devnulloverflow

> I can't even find a half decent http client which handles all the important stuff.

I'm guessing you don't count cURL as half-decent. Because it's API is C++k let alone idiomatic, modern C++?

> comply with the law

It's not a defense of a bad law to say that it forces people to by "comply with the law".

It also depends on the country. I had family hand me a 500 Euro note because they couldn't even get get it changed at banks in France.

I took it on my trip to Austria a week later and got it changed at the post office.

It's a joke. The whole point is for the author to cast themself in a negative light.

Yeah, it's an amazingly creative technique: explain the fuck your thing is, so that people might decide they want it.

I suspect the market does not lie though, and if you are pedaling broken stuff t to middle-managers, it's best to not explain a damn thing.

Most versions of the American accent are a bit nasal compared to other English speakers, so I guess that makes it higher pitched on average -- even if I wouldn't call it "shrill".

Also, there is no a neat separation between nasal Americans and other English speakers. Many Australians are also quite nasal, whereas black Americans (unless you count Steve Urkel) don't strike me as nasal at all.

On the third hand: I find the Irish accent is higher pitched than most, without sounding either nasal or shrill. But Americans often sound a lot like the Irish, so that might also make them higher pitched.

It would have been a great title.

But the pedants like me would have crept up to say "but Liskov tells us we can accept substitutes".

Is there an actual explanation of how the design fridge works?

> ..., you often get no feedback after job interviews.

There is nothing new in this.

Now you are confusing me, because in Australia "mall" means something else -- and in Bondi Junction there's a mall right outside the Westfield.

I had some visitors from from Washington DC recently. They were impressed at how much more "happening" the local shopping centre (Hornsby Westfield) was compared to American malls. I suspect Westfield is a bit of a world-leader in this business.

Because in America these things are designed by zoning and the political process. What you describe in Japan sounds like the Horrors of Captialism and can't possibly be allowed in America.

(Except I suppose it does happen, since the whole point of the article is that NYC does it).

> Complexity will increase, but our level of abstraction will increase to match, as with any technology.

But this is no panacea. The complexity will still be there, and ops folks will have to deal with it through extra layers of indirection and obscurity (which are other ways to spell "abstraction").

That might be the best compromise, but it is still a compromise.

That looks, on it's face, like a violation of the 14th amendment equal protection clause.

A public safety rationale would be about cops service weapons. The parent post sounds like he means individual cops can buy guns on the open market as private citizens would be allowed to do in states with looser gun laws.

> why didn't they test before panicking?

Because that's the sort of thing that can blow out a lawsuit or result in bad press.

What does ISTM stand for?

Are you talking about in house spies, or spies placed in companies by governments?

If the latter, then the answer is all of them.

> British idiomatic spellings

Let's get this straight. There's "American English" used in the US and Canada. And then there English, where "colour" is spelled with a "U", and that's used in lot more countries, and natively spoken by more people than American English.

The Nazis got away with going around beating up opponents with truncheons.

The authorities turning a blind eye to that stuff was not an upholding of anyone's civil liberties, it was being complicit in shutting down other's free expression.

That's a of an odd reading of an article that is going out of it's way to point out that the "marketplace of ideas" idea was (1) not the justification for the 1st Amendment and (2) that Ben doesn't view it as the justification for Facebook's move either.

> In fact, I would go further: Facebook’s stance is an essential expression of what makes American tech unique. Don Valentine, the legendary founder of Sequoia Capital who passed away last week, once said:

>> The world of technology thrives best when individuals are left alone to be different, creative, and disobedient.

> This is not a statement about participating in the marketplace of ideas, winning others over by the power of your argument. It is, rather, an affirmation of the absence of tyranny. Only when individuals are able to think for themselves can something truly new to the world be created, and the proof will be the success in the market for tech products and services.

It's interesting to see how Hamilton's arguments against a bill of rights hinges on the idea that the government doesn't have power unless the Constitution grants power to the government.

> Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?

The US constitution (like others) is indeed formally structured around enumerated powers. But such limitations are have been deeply unfashionable for decades -- and the great and the good have found various end-runs around it (such as the US commerce clause).

The anti-federalists were right not to trust Hamilton.

> copyright enforcement.

Ahh, but copyright won the last war, by moving to centralised platforms. The privacy mavens are going to lose, but they are going to lose to Big Brother, not to decentralisation.

>> "A generation of lazy people who don't work hard"

>I am sorry for derailing, but how does that happen, did they come out like a faulty batch from a factory?

One generation is unlikely to be much lazier than the last. But the economic policy of post-war Britain was dominated by nationalised industries and, rules made by and for the unions etc. Workers toiling hard in make-work industries or workers refusing work that breaks strict demarcation rules are as unproductive as lazy workers.

This sort of thing the generally poor economy of the UK, and why the UK did not produce stuff people wanted to buy. That it translated into a series financial crises depended on other factors.

> shady work-for-hire deals

Is that the kind of deal where you work for an employer and they pay you?

Kind of like the deal most software engineers take.

> grant money as possible rather than build a successful product.

You are not thinking the right way. Machinery for writing good grant applications is a successful product.

This is why research universities are such great training grounds.

> > "Oligarch" originally meant the post-soviet kleptocrats who were handed control over formerly state companies at discount prices.

> Aristotle already pioneered the use of the term as meaning "rule by the rich for the rich" aka plutocracy [0].

"Original" is a dangerous term which roywiggins shouldn't have used in this case. But roy is right about how the term got used in the Eastern European context. And while things happen in the west too, people complain as much or more billionaires who made it big as outsiders who (initially) had no such connections to political power.

Wouldn't you be canarying your switch over a period of longer than 24 hours anyway?

I can still imagine a benefit to short TTLs in the sense that you can maybe roll out your canary in a more controlled way. But that's a lot more complicated than the issue of quick switching.

It's a pretty common pattern for brilliant people to do a PhD in the Ivy league while having done undergrad in some other country entirely. Not sure if that is less or more common than having done undergrad at an Ivy and/or some other US university.

What is the exact relationship? The history as I remember it is:

1. SGML (Simple Generalised Markup Language) came first. 2. HTML was a specialisation of SGML, it took off because of the web, and is probably the only reason for SGML to become famous. 3. XML was then invented as a generalisation of HTML, perhaps by people who had never heard of SGML.

And I seem to remember DocBook is an SGML thing, it was invented between steps 2 and 3.

> Didn't stop the court case of US government wanting data from Microsoft Ireland and trying to force Microsoft US, (empahsis added)

The trying to bit is important. The US tried to compel Microsoft to hand over data, and Microsoft went to the US courts and (we think) prevented it. MS can now go to European governments and say that both willing and able obey the European law in this regard.

Now this might not be true. Perhaps the US Govt. has used its leverage to force MS to MS slyly leak the data anyway. And perhaps European governments are quietly doing the same. But if the rule of law is uncertain restraint on western governments, it is no restraint at all on the Chinese government. A company straightforwardly will be compelled to hand info over to the Chinese government, and Chinese courts will not even consider trying to stop it.