coriny

It could also be self-fertilisation, which is still a form of sexual reproduction. Sorry for being so pedantic.

"... it's in the bucket of tools which - at least to me - should be treated as liable to be cut at any time and don't rely on it."

Unless you've paid for a guaranteed period of support, bug fixes and extensions of functionality, this how you should treat all code libraries surely? All libs come as is, and statements of future actions are always expressions of intent, not facts. If your company is utterly dependent on a single free 3rd party library then you should be prepared to take over ownership of it - or accept that your company's survival is at the whim of another. Personally, I would not be swayed by any brand name here - but who would you trust (enough to bet your company on) to provide long term support for a free OSS library?

Personally, I would consider the closing down of a very niche, free, consumer product based on a seemingly dying web technology as a very poor guide towards how Google will treat GWT, which is actually used by them for website development.

"First, because you should be making the decision about whether to run the script after you look at it" - exactly, which is what my suggestion is. All I'm suggesting with tee is that it allows you to read in terminal what you are writing to file in the same command. The OP was downloading the script to view in less, and then downloading it again to execute. This method at least ensures that what you view is what you are going to execute but ...

"Second, because you should not be echoing possibly-malicious characters to the terminal" - this is something I know nothing about, so I would be (and maybe others) highly appreciative of any links about this class of attacks that you could post. Is it possible to execute malicious code while writing to STDOUT, or is it because you can hide malicious code with escape characters? Also, I don't quite understand the "cat" comment as we're not doing any file concatenation here?

As already mentioned, save to disk first to avoid network connection failures messing you up. To avoid an extra command use "tee" to output to file while viewing it (i.e. it's "less" and ">" functionality combined).

And, in 1963 Moore's Law had yet to be recognised. If it had been, he might have realised that fat clients were going to dominate the future of computing. But at the time, it would have been near impossible to believe how relentless CPU progress was going to be.

Yep, sure. The thin client approach has grown substantially recently, mostly I think due to improvements in networking. But the author was talking about "20 years time", so the early 80s. What we actually saw was the arrival of the domestic computer. That was the period in which computing became ubiquitous, and actual physical machines doing the processing locally could be found in every business and home.

So, I would argue, that for the period he is talking about the fat client and stand alone models were much more dominant than the thin client, in contrast to his expectation.

Or to use his reference point, nearly every university had its own computer in the 80s, rather than using a thin client to a host at MIT/Oxford/Harvard etc.

And in general, despite the cloud, I think fat clients are still dominant. I.e. look at gaming, the majority of processing is still done locally, despite MMOs and the internet.

EDIT: I think most people expected thin computing to dominate. But it turns out to be easier to manufacture and ship PCs around than data.

It was light hearted, comes with a smiley now :)

"I think by far the most twisted notion in the article is the idea that little changed between 1913 and 1967. I'm pretty sure technological change during that period had more impact on the average Westerner's life than any other 54 year time span in history. It takes a very peculiar world view to completely ignore the invention of television or to consider a biplane as being basically equivalent to a jumbo jet."

That's not what it says at all. He states that the 60s economy is still dominated by technologies that pre-date 1913. He even specifically cites the economically dominant technologies, instead of the vague assertion, "I'm pretty sure ...". He particularly notes aeroplanes and computers as being invented during that period and can be expected to have enormous economic impact. Which they did, but hadn't by that point. The same with television.

Looking at the rest of your comment, I kind of think you should delete and reread the article. Every criticism is incorrect or unsupported - like the MIT crack. He's clearly talking about the "thin client" approach to providing computing - he was wrong, but it was not an unreasonable supposition to make.

He's after this weeks "Useless use of cat" award: http://www.smallo.ruhr.de/award.html#cat

Good to see there's still some competitors out there.

Given that referendum, an independence referendum was always possible. It was probably only during the 80s that it didn't seem possible, and was definitely being talked about by the time I lived in Edinburgh 15 years ago. Devolution was always seen as a process towards strong local political representation, whether or not ending in full independence (aka membership of the EU).

