cdcfa78156ae5

> Whether you love or hate Microsoft for $6.99/mo you can get Office, (decently private) email, cloud storage, and Skype. Hate Skype? Don't blame you but from there you can get a phone number that you can give out and keep your personal number just for family/emergencies.

Microsoft compromises the security and privacy of all of their online services, including Skype, Outlook.com, and Hotmail: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

A much better alternative is to give your money to independent telephony providers that run on, and support, Free Software: https://jmp.chat/

> coming to the conclusion that slowing development time was worthy if the resulting product was performant

What I don't get is where these claims of faster development time come from. Toolkits like Qt make it way faster and easier to build UIs than trying to use HTML/CSS garbage.

Snap-on, Knipex, Milwaukee, Bosch

> usenet was actually usable

When did it stop? comp.lang.* is still pretty active.

Yes. Erlang is built around distributed message sending and serialization. Python does not have any such things; even some libraries like Celery punt on it by having you configure different messaging mechanisms ("backends" like RabbitMQ, Redis, etc.) and different serialization mechanisms (because built-in pickle sucks for different uses in different ways). Node.js does not come with distributed message sending and serialization either.

> There are a lot of python distributed systems built around in memory stores, like pycos or dask, or built around existing distributed systems like Akka, Casandra, even Redis.

Cassandra and Redis just mean that you have a database-backed application. How do you schedule Python jobs? Either you build your own scheduler that pulls things out of the database, or you use an existing scheduler. I once worked on a Python system that scheduled tasks using Celery, used Redis for some synchronization flags, and Cassandra for the shared store (also for the main database). Building a custom scheduler for that system would have been a waste of time.

Here is a good example of ESR being racist: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833

Here is an example of ESR being misogynist: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907

This is trolling by people who do not understand the GPLv2, and has happened before. Someone had the "brilliant idea" of "retroactively revoking" the GPLv2 a decade ago (2008): http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2006062204552163

You cannot do it. The only way the right to distribute GPLv2 software gets revoked is for a specific party that distributes a GPLv2 licensed work in violation of the GPLv2 distribution terms.

> If the code is written in a distributed fashion from the start then it can be designed so it's one python/node/R process per core.

That's a really glib dismissal of how hard the problem is. Python and node have pretty terrible support for building distributed systems. With Python, in practice most systems end up based on Celery, with huge long-running tasks. This configuration basically boils down to using Celery, and whatever queueing system it is running on, as a mainframe-style job control system.

The "shell scripts / xargs -P" mentioned by chubot is a better solution that is much easier to write, more efficient, requires no configuration, and has far fewer failure modes. That is because Unix shell scripting is really a job control language for running Unix processes in parallel and setting up I/O redirection between them.

There is no such software, because what you are asking for is for the software to "one-click install" read your mind. Dropbox cannot cover customized use cases, and it does not accomplish the same goal. My use of the commands mentioned cannot be replicated by Dropbox. The facts that Dropbox does not provide adequate privacy, and is proprietary software, also prevent it from accomplishing certain goals (namely that I want my data to remain private, and that I would like to avoid using proprietary software).

Those are all very good ideas for email. Part of it could be dealt with in RFCs, part of it by changing default email client behavior.

I also agree that email should be a personal preference. I think that DFeed[1][2] shows how open discussion systems should be built. DFeed provides a unified discussion system that is simultaneously accessible through email, NNTP, a web interface, and Atom feeds. That would be a really nice way to offer a comment discussion system on a blog.

[1] https://forum.dlang.org/help#about [2] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

> Of course there's no name.

That's because this is an Internet post, not a car that can be used to maim and kill people.

> Cryptography isn't perfect; someone could always guess your private key.

Cryptography is a branch of mathematics, and cryptographic systems can be formally proved to have certain properties, such as being unable to derive the private key from the content of the encrypted message. That the private key can be guessed is a trivial observation, and a bad argument for dismissing formal proofs. ASLR is a hack on a hack that does not tell you anything about the formal properties of the system.

By your definition, wearing a wig and sunglasses to get away with shoplifting is a "clever exploit." Refusing to put license plates on your car so you cannot be identified for breaking the law is antisocial criminal activity.

The author is Philip Greenspun, who in the 1980s worked with the people that created all of the things you listed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun

There is nothing myopic about his perspective.

What benefits exactly can be derived from driving without license plates that make it a "hack"? Avoiding getting arrested for hit-and-runs? Not getting tickets from red light cameras?

If you care about this, the best thing to do is to start using IPv6, and insisting on IPv6 support in any interactions with service providers (SaaSS, hosting, data providers, etc.) that you have.

> Maybe RSS could be dropped? Are there news readers that support RSS but not Atom?

Unfortunately yes. Gnus has not gotten Atom support yet (people keep using external programs to translate). Also far too many feeds still output RSS instead of Atom. RSS is a horrible format and there is no reason today to use it instead of Atom.

> expanding it with social functionality like likes, reposts and comments

One of the problems I had with blog comments is spam. Blogger would queue up moderated comments and send you an email about them. The idea occurred to me that that was redundant and it would be better to cut out the middleman - you are getting email notifications about comments needing moderation, and email already had long established and much better spam filtering. Why not have people submit comments via email? That way you can also reply to people privately. This is also convenient for people who read their feeds via RSS-to-email or in newsreaders/email clients like Thunderbird and Gnus.

Another aspect of comments via email is that it is much more like a letter to the editor. Your blog posts are articles, and you can choose to update them with corrections and comments that people send in, instead of trying to manage a half-baked message board that is the standard LiveJournal/Blogger/Wordpress/Disqus comments section.

I think an easy and valuable way to get non-geeks to use web page feeds more is to provide the option to sign up for the feed via email, by offering a "newsletter" option.

That comment was true then and is even more true now. rsync, unison, and git over SSH provide a far superior solution for more use cases (many of which Dropbox cannot support) than Dropbox does, without any of Dropbox's risks to privacy.

> snazzy Electron interface or some other trendy framework that makes everything super easy

Except that Electron is harder to use than pre-.NET Visual Basic, or Delphi, or especially HyperCard. All of the developer convenience of web apps, with all of the great performance of web apps!

Hospital shifts in the United States should be used as a warning for what not to do:

"Halsted promoted several very important concepts and practices in residency training: graded responsibility, a variable and lengthy training period, a pyramidal system of promotion, a resident's ward service, and, most pertinent to this article, a restrictive lifestyle. This last concept of a restrictive lifestyle meant that residents truly resided in the hospital. They received little or no pay, were discouraged from marriage, and worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. At first, the Halstedian model was more the exception than the rule but gradually became more common, especially after World War II when more surgeons wanted to be trained and certified for both the prestige and financial rewards."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/392...

The Halsted is William Halsted, a workaholic lifetime cocaine addict: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted

You can get that in Emacs with the which-key: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

This is why Richard Stallman calls SaaS "Service as a Software Substitute" and recommends running your own programs on your own computers: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

If you are using any Unix derivative there are still Free Software applications from the 1980s (or 1970s if you run BSD) that you are running every day without any problems, whether you realize it or not.

Consider doing your financial modeling with a Free Software program like Gnumeric: http://gnumeric.org/