iamsohungry

Not sarcasm. I'm entirely annoyed with the software industry's constant attempts to make money off problems that were solved by someone else decades ago.

I'm pretty sure this recent instability won't make Slack go out of style. What will likely happen is Slack will continue releasing "features" that don't improve upon IRC and make their product harder to use, until someone else comes along with a simple IRC clone and unseats them just like Slack unseated HipChat. It's an exercise in pointlessness.

    sudo service ircd-irc2 restart

Fixed it.

> Hell, Slack could be IRC for all I know, but what makes people use Slack is more than what protocol it uses underneath.

Yeah, it's a combination of slavishly always having to be on the next new thing, and being unable to recognize that this is a problem.

Meanwhile, IRC continues to work exactly as well as it has for 20+ years.

The amount of work necessary to generate new versions of CentOS is not feasible for individuals.

I'm going to venture a guess that you don't write much rendering code or fonts.

A polluted standard makes it more difficult to implement the standard. In practice this is passed on to the user in performance and monetary cost, not in something more visible. The fact that you don't understand the problem is due to you not working with Unicode at a low level.

> The way they pitch immunity in this case is to claim that a prosecution of an NSA official that broke the law would cause the remaining NSA employees to be on-guard for lawbreaking,

Good. Government officials should be on guard for lawbreaking.

> This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish.

But I can't use the code as I wish. If I want to make a modification to it and then redistribute it, I then have to go through the entire codebase and remove trademarks. I wish to do the first step without doing the second step, and I can't.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: when law enforcement compromises the security of a network without a warrant, they need to be prosecuted and jailed under the same law that any other hackers breaking the law would be. As long as there are no consequences for breaking the law, the NSA will continue breaking the law.

False: the card is inactive until someone activates it.

> And what are dingbat typefaces if not emoji under an other name? Nobody cared when unicode added U+2701 UPPER BLADE SCISSORS and U+273B TEARDROP SPOKED ASTERISK.

Just because nobody complained doesn't mean that it wasn't a problem.

> If you don't think that emoji is an expressive language then you may have missed a few years of internet history. ;)

If you think emoji is an expressive language, then I'd like you to make an argument toward that point in emoji.

> > I don't hate Emoji or anything

> Yes, yes you do.

Was this necessary?

> similar to how people often communicate only in Emoji.

When you have examples of emoji being used to communicate on anything resembling the level of a real language, I'll buy that argument. But currently even synthetic languages like Toki Pona or Esperanto are capable of far more communication than Emoji.

> Making emojis Unicode will significantly improve their handling.

...and significantly hurt the handling of foreign language characters.

I'd be happy to have a standard for emoji. I'd be happy to have a standard for interleaving emoji and text. What annoys me is that the standard for emoji has been mashed into the standard for characters as if they are the same thing. Mashing the two standards together means that people who only want to support characters or only want to support emoji have no guidelines for doing so.

If you don't understand why this is bad, it's probably because you don't understand type systems and the fact that emoji and characters are different types.

I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about outliers when there are so few major exchanges.

Apparently you didn't study it last week when Coinbase was $20-$50 different from BTC-E for 5 days.

Ah, I agree on that front. That does make sense.

But I still don't think this should distract from a conversation about encryption. Encryption has very importat implications for free press and privacy far outside of preventing terrorism, and it's important that it stay legal and accessible to normal people. Experts need to make their voices heard so that legal decision isn't made by people unconcerned with these important issues.

Ah, yeah, that's an interesting concern. Anyone with more knowledge about microbes want to weigh in on how much of a concern this really is?

But checking this flag takes another instruction, no? I'm thinking more along the lines of some sort of interrupt being thrown automatically if the operation overflows.

> Nope, the problem is you need to identify the specific Bacteria that's causing a problem before you can use a bacteriophage to fight it.