EDIT: I should note at this point, I honestly don't care how the vote goes and have very little interest in it. To me, it's been a long ongoing process that will probably follow the same rough path and end in the same rough place whatever the vote is.

Or that lots of Android apps are shoddy iPhone ports by developers who approach it as a second class citizen, and so are unaware of what it can do.

And then they complain that Android users don't buy their apps...

"it’s as crazy and unrealistic a dream as an independence referendum used to seem."

I'm assuming this guy's pretty young as there was one 35 years ago. I kind of feel that a similar amount of evidence was used in the rest of the analysis as well.

So, I'm definitely not confused :)

I do appreciate it's very common in what I'd call pseudo-formal speech, mostly used when trying to impress someone one perceives to be of higher social station. Estate agents do it a lot when talking to clients. And so it does have the "well, lots of people do it" support.

However, if you go back to the roots (Latin), "myself" is specifically the reflexive form of the first person. When the first person is the object or the dative, it is "me/to me". So to have correct agreement with the verb, your example should end in "and me".

While your example is easy enough to parse, it doesn't actually follow the rules - though maybe the common practice. And if you rearrange the two object nouns (i.e. back to the original) the sentence loses clarity. Using "me" never loses clarity, and the ordering of object nouns shouldn't matter beyond providing emphasis.

Basically, that example is ok in Perl, but not in Java ;)

And ultimately, using the reflexive form incorrectly never makes a sentence clearer, and it's longer to write and say.

Anyway, this is so far off the OP's topic, which is actually much more important & interesting, I do apologise to him/her.

Well, I can't say much about the reality of the FBI approach, y'all seems to have that better covered.

Instead, I'm led to ask at what point will people stop using "myself" as a formal version of "me"? It isn't, it actually has a completely different usage.

In this case: "the SR Server was located by myself and another member of the CY-2". Here 'by myself' means 'on my own', not 'by me', so it directly confuses the meaning of this sentence. To me the obvious meaning is that they both work independently and found the same thing.

About the only other time you can use '-self' is in the reflexive, as in "I did this to myself", "you do this to yourself". I will never do something to yourself, and you will never do something to myself.

So, I know this is completely out of place, but if I can get one person to not do this in the future, I will make my life a bit happier. Also if I can persuade that small group of nameless people (you know who you are) that "could care less" actually means the opposite of what they think it does; and that "alot" is not a word.

I'm all for the English language evolving and expanding, but let's weed out the bad ideas which only increase confusion and bring nothing good. And seriously, "alot"? "Lot" is a three letter word, it's not hard to spell. As for "a" ...

Apologies for my poor stab at answering this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273839

Sorry for the very late reply, I've been hoping I'd get some time to do this properly, but haven't succeeded. It's something I first read ~10 years ago, where it was mostly in the musings of a complexity theorist. Since then odd things have cropped up which have supported that narrative in my mind, but I haven't got a particularly convincing collection to work with. There's some leads in here though: http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/documents/Anarch....

The Natural History museum in the UK has shelves full of samples dating back >100 years that have never been looked at. Furthermore, even ones that have been studied can be revised in the light of new evidence.

So primarily it's a question of man power and triaging samples. Secondly you need a lot of evidence before declaring a new species and various formal steps should be taken (providing a reference sample etc), so that process in itself can take years+.

Though I think he is correct that politics does not need to be antagonistic to prevent "politicians running rampant with power". Plenty of democracies use more collaborative politics than the USA (e.g. the Polder model of democracy in the netherlands). And I think most people would agree that the US republicans & democrats could engage more constructively while maintaining ideologically distinct positions (and not turning the country into a single party fascist state).

Anarcho-collectivists, which as far as I understand, represents the dominant modern anarchistic philosophy, examine alternative methods to central government for generating laws. So they don't argue for an unregulated society - which is obviously a non-starter under the lens of reality - or a return to pre-government, but rather a complete replacement of the law-making mechanism.

