about starting new startups. I guess, there are not so many startups working in this particular business ...?
PythonicAlpha··on Why do we need modules at all? (2011)
Why not go further?

In some old Fortran compilers, names of functions could be at most 6 characters long and I am not sure, if upper and lower case where distinguished, I guess not. But with only lower case letters and digits, you roughly get 1.5 billion different names. That is a lot -- you will have a busy time to use them all!

The only problem is, that the overhead remembering such names is huge, but it can be done!

I still think, that in programming, managing complexity is key. You need different levels of simplification -- and here come modules in. Even when you want to use some kind of key-naming scheme without modules as described -- you at least will end up better of, when you use common prefixes to make life a little bit easier ... (and one could come up with the idea, calling the prefixes "module").

Beside that, modules bring other advantages into the game besides naming.

PythonicAlpha··on The thinking and dollars behind The New York Times’ new digital strategy
No offence taken, but thanks!
PythonicAlpha··on The thinking and dollars behind The New York Times’ new digital strategy
By asking, you can learn.
PythonicAlpha··on The thinking and dollars behind The New York Times’ new digital strategy
Thanks, did not know that "omnibus" had this meaning. In my language, "omnibus" is just an old fashioned word for "bus" (transportation) ;) -- translation services are also not all the time helpful.
PythonicAlpha··on The thinking and dollars behind The New York Times’ new digital strategy
Yes, I think, the whole news industry will be changing. Also in my country, the big papers are trying to secure their income streams -- with partially idiotic actions -- for example, they pressed the government to make laws that Google must pay for small text phrases taken from their news side .... but when Google dropped their linking, they also where not amused (they thought, Google would just pay and go on making their linking so, the news corporations just got more money ...) STUPIDITY!

Can you explain the phrase "omnibus paper"? Is this a fixed phrase?

PythonicAlpha··on Show HN: LanderDB – A Mini Flat File Database Engine for Python
You don't need a full blown ORM here. A rather thin access layer would suffice, as much I can see from the API.

What I can see here, is that the data store is just a big JSON-file. So the implementation does not scale well (every save just writes the whole database and the database must be read in total to access any tiny bit of data). For any even medium sized application, it would be better to use a more sophisticated basis.

Maybe as configuration database -- but even for that, I guess there are already better choices in existence.

Edit: Upvoted the OPs post, because of the Vietnam-Link -- good read. Still, I would not throw RDBMSes totally out of the window. I think, we have learned a lot from them and in many, many cases they are just right. There are some cases of course, where object oriented schemes are more appropriate.

PythonicAlpha··on Inside Britain's Secretive Bullingdon Club
What is so special about it?

We are at the verge of a new area of aristocracy. The new aristocrats are building their relationships and are shielding themselves from the plebs -- just the same as in the Roman empire: The "best" people of the world, don't need morals or standards, that belong to the outsiders.

That is also the reason, we need more and more surveillance -- to protect the "best" people from the terrorists -- all people, that oppose this world-order.

PythonicAlpha··on Larry Lessig: I'm All In
Larry Lessig definitively has my vote.

It is just inconvenient, that I am not an US-American. But if he would run for election in my country, I would give him my vote.

The reason: He really takes democracy seriously -- some thing, that I would not attest to most people in our government -- and definitively not to the leading politicians of most political parties in my country.

That is the reason, I fear that democracy is bound to fail -- and to be replaced by corporate ruling (in fact, we are already at this point, where corporations have much more power than politicians or voters).

PythonicAlpha··on Why Russia’s Alternate History of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Matters
One side note:

The trouble, I see at least in my (Western) country: The main (public) TV programs are in the hand of the state (via regulatory control of the TV channels through political parties) or of two to three big corporations (many channels belong to one big corporation controlling them and also other news media).

From Italy, I heard, that many TV channels are controlled by one media mogul that also was the president. I guess, there are also other western countries, with similar situations.

At least in my country, I see clear evidence, that political unwanted news are at least suppressed or sometimes shown in a very distorted way. For example, when the software patent discussion came up some years ago in Europe, they brought news showing software patents in a shiny, only positive way. I would accept that from a purely private TV channel, but that was a "public TV channel" -- and many in my country still believe, that those public TV channels only tell the truth. But that is not so -- they tell, what our governments want us to know!

Also, at least one leading news reporter was dismissed (against protests from other reporters), he was inconvenient for one leading political party.

So, in the west, we don't have it as bad as in Russia -- but we should be very careful, the situation is far away from good.

PythonicAlpha··on TPP could thwart computer security research and tinkering
The main reason: With all these treaties, the world is going to be gradually reshaped into a world optimized for corporation profits. In such a world, humanity and personal rights (of the less than billionaires) are of no value (your value to society is calculated by your bank account and potential to "invest"). Instead of human rights, the "right for profit" for the corporations is established (nothing else are those courts of arbitration, that shall be established for example with TTIP).

When you want to see the end-result: Just watch the classic "Blade Runner" (and open your eyes between the action sequences).

PythonicAlpha··on The Drone Papers
> Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that means all males ages 18-49 are considered enemy combatants. Since you're guilty by association, your age makes you a target.

A German newspaper wrote, that males with an age of 12 years up are considered legit targets.

PythonicAlpha··on GCHQ can monitor MPs' communications, court rules
In this case, the British surrendered -- and all free nations are about doing it also.
PythonicAlpha··on GCHQ can monitor MPs' communications, court rules
Benjamin Franklin, being a big man, but still a human. We must not think, that he could comprehend our future problems.

Of course he did only talk about his current problems.

Still it is a very good quote that deserves to be seen not only in it's singular, historical meaning, but also in a wider look.

And as we see, we all need a broader look to preserve humanity -- or freedom and humanity will finally perish.

PythonicAlpha··on GCHQ can monitor MPs' communications, court rules
Right. They just reap, what they have sowed.

Maybe, some of them might begin to realize what they have done ... but I doubt it.

PythonicAlpha··on Nibbler 4 Bit CPU
Of course the technique itself is not that new, but it is still amazing, because of the real few chips used. Of course the microcode ROM replaces plenty of those, but still it amazes me, how few chips make up for a workable CPU.

I guess, the PDP has at least 10 times more (equivalent) chips inside.

PythonicAlpha··on Nibbler 4 Bit CPU
That is right. That differs of course from early microprocessor designs, but still it is valid, since today's processors also rely heavily on microcode that is simply stored in ROM or similar areas.

I think, you can not give this design a negative, because it is much simpler than early microprocessors.

I forgot about the ROM, and apologize for it.

PythonicAlpha··on Nibbler 4 Bit CPU
Yes, it is a very limited design, but the thought, that it was implemented just using (very few!) standard 74xxx TTL logic is really amazing.

And still it runs with 1MHz, the same speed of my first computer ;) with a dedicated integrated CPU.

PythonicAlpha··on Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capitalism, Not Robots
> Making a profit needs to be balanced with the reason the company is in business, (i.e. the needs of its customers), its employees, and the environment.

I completely agree. I also don't think, that public sector is always optimal. Public institutions some times tend to be inefficient.

The problem, I see in many privatizations, is that profits are the main (and sometimes only) motive and any efficiency improvements are put into shareholder value instead into public benefit.

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