Uh, that's not actually an issue as I understand it. The treatment, as I understand it, works by starting with a sample of infected tissue from the infected person. The bacteriophages are then grown starting from a few different kinds of starters, but the process I read about starts with a broad spectrum of bacteriophages. As long as a bacteriophage is close enough to being able to attack the desired bacteria, it some percentage of the bacteriophages will mutate into the exact bacteriophages you want. Since the available food for the bacteriophages is the bacteria you want to kill, the bacteriophage specific to that bacteria grows exponentially until there are enough bacteriophages. At this point the solution contains a large number of bacteriophages specifically bred to kill the bacteria in question. The solution is reintroduced into the infected tissue, where it eats most of the bacteria.

> Antibiotics are much simpler to use.

Chanting healing spells is simpler to use than antibiotics and in a few decades time it will be equally effective.

Never let a good disaster go to waste...

Yeah, from what I can tell (I'm not a professional in this field) the underlying issue here seems to be that bacteria are evolving faster than the fungi and molds that produce antibiotics. The solution is to find something that evolves faster than bacteria: viruses. Bacteria will never evolve as fast as viruses because their reproductive cycles are much longer.

The opposition to bacteriophage research comes from the belief that bacteriophage research could accidentally produce viruses that are deadly to humans or be used as a cover for biological weapons research. But these concerns are invalid: bacteria and human cells are drastically different, and so are the viruses that attack them: there's no chance that bacteriophages will mutate into viruses that attack human cells. And as the necessary equipment to do research on viruses becomes cheaper and cheaper and more easily constructable from widely available components, blocking legitimate bacteriophage research does less and less to prevent illegal biological weapons research.

The infinite loop on unsigned integers exemplifies a failure in C's type system: integer wraparound is so rarely desirable behavior that a range error on wraparound would prevent many such errors from failing silently.

There's an argument to be made that this check would hurt performance (and I buy that argument--given C's goals and the time when it was made, the type system compromises it made make sense). But it would be nice if processor manufacturers made add/sub instructions that detected wraparound, which would allow languages to implement such checks performantly.

I agree that you've identified a problem. I don't agree that it's a technical problem. It seems to me that technology simply doesn't offer any solutions to this kind of problem. Perhaps that's a failure of imagination on my part, though: what are some areas of research you think might cause law enforcement to start responding to credible threats?

There will always be crazies, but crazies like Qutb would likely not have as many supporters if they didn't have a wide base of people with real reasons to dislike the US to draw from.

> We want to keep doing those things.

Speak for yourself. I'm an American citizen and I don't want to start economic wars, support violent dictators, create economic sanctions that harm the common people and not the national leaders they purport to, provide conditional and earmarked aid that is sometimes actually harmful, and a wide variety of other internationally sociopathic behaviors. I think most people would agree if they actually understood that that's what's happening. But most people think we're spreading peace and freedom and protecting human rights.

> Because without money, you can't do anything but let dictators and mass-murderers trample around like vicious kings.

But with money, you can arm those dictators and mass-murders so that they can become actual vicious kings.

> Turning a blind eye to your abused neighbors isn't a way to prevent terrorism, either.

That's true, which is why it's so puzzling that we so frequently turn a blind eye to our abused neighbors and fund the abusers.

I'm definitely not proposing isolationism. I'm proposing we spend aid money actually helping the populations of nations instead of funding whatever militant promises to protect US interests.

> Just because something isn't necessary doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Your comment isn't necessary, and it isn't making a friend of me. Does this mean that it's your fault if I attack you? That you should have backed out and minded your own business?

Surely you can discern why disagreeing with someone on HackerNews is different from invading their country, seizing their resources, and killing their family members.

> So you say. But I can't distinguish that whether that statement is fact or ideology. So I don't believe you, and I shouldn't until you've got some convincing evidence that it's true. You can tell me a story. I don't want a story.

And you can distinguish fact from ideology when people say that the solution to terrorism is more of what we're already doing?

I can understand you discarding information because you don't believe it's reliable. What I don't understand is that in the absence of information you believe to be reliable, you've still decided to form an opinion and argue for it. If you don't have enough information, it's okay to admit you don't know.

> And I really don't see how people committing acts of terrorism are making good decisions that we should support by giving them what they want for doing so.

I really don't see anyone proposing that.

Anyone care to enlighten me as to why I'm being downvoted?