Basically, they're all over complexity theory and how to use strong local interactions to develop self-organising non-local societies. Which I personally think makes anarcho-collectivism possibly the most sophisticated and futuristic of current political models. They were two decades ahead of the "localism" and "direct democracy" ideologies, and with a far better understanding of the maths.

:) I thought I recognised the name, and as a microbial genomics guy myself, I'm pretty familiar with TIGR. I suspect we agree more than disagree on OA, but these are some good points for debate. Genomics has largely been very pro-OA thanks to the efforts of the Wellcome Trust.

1. So I found this quite interesting. I think in the UK it's rare for an institution of that size to not be affiliated with a university and so able to get access. I was at the Sanger which was Cambridge Uni affiliated. However, this is also an issue of journal bundling and secret negotiations. Unless you're suggesting the complete dismantlement of the publishing scene, then this needs a complex solution. And re startups, I'm not sure why giving commercial entities subsidised access to the literature is a priority?

2) Full text analysis is not really an OA issue either (I've also not been very impressed with the results from it so far, but that's a different story). Yes it can be done more easily via OA, but most major publishers are increasingly supporting it. They can be obliged to support it without forcing OA as a publishing model. Many other issues fall under local copyright laws which makes it more complex. However, educational purposes and informal sharing is normally covered by fair use. And even with online textbooks, I'm not sure even if I publish as OA that I necessarily want someone else using it for commercial purposes for free. And licensing commercial use is a valid method for OA publishers to make money, surely (something they are struggling to do)? Of course, there are many different OA models with very varied licensing.

3) So I absolutely agree with improving public engagement, but increasingly methods sections are small print, very small word limit and stuck at the end of the paper. This utterly and fundamentally breaks the most important part of the scientific literature - reproducibility. And that is at crisis level now (ok hyperbole, but have you ever replicated something and not discovered that half the essential information is missing?). Similarly poor but simple/comprehensible papers will be higher rated than superior but complex papers.

We are asking the core literature to server two masters with very different needs, and my instinct is that this is ultimately not tenable. Review papers are far more useful to the public in general, since unless you're getting your hands dirty with the data, and learning it's foibles, then it's difficult to evaluate focussed research. This is especially true when dealing with sequence databases (assumptions of sequence accuracy, over/under representation etc), as I'm sure you appreciate.

Publishing in multiple journals is heavily frowned on (and most journals will not republish work irrespective of copyright) since it is normally done to (a) boost publishing records and give the impression of greater productivity (CV padding) & (b) increase the authors' citations (i.e. the impact of the work) & (c) add undue weight to a hypothesis, by increasing the apparent number of papers that support it.

However, this is not a barrier to including papers in institutional repositories etc, simply to publishing in multiple journals.

It's not about handing over copyright but it's generally agreed that publishing multiple copies of the same work is a bad thing. This is typically done by researchers to boost their paper count (+ a bit of self-citation), and can make a hypothesis seem better supported than it is.

So only dodgy journals will re-publish work that has been published elsewhere.

A second key step that is frequently ignored is that funding has to be provided for publishing in open access (normally it isn't). Publishing budgets are normally very small (if any money is given at all). This often puts quality open access (e.g. PLOS) out of reach.

The last team I was in always wanted to publish open access, but only the Wellcome Trust funded person had a specific budget to pay for it. So we either crammed him on the author list and pretended he contributed significantly (unethical all round) or went non-OA (not what we wanted either).

And this is before we get into whose government paid for what. I was US-funded and working at a British university alongside EU & charity funded researchers. Who has the right to see what? And what if the work was partially funded by a company? Or do you argue that all Europeans have the right to read US-funded work and vice versa? I personally would, but I think many people would disagree if I'd written China instead of the EU.

Also, though I think many people will disagree with this, I'm not sure open access - while ideologically preferable - is a panacea for much at all. I've been publishing OA for >10 years, but in practice it makes virtually no difference to accessibility for professional western researchers. Research papers are perhaps best understood and used as professional communications on method rather than descriptions of truth or the state of the art (as a side note I believe this conflict is where many of the arguments over the quality of the literature arise)*. Professional researchers have access to all the papers they need.

OA really really helps researchers in poor countries. And this is the strongest argument for it, where the impact can really be felt and measured, but this is almost never the argument I see put forward by the tech/gadget communities.

Thanks to reveals like Echelon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON), every big/strategic (e.g. energy/arms) business in Europe has been aware of this since the late 80s (at least). For instance in the 90s, a common strategy when negotiating with US companies was to send misinformation via email or fax internally knowing that the NSA would pass it on. From the results of the negotiations it appeared that the NSA were not aware that they were being played in this way.

Anyway, so that's why I think you're not hearing too much about that scandal - it comes as no shock to anyone it affects.

I like your idea. A small amount of randomisation can be very effective at (1) defeating gaming, (2) finding unexpected signals in complex systems (3) Preventing over-fitting of results when optimising.

All three of these advantages come into play here.

"Its pretty much the same as "Perl hate", why do we hate Perl? No reason at all, other then being cool means hating Perl!"

Ummm, no. Believe me, having worked in a PERL shop for nearly 10 years, I was ecstatic to start working in Java (!). And I have zero regrets. It's nothing to do with being "cool" or any other pointless patronising insults to other developers. It's that badly written PERL is the worst excrement ever to have been smeared on a computer screen. Yes it can be clean, clear and readable, but only in the hands of an experienced expert (using "modern PERL", which only started to exist ~6-8 years ago) backed by stringent code review and consistent team practice. Without the infrastructure in place, you end up with reams of unmaintainable, slow, buggy, eye bleed code. I've seen plenty of PERL from plenty of projects and plenty of different developers in different institutions and companies and the vast, vast majority is crap.

The last bit of code I had to rewrite (5 years effort by a weak PERL coder, replaced in 3 months in Java, maintained by someone with no previous Java experience quite happily) would have made you cry. I have never seen anything like it in any language (note, I don't work with PHP either), and I don't believe such a steaming mess would be possible in any other modern programming language, let alone from someone who had been a professional programmer for 10 years.

To me, your attitude is the problem the PERL community has. The language deserved the bad reputation. Until modern PERL appeared, it was almost impossible for a beginner to produce anything like good code. It is possible now (I have seen beautiful clean PERL), but instead of trying to educate and bring people back to the fold, the community has a massive chip on its shoulder, refuses to admit the problems PERL has (still), or that it ever had any, and proceed to insult everyone else. If PERL hadn't learnt from the trends in other languages (esp a decent OO system, Moose), it would be literally dead by now.

Yay, I'm lucky too. Not only that but 2 out of 3 MacBook Pros in my office do very badly with WiFi - slow to connect (my android phone is 10x faster) & they drop at the first sign of a flaky signal.

The most robust laptop I've had on wifi was a Samsung running Fedora 20. Very fast to connect and never dropped. The pre-installed Windows 7 dropped continuously and often failed to connect.

I suspect the "issue" may be very hardware dependent.

Your comment is quite disingenuous. The major ISPs parental filters have all suffered numerous false positives and varying commitment to fixing the problems. The porn filters particularly often block access to sex education, anti-bullying, and support sites for young gay/transgender etc (also I believe some charity sites for women suffering from sexual and physical abuse at home). If someone opts out of the default filter they are ensuring that people in their household can access support they may need, not just letting porn in.

Arsenal coming back from 4-1 down against Reading to win 7-5 was pretty epic as well.

Also, goal difference is important in leagues, so teams tend to play to the end even if the gap is large. Though I think this could be improved by changing to 2 points for a win, with a bonus point for scoring 3+ goals.

True. I could also walk over to the place and tell them in person (after a flight and a drive etc). My thoughts are that if you are asking people to volunteer to contribute, expecting people to sign up to a third party in order to communicate is not "frictionless". After all, there is thing called email that's been around for a while and is used by, pretty much, everyone. Also post forms. The main reason for using Twitter (my belief) is to get your users to promote you for free.